Redistribution of Power [SI/CYOA-ish]

[sapient_cogbag]

[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
First target: Kid Win's lab. I poked around with a microportal near the Protectorate Rig, and found his lab inside. I could already hear alarms blaring and doors slamming shut in an attempt to counter an intruder, but there's not much they could do against me. I eventually found Kid Win putting his red suit on - presumably in preparation for attack - inside his lab that was about as disorganised as my own accommodation. Twisting the knob again on my Pocket Dimension Access Controller (PDAC) to be a little wider than my arm, I waved the note in front of his face before he got a chance to aim a gun at me, and I saw a feverish look come over him as he dived for his notepad instead even through the screeching, painful alarms.

Pulling my hand through the portal and closing it quickly, I left Kid Win to his tinker fugue and decided on my next target - Director Piggot. No doubt she'd be in her office right now in the PRT building organising a response to the breach, and probably ready to shoot anything that moved. So I had to be careful here, moving my microportal along the locked down corridors (wincing at the noise every time it was open) and avoiding any attention from PRT troopers towards the blinking motion of the tiny purple dot. It took almost two minutes, but I eventually found her office and, as expected, she had a dangerous look in her eyes (despite her failing physical body), holding an obviously loaded pistol and rapidly coordinating on a walkie talkie with the troopers, along with someone who was likely the Deputy Director. Regardless of my distaste for cops, I couldn't help but be impressed by her ability to remain calm in a situation like this.

I broke the cameras in her office through small portals - to avoid Coil's tendrils, even now I was scared of him - and before she could respond to the noise behind her with her pistol I had dumped her note on her desk with a smug grin as I closed that portal as well. I could swear I heard a bit of cursing right at the end there, as I went back to the Protectorate rig to find Miss Militia and Armsmaster, both of them coordinating in clipped tones in a locked-down meeting room, with the Wards themselves listening in along with Alexandria on a viewscreen (except Kid Win, who was apparently so deep in a fugue he couldn't even respond despite being in the call). I suppose it makes sense that Cauldron would be interested in someone else with dimensional tech breaching the PRT and the Rig. They must just be jealous, I thought to myself with a hint of humor, once again fighting down the urge to snicker at the mess currently being made in futile attempts to stop my distribution of information, as I opened a portal above Miss Militia and dropped a piece of paper on her head before Alexandria could shout a warning. In about 3 seconds I had done the same with Armsmaster, and I saw his face fall into a grimace just before closing that portal as well.

Moving my microportal out from where the PRT and Protectorate had been present, I began looking for my other recipients. Taylor Hebert's house had taken longer to find, but only because I had to look for a Danny Hebert in various files that I grabbed from government offices. About 10 minutes later, I found the young Miss Hebert in her ever-drab clothing at her table, eating dinner alone, presumably after returning from Winslow within the past hour or so. As such, I opened a portal and waved the note in front of her, seeing her panic-stricken face for a second before hearing an ominous, rising buzz. I quickly closed that portal, not want to deal with Miss Biblical Plague's wrath proper.

Looking back over Brockton Bay with another microportal and focusing on the clearly less neglected areas, I located the house of Dinah Alcott in another 5 minutes or so. I found her looking some combination of excited and smug as the portal opened (precogs, what can you do?) as she let me give her my letter for her and vanish off to find the Undersider's lair - which was actually probably fairly close to my comfy warehouse that Armsmaster wrecked in the docks, now I thought about it.

This was more complex. I knew it was above an old factory though, so I switched out my tinker charges towards manufacturing infrastructure and scanned my eyes from high above locating numerous factories in the old docks. From there it was easy to find the Undersider's lair, but Lisa was not actually there, which was either worrying or completely normal. I thought to myself where she could be, and remembered both the apartment and the shop on the boardwalk she often hangs out in, deciding to look on the Boardwalk first.

I did, in fact, find her there, apparently looking frantically at some PRT files. It seemed the PRT was now in full Master-Stranger protocols and Director Piggot was deliberately avoiding giving her note to the Chief Director (which was good for her health, I doubted she'd survive very long if Cauldron knew she was aware of them and the sheer level of corruption involved at the highest levels of the PRT). It apparently didn't take long for her to realise I'd found her as she started fumbling for a weapon almost immediately, the normally smug grin wiped off her face for a paler and more worried expression. I dumped the note on her before she could shoot some important blood vessel in my arm and shut the portal in her very confused face.

Tattletale Perspective
Tattletale was having a hell of a day. Her head was throbbing in pain as she scrolled through the PRT files that were already being written on the current breach and the mess that had been made so far in response. She set her mind to analysing the situation at high pace. Opening the floodgates of her power just a little, she pushed on at the data she had seen.

Breach in PRT and Rig too close to reach at speed. Mover? Ground transport would need to be extremely rapid, likely police response. Flyer? Would have indication of forced entry. Not flyer. Teleporter? Teleporter.

She grinned her trademark grin. Gotcha, new cape. A teleporter would be a pain to fight especially given that nothing indicating a line of sight requirement was present, but forewarned is forearmed, she supposed to herself. Maybe they'd even make for a good counter to Oni Lee for our team, she thought, no doubts at all that Coil will want us to grab them as soon as possible, the bastard is a control freak.

Looking through a new file that had just been created, her brain almost came to a stop. The name of the cape responsible - which they'd apparently put on the letters they'd dumped in the PRT for whatever reason - was one "trans_morphic", otherwise known as Appleseed.

Appleseed reference to Johnny Appleseed. Reference to spread. Reference to exponential spread. Reference to cape I warned Piggot about.

And with that, her power gushed open, her head screaming just like it had a couple days ago. She could almost feel some kind of twisted curiousity from it as her eyes nearly involuntarily scanned over the remaining files at a far faster pace than her brain could actually read them, her power dumping a waterfall of conclusions straight into her brain while barely feeding any intermediate information at all.

Not teleporter. Portals involved. Anomaly. Not threat against PRT. Amusement. Probable attack on Coil. Anomaly. Dislikes government enough to break security. Moderately irreverant to backlash. Anomaly. Dangerous. "Yeah no shit" she muttered to herself, burying her head in her hands "the cape who 5 days after appearing successfully breached the PRT and Protectorate bases to give people letters is dangerous." Probable access to pocket dimension. No indication of allies. Impulsive decision? Too poor to buy from Toybox. Developed tech themselves. Kid Win letter indicates probable secret identity knowledge. Thinker ally? She winced even more as nails metaphorically stabbed her eyes. No thinker allies in Brockton Bay. Not Thinker. Thinker. Anomaly. Not normal tinker. Broad specialty? No specialty? Mad Scientist Tinker? No particular category or restriction yet indicated. Unknown. Anomaly.

She dragged her head out of her hands in pain. Her power apparently decided to give her a break rather than knocking her out at least, and she reached for the coffee she had been drinking, looking over the files her power had consumed too fast to actually understand herself.

A few minutes later, as she glanced at the computer screen, she saw a tiny, purple dot appear. Holding her power on a tight leash, she consulted it.
Not from computer. Behind you. Identical colour to trans_morphic portals. trans_morphic found you.

Fuck, fuck, FUCK, she thought to herself as she grabbed for the gun she kept hidden in case Coil decided he was done with her being free, as the portal vanished and reopened and a peice of paper was dropped in front of her. She looked extremely confused for a moment but eventually, cautiously, examined the letter with her power.

Not threat. Not poisoned.

Picking up the letter, she read it, but then she experienced a bout of confusion and it seemed to her like she forgot something in the second half, something extremely important.

Not Stranger effect. Power-based information censorship. Mentioned nature of powers.

Not going to let that stop me discovering the secret she thought to herself, grinning in anticipation of something truly challenging for her to discover and remember, to the point she almost forgot to pay attention to the thing about her shithead of her boss getting outed in a few days. She needed to make preparations, but right now all she wanted to do was break past that mental block, even as she rushed out of the shop to get to her apartment and sleep off the migraine she was rapidly developing.
[end of chapter - nya~]

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[cw this chapter has some mild written transphobia, the kind you'd expect from internet forums really]
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
I had just finished causing unmitigated havoc. As such, I was a little mentally tired and took a rest on my bed, almost falling asleep, but I remembered to create a couple of accounts on the internet - one on an anonymous, E2EE (end to end encrypted) I2P chat service called intercrypt that as far as I was aware didn't exist on my Earth. One on a known-private email service on Bet called onion.email (apparently someone stole the term from the nonexistent Tor network that never ended up working here), and finally, of course, a PHO account. All under the username trans_morphic, naturally. Then I got distracted for several hours designing and making on the computer a logo (with a flexible, modifiable outline that could look clean but I wanted to make a statement that I was queer and the Nazis could do jack shit about it, so I put gaudy nonbinary flags in the outer ring instead). The inside of the logo ended up being a simple infinity symbol inside a power symbol (for technology and development - I was a tinker after all). The logo ended up looking like the following...

Spoiler: trans_morphic logo

Then, I fell asleep, comfortable in my bed, ready to wake up and see what the fuck kind of shitshow was going to happen tomorrow. Although I didn't remember the dreams, I was plagued with nightmares about my lack of friends, my isolation, and people invading my pocket dimension, so after a full night's sleep I woke up tense and curled up for a couple hours before pulling myself out of bed again, reassuring myself of the lack of invasion in my little hideyhole dimension I called home.

I had things to do, places to be, Nazis to antagonise, but I also had to take care of myself at some point. I really needed a proper shower and some other stuffs. Finding a decent gender neutral bathroom of some kind where I felt safe and also had a shower would - theoretically - be difficult, but I did essentially have a whole planet's worth of options. There was also the issue of... well, my body was still gross and masculine and I'd been trying to avoid noticing too hard but not showering was not long-term viable and also had been uncomfortable for several days already. To be honest the largest worry about that was having to leave my PDAC anywhere, which was getting to be a serious issue. The more well known I became in the PRT and elsewhere (and no doubt, I was well known), and the more they were aware of my pocket dimension capabilities, the more they'd try and stop me accessing them the moment I left it.

So the logical conclusion to ensuring something couldn't be taken from me? Implant it in my body. It wouldn't be particularly hard - I still had the sterilisation lasers that let me do HRT-enabling surgery on myself almost 4 days ago at this point, after all, and basic, low precision biocompatible neural interfaces with strange materials like iron were easy with my tinker power allowing structured nanomaterials to emulate many molecular properties. My own knowledge of neuroplasticity meant I knew my body would adapt to it like a new sense with just a basic implant. I probably wanted to put it in my arm though, it would make aiming at surfaces when desiring to return to pocket space easier if I wasn't just manually putting in coordinates.

Hence, my current actions after shifting my tinker charges to 2 in neural interfacing, 1 in biocompatibility, and 2 in anti-EM shielding (I really did not want to get some internal device fried by a localised EMP, or yanked out by a strong magnet). Then I aimed my sterilisation laser at my few surgery capable tools that I'd grabbed from my old home, as well as the surface of my skin on the arm my HRT implant was not in, and began. After removing the buttons and knobs and replacing them with crudely shard-powered electrosensitive pads, replacing the indicators with neural feedback interfaces, and adding some extra EMP shielding and general EM counters that would disable attacks via that route, I fully dropped into fugue. I had installed my basic PDAC inside my non-HRT-implant arm merely a couple hours later, using another of those highly improvised biometallic bandage substitutes to cover up the surgery area for healing.

A few more hours of casual practice, fiddling with portals and browsing PHO, and I'd started to gain some true instinct of where my portals were located and the general way to open and shut them with a mere thought. No longer could people take my way home from me, and no longer did I need to fear the device being ruined, lost, or forgotten unless the arm itself vanished, so I could go bathe as much as I liked. The problem still remained, though? Where could I shower? But then the answer came to me. I just needed to find some random bathroom with a completely private shower cubicle and teleport straight in and out via portals! No need for anyone to even see me at all, ever! Finding one without accidentally peeking on people would be more difficult, but I guessed I could just look at geotags on bathroom photos or something.

So I got to go on the weirdest internet search I'd ever done, and found a usable shower room. Translating the geo-coordinates to my own coordinate system with a little script I threw together, I mentally used my instincts to push them into my implant, using a microportal to reassure myself beforehand that I had truly managed to find a completely empty bathroom. And then, of course, I had a blissful, 45 minute, wonderful and amazing shower in the middle of Mexico, feeling truly clean for the first time in almost a week, the constant discomfort on my skin that was an ever-present exacerbator of dysphoria vanishing - and plopped my way back home with a simple flash of a portal, to dry myself off.

Now I'd properly cleaned myself, I wanted to make some real progress in doing things. I needed to repair my pocket dimension generator and create another pocket universe for Dinah to use. Luckily for me, repairing it required minimal resources as compared to producing it. Producing a simplified PDAC with a simpler coordinate memory and entry mode was also trivial with my resources, as it was almost an identical blueprint and just needed the little PD identifier chip that my pocket universe generator would emit. These were essentially just hardcoded keys, rather than generic software accessor tokens that a far more complex pocket dimension remote could use (one which I was far from having the resources to make, mostly down to lack of access to computing chips).

To make Dinah's dimension, though, I still needed the big jolt of power that a fusion reactor required, and I needed to run the PD creator in the mainline Earth Bet universe. Pocket dimensions were weird - you could access them from any dimension with sufficient energy, but they existed on a different multiversal axis to the general multiverse that Worm consisted of, so pocket dimensions created from inside a given pocket dimension could solely be accessed from that pocket dimension itself or other pocket dimensions of the same "depth". The original reactor was absolutely fried, but it had lots of the bulk components needed to build another, primarily missing the control chip and connector that were both wrecked. This meant I had to cannibalise another CNC chip from my drillbit manufacturer - I was getting very short on computer chips, I noticed - and build a much larger cable to the pocket universe creator that could handle the current and not explode like last time (which was pretty annoying).

While the chip had insufficient power to coordinate a stable plasma for extended periods of time, this time the connector would not explode and I could at least reuse the thing after an extended cooldown period. It actually had a large enough power output that it could directly plug into the pocket dimension generator for a little when ramped up, which was significantly better than last time where I'd required a supercapacitor. And so, after about half an hour of reusing much of my preexisting mental blueprints, the job was done. I really really did not want fucking Coil getting his filthy hands on Dinah (or anyone else for that matter). I trusted her to use her ability well enough to know when it was safe to leave and she wouldn't get darted remotely or something and have her accessor taken from her.

And so, with a mere thought, I tore a hole in reality in the depths of northern Canada to make Dinah's pocket dimension. Dragging out the pocket dimension generator made me grunt in effort, and the cable was almost thicker than my arms, but I eventually managed to connect the fusion reactor/electrolyser/pocketverse generator system together. I hauled the raw silicon from my elemental resources pile into the pocket dimension creator (for imprinting the accessor keys that it emitted), and heaved the obligatory massive lever that would hook the power up and initiate the dimensional creation operation with a resounding thunk. The fusion generator hummed in the background as current flowed, and for the second time in a week a hole was ripped somewhere in the interversal void to create a new pocket dimension for Dinah. This one I made have clean, dark orange walls that should help her sleep even if she needed a light or something (and was distinct from my own, as well). It was also slightly smaller than my own, but not significantly so, merely a function of the smaller amount of energy involved in making the thing, and with a small clunk the accessor key was spat out of the machine. A minute later and I'd shut it down, and plugged the key into Dinah's mildly simplified PDAC device.

Weird as it was to use one of these things by hand again (which was a strange thought since only a few hours ago I had needed to do so myself), I tested it to make sure it worked. After moving my little setup back into my own dimension, I flitted around various regions of the world saving some random, out of the way spots that Dinah could use, if her local saved spots ever got permanently watched for whatever reason, most with mobile phone signal as far as I could tell, so she should be able to message me if she ever needed some kind of pickup on PHO.

With another quick portal, I was back in my home where I scribbled out some usage notes and information for Dinah. She might have been at school or at home (from her headaches), and so I decided I'd leave her pocket dimension gun under her pillow. Which I did, then I looked outside her house for a bit and saw sketchy black vans watching it. Sketchy black vans that seemed an awful lot like Coil's. Shit, I thought to myself, there's a chance Coil makes his play today. And so, I decided to resolve it in the best way possible. With a portal over the sea and another portal under each van.

And with a splash splash the problem was resolved, at least here. And so it was I started scanning over Brockton around the schools - after several minutes, I located sketchy black vans following one extremely smug looking Dinah Alcott. Because precogs, of course. And lo, those vans also vanished with two splashes in the ocean. A twenty minute walk later and Dinah was home - I presumed that her parents were out from some important meeting or another, leaving a 12 year old to walk home alone regularly in a city like Brockton Bay seemed... a little questionable. And with that, I considered the problem mostly dealt with, Dinah was pretty intelligent and I couldn't spend all my time making sure she was OK. Coil was going to be fucked in a few days anyway.

I still hadn't done much publicly - though the PRT was starting to leak rumors of a new tinker and they were preparing to make a press statement tomorrow - so I thought I'd make one part of my intentions very clear (and verify my PHO account in the process!). I opened another portal near New York, and bought some domino masks, and then went back through my pocket dimension again to Brockton Bay Market (the best place to buy sketchy spraypaint equipment without ID or whatever it is you'd normally need - I had never actually bought spraypaint before). It didn't take me long to buy several nice colours in large quantities - black, red, green, blue, orange, purple, yellow - and prepare to make a splash on the Bay.

The plan was simple and effective. I wanted to get ahead of whatever the hell the PRT and government said about me, I wanted to remind people that fighting back against Nazis was doable in ways without involving feudalistic trash like Lung as a counterpoint, I wanted to send a message. And where was the best place to send a message? Right where everyone in the Bay could see it while spitting in the face of the resident E88 front, Medhall Corporation. It was with no small number of cackles that I opened up small portals in a circle near the side of the Medhall building facing most of the Bay, and simply sprayed black paint through all of them simultaneously. I did the same, to make 3 neon red arrows at a downwards angle in the middle.

To finish it off, I took several minutes to write a huge message in a dark purple that matched my pocket dimension colour below it:

Fuck Nazis
Fuck Fascism
Reject Subjugation
NO MORE E88
- trans_morphic, your local queer as fuck tinker

I then decided to get verified. With a satisfied smirk, I opened a much larger portal where I could see the message on Medhall, and stuck my spraypaint out of the portal with one arm and made a thumbs up with the other, poking my tongue out and taking an actual picture of myself. Honestly I didn't like it much - too much of a reminder of dysphoria - but it'd do and it was kind of funny despite that. And then, I opened PHO....

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♦ Topic: Verification
In: Boards ► Private Messages ► Tin_Mother
trans_morphic (Original Poster) (Verified Cape)
Posted On Mar 6th 2011:
I'd like to get verified, please
Let's just say I sent a bit of a spit in the face to the Empire and some encouragement to the residents of Brockton Bay w.r.t. fascists and gangs and nazis. Link.
- nya~

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(Showing page 1 of 1)

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►Tin_Mother (Moderator)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

I will add the tag. I would consider not doing illegal and public acts in future like this, however, and deliberately antagonising the Empire seems extremely dangerous.​

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►trans_morphic (Original Poster) (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

They would already kill me if they got the chance (which they won't). As for illegal acts, let's just say I don't think the legal authorities are competent or able to tackle fascists, and I care very little about legality.​

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Thanks for adding the tag tho ​

- nya~​

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►Tin_Mother (Moderator)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

Still, please consider it.​

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End of Page. 1

And, of course, once I had verification, I then went to fuck around on my introduction thread that Bagrat had made!

♦ Topic: New Tinker Announces Themself Ahead of PRT Conference
In: Boards ► Locations ► USA ► Brockton Bay ► Recent Events
Bagrat (Original Poster) (The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)
Posted On Mar 6th 2011:
It looks like the rumors of a new Tinker cape are true. They've announced themselves in probably the most blatant way possible, by spraying a massive message and symbol on the Medhall building. See here.

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(Showing page 6 of 9)

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►nah_not_me (Cape Groupie)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

tbh Medhall seems an odd target.​

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►Reave (Verified PRT Agent)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

After consulting with our press team, I can confirm that this is the new tinker being talked about. The PRT will be providing more information in a press conference soon.​

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►Col_Xy ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

Im thinking maybe paint tinker or flying tinker​

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how did they even get up there and do it fast enough to not get noticed?​

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►Thatdude ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

Not sure they should have done that, Kaiser will be out for blood​

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Maybe do less vandalism next time if they're still around if they're even alive​

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►Tin_Mother (Moderator)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

Due to the controversial nature of the new Tinker's actions, and their status as an LGBT+ cape, this thread is now being heavily watched by forum moderators.​

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►bbhh_civdef88 ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

hope Kaiser does what he does best, for the city - remove the degenerate cluttering up our streets and buildings​

(Banned: Don't advocate for removing queer people - Tin_Mother)​

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►RealGuy ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

Personally I hope the PRT stop the awful vandalism and put 'em away. Would probably be for the best if we don't want the city to get any worse.​

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►nah_not_me (Cape Groupie)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

the more i think, the weirder it seems, there were several other skyscrapers that would work just as well​

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►Point_Me_@_The_Sky (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@nah_not_me Probably some personal grudge or something with an employee, or maybe they were fired or something.​

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Its pretty iconic though, probably all the justification they needed.​

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►nah_not_me (Cape Groupie)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ Thatdude it's their choice i suppose​

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at least people are not being too shit here - this page isnt full of misgendering yet like some of the earlier ones​

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►actuallyZandra ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

I wonder if they have access to hormones​

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if so im fucken jealous​

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ actuallyZandra woo a fellow trans person (presumably) c:​

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pls stay safe around like the fucking nazis and shit​

and I do have access to hormones actually. Im not in a position to redistribute yet, i actually have an implant that converts testosterone to estrogen​

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right now not something i can like, mass produce or anything. will probably do something in the future, access to hrt is important, fuck gatekeeping​

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@ nah_not_me i did have a reason for picking Medhall beyond just personal spite ​

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i'll let you all figure it out what it is~​

nya~​

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►XxVoid_CowboyxX (Temp-Banned - 1 day)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ nah_not_me bet Medhall is secretly funding the Empire or something. Maybe they provide legit jobs for the capes. Or maybe the CEO is dating Kaiser in secret, that'd be pretty funny.​

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@ trans_morphic Am I right?​

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(This comes close to speculating on cape identities. Have a warning - Tin_Mother)​

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►Point_Me_@_The_Sky (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ trans_morphic Shame I might have to fight you. Graffiti on Medhall was unnecessary, though I agree - fuck Nazis. Messing with the PRT like you did yesterday was pretty villainous though so yaknow...​

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Maybe we'll get to chat properly in other circumstances, probably with you in a cell at this rate, or maybe you'll decide to join the light side​

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ XxVoid_CowboyxX surprisingly insightful, but incorrect. The real reason is worse.​

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@ Point_Me_@_The_Sky​

I was just giving them information.​

So much highly dangerous information~​

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I love telling secrets and hate keeping them but I know way too much, enough to get everyone killed. Getting some of it to the right people like that was the only good way I could think of, and also it was really funny and I dislike cops enough that I don't care that it caused them problems.​

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I didn't just mess with the PRT, either, and this won't be the last time I do stuff like this. Best get used to it ;3​

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Also i hate how superhero has become a synonym for supercop. its gross imo, i mean like do you think punching people actually solves structural problems or something??​

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On another note, I wonder how many in BBPD are E88 sympathisers? Important questions, important questions....​

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nya~​

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Edit:​

kidnapping and torturing me wont get this shit out of me, torture doesn't actually work anyway and most of this isn't useful to people's goals, its more "if it becomes general knowledge it will start a multiversal apocalypse" kinda shit so yeah just dont fuck with it. Like seriously unless you want everyone to die dont try and get it out of me until humanity is ready or whatever, also if you kill me it all gets released.​

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Double also: good luck keeping me trapped lol, pocket dimension go brr​

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

Also my lab/home is like the only place i have, dont fuck with it like armsmaster did it's pretty unpleasant for everyone (mostly me tho ;-.​

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Keep an eye on coil btw, way more powerful than he makes out, real rule from the shadows kinda guy who really does not care at all about the unwritten rules. Guy'd have me drugged in a basement somewhere if he could, I know someone he was planning to do that to actually.​

- nya~​

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►actuallyZandra ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ trans_morphic That's pretty neat, I really wish you could give me one ​

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Honestly i'm just glad someone is finally going to put some real pressure on the empire, it just seems like people are fine with them a lot of the time. its pretty fucked up​

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and i cant believe youre actually in the thread o.o​

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►AnonymousDecree ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ trans_morphic The empire do vandalism too, you shouldn't sink to their level bro​

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►Vista (Verified Cape) (Wards ENE)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

PR requires I do not express support for trans_morphic's actions.​

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►Gallant (Verified Cape) (Wards ENE)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ Vista be careful what you post​

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I unequivocally condemn your actions, @ trans_morphic. Vandalising Medhall is not the appropriate way to express disagreement.​

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End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

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►Emissary_of_Jesus ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ trans_morphic Be saved! Repent from your demonic ACTS!!!​

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►ILoveWhiteTraps (Banned)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

[removed]​

(That is absolutely vile. Have a ban - Tin_Mother)​

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ Vista I think I get what you're saying ​

@ actuallyZandra I can't dismantle the bigotry that causes the Empire by myself, unfortunately. Others have to do work as well and help disrupt or stake out their operations. In fact having me as a single point of failure is a bad idea.​

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What I'm saying is - start forming your own organisations :3​

- nya~​

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►nah_not_me (Cape Groupie)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ trans_morphic Wait you're using tinkertech for hormones? I'm not sure if that's cool or scary.​

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I wonder what your specialty is, maybe bioaugmentation or something? The thread didn't have any particularly good ideas before you came along.​

​

@ Col_Xy have any other ideas? The HRT information makes me think there's something important we're missing. They could have bought the pocket dimension and implant from Toybox, but they seem (no offense) too poor for that.​

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►Reave (Verified PRT Agent)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

While I'm not allowed to confirm any details, I know for a fact that their specialty isn't likely related to paint. The spraypaint used was just ordinary, store bought cans.​

​

We encourage the public to avoid asking trans_morphic for anything related to hormones or access to sex transition. Transsexuals should go through proper channels.​

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►Col_Xy ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ nah_not_me Perhaps a pocket dimension tinker then? If they bought the implant anyway. I still think we're missing something, but we can at least rule out paint tinker thanks to @ Reave​

​

►run_around_the_block ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ Reave yeah! no giving hormones to children, we know that's what they want to do.​

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►AnonymousDecree ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ run_around_the_block I don't know if I'd go that far, but we definitely need to have a discussion on the issue of confused normal people getting surgery. Its a big problem.​

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ AnonymousDecree @ run_around_the_block Neither of you understand how transition works. Please stop with the transphobic talking points and stuff. I know exactly what you're doing and I already have to deal with way too much of that crap ​

​

@ Reave have you SEEN the process for access to HRT here? If you arent rich you're basically fucked and it's humiliating and insulting and at least a year long. Fuck. That. Shit. (also transsexual is a very outdated and often offensive and dehumanising term, transgender is usually preferred urgh).​

​

Right now though I can't give anything resembling HRT to anyone though at a reasonable access level, but when I have time and nab more resources I can probably set something up.​

- nya~​

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(Tone down the antagonism a little, trans_morphic - Tin_Mother)​

​

►XxVoid_CowboyxX (Temp-Banned - 1 day)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ trans_morphic I noticed you didn't answer about your specialty, are you avoiding the question or something?​

​

►nah_not_me (Cape Groupie)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ XxVoid_CowboyxX maybe give 'em some time to answer? Or maybe they just didn't notice yet. No need to be a dick about it. And if they are avoiding the question, so what?​

​

@ Col_Xy Honestly seems like a good possibility.​

​

Something else that we seem to have forgotten is the whole thing where they mentioned the potential to cause a MULTIVERSAL APOCALYPSE, why the fuck is no-one freaking out about that???​

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ nah_not_me @ Col_Xy I made all the tinkertech I have, actually. My specialty isn't pocket dimensions. I'm not in any way connected to toybox either, and I am in fact way too broke to buy anything from them anyhow.​

​

Fun fact - one of the first things i built was a laser hair removal machine, but i forgot to get numbing cream to counteract pain, so I passed out when i used it. it hurt a lot heh. I kinda already disassembled it for parts tho ;3​

​

In fact my actual power is sufficiently strange that I doubt many people will figure it out, it lacks certain characteristics of other powers that are quite distinctive.​

​

I'm also surprised by the lack of freakout tbh ;p. I've been coping by distracting myself a lot and trying not to have a breakdown ^.^​

- nya~​

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@ XxVoid_CowboyxX there is a reason I'm not revealing the true nature of my power, (as much as i really want to) yah. Take a guess what it might be related to ;p​

​

Feel free to speculate though, it's not dangerous or anything.​

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►run_around_the_block ​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ trans_morphic You should stop with transition and get help, we can stop whoever confused you.​

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►aerinbbvet (Veteran Member)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

@ nah_not_me​

Honestly I think half the people in the Bay are wishing for death at this rate, might explain the lack of panic. Or most people think trans_morphic's wrong or exaggerating or making stuff up or something.​

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

Blegh. I'm out for a bit, don't wanna deal with more transphobia from this thread right now and I'm gonna end up saying something and getting banned in response.​

​

be gay do crime, nya~​

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►Procto the Unfortunate Tinker (Not a tinker)​

Replied On Mar 6th 2011:​

You a cat or something?​

​

​

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

■​

I sighed and closed the laptop. I guess I shouldn't be surprised the internet still has tons of transphobes on it, but it's merely a consequence of the sociopolitical environment of Brockton Bay... I suspected that there was going to be a lot more shit going down very soon. In Brockton there was a surprisingly small number of non-white or non-straight capes, certainly disproportionate to the inflated number of triggers you would expect, which I suspected might be related to the Empire. Maybe they were in hiding, or maybe they were dead, either was a bad, bad thing and I intended to tear that bias apart.

Compared to some of the radical shifts the things I wanted to do were likely to cause, it'd be a minor change in the grand scheme of things, but this was a good start. Someone needed to catalyse and aid in the destruction of the Empire's systems of subjugation and repression, and it may as well be me rather than someone even less able to defend themselves. The Empire needed to die.
[end of chapter - nya~]
So, first PHO interlude, and first taste of public reaction ;3

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[cw misgendering and also the Empire being super fucking Nazi fuckers]
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
I actually felt like sleeping at the moment. I'd already done so much in the day. So I slept, and then I got up again (as you do) ready for a whole new day of... loneliness. And fucking over Nazis to be fair, but that didn't really compare to the isolation.

I thought over what needed to be done and remembered one of the more important things - processing unit generation. The issue was of course a lack of doping materials for silicon, and I again wondered with some excitement if I could get away with skipping the whole silicon bullshit and jumping directly to pure graphene processors. I considered - what if I could impart some abstract tinkertech variant of spin that would let me rotate bi-layered graphene to induce the required metamaterial states for transistors! No need for complex graphene reworking during manufacture if I can just splice micro-squares of graphene to refine - block by block - into small regions of metamaterial. The only limit was essentially the precision and size of the lasers.

Pushing my specialty towards laser-made nanomaterials, it took merely a few hours for me to scratch together a complex design capable of using interference patterns from even my current crude lasers - on top of a silicon carbide substrate - to make structured rotations on the order of about 7 nanometres. Honestly it just spoke to the sheer nonsense I could do with this power, but I wasn't complaining. And of course, unlike Silicon-based tech, all the conductive regions in the chips I designed would be superconductive, graphene metamaterials, and the graphene itself would conduct heat so well I could jump up the clockspeed by at least 5x the equivalent silicon circuitry, amongst several other levels of bullshit.

The actual chips themselves wouldn't even be tinkertech (at least for now), there was no need. While developments in chip design in my time (2021) were far ahead of that of Earth Bet, it wasn't so far that I'd need blackboxing from my power to make it at the moment, which was definitively a good thing. Tinkertech replication difficulty - as far as I could guess - came from 3 things: advanced manufacturing techniques with complex and precise localised shaker effects, local universe multidimensional phenomena (talking here about dimensions as in spacial dimensions), and actual blackboxed components that essentially offloaded processing and/or material to a shard itself via microportals that - as far as I could deduce given the lack of impact on tinkertech from power nullifiers - were primarily present in a different spacial dimension as compared with the microportals of parahuman connections. I guessed that the first and second were the bits of tinkertech Dragon was able to reverse-engineer with her power, and the third were not reverse-engineerable with any conventional parahuman power whatsoever.

My thoughts finally jumping back to the design I'd made for producing graphene-based chips, I had two main obstacles - access to silicon carbide (for the substrate), and access to material for casings, actually. To solve the first one, I did a little research and found out I could probably just buy bulk rice and heat it in a vacuum furnace or something - not too hard to do given how little I needed - though I did need to obtain ceramics. What did that mean? A trip to the scrapyard for old pots. I needed a lot of furnaces at the moment, actually, for various processes, so I pushed all my charges over to Furnace Tinkering and began the easy process of nicking various appropriately sized ceramic pieces. Then I jumped back home and bought some bulk rice packages as the sun moved over the skyline of Brockton Bay. I was... pretty tired but I really wanted to get some furnaces up and running and so I took a mere 30 minutes to assemble the primitive technology that would let me truly begin manufacturing some processing units for myself.

Heat management would be another problem, but for now I could just circulate air out of my pocket dimension and it'd be enough, and within the hour (in which I desperately browsed PHO to continue to push away the sense of isolation I was seriously starting to feel), I had crystalline blocks of silicon carbide. Modifying some of the remaining ceramic, I produced a bottom panel for the purposes of manufacturing chips.

In essence, it had little nodules evenly spaced that allowed for solidifying of metal connectors, and those nodules could move upward and be flash-heated to fuse the connectors to a printed chip of various sizes, up to some pretty massive boards, but also down to minuscule ones. All my chips would have power consumption an order of magnitude lower than silicon based chips, and running at 5x the clock speed at minimum. And so, I got to tinkering, constructing a vacuum chamber with all the lasers in appropriate positions. All I lacked were casings, which were pretty simple to make out of ceramics - so I just pushed my specialty to 3 in ceramics and 2 in scrap tinkering, such that I could make a highly thermally conductive ceramic out of, essentially, bits of clay and household chemicals. Another half hour and I'd done making a simple container for producing the ceramic mix.

It would take overnight for my first computing chip to be produced. It would be stupidly powerful compared to anything I'd used before, though I needed more lasers and more precise lasers if I wanted increased speed of application of the bilayer graphene rotations. So, after an exhaustiing mess of tinkering for several more hours fine tuning to ensure correctness, and after all the work I'd done I curled up in bed, constantly reminded of my isolation, until I fell asleep once more.

Somewhere in Cryptographically Secured Cyberspace
Welcome, actuallyZandra@03a7:79a1::0362 to #bb-opno88 on ene-cryptchat (03c6:192d::a237)
antifbob: heya!
xx_smash_xx: hi, we were just talking about some disruption of e88 ops
xx_smash_xx: techniques on disruption, warning signals, etc. giving intel to New Wave - we think the prt is compromised and there's some suspicions of medhall connections going around - would make sense for trans_morphic to put antifascist symbols on them in that case
actuallyZandra: I had a poke around near Medhall and found some sketchy stuff. several warehouses with clear Empire guards and shit
actuallyZandra: One of them I saw receive some pretty large boxes, earlier, labelled with medhall corporation on them
xx_smash_xx: cool
antifbob: u have sm addresses? mebbe we shld peek at them or smthng
actuallyZandra: actually i wrote it down
actuallyZandra: the box one was 17 Corp Street, the others were 5 Wallis Street and several a couple streets over, not sure of the address on them
actuallyZandra: pls be careful
actuallyZandra: pretty sure I saw Kaiser at some point
antifbob: thx
antifbob: stay safe
xx_smash_xx: imma try infiltrate that place
xx_smash_xx: the medhall one
antifbob: seems rlly dangerous, if a cape's there we could be screwed
xx_smash_xx: could get some backup
actuallyZandra: im trans, really really do not want to get caught by those shits
actuallyZandra: gonna stay out of this improv operation
antifbob: howvr, @xx_smash_xx, could try double team stealth or something
antifbob: mebbe some recording devices?
antifbob: i rlly want to unrvl medhall x e88 and mebbe gessel connections
antifbob: medhall pkgs in e88 warehouses is super suspish
xx_smash_xx: @antifbob meet at Forsberg Gallery?
antifbob: sure
actuallyZandra: good luck <3
actuallyZandra: I'll do some more searching for less obvious e88 ops
actuallyZandra: i gotta go do some other shit now tho
actuallyZandra@03a7:79a1::0362 left the chat

Cauldron's Perspective
The bright walls around the meeting room almost seemed to glow in their pristine condition. With barely a whisper, Alexandria, Eidolon, and Legend stepped through a hole in space, followed shortly by a woman in her characteristic fedora and suit - the ever-present bogeyman - along with Doctor Mother. Number Man made an entrance similarly lacking in fanfare.

The suited agent of the Doctor began the conversation swiftly, with a tone undoubtedly designed to induce the appropriate response. "We may have a problem". she began, and Alexandria continued the conversation for her as if prompted. "trans_morphic, and the shifts in your Paths, yes".

Contessa elaborated. "Yes, I have come to believe trans_morphic knows about our operations, and likely our goal. Shifts in my path are happening more rapidly, and they are becoming more of a blindspot. I am still unsure what exactly triggers the shifts, but over time the long term effects and changes are becoming more dramatic in scale".

She prompted Alexandria to state her hypothesis, and the namesake of Brutes spoke - "I believe this may be some combination of his" - Legend glared at her but did not speak - "power and nature as a tinker. I think, perhaps, that he may know more about our operations than we are aware of" - Legend was wincing, but let her pass the conversation to Contessa once again.

"My path to keeping the existence and operations of Cauldron a secret in the case that they are significantly hurt or killed recently extended by almost 70 steps, primarily due to contingencies they have put in place. It would be an extensive effort and the previous shifts in the Path suggest that it may become more complex or even impossible in future. "

As Contessa concluded on the topic of her Paths, Alexandria took the reigns, her face effortlessly controlled. "I don't trust him. The moment Director Piggot got one of his letters, she had clearly begun giving me the cold shoulder as the Chief-Director and was far more evasive than she has ever been, even with her generally stubborn attitude. I suspect she knows several things she shouldn't, given trans_morphic's stated fascination with sharing secrets everywhere he can without direct lethal harm coming to himself" - as Legend gritted his teeth even more than before, she continued - "I believe the Director is at the very least aware of, to some degree, the Brockton Bay experiment, and likely my dual identity as Alexandria. The psyche profile on trans_morphic strongly suggests that he is unlikely to simply share one of those secrets when he could share all of them."

Finally, Eidolon spoke up. "So, what do we do about them?", to which Legend quickly replied, while glaring at Rebecca Costa-Brown, "Well, firstly, we at least respect their gender identity when talking to them, if we want to avoid antagonising them. We also must be extremely careful, as with all tinkers. They have unknown technology, and Tattletale along with Watchdog's verification have suggested both the ability and willingness to deploy exponential threats".

Contessa, interrupting Legend, began to speak. "The path to disable their contingencies in case of immanent death involves travelling to Germany on Bet and doing various tasks, telling us that they have global reach at the very least. Attempting to bring them under the purview of the Protectorate in a functional manner would be highly difficult, with or without coercion, due to their intense distrust and distaste for authority previously demonstrated on the Parahuman Forums and interactions with the PRT since we became aware of their existence".

Doctor Mother, speaking for the first time in the conversation after Contessa finished, suggested a course of action. "As for what we do, I suggest that we use one or two of the favours we're owed and try to keep a close eye on them, as difficult as that seems to be at the moment, and begin to prepare contingencies. Given their demonstrated statements about apocalyptic events on information release, I would suggest that they are aware of the Enemy and likely working against it, as we are ourselves, but their impulsive behaviour around information is something we want to be extremely conscious of and monitor as closely as possible without alerting suspicion. I highly doubt that the fiasco with the PRT ENE 3 days ago is the last of their escapades in involuntary declassification".

"If they've made contingencies already, they are likely aware of both our existence and our methods to some degree and are paranoid enough to take preventative action. If we're going to monitor them, I think we should be extremely wary of their capabilities to catch on to us." Eidolon pointed out. "But otherwise this seems like a good plan, as long as we ensure the Protectorate knows that a rapid response to their presence is required, to gather as much information as possible and perhaps capture them."

"It seems this situation has been dealt with, for now." Alexandria finalised. "I will inform Director Piggot and the other branches of the expected rapid response to trans_morphic. Perhaps, despite the odds, we can get him to work for the Protectorate and use his tinkertech for some actual good, maybe I'll convince him to take that implant out and get his head on straight. Door to my office."

Vista Perspective - At Home
Missy was in her bed, and unfortunately for her, this was in her parents' house. She was annoyed to say the least, frustrated at the PRT's policy of hostility towards trans_morphic. Sure, they had disrupted operations a bit, but she saw how much happier Chris was already knowing his specialty - he'd been tinkering almost nonstop since the letter came through, with a grin on his face the entire time. And the thoughtful looks Miss Militia gained when she thought no-one was looking at her, Vista knew something profound had happened. She could tell, even if she didn't know what precisely trans_morphic had told the others in their letters - and it was obvious that trans_morphic intended to upend the status quo that had been maintained for so long, with dangerous information if nothing else.

Even despite the unpleasantness of Master-Stranger protocols, the effects were already worth it to her. Shadow Stalker had been transferred to Texas, after it came out that she'd been perpetuating a bullying campaign that could accurately be described as torture in her civilian identity. While I'm not happy she's still on the Wards, Missy thought to herself, at least I don't have to put up with the psycho anymore.

Thinking back to trans_morphic, she felt sorry for the Tinker and - despite PR's insistence - approved strongly of their declaration of war on Fascists and the Empire, even if they were being treated as a villanous cape by the PRT . Being visibly transgender and nonbinary, and a Tinker apparently with minimal support, in the Nazi Capital of the USA had to really fucking suck. If, of course, they can even survive the Nazis to do whatever it is they actually want to do, she idly thought to herself (remembering her own battles with Hookwolf), as she opened the thread on PHO that had got her temporarily locked out of posting by PR, to find the video response Kaiser had just released. Max Anders, she reminded herself. Piggot had disclosed that much of her letter at least. I'll never look at Medhall the same again.

Pressing play, she watched as Kaiser himself and several other E88 capes - in front of a large E88 logo on the back wall - began his speech, opening his arms wide.

"Today, I am honoured to have the good people of Brockton Bay as my audience", he began
"Just a day ago, a grand gesture of antagonism to honest, working folk was constructed, visible to all."

"A challenge to the Empire by the degenerates, the ones who leech the life from our fair city with their deviant transsexual ideology!", Kaiser gestured to the watchers.

"Diseased in mind, this tinker - going by the name trans_morphic - decided to vandalise the building of the largest employer in the city, Medhall."
Yeah, your fucking company, dickhead, Vista thought to herself, I wonder how many of those "employees" are not white or are transgender, or gay?

"The Empire intends to recruit this creature, and rebuild it to it's full humanity, as a loyal soldier of the Empire. A restoration of the natural order. of the roles best played by man and woman!", Kaiser gestured to Othala and Victor.
Jesus he's laying it on thick, she thought to herself, might be related to the indication that trans_morphic seems to know his civilian ID

"The Empire will not surrender. The Empire will not retreat. The Empire intends to protect the city from the scourges of degeneracy, to shield your fair children from the lure of transsexuals and other deviancy, to fix them or put them down if necessary. And our prime example of what we can do for you will be trans_morphic. He will come to serve the Empire, in time, or he shall cease to be a problem. I shall ensure it personally, if I must".
Fucking hell, Vista paled. The Empire were going full goddamn bore on trans_morphic. No doubt they'd be sending all the forces they could to try and catch them unguarded. Hell, she thought to herself, I wouldn't be surprised if they brought some Gesselschaft fuckers over just for them. The threat of an organised antifascist movement along with someone who sent a brazen message like that must have spooked them, and pretty fucking badly too.

"Of course, trans_morphic could realise the disease of his mind and voluntarily turn himself over to the Empire, to serve our great cause, to save Brockton Bay from the rabble who inhabit it, the lesser races and deviants sucking on the economic blood of their betters."
Literally zero percent chance of that happening, Vista darkly chuckled to herself
.
"And so, I leave you, the honest people of Brockton Bay, with a question. Do you want the security and strength of the Empire behind you, or do you want the approval of a mentally ill tinker who goes against his rightful place?" Kaiser finished, the video cutting to blank.

Missy was deeply worried for the new tinker. She'd heard of forced tinker recruitment, but this was something else. A full-on manhunt (or nonbinary-hunt, heh), with intent to delete their very identity, a core part of themself. While Vista was young, she was astute, experienced, and kept her ears to the ground. Fully aware of the rumours of what the Gesselschaft did to capes, the whispers of the trigger camps and the indoctrination centres, she worried deeply for the welfare of the antifascist tinker, regardless of if they were mildly villanous in classification.

She didn't sleep well that night.
[end of chapter - nya~]
Sorry for the delay. I had the first half of my CoVID shot a couple days ago and also have had other IRL stuff to deal with, also adhd nya.
But I hope you all appreciate the different perspectives ^.^
also misgendering myself via other characters is super uncomfortable to write :/ but also important to the nature of the story nyaeoww

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
In the early morning, I woke up, too warm but still comfy. As was my standard operating procedure (also known as procrastinating from actually doing stuff) I took a look at my PHO thread, which had gained at least 15 new pages overnight (and at least 6 of those were entirely full of Nazi apologists).

And then I saw the video. Kaiser's response. Now, while I'd experienced some pretty bad transphobia indirectly in my former world, this was... well it was totally mask-off, which I really should have been more prepared for given the state of Earth Bet (and more specifically, Brockton Bay). I was unashamed to admit that I was shook and deeply disturbed after watching it, and took a while to calm myself down.

A little ping for a private message from one Miss_Warper came through. Going to be honest, it was obviously Missy, but the information inside sent chills down my back. She reminded me of a very important fact. The Nazi scum here could get help from the Nazi scum abroad, which meant they'd probably bring in Masters and people able to detect pocket dimensions or other interversal rifts. Which was worrying as fuck. My heartbeat raced up at the thought of being sent into Conversion Therapy++++ in those fucking Gesselschaft torture camps. Curling up tightly under the covers, I took a few moments to try and calm myself down, especially after the visceral reminder of the dysphoria that that video had been. Jesus.

What I needed to do was shut off my links to Medhall, and so within a few minutes my infrastructure hijacking machines were retracted and I closed the portals myself. As much as I ever enjoyed hijacking Nazi gang property, it was... not worth the risk right now, I thought to myself, shuddering at the idea of the Gesselschaft camps again. Contemplating over targets that would be easiest and most acceptable, I decided to nab internet from the offices of Fortress Constructions - because, and I could not say this enough - fuck Coil, and a few minutes later I was once again hooked up to the internet and other utilities.

It was then that I looked upon the most beautiful hardware chip ever. The one that'd just finished being engraved in the rotations of bilayer graphene and stood before me in the chip production chamber. A wonderful piece of electronic machinery, capable of emulating the laptop I currently used to do my computing on a single one of it's 512 fucking cores, each capable of maximum clockspeeds as high as 20GHz, with almost 1GiB of high speed cache to counter the extremely slow RAM of Bet's tech level. I could even put it right in my current laptop and it'd adapt itself for the motherboard and then manage the other 511 cores appropriately. This absolute beast was a combination of highly adapted 2021 and near future chip technologies, the bullshit-level material properties of graphene, and the magic of tinkertech manufacturing devices. And so, I finished off the entire thing with the ceramic casing and carefully replaced the chip in my laptop with something that outstripped it's capabilities by about 3 orders of magnitude at 1/10th the energy cost.

I would never be short of computing power for a very long time, I felt, as I set the chip production machine to making another.

And once again I was alone with myself, and my thoughts. I'd spat on the Nazis and I'd keep having to do that, but how much longer until I couldn't cope with the loneliness? How much longer until I broke from complete lack of communication and depression. I needed friends - ideally I could cuddle them and get cuddled or petted because that was what I liked in life and it was my most effective form of emotional communication, but I'd take literally anything at this point. Hugging myself, I set my brain to solutions to the problem.

I needed someone capey enough to be able to keep up with my life being basically 100% parahuman bullshit, someone around my age of 21, someone who seemed like a decent enough person, and would not be bigoted towards both my transition and the more radical parts of my own morphological wants. They also couldn't work for any government organisation connected to the PRT or Protectorate or the police or military, for fairly obvious security and ideological reasons, and had to be comfortable with my neurodivergent behaviour. God, I'm so needy, hah! I thought to myself in amusement.

The Friend Problem was apparently the hardest I had yet come across. Not something I could solve by tinkering, at least not currently, but I supposed I could make a start. The biggest issue actually came with the transhumanism/morphology thing - the existence of people like Bonesaw and Nilbog had made people... extremely prejudiced to biological modification of almost any kind, more especially in the cape scene, which was the only place I'd find people capey-enough to deal with me. Transmedicalism had somewhat greater ideological support on Bet due to the generally more negative view of body modifications and increased pressure to justify access to them in any way, which was an odd and fairly depressing result.

Having friends was going to be difficult as fuck. In my world, I'd also had trouble making friends, but Earth Bet had a moderately less potent Internet cultural complexity, so I had to look even harder for appropriate communities. However, I was in luck, as PHO had a section focused on LGBT+ capes and LGBT+ issues around capes, which probably had a good community for me to try and find people! Perhaps I could make up for the current situation's worst aspect - the loss of my friends, the people I cared for the most - at least a little. Even as I began browsing the LGBT+ PHO forums, I felt pangs of loneliness, and worry for my friends, in my chest - and while I'd subconsciously already registered the idea, I firmly resolved myself to tear gaping holes in the fucking fabric of the multiverse back to my original world if it was the last goddamn thing I did.

Gritting my teeth in one of those intense surges of determination I occasionally got, I went to work on a temporary solution. Namely, being able to walk outside for more than 5 minutes without fear of being ganked by Ziz or Miss Fedora and her associates. I needed to talk to at least some people about all the ridiculous secrets I have because the psychological strain was draining, even with the deadswitches I'd set up. Putting all my charges in Precognition, I gained an intuitive/tinkertech-bullshit understanding of the mechanisms. More specifically, the way in which shards smoothed out the expected variations based on quantum mechanics (rather than the mere butterfly effect of classical mechanics). The ways to make precognition too computationally expensive for even the bullshit-level multidimensional space-whale fragments by the introduction of sufficient interactions predicated on individually random processes rather than bulk, statistical wavefunction collapse, despite their access to small pieces of information from possible futures in the form of the occasional tachyon. In fact, at the corner of my precognition specialty, I could feel some primitive blueprints to block microtelekinesis and inter-versal and multi-dimensional observation effects - and, although it strained the specialty a decent amount, it provided some evidence that shard precognition was also heavily dependent on unparalleled data collection, to really model all near-classical interactions as well as possible.

I wanted to build a precognition blocker. The problem was, I needed some pretty exotic matter for what I wanted to do, and this time the shard wouldn't bullshit it away for me like it had with my pocket dimensions - at least not with my available materials. Currently, what I had in mind was essentially a remote neural randomness injector, that would trigger electrical impulses that induce roughly 10% of the activation voltage of the average human neuron based on the the input of one of quadrillions of individual quantum-scale systems. Doing this remotely was easier than you might think once you considered the extra dimensions available to be moved through, with at least 61 more spacial axes (which behaved oddly compared to the standard 3D central universe in how they interacted with current physics models).

Precise use of another fundamental force that interacted with W-bosons (and sun-sourced neutrinos) would allow me to shift an appropriate number of specifically timed photons a single unit (the dimension was discrete) in axis #23 for an arbitrarily determined amount of time before they decayed back to solely be in the standard 3 dimensions (or 4D spacetime), triggering spontaneous reactions in neurotransmitters - the photons matched a very particular energy band - that would induce the desired effect in the neuron that got hit. There were more general dimension spreading techniques with much lower energy cost (see: Sting), but high precision displacement was needed - or at least, that was what I understood from the current blueprint.

Once I wrote down the blueprint for my precognition jammer/randomness injector, I set out to prevent multiversal observation by capes like the Clairvoyant and pushed 1 charge into multiversal mechanics, 1 into multidimensional mechanics, and 3 into stealth. In doing so the solution to the observation problem was obvious - merely increase the energy required to transition between universes in the local area enough that the echo particles made by photons (traveling while shifted in axis #54) could not be observed via the ultra low power form of portals that the Clairvoyant likely used to be able to watch over everywhere, in every universe. Luckily those "bleedthrough portals" (because they let various echo particles that exist, shifted in axis #54, bleed through universe boundaries) did not work in anything on a different level of the Worm multiverse, which actually meant that most shards probably couldn't see in my pocket dimension at all. Completing the blueprint was fairly simple - extrude matter properly in the direction of axis #10 and the gravitational disturbance would locally increase the interversal boundary energy wall for the particles along axis #54.

Doing the extrusion required very precise photon interaction, which was easy with tinkertech Shaker powers that let me produce blueprints for inducing those interactions in the device. The clairvoyant blocker was actually very simple to construct - the Shaker powers did all the work in converting simple glass into some hyper-precise photon interaction machine that continually pushed bits of air along axis #10, with even that minor of a gravitational disturbance being sufficient to blank out the entirety of Brockton Bay on about 1 microwatt of power. It was such a simple machine, in fact, that I made about 30 of them in an hour using extremely small amounts of resources - putting 3 in my own pocket dimension (just to be safe), implanting a couple inside my lower body with the biocompatibility and cybernetics specialties (it transferred bits of water, and used sugar from my bloodstream as an energy source), and carrying one in my small backpack I was going to wear when I went outside again.

Constructing the precog jammer was harder. The processing power required to coordinate quadrillions of lightbeams of particular wavelength using specific W-boson interactions was... pretty high. Essentially, I'd need pockets of very precisely structured matter to enable W-boson interactions when an electrical charge was run through, and I needed them en-masse, as well as the graphene equivalent of an ASIC to convert all the outputs from the quadrillions of quantum randomness sources into instructions for the photon pulses. Fortunately for me it took barely two hours and several high-precision metallic sheets and materials to add a piece of equipment - involving many lasers - to my chip manufacturing machine that could inject single atoms into fixed locations of the graphene bilayer hexagonal structures in bulk, enabling the creation of photon-shifter components amongst many other things. Because while doping was not required for basic computation, the usage of elements with different nuclear masses was required for the exotic interactions involved in pushing photons in direction #23, amongst many many other effects I could probably learn about and use with different specialties.

A little modification to my chip design program (on my laptop), and I had come up with a truly powerful blueprint format that would enable the documentation of arbitrary-scale precision insertion of atoms into a chip. And with that, I went to work, designing a System-on-a-Chip that would inject quantum randomness on a more classical scale across a wide area, blasting photon pulses throughout a roughly 5km radius that would induce enough randomness in decisions to make precog that could account for the quantum effects impossible. The chip itself was physically huge, enough to cover half of my laptop keyboard, and contained about 10 trillion nanoscale shifted-photon LEDs, each hooked up to a binary quantum system (some with varying probabilities), and an appropriate power supply. While an individual chip would definitively hinder precognition in the local area, several were needed to block it, and I wanted about 100 to be sure - luckily for me the actual quantity of materials involved in making these chips was extremely minimal and their uniformity enabled significantly parallelised manufacture compared to more complex designs. Each of the chips used about a single Watt of power, and would probably take about 30 minutes to produce.

So I set the chip fabricator going. spending the time browsing the PHO LGBT+ forums and making idle chatter. Apparently, I had a lot of fans on there, which was a strange feeling, but it made sense given my actions around the Nazi trash. The celebrity worship - while minor, given my repeated statements and reasoning on various threads that it was a very bad idea to centre any one person for your ideas - was still pretty uncomfortable, but I talked with some people and it was pretty nice. There were several minor dormant antifascist groups in Brockton that had been jolted into action by what essentially amounted to a mutual declaration of war between myself and the Empire 88 - I was worried about the risk of non-capes up against capes, but I decided that the best option was to provide maximal information along with the primary risks on stealthy actions (particularly Stormtiger and Cricket), which took a few minutes. While I was online, I also dumped some blueprints (translated to modern design languages like Verilog) of my highly modular and physically dense chip technology adjusted to run on silicon and doping based chips, all open-sourced.

Which got quite some traction, extremely fast, as soon as someone who knew what these designs meant got a look. Honestly, seeing technology you'd essentially designed in an afternoon via tinker powers cause an unmitigated internet riot was... rather fun. Chatting with Totally Not Vista was also surprisingly relaxing - while I'd been branded a villain, there was supposedly some pretty big internal PRT politics going into that decision (and the decision to treat me with more potent hostility and attempts at capture). The effects of the shit I did were already having wider impact - Director Piggot and the ENE branch were increasingly distrusting of the wider organisation, with Piggot's letter apparently causing the woman significant apprehension towards the Chief Director - and Vista suspected based on various things she'd overheard that the PRT was leaning toward bigotry about my transition and that was pressuring up threat responses and a desire to bring me in and stop it due to my growing status as a symbol of radical capes - some minor comparisons to Lustrum had been made but quickly dismissed. Of course, with this discussion, I reminded her that if she was caught talking to me she'd be in deep shit, but Vista probably already knew that so it was a bit pointless on my end.

A few more hours of mindless procrastination and loneliness later (and nibbling of convenience store pasties I had bought), and my brain was brimming with tinkertech ideas. One of the effects of my newly modified CPU fab was the ability to inject various elements at atomic precision into my CPU chips, and with appropriate configuration (and charges in "nanoscale exotic effects"), I figured out how to directly make the graphene bilayer spin inducing lasers (rather than via coordinated interference as I currently used in the tinkertech fabber). What this meant in practice was that I could make a chip capable of reprogramming my other graphene chips without involving the fabber setup I currently used at all - at least if those chips did not need any complex exotic effects via doping.

The consequences of this were absolutely huge. I could manufacture what essentially amounted to a perfectly reprogrammable FPGA of efficiency comparable to straight-up specifically crafted computing chips like graphics cards or ASICs, that I could use to design hardware and essentially have a perfectly mutable computing platform for any specialised functionality desired. The sheer possibilities were legitimately insane - perfect hardware algorithm implementations were in sight, perfect hardware parallelism, perfect network routing, perfect extra RAM, perfect second CPU, perfect combination of any of these, I was practically goddamn salivating, especially since the optimisation algorithms used in my world's modern CPUs had strong focus on identifying parallel operations anyway that I could probably just use those and essentially create a customised chip for each program I needed to run with high performance. I hadn't even built the bloody thing yet and I had already begun writing interface drivers and a program-to-optimised-hardware-configuration converter without even realising, I was that excited about this concept.

While I'd been procrastinating, there'd been enough time already to produce almost 20 of the precog blocker chips. The Simurgh was going to fucking sweat once I'd finished setting these up, and even without the full 100 of them it would at least theoretically be enough to block precog (I had chosen to make 100 to be absolutely sure, and I intended to leave about half in my pocket dimension just to be certain, as well as bring half with me in another device to Brockton).

I prepared to sleep, curling up in bed, as it was starting to get late with all my tinker bullshit that I'd done, and I mentally prepared myself to speak to Faultline's Crew about Case 53s, probably tomorrow or the day after. I wanted to give them the full story of powers and Case 53s, which meant I'd need evidence, which meant... Well, it meant that I needed to work on some more multiversal technology, because I was going to rip holes into the realities that shards inhabited. I needed to do this anyway, since I already had many ideas about the things I might be able to do with direct access to shards (especially my own), and it'd provide essentially irrefutable evidence to anyone I needed to inform of the true nature of powers. It was with that thought that I finally drifted off and dreamt of eldrich landscapes and long, white halls.
[end of chapter - nya~]
Progress is made on the Friend Problem, and on inter-universal stealth and anti-precognition defenses! (which are important parts of the solution to the Friend Problem).

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
Waking up, I was bouncing from one of those random burst of intense motivation you sometimes get. I had things to do and I damn well was going to do them! I had to make a multiverse portal generator - for the base-level Worm multiverse, not merely my pocket dimension - and for that, I needed several things.

The most important was targeting - I pushed 3 charges into multiversal tinkering, 1 into multidimensional phenomena, and one into integrated circuits. It didn't take long for me to identify a dimensional axis involved in combination with exotic gravitational phenomena to rip holes in spacetime - my scanner/targeter chip would need a small amount of magnesium for obscure interactions with that axis using electrons and carbon-magnesium nuclear interactions. This would essentially provide a relative location that, with an appropriately applied gravitational anomaly, would allow for Doormaker-style portals. My power provided a fantastic modular targeting circuit - the circuit itself was fairly crudely designed but it did the job and would let me indefinitely expand the area in which a portal would be targeted (rather than randomly attaching to some other alternative universe). Another 20 minutes and I had a scanner module blueprint that would detect anomalies in the same axis indicative of a nearby interuniversal interaction - this is what would let me find parahumans and their shards. The multiversal mechanics behind what anomalies in the given axis are associated to what multiverse - for each universe - meant I could save different identified locations and access them in a comparatively absolute manner (as opposed to merely "relative" locations between universes)

Reprogramming my chipfab - which had overnight finished making another 40 or so antiprecog chips - I set it to work constructing one of my targeter/scanner combination chips with little difficulty. The big problem for me now was creating a portal-generating gravitational anomaly. This would require a chip to coordinate the construction of a field of exotic matter and a decent sized power input to create and manage the portal (coordination of the portal with Earth's rotation).

Creating the negative mass required for some of the related gravitational phenomena would theoretically be difficult, but my tinker power eventually gave me some answers - some more multidimensional interactions would allow me to exploit the Casimir Effect in macro. I was also lucky that I was using graphene chips - which let me make bilayer superconductors - or the power going through the chip would most definitively scorch the bloody thing. I needed roughly half the output from my fusion reactor to power it as well, which currently meant I could only run the system for an hour or so at a time.

Queuing the second chip, I went to PHO and began looking for Faultline. Obviously, she couldn't just call herself that on the PHO boards (well, she could, but I didn't think she was the type to take the risk in the way I had), but she had to be accessible enough for people to find and ask for jobs if they were really looking for her Crew. It was with that that I began seriously searching over the US boards and more importantly user lists to see if there were any people that had usernames moderately related to their name - eventually I found several, and further analysis (for an hour or two) of their biases towards Case 53 topics and wide-area conversations and information gathering (as was natural for a mercenary team that travelled), lead me to believe that the user "NoFaultInvolved" was almost certainly Faultline or someone in communication with her team.

So, I opened up my private messages and got straight to the topic, despite my social anxieties making me hesitate...

■​

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■​

♦ Topic: C53 Info
In: Boards ► Private Messages ► NoFaultInvolved
trans_morphic (Original Poster) (Verified Cape)
Posted On Mar 8th 2011:
Hai, I have info on case 53s (and powers) and I figured you'd be interested. I've finally got some antiprecog stuff going on which means I can tell people without just getting very dead. Willing to arrange a meet, if you are who I think you are (honestly I coulda gone outside and asked but I... am anxious and stuff).
- nya~

​

(Showing page 1 of 1)

​

►NoFaultInvolved ​

Replied On Mar 8th 2011:​

I am who you think I am, and if you legitimately have solid information, we'd like to hear it.​

​

We can discuss prices now, if you prefer.​

​

►trans_morphic (Original Poster) (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 8th 2011:​

Well I'd happily tell you for free (you've seen how I handle information, namely spreading it as far as possible), which makes me ridiculously happy, but if I understand you'd prefer something without favours being owed (even implicitly or unintentionally).​

​

To be honest just having someone to share this information with in the first place would be a huge burden off of me, having world-ending information is extremely distressing. Even just letting me talk about it to a group for whom it is relevant and I know will be responsible with it is a huge favour to me.​

​

This would be knowing and expecting that the information I tell you is likely to come out publicly as soon as the world has the ability to not get, well, obliterated on the release of it, of course. As for when that happens, expect mass social unrest with some of the things I want to do to precipitate it.​

​

If you need a monetary price, though, and insist on paying for stuff, I'd take $2000 in cash (for essentially feeding myself for the forseeable future). I do not work with the Number Man, for reasons related to the information I want to give to you. I'm aware I'm probably significantly undervaluing the information, but I generally do not value money that much other than for the fact I need it to live - I have other motivations.​

- nya~​

​

►NoFaultInvolved ​

Replied On Mar 8th 2011:​

$2000 is an acceptable amount. It will be provided in cash after the information is given.​

​

We can meet later today at the nightclub at 10PM, if that is ok with yourself, and there are no additional requirements.​

​

►trans_morphic (Original Poster) (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 8th 2011:​

That seems ok to me, though I do have several things you should be aware of.​

Firstly, the Gesellschaft and E88 want me alive or dead. I'm sure you already know this but i'd really appreciate if you checked a little around the nightclub before I come to visit.​

Secondly, the information in question is dangerous enough that it requires me to employ active anti-thinker and anti-precognition measures, so you should be aware that until I get redundant devices scattered around the Bay, there is significant risk if you even try to communicate the information (especially about case 53s).​

Thirdly, some of the information I give you may be censored by your power itself. Be prepared for occasional periods of disorientation or forgetfulness due to power censorship. There is a better chance that your Case 53 members remember what I tell you about several things, but you can also probably figure out some mental workarounds as well, and if you are appropriately paranoid I would suggest employing whatever M/S codes and stuff your team uses or similar protocols.​

​

The anti-observation devices I use actually consume minuscule amounts of power and are trivial for me to make, so I can give you one easily (this should preserve moderate precognition immunity for a period even if active anti-precognition wears off). I have at least one of these implanted though, and I've left several throughout Brockton, so you're probably safe regardless.​

- nya~​

​

►NoFaultInvolved ​

Replied On Mar 8th 2011:​

Thanks for the warnings. I will be sure to run some extra patrols around. The keyword for the bouncer is Amyoka, at 10pm as per our agreement.​

​

See you then.​

​

End of Page. 1

■​

And so, I had an arrangement with Faultline in about 10 hours, which was enough time for both of the required processing chips to be fabricated with several hours to spare. I needed preparations, so I took half an hour to wire sets of 30 anti-precognition chips up to a standard plug to the power system - it was pretty simple due to their very self-contained nature - and set to work constructing housings for my Scanner/Targeter/Doormaker devices. The scanner and targeter were simple enough (and for the sizes of portal I was interested in, that is, about maximal 5m diameter with my signature purple outline, small enough) that I could implant them just like my own pocket dimension generator. After eating some of that corner-shop pasta salad as a late lunch, I pushed my specialty fully to bioaugmentation and neural interfaces and I'd developed a housing for the scanner and targeter devices with an internal memory and naturally a low-power energy supply that could obtain electricity directly from glucose and oxygen in my bloodstream. It took very little effort to make one of those for my existing pocket dimension portal generator as well.

The real power hog was the gravitational anomaly generator. It, like the targeter, had a massive range limit (and had optional but default portal anchoring to Earth), but a massive power draw. The chip itself was large but not that bad - the real issue was power consumption (and thank fuck for superconducting components or heat would be the real problem). Like my pocket dimension access gun, I wanted it implanted (so I couldn't lose it), but it did need an external power source like my fusion reactor, and the interface for that would be much more complex to implant than the simple stuff I'd done so far - it had to have external access, after all, and that meant that keeping it uninfected and free of environmentally-induced conditions would be significantly more difficult.

As such, I pushed my specialty towards bio-reactive materials and environmental hardening, and with that my power provided a solution. I could take iron and meld it with silicon in a particular manner while tinkering and it'd have all the properties I needed for biological interfacing, and would, with appropriate connector structure, prevent water from passing into any internal circuitry or connecting the 3 power cable slots. It took about 3 hours but I constructed all the housing and peripheral components to the main technology, and set myself to working it into my body. The scanner and targeter comfortably fit into my upper arm, but the gravitational anomaly generator better fit in my leg, which provided space for my power cable slot - installing that system took almost an hour by itself - and then I had to apply my standard improv-material metallic bandages that I'd used for my other self surgeries. Gaining instinct for my interuniversal portal generator was going to be hard and I needed to get it to at least rudimentary function for my demonstration of the nature of powers to Faultline's Crew later that night.

It was with that thought that I moved the cable from my fusion reactor and hooked it into my leg (even despite the bandaging all around the edge), and enabled the fusion reactor at half output for the purposes of some experimentation and honing of new types of instinct.

The first thing I needed to practice was using my pocket dimension generator in concert with the interversal portal generators to create a direct portal from my pocket dimension to anywhere in the base-level multiverse. I used the scanner on the portal to Aleph and saved both it and Bet's universe coordinates to the internal memory system, and then I went to work practicing converting my internal instinctive understanding of coordinates from the pocket dimension gun to the relative coordinates used in the interuniversal generator system, so I could place the portals on top of each other and as a result fuse them together to produce a new, direct, portal. It took almost 30 tries but I eventually managed a direct portal to Aleph's Alaska. A little more experimentation and I had the dimensional address of my own shard. But, my fusion reactor needed time to cool off for the demonstration with Faultline - in about 1 hour at this point - and so I reluctantly disconnected the reactor and watched as the nice purple-encircled, swirling holes in reality slammed shut.

Frankly, my anxiety was building, and I took the time to tensely wash myself, and pace around my homely pocket dimension. The precog jammer housing was filled with the thin black rectangles that were my chips, I had all the equipment I needed implanted and unlosable, and I had nibbled some more delicious pasta. One of the precog jammer machines was continuously running inside my lab (with about 30 chips), and the other I was currently fidgeting with in my hands as a result of anxiety. I decided, then, I could put my external one fairly central to the Bay, in the Fosberg Gallery - so I took 10 minutes to do that before returning to my fearful pacing.

Five minutes before the meeting time, I braced myself mentally, and used my internal pocket dimension gun to rip a hole near the Palanquin, readying myself and desperately hoping Contessa or the Triumvirate didn't just kill me right here, right now, despite all my countermeasures.
[end of chapter - nya~]

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
Above the Palanquin - Faultline Perspective
Faultline had been looking for information for almost 3 years at this point. Scraps of data and rumors of vials, mostly, all pointing to the existence of a shadowy organisation. The shared stories of her Case 53 teammates, dumped with no memories into the streets with a strange marking. She'd paid (with the funding of her Crew), something on the order of $500,000 just to scratch out this much information on the topic.

People who claimed to know more disappeared with disturbing regularity. To be honest, she was skeptical of trans_morphic for the fact they were still alive despite claiming to know more than anyone else she'd ever been in contact with, but she seriously doubted they were intentionally dishonest and the chaos they'd already caused in the PRT - rumoured in the underworld to be from some kind of information leak - meant she was far less skeptical than she would have been of their claims earlier. So she was willing to take a chance. They were asking for a pittance compared to what she'd already spent on the topic, and they'd made it pretty clear they didn't even care about the money all that much.

Their distrust of the Number Man gave her pause though. If the Number Man was involved, it implied some seriously concerning things about the level of power this organisation actually held. Number Man managed the finances of the entire criminal underworld, essentially, and she strongly suspected he had a significant hand in regulating the legitimate economy as well. It only made sense given both the rumors and the lack of total economic collapse from the Endbringers, which anyone with an understanding of economics would have predicted happening years earlier without some kind of intervention.

She'd been going over M/S protocols with Newter and Gregor and Labyrinth extensively in the past day. She was also deeply worried about the idea of her power messing with her head to such a degree that it might be required. Of course, she understood from her own reading on parahumans (in her attempts to bend her way around the Manton Limit) that they had a natural tendency for conflict, but she hadn't really internalised the fact that her power might be disrupting her thought processes more openly. Having it stated in such a direct manner was extremely concerning on a visceral level and her teammates seemed just as worried as her even through their usual ways of handling stress - Newter was talking rapidly about everything and anything to Gregor and they were both pacing intently, and Labyrinth was clearly struggling to hold back the tide of her power with flickers of expansion and shadows of medieval medical equipment flashing in and out of existence on the floor.

Of course, as the minute hand drew closer, she prepared herself for the meeting, gathering up the money she had gotten in cash and placing it in a briefcase. It wasn't very much, all things considered, for what they would hopefully be getting, but it didn't mean she would be careless with counting. She was a mercenary who stuck to the deals she made and she had no desire for her team to lose that reputation.

Just as she finished, there was a knock on the door, and she knew it was time.

Cauldron Perspective
It didn't take long for Contessa to notice a problem. Her Paths were fragmenting.

This wasn't like Eidolon, or Scion, or the Endbringers. Those were artificial blindspots and she could work her ways around them. Even Mantebellum, the power nullifier, lacked anything toward the same effect.

Brockton Bay was a true blindspot. She knew it the moment it started, and for maybe the fourth time in her life, Contessa was genuinely scared. Every Path even tangentially involving Brockton Bay had started continuously shifting and changing , and in Brockton Bay her Paths simply shattered into a thousand quintillion different pieces that were continually breaking apart further, completely incoherent to her ability to plan until her power ceased attempting anything entirely. More concerning, just before this event her power had been pointing her towards another interference with Faultline's Crew related to Cauldron's secrets and ensuring they didn't find out too soon.

It was pretty obvious to her that trans_morphic was responsible. They'd always caused shifts in her path very occasionally, and they clearly were aware of the presence of Cauldron (as well as the Entities) from their very unsubtle allusions on PHO. Unfortunately, every Path she had for stopping the near leak ended catastrophically or required hours of work to undo various countermeasures trans_morphic had clearly put in place - and now that they had definite access to Path-disrupting technology amongst other things she knew that there could be any number of other hidden countermeasures she could not see with the Path to Victory.

The other issue, of course, was the destabilisation within the Protectorate and PRT that trans_morphic had induced so far. Her lack of agreement with Alexandria's transphobic attitudes did not stop her from exploiting that view to get a closer eye (and hopefully capture) on trans_morphic, but it was causing friction between the Protectorate (most especially the Wards) and the PRT across America. The ENE branch being the most prominent example, with Director Piggot pulling away from the larger organisation despite the wishes of her underlings and Alexandria as Chief Director. Legend's own souring attitude towards Alexandria and to a degree to the more passive Eidolon was another - the rift within the Triumvirate was going to have to be resolved soon.

trans_morphic was becoming a problem. A couple days earlier and there was no issue, but right now? She needed to deal with them. Not kill them, no - they seemed far too useful for that, as indicated by the precognition blockers alone they were probably one of the rare few capable of genuinely affecting the Entities in some way or another - but permanent capture and control by Cauldron looked necessary, at this point.

After a 3 minute discussion with Doctor Mother, it was decided. She picked up the metaphorical interuniversal phone to Alexandria and Eidolon, and gave orders aimed directly at the people in the Palanquin. Known place, known time, rough capabilities - the Triumvirate would almost certainly succeed.

In 5 minutes, they'd be there and it'd be over.

Somewhere in Cryptographically Secure Cyberspace
Welcome, actuallyZandra@03a7:79a1::0362 to #bb-opno88 on ene-cryptchat (03c6:192d::a237)
antifbob: oh hi
antifbob: so basically
antifbob: we've got a sound activated camera inside the E88 warehs now.
antifbob: was fucking scary, had to hide behnd a box
antifbob: literally saw fucking Kaiser
antifbob: he left after 2 min tho
actuallyZandra: please keep safe like holy shit that's... dangerous as fuck.
actuallyZandra: I'm glad you're ok
actuallyZandra: But this is fucking big
antifbob: ye i dn't think weve ever had a direct like in e88 ops before
antifbob: @xx_smash_xx has been looking at the vids
actuallyZandra: yeah they should be here soon I think
actuallyZandra: i talked to them a couple days ago when they were just getting started
xx_smash_xx@03c4:23a1::7d6e joined #bb-opno88 on ene-cryptchat (03c6:192d::a237)
xx_smash_xx: holy shit
xx_smash_xx: folks you have no idea what the FUCK i found
xx_smash_xx: it's insane. we hit the jackpot with this @actuallyZandra @antifbob!
actuallyZandra: well tell us then silly ;p
antifbob: yeah i think getting the vids archived wth all of us to stop potential loss is a gd idea, before we discuss it
xx_smash_xx: sure
xx_smash_xx is hosting a file e88-footage.tar.gz, download [y/n]? y
actuallyZandra: thanks
antifbob: thx, lets discuss that shit then
xx_smash_xx: so, the vids from last night
xx_smash_xx: starts with a massive shipment, right?
xx_smash_xx: then at 03:47 we see Kaiser come into view
xx_smash_xx: talking about "the arrangement" with Hookwolf (i think) and a cape i'm pretty sure is gesellschaft
actuallyZandra: yeah that looks like hookwolf to me
actuallyZandra: and i think iirc that the other guy is "Thunderstruck"
actuallyZandra: some kind of electrokinetic with more control in metals. I think? not sure i remember right
xx_smash_xx: probably less relevant rn, so carrying on
xx_smash_xx: this guy comes on as the medhall shipment - actually full of fucking AKs and pistols - which gets hauled in by these toughs
xx_smash_xx: Kaiser is talking to him more
xx_smash_xx: stuff about controlled finding and removal of moles for a capture of a fake e88 shipment in the future
xx_smash_xx: then, by chance, he looks straight at the camera
antifbob: is that who i think it is?
xx_smash_xx: oh yes
actuallyZandra: oh FUCK no
xx_smash_xx: chief of BBPD
xx_smash_xx: you can even see his badge peeking out under the overclothes
actuallyZandra: this is
actuallyZandra: the cops have been playing a shell game with the goddamn e88 all this time?
actuallyZandra: fucking hell
antifbob: i say we smash 'em lol
actuallyZandra: i mean i get that but we need to figure out the best way to handle this info i think
actuallyZandra: personally i think we should release straight to the press
xx_smash_xx: problem is E88 backlash i think
xx_smash_xx: they're already going hardball on trans_morphic
xx_smash_xx: not sure what would happen if this straight up got dumped right now
antifbob: i mean i'd definitely prefer to just release it too
antifbob: meming about smashing is fun ;p
antifbob: tho rn we've got to figure how to deal with this
antifbob: this level of infiltration + the existing conservative nature of police institutions
antifbob: how much of the police are straight up empire?
actuallyZandra: i mean there's def a lot of sympathisers
actuallyZandra: gotta love sketchy transphobic harassment from cops :/
actuallyZandra: tho the level of actual empire membership is not something we can know rn
xx_smash_xx: yeah
xx_smash_xx: this is quite a difficult situation
xx_smash_xx: obviously the ideal is just releasing the whole footage to the press/internet
xx_smash_xx: but this is.... yeah
actuallyZandra: it has to come out at somepoint
antifbob: i think we all agree there
xx_smash_xx: yeah
xx_smash_xx: i think
xx_smash_xx: maybe we anon tip the PRT director
xx_smash_xx: go direct to the top
antifbob: if they're compromised too...
xx_smash_xx: yeah, i know
xx_smash_xx: but i'm not sure it could be worse than what already is the case
xx_smash_xx: don't think any of us trust the authorities but antifascist networks are really weak here
xx_smash_xx: and it's not like anyone who isn't e88 owns that warehouse that we could get to kick them out or interfere
xx_smash_xx: if we did they'd probably just go straight into medhall instead or a different warehouse
actuallyZandra: honestly? you're probably right
actuallyZandra: we don't have the manpower or any capes to deal with this
actuallyZandra: not right now
antifbob: i think we tip the director
antifbob: then if nothing happens in a week or there's an indication of PRT compromise
antifbob: we release the vids fucking EVERYWHERE
antifbob: no stopping that info
antifbob: cus this can't keep on
actuallyZandra: that honestly seems like the best idea right now
xx_smash_xx: i think it's a good idea
xx_smash_xx: makes sure it can't just get buried
xx_smash_xx: actually i'll rent some servers for a couple weeks
xx_smash_xx: load the videos and if there's no interaction they get posted everywhere
xx_smash_xx: especially if the PRT is compromised and sets thinkers on us
actuallyZandra: both of us should do that too i think
antifbob: ill def do that
antifbob: but just... fucking hell
antifbob: this could start a war
antifbob: like genuinely holy fucking shit
actuallyZandra: yeah im not gonna sleep well tonight.
xx_smash_xx: i think its gonna take a bit to properly sink in
xx_smash_xx: anyway i'm going to sleep
antifbob: sleep well
actuallyZandra: niiight~
actuallyZandra@03a7:79a1::0362 left the chat
[end of chapter - nya~]
So, I should explain the delay

Essentially, the way i work on any project is my interest waxes and wanes over time. Sometimes I'll go weeks without doing anything on them at all, and sometimes I'll go full bore for days on them nya.

If this story goes dark for a week or two, it does not mean it's dead. Even like more than a few months.

As for what else I was doing? Well I was programming a lot (I've been writing a proactively memory loading static site server/generator) and also sorting out more legal ID shit for transition

I also graduated! With a not too bad grade despite how appalling this last year was for me as a consequence of ADHD meshing horrifically badly with structured education and some other stuff.

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[cw: a couple instances of misgendering of SI and Alexandria being a transphobe nya]
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
I continued pacing, peeking at the time on my laptop. This'd be the first real life social interaction I'd had in... over a week at this point. And it would be about highly dangerous knowledge of arguably the most powerful group in the local multiverse and the eldritch thing they were preparing to fight.

As the clock ticked to 21:57, I tore open a hole in reality just outside the Palanquin. It was tall and had the common trappings of a nightclub - bright colours, neon lights, the sound of heavy bass beats from within. The structure itself sturdier than buildings I was used to, coming from a world with fewer city destroying terror machines and parahumans with a tendency to fight. It's two floors were oddly intimidating despite the small stature of the building in absolute terms, I noted, as I looked to the obvious entrance with a sturdy pair of bouncers who made me anxious by their stature.

Nervously dashing over to them, I rushed out the codeword "Amyoka", eyes still examining the random interesting things around me. With an affirmative nod, the larger of the two bouncers led me inside - where I got a glimpse of a clearly thriving bar with a fantastic mix of cocktails and other alcohol, and some exceptionally pulsating electronic music that matched my personal tastes surprisingly well - and then up sturdy, mildly worn stairs to the quieter areas of the nightclub and bar, overseeing the floor below in a darker environment (which was also easy on my eyes, sensory issues were one of the reasons my signature colour was a near-black dark purple, after all, and this part of the club matched that sufficiently well to be extremely comforting to me).

It took another few seconds of me taking in the upper floor and we reached an almost industrial-style thick metal door, which was presumably where Faultline's Crew were currently situated. Heart beating wildly from meeting a social group, especially with people who were technically speaking dangerous to me (though I trusted them not to fuck me over), the bouncer knocked and a professional looking woman with a rugged metal mask and a false ponytail (I remembered that bit!) opened the extremely heavy looking door with mildly terrifying ease. She waved the way in where the other 3 of her teammates were stood behind her, and invited me to enter.

Gregor the Snail and Newter were of similar height (Newter I could tell was holding back the urge to word vomit in the same way I occasionally did when tense), Labyrinth was shorter and had an extremely glazed look to her eyes (I guessed she was having a bad day, given the way her power seemed to be flickering around the place and struggling to break free), and Faultline looked stoic and professional (which was entirely what I expected). I glanced behind me to find the door closed (it was surprisingly quiet enough that I didn't notice it, but it was also expected), and Faultline took the initiative which was extremely convenient for me given that I'd started physically shaking from anxiety at this conversation - which I needed to do for my own long term mental health and just because it was shitty not to get Case 53s clued in on the issue - but that didn't stop my brain grinding itself to a halt in cycles of terror.

"So. We should probably begin, trans_morphic. What information can you give us related to Case 53s?", she said with a surprisingly reassuring cadence. I guess my paralysing state of fear was pretty obvious, as was my complete... lack of formality. Which I was completely unashamed of, but I knew people could be pretty judgemental to that sort of thing. Faultine seemed good about that so far in our interaction which helped me relax from "completely paralysing terror" to "mostly paralysing terror", and, continuing to twist and generally stim with my clothes and hands, I began.

"So, basically there's a lot to get through, the source of powers, the organisation responsible for case 53s, the reason that organisation makes case 53s, the true number of case 53s. The organisation is named Cauldron, but don't say that name, they have a cape that can see all alternate earths and pass the sight on and a cape that makes portals to anywhere they can see - Doormaker and Clairvoyant . I have got precognition and Clairvoyant blocking tech up right now in Brockton, but without it they have a cape who's power is literally Path to Victory. Thinker: Run. Do not fuck with her or you will die without precog blockers", I said rapidly, not breathing properly.

Despite Faultline's professionalism, she visibly paled. I mean I guess she knew the people responsible were some degree of powerful, but honestly Cauldron in general was fucking terrifying with a bit of thought. They could be anywhere, anytime, and kill you anyhow. Frankly I still did not feel even the slightest bit safe.

"Well, fuck.", was Newter's response, as his tail twitched from what I presumed was worry. Succinct and accurate.
"This is indeed a rather concerning piece of information, if true.", was Gregor's response, which was less succinct but just as accurate.

"So yeah basically do not spread that around. They will absolutely know and are willing to kill to preserve secrecy. Also the Triumvirate are involved, though Legend does not know any of the sinister Case 53 stuff. Also! Alexandria is the Chief-Director. This shit is one of the reasons I live out of a fucking pocket dimension. heh"

The response I got was a chorus of frustrated realisation from the two Case 53s, and Faultline's solemn nod. "Well that would explain why the PRT makes almost no progress on solving the Case 53 mystery", was her vindicated reply, and Gregor and Newter both seemed pretty angry at this. Given the way the PRT and Protectorate presented themselves as an ideal place for Case 53 capes to be safe, protected, and welcomed, that absolutely made sense. I found it extremely disgusting and deceptive myself, though obviously most people in the Protectorate were unaware of Cauldron's existence or if they were, did not know of their Case 53 experiments.

Gregor continued though, interrupting our contemplation (and my continued nervous stimming and fidgeting and usual pacing) with a question to me. "Well, this is all well and good. But, you have yet to present evidence, although I am inclined to believe you, and you did say you would elaborate on the actual nature of Case 53s and the reasons for being.... made how we are."

I started speaking in anxious rapidity again, looking behind me for a second - "Oh, sorry, yeah. To do that though, I need to start by the nature of powers and of Cau-".

That was the time I turned to a loud crash as Alexandria and Eidolon hurled themselves through the wall - and the green-clad "hero" grabbed me around the neck. They stood there and I was... extremely afraid. I'd gone beyond mental shutdown and now adrenaline was racing through my shitty body and I felt time seem to slow down, my thoughts running like a steam train. I was getting really dissociative really fast and... I guessed my pupils were probably wide enough to consume my iris entirely. These two could have killed me right now if they really wanted.

Faultline's Crew were honestly terrifyingly quick in reaction speed. Within an instant, they were grouped up and ready to fight, dancing around the room in a dangerous, martial manner. Gregor and Newter looked like they were ready to explode at the two Triumvirate members despite the perilous situation - Newter in particular using his preternatural balance to continuously jump around the accelerating death trap of a maze that was appearing around us as Labyrinth let loose on her dimension-shaking power. Luckily for me, I knew that despite Eidolon holding me around the neck, Cauldron lacked Clairvoyant viewing of this place (and hence lacked Door capabilities). As long as Alexandria didn't grab me...

This did not stop the screaming terror that had completely consumed my mental state. I was in a genuine life/death situation and I really did not feel good about that. Dissociation was not a healthy response but it would probably be what saved my life or freedom (because it seems Cauldron did want me alive or I'd definitely be dead already) if I managed it, at this point. Being controlled by Cauldron was almost a fate worse than death for me, in a way, though it was pretty close if I thought about it. I could get Slugged, or abandoned in a blank white cell (have you seen what environments like that do to someone with ADHD), alone and isolated. Turned into a tool. Any number of other horrifying things racing through my mind rather than productive action. Maybe I'd end up like Dinah in the original timeline, or lobotomized and just used as a shell of my power (though I got the oddest sense my shard would not let that happen so easily).

My internal musings were interrupted because Alexandria apparently decided... monologuing was a good idea? I mean I wasn't going to complain but it was definitely strange. She had a cruel smirk as she began.

"Well, it seems that Faultline has discovered that there are limits to what she is allowed to learn. Do not investigate this further or you will share a similar fate to trans_morphic here", Alexandria stated with satisfaction, while waving deliberately at my near-paralysed self. All deliberate of course, because of her perfect control of reactions, and emphasized by pinning Faultline to the wall by the throat for several seconds. I at this point was getting leaky eyes from the sheer stress, and yet somehow Faultline still remained professional as fuck, with merely a low grunt of exertion as she dropped from the deadly Thinker-Brute's titanium grip. Gregor and Newter looked on with what I could guess was near murderous rage - despite their normally friendly or polite demeanor, and fuck knows how far Labyrinth's power reached at this point with her emotional state. I'd have been unsurprised if she'd covered half of Brockton.

<transphobia>Alexandria continued, this time clearly directed at me. "I'll be making sure he," (oh boy, I winced to myself, Alexandria is a fucking transphobe), "gets treatment for his mental illness. He also won't be using that unsafe tinkertech implant when clearly medically unfit for making any gender identity decisions, so at least, Faultline, take comfort that your associate here will be in good hands for his illness".

Faultline, ever the professional, merely gritted her teeth in response to that. Somehow I didn't think she was in line with Alexandria on this one.

"Eidolon, take him properly. I think our point has been made.", was Alexandria's line as Eidolon activated some kind of master power that seized my voluntary muscles and pushed them around like a puppet, as he started to fly. Flying would be fun if I wasn't also a captive, so instead I felt a deep, horrific stress instead. But at some point I'd been smart enough to come up with an idea in all the panic that I was still feeling. Frankly I was exhausted, this amount of stress was not good at all, life and death situations involving 2 of the strongest parahumans on Earth Bet were also really shit, and my ability to even be coherent was fraying. Yes, I was getting tired and probably slightly delirious, but as I was lifting from the Palanquin, I felt water leak from my eyes while I began my targeting.

Locked down muscles were insufficient to stop my imitation of Doormaker, after all, and I spent all my remaining mental energy using my instincts for a target that would take me but not the flier I was being carried by. Faultline's Crew were comparitively easy, just a circle around where they were all standing, still in the Palanquin. I had severe doubts they'd stay alive if my precognition blockers managed to get cut off or even if I just left them. Racing forward, the air streaking tears and sweat down my exhausted face and coherent thinking at a minimum, I slammed open the portal.

A slight mis-aim, a few millimetres too low. I felt a horrible, screaming pain on the back of my head and a wet sensation - as myself, Eidolon's arms (but not the rest of Eidolon), and Faultline's Crew all came rushing into my pocket dimension. I slammed into my bed with a sickening crack, seeing double, and just about managed to close all the portals before blacking out completely.
[end of chapter - nyaaa~]
So! the first confrontation

On another unrelated note, fuck Alexandria and also painful ear infections ;-; nya

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
Missy Biron was worried. trans_morphic had vanished off of PHO for an entire day in the sections they usually frequented.

While this would be normal for most posters, trans_morphic was an active participant in PHO. Vista was not ashamed to admit she was a bit of a fangirl for the technically-a-Villain, and the thought of them getting seriously hurt in the current, Nazi-infested, environment was deeply worrying - especially with the recent sightings of some powerful Gesselschaft capes around the place, with Director Piggot organising patrols away from E88 territory until the capabilities involved were known. Missy did understand the reasoning, though she found it deeply frustrating despite that - there was a palpable tension in the air, even ignoring the chaos of the information leak a few days ago that the PRT was just barely starting to get a handle on at this point, since trans_morphic's statement of intent on Medhall.

The press conference the PRT originally planned for a couple days ago had been pushed to within about half an hour, and the PR team were having an absolute nightmare trying to deal with criticising trans_morphic while not coming off as Nazi sympathisers to the more astute folks who were aware of dogwhistling. Yes, Vista thought, maybe they're suffering and maybe I'm supposed to agree with them, but fuck them to be honest. After denying her various means of defending herself and constant infantilisation, she was pretty unsympathetic to their plight.

She decided she'd do some investigation on what was happening - so she grabbed her civilian phone (which was not PRT related) and logged on to her stealth second account on PHO.

■​

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♦ Topic: Triumvirate Attack Palanquin
In: Boards ► Locations ► USA ► Brockton Bay ► Recent Events
Col_Xy (Original Poster)
Posted On Mar 8th 2011:
So it seems someone at the Palanquin seriously pissed off the Triumvirate, I actually caught them on video despite them seeming to try and avoid attention (I live near the area). See here for the video.

This is pretty unusual. It's fairly common knowledge in Brockton that Faultline's Crew (cape mercenaries with two case 53s) stay at the Palanquin when not on any jobs, but they don't tend to do anything which would attract the level of attention implied by the presence of the Triumvirate.

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(Showing page 23 of 27)

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►Antigone ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

This is fucking wild. The triumvirate come here but they don't bother dealing with the fucking rage dragon or superpowered nazis and instead go to harass the comparatively harmless mercenaries? wtf​

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►Point_Me_@_The_Sky (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

This is def. odd. I think we should wait and see - I would bet there's a press conference at some point about this.​

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Or it could be some sort of sting operation we don't know about. Maybe Faultline stole from the wrong corporation or something?​

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►Emissary_Of_Jesus ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

THEY have been PUNISHED for the SINS OF THE FLESH!!!​

The unholy ACTS of the CLUBBERS must be REPENTED!​

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►Reave (Verified PRT Agent)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ Point_Me_@_The_Sky​

We'll be discussing this in the press conference in about half an hour, so just wait until then.​

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►AllSeeingEye ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ Point_Me_@_The_Sky​

I don't know if FC have done any mercenary jobs recently but if that is the reason that the Triumvirate came it'd have to be something big. Government related and probably very classified.​

​

Faultline's Crew have a reputation for laying low and avoiding hostile attention from the PRT. It seems way out of character for Faultline to do anything that'd piss them off enough to bring out Eidolon and Alexandria.​

​

Maybe there was someone else who happened to be at the Palanquin and this wasn't an attack on Faultline's Crew at all?​

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►Antigone ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ AllSeeingEye​

I actually didn't think of that. Definitely a possibility.​

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►nah_not_me (Cape Groupie)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I hope they're OK! I mean I know they're technically villains but they're not really bad imo, not like Kaiser or Lung or whatever.​

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►AnonymousDecree ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Aren't Faultline's Crew the ones with the monster capes?​

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►RealGuy ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I hope they got arrested, whoever it was. They must have done something pretty terrible and be super dangerous for the triumvirate to get involved.​

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►White Fairy (Veteran Member)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ AnonymousDecree yep, tho I think they prefer "case 53"​

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(Showing page 24 of 27)

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►run_around_the_block (Banned)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ White Fairy they harbor THOSE freaks?! they definitely got what they deserved then. Those degenerates are a threat to our children, what would they think??? Disgusting.​

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[Moderator Notice: Have a ban - Tin_Mother]​

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►actuallyZandra ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ run_around_the_block wow wtf.​

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►run_around_the_block (Banned)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ actuallyZandra [removed]​

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[Moderator Notice: Removed for extreme transphobia - Tin_Mother]​

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►aerinbbvet (Veteran Member)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Well, I just woke up, but I was also near the area. I caught this video in what I assume was after all the other triumvirate action.​

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►actuallyZandra ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ aerinbbvet I'd recognise that person anywhere, that's @ trans_morphic! That portal right at the end was fucking brutal holy shit.​

​

I mean it didn't take long for Eidolon to regrow his arms but still. I'm pretty sure that was a bit of bone that came off of trans_morphic, that looks nasty :/ I hope they're OK.​

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►Robby ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

so wtf would the triumvirate want with trans_morphic?? what the hell did they actually do?​

​

And why on earth were they with Faultline?. New member of the team or something? But why the fuck would the Triumvirate get involved with that??​

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►Emissary_Of_Jesus ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ actuallyZandra they were PUNISHED for their filthy ACTS!! by the will of GOD!​

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[Moderator Notice: Have a warning. Stop being so transphobic, please - Tin_Mother]​

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►Tin_Mother (Moderator)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Like all threads related to trans_morphic, this one is being heavily watched due to their status as a controversial and LGBT+ cape.​

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►Point_Me_@_The_Sky (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I don't know what the hell trans_morphic did, they don't seem that dangerous. And they definitely don't seem mercenary-inclined. Though if it was dangerous enough for the triumvirate to get involved... I have to be worried that they seem to have escaped.​

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►AllSeeingEye ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Seems I was right about the meeting ​

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(Showing page 25 of 27)

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►XxVoid_CowboyxX (Temp-Banned - 3 days)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I bet it's a coverup or something! What are the triumvirate hiding?​

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[Moderator Notice: Please try and keep the conspiracy theories down a notch. Have a warning. -Tin_Mother]​

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►RealGuy ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I knew trans_morphic was a bad egg! Now they've got the triumvirate on their ass. Like wow.​

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►Reave (Verified PRT Agent)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

The PRT would appreciate if speculation over the incident would remain grounded, due to the classified nature of the operation.​

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►Antigone ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Classified? what the hell did trans_morphic do?​

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►Good Ship Morpheus ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Did we forget about something else? That trans_morphic seemed to make that portal without any device at all (I can't imagine that Eidolon would leave a tinker with any of their tech, to be honest)! Do they have a mover power or something because that is broken as fuck if so.​

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►aerinbbvet (Veteran Member)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ Good Ship Morpheus​

Tinkers are kind of bullshit. If I had to guess, I'd say implants or something, especially given they already have a hormone implant - they're definitely comfortable with changing their body.​

​

Actually, maybe this is their specialty? We still don't actually know it after all.​

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►AllSeeingEye ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ Antigone​

Well, I mean what's the most dangerous thing trans_morphic has claimed to have? It's not their powers (at least not so far). It's information.​

​

This still doesn't change that Faultline don't like attracting attention though. If they were getting some info that'd attract the triumvirate it would have to be for a damn good reason.​

@ XxVoidCowboyxX you... might not actually be completely wrong for once! In something anyway.​

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►Bagrat (Veteran Member) (The Guy in the Know)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Well my own sources say this seems to be classified all the way up to the Chief Director. Not even Director Piggot seems to know what this is about.​

​

As for the mover rating, almost everything points to trans_morphic being a tinker. So yes, I'd think it's probably implants as well.​

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►actuallyZandra ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ AllSeeingEye honestly though what kind of information would the triumvirate need to get involved in keeping from Faultline's Crew that trans_morphic would want to share with them and also have. Hm.​

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►RealGuy ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

bet trans_morphic was outing capes. sounds like the kind of shit they'd do. or maybe disrupting an anti-Faultline operation.​

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End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 23, 24, 25, 26, 27

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(Showing page 26 of 27)

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►Miraclemic ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I feel like we're all missing something here:​

* Faultline doesn't want attention (without an extremely good reason)​

* trans_morphic was probably sharing some information.​

* This kind of information attracted the triumvirate (and somehow they also knew about it within minutes of it happening, which no-one has mentioned yet, so probably watchdog or thinker powers from Eidolon).​

​

Ward identities fit the second and third but not the first. Something that Faultline didn't know would attract this degree of attention fits the first and third (but I expect that trans_morphic would know in that case, they have to know the boundaries to push them in the way they seem to be trying to do).​

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►Acree ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

This is definitely... a conundrum. I mean I can't imagine trans_morphic likes sitting on all their information with (presumably) no-one safe to talk to about it. They clearly know SOMETHING important for it to attract the Triumvirate that is also important to Faultline's Crew.​

​

But what exactly would it be. I mean... urgh​

​

@ RealGuy I doubt Faultline would want to talk about anything like that. Way too much backlash to be safe.​

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►XxVoid_CowboyxX (Temp-Banned - 3 days)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I actually... it has to be to do with the Case 53s! I bet the triumvirate knows how they're made and trans_morphic was saying stuff about them!​

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[Moderator Notice: I warned you to stop trolling with the conspiracy theories, have a temp-ban - Tin_Mother]​

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►Antigone ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I mean what we know about C53s is that they are some kind of broken power trigger or something.​

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►Brocktonite03 (Veteran Member)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

If the triumvirate knew about C53s I definitely think they'd tell us.​

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►Robby ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ Antigone actually, that's just what's on the PRT website. And it's apparently mostly just a hypothesis.​

​

It also doesn't explain the omega tattoos they all have​

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►Miraclemic ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I think the resident troll might actually have made a good point. I mean, in mentioning Case 53s, not the conspiracy stuff.​

​

If it attracted the Triumvirate though... what the hell does trans_morphic know? And maybe the conspiracy stuff isn't completely off base?​

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►Brocktonite03 (Veteran Member)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ Miraclemic If the triumvirate knew, they'd definitely say. They're massive heroes. Void Cowboy's conspiracy theories aren't real dude.​

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►Weld (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

If the PRT did know and didn't tell us... But I trust them. They've helped me ever since I woke up without any memories.​

​

If @ trans_morphic does know the real origins of case 53s I damn hope they'd tell the PRT. Hell, they can directly talk to me if they are not comfortable with the organisation as a whole, I'll clue in the others.​

​

My PMs are open.​

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►AllSeeingEye ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

It's definitely case 53s and something related to them. It fits too damn well.​

​

As for why it attracted the Triumvirate though? I don't have a clue. It reeks of some kind of coverup to me, or maybe some classified investigation into case 53s.​

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(Showing page 27 of 27)

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►actuallyZandra ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

This is super sketchy, not gonna lie.​

​

I think if trans_morphic knew about the origins of Case 53s they'd share it with us if they could.​

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►Point_Me_@_The_Sky (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

@ actuallyZandra this whole situation gives me an unspecified feeling of dread.​

​

What if... trans_morphic can't share that information. What if the case 53s are related to that stuff they said about apocalypses? Because that is fucking terrifying to think about.​

​

Depending on what it is, I'm still worried that the Triumvirate didn't get them. I can't imagine if the Gesellschaft gets them it'd be better than the Triumvirate, either, because they might be involved here too given the Empire is after trans_morphic a shitton right now.​

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►aerinbbvet (Veteran Member)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Pretty sure that feeling is just called "living in Brockton Bay"​

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End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 25, 26, 27

■​

This whole situation was deeply concerning to Vista. She'd heard the troopers talking about some highly classified stuff involving trans_morphic, but this was something else. She really couldn't think of anything super villainous that trans_morphic seemed likely to do, let alone something that attracted the Triumvirate like they seemed to have done. Like others on the thread, she was experiencing a weird feeling of dread - trans_morphic knew something dangerous, and this was the first real illustration of that fact (to her at least).

The letters were one thing, but this? This was nuts. She didn't know what to think about the fight (or rather, trans_morphic running away from the Triumvirate), but she did at least want to know if trans_morphic was still alive. She couldn't imagine that her Case 53 colleagues wouldn't want to be in contact with trans_morphic after this either, since it seemed pretty clear trans_morphic knew more than the PRT in regards to their origins, or at the very least they knew something.

Collecting herself, Vista opened up her PMs and messaged trans_morphic. She was going to get to the bottom of this mess.

■​

♦ Topic: Are you ok?
In: Boards ► Private Messages ► trans_morphic

Posted On Mar 9th 2011:
I've been reading the thread about the thing with the Triumvirate. If you were really talking about Case 53s... I'm friends with several and if you actually know the origins of Case 53s they'd really appreciate knowing.

Please try and stay safe. I really hope you're still OK, the stuff you did against the Empire was pretty badass too, but I... really don't know what you did to piss off the Triumvirate so badly if you were talking about the case 53 thing.

■​

Just as Missy finished writing her message to trans_morphic, her PRT phone pinged to notify about the Director's press conference starting. With some degree of anxiety she opened the video and began to watch her organisational superiors discussing the chaos of the past week, as perpetuated by the ever-antifascist and ever mess-generating trans_morphic. Armsmaster, Assault, Battery, and Miss Militia - along with 4 PRT Troopers - surrounded her on the stage.

Director Piggot began with a gesture to the reporters in her commanding-the-room voice. "You can ask your questions later once we've actually discussed the issue of trans_morphic."

"The PRT first became aware of trans_morphic several days ago. In fact, before they had antagonised the Empire 88 at all", she continued, "It was actually due to a tip from a source who wishes to remain anonymous."

"Using our own methods, we verified that the source was accurate and honest. trans_morphic - then known by the codename 'Appleseed' - was a tinker on the potential scale of Nilbog or the Machine Army", Piggot said, with a subtle grimace in her voice that belied her own past with that particular S-class threat. Vista, like all the Wards and Protectorate, had been briefed on that tip, so it wasn't a shock to her, but it still was something she had in the back of her mind despite being a fan of trans_morphic.

Riotous reactions from the reporters, however, were indicative that they had not known this fact beforehand, but Piggot once again reminded them that they could ask questions later and continued.

"We, incorrectly, concluded that that was the most dangerous thing about them, and sent extra troopers around where we believed their lab to be, based on various sources of intelligence," this time the reporters let Piggot continue, "and this seems to have spooked them into making a pocket dimension to live in. Armsmaster did attempt a capture, but was only successful in determining the location of the laboratory down to the building and capturing a few small pieces of technology."

Vista almost snorted at that bit of spin. Armsmaster failed at a capture after breaking into their home-lab, which was the entire point of that mission.

"What followed was a campaign of chaos. trans_morphic used their portal technology to provide dangerous information within the PRT building, some of it sensitive enough that the recipients of these printed letters still do not want to disclose the contents. This caused a disruption in service due to scrambling to prevent an attack that never came."

No mention of the outing of villains (especially Nazis), and the operations to reduce Coil's access then, Vista thought to herself.

Director Piggot continued "Then came their declaration of war on the Empire 88, in the form of graffiti visible to most residents of the Bay, which pushed back our original press conference to today. Of course, if trans_morphic wanted to take down the Empire 88, they could have cooperated with the lawful authorities, but chose not to do so for reasons the PRT is unaware of."

Missy herself was pretty sure it was some matter of ideological distrust and fear, but it was, technically, unknown. That they also hadn't yet informed the PRT of what they knew of Case 53s did validate her opinion, though. Either way, Piggot pushed forward, leaning into the podium and dismissing some more overenthusiastic reporters....

"Last night, trans_morphic - along with the other residents of the Palanquin night club - were the targets of an operation to ensure the secrecy of highly classified PRT information and protect national security. As of today, trans_morphic themself is fully classed as a national security threat as per the Chief-Director, " the Director gestured to the reporters, "ask away."

Vista was not happy with that - "upholding the law" was her job but this felt pretty heavy handed, especially if the PRT were aware that trans_morphic was probably trying to help Case 53s. Capture-on-sight was now universal PRT and Protectorate policy except in S-Class truce events. It gave her oddly conflicting emotions. Her own ears-to-the-ground information suggested that trans_morphic had already pushed existing antifascist groups in BB to high gear - she'd actually been reading about that lately and it seemed that having a cape make a bold statement against fascists motivated people quite a lot - but a capture would probably demotivate people from resisting the Nazis, a return to an extremely negative status quo in her opinion. It left her feeling pretty uncertain of herself.

Some questions from reporters about the nature of the classified information in relation to the fact it was likely Case-53 related lead to a few dismissals from the Director and a frown from the watching Vista, and questions about trans_morphic's powers were met with the long-winded equivalent to "We don't know but it's probably a really scary tinker". Questions about quarantining the city were met with "the PRT has no intention of quarantine, because trans_morphic seems to be able to leave regardless and there is no indication they've released anything. We are watching closely for any indication if they do", and an unhappy-looking Director. A few minutes of questionable questions about trans_morphic's trans status from newspapers known for their inflammatory reactionary rhetoric and a repetition of "go through the standard process, no hormones are given to children, be careful of the Empire", and denouncement of using trans_morphic as a role model or source of HRT later, and the press conference finally concluded.

Missy was not exactly happy, but she got an alarm indicating it was time for Wards duties and her thoughts were directed elsewhere.
[end of chapter - nya~]

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
My eyes cracked open to a sore body and constant throbbing pain on the back of my head and all across my chest. Instinctively, I moved to scratch behind my skull, but a hand on my arm stopped me. A hand... from someone wearing a metal mask and looking oddly concerned down at me along with an orange dude and the guy with the snails and a blond older girl.... Faultline! Crap crap I never finished my meeting with them! I blurted out a hurried "sorry" before Newter laughed, "what? you gave me more answers about Case 53s than anyone ever has before! Not your fault the Triumvirate decided to confirm the stuff you were saying. I've had to knock you out 3 times now cus you were screaming from the pain but that portal move was fucking awesome! Someone posted a video on PHO!"

Faultline chided him "Newter...", and I moved to dismiss the complaint with a "nah it's ok" but I only got halfway through the words before my ribs made me wince from moving my arm.

"I am not sure moving too fast is a particularly good idea for you right now", Gregor said with his oddly calming voice, as I moved, this time much slower, out of my bed to at least lean up a bit. Having other people in my private area was definitely anxiety inducing but right now I was too tired for that to matter so much. Even ignoring my injured state, though, I could feel the dysphoria piling up again for a bit - at least I didn't have any goddamn facial hair to shave anymore. Labyrinth seemed to be whispering to Faultline as well - if I had to guess, I'd say going in a pocket dimension had shut off her power and she could actually interact easier - I was extremely happy for her.

Coil's tower that I was hooked into must have had good signal, because Newter was busy examining his phone."Wow, the PRT just declared you a 'threat to national security' and 'capture on sight'. We sure pissed them off with our little chat, hah! 'leak of classified information' indeed," he exclaimed.

"Now you're at least up and somewhat mobile," Faultline interrupted, "Perhaps we should discuss what to do next? We do need to leave at some point, after all, amongst other things."

I reached for my laptop, with several winces in the process, and talked back "Yep. There are so many things to do. I am ok with you guys being here but I also need my private space eventually. Though you yourself might need a pocket dimension after this because there is zero way the Thinker I told you about will let you survive if you stay in base-level Earth Bet. Fun Cauldron knowledge problems, heh? But maybe we should get some food to eat first or something, 'cus I'm starved."

On saying that I (again slowly) hauled myself over to my little pastie and miscellaneous food storage area and nabbed one of the delicious pieces of edibleness in front of me. After devouring it in about 3 minutes in front of an expectant Faultline, I continued... "So I also should tell you all about the detailed case 53 and cauldron and powers stuff as well right? I really need to tell some people. As for leaving, I can open portals pretty easy and my precog blockers work through my own portals so that won't be an issue to be honest."

"Actually, if you have precognition blockers, I'd like to know why the Triumvirate still attacked the Palanquin?", Faultline asked.
"Well, uhh, I only turned the precognition blockers on a few minutes before we met. If I guessed, one of Contessa's - that's the Thinker - Paths was already set to intercept and the disruption my tech caused probably made her send the Triumvirate.", I replied. That was my working hypothesis because I knew that there were fundamental randomness computation limits I had far exceeded even for shards.
"So it shouldn't be a problem in future, then," Faultline half-stated, half asked. "That means we can go outside sooner rather than later."

A thought popped into my head. "On that note, I should make some more of those. I think it's only fair I give you some after all the shit you just had to deal with," and with that I set my CPU constructor to building more, and opened my laptop and went to login, before Faultline verbally poked me again from my activities with an "ahem," and I responded with an "ah shit sorry, where'd you want me to open a portal to?"

"My teammates need access to a toilet," she reminded me, as I sheepishly replied "Yeah. I kinda need that too. Um, I have some good locations in random places without security cameras? I'll put the portal outside the toilets, I usually just dump myself in the stalls but I have no way to tell when you are done," and with a thought I opened a portal to that one random building in Mexico, and Faultline's Crew all hurried out pretty fast after that. Then I hid in a stall in one of my other prime areas before coming back, cleaning my hands, and continuing onto my laptop with PHO. I should probably see what was up with that thread and the press conference. From what I heard the PRT were doing their PR bullshit, so it was time to put a little of my own thoughts and information out there. While I'd love to just expose Cauldron directly, I really couldn't do that. After all my understanding was that right now that would lead to the end of the world.

I sat back and read the thread so far. Honestly, the detective work by people on there was pretty neat, it's amazing how much you can deduce once you start looking at motivations. Watching the press conference though, gahhh, it reminded me of all the reasons I hated advertising and other kinds of manipulative bullshit. Like seriously, how the fuck did they manage to spin my shitty interactions with the PRT so hard!?. Glenn Chambers was on my damn shitlist right now.

Apparently, I'd made a grumbly noise, because Newter just went "Hah! You looked at what's going on?", to which I replied with a shrug and a "yeah, honestly I'm a bit surprised at how much reaction I've had already, I've not really done that much. And their spin on the Armsmaster thing is total bullshit! Smashing into my place was both rude of him and extremely unpleasant, it was literally the only place I had on this shitty planet". I folded my arms in a huff at being reminded of that, but winced as pain jolted through my ribs again. This sucked.

"So I guess I should tell you the other stuff, the details of everything, right? Like before we had to do an impromptu escape from Eidolon and Alexandria? And before I get distracted by PHO again in about 30 seconds," I prompted Faultline.

"I think we'd appreciate that. We've come this far already, and it's too late to turn back now, " she replied, in her exceptionally professional demeanor.

"Well, this is where I'd recommend M/S protocols, because this is where I'm not sure what's going to stick in each of your memories. If I directly show you, I think it might be able to stick, but I'm not entirely sure and I'm going to have to make a workaround". In response to this they each muttered a few codes to each other.

"So, first things first, I should discuss the origins of parahumans. Parahuman powers are alive. Parahuman powers exist in alternate universes, like Aleph. Near uncountable numbers of them, in fact. These are called 'shards' - though Cauldron calls them agents and Bonesaw calls them passengers. They are continent-to-moon-sized and often exist in multiple universes that are continuously interacting as one organic-metallic organism thingy. Kinda eldritch bio-computers I guess."

Good so far. No-one was looking particularly dazed, though they did look pretty shocked. "This sounds like Passenger Theory, which is a fringe theory that's mostly been dismissed," Faultline stated, to which I replied, "well, a big part of that is down to Cauldron, but also down to the fact that the vast majority of shards are subsapient. However, specialised powers with no consistent mechanism that actively respond (if poorly) to the needs of the user reeks of some form of rudimentary intelligence. But of course, I'm not going to just tell you this without proof. If one of you could grab that cable from the reactor I'd appreciate it," I said, gesturing to the fusion reactor and it's bulky cable. Gregor was nice enough to pull it over, and I promptly pulled up my trousers and plugged it into my leg, to which Faultline gave me an expression of clear discomfort. "What? How'd you think I made portals without any external tech? God this world is so prejudiced against body modification, urgh. Sorry, ranting, I know why it is, it just makes me upset."

"Apologies, trans_morphic, I'm just not used to people being so comfortable with it. Also, what did you say about Bonesaw knowing about this? More importantly, how do you know that she knows?", Faultline asked incredulously, to which I replied, "Well, same way I know all the other stuff I do. I highly doubt you'd believe me if I told you. I'll just say I 'read it somewhere' and leave the rest to your imagination, if that's ok?", I rushed ahead, "So, Faultline, do you want to see your power? I'm going to be making a portal quite far up from the Earth in case it has automated defenses or something," she waved me with assent, and I simply pushed through the coordinates I'd scanned almost a day ago...

Before remembering that we needed to stop the air escaping. "Hey guys, I realized I forgot something, we need a vacuum chamber. So we don't all suffocate. Which would definitely be bad." It took only a couple minutes of looking, though, and I found a shop that sold thick glass balls as ornaments, which would do the trick, and a couple more minutes for an unmasked Faultline to grab one for us. "Thanks," I told her, "now we can see your power!"

With that, I pushed for a small portal - about 20cm in diameter, that fit inside the ball with the primed target location a couple hundred miles above a barren Earth. And what was on it was... It was surprisingly beautiful. Fractalline shapes of extreme complexity crawled across the planet, covering almost all of Europe and Africa. Brown with glowing regions pulsating across the vast organism, cracked mountains and tendrils sprawling, and a constant area of high activity around a nexus point somewhere near Italy that I presumed was the other end of Faultline's Corona Pollentia. Everyone's eyes were wide at this... awesome thing that granted Faultline a tiny fraction of it's power, even despite Faultline's attempts to remain composed she actually gasped. Newter's response was a more immediate "Holy. Fucking. Shit", and I was entirely inclined to agree with him. I mean, I understood the idea of this conceptually, but actually seeing it was... something else. The fact Faultline and Labyrinth weren't completely out of it from memory loss made me think something fishy was going on though. Perhaps my antiprecog/anticlairvoyant tech was interfering, or just the fact of seeing an actual shard essentially did the equivalent of making the system throw it's hands up in frustration.

We all took a moment to appreciate the magnificence of a shard, but we did need to move on, and Gregor took the initiative. "So, what is so world ending about this admittedly shocking and theory-overturning phenomenon?"

"Well, these shards want to collect data and have almost no creativity. That's why they grant powers - experimentation. But the concerning thing is less the shards and more what their hive organism is. While most parahumans have their memory wiped of it (and are essentially unable to remember it), all parahumans experience a vision when they trigger - two vast worm-like beings agreeing on a destination, then spiraling and shedding off millions of pieces, one of which eventually collides with them. The vast worm creatures across millions of dimensions are generally termed 'Entities', and they are not friendly to any world they visit. At least the ones here aren't. I mean they have this stupid thing called the Cycle where they make their host world creatures fight each other for 300 years in the most atrociously inefficient and unethical attempt to solve entropy I've ever heard of, and then explode every possible variation (10 to the 80th power or so) of the planet to move on to the next. Omnicidal hegemonizing multiversal swarms are just the worst," I laughed awkwardly as the constant dread of being on this world was brought to the forefront of my mind, "Yeah..."

"Well that is absolutely fucking horrifying," was Labyrinth's response, to gritted nods from the rest of the Crew. She hadn't said much so far but apparently Elle was far more blunt than I ever expected when her power wasn't interfering. Which was fine, just oddly amusing to me.

"So Cauldron's leader, with the help of Contessa and her Path to Victory shard from a third entity that made the 'Thinking' entity crash via distraction, shanked the Thinker entity before it could fix itself from that crash. That happened before the Thinker entity had properly configured her shards for humans and the network that provided that information was essentially destroyed in the process too. This means that the shards from that are running out of energy", I continued. Faultline interrupted me, "I am going to guess and say that Cauldron was founded to kill the other entity and lost all concept of ethics and common sense in the process?", and I gave a "yeah, basically" in response.

Newter thought a bit, then said "I think, then, I understand why we're like, well, this", as he gestured to himself and Gregor, to which I said, "Yeah, it's pretty much a configuration error with your powers (and multi attachment and other weird stuff). The memory wipe and, you know, using you as experimental subjects was all Cauldron's doing, though - they were testing power granting vials of different mixes, basically, and in fact something like 80% of their earliest subjects died in the process. There's actually a shitton of case 53s that are locked in their labs right now because they deter the 'Warrior' entity, which I'm sure you've guessed is Scion, since to him you're wearing his partner's corpse. Which, like, good because fuck him and his entire shitty omnicidal cycle, even if it's broken by the death of his partner and he's just eventually going to snap and kill everyone instead of being depressed and trying to cope with heroism."

"The other entity is Scion. That's...", Faultline chimed in, her brow furrowed, and Newter looked absolutely pissed and almost yelled, "Holy shit did you say thousands of Case 53s being locked up and used as test subjects!?"

"Yeah, it's... not good. At all. To either of those points. And it's not like if I broke them out I'd have anywhere to put them either, which is seriously unfortunate or I'd do it as soon as I had some kind of counter to Cauldron's many, many powerful capes. I'm pretty fucking furious about it as well though my attention is distracted by like a million different things because this world is an absolute hellscape, and trying to help people fix it is tough as fuck. I just want to curl up and cry if I think too hard about it, um, yeah."

"It is clear that you are at least trying, which is better than most of the PRT manages", Gregor stated, while I nervously fidgeted, "though I suggest you try and be less reckless sometimes."

"I am not reckless! At least... mostly", was my futile objection, "actually, I just remembered about the whole mutual unmasking thing and with me knowing basically all the civilian identities of capes in the bay I should do it. Not that I have much of a civilian identity anyway...", I said as I pulled off my cheapo mask, gently avoiding making my ribs hurt more, "I'm Zychi".

I was pretty happy right now even despite the horrific status of Bet and the whole of this bit of the multiverse. I actually... got to talk to people properly, which, well, I felt warm happiness fill my chest, a hole from lack of socialisation being filled. No hugs or anything but just talking was enough for me right now, even despite my injured body, and I got to do my trademark thing of oversharing way too much shit with people!

Newter was pacing, and Gregor was still looking at the portal to Faultline's power, deep in thought. Presumably about the whole multiversal apocalypse thing and horrible experimentation. "Actually I just remembered - Cauldron does some brainwashing stuff for hire, it's called Nemesis, and they do other stuff as well. Honestly going into the details of Cauldron's primary operations beyond what I've said probably isn't useful, though I can elaborate on a couple of them if you really want?" I asked, for which I got some expressions of negation while I did my awkward fidgeting.

"I think... I think we have what we came for," Newter told me. Some unspoken communication between the four of them seemed to occur, and they all nodded - and that discussion was over and done with as they talked about whether or not to ask for a pocket dimension and some of their future plans (presumably, nothing sensitive). I moved to remove the power plug from my leg and shut off the reactor, nearly cried in pain again before Gregor helped me with it. It was so weird to have people actually helping me with things, I thought to myself, as I carefully looked back at the thread. I wanted to at least say what I had been doing and that I was alive even if somewhat injured - I asked Faultline if it was OK for me to confirm people's guesses at our topic of discussion, and she essentially stated that since people basically already knew, it was alright.

So I went on PHO to reply to both the Palanquin thread, and to totally-not-Vista's private message...

■​

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♦ Topic: Triumvirate Attack Palanquin
In: Boards ► Locations ► USA ► Brockton Bay ► Recent Events
Col_Xy (Original Poster)
Posted On Mar 8th 2011:
So it seems someone at the Palanquin seriously pissed off the Triumvirate, I actually caught them on video despite them seeming to try and avoid attention (I live near the area). See here for the video.

This is pretty unusual. It's fairly common knowledge in Brockton that Faultline's Crew (cape mercenaries with two case 53s) stay at the Palanquin when not on any jobs, but they don't tend to do anything which would attract the level of attention implied by the presence of the Triumvirate.

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(Showing page 35 of 35)

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►Acree ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I'm still pissed that they didn't deal with the goddamned Nazis. Or the rage dragon. I mean the Triumvirate are pretty clearly heroes, but sometimes I just don't understand priorities.​

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►Miraclemic ​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I have to admit the press conference on @ trans_morphic was a bit sketchy though. It just felt a bit... I don't know, off, with the dismissal of the Case 53 thing? I'm not sure, I mean the PRT is full of weird PR stuff anyway.​

​

I wonder if they'll respond to this whole thing, though. If they're still around.​

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

Hello! I'm alive! Barely!​

​

If you're curious, I can confirm that I was discussing the origins of case 53s and the nature of powers with Faultline's Crew. I needed to talk to someone about it really pretty badly, to be honest, I hate keeping things like this to myself, and I have been having severe issues with loneliness and isolation anyway.​

​

The problem is the stuff about the nature of powers at least and some about Case 53s is the same sort of information that leads to multiversal annihilation of all Earth variations if it becomes common knowledge.​

​

At least for now, but hopefully I'll be able to do stuff that means I can share it. Of course, right now I'm still recovering from cracked ribs and having a whole chunk of skull stripped off the back of my heads from my portals trying to avoid the triumvirate kidnapping me. Good fun times!​

​

I'm actually still with Faultline's Crew at the moment, I don't like having people in my pocket dimension but they've been accommodating of me through this whole mess and seem pretty chill.​

​

I can talk to other C53s about it as well, but unfortunately @ Weld I really can't trust the PRT with this information so easily. The PRT... are associated with the reason Case 53s exist, but most people in it are unaware. I'll leave it at that for now. And if you do want to discuss it, you'll want to base your actions on something that blocks precognition and other thinkers beforehand. I actually have some devices that do true precog and observation blocking. Just... be careful.​

​

On another note, that press conference was total bullshit. Armsmaster primarily went into my home (that is also my lab because I didn't have anywhere else!) in an attempt to arrest me on suspicion of being a biotinker with a tendency towards being S-class or something like that... which actually isn't wrong but you can't arrest people based on just potential threat. Basically said "come with me or I will arrest you".​

​

I have enough issues with personal space that I panicked and made a pocket dimension when I noticed the extra patrols around and got the fuck out just before Armsmaster could grab me. Urgh.​

- nya~​

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End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 33, 34, 35

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♦ Topic: Are you ok?
In: Boards ► Private Messages ► Miss_Warper
Miss_Warper (Original Poster)
Posted On Mar 9th 2011:
I've been reading the thread about the thing with the Triumvirate. If you were really talking about Case 53s... I'm friends with several and if you actually know the origins of Case 53s they'd really appreciate knowing.

Please try and stay safe. I really hope you're still OK, the stuff you did against the Empire was pretty badass too, but I... really don't know what you did to piss off the Triumvirate so bad if you were talking about the case 53 thing.

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(Showing page 1 of 1)

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►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​

Replied On Mar 9th 2011:​

I'm alive, injured, but ok. And much happier emotionally speaking from talking to Faultline's Crew.​

​

As for C53 info, I did mention stuff in the thread and I'd be happy to tell them, but it's a delicate and extremely dangerous situation and generally fraught with disgustingly high-powered thinkers. One of whom is so powerful you cannot win, and I mean mathematically a 0% chance of winning, without anti-precognition measures.​

​

Right now it is a more dangerous endeavor to investigate yourself than any possible fight you could get into and well beyond the level at which things like the Unwritten Rules apply, though actually at the moment my anti-precognition and anti-observation technology covers most of Brockton Bay still.​

​

I mean I tried to share my information on this and nearly got taken by the Triumvirate. Just... be careful. And I don't mean because you're young, this is horrifically dangerous for literally everyone, I just am unlucky enough to be the one with the dangerous information already. If I tell you and the anti-precog defenses get knocked out or something you will probably be killed for just knowing.​

​

Honestly I'm glad the Empire hasn't gotten me yet (and I appreciated the reminder about Gesellschaft), and I do intend to do more stuff to them as well, I haven't so far because I am, to be frank, a dysfunctional mess.​

- nya~​

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End of Page. 1

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Making sure people knew I was OK made me feel even better. And I suspected my reply was going to cause absolute chaos at this rate... it would not take much for the press to realise some of the implications. In a world like Bet where secrets and conspiracies and manipulation was absolutely rampant, total honesty where possible like this would be a complete shock to the system, which I was more than fine with. God, I thought, Accord must hate me.

While thinking on this, Faultline's Crew had come to a decision. They wanted a pocket dimension, which I could absolutely do, though they thought they should pay for one. I mean I get that they were mercenaries, but this mess was my fault for not doing the precog blockers in time. Despite reminding them of this fact, Faultline did convince me to take $500 for it along with the $2000 she owed for this meeting about Case 53s. A couple hours and tinker specialty shifts later, and I had built four more of those pocket dimension access guns - like Dinah's - using shard blackbox bullshit and a bit of charging using my reactor. Then I adjusted the Pocket Dimension Generator to make a variable number of pocket dimension keys, did one of those trips to Canada like I did for Dinah's to actually make the pocket dimension, and demonstrated them to all of Faultline's Crew.

Their portals and dimension came out with a middling turquoise, as per their request, and Newter cracked into a wry grin once he started messing with them, after I demonstrated the various modes and size controls to all four of them. I suspected Faultline's Crew would get fantastic use out of those things.

And with minimal fanfare and a tinge of longing for further conversation, I let them get on their way as they vanished into their own pocket dimension, with one half of my existing precognition blockers donated to them, with a slow wave of my hand from my portal that I did to avoid making my chest sore. Right now, though, I had goals, ideas, and so many things I wanted to do.

I could rip holes in reality to shards directly, now, but there was still little I could do with that. However, I finally had the technology to manipulate genetic code and manufacture artificial protein structures - in the form of my enhanced manufacturing process, which could make chips that did almost anything with the right embedding of various elements and structures in electronic substrate. I had technology to prevent Cauldron interference (mostly) and to disrupt any other observational thinkers, and I had multiversal access tech that I was already thinking of using for automated resource gathering.

I was ready.

Shifting my specialty towards genetic encoding, compute-assisted protein manufacture, and biochemical slurries, I let the ideas flood into my brain. That occasional urge to cackle was feeling extremely strong right now. I had so, so many ideas, wondrous biotechnology to share, and I was finally, finally getting to a point where I could get real things done on that front. The PRT were not going to like what happened soon, I knew that much, but I also at this moment gave zero fucks about their opinion and so with great enthusiasm I opened my CPU blueprint software and tinkered like I had never before.

I was ready, but Earth Bet was most certainly not, and that just made it better.
[end of chapter - nyaa~]
And so, it is the end of one arc and the beginning of a new one yet again. It's time for acceleration and escalation and beautiful trans chaos nya.
Vista is getting more cynical with the PRT and Protectorate, and she's not the only one, and far more other things are also going to happen soon. I am very excited. But we are still just getting started.

 

[sapient_cogbag]

[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
So, Faultline's Crew had been nice, and I still had a sore and unpleasant set of injuries. I also had ideas, to finally get to the kind of biotech tinkering I wanted to do. A couple prerequisite steps, and then I'd be ready.

I needed something that could generate proteins and genetics to print new lifeforms, or "genetic-deltas" in the form of a CRISPR-like system that I could apply to other organisms. But for all of this, I first needed a biochemical soup with all the ingredients available to be involved in manufacturing - bioslurry, so to speak. It would need to have nucleotides and numerous other fairly standard biological building blocks like amino acids and lipid components, and ideally could be generated from any kind of existing biomass. Actually, I did have ideas for bioslurries that were designed with more information-dense DNA analogues in mind, but I wanted my stuff to be compatible with Earth life at the moment. Though I also had ideas for chemical reactions that would enable earth-compatibility and conversion to the more dense DNA analogues.

Biology was fucking complicated, but my power supplied everything I needed, and having biochemical slurry and generalised biomolecule printers would provide the ultimate foundation of this level of biotinkering. And because of the sheer diversity in what my existing chip manufacture methods could produce, I was able to do it all with my current resources. This entire thing made me unreasonably happy and I spent a couple hours examining scientific data - and my own tinker power knowledge - on the specific wavelengths of light that would break the various subtly unique bonds in almost all mid-complexity biocompounds in Earth life. All I had to do was then switch over my specialty to 3 in photon generation and 2 in chip design, and with merely an hour of drawing up and refining blueprints I had doped graphene chip components for emitting photons in exactly those wavelengths, that I could insert into any other chips I needed to, to generate bioslurry from nearly all Earth-derived biological matter via breaking it into component pieces.

I knew, to some degree, that I needed to deal with my other issues. But I really wanted to tinker and that was what my brain was stuck on, so tinker I would - indeed, I suspected that my tinkering would not take long to come up with solutions to things like my injury. I had the basic blueprint for tools to generate bioslurry - the next part of that system was reconstituting bioslurry into new biological structures once again. For that, I needed an artificial equivalent to enzymes - so I shifted my specialty towards two charges in chip manufacture, one in biological emulation, and two in enzymes, and considered the problem. Right now, my primary thought was on the idea of something on a chip that would emulate the binding points of various enzymes to induce the same reactions of those enzymes - with the big problem being that the chip was 2-dimensional and would have trouble with certain more complex binding points and larger protein structures.

And then I figured out a solution! It was possible to essentially create a series of binding points for various amino acids such that those formed the actual active site that enabled a reaction! This ultimately solved any problem constructing more complex 3D collections of binding points, because if worse came to worse, I could simply induce the formation of one of those enzymes that cells use to build their own proteins, with preloaded genetic content, to make the final product.

Feeling very happy and admittedly somewhat smug with myself, I set to work creating the blueprints for chips that would enable entirely arbitrary biological construction. Oh, Director Piggot would be furious if she found out what I would soon be able to do! Hah!

Director Piggot
Director Piggot rubbed her hands on her forehead in frustration. The incident with trans_morphic had her PR department taking a thrashing from upstairs - despite the fact that this could have been handled far easier if the even the subject of trans_morphic's discussion with Faultline had been disclosed to them. She'd already seen what trans_morphic had done to her own department with just a few words in the right places, and this demonstrated without doubt that they would cause chaos as long as they were not under the control of the PRT.

This whole incident stank of corruption, however. The fact that the Triumvirate were involved sadly moved to convince her that trans_morphic was being fairly honest, at least about that, in their letter. Oh, she didn't believe for a minute that trans_morphic was doing it out of the good of their own heart - that wasn't how parahumans worked, after all - but it didn't mean they were wrong about the evidence of high-level corruption or some sort of coverup, which seemed to become more evident by the day. Piggot loathed the cesspit of PHO, but anyone in parahuman circles was aware of the conspiracy theory about vial powers and case 53s - Cauldron. Which was no doubt what trans_morphic had been referring to in their letter, and as much as she hated to admit it, she was starting to think there might be something to those rumours after all.

She wasn't the only one who'd made at least the connection to high-level corruption. Despite the efforts of the PRT, and Dragon (under orders from the President himself), social media was on fire. Not just on the usual haunts of PHO, but also those less attached to cape events were steaming ahead with angry commenters and people forming anti-corruption groups abound. Her analysts were working overtime to keep track of the mess - as was the rest of the PRT - and it seemed like the DWU amongst other more radical union and anti-authoritarian groups that had been heavily diminished in the past 40 years or so were starting to latch on to this new, nebulously defined series of only weakly connected movements. They were made up of people complaining about the deprivation of funding from various public services and Endbringer resilience initiatives, to be put towards a PRT that was beginning to be seen as a corrupt money-bleeding organisation.

The Director scoffed at the thought of people participating in those groups. What did those people really know about defending her city?, she thought to herself, they aren't the ones who have to carefully balance the gangs on a knife-edge.

A half-hour of Ward paperwork later, and she was ready to get some dialysis, as much as she despised it. Plugging herself into the hulking machinery, she wondered what the hell trans_morphic was going to do next. That bastard had already caused enough problems for her and she had a bad feeling it was only getting started. The S-class threat assessment seemed accurate enough - Tattletale had been proven honest, after all, and she did not think that someone like her would have ever called the PRT without a damn good reason. trans_morphic had demonstrated a terrifying ability to ramp up - it usually took new tinkers months to gain decent enough quantities of resources and tools to perform something even 1/10th as terrifying as what trans_morphic had demonstrated within less than a week - a full-on infiltration of the PRT base on what essentially seemed like a complete whim.

The dreaded ping sounded from the computer that sat to her right snapped Piggot out of her thoughts on trans_morphic's future actions (and their still-unknown tinker specialty). More rejection of her requests for more funding, probably, she thought to herself morbidly, as she moved to read it.

To: emily_piggot@internal.ene.prt.gov
From: anon@onion.email
Subject: E88-BBPD collusion
From what we can tell the BBPD is essentially a puppet of the Empire. See attached video for proof.
Download e88-bbpd.mkv [34.8 MiB Attachment]

Director Piggot cursed. After running the attachment through a program to detect malicious files, and confirmed it clean, she watched the video and cursed even more. It seemed today was not her day, and she would not be getting any rest any time soon. The first thing she needed to do was yell at her IT security team, since external mail addresses should not have access to the internal PRT network. The second thing she needed to do was purge any Empire moles she could find, and third was to notify the Chief-Director of this deeply unfortunate development for which she'd no doubt get a reaming out - a major parahuman gang being in complete control of the BBPD was a disaster of the highest order and it had occurred under her watch. More corruption, more chaos, and no doubt increased suspicion of the PRT by proxy for not discovering this... arrangement if the video was ever leaked.

As she developed a headache and a wish that she could still drink, she began her work of putting together a strike team. If this gets out, she thought to herself, there's going to be riots and worse.

Accord - Boston [cw some veiled transphobia + anti-neurodiversity ableism from Accord]
Accord was rarely a happy man. Today however, this was exacerbated.

At precisely 9:00:00am, his Citrine opened the door to his office with perfect precision, no squeaks, no twitches. He smiled to himself. A beautiful island of order. Yes, I am glad I have her in my employ, he thought. A perfect, 5 second bow from her to him, and she began in refined and precise English.

"Sir. I have your requested report on trans_morphic."

A subtle and cleanly timed nod from himself and she continued.

"trans_morphic's actions have resulted in unrest in the general population, in both Brockton Bay and the surrounding cities. This includes those within your territory, sir. There are at least 5 separate groups in opposition to the PRT of which I have been made aware of within your territory, although only 3 of them have made any move to offline organising and action. trans_morphic is aware of the power-brokers and appears to be moving against them in some manner, and has demonstrated strong anti-authoritarian tendencies repeatedly, sir. I think they are likely to find your methods and values to be against their ideals and I would be unsurprised if they were working against your organisation, based upon their actions so far."

Accord loathed trans_morphic. What little he had seen of them indicated that they were a force of chaos. It had taken them barely more than a week to send the PRT into disarray, despite the efforts of the power-brokers and a PR department with significant resources, that outmatched even his own organisation. He despised their opposition to the structures required for society to function in an appropriately regulated manner, and it filled him with rage to watch the consequences of trans_morphic's rise to prominence, to see those who would reject the clean order of a gender binary be celebrated and those who would oppose a strong, well-run society gain popular awareness and influence.

Roles, strictures, order, and precision were what Accord wanted - he hated those who would pit themselves against an endeavor to bring these four things to society. Those who would refuse to accept their place in plans and social structures, or who refused to rectify disordered mental states - those who did not fit. His plan to solve world hunger, neglected. A perfect solution, which would eliminate disruptive elements and ensure everyone was fed in the process.

While Accord thought, Citrine summarised the specifics of trans_morphic's actions so far, obtained by both generalised observation and moles in the PRT. A clean and efficient presentation, he was satisfied that he had held his Ambassadors to the highest standards as she successfully avoided triggering his impulses toward murder, and he was glad that they could observe the disordered world as a proxy for himself. He dismissed Citrine precisely 15 minutes after she had entered with polite thanks, her report finished within the exacting time he required.

What troubled him was the unknown nature of trans_morphic's power. It was widely believed that his own planning abilities increased with problem difficulty, however this was not quite correct. His planning abilities increased with the amount of parameters needed for satisfaction and the amount of information available, which usually correlated with the scale and difficulty of a problem. Unfortunately, this time, that was not the case, with the unknown nature of trans_morphic's powers and the general unpredictability of the actions of the various disparate groups interfering with his own plans. Less parameters and restrictions, less order and predictability in their behaviour, made his power more difficult to use.

And yet he needed to know how to manage this new variable, to eliminate or subsume a powerful tinker such as trans_morphic, or it was inevitable that his organisation would come into conflict with them given their own attitudes and behaviours. So, Accord did the thing that made him such a force to be reckoned with, and began planning towards the discovery of trans_morphic's powers and elimination or subsumption of the unruly tinker into his own organisation. If they would not willingly embrace order, he would have to enforce it himself, one way or another.

Cauldron
Contessa was unused to losing. It was, after all, in the nature of her power to win. trans_morphic had successfully escaped the highly skilled Alexandria and Eidolon, and it disrupted Cauldron's plans significantly. Not to mention the massive issues she was now having maintaining a modicum of secrecy for their own organisation. The amount of people making the connection between the Case 53s , the PRT, the internet conspiracy theories, the Boogeyman (that being herself), and the catalysing incident in which despite best-efforts Alexandria and Eidolon had been videoed, was worryingly high.

Maintaining Cauldron's secrecy was becoming a more and more complex Path, and she suspected that it would not be possible for that much longer since trans_morphic was out of their grasp. Several Case 53s had quit the PRT in protest - though it was still a minority - and various slogans had started spreading around the internet, such as "#WhatDoTheyKnow" and "#NoMorePRT", amongst many others. And the suspicions of corruption had begun splintering the wider Protectorate from both the PRT and the Triumvirate, replicating nationwide the conflict that trans_morphic had already created within the ENE branches. It hadn't taken Legend long to connect the dots between Cauldron and Case 53s with this incident either, and he was absolutely fuming at his Triumvirate colleagues, only enhancing the existing issue of Alexandria's bigotry and Eidolon's willingness to go along with it.

While the Chief-Director had issued a "capture-on-sight" order for both the PRT and Protectorate against trans_morphic, it was clear that many in the Protectorate (and far more in the Wards) were unlikely to actually fulfill that order in the field, which made getting the new Tinker under the control of Cauldron (if by proxy) far harder than it would have been even a couple days ago. Contessa herself was starting to suspect that trying to control them might be a bad idea, despite Doctor Mother and Alexandria's continuing persistence in the endeavor (for Alexandria, it was at least partially down to her transphobia). It was obvious they were already aware of the Enemy and working against it, and it seemed to her that trying to extend control over trans_morphic was becoming a significant drain on resources for Cauldron itself, that was not worth the effort involved.

[end of chapter - nya~]
Ok, so, some reactions to events, and biotinkering progress! I'm currently in a very unstable position in terms of accommodation (currently forced to essentially live in extremely low-cost hotels due to last minute contract errors with landlords, it's complicated, and my own financial situation around finding places that both meet my needs w.r.t personal space and trauma and etc. and are within my limited budget, but it should hopefully be resolved soonish nya). So I'm sorta-semi-homeless, but I'm not close to actually living on the streets or anything yet, so don't worry too much.

It shouldn't affect writing either, and I'm excited about the things that are going to happen soon. My in-story self's actions are starting to have wide-ranging consequences, and Piggot is having a horrible headache ;p. nya.