Recuperation 9.7
June 30th, 2011. 5:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I moved quickly, unencumbered by armor as I formed a wave of earth beneath my feet, and pumped my arms to push the wave of earth forward. The earth flowed and I let out a whoop as I accelerated to speeds that would probably kill me if I was a normal human. To my left I saw that Sveta was keeping up with me, making use of her unusual biology to keep moving at top speed without tiring.
A brief test using her tendrils ended up launching herself well over a hundred and seventy feet in the air, and she tumbled
through a block of cast iron I had laying around for metalbending practice. She was seemingly much stronger than before, but only if she exerted herself. Instinctual uses of her power on unarmored people did much less damage than they should, like she was hugging chunks of metal instead of living people.
Even so it still caused bruises and made her hysterical, so for now she was partnered with Vicky. On a shard level, Queen was making adjustments to Nautilus, so the shard would restructure and fold and someday it would bud in the future.
It was
easy to sink into the logic of the shard, easy to understand their alien thoughts and mental processes. It was no less difficult than understanding the logic of the spirits, and the shards themselves were at a strange precipice between soul and spirit. It made sense too…because I was a being that was both shard and not, even if one who was restricted to the frame of a human.
Not that there was anything wrong with that.
The Entities were not a species I wanted to emulate outside of their ability to warp reality. They were selectively stupid in a way I didn't tolerate, like babies given god-like power and with all the creativity of a computer.
She hasn't been fully filled in on every detail on our mission, and she had a weekly session with Doctor Yamada coming up later. For now we gave it a few weeks to adjust to not being inside an asylum, and the weekly sessions would likely stay in place for months.
Though it was clear that she knew a lot more than she let on but was willing to go at her own pace as we set things up. Obviously her shard had been whispering to her like they did to certain capes like Fragile One. She could also be considered our second pure brute on the team, since we used barriers and our physical toughness made us brute 3 at best.
I could very much see why she had managed to kill so many people, and Vicky would be good for her, and she was obviously friendly with a certain metallic soon to be former Ward.
I was definitely going to have to take some care on how we broached
that subject, because if the Case 53s were going to find out I would rather try to preempt some of the stupidity of them trying to kill Cauldron during the literal
end of the world.
If they're going to kill them, do it
later when the world isn't falling apart, at least in this case where we have an actual chance at not dying off as a species.
But I wasn't going to bet on that going well, so I had contingencies so they wouldn't try to kill me for the 'ties' to Cauldron that I wanted nothing to do with. Which was why I was making a nice and cutesy presentation explaining in detail why Cauldron committed their horrific atrocities for the greater good.
Moving on.
I kept swinging my arms, and Sveta's legs unraveled and a bracing of poweful muscles launched her forward like a grasshopper and accelerated past me without a struggle. She was one of the fastest people on the team, equaling the speed of an airbender but without any bending or special powers besides her own beating soul.
I let the earth slip away from my grasp, and with another shout I
exploded out in a burst of compressed wind. Air friction became a thing of the past, and my hair whipped past me as I sprinted on the wind.
I immediately matched up with Sveta, and I marveled at her ludicrous speed and the sheer amount of power that had to be outputted from the muscles to do this much work. The nervous system was a net of conductive polymers interlaced with copper and encased in an insulating waxy lipid, sending signals at immense speed to let Sveta move and react at the speeds that she can launch at.
I eventually slipped ahead of her, bounding from step to step in the fashion that airbenders did. Sveta finally slowed down, and a Rachni soldier gave her a fruity juice before wandering off to perform manual labor.
I rolled in the air, and with another laugh I did a cartwheel to slow down from about a third of the speed of sound to a standstill in the span of several rolls. I pulled back my hair, and pulled out a blue hair tie from the many pockets of my green cargo pants. Once my hair was up in a ponytail, I adjusted my tank-top, briefly scratching my stomach as I took the time to look around the local grass plain.
A few strange native animals grabbed my attention, a large avian creature about as tall as Manpower, a short beak poking out from the fluff of fleshy cheeks. It sort of looked like a feathered biped hadrosaur, and a yawn revealed grinding plates forming a sort of jaw-tongue that the beast was using to trim tall grass. It was a large animal, easily six hundred pounds based on the vibrations I was picking up with my feet.
It was this that saved me from an embarrassing tumble when a large feathery predator emerged from the darkness of a bordering woodland. This was a real monster, about ten feet tall and twenty feet in length and covered in a mottled brown and black feathery coat. It caught one of the grazing birds, and with a snap of a pseudo-toothed beak snapped the long neck of a majestic gazelle equivalent.
It was a big one, a three thousand pound monster with a bite force of more than two thousand PSI. The top predator in the region, and a shockingly social one though this elder was currently alone. It easily cut into the flesh, and slashed at the grazer's hide with its massive foot claws.
I simply called him Bishop.
The old bird tilted its head at me, and I simply lifted an eyebrow right back. I could hear his questions as if they were in my own mind, and I shrugged.
You have brought the Many-Limbed Mimic…why?
I scoffed at the beast, wrapping my arms around my slim stomach. "Because she's part of my team. Besides she's not one of the Many-Limbed Stalkers, they only have ten limbs at
most." I waved off his concern.
You speak the truth, Emerald Child.
The elder let out another chuff before taking off with his kill, and Sveta was staring at me from a perch in the shadows of a large tree.
"Did…did you just talk back to a giant bird?" She sounded confused and I giggled at her utterly baffled expression.
"I'm a shaman, we'll talk to toasters just as readily as we'll talk to trees, animals and people." She looked no less baffled, and a loud boom echoed out from a nearby mountain that was serving as a launch site for the Rachni. We were a good one hundred miles from the main base on Earth Lotus, and thus seventy miles away from the first Rachni hive.
"Okay…" Sveta left, and I took the time out of my time to think as I leapt from free to tree towards a local observation base for animal watching.
The Rachni had been
busy, numbering about 20,000 with the number of Queens having gone up from three to seven, four young ones sent out with armed guards and workers to take to the stars once again. They would be taking at least one to three weeks to start putting out their own eggs and starting their own bloodlines.
There was still an usually low number of auxiliaries, but 20 Warriors and 200 soldiers were nothing to scoff at. A single warrior would qualify for about a Brute 5+, while soldiers were Brute 3+
without accounting for technological aids like living armor, kinetic barriers, and mass effect firearms. Each worker was relatively weak but they could survive in almost any conditions, could spit deadly acid and build nuclear reactors from scratch. With the same acid spitting applying to higher Rachni.
Their four systems currently had patrol boats keeping an eye out, and they were laying down an orbital assembly plant to pump out frigates and eventually cruisers. It was actually rather impressive on how fast they were at putting down roots, and I could only imagine what another two years would do for them, and then another two years including Ward.
They were almost certainly taking notes on my own technology, and making use of their inherited genetic memory from their work on the Crucible…though they had apparently had the schematics plucked from their memory.
A…rather frightening aspect since that involved precise manipulation of metaphysical psychic memory. Probably for the best however since whatever sorcery the Crucible caused was strong enough to destroy the Reapers and their maker and end the cycles of extinction. Something powerful enough to engulf an entire galaxy was
not something that needed to exist.
I had also built a bunch of guns, perhaps a little too many. I could probably arm everyone in the city in a matter of a few days(weeks?) if I felt like it too. The Rachni were also building military vehicles, including gigantic tank-walkers some seventy meters long and smaller tendril-tanks with mass lightened treads. I had a few patrol boats, gunships, and fighting vehicles as required and quite a few sets of armor as required.
Teaching the team how to use the weapons wasn't the easiest prospect, simply because I had a complete lack of military experience, and I cheated a bit with implants and auto-targeting software.
Though it turns out Melanie is very good at using guns, and picked up on how to use mass effect weapons very quickly and was taking up the slot of teaching everyone else now. Unfortunately a good amount of that was only useful for specific situations since mass killing criminals was
not a long term solution for fixing literally anything. The Drug War back home was a testament to that, though cape gangs were a little more simple as well as less simple.
Taylor of course made an amazing sniper and I once saw her shoot a penny out of the air from three kilometers out. Bakuda was in turn amazing at throwing bombs, and built herself a fuckoff huge grenade shotgun that hit like a tank. Plus her Halcyon cannons were limited applications of Stilling.
In…fact speaking of Taylor, I spotted her patrolling along the tiny base and grinned as I squatted on a large branch, my hands providing further support as I grasped the swaying tree part.
Taylor didn't seem to notice me, though based on how the insects were swarming away from me that had more to do with practicing her powers than a true lack of awareness. I watched, curious to see what she was going to do with her growing power.
She gathered a swarm of insects, creating a swelling mass as they floated in the influence of her telekinetic rotes. She snapped her finger, and in a blink the mass accelerated like a bullet and collided with a solid chunk of rock. There was a hiss that followed as the mass spread out, the rock breaking down as they burrowed into it while surrounded by a blue-white aura.
A modified telekinetic attack, breaking molecular bonds and weakening the rock as the insects cut into it. A sort of replication of
warp by precise teleportation of force carriers to break up matter. The heat from breaking the bonds was absorbed by her shard, likely a modular set of reality warping methods that Taylor could click together to generate offensive or defensive effects.
One effect formed a kinetic energy absorbing Breaker field, negating kinetic attacks and momentum. It wasn't indestructible however, because the Sapphire Queen couldn't directly make use of other shards to make her power more efficient. The dimensional portals had leakage, and could only divert so much power at a time.
Studying Taylor had been an
excellent use of my time, since both she and Elle worked on the nitty-gritty weeds of mathematical formulas and equations describing the specific methods of warping reality that the Entities made use of.
As shard-spirits, they had a unique set of abilities that were intrinsic to them and dimensional transference and spatial warping were two of them. It was literally what they had evolved into…and it meant I had a lot of examples to pull from when examining Taylor's powers.
It didn't hurt that Taylor was nice to look at.
The kinetic energy could also be reflected back, looping back the kinetic energy through another set of portals with a mild efficiency hit. So the right modular code could make a less versatile Assault powerset.
In this case it was purely making use of Queen's own abilities, her ability to shunt matter and energy between realities was of course rather innate, and honestly I was starting to wonder if Taylor couldn't just open up portals to spew out whatever she wished. It was how she made her commander bugs, with some of her food being broken up to fuel a biological matter printing process to create special bugs.
They then proceeded to push out of her body through a short-lived dimensional bridge and were smarter, tougher and better able to handle the stress of acting as portals for powers.
Her heavy Trump aspect was basically a shard waste powerset but paying some respects to the concept of administration. Dimensional shifting and then creating powers from that, flight, and the general applications of entity powers.
But her powers were less efficient and not as intuitive as they are for other people, and she couldn't turn herself into Alexandria even with a suit of minion meat. Though making herself far tougher than she should be was an easy feat with her armor. She couldn't do something ridiculous like stealing powers, but she could link up different functions to form a single power. Grab water from one dimension, sap heat energy from it until it freezes and then launch it with a telekinetic push.
I…was probably going to have to check on that with her, see if she can pull it off even indirect. There might be a limit to only diverting energy.
Taylor spun her swarm around until it formed a shield, insects clinging onto each other with their legs and their bodies shimmering as they were saturated with power. One of the drones was commanded to let loose a barrage of 2mm mass accelerator bullets and they plink off of the bug barrier as their kinetic energy was robbed. She made a slicing motion with her arms, and the shimmer shifted and the swarm came down like a knife and cut the unshielded drone in half.
With a smirk I make my entrance and turn myself into a human cannon, Taylor turned on her heels and swept her swarm out of the way. I collided with her, and I let out a squeak when my chest hits her face for a moment before I slid down a bit.
"Hey there." I let my voice turn a little sultry and husky, and Taylor let out a grumble that told me that my choice of tone was working. I was more than willing to use my newfound feminine wiles, and Taylor didn't seem to mind it.
"You're a lot more affectionate than I thought you would be." She didn't resist the urge to cuddle though, and I wiggled my hip as I slid back down to my feet.
"We're both touch starved and your muscles are nice." She flushed and I didn't much care that I was acting a little more feminine. Taylor's little ticks and her blushes were
adorable and precious.
I…felt my own face brighten, as I noted just how tall she was. My face was about upper chest to shoulder height with her, and if I leaned up on my toes a little I could nestle into the crook of her neck.
"You're very nice to hug too…I like your b—" She cut herself off, her face going nuclear. What had she been going to say?
"We should really go on a date sometime, just the two of us." She looked surprised at my easy admission, but I was in a good mood and I wanted to date the hell out of her right now.
She smiled sincerely. "That would be
really nice but we're still getting everything in order and the Voyagers needed to talk with you." I wilted, but didn't try to hide it behind a fake smile.
No point to lying.
"I'm going to hold you to that. There's probably a lot of bending based pick-up lines I can make use of."
"Please don't." She might
sound horrified at the prospects but I in fact enjoyed puns and we needed more of them in this bleak and cruel world.
"So did they want to see me now or…?"
"You have about thirty minutes to freshen up." I grinned and gave her a peck on the cheek, she smiled and I immediately went on the plan of ruining it.
"See ya honeybee." Her expression was
priceless and I waggled my eyebrows. "You know…like BEES!" I fluttered my fingers and made the sound and she made a choking sound that was either frustration or laughter.
"Just go." She was exasperated, and I tilted backward into a dimensional doorway.
"I'll
bee back." She let out a chortle and I left right then and there, shutting the door behind me.
I glanced down at my sweat-soaked clothing and knew a hot shower was in order.
___
June 30th, 2011. 5:35PM
Basilia Rubio
I pranced about in one hundred pounds of armor until I skidded to a stop in front of a bemused Echidna. Most of her team was apparently elsewhere, though I could see Rhizome working on a computer, several cloned organisms circling around him with light clicking sounds. Cody was lounging about, frowning as she gripped onto her long hair…the Japanese girl they had stolen from the Yangban was rubbing her shoulders and I nodded respectfully.
I could easily imagine that she was dealing with the change much more poorly than I was. I was weird and didn't mind it in the specific sense of it messing with my head but
did dislike the lack of consent of effectively being mutilated against my will.
I just didn't like thinking about it and Cody made that harder.
I blocked that line of thought from my mind, and greeted Noelle. "Hello again. It's been a while since we've seen each other…probably a little too long when I have the ability to get you all home." Cody chuckled darkly but was quickly distracted by her friend.
"It's not a problem…we needed a break first and foremost and we can go back at any time as long as we ask." Noelle had a calm demeanor, a rather different prospect from her insanity due to the incorrect configuration of her power. "But that's not really too important right now…I've been thinking about the future of my team."
Here we go.
"Go on?" I was hesitant on what exactly this was about, because I didn't really fancy outnumbering the government and getting them all flustered. Though that possibility had long since left the station when I had an alliance with an alien race, I could set up bases on other worlds and built weapons capable of damaging Endbringers.
"We finally have a way back…but a lot of our members are
from Earth Bet and and I'm not so sure the PRT will enjoy former criminals gallivanting on another Earth."
"Well Rhizome wasn't exactly an angel before you…honestly I have no idea how in god's name you ended up with each other." Noelle looked contrite, and Rey looked like he was in hell.
"I like to think this is divine providence for being an asshole." He turned back to his work and I couldn't disagree with his statement. He had
multiple assaults to his name, as well as damage to property and certainly a murder to his name. The only time he had stepped up was against Bonesaw and that was butterflied away.
Without him or Cranial the Slaughterhouse 9000 was a no-go, and there weren't really many other options.
"I didn't really have many other options…and Noelle is nice enough." Fume Hood didn't seem to mind though I wondered how a group this size managed to survive for so long. Undersider-type groups were much more stable due to the conflict drives, a combination of minor shard interference and preying upon psychologically broken people. Plus
major shard interference towards capes that can make a difference like Tinker 15.
His fate was beyond horrifying but it wasn't outside of the norm from what I had learned from scrolling through the history of the Citadel races in the past. They had done some war crimes at least a few times, and the Reapers abominations gave me nightmares.
"Well…it turns out to be a lot easier to corral capes when you can make their shards shut the hell up." Noelle replied bluntly, and I remembered she was fused with her shard and thus was capable of broadcasting to other shards. "I had to figure it out all on my own…but that's just what shaman have to work with." I had never gotten any advice on communing with spirits, that was more instinctual as well as a case of natural talent.
"How…is that anyway?" I was too curious for my own good.
"It's…overwhelming, there's so much information…so much data and instincts that I have to fight and break." She looked tired but relieved. "But I pretty much have complete access to what I took from Division."
So she could clone capes by grabbing pieces of other shards, and could probably make use of other expressions of Division to some extent. At the least she could generate new shards to add to her network but with her stable mind wouldn't screw up other shards by forcing them to overbud.
With Rhizome, she could bind a shard to a few bodies and program the bodies into living biological weapons. Or simply unleash shards into the physical world…though she didn't do that because it would bring too much attention. She could also steal shards, though that required killing their hosts and using the same mechanism to force buds and turning it into a crude version of Glaistig Uaine's harvest.
Or maybe it was something like creating a cluster similar to Null, though her shard was only so large and powerful since she hadn't consumed the entire thing. Either way she had then reassigned the shard to her little orphan buddy and edited it by adding buds from the former Yangban member/prisoner.
"So you want us to what…keep an eye on your Bet teammates so they don't pull off something stupid?" Noelle nodded, and I was now being appointed to being the watchdog of a second biotinker, a poison throwing dumbass, a little kid with vast strength and power resisting aura, and a fugitive from a dictatorship run on slaves with superpowers. With a power making use of nullification waves using a shard that was a cousin to Stilling.
The main difference was that the shard was smaller and thus had less overall power to offer its host, and less modularity to its nullification waves.
"What exactly do I get in return for this mess…? Because I have no reason to trust the man who used to be Blasto, and I have enough on my plate with the size of my team."
"We have a
lot of powers to offer." She gestured to herself and her joint creations. "I know you've been working on studying Parahuman powers and I might be able to help with that."
I took a soothing breath, and acceded to the madness. "That…should be acceptable, but I have my doubts that you're leaving this to just me."
She laughed, rubbing her cheeks and shaking her head. "You'd be right about that, the PRT is going to make regular rounds and while they're not going to try to arrest Rey anymore. They're not going to let their guard down either…and he'll have to work for it."
Rey scoffed. "Hey…I managed to save that village in Puebla didn't I?" Noelle gave him a skeptical look.
"Only after that blood spirit tried to drink you like a fruit juice pack. You built a giant frog-bear-lizard
thing and bought me time to gather some styptic herbs."
"There was that time with the Bear spirit…" Rey sounded sheepish, scratching the back of his neck.
"You knew this wasn't going to be easy from the start, you hurt and scared a lot of people…
I hurt and scared a lot of people." There was certainly a history I wasn't familiar with here, which made sense to my mind because I wasn't the center of the universe. Shit happened outside of my range of influence, and some of it was good while some of it was bad or even neutral.
"So I'll be your teammates' minders along with whoever the PRT assigns." I pretended to not be exasperated, and Noelle quietly confirmed it.
"Pretty much, and since the arrangements have been made I wanted to…get it done." Her voice was soft, and I could hear loud shuffling from the Aleph natives peeking from a door in the warehouse they had somehow acquired legally.
"Gate to Earth Aleph." An interface formed in front of me, and my machine spirits sent a scanning pulse along higher dimensions, narrowing it down to a single location. Madison, Wisconsin was on the other end and the portal itself had been placed down far out of sight from anyone capable of sensing it.
It's not quite as instantaneous as Doormaker but it was still an effective substitute for the guy, and without the moral implications of using broken people as tools. Most of my work with portals was in figuring out how to better utilize them with my technology that didn't involve other dimensions.
My Nihilim cannons were crude weapons, brute-force portals diverted massive amounts of energy from other dimensions to power the machine and warp space. The mechanism for spatial warping was a miniaturized Posigravity drive. This was made possible by the micro-fusion reactor that opens up dimensional rifts, dark energy slipping through to power a metric-altering wave of warped space.
But I could certainly make better equipment, make smaller more efficient portals that would lose less energy to defects in the metric. However this portal was more than good enough for what it was needed for and the expression on the Voyager's faces made that obvious.
"I will set up a base of operations…then we'll try to figure out what we'll tell our families." She stepped through in a hurry, numerous creations following behind her. Most of the team ducked back behind the door, and I could hear loud and annoying muttering from them as they left to
do something.
I shut the door so that energy wouldn't be wasted holding it open, and I was left in an awkward silence with Rhizome, Cody and her friend…?
"You're going home then? I'm sure your parents will be surprised." She spoke with a mild Japanese accent, and Cody scowled.
"Asami…not now,
please." Asami pouted but listened to her friend and simply helped her relax, humming a tune I vaguely recognized. It was almost sad, and I swore I should be able to remember it but I couldn't.
I…had no reason to be here anymore, but it felt rude to leave and I would probably need to open the door for Echidna again. So I was going to wait until she was done with whatever she was working on.
I found my way to their couch, ugly as sin but heavenly in its support and softness despite looking like wet garbage. And that was from under the layers of armor and bodysuit made out of tough fiber. Couldn't begin to imagine what it would be like with a single layer of clothing.
Rhizome was working on his computer; and I decided that was the best use of my time. I was a wet tinker, though I had nothing on the very high tiers of biotinkers on the planet with some of the more bullshit uses of biokinetic powers.
I glanced over his shoulder and while at first he looked annoyed, it became less so when I started to rapidly scan the written genetic code running on the computer.
A scan of one of the bodies in his machines found an eclectic genetic admixture of human, bird, crustacean, and axolotl. Though the human part seemed to be specific lines of code that corresponded to the growth of a Corona Pollentia and little else. That was something I had noticed myself when I analyzed the gene sequences of capes. Simulations indicated that growing a clone would clone the Corona Pollentia, which was rather obvious even before I had come here.
He was creating sterile organisms with power expressions weaved into them, though there was some stray genes relating to parthenogenesis from monitor lizard DNA.
"You should probably update this one's genetic code, it's got parthenogenesis working." Rey paled.
"Okay…that shouldn't be…
shit." He cancelled a procedure on his laptop, and the life signatures on the organism all flatlined at once. Three redundant hearts stopped beating blood, the complex unidirectional saccular respiratory system stopped bringing in oxygen, and electrical activity in the computer-like brain ceased.
He had rigged up a method of controlling the organism with precise pulses of light like what was done with certain biological experiments back home but far more advanced.
"I guess you really do need to be watched." His face twisted into a scowl and I grinned cheekily even if he couldn't see. I didn't much like him but it was going to be
fun to mess with the guy.
Heh.
___
June 30th, 2011. 7:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I sat comfortably in the glowing library of knowledge lying within my soul, opening the text dedicated to a particular species that I knew well at this point. I gladly read the old words, perhaps some of the last words of a race long dead.
The Thirty were ancient hunting clans, the only Asari to be taught by the goddess Athame and the first to found the great thirty cities of Thessia. They accrued wealth and power due to their proximity to the seas and it's bounty and…
I snapped a book shut as I heard some footsteps, and listened carefully as I saw a figure in the distance of the mind palace. It was a woman in blue, her fine features obscured by distance and by a spiritual fuzz that blinded me. She was looking at a book, and glanced at me before scurrying off into the deeper recesses of the vast memory palace.
I shook my head, feeling quite irritated at the fact that most of the aliens in my brain didn't seem eager to talk. So I decided to move from looking at Asari history to looking at the history of the Thranx. The library melted into a cacophony of sound and a flurry of color and light.
What I saw was much more vast than I expected, rows upon rows of books continuing on for what felt like miles. Like every text in here they sparkled with emerald, and I blinked once I realized they weren't all in the written language of the Thranx. It was some type of symbolic cant, capable of converting both their complex whistles and clicks and gestures with their multiple limbs into a written and understandable form.
I could just about write in it but the language gave people headaches due to its complexity, though teaching them the spoken variety was easier with a little tongue twisting. Getting
their history was difficult due to the fog, but as I made more and more use of their technology, the fog appeared to clear up with time.
Laser and plasma weapons were seemingly not uncommon, and I had managed to create a vibro-blade vibrating at 50 gigahertz. The specially designed blade would vibrate back and forth 50 billion times a second, more than enough to obliterate matter.
A bit…how should I say this…stereotypical and impractical with modern technology but possible. Not
useless though, though it really was more of a novelty item that needed significant resources, supermaterials and then be designed to be safe to prevent carpal tunnel that made it kind of garbage.
The particle beam and laser pistols were neat enough though, but quite odd in how they functioned.
I moved on from those thoughts and began to walk across the library, and saw scenes of dead races, flashes of memory that were lifeless and empty even as events and strife and war and conflict and peace and love and every possible spectrum of emotion existed within them. Two of the races were familiar, one was Thranx while the other was…human.
They looked human, they sounded human, they
were human. Centuries passed by in the blink of an eye, wars and conflict and galactic intrigue and apocalyptic threats from behind the stars. But no matter how much time passed there was no bending, no spirits…and certainly no Eezo.
But it didn't mean they didn't have powers, though they seemed to be limited to Empaths and Telepaths. Thousands of years start to pass by, and one by one the various species start to wink out until only a half dozen remain, including humans and Thranx before they too winked out of existence.
Eventually only a single species remained, an ursanoid alien much larger than a man and twice as broad. They were building tunnels and the group collectively lifted their heads in seeming realization.
For a moment there was a flash, a memory of an empire that spread across a million stars, building atop the corpses of dead stellar nations, long since decayed to near nothingness before they too winked out from existence.
There were a lot of texts now, and I knew it wasn't going to be quick or easy to start writing down what little I could manage or translate.
"At some point you're going to have to talk to me." I called out the people who were in my head, and who were thankfully busy doing their own thing inside whatever space held the spirit of Veda.
I didn't get an answer back, and with a sigh I let myself sink back into my physical body. The library flew apart and I was back in my room, sitting in a Lotus position and shimmering a bright emerald. The sensation of unadulterated
power faded and rubbed my face as the headache from diving
deep started to set in.
I had kept trying to piece together the past, and each time I got more and more questions than answers. In the last cycle of the Reapers there were humans and the Thranx themselves became the closest allies of humans, though they certainly weren't the
same humans.
Why and how?
The worst part was that this clearly wasn't happening as soon after as I had originally expected. There was some vast gap of time between the rise of this particular era, at least millions of years if not hundreds of millions of years. There was also the intuition that getting the full picture was beyond my ability, that the restrictions to only a few branches was deliberate. Tinkers had access to the database of hundreds if not thousands of species, but distilled down into a specific specialization, whether a methodology, a certain type of technology or a more general power due to minimum restrictions like Hero.
I was still trying to figure out how to make improvements to what I had gleaned from the races I had on hand. The Posigravity drive was being tweaked constantly, and it had been dismantled three times in the course of the last month to increase its efficiency. Vista has been a boon with some scanning pulses whenever she used her power, providing efficiency boosts of more than 25% or so.
I
needed a fast ship, something capable of traversing space at speeds that wouldn't take decades to cross the galaxy. That was certainly
not going to be the first model however, and the Entities became a much bigger problem if I decided to push myself out too far. There was the vague feeling to keep away from Earth Bet's sets of Andromeda's but that didn't tell me shit beyond that.
"God this is getting tiring." My belly rumbled and I realized I was hungry and angry at the same time.
Hangry?
I growled.
Let's go with that.
I launched myself onto my feet, and instead of opening the door normally I entered the Outer Sphere for shits and giggles. Spirits wandered about in my home, and the door was open here while it was closed in the physical world. I stepped through the door and with another blink I was on the other side.
I stomped down the hallway of the second floor, and leapt off to land gently on the first floor and was glad for the way the building was built to facilitate such childish tomfoolery.
I thought of making something but my eyes instead caught on to a clear plastic box of chocolate chip cookies and the decision was made on what my dinner would be for tonight. I grabbed a glass of milk, a sweeter brand that I preferred for its lack of lactose even if my body perfectly tolerated the stuff with my genetic enhancements.
Not that I had any actual issues with lactose, that was more a habit I had gotten from my mom buying the stuff for my brother(I think?) for years. The brand was delicious so it's what I ended up sticking with even in another world.
I was a creature of habits and routine.
I skipped over to the empty dinner table, and sat my butt down on the soft plush chairs I had bought what felt like a lifetime ago. I dunked a cookie into the water, and once it was softened enough bit into the delicious and unhealthy treat.
I was…reminded of home, even if the choice of brand was different, even if the milk didn't taste quite the same and the cookies had a slightly different texture.
Was I happy?
I stilled at the question to myself, feeling at a loss for words on how I should answer that. I was safe, I hadn't died even if there had been far too many close calls…and I hadn't lost anyone except…
I remembered the Endbringer memorial that had been put in place, a large pillar of stone made by bending and then reinforced by Tinkertech to make it tough enough and dense enough to resist further manipulations. Out of more than two hundred participants just under a tenth had died, mostly out of towners but we had lost a few no-name independents and Velocity.
Of all the names he could have had…Robin was certainly one of the most fitting.
He had been killed when Leviathan had managed to shatter the city barriers, I remember catching a glimpse of his body as it was
crushed, the waters turning red even as he had tried to accelerate away from the danger and failed. Even when my eyes closed I saw it and I saw the sheer hate on Leviathan's face as he did all he could in trying to murder me.
If any more of my tech hafailed at any instant we would have failed and I'd be six feet underground at best and scattered pieces of rotting flesh at the bottom of the ocean at worst. My cannons were only barely reliable and I had needed at least one or two more iterations for a more reliable and stable system…Bakuda had to patch them just so they wouldn't accidentally kill everyone by generating a singularity.
If he had arrived faster he would have torn through the barriers and picked us apart. If he had stopped jobbing sooner and gone full Skitter on us with hundreds of water echoes we would be dead. If my prediction on his Manton limits has been wrong he would have made us explode like balloons.
I remember my ribs cracking, my arm retching itself out it's socket. The burning in my chest and the overwhelming grief at watching someone I loved die. Because I
did love her…and not just her, I loved my friends, the people willing to stick by my side and stick with my nonsense and awkwardness and occasional social gaffes.
I had been so afraid.
That loss of autonomy and control as I entered that rage state was beyond
revolting and I still shuddered when I tried to think back to what had triggered it and about whether it would happen again without my control.
I barely restrained myself from shattering the glass of milk in my hand, and tried the breathing exercises. They worked by only the slimmest of margins nowadays so I dunked another cookie.
I wanted to scream but didn't want to make my neighbors suffer, the lady next door had a cute little baby and I didn't want to disturb them more than I had with fixing up cars for people in the area. It…was something I had picked up on doing when I had the urge to get down and tinker without having to leave the house and gave me an excuse to need parts.
Getting a driver's license was also easier than I thought, and I was fairly sure I had a Thinker ability related to the operation of things I make like Squealer.
"Haaaa…" A sigh came from my mouth and I continued to munch on my cookie until it was gone. I leaned my head back to stare at the ceiling.
…
It wasn't going to get easier from here…that much I was sure about.
___
AN: Turn out dealing with Earth Bet's shit brings a lot of stress and grief.
