Sunday morning was mildly amusing while looking over news reports. Taylor found that those in the Bureau's area were reacting similarly to those on PHO to the footage of the attempted invasion. Namely, everyone thought that those responsible had been complete idiots. There were some cultural differences in the reactions though, PHO being clueless about the 'hand over kids to be raised by the enemy as theoretical incentive for both sides to not fight later' tradition. The intent was to have the losers not willing to try again for fear of killing their own kids, the kids to be raised properly and not want to go to war with their birth planet, and with any luck a generation of peace between the two.
...which failed miserably nine times out of ten in the historical references because the kids frequently died fighting someone else instead. The kingdom was going to do better than that, even if Robin had taken the girl in directly instead of passing her along.
A quick check of other Earths they had spread news to showed much more varied reactions. They were at over a dozen total with at least one healing outpost available, plus three with information networks they'd set up on but hadn't done anything more than build an outpost in an out of the way location, and a few of them were assuming that the kingdom was some kind of large-scale promotion for a new movie or something. Only those who had actually visited the resort were universally exempt, if only due to the scale of the place that you'd just essentially walked to making it hard to argue that it was faked.
While checking over the various Earths, she'd also checked immigration requests. Less than one tenth of a percent had been accepted, generally for those in horrible situations that needed an escape. Though it looked like a tweak might be needed to the diplomatic devices if they were refusing basically all evangelistic reasoning with a message that called the religions cults.
Digging into that had her eventually sighing, because after nearly an hour she couldn't come up with a definition that the automated systems could use to differentiate 'religion' and 'cult'. In fact, if anything she was having trouble making the distinction herself now, and didn't exactly want to break the 'escaping a cult' justification tree to pull it off.
Chris hadn't expected Dinah's school to post the 'trial group' videos online, but they'd done so this morning. PHO had picked up on this quickly, after the presence of Wards was almost missed entirely by the site and news coverage, and that had caused a bit of an explosion of interest. They'd even correctly identified which Ward was responsible for which portions of things...and had noticed the dolls all turning to look at the group when the group had missed it entirely.
That had, to the group's credit, taken sixteen pages of discussion to be spotted.
His various creations were seen as suitably creepy and they were impressed with the 'sudden scythe blade' trick. The exit being obviously passable until just before someone tried to go through it thanks to Dennis was seen as a very nice touch, and had gotten most groups to suddenly back away in shock. Straight into the coffin, essentially, allowing Dinah to pull off more 'startle by grabbing' attempts than not.
Then about an hour ago the PRT had gotten involved, and posted their own 'highlights' footage from the entire night, from the working 'security cameras' that they'd put up. That allowed PHO to see the entire collection of outfits Dinah had been swapping between, as well as how she moved her smaller self around on the shelves of dolls to make it harder for people to identify her from previous descriptions.
Browsing the thread as it updated every half-minute or so was interrupted by the phone ringing, and Chris answered it. "Hello?"
"Good morning," came a familiar voice. "This is Glenn Chambers."
"Good morning, Mister Chambers. May I ask why you're calling me on a Sunday?"
"We've gotten multiple requests for your little surprises from last night, and if you can ensure that they're individually controllable then we'd like to auction them off. Half the proceeds to you, half to charity."
Well, that was unexpected. "Tinkertech doesn't exactly stay functional without maintenance."
"Which will be warned about, and I'm sure that the buyers will be pleasantly surprised when it turns out that these continue to work fine. I'm well aware that you've ceased to fall under those general guidelines."
...what?
Amy was enjoying the discussion about Rainbow's outing the day before. There was significant bleed-over with the discussion of Robin's invasion-busting, as far as comparing definitions of what the kingdom called dangerous compared to everyone else ever, but that was okay. Taylor had even ensured that information on differing levels of protection for the 'core body' compared to limbs was posted on the Team Mana website, though only in generalities.
Missy would probably be enjoying the two threads dedicated to figuring out the gun. It had never been reloaded, but spent cartridges were found from it ejecting them and pictures had been posted so nobody was actually certain how that worked. The selector switch had also been singled out, and the various modes identified...but nobody was entirely certain how they all worked. Each had been used though, triggering confusion about how many rounds a trigger pull fired until someone had extracted good pictures of the selector switch.
There were a lot of people that wanted to know what the internals looked like, but Amy wasn't going anywhere near figuring that out. If Missy wanted to share then she could.
Another check showed that in the kingdom, where this had also been discovered due to the news programs covering it, there was apparently an uptick in kids playing with live ammo guns...provided they had proper protections in place, passed a twenty minute basic safety class, and they were in an area secured from unexpected participants. Also included were lightsabers and some imitation energy weapons.
...now if only the whole thing with Robin taking a kid with him from the 'invasion fleet' made more sense.
"They want what?" Nanoha asked, blinking.
"For us to be a little more aggressive today," Hayate answered, sounding unsure of things herself.
"...why?"
"Probably because Rainbow was running around with a machine gun yesterday," Fate pointed out. Which was honestly a good point. "We look like near-pacifists right now when they're letting a kid run around with a lethal weapon. Even if their laws happen to consider it to be a toy, our minimal injuries by comparison is probably looking like we were showing off...or afraid to cause injuries."
"But we don't have access to...their...huh. We do have access to their healing, individually and by just calling for some nurse devices." And for that matter, Raising Heart had just highlighted a remote healing option to keep otherwise-fatal injuries from being fatal before a proper healing device could show up. An option that the system said had been in use while Rainbow was running around shooting people in the arms and legs.
"We could justify some of it as avoiding property damage," Hayate offered. "We, er, are a little less equipped for doing things without causing collateral damage to structures. In theory. Except for Nanoha, ironically."
Fate blinked. "Except for Nanoha?"
"She demonstrated knockout bullets yesterday. Homing ones. Bardiche requires too much room for you to swing and I'm very much still primarily area-of-effect in my skills."
"Precision targeting can be vital no matter how big the explosion at your target," Nanoha noted. "And keeping someone alive when you hit them doesn't do any good if you crush them to death with a collapsing building. Sure, sometimes you have to punch through decks of a ship to take out a target that you're not too concerned with keeping alive, but proper application of force is always important. Especially if there might be bystanders around."
Fate turned to her, one eye twitching. "Your signature attacks are essentially various levels of magical orbital bombardment strike."
"And most of my targets warrant that level of power. I don't think anyone on Earth Bet would, and there's a reason that my indoor training includes very low power Divine Buster attacks."
"But even those would cause problems with buildings not rated for magical attacks," Hayate pointed out.
"Well duh. That's why I stuck with basic bullets. They're the only thing I have that I feel is safe to hit someone without magic on a planet with no magical reinforcement on the buildings. The kingdom doesn't seem to have much better, but knowing that they don't mind injuries even when they aren't deemed necessary? They don't need anything better."
She wasn't sure why they were staring at her for that. It all seemed obvious to her now that she'd realized some of the implications of the kingdom's healing capabilities, though if she was allowed to she'd be planning to pull out the lightsaber and go after their upcoming targets at least once.
...a quick reminder to do more sword training, lightsaber or otherwise, was added to her todo list.
Missy had taken a quick look at PHO, and found the reactions to the gun she'd built amusing, but most of her focus today was trying to figure out how to make a couple of things work. She still wanted to get the stealth spell working so that she could hide bystanders, and had discovered a whole pile of information on area-of-effect tricks that now existed in the kingdom's systems during an idle search for ideas. None of them did what she wanted, admittedly, but they helped with figuring out a few details.
And made several others a lot more confusing, admittedly.
The other thing she was looking at, though only with a single multitasking instance, was possible things to do for a next appearance. The 'goose company' was taking care of the bulk of the small stuff and didn't seem to need any help, not to mention were trying to be a lot more subtle than an outright attack would be. That said, their choice of less obvious targets at several points was interesting. Such as going after the processing facilities handling converting coca to cocaine for illegal distribution instead of the coca plant itself, and factories that produced a number of tobacco-based products instead of tobacco farms. The latter were also being treated a lot more 'gently', instead of obvious and destructive sabotage.
...like gradually partially turning the water feeds off to create a water pressure problem for a tobacco processing facility compared to rigging things for an overnight roof collapse for a cocaine production facility or ensuring that a methamphetamine production facility experienced a reasonably harmless fire. No, wait, the details on the latter indicated that the goose involved had only turned off the power on the easily-accessible external cutoff and the fire started when someone was stupid when turning it back on. Then the goose returned to ensure that the fire suppression system actually activated instead of failing to do so because it had been bypassed.
After dragging herself away from that, she was disappointed in the other events going on. Sure, Taylor had dug up some 'help law enforcement' jobs for their visitors, but those were boring. The problem was that most of the other potential problems had either been significant enough for Dragon to trigger remote depowering of the parahuman or were intelligent enough to keep their heads down. Well, there were a couple that the Guild was actively working on, but it felt rude to interrupt and it seemed likely that there was a wider goal than just stopping the parahumans if they were still parahumans.
Maybe it was time to expand the search to other versions of Earth? They didn't necessarily have proper introductions off of Earth Bet, after all. Either that or see if the Bureau had problems that would be trivial to solve with a little application of proper force that they'd been reluctant to apply...assuming that was the case anywhere. Most of the trouble from that area seemed to be of the 'idiots wanting to take over the kingdom' variety these days, and everything else that had come up recently was boring by comparison. Or involved entire governments.
Expanse wasn't a good choice for taking on planetary governments in any reasonable fashion.
Dragon hadn't expected a visitor today, but wasn't busy enough to send her away. "Good morning, Rein."
"Good morning," Rein replied.
"I expected you to be with Hayate on one of the dozen potential 'aid law enforcement' tasks lined up for the day."
"We decided to split up for the day. She wants to test her personal precision casting without my aid, and I suspect that there's also a desire to not have me tell her off for causing injuries."
"Your normal doctrine is to cause as few injuries as possible, right?"
"That varies significantly. The bigger the threat, the more acceptable extra damage is, to both people and the surroundings. A review of all of Minerva's outings and the injuries caused by her has her well within our standards. Expanse, Betty Bop, and Bunker Bunny are all similar, with even the incident with that 'Crawler' person being acceptable given his crimes. Rainbow is the outlier, some of her antics being legitimate mistakes but with far too much willingness to cause direct harm. If she were actually a child then it would be more understandable..."
"In a couple of very important ways she actually is a child," Dragon interrupted, digging up links to their documentation of the personality-forming mechanics from using the alternate form system.
"...really? I was about to start on a 'differences between healing capabilities' explanation."
"We're aware of that evaluation on your end, as well as our differences in personal protection. I understand that releasing footage of a child sitting in the room with a nuclear bomb was a shock and somewhat unsettling to a number of people. But those taking on other forms, younger or not, are an interesting subject. I personally think that several of them are essentially experiencing childhoods they couldn't have the first time around for various reasons."
While Rein looked over the documentation, Dragon returned her focus to watching the latest attempt to attack the kingdom's near-Antarctica outposts. Today's group included a submarine, which made the 'dismantle ships around the occupants until there was just enough to keep the sailors out of the water, then remove the people before dismantling the last of the hulls' tactics more difficult. But apparently not much more difficult. Drones had plugged the openings for the ballast tanks to remove all ability to control them from inside the submarine before emptying them to force the vessel to rise, and once it was on the surface had started the dismantling procedure.
A reasonably simple solution to a potentially tricky problem. Flash-dismantling planes that were already in the air, triggering parachutes on ejection seats when there was nothing left to eject from, honestly looked more impressive though. Returning the captured people to their home countries after 'rescuing' them with a small fleet of cabbies was another element entirely, with any parahumans depowered as part of processing.
Despite it going against their normal operating procedures in the Bureau, Hayate was being significantly more violent today than she had been the day before. There were multiple reasons for this though, and being asked to was honestly a very small part of things. Concern over the Wolkenritter being worked on today was a much larger factor, but the largest contributor was probably what kind of assholes she was helping with today.
The first group had twice held schools hostage with explosives, though admittedly not in the past couple of months. That didn't make it better, in her opinion. She'd felt better after leaving the leaders of that group with broken limbs. They'd just finished up with the second group, which had been linked to an abduction ring in addition to using 'parahuman' abilities to evade capture. Barriers and depowering had put an end to that, but she'd not been able to break the leader's legs to keep him from running away due to the barriers knocking the man unconscious.
There were still no fatalities, on either side. The Bureau and the kingdom were in agreement that needless deaths were to be avoided, and a review of trials from conquered worlds showed that they also weren't a fan of 'life in prison' situations either. Long-term rehabilitation measures away from the bulk of society were another matter entirely.
"No partner for you today?" one of the officers commented.
"I left her behind in case there were problems with some medical procedures others are undergoing," Hayate replied. Not that she recalled mentioning that part of the justification to Rein, now that she thought about it. Of course, the chances of there being problems with the kingdom's level of medical technology was also basically zero.
"Always prudent to have someone available for those situations. We think we've got everything we need taken care of, so you should be good to go. Time for a lunch break for you, I'd think?"
"It is, yes. Hopefully the others are also ready for a break as well."
"Thanks for the help and I hope you enjoy your lunch."
Ethan had ended up with a Sunday shift, and was annoyed. Not because he was working on a Sunday, but because he mostly had paperwork to deal with. Their need for patrol schedules had been all but negated by the kingdom letting them know that Lung and Oni Lee were no longer parahumans, the latter due to his powers having been degrading his mental capabilities for years and the former due to accepting the offer of his powers being removed instead of dealing with the need to get into fights every so often.
That change meant that they no longer had any parahuman-run villain groups in the city. Or parahuman villains at all on paper. Only a couple of independents and some of Faultline's group were still in town, and Faultline wasn't even taking jobs anymore. Which might create some problems for any 'need to get into fights' urges over time, unless they'd also availed themselves of the ability to have their powers permanently removed?
Lung had asked that the PRT and Protectorate be informed of his and Lee's depowerings, and for that to be passed on to the other enforcement agencies to hopefully keep them less trigger-happy, but Ethan was intentionally avoiding checking on those he shouldn't have any reason to know anything about.
There was actually a noticeable drop in villain activities worldwide, honestly. Partially Dragon ensuring that problems stopped being problems, but mostly each new outpost creating a zone of 'do not fuck around or the kingdom might come for you' concerns. A number of villains had also seen the end of the Endbringers as a reason to 'go legit', as participating in the battles was no longer going to get them a free pass.
None of this directly helped with Scion, but he seemed content to wander around doing random stupid shit.
A good part of the paperwork was reports on anything even potentially related to Team Mana and the kingdom passing through them for review, and he was amused that the geese were now part of that. Only a third of the reports involving geese were actual goose company activities, the rest being legitimate geese just being geese. And only a quarter of the actual goose company activities were being noticed, though some of that was probably because at least half of the list was happening outside of the country at this point.
Hitting an update on the global map of 'outpost locations' in the middle of the pile had him blinking though, as he'd not realized just how quickly those were spreading. In particular, it looked like China had finally cleared up a couple of their laws and gotten their first locations...far from Beijing. Specifically, two areas with some significant medical problems in the local populace that they'd been struggling to help. That those areas were likely to get some significant 'medical tourism' traffic until additional locations existed was probably going to help just as much as the outposts themselves too.
...actually, maybe the kingdom had just made an exception for the laws not being up to date to help with the suffering of those areas. Needing to go to the effective 'middle of nowhere' in the country for the incredible healing would be a great way to convince the 'better off' politician types to stop dragging their feet.
Over the past few days of running her two doppelgangers, Hannah had accidentally learned that her magic color was almost indistinguishable from Dwight's...unless they were next to each other. Nobody could explain what was different about them, but when formed at the same time they could be distinguished. In person. Cameras recording the color thought they were literally identical.
This had been discovered in part because her two doppelgangers had gone to question the gaming duo about things and come back happy with what they'd learned. Though that had come after names were picked and outfits designed by the two, and she really wasn't sure if she wanted to create confusion or that was a side effect of something else. The boy doppelganger had picked the name Joyce and came up with a frilly dress with flower details that was also full of hidden pockets for gadgets and the girl doppelganger had picked the name Jessy and looked more like a mechanic in a jumpsuit with tools. And a toolbox.
As far as Hannah could tell, the intent of the duo was for Jessy to build equipment for Joyce to then go out and be the one using. He was doing training, including visiting the kingdom's combat gyms, and seemed to want to be able to use almost anything he could get his hands on if needed. She'd gone far more into ensuring that she knew how to make things, but didn't seem to care if she could use them at all. Well, beyond test sequences, but she had no interest in being proficient with them.
In addition to that, they'd run with the technology side of things to the point where neither of them wanted to be able to cast anything but the basic protection spells. Joyce wanted to be able to fight with only gadgets. Having a bunch of shield and stealth field generator spots in his Knight Armor dress was an example there, but Jessy's first project was working on figuring out a custom pair of shoes for him instead of using any of the basic designs that the kingdom already had available. Some of that seemed to be because the kingdom focused on sneakers for combat...and Joyce wanted heels for some reason.
...actually, focusing on him for a couple of minutes to try and figure out what was going on in his head seemed to indicate that the two had found 'magical girl' shows from Aleph and he'd decided that he wanted to be one...with gadgets. But he didn't want to be a girl, just an overly-frilly and impractical-looking 'magical girl' that was still effective.
It really felt like the therapist network had to have missed something in Hannah that was expressing itself very weirdly in the two 'kids'. She understood the individual desires and where they'd come from, just not how they'd distributed them across the pair. At the same time, she really wanted to see the look on Ethan's face when he first saw Joyce in action. Which, thinking about it, might explain things more than she was willing to admit to herself normally.
"So you've got a little under half an hour before you start your big stream," Danny noted.
"Yep," Taylor replied. "Dwight and Virgil were disappointed that they'd not been ready to cover the invasion attempt, but it was honestly a bit of a letdown across the board anyway. Not really worth their time, unlike this that they're currently ensuring they have a rough script for."
"I see. You know, I've been looking at a few things."
She groaned, likely knowing that this was going to be a good argument for something she didn't want to do. "Really?"
"Yes. The local China wasn't the only one around here with leadership issues. Having the fox show up to express displeasure with a couple of others would probably lead to good things overall, and there's at least one Japan that could do with a similar visit."
"Most of the other Chinas I glanced over would probably take better to a dragon showing up than a fox."
"They all have a cultural history that includes stories of their mandate to rule being influenced by a nine-tailed fox. Very similar stories, and being wrong for the current views is almost certainly going to be treated as a sign that things have been potentially illegitimate for a while."
"I don't want to directly mess with non-parahuman politics."
"You could just create a nine-tailed fox messenger device and set it loose like you did the geese."
"...the automated systems are supposed to specifically avoid meddling with governments directly, right down to not even being permitted to make the call for hostile takeovers. Partially because they'd probably be far too good at what would amount to remote takeovers, but mostly because that would essentially be stating that they aren't recognized as valid governments. My second appearance as the fox was honestly skirting the line and was only acceptable due to the parahuman-maintained elements of the dam in the first place."
He blinked a couple of times as he considered that. "You have an entire automated diplomatic corps that's regularly 'meddling' with governments."
"Diplomatic relations are a necessary but indirect method of pushing for change in a government. Going in myself to essentially call the current government illegitimate when there isn't mind control involved, or sending a device to do the same thing, would be stepping over several lines. Yes, the kingdom could trivially get away with it, but it isn't the kind of tactic I want to be used just because a government doesn't meet our approval in a general sense. Also, I made it illegal for basically that reason and the automated systems at least follow the letter of the law, even if they don't always care about the intent. Parahuman involvement in mind controlling the people was basically the only reason I wasn't breaking my own laws when I pulled the first nine-tailed fox visit."
As annoying as it was to be shot down like this, he had to admit that having very specifically defined lines that shouldn't be crossed was a very good thing. Though that brought up other questions. "So if there are lines not to be crossed, where does the 'goose company' fall in their assault on legal enterprises like the tobacco industry?"
"They should only be targeting companies that are still legal where evidence says they knew about and have done their best to hide or downplay the medical problems their products create. In general, not just for tobacco, though the tobacco industry's history of hiding the dangers of smoking in particular makes them fall under several 'expose or combat corruption' justifications in a general sense."
Damn. That was a much better direction to justify things through than he was expecting. "What about things that are fully legal in one jurisdiction but not in another?"
"If you're referring to some of the drug trade, where it's legal to produce the stuff in the countries that they're doing so in but not where they're selling the end product, then you can run a trace on all the activities of the geese to find that they fall under the 'expose or combat corruption' rules or that the facilities are part of a known export chain into black markets where the product isn't legal. At least a dozen facilities that are producing the drugs for use in exclusively legal contexts are being ignored entirely, even if the kingdom wouldn't agree with the legality of the usage."
"You've put a lot more thought into this than I thought."
"I built a very solid legal framework and the automated systems are looking for every loophole they can find in it. I think they've been trying to find justification to file certain things as crimes against the populations in general in order to be able to allocate more resources to the disruption projects."
"...what?"
"Several of the larger automated systems have already needed to start getting paid due to making the legal leap from 'automation' to 'people' while adapting to changing demands. Or at least that's what my daily briefings have pointed out multiple times. In fact, now that I'm looking, there have been over two hundred attempts to get 'use local mythology to affect problematic governments' past the rules checks citing my appearances as a nine-tailed fox as justification. Only one succeeded because a parahuman using mind control to maintain power was involved, and to stay on the right side of the law they had to restrict things to the removal of the parahuman influences by the simulated spirit they assembled. Largely what I did, but without a brainwashed parahuman army providing the extra latitude needed to make a bigger statement."
She was kind enough to send him the information on that one, and it turned out to be connected to an island nation on another Earth that he'd never heard of and had likely missed because he'd been focusing on 'minimal effort for maximum gain' desires to help his own arguments along. 'You can help this group of a hundred people' sounded a lot less worth bending rules for than 'you can help a nation of millions to billions'. Also included were some references to other things she'd just brought up, and he found himself reluctantly agreeing with where the lines had been drawn.
They weren't where he wanted them drawn currently, admittedly, but could see how being more permissive could get problematic with less annoying governments. Taylor very obviously didn't want to be subverting planets through direct manipulation to get them to want to join the kingdom or empire, and that was very hard to argue against no matter how much the people might be better off. Even that was only due to the technological gap between the kingdom and...er...everyone else, really.
"Time for me to do my quick introduction to things," Taylor said, standing up.
"You aren't just going to do it in a simulation interface?" he asked, surprised.
"I'm going to be doing it with Dwight and Virgil, or rather Iris and Siri, before leaving them to handle the rest of the coverage. But feel free to check on the automated debates over whether or not to do planetary cleanups on planets that nobody has asked for anything like that to be done on."
...now he was torn between seeing what kind of automated headache had been created and watching the demonstration itself live. Then again, he did have limited multitasking available...
