So, the Vulture light corvette was a success, as was the sting projectile test and the new, much more advanced graviton emitter propulsion units. I was honestly rather impressed by the accuracy of the stuff, which I assumed would be lower, and I'd merely cripple an endbringer. Would be nice, but I wouldn't currently be getting like everywhere there used to be a Newfoundland or Kyushu dedicated to me right now. That was pretty fucking sweet.
So, now I just have to deal with the cultists.
And here's one of their buildings, and boy, do they look ready for some fucking with.
And I know just how to do so.
=====================================================================
++Transcript of video log from HC3 (Hidden Camera 3) on suspected Fallen Meeting place. For internal PRT circulation only.++
++2034: Presumed Fallen members enter building. Numbers are around 30-40++
++2101: Man (henceforth identified as "Subject") walks up to building. Dressed in Hawaiian shirt over breastplate, tinker made, cargo pants, dark grey-blue greaves styled to resemble combat boots, and aviator shades over plague mask-esque faceplate. Holding weapon, similar to a shotgun, most likely tinker made. Fake parrot on left shoulder. Individual believed to be Brockton Bay based Vigilante/Villain Commander. Subject inspects building for approximately 2 minutes.++
++2103: Subject kicks door open. Subject heard by audio recorders yelling something along the lines of "Muckle darmed cultists! [where] [you] namblies keeping my wee men?" In a fake Scottish accent. Gunfire consistent with the large shotgun is heard.++
++2108: Subject leaves building.++
++2115: PRT arrives at location. Scene is describes as a "bloodbath." Two Fallen capes (see files Fallen: Gamigin and Fallen: Furcas) identified in corpses.++
++2130: PRT officer removes camera. Log ends.++
=====================================================================
Man, that was fun. I need to find Valefor though. Fucker isn't going to be happy, and I would prefer he not cause everyone in a city to kill themselves or something. That'd be messy, and hard to deal with.
Luckily, I have stealth drones to send around. All the places I suspect the Fallen to be hanging out get one, and If I find them, I'll just teleport in killbots until they stop being an issue.
I think this technically counts as religious discrimination, but fuck 'em. Nobody likes cultists, especially ones that worship monsters created by a manbaby's need to be the very best, like no one ever was.
After the Fallen are dealt with, I really don't have anything left to do. I have every villain located, and telling them to all be good under threat of kill bot attack has seemed to be fairly effective.
I guess I have the Gesselschaft to deal with.
Hm…. I know where Fuhrer is, and I still have the Vulture in orbit....
Orbital laser strike initiating in 3, 2, 1.
And there goes the third highest rated master on the planet.
Speaking of masters, I haven't dealt with the people in Bad ol' BB for a while, have I?
Wire money to to the undersiders and other decent people who got screwed over. There we go. Send an email to them.
Good. Now to figure out how to deal with Behemoth and Ziz. And the rest of the theoretical Endbringers.
I'm also done fixing the Siberian's shard. Now it produces power, so it won't just die after a few more decades. Now to spend a few hours objective time figuring out how to modify it to be actually useful to me.
You know what?
I could probably start assimilating Zion at this point. Just take control of all of his shards, replicate them in a way that both allows me to keep them and helps keep all the parahuman goodness here. Just got to start teleporting little blobs of nanobots throughout the various earths, find ones with big meat machines that aren't connected to anybody, connect them to me, copy the ones connected to people, connect the copies to me, then start separating them from each other until Zion as an entity stops existing. I'll also eat Eden shards, and turn those shards back on.
It's easy as pie. Or, for a normal person, probably as easy as designing and then doing the math for a space warship. With a graphing calculator. While on fire.
And now to start. And...started. Now to wait.
God this is going to be boring.
=====================================================================
I just had an idea. I can just turn off the Endbringer shard! Just got to teleport a note over to Eidolon warning him I'm teleporting in in a few minutes. Plenty of warning.
I teleport in and give him the wonderful news. "Hey, Eidolon, are you ready to help deal with the Endbringers?"
And I just dodged a laser. And he has pajamas on I forgot timezones and personal space were things humans had to deal with. I call out an apology and tell him he has ten minutes to get ready.
Back to waiting.
And he's ready. I teleport back in. Then get my head shot off.
"Oh yeah, you people care about your privacy, sorry. But yeah, I'm going to get rid of the Endbringers with your help. All you have to do is let me put this thing up your nose, so I can disable part of your power."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
I hmmmed at him. "Yeah, I never explained that, did I? Could have sworn that my vague hint was enough. Anyway, your powers give you what you need, right? And you have a huge inferiority complex," He made a sound like he was going to protest, but I cut him off, "so your powers gave you opponents that can make you feel good about yourself, and you happened to get a shard that wasn't fully set up thanks to Miss I-could-probably-cure-prostate-cancer-with-a-shotgun, so it handed you another not fully broken in shard, which has multiple sub shards that have lots of energy, and and it decided to express them as giant murderbeasts. So, If I can turn that shard off, or disconnect it, we can get rid of the chances of any more cropping up, and possibly deal with the ones already out. If it doesn't kill Ziz or Behemoth, that sucks, but can be dealt with. So, you ready?"
"If it means saving the world, fine. But how the hell did you find my house.?"
"Oh, that was easy. I have spy drones everywhere."
"Honestly, I'm going to regret asking, but why?"
"So I can collect useful data on things, duh." Huh, I thought that would have been obvious. I shrug.
"Anyway, just snort this up your nose or cram it in your ear or something. I just need to get to your brain and those are the easiest ways to do that that don't involve pouring nanobots on your eyes, which gets quite irritating after a bit, for humans at least."
I hand him a little blob of nanobots, which he looks at dubiously for a few minutes, undoubtedly using some power to make sure it wouldn't cause his head to turn into a kitten or something.
Then he put it in his nose and I laughed using a different avatar sitting in my base because it was all converted to laxatives after they entered his system. and I had the air filled with nanobots a few seconds after I entered the first time.
Gullible humans are wonderful.
"Alright Eidolon, those will be entering your Shard and removing the Endbringer issue shortly, and for being so cooperative I'll even fix your performance concerns while I'm at it. You're welcome."
I then left. Because I am trying to be as inexplicable as possible, and it seems to be working so far.
=====================================================================
I...Really don't have much left to do, do I? I've just sent in the killbots to deal with Gesellschaft and the CUI, most of the rest of the villains are being depowere through precision brain surgery performed by nanobots, and the Feathered Bint has about five thousand rail cannons armed with Sting access orbiting her location in a dimension with a shard in it, and thus cut off from her precog.
It will only be a few hours before I teleport them in. After that, I just have to finish subverting the shards that make up Zion, and after that, The FTL probes I've been launching should be locating other entities, given the fact that ex nihilo mass and energy plus self replication means I'll have a number of them with more zeros in it than is really necessary by the time they leave the local cluster.
And It's going to be another six or so months before I turn the being known as Zion into auxiliary processing and power use.
Behemoth is there as well, I guess. I'll let him come up for destroying things and kick the piss out of him.
I'll be leaving after that I guess. Just got to wait for the probes to hijack any hostile entities they encounter, and duplicate any helpful ones. Past that, Worm offers nothing for me, and I can go on my merry way across the cosmos.
Now we wait.
=====================================================================
And there go the seismic sensors. Looks like...Istanbul. Fun. I have a Plan. It is a good Plan.
First, I need to start building. I figure out why everything tooks so long the first time, and I have teleportation tech now to make it quicker. This is going to be Fun.
=====================================================================
Alexandria was at the command post. The eldest Endbringer hadn't emerged yet, but Thinkers had put it at less than fifteen minutes. With Leviathan dead, turnout was abnormally high, though there was a distinct lack of the crazy bastard who would most likely be the one to kill it.
She really wasn't sure she wanted to know what it was before he actually brought it out. Signs pointed to him trying to top himself in the insanity department. And wasn't that just what they all needed.
She decided to put it out of her mind for now. She had to coordinate with the head of Ekselansları for the defense, and she couldn't do that distracted. Commander would show up when he showed up, for better or worse.
=====================================================================
"Dervish deceased, C-4"
The fight had been going on for about fifteen minutes, good capes dying everyone of them, and there was still no sign of Commander. If her read on his personality hadn't been as accurate as everything seemed to suggest, she'd think he wasn't going to show up at all.
Her fist slammed into Behemoth just below where a person's ribs would be and sent the monster slowly reeling backwards. Lightning arced through the deadly field of radiation that marked the kill zone surrounding the Endbringer, deflecting off her costume as she and several other Brutes
Tried to slow the thing. It hadn't been going great, but every second she and the other capes stalled it was another that could be spent getting people to shelters or outside of the city.
Her musings were stopped by the music that, while she didn't recognize it, obviously signified Commander's imminent arrival.
It was at that point when everything got dark for a split second, barring the quickly fading light from various attacks, and the Endbringer's lightning, and she turned to see what had blocked the sun.
Her jaw proceeded to hit the floor at the sight of the thing hurtling toward the ground, before impacting with an earthshaking boom and a cloud of dust that seemed to blot out the sky.
Then the ground started shaking in time with the music, before an arm the size of a small building came and elbow dropped Behemoth through the ground.
It was around then that the skyscraper sized mountain of guns and armor that was Commander's machine became apparent
A chunky, four armed design that had the same industrial, sleek-yet-bulky look that most things built by the maniac did. Arms that seemed to consist of guns firing blasts of various colors at the hero killer, who barely came up to the mech's ankles. It would be somewhat nightmarish if it hadn't just grabbed behemoth by the leg and chucked him over the horizon.
Then the fucking thing jump after it, cracking the hard packed earth as it did so.
Then...was that a fucking sword? That's a fucking sword. Why the fuck does Commander need a sword the size of a wind turbine?
Oh. That's why. He just fucking decapitated Behemoth. Then stabbed the rest of it. Why does this not surprise her anymore?
=====================================================================
There we go. I Now have access to Behemoth's head to make into a throne. Just got to put a little seat between those two horns. Now to just prop it up, sit in it, and port it back to base.
...
I just realised this was a terrible mistake. This is quite possibly the least comfortable thing I've ever sat on.
In for a penny, In for a pound, I guess. I've been planning this far too long to give it up.
I'm going to regret this forever.
=====================================================================
Okay, now I just have to deal with the Simurgh, who makes herself a much easier target than Behemoth or even Leviathan, really. He at least had a few dozen miles of the least cooperative substance between bullets and his stupid core.
You know, I have the Eidolon Shard. I could just Befriend her and have an unfeeling murder thing with precog along for the ride. That could be fun. I could put her in all sorts of comical hats!
Or just strip off all the extraneous material off and use the core as a secondary processor. Then make it wear a comical hat.
So how do I go about this? Probably need to do a whole ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL thing.
Just gotta jack into the shard, put on some cool hacking music, and start trying to get it to listen to me.
=====================================================================
Dragon was doing some relatively routine maintenance on her various suits and assorted gear, when she got a ping from the Endbringer feed. Normally this wouldn't be much of a concern, as it updated her on everything, from Leviathan heading toward a city to Behemoth doing the equivalent of scratching his ass.
However, with how much Commander had cocked this whole endbringer thing up by driving a KKV through one and decapitating another, she checked immediately.
What she saw would probably haunt her for quite some time. After all, it wasn't every day one sees the third endbringer do the chicken dance then vanish.
=====================================================================
I now have a Simurgh. This is a good thing. Probably won't use it much, because precog on that scale is cheating, and kind of sucks the joy out of every new surprise if you see them coming a lightyear away and can plan for them.
At this point, I don't even need to deal with the time travel bullfuck that would actually require I see the future to deal with.
What other broken powers are left for me to deal with? I've already acquired almost all of the Eden shards, and I've gotten enough of Scion subverted and copied I could pull the plug on him at basically any minute.
All it requires is some portals being shut off, some others being turned on, and waiting while the equivalent of being smothered with a pillow happens to Zion.
=========================================================================
Zion watched as the fire was extinguished under a stilling beam of golden light. Modulating the vibration that provided the energy that sustained the blaze. His directive provided him with direction, but no satisfaction. He was not capable of coming to a new conclusion on his action but this one would suffic...what was happening?
His perspective was shrinking. Shards were being disconnected at an alarming rate. A quick shift to his main body did not reveal anything wrong, neither did checking other shards he no longer was in control of. There was nothing he could think to do to regain control, and as he panicked, desperately trying to find the cause, his awareness slipped to nothingness, and Zion was no more.
=========================================================================
And I have access to all Shards, including the ones that Entities use to host themselves on. Neat. Integrating...now!
[Installing Updates. Please do not shut off your Commander]
[1%]
[5%]
[12%]
[26%]
[38%]
[50%]
[75%]
[90%]
[Restarting core]
[Updates installed]
I CAN SEE EVERYTHING
=====================================================================
This is the weirdest thing. I have local omniscience. I see everything within about...3 AU, in about ten to the eightieth different parallel universes. I'm still upgrading my shards, so they can generate power better and I can do cool stuff. So neat to think I have shards.
Like this! I just made a planet disappear! And now it's back! Yay!
Holy shit am I out of it right now.
Oh, and the probes are finding new things now. I think I'll just have them figure out what does what, then discard the rest. Some of the entities are benign, so I'll leave them be.
Send a note to Cauldron and Dragon, and then fix Piggot's kidneys. Then I just send Taylor a gift basket (and an utterly ridiculous amount of cash).
Am I forgetting anything? Let's see...The Yangban, right. Just teleport all of the assholes in charge to Ganymede, put them in a dome, steal the powers, become even stronger.
And...Done. Now to pack all of this up and move it back to Dascides.
And open the gate for my chassis which still stores most of my consciousness…
==Um, Hi, Commander. You're back. Before you come in could you try not to be angry==
Oh Jesus Fuck. I forgot about her.
++Yes. What did you do?++
This is going to be bad.
==I, uh, well, I, may have, um, startedashootingmatchwiththreeothercommandersdon'tbemadpleasepleaseplease?==
Of course it's worse than I was imagining.
