Kinsfire
Verified {Redacted}
- Location
- New Jersey
Did you actually read the post you were quoting from? They IMMEDIATELY explained how the reaction goes after saying what you quoted!
Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard? (Worm/MGLN) (Complete)
- Thread starter CmptrWz
- Start date
- Crossover
Did you actually read the post you were quoting from? They IMMEDIATELY explained how the reaction goes after saying what you quoted!
Yes, which is not a citation, it's just a description of the claim. The fact that you can write a balanced reaction involving molecules that exist isn't any sort of support for the part that matters, which is "reacts vigorously".
(The citation I can find on the formulation of the stuff seems to be saying that the reaction needed photocatalysis, but I'm not certain I'm interpreting the symbols right. EDIT: Sorry, I got mixed up in there, that's to react the two to produce ClO2F3, at moderately cold temperatures. Doesn't imply it is impossible to react the two otherwise, especially at higher temperatures. That's the only reaction of the two I've found references to so far, though.
Here's a patent that characterizes decomposition into oxygen and chlorine triflouride as the result of poor execution of a reaction intended to produce ClO2F3, though part of that involves an 'assuming' that I don't know whether is reasonable.)
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Sand won't save you now.
Google it; Derek Lowe explains everything you need to know.
And here I thought I had left Chemistry behind. 😣
- Pronouns
- he/him/his
Within the range of conditions that biology can exist, chemistry is always relevant. You are chemistry; you cannot leave it behind.
More to the point, here on SV/SB we get excited about high energy processes. Pun retroactively intended.
That goes without saying, high energy processes are needed to launch stuff at your foes during SpaceBattles at a Sufficient Velocity to be effective
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Well I came back and reread the whole thing now that it is finished like I said I would. Took me about two days between stuff I had to do to go through it all. It suffers a lot less fatigue when reading it all at once rather than some weeks being complete wastes of time from a narrative view. However some of the underlying issues that made that fatigue build up still stand out when read as a whole. So my final review of this fic gives it a 8/10.
On the whole it's not a bad story. It was finished, chapters were never late, and narratively it is consistent. There are always a few points that come off as odd such, as when three kids were given battle drugs that lead to the mental override of the psych of one and the adults just go oh well, but they were for the most part minor. The overwhelming attention to detail ensures that it suffers a lot less from "it works cause i said so" that so many other stories suffer from. Also the slice of life bits didn't tend to be so utterly boring as to just involve say an entire chapter dedicated to cooking and eating a lasagna, which I have sadly seen too often.
However, as in their other work Mauling Snarks it did still suffer from the majority of the characters just being slight derivatives of the same overarching characters. In fact you can argue that there were really only five distinct characters in the series and that they just switched names when needed. There was Taylor who could do anything and was perfect and only made mistakes when she was learning to do something, the earth bet characters, in which hive is included, that became mages who were all really good at overly planning for any eventuality and were always overprepared for anything unless they needed to mess up so Taylor could look better than them, the TSAB adults who after their initial appearance served no purpose other than to say wow the kingdom is so advanced, and the TSAB kids who served as filler chapters because they wanted to look creepy, and finally the idiots who were generic npc characters that served to allow for people to be punched. Outside of those five archetypes there were not any really distinct characters. It doesn't make the story unreadable but at times it just gets stale feeling. It also results in things like Taylor's relationship with Amy just feeling tacked on because, outside of when she is being a caricature of a person in Rainbow, Amy is one of the more generic Earth Bet type characters and thus doesn't feel like a good counterpoint to Taylor/Minerva. This problem is also felt around the time when Taylor begins to work in larger ways. Hive was a central character in the story up until about halfway through when Taylor suddenly no longer needs her for large scale projects. After this point is reached Hive is rarely mentioned doing anything again and becomes more like Hal in that she just serves as a device for Taylor. She ceases to be her own person and is just mentioned as doing background projects for most of the rest of the story.
The other main problem though one I consider a smaller problem than character development is simply how about forty percent of the story never actually mattered in the least. While it is a slice of life type fic, when you only got an update a week, having that update being about three kids that wanted to be creepy was a bit of a let down. It actually lead to me abandoning this story until it was finished. It wouldn't matter so much if it was about the life of characters that actually mattered, but after their debut the TSAB characters were never important to the story in any way again. If they were mostly cut out of the story after that point it probably would not effect the story so much. It is not as much of a problem with the story finished but when it was just a chapter a week it was a weakness in the style of writing that you could already tell they didn't matter and thus couldn't bring yourself to care about them. In fact the real secret kingdom that was in the epilogue that we never actually met could be said to have had more impact on the story than any of the TSAB characters combined. I feel that the TSAB characters should have been tied more firmly into the story in a way that mattered if we were meant to care about them.
So in all it got a 8/10. I gave it five points for it's length and not being the kind of story you get a few chapters in and wonder if it's an elementary school student writing their first fic and including anything their brains go "OMG that is so cool!" rather than actually plotting out their story and having a coherent plot. I gave it another point for actually finishing. Stories that actually end up being finished that are not one shots are very rare. I gave it another point for attention to detail. Any time the author says something happens because I say so to make their story work instead of having it happen because of a logical, or in the case of some characters illogical, chain of events is an instant fail. So they get a point for avoiding that. It also gains a point for inclusivity without being annoying. As a gay person I find fics where every character is gay as being annoying simply because of the statistical improbability of it. They got around that by making gender not matter with their other form system. However there did seem to be a bias towards lesbian characters over gay characters since the only actual gay characters got female forms and an androgynous, could be either, AI in the relationship while the lesbian main characters never got male forms or even considered them really. Despite noticing that I still give them that point as it was a minor thing to notice since even a lot of the hetero characters were given female forms. Still points towards a preference for females, but at least it was consistent and was rarely mentioned again after stated that it was an option they picked. They lost two points for characters all feeling the same and just the way the TSAB characters felt like padding rather than being important.
So again 8/10, would recommend as a read but only after it's finished or after waiting a few weeks between chapters since some of the chapters were just so annoying being in a weekly format.
On the whole it's not a bad story. It was finished, chapters were never late, and narratively it is consistent. There are always a few points that come off as odd such, as when three kids were given battle drugs that lead to the mental override of the psych of one and the adults just go oh well, but they were for the most part minor. The overwhelming attention to detail ensures that it suffers a lot less from "it works cause i said so" that so many other stories suffer from. Also the slice of life bits didn't tend to be so utterly boring as to just involve say an entire chapter dedicated to cooking and eating a lasagna, which I have sadly seen too often.
However, as in their other work Mauling Snarks it did still suffer from the majority of the characters just being slight derivatives of the same overarching characters. In fact you can argue that there were really only five distinct characters in the series and that they just switched names when needed. There was Taylor who could do anything and was perfect and only made mistakes when she was learning to do something, the earth bet characters, in which hive is included, that became mages who were all really good at overly planning for any eventuality and were always overprepared for anything unless they needed to mess up so Taylor could look better than them, the TSAB adults who after their initial appearance served no purpose other than to say wow the kingdom is so advanced, and the TSAB kids who served as filler chapters because they wanted to look creepy, and finally the idiots who were generic npc characters that served to allow for people to be punched. Outside of those five archetypes there were not any really distinct characters. It doesn't make the story unreadable but at times it just gets stale feeling. It also results in things like Taylor's relationship with Amy just feeling tacked on because, outside of when she is being a caricature of a person in Rainbow, Amy is one of the more generic Earth Bet type characters and thus doesn't feel like a good counterpoint to Taylor/Minerva. This problem is also felt around the time when Taylor begins to work in larger ways. Hive was a central character in the story up until about halfway through when Taylor suddenly no longer needs her for large scale projects. After this point is reached Hive is rarely mentioned doing anything again and becomes more like Hal in that she just serves as a device for Taylor. She ceases to be her own person and is just mentioned as doing background projects for most of the rest of the story.
The other main problem though one I consider a smaller problem than character development is simply how about forty percent of the story never actually mattered in the least. While it is a slice of life type fic, when you only got an update a week, having that update being about three kids that wanted to be creepy was a bit of a let down. It actually lead to me abandoning this story until it was finished. It wouldn't matter so much if it was about the life of characters that actually mattered, but after their debut the TSAB characters were never important to the story in any way again. If they were mostly cut out of the story after that point it probably would not effect the story so much. It is not as much of a problem with the story finished but when it was just a chapter a week it was a weakness in the style of writing that you could already tell they didn't matter and thus couldn't bring yourself to care about them. In fact the real secret kingdom that was in the epilogue that we never actually met could be said to have had more impact on the story than any of the TSAB characters combined. I feel that the TSAB characters should have been tied more firmly into the story in a way that mattered if we were meant to care about them.
So in all it got a 8/10. I gave it five points for it's length and not being the kind of story you get a few chapters in and wonder if it's an elementary school student writing their first fic and including anything their brains go "OMG that is so cool!" rather than actually plotting out their story and having a coherent plot. I gave it another point for actually finishing. Stories that actually end up being finished that are not one shots are very rare. I gave it another point for attention to detail. Any time the author says something happens because I say so to make their story work instead of having it happen because of a logical, or in the case of some characters illogical, chain of events is an instant fail. So they get a point for avoiding that. It also gains a point for inclusivity without being annoying. As a gay person I find fics where every character is gay as being annoying simply because of the statistical improbability of it. They got around that by making gender not matter with their other form system. However there did seem to be a bias towards lesbian characters over gay characters since the only actual gay characters got female forms and an androgynous, could be either, AI in the relationship while the lesbian main characters never got male forms or even considered them really. Despite noticing that I still give them that point as it was a minor thing to notice since even a lot of the hetero characters were given female forms. Still points towards a preference for females, but at least it was consistent and was rarely mentioned again after stated that it was an option they picked. They lost two points for characters all feeling the same and just the way the TSAB characters felt like padding rather than being important.
So again 8/10, would recommend as a read but only after it's finished or after waiting a few weeks between chapters since some of the chapters were just so annoying being in a weekly format.
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Virgo Supercluster, Earth-1218
Awww, well there goes the plot of Superbad being negated.
New Game 3 - May 15, 2011 (CmptrWz)
The fifteenth of May brought with it no attack by Leviathan. At all. Behemoth hadn't moved either, but there was no guarantee that this was because the attacks had stopped entirely. Brockton Bay had made the national news though, due to 'exotic bombs' from a bomb tinker working for the Azn Bad Boyz. More importantly, they mentioned that Dinah was still missing.
Taylor had forgotten about that, and her monitoring routines hadn't included anything for that level of problem. She started a check for children abducted worldwide, at least in places where the authorities could reach them with a little help, and was surprised at how few hits came back. Even after filtering a few times with more relaxed rules. It seemed that child abductions had died off significantly from what she'd been expecting unless the child already had powers due to too many children then gaining powers and severely harming their abductors.
Well, that made the number of places for Stella to visit smaller, at least.
She started with the easy ones, mostly to ensure that she got things down before the more difficult ones. Appearing over a building, circling it while letting motes of mana drift down from her broom, and making branch-like barricades appear in and around the building. Around the building to keep the abductor in, and in the building to isolate them from their abductee. The latter generally included an inverted barricade, able to be opened by the abducted kid from inside the room they were currently in but not by someone outside.
Once the barriers were in place, the building would flash and all doors needed to gain access to the kid and the one who took them would unlock and those not barricaded would open. Then she 'drew' the name and age of the kid abducted in the air over the building and moved on. She included apartment numbers for apartment buildings, glowing mote paths to follow for hidden areas, and generally ensured that it would be impossible for the authorities to not locate the missing kids.
Three times she had to add to her overall plan a little. One apartment building had four abducted kids in it, which was a slightly more complicated challenge and she ended up color-coding the mana for each of them. Another required some thought as the kid was being kept in the same room as the abductor and a slight biological manipulation prod to make the kid need to use the toilet allowed for separating the two. The third time was the first infant on her list, who wouldn't be able to free themselves once the abductor was taken into custody, so a branch-like key had been left on a sign outside that would allow the police to get through the final barricade.
A few hours later she came to Dinah. By this point the pattern was clear, but hadn't actually properly hit the national news even if it was starting to spread rapidly through law enforcement networks. More importantly, hopefully-subtle manipulation of things had prevented the data feeds in the hidden base from picking up on the information that had reached the local PRT and police. For the base an extra-large circle would need to be made over Brockton Bay's financial district, and a much larger set of isolation barricades were going to be needed. Plus disarming all the explosives, preventing the computer systems from being wiped, and other items, all of which had to happen in very rapid succession.
Luckily there were a lot of drones available hiding in the dimensional sea, meaning she just had to put on the proper light show while they did the actual work. Already captured on cameras, she started by glaring down at the financial district, as though it offended her, and then manipulated her broom to cause the bristles to grow extra-large. That let her leave a much wider and thicker collection of motes behind as she circled in the air, while also drawing a lot more attention that was being completely ignored inside of the hidden base.
At least until she triggered everything. Barricades appeared, the computers all powered down, connections to all the detonators on the explosives were severed by roots and vines, all the batteries and tinkertech power cells other than those in the emergency lights were drained. This left the mercenaries spread out in isolated pockets, Calvert trapped in his office, Dinah with a barricade over her door to his office that he couldn't open but she could, and no way into the base yet.
Causing the entire area to flash was easier than getting all of her drones to force the doors open, because a number of the doors were giant vault doors. Then she began the mote-path process even as she drew Dinah's name and age in the air, plus created a couple of small trees near each of three entrances with maps and warnings. Those were actual trees, local to the area, with wooden signs seemingly made from the same kind of trees, so that they wouldn't 'time out' and vanish. What people would think of potted trees with signs was another question entirely and would be interesting to check up on later, and who knew how long it would be before someone found the remains of the plants used to disconnect all the detonators.
In addition to all of that, Dinah also flashed as she had the drugs cleared out of her system and a general tune-up given to hopefully remedy some of the withdrawal symptoms, plus a sign on the door to Calvert's office included very basic assumptions about how his powers worked...and that they'd been purchased. No attempt was made to claim from where they'd been purchased.
Then, as if that wasn't enough to ruin Calvert's day, she flew over to the PRT building and made branches holding a sign outside of Director Piggot's office with the same information on Calvert's powers and that he was responsible for abducting Dinah. With all of that in place, and Director Piggot looking like she was working up to a very angry session, Stella left to handle the last few kids because Dinah being at the beginning or end felt too much like painting it as the actual priority.
The fallout from Stella showing up all over the planet to point authorities at abducted children had been a little hilarious. Both in trying to figure out what her priorities were, given some of the other things she'd done, and because a pile of pictures of the various barricades and signs had made it online. Casual examination showed that the branches that made up the barricades, and the apparent wood making up the signs, were always from a local plant...assuming you stretched the definition of 'branches' and 'wood' enough to include the one use of bamboo, anyway.
Having her priorities bounce between 'big' and 'small' things, as large as destroying an Endbringer and as small as saving parahumans on their first nights out or making it easy to recover abducted children, was probably the more amusing thing trying to be figured out. It apparently made her seem appropriately child-like though, deciding that this was today's way to be good and then just running off to do it without worrying about a larger plan.
If only they knew about the giant plan in the background.
Cauldron was having a harder time of things. Stella was not pathable, did not act in a predictable enough manner to be 'modeled' right now, and apparently couldn't even be seen properly by the Clairvoyant. Further, the latter had suddenly realized that entire alternate Earths had vanished from their ability to perceive them, presumably the growing number of alternates that Taylor had been building shield and sensor spires on while trying to ensure that she had enough shard-stuff to manage large-scale healing.
After finding out that they were noticing, she actually changed the build-out routines slightly to ensure that a planetary shield went up over any planet she was about to start working on, just in case. Once the spires were online they'd protect the planet on their own, but there was no need to be properly spotted ahead of time.
Also interesting was that her presence in Illinois had been 'missed' by Cauldron, presumably due to Taylor also being a blind spot that Cauldron was still unaware of. The government suddenly had non-parahuman options for a couple of things and were working on other items that hadn't originated with the PRT and that was also screwing up the paths. A complete failure to need thinker or tinker support in cracking some encryption was the first sign that reached the secret organization, after Costa-Brown had prepared to have suitable parahumans available and then the request had never come in. But they were blaming it on the appearance of Stella, who they knew was a blind spot, and not on Taylor, who they didn't know existed at all. In fact, it seemed like they were assuming the attempt to access the information had been aborted instead of successful due to the factoring method obtained from her.
Seeing how all the little missed things would gradually hinder them more and more would be easier to do if there was a control available, to see how they did without the proverbial wrench thrown into the works. Sadly, that wasn't an option.
"You can jam radio waves but you can't just make them not traverse an area," Erin said as she looked over the contraption doppelganger-Taylor was carefully assembling.
"A Faraday cage basically does just that," Taylor replied.
"But you claim this will work in the open!"
"Because it will."
"There's no way to accomplish that!"
"You just have to convince the quantum strings to create a Faraday cage. Kind of, anyway, because it doesn't really work that way, but it's probably as close as we're getting without going through five of my shorthand notebooks. Besides, you told me that the fusion generator wouldn't work either."
The woman just sputtered as Taylor made a couple more notes on what she was doing, then collected a few more components from the bin she'd filled with what she'd need. At this point the entire set of retired professors, and the seven other experts in their fields the government had slipped into town, should be used to being told that the impossible was actually possible without parahuman intervention. They just didn't have access to the technology database that she did, and she wasn't even going too deep.
...most of what she was doing would be completely unintuitive though. She was essentially spawning entire branches of science through providing samples of the output end of them existing. Nothing she'd made so far had failed to be duplicated by others within two weeks of the notes making it into the hands of a lab with the equipment needed elsewhere. Her bank account let her buy basically anything she wanted now, and she was playing a proper 'crazy inventor' type by only spending significant amounts of money on new equipment or supplies needed for a project.
And ignoring that said equipment and supplies should frequently either be impossible for her to get her hands on or should've taken six times longer to arrive at a minimum...and that people didn't tend to just decide to help someone out by renovating a warehouse so that some of the larger items could be brought in.
Of course, it was also feeling likely that those around her were intentionally refusing to believe half of her claims in the hopes that she would prove them wrong. Mostly because she'd established a pattern of that early on.
Two hours later she'd finished assembling the contraption. It was the size of a large microwave oven, and in fact incorporated some of the outer casing of one. She'd run a pile of tests with various pieces of equipment as she was closing it up, and confidently pushed the cart it sat on outside. Erin followed, and four others in the neighborhood took notice of the garage door opening. An extension cord was grabbed from next to the door on the way by and used to plug the device in, followed by some adjustments being made on several knobs before the power switch was flipped.
Lights lit up...and nothing otherwise seemed to happen. But Taylor pulled a couple of meters off of the bottom shelf of the cart and checked them, nodding when they picked up nothing, and then turned on a radio. It also picked up nothing at all as she spun the dial back and forth, and she wondered how long it would take a couple of the watchers that had come close enough to realize that their phones were dead. She started walking away with the radio, and a little over thirty feet away the radio suddenly crackled to life.
...based on Erin's reaction to that, and the radio going dead again as soon as it was passed back across the invisible line of the bubble around the cart, perhaps she wasn't being told to tell Taylor that things were impossible.
Near the end of May the automated monitoring spotted messages being sent to Behemoth and Leviathan, putting Taylor on high alert. When both started moving at the same time she sighed, because apparently she didn't get Memorial Day off from a crisis, but at least it made figuring out where the attack would be easier. She'd even anticipated needing drones of some kind that fit Stella's whole theme and had come up with options.
...plans were going to need some on-the-fly adjustment for an attack on Houston though.
Stella appeared nearby, but not directly over the city itself, and started circling to drop motes of mana down into a ring on the ground. There were six trees in the ring, and they all started glowing after her second loop. In reality, they'd now been replaced entirely. Once that was 'well established' she darted to the bays nearby. Leviathan's arrival point was...far more likely to be variable compared to Behemoth's current straight shot upward. Making her bristles larger again was followed by higher-speed passes along the entirety of the water line between Freeport and High Island, trailing motes of mana the entire way. Unseen in the background was the line of drones setting up in the dimensional sea.
Leviathan arrived first, on her third pass, and very obviously wasn't expecting the sudden wall of branches that appeared in front of it. Nor did it seem to expect said wall to partially give way when it struck the branches, even as more walls of branches spread from where it had tried to cross the motes of mana and back across the hole it had just made. Of course, giving way was just so that the branches could enclose it in a ball of branches before leaf-covered portals appeared to allow larger reinforcement branches to reach in and start pumping power in.
...that felt like it had been far, far too easy, but being unable to 'see' her or what she was doing probably helped explain a lot of it.
Behemoth was slightly trickier in that its angle changed at the last minute so that it came up from the ground just outside of the circle that had been left for it. That was okay though, because the six trees that had been replaced suddenly grew, becoming much thicker and pulling their roots up as they went from trees to apparent ents that immediately moved to engage with Behemoth. Stella left them to that as she landed near some people that immediately started filming her, producing the Book of Destruction as soon as she got off the broom.
"...what now, Stella?" the projected cat-witch asked.
"Two more monsters," Stella replied. "I trapped one already."
"I see. Shall we see if the matter annihilator works on this one?"
Stella nodded, and flipped to that page again as the ents grappled with Behemoth in the distance. She went through the motions of casting the light show while a drone did the work when the attack 'hit' Leviathan, leaving behind a couple of partial claws and a bit of tail when the destruction was over. Nodding as the larger branches retreated, she left the ball of branches that had held Leviathan as she closed and stored the book before grabbing her broom in order to take to the sky again.
Or try to take to the sky again, because Eidolon threw a dome over her as she was mounting the broom. She glared at the dome, which was transparent but seemed configured to block sound and keep her from leaving. The former might simply be a side effect of the latter, creating a solid surface that sound waves couldn't propagate through? Whatever the case, she pulled some 'seeds' from a pocket, actually bullets created on the spot, and threw them at the dome.
It shattered when the 'seeds' exploded against the dome, and Eidolon reeled at the feedback from it shattering.
She was in the air before he recovered, but instead of going after Behemoth she went after him.
"You don't care how many people are hurt so long as nobody upstages you," Stella yelled, mostly for the benefit of the people recording from the ground. "Your powers called the monsters here, probably because you wanted to be the hero that drove them off!" She then hit him with ice bullets, covering him in ice and forcing him to shift his power set to stop himself from freezing, before leaving him to figure that out and heading towards Behemoth.
Though he was free of the ice within a minute, he didn't even attempt to follow.
Behemoth was doing its best to call down all the lightning, irradiate the entire area around it, and melt the area around it at the same time. None of it was so much as mildly inconveniencing the glowing 'ents', which were now preventing the Endbringer from leaving as much as anything else. Stella started circling the area, occasionally throwing up pentagonal shields with a picture of a cauldron on them to intercept lightning in particular as things were directed her way, dropping a new circle of mana motes from her broom. After a couple passes around the Endbringer she triggered the creation of branches and roots, the roots going under the Endbringer to prevent it from escaping and the branches forming a dome over it.
As a side benefit, this was essentially the 'area of effect' for the bulk of Behemoth's ruination of the landscape.
With the Endbringer fully contained, the ents suddenly backed off, then the devices inside of them used a dimensional transference to leave. The wood they'd been manipulating and protecting with magic was left behind though, the protections falling and all of it basically bursting into ash almost immediately under Behemoth's continued onslaught inside of the dome.
Landing again, though without any good place to have someone close by recording her, Stella produced the Book of Destruction again and went through the motions of casting the light show spell. Longer-range cameras could still see her, or so monitoring said at least. How much of Behemoth failing to run underground they could see through the branches was harder to say, but when the destruction happened it sliced a good chunk out of the ground as well. This removed basically all of the dangerous remnants from Behemoth being held in place...and left a sizable crater.
She didn't have any plans to fill that in, and idly thought that it might very well become a memorial site.
With that done she closed and stored the book, then got onto her broom and circled the dome. After a full pass the dome dissolved, and what little radiation and excess heat had remained outside of it was taken care of by her drones poking in from the dimensional sea. She then moved back to the water, passing back and forth along the wall of branches there that had stopped the bulk of a couple of larger waves while she'd been occupied with Eidolon and Behemoth. Causing all of those branches to wither away didn't take long, and after a quick pass by the ball that had held Leviathan to make those wither away she flew back into the sky and vanished.
Eidolon was still just floating there in the air, and it would take Alexandria and Legend working together to get him to move over an hour later.
Over the next few days it became obvious that 'destroyed all three Endbringers as though you were barely trying' apparently made you insanely credible when you accused someone else of having called two of them to attack in the first place. Eidolon had become the center of a massive scandal as a result of that, Stella's statements holding even more credibility when the statements and video evidence showed that instead of going after one of the Endbringers Eidolon had gone after Stella.
Right now, the only major complaints against Stella were that she showed up randomly and didn't stick around to be praised when she was done. The latter was seen as part of why she was a true hero though, because she did what needed to be done instead of taking actions that would let her bask in the praise from those she had helped. At the same time, there was basically a standing thing, worldwide, that if she showed up in a store or restaurant then she wasn't going to be paying. Likely ever. More so than Scion, if he had ever deigned to shop or eat. In fact, Stella had now officially eclipsed Scion in every ranking because she'd now done things that he'd never accomplished.
Taylor found the whole thing a little amusing, but couldn't decide if she wanted to have Stella make an appearance to just shop or eat. It would cut into the whole mysterious witch vibe going on at a minimum, and she was enjoying that vibe.
Another side effect of taking out the Endbringers as visually easily as they'd been taken out, coupled with the accusations against Eidolon, was that all the various forms of 'Endbringer truce' type activities were rapidly falling apart. The Triumvirate and Costa-Brown were far too embroiled in the scandal surrounding Eidolon, so national oversight of the Protectorate was in shambles and teams wanted to prove that they weren't creating problems like Eidolon had been accused of doing. Other enforcement groups at various levels had also decided that the PRT and Protectorate were compromised and decided to start handling things without them.
The result was that villains were suddenly finding that the heroes were no longer willing to play by the unwritten rules to the same degree that they had before and non-PRT and Protectorate law enforcement was suddenly a lot more active going against parahumans. As a result of that several cities had turned into essential war zones. There were similar, but far less prominent, changes overseas where the scandals at least weren't really having a direct impact but the need for powerful capes to help drive an Endbringer off was no longer a factor causing law enforcement to hold back.
...on that front, having something like Team Mana or the kingdom around as a more significant 'bigger stick' boogeyman would probably have helped keep things calmer. But back home they'd not revealed the connection between Eidolon and the Endbringers and there'd been far less upheaval because of it. Or maybe things had been less significant due to the reveal that there had been seventeen more, coupled with eventually 'relocating' Behemoth instead of destroying it in the end?
It was hard to say. Too few data points, too many differences here compared to there. The upheavals had created far too many problems at once though, and Fortuna had been unable to keep up. She'd made a good try, but had collapsed in exhaustion at one point, and while she was unconscious over fifty significant parahuman villains in the United States alone had died to snipers. Several leaders of the Elite, notable members of the Fallen, three quarters of the villains in Brockton Bay...
How the hell one woman had kept that kind of thing from happening for so long was frankly a mystery, but Stella's repeated upsets had apparently finally overcome her ability to keep up. The sudden but massive change in the balance of things had thrown remaining villains and groups into hiding.
Taylor's birthday had been spent relaxing instead of making history and she'd even attended a party thrown for her at Jay's diner in person instead of with a doppelganger. They were surprisingly unaffected by the general chaos elsewhere, including in Chicago proper nearby. Some of that was admittedly likely stemming from the government putting significant effort into keeping the town 'isolated' from problems, but the various professors had retired here in part to get away from parahumans in general so the town hadn't contained any. No parahumans meant very little upheaval, though supplies were apparently an issue in some other small towns.
After that, she paid a bit more attention to Cauldron. They were in an outright panic due to the rapid decline in parahuman numbers and no clue if Stella would be able to, or willing to, help with Scion. Taylor wasn't sure if she wanted Stella to confront him or for him to just vanish, but she had several Coconuts and a couple of Warspheres completed and a decent network of 'border world' build-outs for eventual shard processing. Her bottleneck was still production of the more important mana-reactive materials used in a lot of things, but she'd continued to ramp up production there as well.
By the end of June things had started to settle into a new normal of sorts regarding heroes and villains, but the PRT and Protectorate were falling into shambles. Too many attempts to defend Eidolon had happened, with him proving unwilling to defend himself, and a mass exodus of 'government parahumans' into independent hero groups with less oversight. New Wave had attempted another push of their platform of transparency in hero groups, but nobody had bitten. Doubly so when they came under a couple of investigations stemming from Glory Girl being a bit too violent and National Guard troops having spotted that Panacea was far too stressed.
The world had changed, and in the short term nobody was certain if it was for the better or not.
Stella had made several more quick appearances during the month, generally where things were getting a little too dangerous for bystanders, and had taken out the Three Blasphemies before they could kill a couple of leaders. That had been...anticlimactic, really, because the three hadn't recognized Stella as a threat. Ignored her outright. She'd been able to punch through each of them with a couple of bullets to disable them entirely without them fighting back.
On the 'crazy inventor' front, she'd not actually created anything new since the virtual Faraday cage device. Explained a bunch of things when asked, better documented a couple of concepts, but no more inventions for now. To be honest, there was no obvious pressure on her to make anything more either. All indications, visible in town and in monitoring, said that the government would be perfectly happy to keep her around for what she'd already handed over just because what she'd already built and documented was just that valuable. The fusion generator alone had basically ensured that they were going to keep her set for life barring going outright traitor at this point.
Which didn't mean that they were skimping on helping set up the renovated warehouse for the next time she got the itch to make something groundbreaking either. They were also being very careful to ensure that her name was correctly on all of the patents and paperwork, even though all but one of the patents had been entered under secrecy orders for now, which meant that when the big things went public it was likely that she was going to be very famous very quickly. At the same time, it was likely that nobody was going to have a clue where to find her when that happened due to how well they were burying the paper trails leading to her.
...the likely inevitable public access to digital property records was probably a nail in that coffin though, since they'd ensured that her name was on a couple of deeds. But perhaps they'd have released the secrecy orders on a couple of the patents before then and the big push to find her would have died down by the time she'd be more easily found?
By the end of July, despite the bottlenecks on mana-reactive materials, Taylor felt that she was ready to begin taking down the shards. It had been mildly annoying, waiting over half a year, but large scale implementations of the biological manipulation system were essentially required to keep parahumans alive during a mass-depowering event. Unfortunately, she'd also not figured anything out regarding how to 'read' these versions of the shards. Identified likely aspects of how they stored and processed information? Yes. Figured out any way to access that information? Not at all.
Without a deeper understanding of these shards she wasn't comfortable trying to bait Scion away, and she didn't think she had any good way to communicate with him in a way that he'd listen to. Those two combined meant she wasn't willing to take risks and planned on taking him out through grabbing all of his shards at once with warships ready to start firing unfolded projectiles as a secondary option.
The end of Scion happened late on the thirty-first, his avatar imploding as the shard maintaining it was grabbed. That all parahuman powers on Earth Bet vanished within an hour of that incident solidly connected things in people's minds, doubly so since Scion had originally shown up at the dawn of parahumans. Unseen and unnoticed by most, the depowering trend continued across other Earths for a day and planetary shields went up after each was cleared.
Cauldron hadn't even noticed what was going on at first due to being in a meeting when she started, with the exception of Legend who'd been on Earth Bet instead of in the meeting of those 'fully in the know'. By the time that meeting had ended they'd then found that 'Doormaker' could no longer access Earth Bet, which made them a bit panicky, and then they'd realized that the 'flesh garden' was rapidly ceasing to exist.
She wasn't cruel enough to leave them trapped in a compound that needed access to portals to be remotely livable, but had dumped all of the 'staff' onto an otherwise uninhabited world in lieu of dealing with setting up a proper prison. Surviving test subjects were, when possible, returned to their planet of origin if they weren't voluntarily helping with things, and drones dismantled the various structures that made up the sprawling facility.
A day after Scion vanished, Stella made an appearance that cemented her not being a parahuman in the eyes of the public. That hadn't originally been planned, but Taylor had forgotten about the Birdcage. The official method for getting people out was the use of portals, so Stella had shown up and removed everyone from the facility before 'erasing' the facility itself from inside the mountain it had been built into.
With the shards taken care of, Taylor settled into a combination of 'continue to uplift Earth Bet' and 'send probes out in every conceivable direction in the dimensional sea to see if she could spot home'. The former went well enough, but the latter was a problem. No direction searched over the course of ten years showed any sign of mana existing. On mana-accessible dimensional axes she found, and dealt with, a dozen other instances of shard infestations around other versions of 'Earth Bet', but eventually concluded that she'd likely been shunted along a dimensional axis that she didn't know how to traverse. One that shard and mana methods combined didn't seem to be able to utilize directly...and that she had no clue how to even begin trying to isolate.
This meant that she was likely never going to 'make it home', nor was help ever likely to come to find her because she was positive that they'd probably not noticed her existence in the first place and were less aware of the holes in their knowledge of physical dimensions than she was.
...which meant that she probably couldn't ignore the therapist in her core device telling her that she should really consider dating someone. Her Amy likely didn't even know she existed, and they were unlikely to ever meet again, so it probably wouldn't count as cheating on her.
Taylor had forgotten about that, and her monitoring routines hadn't included anything for that level of problem. She started a check for children abducted worldwide, at least in places where the authorities could reach them with a little help, and was surprised at how few hits came back. Even after filtering a few times with more relaxed rules. It seemed that child abductions had died off significantly from what she'd been expecting unless the child already had powers due to too many children then gaining powers and severely harming their abductors.
Well, that made the number of places for Stella to visit smaller, at least.
She started with the easy ones, mostly to ensure that she got things down before the more difficult ones. Appearing over a building, circling it while letting motes of mana drift down from her broom, and making branch-like barricades appear in and around the building. Around the building to keep the abductor in, and in the building to isolate them from their abductee. The latter generally included an inverted barricade, able to be opened by the abducted kid from inside the room they were currently in but not by someone outside.
Once the barriers were in place, the building would flash and all doors needed to gain access to the kid and the one who took them would unlock and those not barricaded would open. Then she 'drew' the name and age of the kid abducted in the air over the building and moved on. She included apartment numbers for apartment buildings, glowing mote paths to follow for hidden areas, and generally ensured that it would be impossible for the authorities to not locate the missing kids.
Three times she had to add to her overall plan a little. One apartment building had four abducted kids in it, which was a slightly more complicated challenge and she ended up color-coding the mana for each of them. Another required some thought as the kid was being kept in the same room as the abductor and a slight biological manipulation prod to make the kid need to use the toilet allowed for separating the two. The third time was the first infant on her list, who wouldn't be able to free themselves once the abductor was taken into custody, so a branch-like key had been left on a sign outside that would allow the police to get through the final barricade.
A few hours later she came to Dinah. By this point the pattern was clear, but hadn't actually properly hit the national news even if it was starting to spread rapidly through law enforcement networks. More importantly, hopefully-subtle manipulation of things had prevented the data feeds in the hidden base from picking up on the information that had reached the local PRT and police. For the base an extra-large circle would need to be made over Brockton Bay's financial district, and a much larger set of isolation barricades were going to be needed. Plus disarming all the explosives, preventing the computer systems from being wiped, and other items, all of which had to happen in very rapid succession.
Luckily there were a lot of drones available hiding in the dimensional sea, meaning she just had to put on the proper light show while they did the actual work. Already captured on cameras, she started by glaring down at the financial district, as though it offended her, and then manipulated her broom to cause the bristles to grow extra-large. That let her leave a much wider and thicker collection of motes behind as she circled in the air, while also drawing a lot more attention that was being completely ignored inside of the hidden base.
At least until she triggered everything. Barricades appeared, the computers all powered down, connections to all the detonators on the explosives were severed by roots and vines, all the batteries and tinkertech power cells other than those in the emergency lights were drained. This left the mercenaries spread out in isolated pockets, Calvert trapped in his office, Dinah with a barricade over her door to his office that he couldn't open but she could, and no way into the base yet.
Causing the entire area to flash was easier than getting all of her drones to force the doors open, because a number of the doors were giant vault doors. Then she began the mote-path process even as she drew Dinah's name and age in the air, plus created a couple of small trees near each of three entrances with maps and warnings. Those were actual trees, local to the area, with wooden signs seemingly made from the same kind of trees, so that they wouldn't 'time out' and vanish. What people would think of potted trees with signs was another question entirely and would be interesting to check up on later, and who knew how long it would be before someone found the remains of the plants used to disconnect all the detonators.
In addition to all of that, Dinah also flashed as she had the drugs cleared out of her system and a general tune-up given to hopefully remedy some of the withdrawal symptoms, plus a sign on the door to Calvert's office included very basic assumptions about how his powers worked...and that they'd been purchased. No attempt was made to claim from where they'd been purchased.
Then, as if that wasn't enough to ruin Calvert's day, she flew over to the PRT building and made branches holding a sign outside of Director Piggot's office with the same information on Calvert's powers and that he was responsible for abducting Dinah. With all of that in place, and Director Piggot looking like she was working up to a very angry session, Stella left to handle the last few kids because Dinah being at the beginning or end felt too much like painting it as the actual priority.
The fallout from Stella showing up all over the planet to point authorities at abducted children had been a little hilarious. Both in trying to figure out what her priorities were, given some of the other things she'd done, and because a pile of pictures of the various barricades and signs had made it online. Casual examination showed that the branches that made up the barricades, and the apparent wood making up the signs, were always from a local plant...assuming you stretched the definition of 'branches' and 'wood' enough to include the one use of bamboo, anyway.
Having her priorities bounce between 'big' and 'small' things, as large as destroying an Endbringer and as small as saving parahumans on their first nights out or making it easy to recover abducted children, was probably the more amusing thing trying to be figured out. It apparently made her seem appropriately child-like though, deciding that this was today's way to be good and then just running off to do it without worrying about a larger plan.
If only they knew about the giant plan in the background.
Cauldron was having a harder time of things. Stella was not pathable, did not act in a predictable enough manner to be 'modeled' right now, and apparently couldn't even be seen properly by the Clairvoyant. Further, the latter had suddenly realized that entire alternate Earths had vanished from their ability to perceive them, presumably the growing number of alternates that Taylor had been building shield and sensor spires on while trying to ensure that she had enough shard-stuff to manage large-scale healing.
After finding out that they were noticing, she actually changed the build-out routines slightly to ensure that a planetary shield went up over any planet she was about to start working on, just in case. Once the spires were online they'd protect the planet on their own, but there was no need to be properly spotted ahead of time.
Also interesting was that her presence in Illinois had been 'missed' by Cauldron, presumably due to Taylor also being a blind spot that Cauldron was still unaware of. The government suddenly had non-parahuman options for a couple of things and were working on other items that hadn't originated with the PRT and that was also screwing up the paths. A complete failure to need thinker or tinker support in cracking some encryption was the first sign that reached the secret organization, after Costa-Brown had prepared to have suitable parahumans available and then the request had never come in. But they were blaming it on the appearance of Stella, who they knew was a blind spot, and not on Taylor, who they didn't know existed at all. In fact, it seemed like they were assuming the attempt to access the information had been aborted instead of successful due to the factoring method obtained from her.
Seeing how all the little missed things would gradually hinder them more and more would be easier to do if there was a control available, to see how they did without the proverbial wrench thrown into the works. Sadly, that wasn't an option.
"You can jam radio waves but you can't just make them not traverse an area," Erin said as she looked over the contraption doppelganger-Taylor was carefully assembling.
"A Faraday cage basically does just that," Taylor replied.
"But you claim this will work in the open!"
"Because it will."
"There's no way to accomplish that!"
"You just have to convince the quantum strings to create a Faraday cage. Kind of, anyway, because it doesn't really work that way, but it's probably as close as we're getting without going through five of my shorthand notebooks. Besides, you told me that the fusion generator wouldn't work either."
The woman just sputtered as Taylor made a couple more notes on what she was doing, then collected a few more components from the bin she'd filled with what she'd need. At this point the entire set of retired professors, and the seven other experts in their fields the government had slipped into town, should be used to being told that the impossible was actually possible without parahuman intervention. They just didn't have access to the technology database that she did, and she wasn't even going too deep.
...most of what she was doing would be completely unintuitive though. She was essentially spawning entire branches of science through providing samples of the output end of them existing. Nothing she'd made so far had failed to be duplicated by others within two weeks of the notes making it into the hands of a lab with the equipment needed elsewhere. Her bank account let her buy basically anything she wanted now, and she was playing a proper 'crazy inventor' type by only spending significant amounts of money on new equipment or supplies needed for a project.
And ignoring that said equipment and supplies should frequently either be impossible for her to get her hands on or should've taken six times longer to arrive at a minimum...and that people didn't tend to just decide to help someone out by renovating a warehouse so that some of the larger items could be brought in.
Of course, it was also feeling likely that those around her were intentionally refusing to believe half of her claims in the hopes that she would prove them wrong. Mostly because she'd established a pattern of that early on.
Two hours later she'd finished assembling the contraption. It was the size of a large microwave oven, and in fact incorporated some of the outer casing of one. She'd run a pile of tests with various pieces of equipment as she was closing it up, and confidently pushed the cart it sat on outside. Erin followed, and four others in the neighborhood took notice of the garage door opening. An extension cord was grabbed from next to the door on the way by and used to plug the device in, followed by some adjustments being made on several knobs before the power switch was flipped.
Lights lit up...and nothing otherwise seemed to happen. But Taylor pulled a couple of meters off of the bottom shelf of the cart and checked them, nodding when they picked up nothing, and then turned on a radio. It also picked up nothing at all as she spun the dial back and forth, and she wondered how long it would take a couple of the watchers that had come close enough to realize that their phones were dead. She started walking away with the radio, and a little over thirty feet away the radio suddenly crackled to life.
...based on Erin's reaction to that, and the radio going dead again as soon as it was passed back across the invisible line of the bubble around the cart, perhaps she wasn't being told to tell Taylor that things were impossible.
Near the end of May the automated monitoring spotted messages being sent to Behemoth and Leviathan, putting Taylor on high alert. When both started moving at the same time she sighed, because apparently she didn't get Memorial Day off from a crisis, but at least it made figuring out where the attack would be easier. She'd even anticipated needing drones of some kind that fit Stella's whole theme and had come up with options.
...plans were going to need some on-the-fly adjustment for an attack on Houston though.
Stella appeared nearby, but not directly over the city itself, and started circling to drop motes of mana down into a ring on the ground. There were six trees in the ring, and they all started glowing after her second loop. In reality, they'd now been replaced entirely. Once that was 'well established' she darted to the bays nearby. Leviathan's arrival point was...far more likely to be variable compared to Behemoth's current straight shot upward. Making her bristles larger again was followed by higher-speed passes along the entirety of the water line between Freeport and High Island, trailing motes of mana the entire way. Unseen in the background was the line of drones setting up in the dimensional sea.
Leviathan arrived first, on her third pass, and very obviously wasn't expecting the sudden wall of branches that appeared in front of it. Nor did it seem to expect said wall to partially give way when it struck the branches, even as more walls of branches spread from where it had tried to cross the motes of mana and back across the hole it had just made. Of course, giving way was just so that the branches could enclose it in a ball of branches before leaf-covered portals appeared to allow larger reinforcement branches to reach in and start pumping power in.
...that felt like it had been far, far too easy, but being unable to 'see' her or what she was doing probably helped explain a lot of it.
Behemoth was slightly trickier in that its angle changed at the last minute so that it came up from the ground just outside of the circle that had been left for it. That was okay though, because the six trees that had been replaced suddenly grew, becoming much thicker and pulling their roots up as they went from trees to apparent ents that immediately moved to engage with Behemoth. Stella left them to that as she landed near some people that immediately started filming her, producing the Book of Destruction as soon as she got off the broom.
"...what now, Stella?" the projected cat-witch asked.
"Two more monsters," Stella replied. "I trapped one already."
"I see. Shall we see if the matter annihilator works on this one?"
Stella nodded, and flipped to that page again as the ents grappled with Behemoth in the distance. She went through the motions of casting the light show while a drone did the work when the attack 'hit' Leviathan, leaving behind a couple of partial claws and a bit of tail when the destruction was over. Nodding as the larger branches retreated, she left the ball of branches that had held Leviathan as she closed and stored the book before grabbing her broom in order to take to the sky again.
Or try to take to the sky again, because Eidolon threw a dome over her as she was mounting the broom. She glared at the dome, which was transparent but seemed configured to block sound and keep her from leaving. The former might simply be a side effect of the latter, creating a solid surface that sound waves couldn't propagate through? Whatever the case, she pulled some 'seeds' from a pocket, actually bullets created on the spot, and threw them at the dome.
It shattered when the 'seeds' exploded against the dome, and Eidolon reeled at the feedback from it shattering.
She was in the air before he recovered, but instead of going after Behemoth she went after him.
"You don't care how many people are hurt so long as nobody upstages you," Stella yelled, mostly for the benefit of the people recording from the ground. "Your powers called the monsters here, probably because you wanted to be the hero that drove them off!" She then hit him with ice bullets, covering him in ice and forcing him to shift his power set to stop himself from freezing, before leaving him to figure that out and heading towards Behemoth.
Though he was free of the ice within a minute, he didn't even attempt to follow.
Behemoth was doing its best to call down all the lightning, irradiate the entire area around it, and melt the area around it at the same time. None of it was so much as mildly inconveniencing the glowing 'ents', which were now preventing the Endbringer from leaving as much as anything else. Stella started circling the area, occasionally throwing up pentagonal shields with a picture of a cauldron on them to intercept lightning in particular as things were directed her way, dropping a new circle of mana motes from her broom. After a couple passes around the Endbringer she triggered the creation of branches and roots, the roots going under the Endbringer to prevent it from escaping and the branches forming a dome over it.
As a side benefit, this was essentially the 'area of effect' for the bulk of Behemoth's ruination of the landscape.
With the Endbringer fully contained, the ents suddenly backed off, then the devices inside of them used a dimensional transference to leave. The wood they'd been manipulating and protecting with magic was left behind though, the protections falling and all of it basically bursting into ash almost immediately under Behemoth's continued onslaught inside of the dome.
Landing again, though without any good place to have someone close by recording her, Stella produced the Book of Destruction again and went through the motions of casting the light show spell. Longer-range cameras could still see her, or so monitoring said at least. How much of Behemoth failing to run underground they could see through the branches was harder to say, but when the destruction happened it sliced a good chunk out of the ground as well. This removed basically all of the dangerous remnants from Behemoth being held in place...and left a sizable crater.
She didn't have any plans to fill that in, and idly thought that it might very well become a memorial site.
With that done she closed and stored the book, then got onto her broom and circled the dome. After a full pass the dome dissolved, and what little radiation and excess heat had remained outside of it was taken care of by her drones poking in from the dimensional sea. She then moved back to the water, passing back and forth along the wall of branches there that had stopped the bulk of a couple of larger waves while she'd been occupied with Eidolon and Behemoth. Causing all of those branches to wither away didn't take long, and after a quick pass by the ball that had held Leviathan to make those wither away she flew back into the sky and vanished.
Eidolon was still just floating there in the air, and it would take Alexandria and Legend working together to get him to move over an hour later.
Over the next few days it became obvious that 'destroyed all three Endbringers as though you were barely trying' apparently made you insanely credible when you accused someone else of having called two of them to attack in the first place. Eidolon had become the center of a massive scandal as a result of that, Stella's statements holding even more credibility when the statements and video evidence showed that instead of going after one of the Endbringers Eidolon had gone after Stella.
Right now, the only major complaints against Stella were that she showed up randomly and didn't stick around to be praised when she was done. The latter was seen as part of why she was a true hero though, because she did what needed to be done instead of taking actions that would let her bask in the praise from those she had helped. At the same time, there was basically a standing thing, worldwide, that if she showed up in a store or restaurant then she wasn't going to be paying. Likely ever. More so than Scion, if he had ever deigned to shop or eat. In fact, Stella had now officially eclipsed Scion in every ranking because she'd now done things that he'd never accomplished.
Taylor found the whole thing a little amusing, but couldn't decide if she wanted to have Stella make an appearance to just shop or eat. It would cut into the whole mysterious witch vibe going on at a minimum, and she was enjoying that vibe.
Another side effect of taking out the Endbringers as visually easily as they'd been taken out, coupled with the accusations against Eidolon, was that all the various forms of 'Endbringer truce' type activities were rapidly falling apart. The Triumvirate and Costa-Brown were far too embroiled in the scandal surrounding Eidolon, so national oversight of the Protectorate was in shambles and teams wanted to prove that they weren't creating problems like Eidolon had been accused of doing. Other enforcement groups at various levels had also decided that the PRT and Protectorate were compromised and decided to start handling things without them.
The result was that villains were suddenly finding that the heroes were no longer willing to play by the unwritten rules to the same degree that they had before and non-PRT and Protectorate law enforcement was suddenly a lot more active going against parahumans. As a result of that several cities had turned into essential war zones. There were similar, but far less prominent, changes overseas where the scandals at least weren't really having a direct impact but the need for powerful capes to help drive an Endbringer off was no longer a factor causing law enforcement to hold back.
...on that front, having something like Team Mana or the kingdom around as a more significant 'bigger stick' boogeyman would probably have helped keep things calmer. But back home they'd not revealed the connection between Eidolon and the Endbringers and there'd been far less upheaval because of it. Or maybe things had been less significant due to the reveal that there had been seventeen more, coupled with eventually 'relocating' Behemoth instead of destroying it in the end?
It was hard to say. Too few data points, too many differences here compared to there. The upheavals had created far too many problems at once though, and Fortuna had been unable to keep up. She'd made a good try, but had collapsed in exhaustion at one point, and while she was unconscious over fifty significant parahuman villains in the United States alone had died to snipers. Several leaders of the Elite, notable members of the Fallen, three quarters of the villains in Brockton Bay...
How the hell one woman had kept that kind of thing from happening for so long was frankly a mystery, but Stella's repeated upsets had apparently finally overcome her ability to keep up. The sudden but massive change in the balance of things had thrown remaining villains and groups into hiding.
Taylor's birthday had been spent relaxing instead of making history and she'd even attended a party thrown for her at Jay's diner in person instead of with a doppelganger. They were surprisingly unaffected by the general chaos elsewhere, including in Chicago proper nearby. Some of that was admittedly likely stemming from the government putting significant effort into keeping the town 'isolated' from problems, but the various professors had retired here in part to get away from parahumans in general so the town hadn't contained any. No parahumans meant very little upheaval, though supplies were apparently an issue in some other small towns.
After that, she paid a bit more attention to Cauldron. They were in an outright panic due to the rapid decline in parahuman numbers and no clue if Stella would be able to, or willing to, help with Scion. Taylor wasn't sure if she wanted Stella to confront him or for him to just vanish, but she had several Coconuts and a couple of Warspheres completed and a decent network of 'border world' build-outs for eventual shard processing. Her bottleneck was still production of the more important mana-reactive materials used in a lot of things, but she'd continued to ramp up production there as well.
By the end of June things had started to settle into a new normal of sorts regarding heroes and villains, but the PRT and Protectorate were falling into shambles. Too many attempts to defend Eidolon had happened, with him proving unwilling to defend himself, and a mass exodus of 'government parahumans' into independent hero groups with less oversight. New Wave had attempted another push of their platform of transparency in hero groups, but nobody had bitten. Doubly so when they came under a couple of investigations stemming from Glory Girl being a bit too violent and National Guard troops having spotted that Panacea was far too stressed.
The world had changed, and in the short term nobody was certain if it was for the better or not.
Stella had made several more quick appearances during the month, generally where things were getting a little too dangerous for bystanders, and had taken out the Three Blasphemies before they could kill a couple of leaders. That had been...anticlimactic, really, because the three hadn't recognized Stella as a threat. Ignored her outright. She'd been able to punch through each of them with a couple of bullets to disable them entirely without them fighting back.
On the 'crazy inventor' front, she'd not actually created anything new since the virtual Faraday cage device. Explained a bunch of things when asked, better documented a couple of concepts, but no more inventions for now. To be honest, there was no obvious pressure on her to make anything more either. All indications, visible in town and in monitoring, said that the government would be perfectly happy to keep her around for what she'd already handed over just because what she'd already built and documented was just that valuable. The fusion generator alone had basically ensured that they were going to keep her set for life barring going outright traitor at this point.
Which didn't mean that they were skimping on helping set up the renovated warehouse for the next time she got the itch to make something groundbreaking either. They were also being very careful to ensure that her name was correctly on all of the patents and paperwork, even though all but one of the patents had been entered under secrecy orders for now, which meant that when the big things went public it was likely that she was going to be very famous very quickly. At the same time, it was likely that nobody was going to have a clue where to find her when that happened due to how well they were burying the paper trails leading to her.
...the likely inevitable public access to digital property records was probably a nail in that coffin though, since they'd ensured that her name was on a couple of deeds. But perhaps they'd have released the secrecy orders on a couple of the patents before then and the big push to find her would have died down by the time she'd be more easily found?
By the end of July, despite the bottlenecks on mana-reactive materials, Taylor felt that she was ready to begin taking down the shards. It had been mildly annoying, waiting over half a year, but large scale implementations of the biological manipulation system were essentially required to keep parahumans alive during a mass-depowering event. Unfortunately, she'd also not figured anything out regarding how to 'read' these versions of the shards. Identified likely aspects of how they stored and processed information? Yes. Figured out any way to access that information? Not at all.
Without a deeper understanding of these shards she wasn't comfortable trying to bait Scion away, and she didn't think she had any good way to communicate with him in a way that he'd listen to. Those two combined meant she wasn't willing to take risks and planned on taking him out through grabbing all of his shards at once with warships ready to start firing unfolded projectiles as a secondary option.
The end of Scion happened late on the thirty-first, his avatar imploding as the shard maintaining it was grabbed. That all parahuman powers on Earth Bet vanished within an hour of that incident solidly connected things in people's minds, doubly so since Scion had originally shown up at the dawn of parahumans. Unseen and unnoticed by most, the depowering trend continued across other Earths for a day and planetary shields went up after each was cleared.
Cauldron hadn't even noticed what was going on at first due to being in a meeting when she started, with the exception of Legend who'd been on Earth Bet instead of in the meeting of those 'fully in the know'. By the time that meeting had ended they'd then found that 'Doormaker' could no longer access Earth Bet, which made them a bit panicky, and then they'd realized that the 'flesh garden' was rapidly ceasing to exist.
She wasn't cruel enough to leave them trapped in a compound that needed access to portals to be remotely livable, but had dumped all of the 'staff' onto an otherwise uninhabited world in lieu of dealing with setting up a proper prison. Surviving test subjects were, when possible, returned to their planet of origin if they weren't voluntarily helping with things, and drones dismantled the various structures that made up the sprawling facility.
A day after Scion vanished, Stella made an appearance that cemented her not being a parahuman in the eyes of the public. That hadn't originally been planned, but Taylor had forgotten about the Birdcage. The official method for getting people out was the use of portals, so Stella had shown up and removed everyone from the facility before 'erasing' the facility itself from inside the mountain it had been built into.
With the shards taken care of, Taylor settled into a combination of 'continue to uplift Earth Bet' and 'send probes out in every conceivable direction in the dimensional sea to see if she could spot home'. The former went well enough, but the latter was a problem. No direction searched over the course of ten years showed any sign of mana existing. On mana-accessible dimensional axes she found, and dealt with, a dozen other instances of shard infestations around other versions of 'Earth Bet', but eventually concluded that she'd likely been shunted along a dimensional axis that she didn't know how to traverse. One that shard and mana methods combined didn't seem to be able to utilize directly...and that she had no clue how to even begin trying to isolate.
This meant that she was likely never going to 'make it home', nor was help ever likely to come to find her because she was positive that they'd probably not noticed her existence in the first place and were less aware of the holes in their knowledge of physical dimensions than she was.
...which meant that she probably couldn't ignore the therapist in her core device telling her that she should really consider dating someone. Her Amy likely didn't even know she existed, and they were unlikely to ever meet again, so it probably wouldn't count as cheating on her.
Considering she is closer to Noelle clone rather than biological doppel, is it really her Amy after all this time of deviation? Just hope we see a reunion of some kind and more chapters, i really am sucker for happy endings. Thanks for the new chapter.
I just want to see the discussion/fight where Amy has to choose between all of the Doppel Taylors.
There is no "official" method of getting people out. The Birdcage is designed so that things go in but nothing ever leaves. There's exactly one way of leaving in canon, and that's Doormaker and Clairvoyant.
GeekGod_of_Speed
He Who Enjoys The Big Words
Pretty sure that's what he meant by 'official method'. I mean, it's either that or GU does something, which may very well also be portals
That's not an official method because there are fewer than ten people who have any idea that they even exist.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Why would she need to choose though? Taylor's basically a tier 2? Civ by herself, polygamy isn't a bad thingI just want to see the discussion/fight where Amy has to choose between all of the Doppel Taylors.
...why is she closer to Noelle clone when she started as one of four absolutely identical Taylors and just happened to be one of the two that went unnoticed as they were flung along dimension axes they previously didn't know existed?
As for any continuation, this is as much as my muse gave me.
The public is told that there's no way out.
The secret, but still official method to get people out was Doormaker.
That only around three people in the entire PRT/Protectorate group know that Doormaker exists doesn't mean that it's any less official. Likely on paper as a "trusted parahuman affiliate" or something like that, to explain why they don't officially use him more often, but still the official (if rarely/never used) method for getting people out.
...because having a prison with zero ways out would be hard to justify officially.
What are you talking about? Governments love black sites where they can throw people and never hear from them again. It's the public that cares about human rights and so on, and as far as the public knows, it's literally impossible to ever leave the Birdcage.
There being a secret way out of the Birdcage doesn't help justify the prison because the people who care don't know it exists.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
Legally a prison with no way out violates the US constitution, so they would need to at least pretend such an exit actually existed.
Obviously the government didn't actually think said portals did exist, it was just an excuse for the public.
But ... but...more :'( please this to good to just stop please I beg you give me more please
(Welp I sound like an addict but that seems about right)
One of two you say?
Well... there is that fourth copy that's unaccounted for