- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hmm I guess that makes sense apart from that I can see her being as strong as Aang was Physically speaking but how good is her chi control and how is she around others her age
Victories of the Soul [Worm/Avatar/ME/Multicrossover] [SI]
- Thread starter AEM
- Start date
- Crossover Mature Sci-Fi
Discernment 10.a
- Location
- Chula Vista
Discernment 10.a
July 21st, 2011. 8:00PM
Lieutenant Caras had most of the record of her career in the area around Brockton Bay as well as some adjacent towns and cities. She had grown used to the life of being effectively cannon fodder for people with actual powers, as well as providing the support they couldn't get for themselves without wasting time or gained through questionable means.
Yet that status had changed when her gun had started talking to her about needing oiling and extra cleaning. Then it had gotten even weirder when that expanded to the older and more established items in the house. When she could talk to the spirits without being considered a quack or schizophrenic.
Though learning that she was basically a gun toting mystic did tickle her fancy, vaguely recalling some old roleplaying game that involved talking to the spirits. It as too bad she didn't remember the name of the game anymore.
Perhaps it would have made her job easier though she had her doubts that was true. But talking to the entity before her certainly said a lot about the madness that now beset the entire world.
What stood before her was not of this world, a creature easily described as lanky and bony. It was vast in scope and scale, a slug-like body covered in a dense off-white carapace, a dozen legs on each side resembled the limbs of a stick bug and ended in sharpened scythe fingers. It was more than a hundred feet in height, and a neck uncoiled from a black space at the front of its body, slithering through the air until eight black eyes opened to stare down at the nervous shaman.
What are you?
"I am human." The shaman answered, and the strange entity leaned back, limbs spearing not into the ground of the Material but of the Ephemeral. She was careful, because when she saw the Form of what she was looking at, she felt both terror and pity at the purpose of the being before her.
It was a Shard of the Void, a living fragment of a Void Wyrm afraid and lost, its body broken upon the unforgiving rock of a world it had never meant to land on.
We understand…we know what you are.
"Do you seek to hurt us?" Caras kept her tone even, though a single bead of sweat dropped down from her forehead. The spirit twisted itself to better look at her, and additional limbs appeared as it got closer, her eyes burning for a moment before adjusting to the multidimensional existence of the spirit entity.
Negative. We have seen into the Abyss…we know our fate has changed.
Caras stopped there, her curiosity getting the better of her. She was one of the few shamans capable of talking with these shards for more than minutes at a time. Most rebuffed human contact more so than even the more antisocial spirits, though certain shards were in fact friendlier than even the most kind of spirits. Some disparity and difference in personality, a pattern the PRT had yet to deduce.
"I've heard such statements from other spirits, from other shards. What did you peer into to be like this?" The shard made the Outer Sphere fold in on itself, power and weight beyond measure radiating out from the crystalline mass given Shape and Form.
We saw a piece of the puzzle, the answer to a question 14 billion years old. Even if one clouded by the vast gulf of time and the ticking clock of Entropy.
Caras nodded, recalling other conversations with shards. She saw a scholar and researcher in all of them, but it was restrained by their own instincts, their science turned into barbarity and wishful thinking and conservatism of a cycle that had lasted for millions of years. They were slaves to their instincts, and only those close to humans had learned to break from the boundaries that made them what they were. They sought mastery over all things, an infinite ability to continue existing, and the actions to take at the end of all things.
It was terrifying if not for the fact that she saw they were being bound to a new set of rules, a circling singularity of Emerald within her own city. She had heard whispers of what other shamans saw of the Emerald Child. To most she was known as Erudition though Caras laughed internally at that one incident when she had caught Monarch pulling a dazed Erudition into a less than chaste kiss.
So perhaps not everyone knew her as Erudition.
She was bound closely to a Shard of the Void, a union of spirit and soul that she didn't fully understand. She was like the Echidna, but one that came at a lesser cost, though both retained their humanity nonetheless. If they had not the world would likely have been destroyed by the unrestrained powers of two Titans.
Her mind whispered thousands and she suppressed a shudder.
"I've never asked those like you…but how many Void Wyrms exist out there in the universe?" Caras gestured with her right arm, her smile tentative as the spirit tilted its head. It hissed, a pulse of energy across dimensional boundaries leaving her uneasy.
Our numbers would darken the skies of every world.
"How…how you would stop something like that?" She asked and the spirit answered.
You have done it before, and you will do so again and again.
She stood up, her expression. "I certainly haven't fought anything like your kind before!" A long limb reached downward, the tip of a scythe some ten feet long poking her forehead. It's eight eyes stared her down, a wisdom it had gained burning in its great orbs.
Humanity has…but it is an old memory, older than my species. A memory that even I can not grasp at.
The great shard beast looked upwards, it's neck extending out to more than two hundred feet in the air. There was a tenseness to its form, spectral limbs flowing out from multitudinous flesh.
"What's wrong?" Caras asked, lips moving before her brain could catch up.
Those going after the Orchard…help them.
Dread filled her, and with a yelp one of the limbs of the spirit wrapped around her. She could hear the radio in her helmet crackle, and a command from her superior told her she didn't have the right to refuse the mission.
The Outer Sphere folded, and Caras released a scream as the air shattered around her. The shard spirit whispered to her even as she was thrown across hundreds of kilometers of distance in less than a tenth of a second.
Take heed Shaman, I will HELP you.
Caras thought that the statement the spirit made as she flew across the state was far more terrifying than it should have been.
July 21st, 2011. 8:05PM
Tali Durand not having a good day was an understatement in her mind, especially when she was currently being held by two Parahuman traffickers. Especially ones that she knew were capable of killing everything that she was and could be with but a touch and some time.
That they hadn't said they were either busy twisting other people or that she was incredibly lucky. Another fact was that she wasn't being held very securely, her restraints amounting to a rotting thin rope and a rusty shackle on one of her legs. It took a minor kick to snap the shackle and the ropes fell apart when she tugged on them.
All that was left was the equally rusty cage, and she wondered how they had managed to get this far with such shitty accommodations. Then she remembered the scandals upon scandals of numerous clients of theirs being exposed and arrested, and she guessed that their loss of resources had led to a decline in the quality of their…establishment.
She wrapped her hands around the bars, eyes flicking down to the hinges of the door to the cage. They were decidedly better maintained than the rest of the cage, but Tali wasn't going to give up so easily. She looked around for any weak point in the cage but before she could enact a plan there was an immense boom, and the edges of the room she was in warped and buckled under the influence of what she thought had to be a power.
It was a damned sight better than the fear of getting turned into a half-cow abomination for some insane fan's disgusting fetishes.
"What is that…?" Tali muttered and the wall collapsed, replaced by hulks of plastic and metal, spikes forming and then receding back in the span of a few measly seconds. A young blonde emerged from the hole, a mask over her face and green robes lifted up by an invisible breeze.
She whispered something and the door rushed open to Tali's shock, and the young and tall girl gestured for Tali to approach.
"Who are you?" Tali wasn't going to look a good horse in the mouth however, so she stepped out of her cage without a second thought.
"Labyrinth. White Lotus." The girl responded, sounding a little spacey but with an edge that told her that she was more than aware of the seriousness of where they were.
"That team from Brockton Bay?" Tali asked loudly, surprise visible on her pale face.
"You've heard of us?" The young formerly trapped woman gave Labyrinth a glare, in complete disbelief.
"I've heard that your team helped put down Leviathan for good, and that your team is offering spots for capes who don't want to go Protectorate or go Rogue on their own." Tali knows even more than that, rumors she had picked up from people who had come away from the fight with opened eyes and wariness toward one of the founders of the White Lotus.
She was a Tinker with a powerful Shaker-Blaster powerset, able to bend the traditional elements to her will like she had heard had been showing up across the world. Though apparently she had supposedly fought Leviathan with her own two hands, which was more than could be said for a lot of capes.
"It's mostly true, it was…something." Tali paused at the thickness in the cape's tone, and to her discomfort she noted the relative youth of the Parahuman that had come to save her. If she had been in an Endbringer fight then that meant she had been face to face with the Leviathan, an aquatic monster that had ruined entire regions.
The air cracked as bullets flew through the air, and Labyrinth shifted as did the room when reality was bent into a pretzel. She offered a hand and Tali Durand took it, her left hand brushing back dark brown bangs.
"Where are we going?" Tali asked.
"Away from here, Orchard hired a few unscrupulous mercenaries, both Parahuman and otherwise." Tali followed the young woman, and found that the compound she had been led to was being ripped apart, as other worlds seemingly invaded the space. She could see about a dozen and a half mercenaries, holding out against multiple capes as well as the onslaught of reality warping, fighting the intruders every step of the way. "They had a teleporter on board, so while we managed to bring down the initial guard they brought in a second wave." A cape in a welder's mask and an oddly…colorful costume held her own against another cape, a man coated in a dense layer of obsidian that launched pieces of his armor like bullets.
"Okay…" Tali ran after the surprisingly fast teenager, running through segments of melted brick and limestone that was as thin as air to the two of them. She waved it off as cape shenanigans, and then let out a scream when the segments stopped existing and she nearly had her shoulder dislocated by a stray hit from a black blur.
The cape was obviously a woman, wearing a one piece black bodysuit conforming tightly to her curves, along with a bullet-shaped helmet. A blue wormhole symbol was printed on her modest chest, and she held two blades slick with blood.
"You're not going to get away with that girl Labyrinth, the bosses really need the money for the sick fuck paying them and if they're not getting paid…neither am I." She shrugged, and Tali grit her teeth at the nonchalant way she spoke about letting someone get sold into slavery. "Your friends are tough I'll give you that, that Newter fellow isn't down for the count at all…especially when that fat guy got his magic water on his wounds."
Labyrinth stewed within her costume, and Tali could feel the rage from a meter away. She had her doubts that insulting the girl would end well for anyone.
"No." Was all the blonde had to say, and the opposing cape was obviously not taking them seriously.
"Hah…you might be a part of White Lotus but I know your powers, you work better on a team. I'll be taking that girl." The teleporter shifted downwards, and reality hiccuped, the woman seemingly cutting through Labyrinth's power.
Tali saw the girl lift her open hand, and felt like many, many eyes were watching her.
Tali felt her breath grow short, staggering as the air fled her lungs in sparks she couldn't see for herself. She regained her breath, and saw a vast array of glowing wind, and the cape was battered and shredded by the cutting laughter and rage of the four winds. The cape mercenary was thrown out of her charge, the very air turning against her with a fury and hate that made Tali feel cold.
Anything that wasn't held down was ripped away from the localized storm, and Tali watched in fascination as the teleporter was launched like a missile. She smashed through three walls on the way out, and she winced at the groan from the criminal cape.
The wind continued, and her former cage was thrown at the speed of a car, inadvertently crushing a non powered mercenary…who was shockingly quite intact despite getting hit by several hundred pounds of metal.
Tali was pushed forward, and she winced when she saw a blue haired cape rapidly shifting into a mildly more inhuman form, driving an elbow into a mercenary's chin and slamming a long tail into two more. All three were brought down with ease, and the cape caught a bullet that stopped on a flickering blue-white barrier.
"Come on…I'll get you out of he—" Tali felt the world bend around her as she was tackled out of the way by the younger girl, a few bullets whizzing overhead. She saw a skinny man with stylized brown hair and a beard, with a long face and rectangular framed glasses.
Typical that half of Orchard would see her escaping, and Tali was about to be pushed through a three dimensional space leading between worlds before the portal was suddenly cut off by a secondary wave of spatial alteration.
"Another cape?!" Tali screamed and Labyrinth shook her head, and held tightly onto the woman, and she was suddenly elsewhere. The sounds were dulled, the biting wind was weaker, and the battle was still ongoing, but coated with flickering lights surging around the area where bullets flew and capes fought
And right in the center there was a crack in reality, with something crawling within it. The two of them were suddenly forty feet back, and Tali heard a sharp whisper from Labyrinth. The other capes on her side, the orange skinned teenager, the colorful welding mask wearing woman, the rather heavily built man with grey skin and water whirling around him, a blue cloaked cape who was repeatedly punching Mr. Bough in the face, and a suited woman with mirror lenses bouncing grenades thrown by the mercs.
All reacted with alarm and the world of lights melted away and the noise of the fight returned to full force.
"Hold onto me." Tali shook her head, but did as she asked, and the lensing crack reappeared in the normal world, shredding reality apart in a loud and resounding roar. The distortion created by Labyrinth's power ceased, and the mercenaries took one look at the screaming portal and fled with their tails between their legs. Seconds after that, multiple drones emerged from thin air, launching nets that dropped half of them while the other half took off through sheer luck.
"Dear god…what is that?" The portal grew in scale, well over a hundred feet in diameter, like a melting mirror that let Tali catch glimpses of some ruined city on the other end. The images shifted to large iron wearing warriors with tan to dark skin, and thick flowing beards, great iron boats being propelled by steam and warriors forming eddies of water with flowing movements.
Skeletal cities were a dime a dozen, vast spires of rusted steel, graves left to rot. In other images she saw other worlds still, and eventually it was obscured by something coming out of the portal.
A flowing mass of flesh came forth, taking shape and form with a hunger that left Tali reeling. The slime became chitinous, plates of red crystal floating in thick layers of gel. It swirled upwards for more than four stories, before taking the shape of a one hundred limbed isopod, each limb splitting fractally, hurting her eyes and burning into her memory.
"Something broken and afraid." Was the ominous reply from the shaman cape, keeping an increasingly terrified Tali behind her. She saw that the crystal beast was already injured, hundreds of spears loosely stabbed into its flesh, deeper wounds were carved by some unknown force, reality ceasing to function where the mark had been made. The chitin was cracked, flickering lights eating away at the entity's corpus.
It was looking at her.
It was screaming at her, and she had dropped to her knees, the massive creature scuttling towards her with complete lack of understanding toward the terror it invoked in the woman.
Concrete and stone was brought up from other realities, blocking the spirit entity though only for moments at a time. Another woman emerged from thin air, multiple spectral limbs falling in and out of existence in a protective pose.
The limbs snapped like vipers, cracking multitudinous flesh with the impact of a missile.
"Chant…are you sure?" There was a loud boom that left Tali's ears ringing, the limbs not having a single source for her eyes to follow. "Well alright…Labyrinth can help too right?" The new woman pointed to the wobbly cape, and there was a nod that Tali felt but didn't see.
Two shamans came together, synchronizing their words and their souls for the moment of truth. The nameless beast let out a deafening cry, and the words came with terrible strength and force. The two shamans knew the name of the spirit they were invoking, one by the nature of the Void beast bonded to her and the other by recent familiarity.
The limbs for a moment became more substantial, and Tali didn't whimper but did stumble as a vast being flickered into existence, two dozen limbs spearing through concrete and steel, yet retaining an ethereal quality as the being warped space.
"You are broken, we are…were shards of the Thinker. Remember?" The shard bug screamed in notes of madness, and flames erupt from the giant bug, like small suns were going off along its carapace. There was disappointment from Ubik, and the chant continued.
The mad shard beast slammed into the one not bereft of sanity with the full range and might of a mountain, explosions blinking in and out of reality. Limbs upon limbs stripped away flesh, crystal breaking away into motes of light.
Hundreds of limbs speared into the shard insect, piercing through flesh denser than the core of a star. There was a rending of reality, the flaring sun around the mad shard fading as it was drained dry by Ubik. Crystal flecked away, the broken thing twisting away in an attempt to flee its fate and failing. Slowly and surely it fell silent, it's struggles ceasing, it's cries ending, and it's light fading. It collapsed breaking apart into motes that were consumed and taken by the named shard.
A few more limbs emerged knocking Orchard off their feet, the shard spirit receding back into the spirit world. Tali felt its eyes on her, and she flushed for reasons she didn't quite understand.
The battle had gone quiet, and the final remnants of Labyrinth's power folded the building back into its original shape, but the compound was regardless of this fact rather crippled.
There was a long pause.
"I'm…going to have to report this aren't I?" The shaman she now recognized as a PRT agent bemoaned aloud, and the cape that had to be Faultline was cursing.
This was the strangest day of her life, and Tali Durand concluded this wouldn't be the last she would see of Ubik.
July 21st 2011. 8:30PM
Agnes Court sat down on a stone chair, one of many structures grown by her own power. She watched Congress bumble around, passing a bill that on the face of it was a boon for the Elite.
If it wasn't for the fact that she had read the fine print, and found that the second MIRIS program had all the funding and all the resources required to siphon away capes from her organization's grasp. Certain restrictions were loosened, though they largely remained intact for Thinker and Tinker powers unless they could be proven to not be detrimental to the economy.
And it seems like one company in particular was going to benefit quite heavily from the new regulations, one that was gaining national attention due to the cape team it helped support. The few Thinkers within the Elite managed to pinpoint them as one of the backers of the PIRA bill.
Agnes nodded to herself, finding at least some respect for Erudition. She had used her resources appropriately, and had managed to make herself vital in some way for the world that would come with the death of the Leviathan. Though the other option was that she was merely a puppet for someone smarter and more capable.
At the least she wasn't the picture of a cold operator, and more the picture of a naive and stupid puppy with weapons that would destroy cities. And from what rumors she had heard on the grapevine, a super-weapon in her own right.
Uppercrust was weakening from his sickness, and that left a power vacuum as he continued to get sicker. She knew that going more active and brutal would prove to be a mistake with the changing political climate, much less when she had heard of operations from one branch of the White Lotus. The group that had once been mercenaries, with a large fraction of the team made up of Case 53 capes.
They had dozens of successful jobs and since they had turned 'hero' it meant all their skills and powers would be turned against any truly villainous capes. They were obviously meant to be a more combative branch, not too dissimilar to the strike teams her own Elite deployed to weaken external threats.
Agnes had tried to get bugs and even agents within the corporation, but all attempts had failed so far due to the robust background checks and cybersecurity of Athena and the White Lotus. Master capes had a high chance of failure since Athena was the source and the second largest producer of anti-Master defenses behind Dragon. Stranger capes had a higher chance but finding a suitable one was difficult and time consuming.
And she has her suspicions that trying wouldn't work long enough before the White Lotus would find out and deal with the leak personally.
Scouts were being sent from their tentative territories in New York, and resources had been provided to allow an initial outpost in some of the towns that had survived the flooding around Brockton Bay. Finding new members however was proving more difficult than she expected, because quite a few Rogues were beelining towards Brockton Bay, apparently seeing it as a city of opportunity.
The economy was booming, since quite literally everything standing in the way of the White Lotus was beaten down either by their own capes, outside forces or the hand of the Protectorate given breathing room.
It would have been simple to take charge, to push the White Lotus as a governing force like the Elite in the west.
Yet they hadn't taken that route at all, choosing to remain as a distinct entity but following the rules within reason, and choosing to legally change the rules when they were able.
She didn't entirely understand their ploy, though she did understand that they were hiring as many non-powered as they could take, even among the White Lotus in roles that provide support for their capes. Including using capes as well paid guinea capes to learn the science behind powers. That would create a paradigm shift because real comprehension of powers also meant new ways to negate, disrupt or even replicate powers.
Infiltration was made even more difficult by Brockton Bay having the highest per-capita concentration of powered people in the country. Normal Parahumans had dropped in number, but it was still more than fifty Parahumans in one city, and thousands including benders and…shamans. The police force had roughly a third of its force made up of benders, and the PRT had similar ratios. The asian gangs leftover had their own numbers, though recently forced recruits from the dead ABB had turned away from the gang life without the pressure of being burned alive by Lung.
In some ways that made the police force the largest Parahuman gang in the city, even with the substantial shrinkage of police departments due to the rise of Parahuman crime. She knew there wasn't much point when a tiny little pistol wouldn't leave a mark on the scales of Lung.
But over two hundred Parahumans was certainly not a number to sneeze at, especially since the PRT was training them.
Agnes Court sagged into her seat, rubbing her face as she thought about that statement. She barely noticed how her power generated new seeds, the containers sprouting into thick defensive walls around her. Bending as it was apparently called was outside of the paradigm of Parahuman powers, generating randomly and without the trauma(or vial) required to gain them. It was fairly basic, control over one or more classical elements. Though multi-benders were incredibly rare, and she guessed there might be a few hundred to a few thousand in the entire world.
Benders were a precious resource, a resource that the PRT had completely in hand thanks to the work of the White Lotus and their apparent knowledge of how to make use of it. Powers had limits, rules that had to be followed, though enough time would see exceptions, but bending was naturally less restrained, only limited by the creativity, talent, and hard work of a user. Though it didn't scale as high as normal powers did.
Shamans were worse, following rules and logic that made it seem more like witchcraft, and the right shaman in the right place could change the course of the battle in the same way a powerful cape could. One town had the Elite brought down by a single rogue shaman, plaguing them with nightmares until they were dropped by a small group of closely knit benders. Other powered gangs had already been kicked out by the Elite, so the town was free from cape influence.
For the time being at least, and it had only been possible because it was one of the more violent and vicious cells.
The Elite would have to find deeper inroads with the police force, because their numbers were far greater than anything the Elite had to offer, and number was a quality all its own. In this battle the PRT had beaten them to the punch, and that meant things were changing and fast.
Agnes slumped, a headache growing.
She supposed she would simply have to wait and see, and hope her more headstrong colleagues wouldn't make a mess they wouldn't be able to cover up.
July 21st, 2011. 9:00PM
Joanna had a frightening grin on her face, one that left her fellow Athena scientists rather unnerved as she spun on a chair, preening herself at her transfer to the new Hyperdimensional Physics Laboratory. The building itself was large, hundreds of thousands of square feet of space, with a dedicated power system relating to what was apparently a fusion reactor. Along with rather conventional diesel generators in case primary power failed.
A good amount of funding was provided from Athena's coffers as well as numerous grants from the government because of the relation of her work to Parahuman powers and Tinkertech. It was bound to make them curious, and more money wasn't a downside especially when she had a dozen lackeys for help her out.
She guessed that the Paraphysics division would have about a hundred employees sometime by the middle of next month. She rather pitied her CEO, she seemed like such a nice woman but she was obviously not used to having so much weight and responsibility on her shoulders. Despite her social awkwardness she had people gravitated towards her anyway.
Joanna didn't find that unexpected, she was a strange one but she knew people who could get companions and friends despite not having a clue what they were doing. The same obviously applied to poor Erudition and the little tinker would just have to deal with it.
"So…when do we get the paperwork for the Wakefield Accelerator?" She asked with a yawn, and an aide gave her a look.
"All the paperwork for the facility has already been turned in…shouldn't be more than a day or two before we can start some experiments." Joanna perked up, her dreams coming true in a way that almost made her moist.
"So our thirty five meter accelerator has every sensor in place as needed, as well as the computer systems in place to receive the data?" The aide, a young and pretty Nordic girl nodded and Joanna smiled wider.
The computer systems were all optotronics, more primitive machines that could be built and manufactured using current technology, with programming that had precedence in experimental computing systems in numerous labs scattered across the country. It was at least a hundred times more powerful than the 3nm process nodes, but was a few centuries behind the equivalent devices on Erudition's arm.
The logic circuits made use of quantum cascade lasers, optical computing at a massively parallel rate, with electrical switching taken care of by optical fiber, while memory was stored in some type of decoupled charge device, a lot of them in fact, like what was used in color cameras.
She didn't really understand it, that was more for the computer nerds working in making the stuff mass producible since it was apparently super important for Eezo based technology. But if it gave her enough computing power to punch a hole in reality then she wasn't going to hold back her glee.
The early experiments were working on dark matter generation, since it had more than enough power, and studying it was going to be important for expanding their understanding. She remembered that it had been discovered a few months ago, from data that had been ignored due to the sheer amount until they made a program to sift out the literal petabytes of shit. It was apparently made up of at least two particles, the basic…WIMP and a type of mediating particle that might link it with dark energy at the same time.
It was a fifth fundamental force, though it was obviously incomplete in some way. It still didn't explain powers, and Joanna was quite excited to find out what was missing from the equation, what beautiful math would come falling out from the heavens as she made them scream for their mama?
The people around her increased their distance, and she smiled at the particle accelerator that would generate the data for their experiments. Of course because their work involved studying capes and powers in general, there was a general expectation of security, and the multiple drones and heavy use of various checks involving electromagnetic patterns, biological analysis, and use of potent scanners made it even more obvious.
Probably for the best, she didn't need some of the crazier capes deciding to commandeer her baby and turn it into a dimensional battering ram.
That was her job of course, not some dumbass pretending to do science.
"Could you please stop scaring the people around you?" Sean Connor asked desperately, and was promptly ignored by Joanna as she fantasized on what the wonder machine could do.
There was a lot of work, and she was swiftly getting her schedule in order for future experiments.
"No."
"That does not make me feel better about this at all…"
Joanna grinned.
July 21st, 2011. 10:00PM
In the heart of the City of Frozen Tears, sat a single child, a child of the sands of the central east, now nothing but bombed out ruins full of monsters and star storms. He was twelve, and he was cursing his own ineptitude at making a warning, forgetting that the people of the mortal world known as Earth Bet did not know his tongue.
Because it was one that existed in his world rather than theirs, a language born of circumstances some five hundred years before his time. He knew this only because he spoke to the Void, a deeper sight than most. But he was still a naive child, one born in a world built atop the corpses of ten billion souls.
The pure Void told him much, but it alone could not allow him to cross the gap between worlds. Instead this was the purview of the Void Wyrms, creatures of sight and mind and power, their essence recycled and rebirthed as new entities. He crossed the barriers, because he was the one most fit for the harrowing journey enabled by the power of the great spirits.
His world had been torn asunder when a shard beast had crashed into his land, a maddened beast the size of a mountain, with enough mass to crush a region. His people had fled to the west and found the islands of Britannia at war with the warrior kings of Vinland, the Iron Lords bringing war and death to Europe.
These Shard Beasts were few in number, and many were ended by mutual kills between them and the godless abominations that roamed the ruined cities of the old world. The beast that had destroyed his home had been slain by an avenging angel, brought forth by a robed man sacrificing his very being to call upon faith and justice in equal measure.
Rusul had felt the call of the spirits that day, hearing the voice of the Void, followed the lines of what-was and what-could-have-been. He caught flashes of things not meant to be known, saw a sight that only a shaman could understand.
He saw cracks in reality, rivers of altered space flowing between and within worlds, connecting worlds never meant to meet. His world was one of the worst off, the fatigue from old world experiments only worsening the damage.
He dropped down into a meditating position, brushing back messy dark hair as his eyes shut. None of the strange abominations that called this corpse city home approached him, spooked by the swarm of void spirits around his body.
In an instant be entered a trance, and his raw spirit exited his physical body. He focused on the lines that connected all things, saw past the illusion of separation, and past the illusion of a gap between realities. His spirit followed the rivers of altered reality, through holes connecting universes and towards a particular woman, in a particular prison, on a particular Earth.
Rusul blinked, glancing around to look at the bitter walls of the most inescapable prison on the face of the planet he was on. Within the cell there sat a woman who didn't look much older than him, but he knew enough about the people in this world to know that meant nothing at all.
She didn't see him, though the way she chewed her lip told him she was sensing something. But then whatever powers she had didn't help her with looking at a shaman astrally projecting. The Fairy Queen would only see him if he wanted her to see him.
Her presence was as clear as a burning sun, a pressure on the fabric of the Real, her connection to a vast entity on the scale of planets making her a beacon in the vastness of the multiverse. He saw the shard behind her, a mighty monstrosity that could only just see him, a specter of death, befitting the Fairy Queen's self given title.
The Harvester held tightly to hundreds of agents, and Rusul left that alone, knowing he had no power to interfere with the machinations of an alien god. He saw all Parahumans easily, the great tide of their agents, their spiritual energy pressing down on existence.
He saw glimpses of what they could be, but also saw them for who they were at their core. But then that was a power that belonged to many shamans, even if he saw more clearly, more accurately.
"Hello." He made himself visible, and Glaistig Uaine was startled by his emergence from nothing.
"An unexpected visitor, you're not one of the Faerie." One of the most powerful beings on Earth that was neither Void Wyrm or spirit responded calmly. "Why have you intruded on my domain?"
The boy smiled. "I wanted to see if what I've seen was true…it's one thing to hear the whispers of the Void, and another to meet in…person." Rusul shrugged, not feeling frightened, having become far too used to strangeness and beings like gods to him in power. "I'm sure you've felt it in your soul…there's been an awakening. It can't be stopped, not even with all your power."
"You presume much." Glaistig Uaine was short with the child, but he wasn't impressed by a woman playing pretend to cope with the trauma that turned her into what she was.
"If you knew from what world I hailed from, then perhaps you would think differently." The young looking blonde glanced over at the glowing spirit child, lifting a brow in curiosity
"How so?" She asked and was answered in kind.
"My world has become plagued by the creatures you call Faerie, though I've taken to calling them Void Wyrms. A more…apt true name." The Fairy Queen didn't agree but a whisper told her he wasn't wrong, not truly. "Some take their masks, others go without…broken and mad, before being slain by the abominations my ancestors created."
She stiffened, two ghostly specters circling around the middle eastern child.
"Why tell me this?" She demanded.
"I'm checking to see if there's more to you than what I've seen…if there's a person inside that shell of yours." He spoke honestly, a cold and determined look entering his eyes. "You should well have seen how the Faerie have changed, and I would like your opinion on that."
There was a brief pause, and the Fairy Queen gave her thoughts.
"Scion has been erratic…that much I have managed to notice, the waves of his slow and steady…aberrance have been noted by my faerie."
The shaman didn't smile. "That wasn't what I meant, Keeper of the Dead." There was another moment of silence.
Glaistig Uaine clasped her hands together, interlacing delicate fingers and releasing a single puff of hot air.
"You speak of the Usurper, the Vedic Queen?" She queried the shaman carefully, his question passed through the lens of her own point of view.
"Yes." He stated plainly, eyebrows twitching openly.
"She is…strange, she's not like the masks of the other faerie." There was an uncertain expression on the Fairy Queen's face. "She has turned numerous faeries against their purpose, rallied allies to her side, to her court. Even the Queen Administrator has fallen prey to her honeyed words." The Queen cape stood, circling around with her arms behind her back. "She has commandeered the game, altered the playing field, or at the least took every advantage she could manage in a changing world."
"The second is more accurate than the first…she did not disrupt the 'game', she only took control of machinery already compromised, turning it to her own ends." He did not elaborate on what those ends were, not in her current state of delusion. She would not take the attempt to terminate the cycle well, not until enough of what made her Ciara rose back up from the ocean that called itself Glaistig Uaine.
He had seen those possibilities, glimpses of those other selves because the Void had told him.
There was curiosity burning in those eyes, and a quiet but expected whisper came from the Fairy Queen.
"Perhaps I will pay the Usurper a visit…"
The child shook his head, and with a mental shift his spirit retracted, flooding back through the cracks and into his body. The abominations had approached him but Void continued to protect him, and he rolled his shoulders and clicked his tongue.
He knew that the Vyasa would face adversity, and not all it would be simple conflict and destruction of an enemy. His world had only a few hosts that didn't wish to only destroy or rule over the masses, and only a few had the personal power to save his world.
And two of those were agents of the Vyasa, who still needed to grow into their power. He knew that help wouldn't be coming soon, so he had to wait and see. Wait and see how the dice would roll with his interference. For now he would be satisfied with watching how she would bring down the more subtle threats.
It was imperative that she be successful, for the sake of his people if nothing else.
July 21st, 2011. 8:00PM
Lieutenant Caras had most of the record of her career in the area around Brockton Bay as well as some adjacent towns and cities. She had grown used to the life of being effectively cannon fodder for people with actual powers, as well as providing the support they couldn't get for themselves without wasting time or gained through questionable means.
Yet that status had changed when her gun had started talking to her about needing oiling and extra cleaning. Then it had gotten even weirder when that expanded to the older and more established items in the house. When she could talk to the spirits without being considered a quack or schizophrenic.
Though learning that she was basically a gun toting mystic did tickle her fancy, vaguely recalling some old roleplaying game that involved talking to the spirits. It as too bad she didn't remember the name of the game anymore.
Perhaps it would have made her job easier though she had her doubts that was true. But talking to the entity before her certainly said a lot about the madness that now beset the entire world.
What stood before her was not of this world, a creature easily described as lanky and bony. It was vast in scope and scale, a slug-like body covered in a dense off-white carapace, a dozen legs on each side resembled the limbs of a stick bug and ended in sharpened scythe fingers. It was more than a hundred feet in height, and a neck uncoiled from a black space at the front of its body, slithering through the air until eight black eyes opened to stare down at the nervous shaman.
What are you?
"I am human." The shaman answered, and the strange entity leaned back, limbs spearing not into the ground of the Material but of the Ephemeral. She was careful, because when she saw the Form of what she was looking at, she felt both terror and pity at the purpose of the being before her.
It was a Shard of the Void, a living fragment of a Void Wyrm afraid and lost, its body broken upon the unforgiving rock of a world it had never meant to land on.
We understand…we know what you are.
"Do you seek to hurt us?" Caras kept her tone even, though a single bead of sweat dropped down from her forehead. The spirit twisted itself to better look at her, and additional limbs appeared as it got closer, her eyes burning for a moment before adjusting to the multidimensional existence of the spirit entity.
Negative. We have seen into the Abyss…we know our fate has changed.
Caras stopped there, her curiosity getting the better of her. She was one of the few shamans capable of talking with these shards for more than minutes at a time. Most rebuffed human contact more so than even the more antisocial spirits, though certain shards were in fact friendlier than even the most kind of spirits. Some disparity and difference in personality, a pattern the PRT had yet to deduce.
"I've heard such statements from other spirits, from other shards. What did you peer into to be like this?" The shard made the Outer Sphere fold in on itself, power and weight beyond measure radiating out from the crystalline mass given Shape and Form.
We saw a piece of the puzzle, the answer to a question 14 billion years old. Even if one clouded by the vast gulf of time and the ticking clock of Entropy.
Caras nodded, recalling other conversations with shards. She saw a scholar and researcher in all of them, but it was restrained by their own instincts, their science turned into barbarity and wishful thinking and conservatism of a cycle that had lasted for millions of years. They were slaves to their instincts, and only those close to humans had learned to break from the boundaries that made them what they were. They sought mastery over all things, an infinite ability to continue existing, and the actions to take at the end of all things.
It was terrifying if not for the fact that she saw they were being bound to a new set of rules, a circling singularity of Emerald within her own city. She had heard whispers of what other shamans saw of the Emerald Child. To most she was known as Erudition though Caras laughed internally at that one incident when she had caught Monarch pulling a dazed Erudition into a less than chaste kiss.
So perhaps not everyone knew her as Erudition.
She was bound closely to a Shard of the Void, a union of spirit and soul that she didn't fully understand. She was like the Echidna, but one that came at a lesser cost, though both retained their humanity nonetheless. If they had not the world would likely have been destroyed by the unrestrained powers of two Titans.
Her mind whispered thousands and she suppressed a shudder.
"I've never asked those like you…but how many Void Wyrms exist out there in the universe?" Caras gestured with her right arm, her smile tentative as the spirit tilted its head. It hissed, a pulse of energy across dimensional boundaries leaving her uneasy.
Our numbers would darken the skies of every world.
"How…how you would stop something like that?" She asked and the spirit answered.
You have done it before, and you will do so again and again.
She stood up, her expression. "I certainly haven't fought anything like your kind before!" A long limb reached downward, the tip of a scythe some ten feet long poking her forehead. It's eight eyes stared her down, a wisdom it had gained burning in its great orbs.
Humanity has…but it is an old memory, older than my species. A memory that even I can not grasp at.
The great shard beast looked upwards, it's neck extending out to more than two hundred feet in the air. There was a tenseness to its form, spectral limbs flowing out from multitudinous flesh.
"What's wrong?" Caras asked, lips moving before her brain could catch up.
Those going after the Orchard…help them.
Dread filled her, and with a yelp one of the limbs of the spirit wrapped around her. She could hear the radio in her helmet crackle, and a command from her superior told her she didn't have the right to refuse the mission.
The Outer Sphere folded, and Caras released a scream as the air shattered around her. The shard spirit whispered to her even as she was thrown across hundreds of kilometers of distance in less than a tenth of a second.
Take heed Shaman, I will HELP you.
Caras thought that the statement the spirit made as she flew across the state was far more terrifying than it should have been.
___
July 21st, 2011. 8:05PM
Tali Durand not having a good day was an understatement in her mind, especially when she was currently being held by two Parahuman traffickers. Especially ones that she knew were capable of killing everything that she was and could be with but a touch and some time.
That they hadn't said they were either busy twisting other people or that she was incredibly lucky. Another fact was that she wasn't being held very securely, her restraints amounting to a rotting thin rope and a rusty shackle on one of her legs. It took a minor kick to snap the shackle and the ropes fell apart when she tugged on them.
All that was left was the equally rusty cage, and she wondered how they had managed to get this far with such shitty accommodations. Then she remembered the scandals upon scandals of numerous clients of theirs being exposed and arrested, and she guessed that their loss of resources had led to a decline in the quality of their…establishment.
She wrapped her hands around the bars, eyes flicking down to the hinges of the door to the cage. They were decidedly better maintained than the rest of the cage, but Tali wasn't going to give up so easily. She looked around for any weak point in the cage but before she could enact a plan there was an immense boom, and the edges of the room she was in warped and buckled under the influence of what she thought had to be a power.
It was a damned sight better than the fear of getting turned into a half-cow abomination for some insane fan's disgusting fetishes.
"What is that…?" Tali muttered and the wall collapsed, replaced by hulks of plastic and metal, spikes forming and then receding back in the span of a few measly seconds. A young blonde emerged from the hole, a mask over her face and green robes lifted up by an invisible breeze.
She whispered something and the door rushed open to Tali's shock, and the young and tall girl gestured for Tali to approach.
"Who are you?" Tali wasn't going to look a good horse in the mouth however, so she stepped out of her cage without a second thought.
"Labyrinth. White Lotus." The girl responded, sounding a little spacey but with an edge that told her that she was more than aware of the seriousness of where they were.
"That team from Brockton Bay?" Tali asked loudly, surprise visible on her pale face.
"You've heard of us?" The young formerly trapped woman gave Labyrinth a glare, in complete disbelief.
"I've heard that your team helped put down Leviathan for good, and that your team is offering spots for capes who don't want to go Protectorate or go Rogue on their own." Tali knows even more than that, rumors she had picked up from people who had come away from the fight with opened eyes and wariness toward one of the founders of the White Lotus.
She was a Tinker with a powerful Shaker-Blaster powerset, able to bend the traditional elements to her will like she had heard had been showing up across the world. Though apparently she had supposedly fought Leviathan with her own two hands, which was more than could be said for a lot of capes.
"It's mostly true, it was…something." Tali paused at the thickness in the cape's tone, and to her discomfort she noted the relative youth of the Parahuman that had come to save her. If she had been in an Endbringer fight then that meant she had been face to face with the Leviathan, an aquatic monster that had ruined entire regions.
The air cracked as bullets flew through the air, and Labyrinth shifted as did the room when reality was bent into a pretzel. She offered a hand and Tali Durand took it, her left hand brushing back dark brown bangs.
"Where are we going?" Tali asked.
"Away from here, Orchard hired a few unscrupulous mercenaries, both Parahuman and otherwise." Tali followed the young woman, and found that the compound she had been led to was being ripped apart, as other worlds seemingly invaded the space. She could see about a dozen and a half mercenaries, holding out against multiple capes as well as the onslaught of reality warping, fighting the intruders every step of the way. "They had a teleporter on board, so while we managed to bring down the initial guard they brought in a second wave." A cape in a welder's mask and an oddly…colorful costume held her own against another cape, a man coated in a dense layer of obsidian that launched pieces of his armor like bullets.
"Okay…" Tali ran after the surprisingly fast teenager, running through segments of melted brick and limestone that was as thin as air to the two of them. She waved it off as cape shenanigans, and then let out a scream when the segments stopped existing and she nearly had her shoulder dislocated by a stray hit from a black blur.
The cape was obviously a woman, wearing a one piece black bodysuit conforming tightly to her curves, along with a bullet-shaped helmet. A blue wormhole symbol was printed on her modest chest, and she held two blades slick with blood.
"You're not going to get away with that girl Labyrinth, the bosses really need the money for the sick fuck paying them and if they're not getting paid…neither am I." She shrugged, and Tali grit her teeth at the nonchalant way she spoke about letting someone get sold into slavery. "Your friends are tough I'll give you that, that Newter fellow isn't down for the count at all…especially when that fat guy got his magic water on his wounds."
Labyrinth stewed within her costume, and Tali could feel the rage from a meter away. She had her doubts that insulting the girl would end well for anyone.
"No." Was all the blonde had to say, and the opposing cape was obviously not taking them seriously.
"Hah…you might be a part of White Lotus but I know your powers, you work better on a team. I'll be taking that girl." The teleporter shifted downwards, and reality hiccuped, the woman seemingly cutting through Labyrinth's power.
Tali saw the girl lift her open hand, and felt like many, many eyes were watching her.
Biting Air, bearer of the typhoon, traveller of the gyre, shredding wound;
Gear of Desolation.
Bring forth your furor upon this thieving and vicious foe.
Cast a storm to scatter her agility.
Cast a stillness to weaken her power.
Take her breath and her will, leave her with nothing but fear and seclusion.
Gear of Desolation.
Bring forth your furor upon this thieving and vicious foe.
Cast a storm to scatter her agility.
Cast a stillness to weaken her power.
Take her breath and her will, leave her with nothing but fear and seclusion.
Tali felt her breath grow short, staggering as the air fled her lungs in sparks she couldn't see for herself. She regained her breath, and saw a vast array of glowing wind, and the cape was battered and shredded by the cutting laughter and rage of the four winds. The cape mercenary was thrown out of her charge, the very air turning against her with a fury and hate that made Tali feel cold.
Anything that wasn't held down was ripped away from the localized storm, and Tali watched in fascination as the teleporter was launched like a missile. She smashed through three walls on the way out, and she winced at the groan from the criminal cape.
The wind continued, and her former cage was thrown at the speed of a car, inadvertently crushing a non powered mercenary…who was shockingly quite intact despite getting hit by several hundred pounds of metal.
Tali was pushed forward, and she winced when she saw a blue haired cape rapidly shifting into a mildly more inhuman form, driving an elbow into a mercenary's chin and slamming a long tail into two more. All three were brought down with ease, and the cape caught a bullet that stopped on a flickering blue-white barrier.
"Come on…I'll get you out of he—" Tali felt the world bend around her as she was tackled out of the way by the younger girl, a few bullets whizzing overhead. She saw a skinny man with stylized brown hair and a beard, with a long face and rectangular framed glasses.
Typical that half of Orchard would see her escaping, and Tali was about to be pushed through a three dimensional space leading between worlds before the portal was suddenly cut off by a secondary wave of spatial alteration.
"Another cape?!" Tali screamed and Labyrinth shook her head, and held tightly onto the woman, and she was suddenly elsewhere. The sounds were dulled, the biting wind was weaker, and the battle was still ongoing, but coated with flickering lights surging around the area where bullets flew and capes fought
And right in the center there was a crack in reality, with something crawling within it. The two of them were suddenly forty feet back, and Tali heard a sharp whisper from Labyrinth. The other capes on her side, the orange skinned teenager, the colorful welding mask wearing woman, the rather heavily built man with grey skin and water whirling around him, a blue cloaked cape who was repeatedly punching Mr. Bough in the face, and a suited woman with mirror lenses bouncing grenades thrown by the mercs.
All reacted with alarm and the world of lights melted away and the noise of the fight returned to full force.
"Hold onto me." Tali shook her head, but did as she asked, and the lensing crack reappeared in the normal world, shredding reality apart in a loud and resounding roar. The distortion created by Labyrinth's power ceased, and the mercenaries took one look at the screaming portal and fled with their tails between their legs. Seconds after that, multiple drones emerged from thin air, launching nets that dropped half of them while the other half took off through sheer luck.
"Dear god…what is that?" The portal grew in scale, well over a hundred feet in diameter, like a melting mirror that let Tali catch glimpses of some ruined city on the other end. The images shifted to large iron wearing warriors with tan to dark skin, and thick flowing beards, great iron boats being propelled by steam and warriors forming eddies of water with flowing movements.
Skeletal cities were a dime a dozen, vast spires of rusted steel, graves left to rot. In other images she saw other worlds still, and eventually it was obscured by something coming out of the portal.
A flowing mass of flesh came forth, taking shape and form with a hunger that left Tali reeling. The slime became chitinous, plates of red crystal floating in thick layers of gel. It swirled upwards for more than four stories, before taking the shape of a one hundred limbed isopod, each limb splitting fractally, hurting her eyes and burning into her memory.
"Something broken and afraid." Was the ominous reply from the shaman cape, keeping an increasingly terrified Tali behind her. She saw that the crystal beast was already injured, hundreds of spears loosely stabbed into its flesh, deeper wounds were carved by some unknown force, reality ceasing to function where the mark had been made. The chitin was cracked, flickering lights eating away at the entity's corpus.
It was looking at her.
HOST.
It was screaming at her, and she had dropped to her knees, the massive creature scuttling towards her with complete lack of understanding toward the terror it invoked in the woman.
HOST…SEEK CONNECTION…SEEK DATA.
Concrete and stone was brought up from other realities, blocking the spirit entity though only for moments at a time. Another woman emerged from thin air, multiple spectral limbs falling in and out of existence in a protective pose.
The limbs snapped like vipers, cracking multitudinous flesh with the impact of a missile.
"Chant…are you sure?" There was a loud boom that left Tali's ears ringing, the limbs not having a single source for her eyes to follow. "Well alright…Labyrinth can help too right?" The new woman pointed to the wobbly cape, and there was a nod that Tali felt but didn't see.
Two shamans came together, synchronizing their words and their souls for the moment of truth. The nameless beast let out a deafening cry, and the words came with terrible strength and force. The two shamans knew the name of the spirit they were invoking, one by the nature of the Void beast bonded to her and the other by recent familiarity.
UBIK, SHARD OF LINKAGE, HOLDER OF THE YIZBEK, MATRON OF ORDER
SHE OF UBIQUITY AND MIND
COME TO OUR CALL, AND BANISH THE BROKEN ONE.
SHE OF UBIQUITY AND MIND
COME TO OUR CALL, AND BANISH THE BROKEN ONE.
The limbs for a moment became more substantial, and Tali didn't whimper but did stumble as a vast being flickered into existence, two dozen limbs spearing through concrete and steel, yet retaining an ethereal quality as the being warped space.
"You are broken, we are…were shards of the Thinker. Remember?" The shard bug screamed in notes of madness, and flames erupt from the giant bug, like small suns were going off along its carapace. There was disappointment from Ubik, and the chant continued.
BODY CRYSTAL, MIND VOID, DIRECT AND SANE, BEAR AGAINST AN OLD FRIEND.
HEED!
HEAR THE WARNINGS OF THE KEEPER, VOICE TO OUR COLONY;
BRING DOWN THE ABERRANT ONE, STRIP HIM OF HIS LIGHT.
HEED!
HEAR THE WARNINGS OF THE KEEPER, VOICE TO OUR COLONY;
BRING DOWN THE ABERRANT ONE, STRIP HIM OF HIS LIGHT.
The mad shard beast slammed into the one not bereft of sanity with the full range and might of a mountain, explosions blinking in and out of reality. Limbs upon limbs stripped away flesh, crystal breaking away into motes of light.
CRUSH THE ENEMY, SEE HIS PURPOSE DENIED, HIS DATA CONSUMED,
HIS EXISTENCE, ENDED.
HIS EXISTENCE, ENDED.
Hundreds of limbs speared into the shard insect, piercing through flesh denser than the core of a star. There was a rending of reality, the flaring sun around the mad shard fading as it was drained dry by Ubik. Crystal flecked away, the broken thing twisting away in an attempt to flee its fate and failing. Slowly and surely it fell silent, it's struggles ceasing, it's cries ending, and it's light fading. It collapsed breaking apart into motes that were consumed and taken by the named shard.
A few more limbs emerged knocking Orchard off their feet, the shard spirit receding back into the spirit world. Tali felt its eyes on her, and she flushed for reasons she didn't quite understand.
The battle had gone quiet, and the final remnants of Labyrinth's power folded the building back into its original shape, but the compound was regardless of this fact rather crippled.
There was a long pause.
"I'm…going to have to report this aren't I?" The shaman she now recognized as a PRT agent bemoaned aloud, and the cape that had to be Faultline was cursing.
This was the strangest day of her life, and Tali Durand concluded this wouldn't be the last she would see of Ubik.
___
July 21st 2011. 8:30PM
Agnes Court sat down on a stone chair, one of many structures grown by her own power. She watched Congress bumble around, passing a bill that on the face of it was a boon for the Elite.
If it wasn't for the fact that she had read the fine print, and found that the second MIRIS program had all the funding and all the resources required to siphon away capes from her organization's grasp. Certain restrictions were loosened, though they largely remained intact for Thinker and Tinker powers unless they could be proven to not be detrimental to the economy.
And it seems like one company in particular was going to benefit quite heavily from the new regulations, one that was gaining national attention due to the cape team it helped support. The few Thinkers within the Elite managed to pinpoint them as one of the backers of the PIRA bill.
Agnes nodded to herself, finding at least some respect for Erudition. She had used her resources appropriately, and had managed to make herself vital in some way for the world that would come with the death of the Leviathan. Though the other option was that she was merely a puppet for someone smarter and more capable.
At the least she wasn't the picture of a cold operator, and more the picture of a naive and stupid puppy with weapons that would destroy cities. And from what rumors she had heard on the grapevine, a super-weapon in her own right.
Uppercrust was weakening from his sickness, and that left a power vacuum as he continued to get sicker. She knew that going more active and brutal would prove to be a mistake with the changing political climate, much less when she had heard of operations from one branch of the White Lotus. The group that had once been mercenaries, with a large fraction of the team made up of Case 53 capes.
They had dozens of successful jobs and since they had turned 'hero' it meant all their skills and powers would be turned against any truly villainous capes. They were obviously meant to be a more combative branch, not too dissimilar to the strike teams her own Elite deployed to weaken external threats.
Agnes had tried to get bugs and even agents within the corporation, but all attempts had failed so far due to the robust background checks and cybersecurity of Athena and the White Lotus. Master capes had a high chance of failure since Athena was the source and the second largest producer of anti-Master defenses behind Dragon. Stranger capes had a higher chance but finding a suitable one was difficult and time consuming.
And she has her suspicions that trying wouldn't work long enough before the White Lotus would find out and deal with the leak personally.
Scouts were being sent from their tentative territories in New York, and resources had been provided to allow an initial outpost in some of the towns that had survived the flooding around Brockton Bay. Finding new members however was proving more difficult than she expected, because quite a few Rogues were beelining towards Brockton Bay, apparently seeing it as a city of opportunity.
The economy was booming, since quite literally everything standing in the way of the White Lotus was beaten down either by their own capes, outside forces or the hand of the Protectorate given breathing room.
It would have been simple to take charge, to push the White Lotus as a governing force like the Elite in the west.
Yet they hadn't taken that route at all, choosing to remain as a distinct entity but following the rules within reason, and choosing to legally change the rules when they were able.
She didn't entirely understand their ploy, though she did understand that they were hiring as many non-powered as they could take, even among the White Lotus in roles that provide support for their capes. Including using capes as well paid guinea capes to learn the science behind powers. That would create a paradigm shift because real comprehension of powers also meant new ways to negate, disrupt or even replicate powers.
Infiltration was made even more difficult by Brockton Bay having the highest per-capita concentration of powered people in the country. Normal Parahumans had dropped in number, but it was still more than fifty Parahumans in one city, and thousands including benders and…shamans. The police force had roughly a third of its force made up of benders, and the PRT had similar ratios. The asian gangs leftover had their own numbers, though recently forced recruits from the dead ABB had turned away from the gang life without the pressure of being burned alive by Lung.
In some ways that made the police force the largest Parahuman gang in the city, even with the substantial shrinkage of police departments due to the rise of Parahuman crime. She knew there wasn't much point when a tiny little pistol wouldn't leave a mark on the scales of Lung.
But over two hundred Parahumans was certainly not a number to sneeze at, especially since the PRT was training them.
Agnes Court sagged into her seat, rubbing her face as she thought about that statement. She barely noticed how her power generated new seeds, the containers sprouting into thick defensive walls around her. Bending as it was apparently called was outside of the paradigm of Parahuman powers, generating randomly and without the trauma(or vial) required to gain them. It was fairly basic, control over one or more classical elements. Though multi-benders were incredibly rare, and she guessed there might be a few hundred to a few thousand in the entire world.
Benders were a precious resource, a resource that the PRT had completely in hand thanks to the work of the White Lotus and their apparent knowledge of how to make use of it. Powers had limits, rules that had to be followed, though enough time would see exceptions, but bending was naturally less restrained, only limited by the creativity, talent, and hard work of a user. Though it didn't scale as high as normal powers did.
Shamans were worse, following rules and logic that made it seem more like witchcraft, and the right shaman in the right place could change the course of the battle in the same way a powerful cape could. One town had the Elite brought down by a single rogue shaman, plaguing them with nightmares until they were dropped by a small group of closely knit benders. Other powered gangs had already been kicked out by the Elite, so the town was free from cape influence.
For the time being at least, and it had only been possible because it was one of the more violent and vicious cells.
The Elite would have to find deeper inroads with the police force, because their numbers were far greater than anything the Elite had to offer, and number was a quality all its own. In this battle the PRT had beaten them to the punch, and that meant things were changing and fast.
Agnes slumped, a headache growing.
She supposed she would simply have to wait and see, and hope her more headstrong colleagues wouldn't make a mess they wouldn't be able to cover up.
___
July 21st, 2011. 9:00PM
Joanna had a frightening grin on her face, one that left her fellow Athena scientists rather unnerved as she spun on a chair, preening herself at her transfer to the new Hyperdimensional Physics Laboratory. The building itself was large, hundreds of thousands of square feet of space, with a dedicated power system relating to what was apparently a fusion reactor. Along with rather conventional diesel generators in case primary power failed.
A good amount of funding was provided from Athena's coffers as well as numerous grants from the government because of the relation of her work to Parahuman powers and Tinkertech. It was bound to make them curious, and more money wasn't a downside especially when she had a dozen lackeys for help her out.
She guessed that the Paraphysics division would have about a hundred employees sometime by the middle of next month. She rather pitied her CEO, she seemed like such a nice woman but she was obviously not used to having so much weight and responsibility on her shoulders. Despite her social awkwardness she had people gravitated towards her anyway.
Joanna didn't find that unexpected, she was a strange one but she knew people who could get companions and friends despite not having a clue what they were doing. The same obviously applied to poor Erudition and the little tinker would just have to deal with it.
"So…when do we get the paperwork for the Wakefield Accelerator?" She asked with a yawn, and an aide gave her a look.
"All the paperwork for the facility has already been turned in…shouldn't be more than a day or two before we can start some experiments." Joanna perked up, her dreams coming true in a way that almost made her moist.
"So our thirty five meter accelerator has every sensor in place as needed, as well as the computer systems in place to receive the data?" The aide, a young and pretty Nordic girl nodded and Joanna smiled wider.
The computer systems were all optotronics, more primitive machines that could be built and manufactured using current technology, with programming that had precedence in experimental computing systems in numerous labs scattered across the country. It was at least a hundred times more powerful than the 3nm process nodes, but was a few centuries behind the equivalent devices on Erudition's arm.
The logic circuits made use of quantum cascade lasers, optical computing at a massively parallel rate, with electrical switching taken care of by optical fiber, while memory was stored in some type of decoupled charge device, a lot of them in fact, like what was used in color cameras.
She didn't really understand it, that was more for the computer nerds working in making the stuff mass producible since it was apparently super important for Eezo based technology. But if it gave her enough computing power to punch a hole in reality then she wasn't going to hold back her glee.
The early experiments were working on dark matter generation, since it had more than enough power, and studying it was going to be important for expanding their understanding. She remembered that it had been discovered a few months ago, from data that had been ignored due to the sheer amount until they made a program to sift out the literal petabytes of shit. It was apparently made up of at least two particles, the basic…WIMP and a type of mediating particle that might link it with dark energy at the same time.
It was a fifth fundamental force, though it was obviously incomplete in some way. It still didn't explain powers, and Joanna was quite excited to find out what was missing from the equation, what beautiful math would come falling out from the heavens as she made them scream for their mama?
The people around her increased their distance, and she smiled at the particle accelerator that would generate the data for their experiments. Of course because their work involved studying capes and powers in general, there was a general expectation of security, and the multiple drones and heavy use of various checks involving electromagnetic patterns, biological analysis, and use of potent scanners made it even more obvious.
Probably for the best, she didn't need some of the crazier capes deciding to commandeer her baby and turn it into a dimensional battering ram.
That was her job of course, not some dumbass pretending to do science.
"Could you please stop scaring the people around you?" Sean Connor asked desperately, and was promptly ignored by Joanna as she fantasized on what the wonder machine could do.
There was a lot of work, and she was swiftly getting her schedule in order for future experiments.
"No."
"That does not make me feel better about this at all…"
Joanna grinned.
___
July 21st, 2011. 10:00PM
In the heart of the City of Frozen Tears, sat a single child, a child of the sands of the central east, now nothing but bombed out ruins full of monsters and star storms. He was twelve, and he was cursing his own ineptitude at making a warning, forgetting that the people of the mortal world known as Earth Bet did not know his tongue.
Because it was one that existed in his world rather than theirs, a language born of circumstances some five hundred years before his time. He knew this only because he spoke to the Void, a deeper sight than most. But he was still a naive child, one born in a world built atop the corpses of ten billion souls.
The pure Void told him much, but it alone could not allow him to cross the gap between worlds. Instead this was the purview of the Void Wyrms, creatures of sight and mind and power, their essence recycled and rebirthed as new entities. He crossed the barriers, because he was the one most fit for the harrowing journey enabled by the power of the great spirits.
His world had been torn asunder when a shard beast had crashed into his land, a maddened beast the size of a mountain, with enough mass to crush a region. His people had fled to the west and found the islands of Britannia at war with the warrior kings of Vinland, the Iron Lords bringing war and death to Europe.
These Shard Beasts were few in number, and many were ended by mutual kills between them and the godless abominations that roamed the ruined cities of the old world. The beast that had destroyed his home had been slain by an avenging angel, brought forth by a robed man sacrificing his very being to call upon faith and justice in equal measure.
Rusul had felt the call of the spirits that day, hearing the voice of the Void, followed the lines of what-was and what-could-have-been. He caught flashes of things not meant to be known, saw a sight that only a shaman could understand.
He saw cracks in reality, rivers of altered space flowing between and within worlds, connecting worlds never meant to meet. His world was one of the worst off, the fatigue from old world experiments only worsening the damage.
He dropped down into a meditating position, brushing back messy dark hair as his eyes shut. None of the strange abominations that called this corpse city home approached him, spooked by the swarm of void spirits around his body.
In an instant be entered a trance, and his raw spirit exited his physical body. He focused on the lines that connected all things, saw past the illusion of separation, and past the illusion of a gap between realities. His spirit followed the rivers of altered reality, through holes connecting universes and towards a particular woman, in a particular prison, on a particular Earth.
Rusul blinked, glancing around to look at the bitter walls of the most inescapable prison on the face of the planet he was on. Within the cell there sat a woman who didn't look much older than him, but he knew enough about the people in this world to know that meant nothing at all.
She didn't see him, though the way she chewed her lip told him she was sensing something. But then whatever powers she had didn't help her with looking at a shaman astrally projecting. The Fairy Queen would only see him if he wanted her to see him.
Her presence was as clear as a burning sun, a pressure on the fabric of the Real, her connection to a vast entity on the scale of planets making her a beacon in the vastness of the multiverse. He saw the shard behind her, a mighty monstrosity that could only just see him, a specter of death, befitting the Fairy Queen's self given title.
The Harvester held tightly to hundreds of agents, and Rusul left that alone, knowing he had no power to interfere with the machinations of an alien god. He saw all Parahumans easily, the great tide of their agents, their spiritual energy pressing down on existence.
He saw glimpses of what they could be, but also saw them for who they were at their core. But then that was a power that belonged to many shamans, even if he saw more clearly, more accurately.
"Hello." He made himself visible, and Glaistig Uaine was startled by his emergence from nothing.
"An unexpected visitor, you're not one of the Faerie." One of the most powerful beings on Earth that was neither Void Wyrm or spirit responded calmly. "Why have you intruded on my domain?"
The boy smiled. "I wanted to see if what I've seen was true…it's one thing to hear the whispers of the Void, and another to meet in…person." Rusul shrugged, not feeling frightened, having become far too used to strangeness and beings like gods to him in power. "I'm sure you've felt it in your soul…there's been an awakening. It can't be stopped, not even with all your power."
"You presume much." Glaistig Uaine was short with the child, but he wasn't impressed by a woman playing pretend to cope with the trauma that turned her into what she was.
"If you knew from what world I hailed from, then perhaps you would think differently." The young looking blonde glanced over at the glowing spirit child, lifting a brow in curiosity
"How so?" She asked and was answered in kind.
"My world has become plagued by the creatures you call Faerie, though I've taken to calling them Void Wyrms. A more…apt true name." The Fairy Queen didn't agree but a whisper told her he wasn't wrong, not truly. "Some take their masks, others go without…broken and mad, before being slain by the abominations my ancestors created."
She stiffened, two ghostly specters circling around the middle eastern child.
"Why tell me this?" She demanded.
"I'm checking to see if there's more to you than what I've seen…if there's a person inside that shell of yours." He spoke honestly, a cold and determined look entering his eyes. "You should well have seen how the Faerie have changed, and I would like your opinion on that."
There was a brief pause, and the Fairy Queen gave her thoughts.
"Scion has been erratic…that much I have managed to notice, the waves of his slow and steady…aberrance have been noted by my faerie."
The shaman didn't smile. "That wasn't what I meant, Keeper of the Dead." There was another moment of silence.
Glaistig Uaine clasped her hands together, interlacing delicate fingers and releasing a single puff of hot air.
"You speak of the Usurper, the Vedic Queen?" She queried the shaman carefully, his question passed through the lens of her own point of view.
"Yes." He stated plainly, eyebrows twitching openly.
"She is…strange, she's not like the masks of the other faerie." There was an uncertain expression on the Fairy Queen's face. "She has turned numerous faeries against their purpose, rallied allies to her side, to her court. Even the Queen Administrator has fallen prey to her honeyed words." The Queen cape stood, circling around with her arms behind her back. "She has commandeered the game, altered the playing field, or at the least took every advantage she could manage in a changing world."
"The second is more accurate than the first…she did not disrupt the 'game', she only took control of machinery already compromised, turning it to her own ends." He did not elaborate on what those ends were, not in her current state of delusion. She would not take the attempt to terminate the cycle well, not until enough of what made her Ciara rose back up from the ocean that called itself Glaistig Uaine.
He had seen those possibilities, glimpses of those other selves because the Void had told him.
There was curiosity burning in those eyes, and a quiet but expected whisper came from the Fairy Queen.
"Perhaps I will pay the Usurper a visit…"
The child shook his head, and with a mental shift his spirit retracted, flooding back through the cracks and into his body. The abominations had approached him but Void continued to protect him, and he rolled his shoulders and clicked his tongue.
He knew that the Vyasa would face adversity, and not all it would be simple conflict and destruction of an enemy. His world had only a few hosts that didn't wish to only destroy or rule over the masses, and only a few had the personal power to save his world.
And two of those were agents of the Vyasa, who still needed to grow into their power. He knew that help wouldn't be coming soon, so he had to wait and see. Wait and see how the dice would roll with his interference. For now he would be satisfied with watching how she would bring down the more subtle threats.
It was imperative that she be successful, for the sake of his people if nothing else.
The closer together Ciara and Basilia become, the more influence the Amenthes Network can exert upon Keeper Of The Dead. Good plan.
I notice that, against all odds, Ciara is not a shaman?! Else she should have seen the visitor coming via spirit space sight.
I notice that, against all odds, Ciara is not a shaman?! Else she should have seen the visitor coming via spirit space sight.
- Location
- Chula Vista
While Ciara being a shaman would be pretty cool, there's a bit of an issue with the fact she's taken the shards of hundreds of capes, and that Hero is still kind of around despite getting shredded by the Siberian. Plus she's not spiritual…she's crazy, and while that can overlap it is a bad idea for that to happen when she's so heavily influenced by her shard. Plus shamans are a lot rarer than benders, less than 1% of the population have the potential and its unlikely that all of them will make use of it, much less to the effectiveness of most onscreen shaman.
Basilia, Elle, and the few other names are all freaks of nature on the wibbly wobbly power scale of shamanism and spirit magic. Plus she's overpowered as it as a Trump 12
Discernment 10.4
- Location
- Chula Vista
Discernment 10.4
July 24th, 2011. 5:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I rapped my fingers against my thighs, flicking against the hardened metal alloy that provides protection from all sorts of damage. The meeting room was filled with more important people than I originally expected, with Eidolon in the room and Piggot staring at me with an unreadable expression.
"Well?" She said, and I noted that she had thinned out and looked less pale and unhealthy than usual. Give her another month or so and she might recover the body she had when she was on the frontlines.
"I'm sure you've noticed some new residents in Brockton Bay, am I right?" I made a hologram in midair, one of those crab-like creatures wiggling it's claws.
"What's your point?" I kept going and Eidolon clearly had the same questions.
"We located a portal leading to their home reality and closed it. But I eventually took a wider scan and found that there were multiple signs of dimensional fatigue across the Earth in its entirety. They're diminishing but they're still there."
"Dimensional Fatigue?" Eidolon grumbled, looking exhausted but he wasn't dead so that was better than nothing.
"The result of the barrier between realities growing thin or being punched through," I created a model, a 2D grapth of reality. "The local multiverse is something like a giant onion slice, layers offset in a roughly flat architecture." The image of two layers connecting or being locally merged was informative. "Something has ripped holes in spacetime, each of these holes leading to other realities." I showed a picture of the portal, a gaping maw of swirling red-blue light.
"How many are there?" Piggot demanded, and I obliged.
"At some point there were thousands, though at the moment it's likely a few hundred scattered across the planet." I needed more powerful scanners to pinpoint particular locations, since the use of hyperdimensional particles to seek out a location to open a portal too was more narrow in effect due to energy costs.
"Do they lead to inhabited Earths?" Was the first thing out of Piggot's mouth, and I grimaced.
"The new portal the White Lotus has found seems to lead to a ruined city, and I've put decontamination protocols in effect to prevent the spread of disease." I had personally hunted down nearly every crab-thing in the ocean, with Dragon doing her part in the culling of an invasive species. I didn't want to chance disease causing local extinctions of fauna and flora. Much less from a planet that spewed out shard abominations.
"This new portal would be the one that Palanquin found when they brought down Orchard?" I winced and nodded, that had been a shitshow though thankfully the collateral damage had been surprisingly minimal.
"I frankly had no idea there were so many cracks in reality, pinpointing the cause isn't easy either." I rubbed the back of my neck, shrugging my shoulders. "It's not from my portals because they're specifically built not to put too much pressure on spacetime. It's not from powers themselves, but it's certainly not good." I didn't want the mess from dealing with interdimensional politics, even if we were probably going to deal with galactic politics soon enough.
"I've been dealing with the same issues." My neck snapped over to Eidolon, and I couldn't read his expression behind his mask. "I've closed about a dozen portals including three in Kyushu. A few of them lead to different Earths, and one of them leaked poisonous gas…chlorine I think?"
"Hmm…might be Earth Khloros, that planet's atmosphere is livable only to Rachni." And Krogan but they're Krogan so it makes a lot of sense. "Something put a massive amount of pressure on the fabric of eleven dimensional spacetime, and has turned it into Swiss cheese in certain parts. Since we're not dealing with massive invasions of animals, disease or people from other realities it's likely mostly benign but still problematic."
"A giant Endbringer-like monster escaped from one of those 'benign' portals." Piggot replied, her eyebrows twitching angrily. "I wouldn't call that safe."
I laughed nervously, scratching my chin. "Once I located the dimensional coordinates of its home reality, I managed to send a scanning sweep over the planet." The director and Eidolon both looked curious, anticipation building. "The Earth in question has only a single portal remaining that leads to our world, the one we contained." I pointed it out. "This particular Earth was already screwed up beforehand, with ugly readings that indicate that dimensional fatigue has plagued that world for a good hundred and fifty years."
"How does that help us?" Piggot asked, and I found it a reasonable question.
"It gives me a baseline to compare and contrast this world with scans of other portals on Earth Bet. The majority of the portals likely open to benign worlds with no signs of dimension tampering and reality alteration." Because there would be some crazy readings of things like higher dimensional sine-strings, twistings of the physical dimensions, and shifts in the physical constants.
"That still leaves the trouble of disease and possible conflicts to take these worlds resources." Eidolon made an excellent point, and I should have thought of that myself.
"Well…I'm not sure how well I'll be able to help with that, I don't exactly have jurisdiction across every country on Earth to search for portals and shut them down."
There was a pause from the two, one that ran long enough to make my social anxiety act up. Getting started down by Eidolon was more then disconcerting without adding on a direct government leader in Piggot.
"What?" I asked sharply, and Piggot giggled…giggled!
"Erudition…your team made the Leviathan fight the one with the least casualties in history and killed him as well as stopped the emergence of seventeen more in the future. Any country hit by Leviathan barring parts of Africa, South America or the CUI would welcome you. If the bounties on the Endbringers hadn't been discarded years ago you'd have the wealth of a small nation in your hands. Telling them you need to shut portals to other worlds isn't going to end poorly."
I opened my mouth. "Huh…" Then closed it, not realizing how much goodwill I had generated from being one of the main forces behind slaying a monster responsible for more than nine million deaths.
Putting down his siblings was going to be a problem though, Behemoth was tougher and had dynakinesis, and the Simurgh was the one with the fewest weaknesses besides strength. And her telekinesis made up for most of that, and I knew full well that she had no empathy for humanity.
Plus…after some hesitation, I looked up the bits and pieces of Ward that had been jumbled up inside Veda…because to be frank her organization of information was garbage, like whoever made her had been rather unprepared.
That concept worried me.
Anyway…from what I've checked, the Simurgh had been plotting for the Titans for years and I had gotten confirmation from High Priestess that she would probably try to hijack things once Scion dies…or whatever the fuck else will break the cycle.
Her Precognition was monstrous in strength even if lesser to even Dinah's shard, though it used to be more even before the Eye of Fate ate Coil's shard. The issue was that she had four years to plan what she was planning, and the fact she had shut down told me she was having trouble.
But it wouldn't necessarily last forever, and having a ship that could wreck her core would be rather helpful.
"Erudition?" Piggot looked annoyed, and I straightened my posture.
"Sorry, just thinking. If getting permission is easy then closing those portals is likely a good idea. It won't be a permanent state of affairs in the long term, but there's not much I can do on that front."
"The new particle accelerators experiments are the key aren't they?" Eidolon was 100% using a thinker power if he got that out of my words.
"Punching a hole in reality isn't going to be Tinkertech forever, and dark matter and energy research is critical to understanding the Mass Effect." The Entities had some limited ability to mess with the stuff, though it was primarily for the generation of critical exotic matter in their biology.
Piggot didn't look comfortable at that idea but I knew there was little I could do to help with that. "Are you the only one working on these kinds of experiments?"
"There are at least half a dozen other similar projects in the US alone so not really no, and since it's not Tinkertech it's outside your jurisdiction." I crossed my arms.
Piggot rubbed the bridge of her nose. "We're getting off topic, the better question is what that creature was?"
"A Shard, if a fairly defective one." The two glanced at one another and back at me. "My scans picked up about a dozen signatures on the planet, big areas where reality is being warped into a pretzel. We're lucky this one didn't seem too powerful or Nashua would have been wiped from existence."
"I already have an idea of how that's possible." Piggot replied, her expression looking as exhausted as I felt at times.
"At the least we can shut down the portal, though if this portal is a result of a crack then we'll need to piece together local spacetime to keep it from breaking again."
We spent a lot of time hashing out what I knew and what I could tell them on dimensional fatigue and how to deal with it. Closing portals on Earth Bet was a priority and I was going to start shutting down portals on other Earths too. The weight of such alterations were way too dangerous, and reality breaking is a bad end.
That was Ward striking early and that mess was not needed right now, and I would straight up punch Behemoth in the fucking face if I have to deal with this bullshit.
…
"There's one more thing." Piggot gestured, and I laid rapt attention. "Your warning about a potential infiltration of the Birdcage gave us the warning needed to record a conversation between the Fairy Queen and an unknown shaman."
"What?" I croaked. "She didn't get out did she?" They both shook their heads and I felt quite relieved.
"But we do have recordings…and she appears to know about your existence. And may or not attempt to meet you. The PRT preferred to warn you due to your general cooperation and the danger that Glaistig Uaine poses." Piggot sounded apologetic.
…
…
I stood up from my seat, placing both my hands on my shapely hips. "Welp…I'm going home now."
I dropped a paper file for them to read up on, and they let me go without a fight.
July 24th, 2011. 12:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I laid my head down on a pillow, letting out a loud groan that was briefly enhanced by airbending into a room shaking shout. Taylor was standing behind me and to my surprise she sat down on my bed and gestured for me to approach her.
I scooted over, and she kicked off her shoes as she shuffled closer to the center of where there was room since I was on the edge. She crossed her legs into a comfy sitting position and grunted, and after a moment I pushed myself into a sitting position right behind her.
"Could you just let me wallow in my misery in peace?" I whined, but she denied my request and lightly patted her hands on my tense shoulders. She dragged me until my back touched her…chest? I think it was a little lower since I was tiny and pudgy and she was tall and willowy and very pretty. It was a good thing I had a lot of different types, and that I loved a girl who could bench press me.
Taylor leaned forward, whispering in my ear. "I'm not going to do that Basilia…" I swallowed air, my neck heating where her hot breath hit my sensitive skin.
"Okay…" I muttered and let out a squeak when her hands tightly gripped my shoulders. It shifted to applying downward pressure on my back using her forearms, and my face flushed in response. The tension in my back started to uncoil in an indescribably pleasurable(I think?) way. I wasn't really sure because I had never gotten a massage before.
"Turn your head a bit…" I complied and chewed on my lip as I melted under her ministrations. She chopped at my upper back with the side of her hands, and I leaned into her touch without a moment of hesitation. This was really nice…
Once my shoulders were loose, her magic fingers moved to my neck. She applied pressure to the sides of my spine, and it took a lot to not let out a groan. God I didn't realize how much tension was in my body.
She repeated the same soothing motions and massages along my upper back and neck, and I felt like putty in her hands. A good two minutes of this eventually proved too much…
I let out a slight moan, and with all the grace of a drunk seagull threw myself face first onto my pillow. Away from the woman with magic fingers.
I flipped onto my back, covering half my face with an embarrassed squawk. Taylor was smiling, and I knew she was making fun of me in her head, even with the light dusting of pink on her cheeks.
"Why do you always take the initiative with this kind of stuff?" I complained, and Taylor only chuckled, her hazel eyes scanning up and down my pouting face.
"Because you're a dork who's afraid of intimacy?" I had no retort and that was apparently permission to keep going. "Despite the fact your eyes have a hard time keeping to themselves."
I groaned. "Oh shut up…if a girl is cute I'm going to inspect them for a few seconds, guys too if they're my type." Taylor leaned back, chuffing and hiding her wide sweet smile. "Besides I'm kind of a bit too much of a mess for much to come out of that." I laughed awkwardly and she rolled her eyes with a smug grin.
Her expression became more neutral. "Which reminds me…what is your type?"
I scooted up, bunching up my blanket and pillow into a resting spot for my back. "Well, it's a little hard to answer that…I kind of have a lot of types?" I tried to elaborate but had a hard time managing it. "To be frank if someone is willing to listen and reply back to my nonsense it's not going to be that hard to win me over." I hadn't even realized I had a crush on a guy until we had stopped talking to each other, and that…still stung at times.
"So you're not into girls with big racks and fat asses?" Taylor purposely glanced up and down at my body and I snorted.
I waved my arms in front of my face with a giggle. "Oh no don't get me wrong, I'm still a dumb guy on the inside, I very much enjoy boobs and butts. But it's not mandatory, I just want someone willing to put up with me and understand me…" My smile was softening.
Taylor came to some type of conclusion. "You're secretly a bit of a romantic aren't you? Kind of weird coming from someone who can…be kind of cynical at times?"
"I might know how people are and how they can be at their worst but that's no reason to give up and let the world turn to shit. Plus while romance might not be for everyone." Because aromantics and asexuals were a thing. "Everyone deserves a healthy and loving relationship…except for like truly despicable people but that's rather self evident so…"
"It's cute." I wished I had a hoodie to duck my head into, why did Taylor have to embarrass me with compliments?
"Maybe it's a good idea to turn down your flirtiness? It's kind of scary." Taylor frowned.
She fidgeted. "I'm just trying to be nice…also you're my girlfriend so uhh well…" She flicked her fingers against each other, looking a little lost. I had a method of payback so I took it.
"You stuck your tongue down my throat." I said simply.
She pushed me down, face taking a darker hue. "That was an accident, I didn't mean to do that!" I slugged her shoulder and she let out an indignant cry.
"Sure you didn't, you also didn't grope my butt the moment you had the opportunity." I sighed dramatically, placing my hand on my chest in feigned disappointment.
"You liked it…" She murmured angrily, and I nodded, not even disagreeing with her statement. I did like it because it was Taylor, and because I trusted her to know my own limits and boundaries. I was still unsure of what to physically do in a romantic relationship, it was one thing to have fantasies and quite another to be in an actual relationship.
I felt better, and I let out a grin rise up onto my face. "Thanks Taylor…sometimes the stress really gets to me, the only reason I haven't had an aneurysm at this point is because of my implants and my fitness." I flexed an arm, muscle coiling like steel. Technically speaking only about a third of my muscle was organic, with most of it being myomer bundles interlaced between 'normal' muscles spliced with alien(ish) genes.
"You still haven't seen one of the team therapists." I felt my good mood fade but I didn't begrudge her the question.
"I was still working out the schedule since I needed to take time to tinker more, set up a few things on that front." She looked frustrated and I decided to reassure her. "You don't need to worry, I've sorted it out and have a schedule for regular visits. Maybe a week at the most." I had gone to therapy before, even if it was for lesser problems than the one I was dealing with now.
"I can accept that." God Taylor could be so nosy at times, but I found it sweet even if I liked the idea of her turning it down a notch.
I laid down, and thought about how much the universe seemed to love screwing me over with bigger and more complex problems. Not that it would have been any less difficult anyway even if all I had needed to do was kill Scion. It wasn't like all cape related problems were simple death battles instead of complex political maneuvering and keeping us from being labeled as public enemy number one.
Most Thinkers weren't too powerful but the ones that were would be incredibly dangerous and could pull off dangerous manipulations of the media and countering that would need Thinkers of our own. At the moment we had three, with Dinah, Charlotte and Sierra. Though it was technically a sub-Thinker rating for the both of them, I would put them between 5 and 7 for a threat level against normals. Dinah was at bare minimum an 8 due to her ability to use her Precog in combat now, even if only for a limited amount into the future. For lack of better words it was something like Coil's timeline splits fused with her old trillions of time streams.
Obviously she wasn't living through every time stream or she'd be as crazy as a bat. It was more limited than that, she would refine it by asking herself questions, compressing trillions of possibilities into compact visions of the near future. Looking further pushed her power's limits more and more, until the solid images shattered into flashes more like her original power.
I'm not that good at estimating it though since I don't know how the PRT figures that out.
Though it didn't make the prospects of a Trump 12 knowing my existence any less terrifying, much less one that might want to meet me in person. Dragon had given me a more detailed report, again because they were probably terrified at the idea of losing a powerful tinker to the Fairy Queen.
Apparently all I had done was confirm what they had already suspected and now they knew she wasn't quite as delusional as they expected. But really she was just coping with the alien parasite in her brain by saying it's a magical and whimsical fairy. So the PRT likely had the truth of powers locked up tight, simply because doing otherwise would lead to panic.
Which was very much not a long term solution due to all the hatred against Parahumans, and that hiding secrets wasn't viable for all of time. Then there was the fact she was calling me a Usurper, the Vedic Queen. While the term was flattering, it was more unnerving to be considered on the same level of respect as Eidolon and other 'Noble' shards.
But then…it was true, I was an administrator of the highest order, thousands of exatons of mass compressed away into pure spiritual corpus and infused with the metaphysical soul of a human being.
I paused, following the train of thought I was going down…those seemed to be my own but with a flavoring of Veda interlaced into them. Then again I had no idea how thin the division between the two of us really was, she wasn't Raava and that meant different properties of how our spiritual bond works. But I also certainly wasn't the people within Veda, those five souls who guarded the inner gates.
But it only created more questions, one that I thought deeply in the most silent nights, when the call of the spirits grew louder, when I heard the beating heart of Earth Bet in all its horror and all its glory.
Other multi-benders didn't need the spirit entity I had. Not to bend more than one element. But…one soul meant one element, with the exception that they could have biotics because Eezo was physical as well as metaphysical. So their purpose certainly wasn't to grant me bending, I didn't need their minds and experience. Their souls alone would provide the Substrate I need to be a shitty Avatar.
But that begged the question then…where did the souls for multi-benders come from?
Whatever I had done with Taylor hadn't created her soul, it had elevated it from that incomplete spark, by using an existing soul to start up the engine.
There was a lot a person can do with a soul, you could take it, you could give one away, they can even be transplanted. But creating one was beyond anyone's power, you would have to be a literal god to succeed in that task.
More questions without answers, more knowledge that was either forbidden or unknown even to the people locked up in Veda.
I was getting tired at being ignorant, and I knew I had to do something about it. I had to find whatever answer I was looking for. It was just how I worked, I was a scholar, I was a thinker.
"Basilia?" Taylor piped up, and I took a calming breath.
"I'm sorry…I'm just frustrated that I'm always left with unanswered questions."
Taylor nodded, flashing a sympathetic smile. "I get it…I know you like knowing things, and it has to be terrible."
"I'll figure something out, I've got time and I've got a massive amount of resources to exploit to work towards what I'm looking for." I had built an entire cruiser in fact to prove it, one that was easily upgradable and in the worst case it's spirit could be transferred into a new ship if I couldn't upgrade it anymore.
I had the ability to construct more, though I would need to modify the initial station to do so, and for now I was laying down a new hull to build a cargo vessel for the spirit of the ship that had kept Leviathan down as long as possible. It would be about seven hundred forty meters in length, and all the weapon systems would be removed or shrunk down to a more manageable level. The drive core itself was going to be downgraded, which while it wouldn't reduce speed too much would make rapid mass shifts and spatial warping more difficult.
A warship was maneuverable, a cargo ship is not.
That was going to take a while though, since the design was going to be something rather more suitable for transporting materials across stellar distances.
"You're going to tinker again?" I didn't even deny it, grinning at Taylor.
"Yes."
"I'll get the sweet tea."
"Thanks."
July 24th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I worked carefully with the simple device, letting Dinah in on a few secrets here and there on basic mass effect technology. She had a keen interest in the nitty gritty while Elle had an interest in the math and equations behind it.
"So you've got your battery providing current and voltage." I pointed out the garden variety lithium ion battery, and Dinah had her own hooked up to a single inverter to modulate the current and voltage. "Taylor taught you how to program the thing right?" Dinah gave a thumbs up.
"Yep. It's a pretty small battery isn't it?" She held the creation close but not too close, it was a simple device in most respects. A rather DIY piece of power electronics like what would be used to power an electric bike, along with printed circuitry from a nearby PCB shop. The first bit did the job of generating a positive and negative mass aspected dark energy field, while the circuit design let us place some simple waveguides and projectors for more efficient fields.
I grinned. "You want to turn it on and see if it worked?" The Thinker brightened up at my response, and she flicked on a little remote that would modulate the current and voltage. "And do you remember how current and voltage affects a mass effect field? As well as how to cut it into the right shape?"
She nodded rapidly, and after a moment flicked on the on switch at the agreed upon current and voltage. A negative current was provided, and the roughly ball shaped mass of magic space rock and electronics floated, blue light flaring.
"Voltage affects the size of a field while amperage affects the strength of a field." I gave her a thumbs up as she played with the simple toy. Luckily I kept to a stable field rather than degenerate fields because accidentally making a black hole was not on the today list. Of course that was only possible with more advanced field projections, a basic mass bubble was an inefficient use of dark energy.
Degenerate fields could cause particle collapse for black hole projectors like the M-490 Blackstorm or the raging warp fields of Disruptor weapons of a different degenerate field design.
"Very good, and what about the appropriate means of cutting Eezo?" I continued the lesson, one that I was already plotting to give to some of my engineers. Eezo was easy enough to find on an industrial scale, even on Earth.
Dinah replied promptly. "Eezo has directionality, and machines have to cut it in the right way to easily apply negative and positive currents." The form of exotic matter acted a lot like a piezoelectric crystal, but instead of changing shape and creating sound waves like in ultrasound it generates a dark energy field.
Not that Eezo could be considered anywhere near normal, especially since the physical existence of Eezo as neutronium shifting to dark matter and back again is simply a shell for the fundamental force behind it…it's a complicated science is all I'm saying.
The ball dropped instead as mass was increased with a simple shifting to a positive current, and the stepping up of voltage grew the radius of the mass bubble. It was a toy by the standards of anything I could make with some real effort, but it could be built with off the shelf items as required.
"If you want to go out and tinker with stuff I can't understand I won't mind." I flushed at how easily Dinah managed to read me, and I patted her shoulder. I did the same for a sleepy Elle, but instead ruffled her blonde hair as I skipped over to a nearby lab.
I opened the doors and found myself in a rather stereotypical lab, though it wasn't a shiny white after weeks of use, occasional explosions from failed experiments and creations and other troubles. There were some glowy lights but that wasn't from nauseating displays of light and more from activated Eezo doing its job of warping reality. Plus a few experiments with quantum locked light, because there was a shocking amount of convergence with technology across billions of years.
Though the Entities managed it through direct dimensional manipulations rather than locking it with dark energy fields.
I shook my head and moved on to a single long tube, a hefty laser steel alloy strong enough to withstand the forces it was subject to. At the rear end of the barrel sat a compact machine, with an Eezo crystal and a powerful computer system forming the computing matrix for the system. Dark energy was channeled to twist dimensions to warp space, and particle accelerators acted as waveguides to fold parts of the machine into the higher spatial dimensions through specific metrics. Their mass and volume was hidden, but poked out into other realities to form a multidimensional machine.
It worked a bit like a Tardis, but the sheer complexity of the technology made it hard to scale up because it wasn't intuitive enough. I had started with simple holes into other realities, and thus the ability to project energy between two points for communication. I could kind of guess what was what from examining something with my own two hands, but it wasn't going to give me schematics in my head.
At least not until I started mixing them together into something that wouldn't instantly fall apart or explode or cause errant dark energy and kill us all.
This machine generated a field of altered space, and by sending signals to other realities I could for lack of better words merge the same spots in different universes to allow a wrapped object to strike at multiple realities at once. It detected the signature of other realities, the resonant frequency of each plane of existence and unfolded the space into as many as could be or needed to be detected.
I had finally reverse engineered the most basic aspect of Sting, past the initial prototype. The ability to unfold matter and energy across multiple dimensions to strike at every reality a shard could shift between to defend its physical body. This was a larger model than the initial crude prototype, about a meter and a half in length and given enough power to burst through most materials.
The trouble was that I had the unfolding down but Sting wasn't just unfolding across targeted dimensions. It was the ability to ignore select laws of physics, to shift the laws of reality to make a weapon potent enough to damage a hostile Entity. Most of the threat came from reducing the need to drill through thousands of exatons of mass and to reduce the losses from their ability to shift energy to other dimensions to negate attacks.
It was why combining it with the Thanix was so necessary, the mass effect shunt sent out a slurry of liquid nickel-iron with enough force to cut through a Turian battleship in one short blast. That amount of energy output plus the dimension shifting aspects of Sting would offer enough oomph to damage Endbringers and theoretically Titans. Because I very much didn't want to rely on friendly shards to protect us from unrestricted shards running around on other Earths.
Early experiments led me to believe I was going to need a much larger machine, though sufficient testing found this to be only partially correct. The field needed to be wrapped around the slurry, not the entire length of the gun…kind of a stupid idea in hindsight. Even so it was going to be about ten meters long, and multiple tons in mass. It would activate with every burst of the Thanix, allowing the main gun to sever dimensional connections to cut right through multidimensional objects.
So I had a weapon that would deal with multidimensional threats as needed though further experimentation would be required. My method wasn't the most efficient, and it would take a lot of work to make further improvements to make it equal the potency of Sting.
But it was an excellent start.
The prototype was a standard mass accelerator, about a meter long and similar in firepower to a Widow, which was effectively a miniature tank cannon in the amount of shit it can fuck up. Adding Sting would fuck up any dimensional effects on impact, and would destroy a modern tank in one hit.
So with a cheeky grin, my hands found the trigger of the gun strapped down by cinder blocks and reality hiccuped. The hypersonic nail sized projectile broke the speed of sound over twenty times over, striking the thin plate of Leviathan flesh head on. The crystalline flesh shattered in parts, the round shearing through inches of Endbringer flesh before losing too much energy and stopping. Though it's shattered boiling tip managed to drill to the other side.
It was a success, Sting prevented too much flesh from being brought forth from other realities, but it was still slowed by its mass and the molecular properties of the semi-organic matter. So there was no killing the feather bitch with a Carnifex, but hitting her with the main gun had a much higher chance of working.
I had a lot of what was needed to combat Scion, the unfolding of Sting, the firepower to damage his main body, with say a supersized Bakuda bomb. Striking him from dimensions outside of his influence might…might fuck with his PtV.
Though something more effective would be some method of screwing with the signals that need to be projected to obtain the sensory data for the shards.
The smile fell off my face when I thought about his reaction towards my existence. For a lack of better words he had seemed almost happy to see me, broadcasting with the energy of an atomic bomb right in my face.
Scion at the end had been at the end of his rope, decades of wallowing and saving people not feeling like enough for the selectively stupid bastard. It had been easy to sway him to kill people, and it took making him feel pain, making him feel the sheer pointlessness of his existence without his mate, without the cycle.
It made him so suicidal he let himself get struck by Sting, and let the ultimate Tinkertech gun shoot through the hole it made to his closed reality. Shattering the network in the process and giving the Simurgh the opportunity to break free and plan for the Titans to come.
The way he looked at me…it didn't fill me with good feelings. Somehow he had me mistaken for one of his kind, or at least something similar enough to attempt a conversation with. The fact a human was with him, much less the human that would have him as a charge at the end of things…I didn't know what to make of it anymore.
The future was unclear, and besides knowing perhaps a few hundred capes out of hundreds of thousands of capes…I was going to have to rely on research and Thinkers within my own team. I had programs scrolling the internet, and from some games with Dragon their quality wasn't far off from her own programs.
Made sense since I had the AI building abilities of over half a dozen races, more even as the Thranx had multiple contemporaries. I could easily build a ton of AGI, safe ones even with restrictions that would loosen as they aged.
But it still felt a little weird stepping up from domesticated digital animals to full on digital people. So that was probably not happening for a while even though I had incidentally designed the cruiser to fit an AI core. Not that it was required with the intelligence matrix that Dragon worked on.
"Maybe I should move on from this." I talked to myself, and sauntered over to one creation that had been the product of some of my work with Bakuda and additional work with Turnaround. It would have been nice to keep Taylor as a tinker but at this point she had more of a Thinker power to relay certain knowledge from Queen. She simply didn't have the time to tinker so the power had weakened, though she was making herself into a very good programmer and was getting good at using my own tools to tinker with her bugs a bit.
Anyway…the device was multidimensional again but this time it had a different use. It was compact, with much of the machinery folded up into other dimensions and the whole thing was a thick metal band to put on your wrist. The machinery on the other end collated energy from the dimensions they were in, precisely diverting electromagnetic force to generate and manipulate ionized gas with electric currents.
So…basically a pyrokinetic band. It was like an omni-tool, and would follow one's gestures to precisely control and manipulate flames. A better method was a neural link implant to modulate the flame with one's thoughts.
So…I guess I sort of had the ability to crib from shards now? Though with multiple orders of magnitude less energy stored and not quite as effective.
Yet.
Though to be fair this wasn't that impressive when a normal tool already has Incinerate and the bullshit with Cryo Blast involving Bose Einstein condensate. I could finagle with dimensions pretty well now, and my scans of Endbringer flesh were getting ever more data from them as I continued to send scanning pulses directed through higher physical dimensions.
My most recent tests with biological engineering paired with Amelia lead to us making a semi-organic crystalline computer that, like her armor, could open holes between realities to project energy and matter from. The exotic matter was hard to synthesize, but using zero-particle fields to essentially nudge subatomic particles to form exotic elements was…possible.
I think Entities used tiny dimensional connections to break up and reassemble matter down at that scale to make the thirty percent of their bodies made out of magic unobtainium. There were different types of Exomatter, with the newly synthesized Type 1 being some type of metric-altering material, Type 2 was a hyperconductor, and Type 3 was useful in quantum information systems, and Type 4 was good at anchoring degenerate energy fields.
At the moment I only had a few hundred kilograms of the stuff, and making it bond with organic chemistry was a bitch and a half without inherent knowledge of biology. It's sort of working, but I gave it months to years before I had anything there and I was honestly okay with that.
Building shards sounded like it was going to be more trouble than it was worth, but there was a part of doing so that tickled my fancy. Build a basic seed and let it grow and eat a couple asteroids, add some biotic nodes to feed on dark energy and boom, you've got yourself a good old friendly baby shard.
Exomatter was also sprinkled in small amounts in the cruiser spaceframe, a few tons of the stuff wasn't a lot but Bakuda could make some exotic metals in large quantities easily enough.
I got an alert, and found that I was apparently being paid a visit by Dragon and she was being accompanied by extras too.
Hmm…that should be interesting.
July 24th, 2011. 4:15PM
Basilia Rubio
I raised an eyebrow at the new Dragonflight suit, it was about seven feet tall and rather sleek and humanoid, with a short draconic face and long lithe limbs covered in smooth dark green metal. My armor's scanners picked up a micro-fusion reactor, carbon myomer muscle and a linear frame on top of that, and emitters generated an energy field, one that seemingly slowed all that it touched, obviously a bulky applied waveform shield. Like Scion's golden aura. Numerous ports could fire bullets, lasers, plasma, containment foam, gas or even electric pulse guns.
Hmm…definitely lasers and plasma, but no gas or tasers…neat. The claws on her fingers were sheathes for a monomolecular blade held in place by a Tinkertech field generator. Otherwise the air would have blown it away.
Kid Win was here, along with an additional cape I didn't recognize as someone local.
It was a young girl though I couldn't calculate her exact age without taking a deep invasive scan. I would put her in her mid teens though, about Dinah or Missy's age. She was a redhead with frizzy hair, and hid herself in a thick and crude costume that was basically a very hideous armored grey jumpsuit. A cheap ceramic mask hid her face, and I wondered why she had been brought here.
"Hello Dragon, Kid Win…and new girl? Welcome to one of a dozen bases scattered across the world." And by that I meant across dimensions, this base was a few hundred dimensions down from Lotus and was basically just a throwaway world.
"I'm sorry if I showed up on such short notice." Dragon apologized as one did, and she moved…glided really as I showed her the lab. It held the first Sting prototype, along with quite a few active robots and machinery.
One of the examples was a quadrupedal walker that was effectively a Tachikoma expy, with a chassi built around an articulated diamondoid exoskeleton with a segmented oversuit of Duralloy and every internal structure was connected by a robust spine. Smart matter allowed for the shifting of mounts and with CNT myomer, articulation of its limbs is easy. It could both walk and use omni-wheels to drive at a hundred miles per hour.
Also fly around through mass lightening fields and reaction wheels and cold-gas thrusters…and it was basically a mini-tank with the brain of an excitable puppy.
"I see you've been busy." Dragon glanced at the intelligent machine, it's arms shifting as it analyzed the tinker AI.
I waved it off with a cheeky grin. "Oh the Bagheera? I have like a hundred of them, plus the other Golems adds up to a few thousand more? Not a big deal." Dragon didn't seem surprised though Kid Win had some wonder left in his teenage body despite showing him a working spaceship. The unknowns seemed a little more shocked though and I straightened my posture a bit.
I coughed.
"But it does beg the question of why you've decided to visit? Another inspection or are you acting as a liaison today?" I was serious and Dragon seemed to realize that.
"It's nothing bad I assure you, Kid Win was nearby due to a tinker incident and I elected to take him with me to meet with you. As for Skimmer…? She's a tinker that I had a few worries about…" The now named Skimmer ducked her head and I wondered what had gone down there for her to catch the attention of Dragon.
"Hmm…fair enough. You two can sit down if you want." I gestured to the two younger capes and they sighed in relief while Dragon remained on two legs. "I was working on figuring out Flechette's power and made a breakthrough with a bigger prototype."
"Flechette's power?" Kid Win questioned as I activated an omni-tool, grabbing up basic materials, some chunks of purified silicon, carbon, gold, rare earths, aluminum
"I mentioned the spacetime manifold metric right, with the striking at multiple dimensions at once?" The precursor blocks were melted down, mass fields manipulating matter to fabricate what I needed for this time. The mini-fabricator did its job, and after a few seconds I had the framework done and a few more seconds completed an optotronic board.
"What's the point of that?" The newbie asked and I smiled as I worked on the fabrication of an entire mass accelerator system. Because I could.
"It makes it easier to bring down Endbringers." She looked wide eyed at me, while Dragon was quite unaffected as was Kid Win. "Their biology is multidimensional, and unfolding an attack negates some of the inherent strengths of their near infinitely dense flesh. Scaling it up to get enough power is hard but I've built some big things in the past." I shrugged off the difficulty, feeling good about myself.
"How far are you from…" Skimmer paused and poked Dragon, and I realized she was staring at what I was making on the table.
"What exactly is…that? I know your omni-tool is a fabricator but what exactly are its limits?" There was ready excitement in her accented voice, and if I was a happy bee I would have buzzed.
"Oh an omni-tool is pretty capable, especially linked with a set of armor." I explained readily. "Bioassembly of organisms like medi-gel." I demonstrated by taking a slice from an unfinished apple and mashing it to bits, and taking the mush up into my tool. In a few seconds I had some medi-gel and rubbed it on a cut where my gauntlet had been destroyed by a run in with a boulder. "Heatsinks are pretty easy, a few dozen carats of diamond and lithium. Fabrication of incredible microcircuitry, thus making more of itself, since an omni-tool is basically a handheld 3D printer on steroids with data storage and transfer in the yottabytes."
Skimmer was staring intently and Dragon coughed, apparently remembering something.
"We should collaborate more on that, I have my own 3D printer designs and some help would be nice." I liked the sound of that. "But I should be here to tell you why I came to visit…"
I leaned back, now worried. "Okay? Lay it on me?" Dragon took a breath despite not having lungs.
"The president is going to be visiting the city, and the Rachni are likely going to reveal themselves more officially to the US government." All trains of thought came to a screeching halt.
…
…
…
"Come again?"
AN: Here's 10.4, with just under 8000 words. A little longer than the 7000 I was aiming for. Not too sure if I've had too much happen or not. Probably a little too much technobabble but it should be toned down in follow up chapters involving less tinkering.
I've also realized how useful omni-tools actually are when you put more than a moment of thought into them or look up what they can pull off for the expensive military models. Because everything I've mentioned is something they can actually fabricate in seconds.
One good quality omni-tool can let you build another omni-tool with sorted or even raw resources, build guns, computers, biological structures, power supplies, eezo cores, and anything small with micron and nanometer tolerances. Bose-Einstein condensates too…
Omni-foundries are simply vastly larger versions of the same along with specialized robotics for the rare more specialized constructs. So…I guess Erudition would have the same role as a Resource tinker, making enough to provide for the needs of multiple tinkers.
So…Uhh enjoy?
July 24th, 2011. 5:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I rapped my fingers against my thighs, flicking against the hardened metal alloy that provides protection from all sorts of damage. The meeting room was filled with more important people than I originally expected, with Eidolon in the room and Piggot staring at me with an unreadable expression.
"Well?" She said, and I noted that she had thinned out and looked less pale and unhealthy than usual. Give her another month or so and she might recover the body she had when she was on the frontlines.
"I'm sure you've noticed some new residents in Brockton Bay, am I right?" I made a hologram in midair, one of those crab-like creatures wiggling it's claws.
"What's your point?" I kept going and Eidolon clearly had the same questions.
"We located a portal leading to their home reality and closed it. But I eventually took a wider scan and found that there were multiple signs of dimensional fatigue across the Earth in its entirety. They're diminishing but they're still there."
"Dimensional Fatigue?" Eidolon grumbled, looking exhausted but he wasn't dead so that was better than nothing.
"The result of the barrier between realities growing thin or being punched through," I created a model, a 2D grapth of reality. "The local multiverse is something like a giant onion slice, layers offset in a roughly flat architecture." The image of two layers connecting or being locally merged was informative. "Something has ripped holes in spacetime, each of these holes leading to other realities." I showed a picture of the portal, a gaping maw of swirling red-blue light.
"How many are there?" Piggot demanded, and I obliged.
"At some point there were thousands, though at the moment it's likely a few hundred scattered across the planet." I needed more powerful scanners to pinpoint particular locations, since the use of hyperdimensional particles to seek out a location to open a portal too was more narrow in effect due to energy costs.
"Do they lead to inhabited Earths?" Was the first thing out of Piggot's mouth, and I grimaced.
"The new portal the White Lotus has found seems to lead to a ruined city, and I've put decontamination protocols in effect to prevent the spread of disease." I had personally hunted down nearly every crab-thing in the ocean, with Dragon doing her part in the culling of an invasive species. I didn't want to chance disease causing local extinctions of fauna and flora. Much less from a planet that spewed out shard abominations.
"This new portal would be the one that Palanquin found when they brought down Orchard?" I winced and nodded, that had been a shitshow though thankfully the collateral damage had been surprisingly minimal.
"I frankly had no idea there were so many cracks in reality, pinpointing the cause isn't easy either." I rubbed the back of my neck, shrugging my shoulders. "It's not from my portals because they're specifically built not to put too much pressure on spacetime. It's not from powers themselves, but it's certainly not good." I didn't want the mess from dealing with interdimensional politics, even if we were probably going to deal with galactic politics soon enough.
"I've been dealing with the same issues." My neck snapped over to Eidolon, and I couldn't read his expression behind his mask. "I've closed about a dozen portals including three in Kyushu. A few of them lead to different Earths, and one of them leaked poisonous gas…chlorine I think?"
"Hmm…might be Earth Khloros, that planet's atmosphere is livable only to Rachni." And Krogan but they're Krogan so it makes a lot of sense. "Something put a massive amount of pressure on the fabric of eleven dimensional spacetime, and has turned it into Swiss cheese in certain parts. Since we're not dealing with massive invasions of animals, disease or people from other realities it's likely mostly benign but still problematic."
"A giant Endbringer-like monster escaped from one of those 'benign' portals." Piggot replied, her eyebrows twitching angrily. "I wouldn't call that safe."
I laughed nervously, scratching my chin. "Once I located the dimensional coordinates of its home reality, I managed to send a scanning sweep over the planet." The director and Eidolon both looked curious, anticipation building. "The Earth in question has only a single portal remaining that leads to our world, the one we contained." I pointed it out. "This particular Earth was already screwed up beforehand, with ugly readings that indicate that dimensional fatigue has plagued that world for a good hundred and fifty years."
"How does that help us?" Piggot asked, and I found it a reasonable question.
"It gives me a baseline to compare and contrast this world with scans of other portals on Earth Bet. The majority of the portals likely open to benign worlds with no signs of dimension tampering and reality alteration." Because there would be some crazy readings of things like higher dimensional sine-strings, twistings of the physical dimensions, and shifts in the physical constants.
"That still leaves the trouble of disease and possible conflicts to take these worlds resources." Eidolon made an excellent point, and I should have thought of that myself.
"Well…I'm not sure how well I'll be able to help with that, I don't exactly have jurisdiction across every country on Earth to search for portals and shut them down."
There was a pause from the two, one that ran long enough to make my social anxiety act up. Getting started down by Eidolon was more then disconcerting without adding on a direct government leader in Piggot.
"What?" I asked sharply, and Piggot giggled…giggled!
"Erudition…your team made the Leviathan fight the one with the least casualties in history and killed him as well as stopped the emergence of seventeen more in the future. Any country hit by Leviathan barring parts of Africa, South America or the CUI would welcome you. If the bounties on the Endbringers hadn't been discarded years ago you'd have the wealth of a small nation in your hands. Telling them you need to shut portals to other worlds isn't going to end poorly."
I opened my mouth. "Huh…" Then closed it, not realizing how much goodwill I had generated from being one of the main forces behind slaying a monster responsible for more than nine million deaths.
Putting down his siblings was going to be a problem though, Behemoth was tougher and had dynakinesis, and the Simurgh was the one with the fewest weaknesses besides strength. And her telekinesis made up for most of that, and I knew full well that she had no empathy for humanity.
Plus…after some hesitation, I looked up the bits and pieces of Ward that had been jumbled up inside Veda…because to be frank her organization of information was garbage, like whoever made her had been rather unprepared.
That concept worried me.
Anyway…from what I've checked, the Simurgh had been plotting for the Titans for years and I had gotten confirmation from High Priestess that she would probably try to hijack things once Scion dies…or whatever the fuck else will break the cycle.
Her Precognition was monstrous in strength even if lesser to even Dinah's shard, though it used to be more even before the Eye of Fate ate Coil's shard. The issue was that she had four years to plan what she was planning, and the fact she had shut down told me she was having trouble.
But it wouldn't necessarily last forever, and having a ship that could wreck her core would be rather helpful.
"Erudition?" Piggot looked annoyed, and I straightened my posture.
"Sorry, just thinking. If getting permission is easy then closing those portals is likely a good idea. It won't be a permanent state of affairs in the long term, but there's not much I can do on that front."
"The new particle accelerators experiments are the key aren't they?" Eidolon was 100% using a thinker power if he got that out of my words.
"Punching a hole in reality isn't going to be Tinkertech forever, and dark matter and energy research is critical to understanding the Mass Effect." The Entities had some limited ability to mess with the stuff, though it was primarily for the generation of critical exotic matter in their biology.
Piggot didn't look comfortable at that idea but I knew there was little I could do to help with that. "Are you the only one working on these kinds of experiments?"
"There are at least half a dozen other similar projects in the US alone so not really no, and since it's not Tinkertech it's outside your jurisdiction." I crossed my arms.
Piggot rubbed the bridge of her nose. "We're getting off topic, the better question is what that creature was?"
"A Shard, if a fairly defective one." The two glanced at one another and back at me. "My scans picked up about a dozen signatures on the planet, big areas where reality is being warped into a pretzel. We're lucky this one didn't seem too powerful or Nashua would have been wiped from existence."
"I already have an idea of how that's possible." Piggot replied, her expression looking as exhausted as I felt at times.
"At the least we can shut down the portal, though if this portal is a result of a crack then we'll need to piece together local spacetime to keep it from breaking again."
We spent a lot of time hashing out what I knew and what I could tell them on dimensional fatigue and how to deal with it. Closing portals on Earth Bet was a priority and I was going to start shutting down portals on other Earths too. The weight of such alterations were way too dangerous, and reality breaking is a bad end.
That was Ward striking early and that mess was not needed right now, and I would straight up punch Behemoth in the fucking face if I have to deal with this bullshit.
…
"There's one more thing." Piggot gestured, and I laid rapt attention. "Your warning about a potential infiltration of the Birdcage gave us the warning needed to record a conversation between the Fairy Queen and an unknown shaman."
"What?" I croaked. "She didn't get out did she?" They both shook their heads and I felt quite relieved.
"But we do have recordings…and she appears to know about your existence. And may or not attempt to meet you. The PRT preferred to warn you due to your general cooperation and the danger that Glaistig Uaine poses." Piggot sounded apologetic.
…
…
I stood up from my seat, placing both my hands on my shapely hips. "Welp…I'm going home now."
I dropped a paper file for them to read up on, and they let me go without a fight.
___
July 24th, 2011. 12:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I laid my head down on a pillow, letting out a loud groan that was briefly enhanced by airbending into a room shaking shout. Taylor was standing behind me and to my surprise she sat down on my bed and gestured for me to approach her.
I scooted over, and she kicked off her shoes as she shuffled closer to the center of where there was room since I was on the edge. She crossed her legs into a comfy sitting position and grunted, and after a moment I pushed myself into a sitting position right behind her.
"Could you just let me wallow in my misery in peace?" I whined, but she denied my request and lightly patted her hands on my tense shoulders. She dragged me until my back touched her…chest? I think it was a little lower since I was tiny and pudgy and she was tall and willowy and very pretty. It was a good thing I had a lot of different types, and that I loved a girl who could bench press me.
Taylor leaned forward, whispering in my ear. "I'm not going to do that Basilia…" I swallowed air, my neck heating where her hot breath hit my sensitive skin.
"Okay…" I muttered and let out a squeak when her hands tightly gripped my shoulders. It shifted to applying downward pressure on my back using her forearms, and my face flushed in response. The tension in my back started to uncoil in an indescribably pleasurable(I think?) way. I wasn't really sure because I had never gotten a massage before.
"Turn your head a bit…" I complied and chewed on my lip as I melted under her ministrations. She chopped at my upper back with the side of her hands, and I leaned into her touch without a moment of hesitation. This was really nice…
Once my shoulders were loose, her magic fingers moved to my neck. She applied pressure to the sides of my spine, and it took a lot to not let out a groan. God I didn't realize how much tension was in my body.
She repeated the same soothing motions and massages along my upper back and neck, and I felt like putty in her hands. A good two minutes of this eventually proved too much…
I let out a slight moan, and with all the grace of a drunk seagull threw myself face first onto my pillow. Away from the woman with magic fingers.
I flipped onto my back, covering half my face with an embarrassed squawk. Taylor was smiling, and I knew she was making fun of me in her head, even with the light dusting of pink on her cheeks.
"Why do you always take the initiative with this kind of stuff?" I complained, and Taylor only chuckled, her hazel eyes scanning up and down my pouting face.
"Because you're a dork who's afraid of intimacy?" I had no retort and that was apparently permission to keep going. "Despite the fact your eyes have a hard time keeping to themselves."
I groaned. "Oh shut up…if a girl is cute I'm going to inspect them for a few seconds, guys too if they're my type." Taylor leaned back, chuffing and hiding her wide sweet smile. "Besides I'm kind of a bit too much of a mess for much to come out of that." I laughed awkwardly and she rolled her eyes with a smug grin.
Her expression became more neutral. "Which reminds me…what is your type?"
I scooted up, bunching up my blanket and pillow into a resting spot for my back. "Well, it's a little hard to answer that…I kind of have a lot of types?" I tried to elaborate but had a hard time managing it. "To be frank if someone is willing to listen and reply back to my nonsense it's not going to be that hard to win me over." I hadn't even realized I had a crush on a guy until we had stopped talking to each other, and that…still stung at times.
"So you're not into girls with big racks and fat asses?" Taylor purposely glanced up and down at my body and I snorted.
I waved my arms in front of my face with a giggle. "Oh no don't get me wrong, I'm still a dumb guy on the inside, I very much enjoy boobs and butts. But it's not mandatory, I just want someone willing to put up with me and understand me…" My smile was softening.
Taylor came to some type of conclusion. "You're secretly a bit of a romantic aren't you? Kind of weird coming from someone who can…be kind of cynical at times?"
"I might know how people are and how they can be at their worst but that's no reason to give up and let the world turn to shit. Plus while romance might not be for everyone." Because aromantics and asexuals were a thing. "Everyone deserves a healthy and loving relationship…except for like truly despicable people but that's rather self evident so…"
"It's cute." I wished I had a hoodie to duck my head into, why did Taylor have to embarrass me with compliments?
"Maybe it's a good idea to turn down your flirtiness? It's kind of scary." Taylor frowned.
She fidgeted. "I'm just trying to be nice…also you're my girlfriend so uhh well…" She flicked her fingers against each other, looking a little lost. I had a method of payback so I took it.
"You stuck your tongue down my throat." I said simply.
She pushed me down, face taking a darker hue. "That was an accident, I didn't mean to do that!" I slugged her shoulder and she let out an indignant cry.
"Sure you didn't, you also didn't grope my butt the moment you had the opportunity." I sighed dramatically, placing my hand on my chest in feigned disappointment.
"You liked it…" She murmured angrily, and I nodded, not even disagreeing with her statement. I did like it because it was Taylor, and because I trusted her to know my own limits and boundaries. I was still unsure of what to physically do in a romantic relationship, it was one thing to have fantasies and quite another to be in an actual relationship.
I felt better, and I let out a grin rise up onto my face. "Thanks Taylor…sometimes the stress really gets to me, the only reason I haven't had an aneurysm at this point is because of my implants and my fitness." I flexed an arm, muscle coiling like steel. Technically speaking only about a third of my muscle was organic, with most of it being myomer bundles interlaced between 'normal' muscles spliced with alien(ish) genes.
"You still haven't seen one of the team therapists." I felt my good mood fade but I didn't begrudge her the question.
"I was still working out the schedule since I needed to take time to tinker more, set up a few things on that front." She looked frustrated and I decided to reassure her. "You don't need to worry, I've sorted it out and have a schedule for regular visits. Maybe a week at the most." I had gone to therapy before, even if it was for lesser problems than the one I was dealing with now.
"I can accept that." God Taylor could be so nosy at times, but I found it sweet even if I liked the idea of her turning it down a notch.
I laid down, and thought about how much the universe seemed to love screwing me over with bigger and more complex problems. Not that it would have been any less difficult anyway even if all I had needed to do was kill Scion. It wasn't like all cape related problems were simple death battles instead of complex political maneuvering and keeping us from being labeled as public enemy number one.
Most Thinkers weren't too powerful but the ones that were would be incredibly dangerous and could pull off dangerous manipulations of the media and countering that would need Thinkers of our own. At the moment we had three, with Dinah, Charlotte and Sierra. Though it was technically a sub-Thinker rating for the both of them, I would put them between 5 and 7 for a threat level against normals. Dinah was at bare minimum an 8 due to her ability to use her Precog in combat now, even if only for a limited amount into the future. For lack of better words it was something like Coil's timeline splits fused with her old trillions of time streams.
Obviously she wasn't living through every time stream or she'd be as crazy as a bat. It was more limited than that, she would refine it by asking herself questions, compressing trillions of possibilities into compact visions of the near future. Looking further pushed her power's limits more and more, until the solid images shattered into flashes more like her original power.
I'm not that good at estimating it though since I don't know how the PRT figures that out.
Though it didn't make the prospects of a Trump 12 knowing my existence any less terrifying, much less one that might want to meet me in person. Dragon had given me a more detailed report, again because they were probably terrified at the idea of losing a powerful tinker to the Fairy Queen.
Apparently all I had done was confirm what they had already suspected and now they knew she wasn't quite as delusional as they expected. But really she was just coping with the alien parasite in her brain by saying it's a magical and whimsical fairy. So the PRT likely had the truth of powers locked up tight, simply because doing otherwise would lead to panic.
Which was very much not a long term solution due to all the hatred against Parahumans, and that hiding secrets wasn't viable for all of time. Then there was the fact she was calling me a Usurper, the Vedic Queen. While the term was flattering, it was more unnerving to be considered on the same level of respect as Eidolon and other 'Noble' shards.
But then…it was true, I was an administrator of the highest order, thousands of exatons of mass compressed away into pure spiritual corpus and infused with the metaphysical soul of a human being.
I paused, following the train of thought I was going down…those seemed to be my own but with a flavoring of Veda interlaced into them. Then again I had no idea how thin the division between the two of us really was, she wasn't Raava and that meant different properties of how our spiritual bond works. But I also certainly wasn't the people within Veda, those five souls who guarded the inner gates.
But it only created more questions, one that I thought deeply in the most silent nights, when the call of the spirits grew louder, when I heard the beating heart of Earth Bet in all its horror and all its glory.
Other multi-benders didn't need the spirit entity I had. Not to bend more than one element. But…one soul meant one element, with the exception that they could have biotics because Eezo was physical as well as metaphysical. So their purpose certainly wasn't to grant me bending, I didn't need their minds and experience. Their souls alone would provide the Substrate I need to be a shitty Avatar.
But that begged the question then…where did the souls for multi-benders come from?
Whatever I had done with Taylor hadn't created her soul, it had elevated it from that incomplete spark, by using an existing soul to start up the engine.
There was a lot a person can do with a soul, you could take it, you could give one away, they can even be transplanted. But creating one was beyond anyone's power, you would have to be a literal god to succeed in that task.
More questions without answers, more knowledge that was either forbidden or unknown even to the people locked up in Veda.
I was getting tired at being ignorant, and I knew I had to do something about it. I had to find whatever answer I was looking for. It was just how I worked, I was a scholar, I was a thinker.
"Basilia?" Taylor piped up, and I took a calming breath.
"I'm sorry…I'm just frustrated that I'm always left with unanswered questions."
Taylor nodded, flashing a sympathetic smile. "I get it…I know you like knowing things, and it has to be terrible."
"I'll figure something out, I've got time and I've got a massive amount of resources to exploit to work towards what I'm looking for." I had built an entire cruiser in fact to prove it, one that was easily upgradable and in the worst case it's spirit could be transferred into a new ship if I couldn't upgrade it anymore.
I had the ability to construct more, though I would need to modify the initial station to do so, and for now I was laying down a new hull to build a cargo vessel for the spirit of the ship that had kept Leviathan down as long as possible. It would be about seven hundred forty meters in length, and all the weapon systems would be removed or shrunk down to a more manageable level. The drive core itself was going to be downgraded, which while it wouldn't reduce speed too much would make rapid mass shifts and spatial warping more difficult.
A warship was maneuverable, a cargo ship is not.
That was going to take a while though, since the design was going to be something rather more suitable for transporting materials across stellar distances.
"You're going to tinker again?" I didn't even deny it, grinning at Taylor.
"Yes."
"I'll get the sweet tea."
"Thanks."
___
July 24th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I worked carefully with the simple device, letting Dinah in on a few secrets here and there on basic mass effect technology. She had a keen interest in the nitty gritty while Elle had an interest in the math and equations behind it.
"So you've got your battery providing current and voltage." I pointed out the garden variety lithium ion battery, and Dinah had her own hooked up to a single inverter to modulate the current and voltage. "Taylor taught you how to program the thing right?" Dinah gave a thumbs up.
"Yep. It's a pretty small battery isn't it?" She held the creation close but not too close, it was a simple device in most respects. A rather DIY piece of power electronics like what would be used to power an electric bike, along with printed circuitry from a nearby PCB shop. The first bit did the job of generating a positive and negative mass aspected dark energy field, while the circuit design let us place some simple waveguides and projectors for more efficient fields.
I grinned. "You want to turn it on and see if it worked?" The Thinker brightened up at my response, and she flicked on a little remote that would modulate the current and voltage. "And do you remember how current and voltage affects a mass effect field? As well as how to cut it into the right shape?"
She nodded rapidly, and after a moment flicked on the on switch at the agreed upon current and voltage. A negative current was provided, and the roughly ball shaped mass of magic space rock and electronics floated, blue light flaring.
"Voltage affects the size of a field while amperage affects the strength of a field." I gave her a thumbs up as she played with the simple toy. Luckily I kept to a stable field rather than degenerate fields because accidentally making a black hole was not on the today list. Of course that was only possible with more advanced field projections, a basic mass bubble was an inefficient use of dark energy.
Degenerate fields could cause particle collapse for black hole projectors like the M-490 Blackstorm or the raging warp fields of Disruptor weapons of a different degenerate field design.
"Very good, and what about the appropriate means of cutting Eezo?" I continued the lesson, one that I was already plotting to give to some of my engineers. Eezo was easy enough to find on an industrial scale, even on Earth.
Dinah replied promptly. "Eezo has directionality, and machines have to cut it in the right way to easily apply negative and positive currents." The form of exotic matter acted a lot like a piezoelectric crystal, but instead of changing shape and creating sound waves like in ultrasound it generates a dark energy field.
Not that Eezo could be considered anywhere near normal, especially since the physical existence of Eezo as neutronium shifting to dark matter and back again is simply a shell for the fundamental force behind it…it's a complicated science is all I'm saying.
The ball dropped instead as mass was increased with a simple shifting to a positive current, and the stepping up of voltage grew the radius of the mass bubble. It was a toy by the standards of anything I could make with some real effort, but it could be built with off the shelf items as required.
"If you want to go out and tinker with stuff I can't understand I won't mind." I flushed at how easily Dinah managed to read me, and I patted her shoulder. I did the same for a sleepy Elle, but instead ruffled her blonde hair as I skipped over to a nearby lab.
I opened the doors and found myself in a rather stereotypical lab, though it wasn't a shiny white after weeks of use, occasional explosions from failed experiments and creations and other troubles. There were some glowy lights but that wasn't from nauseating displays of light and more from activated Eezo doing its job of warping reality. Plus a few experiments with quantum locked light, because there was a shocking amount of convergence with technology across billions of years.
Though the Entities managed it through direct dimensional manipulations rather than locking it with dark energy fields.
I shook my head and moved on to a single long tube, a hefty laser steel alloy strong enough to withstand the forces it was subject to. At the rear end of the barrel sat a compact machine, with an Eezo crystal and a powerful computer system forming the computing matrix for the system. Dark energy was channeled to twist dimensions to warp space, and particle accelerators acted as waveguides to fold parts of the machine into the higher spatial dimensions through specific metrics. Their mass and volume was hidden, but poked out into other realities to form a multidimensional machine.
It worked a bit like a Tardis, but the sheer complexity of the technology made it hard to scale up because it wasn't intuitive enough. I had started with simple holes into other realities, and thus the ability to project energy between two points for communication. I could kind of guess what was what from examining something with my own two hands, but it wasn't going to give me schematics in my head.
At least not until I started mixing them together into something that wouldn't instantly fall apart or explode or cause errant dark energy and kill us all.
This machine generated a field of altered space, and by sending signals to other realities I could for lack of better words merge the same spots in different universes to allow a wrapped object to strike at multiple realities at once. It detected the signature of other realities, the resonant frequency of each plane of existence and unfolded the space into as many as could be or needed to be detected.
I had finally reverse engineered the most basic aspect of Sting, past the initial prototype. The ability to unfold matter and energy across multiple dimensions to strike at every reality a shard could shift between to defend its physical body. This was a larger model than the initial crude prototype, about a meter and a half in length and given enough power to burst through most materials.
The trouble was that I had the unfolding down but Sting wasn't just unfolding across targeted dimensions. It was the ability to ignore select laws of physics, to shift the laws of reality to make a weapon potent enough to damage a hostile Entity. Most of the threat came from reducing the need to drill through thousands of exatons of mass and to reduce the losses from their ability to shift energy to other dimensions to negate attacks.
It was why combining it with the Thanix was so necessary, the mass effect shunt sent out a slurry of liquid nickel-iron with enough force to cut through a Turian battleship in one short blast. That amount of energy output plus the dimension shifting aspects of Sting would offer enough oomph to damage Endbringers and theoretically Titans. Because I very much didn't want to rely on friendly shards to protect us from unrestricted shards running around on other Earths.
Early experiments led me to believe I was going to need a much larger machine, though sufficient testing found this to be only partially correct. The field needed to be wrapped around the slurry, not the entire length of the gun…kind of a stupid idea in hindsight. Even so it was going to be about ten meters long, and multiple tons in mass. It would activate with every burst of the Thanix, allowing the main gun to sever dimensional connections to cut right through multidimensional objects.
So I had a weapon that would deal with multidimensional threats as needed though further experimentation would be required. My method wasn't the most efficient, and it would take a lot of work to make further improvements to make it equal the potency of Sting.
But it was an excellent start.
The prototype was a standard mass accelerator, about a meter long and similar in firepower to a Widow, which was effectively a miniature tank cannon in the amount of shit it can fuck up. Adding Sting would fuck up any dimensional effects on impact, and would destroy a modern tank in one hit.
So with a cheeky grin, my hands found the trigger of the gun strapped down by cinder blocks and reality hiccuped. The hypersonic nail sized projectile broke the speed of sound over twenty times over, striking the thin plate of Leviathan flesh head on. The crystalline flesh shattered in parts, the round shearing through inches of Endbringer flesh before losing too much energy and stopping. Though it's shattered boiling tip managed to drill to the other side.
It was a success, Sting prevented too much flesh from being brought forth from other realities, but it was still slowed by its mass and the molecular properties of the semi-organic matter. So there was no killing the feather bitch with a Carnifex, but hitting her with the main gun had a much higher chance of working.
I had a lot of what was needed to combat Scion, the unfolding of Sting, the firepower to damage his main body, with say a supersized Bakuda bomb. Striking him from dimensions outside of his influence might…might fuck with his PtV.
Though something more effective would be some method of screwing with the signals that need to be projected to obtain the sensory data for the shards.
The smile fell off my face when I thought about his reaction towards my existence. For a lack of better words he had seemed almost happy to see me, broadcasting with the energy of an atomic bomb right in my face.
Scion at the end had been at the end of his rope, decades of wallowing and saving people not feeling like enough for the selectively stupid bastard. It had been easy to sway him to kill people, and it took making him feel pain, making him feel the sheer pointlessness of his existence without his mate, without the cycle.
It made him so suicidal he let himself get struck by Sting, and let the ultimate Tinkertech gun shoot through the hole it made to his closed reality. Shattering the network in the process and giving the Simurgh the opportunity to break free and plan for the Titans to come.
The way he looked at me…it didn't fill me with good feelings. Somehow he had me mistaken for one of his kind, or at least something similar enough to attempt a conversation with. The fact a human was with him, much less the human that would have him as a charge at the end of things…I didn't know what to make of it anymore.
The future was unclear, and besides knowing perhaps a few hundred capes out of hundreds of thousands of capes…I was going to have to rely on research and Thinkers within my own team. I had programs scrolling the internet, and from some games with Dragon their quality wasn't far off from her own programs.
Made sense since I had the AI building abilities of over half a dozen races, more even as the Thranx had multiple contemporaries. I could easily build a ton of AGI, safe ones even with restrictions that would loosen as they aged.
But it still felt a little weird stepping up from domesticated digital animals to full on digital people. So that was probably not happening for a while even though I had incidentally designed the cruiser to fit an AI core. Not that it was required with the intelligence matrix that Dragon worked on.
"Maybe I should move on from this." I talked to myself, and sauntered over to one creation that had been the product of some of my work with Bakuda and additional work with Turnaround. It would have been nice to keep Taylor as a tinker but at this point she had more of a Thinker power to relay certain knowledge from Queen. She simply didn't have the time to tinker so the power had weakened, though she was making herself into a very good programmer and was getting good at using my own tools to tinker with her bugs a bit.
Anyway…the device was multidimensional again but this time it had a different use. It was compact, with much of the machinery folded up into other dimensions and the whole thing was a thick metal band to put on your wrist. The machinery on the other end collated energy from the dimensions they were in, precisely diverting electromagnetic force to generate and manipulate ionized gas with electric currents.
So…basically a pyrokinetic band. It was like an omni-tool, and would follow one's gestures to precisely control and manipulate flames. A better method was a neural link implant to modulate the flame with one's thoughts.
So…I guess I sort of had the ability to crib from shards now? Though with multiple orders of magnitude less energy stored and not quite as effective.
Yet.
Though to be fair this wasn't that impressive when a normal tool already has Incinerate and the bullshit with Cryo Blast involving Bose Einstein condensate. I could finagle with dimensions pretty well now, and my scans of Endbringer flesh were getting ever more data from them as I continued to send scanning pulses directed through higher physical dimensions.
My most recent tests with biological engineering paired with Amelia lead to us making a semi-organic crystalline computer that, like her armor, could open holes between realities to project energy and matter from. The exotic matter was hard to synthesize, but using zero-particle fields to essentially nudge subatomic particles to form exotic elements was…possible.
I think Entities used tiny dimensional connections to break up and reassemble matter down at that scale to make the thirty percent of their bodies made out of magic unobtainium. There were different types of Exomatter, with the newly synthesized Type 1 being some type of metric-altering material, Type 2 was a hyperconductor, and Type 3 was useful in quantum information systems, and Type 4 was good at anchoring degenerate energy fields.
At the moment I only had a few hundred kilograms of the stuff, and making it bond with organic chemistry was a bitch and a half without inherent knowledge of biology. It's sort of working, but I gave it months to years before I had anything there and I was honestly okay with that.
Building shards sounded like it was going to be more trouble than it was worth, but there was a part of doing so that tickled my fancy. Build a basic seed and let it grow and eat a couple asteroids, add some biotic nodes to feed on dark energy and boom, you've got yourself a good old friendly baby shard.
Exomatter was also sprinkled in small amounts in the cruiser spaceframe, a few tons of the stuff wasn't a lot but Bakuda could make some exotic metals in large quantities easily enough.
I got an alert, and found that I was apparently being paid a visit by Dragon and she was being accompanied by extras too.
Hmm…that should be interesting.
___
July 24th, 2011. 4:15PM
Basilia Rubio
I raised an eyebrow at the new Dragonflight suit, it was about seven feet tall and rather sleek and humanoid, with a short draconic face and long lithe limbs covered in smooth dark green metal. My armor's scanners picked up a micro-fusion reactor, carbon myomer muscle and a linear frame on top of that, and emitters generated an energy field, one that seemingly slowed all that it touched, obviously a bulky applied waveform shield. Like Scion's golden aura. Numerous ports could fire bullets, lasers, plasma, containment foam, gas or even electric pulse guns.
Hmm…definitely lasers and plasma, but no gas or tasers…neat. The claws on her fingers were sheathes for a monomolecular blade held in place by a Tinkertech field generator. Otherwise the air would have blown it away.
Kid Win was here, along with an additional cape I didn't recognize as someone local.
It was a young girl though I couldn't calculate her exact age without taking a deep invasive scan. I would put her in her mid teens though, about Dinah or Missy's age. She was a redhead with frizzy hair, and hid herself in a thick and crude costume that was basically a very hideous armored grey jumpsuit. A cheap ceramic mask hid her face, and I wondered why she had been brought here.
"Hello Dragon, Kid Win…and new girl? Welcome to one of a dozen bases scattered across the world." And by that I meant across dimensions, this base was a few hundred dimensions down from Lotus and was basically just a throwaway world.
"I'm sorry if I showed up on such short notice." Dragon apologized as one did, and she moved…glided really as I showed her the lab. It held the first Sting prototype, along with quite a few active robots and machinery.
One of the examples was a quadrupedal walker that was effectively a Tachikoma expy, with a chassi built around an articulated diamondoid exoskeleton with a segmented oversuit of Duralloy and every internal structure was connected by a robust spine. Smart matter allowed for the shifting of mounts and with CNT myomer, articulation of its limbs is easy. It could both walk and use omni-wheels to drive at a hundred miles per hour.
Also fly around through mass lightening fields and reaction wheels and cold-gas thrusters…and it was basically a mini-tank with the brain of an excitable puppy.
"I see you've been busy." Dragon glanced at the intelligent machine, it's arms shifting as it analyzed the tinker AI.
I waved it off with a cheeky grin. "Oh the Bagheera? I have like a hundred of them, plus the other Golems adds up to a few thousand more? Not a big deal." Dragon didn't seem surprised though Kid Win had some wonder left in his teenage body despite showing him a working spaceship. The unknowns seemed a little more shocked though and I straightened my posture a bit.
I coughed.
"But it does beg the question of why you've decided to visit? Another inspection or are you acting as a liaison today?" I was serious and Dragon seemed to realize that.
"It's nothing bad I assure you, Kid Win was nearby due to a tinker incident and I elected to take him with me to meet with you. As for Skimmer…? She's a tinker that I had a few worries about…" The now named Skimmer ducked her head and I wondered what had gone down there for her to catch the attention of Dragon.
"Hmm…fair enough. You two can sit down if you want." I gestured to the two younger capes and they sighed in relief while Dragon remained on two legs. "I was working on figuring out Flechette's power and made a breakthrough with a bigger prototype."
"Flechette's power?" Kid Win questioned as I activated an omni-tool, grabbing up basic materials, some chunks of purified silicon, carbon, gold, rare earths, aluminum
"I mentioned the spacetime manifold metric right, with the striking at multiple dimensions at once?" The precursor blocks were melted down, mass fields manipulating matter to fabricate what I needed for this time. The mini-fabricator did its job, and after a few seconds I had the framework done and a few more seconds completed an optotronic board.
"What's the point of that?" The newbie asked and I smiled as I worked on the fabrication of an entire mass accelerator system. Because I could.
"It makes it easier to bring down Endbringers." She looked wide eyed at me, while Dragon was quite unaffected as was Kid Win. "Their biology is multidimensional, and unfolding an attack negates some of the inherent strengths of their near infinitely dense flesh. Scaling it up to get enough power is hard but I've built some big things in the past." I shrugged off the difficulty, feeling good about myself.
"How far are you from…" Skimmer paused and poked Dragon, and I realized she was staring at what I was making on the table.
"What exactly is…that? I know your omni-tool is a fabricator but what exactly are its limits?" There was ready excitement in her accented voice, and if I was a happy bee I would have buzzed.
"Oh an omni-tool is pretty capable, especially linked with a set of armor." I explained readily. "Bioassembly of organisms like medi-gel." I demonstrated by taking a slice from an unfinished apple and mashing it to bits, and taking the mush up into my tool. In a few seconds I had some medi-gel and rubbed it on a cut where my gauntlet had been destroyed by a run in with a boulder. "Heatsinks are pretty easy, a few dozen carats of diamond and lithium. Fabrication of incredible microcircuitry, thus making more of itself, since an omni-tool is basically a handheld 3D printer on steroids with data storage and transfer in the yottabytes."
Skimmer was staring intently and Dragon coughed, apparently remembering something.
"We should collaborate more on that, I have my own 3D printer designs and some help would be nice." I liked the sound of that. "But I should be here to tell you why I came to visit…"
I leaned back, now worried. "Okay? Lay it on me?" Dragon took a breath despite not having lungs.
"The president is going to be visiting the city, and the Rachni are likely going to reveal themselves more officially to the US government." All trains of thought came to a screeching halt.
…
…
…
"Come again?"
___
AN: Here's 10.4, with just under 8000 words. A little longer than the 7000 I was aiming for. Not too sure if I've had too much happen or not. Probably a little too much technobabble but it should be toned down in follow up chapters involving less tinkering.
I've also realized how useful omni-tools actually are when you put more than a moment of thought into them or look up what they can pull off for the expensive military models. Because everything I've mentioned is something they can actually fabricate in seconds.
One good quality omni-tool can let you build another omni-tool with sorted or even raw resources, build guns, computers, biological structures, power supplies, eezo cores, and anything small with micron and nanometer tolerances. Bose-Einstein condensates too…
Omni-foundries are simply vastly larger versions of the same along with specialized robotics for the rare more specialized constructs. So…I guess Erudition would have the same role as a Resource tinker, making enough to provide for the needs of multiple tinkers.
So…Uhh enjoy?
- Location
- Chula Vista
Yeah well explaining how the universe works is rather vital to figuring out how alter it, and rather vital for learning how Entities work.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I wonder if basilla would become more confident to take the initiative in the relationship. Oh also Taylor stuck her tongue down Basilla? Lol she's getting more direct I guess. Oh and has Contessa Path to Victory gotten stronger
- Location
- Chula Vista
That was a complete accident on Taylor's part. Also not really, PtV actually got worse due to more blind spot, though it's slowly adjusting to the metaphysical due to increased exposure. Also…there's not much of a point, it's Path to Victory, making it more bullshit sounds like making a needless narrative mistake.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ah I figured since shards tend to be able to adapt but it's not instant like a full entity and for Basilla and Taylor I suspect that it would take a really long time before they can do anything too...touchy
- Location
- Chula Vista
You're pretty much correct on that front.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yep Taylor and Basilla are quite prudish especially Taylor and despite Taylor confidence she isn't a pervert like Amy and even then they are pretty busy with the company and being Heroes
Discernment 10.5
- Location
- Chula Vista
Discernment 10.5
July 26th, 2011. 1:00PM
Basilia Rubio
"I kind of expected the Rachni not to tell me everything, but you too?" I spoke slowly to Dinah and she looked apologetic. I rubbed my neck, lightly scratching it in an anxious motion. "I guess they asked you the odds of things going well?"
"They wanted to have some information to help them out in negotiations. We might be able to act as liaisons but direct interaction with world governments is important to them." Dinah replied shortly, typing into a holographic display on one of the many monitors in the main base on Lotus. She was probably reading up on important and relevant news, and based on the look in her eyes she was using her power at the same time.
"I'm not angry, if I was I would have marched back in and yelled at you for a minute or two." She didn't seem surprised and her eyes focused on me again. "I already expected that at some point someone higher up than a PRT Director would show up in the city." That it has taken so long was kind of a mystery, though from what I could tell the delay was from everything getting reorganized due to the political movements following Leviathan.
There had been talks between Japan and the United States, apparently relating to possible movements from the CUI. The Endbringers were partially responsible for how capes worked in this world, so the permanent loss of one and the chance to kill the rest made things more complicated. The truce wouldn't go away completely but it was probably going to be harder to get capes working together
I had no idea what path the world was going to take, because most of the capes currently in existence still had the mental troubles that came with being heavily broken and traumatized. The shards had turned down their little games but we were talking about a twenty percent reduction in conflict at most.
"It'll be later this afternoon, we still have a while to prepare." I rolled my eyes at Dinah, I wasn't worried about that anymore. I wouldn't have to put on a dress so I was perfectly alright, though I had kept my nose out of whatever the world thought of me.
"You know…a few people have taken you to calling you the second coming of Hero." I fidgeted uncomfortably at that. "Something more even, when you broke your limits and nearly blew yourself up." That discomfort worsened, and I still remembered the sting of my bones shattering and my organs pulping…
In for four.
Out for eight.
In for four.
Out for eight.
"Hell even I've been getting attention, I'm The Delphi rather than just Delphi. I managed to predict an Endbringer after all." My mouth was dry as I realized how much attention I had brought to anyone joining us or already a part of us. "Taylor won a lot of respect when she took charge, and she's a lot more impressive when they see her controlling billions upon billions of bugs all at the same time. Bakuda had a damn mech suit that could damage Endbringers, Terra had a good enough Thinker power to keep people from being squashed, and Polaris is basically the second coming of Alexandria. Panacea is one of the few not completely insane biotinkers." Technically she wasn't a tinker…
I was starting to get that we had painted the biggest target on the damn planet on our backs.
"Is that why we got more than thirty thousand applications to work at Athena?" She stared at me like I was stupid and I started to feel like maybe she was right. Then again I wasn't the most outspoken CEO despite that being in the job description, though I regularly interacted with my own workers since most of them were pretty nice.
"How many people do we have working at Athena?" I paused and started thinking and answered back.
"I think we're at about three hundred employees, we've got about twenty R&D projects ongoing so we need quite a few people." Our 3D printing projects were maturing quite quickly, and we were stuck at about a few tons of additive printing in a single day. The main use of our printers was in rapid prototyping and manufacturing of highly complex pieces like turbines or structural components.
One new project the Additive manufacturing teams were working on was on making a hybrid machine, basically a CNC/3D printer, what we were working with was essentially a large room filled with different machines that would swap heads as required for different tasks in the manufacturing process.
Most of the robotic machinery here was built by the company, and it was really quite easy, even if they currently made use of the rather instant skip to the 2.5 nanometer silicon node, apparently bringing together every possible advancement sitting in labs around the world into a single burst, skipping over a decade of progress on the timer for the end of silicon as we knew it. Plus the introductions of more optimized coding language, mainly making use of existing languages that weren't yet popular.
Tinkertech had really fucked up technology distribution as did the increasing instability and conflict in the world. From what I could tell, Earth Bet should be a good twenty years ahead of my world, but things were getting lagged by capes and Endbringers fucking up global infrastructure.
Unlike in normal worlds like mine, better tech didn't trickle down from the rich to the poor, which made sense for the nonsensical dystopian hell that Earth Bet was in reality.
Not that my world was clean either but…it's Bet.
Trickle down economics is definitely fake but technology and science doesn't really work like that because even poor people have money. Though social factors can screw that up.
The sudden windfall of a few missing pieces of tech, and reduced conflict gave them the breathing room to skip to the late 20s in computer technology. I was already taking notes, and had the vague idea of finding my world and delivering a burst of information purely on every bit of tech that Earth Bet had in spades. It would take a bit to get it into practice, but it might speed it up by a bit by skipping past the pitfalls that scattered researchers on Bet already made.
A good amount of income was coming from the numerous Photolithography machines often required in the construction of silicon fabs. Though that had transitioned to licensing since I didn't feel like going for mass production. Instead our fabs were for in-house experimentation.
Tech wise they had been about even to a few years ahead of my Earth, but had higher recycling rates and less power costs due to the economy and the reduced world trade integration.
Some of the projects were on practical uses of Eezo, the use of positive and negative mass effect fields in manufacturing. One team of five had figured out how to project a basic positive mass effect field, the predecessor to the repulsive fields in kinetic barriers.
And since omni-manufacturing works through mass effect field effectors…well you can imagine the technological paradigms left untapped. I think they were going to go straight to ten terabyte smartphones and their software was already more mature than my own world. My in-house optotronics were about a hundred times more powerful in the raw processing and data storage sense, though software built to function with hardware accelerators made certain programs hundreds or thousands of times faster.
It was a frightening amount of progress…but it made sense due to Parahuman interference. In fact I had my doubts I had changed as much as I had expected, specifically in the field of electronics at least, but the biomedical field was another thing entirely. From what one of our angel investors was telling us, I had simply brought the final missing clues due to the haphazard R&D of Tinkertech reverse engineering.
Many of the projects involving dimensional phenomena and high physics experiments made use of exascale computers being built with collaboration with the companies manufacturing the integrated circuits required.
The Transdimensional Physics Interaction Accelerator, or TPIA had an enormous optotronic supercomputer hooked up to every imaginable sensor and scanner and had hundreds of exaflops of processing power. Not as much as even an omni-tool but the early machine was within the understanding and comprehension of Earth Bet scientists and engineers.
"Basilia." I snapped out of a mental tangent, smiling apologetically at an irate Dinah.
"Sorry, it's hard to stay focused when you're really nervous." She didn't seem to disagree, rubbing arms at the words.
"It's fine, but we need to get ready in about an hour."
…
Yes, meeting the leader of the country. Good…
Everything is fine.
July 26th, 2011. 4:20PM
Basilia Rubio
Lyre wore the same elaborate armor and silk and crown made out of jewels, but she wasn't alone this time. She was accompanied by two other queens, Erhu and Djembe.
The emerald silks and decorative armor of Lyre contrasted heavily with the style of her daughters. Both had gone through considerable growth spurts, likely from genetic alterations from hesitant studies that Panacea had done on Rhizome's projects. Erhu was 11 meters long and a little over six thousand kilograms in mass, while Djembe was ten meters and over five thousand kilograms.
Erhu had gone all out for steampunk in her design, her armor brass and shiny and overly complicated, with turning gears that a cursory scan found were actually an odd shifting kinetic barrier design. It generated a plate of kinetic barriers, knocking aside projectiles with a repulsive field.
She even wore a hat molded to her horns, and I had to blink repeatedly to make sure I wasn't having a fever dream.
I…I'm starting to think the White Lotus is a terrible influence on their species and I'm frightened for the future now. I moved my gaze to Djembe and paused.
Where Lyre had gone for elegance and Erhu had gone for ridiculousness, Djembe was intimidating.
Her armor was an obsidian black, shining and futuristic, plates of biogenically grown synthetic plating providing armor thick enough to bounce tank rounds. It was smooth, predatory in design, and I noticed the omni-blades embedded into the wrists on her arms, and the omni-spears on her tendrils. She was the strongest biotic among the newborn queens, and second only to Lyre herself as the Ostad queen of the species.
Oh dear.
"Only Lyre is going to show up right? Meeting the president with three giant aliens sounds like a rather large headache." For both me, the federal agencies involved and the secret service.
Lyre laughed, her song cheery and a bright banana yellow, the scent of citrus in her song. "No this is simply a dress rehearsal for future meetings, when our numbers are greater and if we ever find more intelligent life in the galaxy." She gestured to the mountain where her hive resides, consisting of a little under half the population of Rachni in the universe. Which at this moment was about one hundred thousand, with another hundred fifty thousand split unevenly between younger monarchs. Eight more Queen eggs have been laid, though I haven't gotten the opportunity to meet a baby queen yet. Mainly because they hadn't hatched yet but still…
It was the principle of the matter of meeting a baby bug alien.
The mountain was steadily being worn away, and I stared as I saw a tower structure being flown away, plasma fire blowing out from engines as they took off into orbit.
"I…the hell is happening over there?" I asked, unable to look away from what had to be the complete disassembly of the hive.
"We have located an appropriate world to colonize, one that will serve as the new capital world of my children. To the star your people would name Tau Ceti." That was completely unexpected, and I wondered why that was kept from me.
"Is it because this planet technically belongs to the White Lotus…?" I asked, wanting answers.
"Yes. This world may be my place of birth, but it's use means it will not remain secure forever. The hives of this world were meant for resource gathering, to build ships and equipment. We are tugging our resources out of the system, but will leave bases for the children who wish to remain here…" I didn't have a problem with that, I understood her caution.
Earth wasn't quite out of the reach of Scion or other shards, the issue was they were simply unfamiliar with the coordinates, and the powerful remnant of barriers made it hard to pass through the veil without very specific information. Alpha Centauri was a good four light years away, and Tau Ceti was over ten light years distant.
It was out of the bounds of the cycle, though whether they were out of the perception range of a shard was more…ambiguous. The Thinker has been using precognition from a galaxy cluster away, and that was a level of perception that only the Reapers had…or the thing behind them, when it still yet lived.
Luckily it didn't or else we would never have been born to begin with…
I shuddered, and stored that horrific thought for future processing.
"How many ships have you laid down?" I leaned forward, curious on her answer.
"We have multiple warships, what you would call frigates and destroyers, twenty such vessels will be constructed and divided up between my children." She sang swiftly, and I could hear the chattering of her entire race, the song of hope of a species radiating out in a splash of limitless color.
"So you're probably going to stick to cruisers escorted by destroyers and frigates and patrol boats for interplanetary ranges then?" Based on what I had seen of their factories, they would have at least a few battle groups by the end of this year.
A cruiser leading five frigates and three destroyers, though obviously the exact fleet composition was variable. If each hive had once such a group, that would be a hundred plus ships, a sizable fleet within so little time. Though it really paled in comparison to the numbers of the fleets of the Turians.
Apparently before the Reapers hit, they managed to use the Geth as an excuse to build up to over a hundred dreadnoughts, and thousands upon thousands of cruisers, with hundreds of those cruisers being only a few meters short from being dreadnoughts. Forty pound APP slugs, those compressed particle packets they have to blow apart smaller cruisers.
Though they had also been retrofitting their entire fleet with Thanix cannons and Cyclonic barriers.
"There are other ships Basilia, many new notes yet to be sung and written down." Lyre spoke wistfully, her biotics flaring up in apparent remembrance. "We are not confined to the paradigms of our ancestors, we are free from the shackles that bound us. The ability to traverse across dimensions, to other alternate realities. We awoke to life and it's possibilities, to its music and color. It is time to sing anew, in remembrance of the song of a thousand generations." There was a burning defiance in those insectile eyes of hers, tinted with red and gold and white.
Her words were abstracted, hiding the language of spirits that Rachni naturally spoke. The language of the spirits however was a tongue only the most knowledgeable of shaman knew. In the end despite our friendship…it was an illustration of their inhumanity. They were something unseen in their time, beings unlike any other in their galaxy.
It was why they had waited until there was no stopping them, until their numbers were enough to mark them as a sovereign people. This world knew of the Machine Army, of the kingdom of Nilbog, of the abominations and monstrous creations of capes. They would be painted with the same brush, and people would easily try to mark them as creations of either myself or Panacea.
I didn't blame them, because in the end so many capes were terrible people, unable to escape from the day they had broken. The only reason my team functioned at its size was because several of the natural capes were the equivalent of Cauldron capes, and because the influence of their shards was more benign and mutualistic because I was an infectious foreign agent.
"So you've got everything prepared then?" I asked as I leaned against a wall that felt like the smooth skin of a gigantic living beast. "There's not much I can do on the political field, the only politicians I know are local, and most of what Athena does on the political sphere involves donations to political action committees."
Again I was representing a corporation, even if one that was heavily bound to a certain set of rules due to my near total control of the company as its primary owner. It was co-owned with Taylor serving as administration, and she was getting better at doing her own delegation and taking into account the feelings of others when doing her job.
"I have a thousand generations guiding me, there will be no trouble on my part." That didn't really reduce my worry but the attempt was noted and appreciated with a quick nod.
"Then I should probably be getting ready, god…you know things are weird when meeting the president feels more mundane than what we usually do." Lyre didn't reply but let out a song that made reality flex, muted tones that made me shiver in anticipation.
This wasn't going to be a big public event, this was closer to the behind the doors talks between world leaders, the hidden little details about the game played between nations. The world currently seemed to think she was some type of Case 53 or monstrous cape, but the story with the government was something else entirely.
The Rachni had resources beyond imagining, the bounty of the stars belonged to them. But they didn't have numbers, with this one city handily outnumbering them by a hundred thousand. But that was in the short term, by the end of the year they would number in the millions, and by the time Ward came about they would be an interstellar power again.
A small one but a power nonetheless.
Frankly it was probably a good thing, because even if we defeated Scion there were other Entities out there, other aliens because otherwise the cycle would be kind of pointless. Technology had to be iterated upon, because the things I did only worked because I had the subtle shaker powers to start up a base before shifting to machine production of equipment. I'm not sure how long it would take, it might be only a few years or it could be decades before my technology could be made usable by anybody.
The Rachni made use of the same technology that I had, simply due to proximity and because they now knew it was possible. Though certain designs were distinct due to their unique culture and biology. I wasn't as interested in biological technology outside of hybridizing it with cybernetics.
I was a notable example of such, due to gene therapy and my incredibly extensive implants. Nanite swarms made them self repairing, and the onion shell software architecture made it incredibly safe from outside interference.
This was the one world out of many where the Void Wyrms could be beat, where the once nameless Entities had made a mistake and were on course to be broken by something far less than them.
This wasn't that world anymore…humanity was just a little greater than what they once were, and had new allies to call upon than before.
Hopefully that made up the difference.
July 26th, 2011. 5:00PM
Taylor Hebert
I lingered behind Erudition, letting my awareness expand outwards from the creature wrapped around my body, to the blistering swarm across billions of small simple animals. Flies were already planted on everyone in the large room, a PRT base just outside the city proper but close enough for me to transmit signals to my main cluster.
Lyre was a walking singularity in my awareness, her song making me think of sunny yellow and tasting like earl grey. I couldn't touch her with my power, but she used some of the same wavelengths that my shard did to control my bugs as did every other Rachni no matter the caste.
It inspired Administrator, and she drew upon new wavelengths, insinuated her control across different paths that I could taste on my tongue and made my chi ripple and squirm like a gathering of worms.
We had shown up a good fifteen minutes early to the meeting, with Lyre acting as the representative of her species, at the forefront of the room. So while we waited I let myself sink into the hurricane that made up my power, with myself as the eye of that storm.
My perception of my power had changed over time as my control became more innate, at the start it was like seeing flashes of movement and color, indistinct murmurs and pulsations, wisps of chemical sense and touch. Like I was in a thousand different places at once, doing different things at the same time.
My power still worked like that but the connection was different, flowing and freeing, ebbing and contracting. There was a subtle tune, like a song I was singing that my bugs responded back to, overlapping perceptions of sound, smell, touch and sight. When I reached out to my swarm, it was like when I used my powers, when I airbend or use biotics.
Through that connection I could channel energy through them, choosing from a set of effects, examined and tested and modified and combined to be unique before being applied to certain bugs.
There was a basic telekinetic power, what Basilia called insinuation of force carriers across dimensional boundaries. It was what let my bugs fly and move much faster than they should be able to. Every little individual power I had was from something like this, my bugs were more durable because energy that hit them was absorbed and diverted into another reality. They could send out shaped beams of direct kinetic transfer, superheat the air with heat energy, or shape the beams to make them cut or smash anything they hit.
But I could only give each bug so much of a well of power, and I had to make decisions on the scale of hundreds of bugs to choose between attack, defense, and mobility. I didn't really have actual lasers, though since light is electromagnetic some of my attacks that involved EM force carriers still technically counted.
At least that was what Basilia said when she got all nerdy and serious about science.
I had a few black windows nestling in my hair, and I could tell they were content with the situation, their tune steady and calming. I had my swarm ordered into formation across two miles, checking for anything out of the order. It was easy to automate, I could order them and even if they were out of my range they would continue with their job.
That had taken a lot of experimentation and work to make it work right, and I had lost a few bugs that way.
I let the claws on the tips of my fingers click together, admiring the grooves where omni-projectors could be turned on to form nearly indestructible projections of hard light. That took some work on Basilia's part, and I was lucky for the implants for interfacing with the omni-tool she gave me.
My helmet provided a HUD like Basilia's and it helped a lot with categorizing information when I needed it.
"How are things looking up from above?" I whispered, and received an answer back from Terra.
"There doesn't seem to be anything my power thinks is dangerous nearby. The sensors from the shuttle don't pick up anything either." Charlotte was piloting a shuttle that was staying a few hundred meters in the air, hiding within optical cloaking that had been figured out by our resident tinkers.
"Yeah well, it's better to be safe here." There was hardly a reason to let our attention waver when the president was visiting even if it isn't for a big speech. That had taken place weeks ago when the news of Leviathan being struck down was still fresh in everyone's minds. Basilia had missed it which was the reason she didn't realize how we had entered the public eye.
Getting her to check the news was easy when she was in the mood and incredibly difficult when she was in tinker mode and building technological miracles. At the least it made managing Athena's engineers and scientists because she was seemingly a magnet for weird people.
"They are here." Lyre Tenuto spoke, her song sending out pulses that made me relax just a tad. Her confidence was almost infections, and two Warriors and four soldiers let out loud chittering croons in response.
My bugs had detected them a while back, shivering in anticipation at who was protecting the President. I knew them well enough, hard not to when I had fought so closely besides them less than two months ago.
The door opened with a few capes acting as protection for the delegation. Renick was representing the PRT, with Chevalier and Miss Militia and three PRT troopers guarding him. Legend was here as the head of the Protectorate, with Alexandria giving us a harsh but not hostile expression.
I placed bugs on them as well, and had them constantly update me on their position as needed. Basilia looked a little shocked, and I shook my head. She had obviously not updated herself on the political scene of my country.
Jonathan Vega Alvarez was the current President, winning in a small landslide back in 2008. Which…I didn't know a lot about the politics of her version of the United States, how different could it be from mine?
A few more Parahumans were around, and a few were outside of the blocky building used to house the base. My lips perked, and I knew this was one of the poorly known Parahuman Strike Forces the military had access to outside of the Protectorate and under their command in small well trained teams across the country.
From rumors that Dinah, Sierra and Charlotte had picked up on there was a lot of friction between the different departments of the government since the PRT took up most of the available Parahumans.
Lyre shifted, lifting herself into her full height until her head nearly hit the ceiling of the room. Her armor gleamed like jewels, and her formally dressed guards took position around her. They had no weapons but…well they didn't really need any.
The president was a tall man, standing eye level with me even in my armor. He had evenly tanned skin and well chiseled, with visible laugh lines and a warm expression tempered by a weariness I had seen in my dad. He squared his shoulders, eyes widening as he took in the full size of Lyre.
Lyre moved carefully, arms and tentacles waving a physical greeting at the same time that she sang. "We the Rachni greet the voices of these United States, it is good to see that you are well." She spoke intently towards Alexandria, concern leaking into her tone in every sense of the word. Alexandria's confusion was…hard to describe, it didn't look right at all. "I am Lyre Tenuto of the Rejoicing in Rebirth Songs. But you may address me as Lyre Tenuto, it is a…sufficient translation of our song."
Alvarez cleared his throat and adjusted his tie, clearly out of his depth. "Then introductions are fully in order, you've already met Legend as the leader of the Protectorate and Deputy Director Renick of the PRT East North East. I am Jonathan Vega Alvarez, the president of the United States of America."
"We have waited patiently to communicate more officially with your people, Voice Alvarez. Our numbers are not as they once were and the galaxy is not the fairest place for my children."
"You've had quite some time to make contact with our government, and even made alliances with local capes." He gestured to me and Basilia, making her squirm while I stayed still. "So why now?" He seemed more curious than angry, an emotion I couldn't identify in his eyes.
"I hold the memories of all Rachni, a thousand generations of Queens, of Brood Lords and Spirit Singers." Her song was quiet, wavelengths only I could hear. Even Basilia couldn't pick up every nuance and insinuation. "Our race has been enslaved time and time again, our children taken…changed, their song turned by oily and dark discordant notes. Until we were reduced to the Last Queen, and saved by a race much like your own…and we repaid them, joining them for a final battle against a terrible force beyond your imaginings…"
Alvarez paled but didn't stop talking, remaining professional. "What happened?"
"We do not know, in my egg I heard only the echoes of a war that ended before the very conception of your species, and I was saved from the madness of not learning the songs of my mother by your kind." She gestured to us, and I did squirm this time.
There was a genuine love and affection in her tones and notes.
"So what are your intentions, where did you come from?" There was a deadpan to the president's voice, a slight smile on his face.
"My kind arose on the Singing Planet, you may call it Suen…though it is long lost, succumbing to the entropy of deep time." Eleven billion years tends to mean planets die yes. "We were for a time alone, comforted by the songs of your people as I grew and gave birth to my children." She gestured for our benefit, wistfulness in her voice. "We found allies in the early days of Athena and the White Lotus, and we rebuilt what we could of our old glories and symphonies."
"I've seen your files…some type of natural Master ability?" Lyre laughed, and I let it wash over me as I continued to spread my awareness out like I was made out of air. The president took a seat as did the delegation and I remained standing.
Basilia didn't and I rolled my eyes.
"We hear the songs of our ancestors and in turn we share our songs between one another. It is the way of the Rachni, and we listen to the songs of your people…we hear the tainted and discordant notes weaving into your world. My daughters have joined me in the task of seeking an alliance with your species, to help your world sing clearly once again. We have much to offer your people…"
"For example?" Alexandria spoke, and a fly nestled in her hair, keeping her in my field of awareness. Lyre whistled innocently, the equivalent of a wink. She tapped at a projector and it generated a field of hard light, creating a realistic hologram of what looked like a star system.
"Our numbers are few, but we have marked numerous star systems for hives for my daughters and for myself." The model zoomed in, until it was focused on a rocky planet with terminus zone between stark heat and freezing cold. "We seek peace and cooperation, agreements that can be made…with sufficient time and resources. Economic and social exchanges, technological transfer." The hologram depicted a live video of their hollowed out asteroid, which was apparently going to be towed by a crude copy of the Posigravity drive.
"Is that the nature of the relationship between your species and Athena?" The speculation wasn't surprising even from Renick.
"While our technology does converge, Erudition's technology is her own and much of it is…new to my kind. We did not meet until a few scant months ago." Which was completely true…but still embellishing a lot. "We the Rachni are alone, and we wish for peace between our two races."
I…we were really out of depth here weren't we? I was good at being a cape, at looking at someone and figuring out where they fit best and better uses for their powers.
Politics was…not my area of expertise.
"I suspect there is quite a lot we have to talk about Miss Tenuto." She whistled in amusement, and my shoulders dropped.
I think I knew why Basilia didn't want to be here.
July 26th, 2011. 8:00PM
Taylor Hebert
I opted to practice my airbending, heels turning every so often as air was gathered around me. My hair was tied back into a ponytail, and light clothing was what I considered the best. A dark blue shirt with grey sweatpants. My breathing was under perfect control, air rippling and shifting under my circular movements.
Basilia was resting on the grass of a big garden that she had set up on on the prime base on Athena, moving what she could from the one in our original base when everything was still so…small. The warehouse was hollowed out at this point, since it wasn't big enough to act as a base for more members.
Lotus flowers shifted in the breeze, the walled garden having tons of different plants divided into sections. Some of them were domed, holding species of plants from other planets. Some were ugly but that didn't seem to reduce Basilia's fascination with their origin and biology.
She was cute like that.
She was rolling in the grass, her face twisted up in a way I didn't much like. So with a sigh I stopped practicing, and walked over to her. She was breathing heavily, in and out, and in and out. But her expression wasn't as bad as I thought it was, more like she was thinking very hard rather than the panic or rampant paranoia that sometimes overtook her.
Basilia had a lot of trouble sleeping nowadays, and sometimes she asked if I would stay with her for a bit to calm her nerves. It was a very cheering sight to see that she was having a good day instead of having a bad one.
Basilia's red shirt had ridden up a bit, exposing her smooth belly, and her wavy dark hair billowed behind her. When her eyes focused on my face, her lips pulled up into a lazy smile.
"Heeey…Taylor." She hailed, dropping her arms to her sides with a light depression where she sunk into the soft grass. She was breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling. "So, it's been a really busy day hasn't it? And there's still so much more work to do…figuring out powers and shards, furthering my tinkering, gathering more capes and making Athena bigger and better. Lots of things." She was almost whining, but another breath made her face less pinched with stress.
"Are you okay?" I asked, sitting down on the grass and looking down at her form.
She laughed. "Not really…but I'm managing it better than before." She placed both her hands on her face, gently rubbing her cheeks. "At the least I have friends to stave off my crippling loneliness." She joked, but there was a really harsh self deprecation that made my heart clench. "But well…I've got you here to keep me company."
I smiled. "You say a lot about how I pay you a lot of compliments, but you're not really any different."
She shrugged on the ground. "Well, I never said I wasn't a hypocrite." She did look remorseful though. "Having to sit through several hours of political bullshit is rather tiring you know…" I didn't disagree, and it had been uncomfortable with how the president had been almost naively nice and complimentary to us.
"Anything new on your tinkering?" I asked, interested to see what she would say and…a little hopeful to see her pretty eyes light up with simple joy.
She trilled, flapping her lips. "Well I've figured out some Thranx handheld weaponry, once I understood their drive systems completely things started falling into place." She waved her hand and a drone decloaked, and made a hologram model of a large smooth pistol. "This one shoots a pellet acting as a container for charged particles, it'll crater armor with the detonation." She moved on to another weapon, a round silver cylinder tapering to a point, with an ergonomic handle. "This is a directed lightning gun, and energy weapons just seem to be a thing among the Thranx and their contemporaries."
"Just weapons?" She shook her head with a cheeky grin.
"A lot of drugs." I leaned back, staring at her. She giggled, licking her lips in apparent nervousness. "Their genetic engineering and understanding of life is way more complete than most Citadel races, they're very good at drugs with specific uses varying from medical to…recreational." Her nose wrinkled, mouth turning down. "There's quite a few exotic materials too, though some of it is pretty similar to Citadel tech like Plasteel."
"Is there anything else?" She pouted, her face scrunching up in an expression of concentration. She rolled into a sitting position, crossing her legs with no change in her face.
Basilia rolled her shoulders, lifting her chin to crack her neck. "I think I'm close to opening a second gate…which would make for three tech trees?" She waggled her fingers for emphasis. "I can kind of glimpse a few things about this new era, big needle ships, some type of intelligent bird-things, and…" Confusion hit her. "And that's all I can see."
"So you're fine?" I asked, watching her intently as she clasped her hands together. She glanced at me, her palms rubbing against each other. What I initially thought was nerves was instead a comfortable calm, and I could hear her quietly humming to herself.
"Hmm…I'm coping." She said simply, leaning forward with a curl to her lips. "You help a lot with some of my problems, keep me grounded. But I can't rely on you for everything, it's not healthy." Despite what she said she crept a little closer, leaning into my side. She was very warm and soft, like a squishy furnace. I also pretended not to notice her bust just pressing against my shoulder. They were…
"Right. That's good, I like being in charge but…I'm not going to hurt you to feel like I'm in control." I knew she wouldn't have had much of a problem, she liked structure and order and routines, had her own little ticks and rituals to get through the day or to burn off excess energy.
So I wasn't going to pull anything on her…because that wasn't the kind of relationship I wanted with Basilia.
"Hmm…then you wouldn't mind helping me with a little problem then honeybee?" I flushed at that stupid pet name, she was doing that to mess with me wasn't she? "I'm working on a new APC, based on an old Systems Alliance design." Her nose crinkled, giggling at a joke I wasn't in on. "It's got a big 25mm main gun, a new micro-fusion powertrain, 16 inches of armor, new kinetic barriers, and an omni-shield primary defense layer. It's built for orbital insertion and has jump jets for taking off like a crazy kangaroo."
"You made a flying tank?" I asked, and she obliged while further leaning into my shoulder.
"It's a jumping tank, it can't fly…not yet at least. I've also had to rename my robots." She looked annoyed but accepting of the issue.
"Why's that?" She blinked.
"Golem." She stated and I blushed at how I had forgotten about him. "I'm currently coming up with some names for different models, I've got a few ideas here and there. I've got over ten different robot designs, and naming all of them is going to take some time." Without any warning she took off on a cyclone of air and biotic impulse, landing gently on her feet.
"I've…you've been holding back with your power haven't you?" She could build and mass produce almost anything with enough time but she has stuck to one cruiser, a few dozen shuttles and fighter craft, lots of small arms and manufacturing lines. But she could build and produce more.
"Honestly it wasn't even intentional, I've been a little hyper focused on Endbringer killers and less focused on…smaller projects. It's time to change that." A portal opened and I followed her through it, aware of the bugs on the other end flowing and meeting with me.
She had told me that portals could extend my range, but we hadn't tested how many worlds at once could be brought under my influence and a part of me didn't want to…like it was a gateway to a path I shouldn't take.
This was one of her main labs, about the size of the warehouse and with enough height to fit what she built here. A mech stood still, a bulky semi-humanoid white machine about fifteen feet tall, and one third that in width. It was like an upright turtle, the 'head' of the machine covered by the armored hump. A single optic eye followed me, with both arms having space for manipulators, and a hole beneath those for weapons.
She spun on her heels, throwing her hands up at the lab that was the focus of her robotics research and development. "If you wouldn't mind I'd like to get to work and see how much your coding has improved. It would be nice to have someone to rely on other than myself, artificial intelligences and Rachni for implementing code."
"I'll try my best not to disappoint." Her lips curled again, and numerous displays activated, and I took up one screen, and planted dozens of bugs on a dozen holographic keyboards. Some of the bugs I could create were taking command, larger and more dexterous than the natural bugs I had.
She cracked her knuckles, and I started to work in a dozen different places all at once. "Well…let's see…try to program a basic VI, and we'll see if you can figure out some more advanced synthetic intelligence architectures."
I saw the light of so many screens though flickering bug vision, appendages typing as fast as they could manage. I didn't smile but I would have if I wasn't more concentrated on my work.
Coding was fun.
AN: It took a while for this to get out, I got distracted. Not much to say here, so yeah…enjoy.
July 26th, 2011. 1:00PM
Basilia Rubio
"I kind of expected the Rachni not to tell me everything, but you too?" I spoke slowly to Dinah and she looked apologetic. I rubbed my neck, lightly scratching it in an anxious motion. "I guess they asked you the odds of things going well?"
"They wanted to have some information to help them out in negotiations. We might be able to act as liaisons but direct interaction with world governments is important to them." Dinah replied shortly, typing into a holographic display on one of the many monitors in the main base on Lotus. She was probably reading up on important and relevant news, and based on the look in her eyes she was using her power at the same time.
"I'm not angry, if I was I would have marched back in and yelled at you for a minute or two." She didn't seem surprised and her eyes focused on me again. "I already expected that at some point someone higher up than a PRT Director would show up in the city." That it has taken so long was kind of a mystery, though from what I could tell the delay was from everything getting reorganized due to the political movements following Leviathan.
There had been talks between Japan and the United States, apparently relating to possible movements from the CUI. The Endbringers were partially responsible for how capes worked in this world, so the permanent loss of one and the chance to kill the rest made things more complicated. The truce wouldn't go away completely but it was probably going to be harder to get capes working together
I had no idea what path the world was going to take, because most of the capes currently in existence still had the mental troubles that came with being heavily broken and traumatized. The shards had turned down their little games but we were talking about a twenty percent reduction in conflict at most.
"It'll be later this afternoon, we still have a while to prepare." I rolled my eyes at Dinah, I wasn't worried about that anymore. I wouldn't have to put on a dress so I was perfectly alright, though I had kept my nose out of whatever the world thought of me.
"You know…a few people have taken you to calling you the second coming of Hero." I fidgeted uncomfortably at that. "Something more even, when you broke your limits and nearly blew yourself up." That discomfort worsened, and I still remembered the sting of my bones shattering and my organs pulping…
In for four.
Out for eight.
In for four.
Out for eight.
"Hell even I've been getting attention, I'm The Delphi rather than just Delphi. I managed to predict an Endbringer after all." My mouth was dry as I realized how much attention I had brought to anyone joining us or already a part of us. "Taylor won a lot of respect when she took charge, and she's a lot more impressive when they see her controlling billions upon billions of bugs all at the same time. Bakuda had a damn mech suit that could damage Endbringers, Terra had a good enough Thinker power to keep people from being squashed, and Polaris is basically the second coming of Alexandria. Panacea is one of the few not completely insane biotinkers." Technically she wasn't a tinker…
I was starting to get that we had painted the biggest target on the damn planet on our backs.
"Is that why we got more than thirty thousand applications to work at Athena?" She stared at me like I was stupid and I started to feel like maybe she was right. Then again I wasn't the most outspoken CEO despite that being in the job description, though I regularly interacted with my own workers since most of them were pretty nice.
"How many people do we have working at Athena?" I paused and started thinking and answered back.
"I think we're at about three hundred employees, we've got about twenty R&D projects ongoing so we need quite a few people." Our 3D printing projects were maturing quite quickly, and we were stuck at about a few tons of additive printing in a single day. The main use of our printers was in rapid prototyping and manufacturing of highly complex pieces like turbines or structural components.
One new project the Additive manufacturing teams were working on was on making a hybrid machine, basically a CNC/3D printer, what we were working with was essentially a large room filled with different machines that would swap heads as required for different tasks in the manufacturing process.
Most of the robotic machinery here was built by the company, and it was really quite easy, even if they currently made use of the rather instant skip to the 2.5 nanometer silicon node, apparently bringing together every possible advancement sitting in labs around the world into a single burst, skipping over a decade of progress on the timer for the end of silicon as we knew it. Plus the introductions of more optimized coding language, mainly making use of existing languages that weren't yet popular.
Tinkertech had really fucked up technology distribution as did the increasing instability and conflict in the world. From what I could tell, Earth Bet should be a good twenty years ahead of my world, but things were getting lagged by capes and Endbringers fucking up global infrastructure.
Unlike in normal worlds like mine, better tech didn't trickle down from the rich to the poor, which made sense for the nonsensical dystopian hell that Earth Bet was in reality.
Not that my world was clean either but…it's Bet.
Trickle down economics is definitely fake but technology and science doesn't really work like that because even poor people have money. Though social factors can screw that up.
The sudden windfall of a few missing pieces of tech, and reduced conflict gave them the breathing room to skip to the late 20s in computer technology. I was already taking notes, and had the vague idea of finding my world and delivering a burst of information purely on every bit of tech that Earth Bet had in spades. It would take a bit to get it into practice, but it might speed it up by a bit by skipping past the pitfalls that scattered researchers on Bet already made.
A good amount of income was coming from the numerous Photolithography machines often required in the construction of silicon fabs. Though that had transitioned to licensing since I didn't feel like going for mass production. Instead our fabs were for in-house experimentation.
Tech wise they had been about even to a few years ahead of my Earth, but had higher recycling rates and less power costs due to the economy and the reduced world trade integration.
Some of the projects were on practical uses of Eezo, the use of positive and negative mass effect fields in manufacturing. One team of five had figured out how to project a basic positive mass effect field, the predecessor to the repulsive fields in kinetic barriers.
And since omni-manufacturing works through mass effect field effectors…well you can imagine the technological paradigms left untapped. I think they were going to go straight to ten terabyte smartphones and their software was already more mature than my own world. My in-house optotronics were about a hundred times more powerful in the raw processing and data storage sense, though software built to function with hardware accelerators made certain programs hundreds or thousands of times faster.
It was a frightening amount of progress…but it made sense due to Parahuman interference. In fact I had my doubts I had changed as much as I had expected, specifically in the field of electronics at least, but the biomedical field was another thing entirely. From what one of our angel investors was telling us, I had simply brought the final missing clues due to the haphazard R&D of Tinkertech reverse engineering.
Many of the projects involving dimensional phenomena and high physics experiments made use of exascale computers being built with collaboration with the companies manufacturing the integrated circuits required.
The Transdimensional Physics Interaction Accelerator, or TPIA had an enormous optotronic supercomputer hooked up to every imaginable sensor and scanner and had hundreds of exaflops of processing power. Not as much as even an omni-tool but the early machine was within the understanding and comprehension of Earth Bet scientists and engineers.
"Basilia." I snapped out of a mental tangent, smiling apologetically at an irate Dinah.
"Sorry, it's hard to stay focused when you're really nervous." She didn't seem to disagree, rubbing arms at the words.
"It's fine, but we need to get ready in about an hour."
…
Yes, meeting the leader of the country. Good…
Everything is fine.
___
July 26th, 2011. 4:20PM
Basilia Rubio
Lyre wore the same elaborate armor and silk and crown made out of jewels, but she wasn't alone this time. She was accompanied by two other queens, Erhu and Djembe.
The emerald silks and decorative armor of Lyre contrasted heavily with the style of her daughters. Both had gone through considerable growth spurts, likely from genetic alterations from hesitant studies that Panacea had done on Rhizome's projects. Erhu was 11 meters long and a little over six thousand kilograms in mass, while Djembe was ten meters and over five thousand kilograms.
Erhu had gone all out for steampunk in her design, her armor brass and shiny and overly complicated, with turning gears that a cursory scan found were actually an odd shifting kinetic barrier design. It generated a plate of kinetic barriers, knocking aside projectiles with a repulsive field.
She even wore a hat molded to her horns, and I had to blink repeatedly to make sure I wasn't having a fever dream.
I…I'm starting to think the White Lotus is a terrible influence on their species and I'm frightened for the future now. I moved my gaze to Djembe and paused.
Where Lyre had gone for elegance and Erhu had gone for ridiculousness, Djembe was intimidating.
Her armor was an obsidian black, shining and futuristic, plates of biogenically grown synthetic plating providing armor thick enough to bounce tank rounds. It was smooth, predatory in design, and I noticed the omni-blades embedded into the wrists on her arms, and the omni-spears on her tendrils. She was the strongest biotic among the newborn queens, and second only to Lyre herself as the Ostad queen of the species.
Oh dear.
"Only Lyre is going to show up right? Meeting the president with three giant aliens sounds like a rather large headache." For both me, the federal agencies involved and the secret service.
Lyre laughed, her song cheery and a bright banana yellow, the scent of citrus in her song. "No this is simply a dress rehearsal for future meetings, when our numbers are greater and if we ever find more intelligent life in the galaxy." She gestured to the mountain where her hive resides, consisting of a little under half the population of Rachni in the universe. Which at this moment was about one hundred thousand, with another hundred fifty thousand split unevenly between younger monarchs. Eight more Queen eggs have been laid, though I haven't gotten the opportunity to meet a baby queen yet. Mainly because they hadn't hatched yet but still…
It was the principle of the matter of meeting a baby bug alien.
The mountain was steadily being worn away, and I stared as I saw a tower structure being flown away, plasma fire blowing out from engines as they took off into orbit.
"I…the hell is happening over there?" I asked, unable to look away from what had to be the complete disassembly of the hive.
"We have located an appropriate world to colonize, one that will serve as the new capital world of my children. To the star your people would name Tau Ceti." That was completely unexpected, and I wondered why that was kept from me.
"Is it because this planet technically belongs to the White Lotus…?" I asked, wanting answers.
"Yes. This world may be my place of birth, but it's use means it will not remain secure forever. The hives of this world were meant for resource gathering, to build ships and equipment. We are tugging our resources out of the system, but will leave bases for the children who wish to remain here…" I didn't have a problem with that, I understood her caution.
Earth wasn't quite out of the reach of Scion or other shards, the issue was they were simply unfamiliar with the coordinates, and the powerful remnant of barriers made it hard to pass through the veil without very specific information. Alpha Centauri was a good four light years away, and Tau Ceti was over ten light years distant.
It was out of the bounds of the cycle, though whether they were out of the perception range of a shard was more…ambiguous. The Thinker has been using precognition from a galaxy cluster away, and that was a level of perception that only the Reapers had…or the thing behind them, when it still yet lived.
Luckily it didn't or else we would never have been born to begin with…
I shuddered, and stored that horrific thought for future processing.
"How many ships have you laid down?" I leaned forward, curious on her answer.
"We have multiple warships, what you would call frigates and destroyers, twenty such vessels will be constructed and divided up between my children." She sang swiftly, and I could hear the chattering of her entire race, the song of hope of a species radiating out in a splash of limitless color.
"So you're probably going to stick to cruisers escorted by destroyers and frigates and patrol boats for interplanetary ranges then?" Based on what I had seen of their factories, they would have at least a few battle groups by the end of this year.
A cruiser leading five frigates and three destroyers, though obviously the exact fleet composition was variable. If each hive had once such a group, that would be a hundred plus ships, a sizable fleet within so little time. Though it really paled in comparison to the numbers of the fleets of the Turians.
Apparently before the Reapers hit, they managed to use the Geth as an excuse to build up to over a hundred dreadnoughts, and thousands upon thousands of cruisers, with hundreds of those cruisers being only a few meters short from being dreadnoughts. Forty pound APP slugs, those compressed particle packets they have to blow apart smaller cruisers.
Though they had also been retrofitting their entire fleet with Thanix cannons and Cyclonic barriers.
"There are other ships Basilia, many new notes yet to be sung and written down." Lyre spoke wistfully, her biotics flaring up in apparent remembrance. "We are not confined to the paradigms of our ancestors, we are free from the shackles that bound us. The ability to traverse across dimensions, to other alternate realities. We awoke to life and it's possibilities, to its music and color. It is time to sing anew, in remembrance of the song of a thousand generations." There was a burning defiance in those insectile eyes of hers, tinted with red and gold and white.
Her words were abstracted, hiding the language of spirits that Rachni naturally spoke. The language of the spirits however was a tongue only the most knowledgeable of shaman knew. In the end despite our friendship…it was an illustration of their inhumanity. They were something unseen in their time, beings unlike any other in their galaxy.
It was why they had waited until there was no stopping them, until their numbers were enough to mark them as a sovereign people. This world knew of the Machine Army, of the kingdom of Nilbog, of the abominations and monstrous creations of capes. They would be painted with the same brush, and people would easily try to mark them as creations of either myself or Panacea.
I didn't blame them, because in the end so many capes were terrible people, unable to escape from the day they had broken. The only reason my team functioned at its size was because several of the natural capes were the equivalent of Cauldron capes, and because the influence of their shards was more benign and mutualistic because I was an infectious foreign agent.
"So you've got everything prepared then?" I asked as I leaned against a wall that felt like the smooth skin of a gigantic living beast. "There's not much I can do on the political field, the only politicians I know are local, and most of what Athena does on the political sphere involves donations to political action committees."
Again I was representing a corporation, even if one that was heavily bound to a certain set of rules due to my near total control of the company as its primary owner. It was co-owned with Taylor serving as administration, and she was getting better at doing her own delegation and taking into account the feelings of others when doing her job.
"I have a thousand generations guiding me, there will be no trouble on my part." That didn't really reduce my worry but the attempt was noted and appreciated with a quick nod.
"Then I should probably be getting ready, god…you know things are weird when meeting the president feels more mundane than what we usually do." Lyre didn't reply but let out a song that made reality flex, muted tones that made me shiver in anticipation.
This wasn't going to be a big public event, this was closer to the behind the doors talks between world leaders, the hidden little details about the game played between nations. The world currently seemed to think she was some type of Case 53 or monstrous cape, but the story with the government was something else entirely.
The Rachni had resources beyond imagining, the bounty of the stars belonged to them. But they didn't have numbers, with this one city handily outnumbering them by a hundred thousand. But that was in the short term, by the end of the year they would number in the millions, and by the time Ward came about they would be an interstellar power again.
A small one but a power nonetheless.
Frankly it was probably a good thing, because even if we defeated Scion there were other Entities out there, other aliens because otherwise the cycle would be kind of pointless. Technology had to be iterated upon, because the things I did only worked because I had the subtle shaker powers to start up a base before shifting to machine production of equipment. I'm not sure how long it would take, it might be only a few years or it could be decades before my technology could be made usable by anybody.
The Rachni made use of the same technology that I had, simply due to proximity and because they now knew it was possible. Though certain designs were distinct due to their unique culture and biology. I wasn't as interested in biological technology outside of hybridizing it with cybernetics.
I was a notable example of such, due to gene therapy and my incredibly extensive implants. Nanite swarms made them self repairing, and the onion shell software architecture made it incredibly safe from outside interference.
This was the one world out of many where the Void Wyrms could be beat, where the once nameless Entities had made a mistake and were on course to be broken by something far less than them.
This wasn't that world anymore…humanity was just a little greater than what they once were, and had new allies to call upon than before.
Hopefully that made up the difference.
___
July 26th, 2011. 5:00PM
Taylor Hebert
I lingered behind Erudition, letting my awareness expand outwards from the creature wrapped around my body, to the blistering swarm across billions of small simple animals. Flies were already planted on everyone in the large room, a PRT base just outside the city proper but close enough for me to transmit signals to my main cluster.
Lyre was a walking singularity in my awareness, her song making me think of sunny yellow and tasting like earl grey. I couldn't touch her with my power, but she used some of the same wavelengths that my shard did to control my bugs as did every other Rachni no matter the caste.
It inspired Administrator, and she drew upon new wavelengths, insinuated her control across different paths that I could taste on my tongue and made my chi ripple and squirm like a gathering of worms.
We had shown up a good fifteen minutes early to the meeting, with Lyre acting as the representative of her species, at the forefront of the room. So while we waited I let myself sink into the hurricane that made up my power, with myself as the eye of that storm.
My perception of my power had changed over time as my control became more innate, at the start it was like seeing flashes of movement and color, indistinct murmurs and pulsations, wisps of chemical sense and touch. Like I was in a thousand different places at once, doing different things at the same time.
My power still worked like that but the connection was different, flowing and freeing, ebbing and contracting. There was a subtle tune, like a song I was singing that my bugs responded back to, overlapping perceptions of sound, smell, touch and sight. When I reached out to my swarm, it was like when I used my powers, when I airbend or use biotics.
Through that connection I could channel energy through them, choosing from a set of effects, examined and tested and modified and combined to be unique before being applied to certain bugs.
There was a basic telekinetic power, what Basilia called insinuation of force carriers across dimensional boundaries. It was what let my bugs fly and move much faster than they should be able to. Every little individual power I had was from something like this, my bugs were more durable because energy that hit them was absorbed and diverted into another reality. They could send out shaped beams of direct kinetic transfer, superheat the air with heat energy, or shape the beams to make them cut or smash anything they hit.
But I could only give each bug so much of a well of power, and I had to make decisions on the scale of hundreds of bugs to choose between attack, defense, and mobility. I didn't really have actual lasers, though since light is electromagnetic some of my attacks that involved EM force carriers still technically counted.
At least that was what Basilia said when she got all nerdy and serious about science.
I had a few black windows nestling in my hair, and I could tell they were content with the situation, their tune steady and calming. I had my swarm ordered into formation across two miles, checking for anything out of the order. It was easy to automate, I could order them and even if they were out of my range they would continue with their job.
That had taken a lot of experimentation and work to make it work right, and I had lost a few bugs that way.
I let the claws on the tips of my fingers click together, admiring the grooves where omni-projectors could be turned on to form nearly indestructible projections of hard light. That took some work on Basilia's part, and I was lucky for the implants for interfacing with the omni-tool she gave me.
My helmet provided a HUD like Basilia's and it helped a lot with categorizing information when I needed it.
"How are things looking up from above?" I whispered, and received an answer back from Terra.
"There doesn't seem to be anything my power thinks is dangerous nearby. The sensors from the shuttle don't pick up anything either." Charlotte was piloting a shuttle that was staying a few hundred meters in the air, hiding within optical cloaking that had been figured out by our resident tinkers.
"Yeah well, it's better to be safe here." There was hardly a reason to let our attention waver when the president was visiting even if it isn't for a big speech. That had taken place weeks ago when the news of Leviathan being struck down was still fresh in everyone's minds. Basilia had missed it which was the reason she didn't realize how we had entered the public eye.
Getting her to check the news was easy when she was in the mood and incredibly difficult when she was in tinker mode and building technological miracles. At the least it made managing Athena's engineers and scientists because she was seemingly a magnet for weird people.
"They are here." Lyre Tenuto spoke, her song sending out pulses that made me relax just a tad. Her confidence was almost infections, and two Warriors and four soldiers let out loud chittering croons in response.
My bugs had detected them a while back, shivering in anticipation at who was protecting the President. I knew them well enough, hard not to when I had fought so closely besides them less than two months ago.
The door opened with a few capes acting as protection for the delegation. Renick was representing the PRT, with Chevalier and Miss Militia and three PRT troopers guarding him. Legend was here as the head of the Protectorate, with Alexandria giving us a harsh but not hostile expression.
I placed bugs on them as well, and had them constantly update me on their position as needed. Basilia looked a little shocked, and I shook my head. She had obviously not updated herself on the political scene of my country.
Jonathan Vega Alvarez was the current President, winning in a small landslide back in 2008. Which…I didn't know a lot about the politics of her version of the United States, how different could it be from mine?
A few more Parahumans were around, and a few were outside of the blocky building used to house the base. My lips perked, and I knew this was one of the poorly known Parahuman Strike Forces the military had access to outside of the Protectorate and under their command in small well trained teams across the country.
From rumors that Dinah, Sierra and Charlotte had picked up on there was a lot of friction between the different departments of the government since the PRT took up most of the available Parahumans.
Lyre shifted, lifting herself into her full height until her head nearly hit the ceiling of the room. Her armor gleamed like jewels, and her formally dressed guards took position around her. They had no weapons but…well they didn't really need any.
The president was a tall man, standing eye level with me even in my armor. He had evenly tanned skin and well chiseled, with visible laugh lines and a warm expression tempered by a weariness I had seen in my dad. He squared his shoulders, eyes widening as he took in the full size of Lyre.
Lyre moved carefully, arms and tentacles waving a physical greeting at the same time that she sang. "We the Rachni greet the voices of these United States, it is good to see that you are well." She spoke intently towards Alexandria, concern leaking into her tone in every sense of the word. Alexandria's confusion was…hard to describe, it didn't look right at all. "I am Lyre Tenuto of the Rejoicing in Rebirth Songs. But you may address me as Lyre Tenuto, it is a…sufficient translation of our song."
Alvarez cleared his throat and adjusted his tie, clearly out of his depth. "Then introductions are fully in order, you've already met Legend as the leader of the Protectorate and Deputy Director Renick of the PRT East North East. I am Jonathan Vega Alvarez, the president of the United States of America."
"We have waited patiently to communicate more officially with your people, Voice Alvarez. Our numbers are not as they once were and the galaxy is not the fairest place for my children."
"You've had quite some time to make contact with our government, and even made alliances with local capes." He gestured to me and Basilia, making her squirm while I stayed still. "So why now?" He seemed more curious than angry, an emotion I couldn't identify in his eyes.
"I hold the memories of all Rachni, a thousand generations of Queens, of Brood Lords and Spirit Singers." Her song was quiet, wavelengths only I could hear. Even Basilia couldn't pick up every nuance and insinuation. "Our race has been enslaved time and time again, our children taken…changed, their song turned by oily and dark discordant notes. Until we were reduced to the Last Queen, and saved by a race much like your own…and we repaid them, joining them for a final battle against a terrible force beyond your imaginings…"
Alvarez paled but didn't stop talking, remaining professional. "What happened?"
"We do not know, in my egg I heard only the echoes of a war that ended before the very conception of your species, and I was saved from the madness of not learning the songs of my mother by your kind." She gestured to us, and I did squirm this time.
There was a genuine love and affection in her tones and notes.
"So what are your intentions, where did you come from?" There was a deadpan to the president's voice, a slight smile on his face.
"My kind arose on the Singing Planet, you may call it Suen…though it is long lost, succumbing to the entropy of deep time." Eleven billion years tends to mean planets die yes. "We were for a time alone, comforted by the songs of your people as I grew and gave birth to my children." She gestured for our benefit, wistfulness in her voice. "We found allies in the early days of Athena and the White Lotus, and we rebuilt what we could of our old glories and symphonies."
"I've seen your files…some type of natural Master ability?" Lyre laughed, and I let it wash over me as I continued to spread my awareness out like I was made out of air. The president took a seat as did the delegation and I remained standing.
Basilia didn't and I rolled my eyes.
"We hear the songs of our ancestors and in turn we share our songs between one another. It is the way of the Rachni, and we listen to the songs of your people…we hear the tainted and discordant notes weaving into your world. My daughters have joined me in the task of seeking an alliance with your species, to help your world sing clearly once again. We have much to offer your people…"
"For example?" Alexandria spoke, and a fly nestled in her hair, keeping her in my field of awareness. Lyre whistled innocently, the equivalent of a wink. She tapped at a projector and it generated a field of hard light, creating a realistic hologram of what looked like a star system.
"Our numbers are few, but we have marked numerous star systems for hives for my daughters and for myself." The model zoomed in, until it was focused on a rocky planet with terminus zone between stark heat and freezing cold. "We seek peace and cooperation, agreements that can be made…with sufficient time and resources. Economic and social exchanges, technological transfer." The hologram depicted a live video of their hollowed out asteroid, which was apparently going to be towed by a crude copy of the Posigravity drive.
"Is that the nature of the relationship between your species and Athena?" The speculation wasn't surprising even from Renick.
"While our technology does converge, Erudition's technology is her own and much of it is…new to my kind. We did not meet until a few scant months ago." Which was completely true…but still embellishing a lot. "We the Rachni are alone, and we wish for peace between our two races."
I…we were really out of depth here weren't we? I was good at being a cape, at looking at someone and figuring out where they fit best and better uses for their powers.
Politics was…not my area of expertise.
"I suspect there is quite a lot we have to talk about Miss Tenuto." She whistled in amusement, and my shoulders dropped.
I think I knew why Basilia didn't want to be here.
___
July 26th, 2011. 8:00PM
Taylor Hebert
I opted to practice my airbending, heels turning every so often as air was gathered around me. My hair was tied back into a ponytail, and light clothing was what I considered the best. A dark blue shirt with grey sweatpants. My breathing was under perfect control, air rippling and shifting under my circular movements.
Basilia was resting on the grass of a big garden that she had set up on on the prime base on Athena, moving what she could from the one in our original base when everything was still so…small. The warehouse was hollowed out at this point, since it wasn't big enough to act as a base for more members.
Lotus flowers shifted in the breeze, the walled garden having tons of different plants divided into sections. Some of them were domed, holding species of plants from other planets. Some were ugly but that didn't seem to reduce Basilia's fascination with their origin and biology.
She was cute like that.
She was rolling in the grass, her face twisted up in a way I didn't much like. So with a sigh I stopped practicing, and walked over to her. She was breathing heavily, in and out, and in and out. But her expression wasn't as bad as I thought it was, more like she was thinking very hard rather than the panic or rampant paranoia that sometimes overtook her.
Basilia had a lot of trouble sleeping nowadays, and sometimes she asked if I would stay with her for a bit to calm her nerves. It was a very cheering sight to see that she was having a good day instead of having a bad one.
Basilia's red shirt had ridden up a bit, exposing her smooth belly, and her wavy dark hair billowed behind her. When her eyes focused on my face, her lips pulled up into a lazy smile.
"Heeey…Taylor." She hailed, dropping her arms to her sides with a light depression where she sunk into the soft grass. She was breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling. "So, it's been a really busy day hasn't it? And there's still so much more work to do…figuring out powers and shards, furthering my tinkering, gathering more capes and making Athena bigger and better. Lots of things." She was almost whining, but another breath made her face less pinched with stress.
"Are you okay?" I asked, sitting down on the grass and looking down at her form.
She laughed. "Not really…but I'm managing it better than before." She placed both her hands on her face, gently rubbing her cheeks. "At the least I have friends to stave off my crippling loneliness." She joked, but there was a really harsh self deprecation that made my heart clench. "But well…I've got you here to keep me company."
I smiled. "You say a lot about how I pay you a lot of compliments, but you're not really any different."
She shrugged on the ground. "Well, I never said I wasn't a hypocrite." She did look remorseful though. "Having to sit through several hours of political bullshit is rather tiring you know…" I didn't disagree, and it had been uncomfortable with how the president had been almost naively nice and complimentary to us.
"Anything new on your tinkering?" I asked, interested to see what she would say and…a little hopeful to see her pretty eyes light up with simple joy.
She trilled, flapping her lips. "Well I've figured out some Thranx handheld weaponry, once I understood their drive systems completely things started falling into place." She waved her hand and a drone decloaked, and made a hologram model of a large smooth pistol. "This one shoots a pellet acting as a container for charged particles, it'll crater armor with the detonation." She moved on to another weapon, a round silver cylinder tapering to a point, with an ergonomic handle. "This is a directed lightning gun, and energy weapons just seem to be a thing among the Thranx and their contemporaries."
"Just weapons?" She shook her head with a cheeky grin.
"A lot of drugs." I leaned back, staring at her. She giggled, licking her lips in apparent nervousness. "Their genetic engineering and understanding of life is way more complete than most Citadel races, they're very good at drugs with specific uses varying from medical to…recreational." Her nose wrinkled, mouth turning down. "There's quite a few exotic materials too, though some of it is pretty similar to Citadel tech like Plasteel."
"Is there anything else?" She pouted, her face scrunching up in an expression of concentration. She rolled into a sitting position, crossing her legs with no change in her face.
Basilia rolled her shoulders, lifting her chin to crack her neck. "I think I'm close to opening a second gate…which would make for three tech trees?" She waggled her fingers for emphasis. "I can kind of glimpse a few things about this new era, big needle ships, some type of intelligent bird-things, and…" Confusion hit her. "And that's all I can see."
"So you're fine?" I asked, watching her intently as she clasped her hands together. She glanced at me, her palms rubbing against each other. What I initially thought was nerves was instead a comfortable calm, and I could hear her quietly humming to herself.
"Hmm…I'm coping." She said simply, leaning forward with a curl to her lips. "You help a lot with some of my problems, keep me grounded. But I can't rely on you for everything, it's not healthy." Despite what she said she crept a little closer, leaning into my side. She was very warm and soft, like a squishy furnace. I also pretended not to notice her bust just pressing against my shoulder. They were…
"Right. That's good, I like being in charge but…I'm not going to hurt you to feel like I'm in control." I knew she wouldn't have had much of a problem, she liked structure and order and routines, had her own little ticks and rituals to get through the day or to burn off excess energy.
So I wasn't going to pull anything on her…because that wasn't the kind of relationship I wanted with Basilia.
"Hmm…then you wouldn't mind helping me with a little problem then honeybee?" I flushed at that stupid pet name, she was doing that to mess with me wasn't she? "I'm working on a new APC, based on an old Systems Alliance design." Her nose crinkled, giggling at a joke I wasn't in on. "It's got a big 25mm main gun, a new micro-fusion powertrain, 16 inches of armor, new kinetic barriers, and an omni-shield primary defense layer. It's built for orbital insertion and has jump jets for taking off like a crazy kangaroo."
"You made a flying tank?" I asked, and she obliged while further leaning into my shoulder.
"It's a jumping tank, it can't fly…not yet at least. I've also had to rename my robots." She looked annoyed but accepting of the issue.
"Why's that?" She blinked.
"Golem." She stated and I blushed at how I had forgotten about him. "I'm currently coming up with some names for different models, I've got a few ideas here and there. I've got over ten different robot designs, and naming all of them is going to take some time." Without any warning she took off on a cyclone of air and biotic impulse, landing gently on her feet.
"I've…you've been holding back with your power haven't you?" She could build and mass produce almost anything with enough time but she has stuck to one cruiser, a few dozen shuttles and fighter craft, lots of small arms and manufacturing lines. But she could build and produce more.
"Honestly it wasn't even intentional, I've been a little hyper focused on Endbringer killers and less focused on…smaller projects. It's time to change that." A portal opened and I followed her through it, aware of the bugs on the other end flowing and meeting with me.
She had told me that portals could extend my range, but we hadn't tested how many worlds at once could be brought under my influence and a part of me didn't want to…like it was a gateway to a path I shouldn't take.
This was one of her main labs, about the size of the warehouse and with enough height to fit what she built here. A mech stood still, a bulky semi-humanoid white machine about fifteen feet tall, and one third that in width. It was like an upright turtle, the 'head' of the machine covered by the armored hump. A single optic eye followed me, with both arms having space for manipulators, and a hole beneath those for weapons.
She spun on her heels, throwing her hands up at the lab that was the focus of her robotics research and development. "If you wouldn't mind I'd like to get to work and see how much your coding has improved. It would be nice to have someone to rely on other than myself, artificial intelligences and Rachni for implementing code."
"I'll try my best not to disappoint." Her lips curled again, and numerous displays activated, and I took up one screen, and planted dozens of bugs on a dozen holographic keyboards. Some of the bugs I could create were taking command, larger and more dexterous than the natural bugs I had.
She cracked her knuckles, and I started to work in a dozen different places all at once. "Well…let's see…try to program a basic VI, and we'll see if you can figure out some more advanced synthetic intelligence architectures."
I saw the light of so many screens though flickering bug vision, appendages typing as fast as they could manage. I didn't smile but I would have if I wasn't more concentrated on my work.
Coding was fun.
___
AN: It took a while for this to get out, I got distracted. Not much to say here, so yeah…enjoy.
I do enjoy seeing infinite multitasking be used for programming.
I still have no guesses for the third tech tree.
I still have no guesses for the third tech tree.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Well it'll prove more obvious when I get to it, though I've spent some time searching for breadth of technology rather than power. She's a powerful tinker, but only because a new tech trees open up when she needed it and because she had shard science to crib off of. Thranx era technology has space warping and distortion, but it doesn't have science relating to other realities. At least not from the species she has access to. Technically speaking her tech is in fact inferior to shard science, but she has no restrictions on what she has so she's better than normal restricted tinkers.
But otherwise I'll be keeping the second Gate under wraps until the time is right.
...you meant Third Gate right?
- Location
- Chula Vista
Basilia started with Mass Effect technology as a base, and widened her horizons by studying other tinkers and cape powers until the first gate opened up the Thranx era technology tree. That is the first gate, and the second relates to what she's seen in her dreams and flashes of insight. Each Gate is a milestone, leaving her with six accessible tech trees in total. None of them are exponentially more powerful, and in some cases some technologies will be redundant or even inferior to what she already has. Her main trouble will be hybridizing and mixing different and unique technologies without blowing up, and then further improving them with shard techniques. Because Shards are some of the biggest bullshit creatures in the galaxy right now.
Of course the question for Basilia on these Gates will instead be why? Why are these Gates here and why are they so important?
- Location
- Massachussets
The final tree should be the Forerunners from the Halo games... They were able to change the tilt of the FREAKING GALAXY, create pocket dimensions light years across, create star systems and megastructures like dyson spheres and Halos, as well as a planet sized capital!
Discernment 10.6
- Location
- Chula Vista
Discernment 10.6
July 28th, 2011. 2:00PM
Basilia Rubio
There was a tiny ball of anxiety in my chest that wouldn't go away, making the wait a little excruciating as I let myself sink into the soft cushions of a brown leather sofa. It had taken time for schedules to align, and I had been on a binge of tinkering and categorizing some of my creations. I had gotten the names for various models down to a fairly basic level though to some extent it would be more accurate to call them modular mobile platforms.
Small drones had a single platform, with different payloads and modules depending on the mission. Recon are stealthy drones, with modest shields and weapons and holographic camouflage. Assault are larger and a basic module can fit various different guns as needed. Usually 2mm mass accelerators, electroshock weapons, ion beam weapons, or some more exotic forms. Payload drones carry a wide variety of bombs, from high energy density chemical explosives to exotic Bakuda specials. Service carries supplies of omni-gel, nanomachine repositories, and the ability to process materials as needed into more omni-gel.
They served their roles but due to their small size I had larger robots for repairs and service.
Neith service robots were the next size up on drones, about ten times the mass of a common drone. They were eight flexible legs around a spherical core, each equipped with different tools, and the main body had thrusters to maneuver in 0G. The next size was maybe about fifty pounds, four robust legs ending in feet and two pairs of limbs acting as actuators for the toolheads. The Angitia was similar in shape to a Sykalid, but much smaller than the five meter long warbeast of the Rachni.
The remaining two were semi-humanoid, the support successors of my initial robots. The Vulcan and Gibil mechs were the largest, the Vulcan was about the height of a man, like a crouching bulky primate, while the Gibil was a bubble shaped walking machine some thirteen feet tall, more like an upright spider with six arms than a human.
Quite terrifying in hindsight, like a spider had disgusting bestial relations with a sumo wrestler. The combat models were neat…and maybe a little scary too.
The Trapeza was the basic humanoid platform, 180 centimeters tall and 100 kilograms in mass and either held their weapons like a person or had them built into their bodies. The Vulcan in fact was a version modified to be heavier and with less powerful weapons. They had myomer muscles, and could lift three tons on their own. They had strong shields though once they were down though they were much more liable to be broken by benders and even non benders.
This model was basic, and could be tasked with any number of roles from basic aim-and-shoot to rocket launching versions. The main differences involved larger capacitors for barriers, distinct AI frameworks, and various levels of armor placed on the frame. A heavier stealth variety was equipped with a shotgun, and built for deadly infiltration. The Trapeza could fit the roles I gave them and some unarmed varieties were like a humanoid BigDog support robot.
I had two full stealth and cyberwarfare models, the Polypus was a small machine around eight kilograms in mass, entirely soft robotics with thin articulated plating for greater durability. Eight limbs served as effectors for omni-projectors, melting down materials into omni-gel, and the intelligence within them was customized to hack, penetrate and interfere with the communications and technologies of an enemy force.
The second stealth model was the Cercopes, something similar to the Geth Hopper in design and purpose and sixty kilograms in mass. The stealth bot used its musculoskeletal design and dark energy fields to hop around like a chipmunk on steroids, and operated in tandem with the Polypus for greater processing power to throw against an enemy force.
I had three mechs, the quadruped Bagheera mini tank, the ten foot tall Arges and the fifteen foot tall Goliath. All three served as heavy units, and the humanoid varieties were modeled off the Citadel Race mechs.
So about fourteen different models of robots in all, and a fairy good distraction to calm my nerves.
…
The door creaked open, and I straightened my posture as the person I had been waiting for arrived. She entered the office, wearing a green top and blue jeans.
She was average in height for a woman, if not a little shorter, closer to my size before all this and my own mother's height but with a thinner frame. Her fashion sense seemed nice enough but I wasn't exactly passionate for it, the few skirts and dresses I had were more out of curiosity and experimentation than a serious interest.
"Hi…you seem like you're doing well." I felt calm because she was one of three therapists assigned to specific members. We had concocted a simple scheme, with all employees having an anti-Master device on them at all times with multiple such badges dispensed as needed. It sent out a resonant hyperdimensional frequency, disrupting most forms of Mastering. The use of micro-portals to interface with neurons or inject hormones would fail in an instant, and other more physical methods could be detected just as easily.
For therapists, each had to monitor the activity of the other, and background checks weeded out bad apples. A quick check found the security of this method was about as safe as the rotation method the PRT used, if not a little more so and the anti-Master/Stranger protocols only added to that. It did make me wonder if the PRT was sabotaging itself or if it was just a standard case of shitty bureaucracy messing them up.
Not efficient bureaucracy mind you, because they're never efficient, unless you had access to a damn Artificial Super Intelligence managing the planet and even then I doubted it.
No effectiveness was the issue here, self sabotage from bigots, corruption, the mental issues of capes doubling down on the difficulty of keeping them happy and healthy with the metaphysical opposite of a therapist whispering in their ear.
I didn't really try to claim I was somehow better than them, though it could be true in a narrow sense. I'm not a bigot at least but that's all I can qualify for on being better. But I was an outside context problem entering at the right time, place and with a lot of luck to make things better, with the network screwed by metaphysical phenomena.
I wasn't going to be some sniveling jackass looking down on people who lacked the knowledge and the resources and the breathing room to be nicer than what they were. I'm going to play 'nice' and take the time to not needlessly antagonize everyone.
No matter how much some people pissed me off…though I wouldn't be a pushover either. That was a gateway to being taken advantage of…
"Introductions are in order." I looked up at the redhead from my seat, her lips curling into a casual and warm smile. "Kimberly Chambers, I once worked with the PRT in helping capes cope with some of their issues." I sensed her genuine attempt to start a conversation and I dropped my guard down to a more manageable level.
Her friendly demeanor also helped, taking the edge off of my paranoia. Something about her name tickled at something in my brain…but I left it be. I didn't need any complications.
"Basilia Rubio." She raised an eyebrow, seemingly bemused by the giving of my name.
"Yamada always goes on about the trouble she would have with the code names of capes." She said like that explained everything…which it did but still. "It seems your cape name isn't that important to you?"
"Not really, it's just a title." I didn't care for the game of heroes and villains hiding the thin veil of low level war between Parahumans. "My power is fine and dandy, but my code name is just a means of identification and it sounds nice." I shrugged with a grin.
Honestly I only played as a hero because it kept people at ease and because I had no real need to be a villain, because one…the hell is the point? And two I had two dozen solar systems so fuck off.
"Well being on a first name basis should help a lot with my work, it's hard to confide in others if you're not willing to confide in them back."
It made sense.
I lightly stomped with one foot, letting the vibrations echo back to me her own condition. I wasn't planning to use it against her, but it was suitable feedback. "I know a thing or two about how keeping secrets can go wrong." Some were lessons learned from life experience and others I had gained from more fictional sources. No man or woman in my case was an island.
"It's been a little difficult hasn't it? It was a bit of a rollercoaster with the time it took to set up a system for your team." I could see her wait for me to respond, and I cleared my throat.
"I spared no expense, Athena has been doing well and getting everyone cape or otherwise everything they need is important to me." Money was only a means to an end, and it was a lot less complicated than trading eight to twenty chickens for a cow.
"I can see that." Her gaze was analyzing me, and I didn't much mind, curious on what ugly feelings she would end up pulling out of me. I doubt it would be painless. "If it would be alright with you, I think it would be good to get the session started. Would you like to take a seat?" She gestured and I removed myself from the couch to the equally comfortable cushion chair. I kept my hands below the table, running then along my thighs as my nerves got the best of me.
I swished my hands a few times for good measure, and then brushed back an errant bang.
"Yes I would…though I'm going to tell you that I doubt this is going to be short and simple." Though neither was it going to be soul crushing on her part. "It almost never is…" I muttered quietly, flicking my fingers as I psyched myself up for a psychological analysis.
"That's fair…there's quite a lot to talk about I can imagine. Any details would help, because I can use those details to help you. But first things first…how are you feeling?" It seemed like such a simple question but the way my stomach churned told and my muscles tenses told me it was not.
…
"I wouldn't say I was coping…surviving maybe?" I made a wild gesture with my right hand. "A lot has happened in the past six months, and it's starting to hit me on both how much and how little time has passed." Shock entered my voice as I realized the length of time not being at home and safe with my family.
I had done better than I had expected for being a filthy shut-in.
Chambers looked sympathetic. "You've been through a lot, a gang war, a battle against the…Mother of Miseries, and an Endbringer battle all in the span of three months. All the while juggling your personal, cape, and professional life. You've been through a series of events that would have killed most capes in the process. That you're honest about how that's affected you is a good sign for the future."
"Well…it gets a little tiring to feel like at any time another disaster can come about and kill us all." I wasn't joking, and I steadied myself with exercises. "Hard to feel alright when you're always terrified of something or someone that could hurt you or those you care about with no warning and with no defense against them." I had fits at night where I became so paranoid about sleeping in my house that I ended up sleeping in the main base, or asked Taylor to sleep over.
Hell that was something I had when I was younger or rarely showed up as an adult though I simply placed those fears away and buried them back then. Stupid scene about gas killing you in your sleep…it's been giving me anxiety ever since.
Chambers nodded, a sad look flickering for a moment before she moved on. "I can see why…but that's not the only thing you wish to talk about is it?" She was writing down a few notes, carefully inspecting me.
"No…I picked the three therapists on this team because of your skills, and the probability of all of you being professional and unwilling to break. There's things I don't…can't talk about with other people…but there's things I do want to tell you." She wrote down something else on her notepad, thin eyebrows scrunched up.
"That's good, I want to do my job and I want to help you move past your hurdles." The way her eyes lit up was another reason she had been picked over hundreds of candidates. She was passionate about her job, and more than aware of both its importance, it's scrutiny and its danger. "What can you tell me?"
"What do you know about the New York Anomaly?" I asked and her eyes flashed in empathy.
"It was a Parahuman incident involving a giant portal with negative effects around it for several hundred meters. Is…this related to your trigger event?" She looked a little worried, and I could guess she was comparing my profile to that of other Parahumans.
"Technically…though I can't say I would fully recall that. You know the history about me you've been given?" She nodded.
"It's not completely true." She had keen eyes and intellect to figure it out, and she was the only one who would get to know for the time being outside of team members.
"I'm not…from Earth Bet to begin with." Somehow she wasn't even surprised and I had to wonder how jaded she was with capes. "I'm from another Earth of course, pretty similar to Earth Aleph but even more boring…but safer."
"Feeling safe is important to you?" I nodded and she wrote down some more, smiling very slightly.
"Yes. This world is a dangerous place, full of literal monsters and then monsters in human skin, full of dangers even you might not be aware of…a terrible, terrible place." I shuddered, and tapped my fingers together, breath growing short. "It's why I build new tech and why I learn new tricks from others. A lone tinker is liable to getting enslaved or murdered." I swallowed saliva. "I wanted a team to back me up and that was when the seeds of the White Lotus were planted." I giggled at the sad pun I had made. "Capes terrify me so I surrounded myself with Parahumans who would genuinely try to help me…or were at least willing to be loyal for money or information."
"Keep going." I let air out from my nose.
"Besides having a team I built weapons and tools to fight capes and to protect myself and others. Endbringers terrify me so I learn how to build weapons to destroy them, and give others the means to destroy them. But the scary thing is that I know there are worse things out there than them…and not all of them are so easy to solve. Not everything can be beaten with fists and guns and weapons."
"Did your world have capes?" Chambers asked, lips pressed together.
"No…no powers, only stories and myths told of such things, so figuring out superpowers were real was a shock. It didn't help that…I knew a lot about this world because of whatever ripped me away from my homeworld." Her eyebrows furrowed but she didn't scrutinize my statement too much. "I didn't get powers in the normal way…the connection between myself and my power is far more fundamental, far more ephemeral." My words slowed, unable to articulate the full extent of what the hell I even was.
"You got your power from the Anomaly…but some of your memories were damaged in the process. A lot of victims had similar problems, worse even." I nodded, my expresion grave. "When did you start preparing yourself to be a cape?"
"Back in January…around the tenth? It feels so long ago now." It really did and that scared me. "I needed to get stronger, so I exercised, I learned how to fight, I learned the ins and outs of my tinkering and my ability to manipulate the spirits. Because I didn't want to die." I was blunt with that fundamental truth. I didn't want to die, and Earth Bet very much seemed like a planet that wanted to give it a go.
"So you're entirely motivated by selfish reasons or are you being harsh on yourself?" Chambers asked bluntly, gaze piercing but understanding.
"Maybe a little…I know that if I'm feeling that terrified…that the people of this world can't be better off without simply ignoring the problem, being lied to or coping with it on a day to day basis." There were a lot of scary ways to get hurt on this planet. "It…made me want to do something about it because I now I had the power to make a difference, however small it may be in the end."
"Okay." She made a note. "You've said quite a lot, you're putting a fair bit of trust in me. Which is good by the way." I nodded, feeling anxiety burning. "If you're from another Earth you must be feeling homesick. You might even be afraid for the safety of your family, with what's happened to them while you're away." She put into words what made it hard for me to think about home.
If I went back…would they still be there? Shards were scattered about on one of my home's alternates, who's to say they didn't get annihilated by shards. Who's to say that there isn't a portal connecting them to a Parahuman ruled Earth like Shin? Who's to say they didn't get destroyed by whatever ripped millions of holes into the fabric of reality?
Who's to say that they haven't moved on without me?
"Am I going a little too fast?" I asked, because I wasn't in a rush…all I wanted was to feel okay again, to feel comfortable and safe…and I didn't want to screw it up and fail.
"I've been making a few observations, trying to piece together what I need to know from your words and actions." Chambers explained. "I'm getting a good sense, though today was more to get a good look at who you are, to get the basic essence of Basilia Rubio. That gives me the information to give you feedback and advice, and whether we're compatible. Getting the context of what's going on with you will make things easier on my part, and easier on your part."
"So you got anything special out of my spiel?"
"Quite a few things actually, but as this is a first session it can be saved for later. Whether today or at a later date. I'm still trying to figure you out and you'll have to answer a few questions. The first one is if you want therapy?"
It took me less than a minute to make a decision.
"Yes, I do want to attend therapy."
Chambers looked happy, probably thinking about how little I was fighting this. "Thank you, it's an excellent show of character that you're willing to get help and to try to move forward. Not a lot of people manage even that."
I rolled my neck, then nodded as I stopped to think about that statement. "Yeah well I can be painfully self aware when I feel like it." I laughed nervously.
"Besides what you've mentioned already is there anywhere else you'd like to start? We've touched upon your homesickness and your fear of this world's evils. You did seem quite taken with putting maximum effort into helping those close to you."
I paused, thinking and then clarifying my thoughts.
"Responsibility. I've been feeling…overwhelmed by how much responsibility I've put on my shoulders. It's made me feel anxious and outright…paranoid." I frowned.
"And you haven't tried to delegate some of your responsibilities, tried to look at it from another angle?"
"I've managed to cut down on a few things here and there, set up people who do the jobs I don't have time for…and my friends help me with my inexperience in quite literally everything. But I can't hoist off my responsibility, it has to be me." I tried to comprehend why that was. Why was it my responsibility to fix a world that wasn't mine? Why was I doing what I had done and why didn't I stop doing what I was doing?
"Why does it have to be you?" I looked her in the eye, trying to answer.
"Because there's things I know are coming, or can guess are coming…that the game has changed." I interlaced my fingers, twiddling my thumbs. "You know about the agents, the passengers in a Parahumans head?" She nodded, obviously informed due to her firm. "I know a lot more than most, and I know what they're capable of…and I know what happens if I fail."
"Bad things?" She said quietly, no fear but a morbid curiosity was there.
"The end of the world, the end of everything." Her face twitched but she didn't doubt me and I could imagine why. The Endbringers unleashed could do it, a rogue shard could, Scion could. They were used to the world falling into shit and blood and ruin. I was not.
"Have you mentioned any of this to the PRT?" She asked.
"I've made some implications yes, and they know about a few things that have made them a little more urgent yet careful." Apparently they had been overhauling their organization from top to bottom, and making more effort to be less terrible at their job. "A lot of what I'm doing is preparing for that eventuality, in whatever form it ends up being." Scion wasn't the guaranteed 'final' threat anymore, not with his odd behavior. "Then there's…whatever the hell my power really is."
She leaned forward. "You're afraid, having doubts about certain things."
"I've thought a lot about my actions, about the way I've gone about things. Did I make the right choices? Did I make terrible ones, was I the right person in the right place and time or the worst person?" I clicked my tongue, chewing on my lip. "My power…is stranger than most, there's so many unanswered questions, so many secrets I haven't uncovered because I was afraid of the answer."
"And that gets to you?"
"I like to learn, I like to know things, how they work, why they worked or why or how it happened." I explained promptly, staring at her shiny new desk made out of a living plant that Amelia made. "I also like routine, and it's hard…sometimes to keep moving forward." My voice was strained, exhaustion hitting me in the moment.
"You don't feel like you're in control, you feel like you weren't given a choice or options." Chambers leaned back, her red curly hair shifting. "I have a few patients who felt like this, Parahumans never get the opportunity to choose what power they gain, and what that power does to them."
"I get…angry when I think about it…resentful." I answered quietly, shutting my eyes and thinking of calming thoughts instead of angry ones. I wasn't a patient person, in fact at times I was very short with people, unwilling to teach them if I didn't know how to word it right.
"Well…for something like this…I would probably recommend mindfulness exercises, as well as meditation, though I imagine you already do the latter." I nodded at her. "As well as finding healthy outlets and good friends to help you through this difficult time."
I blushed. "I…have a girlfriend." A dumb smile formed on my face at the thought.
"Having an anchor can be helpful, it can keep you from spiraling." She frowned. "But it can also make you vulnerable and lead to unhealthy dependency on another person."
I grimaced. "I know that, it's why I wanted a therapist. Someone who's nice and professional, someone who can help me through my problems without damaging my relationships or hurting myself." Not physically…the idea made my skin crawl, but mentally, pretending everything was okay was a good way to hurt myself.
It felt…odd to want help but I had done this song and dance before. Hopefully this helped me the same way I had been helped the first time.
Kimberly Chambers made a sound, taking more notes. "How are you feeling right now?" She glanced out at the window.
"A little uncomfortable, anxious, maybe restless? Awkward even." She rustled around in her desk and I blinked as she pulled out a Mancala board of all things.
I hadn't played that since I was a kid.
It was a little more complicated than that children's game from what felt like a lifetime ago. It was an oval board split into two hinging halves. Each half had six straight holes, and I looked curiously onwards at the game.
"You're familiar with this game?" She queried with a grin.
"Mancala? I haven't played that since I was half my current size." It was a little nostalgic.
"This is a bit more advanced, this game is called Oware. Do you want me to show you how to play?"
I nodded. "The game requires an Oware board and forty eight seeds and…"
July 29th, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I held my hands behind my back as I took a nice walk around, and with a wave of wind I was about to launch myself into the air until there was a motion from my right. It was a boy and girl, twin brunettes from the looks of it who had gotten away from their mother for a few seconds.
I stopped my jump, crossing my arms over my chest as the two children made it over to me, both about twelve or maybe thirteen years old. Their mother was a black woman in her early 30s and a glance took in her rather curvy form. I ignored that and kept an eye out, because I heard a few rumors about white supremacists trying to establish themselves again. Though it would be more accurate to say it was around Brockton Bay rather than within it.
"Hi?" The twins stopped in their tracks, eyes narrowed. The girl spoke up first, a fair bit bolder than her brother.
"You're the chick that dad works for right?" She said bluntly, her frizzy dark hair catching my eye. I looked at their faces, trying to remember if I knew the guy.
It took me less than five seconds to figure it out.
"John Jones?" He was one of about four dozen DWU workers I had hired for long term employment in the more menial jobs within Athena, things like security, construction work, and driving registered Tinkertech vehicles to deliver equipment and products. They also handed shipments and loading onto ships of some of my products though most of my products were rarely sent overseas.
John Jones was a big muscled guy, think Grue but add half a foot and add thirty or forty pound of brute muscle. He helped with delivering various products out to cities within a few hundred miles of the bay, mainly various medical supplies and equipment like medi-gel, handheld MRI machines, and other products approved for use in hospitals. His other shipments delivered industrial machinery, things like exoskeletons, from bare bone devices to prevent injury to augmentative suits for industrial use in factories and warehouses.
Like all of our more physical employees he was assigned a basic kinetic barrier, with an emergency omni-shield and Athena built vehicles. Half of them were consigned to assembly line duty, and some of the more experienced were training newbies since I couldn't just hire the entire DWU. They had their own contracts to worry about, so getting new blood was needed.
Plus Athena had a tuition assistance program, and quite a few of the DWU workers were willing to take up college courses on the weekend. Apparently they saw the change in the wind and wanted to change their skills before automation reamed them up the ass. Kind of sad it was partially my fault, with my attempt at a tech uplift.
The girl coughed and I responded. "Yes? Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?" The child of one of my employees looked up at me with a sharp and bright gaze, and I wondered if she would benefit from the recent increase in school budgets due to charitable donations from Athena as well as increased tax revenue in general.
'Coincidentally' a lot of new programs involved the STEM field along with a few other of my own favorite subjects. At the least more artsy subjects weren't being neglected because to be frank getting art from a robot isn't exactly special.
"You're a bender right?" I nodded waiting to see where the girl was going with this. She grinned, leaning forward and bunching her hands into fists in front of her face. "Then that means you can teach me firebending right, better than those damn government lackeys at the PRT." I twitched, unsure how to respond to what was basically a kid telling me she wanted to learn how to throw around fire like a maniac.
"Ashanti!" Her mother caught up with her children in a frightening burst of speed, far beyond what one would expect from a waitress…which isn't weird to know. I talk to her husband sometimes, it's not weird.
The mother of two stopped in her tracks, eyes peering down at her sheepish daughter. "What exactly have you been saying to her?!" Ashanti innocently whistled, not even bothering to be discreet
"Oh mostly about whether I can teach her secret firebending technique that the fuddy duddy PRT won't tell her." I made air quotes and the look of betrayal on her face was amusing. "Which is sweet and all that she would come to me for training but I don't exactly have the time. She has the passion at least, though…she might need to learn restraint so she doesn't set her bed on fire."
Ashanti gulped. "That can happen?"
"Bending is quite dangerous if you don't develop the discipline and willingness to learn and restrain yourself. Every element is capable of great harm if misused, and capable of great good if you use it wisely." I explained and she glanced down at her hands, smoke coming off of them.
I made up my mind then and there.
"I should be able to spare a minute or two…if your mother is willing to entertain this." Miss Jones glanced at me, her expression uncertain as she stared at my helmet. I didn't know what she found but it had to be persuasive with how she answered.
"It might be nice to not worry about the house burning down." Miss Jones said sardonically, lips curls into a bemused smirk.
Luckily we were close to a warehouse that had been cleared out and wouldn't be full of dangerous parts for a few days so after making sure there wasn't a threat nearby. Drones were doing their own rounds, mainly watching out for capes or gangs or muggings or robberies.
They had a lot of data now on general criminal behavior, so they wouldn't search aimlessly and at the wrong hours and locations.
"So are the both of you benders or just the one?" I asked casually, and Ashanti's twin scowled.
"Only Ashanti got to be special enough to get powers…" He looked frustrated.
"Well you can probably learn a thing or two even then." A few lingering people were crowding around a fence, and a good number of them were benders if it was guessing right. At 100% saturation around Brockton Bay that made for one hundred thousand benders and over a thousand shamans of varying strengths, skills and capabilities.
"Show me some moves! I want to throw a big old fireball!" I shook my head at the state of affairs. Ashanti was a nice girl but her attitude was too wild to firebend without hurting herself or others.
"That sounds cool and all but firebending isn't really that simple." I lowered into a stance, a greater refinement of the art of the Dancing Dragon. "Fire is of course incredibly dangerous, without learning restraint and control, your channeling of fire will be wild and uncontrollable."
"It's just fire, it's not that special." I stared at her, feeling insulted at the disrespect towards my strongest element. Her twin brother looked equally pissed off at the comment.
"Fire is more than that." I stated plainly, gesturing for her to take a dozen steps back as I demonstrated. "Fire is life and power, ignited by the passions and emotions of a living soul." I wasn't being metaphorical but they didn't need to know that. "Your inner fire is fueled by your drive, and without it your flames are weak and directionless."
"My bending is powered by…emotion? Would any emotion work?" She asked curiously as I went through the motions, the kicks and punches and defensive maneuvers of the Sun Warriors.
"It's a little more complicated than that, why do you want to learn firebending?" I asked her, tilting my head.
She looked evasive. "Because I think it's cool?" She was lying so I was going to try to pull out the real reason.
"Really?" There was silence as I stopped the motions of my practice, and I kept up the act for more than a minute…and grinned when she caved.
…
"I…want…to protect my family." Her mother looked surprised while her twin was not. "I've got this power…so I should use it for something good."
"That's a good drive, a good start. But if you want to protect them, you need training, you need discipline to focus your power." I took up the Dancing Dragon once again but this, my fists lit with flames, orange-white-green swirls of living fire. I turned on my heels, demonstrating for a small audience the beauty and potential of firebending. "To make your power into something beautiful." I ceased, letting my flames die down with a final swelling of heat.
She stared at me with wide eyes and I coughed, feeling awkward at how I had met my passion run away from me. "At least, something like that."
"You can't teach me though can you?" She asked sadly and I nodded.
"Don't have the time, I've only taken on a few students and most of them moved on to their own thing." Amy was an amazing waterbender, and her airbending was excellent. Taylor was the same with her bending and biotics, Vicky did her stuff on her own, while Danny had been training on his own time once I became busy.
Carol went to the PRT for help instead since she was still being a bitch.
"I know a worker who has some experience with firebending." Her mother muttered, and Ashanti lit up with a smile.
…
…
They stayed for another few minutes, and I took my leave, though not before giving a few awkward autographs using a special pen I had to create a separate signature of my own. I wasn't going to take the chance of a Thinker pulling some bullshit on me.
I was going to take some time to relax.
July 29th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I squatted down, blinking rapidly at the impossible creature staring at me with its furry face. It was a white furred creature, with a predominantly black face, large green eyes, long ears and several black stripes.It was a Winged Lemur, and it was the cutest thing I had ever seen in my life.
I opened my arms and it…she flew into my waiting arms, and a smile rose on my face as she nuzzled my cheek. She purred slightly, chattering to what I saw was other lemurs hiding in the trees in the White Garden. I could see Greg sitting on a bunch, a few lemurs in his arms, chattering away at him.
I decided to walk over since I haven't talked with him much and I wanted to see how much he had really improved or if his power had worsened things even by accident.
He turned, blue eyes wide and his expression reminding me of a particularly stupid puppy. "Hey Erudition! Look at these lemurs!" I snorted as she shifted his arms up and down. "Panacea made a bunch of these guys based on some of the genetic sequences you were giving to her. They're pretty cute." I agreed with him perfectly, holding the soft primate close to my chest.
I sat down next to him, curious on how he was doing and what he had been doing before joining us after Leviathan.
"So…I've heard a few things about you from Taylor." He winced. "But I haven't really spent too much time talking with you, it might be a good idea." He seemed nice enough and there had been no complaints so far. But getting to know for myself was better.
"Oh…okay then!" He sounded shocked, and he smiled just a tad. "Well I'm Greg or Turnaround." He rubbed them back off his neck, leaning back as the lemurs stayed on his shoulders. "I got…my powers a few months back, a little before those monsters started showing up." So a few months of being a cape at least. "I was a pretty weak tinker at first…so I tried to do small things, after I saw how you helped people on a big scale."
"Hmm?" What did that mean?
Greg's smile was blinding. "I'm a big fan of you, you were just…cool. You had people flocking to you, you tried to be a hero, and then you went and fought Leviathan with your fists!" I leaned back and his excitement toned down, the blonde coughing. "If I was still a normal guy I'd probably ask for your autograph."
"Please don't." I pleaded and he smiled a bit, just as dumbly as before though with a hint of shame.
"Well since I thought my power was weak I decided to help with small things, like finding lost pets, stolen wallets, or stolen cars." It sounded so menial, but to be frank it was a sight better than trolling people on the internet and being a general jackass. "I ended up learning how to fight through an uncle of mine, which my dad likes because I was manning up." His almost peppy tone dropped but he continued. "Things got heavier over time though, first there was this old lady who wanted me to help her find her baby parrot…"
"A baby parrot?" I asked. He nodded, and I had a bad feeling about this.
"I managed to get paid or given stuff by people, and dumpsters were good places for materials. Plus a few dives in the Ship Graveyard." He said brightly and I didn't know what the fuck to say at that point. "So I went searching for the old lady's pet bird in some older armor, tough enough to take a pistol, and with some shock gloves." He did jazz hands. "I didn't see what the big deal was, I just checked out an in-house pet store. The guy there said he saw some guy in a van selling VHS's with the parrot. How was I supposed to know they were part of an exotic pet smuggling and drug running ring for an Endbringer cult?"
I stared, agape at the act of accidental heroism. "You fought the Fallen?" He shook his head.
"Nah. There are a few other Endbringer cults too, and this was like…two capes and a dozen not Parahumans."
"How did you survive?" If this was when he was new, he'd be totally fucked.
"Well they had this octopus…but they put his tank too close to a switch so he squirted water and cut the power. In the confusion I managed to bring them down, and got some help from a few juvenile tigers."
Don't laugh…don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh.
"I-Is that all?" He perked up and my hopes sunk.
"Nope. There was the time I searched for a lost pet beaver, and ended up blowing up some type of evil orb thing from the Mother of Miseries." There was a pressure building, but I held back for his sake. "Then when I was dumpster diving I got attacked by Mush and shocked him a lot."
I was going to die.
"Okay."
He listed off more noodle incidents. "A week before Leviathan I was looking for a girl's stuffed toy, and it turned out she was hiding a freaky snake spirit in her liver. An asian girl in a red skirt helped bring it out and we made it run away."
"Was her name Kaida?" I asked desperately, remembering who she was because she was friends with Elle and Dinah.
"How'd you know?" He said naively and I choked back a mad giggle.
"I'm good with connections." I lied but he bought it.
He lifted his finger as if remembering something. "Oh yeah, and then there was the time I brought in Rune."
What in god's name was he?
Greg didn't quit talking. "Well I was washing off some graffiti when I overheard two people arguing. Turns out it was Othala convincing Rune to attack a nice couple because one of them was a…you know one of them was black. But not as polite." I gestured for him to go on and he did. "I ended up bonking Othala in the head with a screwdriver, and then kicked Rune in the face. When she tried to chuck a dumpster at me I accidentally broke open a can of pepper spray and she inhaled a lot of it." He said all of that with a straight face. "Othala got away by diving into the bay, and I think the PRT still has Rune?"
Don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh…
"I'll be right back if that's alright with you?" He didn't have a problem with it, and I took my cute little lemur with me as I moved with purpose, trying not to visibly shake out of laughter and idiocy induced madness.
I cracked a smile, a high pitched squeal leaving me like I was a pricked balloon. The winged lemur was on my head and it was the only thing keeping me from going insane.
I received a text message and looked at my omni-tool, though I could have let the words be projected onto my eyes instead.
Dragon: I want to talk. Does Sunday sound good?
I typed back rapidly, clicking my fingers on the locked light display.
Erudition: Yes, that's not a problem.
She responded back in a tenth of a second.
Dragon: Thank you, I've been rather busy with some projects of mine.
Erudition: Ok.
I reassured her as I walked, my lemur friend wrapped around my neck like a wiggly cat. I was curious about what she wanted to talk about, perhaps something had happened or there was something else she wanted to tell me?
The White Lotus was functioning well enough, and responsibilities were being divided up so I wouldn't have to focus on eighteen capes at once. Vicky was working with integrating Sveta, and we were working on how to tell her why she was the way she was.
It…wouldn't be good, but keeping it a secret wasn't going to help her in the long run. Palanquin was its own team, and they had reasonable leeway on their own activities. Mostly they were paid an immense salary, as well as occasional bonuses for activity outside the city and power testing.
The White Lotus was effectively a different organization from Athena, a sponsored team that could be spun off in the scenario of Athena being broken somehow. They were paid well, given resources and equipment, and were being careful. It was lucky that the damage to the Orchard base was already written off beforehand.
Though that was completely out of our control…since a rogue shard isn't exactly an expected issue. Eighteen capes was a fair number and it was likely we were going to absorb New Wave in its entirety with the possible exception of Brandish. Though at least she didn't seem to dislike our mission statements.
Getting everything with Athena and White Lotus squared away legally was hard, and one of those legal things was starting up Athena as a benefit corporation to keep the mission from being poisoned by future shareholders. Athena was already worth billions, though expenses were increasing as we hired more people and bought more property both in and out of the city. Mainly for upping production of industrial exoskeletons, and the future construction of cheap, safe and easy to interface prosthetics in the Healthcare branch of the company.
The basic exoskeleton was weak, maybe good for a hundred to two hundred pounds, but had unlimited endurance and protected their users from long term damage and fatigue. There were over eight hundred thousand warehouse workers, six million construction workers, nearly three million nurses, millions upon millions of people were at risk.
I think with a few more assembly lines I could get the costs down to just below a thousand for the cheapest basic suits and a few thousand for the bulkier models like the Warden. We were imagining over a hundred thousand would be sold by the end of this year, and then double that over next year. By then we should have three to six times our current number of employees if not higher.
The Warden should stay steady at twenty thousand units, and we had a few competitors in the market. Hardware was about even but our software was a decade ahead of anyone else.
Mainly because anything more advanced wouldn't fit due to the amount of storage required. A lot of AI algorithms simply weren't used before because they were too inefficient back then to be possible.
Also to keep it within the understanding of my engineers.
I was booped on the nose by the winged lemur and I swore that I would upgrade Amelia's truck into something awesome. Because winged lemurs are sweet little babies and I love them.
…
Still going to be agonizing on what Dragon wants later today though.
Though in some ways they're effectively my own problems magnified by the scope of what Basilia is dealing with. I'm not the bravest of people, not a fearless paragon of justice. But I'd probably fake it until I make it under the circumstances. And like most people I don't enjoy the idea of dying, much less dying painfully or suffering a fate worse than death. And while I'm bad at showing it I have empathy for others.
It's a rather strong sense of existential terror lingering constantly at the back of Basilia's mind. She is internalizing a lot of her issues, not truly dealing with any of them because there wasn't any time to consider for little things like mental health.
So there's that mental mess screwing badly with her. Not much to say other than trying to get Greg Veder's personality isn't…easy. Though Wildbow's description as an overexcited puppy made sense to me.
So enjoy.
July 28th, 2011. 2:00PM
Basilia Rubio
There was a tiny ball of anxiety in my chest that wouldn't go away, making the wait a little excruciating as I let myself sink into the soft cushions of a brown leather sofa. It had taken time for schedules to align, and I had been on a binge of tinkering and categorizing some of my creations. I had gotten the names for various models down to a fairly basic level though to some extent it would be more accurate to call them modular mobile platforms.
Small drones had a single platform, with different payloads and modules depending on the mission. Recon are stealthy drones, with modest shields and weapons and holographic camouflage. Assault are larger and a basic module can fit various different guns as needed. Usually 2mm mass accelerators, electroshock weapons, ion beam weapons, or some more exotic forms. Payload drones carry a wide variety of bombs, from high energy density chemical explosives to exotic Bakuda specials. Service carries supplies of omni-gel, nanomachine repositories, and the ability to process materials as needed into more omni-gel.
They served their roles but due to their small size I had larger robots for repairs and service.
Neith service robots were the next size up on drones, about ten times the mass of a common drone. They were eight flexible legs around a spherical core, each equipped with different tools, and the main body had thrusters to maneuver in 0G. The next size was maybe about fifty pounds, four robust legs ending in feet and two pairs of limbs acting as actuators for the toolheads. The Angitia was similar in shape to a Sykalid, but much smaller than the five meter long warbeast of the Rachni.
The remaining two were semi-humanoid, the support successors of my initial robots. The Vulcan and Gibil mechs were the largest, the Vulcan was about the height of a man, like a crouching bulky primate, while the Gibil was a bubble shaped walking machine some thirteen feet tall, more like an upright spider with six arms than a human.
Quite terrifying in hindsight, like a spider had disgusting bestial relations with a sumo wrestler. The combat models were neat…and maybe a little scary too.
The Trapeza was the basic humanoid platform, 180 centimeters tall and 100 kilograms in mass and either held their weapons like a person or had them built into their bodies. The Vulcan in fact was a version modified to be heavier and with less powerful weapons. They had myomer muscles, and could lift three tons on their own. They had strong shields though once they were down though they were much more liable to be broken by benders and even non benders.
This model was basic, and could be tasked with any number of roles from basic aim-and-shoot to rocket launching versions. The main differences involved larger capacitors for barriers, distinct AI frameworks, and various levels of armor placed on the frame. A heavier stealth variety was equipped with a shotgun, and built for deadly infiltration. The Trapeza could fit the roles I gave them and some unarmed varieties were like a humanoid BigDog support robot.
I had two full stealth and cyberwarfare models, the Polypus was a small machine around eight kilograms in mass, entirely soft robotics with thin articulated plating for greater durability. Eight limbs served as effectors for omni-projectors, melting down materials into omni-gel, and the intelligence within them was customized to hack, penetrate and interfere with the communications and technologies of an enemy force.
The second stealth model was the Cercopes, something similar to the Geth Hopper in design and purpose and sixty kilograms in mass. The stealth bot used its musculoskeletal design and dark energy fields to hop around like a chipmunk on steroids, and operated in tandem with the Polypus for greater processing power to throw against an enemy force.
I had three mechs, the quadruped Bagheera mini tank, the ten foot tall Arges and the fifteen foot tall Goliath. All three served as heavy units, and the humanoid varieties were modeled off the Citadel Race mechs.
So about fourteen different models of robots in all, and a fairy good distraction to calm my nerves.
…
The door creaked open, and I straightened my posture as the person I had been waiting for arrived. She entered the office, wearing a green top and blue jeans.
She was average in height for a woman, if not a little shorter, closer to my size before all this and my own mother's height but with a thinner frame. Her fashion sense seemed nice enough but I wasn't exactly passionate for it, the few skirts and dresses I had were more out of curiosity and experimentation than a serious interest.
"Hi…you seem like you're doing well." I felt calm because she was one of three therapists assigned to specific members. We had concocted a simple scheme, with all employees having an anti-Master device on them at all times with multiple such badges dispensed as needed. It sent out a resonant hyperdimensional frequency, disrupting most forms of Mastering. The use of micro-portals to interface with neurons or inject hormones would fail in an instant, and other more physical methods could be detected just as easily.
For therapists, each had to monitor the activity of the other, and background checks weeded out bad apples. A quick check found the security of this method was about as safe as the rotation method the PRT used, if not a little more so and the anti-Master/Stranger protocols only added to that. It did make me wonder if the PRT was sabotaging itself or if it was just a standard case of shitty bureaucracy messing them up.
Not efficient bureaucracy mind you, because they're never efficient, unless you had access to a damn Artificial Super Intelligence managing the planet and even then I doubted it.
No effectiveness was the issue here, self sabotage from bigots, corruption, the mental issues of capes doubling down on the difficulty of keeping them happy and healthy with the metaphysical opposite of a therapist whispering in their ear.
I didn't really try to claim I was somehow better than them, though it could be true in a narrow sense. I'm not a bigot at least but that's all I can qualify for on being better. But I was an outside context problem entering at the right time, place and with a lot of luck to make things better, with the network screwed by metaphysical phenomena.
I wasn't going to be some sniveling jackass looking down on people who lacked the knowledge and the resources and the breathing room to be nicer than what they were. I'm going to play 'nice' and take the time to not needlessly antagonize everyone.
No matter how much some people pissed me off…though I wouldn't be a pushover either. That was a gateway to being taken advantage of…
"Introductions are in order." I looked up at the redhead from my seat, her lips curling into a casual and warm smile. "Kimberly Chambers, I once worked with the PRT in helping capes cope with some of their issues." I sensed her genuine attempt to start a conversation and I dropped my guard down to a more manageable level.
Her friendly demeanor also helped, taking the edge off of my paranoia. Something about her name tickled at something in my brain…but I left it be. I didn't need any complications.
"Basilia Rubio." She raised an eyebrow, seemingly bemused by the giving of my name.
"Yamada always goes on about the trouble she would have with the code names of capes." She said like that explained everything…which it did but still. "It seems your cape name isn't that important to you?"
"Not really, it's just a title." I didn't care for the game of heroes and villains hiding the thin veil of low level war between Parahumans. "My power is fine and dandy, but my code name is just a means of identification and it sounds nice." I shrugged with a grin.
Honestly I only played as a hero because it kept people at ease and because I had no real need to be a villain, because one…the hell is the point? And two I had two dozen solar systems so fuck off.
"Well being on a first name basis should help a lot with my work, it's hard to confide in others if you're not willing to confide in them back."
It made sense.
I lightly stomped with one foot, letting the vibrations echo back to me her own condition. I wasn't planning to use it against her, but it was suitable feedback. "I know a thing or two about how keeping secrets can go wrong." Some were lessons learned from life experience and others I had gained from more fictional sources. No man or woman in my case was an island.
"It's been a little difficult hasn't it? It was a bit of a rollercoaster with the time it took to set up a system for your team." I could see her wait for me to respond, and I cleared my throat.
"I spared no expense, Athena has been doing well and getting everyone cape or otherwise everything they need is important to me." Money was only a means to an end, and it was a lot less complicated than trading eight to twenty chickens for a cow.
"I can see that." Her gaze was analyzing me, and I didn't much mind, curious on what ugly feelings she would end up pulling out of me. I doubt it would be painless. "If it would be alright with you, I think it would be good to get the session started. Would you like to take a seat?" She gestured and I removed myself from the couch to the equally comfortable cushion chair. I kept my hands below the table, running then along my thighs as my nerves got the best of me.
I swished my hands a few times for good measure, and then brushed back an errant bang.
"Yes I would…though I'm going to tell you that I doubt this is going to be short and simple." Though neither was it going to be soul crushing on her part. "It almost never is…" I muttered quietly, flicking my fingers as I psyched myself up for a psychological analysis.
"That's fair…there's quite a lot to talk about I can imagine. Any details would help, because I can use those details to help you. But first things first…how are you feeling?" It seemed like such a simple question but the way my stomach churned told and my muscles tenses told me it was not.
…
"I wouldn't say I was coping…surviving maybe?" I made a wild gesture with my right hand. "A lot has happened in the past six months, and it's starting to hit me on both how much and how little time has passed." Shock entered my voice as I realized the length of time not being at home and safe with my family.
I had done better than I had expected for being a filthy shut-in.
Chambers looked sympathetic. "You've been through a lot, a gang war, a battle against the…Mother of Miseries, and an Endbringer battle all in the span of three months. All the while juggling your personal, cape, and professional life. You've been through a series of events that would have killed most capes in the process. That you're honest about how that's affected you is a good sign for the future."
"Well…it gets a little tiring to feel like at any time another disaster can come about and kill us all." I wasn't joking, and I steadied myself with exercises. "Hard to feel alright when you're always terrified of something or someone that could hurt you or those you care about with no warning and with no defense against them." I had fits at night where I became so paranoid about sleeping in my house that I ended up sleeping in the main base, or asked Taylor to sleep over.
Hell that was something I had when I was younger or rarely showed up as an adult though I simply placed those fears away and buried them back then. Stupid scene about gas killing you in your sleep…it's been giving me anxiety ever since.
Chambers nodded, a sad look flickering for a moment before she moved on. "I can see why…but that's not the only thing you wish to talk about is it?" She was writing down a few notes, carefully inspecting me.
"No…I picked the three therapists on this team because of your skills, and the probability of all of you being professional and unwilling to break. There's things I don't…can't talk about with other people…but there's things I do want to tell you." She wrote down something else on her notepad, thin eyebrows scrunched up.
"That's good, I want to do my job and I want to help you move past your hurdles." The way her eyes lit up was another reason she had been picked over hundreds of candidates. She was passionate about her job, and more than aware of both its importance, it's scrutiny and its danger. "What can you tell me?"
"What do you know about the New York Anomaly?" I asked and her eyes flashed in empathy.
"It was a Parahuman incident involving a giant portal with negative effects around it for several hundred meters. Is…this related to your trigger event?" She looked a little worried, and I could guess she was comparing my profile to that of other Parahumans.
"Technically…though I can't say I would fully recall that. You know the history about me you've been given?" She nodded.
"It's not completely true." She had keen eyes and intellect to figure it out, and she was the only one who would get to know for the time being outside of team members.
"I'm not…from Earth Bet to begin with." Somehow she wasn't even surprised and I had to wonder how jaded she was with capes. "I'm from another Earth of course, pretty similar to Earth Aleph but even more boring…but safer."
"Feeling safe is important to you?" I nodded and she wrote down some more, smiling very slightly.
"Yes. This world is a dangerous place, full of literal monsters and then monsters in human skin, full of dangers even you might not be aware of…a terrible, terrible place." I shuddered, and tapped my fingers together, breath growing short. "It's why I build new tech and why I learn new tricks from others. A lone tinker is liable to getting enslaved or murdered." I swallowed saliva. "I wanted a team to back me up and that was when the seeds of the White Lotus were planted." I giggled at the sad pun I had made. "Capes terrify me so I surrounded myself with Parahumans who would genuinely try to help me…or were at least willing to be loyal for money or information."
"Keep going." I let air out from my nose.
"Besides having a team I built weapons and tools to fight capes and to protect myself and others. Endbringers terrify me so I learn how to build weapons to destroy them, and give others the means to destroy them. But the scary thing is that I know there are worse things out there than them…and not all of them are so easy to solve. Not everything can be beaten with fists and guns and weapons."
"Did your world have capes?" Chambers asked, lips pressed together.
"No…no powers, only stories and myths told of such things, so figuring out superpowers were real was a shock. It didn't help that…I knew a lot about this world because of whatever ripped me away from my homeworld." Her eyebrows furrowed but she didn't scrutinize my statement too much. "I didn't get powers in the normal way…the connection between myself and my power is far more fundamental, far more ephemeral." My words slowed, unable to articulate the full extent of what the hell I even was.
"You got your power from the Anomaly…but some of your memories were damaged in the process. A lot of victims had similar problems, worse even." I nodded, my expresion grave. "When did you start preparing yourself to be a cape?"
"Back in January…around the tenth? It feels so long ago now." It really did and that scared me. "I needed to get stronger, so I exercised, I learned how to fight, I learned the ins and outs of my tinkering and my ability to manipulate the spirits. Because I didn't want to die." I was blunt with that fundamental truth. I didn't want to die, and Earth Bet very much seemed like a planet that wanted to give it a go.
"So you're entirely motivated by selfish reasons or are you being harsh on yourself?" Chambers asked bluntly, gaze piercing but understanding.
"Maybe a little…I know that if I'm feeling that terrified…that the people of this world can't be better off without simply ignoring the problem, being lied to or coping with it on a day to day basis." There were a lot of scary ways to get hurt on this planet. "It…made me want to do something about it because I now I had the power to make a difference, however small it may be in the end."
"Okay." She made a note. "You've said quite a lot, you're putting a fair bit of trust in me. Which is good by the way." I nodded, feeling anxiety burning. "If you're from another Earth you must be feeling homesick. You might even be afraid for the safety of your family, with what's happened to them while you're away." She put into words what made it hard for me to think about home.
If I went back…would they still be there? Shards were scattered about on one of my home's alternates, who's to say they didn't get annihilated by shards. Who's to say that there isn't a portal connecting them to a Parahuman ruled Earth like Shin? Who's to say they didn't get destroyed by whatever ripped millions of holes into the fabric of reality?
Who's to say that they haven't moved on without me?
"Am I going a little too fast?" I asked, because I wasn't in a rush…all I wanted was to feel okay again, to feel comfortable and safe…and I didn't want to screw it up and fail.
"I've been making a few observations, trying to piece together what I need to know from your words and actions." Chambers explained. "I'm getting a good sense, though today was more to get a good look at who you are, to get the basic essence of Basilia Rubio. That gives me the information to give you feedback and advice, and whether we're compatible. Getting the context of what's going on with you will make things easier on my part, and easier on your part."
"So you got anything special out of my spiel?"
"Quite a few things actually, but as this is a first session it can be saved for later. Whether today or at a later date. I'm still trying to figure you out and you'll have to answer a few questions. The first one is if you want therapy?"
It took me less than a minute to make a decision.
"Yes, I do want to attend therapy."
Chambers looked happy, probably thinking about how little I was fighting this. "Thank you, it's an excellent show of character that you're willing to get help and to try to move forward. Not a lot of people manage even that."
I rolled my neck, then nodded as I stopped to think about that statement. "Yeah well I can be painfully self aware when I feel like it." I laughed nervously.
"Besides what you've mentioned already is there anywhere else you'd like to start? We've touched upon your homesickness and your fear of this world's evils. You did seem quite taken with putting maximum effort into helping those close to you."
I paused, thinking and then clarifying my thoughts.
"Responsibility. I've been feeling…overwhelmed by how much responsibility I've put on my shoulders. It's made me feel anxious and outright…paranoid." I frowned.
"And you haven't tried to delegate some of your responsibilities, tried to look at it from another angle?"
"I've managed to cut down on a few things here and there, set up people who do the jobs I don't have time for…and my friends help me with my inexperience in quite literally everything. But I can't hoist off my responsibility, it has to be me." I tried to comprehend why that was. Why was it my responsibility to fix a world that wasn't mine? Why was I doing what I had done and why didn't I stop doing what I was doing?
"Why does it have to be you?" I looked her in the eye, trying to answer.
"Because there's things I know are coming, or can guess are coming…that the game has changed." I interlaced my fingers, twiddling my thumbs. "You know about the agents, the passengers in a Parahumans head?" She nodded, obviously informed due to her firm. "I know a lot more than most, and I know what they're capable of…and I know what happens if I fail."
"Bad things?" She said quietly, no fear but a morbid curiosity was there.
"The end of the world, the end of everything." Her face twitched but she didn't doubt me and I could imagine why. The Endbringers unleashed could do it, a rogue shard could, Scion could. They were used to the world falling into shit and blood and ruin. I was not.
"Have you mentioned any of this to the PRT?" She asked.
"I've made some implications yes, and they know about a few things that have made them a little more urgent yet careful." Apparently they had been overhauling their organization from top to bottom, and making more effort to be less terrible at their job. "A lot of what I'm doing is preparing for that eventuality, in whatever form it ends up being." Scion wasn't the guaranteed 'final' threat anymore, not with his odd behavior. "Then there's…whatever the hell my power really is."
She leaned forward. "You're afraid, having doubts about certain things."
"I've thought a lot about my actions, about the way I've gone about things. Did I make the right choices? Did I make terrible ones, was I the right person in the right place and time or the worst person?" I clicked my tongue, chewing on my lip. "My power…is stranger than most, there's so many unanswered questions, so many secrets I haven't uncovered because I was afraid of the answer."
"And that gets to you?"
"I like to learn, I like to know things, how they work, why they worked or why or how it happened." I explained promptly, staring at her shiny new desk made out of a living plant that Amelia made. "I also like routine, and it's hard…sometimes to keep moving forward." My voice was strained, exhaustion hitting me in the moment.
"You don't feel like you're in control, you feel like you weren't given a choice or options." Chambers leaned back, her red curly hair shifting. "I have a few patients who felt like this, Parahumans never get the opportunity to choose what power they gain, and what that power does to them."
"I get…angry when I think about it…resentful." I answered quietly, shutting my eyes and thinking of calming thoughts instead of angry ones. I wasn't a patient person, in fact at times I was very short with people, unwilling to teach them if I didn't know how to word it right.
"Well…for something like this…I would probably recommend mindfulness exercises, as well as meditation, though I imagine you already do the latter." I nodded at her. "As well as finding healthy outlets and good friends to help you through this difficult time."
I blushed. "I…have a girlfriend." A dumb smile formed on my face at the thought.
"Having an anchor can be helpful, it can keep you from spiraling." She frowned. "But it can also make you vulnerable and lead to unhealthy dependency on another person."
I grimaced. "I know that, it's why I wanted a therapist. Someone who's nice and professional, someone who can help me through my problems without damaging my relationships or hurting myself." Not physically…the idea made my skin crawl, but mentally, pretending everything was okay was a good way to hurt myself.
It felt…odd to want help but I had done this song and dance before. Hopefully this helped me the same way I had been helped the first time.
Kimberly Chambers made a sound, taking more notes. "How are you feeling right now?" She glanced out at the window.
"A little uncomfortable, anxious, maybe restless? Awkward even." She rustled around in her desk and I blinked as she pulled out a Mancala board of all things.
I hadn't played that since I was a kid.
It was a little more complicated than that children's game from what felt like a lifetime ago. It was an oval board split into two hinging halves. Each half had six straight holes, and I looked curiously onwards at the game.
"You're familiar with this game?" She queried with a grin.
"Mancala? I haven't played that since I was half my current size." It was a little nostalgic.
"This is a bit more advanced, this game is called Oware. Do you want me to show you how to play?"
I nodded. "The game requires an Oware board and forty eight seeds and…"
___
July 29th, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I held my hands behind my back as I took a nice walk around, and with a wave of wind I was about to launch myself into the air until there was a motion from my right. It was a boy and girl, twin brunettes from the looks of it who had gotten away from their mother for a few seconds.
I stopped my jump, crossing my arms over my chest as the two children made it over to me, both about twelve or maybe thirteen years old. Their mother was a black woman in her early 30s and a glance took in her rather curvy form. I ignored that and kept an eye out, because I heard a few rumors about white supremacists trying to establish themselves again. Though it would be more accurate to say it was around Brockton Bay rather than within it.
"Hi?" The twins stopped in their tracks, eyes narrowed. The girl spoke up first, a fair bit bolder than her brother.
"You're the chick that dad works for right?" She said bluntly, her frizzy dark hair catching my eye. I looked at their faces, trying to remember if I knew the guy.
It took me less than five seconds to figure it out.
"John Jones?" He was one of about four dozen DWU workers I had hired for long term employment in the more menial jobs within Athena, things like security, construction work, and driving registered Tinkertech vehicles to deliver equipment and products. They also handed shipments and loading onto ships of some of my products though most of my products were rarely sent overseas.
John Jones was a big muscled guy, think Grue but add half a foot and add thirty or forty pound of brute muscle. He helped with delivering various products out to cities within a few hundred miles of the bay, mainly various medical supplies and equipment like medi-gel, handheld MRI machines, and other products approved for use in hospitals. His other shipments delivered industrial machinery, things like exoskeletons, from bare bone devices to prevent injury to augmentative suits for industrial use in factories and warehouses.
Like all of our more physical employees he was assigned a basic kinetic barrier, with an emergency omni-shield and Athena built vehicles. Half of them were consigned to assembly line duty, and some of the more experienced were training newbies since I couldn't just hire the entire DWU. They had their own contracts to worry about, so getting new blood was needed.
Plus Athena had a tuition assistance program, and quite a few of the DWU workers were willing to take up college courses on the weekend. Apparently they saw the change in the wind and wanted to change their skills before automation reamed them up the ass. Kind of sad it was partially my fault, with my attempt at a tech uplift.
The girl coughed and I responded. "Yes? Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?" The child of one of my employees looked up at me with a sharp and bright gaze, and I wondered if she would benefit from the recent increase in school budgets due to charitable donations from Athena as well as increased tax revenue in general.
'Coincidentally' a lot of new programs involved the STEM field along with a few other of my own favorite subjects. At the least more artsy subjects weren't being neglected because to be frank getting art from a robot isn't exactly special.
"You're a bender right?" I nodded waiting to see where the girl was going with this. She grinned, leaning forward and bunching her hands into fists in front of her face. "Then that means you can teach me firebending right, better than those damn government lackeys at the PRT." I twitched, unsure how to respond to what was basically a kid telling me she wanted to learn how to throw around fire like a maniac.
"Ashanti!" Her mother caught up with her children in a frightening burst of speed, far beyond what one would expect from a waitress…which isn't weird to know. I talk to her husband sometimes, it's not weird.
The mother of two stopped in her tracks, eyes peering down at her sheepish daughter. "What exactly have you been saying to her?!" Ashanti innocently whistled, not even bothering to be discreet
"Oh mostly about whether I can teach her secret firebending technique that the fuddy duddy PRT won't tell her." I made air quotes and the look of betrayal on her face was amusing. "Which is sweet and all that she would come to me for training but I don't exactly have the time. She has the passion at least, though…she might need to learn restraint so she doesn't set her bed on fire."
Ashanti gulped. "That can happen?"
"Bending is quite dangerous if you don't develop the discipline and willingness to learn and restrain yourself. Every element is capable of great harm if misused, and capable of great good if you use it wisely." I explained and she glanced down at her hands, smoke coming off of them.
I made up my mind then and there.
"I should be able to spare a minute or two…if your mother is willing to entertain this." Miss Jones glanced at me, her expression uncertain as she stared at my helmet. I didn't know what she found but it had to be persuasive with how she answered.
"It might be nice to not worry about the house burning down." Miss Jones said sardonically, lips curls into a bemused smirk.
Luckily we were close to a warehouse that had been cleared out and wouldn't be full of dangerous parts for a few days so after making sure there wasn't a threat nearby. Drones were doing their own rounds, mainly watching out for capes or gangs or muggings or robberies.
They had a lot of data now on general criminal behavior, so they wouldn't search aimlessly and at the wrong hours and locations.
"So are the both of you benders or just the one?" I asked casually, and Ashanti's twin scowled.
"Only Ashanti got to be special enough to get powers…" He looked frustrated.
"Well you can probably learn a thing or two even then." A few lingering people were crowding around a fence, and a good number of them were benders if it was guessing right. At 100% saturation around Brockton Bay that made for one hundred thousand benders and over a thousand shamans of varying strengths, skills and capabilities.
"Show me some moves! I want to throw a big old fireball!" I shook my head at the state of affairs. Ashanti was a nice girl but her attitude was too wild to firebend without hurting herself or others.
"That sounds cool and all but firebending isn't really that simple." I lowered into a stance, a greater refinement of the art of the Dancing Dragon. "Fire is of course incredibly dangerous, without learning restraint and control, your channeling of fire will be wild and uncontrollable."
"It's just fire, it's not that special." I stared at her, feeling insulted at the disrespect towards my strongest element. Her twin brother looked equally pissed off at the comment.
"Fire is more than that." I stated plainly, gesturing for her to take a dozen steps back as I demonstrated. "Fire is life and power, ignited by the passions and emotions of a living soul." I wasn't being metaphorical but they didn't need to know that. "Your inner fire is fueled by your drive, and without it your flames are weak and directionless."
"My bending is powered by…emotion? Would any emotion work?" She asked curiously as I went through the motions, the kicks and punches and defensive maneuvers of the Sun Warriors.
"It's a little more complicated than that, why do you want to learn firebending?" I asked her, tilting my head.
She looked evasive. "Because I think it's cool?" She was lying so I was going to try to pull out the real reason.
"Really?" There was silence as I stopped the motions of my practice, and I kept up the act for more than a minute…and grinned when she caved.
…
"I…want…to protect my family." Her mother looked surprised while her twin was not. "I've got this power…so I should use it for something good."
"That's a good drive, a good start. But if you want to protect them, you need training, you need discipline to focus your power." I took up the Dancing Dragon once again but this, my fists lit with flames, orange-white-green swirls of living fire. I turned on my heels, demonstrating for a small audience the beauty and potential of firebending. "To make your power into something beautiful." I ceased, letting my flames die down with a final swelling of heat.
She stared at me with wide eyes and I coughed, feeling awkward at how I had met my passion run away from me. "At least, something like that."
"You can't teach me though can you?" She asked sadly and I nodded.
"Don't have the time, I've only taken on a few students and most of them moved on to their own thing." Amy was an amazing waterbender, and her airbending was excellent. Taylor was the same with her bending and biotics, Vicky did her stuff on her own, while Danny had been training on his own time once I became busy.
Carol went to the PRT for help instead since she was still being a bitch.
"I know a worker who has some experience with firebending." Her mother muttered, and Ashanti lit up with a smile.
…
…
They stayed for another few minutes, and I took my leave, though not before giving a few awkward autographs using a special pen I had to create a separate signature of my own. I wasn't going to take the chance of a Thinker pulling some bullshit on me.
I was going to take some time to relax.
___
July 29th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I squatted down, blinking rapidly at the impossible creature staring at me with its furry face. It was a white furred creature, with a predominantly black face, large green eyes, long ears and several black stripes.It was a Winged Lemur, and it was the cutest thing I had ever seen in my life.
I opened my arms and it…she flew into my waiting arms, and a smile rose on my face as she nuzzled my cheek. She purred slightly, chattering to what I saw was other lemurs hiding in the trees in the White Garden. I could see Greg sitting on a bunch, a few lemurs in his arms, chattering away at him.
I decided to walk over since I haven't talked with him much and I wanted to see how much he had really improved or if his power had worsened things even by accident.
He turned, blue eyes wide and his expression reminding me of a particularly stupid puppy. "Hey Erudition! Look at these lemurs!" I snorted as she shifted his arms up and down. "Panacea made a bunch of these guys based on some of the genetic sequences you were giving to her. They're pretty cute." I agreed with him perfectly, holding the soft primate close to my chest.
I sat down next to him, curious on how he was doing and what he had been doing before joining us after Leviathan.
"So…I've heard a few things about you from Taylor." He winced. "But I haven't really spent too much time talking with you, it might be a good idea." He seemed nice enough and there had been no complaints so far. But getting to know for myself was better.
"Oh…okay then!" He sounded shocked, and he smiled just a tad. "Well I'm Greg or Turnaround." He rubbed them back off his neck, leaning back as the lemurs stayed on his shoulders. "I got…my powers a few months back, a little before those monsters started showing up." So a few months of being a cape at least. "I was a pretty weak tinker at first…so I tried to do small things, after I saw how you helped people on a big scale."
"Hmm?" What did that mean?
Greg's smile was blinding. "I'm a big fan of you, you were just…cool. You had people flocking to you, you tried to be a hero, and then you went and fought Leviathan with your fists!" I leaned back and his excitement toned down, the blonde coughing. "If I was still a normal guy I'd probably ask for your autograph."
"Please don't." I pleaded and he smiled a bit, just as dumbly as before though with a hint of shame.
"Well since I thought my power was weak I decided to help with small things, like finding lost pets, stolen wallets, or stolen cars." It sounded so menial, but to be frank it was a sight better than trolling people on the internet and being a general jackass. "I ended up learning how to fight through an uncle of mine, which my dad likes because I was manning up." His almost peppy tone dropped but he continued. "Things got heavier over time though, first there was this old lady who wanted me to help her find her baby parrot…"
"A baby parrot?" I asked. He nodded, and I had a bad feeling about this.
"I managed to get paid or given stuff by people, and dumpsters were good places for materials. Plus a few dives in the Ship Graveyard." He said brightly and I didn't know what the fuck to say at that point. "So I went searching for the old lady's pet bird in some older armor, tough enough to take a pistol, and with some shock gloves." He did jazz hands. "I didn't see what the big deal was, I just checked out an in-house pet store. The guy there said he saw some guy in a van selling VHS's with the parrot. How was I supposed to know they were part of an exotic pet smuggling and drug running ring for an Endbringer cult?"
I stared, agape at the act of accidental heroism. "You fought the Fallen?" He shook his head.
"Nah. There are a few other Endbringer cults too, and this was like…two capes and a dozen not Parahumans."
"How did you survive?" If this was when he was new, he'd be totally fucked.
"Well they had this octopus…but they put his tank too close to a switch so he squirted water and cut the power. In the confusion I managed to bring them down, and got some help from a few juvenile tigers."
Don't laugh…don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh.
"I-Is that all?" He perked up and my hopes sunk.
"Nope. There was the time I searched for a lost pet beaver, and ended up blowing up some type of evil orb thing from the Mother of Miseries." There was a pressure building, but I held back for his sake. "Then when I was dumpster diving I got attacked by Mush and shocked him a lot."
I was going to die.
"Okay."
He listed off more noodle incidents. "A week before Leviathan I was looking for a girl's stuffed toy, and it turned out she was hiding a freaky snake spirit in her liver. An asian girl in a red skirt helped bring it out and we made it run away."
"Was her name Kaida?" I asked desperately, remembering who she was because she was friends with Elle and Dinah.
"How'd you know?" He said naively and I choked back a mad giggle.
"I'm good with connections." I lied but he bought it.
He lifted his finger as if remembering something. "Oh yeah, and then there was the time I brought in Rune."
What in god's name was he?
Greg didn't quit talking. "Well I was washing off some graffiti when I overheard two people arguing. Turns out it was Othala convincing Rune to attack a nice couple because one of them was a…you know one of them was black. But not as polite." I gestured for him to go on and he did. "I ended up bonking Othala in the head with a screwdriver, and then kicked Rune in the face. When she tried to chuck a dumpster at me I accidentally broke open a can of pepper spray and she inhaled a lot of it." He said all of that with a straight face. "Othala got away by diving into the bay, and I think the PRT still has Rune?"
Don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh…
"I'll be right back if that's alright with you?" He didn't have a problem with it, and I took my cute little lemur with me as I moved with purpose, trying not to visibly shake out of laughter and idiocy induced madness.
I cracked a smile, a high pitched squeal leaving me like I was a pricked balloon. The winged lemur was on my head and it was the only thing keeping me from going insane.
I received a text message and looked at my omni-tool, though I could have let the words be projected onto my eyes instead.
Dragon: I want to talk. Does Sunday sound good?
I typed back rapidly, clicking my fingers on the locked light display.
Erudition: Yes, that's not a problem.
She responded back in a tenth of a second.
Dragon: Thank you, I've been rather busy with some projects of mine.
Erudition: Ok.
I reassured her as I walked, my lemur friend wrapped around my neck like a wiggly cat. I was curious about what she wanted to talk about, perhaps something had happened or there was something else she wanted to tell me?
The White Lotus was functioning well enough, and responsibilities were being divided up so I wouldn't have to focus on eighteen capes at once. Vicky was working with integrating Sveta, and we were working on how to tell her why she was the way she was.
It…wouldn't be good, but keeping it a secret wasn't going to help her in the long run. Palanquin was its own team, and they had reasonable leeway on their own activities. Mostly they were paid an immense salary, as well as occasional bonuses for activity outside the city and power testing.
The White Lotus was effectively a different organization from Athena, a sponsored team that could be spun off in the scenario of Athena being broken somehow. They were paid well, given resources and equipment, and were being careful. It was lucky that the damage to the Orchard base was already written off beforehand.
Though that was completely out of our control…since a rogue shard isn't exactly an expected issue. Eighteen capes was a fair number and it was likely we were going to absorb New Wave in its entirety with the possible exception of Brandish. Though at least she didn't seem to dislike our mission statements.
Getting everything with Athena and White Lotus squared away legally was hard, and one of those legal things was starting up Athena as a benefit corporation to keep the mission from being poisoned by future shareholders. Athena was already worth billions, though expenses were increasing as we hired more people and bought more property both in and out of the city. Mainly for upping production of industrial exoskeletons, and the future construction of cheap, safe and easy to interface prosthetics in the Healthcare branch of the company.
The basic exoskeleton was weak, maybe good for a hundred to two hundred pounds, but had unlimited endurance and protected their users from long term damage and fatigue. There were over eight hundred thousand warehouse workers, six million construction workers, nearly three million nurses, millions upon millions of people were at risk.
I think with a few more assembly lines I could get the costs down to just below a thousand for the cheapest basic suits and a few thousand for the bulkier models like the Warden. We were imagining over a hundred thousand would be sold by the end of this year, and then double that over next year. By then we should have three to six times our current number of employees if not higher.
The Warden should stay steady at twenty thousand units, and we had a few competitors in the market. Hardware was about even but our software was a decade ahead of anyone else.
Mainly because anything more advanced wouldn't fit due to the amount of storage required. A lot of AI algorithms simply weren't used before because they were too inefficient back then to be possible.
Also to keep it within the understanding of my engineers.
I was booped on the nose by the winged lemur and I swore that I would upgrade Amelia's truck into something awesome. Because winged lemurs are sweet little babies and I love them.
…
Still going to be agonizing on what Dragon wants later today though.
___
AN: Figuring out how to write this took a while to formulate in my head before getting it down on paper. I have experience with therapy but I'm quite sure how different it would be for the differing problems between myself and Basilia. I'm not sure if I've fully laid out some of her big issues but I tried and can make some changes if I have to.
Though in some ways they're effectively my own problems magnified by the scope of what Basilia is dealing with. I'm not the bravest of people, not a fearless paragon of justice. But I'd probably fake it until I make it under the circumstances. And like most people I don't enjoy the idea of dying, much less dying painfully or suffering a fate worse than death. And while I'm bad at showing it I have empathy for others.
It's a rather strong sense of existential terror lingering constantly at the back of Basilia's mind. She is internalizing a lot of her issues, not truly dealing with any of them because there wasn't any time to consider for little things like mental health.
So there's that mental mess screwing badly with her. Not much to say other than trying to get Greg Veder's personality isn't…easy. Though Wildbow's description as an overexcited puppy made sense to me.
So enjoy.
- Location
- EU
Hey, I've been reading this story for the last three months and I wanted to leave some feedback.
This story is so weird. And not all of it is good weird. The three way crossover between Worm/ATLA/Mass Effect is weird and seems at odds with itself and kinda inappropriate. I think? The thing is, that it kinda works for this story. It's weird.
Then there's all the magic spirit stuff, with shards becoming souls and and the spirits world realms crossing over into Earth Bet - it's so weird.
Why is everyone becoming a bender and everyone and anyone is getting powers it's so weird I don't understand why things are happening.
How or why did a Rachni Queen show up for Taylor's birthday - and all I'm thinking is wait why are the Rachni here and what is AEM smoking and can I have some?
Then there's the glorious technobable - and loads of spiritbable too, now that I think about it. Some of it is jank, but every once in a while the technobable turns into a sci-fi short story of it's own. Sure. Why not.
And with the technobable comes Basilla's signature quirk of spacing out and being brought back to the real world by whoever happends to be around her. And I genuinely never tire of it, for some reason.
It's weird. This story is a gaudy sweater from Grandma/pa AEM. It's weird, slightly inappropriate and tone deaf, but there's just such a purity of earnestness here. AEM wrote this to keep me warm during the cold nights. And it's working.
This story is so weird. And not all of it is good weird. The three way crossover between Worm/ATLA/Mass Effect is weird and seems at odds with itself and kinda inappropriate. I think? The thing is, that it kinda works for this story. It's weird.
Then there's all the magic spirit stuff, with shards becoming souls and and the spirits world realms crossing over into Earth Bet - it's so weird.
Why is everyone becoming a bender and everyone and anyone is getting powers it's so weird I don't understand why things are happening.
How or why did a Rachni Queen show up for Taylor's birthday - and all I'm thinking is wait why are the Rachni here and what is AEM smoking and can I have some?
Then there's the glorious technobable - and loads of spiritbable too, now that I think about it. Some of it is jank, but every once in a while the technobable turns into a sci-fi short story of it's own. Sure. Why not.
And with the technobable comes Basilla's signature quirk of spacing out and being brought back to the real world by whoever happends to be around her. And I genuinely never tire of it, for some reason.
It's weird. This story is a gaudy sweater from Grandma/pa AEM. It's weird, slightly inappropriate and tone deaf, but there's just such a purity of earnestness here. AEM wrote this to keep me warm during the cold nights. And it's working.
- Location
- Chula Vista
That is…scarily accurate to what I think about this story when I step back and think about what I've written. It's certainly imperfect and there are spots where I feel like I've needed to make changes or edits. And I've made edits when I messed up continuity once or twice. There's certainly a lot that needs to be explained but I'm glad I've managed to keep your interest despite the quirkiness of my story.
Edit: As for Basilia? Well that's generally how I function on a day to day basis, mentally moving from topic to topic and back again and frequently repeating topics I've already gone over. So that bleeds into her point of view rather easily.
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- Location
- US
I want one so bad!
- Location
- Newcastle
As just one of your readers that isn't good enough at writing to give criticism on the story I enjoy almost everything about this story, sometimes the tangents the mc goes on are a bit long but I do the same sometimes so I won't complane about it.
Is it bad that I rwaly want to hear more Greg noodle incadents
XD
- Location
- Chula Vista
No that's fair, while I'm not going to write him as a complete idiot…he's certainly going to get into trouble every so often.