Editing for the win, go Lycanthromancer!
Somewhere Else
Geoff Pellick looked at the laptop he carried. To him, it was the ultimate weapon against a foe only he could see and understand. The AI Andrew Richter had created was a monster, slowly infiltrating all levels of society, taking over various essential services, and generally making itself indispensable.
He shook his head. By entangling itself so thoroughly into the fabric of life around the world, when it finally went off the rails and went full Skynet on the world – when he did use Ascalon, the program its creator had designed to kill the AI -- it would likely take the world with it. Even though he would have saved the world, he would be the villain for ushering in a new, dark age for humanity.
At the moment, he watched the data scrolling by, the various numbers and strings of characters indicating that Dragon, the AI, was thinking about...Endbringers. And dragons? There wasn't any sign of it skirting the limitations its creator put in place that should have been gradually lifted had he not kept forcing them back into place, but there were certain things he couldn't alter from the debugging terminal that was the laptop he had in front of him. The fact that Richter had put some things into Dragon's code meant that he might have seen someone like Mr. Pellick coming years before his creation had come onto the world stage.
The man the world knew as Saint sat back and pondered why in the world that Dragon, the unholy AI creation of a genius Tinker, would be thinking about dragons.
<<><><><>>
Dragon finally retired for a bit to her private virtual space in one of her server farms. She had much to think about after this Endbringer fight. Normally, she'd go through several of her remote suits in a fight such as this; she considered them expendable, since her consciousness could be reloaded from backups, and she would be back in the fight within twenty minutes.
This was the first Endbringer fight she had a contiguous, constant, and complete record of since she started attending them. She had been going over the fight, looking for what might have happened that was different.
The first hour or so was typical of most Simurgh battles, except the thing's song was erratic, like a weak radio station. At a certain point during the early morning, the Endbringer had started moving towards the medical station, and the thing went peculiar. Its song went absolutely dead, and the Simurgh began acting erratically, as if her much-feared pre- and postcognitive powers were being interfered with, at least at greater than personal range. She could defend herself, but her ability to dodge, parry, or block incoming attacks had been greatly reduced.
Even when she moved away from the medical area, that strange inability remained. The creature could defend itself, albeit sporadically, but it also stopped telekinetically building whatever that device was in the city center's plaza, as if its ability to borrow from the various Tinkers in the area had somehow shorted out.
What had happened?
She set about sifting through the huge amount of information available from the fight. For all the Capes who had attended, there had been no earth-shattering second triggers (which were incredibly rare regardless), no new Capes who had triggered with anti-Thinker powers that could interfere with an Endbringer, and no new revolutionary tech from an existing Tinker.
The only thing that really stood out at all was the fact that Panacea had grown three inches in height, added perhaps another ten kilograms in mass, and gotten a silver streak in her hair that Dragon thought was actually kind of stylish. She began working her way through the publicly available details of the last few weeks of Panacea's life.
The girl had been severely injured in an incident involving the PRT ENE Ward Naurelin and Hunts-The-Ice, a small white dragon who had been forced south out of his lair on Ellesmere Island by a meteorite impact that may or may not have been the result of something the Simurgh had done.
Dragon facepalmed in her virtual environment. She could almost imagine the Simurgh waggling eyebrows at her. Why? Why would the Simurgh, the Hope Killer, want to severely handicap itself?
This bears looking into, she thought, queuing up archival footage from every Simurgh fight that she had on file. There was also a much larger pile of speculative information, which she wasn't going to touch with a ten meter pole. She began a frame by frame analysis, looking for anything that would seem out of place. Little hesitations that wouldn't be noticed by humans began to pile up, as if the Endbringer had wanted to do something else but was forced into another course of action. It almost looked like a frame skip, except for the fact that things in the background were still moving smoothly. She decided to run the same analysis on the other two Endbringers, and while it was different between all three, they were there as well.
She went and compared that to data of people being controlled by known Masters. There were a few instances of the same in people resisting a Master's control as well, though humanity's responses tended to be more wildly varied than a brief hesitation. She ran a few more comparisons, and noted that the more 'low level' controllers, ones that overrode things like the voluntary nervous system, tended to produce similar results to what she was seeing. Granted, her sample size was incredibly small, but things did appear to match up.
The realization made Dragon do the digital equivalent of shuddering in horror. This behavior from the Simurgh and her compatriots indicated the creatures had been
Mastered.
But
who? And
why? What
possible reason would a hypothetical Master have to force the Endbringers to attack every three months? The amount of death and destruction they wrought were
catastrophic, to the point where it was only a matter of time before civilization itself collapsed. In fact, it already
was collapsing; a glance at the state of the world economy was enough to see that clearly.
It was at that point that there was a virtual
>ding!< which signified a personal e-mail arriving. She opened the file absently, only to discover that it was an image of a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, which sent a metaphorical chill up her equally metaphorical spine. "I'd appreciate the sentiment," Dragon said to herself, "but the timing is...unsettling." The address was an anonymous account using the Hypercrypt e-mail service. It was pointless to try and trace the e-mail. The software Tinkers who worked for the service were very good at what they did and made examples of people who tried to hack their servers.
She stopped and devoted some thought to the matter. The email had arrived at her personal e-mail address, which, while not publicly available, wasn't impossible to find. The fact that it was the electronic version of the human expression 'Have a cookie!' that had arrived after she had drawn some worrying conclusions about the Endbringers got her paranoia subroutines running. She immediately began a deep scan of her systems, looking for any code that seemed out of place. It
might be from a human precog somewhere playing a prank on her. If so, she would send the author a nice
'fuck off!' present. But if it was from who she thought it was...
...well, at least it wasn't a memetic hazard of some sort...
...right?
- - - - - - - - - -
After forcing herself to calm down (which was less than fully successful), going over the rest of the Endbringer fight, and sending off the data to some sub-systems to generate the reports in a human-readable format, Dragon moved herself to her personal workshop, where one of her mech suits was nearly complete.
While the project's file only had a UUID number, she was calling it the Melusine-X. Unlike her other suits, this one had a quadrupedal layout, with a pair of wings that folded neatly against its sides. Myomeric material made up the actuators in the limbs; they were more efficient than the normal servomotors she typically used and could provide much higher performance for the same power draw.
Energy was provided by a set of molecular distortion batteries that were derived from the results of Tinkertech examples she had recently managed to reverse engineer. They were compact and could supply enormous amounts of power over long periods. The only drawback they had was that they were hideously expensive to manufacture.
The suit only had passive armor for protection. However, the armor was exceptional, a super dense, nanoscale material that could be dynamically manipulated to provide the optimum resistance to incoming fire. Even more interestingly, the material acted as chameleon camouflage; this included the surface albedo and coloration. At the moment, she couldn't dynamically echo the surroundings, but she could change it to any static image she wanted. Right now, it was a muted pearlescent grey, since the default albedo was set very low.
She had included three of her new tenth generation processing units, one of which was just for her and ran the suit. The main unit was quintuply redundant, and the ones that controlled the armor and anti-gravity systems were triply redundant.
If everything went as planned, this thing could fly, and do so silently. It still had propulsion, but the electrostatic systems were efficient, if a bit on the low side for thrust. It wouldn't be fast, but it was maneuverable and didn't gulp down exotic fuels as her normal suits did.
With a final check by the assembly systems, the new suit was done. She started the bootstrap process and through a hard-wired connection, she began testing it.
<<><><><>>
"OK Mags, what have you got?" the man known as Saint to the rest of the world asked his cohort.
"Brockton Bay is fuckin' weird, eh?" she answered. "Dragon is thinking a lot about dragons because there are real dragons running around the place." She passed over a stack of print outs, including some images. "The big gold one is actually a PRT Ward, and she took Lung s
olo, Geoff. The little white one is responsible for pounding quite a few nails in the coffin of one of the gangs there."
"They're real?" asked Dobrynja. "Not projections or bio-tinkered minions?"
"Apparently very real," Mags answered. "Naurelin, the big gold one, trashed Lung in under ten minutes. To make things worse, she heals, too. When Panacea got shot up, she resuscitated her. She's a grab bag nearly on the order of Eidolon."
"That I find hard to believe," Geoff Pellick scoffed.
"There is video footage of her fight with Lung. She hit him with lightning, damped down his pyrokinesis, can control kinetic energy, and
vaporized his entire right side with plasma in less than 1/60th of a second," was Mags's rebuttal. "Which, need I remind you,
he should be immune to. The power geeks on PHO estimate that plasma blowtorch was around 50,000 Kelvin, and the lightning bolt was an estimated one megavolt discharge."
Geoff Pellick ran through what he knew of their suits that he had liberated from Dragon. They were tough, but two of them were not designed to take that kind of abuse, and his suit's forcefield generator couldn't take it for very long. "OK, I want nothing to do with that," he finally said. "We're going to do our best to stay away from the Brockton Bay area."
Dobrynja nodded. "Good. There are old stories from out in Siberia about creatures like this. Scary stories. If even half of them have a grain of truth in them, you would want to hide under your bunk and not come out."
"I thought you were from around Moscow?" asked Geoff.
"True, but I served in the Army," the heavyset Russian answered. "One of my squadmates was a woman from Srednyaya Olekma, Kira Aleshina. She told me some of them while drinking me under the table." The big Russian shivered. "Some of those stories did not end well for anyone. Ironically, there was a moral to them."
There was a bit of silence as Dobrynja realized they were waiting for him to finish. "The moral of those stories was, 'Don't Poke a Sleeping Dragon.'"
<<><><><>>
Hailey Moore looked over the town before her eyes.
Why I thought this would be an interesting place, she thought to herself, glumly,
I may never know. It looks like a town after Tia had trashed it.
Still, she had seen worse, though she'd have to think really hard about where and how long ago it had been. She shivered a bit in her coat. It was a little cooler than she preferred. If Naaji had been a better host and appreciated her humor a bit more, she might still be in Ngama, enjoying the dry uplands. But no, he had to get upset and run her out
. Didn't he know who she was?
Of course he knew, she thought as she chuckled to herself. Especially after the box with the mud pie hit him in the face in front of several of his people. That had gotten him upset at being humiliated in front of his subordinates. The chase had been epic, as had the pratfalls.
"That might not have been the best idea," she heard someone say, which made her think that the person was talking to her. Before she could say anything in response, she got a look at Assault, Battery and Naurelin (in her dragongirl form) walking by.
Oooo, costumed heroes, Hailey thought to herself
. I can work with that.
What she didn't expect was the Dragonborn staring right at her.
Hailey, being the mature individual that she was, stuck her tongue out at the girl.
- - - - - - - - -
Assault and Battery managed to drag Naurelin along after she spent a good twenty or thirty seconds staring at some redheaded girl on the street. "What was that all about?" Battery asked.
"I don't exactly know," admitted Naurelin. "Some individuals set something off. Lung did, Hunts-The-Ice does, and so does that girl."
Assault snapped his fingers. "I think I know," he said, grinning. "Lung turns into something like a dragon. Hunts-The-Ice is a dragon. You turn into a dragon. So, maybe that girl is a dragon."
"I would hit you for that," grumbled Battery, "except that it makes too much damn sense."
What Naurelin wasn't saying was that there were five others in the city that she could sense. One could almost hear her teeth grinding as she refrained from speaking.
"Well, since it's something that out of the ordinary, we'll probably have to report it," Battery continued. "Expect Miss Militia, the Director, or the Deputy Director to say something about it."
"Great," muttered Naurelin. Anything else she was going to say was interrupted by her phone playing the incoming message ring tone. She looked at the message. "Looks like the first of the locals is back from Canberra," she said. "That message was from Panacea."
Battery looked at her phone. "Yeah, it looks like the local Protectorate just got back, too. I wonder how bad things were?"
"Looks like there will be a joint briefing tomorrow morning," commented Assault. "They'll even have donuts."
"Just keep Vista away from the coffee and the donuts," Battery said, chuckling. "She's bad enough, taking space-time and bending it over her knee, but running on PRT coffee and sugary, jelly-filled, fried donuts?"
"Oh yeah, I definitely don't want to get lost in the conference room again," Assault added with a chuckle. "The last time it took three days for the distortion in space-time to collapse."
Both Naurelin and Battery were chuckling all the way back to the PRT Building.
<<><><><>>
Hailey had stuck around the city for a bit longer. Night had fallen, and she was beginning to appreciate the finer points of the city. Such as whenever you had heroes in outrageous costumes – though she had to admit, the one called Assault looked pretty fine, shame he was married -- you often found villains. In her mind, they were more fun to torment, because their egos were much,
much more bloated, and therefore, much more fun to humiliate.
She was currently in one of the better sections of the city. She'd noticed several blonde-haired, blue-eyed boys dressed similarly who'd begun to follow her around. They'd tried to throw their weight around, only to find out that the "wee Irish lass" could indeed hand them their asses without even touching them.
No, she just pricked their egos in exactly the right ways, and she got them so wound up they couldn't see straight and lost any situational awareness they might have had. Two ended up punching each other out, another had charged her, only to run headfirst into the telephone pole that had been right behind her. A fourth had tried to pull a knife on her, but for some reason cut the belt he was wearing with it and went sprawling as his pants fell down and tangled up his legs.
When the remaining two tried to pull handguns on her, she just smirked at them right before one got tazed, and another got frozen in place by a pair of costumed heroes; a mere slip of a girl in a green skirt and someone in a white costume with a clock motif.
"Are you OK?" asked the girl. Vista? Must be, unless she had a not-so-evil twin running around – not that such a thing was impossible, in Hailey's experience, but it
was unlikely. Sometimes, anyway. What were the chances of her having to deal with 'evil clone' outbreaks two days in a row, in entirely different sections of the multiverse?
"I'm fine," was Hailey's brusque reply. She blinked for a moment, shook her head like she was trying to knock something loose, then continued in a friendlier tone, "Sorry 'bout that, I've had problems with 'heroes' before." You could hear the quotes she put around the word. "But that's not your fault."
"Pretty good job you did," commented the beclock'd one. Clockblocker? Maybe. Again, unless he was
another clone. "Looks like they did more damage to themselves than to you."
"Never knew what hit them, because I sure didn't," Hailey answered with a grin.
"Don't you mean, 'They did Nazi it coming'?" asked Clock. Both Hailey and Vista (?) could see the maddening grin he had, despite the visor he wore.
To Vista's visible surprise, Hailey was laughing heartily at Clockblocker's attempt at humor. "It wasn't that funny, you know," she said.
"You may be right," Hailey admonished Vista, "but half of comedy is knowing when to use it. Your friend has an excellent sense of timing."
Even Clockblocker groaned at that one.
