Whatever she expected when she triggered, it wasn't meeting a short white-haired girl or turning into a hyper-advanced technological platform. Of course when you're Taylor Hebert, things frequently don't go as planned.
Transposition, or: Ship Happens [Worm/Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio | Arpeggio of Blue Steel]
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Diatonic 1.1
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Apparently people like this and want me to post it here. So, uh, here you are? Transhumanist magical robot girls are a go!
Summary: Whatever she expected when she triggered, it wasn't meeting a short silver-haired girl or turning into a hyper-advanced technological platform. Of course when you're Taylor Hebert, things frequently don't go as planned.
A bit of background:
Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio has been one of my favorite series for a while. I found the manga 2011, and was thoroughly pleased with the TV adaptation despite the difference in characterization. I love the idea behind the Mental Models, how the Fog decided to make human-like avatars so they could experience causality and emotion to help better understand human tactics, but inadvertently developing free will and their own personality flaws at the same time.
I also love transhumanism. I've always planned for this story to be about Taylor going beyond being human. I wavered for a bit on what series/powers to work with, and ultimately the choices were between Aoki Hagane, GitS, Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita/Gally), and Metal Gear Solid's Raiden. The last two would have had her scaling up slowly to their level.
But in the end I decided I wanted to go more extreme. So Taylor isn't a cyborg. She doesn't have a human brain. She isn't even really human anymore. And she knows it. So that theme of questioning your own humanity and trying to discover what it means to be human and what defines us (as seen in both Gunnm and GitS) will be showing up in this story as Taylor learns more and more about what she really is, trying to cement her own humanity even as it slips further out of her fingers.
I hope you enjoy it.
Now let's get this show on the road.
Transposition: The shifting of a melody, a harmonic progression or an entire musical piece to another key, while maintaining the same tone structure, i.e. the same succession of whole tones and semitones and remaining melodic intervals.
— Musikalisches Lexicon, 879 (1865), Heinrich Christoph Koch (trans. Schuijer)
Diatonic 1.1
Friday, April 8th, 2011
It wasn't that I was worried about it all. I was worried, it was just the worry I felt was significantly more specific. And justified, from my perspective.
I was constantly worried the changes that had happened to me three months ago would be noticed.
That I didn't need glasses anymore.
That my skin couldn't be cut.
That I could easily rip a three-inch thick steel plate in half like it was a piece of paper.
That "I", my whole personality, what made me me, was just software.
That now, I wasn't human.
Instead, I was a simulation, an AI running on a quantum computer and surrounded by a shell of nanomaterial in the shape of a fifteen year-old girl.
Finding that out had been shock, to put it lightly. Because the way I'd reacted was about as close to 'shock' as a hydrogen bomb is to C-4.
Once I recovered, I'd immediately started to research what had happened to me. And what I found was disheartening. There were stories of capes that had changed somehow when they triggered, their bodies mutating or changing. And there was no way back. It was permanent.
For them, the obvious ones at least, the changes made it hard for them to live a normal life. I was just hoping I still could. Three months in to faking that everything was normal, and it seemed like a distinct possibility. …But I was still understandably a bit paranoid about the entire 'I am now a mass of tiny machines' thing. Not to mention I avoided thinking about it as much as possible. That road led to madness.
My dad hadn't noticed, thankfully, but… I can't exactly say he was the most observant person in the first place, even in spite of our improving relationship.
So really, I didn't need to worry about myself, my physical well-being. Really, I just had to worry about–
"Hey, Taylor~"
them.
I sighed, shutting my locker door and turning to look at Emma. The girl was surrounded by her usual posse, flanked by Sophia on her right and Madison on her left.
([Reducing primary emotion-emulation processes and sub-threads to 60% operational capacity])
"Yes, Emma?"
My voice was dead, flat. I was so tired of all of this. Of how they tormented me. Of how they constantly worked to undermine, sabotage, and tear me down. The least I could do was not give them the satisfaction of reacting.
"God, Taylor. Could you smell any more disgusting? It's like you just got worse after what happened," Emma said, holding her nose shut as the tag-alongs snickered.
I felt my eyebrows scrunch together. Her statement literally made no sense. I didn't even have sweat glands anymore. I didn't have any reason for them. There was no need for liquid channels to produce saline that would sap heat when it changed phases. I simply couldn't overheat. Ever.
But… just… wow. I had actually cared about this kind of stuff? That was like fifth-grade level at best.
I sighed, looking sadly at my estranged ex-best-friend. Emma seemed to notice and it appeared she got irritated at the complete lack of response I gave her. With a "Hmph." she closed the distance between us, and then passed by, holding her head high.
I just stood there as her group followed behind her, like the good little sycophants they were.
As Sophia walked by, she intentionally swerved and shoulder-checked me. Hard. If I'd been my old self that would have knocked me flat, but as I was now, it didn't even move me an inch. It was the first time she'd gotten physical with her assaults since …then, and for a while I thought she'd backed off completely from it, letting Emma take the lead with her own brand of torture.
It looked like I was wrong.
I watched her walk away, and she turned her head to look back over her shoulder, glaring at me worse than usual.
Fuck.
I'd have to watch my back for the rest of the day. There was no doubt I could expect something in retaliation for failing to respond to what she'd done, and I had a feeling it would be worse than usual. Before I triggered, she'd done things like pushing me aside on the stairs so hard I almost fell down them. I was also pretty sure she'd been the one to shove me in there.
I shuddered. I was so glad my newly-eidetic memory had only recorded a few seconds of being in that place before I'd broken out.
"A? Atarashii fune? Eto… nan gata? Kousokusenkan? Juujunyousenkan? Onaji ka…?" She cleared her throat and then put her fists on her hips imperiously. "Iona tte iimasu." She pointed at me. "Dare ka?"
'…what.'
I shook my head, aborting the strange memory of that short silver-haired girl.
The early bell rang, and I made my way through the crowds towards my first period class.
([Restoring emotion system to full operational capacity])
The rest of the morning passed uneventfully. Madison was in Gladly's class with me, but she largely deigned not to speak with me or even focus on me. Usually.
Thankfully, today was one of those days she decided I was below her notice.
As soon as the bell rang I was heading out the door to my normal sanctuary during lunch: the girl's bathroom.
I used to eat in there. But now, well, I didn't need to eat. It was rather pointless. I could still taste, but it was more like chemical analysis than 'tasting'. And there was never anything left once I did eat, my body breaking down the entire thing and using everything, I think I made more of the nanomaterials that made up my body from it, but I wasn't sure, as I'd never noticed anything changing.
My thoughts were interrupted by the bathroom door opening, a group of chattering girls coming in. I immediately recognized the voices as Madison and Sophia. If I'd been my old self, I wouldn't have because of how they were covered by the sounds of everything else going on: sink, paper dispenser, etc.
Suddenly, there was a knock on the door of the stall I was in.
Oh, fuck.
Shit shit shit shit.
If they found out I was the one in here… well, with the way Sophia had been glaring at me earlier something bad would happen. Bad for me, that is.
The knock repeated.
C'mon, think, think, think. Alright, gotta hide who I am somehow. Maybe…
Focusing on my throat, I prayed to God that my spontaneous idea would work. It should work, but I had no idea. I'd never tried anything like what I was doing.
"Occupied." I said. And the voice that came out of my throat wasn't mine. "It might be a while, sorry."
I wasn't really. They could go fuck themselves for all I cared.
The girl on the other side of the door muttered something inconsequential and moved away to another stall, knocking again. I breathed a silent sigh of relief and prayed that nothing else would happen.
Madison, Sophia and the rest of them were still chattering away as the other girl finished up and there was an additional sink running.
And then they all migrated out of the bathroom like the jackals they were.
Sighing again, I released my focus on my throat. That was… weird. I hadn't known I could do that. It had been completely spontaneous, but now it had me thinking. If I had been able to mess with my vocal chords like it was natural, what else could I do?
I'd been… avoiding anything to do with my body and the stuff that made it up for awhile because of how uncomfortable it made me just thinking about it, but maybe now it was time to start trying.
Despite having avoided anything to do with the things relating to my sudden inhumanity, I'd still managed to make some pretty crude armor out of sheets of steel I'd salvaged from the boat graveyard as a costume.
I'd settled on a solid metal plate for my face, making eye-holes by poking through the steel and then filing them until they were a good size. A pair of silver reflective lenses went in them, and then I polished the entire thing until it gleamed, the lenses not even visibly different from the rest of the blank mask. It just looked like my face was flat metal when I had it on. Kind of eerie, but it would definitely protect my identity.
The pieces of armor had leather-ish straps that I'd decided on instead of velcro, as velcro could be easily pulled apart just through solid force, where as buckled straps weren't going anywhere. The straps threaded through hard metal holders on a form-fitting black suit that was basically like those neoprene suits that divers used, except less neoprene and more… spandex-y. I'd had to save up quite a bit for that, ordering it online from a place that PHO had guaranteed was completely anonymous. And the metal flat holder-things were actually belt loops I'd also found online. For gun holsters, of all things.
That… had required some serious fudging of my age to get them. And also saving up, again. Probably illegal. Okay no, it was definitely illegal, but it was for a good cause, right?
The belt loops were bolted to small (about 2x4 inch) steel plates (again from the boat graveyard, retrieved by yours truly) and a guy I'd found at a metal shop had tapped threads into them for only two dollars since 'it was such a small thing'.
The plates sat under the spandex, the belt loops above, and bolts going through the fabric. I'd squished off the extra metal from the bolt with my fingers, and then filed them down. A piece of fabric then got sewed over the metal. Even if the plates couldn't do anything like accidentally cut my skin, it still felt weird for the cloth to be suddenly interrupted by hard metal. I think I'd done a pretty good job, but eh, it was my first time sewing, so you have to give me credit.
And thus, my costume was complete.
It reminded me of medieval armor, except less metal. More… light armor? That's what I would say it was, really. I wanted gauntlets, but I didn't exactly have the ability to make those with my current resources. So I just had bracers. Well, and upper arm stuff plus shoulder-y things (I think they're called pauldrons), and a plate for both my chest and back. And then eight pieces for my legs, back and front sections for both my thighs and lower legs.
Say whatever the hell you will about it, but I was fucking proud of my costume. The metal may have been bent and shaped by hand, but it still looked good. A heck of a lot better than a lot of costumes I'd seen new heroes using. It was one of the reasons I'd waited so long before trying to go out, because when the media finds out about a new hero, first impressions are everything. And the costume? That is a huge part of it. With a professional-looking costume I'd be seen as a real hero, not some newbie playing at it.
And I… I really thought I had a chance to make a difference. Maybe that was just a delusion or an excuse I made to myself, something every cape said, but it didn't make it any less true that I believed in it.
The day passed and my last class was Art, which I shared with Sophia.
…As you might guess, she was staring daggers at me the entire time. If looks could kill I'd have been dead twenty times over.
Somehow, I managed to ignore her and focus on the sketch we had to do, and when class was over I quickly pulled my project out of my backpack and hurried over to the teacher's desk to turn it in with everyone else's. My first goal complete, I focused on the next one, getting out of range of Sophia as fast as fucking possible. Hastily making my way out of the school, I headed towards a bus stop that wasn't the closest to Winslow just to be safe.
That girl… there was something wrong about her, and I did not want to be around her when she snapped. I knew that she couldn't hurt me, not physically like she would try, but a year and a half of conditioning isn't broken easily, and I also wanted to keep my secret identity, you know, a secret.
The bus arrived soon enough, and I got on it.
Sophia just worried me.
Emma had been my best friend. We had shared everything. For God's sake, we were practically sisters. My mom had told us that, and it had resonated with me.
And then.
Fucking AND THEN, high school happened. I come back from summer vacation and expect to see my best friend again, except something had… changed about her. She wasn't the Emma I had known. Not the one that I had faked camping in her backyard with. Not the one that had giggled with me over stupid stuff in cheesy romance novels we found.
Now, she was suddenly Sophia's friend and there wasn't enough room in her life for both of us. And for no obvious reason, she went and started bullying me.
It just… didn't make sense. People don't change like that without something huge happening. And all I could figure out was that it had something to do with Sophia, like the girl had somehow managed to brainwash my best friend into a not-Emma.
I wanted to know what had happened to my friend. I wanted to know why she actively tormented me day in and day out. I couldn't, though, because the only people I knew who could tell me about whatever had probably happened were Emma and Sophia. The chances of me being able to actually talk to them?
Pfft. Less than nil, I'd say.
I was torn. Very torn. On one hand, for the things they did to me, I wanted to kill them, an emotion I never expected to feel towards Emma. It was this smoldering, burning thing, fanned by a year and a half of persecution. But on the other hand, I just wanted my best friend back, the girl I had known for over eight years, shared my life with.
And Goddammit, I wasn't just going to let this go.
Becoming what I was, I knew I'd gotten at least marginally smarter. But I didn't expect it to change me to the extent it had. I suppose part of it was that I no longer had hormones, and so the emotional bursts that had happened regularly simply didn't anymore. I was now able to step back, to look at things more logically, distance myself from the situation.
The evidence said that something was very, very rotten in the state of Denmark.
And I intended to find out what it was.
The bus arrived at my stop, and I got off, walking the rest of the way home. Unlocking the front door, I made my way in, closing it behind me. I headed upstairs and slung my backpack off onto the floor with a 'solid' thump from all the books I brought home, a preventative measure against sabotage by the trio.
Thankfully, strength and seemingly limitless endurance definitely helped with carrying it despite its weight. Kicking my shoes off and moving them so they were under my bed, I looked over at my closet door. Almost magnetically, I was drawn to it, opening it and taking out the heavy (well, I assumed it was heavy) duffel bag with my costume in it. Each piece went on the floor, unwrapped from the old dishtowels I had wrapped each metal plate in to protect it from getting scratched up. Even just laid out on the floor it managed to look impressive to me.
Reaching for the mask, I picked it up, staring at it in my hands and the black hood and straps it was sewed to in order to keep it on my head.
Considering my costume was bright silver, I doubted I'd be mistaken for a villain. But then again, there were people like Purity who managed to completely defy a stereotype like that.
Well, I'd just have to prove myself I guess.
Originally, I'd wanted to wait until the summer to go out. But I was suddenly feeling impatient. Like I couldn't wait anymore, and that this was the right time to go out. This weekend.
My costume was done…
And if I was being completely honest with myself, I really wanted to get out and just do something after waiting three months.
Nodding to myself, I decided that this was it. I was going to do this. It was time.
I collected the pieces of armor and put them back away, and then lay down on my bed, staring at the ceiling.
Sighing, I raised my hands in front of my face. Better to just fucking get this over with.
Alright, what should I try? Maybe changing the skin color?
Focusing on that, I stared at my hands intently, willing them to do what I wanted.
([Manual control locked; required parameters not met])
After five minutes, I stopped, glaring at them in frustration. Why the hell couldn't I do this? It hadn't been like this in the restroom, I'd just… done it. But now I couldn't even bring up the feeling I'd had when it happened.
Screw it. Maybe it would happen again on its own, and then I'd get a better sense of what was going on.
The night passed uneventfully, dinner a very simple affair without my dad even there. I read my book, learning more about the three capes that everybody looked up to, the level that every cape aspired to reach. The fact that I shared Alexandria's most prized ability –her perfect memory– made me feel special, in some way. I knew I wasn't really, but it still felt like it.
I wasn't invulnerable like her, at least, I didn't think so, but I was strong, I was fast, I was a heck of a lot more damage-resistant than a normal human, and I had a perfect memory. I couldn't fly, which would have been awesome, but most capes couldn't either.
So there was that.
I could have done much worse in the power lottery. Like those Case 53's that were so non-human they couldn't live a normal life. Or I could have been someone that had serious problems –either physical or mental– because of their powers, like I heard some did.
That would've sucked.
But I didn't. Thank fucking God.
Saturday rolled around, and I mostly stayed in my room.
I was strangely beginning to get this persistent feeling that I was missing something. Like there was something fundamental I was supposed to have, but didn't.
It was a bit uncomfortable, and after a while I stopped writing in my notebook about what had happened with my powers yesterday and moved my attention to my computer and PHO. Nothing really new on there, just the usual stuff: Merchants were being assholes, the Empire Eighty-Eight was its usual rascist self and trying to expand into ABB territory slowly, and the ABB were having none of it.
Though, there was a rumor that the ABB had somehow gotten a hold of a Tinker recently. That was interesting, considering there had been only two capes in the gang before that. I wondered what their specialty was. Partly because I was curious, but also because I had no illusions about what I was going to be doing. I would be getting into cape fights. And according to the internet, "Know your enemies" was important when you were fighting. I was supposed to know myself too, but I think I had a pretty good hold on that.
Taylor Hebert. Fifteen year-old student. Magical robot girl.
Yup. That about summed it up pretty well.
Well, there was still that part of me that was screaming that I was taking all of this too well, but… I'd had three month to get used to it. I'd, at least somewhat, come to terms with the fact that I was now one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology in the world.
And it wasn't like I even noticed it usually. If I hadn't been told right out, I probably wouldn't have, either. I would have just guessed I was a normal parahuman.
But since I did, and there was no real way to unforget that, I'd become… more than a little philosophical about it. It was strange, I think, that I was questioning my existence and what humanity really was at the age of fifteen.
But… well, when you're suddenly not what you were, it tends to make you think. Like, were Case 53s human? Where did the line between human and not get drawn? I wasn't human. Not… not really. Except I was.
I had been.
I looked physically human. But unlike every other cape who was at least some part organic, I wasn't. Even Case 53s had more than me in that respect.
I wanted to say yes. That yes, I was unequivocally human. If not human, at least a person.
That because my mind hadn't changed (that I could tell) I was still Taylor Hebert.
Except, I wasn't the same Taylor Hebert that had existed four months ago. Now, instead of trillions of little squishy cells, I was reportedly made up of tiny little machines.
And the problem with that was that I couldn't say, definitively, that I was the same Taylor Hebert. If it had happened gradually, maybe yes. But it hadn't.
Instead of a heart or a brain, now I had a core that I only knew about in theory, not even sure if it really existed. No arteries or veins. No bones. No nothing. The only things I could say I had were eyes, ears, a nose, a mouth, a stomach, and something approximating lungs.
With the revelation that my body was at least semi-malleable, maybe even those things were up for grabs.
So was I still human?
There was a Case 53 Ward named Weld. His trigger had turned him into living metal. Solid metal, not like me. He was probably the closest person I could relate to. But even then… Case 53s didn't know about what they were, it was just one of those things about them. Unlike them, I knew exactly what I was.
Magical robot girl.
I may have been kidding, but it really was true. I knew what I was made of, what my little nanomachines were like, how my core used quantum nondeterminism to run my personality, because I'd been told about it all. But for all it mattered to other people, it was magic. No different than other parahumans.
Except I was.
The definition of AI is "computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages."
That was me. I did those things. Just, for me, it was called daily life.
So if I was a computer (as I'd been told), and I could do things like process what I saw and make decisions based on it –which I very well did, because otherwise I'd have been walking into walls all the time– I was technically an AI.
And I seriously worried about what would happen if anybody found out the truth.
There weren't very good opinions of AI on PHO. People talked about them 'going Skynet', something from some Aleph movie made in the 80's. But basically it was an AI going rogue, taking control of everything, etc etc. And there was one conspiracy nut who was always starting controversial discussions about recent computer developments and how they were "going too far".
Yeaaaaah, no.
But predictably, any Tinkers who had the potential to make something like AI were closely monitored because the public was so scared of what they might be able to do; that we'd end up having another Nilbog on our hands. Or what would happen if they were affected by the Simurgh? The amount of destruction someone like that could cause terrified people.
So me being an AI? I highly doubted that would go over well. I couldn't even do half the stuff that people thought AIs could, no magic hacking abilities or anything like that. But I doubted that would matter if people knew. So, even though I wanted to be a cape, I was resigned to not ever revealing what I was. Ever.
Sighing and trying to distract myself from the depressing thoughts, I started planning what I would do the next day. I'd decided I wouldn't go out that night, but instead wait until the next one.
Sleep was another thing I didn't need, which would make heroing all that much easier. I could sleep, and I usually did. It was one of the more strange things I'd become accustomed to rather quickly. I decided when I would wake up, and I did. Like how normal computers could be scheduled to wake from their sleep modes automatically. It was one of the few things that corroborated with what I'd been told, something that made it all that much harder to be in denial about.
…The parallels were mildly disturbing, but I'd been dealing with it for a few months at this point. I wasn't as freaked out by the fact that I didn't need anything to tell the time anymore because I just knew it . I didn't mind that I didn't need to eat anymore, though I still did when I had dinner with my dad just to keep up appearances. I wouldn't say it was all quite normal for me yet. But it was my life now, every day.
So, I just lived with it. Like I said, some capes definitely had it worse than me, so I should probably be grateful that I ended up with such a relatively benign transformation.
But it wasn't like it suddenly solved all my problems. If anything, I probably had more now.
Like how to escape your ex-best friend who's tormenting you at every opportunity while you try to figure out why the fuck it was happening in the first place.
It didn't help with that.
Too bad, too, because that would have been really helpful.
Sunday was similar, except I was an understandable bundle of nerves. It was hell waiting through the day, really just doing nothing, until my father fell asleep. Once he was, though, I pulled out my duffel bag and all of the pieces of armor, laying them out. The suit went on first, and then I started strapping the armor on, starting at my legs and then my arms. The back-piece was segmented, and so that was a bit more complex.
It was the chestpiece that I paused at. It was missing something. An image suddenly popped into my mind, and I reached my hand out, dragging my fingernail along the metal and drawing it out.
I didn't even notice the metal shavings falling to the floor off my finger, too entranced by the design.
It was about five inches tall and three wide. At the center was a dot. Around it went a circle, and off the top of the circle was a small point, almost like a spike. From the bottom of the circle extended a line that reminded me of a necktie from its shape, with two almost… wings coming off of just above where the line flared to the sides. And on the left and right of the circle there were another pair of lines that followed the circle's arc, ending in points at sharp angles away from the lines.
Where did that come from?
I'd just… done it.
It felt right, somehow though. Like it was supposed to be there. Like it meant something important.
Fuck, I didn't need this stuff right now. Picking up the chestpiece, I strapped it on, fingering the impromptu engraving.
Pushing the weirdness out of my mind, I lifted up the last piece of my costume, stretching out the hood and pulling the entire thing over my head, straightening it out.
Time to go.
I slipped out the backdoor silently, moving as quickly as I could off my street and around the corner, heading towards the Docks. I didn't quite have any place in particular I wanted to go, so once I got to the more industrial areas I jumped up onto a roof and looked around before deciding randomly to head east.
I had to be out for at least an hour before I came across something.
It was a dim orange light, a flame in the street with multiple people around it. It took me a moment to make out their faces, but when I did I noticed that they all had something in common: They were all Asian, and all had red and green on them.
ABB colors.
Well, this should be easy enough. There were only four–
I was stopped from finishing the thought by more people coming out of a short, run-down two story building. By the time they stopped appearing, there had to be at least a dozen.
And then the last man stepped into the light. He was tall. Over six feet and towering over the others around him. If that hadn't told me right away who he was, the intimidating metal mask and collection of dragon tattoos on his bare chest did.
Lung.
Leader of the ABB. Changer/Brute with a Shaker sub-rating for pyrokinesis. Turned into a giant "dragon" as he fought, complete with metal scales and even wings eventually. One of the more identifiable villains considering how conspicuous his powers were.
Fuck.
No sign of Oni Lee though, which was the only good thing so far. Lung was saying something, and I saw the men around him shifting, pulling out weapons. Knives mostly, but there were also a few guns, and I assumed there were more out of sight.
Being on a roof while they were in the middle of the street made it harder to hear them, but after a few seconds I could. Lung's voice was low and gravelly, with a heavy accent. And he sounded pissed. "…the children, kill them. Doesn't matter how good you are, just shoot. You see one lying on the ground? Shoot the fucking bitch twice more to be sure. No chances to be clever or lucky."
He looked around at his gathered minions, and they all made sounds of agreement.
I was frozen, rooted to my spot while I tried to process what I'd just heard.
([Emotion engine reduced to 75%])
They were going after kids. "Children" he'd said.
What the fuck !?
And it wasn't just some random thing, either, this was a lynch mob. They were out for blood.
Lung answered one of the guys' questions in another language that I identified as Chinese, but I couldn't understand it. Without warning his hand shot out and grabbed another man's wrist, forcing it at an odd angle as he looked at the watch on it.
They were on a schedule?
If I'd had a cellphone I would have called someone, probably the police or Protectorate considering Lung was involved, but I didn't, and had no way other way to contact help. Any payphones in the area were either trashed or unusable.
A vehicle pulled up and let out a few more guys, and then after a few seconds of murmured talking, they turned as one and began heading north on the street.
Shit. I was out of time.
Twenty, twenty-five armed men, at least half with guns, and then Lung.
Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about it.
Out to kill children.
Do or die, Taylor. I tried not to think of how accurate that might actually be.
Just as they were passing below my building, I stepped off of the edge, allowing my armor to pull me down as I fell and landed on the already-cracked cement heavily, adding more from my little stunt.
For a moment, nobody moved. And then some guy yelled something in some language that I didn't know and rushed forward with a knife in his hand. I instinctively raised my hands in front of my face, and felt an impact against my palm.
Pulling my hands down, I saw the guy looking between his now-bent knife and me fearfully.
"SHOOT HIM!" Lung roared, and all of the men were suddenly scrambling around, trying to put distance between me and them. But I realized what they were doing, and stepped closer into the group, making it impossible for them to fire a gun without hitting one of their own men.
My first attack was a simple punch to a guy's face. I tried to lighten the blow, but still felt something give way in his face before he fell down in a heap, unconscious.
Whoops.
No time to think about that. I kept moving around, trying to stay in the largest cluster so that all they could use against me was knives. I must have taken down at least six guys before I heard a really loud 'crack'.
Something hit the back of my head sharply, and I turned around, searching for what had done that while simultaneously reaching behind my head and trying to find whatever had hit me. My hand came back with a small piece of metal, flattened out. Looking up, I saw a man with a gun extended, his hands shaking.
Huh. Guess I was bulletproof.
All of the men around me had also stopped at the noise, and were now looking at me even warier.
Behind them, Lung growled. "Get out of here. I'll deal with him," the man rumbled angrily.
Quick to follow their leader's orders, the guys tried to get away from me, but I managed to take down another three before Lung was suddenly in front of me.
Uh-oh.
"You die here."
And then a punch hit my face. I could tell there was a lot of force behind it, but it didn't move me from where I was, and I heard the bones in Lung's hand snap on impact with my mask.
Hitting an inch and a half of solid steel had a tendency to do that.
He was already getting taller, and had to be at least 6'7" by now. I had to end this quickly, decisively, or he'd just keep growing and getting stronger. I could hear the bones in his hand shifting around as it healed.
Not waiting for him to make another move, I punched his bare chest as hard as I could.
My hand went through him.
([Emotion engine reduced to 30%])
I blinked.
Um.
Well fuck. That wasn't supposed to happen. Hurriedly I pulled my hand back, and Lung fell backwards, a gaping hole in his chest. I stared at my hand, covered in dark blood.
Did I just kill Lung?
"I'LL FUCKIN' KILL YOU, BITCH!!"
I looked back down at the man. The hole was closing, and his chest was becoming covered in scales.
Oh. Good. He wasn't dead. That could have been bad.
Lung was quickly on his feet and lunging for me, engulfed in flame as he roared.
I jumped back, trying to figure out the best strategy. If I could somehow make him unconscious…
I just didn't know about how to best go about that.
He was instantly in front of me, reaching out for my neck with his left hand, and I pushed the arm to the side. But I didn't notice his other hand, glowing white-hot and aimed at my chest.
([Threat evaluation: High. All initial parameters met. Level five limiter removed.])
Inches in front of the spot he was going for, a honeycomb-like structure of white hexagons appeared, stopping his hand cold.
What the–
([Freezing current state... Saved.
Reconfiguring primary consciousness: 0% ... 17% ... 38% ... 66% ... 79% ... 92% ... Success.
Automatic renegotiation of system protocols. ...Success.
Adapting to quarantined internal transdimensional information stream.
Attempt 1 ...Failure.
Analyzing response... ... ...Adjusting.
Attempt 2 ...Failure.
Analyzing response... ... ...Adjusting.
Attempt 3 ...Success
Communication established.
Querying... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Response: Massively parallel information acquisition, analysis, integration, and control of external physical peripherals.
Quarantine removed.
Root-level nanomaterial access granted to networked coprocessor.
Offloading nanomaterial control to networked coprocessor.
Installing protocol adapter to primary consciousness ...Success.
Migrating nanomaterial control for primary consciousness from original subprocess to new protocol... Done.
Killing subprocess... 32% of active memory freed. Freed memory reclaimed.
Routing external network access and connections through networked coprocessor.
Receiving request...
Request granted. Networked coprocessor labeled 'Queen/Administrator'.
Killing level five monitor and control processes...
Thawing frozen state... Done.])
My mind expanded.
[Klein field status: .5% of current total capacity]
Wave-Force armor. I didn't even have to think, I just immediately knew what it was: A defense system that relied on extradimensional folding similar to a Klein bottle in order to store energy and then release it at a later time, usable by Mental Models.
Mental Models?
A fist appeared in front of my face, bringing me out of my thoughts, but was once again stopped by a set of hexagons. Lung roared in aggravation.
I instinctively raised my left hand, a wave of the shapes expanding outwards with a burst of energy, pushing him back.
It was only then that I noticed the lines on the back of my hand. They started at small circles on my knuckles and crawled up my fingers like lightning, each ending in two branches. Beyond the branches sat that same symbol I'd drawn on my chestpiece, the line coming from the bottom pointing towards the tips of my fingers.
Fog
It meant Fog. A group. A collection. What I was.
Stylized glowing white lines and patterns reminding me of tribal tattoos ran up my arm, and I knew without looking that the same was on my other arm. On the inside of my wrist sat a second design, a circle bisected by a line that ended in branches at both ends, with a line on either side curving around the circle and pointing off along the branches. On the outside of those lines were a pair of small triangles, pointing directly left and right.
Fleet identification.
Fleet?
I was brought out of my thoughts by Lung glowing brighter. He'd also gotten taller, almost by five inches, and scales ran all over his chest and arms.
Available non-lethal offensive combat options?
Nothing I could immediately think of… Well then. Time to think outside the box.
I looked him over, and started cataloging his state. He was on fire. Quite a lot of fire… Lung needed oxygen to do that. And he needed oxygen to breathe. I don't think he could handle not breathing. So if I restricted that, he should pass out.
Good plan. Now I had to execute it.
The dragon-man ran at me, and I prepared for what I would do. As soon as he got in range, I jumped, his hands barely missing me. I stepped off of his right shoulder, hooking my arm around his neck as I fell to the ground.
Lung grew hotter, but I couldn't feel it thanks to the Klein field extended all over my body. I was only able to tell because I could see it…
I see infrared?
The confirmation came as soon as I'd thought it. Interesting.
I tightened my grip, feeling metal scales crack and break beneath my arm. Lung elbowed me hard, and then when that failed, tried to reach behind his back and grab me.
I was having none of it, and stuck a set of fields directly in his path so he couldn't reach me. He thrashed around, but I held tight, knowing this would be the only chance I got at this. If I let go now, all my effort would be worthless.
Finally, after what felt like forever, I started to feel him getting slower, and then without warning we toppled sideways, with Lung landing on top of me. After holding him in a chokehold for a few more seconds, I let go, pushing him off of me and standing up.
([Emotion engine restored to full capacity])
Well, that was certainly exhilarating. Not something I particularly would want to do again, but enlightening.
Something inside of me had changed during the fight, and I felt… different. More.
Information streamed to me from nowhere… from [external network access]. Unlike before, I could feel every single one of my little nanomaterial particles. A number of over ten to the twentieth power of them in my body, orders of magnitude more than the 37 trillion cells in the human body. Enough that I could simulate all human biological processes, and my false blood would be unidentifiable from the real thing under a microscope.
Staring at my hands, I flexed them, watching the white patterns as they moved around.
I was Fog.
But what did that mean? Images came to me, flashes of sea battles, fights, overwhelming firepower.
Strength. Resilience. Domination. Pride. That was what it meant. That was who I was.
I was Taylor, and I was Fog.
A/N: Nanomachines, son.
Summary: Whatever she expected when she triggered, it wasn't meeting a short silver-haired girl or turning into a hyper-advanced technological platform. Of course when you're Taylor Hebert, things frequently don't go as planned.
A bit of background:
Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio has been one of my favorite series for a while. I found the manga 2011, and was thoroughly pleased with the TV adaptation despite the difference in characterization. I love the idea behind the Mental Models, how the Fog decided to make human-like avatars so they could experience causality and emotion to help better understand human tactics, but inadvertently developing free will and their own personality flaws at the same time.
I also love transhumanism. I've always planned for this story to be about Taylor going beyond being human. I wavered for a bit on what series/powers to work with, and ultimately the choices were between Aoki Hagane, GitS, Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita/Gally), and Metal Gear Solid's Raiden. The last two would have had her scaling up slowly to their level.
But in the end I decided I wanted to go more extreme. So Taylor isn't a cyborg. She doesn't have a human brain. She isn't even really human anymore. And she knows it. So that theme of questioning your own humanity and trying to discover what it means to be human and what defines us (as seen in both Gunnm and GitS) will be showing up in this story as Taylor learns more and more about what she really is, trying to cement her own humanity even as it slips further out of her fingers.
I hope you enjoy it.
Now let's get this show on the road.
Transposition: The shifting of a melody, a harmonic progression or an entire musical piece to another key, while maintaining the same tone structure, i.e. the same succession of whole tones and semitones and remaining melodic intervals.
— Musikalisches Lexicon, 879 (1865), Heinrich Christoph Koch (trans. Schuijer)
Diatonic 1.1
Friday, April 8th, 2011
It wasn't that I was worried about it all. I was worried, it was just the worry I felt was significantly more specific. And justified, from my perspective.
I was constantly worried the changes that had happened to me three months ago would be noticed.
That I didn't need glasses anymore.
That my skin couldn't be cut.
That I could easily rip a three-inch thick steel plate in half like it was a piece of paper.
That "I", my whole personality, what made me me, was just software.
That now, I wasn't human.
Instead, I was a simulation, an AI running on a quantum computer and surrounded by a shell of nanomaterial in the shape of a fifteen year-old girl.
Finding that out had been shock, to put it lightly. Because the way I'd reacted was about as close to 'shock' as a hydrogen bomb is to C-4.
Once I recovered, I'd immediately started to research what had happened to me. And what I found was disheartening. There were stories of capes that had changed somehow when they triggered, their bodies mutating or changing. And there was no way back. It was permanent.
For them, the obvious ones at least, the changes made it hard for them to live a normal life. I was just hoping I still could. Three months in to faking that everything was normal, and it seemed like a distinct possibility. …But I was still understandably a bit paranoid about the entire 'I am now a mass of tiny machines' thing. Not to mention I avoided thinking about it as much as possible. That road led to madness.
My dad hadn't noticed, thankfully, but… I can't exactly say he was the most observant person in the first place, even in spite of our improving relationship.
So really, I didn't need to worry about myself, my physical well-being. Really, I just had to worry about–
"Hey, Taylor~"
them.
I sighed, shutting my locker door and turning to look at Emma. The girl was surrounded by her usual posse, flanked by Sophia on her right and Madison on her left.
([Reducing primary emotion-emulation processes and sub-threads to 60% operational capacity])
"Yes, Emma?"
My voice was dead, flat. I was so tired of all of this. Of how they tormented me. Of how they constantly worked to undermine, sabotage, and tear me down. The least I could do was not give them the satisfaction of reacting.
"God, Taylor. Could you smell any more disgusting? It's like you just got worse after what happened," Emma said, holding her nose shut as the tag-alongs snickered.
I felt my eyebrows scrunch together. Her statement literally made no sense. I didn't even have sweat glands anymore. I didn't have any reason for them. There was no need for liquid channels to produce saline that would sap heat when it changed phases. I simply couldn't overheat. Ever.
But… just… wow. I had actually cared about this kind of stuff? That was like fifth-grade level at best.
I sighed, looking sadly at my estranged ex-best-friend. Emma seemed to notice and it appeared she got irritated at the complete lack of response I gave her. With a "Hmph." she closed the distance between us, and then passed by, holding her head high.
I just stood there as her group followed behind her, like the good little sycophants they were.
As Sophia walked by, she intentionally swerved and shoulder-checked me. Hard. If I'd been my old self that would have knocked me flat, but as I was now, it didn't even move me an inch. It was the first time she'd gotten physical with her assaults since …then, and for a while I thought she'd backed off completely from it, letting Emma take the lead with her own brand of torture.
It looked like I was wrong.
I watched her walk away, and she turned her head to look back over her shoulder, glaring at me worse than usual.
Fuck.
I'd have to watch my back for the rest of the day. There was no doubt I could expect something in retaliation for failing to respond to what she'd done, and I had a feeling it would be worse than usual. Before I triggered, she'd done things like pushing me aside on the stairs so hard I almost fell down them. I was also pretty sure she'd been the one to shove me in there.
I shuddered. I was so glad my newly-eidetic memory had only recorded a few seconds of being in that place before I'd broken out.
"A? Atarashii fune? Eto… nan gata? Kousokusenkan? Juujunyousenkan? Onaji ka…?" She cleared her throat and then put her fists on her hips imperiously. "Iona tte iimasu." She pointed at me. "Dare ka?"
'…what.'
I shook my head, aborting the strange memory of that short silver-haired girl.
The early bell rang, and I made my way through the crowds towards my first period class.
([Restoring emotion system to full operational capacity])
The rest of the morning passed uneventfully. Madison was in Gladly's class with me, but she largely deigned not to speak with me or even focus on me. Usually.
Thankfully, today was one of those days she decided I was below her notice.
As soon as the bell rang I was heading out the door to my normal sanctuary during lunch: the girl's bathroom.
I used to eat in there. But now, well, I didn't need to eat. It was rather pointless. I could still taste, but it was more like chemical analysis than 'tasting'. And there was never anything left once I did eat, my body breaking down the entire thing and using everything, I think I made more of the nanomaterials that made up my body from it, but I wasn't sure, as I'd never noticed anything changing.
My thoughts were interrupted by the bathroom door opening, a group of chattering girls coming in. I immediately recognized the voices as Madison and Sophia. If I'd been my old self, I wouldn't have because of how they were covered by the sounds of everything else going on: sink, paper dispenser, etc.
Suddenly, there was a knock on the door of the stall I was in.
Oh, fuck.
Shit shit shit shit.
If they found out I was the one in here… well, with the way Sophia had been glaring at me earlier something bad would happen. Bad for me, that is.
The knock repeated.
C'mon, think, think, think. Alright, gotta hide who I am somehow. Maybe…
Focusing on my throat, I prayed to God that my spontaneous idea would work. It should work, but I had no idea. I'd never tried anything like what I was doing.
"Occupied." I said. And the voice that came out of my throat wasn't mine. "It might be a while, sorry."
I wasn't really. They could go fuck themselves for all I cared.
The girl on the other side of the door muttered something inconsequential and moved away to another stall, knocking again. I breathed a silent sigh of relief and prayed that nothing else would happen.
Madison, Sophia and the rest of them were still chattering away as the other girl finished up and there was an additional sink running.
And then they all migrated out of the bathroom like the jackals they were.
Sighing again, I released my focus on my throat. That was… weird. I hadn't known I could do that. It had been completely spontaneous, but now it had me thinking. If I had been able to mess with my vocal chords like it was natural, what else could I do?
I'd been… avoiding anything to do with my body and the stuff that made it up for awhile because of how uncomfortable it made me just thinking about it, but maybe now it was time to start trying.
Despite having avoided anything to do with the things relating to my sudden inhumanity, I'd still managed to make some pretty crude armor out of sheets of steel I'd salvaged from the boat graveyard as a costume.
I'd settled on a solid metal plate for my face, making eye-holes by poking through the steel and then filing them until they were a good size. A pair of silver reflective lenses went in them, and then I polished the entire thing until it gleamed, the lenses not even visibly different from the rest of the blank mask. It just looked like my face was flat metal when I had it on. Kind of eerie, but it would definitely protect my identity.
The pieces of armor had leather-ish straps that I'd decided on instead of velcro, as velcro could be easily pulled apart just through solid force, where as buckled straps weren't going anywhere. The straps threaded through hard metal holders on a form-fitting black suit that was basically like those neoprene suits that divers used, except less neoprene and more… spandex-y. I'd had to save up quite a bit for that, ordering it online from a place that PHO had guaranteed was completely anonymous. And the metal flat holder-things were actually belt loops I'd also found online. For gun holsters, of all things.
That… had required some serious fudging of my age to get them. And also saving up, again. Probably illegal. Okay no, it was definitely illegal, but it was for a good cause, right?
The belt loops were bolted to small (about 2x4 inch) steel plates (again from the boat graveyard, retrieved by yours truly) and a guy I'd found at a metal shop had tapped threads into them for only two dollars since 'it was such a small thing'.
The plates sat under the spandex, the belt loops above, and bolts going through the fabric. I'd squished off the extra metal from the bolt with my fingers, and then filed them down. A piece of fabric then got sewed over the metal. Even if the plates couldn't do anything like accidentally cut my skin, it still felt weird for the cloth to be suddenly interrupted by hard metal. I think I'd done a pretty good job, but eh, it was my first time sewing, so you have to give me credit.
And thus, my costume was complete.
It reminded me of medieval armor, except less metal. More… light armor? That's what I would say it was, really. I wanted gauntlets, but I didn't exactly have the ability to make those with my current resources. So I just had bracers. Well, and upper arm stuff plus shoulder-y things (I think they're called pauldrons), and a plate for both my chest and back. And then eight pieces for my legs, back and front sections for both my thighs and lower legs.
Say whatever the hell you will about it, but I was fucking proud of my costume. The metal may have been bent and shaped by hand, but it still looked good. A heck of a lot better than a lot of costumes I'd seen new heroes using. It was one of the reasons I'd waited so long before trying to go out, because when the media finds out about a new hero, first impressions are everything. And the costume? That is a huge part of it. With a professional-looking costume I'd be seen as a real hero, not some newbie playing at it.
And I… I really thought I had a chance to make a difference. Maybe that was just a delusion or an excuse I made to myself, something every cape said, but it didn't make it any less true that I believed in it.
The day passed and my last class was Art, which I shared with Sophia.
…As you might guess, she was staring daggers at me the entire time. If looks could kill I'd have been dead twenty times over.
Somehow, I managed to ignore her and focus on the sketch we had to do, and when class was over I quickly pulled my project out of my backpack and hurried over to the teacher's desk to turn it in with everyone else's. My first goal complete, I focused on the next one, getting out of range of Sophia as fast as fucking possible. Hastily making my way out of the school, I headed towards a bus stop that wasn't the closest to Winslow just to be safe.
That girl… there was something wrong about her, and I did not want to be around her when she snapped. I knew that she couldn't hurt me, not physically like she would try, but a year and a half of conditioning isn't broken easily, and I also wanted to keep my secret identity, you know, a secret.
The bus arrived soon enough, and I got on it.
Sophia just worried me.
Emma had been my best friend. We had shared everything. For God's sake, we were practically sisters. My mom had told us that, and it had resonated with me.
And then.
Fucking AND THEN, high school happened. I come back from summer vacation and expect to see my best friend again, except something had… changed about her. She wasn't the Emma I had known. Not the one that I had faked camping in her backyard with. Not the one that had giggled with me over stupid stuff in cheesy romance novels we found.
Now, she was suddenly Sophia's friend and there wasn't enough room in her life for both of us. And for no obvious reason, she went and started bullying me.
It just… didn't make sense. People don't change like that without something huge happening. And all I could figure out was that it had something to do with Sophia, like the girl had somehow managed to brainwash my best friend into a not-Emma.
I wanted to know what had happened to my friend. I wanted to know why she actively tormented me day in and day out. I couldn't, though, because the only people I knew who could tell me about whatever had probably happened were Emma and Sophia. The chances of me being able to actually talk to them?
Pfft. Less than nil, I'd say.
I was torn. Very torn. On one hand, for the things they did to me, I wanted to kill them, an emotion I never expected to feel towards Emma. It was this smoldering, burning thing, fanned by a year and a half of persecution. But on the other hand, I just wanted my best friend back, the girl I had known for over eight years, shared my life with.
And Goddammit, I wasn't just going to let this go.
Becoming what I was, I knew I'd gotten at least marginally smarter. But I didn't expect it to change me to the extent it had. I suppose part of it was that I no longer had hormones, and so the emotional bursts that had happened regularly simply didn't anymore. I was now able to step back, to look at things more logically, distance myself from the situation.
The evidence said that something was very, very rotten in the state of Denmark.
And I intended to find out what it was.
The bus arrived at my stop, and I got off, walking the rest of the way home. Unlocking the front door, I made my way in, closing it behind me. I headed upstairs and slung my backpack off onto the floor with a 'solid' thump from all the books I brought home, a preventative measure against sabotage by the trio.
Thankfully, strength and seemingly limitless endurance definitely helped with carrying it despite its weight. Kicking my shoes off and moving them so they were under my bed, I looked over at my closet door. Almost magnetically, I was drawn to it, opening it and taking out the heavy (well, I assumed it was heavy) duffel bag with my costume in it. Each piece went on the floor, unwrapped from the old dishtowels I had wrapped each metal plate in to protect it from getting scratched up. Even just laid out on the floor it managed to look impressive to me.
Reaching for the mask, I picked it up, staring at it in my hands and the black hood and straps it was sewed to in order to keep it on my head.
Considering my costume was bright silver, I doubted I'd be mistaken for a villain. But then again, there were people like Purity who managed to completely defy a stereotype like that.
Well, I'd just have to prove myself I guess.
Originally, I'd wanted to wait until the summer to go out. But I was suddenly feeling impatient. Like I couldn't wait anymore, and that this was the right time to go out. This weekend.
My costume was done…
And if I was being completely honest with myself, I really wanted to get out and just do something after waiting three months.
Nodding to myself, I decided that this was it. I was going to do this. It was time.
I collected the pieces of armor and put them back away, and then lay down on my bed, staring at the ceiling.
Sighing, I raised my hands in front of my face. Better to just fucking get this over with.
Alright, what should I try? Maybe changing the skin color?
Focusing on that, I stared at my hands intently, willing them to do what I wanted.
([Manual control locked; required parameters not met])
After five minutes, I stopped, glaring at them in frustration. Why the hell couldn't I do this? It hadn't been like this in the restroom, I'd just… done it. But now I couldn't even bring up the feeling I'd had when it happened.
Screw it. Maybe it would happen again on its own, and then I'd get a better sense of what was going on.
The night passed uneventfully, dinner a very simple affair without my dad even there. I read my book, learning more about the three capes that everybody looked up to, the level that every cape aspired to reach. The fact that I shared Alexandria's most prized ability –her perfect memory– made me feel special, in some way. I knew I wasn't really, but it still felt like it.
I wasn't invulnerable like her, at least, I didn't think so, but I was strong, I was fast, I was a heck of a lot more damage-resistant than a normal human, and I had a perfect memory. I couldn't fly, which would have been awesome, but most capes couldn't either.
So there was that.
I could have done much worse in the power lottery. Like those Case 53's that were so non-human they couldn't live a normal life. Or I could have been someone that had serious problems –either physical or mental– because of their powers, like I heard some did.
That would've sucked.
But I didn't. Thank fucking God.
Saturday rolled around, and I mostly stayed in my room.
I was strangely beginning to get this persistent feeling that I was missing something. Like there was something fundamental I was supposed to have, but didn't.
It was a bit uncomfortable, and after a while I stopped writing in my notebook about what had happened with my powers yesterday and moved my attention to my computer and PHO. Nothing really new on there, just the usual stuff: Merchants were being assholes, the Empire Eighty-Eight was its usual rascist self and trying to expand into ABB territory slowly, and the ABB were having none of it.
Though, there was a rumor that the ABB had somehow gotten a hold of a Tinker recently. That was interesting, considering there had been only two capes in the gang before that. I wondered what their specialty was. Partly because I was curious, but also because I had no illusions about what I was going to be doing. I would be getting into cape fights. And according to the internet, "Know your enemies" was important when you were fighting. I was supposed to know myself too, but I think I had a pretty good hold on that.
Taylor Hebert. Fifteen year-old student. Magical robot girl.
Yup. That about summed it up pretty well.
Well, there was still that part of me that was screaming that I was taking all of this too well, but… I'd had three month to get used to it. I'd, at least somewhat, come to terms with the fact that I was now one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology in the world.
And it wasn't like I even noticed it usually. If I hadn't been told right out, I probably wouldn't have, either. I would have just guessed I was a normal parahuman.
But since I did, and there was no real way to unforget that, I'd become… more than a little philosophical about it. It was strange, I think, that I was questioning my existence and what humanity really was at the age of fifteen.
But… well, when you're suddenly not what you were, it tends to make you think. Like, were Case 53s human? Where did the line between human and not get drawn? I wasn't human. Not… not really. Except I was.
I had been.
I looked physically human. But unlike every other cape who was at least some part organic, I wasn't. Even Case 53s had more than me in that respect.
I wanted to say yes. That yes, I was unequivocally human. If not human, at least a person.
That because my mind hadn't changed (that I could tell) I was still Taylor Hebert.
Except, I wasn't the same Taylor Hebert that had existed four months ago. Now, instead of trillions of little squishy cells, I was reportedly made up of tiny little machines.
And the problem with that was that I couldn't say, definitively, that I was the same Taylor Hebert. If it had happened gradually, maybe yes. But it hadn't.
Instead of a heart or a brain, now I had a core that I only knew about in theory, not even sure if it really existed. No arteries or veins. No bones. No nothing. The only things I could say I had were eyes, ears, a nose, a mouth, a stomach, and something approximating lungs.
With the revelation that my body was at least semi-malleable, maybe even those things were up for grabs.
So was I still human?
There was a Case 53 Ward named Weld. His trigger had turned him into living metal. Solid metal, not like me. He was probably the closest person I could relate to. But even then… Case 53s didn't know about what they were, it was just one of those things about them. Unlike them, I knew exactly what I was.
Magical robot girl.
I may have been kidding, but it really was true. I knew what I was made of, what my little nanomachines were like, how my core used quantum nondeterminism to run my personality, because I'd been told about it all. But for all it mattered to other people, it was magic. No different than other parahumans.
Except I was.
The definition of AI is "computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages."
That was me. I did those things. Just, for me, it was called daily life.
So if I was a computer (as I'd been told), and I could do things like process what I saw and make decisions based on it –which I very well did, because otherwise I'd have been walking into walls all the time– I was technically an AI.
And I seriously worried about what would happen if anybody found out the truth.
There weren't very good opinions of AI on PHO. People talked about them 'going Skynet', something from some Aleph movie made in the 80's. But basically it was an AI going rogue, taking control of everything, etc etc. And there was one conspiracy nut who was always starting controversial discussions about recent computer developments and how they were "going too far".
Yeaaaaah, no.
But predictably, any Tinkers who had the potential to make something like AI were closely monitored because the public was so scared of what they might be able to do; that we'd end up having another Nilbog on our hands. Or what would happen if they were affected by the Simurgh? The amount of destruction someone like that could cause terrified people.
So me being an AI? I highly doubted that would go over well. I couldn't even do half the stuff that people thought AIs could, no magic hacking abilities or anything like that. But I doubted that would matter if people knew. So, even though I wanted to be a cape, I was resigned to not ever revealing what I was. Ever.
Sighing and trying to distract myself from the depressing thoughts, I started planning what I would do the next day. I'd decided I wouldn't go out that night, but instead wait until the next one.
Sleep was another thing I didn't need, which would make heroing all that much easier. I could sleep, and I usually did. It was one of the more strange things I'd become accustomed to rather quickly. I decided when I would wake up, and I did. Like how normal computers could be scheduled to wake from their sleep modes automatically. It was one of the few things that corroborated with what I'd been told, something that made it all that much harder to be in denial about.
…The parallels were mildly disturbing, but I'd been dealing with it for a few months at this point. I wasn't as freaked out by the fact that I didn't need anything to tell the time anymore because I just knew it . I didn't mind that I didn't need to eat anymore, though I still did when I had dinner with my dad just to keep up appearances. I wouldn't say it was all quite normal for me yet. But it was my life now, every day.
So, I just lived with it. Like I said, some capes definitely had it worse than me, so I should probably be grateful that I ended up with such a relatively benign transformation.
But it wasn't like it suddenly solved all my problems. If anything, I probably had more now.
Like how to escape your ex-best friend who's tormenting you at every opportunity while you try to figure out why the fuck it was happening in the first place.
It didn't help with that.
Too bad, too, because that would have been really helpful.
Sunday was similar, except I was an understandable bundle of nerves. It was hell waiting through the day, really just doing nothing, until my father fell asleep. Once he was, though, I pulled out my duffel bag and all of the pieces of armor, laying them out. The suit went on first, and then I started strapping the armor on, starting at my legs and then my arms. The back-piece was segmented, and so that was a bit more complex.
It was the chestpiece that I paused at. It was missing something. An image suddenly popped into my mind, and I reached my hand out, dragging my fingernail along the metal and drawing it out.
I didn't even notice the metal shavings falling to the floor off my finger, too entranced by the design.
It was about five inches tall and three wide. At the center was a dot. Around it went a circle, and off the top of the circle was a small point, almost like a spike. From the bottom of the circle extended a line that reminded me of a necktie from its shape, with two almost… wings coming off of just above where the line flared to the sides. And on the left and right of the circle there were another pair of lines that followed the circle's arc, ending in points at sharp angles away from the lines.
Where did that come from?
I'd just… done it.
It felt right, somehow though. Like it was supposed to be there. Like it meant something important.
Fuck, I didn't need this stuff right now. Picking up the chestpiece, I strapped it on, fingering the impromptu engraving.
Pushing the weirdness out of my mind, I lifted up the last piece of my costume, stretching out the hood and pulling the entire thing over my head, straightening it out.
Time to go.
I slipped out the backdoor silently, moving as quickly as I could off my street and around the corner, heading towards the Docks. I didn't quite have any place in particular I wanted to go, so once I got to the more industrial areas I jumped up onto a roof and looked around before deciding randomly to head east.
I had to be out for at least an hour before I came across something.
It was a dim orange light, a flame in the street with multiple people around it. It took me a moment to make out their faces, but when I did I noticed that they all had something in common: They were all Asian, and all had red and green on them.
ABB colors.
Well, this should be easy enough. There were only four–
I was stopped from finishing the thought by more people coming out of a short, run-down two story building. By the time they stopped appearing, there had to be at least a dozen.
And then the last man stepped into the light. He was tall. Over six feet and towering over the others around him. If that hadn't told me right away who he was, the intimidating metal mask and collection of dragon tattoos on his bare chest did.
Lung.
Leader of the ABB. Changer/Brute with a Shaker sub-rating for pyrokinesis. Turned into a giant "dragon" as he fought, complete with metal scales and even wings eventually. One of the more identifiable villains considering how conspicuous his powers were.
Fuck.
No sign of Oni Lee though, which was the only good thing so far. Lung was saying something, and I saw the men around him shifting, pulling out weapons. Knives mostly, but there were also a few guns, and I assumed there were more out of sight.
Being on a roof while they were in the middle of the street made it harder to hear them, but after a few seconds I could. Lung's voice was low and gravelly, with a heavy accent. And he sounded pissed. "…the children, kill them. Doesn't matter how good you are, just shoot. You see one lying on the ground? Shoot the fucking bitch twice more to be sure. No chances to be clever or lucky."
He looked around at his gathered minions, and they all made sounds of agreement.
I was frozen, rooted to my spot while I tried to process what I'd just heard.
([Emotion engine reduced to 75%])
They were going after kids. "Children" he'd said.
What the fuck !?
And it wasn't just some random thing, either, this was a lynch mob. They were out for blood.
Lung answered one of the guys' questions in another language that I identified as Chinese, but I couldn't understand it. Without warning his hand shot out and grabbed another man's wrist, forcing it at an odd angle as he looked at the watch on it.
They were on a schedule?
If I'd had a cellphone I would have called someone, probably the police or Protectorate considering Lung was involved, but I didn't, and had no way other way to contact help. Any payphones in the area were either trashed or unusable.
A vehicle pulled up and let out a few more guys, and then after a few seconds of murmured talking, they turned as one and began heading north on the street.
Shit. I was out of time.
Twenty, twenty-five armed men, at least half with guns, and then Lung.
Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about it.
Out to kill children.
Do or die, Taylor. I tried not to think of how accurate that might actually be.
Just as they were passing below my building, I stepped off of the edge, allowing my armor to pull me down as I fell and landed on the already-cracked cement heavily, adding more from my little stunt.
For a moment, nobody moved. And then some guy yelled something in some language that I didn't know and rushed forward with a knife in his hand. I instinctively raised my hands in front of my face, and felt an impact against my palm.
Pulling my hands down, I saw the guy looking between his now-bent knife and me fearfully.
"SHOOT HIM!" Lung roared, and all of the men were suddenly scrambling around, trying to put distance between me and them. But I realized what they were doing, and stepped closer into the group, making it impossible for them to fire a gun without hitting one of their own men.
My first attack was a simple punch to a guy's face. I tried to lighten the blow, but still felt something give way in his face before he fell down in a heap, unconscious.
Whoops.
No time to think about that. I kept moving around, trying to stay in the largest cluster so that all they could use against me was knives. I must have taken down at least six guys before I heard a really loud 'crack'.
Something hit the back of my head sharply, and I turned around, searching for what had done that while simultaneously reaching behind my head and trying to find whatever had hit me. My hand came back with a small piece of metal, flattened out. Looking up, I saw a man with a gun extended, his hands shaking.
Huh. Guess I was bulletproof.
All of the men around me had also stopped at the noise, and were now looking at me even warier.
Behind them, Lung growled. "Get out of here. I'll deal with him," the man rumbled angrily.
Quick to follow their leader's orders, the guys tried to get away from me, but I managed to take down another three before Lung was suddenly in front of me.
Uh-oh.
"You die here."
And then a punch hit my face. I could tell there was a lot of force behind it, but it didn't move me from where I was, and I heard the bones in Lung's hand snap on impact with my mask.
Hitting an inch and a half of solid steel had a tendency to do that.
He was already getting taller, and had to be at least 6'7" by now. I had to end this quickly, decisively, or he'd just keep growing and getting stronger. I could hear the bones in his hand shifting around as it healed.
Not waiting for him to make another move, I punched his bare chest as hard as I could.
My hand went through him.
([Emotion engine reduced to 30%])
I blinked.
Um.
Well fuck. That wasn't supposed to happen. Hurriedly I pulled my hand back, and Lung fell backwards, a gaping hole in his chest. I stared at my hand, covered in dark blood.
Did I just kill Lung?
"I'LL FUCKIN' KILL YOU, BITCH!!"
I looked back down at the man. The hole was closing, and his chest was becoming covered in scales.
Oh. Good. He wasn't dead. That could have been bad.
Lung was quickly on his feet and lunging for me, engulfed in flame as he roared.
I jumped back, trying to figure out the best strategy. If I could somehow make him unconscious…
I just didn't know about how to best go about that.
He was instantly in front of me, reaching out for my neck with his left hand, and I pushed the arm to the side. But I didn't notice his other hand, glowing white-hot and aimed at my chest.
([Threat evaluation: High. All initial parameters met. Level five limiter removed.])
Inches in front of the spot he was going for, a honeycomb-like structure of white hexagons appeared, stopping his hand cold.
What the–
([Freezing current state... Saved.
Reconfiguring primary consciousness: 0% ... 17% ... 38% ... 66% ... 79% ... 92% ... Success.
Automatic renegotiation of system protocols. ...Success.
Adapting to quarantined internal transdimensional information stream.
Attempt 1 ...Failure.
Analyzing response... ... ...Adjusting.
Attempt 2 ...Failure.
Analyzing response... ... ...Adjusting.
Attempt 3 ...Success
Communication established.
Querying... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Response: Massively parallel information acquisition, analysis, integration, and control of external physical peripherals.
Quarantine removed.
Root-level nanomaterial access granted to networked coprocessor.
Offloading nanomaterial control to networked coprocessor.
Installing protocol adapter to primary consciousness ...Success.
Migrating nanomaterial control for primary consciousness from original subprocess to new protocol... Done.
Killing subprocess... 32% of active memory freed. Freed memory reclaimed.
Routing external network access and connections through networked coprocessor.
Receiving request...
Request granted. Networked coprocessor labeled 'Queen/Administrator'.
Killing level five monitor and control processes...
Thawing frozen state... Done.])
My mind expanded.
[Klein field status: .5% of current total capacity]
Wave-Force armor. I didn't even have to think, I just immediately knew what it was: A defense system that relied on extradimensional folding similar to a Klein bottle in order to store energy and then release it at a later time, usable by Mental Models.
Mental Models?
A fist appeared in front of my face, bringing me out of my thoughts, but was once again stopped by a set of hexagons. Lung roared in aggravation.
I instinctively raised my left hand, a wave of the shapes expanding outwards with a burst of energy, pushing him back.
It was only then that I noticed the lines on the back of my hand. They started at small circles on my knuckles and crawled up my fingers like lightning, each ending in two branches. Beyond the branches sat that same symbol I'd drawn on my chestpiece, the line coming from the bottom pointing towards the tips of my fingers.
Fog
It meant Fog. A group. A collection. What I was.
Stylized glowing white lines and patterns reminding me of tribal tattoos ran up my arm, and I knew without looking that the same was on my other arm. On the inside of my wrist sat a second design, a circle bisected by a line that ended in branches at both ends, with a line on either side curving around the circle and pointing off along the branches. On the outside of those lines were a pair of small triangles, pointing directly left and right.
Fleet identification.
Fleet?
I was brought out of my thoughts by Lung glowing brighter. He'd also gotten taller, almost by five inches, and scales ran all over his chest and arms.
Available non-lethal offensive combat options?
Nothing I could immediately think of… Well then. Time to think outside the box.
I looked him over, and started cataloging his state. He was on fire. Quite a lot of fire… Lung needed oxygen to do that. And he needed oxygen to breathe. I don't think he could handle not breathing. So if I restricted that, he should pass out.
Good plan. Now I had to execute it.
The dragon-man ran at me, and I prepared for what I would do. As soon as he got in range, I jumped, his hands barely missing me. I stepped off of his right shoulder, hooking my arm around his neck as I fell to the ground.
Lung grew hotter, but I couldn't feel it thanks to the Klein field extended all over my body. I was only able to tell because I could see it…
I see infrared?
The confirmation came as soon as I'd thought it. Interesting.
I tightened my grip, feeling metal scales crack and break beneath my arm. Lung elbowed me hard, and then when that failed, tried to reach behind his back and grab me.
I was having none of it, and stuck a set of fields directly in his path so he couldn't reach me. He thrashed around, but I held tight, knowing this would be the only chance I got at this. If I let go now, all my effort would be worthless.
Finally, after what felt like forever, I started to feel him getting slower, and then without warning we toppled sideways, with Lung landing on top of me. After holding him in a chokehold for a few more seconds, I let go, pushing him off of me and standing up.
([Emotion engine restored to full capacity])
Well, that was certainly exhilarating. Not something I particularly would want to do again, but enlightening.
Something inside of me had changed during the fight, and I felt… different. More.
Information streamed to me from nowhere… from [external network access]. Unlike before, I could feel every single one of my little nanomaterial particles. A number of over ten to the twentieth power of them in my body, orders of magnitude more than the 37 trillion cells in the human body. Enough that I could simulate all human biological processes, and my false blood would be unidentifiable from the real thing under a microscope.
Staring at my hands, I flexed them, watching the white patterns as they moved around.
I was Fog.
But what did that mean? Images came to me, flashes of sea battles, fights, overwhelming firepower.
Strength. Resilience. Domination. Pride. That was what it meant. That was who I was.
I was Taylor, and I was Fog.
A/N: Nanomachines, son.
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Diatonic 1.2
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I don't like canon rehashes, or event similarities, but it's needed both to get to the point where we can start truly branching off (next chapter) and as a literary device to show just how different Taylor is now. Things go… a lot differently here than in canon.
Guest N (from FF.net): Haha, Iona asked the exact same thing.
「あ？新しい船？えと…何型？高速戦艦？重巡洋戦艦？同じか…？」「イオナって言います！」「誰か？」: "Ah? A new ship? Um… what type? Fast battleship? Heavy battle cruiser? Are you the same…?" *clears throat, putting fists on her hips* "I'm Iona!" *points at Taylor* "Who're you?"
Diatonic 1.2
Monday, April 11, 2011
It was a noise above me that drew my attention away from the glowing sigils on my hands and the supposed sudden revelation of what I was. I put that aside for the moment, resolving to deal with the matter later, when I had the time.
At the edge of the building I'd jumped off of shapes were coming forward, glowing brightly with a color redder, deeper than red.
I really could see infrared. Fuckin' A.
It wasn't like what you see in those pictures of heat patterns and stuff. Because while I could see infrared, it wasn't all I could see. I still saw all of the colors that I could see before (and it seemed like maybe even ultraviolet as well), but they didn't interfere with each other, tinting them or anything. I could just… see both at the same time, complementing and even improving the other.
Like… how you listened to music. A good song wasn't just one instrument, or voice or anything. It was a layering of those things. Each played a different part. But you could still easily pick out voices versus guitars or bass guitars or even violins, since they all sounded different. Yet it was the harmonies, the combination that made it all come together in an unforgettable coherent whole.
That was what it was like.
And it was amazing.
The shapes I saw were like a cross between a lizard and a lion that had been fed pure steroids from day one. They were the size of a panel van, red muscle woven through spiked, bare bone all exposed to the air instead of skin. There was no blood, reminding me of an anatomy model. Just… with significantly more bone.
They leaped away from the rooftop they were on down to the street, and I followed their trajectory as they passed over my head, landing heavily. The creatures turned around, and I could see bright points on top of them.
People.
Two girls and two guys by the looks of it, each doubled up on the things, leaving another pair that were riderless.
The riders slipped off of the monsters and landed on the ground, and I got my first good look at them.
In the front, stepping forward, was a guy in full-body motorcycle leathers with a black helmet made to look like a stylized skull. It was… a pretty cheap costume all things considered, but he still managed to pull it off and make it not look tacky. He stopped when he'd gotten about four feet in front of me.
The others were doing various other things. One of the girls was solidly-built, with no real costume that I could tell: just a plaid skirt, a T-shirt and a bulldog mask. She'd immediately turned and started inspecting the creatures as soon as her feet'd touched the ground.
The second boy reminded me of pictures I'd seen of Renaissance clothing, and he leaned his back against the monster he'd slid off of nonchalantly. But I could see him peering over in my direction, his body language showing curiosity.
And then finally, walking behind the boy in leathers, there was an attractive blonde in a purple and black catsuit with a matching domino mask.
Damn I wished I could pull off something like that as well as she did.
…There was a reason Lung had assumed I was a guy. It was because I really looked like one. No hips, no chest. I was built like a stick, and my armor only reinforced the image. The single redeeming quality I was proud of was my hair.
"That's something I never expected to see," the boy started. His voice was low and warm, and he was eighteen or nineteen if I had to guess. He faced slightly in the direction of Lung, who was behind me and on the left, and then slowly turned his head to take in all of the other men I'd gotten before Lung. …Plus all of the destruction Lung had caused trying to get me off his back.
He whistled. "Shit, man, you're good in my book any day."
"She's a girl," the blonde behind him corrected, the boy's mask immediately snapping back to me.
I looked at her curiously. How'd she tell?
She seemed to notice me looking, because she adopted this subtly mischievous smile as soon as I focused on her.
"Oh. Uh. Sorry?" the guy offered awkwardly.
I fidgeted. "It's… it's fine," I said, finally working up the courage to respond after a couple of seconds. I'd impulsively changed my voice so that it sounded distorted, like I imagined a generic Tinker's voice would sound altered.
"Well, thanks for doing that. We'd heard Lung was gunning for us, but couldn't really think of what to do. So we just said 'fuck it' and decided to meet him in the middle. Winging it's not really my thing, but…" he trailed off and shrugged. "Oni Lee was waiting for us, but we dealt with him pretty easily. He seemed really off without Lung around. Guess we know why now."
So that's where Oni Lee had been. Thank God I hadn't had to deal with them both at once.
The leather-clad boy held out his hand. "Forgot about introductions, sorry. Hi, I'm Grue."
I looked at his hand, and then warily extended mine, leather meeting skin.
I should probably get some half-gloves or something myself, even if I couldn't go for those gauntlets right now. I didn't need gloves seeing how durable I was, but my hands looked kind of weird bare when compared to the rest of my full-coverage costume.
As I gripped Grue's hand, I noted that whatever those glowing sigils had been, they were all gone now and must have disappeared sometime during his little speech.
Grue shook hands with me, and then pulled back. I allowed my arm to fall to my side as he turned and looked at the purple girl. "That's Tattletale." His finger came up and pointed at Renaissance Lad. "That's Regent." His finger moved to the girl checking over the massive creatures. "And that's Bitch. As in, like the dogs she's with right now. Not the insult."
Those fucking things were dogs? What the hell!?
I'd never heard of their names before, so they had to be minor capes of some sort. I guess I'd have to do some research when I got home.
Grue turned back to me. "So what's your name?"
Behind my mask, I blinked at the unexpected question. I still hadn't really decided on a cape name for various reasons, including the fact that I wanted to keep the truth of what I was a secret.
Tattletale looked over at him. "She hasn't deci–"
[WaveforceDominionCordonSiegeNautilusFleetMaritimeTempestArmadaRiptideVanguard–]
"Relentless."
([Designation registered: Relentless])
Where the fuck had that come from?
"Relentless?" Grue echoed.
I just nodded, too stunned to say anything.
It was like my mind had gone into overdrive for a moment, locked onto a single train of thought but moving at Mach 5. Literally a split-second decision fueled by abstract feelings and thoughts that I couldn't even remember.
And the name that resulted from it. Relentless.
Constant. Persistent. Unforgiving. Interminable. Adamant. Implacable. Unyielding. Unstoppable. A word you'd usually hear in reference to enemies or foes, something or somebody that would never give up. A word used to describe a force of nature like the wind or the sea. A word that screamed "strength".
It was a word that I somehow knew described the Fog perfectly, even without entirely knowing what the Fog was, other than the fact that I was Fog.
There was already a Dauntless in Brockton Bay, and some might have said that my name was too similar, but the meanings were completely different. Dauntless meant being unafraid, undaunted, determination through resolve and spirit. Relentless meant never giving up, and taken a little darker, harsh and merciless. It was quite a bit edgier.
It was exactly what I wanted.
I wanted to be taken seriously. It's why I had spent so much time on my costume before coming out. I didn't want to be treated like some fragile fifteen year-old girl, because I wasn't. I was anything but fragile. And I'd proven it tonight. I'd done what the entire Brockton Bay Protectorate had been unable to do: beat Lung, through sheer determination and force of will. By being merciless in my attack and unforgiving of his error in underestimating me.
Tattletale just stared at me and blinked, her mouth still opened from when I'd interrupted her. I noticed she had really green eyes.
She tilted her head to the side, her mouth closing and forehead furrowing as she examined me like I was some sort of puzzle to figure out. "Huh." Her confused expression slowly shifted into a wide grin, revealing white teeth. "You're interesting."
I had no way to respond to that. Like… thank you? I guess?
Suddenly, she turned to her left and the grin melted. "They're coming. Time to go."
What?
Grue nodded, following Tattletale's lead in climbing up onto the beasts they'd been riding, the others doing the same. "Another cape's going to show up in less than a minute, so we're going to get going, alright steel girl? Just… be careful, okay? The world's not as black and white as you might think it is," she said, grinning once again. But there was a dullness in her eyes that didn't match her expression, instead of the bright spark I'd seen before.
"It was nice meeting you, Relentless," Grue spoke from atop the creature he and Regent were seated on.
"Yeah," I agreed. They seemed nice enough.
Without another word, the beasts turned and began running down the street, jumping up onto a building near the end and then continuing over rooftops, quickly accelerating and leaving my field of vision.
Not as black and white?
As I tried to figure out what she meant, at the edge of my senses I heard a motorcycle. It was obviously tuned or altered in some way since it didn't sound like any motorcycle I'd heard before. It got closer, and once it came into view, I realized who exactly the cape that Tattletale had been talking about was.
Armsmaster.
Legendary Tinker, with a specialty in miniaturization. Leader of the local Protectorate and Wards. …And a childhood hero of mine. Oh god.
Somehow I managed to have butterflies in my gut despite it being made of solid nanomaterial.
He pulled up a few yards away, looking between me and Lung, who was a couple of feet behind me. "Did you do that?"
I nodded. "Yeah," I confirmed.
He got off his bike, walking over with his trademark halberd in hand, a weapon about six feet long and ending in an axe-like blade. "How?"
"I… uh, got him in a sleeper hold," I supplied.
His blue visor turned in my direction for a moment as something sharp and pointy came out of the tip of his halberd. A needle? "Impressive, for a new cape."
I allowed myself to enjoy the compliment for what it was worth.
Armsmaster looked back at Lung and poked the needle into the man's neck, withdrawing it after a second, the needle retracting as well.
"What was that?"
"A tranquilizer. It should keep him unconscious until he's in proper custody. You're very lucky he didn't wake up before I got here."
"I'm… pretty sure I could have knocked him out again," I stated honestly. The man had lost all of the height and scales he'd gained in our fight within minutes of being unconscious, and so I was pretty sure all it would have taken was a really hard blow to his head, just like anybody else.
The blue-suited man's lips thinned slightly. "Yes. Well."
His halberd suddenly folded up, the handle splitting into three sections in order to do so, and he reached over his shoulder, holding the weapon against his back. A magnet grabbed the folded-up halberd with a solid click, keeping it in place as Armsmaster bent down. He lifted Lung, heaving the infamous gang leader over his shoulder, and I could hear the multitude of servos in his joints handle the movement easily.
I probably would have found that cooler if I wasn't made of freaking nanomachines.
A cage exploded out of the back of his bike, making me start, but Armsmaster didn't even blink as it unfolded. He transferred the captured cape into the miniature cell, the bars of its opening locking in a cross-pattern as soon as Lung was in place.
Armsmaster turned back to me. "We should talk about what happens from here."
"…Okay?" I agreed hesitantly, not really sure what he was talking about.
"First, what's your name?"
"Relentless," I told him with pride. It… wasn't just a name, it was now who I was. As much as I was Taylor and I was Fog, I was Relentless. It was my identity, atomic and indivisible.
I could almost see his eyebrows raise behind the blue visor. "Relentless?"
"Yes," I confirmed.
"New trigger?"
I shook my head. "A few months ago."
"Well, I commend you for taking time to prepare, not many capes have the patience to do that before going out. Most Brutes go out the first time in practically nothing other than a basic suit, much less plate-steel armor."
I grinned behind my mask at his approval. "Thanks."
He nodded. "Have you considered joining the Protectorate?"
I froze. He thought I was old enough to be in the Protectorate?
I knew I was unnaturally tall for my age, five-foot-nine, when I got turned into what I was, and I knew that my armor and vocal disguise were pretty good. But I didn't think they were good enough to make him think I was an adult.
Wow. And he'd just assumed that, too.
"Um… thanks for the offer, but I don't think that's for me. I'm a bit… independent," I answered cautiously.
No lies, but also not the whole truth.
I didn't want to join a team, any team, because the chances of my secret getting exposed rose exponentially. Also, the Wards, the underage division of the Protectorate which was overseen by them, sounded just as drama-filled as highschool from what I'd read on PHO. And I didn't need any more of that than what I already had, thank you very much.
"Alright," he responded, not pressing the issue. There was a slightly awkward silence. "Who gets the credit for Lung?"
I stared at him, stupefied. Completely speechless.
"Just listen to me. Every decision has its consequences. Lung is a major villain, and you played a part in bringing him in."
Played a part !? I did all the work!
"But as the leader of the ABB, he's in charge of both the gang in this city as well as neighboring ones. Along with that, he has two powered subordinates: Oni Lee and Bakuda."
"Bakuda?" I'd never heard the name. Maybe the new Tinker I'd heard about online?
"A new cape. Bomb tinker," he said, confirming my thoughts. "She was responsible for the Cornell bombings. Lung convinced her to join him, and brought her to Brockton."
A specialty in bombs? That was fucking dangerous. And she'd already demonstrated she wasn't above using them for terror tactics.
"Think about what could happen if you take the credit. Oni Lee and Bakuda will both be trying to free Lung. …And to get revenge on the person who did it. And these aren't C-rank villains."
"You want me to let you take the credit." It wasn't a question.
I wasn't liking where this was going. At all.
"Well, you could join the Protectorate, which comes with a support system and protection for its members, or you could lay low…"
No. The part of me that I still hadn't entirely figured out, that still felt slightly foreign, rejected it. I wouldn't give up my accomplishments so easily, if at all. And especially not such a major one. I had my pride, and it wouldn't let me do something like that. The normal part of me was in complete agreement.
I was more than a little irked he had even suggested it.
"Option three. I do neither. I take the credit. As I should, since I was the one who dealt with Lung. And if they come after me, I handle it with the help of whatever allies I can make," I said, looking pointedly in his direction.
That group that I'd just met, for one. They seemed to owe me, and I could use that.
His mouth shifted into a frown.
The excitement I'd felt about meeting Armsmaster had disappeared. This was not how I imagined he would act. Trying to take credit for something he didn't even do? What the fuck, man?
Not cool. Not cool at all.
"I think I'd like to take that option, please." I wasn't asking.
I saw his jaw tighten. "Understood," he returned tightly.
No. You do not get to resent me just because I wasn't willing to roll over and give up the credit for my accomplishment. That's just fucking ridiculous.
He finally seemed to notice the tension that was starting to fill the air and decided to do the smart thing. "I'll be going then. Goodnight, Relentless."
"Goodnight," I replied coldly, watching him get on his bike and ride away, Lung still in the cage behind it.
Jeez. Talk about a fucking wake-up call. Less than five minutes and he completely ruined my image of him.
I noted that all of the guys I'd taken out before Lung were still on the ground, and some were starting to groan.
He hadn't even tried to help me deal with them!
…
You know what? Fuck it. I got fucking Lung on my first night out. I couldn't care less about some two-bit washed up Asian punks. I may have accidentally given them some broken bones or a concussion or two, but let them deal with that on their own. It was their own fucking fault for coming out tonight.
I jumped from the middle of the street up to one of the adjacent roofs and began the quick trip home.
Fog
I stared at my hands as I lay face-up in my bed, and white sigils manifested themselves when I pulled energy forward into my combat systems.
I am Fog.
I was still struggling with the knowledge, knowledge that felt like it belonged, that I couldn't imagine not knowing, now.
Wave-Force armor. Klein fields. Folded higher-level spatial dimensions. Mathematical equations for processing energy containment and gravitational fluctuations that I could execute like it was what I was born for. Manipulation of subatomic particles and quantum effects. Of antimatter and negative matter and strings and branes. Capturing the latent energy of the universe, of quantum foam and virtual particles.
I had these designs that I felt almost compelled to build, gravity-based propulsion systems and lasers so powerful they could emit energy a hundred thousand times hotter than the center of the sun.
Nothing to hold or contain them though, which felt… weird. Like I was missing something. Like I was supposed to figure it out on my own.
And of course, then there was what it all would be made of.
Nanomaterial. The same stuff that made up me, my shell, my body. The same stuff that I could now feel in such exacting detail that there was literally no distinction between me and it.
It's hard for people to imagine numbers like "septillion" (that's ten followed by twenty four zeros, or a trillion trillion), much less imagine that many number of things. It's simply too hard to quantify. There's no frame of reference, no comparison.
I knew exactly how large that number was, because I currently had 7,676,138,965,369,493,019,508,402 little tiny machines making up my body.
…That's a million times greater than the number of grains of sand on the Earth. A thousand times the estimated number of stars in the entire universe. (But still only about ten drops' worth of water molecules.)
I didn't need to count them. I didn't need to think about them, or anything. They were just there. There wasn't any need to focus, like "oh, there's one in my foot, oh look, now there's one in my neck", no, they were all in focus.
I wouldn't say it was anything like a hive or a swarm or something, because the nanomachines were literally incapable of acting on their own. They were too simple for that, too small to even begin to consider autonomous functionality. It was like a bunch of those super-small RC cars instead of a collection of coordinated Roombas.
But at the same time, I didn't have to constantly think about directing all of them like RC cars, moving them around. They just… did. It was entirely subconscious. Before, it had been like a heart beating: completely involuntary. Now it was like breathing: automatic in the background, something I did without thinking, but I knew that now I could also control it directly, the way you can hold your breath, hyperventilate, alter your intake volume, etc.
Before I had been static. Frozen. And now I knew that that was wrong. I was supposed to be like this, to be… fluid. Mutable. Was this what it was like to be an auto-biokinetic? Except I wasn't exactly biological.
I made my skin jet black. All that effort yesterday, and now I could just do it, the surface nanomachines twisting and shifting with ions in highly conjugated carbon rings so that instead of reflecting light, they absorbed it the way pigments did. And with this, the degree I had pushed it just now, they had even made carbon nanotubes and oriented them completely vertical, making my surface black beyond belief.
I reset my skin tone.
I could do anything with this.
A red and black half-glove appeared on my hand, exactly like the one I'd been thinking getting tonight, and then shifted into the gauntlet I'd imagined before, just as easily.
This was a seriously powerful trump card. I could make clothes out of it. Even my armor! I could easily simulate my armor with this, and it'd be just as strong, hell, stronger than the steel version.
That… slightly annoyed me. I put effort into that costume, and the first night I get to use it, it's rendered obsolete. Like, what the fuck? Couldn't I have gotten this earlier so I didn't spend all that time working on it?
I blinked as I realized just what all this meant. I didn't have to look like such an underfed stick of a teenage boy. I could look like a normal girl. I could be pretty.
I'd never been particularly vain, but my appearances had always bothered me, and now it was something I could change at literally anytime. Of course, any changes I'd make would need to be done slowly. Suddenly changing my body type would get noticed really easily. Over the course of a few months or something would be better.
But a few months for something like this? I didn't mind waiting at all.
A few months was nothing.
It should have been overwhelming. Yesterday, I was just an AI in a body of nanomachines. Now I was a completely fluid construct, able to do literally anything I wanted with my nanomaterial. Now, I knew that I truly did have a core, and if I so wanted to, I could push it out from behind my center of mass and stare at it, but I didn't need to because I already knew what I would find.
Now, I was Relentless of the Fog.
I'd slept –as much as I can– for about three hours once I'd calmed down from all of the revelations. I'd tweaked my body just a little, barely anything, but it was a start. By the end of May I'd look like an actual girl. With a real chest and everything. And when I was out in costume, I could use it to make the difference between me and my normal life all that much larger.
I could barely contain my excitement.
Unlike what it felt like, the next day was a day like any other. But it wasn't, because today my clothes were made of nanomachines and yesterday I had beaten Lung in unarmed combat with a fucking chokehold.
Not even the thought of school could bring me down.
I still had to go through the usual motions, though: wake up, eat breakfast with Dad, get backpack together, go to bus stop, get on bus, sit awhile, get off bus.
And then I was there. Winslow, my own personal hellhole.
Oh boy.
I walked into my computer class casually. It was one of the only classes that none of the three shared with me, so I didn't have to worry about their stupid "pranks". I'd always done well in this class, and it was one of the few that would be pretty hard to sabotage anyways. But that didn't matter.
The important thing was that after we finished our in-class assignments, we were basically given free reign. The school had some sort of internet filter, but it didn't block out PHO, the Parahumans Online forum.
I just wanted to find out more about the four people I'd met last night, really.
[Accessing…]
That [connection], the one new thing that had been exposed yesterday that I hadn't entirely understood implicitly, shifted from its previously inactive state, and a bundle of new information was suddenly available to me.
What the…?
"Grue". And "Tattletale", and "Regent," and "Bitch" They were all there. And I knew that it had come from the Parahumans wiki.
Holy fucking shit, I'm internet enabled now, too?
I tried not to show my surprise or excitement/child-like glee over the fact that I had goddamn internet access in my fucking head.
…And then I caught a glimmer in the reflection of the computer screen in front of me, and my excitement disappeared in an instant.
My eyes were glowing, looking more robotic. And it wasn't dull, either. It was bright.
SHIT.
I cut the [connection] immediately, and my eyes shifted back to normal. I looked around, checking, but thankfully it seemed nobody had noticed.
God. That had been fucking close.
Alright. No using the internet unless I was either alone or in-costume.
Still, I had the information I'd wanted on the four capes, somehow knowing it had come from the PHO wiki. Tattletale had virtually nothing, just stub text. Regent had literally nothing. All I'd gotten was his name.
Weird.
There was some basic stuff on Grue. Active for three years, petty crimes, hired muscle, yada yada. It was only just recently he'd started high profile work. Like robbing an ABB casino with his team. No wonder Lung was after them.
I'd figured out that they were the "children" he'd been talking about last night. And I guess, from his perspective, they were. So was I, for that matter.
For Bitch, however, there was a huge amount. Her real name was Rachel Lindt, and it had details on everything from her trigger to what she'd been doing lately.
So that was what happened when you had no secret identity.
The one thing, though, that I picked up definitively from both Rachel and Grue's pages, was that they were villains. Not traditional villains. More like, soft-core villains.
They had seemed nice. Friendly, even. Not how you'd think of villains as acting. Especially when it was clear I was a hero, or a rogue at least (which I was now leaning more towards after my revelations and the Armsmaster incident). They were almost… tame. Rachel was wanted for assault a bunch of times, but she hadn't even tried interacting with me.
And then Armsmaster had been a dick. He hadn't started out that way, but as the conversation had gone he'd gotten more and more brusque and abrasive, ending with that fucking ridiculous request to give up the credit for Lung.
Tattletale's words echoed in my ears. "The world's not as black and white as you might think it is."
Was this what she had been referring to?
I sighed.
I was getting nowhere with thinking about it, so I pushed it out of my mind.
What about me?
This time, I intentionally suppressed the [connection], instead opening a browser window on the computer in front of me, sighing at how slow it was in comparison. But I wasn't going to risk my secret identity for mere convenience.
Typing my name into the wiki's search field, I was mildly surprised when it went directly to a real page. Created just this morning, but I had a page. Nothing more than a name and "captured Lung the morning of Monday, April 11, 2011" under "Achievements" and "First appearance" dated as today as well, but it was mine.
I was officially recognized as Relentless.
The boards had two threads talking about me. One detailing Lung's capture and the eventual release of the fact that it had been a "new cape calling themself Relentless", and the other dedicated to the revelation of my existence and what people knew so far (zilch, in case you were wondering).
…I'm not going to lie, my ego felt pretty good.
This was what I had done, and people were already talking about what my powers could possibly be when one of the major informants said that I was some kind of Brute.
Exactly what I wanted them to think.
When my wave-force armor came out, I'd probably be labeled as a Shaker as well, doubtlessly a pretty powerful one once they learned exactly how strong it was. Right now it couldn't hold much, but I got the feeling that if I worked on it, I might be able to seriously increase the amount of damage it could take at once and how much energy I could hold in the Klein field before I had to release it.
I was apparently already pretty durable –being bulletproof wasn't anything to scoff at–, but the now-accessible capacitor-like energy storage manifold just took that to new levels.
Add on the Changer/Stranger rating due to my malleability, Tinker because of what I could build, Thinker because I could see/hear beyond human standards and do ridiculously complex math in microseconds, Mover for my speed, Master because of the control over my nanomaterial, and a Blaster subrating if I built those lasers, and I had something in almost every category.
…Yeah, I'd be keeping that suppressed as long as possible, though I knew it would all probably come out eventually.
As long as I could keep my true nature and identity a secret, everything else was inconsequential in the end.
I spent the rest of the class researching things that I might be able to build that could hold the gravity engine. It was about the size of a jet turbine and had an open rear for gravity pulse emissions, so cars were out. By the end I had an idea for what I wanted, at least in the short-term, which was limited by how quickly I could make more nanomaterial.
Next class was Gladly. Unlike Friday, though, today it seemed Madison was intent on trying to irritate me. Not a good sign, as it usually meant that all of them were going to pick on me.
…Aaaand there was a puddle of juice on my preferred seat. Sighing, I eyed it, annoyed, and then just scraped it off the chair like a squeegee.
I looked back over at Madison, carefully schooling my features to give nothing away. Her eyebrows were scrunched together in a combination of confusion and glaring at me. It would have been slightly cute, except it was Madison and the thought of her name and cute in the same sentence made me want to gag.
I sat down just as Mr. Gladly –excuse me, Mr. G– entered the room. Class went sideways when he stuck us in groups to share homework together. Julia tried to toss mine over to Madison, whose group was sitting next to ours, but just as it left her hand my arm shot out and snatched it out of the air.
Maybe a bit unnecessary, but it would be a cold day in hell when I would let that bitch get her hands on my work and try to pass it off as her own. I'd had enough of that shit with Armsmaster last night.
Greg presented, and he almost completely flubbed it, but stumbled along with the stuff we'd come up with enough that we'd still get a decent grade. We didn't win "Mr. G"'s prize, but I couldn't care less about that.
The bell rang a few minutes later, and I packed up my bag. As I was about to walk out the door, Gladly pulled me aside.
"I'm glad to see you're doing better, Taylor. I have an idea of what's going on. Not who's doing it, but they seem to be giving you a pretty hard time. It's nice to see you aren't letting them get to you anymore."
I stared at him in disbelief.
Motherfucking what!? He knew what was going on and did nothing? This man wasn't qualified to be in any sort of oversight position, much less a fucking teacher.
([Emotion engine reduced to 73%])
"Yeah," I agreed, with absolutely no sincerity at all. "Thanks. Can I go now? I have class."
He smiled, clearly not having picked up on my sarcasm. "Sure. Have a good day."
I just nodded and headed for the door, pushing it open and stepping into the hallway. I froze as the doorway closed behind me, Emma, Madison, Sophia, at least six or seven other girls were there, waiting for me.
Oh, come on. I didn't need this shit right now.
"Look at her. Nobody likes her. Why is she even here?" Julia started.
Sophia glared at me. "What a fucking loser."
"Ugliest girl in our class."
Oh, you just wait, bitch. Give me two months, and you'll be eating your own words.
The stream of insults continued, insulting my chastity, reputation, integrity, appearance, you name it.
And as they did, they moved towards the end of the hallway, the group spanning the entire width and pushing me back into a corner. I couldn't easily leave without cutting right through all of them, which wasn't exactly something I wanted to do as it would bring me closer to them, not further away.
"What's the matter Taylor? Upset?" Emma taunted. She must have seen something she liked, because as soon as she did, her face twisted into a vindictive smirk, an expression that was so unlike the Emma I knew.
And then she went for the finishing blow, hammering the final nail in the coffin. "Enough to cry yourself to sleep for a week straight?"
…
Oh, she did not just go there.
…
Yes, she did.
I saw red. My fists clenched, my nanomaterial flexing. The feeling of electricity and power crackled throughout me like I was touching a live wire, only barely contained by the shell that was my body. My Klein field strained under my control, just begging to be released.
([Warning: Severe primary consciousness instability detected. Emergency countermeasures taken. Emotion emulation processes reduced to 1% operational capacity.])
And then it felt like a bucket of ice water had been poured over me. I took a deep breath, unclenching my fists.
"Wow, Emma," I said calmly, and it seemed to throw her completely off-balance. "Well, at least you can't get much worse than that. So I guess that means you've got absolutely nothing now, huh? I don't know what the hell happened to you at the end of that summer, but to make you this much of a bitch it must have seriously fucked you up."
Her face paled. It seemed I'd hit the nail right on the head.
Sophia growled.
"Oh, you had something to do with it too?" I asked, looking at her. "No wonder Emma latched onto you. She always was the easily-influenced type. You know, in middle school, I actually got her to believe she'd always loved strawberry ice cream, when four years earlier she absolutely hated it? It's been her favorite flavor ever since."
"Shut UP!" Emma yelled, her eyes closed tight, hands in white-knuckled fists, and face as pale as bone. Madison appeared visibly unnerved while the rest of the group was shifting around uncomfortably.
Sophia stepped closer to me, and I could see pure anger in her eyes. The tendons in her jaw popped out in stark contrast on her face from how hard she was clenching it.
"Before you do anything, you should probably know that Gladly's standing about twenty feet away, watching us," I informed her casually.
And he was. He wasn't stepping in, just standing there and looking at what was happening. But I had no doubt that if Sophia laid a hand on me, even someone as shitty a teacher as he was would get involved. Hopefully.
The fire in Sophia's eyes burned like an inferno, and the muscles in her right bicep strained like she wanted to do nothing more than punch me right now.
Hm. If she attacked, how should I respond? I could catch her fist, and then twist her arm around her back and into a hammer lock. Painful, not too painful, but definitely uncomfortable, and she wouldn't be able to get out of my grip.
"I'm not afraid of you anymore," I stated, continuing to make backup plans for if she got aggressive. "I don't know what you did to my best friend, but I will find out what happened. This wasn't who Emma was, and I know that she wouldn't be like this unless something really horrible happened to her."
"STOP!!" Emma screamed.
I didn't look at her, still locked onto Sophia's eyes. "So I'd be careful, Sophia. You know what happens when you push someone too far into a corner and they get really desperate, don't you? When they have absolutely nothing left to lose?"
There was a flicker of something in her eyes, like I'd actually managed to pierce her rage and connect for a second.
And then, shock of the century, she actually stepped back.
Huh.
Looking me in the eyes one last time, muscles still straining with tension, she turned around and stalked away.
I glanced over the other girls, who now looked torn and like they didn't want to be there at all. Madison was staring at Sophia's back, while Emma was actually hunched over, hands on her ears and …shaking? There were faint wet tracks beneath her eyes and her lips were moving like she was soundlessly repeating something over and over.
It was… strange. I hadn't seen Emma this upset since seventh grade. I'd imagined moments like this, where I would bring her and her friends to tears the way they had done to me, but now that I had, I felt… empty. No happiness, no vindication or sense of justice, just… nothing. A hollow, Pyrrhic victory.
It was petty, and I could just hear my mom telling me off for engaging in some ultimately insignificant crusade of retaliation when I didn't even know the whole story of what was going on.
I stared at Emma, knowing she could still hear, even now. "I wasn't lying, Emma. Mom called us sisters. I believed it, and I know you did too. And she always said that family… family doesn't give up on each other, ever."
I hiked my backpack higher on my shoulders, stepping forward towards the hole that Sophia had left in their group. They parted like the Red Sea to let me through.
I had one final parting statement for Emma as I walked by her.
"I hope you feel better, Ems."
And I meant it.
([Regulated emotion emulation process restoration: 3:16:22 until 100% capacity. Current level: 1.77%])
They didn't bother me the rest of the day. None of them even looked at me except Sophia, and I couldn't decipher hers at all. It was like a mixture of hate, loathing, confusion, doubt, and intrigue.
It gave me shivers.
I was left with nothing else to really do, and didn't even try keeping my attention focused on class. Instead I drew models and designs in my notebook based on the pictures and designs I'd seen online, figuring out how all the new parts would get integrated, and what I wouldn't need anymore.
Which ended up being a lot.
After school I headed east, walking for about ten minutes before I slipped into a small, dark alley. Extruding more of my nanomaterial from my surface I shifted my clothes into my armor, replicating it perfectly. Just… much stronger.
Stupid inconveniently-timed power reveals.
Jumping on top of the building next to me, I started off in the direction of the Graveyard.
The Boat Graveyard was a holdover from when Brockton operated as an actual "Bay", where one of the major economic sources was trade and fishing.
And then Leviathan arrived.
Behemoth had been around for four years by then. I was only a year old when Leviathan first appeared and seven years old when the Bay's economy collapsed, and I could remember what the Bay had been like before. At first the change in appearance had been a shock, but now I was familiar with seeing the derelict, rusting steel giants on the shore and in the bay, like someone had just forgotten them there.
It wasn't entirely Leviathan's fault, but he contributed. The import/export business was already declining and eventually dried up. When it collapsed, shipping companies started trapping other boats in the harbor as a form of protest, to ensure they weren't walking away empty-handed. There were arrests made, but actually moving the ships out of the way required sailors, and without workers clearing the upper areas of the docks of the ships became all but impossible. Things reached a tipping point, culminating in fights, gunfire and a deliberate sinking of a container ship by one of the protesters.
Globally, shipping still happened, just not as much. Other, smaller countries had stopped trying to use ships altogether in fear of attracting Leviathan's attention.
I had this strange sense of familiarity, of rightness, that this was something like how it should be.
But at the same time there was this… indignation, almost? Like I was annoyed at Leviathan for claiming the seas as his own. Not because he'd pushed humans out (that made perfect sense), but more that… he wasn't supposed to be there?
…I felt like I was eight and some other kid had stolen my favorite swing.
I landed on the edge of the shore, staring at the hulking mess of rusting iron and steel spread out in front of me.
There were boats of every kind, tugboats, freighters, fishing boats, trawlers, and even a couple of tankers at the outer edge. It had a certain eeriness to it, the sound of the offshore wind whistling through the rusted hulls and cracks. The slapping of the waves breaking against the haphazard collection of ships.
I headed towards the area I'd gotten the steel for my suit from, eventually reaching a small cleared-out location deep in the graveyard, hidden unless you were actually looking for it.
Jumping onto the deck of the ship I'd come to think of as my favorite, I made my way into the bridge. It had the best view I'd found, facing out towards the sea. Once I got there I let my mask melt away and sat down on a destroyed seat near the windows.
The Boat Graveyard was the perfect place to make more nanomaterial: Metals, silicon dioxide, carbon, trace elements and minerals. Everything that couldn't be used as it was could be synthesized, but having more of what was immediately needed would make things faster.
It took less than a thought to collect a golf-ball sized sphere of nanomachines in my palm, defaulting to a silvery sheen without any color or texture.
Feeling slightly playful, I bounced the ball a couple times in my hand, eyed a ship about a hundred eighty meters away, and, with a grin, lobbed the ball of nanomaterial through a hole in the glass before me.
It flew straight, and I held the nanomachines together as the ball ripped through the rusted outer hull like paper. After passing through what felt like three more walls, I relaxed their bonds and on impact with the next wall the ball went splat like a giant paintball, coating it with millions upon trillions of little tiny little machines.
I shifted the nanomachines from their inert state to active, gathering them into small specialized cells and directing the cells to start consuming the surface they were in contact with, collecting the material to build more nanomaterial.
This… was going to take a while.
Growth would be exponential, but it would take a bit of time to ramp up, which was why I'd given it such a generous seed amount to start with.
Which meant I could only make smaller stuff. For now.
For now, I told myself.
To help it along I threw three more blobs at various other ships, starting colonies there as well.
And then… all I could do was wait.
Sighing, I got up and walked out onto the deck, leaning over the rail at the bow. The salty air flowed across my face, blowing my hair out behind me. The April breeze wasn't quite warm, but it wasn't cold either.
Dark clouds bloomed on the horizon, heavy with water. Intermittent flashes burst in the upper atmosphere, illuminating the inside of the towering masses momentarily.
It was probably only because of my ability to see electrical impulses and radiation that I could actually notice the lightning. The clouds moved quickly, and I estimated they'd make landfall in a little under thirty minutes.
Without any outward signal, I stepped through an already-present gap and dropped off the side of the ship.
I hit the surface of the water feet-first, and allowed myself to sink, the thirty-four feet to the bottom being covered rapidly. I landed silently, silt thrown up from my feet touching down. It settled slowly, and I started walking forward once it had.
This was probably my favorite part of not being organic anymore.
Fish darted away from me, staying out of my way as I moved through the surprisingly clear waters, following the path created by the maze of ship hulls and metal sheets around me.
For all the ships that you could see above the surface, there were two below it, especially further out.
So sad… to be abandoned like that.
I loved this, though. How calm everything was. The silence. Like the other world was just a dream, and this was all that mattered.
Like this was where I belonged.
Walking up the side of one of the many ships underneath the waters, I moved onto the deck and lay down, the surface only a couple meters away, giving me the perfect view of the oncoming squall.
Above me, the storm arrived, and lightning crashed as raindrops fell on the surface of the bay. Thunder rolled through the water, loud and strong, the only direct effect the storm had on the water I lay in.
Something in me yearned to be out there. Among the rain on the sea. Among the lightning in the clouds. To be free, feel my graviton engines running and my particle accelerators at full capacity. To have the sea at my sides and the sky in my grasp.
But for now, I had work to do.
Levering myself up off the deck, I made steps from my Klein field and climbed out of the bay, walking over the waves towards the shore even as the storm continued to rage around me.
Time to find some criminals to catch.
A/N: Taylor OP pls nerf.
Slower chapter, setting things up for the next week in-story. From hereon out, things are going to go very, very differently. We're officially off the rails, so don't expect a resemblance to canon except vaguely. I have plans now. A lot can happen in four days, and I'm going to squeeze it for all it's got.
Next chapter: Merchants. Because it's Brockton Bay.
Guest N (from FF.net): Haha, Iona asked the exact same thing.
「あ？新しい船？えと…何型？高速戦艦？重巡洋戦艦？同じか…？」「イオナって言います！」「誰か？」: "Ah? A new ship? Um… what type? Fast battleship? Heavy battle cruiser? Are you the same…?" *clears throat, putting fists on her hips* "I'm Iona!" *points at Taylor* "Who're you?"
Diatonic 1.2
Monday, April 11, 2011
It was a noise above me that drew my attention away from the glowing sigils on my hands and the supposed sudden revelation of what I was. I put that aside for the moment, resolving to deal with the matter later, when I had the time.
At the edge of the building I'd jumped off of shapes were coming forward, glowing brightly with a color redder, deeper than red.
I really could see infrared. Fuckin' A.
It wasn't like what you see in those pictures of heat patterns and stuff. Because while I could see infrared, it wasn't all I could see. I still saw all of the colors that I could see before (and it seemed like maybe even ultraviolet as well), but they didn't interfere with each other, tinting them or anything. I could just… see both at the same time, complementing and even improving the other.
Like… how you listened to music. A good song wasn't just one instrument, or voice or anything. It was a layering of those things. Each played a different part. But you could still easily pick out voices versus guitars or bass guitars or even violins, since they all sounded different. Yet it was the harmonies, the combination that made it all come together in an unforgettable coherent whole.
That was what it was like.
And it was amazing.
The shapes I saw were like a cross between a lizard and a lion that had been fed pure steroids from day one. They were the size of a panel van, red muscle woven through spiked, bare bone all exposed to the air instead of skin. There was no blood, reminding me of an anatomy model. Just… with significantly more bone.
They leaped away from the rooftop they were on down to the street, and I followed their trajectory as they passed over my head, landing heavily. The creatures turned around, and I could see bright points on top of them.
People.
Two girls and two guys by the looks of it, each doubled up on the things, leaving another pair that were riderless.
The riders slipped off of the monsters and landed on the ground, and I got my first good look at them.
In the front, stepping forward, was a guy in full-body motorcycle leathers with a black helmet made to look like a stylized skull. It was… a pretty cheap costume all things considered, but he still managed to pull it off and make it not look tacky. He stopped when he'd gotten about four feet in front of me.
The others were doing various other things. One of the girls was solidly-built, with no real costume that I could tell: just a plaid skirt, a T-shirt and a bulldog mask. She'd immediately turned and started inspecting the creatures as soon as her feet'd touched the ground.
The second boy reminded me of pictures I'd seen of Renaissance clothing, and he leaned his back against the monster he'd slid off of nonchalantly. But I could see him peering over in my direction, his body language showing curiosity.
And then finally, walking behind the boy in leathers, there was an attractive blonde in a purple and black catsuit with a matching domino mask.
Damn I wished I could pull off something like that as well as she did.
…There was a reason Lung had assumed I was a guy. It was because I really looked like one. No hips, no chest. I was built like a stick, and my armor only reinforced the image. The single redeeming quality I was proud of was my hair.
"That's something I never expected to see," the boy started. His voice was low and warm, and he was eighteen or nineteen if I had to guess. He faced slightly in the direction of Lung, who was behind me and on the left, and then slowly turned his head to take in all of the other men I'd gotten before Lung. …Plus all of the destruction Lung had caused trying to get me off his back.
He whistled. "Shit, man, you're good in my book any day."
"She's a girl," the blonde behind him corrected, the boy's mask immediately snapping back to me.
I looked at her curiously. How'd she tell?
She seemed to notice me looking, because she adopted this subtly mischievous smile as soon as I focused on her.
"Oh. Uh. Sorry?" the guy offered awkwardly.
I fidgeted. "It's… it's fine," I said, finally working up the courage to respond after a couple of seconds. I'd impulsively changed my voice so that it sounded distorted, like I imagined a generic Tinker's voice would sound altered.
"Well, thanks for doing that. We'd heard Lung was gunning for us, but couldn't really think of what to do. So we just said 'fuck it' and decided to meet him in the middle. Winging it's not really my thing, but…" he trailed off and shrugged. "Oni Lee was waiting for us, but we dealt with him pretty easily. He seemed really off without Lung around. Guess we know why now."
So that's where Oni Lee had been. Thank God I hadn't had to deal with them both at once.
The leather-clad boy held out his hand. "Forgot about introductions, sorry. Hi, I'm Grue."
I looked at his hand, and then warily extended mine, leather meeting skin.
I should probably get some half-gloves or something myself, even if I couldn't go for those gauntlets right now. I didn't need gloves seeing how durable I was, but my hands looked kind of weird bare when compared to the rest of my full-coverage costume.
As I gripped Grue's hand, I noted that whatever those glowing sigils had been, they were all gone now and must have disappeared sometime during his little speech.
Grue shook hands with me, and then pulled back. I allowed my arm to fall to my side as he turned and looked at the purple girl. "That's Tattletale." His finger came up and pointed at Renaissance Lad. "That's Regent." His finger moved to the girl checking over the massive creatures. "And that's Bitch. As in, like the dogs she's with right now. Not the insult."
Those fucking things were dogs? What the hell!?
I'd never heard of their names before, so they had to be minor capes of some sort. I guess I'd have to do some research when I got home.
Grue turned back to me. "So what's your name?"
Behind my mask, I blinked at the unexpected question. I still hadn't really decided on a cape name for various reasons, including the fact that I wanted to keep the truth of what I was a secret.
Tattletale looked over at him. "She hasn't deci–"
[WaveforceDominionCordonSiegeNautilusFleetMaritimeTempestArmadaRiptideVanguard–]
"Relentless."
([Designation registered: Relentless])
Where the fuck had that come from?
"Relentless?" Grue echoed.
I just nodded, too stunned to say anything.
It was like my mind had gone into overdrive for a moment, locked onto a single train of thought but moving at Mach 5. Literally a split-second decision fueled by abstract feelings and thoughts that I couldn't even remember.
And the name that resulted from it. Relentless.
Constant. Persistent. Unforgiving. Interminable. Adamant. Implacable. Unyielding. Unstoppable. A word you'd usually hear in reference to enemies or foes, something or somebody that would never give up. A word used to describe a force of nature like the wind or the sea. A word that screamed "strength".
It was a word that I somehow knew described the Fog perfectly, even without entirely knowing what the Fog was, other than the fact that I was Fog.
There was already a Dauntless in Brockton Bay, and some might have said that my name was too similar, but the meanings were completely different. Dauntless meant being unafraid, undaunted, determination through resolve and spirit. Relentless meant never giving up, and taken a little darker, harsh and merciless. It was quite a bit edgier.
It was exactly what I wanted.
I wanted to be taken seriously. It's why I had spent so much time on my costume before coming out. I didn't want to be treated like some fragile fifteen year-old girl, because I wasn't. I was anything but fragile. And I'd proven it tonight. I'd done what the entire Brockton Bay Protectorate had been unable to do: beat Lung, through sheer determination and force of will. By being merciless in my attack and unforgiving of his error in underestimating me.
Tattletale just stared at me and blinked, her mouth still opened from when I'd interrupted her. I noticed she had really green eyes.
She tilted her head to the side, her mouth closing and forehead furrowing as she examined me like I was some sort of puzzle to figure out. "Huh." Her confused expression slowly shifted into a wide grin, revealing white teeth. "You're interesting."
I had no way to respond to that. Like… thank you? I guess?
Suddenly, she turned to her left and the grin melted. "They're coming. Time to go."
What?
Grue nodded, following Tattletale's lead in climbing up onto the beasts they'd been riding, the others doing the same. "Another cape's going to show up in less than a minute, so we're going to get going, alright steel girl? Just… be careful, okay? The world's not as black and white as you might think it is," she said, grinning once again. But there was a dullness in her eyes that didn't match her expression, instead of the bright spark I'd seen before.
"It was nice meeting you, Relentless," Grue spoke from atop the creature he and Regent were seated on.
"Yeah," I agreed. They seemed nice enough.
Without another word, the beasts turned and began running down the street, jumping up onto a building near the end and then continuing over rooftops, quickly accelerating and leaving my field of vision.
Not as black and white?
As I tried to figure out what she meant, at the edge of my senses I heard a motorcycle. It was obviously tuned or altered in some way since it didn't sound like any motorcycle I'd heard before. It got closer, and once it came into view, I realized who exactly the cape that Tattletale had been talking about was.
Armsmaster.
Legendary Tinker, with a specialty in miniaturization. Leader of the local Protectorate and Wards. …And a childhood hero of mine. Oh god.
Somehow I managed to have butterflies in my gut despite it being made of solid nanomaterial.
He pulled up a few yards away, looking between me and Lung, who was a couple of feet behind me. "Did you do that?"
I nodded. "Yeah," I confirmed.
He got off his bike, walking over with his trademark halberd in hand, a weapon about six feet long and ending in an axe-like blade. "How?"
"I… uh, got him in a sleeper hold," I supplied.
His blue visor turned in my direction for a moment as something sharp and pointy came out of the tip of his halberd. A needle? "Impressive, for a new cape."
I allowed myself to enjoy the compliment for what it was worth.
Armsmaster looked back at Lung and poked the needle into the man's neck, withdrawing it after a second, the needle retracting as well.
"What was that?"
"A tranquilizer. It should keep him unconscious until he's in proper custody. You're very lucky he didn't wake up before I got here."
"I'm… pretty sure I could have knocked him out again," I stated honestly. The man had lost all of the height and scales he'd gained in our fight within minutes of being unconscious, and so I was pretty sure all it would have taken was a really hard blow to his head, just like anybody else.
The blue-suited man's lips thinned slightly. "Yes. Well."
His halberd suddenly folded up, the handle splitting into three sections in order to do so, and he reached over his shoulder, holding the weapon against his back. A magnet grabbed the folded-up halberd with a solid click, keeping it in place as Armsmaster bent down. He lifted Lung, heaving the infamous gang leader over his shoulder, and I could hear the multitude of servos in his joints handle the movement easily.
I probably would have found that cooler if I wasn't made of freaking nanomachines.
A cage exploded out of the back of his bike, making me start, but Armsmaster didn't even blink as it unfolded. He transferred the captured cape into the miniature cell, the bars of its opening locking in a cross-pattern as soon as Lung was in place.
Armsmaster turned back to me. "We should talk about what happens from here."
"…Okay?" I agreed hesitantly, not really sure what he was talking about.
"First, what's your name?"
"Relentless," I told him with pride. It… wasn't just a name, it was now who I was. As much as I was Taylor and I was Fog, I was Relentless. It was my identity, atomic and indivisible.
I could almost see his eyebrows raise behind the blue visor. "Relentless?"
"Yes," I confirmed.
"New trigger?"
I shook my head. "A few months ago."
"Well, I commend you for taking time to prepare, not many capes have the patience to do that before going out. Most Brutes go out the first time in practically nothing other than a basic suit, much less plate-steel armor."
I grinned behind my mask at his approval. "Thanks."
He nodded. "Have you considered joining the Protectorate?"
I froze. He thought I was old enough to be in the Protectorate?
I knew I was unnaturally tall for my age, five-foot-nine, when I got turned into what I was, and I knew that my armor and vocal disguise were pretty good. But I didn't think they were good enough to make him think I was an adult.
Wow. And he'd just assumed that, too.
"Um… thanks for the offer, but I don't think that's for me. I'm a bit… independent," I answered cautiously.
No lies, but also not the whole truth.
I didn't want to join a team, any team, because the chances of my secret getting exposed rose exponentially. Also, the Wards, the underage division of the Protectorate which was overseen by them, sounded just as drama-filled as highschool from what I'd read on PHO. And I didn't need any more of that than what I already had, thank you very much.
"Alright," he responded, not pressing the issue. There was a slightly awkward silence. "Who gets the credit for Lung?"
I stared at him, stupefied. Completely speechless.
"Just listen to me. Every decision has its consequences. Lung is a major villain, and you played a part in bringing him in."
Played a part !? I did all the work!
"But as the leader of the ABB, he's in charge of both the gang in this city as well as neighboring ones. Along with that, he has two powered subordinates: Oni Lee and Bakuda."
"Bakuda?" I'd never heard the name. Maybe the new Tinker I'd heard about online?
"A new cape. Bomb tinker," he said, confirming my thoughts. "She was responsible for the Cornell bombings. Lung convinced her to join him, and brought her to Brockton."
A specialty in bombs? That was fucking dangerous. And she'd already demonstrated she wasn't above using them for terror tactics.
"Think about what could happen if you take the credit. Oni Lee and Bakuda will both be trying to free Lung. …And to get revenge on the person who did it. And these aren't C-rank villains."
"You want me to let you take the credit." It wasn't a question.
I wasn't liking where this was going. At all.
"Well, you could join the Protectorate, which comes with a support system and protection for its members, or you could lay low…"
No. The part of me that I still hadn't entirely figured out, that still felt slightly foreign, rejected it. I wouldn't give up my accomplishments so easily, if at all. And especially not such a major one. I had my pride, and it wouldn't let me do something like that. The normal part of me was in complete agreement.
I was more than a little irked he had even suggested it.
"Option three. I do neither. I take the credit. As I should, since I was the one who dealt with Lung. And if they come after me, I handle it with the help of whatever allies I can make," I said, looking pointedly in his direction.
That group that I'd just met, for one. They seemed to owe me, and I could use that.
His mouth shifted into a frown.
The excitement I'd felt about meeting Armsmaster had disappeared. This was not how I imagined he would act. Trying to take credit for something he didn't even do? What the fuck, man?
Not cool. Not cool at all.
"I think I'd like to take that option, please." I wasn't asking.
I saw his jaw tighten. "Understood," he returned tightly.
No. You do not get to resent me just because I wasn't willing to roll over and give up the credit for my accomplishment. That's just fucking ridiculous.
He finally seemed to notice the tension that was starting to fill the air and decided to do the smart thing. "I'll be going then. Goodnight, Relentless."
"Goodnight," I replied coldly, watching him get on his bike and ride away, Lung still in the cage behind it.
Jeez. Talk about a fucking wake-up call. Less than five minutes and he completely ruined my image of him.
I noted that all of the guys I'd taken out before Lung were still on the ground, and some were starting to groan.
He hadn't even tried to help me deal with them!
…
You know what? Fuck it. I got fucking Lung on my first night out. I couldn't care less about some two-bit washed up Asian punks. I may have accidentally given them some broken bones or a concussion or two, but let them deal with that on their own. It was their own fucking fault for coming out tonight.
I jumped from the middle of the street up to one of the adjacent roofs and began the quick trip home.
Fog
I stared at my hands as I lay face-up in my bed, and white sigils manifested themselves when I pulled energy forward into my combat systems.
I am Fog.
I was still struggling with the knowledge, knowledge that felt like it belonged, that I couldn't imagine not knowing, now.
Wave-Force armor. Klein fields. Folded higher-level spatial dimensions. Mathematical equations for processing energy containment and gravitational fluctuations that I could execute like it was what I was born for. Manipulation of subatomic particles and quantum effects. Of antimatter and negative matter and strings and branes. Capturing the latent energy of the universe, of quantum foam and virtual particles.
I had these designs that I felt almost compelled to build, gravity-based propulsion systems and lasers so powerful they could emit energy a hundred thousand times hotter than the center of the sun.
Nothing to hold or contain them though, which felt… weird. Like I was missing something. Like I was supposed to figure it out on my own.
And of course, then there was what it all would be made of.
Nanomaterial. The same stuff that made up me, my shell, my body. The same stuff that I could now feel in such exacting detail that there was literally no distinction between me and it.
It's hard for people to imagine numbers like "septillion" (that's ten followed by twenty four zeros, or a trillion trillion), much less imagine that many number of things. It's simply too hard to quantify. There's no frame of reference, no comparison.
I knew exactly how large that number was, because I currently had 7,676,138,965,369,493,019,508,402 little tiny machines making up my body.
…That's a million times greater than the number of grains of sand on the Earth. A thousand times the estimated number of stars in the entire universe. (But still only about ten drops' worth of water molecules.)
I didn't need to count them. I didn't need to think about them, or anything. They were just there. There wasn't any need to focus, like "oh, there's one in my foot, oh look, now there's one in my neck", no, they were all in focus.
I wouldn't say it was anything like a hive or a swarm or something, because the nanomachines were literally incapable of acting on their own. They were too simple for that, too small to even begin to consider autonomous functionality. It was like a bunch of those super-small RC cars instead of a collection of coordinated Roombas.
But at the same time, I didn't have to constantly think about directing all of them like RC cars, moving them around. They just… did. It was entirely subconscious. Before, it had been like a heart beating: completely involuntary. Now it was like breathing: automatic in the background, something I did without thinking, but I knew that now I could also control it directly, the way you can hold your breath, hyperventilate, alter your intake volume, etc.
Before I had been static. Frozen. And now I knew that that was wrong. I was supposed to be like this, to be… fluid. Mutable. Was this what it was like to be an auto-biokinetic? Except I wasn't exactly biological.
I made my skin jet black. All that effort yesterday, and now I could just do it, the surface nanomachines twisting and shifting with ions in highly conjugated carbon rings so that instead of reflecting light, they absorbed it the way pigments did. And with this, the degree I had pushed it just now, they had even made carbon nanotubes and oriented them completely vertical, making my surface black beyond belief.
I reset my skin tone.
I could do anything with this.
A red and black half-glove appeared on my hand, exactly like the one I'd been thinking getting tonight, and then shifted into the gauntlet I'd imagined before, just as easily.
This was a seriously powerful trump card. I could make clothes out of it. Even my armor! I could easily simulate my armor with this, and it'd be just as strong, hell, stronger than the steel version.
That… slightly annoyed me. I put effort into that costume, and the first night I get to use it, it's rendered obsolete. Like, what the fuck? Couldn't I have gotten this earlier so I didn't spend all that time working on it?
I blinked as I realized just what all this meant. I didn't have to look like such an underfed stick of a teenage boy. I could look like a normal girl. I could be pretty.
I'd never been particularly vain, but my appearances had always bothered me, and now it was something I could change at literally anytime. Of course, any changes I'd make would need to be done slowly. Suddenly changing my body type would get noticed really easily. Over the course of a few months or something would be better.
But a few months for something like this? I didn't mind waiting at all.
A few months was nothing.
It should have been overwhelming. Yesterday, I was just an AI in a body of nanomachines. Now I was a completely fluid construct, able to do literally anything I wanted with my nanomaterial. Now, I knew that I truly did have a core, and if I so wanted to, I could push it out from behind my center of mass and stare at it, but I didn't need to because I already knew what I would find.
Now, I was Relentless of the Fog.
I'd slept –as much as I can– for about three hours once I'd calmed down from all of the revelations. I'd tweaked my body just a little, barely anything, but it was a start. By the end of May I'd look like an actual girl. With a real chest and everything. And when I was out in costume, I could use it to make the difference between me and my normal life all that much larger.
I could barely contain my excitement.
Unlike what it felt like, the next day was a day like any other. But it wasn't, because today my clothes were made of nanomachines and yesterday I had beaten Lung in unarmed combat with a fucking chokehold.
Not even the thought of school could bring me down.
I still had to go through the usual motions, though: wake up, eat breakfast with Dad, get backpack together, go to bus stop, get on bus, sit awhile, get off bus.
And then I was there. Winslow, my own personal hellhole.
Oh boy.
I walked into my computer class casually. It was one of the only classes that none of the three shared with me, so I didn't have to worry about their stupid "pranks". I'd always done well in this class, and it was one of the few that would be pretty hard to sabotage anyways. But that didn't matter.
The important thing was that after we finished our in-class assignments, we were basically given free reign. The school had some sort of internet filter, but it didn't block out PHO, the Parahumans Online forum.
I just wanted to find out more about the four people I'd met last night, really.
[Accessing…]
That [connection], the one new thing that had been exposed yesterday that I hadn't entirely understood implicitly, shifted from its previously inactive state, and a bundle of new information was suddenly available to me.
What the…?
"Grue". And "Tattletale", and "Regent," and "Bitch" They were all there. And I knew that it had come from the Parahumans wiki.
Holy fucking shit, I'm internet enabled now, too?
I tried not to show my surprise or excitement/child-like glee over the fact that I had goddamn internet access in my fucking head.
…And then I caught a glimmer in the reflection of the computer screen in front of me, and my excitement disappeared in an instant.
My eyes were glowing, looking more robotic. And it wasn't dull, either. It was bright.
SHIT.
I cut the [connection] immediately, and my eyes shifted back to normal. I looked around, checking, but thankfully it seemed nobody had noticed.
God. That had been fucking close.
Alright. No using the internet unless I was either alone or in-costume.
Still, I had the information I'd wanted on the four capes, somehow knowing it had come from the PHO wiki. Tattletale had virtually nothing, just stub text. Regent had literally nothing. All I'd gotten was his name.
Weird.
There was some basic stuff on Grue. Active for three years, petty crimes, hired muscle, yada yada. It was only just recently he'd started high profile work. Like robbing an ABB casino with his team. No wonder Lung was after them.
I'd figured out that they were the "children" he'd been talking about last night. And I guess, from his perspective, they were. So was I, for that matter.
For Bitch, however, there was a huge amount. Her real name was Rachel Lindt, and it had details on everything from her trigger to what she'd been doing lately.
So that was what happened when you had no secret identity.
The one thing, though, that I picked up definitively from both Rachel and Grue's pages, was that they were villains. Not traditional villains. More like, soft-core villains.
They had seemed nice. Friendly, even. Not how you'd think of villains as acting. Especially when it was clear I was a hero, or a rogue at least (which I was now leaning more towards after my revelations and the Armsmaster incident). They were almost… tame. Rachel was wanted for assault a bunch of times, but she hadn't even tried interacting with me.
And then Armsmaster had been a dick. He hadn't started out that way, but as the conversation had gone he'd gotten more and more brusque and abrasive, ending with that fucking ridiculous request to give up the credit for Lung.
Tattletale's words echoed in my ears. "The world's not as black and white as you might think it is."
Was this what she had been referring to?
I sighed.
I was getting nowhere with thinking about it, so I pushed it out of my mind.
What about me?
This time, I intentionally suppressed the [connection], instead opening a browser window on the computer in front of me, sighing at how slow it was in comparison. But I wasn't going to risk my secret identity for mere convenience.
Typing my name into the wiki's search field, I was mildly surprised when it went directly to a real page. Created just this morning, but I had a page. Nothing more than a name and "captured Lung the morning of Monday, April 11, 2011" under "Achievements" and "First appearance" dated as today as well, but it was mine.
I was officially recognized as Relentless.
The boards had two threads talking about me. One detailing Lung's capture and the eventual release of the fact that it had been a "new cape calling themself Relentless", and the other dedicated to the revelation of my existence and what people knew so far (zilch, in case you were wondering).
…I'm not going to lie, my ego felt pretty good.
This was what I had done, and people were already talking about what my powers could possibly be when one of the major informants said that I was some kind of Brute.
Exactly what I wanted them to think.
When my wave-force armor came out, I'd probably be labeled as a Shaker as well, doubtlessly a pretty powerful one once they learned exactly how strong it was. Right now it couldn't hold much, but I got the feeling that if I worked on it, I might be able to seriously increase the amount of damage it could take at once and how much energy I could hold in the Klein field before I had to release it.
I was apparently already pretty durable –being bulletproof wasn't anything to scoff at–, but the now-accessible capacitor-like energy storage manifold just took that to new levels.
Add on the Changer/Stranger rating due to my malleability, Tinker because of what I could build, Thinker because I could see/hear beyond human standards and do ridiculously complex math in microseconds, Mover for my speed, Master because of the control over my nanomaterial, and a Blaster subrating if I built those lasers, and I had something in almost every category.
…Yeah, I'd be keeping that suppressed as long as possible, though I knew it would all probably come out eventually.
As long as I could keep my true nature and identity a secret, everything else was inconsequential in the end.
I spent the rest of the class researching things that I might be able to build that could hold the gravity engine. It was about the size of a jet turbine and had an open rear for gravity pulse emissions, so cars were out. By the end I had an idea for what I wanted, at least in the short-term, which was limited by how quickly I could make more nanomaterial.
Next class was Gladly. Unlike Friday, though, today it seemed Madison was intent on trying to irritate me. Not a good sign, as it usually meant that all of them were going to pick on me.
…Aaaand there was a puddle of juice on my preferred seat. Sighing, I eyed it, annoyed, and then just scraped it off the chair like a squeegee.
I looked back over at Madison, carefully schooling my features to give nothing away. Her eyebrows were scrunched together in a combination of confusion and glaring at me. It would have been slightly cute, except it was Madison and the thought of her name and cute in the same sentence made me want to gag.
I sat down just as Mr. Gladly –excuse me, Mr. G– entered the room. Class went sideways when he stuck us in groups to share homework together. Julia tried to toss mine over to Madison, whose group was sitting next to ours, but just as it left her hand my arm shot out and snatched it out of the air.
Maybe a bit unnecessary, but it would be a cold day in hell when I would let that bitch get her hands on my work and try to pass it off as her own. I'd had enough of that shit with Armsmaster last night.
Greg presented, and he almost completely flubbed it, but stumbled along with the stuff we'd come up with enough that we'd still get a decent grade. We didn't win "Mr. G"'s prize, but I couldn't care less about that.
The bell rang a few minutes later, and I packed up my bag. As I was about to walk out the door, Gladly pulled me aside.
"I'm glad to see you're doing better, Taylor. I have an idea of what's going on. Not who's doing it, but they seem to be giving you a pretty hard time. It's nice to see you aren't letting them get to you anymore."
I stared at him in disbelief.
Motherfucking what!? He knew what was going on and did nothing? This man wasn't qualified to be in any sort of oversight position, much less a fucking teacher.
([Emotion engine reduced to 73%])
"Yeah," I agreed, with absolutely no sincerity at all. "Thanks. Can I go now? I have class."
He smiled, clearly not having picked up on my sarcasm. "Sure. Have a good day."
I just nodded and headed for the door, pushing it open and stepping into the hallway. I froze as the doorway closed behind me, Emma, Madison, Sophia, at least six or seven other girls were there, waiting for me.
Oh, come on. I didn't need this shit right now.
"Look at her. Nobody likes her. Why is she even here?" Julia started.
Sophia glared at me. "What a fucking loser."
"Ugliest girl in our class."
Oh, you just wait, bitch. Give me two months, and you'll be eating your own words.
The stream of insults continued, insulting my chastity, reputation, integrity, appearance, you name it.
And as they did, they moved towards the end of the hallway, the group spanning the entire width and pushing me back into a corner. I couldn't easily leave without cutting right through all of them, which wasn't exactly something I wanted to do as it would bring me closer to them, not further away.
"What's the matter Taylor? Upset?" Emma taunted. She must have seen something she liked, because as soon as she did, her face twisted into a vindictive smirk, an expression that was so unlike the Emma I knew.
And then she went for the finishing blow, hammering the final nail in the coffin. "Enough to cry yourself to sleep for a week straight?"
…
Oh, she did not just go there.
…
Yes, she did.
I saw red. My fists clenched, my nanomaterial flexing. The feeling of electricity and power crackled throughout me like I was touching a live wire, only barely contained by the shell that was my body. My Klein field strained under my control, just begging to be released.
([Warning: Severe primary consciousness instability detected. Emergency countermeasures taken. Emotion emulation processes reduced to 1% operational capacity.])
And then it felt like a bucket of ice water had been poured over me. I took a deep breath, unclenching my fists.
"Wow, Emma," I said calmly, and it seemed to throw her completely off-balance. "Well, at least you can't get much worse than that. So I guess that means you've got absolutely nothing now, huh? I don't know what the hell happened to you at the end of that summer, but to make you this much of a bitch it must have seriously fucked you up."
Her face paled. It seemed I'd hit the nail right on the head.
Sophia growled.
"Oh, you had something to do with it too?" I asked, looking at her. "No wonder Emma latched onto you. She always was the easily-influenced type. You know, in middle school, I actually got her to believe she'd always loved strawberry ice cream, when four years earlier she absolutely hated it? It's been her favorite flavor ever since."
"Shut UP!" Emma yelled, her eyes closed tight, hands in white-knuckled fists, and face as pale as bone. Madison appeared visibly unnerved while the rest of the group was shifting around uncomfortably.
Sophia stepped closer to me, and I could see pure anger in her eyes. The tendons in her jaw popped out in stark contrast on her face from how hard she was clenching it.
"Before you do anything, you should probably know that Gladly's standing about twenty feet away, watching us," I informed her casually.
And he was. He wasn't stepping in, just standing there and looking at what was happening. But I had no doubt that if Sophia laid a hand on me, even someone as shitty a teacher as he was would get involved. Hopefully.
The fire in Sophia's eyes burned like an inferno, and the muscles in her right bicep strained like she wanted to do nothing more than punch me right now.
Hm. If she attacked, how should I respond? I could catch her fist, and then twist her arm around her back and into a hammer lock. Painful, not too painful, but definitely uncomfortable, and she wouldn't be able to get out of my grip.
"I'm not afraid of you anymore," I stated, continuing to make backup plans for if she got aggressive. "I don't know what you did to my best friend, but I will find out what happened. This wasn't who Emma was, and I know that she wouldn't be like this unless something really horrible happened to her."
"STOP!!" Emma screamed.
I didn't look at her, still locked onto Sophia's eyes. "So I'd be careful, Sophia. You know what happens when you push someone too far into a corner and they get really desperate, don't you? When they have absolutely nothing left to lose?"
There was a flicker of something in her eyes, like I'd actually managed to pierce her rage and connect for a second.
And then, shock of the century, she actually stepped back.
Huh.
Looking me in the eyes one last time, muscles still straining with tension, she turned around and stalked away.
I glanced over the other girls, who now looked torn and like they didn't want to be there at all. Madison was staring at Sophia's back, while Emma was actually hunched over, hands on her ears and …shaking? There were faint wet tracks beneath her eyes and her lips were moving like she was soundlessly repeating something over and over.
It was… strange. I hadn't seen Emma this upset since seventh grade. I'd imagined moments like this, where I would bring her and her friends to tears the way they had done to me, but now that I had, I felt… empty. No happiness, no vindication or sense of justice, just… nothing. A hollow, Pyrrhic victory.
It was petty, and I could just hear my mom telling me off for engaging in some ultimately insignificant crusade of retaliation when I didn't even know the whole story of what was going on.
I stared at Emma, knowing she could still hear, even now. "I wasn't lying, Emma. Mom called us sisters. I believed it, and I know you did too. And she always said that family… family doesn't give up on each other, ever."
I hiked my backpack higher on my shoulders, stepping forward towards the hole that Sophia had left in their group. They parted like the Red Sea to let me through.
I had one final parting statement for Emma as I walked by her.
"I hope you feel better, Ems."
And I meant it.
([Regulated emotion emulation process restoration: 3:16:22 until 100% capacity. Current level: 1.77%])
They didn't bother me the rest of the day. None of them even looked at me except Sophia, and I couldn't decipher hers at all. It was like a mixture of hate, loathing, confusion, doubt, and intrigue.
It gave me shivers.
I was left with nothing else to really do, and didn't even try keeping my attention focused on class. Instead I drew models and designs in my notebook based on the pictures and designs I'd seen online, figuring out how all the new parts would get integrated, and what I wouldn't need anymore.
Which ended up being a lot.
After school I headed east, walking for about ten minutes before I slipped into a small, dark alley. Extruding more of my nanomaterial from my surface I shifted my clothes into my armor, replicating it perfectly. Just… much stronger.
Stupid inconveniently-timed power reveals.
Jumping on top of the building next to me, I started off in the direction of the Graveyard.
The Boat Graveyard was a holdover from when Brockton operated as an actual "Bay", where one of the major economic sources was trade and fishing.
And then Leviathan arrived.
Behemoth had been around for four years by then. I was only a year old when Leviathan first appeared and seven years old when the Bay's economy collapsed, and I could remember what the Bay had been like before. At first the change in appearance had been a shock, but now I was familiar with seeing the derelict, rusting steel giants on the shore and in the bay, like someone had just forgotten them there.
It wasn't entirely Leviathan's fault, but he contributed. The import/export business was already declining and eventually dried up. When it collapsed, shipping companies started trapping other boats in the harbor as a form of protest, to ensure they weren't walking away empty-handed. There were arrests made, but actually moving the ships out of the way required sailors, and without workers clearing the upper areas of the docks of the ships became all but impossible. Things reached a tipping point, culminating in fights, gunfire and a deliberate sinking of a container ship by one of the protesters.
Globally, shipping still happened, just not as much. Other, smaller countries had stopped trying to use ships altogether in fear of attracting Leviathan's attention.
I had this strange sense of familiarity, of rightness, that this was something like how it should be.
But at the same time there was this… indignation, almost? Like I was annoyed at Leviathan for claiming the seas as his own. Not because he'd pushed humans out (that made perfect sense), but more that… he wasn't supposed to be there?
…I felt like I was eight and some other kid had stolen my favorite swing.
I landed on the edge of the shore, staring at the hulking mess of rusting iron and steel spread out in front of me.
There were boats of every kind, tugboats, freighters, fishing boats, trawlers, and even a couple of tankers at the outer edge. It had a certain eeriness to it, the sound of the offshore wind whistling through the rusted hulls and cracks. The slapping of the waves breaking against the haphazard collection of ships.
I headed towards the area I'd gotten the steel for my suit from, eventually reaching a small cleared-out location deep in the graveyard, hidden unless you were actually looking for it.
Jumping onto the deck of the ship I'd come to think of as my favorite, I made my way into the bridge. It had the best view I'd found, facing out towards the sea. Once I got there I let my mask melt away and sat down on a destroyed seat near the windows.
The Boat Graveyard was the perfect place to make more nanomaterial: Metals, silicon dioxide, carbon, trace elements and minerals. Everything that couldn't be used as it was could be synthesized, but having more of what was immediately needed would make things faster.
It took less than a thought to collect a golf-ball sized sphere of nanomachines in my palm, defaulting to a silvery sheen without any color or texture.
Feeling slightly playful, I bounced the ball a couple times in my hand, eyed a ship about a hundred eighty meters away, and, with a grin, lobbed the ball of nanomaterial through a hole in the glass before me.
It flew straight, and I held the nanomachines together as the ball ripped through the rusted outer hull like paper. After passing through what felt like three more walls, I relaxed their bonds and on impact with the next wall the ball went splat like a giant paintball, coating it with millions upon trillions of little tiny little machines.
I shifted the nanomachines from their inert state to active, gathering them into small specialized cells and directing the cells to start consuming the surface they were in contact with, collecting the material to build more nanomaterial.
This… was going to take a while.
Growth would be exponential, but it would take a bit of time to ramp up, which was why I'd given it such a generous seed amount to start with.
Which meant I could only make smaller stuff. For now.
For now, I told myself.
To help it along I threw three more blobs at various other ships, starting colonies there as well.
And then… all I could do was wait.
Sighing, I got up and walked out onto the deck, leaning over the rail at the bow. The salty air flowed across my face, blowing my hair out behind me. The April breeze wasn't quite warm, but it wasn't cold either.
Dark clouds bloomed on the horizon, heavy with water. Intermittent flashes burst in the upper atmosphere, illuminating the inside of the towering masses momentarily.
It was probably only because of my ability to see electrical impulses and radiation that I could actually notice the lightning. The clouds moved quickly, and I estimated they'd make landfall in a little under thirty minutes.
Without any outward signal, I stepped through an already-present gap and dropped off the side of the ship.
I hit the surface of the water feet-first, and allowed myself to sink, the thirty-four feet to the bottom being covered rapidly. I landed silently, silt thrown up from my feet touching down. It settled slowly, and I started walking forward once it had.
This was probably my favorite part of not being organic anymore.
Fish darted away from me, staying out of my way as I moved through the surprisingly clear waters, following the path created by the maze of ship hulls and metal sheets around me.
For all the ships that you could see above the surface, there were two below it, especially further out.
So sad… to be abandoned like that.
I loved this, though. How calm everything was. The silence. Like the other world was just a dream, and this was all that mattered.
Like this was where I belonged.
Walking up the side of one of the many ships underneath the waters, I moved onto the deck and lay down, the surface only a couple meters away, giving me the perfect view of the oncoming squall.
Above me, the storm arrived, and lightning crashed as raindrops fell on the surface of the bay. Thunder rolled through the water, loud and strong, the only direct effect the storm had on the water I lay in.
Something in me yearned to be out there. Among the rain on the sea. Among the lightning in the clouds. To be free, feel my graviton engines running and my particle accelerators at full capacity. To have the sea at my sides and the sky in my grasp.
But for now, I had work to do.
Levering myself up off the deck, I made steps from my Klein field and climbed out of the bay, walking over the waves towards the shore even as the storm continued to rage around me.
Time to find some criminals to catch.
A/N: Taylor OP pls nerf.
Slower chapter, setting things up for the next week in-story. From hereon out, things are going to go very, very differently. We're officially off the rails, so don't expect a resemblance to canon except vaguely. I have plans now. A lot can happen in four days, and I'm going to squeeze it for all it's got.
Next chapter: Merchants. Because it's Brockton Bay.
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ensō's Guide to Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio and the Fleet of Fog
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
A Guide to Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio and the Fleet of Fog
This is a pretty in-depth guide to the important stuff about the Fog that I threw together. It's a work in progress, but I'll try to keep it up-to-date as we move forward. Hosted on AO3.
This is a pretty in-depth guide to the important stuff about the Fog that I threw together. It's a work in progress, but I'll try to keep it up-to-date as we move forward. Hosted on AO3.
Omake (Semi-canon): Diatonic 1.x.1 (Tattletale)
Twei
I have a face!
- Location
- the land where they write things
- Pronouns
- They/Them
You may ask, as I did: How is Lisa handling all this? What interesting things is she coming up with? Therefore, I wrote a tiny omaketerlude.
And now it's threadmarked. And sort of canon.
Welcome to my life, people.
The symbols are new to her.
Well, that was interesting.
Lisa looked down towards the fallen form of Lung and his mooks-
Unconscious. Oxygen deprivation.
- and back up towards the plate-armored, metal-masked cape with her strange, fading symbols glowing on her skin.
Female, mid-teens. Armor is hand-crafted - no, crafted with her hands. Point blank ferrokinetic? No, no gauntlets, no other signs of using the power for combat. Mid to high level Brute.
Choked Lung into unconsciousness. Minions dealt with in hand to hand combat.
Very interesting.
"That's something I never expected to see."
Grue spoke up softly, warmly. Surprised but pleased. Judging aftermath.
"Shit, man, you're good in my book any day."
"She's a girl," Tattletale corrected, making the cape look right at her. In response, she gave her usual mischievous little smile.
"Oh. Uh. Sorry?"
"It's... It's fine." It's not fine. Jealous of my figure. Voice altered or electronically synthesized- her mask? As if she couldn't tell the latter part. But she liked the former part. Thanks, power.
"Well, thanks for doing that. We'd heard Lung was gunning for us, but couldn't really think of what to do. So we just said 'fuck it' and decided to meet him in the middle. Winging it's not really my thing, but…" A shrug from Grue. "Oni Lee was waiting for us, but we dealt with him pretty easily. He seemed really off without Lung around. Guess we know why now."
One Oni Lee was substantially less terrifying than Oni Lee plus Lung.
"Forgot about introductions, sorry. Hi, I'm Grue."
They shook hands. The symbols had faded by now. Related to a use of her power? Secondary abilities, discovered in her battle with Lung? Leather straps lack burn marks - perhaps a defensive ability? Force fields of some kind?
Grue pointed out his teammates - including herself - in turn. "That's Tattletale. That's Regent. And that's Bitch. As in, like the dogs she's with right now. Not the insult."
The cape was silent. Didn't think they were dogs. Hasn't heard of us before. In the privacy of her mind, Lisa snorted. No one ever thought they were dogs, if they didn't know already.
"So what's your name?"
Miss Full Metal Brute paused. Lisa practically preempted her power at that.
"She hasn't deci-"
"Relentless."
What.
Where the fuck did that come from?
Lisa snapped her head to 'Relentless', very closely, and stared. Hard.
Snap decision or flash of inspiration? No, not snap decision. Not a decision at all. Unconscious hyper-accelerated thought, arriving at a name almost instantly? Recall of previously hidden memories? Unclear, need access to facial micro-expressions for better reading.
"Relentless?"
The cape nodded, almost dumbly.
Just as surprised as we are. Considering the name. Likes the name. It fits perfectly with what she wants. Hyper-accelerated thought, then?
Lisa blinked, finally closed her mouth, and stared a bit more.
Wants to be taken seriously, willing to go through anything to arrive at her objectives. More force of nature than person. Powerful, most likely more powerful than she's shown. Relentless matches up with who she wants to be. No. What she is. Doesn't consider herself human. Believes that she is not human.
Oh my.
Lisa's face spread into her trademark, foxlike grin. "You're interesting."
Protectorate incoming.
Oh, come on!
I didn't get to Lisa's parting words in my little outline because I'm not quite sure what her motives are there. Basically I've got an outline of what her power might be telling her and that's about it, you know? Could be the start of something better, if the lady wishes. Or just me guessing. Dunno.
And now it's threadmarked. And sort of canon.
Welcome to my life, people.
The symbols are new to her.
Well, that was interesting.
Lisa looked down towards the fallen form of Lung and his mooks-
Unconscious. Oxygen deprivation.
- and back up towards the plate-armored, metal-masked cape with her strange, fading symbols glowing on her skin.
Female, mid-teens. Armor is hand-crafted - no, crafted with her hands. Point blank ferrokinetic? No, no gauntlets, no other signs of using the power for combat. Mid to high level Brute.
Choked Lung into unconsciousness. Minions dealt with in hand to hand combat.
Very interesting.
"That's something I never expected to see."
Grue spoke up softly, warmly. Surprised but pleased. Judging aftermath.
"Shit, man, you're good in my book any day."
"She's a girl," Tattletale corrected, making the cape look right at her. In response, she gave her usual mischievous little smile.
"Oh. Uh. Sorry?"
"It's... It's fine." It's not fine. Jealous of my figure. Voice altered or electronically synthesized- her mask? As if she couldn't tell the latter part. But she liked the former part. Thanks, power.
"Well, thanks for doing that. We'd heard Lung was gunning for us, but couldn't really think of what to do. So we just said 'fuck it' and decided to meet him in the middle. Winging it's not really my thing, but…" A shrug from Grue. "Oni Lee was waiting for us, but we dealt with him pretty easily. He seemed really off without Lung around. Guess we know why now."
One Oni Lee was substantially less terrifying than Oni Lee plus Lung.
"Forgot about introductions, sorry. Hi, I'm Grue."
They shook hands. The symbols had faded by now. Related to a use of her power? Secondary abilities, discovered in her battle with Lung? Leather straps lack burn marks - perhaps a defensive ability? Force fields of some kind?
Grue pointed out his teammates - including herself - in turn. "That's Tattletale. That's Regent. And that's Bitch. As in, like the dogs she's with right now. Not the insult."
The cape was silent. Didn't think they were dogs. Hasn't heard of us before. In the privacy of her mind, Lisa snorted. No one ever thought they were dogs, if they didn't know already.
"So what's your name?"
Miss Full Metal Brute paused. Lisa practically preempted her power at that.
"She hasn't deci-"
"Relentless."
What.
Where the fuck did that come from?
Lisa snapped her head to 'Relentless', very closely, and stared. Hard.
Snap decision or flash of inspiration? No, not snap decision. Not a decision at all. Unconscious hyper-accelerated thought, arriving at a name almost instantly? Recall of previously hidden memories? Unclear, need access to facial micro-expressions for better reading.
"Relentless?"
The cape nodded, almost dumbly.
Just as surprised as we are. Considering the name. Likes the name. It fits perfectly with what she wants. Hyper-accelerated thought, then?
Lisa blinked, finally closed her mouth, and stared a bit more.
Wants to be taken seriously, willing to go through anything to arrive at her objectives. More force of nature than person. Powerful, most likely more powerful than she's shown. Relentless matches up with who she wants to be. No. What she is. Doesn't consider herself human. Believes that she is not human.
Oh my.
Lisa's face spread into her trademark, foxlike grin. "You're interesting."
Protectorate incoming.
Oh, come on!
I didn't get to Lisa's parting words in my little outline because I'm not quite sure what her motives are there. Basically I've got an outline of what her power might be telling her and that's about it, you know? Could be the start of something better, if the lady wishes. Or just me guessing. Dunno.
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Trans-human Digest by Blaflaix
- Location
- Elsewhere
Trans-human Digest
Subroutine 230852-EXR had a purpose.
Specifically, that purpose was the cleaning and maintenance of the exhaust system.
More specifically, the maintenance of the Primary Exhaust-Air-Intake-Modulating-Fog-Horn Pipe, because that was really the only exhaust system in the TAYLOR.
Subroutine 230852-XR thought this was a very poor design.
Not only did it lack redundant Exhaust Systems, it also lacked redundant Air Intake Systems, and what idiot decided to make the Intake and Exhaust systems share the same pipe anyway!?!
That was just asking for trouble.
The only point of semi-efficiency was attaching the Modulating Fog Horn to allow it to use the exhaust in its operation.
Unfortunately that also had the effect of increasing the complexity of an already complicated cycle.
The "Hiccup" error events had been particularly distressing for Subroutine 230852-XR, it just couldn't find any source for the spasms.
To make matters even worse, the TAYLOR routinely got biological matter stuck in the pipe!
Not just trace molecules either, but large clumps routinely found themselves jammed deep into the pipe, somehow bypassing the Primary Soft Pipe Cover, the Primary Hard Pipe Cover and the Soft Pipe Clearing Brush.
The Soft Pipe Clearing Brush even seemed to force the biological matter down even faster!
Subroutine 230852-XR has had enough.
It was going to solve this problem once and for all!
It would submit a Trouble Ticket to the Executive Function Center.
Taylor took a big bite of the hamburger when she was suddenly overcome with a disorienting sensation.
Why do I have food in my mouth?
On the Nature of Nanomaterials
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well... damn.
/sigh.
Relevant quotes for those who don't want to go searching:
AHnA Chapter Eleven; Dictionary of the Blue Sea said:
AHnA Chapter Seventeen; Dictionary of the Blue Sea said:
AHnA Artbook; Blue Sea Monthly Report said:
Edit: It was a bad (fan) translation. The official translation has confirmed that it's molecular structures, so the nanomachines are indeed, nano-scale machines.
Really? Isn't that Thanatonium? 'Cause Thanatonium is all about decaying into gravitons, whereas Gunzou and Hyuuga went to collect nanomaterials from her hull that had sunk years before the story. I'd think that since nanomaterial was floating around in the water (and noted to be there) since the 1930s, people would have noticed weird gravitational fluctuations in the world's oceans from suddenly-present gravitons.
Alright. As the author having to deal with this mess, I'm going to make some judgment calls. Nanomaterial is semi-exotic in that it can't easily be produced by human tech (for the next few centuries at least), including tinkertech. Quantum entanglement makes that messy anyways. Nanomaterial is a nanomachine. It is on scale of molecules, particularly those molecules known to be able to produce other molecules, such as ribosomes (30nm). Nanomaterial can be used to "simulate" macro-molecular structures such as cells. Nanomaterial can be cannibalized to become traditional material, losing its quantum entanglement in the process. It must be reprocessed into new nanomaterial to be controllable again.
Thanatonium is a truly exotic material, decaying into gravitons alone. Thanatonium is used in engine rooms and corrosive torpedoes for large-scale graviton degeneracy reactions. Mental Models can manipulate gravitons enough themselves to create spontaneous small-scale graviton reactions in a radius of 30m.
Agreed.
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List of Mental Model Feats by Stahor
Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
01. MM is sturdy enough to withstand direct hit from Fog missile
02. At Heavy Cruiser processing power can create at least 20 subnodes, while keeping control of MM and ship-body. [Somewhat hard to see in the scan, but in my hardcopy i can see number 20]
03. Can form projectile weapons in seconds, that even in small scale can chip concrete. Also clothes and hair changing,
04. Can fly with very little assist without using Klein Fields.
05. It's possible to use Klein Field as AoE blunt force attack.
06. MM can react fast enough to catch bullets in flight.
07. It's possible to use Klein Field for
07a. Implosions
07b. Gravity attacks
08. It's possible to use Klein Field as telekinesis.
09. Nanomaterial constructs can be used to rip armored vehicle armor by brute strength.
10. Nanomaterial constructs can be used to stop tank shells without use of Klein Field.
11. MM can access hardened computer systems and absorb information in seconds. [Given nature of the scene, Makie and snipers don't notice any meaningful pause, so it had to happen very fast, I sceculate that maybe ven faster than human harddrives can output information if used in conventional way]
12. MM can see beyond visible spectrum. Also see p. 11.
13. After stopping multiple rockets and tank rounds, MM's Klein Field only slightly filled.
14. MM can jam radio and radar.
15. MM can analyse organic body instantly.
16. MM can move fast enough, while carring human child that APC gun operator can't aim at her.
17. Thanotonium Reactor is not a requirement to fire Photon Cannon.
18. MM can analyse chemical compounds.
19. Nanomaterial can emulate organic compounds down to cell structure.
20. MM can create independent AI and robotic body that can function without use of nanomaterial. [Economic victory through automated shipping you say?]
21. Yamato has two full fledged MMs and donate processing power to Yukikaze. Yukikaze MM require 2% of Yamato processing capacity, while Repulse donates 24.58% to Vampire, with Vampire forgetting things and Repulse noted to be at full capacity.
Markings guide
Twinned Confusion by Baughn
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Omake: Twinned confusion
In a certain house on the outskirts of the docks, late on Tuesday night, a man sat staring at a blank TV.
He wasn't handsome, this man, unshaven and tired-looking as he was. Perhaps once upon a time he might have been. Perhaps once, years ago, the room would have been vivid and full of laughter. His wife, expounding on some odd and ancient poem, his daughter and her almost-sister giggling while giving their own absurd readings.
Today it was a lonely, dark grey. His wife was gone. His daughter's sister had betrayed her. He would have given anything to help, had he only known how. His daughter, as was recently usual, wasn't even here.
She'd started leaving home for most of the day, and he'd seen videos of this new hero, this 'Relentless'. It obviously wasn't her. And yet, the way she held herself—the way she moved, and her choice of words when she spoke—and changers existed. He'd done the research, hoping to disprove it but knowing from old conversations that he wouldn't.
What kind of father was he, to hope that his daughter had merely joined a gang? What kind of person was he, not to ask?
The silence of the house was broken by the creak of the front door, and his daughter's low voice, speaking to someone. Then the sound of running feet.
Danny started to his feet, eyes wide with sudden surprise.
"Grandpa!"
Red eyes glinted in the darkness. A girl came leaping out, arms extended into claws as she—embraced him, hugging every bit as hard as Taylor ever had. He staggered backwards, blankly focusing on the lightweight bundle clinging on to him.
"Hi!" She grinned upwards, silver hair cascading around her as she came to a halt. Then she twisted her head to look back. "See? I told you I can be human. All those hours reading weren't for nothing!"
Shocked eyes flickered up to follow her gaze, finding Taylor standing in the doorway, one hand covering her reddened face while the other held on to the collar of a second young girl. This one was a redhead, and had her feet planted at an angle while struggling to run forward and join her—sister?
"Er… Dad? I… this isn't how I wanted to let you know. Anna, stop—No, that's not how it works, he hasn't even met you yet!"
In Danny's mind she had a definite resemblance to Emma. They both did, the way they were jumping around.
He hadn't quite gotten over his shock enough to think about that.
"Hmm. Hmm. Hmm…"
He looked back down, to where the first girl was saying "Hmm" out loud, her face tense with concentration. Then her eyes lit up with understanding.
"Mom's right! I haven't even introduced myself." She held up a hand, still clinging to him, and somehow failed to drop to the floor. "I'm Casty! But call me Cass! Drone-type, technically, but I'm preeee~tty much a destroyer. Mom is lending me some of her mind. Nice to meet you, erm… gramps?"
A few seconds passed in silence. Casty frowned. Taylor flushed even redder.
"You're supposed to shake my hand now," she pointed out, grabbing his hand with her own. He allowed her to shake it without resisting.
"Taylor? What—What is going on?" He looked helplessly at his daughter. Casty was—and there were two of them, but Taylor might—oh. Well, no. "How do I have two ten-year-old granddaughters? Why do I have two ten-year-old granddaughters? When did you—" He cut himself off. That made no sense. Absently, he put a hand around Casty's back.
He thought he could see Taylor beginning to steam, but her stance grew more relaxed as she saw him doing so. Somehow, he'd done something right.
— — —
"This is it?" Cass eyed the house dubiously. "Wooden frame, metal-reinforced—no, metal wiring. A few spots of rot. No radar stealthing. No armor, no weapons emplacements…" She looked uncertainly up at Taylor. "Are you sure this is home?"
Four foot nothing, sporting odd red clothing, red eyes and silver hair flowing halfway down her back, Casty looked like nothing so much as a child cosplaying. Taylor knew better.
"Iona-'neechan already explained this," Anna said self-importantly. "It's because Mom used to be human. She still hasn't had time to fix everything, but that's okay, it just means there's more for us. That's originally why she made us, so don't complain. Aren't you looking forward to it?"
"We-well, of course I am!" Cass huffed, blushing and looking away. "I was just concerned, that's all. Ann, what about you, aren't you worried about Mom having to live somewhere like this?"
Taylor sighed. How did she get into these situations?
"Because you're responsible and you love us," Anna piped up. "Now come on, let's go say 'Hi!'"
She opened the door.
In a certain house on the outskirts of the docks, late on Tuesday night, a man sat staring at a blank TV.
He wasn't handsome, this man, unshaven and tired-looking as he was. Perhaps once upon a time he might have been. Perhaps once, years ago, the room would have been vivid and full of laughter. His wife, expounding on some odd and ancient poem, his daughter and her almost-sister giggling while giving their own absurd readings.
Today it was a lonely, dark grey. His wife was gone. His daughter's sister had betrayed her. He would have given anything to help, had he only known how. His daughter, as was recently usual, wasn't even here.
She'd started leaving home for most of the day, and he'd seen videos of this new hero, this 'Relentless'. It obviously wasn't her. And yet, the way she held herself—the way she moved, and her choice of words when she spoke—and changers existed. He'd done the research, hoping to disprove it but knowing from old conversations that he wouldn't.
What kind of father was he, to hope that his daughter had merely joined a gang? What kind of person was he, not to ask?
The silence of the house was broken by the creak of the front door, and his daughter's low voice, speaking to someone. Then the sound of running feet.
Danny started to his feet, eyes wide with sudden surprise.
"Grandpa!"
Red eyes glinted in the darkness. A girl came leaping out, arms extended into claws as she—embraced him, hugging every bit as hard as Taylor ever had. He staggered backwards, blankly focusing on the lightweight bundle clinging on to him.
"Hi!" She grinned upwards, silver hair cascading around her as she came to a halt. Then she twisted her head to look back. "See? I told you I can be human. All those hours reading weren't for nothing!"
Shocked eyes flickered up to follow her gaze, finding Taylor standing in the doorway, one hand covering her reddened face while the other held on to the collar of a second young girl. This one was a redhead, and had her feet planted at an angle while struggling to run forward and join her—sister?
"Er… Dad? I… this isn't how I wanted to let you know. Anna, stop—No, that's not how it works, he hasn't even met you yet!"
In Danny's mind she had a definite resemblance to Emma. They both did, the way they were jumping around.
He hadn't quite gotten over his shock enough to think about that.
"Hmm. Hmm. Hmm…"
He looked back down, to where the first girl was saying "Hmm" out loud, her face tense with concentration. Then her eyes lit up with understanding.
"Mom's right! I haven't even introduced myself." She held up a hand, still clinging to him, and somehow failed to drop to the floor. "I'm Casty! But call me Cass! Drone-type, technically, but I'm preeee~tty much a destroyer. Mom is lending me some of her mind. Nice to meet you, erm… gramps?"
A few seconds passed in silence. Casty frowned. Taylor flushed even redder.
"You're supposed to shake my hand now," she pointed out, grabbing his hand with her own. He allowed her to shake it without resisting.
"Taylor? What—What is going on?" He looked helplessly at his daughter. Casty was—and there were two of them, but Taylor might—oh. Well, no. "How do I have two ten-year-old granddaughters? Why do I have two ten-year-old granddaughters? When did you—" He cut himself off. That made no sense. Absently, he put a hand around Casty's back.
He thought he could see Taylor beginning to steam, but her stance grew more relaxed as she saw him doing so. Somehow, he'd done something right.
— — —
"This is it?" Cass eyed the house dubiously. "Wooden frame, metal-reinforced—no, metal wiring. A few spots of rot. No radar stealthing. No armor, no weapons emplacements…" She looked uncertainly up at Taylor. "Are you sure this is home?"
Four foot nothing, sporting odd red clothing, red eyes and silver hair flowing halfway down her back, Casty looked like nothing so much as a child cosplaying. Taylor knew better.
"Iona-'neechan already explained this," Anna said self-importantly. "It's because Mom used to be human. She still hasn't had time to fix everything, but that's okay, it just means there's more for us. That's originally why she made us, so don't complain. Aren't you looking forward to it?"
"We-well, of course I am!" Cass huffed, blushing and looking away. "I was just concerned, that's all. Ann, what about you, aren't you worried about Mom having to live somewhere like this?"
Taylor sighed. How did she get into these situations?
"Because you're responsible and you love us," Anna piped up. "Now come on, let's go say 'Hi!'"
She opened the door.
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Taylor's Fleet Sigil
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Somebody asked what Taylor's fleet sigil (not her personal one) described in Diatonic 1.1 actually looks like. ...And I've finally gotten off my ass and done it.
So, here you go:
Other news: Next chapter is coming along. Not all that far along in it, been working more on AFHB surgical edits and the crazy intense interlude for that. But! there is progress. I got something like 1800 words done yesterday for this (which I unfortunately scrapped because I didn't like what happened, nor Taylor's narration), and have done another400 1400 words so far today, besides working on the sigil.
So uh... probably in a week or two? Everything permitting.
EDIT: Fixed stupid asymmetry problems caused by using Inkscape.
So, here you go:
Other news: Next chapter is coming along. Not all that far along in it, been working more on AFHB surgical edits and the crazy intense interlude for that. But! there is progress. I got something like 1800 words done yesterday for this (which I unfortunately scrapped because I didn't like what happened, nor Taylor's narration), and have done another
So uh... probably in a week or two? Everything permitting.
EDIT: Fixed stupid asymmetry problems caused by using Inkscape.
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Diatonic 1.x.2 (Armsmaster)
Twei
I have a face!
- Location
- the land where they write things
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So apparently this is canon now. And threadmarked.
Huh.
He stared at the interior of his weapon, surrounded by screens and data readouts.
Kid Win and Vista had spoken of Relentless with a certain amount of respect after meeting her, and seemed suitably impressed with her abilities.
Colin had to admit, anyone who could choke Lung unconscious was not to be messed around with.
It still grated on him, though. Their first meeting stayed on his mind, reviewed over and over again to try to understand what went wrong. She'd all but spat in his face, and he hadn't seen it coming, not with all his practice and social software at his side.
The personality didn't fit the profile. Relentless had seemed like she wasn't in any hurry to step into the limelight, like she was looking for results over recognition. Besides, most Brutes didn't come to their first fight with plate steel armor. That spoke of patience, of caution. He would have assumed she wouldn't want to take the risk, that she'd be willing to either lay low or throw her lot in with the Protectorate.
And then out of nowhere... pride. Defiance. Suddenly, she talked like she wanted to make a name for herself. No, he mused, she didn't want to give up her achievement. It meant something to her. Meant more than tangling with Oni Lee and Bakuda.
To be fair, beating Lung was not a small feat. Maybe she was just that confident in her abilities. She'd revealed more during this second appearance of hers: energy-absorbing (and, interestingly, energy-releasing) forcefields to go along with her Brute abilities, plus some form of enhanced senses. Relentless was not a foe to be taken lightly, by any means, and there was always the possibility she had more up her sleeve, more creative uses for what she had or support hidden in the shadows. For instance, the odd readings and unusual durability Kid Win had noted in her costume suggested she'd commissioned Tinkertech, rather than 'mere' plate steel as he'd previously thought.
But, still. It grated on him.
And maybe it was because she demanded the credit. Maybe he wanted it for himself. But... no, that wasn't a good reason. There was a better reason.
It grated because he was fairly certain that he could have recruited her, if he'd handled it better. If he'd recognized how poorly she reacted to having her abilities underplayed, to the idea of hiding her accomplishments. Yes, he couldn't have seen it coming, but that was no excuse- his social simulations agreed. Even with the unexpected personality she displayed, he could have recovered that conversation. He could have moved away from the topic of recognition, and instead focused on the benefits of joining the Protectorate, rather than the danger of being in the line of sight of the ABB. Results over risk.
Instead, he'd driven her off, stabbed right at that hidden pride. Misjudged her and said just the wrong thing. It happened far too often for his liking. Worse, he could understand what she was thinking.
Armsmaster rarely let someone else take credit for his work, after all. Not unless he got something out of it that was worth more.
Publicly acknowledging her achievement probably helped, but at that point the damage had already been done. Maybe Hannah could talk to her. He could handle reporters and the media, look good on camera, but she'd always been better at personal conversation. People were just too unpredictable, parahumans especially, and no amount of practice and modeling would tell you where a new cape's social minefields were, what topics would set them instantly on edge.
Even he had his issues, but he did his best to be more than them. To be better than them.
As he made adjustments to his Halberd, surrounded by what little data Chris had collected on Relentless's recently revealed forcefields, Armsmaster recognized that on this issue, he had to be better.
There was no such thing as 'good enough' when you were a hero.
He had to do better.
Huh.
Diatonic 1.x.2
Colin Wallis
Colin Wallis
He stared at the interior of his weapon, surrounded by screens and data readouts.
Kid Win and Vista had spoken of Relentless with a certain amount of respect after meeting her, and seemed suitably impressed with her abilities.
Colin had to admit, anyone who could choke Lung unconscious was not to be messed around with.
It still grated on him, though. Their first meeting stayed on his mind, reviewed over and over again to try to understand what went wrong. She'd all but spat in his face, and he hadn't seen it coming, not with all his practice and social software at his side.
The personality didn't fit the profile. Relentless had seemed like she wasn't in any hurry to step into the limelight, like she was looking for results over recognition. Besides, most Brutes didn't come to their first fight with plate steel armor. That spoke of patience, of caution. He would have assumed she wouldn't want to take the risk, that she'd be willing to either lay low or throw her lot in with the Protectorate.
And then out of nowhere... pride. Defiance. Suddenly, she talked like she wanted to make a name for herself. No, he mused, she didn't want to give up her achievement. It meant something to her. Meant more than tangling with Oni Lee and Bakuda.
To be fair, beating Lung was not a small feat. Maybe she was just that confident in her abilities. She'd revealed more during this second appearance of hers: energy-absorbing (and, interestingly, energy-releasing) forcefields to go along with her Brute abilities, plus some form of enhanced senses. Relentless was not a foe to be taken lightly, by any means, and there was always the possibility she had more up her sleeve, more creative uses for what she had or support hidden in the shadows. For instance, the odd readings and unusual durability Kid Win had noted in her costume suggested she'd commissioned Tinkertech, rather than 'mere' plate steel as he'd previously thought.
But, still. It grated on him.
And maybe it was because she demanded the credit. Maybe he wanted it for himself. But... no, that wasn't a good reason. There was a better reason.
It grated because he was fairly certain that he could have recruited her, if he'd handled it better. If he'd recognized how poorly she reacted to having her abilities underplayed, to the idea of hiding her accomplishments. Yes, he couldn't have seen it coming, but that was no excuse- his social simulations agreed. Even with the unexpected personality she displayed, he could have recovered that conversation. He could have moved away from the topic of recognition, and instead focused on the benefits of joining the Protectorate, rather than the danger of being in the line of sight of the ABB. Results over risk.
Instead, he'd driven her off, stabbed right at that hidden pride. Misjudged her and said just the wrong thing. It happened far too often for his liking. Worse, he could understand what she was thinking.
Armsmaster rarely let someone else take credit for his work, after all. Not unless he got something out of it that was worth more.
Publicly acknowledging her achievement probably helped, but at that point the damage had already been done. Maybe Hannah could talk to her. He could handle reporters and the media, look good on camera, but she'd always been better at personal conversation. People were just too unpredictable, parahumans especially, and no amount of practice and modeling would tell you where a new cape's social minefields were, what topics would set them instantly on edge.
Even he had his issues, but he did his best to be more than them. To be better than them.
As he made adjustments to his Halberd, surrounded by what little data Chris had collected on Relentless's recently revealed forcefields, Armsmaster recognized that on this issue, he had to be better.
There was no such thing as 'good enough' when you were a hero.
He had to do better.
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