Victories of the Soul [Worm/Avatar/ME/Multicrossover] [SI]

[AEM]

Case Number 162: Kala, The Mother of Miseries, The Broken One

Threat Class: Neutralized

PRT Classification: Trump (Tinker 9, Master 8, Brute 9, Blaster 8, Mover 7, Shaker 8, Breaker 5)

Special Containment Procedures: None as the entity was completely destroyed by the combined efforts of various Parahumans and two Euclid-class spirits.

Description: Case 162 was a confirmed extraterrestrial artifact of incredible age, with dating methods indicating an age of between ten and eleven billion year old. It contained a malicious hyperintelligence with a complete disdain for the very existence of life that was not either dead or eternally tormented. The artifact came into the position of a Gesellschaft cape who was Mastered and given directives to infiltrate a city on the east coast. The cape did so but not before attacking and killing numerous of his own allies at [REDACTED] with a death toll of about 115 people including civilians. It eventually crossed the sea, sinking a cruise ship with 400 people onboard. The civilians were likely consumed, adding to the dark entities power.

The orb itself was a white perfect sphere about two meters in diameter, with black fleshy tendrils extending seamlessly out to up to ten meters. The intelligence known as Kala had numerous abilities including a fortunately close range Master ability, and a much more dangerous knowledge of biology, technology and metaphysics. It made use of its knowledge to take control of the Empire 88, using a form of [REDACTED] to enhance Parahuman abilities and biochemical cocktails to enhance and keep a steady hold on the members that couldn't escape.

The Mother of Miseries had a potent ability to biologically tinker, creating an army of biological weapons in waves that grew in strength, intelligence and precision with time. She also had the ability to manipulate certain types of spirits, offering them power and breadth of ability with an exchange of loyalty. Due to damage from age, the artifact had been building up a power base utilizing darkened spirits and its human thralls as meat shields. The humans and Parahumans it had acquired served as fuel for the dark entity, where it eventually emerged as a humanoid form protecting its core.

This form was incredibly powerful, capable of fighting on par with Alexandria and numerous other Brutes at the same time. The entity created a field of altered reality toxic to most known life without sufficient protection. The toxic sludge could burn through inches of steel at a time, and radiated a emotion manipulating effect that was soundly countered by numerous counter-Master manifestations of power invoked by various individuals working in unison. The other Shaker effects were countered by different means.

Once the area of altered reality was destroyed the entity transformed for a second time, and controlled the classical elements on a wide scale, generating firestorms, intense gusts of wind, and waves of earth. It's most used ability was the creation of a physics altering field, generating attacks of far greater power than any of its previous attacks. It was also incredibly fast, capable of keeping pace with Alexandria and Legend for large periods of time. It nearly [REDACTED] every participating Parahuman through a [REDACTED] technique.

The entity took numerous attacks including but not limited to a relativistic metal slug, a gravity beam, a makeshift bomb comparable in yield to a nuclear warhead, beams and blasts from multiple capes including Legend and Eidolon. Essentially an Endbringer but with far greater malice and hatred of life. It took the combined efforts of dozens of capes, a traitorous secondary personality and the cooperation of two Euclid class spirits, Cases 164 and 165. The invocation of an unknown Ban involving a song weakened the being and its core was destroyed by a dozen cape affected projectiles shredding its interior as it broke through.

The entity was apparently once an individual that had been corrupted by the actions of the [REDACTED] and its influence was destroyed once it had lost the anchor maintaining its form. All remains of its creations are to be destroyed on sight, those who survived its experiments are to be closely watched and monitored.

So far no traces of technology similar to that of Case 162 has been found, and it is unknown if alien existences such as Case 162 are unique.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.1

May 1st, 2011. 10:35AM

Basilia Rubio

"Hmm…" I poked and prodded at the ship core, mentally operating on the robotic appendages built to carefully assemble an Eezo core, as other machines worked to construct the space frame around it. It was a largely steel and titanium frame, nanostructured metals reinforced by carbon nanotube fibers and some exotic elements.

The ship was the first of its kind, a cruiser class vessel about 660 meters in length once fully completed. The core was a unique design, implementing the greatest advancements of the numerous races I had within my head. An Eezo core was a complicated beast once you got beyond just connecting a wire to a piece of space magic rocks.

There was the absurd amounts of math to create shaped fields of dark energy, specific space-time architectures that allow for greater speeds, efficiency and even power. A drive field assembly was essentially solid-state power electronics built down to a nanoscopic scale. There was the power coupling, adding a steady flow of electricity to the element zero core. Followed up by the dark energy waveguides and projectors to form the mass effect field required for STL countermass drive fields, the mass reduction that allows for insane acceleration with Mass Effect based ships. Which was distinct from the projector assemblies used for FTL travel, requiring different gears for travel.

However this ship was not solely using the technology of the Citadel, it was in fact being hybridized with my knowledge of shard magic and the technology of the Thranx. They used dark energy fields to manipulate gravity, warping space to travel at even greater speeds than what most Eezo drives were capable of. From what I could tell, that had been a technology created from dark matter interaction experiments, which lead to understanding of the coupling of dark matter and energy as one united force. Really it was a lot like technologization of biotic invocations.

The Entities had their own methods, involving manipulations of the fifth and sixth spatial dimensions to tweak physical constants to create areas of altered space, as well as metric-altering exotic matter to finish off their reality warping.

"Are you sure it's a good idea to make the ship core out of a shard?" Amy spoke from my left side, crossing her arms as I worked on the drive core. She had been instrumental in setting up the basic biological structure of the shard core. We had completed some of the puzzle pieces of the biology of a shard, and I had managed to create the exotic elements required using highly precise quantum fields to build exotic atoms.

I eyed her carefully. "You…do remember that this isn't a full blown shard right? This is more like advanced power electronics but made out of very exotic biology." The shard was more like an effector, though there was some computing going on. Massive optotronic array banks interspersed with shard computational matrix created a compatible operating system for the drive metrics, trillions of lines of complex code that would set up the specific field shapes for the ship.

"It still seems really crazy." Amelia rubbed her arms, smiling lightly. "It's a pretty big jump to go from a space shuttle to a full on giant space cruiser." The sound of sparks and welding, warp welding and laser sintering followed and I shrugged at her.

"Maybe, but I do have a few probes in the works now. Exploring the Local Bubble isn't going to be done by itself." I pointed to the ten tapering cylindrical craft, each of them were about 16 meters long and each had a sizable element zero core, and could manipulate dark matter and energy to warp space as a form of propulsion.

They were tests for new forms of FTL travel, as well as experiments on drawing upon extant dark energy, converting the non-baryonic energy into baryonic mass-energy and vice versa. From what I can tell dark energy can't be drained permanently, the laws of reality forbid a complete loss of dark energy and matter.

It doesn't mean we can be reckless about it of course, there was that whole nonsense with an aging sun due to dark energy. I'd rather not accidentally blow up the sun, though none of my experiments were currently on that kind of stellar scale.

"I still can't believe the words that came out of your mouth sometimes." Amy groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. "And I'm pretty sure you still need to meet with some silicon wafer company right?"

I blinked. "Yes but how do you know that?" I asked suspiciously.

She looked at me like I was a moron. "Taylor told me, and said to ask if you were getting on track for an anti-Endbringer weapon."

I perked up at that moment. "This is actually a step towards that, space warping is one of the more effective methods of piercing through the dense multidimensional flesh of an Endbringer. Instead of the relatively stable spacetime metric of a warp drive, a chaotic maelstrom would cut through the outer layers."

"There's a 'but' waiting in that statement." Her eyebrows twitched, and I nodded.

"However the core of an Endbringer would likely counteract anything I make with the timeframe I have available. But if I can get Flechette to help out, Sting will destroy the core killing the Endbringer."

Amy crossed her arms. "Let me guess, that's only if the Endbringer doesn't do the smart thing and dodge?"

I sighed. "Honestly it's a difficult prospect, Leviathan could probably just summon a wave of water, the Simurgh has Precognition and Telekinesis and Behemoth is Behemoth. Then there's the other Endbringers if they show up." I rubbed my chin, and I could see the irritation in Amelia's eyes.

"Yeah…thanks for telling us about that by the way so long ago." Her tone was characteristically sarcastic. "Even if we manage to kill all three we still have seventeen more, and you only know about three of them. One of which can control time and teleport, another which is basically Vista and Labyrinth times a hundred while the third is a Trump that can mimic Eidolon and the Fairy Queen at the same time."

"And now you know how I feel about living on Earth Bet." My reply was peppy, my smile feeling fake as I thought about how fucked this planet was.

"Hey! Don't forget about me!" I flinched and then yelped when Grace ambushed me from behind, bumping me out of the way with a low chuckle. "You're not the only tinker who can build cool shit!" Grace wasn't wearing her helmet, but she did have the rest of her armor.

"What have you got then?" I was curious to find out, and I could hear her mutter under her breath.

With a blink the three of us were forcibly stepped through the portal into Base Gamma on Earth Lotus. Dozens of experimental bombs and weapons had been lined up in a neat pattern that had clearly been the work of my new VI.

"You have returned to us my Dark Lord of Explosions." I rolled my eyes when I heard my Jarvis copy dully speak, one of my newest experiments after witnessing what spirit artifacts could do.

"Machine spirit. Please don't humor Grace's crazy." The hologram flickered.

"Affirmative. Designation reset to Bakuda. Query. Should I return to the primary task?"

"Yes."

"Confirmation. Acceptable." The VI winked out of existence, and I could see how shocked Amy was.

"You got your spirits to start playing even nicer with your tech?" She looked surprised.

"It's not complicated once I realized it was possible, every VI I built has its own spirit. Getting them to manifest was simply a matter of time, now I've got a ton of friendly spirits at my beck and call." Well at the moment I only had the one, it would take me time to do the same to the rest of my digital intelligences, but it would be worth it.

"Right…" I turned to Grace, and moved on to what she was working on.

"So what do you have for us?" Grace grinned, her expression lighting up like the sun.

She grabbed several different bombs, carefully holding them up as if to display them for all the world to see. "Well, I've been working on a few bombs here and there based on some scans I've taken from Elle with her dimension shifting." I took a step back, and she placed the bomb in a launcher, which was essentially a biotic cannon. I stood back and watched as the grenade was launched with a whump sound.

My own senses, and the ones built into my DNI…my neural link quickly detected what exactly was going on. Space was distorted, and multiple different sections of reality were forced to come together into a generated space. But instead of making a room, they violently crashed together into a single point. In my mind's eye I saw a world crack like an egg, as energy and matter was merged together to the point of singularity.

The following detonation was potent, pulsing through multiple alternate realities and emitting an output equal to a bomb a hundred times its size despite being the size of well…an egg. A mushroom cloud was formed, and I was thankful for the soundproofing of this room as the shockwave hit the kinetic barriers.

"That's a lot more frightening than I expected it to be, you're collapsing multiple small sections of different realities, creating an immense explosion." That was likely one of the mechanisms behind the end state of an Entity cycle, subsuming the entire planet to propel countless shards up into space. Chevalier seemed to have a similar shard, and Damsel of Distress used her space warping to create an effect of the same nature.

My suspicions were that some shards were highly redundant, there was no reason for there to be only one shard for one function, especially with their fractal biology. You split a shard in two, you get a shard, you merge a few shards and you get a shard. Even an Entity would simply be considered a very large shard cluster. There were at least some exceptions yes, like the Administrator. But that was only on a large scale, other shards were also good at doing her job but they were generally either less powerful, less effective, or simply couldn't scale up as well.

Apparently Goddess had an Administrator shard of her own, though it was far smaller and less capable than Queen. That was of course evened out by the restrictions placed on Hosts, though that gap was narrowing as Taylor began to shrug off her restrictions. Her main power was still bug control, but at this point she was basically a Trump that was loosening up in ways that were compatible with her original power since she didn't have the intuition that someone like Eidolon would get as his slot kicked in.

All shards had a basic set of powers, casual movement between dimensions, creating pocket dimensions for resource storage. Incredibly complex machine learning on a scale that dwarfs nearly everyone except maybe Dragon. A certain degree of biological data, though nowhere as specialized as Shaper or Maker or Chirurgeon. Vast stores of data on past alien species, as well as the uploaded minds of previous Hosts(which…has some disturbing implications) and high levels of communication through means that humans lacked.

Though to be frank…that was simply the passing of various communication mediums through wormholes, using electromagnetism, gravity waves, magnetic fields, heat, vibrations and sound and particle emissions to convey information. They could also selectively decide how a power applies to baryonic matter-energy. They had some level of personality and basic animalistic emotions, though they were far simpler than anything short of a nematode.

With some exceptions of course.

"Anything else?" I got back into it, rolling my shoulders and twisting my torso for a small stretch. Grace pulled out another grenade, and immediately launched it. It landed on a target of solid laser steel before detonating in a flash of golden light.

I had mentally activated more Eezo infused shard sensors, and gained a rough idea of what was happening as the steel was disintegrated. An intense field of energy was pulling on the smallest structures of reality possible, though even the resolution of my current sensors and scanners were having a hard time with it.

No…it was operating down at a quantum level, where matter and energy are the same thing but operating at different frequencies and vibrations, different hyperdimensional wavelengths of quantum motion. For the steel it seemed to be stilling the motion of the forces holding atoms together, breaking them apart into nothing.

"Pretty cool right?" Grace's grin dropped as the blood drained from my face, as I came to a quick and obvious realization.

"I've got a few questions for you. How has your power been changing?" She looked startled but replied soon after.

"Err…well my name is a clue to my power isn't it?" I didn't reply, cocking a hip and tapping my foot on the floor. Bakuda continued. "Yeah…okay my power started changing a while back, around March I think? I usually had to be pretty manic, and my power seemed to like it when I was more…chaotic? It was hard to make a bunch of the same bombs, and I got bogged down in them. But if I went crazy and built whatever, my power worked a lot better."

"That would probably be because of your shard." It was Amy who said that, since she had been gaining a greater understanding of shards and shard connections through Shaper. Apparently she had been experimenting to help distract Shaper from whatever it saw with the Mother of Miseries.

So…a traumatized shard is certainly a first from my perspective, and Queen and Correspondence were both acting like support for the poor thing. The relatively large shard of Charlotte was apparently rather effective at communication and was evasive whenever I tried to ask about what kind of shard she was.

I had a good guess on what was going on, and a number of experiments would have to be made to confirm my theories. Safe ones of course, power testing was something done quite routinely. Stop getting distracted.

"So what started to change?" My queries began.

Grace leaned back, casually tilting her head. "My power started to calm down about how I made my bombs, though I didn't stop experimenting, Empire goons are pretty good target practice." She coughed awkwardly at our expressions. "I was mostly stuck to single-use devices, though I could dabble with Tinkertech that was less…explosive. I even made a bomb that could promote regeneration…though I could really easily turn it into a cancer bomb too." That…makes sense, Panacea heals but she can easily rip apart someone's biology.

Which was why I was glad she was starting therapy sessions later this week.

"Go on."

Grace frowned. "Right. So it took a while, but it started getting easier to make bombs, and then it started to get easier to make things that aren't just bombs." She lifted one of her creations, a large tube that would direct an explosive impulse as propulsion. It was basically a rocket equivalent of her unusually powerful chemical bombs, which were basically just using pocket dimensions to store extra amounts of energetic fuel."I'm good at building stuff anyway, since I'm an engineer, and a fucking good one but I've managed to fix some of your electronic prototypes. Those 3 nanometer nanosheets you're planning to sell off to a bunch of dumb business cronies." That…did seem a little out of her specializations. "That was when things started to get a little weird, I started getting a few more ideas popping in my head. The Disintegration cannon was the first, it came to me in a dream."

"I remember that…it scared the shit out of me." I shuddered remembering that day.

"Well after that it was like the floodgates had opened up." She was openly ranting, pacing back and forth with her hands behind her back. "The jump boosts on my Bakuda-Bot was the first time I knew my power was really changing. My instincts on mechanisms have gotten way better, and I've managed to make a few things that aren't just bombs." She pulled out a crude computer, a short scan revealing it to be a plasma processor with components involving manipulation of wavelengths to remove heat, as well as improving processing speed.

The processor was essentially a contained explosion, computing at an exponential speed before blowing up in a flash of heat and radiation. The right materials could make the processor stable, likely using an exotic matter mesh to contain the plasma. So not far from her specialization but still odd…though even canon Bakuda could make an HUD.

"Lambda." Her shard popped into existence, the figure of explosions appearing more solid, lines of gold chains writhing around her. Bakuda yelped and Amelia had already felt the pop before Grace did.

"It's been some time." She spoke normally, though there was an inflection to her voice that I found soothing. "I suspect you have many questions Vyasha, and I will answer them to the best of my ability. One of your appointed roles is of course that of an Administrator." She was more eloquent than her host, a certain cheerful undertone that made one feel at home. Despite being so formal…and one of my appointed roles?

"You were the Detonation shard before right?"

She adjusted her posture, projecting discomfort. "That was the shard attached to Grace yes…though to be frank I am not that being anymore. I ceased to be that shard on the 16th of March."

That confirmed it.

"Bakuda's shard was fused with Eden's Stilling wasn't she?" No one else around me understood the implications, because the only attack I had mentioned by name was Sting. I had talked about Scion's golden aura but I hadn't used Stilling as a name for it.

Too many letters.

Lambda fidgeted. "You would be correct, it took time for my corpus to fully assemble itself and that resulted in some changes to my Host's powers. I am both shards, a fusion of their essence into a single entity." Her lips twitched at the last word, and I sighed.

"Stilling…what the hell is that?" Bakuda was definitely worried now, so I decided to end that before it went anywhere odd.

"Scion's golden light, the ability to control wavelengths. The Eden shard that belonged to Hero." She stilled.

"Basilia…what even is your life?!" Amy dropped her face into her palms, and I agreed with her on a level that I rarely ever reached with other people.

"Insanity." I plainly replied. "Pure and utter insanity…actually…did you want a coffee? I think Taylor was making some…not my thing bu—" I didn't need long.

"Yesss." Both Parahumans responded and I lifted my hands in self defense. Annoying some of the most dangerous people in the city wasn't in my to-do list.

As for my choice of drink…I was going for some chocolate milk because I'm an adult and can do what I want.

___​

May 1st, 2011. 1:30PM

Basilia Rubio

I left the conference room with a happy skip, and I could hear the grey haired gentleman sent to meet with me chuckle as we parted. The company he was representing was one of the silicon wafer manufacturers considered a bedrock of the modern electronic world.

Actually the company itself was a parallel to a company familiar in my world, a certain little company known as AMD(GlobalFoundries never split off). They had been the first to license my technology, along with a few smaller foundries that had probably gone bankrupt between now and 2020(if Scion wasn't a thing). Other companies had been far more conservative, and had lost big, though not to the point of really damaging their own sales.

Samsung was also another corporation and that had been a bit of a shocker. Turns out most of Japan's megacorporations had survived the economic collapse after the destruction of Kyushu. In fact there had been an economic boom that had picked up around February. Apparently the high levels of Parahuman violence had been suddenly broken by a new group of capes, using abilities that were far too similar to shamanistic practices to not be exactly what I think they were.

So that was neat.

"Gate to Athena…" Reality did my bidding, and tendrils lashed out from the door, forming a protective bubble as I passed through. A security update in case someone tried to brute force their way through or had a Stranger power. The gifts of a guardian spirit were quite useful in deterring intruders to the countless petals of the portal network. About six worlds were firmly established, with another hundred having preliminary roads. Multiple multidimensional scanners were set up on automatic, sending FTL accelerated pulses to scan parallel Earths.

They were primarily experiments, and would serve for whenever I felt it was time to search for home. Honestly it would have to be a minimum of two years if not longer, perhaps even four years before I could go home.

Which…would take us past the events of Ward.

4 years was a long time. But it was better than going back immediately and bringing all the troubles of this multiverse onto its head. My Earth wouldn't survive that, and I don't want to be responsible for untold numbers of deaths.

As I walked I began to make use of my cybernetic implants in a far more direct sense. Data and information became visible, and I was reminded of the spirit world at the abstract nature of the digital world. The entire system was open to me, lines of abstract code passing me by as I moved both physically and digitally. The various virtual intelligences were represented as figures of ones and zeros from simple unfeeling expert systems to supersophont limited artificial intelligences. A minor flicker of thought, revealed the thinking machine code patterns spiritual counterparts.

This building had vast amounts of optotronic processors, running everything in the building as needed and with the appropriate security measurements. Several of my VI were already in the process of being intertwined with their spirits, and there was a lot of opportunity with such machine spirits. They were more direct uses than what I had done before, using spirits primarily as protection for my systems instead of as integrated parts of my technology and infrastructure.

I entered the labs that had been set up with slightly modern standards, where my employees would soon be starting up their various projects for the large R&D department. That was what Athena has been built for, and the patents gained from successful projects would simply add further income to fund more projects, and any inventor would get compensation as needed.

Hell Bakuda had filed a few for a specific configuration of advanced nanometric explosives for cladding…explosive welding essentially. As well as a patent for her HUD, and an obsolete trigger system. Also a few more parents for even more types of chemical explosives. From what I could tell they were heavily simplified varieties of her own bombs without the shard shenanigans to make them compact and powerful.

…

"I know you're there Noelle." The S-class threat cape slid downwards into the Inner Sphere. She wasn't in costume, and her eyes glowed with a scarlet light.

"I guess I shouldn't expect to be able to sneak up on one of your strongholds?" She rubbed the back of her neck, and I lifted an eyebrow.

"This is a world full of Thinkers, Tinkers, Strangers and Masters. Being paranoid is the bare minimum of what I need to be to keep my company and my team afloat. I've got contingencies like you wouldn't believe." Even with her presence in the spirit world, my fellow shaman didn't have the ability to mess with the spirits of machines, industry and technology that called this place home. Even so I could see their shivers at the singularity that was Noelle/Echidna/Division…

"I've come here to a—"

"You want me to send you back to Earth Aleph with the rest of your friends?" I smiled at her semi dumbfounded expression, the amusement being a good pick me up after the weeks I've had.

"Oh…right." I didn't ask what she meant by that, and I was fortunately in a good enough mood to not get a headache from all the questions that her existence brought up.

"Gate to Earth Aleph." Her mouth opened as a hole in reality opened, emerald light emitting from the door. I waved to the door with a stiff posture. "There it is, call up your friends and you can go home." She approached slowly, and poked an arm out into the other side of the wormhole.

"That's not what I wanted to ask…but thank you." She pulled back her arm from the doorway, and it shut soon after.

"What did you want to ask then?" Her expression went blank, and her reply left cold.

"Do you remember?" I took a step back, my entire body turning stiff at the piercing question. I didn't…not really.

"N-No I don't…do you remember?" I managed to throw out a weak retort, and she looked apologetic.

"I remember that it hurt, and I remember the echoes of something ancient." I felt goosebumps rise up and down my back.

"Seems like we've got some memory loss in common then. Is it the same for Cody?" She flinched, and I knew it wasn't because of the name drop. I didn't understand why she reacted that way however.

"I…yes he…she…got really badly hurt because of me. Whoever healed us…I'm not really sure they knew what they were doing." The chills grew stronger, and I remembered the DNA damage that had been cleared up by microbot machinery.

I hadn't done much to find the other people who had been affected by the tear in reality, a primal fear of the unknown holding me back. Noelle's words only made me more afraid even as my curiosity grew.

But I was still too afraid.

"Right…I'm sorry to hear that, I really am…but I don't much remember anything about that day outside of night terrors."

"You mean nightmares?" She asked.

…

I stared at her. "No."

___​

May 4th, 2011. 7:30PM

Basilia Rubio

"Test 3…its test 3 isn't it?" I questioned Bakuda as she typed away on a holographic display, eyes darting back and forth across the screen.

"Yep." She replied and I saw that Glory Girl was training with Dinah in the distance. They were going through the motions, and Vicky had obviously brought her shield down to almost nothing if her winces when Dinah got a good hit was a sign.

I cleared my throat. "Test three of the Nihilum Cannon." The weapon was a brutal design, a three foot long rectangle that was the current crude prototype for the anti-Endbringer device it would become. The weapon functioned based on the FTL drive of the Thranx, which was apparently a far more elaborate form of the Normandy propellantless drive. A dark energy invocation would generate a massive positive gravity field, warping space to a degree that would make a black hole look calm and orderly.

Typically particle accelerators would be used to generate the appropriate dark energy field, but since I have a super useful wonder element in my hands I went with both. But a little bit of space warping alone won't be enough to get to the core, and the power required was enormous. The obvious choice here was creating a lense of small portals using shard tech, funneling the energy of multiple power plants into the machine.

An additional modification was the shifting of matter and energy between multiple realities, using a specific space-time metric to shift off of our universe. It was essentially a gravitational shear cannon, and would tear apart matter with intense warping effects, like a demented combination of Scrub and Ashley.

"Test number three, commencing." My first machine spirit, who I had named Sigil, replied back.

"Warning. Commencing experimental weapons testing in 3…2…1." The gun began to rattle as a gravity field in the millions of G's bent space into a pretzel. Matter was torn apart at the seams, and I grinned. But right as the metric tried to exchange spaces between worlds…

BOOM!

The gun and everything within a hundred feet was sheared apart, leaving nothing but twisted metal and melted ground. The Eezo was scattered in a cloud of reactive dust, and the testing facilities generated a space of nullified gravity to hold the broken element zero core in place.

"Another failure…" I checked the math again, and found several errors, a few equations had been switched around to couple the two space-time metrics together. The materials for the barrel needed to be made far tougher, and the projection had to be tapered to keep it from approaching the structure of the weapon.

"Yikes." Bakuda hissed, and I turned slightly.

"So that's currently a bust, we'll have to start another experiment tomorrow. How's your project coming along?" I adjusted myself in the nice chair, and Grace seemed a little off.

"It's been…fine I guess." She covered her face, her lips twitching. "Shit…it's been a little weird you know?"

"How so?" I straightened my posture, actually getting curious.

"What you told me about having the Hero's shard…I guess it's a little intimidating? Especially with all the dreams." I let my feet touch the ground, and I used my seismic sense to its limits. Her heartbeat was picking up, and she was biting her lip in a specific pattern. I could read her from a mile away, though Charlotte was an order of magnitude more effective than I am.

"Right your dreams…we should talk about that." I stated.

"Well you already know about my sleep walking with the Disintegration Cannon." That had turned out to be a limited application of Stilling, destroying matter and messing with physics altering effects. "It's mostly just weird flashes when I make certain equipment." She pulled out a small gun, which based on the design was modeled after the Sol hand cannon. "Like this little Detonation Blaster, it's basically a directed energy beam." She opened a compartment, revealing small bombs. "Each of these little guys is a shaped nuclear charge, and I have a circular set of emitters in the gun." I looked down, and found the emitters. "They generate specific wavelengths that shape the nuclear blast into a beam and then boom I blow up a tank." She made a finger gun, and a clicking sound to emulate a trigger.

"Huh…I'm not entirely sure why that would be happening. In those flashes what do you see?" I pulled out one of the bombs, not being at all afraid about a mishap since I knew what those beads were. They were rather simple compact nuclear explosives, the trigger was an ion bombardment of a uranium-gold target to create a Metastable Innershell Molecular State molecule, converting kinetic energy into X-rays to trigger a fusion explosion. The tech was anywhere from one to three decades ahead of what my world was capable of, and it meant that even a little damage would make the thing inert.

A MIMS molecule would have somewhere around five hundred times the bond energy of a triple carbon bond. Unfortunately it was only metastable, making it useless as a direct explosive without shard shenanigans. Even so a lot of her base bombs used that type of explosive, and then compactified it with dimensional phase alterations.

But it might be…theoretically possible to make limited use of MIMS molecules in an offensive method. You need around an impact of 30 kilometers a second to create such a strange form of matter, and something like HMX has a detonation velocity of around 10 kilometers a second…however with a shaped charge with beryllium jets one could generate the impact velocity necessary.

So…chemical explosives that fire off X-day beams.

Pain hit me as a finger flicked my nose, and I nearly fell from my chair. Grace stepped back with a smirk, and I felt a blush rise to my face.

"You really need to be more careful with your tinker fugues." I hissed and the explosion specialist laughed.

"Right sorry…I've been a little out of sorts since Athena started up." This Monday had been the first day that employees with actual backgrounds in STEM had arrived. Most of that had been spent on training for company procedures, equipment, fabricating methods, and calculations. A mix of engineers and industrial scientists tasked with applied research in technological fields.

That would make up most of the employee roster, with a smaller number that would be dedicated toward manufacturing certain products like armor, robotics, and photolithography equipment. We didn't sell more than about two a month, and that was around fifty million dollars of revenue in a month. My contract for armor from ENE was modest, maybe a few million per year across the state of New England, and my various industrial exoskeletons were doing well enough, selling anywhere from several hundred to several thousand units depending on the model.

Warehouses apparently really liked the Wardens, and preferred the simpler less sophisticated units that could lift about fifty to seventy kilograms. Labor of that caliber tends to be crippling in the long run, but with a Warden Basic you've got unlimited endurance and maintenance of lifting form in a slim compact package.

So again millions, and apparently it had given new life to a few startups as well as further advancement of some programs from a few more established corporations including the Bet equivalent of Sarcos…Sarxs robotics.

Not very different there…and what was Bakuda saying again?

"God those little bastards had so many questions…" Grace growled, and started to wave her arms. "Ooo when do we get to work with you, ooo what's it like to be a hero, or why shouldn't we touch this piece of highly dangerous industrial equipment." She bowed her head, and I largely felt the same way. Even Taylor had been badgered by our new charges, and she was the least tinkery of the group. Though she was good at software and had some limited access to certain chemicals, polymers, and neural biology, she was also progressively getting better as she made use of her swarm as a rapid processing system.

And since there were probably around between ten and thirty million usable arthropods per acre, and she had a twenty five square mile area of control…you can see where I'm going with this.

That excludes mites and other small insects which would increase the number by an order of magnitude. The processing power was on a level that more or less equaled my current cybernetic implants, and had been useful for the precise shapings of her biotic invocations.

"Yes…but that's a good thing, it's all part of the process." 45 engineers was a difficult number to rangle, and some of our new hires were managers who were more experienced but not so much so that they'd be stuck in their ways. The gist of it was that we gave our workers specific projects to work on, got a group of three to six together and gave them the necessary resources for the fields we're working on.

"And that's my problem how?" I narrowed my eyes and she paused any future rant.

"I think we've gone off track." I said flatly.

"Right the dreams…there isn't much to them, just flashes of Tinkertech and murmured sounds." She scratched her cheek, and I had a feeling she was either lying or simply unsure about what she was seeing. I could check but that felt like a breach of privacy for something that isn't that important.

"Okay I'll accept that." I was lying, but I was going to let it lie since it didn't seem important.

"So…what did happen with Echidna, she did show up at Athena right?" The unexpected question took me off guard. But I replied back easily enough.

"Err…well yes she did." I crossed my legs in my chair, removing my connection from the Earth. "She wanted to ask me something private. I ended up offering her a way to go home, since easy dimensional travel tends to give one a ton of leverage. She declined, saying she still had a few things to take care of before making her leave…" I trailed off, thinking about the expression she gave me before she had stepped upwards into the spirit world.

"So…you think we might be able to work with The Voyagers?" I paused my movements as I dabbed my fingers together. Amelia had made her triumphant return into the conversation, arms cradling the back of her neck. I looked at the freckles along her bare arms, blinking slowly.

"I believe so? Echidna is remarkably stable as is the rest of her team. Though I can't say for sure since we haven't known them for more than half an hour." Thankfully neither Klause or Cody were in charge, and whatever kind of stupid biotinker bullshit rattling in Blasto's brain had been beaten out of him by the experiences he had suffered from.

"So they weren't stable in the future?" Bakuda piped up and I suddenly felt self conscience once I realized how little of my future knowledge had been put to good use. The most I had gotten was the general traits and history of certain people, like Amelia being rather fucked in the head, Victoria having her own issues due to the expectations her parents had placed on her, Bakuda was only known as a bomb tinker, and Scion was a depressed space whale. Most of the planning had been made for fighting Scion, and I had mentioned a few possible issues to deal with such as the Slaughterhouse Nine, The Fallen, and The Teeth.

Huh…I guess it's been a bit too busy lately…that's not good.

"Not particularly no…they were brought here by the Simurgh to expose Cauldron." There was a stark silence, and I realized then that I hadn't gotten any opportunities to mention any of that. Most of the future had been left alone as things that might not even happen anymore, and while I had a timeline and even some extra stuff from Veda…it wasn't perfect.

Amy whistled. "You…really need to get your priorities straight." Irrational anger flooded me then and I stepped out of my chair to look down on a suddenly worried Amelia.

Shut up.

"Oh I'm sorry if I've been a little busy with fighting off an alien dark god trying to turn the entire planet into a literal hellscape! Some smaller less important things might have slipped my mind, especially since I can tell they're pretty much clean of any influence from her by some miracle!" I screamed at her, gritting my teeth.

Amelia lifted her hands in the air, looking taken aback. "I…sorry I didn't mean to make it a big deal like that. It was just…teasing." My anger cooled, and I felt tired again.

"Sorry, it's not your fault." I closed my eyes and breathed through my nose to calm my hot blood. "I think I'm just a little…worn out."

"Maybe it's time to take a break?" Bakuda recommended cautiously, and I rubbed my face with a low groan.

"That…that might be nice."

But I'm not sure I was going to do that on my own. What would even be the point?

___​

May 5th, 2011. 7:30PM

Dinah Alcott

"Focus." I heard Anansi's voice as he warbled in his psychic voice, a blue aura wrapping around him. I was getting a better handle on my powers with each day that he spent with me, especially after Fate had consumed Split Path. I hadn't gotten to ask as many questions because of my headache, but the few I did ask seemed to trigger a brief cascade of images, flashes of the future far more clear than I had before.

My limits to asking questions had been put in by Scion apparently, and for a moment I thought of punching him in his face. Asking a question on that worked better than I thought, and apparently it was at about 20%…give or take ten percent.

He still messes with my power really badly, but it was getting easier to get things out of him. I had started with being able to ask about six questions a day, and it had gone up to about fifteen after the Mother of Miseries. She had sent out what felt like waves of chaos and madness, and I had been forced to try to filter through it…trying to pull on my timelines like I was fishing for a giant shark. The flashes then were much more intense, images that I had blocked from my mind as best as I could.

I had tried to get the best outcome I could but it was almost impossible. Even when I gave my predictions, I never mentioned how inaccurate they probably were. But I think Basilia knew, but there wasn't anything else we had besides guesses. The only person to receive permanent damage had been Lung and his shard.

I could still hear its screams in my ears.

"Dinah…?" I blinked my eyes open, and saw the naked concern radiating from Anansi. He was always very understanding, but I didn't want to talk about what I had seen or heard. I didn't want to think about the people I had failed…the people hurt by my inability to predict the future effectively enough to stop her.

I felt someone bump into me, and I leaned back when I saw that Elle had appeared from the three dimensional space that bridged the gap between worlds. I felt my lips drown into a grimace at the red marks on her cheeks. They had faded from red crystal to soft red tattoo-like markings in the shape of a curving upside down triangle.

"Hello Dinah!" Elle carefully waved her hands, her blank face lighting up into a much more expressive one. She placed a hand on my shoulder, jostling me with a grin.

"Hey…Elle." She frowned and faster than I could blink I got a flick to the forehead that snapped my head back. I yelped and I heard her giggle as I landed on the soft grass of the Athena garden. I rubbed my forehead and growled. "What was that for!?"

I froze under her gaze, her foggy eyes glimmering with light. "You were being too hard on yourself. Just like Basilia…"

"Huh?" I asked dumbly.

Elle grimaced back. "I can tell she didn't like how things went down with Kala. It makes her really…irritable…it's not good to dwell on stuff like that." Her gaze became distant, like she was looking through me. And maybe she was, with those eyes that could see beyond the physical world.

"I…it just feels like I failed." She flicked her finger again, and the pain was intense for someone who was so skinny.

"Dinah…nobody died, not even the villains did even if they got hurt or scared or even traumatized. There wasn't any avoiding that, everything that happened was outside of our control. You did the best you could…and if you still feel bad, you just need to practice. It did wonders for me." Her eyes glowed, and I could see her costume coming to life with the power of the spirit she had bound to it.

She had found some type of metal spirit, and convinced it to form her costume. It was pretty cool. The costume hardened in response to physical trauma, and I had seen it take hits from Glory Girl head on. Though it obviously could only take one good hit before needing to recharge.

"Okay." Elle gave me a hug, her smile lighting up her whole usually blank face. I smiled back, and glanced over to a chittering Anansi. "I think I can get back to it…" I sat down, crossing my legs and placing my hands on my lap, interlacing my fingers.

"Are you trying to improve your use of your power?" Elle chirped in, and I nodded. "Then I join you in meditation, if that's what you're doing?"

I smiled widely. "It is what I'm doing, so go ahead." She sat down across from me, with Anansi completing the triangle of friendship. He sang loudly, and I wanted to pet him…he was adorable.

…no back on track.

I closed my eyes and breathed.

I had questions left…but that wasn't what was going to give me a headache.

Chance of major damage to the city within one week?

18.68789%

I shuddered as I saw flashes of possible futures, and I forced myself to see them. They solidified for several mental minutes, and I saw timelines split and shatter and mold themselves together in a cacophony of insanity. Bits and pieces of information burrowed into my brain and it hurt.

Breath.

The images cleared again, a river splitting infinitely as I tried to narrow down on the possibilities. It wavered in places, spots disrupted by the actions of someone else. I shuddered, my head warming as I tried to break the ropes that bound me.

I was a Precog…and apparently the third most powerful in the entire world. I knew enough from what Basilia had said that I had been a damsel in distress, just a plot device for someone else's story. She hadn't said it herself but I had inferred it…I wanted to be more than that, to carve out my own Path.

I moved to the next question…what are the chances of major damage to the city within thirty days?

…

94.79879%

My breath hitched and I was thrown back by the current of a thousand possible paths. No…a billion…far too many for a human mind…so I abstracted instead. Some splits were cut away for being too unlikely, others were collapsed together because they were too similar. I heard a whirring in my own head, old machinery gearing and tearing as they opened pathways I hadn't known were there.

The glimpses were strong and scary, and blinding.

In my mind I saw a world of reflective glass, the floor forming a river that divided into many possibilities. There were so many, so many possible ways that everything could go wrong. The Slaughterhouse Nine coming to town, The Fallen, rogue spirits or even insane shamans…and those futures burned as I tried to look at them. Others were more broken, shadows in the path that I had seen only a few things make. I saw ghostly feathers and flowing silvery hair, I saw lightning and magma and a burning cyclops eye, I saw pounding rain and the sound of rushing waves, and the flick of a long tail. I saw blinding gold light, and nearly bit my tongue off. And I saw emerald fire, chaos and compassion and knowledge and void bound as one.

I could hear humming from Elle, and the pounding in my head subsided. I focused on that tone that plucked at the mind, and breathed.

What are the chances of the city being quarantined within 40 days?

10.67878%

I saw the river divide, and the future here was different but still hard to truly see.

What are the chances of the city being damaged by heat, radiation, or lava?

40.79986%

Hmm…there were groups of different futures, and it seemed to be split on different causes in two major channels. But…it wasn't it.

What are the chances of the city suffering water damage?

I felt the burning in my skull, like someone was drilling a nail into my brain. I took rapid breaths, and I got my answer.

92.78952%

This time for a single relative second I could see it, surrounded by a billion other little possibilities.

Something thirty feet tall moving at speeds that my eyes couldn't catch, waves of water rising to smash into unseen people. My breath hitched at the cracks filled with inhumanity. In an instant it was gone, flashing away into motes of emerald.

I fell back, landing in Elle's lap, she had moved from where she had been standing and my head hurt. She smiled sadly like she already knew what I was going to say.

"I've felt it too…the spirits have been restless, they know something is coming. Most of them don't know what is coming…but some of the older and more wizened spirits do know."

"Basilia isn't going to like this." I just knew she was going to break out into a rant. Not at me of course but…I could tell she had a lot of rage packed up in a smallish package.

Now…what else could I ask? To keep as many people alive as possible?

___
​

AN: So here is chapter 7.1 starting this Arc off with a rather more ominous feeling than I had originally planned. I mean it's still a break arc, and should have between six and eight main chapters but yeah…

I already have 7.2 done with about 8000ish words, and 7.3 is one sixth to one seventh done. I think I've gotten back into my previous writing pace once I finished off Exorcism and moved on to something new. This will essentially be the aftermath of everything that's happened in the past three Arcs with the dissolution of most of the gangs, and the other changes in the background, as well as a more personal aftermath for everyone involved.

So enjoy.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.2

May 6th, 2011. 10:00AM

Collin Wallis

I ran the program over and over, and I could hear Dragon doing the same at a far greater pace than I ever could as a human. I could see the patterns changing, massive amounts of data input providing the program what it needed to do its job.

"The atmospheric shifts are almost too small to mention…but everything else adds up to the pattern. But it's so slow, like a steady buildup instead of a rapid acceleration. Why?" I could hear Dragon murmur, and I wondered what code made her act more human than I was at times.

"Perhaps the changes in the city are a factor?" I added on, my hands moving on to working on my halberd. I had modified it heavily, making use of the element zero Dragon and I had been gathering for our own projects. It was a potent power source, but implementing it was far more difficult than I had expected. There was no intuition to using it…all we had was the properties and characteristics and the basic equations for utilizing mass effect fields.

But Dragon had multiple subroutines working on creating the math for more advanced uses. For now, it was limited to powering my nano-thorns, as well as in increasing the power supply of my main power core.

"If that's true, if our software is correct it means we have more time to prepare than any previo—" She cut herself off, and I stopped my hands from working on my equipment.

"Armsmaster." Piggot's voice came through near instantly, and I knew then that something else had come up.

I moved quickly, making rapid repairs on my halberd and placing it away as I ran. I weaved through the winding halls, until I arrived in the Director's office. Her expression was dire, arms folded as her gaze sharpened.

I saw that Erudition was sitting opposite to her, and I used my HUD to read her mood. She was stiff, and there was a tension to her shoulders that I had seen many times since the Mother of Miseries attempted to claim my city.

Miss Militia was standing, her expression stone cold and her gun rapidly shifting between dozens of guns. I moved to my fellow hero's side and felt out of place. Though even I knew how to tell the mood…there was something wrong.

"Now that Armsmaster is here…I would like to reiterate." A shudder passed through the Director's body. "You are saying that your Precog has determined that Leviathan will attack Brockton Bay within the month?" Shock hit, and I knew that the S-class predictive program had been more successful than I could have ever imagined.

Whatever reserves of strength that Erudition used to keep herself together seemed to have drained out of her. "Yes that is what I am saying. She's narrowed it down to between two and three weeks from now, though she can't pinpoint anything beyond that or any further specifics on his…it's actions. I'm guessing the chaos from that monster brought its attention to us."

"Delphi is known to be a powerful Precog, perhaps the most powerful we've ever seen." Piggot's skepticism was warranted but only because of the data she lacked. "But her power has been said to have trouble with Endbringers in the rare times we've had her use our power testing equipment."

"Well that appears to have changed." Erudition's reply was dry. "Even if only by pushing her power far beyond its original limits. Honestly…at this point it shouldn't be much of a surprise."

Piggot's lip curdled. "Is that so?" Her eyes flashed dangerously.

Erudition coughed awkwardly into her fist. "Oh…that wasn't meant to be rude, I'm just…a little wound up right now." She confessed carefully, and my HUD and my own mind told me she was ready to bolt at any time. "Going from one crisis to another is…probably something you're all used to." I took the time to think then.

Erudition had only been around for three months, and in that time had done more for the city than I had done in ten years. Though at least some of that had come from being willing to work with the PRT, and to inform us of information that we needed to know.

The Empire was gone, the remaining gangs had no Parahumans of their own though there was the growing worry of elemental benders and even shamans taking control of the lesser gangs, and the ABB had fallen apart without Lung and Oni Lee. Even so we knew that he had recruited about thirty people…many of whom had been the first to break ties without the threat of Lung. His daughter was likely the strongest cape in the city, from what our power testing had noted and the economy would likely start recovering soon.

But even if all had gone well, Erudition was a new cape and her personality fit more the attitude of rogues like Parian rather than heroes or villains with more aggressive tendencies. Perhaps it had taken a toll on her?

"Fine." Piggot waved off the independent cape. "You've thrown me for a loop again, and I imagine there's much more hiding in that head of yours Erudition." The tinker sheepishly chuckled, though it was no less happier than before.

"Not as much as you would hope…but yes." Her response was a half truth, a clear omission. "This is probably the most time that anyone has ever had to prepare for an Endbringer. Though to be frank that might also be problematic…evacuating the city might trigger Leviathan early, or he'll redirect himself to another city and we lose the element of surprise."

"Do we know what happens if we do evacuate?" Piggot questioned the rogue, and Erudition nodded.

"It took her a bit to get it but…based on what she saw, the chances of the city being completely destroyed rises to more than 90% if we try that." There was a silence there, at the idea of the city being lost when hope had risen its head for the first time in nearly two decades.

"So our best option would be to have the city down in the Endbringer shelters, or evacuated shortly before the expected attack."

"About one to three days is what we might be getting, even Delphi isn't too sure with the change in behavior." Erudition fidgeted, flicking a flame on her finger tip in the fashion I had seen some of our PRT agents do themselves with their newfound powers. "Despite her predictions she can't see the Endbringers directly, she can only predict the effects around them…and the Simurgh is far more troublesome than her siblings to get a read on."

"Indirectly?" Miss Militia entered the dialogue.

"She started with questions on major damage to the city, and narrowed it down to specifics. The chance of a quarantine, heat or radiation damage or major flooding and water damage. And trying to use her power that way puts major strain on her, and I would prefer she not do such things without adult supervision." There was anger and indignation and worry there, and I understood. Delphi was Erudition's responsibility, and Erudition wouldn't want anyone under her leadership being hurt.

That has been an easy enough trait to glean from her general behavior.

"Are there chances of Delphi's predictions being wrong?" The worry in the Director's voice was uncharacteristic. I sighed.

"Unfortunately based on some of the programs I've created with Dragon, Leviathan is quite likely readying to attack the city, the only strange factor is the gradual ramping." I spoke, tension forming in my shoulders.

Piggot breathed, resignation striking down her usual scowl into a more uncertain distant gaze. "Then we'll need to start making preparations, is Delphi willing to answer more questions?"

"Not today." Erudition's tone was flat and harsh, steel entering her stance. "Even if she is part of my team, I'm not going to put her under more strain than absolutely necessary. I've got standards and regulations to follow." Piggot narrowed her eyes, but didn't try to wrangle any agreement from her.

Piggot shook her head. "You've brought a lot of trouble, and a lot of paperwork to my desk Erudition. But you've proven reliable if nothing else, is there anything else you can mention about the next Endbringer attack?" The Director didn't look angry, simply resigned to the inevitable. Erudition seemed to share that same reaction.

"I don't have much…but I'll try. There are a few things I want to ask Armsmaster as well, I've got a project or two involving possible weapons. And it's been going poorly…" My head snapped in her direction.

A project…to fight Leviathan.

I smiled…

Yes…that might prove fruitful if her current record holds.

___​

May 6th, 2011. 7:00PM

Basilia Rubio

"Taylor what exactly are we doing?" I asked with trepidation as she pulled me by my arm with a loose grip. I tried to remove myself but all that did was make her shift her hand to my wrist, and another adjustment had her larger hand wrap around my own.

That…didn't do much to alleviate my worries, though it did feel nice.

"I've decided you're going to take a break today, and there's a very good holographic TV that you've never bothered to use to watch some movies. I also invited everyone you're friends with."

"That would be a fairly modest group, Tay." She smiled at my response, and she continued to grip my hand. It was nice.

"Basilia I might have been more extroverted when I was little but I'm not like that now am I?" Her eyebrow raise was impressive. "A small group is fine…and I like hanging out with you." I felt my face heat up.

"Okay." Her smile widened, and I looked away. As we walked my mind wandered, like what exactly the plan was for the little get together. I didn't exactly know shit about that myself, I hadn't gone out with friends for more than two years. Maybe even three years if my memory is correct…I don't think I realized how sad that was until now.

Veda?

Despite my calling out for her, she didn't respond with her voice or an avatar like she used to. But there was a sense of emotion, a wave of comfort that made me feel less alone. In that wave I picked up foreign emotions, one of them was familiar and I hadn't spoken with him since the incident.

Maybe I should.

There was another flood of something, and my omni-tool registered a few hundred gigabytes of files. I felt Veda recede back down into our shared soul, and I looked up to find Taylor staring at me. Her smile was lighter, and her eyes were bright in a way that I couldn't ignore.

Why is she looking at me like that?

"Taylor is there something wrong?" My question didn't deter her smile and right then and there I honestly felt clueless. I might have slightly more life experience than Taylor but that wasn't going to make me into uncle Iroh. I wasn't really used to Taylor being so smiley…in fact I wasn't used to a girl smiling so much at me in the first place.

"No I'm just in a good mood today." I nodded slowly, adjusting my grey tank-top and black sweatpants. I was going to reply and stopped when I realized I was going to gush about how her being happy made me happy.

Oh god I'm screwed aren't I? Well…maybe it'll be in a good w—

I choked and Taylor looked over at me with concern, I waved her off with a bright blush. "I'm good, just…ahem give me a second." I slapped my face, thoughts racing. That was the first time I had thoughts like that in a while, and I was a little unnerved by it. Any of my…pervier tendencies had been suppressed as rather pointless out of…I'm not even sure why. Embarrassment, fear, shame?

Maybe just plain depression?

"If you say so." She was skeptical but obviously didn't want to bother me too much about it. And frankly I didn't want to talk about things like that…I was still a little too modest for those kinds of conversations.

"Here we are." Taylor muttered, and I quickly thought to use my seismic sense. I stepped, and focused on the sense that was still inferior to Charlotte's own talent. I could feel Taylor's bugs, the vibrations of countless insects running through every specifically created defensive compartment being quite visible. I could feel that Amelia, Victoria, Grace, Charlotte were here.

Golem was not but his membership was still preliminary due to the whole mess with Medhall falling apart without Kaiser at the reins. The corporation was dealing with the legal mess of detangling from the whole Nazi villain thing, and Theo was caught in the middle of the legal proceeding for everything involving inheritances and other troubles. They weren't collapsing, but they were probably going to be combing over their finances for months to clean up the mess, and quite a few rich guys were being scapegoated into oblivion.

It made me wonder if there was anything there I could buy for myself. But I'm not so sure on the legal framework for any of that.

Taylor opened the door and pushed me into the room with a gust of wind that I didn't counter. I stumbled and glared at her with a pout on my lips, and she responded with a cheeky grin instead.

WOOSH!

"What the hell?" I panicked as a hand plucked me from the ground, arms flailing for purchase. Vicky had managed to ambush me, and to my surprise she was using her forcefield (The Fragile One…) to do so. The millimeter thin barrier had extended itself, and I could tell that her shard was pushing parts of her corpus into the material world with greater ease. I hadn't seen Vicky since that day…

"Heeey Basilia!" I jostled as Victoria spun elegantly, her blonde hair flying in the wind she created with her spin. Invisible hands tussled my hair, and based on the rough shyness to the affectionate touch it had to be Fragile One instead of Vicky pulling the strings here.

A hand extended and I was unceremoniously plopped down on the couch of the dorms I had built into my base. Because in the long term I did plan to expand my official reach to other worlds…

Eventually.

"What?" I examined Vicky closely, hiding the wobble of my lips as I noted the marks along her arms and hands. Golden flakes of what looked like entity flesh, though it had faded to something more like paint.

I…didn't feel good about that at all…

"This is exactly why you need a break." Vicky placed her hands on her hips, her expression rather admonishing. There was a shimmer in the air as her shielding seemed to splinter, six layers reforming into a golden avatar that was far more smiley than even this version of Victoria Dallon.

From…what I know of Ward, that Victoria was a lot less happy for a number of legitimate reasons.

"Yes…a break is good?" I tried and failed to respond to the kind and warm double tones of the Fragile One. She cleared her throat(how?) and spoke again. "Yes, you must take a break. This was the best option available, we had no time…it was all we could to stop her." The shard retreated back, folding over the eight layers that Victoria still had on her.

I still remembered the readings of her shielding, physical constants were tweaked and combined with molecular light and dimensional energy distribution to create a one use blockage of any attack. The shield's microscopic wormholes would collapse upon a sufficient hit, and would reset within one to two seconds. The shield was maintained by an altered electrogravitic force, with a separate module being responsible for her flight. With Fragile One's devotion to her Host, there had been tweaks that shrank her several millimeter field down to a tenth of its size, and made room for a dozen more shields on top of the first.

It was…

A burst of light hit my forehead and I let out a shriek and followed its slow trajectory. Charlotte waved shyly, and I growled at the fact she had transmitted a blast of kinetic energy into my face.

"Charlotte why?" She shrugged, and I blasted her with wind. She yelped and fell back on the big expensive looking couch I had made out of claytronic atoms. A relatively powerful VI operated it, and it was the fifth machine spirit in my arsenal. It would make for some good and very comfortable furniture, and in case someone came in I had a witness to track them down.

Turns out every wall and pebble has eyes and ears if you've got the right disposition. So I could literally make someone's house and street betray them with a silver tongue.

"Maybe it's because she wants to hang out with her leader…" I instantly cringe at the peppy reply of Vicky. I don't think I really qualify for leadership, I think Taylor is better at it…or at least better at managing my mess.

"Sure, I guess so." I agreed with her on the first part though. Charlotte was a nice girl, and I hadn't done as much as I should have to be…well friendly to her. Hell Taylor did a better job than me and she almost attacked her. "So what exactly is the plan here? I'm not an expert on this kind of thing." I waved around at the whole idea of social interaction. I literally had to have cues in my HUD for the few speeches I made, and most of the time with my new engineers was helping them get used to their work and teaching them some more advanced science.

I saw that Amelia was in the kitchen, opening a microwave to remove a bag of newly popped popcorn. She was in basic sleepwear, a loose white shirt and a pair of dark stretchy pajama pants. Next to the microwave I saw bags of snacks, candy and chocolate and other assorted goods that made me terribly hungry.

Gummy worms and bears, M&M's, and other brands that seemed to be the same, and one or two that were different but equivalent in some way. There was ice cream as well, and icicle pops.

"Movie night!" Vicky dropped down, bouncing on the couch in what I realized was a set of adorable penguin pajamas. "We'll watch some movies, and you get to eat until you feel better." I raised an eyebrow. "A tub of ice cream always makes me feel better." Her smile was frozen, and I wondered how the on again off again nature of her relationship with Dean made her feel. Just in the past two months they had broken up twice, though it seemed to be stable as of now.

Then her comment registered and I got the best idea.

"But I hate ice cream though." Everyone froze at my response, and even Taylor seemed slightly appalled at the statement. "Oh I also don't much like cake either, or gelatin. It's gross…" My smirk was toothy, and the disappointment in their eyes only fueled my amusement.

The sole biokinetic in the room glowered. "I always knew you were evil."

"Oh don't be so surprised Amelia, I've got a eudaemon tucked up in my soul of course I'm evil." I felt a smile pull at my lips at the banter, and a tension in my stomach uncoiled. Hanging out with people always felt awkward and stilted even if things were going well. The anxiety of whether I was being a little much, or if my monologuing was pushing a person away always lingering at the back of my mind.

But this…this was nice.

The freckled brunette chuffed. "Sure…which reminds me…why do you call me Amelia?" She pulled out tortilla chips, along with a bowl of salsa that someone had clearly prepared. Nostalgia hit me, because the salsa looked almost exactly like the salsa from a restaurant in TJ that I used to go to with my parents back home.

I left that question for later.

"Honestly I just like the way it rolls off my tongue, Amelia is just a nice name." That was frankly why…

"And because it annoys me, right?" I snapped my fingers and grinned at the second reason. Amelia groaned and rolled her eyes, and coughed loudly. Before our eyes the food began to magically float, and I picked up the invisible wavelengths of the Fragile One.

"Wait…where did Grace go?" She had popped out of my awareness, and my memories recalled a flash of emerald. Taylor blinked, and a portal silently opened behind her.

"Sup." She greeted Taylor in her ear and took a slap to the face for the trouble. Taylor flew back onto the couch, taking a seat between me and Victoria. Grace squawked, and fell to the ground in a heap. "JESUS FUCK! What the hell are they feeding you?" She held her jaw, and rolled back to her feet, hopping back and forth as she groaned.

"Food." Taylor said with an unimpressed look and I couldn't help but snort and giggle. She brushed her dark curly locks back, her eyes lighting up again.

Victoria was beaming and Amy was rolling her eyes, with a slight odd emotion in her eyes. Uhh…bemusement? With a little bit of something else mixed in?

"Sit down already Grace, you don't need to make more of a fool of yourself." The bomb tinker had the audacity to grumble besides Amelia who was on my left versus Taylor being on my right, with Vicky being even further right.

"Shud up." She mumbled.

I took the opportunity to grab the gummi bears, opening a bag and wiggling at the divine taste of pure sugar on my tongue. I also grabbed a hotdog that has to be Taylor's doing and when I didn't see the ketchup and mayo I pulled on the bottles with great care.

"So we've got a few choices here girls." I let my body sink into the cushion, relaxing under the softness created by trillions of simple emulating microrobots. "Bakuda snagged us a few movies from Earth Aleph, and I brought a few from home." Vicky waved the movies with her power that she had leveraged into effective telekinesis.

Wait.

"I might have a few movies to share myself…" I brought up my omni-tool and found a ton of movies that I hadn't seen in a long time. "From my home."

Everyone looked at me, and I let my growing grin remain on my face.

___​

May 6th, 2011. 11:30PM

Basilia Rubio

We finished off the first Jurassic Park movie, and Charlotte latched on to one of my comments.

"Wait…so your world got a fourth and fifth Jurassic Park sequel?" Charlotte asked eagerly, since apparently Jurassic Park was an Aleph import and it was different from my Earth's version. The first caught on well, but the second and third movies did far worse, and some other studio created a competing movie that had more realistic dinosaurs and different conflicts. Aleph archeology is ahead of my world's equivalent of 2011, though a year behind my Earth.

I kicked back my feet as I responded. "Jurassic World was great, but the fifth movie was trash. About as garbage as Star Wars Episode Nine." I shuddered, remembering how much of the movie I disliked on my first watch. Parts of it like Palpatine weren't bad but it was obviously trying to prey on nostalgia…which was funny since I never watched the Star Wars movies.

I literally only knew Palpatine from memes.

"They made sequels in your world?" Amelia was as curious as Charlotte, her usually tired expression fading completely.

"The seventh was basically a rehash of the first movie, and everything that the original movies worked for was basically gone since the Jedi died again." The sheer look of disdain on all their faces made me pale. "The follow up was…worse and personally I didn't find it awful…or good. I think they switched directors at some point which led to a mess, and the Ninth was…well garbage."

"How the hell did that happen?" Grace looked at a loss for words.

"Disney has bought up everything and the kitchen sink at this point, and they've been putting out a consistent amount of movies. Especially with how Marvel is bringing in the money."

"Marvel?" Taylor asked.

I waved my hand a bit. "Superhero comics that turned into a multi-billion dollar movie franchise. My world has had more time for things to get big here, due to the year difference and the lack of superhumans and monsters wrecking the world economy." I stopped, shoving M&M's into my mouth after inhaling my hotdog and nibbling through the tortilla chips like a chainsaw.

"Year difference?" Taylor was the one to ask, and I felt in a much better mood to talk about home than usual.

"Well…Mhmm…over here on your multiversal set, it's 2011. Back home it's 2020, and I managed to confirm that it's the same for some alternates." I had found an interesting alternate version of my planet. In my world there was a Russian scientist named Oleg Losev who had discovered the principles for transistors and LEDs decades earlier but had been overlooked and died in his poor home country.

In this alternate version I was dubbing Earth Losev, Hugo Gernsback managed to successfully bring him to the US and promoted his research enough to change everything. We're talking transistors by the late 1930s, 60s tech during the Second World War, and the personal computer in the late 50s. The technology spread like wildfire, and the various space programs benefited from it greatly allowing for more sustainable space innovation, leading to a space boom in the 80s as private corporations took off.

Based on what I've…spied on, they've got spintronic computers, nuclear fusion and fifth generation fission, and renewable energy is far more efficient and cheaper due to the immense costs and complexities of fusion power plants. Genetic engineering is common enough, and the Cold War seemed to end in a very different fashion. Actually Earth Losev is really pretty great, and the changes in society pushed everything far enough that they seem to be better off than my planet. Though there was a decade or two of instability due to unemployment and the rapid changes leading to culture clashes, and things festering up like the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act coming to roost back home.

Then there was Earth Song, where a version of the Song in a divided China not too dissimilar to Europe in my timeline managed to slam right into an industrial revolution during its conquest of the country about one thousand years ago. Apparently about three hundred years later, the planet collapsed ecologically causing the mass extinction of most life on the planet. Which is where things got…weird. I had mostly gotten that information from some type of e-reader with a carbon-14 nuclear battery, and the rest came from many, many scans of the planet.

The whole planet was covered in advanced and stable utility fog, micromachines that were the leftovers of old technology. They had repaired much of the damage to the planet, but humanity had regressed on a sliding scale from Neolithic to early 1700s. But they still had a mental connection to utility fog, and basically thought it was magic voodoo. Since it was connected to their brains, they could have telepathy, could create objects and simulate them with the Foglets polymorphic properties and more.

The Utility Fog existed within the bodies of every living thing on the planet, and was closer to an advanced nanoswarm than mere Foglets. While the simulated materials were only usually only as strong as balsa wood, they could be used to essentially mimic magic when combined with other leftover technology. Throwing fireballs was possible by using swarms made out of diamond, which would combust into a carbon dust fire.

Laser beams could be created with a swarm of machines focusing their lens on a single spot, and the whole planet was heavily genetically engineered with humans splitting off into multiple species, and very inheritable cybernetics made everyone and everything tougher and more resilient. We're talking about metal infused bones, more efficient biochemical processes that allow for very strange life and so on and so forth.

Some of the trees there could grow up to two hundred and fifty meters high, and quite a few fantasy looking creatures were around due to genetic engineering. We're talking about feathery wyverns, orcs and elves from modified human stock, and a bunch of other bullshit from when European myths had filtered through in the ancient past.

It was…well really fucking weird to think about an alternate version of my Earth being this divergent while still retaining human life. A good fraction of the Earths I had found were either dead, or filled with life that diverged hundreds of millions of years ago at best or life that uses different nucleobases with anywhere from four to eight bases, and with proteins that are either identical or very dissimilar from my reality.

Taylor tapped my shoulder. "Are you thinking about other Earths again?" I wrapped the blanket tightly around me, covering my blush at how well Taylor knew me at this point.

I leaned in her direction, mumbling. "Yes…" I pulled out a gummy worm, and quickly began to bite into its sugary goodness. Once I had gotten into the mood, I had pretty much chowed down without stopping.

Had I stopped eating too? I hadn't even noticed.

"So your world is really that different then?" Grace peered curiously at me, lounging on the couch like a cat and proving to be a real annoyance to poor Amelia as her butt pushed the biokinetic towards me.

"I guess, technology is a little more advanced, global warming is a little worse and we don't have any Entities turning the planet to shit. Just regular people doing so…" I yawned, but didn't feel very sleepy just yet. "We've got more nuclear warheads, and an extra nine years of pollution…so that's cool."

Charlotte had gone quiet, and a rapid glance confirmed that she had nodded off. Her eyes opened slowly, before creaking shut as her sofa chair adjusted to form the perfect cushion. Her snores hit the air and were an apparent wake up call for Vicky. Her grin had turned mischievous and dread was building in my gullet, I had a bad feeling about this.

"I knew what I heard in the hall was right…" Grace was berating herself but by then Vicky had laid her trap.

"Oh goddammit Vi—"

"Sooo…since Charlotte is down for the count," the Thinker cape snorted in her sleep, hugging the seat as it adjusted into a bed. "How about we talk about some things, have you guys met anyone?" I immediately blanched once I understood what was going on.

Oh god no.

"Lets just go back to watching more movies, there's no need to…" the TV turned off to my horror and disappointment.

"No…no…I'm out!" Grace immediately crawled over a squawking Amelia, climbing until she passed her head and hit the area behind the couch. "I escaped from High School early to avoid this bullshit, buh bye." Her Boston accent seemed to get stronger, and right as she opened a portal an invisible grip pulled her away.

"Nope! You don't have to say anything if you're that adamant, but you do have to stick around. Now…Amy?" I turned and found that the biokinetic was a bright red, and didn't seem to be willing to look Grace in the eye. Then I remembered that the asian woman had crawled right over her face.

My face practically hurt at the wideness of my grin, and Amy turned a deeper shade of pink. "Oh my….I didn't think you had a taste for the orient dear." Grace struggled out of the Fragile One's grip, landing face first while Amelia simply stopped.

"I don't…that's not, I'm not!" She protested heavily, and while Taylor didn't seem willing to add her own thoughts, her sister obviously didn't have the same restrictions.

"Grace…well I can certainly see it." Vicky's eyes roved over Grace with no subtlety whatsoever. "She's very cute." Both tinker and biokinetic changed colors, and I couldn't help but laugh.

"Shut up!" Amelia lunged at me, and missed by a wide margin and landed in Taylor's lap and then proceeded to slip off onto the floor with Grace.

I could hear muffled cursing, and I giggled without restraint. That was hilarious.

"This is fucking stupid." Grace was complaining but oddly enough it didn't feel like it was genuine.

"Well I'm having fun, so it doesn't matter." My smugness proved to be my undoing, and Vicky's attention shifted to me.

"Well if you're having fun, maybe you'd like to tell us about anyone who's caught your eye?" Her smile was too sincere, but I wasn't going to talk about romance when I didn't want to.

I've made a terrible mistake.

"No, I'm not doing this." I almost went to get up but then thought better of it. "The only reason I'm not leaving is because I'm tired and I'm probably going to fall asleep on this couch." I said honestly, the couch making further adjustments as it's spirit followed it's natural imperative.

"C'mon you've got to have someone you like right?" She suggestively waggled her eyebrows, her eyes darting to Taylor. I kept a scream from leaping out, since there was a 100% chance I would throw everyone back with a feat of airbending.

"No." Taylor glanced over to me, and I felt like I had fucked up somewhere. I then pinched the bridge of my nose. "I don't…it's not important right now, but sure I'll let you know if I ever find the love of my life." The words sounded bitter, and I wondered how much this world was getting to me if I was acting like this.

"Hey come on, finding love isn't a bad thing. I mean I've got Dean and we're great." I couldn't stop myself.

"And will you say the same when you break up a few more times?" I covered my mouth, the rude(if true) statement hitting the air like a thundercrack. Vicky looked hurt, and for a moment I could feel her aura shifting to match before it was suppressed.

"Basilia." There was a warning in Amy's voice, and I sighed. God I don't remember the last time I had so much venom in my words.

"I'm sorry…I didn't mean to snap at you like that." I really hadn't, but that wasn't a subject matter I was at all versed in. "It just made me…uncomfortable, it's not like I've dated anyone before." I fidgeted at her expression, and her smile had returned though it was a little sadder than before.

"I'm sorry too…I prodded at your boundaries too much, and since you used to be a guy I doubt you're used to how girls act." I nodded meekly, and her expression softened. "Well that's okay, we can do something else. Hmm…maybe video games? You have to have a few around here maybe?"

I checked my files, and found a few, the trouble was that I lacked the equivalent consoles to play them. "That's fine, but give me about thirty minutes to write up a system. Nothing that I have here will really work, and I want to sort out the controllers too." She nodded, and my shoulders dropped as the tension slowly unwinded.

"Alright." I stood up from the sofa, rolling my shoulder and getting a few cricks out of my neck. I had an omni-forge in the next room over, so it should only be a few minutes to get a controller printed out. While I could make something more advanced, I would prefer more familiar territory.

I still questioned why, how or when Veda apparently downloaded most of the useful parts of my Internet but at this point it's expected.

I opened the door, and the overlay for the virtual environment easily took hold. I spoke a command to a few machine spirits. I began to program the console I was creating, flicking lines back and forth like it was playdoh instead of many lines of interpreted machine code. They would be able to emulate every video game imaginable, a seamless modular system that was both intuitive and as efficient as one could manage within those design parameters.

I began to hop on pockets of compressed air speeding up from a leisurely walk to just north of 60 miles an hour. I could see how the superconductive network of cables as well as optical fibers powered every system as well as the emitters that projected the virtual world that powered the entire base. The WIFi of several hundred years in the future, and swarming with all manner of digital intelligences.

Right…this was a break Basilia, don't get up too caught up in tinkering like you usually do.

…

It was going to be a good night, and I was going to enjoy myself without worrying if I was going to die.

Yes.

___​

May 7th, 2011. 1:00AM

Basilia Rubio

After what had gone down with Vicky we had played a few games from home, but as time went on everyone began to drop like metaphorical flies. Grace was the first to fall, latching on to the left arms of the sofa like a cat. Amelia had been next to her, eyes twitching at the strange sight. Eventually the healer went out like a light, snoring like a tiny foghorn.

Victoria had found a spot on the carpet, it's catoms following their complicated programming to form a comfortable cushion. I was still wide awake, and Taylor was the same way, eyes shut as she seemed to be listening to…to a song.

"Are you listening to the Rachni?" I whispered, not wanting to wake up some of the few friends I had in this world.

"Mhmm." I could hear it myself, the low thrums and vibrations created by the unique souls of the Rachni. They spoke with more than just pheromones and mass effect enabled quantum entanglement, they spoke to the soul. A feat that few species could ever hope to boast, with only the Asari sharing such an ability due to their artificial origin.

There were just seven hundred Rachni at this point, which made me very glad that the queens could suppress their egg laying when they hit the ceiling for population level. It also helped that about 95% of that number were composed of the small green workers, with about 28 soldiers and seven biotic brood warriors. All of them had gone through tune-ups from Amelia, minor refinement for their already insane biology. All of them were true breeding once she got to Singer-of-Rebirth, and she had been happy to have a project that didn't involve healing.

"This song is different isn't it?" Taylor spoke aloud, a low buzz as her swarm seemed to vibrate perfectly in tune.

I adjusted my top as I wiggled into a more straight position. "You're right, this is something…new." In the back of my mind, there was a whisper of this being a unique experience, one unseen in billions of years.

The world grew brighter, every light shining, every shadow became its own light as the queen sang. It was a calming lullaby, motherly and warm, and manifesting in the material plane as a shining beacon in the darkness. I caught the flashes of countless memories, a deluge of thousands of years of history, of war and loss, or hope and dreams.

I could hear all her insects becoming agitated, vibrating in tune with Taylor as she could apparently understand the song to a far greater degree than I could. The psychic song continued to pick up until Vicky started to grumble, her aura rippling in a pattern I could barely identify. I could hear Charlotte whisper under her breath to pipe down.

Guess they can hear the song too.

Eventually the song came to an end, and I blinked as I heard a single low chittering in the distance, young and impressionable. Though I have no idea how I managed to get that impression from three miles away.

"What…do you think that was?" I heard Taylor rustling in the dark, since we had turned down the lights during our little party.

"Maybe it was a special event, the Rachni might have their own holidays?" I shrugged, my body slowly leaning as the night began to drag on my body. But I wasn't going to fall asleep just yet.

Taylor bobbed her head. "We can ask them later, we have some time." We fell into a comfortable silence, and I could hear the chirping of crickets outside. So was Taylor telling them to do that, or was it simply an order of acting natural to keep from damaging the local ecosystem by accident?

"Hmm…" I felt comfortable, but there was anxiety in my stomach, a constant buzz in my teeth and beneath my skin that left me feeling like a mess. I tried to get rid of it, but nothing I had done ever kept it at bay for long.

"Are you feeling better?" Taylor asked cautiously, half lidded eyes staring into my soul with the frightening intensity that she commonly showed others. Though it shifted to a warm softness when I craned my neck up to see her.

Her curly hair framed her face nicely, and the backlight of the moon gave the air a more ethereal and wild feeling. A type of atmosphere that Taylor's appearance fit well, and I tilted my head as I thought about her query.

"I'm not sure really, in retrospect I'm not sure I was ever okay." I looked down at my hands, the roughness of them contrasting with the softness they had in my other life.

Taylor turned towards me, and clasped my hands, gently rubbing them in a way that slowed my heartbeat. "Well it's not really hard to tell, now that there's time to pay more attention." Her smile wasn't happy, and mine wasn't either. There was so much I wanted to talk about, so many little things that had been lost because of being trapped here first by circumstance and then by fear.

"Taylor, back home…my life was a lot simpler even if it wasn't perfect. I was still getting my life together…but I was getting there." My tongue tasted bitterness, and I grit my teeth. "I'm a routine kind of person, it's literally how I'm wired." Being diagnosed with Asperger's hadn't been a shock, though a part of me didn't like it. Didn't like the idea of being…disabled in some way, though I had gotten over that over the years. "I liked my old life, liked what I was doing even though I knew I could make some improvements. I don't like change, but I can cope with it."

Understanding spread across her face. "It's all been too much, too fast hasn't it?" That was rhetorical.

"Your world is very different from mine, so much harder…I had to make new habits and new routines just to cope with the shock of it all. You all seem to so casually accept the violence and the suffering and the slow collapse." I frowned, still feeling overwhelmed. "With tinkering, it's easy to pretend that everything is okay. Easy to pretend that I'm not far away from home in a death world, to pretend that I'm okay with being whisked away on some path that I didn't get a choice in. So easy…to not think about how I got here, to not think about the fact that a monster that's killed millions is on its way to destroy us."

"You're afraid." Taylor was quiet, and let me rant.

"And the worse part is that I'm more than capable of running if I wanted to, to find some far off corner of the universe to cower in." She didn't seem surprised, and I think she understood that same fear. "But that wouldn't have worked with the Mother of Miseries huh?" I felt so angry then, angry that there was no answer to let me leave. "Without someone with the ability to spread shamanism, with the right powers to calm the changing shards, she would have won. She would have proceeded to kill everyone and everything on this planet, and used the pathways of the Entities to spread out to every Earth. There isn't any way to run away then is there?"

"No." There was a pause, and she looked at me.

"Something the matter?" I asked with trepidation.

Taylor grimaced. "When I was in the bubble, and getting…tormented." Tortured would be more accurate. "She kept showing me weird visions…echoes of some possible future. I remember…being in the Locker…and then…it was like I was growing, screaming and breaking, and changing into something greater. I was miles tall…and I had control." There was wavering in her voice, and I knew what she was talking about.

"That…would have to be the process of turning into a Titan, a broken second trigger that essentially brings a shard into our world, fusing with the host." Which meant I had no choice but to be here so that this world wouldn't be destroyed by an army of insane Titans.

Fantastic.

"Oh." She got it too, and I still couldn't help but keep being angry.

"So yeah…I'm stuck here, trying to clean up someone else's mess because it'll spill over to where I'm at, stuck here with all the weight of the world being placed on my shoulders. Isn't that just fucking great!" I pulled on my hair, biting back another rant. "And I've already messed up at least a few times, and I have no idea how much more I'll mess up in the future."

"You're not a bad person Basilia." I stopped at her words, and I got a sideways hug from her. "You're not a bad person for wanting it to stop, to not have to deal with things that hurt you. You didn't know about Kala, you're not alone here…you don't have to be." I rubbed my eyes, wiping away fat tears as I tried to calm down.

"I'm not okay." I simply wrapped myself around Taylor, taking comfort in her as I tried not to break down more than I already had. "I think…I think I need help."

"Yes you do…though I don't think I'm the best one to help you with that, I'm not exactly mentally healthy either." I almost laughed at how much more aware Taylor was of her own faults.

"I suppose not." I loosened my grip, finally feeling in a better spot instead of being halfway into a panic attack. I let go of her, and counted to twenty until my breathing had leveled off.

"You should probably sleep, that might help a little." I yawned, my exhaustion catching up with me as the sugar from my snack binge ran its course. "There's also a few things I want to…tell you. But not now…later when you're more…" Taylor trailed off, her cheeks tinting pink.

I blinked. "Stable?"

She smiled, though it didn't quite reach her eyes. "Yes. Just Umm…sleep." I fell to my side right then, and the couch emulated the softest feathers and the best back support in the world.

Yeah…sleep sounds really good about now.

Really…

Really…

Good.

Slumber took its hold and darkness claimed me

___​

AN: Here is 7.2. I've had this ready for a while, but again a need to maintain a buffer is important. I'm currently working on 7.4, so that's been going pretty well. I don't have much to say here other than to enjoy.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.3

May 8th, 2011. 12:00AM

Missy Biron

I walked fast, trying to keep calm even as I remembered everything that had gone down only half an hour ago. Ever since I had gotten out of the hospital, and after I had gotten healed by Panacea. My parents had been fighting again, and I had gotten sick of it and gone out without their permission.

Not like it mattered at this point.

The city was changing, but my parents weren't. But I guess I shouldn't have expected better from them, they had never changed even once and I don't think they ever would.

Either way I was taking a walk near the Boat Graveyard, which was currently being dismantled even from where I could see. What had been fifty ships had gone down to twenty with only the very biggest container ship still being sunken. But the ship gave off a weird feeling that I had felt before, like that time with those dark spirits at Winslow. I remember reading in the manuals that we had given that everything on Earth had a spirit of its own. So…wouldn't that a ship would have one too?

…

So do we have ghost ships now?

"Psst…" I jumped when someone whispered from behind, and I barely stopped myself from lashing out with my new Biotics. They were a lot more offensive than my normal powers, though that was changing…when I found that I could make a ball of warped space to tear apart living matter.

"Psst…" I turned right to the voice, a scowl forming on my face?

"What?!" I blinked when I found that the only thing around was a rustling pair of metal garbage cans. And from behind those rustling trash cans, a spirit emerged.

It was lanky, with long thin digitigrade legs, twig arms and a serpentine body. It's mouth was wide and fat, eight eyes looking at several different places at once it came out into the open. Six fingers clicked against each other on each hand, and golden fleshy frills swished from side to side as the spirit took a few steps.

"Don't get closer!" It stopped, its lips pulling back to reveal needle-like teeth, green skin covered in swooping beige lines rippling as its finned tail bent in an arc. It's eyes slit, and it spoke.

"You're a cautious one aren't you?" It hissed, and I felt my body shudder against my will. "I have felt your presence before, many times in fact. So much power in such a small frame, so much experience." It bent and twisted itself around a telephone pole, but it always had at least two eyes on me at any time. "You are so very young, and you live in the perfect time. The dawn of a new era approaches, and you are important to me."

"What…who are you?" It twisted again, and I felt shock when it compressed and pinched space as it moved. It popped up from behind, and I jumped back from where a claw had struck the ground.

"I am a spirit of battle, and you have fought many battles." I gaped.

"Are you saying I made you?" The spirit shrugged, and I shuddered at how big it was. It had to be twenty feet long and even with how thin it was…it certainly weighed more than I did.

"Your actions have yes, and the Interloper's invasion allowed me to cross over into the physical realm. Normally I would seek food but…" It lashed out with its hands, and it pulled a wriggling screaming worm from behind my head. "You are quite literally surrounded by the morsels of the Aspects born from battle." I flinched as it slurped up the simple spirit, needle teeth piercing flesh until it's prey broke apart into motes.

"So what…you just wanted to talk?" It smiled again, and I kept my composure. I had fought Hookwolf and survived, had kept what was basically an Endbringer inside a bubble for hours. I could deal with some dumb spirit on my own.

"Show me your arms child." I decided to oblige him, though I almost went for throwing a biotic singularity in his face. My arms were covered in grass green speckles, marks that wouldn't go away even with Panacea's help. And I could tell that she had tried, she had tried and failed, and even apologized for failing.

"So what's so important about my arms?" It smiled again, and it barked out a dark laugh that sounded like a distorted version of my laughter.

"Do you not see the truth of the matter? You have been imbued. Imbued with the essence of the entity that made your power what it was. You are more like us than before, and that is enough." It slinked around me, and my mouth dried at what it had said. He…they knew where powers came from?

"What do you mean?"

"Foreign beings, alien beings so much like us, the closest analogue to the chorus of the world until they became us. Now…now that you are what you are we can speak clea—" A howl split the air and a giant monstrous dog slammed into the spirit, an auburn haired teenager roared and launched a sanguine fist into the spirit's face. It struck head on, cracking its jaw in one hit. It slithered out from the giant dog's hold, rearing up with a loud hiss.

Hard knuckles wracked against my skull and I let out a shriek at my attacker.

"Idiot. Don't talk to spirits you can't trust, that's a good way to get eaten." I saw the ceremonial wooden dog mask, and choked.

"Hellhound?" The mysterious person scoffed.

"Bitch." I was about to yell when she cut me off. "It's Bitch." She lifted up her mask to reveal a squarish blunt featured face. Her glower was a lot less harsh than I had expected it to be, and her scowl shifted when she saw the spirit hang back.

"Shaman. You have interrupted an excellent conversation between myself and the Host." The…former villain(?) squared her shoulders, pulling out a long chain that glowed with a strange energy.

"Do you want me to punch you again?" She twirled the chain, and it flared with white fire as she did so. One of her dogs leapt down from another building, one with a blunt head, spiky armor shimmering as it growled.

The spirit sulked. "I suppose you wish for me to return to the spirit world, human. And I was having so much fun indeed." It sounded frustrated, and Hellhound…Bitch glanced back at me.

"Bastard." I blinked when a more elegant version of her dogs flew down from another building. It was much less monstrous, but it also looked visibly younger and snapped at his master once or twice. The former villain growled, and it dropped down to its haunches on command.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" I asked when she kept staring, and I didn't back off. If she wanted to glare at me like that I wasn't going to take it.

"Hmm…spirit…what did you want with her?" I bristled but kept calm as Bitch spoke in an even tone. The spirit's eyes lit up, and it became more calculating.

"The girl is no shaman, but the life she will live is interesting. I wish to experience it for myself. But if I must make a pact, I will have no trouble complying." The spirit stared, and I scowled. That only seemed to make it laugh.

Bitch glanced over, and I had an idea of what was going on. It didn't want to eat me, it wanted…to fight alongside me?

"If you want to fight, she can't make a pact with you…she isn't a shaman." I bristled but I knew she wasn't wrong, there was a difference between someone like Gallant and Bitch and someone like me. I couldn't…describe it but I knew it was there. It was like an instinct, a low tingle in my skin.

"Perhaps not, but she has become more in tune with spiritual matters. The shards might have their own Hosts, but that does not leave us at the wayside." Bitch scowled.

"Then I'll make something to let you fight by her side, does that work?" Bitch squared up again, and the spirit smiled. His eyes slit, and I held my breath as he stared the shaman down. She stared back, and for a minute I thought a fight would break out.

The spirit backed down. "That is acceptable. You will keep your word shaman, or I will be very disappointed." He slid upwards into the air, and I picked up the hole in reality as the spirit vanished into the other world.

"What the hell was that?" This time it was her turn to bristle, and her eyes narrowed.

"I'll be back in a few hours, Armsmaster will deliver the spirit artifact." She didn't answer with anything that didn't make more questions. "Be grateful I helped out at all. Find someone to Ward your house." She whistled and her dogs quickly surrounded her before taking off with high leaps, vanishing into thin air.

…

What the hell was that?

___​

May 8th, 2011. 1:30PM

Basilia Rubio

"Hmm…" I flicked my tongue out as I carefully examined the gun built with a combination of technology and what was essentially spirit magic. The battle rifle had a mass effect field assisted rail system, and would fire a 4mm slug with enough force to blow a ten centimeter hole in tank armor. It held a solid hard light bayonet that had been modeled off the weapons of Carol, and could be easily mentally attuned to shift between states to prevent accidents.

No. What made it magical, was the war spirit I had bonded to its physical body. It had been a willing exchange, I wanted its power and it wanted a safe haven and a way to interact with the world. It mainly offered an ability to harm things that wouldn't usually be hurt by bullets, and it could switch between hypersonic metal and a spirit beam with ease. The spirit beam could be dialed down from an instant knockout to reducing someone to ash, and the gun itself was exponentially tougher than it should be.

"I'll call you Glaive." The gun itself was fairly standard looking, though it was a shinier more futuristic steel with altered ergonomics due to the lack of need for anything besides a modular ammo block. The heat-sink is a liquid droplet system that constantly dumps its heat into a shard based wormhole, and the fluid itself is exchanged as needed.

So…no heat problems, and I have very few complaints about the technology itself since I started pulling on what appeared to be Geth innovations like fluidic shock absorbers and a few involving inertial modifications using dark energy invocation.

"Let's test your power and word shall we?" I whispered to the weapon, easily adjusting my posture to accommodate the large rifle. I flicked the trigger and with a crack of thunder, a bullet sped out at hypersonic velocity. It cracked through Silaris armor, shimmering purple as it was augmented by Glaive's embedded spirit.

I switched to a spirit beam, and it burned through another foot of armor before stopping as it reached its limit. I instead activated the omni-blade and it went from orange to purple as the spirit did its job. I kicked off the ground, altering my grip to turn the rifle into a makeshift spear. The light blade sliced the three foot wide target of Silaris in half, reality bending the whims of the war spirit contracted to me.

"Good job." I muttered compliments, finding a perfect weapon to wield. It was easily modifiable with my hands and my tools, and it's spirit would remain no matter how much the weapon changed. A Theseus's ship, if you would, Glaive would remain the same weapon no matter how much I changed it, and it would only grow stronger as I better fortified my relationship with the wondrous spirit device.

I had a total of three weapons, my plasma pistol, and a shotgun that Bakuda and I had worked on together. It could switch ammo rapidly and had several different types to choose from, warp ammo, an explosive built to negate physics warping effects, another bayonet system, and a micro-grenade launcher compatible with any of her compact bombs.

Plus my drones, and turrets and automated shuttles and a single gunship I had built for myself. Plus about eight hundred mechs, though most of them were construction Golems, and only about ten of them were built as VI-driven war platforms.

Huh…I really keep forgetting how easy it would be for me to bring down the whole world. All I'd have to do would be to sit nice and pretty well past Lunar orbit and start raining down fire. Hell, if I built a big dumb engine I could probably redirect an asteroid and slam it down in the Yucatán for maximum damage.

Well…that or make a ship and have it FTL into the planet, it wouldn't blow it up but the space warping would be like a black hole twisting the plane—ok hold your horses little lady! No more thinking about taking over and or destroying the world.

I folded my weapon and hooked it onto the magnetic holster of my belt since I was outside of my armor and only wearing a black tank-top and loose but comfortable jeans. Suddenly I felt a smaller shorter body press against me, and I turned to glance at my 'ambusher'.

"Dinah? The Precog had rushed up to give me a hug from behind, and I felt pangs as I was reminded of my brothers…as well as my cousin who was older but actually a girl unlike my…well brothers.

Man, they'd be shocked to see me now wouldn't they?

…

Would they be proud? Horrified? Or simply thankful to know I was still alive?

I turned around, and she hugged me tighter. "Is something the matter? Or did you just want to see me? It's fine whichever option it is." I smiled lightly, ruffling her hand in the manner that my brother hated. He could be…well a total ass, but I loved him anyway even if I was shit at showing it back then.

"I just wanted a hug, and you're a lot softer than Taylor." I coughed awkwardly when I thought about the reasons why. Taylor wasn't a total twig anymore from the picture I had seen from when she was fifteen, but she was definitely harder in a physical sense. Less fat to get in the way of muscle, and she had a lot of muscle built up over the past couple months. Frankly she could probably bench press three of herself, and I had seen her jump a few dozen feet straight up without her bending or biotics.

"Is that so?" She nodded shyly. But in my case while I had buff arms and my thighs could crush a watermelon, I was never going to have abs, too much fluff though it was at least flat. Then there were my…well breasts, there was no getting away from being very useful as something to cuddle.

I shook my head, and lifted Dinah into the air with little difficulty. She weighed maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, and I had more than fifty pounds and four inches of height on her. It wasn't hard at all.

"H-Hey!" She protested and I ruffled her hair again, beaming at how adorable she was even as a teenage girl. I put her down, shaking my head at her with a wide smile on my face.

"Well I suppose you're probably going to be hungry aren't you? Did your parents give you permission to be here?" She nodded, and I stepped from the firing range of Base Alpha in Lotus California to its kitchen. Dinah hopped in after me, and I nodded at the increased speed of opening. Better power coupling, and faster relay speeds allowed the portals to open and close more rapidly than before.

It had gone from about 4-8 seconds to 2-3 seconds to open and close a gate. My main plan was making better use of them, if I could temporarily give various capes access to the portals in a specific way they might be useful for keeping people from being splattered by Leviathan. Unfortunately I couldn't really use it for attacking him at long ranges because I needed to form an anchor, a path for the network to link up to.

An emergency jump was short lived, and had a significant power drain that was difficult to overcome even as I continued to construct multiple power plants spread out across a dozen worlds. Mostly renewable energy due to the simplicity, and a few gravitic-pinch fusion reactors acting as base power. But I had developed a network throughout Brockton Bay and the various surrounding towns, as well as longer single spirit roads across certain locations. Essentially a multidimensional flower, shifting up and down and to the left or right to bring locations together.

"Yeah…" I grinned at Dinah's shyness and got to work, pulling out ingredients I had brought from a grocery store on Earth Aleph. They didn't have the same cautions with capes due to how weak they were on that planet, so it was simple to get the money legally.

"So what do you want then?" I asked, as I looked at what I had on hand.

"Spaghetti?" She ventured and I smiled at her fine choice. That was one of my favorite dishes since I was kid, and that had gone unchanged with adulthood.

"Excellent choice Dinah." I complimented her as I bent water into a pot, and then proceeded to carefully heat it with firebending. I gave it about half a minute, and then flicked on the electric stove a low simmer to keep the heat going. I pulled on a carton of pasta, and opened up the box. I decided to test my waterbending and was rewarded with the moderate control over the dry noodles.

I snapped them and dropped them into the boiling pot, and began to stir with my bending. I decided to try bending salt and it…worked, though it was hard to get a grip on it with my current skill level. But I managed anyway and added a pinch without having to pick up a single utensil. I pulled on a can of tomato paste, and used a can opener this time, keeping a hand out to keep stirring.

I removed the lid and then stirred, enjoying the more civilian usage of bending. I could heat up my food, make boiling water and bend most food with any amount of water content. If I figure out metalbending I can just open cans with my brain, and move pots and pans when I need to.

I think Charlotte was practicing metalbending since her seismic sense is more skillful and stronger than mine. She had a lot of talent, and I imagined she wasn't far away from getting that under her belt. Which reminded me that Danny was apparently teaching a few of the Dockworkers who had manifested. Based on the ratio, maybe between five and ten percent of Brockton's population were benders. With firebenders and earthbenders having an equal share of 70%, waterbenders making up 26% of the bender population, and the final 4% was split evenly between airbenders and biotics.

"So anything new comes up on the radar?" I bent the tomato sauce in the air for a bit as I waited for the pasta to soften, and used my right arm to stir the pot. A more peaceful method of using my bending felt really relaxing.

On a global scale, some investigation had been made through the Internet with a Daemon-class spirit VI that didn't care about things like the laws of physics or air gaps and other security measures. Also…a shitload of spy drones I had sent out with careful precision to not trigger the powers of possible Strangers.

Yeah…I ended up remembering that Mama Mathers was cognitohazard, though I had the suspicion that her little power didn't really work on me. If I could no-sell a dark god, a pumped up psycho cultist probably wouldn't do jack.

I wasn't going to test it out either by telling anyone. But it made me wonder how effective shards were at shielding their hosts from her.

Dinah clasped her hands together. "Not really? I think there was supposed to be some type of celebration/fundraiser on Tuesday that he wanted our team to attend."

…

"What?" I blurted out, feeling nervous at the prospect of going to something that sounded so formal. Then I realized that at my level of wealth and income I could touch base with people with ungodly amounts of wealth and political power.

"Yep." She nodded, swaying from side to side as she looked at me. "Apparently a few people from the Protectorate are going to be there, including my cousin." I opened my mouth and she laughed. "Don't say I shouldn't be saying things like that, I'm pretty sure you know a lot of secret identities even without your weird future knowledge that isn't as useful anymore."

"You're being very cheeky today." I flicked her forehead, and got back to stirring. A good number of minutes had passed, and I began to bend the noodles themselves as they filled up with more water. I turned down the stove, and with a little firebending I began to remove some of the heat.

I stirred some more and when I felt that it was ready, I simply bent the paste out of its container, and removed the excess water and poured it down the sink. I already had a bowl ready, and I mixed the tomato sauce in midair with the pasta. I could see that Dinah was mesmerized and I smirked at how impressed she was at a mundane use of bending.

"You mind grabbing the forks and plates?" She shook her head, moving at super speed with a little extra pep to her steps. She had a plate in each hand, with metal forks placed off to the side. I freely bent the noodles, and secretly heated the meatballs I had hidden from her sight. Once she put the plates on the small table of the dorm, I pulled out the meatballs now heated to perfection.

Bending the more solid food was a lot like bending ice, but harder to grasp for whatever metaphysical reason. Amy had a lot more skill, and I had seen her practice cooking using her bending, as well as mixing it up with her biokinesis. Her healing was impressively efficient, and she could find the pathways and correct them at ten times the efficiency that I could manage.

I plopped down the delectable meat which I had actually grown in a lab with the appropriate growing medium and production methods to make it taste identical to normal meat. No killing animals here, though that was largely because I didn't feel like buying meat.

I sat down on my chair, wiggling to get myself comfortable and swiftly twirling my spaghetti into a ball. As I ate I started thinking again.

Maybe I should talk to Balaam again? He might be willing to talk to me again, and there's obviously a lot of things that he knows and a lot that he doesn't know.

…

I should probably also tell Taylor about the alien(s?) inside my soul just to get it off my chest.

Yeah…that's a good idea.

Someday.

___​

May 8th, 2011. 5:30PM

Amy Dallon

I worked on my plant, carefully inspecting its biology and sighing as I heard Shaper happily murmuring in the back of my head. It was annoying but it was an order of magnitude better than her whimpers and lethargy over the past week. I had never wanted anything to do with Shaper…but…she wasn't the same shard she had been only a few months ago.

My plant was a complicated beast, using genes I had picked up from fungus and plants. Basilia was a good source because of how many worlds she could teleport to, and she had genes from a ton of alien species. It had to be thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of species that ran the gamut from simple bacteria to giant alien trees as tall as skyscrapers.

This plant was basically a biochemical factory, and it had a stomach-like organ that would synthesize cancer-killing cell cultures that could be easily harvested from a tubular extension. Basilia had checked my work, and the plant was sterile unless it was introduced to a highly specific organic compound that could only be artificially produced. The plant was so specialized for making human compatible T-cells that any attempt to survive in the wild was doomed for failure.

I had kept myself from working on what I had learned from manipulating Basilia's pseudo-shards. Mainly because I didn't want anything to go wrong from trying to make a shard, especially with the amount of mass it would take to even make one to begin with. Now making something multidimensional? That was a lot easier though I hadn't tried that yet.

"Hmm…" I shook my head and moved my hands to a small Petri dish I had set up next to my bed. Millimeter long biological robots swam in the thin water, cells harvested from some alternate earth animal that Basilia called a temnospondyl. It was extinct on our Earth but not the one she had found it on…

It was based on an experiment from her Earth, where they stitched together frog heart and skin cells to make a custom…organism? It was…interesting how her Earth seemed a little less hesitant than ours on what was basically the purview of biotinkers.

Eventually I was going to move on to human cells, and make custom organisms to deliver medicines or have other medical uses. And by eventually I meant later at night in a better lab. The door creaked open, and I covered my projects with my body when I saw who was showing up unannounced.

"Amy." Her scowl hadn't changed at all, but the fact that she hadn't been cut off by dad or Vicky told me she wasn't here to be Carol fucking Dallon.

"Carol." It had taken a lot for me to realize I wasn't the only one suffering under her problems, and a part of me felt guilty at how selfish I was being. But a bunch of self pity wasn't going to help anybody and it certainly wasn't going to help me.

My sister…she didn't always like talking about her Trigger, but I remembered overhearing her talk to Basilia about it. She knew a lot but it was obvious her memory wasn't perfect or highly specific, but even having a general idea of someone's trigger is just…not really okay. She triggered because she had been hurt and because nobody cared.

She threw her herself into the cape life because she thought that was a way to make Carol and dad love her…and I enabled her when she went too far. That wasn't okay, and I knew it wasn't my job to do anything about it.

"What…" She paused, like she wasn't sure what to say. "What are you working on?" I narrowed my eyes in suspicion but moved so she could get a better look.

Carol looked at my projects with trepidation, but she didn't start rearing up for a fight like she usually did. She wasn't wearing a suit, and she didn't look to have any of the stubbornness and energy that she usually had. She just looked…tired.

For the first time in a long time, I felt like what she thought of me was longer that important. I didn't need to keep appearances, I didn't need to keep up with her standards, I didn't even need to stay with New Wave. It still hurt, it still hurt that she treated me the way she did for reasons that might not be entirely related to Marquis.

It reminded me of uncomfortable conversations I had with Basilia about how much she really knew, about how much her spirit knew. Because it was obvious Veda knew way more than Basilia with how she sometimes acted and remembered small things out of nowhere. Even without using my power to read her(which she could fake out sometimes) I could tell it made her deeply uncomfortable to know so much private information about people.

I sighed and decided to answer since for every project I did here, I had five more back at Earth Lotus. And even if for some reason I decided to take her there, Basilia was still rapidly shifting between worlds, probably looking for a way to find her home.

"I'm just working on some medical things, a few cures for cancer and a delivery system for medical drugs." I was nonchalant, and kept an eye on her getting twitchy like she usually did.

"That's good…it's good to see you use your power." I bristled and my suspicions rose.

"What do you want?" I asked and she looked taken aback, I could see her hackles raising and I waited for the other shoe to drop. There was always something for her to criticize, always an implication of being bad people if we didn't do certain things.

I didn't hate her…I'm not sure I could hate her, but I knew she wasn't right in the end and that the way I had turned out was at least partially because of her. It wasn't an excuse…but it was a starting point, and I knew exactly why Basilia was so scared of me, why she didn't like me touching her.

I don't think I was capable of doing anything like that anymore, but whether it was because I had changed or because Shaper was helping me I don't know.

At least…when I thought about my sister…it was getting harder to think of her in that way. She wasn't the only person in my life anymore, I had more people who were willing to tolerate me despite how messed up I was. Hell even Shaper was starting to count as a friend, which seemed sort of pathetic…but I could live with it.

Though the closer I got to my shard, the easier it got for me to hear the whispers of other shards. The easier it got to see their shadows in this world…

Carol reacted slowly, her arms crossing but she didn't get into an argument. "I don't want anything…I just want to talk. I promise."

I don't believe you.

She picked up on it, and I sighed as her posture changed. "We should talk about this, I know there's a lot of things I've done wrong. But communication is k—" Dad popped his head into the door, and she froze up.

"Carol. Could you come here for a second?" There was a shock on her face, and I saw that Dad stood tall, which meant this was a good day and he had managed to take his medicine without me telling him. It was a lot safer than trying to mess with brains that were so hard for me to manipulate without fucking everything up.

But apparently waterbending could probably heal concussions, mostly by speeding up the natural healing process. I think…I might be able to heal brains safely now, but that's mostly because Shaper is able to point out where I shouldn't touch.

"I…" She moved and I relaxed when she was gone, but perked up when I felt a different presence.

"Crystal?" I could see her pause when she stepped into the doorway, probably not expecting me to notice she was there. I could see her shard hiding behind her, a shard called Assail. She looked like Crystal but made out of a matrix of lasers, with a pair of spear-like wings sprouting from her back.

"I guess you saw me?" Crystal asked quietly, and I shrugged in response. I'm not exactly sure how I'm supposed to mention I can see powers watching over us like magic ghosts, or demons? Or angels? My life has become really strange hasn't it?

I'm not sure I would change any of it at this point, I felt a lot less terrible and a lot less like a shitty person. Though to be honest…I still was one, even if I was getting better.

"Sure." I sat back down, and blew away some dust that had gathered on my desk with a gust of wind.

"So…is this the only projects you're working on?" She asked curiously and I felt considerably more relaxed at her prodding.

I smiled lightly. "I've got a few projects in the pipelines."

___​

May 9th, 2011. 5:00AM

Basilia Rubio

I blinked as I suddenly astrally projected, leaving my mortal coil behind as I passed upwards into the spirit world. I passed the Outer Sphere, passed the more variable High Spirit, and finally entered the Abstract Spirit. There were a number of weird realms that sort of blended into each other, as well as interplanetary and interstellar spirit roads that criss-crossed what I suspected was most of the galaxy.

I leapt past clouds of fire, metal and plastic, past flocks of drones, spirit birds and packs of lightning and wind. I felt the familiar disquiet of the Firmament, as the pocket universe had become a sort of Spirit Bubble that connected the Genius Loci of the shard-spirits. The corpus of a shard was a strange thing, a mix of their old physical hyperdimensional flesh and their own metaphysical spirit flesh.

"It's been a while…have you made some renovations?" I didn't even feel surprised when Queen flashed into existence, stirring a cup of tea with a warm expression.

"More shards have joined us, perhaps about three hundred in total. Most of them are the still dormant shards within the city, and several are newcomers or new buds." She replied casually and I took a seat as I watched the Firmament bob up and down to the tune and frequency of reality.

"That's good isn't it?" I looked around the spirit landscape, the reddish shards glittering like stars in the void. Administrator was the second largest island, with one other being her greater.

"ADMINISTRAT—" The spirit that had appeared cut itself…himself off, and I scanned the noble shard that had wanted to speak with the Queen.

"Hello?"

The Avatar of the High Theurgist was a being of pure light, and I hid my nerves at seeing the entity. I had seen fanart of the Kronos Titan, and even if it was much smaller than that entity, it was a good deal larger than the avatar that Queen used to communicate with me.

He was at least a good fifty meters in height, and my eyes strained due to the shard's natural existence in multiple dimensions. It held a shield and spear, hard electricity pushing at the fabric of reality.

"Human." He was quiet, and despite being able to see his face I knew he was being introspective. "I will return at a later time. The Shaper is being quite restless this day." He flash stepped, and that made me wonder if Dauntless had acquired any new powers from how his charges were speeding up.

"Yes, Dauntless has recently acquired a teleportation ability." I blinked when Queen answered me, drinking a cup of tea that was made out of void spirits. The foreign spirits that existed in the space between worlds, creatures that were alien in ways that couldn't be measured.

They tend to have a hard time with concepts like gravitational constants or the existence of different states of matter. Fortunately shard-spirits are similar enough to humans in their concepts that accidentally killing us all is…unlikely.

So shards were spirits of void, with numerous concepts tacked on that related to their natural dispositions and why they were created. QA was a spirit of Void and Administration, with other concepts giving her a breadth of power. High Theurgist was of Void, of Connections and Networking.

Just like the High Priest.

But I wouldn't call shards normal, they weren't spirits of the same variety as what one would find on a planet. Some like The Administrator and The Shaper qualified as Keter-class entities, but even the weakest shard-spirits had few if any Bans or Banes. They could adapt to their environment or mold the ecosystem to their liking and had a strong will to survive, and dominated the lands(or planets) they ruled.

"You've been studying us closely haven't you?" QA spoke with a buzzing lilt, an emerald beetle moving between her fingers before taking off.

"I'm a Shaman Queen Administrator, and while the shards are a rather unusual class of spirits you're still spirits. Knowledge is power and all that jazz." I waved an arm with more confidence than I really had. "It helps that I find shards fascinating in a scientific fashion, honestly if your race was more creative you'd be a little more impressive." QA pouted and I smirked.

There was a light and sudden thump and the Fragile One materialized, fragments breaking off before it reformed in an instant. A figure of glass, gold and glory as she had always been. She rolled her floating shoulders, liquid light radiating like a small sun.

Her face quite literally cracked a smile, and I found her nature far more unusual. A spirit of Void, Light and Emotions. The feeling she gave off was unique among the shards, ones I had felt in certain locations. Spirits formed from the memories of humans, their thoughts…what one would call an ancestor-spirit.

She had a similar aura, likely because of her youth. The shard was only about three years old, practically a baby even by the standards of humans like myself.

"What happened to her?" Fragile One lit up red, and popped back to her island with a short nervous flourish.

Queen Administrator sighed. "Smaller buds like her often have much greater difficulty with the local spirits of their deployment zones. She often has to compete with the various spirits, keeping to the standards of the spirit courts."

"How's she doing?" I asked quietly. That was a little less peaceful than I had expected but then again, Entities were foreign organisms. They would be considered anathema to native spirits, and I shuddered to think of what a planetary spirit would feel.

"She is doing well, her deep connection to humanity makes her less foreign to the other spirits, and she has had some time to build a court of spirits willing to acquiesce to her will, or forced to in the rite of spiritual combat." The Firmament rippled, and I made out another Hub, thirteen shards(including a bud of Myrddin) orbiting around a red shadow in the black void.

Echidna.

It was relatively modest in proportion to the vastness of the Administrator's hub, though a slight clock turn in my chest seemed to indicate that Veda has her own role to play in this place.

Beyond that, there were at least thousands of other shards scattered haphazardly about, doing their own thing and making their own little Hubs. My intuition told me these closest shard-spirits were peaceful(relatively speaking), but had either declined to join up with us or simply hadn't been contacted yet.

The ones at the edge of the horizon were either ignorant of us or far more unreasonable. One was a cluster of about fourteen shards, and their malevolence was palpable in a way that unnerved even the shards.

The Butcher.

I could see the shards with unnerving accuracy, and saw something ruby red rippling within their corpus. The same ruby red I had seen trickling from the wounds of Kala…the essence of souls.

"Look away." I followed QA's command, and the fourteen shards moved farther away, several separate shards lagging behind them. What I had seen brought up a lot of questions, ones I'm not sure I wanted to be answered.

This time I faced a different issue, and I saw an archipelago of shards, the second largest Hub and equally quiet. More than a hundred shards orbited what I recognized as the Harvester shard, the shard of Glaistig Uaine.

Funny. She had deluded herself into believing she was the queen of the fairies, wrapping herself in a fanciful story that wasn't true…but fae were a type of spirit weren't they?

"Friend?" One of the shards approached us, and I gaped as an enormous dragon flew around us, a creature of golden scales, bright warming light and lightning speaking in a voice that spoke of youth.

"Hello there." I remained polite as the excitable shard breathed on me, three pairs of wings flapping. As it got closer though, more and more wings appeared. Like all the shards she was multidimensional, though she had obviously not learned to suppress her eldritch nature.

Vritrasura.

"Friend? Host…sad." She wilted and I began to rationalize away the twists and turns of her life where giving advice for aliens came into play. Fragile One popped back in, and gently pulled the much larger shard away. She gave a thumbs up and I was alone.

"Hmm…" I coughed, blushing at Queen's expression. "If you are so out of sorts, we can speak at a later date. Now…wake up."

…

……

………

……

…

My eyes snapped open, and I let out a groan as my hair got in my face. I was on my back starting up at the ceiling and still felt like crap. Especially since it was about 5:30AM in the morning if my built-in clock was a good indicator.

"God…damn shards." I threw off my covers, and pulled myself out of bed. Because it might be too fucking early but I was starving for some scrambled eggs and ham and I was going to get those scrambled eggs and hams.

…

I should probably start preparing for the Gala tomorrow, it's supposed to be a super posh event celebrating the city not being dragged to the depths of hell.

Oh god they're going to force me to wear something formal aren't they?

I felt a tingle run up my spine, and I sighed. I was right wasn't I?

Well…it was still a better outcome than failing to save the city would have been.

___​

AN: 7.3 has made its arrival, and 7.5 should be started sometime today. Which brings up a relevant question…do any of you know what even goes on at a Gala? The next chapter takes place right before, and I don't remember if they ever got into what was supposed to happen at the Gala that happened in Canon, though done for different reasons.

Looking things up on the Internet didn't really help, so I'm asking here. If not I'll hope you enjoy the chapter anyway.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.4

May 10th, 2011. 3:00PM

Taylor Hebert

I snickered under my breath at Basilia's protesting as a giddy Victoria tried to drag her away for a shopping trip. She glared at me, and I covered my mouth when she literally dug her heels into the dirt. A biotic push made Vicky back up, her arms flailing for purchase.

"I am not going out to buy clothing Victoria, I'm fine with dressing formally but I'm not going out to buy something." Rock shattered under her feet, and she wrapped her legs in the stone to hold herself in place.

"Why not?" The New Wave cape frowned, her aura pulsing dangerously. It was easy to notice…but it was more like another way to emote instead of a way to manipulate us with her power.

Basilia placed her hand on her shoulder. "Vicky…I know we're friends, but fact is if you try to pick out a dress for me there'll be people poking around due to your whole deal with being…Glory Girl." Something passed between them, and I wanted to know what it was about…but let it go. "If they see a woman picking something out that's identical to what Erudition uses it's going to create complications I don't want. Besides I already have a dress."

"Dress?" Amy spoke with a dumbfounded expression. "You're actually going to wear a dress?" Basilia started blushing and she ducked behind me after breaking out from the ground.

"What about it? I have a nice dress…though I only put it on once, it should still fit." Basilia twirled a lock of hair, a habit she had picked up that I honestly found rather endearing.

Vicky grinned. "Well there's nothing wrong with it but it's a little unexpected since you were a…" She trailed off and Basilia hardly reacted at all, which was to be expected. Unless you found the right button to push you wouldn't be able to file her up.

Basilia gave out a blank stare. "A person of a more masculine persuasion?"

"No…not at all." I stared at Vicky, the obvious lie catching my attention even as I played with my swarm three miles out.

"Vicky, I'll admit dresses aren't my thing…but…" Basilia blushed harder, her cheeks rosy as she looked off to the side. "I'm at least a little curious about those kinds of things."

That was…actually really cute.

"Alright so you've got a dress, but you're obviously not going to go without a better mask since you're going without armor." Victoria backed off, and I noted absently that Basilia had been making a few mutterings on better masks.

She smirked and poked around her eyes. With a ripple, her domino mask appeared and shifted to dozens of different colors and designs and patterns. Some of them tricked my bugs, as expected of Basilia. "This would be another technological spirit artifact, it'll fake out most forms of sensory reception. And I managed to make about four of them." She presented herself proudly, her chest puffing up and bouncing just slightly.

"So does this work on Thinkers too?" I asked, and she obliged with pride in her voice.

"Indeed it does my friend." She patted my shoulder, standing on the tips of her toes with an easy smile on her face. "Most Thinker powers rely on various forms of sensory reception, so there's no recognizing faces with the exceptions of powers that can model around that." Basilia rubbed her chin. "Honestly it should be fine, though personally secret identities are probably just a polite fiction unless you're incompetent."

Amy spoke up. "Polite fiction?"

Basilia snorted. "Tell me…could you use your power to identify someone's identity? What about Gallant's emotion sensing, or certain Thinker powers with enough resources?"

Oh.

"It's not that easy right?" Vicky sounded skeptical and Basilia laughed.

"Chevalier can identify Parahumans on sight, and also knows that the Deputy Director of the PRT is Alexandria."

…

"Sometimes I keep forgetting about Cauldron, I'm not sure how that happens." Amy threw her hands up, her face set into a hard expression.

"Maybe because it's hard to get over your heroes being a bunch of assholes?" Basilia's suggestion was halfhearted. "I don't really have any expectations myself, every Parahuman is just a person with all the flaws and issues that implies. Sometimes it's a small thing, like them being rather dickish like Armsmaster, other times it turns out your heroes are part of a global conspiracy started by a child and a woman who isn't even a doctor." I…feel like she was giving Cauldron less credit than they deserved.

"You technically aren't a doctor either." Amy added, lips twitching into a smirk.

Basilia shrugged her shoulders, eyes shimmering emerald. "You're not wrong there, but Cauldron does seem to have a lot of problems…though I'm not sure how much of it is their own fault or the fault of the Entities." From what I had asked from my shard, the Entities had been doing their cycle for a long time, and periodically…I'd see short flashes of her past, of the species she had found over thousands of cycles.

It made sense that they would have their claws buried so deep in a species they found interesting.

Vicky smirked. "So where's the dress?" Basilia blinked, and pointed to the door to the interior of the base. Base Alpha was the largest of our bases, a roughly pentagon shaped facility that was two hundred and fifty meters in width, twenty five meters in height, and hundreds of rooms and spaces for all the equipment and technology that Basilia likes fitting in.

Basilia cleared her throat. "It should be in there, I had to make a few modifications before putting it on." She skipped happily on the air, and I followed behind her before the Dallon sister could say a word.

Amy puckered her lips, and I stuck my tongue out at her. I could still sort of sense that she was making a dumb face with my swarm, though it took a dozen paired in the air to manage it.

We entered the lab, a large sterile building full of omni-forges, chemical and biological synthesizers, and a lot of scientific equipment that I had learned to use from Basilia. Her VI controlled robots ran back and forth, doing their programmed jobs of keeping everything in order.

"Here it is!" I smiled when Basilia lifted the black dress from the one awkward time we had gone shopping. That day had been a little embarrassing…but it had been nice, though really weird in retrospective.

Basilia had actually been a guy instead of just being socially awkward…no didn't she say it was both?

"That…will definitely suit you." Victoria nodded in approval, and Basilia held the loose dress to her chest.

"You think so?" The dress rippled at her touch, and I could see the outline of a hexagonal barrier. "I only really put it on once, and then left it in my closet for two months."

It would definitely suit her…very well.

I blushed and Amy rolled her eyes, miming retching. I glared, and she only laughed silently. Sometimes she made me reconsider trying to befriend her, but she wasn't half bad when she wasn't being depressing.

Which I know was ironic coming from me but…still.

"What exactly did you do to it?" I got everything back on track, and Basilia lit up, just a small amount of smugness entering her stance.

"I changed the dress into a tough mimetic fabric, which is about as strong as carbon nanotubes, but comfortable and easy to wear due to its smart catoms." She gushed, getting into my personal space without a second thought. "The dress is powered by microscopic Eezo flecks, and energized with a type of mechanized stasis that makes it an order of magnitude stronger without losing flexibility. A larger micro-fusion generator creates a much larger barrier system, which can take a few dozen anti-material rounds to the face. More even." She boasted, rolling on her heels in a constant swing.

It was…adorable.

"So is there any room to modify what I'm going to wear?" I leaned forward, getting a little closer to a happy Basilia. Though her expression shifted to a confusion that I didn't get. Had she forgotten I was going to go formal too? I still had my biotics to protect me.

"Weren't you going to…" She shut up, and I felt just a little indignant at what that implied.

"Did…you think I was going to go in costume?" She whistled poorly, not meeting my eyes, and her lips pulled off a phone alert.

"Well look at the time, I've got to run off and talk to…someone, byeee." She vanished, and I suppressed my anger at the slight. Basilia was just awkward like that.

And now I was alone with the Dallon sisters.

…

Amy whistled. "Wow. You've got it bad, and she's either deliberately blind or socially obtuse." I blushed even harder. "Honestly…I did peg you as being a useless bisexual, though pretending to not notice the obvious has gotten pretty hard."

"R-Really?" I stared at her, and Amy stared back. Her dark eyes didn't leave for doubt, and her freckles were slightly distracting for some reason.

Vicky placed an arm on my shoulder, floating in the area to reach up with a warm smile. "Taylor…honey, you're not as conspicuous as you think when you stare at people. I'm pretty sure you have a whole thing where you talk prose about how cute or attractive other people are in comparison to you."

I…don't even have a defense against that do I?

"Right, so why exactly does that matter? She…doesn't seem interested?" Both sisters stared at me, and despite all the confidence I had gained over the past few months, I fidgeted.

Amy looked so disappointed. "Taylor…she is very much interested, she's just not very bright."

I frowned. "I wouldn't call Basilia stupid." Amy cracked a grin at my words.

Vicky shook her head. "Being denser than a neutron star isn't much better Taylor." I couldn't deny that either, Basilia could be…really frustrating at times but then I don't think I was good at this either. Winslow didn't really give me a lot of opportunity to date, and…I've never had a lot of crushes either.

Especially girls…at least…I don't think I have? Except maybe…

"Why don't you ask her out then?" Amy grinned, and my face flushed. That wasn't exactly as easy as just going up to her and asking. It was…more complicated than that.

"I don't think she would say no, are you scared she isn't into you?" Vicky was smiling, floating in the air with her power.

"That's not the problem." I had to tell the truth, though I wouldn't go into much detail. "Basilia is…well she isn't in the best place right now, she pretends to be okay when she really isn't and…I don't want to take advantage of her." I went quiet near the end, biting my lip as I thought about that night.

She looked so tired, so afraid…so fragile.

Amy cupped her chin, eyebrows raised. "Taylor…she's older than you, I'm not sure how there'll be taking advantage of anyone in there, especially with Basilia being a little…naive?" Her expression twisted for a moment, and I sighed.

"It's not that simple." I wasn't sure how to explain it exactly without going into the specifics. I'm not sure I wanted to…Basilia had kept a lot of secrets that other people had, including some of mine. What she had told me had been private, almost intimate in how willing she had been to open up to me.

What did she see in me to care this much? Why did she care so much?

"Hello?" I stiffened when Basilia walked back in, my swarm-sense warning me before either Amy or Vicky would notice her arrival. "Hey…why's everyone being so quiet? Did something happen?" Her concern was palpable, and one of her legs had already started bouncing due to her nervousness.

"It's nothing, we were just talking." She looked skeptical but didn't push, still holding the dress to her chest.

She pouted, and I blushed again. "If you say so."

…

At some point I should just tell her shouldn't I?

___​

May 10th, 2011. 3:15PM

Emily Piggot

Perhaps I really was the only sane person in this town?

I leaned back in my chair, rubbing the areas where I had been opened up only two days previously. Two new kidneys, and regenerated leg muscles made today a little more bearable.

A blank computer monitor reflected my appearance, and I noted that some color had returned to my face. I was one of the first to arrive at the meeting, with the number of blank or dark computer monitors set up. Miss Militia was standing behind me, her steely expression a calming constant in the recent storm of madness that had gripped my city. Armsmaster was watching as well, expressions hidden underneath his helm.

Costa-Brown was already on screen, her expression stone-like as other Directors popped in from their video feeds. The lag was much reduced after a modernization revamp pioneered by Dragon, Armsmaster and Kid Win as well our other tinkers and far more secure.

The sheer number of vulnerabilities in our systems were…disconcertingly common.

"Have the video recordings been distributed as needed?" I had to ask, the recording made by Armsmaster had revealed something far beyond my paygrade and perhaps far beyond even the purview of the PRT as a whole. It had taken time to gather data, and some of that had been derailed by the various spirit incursions that the other departments were having to deal with. With an Endbringer on course for the city, there was no better time than now.

Costa-Brown nodded. "Keeping this from the public is likely going to be difficult in the long term. The confirmation of at least two examples of intelligent alien life is…difficult to swallow." I didn't deny the issue, especially with one of them being explicitly hostile while there other seemed to be the exact opposite.

"The Mother of Miseries can easily be placed as an S-class bio-tinker with some level of shamanistic abilities…but the second entity…removing her is a possibility is it not?" One of the Directors spoke and I sighed.

"I'm rather doubtful that's the case, the Rachni Queen has the same access to Erudition's portal network making it impossible to contain her. And if she's the leader of an alien species, it could very well trigger a war that we can't win." My job was to keep this city under control, and triggering a needless war was certainly not keeping it under control. Especially with a species that apparently had personal experience with malicious Masters.

Director Tagg stepped in, the man looking rather dour. "Which brings us to the new cape group you've allowed unmolested in your city. The White Lotus, and the tinker that found it, and the company that backs it."

"It's difficult to take a heavy-handed approach when a cape decides to be highly cooperative and open, and so far the relationship we've cultivated has been beneficial to the PRT as a whole." Director Tagg had been the first to purchase anti-Master Tinkertech created by our own tinkers using the esoteric schematics that had been sold to us by Erudition. So I knew this wasn't a genuine gripe.

One of the more militant Directors spoke up with a haughtiness that made my lips curl downward. "You've allowed a cape with an unknown number of capabilities to sink her claws into the city, without closely examining her motives or potential secondary abilities that could pose a substantial threat. We don't need another Teacher on our hands." My hands gripped tightly around a cup of coffee, and I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth.

Director Tagg spoke first, a very subtle smirk hidden behind his hand. "Normally I would agree, but the amount of power testing that's been done has given us a rather clear picture of her general capabilities. I simply wanted to understand Director's Piggot's reasonings on her treatment of the White Lotus." The militant Director shut her mouth, taken aback for the briefest of moments.

I sighed, not much interested in the politics being played. "Erudition is one of the most diverse Tinkers we have on record, with no specific specialty besides the utilization of some form of exotic matter, though it's not a necessary component of her technology. She has a Trump aspect to her tinkering, capable of integrating and understanding the tech of other tinkers, though immediate integration apparently requires substantial effort." I shifted to a video, one of the few tests that Erudition had been willing to run.

The tinker was closely inspecting a power source from Leet, pen marks labeling different components that were normally quite esoteric to non-Parahuman scientists.

"That may be selling her short," Director Armstrong made his own contribution to the meeting. "She appears to have a much clearer picture of how Tinkertech and powers operate, which has managed to create breakthroughs in understanding how powers function."

"Multidimensional mathematics?" Armstrong blinked at my response, and I scoffed. "Armsmaster has been making attempts to learn it, and one of our Wards has an instinctual understanding of it." Armsmaster grunted, and added his own take.

"It's a very new field of study, and many have stumbled upon it independently over the past several months. It seems to relate to higher physical dimensions as well as the interactions between different universes." The other Directors said little, and Armstrong added more content for Costa-Brown's lack of comprehension.

"It's been a boon with some of our power testing equipment, and with enough study we may be able to unravel the mystery of powers." There was a glimmer in the various Director's eyes, and I could see that Costa-Brown didn't seem to like it.

"There's still the issues with her towing the line with NEPEA-5." I didn't see who else had spoken.

"While she is on the edge, Erudition has more or less stuck to the law since most of her corporation obtains income from licensing of various inventions that don't qualify as Tinkertech." The Chief Director responded, expression hardened at the jockeying of the highest authorities of the PRT. "What physical products and software she does sell also don't qualify as Tinkertech or fit within the words of the law." That stopped all questions relating to that legal matter, and I wondered when my opinion had started to shift on…

There was still something being left unsaid. "There's also the matter of the spirits and…bending phenomena that has been proving a headache." Armstrong piped up, adjusting his collar. "Boston has reported at least several hundred cases of people spontaneously developing four different forms of elemental manipulation, and ten percent of my staff has manifested powers, and one of my agents also became a shaman." His lips had curled at the term.

Other directors as far off as Alaska reported the same issues that plagued my city, though all of them were an order of magnitude less frequent with the exception of the areas not as firmly under the control of the PRT.

Costa-Brown nodded. "We've made estimates at the number of benders being in the vicinity of twelve million, with certain hotspots across the entire planet. Communications with Earth Aleph seem to indicate that it's a problem that's not localized to Earth Bet." There was a low murmur in the room, and I could tell that they were disturbed.

"At the current steady pace increase in elemental benders, they will represent a significant fragment of the population, in the United States alone they would number around 75 million. People with the ability to communicate with and manipulate spirits will comprise between 0.2 to 0.4% of the human population." Armsmaster helpfully informed us.

"There are already a number of Parahumans working within the PRT, and several programs dedicated to rogues. We will have to adapt to the times or wither on the vine and die." There was disquiet at the hard steel in Costa-Brown's dark eyes. "The interdimensional entities we have designated as 'spirits' are both incredibly dangerous, as well as potentially useful. Programs for the recruitment and training of those able to commune with them, and loosening of certain regulations will be required for the PRT to adapt to the largest increase of Parahumans on record."

"Is there no way to detect these new Parahumans?" One Director looked rather disconcerted.

I shook my head. "Benders and shamans both lack any anomalous brain structures, and the only sign of anything odd is useless without more precise equipment."

"Some Tinkertech has been used to sense an anomalous energy field." The tinker Protectorate cape adjusted a projected holographic screen, depicting numbers and scientific measurements that I had little experience with. "This field seems to follow certain pathways, and seems to power these new abilities in a manner distinct from typical Parahuman phenomena. However…this energy field permeates every single human it's been tested on, no matter the distance from hotspots. At its most basic, this field provides some measure of unusual durability, speed and other small superhuman aspects." A video played of one of our more experienced agents, a young and athletic woman leaping two dozen feet straight up, spinning in the air before landing on her feet with a frightening grace. "It can be channeled to some extent with certain forms of martial arts, based on various experiments."

The same woman spun with a knife in hand, and cut a rock projectile in half. Another agent attempted to ambush her from behind and she responded with a rapid series of hits that my sharp eyes caught perfectly.

"So there's no way of determining the difference between someone with or without powers with this energy field. How common is it?" Tagg questioned, and I grimaced at the recent numbers.

"At this point, it's likely spread to every human on Earth Bet, with elemental manipulation taking longer to activate than the basic universal brute package. Records of injuries from blunt trauma and temperature extremes have dropped by an order of magnitude over the past two months…and are continuing to drop."

Armsmaster was correct, and I didn't like that we had been blindsided by this. Even Erudition hadn't initially known about this widespread effect, but by then there was likely nothing that could have been done to stop it. If it was even possible.

"Is there anything we've pieced together on what triggered this second wave?" Armstrong asked, and the Director of New York obliged.

"There was the incident that occurred just outside New York city bounds, on January the third at 12:00PM. Some form of…portal spilled out an unknown form of energy, causing massive amounts of damage and leading to the disappearance of a little known Parahuman mercenary team. Our sensors didn't initially keep the data, but we managed to regain it after months of investigation." My back straightened as a fuzzy video played, and my eyes burned at the black void that floated in the sky.

"What am I looking at?" Costa-Brown didn't take it any better than I had.

Wilkins's smile was strained. "Nothing."

"…?" Wilkins didn't stop for much longer at our collective unimpressed looks.

"That…portal led to what was picked up as a space…completely absent of anything to begin with, no light, heat or matter, no gravity, no electromagnetism, or any of the fundamental forces. It was this prolonged contact with what is essentially a space devoid of all physics…some space that our thinkers could only call the Outside that led to the massive damages, and the mental and physical abnormalities to those caught within the portal's range of influence."

The video continued, and that black void rippled before a flash of white light flowed out from it like a liquid tide, and reality began to lense around the single point as if something enormous had passed by. My skin crawled, and it was as if some arcane machinery had its final components put in place when that light shined over the small unsuspecting town. As the light passed, the entire world had turned to faint glass, becoming rather unreal before returning to normality.

I had seen that before…that was the spirit world.

"That was the only time we received actual measurements, readings not far off from data from Doctor Haywire's research on dimensional travel. An unknown event bridged some vast gap between our universe and another different universe, and it triggered a large scale shift of reality based on what some of our labs have been hypothesizing."

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. An event like that…it would be an effective trigger event wouldn't it? Simply looking at that tear made even a very hardened PRT leader feel small, what would it do to someone far more vulnerable?

If this portal was the source, then Erudition's powers made sense as some form of response to whatever lay on the other end of the portal. Element Zero hadn't appeared until that gate opened, which meant that her power had been altered by the portal like it had altered the power of other Parahumans in the area.

If I was more paranoid perhaps I would think that Erudition had created the portal herself…but I had seen the woman bump into doors far too many times to consider her capable enough of altering the entire world so easily.

This meeting was going to last for some time. Especially with the exchange that Vista had with that spirit.

What did Shards have to do with Parahumans…?

___​

May 10th, 2011. 6:30PM

Basilia Rubio

I fidgeted, looking at myself in the mirror, swaying slightly as I checked that I had left nothing out of place. I wore a little black dress but kept it conservative since I was not planning to go all in with the being a woman shtick. Not being judged for putting on a dress was definitely going to be new…not that I've ever done that as a guy…I have had some spurts of curiosity though.

The dress was actually really nice, with cute ruffles at the hem and a little looser on my body. Not at all as tight and body hugging as other black dresses I had seen in a few cursory searches on the internet, and the skirt went down to my knees instead of showing off my legs…which while it sounds weird in my head, I've seen quite a few guys(and girls) take rather long glances at.

Also a few stares at my butt apparently…then again I did have a very nice one.

Right…where was I?

My neck was covered in a warm dark wrap/shawl(?) that hung loosely over my shoulders like a cape. Singer-of-Rebirth had some of her children knit it from local fauna, some species of giant flightless bird easily twelve feet tall and two thousand pounds. I wouldn't even call it the largest, and there had been some other species that reached over nine tons on their own.

"Huh…I look good right?" I spun on one foot, my dress shifting with the rapid and steady movement. I had gone with soft grey ankle boots, the bottoms specially designed to allow vibrations to pass back and forth without compromising strength or protection.

I…may have also added some grav-plates to the boots, making them hit with enough kinetic force to snap a two inch thick bar of structural steel in a single kick.

Opaque tights finished off the rest of my outfit, apparently something that Vicky recommended due to things like wind.

My unruly hair had gotten too long, draping down in waves down to my upper back. I had clumsily tied it back into a ponytail so it wouldn't get in the way and vowed to cut my hair down to a more manageable length. Taylor looked gorgeous with that pretty curly hair but I didn't want to manage such unruly hair myself.

I still had access to my drones and my computer systems since a good fraction of my cybernetics held a lot of processing power and data storage. I also had an idea or two that could be implemented at a later date with Amelia's help.

There were also a few hidden compartments, dedicated fetishes that had a few animal spirits of the right nature bound to their existence. They were removable, and could hold up to four times their apparent volume. So…Glaive was packed in one of them, along with a bunch of other rather deadly tools.

Not…that I would let anyone know that.

I crossed my arms under my bust, lifting it up with a curious tilt of my head. I licked my dry lips, and thought I probably needed to use chap sticks more frequently. There was a small thought that it was a good thing I hadn't gone for anything tighter…seriously…they're a lot bigger upon retrospect…and I should stop with this derail before it goes somewhere really weird.

But…the weird thing was how much I looked like my mom…though I at least maintained a lot of my dad's features in my facial structure, hair color and nose shape.

I missed them.

I felt a buzzing in my teeth, hearing the frequency of a source of dark energy fields. That sense typically went unused since there were only four biotics in the whole world, while it was as common as airbending it was much less intuitive in its manifestation and more advanced sleights require mechanical assistance with some exceptions for exceptional individuals. Barriers, pulls, throws, and lifts should be pretty basic skills however. Other more advanced invocations should also be possible, though the more precise the technique the less likely it can be learned.

Unless you're one of those exceptions I've mentioned, which so far include Missy and Collin. There was a sudden tingle on my skin, and I redirected myself toward a source of electromagnetic interference. Taylor was probably the source, and I thanked the cybernetic optical implants for making it a little more clear with my enhanced vision.

I added a good tap with my heel, and the vibrations came roaring in as I focused. Taylor was there, though I couldn't tell what she was wearing with the sense, it likely wasn't a ball gown if I knew her well enough. She was pacing, her muscles tense, her hands wringing together in a physical display of anxiety. My earth senses had improved in leaps and bounds to the point I could see the clenches of her jaw, eye movements and flutters and the way her tongue moved in her mouth.

It was…far more detail than I had expected, and now I wanted to ask what Charlotte could see? From what she had described of her power, she sensed the world around herself as vibrations and wavelengths. Every movement of wind, every shift in body posture, every flick of the tongue or intake of breath or even shifts in other more hidden factors. Her range on that power was enormous, easily six blocks for immense accuracy and growing more fuzzy before petering out at greater ranges.

There was something about her power, the way it operates, the way her shard acts. There was something beyond important…but there was a feeling of simply leaving it alone until the time was right.

My tremor-sense picked up Charlotte and Dinah, and Grace wasn't here since she was staying behind to keep a good eye on Athena. She was also doing a small run of the labs, repairing some of our most advanced tech and checking for any abnormalities. Golem was doing his own thing around Athena, and I remembered that we had a few things to talk about before he could more officially join our team.

Charlotte seemed nervous but excited, and Dinah was fairly calm at the whole situation of being in such a public, fancy event. Should I reevaluate my idea of going along with the Mayor's invitation?

No…getting along with rich and powerful people was going to be a rather annoying necessity, especially since I was one of the few shareholders on board alongside Taylor…though how that worked with her age was a headache I didn't want to think about. Though frankly it was less for the possible investments and more for not having people get in my way.

Because no one would like how that would end.

There was a knock on the door from Charlotte, and with a choked sigh, I opened the door since I had everything I needed. Terra appeared in a blue frilly dress, her own mask obscuring her features with its literal magic, using flats instead of heels.

Worse than boots though.

She looked great, and I didn't have much to say on that part since it was obvious to my own eyes.

"Hey Charlotte, you look nice." I said so slowly, a single yawn escaping me. She smiled and stepped to the side as I walked out and shut the door behind me.

I turned to Taylor and it was like a record scratch in my poor sensitive brain.

Lovestruck fool.​

I swallowed nervously, and I repressed the urge to smack Charlotte as she giggled behind Taylor's back. The only hope was that her swarm-sense wasn't good enough to make out what she was doing. That was not a dress, not a dress at all.

Instead of the dress I had expected, she wore black dress pants that fit those lovely legs of hers very well, a white ruffled tuxedo shirt and a black button-up vest. She nervously fussed with a black tie as I stood frozen. She had her mask, though there had been some customization, the fetish taking the shape of fine moth wings. Fancy dress shoes clicked on the ground as she walked, and her hair was well groomed, billowing behind her head as she smiled nervously at me.

I want her to step on me.

The thought was like lightning and I overheated at a rapid pace all over as I took in the sight of Taylor in a suit. Holy shit she looked amazing, how could a woman in a suit look that good? She looked just…damn I am fucking st—

Ahh…the wonders of youth, I remember…a pair of dark eyes on the sands of Rak—​

…

"You look really good, amazing really." My smile was small, and my heart was fluttering in a way that it had rarely done in the past. I could hear her own heart skip a beat, the way the tension vanished from her shoulders. I saw how dense, strong muscles uncoiled from their positions and I swallowed again. I was going to die wasn't I? Oh gods above and below why me?

I kept still when her eyes roved up and down, a certain look entering them that I wasn't sure how to take. I avoided using the built in analysis subroutines in my DNI, but I couldn't avoid how her heart was as over the place as mine was. There was some specific way to take the manner in which she was inspecting me, and I felt vulnerable…

Her almost goofy smile broke my brain two more times in rapid succession. "You look great Basilia, that dress really suits you." I pretended that the compliment didn't boost my self image by one order of magnitude, and pretended that I didn't want her to step closer so I could jump into her arms like a fucking moron.

"You think so?" The giddiness still got out, and I wanted to slap my own mouth for sounding like an idiot. Charlotte was still laughing, and my face turned hot as I noticed Dinah's giggles.

"Yes." Her reply was so resolute it was almost comical, but I accepted the compliment. If that meant I had a slight skip in my step I didn't care.

"So you have everything right?" Charlotte asked with a faint and infuriating smile, the twinkle in her eye revealing her amusement.

I checked quickly, and nodded. I had my weapons on hand, I had my bending, I had my biotic implants in top shape, I had kinetic and energy barriers and I had a fabric tough enough to bounce bullets. So I had everything I needed to keep myself safe.

"Yes." Taylor adjusted her tie, and I got distracted again. She looked over to me, flashing a winning smile that left me reeling. "Dinah is ready too right?" The future seeing child gave a thumbs up, wearing her own fancy little dress.

"Yep."

"Then I'll open the door." With a quick command, two different points became one and a distance of several kilometers in the old base became about fifty meters. I took a few probing steps, making sure this dress wouldn't mess me up and make me look like an idiot. Once I confirmed that, I stepped forward and the gallery stood before me.

I folded my arms, biting my lip at the red carpet that had been placed down. A good third of the Protectorate was here, with a few of the heroes who had come from out of town picking up the slack, and a few PRT vehicles and police vehicles going out on patrol. There had been a lot of chatter I had picked up with my Daemon VI, with programs apparently being put in place to enlist benders and people with the right disposition to become martial artists within the local police force.

As well as Shamans…

We had landed on a building and a devious idea came to me, though maybe it wasn't that devious.

"You want to make an entrance?" Taylor said what I thought aloud, hazel eyes shifting to a shade of dull green under her mask.

"Maybe just a little bit." I admitted that urge, rubbing the back of my neck as I saw a fairly rich older couple pass by the worker doing his job of vetting the guests.

"You probably don't want to fly down am I right?" I gripped my skirt, heat rushing to my face at the idea. God no…certainly not.

"I'll make my own way." Charlotte stepped back from us, and with a flick of her arms multiple stones are melded together. She threw herself off the building, and levitated the two stones to step downwards in the air. They crumbled to dust and reassembled themselves on the fly as she lowered herself with dust-stepping.

"Biotic blink?" I asked, and Taylor smirked.

"Biotic blink." I laughed and with a mental flicker I blinked out of reality and back again with a snap of displaced air. Dinah followed behind us, jumping back and forth against two walls before letting herself drop to a crouch about a dozen feet down. She twisted on her heels, and with a single movement took off about thirty feet straight up. She crossed the street with a single bound, bleeding velocity as she did two backflips in midair.

The attendant startled when Dinah landed in a stance, a hand placed on the ground as she lifted herself back up. With another snap of reality alteration, Taylor popped into view in a blue flare of biotic light, sauntering with a confidence that seemed partially feigned from what I could read off of her.

"Luckily it seems we're on time aren't we Monarch?" I smirked at the dumbfounded expression of the poor guy, though when his gaze shifted to Charlotte it turned to curiosity and awe.

"Could I do that?" Charlotte blinked and he clarified by lifting a few dozen pebbles with a clench of his fists.

She smiled slightly, obviously flattered by the man's friendly question. "With enough practice, there's a lot that someone can do with earthbending." He looked rather enthused, and it seemed a truly innocent curiosity made him ask.

"R-Right, and please no power usage within the halls. For everyone's safety at least." He looked embarrassed, and then excited at something behind him. New Wave had made their arrival, and I giggled when I saw that Panacea had mimicked Charlotte with columns of ice instead of fragile stone. Despite the fact she could fly.

I smirked, and she chuffed while looking away.

Vicky was wearing a lovely dress, her blonde hair flapping with a specific pattern to make it look cooler.

Fragile One is having fun huh?

"We should go." I waved at the poor attendant, and New Wave dropped behind us in what would probably be a pretty cool shot if I had a camera. Which I do with the drones but that's not importan

It didn't take long for the cameras to flash and shutter, and I quickly internalized the sheer amount of anxiety it summoned from within the bowels of my mind. Taylor was obviously channeling her swarm, and Charlotte was retracting inward at the sheer amount of attention. Fortunately Glory Girl and Laserdream were there to take some of the heat off from us, being far more used to the spotlight. Most of my own responses to the public was usually through the Internet or on Athena property.

As we hit the groups of random people(reporters?) I simply took my typical march. I wasn't elegant and I wasn't going to pretend to be elegant, my most natural element was of fire, of passion and pride and power. I was going to exemplify that part of my soul to the best of my ability.

As we kept walking, it grew obvious that the reporters wanted to talk to us with a few already getting Lady Photon bogged down with questions. One of the reporters approached us, a woman with a warm expression. One of her hands shifted, a small gust pushing back an older man with a visible sneer in his face. He didn't notice, but did trip up on 'nothing' at all.

Heh.

"Eliza Moore. Bay Bulletin." She spoke fast and with a hint of excitement and energy to her tone that relaxed me in comparison to her far hungrier competitors.

"Hello." I waved, feeling my lips pulling into a genuine smile at her disposition. At least a quarter of the reporters had more antagonistic auras, and less genuine smiles.

"If I may ask, what are your plans after helping to defeat the biotinker that attempted to take over the city? With the major powered gangs gone there isn't much left is there?" I grinned, and she stared, waiting for me to respond.

"Being a local you'd have to be well informed Ms. Moore," I brushed a few bangs and flashed a grin. "I'm really more of a Rogue really, I thought that Brockton Bay was a good place to start up something new. Punching people in the face does help but that alone doesn't fix the structural problems that the city is facing." I spoke carefully, having thought a lot about why I wanted Athena to succeed. "That doesn't help revitalize the economy, which then leads to poverty which leads to crime and room for powerful Parahumans to move in. I want to at least try changing that if nothing else." She looked taken aback, but there was still the joy of a scoop in those emerald eyes of hers.

"I suspect your partner would think the same then?" Ms. Moore turned her attention to Taylor without a second thought, practically sparkling. "Why did you join up with Erudition?"

Monarch straightened, confidence flooding her posture and subtle ticks. Her almost 1.9 meter height did the trick of catching everyone's eyes including mine, a very subtle biotic aura glimmering along her suit. "I'm not going to go into the specifics of how we met," Her voice was even and strong. "But I believed in the dream that she told me, believed that if we could work together we could do a lot of good, whether as heroes or in the business world." The sheer trust she had in me was almost too much to bear, and I flushed without hesitation. "And so far we've been doing well enough."

For the next five minutes we were asked questions and when Delphi responded a few innocuous questions. Locally at least it seemed they had some mild knowledge of what her powers were, though they thought she was a mild Brute as well.

Which she was but only in the sense of physical strength and striking, with toughness being somewhat negated by metal at sufficient velocity. Though blunt impacts wouldn't do much unless it was something of sufficient mass and velocity to overcome that. Which would include a good number of bending attacks, pointy weapons with enough force, bullets, lasers, and very strong punches.

There were actually quite a few ways to damage even someone with a much stronger body, and frankly bending was insanely lethal if one actually tries. Most of my lightning generation would kill a person in an instant, my firebending could burn people alive, and water is everywhere…so yeah. And airbending is definitely strong enough to cause some damage.

We hit the actual gallery, and I saw people milling around like excitable ants. As we walked unaccosted I got a moment to speak freely. I directed my voice to my team's ears.

"Seems like they've been preparing for a while then." I had never seen anything so fancy in my life, and frankly it was almost tacky to my uncaring eyes. I saw an elevator, the one would lead us to the gala.

"It's the nicest party I've ever been in." Taylor commented, and Dinah had a dismissive shrug. Being the mayor's nephew probably gave her a taste of luxury, even if at a distance…and her family wasn't poor. Which reminded me…

"What does happen at Galas?" The Dallon sisters right behind us heard clearly, and I was put under scrutiny.

Amelia grimaced. "It's just a big fancy party with a lot of sucking up between rich people, a long boring speech, and expensive dinners. As well as dumb raffles and dancing."

"Oh." She smirked.

"I'm sure you'll enjoy showing off on the dance floor." I cringed back.

"God no, I'm not going for it." Martial arts was one thing, dancing was another thing entirely. What I did at home did not relate to what would be done on the dance floor.

"It…might be fun." Taylor's comment didn't go unnoticed, and she looked away from that biokinetic devil's cackling.

I'm just going to keep an eye out to keep myself from sinking into an anxiety attack from such a big important event.

I leaned against the wall of the elevator, it's attendant giving me a reassuring look. But right before the door was about to be closed, another emerald gate opened to reveal…the fucking Rachni Queen?!

Dinah facepalmed. "I forgot to tell you that Singer-of-Rebirth was going to show up to attend the party, and talk to a few reporters."

…

"What?"

…

Fuck my life.

___
​

AN: So 7.4 is out and I currently have about 5k words invested into 7.5, with a few hundred invested into 7.6 and an Interlude or two. Realignment will be about 8 main chapters, and at my current rate should be done in a little under two weeks. At that point it should be close to be being longer than every other fic I've ever published combined. If I include stories I've written but never let out into the light of day.

It'll still be shorter then.

So enjoy my writing if it's to your liking.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.5

May 10th, 2011. 7:00PM

Basilia Rubio

I sauntered down the fanciest hallway in my life to the first ballroom I had seen in my time here. I could see the layout of the tables, where people had been placed as well as what appeared to be a custom setup for the Rachni Queen.

One of the gallery staff guided us to a table, with another close by belonging to New Wave. Despite Carol's bitchy nature we had apparently been found more likable to the rest of the family so the tables had been placed as such.

Miss Militia, Assault, Battery, Dauntless, Armsmaster and Velocity were here and spread out throughout the room with relaxed postures. There was one other cape, maybe in her early 20s, covered in metal that phased in and out of existence. She was either an out of towner or a new trigger and she was obviously Protectorate.

I saw her shard and paused in my tracks…it was a bud from several local shards, a combination of Blade-works, Phase and Suspension. She could turn her body into ghostly metal, phasing in and out of reality and obtaining an immunity to time manipulation powers under the effect of her power.

It waved at me, the shadowy metallic figure letting out clicks of steel and flares of shadow. I didn't wave back but I did whisper a hello in her language.

The Wards made a good showing with Vista, Clockblocker, Gallant, and Flechette being about two tables over. Not too close but not too far either, and Dinah waved at Vista with a lopsided grin. To my amusement I saw that the Undersiders had apparently made it, and Lisa was grumbling into the table as a more humanoid dragon suit kept watch over the former villains.

Bitch was staring at Vista, making the Ward bristle. The little blonde pulled out a wooden stave in the shape of a thin salamander and pointed at it with an annoyed look. The dog enhancer/shaman nodded in acceptance and instead began to glare at anyone who went near her instead.

I have no idea what that's about and I really don't want to know.

"I didn't think that Palanquin would show up either." I heard Charlotte murmur as we took our seats, and I kept my expression blank as I saw a smug Faultline wave at an attending Chevalier. Apparently he planned to stick around for a little while until Leviathan showed up, though Myrddin had gone home with a notice for the attack.

Hmm…they had been paid at some point to deal with a spirit incursion in Philadelphia. That had probably given the two heroes an aneurysm, since they couldn't go out and arrest what were frankly criminals. Faultline wasn't exactly very likable, Gregor, Newter, and Spitfire were okay, and Elle was my student. They had also found a few other capes, and had apparently done something in Madison, Wisconsin.

Probably related to all the civilians that had been broken by the Simurgh. Especially with the recent breach that had been cut into the spirit world, and a few rifts between worlds. I had used long range scanners, and the distortions were obvious even from hundreds of miles away.

Earth Bet had to have at least a hundred breaches, rifts into different regions of the spirit world. Scanning had been difficult, and it had been facilitated by Dragon with her satellites.

As in…I secretly planted a probe with its own mass negation so that her systems wouldn't pick up the extra mass. The probe was dimensionally shifted, and it had systems to pick up tampering from a certain precognitive angel. Which reminded me of the space probes, the ten units had been sent off to some success though one suffered catastrophic failure and I had to salvage the unit in orbit, three had trouble with their FTL engines and required some repair, and the remaining six took off at about forty thousand times the speed of light with their Posigravity drive systems.

Normally such drive systems would need to be much larger, a ship would need to be ten times the length and thus 1000 times the volume and mass to have this type of FTL at this speed. But Eezo was a very good channel for dark energy, even if electric discharge was a problem…luckily the Salarians had developed a solution for that ages ago.

Streaming cores were neat.

They could shift between dimensions too, which meant I could loop back around to Earth Bet and hide a probe out past Jupiter if I have to.

…

Holy shit my powers are pure unadulterated bullshit aren't they? I'm talking about my probes that I built to scan an area of space 150 light years in radius, and can tell them to scan alternate versions of those same stars in other universes.

And that's just the tinkering part of my powers, and didn't include my bending or my shamanism. Especially with the still untapped talents in communing with the spirits. Most of that had been because of time though, seeking out spirit teachers would get me a wide repertoire of skills but like all things they required time.

Most shamans had the natural ability to channel their own energy as well as spirit quintessence to be able to use their abilities. They talked to the spirits with their souls, with the language of the world itself. They could convince spirits to help them, or destroy them under the right circumstances, could heal sicknesses made by the denizens of the spiritual plane or create tools that would serve as vessels for spirits willing or otherwise. Or they could find willing spirits and learn how to channel their energy in a specific way.

Which…well at that point it's just basically magic, with bending and biotics being some different but related branch of magic. Typically bending drew from the soul, one's life energy, their chi creating primordial elemental effects. Shamanism did the same but also drew upon external spirit energy in some unique expression, allowing them insight into the Ephemeral. Chi manipulation was something literally anyone could do, though it was typically limited to the material world unless one was highly spiritually attuned. Like chi blocking, or the weird extrasensory abilities of certain people like Guru Pathik. Also…something about forms of immortality?

Hell Eezo itself was just space magic, and every piece of tech that I had was basically just sufficiently analyzed magic under the hood. It's still science of course, just very strange science.

I felt a shiver run down my spine, and I turned around and grabbed Imp's wrist. The fifteen year old Stranger choked beneath her impish mask, and I quirked an eyebrow. The entire table had startled with the exception of Charlotte, and I wondered about that.

"You would be Imp then?" I let go and kept my attention focused and an inch wide camera drone floating over her. Her power was an insidious one, and it seemed to have adapted itself in some way to the phase alterations. But while I wasn't immune to her power I was resistant, and I wondered how it functioned. It certainly didn't just block memories on the fly since I had protected my brain from such crude manipulations. There were certain spirits capable of hiding themselves from human perception though.

"Hah…know this wouldn't catch ya off guard." Despite her mask I could feel the smirk she was pulling with my feet on the ground "We've never really talked, outside of your little cat fight with Tattletale."

"Right. I kind of forgot about that." I rolled my neck, and a breath released flames from my mouth. "It frankly wasn't that important." I had more things to worry about back then, like not dying.

Imp snorted. "Hmm…you're Monarch right?" She pointed to Taylor, who stood up straight at the attention. "You pull off a suit well, good for you. You'll be pulling guys and gals like nobody's business." Taylor flushed and I pretended not to notice her brief glance at me.

Dinah stared at Imp with curiosity, and I blinked as Imp faded out of mind. From what I could tell, the effect was more like my attention was shifted elsewhere instead of erased. Whether that was because her power was different or simply compensating for however I usually blocked mental effects I didn't know.

I could ask though.

"So are you trying to pull something or are you just bored?" Dinah's eyes had crossed and she flicked a balled up paper napkin right into Imp's face, who yelped at the sudden attack. Grue had stood up, exasperation coming off of him in waves. He muttered an apology and gently guided his sister away from us, returning to their table.

One other table held The Voyagers. The attending members were Echidna, Revert, Onmyoji, Railgun, Fume Hood, and Pax…and that brought a small surprise. Based on his power I had thought him to be some type of clone or hybrid cape, but he actually looked like a kid about Dinah's age. He was about 5'4 and skinny but with a little definition to his arms. His costume amounted to the same baggy pants and a white dress shirt to fancy it up. His face had a bird beast mask, though I could see a head of tawny hair poking out.

A quick invisible scan found that the genetics weren't remotely similar to that of a delusional power denying brute. Actually…a quick checkup found a missing persons report for some kid that had been around a town destroyed by the Nine about one month ago…oh.

So some kid got his town splattered by the Nine, and Echidna then murdered one member as well as a prospective member and grafted a shard onto the kid that was a combination of Hatchet Face, and buds from three more shards forming a discrete powerset.

His physical strength was through brute muscle mass and unusual biology, and his regeneration was comparable to Noelle, and he could shift between his normal state due to Oliver. Onmyoji had some form of Nullification wave, a toolset similar to Stilling though perhaps not as effective. Which was normal, with trillions of shards there was bound to be some overlap. Her power was combined with Hatchet's Face's power nullification, which essentially interrupted the signal to allow a power to function. Physical changes didn't apply since they were already there, though a transformation could be stopped.

Instead of an external attack, he could generate a millimeter thick Nullification force field that would essentially reduce the impact of any attack on contact. Fire burned less strongly or went out, freezing beams didn't affect him, electricity trickled away since he was essentially a shock absorber. But like any power there were limits to how much he could cancel before being overwhelmed. Sting would be dulled but he would still have to rely on his regeneration to save him. Stilling wouldn't kill him instantly, but once it was tuned he'd be torn apart. A power made black hole would definitely kill him since he can't shut off a singularity, though he'd last longer than most people would.

There was a light tap on my head, and I grumbled when Taylor looked at me with a warm smile. "Sorry, if I've been a little distracted. I'm still rather nervous." I laughed nervously, interlacing my fingers and placing my elbows down on the table.

"No it's fine, I'm not used to this type of attention either." I scanned the room, as rich people mingled and did rich people things. Frankly I was only here because I didn't want to snub the mayor for no reason. He had been quite agreeable to my plans, and had apparently been the one planning to have the Rachni Queen attend. Though the idea had been her own…and it made sense, especially with the Queen egg she was nurturing. Two of them in fact, though one of them had been placed in dormancy in case of an extinction event. With the first egg getting ready to hatch within their settlement…yeah.

Her Workers were exactly as efficient as you would expect, and had been hollowing out a nearby mountain with a combination of their acid, custom mining machinery and some method of spirit manipulation. They had essentially turned a three thousand foot mountain into the early stages of an upsized termite mound, a self regulating masterpiece of engineering. Oxygen, temperature and humidity are regulated through porous structures built by the workers as well as complex life support machinery forged and grown from raw materials they had dug up or even harvested. They had also borrowed some of my tech, plucking it from the songs of other species.

So they had enough production lines to build a civilization, and with an additional Queen on the way they'd double their population growth. They were regaining their tech infrastructure, and of course I had the gene sequences for some of their genetically modified organisms. Rachni technology was a combination of organic and inorganic frameworks, with synthetic materials forming the skeletons of their infrastructure. Their wiring and computing systems however were flesh and metal combined, though their exterior was largely similar to that of other Mass Effect using nations.

While in fiction a lot of bug races have biotechnological ships, the Rachni only have it in certain components, so no fleshy organic rockets for them.

Even so some of their missiles would in fact fire symbiotic organic entities that could breech into a ship for various…rather violent purposes. Honestly based on what I know of the Rachni, by the time Gold Morning comes, they'll probably number in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

Huh…it's a really good thing that Panacea is still hiding her power or she'd have a kill order on her ass. Even though it was Shaper who had done the deed, and my suspicion was that even if Panacea was dead this would have happened regardless.

Wait…

"That reminds me…exactly how is Singer-of-Rebirth coming here?" My question was answered when she crawled out of an emerald portal, and I got an alert that someone was using the DPN. The floor beneath her didn't give, which made sense since she was only about twenty three feet long and just over four metric tons. Though there might be some reinforcements put into place beforehand. And frankly she was the strongest biotic on the planet so her mass might not even matter.

And what I had in my mind picked up on legendary battles between Krogan Battlemasters and Asari War Priestess that wouldn't be out of place in ancient myths or…anime I guess?

We're talking rapid fire spurts of teleportation, smashing buildings with titanic biotic attacks, dodging bullets and crushing small armies to paste with a ferocity and level of violence that would equal any cape fight on Earth Bet. I only recall some flashes, some of them provided by the Rachni. Of an ancient krogan quite literally moving tens of thousands of tons of rock with a single hard push of earthbending and Biotics combined. Of an Asari War Priestess cutting a dozen Rachni shuttles in half with a warp sword and a biotic flash-step, and then proceeding to bitch slap a Rachni Queen Matriarch through a building and blowing it up with a biotic flare.

And that very Queen reacted with Annihilation, disintegrating hundreds of tons of stone, metal, plastic and glass with sheer entropic power. That Queen then slaughtered hundreds of Krogan including battlemasters, thousands of Asari and very nearly brought some of the strongest biotics in the galaxy down to their knees. Their battle destroyed kilometers of landscape, and it took the Battlemaster shoving an antimatter bomb into the Queen's chest to bring her down.

It's frankly a miracle that Singer-of-Dawn was allowed here at all, but then I saw the equipment hidden in every vase and fancy sculpture to block Master effects. It took a while to get that right, especially since there were so many different methods to manipulate people's brains.

I easily spotted Elle coming over, flanked by a smirking Newter. The Wards came over, probably to talk to Vicky and Amelia. Elle turned immediately, winking out of existence before popping back in again with her power.

Vista startled when Labyrinth grabbed her arms, her fellow Shaker inspecting her before nodding in satisfaction.

Newter laughed. "Seems like Labyrinth likes you, congratulations." His tail flicked back and forth, and I still felt a little guilty for not helping him look a little more human. Though we had managed to get his hallucinogenic bodily fluids under control and he could toggle off his power. Then we had been run ragged with the Mother of Miseries and all that bullshit and…ugh.

Vista narrowed her eyes. "That's not really saying much when she's being taken care of by villains." He lifted his orange hands defensively, his flexible tail miming them.

"Hey, we're retired from most of our old jobs, the chances of us…being on opposite sides is pretty low." Vista didn't notice but I did, there was a hitch. Not a lie of course but then this Newter knew about Cauldron and their role in the PRT and the Protectorate. My warnings and Shamrock had kept them out of trouble, and most of their time was being spent on finding Case 53's…not to recruit them but to see if they could be helped from their terrible situations.

There was some rumbling about a kid that had apparently had the texture of an egg in the worst way possible. I swore he was familiar and Veda rumbled loudly whenever he came up. So we were probably going to deal with that after Leviathan.

Or not at all if we all die.

"Retiring?" Gallant questioned, tilting his helmet in the older teenager's direction.

"Yep. Faultline can tell where the wind is blowing and it's definitely time to get out of the game while we still have a chance."

Elle nodded. "The world is waking up, and I'm not sure what's going to come out on the other side." I shuddered at the ominous wording but Labyrinth was right. There was no telling how this would end, no telling how the world would change with this alteration of the very laws of physics.

"That's a little ominous isn't it?" Clockblocker stated the obvious, and I nodded at the thought that he had a cute smile. Too bad his sharp wit would get replaced by cynicism and anger. Even with how the world had changed I doubt that would be altered too much, very few people stay optimistic forever. Hopefully he'd at least be better off without having a third of his friends ganked by a genocidal lizard.

Hopefully.

"Clockblocker…just a few days ago I had a giant salamander/lizard spirit sneak up on me and now I have him on a keychain so I can summon him like that video game from Earth Aleph." Was she talking about Pokémon? "She's not wrong that the world has gone crazy."

"If you think that's bad then you have no idea." Newter stepped closer, his tail brushing against a suddenly frozen Vista in his inattention. "Labyrinth taught herself how to block radiation by getting radiation burns from a spirit made out of uranium."

"Radiation spirits are a thing?" Clockblocker asked, his voice sounding dubious.

"Every concept and object in the universe has spirits to represent them, hell every nuclear reactor has an atomic spirit at its core and there are certainly some Keter spirits still napping." Taylor was letting me talk, chatting with Amelia while I talked with the Wards.

"I'm not really sure what a Keter spirit is?" Flechette butted in, learning forward just the slightest amount.

"They're the top dogs of the spiritual courts, which operate on a hierarchy that's a combination of a food chain and highly complex politics. They tend to be entities that represent entire regions or fundamental concepts. Something like a spirit that represents the concept of life or death." I fiddled with my hair, enjoying that someone wanted to learn from me. "Most city spirits can range up to borderline Keter, and are effectively gods to most normal people. The Brocktonite Titan is a good example…this city has been around a few hundred years and has a lot going on."

Vista brushed off Newter, her anxiety clear. "Have you ever met that spirit?"

The blood drained from my face. "I would rather not, spirits like that tend to be incredibly capricious and terrifying. They're Endbringers, but tied to the city they represent. They're fundamentally hard to interact with due to their amalgamated nature, being the spiritual manifestation of every brick, every road and wiring, every pesky rat and cute golden retriever. Every human, from the worse to the best. They're abstract in a way that is difficult for normal humans to wrap their heads around. And they'll know you intimately as a part of their physical body, as a part of what makes them a spirit."

"I can warp a city…" Vista grumbled despite herself.

"Which won't do shit since it'll firmly collapse your power and snap you like a twig. Or it'll simply send off its minions to do the dirty work, and your power won't do you much if everything around you decides to kill you."

"What…will a fire hydrant explode and take me out?" Vista thought this was a joke but I didn't find it very funny.

"That or you'll suddenly get cut apart by spontaneously exploding windows, or get overtaken and eaten by hordes of city rats, or 'accidentally' get hit by a parked bus. There's no fighting a city spirit, there's only appeasement, reasonable communication and negotiation between equal parties."

Assault had been about to make a quip but stopped at the statement about vicious rat hordes. "That's…crazy." But I did hear his squeaky reply.

"And those aren't even Keter." Flechette whispered with horror and I grinned cheekily.

"Oh no Keter spirits are far more dangerous." I grabbed an appetizer that Charlotte had brought on a metal plate she was…levitating.

Son of a bitch she figured out metalbending.

I ate a mini burger in two bites and continued while keeping my strong jealousy to myself. "All spirits have certain behaviors and weaknesses, fire spirits might not be able to enter rooms below 32 degrees, Greed spirits can't resist fleecing people or making deals. Even city spirits are restricted to their physical counterparts, and can be pulled on one way or another. Keter Spirits have evolved beyond their purview, aspects of reality manifesting as beings of terrible power and might. Frankly they're the only spirits that would have enough personal power to kill an Endbringer."

"You're joking." Clockblocker responded with a flat tone.

"Keter spirits are aspects of massive regions, the United States would have one representing itself in the spiritual world…and is probably insane." I shuddered. "Then there's the spirit of Life that's gotta be out there…that's not a good spirit to meet."

"I thought that Death would be worse right?" Assault chimed in and I went with proving him wrong.

"You know cancer can be considered alive right?" He paled. "We're talking about what is essentially an archive of every organism that has ever lived. Everything from flesh eating bacteria to parasitic wasps, to dinosaurs and ancient sharks. There's a good chance you'd be turned into a puddle of meat and bones or simply die in alien environments that no longer exist on this planet."

"You really like messing with them don't you?" Taylor's voice carried on the breeze, and mirth made its way to my lips.

"What gave it away?" It had been a long time since I had really gotten to fuck with people in such a morbid way. I remembered how often I messed with my brother with frankly awful interjections that would just ruin his day. The poor eight year old had to suffer from my 'jokes' and it was hard to stop.

Honestly he hated me for a reason and I wouldn't begrudge his dislike of me. I had brought it on myself.

"You're not exactly what could be called subtle Erudition." She leaned into me, smirking with poorly hidden mirth dancing in her hazel eyes.

"How many Keter Spirits are out there?" Gallant was the one asking, turning from Glory Girl with a metaphorical gleam in his eyes.

I shrugged my shoulders. "Honestly I've got no idea, it could be easily dozens on this planet alone or even hundreds though I'm doubtful there are that many." Enough to outnumber the twenty Endbringers seems about right though. "And god knows how many spirits like that exist in the shadows of other worlds."

"Other planets?" That got Battery's attention and I smirked.

"The spirit world isn't limited to Earth you know, the void of space itself has its own ephemeral counterpart though the entities that inhabit it tend to have trouble with things like gravity exists or whether water is liquid." Their wince told me they understood the circumstances of facing a Void spirit. "Every planet has their own unique spirit world, and every spirit world is connected by spirit roads. You get a shaman in the right place and you can walk right down to other planets in a jiffy." I mimicked someone walking with my right hand.

"How would you even know that? Parahuman powers tend to have issues leaving space." I raised an eyebrow at Assault.

"My powers don't work that way, shamanism and bending don't work that way either, and spirits only sometimes work that way. Though a few could certainly extend their Genius Loci a few thousand light years if they were old enough and had few enough Bans. But…don't take my word on that one." Because the thought of a spirit that powerful was frightening beyond belief.

"The fact I can't tell if you're lying is much more concerning than what you've just told us." Gallant's voice was small, and I could feel the warning glare from Glory Girl.

I raised my hand in exasperation. "Alright if you're really so unnerved we can talk about something else."

Clockblocker grinned. "So we can talk about the little thing going on between Monarch and y…" He trailed off, and my lips pulled back to reveal straight teeth grit tightly.

"I will literally place a pox upon your house's little time man." His smile was more brittle.

…

Damn Wards.

___​

May 10th, 2011. 8:00PM

Basilia Rubio

The next half hour or so had been spent just talking and messing about with the Wards and even New Wave. A few times we had some richer folk come up to speak with us, apparently a few of them wanted to invest into Athena and I denied most of them but had three or so that had a certain spark and quality. One of them I had found was apparently an inventor and engineer who had managed to make it big and was a rather nice guy. Two were simply naive and with little money sense to be frank…and were placed as maybes.

A few had come up and thanked me since my drones had kept a few rich guys from suddenly being absent an heir. A lot of Kala's minions had really wanted kids to butcher...and there's nowhere left to go with that. There really wasn't.

Singer-of-Rebirth was apparently chatting with the inventor from before, rapidly gesturing with her single set of arms as well as her tendrils. Her voice added a faint undertone of music interlaced with whatever dreck they were playing in here. Some of the machine's did a specific beep, likely signifying the use of Psionics as a form of communication. I made that machine as comprehensive as possible to differentiate different Master effects and prevent misunderstandings.

Gallant muttered into whatever they had built into his helmet and I imagined that they already knew about what the Rachni could do. And when I looked up uses of the DPN I found that many of them had been logged as going to various PRT facilities.

So Power Testing had probably been done as a show of good faith. Not that it would change much but…it was fine. The Rachni had survived the Krogan, they had survived multiple cycles of extinction, they would certainly be able to peacefully deal with Earth Bet.

"Labyrinth got new powers…" To my surprise Carol had decided to enter the spirits of conversation that opened up. "How does that work?" There was a genuine curiosity, and I obliged her out of common courtesy if nothing else.

"Well it tends to require finding an appropriate spirit to teach them new skills, as well as a safe location to study and practice and learn the skill. And they're often incredibly painful or tiring. They didn't get new powers, they quite literally spent blood, sweat and tears to scrounge for whatever power can be taught to them by a spirit. Some of these skills they can learn by themselves through sheer trial and error, others need spirits of the right nature to be taught and passed down."

"For example?" Vista was still here and listening intently as was Gallant.

"Technology jamming." I pulled out a phone…that was turned on and with a snap of a finger it turned off. "It takes hours of quite literally screaming at inanimate objects to do your bidding, and then it takes more hours to make it go from a minute to ten seconds. Shamans will run into fires and coal pits to expand their repertoire, learn from bear and snake spirits on how to draw strength or terrify their enemies or even poison their foes. These unique expenditures of their power can then be taught to other shamans…but at a far slower rate because they are not spirits. On occasion you may even play Host to a spirit to appease them or to serve a specific goal or purpose." This was pointed toward Gallant. I saw that his spirit of water and healing had grown, and actually looked like a pink version of SCP-999. I didn't want him to get complacent and get himself killed, so I was explicit with my descriptions and warnings.

"So Shamans are like Eidolon-lites with much harder and shittier lives?" Assault crossed his arms, a wide smirk on his face.

"That's not…entirely wrong actually and they're very rarely as strong except under very specific circumstances. Like if they're Hosts to very powerful and very compatible spirits, or if they can command the attention of a Keter spirit. Of course that's basically like trying to direct the Ash Beast. Not a lot of control there but useful for a potential city or country destroying event." I grabbed another appetizer, which were basically fancy tortilla chips.

Battery muttered to the Wards and to my disappointment they went back to their seats, Spitfire waved her teammates over and they left as well, and I pouted as the room felt more empty. I simply dropped my head to the table, not needing much if any support from my hands.

I looked up once resting on my chest got uncomfortable, supporting my head with my hands as I placed my elbows on the table. Dinner had started, and I had gotten some random chicken that was good but I didn't bother to figure out it's pretentious dish name. I didn't partake in the wine because I was literally not old enough for it, and fortunately they had some soda, though it wasn't a brand I was familiar with.

I had pretty much burned through a good amount of fancy tiny cheeses, and I lightly shook my non-alcoholic drink as I looked around the Gala. I coughed, gently brushing back a bang while thinking rapidly.

Why were they staring at me?

"What?" I fussed with my hands, not understanding what their looks meant without using my analyzing software. Taylor and Amelia were pulling a face while Victoria was merely bemused. Charlotte wasn't paying attention, humming a quiet precise tune.

"How the hell do you not fall flat on your face?" I blinked at the freckled girl's odd quip.

"I have no idea what you mean." She pointed to her chest and then pointed to mine. I looked down and it took me an embarrassingly long time to parse her meaning.

"Seriously…how the hell do you lug that around all day?" I had never felt such a strange mixture of offense and confusion in my life and I did really not know how I should take it. Amy kept going, waving her arms around. "Shit it's usually hard to notice because you wear baggy clothes or an inch thick layer of plate armor but Jesus."

Eric was cupping his ears, and I felt slightly appalled when I realized they were doing this in front of their family. Vicky started to smile, catching the attention of her mother.

"Victoria…" Carol had some warning in her voice, and Vicky shushed her.

"C'mon I know you're having the same thoughts mom." The lawyer instantly shut her mouth and didn't meet her daughter's eyes. My horror elevated when Sarah muttered a firm agreement. "Seriously I know I'm busty but that's just ridiculous." She pointed to my chest, shaking her head as she ruined my life. "I'm pretty sure you have more cleavage than everyone on both of these tables."

My eyes betrayed me by darting to every woman on the table, and I managed to get an accurate measurement using scanners. She…wasn't right, but she was closer to the truth than I wanted to admit. Seriously they were nice to look at but really inconvenient and painful at times.

I still remember when I accidentally slammed into a piece of metal jutting out, it had hurt like hell and I…probably wasn't a masochist.

Why did I hesitate on that?

"We are not doing this at a damn Gala." I groaned and was thankful that at least Taylor wasn't joining in on making fun of me.

"They…are…pretty big." Her voice was so quiet that only Charlotte heard with that smug face of hers. Taylor's cheeks were rosy, and I felt terribly self conscious. I know she had some self image problems, and I hope that she wasn't reacting to that in some way…

Oh god who am I even kidding…I'm socially stunted not blind. The way she acted, the way she looked at me like I was all that mattered, the way she supported me or tried to help me.

No one had ever looked at me like she did…and I was a little afraid.

Panacea poked me, moving from her table and I flicked her on the nose for the attempted demonstration of boob physics. Frankly it was a miracle I had gone this long without indulging in my curiosity, and I wondered if that meant there was something wrong with me…or if that was normal?

"Heh." She sat back down and the lights began to dim and adjust, and Dinah straightened her posture.

A curvaceous woman spoke, and I heard platitudes on thanking the people who had come together in the Truce against the Mother of Miseries which was a shockingly neutral stance. Apparently the PRT and Protectorate essentially winning the gang war gave them some breathing room, though the way they worded some things sounded like subtle snubs that I didn't fully pick up on.

Mayor Christner was introduced. "The efforts of many have come together to save our city from a dangerous threat, with some of our new heroes being rather unusual." The Rachni Queen waved, her mandibles shifting and clicking out notes of joy and flattery. He gestured to the heroes, to the Undersiders and the recently renamed Palanquin. Especially since they were my problem now.

Thanks Piggot…because as an associate of the Protectorate I would do my best to reform violent criminals into useful members of society and yada yada, etc, etc.

She could be a raging bitch at times but she was a lot saner than the other bigots in the PRT. Armstrong might be a nice alternative though, his Parahuman studies sounds like some good fodder for my tinkering.

While the speech went on I simply inhaled my chicken, as well as the pasta that had suddenly arrived. He went on for a good five more minutes, before they moved on to more active auctions and raffles with the previous silent ones taking a few hundred dollars from my pockets.

Including a silver spoon of all things, because someone has got jokes to tell here. And it was quite successful because a good fraction of what was being actioned was donated by Singer-of-Dawn.

Expensive looking trinkets and weavings by her children, that brought in a good twenty thousand dollars in the silent auctions.

There was also movement as the lights changed, and the large space given for dancing was cleared up rapidly. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that the dancing part of the Gala was getting set up rather rapidly.

Vicky stood up, hands splayed on the table with a bright twinkle in her eyes.

I opened my mouth. "I'm not dancing." Taylor looked disappointed, and I simply brushed a hand against her to…I'm not sure what…comfort her?

Vicky shrugged. "Oh I know, but I know exactly what I want to do." She stood up, floating a inch or two off the ground. Fragile One lightly scuffed a table, easily cutting through parts of the table. Which…immediately stopped before Vicky skipped over to the Wards.

Amy twitched but proceeded to shift her attention to our table. The lights dimmed a little more, and I saw that people were getting up to dance. Dinah had not and was instead being needlessly precocious towards an unprepared Amelia. I left that alone, and simply sat, shifting my seat a little closer to Taylor.

"Are you okay?" Taylor questioned me out of nowhere and I responded slowly and unsurely. The music was getting a little loud…but it was fine.

"I'm good, getting a little antsy but I'm good." Her smile was genuine, and I tapped my fingers on the table as I tried to think of something to say. "So what made you decide to dress up like this." I found it, and flourished with my hands to express the question.

She stared at her suit. "Is there something wrong with it?" I saw that she was expressing some nervousness, anxiety and fear and I charged to keep her from having bad thoughts.

"No it looks really good, I think you look very pretty." I choked on air when my attempt to comfort her came out what I think was flirting? Taylor took my comment in stride, though underneath that confident demeanor was a ton of embarrassment that I related to. "I mean you look…gorgeous." That turned her pink and I groaned at my failure to make it less…something.

I'm not even sure what I'm saying anymore…this always happens to me, crushes always get me acting stupid but this is somehow worse than before.

"You…" She fiddled with her tie, eyes sparkling even beneath the mask that could block Thinker powers. "You look beautiful." I choked on air again, and my mood was both elevated and dropped since I saw that Carol was peeking from over her drink. She looked away, giving us what little privacy she could offer.

"I…Umm." I stammered and muttered a thank you as I tried to think of something more normal to say. "How is…everything?" I groaned internally but Taylor didn't seem off-put by my sudden lack of poise and elegance(hah) and replied.

"Well…I got a therapist." I adjusted my posture, since that was actually big news. "Or well…I'm going to get a therapist, though there's been a lot going on so it won't happen for…a while." It went unsaid that she meant after the Endbringer.

"That's good, it really is." Therapy like any other treatment wasn't an instant boon, it wasn't magic but it could help. Though despite my thoughts, I was still happy that Amelia would probably manage to snag one of her own. We might be friends but she could still be pretty self deluding at times with some narcissistic tendencies that were rather frightening.

Though if you're talking about self-delusion then I can't leave Taylor out of that circle. She has…an intense personality that was rather hard to curb. I certainly couldn't do it, and we were lucky that things hadn't gone worse or we'd have a warlord Skitter showing up.

"I also got a new record for my daily jog." I nodded.

"You still do that?" I mean I knew that but I wanted to make sure of it, and I was curious on why?

"It's just what I do, and Brockton Bay is a lot safer lately. Plus…bugs." A few insects flew around the table in geometric shapes and patterns. That got me curious because while I ran, I rarely went full out like Taylor did.

"What's the fastest you've run?" So I asked.

She mumbled under her breath, seemingly calculating the numbers in her head, though the way the bees in the centerpiece stood still told me it wasn't so simple.

"With or without bending?" She asked for clarification.

"Without. It's a little less cheaty that way." I crept closer, very curious to find out how fast she really was.

"I tested and hit about 110 miles per hour for a few seconds." I could feel Carol's eyebrows raise at the huge number, and I found it realistic. Chi was a source of metaphysical energy, the stuff of the soul itself. It tended to provide some juice for one's own physical abilities. Of course that wasn't a continuous speed unless you use bending or cybernetic implants. It was the equivalent of a flat out sprint, a burst of speed meant for crossing distances. Though it could definitely be maintained for a good minute.

Think Captain America with his bullshit with outrunning cars but spread out to every human on Earth. As well as lifting ridiculous weights, and while you would think that would make cars obsolete…one you'd have to sprint and most people are not willing to do that, and two a sustainable pace would be around twenty six miles per hour instead of a hundred. And traffic slow enough to make it worth it is already slow enough to make regular jogging and biking worth it.

Taylor snapped her fingers and I blushed at the tangent my mind went off too. "Ahh sorry I didn't mean to be rude. I'm just a little distracted." She laughed and waved off my apologies.

"No it's fine, I know what you're like." She held a cup of some juice, smiling as she sipped from the cup. "Is there anything new on your plate?"

I took another bite from a cut of chicken and talked after I chewed and ate it. "Well I've taken to reading a few books and I've been picking up on drawing again." I had a lot of material for that, and it had been a bitch trying for more complex things.

"Could you show me?" I beamed, and grabbed an item from one of my dimensional pockets. I pulled out the book with blank sheets of paper, tons of doodles left unfinished as I worked on whatever I felt like.

"Is that supposed to be the Rachni Queen?" She leaned in to get a better look, the drawing wasn't that good, and I felt that some of the details on her legs and head were off.

"It's not very easy for me to draw insects, I only got really good at drawing dinosaurs since it was all I was into as a kid. Then I got into technology and science, like rockets and astronomy, genetic science and biology…little things like that." The memories were nostalgic and there was a painful pang in my chest that made my breath hitch and my eyes water.

"Basilia?" Her head tilted and I took a breath, letting the fresh air in through my nose and out through my mouth in a calm circulation of air.

"Sorry I'm good…how much longer is this going to go on?" At some point Dinah had gotten up to dance, and had pulled Elle into the fray. Victoria was dancing with Dean but had switched to Clockblocker for a bit. Amelia was murmuring to herself but otherwise I could tell she was in a good mood despite my muffled senses.

"Maybe another ten, fifteen minutes?" There was a sense of things winding down, and I could see that the Queen was happily singing along to the tunes that were playing. A few PRT troopers eyed her, keeping rather tight grips on their containment foam launchers. Though they relaxed when the Queen cooed at them, murmuring with low and harmless pitches.

"Hopefully." It had taken time but the party and close proximity with people and loud music had finally begun to take its toll. I was an introvert, people just tired me out after a while. Taylor was…a bit of an oddball though, she could be quite convincing despite being friendless for so long.

"We can leave if you want, there's probably a few things we can take care of at Athena to waste some time." I shook my head at her suggestion.

"We came here to make at least some connections, it's not my thing but I'm not going to ruin this."

"If you're sure." She looked concerned.

"I am." I nodded with stern expression, but I kept my thoughts racing. There hadn't been much besides getting teased and finding some agreeable people. I got to wear a pretty dress so that was something, and it was hard not to ogle Taylor because she looked fantastic.

I…had a hard time with things like emotions and feelings, I wasn't always the most understanding, wasn't always the most empathic, didn't always pick up on the little nuances that other people understood flawlessly. I had said things, done things that were needlessly mean, needlessly cruel and looking back on my younger self or even something I said a month ago would make me cringe.

But I had learned at least a little, even if I always kept it in the foreground. There was no point to constantly thinking about the tragedies and horrors that people faced on the other side of the world. Not if you lacked the power to help them, not if you lacked the means, power or will to do shit. It didn't mean you shouldn't try but…there was definitely a need to take a step back.

I hadn't ever really planned on seeking out Taylor, because it felt exploitive and wrong to do that. I had planned on perhaps not going at it alone, but on helping her indirectly by pulling a few strings with what my powers could really do. The same thing had applied to Vicky and Amelia. There was no in to getting involved with that disaster in the making. Vicky was still immature but not evil, and Amelia was frankly a ticking time bomb I didn't want to touch.

I hadn't read Ward, only read others' reactions and their opinions. Some were incredibly negative, finding that it had tainted the characters in some way. And I had read my fair share of Worm fics with Amelia in them. But I never really understood that myself with what I had read. Amy was clearly fucked in the head from my perspective though before the Nine she hadn't been evil, though she certainly couldn't be called the nicest person.

She was someone who needed an ungodly amount of psychological help and with a flood of neuroticisms that scared the shit out of me.

And she was frankly…kind of a stupid cunt(I can say that right?) and even if we were friends that had only recently started to change. She was awful at using her power, and clearly not mentally or psychologically up to the challenge. Now I'm sure there were other issues with Ward, but that wasn't important since this world was only mostly identical to that worldline. There were small differences mainly of age, though the discrepancy narrowed with adults, other small little signs that while my knowledge was useful it wouldn't be at a 100% accuracy.

Like the creeping thoughts of why there precursors for the soul before I had come here and what that meant for this reality cluster.

Or whether I was still even human…of what had been done to me and why?

I suddenly got a hand gripping my wrist, and I pulled back to Taylor. She gestured with her chin, and I saw that a few people were taking themselves downstairs.

…

I nodded.

___​

May 10th, 2011. 8:30PM

Basilia Rubio

I leaned and supported myself on the smooth wall of the building, warming myself with the dragon's breath. Taylor was on my right, and I took the time to simply be away from people. I could see a few stars twinkling in the night but that wasn't a big number since we were in a city.

"Are you feeling better?" I grimaced at her question, I ignored how being so close let me feel her warmth and I focused.

"No…at least I don't think so." I rubbed my face, and simply kept with the breathing exercises that had become common routine just to stop my new habit of panic attacks. Back home the closest I had come to such things was when I fell into a bout of paranoia about dying in my sleep.

It…always left me disquieted and miserable until it passed.

"You don't have to do this, if this is all too much we can stop." I bristled at the thought. Taylor looked surprised at my reaction and I responded.

"I have to do this, it's literally part of the job description. I might be a little uneasy but I can do this." I chopped my hand through the air, and growled.

I can do this.

"I didn't say you couldn't." Her response made the anger leave and instead I just felt cold.

"I…I think I'll be okay."

"Do you want me to leave?" She asked with that sincere need to help, and I swallowed.

"Stay. Please." I almost begged but did my best not to humiliate myself.

There was a comfortable silence, peace that soothed my tense muscles and let me simply be. In the dark I could see the spirits poking their curious heads, as the barrier between worlds continued to thin. They couldn't shift, but they could take good long peeks.

"I guess you don't really want any distractions." There was a strange bitterness, and I needed elucidation from Taylor. She stared off, looking up at the moon.

"Distractions? I don't…oh." I got it so very quickly, and my throat closed up.

She knew then…of course she had figured it out.

Taylor watched me beneath dim moonlight. "Am I right?" I swallowed and didn't answer until my mind caught up with the changing mood.

"You're not a distraction…I'm just…" A coward was what I wanted to say. "Afraid."

"We'll talk about it then?" She inquired hopefully, and I felt a flutter in my chest. But also fear in my gut…I knew what this world was, I knew what it did to the people who lived in it. But…I couldn't run from all my problems forever.

"Sure." She was scanning up and down my face, gears turning in her head.

"I can wait a little while longer…before anything else can happen." I opened my mouth and then shut it. I meekly grumbled an agreement and got a shoulder squeeze in return.

That was good.

"We can stay here a little while yeah?" My voice was small and cracked at the end.

"If you want." She shrugged her shoulders and I craned my neck up to watch the stars.

I was tired…but for tonight I felt a little happier than usual.

___​

AN: So here is chapter 7.5, and there's only about three chapters and two Interludes to go before Arc 8 begins. When I started the simple outline, I had a basic premise as this being a simple break arc, something happy and…fluffy I guess? But as I wrote it sort of morphed into something different.

When I think of an Arc, I generally just write a few sentences on what I want to happen, basically a synopsis for each Arc. The specifics are basically written on the fly, and things shift as I write and things move into place on paper and in my head. I don't have any specific dialogue in mind, though I might fit something specific if it feels right. It's just generally how I write, and full on deep outlines tend to be hard to do for me.

This Arc is an example of that, and was far more serious than I had originally gone for. Some of it probably stemmed from criticisms in earlier chapters about how Basilia…acts I guess about her situation. Most normal people would probably fall apart in Worm, and while that's a story some can write I doubt I have the same skill to write that level of emotional trauma and angst. So I went with a different approach.

Basilia at this point is a very different person from me for a number of reasons. The things she's been through has left an impact on her, some of them good and others…not so much. Certain issues that I have, have been multiplied due to the stresses and frankly severe traumas she's been through. She responds to them in the same way that I try not to with my own problems, by burying them deep down and distracting herself with other activities. It's not a remotely healthy way to deal with things, and now that there's a lull time there's some room for things to start bubbling up again.

And it's also not something that'll be addressed in a single Arc because it doesn't work that way. It won't be the primary conflict but it's something that'll be around for a while at least when there's time. It's one of the reasons she has such a hard time dealing with personal relationships beyond just her general inexperience and lack of social grace. It does not means she can't overcome it, but she'll definitely not be the one taking the initiative.

That's pretty much all I wanted to address, though I'm not sure if what I've said isn't obvious in the text itself. Hopefully this makes sense…yeah.

So stay tuned I guess.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.6

May 16th, 2011. 3:30PM

Basilia Rubio

"Err…ma'am?" I stopped working on making repairs and adjustments for one of the gene sequencers, though I could probably just have bought from a competitor that would be no less effective due to my licensing. He was one of the youngest I had placed on a project involving the design of hybrid micromachines and nanoparticles as a vector for gene therapy. Another group was dedicated to the study for more complex and advanced gene therapy methods, including a more complex form of CRISPR. Perhaps one or two decades ahead of what my world had in store. They had use of what was basically a modular gene modifying program, and I pretty much had a complete picture of what every gene did or didn't do.

There were around twenty thousand protein encoding genes, and well over twenty thousand other genes relating to regulatory RNA and biochemical processes that were only barely starting to be understood by my home world.

"What's up?" I took my hands out from the guts of the machine, omni-gel going solid as the projected energy field locked the former fluid in place. I rolled my shoulders and looked at my new employee. I was in my armor, and my hand drifted to sit on my hips as I looked up at the lanky man who was considered one of my charges. Which was why I was currently searching for someone to work for my HR department. I had a little over seventy employees, and I needed to provide them with the necessities that I was legally(and morally) required to give them.

"One of the spectrometers failed." I sighed, while most of my employees did know how to maintain their equipment, being able to repair them was a different story though a few of the older ones certainly had the ability. That was certainly something that they would be caught up on with time, and I did have a few months to get them up to speed with the increasingly better equipment I would give them.

Eventually I would have to start publishing research since I had a fairly complete understanding of how the human body works. Every gene, every little effect that could cause epigenetic changes. Methods of disabling genes that would create deleterious disorders. Methods of improving intelligence though in a rather abstract sense. A lot of it was simply taken from natural variation in the human population, small improvements that could increase the average lifespan to 120, as well as give most people healthy bodies.

While I could simply sell and manufacture everything myself, I wanted to see how far I could push technology forward. My pseudo-shards could precisely cut and insert genes but require exotic elements that most corporations would have a hard time reproducing. There were spurts of more advanced technology sprinkled from slow and almost useless studies of Tinkertech, and they were easily a decade or two ahead of what they had now.

But they were almost impossible to scale, staying at the level of labs and hesitant experimentation. I had already patented my form of synthetic CRISPR, and my employees were simply working on improving it in small ways for production with conventional equipment.

"You know there's a button to get those repaired right?" His face fell and there was a light blush on the poor man's face.

"I'm sorry for wasting your time." I waved him off with a grunt and he got moving. I sighed, and privately thanked Ms. Merchant for sticking as my lawyer. As Athena was embroiled deep in research and development there were a ton of laws that needed to be followed. A good amount of certifications that needed to be made, and a few tests that made my work have authority. I currently had gotten about half a dozen degrees in various different fields, the same way that Panacea had her whole deal with being a 'doctor' and shit.

"Gate to…" Once the guy was out of sight and everything was in order I stepped back into a newly constructed base. I had decided to stop holding back my capabilities on other planets, once I had more spare time and an incentive to do it. I had several hundred omni-forges working in tandem, raw materials going in one side and being refined by plasma furnaces, and various forms of shard based nanomachine slurry before being assembled on the other side into finished products by complex and efficient assembly lines.

The timeline for the cruiser had gone from six months down to about two months, and numerous smaller vessels were being laid down. Though upon some amount of retrospective analysis, I had moved the vessel to orbit with numerous construction drones doing their job laying down wiring and mobile grav-plates providing gravity when it was needed for a process.

I also ended up setting up a nice base orbiting around what I had confirmed was the ninth planet, a cold and large world about five times the mass of the Earth. It had a plethora of small moons, including an unusual rocky one with a high content of heavy elements. I assumed it was likely the ejected core of some long dead planet. It was about 1200 kilometers across, but I had built a nice kilometer long facility though it was only about one hundred meters in width.

This would serve as the primary testing ground for the Nihilum cannon, as well as other small scale experiments for anti-Endbringer weapons. Unlike most of my bases however this one resided in Earth Bet's reality, and was apparently outside the range limits of even the Endbringers.

Barely.

Regular shards could push their ranges a few dozen AU, and the Endbringers could push it even harder but I'm parked over 400 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

So suck it you feathery bitch.

Anyway, setting this up had taken a lot less time than it should…because I had an army of construction mechs and three willing earthbenders to move hundreds of thousands of tons of rock. Bless Danny and his willingness to travel farther than any man has before. Charlotte had done her own part since her earthbending was still stronger than mine. Victoria had done her part in a space-suit, lifting blocks of compressed stone to be dumped away for processing.

It had taken three days but in that time I had a full planetary base for testing dangerous superweapons. In the meantime I worked on smaller projects with Dragon and Armsmaster that would work up to my space manipulating cannon.

He had made some modifications to his stasis module, and it was closer to Clockblocker's power…apparently he had trouble copying it at first which had shown with Lung. Though at this point it had been perfected just in time for Leviathan.

The Nihilum mark 4 was the first cannon that hadn't instantly exploded, using principles of space warping I had derived from a few projects with Armsmaster and his nano-thorns. The barrel was lined with a sheath that projected a field of warped space that would stabilize the blast, keeping it from shredding itself into a million pieces. The power core itself was basically a copy of how Tinkertech really works, which isn't any blackbox process so much as the esoteric manufacturing and unreplicable advanced technology biting people in the ass.

Most Tinkertech either used powers to make the tech, or had a lot of dimensional manipulations to make them work. The first made it impossible to follow the exact process to replicate it, though one could gain insights and it showed with the odd disparities between mass produced technology and some of the more expensive Tinkertech inspired tech they had lying around.

The more potent Tinkertech did use dimensional alterations but that was still tech that did it. It was simply multidimensional, meaning it was outside of human perception and technology to understand it at the current level of technological sophistication.

The power core simply opened portals to sap power from other dimensions, energizing the core and pulling on dark energy to convert it into usable energy for the space warping effect.

There was a chime and I simply opened the gate. Armsmaster stepped through and I smirked when there was a sudden wobble from him. There was no trouble for his shard, as the Corona Pollentia acted as an avatar of its power. The spirit roads easily channeled its energy, and I laughed.

"Hello Armsmaster, welcome to Ennea." I flourished with my hands, and Armsmaster simply looked around, clearly taking a few sensor sweeps that I allowed.

"How well did my components work?" He was right down to business and I took a flying leap across the room. He followed after me, a stable biotic glow indicating that his biotics has improved in leaps and bounds.

"See for yourself." I flicked a video open, an inspector drone doing its job of keeping the barrel clean of obstructions and taking scans of the etched circuitry that Armsmaster had made in a binge on improving his nanotechnology. He wanted a larger guarantee of success for Leviathan, and space warping was something he wanted.

Eezo had been the answer, and the sheath was itself a solid sheet of nano-thorn like technology. For his halberd, who had apparently been awakened by Gallant if the constant technological squeals were real. Eezo powered a spatial shearing effect, multiplying the threat of his halberd by an order of magnitude.

"You fire it?" He walked stiffly but with purpose and I nodded.

"Here. I'll play it back." A holo video popped up for his viewing pleasure, the four foot long cannon glowing as massive amounts of power were directed into its power infrastructure. Dark energy twisted in tendrils of reality breakage, and there was a whir as I made the laws of physics my bitch.

The target was a poor simulation of Endbringer flesh, essentially sheets of matter that were shifted between multiple dimensions. They cut through twenty layers, slicing dimensional connections with the sheer warping screwing with their spatial metric. However this was only a simulation, I didn't have actual entity flesh to test this on, and my shards weren't the complete deal.

Other targets were three foot thick walls of laser steel, Silaris, Cerametal, and certain forms of energy shielding. All failed against the shredding, and were torn apart as matter and energy were thrown back and forth across dimensions until the very forces that held them together fell apart. It wasn't perfect, and Vicky could probably take a hit due to how her shield works, but I could probably get to the core easily enough.

"It's very…destructive." The tinker didn't sound worried.

"This is a weapon meant to combat Endbringers, it's meant to be nothing less. Besides the range is only about twenty to seventy meters." Larger ranges would cause wide scale effects that wouldn't be taken well. "Your nano-sheath solved the problem it had with wear with incredible ease." Unfortunately the Thranx only had space warping missiles, and not warp cannons.

"Your advice on microscopic element zero power elements allowed me to make a breakthrough in improvements to my tech. It was necessary to reciprocate." He didn't fully accept the praise, but I could see his hunched back lift a bit.

"I suppose, my main issue was with the wiring. I think I can eke out some extra power, but I'm not sure by how much." I dropped down to the weapon, and with a few quick taps with my Omni-tool's projections I opened up the heavy weapon.

He came down to take a look, and pulled out some form of microscope. Collin hummed, sharp eyes following the lines of networks of wiring.

"Perhaps about 20% more power with a more effective superconductor." He pulled out a sample of the superconductor. It was some form of exotic atom, one with hyperconductive properties with both zero electrical and thermal resistance. Then it was mixed with a specially tuned zirconium vanadium hydride, which I was already patenting the process for.

For the Zirconium vanadium hydride I mean, that had already been a material I had on my own.

Both materials were superconductive, but it was energetically cheaper to use normal materials.

"Anything else?" I was curious about his opinion.

"With a minor application of spatial folding, another 15% increase on top of that should be possible." He lifted a built in computer screen, and I quickly understood what he meant.

"Oh…yeah…with the right application and tweaking of fifth and sixth dimensional space you'd be able to…" I accelerated into technobabble, writing down the math in my omni-tool, and calculating the complex formulas and equations in my own head. Alcubierre-like metrics lended themselves to Tardis shenanigans, and the power use was relatively low with modifications to fifth and sixth dimensional harmonic vibrations. It was an efficient method of doing so.

"There are also some modifications to your computer systems to make it more resistant to the backlash from your weapon." I got more excited, nodding rapidly as I continued to work with Armsmaster.

The next thirty minutes were spent on tinkering, Armsmaster adding pointers and my computers and Omni-forges working overtime to replicate designs. We ended up switching from the Nihilum to his halberd, and we made improvements to his power generator. Distributed efficient integrated computer systems had their software modified, and I saw lines running hyperdimensional math equations. Some of the programming was a hallmark of Dragon, and there were lone mysterious bits that said hello and good morning and other pleasantries.

The spirit was awake and it was happy.

The facility shook, and I nodded since that had to be Dragon and Bakuda. They were working on the Halcyon, the culmination of weeks of work and a massive influx of materials harvested from nearby ore veins and several mineral rich asteroids. The weapon was a hybridization of Bakuda's original bomb tinkering with her more general wavelength tinkering.

Bakuda could technically just act like Hero in her specialization, but her preference had been more or less set as some method of explosion or rapid expansion of energy or matter. Though only in the sense that it was what she was used to, though she was branching out a bit like most Tinkers tend to do.

The Halcyon was an attempt to recreate Stilling in a technological form, something capable of destabilizing the physical form of an Endbringer. Dragon was largely here due to her large database of reverse engineered Tinkertech, and her complex AI software made her a real powerhouse.

Still can't get through my firewalls though, but she's been improving.

Which is why the wireless network had built in AI subroutines lined and etched within its systems. Different grades of artificial intelligence working to specific ends as controllable machine spirits.

I streamed footage, and looked at what Dragon and Bakuda were getting up to. Like her early fusion cannons, they were a unidirectional beam and based on the slag that had been a meter wide block of titanium alloy a rather successful test had been performed.

However certain safety precautions had to be taken to keep the thing from being used against it like her time bubbles in the 'OG' timeline. Which had basically set up for the Kronos Titan four years later.

Which is either luck, or Simurgh magic or both…

"How much of my existence did you really require?" His interjection was rapid and concise, and I went for honesty.

"I likely would have figured it out on my own, though it would certainly be more crude than your elegant warping sheath." I dove into the guts of the weapon, making software changes that would alter the spatial warping field on the fly. This weapon had to hit Leviathan and no one else. A single failure wouldn't be allowed.

Armsmaster actually cracked a smile at that. "Certainly, it must have taken you some time to create this base Basilia."

…

…

I turned robotically, hands twitchy and clammy and my legs bracing for a flame wreathed spin kick. "I'm not sure what you're talking about Armsmaster, not at all.

"May 14th, at 1:30PM…you were at a local cafe shop with one Taylor Hebert." He was smug, and I wanted to punch him in his perfect teeth

"How the fuck?"

He flared his biotics. "It took some time to realize that the both of you emitted a potent dark energy field, and your mannerisms outside of costume were sufficiently similar to realize the truth as well as your body type." Which was a very diplomatic way of saying I'm an idiot with big tits. Which probably also meant that the bastard had figured out Taylor's identity by proxy.

"And what are you going to do with this information?" I twitched, breathing out to keep from exploding into a rage.

"I have questions…many questions." To my shock his hands moved to his helmet and with little fanfare he unlocked the latches of his helmet.

Armsmaster was…fairly normal all things considered with dark brown hair, a neatly trimmed beard and his eye color was all just…normal beneath his helmet. A few insects gathered, remaining peaceful even as I could feel her agitation from a hundred meters away.

"About what specifically? Bending, shamanism or some other third thing?" This was oddly bold of the man and I wanted to know what he thought he was doing.

"About the Servants of the Harbinger." I froze, and my shoulders drop as my stress levels went back up. "About these Reapers."

"How much do you think I really know?" I knew about the games but this wasn't the game, not with the kind of power the Reapers could throw around here. Whatever they had been, whatever their master had been it was far beyond the badly programmed super AI they were in Mass Effect. Those monsters could shrug off any amount of conventional firepower, and only a few weapons seemed able to damage them…intuition from my Tinker power being quite helpful for which ones could do the job.

"More than us." He replied curly, finding himself a seat as I watched him. The Overlay became more active as I mentally turned on numerous programs, each of them different forms of VI living within my direct neural interact and the surrounding computer network.

I let out a huffy breath, and pulled off my own helmet letting my hair free from its confines. I grasped my hair, combing through my shoulder length hair after I had Taylor cut it. She was good at shaping and cutting and caring for her hair, and I didn't feel like going to a hair salon. Not that it would have been uncomfortable since I had only gone to a barber shop a couple of times as a guy.

It was nice…and I really liked how Taylor's fingers ghosted around my neck in a way that…down girl. Down.

After the talk with Taylor…and about us…I seem to have lost some of my self control. It was getting harder to pretend that she wasn't attractive to me, to pretend that I didn't want to be with her…that I didn't want her to do a great many things to me…dammit.

Stop acting fucking thirsty Basilia, we need to be clear of mind when we're talking to Collin

And now I'm talking to myself. Wonderful.

"Alright alright. Maybe introductions should be in order before we go any further." I summoned a flame, channeling chi into the manifestation of heat and energy itself. "I'll see what I can do…"

He became more serious than he already was, and approached me with a hand out. "Collin Wallis." I gave him my hand and we shook them for a brief several seconds.

"Basilia Rubio. But then you already knew that." I let go of his firm gripping hand, and snuffed the flame from my left hand.

"I could say the same…" I grinned, not denying it. Anywhere there was an internet connection wasn't safe from me, and even without one…well the walls have ears.

"Come with me…" I gestured to him with my right hand, and a door opened to an irate Taylor. She was in costume, the living armor flaring with luminescent spots in a display of quiet anger. It had been heavily modified by Panacea as an experiment, neural relays improved, and its energy stores made more efficient with her biomanipulation. The fabric that made it into a wingsuit was self repairing and as tough as carbon nanofiber sheeting.

The main modification was the modified neural network acting as an antenna, extending her range by up to quarter mile. Essentially a relay bug made out of a combination of Rachni with custom engineered tissue. She hadn't made others because Taylor already had relays from the bugs she created with her Changer ability.

Her range was at least six miles at this point and even here she was dangerous.

We had passed her by and I gave her an apologetic shrug. Collin swatted at a wasp that had hit him in the face, and it went merrily on its way as Taylor sauntered into the room we had been in. After that we marched through weaving hallways, passing through cellular units until we hit the end of the building. This part jutted out of the large mountain we had built the base over, and acted as a glass room to witness the majesty of the eternal night.

I could hear the surprise trapped in Collin's throat. He knew enough about how the sky works to realize that one of those bright stars shouldn't be there. That this darkness was not normal, and that the planet below us was far too massive and far too dark to be Earth.

"There's a reason I called this place Ennea."

"Nine…this is the ninth planet, but we would have to be billions of miles outside the limit for powers." His shock was palpable and I simply stared up at that night sky, at the rocky former gas giant core. It had a dense and thick atmosphere, straddling the point between super-Earth and light Neptune.

"I think I've already told your Wards that my powers don't work that way. They never have…though it's taken some time to get to this point." The planetary base had numerous launch points for shuttles, including a larger craft about forty meters in length. A patrol boat with FTL speeds of about six light years per day, a rather more conventional FTL speed and conventional drive system.

I had taken it for a spin to the Oort Cloud, plucking a few hundred metric tons of ice for fusion fuel.

"How far…" I hummed, remembering the numbers.

"About 60 billion kilometers?" I shrugged and I almost laughed at the fish face I got Halbeard making. "I could have placed it farther, but setting up a portal takes a lot of time out of my day." That had brought up a few strange facts on how Mass Relays work.

Mass Relays generate a circuit, connecting two points in space with a hyper efficient mass effect tunnel. The relays are speculated(confirmed) to be spiritually connected to the Spirit Roads, the paths that connect the shadows of all worlds. During transit, the closer a ship flies near the linked Spirit Road the faster they can travel.

The Entities had their own methods of generating portals, and could shift through realties with a method of spatial warping to harmonize quantum strings to the vibration of a parallel reality. Portals were made the same way…and my abilities as a shaman made my DPN much more effective…at shifting between dimensions on the same planet. To get here we needed to actually travel, and it took time to get the infrastructure to set that up. Basically a mini Mass Relay was built to forge a connectable road.

That would be the efforts of the Asari with their ship cores being able to use biotic charges. As well as some experimental Mass Relay experiments…that took a while to get right. Either way we had the ability to step between worlds, and it would only expand in capabilities as I made improvements. As well as setting up distributed power generator's in locked dimensions.

Collin blinked. "You have no limits as a tinker." I decided to correct him on that little insinuation of his. I turned around, brushing back my bangs.

"Not quite Collin…as you can tell my technology has a theme doesn't it?" He nodded, eyes sharpening.

"It all uses element zero in some form." He was half-right, though it would be more accurate to say that it was the initial tech tree I had been given. But even the Thranx still made use of dark energy manipulation, so it wasn't as different as you would expect.

"While I can…gain a very basic understanding of another tinker's tech, it takes an immense amount of effort and experimentation to meld it with my technology." I remembered just how much of my stuff had simply blown up, not worked or even broke apart into dust. "You can't even begin to imagine how bad some of my attempts have gone. I've been branching out, and as I branch out my tinkering improves and I can build even more."

"Hmm…about these Reapers." He moved on, and I frowned.

"The Reapers are…something old, something I thought of only as myth, as something that didn't exist…couldn't exist." It wasn't even a lie as I informed him of the past I didn't fully know. "They were a race of machine gods, AI warships if you would." I was underselling them by a lot here. "They are each a nation free of all weakness, their minds created by harvesting billions of people while they're still alive before encasing them in a near invulnerable material shell. The Servants of some greater force that I don't want to understand." I was shivering and I could barely keep my knees from collapsing under me. The Reapers were strong in both the physical and spiritual worlds, they had their own Genius Loci…a literal world supporting their very existence.

They were terrifying.

"Machine gods…" His concern for Dragon was there, and I scowled.

"The Reapers are responsible for a harvest and mass genocide of life on a time scale of more than two and a half billion years. Their every move has pushed them towards the goal of their maker. The echo of something old. And unfortunately something I lack knowledge on." I shuddered, and my stomach turned. "A single ship could reduce humanity to rubble, and the power of their greatest leaders would bring even the grandest of spirits to their knees." Death could not be killed but for the Reapers…that was not a guarantee. "They created a system of FTL devices superior to what could be done with Eezo…as a trap and lure for more species to harvest. Their Avatars could control all four elements, and their Indoctrination…their ability to enslave those to their Will was beyond insidious and beyond frightening."

"Your Anti-Master devices." Collin breathed.

"The chances of it working on that power are much lower than I would like, their insidious words are rot and poison for the mind, body and soul." I wasn't being metaphorical. "The only good thing about them is the fact they're dead."

"How can you be so certain?" He demanded, and I read how his heartbeat has elevated. So many different emotions crashing together to make him like this.

"I don't know what their plan was, I don't know the purposes of their murder and genocide. But I do know right down to my soul…that if they weren't dead. We wouldn't be here."

"Humanity?" I shook my head, and he looked determined.

"Everything. It would be the silence of all things, there would be no Earth, there would be nothing. Only silence and void…"

"Are you alright?" He actually looked concerned for me, an unexpected development.

"Not really…though curious about what you'll tell your boss."

"Some details will need to be omitted from my report, yes." He gripped his halberd. "I'm sorry but it needed…it needed to be done. I needed a guarantee." It hurt to think that he thought so little of me. That he thought that simply asking me wouldn't work.

"You owe me a lot Halbeard." I was angry, but I wouldn't waste my time on something meaningless. Not now at least.

He didn't reply, leaving quietly as I sulked.

___​

May 16th, 2011. 8:30PM

Basilia Rubio

"Hmm…" I rolled my shoulders, shrugging off a lab coat and leaving myself in only a black shirt and jeans as I examined my own biodata. Amelia doing the same, eye wide and her expression uncertain.

"Are you sure that all of that is necessary?" Amelia seemed to be a mix of amazed and terrified, and I shrugged.

"Do you think it's excessive?" I asked sincerely, feeling a little self conscience all of a sudden.

"We're talking about a heavy amount of augmentics here Basilia. Hell you're almost going Mannequin with this…" She must have seen what my face shifted to when she mentioned that murderer. "Okay…too far I'm sorry."

"No it's fine, I know I'm going a little overboard here but to be fair I've always wanted to be a cyborg." Technically I already qualified since I had a computer in my head. "But with Leviathan on the way I'd rather be a cyborg than just a squishy human."

Amy rolled her eyes. "I've seen you take anti-tank guns to the face, you are not squishy."

"And how will that work against an Endbringer?" I spoke back to her, eyes narrowed and lips pulled taut.

"Fair enough, and I already know why you need my help…but are you sure about this?" She gestured to the image of the augmentations I had in mind. "There is a lot to cover here, and while I can move some stuff around I'm not a surgeon."

"Which is why I have a medical AI right over there." I pointed to the surgery machine I had built, it was a complex machine using a combination of nanobots and various futuristic medical tools to perform near perfect surgery. "While that can do the surgery on its own you can rapidly speed up the process." It was a full on automobile doctor, and could deal with anything, from the common cold to brain surgery.

"True. So what exactly are you going to do…I know there's a lot but I can't speak technobabble." Amelia grinned, and I decided to be honest here.

"Heavy cybernetics as you've mentioned, I've developed a form of highly reliable nanomachines that will help integrate the various components. My bones will be largely replaced by a cybernetic assembly of diamondoid with specific mass effect components and my muscles will be augmented with myomer bundles. They can be biologically grown, which is where you come into play to make that possible. My immune system will be enhanced by my nanonic injection and my blood will integrate Krogan regenerative biology. There are also some genetic augmentations I'll like to be put in if you can do that." There was a lot I was still leaving out, but that would serve as a preview.

Amelia stared. "Are you 100% certain about this?"

"Yes." She sighed and after a minute she nodded.

"Get on the table you crazy tinker." I shook my head, and with little warning I pulled off my shirt. She squawked and I grinned cheekily, following that up by shimmying out of my jeans.

"Amelia please, you know the clothes are going to get in the way." I hopped over to the table, and she followed with a loud grumble about 'Stupid sexy tinkers…' and curses.

I landed firmly on my butt, and shimmied up until my head was where it should be. The Auto-Doc activated, and it shifted its attention to Amelia. A spirit manifested, a round obsidian mirror of energy standing before Amelia.

"Welcome Panacea. I am Doc, my imperative is to follow the commands given to me." It was a no-nonsense spirit doing exactly what it was meant to be doing with no deviation. Various tools popped out of it, including needles that would inject the nanonic treatment for wide scale augmentation."

"You're nuts you know that?" I laughed and I felt a hand on my shoulder. Amelia's expresion turned serious, Shaper giving me a thumbs up from behind.

"Maybe…but it's worked out so far." I shrugged and started to feel sleepy.

"Heh…it has. So just lie back and sleep…god you're really trouble sometimes."

I was knocked out with a single touch, and the machine spirit let out a ding.

___​

May 17th, 2011. 9:00AM

Basilia Rubio

I awoke to the smell of eggs and bacon, and a slight sensation of pins and needles. As well as an immense amount of hunger and a sense of something being different.

But in a good way.

I was on the couch of my living room, the sparsely decorated room retaining the relative emptiness as per usual. I blinked repeatedly and in an instant everything became clear. The whole surgery with the Auto-Doc and Panacea had been completed, and I grinned even as I didn't get up from the sofa. A jumping spider waved at me, and I waved back with a dopey smile and went back to thinking about the full ramifications of what I had done to myself.

The basics were simple, and started with the integration of nanomachines into every cell of my body. That was largely taken care of by the Auto-Doc and Panacea who mostly worked on the genetic tweaks and the physical tissue alterations. The small and complex machines varied in size from sub-micrometer components living symbiotically within my cells to larger cellular machines in my blood.

Their purpose was basically acting as a supercharged immune system, monitoring for foreign pathogens, identifying disruptions to metabolic processes and correcting them and the sequencing of live genomes. Various implants a few centimeters in width created those nano swarms, with the nanometer scale machines being self replicating in a limited fashion. They also served the role of maintaining the extreme cybernetic augmentations with stores of omni-gel scattered in more cybernetic organs.

The entirety of my skeleton was augmented, and was basically a machined Carbon allotrope structure, with the bone marrow acting as a repository for a self repair system as well as the usual functions for bones. Like calcium…and blood cells. My muscles were almost entirely carbon nanotube myomer, with the remaining 10% being spliced with Asari, Krogan and Turian genes…mirrored to replicate their biochemical functions. My DNA was modified heavily, allowing for low error DNA repair, rapid clotting and regeneration of everything up to whole limbs. Organs received modifications derived from alien biology, with Turians contributing to my liver and lungs and the Asari contributing an electric organ to boost my biotics as well as nanonic modification of my Eezo nodes.

The nanomachines were powered by a combination of organic matter, ultracaps, nano flywheels and the dark energy amplifiers embedded in my implants. Which was what the mass effect components were for. The nanomachines themselves were a hybrid of synthetic and organic, and could create and modify things as needed. Shock absorbing polymers were the norm, again made by my cybernetics and medi-gel literally flowed in my veins.

I had grav-plates implanted in my hands and feet, and all my organs were enhanced biologically and cybernetically and they had backup organs grown in place by Amelia. My circulatory system was changed using inspiration from the Rachni biological system, a controllable lining of cells capable of wafting liquids, wrapped materials and devices throughout the body. It transported everything from my artificial blood, to my medicytes and waste. The red blood cells were modified and accompanied by respirocytes which meant I could hold my breath for about forty minutes, and could survive in space for a little while. I also had a reserve of nutrients and minerals giving me enhanced endurance like a mini Krogan.

My skin grew over a biosynthetic armor covering that pretty much left me resistant to knives and blunt trauma from other people though it didn't work against bullets. There were sub-dermal armor areas around vital organs, ribs and my skull…which remained rather light actually due to eezo. All this was maintained by a network of distributed computer implants forming the PAN.

So I had pretty much made myself a cybernetic monstrosity on the inside and a pretty and curvy girl on the outside. The sheer software built for checking errors had been an immense amount of work, and I wa—

GRRRR!

I let out a yelp when my stomach growled like a hungry beast. I held my stomach, rolling into a ball as the pain doubled down.

A steaming plate was placed down on the short table living room table, and I felt my mouth water as another plate was placed on the opposite end from the plate closer to my mouth. I immediately rolled off the bed, and heard Taylor's chuckles as I scrambled into a criss-cross applesauce sitting position. I rested my chest on the table, pushing back to make room for the morning meal.

Taylor had sat on the floor like I did, though she was a good eight inches above where I was. It couldn't be comfortable but she didn't seem to care with that warm cheery smile on her face. I licked my lips at what was on my plate, two very fluffy pancakes paired with scrambled eggs and three pieces of crispy bacon. A bottle of ketchup and maple syrup were both placed down, and I grabbed the fork with a growl in my throat.

"I knew you were hungry, so I decided to prepare breakfast for the two of us." Taylor explained while picking at her food, one hand rubbing her chin as she talked. "I know you like my pancakes so…" My eyes went wide as I looked at her.

I love you.

The thought went unsaid but the way her cheeks turned a cute shade of red made me think she knew my thought process. I simply admired her features, and for a moment I thought about sitting in her lap and cuddling up with her.

It sounded really nice, and I really wanted to do that.

I coughed awkwardly. "Thank you…god I had been planning this out for about two months but I'm definitely much hungrier than I expected." Most of this body had been designed over months, put on the backburner as crisis after crisis unfolded. But now…I got that time to make the refinements necessary, and I now had a standard enhancement package for anyone to use with my tech.

"I guess Leviathan got you riled up then?" I swallowed, taking a breath that felt a little off with the alterations to my respiratory system. That was going to take some time to get used to, and the saccular respiratory system and complex hexagonal hair linings were going to take time to form and respond naturally.

I had to make some modifications to add natural filters for things like spores, since the Salarians had run experiments on the Thorian at some point. Also Bonesaw, can't forget that mess of Stockholm syndrome and shard induced insanity.

I'm not even going to pretend I'm good enough to fix that, even Yamada and Contessa were barely good enough…and from what I remembered a lot had gone wrong near the finish line. Honestly just straight up killing the Nine was a lot easier but I'd have to find them first. The last sighting was near Boston, which was where Echidna had kicked the shit out of them.

"A little bit yes, but frankly being a cyborg was a little bit too cool to pass up. Especially when my nanomachine infusion was well tested." I had done a lot of experiments on rats, pigs and recreations of human flesh and organs. I did direct splicing of alien genetics, and I frowned at how compatible they were. Every life form aside from the Volus and the Rachni had some form of DNA, which should be impossible…or at least improbable.

Panspermia maybe?

Taylor didn't look any less worried. "And you're sure that everything was done right?" She opened the maple syrup bottle, pouring it on her three stack pancakes.

I smiled, playfully twirling my fork. "No I made sure of it, and while difficult these implants are removable. Though as you can imagine it's a very involved process." Being that my bones are now a nanocomposite of carbon allotrope and organic polymer with reserve implants to keep my body functioning…you can understand the difficulty. Some of the implants were specifically there to counteract bad reactions, and I had a few basic gene mods built to make cybernetic implantation safer and easier.

I added ketchup to my eggs and maple syrup to my pancakes, and used my grubby hands to pick up and place some succulent bacon in my waiting mouth.

…

More.

I began to devour the food like a ravenous animal, easily cutting the pancakes with my physical strength and leverage. Taylor simply watched with a bemused tilt to her lips, and I tore into a piece of bacon as my hunger beckoned me forth. All her bacon vanished into my stomach, and I moved on to the sweet pancakes.

"So you like it?" She tilted her head, a hand holding her left cheek as she took a bite of her own food.

I nodded rapidly, wiggling as the hunger started to abate. Luckily only certain components of my body were powered by digested organic matter, mainly the personal medical system and a few smaller stuff. The myomer muscle itself was powered by electricity from batteries which were themselves powered by the cybernetic Eezo power elements.

"I love it, your cooking is always on point." I complimented her, finding nothing wrong with her cooking. It was…a comforting routine and reminded me of when my mom or my grandmother would cook for me. It was different because it was Taylor but it was still nice.

"Your cooking is good too Basilia." I stopped chewing, swallowing at the compliment she gave in return.

"Y-You think so?" I stimmed my fingers together, frowning at the stickiness from handling the syrup. "I don't really know too much about cooking really, back home I only knew how to make spaghetti and carne asada." My dad's second wife had taught me, and it was honestly really awkward.

We hadn't met in the best circumstances, and she was a little young for him. Though at this point I had learned to move on and not give a fuck, though the first impression left us at…odds. But that was more on my side than on hers.

"Well you learned how to cook chicken and fish didn't you? You even learned how to make burritos." I blushed since I was very much not good at taking compliments in stride. I had been learning how to make a lot of Mexican food…or well things that my mom and grandma made in general.

It was something that made me feel at home…even if back then I'd be too lazy and privileged to do shit.

"Yeah well…you helped a lot with that too." I dropped my eyes to my eggs, since I had chowed down on the pancakes until there was nothing left. Once the eggs were done; I dropped my hands on my legs and paused.

Was I only wearing boxers?

I checked my chest and relaxed at the plain black t-shirt, and nodded at the fact it was only my legs that were exposed. I blinked and found that Taylor had moved from the opposite end to my left side. Her plate was also finished, probably because of her biotics. Those took a lot out of a person.

"C'mon you shouldn't give yourself so little credit." To my surprise she placed an arm around my shoulders, jostling me as she tried to up my own confidence. I let her go on, strangely enough enjoying the physical contact. Usually physical affection caught me off guard or just made me anxious…but hugs from Taylor could never be a bad thing in my eyes.

I could tell she was just as surprised and nervous, but I was okay with that. I wasn't ready to say anything because I was a coward but that didn't make this any less nice. Little things like this made it a little more real, even as it set my stomach churning.

I gently pushed her off, but kept one of my hands on her as I got back up to my feet. Taylor got up too, still towering over me since I didn't have any reason to change my height. Which scarily enough was actually possible with my medic nanites, but it wouldn't be a quick process unless Amelia was on hand.

"I'm going for a jog." I rolled my shoulders, getting out some of the mechanical kinks from the cybernetic joints. Followed up by twisting my torso and rolling my neck. "I'm in the mood to test out how well I've taken to the implants." Rejection was unlikely, and I already had the surgical experience to avoid the issues with direct neural interfaces. Turns out that tended to need dabbling with metaphysics because the soul would react to a foreign presence. As in keeping the soul from fleeing the body kind of crap.

"You want me to come along with you?" I gave a thumbs as I jogged in place before turning on my heels to head up to my run. I dashed quickly waving at her as she went back to her house to change.

I opened the door to my room on the second floor, bobbing my head up and down. There was a lot on my mind and a jog was a good way to get distracted. There was so much to do and so little time, so many weapons to construct. So many defenses to build up, so many Athena buildings to reinforce and restructure. The Endbringer shelters were being refurbished, and Coil's base had been revamped for its original purpose. There were steady plans by the PRT to set up evacuation points, and heroes were being called in.

It would take time for things to build up, and my spy satellite was already picking up a growing tropical storm. It was deceptively small, slowly growing as it made an approach that I predicted as heading right for Brockton Bay.

Zettascale computing was quite effective at predicting weather for up to two weeks at a time. Dragon was bringing in multiple dragon suits, and she had dropped hints that she was recruiting a cape in Japan. If Masamune was going to show up then that was a power multiplier on an enormous scale. Plus something about setting up a Guild division to stabilize the damaged country.

There were rumblings from China that didn't put Dragon at ease apparently.

"Okay…" I brought out a pair of blue gym shorts, and a shirt more appropriate for running. I picked out from one of three sports bras…for obvious reasons and kept thinking as I made up my mind.

The Nihilum was reaching completion, and I had built several copies that would be strapped to a modified heavily shielded gunship. There was also some module that Bakuda wanted to attach, some method of altering wavelengths to keep Leviathan from fucking with them.

A single hit by the space warping weapon would reduce a person to atoms, and most Brutes had a vulnerability to such things with the likely exception of Eidolon and…oddly enough that kid that Noelle had picked up. His defenses were tuned against all attacks after all…which is pure bullshit.

Not as good as Zion's golden aura though. But a miss or even a near-miss could cause a lot of collateral damage. I had hardened all of my buildings, including a few unused warehouses. Which might serve as good places to set up during the fight. I was also experimenting with specific barriers to block the flooding, as well as a secondary portal network to divert water into another dimension. An Earth recovering from a mass extinction caused by some ancient human species about two million years ago.

Which was around the time Homo Erectus showed up so…I guess hominids reached modern intelligence faster on that Earth?

Either way there was a dry lakebed that could easily take a few hundred trillion gallons of water as needed. His water shadow was also trouble, because while it could definitely be manipulated that would get him on your ass in a second flat. Without scans of his powers, I wouldn't be able to determine the specific metric used to summon the shadow.

I could just guess and hope for the best, and if it fails it fails. Long as no one expects it as a magic linchpin…people shouldn't die…from expecting it to work.

Probably…maybe, hopefully?

They'll still die from Endbringer rage though.

I took a deep breath.

"Running first. Thinking about the walking genocidal kaiju later." I put on the shorts, humming as I pulled off my shirt and putting something better for exercise.

So little time.

And there was still a flood of problems to take care of in the near future.

But I guess that was the life I had to live.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.7

May 20th 2011. 3:30PM

Basilia Rubio

I felt some air leave my lungs as a fist slammed into my chest, I nearly fell to the ground but pulled off an athletic cartwheel. Long toned legs tried to knock me off course, and with an application of earthbending when my hands hit the ground I flew upwards.

I spun in midair, and righted myself in motion with an easy airbending vortex. Taylor vanished and a snake like arm tried to strike against my chest, and I spun on my heels moving with her circular arcs and reflecting the blow. I stomped and a pillar of stone threw her from her stance. She twisted on streams of air, and her biotics lightened her until she was like a leaf in the wind.

I stepped backwards, lifting my hands up into loose fists while Taylor slowed her fall. On the ground I could read her movements, but in the air I was limited to the senses built into my cybernetic eyes, and the buzzing of dark energy in my skin.

"Well…you've gotten pretty good…" She popped into reality again with a snap of air, and I took a brutal kick to the stomach. I was pushed back a dozen meters, and with a growl I slammed my foot down to form a wave of rock, slabs crashing into her in an instant. Her hands flared blue, and a violent roiling warp field fifty feet across shredded through rock.

It was a good thing biotic Barriers blocked most biotic attacks or we would have killed each other a long time ago. Only certain forms of Taylor's gravitic blades could crush barriers, and she doesn't know that technique. As well as some others that we haven't done much practice on.

Taylor shrugged, her hair pulled back for sparring practice. "Yeah…well I'm a quick learner." I flare an annihilation field, incinerating the bugs she had hidden on my person.

I launched like a bullet, as without my armor I could move at far greater speeds than ever before. Muscle strength, airbending, biotics and firebending combined and I slammed into Taylor at well over half the speed of sound. She let out a choked muffled growl, and spun around before launching her knee into my face.

Her barrier was flickering, and I rolled on the ground before an idea came to me. I placed my hands on the earth and dug. Before Taylor could act I drilled into the earth with my bending until I was a good three meters below the surface. I closed my eyes, and felt her milling around. I picked up an ant colony a good thirty meters away, and kept an eye on it.

I was going in for sneak attack, attacking her from below like a sand worm.

Something slimy fell on my bare neck, slithering and leaving residue and then I looked up to a pile of earthworms…oh god no.

I screamed and exploded out from the ground.

"AYAEEEEE! GET IT OFF GET IF OFF GET IT OFF!" I screamed like a little girl, arms flailing wildly.

KILL IT WITH FIRE!

Then a swarm of wasps smacked into me and I truly understood horror. I exploded in a burst of concussive flames, and launched a half dozen warps with one of them hitting Taylor's Barrier. She shook her head, her barrier flickering but staying strong as I screamed my fucking head off.

Then a tarantula covered my face and I simply dropped dead. I hit the ground face first from forty feet off and besides a little pain…I just took it. The spider ran off at a blistering speed for an insect and my cheeks burned at the laughter from Taylor.

"I thought you'd be able to handle a few bugs." I pouted and puffed up my cheeks, and I threw myself at her. She let out a sputtering giggle and I grabbed at her shirt in rage.

"WHAT THE HELL MAN?! You almost gave me a damn panic attack!" I growled at her and she only hissed out more giggles. I rolled off of her and lifted her by the scruff of her neck.

Taylor yelped, and I lifted her over my head. "Hey put me down!" She complained but I ignored the shit out of her as I jogged, testing out my great strength and newfound endurance and fucking with her at the same time.

"You put a tarantula on my face!" I screamed back. I hit about sixty five miles per hour, and I enjoyed the wind whistling past my ears.

"You…have to deal with things that are scary anyway…my…bugs are a sight better than something made by Bonesaw." I slowed at her rather truthful statement, and I put her down a half minute later. Taylor wasn't in her normal costume, it was basically a black form fitting armored jumpsuit I had fitted.

Taylor really looked good in black. Taylor tilted her head. "B—Erudition?" I snapped out of my admiration, and wondered if I had messed something up when I added nanites to my body.

Nope. That's just my hormones going wild in a normal sense, so while I can regulate them down to a normal level I don't feel like doing that was healthy. It was a good thing my augmentations were essentially stable on the range of centuries.

A warehouse had been bought and refitted so Taylor and I could spar in public. It was a nice way to get the general public engaged from a safe distance, and barrier projectors would keep both ourselves and other people unharmed. Like right now, a small crowd had built up with most of their populace being children between the ages of eight and eleven. One of the kids was trying to climb the fence, and Taylor blinked to about a foot back from the barrier.

I watched to see what Taylor would do.

The kid in question was a young girl, a tiny asian girl with grey eyes that hinted at her being of mixed descent. She wore a blue dress, and I could tell that she was on airbender. She dropped down slowly, bouncing a foot in the air with a bright youthful glow to her eyes. Her mother was maybe in her early 30s, and looked quite tired and nervous. Her child was about ten, and weighed maybe 80 pounds.

"Hey there." Taylor's voice was soft, smoothly transitioning from brutal combatant to almost soft hearted hero in an instant. "I guess you liked watching us fight?" Her grin was quite sincere, and the little girl jumped up and down.

"It was super cool…you were moving like at the speed of sound, and you're like me." She excitedly threw around gusts of wind that battered a few people, though none of them were angry. I already knew the other kids were benders too, it was just intuitive even if my old soul-sight had gotten rusty.

Plus the interference from a dearth of souls made it harder to use, though I could more or less tell apart a normal human from a Parahuman on sight.

"So you're an airbender?" Taylor spoke softly, bemusement dancing in her eyes.

"That's what the PRT said it was called right? I'm a Bender." The other kids nodded back, and a few managed to lift up pebbles and spilled water and one managed to summon some fire before yelping and shutting it off.

Firebenders can be burned by their own flames, but it's the first thing they learn when they're still kids. Guess he was still working on it.

"Yes you are, it's pretty neat isn't it?" The little girl nodded, somehow managing to sparkle to my eyes.

The questions started. "Will I be able to fly like you? Can I jump really high? Can I do tricks? Can I run super fast and…" Words spilled from her mouth like water from a hose, and I giggled.

Taylor cleared her throat and the kid quieted down. "With airbending there is a lot you can do." She moved her hands in a circular motion, creating a cute little air ball in her hands. A few butterflies showed up, and one of them dove into the ball. It simply serenely floated and there was delight in the kid's eyes.

She made the same motion, and after a few failed attempts got a very sputtery air ball in her tiny hands. The kid looked so happy I thought she would take off…and then she did, on a burst of directed wind. A few dozen large flying insects came to the rescue, and I questioned how much stronger and durable Taylor's standard insects were if they could carry a human child.

"S-Sorry." She was dropped into her mother's arms, who surprisingly despite weighing maybe a 130 pounds didn't strain at all. "I wasn't thinking."

"It's fine Junko." Her mother sighed, and I could see a few bags under her eyes from lack of sleep. "It's just your power has been hard to…" She cut herself off, and I then realized that the announcement hadn't been made yet.

"You've been having difficulties with her bending am I right?" I took over from Taylor, smiling at the younger girl who was still trying to control her power.

The mother sighed. "It's been hard, I have no idea what to do and joining the Wards is apparently not an option." She sounded bitter and angry, and I got that fine.

"It's not sustainable, there's too many people manifesting powers. In this crowd of about thirty people we have at least eight benders. The Wards number less than ten people, and there could easily be hundreds of kids with a form of elemental manipulation." So I gave them an explanation, to give them at least something.

"Then what am I supposed to do…?" She looked lost and fearful and I understood why. The gangs led by capes were for all purposes dead, but many of their members remained. Which was why I had helped start up a lot of clinics and rehab centers, and the mayor had been convinced to put more effort into certain safety net programs so that less people would fall into the cracks.

I even personally hired people with criminal backgrounds, mainly for the jobs that were more of the manual labor variety. I pretty much paid them well, and offered various assistance programs. Seriously…I'm like 90% sure I'm a multimillionaire at this point, and setting up the business bank account was a bitch of a time so I was setting up a whole department of about three people.

Well…Taylor was because she was getting a headache from all the complexities involved in business and finance. Actually I've got at least tens of millions of dollars, and billions in stocks at this point with a voting majority. Taylor owned the rest, though I doubt she realized the full implications.

Oh. Billionaire then…huh, neat.

I did plan to open up to some private investors, and all of our employees get access to all the information needed to not fuck up their lives.

Also health insurance…I wonder if I was doing too much?

Hmm…

No I only had a hundred people working under me, which wasn't that much higher than what my dad managed back home. He had around twenty employees, and a good fraction of them were lazy jackasses…including me oddly enough.

Wait.

I relaxed and slowed my thoughts to answer the poor woman's plight.

"Ahem…" Taylor smirked, and I ignored that. "Well it's going to be announced later today, but the PRT is planning to set up a training camp. A place where people can learn how to control their powers, learn how to use them more constructively." I levitated a stone, shaping it into a cute penguin. I dropped it in the girl's hands, unable to keep a light grin off my face. "There's so much potential with bending, and learning to safely harness that potential is important." I had pushed them towards the door myself, leading them towards the martial arts that more closely fit the elements but not denying that mixing it all together could create something greater.

"How long will it be until they can set up…?"

"Maybe one to two weeks?" The PRT wanted to buy extra time for the benders they had on hand, a month of training was barely adequate with the exception of a few prodigies among them.

There was a lot of change getting set up, and a lot of rumors that said something big was on the way in a legislative fashion. The status quo can't stick around, something has to give or the world will burn.

I was doing my own efforts to push the world towards a better future, but it would take time and a lot of it.

But I was going to give it my best shot.

___​

May 20th, 2011. 4:00PM

Basilia Rubio

"How much is this again? I'm not really trying to measure it out." I asked casually as I lifted a piece of scrap metal over my head, an iron block about one hundred and 60 centimeters on each side. Taylor rested comfortable on a chair, and waved her omni-tool in response.

"About 33 thousand kilograms, so about twelve times higher than your previous record. I've lifted about…a tenth of that?" I dropped down the metal block, and a loud ominous crash followed as it fell. The strain that should have been there wasn't and I grinned.

"Seems the grav-plates did their job." Those plates were designed to give leverage to keep the woes of realistic super strength far from my person. Though frankly chi already had a subtle Breaker effect to allow anime physics a chance. "I'd test the regeneration but that would require something strong enough to cut my skin." A fast enough sword could do it, but a knife was out of the question.

"How fast can you heal?" I sat on the broken metal, a fist crashing into the metal and denting it. It was normal steel, with only 250 megapascals of tensile strength.

Nothing special.

"Most wounds can heal in minutes, which includes cuts, bruises and lacerations. Bigger things like dismemberment will take about two weeks, though reattachment is far easier and less stressful on the body. I'll probably need to take supplements for the unusual components within my body…but carbon is a common element."

Taylor looked at me like I was crazy. "I think you're being a little too casual about losing your limbs."

I folded my arms over my chest, sticking my tongue out at her. "I made myself a cyborg because I don't want to lose limbs and if I did I could grow them back." As well as the ability to enact various mental programs varying from cyberwarfare to simply browsing the internet within myself.

A minor mental flick saw myself retract inwards, and I saw the world replaced by trillions of lines of code. Numerous spirits made their homes within my implants, and I could sense them, perceive what they perceived, understood what they did and what they could do. Other spirits drifted within the vast internet system of every Athena building, a hierarchy of AI running as background agents in the computer systems. They're supersophont entities but only in a single purview, and couldn't be considered true sapient beings like Dragon.

Hell Dragon had a few hundred such entities, and they have essentially no personality at all outside their specialty and their ability to learn is throttled or non-existent. They piloted most of her suits, so she could split her attention more effectively. They were basic Warminds, clusters of limited purview AI created to solve problems of a more violent nature.

Hmm?

"You noticed them too?" I nodded, I had sensed the distortion in reality like a burning beacon. I turned around to greet the people who had made their arrival known.

It was the Wards, though in this case it was specifically just Kid Win and Vista. The modular tinker was riding on his skateboard, which looked to be a lot sleeker than what I had seen a while back. A few drones orbited around, pulsing ominously before shifting to a friendlier color. Vista was falling with style with her biotics, the Asari ability of Soar. She hit the ground and there was a ripple that steadied as she landed.

Kid Win was interesting, and his little spark pistol had been replaced by a six barrel model that was about half again as long and wide as his spark pistol. There were a dozen holes on either side of his skateboard, seemingly holding something within their depths. Two guns were hidden away, of a similar design to his new hand cannon. I could see room for projectors on his belt and a scan in the wide electromagnetic spectrum indicated an energy shield.

"I…hi?" Kid Win stammered lightly though his confidence seemed to build when we didn't say anything rude to him. "I…we were patrolling and heard what was going on and wanted to take a look."

"Well that's fine, do you want to watch us…or would you rather have your feet closer to the ground?" The two Wards whispered, and I heard radio chatter loudly and cleanly, though I ignored how easily I made their communication useless. Vista bent space but the barrier resisted her power, and I tuned down the power until she could compress space to enter the yard. I turned it back up and now nothing short of a frigate gun would strike down the barrier.

"So I guess even independents have to do PR." Vista sounded a little bitter and I nodded.

"It's fun at least, I don't care much for fighting but I've had to get a lot better at it." I wasn't bad but I knew I didn't have the same instincts that someone like Taylor would have…or someone like Vista. When we fight, Taylor was an outright monster on the battlefield. She wouldn't give a single inch, and her airbending was violent and vindictive…more a focused hurricane than a light peaceful breeze.

Her gravity control and dimensional control was practically prodigious, and her biotic singularity was pretty much an instant lethal blow for most Parahumans. Any use of her stronger biotics had the tendency of reducing people to plasma and red mist. Very few people were capable of taking hits like that. Her swarms were vast and had a wide range of attacks, including kinetic lasers, heat lasers, freezing lasers, concussive lasers, cutting lasers and aura variants of such. She had also created a telekinetic aura, and could pretty much use her swarm to send people flying with an application of immense kinetic force.

She might not use some of the tactics that Skitter did, but there was no doubt that she wouldn't hesitate if she was pushed hard enough.

"Yeah…well not everyone gets to show off how good they are at punching people." She sounded slightly jealous, compressing space and uncompressing it as she circled around us.

"Honestly I've just been testing a few things, and wanted to make sure everything was in order."

"About that…how are you lifting so much?" I ran over, deciding to get closer to tell her more easily. Kid Win looked curious, and I placed him at about sixteen years old. So basically about the same difference as everyone else…

I moved one of my arms in a circular motion, and I could pick up the vibrations from mechanical components doing their job. "Well I decided that I needed to add some cybernetics. I'm very good at biology, kind of have to be with how a lot of my tech functions." Cybernetic interfaces were an important facet of how I operate and of how I use my biotics to their full potential.

"Cybernetics?" Kid Win looked curious, and I smiled at the young tinker. He had his powers for a lot longer than I did, but then he didn't know his specialty and that delayed him for a long while. Also my tinkering power was better, though his specialization in modularity meant that he would operate more effectively in that regime.

"Yes." I knocked against my head, where a thin slice of non-magnetic plating kept my brain from being instantly shattered by a bullet. "While my armor and barriers are pretty tough, I want a bigger guarantee of survival in case something goes wrong. Nearly indestructible bones and regeneration are a pretty good way to manage to get through tough situations."

"And artificial muscles right…that's what you did?" Kid Win was smart enough to figure it out

"Myomer fibers." I flexed my arm and then slammed it back against another steel block. The metal was dented, and the Wards looked astonished. "Incredibly tough, incredibly heat resistant, and highly biocompatible. Then there's the personal medical system I have installed."

"And that is?" Vista raised an eyebrow, and I then turned off the vision modes that let me see right through their lenses. That was probably something to keep under wraps.

"Basically a colony of micro machines managed by complex computer programs." I looked at my nails, having a hard time not bragging. "Think stable regulated nanites created in macro-scale implants distributed across certain organs." Vista looked a little disturbed. "They protect me from disease, cancer, injury and old age."

"What was that last pa—" I moved on from Kid Win's comment.

"Rapid tissue regeneration is possible, if I lose an arm I can grow one back. But it's safer and easier to just reattach it." The crowd had thankfully dispersed by now, so we had room to talk more frankly.

"Like Aegis?" Kid Win looked at Vista and her return look stopped him in his tracks.

"Sort of, there's even some amount of body adaption possible with it though it isn't very fast outside of rather cosmetic changes." I could probably make myself taller or shorter, or change the color of my hair…more dramatic alterations would take months though.

I suspected they found no point in hiding powers since I had already seen them in action. Hell I had heard people saying Gallant was a tinker, and wasn't sure if people were just stupid or willfully ignorant. Then again there was always that strange attitude of treating Parahumans either like untouchable gods or monstrous devils.

In some ways they were right, because normal Parahumans weren't born from normal circumstances. They were born from moments of pain, moments that change someone forever. And they pick out anyone they consider will invoke conflict. Sometimes you get good people who want to help, sometimes you'll get people who want nothing to do with the game, and sometimes you'll get thugs and criminals and monsters.

The only hope was that the shards were selecting their hosts with different goals and difference purposes in mind now.

"Why would you go so far?" Vista sounded a little disturbed and I raised an eyebrow.

"For one thing, I have a very good understanding of how my technology functions and can easily and safely test what I make. Two, fights aren't always going to go my way. Things can go wrong, and I want that extra margin of error to keep myself safe."

The Wards were about to respond when some radio chatter picked up, they looked apologetic and I shrugged.

"If you need to go there's no trouble." They spoke their goodbyes and with a whiff of reality and of space they were gone. Taylor hadn't added her own words, because she was practicing with her bug powers. One of her bugs was a large scorpion, and it floated in the air without the use of biotics or airbending.

I took my place so I could look closer, and saw what was happening with a deep scan. It was a standard entity technique, though powered by spirit quintessence instead of the energy of three planets. Most of her beams and auras were forms of dimensional energy transference, since it was typical for entities.

The telekinetic aura was a form of force carrier transmission and exchange, pulling an electromagnetic force from one universe and transferring it to another or exchanging two force carriers to create massive amounts of quantum repulsion.

This…would have taken weeks to pull off in the right way. Though simply asking other shards with experience could cut that time by a lot.

"So you figured out telekinesis?" She nodded, several hundred ants taking flight through the application of energy. Her armor was shimmering with her power, the living entity suffused with her…her…power.

…

"Something wrong?" Taylor looked over, eyebrows furrowed.

"You can control your suit right? Because it's alive and falls under your power."

She replied. "Yes? Why is that important?" I felt incredibly stupid that I had missed this, and I knew Taylor would feel the same way.

"Your suit is alive…you can project effects from your bugs, and your suit is counted as a bug. Do you see where I'm going with this?" I waved an arm at her, and her lips pursed.

"Wait…but that means…" Her eyes were wide. "Did…did I seriously not consider that?" She face palmed, groaning loudly to express her displeasure. She lifted a hand, and a kinetic beam was projected right out from her palm. A one kilogram rock was accelerated to about two hundred meters a second, and I groaned.

I bent a kilogram of water for her to heat up, and she responded with a heat beam. It took only a few seconds for it to boil, before exploding in a blast of steam. Another beam instead combined several functions to create a concussive shockwave, knocking another rock away with the blast.

Another beam contained hot plasma and incinerated a patch of dead grass.

Taylor stopped her experimenting, and laid out her arms to both sides of her body. She exhaled, and a light shimmer coated her organic armor as she took off into the air.

"We're idiots." Taylor nodded at my true response, and the movement caused a quick motion that launched her into the fence. She let out a choked sound, and I laughed.

…

"Don't say another word."

___​

May 21st, 2011. 1:30AM

Basilia Rubio

My awareness returned to screaming in my ear, and I let out a scream of my own as sounds rattled in my own skull. Screaming and screaming and screaming and fire and fire and fire and fire and fire an—

Sto

I shuddered, curling into a ball as I floated in what felt like a vast ocean, the fluid thick and tasting of iron. My body swayed back and forth on the current, and I couldn't open my eyes for more than moments at a time without it feeling like they were burning and my brain was being shredded. Only flashes of something terrible beyond words, of a scream that would haunt me for all of time.

There was only a single image, of a vast sea shrouded in mist, of a golden sky littered with stars. A place that I knew in my heart and soul, a place that none should survive unless they were already dead.

Some would call it Heaven, others would call it Diyu, a part of the Otherworld. Others would call it the Thirteen Heavens, the Asphodel Meadows or even the Abyss.

I simply knew it as the Sea of Souls.

When I could finally open my eyes, the vision of nightmares and death were gone and I was sitting in a meditating position. There was a thought buzzing in the back of my mind of having felt something vast wading in the waters of the great and infinite ocean. Something so far beyond me that it made even stars appear small and irrelevant. It made even the Thinker and the Warrior at their full power seem like mere shrimp swimming in the cosmic ocean.

"It's been a long time since we've spoken." Veda spoke from the seat of our soul, and I saw the landscape of the vast united corpus. The five pillars of the elements remained, all of them surging and burning brighter and stronger than before. "You have done much, suffered much, and I have not spoken up." She emerged from a fractal wall, my mirror in emerald sauntering over before falling into an identical position.

She didn't look like she once had in the early days, when I was doing my best not to break down, just spending time getting myself protected and ready. Before she was smaller, looking far less like me. Now she was almost identical, but her eyes swirled with a spinning mandala.

"There's nothing you could have done, you were as much in the dark as I was and you had to spend time trying to keep the Firmament from imploding and killing us all." That had been a wake up call, if we hadn't been here every shard would have gone Extortus, broken mad entities that would subsume the two worlds until nothing but ashes remained.

Across every Earth.

"Even so it vexes me…we are one. I should be able to help you…and I have failed you." She bowed her head, and there was a twinge of guilt in my chest.

"We're basically a single entity, if there's anything that we know it's certainly locked behind our ability to open up the gates." I shifted myself toward the tower of air and wind, and we seamlessly passed through kilometers of crystalline corpus until we entered the eye of the storm. I laid down on alien grass, finding purple tubers growing from the ground in thick clumps.

"Perhaps…" I could hear shuffling, and the black robed batarian monk emerged from the winds. His robes deflected the current and he did not look surprised to see me. Seeing him for a second time revealed more details, scars and wrinkles and marks of a harsh life. His eyes were blazing, and he took a seat on an alien stump.

"Human. Basilia, it seems you've decided to make your return. Did you simply wish to see me, or is there wisdom you want me to give you?" There was an almost sarcastic lilt to how he spoke, head tilted at an insulting angle.

"Honestly I just want to know if my dream means anything to you?" That brief glimpse had been frightening, and the way my skin lit up like someone was striking a hot iron into me was concerning.

"A returned memory, a fragment of the events that led to your rebirth, and the memory of a greater force at work."

"Really?" I asked.

"Maybe? Probably?" He shrugged and I felt the winds in my sails die. "Even we are not fully privy to what was done to you. To what linked our worlds together as one. We are the gatekeepers, not the librarians. Though we have glimpsed at the many secrets carved within your spirit flesh."

"We?"

He lifted a finger, and it swirled with a shining emerald tornado "Five souls for five gates, and as the doors open your power will grow as your union between your spirit and your soul becomes sharpened." There was a rumble from the other towers. Words in crackling flame and groaning earth, calls of burbling waves and vibrating dark energy.

I had a small idea of who one of the souls was, if that barely recalled vision was an accurate memory of the past. Veda had receded back, though I could still feel her as a warm shadow at my back.

"Right…so is there anything you do know? About me, about what I am or what I can do?" I needed to know because in the end there was little to work off of. I was a human soul bonded with a spirit down to the most fundamental metaphysical level. I had alien souls housed within my…our corpus, and that let me bend all five elements. I was a born shaman, and I had been thrown across the gap between worlds and sent into a world on the brink of destruction.

Why was I here?

Did I have a purpose or was I the result of some cosmic fluke, a one in a trillion event?

"You are a Host…isn't that obvious?" I glowered and he smirked. "If a rather unusual one, and one with far greater personal power than normal Hosts would ever achieve."

"I don't feel especially powerful." I had strong bending, and my firebending was the strongest in the city, second only to Lung, but most of my elements weren't that much stronger than other people. They were top-tier yes, but my earthbending was beaten out by Charlotte and my airbending was inferior to Taylor's. My biotics were stronger…but that was about it.

"Do you truly think you have reached the peak of your power just yet?" He unruffled his robes, eyes lighting up. "There is much potential still locked away and you've only just begun to crack open the door."

Huh…fair enough.

"Okay then. So I've got a few powers, what about my tinker power? Do I what…? Channel the knowledge of other alien races to do what I do?" He snapped his finger and we were at the open gate, and I blinked at the countless eyes in the darkness behind the gate.

"Your spirit…your Veda was infused with the last remnants of civilizations long forgotten, in eras so very different from this current time. All that they once were in culture and knowledge if not in soul lives within you now." Hundreds if not thousands of lights shone in the darkness, and there was a weight behind his words that left me reeling.

All those races that I saw flashes of, all of them were dead for potentially billions of years. The races of the Citadel were gone, the Thranx had succumbed to the sands of time as did the races that lived alongside them. Even if at this point, their world was not fully clear to me. I had opened the door, but I was still wading through an ocean of mist and fog.

And I was the only one who still remembered them, the only one who would know their faults, who would know them at their best and at their very worst.

"Who were you?" Balaam tilted his head, eyes dim. "Who were you before all of this, before you were here?"

He looked nostalgic, his smile bitter and tired. "Before this…I was a man who had realized the sins he had committed, realized the truth of our history. All through a single question, from the first of my people to find the truth in nearly 300 years."

"Question?" I asked warily.

"Who are you, who does not know your history?" He looked so tired, used familiar words. "I opened my eyes to that revelation, opened my eyes to see the true face of my nation, of the dark gods using us like puppets. We had hope to beat back the darkness, to return to the heyday of the Batar." He scoffed, fists tightened and a wisdom that could only come from suffering being expressed. "In the end, my people were nearly gone, left to fight in ramshackle ships to the very end in hopes that the humans would bring the end of the Cycle."

"Did they?" I was afraid to know the answer.

He didn't move his head. "At the very end…I'm not sure really, I was quite busy keeping my cruiser from being torn apart by Reaper destroyers. Only a flash of brilliant…brilliant light, and then nothing." That…the only thing that could have done that would have been the Crucible, but I have no idea what could have happened.

This wasn't a game, it was some other story so similar and yet so different that without using the same words they'd be different things entirely.

"This going to be a complicated mess isn't it?" I covered my face, groaning at the fact it probably was going to end up being important. But there's nothing I can do to see if the data is buried inside me. Which means I have to find the truth somewhere else…but there's nothing left of the old world except…

Kala.

She was of the old world, and she had survived even if heavily crippled and damaged. Otherwise we wouldn't have won against her, and she would have turned the world into the end of Evangelion.

So there had to be other things that had survived, artifacts or remnants that would get me the answers I wanted. And if some of them were anywhere near as dangerous as what Kala had been like…then they would need to become contained, pacified or destroyed.

"Right I don't have anything else to talk about then." I stood up straight, and she did the same. "Now do you have anything else to tell me before I wake up?" My tone was harsh and gruff, and he looked amused.

"Do your best to keep yourself grounded."

I laughed. "This coming from an airbender?" He shrugged, and I simply wondered how long my life would remain crazy.

He didn't say another word as the dreamscape collapsed, shards of spirit corpus receding back as I returned from the Ephemeral world. I slipped off of my bed and so I let oa muffled yell as I hit the ground.

Oww!

I rubbed my head, grimacing at the pain. You would think that having diamond hard bones would make things less painful but apparently not. Then again that might be because the neural effectors haven't been altered to suppress pain yet

They were the same tech that used bounded electromagnetic and mass effect fields to manipulate matter and energy. They could remotely manipulate nerves, so dulling pain was an easy prospect. They were used in my nanomachines to instantly identify pathogens as well as perform compound analysis.

"I'm going back to bed…it's too early for this shit." I took off in a blast of air and landed on my feather soft smart matter bed. I flipped onto my back, not feeling like laying on my chest.

This had been the longest stretch of time where there had been some measure of peace in my new life. It was a little sad to think about it but it was the truth…

I sighed.

Everything was getting put into place, there were only a few things left to get taken care of. The Nihilim was reaching completion, and I would have several copies of my own within the next two days. I had set up the combat program for Leviathan, and had numerous Battleminds powering the combat system for my entire team. Dragon would probably add her own to the bracelets.

There was only one more thing to take care of.

It was time to talk with Noelle.

___​

AN: Here's 7.7, and we're about one chapter and two interlude away from the end of Realignment. 7.8 is about a sixth to a seventh way to being done, the first interlude is halfway done, and the second interlude has maybe a few hundred words.

I've felt pretty good about these chapters so far, and will keep putting them out as needed.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.8

May 24th, 2011. 8:00AM

I looked around, orienting myself as the small crowds parted around me. It had taken me a long while to pinpoint the location of the Voyagers, and I had to admit that Noelle was very good at hiding herself with spirit magic.

I was alone, and the world around me exploded with information. A gift I had picked up unknowingly from my talks with Centralis. It combined seamlessly with my Overlay, and I could perceive radio transmissions and other electromagnetic connections, tapping into them with little flaw.

I wasn't in any visible armor, though a white blouse and blue gym shorts weren't exactly going to provide limitless protection. Which was why they had the same modifications as my pretty black dress, and a hidden shield projector that would wrap around my biotic barrier. The usual affair of course.

I was walking around the Docks, just outside the area where Athena had set itself up in. A few buildings were being renovated, likely former industrial buildings that were being converted into low cost housing. A restaurant or two had opened up, and the number of ships in the Boat Graveyard had dwindled down to about three. The largest was the sunken container ship, easily a quarter of a kilometer in length. Multiple machines were attempting to break it apart, though they seemed to be having trouble of some kind.

Like the ship refused to budge an inch, to give even a single millimeter of its steel up to the ones trying to break it up.

I took a short whiff, and followed the scent of spirits, the unnatural pressure that they exerted on reality. Noelle was close but since I didn't feel like being the one to approach her I decided to sit down at a coffee shop. It looked nice enough and safe enough, and it had opened up maybe about a month and a half ago if I remembered correctly.

I didn't bother to check the name, and I made my way into the shop. There was a small line, of maybe about three people. I took my place, quietly humming and being thankful I had pockets in these shorts. I didn't bother keeping much of an eye out, since I already had my seismic sense doing its job, and I could pick up electromagnetic waves easily enough.

Even so it was good to be careful.

It didn't take long for the line to shorten to just me, and I smiled lightly once I saw the employee manning the cash register's face. A young black woman maybe about nineteen or twenty years old, frizzy hair pulled back into a ponytail. She smiled back, and I found my order.

"One egg and ham croissant and orange juice." Apparently this place made its own juice though it offers some standard brands. I decided to try out something new and hope for the best that it didn't have an excessive amount of pulp. I paid in cash, and shook my head at how I had managed to keep my civilian and cape life separate.

Officially I was a rich kid who got her parents murdered by the Nine, and unofficially all the money had been emptied out from a few criminal bank accounts which in retrospect was actually impossible. Because hacking doesn't work that way, and the weird ways that omni-tools work give me a major headache to try figuring them out.

There's basically a physical package, as well as interference with communication lines to get into a foreign system. Overload's easy though since that's a directed EMP. It uses mass effect fields to shape the electromagnetic pulse to penetrate throu—

The person behind me coughed, and I blushed and took the receipt from the bemused cashier. I stepped out of the line, and found a booth to sit at. The scent was growing stronger so I knew it wouldn't be more than maybe ten minutes before Noelle would show herself. We didn't have long to talk, since in a few more hours the city would start the Endbringer alarms and evacuate the city. They had remained conspicuous, but they had apparently gone and repaired some of the shelters, and added special Tinkertech shield projectors made by Dragon.

They were rugged and would last up to several weeks without any maintenance. It would have been better to evacuate the city, but trying that would be a complete shitshow, and would trigger Leviathan early. Portals seemed to have the same result, and even if it would work the DPN could only open so wide and could only open so many portals at once before he showed up.

But that didn't mean it wouldn't serve a use in battle, especially since I got the portal opening time down to a tenth of a second. I was pretty much done with refining it, including an ability to have the DPN detect the signature of a specific person to give them temporary permission to access the network.

Most people wouldn't survive even a single strike from Leviathan, if I could portal them before he hits them we can reduce the casualties. He wouldn't be able to damage the network either since the power generation was located on inaccessible worlds, and Bakuda figured out dimensional locking. Which was essentially sending out wavelengths across higher dimensions, disrupting attempts to form links between reality planes. It could be overpowered but it was no easy feat…not at all.

I also had an absurd amount of power flowing through the system, dozens of protium fusion reactors doing their job in keeping the thing running. They would work as needed for what would come next.

"Hmm…" I stood back up once I saw that my order was ready, scurrying over so I could get a meal down in my belly. I opened the brown bag, and my nose twitched at the bewitching smell from the bag. I took a bite, and my mouth filled with flavor.

Good.

Whoever made this knew what they were doing, and a cursory chemical inspection revealed a general following of health guidelines. I held the clear plastic cup with my right hand, and opened up a plastic straw. A sip revealed that it was good and without an excessive amount of pulp. It was perfect in every way.

I'll be coming here again if this place isn't destroyed, though since it's close to Athena it should at least be notably reinforced.

I've got a few dozen barrier projectors that would block floods, and divert waters into other dimensions. Testing it against waterbending made sure it was secure against Leviathan grabbing the water back from the other end. Adding some multidimensional wavelength disruption made it a little more certain. Though that didn't mean they wouldn't suddenly get shredded by the sheer force Leviathan has to offer. Though even the weakest barriers offered the resistance of a frigate class barrier, while the strongest were the equals of a destroyer.

He could definitely(well eventually…) punch through them, but it would give the defenders precious seconds or even minutes. And the barriers were mobile as required…anti-gravity platforms essentially.

I was setting up a small scale production line for barriers and Nihilum cannons, and would build as many as was feasible before my time was up. Bakuda had several of her own super-weapons, as well as a vast number of Tinkertech bombs she planned to give to Miss Militia and Dragon, as well as my automated gunships.

I had been reassured that the cannons would cause considerable damage, severing dimensional connections by collapsing the metrics that allow for shifting between realities. The core was still unable to be damaged, but that was more an issue of the space warping of the core negating the metric I used. A different piercing metric could certainly damage the core, but unfortunately there did seem to be an issue with passing down data from shards to me.

That was…inconvenient, but I'd leave it be until I could figure out why.

So what I had built could sever the connections of most of the layers without requiring hundreds of petatons of brute force energy to simply incinerate their body. From what I could ask, it wouldn't take planet-busting to kill an Endbringer though digging through the layers would never be possible. You needed something capable of rapidly disintegrating the layers before they can be regenerated by hundreds of exatons worth of modified entity flesh. So nano-thorns could get through a good three quarters of their layers, but would be stymied by density as well as how the inner layers alter the behavior of atoms and molecules to function.

Explosions could do it by sheer brute force, the energy input easily collapsing the wormholes. But as the layers get deeper, energy can be more easily funnelled away by space warping. So below a certain threshold you can't kill one of those monsters.

But space warping would screw up their dimensional shifting much faster than they can dissipate the attack, and would shred their layers apart.

To a point.

I sipped my orange juice since I had finished the sandwich, and I tilted my body when I saw one of the customers approach me. I had felt him before with my feet, but I hadn't cared until he turned my way. He wasn't bad looking, tall and well built with a hint of pretty-boy(douchebag) styling to his red hair. He seemed to put a lot of effort into himself, which wasn't a bad thing but I didn't really care much about that to begin with. It's not like I needed anything beyond moisturizing and basic cleanliness habits, though I did need to clean up my act. You kind of have to when you have a few extra areas to clean than before…

I stared at the guy, ignoring my last thought. He was very slightly tanned, likely from going to the beach a lot(or just genetics). There was a look in his eyes that made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. An arrogance that made his appearance feel fake and unwanted. It instantly got me in a bad mood, and I frowned not bothering to hide my contempt.

Bastard seemed to ignore that when he placed a hand on the table.

He smiled, and I didn't find that smile agreeable. "Hey there. I saw you sitting here alone, thought you'd want some company." His smile wasn't doing shit for him, since everyone I know including Bakuda and Collin had nicer smiles. "Name's Jake Williams." He offered a hand and I didn't touch him, my grip tightening on the cup that was much cuter than he was.

"Hmm…" The guy's smile shrunk but that didn't stop him from making an ass out of himself.

"Well…I thought that maybe the two of us could hang out sometime, maybe even today? Have some fun?" His grin turned subtly lecherous and my gut filled with no small amount of disgust.

"Sorry but I'm going to be quite occupied, I've got a lot of stuff on my plate for the foreseeable future." And when I said foreseeable future I meant forever.

"Come on, someone as beautiful as you deserves some good company. I'm a nice guy." The blood drained from my face, my mind conjuring up my foray into online Nice Guys through the medium of YouTube. "Everyone deserves a little fun" His eyes darted where they shouldn't.

I was going to set his balls on fire.

"My answer is still no." I looked at him straight in the eye and was almost impressed by his stubbornness if he wasn't an asshole. He looked away, and I could already tell that he was hiding his expression from my eyes.

He immediately tried to place a hand on his shoulder, and was intercepted by a rapid darting arm. None of the crowd seemed to notice that Noelle had appeared out of nowhere, though a quick reading of virtual memory found she had been here for a good twenty seconds.

"It's a good thing for you to leave." Her expression left no room for argument, and the man let out a squeak when she snarled.

"I…" He tried to protest and immediately pulled himself from her grip with fear wafting out of him. She kept staring, and he ran with his tail between his legs. Once he was gone the revulsion set in, and I shuddered.

Was that something common? Or had I just been unlucky enough to get the attention of some jackass?

"I guess that's the first time you've ever been harassed?" Noelle slid over into the booth, looking slightly shy at the attention that others gave her at the intervention she pulled.

"I…don't really need to go outside often…so yes." I crossed one leg over the other, lightly jostling it up and down as I answered her. "So…do you want to talk here or…?"

"I've got a place." She replied, nodding seriously.

___​

May 24th, 2011. 8:15AM

Basilia Rubio

"You know it's true! Noelle might not be a monster anymore, but this doesn't make what she's doing any less crazy!" Were the first words from Solaire's mouth as we entered the apparent base of the Voyagers. It was a large warehouse where the ABB used to rule, though I had already suspected they had moved in around here with the rumors of numerous bending triads getting crushed by something.

The team froze when they took sight of me, and I waved politely while a few of them seemed to have gotten well acquainted with whatever insanity that Noelle had thrown them into in the past. Shamans are gigantic trouble magnets because of what they were, and I imagine that's been an ongoing problem for them.

"Hello?" I waved again, and my eyes tracked everyone in the well kept room. Fantasm or Jess was standing, though she was obviously a little out of practice with how shaky she was. Switcheroo was taking a smoke, and the familiar whiff of cigarette smoke entered my nose.

I gently bent the current to get that cancer smoke out of my face.

Marissa looked a little shocked, and a small amount of shame filled her face. Railgun(Luke?) was in front of her, hands lifted defensively. It seems like the two of them had been arguing though I didn't know what it was about. Fume Hood was sleeping through the whole argument, clinging to what I was 90% sure was a mini chocobo(how do I even know what that is?), feathers ruffling as the cape slept on it. The kid I quickly identified as Alexander Lawson, the child of Amelia and Robert Lawson.

He was slowing at the other end of the couch, twitching and muttering. The arm almost exploded in his grip, his skinny muscles tending to reveal muscle like steel threads.

I left that scene be, and before I could say a word I saw Cody prowling. She looked just like what I remembered her to be, and despite myself I was rather familiar with the kind of anger she exudes. Her brown hair was being pulled back by a curvy and athletic Japanese girl, muttering quietly as she fixed her glowering friend's hair. Though the light blush, and very barely visible smile on her face told another story. I…still had a hard time picturing Cody of all people as being a girl, and I started to question the competency of the entity or entities that brought me here.

Of course the fact that my only memory of the thing was screaming wasn't a good sign. The fact that my DNA had apparently been degrading before I had corrected the issue was even worse, and had been rather fucking awful for my psyche that I could have died from cancer or some form of radiation poisoning.

"You are not easy to poke." I didn't respond to the clone of Cherish, who from what I could tell was much less sociopathic than the original if you could believe it. My cybernetic implants seemed to be kicking in, pushing back against her power. "I can read you just fine though…I think you'd confuse the Simurgh though."

"Neat." There was arguing, Marissa pointing at me as she spoke up to Noelle. Fume Hood was still sleeping, and Cody was staring at me as her friend pulled her away to some other room.

A hand plopped itself on my head, and with a snap of folded space I was somewhere else with Noelle following shortly after. We were in a lab, numerous vats growing organic frames for various organisms. One of the Railgun clones…

No those were vessels, organic entities designed as a channel for a shard-spirit to split itself about 14 times. Three had powers similar to the original, one could only fire small projectiles but could launch them like hypersonic missiles, a second could launch ten tons at low Mach speeds and imbued them with explosive energy. The third was no different from Railgun.

The forth applied the power to himself to create a straight line supersonic Mover power with Brute applications due to the kinetic energy from such speed.

"You and Noelle have been working with each other for a while haven't you?" The synergy was terrifying. How did they do this?

"Rey makes the bodies and I provide the animating force behind them. His normal creations are a little easier to control as well…"

Rhizome didn't seem to care about his identity, and I honestly was just tired of cape bullshit at this point. "Figured out an organic radio, I can just transmit orders with a press of a button." He displayed a roughly square mass of fungus, and a genetic analysis with my equipment found that it made use of octopus DNA to create a touchscreen. There were organic receivers based on electroreception as well as eyes and neural networks…that must have taken a lot of trial and error.

"How exactly do these things work?" Noelle got to me before Blasto could.

"My power…it used to be the ability to consume people and then create clones from them by forcing buds from their shards." Her flesh unfolded around her left arm, revealing a dense mesh of different appendages before receding back and leaving only grey scales. "Honestly…I could pretty much clone anything that was alive, but they're not as useful." I think I remember that, but that was a while back now.

"And how did it change?" I was curious.

Noelle shrugged, her smile revealing sharp teeth. "I can still still clone anything I touch…but they're much more stable, and my power is a lot more controllable and modular." She demonstrated her changed power as another arm expanded, her hybrid corpus warping and flexing before disgorging a shard-spirit into the physical world. I recognized it as a fragment of Vista's shard, but it's expression was altered to create a storm of warped space that would shred all matter in its path.

It could also fold space to create a shield, bending projectiles around itself with the warping of reality. More limited effects could safely move people around it to protect them from being squished by an attack they can't react to.

"Oh I get it…you can touch someone and then create a shard-spirit from the flesh of another shard. Then Rhizome creates a vessel for them with his vats so they don't need to exert so much energy to stay in this world." Shards had no problem with the material since they were themselves sort of hybrids of the material and the spiritual. And it provided protection from damage, allowing them to hide away in Shardspace while they pilot Rhizome's meat suits.

She was basically a flesh based Glaistig Uaine, with a bit of Teacher mixed in to give people powers.

Holy shit she was a power manipulator.

"You've got it right." The shard-spirit poked me, its eldritch form shifting as it examined my form. Rhizome sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose before pointing toward another humanoid body. He left with the generated spirit in tow.

"So why does he need to make physical bodies for them? Couldn't you just make them bodies?"

"They'd be human ones…and that creates a lot of headaches I don't want to deal with." I could hear Empathy laughing at something in the other room, almost cruel but far enough away from the edge to be normal instead of dangerous. "Cherry is much nicer than the original but…it's a little ethically questionable to make weapons out of human beings. So shard buds are the go-to for now, unless I can figure out how to make a more suitable body."

"Plus I imagine those bodies are a lot stronger and more resilient than human ones right?" Noelle smiled a bit, eyes shadowed by her hair.

"Usually yes, and Rey has managed to weave some power expressions into their physical bodies. We've got three different models of sorts. Jinn are support, like the Jaunt Jinn, Nymphs are the same like the Codec Nymph." The aforementioned shard-weapon revealed itself, a sleek golden entity that seemed to dampen reality. "She's the product of a meeting with Accord's Ambassadors."

So Citrine then.

"And the others?"

She shrugged. "Golems and Banshees are our offense, they hit hard and fast or they're very physically resilient. We have two Adaption Golems from Aegis, so that's interesting." I saw the weapons and blinked at the two behemoths, both were about nine feet tall, with their form shifting quickly and their pillar-like legs held off the ground by flight.

That wasn't terrifying at all, especially when Echidna had probably eaten at least a few people and Rey was wanted for at least one murder, drug trafficking and multiple cases of assault and property damage. Though I suspected all the biological weapons were on a biological level unviable, unable to reproduce or do much outside being vessels for small shards. And Noelle's enormous body mass came from her shard rather than mountains of human and animal corpses.

There was a pause then, a moment of introspection and sensible thought. I had come here for a reason, and some final questions had to be made while I still had time.

"About what happened to you…to us. What do you remember?" There was a sense of discomfort on her face, but she seemed ready.

"I was fighting with Cody when it happened…he…she had tried to touch me and I almost lashed out…when I saw it." I closed my eyes, remembering the void that still haunted me in my dreams. "After that it was like I had been hit by napalm, and it hurt. It was like someone was ripping me apart and putting me back together, not knowing how to fix me…and with some of the people there….they didn't get fixed at all."

"I only really recall flashes of that myself." I didn't really want to remember, because that sounded like an utter nightmare. It made my stomach churn and I felt a little faint.

Noelle fussed with her hands. "And when I woke up again something had changed about me…so many voices, so many echoes of the world that lay on the other end of that hole in reality. In those flashes…I saw something of my reality there, a possible future. I'm sure you understand what I mean Basilia."

…

She knows.​

…

"You know about my world then?" I sent my voice on the breeze, outside the prying ears of Rey. That plus a few other subtle uses of technology isolated what I had said. "About what it's like?"

Noelle nodded. "When the two universes drew close together, things seeped through on both ends. I knew things I shouldn't have…and that set me on the course I'm following. I doubt I'm the only one."

"You're going to fight Leviathan." I started without preamble. "That's why Solaire was so angry. Because well…to be frank it's completely insane to want to fight a goddamn Endbringer." I laughed nervously, scratching my right cheek. I didn't even want to fight him, and frankly I was mostly just going to be there to provide technical support for my weapons.

And…it felt cowardly to simply operate from another world and let others take care of it.

"I have to fight him…I can't not fight him, and Marissa doesn't understand that." The shaman looked so frustrated.

"Why? Why do you need to fight a monster like that?" She paused, slit eyes staring at me with a reptilian gaze that would give most people chills. Which meant very little when I was slowly acclimating to Taylor's occasional creepiness, Amelia's periodic scary ramblings and the general factor of Rachni and spirits being terrifying.

"Why huh?" She muttered to herself, appendages uncoiling from her back as she turned away from me. A circle lit up on her back, a rotating pattern with two layers circling around each other in a particular frequency. Such a thing I had seen before, in my nightmares and in the dreams of the abyss within my own strange soul.

"Yes." I replied solidly to Echidna.

She turned back around, and I saw the shadow that hinted at her true form. Something so vast it boggles the mind, and etched with complex self aware code. She closed her hands into shaking fists.

Noelle sighed. "I made a promise…and I intend to keep it."

___​

May 24th, 2011. 12:00PM

Basilia Rubio

I looked out to the horizon, at the distant dark storm that was moving at an almost intentionally slow pace. The Rachni Queen was looking out at the ocean as I landed, and I felt a second song weave into the air. One that sounded curious and young and innocent.

"What's her name? I asked Singer-of-Rebirth, and the alien queen let out a quiet click.

"Basilia…this is Forge-Singer." The new queen was a tiny one in proportion to her mother, maybe about the size of a medium dog. She was twitchy, and her attempt to communicate grated at my senses. The first queen quieted the newest, and I saw that several Workers were preparing the special blend of jelly used to nourish the Queens.

I lowered myself a bit, smiling at the strange little baby alien. "Hello there." She ducked a bit behind her mother and I grinned in amusement. "You're a sweet little baby aren't you?" Despite being an insectile horror Forge-Singer gave off the vibes of a shy puppy more than an alien menace. She didn't speak, instead whispering to Rebirth. The Queen whispered back and the little one drooped and retreated into a gate.

"She will be one of many new Queens yet to come, and it is why I must fight. I must fight to create a world where we will be free. Free from the shackles of a Cycle of a genocide and violence."

"This isn't like with the Mother of Miseries Rebirth." I warned her. "Leviathan doesn't have a secret part of himself that doesn't want to kill us. He's a killer of tens of millions of people if not more, and if he wanted to kill us he could just crush the land beneath us and sink a continent." Lung's fight with Leviathan hadn't mattered at all in the end, he had sunk Kyushu with little effort. They were holding back by who knows how much. Though I did have the suspicion that they were probably not holding back so much in power but instead restraining themselves in tactics.

Like what had happened at New Delhi…I ended up having to look that up from what I had from the plot line of Worm. Seriously I was lucky I had offline google docs with a timeline and a chapter synopsis…though that was rather general when you think about it.

"I will not change my mind." I let out a huff, knowing that Rebirth was set on becoming a part of an Endbringer fight. There wasn't anything I could do that would stop her, not even sending her back to Earth Lotus would help. With how smart her species was I didn't doubt that she would find a way to make her way across realities. Especially when she was only about twenty miles away from a working sample of the technology required.

"Do what you want then. It's your decision to make." I couldn't interfere with her, I didn't have the right unless she hurt others and only if those people were innocent. Even if they weren't they would…deserve the common courtesy of most human beings. Unless it was Jack Slash…he can rot in hell for all I care.

Rebirth vanished in a gust of biotic force as she teleported, and I sensed Taylor before I saw her. She dropped down with a jitter to her movements since she was still getting used to the flight abilities granted by her powers. The exchange of force could get her up to eighty five miles per hour, since most of the well was used to make the suit more durable or to power attacks in combination with her own biotics. A single large green beetle was following her, a creature about one hundred sixty pounds in weight.

"How's your Giant Rhinoceros beetle working out?" I was casual with my prodding, sitting down on the roof of the main Athena building. The building had been a warehouse that I tore down and rebuilt into a multiple story monster, more than large enough to house a few hundred people.

"He's a lot tougher than any other bug I've used before, and he's cool." She patted the monstrous beetle on its head with a smile in her voice.

That beetle was part of an experiment of mine, I had at least several hundred thousand species bouncing around in my soul. Almost all of them weren't well people in the sense of a Rachni or an Asari but they were there. A Si Wongi Giant
Beetle sounded like an excellent choice with their ability to reach several thousand pounds, and being domesticated too.

Wonder if a Buzzard wasp would be too outside of her power…if not that's a man sized death machine that could one day shoot energy beams and tank bullets.

Thresher Maw was probably a step too far and they were almost uncontrollable due to their natural earthbending. Which is exactly as frightening as you can imagine. Throwing around buildings, boring through kilometers of rock to chase even Krogan down like mere prey.

That was probably a good way to get a Kill Order since Thresher Maw spores can survive orbital impacts to spread as needed. Hell they could even survive on asteroids and may or may not even be native to Tuchanka to begin with.

They certainly fit in though.

"How's Golem?" Taylor sighed, and I knew that wasn't the best of the worst signs. The child of Kaiser had been difficult to manage not for very any reason involving being unpredictable but a dose of distance that he placed between us and him. He was still new to this, his powers had only shown up a few weeks ago and I didn't expect him to just straight up join us off the bat.

His costume was basically on loan until we could convince him to join. While I didn't care about things like having a gender balanced team, it didn't mean I didn't want guys on the team.

"He's been getting less skittish, but I think he's been really rattled with what went down with Kala." Taylor was looking at the horizon like I was as she spoke. "But since I started training him he's been calming down a lot, his power is really strong when it's combined with his earthbending."

"He can project hands and limbs from any surface right, with a bias for anything covered by earthbending?" She gave a thumbs up, her hair lightly shifting in the growing breeze.

"If he joins we'll welcome him, he seems nice enough. Way better than his dad at least." And wasn't that the truth, his dad was an opportunist using racism and hatred for his own means and his mother probably was a raging murdering racist.

Which is probably why Kayden isn't going to stick around for long. Based on what I've…found in PRT databases, once Leviathan mows down the city she's to be transferred to deal with other white supremacist cape groups across the country. As well as remnants of Gesellschaft that had smuggled themselves into the United States.

They weren't going to last long in this country.

"Well yeah it's nice to have another guy on the team." Taylor looked at me and I paused as a funny thought came to mind.

Did any of that shit about gender matter to me beyond an abstract sense? I looked like a girl, and had all the bits. But I had been male before, and the only changes in behavior involved having to wear bras, tying back long hair, hygiene and getting gross looks from a fraction of the male population. Plus that whole deal with color perception differences between men and women.

I think it was at least partially biological, though culture could also play a part. I seemed to do fine with both color differentiation and rapid movements however. So maybe my brain is just wired differently?

Wait…but my brain already is wired differently since I'm on the spectrum. That's not exactly a clue…

I hummed, crossing my arms around my heavily armored stomach as I stared down at the people on the streets.

"I'm going to remind you now…how many Cannons are you building, and did Bakuda's tagging system work? What about the number of ships, and did you get what Vicky asked?" Taylor lightly knocked the glass on my helmet, and I chuckled.

"We've got about a dozen cannons fully completed and tested, and if the timeline holds there should be another dozen online by the time Leviathan makes landfall. We have twelve heavily shielded gunships that will carry two cannons each to replace conventional mass accelerator arms. Bakuda managed to construct five Halcyon cannons, and Dragon is probably dusting off less effective copies for her suits. She's going to wield one of them, another will go to Vicky and the rest will find their way into the hands of a suitable Brute." Alexandria might be a good fit, though there had to be other options. A few extras will probably be built just in case, Leviathan is a tough bastard.

"And Vicky?"

I raised a hand, biting my lips. "Vicky's request has already been sent off, just like Amelia." Everything was falling into place but I knew it wouldn't be enough. This was one of the most powerful beings on the planet, one that had crushed nations. I wasn't weak, in fact I was probably one of the best tinkers in the world at least in breadth if not in experience or skill. Dragon was probably the only one that could be better than me due to her Tinker/Thinker power.

Though others could surpass me in the firepower department like String Theory.

Though my power kind of worked the same way…actually it wouldn't be dishonest to say I had something like slots for different tech bases. One was Mass Effect divided into different convergent branches, while the other was Dark Energy manipulation through particle bombardment. So not too far off from being a Tinker Eidolon. Though with only 'two' slots as of now.

"So we're prepared then?" I rolled my shoulders, grimacing.

"As best as we can be with the circumstances, and we still have some more time since he's still far off." The storm was tiny on the horizon but that wasn't going to stay the case for long. "How's your dad…has he started preparations?"

"They're still trying to get rid of the tanker, but I don't think they're going to make it in time." I saw that it was true, and I felt something off in the air around the ship. "I really hope he doesn't try to stick it out." There was a worry in there, worry for the little family she had left.

I didn't even have that did I?

I bobbed my head. "Well your dad is pretty hard headed and stubborn, it makes sense that he'd be this determined. I'm sure you get some of that from him." Though I suspect she's got the blood of both her parents running strong in her veins. Annette Hebert was no damsel of distress that's for sure from what Danny has told me in the few opportunities we had to talk.

I clenched my fists, I feel like it would have been nice to meet her mother. I don't think my mom would get along with her. My mom is no wallflower, but she was never what one could consider politically active or heavily invested into knowledge. But who knows, maybe they would have enjoyed their different and unique perspectives?

We took some time to allow the quiet to linger, and I also prepared numerous other contingencies. I wasn't stupid and knew just how things could go wrong in a matter of seconds in a world like this one. I wasn't going to take my chances with Murphy's Law screwing me over.

I was bringing every tool on the table for this, every machine, every litany of power and every bit of technological know-how I could offer in what time I had left.

"Basilia." She said my name, and there was a change in her tone and in the atmosphere itself. "I…wanted to say I—" A harmless droplet hit her helmet, and I saw the clouds forming as a consequence of the distant storm making its way on a steady course toward the city. The rain was pitter pattering on the ground, and my heart dropped into my stomach.

A whining sound hit the air, the nasal boom echoing its message across the city. From my vantage point and the magnification of my helmet, I saw the UWA hastily stopping their scrapping of the vessel. A single tiny dot that a nearby drone revealed as someone around my age, who was lightly touching the ship's hull. More drones came online, from about a hundred to nearly two thousand across the city. Other AI-operated mechs and droids activated, serving in less combative roles. From the west I saw the signatures of numerous vessels coming in at great speed.

The orders were clear, and I could see all my employees being evacuated and the fusion reactor spooling up to bring the kinetic barrier up to full power. Six Athena buildings did the same, and projectors were quietly distributed across the city as needed.

I jumped off the building, literally flying at top speed toward where I needed to go. Taylor followed me, easily speeding ahead of me with her lighter framed armor and her stronger airbending.

4 more hours.

…

4 more hours before Leviathan makes Landfall.

___
​

AN: So after some extra time I have this chapter written out along with the Interludes and most of 8.1, and 8.2 should be started sometime today. Which means we'll be hitting the Leviathan…which makes me really glad I outlined out a lot farther than this.

With how often other Worm stories die once they reach Leviathan. This will pretty much mark where things will start changing more drastically than they already have. So enjoy that.

 

[AEM]

Realignment 7.a

May 24th, 2011. 11:00AM

Elle

I felt my power's influence on dimensions as I walked, hands wringing together as I focused on the many pocket worlds I had the ability to summon, each of them containing spirits that I had befriended and tamed. Spirits of flame, fire and heat, spirits of waters, ice and steam, spirits of earth, metal and glass, of emotions and concepts that resonated with me.

For this trip I had gone alone, my costume protecting me from the sickness that hung in the air of the place I wanted to make use of. I had heard the rumors of the strange happenings in Japan, the stories of mythical beings and of rising lands and enchanted forests shrouded in mist. Here the barrier between the two worlds had grown thin.

"You have chosen a grave place to seek out a spirit my Host." My shard spoke with a voice that was hard to tell whether they were male or female, though technically shards had no real gender with the way their species worked. Their voice had become much more clear after we had managed to contain her for a few hours, one of the results of pushing my power so much.

It hurt.​

My power was the ability to shift locations between dimensions, creating pocket worlds in or out of sync with the reality I was in. I had a few worlds to choose from, like the high temple, a place that had grown in leaps and bounds as I got better control of my power. My range was maybe a few hundred meters, and I had many worlds to choose from to help me.

One was a world of glass and spikes and burning silicon dust, another was a field of lava, the air choked with sulphuric gas and thick clouds of carbon dioxide. Another was a forest clearing, a stream filled with strange fish that Basilia said weren't fish but weird worms with fins and backbones made of cartilage and iron.

The soil was still waterlogged, and I could see a few animals hiding in the undergrowth, as well as hear the whispers of the spirits on the sea breeze. I let out a prayer, and made use of the gift from one of the radiation spirits I had met on the lava fields.

I felt my own energy, my chi pulsing in synchronization with my heart. I let out a single breath, and the sickness in the air couldn't touch me. I had to spend a lot of time getting radiation burns to figure this out, and I had picked up a few things from the spirits.

Denial of Excess…it kept my body from taking in the radiation that soaked the land here in one of the rising islands of New Kyūshū. This had been a city by the name of Genkai, before it had sunk beneath the waves like every other city on the island. It was here that I sought a spirit, a very powerful one that I could motivate to help us fight

We were running out of time, and I needed something strong and with the motivation to fight the Endbringer, the Culling Unit headed toward the city that Basilia and Taylor wanted to protect.

Here.

I stopped at the hole in the ground, twisted metal marking the spot. I could feel it's gaze, but I swallowed my fear. I couldn't be scared anymore, I wouldn't be scared. I had to be more, I had to do more, and I was going to make sure that this world would change.

I stepped into the hole.

I took more steps, and within seconds I was in darkness. The only light was in the distance, a blue eerie glow that marked my destination. I felt the radiation strike against my barrier, and I knew I had only a few minutes.

So I burned some of my power for a different use, something I had learned from a kangaroo spirit.

I practically exploded into the air, bouncing off rusted metallic walls to pick up momentum and energy. The Leap brought me to speed, and the rumble of power grew louder and more violent.

I hopped through corridors, and twisted the landscape to my advantage. My shoes only accelerated my movement, air spirits doing my bidding as I got closer and closer to what I was looking for. The Verge grew more unreal as I got closer and closer to the heart of this place.

Water leaked from everywhere, and spirits of radioactive decay and water shifted in and out of reality. It took me a minute even at top speed, and it was obvious that reality wasn't working right.

And why would it? This place was broken, it shouldn't exist anymore since it was buried beneath the waves.

I stopped at a twisted door, a bright light shining through the cracks in the thick steel. I stopped as the radiation spiked, and I lifted my hands to either side of my body. I breathed, in and out and knew what I had to do next.

BURNING STAR, WRITHING FLAMES, VOICES OF DECAY, MEMORY OF CREATION;
BRING FORTH THE MAIDEN-OF-LIGHT-AND-STARS
I OPEN THE GATE, AND GIVE YOU CHOICE TO CROSS.
THOSE WHO PREVENT YOUR CROSSING WILL BURN.
THOSE WHO SUPPLANT YOUR POWER WILL FALL.
CROSS THE GAUNTLET.
JUSTICE AWAITS YOU.​

I nearly sank to my knees, shivering and shuddering as my voice grew hoarse. With my chant the doors were torn from their hinges, and from the heart of a nuclear reactor it appeared from the rippling pool. It came in vibrations that made my power recoil, and I straightened so I wouldn't appear weak. Even if no matter how I looked, it would be true anyway.

The power of a spirit like this was far stronger than any normal Parahuman.

She surged into the Material, and I kept my cool, even as the bending and twisting figures of flames around her reminded me of her. Reminded me of those days in the Asylum. The spirit of the atomic was as elegant as she was terrifying and I had a hard time not being blinded by the light of her Cherenkov emissions.

Her form was alien, a maddening cacophony, a creature not of this world.

I think I'm spending way too much time with Basilia if I'm talking like this.

She was vast, easily filling the entire room with her corpus. Her body was made of flesh and metal and nuclear fire, a thousand eyes spilling rivers of radiation and rivers of liquid plutonium. A billowing dress covered most of her soft almost sensual form, sheets of glowing iron rippling like water. Her form was as alien as it was human, skin shifting like sand instead of just flesh, her eight eyes reflecting the stars and her ribbon-like hair acting like liquid plasma. Her face was delicate even if I knew it was harder than the densest, most polished diamond, and tougher than the strongest steel.

"Why have you called me shaman?" The voice came from within my own head, and I kept a determined expression on the outside even with the fear growing in my chest. I had met a lot of spirits since Basilia had started teaching me, and so many of them were friendly, they wanted to teach me…even if it was just to show off how powerful they were when I used their gifts.

With little hesitation I dropped to my knees and bowed. The spirit stilled but didn't seem angry at the gesture of respect.

"I've called upon you to ask for your assistance in protecting my home from the Leviathan." My protection strained against the massive burst of radiation from the spirit, and I hoped that I hadn't signed my death warrant.

I could do this. I could do this. I could do this.

"Raise your head shaman. Raise your head or I will leave nothing but ashes and dust." I did so, moving quickly before I would be killed.

I didn't want to die…but I wanted things to change, and I was going to make it happen.

The Maiden-Of-Light-And-Stars was boiling over, her inhuman form swirling like a tornado of nuclear energy. "You seek my assistance in the destruction of the Foreigner?" I nodded carefully, and the spirit looked astonished. "You have traveled across thousands of miles of oceans, to a place broken by the very creature which seeks to drown your world. Why?"

"Because that was in a time when the WORLD was still sleeping." I kept my tone even, following Basilia's advice. There was a time to keep going or give in, and now was the time for action. "The WORLD has changed, but the Foreigners haven't."

I let out a near silent yell when a glowing finger poked me in the chest, an arm extending like a whip made out of water. "You say such things, yet I see that you play Host to a Foreigner yourself. The Leviathan will have adapted as your shard did."

I shook my head. "They can't adapt, because they're not connected to a being of this world. And they can't fake humanity, they don't have the programming for it." That was something I was certain about, they could never be human, they could never become a part of this world with the way they were.

There was intrigue in her countless eyes. "Is that so? So why me? Why not any of my hundreds of brethren across this dying world?"

"Because you have a more personal stake in this, he killed you. Destroyed this place that you once called your body. And I intend to help kill the Leviathan, to keep the rest of his siblings from rising ever again against Mother Earth."

The elemental spirit leaned back, and to my shock she began to laugh. To laugh in waves of gamma rays and neutron pulses. My protection was holding, and I kept my calm.

"You intend to kill a creature of such potent power, a beast coated in the bloods of millions? And you wish for this old spirit to help you?"

I squared my shoulders like I had seen Melanie and Taylor do, and looked the spirit straight in the eye(eyes…)

"Yes."

Her entire body flashed, rumbling a laughter that shook my bones and wrinkled the air. "Oh you have some real confidence, human, but how do you intend to bring me across the ocean?" I demonstrated, and reality altered around us. Palaces of glass and crystal, valleys of sharp grass and swaying fleshy plants, and lakes of boiling acidic water.

"Does that answer your question?" The spirit smiled, teeth glittering like gold.

"You're interesting for a human, you have steel in your bones and fire in your blood. If you can bring me vengeance, if you can restore me to my prime…I will burn a WORLD for you."

I lifted a hand. "So do we have a deal?" Her much larger hand grasped mine, and my hand was burning.

"We shall see how this goes." She let go to my relief, and I shook my hand behind my back. "Do not disappoint me, human…or there will be consequences." She retreated back into the spirit world, and the radiation faded.

I twisted reality, and flew back up into the outside. The ethereal forest was growing much brighter. Spirits drifted, and I slipped past an ancestor-spirit and a death-by-radiation spirit as I prepared a way home.

I wonder if Newter was going to have a baked batch of cookies for me?

I was getting hungry.

___​

May 24th, 2011. 12:00AM

Danny Hebert

I rubbed my face, glaring over at the disobedient ship that had desired every attempt to cut it up or even move it. It was like it had a will of its own, and with what Taylor had told me that might actually be true.

"Anything?" I asked Kurt, and he shook his head, the ground rumbling under his steps. That was some of the hardest thing to keep under wraps, nearly a third of the Dockworker's Association had developed powers with most of them being earthbenders and firebenders and with a few waterbenders mixed in.

"Nope. This ship is stubborn as hell, it's not moving no matter what we throw at it." He brushed back his hair, expression set in the frustration I felt. We were almost out of time…if we let this ship behind. Leviathan was going to slam it into the city and kill potentially hundreds of thousands of people with it.

"Hmm…" One of the younger hires, a kid about a year or two older than Taylor was staring at the ship.

"Something wrong kid?" Kurt smirked, and the new worker grimaced.

"It's not going to move anytime soon…it wants…to do something. Something important." I stiffened and realized what was going on.

"Jason right?" He stood up straight, and I blinked at the surprising deference he showed to me. I don't think I really inspired that much faith right? I wasn't exactly in the best shape, even if I was practicing my bending every day now when I had the chance. Which was a lot more often once I figured out how to delegate more, to administrate a little more effectively. "Are there other little hunches you can offer?" Jason was actually a mechanic, and he was a lot more intuitive than I had expected from someone with his age and experience.

"It's not much sir…it's just little feelings about things, like whether the oil needs to be changed or a screw replaced."

I nodded.

Jason was a shaman. Had to be with how he made a few of the boats sing after years of rust and decay. He made a lot of our equipment better and more effective than before, but it took awhile for us to figure that out. We thought he was just a very good mechanic, but it didn't make sense when we realized how much better he made everything run. The boys had tested it scientifically.

I hadn't gotten a lot of time to process what was happening, to process how much the city had changed in a scant few months. How much everything had changed, how much Taylor had changed, and how I changed.

…

When I had found out what had happened to my daughter, what had happened to our little girl. I had felt like a failure, I had felt like I had neglected the one thing I had left in this world. And I would have failed her more if I had settled…but I hadn't, because something had told me that actually trying would turn out differently.

And it had, and all of it had happened by what was either happenstance or even destiny if what Basilia has told me about the spirit world was even halfway true. When I had found out that Amy Dallon had gotten the ball rolling I had thanked her for standing up for Taylor.

Though learning she had done it more to screw over and spite Sophia Hess had dampened the image she had. But then even Heroes were still human, someone my age should really expect that kind of thing by now.

"Try to see if your instincts tell you anything different, okay?" I took a step back as Jason got to work, his eyes shining. Kurt followed behind me, lightly bumping shoulders with me. To both our shock I hadn't been knocked on my ass like usual, and had managed to push back a bit.

"Hah! Seems like getting yourself in shape has let you pack some meat on those skinny legs and arms of yours." He poked my arm, and I felt surprise when flexing revealed dense refined muscle. A cursory check of my legs revealed the same phenomena, I wasn't built like a brick like my boys but I was a wiry kind of strong.

"Huh…neat." I muttered as I thought back to how all of this had started. Taylor had just wanted to go to the library for research and to have something to do while we went through our options.

Taylor bumping into Basilia had been a happy if awkward accident, and the fact that had started a friendship between them had made me happy even if a little wary of someone older taking advantage of her. But Basilia was far too bumbling to be anything less than sincere, and she had probably been just as desperate for friends as Taylor.

I…couldn't imagine losing everything I had like that, to be ripped away from my home and family. That she was willing to stick her neck out for us either said something about her character or her mental well-being. Maybe it was both even but it didn't make me any less grateful.

I knew the statistics for independents, how long they would last before they were recruited either by the Protectorate, by villains or killed and left buried in a ditch. Despite my initial suspicions of Basilia she had proven to be fiercely protective of those she cared about, though from her expressions you'd be hard pressed to know that was true. She was a lot like Taylor in a way but leaning more towards apathetic than glowering.

Taylor really got that more from me, Annette had always been the happier of the two of us, though she had a fierce temper like I did. Together Taylor and Basilia had managed to set up a team, and with my help with some of the early legwork they had established themselves as a power in the city.

It had been terrifying to know that they would be out there fighting monsters like Hookwolf and Lung, but I had seen how well they worked together. Basilia was a tinker but she wasn't the best at planning anything outside a basic outline of what she wanted. Taylor filled that outline, and I couldn't be more proud when she had asked for my help in organizing Athena. It felt a little strange in some ways to realize that my own daughter could boss around some of the DWA for their more labor intensive jobs. Or that they were an integral part of Brockton Bay's economy on a tax level at least.

Or that they had more money in their bank accounts than I had made in my entire life.

…

I wasn't jealous.

Taylor had managed to break out of the shell that the bullying had put her in, and I grit my teeth at what those three girls had done…at what Emma had done. I hadn't talked with Alan for a long time but Zoe was a different story. Their marriage was falling apart after the psychotic break that Emma had gone through because of those…spirits.

I remember my daughter coming home that night with a haunted expression and her face ashen. I understood why just fine, despite everything she had done Taylor still had a piece of her that remembered their friendship. Seeing her broken like that was too far, and Basilia had the same concerns. It was why I warned my boys to be careful at certain spots, to always spot each other at night and if anything didn't feel right to drop everything and leave.

That had saved a few lives at least and that was before that thing in the bay had shown up. For the past two weeks I had woken up in a cold sweat, and it was routine to check up on Taylor to see if her nightmares had left yet. Sometimes I checked up on Basilia since she granted me access to her lab. Both were rattled by what had happened, and I knew it was going to get worse before it could get better.

Even with my bending I didn't have the power to stop Taylor, she had too much of her mother in her. Basilia was no different in her stubbornness, and was throwing everything she could reasonably bring to bear on what was coming to the city.

"What's the kid doing?" Kurt stood straight, and I stared as the new mechanic went up to the ship on one of our platforms. He lightly brushed away thick rust from the ship, whispering words that I couldn't hear but I could feel.

The ship…jumped and I was gobsmacked at the scene. Jason murmured again, and there was a low groan of old steel and the sputter of broken engines shaking the air and the ground. The low growls made my organs shift but Jason didn't care, speaking to it like it was an old friend instead of a dead rusted ship. Chains shifted, an anchor ripping its way out from the water and nearly knocking Jason from his perch.

"That thing is haunted! We should…" I pushed Kurt back, this wasn't a thing we should interfere with. It wasn't our place.

"Let's see how this plays out." There was a loud rumble as Jason negotiated with the ship, and there was a low murmur of rage in the air. It was primal, yet it was young and technological in a way I couldn't understand.

For minutes we watched as the argument flew back and forth, and the ship understood what Jason was telling it. It let out another groan, and there was a powerful determination seeping into the air that left me feeling ready for anything and everything.

Then I heard it.

The shrill air siren that meant only one thing for a city, and what for many cities was often a death knell. The Citykiller was directing its ire towards the city that had been my home for so long, the city that Annette had lived in for so long.

And Taylor was going to fight that monster.

But she wasn't alone, she had a team, she had a partner that would have her back. And she had resources that would leave even the PRT wanting, I just had to have faith that Taylor and her friends would survive a fight against an Endbringer. They had more time than anyone had ever had before, more capes to back them up and more time to set up a big fortress that might hold Leviathan back for at least a little while.

The ship rumbled a battle cry and I hoped despite myself that something would change.

___​

AN: So here is the first Interlude that will mark the transition between Arc 7 and 8. Keeping a gap of about three days for both kinds of chapters has made it a lot easier to get chapters written out, and I'm not too far off from finishing 8.2 and starting on the next chapter after that. Once this is done, I'll have a lot more free space for other plots. I've outlines for three(four?) less intense Arcs after this, but thats still a whiles off.

But before all that will be 7.b, which will be very, very interesting. So enjoy.