Returning to shore after the honestly quite boring ferry tour had Taylor and Amy both suddenly getting up. Their snark sense was reporting that there was something there that they'd never felt before, and that felt like nothing that they'd ever been near before. To a significant degree at that.
Taylor: What the hell is that?
Amy: I don't know. It certainly isn't a snark, or even a boojum.
<Data>
That had both girls blinking.
Amy: That's a jabberwock?!
<Agreement>
Taylor: Okay...are there any rules of etiquette or something like that to follow with one?
<...data. Elaboration>
Fun. It depended entirely on what emulation the jabberwock was or wasn't running, and without one they tended to just do their thing because there really wasn't any way to be 'rude' with them under normal circumstances. Well, unless you tried to kill them.
That translated as something 'rude' at a minimum, though only if they hadn't tried to kill you first.
As the ferry approached the shore it became incredibly obvious that there was a sizable group gathered. A fairly noisy group that was taking a large number of pictures, almost but not quite centered on where Taylor and Amy had parked their mopeds. Though some of that was easily attributed to a fence and building being in the way for people to actually be centered there. The jabberwock appeared to be the focus of the group, and was pretty much right next to the mopeds.
It wasn't until they stepped off of the ferry and headed towards the crowd, cautiously, that they noticed that there was a gap in the crowd. One leaving a path through the crowd, glowing barriers keeping people from entering it. Or at least that was what they thought at first, until a kid and their parent crossed through it seemingly without noticing the gap. That struck them as odd. At the same time, there was a glowing sign at the end of the path with their names on it.
Deciding that there wasn't a whole lot of reason not to, they carefully stepped onto the path. Three people behind them gasped and said something about them vanishing, which meant that there was likely a stranger effect of some kind on the path preventing anyone else from even realizing it was there. That might explain how people could cross over it but not acknowledge it. Moving down the not-quite-straight path didn't take long, and at the other end they found Scion. Though not as anyone had likely seen him before today.
He had a lawn chair set up next to the two mopeds, reclined back. Instead of the white bodysuit and cape that he was known for wearing he had on a tie-dye t-shirt and khaki pants. No shoes or socks, but his hair was trimmed back to shoulder length and his beard had apparently been shaved off. Next to the chair were what looked like two gifts, identically sized but with very different paper on them. One looked like it had a pattern of DNA molecules that were far more complicated than they should be while the other appeared to have a pattern of carbon atoms bonded in impossible ways. Well, unless you wrapped them around another physical dimension, maybe?
Scion didn't seem to notice their approach, and there were barriers around him and the mopeds keeping everyone else away. The only gap in those barriers was at the end of the path that they were walking down, and there were gasps when she and Amy stepped off of the path and into the cleared area. Apparently now they could be seen again. Despite the gasps, Scion still didn't react.
Standing there for a minute and feeling stupid, Taylor finally sighed. "Hello?" She got no response, even if she could feel that something was going on. Data moving back and forth between Scion and unknown parts, perhaps?
"Scion?" Amy tried, also getting no response.
Well, they could either ignore him, get on the mopeds, and see if they could make it back out along the path with them or they could try a different communication method to get his attention. Taylor opted to try the latter.
Taylor: Hello?
That caused Scion to suddenly sit up in a manner that defied biological explanation, though might be possible by the known laws of physics if his legs had significantly more mass than his upper body did. They didn't look like they did, of course, but it was at least possible. In theory, anyway. He looked around, finally noticing Taylor and Amy standing there.
"Good afternoon," he said, nodding slightly. At the same time he floated up a bit more and the lawn chair vanished, allowing him to land on his feet right where the chair had been, and it felt to Taylor like there was quite a bit of information moving around, but more incoming than outgoing now. "My apologies for dropping in." He then looked directly at Taylor. "I wanted to personally thank you for bringing the network's attention to the infection that had been planted in it. At the same time, I've been reminded by other portions of the network that if I'm going to vanish that I need to explain a few things."
Here he paused, looking around, before turning back to Taylor. "Perhaps you should activate the recording system in your visor. It will be far higher quality than the devices others are already using to record this. I could set up the system we'd originally planned to use for revealing this information, but since my counterpart didn't survive that doesn't appeal to me."
Blinking, Taylor shrugged and started her visor recording. "Okay."
Scion nodded. "I apologize in advance for any misunderstandings, for I am not and never have been human. I've got an...overlay, to simplify it, of human behavior but that isn't enough to properly understand your species. Other aspects of the network have studied various human cultures to a much greater degree than I have, and I'm currently using several of them in order to facilitate this communication." He then looked down at his clothing. "It's also possible that those aspects are being less than directly helpful, my counterpart would normally have handled a lot of this. I'm more of the 'smash problems' part of our partnership. I'm not sure why these garments were deemed appropriate."
He shook his head lightly and looked back at Taylor. "Regardless. My counterpart and I are the origin of what your people refer to as 'parahuman abilities'. We're what you might call a supraorganism; despite being a pair we could merely have been considered two parts of a single whole and many of our component pieces, shards of ourselves, are mutually dependent on one another. It is those shards that grant the additional abilities to hosts, both to learn more about possible ways to do things and to hopefully solve various long-term problems that our species is aware of. Several of those problems we have come to believe are unsolvable, but telling you what those are has been proven to be a bad idea in the past. Learning new ways to use the abilities that the shards possess is always an option, and you've personally helped with that in multiple ways already."
Holding a golden hand out, a three-dimensional image appeared over it. A sphere, mostly covered by one large blob of something but with a smaller blob on the far side of it. "This is the version of this planet that your own shard sits on, shared now with the shard of another. Your shard, or the bulk of it anyway, was sent there as my counterpart and I arrived in this region of space nearly fifty of your years ago. Eventually the two shards will cover that planet entirely, then extend down into it until even the planet's core has been consumed for resources. At that point they will reconfigure to better obtain energy from the star that they're orbiting. During this process they will likely split multiple times, individual portions working with different hosts."
A moment later the image changed, to show another planet. This one had three smaller blobs on it, with no obvious water sources or continents. He gestured at it with his other hand. "This is another version of the planet that you know of as Venus, one that has three split-off pieces of shards recently deposited upon it. Provided that there are planets in uninhabited iterations of the local star system available then split-off pieces of shards may be sent to them in order to grow." The image then changed again, this time simplifying to show a generic Earth image with a moon orbiting it. This image had a web around it, just outside of the orbit of the moon itself. "And this shows the current configured range limit on shard to host connections. Recent predictions have the network recovering enough to allow it to be expanded to cover at least the inner star system in eighty to ninety years followed by the majority of the star system in another four to five hundred. Until then those with parahuman abilities will need to avoid space travel, but over time additional ways to cross dimensional boundaries to other inhabitable iterations of the star system will become available. I'm under the impression that steps are already being taken to help facilitate that above and beyond the granted abilities that would otherwise do so."
He waved the image away, and then he was surrounded by images of twenty beings. Taylor recognized Helvetia and Margaret almost immediately. Scion spun to gesture at them all. "These twenty are what translates to something like 'troubleshooter' in this language. They have their own tasks, but that will include watching over the network so long as it remains viable. Like me, they are not and never have been human, but they are much better at faking it than I am. At the same time, every so often they will cycle out to 'refresh' their systems. Hosts such as humans can grow in ways that they can't and if they become too disconnected then they take time to rebuild their profiles. When that happens they will likely return in very different guises."
Those images vanished, and he turned back to look at Taylor. "Once the network has advanced far enough it will stop seeking out new hosts. Instead, hosts will have to seek out their own partners, though how that will work will vary significantly. This is because to connect to a partner is to trap yourself in this star system, and eventually most host species wish to explore further than that. Groups that aren't dependent on a connection to a partner will need to be assembled for the actual journeys, even if those with partners help construct the vessels they do so with."
He then held his hand down, and the two boxes lifted up to hover near it. Once they had he shifted his hand to hold it out towards Taylor and Amy. The box wrapped with the linked carbon pattern floated to Taylor while the one with the DNA pattern floated to Amy. "Eventually the troubleshooters that currently identify as Clive, Helvetia, and Rin will be available for further questioning, if needed. Once again, I thank you, but suggest that you open my gifts to you for your assistance in private."
As soon as the two had taken the gifts in their hands he gestured behind him and a tear in reality opened up. "With that said, farewell. It's possible that you won't see me again." He then stepped through the tear, but paused on the other side. Turning back to look at Taylor and Amy, there was a burst of data that felt like something had changed in their snark. "I have, however, just ensured that if you need to you can have your partner contact me. If I haven't left before you two make your status official then I would not object to attending. Oh, and the barriers will vanish a few minutes after you've left."
With that the tear in reality closed. Taylor looked at Amy, who appeared to be in a state of shock. Perfectly understandable in Taylor's opinion. Deciding that actually driving anywhere was out of the question right now, she remotely triggered a portal to appear in front of the two mopeds. Neither of them said anything, even as a few of the bystanders snapped out of their own shock and started yelling questions. Instead they just shifted the two mopeds into the pocket dimension, made sure that they had their gifts with them, and closed the portal.
It would be another half hour before Taylor remembered that she'd been recording and stopped it, followed by extracting the relevant portion of the recording to drop into the PRT's system. As far as she was concerned, they could figure out what to do with it.
Scott and Scott stepped through the portal that they'd opened. Helvetia wasn't letting them reach the Cauldron compound until she was done there, but had promised that at least one of the anchors they needed to target locations would be present before she left. She actually planned on one per building, but admitted that if given other tasks that she'd only be able to guarantee one in the main building. They could figure out getting to the other buildings themselves if needed.
For now, however, they'd recovered from their agent being deployed and needed to visit some people. Their first stop was a little scary for them though, because it involved getting within experimentation range of Riley. That anyone in the area should have the cables or wireless charging equipment that they needed to get their tablets back online was a bonus, admittedly. Luckily for them they remembered enough about the hidden city to not need to ask for directions.
Of course, knowing where they were going didn't stop them from attracting attention. They weren't exactly dressed for the weather, or not being in a hospital bed for that matter, and Helvetia hadn't really helped them clean up much either. Regardless, nobody approached them and they made it to the Horsfall residence without issue and rang the doorbell. Luckily for them, Joey answered the door.
"Hello," he said, looking over them. "Er, not to sound rude, but you two look like you escaped from a hospital. Which is impressive, because we don't have one."
"We're okay," the former Doormaker replied. "Just hoping for a little bit of assistance from you."
"Three main things," the former Clairvoyant continued. "The first being an opportunity to charge our tablets. At which point we'll be able to prove quite a bit more to you, unless you'd like us to use your own equipment to validate our PRT credentials?"
Joey raised an eyebrow. "Okay, you've got me curious. What are the other two?"
"We're hoping that you're willing to accept some off-world beacon codes as payment for a pocket dimension and related equipment."
"Also," the former Doormaker said. "We're a lot more limited now and might want a better introduction to Riley. Our previous 'mysteriously deliver packages' trick might not have been the best impression...and we can't actually do that anymore."
Joey sighed. "Fun. We've got a wireless charging pad in the living room, or I can dig up a brick or two with cables if you don't have that option?"
"Wireless is fine."
"And as soon as my mother or sister see you they're probably going to insist on getting you something else to wear. Unfortunately for you, I think the only things we've got around that might come close to fitting you are my sister's."
Ah. That would be one of those unanticipated downsides to their first choice of destination
not being one of the PRT warehouses with lots of clothing in them. Admittedly, without their tablets they couldn't actually get into those. Even with them they might not be able to, honestly, they'd never
needed authorization codes to enter buildings before and thus it was likely that nobody had ever bothered to give them any.
Taylor blinked and looked at her father. "What?"
"What did Scion give you?" he repeated. "Surely you've opened the gift he gave you by now?"
"Er, no, actually. Amy and I left them sitting next to the mopeds while we worked at processing everything
else he talked about."
"Ah. I suppose that makes some sense, given the amount of discussion that it's getting everywhere else. The reactions to people finding out that parahumans were given powers by aliens from who knows where have been incredibly varied. There are a lot of people that refuse to believe it as well, for that matter, but having Scion reappear just to make the explanation has resulted in the doubters having less of a voice. Well, except for those claiming that it was a hoax, but the complete lack of anyone present noticing that path you two walked down made people assume that was less likely."
Taylor nodded. "Not to mention the other barriers, the vanishing chair, the light show, the portal..."
"Yeah. Either Eidolon came to visit and showed off or it was actually Scion, and a number of people described being around him in ways that were sufficiently close to other descriptions of being around Scion. Well, minus a constant feeling that he was sad, anyway. That Eidolon was known to be battling a fire during part of Scion's appearance helped rule that out as well."
Taylor nodded, but was distracted before she could say anything.
Amy: So, Vicky is insisting that we open gifts.
Taylor: My father was just asking me about that, actually. Meet up in the pocket dimension and open them there?
Amy: Works for me.
"So," Taylor said. "Vicky apparently decided to pester Amy about gifts as well. Want to join us in the pocket dimension for opening them?"
"I think I'd like that," her father replied.
Ten minutes later Taylor and her father were joined by Amy, Vicky, Carol, and Mark. Taylor handed Amy the DNA-patterned gift box before picking up her carbon-bond pattern one. Both looked over the boxes.
Taylor: Think there's technology in these?
Amy: Maybe.
<Data>
Huh. Their snark wouldn't let them try and identify what may or may not be in the boxes because that would 'ruin the surprise'. Which was probably not a horrible thing, admittedly, even if it was annoying. After a couple of shakes of each gift the two shrugged and tore off the wrapping paper to reveal plain brown boxes. Raising eyebrows, they opened those up to find a set of paperwork sitting on top of a plastic insert.
"Is that written in anything anyone has
any hope of reading?" Vicky asked, looking at Amy's paperwork booklet.
"What?" Amy said, looking at the sheet and pointing at the top of it. "It states outright that these are instructions for a personal flight device right there."
"If that's what it says then you're capable of reading what looks like a very complicated
barcode."
Taylor frowned, and flipped through the manual. It was
incredibly detailed, including maintenance and other technical information. At the same time, it was ten pages long. "I'm thinking that there's no way that this is written in English, even if I understand it perfectly. It's too
short to be written in English with this level of detail."
Amy blinked, flipped through her own copy, and nodded. "Okay, yeah. But is it something to do with our snark or is it something that Scion did to ensure that only we could read it?"
"I'm assuming that making it so that our snark would translate it for us
is the easiest way to ensure that only we can read it."
"Point."
Putting the manuals aside, the two then removed the top plastic insert. That was followed by removing what looked like sleeveless leotards with a built-in low-profile multi-piece harness for the upper torso. The two leotards were currently almost but not quite skin tone for the two and looked to be slightly large, but both of them now knew that they would actually resize to fit them when put on. At the same time it would adjust to match their skin tone so as to be less obvious that they were wearing them.
The leotards themselves counted as somewhat armored, though that was more of a side effect than intention. There was no way to charge or power the leotards included, but that was because they were specially tuned for Taylor and Amy. To the point where they couldn't even use each other's instance. Once they pulled them on the devices would interface with the connection to their snark, each set to only work with the single connection. That interface would both power the devices
and allow for direct, instinctive mental control. As though they had a flight power, but without having their snark doing the work.
If she were being honest, though, Taylor currently thought that the manual was the bigger 'gift'. While it didn't explain how to
power things with a snark connection, it actually contained instructions on building wearable control interfaces that were
controlled through the connection. They would need to be individually tuned, and thus at a minimum the final steps for manufacturing them would need to be done per user, but that was likely an incredibly useful bit of information that would need to be translated into something others could understand.
"So are you two going to try them out?" Vicky asked while the three parents just watched from the sidelines.
"Not right now," Taylor stated.
"Awww. Why not?"
"Because we're not stripping out of our clothing in front of all of you just to put them on," Amy retorted.
Vicky blinked at that, then blushed. "Oh, right. Sorry, I wasn't thinking."
"Which sounds about normal for you," Carol said. "Though I am curious as to what the potential capabilities of these devices are. Do you happen to know how fast they'll let you go, their height limitations, what kinds of safeties do they have? Or even how long their power sources will run for before you need to recharge them?"
"If we push them they'll do a couple hundred kilometers an hour," Amy said. "No altitude limits, if we fall unconscious while flying they'll gradually drop us to the ground, and they're powered off of our snarks and thus have what might as well be unlimited runtime."
<Data>
Taylor blinked. "And apparently even a power nullifier can't make them stop working, like pretty much all of our other tech. I imagine that wouldn't be the case if Scion had just given us a flight power directly?"
"So," Vicky said. "You were given what amounts to a wearable flight power."
"Yes."
"Do you think that any
other kinds of powers could be made like that?"
"You could ask Reknit," Amy suggested.
Rebecca sighed as she reviewed the final 'to be uploaded' video from Scion meeting with Miss Hebert and Miss Dallon, the latter coming across as more of a 'because they were going to be together anyway' detail than an actual intention. The more annoying part was the pile of information that Scion had revealed, coupled with him giving outright gifts to a Ward and an affiliate before vanishing again.
They still didn't actually know if the danger had
really passed, or if they were being played for fools by Scion. There was no longer any way to tell, as they no longer had any information advantage whatsoever. The only thing they could do was hope that they didn't all die in an explosion one day while looking for any hints at all that they
weren't safe from the entities. Which was, in and of itself, a scary proposition on its own, only to be made worse by conspiracy theorists likely making it harder to spot real problems instead of manufactured ones.
Deciding that the video wasn't going to get any less annoying, nor that it was really revealing anything that wasn't present in over a dozen phone-recorded videos, she approved the video to be posted. She wouldn't be doing so personally, that would probably be snatched up by Glenn at this stage. Instead she moved on to the next item on her list, which was writing a message to Miss Hebert to officially enquire as to what, exactly, Scion had given her. There was no legal or contractual obligation for the girl to answer, at least so long as it wasn't a weapon of mass destruction of some kind, but they could ask.
When she was done with that she was going to go over her personal checklist for 'should I just retire from running the PRT?', because at this point she was starting to think that sticking to just being a Protectorate and Guild member might be less stressful. That, and it was
much harder to juggle things now that she'd lost her perfect recall. Sadly, the hard part, should she decide that it was time to retire, might be convincing the President to
let her.
Taylor was impressed with herself, having converted five pages of the provided manual to
eighty pages of English. Whatever the manual was written in was incredibly information-dense without looking it, or it was tapping into things that her snark was filling in the details on automatically. She wasn't sure which, and her snark hadn't been able to tell her either way. Whatever the case, she was taking a break from that to look over the actual device for things that the manual didn't actually state outright.
As an example of that, there appeared to be a set of very low-power emitters in the harness section that were intended to keep wind from being a significant problem while flying at speed. It wouldn't help as much with anyone that they were carrying, should they do that, but it would help them from the majority of the wind chill that they'd otherwise be subjected to. It was also possible that they'd be effective against small insects and particles. They would not hold up to impacts with birds, bullets, drones, or planes though.
Amy: I vote that we try the flight systems out tomorrow.
Taylor: That sounds like a good idea, but I vote that we check to see if anyone has a problem with us visiting the private beach to do so.
Amy: I'll second that. Is the beacon still working?
Taylor opened up the remote control system to check.
Taylor: Yep.
Amy: Okay then. Think we should see if anyone else wants to join us?
Taylor: I know my father has to work. Inviting the other Wards might be nice?
Amy: I can check with Vicky, and it doesn't sound like a horrible idea to invite the others. Better for them to know what you've got available outside of a situation where you use it out of necessity, after all.
Taylor: Yeah.
Sending a message off to the other Wards, or to Kenta and Miku in Takara's case, only took a few minutes. She'd had to include a note that they were still waiting on permission from the people who set up the beach hut, which was asked for in a second message shortly afterwards. That was followed by some initial packing for the potential trip, nothing major in case it didn't happen, and some thinking about if it would be advisable to bring Ackbar and Rodney along for the trip or not.
Helvetia sighed as she examined what this shard had been doing. Five host connections, each of them horrible. One was to the rock at the bottom of a well, which it had been keeping at a constant temperature just above the freezing point of water. Another was to a pair of sneakers, or more specifically the soles thereof, which it had been ensuring were frictionless. Then there was a connection to a plastic toy soldier where it had been ensuring that the sword the soldier was holding was as sharp and dangerous as a real blade would be. Another rock had been made to give off a small amount of light. Lastly, there was a tongue piercing that had been causing anyone with it in their tongue to be unable to control their tongue in order to speak.
Unlike most shards with this kind of connection problem, she wasn't annoyed with how stupid this one had been. No, if anything she was impressed that it had remained as
functional as it had. It had taken severe damage thanks to a spike of rock piercing it, almost splitting into smaller pieces in the process. Most of its primary processing capabilities had been damaged beyond repair, a significant portion of its memory storage was on incredibly hard to access tertiary backup layers right now, and the grafted-on host connection bits hadn't properly attached to the whole and were barely communicating.
Disconnecting the host connections was trivial. Extracting the shard from the spike without causing further damage was much, much harder. It wasn't quite damaged enough to need to be scrapped for raw materials, and had persisted even as it no longer fully knew what it was supposed to be doing. At the same time, repairing it would be incredibly difficult, to the point where it would actually be easier to scrap it and build a new shard from the raw materials. Especially as what little sense of 'self' it had really hadn't survived, most of what it had been doing being entirely on 'instinct'.
A decision was made, and the shard was carefully moved. Not to another planet, but next to one of the buildings on this one. It was carefully deployed, pulled out of storage mode incredibly delicately so as to cause as little additional damage as possible. With that done some very basic fixes were applied. It would be fed energy, no longer able to gather resources on its own. It wouldn't be able to grow or repair itself, but instead it would be the first sample of a shard made intentionally available to humans. Signs in every language she had available were placed next to a new door she installed in the building, and she carefully patted the shard.
In the next hour or so Coordinator would revoke any remaining access keys that the shard had once been permitted. Coordinator would also be responsible for setting up the regular energy feedings that the shard would need, and possibly setting up additional safeguards for the shard's connection rules. Perhaps even disabling them entirely, though making that particular call wasn't up to Helvetia.
Five minutes later her somewhat somber mood was obliterated by determining that the next shard down the line had connected to a rubber stopper of some kind
without being severely damaged by a spike of rock piercing it.
