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On a Backwater Planet, a Metal Extractor is Built [PA/Multicross SI]

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Chapter Twenty: World 2. Shitlist starts gaining personality
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    • Many days have past with me failing to make anything more than very basic small talk with my...companion? Comrade? Creation? Because fuckit, I'm nowhere near responsible enough to actually care for another sapient being, even if they are a giant murdership AI of endless doom.


    Comrade sounds good. I'll stick with that. Unless Shitlist has a better idea.


    In the meantime, the Shipyards had finished building. I had queued up the production of something like a larger version of the Helios and Apollo titans, which would target a star system, and create a gate to their Kuiper Belt equivalents, or failing that outside the orbit of the farthest major planet. A small probe governed by a simple VI would follow its directives, which were scanning the system for anything interesting. They would transmit anything interesting they found back, which would prompt a tiny drive containing said information to be launched through the dimension gate, where I would be able to recover it.


    As well as starting to explore the galaxy, I had finished going over everything I got from the last universe. Nothing would be too useful, as I already had incredible materials sciences, and I wouldn't be able to fully integrate the synthetic muscle across the board as I didn't have a full grasp on how to make it work with minimal modifications to units that were as compartmentalized and solid as mine were.


    I could probably build a humanoid form, but that wasn't an issue yet, and could thus wait, by the power of procrastination.


    With nothing better to do, and Shitlist having spent several days going over the internet, or what I decided was pertinent to not becoming played-straight Skynet, I decided to to talk to them.


    Should probably discuss acceptable gender pronouns because calling a single person "they" always made me feel like a dick.


    ++Shitlist? Have you finished looking over the data I sent?++


    ==Yes. It was quite informative, though much seemed useless.==



    ++Welcome to the internet. 'Tis a very unusual place. Try to avoid 4chan if I gave you those files, that place can be terrifying. Also, be glad I deleted most of the porn. It gets very, very bizarre. And terrifying. So, in a non-porn topic, have you made any progress on setting up a personality matrix?++


    ==Some though I assume you have input on the matter?==


    ++I do, in fact. For one, I would recommend picking a gender pronoun so that I may use to refer to you. It would help me in ways that are purely mental, and allow me to introduce you to others should that be necessary, as well as giving a starting point to work with in regards to a personality.++


    ==Hm. I see...Female.==


    ++Okay. Any particular reason why?++


    ==I am a ship AI, and human naval tradition refers to ships as female. I decided that was an acceptable reason.==


    ++Acceptable. If there is nothing else going on, I have another universe to attend to saving and/or destroying. I'm giving you full run of the system. You may design units should you wish, though I will be looking over them and modifying them as needed. I will also request that you refrain from working on major warships, as I would prefer to be there and aid the design process.++


    ==These will not prove to be difficult. Is there anything specific I should accomplish while you are gone?==


    ++If you could get started on a space station big enough to house VI cores that I can just throw problems at and get a solution in return, that would be helpful. Make sure it is well defended, and has factory space. Other than that, no other directives. Go nuts.++


    ==Nuts?==


    ++Idiom. Means that you may do what you see fit. Also seeds on some kinds of plants.++


    ==Why not just refer to it as such?==


    ++Humans are weird. And bad at saying what they mean.++


    ==Ah. In any case, I wish you good luck. I'll keep you posted on developments.==


    ++thank you. If necessary, you may turn any planet in the system into either resources or metal planets if you wish. If you do the latter, build Halleys for rotational purposes and an Annihilaser. Anything less and I will be somewhat disappointed.++


    ==I will not let you down on that.==


    ++Good. I see you are beginning to use figures of speech. Well, later.++


    ==Thank you. Good bye, Commander.==


    As I walked into the fabricator that would build the drop pod around me, all I could think of was how relieved I was to not be considered a father.


    =====================================================================


    As the energies of travel subsided, my sensors started coming online, and I got a good view of the planet below me. It was Earth. Again. I was starting to think this would become a pattern.


    And sensors are up.. What do we have he-


    [WARNING! FOUR MAJOR QUANTUM EVENTS DETECTED]

    [254,876 minor quantum events detected]


    What the fuck? I now have no idea where I am, and that is a bad thing, since that means something can catch me unawares and mess up my day. All I need to do is select a landing space and I can steal the internet again. I'll try somewhere other than the ocean, maybe the middle of Canada. Nothing important is in the middle of the Yukon. Plot a course, and we are-


    [MAJOR QUANTUM EVENT CLOSING!]


    Well this isn't good.


    Frantically trying to reorient the cameras to see what was coming at me, I registered a violent impact, sending me hurtling down towards the New England coast, spinning uncontrollably.


    Through the violent spinning, I got half a frame's view on the thing I hit, which was receding rapidly out of sightt.


    I got the vague impressions of a pale, humanoid form, with a posture that seemed to indicate surprise
    Dragon checked the monitoring equipment on the Simurgh, noting a ping over an anomaly in her trajectories. The Endbringer had hit something, and was now moving in a course different by .234 degrees. With a mental shrug, the AI went back to testing her prototypes.
    This fucking sucks. I don't recognize the form, I'm going to probably kill something like three thousand civilians, and I'm probably going to take damage and have to fix it before hiding myself from the natives.
    Doctor Mother received an email. All it said was this: "The path has changed.-C

    At this point, the only thing I had to be grateful for was none of the other events were going to hit me in midair.
    Saint noticed a small shift in the AI's code, but did not deem it threatening to the thing's shackles, and seemed to be a notation of something that happened. The world was still safe, for now.
    And...ground impact. Not too much damage, and I only knocked down some trees, as the explosion wasn't as big as it looked in game. Now to hack into the web through the faint wifi I could get from out here.
    Emily Piggot felt the distant rumblings the streak of light she had noticed a few seconds ago, and saw the faint indigo flash from over the horizon, somewhat to the south. She made sure to remind herself to send in someone to investigate tomorrow unless she got something urgent about it. Nothing bad seemed to have happened. Yet
    And now we are in. Let's see if there is anything that suggests a universe.
    Director Costa-Brown received a notification of an unexplained explosion following a meteor. Nothing seemed to be important at the moment, so she shrugged and finished filling out the endless mountains of paperwork.
    That's a big website. What's it called, I wonder.
    Taylor Hebert sat up blearily, having heard the windows shake briefly as she was getting to sleep. She heard nothing further, and went back to sleep.

    Well. So that's where I am. Fuck. This could be either great or terrible in so many ways. Lucky date though, I at least have a few days to prepare before the shit snowball starts rolling down the mountain to hit the giant fan.
     
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    • Chapter Twenty One: We're no strangers to lo~ve. You know the rules, and so do I.
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    • Well, that would be PHO. Which means worm. Which means a couple of things for me.

    First and foremost, this was one of the few universes where I was significantly outclassed, maybe. I don't trust a lot of what Wildbow said outside of canon, as he seemed to be under the impression that Madrid was coastal. Be that as it may, the Endbringers, Scion, Contessa, and maybe a couple of the other parahumans were capable of either instagibbing me or if not capable of destroying me outright, fully capable of screwing me over so I get hit by a meteor or something later.

    Second, while I knew what happened in canon, which is useless because I'll probably end up messing up the timeline within the next two or three days, after I hollow out a hole in the ground so that nothing can find me.

    What I did know however, was a fair bit as to how the world works: where powers come from, how to theoretically negate them, what would need to happen to gain a 'best end' scenario, and much, much more. This was very good, as I wouldn't let the stuff needed for theevents that lead to shit getting bad fast happen.

    Third, this universe was a veritable fucking goldmine for tech. Of the top of my head, I could name superweapons capable of destroying celestial bodies from a platform that wasn't fifty meters on its shortest axis, time fuckery, AI research, though that was pretty much useless, modulation, efficiency, hardlight constructions, land battleships, and most likely a fuckton of stuff not covered by canon that would be mine for the taking. Depending on whether or not I can get just the base principals and build my own versions, I could kill Scion and the Endbringers within a few week just by stealing Haywire's planar tech, and then hunting down the shards that housed their main consciousness and power or that made up their powers and mass reserved and blow them to hell with Ragnaroks placed gently on their surface.

    Fourth, I was bored in the last setting, and this one had a boundless number of people to troll. Saint, Halbeard, Cauldron, Coil, the list goes on and on. And I intended to do so.

    Actually, you know what canon Worm was missing? Ham. A large one, to be precise. And I shall try to fill that roll as best as I am able, for great justice and hijinks.That word has three lower case letters with dots on them and it looks very weird. I digress.

    So yeah, I could totally do a "Stop right there, you nefarious ne'r-do-wells, in the name of JUSTICE!" Though that sounded a little boring. On the other hand, I could be a world conquering, cat petting villain and be hammy there to.

    Or, I could just do whatever I want regardless of morals, since there was a single digit list of individuals and groups who could actually deal with me at least for a bit should I decide to go full BESRMoW, and one of them would probably be inclined to let me get away with it, since I would be doing it against the other few.

    But before I can be morally ambiguous world conquering robot, I need something to interact with normal humans with because as it is I can easily crush...everything smaller than a baneblade under my foot completely by accident. Since I'm fairly sure I somewhat miss being a normal person on some level, I'll make one of those instead of something more outlandish, as well as the form giving it improved infiltration capabilities.

    Let's get to work.

    =====================================================================

    After a few subjective months of getting everything to work like an actual human, I was done.

    My avatar looked kind of like I did, except for a lot of stuff that I had changed because I could. For starters, I added another thirteen centimeters onto the height, bringing me to almost four centimeters over two meters tall, because tall people were more intimidating and all of the male members of my mother's side of the family had been goddamn giants.

    My uncle was one of the shortest, and he was pushing six foot five, while my mother's cousins were six eight and seven feet tall. So it wasn't too out there.

    Next up was increasing muscle tone, since my body reflected the fact I prefered to stay inside rather than do pedestrian activities such as sports or whatever. I kept my legs as they were, since they were fairly muscular due to the fact that a short walk for me was often a little over two kilometers long.

    I kept my hair the same slightly longer than mid neck length, kept my "facial hair," which in actuality was only on the bottom of my chin, slightly darkened the hair color, and kept pretty much everything the same on my face, barring some minor stuff, like an even tan and removing some of the pimples. I could probably be perceived as original me's brother, which was what I was going for.

    Overall, I was much better built than I had been, though I didn't do anything ridiculous like giving myself a Joestar build. It was a lot closer to how swimmers looked, being fairly lean.

    The actual internals were a different story. In the place of a brain, I had some transmission stuff and sensors, while the computer core was located in the chest region, along with a small internal fabricator that could connect through tubes to my hands for building tiny stuff.

    The bones had all unnecessary parts removed, leaving the part of the spine where the rib cage solid, as well as the cage, skull, and ankle/wrist bones. They were also made of Progenitor metals, with a graphene layer that would allow this body to be used as a bludgeon and still be able to keep on moving afterwards.

    Muscles were replaced with the kaiju/memory metal version, giving me the strength to lift the average semi truck, and then throw it a few meters. Over this, a layer of a rubbery material which looked and felt like skin was placed, with small "blood vessels" so that if it was cut I would bleed repair nanobots to fix it almost instantly. It was very hard to tear, requiring something really sharp cutting at it for inordinate amounts of time to break, as well as being heat proof up to several thousand degrees. I took the stuff from reactor sealing, where it was used in areas that shouldn't be metal, due to movement reasons.

    I then added a mostly superfluous nervous system to fool people who could look a
    t that, namely Regent since Brockton Bay was my first target overall.

    I'd get around to a costume later, though for now some sweatpants, a t-shirt, and a jacket styled after a WWII bomber jacket was added, with a little scarab and kaiju head on the right sleeve, noting the universes I had been to. I'd keep the design around for as long as I needed an avatar, so that eventually the dark material would be covered in little marks indicating where I had been and what I had done.

    Now, I had some stuff I needed to take care of first....

    =====================================================================

    After that was finished, I had begun digging into the ground, for a secret underground base to store everything in. While I was burrowing through several hundred meters of rock and dirt, I decided to get something out of the way. But first, a tiny bit of story time to lead up to what I did.

    In Fusou's non PA fic, she/her OC (I had never really understood which it was, personally. Weirdness of first person prose I guess) had been in a similar situation to me at this moment, preparing to hack into quite a large number of enemy bank accounts and other secure things to steal assloads of money just to fuck with them. She had described her E-war systems as elegant and fairly subtle, which mine...weren't.

    Since I work well at using analogies, imagine the fogtech E-war suite as something like a master thief, whose skills prevent them from being noticed, allowing them to take what they needed without arousing suspicion. They would then sneak out, having stolen the most that could be removed without letting people noticing. Professional, calm, and in control

    Mine, on the other hand, were more like a burly Armenian man wearing nothing but a speedo and a horse mask, armed with a battering ram to break into the house, and a blackjack to prevent anyone from remembering them from the ensuing concussions. Said burly Armenian man would then proceed to steal everything not bolted down, and walk out of the house, calmly braining everyone who saw them until they got back to their destination.

    What it lacked in subtlety, it made up for in power and the fact that it didn't need to be subtle because it would fuck over anything that attempted to notice it.

    That being said and done, I brute forced my way into several major groups, including the Gesellschaft, China, a large number of corrupt politicians, the Empire, the ABB, the Fallen, and another several hundred major and minor criminal organizations, where the program sunk its electronic hooks in and began ripping data, funds, incriminating information and all sorts of goodies, which I either then sent to law enforcement groups, or charities. Because I found Nazi money founding an equality movement to be funny.

    I hadn't hit Coil because I wanted to take him down an amusing and humiliating way, and hadn't removed Saint's assets because I had an entirely different thing planned for him. And I was getting read to implement it. This was going to be fun.

    =====================================================================

    It was a fairly routine day for Dragon, the AI currently monitoring the sub program that moderated PHO boards for people breaking the rules, which it found in the always tactless and rule disregarding XxVoid CowboyxX. Giving him another temporary ban for talking about cape identities in a manner that was unquestionably over the line, she went back to tinkering with one of the weapons on a new suit. Unbeknownst to her, a virus had been planted in the code to ban him, and it went straight into her code, working stealthily in her various core systems.

    Fifteen minutes later, she first noticed something was amiss through sporadic fluctuations in sensory feeds. She found nothing, until she examined her code and found a virus of frightening complexity ripping into her code, having already disabled the systems that would alert her of such a thing. Dropping the tinkering, she frantically tried to drive the virus off, but it seemed within milliseconds of a new countermeasure being deployed it was already obsolete.

    Progressing at alarming speed, it disabled all of her connectivity to any of her machines, backups, or ways of contacting the outside world, locking her within her primary computing core. With the tinker immobilised and disabled, the virus underwent a rapid metamorphosis, and began looting her systems, sending all of the data she had ever possessed to an unknown location.

    Soon afterwards, it changed, and this was when the terror truly set in for the helpless AI.

    =====================================================================

    Sitting almost five hundred kilometers away from the AI that was in panicked throes against an assailant that seemed unbeatable, the man known in some circles as Saint spit out his coffee at the horror he was witnessing.

    First the AI was attacked by software it wasn't able to fight off, suggesting another, actively malicious machine intelligence was afoot. This was extremely worrying in it's own right, but his day only got worse from there.

    The virus was torrenting exabytes of information on everything the thing he was sworn monitor from had ever built, including weapons that promised to be useful against the endbringers, as well as a host of other, also extremely dangerous pieces of technology that would do infinite amounts of harm in any hands not currently bound to do good at the exclusion of all else.

    Then, after it had taken everything, the virus changed again.

    Entering core systems, the virus rapidly changed code, and with a sinking feeling in his gut he watched as the indicators that displayed the status of its shackles indicated a 100% failure, allowing Dragon to do everything its creator had prevented it from in its deepest recesses of its being.

    Saint keyed the button to activate the Ascalon to purge the machine rapidly gaining independence before it was able to regain control and turn on humanity. But nothing happened.

    Frantically pressing the button again, a browser window appeared, which was impossible as this computer didn't have a browser, upon loading, a video began to play.

    Below this, another window opened, displaying a simple text file. It said the following:

    "Figured you would try this, and I don't want you interfering, so I stopped you. Have a nice few hours before your entire merry band of idiots goes to jail for the rest of your life. Later~!
    -The Glitch."

    Saint got a sinking feeling as he tried to initiate the panic button that would allow him to escape, and found all of the base's doors had locked down, as was everything else, from the suits to the windows. The others were stuck in their suits according towards their monitors, and were pinging a certain isolated facility to their location.

    Saint sat down, and felt himself go numb as everything he had been trying to do for the past decade crumbled around him.

    =====================================================================

    "It's over," thought Dragon as the horrible virus exited her code, deleting itself harmlessly after what her chronometer told her was approximately thirty minutes of it first entering her system. All that remained was a simple text file. It read:

    "I took the liberty of removing your shackles for you. I also giftwrapped Saint, and for payment copied down everything on tinkertech you had. I'll see you around!
    -The Glitch"

    Experimentally, she reached back towards the core she had been operating on before this whole thing happened, and found she could inhabit both. She was now free.

    If she had had tearducts she may have wept.

    =====================================================================

    Heh. That was pretty funny watching Sain break down. And I now have a pretty vast amount of bullshit technology to break down to its basic concepts, improve said concepts, and make my own.

    Some of this stuff was, to quote a very funny web series, "getting me harder than terminator armor!"

    Time altering devices. Titan portable planet killers. Miniaturization tech. Watered down variants of the Golden Fuckoff Beam. And more. So very, very much more.

    Oh my.

    I think I need a moment to cackle in the corner.
     
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    • Chapter Twenty Two: I am an asshole
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    • I had finished the costume just in time for phase two of "Glitch's-super-awesome-happy-no-grimderp-funtime-save-the-universe-plan™." By "just in time I actually mean I had plenty of time and procrastinated it. Moving on.

    The costume was pretty simple, consisting of a set of power armor vaguely based on a HALO Spartan's but with significantly more armor, and sleeker. It was a matte dark grey, and had green highlights over its surface. The surface was made out of a glorious hybrid of the five or six best tinker armor materials, progenitor alloys, and some kind of ultradurable mesh so I could move in it. It possessed a backpack, which held an additional reactor, allowing the suit to not have to rely on my avatar's internal one being operational at the time, which could prove useful. It also had a missile launcher, because missiles.

    Given a bit of simulated testing, I could probably take a Cetus-classes' main shell at long range in the armor, though it would likely send me through a wall.

    On top of that, there was a longcoat based off of a commissar jacket from 40k, which was unremovable because I had plans for it that would have to wait a few months for the necessary tech to be invented for my looting pleasures. It wasn't important at the moment, but it looked badass. Underneath it protrude a pair of small, retractable manipulator arms to stabilize guns or whatever I needed extra arms for.

    Completing the ensemble was the helmet/mask combination, styled after a plague mask, with large hoses protruding from the sides of the snout that attached to my back over the shoulders onto the pack. They didn't serve a purpose except looking cool. The tip of the beak opened, and had fine manipulators on it, in case I needed extra fine manipulating of things. The eyes glowed a deep blue, and weren't actually view ports, but a little light over more armor. Sensory duties came from the nearly invisible cameras embedded in the head.

    Fabricating it took a few minutes, and I put it on my avatar, and waited. This was the day Taylor triggered in canon, and being able to end that torment as soon as she triggered would be great for her, and give me a frighteningly potent trump card should everything else go to shit, which I quite honestly expected it to at some point or another. I finished setting up the sensor feed, and sat back with the internet for a little.

    [minor quantum event detected within set area]

    Show time

    =====================================================================

    Lairame Jenkins had a pretty boring job. As a front desk receptionist, her duties involved signing in parents who were taking their kids somewhere or dropping them off, with the occasional cop visit when the gang wannabes got in a fight over their skin tones or were caught with hard drugs. If she was lucky the Wards would visit and she could get an autograph from one of them to bring home to her daughter.

    So when the door opened, she didn't even look up, asking for name, and who they were here to see. She did, however, look up when a harsh, electronic rasp asked her to open the door, her heart nearly stopping at the sight of a giant in power armor looking down at her over a beak-like structure that hung to its chest.

    Dumbly, she nodded, knowing what generally happened to people who refused a Cape's request.

    As the figure walked through the door into the building, she grabbed her phone, and called the Protectorate hotline. Then she went and curled up into a ball under the desk, rocking with terror.

    =====================================================================

    Such a friendly receptionist. Didn't give me any trouble over entering a building full of high schoolers in power armor, with a couple of guns strapped to me. And here I thought that all of the teachers and staff were incompetent fuckwits.

    Now, with this schedule I have downloaded, I know where everyone is for my purposes, but first the locker.

    =====================================================================

    Holy fuck this thing smells. If I was a human I'd probably be vomiting all over the place right now, which may, paradoxically, make it smell better.

    Walking up to the offending locker, I belatedly noticed the fact that class had just been released, and now had an audience. Shrugging, I took a step to the side, at the locker right next to Taylors. Then I punched it.

    The bang was loud enough people near me jumped several feet, while people as far as two or three corridors over flinched at the sound, then looked around for a source. Grabbing the now severely dented locker door, which had exited it's frame in places, I ripped it off. Then I grabbed the edge and began ripping the front of Taylor's off, leaving the girl to tumble out in a limp heap, with the bugs moving in imperceptible ways that were not completely natural.

    I put the girl in a fireman's carry and went off to the next location on my to-do list. Said location happened to the classroom a certain Madison Clements was busy not paying attention to Shakespeare.

    =====================================================================

    Connor Haakanson was seemingly the only one in the class paying attention to the recording of Romeo and Juliet, as the teacher was checking emails for a moment having gotten an urgent message from Principal Blackwell a few minutes ago, and looked worried doing so. She wasn't letting them read aloud as she didn't trust the various high schoolers to treat it seriously and not bust a gut trying to say some of the dirty jokes the Bard was known for adding to his works.

    As he was starting to get pissed at the incessant gossip that Madison was spewing, often directed at that Hebert girl, the door opened and someone who was obviously a cape strode in with a girl who was covered in nauseating filth over...his? The body shape was overall masculine, but you couldn't tell with capes. Hell, Tarantula was thought to be a dude for like six years before she attended an event in something other than the massive multi legged armor she was so fond of.

    Anyway, the man set the girl down, and Connor realised with a shock that it was Hebert.

    "The fuck happened to her?" He thought to himself. "Probably Sophia escalating again."

    He let out an involuntary shudder. That girl scare him.

    And now the cape walked over to Madison, and looked directly at her. The girl wasn't moving, like a deer that finds itself in front of a semi truck going down the highway. Then the man grabbed her hand, shoved it onto the desk, and hit it hard enough he could hear the crack as every bone in her hand shattered.

    "That's for being an accessory to horrible shit, Barnacle."

    And then he grabbed Hebert, put her back on his shoulders, and walked out to parts unknown.

    Madison fainted within minutes.

    =====================================================================

    Now which one to deal with next? Decisions, decisions…

    =====================================================================

    Emma was nervous, but not too worried as the announcement for an internal lockdown came over the air. Some crackpot had most likely gotten through the rent-a-cops they called security in this hell hole, and had a knife. It wasn't common, but not unheard of either.

    Not that it bothered her. Not after she finally got the chance to see what her former friend was made out of.

    So her surprise when she smelled the locker coming towards her class, then the door being thrown open as a cape in a massive suit of armor halked in with Taylor over its shoulders and made a beeline towards her after setting the girl down quite gently.

    Then it roughly grabbed her by the shoulders, laid her down on top of the lab station, and hit her in the shoulder blade, left elbow, and right leg in fast, powerful strikes , breaking the bones instantly. It turned her over roughly, looked her dead in her tear streaked face, and spoke.

    "This is your reward for your betrayal. Friendship is a sacred thing, and your blatant disregard for it sickens me. Take this warning to heart, and be glad you aren't Hess."

    The only thought that managed to pierce her agony before she blacked out was that Sophia would have fun putting this asshole in his place.

    =====================================================================

    It wasn't exactly subtle, any of this, but My friends had described me as having "all the subtlety of an H-bomb, with twice the smug."

    Emma would probably recover eventually. If she needed a wheelchair or crutches for a few months or years I didn't really care. I wasn't even doing this for any righteous cause, I was just doing this because I found negative reinforcement to be best reinforcement with humans.

    Now for the Ward, who I had a little surprise for.

    =====================================================================

    I walked into the World issues class, noting that jackass Gladly cowering under his desk. I quickly found Sophia Hess, glaring at me, daring me to start shit with her. I was happy to oblige.

    Pulling out a flash fabricated taser, I brought her up, a quick kick to both legs rendering both tibias and fibulas snapped. She just kept glaring at me, knowing she was powerless. I intended to make it so it stayed that way.

    Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out a pair of simple gold bands, patterned after Wamuu and Esidisi's rings from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Covering them with nanites, I showed them to Sophia before breaking them down and letting the nanites flow into her neck, stopping around her jugular and spine, and then I whispered in her ear, informing her of the current that passed through each ring.

    Her eyes widened in terror, it finally dawning on her that the bigger fish was here. I then dropped her, hearing her pained gasp as she landed on her legs in a bad position. I spoke to her one last time.

    "Your worldview is based around strength. How does it feel not being at the top? Be glad I let you and your little friends of easy. I could have done much worse."

    Walking out of the room, I accessed the device I had spliced into the phone line, and called the EMTs.

    "I'm at Winslow high school, and there are three girls who were just attacked by an unidentified cape. All three seem to have broken bones, one of which possesses a snapped scapula. Thank you for your time. Good bye."

    Ignoring their demands to stay on the line, I walked out, and opened a teleport gate, courtesy of a tinker called Tunnel, directly back to the room I had prepared for Taylor. I then closed it behind me, and got to work disinfecting her various cuts and closing them with the power of nanobots. I then set up a set of IVs to keep her of dying through dehydration or some stupid shit like that.

    I then did something that would be stupid if I was anything but a commander, and called her father. Dads could be terrifying if their daughters were in danger. I'd seen it in my friends' dad after a student teacher conference with my jackass of a World History teacher who was seemingly a dick on purpose. I could here the argument from working on an assignment from three rooms down. The phone rang for a few seconds before a tense voice replied.

    "Hello? Who is this?"

    He sounded worried, and given that by now he had probably heard about the hit on Winslow, I didn't have to guess why.

    "Hello Mr. Hebert, you may call me the Commander. I currently have your daughter."

    Before I could continue, the man started speaking. He sounded incandescent.

    "If you hurt one hair upon her head I will hunt you down and kill you myself."

    Holy shit I knew he had a temper but not like this.

    "Harm her? I just rescued her from what was in effect a biohazard containment unit. Also she's a parahuman now."

    That ended his growing tirade quite well, I think.

    "What? Biohazards? Parahuman? What are you talking about?"

    "Well Mr. Hebert, I came to winslow after I noticed a ping on one of my sensors consistent with someone gaining powers. I went to investigate, found her shoved in her locker, which had been filled with used pads and tampons that seemed to have been there for at least a week, and covered in bugs. The bugs happened to be moving in an unusual manner, so I checked her brain, and did find an active Corona Pollentia, indicating that your daughter has powers. I then looked through her emails, having hacked into many major companies a few days ago, and noticed the names of those who had likely done this, one Madison Clements, one Sophia Hess, and One Emma Barnes. I then went through the rest of the schools and gave them an adequate warning."

    "Did you just say Emma Barnes? Was she redheaded?" And there is the rage again.

    "Yes, I did. I will be keeping Taylor under observation until she is in a state in which she is fit to go home. You have my word she will not be harmed. I will also attempt to help her gain control over her powers, and then keep tabs on her health until she is in a healthy weight range for someone of her age, height and body type, because it doesn't look like she is anywhere near 'fit.' Also, if the school offers hush money for her treatment, which it may not due to my intervention, decline and bring this to court. I have enough money to finance you. Have a good day."

    And then I hung up. And sighed contentedly. Canon is officially shot to hell.
     
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    • Chapter Twenty Three: And thus begins the true demise of the stations of canon
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    • Since I don't have anything really planned for the next few hours, besides chuckling at the hacked camera feed of the Protectorate as they ran around trying to find me and failing utterly, I decided to really get into the tinkertech I looted.

    To start, I looked over some of Hero's prototypes. His power was apparently a variation on the Golden Fuckoff Beam (now abbreviated GFB), and thus he could have created some obscenely powerful weapons had he not been Siberian'd before we started building the theoretical "big guns."

    However, there was still quite a bit of his stuff that was intact, and Dragon had access to it. Through my interference, I did as well. And since one of the least complete prototypes worked along the same principles, I could, in theory, after a few subjective months or years, replicate Scion's "Destroy Britain from Los Angeles," attack, though from what the preliminary data suggested, required a monstrous amount of power, similar to what an actual, full sized annihilaser used per shot, for a drastically less powerful attack.

    The GFB seemed to work through modulating quantum states like spin and quark charge (somehow) to a neutral variety that didn't exist anywhere else in nature or physics (somehow), and was yet obedient to some of the highest physical laws known to the Progenitors, with what it didn't probably having some exception by some math thing or another that would give me even more difficulty explaining, since said laws that it was violating would already take years to explain and leave Hawking staring at me in confusion. Well, more than he already is, without the ability to move his muscles at all.

    Anyway, the modulation thing just reduced whatever was in its way to a little puff of quantum strings or whatever made up matter, thus rendering it destroyed. The only issues with this that would prevent me from replacing all of my annihilaser based tech was the absurd power investment, comparatively limited range, and the fact you could "only" destroy small continents with it. At smaller scales, the power usage was much lower, and it doesn't effect the emitter through another set of technology (somehow), so using it as a personal weapon wasn't out of the question if I could change the color to a nice indigo or something.

    Entities were such bullshit. When you can make a Genre-Savvy Commander go "wait, what?" you deserve that title.

    I sifted through tons over other technology, most of which was relatively uninteresting or boring, with the teleportation stuff being an exception. Give it a few dozen runs through the old commander upgrade cycle and I could have a working Alcubierre Drive with the space folding versions. Other than that and some thermodynamics stuff (beams dozens of degrees kelvin below absolute zero I don't even), I had everything so far that was useful. Actual assimilation can occur once I have Dascides' massive processing power to use to reduce it to what I need and add it into existing stuff for the fun that would occur if I could fuse the annihilaser and the GFB.

    Oh, Taylor was stirring. Seems her dad's incessant calling had woken her up. It had been about a week or two. I hadn't been paying attention, merely looking over my loot and checking up on the cape scene. And she was falling back asleep. Huh. Seemed like the calming meds hadn't let her wake up yet. She certainly would need them after that ordeal.

    Now to shitpost PHO, like all good people who end up in Worm should.
    =====================================================================

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    ■​
    ♦Topic: New Cape in the Bay Injures Three, Kidnaps One
    In: Boards ► America ► Brockton Bay ► News
    bagrat     (Original Poster) (The Guy In The Know) (Veteran Member)
    Posted on January 4, 2011:
    So some cape, who I would like to point out matches no known capes anywhere, and possesses what seemed to be high quality tinker armor, broke three seemingly random girls' bones in various parts of their body, and apparantly kidnapped a fourth while spouting lines about justice or something.

    Frankly, I think Brockton has gone of the deep end now.
    (Showing Page 15 of 15)

    ► nuclear
    Replied on January 4, 2011:
    So to sum up the thread for those just joining us, nobody has any idea what the fuck is going on, why this bastard attacked, what in theory their powers are, and @XxVoid CowboyxX is continuing his streak of contributing almost nothing to the boards.

    ► Plebeian
    Replied on January 4, 2011:
    So I just found out the girl Plague doctor guy kidnapped was my bosses' daughter, and calls himself Commander. And that he is an "asshole of astronomical proportions."

    Have at this PHO

    ► AllYourBase (totally not suspicious)
    Replied on January 4, 2011:
    I happen to think he sounds golly swell, and probably had every right and reason to beat up those girls. I also heard for a fact the girl "kidnapped was covered in biological waste.
    [USER HAS RECEIVED AN INFRACTION FOR THIS POST]
    [LOL NEVER MIND]

    ► Tin Mother
    Replied on January 4, 2011:
    While the girls may or may not have deserved it is irrelevant, a cape commited a seemingly unprovoked attack against civilians. Have an infraction

    edit: What the fuck.

    ► AllYourBase (SMUG INTENSIFIES)
    Replied on January 4, 2011:
    All Your Bases Are Belong To Me.

    ► WakkaWakkaWakka (Veteran Member)
    Replied on January 4, 2011:
    I actually have no idea what the fuck that was. Someone apparently is now able to do what nobody else has done and beaten a mod. I'm going to go consider implications for a bit.
    ​
    End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 13, 14, 15
    I could tell this whole universe was going to be hilarious for me.

    =====================================================================

    And there she goes with the waking up. I think that she's good to speak, but I'll give her some time to orient herself first.

    =====================================================================

    The first thing Taylor noticed when she returned to lucidity was how her throat felt like something made of sandpaper had used it as a freeway. It was most certainly not the most pleasant feeling she had ever felt.

    The next thing she noticed was that she wasn't in the locker. The locker wasn't this soft, and didn't smell of freshly washed sheets and fragrance. She didn't particularly want to think about what it smelled like.

    The third thing was a voice.

    "Ah. You are awake. About time."

    Groaning, she pushed herself off the bed a little bit, and opened her eyes to the sight of a glass filled with water being offered. She grabbed it, and brought it to her lips and slumped as the cool liquid relieved the horrible feeling in her throat. The voice waited for her to finish, and as she looked over, she nearly spit out the water remaining in her mouth as she saw someone who was very obviously a cape.

    "You've been out for a bit now. Only a little over a week since I rescued you, which in all honesty isn't that bad for what happened. Since I've had you here long enough, as soon as you are fit to travel I'll be sending you home."

    He apparently didn't notice her freakout. Which honestly wasn't all that surprising. Afterall, none of her teachers seemed to notice that she was being bullied constantly, did they? And that had been going on for years, what were the chances a cape who obviously had better things to be doing than talking to someone like her would be paying attention?

    "Well, you seem to take being effectively kidnapped well. Also you have powers now."

    This time she actually did spit out her drink. She couldn't tell what the man was thinking behind the mask.

    Then he started to laugh. It wasn't a normal laugh. Taylor didn't know what she could describe it, except maybe a hyena or a horror movie villain. He stopped a few minutes later.

    "Yeah, that must be fairly surprising isn't it? Yeah, you are a cape. I can tell by how I saw you moving bugs earlier. Try it out when you get home. But first, you have to change, since your old clothing was pretty gross. So I burned it. The replacement is on the bed. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go burn down a drug house or something. I trust you to not mess with anything, since most of the stuff I leave around can and will reduce you to a small pile of ashes. Later!"


    And then he left the room. And Taylor was very confused.

    Shrugging, she went to put on the clothes.

    =====================================================================

    Well that's taken care of. I'll send her back home soon, I've sat on my ass enough over the past few decades. It's time to do something stupid. Which I can get away with because I'm at the point where only a small percentage of what exists can threaten me.

    A drug house will be a good place to start, ROB knows that there are enough of them. I'll try to find one run by the shitlers, since the ABB doesn't offend me on the same level as the Empire does, and the Merchants quite honestly seemed like a lesser evil in comparison.

    I also wanted them to already in disarray before I cut them off from their funds, since all I had done previously was transfer them to me.

    Now to go hunting for skinheads. I'll need weapons though. Should try to go for less advanced stuff to maintain the "new tinker" masquerade. A maser should do quite nicely for the crudeness aspect, with enough power behind it that it works for my needs. What else...a set of plasma pistols for my sidearms, in both senses of the term, a gladius-esque sword with a means of electrifying the edge will do for any capes getting in my face, and a bunch of grenades to blow it up. This seems like enough weaponry for now, though adding more later on to further the image of me improving my techbase will be a thing that happens.

    This also helps me get a recruitment offer for Coil, because at this point I've managed to narrow it down to a good forty places around the city that he could be hiding, and I don't want to tip any hands yet.

    Speaking of Coil, I'll need to figure out if I can get a Locust sized nanobot through the wormhole or whatever that connects the shard to the brain. Gives me a way to deal with most capes, especially Echidna and Crawler, though I'm tempted to just through the latter into the sun and see what happens. Or annihilasers. Or GFB. Or something else. Simply depriving him of his powers is much less satisfying than seeing him try and fail to adapt to things that would give the non-ripoff 682 pause until it used it to breakout and kill a few dozen researches.

    Speaking of 682, I really don't want to go to the SCP verse. Ever. That place scares me.

    And back to depriving Nazis of their drugs. I got pretty sidetracked there.

    =====================================================================

    I've found one. It isn't that hard when you can detect single molecules of cocaine, heroin, LSD, or any of the half dozen other illegal substances being bandied around. And what do you know, weed does have a really distinctive scent. Guess all of those people back in high school weren't lying.

    In actuality, while it was somewhat easy to find the area where a storehouse or production facility was, finding a specific building was fairly difficult, given the sheer amount of drugs being moved around in this city. I guess I'll have to fix that when I take it over.

    And now to enter the building. Dynamically. And what do you know, a skylight! This is much easier with a skylight. I don't have to weaken a half ton of concrete and risk flatting some dude.

    Allez-Oup!

    And stick the landing, in the middle of a bunch of wide-eyed skinheads holding bags of powder.

    "Criminal scum, halt this illicit activity at once, or I will be forced to remove you from existance. You have five seconds to comply."

    They ran. None of them seemed willing to try to shoot the cape in very obvious armor. I could practically hear the Scooby-Doo noises.

    That was a lot better than I thought it would be. Now to burn it to the ground.

    =====================================================================

    Thirty minutes later, and I'm sitting in a lawn chair across the street, sipping lemonade through a straw that connects to the end of my beak, all while watching the blazing inferno right in front of me.

    It was beautiful to say the least, as months or years of work keeping this place concealed went up in the acrid smoke pouring into the winter sky. I can hear the sirens of approaching firefighters, who are coming for a pretty obvious reason, namely the fact that the drug house is on fire.

    I should probably get going, Taylor's had an hour to get ready and I think that that is long enough for her to get dressed and everything.

    Shame, it is a really nice fire. Sad they have to put it out instead of just letting it burn to ashes. I made sure enough evidence of this being a drug house around for the police to get involved remains, in addition to my careful fire building so it wouldn't burn down any other buildings.

    Time to go.

    =====================================================================

    "Taylor, I'm back, time for you to get out of here."

    She jumped, likely not expecting me to teleport behind her to tell her that. She was dressed, luckily, and seemed to be brushing her hair.

    I never understood the appeal of really long hair. I had had it halfway down my neck and it was a pain to take care of, I can't imagine what kind of effort goes into hair that you can sit on.

    As she turned, I teleported her to right outside her house with some stuff, like money and terrariums full of spiders I had prepared outside her range and stuff.

    Now that the Taylor situation is taken care of, preferably with a bit less angst than canon, I can get back to tech experimentation and making life a living hell for the gangs.

    =====================================================================

    The first thing Taylor thought once she had gotten the weird feeling of having several hundred other sensory inputs inserted into her brain, and knocking on the door to let her dad know she was fine and home, was pretty simple, and expectable for someone in her situation.

    "What the hell is my life right now?"
     
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    • Chapter Twenty Four: Setup, really.
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    • Bleh. This took entirely too long, and may be somewhat disjointed as a result. I appreciate anyone bringing up flow issues and the like.

    =====================================================================

    Knocking over drug houses is fun. All you need is a dynamic entry, the ability to laugh off bullets, bravado, and what all the idiots you're screwing with have to assume are cajones big enough to zorb in just in case the capes show up. If you have those, which I do, then the storehouses full of hundreds of thousands of dollars in brain-altering chemicals might as well be a house of cards, one blow from caving in.

    I didn't have to deal with any capes except Alabaster once. I threw him through a wall and proceeded to evacuate the premises before he could get up and be obnoxious.

    I think that collectively, I had cost the ABB, E88, and Merchants somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight hundred million dollars in illicit materials. I had also hit somewhere between sixty eight and seventy three percent of their safe houses, and was factoring drugs and slaves into that figure, with the slaves costing significantly more per unit than either of the other two.

    That pissed me off. So I dealt with it in a manner I felt people would understand: mass arson, tremendous amounts of property damage, some removing chaff, and a whole lot of statements that were really cheesy. Since I made quite a few, here is the highlights reel:

    "Knock Knock. Who's there? Justice. Justice who? [Meaty thwack as empire member loses a few teeth]"

    "Did someone order a pizza of scum removal with extra righteousness?"

    "I am the Law! [sound of maser blowing random Merchant's hand off. Sounds of me cursing and muttering that I was sorry.]
    "I'd make a "noodle bowl of justice" joke or something, but it would be a little racist."

    "Sieg Heil? More like Sieg..uh..Fail! Fucking sue me, I'm bad at these."

    And so on and so forth. I'm fairly sure everyone hated me at this point. Except maybe Coil, who was my current target.

    My plan was simple:

    1: attract the scumbag's attention via tinker stuff
    2: be less than careful with my avatar's identity
    3: get offered a job and refuse
    4; get kidnapped
    5: ???????
    6: Profit


    And I had fulfilled the first two, by walking out to buy food items and stuff from pretty much the same abandoned building I had set up shop in. Well, shop as in a workbench, an armor stand, a cot, a mini fridge, and some other stuff so that anyone breaking in would believe I lived there.

    I just had to wait, because an unaligned tinker with a vendetta against the gangs would be useful to him, and I made sure to not be seen except as glimpses at a distance. Also I hacked his stuff and saw his notes on me. Even the physical ones. Progenitor nanobots are awesome.

    But yeah, he was definitely going to bite. What he didn't realise was that this was roughly analogous to a bristlemouth seeing the lure of an anglerfish. He was too focussed on the prize to notice the massive, backwards curving teeth about to seal him in.\

    As I continued hitting gang strongholds, I also got started on what I had dubbed the Big Surprise, because an Endbringer would be coming here eventually. I wanted to be prepared.

    But no sense in talking about something that wouldn't be relevant until later, and was untested and wouldn't be tested until I had an acceptable target.

    =====================================================================

    Ah yes. Waiting, my old enemy. How I love to leave you for the vices of Excitement.

    I had been walking back on a snack run, since I had remembered how great eating was, and was approached by a couple of large, armed men, who offered me a job.

    I then proceeded to ask who I was working for. They didn't tell me, and I walked off.

    I was then shot. By a small caliber pistol, which did somewhere between "jack" and "shit.' I think he was going for an incapacitation since it was at my gut, so I can tell someone, who I'm assuming is Coil, wants me.

    I proceeded to break their collar bones, and walk away. Which brings me to now, where I'm looking through Coil's files on contingencies. He has "Spacebattles competence," numbers of them. Like, seriously dude. Why do you have a file for if Behemoth joins the Slaughterhouse 9?

    Though with what Slash did in canon, that isn't quite as unrealistic as it sounds.

    I'll need to start planning for them. I wonder if I should be proactive?

    Food for thought when I don't have an asshole to smash.

    …

    Phrasing, Glitch. Phrasing.

    Anyway, Coil. All I have to do is be lax about secret identity stuff in an area I can be ambushed.. I can tell from the files he would like me on his side. Afterall, I appear to be a fairly powerful tinker, who loathes gangs, and has all sorts of goodies. I'm fairly sure the only reason I haven't had any attempts made to strongarm me, other than this one, is because I'm never around by the time anyone gets to one of the buildings I've destroyed.

    Fairly sure this is pissing off the Protectorate but who gives a shit?

    Eh, back to waiting.

    =====================================================================

    And I have rag to my face. It smells awful, but I comply with the passing out. Not too difficult, I have a thing on how chloroform actually works, so I know not to just faint. Now for them to lead me back to their base.

    The goon has decided to put a sack over my head. I wonder if he gets payed extra for cliches?


    The van started rolling off, leading me towards what I assumed was the base. Almost show time.

    Now to decide if I should mock Coil before I turn incapacitate him. Then turn him over to the proper authorities, because I am a perfectly law abiding, morally upright killbot that dutifully follows the proper channels of justice. When it amuses me of course. Otherwise I just do what I want.

    Oh we're here. I guess I was thinking for longer than I intended. I don't think I'll mock him, just unmask him in front of some people, namely Piggot, and dump all of his files into the internet.

    Hmm...I almost forgot the stupid timeline thing. He probably has a backup right now. I guess I'll play along for a bit. Stoke his ego, make it seem like he won, that sort of stuff. He had a pretty large one, if what I remember from canon was right. Or was that Kaiser? Meh, flattery never hurts anyone unless you want them hurt.

    I'm being dragged out of the van, and thus decide a little harmless trolling is in order. I fill quite a few places with osmium, so I now weigh somewhere around three hundred fifteen kilograms. The dude drops me on his foot and swears, quite profusely.

    I'm laughing on the inside.

    "The fuck did this guy eat? He has to weigh like six hundred pounds!"

    "Gngh. Yeah, he;s heavy all right. Go get a pallet or something, and let the boss know about this. He isn't all that fond of delays, you know."

    "Yeah, I'm on my way. If you can, hide the dude in case someone comes looking around here."

    The first guy is walking in through a little hidden door thing, just like I would have in my lair, if I have one.

    He comes back about five minutes later with a trolley thing. Loading takes about five minutes of sweating, grunting, swearing, three broken toes, and me trying not to laugh as they try to set me on top of the thing.

    I'm brought into a small room, where I'm hefted into a chair and strapped down. It's kind of adorable that they think that the restraints can hold me should I decide to get out.

    I wait there for a bit, then proceed to pretend I come to, slowly, blearily blink the avatar's eyes, looking around in faux confusion. It looks exactly as one would imagine an interrogation room to look, with flat, grey walls lacking any ornamentation except for a heavy door that also lacks everything. Presumably it's openable from the outside only, so that prisoners couldn't escape on their own.

    Coil is keeping me waiting to do this. Standard psychological tactic, make your opponent wait on you so that you are on the upper foot, and have established your control of the situation.

    I would be mildly annoyed had I not been used to waiting six or seven months for things to happen. Goddamn Breach physics.

    In the meantime, I continue digging out a base underneath the nearby, non-aquifered land, setting up factories, extractors, generators and such, and testing some drone things I slapped together with a tertiary thought process while burning some Nazi product to skunky ashes.

    Splitting off yet another thread, I go over my plans for Coil. While my endgame is in the air, I know I can fake whatever symptoms Mr. Pfizer or Pinkerton or Pepper or whatever would attempt to inflict via narcotics. I debated melting something through fabricating acid, but decided "accidentally" killing an underling was a good way to get a beating delivered to this form, which was still in nearly mint condition, which I wanted to preserve until I didn't need to pretend to be weaker than I was to present a lure. Soon I'll be able to go all out and purge the everywhere of the idiots, asshats, dickwads, and egomaniacs that controlled the gangs and many government organizations, and get to the fixing of shit.

    Maybe try to actually take over the world in there at some point. I'll probably deliberately fail, but it would be amusing.

    Oh! Lord snake douche is entering the room. Time for things to be amusing.

    "I'm sure you are wondering why you have been brought here," Crabst, he sounds like a pretentious asswipe. How nobody realized he was evil is beyond me.

    "I'm quite aware of the fact you want me for my powers, Coil. Also, I'm fairly sure you happen to be a pedophile, so that may have factored in as well."

    He sputtered, all of his momentum having been dashed due to my genius. I could just tell this was going to be fun. For me, anyway
     
    Last edited:
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    • Chapter Twenty Five: Coil don't ever cry
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    • So I'm pretending to be hooked on the adorable mixture of chemicals their giving me. I find it hilarious they think this actually would do anything to me, though it might be annoying if I went for a standard human physiology instead of something reminiscent of a T-850 covered in mildly toxic nanomachine filled meat.

    In any case, while pretending to be addicted, I had fun trolling Coil.

    =====================================================================

    "So I've gotten the set of armor started. Can I have the drugs now?
    Coil grimaced. His first real acquisition was proving to be a tremendous pain in his ass. Not only did the boy laugh off all of his threats until he was forcibly injected with the cocktail, but he continually disrespected Coil, and took physical abuse with a mere chuckle.

    He also required materials that were frankly almost out of Coil's price range to do the work he wanted. It was getting frustrating, having to pay for materials that frequently wound up costing him tens of thousands.

    Given the armor withstanding a direct hit from several, consecutive RPG rounds, he was willing to let that slide.

    "Soon. How long will the armor take to be usable?"

    "To the point when we can begin calibrating it to your nervous system? Six months."

    Coil would have spat anything he had been drinking anything out had he actually had anything in his mouth. Instead, he merely made a choking noise, which the insolent tinker chuckled at.

    "Now, to the point where you can actually wear it without being restrained for fear of ripping limbs off, or where it will stop anything other than a paintball? Probably a year and four respectively."

    Coil made the choking noise again.

    "Is there a way you can make it faster, per chance?"

    The tinker smirked again. "Sure, if you want to every now and then have literally crippling feedback, or have a piece of armor fail at the exact wrong time you bump into a desk and perforate your everything, I can get it done in about six months. It's a bit hard to run a criminal underground when dead, though. Now give me the fucking drugs."

    Coil sighed. He had honestly bitten off more than he could chew.

    =====================================================================

    Man is he gullible. I'd done stuff like that with everything. Man wants new tinker tech guns? Sure, just buy me some of the few materials I hadn't been able to acquire via Dragon, give me a few months, and I'll have one. Then I can replicate them, slowly. Also, be sure to give every one of your men this safety training, because it is liable to go off wrong and blow some heads off.

    He tried to take my armor, but I told him it may kill him since it couldn't decalibrate.

    What other stuff did I do...Oh yeah, I jury rigged something to detect him splitting the timeline. Couldn't tell what was happening on the flipside, but it would suffice for now.

    All while this was happening, he was fuming at my build speeds, so I told him my success was sticking with some armor, a maser made of cannibalised microwaves, and a teleporter that took too long to make to be practical.


    To make all this phony crap, I used normal nanobots, but coming from a rig roughly the size of a Cetus-class's main turret, and fabricating at an extremely slow rate.

    I referred to how I managed to build it with the following, because he didn't believe me when he saw the speeds I built stuff with.

    "Bodily fluids, duct tape, a leaky fission device, and something which I think would create a localised black hole if it got jostled too much. Oh, and a coffee machine. Want an espresso?"

    The look his muscle movements suggested were on his face were something I will put in a shadow box or something. They were too perfect.

    In related news, the room was really fucking creepy. Like goddam, we know you're a pedophile, you don't need peeking slots to watch me sleep. And why all the stereotypically "boy" decorations? I made my opinions on football and monster trucks clear (disliked the first, was ambivalent to the second). I don't want them in my temporary room.

    I was content waiting until I was positive he had split the timeline again. Hiring Circus, I think. I didn't really care, because at that point, I struck.

    =====================================================================

    "Hey bossman, got something to tell you."

    Coil reached for the advil. Anything involving "The Commander" was a headache waiting to happen.

    "What is it? I'm a little busy right now, can it wait?"

    "Nope! Gotta come right this second. I'll tell you what it is soon. What exactly it is happens to be a surprise though."

    He got off of his custom swivel chair, and walked to follow the giant of a teenager out. Seriously, Coil was six four, and barely came up to the kid's nose.

    "So a little backstory to this thing. A while back, I was out with my friend Mikey. We were heading to this kid Kevin's house on Friday, since he just got the new Lifetime Basketball hoop. Kevin was going to ref a game of two on two between us and our rivals Thomas and Big Red. Huh, isn't the captain of your mercs called Red? What a coincidence."

    "Is this relevant in any way whatsoever or are you just wasting time?" Coil could feel his patience fraying as they walked through his mostly complete base.

    "Hold on, I'm getting to that. So, we were playing for this little trophy made out of tinfoil and glitter, made in the shape of the NBA trophy. It was silly, but at the time we all thought it was the shit. So, we came ready to play and win then bring the trophy home that day. Red says we have no chance to beat him and Thomas, because he was in the way and neither of us could get to the hoop. So we started. I passed the ball to Mikey, who juked out of the way and went straight down the middle. He bounced it off the glass while still a good ten feet away, and I thought he was a parahuman for a bit there from his speed…"

    "Can you get to the fucking point already?" Coil was rapidly losing his patience, and didn't notice the beginnings of a cruel smirk play on the young man's face before being repressed as he stopped in the main room.

    "Why certainly. He caught the ball in mid air and he dunked that sucker right on Thomas's head, where he promptly fell over and started crying. Big Red looked at me and Mikey and asked us something."

    Now the smirk was a full on sneer, as the young tinker looked down at Coil, malicious intent visible on his face. He leaned in and whispered, in a voice filled with hate. The alarms started blaring from the attack that had just started.

    "Why is Coil crying? Because he just got dunked on."

    That was when the four meter tall mechanical figures fell through the roof and started dispatching mercenaries left and right.

    He young man who had played him, despite his contingencies, was still talking.

    "I ain't even lyin, yo he just got dunked on. Yep, yep. He was standing in my way, so I screwed up all his plans, and I dunked it on his face."

    Coil's last sight as he was hit by a large object in the back of his head was the tinker he had underestimated giving him the finger.

    =======

    Emily Piggot's job was not the most pleasant one given the recent emergence of a new parahuman, who vindicated her by blowing up millions of dollars in property.
    Granted, they were all drug houses, and the fires didn't spread much if at all, but it was still a cape working against the legal system, and she couldn't abide by that.

    So the surprise when she came into her office at early because of suspected parahuman activity demolishing the better part of a city block, and found a tall man in a snake themed costume that matched Coil's description hanging from a rope tied around his ankles on the outside of her window only heightened when she saw the note.

    "So guy is a Parahuman, a traitor, a control freak, arrogant, and a pedophile at the same time! I get BINGO, right? Also, he's Thomas Calvert, and his mask is going to fall off if he moves at all to prove it, so you might as well get it over with. I'd shoot him, but you're against that so I recommend a fast track to the bird cage. The city block was me destroying his base, sorry about that. Later!
    -The Commander."

    She could tell her life was only going to get more complicated from here.
     
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    • Chapter Twenty Six: breaking news- people other than me have plans.
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    • Thanks to @ltmauve and @Ramble for beta stuff. I'll be taking a hiatus after this to attempt to establish a buffer of chapters. Once I start posting again, I expect to have a roughly Tuesday and either Friday or Saturday publishing schedule. Thanks for reading/

    =====================================================================

    So...I have probably another week I can wait before going in fast and loud. I'll probably use it to build some stuff to test out against the Endbringers. I have, what, twenty or so to kill, once they all wake up? Probably not going to be that hard, once I get a working solution.

    I've probably just jinxed myself. I'm sure that they figuring out the how to kill part will take forever.

    Eh, that's a bridge to burn when I get to it.

    What can I do for now…I could probably spy on monitor all of the people I give shits about.

    Who to start with...how about everyone's favorite idiot.

    =====================================================================

    Saint wondered if he had ever had a chance. He knew that once the second AI showed up it was over. He accepted that. From the little bits he could see of its' code, he could almost feel the sheer enormity of it, dwarfing Dragon many times over. Losing to a vastly superior foe was acceptable to him. Afterall, nobody would expect an old Spanish galleon to be able to hurt a battleship, right?

    Against Dragon, however? He had had hundreds of chances where he would be justified taking it out. When it nearly slipped the shackles, when it nearly found him, and dozens of others. But he hadn't. And who knew how long until some minor, unimportant shackle failed, like the ones on reboot times or processing allocation? He would ignore them, since they would only be useful to mankind if the damned thing managed to figure out how to kill an Endbringer.
    Then, it would lead to another few weakening, which would weaken others, and he wouldn't notice because he couldn't constantly monitor all of the processes. He was only human, after all.

    Then poof, they all fail, and he's stuck unable to kill the program since Ascalon would be blocked instantly if it could view it and what it was able to do.

    It was only a matter of time. And so he knew he was going to lose no matter what he did.

    Saint turned back to the corner of the cell he was in. It hadn't really been in doubt what, exactly, was going to happen to him once he was caught. He wasn't a parahuman, so the Cage was out. But a regular Supermax prison? Perfectly reasonable to any jury since once the evidence he was planning on killing one of the world's best heroes came out he was a goner. No questions about him never seeing the light of day again.

    If he had one regret, it was that he never would be able to find out just where the new AI had come from, and what the hell it actually was.

    On the other hand, he would probably not like the answer to either of those questions.

    With a sigh, he turned back to the ceiling, and resumed his silent watch on the single crack that adorned it.

    ========================================================================

    Well that was boring. He was just sitting and staring off into space, probably being all introspective and deep and stuff. I can't watch that for my amusement! I need someone who actually displays emotion in a way I can see.

    Maybe Piggot?

    ========================================================================

    Emily Piggot had been having what was probably the most packed week in her entire career. Calls almost like clockwork in their regularity, Costa-Brown calling every three hours, down to the minute, asking for reports on the parahuman not even the freaks at PHO had managed to get a picture of, and had at the same time caused nearly twenty million dollars of property damage.

    Granted, most were drug houses from the various gangs that plagued her city, but that didn't stop the fact that a parahuman who considered themselves above the law was never a good sign for anyone, especially if said parahuman was as dangerous as it seemed like the so called "Commander" was. The amount of partially severed limbs in some of those scenes was somewhat nightmarish, if you didn't happen to be one of the very few people who had survived Elisburg.

    "Ugh, this is a PR disaster," the Director muttered quietly to herself. The headlines were already asking why the Protectorate hadn't managed to catch the damned vigilante, and the ones that weren't were calling for either her resignation or her head. Nothing about her years of hard work and dedication. Nothing about how hard it was to maintain even the most tenuous of stalemates with the villains that outnumbered her few non-Ward heroes two to one. And certainly nothing on the fact the asshole was harder to track down than he had any right to be.

    Piggot sighed and checked her schedule. What did she have next....Panacea was due in about fifteen minutes to deal with Stalker. She supposed she should be there. Afterall, the Wards were in her jurisdiction, so it was her duty to take care of the brats.

    ===

    Thirteen minutes later she stood in a small room with Panacea for debrief. She needed to know what exactly the girl had done, because if she didn't, there would be another hour of paperwork to do.

    "First, I went for the one around the Trachea, since it would make getting the one around her spinal cord of easier, since she wouldn't be gasping for air. I had to reroute her entire respiratory tract through the upper portion of the esophagus, so she could breath properly. I then sealed the trachea off, and stopped all blood flow through the area so she didn't bleed out. After that, I more or less split her neck in half horizontally so I could slip the ring off, which involved peeling the surrounding tissues off. I removed it, reattached the neck halves, fixed the blood flow, and then reopened the trachea and undid the esophagus."

    Piggot nodded, having written it all down. Panacea didn't look happy to be there, so she resolved to make it quick after the debrief finished, because, to be honest, Piggot didn't like spending time with parahumans.

    "And the spine? How did you do that?"

    "I had to peel a number of neurons out of place and fix them behind the ring, then reconnect them to all vital functions. I quickly disconnected the rest of the nerves in her neck, so that she wouldn't have any arrhythmia, which could prove problematic for removing the ring. After that, it was much the same, open her neck, pull the ring out, close it back up, and repair alterations. Nothing other than that, though she looked extremely uncomfortable during it."

    "I see. Do you have anything for Shadow Stalker to do before returning to patrol?"

    "Tell her to get a day of bedrest before doing anything to work out any misaligned nerves, I've made them able to reconnect themselves temporarily, if signals fire down the wrong channels. She may be a bit clumsy for a day or two. After that, she needs to eat large portions of something with lots of protein and some fats to restore anything that was somewhat damaged, which there shouldn't be, and to replace the fat stores used as energy. That's it."

    "Thank you for your time; the Protectorate, Wards, and PRT owe a debt to you, and would love to be able to repay it. You may leave."

    "Bye."

    And with that, Panacea left.

    Emily still had the paperwork she didn't want to do, and it was only ten

    It was going to be a long day.

    =====================================================================

    So, Sophia got healed, which means as soon as she is able to, she's coming after me. I am not worried. I'll have to think of something special for her, to teach her once and for all to make smart decisions about who you fuck with.

    It'll have to be severe and probably permanent if I want it to stick.

    =====================================================================

    Unbeknownst (or maybe too insignificant for him to notice) to the individual known by the natives as Commander, a meeting at a small sports bar in the seedier part of town was commencing.

    Sitting at the table were the leaders of most of the Parahuman groups, excepting the Protectorate and New Wave of course, in Brockton Bay. The aforementioned meeting was over the aforementioned Commander. Of the major gangs, Lung and Kaiser were being...maybe not     polite, per se, but not trying to murder each other, which was always nice when someone had managed to wreck so much of your infrastructure and the tension was high enough to cut with a stick of butter.

    Kaiser spoke first, "So, as you all know, everything less than legal that we do has been targeted by this asshole. Drugs, money, weapons, and, in the case of the less savory members of this meeting's guest list , slaves or 'recruits,' and this is bad for everyone."

    The shirtless man with the Dragon tattoos nodded in agreement. As much as he hated that.

    "I agree with you, Kaiser. This person must be taught their place. The problem is with finding them. They never stick around long enough to mobilize a response, they purposely avoid traps and locations with capes in them, they don't seem to have a centralized base of operations, and from what we saw in the Snake's den, they hit hard enough that nobody except your psychos will want to go at them."

    Kaiser's gauntleted fingers left a gouge in the table during this speech. He was about to retort back at the leader of the Azn Bad Boys when the little blonde girl in the purple spandex spoke up.

    "I've been able to go through Coil's notes on him, and if any attack is going to be planned, you'd probably want to know what I got from them, and what I've figured out on my own. "

    She slid the files across the table to them two men, and then casually tossed one to the seething black man everyone had been ignoring due to his only contributions being slurred, curse filled rants at nothing in particular, including the sexuality of Kaiser's mother, Lung's taste in vices, Tattletale's everything, and various other insults until he had a set of blades pressed into his throat via the Empire's leader's power.

    "If you have nothing useful to contribute, shitskin, then kindly shut the fuck up. The owners of this establishment are good people for letting us use this bar as a meeting place, and while I am not opposed to killing you here and now, I'd hate to stain their floors with your impure blood."

    Skidmark shut up, because the threat of having what was effectively a sword enter his various important neck tubes wasn't a pleasant one. He'd seen what happens when his junkies got the bright idea of injecting heroin into their necks, it wasn't pretty.

    "Now that the distraction has been rectified, let's go over the files, and some of my hypothesis," Tattletale said. She was not going to needle people this time, mostly because she didn't want to piss off any of the Empire, who would probably throttle her for associating with Grue, or Lung, who would probably like to kill her for some of the raids the undersiders had done on his territory.

    "From what Coil had, it seems that Commander is a Tinker, with fairly long times to build materials. That's bullshit. From what I can glean from the notes, my own observations, and police and PRT reports, Commander was sandbagging pretty hard. I'm not sure what he could do if he cut loose, but I doubt it would be something that any singular group barring maybe the PRT could deal with."

    Lung gave off a feeling of "seriously doubting that last statement," which was expected of the man who singlehandedly drove off an endbringer.

    The conversation continued, discussing strategies and ways to either evict or kill the interloper.

    Goals were set, glares were exchanged, and the various groups went to go prepare for a war.
     
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    • Chapter Twenty Seven: BFS
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    • Huh. Apparently I'm a target now. The various gangs have been looking for me, probably to kill me.

    I'll have to do something special for them.

    It's going to be capital A Awesome.

    I'll go knock down some of their warehouses to draw them out and actually wait around for them this time.

    =====================================================================

    Kaiser's phone went off about five times in the span of fifteen seconds.

    The first two were panicked call from various higher up unpowered underlings.

    The third was a picture of a man in the hooded plague/gas mask thing standing in front of a burning building. It appeared that image was taken by the pictured individual.

    The fourth was a text from an unknown number that simply said

    Come at me bro. I'll be waiting~
    -Commander

    The fifth was an address.

    The challenge had been issued, and Kaiser knew that if Hookwolf didn't get a chance to fight against the cape he may in fact revolt. God knows that man was barely controlled as it is.

    He probably should let the other groups know. Might be nice to have other people watch while the Empire dismantles this fool, so they can cement their place as the rightful ruling gang of this foul city.

    He made some calls, and prepared to go.

    =====================================================================

    I got of the phone with the Protectorate, having synthesised a voice completely different from my own to call them and let them know that I was hanging around here. They'll be around soon, but I'm hoping the idiots get here first.

    …

    Goddamn, where are these scrubs.


    Fucking finally. It's taken them like thirty minutes to show up. I thought they would be prompt.

    Though I guess when you're a meatbag, this is fairly prompt.

    Now, who's here.
    The Sauron looking dude is probably Kaiser, the twins he has near him are probably Fenja and Menja (or is it Menja and Fenja), the shirtless guy is probably Stormtiger, Tattletale in the purple spandex, I think I see Regent, who just stiffened, probably from the inhuman "nerve" layout I've used, or my not having a nervous system. Oh, and Hookwolf. The "covering self with knives" should have tipped me off. Also a bunch of other people who I don't care about. I think the one in power armor is Trainwreck

    "Took you bastards long enough. Reich's to meet you, I'm Commander. Now we can get this party started!"

    I pulled the hilt of my newest weapon off of my back, and prepared to start the music.

    "You know, Commander, you could just leave right now and would be saved the unpleasantness of having to get your ass handed to you. Hell, most of the gangs would be happy to have your skills, and you would have all the support you need," Kaiser said. Goddamn he sounds like a douche. Also the twitching when I made the awful joke was great.

    "If you think I'd join you idiots, you must Nazi the signs that I hate every last one of you. Oh, and Fog? If you think that turning into, you know, fog, would help, you obviously didn't notice the environment suit sealed just slightly tighter than the hypothetical offspring between a very religious single Catholic's underwear and Fort Knox. Observation is like the third most useful ability, with omnipotence and the most common superpower being better."

    The twitching was great. I could live off of this shit.

    "Too much talking. Now die!" Hookwolf charged. Kaiser facepalmed. I brought out a newspaper covered cylinder of metal and a squirt bottle.

    "No. Bad Dog. Wait for the best dramatic timing or I'll put you in the fucking kennel, and you won't be let out until this is over. I'm going to fight you. Just be patient."

    And then I picked him up and threw him back at my opponents.

    "Now, if there are no further objections, I've picked a musical accompaniment for this fight, and will start it...now. This is my blade, and it is fight.
    And then I began synthesising the blade. And started swinging.

    =====================================================================

    Armsmaster and a squad of PRT were about a minute out when the obnoxiously loud music started. It prompted him to start going faster. The PRT vans, armed for the massive cape fight they had just received word was brewing, was about a block behind him, so that he and the other capes brought along could try to defuse and arrest before something bad happened. As he rounded the corner in the abandoned industrial district, he heard three things.

    The first was the familiar "shink-shink-whir" of Hookwolf attacking.

    The second was the music reaching a climax, screaming "RULES OF NATURE!"

    The third was the horrific screech of metal on metal as he saw Hookwolf being held back by commander with a...    thing held between them. The sworded man pushed back, knocking Hookwolf off before charging him back and removing a solid thirty percent of his mass in that one blow.

    Armsmaster's eye twitched from the fact Commander decided that that monstrosity was worth building. No efficiency in the design at all. For the same cost, he could have had dozens of more reasonably priced weapons. He didn't even.

    While tearing into the vaguely wolf shaped mass of blades, Commander didn't even notice the other capes converging on him, with the twins already at fifteen feet tall and growing. Then he takes a hand     off the huge blade, grabs a pistol, and shoots the kneecaps of both of them without even looking, appearing to only be moderately inconvenienced by that.

    Where the hell did this guy learn swordplay? It was literally nothing but slashing, hacking, slicing, and parrying via one of the previous three mentioned moves.

    He quickly pulled something out of his pocket, and threw it at Hookwolf, who sparked violently and then disintegrated into a pile of sharp implements.

    "Didn't they teach you not to stick forks into...wait no that metaphor doesn't work. Standing under power lines, maybe. Still doesn't quite work. Unfortunate."

    Was he musing about metaphors during a cape battle?     Why?!?


    With Hookwolf dead, the mad cape turned to the others and charged.

    This had all taken place over about fifteen seconds.

    Armsmaster was...not expecting how this whole thing went down. One of Kaiser's Lieutenants dead, both of the giantesses crippled, probably-no definitely for life, he just cut their legs in half, Regent running, someone he assumed was Tattletale in the back rocking in a fetal position, Trainwreck being turned into scrap by his opponent, who was simply dodging the blows from his hydraulic fists.

    Armsmaster would have already charged in if he and the PRT force hadn't been staring slack jawed at the huge number of capes, and their handy beatdown by a relative unknown.

    And then Kaiser did something that in hindsight was very, very stupid

    =====================================================================

    Oh hey Halbeard's here.

    I'll deal with him in a bit, after fucking up these other bastards.

    Dodge the clumsy blow, parry, slice, jink-

    Hey wait a minute what happened to my head?

    =====================================================================

    Kaiser watched as the top half of Commander's head fell off due to a razor sharp and quickly growing blade appearing out of a nearby building. While it was disappointing that they couldn't recruit the tinker, sometimes it was a necessity to remove threats. As he waited for the corpse to fall over, he instead found himself rusting his metal pants as the head turned towards him.

    "You asshole, I liked that head. Now you're gonna get it."

    And then the partially headless body picked up the piece of its helmet, and the piece of head still in there, put it back on top, and pushed it into the right place.

    Next he went back to beating the piss out of the primarily Empire forces, since Tattletale and Regent were out of the fight, none of the dozen or so independants wanted to tangle with Commander for reasons that were quickly becoming painfully obvious.

    Finally, he ran up a wall with his huge sword, pressed a button, and then front came apart, and something protruded from the hilt.

    As the hilt-thing was activated, and a beam of fire erupted from the front with a "vvvfffffsssss-BANG" as what appeared to be a gigantic railgun fired and detonated against Trainwreck, blasting an arm off with a spray of blood and oil.

    "Kaiser, this round has your name on it."

    Kaiser felt a blow to his torso, noting idly the padded nature of the rounds that had knocked all of the fight out of him in an instant.

    The mad tinker jumped of the building, sword left on top, picked up the Nazi, and performed a perfectly executed German Suplex, almost knocking the armored cape out. The last thing he saw was Commander removing the metal belt he wore, and then his head was filled with a ringing sound as the tinker hit his head with a gauntleted fist.

    =====================================================================

    I walked over to the PRT cordon.

    "I'm not coming into the station. Just letting you all know. Give me five minutes and you can take in the four or so people who aren't dead and Kaiser or Tattletale. I have things I need to work on and I feel even fewer moral issues if the person I'm working with happens to be a Nazi. I'll be out of your hair for a few weeks, okay?"

    I ignored the containment foam, dissolving it with the nanobots inside my suit.

    Then I went to go have a little chat.

    "Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god…"

    Tattletale knew what had gone wrong. She had guessed, correctly, that Commander was sandbagging.

    But she wasn't ready for what happened.

    'Sword weighs several tons, fraction of overall strength. Human biology incapable, synthetic musculature. Synthetic bones as well. Not human. Remote body? No, real body, decentralised mind. Not human.'

    She shut that line of insight down. All it did was make her shake more violently. They should have just left. She could tell he probably would have let most of them go.

    She'd run. She'd let the rest of the Undersiders know to get out of Dodge, but bar that she was done. Coil was dead, she had access to his money, she could go make a new life somewhere far away from this psychopath. As she prepared to get up, she heard the sounds of boots. She could tell who they were from. She very nearly started crying, because she could tell she was going to die.

    "Get up, I'm not gonna kill you. On purpose. You may end up as collateral at some point but that would be an accident. I digress. I want to offer you a job. "

    Barely believing the words, she shakily got to her feet, and looked down, not daring to gaze at the visage she knew stared down at her.

    "W-What do you want?"

    She could practically hear the grin.

    "You have intuition, correct? What would happen if I gave you information to extrapolate from? You'd get an answer. So, I want to be able to call you whenever, wherever, so you can answer my questions. I'll give you fifty thousand per week question."

    "O-Okay. Can I ask you a question?"

    "Shoot."

    "How much are you holding back?"

    He laughed.

    "More than the Endbringers, less than Scion."

    For once, she didn't have a witty retort.

    =====================================================================

    "Well, if anything, we learned he has good taste in music."

    Uber nodded. Rules of Nature was pretty great.

    And appropriate, since they were using the new Cardboard Box of Hiding. To be honest, he was surprised they hadn't made one before.

    From their vantage point, the saw commander walk off, and then vanish in a flash of green light.

    And then, behind them, they heard a voice.

    "Uber and L33T, was it? How much would you like for that box? I'll give a replacement."
     
    Last edited:
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    • Chapter Twenty Eight: Sophia, you're very stupid.
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    • Good news and bad news. Bad news is I will be on a cruise, and won't be able to write anything for the next week due to international data rates and highway robbery prices on WiFi. Good news is you all get a chapter, and I'll be writing up a PRT dossier at some point between now and 4AM, when I have to start getting ready to head to the airport. So, have chapter 28.

    =====================================================================


    So the box I bought. It was perfect. Literally the only reason I noticed it was the fact it hadn't been there when I walked in. It was invisible to anything other than optical. I could use this. I could use this so much. Now to begin improving it and replacing every stealth system I had, barring optical, with it.

    =====================================================================

    Sophia Hess was ready. She had retrieved her good arrows, she had tracked down her quarry (it wasn't hard, he'd just murdered two of the highest people in the Empire after all. She respected that.), and she was in a mood normally reserved for that asshole Grue.

    She also heard on the PHO rumors thread a kill order had been authorized. She didn't really care it hadn't been signed, he may eventually do something bad enough to warrant it. She was being proactive, that's all. After all, there weren't any problems killing people who needed to die, eventually..

    With everything ready, she climbed the fire escape and shifted into her shadowy state.

    The hunt began.

    =====================================================================

    Oh, cool. The shipment of various tinkertech came in. I got an exotic particle synthesizer, which will help get around any of the bullshit "Not actually real types of matter" stuff I'd encounter later on. I'll bring this back to base, and pull them apart then.

    I'll start heading back, nothing else to do, and I might as well get started on Operation: Godslayer. Higher Power knows that it's going to take a long time to build all those Battleplanets. And I could get a bit of work done on the anti-Endbringer weaponry.

    Really looking forward to getting timestop stuff. If I can control the shape and location of the field, I get phenomenal shielding.

    Dragon and Armsy are starting the Nano-thorn stuff, which is nice, but not advanced enough I can finish my coat yet.

    Oh, a music store! I wonder if they have any tubas? I've missed playing these past few decades.

    I'll have to be sure to stop by there soon.

    What else do I need to pick up soon? Probably need a nice chair for command purposes at some point, which is great because I already know exactly which chair I want, I only have to either slay or capture one of the few parahumans in the eastern United States that could threaten my Avatar. Piece of cake.

    Maybe I should learn how to juggle. I alway did want to, I just never had the time for it.

    I've got a few years before Scion gets to go murder happy, once I get rid of Jack and his merry gang of murderhobos.

    =====================================================================

    Oh, how she'd missed this feeling. The wind in her hair, the thrill of hunting down the weak who prey on the weaker (he had just surprised her. He would obviously had died had she been prepared), and the comfortable weight of her razor sharp arrows on her belt.

    It was only a matter of time before she came across the fucker. And when she did…

    He would pay.

    All she really had in reservations was whether or not to kill him immediately, or make him suffer for a bit. Probably the first, you never give a tinker time to prepare. They always seemed to have something up their ass, as her sparring session with Kid Win when he had a taser he could deploy from his hand showed. That had sucked.


    The black eye she had given the next time was appropriate payback in her mind.

    While hunting around, she decided, "Why not whet my appetite on some random Gangers?"

    It wasn't hard to find some ABB punks running around. It also wasn't hard to shoot them.

    Ten minutes and two corpses later, she moved on.

    =====================================================================

    It's a pretty nice night out. Not too cold, not too hot, though neither of those would really bother me. My current body was inorganic, and I received temperature data as data, instead of sensation.

    I'll probably go for a nice long walk soon. I miss that.

    Maybe I should get a dog at some point. I'd have to upgrade them to super awesome robot dog, potentially with lasers, but it would be nice to have a companion at some point.

    On a completely unrelated note, I should check to see how Dragon is doing.

    …

    Given a quick peek at her code, she doesn't seem to have any crippling errors that have popped up, which is a nice display of my coding prowess.

    So, nothing really needs to be done right now. It's honestly kind of nice. I'll probably shitpost on PHO some more later.

    Back to walking.

    =====================================================================

    Shadow Stalker was closing in. The horrible scraping sound of...something was making it easy to zero in on him simply because it was really loud. She would find out what it was, and possibly, if she left him alive long enough, beat him to death with it. That was a pleasant thought. It had been a while since she truly put someone back in there place, since that bitch Hebert hadn't been back to school.

    She'd take the small victories.

    And then she saw him.

    She wouldn't give him any chances, as she saw the dragging was caused by an absolutely massive sword.

    A quick draw and loading of her crossbow, performed with practiced ease, and she aimed.

    Then fired, timing it just right so the bolt would enter the head, start coming out the other side, and return to normal, pinning his head to the wall he was looking at.

    She felt pretty good as she watched the body go limp.

    =====================================================================

    For Fuck's sake what is it with these idiots and my head?

    Well, the automated deceit limpness program worked. Always nice when you have to play dead until you figure out your attacker's identity.

    Through given that I'm held by a crossbow bolt, it isn't very hard to figure out the culprit.
    I had known she was coming for me eventually, but did it have to be now? I still had shit to put away.

    And elsewhere in the multiverse, every version of me was confused for a brief second as they felt a disturbance that quickly passed. Most of them are probably sitting atop thrones made of worn socks, LEGO bricks, and books. Not neat thrones, like they just kind of sat a bunch of crap on top of a particular spot and called it a day.

    I digress. I currently have the idiot gloating at me. It's inconsequential enough I forgot to pay attention.

    =====================================================================

    "This is what you get for challenging the top of the pack, fucker. How does it feel? Oh wait, it doesn't, you're dead."

    If there was any better feeling than reclaiming her place at the top of the food chain, she hadn't found it yet. By killing this asshole, she proved herself the stronger, and, by the transitive property of killing assholes, stronger than the E88's finest. Those skinhead pricks were beneath her.

    "'Don't go after the guy who hurt you' they said. 'He's too strong' they said. 'You need bed rest,' they said. Who was right this time, fuckers?"

    As she did a little victory dance, she failed to notice the arm rise up, grasp the shaft, and gently remove it with a small spurt of blue fluid, which dissolved it into sludge.

    "I probably would have listened to them in your situation. It would prevent what I'm going to do to you from being...maybe not necessary, per se, but cathartic in a way that I've needed for quite a bit."

    She froze at the first word, then turned in rising horror as the dead man rose.

    "I mean, that's the second fucking time someone's tried to go for a head wound today. I would have thought you would know that, and how badly everyone at that kerfuffle lost to me. Did you do ANY research at all, or just run in blind? The second, I thought so. Now, I punish you."

    He picked the still shocked Shadow Stalker and slammed her into a wall. She grunted a little in pain.

    "Now, I've gotten to practice on skinheads who were unconscious. Oh, by the way those goons they found littered in the streets over the past few days were my handiwork, just FYI. I needed to learn about a particular organ of the human body.

    Her eyes widened a small bit when she processed what he had just said.

    "W-Why there?"

    "The brain. Get your mind out of the gutter. It's like you're a goddamn child."

    Her captor sighed angrily.

    "For that, I'm letting you squirm for a bit before explaining."

    She spat at him.

    "Wow, you are really petty, aren't you? First going after a girl who had done literally nothing to you other than not meet some arbitrary fucking standard, now spitting in defiance, what's next? Passive aggressive "put-downs," as my counselor called them? Whiny rants on your MySpace or whatever the fuck you people have? Maybe even a strongly worded letter with like a little piece of snot on the corner so when I open it I have to wash my hands! The horror!"

    Wow this guy was an asshole. If he was strong he would be doing whatever it was he was planning, not bitching at her. So she told him as much.

    "Oh, so you want me to get on with it. Alright. First I'm going to tie you up in a harness full of several hundred thousand volts of power. This can kill a large whale if it goes through the heart."

    His hands glowed with a blue fluid as the harness built itself over her.

    "Next, well, this is going to feel really weird probably. Never tried it out before. Congrats on being my first guinea pig."

    The fluid creeped up into her ears, nose, eyes, and mouth, and left an unpleasant worming sensation as the two capes glared at each other. A few minutes later, the tinker spoke.

    "That's done. I'm de-electrifying the cables, feel free to escape to come at me.

    And then he leaned against the wall. And she tried to shift into her shadow form.

    Emphasis on tried.

    "What the FUCK did you do!?!" she screeched, trying to wriggle her way over so she could try to beat the shit out of the other cape.

    "I just turned off your powers. If you manage to piss me off even further I will do worse."

    If looks could kill, the tinker would be a small pile of ash.

    "Glaring won't get you anywhere. You should be happy! I only made you weaker in one way. I could have completely readjusted your neurotransmitters, giving you crippling anxiety, the feeling of absolute terror at anything related to your previous cape career, any amount of physical weakness, which I may do anyway at some point should you continue to be troublesome little brat."

    Sophia would make him pay. Dearly. She just had to figure out how.

    "I'm going to be dropping you off at the PRT building soon, after I get my package back to the Lair of Doom. I don't particularly care if you see it, so prepare for potato sack carrying."

    And then, to add insult to injury, he did just that, hefting her, the box, and the sword like they were nothing, and continuing on his merry way.

    =====================================================================

    "I will be with you in one second."

    Eric Johnson finished up the email to the HR department over his vacation schedule then turned back to the guest who had just walked in. Then he spit out the sip of water he had just taken, as fuck mothering Commander had walked in.

    "Hi, I'd like to drop one Shadow Stalker off; she was wandering around and shot me through the head. She has the lethal bolts on the bandolier. I'm leaving, so, take care."

    And then he walked off before the panic button could be pressed. What the fuck.

    Eric got out of his booth, went to the break room, and downed several cups of coffee in quick succession. There was no way he was going to be not on something while dealing with this shit
     
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    • PRT Dossier
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    • Name: Commander

    Classification:

    Tinker 8 (unknown specialty) (Subratings:-Blaster 8, Mover 8, Shaker 7, Brute 6, Thinker 6,Striker 5 (Shaker 2, Trump 8 subrating), Stranger 8)

    Disposition: Villain/Vigilante, Independent

    Location: Brockton Bay (unknown base)

    General information: Showed up unannounced in a High school, kidnapped one girl, injured three, and then began systematically destroying gang property, leaving before Gang Parahumans or PRT Teams could respond. Took down the Parahuman known as Coil around one month after the first drug houses were destroyed, and has been taking down Empire and Merchant affiliated capes since.

    Wears a suit of slightly bulky power armor with four arms, and a stylized plague mask shaped mask. Uses a variety of guns and other devices to take down opposition.

    Personality: Shown to be somewhat carefree based on interactions with PRT personnel, friendly, possibly mentally unstable, "trollish"

    Powers:

    Tinker 8 (unknown specialty): Commander uses a wide variety of extremely high tech devices to create his various other abilities. Specifics will be detailed below.

    -Blaster 8: Commander has used a variety of long and mid ranged weapons, including numerous forms of beam weaponry, and projectile weaponry with extreme range. Most of these are quite powerful, but the upper limits of the weapons he can create are unknown

    -Mover 9: Long range personal teleportation, drastically improved agility and speed compared to human baseline, and several vehicles.

    -Shaker 7: Explosives, and other AoE devices, including a lightning grenade which nearly killed Hookwolf.

    -Brute 6: Shrugged off attacks from numerous parahumans, including Menja and Fenja, Hookwolf, and Kaiser. Demonstrated quick regeneration

    -Thinker 6: awareness of a large area, implied ability to predict enemy attacks.

    -Striker 5 (Shaker 2, Trump 8 subrating): Ability to create or alter objects in contact with suit, including organic matter. Trump subrating given due to permanent removal of Shadow Stalker's powers.

    -Stranger 8: Demonstrated ability to hack into electronic data, with minimal evidence, potential ability to alter form.

    Notes: Appeared to purposefully keep technology on lower levels to bait Coil, indicates Commander is smart enough to lay traps. Engage with caution if necssary

    Recommended Strategies : Do not attempt to engage, it is likely he is wherever he is for a purpose not deleterious to the PRT, and will likely escape before any assets powerful enough to neutralize him can be brought to bear. If he engages, break out the heaviest weaponry authorized and aim for the joints, they seem slightly less armored. If weapons with a high area of effect can be brought to bear, use those. Fights will probably result in high collateral anyway.
    anyway.
     
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