Saturday morning started with Taylor having to listen to Missy grumble about the world not being fair. It took very little time for Taylor to decide that she was sick and tired of the whining, pulling out Chain and using it to keep Missy running. Halfway through their exercise time Missy realized that she could manifest shields to block Chain. Three quarters through she realized that she could pull out Reason and counter-attack.
Taylor had then pulled out Hal as well, telekinetically controlling both weapons at the same time, getting a near-continuous stream of swears out of Missy until they were done. Followed by a declaration that Missy was going to train to at least be able to do something similar with Reason.
No mention was made on Taylor's part as to how much she'd been winging it at first, nor that she only really pulled it off because Missy was too busy defending to attack back by that point.
"I don't think she liked that surprise," Taylor noted once Missy had returned home.
"Then she shouldn't have been whining," her father replied. "Though you should consider that kind of thing more often, given that I think you both got better workouts because of the added challenge."
She raised an eyebrow at that. "So you think that we should spar while exercising more often?"
"That and see about having Hive set up traps that neither of you know about to attack you randomly. Situational awareness, with them ignoring you some days and attacking you others? Perhaps Hive could make devices that just roam the area to serve as a defensive line, but randomly decide that you and Missy are a threat for training purposes."
"I don't know if that's going overboard or not, and it would possibly place you in the crossfire."
"You might have a point there. I suppose that doing proper training sessions would be better from that point of view then. Either way, we should get back so that you can get ready to go sit around for a few hours."
Taylor rolled her eyes, but didn't disagree.
Missy stared at Ethan, who was grinning. "Why are you grinning?"
His grin just got worse. "Because we've got plans for the day."
"What kind of plans?"
"The kind you probably won't be happy about at first, admittedly."
One of her eyes twitched, but she resisted the urge to ask him more questions. As a tactic, that appeared to be working, because he frowned when she stopped playing along. After a full minute of silence from him, she shrugged and turned around to head up to her room.
"And where are you going?" Ethan asked.
She rolled her eyes, not that he could see them right now. "Upstairs."
"Get back here. We have places to be."
"You're intentionally annoying me, so I don't see why I need to cooperate."
"I don't think that matters, but if you want to play hardball then I can do so as well. Get back here or I'll bar you from training with Taylor."
Missy stopped at that, half-turning to look at him. "And will Sherie agree with you?"
"Won't matter, our agreement with Danny is that if either of us says no then you don't get to train with her."
Fuck. That sounded like something that Danny would insist on, meaning that he had an actual threat. "Are you going to continue to antagonize me unnecessarily?"
"Maaaaybe."
"And what will Sherie do if I call her to tell her that you're doing so?"
He grinned, and held up her cell phone. "I've got your phone, so you can't."
She grinned right back. "Space has a built-in phone and can make calls using my phone number."
That wiped the grin off of his face, and a moment later he sighed. "Dammit, I thought I had you when I found that you'd left your phone out of your little storage pocket."
A moment later the phone vanished from his hand. He jumped, and then another flash of light had it appearing in her hand. "Also, you're in range for me to retrieve my phone."
"Shouldn't have told you that I had it at all."
"So am I going upstairs or are you telling me the mysterious I-won't-like-them plans?"
He grumbled for a moment before sighing. "I need to pick things up at the hardware store, and you're coming with me."
Missy's eye twitched some more. "All of that for a hardware store run? Really?"
"Bah. You're no fun."
Taylor hadn't known what to expect for the day, but being brought out to the Rig and led through the structure through directions relayed over a radio that she'd been handed hadn't been in the list of possibilities. It seemed that the elevators and doors were being operated remotely, the structure itself being largely deserted. Before long she'd reached a small waiting room and was told to collect any drinks or snacks she wanted from it and place them onto a cart that was waiting there while they finished final prep 'elsewhere'. She also took the time to pull out a book and the puzzle books that she'd brought to have something to do and put them on the cart, figuring that would be easier than digging into her bag.
Despite a worry that they'd keep her waiting for an hour, it was only ten minutes later when they asked her to bring the cart with her down the hall. There she was directed into a room where a younger black girl, probably Missy's age, was waiting. Said girl was also a parahuman. There were a number of pieces of equipment around the room, and plenty of cameras. In the middle was a collection of different kinds of chairs, which Taylor had been informed was so that she could hopefully pick a comfortable one before they began.
"Hello," Taylor greeted, causing the girl to jump.
"You can see me?" the girl questioned, before groaning. "Of course you can, because my powers are useless."
"I'm confused."
"Miss Laborn's powers cause most people in her immediate vicinity to both be unable to perceive her and to forget that she exists," the person on the radio said. "You appear to be immune, which was expected as Miss Biron is likely to be similarly immune based on reports we have."
"Oh. I guess that makes sense."
"My name is Aisha," the girl grumbled. "But yeah, that sounds about right anyway. Can we get on with things before I change my mind? Or maybe before my useless powers change my mind, because I can't shake the feeling that my mental arguments aren't all coming from me. Especially the bits telling me that the reasons I want my powers gone aren't important in the least."
"Well, let me take a seat before we try. I don't want to be stuck standing here."
Taylor pushed the cart over to the chairs, picked the one that she thought would be most comfortable, and was about to sit down when there was a flash of light as Hive dropped a piece of paper in front of her. Startled, she still pulled off grabbing the paper before it fell to the ground.
"What's it say?" Aisha asked, obviously curious.
"It says that I should flip my necklace around and have you sit in a chair behind me," Taylor answered. "For 'both of our comfort'."
"Oh."
"Better than you literally hanging in the air from your head," came over the radio, "Though you'd probably be unconscious, it can't be good for your neck."
Aisha flinched before nodding and looking over the other chairs. Taylor made sure that the cart was right next to her, everything in reach, with Hive's pendant behind her.
"Lord?" Hive sent to Taylor.
"Yeah?" Taylor replied.
"They have a lot of monitoring in place, and I'd like to test their reaction to adding to it while testing to see if my targeting data is correct in advance."
"Adding to it how, exactly?"
"Casting a sensor drone to where the Shard device is and monitoring it from that end, passing a video feed from the drone into the collection that they already have going."
Taylor considered that while Aisha was testing and rejecting one of the chairs. "I suppose that isn't a horrible thing. It isn't like they're going to learn much about you from that, right?"
"No, Lord. They should already suspect or know pretty much everything that should tell them."
"Then you might as well go for it."
"I think I'm ready," Aisha said after she'd chosen a chair, pushed it up behind the one Taylor was in, and sat down in it. "Is this going to hurt?"
"I have no clue," Taylor admitted. "I don't know if anyone's asked either."
"Oh."
There was a small pulse of mana as Hive cast a sensor drone. A video feed appeared in the multitasking instance for Taylor to monitor, showing one of the shard devices with an odd spire of sorts protruding from it. The spire wasn't tall so much as just stretched via an odd dimensional effect. Eight seconds later there was a larger pulse as Hive latched onto Aisha's entire body for a moment before pulling, a mana field flowing down the spire in the video feed to latch onto the shard device.
The funnel formed as the shard device started to be pulled into the 'spire', and Taylor picked up one of the puzzle books because this was going to take a while. Though she did realize that Hive had to be actively converting small amounts of the shard to mana just to power the entire effect. There was no way that a continent-sized anything would be absorbed otherwise.
"Whoa," Missy said, looking towards the Rig where a giant funnel had appeared sticking out of the side of the structure. It was angled slightly down, hanging over the ocean oddly, and appeared to be lit from the wrong direction entirely.
"Yeah," Ethan agreed before the light changed and he focused on the road again. "I wonder if this one will result in another necklace?"
"Probably not. Aisha doesn't have a linker core."
"Ah. That would make sense. At least I don't need to be jealous of her getting to be incredibly awesome when I've already lost my chance to do the same."
"Like Sherie would let you try."
"True, she's made that abundantly clear. And my brand is far too established to change it up that much at this point. Did that once, don't really want to go through it again. You have no idea how lucky you are to have a declared-dead previous identity, a new unrelated power set, and horrible assumptions that will likely come forward when you show yourself on your new team."
There were more details there, but she wasn't about to press for them and he seemed to realize what he'd said and didn't offer more. Instead she did her best to watch the funnel, up until they reached the hardware store and had to head inside. Of course, the funnel existing at all had a large number of people occupied, so the store itself was more deserted than it likely would've been otherwise.
"So what are we here for?" Missy asked.
"The biggest thing is a couple bags of mulch to spread around today," Ethan replied. "I also want to grab a couple sheets of plywood and a box of screws for covering some spots in the attic."
Missy nodded, then just followed him as he collected things. She was thinking on the funnel while an instance of her was in the combined Space and Reason simulation system working on spell design. Which wasn't going well, because she'd come to the conclusion that neither device was properly creative. They were undoubtedly intelligent, and could piece things they already knew about together in new ways, but neither could really come up with proper ideas for anything new.
Admittedly, Reason had acknowledged that it had 'locked-down' functionality that might help with things once it was unlocked, and couldn't reveal anything tied to said functionality while it was locked, but had also stated that the hardware modules might not contain useful equations. Space was of the opinion that some of what she wanted to create would be easier once they had the full dimensional transference equations and she had some training in it. Neither really helped her now.
It led to a lot of frustration as she tried to understand how various bits of math went together to get different effects so that she could do new things with them on her own. Except that she didn't have enough math background, so another instance of her was in the multitasking interface studying math books. She'd also added some physics to the queue so that she knew what kinds of things to take into account.
One such thing to take into account was not allowing an explosion from her fist to affect her fist due to equal and opposite reactions. Because that would suck and she wasn't sure if the Knight Armor would protect her properly there. That might depend on whether the spell was layered on the outside of the protections or on her fist directly, if it would properly protect her from a spell she was actively casting at the time of the explosion, and who knew what other details.
Perhaps she should be asking Taylor to tutor her in math in addition to practical training?
Protectorate staff had brought Taylor lunch, apparently no longer avoiding the area. They confirmed that they could see and remember Aisha, and then one of them offered to play card games with Taylor for a bit. It didn't take long for them to get frustrated, and it wasn't until after they'd left that she'd realized that she'd been absently keeping track of every card in the deck even through shuffling. Which could be good for some parlor tricks, admittedly, but was probably considered cheating if anyone figured out that she'd been doing it.
With card games done, she'd switched to reading the book that she'd brought with her. It was one that she'd read before but didn't mind reading again, since she hadn't bothered to visit the public library for something new just for maybe reading today. It was midafternoon when she stopped, the funnel vanishing sooner than she'd personally expected it to. Several medical staff came in and moved both her and Aisha out of the room and into a medical room to be checked up on.
Taylor was cleared quickly and was able to collect her things before being escorted out of the building. Aisha was still unconscious at that point but should pull through without any significant issues. She just needed time to recover from the ordeal, and they didn't need Taylor sticking around for however long that would end up taking. Instead she got an uneventful ride home while Hive continued to process the just-consumed shard.
"I'm back," Taylor called as she entered the house well before dinnertime.
"Crap," her father called back. "Does that mean that I have to cook instead of expecting you to fend for yourself?"
"Maybe."
He met her in the hall, seeing that she was alone. "Oh well. Learn anything of use?"
"Not sure. Hive's been silent on that front so far, but I haven't been pushing for answers either."
"My Lord has been patient," Hive said. "And I'm honestly amazed at what that particular Shard device was used for, on top of being concerned that it going missing will be noticed."
Taylor blinked at that. "Oh?"
"It was unusually open in configuration compared to the others due to having two active profiles. Hiding the one it was connected to by altering perceptions and memories in real time was one fairly limited profile, the other was an on-demand trigger to erase specific outside memories in a varying area when requested. The latter had been used hundreds of thousands of times and I believe several attempted triggerings of it occurred during the absorption process. To accomplish those tasks the device was capable of scanning, simulating, and editing most mammalian brains at a minimum. Surprisingly, the end result actually looks to be safe and reasonably reliable for what it is."
It took Taylor a moment to realize what Hive had just said. "You just absorbed a mind reading and editing device? One that's likely done its thing to hundreds of thousands of people?"
"Yes, Lord. The scanning is detailed enough to be useful for a number of things, but the editing portion implies things that disturb me. Specifically, how many trials did this go through before they got it to this level of accuracy and safety?" Taylor and her father both shuddered at that, but Hive continued. "Beyond that while it is amazingly safe, it isn't perfect and repeated exposure to the original effects could cause a number of potential long-term problems. I don't recommend using the editing functionality at all."
Taylor nodded immediately. "That sounds like a very good idea."
"I find myself wondering what the scanning part would be useful for," her father added. "Since you seem to think it would be useful?"
"That's easy enough," Hive answered. "Imagine an interface device that can literally read your mind, allowing you to control whatever it's attached to in various ways. A Combat Device could know exactly what you need it to do in real time, a computer could pull text and images right out of your thoughts, or perhaps a wheelchair that's directed by the user's thoughts. All without needing to use mana at all, though I'm not yet certain how compact the scanning equipment can be made without extra-dimensional pockets."
"Huh. I suppose that kind of thing would also let you make Star Trek style doors that only open when you actually intend to go through them, wouldn't it? Or elevators that just know what floor you need to go to, I suppose."
"Only if the targets don't have any multidimensional shielding up at all, though the device bypassed a number of things by virtue of being permitted to piggyback on existing connections from other Shard devices. That capability and requests from other devices for memory erasures were mediated in part through the slave circuit. I attempted to analyse it, but had to destructively dismantle it before it could send out a distress signal."
Taylor thought about that for a moment, then sighed. "Somehow I suspect that 'can read minds' isn't going to come up as useful in anything other than a 'violate privacy' context anytime soon, at least from a combat point of view. Though if you can get 'control computers and wheelchairs' down to a headband without needing mana then that would probably be a good money-maker."
Her father nodded. "That definitely sounds reasonable, so long as the headband couldn't just be reprogrammed to read everything from someone's brain."
"I'll add it to the low priority list," Hive said. "Lord, my previous supply combined with the processed resources from the device combined provide just enough components for two more augmentation units. Do you have any preference for how those are distributed? Missy has three available slots to your four, but she also has only one existing unit to your three."
That was a good question, and Taylor thought about it for a moment. "I can see a good argument for getting her up to three, but at the same time I have potential plans now that could benefit from me getting a boost before I enact them. So I'm thinking one for each of us, get us both to or past half capacity for the things."
"That sounds fair," her father agreed. "I can't see Ethan or Sherie disagreeing either. Though that does bring up the question of when."
"Tonight for me if Hive thinks she'll be ready, next Friday or Saturday for Missy in case it keeps her from sleeping properly like it does to me."
"There will be no problems with starting tonight," Hive agreed. "Though tomorrow you will need to adjust to the added output."
"Of course. Not like today was a good day for training anyway."
Missy had been excited when they'd informed her about getting her a second augmentation unit the following weekend, but Taylor was getting her new unit that night. Which meant that her body didn't get much sleep and she was constantly somewhat distracted. She'd opted to stick with working on playing the flute instead of anything more serious, ending up feeling like she'd made some actual progress by morning.
Hive had finished processing things as far as she planned to and wanted to install things in the Inn. Specifically, she planned on using the morning to set up remote shard hardware for various uses. Initially locked down to her and Taylor, but possibly eventually to be opened up in a limited fashion to Missy as well at some point. It wasn't going to be anywhere near as capable as Hive's own systems but it should still be useful for shard techniques that worked best crossing dimensional boundaries.
Which seemed to be almost all of them, because the things operated that way by default.
Once done with that, Hive's plans were to start tracing back the tracking devices that had been left in the warehouse. The one left by the PRT was likely to be the only one they didn't go to any length to follow the trail of, since it had seemed to be an honest mistake that Armsmaster had let them know of quickly. The rest were more likely to be interesting, if only from the point of view of figuring out what others were planning.
"You look like you stayed up all night," Missy commented when she arrived for exercise.
"I didn't get much sleep," Taylor admitted. "You can probably expect that yourself next weekend."
"Crap. That's why we're waiting until the weekend?"
"Yep."
"That's going to suck."
Taylor shrugged. "You get used to it, and you'll go through it less times if we both end up with all of our slots filled."
Missy nodded. "That makes sense. It doesn't sound fair, but it makes sense." She then looked around. "Where's your father?"
"He's in the new command center trying it out."
"Why would he be doing that now?"
Taylor grinned while gesturing towards the door of the Inn. "Because instead of a run we're going to be in the air. Remember the first training session you joined?"
Missy's eyes widened. "Before breakfast?"
"Suck it up," Sherie's voice said over the communication system from where she was also monitoring back on Bet. "As a hero you don't get to choose to eat before replying to an all-hands emergency."
"Fuck."
Missy frantically dodged a beam that had nearly hit her face before dropping a shield in the path of a homing bullet. Reason twisted into the path of another homing bullet, a shield appearing at its tip just in time to intercept the bullet. Six more bullets and two beams were dodged in the following second and a half, two of the bullets exploding in fixed points while the other four continued on towards Taylor instead of sticking around where Missy currently was.
Speaking of Taylor, it was completely unfair how unfazed she was with the entire exercise. The older girl didn't even have Hal or Chain out and had claimed to be working on snap-casting without any gestures whatsoever. To that effect, she'd even blindfolded herself, relying entirely on her sensor and whatever mana senses she had. Then there were the training drones, that had automated shield drones hovering around them, intercepting any bullets or beams sent their way. Something that Danny claimed was Taylor's own creation, and yet the older girl didn't seem to care to use the spell normally.
Admittedly, building reflexes that depended on having automated shielding sounded like a horrible idea, but it still felt ridiculous.
Every few minutes Taylor would also send attacks at Missy. It'd taken ten of those before Missy realized that meant that she could add to the pile of attacks heading towards Taylor. Not that the added bullets and beams had seemed to even register, each of them dodged or blocked as needed. Which was annoying as hell, since several of Taylor's attacks had gotten through.
A few minutes later Missy went wide-eyed as she realized that she was boxed in and about to be slammed by who knew how many bullets. Still, she'd kept a multitasking instance in reserve for just such an occasion, and just before she was going to be hit she vanished in a flash of light. Having 'blinked' out of the way, she dodged three more bullets while an explosion of light came from where she'd just been.
"Not bad," Danny said. "Wasn't sure if you'd picked up on the tactic of keeping an emergency blink handy."
"I'm not up to spamming them like Taylor does," Missy replied, backflipping through the air to dodge four bullets. One of them suddenly flashed and became a homing bullet headed straight for her ass, only to be intercepted by a point-blank shield. "But yes, having one ready just in case only makes sense."
It pretty much went unsaid that as soon as she'd finished casting that blink spell that another one had been queued up and held ready. Now that she'd demonstrated that she was ready with one she was expecting more 'no way out without it' events to come up. She wasn't disappointed either, ending up blinking out of six more situations before she was called out of the fray. Taylor kept at it, though, and now had the undivided attention of the training drones. Missy left her to it and dropped onto one of the couches in the Inn to properly catch her breath. Her flight spell and Knight Armor had been dismissed just after she'd landed at the Inn.
"You lasted longer than the first time," Sherie said. "And you didn't have to be evacuated."
"I'm still not up to Taylor's level."
"The only way you're getting to her level is if she stops training."
"That is a good point. Still feels wrong to be so far behind, and the blasted bullets ignore spatial warping more often than not. That negates most of my tricks from being a Ward, where I was at least the equal of everyone else on the team."
"And I'm fairly certain that Taylor could take on every parahuman in New England at the same time and still come out on top, so using what you used to be able to do as a benchmark is stupid. Right now I'm betting that you could likely take on any five parahumans at once. I sure as hell don't want to fight you."
"Assuming you exclude Taylor," Danny interjected. "Assuming we're counting 'mages' as being a form of parahuman, anyway."
"Yes, we're excluding mages. Especially mages with force multiplying drone support."
"Those do tend to tip the odds quite a bit in the mage's favor."
"Are you trying to make me more jealous of not having Taylor's insane multitasking?"
"No," Sherie replied. "Just got off on a bit of a tangent. Still, you should probably come home and eat something."
Missy sighed, but nodded and pushed herself up off of the couch. Moving over to the nearest transport device she reached out to it and asked it to send her home.
Taylor groaned as she got up, having just gone through a post-breakfast second pass on the tumbling devices. The first two levels had actually been unable to even affect the multitasking interface with the brain shield up. The second level caused the drain from said shield to become noticeable, but the shield held. Unfortunately, the third level was barely held back, tearing the new shield apart just before it did the same to the multitasking interface.
It took a few minutes for her to recast the brain shield, after which she grumbled a bit and remotely triggered one of the transport devices to pull her back to the Inn. At least this time she hadn't spent more than a few minutes unconscious. They really needed to come up with a version of those tricks that could allow exclusions. Preferably that could be made into a spell or barrier, something that Hive was working on but hadn't gotten to the initial testing stage of yet.
"Well that was fun," Taylor said as she dropped into one of the chairs.
"I'm sure it was," her father agreed with a smirk. "Still, Hive says she's almost done what she needs to be here for and made a few devices for Ethan and Sherie to use as a secondary security system. You two should probably go install that today, unless you'd prefer to do it while watching Missy tomorrow?"
"Might as well get it over with. Besides, it'll be easier to show them how the thing works if they're actually there."
"Very true. Do you have anything else to test today?"
Taylor shrugged. "I should probably see how the grasping tentacles thing I've come up with works on an unshielded non-simulation human, but I think that can wait a few days."
He raised his eyebrow. "Are you planning on testing it on yourself?"
"That was the plan, yes."
"Why not test it on me?"
"Because I can shut it down faster if it's a problem and I'm the one captured by it?"
"Seems like a poor test if you can get out that easily."
Taylor rolled her eyes. "The first test is to ensure that people grabbed by the tentacles can, in fact, breathe. Additional tests after that would likely involve others, but until I know that breathing works I don't think it would be responsible to test with someone who can't dismiss it as soon as they realize that they're suffocating."
"Oh. That's a much better argument, and all of a sudden I don't want to be the first test subject. It's also more responsible than I was expecting, given how many other things you've apparently been somewhat lax in testing properly."
"Most of my Lord's spell problems have been discovered during proper testing in reasonably safe environments," Hive countered as she appeared. "The same goes for my own testing. Admittedly, some of those environments are no longer anything resembling safe, but they're also not places that anyone visited regularly for any reason."
He looked between the two before sighing. "Okay, you win. Shall we head home then?"
A few minutes later they were back on Bet, Taylor grabbing a snack while her father turned on the television. It was likely going to be a lazy rest of the morning across the board, though there was a message relayed through Missy. They came to a quick agreement that Taylor would head over after lunch to set up the new magical security system.
