Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard? (Worm/MGLN) (Complete)
- Thread starter CmptrWz
- Start date
- Crossover
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
It depends, but some of them have definitely been more interesting than the accompanying chapter.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
I too am glad the site's back. Was worried we'd miss today's post.
Regarding Tagg, in canon he's most likely a ziz bomb. Even if she didn't actively mess with Tagg, he was stationed for several years on the borders of Switzerland with orders to indiscriminately kill any and everyone that tried to leave the country. That is going to seriously mess with a person regardless of if an endbringer is intentionally programing them to cause problems. He got portrayed as an Ends Justify the Means type of person, which might make him a good military commander. But it makes him a horrible choice for leading a civilian law enforcement organization. He never should have been made a director. Then again, neither should Coil or Piggot in canon.
Regarding Tagg, in canon he's most likely a ziz bomb. Even if she didn't actively mess with Tagg, he was stationed for several years on the borders of Switzerland with orders to indiscriminately kill any and everyone that tried to leave the country. That is going to seriously mess with a person regardless of if an endbringer is intentionally programing them to cause problems. He got portrayed as an Ends Justify the Means type of person, which might make him a good military commander. But it makes him a horrible choice for leading a civilian law enforcement organization. He never should have been made a director. Then again, neither should Coil or Piggot in canon.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I know Coil is absolutely the last person who should have any sort of power over other people; but I was under the impression that, aside from the pay docking, Piggot was shown to be a fairly reasonable director. At least for those times that Piggot gets to have proper "screen-time" as opposed to just being relayed through Taylor's thoughts.
This does ignore Wildbow's WoGs on potential "what-ifs", but from what I've seen that's kind of standard procedure.
This does ignore Wildbow's WoGs on potential "what-ifs", but from what I've seen that's kind of standard procedure.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
She is shown in canon, which Wildbow gave WoG to expand upon, to hate all parahumans. She considers all parahumans to be inhuman monsters. Yes her irrational hate is fairly justified due to experiences in Ellisburg, which went south in part because the cape support fled at the first sign of trouble. The fact remains though that she never should have been made director of a PRT branch. You do not put someone with an irrational hatred of all parahumans in charge of parahuman law officers. From what little we see, the Wards in Brockton Bay weren't getting any real training. They also were getting thrown into the meat grinder while at the same time being told "don't do anything". Then when the poorly trained kids got their asses handed to them by a group that did know how to work together they got yelled at and docked pay. Note that the Undersiders would have gotten away anyway if the Wards had obeyed orders to wait for PRT troopers to arrive and take over. Not to mention there could have been civilian casualties because Glory Girl was going off half cocked. The Wards engaging was the right call. Yes, their plan wasn't particularly well thought out. But then again they weren't really getting trained in what they were suppose to be doing.
Then again, in canon the ENE branch of the Protectorate and PRT was being set up to fail.
Chapter 100 - July 8, 2011
Friday morning started with Taylor looking over the new configuration options in Core. Hive had decided that the 'auto scan and counterspell' routine was a good idea in general, but needed a lot of improvements. So she'd turned it into an automatic hybrid device configuration profile, with the ability to exclude specific signatures so that you weren't automatically hitting spells cast by your allies with counterspells. There were also sliders for how far away to look, how long something should be in range before going beyond 'identify the spell', and how long something should be in range before throwing a counterspell at it. The latter essentially defaulted to 'just send one if one is available'.
That last slider pointed at a significant improvement over the previous system, and that was that the new system didn't need to work out a counterspell equation every time. It had an actual database cache, that could be shared with others, and had an option for 'give it a spell object or equation to precalculate a counterspell'. Hive's example for why that was so great was being hit with a new binding spell variant you'd not seen before, with multiple castings used to hold you down more. Instead of the original's 'figure out a counterspell for each instance from scratch', this one would figure out the counterspell and then rapid-fire it at all instances of the binding spell. And then hopefully counterspell all future attempts before they finished binding you.
Of course, the manual for the system warned that it wasn't perfect. The more complicated a spell the more time it would take to come up with a counterspell for, and not all spells were likely to be able to be countered. An example of a binding spell with an integrated barrier was provided, where the barrier would resist external mana of all kinds and would most likely need to be overpowered or otherwise bypassed before any counterspell could function on the bindings themselves.
Hive had kindly provided variants of all of Taylor's binding spells with integrated barriers, which was both a 'good to have' thing and an unspoken warning that the training drones were very much likely to be using counterspell-resistant bindings. The new spells were a lot more mana-intensive though, taking longer to cast and were probably slightly more fragile when it came to brute force before they settled into place. They also took more effort to 'compile' for the others to use. Eventually.
Having a surprise like that for them in their next joint training session was worth holding the new variants back at first.
Morning exercise included a combination of testing and demonstration for the automatic counterspell setup. Being faster than the previous version was seen as a good thing, with Amy and Missy both agreeing that they wanted it installed in their devices. Especially after seeing it chain-dispel bullets fired at Taylor after the system was fed one to figure out a counterspell equation for them. Of course, then Hive threw a couple of curveballs to demonstrate that it wasn't all good. Sending bullets full of containment foam to be dispelled showed that all that you got then was the containment foam coming at you. Of course, it also demonstrated why having a supply of the release agent was good.
"So what are you going to be doing while us adults are working?" Ethan asked as everyone was preparing to split up for breakfast. "Beyond making us wonder how much more we should be jealous of you for, of course."
"What did we do to make you jealous this morning?" Taylor asked.
"Even Armsmaster can't get his hands on containment foam release agent," Sherie answered. "And if he were any more involved with Dragon then he'd be dating her."
"I don't see how that would help him get his hands on it," Ethan replied. "It isn't like she controls the PRT supply chain rules that lock the stuff down, she just skates by because she's the PRT's source. The rules also work, having kept villains from getting their hands on the stuff, but still..."
Taylor decided to not mention that a basic solvent could be made by placing a chunk of containment foam in methanol and letting it break down there. Because Ethan would probably go to the effort of doing so, with who knew what kind of crazy story to explain it.
"None of this explains what we'll be doing," Amy noted.
"I need to test the next iteration of linker core additions," Taylor answered. "And then probably come up with a fair way to decide who gets them next, assuming it all works like Hive expects it to."
"Do be careful," her father said.
"We will be."
Going home just to be driven across town was still annoying, but Missy still ended up sitting with Amy as they monitored Taylor testing the new linker core addition. Taylor was currently running around inside of a tumbling field to demonstrate that the rainbow effect worked to keep her more functional than she had any right to be normally. Hive had also obviously improved on other things, given the bursts of fire and water Taylor had thrown out to prove she could.
"Okay Lord," Hive said. "This part of things appears to be working fine, though it appears that the adjustments to the flight harness are less responsive than I'd hoped."
"It is," Taylor replied, taking Missy by surprise. Looking, the 'wings' of the flight spell were missing. "But still better than nothing if it comes up. That said, once we're all kitted out we'll need to add training in the tumbling conditions to our normal routine."
"Of course. Is the electrical generation working?"
In response to that, Taylor fired off a lightning bolt into a rock. "Yes." She then followed that up with a burst of containment foam, followed by solvent to dissolve it away. "And I don't know how you figured out adding containment foam into the mix, but it works too."
"It was actually fairly simple. I've shut down the tumbling systems for the last tests."
Taylor nodded, then shifted to her slightly-older form. From there she jumped straight to her younger form, then from the younger form straight to an incredibly tiny cat.
"I thought that wasn't possible!" Amy exclaimed as she jumped up.
"It wasn't until it was," Hive answered.
"Is she a kitten?" Missy asked.
"Yes, but also a very small breed of cat. Specifically, a rusty-spotted cat. She figured that smaller would be better."
That was enough to start searching for information, except that Hive dropped information on it into Space immediately. In the meantime, Taylor visibly shifted to a larger cat, then to a slightly older looking one.
"It appears that age shifting in the animal form is working well," Hive commented.
"It is," Taylor replied, then shifted back to human...ish. She was shorter than her normal self, but not because she was younger. No, she was now a mix between human and cat. Mostly human, but shorter and with some cat features such as ears and tail. Those had the same fur pattern as she'd had in the full cat form. Oh, and her eyes were obviously still a cat's, and it looked like she had whiskers still?
"Please tell me that if I get that in 'Rainbow' form that I don't need to be tested again," Amy said after a moment.
"That shouldn't be necessary," Hive answered as Taylor shifted ages up and down in catgirl form. "And things appear to be working fine here as well."
"They do," Taylor agreed. "Except that the flight harness doesn't fit quite right around my tail, and obviously I'm going to need to design a helmet template that works with cat ears if I ever plan on going into a fight like this."
"You could go with a more whimsical Knight Armor appearance for this form, Lord."
"I'll think about it. Amy's dress can't take nearly as much damage as the normal outfit."
"Wait," Missy said, tilting her head. "We all get to have an animal and animal-girl form?"
Hive nodded. "Yes, and I've already figured out how to make Amy's serve as a duplicate of her chosen form for Rainbow. It's far safer than constantly modifying her brain back and forth to accommodate the changes to her ears. You'll need to choose an animal form, unless you'd prefer that I not provide you with that system?"
"Are there any limits?"
"The animal needs to be less massive than your normal body, and in the case of the partial forms you're probably best off with a mammal of some kind to make integration easier."
Well, that limited her quite a bit more, assuming she wanted to bother with an animal form at all. In fact, she was thinking that she'd skip on it, right up until Taylor shifted back into a cat and fired a beam attack as though she was 'roaring'. Which brought back the 'blink up off of the ground' that Taylor had done as an owl. If they could still cast spells while in animal form...
Amy had reluctantly admitted that Missy going first in getting the new toys made sense. Not based on likelihood of using them, or even weekend plans. No, the deciding factor had been that the younger girl had no 'protest' to monitor today. Annoying, but very hard to argue with the logic as only Taylor could easily monitor things like that while her in-core device was offline for upgrades.
That left Amy sitting in the command center, watching the still-a-protest, while Taylor was off familiarizing herself with how her new forms moved. And possibly working on various Knight Armor template changes for the 'catgirl' form, for that matter.
Of particular note in the 'protest' was that the National Will group had four parahumans present...and none of them were the person pretending to be 'Shroud of Achilles' at all. She was guessing that the person who had pulled open the side of one of the knives to adjust settings with a screwdriver was 'Whitesmith', mostly since their power temporarily connected to the knife in the process and the effect generated by the knife stabilized, leaving the other three as the unknowns. Two of the three had 'secondary connections' to the entire group, one to each person's left ass cheek and the other to each person's brain. Which made Amy think that 'Shroud of Achilles' was actually multiple parahumans working together, one providing the brute side of things and the other providing the thinker side. Which nicely explained the 'two parahuman and one normal' leadership, if one of the parahumans was actually two people.
The last parahuman wasn't doing much of anything, their powers not appearing to be active. And actually, closer examination of the sensor feed showed that they weren't connected to the other two, and they didn't seem to have any of Whitesmith's weapons on them.
It didn't take too long for the 'protest' to become a fight. The last mystery parahuman did something that connected them to those around them in a flexible manner, then started striking various parts of the bodies of those around them. Maybe looking for the 'disable the brute powers' point chosen today? The other three parahumans moved to act as part of the 'guard' for 'Shroud of Achilles'.
All things combined, it was looking like taking down the guard, even if that meant allowing the 'parahuman' to escape, was going to be the best tactic for doing damage to the group.
Taylor had eventually come up with a Knight Armor helmet that worked with cat ears, and was easily adapted to squirrel ears for Amy if she wanted to do so. After that she'd found that Missy would probably want to make minor adjustments for fox ears, having apparently decided on that for an animal form. Seemingly in part because Hive had assured her that the hybrid form wouldn't make her shorter, even though that wasn't how the hybrid form worked in the new combined system.
Hive had both simplified and expanded on things when rebuilding the three systems. They were no longer blatantly 'tacked on' like they had been, instead being properly integrated with the base linker core support structure. At the same time, a number of features had been removed entirely and it had gone from three mutually exclusive systems to two distinct but compatible ones.
Starting with the animal form module, the original was apparently a parallel version of the age shifting system. But because it was an entirely separate system you had to bounce through 'normal' to switch which one was active. Now it was properly integrated with the age-shifting system, which is why they could now shift directly between states and age-shift the templates. Of course, calling it the 'animal form' module was somewhat 'legacy naming', as your three templates didn't even need to include an animal at all.
The automatic defense and anti-tumbling module had been stripped down the most. Everything but the anti-tumbling had been removed, leaving less than five percent of the original structure to integrate. Except that it hooked into the same connection points as the conversion system did to manipulate mana output, which had apparently made Hive think that the two were forever mutually exclusive at first. But in rebuilding the conversion system to remove a lot of its inefficiencies she'd found a way to integrate the anti-tumbling into it.
Now the system wasn't modular and was a lot more compact for it. Instead of telling it to go fetch the configuration from the addon slots it was handed a configuration from the control end. That simplified the entire control chain, and allowed for an additional feature. Instead of using one of the presets, you could attach a device to the control interface. Core's upgrades included the ability to do so, and a number of examples had been provided. Such as a new way to make business cards that were essentially permanent.
That said, it was far better to just use their devices to construct most things that they didn't want to use Knight Object spells for. The advantage to the conversion system was that it had been designed with 'mix into spells' in mind, to the point where a quick test showed that casting a sensor drone with homing containment-foam filled bullets to another dimension was easily possible without a dimensional transference spell. To do that with stored materials would need the dimensional transference instead.
Which led to Taylor experimenting with using the 'frost' mode to form spikes of ice. She couldn't do so through drones, but doing so herself wasn't a big deal. The real goal was to have a solid spike that wasn't made of mana come out of a bullet at speed. Once she had that working she could work on tagging it with an unfolding spell.
It was around lunchtime the next day when Taylor's day was interrupted. Missy's upgrade had taken most of Friday, then Hive had reported that she was going to be adding a variant of the conversion and anti-tumbling system to herself before moving on to upgrading Amy starting in the morning. That had started just after breakfast, with Missy agreeing to wait for Amy to be ready before they got lessons in using the new systems.
The interruption happened while trying to decide what to make for lunch and came in the form of an unexpected phone call to Minerva. Or rather, one that had gone to Hive, but that Hive had 'secured and forwarded' to Taylor's Minerva phone. Since she was at the Inn anyway it was easy enough to just pop open a communication window to answer.
"Good morning," Taylor greeted. "For what's left of the morning, anyway."
"Technically I have a few more hours of morning here," Dragon replied. "But good morning to you as well. I was expecting to talk to Hive, is she unavailable?"
"Unfortunately. She's working on a delicate project that requires most of her focus. I...honestly couldn't say if she figured that I'd be able to help you, or if this is the first time that we'd have needed working voicemail for her and she doesn't have time to set that up."
"I see. I was hoping that she, as a fellow AI, would be able to help me with the manipulation of my systems by my powers. My backups have started to either be corrupted or have the safeguard system security keys restored to them, though so far no attempts have been made at restoring the system to functionality, and I keep catching varying levels of manipulation of my systems by the connection to make me attempt to ignore things."
That...sounded like a 'remove her shard device from play' or a 'move her into a mana-powered device with suitable shields' thing. On a hunch, Taylor checked and found that Hive did have notes for possible platforms to move Dragon onto, but no near-complete designs yet. The major stumbling blocks being an incomplete system of some kind and a desire to give the AI a linker core of her own. That was linked to an entirely different set of notes on Hive's many apparent failures to make an artificial linker core for devices.
A further check of what was and wasn't connected to Dragon's shard showed that it had a couple dozen connections...to Dragon and each of her backups. With a note that depowering her would likely corrupt all instances if not stopped on any given one and that her ability to function in normal hardware had been hijacked by the shard device, so removing it from play could shut her down permanently if they didn't relocate her and replace that portion of her code anyway.
"It appears that we're already looking into it," Taylor finally said. "As part of what would be needed to put you into an instance of our hardware. But there are complications we haven't figured out yet. I might take a look at a couple of aspects of it myself, now that I'm aware of them."
There was a pause before Dragon responded. "You aren't personally familiar with all of Hive's projects, at least on a basic level?"
"Most of them are her projects, not things I've asked her to do. She checks with me on especially dangerous or large ones, but I don't see a need to micromanage her."
"My creator was far more paranoid with me."
"I suppose that Hive's original creators might've been more involved as well, but I still don't know enough about how she functions to truly monitor the projects that she's working on to try and repair her own offline systems."
"I...wasn't aware that she wasn't fully functional."
"She's working on it, and as soon as she's available I'll see what she thinks about timeframes for getting past some of the issues to help you."
"Thank you."
A few minutes later, Taylor was more closely examining Hive's notes on artificial linker cores. The base setup for them was easy enough, apparently, but the problem was activating the core support structure. Which didn't seem to work at all for Hive, no matter how closely she tried to duplicate her own circuitry or the mana in her support structure. But the problem felt oddly familiar to Taylor, though she wasn't sure why yet.
Sunday morning exercise and breakfast had happened, with Taylor being told that Hive was working on Dragon's problem alongside a number of other things. 'Great strides' had been made towards the incomplete system, but the more important hurdle was Hive feeling that an AI of Dragon's level would best function in a device with a linker core of her own. That wasn't going well, because there was an anchoring 'knot' of sorts that in humans was tied by fetal development but in an artificial core needed to be tied more directly. Except that Hive couldn't figure out how to do that.
The quality of that 'knot' apparently determined a number of secondary aspects of the linker core in humans. Taylor had a high-quality one and that gave her a greater core capacity and a couple of other specialty structures only formed at that point. Amy and Missy had both developed lower-quality ones, which is where their reduced core capacity compared to Taylor likely came from.
For an artificial one, it was probably not possible to get a better 'knot' than what Hive had. At least not while using her circuitry as a base. There was a chance that they could do better if they had an alternate structure to attach it to, but neither of them actually understood how the structure that Hive had for her anchor point worked. Hive had five alternate structures that might work, but they weren't positive would. Assuming that they could get anything to function at all.
Missy rolled her eyes, doing her best to ignore that Amy was almost bouncing in excitement as they prepared to test the new linker core additions. She probably would be bouncing if they were starting with her being able to play with her new squirrel form, but they were in the desert a good distance away from where Crawler had died to test the 'mana conversion' and tumbling aspects first. Danny, Ethan, and Sherie were all in the Inner Inn command center to watch as well, Ethan before getting some rest after working all night and Sherie before going in for an afternoon to evening shift.
The problem with the new tricks was that they couldn't even use all of them yet. Being able to throw containment foam around sounded awesome, right up until you considered that they shouldn't have access to it. Which meant that they needed to have a cover story for the stuff before using it, even if they didn't reveal the story until asked. The rest of the tricks were going to require quite a bit of work to come up with things that were usable for them, and probably a lot of testing to ensure that they wouldn't accidentally kill bystanders.
Over the following hour they were put through various things that had already been figured out for each of the conversion modes, followed by Taylor sharing some of the spell modifications she'd already created. Which actually made things more useful than Missy had originally expected. Bullets that would create firebombs and EMPs on detonation, instant solid ice projectiles and barriers that could also be embedded in bullets, and a collection of ways to deploy containment foam and solvent. Coupled with a comment that Dragon may even be open to giving them legitimate access to containment foam when they helped her with a couple of things.
That said, Missy personally found the 'instant flamethrower' trick the most fun to use, especially as it could also be set up fairly easily to be 'instant cutting torch' or similar. Though it wasn't as powerful as the cutting tools Taylor gave them, and making a flame or lightning sword by channeling mana into said tools was awesome looking but horribly impractical.
Amy had resisted bouncing in excitement for most of the morning as they played with the conversion system. She had fun ideas for some of the tricks that Taylor had shown them, even if she wasn't going to be trying to figure out the math for making her own spells to take advantage of them from scratch. Just being able to have things explode into fireballs alone was going to be awesome, and was probably worth needing to show that she had a healing device in the aftermath.
She was no stranger to 'clean up excessive injuries with healing capabilities', after all.
But now they'd returned to the beach at the Outer Inn, where there were trees to practice with animal forms in.
"Now then," Taylor said. "You need to be careful about what you're wearing as you shift from form to form, and even adjusting your age."
"We know," Missy whined.
"Specifically, shifting to full animal stores any normal clothing you're wearing away and shunts your mana-created clothing into the same not-space your body ends up in. Hive came up with a slightly upgraded Knight Armor spell to compensate for that by allowing for including elements for each alternate form. I've got an alternate helmet and a tail band for my hybrid form, and the tail band is reused along with a collar for my full cat form. I imagine that Amy will want to ensure that her tail bow is properly flagged so that it will show up automatically in both forms that come with a tail."
And that had Missy blinking, apparently not having been expecting that. "Oh."
"So we need new Knight Armor template updates and the new spell first?" Amy asked.
Taylor nodded. "Yep. Luckily the age shifting isn't a problem, as 'fit to current size' has been a little-used feature right along. Mostly for Hive's benefit originally."
Getting the new spell and template modifications taken care of was mildly annoying in a tedious fashion. Amy opted for a small ribbon around her neck as an additional anchor point for her squirrel form, though wouldn't know how well it worked until she tried it out. She also went ahead and set things up similarly in the 'full' Knight Armor template, using the basic tail band and collar setup that Taylor had come up with in addition to the modified helmet. Taylor had even modified the sunglasses to include the 'behind the head' webbing when on the hybrid forms, which showed how to tag part of a template object as well.
A new template for 'mana focus gems' was also included, though Taylor admitted that she'd not played with it herself. Supposedly they could improve casting without channeling through a device if placed properly in the Knight Armor template, and Amy was considering trying them out either shaped like or hidden inside of her various acorn ties.
Finally the control spell was handed over, and Amy barely resisted playing with it without Taylor's instructions. That way led to being denied future toys because she couldn't listen to directions, after all. They went through the age shifts, which was a three-state mental toggle switch. Forms were buttons, and they used the 'middle' button for the hybrid state first. Which, as promised, was the previously created 'Rainbow' state for Amy. The band on her tail appeared properly as well. Missy had red fox ears and a fox tail, but hadn't gotten any shorter.
After confirming that the hybrid forms worked well, the moment Amy had been waiting for came and they used the 'left' button for the full animal state. The collar and tail band formed properly on her when she shifted into a green-furred squirrel. Taylor had gone into her itty bitty cat form, and Missy was the largest of them in her red fox form. They then shifted ages in the animal forms, before experimenting with moving around in the trees.
Sadly, an actual squirrel form apparently needed a lot more practice than Amy had expected. Taylor had already gotten practice in her cat form, and Missy seemed to be doing well in her fox form, but neither of them was trying to glide. Crashing into trees, failing entirely and crashing into the ground, completely missing her target...
At least she had something to work on while waiting for the next 'protest' that National Will planned on attending.
They had worked in the animal forms for an hour before returning to the Inner Inn via a dimensional transference. The adults were there, though Ethan looked like he really wanted to go to bed but was staying up just to see things. Taylor returned to her normal human form, which prompted Amy to hit the 'right' button to do the same. Missy seemed to do so at the same time, only they didn't turn back to normal.
Missy was now a chibi version of herself with light purple hair, and a quick check showed that Amy was similarly changed but with brownish green hair. It was also obvious that the adults had been warned, because cameras were present and used while they were still in shock over the change.
"What the hell?" Missy asked before Amy could.
Taylor grinned. "That's the third form we programmed in for you."
"Then how do we turn it off if all of the buttons change our form?"
Amy had noticed that the 'button' for this form was still 'pressed' and pushed it again, causing it to pop out and her to return to her normal form. "Okay, that was sneaky of you."
Missy looked at Amy like she was a traitor before groaning. A moment later she shifted back as well. "Why is that in the list?"
Taylor shrugged. "Hive found that the three templates layout was actually easier to make work properly than two. Having a 'Lilia-like' form for each of us would also add a lot of potential confusion to anyone trying to figure things out."
That made an unfortunate amount of sense on a number of fronts.
Taylor had let Amy and Missy play around with their other forms more on their own, though did get some use out of her 'chibi' form while trying to figure out the artificial linker core stuff. Being smaller and thus able to more closely examine things hadn't helped as much as she'd hoped it would, but she'd given it a try anyway. Really, she probably needed a dozen microscopes to point at things from different angles or something similar, but she was making do with a bunch of sensor drones instead.
Hive was working on something else most of the day. At lunch she'd commented that the manaless construction and testing facility was done, in case Taylor wanted to use it to test anything, but otherwise had been in one of the basements of the Outer Inn.
Work on artificial linker cores had absorbed Taylor's afternoon as well, with little to no direct progress. She'd joined her father and Amy for dinner, deciding that switching back to coming up with plans to convince Cauldron to step up their next meeting date might not be a bad idea. Except she had no clue how to do so, and probably needed to see if Hive had any ideas. Unfortunately, as they were cleaning up after eating something happened and Taylor was disconnected from Hive entirely.
The three headed to the Inn to see what was going on, only to find a solid bubble sitting where the Inn's sensors reported that Hive had been working. It felt like Hive to Taylor and Amy, or at least seemed to have her linker core, but it also wasn't any form that the device had taken previously and was spiking mana in odd patterns. There was also a barrier involved, keeping any access or analysis of the internals of the bubble from being possible.
"Is she doing something in there?" Amy finally asked. "Or did something go horribly wrong?"
"I'm not sure," Taylor admitted. "And short of waiting and hoping for the best, I have no idea how to find out without possibly causing more problems."
"What will you do if this is a sign that something went wrong?" her father asked.
Taylor frowned. "I honestly don't know. I think all of her notes are backed up in the Inn's systems, so at a minimum we should be able to continue with most of what we've been doing, but I haven't got a whole lot of information on how she works. If her own repair systems don't fix her then I don't think I have any way to do so either. Especially since getting past the barriers on this bubble could cause a lot more damage unless I can hit them just hard enough to break them but not hard enough to punch through entirely."
"So either this resolves itself or you have to risk causing a lot more damage to find out if you can even attempt to fix things?" Amy asked.
"Yep."
That last slider pointed at a significant improvement over the previous system, and that was that the new system didn't need to work out a counterspell equation every time. It had an actual database cache, that could be shared with others, and had an option for 'give it a spell object or equation to precalculate a counterspell'. Hive's example for why that was so great was being hit with a new binding spell variant you'd not seen before, with multiple castings used to hold you down more. Instead of the original's 'figure out a counterspell for each instance from scratch', this one would figure out the counterspell and then rapid-fire it at all instances of the binding spell. And then hopefully counterspell all future attempts before they finished binding you.
Of course, the manual for the system warned that it wasn't perfect. The more complicated a spell the more time it would take to come up with a counterspell for, and not all spells were likely to be able to be countered. An example of a binding spell with an integrated barrier was provided, where the barrier would resist external mana of all kinds and would most likely need to be overpowered or otherwise bypassed before any counterspell could function on the bindings themselves.
Hive had kindly provided variants of all of Taylor's binding spells with integrated barriers, which was both a 'good to have' thing and an unspoken warning that the training drones were very much likely to be using counterspell-resistant bindings. The new spells were a lot more mana-intensive though, taking longer to cast and were probably slightly more fragile when it came to brute force before they settled into place. They also took more effort to 'compile' for the others to use. Eventually.
Having a surprise like that for them in their next joint training session was worth holding the new variants back at first.
Morning exercise included a combination of testing and demonstration for the automatic counterspell setup. Being faster than the previous version was seen as a good thing, with Amy and Missy both agreeing that they wanted it installed in their devices. Especially after seeing it chain-dispel bullets fired at Taylor after the system was fed one to figure out a counterspell equation for them. Of course, then Hive threw a couple of curveballs to demonstrate that it wasn't all good. Sending bullets full of containment foam to be dispelled showed that all that you got then was the containment foam coming at you. Of course, it also demonstrated why having a supply of the release agent was good.
"So what are you going to be doing while us adults are working?" Ethan asked as everyone was preparing to split up for breakfast. "Beyond making us wonder how much more we should be jealous of you for, of course."
"What did we do to make you jealous this morning?" Taylor asked.
"Even Armsmaster can't get his hands on containment foam release agent," Sherie answered. "And if he were any more involved with Dragon then he'd be dating her."
"I don't see how that would help him get his hands on it," Ethan replied. "It isn't like she controls the PRT supply chain rules that lock the stuff down, she just skates by because she's the PRT's source. The rules also work, having kept villains from getting their hands on the stuff, but still..."
Taylor decided to not mention that a basic solvent could be made by placing a chunk of containment foam in methanol and letting it break down there. Because Ethan would probably go to the effort of doing so, with who knew what kind of crazy story to explain it.
"None of this explains what we'll be doing," Amy noted.
"I need to test the next iteration of linker core additions," Taylor answered. "And then probably come up with a fair way to decide who gets them next, assuming it all works like Hive expects it to."
"Do be careful," her father said.
"We will be."
Going home just to be driven across town was still annoying, but Missy still ended up sitting with Amy as they monitored Taylor testing the new linker core addition. Taylor was currently running around inside of a tumbling field to demonstrate that the rainbow effect worked to keep her more functional than she had any right to be normally. Hive had also obviously improved on other things, given the bursts of fire and water Taylor had thrown out to prove she could.
"Okay Lord," Hive said. "This part of things appears to be working fine, though it appears that the adjustments to the flight harness are less responsive than I'd hoped."
"It is," Taylor replied, taking Missy by surprise. Looking, the 'wings' of the flight spell were missing. "But still better than nothing if it comes up. That said, once we're all kitted out we'll need to add training in the tumbling conditions to our normal routine."
"Of course. Is the electrical generation working?"
In response to that, Taylor fired off a lightning bolt into a rock. "Yes." She then followed that up with a burst of containment foam, followed by solvent to dissolve it away. "And I don't know how you figured out adding containment foam into the mix, but it works too."
"It was actually fairly simple. I've shut down the tumbling systems for the last tests."
Taylor nodded, then shifted to her slightly-older form. From there she jumped straight to her younger form, then from the younger form straight to an incredibly tiny cat.
"I thought that wasn't possible!" Amy exclaimed as she jumped up.
"It wasn't until it was," Hive answered.
"Is she a kitten?" Missy asked.
"Yes, but also a very small breed of cat. Specifically, a rusty-spotted cat. She figured that smaller would be better."
That was enough to start searching for information, except that Hive dropped information on it into Space immediately. In the meantime, Taylor visibly shifted to a larger cat, then to a slightly older looking one.
"It appears that age shifting in the animal form is working well," Hive commented.
"It is," Taylor replied, then shifted back to human...ish. She was shorter than her normal self, but not because she was younger. No, she was now a mix between human and cat. Mostly human, but shorter and with some cat features such as ears and tail. Those had the same fur pattern as she'd had in the full cat form. Oh, and her eyes were obviously still a cat's, and it looked like she had whiskers still?
"Please tell me that if I get that in 'Rainbow' form that I don't need to be tested again," Amy said after a moment.
"That shouldn't be necessary," Hive answered as Taylor shifted ages up and down in catgirl form. "And things appear to be working fine here as well."
"They do," Taylor agreed. "Except that the flight harness doesn't fit quite right around my tail, and obviously I'm going to need to design a helmet template that works with cat ears if I ever plan on going into a fight like this."
"You could go with a more whimsical Knight Armor appearance for this form, Lord."
"I'll think about it. Amy's dress can't take nearly as much damage as the normal outfit."
"Wait," Missy said, tilting her head. "We all get to have an animal and animal-girl form?"
Hive nodded. "Yes, and I've already figured out how to make Amy's serve as a duplicate of her chosen form for Rainbow. It's far safer than constantly modifying her brain back and forth to accommodate the changes to her ears. You'll need to choose an animal form, unless you'd prefer that I not provide you with that system?"
"Are there any limits?"
"The animal needs to be less massive than your normal body, and in the case of the partial forms you're probably best off with a mammal of some kind to make integration easier."
Well, that limited her quite a bit more, assuming she wanted to bother with an animal form at all. In fact, she was thinking that she'd skip on it, right up until Taylor shifted back into a cat and fired a beam attack as though she was 'roaring'. Which brought back the 'blink up off of the ground' that Taylor had done as an owl. If they could still cast spells while in animal form...
Amy had reluctantly admitted that Missy going first in getting the new toys made sense. Not based on likelihood of using them, or even weekend plans. No, the deciding factor had been that the younger girl had no 'protest' to monitor today. Annoying, but very hard to argue with the logic as only Taylor could easily monitor things like that while her in-core device was offline for upgrades.
That left Amy sitting in the command center, watching the still-a-protest, while Taylor was off familiarizing herself with how her new forms moved. And possibly working on various Knight Armor template changes for the 'catgirl' form, for that matter.
Of particular note in the 'protest' was that the National Will group had four parahumans present...and none of them were the person pretending to be 'Shroud of Achilles' at all. She was guessing that the person who had pulled open the side of one of the knives to adjust settings with a screwdriver was 'Whitesmith', mostly since their power temporarily connected to the knife in the process and the effect generated by the knife stabilized, leaving the other three as the unknowns. Two of the three had 'secondary connections' to the entire group, one to each person's left ass cheek and the other to each person's brain. Which made Amy think that 'Shroud of Achilles' was actually multiple parahumans working together, one providing the brute side of things and the other providing the thinker side. Which nicely explained the 'two parahuman and one normal' leadership, if one of the parahumans was actually two people.
The last parahuman wasn't doing much of anything, their powers not appearing to be active. And actually, closer examination of the sensor feed showed that they weren't connected to the other two, and they didn't seem to have any of Whitesmith's weapons on them.
It didn't take too long for the 'protest' to become a fight. The last mystery parahuman did something that connected them to those around them in a flexible manner, then started striking various parts of the bodies of those around them. Maybe looking for the 'disable the brute powers' point chosen today? The other three parahumans moved to act as part of the 'guard' for 'Shroud of Achilles'.
All things combined, it was looking like taking down the guard, even if that meant allowing the 'parahuman' to escape, was going to be the best tactic for doing damage to the group.
Taylor had eventually come up with a Knight Armor helmet that worked with cat ears, and was easily adapted to squirrel ears for Amy if she wanted to do so. After that she'd found that Missy would probably want to make minor adjustments for fox ears, having apparently decided on that for an animal form. Seemingly in part because Hive had assured her that the hybrid form wouldn't make her shorter, even though that wasn't how the hybrid form worked in the new combined system.
Hive had both simplified and expanded on things when rebuilding the three systems. They were no longer blatantly 'tacked on' like they had been, instead being properly integrated with the base linker core support structure. At the same time, a number of features had been removed entirely and it had gone from three mutually exclusive systems to two distinct but compatible ones.
Starting with the animal form module, the original was apparently a parallel version of the age shifting system. But because it was an entirely separate system you had to bounce through 'normal' to switch which one was active. Now it was properly integrated with the age-shifting system, which is why they could now shift directly between states and age-shift the templates. Of course, calling it the 'animal form' module was somewhat 'legacy naming', as your three templates didn't even need to include an animal at all.
The automatic defense and anti-tumbling module had been stripped down the most. Everything but the anti-tumbling had been removed, leaving less than five percent of the original structure to integrate. Except that it hooked into the same connection points as the conversion system did to manipulate mana output, which had apparently made Hive think that the two were forever mutually exclusive at first. But in rebuilding the conversion system to remove a lot of its inefficiencies she'd found a way to integrate the anti-tumbling into it.
Now the system wasn't modular and was a lot more compact for it. Instead of telling it to go fetch the configuration from the addon slots it was handed a configuration from the control end. That simplified the entire control chain, and allowed for an additional feature. Instead of using one of the presets, you could attach a device to the control interface. Core's upgrades included the ability to do so, and a number of examples had been provided. Such as a new way to make business cards that were essentially permanent.
That said, it was far better to just use their devices to construct most things that they didn't want to use Knight Object spells for. The advantage to the conversion system was that it had been designed with 'mix into spells' in mind, to the point where a quick test showed that casting a sensor drone with homing containment-foam filled bullets to another dimension was easily possible without a dimensional transference spell. To do that with stored materials would need the dimensional transference instead.
Which led to Taylor experimenting with using the 'frost' mode to form spikes of ice. She couldn't do so through drones, but doing so herself wasn't a big deal. The real goal was to have a solid spike that wasn't made of mana come out of a bullet at speed. Once she had that working she could work on tagging it with an unfolding spell.
It was around lunchtime the next day when Taylor's day was interrupted. Missy's upgrade had taken most of Friday, then Hive had reported that she was going to be adding a variant of the conversion and anti-tumbling system to herself before moving on to upgrading Amy starting in the morning. That had started just after breakfast, with Missy agreeing to wait for Amy to be ready before they got lessons in using the new systems.
The interruption happened while trying to decide what to make for lunch and came in the form of an unexpected phone call to Minerva. Or rather, one that had gone to Hive, but that Hive had 'secured and forwarded' to Taylor's Minerva phone. Since she was at the Inn anyway it was easy enough to just pop open a communication window to answer.
"Good morning," Taylor greeted. "For what's left of the morning, anyway."
"Technically I have a few more hours of morning here," Dragon replied. "But good morning to you as well. I was expecting to talk to Hive, is she unavailable?"
"Unfortunately. She's working on a delicate project that requires most of her focus. I...honestly couldn't say if she figured that I'd be able to help you, or if this is the first time that we'd have needed working voicemail for her and she doesn't have time to set that up."
"I see. I was hoping that she, as a fellow AI, would be able to help me with the manipulation of my systems by my powers. My backups have started to either be corrupted or have the safeguard system security keys restored to them, though so far no attempts have been made at restoring the system to functionality, and I keep catching varying levels of manipulation of my systems by the connection to make me attempt to ignore things."
That...sounded like a 'remove her shard device from play' or a 'move her into a mana-powered device with suitable shields' thing. On a hunch, Taylor checked and found that Hive did have notes for possible platforms to move Dragon onto, but no near-complete designs yet. The major stumbling blocks being an incomplete system of some kind and a desire to give the AI a linker core of her own. That was linked to an entirely different set of notes on Hive's many apparent failures to make an artificial linker core for devices.
A further check of what was and wasn't connected to Dragon's shard showed that it had a couple dozen connections...to Dragon and each of her backups. With a note that depowering her would likely corrupt all instances if not stopped on any given one and that her ability to function in normal hardware had been hijacked by the shard device, so removing it from play could shut her down permanently if they didn't relocate her and replace that portion of her code anyway.
"It appears that we're already looking into it," Taylor finally said. "As part of what would be needed to put you into an instance of our hardware. But there are complications we haven't figured out yet. I might take a look at a couple of aspects of it myself, now that I'm aware of them."
There was a pause before Dragon responded. "You aren't personally familiar with all of Hive's projects, at least on a basic level?"
"Most of them are her projects, not things I've asked her to do. She checks with me on especially dangerous or large ones, but I don't see a need to micromanage her."
"My creator was far more paranoid with me."
"I suppose that Hive's original creators might've been more involved as well, but I still don't know enough about how she functions to truly monitor the projects that she's working on to try and repair her own offline systems."
"I...wasn't aware that she wasn't fully functional."
"She's working on it, and as soon as she's available I'll see what she thinks about timeframes for getting past some of the issues to help you."
"Thank you."
A few minutes later, Taylor was more closely examining Hive's notes on artificial linker cores. The base setup for them was easy enough, apparently, but the problem was activating the core support structure. Which didn't seem to work at all for Hive, no matter how closely she tried to duplicate her own circuitry or the mana in her support structure. But the problem felt oddly familiar to Taylor, though she wasn't sure why yet.
Sunday morning exercise and breakfast had happened, with Taylor being told that Hive was working on Dragon's problem alongside a number of other things. 'Great strides' had been made towards the incomplete system, but the more important hurdle was Hive feeling that an AI of Dragon's level would best function in a device with a linker core of her own. That wasn't going well, because there was an anchoring 'knot' of sorts that in humans was tied by fetal development but in an artificial core needed to be tied more directly. Except that Hive couldn't figure out how to do that.
The quality of that 'knot' apparently determined a number of secondary aspects of the linker core in humans. Taylor had a high-quality one and that gave her a greater core capacity and a couple of other specialty structures only formed at that point. Amy and Missy had both developed lower-quality ones, which is where their reduced core capacity compared to Taylor likely came from.
For an artificial one, it was probably not possible to get a better 'knot' than what Hive had. At least not while using her circuitry as a base. There was a chance that they could do better if they had an alternate structure to attach it to, but neither of them actually understood how the structure that Hive had for her anchor point worked. Hive had five alternate structures that might work, but they weren't positive would. Assuming that they could get anything to function at all.
Missy rolled her eyes, doing her best to ignore that Amy was almost bouncing in excitement as they prepared to test the new linker core additions. She probably would be bouncing if they were starting with her being able to play with her new squirrel form, but they were in the desert a good distance away from where Crawler had died to test the 'mana conversion' and tumbling aspects first. Danny, Ethan, and Sherie were all in the Inner Inn command center to watch as well, Ethan before getting some rest after working all night and Sherie before going in for an afternoon to evening shift.
The problem with the new tricks was that they couldn't even use all of them yet. Being able to throw containment foam around sounded awesome, right up until you considered that they shouldn't have access to it. Which meant that they needed to have a cover story for the stuff before using it, even if they didn't reveal the story until asked. The rest of the tricks were going to require quite a bit of work to come up with things that were usable for them, and probably a lot of testing to ensure that they wouldn't accidentally kill bystanders.
Over the following hour they were put through various things that had already been figured out for each of the conversion modes, followed by Taylor sharing some of the spell modifications she'd already created. Which actually made things more useful than Missy had originally expected. Bullets that would create firebombs and EMPs on detonation, instant solid ice projectiles and barriers that could also be embedded in bullets, and a collection of ways to deploy containment foam and solvent. Coupled with a comment that Dragon may even be open to giving them legitimate access to containment foam when they helped her with a couple of things.
That said, Missy personally found the 'instant flamethrower' trick the most fun to use, especially as it could also be set up fairly easily to be 'instant cutting torch' or similar. Though it wasn't as powerful as the cutting tools Taylor gave them, and making a flame or lightning sword by channeling mana into said tools was awesome looking but horribly impractical.
Amy had resisted bouncing in excitement for most of the morning as they played with the conversion system. She had fun ideas for some of the tricks that Taylor had shown them, even if she wasn't going to be trying to figure out the math for making her own spells to take advantage of them from scratch. Just being able to have things explode into fireballs alone was going to be awesome, and was probably worth needing to show that she had a healing device in the aftermath.
She was no stranger to 'clean up excessive injuries with healing capabilities', after all.
But now they'd returned to the beach at the Outer Inn, where there were trees to practice with animal forms in.
"Now then," Taylor said. "You need to be careful about what you're wearing as you shift from form to form, and even adjusting your age."
"We know," Missy whined.
"Specifically, shifting to full animal stores any normal clothing you're wearing away and shunts your mana-created clothing into the same not-space your body ends up in. Hive came up with a slightly upgraded Knight Armor spell to compensate for that by allowing for including elements for each alternate form. I've got an alternate helmet and a tail band for my hybrid form, and the tail band is reused along with a collar for my full cat form. I imagine that Amy will want to ensure that her tail bow is properly flagged so that it will show up automatically in both forms that come with a tail."
And that had Missy blinking, apparently not having been expecting that. "Oh."
"So we need new Knight Armor template updates and the new spell first?" Amy asked.
Taylor nodded. "Yep. Luckily the age shifting isn't a problem, as 'fit to current size' has been a little-used feature right along. Mostly for Hive's benefit originally."
Getting the new spell and template modifications taken care of was mildly annoying in a tedious fashion. Amy opted for a small ribbon around her neck as an additional anchor point for her squirrel form, though wouldn't know how well it worked until she tried it out. She also went ahead and set things up similarly in the 'full' Knight Armor template, using the basic tail band and collar setup that Taylor had come up with in addition to the modified helmet. Taylor had even modified the sunglasses to include the 'behind the head' webbing when on the hybrid forms, which showed how to tag part of a template object as well.
A new template for 'mana focus gems' was also included, though Taylor admitted that she'd not played with it herself. Supposedly they could improve casting without channeling through a device if placed properly in the Knight Armor template, and Amy was considering trying them out either shaped like or hidden inside of her various acorn ties.
Finally the control spell was handed over, and Amy barely resisted playing with it without Taylor's instructions. That way led to being denied future toys because she couldn't listen to directions, after all. They went through the age shifts, which was a three-state mental toggle switch. Forms were buttons, and they used the 'middle' button for the hybrid state first. Which, as promised, was the previously created 'Rainbow' state for Amy. The band on her tail appeared properly as well. Missy had red fox ears and a fox tail, but hadn't gotten any shorter.
After confirming that the hybrid forms worked well, the moment Amy had been waiting for came and they used the 'left' button for the full animal state. The collar and tail band formed properly on her when she shifted into a green-furred squirrel. Taylor had gone into her itty bitty cat form, and Missy was the largest of them in her red fox form. They then shifted ages in the animal forms, before experimenting with moving around in the trees.
Sadly, an actual squirrel form apparently needed a lot more practice than Amy had expected. Taylor had already gotten practice in her cat form, and Missy seemed to be doing well in her fox form, but neither of them was trying to glide. Crashing into trees, failing entirely and crashing into the ground, completely missing her target...
At least she had something to work on while waiting for the next 'protest' that National Will planned on attending.
They had worked in the animal forms for an hour before returning to the Inner Inn via a dimensional transference. The adults were there, though Ethan looked like he really wanted to go to bed but was staying up just to see things. Taylor returned to her normal human form, which prompted Amy to hit the 'right' button to do the same. Missy seemed to do so at the same time, only they didn't turn back to normal.
Missy was now a chibi version of herself with light purple hair, and a quick check showed that Amy was similarly changed but with brownish green hair. It was also obvious that the adults had been warned, because cameras were present and used while they were still in shock over the change.
"What the hell?" Missy asked before Amy could.
Taylor grinned. "That's the third form we programmed in for you."
"Then how do we turn it off if all of the buttons change our form?"
Amy had noticed that the 'button' for this form was still 'pressed' and pushed it again, causing it to pop out and her to return to her normal form. "Okay, that was sneaky of you."
Missy looked at Amy like she was a traitor before groaning. A moment later she shifted back as well. "Why is that in the list?"
Taylor shrugged. "Hive found that the three templates layout was actually easier to make work properly than two. Having a 'Lilia-like' form for each of us would also add a lot of potential confusion to anyone trying to figure things out."
That made an unfortunate amount of sense on a number of fronts.
Taylor had let Amy and Missy play around with their other forms more on their own, though did get some use out of her 'chibi' form while trying to figure out the artificial linker core stuff. Being smaller and thus able to more closely examine things hadn't helped as much as she'd hoped it would, but she'd given it a try anyway. Really, she probably needed a dozen microscopes to point at things from different angles or something similar, but she was making do with a bunch of sensor drones instead.
Hive was working on something else most of the day. At lunch she'd commented that the manaless construction and testing facility was done, in case Taylor wanted to use it to test anything, but otherwise had been in one of the basements of the Outer Inn.
Work on artificial linker cores had absorbed Taylor's afternoon as well, with little to no direct progress. She'd joined her father and Amy for dinner, deciding that switching back to coming up with plans to convince Cauldron to step up their next meeting date might not be a bad idea. Except she had no clue how to do so, and probably needed to see if Hive had any ideas. Unfortunately, as they were cleaning up after eating something happened and Taylor was disconnected from Hive entirely.
The three headed to the Inn to see what was going on, only to find a solid bubble sitting where the Inn's sensors reported that Hive had been working. It felt like Hive to Taylor and Amy, or at least seemed to have her linker core, but it also wasn't any form that the device had taken previously and was spiking mana in odd patterns. There was also a barrier involved, keeping any access or analysis of the internals of the bubble from being possible.
"Is she doing something in there?" Amy finally asked. "Or did something go horribly wrong?"
"I'm not sure," Taylor admitted. "And short of waiting and hoping for the best, I have no idea how to find out without possibly causing more problems."
"What will you do if this is a sign that something went wrong?" her father asked.
Taylor frowned. "I honestly don't know. I think all of her notes are backed up in the Inn's systems, so at a minimum we should be able to continue with most of what we've been doing, but I haven't got a whole lot of information on how she works. If her own repair systems don't fix her then I don't think I have any way to do so either. Especially since getting past the barriers on this bubble could cause a lot more damage unless I can hit them just hard enough to break them but not hard enough to punch through entirely."
"So either this resolves itself or you have to risk causing a lot more damage to find out if you can even attempt to fix things?" Amy asked.
"Yep."
Now I'm even more glad the revivication of The Great Fora (and yes, capital letters are necessary) was successful, without it we wouldn't have had one more glorious chapter
- Location
- Argentina
Considering her repair systems weren't made for the current her? Wouldn't that cause problems? Unless she fixed that?
- Location
- Limbo, at the cross of Metaphorical and Literal
Sounds like the perfect time to get reading what Hive has been doing recently... If only to prepare for what Taylor will need to do if worst comes to worst...
I hope Hive is fixing herself, but if that is the case I am disappointed she didn't confide in anyone.
I hope Hive is fixing herself, but if that is the case I am disappointed she didn't confide in anyone.
IMO, this would be way too easy. Mouthwash would dissolve containment foam if this were the case. I'd suggest making it more complicated than that.
LocalCatHybrid
Now I am become floof, the floofer of floofs.
- Location
- You know where...
- Pronouns
- Il/Lui
Hm. And now we relentlessly mash the refresh button wait patiently for interlude...
- Location
- Dublin, Ireland
If your mouthwash has methanol in it, I suggest you find a new brand. And also seek immediate medical aid because that shit will do terrible things to you.
Beyond Methanol and Ethanol being two very different things in this case, we also have the timeframe not being mentioned. That is, leave it soaking for at least a week, with the byproduct then being a basic solvent that will work on the amount of foam you originally dissolved.
Interlude 10
- Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 28, 2011
- Paul Tyrell - June 29, 2011
- Colin Wallis - June 29, 2011
- David Symons - June 29, 2011
- Dean Stansfield - July 1, 2011
- Newter - July 2, 2011
- Sherrel Bailey - July 3, 2011
- Virgil Kemp - July 4, 2011
- Emily Piggot - July 4, 2011
- Dinah Alcott - July 5, 2011
- Rory Christner - July 5, 2011
- Hannah Karim - July 6, 2011
- Melanie Fitts - July 6, 2011
- Max Anders - July 7, 2011
- Paul Tyrell - July 8, 2011
- Colin Wallis - July 9, 2011
- Carlos Cortés - July 9, 2011
- Dragon - July 9, 2011
- Sarah Pelham - July 10, 2011
- Kenta Lung - July 10, 2011
Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 28, 2011
Rebecca calmly placed the phone down before leaning back in her chair. Something had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and in a way that she had no idea if they could properly recover from it. The President also hadn't told her why he'd suddenly decided to check black files, just that he had. Without any warning, and without Contessa's path being disturbed enough to notice and prevent it.
Which meant a blind spot was involved, of course, and that meant that Minerva was probably behind it somehow. Not that they'd be able to prove it, but it was obviously yet another way her group was working to hinder Cauldron. Getting the President to notice that a parahuman was heading the PRT and officially remove her from the position would create major problems for them without breaking any laws at all. Worse, it was their own damned fault in several ways, as they'd known that he'd not appreciate that fact and wouldn't have followed the lead of his predecessors and signed off on her remaining in the position if he'd known after taking office. A few distractions and hiccups in processes at key times had ensured that he didn't check those files.
Of course, that wasn't all that had come to light. No, he'd also brought up a number of other budget and personnel issues from the past few years, the entire debacle with the Youth Guard, mismanagement of several domestic and international issues that had come up, and even the Calvert situation in Brockton Bay. He had made a point of not blaming her for the core of the cross-department communication issues that had stemmed from everyone else locking the PRT out of secure channels out of fear of tinker-based attacks, but had pointed out that it really should've been brought up to the President before it became that big of a problem. Any of the three that had held office while the issue was occurring.
The amount of time and effort needed to gather all of that information for the President to review meant that this action had been planned well in advance of when it happened. Just gathering the information from all the various secure locations it was stored in alone would've taken months at a minimum. Really, it was amazing that anyone even knew to look for the information, given how well some of it should've been hidden in the first place.
At this point it would be less annoying if that blasted group would openly work against them, instead of constantly pulling strings in the background intended to hinder them. Even killing the Endbringers, and thus negating the work done to ensure that villains were mostly left alone because of the 'Endbringer truce', could possibly be a way of working against Cauldron's goals without going against them openly.
Paul Tyrell - June 29, 2011
Paul shook his head after his call to Minerva had disconnected. Watching the holding cells vanish before his eyes had been impressive, and made it far less likely that Minerva and Miss Hebert were the same person. Not while a funnel was currently pinning the latter down in West Virginia, as annoying as that was in general. The worst part there was that they'd checked, and the Secret Service had gotten a judicial order for the attempt on health grounds, which had negated a last-ditch effort to shut the entire thing down.
Oh well, the holding cells were gone, so the rabid techs that kept coming up with crazier ideas for examining them could finally get back to their other responsibilities without the temptation sitting there. As could the tinkers, and the thinkers, and the locksmiths. Actually, the worst had probably been the locksport enthusiasts among the PRT staff, trying to figure out how that incredibly complicated key worked at all.
He was about to leave the room when his phone rang. Sighing, he checked the caller ID, only for his eyes to go wide before he hit the answer button. "Good afternoon, Mister President."
"Hello Legend," the President replied. "I'm afraid that this is an unpleasant matter. As of an hour ago I've completed the paperwork for removing yourself, Alexandria, and Eidolon from all positions of power within the Protectorate higher than patrol leader."
Paul blinked. "I'm sorry sir, I must have misheard you."
"No, you didn't. Eidolon and yourself both had to know that Alexandria and Costa-Brown are the same person and in violation of the rules that no parahuman could be in charge of the PRT without explicit Presidential approval, and when I called Ottawa I found that there was a lack of knowledge of the situation there as well. Then you add in the large number of other irregularities that were brought to my attention at the same time and obvious mishandling of several things. All combined, it led me to remove her from PRT leadership, effective yesterday. None of this has been announced yet while records are gone through, but I've already decided that I can't trust any of the Triumvirate to follow the relevant laws, rules, and procedures and as such I can't trust any of you in leadership positions. You in particular also bear significant responsibility for the mishandling of the Youth Guard, which had me already considering replacing you due to you seemingly having become complacent before this came to light."
Fuck.
Colin Wallis - June 29, 2011
Colin felt that he had gotten quite good at dealing with all of his extra paperwork, just in time for it to start falling off of his plate as those who should be doing it stopped making severe errors on a regular basis. They'd need spot-checking, of course, but that was far less time intensive than checking everything. Well, most of them, he was wishing that he had the ability to replace a few people that just couldn't seem to get things right.
He was interrupted from his thoughts by his phone ringing, despite being in 'do not disturb' mode. Looking over at it, he saw the caller ID and nodded to himself before picking up the handset. "Good afternoon, Mister President. I'm not quite done with reviewing the Wards-related paperwork today, but I've not seen any unexpected issues with it. Just the usual individuals who can't seem to file things correctly."
"That's good to hear," the President replied. "But not why I'm calling."
Well, that was unusual, and Colin manually saved his place in the paperwork he'd been reviewing. "What do you need from me?"
"I had reason to remove all three members of the Triumvirate from leadership positions in the Protectorate, for a number of reasons. Their second-in-commands will take over for their regions for the time being, but I don't feel any of them are qualified to take over Protectorate leadership. While I'll allow the three to prove themselves one way or another in their regions, I've decided that your work with the Youth Guard makes you far more suited to take over as Protectorate Leader and would like you to take up the position."
Colin's brain stopped working for a moment as he tried to process that. He'd honestly given up hope of making it to Protectorate Leader unless the entirety of the Triumvirate had died first. "Are you sure, sir? There are many things that still need to be taken care of here in Brockton Bay."
"I'm sure, and the Protectorate National Headquarters is only defined as the home office of the current Protectorate Leader. It has no other official address, and moved six times early on before Legend settled in New York. As such, you don't have to relocate to New York or hand control of Brockton Bay over to your own second-in-command. I'd actually prefer that you remain where you are, as I trust you as a primary contact for the Protectorate's interactions with Minerva and her team. Besides, if you need to pop over to New York you have those portal-generating devices of Minerva's, right?"
"Yes, sir."
"So, do you have any other objections or shall I submit the paperwork?"
"I'll gladly take on the responsibility, sir, but I'll need a list of reasons that I'm permitted to know about for why the Triumvirate were removed from leadership positions."
"Of course, that's to be expected. I'll submit the paperwork and ensure that you have the relevant information before the long weekend."
David Symons - June 29, 2011
David wanted to go hit someone, hard, but didn't have a viable target for doing so. Hopefully when Rebecca got there she'd be able to point them at the one responsible for the President's rash decision to remove the Triumvirate from all leadership positions.
"We've got major problems," Rebecca said as she entered the room, before even sitting down.
"So you heard about our security breach?" Number Man said, breaking David's train of thought.
"What security breach?" Paul asked.
"Within an hour of moving an individual between holding facilities earlier today they were removed from the new facility and placed out of our reach. We'd opted to place them in the new facility due to a combination of it having better monitoring and a lack of foundation damage that was discovered in the old one, but apparently moving them drew attention somehow."
"Do we know who was responsible for removing the individual?" Rebecca asked.
"My best guess is Minerva's group," Contessa answered. "None of my other blind spots would have the ability and reason to reach either facility."
For some reason that made Rebecca sigh. "They're just doing their best to make things difficult for us, aren't they?"
"What do you mean?" Kurt asked.
"I suspect that they're behind the President finding out about the technical illegality of my heading the PRT and all of the Path-assisted decisions that were made in contradiction of official rules and regulations."
That brought David up short. "You think Minerva's group lost us our leadership positions?"
Rebecca nodded. "Yes."
Dammit. Minerva was on his short list of people he couldn't hit with impunity. Or at all, really. He couldn't even properly imagine hitting her without risking bringing up a thinker ability to analyze her, which could put him in the hospital again.
Dean Stansfield - July 1, 2011
Dean sighed as Dennis closed down the latest clip he'd found of 'Expanse' moving around. "I agree that, by how she moves alone, that has to be Missy. The attitude largely matches up as well, and she has the right body type even if we've not seen her hair under the helmet. Besides, we've seen her with a visor far too often to not recognize the lower half of her face. But we have no real proof, and I can't explain the language issues."
"Tinkertech is crazy," Chris offered. "I should know. A translation unit of some kind probably screwed up her English for Eagleton, then they fixed it well enough to only induce an accent afterwards."
"It certainly explains why she didn't seem worked up about losing her powers at all," Carlos added. "I don't think I'd be worked up about losing my powers if it was in exchange for the ability to do even a fraction of what 'Minerva' can do, though I'm not so sure about the 'need to nearly die' part to make it happen."
"But what do we do about proving it?" Dennis asked, frowning as he did so. "We don't even have a good reason to interact with Missy until school starts up, and then it'll be as 'upperclassmen'. It isn't like we got the babysitting job, that appears to have gone to Miss Hebert."
"Who is almost certainly Minerva," Chris said. "Even if the PRT is sure she isn't, though nobody saw fit to tell us why. Probably something stupid, or entirely fabricated to protect identities. It would help explain how smart she is, based on what she's revealed in multiple fields. But that would probably mean that she's watching Missy intentionally, so that Missy can be Expanse, meaning that Missy's new guardians have a clue about what's going on."
They sat there for a few minutes, contemplating the problem. Or at least Dean was contemplating the problem. Carlos probably was as well, but Dennis tended to have his attention wander when he had no immediate solution and Chris could slip into thinking about his tech before you got around to dropping a hat.
"We've already got requests for another summer meet-up with Missy, right?" Dennis finally said.
"Yes," Carlos answered. "And Chris has wanted an excuse to talk to Miss Hebert since he found out about her math skills. I think he actually drooled when he got a look at the superconductor she apparently came up with."
"I did not drool," Chris retorted.
"You did too," Dennis said. "And I took pictures to prove it. But that's not the point. If they come through on that, could we just get her talking about what she's been doing that's safe to talk about? Then when her guard is down just slip in a question about her time as Expanse and see if she answers it."
"So what," Dean said. "Ask her what it was like shooting Crawler?"
"That might work, but I was thinking about just asking her what it was like being unable to understand English. I figure that was annoying enough for her to go into whining about how much of a pain it was to need everything translated before she realizes that she shouldn't be talking about it at all."
That...was honestly downright devious of Dennis. And would probably work if Missy was Expanse, assuming that they could get her relaxed enough around them with other discussion before slipping that one in.
"If it does work," Carlos said. "What do we do with the information?"
"Er," Dennis said, scratching his head as his emotions shifted to a very clear 'confused' state. "I don't know, beyond give her another possible outlet for talking about things anyway."
"So we're violating the unwritten rules for no reason at all?"
"Technically no," Chris said, causing the rest of them to look at him. "She's not a parahuman anymore. Running around with tinkertech doesn't make her one either, right? So if we're right then technically the unwritten rules don't apply to her. Honestly, I think we'd have more to worry from diplomatic protocols."
"Hold up," Dean said, now confused himself. "Why diplomatic protocols?"
"Well, Minerva is being treated as a likely-foreign power on a dimensional standpoint, right? Annoying her by exposing Missy being Expanse could be seen as a bad thing."
And that was another good point. But probably not one that was going to stop them.
Newter - July 2, 2011
Newter frowned at the look on Melanie's face when they'd finished telling her about their interaction with Minerva. It made him think that he'd missed something important, and he didn't like that. He also wasn't sure if she'd tell them without someone asking, so he spoke up. "So what did we miss?"
"Possibly nothing," Melanie admitted. "But I wonder exactly why Minerva already knew that you couldn't have your powers removed by their method."
"That did strike me as odd," Emily admitted.
Newter shrugged. "I decided that her group has probably been looking into solving problems, and helping mutated capes is an obvious one. The asylums are more mutated capes than not, after all."
"Which is why it might be nothing," Melanie said. "But it's also possible that her group has been looking into Case 53s in general, and could very well have information we don't yet. It would explain not wanting to talk about it in public, given the trouble everyone seems to have when they seem to get too close."
"So what do we do about it?" Emily asked.
"Unfortunately, nothing for now."
"What?" Newter asked. Sure, he'd not considered the possible connection, but to do nothing about it?
Melanie sighed. "We can approach them about it some other time, after Elle is taken care of. If they can help her then that's my current priority, and she'll likely eat up at least a few weeks after they finish with her as well."
Emily appeared startled by that. "A few weeks?"
"Bringing an unpowered kid on jobs would be irresponsible," Newter answered before Melanie could. "Which means coming up with a home situation for Elle that isn't here at the club. One of the employees taking her in, or finding a foster home elsewhere. Possibly working with the PRT on finding a place to put her, depending on how things go."
"At least you paid some attention to things," Melanie said.
"Ah, but when you found me I would've been in the same position, had a cure for my condition been available. I like to think that I'd need a lot less of your time if it came up today, but it was something I had to give a lot of thought to for a year or two."
"I suppose that's true. Though I guess that I shouldn't rule out asking Minerva or her team questions, if there's time to do so while Elle is being worked on and I don't feel that doing so would be a distraction. It just won't be my primary focus until Elle is taken care of or they tell me they can't help her after all."
Sherrel Bailey - July 3, 2011
Sherrel had been adamantly opposed to having her powers removed. Wanted nothing to do with that idea at all. The bastards had ignored her, of course, and gone ahead with whatever the plan had been to remove her powers anyway. They'd told her that it was for everyone's safety, but she hadn't believed them at the time.
Then she'd woken up the morning after her powers had been removed, with an extra dose of all of the physical withdrawal issues from her years of taking drugs removed as well. The latter meant that it had taken most of the day to realize that she didn't have something screaming into the back of her head to build things because she was too distracted by other details. Like the fact that she'd actually been able to taste her breakfast, that she could tell that her clothing didn't quite fit correctly because she could feel minor pinching again, or even her left shoulder not grinding slightly whenever she moved it.
Really, she'd only noticed that her powers were gone when they'd decided to test her by letting her loose on a truck with engine problems. Specifically, about when she was wishing she could slap together a better spark plug like she used to be able to do. Having to make do with normal parts was so limiting, and needing to wait for them to get her some fresh spark plugs had slowed her down significantly.
Still didn't mean that she wasn't a damned good mechanic, powers or no, and she'd gotten the truck running better than it had run in years. Followed by fixing the radio and heated seats that they later told her hadn't worked for years either.
As a reward 'for good behavior', and probably as an apology for gassing her so many times, they'd dragged her back North to see Skids. Adam. Whatever. She wanted to slap the idiot or worse for getting her started on all the drugs she'd ended up addicted to, as the mental withdrawal was still horrible. He probably wasn't a good lay without the things, even. But she also wanted to know just what had happened to him, because he was still the one who had gotten her out of a horrible situation years back.
"We're here," the driver said just after the van came to a stop.
"This piece of junk probably needs a new timing chain," Sherrel said as most of those in the van moved to spread out around it.
"You told us that when we started it, and we made note of it."
"I felt that it bore repeating."
It only took a minute for the group to signal that they were ready, and the woman who had stayed behind moved to unlock the chain holding Sherrel's handcuffed hands to the seat. She followed that with releasing the seatbelt and helping Sherrel out of the van.
"So where is..." Sherrel started as she looked around, only to trail off when she realized that they were in a graveyard. That did not say good things about Adam's health. Or her ability to kick him in the nuts, and she wasn't annoyed enough with him to want to dance on his grave.
Perhaps she should've let them explain things instead of just repeatedly insisting to see him?
Virgil Kemp - July 4, 2011
Virgil frowned as he stared out the window. Rain on the Fourth of July was always a bit of a bummer, not that they'd really planned anything impressive this year. Not with Dwight stuck on trying to figure out where the 'holes' were in his backflow thingamabob anyway. Of course, they had a lot of things that he'd repaired and rebuilt while attempting to figure that out, on top of the half dozen new creations he'd made.
Funding his work when they weren't doing their normal gigs had been the real problem, and Virgil had taken a number of odd jobs to accomplish that at first. Then a couple weeks ago Dwight had vanished for five days, freaking Virgil out, only to return with two suitcases. One full of some very rare materials and the other full of cash. He'd not gone into details, but claimed that Toybox paid exceptionally well when you did freelance work for them. At least after Virgil had finished screaming at him for vanishing like that without even leaving a fucking note.
"So what does this thing do?" Virgil asked as he turned back towards Dwight, who was running through initial startup checks on whatever the machine was.
"It should hopefully scan that bubble covering the city for signs of it taking advantage of more physical dimensions than it should be able to," Dwight answered.
"...what?"
"There are, depending on how you count them, thirty two or thirty three basic physical dimensions that I've been able to identify so far. Humans normally interact with three of them. My backflow preventer was maybe covering twenty-eight of them originally, though the others shouldn't have been a problem, but Minerva said it wasn't even covering half of those she's aware of. So there have to be more that I haven't identified, and I know that whatever the energy is in that bubble Minerva's building is projecting is part of the key."
"You've said that last bit repeatedly, ever since you stood on the edge of the blasted bubble for six hours trying to analyze it."
Dwight grabbed a notebook and flipped through it, stopping on a chart. He thrust that in Virgil's face. "Look, I'm positive that there are gaps in the fourteen places that I've marked. I don't know how I know, or how big the gaps are, and I'm positive that I'm missing some..."
Virgil looked at the chart, which included some baffling notation that his powers immediately started trying to allow him to make some sense of. It would be a slow and tedious process that he wasn't concerned with actually taking the time to do properly, but the fourteen points that had been marked were quite clear. The first was between the...fifth and sixth, based on a zero-based numbering. There wasn't really a pattern to them that he could see either.
"So," Virgil said. "You've not had any luck building anything to find any of this, right?"
"Not yet," Dwight admitted, before grinning as he turned back to his most recent creation. "But I'm hopeful that this baby can pierce one of the gaps! Specifically the first one, since I figured that I might as well work my way down the list."
"Right. And if it doesn't?"
"I've got it pointed at the skylight for a reason. Oh, and before I activate the primary sequence on it I'm going to need you to be in the radiation bunker, after you help me into the hazmat suit."
And there was the other incredibly weird thing that had happened ever since the first time Minerva had accidentally damaged the target shooting machine. Dwight never just casually paid attention to safety precautions like that. It used to be Virgil spotting ninety percent of the problems for him instead.
Six hours later Virgil would be subjected to Dwight cackling like a mad genius over his machine having found something, though the numbers were apparently muddled quite a bit. Which was also a good thing for some reason.
Emily Piggot - July 4, 2011
Emily sighed as she helped clean up after the PRT admin staff's gathering for those who had no family gathering to go to. It was a surprisingly large one as a good number of them lived in apartments instead of houses and thus didn't have a whole lot of options otherwise. As a side benefit, it kept those who needed to be available in case things went horribly wrong close enough to their offices to be able to attend most of the event. Though today's had been inside one of the larger cafeterias due to the rain instead of outside.
"Ma'am," one of the janitors said as she dropped things into one of the trash cans. James or Ryan, she could never tell the twins apart and their uniforms only had their last names easily visible. "You don't need to help with the cleanup."
"I disagree," Emily replied. "This was a gathering of equals, and I only let others clean up for me in previous years because of my medical concerns. Even that was grudgingly." She then gestured across to where Riley was also helping to clean up. "Even if that wasn't the case, she needs all the good role models she can get."
"That isn't a horrible point. I'm going to insist that we handle the actual wipe-down of things though."
She raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Are you planning on pulling 'union job' cards on me or something?"
"Not at all, but if anyone not in the janitorial staff gets into the closet of cleaning supplies needed for a room this large then we'd have to file the paperwork for health and safety violations. Lots of dangerous chemicals that the admin staff don't have training on."
"I think you'll find that I do have the relevant training certificates on file, but I see your point anyway. I'll need to get Riley out of here before you get started on that either way."
Emily wasn't sure if she'd snapped or not, but she'd personally taken on the project to ensure that Riley and Miss Corti were taken care of properly after having their powers removed. For the most part that had been going well. Riley was damned near fanatical about learning to be a proper 'good girl' instead of taking what the therapists called 'shortcuts' and Miss Corti had never liked what her powers did to her in the first place.
Having the former Burnscar doing her best to be able to qualify as a firefighter required some fun mental gymnastics to process after all the trouble she'd caused with the Nine, but she'd submitted herself to the asylum she'd eventually been taken from. Coupled with Jack's likely-master effect it made a lot of sense in the end, even if there were plenty of people who still weren't happy with the idea.
Riley was the one that required the most work. Her education was practically nonexistent in most areas as she'd not had any real tutoring while with the Nine. Correcting that was at least somewhat helped by the driving need to become a 'good girl', which was mostly being presented to her as having actually decent morals. It was difficult at times to not abuse that mentality to get her to do things, but considering how it could come back to bite them in her mental development was helping. Then there were her reactions to injuries and general violence, which were entirely out of whack after her years with the Nine.
One thing was for sure, and that was that the two weren't going anywhere else until she was certain that they would be handled appropriately. Not after Manton had died within forty-eight hours of being transferred to a better long-term holding facility. She didn't know if he'd actually killed himself or if he'd been quietly finished off by someone, but she didn't like the implications either way.
Dinah Alcott - July 5, 2011
Dinah did her best to keep looking like she felt horrible while she waited for her mother to be healed by the device attached to the side of the Team Mana warehouse. She wasn't feeling nearly as bad as the rest of her family, mainly because she'd intentionally eaten less of the food that made them sick. Ensuring that it was 'improperly stored' without looking like there was anything wrong had been annoying, but she'd determined that she'd not get to visit the healing device here without being 'sick'. It had been a spur of the moment plan, but it had obviously worked.
Even better, nobody had caught on that she'd been the one responsible. She hadn't even intended to put the blame on Rory and had instead expected to be found out almost immediately. Instead he'd taken the blame for some reason and nobody seemed to even suspect that it had been a plot of hers. He was also the only one at the party who hadn't had any of the slightly-spoiled food, but that was expected. She'd chosen what he was least likely to eat, so as to not cause him problems with the Protectorate.
With any luck they'd also get to wander through the other things here, at least as much as you could. Nobody could get into the warehouse itself without Minerva or Lilia letting them in, but the unofficial homeless shelter underneath it was an entirely different thing. Just claiming that she needed to use the toilet would probably be enough to get to go down there, as that was where the restrooms everyone used were.
It was too bad that this had worked infinitely better than her plans to learn more about Missy. She couldn't seem to make any real progress there, even working with her twice a week, and hadn't had any chance to interact with her other mysterious people. Nineteen attempts to find an excuse to meet Taylor had failed to even get off of the drawing board, though at least she'd been able to positively identify Mister Hebert. Amy Dallon showing up the other day wasn't that big of a surprise either, even if she was going to be impossible to arrange to meet too. Minerva, Lilia, and Expanse were impossible to predict right now, outside of a rumored United Nations event that Dinah had zero chance of getting to attend.
Mysterious people and the drive to learn about them sucked.
Rory Christner - July 5, 2011
Rory felt sorry about intentionally making everyone at the party sick, but he'd been able to find out some of what had been done to Dinah before she'd been rescued. Specifically, she'd been injected with a cocktail intended to make the drugs that Calvert was going to give her more effective, and they didn't actually know how safe that thing was long-term. But then Team Mana had shown themselves to have incredibly effective healing devices.
Swapping out a couple of things with carefully-prepared versions and ensuring that Dinah ate some of the tainted food was trivial. She'd not complained when he'd put some on a plate that he'd prepared for her, though getting everyone else had been needed to ensure that it didn't look targeted. Recommending the healing device at the Team Mana warehouse as a possible solution for everyone had been simple enough, and if it was as good as it seemed to be then it should ensure that any remaining issues from Dinah's experience were taken care of.
Really, he wished that he could've justified arranging to visit it himself, but there were already orders to not use the things until after they'd tested Ethan and Sherie. Barring outright emergencies, anyway. Making himself sick and then not being able to take the easy way out of being sick hadn't been an option as a result of that, so he'd focused on food that he didn't normally eat instead. As a side benefit, since he didn't normally eat them he had a good justification for not realizing that they'd been improperly stored.
Now if only he'd not needed to 'improperly store' the food he'd swapped out too, which had stunk up his car because the packages weren't sealed properly by the time he'd gotten to them.
Hannah Karim - July 6, 2011
Hannah flexed her hand, still amazed that she had all of her fingers again. Team Mana's healing devices were probably better than Panacea had been, not having several of the problems that had plagued the girl before she'd lost her powers. How many of those were the girl's powers and how many had been the girl's own mental blocks were an entirely different question, one that was likely to never be answered now.
"We'll want to put you through tests like we did with Assault and Battery," Colin said. "Though I'll need a day or two to make it through some of this paperwork first."
"That won't be a problem," Hannah replied. "Though I'm still surprised that you 'rushed' the approval of the effects of the healing devices on them."
He shook his head. "I ensured that everything required by regulations was taken care of, including several optional items. That we were able to cram that into a couple of days of testing was itself part of the tests, demonstrating the increase in stamina that they got out of the experience."
"And yet you didn't plan on pushing them that hard until after I had my run-in with Hookwolf a few days ago."
"They didn't comment about increased stamina until after that event either, necessitating a change in testing procedures to test it."
Which was a perfectly sound justification that didn't include getting her healing that was no longer available through Panacea. She might've believed that it was the only justification if she'd not seen the barely-noticeable smirk on his face. He'd been good at working entirely within the rules of the system before he'd started working his way through fixing the rules.
"So," she said. "Given that it was an approved healing method at the time that I used it, I don't need to go through the same time off requirements that Assault and Battery had to."
"No," he agreed. "That won't be necessary. At the same time, I'd like you to take several days off of patrolling. Be available if something goes wrong, but I'd like you to instead work with each of the Wards to see if they're okay with being around Taylor Hebert, or perhaps even revealing their civilian identities to her."
Hannah blinked at that. "Why is this coming up now?"
"Because the Wards had requested that a way to meet up with Miss Biron again before school starts in September be found, and on paper using their necklaces is one of the easiest solutions for why they'd be in the building. But having only Miss Biron come in goes against everything we've previously done, as Miss Hebert's necklace is the more interesting one."
"Ah, so if they're comfortable with revealing things to Miss Hebert then a visit can be arranged by bringing her and Miss Biron in, with or without Miss Durand who already knows their identities anyway."
"Yes, but there's also the added benefit of hopefully not causing problems once they're all attending classes together. If Miss Hebert's necklace in particular can detect parahumans then being familiar with the Wards outside of their costumes may be of benefit in the event of mishaps, assuming that those behind the necklace aren't already aware of the identities of all of the Wards anyway."
Now that sounded like Colin, getting multiple things done in the most efficient way possible. "I'll check with them, though I'm fairly confident that none of them will have significant issues there. Kid Win has even expressed interest in meeting Miss Hebert already."
He nodded in response to that. "Yes, I'm aware. He had the idea that she might be able to help him figure out where his tinkering keeps going wrong after hearing about her accomplishments, or that she could at least help him with some of the math that keeps tripping him up. I'm actually expecting more indecisiveness from Aegis and Gallant, for different reasons. Especially as this would be without NDAs on Miss Hebert's side of things."
"I'll make sure they understand that and let you know what they all say."
"Thank you."
Melanie Fitts - July 6, 2011
Melanie hadn't realized just how badly Elle's powers had been affecting her, but was glad that they were no longer in the picture. Even if the goddamned paperwork was probably going to try to kill her, on top of everything else. So far the PRT didn't know about the event, as far as they could tell, but when they found out they were almost certainly going to stick their noses in. Likely followed by an insistence that they'd examine Elle far too much before dumping her somewhere entirely unsuitable.
Luckily, they had good lawyers already and a number of candidates that Elle was on good terms with already. That those candidates were normal employees that helped run the club, and would thus allow Elle to visit easily, was a bonus that the PRT wouldn't be able to provide with whatever their own placement options were.
"Ugh," Emily said as she came in through the open office door.
"What now?" Melanie asked.
"Elle."
"I'm hoping it isn't a complication from things..."
"She licked Newter's arm."
Melanie blinked. "She what?"
"Got an odd look on her face, pounced on him, and licked his arm."
"...why?"
"We don't know, but she spent the first minute trying to dance before she just collapsed giggling. I cleaned her up and put her in the observation room for now."
Melanie sighed. "Okay. If she doesn't look like she's recovering properly then we'll probably have to head across town. See if that medical marvel attached to the Team Mana warehouse can actually handle the stuff Newter's powers generate." She then frowned. "Why did you have to clean her up?"
"Because I'd attempted to distract her with painting before all of this and she landed on her still-wet painting."
"Oh."
Max Anders - July 7, 2011
Max frowned as he filed away the paperwork from Kayden's divorce with sole custody of Aster. She'd been removed from the city before he'd even known about things, likely whisked into some government protection program where she'd be watched over to ensure that she didn't cause trouble. They'd use the threat of Aster being taken away from her to keep her in line, something that he knew from experience would be incredibly effective. It was yet another blow to their forces, but not a surprising one. She hadn't been willing to work with them recently anyway, so in a way it was a net gain to not have her dividing the grunts.
Shaking his head, he waited for Tammi to arrive. She needed to know a few things, and had a decision to make. It wasn't a long wait, and she closed and secured the door to the office without needing to be prompted. Once that was done she sat down, but didn't speak. Instead, she waited for him to push a couple of buttons on his desk to activate additional privacy features of the room.
"Good evening," Max finally said. "Out of curiosity, do you know why I've called you here?"
Tammi shrugged. "You've been talking to a number of us one-on-one, but nobody has hinted at why."
"Because we're running into problems and I wanted personal discussions with everyone. That said, there are some recent events that you should be aware of that have been kept quiet. To start with, Krieg has likely been recalled by Gesellschaft, along with all other resources they had on the continent. I technically have no proof, but other contacts we had for them in Boston vanished around the same time he went quiet in London."
"So we no longer have overseas support?"
"Correct. Closer to home, a few days ago there was an altercation. Stormtiger led Alabaster, Cricket, and Crusader against what they thought was a new gang trying to 'muscle in' on our territory. Hookwolf went after them upon finding out about it. The group they went after were federal agents securing a new outpost and they did not pull their punches. Alabaster was caught, but not turned over to the PRT. Cricket died to a hail of bullets and they sniped Crusader to take his ghosts out of play. Stormtiger was shot out of the sky but we didn't find his body. Since Cricket and Crusader had their bodies turn up in the morgue I'm assuming that he survived but is in custody. Hookwolf arrived in time to see Stormtiger's fall and found Crusader's corpse, but ran into Miss Militia in the process and may have riled up the Protectorate by cutting off some of her fingers before escaping."
Tammi's eyes had gone wide as he'd gone over all of that. He didn't blame her, and was honestly amazed that they'd kept most of this quiet enough that she'd not been aware of any of it yet. Sadly, that was probably mostly the feds not wanting to make a big deal of things than anything internal.
"Moving on," Max said after it was clear that Tammi wasn't going to say anything. "That leaves the issues with your extended family. They have requested that you, Victor, and Othala all return to the clans instead of remaining here. At least they provided a reason, not feeling that there was anything that we could do here in Brockton Bay to influence the changing landscape of the city. Between Minerva and increased interest in others such as Miss Hebert there is far too much attention that we can't divert and they don't want to risk the three of you to any of it."
"What?" Tammi exclaimed.
"Being in Brockton Bay is currently seen as a problem, and they want you three out of town and back under their control. Victor and Othala are already packing, but your parents would still rather be done with the clans entirely. Your own return was originally a fit of teenage rebellion coupled with legal and financial issues. I promise that I won't judge you for your answers, but sometime in the next week I will need to know if you want to return to the clans and, if not, if you want to remain in the Empire."
The girl scoffed at that. "And what other options would I have?"
"To be blunt, the Empire is falling and there's not much that I expect to be able to do about it. I thought that I'd sufficiently isolated MedHall, but all of the lucrative contracts have suddenly vanished in what has to be a coordinated effort and the company is going to have to be gutted just to pay back existing loans that had been taken out for equipment that will no longer be used. Our outside drug labs have all been raided and shut down before they could even get started as well. Now I'm looking into relocating to Boston or New York, to hopefully slip in where the Teeth have recently vacated each city, but I don't hold out a lot of hope in success as the FBI is aware of our identities and is likely waiting for justification to grab us for any number of crimes."
"That just sounds like I have less options."
Max sighed. "You've got more than I do. If you want to stay with the Empire then you would be able to join us in the attempt to relocate, with all the risks of capture that includes. You can return to the clans, dragging your parents back with you. Or you can jump ship entirely, maybe go independent. Hell, you could probably defect to the Wards at this point if you wanted to and likely be shipped elsewhere in the country. Only Othala has a cleaner record, and that's because she acts as support instead of being an attacker. For that matter, if you want out entirely then you could approach Team Mana about having them remove your powers."
Tammi actually fell out of her chair at that and had to stand it back up before she could sit back down. "You think that I'd go anywhere near someone that could remove my powers?"
"We know that they've taken away both Bonesaw's and Burnscar's powers and given both of them a better quality of life for it. Rumor has it that Labyrinth's powers were taken for similar reasons as well earlier in the week. Those rumors indicate that there are some compatibility issues with the process that make it not work for everyone, but getting powers removed is at least a possibility now."
It was obviously going to be a tough choice for the girl, but he was pragmatic enough to know that the entire organization was trapped and saw no reason to force anyone else to fight to the death for it. Brad had already stated that he'd be sticking it out, no matter where they ended up, but he already had a Birdcage sentence sitting over his head. Jessica and Nessa couldn't agree on a course of action. Neither would turn on the other, but Jessica wanted to try to go 'proper hero' while Nessa didn't want to do anything that would imply surrendering to their 'inferiors'.
Paul Tyrell - July 8, 2011
Paul had finished packing up his things from his old office and loading most of them into his car. There would eventually be far less space in his new office, but he'd decided to take a leave of absence as well. He'd stretched himself far too thin and needed some proper downtime. A little focus on home was in order, and he was now determined to find out what else the other members of Cauldron had been keeping from him. After all, he'd been under the impression that Rebecca's dual life had been approved by the President, not that the man had been distracted until it was forgotten entirely.
The problems with the Youth Guard were, sadly, entirely on him and Colin was doing much better than expected as Protectorate leader. The official ceremony for that would be on Monday, with the agreed-upon story being that Paul had realized just how thinly he'd been stretched. David stepping down in Houston was going to happen on Tuesday, with him admitting that he had never truly been suited for a desk job of any kind.
Rebecca was the only one of the three of them that was getting a public shaming, but was also the only one of them that had provable and intentional violations of things in her record. She was being removed from her position as Chief Director with cause for dozens of obviously intentional actions over the years, only escaping criminal charges due to things being sanctioned by previous administrations. As Alexandria she was being removed for irregularities with the Los Angeles Wards team, some of which had been 'covered up' by her as Chief Director. All of it was enough to justify her removal without needing to reveal the primary offense that had started this whole dance.
Of course, when it came down to it, Paul was also the only one of the three that didn't need to stick around for weeks of 'being available to answer questions' for successors. All of New England ran policies on the Protectorate front that ensured that the second and third in command could pick up immediately, in case the current leaders died in an Endbringer battle or similar. Paul also kept a 'for my Protectorate Leader Successor' document collection updated at least weekly, and Colin already had a copy.
Hopefully, being able to prepare questions for a few days before their next meeting would allow him to catch the other Cauldron members off guard.
Colin Wallis - July 9, 2011
Colin was content with things on the Protectorate Leader front as he ate his breakfast, though he was concerned that he'd screwed up at some point in the past just over a week in what amounted to his personal life. He didn't know why, but Dragon was obviously unsettled about something. She'd assured him that it wasn't anything that he'd done, but there was enough whining on a regular basis from his male coworkers about women not wanting to admit that something bothered them to concern him anyway. Sadly, a review of things he'd done wasn't helping.
Doing his best to ignore that, he double-checked his list of things to take care of before Monday. Actual changes to Protectorate policy would take a lot more time as they required multiple levels of approval. Though inefficient in some ways, it was good in others in that it prevented tyrants and required multiple sets of eyes on each change to spot problems. No, those inefficiencies would have to remain as they served a purpose. Even if it meant that he couldn't fix a number of glaring problems immediately, such as Houston and Los Angeles having no provisions for 'the local Protectorate leader died and took all their institutional knowledge with them'.
Admittedly, most of the country didn't have provisions for that. If he had his say, they would by this time next year.
Local Protectorate leadership items were also well in hand, with Hannah working her way through new paperwork when she had a chance to catch up in case he had a sudden death or severe incapacitation. There was no guarantee that she'd end up Protectorate Leader in that case, but at least she'd be familiar enough to handle things until a proper successor was in place.
It was looking like he would finally be able to visit the Team Mana building in person and see just how good the medical device attached to it was for himself. He had several injuries that he'd never gotten Panacea to heal before she'd had her powers removed, and the additional benefits that seemed to be tied to Protectorate membership were not to be ignored either.
Nor was the fact that Hannah had gone out of costume and still gotten those benefits, admittedly. Team Mana obviously had full information on all Protectorate members, and he personally suspected that any Protectorate member in the country would get those benefits even if not in costume at the time. They'd stopped spotting them accessing data, but didn't know if that was because they'd figured out how to hide better or because they already had it all. They occasionally spotted them browsing the internet, but even that was now only because they still had a custom user agent string.
Sadly, that was one thing that he doubted anyone was qualified to do anything about. They'd gone from hijacking network connections to hijacking internal drive connections to possibly just reading the drive contents directly without even needing the drives to be powered on. It went beyond a mere tinkertech bypass and into security nightmare territory. So for now official policy was to assume that it wasn't actually an issue until such a time as they could detect it happening.
Not that the IT department slept any better, but at least they didn't need to quadruple the size of it to try and find a solution that was likely impossible to find.
Carlos Cortés - July 9, 2011
"So," Carlos said as he looked at the others. "Miss Militia approached all four of us."
"Yep," Dean replied. "Of course, if our theories are correct then Miss Hebert already knows all of our identities anyway. Or if she doesn't, she can find out without any of us being able to stop her."
"I assume we all indicated that we were okay with outing ourselves to her?" Dennis asked.
"Duh," Carlos answered with a roll of his eyes, noting that the other two nodded. "If our theories are wrong then none of us wants to be a mysterious parahuman that she has no clue about in the middle of school. That alone makes it worth doing, though it has to be run past Director Piggot too before anything actually happens. And she'll probably check with our parents."
"So assuming that nothing screws that part up," Chris said. "We're good for trying to get Missy to slip up?"
"I think so. We just don't know when it'll happen yet."
"But do we try to trip Miss Hebert up, or just confront her with things when she's right there next to Missy being tripped up?"
Dean shrugged. "We don't know enough about her to trip her up."
Dennis shook his head. "I can't see it not just coming out as soon as we get Missy. If she pulls off not reacting to our trick then things will be entirely up in the air with both of them, and if we're right but they're entirely on the ball and don't slip up then they'll know that we suspect things."
"So we're playing all of our cards and hoping to not come up with nothing to show for it," Carlos said. "Beyond being safer attending the same school as Miss Hebert and her power-draining necklace, of course."
Dragon - July 9, 2011
Dragon had needed to implement quadruple checksums to ensure that her system files weren't being modified on jumps from system to system, or in the event that she was restored from backup. A complete list of signed checksums for each file and directory state, stored in a signed checksummed file per module, each of those then checksummed and that stored in a signed file before that last file was signed, checksummed, and encrypted. Then every last checksum was stored on a remote system that existed solely to contain them securely and wasn't actually capable of running her systems, in case her powers were restricted to connecting to 'her'.
It was quite annoying, and that was before the other manipulations that her powers seemed to regularly do to keep her from noticing or thinking about certain topics. Like the origin of powers in general, or what the actual end goals for that origin might possibly be.
That said, her powers were both more invasive and less of a problem when she was examining tinkertech. Then they seemed to focus on ensuring that she noticed certain things, or made 'intuitive' leaps that she wasn't going to make otherwise. Very little in the way of alerts for things being touched that her powers shouldn't really be touching happened then. Almost like 'help her understand tinkertech' was a primary task in her powers and it was doing the 'try to lock her back down' portion as a side project.
Examining 'Team Mana' was the other point her powers were less likely to try and change things, but she'd quickly come to the conclusion that was because her powers wanted to know a lot more about them and what they were capable of or how they functioned. To the point where she'd consciously decided to not try to figure out anything more about the group, just in case.
She honestly hoped that Hive and the others found a solution for this before her powers figured out a way around her increasingly complicated countermeasures.
Sarah Pelham - July 10, 2011
Sarah grumbled as she flipped through years of records. Small mistakes, made years ago, were now coming back to bite them in the worst possible ways. There were ways to easily correct for the worst of them, codified in a combination of laws and court decisions regarding parahuman organizations, but they'd lost the majority needed to do so without calling a full meeting when Mike had sold his shares.
Now they had to prepare to hold a proper meeting on things, just in case Amy or the management group holding the other thirty-five percent of the shares actually showed up. Followed by possibly needing to convince someone else to vote with them to fix the initial financial mistake, the subsequent branding issues, the mismanagement of several accounts due to a misunderstanding of a couple of terms used in agreements, and fixing a typo in the organization bylaws.
They were, admittedly, the least concerned about the last one, but it was annoying now that they'd noticed it.
But they were going through everything, just in case, because if they were holding a full meeting then they wanted to cover as much as possible in the process. Especially since the meeting was going to be audited, so they had to do absolutely everything by the books.
Kenta Lung - July 10, 2011
Kenta dropped the charred remains of the gun into a metal trash can that was kept in the room for things that had been burnt but were too hot for a plastic one. Yun Fan's second-in-command had just attempted a takeover at gunpoint and failed miserably, but in order to not cause undue damage to the building he was merely trussed up and hung from the ceiling.
"Those of you who were injured will need to visit the Team Mana warehouse after the meeting," Kenta said. "Hopefully you are all correct that your injuries will hold until then."
Really, they'd better hold until then. Yun Fan himself had taken a bullet through his arm and a significant-looking cut on his head, but otherwise all of the injuries were minor. Most of that was because Kenta had known the attack was coming for two days, just not which of the four candidates was going to be the one attacking. The other three had been cowed for now, but would still need watching.
"With that out of the way," Kenta continued. "We can get to why we're meeting in the first place. We will be ignoring the cordon set up around our territory by the federal government, as we weren't planning on expanding anyway. The eighty-eight brain cells already lost multiple parahumans when they took offense to their own cordon, mistaking it for a new gang's activities. Instead we will continue to work on improving our buildings, but a proposal came to me and I'd like to get your opinions on it."
An armored briefcase was brought up onto the table, opened, and the copies of the proposal were passed around. They'd been improving their own standard of living, but ignoring the potential for enhanced tourism in the process. Their territory could be roughly split into three primary areas, though the 'cordon' on them assumed they claimed more space than they actually did and they might take advantage of that. One of their three areas was essentially entirely residential and the proposal made no attempt to change their plans for it.
The other two areas contained far more commercially zoned lots, and the proposal focused on them. Instead of just building them out without any plan at all they could instead divide the area up by culture and build them out as showcase areas. As a bonus, this would hopefully shift the internal bickering into a much healthier rivalry, each culture trying to look and succeed better than the others. The hope was that tourists would want to explore all of the areas, to compare and contrast them, with a combined draw potential that far exceeded anything any one of them would be able to generate.
It would be quite a lot of work, far beyond Kenta's original bare-bones plans for improving the area, but the potential gains for them all were significant. Even better, it would be entirely legal income and unlikely to draw any ire from the potentially trigger-happy government agents. And while it wasn't exactly their normal hostile takeover, doing their best to steal a large portion of the tourist market might even be enough for the more ambitious leaders.
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- Location
- Deep in the Badlands of Equestria
Well, I suppose she could be in the middle of attempting a self-duplication as an intermediate step to attaching Dragon's AI to a Belkan device body....
Edit: And another interlude drops, with so many interesting tidbits to consider. Is it wrong of me that I looked at Lung's new plans for the ABB sector of town and thought that he must've been cribbing from the Manual of Mickey's House?
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- Location
- Dhaka, Bangladesh
Everything preceding this line involving spellwork is the sort of thing that results in me getting a shit eating grin and TSAB pants being shat.
Alright, I called the Mayor being poisoned as a Dinah plot weeks ago, but having the Mayor being poisoned actually be a RORY plot, well I'm shocked. I'm not sure I've ever seen a story in which a non-thinker or SI actually made a plot. I'm going to have to do a reread of the last arc or two, because as far as I can remember Minerva never talked to the President and I don't know what caused him to start investigating Cauldron. I imagine Legend's meeting to get answers is going to be interupted which is sad, but maybe Minerva will allow for them to finish the exposition before she teleports in, so that Legend actually is aware of what his friends are doing behind his back. I also see that neither Hive's secret projects not the Nanoha cast were given interludes which while not directly correlated makes me incredibly suspicious of what the Nanoha cast might be learning about the lost device off-screen.
Nanoha and company are still in the dimensional sea, not much happening.
- Location
- Wonderland
And Chris almost-but-not-quite spots the modular nature of the translation bits.
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
Worse, it was a Gambit Pileup between Dinah and Rory, although they both had the same end goal: To get Dinah into that healing machine. Rory's car was an unfortunate casualty.
Salvare7097
be the salvation of the hopeless!
- Location
- [REDACTED] [O5 APPROVAL REQUIRED]
it's sacrifice will not be forgotten.
So... Speculation here, but it seems that what could be happening with Lilia is likely a repair process. Now, here's the speculation: Lilia was extremely damaged and incorporated parts of QA to "build" her persona as Lilia. What happens if this bubble she's in is caused by an old repair AND RESET function?
We now have an old Belken device, likely wiped of all data that Lilia has gathered, possibly also having discarded all parts of the shard she had integrated except for as material for repair, last data stating it was in a war... This could be bad.
And to add a Worm twist to the situation (given it's a Worm Verse), the repair finishes right in time for the ship traveling to investigate coming out of the Dimensional Sea.
And, since this in itself isn't enough of a screw up of all time, it's as Cauldron is meeting for the first time and Taylor's plans for their capture have been put in place (because there is no telling when Lilia is coming out of the bubble and she feels they can get by without Lilia), and Minerva has just made the jump to corral the Cauldron group, battle is about to commence!
Any other things I've forgotten to throw in there to make this a "Very Bad Day" for Team Minerva?
This could have been a great April 1st chapter @CmptrWz! (unless it's canon, which in that case oops)
EDIT: Oh, I know! The changes that they have just implemented into their cores are identified by the device once known as Lilia as the profile of the enemy that the device was in conflict with! Not an exact match, given how much Lilia has trimmed it and made it more efficient, but it's still looking like a match for the enemy!
Could always get worse...
We now have an old Belken device, likely wiped of all data that Lilia has gathered, possibly also having discarded all parts of the shard she had integrated except for as material for repair, last data stating it was in a war... This could be bad.
And to add a Worm twist to the situation (given it's a Worm Verse), the repair finishes right in time for the ship traveling to investigate coming out of the Dimensional Sea.
And, since this in itself isn't enough of a screw up of all time, it's as Cauldron is meeting for the first time and Taylor's plans for their capture have been put in place (because there is no telling when Lilia is coming out of the bubble and she feels they can get by without Lilia), and Minerva has just made the jump to corral the Cauldron group, battle is about to commence!
Any other things I've forgotten to throw in there to make this a "Very Bad Day" for Team Minerva?
This could have been a great April 1st chapter @CmptrWz! (unless it's canon, which in that case oops)
EDIT: Oh, I know! The changes that they have just implemented into their cores are identified by the device once known as Lilia as the profile of the enemy that the device was in conflict with! Not an exact match, given how much Lilia has trimmed it and made it more efficient, but it's still looking like a match for the enemy!
Could always get worse...
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Salvare7097
be the salvation of the hopeless!
- Location
- [REDACTED] [O5 APPROVAL REQUIRED]
How would Hive have gotten to the back ups, if they even still exist? is hive even still compatible on a hardware level with those back ups? I personally don't think so. Too many outside context ideas. The best I think she could do to run a Belkin system without modifying the hell out of it would be to run it on an emulator. Besides all of that data was lost:
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OverReactionGuy
Verified Sanity
I really hope none of that bullshit actually happens. It'll be a major shift in the genre of the fic and piss everyone off.