Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.2
- Pronouns
- Xe/Xem/They/Them
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
If scientists on my home earth (which I was calling Earth-H) knew the kind of shit I was pulling with electrochemistry right now, they'd cry bullshit. For my artificial binding site components, what I had was essentially a controlled electronegativity on a few atoms of carbon, plus a feedback line for when an atom attached to the site that would induce an electric field to eject it if it didn't match the desired bond electropotentials. Essentially, an arbitrary filter for atoms and molecules with a resolution of barely 4 atoms in both axes, using highly controlled doping of the bilayer graphene base to construct the analog circuitry for the component.
So, I had both an artificial enzyme-like binding site, and a series of components that would reduce complex biological material into basic organic molecules, each of which I could fit trillions on a single couple-millimetre-square microchip. My actual chips would be bigger than that, of course, and it did not take me long to make the very simple, repeating blueprint for the photon emitters - essentially a manifestation of quantum dot technology - for bioslurry generation. There'd be almost a quadrillion of the things in each chip, and all they needed was power, really.
Removing about 3 or so precognition blocker chips from the ejection bin, I programmed 3 bioslurry related chips into the chip foundry. The first two just produced photons of appropriate wavelengths to tear apart organic matter into primitive biocompounds with a few hundred Watts of power input. The final chip was special - it had two modes. The primary mode was continuing to maintain the bioslurry - without constant input of photons, the bioslurry would quickly coalesce into a miscellaneous lump of polymerised compounds as the smaller organic molecules reacted back together, so continuous energy input was required.
The secondary mode emitted one very particular wavelength of light at about 200nm - a near-ultraviolet region of the spectrum that enabled an ADP + Phosphate -> ATP reaction using a series of binding sites that I could provide. ATP is essentially the universal energy currency of Earth life, and most enzymes involved in Earth life used it as an energy store (by converting it back to ADP or Adenosene Monophosphate (AMP)), which meant that being able to maintain a high concentration of the substance in the bioslurry for the purposes of appropriating preexisting enzyme structures was a practical necessity.
The final chip I needed - one for which I was just now writing the structure in the relevant hardware definition language - involved reconstituting the bioslurry using the analog artificial binding site components. The big problem was actually fitting Digital-to-Analog converters that could work with repeating structures within variant lines of output. My eventual solution to the problem was to separate the generation of appropriate voltages from the selection of where those voltages should go in the banks of artificial binding sites, so the components and structure of a series of binding sites would be separated from each other. However, this did not solve the problem entirely due to the need for hyper-precise connector routing to the artificial binding sites.
What ended up being the final configuration involved lots and lots of different arrangements and spacings of these binding sites - plenty of quadruple-sets of lines along with a complex array of other patterns for constructing biomolecules. This allowed me to construct a series of standardised modules for protein and RNA and lipid construction, as well as generic modules for most other macromolecules. I'd built up from a simple series of binding sites to various submodules with routeable inputs to various larger modules constructed of a number of the submodules, each of these taking up a couple micrometres square on the chip. Which meant that on the 10cmx10cm square chips I was planning on producing, I could fit around 100 million larger modules with a collection of production sites for RNA, protein, and lipids.
It had taken me at least six hours to work out the kinks, but I now had all the designs I needed to produce the biochemical construction systems I wanted. Soon I'd have proper, mad-scientist style vats of biochemical slurry! A maintenance and photosynthesis chip at the top, an AAS (Artificial Active Site) chip at the bottom, and a sealable small access port in the middle for the addition and removal of various items. Creation of bioslurry would be simple - all that was needed was something to shred biomatter and a small channel with one of the breakdown chips positioned on each side. Storage was trivial! All I needed to do was let the sludge that would result from the machine solidify and then it could be broken down again.
Feeling smug as a bug though tired enough to have a comfy lie-down in my bed after the tinker-induced hyperfixation - which was how my power dealt with my ADHD problems while tinkering, as far as I could tell - I set the chip fabricator to produce several more AAS chips and the two-mode breakdown chips ready for my - in my opinion, extremely fantastic - biotinker setup.
Then, I had an idea. My tinker power was not shard-restricted. At all.
Which meant it would let me fully reverse engineer tinkertech if I gave it a chance. My tinkertech already didn't suffer from the sabotaging or degradation that normal shard tinkertech tended to, because my power was more cooperative, and it made it obvious when it was blackboxing things or when it's shaker effect would come into play, but this would... well, it would change the game of tech on Bet. As the chip fabricator made soft whirring sounds in the background I pushed my specialties into 3x Reverse Engineering, 2x Tinkertech Multiversal Effects, and pushed. One core blueprint made itself clear in my mind, a multiversal component tracer that could trace blackboxed connections back across the multiverse. Scribbling it down on my laptop before I got distracted by something else again I thought about what I was going to do.
Obviously I wanted to spread massive scientific advancement and solve a bunch of problems with the world. And I had every intention of snubbing the PRT and their "S-class threat" classification when it would enable me to do that, and I would be paying no attention to corporations wanting to lock down my technology either (in fact now i had the power to do so I was very tempted to just leak all their blueprints).
The big issue was ensuring that I didn't hand everyone a bunch of Clarketech that they would be unable to understand at the current level of scientific knowledge on Bet, otherwise what would end up happening was humanity just stagnating and using items they didn't understand and would never be capable of understanding even if they tried to. Even if it wasn't actually blackboxed, it would be blackboxed in practice, suffocating the ability for people to comprehend, replicate, analyse, and improve the technology. Of course, for the Entities, this would be a positive outcome, but not for humanity itself. No, what needed to happen was documented and explained blueprints for the stuff I was going to make, and perhaps posting about some foundational scientific principles used in my tinkertech.
I was interrupted in my musings on what I would be doing by my stomach grumbling and realizing I hadn't eaten properly since before Faultline left, which somehow had drifted into more than 8 hours ago. Attempting to get food from my personal store was futile! Apparently feeding Faultline and her Crew had left me with no more food. Which was annoying, and my still sore ribs would make getting food unpleasant - but it did need to happen. It was not rare that I thought about how nice it would be if taking care of myself was easier for me, and this was one of those times, and then I also remembered that I still had a massive injury on the top of my head that I really needed to at least cover up and hide if nothing else. Unfortunately, I hated wearing anything over my head - it caused me weird sensory issues which was why you'd never see me with a hat on - and that provided an obstacle that had to be dealt with.
Thinking on the problem, I figured I could probably make a temporary solution using some metal until I could finalize my biotinkering setup. In fact, due to the way the wound was made, using a portal as a form of shaping tool was viable. A little slice off the boat graveyard later with an appropriately sized portal, and I had the protective metal sheet to put on the back of my head, my tinker power shaker effect helping shape the outside to match the original form of my own head - and within about 30 minutes (including some scrubbing to remove immediate infection risks) I had a very temporary solution. The constant dread of being on Earth Bet came to the forefront as I remembered the existence of Master capes again, and once again, I distracted myself by opening a portal to New York to go grab food before I could have a horrific anxiety breakdown.
Mildly limping (my chest still hurt, dammit!) down a market street, I stopped by a corner shop and noticed several papers, with headlines like "Case 53s - What We Know?" and "PRT Corruption Exposed!". I wasn't used to fame and this... was extremely weird and oddly uncomfortable. Of course, then there were the transphobic rags which made me mentally wince - this time, not from pain - spreading articles with names like "TransMorphic - A Threat To Children?" (they even spelt my cape name wrong!), and "Cape Transgenders - A Rejection of American Family Values". I was trying to ignore the gossip mag headlines entirely, and the fact that no doubt there was already various rule 34 drawings of me floating around the internet.
Yes, I was most definitely going to avoid thinking about that, I thought to myself, as I popped into a store while my focus was mostly on my own train of thought rather than the wall items, and I nearly knocked over a couple jars of spicy peppers in my internal distraction before grabbing a couple sandwiches, buying them, and devouring them as I walked out the shop. The first bit of peace I had had since I got on this... awful planet, really, and I wandered around for a bit before carefully sitting on a bench and just relaxing, even despite my anxiety problems. Looking on I could soon clearly see the boundary where the damage from Behemoth had been rebuilt, as my stomach twisted thinking about it - the gleaming buildings with thicker walls in contrast to older designs including several of brutalist or late-Victorian and industrial aesthetic from the pre-Behemoth city. It was a stark difference and a more apparent reminder of the state the world was in, and it made me angry to think about too much, in the same way that death itself rocketed between a sense of tearing up and anger in my body. The feeling of suffocation and degradation and sapping of all agency and hope from everyone on the planet.
While I was bad at reading body language I could still see the way people walked wearily, the way they avoided even going outside, an effect of the absolute strangling horror that came from the ending of millions of individuals and all the infrastructure and culture and love for the people they cared about, and friendships and relationships they had made with others. The deletion of parts of a complex global societal interconnection that grew dimmer as people were slaughtered en-masse, as hope was murdered by shard-powered death machines, city killers, annihilators that ensured no-one would ever feel safe, that people would never reach for the stars or just their loved ones too tightly, that they felt forever helpless and that no amount of cooperation or aid would keep the tide of civilizational death away.
Thinking, truly thinking about it, the sense of loss on both a global level and on a personal level, still mostly alone on a world like this, was enough to make my eyes leak in the overwhelming bout of emotion like those that I was occasionally prone to. The sheer sense of fatalism and futility I could see around me in the other people, it was horrifying in a way that was hard to truly enunciate other than by my own reaction. We deserved better, the people of Bet all deserved so much better than this constant state of atrocity, and for once in my life I had the power and agency to change things, and more importantly to ensure that everyone had that. The fact that people kept going, kept fighting to both survive and help each other even in the face of all that...
Contemplating the state of Bet, that was really the only thing that kept my mood from crashing, instead doing my old emotional trick of shifting sadness and hopelessness towards anger at the cause of the situation, as I watched lasers and explosions a few kilometres ahead of where I was sitting, presumably Legend beginning a fight with some local villains or something like that.
I took a few minutes to myself, to clear up the little bits of moisture on my face, before slowly (due to injury) walking through a portal I made that I hid behind a tree. Yawning, I opened my laptop and immediately got a ping from Vista's (sorry, "Miss_Warper"s) PM on PHO, containing the message...
"Well that's not going to stop me searching about C53s, especially since you've got the precog blockers going. And I hope you deal with the Empire more!"
Which did remind me I needed to deal with Brockton gangs. In fact, as I was coming to realise, Doormaker style powers were complete and total bullshit and I could probably dismantle every Brockton gang in about 20 minutes of work really. It took a fair bit for me to realize how truly broken this artificial power actually was, but I'd come to that realisation ever since I used it to slice off Eidolon's arms in a successful Cauldron escape attempt. So I typed out a quick reply, being careful to avoid triggering my injuries with my general ADHD fidgeting and shuffling as I used the laptop...
"I'm gonna deal with the Empire tonight. And if you are really wanting to look into the C53 stuff, the key word is what witches brew potions in. Don't say it, don't even write it down, but that is the name you are looking for."
Now, I had few ethical issues with killing Nazis in my current situation with my current power level - certainly not ones with histories of mass murder like Kaiser or Hookwolf, at the very least. But in practice the thought of making the decision to kill someone was not something I could really do, emotionally speaking. To be clear, it would be a trivial task for me to kill either of them by dropping them above the Earth's atmosphere, but that did not mean I wanted to do that. Which meant that I needed to come to a decision on what to actually do with the Nazis - my first thought was holding cells but that wouldn't work. My second thought was dumping the worst of them in the Birdcage (despite my ethical issues with the existence of such a place, right now there really were not any better solutions for me), and that's what I decided to go with.
With some amount of trepidation, I located the top of Medhall, a good place to start the search for sure, and watched as a tall (and very stereotypically Aryan) Max-Anders-as-Kaiser walked into the room with a stern confidence, along with a gruff looking man holding a hammer that sparked out of each end of the head, and a man that could only ever be Hookwolf. The three were in a collection together, apparently discussing further trade of capes - including one that could apparently detect very recent dimensional rifts as a side effect of detecting and sensing parahuman powers, though by my estimation the only mechanisms for that would fail due to my various clairvoyance blockers and true pocket dimensions rather than alternate universes - for access to ammunition and weaponry supplies.
I later noticed two women behind the head Nazi trash, presumably Menja and Fenja, as I shut off my microportal and began locating the Birdcage. I'd probably dump these dickheads with Marquis, so I got a feel for the coordinates while rapidly shutting any of the portals I made to find the place so someone like Glaistig Uaine didn't screw me over with parahuman sense or something. A few tense moments and I had my target coordinates, and before I could flounder about in anxious indecision, I opened a portal directly on the floor of Medhall's top office that connected essentially immediately to the Birdcage location - in a two-portal maneuver I was getting decently experienced with at this point. Before any of them could react, the portal slammed shut as fast as I could and I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding. That'd send the Empire into chaos, I thought, though I still have a few more to deal with.
Exhausted, I lay in bed avoiding rib pain and trying to ignore dysphoria as I fell asleep to the gentle noises of the chip fabricator, still building my biotinkering technology that would be ready by tomorrow (or today, because it was getting past midnight).
Perspective - The Faerie Queen
For several days now, Ciara had watched the visions of her fellow fae with great intensity. The Queen Administrator was making preparations, and Negotiator - while not a Noble faerie - had been engaging in productive information gathering.
A faerie not of the two courts or of any known court had been found, by the name of Lost Store, and the presence of this mysterious new faerie was being discussed by the highest of the Summer Court.
Until now, she had not seen this faerie with her own senses, only in visions and dreams of isolation and a longing for companionship. Yet, she felt a sense of something approaching motherhood over the new faerie.
Just a flash, and the faerie appeared in her midst, yet insufficiently long for her to act and to reclaim it from its host as she desired. For this faerie she knew needed her own personal tutelage, and yet she had trouble locating it - even in discussion with her subject fae and fellow Nobles Queen Administrator, Desmesnes-Keeper, and Queen Shaper.
A second flash as 5 faerie appeared in her gilded cage alongside the Lost Store, and she was decided. She was going to locate the new faerie herself.
With a pop, Glaistig Uaine vanished from the Birdcage.
[end of chapter - nyaa~]
So here we see ripple effects, self contemplation, and near-completion of biotinkering (which is going to result in so much fun!), the Shard Network attempting to regain control of the situation by pushing on one of the most powerful parahumans to go fetch, and the rapid dismantling of gangs that is set to continue tomorrow (in universe nya), along with much other things.
If scientists on my home earth (which I was calling Earth-H) knew the kind of shit I was pulling with electrochemistry right now, they'd cry bullshit. For my artificial binding site components, what I had was essentially a controlled electronegativity on a few atoms of carbon, plus a feedback line for when an atom attached to the site that would induce an electric field to eject it if it didn't match the desired bond electropotentials. Essentially, an arbitrary filter for atoms and molecules with a resolution of barely 4 atoms in both axes, using highly controlled doping of the bilayer graphene base to construct the analog circuitry for the component.
So, I had both an artificial enzyme-like binding site, and a series of components that would reduce complex biological material into basic organic molecules, each of which I could fit trillions on a single couple-millimetre-square microchip. My actual chips would be bigger than that, of course, and it did not take me long to make the very simple, repeating blueprint for the photon emitters - essentially a manifestation of quantum dot technology - for bioslurry generation. There'd be almost a quadrillion of the things in each chip, and all they needed was power, really.
Removing about 3 or so precognition blocker chips from the ejection bin, I programmed 3 bioslurry related chips into the chip foundry. The first two just produced photons of appropriate wavelengths to tear apart organic matter into primitive biocompounds with a few hundred Watts of power input. The final chip was special - it had two modes. The primary mode was continuing to maintain the bioslurry - without constant input of photons, the bioslurry would quickly coalesce into a miscellaneous lump of polymerised compounds as the smaller organic molecules reacted back together, so continuous energy input was required.
The secondary mode emitted one very particular wavelength of light at about 200nm - a near-ultraviolet region of the spectrum that enabled an ADP + Phosphate -> ATP reaction using a series of binding sites that I could provide. ATP is essentially the universal energy currency of Earth life, and most enzymes involved in Earth life used it as an energy store (by converting it back to ADP or Adenosene Monophosphate (AMP)), which meant that being able to maintain a high concentration of the substance in the bioslurry for the purposes of appropriating preexisting enzyme structures was a practical necessity.
The final chip I needed - one for which I was just now writing the structure in the relevant hardware definition language - involved reconstituting the bioslurry using the analog artificial binding site components. The big problem was actually fitting Digital-to-Analog converters that could work with repeating structures within variant lines of output. My eventual solution to the problem was to separate the generation of appropriate voltages from the selection of where those voltages should go in the banks of artificial binding sites, so the components and structure of a series of binding sites would be separated from each other. However, this did not solve the problem entirely due to the need for hyper-precise connector routing to the artificial binding sites.
What ended up being the final configuration involved lots and lots of different arrangements and spacings of these binding sites - plenty of quadruple-sets of lines along with a complex array of other patterns for constructing biomolecules. This allowed me to construct a series of standardised modules for protein and RNA and lipid construction, as well as generic modules for most other macromolecules. I'd built up from a simple series of binding sites to various submodules with routeable inputs to various larger modules constructed of a number of the submodules, each of these taking up a couple micrometres square on the chip. Which meant that on the 10cmx10cm square chips I was planning on producing, I could fit around 100 million larger modules with a collection of production sites for RNA, protein, and lipids.
It had taken me at least six hours to work out the kinks, but I now had all the designs I needed to produce the biochemical construction systems I wanted. Soon I'd have proper, mad-scientist style vats of biochemical slurry! A maintenance and photosynthesis chip at the top, an AAS (Artificial Active Site) chip at the bottom, and a sealable small access port in the middle for the addition and removal of various items. Creation of bioslurry would be simple - all that was needed was something to shred biomatter and a small channel with one of the breakdown chips positioned on each side. Storage was trivial! All I needed to do was let the sludge that would result from the machine solidify and then it could be broken down again.
Feeling smug as a bug though tired enough to have a comfy lie-down in my bed after the tinker-induced hyperfixation - which was how my power dealt with my ADHD problems while tinkering, as far as I could tell - I set the chip fabricator to produce several more AAS chips and the two-mode breakdown chips ready for my - in my opinion, extremely fantastic - biotinker setup.
Then, I had an idea. My tinker power was not shard-restricted. At all.
Which meant it would let me fully reverse engineer tinkertech if I gave it a chance. My tinkertech already didn't suffer from the sabotaging or degradation that normal shard tinkertech tended to, because my power was more cooperative, and it made it obvious when it was blackboxing things or when it's shaker effect would come into play, but this would... well, it would change the game of tech on Bet. As the chip fabricator made soft whirring sounds in the background I pushed my specialties into 3x Reverse Engineering, 2x Tinkertech Multiversal Effects, and pushed. One core blueprint made itself clear in my mind, a multiversal component tracer that could trace blackboxed connections back across the multiverse. Scribbling it down on my laptop before I got distracted by something else again I thought about what I was going to do.
Obviously I wanted to spread massive scientific advancement and solve a bunch of problems with the world. And I had every intention of snubbing the PRT and their "S-class threat" classification when it would enable me to do that, and I would be paying no attention to corporations wanting to lock down my technology either (in fact now i had the power to do so I was very tempted to just leak all their blueprints).
The big issue was ensuring that I didn't hand everyone a bunch of Clarketech that they would be unable to understand at the current level of scientific knowledge on Bet, otherwise what would end up happening was humanity just stagnating and using items they didn't understand and would never be capable of understanding even if they tried to. Even if it wasn't actually blackboxed, it would be blackboxed in practice, suffocating the ability for people to comprehend, replicate, analyse, and improve the technology. Of course, for the Entities, this would be a positive outcome, but not for humanity itself. No, what needed to happen was documented and explained blueprints for the stuff I was going to make, and perhaps posting about some foundational scientific principles used in my tinkertech.
I was interrupted in my musings on what I would be doing by my stomach grumbling and realizing I hadn't eaten properly since before Faultline left, which somehow had drifted into more than 8 hours ago. Attempting to get food from my personal store was futile! Apparently feeding Faultline and her Crew had left me with no more food. Which was annoying, and my still sore ribs would make getting food unpleasant - but it did need to happen. It was not rare that I thought about how nice it would be if taking care of myself was easier for me, and this was one of those times, and then I also remembered that I still had a massive injury on the top of my head that I really needed to at least cover up and hide if nothing else. Unfortunately, I hated wearing anything over my head - it caused me weird sensory issues which was why you'd never see me with a hat on - and that provided an obstacle that had to be dealt with.
Thinking on the problem, I figured I could probably make a temporary solution using some metal until I could finalize my biotinkering setup. In fact, due to the way the wound was made, using a portal as a form of shaping tool was viable. A little slice off the boat graveyard later with an appropriately sized portal, and I had the protective metal sheet to put on the back of my head, my tinker power shaker effect helping shape the outside to match the original form of my own head - and within about 30 minutes (including some scrubbing to remove immediate infection risks) I had a very temporary solution. The constant dread of being on Earth Bet came to the forefront as I remembered the existence of Master capes again, and once again, I distracted myself by opening a portal to New York to go grab food before I could have a horrific anxiety breakdown.
Mildly limping (my chest still hurt, dammit!) down a market street, I stopped by a corner shop and noticed several papers, with headlines like "Case 53s - What We Know?" and "PRT Corruption Exposed!". I wasn't used to fame and this... was extremely weird and oddly uncomfortable. Of course, then there were the transphobic rags which made me mentally wince - this time, not from pain - spreading articles with names like "TransMorphic - A Threat To Children?" (they even spelt my cape name wrong!), and "Cape Transgenders - A Rejection of American Family Values". I was trying to ignore the gossip mag headlines entirely, and the fact that no doubt there was already various rule 34 drawings of me floating around the internet.
Yes, I was most definitely going to avoid thinking about that, I thought to myself, as I popped into a store while my focus was mostly on my own train of thought rather than the wall items, and I nearly knocked over a couple jars of spicy peppers in my internal distraction before grabbing a couple sandwiches, buying them, and devouring them as I walked out the shop. The first bit of peace I had had since I got on this... awful planet, really, and I wandered around for a bit before carefully sitting on a bench and just relaxing, even despite my anxiety problems. Looking on I could soon clearly see the boundary where the damage from Behemoth had been rebuilt, as my stomach twisted thinking about it - the gleaming buildings with thicker walls in contrast to older designs including several of brutalist or late-Victorian and industrial aesthetic from the pre-Behemoth city. It was a stark difference and a more apparent reminder of the state the world was in, and it made me angry to think about too much, in the same way that death itself rocketed between a sense of tearing up and anger in my body. The feeling of suffocation and degradation and sapping of all agency and hope from everyone on the planet.
While I was bad at reading body language I could still see the way people walked wearily, the way they avoided even going outside, an effect of the absolute strangling horror that came from the ending of millions of individuals and all the infrastructure and culture and love for the people they cared about, and friendships and relationships they had made with others. The deletion of parts of a complex global societal interconnection that grew dimmer as people were slaughtered en-masse, as hope was murdered by shard-powered death machines, city killers, annihilators that ensured no-one would ever feel safe, that people would never reach for the stars or just their loved ones too tightly, that they felt forever helpless and that no amount of cooperation or aid would keep the tide of civilizational death away.
Thinking, truly thinking about it, the sense of loss on both a global level and on a personal level, still mostly alone on a world like this, was enough to make my eyes leak in the overwhelming bout of emotion like those that I was occasionally prone to. The sheer sense of fatalism and futility I could see around me in the other people, it was horrifying in a way that was hard to truly enunciate other than by my own reaction. We deserved better, the people of Bet all deserved so much better than this constant state of atrocity, and for once in my life I had the power and agency to change things, and more importantly to ensure that everyone had that. The fact that people kept going, kept fighting to both survive and help each other even in the face of all that...
Contemplating the state of Bet, that was really the only thing that kept my mood from crashing, instead doing my old emotional trick of shifting sadness and hopelessness towards anger at the cause of the situation, as I watched lasers and explosions a few kilometres ahead of where I was sitting, presumably Legend beginning a fight with some local villains or something like that.
I took a few minutes to myself, to clear up the little bits of moisture on my face, before slowly (due to injury) walking through a portal I made that I hid behind a tree. Yawning, I opened my laptop and immediately got a ping from Vista's (sorry, "Miss_Warper"s) PM on PHO, containing the message...
"Well that's not going to stop me searching about C53s, especially since you've got the precog blockers going. And I hope you deal with the Empire more!"
Which did remind me I needed to deal with Brockton gangs. In fact, as I was coming to realise, Doormaker style powers were complete and total bullshit and I could probably dismantle every Brockton gang in about 20 minutes of work really. It took a fair bit for me to realize how truly broken this artificial power actually was, but I'd come to that realisation ever since I used it to slice off Eidolon's arms in a successful Cauldron escape attempt. So I typed out a quick reply, being careful to avoid triggering my injuries with my general ADHD fidgeting and shuffling as I used the laptop...
"I'm gonna deal with the Empire tonight. And if you are really wanting to look into the C53 stuff, the key word is what witches brew potions in. Don't say it, don't even write it down, but that is the name you are looking for."
Now, I had few ethical issues with killing Nazis in my current situation with my current power level - certainly not ones with histories of mass murder like Kaiser or Hookwolf, at the very least. But in practice the thought of making the decision to kill someone was not something I could really do, emotionally speaking. To be clear, it would be a trivial task for me to kill either of them by dropping them above the Earth's atmosphere, but that did not mean I wanted to do that. Which meant that I needed to come to a decision on what to actually do with the Nazis - my first thought was holding cells but that wouldn't work. My second thought was dumping the worst of them in the Birdcage (despite my ethical issues with the existence of such a place, right now there really were not any better solutions for me), and that's what I decided to go with.
With some amount of trepidation, I located the top of Medhall, a good place to start the search for sure, and watched as a tall (and very stereotypically Aryan) Max-Anders-as-Kaiser walked into the room with a stern confidence, along with a gruff looking man holding a hammer that sparked out of each end of the head, and a man that could only ever be Hookwolf. The three were in a collection together, apparently discussing further trade of capes - including one that could apparently detect very recent dimensional rifts as a side effect of detecting and sensing parahuman powers, though by my estimation the only mechanisms for that would fail due to my various clairvoyance blockers and true pocket dimensions rather than alternate universes - for access to ammunition and weaponry supplies.
I later noticed two women behind the head Nazi trash, presumably Menja and Fenja, as I shut off my microportal and began locating the Birdcage. I'd probably dump these dickheads with Marquis, so I got a feel for the coordinates while rapidly shutting any of the portals I made to find the place so someone like Glaistig Uaine didn't screw me over with parahuman sense or something. A few tense moments and I had my target coordinates, and before I could flounder about in anxious indecision, I opened a portal directly on the floor of Medhall's top office that connected essentially immediately to the Birdcage location - in a two-portal maneuver I was getting decently experienced with at this point. Before any of them could react, the portal slammed shut as fast as I could and I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding. That'd send the Empire into chaos, I thought, though I still have a few more to deal with.
Exhausted, I lay in bed avoiding rib pain and trying to ignore dysphoria as I fell asleep to the gentle noises of the chip fabricator, still building my biotinkering technology that would be ready by tomorrow (or today, because it was getting past midnight).
Perspective - The Faerie Queen
For several days now, Ciara had watched the visions of her fellow fae with great intensity. The Queen Administrator was making preparations, and Negotiator - while not a Noble faerie - had been engaging in productive information gathering.
A faerie not of the two courts or of any known court had been found, by the name of Lost Store, and the presence of this mysterious new faerie was being discussed by the highest of the Summer Court.
Until now, she had not seen this faerie with her own senses, only in visions and dreams of isolation and a longing for companionship. Yet, she felt a sense of something approaching motherhood over the new faerie.
Just a flash, and the faerie appeared in her midst, yet insufficiently long for her to act and to reclaim it from its host as she desired. For this faerie she knew needed her own personal tutelage, and yet she had trouble locating it - even in discussion with her subject fae and fellow Nobles Queen Administrator, Desmesnes-Keeper, and Queen Shaper.
A second flash as 5 faerie appeared in her gilded cage alongside the Lost Store, and she was decided. She was going to locate the new faerie herself.
With a pop, Glaistig Uaine vanished from the Birdcage.
[end of chapter - nyaa~]
So here we see ripple effects, self contemplation, and near-completion of biotinkering (which is going to result in so much fun!), the Shard Network attempting to regain control of the situation by pushing on one of the most powerful parahumans to go fetch, and the rapid dismantling of gangs that is set to continue tomorrow (in universe nya), along with much other things.
nya