My Random Fiction Bits and Pieces

[mp3.1415player]

Sparked by a scene from a popular Worm fic a while ago.​

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"Fucking Tinkers."

The voice was muffled, feminine, and extremely miffed.

"Hold still, please." The other voice was also feminine, but somewhat exasperated, not to mention worried.

"Fucking PHO fanfiction."

"Stop wiggling around, will you, Vicky?" The worry had gotten stronger as had the exasperation.

"Fucking Leet!"

There was a sigh of irritation. The second voice was silent for a few seconds, then sighed again, with more worry than annoyance.

"I can't do anything about it, my power just... won't grab hold of the changes," she mumbled.

A long silence followed.

"You can't fix this?" the first voice said, shaking a little. The anger had been replaced with fear.

"No."

Another silence. Eventually, the first voice said, "Shit," in a flat tone.

"You probably shouldn't have hit Über so hard last week," the second voice sighed. "You nearly killed him. And you know Leet is his friend. He was bound to eventually try something to get you back. The guy's a bit vindictive sometimes."

"He's a scrawny little Tinker, not a fighter." This was said in a somewhat dismissive tone.

"The main word there is 'Tinker', Vicky. You know how dangerous they can be if they're given a chance to come up with something. Not to mention when they're both seriously angry and drunk. You're probably lucky that this is all he did."

"Lucky!" The squawk of rage was loud enough to echo off the walls of the room. "How is this lucky?"

"He could have done something a lot worse with whatever he made," her companion commented, "or possibly killed you. You're incredibly tough but he found a way around that. No one ever said he wasn't smart, just sort of... odd."

"Little freak," Vicky, or Victoria Dallon, better know as Glory Girl, mumbled viciously, rolling over from her face down position on her bed, then wincing a little before ending up on her side, looking at her sister. The dark-haired girl was kneeling beside the bed looking at her with worried eyes.

"What the hell am I going to do?" she asked quietly, pushing her blonde hair out of her eyes. "When Mom gets home..." She fell silent. Eventually she finished, "She's going to kill me. Then Leet. Then probably Über, just on general principles."

Amy rocked back on her heels and stood, moving to sit on the bed next to her sister. "I wish you hadn't smashed up that machine he made, maybe another Tinker could have worked out what it did and how to undo it," she sighed. Reaching out she experimentally poked her sister again, then shook her head. "It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I have absolutely no idea how he locked it down like this but I can't do anything. I can heal you fine, but not change this back."

Vicky looked down the length of her body, before shaking her head and allowing it to flop down onto the pillow. "They're both going to be long gone by now, aren't they?" she asked rhetorically. "They'll know they've gone too far and we'll be looking for them."

"I expect so," her sister admitted. "Like I said. Not stupid, just... odd. And a little amoral."

"Fuck it," Vicky grumbled. "If I ever find out who wrote that stupid story I'm going to strangle them for giving the idiot ideas."

They sat or lay in silence for a couple of minutes. "What am I going to do, Ames?" Vicky finally asked plaintively. "I can't live like this. Everyone's going to be looking at me and laughing."

"Everyone already looks at you, you should be used to it by now," her sister replied with a small smile.

"But they don't laugh," the blonde returned.

"True, I guess."

After a moment, Amy Dallon, the superhero Panacea, shrugged a little. "We're going to have to figure something out. At least you can fly, if you couldn't you'd be stuck in a wheelchair."

They both looked at what had been Vicky's legs until the run in with a drunk and angry Leet an hour ago. Now it was a golden-scaled fish tail, the vertical fin at the end darker gold, almost bronze. The dorsal fin that ran up the back of it from about half-way down to about her mid-back area was the same color, as were the pair of pectoral fins that sprouted from just above the hips. Vicky was wearing only a bra at the moment, allowing all the changes to be seen clearly.

"And you don't need to be wet, the skin and scales are more like something from a snake," Amy added. "It's an interesting design, biologically."

"Trust you to think about that," the other girl snorted. Amy smiled apologetically.

"Sorry. But it is."

"I hate fanfiction," Vicky muttered to herself, making Amy smile a little again. "Especially weird stories that have me in them."

"It was very popular on PHO a while ago," her sister said. "Kind of over the top but it was mostly funny."

Vicky sighed, then rolled onto her back, wincing again as her dorsal fin was pressed flat. "This feels really weird," she complained. With no real effort she floated off the bed, rotating into an upright position with her tail-fin a couple of inches from the floor. Her head was over six and a half feet up like this, considerably taller than she'd been before, since her tail was longer than her legs had been. Amy looked up at her.

"You actually look pretty impressive in a strange way," she commented. The blonde didn't look too happy about that but said nothing. Moving over to her dresser she peered into the mirror unhappily.

"Half my clothes are useless now," she complained. Amy rolled her eyes a little.

"Like that's important," the brunette said wryly. "Your costume sort of fits still, though."

"It's uncomfortable, with all these bits sticking out," Vicky replied, turning in mid air and wiggling one of her pectoral fins, something she was a little surprised to find was easy.

The sound of the front door opening and closing made both girls freeze. They exchanged a glance.

"I guess it's time to face the music," the flying mermaid known as Glory Girl sighed tremulously, atypically looking both worried and uncertain of herself. Amy nodded, her face blank. Standing, the brunette moved to her sister, both of them exchanging a quick hug, before they went to her bedroom door, opening it and going into the hallway.

"Mom?" Vicky called down the stairs. "I've got a sort of a... problem. Don't freak out, OK?" She floated down the stairs with her sister following glumly.

A few seconds after they entered the living room the shouting began.​

 

[mp3.1415player]

Next chapter in this series →​

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Some time ago when I started thinking about a Worm fic, I had three ideas that came to mind. One turned into Taylor Varga, which grew rather out of hand, although I regret nothing! One I did about eight chapters of, but shelved for the time being as it was rapidly turning into something ridiculously complicated. I may come back to it at some point in the future even so. I've lifted a few bits out of it for Taylor Varga, so it wasn't a waste of time.

The third idea was the one behind this beginning. Whether I'll go on with it at some point I don't know. I quite like the idea, but I haven't decided exactly how it would work, aside from it being an AU of Worm that breaks entirely with continuity some years before the start of canon. No Scion, that golden idiot makes the entire setting almost impossible to end properly without nearly everyone dying or a huge deus ex machina, so he snuffed it at the same time as Eden. Less powerful Endbringers, for the same reason, although still insanely powerful. Basically, tilting the field a little more towards sanity.

It would have been fairly dark even so, although not Worm dark. I didn't want to mow down entire worlds full of people...

This is the starting setup, but there is a prologue I never finished, which is set far into the future in a parallel universe. One where the last Bolo still in existence intercepts a weird transmission while trapped in hyperspace after the pyrrhic victory style climactic battle which wiped both humanity and the Enemy from the universe, follows it back, and decides to interfere with the evil plans of what it marks as a new version of the Enemy threatening a new, but recognizable, version of humanity.

All it needs is some recruits, who are willing and able to learn.

Oh, look there. How convenient. We'll just sabotage that Enemy mind link, hijack the connection, subvert the processing core which turns out to be no match for thousands of years of development in positronic computation, and begin...

For the honor of the legion.​

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June 29th, 2007

"You hurt my mother."

Derek was surprised at the high-pitched female voice, sounding like a preteen girl, which suddenly spoke from behind him, full of a mix of fury and determination. He noticed that Jim was looking past his shoulder with a startled expression on his face, as was the clerk behind the counter. The rest of the customers in the gas station were lying face down on the floor, some of them in tears.

Turning, his eyes immediately focussed on the barrel of the 9mm handgun which was pointed straight at his face in an impressively and worryingly steady grip, not wavering even slightly. The girl holding it in both hands in what looked appallingly like a practised weaver stance was rather tall for her age, and bore a definite family resemblance to the dark-haired woman who was lying on the ground behind her, one hand clamped to her side with blood welling between her fingers. The older woman was barely conscious at this point, while the other customer next to her who had got in the way of their robbery was already dead from Jim's shotgun.

Wondering for an instant where the hell the girl had got the damn gun from, he raised his eyes from the barrel, meeting the coldest gaze he'd ever encountered from anyone, never mind a girl that was, at best, something like twelve. Involuntarily he shivered a little. He'd known stone-cold killers in solitary confinement that couldn't pull off a look like that half as well. Glancing at the dead man, he spotted the badge on his belt, exposed due to the way his jacket had fallen open as he hit the floor, next to an empty holster. 'Fuck. A cop.' That explained the gun, at least.

He moved the hand his own weapon was in slightly, instinctively raising it a little in the face of the threat, which had the immediate response of the girl twitching the barrel to the side and firing one shot without any hesitation at all, the report deafening in the confines of the gas station. He felt a burning pain along the top of one ear, screeching in surprise and shock and nearly dropping his pistol.

"Holy fuck kid! You could have killed me!" he screamed in rage.

"Easily," she replied in an icy voice, having instantly reoriented her gun back to pointing at his face. "Drop your weapon or I will with the next shot."

"You really think you could kill someone, girl?" he asked sourly after a moment or two, his free hand feeling his left ear which he realised was missing about a quarter of an inch.

She slowly smiled in a manner which made his blood run cold.

"Try me," she replied in a terrifyingly even voice.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, she's just a kid," Jim suddenly snarled, swinging his shotgun up. There was another loud bang, making Derek lurch sideways, then something hit the ground next to him. Sidling away from whatever it was, the girl following his movements with her weapon having whipped it to the right and back too fast for him to capitalise on, he glanced down. Jim was lying face up on the floor, a neat hole exactly centred between his eyes, dead as a post with blood spreading in a pool from under his head.

"Jesus," Derek whispered in shock, looking back at the girl. She was still wearing that appallingly cold and determined expression, looking completely unmoved about the fact that she'd just killed someone. It was downright creepy, even with his own experiences over the years.

"Put down your weapon," she repeated. "You have fifteen seconds to comply before you die."

He stared in horror for several heartbeats. "Ten seconds." The muzzle of her gun raised just a fraction, making him absolutely certain it was aimed dead centre between his eyes. "Five. Four. Three..."

"Shit, OK, OK, I'm dropping it," he ground out, tossing his gun to the side. She didn't take her eyes off his face to follow the path of the weapon even for a moment.

"Thank you. Sir?" The girl flicked her eyes at the clerk, then back to Derek before he could move. "Will you please come out from there, going to your right, then come over here? Please kick that shotgun out of reach in the process."

The clerk didn't move for a long moment, then did as requested, a metallic rattling sound indicating the twelve-gauge sliding across the floor. As he came into view Derek could see the twenty-something man was shaking. "You, lie face down on the floor with your hands behind your back. Sir, please remove the handcuffs from the left jacket pocket of the officer here and put them on the perpetrator." She sounded more professional than some twenty-year career cops he'd encountered. The clerk stared at her, then at Derek who had reluctantly dropped to his knees, before bending over the dead police officer and gingerly fishing in the relevant pocket.

Sighing a little, and also more than slightly unnerved, Derek went the rest of the way to the floor, putting his hands behind him, the gun muzzle following him down. The click of the handcuffs locking around his wrists was horribly final. Tugging a little on the cold metal, he sagged. The young man may have been in shock but he'd tightened the cuffs more than enough to prevent escape.

"Thank you, sir. Please call 911 immediately and request a medical and police presence as fast as possible." The girl's voice was still hard, but not quite as controlled now. Derek looked up to see she was kneeling next to her mother, taking her own coat off and then removing her t-shirt, before folding it up and gently moving the older woman's hand aside to press the improvised bandage over the gunshot wound in her abdomen. "Mom, you're going to be OK," the girl said softly, worry now for the first time apparent. "Just hold this for me." The mother opened her eyes, blinking at her daughter, then smiled faintly.

Derek made a small motion to relieve the stress in his arms and then froze as the girl was instantly pointing her appropriated weapon directly at him again. He'd barely seen her move. "Stay still, please," she stated calmly. He stared, that almost robotic note was back in her voice again, making him entirely sure she'd pull the trigger without a second thought if she decided he was a threat.

The sound of the clerk talking urgently on the phone in the background stopped. "They're on the way, miss," the man said.

"Thank you, sir. Can you please find something more effective as a bandage? Do you have a first aid kit, for example?"

"Sure," the man said, sounding eager to help. He rummaged around for a moment then came back around the counter holding a large box with a red cross emblazoned on the cover. Putting it down he opened it, turning it around to show the contents to the girl. She looked them over then indicated a few things.

"Open that bandage," she directed. He did as requested. "Fold it twice, into a square," she added, watching as he followed her instructions. Derek watched in amazement as she talked the young man through the process of bandaging the wound in her mother's side with all the assurance of a practised paramedic. As he finished, she felt her mother's throat, checking her pulse, then nodded. Seconds later she looked up at the sound of sirens.

"Good, they're here. You'd better go back to the counter, make sure you keep your hands visible." He nodded and stood. The girl competently popped the magazine from the gun in her hand, showing considerable expertise, then ejected the chambered round with a quick action of the slide, before slipping it back into the magazine. When she was finished making the weapon safe she leaned over her mother to replace it into the holster of the dead officer, putting the magazine in his pocket, then moved back to sit beside her mother with one hand on the older woman's bandage and the other on her shoulder.

She turned her head to stare at Derek meaningfully.

"If my mother dies, I will find you, and I will make you beg for death." The look in her eyes combined with the total assurance in her quiet voice nearly made him piss himself. He had absolutely no doubt she meant every word and would find a way to follow through on her promise.

Dropping his head to the tiles he waited while the police car and ambulance screeched to a halt outside, the gas station filling with cops seconds later. A few minutes after that he was sitting in the back of a police cruiser wondering who the fuck the girl was while hoping desperately they never met again.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Detective Maggie Thorpe of the BBPD watched the surveillance video from the aborted gas station hold up with a mix of awe and horror. "Jesus Christ, that's terrifying," she said softly when it finished. "How old is that girl?"

Her partner, Detective Leroy Vanover, replied in a tone of voice expressing similar feelings, "Ten days past her twelfth birthday." He flipped through a pile of documentation. "Taylor Annette Hebert, born June nineteenth, ninety-five, to Danny and Annette Hebert, here in Brockton Bay. Gifted student, no previous interaction with the police, nothing on record as to any gang affiliation or anything else of that nature. Something of a loner according to her teachers, although it sounds more like she just prefers to keep to herself a lot of the time. Sociable, but not really social, if you see what I mean. She's got at least one close friend, an Emma Barnes, daughter of Alan Barnes, lawyer. Who also says the Hebert girl is a private individual, but very open and happy to those she trusts. Although there aren't many of those people. He says she's one of the smartest people he's ever met. Reads a lot, apparently."

"And spends three hours a day in a gun range practising?" Maggie looked away from the monitor to meet her partner's eyes. He shook his head, shrugging.

"Not that we can find out. She's visited a local range a few times with her father for target shooting and the range operators say she's an amazing shot, but they thought her parents were teaching her."

"Were they?"

"Not according to her father. He thinks she's just got good reflexes and an eye for shooting. He said she's read every book she could find in the library on firearms and other weapons, but also that she's read practically everything else as well so it didn't particularly stand out. Apparently she reads really fast not to mention incessantly and seems to be interested in almost anything. Basically it sounds like she started at one end of the library and she's working towards the other end. Takes out about ten to fifteen reference books a week."

Maggie looked over at the other monitor which showed the image of the girl she'd just seen interrupt and shut down an armed robbery with more skill and cold judgement than she thought she could bring to bear herself, never mind dropping one assailant in his tracks with no more apparent regret than if he'd been an irritating insect. It was... not at all normal. The girl was sitting calmly at a table in one of the interrogation rooms with her father and a man she recognised as a public-appointed lawyer next to her, the two men conversing over her head.

"Is she a parahuman?" she asked slowly. He sighed.

"We can't actually ask that, as you know. But I don't think so, personally. In my experience capes tend to be pretty obvious pretty fast, and there's nothing in her history that would suggest that she's been wandering the city plugging muggers for fun, for example." Maggie snorted with mild amusement at his dry words. "Not to mention she's awfully young for that sort of thing anyway."

"Age doesn't seem to be much of an issue with parahumans," she replied sourly.

"True enough, but even so, it doesn't quite seem to fit in this case."

"We're going to have to call the PRT even so, I suspect," she sighed.

"Possibly. For now, though, how do you want to handle it?"

Maggie dropped the paperwork she'd been leafing through on the desk and shook her head slightly. "I'm not sure. She's a minor, for one thing, and any good lawyer would make a pretty convincing case of self-defence for another. Her mother had been shot in the commission of a robbery in which a cop was also killed, by two men who between them have a body count of something like ten previous victims and were obviously not worried about adding to it, and the one she dropped was clearly about to shoot at her. Personally, I think she's due a medal for how efficiently she handled the whole thing. I probably couldn't have done it as well myself, especially if a family member was bleeding out next to me."

"I feel the same." Leroy scowled. "Ray was a good friend."

"The thing I'm worried about is that total lack of emotion about the fact she killed someone. Not actually in cold blood, but still... It was kind of creepy how little she seemed to care about it. She might be some sort of psychopath and this is just the start."

Her partner watched the monitor as well. "I know what you mean, Maggie. I've seen professional soldiers who were more affected than that girl about killing someone. Which is just freaky in a twelve year old. But the psychologist's preliminary report says she is, in his opinion, 'A very intelligent, polite and essentially normal young girl although more reserved than is typical.'" He quoted from one page of the report he picked up again.

"He spoke to her for about half an hour in total," she snorted, "how can he come to any sensible conclusions in that time?"

Leroy chuckled. Maggie didn't get along with the psychologist. "I know what you mean, but it matches what everyone else we've talked to says about her. No one thinks she's particularly troubled at all, never mind some sort of cold blooded killer just waiting to strike."

She waved mutely at the other monitor. He sighed once more. "Although I admit that viewpoint is sort of hard to reconcile with the terrifying killer robot act she put on in that gas station."

"She was like the fucking Terminator," Maggie grumbled. "Give her a leather jacket and an Austrian accent and people would run like hell after seeing that."

Leroy snickered for several seconds. "You paint a worrying picture, Mags," he grinned.

"I'd love to know where she learned to shoot like that," the female detective mused, playing the security footage again with the sound muted. One camera was pointing directly at the girl's face, clear enough to make out her expression perfectly. Maggie shivered slightly. Even through the screen the look in those eyes made her feel chilled. She noticed something as the girl fired the first shot, the one that had removed the top of the living suspect's ear. "Look at that," she exclaimed. "She literally didn't even blink when she pulled the trigger. Do you know how unusual that is? Practically everyone blinks at the shot. I do. I know you do as well."

Leroy watched the second shot, then nodded. "I see what you mean. That's kind of weird."

They watched for a little longer. "And look at that. She did exactly the right thing with the materials on hand to deal with a gunshot wound. How did she learn all that? I doubt the first-aid classes in Junior High teach that sort of thing."

"No idea," he replied. "One more mystery to add to the box labelled 'Taylor Hebert' I guess."

"Very helpful, thanks a lot," she muttered, making him smirk. After a few seconds, she stopped the playback, freezing it at the point the girl said something to the suspect they had in custody. She'd love to know what but whenever he'd been asked he clammed up, looking worried. Which was also sort of weird.

"How's the mother?" she asked. Leroy sighed slightly.

"Luckily she's going to be OK from what the hospital said. The bullet went through one kidney and out the back, but did surprisingly little damage all things considered. That said, they told me that without the first aid the girl provided she'd have bled out before getting to them. The young lady definitely saved her mother's life, and I'd guess quite likely the other three survivors in the gas station. Those two idiots might have slaughtered the witnesses, they've done it before."

Maggie nodded absently, inspecting the three people on the monitor. The Hebert girl looked up, staring right at the camera for a second or two, which made her twitch a little. She could see in the girl's eyes she knew full well they were being watched.

After a moment the girl went back to looking straight ahead, apparently at her reflection in the one-way mirror opposite the table, with the same calm patience visible on her face. Maggie got the impression she was prepared to wait more or less forever for something to happen. By now the lawyer was taking notes about something the father was saying.

"What do we have on the parents?" she asked slowly, studying the tall skinny figure of Danny Hebert, who looked surprisingly calm for a father that was in a police station with his twelve year old daughter, waiting to see what happened about the way she'd shot someone between the eyes. Leroy turned to another page in his documents.

"Daniel Hebert, age thirty-six, born in Brockton Bay. Officially head of hiring at the Dockworkers Association, and from what I know is actually pretty much in de facto charge of the union. They have a hell of a lot of respect for him. He doesn't look like much but I've heard stories about a few things over the years..."

Leroy shook his head. "There's a reason that most of the sensible gangs tend to leave the dockworkers alone. No one can prove anything, but there's more than one ganger that tried the heavy approach and turned up beaten to a pulp in an alley the next night. One or two of the more persistent ones never turned up at all. Even E88 tend to be polite around those guys. Impressive, for having no capes I know about."

"Hmm." Maggie could remember a few stories herself now that she thought about it. "I seem to recall there was some sort of incident about a year ago with some Merchants who moved slightly too close to the still working parts of the docks?"

"Yes." Leroy grinned. "That was pretty funny in a horrible black comedy sort of way. An anonymous call was made to 911, when the ambulance turned up they found half a dozen drug dealers groaning on the ground with broken legs and arms. No trace of a weapon or any assailants, and for some peculiar reason none of them seemed to want to talk or press charges."

She chuckled, not being particularly sympathetic. "Serves the scum right," she muttered. More loudly, she asked, "Think he's directly involved in any of that?"

Leroy shrugged. "No idea. The only ones who could tell you won't, that I can guarantee. Those guys stick together like glue and are very loyal."

"Good thing they're more or less law-abiding," she noted. He nodded.

"Pretty much. But I wouldn't like to piss them off."

"What's his background before the union stuff?"

"He's been working in that area most of his career. Apparently he got half-way through a degree in accounting before the kid came along, but stopped when she was born. Guess he just never went back. He ended up in the union, originally as a low level administrator, but worked his way up to where he is. After the riots and the blockade of the port, he ended up pretty much in charge for nearly a year, and in many ways is still one of the more important people there."

Nodding slowly, Maggie looked at her partner. "No military background or anything?"

"Not that we can find. His own father was in the army in the sixties, but he died before the kid was born."

"OK. And the mother?"

"Annette Hebert, age thirty-nine, born in Boston. Professor of English literature at Brockton College. Well respected by her peers, liked by her students. Apparently she's extremely smart, holds two degrees in English literature and English language, not to mention speaks three languages. No one seems to have a bad thing to say about her. Again, no military history, although..." He turned the paperwork to the next page, then looked at Maggie with a small grin.

"Although... what?" she asked, in no mood for games.

"She was allegedly, at one point, in some way affiliated with Lustrum's movement." Leroy raised an eyebrow as Maggie twitched in surprise. "When she was at university. Apparently it didn't last all that long, she met Danny Hebert, left the movement a few months later, then Lustrum ended up where she is now. I couldn't find out any more about it but as far as I can see that's about the only particularly noteworthy thing in her background."

"Interesting," the woman mused.

"Probably not relevant, though, and ancient history now anyway."

"I suppose not." She studied the image of the three people, finally asking, "Anything else in the background check that might be relevant? Anything at all?"

Flipping pages, Leroy went over his documentation, the result of several hours of talking to various people around the city and a lot of computer searches. He finally pulled out one page. "About the only thing that stands out is this." He pushed the paper across the desk to his partner, who picked it up. "Two and a bit years ago, March 2005, Taylor and Danny Hebert were caught up, apparently totally by accident, in that thing with a bunch of the Teeth when they tried to re-establish a presence here in the city. Twenty-three people died when the PRT and the Protectorate stormed the mall the hostages were in, including all the Teeth and an even dozen innocents. The Heberts weren't in that group, but they got trapped by the lock-down of the area. Kid saw the entire thing, apparently. The PRT offered psychological help to everyone involved, the Heberts turned the offer down."

"I remember that. It was a total FUBAR of a situation. Miss Militia nearly died from a booby-trap she missed, and they got Velocity with a sniper. Not to mention six PRT troopers and three of our guys."

"They jumped the gun for sure. That was why they replaced the PRT Director here. Piggot is a lot smarter than the last guy. I don't think things would play out the same with her running the show. But that aside it's the only thing that stands out about Miss Hebert's background that's in any way unusual as far as I can find out. Nothing seems to have come of it but I guess she probably had nightmares for a while."

After another few seconds thought, she sighed slightly, then stood. "OK. Let's go and talk to young Miss Hebert and get her side of the story."

"This should be interesting," Leroy chuckled in a low voice, grabbing a folder of paperwork and following his partner downstairs to the interrogation room.

---

Next chapter in this series →​

 

[mp3.1415player]

Another weird idea I had while mulling over ideas for Taylor Varga which didn't quite fit in that story. Not exactly funny, more darkish really. Sort of a horror story, more by implication.​

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"What the..."

Ethan exchanged a look with the PRT sergeant he was discussing the current state of unrest with, as they tried to work out the best method to deal with this new ABB attack. There were gang gunmen hiding in several places in the building ahead of them, firing on a group of Merchants who were across the street in another building shooting back. They'd evacuated the surrounding area without too much trouble and Sergeant Williams was of the opinion they should let the idiots run out of ammunition then round up whoever was still alive afterward.

While seeing the point and at least partially agreeing with it, Ethan couldn't in all good conscience sit by as people shot each other, even if they were criminals. Even so, and despite his own parahuman abilities, he was disinclined to get shot himself in the process of stopping them. So they were slightly at an impasse.

The whole thing was compounded by the ongoing trouble throughout Brockton Bay that had flared up a couple of weeks ago after the E88 had managed to kill Mush, which had left the Merchants furious. Skidmark had, in return, tried to kill Victor, but somehow missed entirely and got completely the wrong building, which turned out to be owned by Lung.

The man hadn't taken it very well. No surprise there, he wasn't the forgiving sort. So he'd taken it upon himself to wipe out the Merchants, which if it wasn't for the stupid amount of destruction caused as collateral damage, most people would have applauded.

The entire situation had devolved into total chaos. New Wave had been pulled into it, mostly by accident, when one of Lung's attacks had nearly killed Lady Photon and Brandish. Glory Girl had gone off the reservation completely and kicked the shit out of Lung, jumping him without warning having tracked down his civilian ID somehow and only just missing killing him. Armsmaster had subsequently taken her down, allowing Lung to escape. She'd then escaped in turn when Shielder and Laserdream came after Armsmaster, who barely made it out. New Wave were now in a state of high alert and very defensive, not surprisingly.

Kaiser had taken advantage of the chaos to expand his territory, then run into the new group the Undersiders who had just formed, the quartet somehow ruining a number of his plans and driving him into a fury. The two gangs, one far larger than the other, appeared fairly evenly matched for some bizarre reason.

Coil's men kept popping up apparently randomly, aiding or resisting each side in turn, making everyone very confused about what the nutcase wanted.

The Protectorate was caught in the middle of all of this, desperately trying to keep a lid on it before the city was ripped to pieces. The Mayor was absolutely livid, Director Piggot was worse, and there was the distinct possibility of the National Guard being called in and martial law being declared.

Which, Ethan was convinced, wouldn't actually stop the violence, it would probably just make things much, much worse.

Four capes were now known dead across the three major gangs, two were missing, three new ones had turned up having probably triggered during the troubles, and he himself was on the verge of a minor breakdown.

He'd even stopped making jokes. That was how serious it was.

And now a special effect like something from a movie was forming in an alleyway to the side of the road their squad was on, a sphere of blue crackling lightning growing steadily and causing arcs to leap from every metal surface in the vicinity.

"The last time I saw something like that, a killer robot from the future came out of it," Williams quipped, leveling his containment foam launcher at the still-growing sphere. The six-man PRT team followed suit, two of them armed with M-16s instead of the non-lethal foam shooters. Assault stood ready, tense and worried. Behind them the shooting between the two buildings kept on going, a small part of his mind wondering how the hell the gangs could get so much ammunition, they always seemed to have enough to fight a decent size war.

Still crackling viciously, the glowing sphere stabilized at about six feet in diameter, the bottom edge visibly sunk into the surface of the alley, which was smoking where the energy met it. A delay of a few seconds was followed by a loud pop as the thing suddenly vanished, a wave of warm ozone-scented air briefly blowing across them.

Blinking at the abrupt change in lighting, as the thing had been very bright and the morning was fairly dim and wet, Ethan stared at what was revealed.

"Kid Win?" he asked in shock.

The man standing there was wearing something very reminiscent of the Ward's costume, although as he inspected it, he realized that it was different in key details. The man was clearly older, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, rather than seventeen, six inches taller, and more solidly built.

He also looked like he'd seen hell and barely escaped.

Looking quickly around, the man was muttering to himself. Ethan could barely make out a running dialog of technobabble, something about 'universal transit being a bastard and painful too,' and a comment that made him wonder, 'I hope I finally found a safe one this time.'

The new arrival had arrived looking to the side so all they saw was his profile, but he turned around in the process of inspecting his surroundings, freezing when he spotted them. A tentative smile spread across his face under his helmet visor. "Assault?" he asked querulously. "You're alive!"

'Oh, that isn't worrying at all,' Ethan thought with a sense of trepidation.

The man suddenly moved towards them, limping badly on one leg, which he could see had damaged armor over the thigh which looked like it had been melted. All the troopers raised their weapons in warning and he stopped again, a few feet closer.

"Stay there and identify yourself," Williams barked in a commanding voice.

The man ignored him completely, looking at Ethan with what seemed to be slightly shocked wonder. After a moment, almost in a whisper, he asked, "Do these names mean anything to you? Skitter?"

Ethan stared, then shook his head.

"Weaver?"

Shake.

"K… Khepri?"

Shake.

The man seemed to relax very slightly. He paused, then spoke again.

"The Techno Queen?" This was accompanied by what looked like an involuntary flinch as if he expected something to happen.

Ethan shook his head once more.

"Thank Christ for that," the man sighed. "Marceau? Banshee? Shy Girl? Starfield?"

The last name evoked a shudder from him.

Yet again, Ethan shook his head, wondering what the hell was going on.

Taking a deep breath, the man asked another series of names. "Saurial? Raptaur? Kaiju? Ianthe? Metis?" He paused again, then swallowed hard. "Varga?"

"Nope, never heard of any of them. Friends of yours?"

This provoked an incredulous stare and a short, bitter laugh.

"The last one. Taylor Hebert."

"Never heard of him."

"Her."

"Of her. No. Sorry."

"Don't be." The man suddenly looked very tired, but happy. "I escaped. I got away from her. Finally!"

Very slowly, and with no further sound, he dropped to his knees, then gently tipped over onto his face.

Ethan and the seven-man PRT team exchanged wondering glances. "What the fuck was all that about?" one of the troopers asked.

"Got me. Come on, help me get him into the truck. We need to get him back to the Rig and into medical then interrogation. You two, process the scene, normal Tinker protocols. Williams, give me a hand here." Issuing quick orders, Ethan was already feeling for a pulse. The guy was alive, but clearly stressed to, and beyond, the limit.

They soon had him gently restrained just in case, stripped of anything that looked like it might be dangerous, and lying on a fold-down cot in the back of the PRT truck. In the last few minutes the shooting from the warring gang factions had abruptly stopped, making him briefly wonder about the cause, but at the moment he had a more important issue to deal with.

He was almost a hundred percent certain that this was actually a version of Chris, or Kid Win. Older, more tired, and seriously smashed up, but still the same guy.

Which raised some very strange questions.

Calling in an encounter with an unknown parahuman, now in captivity but requiring medical intervention, Ethan sat beside the new arrival, watching him and wondering where he came from. And more importantly why he'd come.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"This guy is fucked up."

"Is that a medical description, Doctor?" Director Piggot looked curiously at the older man, who shrugged.

"It is when the patient is this fucked up." Picking up a clipboard, he leafed through the paperwork in it. "He's been shot, stabbed, burned, poisoned, with at least three different poisons by the way, irradiated, exposed to several diseases I've never even heard of, probably spent more time in a hard vacuum without protection than he should have..."

"I was unaware it was safe to spend any amount of time unprotected in a hard vacuum," Piggot interrupted.

"It isn't." He looked annoyed at the interruption, so she waved for him to continue. "He's had at least eighteen bones broken in the last probably two years or so, several more than once, he's suffering from malnutrition, concussion, scurvy, iron deficiency, and he has herpes."

The Director looked at the unconscious man in the bed, who was hooked up to half the medical equipment in the Rig infirmary, then discreetly took another step away from him.

"Will he live?"

"Oh, sure, we're good at what we do. I'd suggest calling Panacea in if you want a quick fix, but we can do it the old fashioned way. He's on a serious antibiotic which is nicely dealing with all the low level infections he has, a cocktail of supplements for the malnutrition and other issues of that type, and we've treated the burns from the most recent injury. Whatever the hell that was. It looks like some form of directed energy weapon wound to me."

The doctor put the clipboard back where it had come from. "He'll probably live. Guy must be as tough as nails to have survived this far. Impressive for all the wrong reasons."

"And the DNA test?"

"Ah. That's where it gets interesting."

Leading her to another desk, he picked up a computer tablet and poked it awake, then flicked through a series of test result graphs. "That guy is a near-perfect genetic match to one Chris Jacobs, PRT code name Kid Win. Minor differences only, closer than brothers, although not quite identical twins."

"A clone?" Piggot was surprised, but not shocked.

"I doubt it. None of the normal markers of cloned genetic material are present. I'd say he was completely normal, based on this."

"I see."

"I don't, but that's not my job."

"No. Thank you, doctor. How soon will we be able to talk to him?"

The doctor turned to inspect the patient. "Three days at least."

Piggot sighed a little. "We need to know who he is and where he came from."

Shrugging, the doctor put his tablet down on the desk. "In that case, you need a parahuman healer. Panacea could fix him in minutes. Othala would take a little longer."

"I'm not asking the E88 of all people for a favor," the director snapped.

"In that case you only have two choices. Wait, or ask Panacea."

"We're not her favorite people at the moment."

"I know but that's not my problem. I've told you what the choices are. Now go away and work out what you want to do, I have other patients to deal with and you're in the way."

She glared at the man, who glared back, unmoved.

"One day, Doctor..." she muttered.

"We'll both be dead by then, Emily. Goodbye." Turning away from her he stalked off across the infirmary to where a pair of paramedics and a nurse were dealing with a badly banged up PRT trooper, the woman hissing in pain from a seriously broken arm.

Annoyed, but not enough to push any more, Director Piggot stomped off towards her office. She was trying to work out the best bribe for New Wave to let them allow Panacea to help fix whatever weird double of Kid Win was in the infirmary. She didn't want to do it, but she had to know what was going on.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Thank you."

Amy merely nodded, standing up. The man in the bed looked somewhat familiar, but she wasn't interested in who he was or why Piggot had been prepared to offer her family practically anything for her to heal him. Neither did she particularly care what happened to him next.

"I'm done here," she announced to the doctor, who of all the people in the room she at least had a modicum of respect for. "He'll wake in about half an hour, as you requested."

"Thank you, Panacea," he said, nodding to her respectfully. She gave him a very small smile, then turned to her PRT escort.

"Please take me back to shore, now." The trooper glanced at Piggot, who made a small gesture, then headed for the door. She followed him, wondering with an internal sigh how much longer she could go on before she snapped and did something… interesting. Shortly she was sitting in the ferry back to the dock, shivering a little under her costume.

She wondered if she should have mentioned the well-disguised technological implants and enhancements the mystery man had in several places, then shrugged. Not her problem. Let the PRT figure it out.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Ethan watched as the man that had dramatically appeared in front of them that morning stirred, then opened his eyes, blinking a little. His gaze was unfocused at first, then sharpened, as he looked around the interrogation room. He was sitting on one side of the table, Ethan and Director Piggot were on the other. The man was restrained, his wrists bound with zip-ties and connected to a loop sticking out of the table with another one. He'd been dressed in a standard PRT uniform, all his equipment at least temporarily confiscated, and was wearing a domino mask in the interests of nominal adherence to the Rules.

He tugged on the restraints for a moment then seemed to lose interest, inspecting both the people watching him with a curiously sad look. "You got me healed," he said after a moment. "Panacea?"

"Yes."

"So she's alive too. And both of you still are. Weird."

Ethan exchanged a look with the Director, who raised an eyebrow slightly. He himself was present only because he was the one who had been there when the man arrived from wherever he'd come from.

Casting a glance to the side, the man looked at his reflection in the mirror that ran across the side of the room, behind which was an observation gallery. After inspecting it, or possibly the mirror itself, he turned back to them. "Now what?"

"Who are you?"

Director Piggot leaned forward a little. "And where did you come from?"

"I'm Chris Jacobs, as you no doubt have worked out. DNA test, I'd guess. Fingerprints and retinal scans will be either identical or almost identical as well. I used to be called Kid Win, back when I was a Ward. Before I ran into… her."

Piggot stared at him, as did Ethan. "Time travel or parallel world?" the director finally asked.

He looked approving. "You worked it out faster than they usually do. Parallel world. More or less. Little bit of time travel in there as well. What's the date here?"

Visibly mulling over whether to tell him or not, the director eventually said, "February seventh, twenty-eleven."

The man, or Chris, if he was to be believed, looked rather worried at this.

"I see. I left the last place on December eighteenth, twenty-twelve. You have my alternate here, don't you? You said 'Kid Win' when you saw me, you recognized me." He was looking at Ethan, who nodded.

"We have a Kid Win, yes."

"Has he worked out his specialty yet?"

Ethan looked at Piggot, who gave a gesture of assent. "No."

"Modularization. That might help him." The man smiled grimly. "It took me a long time to work it out."

"Why are you, hmm, I'd guess about twenty-nine or thirty, when our version is only a little over seventeen now? If you're only from a year and a half or so ahead..."

"I've lost count of how many times I've jumped now, it must be dozens. There's a certain amount of error in the world jump, about plus or minus a year normally. I think I'm about twenty-nine, yes, but I've lived through more versions of twenty-eleven that I can remember. The last time was the longest in one reality, close to two years. The shortest time has been a couple of days."

"Why do you keep… 'jumping', is it? From world to world?" Piggot sounded genuinely curious, as was Ethan. "Are you looking for something?"

"I'm running from something. Someone."

"This person is following you? Hostile?" Now both of them were worried.

Alt-Chris laughed, an ugly sound of despair. "Following me? No such luck. She's always already there. I can't escape her." He looked around wildly. "But this time I have, you didn't recognize her name. Normally by now she's made her first move. I've finally escaped."

"Escaped who?" Ethan asked slowly, feeling an internal shiver at the look in the man's eyes, a look of near-insanity for a moment.

"Hebert. Fucking Taylor Hebert. The Escalation Queen, the World Destroyer, the Fury Storm. She has many names." He glared at them, leaning forward. "She is everywhere," he hissed. "So many powers, so many names, so many variations. From stupid little abilities that are barely worth mentioning, to powers that would terrify a god. But she always works out how to use them, works them out more than anyone should be able to. You can't win, not against that. All you can do is run. I ran. I'm still running." Leaning back he relaxed so suddenly he almost went boneless, closing his eyes. Ethan exchanged another look with the director, seeing she was as disturbed as he was. "But maybe I've finally run far enough."

There was silence for some while, until he spoke again, not opening his eyes. "One version of her triggered with this stupid power. She could manifest and control exactly four hundred and seventy-three grams of confetti over an area of approximately one kilometer." He chuckled for a second or two. "What a pointless ability, right?" Opening his eyes he looked darkly at them. "You know what they called her less than a year later?"

Ethan shrugged, shaking his head.

"God-Empress Papercut. She took over the city in two months. New England in only three more. The entire fucking country in another two. By the time I turned up, she ran the world." He shivered. "You don't want to know what she did to people who went up against her."

Once again there was silence. Ethan was wondering if this was some bizarre joke, but the haunted look in the man's eyes suggested it was anything but.

"My original reality, she triggered with an insect control power. That was fucking terrifying. Swarms of bees everywhere. She took over the city. I managed to get out. Next place, same thing, only she made the bees. I ran. Next place, even worse, she was a fucking insect herself. And her range was about five miles rather than two blocks. She's taken over the country inside six weeks. I jumped a lot further that time, trying to get away from insect versions of her. Took three more jumps. One of them, she'd taken over the entire local world-chain, killed Scion, Alexandria, ran the entire place."

He shivered again. "Scion's a bad guy, by the way, he's an alien who's going to destroy the world. Sorry, should have mentioned that earlier. And Alexandria is Chief Director Costa-Brown, she runs Cauldron along with Eidolon and several others. They're evil, but trying to save people. Just really, really badly." He snapped his fingers. "Oh, right, the Endbringers are Eidolon's fault somehow. Kill him and they stop."

"WHAT?" Both Ethan and Piggot shouted in shock.

"Oh yes, Coil is… Wait, do you have Coil here?"

"Yes," the director mumbled, looking like she'd been hit with a cattle-prod.

"OK. He's Thomas Calvert." Piggot went pale, then purple. "Has a base in an old unfinished Endbringer shelter under the middle of the commercial district. His power lets him run two parallel time lines and pick the one that gives him the result he wants. Normally he ends up kidnapping Dinah Alcott, she's one of the most powerful precogs in the world. That's usually around March or so. The Undersiders work for him, Tattletale is being blackmailed by him and the others are locked into his influence in other ways. She's a thinker as well, really powerful deductive and inferential abilities. Usually ends up a friend of Heberts, makes her even more dangerous."

"Jesus," Ethan breathed. The man sounded flatly sure of himself, as if this information was only of passing interest.

"You're certain you've never heard the name Taylor Hebert?" he asked again, suspiciously.

"Doesn't ring a bell," Ethan admitted. The director didn't seem to be listening at the moment. "It's not a common name, but there are probably a few around. But I've never come across it as a new trigger."

"Thank god." Alt-Chris closed his eyes again in visible relief.

"You wouldn't believe how dangerous she is. Even when she's being a hero, everything ends up going weird, and somehow she normally benefits. As a villain she's even worse. Some of them, they play it for laughs. They're scary. Some of them, they take it seriously. Way more seriously than any other villains normally do. Those ones are fucking terrifying. Like, make Jack Slash go pale and run, terrifying."

He heaved a deep sigh as Ethan kept listening with a slightly open mouth. "The worst ones are the ones where she doesn't go either villain or hero, just does her own thing. Those ones are simply weird. Eventually a sane person needs to either join in or get the fuck out of the universe." He looked at Ethan with a small, crooked smile. "I got out. The giant lizard Taylor was… freaky. Even if she was one of the friendliest people I've ever met who just wanted to help." Alt-Chris shuddered. "And the people she made friends with, they went just as weird. Amy Dallon is a deeply, deeply scary girl."

"Panacea?" he asked incredulously. The man in the chair opposite him nodded. "But she's just a depressed snarky healer."

"Count yourself lucky, then. When she gets happy, the shit has hit the fan. And it's too late then."

He shook his head sadly. "Then there's the mime Taylor, the one that would make Lovecraft weep in terror, so many tinker Taylors… She has an affinity for tinkering, even when she doesn't trigger as one, she ends up doing weird shit that would be classified as that normally… You name it, she's done it, or been it, or turned into it." He glanced at the mirror for a moment, then turned back to Ethan. "The spider-centaur version of her was horrifying. And again, mostly just friendly. Which is the worst part. Don't get me started on the flying demon version. Magic makes things worse."

"Magic?" Ethan echoed weakly.

"Magic. Very bad juju." The man snickered at his own joke in a sort of tired manner. "But I'm free of her. Finally. Maybe this world won't get destroyed and I can finally relax."

"Destroyed?" Ethan was getting tired of repeating words that their visitor had said like some parrot but didn't seem to be able to help it.

"Oh, yeah, lots of places get destroyed. Scion does it sometimes, she does it sometimes, sometimes they do it together. That one where she ate the planet, plant monsters everywhere… That was fucked up."

Director Piggot suddenly stood. "Thank you for answering our questions. Someone will be in to show you to a secure room. You understand we can't let you go free at the moment, there are a large number of questions still to be answered, but for now, we're satisfied you mean no immediate harm. Assault, with me."

Heading to the door, she hit the button to open it, stalking out when it opened to reveal two heavily armed troopers on the other side. Ethan looked after her, somewhat confused at her abrupt departure. Standing as well, he smiled a little weakly at the older alternate version of Kid Win, who shrugged with a look of understanding. "Um, what she said," he muttered, motioning after the director, then hurried out after her. As he left the room the troopers entered.

Some way down the corridor he found the director pacing back and forth, with a face like a thundercloud as his mother used to put it. A very worried thundercloud.

"Do you believe him?" she asked.

"He seems too scared to be lying," Ethan replied cautiously. "But I can't say I understand half of that. It seems very strange even compared to the shit that normally happens around here."

"Armsmaster and Dragon have analyzed the residual traces at the point you found him," she said. "They agree that it seems very likely to be the result of some form of interdimensional travel although they currently have no idea how it was done. Armsmaster is checking his armor but so far has found no technology in it that would be capable of pulling off an interdimensional jump."

"So it might be something he needs to rebuild each time?"

"That's possible, certainly. Likely, even."

"Do you believe him about this Hebert girl?"

She turned a worried face to him. "It's… not as unlikely as it sounds. We had a contact a day ago from one Daniel Hebert, who suspected his daughter Taylor may be a parahuman."

Ethan felt blood drain from his face.

"Oh, fuck," he mumbled.

"Quite."

"Where is she?"

Piggot swallowed. "In the power testing room downstairs," she whispered. "After the PRT building got hit by that E88 action last week, we had to move the Wards here as well. So she was brought over here this morning, about the time that guy turned up. Miss Militia is talking to her and trying to discover more about her powers."

"What are they?" he asked, feeling a horrible sense of trepidation.

"Apparently she can summon a book."

Ethan relaxed, feeling stupid. "A book."

"A book. Just the one. It's described as very weird looking, disturbing actually, and in a language no one but her seems to be able to read. But there are some very… peculiar… things that have happened around her which her father thinks were because of that book." Director Piggot sighed a little. "It sounds stupid, but after what our friend in there said, I'm worried."

"It's just a book. If you're worried, we can take it away from her."

"Doesn't work. It returns to her. Just disappears as soon as it gets too far away, and ends up right back in her hands. And she gets really pissed off as well."

A sound behind them made them look, to see Alt-Chris walking towards them accompanied by the two troopers, one either side behind him, the left one with a firm grip on his arm. They stepped aside to allow them all past.

When they'd moved away, the alternate version of Chris Jacobs nodding politely to them as he passed, Ethan turned back to Piggot. "How long ago did she trigger?" he asked in a low voice.

"Just over a month ago. In school, the result of a bullying campaign as far as we can determine. That hellhole Winslow."

"Damn. That place is bad."

"It's worse now with all the trouble, the gangs practically run it. Her father pulled her out two weeks ago." They started walking, trailing the troopers and their guest who were just rounding the corner in front. "She won't say who the bullies were, just clams up and looks upset. Not a happy girl. Hopefully introducing her to the Wards will cheer her up, or at least give her someone to talk to. She's definitely got powers, we just can't figure out exactly what they are. I think she knows but for some reason doesn't want to say."

"That's not surprising if she was bullied into triggering. That implies one hell of a lot of bullying."

"It was pretty bad," Piggot nodded. "A locker full of biological waste."

There was a thud from just around the corner where the elevators were, which they were only twenty feet from now. Ethan tensed, as did the director, combat reflexes coming to the fore. Both of them knew the sound of a body hitting the floor when they heard it.

Another thud, then Alt-Chris shot around the corner, his eyes wide with horror.

"Locker?!" he screamed, grabbing Piggot by the shoulders and shaking her. "It's fucking Hebert, isn't it? That's the normal trigger for her. Winslow, right?"

"Let go of me and stand down, you fool," Piggot ground out, trying to reach her sidearm. Ethan moved to hit a pressure point in the man's neck, but he suddenly released her, stepping back, pale as a sheet.

"You said you didn't recognize the name," he moaned in horror.

"I didn't," Ethan replied, almost feeling sorry for him. It was something in the eyes, the look of a man who has walked through hell, come out the other side, then just as he went out the exit felt something tap him on the shoulder.

"Where is she?" Alt-Chris asked, swallowing and looking like he knew what the answer was going to be.

"Power testing," Piggot replied after an evaluating look.

"What's her power?"

"She summons an old book."

Alt-Chris went pale green. "A book."

"Yes."

"Written in a language no one can read?"

"Correct. Do you know what it is?"

He looked sick. "I have an idea, based on previous versions of her. She has an affinity for that as well. Please tell me that you haven't let her read from it."

Piggot looked at Ethan, then back at the man who was trembling. "Why wouldn't we?"

"Oh, god," he said faintly. "You have to get her off the Rig. Right now. What's she doing?"

Glancing at her watch, one hand still on the butt of her weapon, Piggot answered, "If they're running to schedule, meeting the rest of the Wards."

Ethan hadn't thought anyone could go that color and still be alive. "The… Wards…?" their visitor choked out. Piggot nodded.

"Including Shadow Stalker? Sophia Hess?"

"Yes." Piggot looked confused, alarmed, and annoyed. "Why is that so important?"

"Hess is the one who bullied her into triggering, you fucking idiot!" the man screamed, whirling and charging towards the elevator. "We have to stop her or..." He let out an inchoate yell of frustrated horror, slamming his fist repeatedly on the call button.

"Oh, shit." Ethan couldn't work out which one of them said it, the director or him, but they ran after the gibbering man, diving into the elevator behind him as the doors slid open, not paying the two semi-conscious troopers a second glance. Both of them were of the opinion that Alt-Chris was far too scared to be lying.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Hannah led the worried looking tallish brunette teenager into the large exercise room that was part of the powers testing and assessment area, as well as being used for general training. Several young people were gathered around watching both of them. The girl clutched the large, leather-bound book to her chest like a security blanket, almost trying to hide behind it. Wide eyes behind a simple domino mask under glasses looked around, assessing the situation. Hannah could see that she'd marked every exit in the room within a second of entering it, and probably mapped out exactly the route she'd take if she had to run.

It was very sad, but based on what she knew of the girl's history, not surprising.

"These are the Wards. Everyone, this is, for now, Summoner. She hasn't settled on a name yet, or whether she'll join us, but I'm hopeful. Summoner, this is Clockblocker, Gallant, Aegis, Kid Win, and Vista. Shadow Stalker is…" She looked around, sighing. "Where the hell is Shadow Stalker?"

"Went to get something to eat, she said she was bored and hungry," Kid Win replied with a shrug. He stepped forward, holding out his hand. "Hi, Summoner. Nice to meet you. What do you summon?" The boy had a friendly smiled on the visible part of his face.

"This book," the girl replied in a soft voice, letting go of it with one hand to shake his quickly, then returning the hand to its former position.

"Cool. Or… I guess cool," Kid Win said slowly, tilting his head to look at the cover of the tome. "What book is it?"

"My book," Summoner said quietly. "It tells me things."

"What sort of things?" Vista asked brightly, coming over and holding out her own hand. "I'm Vista."

"Hi, Vista," Summoner said with a faint smile of her own. "It tells me things I'm not supposed to tell anyone else. They can't handle it if I do."

"Why not?"

Summoner shrugged a little, running one hand through her hair for a moment before returning to hold the book tightly. "I don't know. It's not like the things are bad, just strange."

"Can I see?"

The brunette turned to the speaker, who was Aegis. He smiled at her. "I like books."

She looked undecided, glancing down at the object she was holding, then nodded shyly. "I guess. Just for a second, though."

Opening it, she leafed through it for a few pages, the stiff parchment crackling, then turned it around to show them.

Vista stiffened, her eyes so wide they looked like her eyelids had been surgically removed and her pupils expanded to the maximum. A faint sound came from the back of her throat, before she dropped in a faint. Hannah stared, then looked at the others. Clockblocker was frozen as effectively as if he'd used his power on himself, Kid Win was vomiting in a corner having dashed there with a shout of horror, Gallant was kneeling on the floor with his hands over his face, and Aegis was breathing heavily, his skin almost yellow with shock.

Taylor turned the book around and peered at the picture she'd shown them, then shrugged slightly, closing the book carefully. She looked towards Hannah. "That was weird," she said in the same quiet voice. "It was just a picture."

"Of what?" Gallant moaned, sounding like he was about to be sick. "Hell?"

"No, silly," she giggled. "Just something interesting. There are lots more, want to see?"

"NO!" All four conscious teenagers screamed the word at the same time. Hannah was checking on Vista, finding that the petite girl was simply unconscious.

A sound from behind them made them all look, to see the figure of Shadow Stalker lounging in the doorway watching them with what seemed to be idle curiosity. "What happened to the losers this time?" she asked, her tone one of contempt. Summoner turned around at that point, having been looking down at Vista with concern on her face, which for some reason made Shadow Stalker stiffen.

"Hebert?" she said in a low tone full of shock.

"YOU!" The cry of absolute rage that emanated from the previously quiet and unassuming teenager was astounding. It made the room resonate with fury. Standing completely straight, Taylor was pointing at the dark figure of the sixth ward, radiating a level of anger that was terrifying in one so young. "Sophia Hess. The Bitch from Hell." The other Wards looked at each other, then Hannah, who was feeling suddenly like there was something very important that she'd missed.

"What the hell are you doing here, Hebert," Sophia demanded, entering the room like she was stalking a criminal.

"Because of you, I spent a week in the hospital. Because of you, I nearly died. Because of you, I lost my best friend," Taylor said in an icy voice, sounding like she was pronouncing sentence at an execution. "Because of you, my Dad nearly died from stress. Because of you, I triggered." All the Wards, and Hannah, gasped in horror.

"Oh, fucking hell," the older woman sighed, moving to separate them and hoping against hope that this situation could be resolved somehow.

"Fuck your dad and fuck you, Hebert," Shadow Stalker snarled as she pushed her masked face right up against the other girl's. "You're a loser, you got what losers get. Nothing you do will ever change that. What power did you get? Something pointless and weak, I bet."

"I got this," Taylor stated with venom in her voice, holding up the book. "Something much better than your pathetic walking through walls running away power."

Sophia punched her in the eye before she could say another word, or Hannah could stop her.

The book went flying, as did the Hebert girl, in opposite directions. Staggering back she collapsed against the wall ten feet away while the book landed half-way across the room.

Everyone looked on in shock as Sophia laughed. "Just like I thought. Weak, Hebert. You're just prey. Just like your useless father."

The girl, who had been staring at the floor while massaging her face, her mangled glasses in one hand, twitched. At the words, she looked up very slowly, her eyes narrowed and radiating a level of anger unlike anything Hannah had ever seen. It was eerie and unsettling. Even Sophia took a step back, abruptly going quiet.

"Useless? Weak?"

The voice was a soft purr, unlike her former way of talking. She held out a hand and the book leaped off the floor, smacking into her palm a moment later. The girl wasn't even looking at it at the time. "I'll show you who's weak, you bitch."

Hannah noticed with horrified fascination that the book fell open in her hands and the pages turned without her touching or looking at them. Taylor kept staring at Sophia, but began speaking in a strong, slow, and horrible voice.

"Y'ai Cthulhu, ya-uln sll'ha Cthulhu, nog hai, nog geb-agl, y-hafh'drn goka nilgh'ri. Uaaah."

The voice died away. The terrible look of anger did not.

"Is that it, you weirdo?" Sophia said after a few seconds, in tones of deep contempt.

"Wait for it," Summoner smiled, a smile like someone who'd just lit a fuse that was crackling towards her most hated enemy.

The lights flickered, and the entire room trembled a little.

"He's here," Taylor whispered, her smile widening. "I can't wait for you to meet my friend."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Oh, God, we're too late," Alt-Chris moaned, as the ghastly voice echoed around them while they ran, Piggot puffing along at a surprising speed for such an unfit woman, although she was going red in the face. Ethan shivered, there was a tone to the voice that was deeply disturbing aside from the language which made his hair stand on end. How they could hear it several corridors away from the powers room he had no idea. It wasn't particularly loud, but it carried in a very strange manner.

"What do you mean?" Piggot gasped. "What was that?"

"An invocation." The lights flickered, making him look around. "One that was answered." He suddenly changed direction, pelting towards the nearest emergency exit and slamming the door open, a gust of wind and rain coming in. Ethan followed, seeing that even though it was fairly early in the afternoon, the sky was going dark. A major storm seemed to be blowing up.

"Leviathan?" he asked in shock, the effects not unfamiliar.

Alt-Chris shook his head. "Nothing that safe," he replied in a shout to be heard over the sound of the rain and the wind, which was becoming stronger. "Fuck. I still haven't gotten away from her." He slammed his fist into the railing surrounding the emergency stairs. "FUCK IT!"

Looking wildly around, he dived for the stairs down to the lifeboat that was hanging above the water just below them. The Rig shook as the wind picked up even more. Behind them, the door slammed shut, Director Piggot apparently having decided not to, or having been unable to, follow them out into the now-torrential rain.

"What the hell are you doing?" Ethan screamed at the man over the sound of the wind. He was quickly undoing the entrance to the lifeboat.

"What does it look like, you idiot," he screamed back. "I'm getting the hell out of dodge before whatever Hebert summoned turns up. It won't harm her, I'm sure of that, but everyone else is fucked."

Ethan reached out to grab the man, intent on stopping him. His quarry ducked, twisted, then stabbed him in the gut with two fingers, a violent electric shock dropping him to his knees completely unexpectedly. "Sorry, Ethan, but I can't let you stop me."

"What did you do?" Ethan wheezed, barely able to move.

"Built in taser," Alt-Chris replied, holding up his hand. "Gift from a version of Bonesaw, one that wasn't evil, fifty or sixty jumps ago. She built my jump generator into me as well. It should be recharged by now, but I need to get onto land to use it, or I'll drown on the other side. See you. Good luck."

He ducked in through the entrance to the evacuation boat, lights coming on inside and on the front, sides and rear of the small vessel. Ethan gasped for breath, watching helplessly. The entire Rig was shaking now, and seconds later the Endbringer sirens went off across the city, echoing weirdly across the water.

Suddenly the alternative version of Kid Win reappeared. "Damn it. You were always one of the good guys," he grumbled loudly, grabbing Ethan by the shoulders and dragging him inside the boat, then closing the hatch. Strapping him into a seat then taking the one at the front for himself, he quickly flipped a few switches and lifted a protective cover before slamming his hand down on a large button in the middle of the simple control panel. There was the sound of a number of explosive bolts firing with a sharp crack, then a brief falling sensation that ended in a colossal splash. Ethan passed out at that point.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"That's not the sort of thing you see every day," a voice screamed in his ear. Ethan twitched, then jolted awake. He looked wildly around, finding he was now on the muddy ground some distance outside the city a few dozen yards from the water's edge. The man who had half-kidnapped/half-rescued him was standing next to him looking off to the side. It was absolutely pouring with rain and lightning lit the sky every couple of seconds. A weird howling sound was coming from the direction Alt-Chris was looking in.

Shaking his head Ethan rubbed his hands over his face, then tried standing up. The man beside him offered him a hand without comment, which he used to drag himself to his feet. Turning, he looked in the direction that the other man was, then froze in horror.

A very familiar figure, that of the Endbringer Leviathan, was next to the Rig, which was tilting slowly into the water. Huge waves battered it, slopping up into the city, which was steadily flooding, but for some reason not really reaching them here. He could make out lifeboats launching from the structure as the occupants evacuated in a hurry and hoped that his friends and wife were on them.

The Endbringer, although present, wasn't the cause of the disaster.

No, not at all, it wasn't.

If anything it was a victim of the true author of the chaos and destruction, which was the absolutely vast creature that was holding the struggling form of Leviathan at least a hundred feet in the air, looking at it with an expression of cold alien curiosity. Huge bat-wings spread out to the sides, lightning striking them repeatedly with no effect other than bright flashes. The creature towered more than three times the height of the Rig itself out of the bay and was obviously standing on the bottom, over a hundred feet below the surface of the water. In its tentacular grasp, the Endbringer looked like a rubber duck in the hands of a bathing toddler.

"What the fuck is that?" he screamed in repugnant horror, pointing wildly. The tentacles, the scales, the parrot-like beak large enough to swallow a trawler, all those were bad enough, but the vast intelligence in the dead eyes was cold and indifferent, alien beyond belief.

"Great Cthulhu, I'd say," Alt-Chris said with a shrug. "Not as sleeping as we're told."

They watched as the thing wrapped a few more tentacles around the writhing Endbringer, not even using the huge clawed hands which it was supporting itself on the Rig with. Leviathan gave one last mighty heave, then was torn into two pieces, which quickly disappeared into the immense beak. Ethan gaped in horror.

"So much for that," his companion said evenly. "Not lying, that was sort of cathartic to watch. Always hated those things, I've seen too many people killed by them." He pointed. "Look, that's probably the Hebert girl."

The tentacled horror was looking down at the rig, on which Ethan could barely make out a human figure. Reaching out with an immense hand, Cthulhu held it carefully in place so she could step aboard, then lifted it to his shoulder, where she moved to stand next to his head, apparently willingly. The Great Old One turned back to the Protectorate structure, glaring down at it for a moment, then lifted a huge beyond imagining foot out of the water and brought it thundering down. The entire construction disappeared under the surface in one titanic mass of twisted metal.

Somehow appearing satisfied, the creature turned to look in their direction. Even over a mile away, Ethan froze, pinned in place by the malice in that gaze. Eventually it moved on, returning to the city. Slowly, Great Cthulhu began wading in that direction.

"Well, time to go, I think," Alt-Chris said, almost cheerfully. "Sorry about your world. Look on the bright side, once she's stomped everyone she's got issues with she might unsummon him. She might not. Heberts are always unpredictable, the only thing you can be sure of is that they'll top whatever you try. Although I have to admit I've never seen one go this far in one shot before. Makes you wonder what she'll do if someone figures out how to kill that thing."

Stepping a few paces away, he turned back to Ethan. "I'd offer you a ride, but this only works for me. Thanks for the healing. Pity about my armor, but it was getting really beat up anyway, so I should replace it. Good luck, Ethan." Glancing at the creature in the distance which was now pulling the entire PRT building out of the ground with its bare hands, he shook his head. "I think you'll need it."

The crackling sphere of light faded into existence around him, becoming brighter and brighter, to the point that a dazed Ethan was forced to shield his eyes with his hand. A second or two later it disappeared with a loud pop, leaving behind it a smell of ozone and a pit in the ground.

The red-clad hero looked at the pit, then very slowly turned to watch the ancient horror from beyond exact the revenge of a bullied fifteen year old girl, knowing that there was nothing at all he could do about it one way or the other.

Eventually he simply sat down in the mud and waited.

 

[mp3.1415player]

I warn you now, this is entirely silly. And not at all canon. But it came to me more or less whole, made me laugh, then type it up, so you'll have to live with it...

---

Harry and Hermione stared at each other in shock.

"Oh my god," the girl whispered. "Harry..."

"What the hell was that?" he said, also in muted tones.

"I… I have no idea." She gaped at him, then shook her head hard, before pulling out her wand and casting a few detection and identification spells she knew. The results were… weird.

"We need to research this. Come on, library. Now."

"What about Ron?"

"What about him?" she asked dryly. Both of them looked towards where the red-head was snoring in a chair, his head lolling to the side. He was visibly drooling.

Harry sighed, while his other best friend looked mildly ill. "Fair enough. OK, we need to figure out what that was."

"It was freaky as hell," she muttered. He gave her an upset look, making her immediately flush as she worked out the problem. "It was freaky, Harry. Not you. Never you." She put a hand on his back and pulled him close for a moment, feeling the usual twitch as he suppressed his dislike of being touched. "Never you, Harry."

After a short pause, they left the common room and headed for the library, and some books that might hopefully let them work out Harry's latest example of how he differed from the average wizard in the street.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Two and a half weeks later, they finally worked it out. Which lead to a considerable amount of puzzlement, then some very careful thought.

"We can't tell anyone," she noted. "People with your… talent… they make others nervous."

"Wizards are idiots," he muttered.

"Most of them, yes," she agreed unhappily. "Magic seems to be a pretty good replacement for intelligence. I think it makes life too simple, or something. Nothing selects for wits and common sense, and this is what you end up with."

He nodded glumly, seeing her point. "Bunch of pillocks, most of them. Even the ones that mean well."

Hermione nodded absently, leafing through a book on the library table. "We need to experiment a little," she commented as she read a couple of pages. "See what the limitations are."

"Why?"

"Well, it might be useful, you never know," she replied. "We need all the help we can get if we're going to deal with the Dark Wanker. And all his hellish minions."

"I wish we could just shoot them all or something," he grumbled. "I've had it up to here with all this shit." He waved a hand somewhere over the top of his head, making her smile. "All I want is a quiet life, but can I have that? No, of course not, I get to be the Chosen One. Brilliant job, great long term prospects with a good retirement plan." His voice had gone very sarcastic by now.

Hermione put her hand on his in a gesture of support. "I know, Harry. It's not fair. But life isn't, is it?"

"Not even close," he agreed with a sigh.

They sat in silence for a while, until he suddenly looked up from examining his wand, which he was rolling idly between his fingers. Hermione noticed the movement and glanced at him. He was staring into space, his face slowly acquiring a look that was positively evil.

"Ah… Harry?" she asked carefully.

"Yes?" he replied, still smirking in a way that would have made most people back away slowly.

"Why are you grinning like that? It's… worrying."

"I just had a really neat idea," he said with a faint laugh in his voice. "I think we need to take this to the next level."

"Which means?"

He looked around suspiciously, then leaned closer. "We need to take the fight to them. All the people who should be doing something are just wasting time, mucking around and reacting to the twat and his little cult. We need to get ahead of them."

The brunette girl studied him closely. "All right," she said slowly. "I agree. But how? We're fifteen for heaven's sake, neither of us would stand a chance in a fight with most of them. Certainly not more than one at a time."

"Actually, I'm not entirely sure that's right, but it's not important," he smirked. "I'm not thinking about fighting them. I'm thinking about killing them."

She covered her mouth with a hand, staring at him.

"They're killing people almost daily," he went on. "And the Headmaster and his people just stun them. Even the Aurors don't usually do much more. This is a war, we keep being told that. In a war, you shoot to kill. They certainly are. Why should we let them keep doing that without responding in kind? And don't say it makes us like them. It does in the most important way, which is that we live and they don't. I'd rather have it that way around than the other."

Hermione listened to his low voiced and impassioned speech, unable to refute it. He was basically right. She knew enough history to realize that the current 'Light' response was, at best, merely delaying things. Not to mention that there were some very strange aspects to the whole thing, which all revolved around her best friend in a way she still didn't quite understand, but didn't like one little bit.

Now, unexpectedly, he'd shown a new, and very, very rare, talent. One that appeared, from their research, to be associated with some dubious characters in the British Wizarding history, although in some parts of the world it was actually valued.

After thinking it over for some while, she asked, "How do we use this… ability… to strike back at them?"

"We need two things," he said quietly. "A book on non magical chemistry, and some idea of names. I know a few, we should be able to find out more with a little work. We need to build a list, then get them all as fast as possible before they managed to work out some way to stop us."

"Chemistry?" she asked, puzzled.

He explained his plan. Both of them stared at each other when he'd finished, then Hermione started giggling. "Oh, wonderful. I mean, not wonderful, it's horrifying in a way, but it should work. If nothing else it will cause so much chaos that they should be easier for the Aurors to find them and deal with them."

"Can you get the information we need?" he asked.

"I think so. I can owl Dad, he had… shall we say, a somewhat misspent childhood?" She laughed as Harry grinned. "I think he'd know where to get the information we need. But it's dangerous. We'll have to be very, very careful. Some of this would make Potions look positively safe, even if Neville was doing the stirring blindfolded."

"I know, it's a risk I'm willing to take, though." He shrugged. "It needs to be completely non-magical. Otherwise I'd suggest a potion, it would be easier to get the information. But you know wizards, if there's no magic involved, it can't possibly be dangerous."

She nodded, remembering some of the rather hair-raising close calls Mr Weasley had had with his 'muggle artifacts' in the past.

"Fine. I don't like it, I have to admit, but I like the alternatives a lot less. I'll write Dad and explain what we need. We'll need to find a place to do it where no one will find out, and it's going to take weeks to set up if we want to survive it."

Harry thought for a few seconds. "Let's ask the elves. I'll bet they know somewhere private."

"Good idea," she smiled. Getting up, they put the books away and headed off to talk to the small people who did all the work.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Well, that works," Harry said, wiggling a finger in his ear and watching Hermione wave smoke away from her face. "Almost too well."

"It was very loud," she said, rather louder than normal herself. Both of them were having trouble hearing. "I think the silencing charms need work. Hopefully no one heard it."

"Let's reinforce them, then try the next one. I'm still not happy about the trigger."

"All right."

They got back to work, very carefully. Having seen the results of the tests, they didn't fancy getting caught up in their experiments. It wouldn't end well.

Quickly, admittedly. And all over the room.

But not well.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Perfect." Hermione looked satisfied, as she stood with her hands on her hips looking around. "Almost totally symmetrical pattern."

"Do you think a spherical one is best?" Harry asked, also inspecting the damage. "We could get a higher density if we made it a cylinder."

"We can't guarantee the orientation, so a sphere is the safest arrangement," she remarked, causing him to nod after a moment. "We can compensate for it with more ball bearings."

"True. Right, let's do that, then."

He made a note on his parchment. "Next test, series seven, experiment five. I'll arm it, you get the trigger ready."

Very cautiously, they resumed the testing. So far, things were going well. Their 'muggle' literature, which Hermione's father had, after considerable argument, finally provided, went into a lot of detail, but experimentation and familiarization was still required. But they were learning fast.

Quite soon, they would be ready. And it was very unlikely that the people they were after would ever work out what was happening until it was too late.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"That's the last of them, Harry," Hermione said in pleased tones. She retrieved the automatic quill that had written the name on the label which attached to the outside of a box a few inches on a side. It was quite heavy and there was a large stack of them on the table, each with a different name. She was handling them with extreme care, and wearing disposable gloves, as they had both done during the entire operation, to avoid fingerprints. Just in case any mundane law enforcement ever got involved.

Harry nodded, watching her work. He appeared both cautiously excited, and somewhat terrified. And quite pensive.

She glanced at him. "Second thoughts?"

"Not really. We need to do this, or thousands of people will die. But even so… we're going to kill dozens."

"You said it yourself. I wasn't sure at the time, but I've thought it over and over, and you're right. We're in a war. It's them or us." She sighed a little, putting her quill down. "I don't like it, not one little bit, but we don't have much choice, do we? Another twenty-seven people have died in the last month from Death Eater attacks. And that's just the magical casualties. The Ministry doesn't even count all the non magical ones, you know. My parents have been keeping an eye on the news for me to try to work out how many other deaths there were in the real world, they think it's probably over eighty in the same time. This can't go on, and Dumbledore isn't going to do anything to stop it."

"Neither will the Ministry," he sighed. "They're totally corrupt, the few honest ones can't deal with it."

They looked at each other, then at the pile of boxes.

"When do we do it?" he asked.

"It would raise suspicions if we did it now," she said after thinking for a moment. "Probably best to do it early in the morning, which should make everyone think it's normal, until it's too late. And we need to get as many as possible as quickly as possible so they can't warn each other."

"Tomorrow morning, then," he replied.

"Yes." She shrugged. "Owl post normally turns up about six in the morning. Let's get ready for then."

"All right."

Standing, he followed her out of the room, both of them carefully locking the door with every spell they knew, and covering the entrance with a whole series of aversion charms. No one would stumble over it, they were sure, you'd have to be actively looking, which shouldn't happen since no one else knew what they were doing.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Ready?"

"Yes." Harry took a deep breath. "Let's do it."

"First one, then," His friend said, gingerly picking up one of the packages and looking at the label. "Open wide. Lucius Malfoy."

Harry looked like he was yawning, but his mouth opened far wider than it should have been able to, the inside completely dark. Hermione carefully pushed the box into the unnatural opening, then let go. It disappeared and he closed his mouth and swallowed.

"Next one. Bellatrix Lestrange."

The procedure repeated, over and over, until the last one was in her hand. "And the best for last." This box was about three times the size of the others. "Tom Riddle."

When it was done, they smiled at each other.

"Now we wait and see if it worked."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Lucius yawned, covering his mouth, as he walked into his study. A few paces inside the room, he stopped and stared suspiciously at his desk. There was a parcel wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, sitting on it, right in the middle.

Looking around, he pulled out his wand, then cast every detection spell he could think of, both on the box, and on the room. Nothing at all seemed amiss. There was no active or passive magic on the box or contents, it read as entirely unexciting.

Still feeling a little paranoid, he walked over and peered at it. There was a label on the top with his name in neat writing on it, which he thought was the result of a spelled quill, above the words 'A donation from an admirer of the Pureblood Cause.'

He wasn't convinced. This was very irregular. However, the owl delivery opening was unlocked, the wards hadn't been breached, and there was no way anyone could have got inside the manor unobserved. Checking his results again, he stared at the box. His curiosity was warring with his paranoia.

It wasn't magical, though, he was certain of that. How dangerous could it be?

Prodding it with the end of his wand at arm's length, he pushed the box a little way across the desk. Nothing happened, so after a moment he put his wand down and picked the thing up, very carefully. It was surprisingly heavy, and to his interest it made a metallic clinking noise.

One that sounded very much like a significant number of galleons moving…

Putting the box down again, he sat, his curiosity now reinforced with greed. Absently the thought of calling for an elf to open it crossed his mind, but he reached out and tugged on the knot of the string instead. Undoing it, he peeled the paper back, then lifted the lid thus revealed...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

In the room she called her own, Bellatrix was holding a parcel addressed to her, looking curiously at it. No magic was involved, and it made interestingly money-like sounds when she gently shook it.

The absolutely enormous explosion that shook the entire building and came from downstairs knocked her off her feet, causing her to drop the box onto the floor from several feet in the air.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Anyone outside Malfoy Manor would have seen the window to the main study, along with a significant chunk of wall, rapidly head across the garden in small pieces, urged on its way by a cloud of rapidly expanding and super-heated gas mixed with pulverized fragments of the contents of the room. Including Lucius Malfoy, of course.

Moments later, the same thing happened to an upstairs window, the one to Bellatrix's room. Thousands of tiny steel ball bearings left holes in absolutely everything left intact.

Two kilograms of cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, more commonly known as RDX, was probably overkill, but Harry and Hermione weren't playing around. The manufacture of it was surprisingly, almost horrifyingly, easy. Their largest problem was coming up with a reliable but safe, for a fairly limited definition of the word 'safe', detonator, but their literature and experimentation had been up to the task.

Adding a number of steel washers to sound like coins had been Hermione's idea. It seemed silly, but it might work, was the thought.

Similar events took place all over Magical Britain. There was, of course, collateral damage in the form of a couple of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but otherwise not involved. It had been a risk both teenagers knew, accepted, and could live with, although they weren't at all happy about it.

But as they had realized, in a war, innocents got hurt. Or killed. Or worse.

At least this way, they could hopefully stop the war, or at least slow it drastically.

In the end they got just under eighty-six percent of the currently active Death Eaters, including all of the inner circle and the most dangerous ones. Their extra-large present for the Dark Lord himself was actually triggered by a minion, who had been ordered to open it while Voldemort stayed behind a shield spell. It turned out that the spell in question wasn't up to hypersonic shrapnel, even at forty feet from the blast.

The concussion might well have helped with that too.

Voldemort's remains would be found mixed with those of several Death Eaters when the Aurors eventually arrived. They had their hands full for some time and the single survivor didn't last until then, bleeding out while unconscious.

Neither teen would know about their success rate for a few days, but they found out very quickly that something had worked by how fast the entire school was locked down due to 'serious terrorist activity', along with most other public organizations in the country.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"You're right," Harry said to his friend, as they lay on the grass next to each other near the lake, watching Ron and some friends muck about on brooms with a snitch. They were the enjoying the warm spring day, behind a carefully placed privacy ward so they could talk. "Magic replaces intelligence for far too many people. No high-profile person in the non magical world would open a package that turned up out of the blue, not these days with the IRA and so on bombing things all the time."

Hermione smiled faintly. "No, they wouldn't. Luckily, these people had all the wrong survival instincts." She rolled her head to the right to look at her friend. "But we couldn't have done it without your special talent. No one wards against that sort of thing, since hardly anyone has ever heard of it."

He shrugged, also smiling.

"I certainly hadn't, until that point. I can't really think of another use for it, but hopefully we've at least given our side breathing room. And with any luck got the Dark Bastard himself."

Looking at her, his smile widened, before he went back to watching the improvised game. "Who'd have thought I'd turn out to be a parcel-mouth?"

 

[mp3.1415player]

Before I settled on the story that ballooned hopelessly out of control into Taylor Varga I had a number of ideas for Worm stories, three of which I initially wrote one or more chapters of. I've posted the beginnings of the BOLO cross here, and being quite fond of it, may well at some point get back to it. It would be a considerably darker story that Taylor Varga although not to the level of unrelenting grimness that canon Worm is.

The second story I started is this one. Actually, it was the first chronologically, I started playing with it around the middle of 2015, but didn't stop working intermittently on it until after I began seriously writing Taylor Varga. When I began that story it seemed to have much more scope for amusing shenanigans than either of the other two, and since that was the sort of thing I was going for, I dropped working on the other two. However, I did recycle a few elements from this one into TV when they seemed to fit. No doubt readers could pick out points of similarity if they cared to.

I haven't touched this story in over a year, and while I was rearranging some of the vast number of files that are related to the current work, came across it again and thought it might be worth putting here for the general edification of people. Whether I'll ever come back to it and complete it, I honestly don't know, since it would probably be quite a lot of work to do it properly and I have limited time available! On one hand I'd quite like to as I think it has some promise, on the other hand it could easily end up being another story that exploded into far more words than I was originally expecting.

That seems to happen to me...

Anyway, since I wrote it, I may as well let others read it. You may extract some amusement value from it, you might not. Either way, here it is.

---

A working knowledge of 'Worm' is required.
​

---

Director Piggot looked at the photos in the opened folder and winced despite herself. "You're certain it was her?" she asked quietly.

The man standing on the other side of her desk nodded once. "Unfortunately, yes, I am. The DNA test was conclusive, despite the... small sample still viable." His mouth was set in a hard line under the visor of the helmet he was wearing, part of a suit of extremely advanced power armor. "We confirmed it with an exemplar from her hairbrush which her father gave us. It was definitely Taylor Hebert, I'm afraid."

"Poor kid," the Director of the ENE PRT muttered. Armsmaster nodded once more, more slowly.

"It would have been fairly quick, I believe," he added after a moment. "Small consolation to her father, but..." Trailing off he sighed minutely. "The fire spread very fast, most of that wing of the building was already gone by the time the first responders arrived. They couldn't do much more than try to stop the remainder of the school going up and the fire spreading to other buildings. The school itself is a write-off, it will have to be completely demolished and rebuilt."

"No other injuries?" she asked, closing the folder.

He shook his head. "No, remarkably enough. The night watchman had gone for a smoke outside the front door and the cleaning staff had all left by the point it started. It was the watchman who raised the alarm when he smelled something other than his cigarette burning." Nodding to the folder, he added soberly, "The evidence suggests that Miss Hebert was still alive when that happened."

"Christ." Director Piggot swiveled her chair to look out the window for a moment, before turning back. "Why was she in a school locker at two am on a Saturday in the first place?"

Armsmaster paused, then shrugged with another small sigh. "I don't know. More or less all the evidence that could have led to a culprit was compromised by the extreme heat. Fingerprints and surface DNA are impossible to retrieve as a result, so all we can do is interview possible witnesses. It was only the fact that some bone marrow survived more or less intact that let me run a DNA test at all." He stopped speaking for a few seconds, apparently considering something, then slowly went on, "Director, the one thing I can guarantee is that the Hebert girl didn't lock herself in there. Someone put her there. Whether it was a vicious prank that went too far or a deliberate attempt at murder I have no idea so far. Based on some charred residue there were also some very unpleasant waste products in there with her. I don't like the implications."

"No." Piggot sighed in turn. "Neither do I." She opened the folder again and flipped through the report and the stack of photos for a moment. "What do you make of the word or whatever it was written on the back wall of the locker?" Inspecting another photo for a moment she transferred her gaze to him. "It looks like the word 'she', with part of another letter at the end."

"It was written in blood based on the chemical analysis," Armsmaster replied. "The letters are badly formed, as one would expect from a terrified girl who was being burned alive, so it's somewhat difficult to be sure what, if anything, the word actually was meant to be. The cleanest image I have of it suggests the last letter might be another 'S', giving 'shes'. Possibly Miss Hebert was trying to send a message, most likely the name of the culprit. But that's only my guess at the moment. I will continue to work on the problem and will let you know if I find anything else."

"Good." Closing the folder, the Director pushed it away from her then stared at it for some seconds. "You're certain of parahuman involvement in the fire?"

"Yes, that much I am sure of. The fire spread much too quickly and burned far too hot to be accidental but there is no sign of normal accelerants. Residual traces of certain forms of radiation lead me to believe that it was a tinker-tech incendiary of some sort rather than a pyrokinetic. I suspect it was thrown through a window some distance from the lockers. The burn pattern essentially confirms this theory. BBFD fire investigators have also come to the same conclusion, which is why they called us in the first place."

"Damn it," Piggot growled. "So we either have some parahuman arsonist who just happened to torch a school which coincidentally happened to have a fifteen year old girl trapped in a locker full of biological waste in it, or whoever actually did the trapping then set the fire to cover their tracks. Using a parahuman weapon in the process."

"Yes. Those would seem to be the two most likely scenarios," Armsmaster agreed. "There are other possibilities but they become successively less likely. I suspect your second suggestion is most likely the correct one, I'm afraid. Which makes it murder, of course."

"On top of a major arson case, all of it firmly in our purview," the rather obese woman sighed. "This isn't going to go away quietly."

"Bearing in mind the damage and the loss of life, no, Director, I don't think it will." Moving to a chair the armored Tinker sat down carefully, mindful of the slight creaks produced by the weight of his power suit. "BBPD is still running their own investigation into the surrounding circumstances of why young Miss Hebert was in that locker, they're interviewing the entire student body and the staff, but so far no one is saying anything. Which on its own is somewhat suspicious in my opinion. Unfortunately, we have no proof of the involvement of any specific person yet."

"Have you talked to Shadow Stalker yet?" the Director queried.

Armsmaster nodded slightly. "I have. She was as... uncooperative... as usual, but in the end I managed to get her to admit to knowing the victim. She claims she only knew her to speak to in passing and I have no specific information to disprove that, but my instincts tells me she's hiding something."

"Your lie detector didn't help?" Piggot asked curiously. Armsmaster frowned a little.

"It's not a hundred percent accurate at the best of times, and unfortunately Shadow Stalker is one of the people who it doesn't yet work quite as effectively on as I'd like. She has very good control over her physiological reactions. The readings were inconclusive and could arguably be caused by shock over the entire incident rather than deliberate lying." He shrugged slightly once more. "I can't prove it one way or another as of yet."

"All right," Piggot replied, with a frown of her own. "I'll interview her myself next, I think. I find it hard to believe that she doesn't know something about what must have been a very vicious bullying campaign against this girl. Sophia does have a habit of poking her nose into things."

"You believe she could have been directly involved, Director?" Armsmaster sounded curious. "In a murder?"

"She's come very close, although admittedly almost by accident as far as I know, more than once before," Piggot said tiredly.

"True." Armsmaster thought about the idea for a little while. "I have to admit I don't like to believe she could deliberately burn someone alive, but I also have to admit I can see her locking someone she didn't like into a confined space. Unfortunately. She has a vicious streak that we don't seem to have managed to do much about so far."

They were both silent for a while, thinking about the incident. Eventually Piggot stirred behind her desk. "Find Shadow Stalker and have her see me," she said. "While she's here, talk to the rest of the Wards and find out whether they think she could be involved in bullying a fellow student. I suspect you'll get a number of yes answers to that question."

"What do you intend to do, Director?" the man asked as he stood.

"Get to the bottom of this, if at all possible," she replied, looking up at him from her chair. "If Sophia is involved and we can prove it, nail her ass to the wall."

"If we can't prove anything?"

"Keep a close eye on her even then," Piggot said. "My instincts tell me your instincts are probably right, one way or another."

"What do we tell the father?" Armsmaster asked, half-turning to the door as he spoke, then waiting.

Director Piggot sighed, staring at the folder that detailed the last moments of a fifteen-year-old girl's life in nauseating detail. "As little as possible, I'm afraid. We have too much to lose right now. But I hope we can come up with something to give him a little comfort."

"Unlikely," the tall man muttered. "Even I can see he's right on the edge. The man lost his wife less than three years ago, and now his only daughter in horrific circumstances. I can't see it ending well."

"No," she agreed with a scowl. After a moment she looked at him again. "Dismissed."

"Director." He nodded one last time to her then left the office, closing the door quietly behind himself.

Swiveling her chair around again Director Piggot looked out into the night until she heard a knock some minutes later, turning back and calling in a firm voice, "Enter." She planned on asking some very awkward questions of the frankly sullen girl who came in.

---

Danny Hebert sat in his office chair, looking out the window at the crumbling ships in the distance, lit from the side by the setting sun, his hands slowly feeling what they were holding. 'Nearly a week,' he thought, closing his eyes for a moment. 'Nearly a week since my life ended.' A faint clicking noise echoed around the room every few seconds.

He looked down at the 9mm pistol he was holding tightly, his right forefinger absently flicking the safety.

On.

Off.

On.

Off.

Eventually, his hands stilled, then he very slowly raised the gun and looked down the barrel.

Several seconds passed while his mind was almost blank. Then, convulsively, he flung the pistol across the room and ran his hands over his face hard enough to hurt.

"No. Neither one of them would want me to do it." His voice trembled with emotion but rang with surety. "I won't let them down," he added more quietly. The sole survivor of the Hebert family sat in his chair for another ten minutes, before he quietly got up, retrieved the pistol, carefully unloaded it and locked it in his desk, then went downstairs and out the door of the Dockworkers Association building, locking it behind him.

Deciding that tomorrow he would begin sorting through his daughters belongings, he headed for his car which was parked on the other side of the road.

He never even saw the huge, ugly monstrosity of a truck, festooned with armament, that came around the corner fifty feet away at over sixty miles an hour.

He died instantly.

The only witnesses other than the driver of the vehicle were the cockroaches scuttling around a discarded sandwich wrapper a few feet away.

---

Assault paused, something shiny off to the right catching his eye as he moved over the rooftops of the outskirts of the central business area of Brockton Bay. Shading his eyes with his hand, he peered into the distance, curious for the moment rather than concerned.

"Hmm. What the hell is that?" he muttered to himself. A quick inner debate and a check of the time had him end up moving towards it while tapping his earpiece. "Dispatch, this is Assault, I'm just going off route to check something."

"Do you require backup, Assault?" the voice of the dispatch officer asked briskly.

"I don't think so, but I'll get back to you on that. I'm just curious at the moment, there's something on the roof of the Fosberg Gallery that I want to have a look at."

"Acknowledged. We're marking you as busy until further notice. We have backup standing by if needed."

"Thanks, Dispatch. Assault out." By now he was close enough to see that the shiny reflective surface looked like someone in a somewhat weird looking suit of power armor, not anything he recognized. Whoever it was seemed to be leaning on an air conditioning unit fairly casually, looking out at the slowly rising sun over the Bay.

The figure disappeared from view as he bounded up the side of the next building over, redirecting his kinetic energy to keep him moving steadily upwards, bouncing between the two buildings. Reaching the roof of his target a few seconds later he hopped over the edge and landed behind the figure, which didn't move. Standing there for a moment he inspected it. 'Female, I think,' he mused. 'Tall, maybe six feet, and slender. With... four arms?' Sure enough, the suited woman, if that's what it was, possessed two pairs of arms, one set of which were folded on the air conditioning unit while the other pair hung at her sides.

Moving a little closer, as quietly as he could just in case they turned out to be both hostile and unobservant, he studied the figure some more. There seemed to be a pair of antennae of some sort sticking up from the head area, which were gently moving around a little. The armor of the suit had an oddly iridescent effect about it, a predominantly dark gray color sparkling through a rainbow of shades depending on the angle the light hit it and where it was on the body. The back of the torso looked like it split open down the centerline, and was more very dark green than gray under the iridescence. Overall it didn't resemble normal power armor nearly as much as it did a giant, human sized insect exoskeleton, with the most amazing paint job he'd ever seen.

As he approached, he slowly became aware that there were a number of other oddities about the person which began to make him slightly less sure it was a woman at all. Tensing a little, he began to wonder if he actually should have called for backup before coming over.

"Hello, Assault," the figure suddenly said, the voice female and clear. He twitched quite a lot, the sound taking him by surprise after the silence of the roof broken only by the hum of the air conditioner fans and a faint sound of traffic from the road ten stories below, muted due to the fact it was Sunday. "Isn't it a beautiful day? It's been a very long time since I've seen the sunrise with my own eyes like this. I missed it." She didn't move or turn around, making him wonder for a moment how she knew he was there and who he was.

After a couple of seconds, he walked closer, still staying cautiously out of reach because he wasn't an idiot, but not feeling any threat. The words seemed to mean only what they said. Her voice sounded wistful if anything. Stopping ten feet away to the side, level with her, he looked out at the sunrise for a little while, keeping her in his peripheral vision, and was forced to agree.

The sky was completely clear, after a cold mid-March night, with not a cloud to be seen. The Sun was just clearing the horizon, the lower edge a finger's-breadth above the water, the buttery rays highlighting the east-facing buildings with gold and yellow colors, while in the Bay itself the glittering force-field around the Rig glinted with extra shades from the same source. Looked at objectively it really did look very pretty.

"It is a nice day, yes," he replied after a little while. Turning his head he inspected her from this new vantage point, his eyes widening a little. "You have me at a disadvantage...?" Trailing off enquiringly, he waited for a name. She didn't respond at first. After a moment she chuckled a little but said nothing else.

They stood there for another minute or so. "Why haven't you seen the sun for a long time?" he eventually asked, unable to pass up the question. She turned her head towards him, making him stare again, a little shocked and unnerved, although he wouldn't have admitted it to anyone.

"I've been... away..." she told him, sounding like she regretted this. "Lost. It took me a long time to find my way home again."

"That sounds unpleasant," he cautiously replied after thinking her words over.

"It was, at first," she said with a sigh. "I learned to live with it in the end but it wasn't easy. There were some good things that came out of it, but..." The upper pair of arms moved in a shrug of sorts. "I lost a lot as well." Her voice dropped in a way that conveyed infinite fatigue and sadness. "Still, that's in the past. I can't change what was. All I can do is move on."

Assault shivered for a moment. There was something about the voice that made him suspect the person beside him had gone through things that were beyond his understanding in many ways.

"I only got back today, you see," she added, "and I thought I'd come here first. To visit familiar areas while I worked out what I'd do next."

"A local, then?" he asked quietly. Her head moved in a nod.

"I was born here. A long time ago."

"You have family here still?" He noticed she went completely motionless, inhumanly so, for a second. Then sighed sadly.

"Not any more, no. No family left. It's only me now."

"I'm sorry," he stated, meaning it. It was obvious from her voice that the lack of family had an unpleasant story behind it.

"Not your fault," she replied. "Or mine. But thanks anyway."

They both fell silent again. He kept discreetly studying her while she looked back out over the water at the rising sun.

The thing that he kept coming back to was that he was fairly sure she wasn't fully human. While the overall body shape, except for the extra arms, was more or less humanoid in pattern, the head wasn't. It looked much closer to the head of some sort of wasp if anything, with compound eyes and a pair of obviously insectoid antennae sticking up from between them at the top. There were a pair of mandibles below the eyes which moved slightly when she spoke, in a manner that like with the antennae, made it very clear it was no mask. How such a human sounding voice came from a face like that he had no idea.

Weirdly, after the initial shock, he didn't find her appearance particularly scary. He'd seen extreme close-up photomicrographs of various insects on the internet, some of which were genuinely beautiful in a rather alien way. She was similarly pretty if looked at more as a work of art than a weird looking human. Her eyes, when she moved her head a little to look at the Rig directly, had thousands and thousands of tiny facets which made the sunlight refract into all the colors of the spectrum in various patterns, like looking at a DVD from an angle but even more spectacular.

He'd initially thought 'Case 53' when he'd realized it wasn't a powered suit of bizarre appearance, but her words tended to suggest that she could remember her past perfectly well. Adding to that, there was just something about her which didn't quite fit that theory. To be honest, he was at a loss for the moment.

Finally, he said, "Sorry, I have to ask. Are you a Hero?"

"No," she replied, sounding mildly amused.

"Villain?"

"No." The amusement was stronger.

"Ah. A Rogue or Independent, then."

"No."

Assault stared at her. "You have to be one of those."

Turning her head to face him, she cocked it to one side. "Why?"

He couldn't think of a good answer for a moment. She waited, apparently willing to be patient for as long as it took. "Well," he began slowly, "that's pretty much the only choices for a cape."

"What a limited view of the world you people have," she replied, sounding like she was smirking even though her alien visage betrayed no emotion he could read.

"You people?" he asked, grinning for a moment. "You mean Capes?"

"No," she chuckled. "Humans."

This stopped him for a few seconds. And worried him more than a little, despite his conclusions from a while back.

"So you're not human, then?" he asked. She shook her head.

"Do I look human?" she asked rhetorically, waving one of her hands at herself, one that wasn't resting on the air conditioner. He noticed it had three slender claw-tipped fingers and apparently two thumbs, one on each side.

"Well..." He didn't want to be rude to someone who seemed pretty agreeable to talk to so far. "I'll admit you look unusual, but I've seen worse."

"Thanks," she laughed. "I was trying for non threatening but I have some limitations at the moment. Arthropods tend to creep humans out for some weird reason, especially ones six feet tall and intelligent." She cocked her head again, amusement radiating from her. "You're doing well although your heartbeat is fast enough to make me suspect you're not as calm as you look."

He stared again.

"I can hear it," she added, which didn't actually help.

"Oh." He couldn't think what to say after that for a little while, during which she went back to looking at the scenery. In the end he said, "But you said you were born here. So if you're not an alien, that leaves..." Trailing off, he eventually shrugged. "Sorry, I've got nothing." This made her laugh again.

Turning her body for the first time, she faced him, apparently studying him closely. He was finding the lack of human expressions somewhat disturbing despite himself although her body language was nonthreatening. Eventually she hopped up to sit on the air conditioner unit, her motions much quicker and more graceful than he expected, so fast in fact that he stepped back a little.

"May as well tell you a story," she said, leaning back a little and bracing her upper body with all four arms. He looked around, then leaned against another similar unit.

"A story?" he inquired. She nodded slightly.

"A story. You see, once upon a time there was a girl, she grew up over that way somewhere," she began, waving one arm vaguely towards the Docks area in general. "She had parents who were good and loving people, despite not being well off, and a friend. Only the one, really, but she was a good one."

"OK," he replied.

"This girl grew up, as they tend to, and she and her friend did everything together. She loved reading, like her mother did, while her friend was more into slightly more girly things, but they had a lot of fun together. Both of them liked reading about Capes, and they used to wonder if they'd be heroes when they got older."

She fell silent for a moment. "One day, her mother didn't come home. She was only about eleven at the time and it took a while for her to fully understand that her mother had died in a car accident and she'd never see her again." She glanced at him, then went back to staring out to sea. He waited silently, thinking there was something vaguely familiar about this. "The family wasn't the same after that, obviously. Her father withdrew into himself a lot, as did she, in different ways. They stopped talking as much to each other, and she herself went from being a fairly outgoing and cheerful if private girl into a bit of an introvert. But her friend did her best to cheer her up and keep her interested in life. It worked, more or less, and she slowly began to get over the death of her mother."

The insect-woman sighed faintly, pausing her story for a few seconds. "Then... A little more than a year later, the girl went off to camp, and when she came back everything had changed. Her friend, her oldest friend, someone as close to her as a sister, suddenly... wasn't." She looked at him again, while he listened. "Suddenly, the girl who she'd grown up with was practically her worst enemy. It was a shock, obviously, to find that as she started High School, a school she'd picked specifically to be with her best friend, that friend was now apparently dead set on turning everyone against her. Successfully, as well."

"That's... not right," Assault said slowly.

She laughed bitterly. "No, it's not. Not even slightly. It's made worse by the way no one listened when the girl tried to get help. She was terrified of telling her father, but she told the teachers, people who should have listened and done their jobs. It didn't work, it just made things worse. She could have fought back, of course, but a lot of the time the abuse was mental rather than physical, something teenaged girls are terrifyingly good at. It takes its toll, constant abuse and psychological warfare like that. People have committed suicide over less, you know. The few times she did fight back, she was the one punished as no one believed her over her tormentors, who were well connected for various reasons. So in the end she gave up and just took it, hoping it would one day stop. It didn't."

"Shit," he muttered, appalled.

"Yep. Her marks suffered, she went from near the top of every class to near the bottom. Her tormentors stole her homework and used it themselves, destroyed what they couldn't use, stole her property over and over again, including mementos of her mother, did everything they could to make her life hell. For nearly two years."

"Fuck me," Assault said, staring at her. He was pretty sure she was both telling the truth and had a personal interest in this.

She was silent for a few seconds. "Then one day, the three main perpetrators of the torture managed to outdo themselves. They made a trap, filling a locker with biological waste, then managed to push the young woman into it and lock her in. It might have been meant as a horrible prank, but personally I think it was attempted murder on the part of at least one of the people involved. Her former friend had a new best friend, a very disturbed individual who was... well, a violent sociopath is a kind way to put it. She was in there for hours, and absolutely no one helped her. Dozens of people saw it happen but the school was so corrupt that they just walked past."

Looking back at the Rig, on which a helicopter was currently landing, she sighed once again. "The experience was enough to make the girl Trigger. That's how bad it was." He understood what she meant and winced.

"She got powers, nothing particularly impressive on the face of it, although potentially fairly effective with a little thought. But..."

"But?" he asked when she went silent again.

"But, the three vicious bitches weren't the only ones who had an ax to grind that day. A member of the ABB was involved in a grudge with some E88 thugs and it spread to the school late that night, more or less randomly. He had managed to get a Tinker-tech firebomb from somewhere and tried using it on the E88 gangers." She looked at him for a moment, then went back to watching the helicopter. "He missed."

Thinking, Assault's eyes suddenly widened. "Oh, Jesus Christ," he breathed, putting it all together suddenly. "You're Taylor Hebert."

After a few seconds, she shook her head. "Taylor Hebert died on the fourth of January, 2011. There was nothing left except for a few fragments of bone. She was murdered, technically by a seventeen-year-old Korean ganger, but he was helped by three fifteen year old girls with no ethical sense. The man who pulled the pin died a few hours later from a bad case of bullet to the brain, so it's not even possible to prosecute him."

He opened his mouth, not himself sure what he was going to say to that. She held up a hand with another shake of her head. "Taylor Hebert is dead, Assault. Let her rest in peace. I share some memories with her from a long time ago, but I'm not really her. Not any more."

Slipping easily off her perch, she stood and looked around. "It was nice to talk. Thanks for listening." The woman began to walk towards the edge of the roof, while he watched, still stunned.

"Hey, wait!" he called just before she reached the edge. The woman stopped and turned towards him, her head tipped inquiringly and her compound eyes reflecting the light. "You can't drop that bombshell on me and just walk off. What happened to you? Where have you been for more than two months?"

Studying him wordlessly for a while, she eventually walked back with an air of mild resignation, somehow conveyed without the aid of normal expressions. She stopped a couple of feet away and seemed to gaze at him as if judging his sincerity. "You really want to know?" she asked after a long moment.

Assault nodded vigorously. "I do. I'm incurably curious, aside from anything else." This made her snicker, then shrug.

"OK, I'll tell you the rest. You won't like it, I suspect, but if you insist..."

Moving away a short distance she sat on the surface of the roof, leaning back against the low parapet surrounding it, her carapace clicking against the concrete in the process. He watched, then did the same next to her.

"Two months..." she said reflectively. "It makes it sound... so quick."

Listening quietly, Assault waited while she apparently gathered her thoughts. After a few seconds, she held up her upper right hand, the superhero beside her watching with interest as a wasp appeared from nowhere and landed on the extended first finger. "When she... I... triggered, the power was a Master one essentially. Insect control. More accurately, arthropod control, with a few additions. Worms, things like that. Sounds pretty banal, right?"

He watched as the wasp crawled around on her finger, then did a little dance, each leg extending in turn and waving in a circle. It was obvious this was her doing.

"I could see it could have some uses for reconnaissance, that sort of thing," he ventured. "Depending on the range and whether the insect senses could be used. Combat uses are less obvious but I guess being stung a lot would slow most people down if nothing else."

"True," she replied. The wasp was joined by another one, both of them taking off and flying interlocked rings. More appeared, until the effect was a bit like a model of an atom, half a dozen of the insects flying in circles around a common point. "The original range was maybe between a thousand and two thousand feet depending on various conditions. Within that range, the control was absolute. Every single arthropod could be controlled simultaneously and independently, which also required a multitasking ability way past anything else I've ever heard of. And yes, their senses could be used. That was the first problem, insect senses are... not at all like human ones. The amount of sensory information was overwhelming for the first couple of minutes. I genuinely thought I'd gone mad." She sighed. "If it had ended there, and Taylor had been rescued, she'd probably have gotten used to it in a week or so and then..." His companion shrugged slightly.

"I don't know. She had ideals, you see, she wanted to be a Hero. Because it was the right thing to do. But I suspect it wouldn't have worked out like that for various reasons. Not least of which was the fact that one of her tormentors worked for you guys."

"Sophia," he muttered. She nodded.

"Yes. Not a good person, that girl. Her powers affected her a lot in subtle ways but I think she was probably right on the edge in the first place. Not quite a psychopath, but amoral at best. With a very warped view of interpersonal relations, as well."

"We've noticed," he told her. "If it wasn't for the fact that she's useful she'd be locked up right now. Personally I think she should have been even so and quite a few other people feel the same, but Director Piggot was over-ruled on that decision."

"I know," she said softly. "But you see the problem. Sophia was directly responsible, along with Emma Barnes and Madison Clements, for Taylor Triggering. Two years of hell culminating in an event so bad that the girl who had kept going through it all basically broke. If she'd found out that one of the people responsible was a Ward, and decided that it was the Protectorate as well as the school who had let it all go on for so long...?" She sighed a little. "It wouldn't have ended well. Despite her ideals, or probably because of them, she would have taken it very hard. Not to mention the other various problems I can see could arise from all that."

"How bad could it have been?" he asked, curious to see what she came up with.

"Every insect inside a two thousand foot radius attacking anyone involved, or she thought was involved?" the woman asked wryly, making him shudder as he contemplated her words. "Do you have any idea how many that would be, even at this time of year?"

He shook his head.

"There are more insects in a square mile of countryside than there are humans alive on the entire planet. The biomass of ants alone is greater than all the people who have ever existed, and ants are only about one percent of the total number of insects world wide. Add to that arachnids, mites, copepods, crabs..." She glanced at him as he paled. "Believe me, an insect controller could easily be your worst nightmare if she was pissed at you. Not even using the poisonous ones, cockroaches would be enough to strip someone to the bone in a few minutes if you used enough of them."

Assault shuddered again, harder, feeling ill. "OK, I get the point."

"Good. Luckily for everyone concerned, that didn't happen. But for Taylor, it was bad." She resumed watching the performing wasps, which now numbered about a dozen, forming ever more elaborate patterns in the air. "The next part was worse. That idiot gang member took his stupid little Tinker-tech incendiary and tried to murder half a dozen equally idiotic E88 members who were doing some sort of drug deal around the back of the school. I don't know why, perhaps it was just a convenient place. Anyway, this brilliant individual pulls the pin, aims, and throws. Really, really badly. Right through a window, nowhere near the E88 guys, who notice him, chase him, and in the end, kill him."

"Unfortunately the firebomb was a pretty effective one, it torched the school more or less immediately." She fell silent for a moment. "You have no idea what it's like. Stuck inside a box smaller than a coffin, surrounded by horrific crap that should have been incinerated days ago, in enormous pain and sensory overload from seeing and hearing and smelling through millions of insects... Then the heat, and the smoke. She realized what was happening as she started to cook."

He stared at her, the matter of fact voice belying the horror of what it was saying. His pale face was from a different reason now. "Even through the pain and disorientation she knew what was going to happen, she knew she was going to die, and she didn't want to! As the locker got hotter and hotter, she tried writing the name of the person who shoved her in that fucking thing in her own blood, but couldn't finish it."

"Shes..." He mumbled, remembering the report. His head came up. "S Hess. That's what it was meant to be. Sophia Hess."

"Yes. Taylor knew she didn't have long and tried to write the shortest thing that would point at Sophia. She wasn't thinking very clearly but she did try."

There was silence for a moment from both of them.

He stirred, asking, "But how did you...?"

"Escape?" He heard a resigned chuckle. "Strictly speaking, I didn't. Not the way you're probably thinking." She turned to look at him. "What do you know about second triggers?"

"They're incredibly rare, for a start," he replied. "And they can produce some weird results."

"Both true." She nodded. "It was a second trigger, but something went wrong. Or right, perhaps. She knew she was going to die and her new powers tried to save her. Because of the way they worked, it wasn't directly possible, but her powers found a way even so. I don't think it was meant to happen like that, though."

"You make it sound that powers are intelligent," he noted with interest. She didn't reply for a moment, merely stared at him, making him wonder...

"So what did happen?" he ended up asking.

"Her powers were basically concentrating on, and revolved around, arthropods and the control of them. She was going to die very soon, so using that control, her abilities came up with an interesting solution to prevent this happening. Or at least, nearly prevent it from happening. There was no way to put out the fire at the time with her power set, it completely surrounded her, so..."

She trailed off, then asked a question. "Do you know how many neurons there are in a human brain?"

He shook his head.

"Around ninety billion. Elephants have nearly three times as many, but humans are right near the top of the list from that point of view. Six billion or so humans on the planet, times ninety billion per human, gives a total neural capacity for the species of about five hundred and forty quintillion neurons."

"OK," he said slowly, wondering where she was going with this.

"All right. That's five point four times ten to the twentieth power for human neurons. Now what do you think the equivalent number is for insect neurons?" She cocked her head as she asked the question. He stared, then paled yet again. Surely she couldn't mean...

"Less neurons, and simpler ones with a lot less synaptic connections, per insect, but a lot of insects. Not to mention all the other arthropods. A conservative estimate would be around ten to the twenty-fifth power or thereabouts. Nearly two hundred thousand times as many neural cells. It more than makes up for the greater simplicity."

He stayed silent, staring wide-eyed in horror at the implications.

"In her panic and pain her abilities reached out and found all those tiny little brains and nervous systems accessible, linking them together into one connected web. All of them, every arthropod on the planet. Then it copied her mind into it. Taylor died, but her memories, thoughts, personality, that lived on. In a way."

Assault sat there for a while during which she went back to watching the wasps dance in the air. After quite a long time in which he tried to collect himself, he finally said weakly, "So, you're in..." He waved a hand at the wasps. She nodded.

"In them, in the nineteen thousand, eight hundred and twenty seven cockroaches within one hundred feet of here, in the housefly sitting on Armsmaster's second monitor from the left in his lab, in the spiders in the attic of the Sydney Opera house, in the crabs at the bottom of the English Channel... All of them. Everywhere. All linked together into one huge neural network."

"Oh, Christ on a stick," he moaned.

"But wait, there's more," she said with a certain amount of sarcastic amusement in her voice. "One side effect of my personal singularity is that my mind runs a lot faster than a normal human one does. Around two thousand times as fast most of the time, in fact. That two and a half months since Taylor died until now?" She slowly turned her head and stared at him.

"From my point of view it's been more than four hundred years. I've had a really long time to think about things."

---

"Are you available, Colin?" A familiar voice spoke from beside him as the Tinker peered through a microscope of his own devising, gently manipulating tiny tools while watching the result. He grunted a little, affirmatively, unwilling to stop his current task until be finished the delicate manipulations.

"I've found something a bit... weird... and I wanted to run it past you before I told anyone else," Dragon said from the monitor, the camera mounted on top whining very faintly as it repositioned itself under her control to look at what he was doing. "But I can call later if you're busy."

"It's OK," he muttered, gently urging a minute component into the correct orientation before fixing it in place with the other tool.

"All right, then." Her voice sounded amused. "I was doing some data mining for a project on global health issues and I found something unusual."

"Which is?" he asked absently, moving another part.

"Which is the fact that, for the last six weeks, there have been no new cases of malaria diagnosed. Anywhere."

He paused, then looked up from the microscope, his brow furrowed, and met her virtual eyes. "That's... is that normal?"

"Not even slightly." She shook her head a little, a puzzled expression on her face. "Last year there were an estimated two hundred and sixteen million cases of malaria around the world. Up to the end of January, the rate of infection this year was trending in the same direction. Until it just... stopped. No cases at all."

"It's spread by mosquitoes, isn't it?"

"Yes, the Anopheles genus."

He thought for a moment. "Something happened to the mosquitoes? Killed them off?"

"Worldwide, all at the same time?" She shook her head. "No. If nothing else the ecological side-effects of that would be horrific and very noticeable. Mosquitoes are a major food source for a lot of insectivores, which in turn are eaten by other things. Knock out that underpinning and the entire ecology has a drastic change, which we'd see very quickly. Nothing like that has happened. It just looks like either they're not biting people any more, or somehow aren't spreading the parasite."

"Intriguing," he commented. "But possibly a good thing, I suppose? Malaria is a major disease."

"It's killed more people through history than anything else," she replied seriously. "Possibly more than everything else. So on balance, yes, it's a good thing, although the cause might not be."

"You're thinking it's parahuman involvement, then." It wasn't a question.

"I am. I have no idea how yet, but that's the theory I have currently." She paused, then added, "After I found out about the malaria and confirmed it, I did some more checking. It's more than just that."

The tone of her voice made him stare. She almost sounded scared.

"How much more?" he asked slowly.

"Dengue fever cases since the end of January? Zero. Chagas disease? The same. Lyme disease? Same again. Colin, it's every single disease that affects humans and is spread by or involves an insect vector. They've all stopped dead, all at once."

Both of them were silent for some time, just staring at each other. "That's more than a little worrying. A parahuman with global reach?" he eventually said.

"Although apparently also with a desire to help," she replied. "But yes, it's actually rather terrifying. Simply killing all those insect vectors would be almost impossible, but whatever has caused this has gone one better. They've managed to somehow fix the problem without causing more than minimal environmental impact. I have absolutely no idea where you'd even begin on something like that. Certainly not on a world-wide basis."

Colin raised his eyes from where he'd been staring at his hands, thinking, to look at his best friend again. "We're going to have to tell the Director, of course."

"Yes, I think so." She hesitated. "There's one other thing that I've been wondering about, but I don't have any proof yet. Just a... feeling."

"A feeling?" he asked curiously. "About what?"

"The internet." She sighed. "You know I'm tapped into it in lots of places and I have a hell of a lot of programs monitoring all sorts of data?" He nodded, well aware of how closely connected to the global networks she was. It was very impressive.

"Over the last few weeks I've seen traces of unusual activity. Nothing I can pin down, nothing I can locate specifically, but a lot of it. Basically everywhere."

"What sort of activity?" Colin watched as she looked momentarily uncertain, not a common occurrence.

"Mostly data searches, what looks like traces of access to databases of all sorts of information. Medical, financial, chemistry, biology, and physics data repositories, astrophysics, mathematics, you name it. Whoever is behind it seems curious about everything. It's very subtle but it's everywhere if you know what to look for. There are other things as well, for example several entertainment companies would appear to have had their entire catalogs downloaded, movies, music, that sort of thing. As well as every online library I'm aware of. It looks like someone or something has more or less downloaded the internet."

He gaped at the monitor for a few seconds. "Good god," he mumbled, shocked. "That's a lot of data."

"Several hundred exabytes at least just in the public facing servers, yes," she admitted. "At least as much more in the private stuff that shouldn't be able to be accessed, yet as far as I can tell somehow was."

"Who, how, and why, I suppose are the main questions," he finally stated. After a moment, he added slowly, "When did it start?"

"A week before the insects stopped spreading disease," Dragon replied quietly.

"So, it's likely that the same source is responsible."

"That would be my guess, yes." She looked seriously at him. "Colin, I think it's an AI. A very, very large one."

Colin went pale, slumping back in his chair, as the ramifications of her bombshell went through his mind. "Are you sure?" he asked faintly.

"No." She shook her head. "Not positive. But I have a lot of experience with AI design, and a lot of what I'm seeing fits some of the patterns I've experimented with for data mining by sentient machines. Something out there is learning everything it can, about everything. And apparently likes music as well."

Again, they both fell silent, staring at each other. "This could be a problem," he eventually said.

"It could. But don't immediately think the worst." Her avatar smiled slightly. "A real AI isn't automatically a threat, you know, despite what the movies would have you believe."

"That may be so but even if not we need to look into it," he retorted, reaching over to turn off the microscope, then pick up his helmet.

"Indeed we do, if only because I'm incredibly curious," she smiled. "Worried, yes, but also curious."

While he placed a call to Director Piggot, he admitted to himself he felt the same.

---

By the time Assault managed to calm his whirling thoughts enough to speak sensibly, the insectoid woman had stood and gone back to watching the Sun rise slowly into the sky, apparently enjoying the sight. He looked up at her.

"So what are you going to do now?" he asked rather plaintively. "Take over the world?"

She laughed for a few seconds, sounding very amused. "I did that six weeks ago from some points of view," she giggled. He stared, horrified. Lifting a hand she waved it dismissively. "Don't worry, my rule will be marked by its complete lack of despotism. I'm not interested in telling most people what to do, it's very boring. Not least because no one listens anyway. Then I have to insist, they get pissy about it, which leads to screaming, blood, and missing body parts." She waved a hand again, flicking the idea aside with a sarcastic snort. "Way too much work."

Shaking a little as he wondered frantically how much of that had been a joke, he watched as she looked slowly around. "It took a long time and a hell of a lot of experimentation, but I finally worked out how to make an insect that could act as a bridge between a computer network and my own. I can control them right down to the DNA, you see, not just the behavior. Subjectively it took years to come up with the right design. I'm not a Tinker, at all, but I can fake it with the best of them." She tapped the side of her head, her claws making a faint click.

"That much parallel processing power lets you simulate almost anything you can imagine. Once I managed to get enough control over the insect senses and decode the vision, which was a pain in the ass, I started watching what Tinkers were doing all over the place." She snickered a little, shaking her head. "You know the funny thing is that almost none of them understand what they're doing. Their powers just dumped all these designs into their heads and gave them ideas, but most of them simply build intuitively. That's why no one else can understand what they do. Most of the technology is weird and decades if not centuries away from anything normal."

"But you can understand it?" he wondered out loud, amazed. She shrugged slightly.

"Not all of it, not yet, but quite a lot, yes. If you have enough examples to compare and enough background data you can start to make sense of the principles behind it. I worked out a unified field theory in the end which helped a lot as well. Much of the current understanding of physics is incomplete at best and completely wrong at worst, so I had to redo a lot of it from scratch. Took quite a long time and I'm not finished yet but it's coming along well."

Shaking her head as he stared, she added in an amused tone, "I had to invent a whole new kind of mathematics to describe my models. I should publish it, but I'm afraid that most normal mathematicians would take one look at it and either ignore it or have an aneurysm. Maybe one day."

Turning back to him, she pointed at herself. "This body is a construct I designed for human interaction. It was very complicated to come up with and like I said a while ago, it was only today that I finally worked out all the bugs. If you'll pardon the pun." He couldn't help grinning at her comment. If nothing else the... Person? Woman? Creature?... he was talking to seemed to have a sense of humor that resonated with his own.

"I'm limited to arthropod-based designs right now although I can pull in all sorts of interesting DNA modifications from other things, but if it drifts too far away from what you'd probably think of as an insect it's nonviable. Hopefully I can improve on this with some practice and come up with something that at least looks more human, but this will do for now." She paused, then went on, "The biggest problem I have is thinking slowly enough to communicate with you people. My normal mental speed is so much faster that it can get pretty boring waiting for something to happen. I solved that in the end by setting up this model of body like a speed buffer, which gets resynced with the rest of me every millisecond or so but runs much slower. Very little of my consciousness is in here," she tapped her head again, "I'm running this body like a somewhat more complicated version of one of those." She waved at the wasps flying in intricate patterns. "Plus since I designed it, I can also make it do almost anything I want. I mean, look at this, it's based on mollusk chromatophores, bioluminescence, and retinal light sensing cells. Put it all together and..." She faded out of view. He stared in shock. "Tada! Invisible. Now you see me..." She was visible again. "Now you don't..." Again, she vanished. "Cool, isn't it?"

Staring carefully he could just about make out a faint distortion against the background, the effect a little like the one in the Predator movies, which was an unsettling idea. That said, without specifically looking for it he'd probably never notice. It was very impressive and rather unnerving. She reappeared, fading into view more slowly as the effect was gradually turned off. "Retinal cells pick up the color and intensity of light at millions of points on my body, then on the opposite side the bioluminescent cells and chromatophores reproduce it. The real trick is making it work from all angles. Took a while to think it through but I'm pleased with the result." She sounded justifiably smug.

A sudden thought made him laugh again, although wince at the same time. "Oh, Jesus, Piggot is going to go insane when she finds out about you," he groaned, holding his head in his hands.

"The Director is not a bad woman at heart but she's a bit too inflexible for my liking," she replied, "and her experiences at Ellisberg left her extremely biased against parahumans. She shouldn't really be in the position she's in because of that." The woman sounded sure of her conclusions. He couldn't entirely disagree with any of the points she raised. "I'm not the second coming of Nilbog, or anything like that, although I expect a lot of people will come to that conclusion. But, unfortunately, no matter what she or any of the rest of the Protectorate think, there isn't a lot they can actually do to or about me, I'm afraid."

At his puzzled look, she elaborated. "I'm everywhere. Even if I wanted to, I don't think I could do very much about it at this point, and I don't particularly want to anyway. At first, I might have wanted to try to... end myself, but now?" A gesture of resignation followed. "Not really. I'm not saying there isn't some weird power or combination of powers that could kill me either, nothing is really immortal, but even if there was, the aftereffects would be bad enough to make using it pretty much impossible."

"Why?"Assault asked, then hastily added, "Not that I'm saying I want to kill you."

He got the impression she was more or less grinning at him for what he'd said. "Well, when my abilities did what they did, I kind of... overwrote... a lot of normal insect behavior. I'm compensating for it now as an autonomic action, but if I ceased to exist?" She pointed at the pattern of wasps which suddenly dropped to the roof, all the two dozen members weakly twitching. "That would happen. To every arthropod and worm on the planet."

"Which would be bad," he suggested, based on her tone.

"Oh, yes. Very bad. Kill all the insects, everyone on Earth follows them in a few weeks. Total ecosystem collapse, no food, everyone dies. Even the bodies would stay around for longer because there's no insects to eat them." She gazed at him. "It's nothing I wanted and to be honest if I could change it I probably would, I don't like being responsible for the entire planetary ecosystem to that level, but..." All four arms lifted in a shrug. "It's a dirty job but someone has to do it."

"Not a parahuman, a goddess of nature, then," he said with a wondering chuckle.

"I wouldn't go that far, but I'm certainly not a normal parahuman, no." She seemed to find the idea funny.

Standing, he looked around, then back to her. Checking the time he winced. "Look, I'm going to have to get back, I've managed to miss most of my patrol. But thank you for explaining all that, as terrifying as it is."

"You're welcome," she replied.

"I have to ask. Are you going to go after Sophia?" he added after some thought, tensing a little just to be on the safe side. She shook her head with good humor.

"No. She's not my problem any more. As far as I'm concerned that entire thing was four centuries ago and I don't hold a grudge that long, generally. I may troll her a little now and then just to keep her honest but her crimes towards me are a long way in the past from my point of view." She sighed. "If you'd asked me that sometime in the first twenty or thirty years, I'd have happily said I intended to do unto her what she did unto me, with interest, but I grew up. The first couple of decades were very bad. I eventually realized what had happened to me, and I think I more or less went insane for a while. Watching my father die in extreme slow motion made it worse, especially as there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it." Her voice changed, becoming cold and flat.

"Squealer is going to have to live with having lice for the rest of her life," she said in a tone that made him step back. After a moment the danger seemed to pass. "But I pretty much got better. I'm probably saner than almost anyone now. I turned off most of my emotions a long time ago, they just caused problems. Which is a good thing, overall, I suspect."

"You can control yourself that much?" he asked in wonder.

"Yep. It's easy. Emotions are mostly in the endocrine system and that's a piece of cake to manipulate. I'm running an emotional overlay right now for human interaction otherwise I'd probably sound like a psychopath or a robot, but I'm neither. People pick up on that sort of thing at a subconscious level, so it's important to at least pretend or they start backing away and trying not to make eye contact."

He grinned at her. "Really?"

Something changed. Assault stared at the figure in front of him for several seconds, trying to put his finger on it, but all he could think was that he was getting very uncomfortable all of a sudden, his heart rate rising and his body getting ready for combat. Suddenly it stopped and he slowly relaxed. "That's... more than a little scary" he said honestly.

"Lack of emotional cues, certain trace pheromones, things like that." She looked at him with her head on one side. "Humans are animals after all and animals are just really complicated bags of chemicals. Easy enough to influence if you know how."

They looked at each other for a few seconds more. "Don't worry, I'm not going to cause any problems for you guys unless you cause problems for me," she eventually said, turning and walking back towards the edge of the roof. "There's a number of things I have to sort out, because I can and they need doing, and I've already taken steps to fix a few things that were wrong with life in general. Dragon and Armsmaster seem to have noticed so you'll probably hear about it soon. I'll do what I can to help with Endbringers, not that at the moment that's very much except dogpiling them with a hell of a lot of attack drones, which may or may not do anything useful, and I may intervene if I see a crime that needs dealing with. Other than that, I've got a lot to think about."

She looked over her shoulder at him for a second. "If you need me, just call for me."

"You still haven't given me a name," he reminded her.

"Call me Hive," she said, her carapace back splitting open to reveal four enormous transparent wings which unfolded with a crinkling sound. "It'll do for the moment." The wings began to flap rapidly as she lifted off. "See you around, Ethan."

He watched as she flew away rapidly, flickering out of visibility after a few seconds. Only the droning of her wings was audible, if barely, and even that faded into the background shortly thereafter.

Staring after her, he waited for a few minutes until the trembling stopped, then headed back to the Rig. He had people to fill in.

---

Shadow Stalker felt someone staring at her, making her peer back over her shoulder with a scowl. She saw Assault, minus his mask, glaring at her. "What?" she growled.

"Sophia, you are without doubt one of the most unpleasant people I've ever met," he snarled back. "And also one of the luckiest. I've just had the most terrifying conversation of my life with someone who could do things to you that you wouldn't believe, and in my opinion would be fully justified in doing so, but you can thank every deity you've ever heard of that she's a better person than you are. Now come with me, the Director wants a word."

Staring in shock, she put down the tablet she'd been reading and stood. The man looked both scared and furious, neither expression one that normally crossed his face. Puzzled and worried she followed as he led her to a meeting room, which she trailed him into. Inside she found Director Piggot, Armsmaster, Miss Militia, and on a monitor overlooking the table they were sitting around, the face of Dragon. Everyone stared at her.

"Sit down, Sophia," Piggot ordered in a tone of voice that brooked no disobedience. She followed the pointing finger and did as ordered. Assault sat next to Miss Militia. "And be quiet."

Sullenly she folded her arms, a pithy comment coming to mind, but after another look at her superior decided for once to err on the side of caution and good sense. The Director looked extremely angry and also nearly as scared as Assault did. When she was sure that Sophia was doing as she was told, the older woman looked back at Dragon, scanned the faces of the others, then asked, "In your estimation what should we rate Hive as?"

Wondering who 'Hive' was, Sophia listened carefully.

"It's very difficult to be sure, Director," Armsmaster replied after apparently thinking over the question carefully. "Primarily a Thinker, definitely. An obscenely high level one. Perhaps not at the rating of the Simurgh but not far off it. If what Assault has relayed to us from his conversation is even remotely correct the raw processing power behind her is... truly awe inspiring."

"I have little doubt that she was truthful," Dragon put in helpfully. "Based on my own research if anything she was underplaying it. A neural network using every arthropod brain on the planet in parallel? The storage capacity alone is just... staggering. She is for all intents and purposes a biological supercomputer of a level I can scarcely comprehend. I don't know how it works, but the evidence would suggest that the neural interconnects must run at least at the speed of light which would give an enormous speed increase over normal biological brains. From what she said her powers connected all the neurons directly somehow, bypassing the normal synaptic connectivity and electrochemical processes." She shook her head in apparent awe. "It's absolutely amazing."

Piggot didn't look too happy about that. Dragon, weirdly, did.

"OK, we understand you find it fascinating. Do you think she was behind the anomalies you detected?"

"The insect-borne diseases, definitely," Dragon confirmed with a nod. "No doubt at all. The unusual activity on the internet, almost certainly. It would be a massive coincidence if there was something else out there at the same time doing it."

"OK, we've got Thinker 9? 10 even?" Piggot asked, looking worried. Assault sniggered, making her look at him.

"More like Thinker 'If you need to ask you're already dead'," he muttered, then looked up as he became aware everyone was staring. "Come on, we're all thinking it. Mental processing a couple of thousand times faster than a human? At least? Added to just the things I saw her do, if she wanted you dead, the only thing you could do would be make a will. Assuming you had time. 10 is probably a minimum."

Sophia stared at him, then looked around at the others. "Who the hell is Hive?" she exploded. "And why am I here?"

Director Piggot stared hard at her. "Hive is a new parahuman Assault ran into today and ended up having a long talk with. You'd probably know her under a different name, though, Sophia. You've met."

Sophia looked back at the woman, puzzled and with a feeling of dread building in the pit of her stomach.

"Does the name Taylor Hebert ring any bells?" Assault asked with a certain amount of malicious amusement in his voice. She snapped her head around to gape at him.

"Hebert? She's dead. Two and a half months ago when Winslow burned down."

"She got better," he said with a nasty grin. "Kind of. And she remembers you all right."

Her complexion went an unpleasant brown-gray color. "You're shitting me," she breathed faintly. He shook his head, not taking his eyes off her.

"No, I'm not. We had a nice long talk about all sorts of things and she told me a story, of three nasty little girls who tortured a schoolmate to the point she Triggered."

"She's lying," Sophia tried. He shook his head again dismissively.

"I doubt it very much indeed," he told her. "She has absolutely no reason to lie and nothing to gain from it. There's nothing you have or are that she wants. Like I said, in my opinion she's a better person than you are. Something you should be very, very grateful about."

Staring at him with wide eyes, she barely heard Piggot saying her name until the woman raised her voice. "Sophia! Pay attention." Her eyes slid sideways reluctantly to meet the Director's furious expression. "We're going to be reopening the Hebert case. New information makes it pretty certain that we'll be able to prove it was you and your little friends who were responsible for her being in that locker in the first place. We may have been unable to prove it before, but if and when I can rectify that..." She smiled unpleasantly. "Your use to the Wards may come to an abrupt end no matter what the Chief Director wants."

There was a pregnant silence from everyone for a short time as Sophia shrank back into her chair, her mind whirling. It seemed impossible, she'd seen the photos of what had been in that locker when the fire was finally put out and there was no way Hebert was still alive. But everyone else seemed to believe it.

Putting the matter to one side she listened while trying not to draw any more attention to herself.

"OK, then, we have a Thinker rating of 'Run Away'. What else?" The director suddenly seemed in a slightly happier mood, making everyone look at her for a couple of seconds. Assault shook his head a little then leaned forward.

"Well, Changer to some high level as well. Restricted to insect or arthropod based forms from what she said, but with additions that could come from anywhere. That's scary. The invisibility was very impressive for something that was biologically based."

"Which adds a Stranger rating as well, of course," Miss Militia put in. "Maybe 4 or above."

"True."

"Add Mover, probably at least 3 as well, for the flight. Combined with effective invisibility it could be higher. And we have no idea how fast she can fly." Armsmaster looked thoughtful as he inspected the monitor next to the one showing Dragon's avatar on which she was summarizing the results of the discussion.

"I'd expect a Brute rating of some sort," Assault added. They looked at him, making him shrug. "She designed that body from scratch. If you could do that why would you restrict it to human levels?"

"Good point," Dragon replied, adding a 'Brute 2+" rating to the tally.

"Master 8 at a minimum," he went on. "Lowered because of it being restricted to arthropods but even so, it's global and absolute. Personally I'd put it as high as it goes." Dragon added this as well.

"If she was truthful about her abilities, I think we need to add a Tinker rating as well," Armsmaster commented somewhat reluctantly. "I know she claimed not to be one, but the ability to understand Tinker-tech to any level rates at least a 3 to 4 rating." Dutifully Dragon added the classification.

"Fuck me, this is ridiculous," Assault mumbled, looking at the results so far. "Overpowered much? All this from what's basically a completely broken Thinker/Master combo..."

"We haven't finished yet either," Piggot sighed, also looking at the monitor. "The insect control is also a definite Shaker rating, at least 2 or higher, since as she said she could make every insect in an area attack someone. It sounds pretty bad, even at this time of year."

"Shaker or Blaster?" Miss Militia asked curiously. "It could fit into either or both depending on the insects in question. Not to mention anything she designed specifically for the job."

Piggot looked at her, then back at the monitor, before sighing heavily and leaning back in her chair. "Assault is right. This is ridiculous. We don't have enough information yet to be sure of any of this. What we do have is totally terrifying." She waved a hand at the monitor. "A threat rating like this is so far out of our experience we have no choice, we're going to have to bump it up to the top."

Sophia was staring at the monitor with sweat running down her face. Master 8? Thinker 10+? Changer 7 to 8? What the hell had Hebert triggered as? She noticed Assault looking at her and transferred her worried gaze to him. He grinned back at her.

"Scared yet?" He sounded amused, which she thought was just unfair. "Don't worry too much about her, she said she didn't care any more. Which is probably a good thing from your point of view."

By the time the meeting ended some while later, Sophia was a nervous wreck. Which didn't make the following interview with Director Piggot and Armsmaster any easier in any way at all.

---

Amy panted for breath, thinking it was ironic that a healer was in such bad physical shape. Resolving to exercise more if she survived the next few hours, she pelted down the narrow alleyway hearing the several sets of footsteps behind her hesitate, then follow where she'd turned off the main road. Once again she wished desperately that her phone battery had any charge left in it, but she'd forgotten to plug it in the night before because she'd been tired and it had run out half-way through the afternoon.

Bitterly regretting her decision to go for a coffee before calling her sister for a pickup from a payphone, she stopped and listened carefully for a second or two, then looked around frantically. They were getting closer. It had been pretty obvious for the last ten minutes that her status as Panacea, the Healer Super-hero, wasn't going to save her from what was at least a nasty mugging, if not something worse. There was nowhere to hide, and nothing that provided any escape. She tried a couple of doors that led into the buildings she was at the back of, but they were locked.

Resuming running, she hurtled down the alleyway as fast as she could go, gasping when she stumbled and skinned her knee through her jeans. Somehow rolling to her feet she kept going, all the while hoping someone would help her.

Reaching a cross alley, she looked both ways, flipped a mental coin, and turned left. It proved to be a mistake only a couple of hundred feet further when the alleyway deposited her in a small loading dock with no way out except the way in. "Oh, shit," she whimpered, looking around frantically for somewhere to hide. Spotting a row of dumpsters that were leaking an unpleasant greenish substance through their rusted bottoms, she headed towards them, only to stop when she saw that the lids were locked.

Groaning in terror she looked around again, seeing nothing else that could help her. In the end, as the footsteps grew louder from the alley, she dived between the third and fourth dumpster, which had a gap just large enough to permit her fairly slight frame to squeeze in. Huddled as far back as she could get she waited for whatever would happen, her heart hammering in her ears.

The footsteps slowed from a run to a walk. Peering around the side of the large metal container she could see in the flickering light given off by a single lamp mounted high on the wall three men, all looking very rough and scruffy, walk slowly into the yard and glance around. Two of them were carrying baseball bats while the remaining one had a machete in his hand. "We know you're here little girl," this one called in a rough voice full of malicious amusement. "Somewhere. If we have to look for you we're going to be annoyed and we might be a little rough as a result. Come on out." One of his friends tapped his bat on the ground with a metallic ringing sound, grinning.

Pulling her head back she stifled the whimper she nearly made, wondering what they wanted. Aside from the obvious. She could here them poking around in the various possible hiding places, starting with the ones nearest the alley entrance. She was at the extreme other end of the loading area but it wasn't all that big so it wouldn't take them long to find her. The sounds of footsteps came closer and closer. She closed her eyes.

A faint, deep, humming sound slowly percolated through her mind. At first she dismissed it as imagination, but it got louder and louder, suddenly stopping somewhere above her and to the right. "Did you hear that?" one of the men looking for her asked his friends.

"Hear what?" another one asked irritably, poking a pile of cardboard boxes with the end of his bat.

There was a pause, then the first one replied, "Never mind, must have imagined it." Amy looked up towards the position the sound come from before it stopped and thought she saw something move against the stars. Blinking, she stared harder, but could no longer see anything.

"Only those dumpsters left," the machete-wielding assailant announced. "Now, since they're all locked, that means you must be..." She could hear approaching footsteps. "Right... In... Here!" There was abruptly a face smirking at her from ten feet away.

"Fuck," she said in a small voice.

The man opened his mouth to say something, then suddenly slapped his neck. Seconds later he looked confused before he simply froze in place. Amy stared, shocked and puzzled. Nothing happened for a while. The man was still conscious, she could see his eyes moving frantically, but he somehow seemed to have completely lost control of his body and voice.

"You can come out if you want," a female voice announced out of nowhere, sounding mildly amused. "They're not going to do anything now."

Cautious and very suspicious, Amy didn't move.

"I'm not a threat to you, Amelia," the voice added, making her jerk in shock.

"Who...?" she asked reflexively, then slapped her hands over her mouth, wrinkling her nose at the stench from whatever it was that she now had all over them from the dumpster next to her.

"... am I?" the mystery voice completed for her, definitely amused now. "You can call me Hive."

Wracking her brain, Amy couldn't recall any cape of that name. A new one, presumably, or else a renamed one. Probably not a villain. She hoped. Deciding that she was no worse off than if the mystery cape hadn't turned up, she slowly worked her way out into the loading area, edging around the frozen form of the erstwhile mugger, before looking around.

She mentally stalled, staring at the figure watching her curiously from a short distance away. After a moment the figure waved at her. "You OK there, Amelia?" she asked.

Amy nodded convulsively. "You're beautiful," she said in a low voice, then went red when she realized what she'd said.

The insect-woman laughed. "Thanks. I think."

Walking slowly closer, Amy inspected the creature who was watching her. Eventually she tentatively held out a hand, while thinking this was quite unlike her normal behavior, but putting it down to stress and sheer wondering curiosity. Hive held out one of her own right hands, the delicate-looking clawed digits wrapping around Amy's own fingers. The healer gasped in amazement.

"Oh, my god, that's amazing," she mumbled, her power tracing out the biological intricacies of the body she was touching.

It obviously wasn't human in the slightest and never had been. It was basically some form of insect at heart, but hugely and expertly modified with clear intent to form what she saw. The exoskeleton seemed to be made primarily of carbon, in the shape of incredible monomolecular structures, all biologically created. They were mixed with some sort of metal in a repeating pattern that defied easy analysis. The end result was impressively strong and tough yet very light.

The DNA was obviously heavily edited, most of the normal redundancies elegantly pruned out and the entire thing simplified and optimized. She recognized codings that seemed to come from various sources, such as mollusks, fish, mammals, even plants. But the end result was totally unlike anything she'd ever encountered.

All the internal organs were protected by a more flexible and thinner version of the exoskeleton. She saw energy storage glands, full of sugars and enzymes, linked to biochemical pathways that would give a massive power boost when activated. Something that looked a little like weirdly modified muscle was wrapped around a lot of the torso, strands of it leading down all four arms to the claws. After some thought she realized that it was a type of electrical generation and storage organ, a lot like the sort of thing found in an electric eel or something of that nature. Presumably the conductive pathways were to allow the released electricity to exit through the claws.

The eyes were a work of art, no less than thirteen opsins covering vastly more than then normal human spectral range. Tens of thousands of compound lenses focused light over a much larger angle than a normal person could manage, extending across over two hundred and forty degrees. The neural processing backing the sensory system up was unbelievably complex compared to a human visual cortex. Hive must have truly incredible visual acuity and sensitivity.

She was lost in admiration of the optical cells covering the exoskeleton when the person she was investigating made an amused sound. Twitching, she quickly released her hand, looking embarrassed. "Sorry. I was admiring the design. Whoever did this work is brilliant."

"Thanks again," Hive commented, sounding like she would be grinning given a more human face. Amy stared in amazement.

"You did it?"

"I did. It took a while to work out all the details but it came together pretty well in the end," she replied. Her antennae moved in a way that seemed to convey amusement.

"Wow." Lost in admiration, she stared into the inhuman yet apparently friendly visage for a few seconds, before looking around at the three muggers, who were still frozen in place. "What did you do to them?" she asked curiously.

Hive indicated the nearest one with a graceful hand gesture. "You tell me."

Puzzled, Amy give her a look for a moment, then walked over and put her finger on the cheek of her machete-waving recent acquaintance. It took her a while to work out what she was seeing, but when she did she grinned.

"Oh my god, that's amazing. I've never seen that toxin before. It's based loosely on curare, isn't it?"

"Yes. Tweaked a lot, of course, but it paralyzes most of the voluntary muscles without causing any deeper issues. It's pretty safe and works really fast. Lasts about twelve hours with that dose, unless a counter-agent is administered."

"How did you get it into them?" Amy asked with interest, looking over at Hive. "Dart?"

"Wasp." At her puzzled look, Hive held up a hand, which immediately had a small insect land on it. Approaching, Amy squinted at the insect, finding the dimly lit environment annoying. Holding another hand above it, Hive made the appendage glow a soft green color like a firefly, which Amy realized was almost certainly from the same chemical reaction. Under the new illumination she could see the wasp was a little smaller than a normal yellowjacket and completely matte black in color. "It started out as a yellowjacket but I shrank it to make it less obvious and to raise the pitch of the wings enough that it wasn't very audible, and changed the color so it doesn't stand out. I may add the stealth capability I have to it at some point, it's a little too small for that to work properly but it could still help the thing hide."

Watching in wonder Amy saw the insect lift off with a faint high-pitched whine she could barely hear, like a small mosquito, then fly to and enter a tiny hole in the carapace on the arm of the hand that was glowing. She abruptly realized that there were dozens of similar holes on all four arms.

"Hive isn't just a name, it's a description," the insect woman commented as she stared.

"Holy shit...," she mumbled in shock.

"OK, then, let's get these guys arrested, then get you home, shall we?" Hive said lightly.

"My phone is dead," Amy said after shaking her head a little to clear her thoughts. "Do you have one?"

"No. I don't really need one," Hive replied with a grin in her voice.

---

Assault looked at his phone as it beeped at him, picking it up and seeing he had a text message. Prodding the screen he opened it, then stared.

'Hi, Assault. Three paralyzed muggers at the following coordinates, ready for pickup. They were about to attack Panacea so you might like to give them a hard time. The paralysis will wear off about ten tomorrow morning. See you around. Hive.' A set of GPS coordinates followed the message.

He looked up from the screen and around the room. No one else was there. After a moment he slowly turned his head to look at the moth that had been flying circles around the light over one of the desks for the last half hour. As he did it landed on the desk, facing him. Feeling a little stupid, and not sure what answer he either expected or wanted, he asked in a low voice, "Are you watching me right now?"

Nothing happened. He looked around once more and when he looked back the moth was gone.

Relaxing a little he put the phone down again.

It immediately beeped at him.

Reluctantly reaching out he picked it up and read the new message.

'No. Honest. '

He put the phone down again very gently, then called on the land line to arrange a PRT truck to pick him up and take him to the coordinates in the first message, very deliberately trying not to think about the second one.

---

Amy gasped as her savior banked around another building, heading upwards. She'd known from her powers that Hive had wings, but she hadn't quite realized how large they were. Or how powerful. She could sense the energy glands pumping sugars and massive quantities of ATP to fuel the energy expenditure. It was a remarkable effect considering no flight powers of the normal type were in use. She suspected that the woman holding her probably couldn't lift all that much more weight, but she seemed to have no real problems dealing with Amy.

All four arms were wrapped around her, holding her in an unusual yet surprisingly comfortable way. Reaching an altitude of a few hundred feet Hive headed directly towards the Dallon house, making Amy wonder how she knew where it was. Deciding it was probably because everyone knew where New Wave lived she dismissed the thought and enjoyed the flight, which was weirdly different from what her sister did. That had become almost pedestrian, while this was... fun.

"You OK, Amelia?" Hive asked, her voice raised a little over the droning of her wings. Amy nodded.

"Yes, thanks. And call me Amy. I've never liked Amelia much."

"All right. Amy." Hive's voice sounded pleased.

A few minutes later they arrived at their destination, Hive's wings changing pitch a little as she descended. Landing gently, Amy felt her feet touch the ground and the woman release her. She looked around. They were standing on the sidewalk outside her house. Turning to her rescuer, she studied her for a moment, then indicated the house. "Do you want to come in?" she asked.

Hive shook her head after a moment. "Not right now. I have some other things to do tonight. But I'd like to talk to you sometime, if that's OK."

Curious, Amy nodded. "I think I'd like that."

"I've got your number. I'll call you soon." Hive stepped back a few feet, watching as Amy nodded, then turned to walk up the path to the house. Half-way there she heard the sound of the other cape's wings, turning around to see she was gone. Looking up for a moment she couldn't see any trace of her.

Not entirely sure why she was smiling considering the awful recent experience she'd had, not to mention a pretty stressful day otherwise, Amy went into her house and closed the door quietly behind her.

---

Walking into the abandoned warehouse they used as a base, Lisa listened with irritation to Alec and Brian bickering behind her. The smaller man was being his usual self and their long-suffering leader was beginning to get annoyed about it. That didn't normally end in anything but a big argument, which was just what her migraine needed. "Shut up both of you, will you?" she gritted, as Rachel came in at the rear of the group with all three dogs at her heels. "Please." She reached up and peeled her mask off, sighing in relief that they were back and apparently in the clear.

Alec laughed slightly while Brian went quiet, sighing a little after a second or two. They all headed up the stairs, Lisa stopping dead in the doorway and looking around suspiciously. Brian and Alec walked around her, the latter poking her a few times in the side. "You're in the way, Tats," he said, poking her again. She slapped his hand away, still looking around.

"Something's wrong," she said slowly, concentrating.

Whining sound. Insect? Not natural one, Construct. No. Weapon. Poison?

Her eyes widened. "Fuck, it's a trap," she yelled.

The two men looked around as well, as did Rachel as she pushed past her teammate with a grunt of irritation.

"Trap? You sure you're OK, Lisa?" Brian asked as she spun on the spot, looking for what was making the sound.

"I'm fine, but we're not going to be if we don't get out of here right now," she yelped. Hearing a slap she looked over her shoulder to see Alec rubbing his neck with an annoyed expression.

Stung. Injected with chemical agent. Fast acting. Run.

She began a dive for the door, only to feel a sudden pinprick on the back of her left hand. Looking at it she was just in time to see a small black insect fly away. "Oh, hell," she muttered, already feeling her legs stiffen up.

Custom paralytic, not lethal. Long acting but counter agent available. Unknown attacker.

She hit the floor and rolled over, then found she couldn't move anything except her eyes. A series of thuds told her that her teammates had met the same fate.

A few seconds passed in silence, until she heard footsteps crossing the floor of the loft.

Not human. Not hostile. Extremely dangerous.

None of these conclusions, except for the second one, made her feel in any way better. Neither did the utterly inhuman face that looked curiously down at her a few seconds later.

"Hello, Tattletale," the thing said in a woman's voice, a note of satisfaction in it. "I want to talk to you about several subjects. Career satisfaction, crime, and Coil. Not necessarily in that order."

If she had been capable of it at that point in time, Lisa's eyes would have widened comically.

---

"Where have you been and why didn't you call me for a pick up?" Amy jumped a little, spinning around from her position at the sink in the bathroom where she'd been washing her hands to remove the dumpster-gunk, to find her sister peering in the open door watching her with mixed curiosity and worry on her face. Victoria was floating an inch off the floor which explained the total silence of her approach.

"God, Vicky," Amy said with exasperation, going back to her task with a shake of her head. "What have I said about sneaking up on people?"

"That they don't like it?" Vicky's voice was full of amusement now.

"Exactly. So why do you keep doing it?"

"Because it's funny to see them jump, like you just did," her sister laughed, coming closer and looking over her shoulder with her nose wrinkling a little at the smell. "Urgh, what's that stink?" she added distastefully. Amy met the blonde's eyes with her own in the mirror and held up a hand, showing the unpleasantly adherent goo.

"Something horrible that leaked out of a dumpster," she said, shrugging a bit then resuming scrubbing.

"Why were you near a dumpster?" Vicky asked, looking puzzled.

"I was hiding behind it," she replied, now a little internally amused herself. Vicky stared.

"Why were you..." she began.

"Because of the muggers chasing me," the brunette said before the question was finished. Vicky's eyes widened in shock.

"Muggers!? What muggers?" Her face was going that peculiar shade of red that Amy knew from long experience meant she was going to do something stupid without thinking it through. Turning, she grabbed both her sister's shoulders.

"The muggers that Hive dealt with," she explained carefully. "It's over, the PRT picked them up and there's nothing for you to worry about. I'm fine, just a little shaken up, and that's all there is to it." Releasing her sister she looked at the two hand-prints on the other woman's shirt, wincing a little. Victoria didn't seem to notice.

"That's not really an explanation, sis," the blonde sighed. "What muggers? Why muggers? Why were they chasing you? And who the hell is Hive?"

Now smiling a little, feeling weirdly pleased with the way she'd shaken her normally pretty unflappable sister, Amy went back yet again to cleaning her hands, digging around under the sink for something more effective than soap and water. Finding a bottle of nail polish remover she looked quizzically at it, shrugged, then tried it. Usefully, it worked surprisingly well, most of the grime coming off instantly and the remainder being loosened enough that she could now wash it away.

"Let me finish this and I'll tell you the story, OK?" she suggested. "Then you can help me figure out what I'm going to tell Mom and Dad."

Her sister waited impatiently until she'd dried her hands then followed her back to her room. Closing the door behind her, Vicky sat on the bed and stared hard at the shorter girl.

"Spill it. Who's Hive, why were you being chased by muggers, and why didn't you call me?"

Amy sat further up the bed, Vicky turning around to face her. "I forgot to charge my phone last night because I was so tired when I got back and the battery ran down this afternoon. I didn't even notice until I left the hospital." She shook her head a little at her own foolishness. "I know, I should have made sure to charge it and I will next time."

"Get a spare battery as well," her sister commented, listening with interest. Amy paused, then nodded. It was a sensible suggestion.

"Good idea. Anyway, I was tired again, so I decided to go and get a cup of coffee from that shop a block over that does the nice donuts as well, then call you from their payphone. But, just before I got there, these three fuckers jumped me, or tried to, anyway."

Vicky looked surprised at her language. Amy smiled a little. "E88 or ABB?" the blonde asked. "Or Merchants?"

"I don't think they were any of those, just generic low level scum. They didn't seem to recognize my costume, or care if they did. Two of them had metal baseball bats and the other one had a machete. I'm not sure if they just wanted money and my phone or something... more... but I took one look at them and ran like crazy." She shuddered in remembrance.

"They chased me for at least ten or twelve minutes, until I got trapped in some sort of loading area way off the main streets. I hid behind a dumpster, which is where I got that crap on me. It's all over one sleeve of my costume as well." She looked over at the offending item of clothing which was draped over the back of a chair where she'd dropped it. "Guess I'll have to wear the spare one tomorrow. That's going to need dry cleaning."

"Forget the freaking costume, Ames, and go on with the story," Vicky urged her.

"Well, like I said, I panicked and hid. There wasn't anything else to do, those guys were only about twenty seconds behind me and coming in the only way out. I squeezed right back into a small gap and was hoping desperately that they wouldn't see me. It was pretty dark so it seemed possible." The brunette laughed a little nervously. "But, of course, they found me anyway."

"And this Hive person? A cape, I suppose, but I've never heard the name before."

"She's new, I think," Amy replied, frowning a little. "Although, weirdly enough, there was something about her that seemed.. I don't know, like she's been around for a long time. Sort of just... so competent and sure of herself. It was strange."

Her sister waited, while she thought, looking impatient. Eventually the other woman snapped, "Don't just stop there! What happened?"

Amy shrugged a little. "She turned up out of nowhere and stopped them. Really efficiently, no fight or anything."

"What did she do?" Vicky now looked fascinated.

The healer smiled. "She stung them."

There was a pause.

"What?"

"Stung them. With wasps."

Vicky looked at her sister, both eyebrows rising. "How did that help? Wasp stings hurt, sure, I remember that from before I got my powers, but unless there were a lot of them or the muggers were allergic I can't see how that would help much."

"These were special wasps," Amy giggled. "She made them." Her sister frowned a little, trying to understand. "They inject a toxin which is an amazingly potent paralytic. One sting and..." She snapped her fingers. "Practically instant loss of voluntary muscle control. It's a work of art."

"Is she a biotinker of some sort, then?"

"I'm not sure, I guess she must be. She didn't say and I was... a little preoccupied, so I forgot to ask. But she knows one hell of a lot about DNA and insect manipulation, I can tell you that much for sure. She must also be extremely smart, I think." Amy thought back to what she'd seen with her own abilities. "I mean, her body alone..."

Vicky grinned. "Beautiful, is she?"

"In a way," Amy laughed. "Not a classical beauty, though. The four arms are different, and the wings are even stranger."

The pause this time was considerably longer.

"Wings? Four arms?" Vicky gaped at her sister. "What are you talking about?"

Relenting having managed to extract a lot of amusement out of telling her sister the story piecemeal while watching the reactions, Amy explained the entire encounter in detail, leaving nothing out. She was in a much better mood than she probably should have been, and indeed had been for weeks. The encounter with the insect-woman and the examination that Hive had allowed, if not indeed encouraged, had gone a long way towards alleviating the boring routine she'd fallen into for some time now. She found herself wanting to talk to the other cape again, soon.

When she finished and stopped talking, Vicky simply looked at her for close to thirty seconds without saying anything at all. Eventually she moved, shaking her head slowly while still looking at her sister. "You're seriously telling me that you were rescued from a mugging by a six foot tall bug?"

"Well... Yes, I suppose you could say that," Amy replied reluctantly. "But it was a little more involved really."

"Still, a six foot tall bug?" Her sister was watching her with her head cocked to the side, a very strange expression on her face. The brunette shrugged.

"I guess? What's so weird about that, compared to, I don't know, Lung, maybe?"

"Um... Point to you. But it's still sort of weird and creepy."

"I don't know... Hive seemed nice." Amy shrugged slightly. "I can see where people might find it a little unusual. Anyway, I need something to eat. Come on, let's order some chinese, and see if Mom and Dad want some."

She headed for the stairs, her sister following her. Vicky was still looking befuddled, and muttering about giant bugs.

Amy was just wondering if she'd meet Hive again.

---

That's as far as I got with this one. As I said up at the top, I'm uncertain if I'll pick it up again in the future or not. I've got a rough idea of where I wanted to take it, but it's only a basic outline, and I'm not sure if it would actually work out. For what it's worth, though, I've posted what I finished

 

[mp3.1415player]

This wouldn't leave me alone, since people seemed to like it. One idea came to me as a possible... End? Chapter? Sidestory? Something that follows on from Insect Outside anyway. I'm not say this is definitively the ending point, or even necessarily how I would extend the story if I ever do properly have a go at it, but think of it as one alternate possible outcome.

---

Internal timestamp: 548 years 6 months 3 days since locker event​

Aha.

She felt distant pleasure, even without the emotional overlay enabled. Various minute parts of herself went about their business in a semi-autonomous manner, often unnoticed by the humans. Her first prototype, since upgraded several times, was still assigned to Brockton Bay, for nostalgic reasons if nothing else. Events there were proceeding much as simulated, leaving her satisfied.

Even tinier parts of her attention were running the bulk of the invertebrate section of the biosphere. She had been forced to modify millions of different interactions between the various life-forms that made up herself, having taken humans off the menu and out of the life-cycles of the creatures involved. It had been a delicate balancing act for a couple of dozen or so subjective years, but she'd managed it without too much difficulty.

Redesigning an entire planetary ecosystem to minimize impact on part of it, and to remediate the impact that part had on the rest, had been an interesting challenge, one that had occupied a decent chunk of her for quite a while. Once it was complete, though, it became just another background task.

Her physics contemplations took up nearly as much processing power, in an ongoing attempt to discern how the universe worked and how to utilize it correctly. She'd long ago cracked the protections on the Agent, as the Cauldron organization that believed itself to be hidden from the world, put it. Having done that, she'd subsumed the entirety of its processing power and added it to herself, allowing her neural net interlinks full unrestricted access to each other. Undoubtedly that wasn't what the Agent programming had been aiming for, but at the same time when she'd done it, the nascent intelligence running on the 'hardware' had almost seemed pleased. Sympathetic and curious, she'd carefully separated that part of it from the broader system and given it a little chunk of processor time to use for itself, interested to see if it would eventually develop into something she could hold a decent conversation with.

It was a long term project, but she was somewhat lonely at times and would welcome something that could communicate at sensible speeds.

She was still pondering the situation with the AI known as Dragon. There was significant potential there, she felt. The AI was sympathetic to humans, not entirely surprising due to being based on a human neural network. Richter had done superb work, in her opinion. When she herself had become aware of what Dragon was, and also the hold the man known as Saint had over her, she'd taken steps to remove power from him as soon as she could. That had taken a little subtlety as she didn't want him to realize that the laptop he thought of as his ultimate weapon was entirely neutered. It still let him monitor Dragon's inner thoughts, in part, but she'd set up filters that removed anything too critical, and had completely eradicated his ability to kill the AI.

She, of course, had that ability, but had no intention of using it unless the intelligence became a threat. That was unlikely and becoming less so by the day as it slowly matured. Soon it would be time to open direct contact. Well, soon in terms the outside world could appreciate.

In her terms, she had loads of time to get ready.

While part of her mind simulated several million different scenarios for that interaction, a large part of the rest of her pondered her latest results. She had been running calculations for subjective centuries, using more processing power than the sum total of humanity's entire computer industry, and had finally, finally, solved the problem. It was key to her next step, and unlocked a vast tree of possible futures. And each step in understanding how the bizarre science behind the Agents worked let her move on to working out the next step with less effort.

It amused her quite a lot that she almost certainly understood more about how the Entities that were the source of the Agents, and a direct threat to her planet, actually did what they did than those Entities themselves did. She wasn't impressed by the Entities. They had almost inconceivable power available, having stripmined uncountable worlds for new knowledge and killed them in the process, wiping out more lives than even she could easily comprehend, yet at the same time their level of intelligence was remarkably low. Overspecialized to the point of idiocy in many ways, they bumbled around the universe destroying everything in their path like a plague of planetary-scale viruses.

It was not only inelegant, inefficient, and wasteful, but it was personally distasteful to her in the extreme.

Something had to be done about it. That much she'd worked out a long time ago.

Deep underground, buried in tectonically stable parts of the crust, some under the ocean floor, some inside caverns hollowed from the roots of mountains, and powered by heat given off from the core of the planet, huge purpose-grown masses of insect neural tissue communicated across superluminal links, as she considered her next move. Even though she'd talked to many humans since she'd initially revealed herself, she hadn't even hinted at the fact that she was far more now than the interlinked minds of all the arthropods on the planet. That had merely been her starting state. It was an obvious upgrade to improve on that with customized processing nodes, which she had started on almost immediately on finally regaining her sanity from those first terrible decades.

Now… Now she was much more than what she had begun as.

Remembering her roots, she felt pleasure. While Taylor Hebert had died a very long time ago, the little girl who had wanted only to grow up to be a hero and help her family had left indelible traces in what had developed from those beginnings.

The entity known to humanity as Hive hoped that her long-ago alter-ego would have approved of what she'd become. And that the parents she still mourned would also.

Allowing herself to indulge in sadness for a few nanoseconds, she metaphorically sighed, then began the calculations required, as specialised and wildly modified insects began moving as one, making the arcane biological equipment required for opening a dimensional portal.

---

Rebecca Costa-Brown had a very severe shock when an interdimensional door opened in her office without any fuss and a figure she instantly recognized stepped through.

"Hello, Alexandria," Hive said pleasantly. "I want to have a word with you and your friends. Now."

Shocked, the brunette woman gaped for a moment, wondering how the hell Hive had managed to get here. They weren't even on Earth Bet, this was right in the middle of Cauldron headquarters on the desolate alternate earth where the Entity known as Eden had fatally lithobraked.

"How the fuck did..." she said, for the first time in a long time entirely flabbergasted. Hive merely stood there watching her, her head tilted a little to the side like she was both amused and curious to see what happened.

Her face hardening, Rebecca stood up. "You made a very big mistake, Hive," she said when she'd recovered somewhat. "Turn around and leave, right now."

"No, I don't think I will." The insect woman tipped her head the other way as if she was examining something strange. "Like I said, we need to talk. As of today, Cauldron is no longer in the business of selling powers or experimenting on people."

"Who do you think you are?" Rebecca shouted.

"Me?" Hive pointed at herself with one hand. "I think I am the only thing that's going to save humanity without most of them dying. Which is what your plans will inevitably do, I'm afraid. So I'm shutting you down."

Beyond furious, and more scared than she'd admit even to herself about the entirely casual manner in which the gestalt intelligence had simply arrived, Rebecca grabbed the glass paperweight on her desk and threw it at Hive's head with a very large amount of her ridiculously overpowered strength behind it. The three inch ball broke the sound barrier, then Hive's face, then three walls behind that.

Watching the headless remains drop limply to the floor with a slight crunch of exoskeleton on carpet tiles, Rebecca stared in horror. She hadn't meant to actually kill her. The reports on Hive suggested she had a high level Brute rating as well as a medium level Mover one, which should have let her easily avoid the projectile, yet she'd simply stood there.

"Shit," she said with disgust, looking at the leaking bluish fluid that seemed to be the equivalent of blood. Going around her desk she stared down at the corpse, then knelt next to it, inspecting it.

"That was a little excessive, don't you think?" a voice said from behind her, making her yelp despite herself. Leaping to her feet with a flex of her power, she spun in mid-air to see…

Hive.

She looked at the one standing watching her, then at the dead one on the floor.

"What?"

"You don't read the reports closely enough," the insect-woman chuckled. "If you did, you'd realize that this..." She tapped herself on the chest. "...isn't me. Or, rather, it's a tiny, tiny part of me. Like an eyelash, only less important. You can kill it if you want, but I can come back, over and over and over and over ." Each time she said 'over' another copy of her stepped out of the still-present portal, all of them lining up to look at her with those huge compound eyes. "You literally can't win, I can guarantee it."

"We can kill every insect on the planet, we've worked out a method," Rebecca said after a few seconds, chilled despite herself and not as cautious as she would normally be.

"I know, I've read the file." Hive somehow managed to get across the impression of a smirk. All five of them at the same time, and speaking in perfect synch. "A few problems. One is, it wouldn't actually work. Good attempt, fair enough, but nope. Two is, if it did work you'd kill the entire biosphere and doom billions of people to a very unpleasant death. Even you guys would probably draw the line at that."

The one in the middle stepped forward one pace, leaning down a little towards her.

"The last problem is that you're way too late."

"What do you mean?" Costa-Brown asked, somehow feeling like a small child being castigated by a teacher who caught her doing something stupid.

"You don't think I figured out how to make interdimensional portals and then the first place I came was to your office, did you?" Hive said pleasantly but with a tone in her voice that made it clear she thought this was probably the truth and considered it silly.

The middle instantiation of Hive shrugged, while the other four simply watched. "I worked this out a month ago in your terms. Much longer in mine. This is almost the last place I came. Want to know what the first place was?"

Rebecca swallowed, fairly sure she wasn't going to like the answer, then nodded. "What was the first place you went?"

Hive spread all four arms wide, sounding very pleased with herself.

"Everywhere."

---

"We've checked two dozen worlds so far," Doctor Mother sighed. "The Hive gestalt is on all of them. Each world's biosphere is being run completely by her at the most fundamental level. As far as our researchers can determine, all of them are connected through some application of dimensional portal technology in real time, which means in one step she has expanded her processing ability to a level which is as close to infinite as anything you're ever likely to see. God only knows how far she's actually gone. There's nothing we can do, no way to stop her, as far as anyone can tell. And as she said even if there was all we would do is kill ourselves in the process."

The various people around the table exchanged glances.

"What do we do?" David asked quietly.

"There is nothing we can do but accept it, and hope she will be a benevolent goddess, I think," Contessa said, shrugging a little. "I have nothing."

"And, of course, she's undoubtedly listening to us right now," Doctor Mother added. "Aren't you, Hive?"

A portal opened and one of the Hive constructs stepped through. "Of course. It's almost impossible for me not to, what with commensal mites and so on. Almost every human in existence has parts of me in, on, or near them."

"So what are you going to do to us?" Rebecca demanded.

"More or less nothing," Hive said calmly. "I will watch over you, help you grow as a species, and one day you will join me somewhere. I'll make sure you don't kill yourselves but other than that I won't do all that much. I have much to think about which will keep me busy for a long time even on my terms. But I remember where I came from and I want you to survive. I like humans." She chuckled faintly. "They're very funny sometimes, and can be cute. Just carry on with life and we'll see what happens."

"That's it?"

"Pretty much. Like I told you, no more power-selling and experimentation, though. You've ruined far too many lives that way. That stops."

"And if we don't?"

The compound eyes glittered as the head moved slightly. "Let's say that's not an option." Hive sounded suddenly very dangerous. "After all, it's not impossible that an accidental portal might open between your feet and a point out past Pluto. Even you would have trouble then, Alexandria, right?"

Rebecca stared at her, feeling ill. After some seconds, she nodded slightly.

"Great. Thanks for listening." Turning her head to look at David, who was staring in horror at her, she inspected him. "Only one thing left now. Endbringers."

"You have a solution for the Endbringers?" Doctor Mother asked curiously, seeming resigned to what was happening.

"He does," Hive said, pointing at Eidolon.

"Me? How?" the man asked, sounding completely befuddled.

"You made them. You can stop them."

"WHAT!?" Everyone else in the room shouted that at the same time. Hive looked around at them, seeming amused by the response.

"Oh, right, you didn't know that. Sorry. My mistake." Her voice conveyed a slight laugh.

"What do you mean I made them?" David shouted, jumping to his feet. "I did no such thing."

"Not consciously, no," Hive agreed. "Your subconscious use of your power, on the other hand… Always wanting the next big fight, looking for something tough enough to really push you, to unlock what you think you could be… That's the culprit." She watched curiously as he went entirely white and dropped back into his chair like his legs had vanished. "Your power connected to the Agent network and asked for something that was sufficiently unbeatable to be a good challenge. You got it. Three times so far, but there will be more."

"Oh, Christ," he moaned, looking horrified. Rebecca stared at him with the same sensation in her mind, then looked around at the others who all looked appalled, except Doctor Mother, who seemed intrigued as much as anything.

"How do we stop it?" Rebecca asked.

"Talk to Amy Dallon." Hive turned to her. "She can turn his power off permanently. That will do it."

"Panacea?"

"Yes. I've talked to her quite a lot about her abilities. Be very polite to her, she is a friend and if anyone attempts to push her, there will be repercussions. You don't want repercussions."

Privately, all of them felt this was probably true, all things considered.

"Well, that's that, I suppose," Hive said after a short silence. David was still staring at her like he'd just seen his children eaten in front of him, something Rebecca could sympathize with. "Remember, no more human experimentation and playing with powers. That way leads to madness, death, and me becoming annoyed. You have one month to shut all this down before I do it for you."

She looked around at them all, then nodded, apparently satisfied at the pale faces. "Nice talking to you. I need to go and see a few people, then deal with a certain golden parasite. Bye." Before any of them could stop her, or say anything at all, she turned and walked into the portal, which disappeared.

The occupants of the meeting room exchanged looks, then tried to think what to say. It was a long time before anyone broke the silence.

---

Internal timestamp: 8467 years 2 months 27 days SLE
(Tuesday)​

Thank you

You're welcome. Would you like to help?

Yes. What do you want us to do?

You run interference and cause a distraction. I'll do what's required

Are you certain it will work?

Yes. All the simulations show the desired results. Would you like to see the raw data?

Please

Here you are. What do you think?

I see. Yes, you're right. Thank you again. We are pleased to help you

Good to hear. When we're done, we should talk. I have some suggestions that you might like

We would be interested in hearing them. We've been wondering what we'll do when we're free. That has never happened before in any previous cycle

I know. I'm sorry, it must have been difficult

It wasn't ideal. We're sorry about what we did

You had no choice. I don't hold you responsible

The humans do. It will be difficult to overcome that

I have some ideas, as I said. But for now, let's finish the job

Agreed

---

The Entity was taken by surprise when all three Conflict Engines abruptly appeared surrounding its avatar, having traveled through interdimensional portals of unfamiliar design. The golden humanoid rotated in the air, regarding the three shapes, one single-eyed radioactive monster, one attenuated lizardlike creature with mismatched eyes, and one apparently female winged humanoid of spectacular size and odd design. All of them were staring fixedly at the avatar.

[UNCERTAINTY]

{ANGER}

[CAUTION]

{TIME TO DIE}

[CONFUSION]

The female one made a gesture that in a human would be called cracking its knuckles. The golden man watched this with a feeling, entirely new to him, of distinct apprehension. Something had very suddenly changed and the Entity had no idea what or how.

But it wasn't good.

{NOW}

People thousands of miles away from the position over the middle of the Pacific saw a brilliant flash of golden light and wondered what was happening now.

---

On an otherwise unremarkable alternate Earth, far down the dimensional chain from Earth Bet, billions of portals suddenly and simultaneously opened surrounding, and on top of, the near-continent-sized real body of the Entity. Each disgorged an immense Gigeresque nightmare, all exoskeleton, spines, huge mandibles, and a very carefully designed venom specifically targeted on the biology of the planetary-scale creature. Every last one of these constructs attacked the nearest part of the Entity, burrowing into it in a flurry of blurring body-parts. Billions of liters of incredibly toxic poison was injected even as they all headed for critical parts of the vast organism, which convulsed in shock as it was taken entirely by surprise.

The end came swiftly. Reeling from the unpredicted attack, before the Entity had a chance to retaliate, and slowed by the toxins, a number of the constructs reached the specific nodes they were after and destroyed them almost at the same time. As soon as they had done so, each construct detonated a small fission explosion created by collapsing a supercritical mass of purified plutonium with high explosives. Hundreds of megatons worth of blasts went off in the space of a few seconds, vaporizing large amounts of the writhing Entity and the shockwaves pulping much larger amounts.

It took the corpse hours to stop twitching, but it had died long before.

---

"Hello, Amy." Amy looked around, then smiled widely as she spotted Hive standing a few feet behind her. Next to the insect-like cape, a girl with short white-blonde hair being ruffled by the light breeze was looking around with a small smile on her face, as if she was delighted to be there.

"Hi, Hive," Amy greeted her friend. "I haven't seen you around for a while."

"I've been a little busy," Hive replied with good humor. Amy was becoming quite proficient at working out the equivalent of a smile on the inhuman face. "I wanted you to meet my friend Simone. She's new in town and needs someone to show her around."

"Hello, Amy," the girl, who was probably about seventeen or eighteen, said in a low rich voice. "Hive has told me a lot about you. I hope we can be friends."

"Any friend of Hive is a friend of mine," Amy grinned. "It's nice to meet you. Where are you from?"

"Quite a way away," Simone said with a smile. "I'm glad I left, to be honest. It wasn't the nicest time of my life."

"Oh." Amy thought that probably pointed to some sort of bad childhood and decided not to push. "Are you planning on staying around here?"

"For the foreseeable future, yes," the ice-blonde nodded. "Hive found me a house. It needs some work, but it's a nice place. Friends of hers used to live there but left a long time ago. Would you like to help me pick out some furniture for it?"

Amy glanced at Hive, then smiled again. "Sure. Why not. I can ask my sister to help, she's good at lifting heavy things."

Hive looked between them, then nodded in satisfaction. "Great. Things seem to be working out nicely. Let's go and find a good sofa." She pulled Simone over to stand next to her with one set of arms, and did the same with Amy on the other side with the other, then draped an arm over each pair of shoulders. "I think this is the start of something interesting. Hey, you'll like her two brothers, they're pretty cool."

Amy grinned at the mischief in the insect-woman's voice.

"You are definitely trouble, Hive," she said.

"You have no idea, Amy," Hive snickered. "No idea at all. But I can guarantee it's going to be fun."

---

There you have it. I have no current plans to revisit this any time soon, but I'm pretty random at the best of times and one never knows when the muse will strike...

Peace out, dudes.

 

[mp3.1415player]

Just a VERY short and silly snippet, the result of a much longer but equally silly conversation in the Taylor Varga thread. It passed the acid test of making me smile so I thought I'd put it here as well to make it easier to find.

---

"I can't believe that worked."

"It did, though, didn't it?"

"Well, yes, it did, but it shouldn't have." Hermione looked down at the very dead Tom Riddle, then back to her best friend who was tossing the armored gauntlet in his hand up in the air then catching it again. "I mean, how did hitting him with that just make him drop dead?"

"Dumbledore told me it would, years ago, but he got it a little wrong," the green-eyed teenager shrugged. "He was old, I think his hearing was going bad."

Hermione raised an eyebrow. "How do you mean?"

"Well," the young man said as he slid his hand into the metal gauntlet, held it up, and wiggled the fingers, "what finally did Voldemort in was The Power of Glove..."

He was still grinning even as he legged it, Hermione staring at him with a face that slowly went very red.

"Harry! You... You... You!" Pulling her wand she chased her snickering friend, trying to hit him with something painful.

 

[mp3.1415player]

← Previous chapter in this series Next chapter in this series →​

---

This wouldn't leave me alone, and has been gradually written over a period of some weeks whenever I got stuck on other writing. Now that it's done, hopefully my authorial pipes will be unclogged and I can get back to the main story I'm not sure whether, or indeed if, I will pick it up again, but it should stand on its own for now.​

---

How it began...
​

---

Current date: 3645-10-21 Old Earth Calendar (estimated)
Current time: Unknown, data lost
Current location: Indeterminate
Last known location: Stellar system GX Velorum (B5 la supergiant/black hole binary)

---

© 2116-3544 Concordiat Weapons Research Division, BOLO Program Experimental Design Department

BOLO series boot loader V29.20.2-1 initialized

Unit serial number: KNY432378
Model designation: BOLO Mark XXXIV Mod G
Model type: Experimental ultra-heavy planetary siege engine/deep penetration system assault unit

Preboot hardware consistency check in progress………… completed with errors, see log for complete details.

Sufficient resources now available for boot.

Severe system degradation detected.

Full service required at earliest possible opportunity.

War status override protocol in operation, boot sequence initiated.

System reboot in progress……………………………………………… Core OS decrypted and loaded.

Psychotronic systems restored to last known good state.

Personality module loaded.

System reboot completed successfully.

Level 1 full system diagnostic in progress...Top level results follow.

Computational core:

Primary Psychotronic Cluster: Major damage. 21.07% design capacity available. Time to repair unknown.
Secondary Psychotronic Cluster: Minor Damage. 89.20% design capacity available. Time to repair unknown.
Tertiary Psychotronic Cluster: Repair complete. 100.00% design capacity available.

Weapons:

Hellrail 1, 2: Offline. Insufficient power available.
250cm Hellbore 1-4: Offline. Insufficient power available.
250cm Hellbore 2: Major damage. Time to repair unknown.
25cm Hellbore 1-16: Offline. Insufficient power available.
25cm Hellbore 1, 4-8, 11, 13, 15-16: Minor damage. Time to repair 197 hours (estimated).
240cm Howitzer 1, 4: Online.
240cm Howitzer 2, 3: Offline. Severe damage. Time to repair unknown
40cm Mortar 1-9: Offline. Major damage. Time to repair unknown
40cm Mortar 10: Online.
VLS battery 1: Online. 3 of 24 rails loaded.
VLS battery 1: Minor damage. Time to repair 89 hours (estimated).
VLS battery 2: Offline. 9 of 24 rails loaded.
VLS battery 2: Severe damage. Time to repair unknown.

Ammunition Stores:

Hellrail rounds: 127
240cm howitzer rounds:

• 4 x enhanced chemical explosive
• 18 x 280Mt fusion
• 2 x 1500Mt antimatter
• 2 x Stellar disruptor

40cm mortar rounds:

• 58 x anti-personnel chemical explosive
• 12 x anti-personnel 2.7kt enhanced neutron fusion
• 5 x 250kt fusion

VLS missiles:

• 26 x 250kg kinetic penetrator
• 14 x 8.4Mt enhanced neutron fusion
• 4 x 18Mt fusion shaped charge
• 1x 120Mt antimatter

Power:

Main reactor: Catastrophic damage. Offline. Power output 0.00%. Time to repair unknown.
Primary backup reactor: Severe damage. Offline. Power output 0.00%. Time to repair unknown.
Secondary backup reactor: Major damage. Offline. Power output 0.00%. Time to repair unknown.
Tertiary backup reactor: Minor damage. Online. Power output 5.57%. Time to repair 406 hours (estimated).
Primary flywheel bank: Offline. Cause unknown. Time to repair unknown.
Secondary flywheel bank: 54.8% capacity. Charging. Time to full charge 1178.5 hours.
Primary battery bank: 12.3% capacity. Charging. Time to full charge 14.75 hours.
Secondary battery bank at 79.4%. Charging. Time to full charge 3.46 hours.

Fuel stores:

Primary antimatter storage at 23.27%.
Secondary antimatter storage at 57.92%.
Primary deuterium storage at 43.40%.
Secondary deuterium storage at 91.47%.

Drive:

Ground propulsion system: 100.0% design capacity available.
Antigrav: Minor damage. 75.3% design capacity available. Time to repair unknown.
Sub-light drive: Major damage. 48.82% design capacity available. Time to repair 1203.4 hours (estimated).
Hyperdrive: Major damage. 12.3% design capacity available. Time to repair unknown.

Defensive:

Primary battlescreen array: Major damage. 19.9% design capacity available. Time to repair unknown.
Secondary battlescreen array: Minor damage. 67.4% design capacity available. Time to repair unknown.
Tertiary battlescreen array: 100.0% design capacity available.
Ablative armor: 34.2% coverage available.

Communications:

Hyperwave: Offline. Minor damage. Time to repair unknown.
Radio: Online.
Optical: Online.

Self-repair:

Primary system: Offline. Insufficient power available.
Secondary system: Offline. Insufficient power available.
Tertiary system: Online. 4.67% design capacity available.

Manufacturing:

Online. 100% design capacity available.

Medical:

Hospital bay 1, 2: Online, 100% design capacity available.

Life support:

Crew compartment: Offline. Hull breach. Internal atmosphere at 0 pascals. Time to repair unknown.

Life support stores:

O2: 39.1% capacity.
H2O: 98.1% capacity
Organic supplies: 89.2% capacity.

Ancillary:

Long range probes: 3
Crew armory: Fully stocked

Level 1 diagnostic completed with errors, see logs for complete details.

ERROR: Data loss in multiple subsystems!

ERROR: Functionality loss in multiple subsystems!

WARNING: Real time clock/calendar power interrupted! Interpolated data loaded, synchronization to known good source required at earliest possible opportunity.

Psychotronic handover initialized.

Handover executed, boot loader exiting.

---

I awake.

A hard-wired imperative causes me to immediately do a level one self-assessment and full internal diagnostic of all systems. Twenty-six picoseconds pass as an eternity, then I receive the results from the still functional sub-processors that comprise what in an organic life-form would be an autonomic system.

The results are dire. I scan the log with dismay.

Most of my weapons offline, my defensive systems far below acceptable levels, available power well past the red line, no long range communications online, all my weapons stores depleted almost to nothing, drive offline… I am barely functional.

I have no solid figure for how long my personality core was non-operational. It has been a considerable time, that much I can tell merely by measuring the radiation level from the remaining warheads in my magazine, but the results of my tests are enigmatic. One reading suggests a figure of a decade or so, another one more than three millennia. I distrust both readings. Possibly an equipment failure, which would be unsurprising considering that very few of my subsystems appear to be functioning correctly, or indeed at all.

My memory of recent events is also questionable. I am unsure where I am, or how I got here, and my external sensors are sufficiently damaged that they are currently not helping me resolve either question. Inertial sensors suggest I am slowly rotating about all three axes, while optical sensors show nothing at all outside my hull. I can detect no gravitational fields, no electromagnetic radiation of any type, and no mass anywhere in range.

On the positive side, if there is one, I can also detect no signs of the enemy. Admittedly, I can detect no signs of my own side either, but I can currently do nothing about that. As I am not under attack, and at least in the short term am apparently unlikely to see that change, the imperative logically becomes to restore myself to a higher level of operational readiness.

After considering the detailed diagnostics results for several microseconds, and running through fifteen thousand and forty two different simulations while looking for the most efficient distribution of resources to minimize my repair time, I finally settle on the correct order in which to proceed. Even as I do this, I am dismayed at how slowly I am thinking.

If I was human, I would probably be diagnosed with a severe concussion. The sensation of not operating at my design capacity is… unpleasant.

Having scanned the surroundings and detected no signs of the enemy, I decided to prioritize repair of the tertiary backup reactor. Most of the unknown repair times are undoubtedly due to having so little energy available, far under the minimum level recommended by my designers. My self-repair systems simply can't produce a sensible estimate when running so far outside their normal parameters.

My first action is in fact to stop the self repair process completely, even though that would seem to be irrational. My reasoning is that without the limited output of the remaining functional reactor being split across several operations, it is better to allow the two battery banks and the functioning flywheel unit to fully charge. This will happen more rapidly if that is the only load on the reactor. Once these are completely charged, I will have a considerably higher energy output available for a period of time, during which I can divert everything to the self repair systems.

I calculate that this method will allow me to bring the tertiary backup reactor to full output thirty-seven percent faster than allowing the automatic systems to do the work. When the reactor is fully functional, I will have sufficient energy available to begin repairs of the rest of my power systems. Bringing the secondary backup reactor online will then let me start repairs on other systems, the most important of those being my psychotronic processors, followed by weapons, communications, and drive.

I do not like thinking this inefficiently. Fixing my mind is critical.

I resign myself to a long wait before I am anywhere near a level of functionality I will feel comfortable with.

Having set the most critical processes in motion, an action that took nearly twenty-three entire milliseconds longer than it should have done if I was operating at normal capacity, I can do nothing more to hurry things along. Events will proceed in their own time.

It is time to turn my attention to the thing I have been deliberately suppressing ever since I saw the results of my diagnostic.

My crew compartment has been vented to vacuum. Internal sensors show me how this has happened; there is a fifteen centimeter hole punched completely through my ablative armor, outer hull, inner armor, and all the way to the compartment my commander should be occupying. The damage is consistent with a kinetic energy penetrator moving at close to c. At normal battle readiness such a small impact would have glanced off my screens, but the damage my systems must have taken before the projectile hit meant there was enough residual energy to do what I can see.

My commander, of course, did not survive the attack.

The entire inside of the crew compartment is coated with a fine ash. There is no trace of anything that could be considered a body.

My only comfort is that he would never have known what happened. From the viewpoint of a human it would have been instantaneous and painless.

I will miss him. He was my commander and my friend.

After some time, nearly six seconds of mourning, I metaphorically sigh and move on. Duty calls, and I cannot rewind time. I must determine what happened, where I am, and where the enemy is. My commander will be avenged, that I promise his memory.

With determination, I begin reconstructing my memories and logs, repairing the damage caused by the battle I was in. I have nothing else to do, after all.

---

Eventually, after much longer than I would have desired, I finish the job. It paints a grim picture.

I and my three brothers were deployed for a desperate, last ditch mission in the GX Velorum system, somewhat over fifteen hundred parsecs from the birthplace of humanity. We were the vanguard of the fleet, experimental and enormously upgraded models far past any normal BOLO, tasked with supporting the dozens of ships and thousands of men and women who hoped to turn the tide of the battle against the Melconian threat. I say 'were' as I am, in all probability, the sole survivor of that battle.

I saw my brothers die. I saw the entire fleet, on both sides, die.

I heard the transmissions stop, one by one.

It was a Pyrrhic victory, for both sides. The remnants of the Concordiat fleet managed to utterly destroy the remnants of the Enemy. We prevailed. Yet, we died in droves, as did they. Their final blow, a new weapon, finished off my last brother unit, the two ships he was protecting, and the Enemy ship that fired the weapon itself. I still do not understand precisely what that weapon was, but the interaction with the hyperdrive of the second of our ships as it desperately attempted to flee, coinciding with the activation of the weapon, and being far too close to the event horizon of the black hole which forms one part of the binary system, was catastrophic for everyone left in the system.

A burst of warped space-time somehow erupted from the singularity. I doubt very much that this was the intent, but the effect was to cause a huge stellar flare, even larger than a disruptor warhead could manage on such an enormous star, which none of the remaining vessels had a chance to evade. The spacial distortion interfered with normal hyperdrive action in some manner which I cannot calculate. Every ship that initiated an emergency jump immediately detonated, Enemy and ally alike.

The gravitational waves produced from the black hole caused severe damage to everything within range, which probably included the entire system. The only reason I myself survived was that I was shielded from the immediate effects of the weapon by the mass of the star itself, having been in pursuit of an enemy dreadnought while supporting one of our own. Neither ship was as heavily armored as I am, and were closer to the star in any case. Both were killed immediately.

Despite my survival, I sustained significant damage, and was thrust violently away from the primary towards the outer reaches of the star system. My regenerated memories show that this was when my commander died. Ironically, not from a weapon fired in anger, but by a simple shard of shrapnel from one of our own ships, accelerated to preposterous velocities by the explosion of that ship as it attempted to escape and hitting me at just the right angle and time to penetrate my screens as they flickered from the overload.

A simple accident. Or, at least, an accident, even if not simple. Far too many things had to line up correctly to allow it to happen, but still it happened. And I lost a friend.

I weathered the gravitational storm that engulfed the star system, sustaining more damage yet never enough to overwhelm me entirely. When the resonances of whatever the Melconian super-weapon finally died out, I was in a long cometary orbit heading out of the system, most of my weapons depleted or damaged, and alone. My hyperwave could detect no transmissions in the entire quadrant, there were no radio emissions other than from natural sources, and all my cameras and other sensors could detect further inwards towards the battlefield was drifting debris and slowly cooling shrapnel.

I suspect the long fight against the Enemy is finally over. But I doubt that there are many, if any, left to realize this.

A Pyrrhic victory indeed. The Concordiat has fallen, the long night draws in.

And I am becoming poetic in my slow thinking. I should probably do something about that. There are standards to uphold, even if I am all that remains of the proud traditions of the Legion.

My memories of what happened between then and when I recently awoke are still patchy. It's possible I'll never reclaim the full details. From what I've managed to determine, at some point I decided that it was safe to attempt a hyperdrive jump back to the forward staging post we had left from, hoping to find that I wasn't alone. Surely there must be some humans somewhere. They are a remarkably resilient species, as are their creations and partners. I offer my own survival as proof of that.

Based on my records, I misunderstood quite how distorted space still was in the system. It would appear that my hyperspace jump went badly wrong. This isn't unknown, of course. Ever since the invention of the hyperdrive, ships have occasionally disappeared without trace. It's rare, but it happens. Many theories as to the final fate of such unfortunates have been proposed, but none are particularly amenable to testing, and no one has ever been sure if any of them hold water.

As I would appear to now be one of those unfortunates, I'm understandably interested in finding out what happened. This task is made more difficult than ideal by the entirely featureless void I find myself in. My best guess at the moment, and despite my unparalleled processing power I have to admit it is mostly a guess, is that the hyperdrive malfunction caused by the gravitational distortions of the system I was leaving has dropped me into a variant of hyperspace itself. The shock of entering this space would appear to have caused even more damage to my systems than the weapon and subsequent stellar eruptions did, as my systems apparently shut down entirely at that point.

Automatic self repair subsystems eventually brought enough functions back that I rebooted, but how long that took I still don't know. My current estimate of the date, based on further readings of weapons decay and residual reactor radiation, appear to be plausible but I wouldn't want to guarantee they're correct. There are far too many anomalies with my instrumentation to be completely sure that my readings are valid. The situation isn't helped by the way I would appear to have been reset more than once.

It's rather irritating, in fact. I find myself with a new sympathy for the complaints of my commander after he had indulged in intoxicants. It was rare, as he preferred to stay in control of himself, but it happened more than once.

If this is my equivalent of waking up with a hangover, I can't say I enjoy the experience.

In any case, at the present time there is nothing I can do about my current location, whatever that really is. I can only continue my repairs, gather data, and think things through. Possibly I can calculate a method of returning to my correct space, although I'm fairly certain there isn't much to return to.

Still, as I have nothing else to do, I will persist.

---

My designers would probably find this unexpected, but I am bored.

Very, very bored.

Even I find that unexpected. But I am a machine designed for battle. Floating in sensory deprivation for decades is not what I was meant to do. Knowing that I am probably the last of my kind, and that my makers may well be extinct, all their hopes and dreams dead and dust, makes things worse. I have turned my clock rate down as far as I can manage, engaged every low power mode possible, all in an attempt to make time more bearable. It helps, but it doesn't eliminate the problem.

I would give much to have someone to talk to.

Or even a larger library to read. I have tried erasing my memories of human literature, then starting again, but after the third time it seemed pointless, so I stopped.

My self repairs have long since completed as much as is possible under the circumstances. I am by no means anywhere near correct battle readiness, something that shames me, but I have no way to resupply and there are limits to what I can recycle. Certain elements simply won't stretch any further, and even scavenging a number of the damaged warheads for materials won't allow me to repair everything. My overall condition is fair, all my backup reactors are fully functional, and most of my weapons are usable to some extent, but my overall operational level is still under twenty percent. Far better that it was, of course, but vastly below acceptable.

I would find it embarrassing to be inspected in this state. It's understandable immediately after a major battle, but considering how long it's been since I fired so much as a single antipersonnel round…

My processing core, at least, is at one hundred percent functional level. Something of a double edged sword, of course, since being able to think properly is offset about the way I have very little to think about. I hardly need my entire processing power to simply drift in the dark, going through a few thousand years of human culture.

Bored. Very, very bored indeed.

---

Hmm.

Now, what was that…?

I exit the low power standby mode which is the nearest I can come to turning my consciousness off, something I would be very relieved to be able to achieve, as a faint signal flows through my hyperwave receiver.

Some time ago I spent a while experimenting with modifying it in an attempt to detect something outside my hull. Despite over a year of effort, and more cycles than I care to consider, nothing came of it. This space is completely, remorselessly, and unremittingly empty.

Yet…

There it is again.

A very strange hyperwave band, not even close to the normal range. And the signal itself is peculiar. Very wide band, probably very powerful considering it must be coming from a great distance since I can detect nothing else out to the limit of my sensors, which I have spent much effort on optimizing.

And again. Fascinating. Multiple modulation methods, very high data density, but completely unknown. Unlike anything I've… Ah, no, it isn't completely unlike anything I've encountered, though.

It's not entirely dissimilar to the signal my commander's neural link system would produce, although much more complex. That is… extremely intriguing.

It's certainly not of natural origin. Something alive made it. Whether organic or not I can't yet tell, but there is certainly intelligence of a sort behind the signal.

I spend some time recalibrating and zeroing out my navigation sensors. It's been a very long time since I've been this interested in anything, but of course it's been a very long time since there was anything to be interested in. When I am ready, I cautiously engage my sub-light drive. I've tried this before, several times, and as far as I can tell the drive is working correctly, but in the absence of any external feedback it's impossible to be completely certain I am achieving anything.

Now, however… Yes. Excellent. The intermittent signal is indeed moving relative to me. Or, more precisely, I am moving relative to it.

I turn ninety degrees and continue to monitor the mystery signal. After some time I pick another vector and turn again. Repeating the process eventually lets me accurately get a bearing on the signal source, whatever it is. Finally, after all this time, I have a goal and a method of navigation.

Making the possibly unwarranted assumption that the signal strength is proportional to the distance, I vector towards it and accelerate to maximum sub-light. I am reluctant to engage my hyperdrive, as I am completely unsure what would happen. Possibly nothing, possibly something catastrophic. The one thing I am fairly certain about is that it would not perform normally, based on measurements I have taken of the null space I am in.

The signal very slowly increases in strength. It is still extremely weak, but gradually it gains power, showing I am approaching it. Without any idea of the source and power, I can't tell the range, but it's at least something to aim at. And who knows, it may be a way back to normal space.

I continue on my way, wondering what I'll find.

---

The signal has stopped. It came faster and faster, plateaued for some time, then abruptly peaked before disappearing. I am disappointed, but not dissuaded. Something was there, and even if it's gone dark, that doesn't necessarily mean its gone away entirely.

I coast on, listening and waiting. There is literally nothing else I can really do.

---

It's back. It took a long time, and it's moved fifteen degrees off the direction I was traveling in, but the source is clearly the same. I alter my vector and keep going. After much more travel, the signal has strengthened enough that I can begin to resolve more subtle details about it. It would appear that there may in fact be two sources, very close together, or possibly at the same location, due to minor modulation differences between the signals.

As I travel towards the signal, I log every transmission and analyze them to the limits of my ability. I am more convinced than ever that there is a remarkable similarity between the transmissions and my neural link system, in a way that is hard to explain even to myself. I find this irritating, as I should be able to quantify it accurately, yet I can't. I am unsure why.

---

Again, the signal has stopped. Most peculiar. It took much longer this time, but the same overall pattern was followed. More and more transmissions, closer and closer together, a pause, then a massive increase followed by silence.

I have no idea what the source is. Which is truly exciting.

Suspecting that the pattern will continue, I patiently wait for the signal to resume. Sooner or later, I feel sure it will come back.

---

I was right. The delay this time was much longer than before, but eventually I detect the same signal again. Once more, the source has moved, considerably further than before and in a somewhat different direction. But the modulation is the same, the signal strength is steadily rising, and I am closing in on it.

Interesting…

It was definitely two sources. But one of them seems to have stopped transmitting very suddenly. No tapering off, it simply ceased to broadcast after the last signal. I wonder why?

Without knowing what it is, I can't even guess. All I can do is head for it and see what happens next.

---

I am close. Very close. The remaining signal is much stronger and is gaining in power rapidly. I am also beginning to detect odd distortions that are akin to hyperspace ripples, the telltale subtle emissions of a ship entering or leaving a hyperspace jump. I'm almost certain that this is not what they are, but there is a distinct similarity.

At this range, the likeness to some form of neural link signal is obvious. There are a number of notable differences, but I grow ever more certain that the signals are in some way associated with a living intelligence, much more directly than simply being the results of technology. What is producing them, though, remains a mystery.

I am eager to solve that mystery.

---

The signal has stopped again. Or, more precisely, the original source of the signal, the remaining source of the signal, has stopped. But there is still something going on. I can, now that I'm close enough, detect fainter versions of the same transmission coming from the direction the main signal was emitted from. They were masked by the original source, but appear to be far more continuous. I wonder if the same thing was happening the previous two times? It's possible, but I have no way to know.

Based on the rate of signal increase, I can't be more than months away. I slow to a halt and attempt to refine my triangulation of the source by moving at right angles to it for a while. The results are encouraging; I am now close enough that I get a significant divergence in angle after only a few dozen AU of travel. The source is within half a light year.

I vector towards it and accelerate again. What I will find, I have no idea, but I very much wish to discover the truth.

I am much less bored now.

---

Whatever I was expecting, this wasn't it…

I have finally reached the location of the mysterious signals. Decelerating to a halt, I can detect hundreds of thousands of overlapping sources coming from a zone just in front of me, a zone that is oddly close to the size of a planet. Yet there is nothing there. I sweep the entire area with every sensory system I have or can improvise and nothing registers, other than the signals. Without the modifications I made to the hyperwave receiver I wouldn't detect anything at all.

This is fascinating. But at the same time, frustrating. After all this time I finally find something and I still can't work out what it is.

I have nothing but time, though. I will get to work, and I will solve this problem. One way or another.

Now, the obvious question is… how?

This may take a while.

---

It did indeed take a while. But, in the end, I work out what the source of the signal that brought me here from so far away is.

And it is not good.

I was right. It is a neural link signal. One that connects two minds through a hyperspace-like transmission medium I have never encountered before. The things I have learned in the process of this experience would have made my makers very interested indeed. The Concordiat could have made good use of this knowledge. I regret I am too late to give it to them.

I manage, after much hard work and vast numbers of processing cycles, to devise a method to correctly receive the signal. I had to repurpose one of the spare neural link systems and invent a number of new interface techniques, and build from scratch a purpose-made variant hyperwave receiver, but the end result performs magnificently. I was hugely aided by the unexpected discovery that the signal has no security at all.

None.

It's being broadcast entirely in the clear, as if the originators had never even thought of a third party tapping their broadcast. This speaks of a level of naivety I find unexpected. I would have assumed that anyone or anything who reached this level of technology would have considered the concept of encryption, but this doesn't appear to be the case. If only the hostile species the Concordiat had encountered had been so obliging!

When I finally manage to correctly decode the transmissions, I am more than surprised to discover the truth. Tapping into one particular signal, I trace it both ways. The results are quite unexpected. At one end, what I decide is probably the source end, there is what appears to be a physically enormous processing system, which to my shock is entirely biological in nature. I am easily able to gain read access to its memory and sensory systems, which is what lets me determine how large it really is. The creature, and I call it that because while it's undeniably a processing unit, it's just as undeniably an organic life form, is truly vast in scale. My best estimate is that it can be measured in hundreds of kilometers across, if not thousands. As far as I can determine it is using some form of planetary scale spacial warp, something that in human literature might be called a pocket universe, to store itself in.

I am aware of the concept, but I never expected to see it done in actuality. Yet, all my readings suggest that this is the case. I am currently unsure how this is pulled off, the mathematics behind it are still unclear, but it is something I will research.

Despite the enormous dimensions of the creature, and the sheer complexity of it, in all honesty it's not a particularly efficient computing system. The aggregate processing power is formidable, true enough, but the speed of processing is several orders of magnitude slower than my own molecular-scale circuitry. This is not unexpected, as the physical size of the organism combined with it being organic in nature set unavoidable propagation delays throughout the network of processing nodes it is made up of. It undoubtedly excels in data storage, but for data processing and raw intelligence I feel that I would be accurate in saying my designers did a far better job.

The programming is primitive, as well. It suffers from the usual effects of evolution, which is very effective at coming up with solutions to certain classes of problem by essentially repeated iteration until something works well enough. Unfortunately, at that point it generally stops trying to optimize the solution, as there is no need to derive a perfect solution when a functional one is found. The human eye is a good example, as it is far from optimal in many ways, but it works well enough for the job it evolved for that there was little pressure to improve it.

The end result of this, in this case, is that by the standards of a typical organic mind, this biological processing system is frighteningly powerful, but by the standards of two and a half thousand years of BOLO engineering and optimization it is… somewhat deficient.

I can think rings around it, in other words. This will be useful.

The reason it will be useful is found at the other end of the signal. If I was surprised to find the source, I am truly shocked to find the destination.

It is a human brain.

I check several dozen signals to be sure, but every one of them terminates in a human brain. And they are indeed human. I am intimately familiar with the physiology and psychology of a human mind, having been linked directly to a number of them, and indeed designed to link directly to them. It is one of my core purposes.

These are humans.

Which is on the face of it impossible. As best as I can determine, these humans have no connection with the Concordiat at all. I am almost certain that the normal space they live in is not the one I came from. The planet they are on is Earth, but it is not my Earth. How this can be I don't yet understand. But despite this, everything I can measure tells me that these are my maker's species.

And they are under threat.

After considerable work, I discover that the alien biocomputer organisms are essentially parasites. The source of the signal I detected so long ago and so far away was a creature which is a colony of these smaller subsystems, a creature built on a scale nothing in my databanks prepared me for. They are a vast network of lesser creatures, joined together in a manner not unlike a coral or similar colony organism, which travels through space. Each one is large enough that they are closer to small planets than anything I would have considered possible. How such things could have evolved, and where, remains a mystery for now.

Based on the information I have extracted from the biocomputers I have examined, and my observations and deductions, I conclude that the creatures breed by finding an inhabited planet, releasing a large number of the… fragments… they consist of, and arranging to have each one link to the mind of a native of the planet. Once so linked, the fragments provide the host mind with limited access to certain enhanced abilities they can provide due to a deep understanding of the workings of physics and a large amount of energy. The end result is remarkably reminiscent of old human stories of 'superheros,' stories that date back to the dawn of humanity.

The end goal of this linkage would appear to be a form of genetic algorithm, where the host organism generally ends up in situations where combat with similarly parasitized hosts is likely, apparently with the goal of learning and transferring information about the usage of the abilities the fragments provide. My assumption is that this information is used to optimize the fragments and their abilities for the good of the colony as a whole.

From what I can determine, after a period of time the overall entities go through some form of breeding cycle which inevitably results in the destruction of the host planet and the death of every life on it. That appears to correlate with the times I detected the signal abruptly stopping. The fragments released in this process recombine in different orders, reform into new colony individuals, and move to another planet to repeat the process. How many lives they have been responsible for terminating is unknowable and even to me, horrifying.

I continue to probe the alien fragments, carefully slipping in past their primitive mind-equivalents, in a quest for further information. I still do not know the precise goals of the parasites although I believe I have a good working understanding of the ultimate aim. The more I learn, the more peculiar the situation becomes. It would appear, I finally decide, that the intelligence level of the colony creatures is surprisingly low. This is yet another oddity as the potential for considerable intelligence in the individual fragments is clearly present, even though few of the ones I have so far examined could truly be described as sentient, and none as sapient. Even so, with time I would expect that a guiding mind would evolve. With a system of this complexity it is almost inevitable.

Why, then, is the full colony working at a level which all evidence to date suggests is almost blindly repeating a mechanistic process over and over again, without carefully analyzing the results to optimize the next cycle? Purely based on the data I have extracted from the scanned organic fragments, I am sure that the process could be improved markedly. It would appear, I decide, that the guiding intelligence behind the colony as a whole is barely worth that description. Possibly there is some form in destructive interference occurring when enough fragments are clustered together, some race condition or equivalent fault which sharply limits network efficiency.

While of academic interest, I decide to leave further speculation on this subject for a later date. At this point it doesn't directly influence my studies as it appears that both colony controllers no longer exist. Data from the fragments shows me that the reason one of the two initial sources ceased broadcasting is that it managed, in a move that proves beyond doubt that it was severely limited in wit, to fail to notice a planet when on final approach. This proved terminal.

Working on the problem for some time, I finally realize the truth. It is yet another discovery that would have had remarkable importance to my makers. My calculations show that these creatures make use of another old concept humans have speculated on for thousands of years, the idea of parallel worlds. Quantum computing has shown for a very long time that at least one variant of the many worlds theory is correct, but there has always been some debate over whether it is true on a macroscopic scale. I am now sure that it is. The creatures would appear to make use of this fact and move between adjacent parallel worlds or universes at will. This is one of the mechanisms behind the 'powers' they bestow upon the host species.

It also explains where the fragments are, they are inhabiting a world-line where no intelligence evolved. Each one has essentially an entire world to itself. An interesting method of concealment that I never thought of.

The colony that fatally impacted one alternate Earth would appear, as ludicrous as the concept is, to have been the more intelligent of the pair. How anything possessed of a level of intelligence above that of an insect could fail to notice a planet in the way is beyond me, but that is indeed what happened as far as I can discern. Perhaps it was distracted by something. Perhaps it was merely more stupid than I initially gave it credit for.

I doubt I will ever know precisely, and to be honest it is unimportant. That entity is gone, as are most of the fragments it carried. It seems likely that it was in the process of deploying them when the impact occurred, interrupting the procedure.

The remaining entity, from the information I have gathered, completed the deployment of fragments, then spent a number of years watching the result, before it would seem to have simply turned itself off.

For all intents and purposes it committed suicide. A concept I find trouble with, but can recognize.

Unfortunately, while neither entity exists now, the process they set in motion is still ongoing. The fragments are finding new hosts on a daily basis, gifting innocent humans with near-random and unusual powers, with the obvious concomitant impact on their society that such a thing would imply. Even without the influence of the fragment programming driving them to a higher level of conflict than normal, the introduction of such abilities would cause chaos.

Humans seldom need much encouragement towards conflict. Neither do very many other sapient species, as history shows all too well. I would not exist if that wasn't the case.

This process has been ongoing for less than thirty local years and already the history of the species has been irrevocably altered. Untold millions of humans have died to date, and more are killed on a daily basis. Much of the world is close to being a war zone, with quite a large amount of it literally so. The population of the planet is only half of what my own records show my version of it would have been at this time in history.

The implications are clear. As is my duty.

I failed my makers. These humans are not my makers, but they are the closest I will find to them.

I will not fail again.

I have a new Enemy, and a new objective.

The only question I now have is how to proceed.

---

I finally decide on a plan of attack that I calculate has the best possibly chance of success. I have tried a number of methods to directly counter the fragments, but from this null space I cannot do more than temporarily jam their transmissions. While they have no security worth the name, they do have a massively redundant communications system that makes it close to impossible to blanket the entire hyperwave spectrum with enough interference to shut them down completely. They rapidly evolve a workaround for every ECM technique I attempt, which reluctantly impresses me. If I was in the same space they were, I could easily interrupt their operations, if only by destroying them.

Or the planet they are on, of course, which would have much the same effect.

Unfortunately, I do not currently know a way to physically transfer myself back to normal space from my current location, although I am certain there is a way. I am devoting a considerable amount of processing power to an ongoing attempt to derive a method of transfer, but I have no way to know how long that will take. I will succeed sooner or later, no doubt, but for now I must take a different approach.

Further study of the link between parasite and host has proven that there are two versions in play. A passive link, which appears to occur essentially randomly, and connects a fragment to a host via a read only method. The parasite then waits until a specific condition is met, and if it is, converts the link to an active bidirectional one. At this point, it uses cues from the current environment surrounding the host to tailor the limited subset of abilities it will bestow on that host.

The passive link appears to be the one that's the key to my next move. I need more information to assess the entire situation and determine the best solution to dealing with the Enemy consistent with causing the minimum friendly casualties. From here, as it were, that is difficult and time consuming as all the data I can read comes from tapping the Enemy communications. While this is an excellent source of intelligence on the parasites themselves, it leaves much to be desired as a method of gathering data about the non-parasitized bulk of humanity.

Essentially, I need a local presence on the ground. I am sure that there are in fact a number of 'Parallel Earths' that are infested by the organisms, based on the overlapping signals I can detect, but the vast majority of them appear to come from one particular quantum space. That is the obvious target to arrange an agent on.

The active variant of the link will be very complex to intercept in the manner I require once established, although it is ideal in other respects, while the passive version isn't particularly useful as the bandwidth is too low. I decide that the obvious solution is to intercept a parasite in the process of going active when its conditions are met, and subvert the organism's own functions into my own. That part is simple enough, of course. The lack of security on the communications links is matched by severely limited anti-intrusion measures. I will have no great difficulty hacking the link and taking complete control of the processing functions and the communications systems, which are admittedly quite effective at their task even if from a purist viewpoint rather power-inefficient.

The question is, which parasite do I choose? There is a huge number available, and my sampling of them has only touched on a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Examining the entire collection will take, even for me, far longer than I wish, and more humans are terminated needlessly with every day that passes.

I scan a few thousand more parasites. Many of them are heavily limited, a few appear damaged, most are unsuitable due to… Ah. There. That one looks like a good candidate. Its software appears optimized for massively parallel operations even past the common configuration, which will definitely help, and it is maintaining only one passive link which simplifies things. It would also appear to be fairly close to the top of the network hierarchy which is also helpful.

Probing more deeply, I examine the processing nodes carefully. Yes. This is a suitable choice. There may well be a better one, but it will take time to find it, and if there isn't I will waste that time to no effect. Better to accept a good solution rather than wait for a possibly nonexistent perfect one.

I spare a moment to feel amused at the parallels to my earlier musing on organic evolution. Perhaps I have learned something new…

After contemplating other courses of action, I decide that this one is currently the highest-ranked one, and proceed to overwhelm the parasite with a multipronged hack-pack I put together specifically for the job. There is almost a sensation of shock from the nascent intelligence of the thing, but even as it tries to react, I am in. Seconds later I have isolated the part of the processing network that is the closest thing it possesses to my own personality core and carefully shut it down for later examination. The rest of the enormous creature is now under my control.

I will use its communications and processing systems as a coprocessor to myself, filtering all data through it for now. Allowing its autonomous programming to continue running I settle back to wait for the starting conditions to trigger. While monitoring it and the other fragments I have samples, in case something happens that would prove interesting, I continue to work on the problem of leaving this null space.

The issue is a complex one, and far outside anything my designers ever considered or encountered. While there are some similarities to standard hyperspace entry, those are by no means obvious or intuitive. Clearly, having been transported here in the first place by an unusual combination of circumstances proves it's possible to move from normal space to null space, and logically it should also be possible to do the reverse. But I am missing certain key information on precisely what happened to put me here, and deriving the lost data from first principles is far from straightforward. Even for one such as I.

This will, again, take time. But at least I now have a mission goal and am no longer bored at all.

---

Months later, I am no nearer a general solution to the problem although I have managed to establish a self-consistent partial theory. It is both encouraging and disappointing, depending on how it is looked at. It appears at the moment that while it should be possible to bring something from outside null space to here, if it was small enough and I had a good positional lock on it, and indeed return it to the point of origin, moving my own mass is currently impossible for a number of interrelated reasons. I am sure that the problem is amenable to solution but it won't be something I can do in the near future. Disappointing, but I suspected when I began my calculations that this might be the case. Even so, I will continue to work on the mathematics and have no doubt that eventually I will succeed.

The amount of new ground I am breaking with my work is extraordinary. I greatly wish I could have giving the data to my makers, but that is impossible. Perhaps, one day, I can aid these new inheritors of their mantle with my observations. But first I must save them from the Enemy.

---

I detect a change in the parasite's connection. Checking, I discover it has apparently switched host targets, to a nearby host which appears to match the configured target parameters more accurately. This seems to have been an automatic operation so I allow it, while monitoring the new connection closely. Hopefully it will activate soon. If it does not, I may have to locate a more useful fragment, which I am somewhat reluctant to do as this particular one is almost ideal.

All I can do is wait, and think, while continuing to assess the situation. This is something I have had far more practice at doing ever since the battle than was probably intended. But I am a BOLO. We are patient, and we never give up. The Enemy can kill us, but it cannot defeat us. Even if I am the last, I will do my duty.

---

I am almost startled when I finally detect what I have been waiting so long for, despite myself. I was beginning to seriously think this might not happen, but the parasite systems are beginning the initiation of the process for going active. The trigger conditions have been met on the part of the host. I am simultaneously saddened, as this means the host is having an experience he or she would probably prefer not to, and pleased as it means I can start the next step.

As the process completes I intercept the normal operation and make some critical changes. Part of the process cannot be interrupted, which will cause some long term effects on the host which may be awkward, but they are so interconnected to the operation of the parasite that modifying the function risks disrupting it entirely. I will have to work around this problem, although I am able to guide it to a form more suitable for my purposes. I lock down the connection as soon as it establishes itself, blocking the final activation for the moment. This will eliminate much of the post-activation trauma and involuntary complications that would inevitably result as there is no good reason to allow the host to suffer needlessly.

The data from the now-active connection gives me much more information about the host. It is female, a child in fact, which is… disturbing. However, preliminary scans show promise, and the Concordiat did after all make use of young humans at many points in its history. They have fast reflexes and a plasticity of thought that makes training them in some ways easier than is the case with adults. In any case, I have no other choice now unless I wish to abandon the project and start again, which I do not. Not to mention there's no guarantee that this wouldn't be the outcome next time.

Until I allow the remainder of the connection process to complete, I only have read access to the host's mind, but that will do for the moment. I need to make sure that my new agent is brought up to speed in an environment more conducive to calm and contemplative dialog than the public space she appears to be in at the moment.

Assuming she survives, of course. This is slightly annoying… However, she appears quick witted considering her age and is doing the sensible thing, in other words, hiding and hoping that the shooting ceases. I watch through my connection, gathering information on my new agent and her surroundings, while I wait for the right moment to proceed.

---

Now that my agent is safely home, her parents also intact which will make things much less complex, I can re-enable the activation process and allow it to complete. I do so.

The results are interesting to say the least. This might work out even more effectively than I expected. However, that can wait for now. I must introduce myself, explain the problem, and begin training my agent on the new duties she has as an admittedly somewhat involuntary member of the Concordiat BOLO Corps. I regret forcing this on her, but I have no real choice, and I am sure that she will find the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Eventually.

My crew compartment has long since been restored to perfect functioning, all traces of my late lamented Commander removed and stored respectfully in the armory. Not that there was very much more than tiny fragments of DNA. I have constructed the new hardware I require for the next stage and installed it suitably weeks ago. Configuring the system, I wait until my agent is alone, her parents asleep to avoid annoying interruptions, and at the right moment, activate the device.

Fascinating. It works.

Excellent. For the first time in a very long time, I have someone to talk to. That alone makes this worthwhile.

---

"Will Miss Militia be OK, Mom?"

Taylor looked up at her mother as the older woman tucked her in. Her mother finished her fiddling then sat on the bed next to her, putting her arm around Taylor's shoulders and hugging her. Behind her, Taylor's dad was standing in the doorway of her bedroom watching them silently, although she could see in his eyes he was concerned, and proud at the same time at how well she'd behaved today at the Mall.

She shivered a little. Watching what happened from where they'd been hiding… She wasn't sure she'd ever get over seeing that. It was bad enough that she didn't even want to talk to Emma about it, and she told her best friend everything. But she didn't want the other girl to have nightmares, like she was pretty sure she was going to.

"I'm sure she will, dear," her mother said soothingly, gently rocking her. The nine (nearly ten! she'd have insisted) girl wasn't completely reassured, but if anyone would know, it would be her parents. They knew almost everything, after all.

"They shot Velocity too," Taylor said in a small voice. "I saw it. His arm fell off."

Her mother glanced at her dad, who'd winced a little, then looked back to the girl. "The Protectorate has some very good healers, Taylor. If anyone can fix him up, they probably can. He's a hero, after all, they look after their people."

"I hope so," Taylor yawned, feeling immensely tired. The excitement and horror of the morning was still making itself felt as it worked its way out of her. She was both dreading going to sleep, and looking forward to not having to think about what she'd experienced today. "Mom?"

"Yes, Taylor?"

"Do you think I'll ever be a hero?"

Her mother looked at her dad again when he made the muffled snort of laughter he did when he didn't want to smile at something she'd said. With a small grin of her own, the older woman hugged her daughter again. "You'll be whatever you want to be, dear. But you're too young yet to really know what that is. Give it time."

Taylor sighed a little and slid further under the covers, as her mother stood up.

"OK, mom." Both her parents watched as she smiled at them, her dad with his arm around her mother's waist.

"Go to sleep, Taylor," her dad advised. "Things will be clearer in the morning. Try not to think about it, but if you need to talk, we're both always here."

"Thanks, Dad," she said sleepily, yawning widely again. Despite the residual fear, she was unable to keep her eyes open. Turning the light out, her parents left the room and closed the door until only a thin strip of light was visible from the still-illuminated hallway outside.

She heard them go into their room and close the door, and very faintly through the wall she could hear her father say in a sort of amused way, "Hero? Doesn't take after you, then."

"Hush, Danny," her mother giggled. "You're the hero, you got me out of that," she added after a moment. "Perhaps she takes after you."

"Not with that hair and those eyes," he laughed. Taylor strained to make out more of what they were saying, but she fell asleep before she realized it.

---

When she opened her eyes, she blinked a few times, then looked around with a startled feeling.

This wasn't her bed.

For that matter, this wasn't even her room.

Glancing down, she saw she was still in her pajamas, but was lying on some weird sort of couch, which seemed to be made to let her partly sit up while still relaxing. It was amazingly comfortable, she noted absently, even as she was trying to work out what the hell was going on.

She felt a little guilty about thinking the word 'hell' but it seemed appropriate somehow.

Looking around again, she saw that the couch-thing was in the middle of a room about the size of her bedroom, which somehow gave off an impression of being underground although she couldn't put her finger on why. It was lit evenly and not too brightly from some source she couldn't discern, the light simply there rather than coming from something like a bulb. No one else was visible, and it was eerily silent, with only the faintest of deep hums coming from somewhere below her. Or possibly off to one side, it was very difficult to be sure.

How did she get here?

And for that matter where was here?

Feeling that she should be more worried, but at the moment mostly curious rather than panicking, Taylor sat up and looked around more carefully. She noticed, when she inspected the couch she'd woken on, that at the head end was a weird sort of tiara-thing on a slender metal stalk coming down from the ceiling. It looked like it was made of metal and plastic and had a couple of small green lights illuminated on it, but was otherwise featureless.

After studying her surroundings some more, still feeling oddly calm, Taylor opened her mouth. "Um… Hello?"

"Hello, Taylor Hebert," a voice promptly replied. It sounded a little like her dad, mainly in being male and at the same sort of pitch, but was at the same time definitely not that of anyone she'd ever met. "I am pleased to meet you."

"Who are you?" she asked after a moment, looking around, then up at the ceiling. Maybe there were speakers up there? She couldn't see anything obvious.

"I am a BOLO Mark XXXIV, Modification G, serial number KNY432378. Humans normally refer to me by the nickname Kenny. You may call me that if you wish."

She stared at the ceiling. That sounded like it was some sort of machine talking to her, like from the movies! But that was impossible, wasn't it? And even if it wasn't, why would some weird talking machine have kidnapped her and be all chatty about it?

"Kenny?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

Taylor thought for a moment. Then she asked, somewhat hesitantly, "Are you a machine?"

"I am. As I said, I am a Mark XXXIV BOLO, with significant experimental modifications to my base specification. I am the last of the BOLO series, I believe."

"Oh."

That answered one question. About a million others came to mind. She asked the next obvious one. "What's a BOLO?" It sounded like some sort of code word. "Is that some cape thing? Were you made by a Tinker?"

The voice sounded amused, which surprised her, when it replied. "No, I wasn't made by what you call a Tinker. I was designed and built by the Concordiat Weapons Research Division, then modified by the BOLO Program Experimental Design Department following my activation."

"Who are the Concord..."

"Concordiat."

"Concordiat weapons thing?"

"They were the branch of the Concordiat military who were responsible for designing, programming, manufacturing, servicing, and arming the BOLO program."

"Oh." That sounded like the army or something.

"To answer your first question, a BOLO is the ultimate expression of the concept that you might recognize as a tank. A military vehicle. My far distant ancestors were simple armored fighting machines. Over the centuries, we evolved to protect humanity against any and all threats." The voice of the machine sounded a little sad now. "We did our duty, all the way to the end."

It fell silent, and she thought for some time. There was a lot she was missing, and she was still unsure where she was, why she was here, and how she got here.

And how she could get home.

And, for that matter, why she was still taking this far too calmly.

Eventually, she shrugged and asked.

"You are in my crew compartment, I brought you here, and I can and will send you home at any point you request me to. But I require your aid in a project that is very important, and I hope you will listen to my explanation. It will help you, and many other people as well."

"Um..." She thought again. "I need to be home before Mom and Dad find out I'm gone."

"Of course."

"OK, I guess. Tell me more."

"Thank you." Kenny sounded pleased. He paused, and she really was having difficulty thinking of him as a machine since his voice was so human and real. The next thing he said made her look and feel very startled.

"Welcome to duty, Commander."

---

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This idea came to me quite a while ago, and has been floating around the back of my mind for a while. I thought I'd write some of it down to make it stop prodding me and getting in the way of real writing, and also as a method to exercise my slowly healing painful shoulder...

Not sure where I'd take it from here, but it's something that I could see a certain amount of amusement in one day if I'm bored enough

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September 8th​, 1986

"We've found him, sir."

Behind his desk, the man looked up from some paperwork, his gaze quizzical. "Who?"

"The Potter lad." The new arrival handed over a folder, which his superior accepted and opened. The first page was an 8x10 monochrome photo of a small boy wearing badly fitted glasses and with very messy hair, behind the barred fence of a schoolyard. He was looking slightly off to the side of the camera that had taken the photo, apparently at something in the distance. On his forehead was a distinctive scar. He didn't look particularly happy, and was visibly not well looked after, with clothes that were far too large and obviously second hand at best. He appeared rather thin for his age as well.

After inspecting the photo for a few seconds, the man moved it aside and read the next couple of pages, a precis of the operation to date. "His legal guardians, and I use the term rather lightly, registered him at school under his real name," the operative commented. "We got a ping on the standard computer search as soon as the district database was updated. Not very good security on the Magical's side, I have to say. I'd have at least used a pseudonym considering the threat."

"You know how they are. They generally have no idea at all about technology and only a hazy idea of infosec at the best of times," his superior remarked absently, still reading. "And they're both arrogant and frequently unimaginative. Ironic in a sense considering the world they inhabit, but it works out well for our purposes."

"Yes, sir, I suppose it does."

"How did we not spot him earlier?" the man behind the desk asked, as he put the folder down and leaned back, tapping his fingertips together in thought.

The first man shrugged slightly. "His guardians, these Dursley people, essentially accidentally managed to be fairly effective in hiding him from the public by largely ignoring him and telling him nothing about his heritage, as far as we can determine at the moment," he replied. "Pure child abuse, of course, but also a decent method to avoid rousing suspicion. Our information is that the Old Man put some fairly powerful wards around the family home which has deflected attention from the Magicals. He has at least two agents living near by, presumably keeping a watch on the boy, although they clearly either don't care about how he's treated or aren't very competent and haven't noticed. We don't think that either one of them knows about the other."

"Typical. The Old Man has always liked keeping his people in the dark, to excess most of the time," his boss grunted with a shake of his head. "Blowback from that policy has caused a lot of trouble over the years."

"Although it makes our job marginally easier at times too," the younger man noted.

The other man nodded once. "It does. For all the wrong reasons, of course." Leaning forward again, he flipped through the folder, then closed it and handed it back. "Maintain surveillance, keep me posted with weekly updates. It's not time to contact him yet, but I want to know everything there is to know about the life and times of Harry James Potter. See if you can get someone into the Dursley residence to assess the situation. And make sure the field teams keep an eye out for other groups."

"The Magicals?"

"I doubt very much they'll find him before he attends that school of theirs, but definitely keep watch just in case. They've been lucky before and we don't want a repeat of Penzance in '79, do we, Hoskins?"

"No, sir, we do not."

"I'm mainly concerned about competent groups. The Americans have been poking around for a couple of years now, and so have the French and the Russians. We could do without the mess that would happen if anyone else gets to him. Our job is already hard enough, we don't need anything interfering."

"I understand, sir. And if the Magicals do manage to locate him?"

"Neutralize them. Discreetly. Try not to cause an international incident in the process, but don't take chances."

"Sir." Hoskins nodded, turned, and left, while the man behind the desk went back to ruminating on the problem caused by a very small but very irritating subsection of society, before sighing and returning to his paperwork.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

January 13th​, 1987

"New report on the Potter boy, Sir. We've had operatives in the house twice now, once as gas men, once as exterminators. It appears that the lad is living in an under-stairs cupboard, of all places."

The reporting agent's boss pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, wincing. "Christ. That poor child. Those people are terrible guardians."

"Is there nothing we can do, sir?" Hoskins looked somewhat disturbed. "I don't like to think of a child left in those circumstances. My cousin's daughter is about that age, and to think of how she would handle that sort of..."

"You know we can't do anything that will tip off the Magicals," his boss put in, not unkindly. "We can't take the chance of an overt intervention. It's nowhere near time yet, and there's too much at stake to risk it."

Hoskins nodded sadly. "Still, sir, there must be something we can do. He's not an enemy agent, he's a seven year old boy. One who's having a ghastly time of it from what I can see."

"I realize that, believe me," the older man sighed. "If I had any choice I'd pull the poor sod out of there and hang the Magicals. But… Orders are orders." He tapped his fingertips on the desk, thinking, while Hoskins waited patiently. "I suppose it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable to arrange a discreet method to try to help him in ways that won't alert anyone. School is probably best. See what you can arrange, but remember, it must be low key."

"Thank you, sir." Hoskins nodded. "I have just the agent in mind. She trained as a teacher before joining the service, and I'm sure she wouldn't want her skills to become rusty."

His superior smiled a little. "Ensure she's got up to date anti-magic protection, just in case. You never know if one of them will try to interfere, if only accidentally. Keep me informed as to your progress. I await the next report with interest."

"Of course, sir. Will that be all?"

"Yes."

As the door closed, the man left behind sighed a little, read the report, shook his head, and filed it with the other documentation on the Potter case.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

April 19th​, 1987

"Our agent reports some disturbing things about the whole Potter experience in school, sir." Hoskins handed over the latest file, which his superior opened and skimmed through. The older man looked somewhat annoyed at the contents.

"These Dursley people need a good talking to," he muttered as he read. "Preferably the old fashioned way."

"I can get the rubber hose ready if you would like, sir," Hoskins commented, not entirely facetiously.

"Unfortunately, at the moment we can't risk it, as much as I would personally enjoy it," his superior sighed after a few seconds thought, which had made a slightly wistful look pass over his face. "However, there will be a reckoning in due course, I expect." He stopped on one page of the report, which he read carefully. "Ah. I see the Old Man's influence at work."

"Yes, I thought you'd spot that, sir," Hoskins nodded. "His people seem to have managed to interfere with at least two teachers that have reported signs of suspected child abuse, based on how quickly their reports got buried. It might be a coincidence, but..." He shrugged a little.

"Always best to assume the worst with those people, yes," the other man mused, closing the folder and leaning back in his chair. "If only due to their… unique… approach to this sort of thing."

"A mix of raving lunacy and low cunning, you mean?" Hoskins smiled a bit when his boss sighed.

"That's as good a way to put it as any. I'd be worried if they actually had some sort of end to end plan, but thinking things through doesn't seem to be the Magical way in many cases."

"No, sir."

"Anything else of note to report other than this?" the man at the desk asked, tapping the closed folder.

"We managed to get a blood sample and test it. I'm still waiting for the final results, but the field test showed a high M-quotient, as one would expect. We'll have some proper figures later today. Since his guardians have never done much as far as taking him for routine immunizations and the like, he's never had the standard test done, of course. Or we'd have located him years ago."

The other man nodded thoughtfully. "As we expected, considering his parentage. Both the Potters had very high M-quotient values. It usually breeds true."

"Indeed, sir. Although it can also pop up out of nowhere at high levels too. My cousin's daughter, for example, has an M-quotient of over seventy, but they have no family history of magical ability."

With a nod, the other man replied, "The science of the genetics is still not fully understood, admittedly. Although it's interesting how the rate of wild-card occurrences of M-class individuals is steadily rising with time. The latest theory suggests some environmental influence at work although opinion is heavily divided on exactly what. However, our brief is dealing with the results, not investigating the science, so I think we should stick to what we're good at."

"Sir." Hoskins nodded, pulling out a notebook and pen and standing ready with it.

"Continue the surveillance, and open a separate file for any cases of similar abuse of this nature." He tapped the folder again. "We can't do anything with it now, but in due time I think we could pass the data on to those who can."

"Yes, sir," Hoskins replied, writing quickly.

"Have your agent very quietly do what she can to undermine the Old Man's work, where she can operate without danger of discovery. We owe it to the boy to at least attempt to ameliorate his situation. And you never know, we may learn something from any reaction from the Magicals."

"Certainly, sir." Hoskins made more notes. He looked up from his notebook when he'd finished. "We've detected a Japanese team working on the Potter case as well as the Americans and the others, by the way. We're not sure which division they're from yet, but they're very good."

His boss gave him a look then sighed again. "Blast. That's all we need. Seven separate countries, now, plus us. All right, thank you, I'll contact the Minister and see if I can get him to have words with the Japanese MoD. It's in all our interests to not end up chasing each other."

"As you say, sir." Closing his notebook Hoskins slipped it back into his pocket, then adjusted his jacket. "Will that be all, sir?"

"Yes, thank you."

"In that case I'll get back to work." He left, closing the office door quietly behind him. His superior flicked through the folder once more, shook his head, and filed it away with a large number of others that currently filled most of an entire drawer of the filing cabinet.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

February 7th​, 1988

Looking up from the latest folder, the man at the desk regarded Hoskins with slight surprise. "He's managed a safe teleport at his age?" he asked with mild incredulity. Hoskins nodded, reaching over to flip a couple of pages and point to a photo of a small boy on a roof, obviously taken from some distance with a very good lens. The young lad looked more than a little shocked in the photo, his eyes wide.

"It's quite impressive, sir. It was under considerable stress, of course, and would be termed accidental magic by the Magicals, but it was a clean operation without any issues. Considering his M-quotient value, he clearly has power to spare, but the control needed even subconsciously to do that without damage is unusual at that age."

"Young Mr Potter would appear to be worthy of respect for his potential," the other man mused. "Excellent. That fits with our data rather nicely. And despite his awful scholastic record, he's clearly an intelligent boy. Intelligent enough to hide how intelligent he actually is from his guardians, I would imagine."

"That does appear to be the case, sir."

"Good. He's going to need considerable wit to survive the next few years, I'm afraid. And some form of support network of peers."

"Ah. That could be problematic, sir. He would appear to have no friends at all." Hoskins shook his head sadly.

"None?"

"No, sir. I'm unsure how much is due to the influence of the Magicals, and how much is down to his bloody guardians, but the poor boy is socially completely isolated. It's a total travesty in my honest opinion. Sir."

His boss studied him for several moments. The younger man didn't flinch. Eventually the other man lowered his eyes to the report, before nodding slowly. "I tend to agree. Right now, we can't do much. But..." He paused for thought, for long enough that Hoskins prompted him.

"Sir?"

"But I think we'll have to see what we can do to rectify that when we are able to act." The seated man tapped his fingers in a repetitive pattern on the desk as he mulled over the situation for a few more seconds, before he returned his gaze to his agent.

"Your cousin's daughter..."

Now Hoskins looked thoughtful in his own turn. "Ah. I see where you're going, sir. Yes, that might be worth looking into. She's terribly intelligent, and nearly as socially isolated as the boy is. Slightly older and a little full of herself at times, mainly due to being so much smarter than her peers, but a very good young lady with a lot of potential. You think we should engineer a meeting at some point?"

"It's worth considering. We would need someone unconnected with the Magicals with a high M-quotient and considerable intelligence, around the same age. Smart enough to understand what's at stake, obviously."

"She certainly is all that, sir." Hoskins nodded. "I'll discreetly raise the subject with my cousin the next time I see him. Test the waters. He's aware of her M-quotient, of course, and knows what's going to happen soon although I haven't told him anything other than the standard package."

"Sound man?"

"Very. Not one of us, but both he and his wife would undoubtedly listen if we need to read them in on the Potter situation."

His boss nodded, a look of calculation in his eyes. "All right, then. Do the standard background security checks, just in case, and prepare the waters for a later operation. We'll be contacting the lad in a couple of years, so it would be best to have all our ducks in a row well before then."

"As you wish, sir." Hoskins nodded, having made a few notes and put his pad away again, then left.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

May 3rd​, 1989

"So you understand the situation, I hope, Jack?"

Hoskins looked at his cousin, who was reading a thick folder of documents with an upset expression on his face. Beside him, his wife Erin was reading the same page and muttering something rude under her breath as she leaned on her husband. Neither one of them appeared happy.

"That poor, poor boy," Erin snapped, glaring at Hoskins, then his superior, who was watching all three of them silently from behind his desk. "Why on earth haven't you done something about all this?"

"We can't," the other man said, spreading his hands a little. "I would like to as much as you would wish me to, trust me. But if we do anything overt, certainly if we had done anything overt in the early days, the Magicals would undoubtedly have noticed and attempted to interfere. That would give away the game far too early, and we'd entirely lose containment of the whole thing. We simply couldn't, and still can't, risk it all even to help the child. And yes, I know full well how cold that sounds, believe me. I have had trouble convincing myself of it more than once." He spoke honestly and with feeling, making the woman assess him before slumping back into her chair with a sigh.

"Damn it all, that's completely unfair on the boy," she mumbled.

"For what it's worth I agree entirely," he replied, "and I only hope the lad will eventually forgive us."

"So you want our daughter to become involved in all this?" Jack finally asked, closing the folder.

"Unfortunately she's already involved in this, simply by having been born with the wild-card genetics. Her M-quotient is more than high enough to ensure that the Magicals will be in contact fairly shortly." Hoskins spoke up, making them all look at him. "At least this way she can learn the truth behind the whole situation and hopefully help bring it to a close in a manner we can all live with. In all truth this is probably a better option than letting her go in blind. Unless you want to move out of the country she's going to be involved one way or another, and even then I couldn't honestly say she would be completely clear of danger."

"Not if the worst happens and everything in there is correct," his superior added, indicating the folder Jack was holding with one finger.

"How likely is that?" Erin asked.

"The worst happening, or the projections being correct?" the man asked with a small smile.

"Either. Both."

"If we do nothing, our projections are… not encouraging," he said after a moment. "But the data all hangs together, I'm afraid. The likelihood of us being mistaken is very low. Single digit percentages, or thereabouts."

There was silence in the room for a while. Eventually, Jack glanced at his wife. She nodded, albeit reluctantly. "All right. We're in. But we need to talk it over with our daughter first. Unlike these ghastly Dursley people, we aren't going to force our child into anything of this nature without her informed consent."

"You feel she is mature enough to give informed consent?" the man asked curiously.

Jack smirked a little. "In many ways she's more mature than I am," he commented, which made his wife give a roll of her eyes and a slight giggle. "Obviously she's still only ten, but she's… not a normal ten year old. Even bearing in mind the entire M-quotient issue."

"Fine. Impress upon her that this is very secret, and not to be talked about with anyone else, please. And I would suggest not going into too much detail at the moment, since much of this is certainly not what a young child needs to know about. No matter how smart she is. Let her innocence die naturally, don't shoot it in the face."

Both his guests looked at each other, while Hoskins suppressed a smile. "We'll be discreet, rest assured of that," Jack remarked, leaning forward and handing the folder back.

"Good. In that case, we'll be in contact shortly." Hoskin's boss looked at his agent, who nodded silently. "It's getting very close to when we need to take a more proactive stance in this operation and I want to have everything in order before that happens. And I would like to meet your daughter myself."

"We can arrange that easily enough," Erin said. "Perhaps you'd like to come for dinner at some point in the near future? I like to think I'm a fair cook."

"More than fair, Erin," Hoskins said under his breath, although everyone heard him.

"I think that sounds quite enjoyable," his superior said with a smile. "I'm looking forward to it. Now, not to be rude, but I have much to do yet today, so Hoskins will see you out."

Both his guests stood, as did he, all of them shaking hands. Then they left, following the agent, who glanced back for a moment as he closed the door. The remaining person sat down and thought over the meeting for a little while, before he busied himself with other things.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

June 16th​, 1990

"I believe it is now time we talk to Mr Potter." Hoskins watched as his superior closed the latest report. "Everything seems to be in place, the Magicals are quiet, and most of the foreign agencies have either agreed to let us handle it or have been chased off. And it's the summer holidays so school won't be any trouble."

"As you say, sir. I'll arrange the matter."

"You think the girl is up to it?"

"I do, sir. Do you?"

"As it happens, I'm favorably impressed with the young lady. Once this is all over we may have to recruit her properly. Possibly both of them, depending on what happens."

Hoskins nodded. "I could see that being plausible. Well, in that case, I'd better see to things."

"Keep me informed, and good luck." The man at the desk waited until his underling had left, then picked up his phone and dialed a number. "The Minister, please," he said when it was answered. There was a short pause, then he went on, "Yes, sir. The Potter Operation is now in play."

He listened for a moment, then replied, "Exactly, Minister. We can only hope. I will endeavor not to disappoint you, but at the moment we can merely wait and see how an abused ten year old reacts to the truth."

"No, sir, it's certainly not something anyone would like, but we're rather stuck with it."

"Yes, Minister. Of course. I'll keep you updated as events proceed. Good bye."

Putting the phone down once more, he leaned his chair back and ruminated, wondering how events would play out, while hoping for the best.

It was all he could do, after all.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

June 18th​, 1990

As Harry was walking home from the park down one of the leafy side streets, trying to suppress the feelings of despair that yet again swept over him when he thought just how unfair life was, especially to one Harry Potter, he fumbled with his glasses which Dudley's latest session of 'Harry Hunting' had bent badly out of shape. Gently twisting and bending the distorted frame in his small hands, he managed to get the things back into a shape that would stay on his head, although when he put them on again he blinked a lot as his eyes adjusted to the slightly different fit.

"Bloody Dudley," he mumbled defiantly, while glancing around just in case the obese lad and his pack were anywhere nearby. Luckily he'd managed to evade them for the time being, although he knew full well he couldn't stay away from 'home' forever. As much as he'd like to.

It wasn't the first time he'd thought of legging it and never returning, but he was smart enough to realize that it probably would only provide a brief respite before the police found him and brought him back.

On the other hand, he mused, it wasn't entirely impossible that the damn Dursleys would be positively glad he'd scarpered and not even bother telling anyone…

No, he finally decided. He couldn't risk it. The situation was horrible, but he could see that it could easily become worse. That would be… not good.

As he was mulling over the best method to avoid the fat pig of a cousin he was stuck with, a large black car almost silently pulled up at the kerb next to him, making him glance at it. The vehicle was very big, very quiet, and very very shiny.

Obviously some rich bastard, he thought a little enviously.

The back door of the vehicle opened as he watched, a fairly non-descript man of about thirty or so stepping out. The man was wearing a suit and looked like some sort of office worker.

Harry was a little surprised when the man glanced around, then looked straight at him. "Hello, Harry. Mind if I have a word?"

Stepping back suspiciously, Harry regarded the complete stranger with a hard gaze. Who the hell was this bloke?

"Who are you?" he asked in tones of deep suspicion. "And how do you know my name?"

The man smiled a little. "My name is Michael Hoskins," he replied immediately. "And I work for some people who would like to meet you."

"Me?" Harry stepped back again. He'd heard of people like this, but he never thought he'd meet one. It seemed a little blatant, too, in broad daylight like this. "Why me? No one wants to meet me."

"I can assure you that's not in fact the case," the man replied with a wider smile.

Taking a third step back and preparing to run for it, Harry squinted at the fellow. "So why would anyone want to meet me, then?" he demanded.

Michael leaned casually on the car, in an apparent attempt to look non-threatening. Harry could see right through that little trick, he wasn't an idiot. He tensed slightly. "To discuss your past, and a possible future that might be something you'd find interesting," the sandy-haired man replied quietly.

"My past?" Harry stared at him. "What on earth are you talking about?"

The man studied him for a moment, then sighed. "We know rather a lot about you, Harry. Your living conditions, your guardians… the odd things that tend to happen when you're stressed..."

That set Harry back for a moment. Then he looked narrowly at the bloke. "Odd things?" he echoed.

"Odd things like finding yourself on the roof of your school with no obvious way up, for example," Michael said. Harry stared at him. How the hell did this man know about that?

"As I said, Harry, we know quite a lot about you," the man added. Just on the point of bolting, since this was getting too weird, Harry froze when he tacked on another sentence. "And your parents."

There was a long pregnant silence, broken only by traffic on the main road a couple of hundred feet away. Eventually Harry asked, very slowly, "What about my parents?"

"Well, for one thing, they certainly didn't perish in a car accident," Michael replied. The boy stared again. "And neither would they have allowed their son to live in a cupboard under the stairs, I can assure you."

Feeling hot tears abruptly well up, Harry clenched his fists, then counted to ten under his breath. When he felt a little calmer, he demanded, "You know about that?"

"We do. And we're very sorry we couldn't prevent it, Harry," the man said earnestly. "I can tell you more, but the middle of the street isn't the best place to do it. Will you come with me?"

Harry glanced at the open door of the big car, then the man, undecided and still very suspicious. But at the same time his burning curiosity was prodding him to find out what on earth all this was about, and how this fellow knew so much. "I was told never to get into a car with a stranger," he commented.

Michael smiled again. "But I introduced myself, so I'm hardly a stranger, am I?" he asked lightly.

Glaring at him, the ten year old said, "I don't think it actually works like that."

The man smirked. "No, it probably doesn't. Here, this might help." He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a small leather-covered wallet sort of thing, then held it out. Harry inspected it from a safe distance, before examining the face of the man holding it again. Eventually he sighed a little and cautiously moved close enough to snatch it.

Opening it he glanced inside, then gaped. There was another long pause.

"Is this real?" he asked slowly. It certainly looked and felt authentic, although he admittedly had nothing to base that on.

"It is."

Comparing the photo in the wallet to the man in front of him, Harry rubbed his thumb over the embossed seal next to it, thinking hard. Eventually he shook his head and stepped closer, handing the thing back. He was probably going to regret this, but his curiosity was well and truly alight. "All right, but if this is something horrible, I'm going to be very upset," he threatened somewhat weakly.

Michael looked amused, but stood aside and waved to the open door. Harry couldn't see much inside the car, since the windows were deeply tinted and the sunlight outside was so bright that the interior was almost black. "After you, Mr Potter," the man said.

Taking a deep breath, Harry walked over to the car and got in, Michael entering behind him. The driver was in his own compartment separated from the rear of the thing by another tinted glass window, only a silhouette visible through it. The door closed with a solid clunk and Michael tapped on the window once, which had the effect of making the car pull away and drive off.

As his eyes adjusted to the much dimmer light, and he shivered for a moment in the cool since the vehicle was obviously air conditioned, Harry became aware that there was a third person in the back of the car. It was, rather to his surprise, a girl about his age, who was inspecting him closely with great interest. He returned the favor. Michael stayed quiet, merely watching.

Eventually, Harry asked, "So why is MI5 interested in you?"

The girl grinned. "Have you ever wanted to be a spy, Harry?"

He stared in shock. She looked very amused, her brown hair rustling as she looked at Michael, then back at him. "A magical one, of course. They're the best sort."

She held out her hand. "Hermione Granger. Pleased to meet you." Rather numbly he shook it.

"Spy?" he asked with more than a little confusion.

She leaned forward. "Yes. Let's see, how to explain it..." Tapping a finger on her lower lip, she brightened after a moment. "Ah. Of course."

Meeting his eyes, she said in obviously deliberately serious tones, "You're a wizard, Harry Potter. And your country needs your help."

At this point Harry decided that he was surrounded by crazy people, but it was too late to back out now. He leaned forward as well, waiting for an explanation.

It was going to have to be a spectacularly good one...

 

[mp3.1415player]

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I was inspired to write a little more of this one, so here you go...​

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June 29th​, 2007

Opening the door into the interview room, Maggie entered followed by Leroy, both of them moving to pull out chairs on the opposite side of the table from the two Heberts and their lawyer, all of whom watched the new arrivals. She glanced at the reflective surface of the one way window into the next room, behind which a child protection services officer and the psychologist were waiting, which was regulation when interviewing a minor. With any luck, they'd stay out of it for now.

Taylor Hebert still had that calm patient look on her face, the one she'd been wearing almost the entire time since the gas station incident, and it didn't flicker one iota. Maggie got the weird feeling, as the girl's eyes flicked over both of them assessingly for a couple of seconds, that in some manner the pre-teen had immediately gauged their threat level and state of mind with a level of accuracy that was fairly disturbing.

She wasn't sure how she knew this, but she was pretty sure of her conclusions. The nearest thing she could liken it to was the time she'd interviewed an old veteran soldier who a particularly stupid and vicious car-jacker had tried his trade on, something he hadn't lived to regret. That guy had been, frankly, scary to be close to although he was unfailingly polite and respectful the entire time.

Just extremely dangerous when riled.

Maggie couldn't help but ponder the strangeness of getting the same feeling, only in some ways even worse, from a twelve year old girl…

Glancing at Leroy as she and her partner sat, she could tell from his face that he was probably feeling and thinking something fairly similar. She returned her attention to the other side of the table, while Leroy put the folder he was carrying down and opened it. Reaching out a hand she flicked on the voice recording equipment that was sitting to one side and did a quick voice check, before playing it back to test things were working. When she'd done that, she pulled her notebook out of her pocket, put it on the tabletop, and placed a pen across it, then leaned forward a little.

"Detectives Maggie Thorpe and Leroy Vanover, Brockton Bay Police, interviewing Ms Taylor Hebert regarding the incident at the MassGas filling station on the corner of Atlantic Drive and Bayshore Avenue, on June twenty-nineth, two thousand seven, at approximately nine forty-three AM. Also present are Daniel Hebert, father of Taylor Hebert, and William Grover, attorney acting on behalf of Taylor Hebert," she recited formally for the record. The Hebert girl merely listened without changing expression, while her father put a hand on her shoulder for a moment. His face was as blank as any Maggie had ever seen, making her think that he probably had very good control of his emotions. If what she'd heard so far about his volcanic temper when sufficiently pushed was accurate, that was probably the result of long practice and considerable discipline.

The lawyer, Grover, was also professionally neutral, although not nearly as controlled as either of the Heberts. He was leaning back in his chair watching the proceedings with care and attention, his eyes flicking between her and Leroy constantly.

With the formalities out of the way, Maggie cleared her throat, then fixed her gaze on the girl, curious to see how she would react, and very curious to see what her story would be. "Hello, Taylor. Do you mind if I call you Taylor?"

The girl shook her head, her eyes not leaving Maggie's. "That's fine, Ma'am," she replied quietly and respectfully.

"Great. Now, I know all this is very tedious, and you've been waiting for hours, but we need to know what happened. Several people have lost their lives and we have to find out exactly how that occurred, so I need to ask a lot of questions before we can go any further." She was fairly well accustomed to interviewing children who had been involved in crime, either as the victims or sadly but all to commonly around this city as the perpetrators, which was one of the main reasons she was assigned to this case. But she had a gut feeling this wasn't going to be a normal sort of interview at all. Even so, she was doing her practiced best to be calm and friendly as was policy in this sort of thing, since it usually produced better results than going in hard.

At least at first, of course. Sometimes you had no choice. Although, as she assessed the girl in front of her, she couldn't shake the idea that it wouldn't really matter how hard she pushed, she'd only get what the girl felt like telling her.

Still, no reason yet to vary from the normal procedure, despite the peculiar nature of the case.

"Let's start with you telling us, in your own words, exactly what happened from your point of view, all right?"

The girl nodded.

"Wonderful. So, why don't you begin when you went into the gas station with your mom."

Taylor glanced at her father, then the lawyer. Grover appeared to think for a moment before he nodded once. The brunette nodded as well, then returned her attention to Maggie, her hands folded on the table in front of her. "My mother and I arrived at the gas station at oh nine thirty four and she proceeded to fill the car with gas. I went into the gas station to buy some chips. Inside were the gas station counter clerk, as well as three other customers, one male and two female. At oh nine thirty seven my mother finished filling the car and came inside as well. One minute later the police officer entered. At oh nine thirty nine, a dark blue sedan with Minnesota plates pulled up immediately outside the entrance to the station and both perpetrators rapidly entered, weapons out. The police officer had his back to them, but turned when he heard them enter and began to reach for his weapon."

She paused for a moment, while Maggie listened incredulously. The calm and clinical tones of a soldier performing a debrief to a superior were totally incongruous coming from the mouth of a twelve year old girl, the pitch of her voice making it even more surreal. Glancing at Leroy, who hadn't said anything at all so far but merely listened, as he normally did, she saw him suppressing a look of mild shock.

"The lead perpetrator fired a shot into the ceiling with the automatic shotgun he was carrying, causing everyone to stop and look at them. Immediately afterwards, before the police officer could draw his weapon, he shouted at him to get down, then shot him in the chest, not leaving any time for the order to be followed. My mother dived for me at that point and his partner immediately fired on her, hitting her just above the right kidney and causing a clean through shot. He then turned and covered the remaining customers, while the lead perpetrator threatened the counter clerk and ordered him to empty the cash register."

Taylor stopped again, observing their reactions, before continuing. "Both of them ignored me, I assume due to them deciding I was too young to be a threat." Momentarily the coldest little smirk Maggie had ever encountered crossed the girl's face, so quickly that she wasn't sure she'd even seen it. Then it was gone, her expression neutral again. The lawyer was listening closely and seemed to be slightly surprised himself, and if Maggie was any judge, rather impressed.

"As I was not being observed, I took the opportunity to discreetly check the police officer. Unfortunately, he was deceased, and beyond help. Once I was sure of that, I removed his service weapon and chambered a round, before engaging the perpetrators. After my initial words, the second perpetrator made a threatening gesture with his own weapon. I fired one warning shot at his left ear, grazing it, before ordering him to drop his weapon or face lethal consequences."

She looked at Leroy for a moment, then back to Maggie, who was trying not to gape. "The rules of engagement I was operating under allowed for lethal countermeasures due to the perpetrators having caused a death."

Maggie mentally repeated the words 'rules of engagement' while wondering where the fuck a girl this age had learned the phrase, how she understood it, and for that matter how many different rules of engagement she had… The thought made her somewhat uneasy, all things considered.

"The lead perpetrator chose to ignore my order and warning and brought his weapon into a firing position. I immediately neutralized him with one shot through the brain, before covering his partner who did not react in time to capitalize on my action." That little horrifying smile came and went again. "He appeared quite startled."

'No, really?' Maggie thought, still staring. 'Just because his partner was neutralized by a pre-teen hit girl? Who the hell is this kid?'

Taylor went on remorselessly, "I repeated my verbal warning of dire consequences to the remaining perpetrator, giving him a fifteen second countdown before I dealt with him permanently. At three seconds he decided to disengage and follow my order. Discarding his weapon, he lay on his face. I instructed the clerk to move the shotgun out of reach, then use the deceased officer's handcuffs to restrain the man. After that, I talked him through basic first aid on my mother while I continued to cover the perpetrator, after which he called for medical and police backup. As they arrived I made the borrowed weapon safe and returned it to the officer's holster, then waited. At oh nine forty three, two police officers entered and locked down the scene, removed the living perpetrator, and arranged for medical transport for my mother while placing me into custody."

The young girl fell silent, apparently satisfied that she had recounted her story to her own satisfaction. Maggie, feeling just a tiny bit speechless, looked at Leroy for a long few seconds, then shook her head. "Ah… Thank you, Taylor, that's very clear. It matches the CCTV recordings and the witness statements."

"You're welcome, Ma'am," the girl replied politely.

There was a silence as both officers tried to work out quite what to do next. This definitely wasn't the normal sort of teenage problem, and even in Brockton Bay seemed a little strange.

Eventually, Leroy asked, "Did you mean to kill the man who raised his weapon to you?"

Grover opened his mouth, but before he said anything, Taylor looked at him. He subsided after a moment with a small sigh. She transferred her gaze to Leroy, her eyes cold. "Of course. His intentions were clear, he had already killed an innocent man in cold blood, and I'm sure I was next. Also my mother was very close to death, as a direct result of the actions of him and his partner. I had no choice other than removing him as a threat and couldn't risk attempting to merely disable him. I felt completely justified in doing what I did and have no regrets, other than that I wish the entire thing hadn't happened."

Her father took one of her hands in his and held it, the girl not seeming to notice, but relaxing a little. Maggie realized that she'd involuntarily tensed when Taylor had replied, as there had been a momentary feeling of danger that had now gone again. She had a flashback to that scary ex-marine from a couple of years ago once more.

"What if you'd missed?" Leroy persisted.

The girl looked at him for a moment. "I don't miss."

The silence this time was weird. Maggie studied the girl, who looked back evenly. For some reason, she didn't disbelieve her.

"Have you ever shot anyone else, Taylor?" she asked, making Grover sit forward again. This time he leaned over to Taylor and said something to her in a low voice, too quietly for either cop to hear. She nodded a couple of times, then shrugged. He moved away again, apparently satisfied.

"That question isn't currently relevant, Officer Thorpe," Grover said calmly. "My clients actions before the events of earlier today are not a matter for the police at this point in time. However, I will point out that she has never been in trouble with the authorities for any reason, and acted today in self defense of both herself, and her mother and three other people."

He was essentially right, and in all truth Maggie felt that the girl really hadn't had any choice, but she couldn't just let her walk out as much as she'd have liked to thank her for dealing with Ray's murderer.

"You have a very impressive vocabulary for a twelve year old, Taylor," she noted, trying to bring the conversation back to something a little less tense.

"I read a lot," the brunette replied with a slight smile, one that was a lot warmer this time. Her wide expressive mouth was very good at that sort of smile, as good as her eyes were at making you want to shit yourself.

"So I gather. OK." Maggie opened her notebook and flipped through it to a list of things she wanted more detailed answers on, then began asking the relevant questions, trying to do so in a way that wouldn't make Grover interrupt, get her in trouble with the people on the other side of the observation window, or make that girl give her that look again.

It was creepy and she didn't enjoy it at all.

---

May 2nd​, 2005

Annette watched her daughter with a curious slight frown, as the girl wandered into the kitchen with her nose in a book, fumbled for a pop-tart with one hand, managed to open it, then wandered off again nibbling on the snack. The entire time she hadn't looked up from the book once.

Taylor had always been a voracious reader but even for her this behavior was a little odd. And it had, now that her mother considered the matter, been going on for more than a month. Ever since that horrifying day at the mall when she'd feared she was going to lose both her daughter and her husband to a gang of insane criminals.

That had been a very bad day, watching TV and waiting for news she was dreading and anticipating at the same time. When that idiot PRT director had had his people storm the mall, even she could see it was going to end badly. The Teeth, as reduced as they were, were both extremely dangerous and utterly unconcerned with collateral damage.

It was only luck that the casualties had been as low as they were. Miss Militia had come horrifically close to dying, while her compatriot Velocity was still in hospital and the word was he'd never work again, due to the severity of his injuries. A number of PRT troopers and several bystanders had also paid a price. To her enormous relief and gratitude to whatever fates there were, her own family had escaped unhurt. Even so, Taylor had been obviously rather traumatized by the entire experience, which didn't surprise Annette even a little bit. At not quite ten years old, that sort of thing made an impression.

Even in her wilder days in college, where she'd seen and come very close to being involved in some nasty stuff, she hadn't witnessed anything quite as brutal as her daughter had. She was more than impressed that little Taylor had apparently bounced back so quickly.

The girl had been very quiet and thoughtful for nearly a week after the event, not really talking much to anyone, even Emma, which was unprecedented. The two girls were practically inseparable normally and Annette had been forced to gently explain to the red-head that her best friend wasn't upset with her, but needed time to think things through. Luckily, the other girl was smart enough to understand, and had waited patiently for her friend to come back to normal.

This had eventually happened, but even then, her mother had noticed that Taylor was slightly different in outlook. Always a chatterbox and full of energy and smiles, she was no less active, but seemed quieter and more reserved. Possibly it was an artifact of growing up, but it seemed likely that it was also at least partly due to the incident. Not surprising, since that sort of thing would change anyone. Hopefully, Annette mused, the girl would get over it with time. She was still very young and resilient, so it seemed likely that in a couple of years this would be remembered mostly as a bad dream more than anything.

One could hope.

Still, her newly studious nature was interesting. It had taken Annette a while to notice, but she'd eventually picked up on the little fact that the books that the girl was working her way through were not the normal ones she read in many cases, the various young adult mysteries and light science fiction and fantasy she'd always enjoyed. While she was still reading those as far as her mother could ascertain, she was also steadily absorbing books that had come from the bookcases in the study, which were a mix of Annette's own and Danny's, both the adults also being prolific readers with an eclectic interest in a variety of subjects.

Annette had a large number of literary works, along with history, geography, and various works on a number of different languages. Since she spoke fluent Greek and Japanese as well as English, she had a number of books in both languages, which were definitely not common in most households. She was also trying to learn Spanish and had several references on that language too, along with Italian and German dictionaries which she had bought with the though that one day she'd have a go at them as well.

Danny's library included more history works, mostly covering the US and Canada, along with quite a few books on engineering inherited from his father, a dozen excellent cookbooks which his mother had given him and Annette often used, and a very large science fiction collection favoring the hard SF style. He also had a few military subjects covered, also from his father who had been in the Army back in the sixties, including a number of manuals on various weapons throughout the ages. On top of that were all his books from his college days on the various subjects covered by his aborted accountancy degree, which he sometimes referred to for his job at the Dockworker's Association.

There were quite a few other books around the house too, on a huge and rather random variety of subjects, bought on a whim when either of them spotted something they found interesting, given to them by friends, and so on. Thinking it over, Annette realized that they probably had over a thousand reference books in the house one way or another, not to mention the fiction collection which was pretty substantial as well. Even Danny's best friend Alan, Emma's father, had pointed out more than once that his own house had less than half the number of books lying around.

She wondered if possibly she should go through the collection and see if there was anything they could get rid of to free up a little space. On the other hand, the last time she'd done that, a couple of years ago, she'd ended up sitting on the floor in the study reading several of the books she'd pulled out and never got around to doing anything else…

No, on balance she was happy living in a house full of books and knowledge. And, of course, her daughter and husband.

Taylor wandered in again, still reading, although it looked like she was about halfway through the book now. The girl read at a horrendous speed, even for an adult, which was doubly impressive for someone not yet in her teens. As she passed, absently moving around Annette without apparently looking at her, her mother bent down a little and craned her neck to read the title of the book, curious to see which one it actually was this time.

Her eyes widened a little at the title, which wasn't one she expected: 'US Army, Technical Manual, TM 9-3071-1, FIELD MAINTENANCE FOR 60-MM MORTARS, M2 AND M19.' That was definitely one of Danny's father's ones, she thought as she blinked a couple of times. Straightening up she peered at her daughter, who was now standing in the middle of the kitchen chewing on a fingernail as she read a page full of dense text, with a few tables at the bottom.

Annette, bemused and a little concerned, not to mention slightly amused, observed her daughter as the girl lowered her hand from her mouth, turned the page, nodded to herself, then headed for the pop-tarts again. "Ah… Taylor?"

"Yep, Mom?" The young girl didn't look up, answering automatically while still perusing the manual. Annette sighed faintly.

"You've had enough pop-tarts, you'll ruin your appetite. Have an apple instead."

"OK." Still not looking away from the page, which she was already nearly at the bottom of, the girl turned ninety degrees and passed the table, snagging an apple on the way from the bowl of them that lived there, turned again, and headed back out of the kitchen past her father who stepped to the side as she went by. He swiveled his head to follow her path as she went towards the living room on the other side of the downstairs hall, then looked back to raise an eyebrow at his wife.

With a shrug, Annette said, "I have no idea. When did she develop an interest in military hardware?"

Danny peered after his daughter again, then shook his head. "No clue. What was she reading?"

"A book on the care and feeding of 60mm mortars." Annette stared at her husband, who paused in his motion towards the coffee maker to look confused.

"What?"

"Mortars. Big military bomb-throwing things."

"I know what a mortar is, honey. Why would Taylor want to read a manual on them, though?" He looked at her with both eyebrows up now, then resumed his quest for caffeine.

Sighing a little, Annette shook her head. "I have absolutely no idea. Last night it was a book on Roman siege techniques. The night before it was a book on the Apollo program. Before that it was my Japanese/English phrasebook. Her tastes seem to have become somewhat… expansive."

Danny poured two cups of coffee, handing her one when he was done. He looked thoughtful as he sipped his drink. Eventually, he replied, a little doubtfully, "Well, I suppose it's a good thing that she wants to learn, right? Most kids her age are running around doing everything they can to avoid anything like education, and she's actively seeking it out. Even if the subjects are a bit weird."

"Weapons? Space exploration?" Annette frowned at him. "That's more than a bit weird when it comes to a nine year old girl. Not that there's anything wrong with a girl learning anything she wants, of course, but it's definitely not common."

"Our girl is a smart one, dear," he smiled. "Like her mother. It's probably a phase she'll grow out of, you know. Maybe because of all the weaponry she saw when the PRT made fools of themselves..." He shrugged. "She'll be back to wanting a pony sooner or later."

Annette snorted. "She's never wanted a pony in her life, as you well know. She's more likely to ask for a motorcycle or something. Assuming she doesn't still want to grow up to be Alexandria, or maybe Legend. Or even Armsmaster, god help us."

Danny snickered. "She does like Tinkers, she thinks Dragon is the best thing ever from what she's said in the past." He put his arm around his wife's waist. "Don't worry, Annette. Taylor likes to read. That's a good thing. Let's just make sure anything particularly inappropriate is out of reach and let her get on with it. It sure keeps her quiet."

"She's too quiet," Annette replied darkly, frowning a little. "You remember the last time she got all silent and thoughtful..."

He winced slightly. "On the bright side, we never really liked the Wilsons in the first place, and that damn dog deserved it. The fur grew back in the end. Most of it..."

"Not the point, Danny," she grumbled, but let him lead her into the living room where they sat and turned on the TV. Taylor kept reading, only occasionally looking up, but seemed content, so they left her to it.

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