Recuperation 9.5
June 19th, 2011. 6:45PM
Basilia Rubio
I pounced on some Yakitori, enjoying the fruits of the labors of others as I sampled my way through everything on the table. I thanked the energy consumption of Biotics, licking my lips as I allowed my appetite to build up for this bonanza of food. I could sense Carol behind me, the older woman fidgeting rather openly.
"What's up?" I turned around and she looked a little startled, obviously she hadn't figured out lithographic sonar for herself. Which made sense, it was a highly specialized skill and metalbenders were maybe a tenth of the earthbending population in a useful fashion. Her firebending would be no help, and I had to shake my head at the flames that nearly licked at my arms.
No control…but better than the ticking time bomb she had been at the start.
"Amy seems…a lot happier." There was a tone I couldn't identify, and I saw what she was looking at. Amy was sticking close to Grace, and I could see her lift her arms to gesture to something on one of the tables. Sometimes her sister would show up, brightening up the conversation before leaving to talk with Dean or Charlotte or Missy.
"I suppose she would be happier, she has a lot more friends than just her sister." That her attitude was adjusting down to sarcastic but well meaning was much better than her attitude of being a bomb that would destroy everything she touched out of incompetence and mental instability.
Carol's expression was shifting many different ways, fast enough I couldn't tell what she was thinking. I ignored her and went back to eating the Japanese food that Grace's mother had lovingly prepared for us. Eric(Shielder) was busy being harassed by Dinah, the brown haired girl flicking rocks to test out the shield. He was showing off how he could change the properties of his shield, like letting air through or not or changing their shape.
He formed a sloped barrier, multiple shields layering together with slightly different properties to form a composite energy shield. At least based on what I could hear from ten feet away.
"You don't like me do you?" I was forced back into a conversation with Carol and I pulled a sullen expression.
"Well of course I don't like you." She looked stunned at my response and I rolled my eyes. "What…did you expect me to be meek and not say it to your face?" There was a lot about Carol that I couldn't respect, she was a good cape…a good lawyer but that wasn't the foundation for a good life.
"I…maybe?" She looked concerned as if unsure what to say.
"I don't like the kind of person you are, and I don't like the results of your bad parenting." She looked outraged, and I shook my head at her. "I actually
talk to your daughters you know? There's not a lot to say other than that I want to maintain minimal contact with you…but you're still their mother." I pulled away from her, and she looked almost bewildered as I turned on my heels to move to somewhere else.
Her face twisted and Mark got in her way, looking sullen but with just enough energy to keep her out of my way. I felt my skin crawl, and I scratched my arms lightly as I made my way to Charlotte. Taylor was talking with her dad, Kurt and Lacey, and I left her alone to talk with family.
One of the lucky things with poaching a lawyer from Carol's firm was that the Miss Merchant was rather ambivalent towards her so there wasn't a high chance of her blabbing anything we talked about to Carol. One of the things I was working with was life/work balance, trying to keep the cape life from utterly consuming the lives of my teammates, trying to give them things outside of fighting and combat.
Carol was a commander, a leader…and she seemingly only did well during such a period of stress. But that wasn't a way to live your life…I didn't want that for myself and I certainly wasn't going to let my friends and allies fall into the same trap. I wasn't going to let her have power on me, and even if she wasn't evil she was certainly
toxic.
My dad was a bit of a workaholic, a bit of a control freak…but he was a damn bug in comparison to Carol. The familiarity was unsettling, and my dad had at least gotten better after the divorce and any troubles he had were no longer my problem. He could make his own fuckups and I wouldn't let
his shit back in my way. Carol was worse though…
Love shouldn't be conditional.
"Hey Charlotte…" Charlotte didn't react with surprise, which was obvious to me since she had half the Broadcast shard lending her its power. "So you and Theo huh?" Despite her lack of surprise, her cheeks turned a deep shade of pink.
"It's not like that." She denied it, and I grinned wildly. "We're just friends, there's nothing there."
"I never said anything about romance Charlotte, just that the two of you seem to have hit it off." Was I so good at words or what? Look at me talking to people like I was normal.
"Oh. That's okay then." Charlotte got back into the mood for talking and we sat down on one of the wooden benches we had placed down beforehand. "Yeah I think we're good friends, he's a little shy but he's easy enough to talk to. He's a good guy, and his earthbending has been getting better with my help." I almost teased her about it but decided against it when her expression changed. Right forgot that her Thinker power is there.
"Well I can certainly imagine, he's got a strong power and the determination to keep moving forward." He didn't have Jack Slash to spur him forward, instead he had the Mother of Miseries, and the death of the Empire 88. Once we brought him in on
what the White Lotus was for, he had grown in leaps and bounds with his control and ability. We were here to stop the end of the world, here to keep the world from spiraling further into despair and moral event horizons.
We had kept potentially hundreds if not thousands of capes alive simply because the Endbringers were dormant or dead or…repurposed. Veda was quiet but she still spoke to me, partially drowned out by the voices of the five souls somewhere in my soul.
I was already coming up with different plans for killing the Simurgh and killing Behemoth. Though in the case of Behemoth, a gigantic Stilling cannon was the best bet since that was what killed him with Scion. The Simurgh needed to be countered by multiple Precogs working in unison(not an easy thing), capes capable of blocking or weakening her future sight like Mantellum and Shamrock, then capes and weapons capable of damaging her. So Eidolon, Bakuda, Flechette, Echidna, and myself…though I'm sure there were others who could manage.
As well as counters to her scream which Bakuda was capable of with a few types of bombs or continuous beam cannons generating the anti-Master effect. Dragon and Armsmaster could certainly come up with something…that or I dump her into another dimension and then strap her onto a rocket with a gigantic bomb inside of it to reduce her to atoms.
"So you were talking with Carol…are you okay?" Her expression was empathetic.
"I'm fine, she just makes my skin crawl." Charlotte nodded in understanding, looking perturbed as she saw the tension building between Carol and her husband.
"A bit rude to say that about my aunt." I jumped when Crystal made her entrance known, but there was no righteous anger burning in
her eyes.
"Am I entirely wrong for feeling that way…?" I murmured and she looked terribly, terribly sad.
"No…not with what I've heard." The pretty older blonde looked awkward, but her uncertainty turned to happiness as she saw how her cousins were doing well even as Carol seemed to be regressing. "New Wave…it's not really doing well after you showed up. Not that it's your fault."
"How bad is it?" I had to ask, and Crystal looked sad but accepting.
"Since Vicky and Amy are both adults, they're probably going to join your team full time. My aunt and uncle…they've been at odds a lot more than usual, and…I don't really want the cape life for myself."
"So I'm going to take a quarter of New Wave?" I would have been speechless if I didn't love the sound of my own voice.
"They're already basically a part of your team Basilia." I had to agree with her on that, both spent a fair amount of time with us and worked closely with our team and Amelia had officially joined. "And I've heard that other capes have been trying to join your team."
"There's a few…most of them are Rogues though." So not useful for fighting but useful to provide new subjects for Parahuman studies, plus I was curious to see if any of them would come up with something new.
"If those requests go in you'll become the largest group of capes in the city, and if your company keeps growing enough…" Crystal hummed, seemingly speculating in her own head what the possibilities were.
"That sounds like a mess I don't really want to get into, but at the same time I don't mind it. We need less capes beating each other on the streets and more of them acting as semi-functional members of society with strange powers." I would have said normal but that was never going to be a thing, they
weren't normal and were never going to be normal again. But they could certainly be taught to cope with their issues and traumas, and the needed skills to not misuse their powers if they got it through Amenthes.
"That's not going to be as easy as you think." She sounded doubtful and I rolled my shoulders as I grabbed one of my burritos to bite into it, dabbing hot salsa to feed my hunger.
"True. But I have a much deeper understanding of powers than almost anyone on Earth, so I might surprise you." Crystal nodded, curiosity brimming.
"About that…could you…tell me about my shard?" I looked at her in shock. "I was there when Taylor went into that…place. I'm just curious." I gestured for her to follow me, and Taylor waved without needing to look at us.
Once we were out of sight, I crossed my arms and started tapping a foot. "So what do you want to know about your shard?"
"Could…is it possible to
talk to it?" Crystal threw me for a loop, and I actually got curious on whether that was possible. Out of my team only some of their shards talked to them, and that included numerous noble shards or very odd shards at least. Taylor had the Administrator, Amelia had Shaper, Elle had Desmenes-Keeper, Vicky had the Fragile One and Veda herself was once an Administrator.
Was that possible?
There was the smell of the shards, that scent of grinded crystal and gunpowder and void. Her shard materialized behind her, hanging over her like a specter even if one that was friendly. She wasn't quite her mirror, appearing more like a guardian angel with wings made out of blades of hardened light than anything else.
"It should be yeah." I said with a flat tone and I heard Crystal let out a held back scream that died in her throat. Her shard simply bowed her head, appearing as a being of light with crystal forming a net along her star-like skin. The Pelham girl reached out and her hand passed right through the avatar's arm.
"Huh?"
"Your shard isn't really here, this is basically a reflection, a sliver of herself to let you see her." The laser blasting cape bobbed her head absently. "If you want to talk you can talk right here and now.
"You're my shard." The shard-spirit blinked.
"
I am Assail of the Everburning Light, yes." God the shards were becoming increasingly melodramatic with the names they were calling themselves, though not all of them cared. "
I am the one granting you an expression of my power."
"So…powers come from aliens from beyond the stars?" Crystal looked so done with this, but there was no stopping her from asking more questions later.
"If you're talking about Parahuman powers yes, benders, shamans and spirits do not get their powers from the Shards of the Void." That was the name that had been given to them by the world, creatures once seeking a victory over all things in creation. Creatures shaped by the space between worlds, conduits of great power with mastery over time and space, with near-mastery of reality itself.
Beings of Void, other concepts turning them into
something new.
"They're different things? How?" Crystal asked.
"
The control of the elements and the spirits themselves come from a source far older and greater than my kind. We do not know that origin, only that it exists." Assail of the Everburning Light responded to her host, and the New Wave member looked a little bewildered. It was probably weird to talk to the entity with a piece of itself lodged into your brain. "
You have sought me out for answers, and I will answer what I can."
"Why did you give me powers…why do you give
anyone powers?" Assail glanced over and I shrugged, giving her free reign to answer in whatever manner she wished.
"
We seek those who are broken, those who will fight and war with each other to provide data for the answer we've been searching for. We have done so for some three thousand iterations to three thousand species."
Crystal mouthed the answer to herself before speaking up. "None of the species you did this to survived, did they?"
"
Some did…there have been many incomplete Cycles across the ages, and we fled from such worlds or destroyed them while doing so. But…in our case, our shard cluster was created some 900 years ago. Three cycles ago."
Made sense, not every shard was going to be ancient. Based on what Queen had told me there was a hierarchy of shards, those closer to the core of what made up an Entity. The Destroyer was one of them, the result of one of its kind learning to slip between realities near the beginning of the species. Queen was another example, an Administrator functioning as a part of the central nervous system of an Entity. Though unlike a normal organism it's function was one they could live without, which was where Scion had gone wrong.
Without Queen he couldn't modify the shards, and there was effectively no way for him to intervene without the Thinker.
"You're obviously not supposed to talk to us…so what changed?" Crystal questioned and my stomach twisted with bitterness.
"
The world changed, and the Vyasha is simply one of the agents of that change, out of their own free will at the least." I scowled at that, wondering if it was even true. "
Some of us wish to make amends…though not all of us will, I'm sure." Some shards were inherently violent and sociopathic, and they wouldn't change unless we forced them to act. Phase was one of the shards that had been caged when Queen got more shackles loosened.
Functionality-wise the Amenthes network was a lot like Glaistig Uaine's flock but without the direct control, a proto-Entity with maybe about…600 shards? We didn't get as many as you would expect because not every shard had split itself with buds like Fragile One.
Cauldron capes for example usually shared a single overstressed shard that had gotten data packets from other shards to stop them from killing their hosts. They had
some more separate buds but there seemed to be numerous mechanisms on how buds worked.
There was a list of about two hundred thirty vials, a note left to us by Fortuna.
Faultline had apparently found the vials that in another timeline would have been stolen by the Merchants. From what she had told me it had been because a new natural Trigger had screwed up the meeting and the case got lost.
She had given me the five bottles, largely to get it out of Cauldron's hands and because she hoped that monstrous capes would stop being a thing. Very few of the Case 53s liked even my unwanted contact with Cauldron, so I impressed on them how
fucked we were if we tried to go against them without a plan and that even if we won the planet would be screwed in the long run.
It still left a bad taste in my mouth, but it didn't stop me from studying the shard fragments that would establish a connection between host and shard.
The Beast formula created Changer/Brute powers, incredibly powerful ones in fact with some rivaling Alexandria in strength and often resembling animals in appearance. The Oculus formula led to eye focused powers, eyes that shoot out black holes, lasers, plasma or particle beams, or other power effects including Master powers.
The Numerology formula offered a calculative engine, enhanced mathematical intelligence, like a weaker Numberman. Hephaestus was a combat tinker formula, with everything from chainswords to power armor. Niflheim was a cryokinesis formula, creating and controlling ice.
Fortuna wasn't rushing into…
whatever this point of contact was, and I still felt unsafe in her presence because she was utterly terrifying. She didn't show up for more than seconds at a time, leaving a bottle once a week. It made me think about the situation in the Firmament.
From what I could tell, a lot of shards pretty much ran business as usual though broadcasts from Queen had shut off the conflict drives in lesser shards. More aberrant or more prideful shards tended to ignore her orders, and they were often distant enough to avoid her wrath. Even so most had calmed down, eager to have some direction for the first time in decades. While many were confused on the new direction for the cycle, they had obviously known that something was amiss and decided trying something new wouldn't hurt.
So at the least conflict was dropping fairly consistently over time, though there was always going to be a simmer of war and suffering simply due to human nature.
The shard network was vast, but even now incomplete since it was only made up of the shards that had landed on the Earths over the last thirty years. Tens of millions of shards, with most of them dormant or still setting up due to damage or simply taking time to prepare themselves.
There were likely
trillions of shards still landing, with quite a number permanently crippled due to what happened to the Thinker. However without the core of Eden they were no less dead. And it would be decades before they would land and set up for a broken cycle.
I wonder what the Fairy Queen made of this nonsense?"
"Basilia?" I snapped out of my daydreaming, and Crystal was giving me an amused expression.
"S-Sorry…"
"
Have I answered your questions sufficiently?" Assail questioned her host and the New Wave cape smiled with a mad edge to it.
"Yes you did…and I think I'm going to have a long talk with my cousins on not hiding dangerous secrets…and that goes to
you too." I gulped at her accusative finger, and her smirk lightened. "But not today, because there's a party to enjoy."
…
True.
I hustled out of there, and felt my lips twitch into a smile when a butterfly landed on my shoulder. It was a time for celebration and not for conflict, so I'm going to do my best so act like it.
I blinked when I saw that Carol was taking shots, urged on by her sister and by Dinah's parents of all people. Grace was secretly giving a curious Amelia a sample of Sake and I sealed my lips on that. Carol took two more shots and I gaped.
I'm not going to have fun like
that though.
___
June 19th, 2011. 7:30PM
Taylor Hebert
This birthday was a lot livelier than anything I had ever expected to get after mom died and dad fell apart. And after Emma had gone as
insane as she had, then even more so because of those spirits. The adults(did I count as an adult now?) were mostly huddled close together, and I saw that my dad was done grilling burgers for the potluck birthday.
I turned around, passing a plate to Missy since Dinah had been hanging out with her. The scuffs on her arms meant that at some point they had a friendly spar with each other out of sight of everyone except Basilia, Charlotte and Dean.
And I had been sensing their movements and their powers rather easily through my swarm. I was slowly starting to get a much better idea of how Missy's powers worked. It was a weird combination of space warping and matter printing, and was obviously limited to less than spatial supremacy like what should be possible at full power.
"Thanks." Missy moved fast and sat with Dinah and Elle on one of the picnic tables, with Anansi taking the other side completely with his giant bulk. I could feel the presence of his mind, like a dense spot that I couldn't grasp onto. Not that I wanted to, because that would take over a
person's mind.
I could sense the hunger reflex of the tens of thousands of flies within a quarter mile of us, and let them get eaten by more useful bugs but kept enough breeding pairs to keep everything nice and stable.
Basilia was sitting casually, shifting from side to side with her usual inability to ever stay still. She propped her chin up with her right arm, another arm waggling in the air as she described…
"So the power train is some form of matter-energy conversion drive?" Basilia spoke excitedly, her soft monotone becoming more energetic and passionate, smiling from ear to ear through the vision my swarm was giving me.
"I can
catalyze a fusion reactor and add a small conversion drive to replace the Antimatter plasma torch drive. Plus I can make the powertrain a little more compact, I'm not sure I can safely scale up the drive to the scale of a ship."
"The Thanix should be able to get an adequate power source then, though hybridizing the thing with shard-based attacks is
not going to be easy." Basilia chuckled, looking cute as she dramatically rubbed her chin.
Grace nodded. "That reminds me…how does this Thanix cannon work?" I rolled my shoulders as they talked shop, because even though I had some tinker aspects I didn't really have the time to make use of them outside of coding. Basilia had said I was going to be a better coder than she was, and I had even managed to design a simple VI using an Omni-tool.
Basilia bounced, pride entering her brown-green eyes. "I'm glad you asked. The Thanix is a superweapon, starting with a plasma compression chamber to flash-melt nickel into a liquid state maintained by high pressure conditions. Magnetic containment will load the hot liquids into a mass effect shunt." My blood had run cold the first time Basilia had described the weapon to me.
The shunt was the same kind used in that Turian weapon that could turn a seven hundred foot cone of air into plasma but
much larger. The aperture on a cruiser would hit harder than any atomic bomb ever made by humans, and could destroy anything short of an Endbringer.
"You trying to implement Sting into it?" Grace asked and Basilia shrugged, her eyes shut and her smile thin.
"I still haven't really gotten it down, though I could probably implement a space shearing field around it to add some extra punch." At this point it was obvious that Basilia was being casually terrifying on purpose even with how friendly and plush she usually was.
I just smiled, even if my face was a little hot from a few memories of hugging her. She was soft and cuddly and it was hard not to like that from time to time, I hadn't gotten a lot of hugs…not until she came into my life.
Basilia let out a soft laugh and I glanced over to find she was being accosted by butterflies…
oh god. She gave me a bemused look at the pretty insects crawling on her hair with their light delicate flaps. She didn't seem to mind, and Grace was openly cackling at my expense.
Basilia ignored that, instead waving at me and flashing me a wide dorky grin. I couldn't help but smile back, and she looked utterly pleased with herself before going back to talking shop with Grace.
"You've got it
bad Taylor, but I can't say you don't have taste. Even if she's a giant dork." I scowled when Amy popped out from the sky, landing on a cushion of air. "Whoever or
whatever made her, seems to have added a few consolation prizes for stranding her in Bet."
"I'm not that bad, Basilia is just sweet." More butterflies covered her hair and I let out groan at how my power responded to my feelings. She simply ignored it, smiling more and her face lighting up as she designed something using the projector of her tool.
"C'mon you're kidding yourself, I'm like 90% sure that if someone managed to badly hurt her you'd probably reduce the person to a shadow of ash on the ground." I tried to deny that, tried to say that I wouldn't do something like that.
But I flashed back to when she fell down onto the ground, ears bleeding, eyes turning red with popped blood vessels, bruises and skin splitting at the seams as she started to die…and the idea of
someone doing that to her made me…furious.
For a single second there was a loud buzz that briefly paused the party and I had to focus back on the present, and I sank into meditation, taking constant calming breaths. The angry swarm calmed, and Amy apologized, looking perturbed at my response.
"Okay…so maybe that wasn't the best way to go on that." Amy was shaking her head, smiling and pawing at her freckles. "How about we talk about much you like watching her come and go." I was going nuclear, my face on fire when she started.
"I have no idea what you're talking about." I pretended that wasn't an outright lie but my poker face was too weak to Amy's snark.
"I'm lesbian and you're bisexual, even if obviously you're not immediately going to tap tha—" I blasted her with air and she sputtered before continuing on the same line of thought. "Basilia started out as a boy and it
shows, even if she was already a part of the rainbow beforehand." I actually couldn't disagree with that, she had mentioned developing a small crush on a guy she had been friends with once. "Out or everyone on the team she's the most…
titillating." She suggestively waggled her eyebrows and I groaned. "But she doesn't seem to give a single fuck about it, and it can be…distracting can't it?"
I…had no way to respond to that without lying.
"I'm not sure how to answer that." There I found an out and I was going to take it. But I did glance over to Basilia as she lounged about, looking at her figure.
She had a nice figure, with wide hips and thick thighs, a slim waist and a large bust and her smile was
pretty.
…
I should stop making eyes at her before Amy gets suspicious.
"Right now is a good example of her being distracting…" I ripped my attention away from Basilia and gave Amy's forehead a good flick.
"Shut up." She rubbed her forehead with a growl, but that didn't stop her from talking.
"Taylor I'm not letting go of this prime teasing material, you and I both know that." Oh damn it all of course she was going this route, she was a snark monster and nothing would change that. She tilted her head, grinning from ear to ear. "So what distracts you the most my bisexual comrade? Is it her womanly curves? Her unreasonably large chest or her rather nice butt? Or maybe it's something simpler, like her smile or her eyes?"
I placed a hand on her shoulder and with a single gesture froze her biotically. I had used that power often enough with some of the stronger earthbenders, the kind of people capable of being thrown through a building and getting back up again.
Carol didn't seem to care that I had frozen one of her daughters solid but that was mostly because she had gotten
incredibly drunk in the span of about forty five minutes. I left Amy behind knowing that she was going to be free in about a minute, and she was safer than we were since her frozen energy state meant she could take a missile to the face without worry.
"Taylor!" Dinah walked up to me with her mother in tow, and I smiled at the mother of one of our youngest teammates.
"What's up?" I stopped her from slamming into me, because it was like getting by a brick wall rather than someone sixty pounds lighter than me.
"Well my mom was a little curious about what you've been teaching me, would it be okay if I could show her?" There was a bright curiosity in
both their eyes and after a moment of thought…why not?
I led them a bit out from the party, though I could see that New Wave and Missy were both watching closely. Anansi had leapt out of his poor wooden seat, his one ton bulk only barely held up by whatever Basilia had reinforced the wood with. Dinah's father didn't seem surprised in the least, and I remembered that Anansi often joined them or the
mayor for dinner.
"What exactly did you want to know?" I asked slowly, carefully probing on what Anna Alcott wanted.
Her smile was warm. "You've been teaching my daughter to fight and to defend herself…and it's not hard to notice a few
oddities outside of her powers." There was more to it than that, and she elaborated without me saying a word. "Also I wanted to know if it was possible to teach me a few things…" She had a sheepish hopeful grin.
"Maybe…though I might have not enough time today." I mused on whether that was true or not.
"I don't mean today, but I'm curious to know what kind of training can make a young girl strong enough to compete with people twice her size." She hummed thoughtfully. "I just thought it would be better for my husband and I to be a little more prepared. The life of a cape can be dangerous, and your team has a lot of attention because of what happened to Leviathan. I don't want to be a liability."
"I'll see what I can do." I guess Dinah had to get her spunk from somewhere and I liked that her parents seemed to be supportive of her…even if it was so hard for them.
We found a flat patch of dirt, and I tapped Dinah with my heel, and she lowered herself into a stance.
I shook my head. "A little lower, shuffle your feet into position." I ordered lightly, and she followed dutifully. "You already know how to breathe, how to sense the flow of your own chi."
"Chi?" Anna popped the question, her eyebrows lifting up.
"Basilia says it's a type of energy that exists and flows between all things." I could feel the flow of my own chi, a breezy current that surged upwards whenever I bent air. "Everyone has chi, this limitless well to draw upon…in benders they can expel their chi to control the elements, to create flame, to move earth and water and air."
"So it's like the Force?" Anna asked, sounding even more curious than before.
"Pretty much. Dinah can't bend but she does have a
talent in bending her own energy." I flicked my eyes to Dinah and she beamed, dragging Anansi into the flat patch. This despite him weighing a literal ton. "She can sense disruptions in her own chi and the chi of others." Some tests with Vicky's aura found that she could detect the power and deny its touch, and that she might be able to give herself immunity to Masters. "One of the things she can do though is
block the flow, even projecting some of her own chi to…" Dinah lashed out with her tiny fists, lip pursed as she tapped her arms like a hammer against one of Anansi's legs.
He toppled as one of his legs stopped responding, and Dinah let out a smug and haughty laugh, one of her hands lifting in a dramatic fashion.
"Oh…oh my. I…aren't Rachni the equivalent of Brutes? She managed to bypass their armor?" She looked suitably impressed, and her arms lowered into a mimic of her daughter's technique. "Would I be able to…" She shifted the positioning of her fingers into a shape better fit for striking.
"Do…you have experience with fighting Anna?" She stopped her posturing and smiled sheepishly.
"In my youth I was…rather more rambunctious than I am now. I managed to get caught up in the cape scene, and fell in with a bad crowd." My jaw dropped, and she smirked. "I was the grunt of a charismatic cape, and it was my husband that managed to get me out of it when Charlemagne started ramping up."
I had heard of him…he was a cape from the mid 90s, who started as an activist for government reform but eventually went full on crazy, turning towards violent revolution and towards the attempted creation of a Parahuman dictatorship. He had the ability to imbue power into both himself and objects around him, though while his powers were strong they didn't get stronger with time.
He had managed to best Alexandria at one point, and the only reason he didn't keep going was because he had died under mysterious circumstances after wiping out a neighborhood.
"He never did have a direct immunity to poison." I didn't know how or whether I should respond to her casual admission to
murdering a cape almost as strong as Alexandria. "He became about cape supremacy, and about how those who were lesser would help their betters take their
rightful place. Shows him…"
Holy shit.
Dinah was staring at her mother like she had grown a second head and I was definitely doing the same.
"So…why were you enticing Carol to get drunk?" I changed the subject immediately.
Her dark expression changed so fast it gave me whiplash. "Oh that was Dinah's idea, apparently she foresaw a high chance of Carol disrupting your party and we came up with a solution to nip that in the bud."
I'm starting to think it wasn't our fault that Dinah was as weird as she was.
"It's more fun this way, at least if she gets mad it'll be a lot easier to keep her from hurting herself." Dinah added to her mom's answer, and was then pushed into the ground by Anansi, and I could hear his laughter loud and clear.
Carol was still drinking and at this point Mark wasn't even trying to stop her. My dad was talking amicably with Dinah's father and Crystal's dad and I shook my head.
"I think I've shown you more than enough." I turned on my heels so I wouldn't get sucked into the insanity. Charlotte was setting something up with Theo, apparently the older adults wanted to set up their own fun. Which I was totally okay with, it seemed to make my dad happy and we could set up something fun for us…well
me I suppose.
A portal opened, and I raised an eyebrow when Newter popped right in baggy green pants and a white tank-top, he flashed a smile and dropped a present into my hand.
"Uh…"
"Not mine.
Apparently a certain blue power ranger wanted me to deliver you a little present." I got a present from Armsmaster.
I got a present from Armsmaster.
"So do you plan to stick around or…?" He grinned.
"Is there food?"
I stared. "It's a party."
"Then yes." He jumped over me in a single step, getting thirty feet of air as he hopped from foot to foot towards Elle. I held the neatly wrapped blue box in my hands and
blinked to the table where a few presents had been placed down. There was one from most of the team, two from Basilia, one from my dad, and two from Kurt and Lacey.
I didn't get gifts from everyone but to be fair I knew my team a lot better than I knew their parents and family.
Basilia had moved on from her long conversation with Grace and was helping with whatever they were going to set up for the younger portions of the party. The air was crisp and clean but it was starting to get cold as night fell. So it was getting closer to having to go indoors to shield ourselves from the cold. It wasn't going to be hard of course, the base was big enough to house a hundred people, so less than two dozen partygoers should be easy.
This was the first energetic birthday I had in years, and it was so foreign to think that I was really going through this. Hard to believe that my dad was paying attention again, that Winslow was
behind me for the rest of my life, that I had something to look forward to beyond today. I had connections that wouldn't abandon me so easily, and I didn't have to worry about that happening.
It was nice, and I was going to enjoy this night.
___
June 19th, 2011. 9:00PM
Taylor Hebert
I winced when I heard the drunken rambling songs of drunk Carol, and Amy was wheezing, leaning into Grace for support. The older adults had been on the karaoke machine they had brought for a good forty minutes, and almost all of them except dad were drunk as hell.
Everyone else was bunched together in the large living room, split up into different activities. Dinah, Elle, Eric, Newter and a new guest had shown up too. Kaida, Lung's daughter had wanted to hang out and brought a gift from…someone?
It was a large box, easily two feet long and rather thin and it had been checked for anything weird. But they found nothing out of the ordinary.
The group of girls and two boys were busy playing a heated game of Uno, and Dinah was cheating using her future sight…though they managed to trick her at least a few times by
also cheating.
I was sitting down on the couch, keeping my swarm running in the background so I could focus on the room instead of everything within a three mile radius.
To my left, Basilia, Crystal, Vicky and Theo were busy playing Cape Fighters. Vicky picked Alexandria, Crystal used Legend, Basilia picked Dragon while Theo went for Vista. This new version was updated, and Alexandria charged a fire blast in Legend's face with a recorded shout. Legend was the same as usual, while Dragon was throwing exploding drones like they were going out of style.
Vista was throwing biotic blasts, or compressing space to move very quickly. She could make attacks miss with her space alteration, and could kick and punch with a biotic aura around her.
It was surprisingly complicated for what was supposed to be a fighting game, and Basilia was deeply concentrated on the game, sticking her tongue out as she got used to the controls. I was feeling a little left out, though it wasn't that bad either with how calming this night was.
"Did…did you want to play?" Basilia was staring at me with her big and innocent looking brown-green eyes, slowing her button mashing. "It's okay if you want to. I've never been one for playing games like this a lot…not in a long time at least." She tried to add something else, but instead her eyebrows furrowed and she let out a growl when her character was taken out by Theo.
"No you can keep playing if you want, I'm not too interested." She gave the controller to Anansi, and the Rachni chittered curiously at the device.
She scooted over until we were only a few inches apart, leaning slightly in my direction. "Is something wrong? It's okay if it is…and it's okay if everything is fine too." She rubbed her hands together, interlacing her fingers together and doing her best to express friendliness.
"No it's fine. It's fine…" Her lips twisted into a sad pout, and I felt like I had kicked a puppy. I placed a hand on her shoulder and that seemed to snap her out of her mood. Instead her eyes sparkled and her frown turned into an uncertain smile.
"That's good…I want you to enjoy the party…they're not really
my thing, but I have no reason to not support your birthday." I had to smile back at her own shyness about
us.
I wasn't any less nervous about this than she was. I had never dated anyone before, I hadn't even been sure I liked girls to begin with, and I believed my thoughts about them were out of petty jealousy rather than attraction. Though Basilia had proven that wrong even if it was completely by accident, plus technically speaking I was actually dating a guy. But one that was currently a woman-shaped person instead of a man-shaped person.
Which reminded me.
"How…how do you feel about yourself?" Her expression shifted, befuddlement obvious.
"Pardon?" I heaved out a sigh, and went for being more specific, hoping this wasn't going to be too personal.
"About being…you know." I gestured to my chest, and I caught her lingering gaze. I didn't much get it since it wasn't like there was
anything to see, not in comparison to her or Vicky.
"About being a woman?" I nodded at her answering whisper. She grimaced, her eyes shadowed by her unruly bangs. "I…never gave it too much thought besides considering my…gender identity much less important than I expected." She looked uncomfortable, fidgeting in her seat and sinking into the couch. "It was strange and hard to manage at first…but I learned to live with it and I learned…a few things about myself." She was silent and I offered her a shoulder to lean on, she took it with grace, resting her head on my left arm.
"So that's it?" She shook her head, her smile weak.
"Sometimes it's hard to look at myself in the mirror, and think that the person reflected there is
me." She was openly leaning on me, and I let her as she just talked. "I thought that I would be uncomfortable in my own skin, that I would feel something for what I used to look like. Apparently not." She laughed, though it was muffled since she was muttering into my shoulder. "It's honestly really confusing, I'm not sure what the term is for that…that kind of thing is not my strong suit." I wasn't sure what she was referring to but she didn't elaborate. "No what I have a problem with is…
other things."
"We can talk about it." The
look she gave me told me that forcing her to tell me would only end badly.
"Maybe someday…but not on your birthday." I sighed and kept my disappointment from showing on my face.
I knew that she was keeping so much close to her chest, and it was worrying even as slowly started to open up to what she was hiding. For example I knew that she said my world was
somehow a myth, that bending was a myth too. I had caught her slip-up but didn't call her out on it. Her world was strange, and I very much wanted to get to the bottom of it.
But she was
hurting. She pretended that everything was okay. I knew that it wasn't okay though, even if she pretended it was. She had lost her home, her friends, her family, her
world. She didn't get a choice in coming here, she had been
trapped here against her will, and it made me want to punch out whatever had done this to her.
Even if it was a literal god I was going to punch its face anyway, and if what Basilia said was true I had killed a god in another timeline. Pulling it off in this timeline shouldn't be impossible.
But it was hard to get her to open up when she didn't want to, and it was almost hypocritical how she said we should get up help but she didn't get help for herself. But there was the looks she gave me whenever I offered her time to vent that told me she knew that. That she knew she couldn't keep this up forever…
But she was right about one thing, now wasn't the time for moping, and it
was my birthday today. I had the right to celebrate it, and I had the right to spend it with people I care about.
On a whim I decided to grab onto Basilia's waist, and she let out the cutest squeak as I pulled her onto my lap. There was a wolf-whistle from Amy, a few of the green Workers mimicking her as they copied her bad example.
I rolled my eyes, and simply let it go. Basilia looked up, and I laughed at her dumb expression of surprise.
"Hi?" Her voice was cracking, and I was easily getting her tells. She was adorably awkward about these kinds of situations, and I couldn't help but tease her since she made it so easy.
"Hey there." She seemed to melt in my arms, and I smirked just the tiniest amount at her response. She was easy to fluster and I didn't have to try very hard to get her riled up.
"Did…you really have to do this?" She whined just the slightest amount, but the fact she was getting herself comfortable was more than telling.
"You make a better pillow than I do." She glanced down to herself, and shrugged helplessly.
"Apparently. Genetics for the win…" She said dryly. "So you think this party is going to pick up at all…? The parents are starting to get really drunk."
"Starting?" I snarked and got another shudder when I listened in on more bad singing, god Carol's voice was like listening to a banshee screaming into a barrel of beer. Dinah was throwing her cards up in the air, glaring daggers at Missy and Elle and Kaida.
Vicky had switched with Newter at some point, and was busy sharing a drink that I was
pretty sure was alcoholic, and Amy and Grace both looked rather tipsy. Charlotte was starting worriedly at them, and I nodded at her. She immediately understood my unspoken order.
Her power to read other people was really convenient sometimes.
"So…it's going to be a giant mess?" I laughed at Basilia's comment and leaned forward to plop a kiss on her forehead. She squeaked again, and she murmured her own affections.
It was going to be a mess…but it was
my mess.
___
June 19th, 2011. 11:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I kept my distance away from drunk Amy and failed to escape from her grasp, the brunette drunkenly singing a butchered theme song that I was very familiar with.
"Gwanna ba the very…best! Like no one evar wass…" I had to pry her grip off of me, and I was thankful that Shaper had a built-in off switch nowadays for situations like these. Grace had simmered at tipsy so she was the logical one of the duo…
oh god she was logical one of the duo.
"No…don't do that…yer…not supposed to lose your virginity just yet." I glared at Grace in outrage, and I caught her staring at my chest. "Well…least she's got nice tits." I squawked and was tempted to knock the two of them out before their insanity infects me.
"Holy…shit they're completely plastered." Crystal looked astounded and I couldn't deny that it was a little odd and I was increasingly convinced that drinking was
not for me. Not that the smell hadn't turned me off of it years ago.
"And they might need to lay down." Taylor's voice came out gruff from the couch, the bug girl clinging onto a large pillow like a hissing cat, glaring daggers at the drunk duo.
"I mean…you're right." I didn't disagree even with the slight discomfort in her tone.
"Hey. Hey. Hey!" I robotically mustered a glance towards Grace, bracing for the madness.
"What?" The dread was building at her sappy dumb face, the blush from the alcohol clear.
She pointed violently at my collar. "You. Me. Mila…and tall, dark and handsome over there." She gestured to a now red faced Taylor, and I felt my own face heat. "We got a bed, we got time and Tay's barely legal…you get the gi—" I lifted a finger back, and with gentle slowness pushed on her face with a delicate index finger. She tipped back, eyes crossing before she collided with Amelia and they fell into a sleeping drunkard cuddle pile.
I stepped backwards until I was a good ten feet away from the horny drunk college graduate, defensively raising my fists to strike at anyone I had to.
"Did…Grace just proposition me for a
foursome or did someone spike our drinks?" I pointed to my second cup of water tonight, and Crystal shook her head.
"No that happened…" Her brows dropped in what I sensed as paranoid worry. "You're not secretly building a harem are you?" The sheer terror she invoked with that thoughtless comment was beyond words.
"By the gods above and below
no." Her fascination at my curse was ignored by me as I broke out into a rant. "Those two are
batshit insane, one of them is an explosion tinker who can build bombs big enough to destroy a small state while the other is the most powerful biokinetic outside of Nilbog. Charlotte is nice but I don't think she's gay or bi, and everyone else is too young, too old or too crazy or both!" I shook her to further make my point, and she crept away from me with a fearful aura. "Plus harems are
stupid unless you're talking about a consensual polyamorous relationship." I'm not in the market for that, though it was something I was intrigued by…mostly in the sense of how it worked.
The only example I have was the creator of Wonderwoman and that one polyfusion from Steven Universe. I imagine it wasn't impossible but it required people with a certain type of mindset and willingness to communicate and compromise. Taylor was
probably not the right fit for that kind of relationship, and honestly I had no idea where my opinions lie on that myself.
So…ixnay on that hot mess.
"Which reminds me…where did Dean and Glory Girl go?" Taylor flushed at my question, dropping her face into her hands. Missy let out an angry chuff, and I quickly got what was going on.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me." I rubbed my face, not able to believe that this was happening.
"I've pretty much tapped out of the room they're in for my own sanity." There was so much that I sympathized with in that sentence that it was crazy.
"Maybe it's time to open your presents?" I tried to move on to a line of thought that didn't relate to the bunch of weirdos that I considered my friends for some inane reason.
"Hmm…what about everyone else though?" I pointed to the transparent sliding doors with a raised brow.
Carol was passed out, sprawled over her much less drunk husband while her sister and brother-in-law kept their own eyes on her. Dinah's mother was busy harassing another Rachni Warrior, dragging the thing out of a tree he had climbed without being crushed under the bug alien's weight. Her husband didn't,
couldn't stop her and there was a sudden flicker of terror at what Dinah would become.
Her power was becoming increasingly stronger, which when thinking about how her power was a heavily restrained Path to Victory could be quite scary. Though it seemed to be following a different algorithm, likely making use of Coil's shard to create new methods of predicting the future.
She at least seemed to have the ability to directly look into possible futures, but like any form of Precognition it was limited by bias and limited by the questions she could ask of it. Plus Blindspots, and even if she had less of them, they would generally be quite unpredictable due to interference from certain powers. There was the recursive loop of trying to predict what a Precog was going to do who was then trying to predict what
you were trying to do.
Precognition works through a combination of some of the most effective and accurate predictive algorithms known, their ability to compute at FTL speeds through portals and reality warping, and the ability to send out pulses from higher physical dimensions to map and scan planets to make their precognition accurate. They were then plugged into the network, gaining further information from dozens of other information gathering shards.
I hadn't spoken with Contessa much, but her shard was likely the same way and due to it not being dead it could freely leech energy from other worlds and tap into Eden shards to improve its predictions…and apparently tapped into Scion shards as well.
Queen called it an odd shard, it was
alien even to them but not actively malicious barring the events that turned Contessa Titan.
Best not to think about that scenario.
"Basilia." Taylor had
all her presents in hand, holding them aloft through a combination of
lift and
pull. "Could you help me with this one?" It was a present from Elle, and I couldn't help but be intrigued at what it was.
I could feel the whisper of spirits, and a single brush of my hand made the wrapping unfold itself. Taylor opened it up and found a key in it, one that looked like it was made out of bone.
"Skeleton key. It'll open almost any door." Taylor looked interested and a few butterflies flew around Elle for a moment.
Cute.
After that Taylor continued to open presents, since there was no cake after a few naughty Rachni had eaten it. Most of it was simple stuff, like clothes or even a few power made gifts. Theo had been nice enough to make art out of some aluminum he conjured up and then reshaped using bending. Amelia had gifted her a glowing lotus flower, one that she could use as a nightlight by pressing a fleshy button. It used sponge DNA to form glass fibers, and photophores to generate the light. Together an organic light bulb.
Her dad gifted her a wooden trinket he had clearly made himself while his friends gave her nice clothes. She whittled down the gifts until she was down to three people.
The gift delivered by a sleepy Kaida was revealed to be an old chipped blade with an engraving in Japanese. Collin got her some type of grappling hook, and now only mine were left.
Taylor smiled. "Did you really get me
two gifts?" I flushed.
"I only planned for one and thought about the second one at the last minute." I fussed with my hands hoping she would like the gifts.
"Which one is the original?" I pointed to the one wrapped in green, and she unfolded the gift using her hands to deftly unwrap the present. She held the gift in her hands, her face lighting up.
"Do you like it?" I was anxious, I didn't know much about gift giving and I wanted her to like what I had made. The gift had taken over three attempts, including earthbending and manual cutting and carving.
She lifted it up. "A necklace?" I nodded, anxiety churning my stomach. That had been my third idea for a gift, the first idea was a scarf, then a knife and then this.
It was a black choker, with a pendant made out of alexandrite that had been dug out of a mine on Earth Lotus. The jewel was carved and refined into the shape of a scarab beetle, something in me pushing to make the shape a reality.
"Put it on…I wouldn't give you
just a necklace." I encouraged her, happy to hear that she wasn't repulsed by it. She easily placed it around her neck, and I grinned as there was a flicker of energy around her.
"What does it do?" She glanced at the multicolored barrier around her, and I rubbed my hands together in glee.
"I bound a spirit from Fragile One's court, a spirit of Light and Protection. It can provide a shield that can block a heavy hit as well as Master powers." It's light would burn away outside influences, essentially making use of the idea of light as a purifying force. It was a better defense than even her barriers, though it would drop with a single large hit.
While replicating the power technologically was not an impossibility this required less maintenance as long as the spirit artifact could feed on ambient essence or be recharged by a shaman. Just binding the spirit took hours of effort and then it was a matter of days to make a good looking necklace.
So not mass reproducible until one could figure out how to fully turn shamanism into technology…which I
was dabbling with.
"Thank you." I preened at the words from Taylor, and I bowed my head in response.
It felt good to give presents. "Now what about this one?" She
pulled the larger boxed present, and I gave her the self evident permission to open it.
Charlotte was peering over from Theo's shoulder, as were the others who were not out of their minds. Taylor let out a sharp intake of air, and the torn wrapping was left to fall to the wayside. The box it was in had its aged wood repaired by spirits of healing, and what was held within was fixed by both myself and a random person experienced with repairing what had returned to Taylor.
She gently gripped onto a white flute that was pristine despite its age and wear. It was an
old instrument, far older than I had expected from what little I truly knew. Maybe a hundred years old and lovingly maintained despite all it has suffered through.
Most objects barely had spirits, some only had reflections of themselves in the spirit world. But this flute had a strong and resilient spirit, one that would endure as long as it stayed with those that owned it.
"You…found it?" She asked, voice faint.
"I had to learn a new trick…otherwise I would never have found it but yeah. Then I cleaned it up, so I thought I'd give it back to you." She held her mother's flute close to her chest, her fingers brushing along its smooth cylindrical surface.
Taylor crossed the six foot distance between us into two long strides, placing down the flute and grabbing me without a second thought. I was dipped, and my brain short-circuited when her lips met mine. We didn't kiss
too often, still testing out the waters on boundaries and our own levels of comfort. This was a little deeper and a little more intimate.
Even as the haze washed over, I still had time to think. It felt nice…she smelled nice and her lips were soft…softer than my chapped ones at least. This kiss lingered for more than ten seconds, and I let it happen…enjoying it until the moment she released me.
"You…liked the present?" I couldn't make words after that, since my brain was broken and Taylor broke my brain even more just by existing.
She
beamed. "I love it." there was a cheer from outside, and I knew this party was going to keep going for
much longer.
I was okay with that.
___
June 25th, 2011. 8:00AM
Basilia Rubio
The next morning was an easy morning for me to wake up, but it was obviously less so for everyone who had gotten drunk or plastered at the party. Most of the elders had not gone home, and had been left to conk out on the beds in the base.
I took a deep breath as I got up from the couch, eyes flitting about to stare at the people who had effectively slept over. That included the youngest of the guests, and luckily Missy didn't have issues with getting away from her parents with a party.
At least when
my parents got divorced they didn't try anywhere near as often to use their kids against each other. So she was here, slumping on one of the chairs while Dinah was sleeping on the table, holding a bunch of Uno cards to her chest. At some point Newter had left to head to Palanquin, and I had my suspicions on what he was up to.
None of my business what he does however.
"You hungry?" Taylor appeared above me, her long curly dark hair tickling my cheeks as she loomed over me. I tightened my hold on a warm blanket, and smiled at the sight of the necklace she was now wearing.
"Mhmm…hey Taylor." I grumbled a greeting, rubbing my crusted eyes and yawning loudly. "You…I'm not hungry…ate too much." I must have eaten three or four thousand calories in a single sitting and I was feeling the consequences some six hours later.
"I'll go wake Dinah and Elle." She stretched and I watched as she sauntered away, then poked the two youths with her index finger. Elle woke immediately, eyes bloodshot but perfectly aware. Dinah protested but the skinny blonde shaman took the opportunity to smoosh her face and make her wake up. Missy cracked and eye open, only pretending to be asleep for reasons I didn't understand.
I managed to rip myself away from the couch, and did my own stretch, standing on the tips of my toes as I extended my arms and body to the sky. There was a slight pulse of mild pleasure from cracking my bones, and my hands moved on to pulling back and then smoothing out my wavy hair.
"Someone is going to have to take Missy home." I talked to myself since Taylor was busy serving herself a cup of water, and I suddenly had a thirst for the clear liquid. I ended up grabbing a cup of my own, and quenching my thirst in the process.
Danny was up, bleary eyes blinking as she adjusted his glasses. He was the adult in the most control, the only one who had kept away from alcohol with even Dinah's parents falling prey to the drinks.
"So…did you have a good time?" Danny said in the dullest tone possible and Tay snorted.
"I feel like I should be asking you that instead." He smirked.
"Capes are crazy."
…
All in all it had been a good party and a good day in general, and the relaxation had gotten me in the mood to push Athena and White Lotus plans forward. The time for action was coming, and I wasn't going to be left behind.
So once I have breakfast I'm going to get right on that…it was going to be a
long process.
But it would be worth it in the end. Even if only to put my own mind at ease.
___
AN: Not much to say on 9.5 other than that it came out at nearly 11K words, and that follow up chapters should be closer to the usual 6-9K range. Besides coming up with one background that was not originally in the outline until I made this one. 9.6 already has 2.5K words, so the new 4 day update schedule shriek simplify things. Enjoy and reply if there's anything off with it.
