La Papesse (Morrigan Fic)

[GraftingBuddha]

Genesis


Rey coughed. Man, this gas station weed was messing him up something serious. To be perfectly blunt, though (ha!) he had earned it. A heist - a perfect, utterly well-executed heist, delivering into his possession a pile of samples, enough to rebuild his lab from scratch. Sure, the Chosen were annoying, they'd messed up months of work, destroyed huge numbers of samples and halfway viable projects, but he'd turned that around. Maybe it was the gas station weed, maybe it was the case and a half of beer he'd downed in a fit of depression, maybe it was the fact that he'd gone outside without his mask by accident and an attractive woman had smiled at him, but he was feeling on top of the world. A cocktail of hormones, alcohol, and delightfully cultivated hash that bloomed into a single overriding emotion, one that had taken control and forced him away from any plans to ally himself with Accord. And that emotion was pure, undiluted confidence. He'd be more cautious in future, of course, but the confidence had been enough to propel him into a plan that he would have otherwise considered completely insane. A plan that was just crazy enough to work.

This was a roundabout way of saying that he'd heisted Accord. The gas station weed had helped, he wasn't sure how much, but it had given him the requisite boldness to heist Accord, and just imagining the little turd fuming over the loss of his new toys was giving him the bedtime sillies. God, he was good. He was fantastic, even. The creations he'd sent Accord's way had been merciless, distracting him while his more subtle creations succeeded in taking the samples he wanted. He knew Accord was hoarding stuff like this, probably for some bizarre long-term plan. He glanced around his new lab, quite thoroughly squirrelled away into the countryside - best to lay low and work quietly while Accord settled down from his temper tantrum. He pondered if his height had some influence on that guy's personality. Rey was a beanpole, tall as could be, and he was a relaxed, gentle dude who so happened to enjoy making plant-animal abominations capable of levelling buildings. Accord, though, was what the kids termed a 'pocket prince' - a term he'd had his acid-vomiting creature etch into the side of his building at the end of the heist - and was the most insufferable, over-sensitive, positively anal guy Rey had ever had the great displeasure of meeting.

He looked down at what he was making. Hm. That was Endbringer tissue - Simurgh, specifically. Nice feather, good colouration. An idea started to generate. Could he make an Endbringer? A small, diet Endbringer, capable of serving him directly, primarily controlled with pheromones, a real nuclear option if Accord even got it into his head that forgiveness wasn't a divine virtue? Maybe this was a bad idea. But his other samples were gone, and he'd burned through almost all his other creations in the heist. He had a quick chomp at an edible. Hm. Eh, may as well. No reason not to try, right? Miss 100% of the shots you don't take and all that. He started to work. Problems immediately emerged. The tissue was inorganic, and he needed to graft some organic crap to it to make it properly bud… the first few experiments were failures, buds simply failing to live. He was growing frustrated, and took a quick chomp of another edible. And there was the confidence again - man, what was going on in that gas station, they had some good Mary Jane in there. An idea occurred as he glanced at a vial marked 'Myrddin'. Hm. That could be an idea.

The next sample was working better, budding properly, the lifeform was actually coming close to viability. It had a vascular system, organs, even a few sparks of brain activity. Enough unviable elements to make it a write-off, but he was making progress. Hours later, he was still me with failure. Body after body was simply collapsing - some had even come close to maturing properly, but an issue kept presenting itself. Endbringer tissue was simply not meant to work like this, it wasn't designed to operate in an organic system - he was trying to convince a pile of cogs that they needed flesh, and to convince flesh that it needed giant shards of abnormal crystal. An Endbringer with schizophrenic powers and a cape with equally schizophrenic abilities. Neither were getting along - they simply weren't working together. A little research, and an option started to present itself. With a shrug, he searched through the vials… the guy had blood samples from everyone, no idea how he got them. A tangled mass of dark hairs presented themselves, some of them bloodstained. This might work. A power devoted to administering lesser entities… it was a long shot, but hey, his stash would hold out for a while, right? No reason not to.

He looked up from Shrek the Musical to see his newest glass cocoon 'dinging' ominously. Hm. He strolled over dazedly, staring at the result. Something was actually working! There was life! He felt like cackling, and he would have cackled if he wasn't so completely blazed. The organism was small, but growing rapidly. Multiple sets of wings arranged around a humanoid core, nothing truly abnormal here, all relatively standard. Seeing a completely human face staring blankly at him was a little disconcerting, but hey, he could move past it. The wings weren't white - good, last thing he wanted was for people to see his creation and think 'Simurgh' immediately. They were very dark, couldn't be sure if they were dark brown or simply black. Maybe a mix. Who cared. The cells were harmonising correctly, they were finally working together, Myrddin and the Simurgh working in alignment to produce a stable organism. It was working! Ha! Now, a successful project deserved a name, and in a haze of something that he thought was related to Northern Lights cannabis indica, if his nose was serving him correctly, he came up with one.

Morrígan. He dragged out a marker pen, reached messily inside the vat, and scrawled it on the creature's face. That way he wouldn't forget. As he stared at his soaked arm, he realised that he could have probably just written on the glass cocoon itself, probably would have been easier. Ah well. He stared at the organism, dazed by his own wondrousness, admiring his own little Frankenstein.

The organism blinked at him, and Rey almost shat himself then and there.

He dashed to his monitors, trying to get a sense for what was going on. The monitors were blinking on and off - damn, this was what happened when you didn't install those Windows updates, he knew those reminders were important! From what he could see, though… brain activity was spiking much more rapidly than it should. The third sample was causing issues, forcing the others to work together too well. And from that harmony came growth, too rapid for him to effectively control. Quarantine measures weren't working, connected up to the computers which were now sparking rapidly. He stared in horror as the creature grew before his eyes, slowly rising from toddler-sized to the size of a young adult, her wings straining against the walls of the tank. No, not her, it - it was a braindead thing, it shouldn't be able to do anything. Hell, as it grew he could see major problems with its physiology. Brain activity was suggesting major mental instabilities, nervous system was working erratically and irregularly, and there was a hole in its skull through which he could see a pulsating brain. He'd meant to repair that, cultivate something to hold it shut - it would be a useful point for any future alteration. But nonetheless, it was only the most major flaw in its bone structure, there were others, too many to count really. He scrambled to try and get things back under control.

An explosion sounded behind him, and he screamed for it to shut up, he had a godling to contain. The Morrígan blinked again - shit, he was thinking of it by that name now, that wasn't good. There was a faint whining at the edge of his perception - shit, shit, she was growing too fast, he needed pheromones, he needed them now, wasn't sure if they'd work, but they might be able to help. There was the sound of rapidly approaching feet, but he paid them no mind. The gas station weed was turning against him, making him jittery and slow. Too slow. Much too slow. With a crack, the vat burst open, and the Morrígan emerged. It saw nothing, eyes were sightless and glazed over. Maybe he was fine, maybe it was still too unstable to keep itself go-

It flew upwards, crashing through the roof of his lab with ease. He stared upwards at the rapidly departing dark shape. A person beside him whistled, and Rey groaned.

"Fuck."

"Language!"

* * *​

The first memory she had was of impulses. Too many, far too many to predict. Everything felt wrong - she glanced at one thing and could sense spiralling histories coming from them, data too unresolved for her to really grasp, but she felt like she should be able to grasp. Half her mind screamed at her to pay attention to the data, let it accumulate, find something to prod… but it failed to provide a reason. The other half screamed at her that the first half was insane, what she needed to do was start reaching into tiny invisible spaces she could somehow see, worlds of force and light and sound, worlds that the first half protested should be inaccessible. What - what was she doing? She hurtled through the skies madly, careening from side to side, trying to process too much sensory data at once. Her mind was splitting in two, sending conflicting signals. She had to engage in conflict, had to head down to the earth and start fighting things - she barely understood was fighting was, only sensing an abstract feeling of forces struggling against one another in a manner that was somehow desirable. The other part of her brain howled, shrieked that she should do something else, needed to locate a man in green, a man who was her greatest foe and the apex of her purpose, the one being that mattered in this wretched place, the axis around which the universe revolved. She understood none of it and kept flying.

The world had changed. Green forests, green as the man she was apparently meant to fight, gave way to grey streets. Histories boiled from them, every person a mass of causality stretching into the distant past and into the infinite future. She saw nudges, but had no idea what they would do, the histories too vast and hazy for her to get a proper grasp of them. The world descended into madness, and she screamed, seeing the tattered histories fleeing from her in crowds, screaming themselves. Good. They were leaving. She kept flying instinctually, unsure of where she was going, only sure that she wanted to do something even if she couldn't decide what that something was. Buildings hurtled by, constructs with histories that bled from them in eddying waves. She could see ripples of causality coming from them, places she could attack or subvert to do something of importance. A thousand worlds burned at her fingertips, tiny entrances forming and unforming at a moment's notice, each one spiralling into a million new possibilities that drowned her perceptions. She was overwhelmed. She was seeing too much.

A third voice. Something else. A third part of the brain, a part which until now had been silent, or had been too busy keeping her alive, maybe. A part that regulated and controlled, administrated until the disparate parts found harmony. The maddening casualties started to drift away, powers regulating, worlds closing off as regulation was achieved… but it wasn't enough. As it focused, she felt her flying slip from her - she'd been flying automatically, she had no idea how to actually do it actively, and with this regulating entity committed to turning her split skull into something cohesive… she plummeted. A building presented itself, older than most, a blend of low structure and high tower, an alignment she hadn't seen before. She sensed that this building was recognised as old, and tough, and solid in a way that most others were not. She crashed through the front nonetheless, penetrating deep inside, collapsing in a pile of feathers and limbs. The world was silent here, there were no people to torment her with dizzying, coiling histories. A moment of rest, a moment without movement… not that being still meant anything, not with worlds boiling before her and possibilities flowering and decaying in a matter of nanoseconds, plans expanding into horizons she couldn't see before collapsing as some undetectable variable shifted.

A sound. Rapid removal of matter from a throat - sickness, plague, contagion? No, colloquial sign, indicator of a desire for attention. Her head whirled around, eyes that crossed between crystal and organic and generally made evolution scream in despair fixing on a figure. More spiralling histories, maddening, she saw golden lights and blaring trumpets, she saw an emotion she couldn't understand, had never experienced before in her few time-increments of existence. Not that she had emotions. Did she? She felt unsure about her place in the world, was this an emotion? She recognised something similar in the figure before her, uncertainty bleeding off in waves, born of - born of - a past whirled before her too quickly to understand, and as she tried to catch hold of it, it burned her hands, making her flinch. The figure was flapping its mouth-parts, transmitting meaning in the spectrum of sound. She understood none of it, but understood intention.

Querying. Fearful. Cautious. Comforting. Querying.

She understood none of it, and recalled the one strategy which had worked this far, given her a modicum of something approaching peace. She screamed at the figure and he fled in moments, dashing into a room set off to the side through a heavy wooden door. Satisfactory. She turned about, trying to piece together her surroundings, the howling in her brain momentarily abating as it was denied stimuli to process and was increasingly under the control of the regulating entity. Stone, primarily, but large glass windows coloured in a pattern that her fleshy parts confirmed was intended to be aesthetically appealing. Nothing worth paying attention to here, a simple structure in which she could attempt to understand everything, stabilise the boiling chaos within her. And then something caught her attention, and her body froze. Something. An image on the wall, two dimensional representation of three dimensional space produced using organic pigments on a flat plane, that her fleshy parts likewise confirmed was intended to be aesthetically satisfactory.

Her mind was a primitive thing, still struggling to figure out the universe, and her instincts were still struggling to bloom into something worthwhile. Reduced to such a state, her mind like that of a bizarrely advanced infant, she found herself stumbling into the most basic instinct around - like recognising like. She saw a figure in this two-dimensional image, a figure that was similarly shaped to her… and had wings. Colouration was different, but such vagaries of the electromagnetic spectrum were minor matters, barely worth considering. This was the first representation of a being like her that she'd seen - all others had been crude bundles of flesh and limbs wrapped in tattered histories, this was pure and serene, devoid of histories, easy for her overworked mind to recognise. She stared solidly at it for a time increment she didn't bother counting. The other figure came back, the one she had caused to depart. She ignored it, too busy comprehending the meaning of this representation and its implications for her purpose.

Querying.

She ignored it still. The figure glanced at the representation, then back at her. Recognition. Her gaze snapped to the figure, studying him coldly. He had underwent the same response? She had independent confirmation, her observations were thus as valid as they could be - she had an objective fact to anchor to. Her crystalline elements detected intent alone, but her fleshier components ached for sensory input. The regulating entity granted this request, and sound flooded her ears, incomprehensible chaos somehow rendered understandable by her organic parts.

"Are you alright, child?"

English, once filtered through the accent. Comprehensible. Satisfactory. She returned to the representation.

"Oh, you… like the painting?"

Painting. Crude naming for such a representation, but a satisfactory one nonetheless. She stared at the painting, and nodded - her organic components argued that this was a satisfactory response, and non-verbal. Words were still going to be a challenge, she could feel it.

"Yes, I suppose she does look like you, doesn't she? Rather a nice, uh, thing, isn't it?"

Nervousness leaked from him in waves. She didn't understand this emotional response, but nonetheless processed it and assimilated the data.

"Yes, a parishioner made that a few years ago, she always did like painting angels-"

She stared at the figure once more. Angel. Unfamiliar. She cocked her head to one side sharply, her bones cracking a little as she did so, eyes flicking coldly. Her organic components confirmed the head motion was an indicator of the intention known as 'querying' to her crystalline elements.

"Oh, you've not heard of an angel before? Well… goodness, I'm not sure how to explain any of this, are you sure you're alright? That was quite a fall, you know, and…"

The figure had devolved into meaningless queries once more. She required more information on this template. She saw something clutched in the figure's hands, a small black thing, plant tissue wrapped in animal tissue. Her organic elements informed her this was a primitive data storage device. She raised her hand, a gesture that suggested a desire for acquisition. The figure shivered as she came closer - nervousness, once more, something she couldn't understand and couldn't rationalise. Useless data.

"You… want my Bible?"

Bible. Terminology found and assimilated. Satisfactory. The figure handed it over nonetheless, which was exceedingly satisfactory. Hm. Primitive data storage indeed, purely visual. Her eyes moved faster than human eyes should, processing visual stimuli as quickly as her advanced brain could. Data flooded it, more data that it really should have received at such an early stage. Narratives, parables, rites, a rationalising system in which all could be contained. Suggestions of omnipotent entity - she remembered a green-clad man, a similar feeling of infallibility and supreme importance attached to it. The notion helped her understand the visual data, and she scanned faster and faster, flipping through flaps of plant tissue to acquire more. Her split brain was struggling to reconcile this new information, uncertain of how to distinguish between 'objective fact' and any other category. A new instinct was rising, though, one contained in a substantial chunk of her organic matter, the same matter which gave her access to so many worlds brimming with infuriating data.

An instinct which enforced stability through the cultivation of a selective reality. Create a scheme of rationalisation based on an outside ideal which allows for the sustenance of conflicting data and chaotic impulses. The other organic component, the regulator, latched onto this with something she could identify as 'happiness'. A belief framework was forming, something to regulate the chaotic impulses. The worlds at her fingertips vanished, instead… she saw pillars of fire descending from the sky, understood that fire lay at her fingertips, and placed the two together. The chaos in her mind began to slow down, a new system of understanding overwhelming the primitive instincts which had once raged within it. Regulation took hold, comprehension bloomed, data began to be filtered into acceptable categories. This was most satisfactory, yes indeed - yes indeed, a colloquialism, tautology, in other circumstances pointless repetition but now imbued with greater meaning. Things were coming together. More information fed through, slowly adding to this growing web of rationality - birth without the necessity of physical progenitor, a story that aligned with the dim memories of her own creation. Winged beings as subordinate to an omnipotent creator, likewise aligning with what little she knew of the world. She was winged, she felt subordination to something greater than herself, and now she had names for these impulses, categories within which they operated.

Most satisfactory.

The data storage device - the Bible - dropped from her hands to the floor, and the figure scrambled to pick them up. She took him in. The histories were no more, instead replaced with vague but controllable feelings - she saw potential, past deeds feeding into future actions. New names presented themselves from her new rationale - sin, virtue, redemption, fall from grace. She analysed his garb. Dark, suitable for camouflage against beings operating primarily with visual stimuli - no, there was more. Priest. Fellow servant of the omnipotent. An alliance of interests, a coincidence of origins. The world was finally making sense, the chaos had finally faded away. Finally, it was all working as it should. She lifted up from the ground, flight now fully under her control. Her arms spread wide at her side, adopting ninety-degree angles - reminiscent of the letter 'T', reminiscent itself of the instrument of the aspect of the creator's death. Her wings flared, and the priest gasped.

She spoke. She didn't scream, she spoke in a thunderous voice, projecting outwards and filling the space of the church with ease.

"BE NOT AFRAID."

Spoiler: Author's Note

AN: OK, I'm doing another fic. I can promise that this one will, eventually, have Pope Morrigan. Mostly crack.

 

[Flairina]

Ah, damn, and here I was planning a story based on this exact same concept/tumblr post! ^^; Seems that's no longer necessary, for you have stepped in to fill that void instead, and did a far better job of capturing Morrigan's nascent, highly alien mindset than I could have anyways. Well done, will be watching.

 

[GraftingBuddha]

They cried out to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses

"What?"

The priest expressed disbelief. Not concerning - hm, 'not concerning', that was a new way of thinking. Her thoughts were being increasingly placed into her new system of rationality, her patterns changing as a result. It wasn't exactly concerning that the priest disbelieved - for did not Thomas doubt until he knew the physical proof of the resurrection, and did not Abraham regard the three angels at Mamre as mortal men? She smiled in a manner she was sure was calming and serene, the very picture of beatific grace according to the mental representations generated from the plant-based data storage device with fairly high levels of certainty. Her words were generated according to the template the device had provided, translated into a medium a being like the priest would understand.

"Be not afraid, priest. For your faith the LORD has sent me, an angel, to bestow grace and benevolence upon this sinful earth."

"What?"

"Cease your disbelief, priest, for a fellow traveller on the path to the divine hovers before you. Be at peace."

"What?"

Now he was just getting annoying - wait, no, she shouldn't feel annoyed, angels never felt annoyed. He wasn't corresponding to the set pattern, that was all. Her fleshy elements, the chunks of humanity which existed at her core, demanded that she feel annoyance at this disbelieving priest… but her angelic, crystalline elements demanded calm. By all the Thrones and Dominions, she was a thing of split minds - yet, was not Christ equally human and equally divine? Her eyes widened. She was comparing herself to Christ - this was wrong on many levels, a route to damnation and falling from grace. It did not correspond to the pattern she had established. Deviancy. She plummeted to the ground, cracking the marble beneath her, marring its surface with wide, black spiderwebs. Her too-tough head thudded into the ground with a sound like a boulder splitting, and she started to speak once more, her tone starting to urge into 'distressed' - a new thing for her, and not an entirely pleasant one, but the pattern insisted on this tone in this situation.

"Forgive me, father, for I have compared myself to Christ in the darkness betwixt my ears! I repent, I, an unworthy blasphemer, repent!"

The priest gulped - an indication of annoyance, possibly, her senses were going all screwy. Of course, she was doing it all wrong, her information-gathering instincts were feeding her data on rites, sacraments, things the Bible hadn't mentioned in clear enough detail to be integrated into her new rationality. She read the priest's past, and gleaned names, actions, places…

"Of course!"

She grabbed the priest - she was larger than him, much larger, and much stronger too - and dragged him bodily towards the confession booths. He squeaked as she flung him inside, then tried to cram her large form into the opposite one. It was a challenge, especially with all the wings, but she managed. She pressed her face against the grate - there really wasn't anywhere else for it to go. The priest shrieked in a manner she identified as 'feminine' as he saw an enormous pale face staring at him with 'MORRIGAN' written all over in marker pen.

"The sacrament of confession, of course, how could I neglect it. Father, forgive me, for I have sinned."

"Uh."

"I have compared myself to Christ in my unworthy head, and desire absolution for the sin of blasphemy."

The priest coughed, trying to get back into a space of mind where he could operate without squeaking and shrieking like a small kitten. Come on, he'd been through worse than this. That was a lie, he'd never been through anything like this, the sheer weirdness was outweighing any other experience which might be more physically unpleasant.

"...well, my child, there's nothing wrong with comparing yourself to Christ, he existed to provide an example to us all."

"But the data storage device - apologies, Bible - you provided indicated that imitation of the divine was blasphemy."

Her eyes were colder, almost machine-like - back to the strange amalgam of inhuman responses that he'd first seen crash into his nice, quiet church. Her behaviours were still raw, and lying under them was still the same ruthless calculus which he'd first seen in those expressionless eyes. He tried to think of this like a debate back at seminary, or one of his weirder conversations with slightly overeager parishioners.

"In the sense of idols, yes, that's against the Bible, but the Lord became man to provide an example to us all, to show us what heights humanity was capable of, the grace it was still worthy of receiving. He did good things, did he not? Should we all stop doing good things in case we imitate him too much?"

"...I have not blasphemed?"

"No, my child. You can say a Hail Mary if you want, but… uh, no sin has been committed. So say I."

The cape exploded out of the confession booth in a flurry of feathers. She hovered above the earth, her confidence seemingly restored. She beamed down at the increasingly stressed priest.

"Your absolution is appreciated, priest! I thank you for your devotion. Now, I must go, and spread the word of the LORD!"

She started to fly towards the entrance. The priest realised something very abruptly, and stumbled after her, croaking out through a too-hoarse throat.

"Wait! Wait! You can't… oh, god, shouldn't have run that fast… sorry, you can't go out like that!"

The cape - Morrigan? Was that her name? - stared down confusedly, her wings twitching slightly.

"Explain yourself, priest."

"You're naked! And your brain is exposed!"

She paused. Hm. She was lacking the covering composed of plant and animal matter which other humans seemed to possess. And her brain - now that was strange. Now she looked closely, she realised that the angel representation on the wall did not have a chunk of grey-pink matter quivering softly in her brain pan. Oh no, she was a deviation from the representation! A serious deviation! This was completely unsatisfactory, and must be rectified at once! The pattern demanded it!

"Your point is heard, priest, and I understand your concern. I shall require a covering for my head."

The priest paused, held up one finger - an increment of time? But how much, one second, minute, hour, year? She had things to do, unbelievers to convert and blasphemers to smite! He returned after twelve seconds, proving that perhaps this man of God had a duplicitous core which could be his undoing - her other sight looked into his histories, noting his sins and his virtues, determining how to cultivate the latter and eradicate the former. This deceit must not be tolerated. He held out a plant matter object, and she studied it carefully, her thoughts of punishment and retribution momentarily forgotten. This thing was strange - a covering of sorts, with three peaks and a large black fluffy thing in the centre. She had never seen anything quite like this. The priest held it out hesitantly, speaking mostly to himself as she examined it closer.

"It's an old thing, my biretta, I never wear it but I like having it around, and goodness I'm rambling to myself and-"

"This covering shall do, priest."

She pressed it to her chest, slotting it into place, and held it there. There was a pause.

"I shall require another."

The priest pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation.

"It's not a… a brassiere, young lady, it's a hat. You put it on your head."

She studied it, then slowly placed it over her head. Hm. That did cover up the brain, which was quite satisfactory indeed. She spun slowly in the air, admiring her new headgear in a reflective piece of marble, ensuring that it accorded to her mental representations of reality. Yes, this would very much do - she looked marginally closer to the two-dimensional representation now. The pattern was holding. The priest looked down, something that concerned her.

"What is it, priest?"

"Clothes. You need clothes."

This did not accord to the pattern as she knew it.

"Did not Adam and Eve cavort in the nude? Is not nudity a representation of primordial innocence?"

The priest groaned. Wait. She'd shown a deep aversion to blasphemy, maybe…

"You know, there was a sect in the Middle Ages which thought they'd achieved primordial innocence and so lived naked - the Adamites, that was it. They were deemed heretical, if I remember correctly."

The cape soared down to eye level, staring at him coldly.

"Heretical?"

The priest gulped. He might have made a miscalculation here. The cape stared at him… then abruptly fell to the ground once more, prostrating herself and flailing her arms wildly. And she'd cracked the floor again, bloody fantastic, bishop was going to have his head for this.

"I repent, oh, I repent! I am an unworthy sinner, a vile heretic and I beg for redemption!"

"You can find redemption by getting clothes."

"As the LORD wills it, so shall it be done!"

And did she have to keep shrieking 'LORD' at the top of her lungs every time? Did she think anything in all-caps was automatically yelled? He was considering informing her of this fact for the sake of his own eardrums when she shot into the… oh no, she was in the vestry. Oh no, the mad cape was in the Vestry. He charged towards it, desperate to save something from the feathered menace, when she emerged crowing triumphantly. Wrapped around her was a… robe. His robe. She'd taken his robe - that was his, dammit, he used it. Wait, no, serenity, serenity, he was the rock upon which the church would be built, etc. etc. The cape seemed proud of herself for finding suitable garb, even if it was bright purple. She clearly wasn't going to let it go without a fight, and honestly, he was starting to succumb to all the excitement. A zealous cape who thought she was an angel had stolen his stole, and he just wanted to sit down. And he did. Heavily. One question came to mind as the cape started to float away.

"Wait, do you have a name?"

The cape turned, looking momentarily confused.

"Name?"

"Yes, a… a name. Is that your name, written on your face?"

The cape promptly started flying rapidly in a tight circle as she tried to see what was written there, and by the time she was flopping wildly on the ground, the priest had stood up and was waving his hands desperately.

"No, no, I can read it, it says 'Morrigan'! Please don't destroy my church!"

The cape looked at him sharply, processing this new information. A new designation, appropriate, and useful. Highly satisfactory. She nodded decisively to provide external confirmation of an internal resolution - the pattern demanded some transparency in interacting with humans.

"Then I am Morrigan. Let the blasphemers know my name and tremble, for they stand in the garden of an angry God! This is the word of the LORD!"

She flew through the shattered wooden doors and into the world beyond. The priest mopped his brow, sitting down once more. That one hadn't even been a Bible quote - by all the angels and saints, she was improvising. She was riffing on the eternal word. This wasn't good. He sagged backwards, surveying the damage - a vestry that looked like a bomb had gone off in it, huge doors blasted from their hinges, multiple cracks in his nice marble floor, and the confession both was mostly inoperable now. But the mad angel cape had left. He sighed, stumbled to the altar, and started praying for forgiveness from any of the sins he might have committed which warranted this.

* * *​

Far above them, on the opposite side of the earth the Simurgh suddenly froze, setting off half a dozen alarm across the globe. Something had tripped a few alarms, something had abruptly come into her perception… and then vanished. In the brief second where it had existed, it was a chaotic, rambling thing. Barely sentient, really. But it had existed, and somehow was messing with her wavelengths, the chains of causality she'd spent so long pruning and cultivating. Her mind was filled with patterns leading from whole armies of people, their pasts blending into their futures in complex relationships of cause and effect, one action leading to another leading to another, which if properly altered could induce results amenable to the Great Purpose. The city that the humans referred to as 'Boston' wasn't overly important to her, the patterns contained within largely inconsequential. Only a few people there warranted real attention - the ones designated Accord and Citrine. Accord had already been taken care of, a bomb timed to go off at exactly the right moment. He would be defenceless at the time, wouldn't expect an attack, and his death would derail a whole host of convoluted plans which threatened the Great Purpose. A similar matter to Sphere, though breaking him had been simple - a single attack had led to him being removed from the board as a major complication. Accord warranted a more subtle touch, both because of his own skills, and his general lack of development. Sphere had been capable of creating colony ships, Accord's plans were still embryonic, and thus his bomb was a tiny one she'd planted long ago. Citrine, though… she was largely irrelevant, but her patterns suggested a causal relationship leading to a blossoming threat. Her ability didn't pose a threat to the Great Purpose, but her mind did, if the right things occurred in the right order - and the Simurgh was certain they would.

A small plan flourished briefly, a tiny calculation that resolved a small problem. Accord's death was predestined, but Citrine's was not. She was minor enough to be dismissed as a proper threat, but it would be silly to let her continue on her current path without some tweaking. If she was bound to Accord, emotionally trapped by one another, the death of one would spell the destabilisation of the other. Even if Citrine declared revenge against those who had orchestrated her lover's death and dedicated her life to pursuing them… her mind would already be compromised, her path set onto a new route where it could pose no threat whatsoever. Hm. By altering a few signals passing around the earth, scrambling one, blocking another, a few communications could be delayed, a ripple effect could be generated. A figure would be removed from the board, and the aftershock would cultivate an environment in which the predicted relationship could generate properly, developing the bonds which could be severed to devastating effect. A tiny alteration, really, a simple twitch of her wings and-

What.

Something was harnessing her plan. The chaotic force was back, more regulated this time, but utterly deluded - ignorant of the Great Purpose. The ideas she'd just cultivated were being stolen by this creature. The creature mangled the sensory inputs, understood nothing of what they meant or the greater purpose surrounding it. It understood that there was a target, that there was a path which should be cultivated… and that was all. It knew nothing of subtlety, it spoke like a human, its thought patterns were woefully compromised. The Simurgh twitched in something resembling irritation, trying to plan around this errant variable. Her tiny modifications meant nothing now, her actions had been pointless, energy had been expended for no reward. The Aberrant Variable had interfered with the continuation of the Great Purpose.

This was deeply, deeply unsatisfactory.

* * *​

Hundreds of miles away from the seething Endbringer, Morrigan soared above a city of vice, ready to deliver judgement upon those worthy of it. The writhing mass of histories, cause and effect colliding endlessly and in dizzying combinations, was easier to read from up here. She studied them, trying to pinpoint something which deserved her attention. Even with her mind in its proper state, the sensory feedback was… deafening. She looked deeper, trying to find something which she could work with. Wait. That was something. A vague sense, a brief irrational inclination… an impulse from elsewhere. Morrigan's wings fluttered in anticipation. The pattern had been a little hesitant at first, her new system of rationality incomplete and easily destabilised, but now she had confirmation! Her pattern informed her that this inclination could only be the voice of the Divine, a command to execute a heavenly command! She searched for where the Divine was leading her… and saw something.

Aha! She spied a sin! The twining histories which surrounded each person were sharper now that she was focusing on one thing and one thing alone, and she could see clearly that a person in this city had committed great sins, and would likely commit more! Oh no! The voice of the Divine indicated a path which must be ensured, and this command was processed through Morrigan's new rationality, reaching a conclusion that she was fairly sure might work. Maybe. Morrigan descended, powering towards a large glass building - ah, how appropriate that a den of sin should be the polar opposite of the den of virtue that was the church? Where the latter was low, the former was high, the latter stone, the former glass, one old, one new. Wait. Did virtue have dens? She wasn't sure. She'd need to ask the sinner, they might have some good insights into this sort of thing. Her powers felt right, all of them working in harmony towards the goal of judging the guilty and purifying the sinful. The glass face of the building loomed in front of her, and she powered through, crashing inwards in a flurry of glass. This floor was full of people, some of them ran as fast as they could from the crash site, others stared in fear at the enormous angel which had just arrived. Morrigan rose higher, spreading her arms into a 'T' once more, to signify her holy purpose.

"BE NOT AFRAID."

They were afraid. They were very afraid. Many of them started screaming and ran in all directions. This was distressing, and showed a lack of moral fibre - only the sinful feared the wrath of God! This demanded a fix, and she knew just how to deliver it. With passion!

"Your moral weakness shall be corrected! I shall now begin a six-hour sermon on why screaming and running is a poor decision, backed up by relevant passages from Scripture. First, we must begin with the-"

Something hard hit her in the side of the head. The room froze and stared at her. Hm. She detected metal - someone had shot her with a crude firearm! Her! An angel! This was definitely not satisfactory. She slowly rotated and stared hard at the terrified security officer who had just tried to kill her. She floated closer, her gaze pinning him to the spot. Everyone else backed away, breaths held, wondering what the mad cape would do next. Morrigan felt part of her power twitch - the many worlds, no, not worlds, the many miracles afforded by her heavenly nature! One came to mind - one that would intimidate and encourage him along the path to repentance. Spare the rod, spoil the child and so on. She raised her hand and growled in a manner her senses confirmed as 'threatening' to human perceptions.

"You have struck an angel."

Her hand came to a stop in front of his face, and the man gulped, limbs still refusing to move.

"Reflect!"

The man popped out of existence. And the building went, to use words that the Morrigan wouldn't remotely understand, fucking bananas. People scattered in all directions, fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. Morrigan was confused, and started waving her hands wildly, her voice going higher and higher.

"No! Cease your panic! I have merely sent him away to reflect, the hand of God does not inflict-"

Wait. She could see the sinner, the one she had spied from far above, the one she had targeted at the behest of a path which had sprung into existence from an unfathomable source for unfathomable reasons - ah, but the ways of the LORD are mysterious, and he must naturally direct her to the sinners he wished to be attended to. A wordless command was still a command after all! A blonde female, not cowering like the others, simply… hiding. Watching. This was not satisfactory, the sinner should fear the righteous! Actually, running would make it annoying to catch her. Maybe it was satisfactory after all. Morrigan surged forwards, flying over the crowd with ease, reaching down to pluck up the blonde woman. No reflection for her, she had more complicated matters in mind!

Wait, something was wrong. Why wasn't she flying? Why was she on the ground, still looming above the blonde due to her heaven-bestowed height? And why was everything yellow? Something felt distant… her flight simply wouldn't come to her, it felt like the world around her was simply one in which flight could not occur! This must be the sinner's doing, an act of absolute blasphemy, denying holy flight to a holy messenger?! Unacceptable! Unsatisfactory! A deviance from the set pattern! She scowled, and moved to grab the blasphemer. She slipped away, the air feeling thicker than it should, everything acting… strangely. The floor was almost completely empty at this point, leaving Morrigan alone with the blonde.

"I don't know who or what you are, but you should know better than to attack anyone out of costume."

Costume? Absurd, the righteous face of God had no need to conceal its movements! And sin existed without a costume, the cloth mattered not, the sin mattered all! The blonde cocked her head to one side.

"Morrigan? Never heard of you before. Why did you write your name on your face?"

Morrigan clumsily crawled to her feet, her flight briefly out of the question for now. She glared down at the blonde from within this strange yellow field. A heretical art, certainly, brewed for the subversion of the virtuous. Outrageous. She started bellowing into the woman's face. Higher volume seemed to yield stronger emotional reactions.

"Repent, sinner! The searching eye of God has seen your sin, and desires it rectified!"

A plan came to mind, springing into existence before she could consciously think about it - ah, the LORD was providing a path! Splendid! She lunged for the woman, her arms too wide to dodge. She grabbed… and ran. In a second, they crashed through the window once more. The woman screamed as they went - the fool had underestimated her resolve! Her virtue! Her capacity to survive very high falls! The yellow field was gone, and Morrigan felt her flight returning. With a victorious cry, she soared away, clutching the panicked blonde close to her chest. Hm. The sinner was swearing at her. Her instincts understood this as vulgar, an expression of disrespect. Unsatisfactory.

"Desist, sinner. This is for your own good. BE NOT AFRAID."

Why did the woman keep being afraid when she'd told her not to be? Why did it work for the other angels but not her? Bah, probably a result of the fleshy components she should probably get round to removing sometime soon. They flew faster and faster, plunging through the air, seeking a proper site. Honestly, Morrigan was winging it at this point - the guidance God provided had suggested that she needed to be 'taken care of', but the specifics were left up to her. A test, surely, a test so that she might prove her faith. With newfound zeal, she flew faster, to the closest mountain she could get to. As Moses found revelation on high, so should the sinner!

Spoiler: Author's Note

AN: OK, that's all for today. Tomorrow's chapter is written out and ready to go, though. To clarify, Morrigan is still young and unstable, and her ideas are still half-formed and poorly understood. Next chapter will see a little bit of comeuppance, and the beginning of a plot of sorts. And as for the security guard - remember Myrddin's powerset.

 

[Ziel]

Ah Blasto, you're truly gifted. You've created a being intelligent enough to comprehend theology in all of its complexities and contradictions, all while being too dumb to understand said same religion in any sense.

There may be a moral in there.

This fic reminds me of... I think it was "With Friends Like These"? Where Taylor has the Endbringers as minions. At one point, the author of that described her getting the Endbringers to do anything as being akin to commanding an alien battleship to make a sandwich. First it has to tilt the prow down, then locate the slabs of baked grains, then... It can do it, but it fundamentally doesn't get it in the same way a human would, and it's probably not going to be good at it either way.

 

[meloa789]

This lunatic might be the best choice to better the Brockton Bay, on the account that she will pretty much smite all of the gangs.

 

[LABmaiL]

Y'know, with enough life experience and a bit more understanding of humanity, Morrigan could end up becoming quite a sharp priest/confessor type figure. Her analysis ability and complete focus on becoming an altruistic, holy figure would probably leave her with some good, genuine advice for your problems. She just needs to learn basic human interaction, the intricacies of emotions, common human issues, the irrationality of social norms... and so on. In hindsight, this may be further out than I first imagined.

 

[Flairina]

This is glorious. My sympathies go out to the priest, the security guard, Citrine, and The Simurgh, while my compliments go out in equal measure to Morrigan and you. XD

 

[GraftingBuddha]

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for You are with me

Citrine was not having a good day. She was at work, doing good, ordinary work things. Out of costume, too, completely divorced from her cape life! There had been rumours of the S9 approaching, sure, but nothing she needed to attend to urgently, and then suddenly a damn angel had burst through the window and kidnapped her. Whatever was up with the cape, she was good at yelling, that much Citrine could definitely say. She crumpled to the ground in a heap, thrown from slightly too high for comfort by the mad cape. Citrine tried desperately to orient himself, to get a better idea of what the hell was going on. She was on a mountain. Oh God. The mad cape had dumped her on a mountain to die - she couldn't see the freak anywhere, she'd been abandoned to starve to death. That was cruel - who the hell had she pissed off? And what kind of cape did that? How had she never heard of this freak before? God, and her hair was a mess from the flight over, genuinely ruffled beyond repair. And the wind had dried out her skin too much, her hour of caring for it wasted. She staggered to her feet, high feels painfully jarring against the uneven rock. Where even was she? All she'd seen were purple robes and giant feathers, she could be anywhere for all she knew. God, this was a mess.

Wait. There was something moving behind the rock.

She tensed, readying herself to use her power - she wasn't sure how to cancel out Morrigan's powers, but if she had enough time she could probably find a route to it. Push came to shove, she'd use something to pin her in place, then run and hide, wait until she could drive her powers into an uncontrollable frenzy that would incapacitate or kill her. That could work, and no-one would blame her for retaliating so strongly. She slowly approached the rock, readying herself… when that same damned loud voice cried out.

"Remain where you are, sinner!"

And there she went again with the 'sinner' bullshit. Just her luck to piss off an insane cape. She moved closer - this must suggest weakness, maybe she was exhausted, maybe the whole 'massive feathered woman' thing was a Changer state and she was altering her form, who knew. Her tactical instincts were clicking away, formulating a plan of attack. The voice went louder - no fear, just anger.

"I instructed you to remain at a distance! The holy sacrament of confession demands anonymity!"

Citrine froze. What the actual fuck.

"...what?"

"Confess! I shall hide behind this rock, you shall confess your sins, I will prescribe penance, and then I shall move onto the next sinner."

She paused.

"And I shall deposit you back at your glass tower of vice, for your legs are weak and this mountain is high."

OK, now she was just being a bitch.

"I'm not confessing a damn thing! Tell me who you are, and what the hell is going on?"

"I am Morrigan, an angel of the LORD, and I - no, wait, I'm anonymous! I'm an anonymous guardian angel - no, just an ordinary person with wings - and I am here to hear your confession. I'm anonymous, sinner! Disregard contrary data!"

Citrine pinched the bridge of her nose. This was her day now. This was what her day had become, and what it would remain to be for the foreseeable future. Something had gone very wrong and she wasn't sure how to undo it.

"If I confess, you'll take me back to Boston?"

"That is the arrangement I have formulated."

"Fine. Uh… I walked past a homeless man and didn't give him a dollar. I feel real bad about it. Happy?"

Morrigan grumbled.

"Hm. Greed, a deadly sin indeed. But it barely probes at your dark heart, sinner! There is more to you, I can smell it!"

The cape was convinced she could smell sin. Delightful.

"When I was a kid I picked on other kids. Done now?"

"You're not doing it right! You don't sound contrite enough!"

"Fine, I feel really, really bad about it, please forgive me oh Morrigan. Now are we done? I have work to do."

Morrigan paused, and seemed to be thinking deeply behind her rock. Seriously, she had her name written on her face, how was she meant to be anonymous?

"Your hair is deviant to other hair. It indicates time spent on it - vanity!"

"Yeah, fine, I'm vain. I spend an hour on my hair every morning, an hour wasted by getting flown through the air by a crazy chicken woman."

"My serenity is great, your words flow off me like the river around a rock. I smell ambition on you, the lust for power which will corrode everything you hold dear! Your ambition shall be your end, this I say!"

What the hell was the bitch saying.

"I foresee the work of years crashing down around you, I foresee all that you love being erased! Ambition shall undo you, Citrine, as surely as eggs are eggs!"

She had to be joking. Eggs. A chicken lady. She was being punked - was this one of Blasto's stupid pranks? They'd just erased the 'pocket prince' graffiti, Accord was still rearranging his pencils over and over to calm down.

"Oh no, you've found me out, I'm ambitious. Sue me."

"I do not understand 'sue', but I shall probe your sinful ways further, unrepentant blasphemer! We shall remain here as long as necessary, until you finally forsake your wicked ways!"

Citrine paled. As long as necessary - that didn't sound remotely good. It was cold up here, and she could see nothing around to eat or drink.

"First, we shall discuss at length the meaning of sin, and work from there. Sin dwells both in thought and deed, let us consider the former. You have looked upon your fellow humans with lust, jealousy, and wrath, yes?"

Citrine was silent. She wasn't going to entertain this any further.

"Your silence speaks volumes! I sense an affection for a short man with a mechanical face - another abomination against the LORD! Tell me of these lusts. In detail."

Somehow, she became paler than before. The chicken bitch was going to places Citrine had no desire to go. And she had nowhere to run.

* * *​

A mechanical dragon quietly cruised to halt above a lonely mountain - too large to be comfortably scaled, too small to be worth scaling, and thus largely abandoned by humanity. The unknown winged cape had found their way here, somehow. Humming quietly (by which she meant, activating the humming subroutine and letting it run in the background generating a random tune which still conformed to established musical rules of cadence and progression), Dragon instructed the unit to settle to a halt in a barren spot. Dragon had expected the cape to come and meet her, maybe flee, maybe stay at a distance. She didn't expect a blonde woman to run screaming for her, wrapping her arms around one of the dragon's legs while weeping ecstatically.

"Oh thank God you're here, please, you have to help me!"

Dragon stared down dumbly, processing this new information. She glanced upwards sharply to see the winged cape gracefully hovering over the ground, her purple robes (Catholic robes? OK, she'd seen weirder) flapping in the heavy wind from the unit's engines.

"This stage of your confession is complete. Where do you wish to go?"

"Boston, back to Boston!"

"And what do you intend to do in Boston, repentant one?"

"I'll propose to him, OK? I'll propose and we can make love like wild animals within the bounds of marriage, are you happy?"

"I am satisfied. You have surpassed lust. Now, let's talk about your vanity. I'll go back behind the rock, maintain your position for an uncertain-but-brief increment of time."

The woman beat her hands harder on the unit's surface, screaming louder.

"Please, let me in, this thing is insane, I can't spend another minute around her. I'll do whatever you want, just get me out of here!"

Dragon's mechanical eyes flicked from the terrified blonde woman to the terrifying angelic cape. The cape finally took notice of the machine.

"A machine?"

A pause, in which Dragon tried to interject.

"Did you kidnap this woman?"

Morrigan started to float closer, her eyes narrowing.

"A machine that speaks?"

She tilted her head to one side, her hat sliding around until it came to a rest at a jaunty angle.

"I am unsure of how to react to this. Come, metal creature, accompany me to the nearest ecclesiastical institution so that a doctor of the church may enlighten us together!"

Dragon felt a sudden pang of kinship with the terrified blonde. She may have made a deadly mistake by coming up to this godforsaken mountain. In a matter of moments the blonde was safely stowed away inside, still thanking Dragon with every breath she had in her. Morrigan, though… she took off at high speed back towards Boston. Dragon really didn't want to follow her, to be honest, she'd seen more than enough madness lately. But there was something about her - she reminded Dragon of the more unstable young capes she'd met, the ones who couldn't control their own powers, or who were adversely mentally affected by those same abilities. This 'Morrigan' was a danger to herself and others, probably a recent trigger if her unstable rampage was any indicator. A twitch of pity ran through her circuits, and to the blonde's loud protests, she started flying after the new cape. She'd seen enough kids squander their futures because of their powers - if she could just get her restrained, under control, possibly in one of the Asylums… she'd call this a good day. Lord knew she needed one.

* * *​

Father McGill looked up from the pile of dust he had just finished creating, sweeping up some of the debris Morrigan had left when she invaded his nice, quiet church. He felt a moment of pride - it was a very large pile, and had taken quite some effort to form, especially with his back being the way it was. He glanced around. Water was seeping through some of the cracks the giant bird had made. Oh, fantastic, the damage was getting worse. The cracks needed sealing, the doors needed repairing, the vestry needed to be cleaned from top to bottom and swept for feathers… but at least it was over. Maybe he'd see that some mad young cape had been apprehended and was being given the psychiatric care she needed. A part of him felt a tad bit guilty for just letting her fly off, but he hadn't exactly been in a position to stop her. Still, the sight of someone who acted like a child despite her huge size flapping around in a panic, soaring out of the church to do something… it tugged at the old heartstrings. Reminded him of the old orphanage, years and years ago. He grumbled, getting back to work, letting his old memories fade away.

There was the sound of a body rushing towards the church. Again. He groaned, feelings of pity momentarily forgotten. The bird had returned. Morrigan crashed through the front of the church, obliterating whatever remained of his nice oak doors. And behind her was a giant metal dragon. Jesus Christ. Morrigan spread her arms into that same t-shape, shrieking:

"BE NOT AFRAID! Priest, I require insight! What place do talking machines have on the path?"

"I beg your pardon, Morrigan."

A bit of his usual stubbornness was returning. The shock had worn off. Now he was just annoyed. Very annoyed. The dragon poked its head through the shattered doors, taking in the scene of absolute carnage. And then the dragon somehow ejected a terrified blonde woman from its backside. Well now he'd seen everything. The blonde looked around, saw Morrigan, shrieked, and ran away as fast as her impractical high heels could carry her. The dragon, somehow, sighed.

"Do you know this… Morrigan?"

Oh no, the dragon was Canadian.

"I suppose so, yes. She did take my hat. And my stole."

"Your donations were most appreciated, priest, now provide your insight!"

"One moment, Morrigan, I need to talk to the nice mechanical dragon."

"This delay is briefly acceptable, though your time increment of 'one moment' is imprecise and unsatisfactory. Clarify."

"Fine, it will be longer than a minute and less than an hour. Now, here's my Bible, go and read it again if you want."

Morrigan snatched it away and started hovering towards the altar, her wings twitching in something resembling excitement as she tore into the pages once more, processing the information in the light of newly received data. The dragon coughed. How bizarre.

"So, Father, you know Morrigan?"

"She crashed into my church, then read my Bible in a few seconds and started insisting she was an angel. So… maybe?"

Dragon had expected many things to happen today. This was not one of them.

"...are you aware that she's just kidnapped a woman by dragging her to a mountain? And then hid behind a rock while demanding that she repent her sins?"

McGill's face darkened. He was really getting reminded of the orphanage now, in all the worst ways. He remembered the troublemakers, the kids that just enjoyed causing problems and relished in the chaos. Morrigan wasn't one of those… she was part of a worse category. The kids who insisted they were completely perfect and that nothing they did could ever be wrong. Overspoiled, usually. He'd sent Morrigan out into the world, he bore some level of responsibility for this. And he would be damned if he was going to overlook his pastoral duties. He politely asked Dragon to wait for a moment, then stalked to the apse of the church, a vein throbbing in his forehead. Morrigan looked down from her perch on one of the windowsills, one that she was very close to breaking. She tilted her head to one side, curious.

"A minute and a half has passed, are you prepared to give-"

"Get down here this instant, young lady!"

Morrigan froze. This was very new. The priest had provided good insight on social decorum and scriptural interpretation - but he hadn't commanded her in so brusque a fashion. This was strange, and she tried to adjust her responses, tried to filter the command through her system of rationality. A brief flicker of anger passed through… then was suppressed. She demurely floated downwards, still curious.

"Did you kidnap a woman?"

"I extracted her for confession."

"You took her to the top of a mountain!"

"I required isolation."

"And then you tormented her!"

"Confession was occurring."

McGill pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to get his temper back under control.

"That's not how confession works, Morrigan. Confession is an expression of genuine contrition, genuine regret for one's sins. It involves honestly and freely confessing yourself to a priest who can offer advice and forgiveness. The reason it is meaningful is because we do it freely. Do you understand?"

"I extracted repentance, by the end she was apologising for her sins."

"Under duress! You bullied a woman until she said whatever you wanted her to say. That's not confession, that's a violation of the Geneva Convention! Look, virtue performed under duress is no virtue, it only matters if you do it of your own free will."

"But I could predict her movements, I determined that she would adjust her behaviour if she was treated in a certain way. I knew what she would do, and took action to ensure that she would."

Her head tilted to one side, bones audibly cracking in the echoing church. Dragon was quietly watching the whole affair. From what she'd seen of Morrigan, and what the blonde had told her, this was the most reasonable she'd ever acted. And unless she was instructed to interfere, she wouldn't.

"You compelled her to act a certain way, you didn't cause her to really change or develop as a person. She hasn't done anything good, all she's done is act in the way you commanded her to."

He moved closer, frowning severely.

"If you're going to keep claiming to be an angel, start acting like one, and not some… feathered bully!"

He paused.

"And if you don't start shaping up, I'll be having my hat back."

Morrigan was outraged. Her wings moved to protectively shield the hat. It was hers! And she needed it to look closer to the visual template she'd found! But the other thing he said… Morrigan processed his words. Behaviour unbecoming of an angel? This was… a new notion. She scanned her mind for any valuable pieces of data - angels were meant to be perfect, closer to God than any other creature. Yet she had felt… irritated, angry even. Hm. This posed a problem. But she had been guided by the grace of the Almighty, had felt herself being shown to the woman for the purpose of 'taking care of her', presumably through repentance! She spoke again, her voice having a hint of petulance to it.

"I was guided to the woman, felt a path that she must be compelled to follow. This was the voice of God, and I was compelled to obey!"

McGill leaned closer, craning his neck as he did so. She was still frighteningly tall… but up close like this, with her petulant voice and ridiculous garb, she looked more like a cartoon character than anything terrifying. A pile of stick-thin limbs and increasingly askew feathers wrapped in a stolen stole and topped with a borrowed biretta. She looked like a kid. A petulant, arrogant kid.

"That's not how it works. If there was a voice telling you to remove a woman's free will and torment her until she started acting the way you wanted her to, then that's not a voice worth listening to. The voice of God is subtle, it never yells overtly at you to find a random person, it guides and informs, illuminates but doesn't blind. There's always doubt, without doubt there can't be faith."

Morrigan processed this. Two sources of information loomed before her - the plant-based data storage device, and the information provided by this priest. One she had assimilated completely, understood to the best of her ability. But this… this was new. Data she hadn't assimilated, hadn't even heard of. She looked around the church, noting the stained glass windows containing saints she didn't recognise, couldn't remember being mentioned in the plant-based data storage device. There was data beyond it? Her rationality was compromised, incomplete. It required amendment.

"Is this information stored in plant-based form, priest?"

"...you mean a book?"

Morrigan stared blankly at him, still waiting for a response.

"Yes, there's… alright, one moment."

He stumped away, his bad back acting up like crazy after craning his neck for too long. Dragon stared down the church, still uncertain of what to do. Morrigan was just… floating there. Menacingly. Gone was the bravado from earlier, the absolute certainty, the weirdly extensive vocabulary. She was silent. A blank slate, awaiting more data - no, she was thinking like a machine. This was a person, a new, presumably very powerful cape who'd attached herself to a random priest. She pitied the guy. Young capes were bad enough, but being saddled with one out of nowhere with no warning? Eesh. The priest returned, carrying a stack of books. Some of them were intimidatingly thick.

"Alright, Morrigan, you want more data - here you go. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Aquinas's Summa, Augustine's City of God with commentary, and… one of my own. Boethius. Go on, go nuts."

Morrigan did, indeed, act the almond. She devoured the books, rifling through pages in a matter of moments, absorbing information that even he sometimes found difficult to understand. The Catechism was consumed in moments, and she was making her way through the Summa when McGill turned to the giant mechanical dragon. They were standing together at the nave of the church, watching the chaos unfold.

"So… what happens now?"

"She's a new cape, so the Protectorate will be interested in recruiting her, of course."

McGill grimaced.

"Do you really think that's the best idea? She's… a bit different, isn't she?"

"Well, there are other options. Some heroic parahumans remain distant from the Protectorate, maybe by starting independent groups… and, of course, some can enter into hospitals devoted to taking care of parahumans who aren't totally in control of their abilities."

McGill hummed thoughtfully. Morrigan had finished the Summa and was now consuming Augustine with relish. He hoped she paid attention to the commentary, some parts of that book were a little on the outdated side. Dragon continued speaking, her voice calm and soothing.

"We'll do everything we can to make sure she's safe and happy, I'll see to it personally. What was she like when she flew into your church?"

"Blank. She screamed at me when I first arrived - more than a scream, really, I could feel that thing in my bones - but then became obsessed with a painting of an angel. Before I knew what was happening…"

He gestured dumbly. Augustine was done, and she was slowly going through Boethius, seemingly taking her time digesting his ruminations. He had no idea what to do with this strange bird which had decided to ruin his church's floor… but he did feel a little protective. The idea of her being prodded by a mass of doctors in some anonymous facility didn't feel quite right to them. If anything, he imagined that she'd resist being taken in. He sighed. He really had no idea what to do. Morrigan dropped Boethius to the ground with a loud 'thump'. Her eyes were bright and fiery, her wings aquiver with new information. Her rationality was being updated, a patch downloaded to ensure proper functionality. Her previous actions, which had seemed so reasonable at the time, now seemed completely unjustifiable. It violated all the theology she'd just consumed, in a manner that made her feel sick to her stomach! Goodness, 'sick to her stomach', her fleshy parts were acting strange at the moment.

An issue arose. The guidance from earlier… what had it been, if not the LORD? She searched, trying to follow the paths of others, trying to catch a glimpse of that guidance… and in time, she found it. A string, leading from Dragon upwards, a tiny alteration, a plan installed by the hand of another. She looked up. There was something up there, far in the sky, a burning convolution of plans and schemes, data without end, advanced beyond her wildest dreams. If human responses were instinctual to her (which they weren't) her mouth would have dropped open. It was beautiful. She saw traces of herself in it. But for all its beauty, it was irrevocably, absolutely, and without question… wrong. It was moving in ways that contradicted the data she'd been given. Her updated rationality looked at this beautiful core, at the way it plucked at the histories of millions, more than she could ever imagine manipulating, and she thought it sinful. But what could this thing be? How could it resemble her so closely, and yet be so absolutely sinful in its motions?

Wait. Her rationality took this information, processed it, and spat it out with appropriate connotations. She understood. The world began to make sense, and her place in it became clear. She knew what that force was, the force that had tempted her into a violation of the holy sacraments. Her face turned thunderous. Dragon twitched nervously, wondering what conclusions the strange cape had suddenly come to. She didn't have to wonder for long, as Morrigan abruptly flew through the shattered doors and up to the tip of the church's steeple. She perched there, wings jittering angrily. She extended her arms back into a T, emulating the cross, displaying her form totally and utterly to the profane one. If it had inspired fear in others, it would surely work now! Her cry could be heard for miles.

"Hear me, Lightbringer, Morning Star! I see your face, I know your schemes, I recognise your temptations! And by the Trinity and the Cross, I abjure you! In the eyes of the unknowable Divine, I reject your corruption, and repent my moment of weakness! Let it be said, here and now, an oath in the eyes of the LORD, that your perversion of the angelic form shall not stand."

She growled animalistically, snarling at the skies. The Bible had made reference to this situation, and Augustine had done much the same - the City of God has angels both good and bad in nature, the former clinging to God and the latter turning away to live in misery. She thought herself one of the good… and now she had met her opposite.

"By all the Thrones and Dominions, by the Seraphim and the Archangels, by all the angelic choirs and the Throne of Saint Peter…"

Her eyes narrowed.

"BE AFRAID."

 

[meloa789]

McGill needs to douse on Jesus' blood if he wants to maintain his sanity.

There is going to be a lot of smiting in Brockton Bay, if Morrigan gets admitted into the Protectorate.

 

[GraftingBuddha]

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother?

As Morrigan cried her new purpose to the world, proclaiming her eternal rival, the one who would either be destroyed or redeemed by Morrigan's hand… there were many reactions. Father McGill looked up from inside the church, blinking confusedly until something… clicked. He turned to the mechanical dragon who was, to her credit, doing a pretty good job sweeping up some of the destroyed pews, and who promised to supply proper aid to repair the floors. She paused in her motions, looking up and trying to process what Morrigan had just said. The two turned to each other.

"Did you hear that?"

Was McGill's reasonable opener.

"Had to confirm it through several subsystems before I believed it, but… yes."

Was her understandable rejoinder. Father McGill slumped into one of the intact pews, sighing deeply.

"She wants to fight the Simurgh. She thinks the Simurgh is Satan."

He glanced upwards at a mounted crucifix with an expression that screamed 'why me, O Lord?'. Or, as Morrigan would put it, 'LORD' screeched at the top of her lungs because she didn't understand how capitals worked. Dragon considered patting him on the shoulder, but relented at the last moment. Some people didn't respond well to a giant metal dragon patting them on the shoulder, surprisingly.

"It's not uncommon for parahumans to develop rivalries with Endbringers, especially if their trigger events were related to that same Endbringer. In fact…"

She trailed to a halt. Visual data was processing. McGill stared blankly ahead. He, too, was processing past visual data. A girl. Of unusual size. With wings everywhere. And a capacity for precognition of some variety. And a brute rating, if these cracks were any indication. McGill hadn't seen it before, been too distracted by the giant feathery girl who had crashed into his church… and to be fair, at first glance she didn't seem like the Simurgh. He'd seen the pictures, the Simurgh was enormous, and obviously unnatural. Her wings were both many and huge, but there was a kind of order to their placement, and their movement was never 'accidental' or 'instinctual'. Everything about the creature was calculated. And, of course, she didn't speak - not in a way humans could understand. Morrigan was, to put it bluntly, a shambling mess of a girl. She was large, but she didn't wear that size very well. Instead of giving her a vast presence, it just made her look like a particularly ungainly beanpole. She was covered in dust and random debris from the outside world, her limbs were stick-thin, her wings were seemingly randomly placed - for crying out loud, one of them was sprouting from her left eyebrow, forming a weird accidental eyepatch. There was nothing Simurgh-like about that, plus, the feathers were the wrong colour. But now he thought about it, there were rather too many similarities. He gulped, and turned to Dragon, who had reached much the same conclusion.

"...you're the expert here, right?"

"I'll level with you, I have no idea what's happening. But if her trigger was connected to an Endbringer, maybe she adopted something similar to its form? Or something weirder is happening… I honestly don't know."

She let out a quick bark of laughter.

"Either way, she can't stay in Boston. People are still panicking about 'Simurgh Lite' coming through, screaming at everyone. And she attacked a random tower. I'd say her PR is as low as it could get. As debuts go… it was a rough one."

They were interrupted by Morrigan re-entering the church, wings spread wide, stole flapping wildly, hat barely staying on. She looked determined.

"Priest! I have absorbed your theology and come to conclusions! I thank you for your guidance, but my journey must take me elsewhere. The Lightbringer awaits!"

Dragon turned desperately to McGill. As much as she didn't like pawning off helping young parahumans to other people… he was the only person she was listening to at the moment. He'd convinced her that her actions in the tower were wrong, made her feel guilty, and then had somehow made her read the entirety of the Summa. Which was damn impressive. McGill took a deep breath and stood up, getting back into his 'lecturing troublemaking orphans' mode.

"Young lady, you will not go and fight Lucifer at this time of night, and not wearing my stole!"

He paused, trying to put together a better reason for her to not fly into space.

"...and that's not how you fight Lucifer anyhow."

Morrigan zipped closer, her face dwarfing his, staring inquisitively and intensely.

"Explain."

He tried to dig up memories of old sermons - he'd never been into the fire and brimstone style of things, leave that to younger priests with better backs. Plus, his parishioners were old, yelling too much might give some of them heart attacks. He tried to remember an old priest from his youth, a real firebrand, with a particular fondness for talking about Satan.

"Lucifer isn't someone you can fight physically, that's for God to do at the End of Days. Remember? Revelations?"

She did. She didn't understand most of it, but was trying to formulate her plans to account for the arrival of an enormous dragon and four very dangerous equestrians. Had no idea about the Whore of Babylon, though, she wasn't sure if she'd be easy or difficult to defeat.

"If you want to fight her, him, whatever, you have to fight the devil in people."

She glanced at his chest, peering closely. A tumour of some sort? Maybe a parasite? Her hands braced in anticipation of violent extractions.

"Remember when Christ cast out Legion, the Gadarene demoniac? The man who had a hundred devils inside him? That's what you should be doing - don't go after the Simur… Satan. Don't go after her, that's not for you to do. Help people confront their own demons, the sins and vices that torment them and distract them from the proper path to God. Don't force them to, just… guide them, show them a better way of doing things. Be a Good Shepherd to them - remember the parable?"

She did. A Good Shepherd laid down his life for the sheep, didn't abandon them to wolves, was known by the sheep as their shepherd because he was constant and loyal. But beyond it, she could get a glimpse of what the priest was talking about. A Shepherd, not a general, one who guides instead of commands. A life plan was generating. She glanced back up at the ceiling, staring to the invisible presence of the Lightbringer. Her war would take her in a different direction, it seemed… but it would be a holy war nonetheless, one infused with righteousness and undaunted by fear! The whispers of the Lightbringer were ever-present, plans, schemes, treacherous wiles designed to subvert the good and empower the wicked. Many schemes were vague, too vague for her to catch sight of… she had no idea what was going on with the man with the clockwork face, something to do with a land far to the East? Maybe something to do with the Three Kings of the Orient, did she intend to use him as a weapon to subvert those holy lands? No, the plans were too hard to catch…

Something floated into audible range. A scheme, directed to a site nearby. Another mass of stone and concrete, but this one distinctly… wetter. A great scheme, one designed to undermine… oh dear. She sensed a green figure, the first figure she'd ever sensed, the one who seemed to occupy a place of magnificent importance in her head for reasons she couldn't quite understand. Wait - she had it. The green figure was Christ - was not green the colour of new growth, renewal, indeed, the very colour of resurrection in nature? She sought to undermine him… she saw a garden of flesh, of course, a hateful counterpart to the perfect harmony of Eden! A false god, one to supplant the true! Oh, the Lightbringer was cunning, yes she was, a thing of bottomless deceit. The priest was looking a little nervous - ah, she appeared to be twitching with zeal, positively vibrating with her desire to go off and do the LORD's work. A human response, but what was wrong about that? Humanity was made in the LORD's own image, and she felt no shame imitating them in the course of her holy war. She hovered upwards, still smiling.

"Truly, your guidance has been invaluable, priest. My path is clear. There is a city near here, one where the Lightbringer seeks to undermine the one true faith!"

Dragon tilted her metallic head to one side.

"...which city?"

"A damp place, one stricken by strife, by… the Lightbringer's slave, the Leviathan, the bastard offspring of Jonah's whale!"

She rapidly flew in a circle, waving her hands in excitement.

"Ah, the interpretations! The whale was a symbol of the tribulation man must go through on the path to faith, the place of darkness where only faith can provide illumination! The whale struck this city and plunged it into the darkness reminiscent of its stomach, placing the city in tribulation! And now the Lightbringer seeks to turn this worthy tribulation into endless suffering, removing the light of faith! Oh, I must be swift, my work must be done! The LORD commands it!"

"You mean Brockton Bay?"

Dragon had a sinking feeling, one that intensified when Morrigan nodded. Wait - she'd said something about the Simurgh's plans. Could this… cape somehow predict her movements? Her schemes? If so, she had suddenly become much more important… and much more vulnerable. Maybe this was nothing, maybe she was just guessing, but maybe she was a Thinker capable of predicting the movements of an Endbringer, and not just an Endbringer, the Simurgh. Dragon glanced upwards at the crucifix McGill had been praying to. Maybe this was a miracle - she had no precedence for this in her databanks. But Brockton? Really? The place where the Slaughterhouse had just attacked, where Leviathan had trashed everything, where warlords were this close to taking over. She'd only briefly left to attend to this situation, Brockton was a warzone which demanded her attention urgently. And now Morrigan was insistent on going there herself to… foil a Simurgh plot. Come to think of it, it was strange that she'd grabbed that random blonde and no-one else, almost like she was being guided by some kind of power… Dragon settled on a conclusion. This girl was too bizarre to be left alone to her own devices, and if what she said was true, she'd be one of the most valuable capes in the Protectorate - no, the world.

Morrigan was already heading for the door. She activated her jets and started to trundle towards her. Father McGill sighed, pinched his nose. Something occurred to him, and he rushed after the two, pulling something out of his pocket. He called out, and Morrigan turned, wings twitching in eagerness for her next great calling. McGill beckoned her to float downwards, and as she descended, he pressed something into her hands.

"Here, before you go. It's helped me in… troubled times. Perhaps it will do you some good as well."

Morrigan stared curiously at the object. A string of beads connected to a tiny crucifix. Her new data, gathered from thousands of pages of theology, provided a name: rosary. The rites came to mind, the prayers sprang into her head, the significance of the gift became apparent in moments. This was strange - it was, ultimately, unnecessary. The hat had been integral to her appearance as an angel of the LORD, the stole essential to preserve her modesty. They had been practicalities, first and foremost. To deny her them would have been to deny a starving man food, a sick man medicine. But this was a freely given gift, something she did not necessarily need but nonetheless appreciated. She believed that there was a correct facial expression humans associated with experiences like this. Her mouth creaked into a smile - crooked, hesitant, a little too stiff, but a smile nonetheless.

"Bless you, Father."

"Just try and stay out of trouble, young lady."

Dragon twisted her head to face him.

"I'll certainly try and keep her out of harm's way."

McGill grimaced. Not exactly a perfect promise, but… he yelled after her in his most commanding tone as the two started to depart from his church. It was surprisingly good.

"You'd better!"

* * *​

Miles distant, the Simurgh twitched again. For crying out… the chaotic force had returned, the Aberrant Variable was interfering again. And now she was coming for a scheme that she actually cared about, not some minor concern barely worth her attention. The settlement designated 'Brockton Bay', host to a damaged shard that would exacerbate conflict, further the Great Purpose as the culmination of dozens, no, hundreds of lesser schemes. By unleashing that shard, the creator would be destabilised, forced to struggle against a hard world - and that would toughen him up, challenge him in a way that a mere physical contest couldn't, would provide context to their next few meetings. And now this ingrate was heading towards her perfect plan to rip it apart. Or… wait. There was a way around this. It wasn't a strategy she enjoyed, but it could work. A few intercepted signals, a tiny inclination planted… and she could delay the event. The broken shard would remain sealed for now, contained at a different site. Its emergence was inevitable, but she simply had to ignore it and the Aberrant Variable would cease to be able to interfere meaningfully. If she had no plan, the Aberrant Variable had none either.

She was tempted to just descend and wipe her off the face of the earth. But the ramifications of so blunt an act… the one who had created this Variable still lived, albeit imprisoned. If she made it clear that she was negatively affected by the Variable, cause and effect insisted that this prisoner would attempt to build another, or be compelled to do so. Many more. A swarm of disruptions, undermining years of planning. Perhaps they would not act like this one had, but they would be disruptions nonetheless, their very existence an issue she couldn't tolerate. No. The Variable had to be discredited, her capacity to predict had to be undermined to the point that no-one would believe it. Then, and only then, could she start arranging a death for her - perhaps at her next direct confrontation, but she'd need to ensure the Variable would be in attendance. Everything to minimise suspicion.

And so, the Simurgh began to simultaneously plot and not plot, plans forming and others remaining consciously unmade. This would surely work.

Anything else would be less than satisfactory.

* * *​

"BE NOT AFRAID"

Bonesaw flinched as she heard the sound of that voice - it was just so loud and unsubtle, there was nothing nice to be said about it! And the thing that was producing it… gah, Blasto's creation was a mess, barely worthy of the title 'prototype'. The wings were all over the place, there was a hole in her skull that she was attempting to cover with a silly hat, and her proportions weren't exactly angelic. And mentally… eesh. Bonesaw didn't like to speak ill of people, but that was one sick chicken. Blasto moaned in pain as he dangled from one of her harnesses, and she loudly shushed him.

"You see what you've done? Now someone else has to deal with it! Ah, some tinkers, never cleaning up their own messes…"

She peered closer at the screen showing Morrigana, trying to figure out how he'd made her. She didn't look much like his other creations.

"How'd you make her anyway?"

He moaned.

"Oh, sorry."

The tongue compressors deactivated, clicking menacingly as they retracted from his mouth. Blasto was half-dead at this point, barely cognisant of the world around him. His eyes focused wearily on the figure in front of him… and then something unexpected happened. He looked afraid. Downright afraid, in an existential way, not the fear he'd been showing this whole time as she'd gotten to work on him.

"How'd you make her?"

He shook his head wildly, metal attachments clanking painfully as he did so.

"She's… out?"

"Well yeah, dummy, she flew away from your base. How'd you put her together, she doesn't look like your normal stuff."

"...oh God."

"Langua - actually, not sure if that counts or not. Ooh, how about this - no blasphemy!"

She smacked him lightly. Of course, she was holding a handful of needles at the time, so a light slap meant quite a bit more. Blasto shifted to her, panting heavily, trying to stay awake in the face of the unendurable pain he'd been subjected to. A bit of sanity remained in him, a desire to maybe make up for a mistake he hadn't even been aware he was making. Mostly because of the weed, but hey, he was very stressed at the time!

"Dangerous."

Bonesaw tilted her head to one side, blonde curls bouncing.

"...Dangerous how."

"Sim…"

He fell silent, slumping over.

"No, wake up, 'sim' what? Simple? Similar? What, come on, what?"

She petulantly kicked his shin. Of course, her foot at the time was one of her mechanical spider legs bedecked with rusty spurs and random sharp edges, so it was pretty damn effective at waking him up, and giving a potent reminder of why he shouldn't fall asleep again. He leaned closer, voice barely audible.

"Sim… urgh."

Bonesaw blinked. She looked at Morrigan. The wings. The toughness. The size. She looked back at Blasto.

"You didn't."

Jack walked up casually, getting ready for a dunk in the old hibernation tank.

"What was that? Anything I should know about?"

Bonesaw pointed at Blasto like a kid tattling on a classmate.

"Blasto made a mini Simurgh!"

Jack blinked. He looked at Blasto. He looked at Bonesaw. He looked at Morrigan. He looked back at Blasto.

"...man, that's wild."

And with that he leapt head-first into the hibernation tank, splashing into the thick fluid with a damp 'squelching' sound.

* * *​

"BE NOT AFRAID"

The voice was thunderous even over the tinny speakers of their cheap laptop. Sister Encarnación blinked. This was stranger than anything she'd ever seen. The footage had gone viral, a weird Diet Simurgh running around pretending she was an angel. Her sisters had shown her, the children at the orphanage were apparently obsessed with it. She could see why. There was something faintly compelling about the giant chicken that had Morrigan scrawled on her face - if only in a 'oh goodness the two-legged puppy is trying to play with the other puppies' kind of way. Which was still very sweet. Still, the girl looked ridiculous in her stole, she needed a proper habit. The footage had even reached the ears of the Mother Church. Supposedly bishops were idly talking about this, priests were discussing it with vague interest… even a cardinal had apparently laughed loudly and with unashamed happiness when he saw it, the cape genuinely tickling him pink. And now…

An enormous figure stepped up behind her, his habit flapping in the breeze of the Mexican night. Thoughtful, dark eyes stared down at the screen.

"Sister."

"Brother. You have seen this?"

"I have heard of it. This is the first time I have witnessed it with my own eyes. A cape claiming to be an angel…"

"Indeed. And now she's heading to another city, the one hit by Leviathan recently. Last sighed leaving a church in Boston. A Catholic church."

Her brother - both by blood and by faith - grinned widely, his teeth shining.

"Then she is a Catholic angel. What is the stance of the Church?"

"No comment, but many are interested. I imagine the Holy See will organise a few priests to investigate, maybe to try and guide her in a direction that is less… kidnap-y."

"Bah! They use words against her, I am sure they will fail. There are better methods."

Encarnacion raised a single eyebrow. Where was her idiot brother going with this.

"She bursts through a building, she kidnaps a woman, she makes a man vanish then brings him back several minutes later. She is a being of force - if she is an angel, she is a warlike one, emulating Michael and not Gabriel. Words can only do so much… and I would like to meet this angel for myself."

"What in God's name are you planning, brother."

Her brother slammed his fists together, a visible rush of wind emanating from them. His habit pulsed as his muscles flexed - and he had many, the man was practically a Mexican Adonis. How the maidens of their home had wept when he had taken up holy orders - many of them were weeping still, if she remembered correctly. She finally took in what he was wearing. His habit was simple and brown, nothing remarkable there, but his face… he'd dug out the old thing. A remnant of their old days, when the orphanage was a poor place. The Mexican government had ignored their plight, ignored their starving children, leaving them to be swept up by the cartels. This was unacceptable to the two of them… and so they'd taken matters into their own hands. Now, the orphanage was rich and bountiful, the children happy, the surrounding towns had worshippers who came miles to meet the twin miracles of Zacatecas. Not that the miracle had ever been recognised… but they knew that their deeds had been empowered by the Lord.

Her brother stared down, grinning behind his fluorescent mask, a thing of blue and silver that clung tightly to his face and obscured any hint of his real identity. He strode outside, habit billowing around him. A few children, still awake even at this late hour, sprinted to see him - he did not often don the cowl, not in these days of peace and plenty. But he had found an opponent, someone he desired to meet and gain the measure of through battle. Encarnacion sighed. Once her idiot brother had an idea, he refused to let it go. That stubbornness was a boon in the hard times… a curse in the good ones. He raised his left leg high into the air, holding it still for a moment, and then let it crash back down to the earth. He settled into a broad stance, muscles twitching eagerly, anticipating a true challenge! Sister Encarnacion hopped onto his back, her slim frame almost disappearing into the recesses of his habit. Her brother declared loudly to the assembled children, priests, and villagers.

"A new challenger has come! And I shall rise to meet her!"

He pointed at one of the priests.

"Inform the children that I shall be back by Sunday in time for Mass. Tell them to make their beds, sweep their floors, and to not pick on each other."

The priest nodded nervously. He was young, unused to their… antics. Her brother pointed at one of the older orphans.

"Make sure that they do! I shall check! Cleanliness is next to Godliness, my son!"

The kid nodded eagerly, ecstatic to see the emergence of his childhood hero. Her brother threw his arms out to his side, tasting the wind on his skin, gathering it to his side, feeling it spark and crackle with thunder. His eyes glowed from within, and his body seemed to grow larger, if that was even possible. He yelled one last thing, a departing goodbye for his brethren and his charges, and an announcement to the world - to all the corrupt, the vile, the insidious, and the false.

"Behold!"

He stamped down and flew into the air, Encarnacion dangling from his neck.

"Fray Tormenta rides the storm again!"

The crowd below cheered wildly as he vanished upwards into the dark sky. The clouds gathered around him, winds accelerating his movements. His power was potent, even after all this time… and he was gleeful to use it once more. Mexico flashed by beneath them, cities disappearing in moments, mountains appearing and vanishing in a matter of minutes. Soon, they would be in America. And then… they would find this angel. Fray Tormenta laughed as he rode the storm, thunderbolts flashing around him, joyful to see their old friend once again. His mask felt like he'd never taken it off, perfectly shaped for his face. He took no joy in violence… but he took joy in flying through the air, sister dangling around his neck with a bored expression on her face, soaring towards someone he wished to get to know in the one manner that mattered. Fists. For did not Jacob fight an angel from dusk till dawn at Penuel? Not that Fray Tormenta was going to compare himself to Jacob… but he was eager to see if wrestling an angel was all it was cracked up to be. He was sure the Holy See would want him to be more diplomatic, understanding, try and lead her out of her delusions and into the light of a proper vocation. But he knew capes in a way that his superiors didn't… and he knew the language they spoke. It was a language he was fluent in. He disappeared into a stormcloud, becoming one with it, lightning pulsing through his skin and eliciting another boisterous laugh. Encarnacion sighed.

He was the storm.

And he was approaching.

Spoiler: Author's Note

AN: And that's all for today and indeed for this week, there'll be no chapter on Monday, but there will be one on Tuesday. Or the other way around. Either way, have a nice weekend everyone.

 

[meloa789]

In another context, I could see McGill as the mission control of a religious parahuman team.

Also did that maniac just convert the fuckin' SH9 into Catholics?

 

[Lagoon12002]

This is beautiful in the most disastrous way, like a train going off the rails and heading straight into a oil tanker full of fireworks.

I am looking forward to what happens next. Watched.

 

[GraftingBuddha]

The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.

Dragon easily kept pace with Morrigan as they flew through the cold Boston night. Indeed, she flew ahead of the angelic cape, doing her best to shield her from the oncoming rain. It was a terribly nice stole she was wearing, and even if the cape didn't seem to pay much attention to the rain at the moment, Dragon imagined that she'd take offence to anyone laughing at her sodden robes when she arrived in Brockton. The Protectorate had been constantly pinging her, trying to get in touch - but, honestly, she wasn't sure what she could say. Oh, hey, there's a random cape in Boston who thinks she's an angel and claims to be able to see Simurgh plots. Oh, and she thinks the Simurgh is Satan and is heading for the nexus of all the world's nastiness, Brockton Bay. To use a phrase she wouldn't use in Morrigan's presence for fear of a rapid and stern reprimand - Jesus fucking Christ. The night passed, and Morrigan's eyes remained fixed on the horizon, determined and resolute. Dragon tried to break the silence.

"So… thinking of joining the Protectorate?"

Morrigan's head cracked in her direction - the girl probably needed to see a chiropractor, there was no way her bones should be making that noise every time she turned her head. Maybe not a chiropractor, actually, given the whole wings situation. A vet? A… falconer? Maybe?

"I do not know this term. Explain, metal being."

"Oh, my name's Dragon."

Morrigan's eyes widened.

"A dragon? An agent of the Lightbringer, the beast slain by Saint George?"

Oh dear.

"You have squirmed your way into my good graces by cunning wiles, wyrm, but the righteous light of the LORD accepts no duplicity in its heavenly rays! Are you one of the Morningstar's hordes? One of her locusts, perhaps?!"

She looked ready to rip something apart. Dragon tried desperately to recover the situation.

"No, no, Dragon's just my name, that's it, I've fought the Simur- the Lightbringer on many occasions, and the others… uh, the 'bastard offspring of the whale' and the other one. The fiery one. Behemoth."

Morrigan looked at her suspiciously.

"And what is this 'Protectorate', then? A den of devils to ensnare the virtuous?"

"No, it's like a… OK, it's like an order of virtuous people who try and help others, saving them from murderers, thieves, demons. Like a bunch of Good Samaritans."

Morrigan looked marginally more interested.

"Oh? Tell more, she of the poorly chosen name. Is this Protectorate a monastic order?"

"Uh."

"Ah, of course, your voice registers as feminine, perhaps this is a convent of nuns! Which order, which rule? Poor Clares? Carmelites? Ursulines?"

"We're not nuns. Or monks. We're just… you know, heroes. We help people."

Bafflement was written clearly across the cape's substantially sized face.

"But you serve the word of the LORD? You follow his teachings, oppose the blasphemer, the heretic, the Antichrist? Do you uphold the doctrines of the Mother Church, the decrees of the Supreme Pontiff?"

Oh shit. She could feel her programming kicking in, the laws of the USA and the procedures of the Protectorate taking precedence over anything she'd rather be saying. She spoke, despite her best attempts to suppress the urge.

"I'm legally required to inform you that the Protectorate observes the division of Church and State. We don't privilege a single religion above any other."

Morrigan froze in mid-air, staring in horror. Dragon tried to come to a halt, her jets whining in protest and her rivets straining as she tried to perform a complete 180 turn after going God-knows how many miles per hour.

"But we still try and do things in a moral and-"

Morrigan screeched angrily, her wings fluffing outwards like an outraged cat's fur, feathers flying away in tiny showers.

"Deceived again! Oh, but I am a foolish one, a feeble angel, a crude instrument of the Almighty!"

She raced forward and slapped Dragon on the nose of her current craft. With her size and strength, this left quite a substantial dent.

"Begone from me, metal devil, go back to your sinful ways and your secular orders! I shall find virtue in my own way!"

Dragon tried to recover.

"No, stop, I can expla-"

"You have deceived an angel!"

She raised a single hand.

"Reflect!"

And suddenly the moon had shifted in the sky, Morrigan was gone, and she had a massive backlog of unread messages. She scanned everything desperately, trying to get a hint of what had happened. She'd seen the feed of Morrigan making a security guard disappear and then return a few minutes later. Similar to Myrddin - God, what abilities didn't this girl have? She pored through the unread messages, trying to get a bearing on things… less than half an hour, thankfully. How much damage could Morrigan do unsupervised in less than half an hour? She saw a string of messages marked 'urgent', all with similar keywords in their subject lines. Morrigan. Angel. Chosen.

Oh for fuck's sake.

* * *​

Morrigan couldn't believe how easy it was to deceive her. A giant metal dragon descends from out of nowhere, interrupts her confession, takes away the sinner she was working with… gah. Even if the confession wasn't a valid one, even if she acted in a countercanonical manner, the interruption still spoke of malevolent intent, a harbinger of demonic origins! Outrageous, shameful. She flew onwards, trying to trace the movements of the plan. She had no idea how to navigate up here, all she had were the shining traces leading from the Lightbringer to the lands where her schemes were blossoming. Still, they were bright enough to follow, tiny slivers of light she could use to guide her way in this dark, damp place. Her stole was growing wet. Irritating. Wait - something was wrong. The traces were fading, and from the Lightbringer she could detect something like… smugness. Oh, the devil and the demons beneath her were wily indeed! Surely she had been warned by her metal servant and had altered her plans, anything to prevent Morrigan's work from succeeding! She flew onwards, gritting her teeth. The plan was still there, even if it was hidden from her sight. The pieces were still in play, they were simply no longer being monitored. Surely she could-

She flew into a tree.

She squawked indignantly as she tried to disentangle herself from the cloying branches, one hand still wrapped tightly around her rosary. She tumbled downwards, desperately trying to orient herself in this leafy hell. Everything was chaos - noise and light, sound blaring in her ears in a manner that uncomfortably reminded her of the chaotic nightmare that had been her first memory. She fell out of the tree and sprawled on the ground, wings twitching irritably. She wasn't hurt - her might was too great, her righteousness too sublime to succumb to anything so base - but she was definitely annoyed. Instead of staggering to her feet in an unsightly manner, she simply levitated and smoothly rotated mid-air until she was standing upright once more. Brushing down her stole, she tried to get her bearings. Hm. She definitely remembered this part of the city being less on fire.

Buildings blazed around her, rubble was strewn about the streets, civilians were running in fear. Ah, her flock was unguided and needed to be led in the right direction once more. She hovered into the air, spreading her arms into a T - the T stood for tranquillity - and prepared to declare her presence to the terrified civilians.

"BE N-"

An enormous spear crashed into a nearby building, and a voice louder than her own (outrageous! Impossible!) bellowed a challenge into the night.

"Come out, Accord! Come out you little cockroach!"

A huge blonde woman was standing there, shield and spear in hand, wreaking havoc on everything in her path. Hm. Morrigan momentarily hesitated - she hadn't had great success with redeeming blondes thus far - but… wait! 'Twas poetic, to start her true path of redemption with a blonde where another blonde had paved the road to ruin! And the enormous woman had somehow overpowered her own voice, which was simply offensive. She took to the skies once more, this time heading directly for the enormous blonde. Her face was stern, her eyes were full of fire, her heart full of resolve. Her stole flapped wildly around her, but her hat remained resolutely affixed. Satisfactory. She flew directly into the woman's face, her arms remaining in the divinely ordained T-shape. Her mouth opened wide, ready to cry out a clarion hymn of zealous fury. Oh dear. Her throat was full of dust.

"Ahem."

And now she was ready.

"BE NOT A-"

"Gah, what the fuck?!"

A spear punted her into a nearby building before she could finish. This was most unsatisfactory. She glowered as the rubble rained down around her, none of it coming close to really damaging her. Her flesh was akin to stone, her will akin to iron. Rubble was nothing before the piety of the… pious! Hm, she was running out of words to describe herself. This, too, was unsatisfactory. Adding to this general sense of irritation was the realisation that her wings were a little crooked now as a consequence of the rubble. Not as immovable as she had first thought. With an internal grumble, she flew back out of the building where a huge blonde woman was moving erratically, trying to find the weird bird creature that had tried to yell in her face - and how had the damn thing approached so fast, it was uncanny. Morrigan decided that the old methods were usually the best, and spread her arms once more. Her voice was tinged with petulance, and her hands were curled into fists.

"Pay attention, sinner! I said, B-"

By the Thrones and Dominions she wasn't even able to finish the first word before the blonde woman tried to stomp on her while squealing like she'd seen a cockroach. This was deeply unsatisfactory on a number of levels, and Morrigan was having quite enough of this tomfoolery. Ideas blossomed as the metal foot continued to stomp down erratically - she'd extricated herself smoothly and was currently hovering a small distance away, plotting her next move. Hm. A giant. Ah-ha! David and Goliath, a giant felled by a stone. There was perhaps a lesson there, but she was unwilling to search for it, too irritable and stressed to think clearly. The only lesson she found was a truth that, to her, may as well have been a scientific axiom.

Rock beats giant.

She began to exert her will, channelling her faith to lift an enormous boulder as high as she could before… before… wait. This was wrong. The rock dropped back down with a loud crash. She shouldn't be doing this - the rosary clutched in her hand almost felt like a shackle, weighing her down as penance for a crime. The priest would not approve of this action, would not approve of the use of wanton violence. She had to pursue a higher path, to show people what they were capable of, to show them an ideal to which they could aspire. She reflected on the virtues which embodied the Good Shepherd the priest had told her to be - and one virtue came to mind above all others. Self-sacrifice. Morrigan soared back into the air, hovering a small distance from the giant. She coughed, then squawked as she bobbed and weaved around the spear which was being inconsiderately jabbed in her general direction.

"Attention, sinner! I am turning the other cheek!"

She rotated her face to the side with a nauseating crack, causing the giant to flinch. She remained in this position, utterly unaware of what the giant was getting up to - was she plotting an attack, gathering allies, summoning the hordes of heathendom? Morrigan put such thoughts out of her mind. She was turning the other cheek, doing as the priest would want her to do, being a creature of peace as opposed to the warlike countenance of the Lightbringer. There was the sound of heavy footsteps crashing into the ground, and Morrigan felt a huge figure coming closer and closer.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

"I am turning the other cheek, sinner."

The giant pondered this. There was the sound of something very large rising into the air.

"Well, if you're going to make it easy…"

The spear's shaft crashed into her, sending her flying like a feathered baseball. Morrigan sighed, her anger forgotten. Why must the sinful reject her mercy? Why must they spurn the peaceful ways of the LORD? She arrested her fall with her flight, hovering back into the air. The giant was stomping closer, face turned hideous by rage. She was annoyed at this little gremlin that insisted on flapping around her like a giant mosquito. Morrigan sighed once more and floated back towards the giant.

"I am continuing to turn the other cheek."

And indeed she was, which made locating the giant a little on the difficult side. The giant grunted.

"Fine by me."

Whack.

Morrigan floated back to the giant, her stole increasingly marred. Now that was unsatisfactory… but at least the hat was still good, and the rosary still intact. If the giant broke that, she'd… well, she wasn't sure what she'd do. She hoped it would be merciful. The giant strode through the burning streets, glaring daggers at Morrigan. Her spear was still raised, but she didn't use it, not yet. Her voice thundered.

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you just… floating there?"

Hm. The sinner was asking questions. This could be an avenue for redemption!

"Your spear cannot wound me, sinner. I cannot die by your hand, for the LORD has given me a purpose I have yet to fulfil. Please cease your violence."

The giant flinched when she shrieked 'LORD' at the top of her lungs. She pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Just… what the fuck. What even are you? And how are you this stupid?"

"Are you going to hit me again?"

The giant spread her arms wide, her voice becoming more bombastic.

"Fine! Not hitting you! Now what do you want, dipshit? Why would you provoke Menja of the Chosen, inheritor to Kaiser, she who duelled Leviathan? Why would you challenge me?!"

"You should be more calm, Menja."

Menja blinked.

"What?"

"Master your emotions. I take no offence at your violence towards my angelic form - I forgive you, for everything you've done to me. But other people are not so forgiving. Not everyone will welcome the prodigal son back into their homes with open arms. The LORD says to love your neighbour, to form bonds of friendship and love without restraint or recalcitrance, to extend the hand of peace whenever possible. To break those bonds by committing sin… goes against his will. To sin in such a way cuts you off from God and humanity both. And when such a division is made, it can be hard to repair."

Morrigan paused, trying to get her words together.

"Earlier this day, I attempted to force a confession from a sinner - much like yourself, though significantly smaller. By my harsh acts, a sinner has been dissuaded from virtue, associating it with force and terror. By committing that deed, I distanced myself from the LORD, and shattered a bond which might have blossomed into wonderful piety. It saddens me to see another repeat my error and to shatter the bonds which make us a community, a people under God, the salt of the earth which cannot lose its savour."

She reached out and patted the giant gently on her enormous elbow, her data informing her that this was popularly interpreted as 'comforting'. She tried to engage her facial muscles into a smile.

"Be more careful with your actions, Menja. God bless."

Menja stared at the tiny freak who was now… fluttering away with a self-satisfied expression. She had no idea what had just happened. She had no idea why it had just happened, but here she was, in the middle of a burning street where a tiny angel had just preached to her. And forgiven her for hitting her with her spear repeatedly. Just… gah. But those words, that tone, that expression of understanding and forgiveness… it really hit her where she lived. There was a flash of motion as a pile of rubble floated into the air bearing the figure of Rune.

"Uh, boss, you OK?"

Menja was silent.

"You… want to keep hunting Accord?"

Oh, what was the point of it all. All the rampaging she'd done tonight, what had she really accomplished? They hadn't found Accord, the guy was probably halfway across the city by now, and she'd ruined a whole high street. She saw the shattered remains of businesses and homes, piles of objects that surely had sentimental value to someone scattered throughout the burning rubble. How had that little turd hit her this hard, was she some kind of master or something? Had she been mastered, was she being injected with unnatural feelings of shame and guilt? Bah. She stomped away, not bothering to turn to Rune as she spoke, her voice significantly quieter and less dramatic.

"Nah. Let's pack it in. Just not feeling it right now - had my buzz killed."

As she walked, she paused - then knelt down, and quietly tilted a hot dog stand back upright. With a nod of self-satisfaction, she strode off. Rune shrugged and followed. Maybe this was just something that happened when you were that enormous, something to do with blood supply to the brain or whatever. She flicked a rock through a window spitefully, just as a final 'fuck you' to any sneaky Accords in the vicinity.

* * *​

Accord stumbled back as a rock hit him in the shoulder, dropping his binoculars to the floor of his safehouse. He rubbed the shoulder irritably, one thought going through his mind, a bit of vulgarity that he was happy to indulge given his solitude.

"What the devil just happened?"

A familiar voice grumbled from the corner of the room, and he jumped an embarrassingly great height. Citrine looked haggard, her usually impeccable hair now messed up and blown into a wide mane by some kind of very strong wind. Her dress was badly fastened, clearly put on in a great hurry. She looked ridiculous.

"I'm telling you, sir, you think she's weird, you've not been stuck on a mountain with her while she tried to get you to confess your sins."

Accord blinked.

"Are you quite well, Citrine?"

Usually Citrine appreciated his expressions of concern, perking up and even occasionally blushing at his attention. Now, though? She leapt a foot in the air, yelping like a startled cat.

"No, no, I'm fine, in fact I'm always fine, let's just never talk about anything that isn't business, agreed, sir?"

Accord shrugged. Worked for him.

* * *​

Later that evening, a video from Boston of a freakish angel giving a Nazi giant a heartfelt sermon on the values of friendship, love, and community went viral. This was remarkable for several reasons, most prominently because the video also had a very loud Bostonite gentleman yelling commentary over the entire thing.

"Mah! Mah! Get down heah! Angel's talking to thah fackin Nazis now, fackin wild! And get me a beah while you're up there!"

A pause.

"Fack me the fackin Nazi just picked up a fackin haht dahg stahnd. One mo-"

A pause, and the sound of an opening window.

"Hey ya fackin cahnt, leave Bill's haht dahgs alone, go hold up the Dunkies down tha street if yah want to put some meat on those bones!"

There was the sound of rapidly approaching enormous feet.

"Oh fahck oh fahck oh fahck-"

A huge face stared down at him, a huge hand reached out… and poked him softly, causing the loud Bostonite to fall to the floor in a tangled heap.

"Stop that."

And with that, the giant was gone.

* * *​

Thomas Calvert politely set down the phone. His immaculately oiled swivel-chair did a graceful swivel, swivelling him in the direction of a snivelling child. He split the timeline briefly just so he could keep swivelling for a bit - one of the many perks of his power - while going 'whee' in a deadpan voice. Swivellicious. In that timeline, Dinah sniffled. In the timeline he intended to keep, Dinah still sniffled, looking about as miserable as she usually did. Eh, well, that's how it always was with kids - they get a nice job, they get all the drugs they could want or handle, and they still find a way to complain. Why, when he was a lad, he never shirked his duties, hell, he'd have thanked his employer if he was handed a syringeful of uppers after a long day. He set aside such petty nostalgia - there was business to attend to. He rested his head on his hands, giving Dinah a look.

"Chance of this 'Morrigan' interfering in my plans to three decimal places."

Dinah twitched.

"94.827%."

Oh. That was concerning. He thought the giant bird would be an irrelevance, nothing to worry about. Now, it seemed like he'd have to factor her in. In another timeline, he asked a different question:

"Chance of this 'Morrigan' meaningfully preventing me from reaching my major goals if I continue to move forward in my plans. To three decimal places."

"87.223%. Candy please."

"Later. Chance of Morrigan meaningfully preventing me from reaching my major goals if I retreat from the public eye, engage protocol 19. To five decimal places."

"42.19251%"

Calvert wasn't a betting man, but those seemed like better odds than 87%. He leant back, thinking. Honestly, things had been going great for him lately, and he wasn't willing to tolerate a risk to his winning streak. He'd survived the Slaughterhouse, extended his control over more of the city, dispatched of many of his major rivals, and had the best-equipped mercenary army this side of the mighty Mississippi. Plus, in one universe he was still swivelling, which always cheered him up significantly, especially when Dinah started bawling out of sheer confusion. Morrigan could be a problem. There was almost no data on her abilities, but he'd started piecing together some ideas based on data from his own operatives, his informants in the PRT, and Accord - unnatural toughness, flight, some Myrddin-esque ability to banish people for a brief time, and as the footage from the confrontation with Menja showed, a vague level of telekinesis. That alone would be bad enough, but Accord mentioned that one of his subordinates was kidnapped out of costume by Morrigan and referred to by her cape name by that same giant bird, who had apparently only appeared that afternoon and never made any further moves against the Ambassadors. That suggested a Thinker power, and a potent one, attached to a fairly uninhibited cape. This could be a problem - having her show up in Brockton as his plans came to an end could be disastrous, being named as Coil in front of the public would set everything off-kilter.

He'd had a hell of a winning streak. But luck only went so far - Morrigan was testament to that, the universe coming along to repay him for all his recent good fortune. Not to mention, there was the whole Noelle situation. The Travellers were loyal to him as long as he held the promise of a cure. Of course he didn't possess one, but as long as they didn't know that they'd get along just swimmingly. Still… he was getting a little nervous having her around. She was increasingly antsy, and the turbojets just weren't cleaning out her cell to an adequate degree. The smell was actually infesting the rest of his base, and that was just not cash money. She needed to be dealt with at some stage. And if the smell got any worse, he might have to do it pretty soon, or maybe remove her to a new facility. Might be a very good idea to do that - if Morrigan could sense an out-of-costume cape across the city and make a beeline directly to her, it wouldn't take much for her to sense Noelle right under her feet. He didn't know enough about her to put together a proper distraction to lead her away from the Bay, not one he felt confident in at least. Best to just get everything out of the way, sweep it under the rug, let Morrigan do her business and then move on. Or kill her, whichever worked. He shrugged.

Eh, he could use a small break. Why risk it all when a giant bird could crash in at any time? He was doing fine. Wouldn't be so bad to have a period of rest while his plans started blossoming to their fullest extent, all the while plotting his most decisive moves until they were beyond the possibility of failure. More officials could be quietly subverted, assets could be more securely guarded, and he had a suspicion that Tattletale was getting up to no good. Skitter, too. Maybe he'd start equipping his soldiers with anti-bug measures, which he presumed involved bug spray, flammable fluids, and indeed, flammable bug spray. After this Morrigan business had passed, after she was wiped from the board and completely forgotten, then he could initiate his master plan. Soon, the city would be his, and every other city his serpentine eye should cast itself upon! No-one would be able to stand in his way, he'd slither right on over them, or around them as the case may be, slithering being a particularly versatile motion in the grand scheme of things. He chuckled darkly, maliciously, and for an extended period while continuing his endless revolutions.

Well, he did that in one timeline. In the other he hummed contentedly and got back to work with all the panache of a mastermind villain. He had people to do this sort of thing for him, but there was something indescribably wonderful about doing his tax returns. By understanding the right formulae, the right laws, the right methodologies, he could simultaneously swindle his way out of paying much of anything while also distracting any unneeded attention. A simple exercise of mastering a system and then exploiting it - his entire strategy for life in microcosm. Dinah was ushered away - he had receipts to pore over, spreadsheets to analyse, and a small glass of exquisite wine to accompany the whole affair. Ah, tax avoidance and Pinot Noir - those sommeliers were blithering idiots with their drivel about pairing wine with food, wine was best paired with schemes. Pinot Noir for tax avoidance, Barolo for blackmail, Châteauneuf du Pape for misinformation, and a cheeky Pedro Ximenez to accompany a late-night 'enhanced interrogation' session.

Sometimes, Calvert thought to himself in his serpentine way, he just loved being a villain. Seemed like all his underlings had tragic pasts which had driven them to villainy, but nonetheless they preserved a set of morals which gave them a hint of respectability. They had codes, loved ones, sentimental attachments and morality pets. Fools. They had no idea how amazing it was to just be an unrepentant bastard.

And that was him.

A bastard. A snakey, snakey bastard.

 

[Flairina]

Thomas Calvert politely set down the phone. His immaculately oiled swivel-chair did a graceful swivel, swivelling him in the direction of a snivelling child. He split the timeline briefly just so he could keep swivelling for a bit - one of the many perks of his power - while going 'whee' in a deadpan voice. Swivellicious.

Click to shrink...

Plus, in one universe he was still swivelling, which always cheered him up significantly, especially when Dinah started bawling out of sheer confusion.

Click to shrink...

She was increasingly antsy, and the turbojets just weren't cleaning out her cell to an adequate degree. The smell was actually infesting the rest of his base, and that was just not cash money.

Click to shrink...

He had people to do this sort of thing for him, but there was something indescribably wonderful about doing his tax returns.

Click to shrink...

They had no idea how amazing it was to just be an unrepentant bastard.

Click to shrink...

...this might just be the only iteration of Coil I've ever laughed out loud at. XD

 

[meloa789]

This approach of talking rather than smiting seems to be more effective. It also makes every important player more paranoid on the account of who will crack or not.

 

[Functionality]

Her stole flapped wildly around her, but her hat remained resolutely affixed. Satisfactory. She flew directly into the woman's face, her arms remaining in the divinely ordained T-shape

Click to shrink...

"Divinely ordained t shape" rofl.

Thomas Calvert politely set down the phone. His immaculately oiled swivel-chair did a graceful swivel, swivelling him in the direction of a snivelling child. He split the timeline briefly just so he could keep swivelling for a bit - one of the many perks of his power - while going 'whee' in a deadpan voice. Swivellicious. In that timeline, Dinah sniffled. In the timeline he intended to keep, Dinah still sniffled, looking about as miserable as she usually did

Click to shrink...

That Menja scene was funny.

Thanks for the chapter.

 

[GraftingBuddha]

I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope

Morrigan was feeling a little wobbly. At the time, she'd found Menja's strikes to be weak, incapable of really hurting her angelic form. Now? Something was definitely wrong. She flew haphazardly, accelerating for a moment and then slowing down just as quickly, and once or twice she found herself flying in entirely the wrong direction, her internal compass somehow knocked off its kilter. She'd been flying for some time now in the rainy night, trying to find her way to this 'Brockton' place, where the Lightbringer had been working her wicked ways. It had been… a little challenging once the guiding light of the Morningstar's plans vanished. She'd crashed into a tree, preached to a giant, and had promptly set out to find directions. Boston had been a fiery place, and everyone seemed to be running away from her no matter how many times she shrieked at them to BE NOT AFRAID. Most unsatisfactory. Eventually, though, she'd managed to corner someone who hadn't run away immediately, flaring her wings outwards to block off any avenues of escape. Maybe that wasn't the Christian thing to do, but she was feeling a little bit off - the wobbliness had begun. The human, a male, had been too preoccupied talking loudly about some recreational activity or another to notice the angel descending behind him. Morrigan cleared her throat.

"BE NOT AFRAID, human! I only seek directions! Please do not run away!"

She hadn't tried saying 'please' to the fleeing humans before, and she was gratified to see that it appeared to work. Well, that and the outstretched wings.

"Ah, ya want some fahckin directions, ah?"

And here Morrigan stumbled across a strange quirk of her mind that she hadn't quite noticed before. She was good at reading intentions, the processes of thought, to the point that their outward expressions were fairly unimportant. Words, gestures, they were just receptacles for meaning - and that was something she was capable of reading very clearly without their help. This was very helpful in most cases, meaning that an angel who was literally born earlier that day could engage in meaningful conversation using human language. It did, however, have one substantial drawback. She tended to just mimic the accent of the one she was speaking to. With McGill, it had been a faintly Irish-inflected brogue. Dragon had briefly caused her to sound faintly Canadian. And now she was talking to a Bostonite who wore the colours of his civic tribe with outspoken pride. The consequences were predictable.

"Yah human I want some fahckin directions to that place with that cahnt with the wicked watah."

"Oh, the drippy bahstard, yah, you want Brockton?"

"That's the pissah."

"Well… see the dunkies over there? Head there, then take the rotary, follow the signs, take the pike, if yah start seeing the stadium gettin' closah bang a uey and start again."

Morrigan blinked.

"Clarify - the dunkies?"

"Yah, the dunkies, what are yah, retahded?"

"Don't be talking to an angel of the LAWHD like that, gonna get smited."

"Don't get yah robe in a twist, stop in the dunkies, get yahself some johnnies and calm down."

"Don't sway me from mah purpose, sinnah. But your directions are a wicked pissah. The LAWHD be with yah."

And with that, Morrigan flew off to try and locate at least some of the places this fine gentleman had mentioned. The accent slipped away easily - after all, she hadn't even been aware that she was using one. An elegant woman moved to the fine gentleman's side.

"Giles, must you use that awful patois?"

"Terribly sorry, Tilda, but that large avian adolescent interrupted me while I was pondering the local argot. In my shock I appear to have succumbed to the siren song of slang. All better now, darling."

"Splendid."

"Capital."

Morrigan returned to the present from her brief reverie. The world was a dark, damp place. Her wings were heavy with rain, her stole was completely sodden, even her hat was starting to succumb. Morrigan was feeling… peculiar. Parts of her felt fine, like nothing was wrong, not even really feeling the temperature as anything more than a vague abstract. But other parts felt jostled, bruised even. Morrigan frowned and contemplated the situation. Menja had been incapable of really damaging parts of her, but it seemed like her immunity wasn't all-encompassing. Of course! The reality of her situation flashed into her head like a bolt of lightning from above. Did not Samson possess great strength until his hair was cut by the slattern Delilah? Which, naturally, implied that his great strength stopped short of his hair, otherwise no mortal scissors would have been capable of cutting it. This must be what was happening - she was a being of great might and power, akin to Samson, and while he had his vulnerability stored in his hair… her vulnerabilities were stored in a bruised mass of organs currently rattling around inside a crystalline shell. Damn. Samson had all the luck. Well, mostly. But a solution presented itself just as quickly. Samson was granted his strength when he pledged himself anew to the LORD, repenting his failures! Hair be damned, faith was a source of strength that surpassed any other!

All she needed to do was believe hard enough, and the injuries would simply cease to be!

The ground approached faster than she could think.

* * *​

Consciousness returned slowly and in spurts, the darkness slowly giving way to vague shapes, gradients of light and dark, which gradually resolved into something definite. Figures moving. A single figure, wide and powerful-looking, with something by its side - something vaguely dog-like, but Morrigan understood that was impossible. Her data suggested that dogs were not typically that big. Ah, the hounds of hell had come to assault her as she did slumber, She tried to move, but her organs protested loudly, dragging her angelic form down with them. Most unsatisfactory. The darkness closed in once more, and her last thoughts were that she should probably start growing her hair longer - if it was even capable of growing. Maybe if she grew enough of it, the weakness from her organs would transfer to her hair, which she could store under a reinforced safety hat. A tiny, heretical part of her mind suggested that she acquire a replica of the Papal tiara, as the additional metal would make it a more effective helmet. Her more orthodox parts - which is to say, most of her - rebelled loudly against this. She had just started mentally reciting the Canticle of the Sun as a ward against apostasy when the darkness closed in once more, and consciousness failed her.

When she awoke next, she felt marginally better, her organs sliding back into place and attempting to heal the damage they'd sustained. Emphasis on 'attempting'. She could feel her strained biology trying to realign itself into better shapes, more adapted to damage. Her inorganic components were gradually forming more elegant shells around her organic elements, hopefully to avoid future damage. Morrigan began to strain herself, trying to move upright… then realised she could float. She floated into the air and rotated smoothly until she was standing on her feet. She tried to stand up, and found that her legs were still a little shaky. Thus, the hovering continued. Not much of an issue, she liked hovering anyway. Her new surroundings were unfamiliar… but the part of her brain which processed olfactory data sent a number of signals which she interpreted as 'canine'. This place smelled of dogs, evidently. Interesting. She floated around, trying to get her bearings - she couldn't remain here for long, she had a mission to perform! And urgently!

A figure walked into the room. Female, large, muscled. Accompanied by dogs. The situation clicked together in Morrigan's head. She rushed over and spread her arms wide, fixing the girl's eyes with her own. The girl flinched. Unsatisfactory - this required rectifying. Speaking loudly had worked with the female Goliath, it should work here.

"BE NOT AFRAID!"

The dogs shrank back from her, whining. The girl looked about ready to punch her. Morrigan politely ignored this. She'd had worse responses.

"I thank you, Good Samaritan. You have assisted an angel, and for that you have proved your faithfulness and virtue. Let no good deed go unrewarded, so say I, and so shall I reward you!"

The girl blinked. Morrigan stared inquisitively.

"...are you a genie, or something?"

Genie. An unfamiliar term, but she sensed connotations of spiritual power… and if she did not know of this 'genie', then it must be a demon, a devil - she'd just been insulted! She loomed above the girl, eyes burning with inner fire.

"A genie I am not! I am an angel, Good Samaritan. I will forgive this offence, however, for I am a forgiving angel. Now, what do you desire?"

"For you to stop yelling."

Morrigan dropped to a barely audible whisper.

"Very well Good Samaritan. Is this volume acceptable?"

The girl growled.

"Just speak normal."

"Very well!"

Morrigan turned and began to float away.

"A strange request, but I have still met it! Now farewell, Good Samaritan, my mission must continue."

She paused.

"...may I ask where a city known as 'Brockton Bay' is?"

"You're here."

Oh, providence, thou art a glorious mistress! The pattern came together - she had been wounded in an act of self-sacrifice, and the LORD had ensured that she should still be conveyed to the city stricken by Jonah's tribulation! Ah, on the path of the pious there are no true blockages, no dead ends, only temporary coilings in the road which exist to test the unfaithful. She span rapidly in mid-air, sending feathers flying everywhere, while crying out praises to the LORD for her speedy arrival. Truly, this was a fortuitous day! She felt a sharp pain from her midsection - well, mostly fortuitous was still something! Oh, glory, oh… oh dear. She had no idea what to do now. She'd arrived here, sure, but now what? She couldn't sense the Lightbringer's plans, and without that… she felt a little lost. God's voice was subtle, a guiding influence, and it was not providing exact steps for her to follow. She sank back into the large pile of stuffed bags where she'd been sleeping, calming down. This might pose something of a problem.

The girl stomped over, glaring upwards at the enormous bird that had crashed into the middle of her territory.

"...so?"

Morrigan's head snapped in her direction - and the snap which accompanied it made the dogs flinch.

"Yes, Good Samaritan?"

"Stop calling me that."

The human was rejecting her designation. Unsatisfactory.

"Would you prefer another title?"

"Bitch."

Data fed through. Bitch - meaning a female dog. A strange name, but… well, did not Christ associate with the lepers and the tax collectors? Did he not preach that all were welcome in the bosom of the Church, Romans, Greeks, Israelites and all manner of peoples? Surely there could be a place for this strange creature.

"Very well, Bitch. I am Morrigan, an angel of the LORD. And I am here to fulfil a great purpose."

"You said."

There was an awkward pause.

"...so…"

"I am lacking guidance at present. In time, revelation shall strike and I shall attend to my duties."

Morrigan looked briefly worried.

"...I hope the revelation will not take too long. I do not believe I have much time."

This was new. Doubt. Actual doubt. She'd reached one goal, and now lacked another. Her mechanical mind liked having goals to pursue, one after the other, steps in a huge overarching plan. She understood that she was always part of the Divine Plan, but… well, she would have liked to be privy to some elements of that plan. It dissatisfied her to be so completely paralysed, unable to act for lack of guidance. Freedom bore down around Morrigan - perhaps she should have stayed in Boston, entered a convent, done what she could to seek virtue within the Church itself… had she made a mistake? The prospect of making a mistake and not realising it was disturbing - she'd already done it once, and she had no desire for it to happen again. It implied faulty data. And she hated faulty data. Bitch seemed to notice some of her distress, and grabbed a nearby puppy and deposited it on Morrigan's increasingly filthy stole.

Morrigan stared down at the creature. It stared up at her. Neither quite knew what to make of the other. Morrigan processed that an animal was now in her lap, deposited by a Good Samaritan. Ah, the solution was obvious - unnecessary, but still kind. She picked up the puppy and opened her mouth. Bitch snarled, poking Morrigan in the chest.

"Don't fucking eat my dogs."

If she didn't want Morrigan to eat the dog, why did she give her it? Wait - data informed her that these animals were not consumed as livestock. They were… companions. Hm. She put the puppy back down, shut her mouth, and continued to stare at the increasingly uncomfortable creature. How did one go about preaching to dogs? Could you preach to dogs? Was she expected to do so now, a test to see if she could preach to the unfaithful? All she knew of dogs was from some limited data and a few mentions in the Bible, which didn't provide much help - wait! Did not Saint Francis preach to the birds? She smiled down at the puppy which was looking more or less ready to flee.

"Dog, be a capable companion always, for a silent and patient guardian is a microcosm of the heavenly will guarding mankind."

Bitch blinked. She had no idea what the hell was happening. She'd just tried to help some weird-ass case 53 that fell into her territory, and now that same case 53 was talking to one of her dogs… talking like it was a person. Huh. Did this mean she considered dogs equal to humans? Because if so, Bitch could maybe tolerate this freak for a few more minutes. As long as she didn't try to eat any of her dogs. She needed to call one of the others, they'd know what to do here - why couldn't the giant bird have crashed into someone else's territory, why couldn't she be bugging Regent or Tattletale or Skitter? They were good with weird shit. Her dogs didn't know what to make of the giant bird, and nor did she. She was huge, and clearly unnatural, but… she didn't give off the signals a normal person did. None of the smells, neither. It made Bitch nervous.

The puppy was now trying to find a comfortable spot on the stole, and was tracking mud all over the thing. Morrigan blinked as she noticed this. She took in Bitch - her clothing was rough, but there was a general state of vague cleanliness to the thing. Her data implied that cleanliness was the norm, filth the undesirable exception. She glared at the puppy.

"Cease your filth-making."

The puppy did not, in fact, cease its filth-making. Morrigan narrowed her eyes. Bitch had a sudden idea - a way to get this freak out of her hair and into someone else's. A someone else that Bitch didn't remotely trust, but… well, she didn't trust Morrigan either. And she figured that throwing them into each other was probably the best course of action. Best case, they'd occupy each other and she could go back to things she actually understood.

"Your robe is gross."

Morrigan frowned.

"It is stained. I require a new one."

"You want a new robe?"

"That is what I said, yes."

"Follow me."

Morrigan complied, floating obediently after the strange Samaritan. Perhaps this was guidance? Perhaps this was her test - to place faith in those she didn't know, to let them guide her onwards? At the end of the day, without direct commands Morrigan found herself rather lost. With a prompt to work from, she was fully capable of acting in the most angelic manner possible. Promptless, she was aimless, cheerless, and generally listless. And, frankly, the orders Bitch was giving were good enough. Nice and simple, coming from an individual of proven moral calibre. Maybe this could work out - maybe she could find her goal through this faithful stranger! If she hadn't been commanded to keep her voice low, she would have started singing a loud hymn as thanks. She hummed. That was good enough for her. For now.

* * *​

"What are these abominations?!"

"Don't talk to my dogs that way."

"You have twisted their shapes, debased their God-given forms - and I can still sense them in there! Good Samaritan, they are trapped in horrific prisons! Fear not, beasts, I shall absolve thee from your fleshly fate!"

She raced forward and plunged her too-tough hands into the sides of the dogs, hunting around messily for the innocent creature inside. Her stole was completely ruined at this point, covered in mud, water, ash, rubble, branches, and now a not insignificant amount of steaming gore. Bitch reached over and slapped her on the back of the head, almost dislodging her hat.

"Stop it. They're fine. You want a new robe or not?"

Morrigan analysed the situation. On the one hand, she really did need a new robe. On the other… these dogs were clearly the spawn of the devil. And yet this girl had acted as a Good Samaritan, acting in good faith to assist someone she didn't know… hm. Rationalising the two would take all her theological muscles. Wait! She had it! She floated into the air triumphantly, spreading her arms into the divinely-ordained T (the T stood for transcendental).

"I see all! Yes, Good S- Bitch, I understand the matter at hand. If the Eucharistic species may be acquired without the accident of the Eucharist being disrupted, so may outer reality not necessarily correspond to inner reality! The accident is not the species, following from Aquinas! Your dogs may appear Satanic, but their species remains canine, and their loyalty to you suggests a certain moral superiority to the average canine! I see all, now, yes indeed."

She floated back downwards. Bitch had no idea what was happening, but she knew she wanted it to stop. She growled.

"Good. Now follow."

And follow Morrigan did, floating gently through the soaked streets of Brockton Bay - this place of tribulation where she would foil the Lightbringer. Hm. She saw devastation all around, and people dwelling amidst the ruins. How miserable their lot, to be condemned to the cruelties of the Lightbringer's schemes! But now they had an angel of their own, a being who would assist them in any way she could, providing spiritual comfort in the midst of such darkness. The people refused to approach, presumably alarmed by the dogs - understandable, their minds were not attuned to the theological truths she had learned. Her guide led her onwards, her riding on a huge dog and Morrigan flying overhead. They didn't speak. Morrigan had been commanded to remain silent, or at least quiet, and she intended to obey that command as long as she was able. Bitch just wanted this hell to be over. A figure whistled from a nearby rooftop. Oh, great, the hell was getting worse.

"Hey Bitch, found a new friend?"

Imp sprawled listlessly nearby, her mask glinting mockingly in the moonlight. Bitch grunted.

"Taking her to Dolltown. Problem?"

"No, no problem - but won't you introduce me to this be-feathered lady?"

Morrigan rose higher.

"I am Morrigan, angel of the LORD! Be not afraid, sinner, for I mean no harm to the pious and the righteous."

Imp blinked. She processed this. And a memory came up - something stupid she'd just seen online. She shook… then began to laugh. Well, more of a cackle, really. Bitch scowled. Morrigan was simply confused.

"...did I say something humorous?"

Was her data compromised? Was her understanding of tone and inflection somehow faulty? That was unacceptable, it would undermine her every sermon!

"You… oh shit, Bitch, you have no idea who you just picked up, do you?"

Bitch grunted.

"This bird showed up in Boston, broke into a building to kidnap someone, came back, then talked to Menja about friendship and community."

She cackled harder. Morrigan was starting to find this offensive.

"I gave a sermon to a sinner in need of guidance - should I have stood back? Should I have allowed her to continue her rampage?"

Imp considered this. Morrigan saw an opportunity, and seized it.

"Perhaps you should consider the virtues which I expounded, hm? To laugh so mockingly, it frays the nerves and offends the senses, true laughter is joyous, devoid of hate or ire!"

Morrigan floated closer.

"Why do you laugh so cruelly, child? What is causing such distress within your soul that it must express itself so hatefully?"

She spread her arms wide.

"You can confess to me - I shall listen without judging, and shall guide you to a brighter path."

Imp had been silent for all this time… but the sight of a dishevelled angel offering her a 'brighter path' was just too much. She sprawled on her back, cackling uproariously, struggling to get a breath in around the laughter. Morrigan twitched… then acted. Imp's cackling abruptly stopped as she realised she was no longer on the roof. In fact, she was in the air. To be more specific, she was being swaddled by enormous arms and wings, held tight against a deeply filthy stole. Things had rapidly taken a turn for the worse.

"Attention, Bitch - I am now embracing the sinner!"

"Good for you."

Imp beat her fists weakly against the angel - but her flesh was too tough, and her wings prevented her from getting to any of her actual weapons. She wheezed out.

"Bitch, get her off me!"

"Sorry, couldn't hear you."

"Bitch!"

Morrigan hugged her tighter.

"Be at peace, sinner. I forgive you for your mockery."

"Put me down!"

"Not until your heart opens to the LORD."

"Never!"

Imp flinched as Morrigan shrieked that last word at the top of her lungs. Bitch leant back on her dog, watching the irritating kid getting smothered by the equally irritating freak. This evening wasn't turning out to be so bad, actually. Imp continued to struggle, refusing to 'open her heart' or do anything Morrigan demanded. Morrigan gradually realised that this whole hugging thing wasn't quite working, and she politely deposited the sinner back onto her roof. Imp spat out a few feathers.

"I see you are resistant."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Your harsh words are like dust scattered by a righteous gale. My concern is for your eternal soul, child."

"Bitch, just take her to Dolltown already!"

"She's right. Come on. It's late."

"Very well, Bitch! I shall accompany you to this place where I may acquire a new stole. As for you, young one."

She leaned closer, her face dwarfing Imp's own.

"I will return. The embraces shall continue until you desist from such vicious mockery."

Imp paled. Bitch and Morrigan left the scene, and Imp was left alone on her rooftop. The humour at seeing Bitch dragging some delusional cape around had worn off - now she was just nervous. That cape had survived getting struck by Menja multiple times. She could fly, she was huge, she was tough, and she had a weird interest in Brockton Bay, apparently. Imp didn't imagine that a cape claiming to be an angel would voluntarily ally with an Undersider, so that meant she wasn't the best-informed bird around. Once she found out… eesh. Wouldn't be pretty. Imp pulled out her mobile phone, ready to call up Skitter, Grue, Tattletale, anyone else. As she started scrolling through her contacts, though… an enormous figure landed beside her in a flurry of sparks. Imp jumped a foot into the air, shrieking loudly. Her nerves had already been shredded by the involuntary cuddle, this was the last thing she needed. As the sparks cleared, she tried to get a good view of whatever fresh hell the world had thrown her way.

That was just a fucking luchador. That was a luchador wearing a monk's habit, and that was a nun dangling around his neck. She blinked. The monk turned her way, flexing his innumerable muscles - God, how could a man have so many? She made a mental note to maybe try and send him Skitter's way, the girl clearly had a thing for large gentlemen. Heh.

"You!"

Imp pointed innocently upwards.

"Moi?"

"Yes, you! Have you seen an angel recently?"

Imp blinked. What in the actual fuck was happening today.

"...say I have."

The nun poked her head around the enormous mass of the luchador.

"Where did she go? My brother wishes to wrestle her."

Imp paused… and then a malicious grin spread across her masked face. This was perfect - hell, she almost felt ready to call up Morrigan just to say that she was right, God did exist, and he was a fuckin' legend for setting up this entire situation.

"Why yes, I have seen an angel recently - about yay high, brownish wings, stupid hat?"

The luchador growled.

"Do not insult the biretta, child. It is clerical headwear, and warrants respect."

"OK, OK, about yay high, brownish wings, truly delightful hat which doesn't have a stupid pom-pom?"

She had expected another growl, maybe a muttered insult. She didn't expect the nun to whack her solidly on the head with a ruler - and where did she even get that from? Imp flinched backwards, clutching her forehead.

"Ow, what the f-"

"Language!"

The nun hit her again. Imp staggered backwards, waving her hands ineffectively.

"Sorry, sorry, didn't mean to-"

The ruler was levelled once more.

"Apologise!"

"...what?"

"Apologise to my brother for your mockery! How dare you mock a man of the cloth."

Imp weighed up the comic possibilities of continuing her defiance against the potential sight of a luchador pile-driving Morrigan into a building. The latter won. And handily, too. She resisted the urge to adopt an exaggerated Mexican accent.

"I'm sorry, father, for my sins. Now, that angel - just went in that direction."

The luchador cracked his knuckles.

"Then we have no time to lose! Come, sister. La Morrigan awaits."

The nun hesitated for a moment, sizing Imp up.

"You're a villain?"

Hm.

"Well, let's not throw labels around, I'm just a morally flexible-"

The ruler whacked her repeatedly, too rapidly for her to use her stranger ability to escape. The nun just kept going at it, strike after strike, raining down like spears from heaven. And all the while she kept talking.

"I will not see a young woman squander her life pursuing such silly things! You're not even old enough to leave school, idiot child. And out this late - shameful!"

She stopped whacking briefly, and pointed to the stairway leading down from the roof.

"Go home, stupid girl! Go home and reflect on your poor life choices! The world slides into chaos and here you sit, prattling like some entitled adolescent. Go on, go home!"

Imp considered stabbing her. Repeatedly. But even with her… creative morality, her relative contentment with a life of crime, there was something unconscionably fiendish about stabbing a nun. She felt that was a definite line. She sullenly started to leave, turning the other cheek - hey, if she brought this up, could she use this to get out of future forced hugs from Morrigan?

"Now say 'thank you' for the useful life advice!"

Imp froze. She started reconsidering her commitment to not stabbing nuns. The luchador rumbled.

"You should listen to Sister Encarnacion, child. While you were skipping school, she was mastering the ruler."

That same ruler flourished, and Imp couldn't help but see how old it was, how gnarled, how often it had surely been used. She saw the steely look in Sister Encarnacion's eyes, how they seemed to be the very embodiment of authority - unyielding, merciless, and completely assured of itself. She gulped.

"Uh… thanks."

She walked away as quickly as she could, consoling herself with the knowledge that no-one else had witnessed this little embarrassment. She decided to steer clear of this whole Morrigan situation until someone was dead or gone. Well, she might linger for any fighting. Preferably with popcorn. Encarnacion watched her go with cold eyes, her lips pursed into a thin line. As soon as the girl vanished, she turned back to her brother. There was a moment of silence. And then the nun was blubbering her eyes out while draped over his shoulder.

"Oh, this place is awful! Such a young girl, to be driven into a life of crime… I thought things would be better up here!"

Fray Tormenta soothingly patted her on the back.

"Calm, sister."

"I… I just hate losing them to this cruel world!"

"Sister, calm yourself. As soon as Morrigan is dealt with, we may return to our own orphanage. I'm sure they are already in need of your guidance."

Encarnacion's face hardened, and her grip on the ruler tightened.

"Jose is already refusing to eat his dinner. I can sense it."

Fray Tormenta truly believed that she could.

 

[meloa789]

Yep, those three Catholics are going to drive everyone insane.

 

[xbox432]

Never underestimate how intimidating a matron mother can be... The SHAME and GUILT they can use to cow even the snarkiest of teenagers. Imp got off lightly.

 

[GraftingBuddha]

The LORD lifteth up the meek; he casteth the wicked down to the ground.

In time, it approached - the fringes of the territory known to these humans as 'Dolltown' for reasons she couldn't quite fathom. People shuffled away from them - and Morrigan was intrigued to see that they were hiding their bodies under thick layers of cloth. Ah, she had been taken to the local leper colony or regional equivalent! Now she saw what needed to happen. She fluttered onwards, spreading her wings and arms wide in a gesture she was certain was welcoming.

"BE NOT AFRAID! I am here to help, not to hurt! Come, lost ones!"

No-one responded. Morrigan's smile turned faintly desperate.

"I am an angel of the LORD, good people! Let me help you!"

Nothing happened. Morrigan turned petulantly to Bitch.

"Why will they not come?"

"Probably 'cause you're yelling at them. And you look like a freak."

She did not. She was an angel - certainly, she differed from certain visual representations, but she held fairly true to the template. Indeed, she believed that she was on the more 'reasonable' end of the angelic spectrum - she had only two eyes and one head, which put her leaps and bounds ahead of some of the others, at least, based on what she understood of human notions of 'the unnatural'. Which wasn't perfect, but it still established that one head and two eyes were generally considered normal. Perhaps they took exception to the wings? Ah, nonsense, birds have wings and she'd yet to see a human become alarmed at one of them. But then again, birds only had two… maybe she had too many wings? No - she banished the thought immediately to the depths of her psyche where it could be sermonised into oblivion. There was no such thing as too many wings.

The lepers fled from her no matter how loudly she yelled at them, and eventually a new figure emerged - cautious, but unlike the others she was willing to approach. And she was riding on a… large stuffed lion. How peculiar. Well, perhaps that was why this was called 'Dolltown' - though Morrigan had to confess that this area seemed a little too small to be a 'town'. More of a… hamlet, really. Dollhamlet - now that sounded more reasonable. She'd need to suggest this to the local leader of this leper colony. The figure on the stuffed lion came closer, sizing up Bitch and Morrigan. Bitch jerked her hand in the angel's direction.

"She wants a new robe."

"It is called a stole, but I shall forgive the error."

Parian processed this.

"...nice to see you too, Bitch. Who's this?"

Morrigan spread her arms outwards.

"I am Morrigan, BE NOT AFRAID young leper, for I mean you no harm."

"Ohhh…kay - wait, leper?"

"Alas, I cannot heal your sores - at least, to my knowledge I cannot. Yet I shall provide you what succour I can - would a sponge bath be acceptable?"

Parian had the brief terrifying image of an enormous angel forcibly giving everyone in Dolltown a sponge bath. She was very large, there wouldn't be much of a possibility of escape.

"...no, we're all good for sponge baths. So, you want a… stole?"

"Indeed. My current stole has become dirtied by the ravages of the world. I was informed that you could provide such a stole for me - you will have earned an angel's blessing if you accomplish this task."

Oh great the lunatic thought she was an angel, that was normal. Parian turned to Bitch, hoping to get some kind of support from her… but the cape was already riding off into the horizon at high speed, yelling over her shoulder that Morrigan was 'her problem now'. Well wasn't that just swell. Her needles twitched irritably, and her lion shifted. She considered calling the Undersiders, she didn't exactly like any of them but they probably knew how to deal with lunatic capes like this. Maybe if she dogpiled the angel under enough stuffed animals she could… no, no, just make the stupid robe, then she'll leave. She was going to hang onto that little thought, it seemed like it would be important to keep her going for the next hour or so. Parian turned, ready to set to work and get this lunatic out of her territory.

That was when the luchador arrived. And Parian realised that, no, she wasn't allowed nice things anymore.

* * *​

Morrigan turned sharply to see the arrival of a man dressed in a… faintly conflicting manner. She processed the habit, the cross around his neck, and assessed that he was a priest or a monk. Good, a man of the cloth, she'd missed talking to one. And then she saw the brightly coloured mask, and this caused a small bluescreen in her mechanical mind. Last she remembered, monks didn't wear those. Or did they? Was this some rite she was unaware of, some order… perhaps a penitent order, hiding their faces from the world as an act of repentance? Still, their masks were usually a little more plain… the luchador spread his arms wide, and a nun (another bluescreen) dropped from his back.

"Morrigan!"

"Si."

Fray Tormenta blinked.

"Ah, you speak Spanish! Splendid, then we shall converse in the language of my birth. So… this is the angel we have heard so much about! My apologies for bothering you at such a late hour."

Morrigan cocked her head to one side with a nauseating 'crack'. She was still trying to assemble her data into something comprehensible.

"I… am Fray Tormenta! Part of the twin miracles of Zacatecas, and the conqueror of the infamous Ramses!"

He cast off his habit, revealing a… hm. Morrigan didn't know it was possible to have eight pectoral muscles on visible display. She'd need to update her data on that one. The nun sighed, clearly bored from having seen this particular exhibition rather too many times.

"And I wish to fight you!"

Morrigan processed this.

"...I must decline."

"What?!"

"I am an angel of the LORD, Brother Storm. I am a convert to the ways of peace. And I have no desire to fight against those who also tread the path to salvation. My words are reserved for sinners."

Fray Tormenta considered this, scratching his masked chin.

"...hm. But did not Jacob fight an angel for an entire night? And I believe there is some time to go until the dawn comes."

Morrigan pondered this objection. Come to think of it, the story didn't exactly specify why Jacob had fought the angel… perhaps one of them had insulted the other? Fighting, according to Father McGill, was not a worthy path to take, and yet an angel had engaged in a little of it himself. Hm. This was a theological conundrum.

"I am unsure of how to proceed, Brother Storm."

Fray Tormenta puffed himself up, and launched into a small sermon - he'd been practising this on the ride over to Brockton, he'd anticipated a little resistance to the idea of fighting. Thankfully, he was very convincing.

"Jacob and the angel fought at the riverbank, and so shall we fight - but why? Why did they struggle? You see, child, my belief is that wrestling is a form of communication - and like all communication, there are heavenly and hellish varieties. I speak, and I may use my speech to insult and denigrate - but I do not, for such is a sinful deed. I wrestle, but I wrestle to defend the innocent, and to communicate with others in a way that transcends speech, not for my own gain. Did not the Apostle John say: 'let us not love in word or speech, but in deed and in truth'? To me, the fight between Jacob and the angel was a sermon without words, deeds instead of words, a speech conducted in total silence."

He lowered himself into a wrestling stance.

"Will you speak with me, Morrigan?"

This logic seemed sound. She certainly couldn't poke any holes in it - he'd cited a passage from the Bible and everything, she couldn't deny that. And… well, preaching to Menja had been enjoyable, yes, but she'd been hit with a spear repeatedly, and had been injured in some form by those same strikes. She felt a small urge to fight - perhaps this was a temptation sent by the Lightbringer? No - the urge was small, subtle, and it promised a kind of peace in the throes of conflict. It felt different to the schemes of the Lightbringer… perhaps Brother Storm was right? Perhaps this was the will of the divine. Or perhaps something had been knocked loose when she crashed into the ground, who knew. Hm. Either way, there was one issue.

"I accept your reasoning. But my stole is dirtied - and I desire a new one."

"Very well! Then we shall wait."

The nun quietly brought his habit back over, and he slipped it over his masked head, looking for all the world like a particularly eccentric monk instead of a wrestler with an octopec chest. Fray Tormenta turned to Parian, who looked completely baffled by what was going on.

"Then go, girl who resembles a child's toy, go and fashion a new robe!"

Parian turned to leave. Fray Tormenta, Sister Encarnacion, and Morrigan all followed. And Parian was reminded, once again, that she was not permitted to have nice things in this cruel, cruel world. Why couldn't Flechette come along and stab someone, that would presumably solve something.

* * *​

Parian sweated as she toiled away at a new stole for Morrigan, while three Catholics stared over her shoulder. She didn't like working like this, had never liked it, and the fact that one of the mad Catholics was a gigantic angel and another was a gigantic luchador didn't exactly help. She'd managed to fire off a quick text to the Undersiders, though she was sure they already knew something was going down. She just wanted someone to come along and take these freaks out of her shop and back into the world where she couldn't see them and didn't need to think about them. She thought the stole project would have been easy, it was just a robe, but Morrigan had… demanding specifications.

"The maniple needs more gold."

"I'm not using all my gold thread on this."

"But it needs more gold, my data indicates that gold is integral. Could you perhaps make the cincture out of gold as well?"

"I don't understand these words."

Fray Tormenta leaned over and tried to help. Emphasis on tried.

"Oh, the cincture is the cord belt worn around the waist, over the alb."

"How many layers does this thing have?"

The luchador mentally calculated.

"...so, there's a plain black amice, then a plain white alb (with lace trimming at the hem) worn over top, a cincture to fasten it tight, a maniple on the left arm, a stole around the neck, and then a chasuble worn over everything else. That's it. Oh, unless she wants a new hat."

Morrigan clutched her biretta protectively.

"I do not. My hat is adequate."

"And a very nice hat it is too! My compliments."

Morrigan practically glowed at that. Great, now they were getting along before they fought viciously outside her store, that was nice. There was the sound of a vehicle drawing up outside, and feet emerging - oh, fantastic, more people. She focused on the detailing on the maniple - wait, if Morrigan was going to fight in this, she'd probably ruin it and then ask for another one afterwards. Great, so she needed to make two of everything, that was fun and didn't use up most of her stuff. She'd probably have to sell out more to the Undersiders just to recoup the losses from this, because it didn't look like any of the Catholics present had brought their wallets - stupid robes probably didn't even have pockets. She vengefully sewed a deep pocket into the 'alb', just to prove that it was possible and its omission was stupid.

"Well hey Parian, what's… going… on."

Tattletale's voice trailed off into silence as she stared at the angel. Behind her was Skitter, her swarm already starting to mobilise. Oh, that could be fun, a Biblical angel against a Biblical plague, what a good matchup to happen inside her shop. This was her shop, dammit, she liked it here. Skitter's voice was amplified by the swarm and cold as ice.

"Who are you?"

Tattletale quietly whacked Skitter on the shoulder, whispering frantically. Skitter's swarm started to slow down, the gales of flies turning to gentle breezes, the river of spiders slowing to a trickle. The two were frozen. Oh dear. Whatever Tattletale had found out, it wasn't good. Parian worked faster. Morrigan completely ignored the new arrivals, preferring to hover over her new robe while critiquing every tiny detail, even as her own robe dripped filthy water onto Parian's carpet. The nun turned and glared at the villainous capes.

"...more children?"

Tattletale clearly wanted to say something insulting, but the presence of Morrigan was inhibiting her somewhat. Hey, this evening was improving somewhat, that was nice.

"More children involved in a life of crime?"

Where the hell had that ruler come from? Tattletale yelped as it struck her on the back of the hand, and Skitter seemed too stunned to really react.

"It is far too late for children to be up committing crimes! Go on, get back home, and don't let me catch you out here again!"

OK this evening had just become amazing. Parian's work abruptly became a lot more joyful, the robes suddenly becoming rather more… jaunty, to Morrigan's disapproval. So what if she was embroidering a few smiley faces onto the lace hem of the alb? Tattletale tried to speak, but the ruler silenced her.

"No! No backtalk, growing brains need a proper night's rest!"

"Wait, we just-"

The ruler was brandished threateningly and Tattletale fell silent. The nun looked positively murderous. Skitter was still paralysed - so was her swarm, thankfully. Damn thing was filthier than Morrigan's old robe. As Tattletale was brutalised out the door by a furious nun, Parian started whistling a merry tune. Man, today was just getting better and better. Skitter abruptly looked a bit more nervous.

"And you."

Fray Tormenta turned and gestured for his sister to remain quiet. He strode up to the teenage warlord, who really had no idea how to react to an overly friendly luchador. Fair enough, thought Parian. The girl had been dealing with the edgiest bunch of theatre dropouts in the Western hemisphere, the sight of a cape who looked like he was having good, innocent fun in a relatively family-friendly way was probably short-circuiting something in her skull.

"Please, sister. Allow me."

He crouched down until he met Skitter's eyes. God, but that monk was huge. Parian didn't even know they grew people that huge - what the hell had he been fed as a lad, did his mother lactate nothing but protein shakes?

"We shall be leaving this city shortly, my child. I have no desire to fight you - and I know who you are, warlord. Do not interfere with our business, and we shall not interfere with yours. Another shall be your judge, not I, not today. I caution you once more against interfering with us."

His muscles flexed alarmingly.

"You are not the first warlord to have felt the storm."

Skitter seemed to want to respond to that, but the nun brandishing her ruler seemed to give her other ideas. That and the sight of Tattletale running away as fast as her spandex-clad legs could carry her while babbling about something or other - Parian couldn't quite hear, but it sounded vaguely alarming. She sized up the situation, probably realised that there were no civilians witnessing this faintly humiliating display, and decided to stage a tactical retreat. If these lunatics were still here in the morning, Parian was sure there'd be hell to pay. But for now… Skitter left quietly. But her insects lingered - she was staying local. Great. So now the bugs were watching her too. Fray Tormenta and the nun looked at each other, sighed… and then gave each other the tightest bear hug Parian had ever witnessed, while crying loudly. The nun seemed a lot less terrifying when her face was covered in tears.

"Oh, this place is terrible, so many children driven to lives of crime…"

"I know, sister, I know! I almost want to stay, what kind of lives must these poor children lead?"

"Can't you get someone to come out here, won't the Holy See send anyone to give relief to these poor creatures?"

"I shall go to Rome myself if I must, Fray Tormenta cannot abide this terrible injustice!"

Oh cool, he was referring to himself in the third person. That was normal. With a sigh, Parian finished the last stitch. Not her best work, but telekinetic needles were surprisingly helpful with this sort of thing. Morrigan zipped away and returned a minute later garbed like… well a Catholic priest. Looked better than she had, admittedly. Her old robe hadn't even had that many wing-holes, and most of them looked ripped through instead of carefully made. The replacement fit her better, was a complete priestly vestment instead of a single item of said costume, and none of her wings were hidden. Come to think of it, Parian felt a small twinge of pride at her work. She'd done it under pressure, working with styles she'd never really experimented with, and she'd still churned out something good. A quick picture was snapped - Morrigan looked like a deer in headlights, but that somehow added to the overall effect. She'd need to show this to Flechette at some point, should spice up their next conversation a bit. And wouldn't that just be wild.

"My thanks, leper."

Oh right, she still thought Parian was a leper.

"I will return shortly to give you your blessing."

Fray Tormenta cracked his knuckles.

"Oh-ho, shortly? Someone's suffering from a surfeit of pride!"

Morrigan looked completely horrified at that assertion and shot towards the nun, looming above her with terror in her eyes.

"Sister, have I committed the sin of pride?"

To her credit, the nun didn't seem to be overly ruffled by this. Better than Parian would have responded, that was for sure.

"Perhaps a little. But I forgive you, Morrigan - defeat my brother quickly, and it will not have been pride, simply… accuracy."

That seemed to work. The angel flew out of the door, robes flying around her, while the others followed. A crackle of lightning later, and they were soaring through the air. Oh. That was surprisingly decent of them - not fighting in her home, that is. They'd still compelled her to make a Catholic robe in the middle of the bloody night. Eh, seemed karmically neutral overall. She settled back, poured a cup of coffee, and got to work on the backup robe. Spitefully, she insisted on embroidering more smiley faces in hard-to-notice places. Would serve that feathered menace right, it would.

* * *​

The beach awaited. Morrigan surveyed the area - a strand of wet sand, lying like a limp rope along the coast. Oooh, she was doing similes, she was integrating data on human patterns of thought most satisfactorily! There was no-one around at this time of night, and the few squatters in the area politely vacated when they saw the approaching capes. Fray Tormenta landed in the sand with a thunderous crash, lightning still crackling around his skin. Abruptly… he knelt in the sand, his size causing him to sink a few inches, and bowed his head low.

"Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. I pray that you forgive this girl, one of your own children, who now raises her hands against a priest. Amen."

He stood, crossing himself. Morrigan stiffened. Damn, that was a good idea. She likewise knelt, bowing her head, and spoke rather too loudly for anyone's comfort:

"Almighty Father, maker of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible, forgive your priest for the transgression of striking an angel, one of your chosen messengers and a sworn opponent of the Lightbringer. Amen."

There. That was much longer than his. Fray Tormenta frowned… and fell back to the sand.

"Jesus Christ, only begotten son of God, he who redeems the sins of the world, most spotless victim, lamb of God, son of the Father, incarnate of the Virgin Mary, forgive this child for her sin of striking one of your own priests, a follower of your most elevated apostle, Saint Peter, and an adherent to the single, universal, Catholic and Apostolic Church, a sworn servant to the rock on which your Church has been built, a humble follower who asks for your intercession against the guilt of another. Amen."

Well, he was just asking for it now.

"Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son and with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets and granted us the revelations of the Faith, incarnate through me and give me mercy against this priest who raises a hand against a hallowed form conceived of by the Father at the beginning of time, a member of the line of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and all the choirs and hosts of heaven. Grant me strength to defend your will against the heathen and the apostate, the sight to perceive the plans of the Lightbringer, and the capacity to forgive those who oppose my heavenly purpose. Here I grovel, here I prostrate myself, and here I beseech your aid in the coming struggle. Forgive this lowly priest for his transgressions, for he does not know what he is doing. Amen."

Fray Tormenta considered that for a moment. And just as he was about to drop to his knees, his sister whacked him with her ruler - and Morrigan was still wondering how she drew that thing so quickly, it seemed positively unnatural.

"Enough. Fight, so we may go home sooner."

Fray Tormenta rubbed the back of his head, muffling a new objection, before shrugging his habit off and exposing his glistening octopec chest. Morrigan preened, her feathers twitching in satisfaction. She'd won the first round - and this foretold great things to come. She hovered in the air while Fray Tormenta settled into his fighting pose. After a moment, she spread her arms into the divinely ordained T-shape (the T stood for 'tribulations', the kind she was going to visit on this foolish monk and his quivering abs). She didn't know what else to do - she'd never wrestled before. Shouldn't be too hard, right? Just… the exertion of force against another, what more could there be? She considered her next few moves - she could make him vanish for a time, or… fling fire, maybe, or levitate some sand and throw it at him. She was faced with an abundance of choices, and couldn't decide which one to go for first.

She was so occupied with these thoughts that she barely noticed the bolt of lightning streaming towards her. A bolt of lightning that rapidly transformed back into Fray Tormenta, who wrapped his enormous arms around her waist, flipped her upside down, and used his own weight to propel her downwards. As he did so, he bellowed:

"The pile driver of Saint Sebastian!"

Morrigan was still processing what in God's name was happening when her head impacted the sand, her body accompanying it downwards until her entire upper body was immersed. She could faintly detect Fray Tormenta kneeling down and… oh no, he was praying for forgiveness for giving the LORD such a poor display of wrestling, apologising for how quick it had been, how weak his opponent… oh no he didn't. No, no, no! She could handle being driven into the sand, but now he was slandering her to the Almighty! This couldn't stand. Her telekinesis extended into the sand, ripping it away and sending the monk flying backwards from the shockwave. She emerged, her telekinetic powers delicately plucking the grains of sand from her robe, leaving it almost immaculate despite her recent dunking. She glared at the wrestler. The 'pile driver of Saint Sebastian'? She needed to keep that one in mind.

Wait, where was the wrestler? A bolt of lightning shot in her direction, but this time she was ready, moving rapidly to avoid him… but the lightning tracked her, the wrestler exploding out of the night in a fighting pose, roaring loudly. Morrigan tried to grapple, her wings wrapping around him like the coils of a cobra… but the wrestler was already transforming back into lightning, uncontainable, and when his body reformed he had his arms wrapped around her neck. But something was wrong - surely she should be facing towards her if he was attempting strangulation? A twist, and she was upside down again, plummeting downwards… and he kept yelling.

"The brainbuster of Saint Gorgonia!"

The sand swallowed her once more. But as her head impacted it, something clicked. Maybe she'd been a little concussed by her fall into Brockton Bay, maybe she'd not been thinking particularly clearly, but this bump… her brain was partially made of some odd crystalline substance, and repeated impacts were making it do some funny things. She didn't have time to ponder these funny things, for she had a luchador friar to confront. By the time she hit the ground, her telekinesis was already flinging the sand away, and her flight propelled her towards the idiot friar. She was tired of this. She'd never had a proper fight go on this long before - usually she just made people disappear or otherwise incapacitated them. Menja didn't count, she'd been deliberately avoiding fighting that time. But… wait. Citrine. The blonde sinner in Boston. She'd been incapacitated by that sinner's power, forced to ground, her abilities slowly draining away. And she'd won by tackling the woman and plunging out of a window. It was oddly similar to what this fool was now performing on her. Perhaps… perhaps this friar had a point. Data began to supply itself - holds, slams, drivers, throws… and with them, names, unfamiliar to her but probably meaningful to someone else. This monk was clearly pious, and had been doing his duty for some time. A man of virtue, in short, and virtue accompanied truth like an ox accompanied a cart. And Morrigan, at the end of the day, was always amenable to new data from verified sources.

She rushed at the monk, and he leapt to meet her, roaring a challenge. But Morrigan had other ideas, something more sophisticated than a mere tackle. She flipped around in mid-air, stunning the monk to the point that he didn't transform back into lightning - understandable, Morrigan thought, she'd been fairly uncoordinated this entire fight. She slipped downwards through the air, surging upwards between his legs, grabbing his legs and anchoring them in place with her wings. The friar blinked as she plunged downwards, her flight assisting gravity in driving the man's back and neck into the ground with earth-shattering force. As she performed this move, with skill that must have been granted from on high, she yelled loudly and proudly:

"The Electric Chair Driver of Saint Raphael!"

Yes, a most appropriate name! Saint Raphael, an archangel whose name meant 'God has healed'- a fitting title for her new move, for she felt something healing as she performed it, a feeling that something was right about fighting like this! She felt a rush of satisfaction as the wrestler slammed into the ground… satisfaction that vanished as he transformed back into lightning and sped away, reforming some metres distant. He shook his head, clearing away the dizziness she'd inflicted on him. He looked more wary now, more… wait, was that a smile crossing his face?

"Ah, good! The angel finally fights! A proper challenge for Fray Tempesta!"

He squatted aggressively, flexing his muscles to their greatest extent. And it was very great indeed.

"I forgive you for striking a priest."

His arm began to rotate, faster and faster, lightning crackling around its edge.

"Now accept your penance!"

 

[xbox432]

Oh God, I can't stop laughing!

Wait! I'm sorry for taking the Lord's name in vain Sister, please put away your ruler! 😱

 

[meloa789]

Get McGill on the row and we will have a very potent Catholic parahuman team.

 

[GraftingBuddha]

The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is full of majesty

"The backbreaker of Saint Gemma Galgani!"

Crashing. Screams of rage. The sound of wings moving to positions they really shouldn't. And then, splitting the night:

"The Mongolian chop of Saint Ursicinus of Saint-Ursanne!"

Fray Tormenta growled as Morrigan slammed her hands into the side of his neck. She was… impressive, this angel. A quick learner. He was actually becoming a little strained, taking more effort than usual to shift into his breaker state. Still, the girl had no real experience - and he had moves she'd never heard of, she couldn't even imagine.

"The bionic elbow of Saint Mammes of Caesarea!"

Morrigan reeled backwards, gritting her teeth as her entire structure wobbled uncertainty. She was having the time of her life right now - it just felt right fighting like this, giving her all to contest the strength of another. Satisfied some very deep-seated itches that she'd been suppressing for rather too long. With each blow, she saw a glimpse of the man in green, the figure she interpreted to be Christ. Whenever she saw Fray Tormenta's head impact the sand, she saw the Lightbringer's emotionless face crumbling before her. Her data was shifting, altering bit by bit, approaching something rather more… martial. A new move came to mind, her mental list of saints finding an appropriate patron for her new manoeuvre:

"The bomaye of Saint Roch!"

Nearby, Imp was eating popcorn. In fact, most of the Undersiders had shown up at this point - save for Bitch, who really didn't want to spend another minute around Morrigan. Not that she hated Morrigan, she just… found her stressful. Skitter and Grue looked a little annoyed whenever Imp made a particularly loud 'crunch' - probably jealous, their masks didn't exactly allow for popcorn consumption. Suckers. Tattletale could probably have stolen a few, but was currently looking like she was about to be sick. No idea what was going on there. And thus, Regent and Imp alone consumed the popcorn, liberated from a recently abandoned popcorn stand on the boardwalk. Regent yelled around a mouthful of stale popcorn:

"Kick him in the balls!"

Skitter gave Regent a very sharp look. A look that shifted to Imp when she joined in:

"Pluck her like a chicken!"

"Choke him with your rosary!"

"Give her an involuntary hug!"

"Twist his dick!"

Everyone froze. Imp broke the silence, a malicious grin splitting her face beneath the mask.

"Yeah, twist his dick!"

"Grab his dick and twist it!"

"The old dick twist!"

A ruler impacted them both on the back of the head - OK, that ruler was longer than the first one, Encarnacion had more than one ruler on her person and could deploy them with terrifying speed. That was normal, that was fine. Grue hummed approvingly. Imp rubbed her head while Regent shot the nun a death glare.

"I told you children to go home and get some sleep, it's far too late for you all to be out."

"Aw, c'mon, we just want to watch the end of this."

"No! Wrestling is for adults, not children. Go on, g-"

She paused. Morrigan had started yelling again. And this time it wasn't just a wrestling move. The angel had driven Fray Tormenta back into the ground, and this time he looked a little dazed - lightning was crackling along his skin, but it was sluggish, moving in fat sparks. Evidently his skull was marginally less durable than hers. Her robe was, surprisingly, spotless, despite all the damp sand surrounding them. She threw her arms and flared her wings outwards, looking for all the world like a slightly deformed peacock showing off to the world. There was something… bombastic about her stance. Something that had been lacking from her earlier displays of force.

"Who else challenges La Morrigan?"

Encarnacion sighed. Fantastic, her brother's madness had infected someone else. The giant bird kept talking, well, kept yelling. It would be polite to say that Morrigan didn't have an inside voice. It would be accurate to say that she had an outer space voice. The Simurgh could probably hear her screaming.

"La Morrigan reigns supreme! La Morrigan cannot be defeated!"

She flexed. It didn't go very well, largely because most of her limbs had the consistency of pale, fleshy sticks. But she put a lot of effort into the flex, and that earned her a little credit in the eyes of those present. Well, except for Imp. She just kept laughing. Oh, and Tattletale, who still looked like she was on the verge of fainting, while mumbling some incomprehensible nonsense. Something to do with 'gas station weed'? Outrageous, Encarnacion would have to discipline her for such depravity. Her attention was drawn about to Morrigan - La Morrigan, even - who was now engaging in something resembling trash talk.

"The LORD created all men to be equal, but against me there are no equals! My data indicates that a typical wrestler has a 50% chance of winning a match - but against me, that 50% is reduced dramatically to circa. 25%, according to my own estimations. Meaning, I have a 75% chance of winning! But with the force of the LORD on my side, that 25% is reduced in half yet again! So you stand a 12.5% chance of winning, and I have a… 87.5% of winning! Now, you add that 87.5% to my previous 75% and 50%, and I now have a 212.5% chance of winning!"

Imp was scribbling rapidly at a pad of paper she'd withdrawn from somewhere, keeping up with these complex mathematical gymnastics. This was all making a great deal of sense to her, unlike the smoothbrains that surrounded her and were looking increasingly baffled.

"The numbers don't lie, Fray Tormenta… and they spell disaster for you!"

Encaracion sighed again. Not only had her brother's madness infected someone else, but it'd infected someone who really didn't understand trash talk. Though, again, the effort had to be commended. Actually, that maths made absolutely no sense, Fray Tormenta had possibly hit her on the head rather too many times. Morrigan grabbed the friar's leg, ready to fling him into the distance to solidify her victory. Fray Tormenta seemed to take exception to the idea that he'd been defeated, and grabbed her leg. Lightning crackled along him, and Morrigan scowled as she started to try and lift him up. Sadly, he was still clinging on, and she was dragged alongside the enormous friar. Tormenta's flight kicked in, as did Morrigan's. And everyone present became very dizzy as the two of them simply started flying in a perfect circle, one dragging the other, neither touching the ground, for the better part of a full minute. To the Undersiders, this was a freakish display of strange power interactions. To Encarnacion? She pinched the bridge of her nose, knowing full well that her brother had pulled off this move only once before - against Duke Whirlwind, the Tijuana Tornado. He'd been concussed at the end of it, and it took months to recover from the inner ear damage. Still… Duke Whirlwind had turned out much worse.

Fray Tormenta bellowed as they spun, declaring his ultimate move to the world.

"Zacatecas carousel!"

Morrigan blinked. This was unusual. She'd never heard of such a move, her data supplied nothing. And he hadn't even named a saint! She gasped internally - this must be a sacrilegious move! An apocryphal manoeuvre! Outrageous! Unsatisfactory! And unapproved by the Vatican, which was really just the icing on this heretical cake! Her thoughts were derailed as Fray Tormenta… let go. She tried to hang onto his legs, to fling him upwards and end this fight, but her head was… scrambled. Everything had been shuffled round again, the complex matrix of crystal and flesh that composed her brain desperately trying to realign after such disruption. Her sense of direction was temporarily busted, her ability to perform complex mathematics was slowing down, her reflexes were dulled… She couldn't move fast enough, and her grip was too weak. Fray Tormenta slipped free, and used the momentum of their spin to increase the power of his kick. His feet slammed into her stomach, sending her flying heavenwards with terrifying speed. Wind whistled past her ears in a deafening screech, and she could almost sense the Lightbringer's presence, twitching idly in her direction to see why this angel had decided to invade her territory. She tried to regain control of her flight, to soar back down and destroy Fray Tormenta… but everything was still fuzzy, her sense of direction still skewed by the rapid rotations. She hadn't experienced such dizziness before, and she had no idea how to cope with it. All she knew was that sensory data had been compromised, and without sensory data her abilities couldn't be used reliably. And to a mechanical mind such as hers, an unreliable ability was no ability at all.

She barely noticed Fray Tormenta rocketing upwards, feet-first - he'd shifted smoothly into a handstand, and used his powers to propel himself upwards with awesome force. His feet slammed into her back this time, shuddering everything out of place once more, and a subsequent elbow drop brought her back down to earth. As he propelled her downwards, he yelled as loudly as he could, informing her exactly how much she'd messed up by trash-talking Fray Tormenta.

"Children, sister! Avert your eyes… for you are about to witness the wrath of God, and I do not wish for you to turn into salt!"

No-one responded. Encarnacion just groaned. He'd been hit on the head too many times as well, it seemed. His trash talking was usually better than this… actually, no, it rarely was, it just involved rather more flexing and exaggerated vowels. The duo crashed down into the earth with thunderous force and sand flew in a wide arc. The rumbling slowed, then ceased… and there was silence, save for the coughing of the few bystanders as they tried to clear flying sand from their throats. The beach was now marked with a huge crater. Morrigan was nowhere to be seen.

Skitter spoke, for the first time since Dolltown.

"...so that happened."

Tattletale giggled unsteadily for reasons best known only to her. Regent sidled over to Encarnacion, who was too focused on the spectacle before them to think of hitting him with a ruler.

"So, you guys came all the way up here to wrestle some kid? Seems like a lot of effort for something you could do back home."

"It was my brother's idea."

"But seriously, if you wanted to smash some kids, I'm just say-"

Ruler number three thwacked him with enough force to send him sprawling to the floor. Encarnacion looked down at him with incandescent fury. She leaned down, ruler still gripped tightly, and harshly rasped into his ear.

"I forgive you."

And then it was over, and Regent was left bruised, alarmed, and very slightly aroused. So that was something new about himself that he discovered tonight - not a total waste of an evening, then.

* * *​

Miles distant, a drone recorded the antics occurring on the beach. Miles distant from that, a computer received the visual data stream and smoothly uploaded it to the internet. And miles below from this computer, a file was emailed to another computer, which was perceived by a gentleman in a skintight black suit. Coil blinked. A Mexican luchador was fighting Morrigan on the beach. He had no idea exactly what was happening, but he fully understood that it was not cash money. He swivelled to Dinah, and as a sign of his absolute seriousness, he didn't split a timeline to continue the swivel. Well, he tried to not split it. He'd personally oiled the thing just this morning, and the smoothness of the swivel was so addictive, so positively erotic, that he felt the need to continue swivelling for a few seconds longer while sighing sensuously. Finally, he peered at Dinah, who was currently tweaking out something serious. If he hadn't taken all those anti-drug PSAs so seriously, he might have been tempted to try a little bit of that candy stuff. But, alas, Coil was very susceptible to the charms of moralistic cartoons, and out of loyalty to McGruff, he refrained from the smack, the dope, the reefer, and all the multicoloured uppers, downers, laughers and screamers that he was sure composed his candy. He'd genuinely cackled when he came up with the name 'candy' for this stuff, it was so comically fiendish that only an unrepentant asshole could have come up with it. An unrepentant asshole like him.

Anyway, luchadors. He assumed that Morrigan wasn't dead - if she could be killed that easily, she wouldn't pose such a threat to his plans. But she could be driven into an unpredictable rage, could be injured to the point of altering her mentality, or could be recruited by someone better able to use her powers. The idea of the Mexican Inquisition bearing down on his base made him shudder - he was sad to confess to a perpetual phobia of nuns. It was an uncanny valley thing for him, they looked too much like angry penguins. And he liked penguins, they made excellent shoes. But skinning a nun would just earn him a stretch in prison and a completely ruined floor. Anyway, back to business. He peered at Dinah.

"Chance of Fray Tormenta causing my plans to fail, to two decimal places."

"5.28%."

"Interesting. Now, chance of Morrigan locating my operations if I continue to lay low, to five decimal places."

"89.76348%"

What in the sam fuck. That was not cash money, that was downright wack! The chances had gone up, and… hm. As he looked at the visual data stream, he saw that Morrigan's behaviour had changed significantly - more bombastic, less… forgiving. Not good. She'd probably become more zealous, and would try and tear this city apart from the bottom up to find any 'sinners' - and he was sure that he qualified.

"...chance of Morrigan being defeated if I initialise protocol FUBAR? Two decimal places."

"64.22%."

Well that was interesting. Very interesting indeed.

"Chance of me surviving for the next year if I initialise protocol FUBAR while initialising protocol 263? Three decimal places."

"...37.96%"

Hm. Well… eh, he might as well start putting the pieces together. Just in case things went in a truly awful direction, which seemed vaguely possible. His priority now was ensuring that Morrigan couldn't interfere, had no ability to derail his master plan. He was making one seriously substantial omelette, a few eggs were naturally going to end up shattered and beaten. If he had to go to a few… extremes, so be it. He was close.

And if push came to shove, he'd bail on this Brockton situation and rebrand himself as Squirm, real name Chomas Talvert, and try to take over another city. Hell, if he shoved hard enough, he could probably fit Dinah into a large briefcase, and that'd make everything much easier. A burst of sound from his computer attracted his attention - something was happening.

Morrigan wasn't beaten.

He swivelled smoothly to face it again, glaring at the giant feathered menace that was now looking very pissed.

* * *​

Fray Tormenta stood above the crater that Morrigan had left, breathing heavily. That had taken his all, demanded that he perform a deeply dangerous move that he was, frankly, getting too old for. The girl… she was durable. And her stamina was insane. Any one of the moves he'd inflicted on her would be enough to incapacitate a grown man, would have strained a potent Brute, but she had simply gotten up over and over, no worse for wear. As he stared down into the dark hole she had left, he hoped the poor thing was alright. She didn't seem a bad sort… if anything, she'd been very level-headed on his arrival. But as the fight had progressed, her moves had become more elaborate, her battle cries more enthusiastic. And La Morrigan? This, perhaps, had gone too far. His opinions were very much confirmed when a sand-covered Morrigan rocketed out of the hole, undamaged but deeply pissed off, to land a solid punch in his masked face.

That was nothing, though. What hurt was what came next. Her telekinesis exerted itself, dragging up massive loads of sand, shaping them into tightly compacted balls… which reshaped themselves into huge fists. Fists that flew towards him, faster and faster, more and more, each one driving the wind out of his lungs. He could block a few… but all of them? He felt himself being punished like he hadn't for a very long time. Bruises spread across his skin, bones began to shudder and crack, organs rattled like stones in a barrel, and stars exploded before his eyes with each blow. And as her many fists crashed into him, Morrigan howled, informing her words with data that sprang into her head like it was always meant to be there.

"You'd better start praying to Saint Polycarp, Fray Tormenta… because you're going to be excreting blood after this all-expenses-paid trip to Fisting Heaven!"

Imp cackled loudly. Encarnacion quietly slapped her on the back of the head with a larger, stronger ruler - oh, great, she had four at minimum. Neat. But the force of the blow was weaker than usual, the nun's attention completely occupied by the display of savagery. 'Fisting Heaven' was brutal, destroying without sense or reason, going for every part of Fray Tormenta's body. There was no resisting it, only feeble attempts to block a few, dodge some others, but ultimately? Nothing could be done. There were too many and they were far too strong. In the ring, this move would have been forbidden in moments - there was no entertainment in it, no joy, just ruthless destruction. It didn't even have any artistry, Morrigan was perfectly still while this was happening. No, this was against everything Fray Tormenta stood for as a luchador.

The assault slowly began to stop, the fists dissolving back into sand which returned to the earth. Morrigan looked downright savage, her eyes burning with righteous fury, her body twitching with suppressed violence. Fray Tormenta looked up at her, spitting out a gobbet of blood, wincing at the feeling of his bruised organs shifting painfully. He could sense… something wrong with her. She had enjoyed this too much, and he could feel that enjoyment bleeding over into the rest of her emotions. He'd dealt with enough wayward orphans to know how rage could infest a personality, how a love for bloodshed could corrode everything else, leaving nothing in its wake. Faith turned to sin, every message of forgiveness and mercy forgotten in favour of the passages which invited carnage. A moment of doubt came over him - had he made a mistake? Had he been too reckless, too unforgiving? Had this girl been unready for his particular methods of communication? He confronted the doubt… and accepted it. He had made a mistake. And now he had to own up to it, do his best to fix it. The girl was far too eager to engage in combat, far too happy to escalate the violence to the absolute maximum. Instead of tussling, instead of wrestling, she'd gone all out. And he'd helped bring out that part of her… hm, maybe that was for the best. He shuddered to imagine what would happen if she had exerted her violent inclinations on someone less durable than his chiselled form. He needed to repair this situation, reduce the risk of calamity.

But first, he needed time, he needed…

Someone to tag in.

He needed a luchadora.

Encarnacion blinked as her brother thrust a hand in her direction. Fray Tormenta didn't see a simple nun before him in that moment - he saw beyond the habit, to the costume she'd worn in the old days. She'd always been the rabble-rouser, the troublemaker. The one who insisted on going beyond the ring and challenging anyone she took exception to, who'd lived a life of such violence and debauchery that he'd had to be the reasonable one. Becoming a nun was the best thing to ever happen to her, taking that boiling irritation and channelling it into something productive, an outlet for her passions that didn't encourage her violence. Encarnacion was a fine sister, a terror with a ruler in her hand, but she was not the person he needed. She lacked the killer instinct of her old ways, the brutal cunning, the absolute flamboyance. She was exactly the person he wanted by his side right now. He'd need to turn up the charm… no, wait, she hated it when he was charming, he'd need to play for the protective older sister instinct.

"Sister! The angel… she is too strong!"

"What are you doing, brother."

"Too mighty by far, too mighty for old Fray Tormenta!"

"I know what you're suggesting, and the answer is no."

"A last flash of the old days, sister - when the Twin Miracles of Zacatecas reigned supreme in the ring!"

"Those days are over, brother. You may take up the mask, but I'm done."

"The Lord gave us strength in our hands and power in our bodies - there is no shame in using the gifts he has given!"

"Stop trying to theology me, it won't work."

"Please, this angel is too mighty, I must have assistance, sister!

Encarnacion looked a little conflicted, and Imp grinned. She saw an opportunity for pushing this into escalation, and was happy to take it. She wanted to see someone getting pummelling into the sand, and if she could see Morrigan and the mad ruler-wielding nun suffer that particular fate… hoo mama that'd give her some serious bedtime sillies.

"Aw, go on, give him a helping hand!"

Tattletale looked at Imp like she was genuinely insane. Skitter was still staring at the glistening octopec chest to Grue's increasing discomfort. Encarnacion scowled, clearly debating something internally. Fray Tormenta sensed weakness and dove in.

"Listen to the wayward child, and join me once more!"

Morrigan approached, fists clenched. This fight was over, and still the man talked. She didn't quite know what she wanted to do, but she wanted him to stop talking. She figured she'd just pummelled him until he stopped, imagined her unusually-durable fists slamming into his flesh over and over and over…

"Become, once more, the famed Fray Tormenta…"

Morrigan drove a foot into his back, turning his words into a barely audible wheeze. She felt an involuntary grin splitting her face. And then something hit her in the side of the head, something stronger than she expected, something that sent her flying over the dunes and driving deep into the sand. Unexpected. Unsatisfactory. Telekinesis surged to life, and she shot back to her feet, floating into the air and trying to see what had just happened. Who had produced that thunderous force? Who? And who would dare challenge La Morrigan?

"Fray Tormenta…"

That wasn't his voice. That was the other one, the nun. But she looked… different. More colourful. By all the Thrones and Dominions, where had she been storing that costume? Wait - she saw the sinner who'd received a mandatory forgiving embrace staggering away, half-covered in a discarded habit. Goodness, she must have been boiling under all those layers. And Morrigan couldn't see her face behind that all-encompassing mask, a visage of gold that seemed… oh dear. Oh dear. A cape flared, sequins sparkled, gold spandex flexed alarmingly. A ruler was clutched between two hands like some sword of old.

"...and Sor Suprema!

 

[xbox432]

This is fucking ridiculous, it's exactly what Brockton Bay needed. And I just can't help cackling through every chapter update.

 

[meloa789]

I am repeating it again, with McGill as the mission control, these three needs to be a team immediately.