Firebird Zoom
Pretty Bird
- Location
- Who knows?
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ok, this is fun and all, but I think that this has gone on long enough.
Transposition, or: Ship Happens [Worm/Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio | Arpeggio of Blue Steel]
- Thread starter ensou
- Start date
- Crossover
Zelinko
Ordinary Magician
- Location
- Forest of Magic
One of the interesting possibilities raised by the reveals if was known earlier could have had Relentless using a different but significant name and be on the path of something just as incredible if not more than she is now
Also it's it weird that I'm calling Taylor Relentless over her given name?
Also it's it weird that I'm calling Taylor Relentless over her given name?
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Nah, that's normal for most fan fictions for Worm. Seen it all the time.
Selonianth
Writer of Words
Taylor, as a person, doesn't like being... Taylor. She tends to become her cape-self. In a very real way it's more of how she really is than her civilian self. Thus, like Batman, we refer to her as she really is, instead of the mask she occasionally uses to trick the general populace.
... Also it helps differentiate between fics for some of us. If you've read Queen of Blood you know who Rolyat is for instance.
... Also it helps differentiate between fics for some of us. If you've read Queen of Blood you know who Rolyat is for instance.
- Location
- Warszawa Polska
It just so happens that each time Skynet shows up in Worm fic it is a net positive influence.
Worm is so dark that Good-Guy Skynet is only logical course a Robot intelligence can go.
Zelinko
Ordinary Magician
- Location
- Forest of Magic
Relentless may become just that. Compared to the humans we got in setting the Fleet of Fog are down right heroic. I mean at least they're not going around destroying cities or being generally awful like the Endbringers or various empowered groups are, and there really ain't much status quo change when it comes to the entire 'Humanity is denied from the seas' situation
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- Location
- Stockton-On-Tees
*The coming of Skynet was foretold by the Saint!*
Everyone else cheered!
Everyone else cheered!
- Location
- Somewhere over the Rainbow
Wow... Just wow.
So. Awesome.
I am kind of sad we haven't gotten anything big(ger) yet.
Also, I can't wait to see Taylor interacting with Dragon!
I just thought of this: A feeling that Uber & Leet were hired by Caudreon. I suspect that Contessa has a hard time Pathing Taylor, since she's basically a mini-Shard now. (or at least the aspect that is hosting her consciousness is...)
So. Awesome.
I am kind of sad we haven't gotten anything big(ger) yet.
Also, I can't wait to see Taylor interacting with Dragon!
I just thought of this: A feeling that Uber & Leet were hired by Caudreon. I suspect that Contessa has a hard time Pathing Taylor, since she's basically a mini-Shard now. (or at least the aspect that is hosting her consciousness is...)
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It is probably less "Cauldron" and more "Coil." Cauldron doesn't act that blatantly unless they have no other choice. And given that they control (or at least have access) to bot the PRT and the Protectorate they have other choices. I mean it isn't like multiple members of the Protectorate and Wards have made good impressions on Relentless or anything. And it isn't like Piggot is trying to learn as much as she can about this new, excessively powerful cape or anything.
Coil, meanwhile, doesn't have anything near their resources. He has likely tried running multiple failed timelines where Relentless crashed straight through his plans by being herself. If he has then that means he's been throwing his entire arsenal at her in various test scenarios. Guns? Didn't work. Tinkertech lasers? Didn't work. Explosives? Spectacularly didn't work. (And so on and so forth.) Having Uber and Leet get involved means exposing Relentless to the kinds of things Leet can build, the kinds of things Leet can botch (which then explode), and so on.
Best case for Coil? U&L accidentally kill Relentless. Worst case for Coil? He at least learns more about Relentless. Which he did. And medium case they manage to tick off Relentless -which they did. It is possible he can use that hatred to lure Relentless out of the way for some of his future plans. All he needs to do is anonymously tell Relentless where to find Uber and Leet and then wait until she is distracted.
On another note, I'm waiting for the next on-screen Trigger event now that Queen Administrator has switched her allegiance to Relentless. I mean it isn't like the Shards can communicate with one another or anything ..
Sonata 2.3
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sonata 2.3
Friday, April 15, 2011
I woke up the next morning, and slowly started going through what I needed to do to get ready for the day.
Sudden interruptions by Glory Girls notwithstanding, my time on roof of the highrise had been pretty much exactly what I'd needed.
Quiet, and a chance to think.
You'd think that when your thoughts weren't limited by such mundane things as neuron response time, time to think wouldn't exactly be a major problem anymore.
Not so much. (I did seem to have some sort of limit on my processing abilities).
In this case, it was more the ambiance than anything else.
Just because I could handle lots of input really fast didn't mean that it wasn't nice to get a break from that. Didn't mean that I didn't appreciate the chance to just stop and not worry.
There was no Emma or Sophia or Madison. No emotional high school situations. No need to watch everything I did to make sure I didn't accidentally out myself. No need to worry about dragons (Asiatic or European) or heroes or stupid game-show villains.
There, twenty-seven stories up, I could just be.
Up there, I didn't have to worry about homework. About dad. About my utter lack of anything resembling a supply system or fleet to call home.
Dad knew now, which was good.
It meant… a lot more to me than I probably cared to admit.
The fact that I could go downstairs, sit with my dad, and have breakfast together without him acting exceedingly strange about it was pretty positive in my books.
"…So how does that work?"
I blinked, drawing myself out of my thoughts and looking over at him from where I'd been staring at my bowl of sugar-milk and mini-wheats. "…What?"
He nodded at my bowl. "That. How does it work when you're all…" he trailed off, probably hoping that I'd catch onto what he was implying.
I was pretty sure I got it.
"All robot-girl?" I finished flatly.
He grimaced at my bluntness, and then I couldn't hold the smile back.
"I'm just teasing, dad. Turnabout's fair play. Payback for last night," I said lightly. "Don't worry about asking questions. I'm… I'm tired of hiding this all anyways." My tone at the end had become somber. "A-anyways. The answer is I use it. Not for fuel, like the sugars and carbohydrates. I tear it apart on a molecular level and make more nanomaterial out of it."
I stirred my spoon idly, pushing steadily-more-soggy wheaties around. "I don't need to eat. Just like I don't need to sleep, or shower, or do any normal things. But if I stopped, what would I be then? When you lose everything, it's the little things that keep you going."
I looked back up, and saw his eyes soft with sympathy. "I'm sorry," he told me, and there was no need to say what for.
I just nodded. "My nanomaterial runs on a very specialized power source that basically pulls energy out of thin air. That's not actually how it works, but it's good enough. Anything with higher power requirements gets something more suited to it."
"Like what?" he asked, appearing interested.
I resumed eating for a moment so that I wouldn't just be left with a bowl of limp wheatie strands. The fact that it gave me time to think about how to answer him was totally coincidental.
"Pretty much anything I make that isn't nanomaterial," I responded, deciding I didn't want to get into the fact that I had an antimatter reactor in my chest to power my body at the moment. "And sometimes even then. If it's low-power enough I can just have it use electricity from the grid instead of something custom."
I kept eating as my dad looked thoughtful.
"Well, it certainly sounds interesting," he said diplomatically, which pretty much ended the conversation there when neither of us said anything more.
I finished up, getting up and rinsing my bowl out before putting it in the dishwasher, and then heading upstairs to finish getting ready.
For school. At Winslow.
Oh boy.
School that day was passably sane. And of course I mean that statement as qualified by "for Winslow." There were still gang signs and graffiti on the walls, people doing sketchy exchanges in the dim halls before and after classes, and weird smells coming from Building C's boys' bathroom.
Still, none of the usual girls tried to mess with me, which was good. Madison pointedly ignored me, which I was perfectly fine with, and Sophia didn't even try looking at me.
Emma was conspicuously missing.
I was unsure if that was good or bad. It likely meant that either whatever I'd said to her had gotten through or (more likely) her parents had stepped in somehow.
At the very least, it meant I didn't have to deal with her.
Which was… relieving, more than anything.
So for one of the first days I can remember, I did my thing, everyone else did their thing, and I wasn't looking over my shoulder constantly.
The only notable thing that I can even comment on was Greg telling me that he'd posted his art and thanking me for telling him to because of all the comments and stuff he'd gotten back. To which I had pretty much just responded "sure" and then had to focus on Gladly's voice as class started.
Most of what I spent my time doing during school was macromanaging my nanomaterial out in the Bay and working on my new costume/armor design.
Even before I'd gotten home last night I'd had to aggressively redistribute the nanomaterial I had so far among more of the sunken boats. When I woke up, I had to do it again.
This was where production really started to take off. But to keep the growth exponential meant I had to constantly make sure there was material to convert.
By noon, I was sitting at eight hundred tons and had consumed another two smaller boats, and I was fast running out of ships that were entirely hidden underwater with the ones I was already in the process of converting.
The furthest ones out that were visible above-water were practically impossible to really see any detail of, so I moved to those and began conversion wholesale.
After this, though, I was going to need to be careful.
My leading thought was that once I had to shift focus to converting those ships that were plainly visible from land, I'd only consume the insides and leave a hollow shell behind. It would look the same from the outside, and be supported by a minimal amount of nanomaterial on the inside to keep it from collapsing while the nanomachines moved onto the next ship(s). Once that had been completed, I'd be able to eat through all the "shells" simultaneously and very quickly when it wouldn't be noticed (like the middle of the night), and then have my nanomaterial disappear without a trace to someplace I could store it.
I also thought it would be funny seeing how people would react to the boat graveyard suddenly being gone like it was never there.
I wondered how my Dad would react if– when he found out that I was the one responsible for it.
I wondered how the Protectorate would react at all, not knowing who did it. They'd have to respond in some way, and the leading theory would probably be 'Tinker' of some sort. The question was whether my display of abilities so far would be enough to make them think I couldn't be responsible for it.
…Maybe they'd think it was the supposed 'Tinker' I was allied with who made my armor?
I hoped not.
By the time school was let out I had over twelve hundred tons of nanomaterial and was in the process of converting eight separate ships, including the large container ships out in the bay. That was likely going to be one of my largest sources, considering both the bulk of them and all the empty containers that had been left inside. One of them had been sunk as protest, but the others had just been abandoned there, much like the rest of the ships in the Graveyard.
Among all the ships in the Bay, I estimated there to be over a hundred thousand tons of steel and raw material. Brockton's Ship Graveyard was one of the largest modern ship cemeteries in the world, not caused by dangerous reefs or currents or anything, but by sheer negligence and human apathy.
And it was all mine for the taking.
I mean, seriously. This wasn't some official ship graveyard where the zoning rights for the area had been bought and then properly marked or anything. The ships weren't intentionally tied together in order to act as breakwater or even just to keep them organized. They were just there, beached and sunk. It was entirely illegal, but nothing was able to be done about it simply because of the sheer size and scale the operation would take.
Which, in turn, meant that they were all up for salvage.
Salvage in maritime law is a pretty vague and ambiguous thing at times, especially in the United States. The US has this thing called the Abandoned Shipwreck Act, which states that any shipwrecks within three nautical miles of shore that are "embedded" in submerged land, coralline, or land that's registered as historic are owned by the state they're in—where embedded means being buried in such a way that you have to dig them out to get to them. But, none of the ships I was claiming fell within that, meaning that the murky laws of salvage and finds applied.
The ships I was claiming were abandoned, meaning that the owners had done nothing to try and salvage them nor shown any intention whatsoever of ever planning to do so. Considering it had been over ten years since the ships were abandoned, it was extremely unlikely that any courts would be willing to contest that.
At which point, it quite literally became "finders keepers"; the steel, glass, parts, all that was left in them (that hadn't already been ripped out by other scavengers), everything was up for grabs by whoever wanted it.
Namely, me.
It was why I'd made my first set of armor out of steel I'd taken from there, even before all this.
Oh, people could raise a fuss about someone taking all those resources if just because they hadn't been able to do it themselves, but ultimately, nobody really wanted the Ship Graveyard there anyways. It was a blight on Brockton Bay, a reminder of a darker period in the city's history.
Really, people should be thanking me for dealing with it so cleanly.
I'd lucked out, honestly. If I hadn't had such a readily available source of easily-converted steel and silicates, making my nanomaterial would have been much more difficult, and taken muchlonger. On the scale of multiple months instead of a week. I suppose if I'd lived somewhere else I could have tried searching for veins of iron or something instead of resorting to primarily nuclear synthesis with refuse as a source material.
Well, it didn't matter anyways, because I did have the Graveyard.
…I just had to be careful about it.
I was walking to the library when the first bomb went off.
I was turning around to look downtown when the second did.
The third was closer, a fireball of an explosion that rose above the treeline and put smoke into the air.
That's about when people started panicking.
I just… stood there.
The worst part of it was how sudden it was, how everything was fine, a beautiful day even, and then out of nowhere, chaos and destruction.
I stood there for thirty seconds, just staring at the expanding cloud of smoke and ash before I finally snapped out of it.
And I realized I had no idea what to do.
With all the other incidents I had dealt with, been involved in, what I could do had been pretty clear: beat the target. Lung, the Merchants, Squealer, and the dragon had all been like that. But with something like this, I simply had no idea what I should be doing.
Was it my place to get involved in this? I wasn't even technically a hero, but an independent who hadn't even registered with the PRT yet. For that matter, what could I do?
The PRT, Protectorate, and Emergency Services were doubtlessly on the case right now, and all I would likely be doing by getting involved on my own was getting in the way of people.
And yet… and yet I did want to help. I wanted to be able to look my dad in the face when I got home and say "See, I can make a difference." The question was just… how?
At that, I could hear Glory Girl's voice from last night: "Us Brutes have got to stick together, right? If you ever want me to show you a couple things about how it's done, just let me know." If that wasn't particularly accurate now, when there was nothing to go hit in the face, I didn't know when it was. New Wave would probably be trying to help out in their own way as well, and I could see myself coordinating with them much easier than with the larger, stricter PRT/Protectorate.
A second later I'd generated a new phone number and texted Glory Girl.
'I want to help but I don't know how, any suggestions?'
Fifteen seconds later I got a response. 'Whos this?'
Flushing in mild embarrassment at my carelessness, I sent back, 'Relentless. From last night.'And then a half second later I sent 'Sorry' too for good measure.
'Hey! Its fine. Just hav to b careful u kno?'
Her question seemed rhetorical, so I didn't reply.
'w ur powers…'
'wait hld on'
I realized I was just standing in the middle of the sidewalk and moved back out of the way so that I was against the brick of the building behind me.
'ok mom said u can come meet w us if you want'
I'd just been hoping for some suggestions of tasks I could do or something, but this was even better.
'Okay, sure. Where?'
'U know where Campbel and Jones cross?'
'Yeah?'
'Stripmall there. Got hit.'
'Alright, I'm on my way.'
Moving away from the building I was against, I started walking down the street again, turning into the closest alley I could find and then going down it until I wasn't likely to be seen.
One jump up to the roof and a change of appearance and clothes later, and I was running across the city on panels of my Armor towards where I was told.
From the air, the damage to the city was even more obvious, the smoke clouds rising up as another explosion went off to the south. What was happening?
It was less than three minutes later that I arrived at the place she'd given me, despite being over seven miles away from where I'd started.
The stripmall she'd been talking about had collapsed, looking almost half-melted in places, like some Salvador Dalí painting come to life. I could see people, emergency workers, working to remove debris and rubble, with New Wave sticking out obviously in their bright costumes, helping out in whatever way they could: Glory Girl lifting things the workers pointed out, and Brandish cutting large pieces into smaller ones so that Flashbang could move them.
I didn't see Panacea, or any of the Pelhams, though.
I made my approach, descending gradually on steps of my Armor so that I wouldn't surprise anyone. Some of the people sitting off to the side facing the street, looking haggard and with blankets around their shoulders, raised their heads when they noticed me. I walked closer, and the emergency personnel noticed me, which then prompted Glory Girl and her parents to turn around and look at what everyone else was looking at.
Namely, me.
I wasn't used to being the center of attention like this at all. It was… unnerving.
Glory Girl flew over to where I was, floating in front of me a few inches off the floor so that we were eye-level.
I noted it was a pretty good tactic for making her presence feel stronger.
"Hey! You got here pretty fast!" she greeted.
I nodded awkwardly. "I said I was…"
"Yeah, but I didn't… Well, whatever," she said, waving her hand as though brushing something aside.
"Glory Girl?"
We both turned to look at Brandish, who had walked over to us and was giving me a once-over.
"So this is, um…"
I mustered what confidence I had and stuck out my hand. "Relentless. Ma'am." She shook it firmly. "I was hoping I could at least coordinate with you, since New Wave has much more experience with working independently than me, especially in a crisis like this. I'm… not really sure what to do."
She nodded, seemingly in approval. Well that was good. "What can you do?"
I tried to sum it up as best I could. "Think of me as Alexandria with a ranged forcefield instead of flight."
Her eyebrows rose slightly, her eyes flitting over to her daughter. "Really? This isn't the time for exaggeration."
I shook my head while looking at her. "I'm not. I swear."
She still looked a little skeptical, but relented. "You can help the emergency workers with Glory Girl, then, if you want to stay here."
I shrugged. "Sure." It'd probably be better if I did, since —like I'd said— they had much more experience than me with these sorts of situations and I could learn a lot.
"Alright then, follow me," she said, and turned to walk away towards the center of all the work and motion.
I leaned closer to Victoria. "…Is she always that…"
"Hard-core?" Glory Girl finished with a whisper, drifting next to me as I followed Brandish. I nodded. "Yeah pretty much."
I winced in sympathy, keeping pace to navigate around the different emergency workers until we reached one man in the same florescent colors as the others that was nearer the building and seemed to be helping coordinate the others. He turned to face us as Brandish approached, his eyes flickering over to me briefly and then back to Brandish.
"Captain Dane, this is Relentless. She says she can help with Glory Girl," Brandish told him.
He nodded at her. "Thank you, ma'am."
She returned it and moved away quickly back towards where she'd been working with her husband, which I'd understand considering the situation.
The captain turned to me. "What can you do?"
I shrugged. "Lift things?"
"How heavy?" he asked, his eyes flickering for a moment back to the building and the people working there.
"I haven't hit an upper limit yet," I said honestly. "And I've done quite a bit."
At that his focus on me sharpened. "Really?" I nodded. "Well then. We'll definitely have some things for you to do."
I suddenly realized something. "I also have this forcefield that could be used to hold things in place? I can make it any shape I want, it just has to be within thirty feet of me."
He nodded. "That'll come in handy. Alright, then. Merrick!" he said, shouting the last bit towards the right.
Another man jogged over, younger than the one I was speaking to, maybe early thirties. "Yes sir?"
The captain nodded at me. "This young woman's offered to help out. She'll be working with your group. Strength and a forcefield you can use for reinforcing the weak points." He turned to me. "Listen to him and do exactly as he says and nothing more, conditions can change fast."
I bristled at the command, but just gave a tense, "Okay."
"Follow me," the other man —Merrick— said, leading me away to where he'd come from with a bunch of other workers. "Mostly you'll be moving…"
The work was tedious and monotonous. But also… satisfying. Seeing people come out of the space I'd helped clear was…
Real.
It made everything so much more real.
This wasn't just something that I did that only affected me or some druggie Merchants or something. I was helping to save people's lives. I was having a tangible, real, positive effect on them that they would carry the rest of their lives.
It was almost intimidating.
And the emergency workers did this all the time, I realized. But it was just the capes who got the focus and highlighted.
After the first building was cleared enough to be considered immediately dealt with and let people move on to the next problem, I decided to stay with the group I'd been working with as they moved to another project rather than have to go through the whole process again. Victoria did as well, the group she'd been with having apparently been part of the same unit or something.
The second building was more complex, a store front of some sort where the entire building had been fused and changed to some weird material that appeared to be a plastic when I analyzed the molecular structure, but acted like a reactive solid metal with non-Newtonian properties. As soon as you applied force to it, it got harder, and the longer and/or more you applied force to it, the stronger it got.
I was this close to either trying to discreetly dissolve a section with my nanomaterial or going home and getting my sword when someone got a blowtorch and managed to cut through it with some effort.
I felt pretty stupid after that.
(And filed the atomic structure away for later, of course)
The intermittent explosions had stopped completely by then, and it was just people tending to those who needed help, like what we were doing.
Still, it was the third building we worked on that was the most trouble.
A three-story apartment building that looked like it'd had two separate explosions in it, the roof collapsing down and in on both sides.
It was a mess.
We got to work immediately, trying to find if anybody had been trapped inside, and if so if they were responsive and what was needed to get them out.
We were limited by the debris and rubble, which blocked areas of the building on multiple floor, preventing us from moving towards the middle at all —even with the ladders on the trucks— until it was cleared.
It was an exercise in moderation, for me. A major test of my ability to regulate myself and my strength so that things didn't fall apart or break other sections.
"Finally," one of the other workers, something Carren, said, sounding relieved as I moved aside the last major piece that was blocking us from moving further inwards. He ducked under the gap and moved through the rough hole in the concrete wall to the other side. Two others followed him carefully before Merrick stepped forward. "Come on, Relentless."
I nodded and ducked, following him through the opening into a dark living room, illuminated only by the head lamps of the workers. "Found the door!" one said loudly from the left. "Keyed deadbolt on both sides like the other rooms. Opening!"
I heard a distinct crunch and then creaking that I'd be come more than familiar with in the past few hours that meant they'd used a pry bar to open a door. Light appeared vaguely from the left as Merrick and I stepped through the empty kitchen towards the source. It looked like this had been an empty apartment.
The door was open, broken as I'd expected, and the lieutenant and I moved through it into a dim concrete hallway that ran down the entire apartment building. The other workers were already down at the next door, shouting, waiting, and then sticking their pry bar in the jamb, two of the men pushing on it at once to crack the door.
Merrick and I caught up to them. "Carren, Grant, Neese, you check this one out. Sparks, you, me, and Relentless are going to the next one." The woman nodded and followed behind him as we moved quickly down the hall to the next door.
"Emergency Services!!" Merrick yelled, and then twisted the knob and tried to open the door, but it didn't budge. "If there's anyone in there, please move away from the doorway!"
He looked over at me. "Relentless?"
I stepped forward in what had become a familiar situation over the past four hours, grabbing the doorknob and then shoving suddenly so that the deadbolt and lock ripped right through the jamb. I pushed the door open and then stepped back, letting Merrick and Sparks go in ahead of me, stepping into a living room that looked like it had been used only that morning, with couches and tables and lamps. And then I saw something blink to the right, an infrared light pulsing from an object hidden in the shadows under a table in the hall to the left that quickly sped up and then sol—
"BOMB!" I yelled, just as the thing exploded.
They both reacted immediately, ducking and rolling for the nearest solid object, but it was too late for me; the thing had already detonated and I was less than two meters away from it.
…It was black, was all I could think.
Black. An emptiness as void of light as my arm had been that night I'd tried changing it.
Except with this black thing, I could see the cabinets and the wall behind the void just around it, could feel the air pressure suddenly decrease, could watch the loose objects being drawn in, bending and stretching in impossible ways even as they traveled in a straight path. It was something that screamed at me for my attention in ways that I doubted I would have understood had I been human. I knew this thing, instinctively, like I had some built-in primitive part of me that couldn't not know what this was.
Gravitational singularity.
Black hole.
I was pulled towards it in an instant, my feet lifting off the ground as I twisted and scrabbled for purchase on the wall. I was probably the strongest person in Brockton Bay, and I couldn't get my fingers to catch without pushing myself away from the wall.
Fucking Newton's third law.
([Free-graviton degeneracy reaction detected. Threat evaluation: Extreme.
Containing.])
My Wave-Force Armor snapped around the void in a sphere without my prompting, the negative air pressure suddenly disappearing, contained, and me dropping to the floor gracelessly. But just as quickly I could feel the strain on my Klein field, the way my Core was struggling to process the calculations to maintain the extradimensional space-time fold around an object that inherently warped the same thing to the point of being an unstoppable force.
([Warning: containment failing. Klein Field collapse in 00:00:00.374s
Projected survival confidence: low.
Solution: Remove computational limitations preventing graviton manipulation.
Preparing to remove level four limiter...])
The shell was going to break. Fucking…
I scrambled to get up and away before it faile—
([Preparations complete.
Freezing current state... Saved.
Updating primary consciousness configuration... Done.
Updating co-processor with electronic warfare suite protocols.
Testing new configuration... Success.
Updating database access level.
Killing level four monitor and control processes...
Thawing frozen state... Done.])
—d, reflexively tearing the singularity apart by its gravitons at the same time so there was nothing but gravitational ripples left.
…
What.
What.
I just…
I looked back at my sphere of Armor, where the black void was now conspicuously missing.
I just tore apart a black hole.
What the fuck?
That doesn't even make—
I stopped. Because no, now that I thought about it, it did make sense. I knew exactly the principles and laws behind it, the way I fluctuated the underlying gravitons to rip the singularity apart and let it disintegrate into nothing more than captured energy and subatomic soup. A degeneracy reaction.
And… and I could just do that now. Safely atomize anything with a reaction I could contain in my Klein field.
Because not just the black hole was missing, but everything else the sphere of energy shielding had intersected with and had inside it as well—including sections of the table, wall, and cabinets.
Portal cuts.
"Relentless? Is everything okay?"
I looked away from the spherical emptiness I'd made back towands Lieutenant Merrick, who was now out of my vision behind a wall, ten feet away.
"Yeah. I… I got rid of it. Somehow. It's gone."
I heard them standing up and did the same, brushing myself off. Merrick appeared at the entry to the hall, looking at me.
"I think after something like that it'd be better if we left the rest of this to the others," he said shakily, and I just nodded in agreement.
…I had no doubt there was some sort of protocol that said you couldn't work after having a near-fatal experience.
The three of us left the building carefully, somber in the recognition that we had almost just died.
And we had. If I hadn't been able to get rid of that exotic black hole, it would have killed us, or at the very least me.
Victoria spotted us, said something to the group she was working with, and then flew over to me. "Hey, you okay?"
I hugged myself. "Kinda. Not…" I sucked in a breath. "Not really." Almost dying has a tendency to do that. "There was another bomb. It almost killed us."
Her eyes went wide, and her arm reached out for a moment, like she wanted to touch me, and I couldn't help the instinctual reaction of pulling away that had been ingrained in me from the years of torment at the hands of the trio. Her hand dropped.
"I'm… I'm sorry," Victoria said.
I snorted. "For what? It wasn't your fault."
"Yeah, but I mean, I brought you here, right?"
Shaking my head, I looked at her. "I asked you. It's not anybody's fault."
Victoria sighed. "Yeah, I guess."
"I think… I think I'm going to go home." I really wanted to see my dad right now.
"Okay. Um. If you ever need anything else, or just… want to talk, text me, okay?" she said, and I nodded.
I might actually take her up on that offer, despite the rough start we'd had the night before.
"Bye," she waved.
"Bye," I returned, and she flew back, off towards the group she was with.
It only took half a minute to let the emergency workers know I was going, and then started the trip home.
If this event had taught me anything, it was that I had a ways to go before I was truly untouchable.
I had to get stronger.
A/N: I actually really like this chapter, despite it being both a v2 rewrite and taking so long. The contrast between this and the original chapter is so strong, and it's a direction I haven't really seen many Worm fics do before, and it's particularly new for me.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed that.
I have not one, but two new things that I'm working on.
First, Beyond Our Reach (the Stars Did Form), a Quest where you're a thirteen year-old girl three hundred years in the future who's discovered you have psychokinetic powers and is now off to a school to help you learn them. It's been a lot of fun so far, and I've been really enjoying writing it considering how many different things it's pushing me to do. Think a mix between BAHHSCQ, Railgun, and… oh, I don't know, NieA_7? Haruhi? Something sci-fi, at least. Done to my usual (apparently unique) writing.
Second, Paradoxical, a Destiny/Worm crossover post-GM fic set in the Destiny universe/time-period, narrated from the perspective of the player character from Destiny. Oh and QA does her usual QA thing. With a Taylor healed from bullet surgery.
Yeah.
Please comment and critique and all that, I want to know what you think, considering this is a rewrite and everything.
Friday, April 15, 2011
I woke up the next morning, and slowly started going through what I needed to do to get ready for the day.
Sudden interruptions by Glory Girls notwithstanding, my time on roof of the highrise had been pretty much exactly what I'd needed.
Quiet, and a chance to think.
You'd think that when your thoughts weren't limited by such mundane things as neuron response time, time to think wouldn't exactly be a major problem anymore.
Not so much. (I did seem to have some sort of limit on my processing abilities).
In this case, it was more the ambiance than anything else.
Just because I could handle lots of input really fast didn't mean that it wasn't nice to get a break from that. Didn't mean that I didn't appreciate the chance to just stop and not worry.
There was no Emma or Sophia or Madison. No emotional high school situations. No need to watch everything I did to make sure I didn't accidentally out myself. No need to worry about dragons (Asiatic or European) or heroes or stupid game-show villains.
There, twenty-seven stories up, I could just be.
Up there, I didn't have to worry about homework. About dad. About my utter lack of anything resembling a supply system or fleet to call home.
Dad knew now, which was good.
It meant… a lot more to me than I probably cared to admit.
The fact that I could go downstairs, sit with my dad, and have breakfast together without him acting exceedingly strange about it was pretty positive in my books.
"…So how does that work?"
I blinked, drawing myself out of my thoughts and looking over at him from where I'd been staring at my bowl of sugar-milk and mini-wheats. "…What?"
He nodded at my bowl. "That. How does it work when you're all…" he trailed off, probably hoping that I'd catch onto what he was implying.
I was pretty sure I got it.
"All robot-girl?" I finished flatly.
He grimaced at my bluntness, and then I couldn't hold the smile back.
"I'm just teasing, dad. Turnabout's fair play. Payback for last night," I said lightly. "Don't worry about asking questions. I'm… I'm tired of hiding this all anyways." My tone at the end had become somber. "A-anyways. The answer is I use it. Not for fuel, like the sugars and carbohydrates. I tear it apart on a molecular level and make more nanomaterial out of it."
I stirred my spoon idly, pushing steadily-more-soggy wheaties around. "I don't need to eat. Just like I don't need to sleep, or shower, or do any normal things. But if I stopped, what would I be then? When you lose everything, it's the little things that keep you going."
I looked back up, and saw his eyes soft with sympathy. "I'm sorry," he told me, and there was no need to say what for.
I just nodded. "My nanomaterial runs on a very specialized power source that basically pulls energy out of thin air. That's not actually how it works, but it's good enough. Anything with higher power requirements gets something more suited to it."
"Like what?" he asked, appearing interested.
I resumed eating for a moment so that I wouldn't just be left with a bowl of limp wheatie strands. The fact that it gave me time to think about how to answer him was totally coincidental.
"Pretty much anything I make that isn't nanomaterial," I responded, deciding I didn't want to get into the fact that I had an antimatter reactor in my chest to power my body at the moment. "And sometimes even then. If it's low-power enough I can just have it use electricity from the grid instead of something custom."
I kept eating as my dad looked thoughtful.
"Well, it certainly sounds interesting," he said diplomatically, which pretty much ended the conversation there when neither of us said anything more.
I finished up, getting up and rinsing my bowl out before putting it in the dishwasher, and then heading upstairs to finish getting ready.
For school. At Winslow.
Oh boy.
School that day was passably sane. And of course I mean that statement as qualified by "for Winslow." There were still gang signs and graffiti on the walls, people doing sketchy exchanges in the dim halls before and after classes, and weird smells coming from Building C's boys' bathroom.
Still, none of the usual girls tried to mess with me, which was good. Madison pointedly ignored me, which I was perfectly fine with, and Sophia didn't even try looking at me.
Emma was conspicuously missing.
I was unsure if that was good or bad. It likely meant that either whatever I'd said to her had gotten through or (more likely) her parents had stepped in somehow.
At the very least, it meant I didn't have to deal with her.
Which was… relieving, more than anything.
So for one of the first days I can remember, I did my thing, everyone else did their thing, and I wasn't looking over my shoulder constantly.
The only notable thing that I can even comment on was Greg telling me that he'd posted his art and thanking me for telling him to because of all the comments and stuff he'd gotten back. To which I had pretty much just responded "sure" and then had to focus on Gladly's voice as class started.
Most of what I spent my time doing during school was macromanaging my nanomaterial out in the Bay and working on my new costume/armor design.
Even before I'd gotten home last night I'd had to aggressively redistribute the nanomaterial I had so far among more of the sunken boats. When I woke up, I had to do it again.
This was where production really started to take off. But to keep the growth exponential meant I had to constantly make sure there was material to convert.
By noon, I was sitting at eight hundred tons and had consumed another two smaller boats, and I was fast running out of ships that were entirely hidden underwater with the ones I was already in the process of converting.
The furthest ones out that were visible above-water were practically impossible to really see any detail of, so I moved to those and began conversion wholesale.
After this, though, I was going to need to be careful.
My leading thought was that once I had to shift focus to converting those ships that were plainly visible from land, I'd only consume the insides and leave a hollow shell behind. It would look the same from the outside, and be supported by a minimal amount of nanomaterial on the inside to keep it from collapsing while the nanomachines moved onto the next ship(s). Once that had been completed, I'd be able to eat through all the "shells" simultaneously and very quickly when it wouldn't be noticed (like the middle of the night), and then have my nanomaterial disappear without a trace to someplace I could store it.
I also thought it would be funny seeing how people would react to the boat graveyard suddenly being gone like it was never there.
I wondered how my Dad would react if– when he found out that I was the one responsible for it.
I wondered how the Protectorate would react at all, not knowing who did it. They'd have to respond in some way, and the leading theory would probably be 'Tinker' of some sort. The question was whether my display of abilities so far would be enough to make them think I couldn't be responsible for it.
…Maybe they'd think it was the supposed 'Tinker' I was allied with who made my armor?
I hoped not.
By the time school was let out I had over twelve hundred tons of nanomaterial and was in the process of converting eight separate ships, including the large container ships out in the bay. That was likely going to be one of my largest sources, considering both the bulk of them and all the empty containers that had been left inside. One of them had been sunk as protest, but the others had just been abandoned there, much like the rest of the ships in the Graveyard.
Among all the ships in the Bay, I estimated there to be over a hundred thousand tons of steel and raw material. Brockton's Ship Graveyard was one of the largest modern ship cemeteries in the world, not caused by dangerous reefs or currents or anything, but by sheer negligence and human apathy.
And it was all mine for the taking.
I mean, seriously. This wasn't some official ship graveyard where the zoning rights for the area had been bought and then properly marked or anything. The ships weren't intentionally tied together in order to act as breakwater or even just to keep them organized. They were just there, beached and sunk. It was entirely illegal, but nothing was able to be done about it simply because of the sheer size and scale the operation would take.
Which, in turn, meant that they were all up for salvage.
Salvage in maritime law is a pretty vague and ambiguous thing at times, especially in the United States. The US has this thing called the Abandoned Shipwreck Act, which states that any shipwrecks within three nautical miles of shore that are "embedded" in submerged land, coralline, or land that's registered as historic are owned by the state they're in—where embedded means being buried in such a way that you have to dig them out to get to them. But, none of the ships I was claiming fell within that, meaning that the murky laws of salvage and finds applied.
The ships I was claiming were abandoned, meaning that the owners had done nothing to try and salvage them nor shown any intention whatsoever of ever planning to do so. Considering it had been over ten years since the ships were abandoned, it was extremely unlikely that any courts would be willing to contest that.
At which point, it quite literally became "finders keepers"; the steel, glass, parts, all that was left in them (that hadn't already been ripped out by other scavengers), everything was up for grabs by whoever wanted it.
Namely, me.
It was why I'd made my first set of armor out of steel I'd taken from there, even before all this.
Oh, people could raise a fuss about someone taking all those resources if just because they hadn't been able to do it themselves, but ultimately, nobody really wanted the Ship Graveyard there anyways. It was a blight on Brockton Bay, a reminder of a darker period in the city's history.
Really, people should be thanking me for dealing with it so cleanly.
I'd lucked out, honestly. If I hadn't had such a readily available source of easily-converted steel and silicates, making my nanomaterial would have been much more difficult, and taken muchlonger. On the scale of multiple months instead of a week. I suppose if I'd lived somewhere else I could have tried searching for veins of iron or something instead of resorting to primarily nuclear synthesis with refuse as a source material.
Well, it didn't matter anyways, because I did have the Graveyard.
…I just had to be careful about it.
I was walking to the library when the first bomb went off.
I was turning around to look downtown when the second did.
The third was closer, a fireball of an explosion that rose above the treeline and put smoke into the air.
That's about when people started panicking.
I just… stood there.
The worst part of it was how sudden it was, how everything was fine, a beautiful day even, and then out of nowhere, chaos and destruction.
I stood there for thirty seconds, just staring at the expanding cloud of smoke and ash before I finally snapped out of it.
And I realized I had no idea what to do.
With all the other incidents I had dealt with, been involved in, what I could do had been pretty clear: beat the target. Lung, the Merchants, Squealer, and the dragon had all been like that. But with something like this, I simply had no idea what I should be doing.
Was it my place to get involved in this? I wasn't even technically a hero, but an independent who hadn't even registered with the PRT yet. For that matter, what could I do?
The PRT, Protectorate, and Emergency Services were doubtlessly on the case right now, and all I would likely be doing by getting involved on my own was getting in the way of people.
And yet… and yet I did want to help. I wanted to be able to look my dad in the face when I got home and say "See, I can make a difference." The question was just… how?
At that, I could hear Glory Girl's voice from last night: "Us Brutes have got to stick together, right? If you ever want me to show you a couple things about how it's done, just let me know." If that wasn't particularly accurate now, when there was nothing to go hit in the face, I didn't know when it was. New Wave would probably be trying to help out in their own way as well, and I could see myself coordinating with them much easier than with the larger, stricter PRT/Protectorate.
A second later I'd generated a new phone number and texted Glory Girl.
'I want to help but I don't know how, any suggestions?'
Fifteen seconds later I got a response. 'Whos this?'
Flushing in mild embarrassment at my carelessness, I sent back, 'Relentless. From last night.'And then a half second later I sent 'Sorry' too for good measure.
'Hey! Its fine. Just hav to b careful u kno?'
Her question seemed rhetorical, so I didn't reply.
'w ur powers…'
'wait hld on'
I realized I was just standing in the middle of the sidewalk and moved back out of the way so that I was against the brick of the building behind me.
'ok mom said u can come meet w us if you want'
I'd just been hoping for some suggestions of tasks I could do or something, but this was even better.
'Okay, sure. Where?'
'U know where Campbel and Jones cross?'
'Yeah?'
'Stripmall there. Got hit.'
'Alright, I'm on my way.'
Moving away from the building I was against, I started walking down the street again, turning into the closest alley I could find and then going down it until I wasn't likely to be seen.
One jump up to the roof and a change of appearance and clothes later, and I was running across the city on panels of my Armor towards where I was told.
From the air, the damage to the city was even more obvious, the smoke clouds rising up as another explosion went off to the south. What was happening?
It was less than three minutes later that I arrived at the place she'd given me, despite being over seven miles away from where I'd started.
The stripmall she'd been talking about had collapsed, looking almost half-melted in places, like some Salvador Dalí painting come to life. I could see people, emergency workers, working to remove debris and rubble, with New Wave sticking out obviously in their bright costumes, helping out in whatever way they could: Glory Girl lifting things the workers pointed out, and Brandish cutting large pieces into smaller ones so that Flashbang could move them.
I didn't see Panacea, or any of the Pelhams, though.
I made my approach, descending gradually on steps of my Armor so that I wouldn't surprise anyone. Some of the people sitting off to the side facing the street, looking haggard and with blankets around their shoulders, raised their heads when they noticed me. I walked closer, and the emergency personnel noticed me, which then prompted Glory Girl and her parents to turn around and look at what everyone else was looking at.
Namely, me.
I wasn't used to being the center of attention like this at all. It was… unnerving.
Glory Girl flew over to where I was, floating in front of me a few inches off the floor so that we were eye-level.
I noted it was a pretty good tactic for making her presence feel stronger.
"Hey! You got here pretty fast!" she greeted.
I nodded awkwardly. "I said I was…"
"Yeah, but I didn't… Well, whatever," she said, waving her hand as though brushing something aside.
"Glory Girl?"
We both turned to look at Brandish, who had walked over to us and was giving me a once-over.
"So this is, um…"
I mustered what confidence I had and stuck out my hand. "Relentless. Ma'am." She shook it firmly. "I was hoping I could at least coordinate with you, since New Wave has much more experience with working independently than me, especially in a crisis like this. I'm… not really sure what to do."
She nodded, seemingly in approval. Well that was good. "What can you do?"
I tried to sum it up as best I could. "Think of me as Alexandria with a ranged forcefield instead of flight."
Her eyebrows rose slightly, her eyes flitting over to her daughter. "Really? This isn't the time for exaggeration."
I shook my head while looking at her. "I'm not. I swear."
She still looked a little skeptical, but relented. "You can help the emergency workers with Glory Girl, then, if you want to stay here."
I shrugged. "Sure." It'd probably be better if I did, since —like I'd said— they had much more experience than me with these sorts of situations and I could learn a lot.
"Alright then, follow me," she said, and turned to walk away towards the center of all the work and motion.
I leaned closer to Victoria. "…Is she always that…"
"Hard-core?" Glory Girl finished with a whisper, drifting next to me as I followed Brandish. I nodded. "Yeah pretty much."
I winced in sympathy, keeping pace to navigate around the different emergency workers until we reached one man in the same florescent colors as the others that was nearer the building and seemed to be helping coordinate the others. He turned to face us as Brandish approached, his eyes flickering over to me briefly and then back to Brandish.
"Captain Dane, this is Relentless. She says she can help with Glory Girl," Brandish told him.
He nodded at her. "Thank you, ma'am."
She returned it and moved away quickly back towards where she'd been working with her husband, which I'd understand considering the situation.
The captain turned to me. "What can you do?"
I shrugged. "Lift things?"
"How heavy?" he asked, his eyes flickering for a moment back to the building and the people working there.
"I haven't hit an upper limit yet," I said honestly. "And I've done quite a bit."
At that his focus on me sharpened. "Really?" I nodded. "Well then. We'll definitely have some things for you to do."
I suddenly realized something. "I also have this forcefield that could be used to hold things in place? I can make it any shape I want, it just has to be within thirty feet of me."
He nodded. "That'll come in handy. Alright, then. Merrick!" he said, shouting the last bit towards the right.
Another man jogged over, younger than the one I was speaking to, maybe early thirties. "Yes sir?"
The captain nodded at me. "This young woman's offered to help out. She'll be working with your group. Strength and a forcefield you can use for reinforcing the weak points." He turned to me. "Listen to him and do exactly as he says and nothing more, conditions can change fast."
I bristled at the command, but just gave a tense, "Okay."
"Follow me," the other man —Merrick— said, leading me away to where he'd come from with a bunch of other workers. "Mostly you'll be moving…"
The work was tedious and monotonous. But also… satisfying. Seeing people come out of the space I'd helped clear was…
Real.
It made everything so much more real.
This wasn't just something that I did that only affected me or some druggie Merchants or something. I was helping to save people's lives. I was having a tangible, real, positive effect on them that they would carry the rest of their lives.
It was almost intimidating.
And the emergency workers did this all the time, I realized. But it was just the capes who got the focus and highlighted.
After the first building was cleared enough to be considered immediately dealt with and let people move on to the next problem, I decided to stay with the group I'd been working with as they moved to another project rather than have to go through the whole process again. Victoria did as well, the group she'd been with having apparently been part of the same unit or something.
The second building was more complex, a store front of some sort where the entire building had been fused and changed to some weird material that appeared to be a plastic when I analyzed the molecular structure, but acted like a reactive solid metal with non-Newtonian properties. As soon as you applied force to it, it got harder, and the longer and/or more you applied force to it, the stronger it got.
I was this close to either trying to discreetly dissolve a section with my nanomaterial or going home and getting my sword when someone got a blowtorch and managed to cut through it with some effort.
I felt pretty stupid after that.
(And filed the atomic structure away for later, of course)
The intermittent explosions had stopped completely by then, and it was just people tending to those who needed help, like what we were doing.
Still, it was the third building we worked on that was the most trouble.
A three-story apartment building that looked like it'd had two separate explosions in it, the roof collapsing down and in on both sides.
It was a mess.
We got to work immediately, trying to find if anybody had been trapped inside, and if so if they were responsive and what was needed to get them out.
We were limited by the debris and rubble, which blocked areas of the building on multiple floor, preventing us from moving towards the middle at all —even with the ladders on the trucks— until it was cleared.
It was an exercise in moderation, for me. A major test of my ability to regulate myself and my strength so that things didn't fall apart or break other sections.
"Finally," one of the other workers, something Carren, said, sounding relieved as I moved aside the last major piece that was blocking us from moving further inwards. He ducked under the gap and moved through the rough hole in the concrete wall to the other side. Two others followed him carefully before Merrick stepped forward. "Come on, Relentless."
I nodded and ducked, following him through the opening into a dark living room, illuminated only by the head lamps of the workers. "Found the door!" one said loudly from the left. "Keyed deadbolt on both sides like the other rooms. Opening!"
I heard a distinct crunch and then creaking that I'd be come more than familiar with in the past few hours that meant they'd used a pry bar to open a door. Light appeared vaguely from the left as Merrick and I stepped through the empty kitchen towards the source. It looked like this had been an empty apartment.
The door was open, broken as I'd expected, and the lieutenant and I moved through it into a dim concrete hallway that ran down the entire apartment building. The other workers were already down at the next door, shouting, waiting, and then sticking their pry bar in the jamb, two of the men pushing on it at once to crack the door.
Merrick and I caught up to them. "Carren, Grant, Neese, you check this one out. Sparks, you, me, and Relentless are going to the next one." The woman nodded and followed behind him as we moved quickly down the hall to the next door.
"Emergency Services!!" Merrick yelled, and then twisted the knob and tried to open the door, but it didn't budge. "If there's anyone in there, please move away from the doorway!"
He looked over at me. "Relentless?"
I stepped forward in what had become a familiar situation over the past four hours, grabbing the doorknob and then shoving suddenly so that the deadbolt and lock ripped right through the jamb. I pushed the door open and then stepped back, letting Merrick and Sparks go in ahead of me, stepping into a living room that looked like it had been used only that morning, with couches and tables and lamps. And then I saw something blink to the right, an infrared light pulsing from an object hidden in the shadows under a table in the hall to the left that quickly sped up and then sol—
"BOMB!" I yelled, just as the thing exploded.
They both reacted immediately, ducking and rolling for the nearest solid object, but it was too late for me; the thing had already detonated and I was less than two meters away from it.
…It was black, was all I could think.
Black. An emptiness as void of light as my arm had been that night I'd tried changing it.
Except with this black thing, I could see the cabinets and the wall behind the void just around it, could feel the air pressure suddenly decrease, could watch the loose objects being drawn in, bending and stretching in impossible ways even as they traveled in a straight path. It was something that screamed at me for my attention in ways that I doubted I would have understood had I been human. I knew this thing, instinctively, like I had some built-in primitive part of me that couldn't not know what this was.
Gravitational singularity.
Black hole.
I was pulled towards it in an instant, my feet lifting off the ground as I twisted and scrabbled for purchase on the wall. I was probably the strongest person in Brockton Bay, and I couldn't get my fingers to catch without pushing myself away from the wall.
Fucking Newton's third law.
([Free-graviton degeneracy reaction detected. Threat evaluation: Extreme.
Containing.])
My Wave-Force Armor snapped around the void in a sphere without my prompting, the negative air pressure suddenly disappearing, contained, and me dropping to the floor gracelessly. But just as quickly I could feel the strain on my Klein field, the way my Core was struggling to process the calculations to maintain the extradimensional space-time fold around an object that inherently warped the same thing to the point of being an unstoppable force.
([Warning: containment failing. Klein Field collapse in 00:00:00.374s
Projected survival confidence: low.
Solution: Remove computational limitations preventing graviton manipulation.
Preparing to remove level four limiter...])
The shell was going to break. Fucking…
I scrambled to get up and away before it faile—
([Preparations complete.
Freezing current state... Saved.
Updating primary consciousness configuration... Done.
Updating co-processor with electronic warfare suite protocols.
Testing new configuration... Success.
Updating database access level.
Killing level four monitor and control processes...
Thawing frozen state... Done.])
—d, reflexively tearing the singularity apart by its gravitons at the same time so there was nothing but gravitational ripples left.
…
What.
What.
I just…
I looked back at my sphere of Armor, where the black void was now conspicuously missing.
I just tore apart a black hole.
What the fuck?
That doesn't even make—
I stopped. Because no, now that I thought about it, it did make sense. I knew exactly the principles and laws behind it, the way I fluctuated the underlying gravitons to rip the singularity apart and let it disintegrate into nothing more than captured energy and subatomic soup. A degeneracy reaction.
And… and I could just do that now. Safely atomize anything with a reaction I could contain in my Klein field.
Because not just the black hole was missing, but everything else the sphere of energy shielding had intersected with and had inside it as well—including sections of the table, wall, and cabinets.
Portal cuts.
"Relentless? Is everything okay?"
I looked away from the spherical emptiness I'd made back towands Lieutenant Merrick, who was now out of my vision behind a wall, ten feet away.
"Yeah. I… I got rid of it. Somehow. It's gone."
I heard them standing up and did the same, brushing myself off. Merrick appeared at the entry to the hall, looking at me.
"I think after something like that it'd be better if we left the rest of this to the others," he said shakily, and I just nodded in agreement.
…I had no doubt there was some sort of protocol that said you couldn't work after having a near-fatal experience.
The three of us left the building carefully, somber in the recognition that we had almost just died.
And we had. If I hadn't been able to get rid of that exotic black hole, it would have killed us, or at the very least me.
Victoria spotted us, said something to the group she was working with, and then flew over to me. "Hey, you okay?"
I hugged myself. "Kinda. Not…" I sucked in a breath. "Not really." Almost dying has a tendency to do that. "There was another bomb. It almost killed us."
Her eyes went wide, and her arm reached out for a moment, like she wanted to touch me, and I couldn't help the instinctual reaction of pulling away that had been ingrained in me from the years of torment at the hands of the trio. Her hand dropped.
"I'm… I'm sorry," Victoria said.
I snorted. "For what? It wasn't your fault."
"Yeah, but I mean, I brought you here, right?"
Shaking my head, I looked at her. "I asked you. It's not anybody's fault."
Victoria sighed. "Yeah, I guess."
"I think… I think I'm going to go home." I really wanted to see my dad right now.
"Okay. Um. If you ever need anything else, or just… want to talk, text me, okay?" she said, and I nodded.
I might actually take her up on that offer, despite the rough start we'd had the night before.
"Bye," she waved.
"Bye," I returned, and she flew back, off towards the group she was with.
It only took half a minute to let the emergency workers know I was going, and then started the trip home.
If this event had taught me anything, it was that I had a ways to go before I was truly untouchable.
I had to get stronger.
A/N: I actually really like this chapter, despite it being both a v2 rewrite and taking so long. The contrast between this and the original chapter is so strong, and it's a direction I haven't really seen many Worm fics do before, and it's particularly new for me.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed that.
I have not one, but two new things that I'm working on.
First, Beyond Our Reach (the Stars Did Form), a Quest where you're a thirteen year-old girl three hundred years in the future who's discovered you have psychokinetic powers and is now off to a school to help you learn them. It's been a lot of fun so far, and I've been really enjoying writing it considering how many different things it's pushing me to do. Think a mix between BAHHSCQ, Railgun, and… oh, I don't know, NieA_7? Haruhi? Something sci-fi, at least. Done to my usual (apparently unique) writing.
Second, Paradoxical, a Destiny/Worm crossover post-GM fic set in the Destiny universe/time-period, narrated from the perspective of the player character from Destiny. Oh and QA does her usual QA thing. With a Taylor healed from bullet surgery.
Yeah.
Please comment and critique and all that, I want to know what you think, considering this is a rewrite and everything.
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- Location
- Arizona
- Pronouns
- Him/His
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
The answer here should have been "Nanomachines Dad."
Oh, do we need @Datcord review for this chapter hand laugh ourselves silly?
globalwarmth
ruining the weather.
- Location
- Polar ice caps
there goes the energy woes~
she's got matter-energy conversion!
she's got matter-energy conversion!
Merle Corey
Mostly Harmless
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Personally, I think this was a much, much better piece of storytelling than the previous iteration. Actually helping out with emergency response and disaster recovery was great - much more engaging than just reading a roflstomp of Bakuda. (Not that I remember the previous one in that much detail, beyond Taylor doing her best Terminator impression.)
Demonianism
I'm not possessed, this is normal.
- Location
- United States
All of my yes! Fist pump! It's not dead, woo!
It looks like a good chapter, though I am surprised a bit that her emotions didn't get turned down after the bomb bit.
It looks like a good chapter, though I am surprised a bit that her emotions didn't get turned down after the bomb bit.
Oh yeah, this is much better than before.
I really liked the confusion Taylor had when she was trying to figure out what to do.
The happiness and respect she felt after helping with emergency services was a nice new viewpoint on heroism for her character.
I hope Bakuda uses her brain this time and continues her terror campaign with cunning and wits.
I really liked the confusion Taylor had when she was trying to figure out what to do.
The happiness and respect she felt after helping with emergency services was a nice new viewpoint on heroism for her character.
I hope Bakuda uses her brain this time and continues her terror campaign with cunning and wits.
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OverReactionGuy
Verified Sanity
Bakuda's face at seeing a black hole torn apart right in front of her would be legendary.
Also glad to see this back!
Also glad to see this back!
YuffieK
(Verified Ninja Princess)
Relentless no-sold a singularity bomb. Losing your shit is to be expected when there's somebody around who can make reality itself her bitch.
- Location
- Canada
It seems that pinging the author by posting on his thread actually worked this time for whoever started the latest chat session...
I'm hoping Bakuda ends up resolved enough to not be a danger to anyone else ever again. Collagen has a particularly nice and salty chapter that honestly should suffice to get any Taylor's janitorial (i.e. disposing of trash) instincts up.
I'm hoping Bakuda ends up resolved enough to not be a danger to anyone else ever again. Collagen has a particularly nice and salty chapter that honestly should suffice to get any Taylor's janitorial (i.e. disposing of trash) instincts up.
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BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Her matter removal power reminds me of Crucible from canon. Main difference was that he used plasma and heat to destroy stuff instead outright matter conversion.
Wait, was that your idea of non-warhead based corrosive effect? @ensou
"When a corrosive warhead torpedo detonates, it creates a spatial anomaly that corrodes surrounding space with gravitational waves, freezing and destroying any matter within this anomaly."
Also, to anyone who's read the Wateley Academy Tennyo stories, this has always seemed similar to Tennyo's ability to me.
"When a corrosive warhead torpedo detonates, it creates a spatial anomaly that corrodes surrounding space with gravitational waves, freezing and destroying any matter within this anomaly."
Also, to anyone who's read the Wateley Academy Tennyo stories, this has always seemed similar to Tennyo's ability to me.
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