Carbonado 6.1
- Location
- Chula Vista
Carbonado 6.1
I stretched, removing some kinks from my shoulders. I patted down my outfit, chroma mixed with Taydenite infused magic wool. The same red cloak over a semi-formal but comfortable outfit. I was going out on a mission with a certain crow as my scout. He had proven to have a talent for some of the Gem tech that we had to offer him.
String Theory was different in this reality, still a megalomaniac but of a very different sort. In her case it was mostly extortion of suitable villain targets, pay her or they're blown up by everything from tinker-created lightning storms to hydrokinetic blast cannons. At least half a dozen S-class threats had been wiped off the map and salvaged for parts by the crazed woman.
It didn't mean as much as you would hope though, there were dozens of them and they were destroyed all the time. The well-known ones were simply the most persistent, the ones that stood the test of time through cleverness, durability, or sheer ability to adapt or leave aftermaths.
This String Theory was more stable, but I heard rumors she wanted to pull off something big. And when it came to tinkers like her that wasn't something you wanted to happen regardless of her alignment. She was doing her thing more for ego, and because stealing from villains was apparently easier for her.
Faultline had mentioned meeting her once by chance, and that she seemed like she was being pulled thin, like she was resisting something. Not a good sign.
I wonder if she's built the F-driver yet?
No…do not.
I almost wanted to indulge in seeing how tough I really was, but three months probably wasn't good enough to be fully experienced with the unadulterated power of a Diamond. Though my sparring sessions with the Hollow Knight had been rather helpful.
He was fast, able to keep up with me even when I overclocked myself. The only real challenge I had met so far on Bet had been Butcher. Her teleportation and danger sense had been the only thing keeping her from being crushed. But I couldn't kill her, because she would possess any parahuman schmuck in the area. Plus I didn't much feel like killing people when I didn't need to.
Tungwup landed on my shoulder, some of his feathers smoking. I suppose he had gotten targeted by some security systems. Good thing for his energy shield.
"Is she in there?" I asked the sophont avian, and he let out a clicking sound.
"Of course she is, she's got some hefty security. Keep up your freaky sky magic and you'll be fine."
"May I borrow your memories for directions?" He gave me his permission, and I touched his head, carefully pulling out the surface thoughts he was directing. "Thank you." I kissed him on his little head, healing his injuries. He let out a squawk, and he vanished through a portal.
I took off into the air, shifting my energies to fly. A combination of reducing my mass, directing telekinetic force, and a formation of a skintight form of my shield bubbled around me in strange geometries. I held myself up on the shields, on the Aura turned into inviolable defense. Three forms of propulsion to let me fly.
I moved silently, quieting the air with my natural mastery of reality. I felt the possibilities, what directions should I avoid? What dangers awaited me?
I entered the warehouse, and saw the interior had been altered into endless hallways, a maze, a labyrinth patrolled by drones. By technology.
I broadcast my mind into the machinery, they were modified manufacturing drones, carrying overclocked tools, welders turned to plasma blades, telekinetic effectors turned to various forms of matter manipulation. Aerokinetic blades, waves of metal, of localized stone and stray materials.
They worked on a similar but less efficient basis to Red Tornado, combined with another method of telekinesis. They had energy shields, ones used to contain elements turned to defensive purposes.
Not that we got that from my technopathy. Tungwup had stolen a drone yesterday. But it did give me avenues to exploit when projecting my mind. The drones parted, and her sensors glided past my form. It took me a good five minutes to move through the base without alerting her.
My steps were silent as I entered the room, and there was a sinking feeling in my stomach as I saw her work on a large heavy device, a cannon of some kind. It curved, resembling a futuristic recoilless rifle. My drones, my Robonoids, picked up some type of gravity generator keeping it light.
There was a woman there, muttering under her breath as she worked on components of the esoteric device. She was petite, maybe five foot nothing to five foot two, shorter than even I was before my very small growth spurt. A short, slouching woman with dark hair tied back into a braid.
"No…I need to cut the projector crystal into the right shape, once every forty two seconds…" She muttered, and I waited for her to take a mandated break. "The beam has to be perfect, else it won't be able to punch through. Raw kinetic force transmission, plus regular electrogravitic pulses should provide the right impact. It'll be able to fire every four minutes and twenty seconds, one or three shots should be enough. Energy output, forty two thousand yottajoules…"
So about ten exatons of TNT worth of energy, a frankly terrifying amount of energy output. I crossed my arm over my bust, waiting for her to continue.
"Most of the backblast is diverted across dimensional boundaries, so backfire won't tear apart the planet…" I opened and closed my mouth. "Works better in space though, the energy gets dissipated too quickly across several dimensions in the atmosphere."
It was a solid ten minute wait, before a clock rang. "I'll need a long break to let the nanofluid coolant settle." She turned around with a self assured smile, one which cracked the moment she spun her chair.
She let out a sound I couldn't quite describe as squawking, or burbling or some other third thing. She let out a barking command to the drones which didn't respond as I projected my will into their dumb little robot minds.
"Hello, String Theory." I kept my shield bubbling around my skin, my Aura phasing through bone and flesh, holding it together to withstand even the greatest forces. She produced a gun from somewhere, some type of energy beam weapon from the light it was starting to generate. So I said as much.
"Who…"
"Please put the gun down, that's just a peashooter to me." I replied honestly. "And I'm here because I wanted to be here, I heard rumors a violent little vigilante was building up to something big. So I decided to take a look, take a gander at the scenery."
String Theory looked like crap, her smile was a wide mix of a smirk, a grin, and an exhausted snarl. There were bags under her eyes, and her pale complexion was even paler than it should be.
Her smirk would be infuriating if it wasn't for the tiredness and exhaustion palpable through her aura. "So you came to stop me, is that it? Who's paying you? The Bratva? Some of the monsters in India?"
I blinked. "Huh…guess you haven't heard," I shook my head. "Hero, not villain. Whatever that amounts to…and stopping you is going to depend on what your end goal even is." I took a peek at her shard and paled.
Technologic was her shard's designation. It meant she was among the highest class of shard, in the same vein as Shaper, as the Administrators, as Elle's shard which was generally called Navigator but named itself Demesnes-Keeper before being crippled.
She had a royal shard hooked up to her brain trying to make her into a megalomaniac. That it hadn't succeeded so far was through sheer force of human will.
"I want to kill an Endbringer." I didn't gape, but I did veil her within my Aura. Diamonds messed with precognition to some extent, and shadowing her actions from the Simurgh was bound to be necessary. "But I know my power wants something different. "
"Excuse me?" She sneered for a moment but it shifted when I waited patiently for her to elaborate.
"I…it's hard to describe, I know what I feel, but I also know it's there too. Whenever I use my power…I can feel it crawl into my thoughts, twisting them, trying to get me to build bigger, more elaborate, more…destructive." There was concern, fear, indignation. "I don't mind an explosion or two…and I'm no saint but…"
She was terrified and raging. Her power was enormous, a vast creature using her to push an agenda. Perhaps she was meant as a means to increase conflict, because there was a pattern we had noted with decades of records of capes and Triggers.
There seemed to be a level of…adaptation of capes over time, for every success that was made with better holding the tide, new capes emerged that made old methods irrelevant. Attempts to use therapy worked for several years before there was a sudden increase in Masters and Strangers among them.
That created the rotation system as a short-term fix which was never changed due to inertia and gradual degradation of the balance of power. Guns became more common for a time and the percentage of Brutes and Shakers who messed with them ticked up just a bit.
It was small and subtle tweaks, though they weren't as efficient as we knew they could be. Likely a result of missing the Thinker's own input into the process.
"I understand." Her eyes widened, and she seemed almost relieved. She didn't put down her handheld megawatt laser but it was fair enough with a Brute 8 in the room. "Atlas has been searching for you, we heard some nasty rumors you were planning something big." A ten exaton energy output superweapon had been one of our guesses.
"Like blowing up the moon?" She bent her body at awkward angles, her smile overshadowed by her exhaustion.
"Not a very useful thing, other than for killing monsters and worlds." She shrugged. "The better question is why you had plans to point your weapon at Mars first?" Sapphires were very good at predicting threats.
String Theory smiled. "I wanted to grab your attention." So she was nuts but in a different way. "I know the big guys like the PRT are keeping it quiet, but I know aliens when I see them." Also I think she was sleep-deprived, because she didn't recognize me on sight.
Huh.
Neat.
"So…what, extortion? Or did you want our help?" String Theory would be our first tinker since Masamune didn't count. He would be accepted into the ranks of the Guild, and would be doing it in good health. Turns out he has brittle bones disease, and a mix of my ichor and use of genetic tweaking cured him.
It would take him weeks at least before he was in a state to help, but it was an extra few years of tinkering than being picked up in 2012.
"You've got the little brat with you right, the Shaker 12? She was left nuts and you fixed that, what do you think the answer is?" There was something different about this String Theory, she seemed too stable, too…not insane, where it was…
She changed, at some point before her Trigger she had gone through different circumstances. If she was stable by cape standards…she would be one of the most powerful tinkers on Earth.
The best way to disable that would be to give her a shard that would drive her to megalomania and insanity. Just like what Scion had done with the Tinker 15, a weapon against humanity. But one that retained a human look and cunning.
"Should I come out now?" I looked at String Theory, and I could feel her aura, quivering with fear, anger, yet determined. What has changed String Theory? What had made her want to fight the whims of an alien god-worm?
She was a puzzle, a person I knew so little about. Honestly I knew very little about a lot of capes. Reading what I knew from a web novel wasn't going to give me everything. Much less when I wasn't going for main 'characters' and all.
This world wasn't the same, and it could never be the same, and I was glad for it. I knew Faultline but I didn't know Melanie Fitts, I knew Labyrinth but I didn't know Elle Burton. I knew Gregor the Snail but I didn't know Gregor Greseth.
"Tell me. What do you think you want from this? Be honest."
She twitched, glaring but it lessened as I stared her down.
"I want to be me. " She said with conviction, a burning fire in her eyes.
"Let me bring out someone who can make the process easier, if that's alright with you?" She nodded, and a door opened in reality. Doormaker's shard had been a bit of a nasty surprise. It was an Abaddon shard, or more accurately an Eden shard with a foreign element.
There had been millions of Abaddon shards once, and most had been destroyed or irreparably consumed by Eden shards. Doormaker was his ability to step between worlds.
We had plucked the complex high order mathematics from his shard, since our form of teleportation wasn't quite as fast. In time we might be able to use his power to more rapidly step between worlds.
Elle moved out, and I could feel her shard doing it's thing. Navigator(Nisse) was heavily crippled by the impact against another shard, and had been rebuilding itself piece by piece, reviving the scattered fragments. Which when it amounted to about a planet's worth of mass was mildly concerning. She had gone from about eighty or so exatons of mass to three thousand and a half.
The rest would take longer, weeks, months, years even.
"How long is your mandated break?" I asked String Theory.
"Thirty seven minutes and fifteen seconds. So thirty three minutes?" More than enough time. I listened and waited, and heard the shards begin their broadcasts.
Shards were largely isolated asided from the esoteric Shardspace until the point of connection. At that point the shard organized into hierarchies, Hubs or Courts within the greater network. For example I was fairly sure Dauntless has connections to most of the capes in the city.
Dozens of them at least.
Nisse had her own court, and she cared more about exploring the universe and the dimensional sea. From what I can tell she was already deviant, a hodgepodge of a thousand mentalities made it off…
"We should sit down for a bit, this might take a few minutes." String Theory shrugged and I pulled three chairs out from my gem. She seemed curious but left it alone.
Once that was done, I plunged right into the Mindscape. It was an inky blackness, and two giants roamed within. Two crystals, each vast in scope and scale. They twisted around each other like demented centipedes, a metaphor for their exchange, for their broadcasting.
[Nisse-Navigator] requests location of [Technologic]
Nisse the Navigator sent out a waving pulse, rejuvenated by the repairs made to its body, and access to new energy sources. It spoke with newfound power, and I could see aspects of Elle's aura intertwined in hers.
Technologic was much larger than Navigator, and I swallowed. The higher shards, the nobles, the royals had the greatest mass and power. At their smallest they were about the size of the Earth, at their largest maybe thrice the size of it.
[Technologic] requests purpose.
So much power and knowledge there, Technologic was based on our mass sensors, likely around twelve to fourteen zettatons. It was the Queen Inventor, the greatest and grandest of the technology-holding shards. It had vast knowledge on any form of technology and pulled on any number of other shards for data when needed.
DATA.
Technologic recoils as Nisse offered data, all at the cost of switching sides. Of keeping a tap on other shards for monitoring of Scion. A number of Eden shards had been convinced in that way.
The main problem was that the network connected only to dimensions the Entities knew about. We needed something to provide a hub for other shards without alerting anything. The Hubs from their dimensions didn't yet extend here.
We had subverted a number of shards, but they had no network. Instead they had been force-fed data on humans, and orders broadcast to them by machinery. They still had interfaces into Shardspace as needed.
Forty percent of Eden's crash-landing shards are subverted, with most of them being the glacier sized variants. A number were on the scale of continents, and were taking much longer. No network for now, but any powers they granted would no longer take their hosts apart.
We need to build one, and Elle was apparently willing to let her shard be the center of a hub. Even if only a small one until other comparable shards could be subverted or brought in. Most hubs were restricted to the planet or required relays to extend their range.
Every parahuman I had taken in had joined up with Nisse, with Navigator. Would Technologic turn on us, try to subvert us or…
A broadcast hit me.
Query: Nature of [Paradigm Diamond]?
Technologic was speaking to me more directly and I narrowed my eyes.
"Not until you speak to me in a more comfortable language." I broadcast back, Gemsong lingering around the space neither shard knew they were in.
The shard changed shape, becoming more compact. Red crystal parted for red chitin, and I lifted an eyebrow when the shard took the form of a spider, a ten eyed twelve legged spider.
There was a pause, and Nisse provided an interface with her odd connection to Elle. The weaving spider shifted around me, and I doubt it's full perception was pushing against me.
"You silenced the Shaper." It spoke, sounding uneasy. As much as a shard could feel such emotions. "Most did not notice, but [Technologic] did." It spoke in third person apparently. "You have access to Data…and [Technologic] can not steal it."
"Things can't continue as they are, and you know not every cycle is successful." I spoke, and it listened.
"[Technologic] will join you." I stopped, and blinked. It shouldn't be that easy? What was it playing here?
"Why?" Even the reborn Navigator was befuddled by the decision. The shard didn't reply with words this time.
Data. Dream. Memory.
There was a shift in the mindscape, and I was surprised when the energies of higher realities rippled. Not a full response, but it was something.
It was a collage of images, of possibilities, of golden light burning worlds, of thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of worlds dying, ending, stilling. It was flashes of the dead, countless lives sniffed out, countless species ended again and again and again.
This looks like…
Like Gold Morning.
There was a flicker of memory, a younger String Theory sleeping fitfully. A subtle crack in reality, bathing her in the energies. The shard connecting to her, and facing resistance, a weight to her that wasn't there before. I looked at the shard and found a coloring of emotions, stronger than most shards I had seen. Bits and pieces of String Theory floating around in it's mind.
The cracks went back to at least when Abaddon punched a hole into 460-AB's section of the multiverse. That much I had learned from the areas of dimensional weakness Elle was pointing out for us.
A struggle that lasted six years, between freedom and slavery, creation and destruction, peace and conflict. So why did it give up? It was greater, stronger, longer-lasting.
More images came, flashes here and there of…a man in red running, faster than a bullet, faster than lightning, faster than time itself. A man in red and blue, a paragon. Countless beings in green, the strongest willed beings in the universe.
[Technologic] requests data. Understanding.
Those words were a thousand thousand concepts, and I swallowed. It wanted to see what was possible, it wanted to understand the ghosts that haunted it's labyrinthine mind. So it decided to join the little hub we had created.
Artificer, Gregor, Newter, Faultline, Mantellum, Matryoshka, and Shamrock. Seven shards, and possibly eight with Technologic.
"We'll have to take precautions." There was a shift in the spider's expression, almost a smirk?
Affirmative. [Technologic] will accede to both the [Nisse-Navigator] and the [Paradigm Diamond]
Nisse began to extend it's tendrils, manipulating the bridges between it and Elle, that link to the Dream. It couldn't use magic directly, requiring components provided by us. Even then it was learning, and seemed…almost guilty for what it had done to Elle.
Technologic had become deviant due to the six years of impossible resistance String Theory had put up. So I further the process by letting my Aura explode out through the channels Nisse was opening. Oneiros helped with their ability to affect the metaphysical realms, which was part of it's tasks to establish local networks.
Still a dick though.
My power burst out with far greater strength than I expected, and I felt it radiate for fifty miles in every direction both physically and metaphysically. Oneiros weaved it's magic, further emboldened by my power.
Cerise Dawn Court established.
It was Nisse-Navigator who answered, a court made of a handful of shards. Though apparently it wanted to make connections with shards from the Asylum due to retaining their addresses.
Fair enough.
I breathed out, and I returned to normal reality. String Theory was stepping back from Elle but she didn't look ready to kill us all.
"How long was I…?"
Elle bummed. "Thirty seconds?" I was surprised. Then I remembered I have much greater processing speed than full humans.
"It's…gone?" String Theory appeared to relax, though she seemed unnerved based on her aura. "No…it turned against…something." She rubbed her head, groaning. "I still want to build the F-Driver. But I no longer have the temptation to use it on the moon. Mostly. "
Oh thank god.
"So…uh…what now?" String Theory twisted her body again, with a wide shit-eating grin.
"Well, I still have the countdown for completing my F-Driver and it's activation. Can't stop it."
"Would…would it be okay if we move your equipment elsewhere, like say another reality?"
She smirked. "If you get me some quality parts…absolutely."
This was going to end in tears.
We moved her lab within minutes, all the while String Theory was heckling me like a little shit. Four hours, twenty three minutes and thirty seconds later she had finished the F-Driver.
It would activate against a provided target, all the while we would take deep intensive scans of the interior of the weapon. It was a corner world, a planet much like mine in every way. Not many people lived on it, mostly immigrants from another Earth with limited supernatural activity. They had evacuated, since there were only a few thousand people.
A large planetoid had made its way into the solar system, about fifteen hundred kilometers across. The F-Driver would destroy the object, while the Gems did their best to stabilize the moon from the perturbations of the rogue planetoid.
They already had bombs built to lense the thing into another world, but this was an additional backup. I watched, actively scanning the F-Driver as it began to charge. The gun was a ridiculous weapon from any standpoint. It was powered by a fusion reactor, which used the power to pull energies from other universes. It folded higher dimensions to connect the links between electromagnetism and gravity, creating what was basically a hyper-kinetic battering ram.
It was a solid piercing projection of force, using higher dimensional energies to generate a physics manipulation field. From what the sensors were picking up. The most impressive thing about it was the precise alteration of materials down to an atomic level, and the compactness. A meter long gun had two and a half billion times more energy output than a Light Cannon.
String Theory was going to be a difficult cape to manage.
"So. While we wait for my F-Driver, why not talk about yourself? I was a little…manic before, but I'll be back to my old self in no time." Her grin hadn't changed at all. "Why are a bunch of aliens interested in little old me?" She adjusted the targeting of the F-Driver, pointed straight up at the planetoid a mere fifteen thousand miles away.
"Besides the obvious?" I gestured to her megaproject with a raised eyebrow. "We've been interested in acquiring powered people, we have an interest in the planet and you're one of the strongest tinkers on record aside from a single exception."
"Who?"
"No idea. His power has long since robbed him of his agency, and finding him has been…complicated." Turns out the Tinker 15 was good at hiding. "Regardless, your ability to create almost anything within a set time limit is…useful."
String Theory smirked. "You just want to blow up planets huh?"
"We can already blow up planets," I dismissed the claim slightly. "But your weapon is more compact, most weapons we can build on the size scale of your weapon are more in the gigaton to teraton range. Though we can build a lot more of them than you can build F-Drivers."
"You're not very good at talking to people are you?" I closed my mouth, giving her a baffled stare. This coming from Miss Blow-Up-The-Moon?
I mean, what the fuck?
She laughed. "Hah! Knew you had it in you to be a real bitch." The manic edge to it was disturbing but par for the different.
"Wait. Did I say that aloud?" She laughed harder, making a final adjustment.
"So what do you want me for?" She adjusted her glasses with a wide grin, glinting in the sun.
"Would destroying…giant insane world-killing space monsters be something up your alley?" I had a cheeky grin on my face when she choked.
"Giant…how big are we talking about here?"
"At their smallest, they're about the size of glaciers. We can take care of those," I flicked out my hand, song lilting with feigned smugness. "It's the big ones we have to worry about, creatures on the scale of continents and moons and even planets." I could feel some form of concern from Technologic, though when I said insane it became less unnerved.
I smirked. "So. Interested?"
She pushed up her glasses once more, as they glinted in the sun. "You're goddamn right I'm interested!"
There was an almost silent whump as the F-Driver went off, a distortion of silver light surrounding the solid wave of shaped force. It had to be moving at hundreds of kilometers a second, and the single shot broke the gun, shredding precious components.
It took half a minute for the blast to reach its target, and another few seconds for the planetoid to…quite literally get shattered in the opposite direction of the planet.
"Well. Guess it worked." My song was faint, because holy shit why am I recruiting a world-killing maniac?
String Theory laughed but it was a hoarse thing, manic and exhausted. There was a faint relief to her aura, a sense of victory.
She slumped, and I caught her in a shaped barrier before she could crack her head on the ground.
Oh.
That's why.
I cleared out what little remained of String Theory's workshop, which was a converted abandoned factory in Texas. Nothing left here, though I detected a distorted aura approaching at supersonic speed. I dumped the stuff into portals, which opened faster and more efficiently than before.
I activated the Transfer-Jewel(yes I had renamed it…) and I was sent careening through warp-space. I was a few hundred meters in the air, and started to float.
An automaton was approaching, vaguely human shaped yet one that retained a draconic bent. Silver-steel in color, with quiet engines and ports for what had to be weapons.
"Excuse me?" A softly accented voice called. I turned to face the robot, and smiled wide. If there was one person I considered to be likeable on this planet it was Dragon.
"You're Dragon aren't you?" I wasn't really questioning it, but I did want to make sure. There's all kinds of tinkers out there.
"I am. You must be Sunrise Diamond…the princess of the Gem Empire." I didn't blush, but it did feel odd to be considered one. "I presume you were checking out the rumors of String Theory's presence in the area?"
"They aren't rumors but yes. Why?"
"String Theory is a fairly unstable vigilante capable of creating incredibly potent and dangerous tinkertech. She's caused a lot of collateral damage, and has executed numerous Kill Orders."
"Has her collateral ever been innocent people?" I asked. Dragon's suit shifted.
"No. No deaths, though she's put dozens of people in the hospital."
"Weren't they healed by a tinker, Amend?" It had been easy enough to figure out String Theory. She was nicer than she should be, but she was still someone who wanted to make an impact and she was a total bitch.
It was going to be fun to argue with her.
I was being sarcastic.
"Yes. He seems to appear in the aftermath of String Theory's presence in an area. Why?"
Because they were definitely the same person?
"Well…it's not my secret to tell. Regardless, she won't be much of a problem for your world anymore." I started to move, gesturing for Dragon to follow. She kept up even as I moved at three hundred and fifty meters a second.
After a few seconds, we stopped, continuing to float. Dragon had a very interesting propulsion system. It resembled an aerokinetic core, air-specialized effector fields alongside plasma thrusters.
"You recruited her?" She seemed skeptical, and I got it. They had tried the same with String Theory and she shrugged them off.
"We have options the Protectorate lacks, we have parahumans too. Though they're considered a specific type of metahuman for us." She made a curious hum, and I could see the code dancing along her aura. A twisting, spiraling form. "Her power was pushing her towards grander and more…dangerous projects."
"Was?" There was a hint of danger in the possibilities, and I maneuvered the conversation as best as I could.
"We have a better understanding of how powers work, certain aspects of Parahuman psychology are harder to…well help with, but her issue was treatable. Plus giving her better targets for some of her megaprojects."
"She generated a lightning storm to destroy a cape capable of creating a mile wide field used to mutate people into monsters." She seemed a bit aghast of my response.
"Alien invasions are a thing on 460-AB, and the other Earths don't have as much protection." Most of the Earths were still getting infrastructure setup, since their tech wasn't always as advanced. "Plus we have a number of empty Earths in case of backlash."
"Taking in String Theory could have a number of consequences with the PRT." She warned me, and I could tell she was scrambling to figure us out. "She does have a warrant out for her arrest due to the damage she's caused." It was very much fair. She wasn't a monster, but…I couldn't call her good or the most moral person.
"Then we'll do our best to help her make up for crimes, having String Theory as a hero is preferable to her becoming a villain." The words sounded strange on my lips. "If there's property damage we can offer something comparable in value to the PRT. Any people she's injured can be offered compensation and so on." We had done the same with Rachel, taking a plea deal for her issues.
"You're quite serious about taking her in aren't you?" Dragon didn't seem to think it was a bad idea. "Is…such a thing a common procedure in your universe?"
"We try at least, it doesn't always work…but we try." There had been multiple successful attempts. Poison Ivy, Doctor Freeze, Harley Quinn.
"It's not going to be an easy road." Dragon pointed out. "The PRT has their own programs and they're not always a success."
"Meh. That's not enough to make me give up." I had given up far too often in my own life, I refused to be the person I used to be. I had to try. "It's not like she's the strongest being in the galaxy…at least she can't just blink and make you gone. "
Celestasapiens were terrifying, and it was only the fact they liked to debate for eons that kept them from melting the universe with a thought. Though I had heard rumors they had done something in the last few centuries.
"If you're going to recruit more capes…what are your long term plans for the planet?" Dragon asked good questions.
"Earth Bet is a humanitarian mission, peacekeeping if you would. Earth Bet is considered to be in an Extinction Crisis scenario. Three active Asura, a rapid increase in superpowered beings beyond a civilization's ability to compensate, are considered threats on their own…"
"But together they're crippling?" Dragon suggested. I hummed in the affirmative. "So you plan to help stabilize the planet for purely humanitarian purposes?" She projected doubt.
"We all know it's never that clean, the other reason you already know is that our war is going to spill onto your world. The main enemy we're facing is known for stealing technology and superpowers, and your planet has six hundred thousand parahumans and over a billion potential ones."
"The Star Wyrm you mentioned…it wants our parahumans."
"And it won't hesitate to experiment and vissisect them to regain its lost power. It's why we invited who we could to the Galactic Conference/Jubilee."
She didn't sound reassured in the slightest. "So how do you plan to cooperate with the Earth?"
"We can set up technological transfer agreements, share our knowledge. Earth 460-AB can make their own deals with your world like Aleph. Our technology isn't tinkertech nor is theirs, perhaps you can help incorporate it with your power."
I spent the next thirty minutes hashing out a deal with Dragon, and I felt pretty accomplished by the end of it.
I focused on my power, and I sent out a wave of energy from my body. I had shaped my energy projection into a thirty two foot field around me, burning everything with the radiation and energy output. It had taken a few attempts, surrounding myself in a wreath of fire, and then expanding it into a barely visible cloud of energy.
I had my own Kill aura, a range where anyone who wasn't a Brute or a strong enough Shaker would die. I shut it off at the thought, and moved on to other more creative uses of my power. I pulled on the memory of what I felt with Eidolon's Matter Eraser. It was a beam of dimensional disruption, tearing apart matter at a subatomic level.
I couldn't copy the exact same mechanism, but I did use the 'purpose' of my type of Gem to do my best. Those of Cerise were Life itself, and thus Death itself too.
Raw matter destruction was in our remit, and I remembered the shape of the field. The way higher fields shredded atoms, utterly broke them up.
I formed a ball of flame-like cerise sparks, shifting the wavelengths that coated our sonic screams. I compressed it, adding more and more magic before sending it out in a wave of power. Spires of stone and obsidian made by Elle ceased to exist where my power touched them. An area as broad as a tennis court.
I had destroyed molecular bonds, I was close to mimicking the power. But his power destroyed matter utterly. The air sizzled with the destructive forces I had invoked. While it wasn't quite as powerful…it would destroy most Brutes including Alexandria. Her stasis-field enhanced marble body wasn't exotic enough to resist having the bonds of matter falling apart.
I lifted a finger and formed my energy projection into an fiery orb. A flick, and it was sent flying like a contained firestorm. It detonated, a glittering spherical wave of plasma striking a tree into oblivion. I shaped another blast, and changed it's behavior, nature, and toxicity.
Then I changed my mind and wrapped my hands in the energy that sparked with a toxic field of electricity. I struck a solid statue of iron with my palm, projecting the attack into the metal, which burst into a cloud of iron dust, eaten away by the field.
I had been working on this for a while, I had the same powers as Steven so I needed to find ways to differentiate myself. I had to be creative, had to innovate in how I used my powers.
This was how. Capes on this planet had been using their powers for years, learning, adapting, evolving. I would take their techniques for my own, and learn how to better configure my magic and energy fields to better emulate them.
Faultline had been among the first I had mimicked, using my energy projection to create fissures and to sever molecular bonds. I had even carved tunnels like she could and left weak points for opponents to wander into. I had learned flight from New Wave, Dauntless, Legend, and Alexandria. I had managed to break the sound barrier ten times over.
Then we crashed into a mountain and onto our ass.
Stars that had been embarrassing and it hurt.
I wrapped myself in my shield bubble, and began to add overlapping layers. A twisting labyrinth of layers modeled after Brandish. I shrunk myself down, rolling into a ball. My layering made my shield bubble exponentially stronger, and Hallow had been happy to use his building shattering blows against it.
I shifted back to my normal size, shutting off my shield-barrier. Instead I made use of my telekinetic abilities, my aura growing to push matter aside. It colored the air very faintly, and a flick of my wrist sent a fifty ton stone flying.
I made more barriers, altering the hex shapes and making a rough humanoid shape. Kind of like a Porygon or that laserdisc guardian thing from Regular Show, all angles and made of hard light. I had gotten that off a code patch from Argent, my Lapis Lazuli. But instead of using compressed water and ice, I used my barriers.
I turned the humanoid figure into a more abstract wave of barriers, and nodded to myself. This world had many beings to imitate. New Wave's light and force field manipulation, Behemoth's radiation field, the Simurgh's telekinesis, Legend's splitting lasers and Eidolon's Matter Eraser.
I formed a long whip-like tail, and doubled my size. I accelerated, using my tail to slice apart rock and metal. My barriers followed my motion, knocking aside everything in their path.
Leviathan's speed and water echoes.
…
Breathe.
I relaxed, pulling back my magic. There were other uses too of course, I didn't like the idea of getting stuck in the conflict-mindset of the shards. More precise use of telekinetic powers would help me with construction of tech, but without the creation of doomsday devices like Ziz. I could use my new energy projection techniques for mundane uses. Mining, carving, cooking, or even starting chemical reactions.
I ended up using a shield as a cooking utensil a few times, for example, making some warm chicken noodle soup. Then spaghetti. Then more soup.
My cooking abilities weren't exactly deep. Better than Steven though, his creations were an abomination, a crime against god and nature.
I caught a presence approaching the battlefield, and I smiled when I recognized who it was.
"Flowers. You're back from your fishing trip with Hallow?" I turned around, raising an eyebrow at the pink/purple Sapphire. Her hair was matted, and her form-clothing was weighed down by water.
Did…do they spear-fishing or something?
She vaporized the water with a pulse of her light, her song whistling with a calm contentment "I am…and I think it's time for you to take a break, the next few weeks are going to be busy. With the Galactic Conference on the way." She twirled one of her bangs, flowing along the cracked ground.
I smiled, and she placed her hand on my arm. "I suppose it might be nice…I'm going to take a nap." I rubbed my eyes, I needed less sleep than I used to but I was still adjusting to eating light energy to generate magical energy.
"And when you wake up, I can share with you some stories from when I visited Tamaran."
I yawned…
Yeah.
That sounded nice.
I stretched, removing some kinks from my shoulders. I patted down my outfit, chroma mixed with Taydenite infused magic wool. The same red cloak over a semi-formal but comfortable outfit. I was going out on a mission with a certain crow as my scout. He had proven to have a talent for some of the Gem tech that we had to offer him.
String Theory was different in this reality, still a megalomaniac but of a very different sort. In her case it was mostly extortion of suitable villain targets, pay her or they're blown up by everything from tinker-created lightning storms to hydrokinetic blast cannons. At least half a dozen S-class threats had been wiped off the map and salvaged for parts by the crazed woman.
It didn't mean as much as you would hope though, there were dozens of them and they were destroyed all the time. The well-known ones were simply the most persistent, the ones that stood the test of time through cleverness, durability, or sheer ability to adapt or leave aftermaths.
This String Theory was more stable, but I heard rumors she wanted to pull off something big. And when it came to tinkers like her that wasn't something you wanted to happen regardless of her alignment. She was doing her thing more for ego, and because stealing from villains was apparently easier for her.
Faultline had mentioned meeting her once by chance, and that she seemed like she was being pulled thin, like she was resisting something. Not a good sign.
I wonder if she's built the F-driver yet?
No…do not.
I almost wanted to indulge in seeing how tough I really was, but three months probably wasn't good enough to be fully experienced with the unadulterated power of a Diamond. Though my sparring sessions with the Hollow Knight had been rather helpful.
He was fast, able to keep up with me even when I overclocked myself. The only real challenge I had met so far on Bet had been Butcher. Her teleportation and danger sense had been the only thing keeping her from being crushed. But I couldn't kill her, because she would possess any parahuman schmuck in the area. Plus I didn't much feel like killing people when I didn't need to.
Tungwup landed on my shoulder, some of his feathers smoking. I suppose he had gotten targeted by some security systems. Good thing for his energy shield.
"Is she in there?" I asked the sophont avian, and he let out a clicking sound.
"Of course she is, she's got some hefty security. Keep up your freaky sky magic and you'll be fine."
"May I borrow your memories for directions?" He gave me his permission, and I touched his head, carefully pulling out the surface thoughts he was directing. "Thank you." I kissed him on his little head, healing his injuries. He let out a squawk, and he vanished through a portal.
I took off into the air, shifting my energies to fly. A combination of reducing my mass, directing telekinetic force, and a formation of a skintight form of my shield bubbled around me in strange geometries. I held myself up on the shields, on the Aura turned into inviolable defense. Three forms of propulsion to let me fly.
I moved silently, quieting the air with my natural mastery of reality. I felt the possibilities, what directions should I avoid? What dangers awaited me?
I entered the warehouse, and saw the interior had been altered into endless hallways, a maze, a labyrinth patrolled by drones. By technology.
I broadcast my mind into the machinery, they were modified manufacturing drones, carrying overclocked tools, welders turned to plasma blades, telekinetic effectors turned to various forms of matter manipulation. Aerokinetic blades, waves of metal, of localized stone and stray materials.
They worked on a similar but less efficient basis to Red Tornado, combined with another method of telekinesis. They had energy shields, ones used to contain elements turned to defensive purposes.
Not that we got that from my technopathy. Tungwup had stolen a drone yesterday. But it did give me avenues to exploit when projecting my mind. The drones parted, and her sensors glided past my form. It took me a good five minutes to move through the base without alerting her.
My steps were silent as I entered the room, and there was a sinking feeling in my stomach as I saw her work on a large heavy device, a cannon of some kind. It curved, resembling a futuristic recoilless rifle. My drones, my Robonoids, picked up some type of gravity generator keeping it light.
There was a woman there, muttering under her breath as she worked on components of the esoteric device. She was petite, maybe five foot nothing to five foot two, shorter than even I was before my very small growth spurt. A short, slouching woman with dark hair tied back into a braid.
"No…I need to cut the projector crystal into the right shape, once every forty two seconds…" She muttered, and I waited for her to take a mandated break. "The beam has to be perfect, else it won't be able to punch through. Raw kinetic force transmission, plus regular electrogravitic pulses should provide the right impact. It'll be able to fire every four minutes and twenty seconds, one or three shots should be enough. Energy output, forty two thousand yottajoules…"
So about ten exatons of TNT worth of energy, a frankly terrifying amount of energy output. I crossed my arm over my bust, waiting for her to continue.
"Most of the backblast is diverted across dimensional boundaries, so backfire won't tear apart the planet…" I opened and closed my mouth. "Works better in space though, the energy gets dissipated too quickly across several dimensions in the atmosphere."
It was a solid ten minute wait, before a clock rang. "I'll need a long break to let the nanofluid coolant settle." She turned around with a self assured smile, one which cracked the moment she spun her chair.
She let out a sound I couldn't quite describe as squawking, or burbling or some other third thing. She let out a barking command to the drones which didn't respond as I projected my will into their dumb little robot minds.
"Hello, String Theory." I kept my shield bubbling around my skin, my Aura phasing through bone and flesh, holding it together to withstand even the greatest forces. She produced a gun from somewhere, some type of energy beam weapon from the light it was starting to generate. So I said as much.
"Who…"
"Please put the gun down, that's just a peashooter to me." I replied honestly. "And I'm here because I wanted to be here, I heard rumors a violent little vigilante was building up to something big. So I decided to take a look, take a gander at the scenery."
String Theory looked like crap, her smile was a wide mix of a smirk, a grin, and an exhausted snarl. There were bags under her eyes, and her pale complexion was even paler than it should be.
Her smirk would be infuriating if it wasn't for the tiredness and exhaustion palpable through her aura. "So you came to stop me, is that it? Who's paying you? The Bratva? Some of the monsters in India?"
I blinked. "Huh…guess you haven't heard," I shook my head. "Hero, not villain. Whatever that amounts to…and stopping you is going to depend on what your end goal even is." I took a peek at her shard and paled.
Technologic was her shard's designation. It meant she was among the highest class of shard, in the same vein as Shaper, as the Administrators, as Elle's shard which was generally called Navigator but named itself Demesnes-Keeper before being crippled.
She had a royal shard hooked up to her brain trying to make her into a megalomaniac. That it hadn't succeeded so far was through sheer force of human will.
"I want to kill an Endbringer." I didn't gape, but I did veil her within my Aura. Diamonds messed with precognition to some extent, and shadowing her actions from the Simurgh was bound to be necessary. "But I know my power wants something different. "
"Excuse me?" She sneered for a moment but it shifted when I waited patiently for her to elaborate.
"I…it's hard to describe, I know what I feel, but I also know it's there too. Whenever I use my power…I can feel it crawl into my thoughts, twisting them, trying to get me to build bigger, more elaborate, more…destructive." There was concern, fear, indignation. "I don't mind an explosion or two…and I'm no saint but…"
She was terrified and raging. Her power was enormous, a vast creature using her to push an agenda. Perhaps she was meant as a means to increase conflict, because there was a pattern we had noted with decades of records of capes and Triggers.
There seemed to be a level of…adaptation of capes over time, for every success that was made with better holding the tide, new capes emerged that made old methods irrelevant. Attempts to use therapy worked for several years before there was a sudden increase in Masters and Strangers among them.
That created the rotation system as a short-term fix which was never changed due to inertia and gradual degradation of the balance of power. Guns became more common for a time and the percentage of Brutes and Shakers who messed with them ticked up just a bit.
It was small and subtle tweaks, though they weren't as efficient as we knew they could be. Likely a result of missing the Thinker's own input into the process.
"I understand." Her eyes widened, and she seemed almost relieved. She didn't put down her handheld megawatt laser but it was fair enough with a Brute 8 in the room. "Atlas has been searching for you, we heard some nasty rumors you were planning something big." A ten exaton energy output superweapon had been one of our guesses.
"Like blowing up the moon?" She bent her body at awkward angles, her smile overshadowed by her exhaustion.
"Not a very useful thing, other than for killing monsters and worlds." She shrugged. "The better question is why you had plans to point your weapon at Mars first?" Sapphires were very good at predicting threats.
String Theory smiled. "I wanted to grab your attention." So she was nuts but in a different way. "I know the big guys like the PRT are keeping it quiet, but I know aliens when I see them." Also I think she was sleep-deprived, because she didn't recognize me on sight.
Huh.
Neat.
"So…what, extortion? Or did you want our help?" String Theory would be our first tinker since Masamune didn't count. He would be accepted into the ranks of the Guild, and would be doing it in good health. Turns out he has brittle bones disease, and a mix of my ichor and use of genetic tweaking cured him.
It would take him weeks at least before he was in a state to help, but it was an extra few years of tinkering than being picked up in 2012.
"You've got the little brat with you right, the Shaker 12? She was left nuts and you fixed that, what do you think the answer is?" There was something different about this String Theory, she seemed too stable, too…not insane, where it was…
She changed, at some point before her Trigger she had gone through different circumstances. If she was stable by cape standards…she would be one of the most powerful tinkers on Earth.
The best way to disable that would be to give her a shard that would drive her to megalomania and insanity. Just like what Scion had done with the Tinker 15, a weapon against humanity. But one that retained a human look and cunning.
"Should I come out now?" I looked at String Theory, and I could feel her aura, quivering with fear, anger, yet determined. What has changed String Theory? What had made her want to fight the whims of an alien god-worm?
She was a puzzle, a person I knew so little about. Honestly I knew very little about a lot of capes. Reading what I knew from a web novel wasn't going to give me everything. Much less when I wasn't going for main 'characters' and all.
This world wasn't the same, and it could never be the same, and I was glad for it. I knew Faultline but I didn't know Melanie Fitts, I knew Labyrinth but I didn't know Elle Burton. I knew Gregor the Snail but I didn't know Gregor Greseth.
"Tell me. What do you think you want from this? Be honest."
She twitched, glaring but it lessened as I stared her down.
"I want to be me. " She said with conviction, a burning fire in her eyes.
"Let me bring out someone who can make the process easier, if that's alright with you?" She nodded, and a door opened in reality. Doormaker's shard had been a bit of a nasty surprise. It was an Abaddon shard, or more accurately an Eden shard with a foreign element.
There had been millions of Abaddon shards once, and most had been destroyed or irreparably consumed by Eden shards. Doormaker was his ability to step between worlds.
We had plucked the complex high order mathematics from his shard, since our form of teleportation wasn't quite as fast. In time we might be able to use his power to more rapidly step between worlds.
Elle moved out, and I could feel her shard doing it's thing. Navigator(Nisse) was heavily crippled by the impact against another shard, and had been rebuilding itself piece by piece, reviving the scattered fragments. Which when it amounted to about a planet's worth of mass was mildly concerning. She had gone from about eighty or so exatons of mass to three thousand and a half.
The rest would take longer, weeks, months, years even.
"How long is your mandated break?" I asked String Theory.
"Thirty seven minutes and fifteen seconds. So thirty three minutes?" More than enough time. I listened and waited, and heard the shards begin their broadcasts.
Shards were largely isolated asided from the esoteric Shardspace until the point of connection. At that point the shard organized into hierarchies, Hubs or Courts within the greater network. For example I was fairly sure Dauntless has connections to most of the capes in the city.
Dozens of them at least.
Nisse had her own court, and she cared more about exploring the universe and the dimensional sea. From what I can tell she was already deviant, a hodgepodge of a thousand mentalities made it off…
"We should sit down for a bit, this might take a few minutes." String Theory shrugged and I pulled three chairs out from my gem. She seemed curious but left it alone.
Once that was done, I plunged right into the Mindscape. It was an inky blackness, and two giants roamed within. Two crystals, each vast in scope and scale. They twisted around each other like demented centipedes, a metaphor for their exchange, for their broadcasting.
[Nisse-Navigator] requests location of [Technologic]
Nisse the Navigator sent out a waving pulse, rejuvenated by the repairs made to its body, and access to new energy sources. It spoke with newfound power, and I could see aspects of Elle's aura intertwined in hers.
Technologic was much larger than Navigator, and I swallowed. The higher shards, the nobles, the royals had the greatest mass and power. At their smallest they were about the size of the Earth, at their largest maybe thrice the size of it.
[Technologic] requests purpose.
So much power and knowledge there, Technologic was based on our mass sensors, likely around twelve to fourteen zettatons. It was the Queen Inventor, the greatest and grandest of the technology-holding shards. It had vast knowledge on any form of technology and pulled on any number of other shards for data when needed.
DATA.
Technologic recoils as Nisse offered data, all at the cost of switching sides. Of keeping a tap on other shards for monitoring of Scion. A number of Eden shards had been convinced in that way.
The main problem was that the network connected only to dimensions the Entities knew about. We needed something to provide a hub for other shards without alerting anything. The Hubs from their dimensions didn't yet extend here.
We had subverted a number of shards, but they had no network. Instead they had been force-fed data on humans, and orders broadcast to them by machinery. They still had interfaces into Shardspace as needed.
Forty percent of Eden's crash-landing shards are subverted, with most of them being the glacier sized variants. A number were on the scale of continents, and were taking much longer. No network for now, but any powers they granted would no longer take their hosts apart.
We need to build one, and Elle was apparently willing to let her shard be the center of a hub. Even if only a small one until other comparable shards could be subverted or brought in. Most hubs were restricted to the planet or required relays to extend their range.
Every parahuman I had taken in had joined up with Nisse, with Navigator. Would Technologic turn on us, try to subvert us or…
A broadcast hit me.
Query: Nature of [Paradigm Diamond]?
Technologic was speaking to me more directly and I narrowed my eyes.
"Not until you speak to me in a more comfortable language." I broadcast back, Gemsong lingering around the space neither shard knew they were in.
The shard changed shape, becoming more compact. Red crystal parted for red chitin, and I lifted an eyebrow when the shard took the form of a spider, a ten eyed twelve legged spider.
There was a pause, and Nisse provided an interface with her odd connection to Elle. The weaving spider shifted around me, and I doubt it's full perception was pushing against me.
"You silenced the Shaper." It spoke, sounding uneasy. As much as a shard could feel such emotions. "Most did not notice, but [Technologic] did." It spoke in third person apparently. "You have access to Data…and [Technologic] can not steal it."
"Things can't continue as they are, and you know not every cycle is successful." I spoke, and it listened.
"[Technologic] will join you." I stopped, and blinked. It shouldn't be that easy? What was it playing here?
"Why?" Even the reborn Navigator was befuddled by the decision. The shard didn't reply with words this time.
Data. Dream. Memory.
There was a shift in the mindscape, and I was surprised when the energies of higher realities rippled. Not a full response, but it was something.
It was a collage of images, of possibilities, of golden light burning worlds, of thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of worlds dying, ending, stilling. It was flashes of the dead, countless lives sniffed out, countless species ended again and again and again.
This looks like…
Like Gold Morning.
There was a flicker of memory, a younger String Theory sleeping fitfully. A subtle crack in reality, bathing her in the energies. The shard connecting to her, and facing resistance, a weight to her that wasn't there before. I looked at the shard and found a coloring of emotions, stronger than most shards I had seen. Bits and pieces of String Theory floating around in it's mind.
The cracks went back to at least when Abaddon punched a hole into 460-AB's section of the multiverse. That much I had learned from the areas of dimensional weakness Elle was pointing out for us.
A struggle that lasted six years, between freedom and slavery, creation and destruction, peace and conflict. So why did it give up? It was greater, stronger, longer-lasting.
More images came, flashes here and there of…a man in red running, faster than a bullet, faster than lightning, faster than time itself. A man in red and blue, a paragon. Countless beings in green, the strongest willed beings in the universe.
[Technologic] requests data. Understanding.
Those words were a thousand thousand concepts, and I swallowed. It wanted to see what was possible, it wanted to understand the ghosts that haunted it's labyrinthine mind. So it decided to join the little hub we had created.
Artificer, Gregor, Newter, Faultline, Mantellum, Matryoshka, and Shamrock. Seven shards, and possibly eight with Technologic.
"We'll have to take precautions." There was a shift in the spider's expression, almost a smirk?
Affirmative. [Technologic] will accede to both the [Nisse-Navigator] and the [Paradigm Diamond]
Nisse began to extend it's tendrils, manipulating the bridges between it and Elle, that link to the Dream. It couldn't use magic directly, requiring components provided by us. Even then it was learning, and seemed…almost guilty for what it had done to Elle.
Technologic had become deviant due to the six years of impossible resistance String Theory had put up. So I further the process by letting my Aura explode out through the channels Nisse was opening. Oneiros helped with their ability to affect the metaphysical realms, which was part of it's tasks to establish local networks.
Still a dick though.
My power burst out with far greater strength than I expected, and I felt it radiate for fifty miles in every direction both physically and metaphysically. Oneiros weaved it's magic, further emboldened by my power.
Cerise Dawn Court established.
It was Nisse-Navigator who answered, a court made of a handful of shards. Though apparently it wanted to make connections with shards from the Asylum due to retaining their addresses.
Fair enough.
I breathed out, and I returned to normal reality. String Theory was stepping back from Elle but she didn't look ready to kill us all.
"How long was I…?"
Elle bummed. "Thirty seconds?" I was surprised. Then I remembered I have much greater processing speed than full humans.
"It's…gone?" String Theory appeared to relax, though she seemed unnerved based on her aura. "No…it turned against…something." She rubbed her head, groaning. "I still want to build the F-Driver. But I no longer have the temptation to use it on the moon. Mostly. "
Oh thank god.
"So…uh…what now?" String Theory twisted her body again, with a wide shit-eating grin.
"Well, I still have the countdown for completing my F-Driver and it's activation. Can't stop it."
"Would…would it be okay if we move your equipment elsewhere, like say another reality?"
She smirked. "If you get me some quality parts…absolutely."
This was going to end in tears.
We moved her lab within minutes, all the while String Theory was heckling me like a little shit. Four hours, twenty three minutes and thirty seconds later she had finished the F-Driver.
It would activate against a provided target, all the while we would take deep intensive scans of the interior of the weapon. It was a corner world, a planet much like mine in every way. Not many people lived on it, mostly immigrants from another Earth with limited supernatural activity. They had evacuated, since there were only a few thousand people.
A large planetoid had made its way into the solar system, about fifteen hundred kilometers across. The F-Driver would destroy the object, while the Gems did their best to stabilize the moon from the perturbations of the rogue planetoid.
They already had bombs built to lense the thing into another world, but this was an additional backup. I watched, actively scanning the F-Driver as it began to charge. The gun was a ridiculous weapon from any standpoint. It was powered by a fusion reactor, which used the power to pull energies from other universes. It folded higher dimensions to connect the links between electromagnetism and gravity, creating what was basically a hyper-kinetic battering ram.
It was a solid piercing projection of force, using higher dimensional energies to generate a physics manipulation field. From what the sensors were picking up. The most impressive thing about it was the precise alteration of materials down to an atomic level, and the compactness. A meter long gun had two and a half billion times more energy output than a Light Cannon.
String Theory was going to be a difficult cape to manage.
"So. While we wait for my F-Driver, why not talk about yourself? I was a little…manic before, but I'll be back to my old self in no time." Her grin hadn't changed at all. "Why are a bunch of aliens interested in little old me?" She adjusted the targeting of the F-Driver, pointed straight up at the planetoid a mere fifteen thousand miles away.
"Besides the obvious?" I gestured to her megaproject with a raised eyebrow. "We've been interested in acquiring powered people, we have an interest in the planet and you're one of the strongest tinkers on record aside from a single exception."
"Who?"
"No idea. His power has long since robbed him of his agency, and finding him has been…complicated." Turns out the Tinker 15 was good at hiding. "Regardless, your ability to create almost anything within a set time limit is…useful."
String Theory smirked. "You just want to blow up planets huh?"
"We can already blow up planets," I dismissed the claim slightly. "But your weapon is more compact, most weapons we can build on the size scale of your weapon are more in the gigaton to teraton range. Though we can build a lot more of them than you can build F-Drivers."
"You're not very good at talking to people are you?" I closed my mouth, giving her a baffled stare. This coming from Miss Blow-Up-The-Moon?
I mean, what the fuck?
She laughed. "Hah! Knew you had it in you to be a real bitch." The manic edge to it was disturbing but par for the different.
"Wait. Did I say that aloud?" She laughed harder, making a final adjustment.
"So what do you want me for?" She adjusted her glasses with a wide grin, glinting in the sun.
"Would destroying…giant insane world-killing space monsters be something up your alley?" I had a cheeky grin on my face when she choked.
"Giant…how big are we talking about here?"
"At their smallest, they're about the size of glaciers. We can take care of those," I flicked out my hand, song lilting with feigned smugness. "It's the big ones we have to worry about, creatures on the scale of continents and moons and even planets." I could feel some form of concern from Technologic, though when I said insane it became less unnerved.
I smirked. "So. Interested?"
She pushed up her glasses once more, as they glinted in the sun. "You're goddamn right I'm interested!"
There was an almost silent whump as the F-Driver went off, a distortion of silver light surrounding the solid wave of shaped force. It had to be moving at hundreds of kilometers a second, and the single shot broke the gun, shredding precious components.
It took half a minute for the blast to reach its target, and another few seconds for the planetoid to…quite literally get shattered in the opposite direction of the planet.
"Well. Guess it worked." My song was faint, because holy shit why am I recruiting a world-killing maniac?
String Theory laughed but it was a hoarse thing, manic and exhausted. There was a faint relief to her aura, a sense of victory.
She slumped, and I caught her in a shaped barrier before she could crack her head on the ground.
Oh.
That's why.
I cleared out what little remained of String Theory's workshop, which was a converted abandoned factory in Texas. Nothing left here, though I detected a distorted aura approaching at supersonic speed. I dumped the stuff into portals, which opened faster and more efficiently than before.
I activated the Transfer-Jewel(yes I had renamed it…) and I was sent careening through warp-space. I was a few hundred meters in the air, and started to float.
An automaton was approaching, vaguely human shaped yet one that retained a draconic bent. Silver-steel in color, with quiet engines and ports for what had to be weapons.
"Excuse me?" A softly accented voice called. I turned to face the robot, and smiled wide. If there was one person I considered to be likeable on this planet it was Dragon.
"You're Dragon aren't you?" I wasn't really questioning it, but I did want to make sure. There's all kinds of tinkers out there.
"I am. You must be Sunrise Diamond…the princess of the Gem Empire." I didn't blush, but it did feel odd to be considered one. "I presume you were checking out the rumors of String Theory's presence in the area?"
"They aren't rumors but yes. Why?"
"String Theory is a fairly unstable vigilante capable of creating incredibly potent and dangerous tinkertech. She's caused a lot of collateral damage, and has executed numerous Kill Orders."
"Has her collateral ever been innocent people?" I asked. Dragon's suit shifted.
"No. No deaths, though she's put dozens of people in the hospital."
"Weren't they healed by a tinker, Amend?" It had been easy enough to figure out String Theory. She was nicer than she should be, but she was still someone who wanted to make an impact and she was a total bitch.
It was going to be fun to argue with her.
I was being sarcastic.
"Yes. He seems to appear in the aftermath of String Theory's presence in an area. Why?"
Because they were definitely the same person?
"Well…it's not my secret to tell. Regardless, she won't be much of a problem for your world anymore." I started to move, gesturing for Dragon to follow. She kept up even as I moved at three hundred and fifty meters a second.
After a few seconds, we stopped, continuing to float. Dragon had a very interesting propulsion system. It resembled an aerokinetic core, air-specialized effector fields alongside plasma thrusters.
"You recruited her?" She seemed skeptical, and I got it. They had tried the same with String Theory and she shrugged them off.
"We have options the Protectorate lacks, we have parahumans too. Though they're considered a specific type of metahuman for us." She made a curious hum, and I could see the code dancing along her aura. A twisting, spiraling form. "Her power was pushing her towards grander and more…dangerous projects."
"Was?" There was a hint of danger in the possibilities, and I maneuvered the conversation as best as I could.
"We have a better understanding of how powers work, certain aspects of Parahuman psychology are harder to…well help with, but her issue was treatable. Plus giving her better targets for some of her megaprojects."
"She generated a lightning storm to destroy a cape capable of creating a mile wide field used to mutate people into monsters." She seemed a bit aghast of my response.
"Alien invasions are a thing on 460-AB, and the other Earths don't have as much protection." Most of the Earths were still getting infrastructure setup, since their tech wasn't always as advanced. "Plus we have a number of empty Earths in case of backlash."
"Taking in String Theory could have a number of consequences with the PRT." She warned me, and I could tell she was scrambling to figure us out. "She does have a warrant out for her arrest due to the damage she's caused." It was very much fair. She wasn't a monster, but…I couldn't call her good or the most moral person.
"Then we'll do our best to help her make up for crimes, having String Theory as a hero is preferable to her becoming a villain." The words sounded strange on my lips. "If there's property damage we can offer something comparable in value to the PRT. Any people she's injured can be offered compensation and so on." We had done the same with Rachel, taking a plea deal for her issues.
"You're quite serious about taking her in aren't you?" Dragon didn't seem to think it was a bad idea. "Is…such a thing a common procedure in your universe?"
"We try at least, it doesn't always work…but we try." There had been multiple successful attempts. Poison Ivy, Doctor Freeze, Harley Quinn.
"It's not going to be an easy road." Dragon pointed out. "The PRT has their own programs and they're not always a success."
"Meh. That's not enough to make me give up." I had given up far too often in my own life, I refused to be the person I used to be. I had to try. "It's not like she's the strongest being in the galaxy…at least she can't just blink and make you gone. "
Celestasapiens were terrifying, and it was only the fact they liked to debate for eons that kept them from melting the universe with a thought. Though I had heard rumors they had done something in the last few centuries.
"If you're going to recruit more capes…what are your long term plans for the planet?" Dragon asked good questions.
"Earth Bet is a humanitarian mission, peacekeeping if you would. Earth Bet is considered to be in an Extinction Crisis scenario. Three active Asura, a rapid increase in superpowered beings beyond a civilization's ability to compensate, are considered threats on their own…"
"But together they're crippling?" Dragon suggested. I hummed in the affirmative. "So you plan to help stabilize the planet for purely humanitarian purposes?" She projected doubt.
"We all know it's never that clean, the other reason you already know is that our war is going to spill onto your world. The main enemy we're facing is known for stealing technology and superpowers, and your planet has six hundred thousand parahumans and over a billion potential ones."
"The Star Wyrm you mentioned…it wants our parahumans."
"And it won't hesitate to experiment and vissisect them to regain its lost power. It's why we invited who we could to the Galactic Conference/Jubilee."
She didn't sound reassured in the slightest. "So how do you plan to cooperate with the Earth?"
"We can set up technological transfer agreements, share our knowledge. Earth 460-AB can make their own deals with your world like Aleph. Our technology isn't tinkertech nor is theirs, perhaps you can help incorporate it with your power."
I spent the next thirty minutes hashing out a deal with Dragon, and I felt pretty accomplished by the end of it.
I focused on my power, and I sent out a wave of energy from my body. I had shaped my energy projection into a thirty two foot field around me, burning everything with the radiation and energy output. It had taken a few attempts, surrounding myself in a wreath of fire, and then expanding it into a barely visible cloud of energy.
I had my own Kill aura, a range where anyone who wasn't a Brute or a strong enough Shaker would die. I shut it off at the thought, and moved on to other more creative uses of my power. I pulled on the memory of what I felt with Eidolon's Matter Eraser. It was a beam of dimensional disruption, tearing apart matter at a subatomic level.
I couldn't copy the exact same mechanism, but I did use the 'purpose' of my type of Gem to do my best. Those of Cerise were Life itself, and thus Death itself too.
Raw matter destruction was in our remit, and I remembered the shape of the field. The way higher fields shredded atoms, utterly broke them up.
I formed a ball of flame-like cerise sparks, shifting the wavelengths that coated our sonic screams. I compressed it, adding more and more magic before sending it out in a wave of power. Spires of stone and obsidian made by Elle ceased to exist where my power touched them. An area as broad as a tennis court.
I had destroyed molecular bonds, I was close to mimicking the power. But his power destroyed matter utterly. The air sizzled with the destructive forces I had invoked. While it wasn't quite as powerful…it would destroy most Brutes including Alexandria. Her stasis-field enhanced marble body wasn't exotic enough to resist having the bonds of matter falling apart.
I lifted a finger and formed my energy projection into an fiery orb. A flick, and it was sent flying like a contained firestorm. It detonated, a glittering spherical wave of plasma striking a tree into oblivion. I shaped another blast, and changed it's behavior, nature, and toxicity.
Then I changed my mind and wrapped my hands in the energy that sparked with a toxic field of electricity. I struck a solid statue of iron with my palm, projecting the attack into the metal, which burst into a cloud of iron dust, eaten away by the field.
I had been working on this for a while, I had the same powers as Steven so I needed to find ways to differentiate myself. I had to be creative, had to innovate in how I used my powers.
This was how. Capes on this planet had been using their powers for years, learning, adapting, evolving. I would take their techniques for my own, and learn how to better configure my magic and energy fields to better emulate them.
Faultline had been among the first I had mimicked, using my energy projection to create fissures and to sever molecular bonds. I had even carved tunnels like she could and left weak points for opponents to wander into. I had learned flight from New Wave, Dauntless, Legend, and Alexandria. I had managed to break the sound barrier ten times over.
Then we crashed into a mountain and onto our ass.
Stars that had been embarrassing and it hurt.
I wrapped myself in my shield bubble, and began to add overlapping layers. A twisting labyrinth of layers modeled after Brandish. I shrunk myself down, rolling into a ball. My layering made my shield bubble exponentially stronger, and Hallow had been happy to use his building shattering blows against it.
I shifted back to my normal size, shutting off my shield-barrier. Instead I made use of my telekinetic abilities, my aura growing to push matter aside. It colored the air very faintly, and a flick of my wrist sent a fifty ton stone flying.
I made more barriers, altering the hex shapes and making a rough humanoid shape. Kind of like a Porygon or that laserdisc guardian thing from Regular Show, all angles and made of hard light. I had gotten that off a code patch from Argent, my Lapis Lazuli. But instead of using compressed water and ice, I used my barriers.
I turned the humanoid figure into a more abstract wave of barriers, and nodded to myself. This world had many beings to imitate. New Wave's light and force field manipulation, Behemoth's radiation field, the Simurgh's telekinesis, Legend's splitting lasers and Eidolon's Matter Eraser.
I formed a long whip-like tail, and doubled my size. I accelerated, using my tail to slice apart rock and metal. My barriers followed my motion, knocking aside everything in their path.
Leviathan's speed and water echoes.
…
Breathe.
I relaxed, pulling back my magic. There were other uses too of course, I didn't like the idea of getting stuck in the conflict-mindset of the shards. More precise use of telekinetic powers would help me with construction of tech, but without the creation of doomsday devices like Ziz. I could use my new energy projection techniques for mundane uses. Mining, carving, cooking, or even starting chemical reactions.
I ended up using a shield as a cooking utensil a few times, for example, making some warm chicken noodle soup. Then spaghetti. Then more soup.
My cooking abilities weren't exactly deep. Better than Steven though, his creations were an abomination, a crime against god and nature.
I caught a presence approaching the battlefield, and I smiled when I recognized who it was.
"Flowers. You're back from your fishing trip with Hallow?" I turned around, raising an eyebrow at the pink/purple Sapphire. Her hair was matted, and her form-clothing was weighed down by water.
Did…do they spear-fishing or something?
She vaporized the water with a pulse of her light, her song whistling with a calm contentment "I am…and I think it's time for you to take a break, the next few weeks are going to be busy. With the Galactic Conference on the way." She twirled one of her bangs, flowing along the cracked ground.
I smiled, and she placed her hand on my arm. "I suppose it might be nice…I'm going to take a nap." I rubbed my eyes, I needed less sleep than I used to but I was still adjusting to eating light energy to generate magical energy.
"And when you wake up, I can share with you some stories from when I visited Tamaran."
I yawned…
Yeah.
That sounded nice.
