"It'll be probably nine more hours before I know anything about Scion's actual condition," Taylor said after she'd eaten a meal. Amy had also claimed her lap at this point. "But so far the network hasn't reacted to his removal at all, which is what we'd expected. Lots of panicking over the removal of the shrouds and the total collapse of the pocket reality, but zero realization that they're now 'leaderless'."
"And you've ensured that parahumans won't exist by morning?" her father asked.
"In general they shouldn't exist by midnight, but getting all the shards with a monitoring connection active will take longer and any of them could go 'full connection' at any time. Time estimates are thus a little trickier until reaching the point where the entire network is processed."
"Ah. So we'll know more in the morning when it comes to Scion, and you can't guarantee a lack of parahumans at any moment for a few weeks?"
"Basically."
"I vote we spend the night here," Amy said. "Because I suspect that a lot of people are going to use this as an excuse to party, or at least get drunk and incredibly rowdy."
That...wasn't a horrible point, all things considered.
Riley had known that Minerva was an awesome magical girl, but hadn't ever considered that Scion might be her 'big bad' that had to be defeated. It seemed obvious now...and yet didn't feel right, as though there had been something missing from the fight. Which either meant that Minerva had been stronger than expected for her big bad...or Scion hadn't been it?
That was hard to figure out. Bandage claimed that the source of parahuman powers was the last 'large threat' the kingdom was aware of, but the end of that threat hadn't required a proper magical girl fight. So maybe the bigger threat was still hiding? But unless the bigger threat had sent the living computer things that granted parahuman powers then there was no hint of the bigger threat yet, and there should already be a hint of one...
"What are you worried about?" Bay asked.
Riley blinked. "What?"
"You're obviously worried about something. What is it?"
"Oh. Er..."
"Let me guess, it has something to do with your expectations for magical girls?"
Riley blushed. "Maybe."
Bay shook her head. "A magical girl story needs to follow story rules. The real world doesn't, and that's assuming that you're even comparing things to the right kind of story."
"...but Minerva's fight didn't feel like a 'big bad' fight."
"Would a 'big bad' fight have involved Scion attacking and hurting a lot of people as part of things?"
"Probably?"
"But Minerva ensured that she got him away from everyone else, so there wasn't anyone for him to hurt. That sounds like something a strong magical girl should do, doesn't it?"
Okay, that was a good point. Keeping bystanders safe was always a good idea, if only to keep the big bad from using them as hostages. And if Scion was behind parahumans then he'd been doing a lot of 'empowering and transforming' innocents...though that didn't quite line up with some of those empowered becoming heroes, but those with enough good in them overcoming what the evil bad guy did to them was also a thing...
And, she supposed that this was a couple hundred years before Scion's plan would've been in full swing. The couple of stories where the magical girls found out who the big bad was early on for some reason and then didn't just go shoot them to stop the plan early had always felt a little weird.
Sunday morning came far too early for Danny. He really should've grabbed a room at the Inn and slept there. But no, he'd gone back home and dealt with the insanity of groups of drunk partiers celebrating the demise of a threat to all of humanity. Nevermind that before yesterday they'd generally not had a clue about the threat and thus generally had only known about it once it was already being taken care of.
Then again, asking people to not party at good news, even without years of build-up, was probably asking too much.
Eventually he noticed that Taylor had decided to do an after-lunch meeting, possibly to give her time to work with whatever remained of Scion. Though giving everyone time to recover from any drinking they'd done, and those with responsibilities on Earth time to deal with anything that came up this morning, did seem to be prudent as well. And there was always the chance that Amy had kept her up late, or the other way around...
Of course, this was probably not a horrible thing for him, given that he was certain that he was going to be getting calls soon as well.
Virgil looked over his notes for Rainbow's portion of things, reasonably certain that he'd picked up on everything. But he saved and sent the list to Tracey so that it could be compared to Dwight's. "An after-the-fact 'how it was all managed' special is a lot more work than I was expecting."
"Should be worth it though," Dwight replied. "Though figuring out how Taylor managed ninety percent of what she did is going to be the hard part."
"I already asked the automated systems about things there," Tracey interjected. "Ninety percent of what was shown at that stage is 'too dangerous for dissemination'."
"...oh. So we should focus on the Rainbow section?"
"Probably."
That made sense to Virgil too, admittedly. "We should still see how much of 'was actively monitoring Scion' we're allowed to reveal the details of."
Tracey frowned, then shrugged. "Okay, that might not be a bad idea, but I don't know if she's told anyone how she did it."
"So we ask her if she's willing to tell us so that we can report on it."
"Right, we can probably do that at the meeting later."
That had Virgil blinking. "Meeting? Did I miss a notification?"
"...how do you not have notifications from Taylor set to be high-priority?"
Yeah, that kind of felt silly in hindsight.
Vivio bounced along even though she wasn't in bunny-girl form. Nanoha-papa and Hayate-mama had things to do today, but Fate-mama had been told that she wasn't going on longer patrols while pregnant and was going to train with them instead.
"So Nanoha did some training with your lightsabers, right?" Fate-mama asked.
"Nanoha-papa is really good with her lightsaber," Vivio replied. "Even using two I couldn't hit her."
"That sounds like her, but it sounds like you and your friends have been focusing on attacking things close to you, instead of at a distance."
"We can all shoot bullets at things in the sky." They'd had to learn that to get good scores in a couple of the games.
"Hmmm. Perhaps we should expand your options there, since I know you've had trouble with a couple of the larger spells when not going into 'adult mode'."
"Nove-sensei says that relying on that for training would make it harder if we can't use it, but that we should use it every couple of weeks if we want to use it in matches later."
"And she's probably right, but there are a number of less taxing ranged options you should be able to use now, and perhaps some bullet variations that you haven't picked up yet. Plus, you should learn to target things on the ground too."
"...but if they're on the ground then I should just go after them?"
"And if they don't want to let you then you can distract them with ranged attacks so they can't concentrate on keeping you away."
Oooooh. That wouldn't work with most of the games they'd played so far, but it probably would work on a person...
Kurt frowned as he looked over things as parahumans had effectively become 'extinct'. The kingdom was shoring up a bunch of tinkertech so that it wouldn't fail suddenly and it was going to be a couple of weeks before things really started hitting harder in some places. Groups like the Elite were already in disarray though, and it looked like the last surviving members of Toybox weren't liking being ejected from the pocket dimension they'd been using as a base without any of their tech.
Not that any of the tech worked at this point anyway.
Ensuring that the governments that had relied on parahumans were still functional in a month was still going to be the more difficult prospect, especially as there were already warning flags for several that had been relying on a parahuman or two without noticing. Generally thinkers helping things along...while also generally being corrupt in some fashion in most cases even if they did still get the job done better than their non-parahuman coworkers and/or predecessors. He was specifically ignoring the United States and Canada on Bet and the PRT/Protectorate issues there though, because others in the 'in the know' group were more directly involved there.
The kingdom seemed to be on top of most of the 'step in to keep governments working' side of things though...everywhere other than Earth Bet. Presumably because the bulk of the 'in the know' organization was based there and focusing on it, so the automated systems felt it was better to focus where others weren't. Though what anyone was going to do about Africa's parahuman-led governments collapsing entirely was a good question.
"Sir," his assistant said, though he avoided looking in their direction as he found today's incredibly colorful outfit a little distracting. Supposedly it was being worn on a bet though. "It looks like there might be more immediate problems than expected with one instance of Russia?"
"...what kind of problems?" he asked.
"It looks like leadership was using a thinker to do a lot of last-minute moving of money around their system and all of a sudden they can't."
"Oh, one of those. I think that's going to fall under the 'fuck around and find out' rules unless it threatens to cause issues for the bulk of the population."
"Predictions are that things won't get that bad for at least four months, though a number of government institutions are going to have problems by the end of the week and there are concerns about potential decisions to see this as an attack and launch nukes."
"...because of course they'd decide something like that. Have the automated systems disarmed the nukes in question already?"
"They're on standby to do so, but haven't done so yet."
"Then I think that side's out of our hands. Is that Earth where China's economy collapsed last year?"
"No, sir, it's the one where Japan successfully conquered China."
"Oh. They're still barely functioning at this stage, right?"
It took a moment to get a response. "Oddly, they appear to suddenly be doing significantly better, though how long that will last is unknown. Several parahumans were depowered last week and haven't been able to create quite as much turmoil as they had been."
Yeah, this was just another reminder that parahumans had been messing with every major government in the inner shroud in some fashion. Hopefully most of the cleanup would be relatively minor.
"So have you managed anything useful with Scion?" Amy asked as they sat down to lunch.
"The therapist network has spawned sixty new independent intelligences trying to work things out there," Taylor replied. "Though 'Scion' wasn't even a name, it was apparently supposed to be 'Zion' as a description. Game-wise, his name was 'the Warrior', but the underlying intelligence controlling things was nameless and genderless."
"Which sounds like there was an underlying intelligence that just didn't want to talk?"
"Yes, though I don't actually know a lot more than that at this point."
"Haven't you been involved?"
"I've been more focused on being a spare resource output and building my workshop while letting the therapists handle that side of things. Hive is trying to use some information gathered from the core shards to tell the network to stop doing monitoring and trigger events, but isn't expecting to be successful. Not that it'll matter too much as we're using planetary shields to keep shards from opening new connections either way. Earth Bet should be clear of shard connections in the next twenty minutes, actually, with the shield having stopped over a thousand attempts at establishing new monitoring connections in the past couple of hours."
"Wait, everything's falling apart for the network and it's stepping up opening connections?"
Taylor shrugged. "Hive mentioned something about 'find a user' being a bit of a default option when they've got nothing else overriding. It's establishing something else as overriding that's the problem for us right now."
"Oh. That makes some sense."
"So, I've not checked PHO. Any interesting takes there?"
Amy snorted. "Insane numbers. Being able to make a 'real life video game' that forced Scion to play by the game rules only really got picked up on by someone sometime this morning. Lots of questions about how old Rainbow actually is if she was trusted to play distraction, or if she was chosen because having an actual child was less likely to cause Scion to act out before you were ready. They had to open up an entire set of boards just for people trying to examine the destroyed civilizations..."
"Oh, right, I should trigger posting the detailed info on those to the website."
"Well, as soon as someone notices that'll probably kill most of the speculative discussion at least."
"Only for a day or two at most before people finish going through a species or two and then want to discuss what they've learned."
Malinda looked at the information on the construction speed at Taylor's 'workshop', finding the rate of construction to be frankly insane. At this rate, by the end of the day the star would be fully enclosed four times over, though it had admittedly already had most of the framework in place from being used as a place for processing devices. It also made 'my workshop planet' feel completely unimportant by comparison.
A ping from her monitoring of Guild communications pulled her attention back to more local concerns, such as the fact that the Guild itself was kind of falling apart. Not that there was much to do about it, given that between her and Colin it currently had two official powered members remaining. It also no longer had a purpose though, as there were no longer international parahuman threats to monitor and deal with, so all that was left was shutting the organization down and possibly helping to find people jobs elsewhere.
The problem was that the worst members were also the most vocal about losing their powers, no matter the source, being an affront to their personal liberties. Good luck on them getting any form of 'justice' as they saw it for the problem though. Even if they could convince the courts that they'd been wronged and the kingdom was at fault there was little to nothing the courts could force the kingdom to do, and it was highly unlikely any judge was willing to try.
Comparisons had already been made to Alberta's rat control measures, even though those were currently temporarily obsolete thanks to the kingdom's cleanup of invasive species, and there had been zero indications that anyone other than former parahumans with delusions of competence were willing to entertain the idea of lawsuits anyway.
"So how many people have messaged you wanting help taking action against the kingdom for 'stealing' their powers?" Colin asked.
"...about a third of the Guild," Malinda admitted. "I assume you've got your own collection?"
"Nearing two-thirds of the Protectorate and a quarter of the Wards at this point, I think, with the latter mostly appearing to be pushed by local Protectorate members."
"And you're nowhere near ready to handle the problems of the adults no longer having functional jobs."
"Unfortunately not. I expected to have months to years to gradually transition from parahumans to mages instead of less than a week, but the President seems to think that we don't have to worry about the upheaval period."
"...that is an interesting point. Do you think we missed something?"
"I think the kingdom has been hiding something from anyone who might reveal their plans to Taylor, honestly."
"Ah. That...would make some sense, which means they won't be willing to tell us until things are fully in place and she can't do anything about it."
"Most likely. I also suspect that it's already too late to do anything about whatever it is, but have no clue what the timeline is going to be on revealing details."
Taylor looked over the notes from the therapist network as everyone filed into the meeting room, mentally sighing as she did so, but it wasn't long before everyone had arrived. This included, to Colin's shock, the President being brought in by Amanda, the civilian mage on his staff. Why the formerly-automated systems had recommended bringing him in was unknown, but they'd also asked about and she'd cleared inviting several other leaders that had declined. As a side benefit, this meant that she didn't see a need to go full Minerva instead of attending as Taylor.
Hive was once again sitting on the table, though closer to Taylor this time, and there were a couple of minutes of introductions for the benefit of the President.
"So," she said once everyone was settled. "This is mostly an after-action thing. Mr. President, you should be aware that at this point there are no longer parahumans on Earth Bet and planetary shields are preventing anyone else from being targeted on the planet. In addition, in a few weeks there won't be any more unprocessed shards at all, which came up at last week's meeting."
"I was aware of both of those thanks to the kingdom's representatives and communications passed through Amanda here," the President replied.
Well, she hadn't exactly decreed that he couldn't be kept informed, and honestly she didn't want to have to micromanage to that level anyway. "As of a few minutes ago I've been informed that the intelligence behind Scion was treating almost everything as a game. It doesn't have emotions in the same way that humans do, but its equivalent had it having spent basically the entire time since Scion appeared in what we would think of as a state of depression. The missing counterpart that never joined Scion was essentially seen as a life partner of sorts, and it had largely lost any sense of 'meaning' without them present."
"It and not him?" Amanda asked.
"A machine intelligence born inside of an alien computer system doesn't fit normal biological gender roles at all. It also came from a species that would likely be insulted at the idea of assigning that kind of thing to an individual at all, as far as I can tell." She waited to see if anyone else had a comment, then continued. "At any rate, that intelligence saw anything other than the other controlling intelligences of shard groupings as not actually worth considering to be its equivalent of 'alive', until I successfully got through to it. At that point it decided that only one of us was going to survive, and essentially hoped and expected that the survivor would be me."
"So Scion was acting suicidal," Amy said.
"Apparently, but with a significant 'the strongest one deserves to survive' deep-rooted element included in the overall calculation. The only reason I wasn't surrendered to was because there was no way to tell if I was actually bigger and stronger without the fight, even if there was an assumption that not being spread out to work with humanity meant that I'd win due to still having access to most of my resources. The therapists are currently predicting a couple of years before they can figure out if it's safe to so much as let it out of a sandbox environment, doubly so since it's tried to delete itself over fifty times since booting back up."
"That's unfortunate," Ethan said. "Though if the intelligence wants to die that much then why not let it go?"
Taylor shrugged. "I've left that up to the therapist network, doubly so since once the last shards are processed I'm hoping to step down from being in charge anyway."
"Legally," the kingdom representative chimed in. "You can't actually do that."
"I wrote the kingdom's laws."
"And you made it illegal for you to change the war rules while empowering a supermajority of citizens to amend them at the same time, on the basis that a sitting monarch shouldn't be able to directly manipulate the rules that allow them to be a sitting monarch. The latest amendments have adjusted definitions that mean that removing the last shards in the immediate area does not constitute the end of the threat or cleanup."
Taylor blinked a couple of times. "When did someone manage to run voting to amend anything?"
"Your Highness, there are entire digital communities of formerly-automated systems willing to work on that kind of project. Individual helpers to ensure that every single citizen of all kingdom worlds understood what was being voted on and the effects of it were the hardest piece of things to arrange. As it stands, there are now several additional requirements before the crisis can be considered to be over."
It didn't take much to load up a list of changes to the laws that she didn't personally put into place, and she was annoyed to find out that there were a pile of war/crisis amendments. With ninety-eight percent approval at the lowest. Including, but not limited to, her first argument that technically she wasn't the legal monarch due to not having been voted in.
Apparently they'd arranged for that vote back in October and had been running confirmation votes on it with every additional planet joining the kingdom.
The representative had waited for her to load things, but continued once she had. Likely for the benefit of the others. "Until all license servers are accounted for there's an assumption that more Shard devices are out there, somewhere, and they're an existential threat to any universe they're in as a matter of record, given that they could trivially trigger a false vacuum collapse and the bulk of those processed here had a goal of replacing reality with their own. More locally, cleanup actions in your original laws and amended by vote require removing all detectable Shard influence from the kingdom's populations and protectorates before the crisis can be declared over, and all institutions created as part of dealing with the problem would need to be dismantled."
"Hold up," Missy said. "You could argue that the kingdom itself was created for dealing with the shards."
"The kingdom does indeed fit the definition of such an institution, and the Queen is the one that included that particular definition and requirement. In fact, the 'influence' definition also comes from her, and includes every living former parahuman."
Taylor frowned at that. "What do you mean by 'every living former parahuman'?"
"Brain alterations from a Shard connecting to a parahuman fall under the definition of influence, including but not limited to your own, most of which are not currently considered safe to undo."
"...that sounds like it falls under several exceptions."
"It might for you due to recursive concerns about not being able to step down until after your own death, but not for your subjects. Of course, there's also the recognition of the Belkan Empire laws that require the current kingdom in charge, and the next likely successor, to have sitting monarchs. Those laws can only be changed with a supermajority of fifteen or more member kingdoms."
...did this count as competent underlings working against her to keep her in power? Because that's what it felt like, and until her approval rating dipped enough there wasn't likely to be a good way to vote her out. Oh, and they'd changed the rules for that a little too, though not to the point of trying to force her to be a monarch for life on a technicality. Fun. And it was unlikely that anyone currently in the kingdom was going to want to be 'in charge'.
"Lord," Hive said. "There is also the fact that there is no way to remove your access permissions from much of the kingdom."
"No," Taylor said. "That's trivial."
"They were based on my own access systems, Lord, and likely need a complete replacement to swap in anyone else so long as you live."
"I can reset your access systems anytime I want, and you made the bulk of the kingdom even easier to reset without noticing that you were doing so. You're just not allowed to acknowledge how to reset your own access systems." There was a look of confusion from several of the others. "I didn't grant myself the maintenance technician title, that came with figuring out how to essentially be a maintenance technician. There are several things about Belkan and pre-Belkan tech that I might be the only living expert on due to black-boxed limitations on the systems themselves...which probably means eventually teaching classes, admittedly."
"So you could give someone else access to all the backend controls," the President said. "But it's unlikely anyone else would be able to handle having access as well as you've handled setting everything up to begin with."
"That might be, or it might not. Stripping the override access codes and leaving the portions controlled by the legal framework would probably be enough either way. I was hoping to be able to go back to being a normal teenager for a bit."
"Your Highness," the kingdom representative said. "That does bring up another item that was...deliberately kept from you as not being worth your attention while it didn't actually matter." Taylor leveled a glare at the representative, which just smiled at her. "Five minutes ago the kingdom started the process of bringing 'Earth Bet' into the kingdom, so you will need to decide whether you plan on remaining there or relocating to one of the kingdom's other planets."
"...what?"
"That's technically been in progress since October," the President said. "Individual countries voting to join the kingdom if the planet reached critical mass of governments voting to do so, though I don't think South America or Africa were predicted to join in so I'm not sure how it happened."
"Africa was easier as their governments were parahuman-led on average," the representative answered. "The leaders were legally compromised, so the populace was approached instead and voted. South America just barely slipped the planet over the line due to repeating that in four additional countries and a military takeover in favor of joining the kingdom in a fifth. We didn't even need to try slipping through an alteration in the 'joining the kingdom' rules as laid down by the Queen. In addition, a planetary scan last night showed a ninety-nine percent approval for joining the kingdom across the entire planet, up from ninety-seven percent last week."
Taylor blinked at that, and checked things. As stated, Earth Bet was already significantly along, and apparently the formerly-automated systems had been checking approval ratings for joining the kingdom every week or two. Excluding mages with protections and anyone with a shard connection, which made things harder to consider entirely valid, but with no more parahumans they'd gotten the single most complete reading possible under the circumstances.
Dammit. Though it was too late to stop things, she did note that the formerly-automated systems had missed a couple of items though, in their rush to get things done before she could stop them...
Sherie looked over the rebuilt Brockton Bay, one of several 'historically significant' cities that was partially untouched. Nothing in the way of the original residential structures remained, not even those put in by the kingdom previously, but it was obvious that this was a 'historic' city due to the still-existing streets. The 'Team Mana' warehouse and its surroundings, several government buildings including the PRT building and Rig, the hospital, and a few other buildings were all still present.
She had not expected to suddenly be a full citizen of the kingdom, on a proper kingdom world, today. Maybe in a few years after things had settled, but not today, and the now-former President had been very smug about the whole thing. Even put it as the kingdom solving a problem that Taylor had created through her decision to remove all parahuman powers on basically zero notice.
"I notice that Missy doesn't have a room here," Ethan said as he stepped out onto the balcony attached to their new apartment.
"By the kingdom's rules she's basically an adult with all the responsibilities thereof," Sherie noted. "Why would she need to live with us? Or want to?"
"Point."
"I'm kind of impressed with how quickly the kingdom moved to make all this happen, but we need to decide if we want to stick around here or not too."
"There are still a number of things in progress, and I don't want to go anywhere near Taylor until she's done using the laws to punish the systems that decided to do this behind her back."
That...wasn't a bad point, she had to admit. "I'm not even sure what laws they broke in doing that though."
"I asked Madcap. The biggest is that significant changes to the status of a planet serving as the official residence of the monarch or more than ten registered kingdom citizens require a notice to go out to all registered citizens using it as an official residence forty-eight hours before the changes are made. They didn't give any registered citizens, Taylor included, advance notice at all. Every formerly-automated system involved in the decision to skip that is thus getting a pile of punishment duty."
"...and they probably factored that into the plans."
"As far as Madcap can tell they didn't consider it at all because one interpretation of the law would only apply it to existing member planets. They just never confirmed that..."
"Ah."
