Can I get some Word Of God explanations of the Greg-ccidents? I sense the references, but have no recognition.
Victories of the Soul [Worm/Avatar/ME/Multicrossover] [SI]
- Thread starter AEM
- Start date
- Crossover Mature Sci-Fi
- Location
- Chula Vista
When I decided to add noodle incidents to Greg's history, it was less to make specific references from the incidents and more to establish him as a more competent Conrad Verner. A guy a bit out of his depth, but with enough dumb luck to get through a lot of bullshit. But…with the actual ability to know how to use weapons rather than…not.
This is crossed with Mass Effect after all.
Ah. I thought the Gregcidents were references side quests from Mass Effect or other works of fiction, to explain why Basilia found them so anomalously humorous.
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- Location
- Chula Vista
Nah, though I can see why you thought that. No the truth is that I and in turn Basilia don't have super refined senses of humor. The sheer improbability of Greg's situations is more than enough to get her laughing.
Oh really?
Than you have all the Watsonian reasoning you need to make the word "Gregccidents" canon, yes?
- Location
- Chula Vista
Hmm…basically. Though that probably won't come up since this arc is a few chapters away from ending.Oh really?
Than you have all the Watsonian reasoning you need to make the word "Gregccidents" canon, yes?
i would be cool if you just posted it somehwere under either sidestroy or informational, you dont have to add it into the chapters, you can just make a list of Gregccidents you find funny and just say their canon, no need for including them into the main story
- Location
- Chula Vista
That's not an impossibility, though I'll probably have to think about it a bit more. It would probably fit for stories I don't think fit in the main storyline.
Honestly with how much is in the world of the story you have made, there is just a whole load of potential stories that we wouldnt know by following Basillia,
also if i was more confident in my writing ability, i would write Omake which would just be a list of Gregciddents in bullet form, and in the middle of the last one there is a dash - where it will then cut to Basillia laughing at the list that either she is reading, or someone is reading to her, likeley the latter. the only thing stopping me is my own condifdence and my the fact in drawing a blank on what absurd things i should make into Gregccidents
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Discernment 10.7
- Location
- Chula Vista
AN: A bit of rude language in the second section. Though it's only like…two slurs? Still…other than that it's rather tame.
Discernment 10.7
July 31st, 2011. 10:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I tapped into the sensors built in the four bulky turreted Halcyon cannons, each gun some twenty five meters in length and making use of all the things I had learned as well as what Bakuda was capable of as an offensive tinker. Of course it wasn't quite as effective as possible due to the consideration for maintenance.
And we had one guest aboard the ship, one I was rather familiar with.
Dragon was here again but this time her suit was rather more humanoid, and if her asking for Panacea's and the Rachni's help some weeks ago was any indication I had a good idea on why that was.
"Dragon…or this time maybe I should address you as Theresa instead?" I turned around, smiling up at the artificial intelligence. She wore green scaled armor, with accents and plating in gold. The metal was a Tinkertech alloy, about one hundred and eighty times stronger than vanadium steel and about as dense as titanium. Some strange superalloy of titanium, iron, iridium with an exotic heavy metal interlaced into reinforcing carbon nanotube chains.
Working the thing required molecular cutters, industrial nano-thorns made possible by the work of Dragon, Armsmaster, and Masamune. In my case, omni-projectors and artificial biotic warp projectors could cut and shape the metal. Turning it into a slurry of omni-gel would make for an excellent feedstock for vehicle armor.
Her armored hands lifted upwards and found a latch where the helmet connected with the set of power armor. With a single swift movement she pulled off the helmet to reveal a human face. Her appearance was hard to fit into any particular classification of ethnicity, but she had dark hair and eyes glowing slightly from the obvious artificiality of them.
"It's good to see you face to face for the first time." The AI said with an honest and brilliant smile.
"I suppose Amelia assisted you with the bionetic skin, and a few other components am I right?" I asked as I made adjustments to the beam cannons, dozens of tons of guns just simple enough to be easy to maintain by myself or with my machines.
"It's a gynoid body Basilia, and is about 95% synthetic, barring the skin and a few artificially grown organs." Even the organic components had cybernetic elements, and a deep scan found it was built to emulate the human form very well.
The bones were made of titanium alloy, the muscles were myomer, and many of the organs were compartmentalized manufacturing centers. The heart pumped a slurry of fluid with matter caches for repair systems, the respiratory system was more an oxygen tank and paired with an enzyme chamber let her eat food to fuel her systems. Nanoscopic channels in her 'ears' gave her physical avatar a method of hearing, so it seems like Amelia had helped with allowing Dragon to emulate the human experience without being bound to it.
Her main power source was a solar energy induced cold fusion reactor, a deuterium loaded exotic erbium alloy.
"Well it's impressive enough, though I imagine this is just one of a hundred projects you have going on am I right?" I flashed a warm grin, as I continued to monitor the cannons. The Thanix was nearly complete, only two components missing from it. Though only one of them was going to be placed down, because of my limited knowledge.
The acceleration for the main gun was provided by a mass effect shunt, like a mini-relay, flinging a slurry of molten nickel-iron with immense force but without the barrel length needed for a normal mass accelerator. A frigate scale weapon would hit many times harder than a dreadnought…but the Thanix scaled down more than it would scale up. My version was maybe twice as powerful, and a dreadnought would be twice that firepower. The scale was on impact and the amount of molten slurry.
The Sting Projector would be ready within a few days, and I saw a path to further increasing firepower…the weapon was missing some type of focusing array, but I didn't have the knowledge to…I should get back to the real world.
It was a good thing my implants accelerated my thoughts, otherwise there would be a lot more awkward pauses than what one would find normal.
Dragon cleared the air. "I've been busy, since I've been needing to make a lot of retrofits to my computers, and taking out some smaller threats here and there." She shrugged her shoulders, her lips curling into a soft smile. "Masamune has been a real boon, and we think we can achieve mass production for Tinkertech for the PRT."
The Dragon's Teeth were likely going to come into play soon, and based on some designs she had let me look at, they made use of some of my exoskeletal work in PRT armor. Though the performance was far superior and would be fitted to their most elite. Tinkertech bullshit pretty much.
"So not too different from my own things, I have lines set up for all my equipment, and omni-forges make things a whole lot easier in the department of repair and maintenance."
"It's a wonder you haven't attempted to flood the market with some of your more advanced technologies." Dragon muttered as she sat down on a reinforced chair since her power armor made her weigh half a ton.
"One there are still rules against that, two I'm not stupid enough to collapse the entire economy and cause mass unemployment. Three my tech still needs maintenance, so if I die the supply chain will last anywhere from months to decades depending on luck." I lifted a finger for each issue with that. "Four omni-tools short circuits a lot of the problems with tinkers and materials which means crazy tinkers can build up with a lot less warning than usual."
Breaking down scrap into omni-gel was so easy it was terrifying, on my own I could probably supply an army.
"You don't want to enable the use of advanced technology as a weapon." She stated and I took a seat of my own at one of the monitors. I held my chin up with my arms, blowing a stray hair out of my face.
"The first gun I ever made hits as hard as a .50 caliber rifle, and I made a 15 kiloton heavy rail-cannon that's only four feet long." The damn Asari and their infinite Eezo let them build some heavy shit. Then again the Turians liked weapons that could generate a four hundred foot cone of plasma, radiation and particles just as much. "A few seconds of the main gun on this…yet-to-be-named cruiser firing would erase all of Tokyo from existence and once it's done tear through Endbringers like a hot knife through butter."
"Eezo can't be put back into the box Basilia, you've shown what's possible with it, and it's an easy enough substance to find and concentrate." Theresa said with a sad look, lips turned down.
"I know that, but the more advanced applications of Eezo are incredibly dangerous. I'll pave the way, simplify the path so they don't make stupid mistakes that get themselves or other people killed." I had already written up a basic treatise on Eezo for that eventuality. "Most of Athena's time is spent on leveling the disparity due to Tinkertech interference. Advancing medical technology, providing the bedrock for studying, perceiving and interfacing with dimensions." I waved my hand, gesturing to skim through the diagnostics of the weapon.
"I can tell…you've bought out some sold off properties and equipment from Medhall, as well as taken some of their researchers." I bobbed my head as I mentally tapped on the screen projected onto my eyeballs.
"Most people don't realize it yet but medi-gel is a synthetic cellular organism. One just barely within the grasp of normal people." I couldn't help the smirk as Theresa understood the implications. "A minor tweak of its genome can turn it into a specialized artificial cell for treating cancer. Panacea has looked at enough patients to figure out the best means to fight cancer, and I've just finished the plans for our medical microbots, self maintaining motile machines capable of medical diagnosis, telemetry, and medical repair."
"That would revolutionize the medical industry." She said in surprise. "I'm not sure corporations will allow such a thing to pass." My face hurt at how much I was smiling. Poor Dragon looked so unnerved.
"They're in on it of course, while Athena owns the parents, they're going to want a share of the pie. We aren't talking Tinkertech nanites, they have to follow physics." So grey goo wasn't a thing, and I already had manuals on what could go wrong ready. "They'll be paired with surgical robots so Doctors can perform surgeries more precisely, and I've got more effective treatments in the wings. Quite a few are prepping by gathering the talent to set up their own lines. You're on that list of course, and in turn so is the PRT."
"So you're moving on to curing cancer, I imagine the profit is a good bonus too." She said with a dry tone, and I rolled my eyes.
"More money means more means to create beneficial tech, and then even more money in a nice loop. Up to a point anyway…" I rolled my shoulders, and cracked my neck. "Athena Healthcare will probably employ a few hundred people within a few months, and Athena Paraphysics figured out dimensional scanners."
"Come again?" Theresa looked a little surprised and I was starting to wonder if our cybersecurity was that good or if she was that busy. Her expression shifted and clarity came to her. "Oh…one of your scientists wrote a paper on that, a means of sending pulses folded up into higher physical dimensions to view perturbations in the local vacuum state."
"I was as shocked as you were, most of our initial sensors involved sensing particles disappearing into other realities, like gravitons or dark sector particles." It took precise technology to focus and fold electromagnetic fields and particle beams into higher dimensions. The machine was two hundred times as big as anything that I could make but it was usable by mundane people. This was without Eezo by the way, with it the machine could reduce its size by 400% with current levels of understanding of the substance.
"Dimensional tech has always been highly restricted." She gently pointed it out and I couldn't help but feel overwhelmed again.
"I know, but like you've said it can't be put back into the box anymore. All the research was pointing in that direction for years, and dimensional viewing was not that far away anymore." I had seen a few Earths on my side of reality that were working towards similar conclusions, Earth Losev was doing something but I hadn't tried slicing too deeply into their internet yet. They were at least forty years ahead of my world, based on a few stray broadcasts.
"Maybe it's time to get to the point then…why are you doing this? Trying to uplift humanity, trying to get us to figure out powers, giving us the tools to work with bending and Eezo and spirits?" Theresa asked and I obliged.
"I'm sure you've seen my history haven't you? I doubt you haven't seen that it's not entirely…true am I right?" I took off, and she followed to the room I was leading her towards.
It took a few minutes, and we stepped into a bay for a few vehicles and Theresa slowed to a drop when she saw how I had the corpse of Leviathan draped over a giant workbench. Most of his mass had been obliterated by Sting, disconnected and scattered across hundreds of universes. So while his corpse still had quite a bit of mass, it was far less without a central core of portals.
What was left had been desecrated rather purposely and there was a flash of emotion on Dragon's new face. Well…I suppose gift wrapping the monster that killed your creator might put someone in a good mood.
"Yes I did see that, so I helped make some further adjustments to your records, we don't need problems cropping up for you." I smiled at the kindness though it was a little worrying. "But where are you going with this?"
"Have you ever thought about other Earths before? About what they're like, about the kind of people that live on them?" Out of millions of realities I had passed over, most weren't the kind of worlds I was looking for. Too alien, diverging hundreds of thousands to billions of years ago. Or they were empty and dead worlds, whether by natural or unnatural disaster.
"Not often." She replied with no change in inflection, and I felt terribly terribly bitter, fury coursing through my veins. A quick breathing exercise dulled my hot resentment
"I didn't either, because I didn't think it was possible to travel to other alternate realities. I didn't even think they existed." She went still, and I waited for her to make her response. I had already checked with Dinah and made a judgement call.
"You're not from Earth Bet…are you from Aleph?" I snorted at the idea.
"I'm not from any universe in the domain of powers actually, though my world would be most similar to Earth Aleph minus Brockton Bay and Parahumans. From what I've pieced together, my universe seems to be part of a different but similar multiversal cluster that…collided with your reality cluster causing a massive shift in the laws of physics."
"How would you know that?" Dragon questioned me and I gestured for her to sit down near the corpse of the Leviathan.
"It's not as difficult as you would believe to talk to shards, at least not for someone like me." I peered over to a Kodiak shuttle, blinking rapidly. "The worlds I've found are slightly off center, corresponding to the structure of my multiverse. A slightly different frequency the shards can detect, but have a hard time peering into without a rupture to project their senses." The barrier between the two clusters was thinning or even broken in parts, but it was enough to disrupt powers not given the data to transition. "Either way my Earth never had anything like powers or alterations of the laws of physics." We didn't even have proof other dimensions existed in both the sense of extra spatial dimensions like in M-theory, and other alternate worlds like Brane Cosmology.
"I believe you, multiple multiverses isn't a very big deal on Earth Bet." Dragon pointed it out, and I understood that too. "But why are you telling me this?"
"I'm telling you this because you're one of the most powerful capes on Earth and can do your own thing, open channels that I can't." I spoke honestly, genuinely. "I've got a ton of resources, and what I did with Leviathan has probably gotten a lot of goodwill…but to be frank I know jackshit on how to exploit that, or on how to navigate the political landscape of Earth Bet." I kneaded the back of my neck with a strained smirk. "And because I need other people with a lot of power that I can trust…trust with dangerous secrets."
"And what are these secrets?" Dragon asked, a hint of nervousness in her voice.
"I've mentioned the shards haven't I? The multidimensional crystalline life forms gifting us powers." She nodded and with a wide gesture I projected a screen on a wall, hard light providing a flat surface. "Shards are colony organisms, countless fractal fragments working together to form a greater cohesive whole. So why did they come here?"
"It wasn't to help us…it couldn't be with how they manifest." She had the right idea from the start.
"The shards are the cells of a greater Entity, multidimensional life with the ability to warp reality and process information and compute at scales beyond anything on Earth. The smallest of the shards would crush city blocks, while the greatest could outmass planets." The screen showed the Fragile One, showed Greg's own shard, showed High Theurgist covering several Earths as well as QA doing the same. "They are able to traverse the void between galactic clusters in search of other worlds in their Imago stage, trillions of shards in unison insinuating themselves at vast speed."
"So they grant powers?"
I grimaced. "It's a part of their cycle of reproduction and data gathering." I elucidated, waving my hands. "They seek an ever better understanding of reality, acting as parasites, absorbing and taking the knowledge and ways of thought of their victims. They sow conflict by manipulating their hosts, creating new data through that conflict between their chosen species. They cordon off worlds for their vast bodies, and collapse near-identical realities to reduce needless redundancy of data. For hundreds of years they spread through all the alternates of their species, wrecking alien civilizations under Host assault, and once the world is saturated…" The screen shifted to millions of alternates exploding, sending off thousands if not millions of offspring into space.
"That…that would be the extinction of the human race." She said with a note of horror.
I shook my head. "They've done it at least three thousand times before this, but that's not a problem…because the cycle is broken. The subspecies of Void Wyrm that came here evolved and requires a pair, a Thinker and Warrior if you would. To keep the cycle on track, both pairs would generate a single avatar to protect their main mass from destruction. The Warrior would protect them from external or internal threats while the Thinker would plan the cycle and alter it on the fly as needed."
Scion was put on the screen. "You're saying Scion is this…Warrior?" She was gripping tightly onto her seat, the metal creaking under her strength.
"Only a tiny fragment of the full scale entity, less than one millionth the size and with only a handful of shard clusters. Even that small handful makes him the most powerful being on Earth. The most powerful Precog in the world, the ability to peer and step between dimensions, the unrestricted version of Hero's wavelength tinkering, and an untold number of perception abilities. When I came to this place, I knew he was the one that was going to destroy the world."
"Him?" She said in reasonable disbelief.
"The Warrior is a broken being Theresa, his partner was killed due to a mistake while simulating their cycle, and killed by a human who took a third entity's path to victory and lobotomized her. Without her the cycle is dead, and due to his human simulacrum he's taken a gigantic whammy of depression. But eventually he's going to get tired of moping around…and he'll start experimenting with violence. And when you can flick your finger and destroy hundreds of British isles at once?"
"He's going to destroy humanity…how do you know all of this, and what else do you know?" I raised an eyebrow and she elaborated. "There's a pattern of behavior here, you know things you shouldn't, know the nature of the Endbringers and shards…how?"
"The simple version is that my world for lack of better words…has certain myths and prophecies about a world like this one, about the calamities that would befall this world." My world was eventually going to gain a connection to this one, and that was going to open Pandora's box.
Honestly I was seriously contemplating making a security detail for Wildbow so he couldn't get murdered by his own stories. God that's existentially terrifying isn't it?
Writing your fiction, and then getting ganked because you know details about the lives of very dangerous real people, or your hand being directly responsible for the death of billions of people. Though the third option was horror that the multiverse existed and had room for the all consuming nature of the cosmic horrors he had created.
"So you know the future?" I almost burst at the question, at this point I didn't know anything.
"I knew a future, one that has been derailed so much so that anything I know is either suspect or only semi useful."
"The Siberian…you said you suspected she was some type of area of altered space, and there were signs of it being similar to Fantasm creations. That was giving us a head's up on her being a projection wasn't it? How specific were these myths?"
"Very specific in some ways and very vague in others, and the information at times was either not useful, inapplicable or they wouldn't help. I had raw information, not the ability to apply it or the resources to make use of it immediately. It does not help that like any normal human being I didn't expect miscellaneous myths to be useful in saving the world." I showed teeth, bitterness seeping through.
"How much of what you've been doing is cleaning up future threats?" She asked slowly.
"Not as much as you would think, I'm a fucking mess Theresa…I've fucked up at least a few times and what I know is less than perfect. The Mother of Miseries was a surprise, the spirits being this fully formed was another, Lung's kid was another, everything with what went down with Leviathan was a shock barring his possible arrival in the city."
"You knew…?" I sighed, feeling a shudder run up and down my body, and my lip trembled.
"There were a few possible Endbringer attacks…but it wasn't anything I could influence. Not with the Simurgh in play with her Precognition, and any future attack has to be predicted with Dinah instead of me. I built space warping weapons and got Bakuda building Halcyon cannons so you could copy off the same principles, and that was all dumb luck too. Bakuda was a monster in the myths, a mad bomber." Dragon probably bought it and I knew that my friends didn't buy it completely, but respected that it was probably weird and uncomfortable.
"Could Eidolon have learned to control them if you had told him?"
"Absolutely not, his power was broken, not insane. Killing him wouldn't have worked either, all it would have done was set them free." I shivered at the idea of what the Simurgh has been planning. "Which is much, much worse than the prospects right now. At this point I've shattered the original path and we're in a new world of possibilities."
"Then how do we know Scion is going to snap in the first place?"
"We don't…but that says very little about the world spiraling down the drain. Or about other apocalyptic threats showing up from out of nowhere. But admittedly I checked with Dinah." I lifted my shoulders up and down, bringing up the numbers. "I asked her about the chances of an end-of-the-world event occurring two years from now. It was at about eighty four point six percent." I wasn't smiling.
"The PRT has to know! Keeping this a secret is…" I stared at her, and she paused.
"And that is why you're here, I'm not sure what this end of the world scenario is, only that it's coming. It might be Scion or it might be something new and equally threatening, which is why I asked what the odds of humanity going extinct was. About forty eight point six four percent chance humanity goes extinct, which of course still means billions upon billions of deaths."
"And you want my help because of my abilities as both an AI and a tinker." I gave her a thumbs up.
"Whatever we're looking at is at least two years from now, but there's projections out to about eight. It's fuzzy and that's rather worrying." Precognition like Dinah's was incredibly powerful, and she had several hundred exatons of mass to process information and see the future. "It's why I've gathered as many capes as I could, and why I've set up safe bases on other worlds. There will be a tomorrow if I have anything to say about it."
"There's more you aren't telling me." She stated and I didn't deny it.
"Some of them are things I don't know about while others I want to set up for later, we've talked a fair bit already." The conversation was tiring and I wanted some alone time to finish up here.
"Fair enough…but I did have one other reason to talk with you…the new cape I brought with me the other day…Skimmer, there's a reason I brought her with me."
"Did she do or try to do something incredibly stupid?" Her silence was an answer in and of itself.
"She tried to investigate the Mathers branch of the Fallen." I choked at the sheer outright madness of what she just said.
"That's never going to work, not with…" I snapped my mouth shut and Dragon glared.
"You also know about their anti-Thinker asset?"
"I'm immune to that because of the deep connection between myself and my shard, but I have no way to convey that information without screwing you or other people over. Plus…I didn't know until I managed to jog my memory with my DNI. I had an awful memory before coming here." Plus I wasn't even sure my own equipment was immune, and didn't like the idea of turning my infrastructure into a memetic hazard. Spirit cybersecurity might be able to block the transmissions or they might not be able to.
Mama Mathers was something I would have to search for manually, and without her power she was a simple human woman. The Fallen as an organization had to be ripped to pieces, anyone who could be saved would be saved and then it would burn.
I would tear apart every truly evil Parahuman organization that I could, and try and hope that by the time I returned home that it would be safe…that the sins of this world wouldn't follow me across dimensions.
Dragon let out an unneeded breath. "I managed to dissuade her from looking too deeply, and thankfully it doesn't seem like she managed to trigger their asset though she did discover a few Fallen locations for the PRT and Protectorate to raid. My main trouble is that she isn't willing to join the Wards, doesn't fit with the teams I'm sponsoring, and is unlikely to go independent." I had a feeling I knew where this was going.
"You want me to take her under my wing?" I questioned, wondering where I had become the dumping ground for capes. That made nineteen. "I suppose that's alright but what kind of cape do we have here?" I didn't find anything on Skimmer, but that could have because she was new rather than anything else.
"She's a Tinker, I managed to detect her programs crawling through the Internet for information on the Fallen."
"When do you want me to talk to her?"
"A few days, Lady Photon will likely want to speak with you on integrating New Wave into the White Lotus."
…
Ignoring Carol that makes twenty four.
Because of course it does.
July 31st, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
A spear slammed into the wall behind me, and I didn't even blink as I stepped into a portal to dodge when it attempted to cut through brick to cut off my neck. Even if it had hit, the attack would have failed when it slammed into an omni-shield.
"Hmm…seems like the drones didn't see you, some type of Stranger power?" I called out while stepping between worlds, and the cape trying to murder me growled.
It was a woman wearing leather armor of vaguely Nordic style, body hugging and tight. Smoke hung around her and my nose picked up the stench of Shadow, Denial, and Strength. It was some type of subtle Breaker state, a sort of shadowy mass that made her body much stronger at some unknown price. Some powers could hide more easily from sensors, and this woman was one of them.
She looked a lot like an emulation of a Valkyrie, though not a very good one. She accelerated like a bullet, and a biotic charge let me dodge the subsonic charge of the cape. I spun on my heels and hopped sixty feet in the air on a blast of wind and called for assistance. My thoughts accelerated.
Shadow Breaker state, provides durability and speed. Some drone sensors wash off of her state, but it would be ineffective against…I saw a few flecks of metal and I realized it wasn't as bad as I thought. Some sensors failed but cameras did not and they shot at her before she had launched the spear infused with her power.
She shot off again, her weapon spinning as she launched it like she had a cannon for an arm. Always a straight line attack…
"Why exactly are you doing this? You know this isn't going to end well for you."
"The Empire 88 is dead! Without them, there's nothing keeping those damn chinks down, nothing to keep in check the filth stealing the riches of their betters! If my power can take one of the Leviathan-Killers down…we can work on putting down those spics and ni—" I launched a biotic kick, a wave of biotic force slamming her into a building.
I felt dirty hearing those words, and I had never in my life been called an ethnic slur before. Even if she only did it indirectly.
She coughed, and I finally identified her as Gungnir, a white supremacist cape from northern New Hampshire and a murderer. She had personally speared half a dozen Mexicans and three African Americans, and lynched one of them the old fashioned way.
So if she was here…that means so was he…
I raised a biotic barrier with a wave of my hand, and the resounding boom of an anti-material rifle round exploding with the force of a bomb echoed. I stepped again until I was a good twenty feet in the air, and generated a wall of air to block a second round when it blew up.
A tall man in a one piece black-white jumpsuit was on the roof of a warehouse, with ceramic armor on top of the reinforced polymer suit. He was thin and lanky, and wore a crow-like mask, black as death and with red eyes.
Crow Salvo was her main partner in crime, a cape who could imbue kinetic and explosive force to any metallic projectile shot at a speed above ten meters a second. His kill count was twice as high, and at one point he had blown away a mayor with his power. The only reason he hadn't gotten heavy resistance was because of the third…
Someone tried to touch me and a flick of my wrist launched a Throw at their chest. There was a laugh from the wound be attacker and I used a feed from a drone for this.
A waifish redhead woman wearing a frilly black Victorian dress, a domino mask and holding a spiked metal bat. Banshee was a teleporter with a Blaster power, focusing her power into her hands to form concussive blasts. I took some deeper scans as she shot out a blast, turning on my heels to dodge the attack. Channeling her power from her hands into her weapons provided a stronger and more efficient focus for the Blaster power.
"Hmm…some limited application of teleportation, causing explosions by disrupting air molecules." I spoke to myself as I stepped back, a hand shifting down to my Glaive weapon. It would…
Gungnir flung herself forward, spear in hand and in a flicker of emerald I was no longer alone. Laserdream emerged from the portal and generated red beams from her hands, Gungnir was knocked off course, spinning like a top from the force. The blonde cape created a shield, narrowly deflecting a bullet from Crow Salvo.
"So…is this a team up or has your mom made it official?" A bullet slammed into a barrier, and the compressive blast was blocked easily by Crystal's new shield generator. She lifted an arm, and I grinned at the newly assigned omni-tool on her wrist.
"Everyone except aunt Carol is joining up, and that makes what…twenty three capes?" I didn't bother correcting her and I stepped and brought us onto the roof of a nearby warehouse.
"You aren't going to leave this place without a fight." Crow Salvo lazily let his rifle wander, sights aimed on people scattering from the fight. My hands tightened into fists.
I commanded numerous Cercopes units and stealth Trapeza units to tail civilians, guiding them and protecting them from the white supremacist capes. Their shields would block bullets and they had enough strength to hold off Gungnir. Once the fight was done or they were out of range they would leave.
I stepped forward, and with a jab a blast of fire slammed into him. He rolled out of the blaze that remained, and in less than ten seconds reloaded and fired off another exploding bullet. I placed down a barrier and it took the impact, holding solidly. I smiled when someone else popped into view, and their sole getaway dropped instantly when Newter placed his hand on her neck.
Banshee was down for the count, and Gungnir had shifted into her Breaker state before Newter could have knocked her out. It didn't matter though, because I was starting to get the pattern.
Straight-line acceleration, only able to make small turns when moving, and switching between her normal state and her Shadow state to make straight turns. She had massive acceleration, but little maneuverability but every hit was like a train crash.
I nodded to myself in that moment as Crow fired again "Buy me me about three seconds." The two launched themselves, one flying into the air while the other bounded forward. The Breaker took the beam from Crystal while Crow moved quickly and easily, clearly experienced in the art of not getting his legs snapped like twigs.
I focused my breath, and Demanded that Crow's gun turn against his master. The gun turned to shrapnel, and the cape had a long orange tail knock him off his feet. There was a cut along his pants and Newter flicked a few drops and that was that.
I followed with a biotic pull and ripped Gungnir's spear from her hands. It was made out of metal, so I warped it into scrap with my modest metalbending. She charged, and I blinked out of the way, and when she snapped out of the Shadow cut through her costume with a carefully aimed shard of glass with a slight biotic pull.
Newter was there and even getting close was enough exposure and in an instant she was down for the count. A few drones hung around, effectors and limbs generating non-metallic restraints and I could hear the PRT on the way.
I called my partner. "Taylor, was this a distraction?" I asked and Crystal seemed to nod.
"They had a cape trying to rally up new members for a gang, Terra and Manpower broke them up and caught a fourth cape. Someone from the Herren clan…the question would be who brought them here or if this is on their own?"
"Well there's a lot of suspects there, the Elite might be trying to soften us up, Accord could be probing us, or some of the other Neo-Nazi groups might be trying to fill the vacuum left by the E88. Or some other fourth or fifth thing might be gunning after us." We were a big target now, and that meant capes and it meant cape organizations.
Cauldron certainly wasn't going to do their part because they were certainly busy patching up since all their plans were getting cosmically screwed in the ass. I had a total of twelve vials I frankly didn't know what to do with other than study and mad science and…
"Keep me in the loop for anything weird, getting caught flat footed is a good way to get shanked." I liked living and I liked the idea of people I cared about living too.
Which reminds me that I need to check up on the Voyagers, see what they're up to. I don't want the surprise of Blasto…sorry Rhizome trying to clone Endbringers behind his teammate's back.
So that should be done soon.
July 31st, 2011. 6:00PM
Basilia Rubio
Asami was an odd member of the Voyagers, which made sense since she used to be the Yangban cape known as Thirty-Two. Her power was the use of Nullification waves, a power similar to Stilling though perhaps not quite as powerful, not quite as broad in potential.
She was happily chatting with the young boy known as Pax to the rest of the world, a shy kid who wouldn't look out of place in the Wards. I was busy inspecting Rhizome's tanks and found his equipment interesting. It was advanced and very clean, clearly not his work.
"A few people owed Noelle a favor and she managed to con them out of everything in this place." The biotinker replied to my unspoken question within missing a beat. A few of his Homunculi were roaming and performing various duties for him, ape-like creatures with dexterous hands and heavy frames.
"Any updates on Earth Aleph?" I had given the Voyagers limited access to the portal network, so they could transport themselves to anywhere on Earth Aleph within a couple of seconds. There had been few improvements since Leviathan besides energy efficiency and increased redundancy.
"Noelle set up a base on some small island right off the east coast, she managed to drag a forest over the island and covered everything up." I nodded, telling nature spirits to create forests where there was none previously was difficult but not impossible.
Especially with a soul as wild as Noelle's.
"Have they talked to their families at all? I imagine quite a few of them aren't going to be in the best shape." It was hard not to empathize with them though it didn't quite a few of them were jackasses.
"Most of them have, but they've kept a lot of things quiet, and didn't want the attention that going public would get." I nodded, carefully analyzing the machines he used to build his artificial life forms.
So far everything was in order, and I had a good idea that while Rhizome wasn't really a good person he wasn't going to return to his old life of crime out of either self preservation or pragmatism. If not both.
"Well everything seems to pretty much be quite safe, so if you wouldn't mind. I'm going to check up on a particle accelerator." He waved me off with a quiet grunt, and I stepped backwards through a portal and onto the physics laboratory right outside city boundaries and heavily guarded by both machine and man. A few former military gents were given armor, barriers and less-lethal weaponry but were allowed lethal weaponry in a worse case scenario.
Against Brutes mostly or to break through shielding. The guns were modified normal weaponry, hybrid chemical/mass accelerators simple enough to be fixed up by them in a pinch.
The Transdimensional Physics Interaction Accelerator hummed before a muted thud followed. There was a sensation of cold, as WIMPs were accelerated, and the detector array did its job for the test. The basic scientific virtual intelligence did its job of compiling data for others to analyze and process and understand.
"Johanna." The young black woman who had taken charge of the project through sheer force of will jumped when I ambushed her, and she smiled lightly.
"Erudition, I see you've graced us with your presence." Hee team gave her worrying looks and I snorted.
"Anything new on your experiments?" I asked and she nodded as her team scrambled to her ready for the influx of data, it would take hours to analyze what they needed, and the data would be passed on to the Eezonics team to better improve their rudimentary comprehension of element zero.
"We're going to need a lot more scientists on board for this thing. We've got well over a 100 TeV of collision energy with some of our experiments, and the high luminosity of the TPIA makes it a lot easier to get good data…but we need more people." I sighed, agreeing with the woman.
"You're right, TPIA is taking up a lot of our resources though thankfully quite a few of it's discoveries have practical applications." Plus most of the technology that made it possible were being licensed out, and a room temperature superconductor was going to be considered normal soon.
"Is that why you're trying to get research grants?" I tilted my head at Johanna, smiling slightly.
"Of course, it might be money with strings but it's money that can be put to good use on research and development."
She smirked. "Then maybe you'll be interested in the next experiment, and I think the PRT will have the same interest." I leaned forward, crossing my arms over my stomach.
"You're finally going to do more than probing other dimensions?" She nodded.
"Well…we've taken every safety precaution, and proven that the experiment will be easy to perform. Our sensors are primed for the data influx, and with more grunts it'll be easier to manage."
"Hmm…perhaps I should offer a few tips then? I'll tell you a few basic things about other dimensions, it should be enlightening…"
I spent the following hours talking shop, and taking the data from today's experiment home and comparing it to my own work.
Today was a good day.
AN: I feel a bit like the pace of things has slowed down a bit post-Leviathan, which is intentional but I don't want to go the opposite and have things slow to a crawl either. Things are starting to move though, it just took some time for decisions to be made due to the ripple effect from one third of the Endbringers being dead while the others are currently dormant.
I've got the general events for future Arcs down at least, so I'll keep writing chapters as needed. Enjoy.
___
Discernment 10.7
July 31st, 2011. 10:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I tapped into the sensors built in the four bulky turreted Halcyon cannons, each gun some twenty five meters in length and making use of all the things I had learned as well as what Bakuda was capable of as an offensive tinker. Of course it wasn't quite as effective as possible due to the consideration for maintenance.
And we had one guest aboard the ship, one I was rather familiar with.
Dragon was here again but this time her suit was rather more humanoid, and if her asking for Panacea's and the Rachni's help some weeks ago was any indication I had a good idea on why that was.
"Dragon…or this time maybe I should address you as Theresa instead?" I turned around, smiling up at the artificial intelligence. She wore green scaled armor, with accents and plating in gold. The metal was a Tinkertech alloy, about one hundred and eighty times stronger than vanadium steel and about as dense as titanium. Some strange superalloy of titanium, iron, iridium with an exotic heavy metal interlaced into reinforcing carbon nanotube chains.
Working the thing required molecular cutters, industrial nano-thorns made possible by the work of Dragon, Armsmaster, and Masamune. In my case, omni-projectors and artificial biotic warp projectors could cut and shape the metal. Turning it into a slurry of omni-gel would make for an excellent feedstock for vehicle armor.
Her armored hands lifted upwards and found a latch where the helmet connected with the set of power armor. With a single swift movement she pulled off the helmet to reveal a human face. Her appearance was hard to fit into any particular classification of ethnicity, but she had dark hair and eyes glowing slightly from the obvious artificiality of them.
"It's good to see you face to face for the first time." The AI said with an honest and brilliant smile.
"I suppose Amelia assisted you with the bionetic skin, and a few other components am I right?" I asked as I made adjustments to the beam cannons, dozens of tons of guns just simple enough to be easy to maintain by myself or with my machines.
"It's a gynoid body Basilia, and is about 95% synthetic, barring the skin and a few artificially grown organs." Even the organic components had cybernetic elements, and a deep scan found it was built to emulate the human form very well.
The bones were made of titanium alloy, the muscles were myomer, and many of the organs were compartmentalized manufacturing centers. The heart pumped a slurry of fluid with matter caches for repair systems, the respiratory system was more an oxygen tank and paired with an enzyme chamber let her eat food to fuel her systems. Nanoscopic channels in her 'ears' gave her physical avatar a method of hearing, so it seems like Amelia had helped with allowing Dragon to emulate the human experience without being bound to it.
Her main power source was a solar energy induced cold fusion reactor, a deuterium loaded exotic erbium alloy.
"Well it's impressive enough, though I imagine this is just one of a hundred projects you have going on am I right?" I flashed a warm grin, as I continued to monitor the cannons. The Thanix was nearly complete, only two components missing from it. Though only one of them was going to be placed down, because of my limited knowledge.
The acceleration for the main gun was provided by a mass effect shunt, like a mini-relay, flinging a slurry of molten nickel-iron with immense force but without the barrel length needed for a normal mass accelerator. A frigate scale weapon would hit many times harder than a dreadnought…but the Thanix scaled down more than it would scale up. My version was maybe twice as powerful, and a dreadnought would be twice that firepower. The scale was on impact and the amount of molten slurry.
The Sting Projector would be ready within a few days, and I saw a path to further increasing firepower…the weapon was missing some type of focusing array, but I didn't have the knowledge to…I should get back to the real world.
It was a good thing my implants accelerated my thoughts, otherwise there would be a lot more awkward pauses than what one would find normal.
Dragon cleared the air. "I've been busy, since I've been needing to make a lot of retrofits to my computers, and taking out some smaller threats here and there." She shrugged her shoulders, her lips curling into a soft smile. "Masamune has been a real boon, and we think we can achieve mass production for Tinkertech for the PRT."
The Dragon's Teeth were likely going to come into play soon, and based on some designs she had let me look at, they made use of some of my exoskeletal work in PRT armor. Though the performance was far superior and would be fitted to their most elite. Tinkertech bullshit pretty much.
"So not too different from my own things, I have lines set up for all my equipment, and omni-forges make things a whole lot easier in the department of repair and maintenance."
"It's a wonder you haven't attempted to flood the market with some of your more advanced technologies." Dragon muttered as she sat down on a reinforced chair since her power armor made her weigh half a ton.
"One there are still rules against that, two I'm not stupid enough to collapse the entire economy and cause mass unemployment. Three my tech still needs maintenance, so if I die the supply chain will last anywhere from months to decades depending on luck." I lifted a finger for each issue with that. "Four omni-tools short circuits a lot of the problems with tinkers and materials which means crazy tinkers can build up with a lot less warning than usual."
Breaking down scrap into omni-gel was so easy it was terrifying, on my own I could probably supply an army.
"You don't want to enable the use of advanced technology as a weapon." She stated and I took a seat of my own at one of the monitors. I held my chin up with my arms, blowing a stray hair out of my face.
"The first gun I ever made hits as hard as a .50 caliber rifle, and I made a 15 kiloton heavy rail-cannon that's only four feet long." The damn Asari and their infinite Eezo let them build some heavy shit. Then again the Turians liked weapons that could generate a four hundred foot cone of plasma, radiation and particles just as much. "A few seconds of the main gun on this…yet-to-be-named cruiser firing would erase all of Tokyo from existence and once it's done tear through Endbringers like a hot knife through butter."
"Eezo can't be put back into the box Basilia, you've shown what's possible with it, and it's an easy enough substance to find and concentrate." Theresa said with a sad look, lips turned down.
"I know that, but the more advanced applications of Eezo are incredibly dangerous. I'll pave the way, simplify the path so they don't make stupid mistakes that get themselves or other people killed." I had already written up a basic treatise on Eezo for that eventuality. "Most of Athena's time is spent on leveling the disparity due to Tinkertech interference. Advancing medical technology, providing the bedrock for studying, perceiving and interfacing with dimensions." I waved my hand, gesturing to skim through the diagnostics of the weapon.
"I can tell…you've bought out some sold off properties and equipment from Medhall, as well as taken some of their researchers." I bobbed my head as I mentally tapped on the screen projected onto my eyeballs.
"Most people don't realize it yet but medi-gel is a synthetic cellular organism. One just barely within the grasp of normal people." I couldn't help the smirk as Theresa understood the implications. "A minor tweak of its genome can turn it into a specialized artificial cell for treating cancer. Panacea has looked at enough patients to figure out the best means to fight cancer, and I've just finished the plans for our medical microbots, self maintaining motile machines capable of medical diagnosis, telemetry, and medical repair."
"That would revolutionize the medical industry." She said in surprise. "I'm not sure corporations will allow such a thing to pass." My face hurt at how much I was smiling. Poor Dragon looked so unnerved.
"They're in on it of course, while Athena owns the parents, they're going to want a share of the pie. We aren't talking Tinkertech nanites, they have to follow physics." So grey goo wasn't a thing, and I already had manuals on what could go wrong ready. "They'll be paired with surgical robots so Doctors can perform surgeries more precisely, and I've got more effective treatments in the wings. Quite a few are prepping by gathering the talent to set up their own lines. You're on that list of course, and in turn so is the PRT."
"So you're moving on to curing cancer, I imagine the profit is a good bonus too." She said with a dry tone, and I rolled my eyes.
"More money means more means to create beneficial tech, and then even more money in a nice loop. Up to a point anyway…" I rolled my shoulders, and cracked my neck. "Athena Healthcare will probably employ a few hundred people within a few months, and Athena Paraphysics figured out dimensional scanners."
"Come again?" Theresa looked a little surprised and I was starting to wonder if our cybersecurity was that good or if she was that busy. Her expression shifted and clarity came to her. "Oh…one of your scientists wrote a paper on that, a means of sending pulses folded up into higher physical dimensions to view perturbations in the local vacuum state."
"I was as shocked as you were, most of our initial sensors involved sensing particles disappearing into other realities, like gravitons or dark sector particles." It took precise technology to focus and fold electromagnetic fields and particle beams into higher dimensions. The machine was two hundred times as big as anything that I could make but it was usable by mundane people. This was without Eezo by the way, with it the machine could reduce its size by 400% with current levels of understanding of the substance.
"Dimensional tech has always been highly restricted." She gently pointed it out and I couldn't help but feel overwhelmed again.
"I know, but like you've said it can't be put back into the box anymore. All the research was pointing in that direction for years, and dimensional viewing was not that far away anymore." I had seen a few Earths on my side of reality that were working towards similar conclusions, Earth Losev was doing something but I hadn't tried slicing too deeply into their internet yet. They were at least forty years ahead of my world, based on a few stray broadcasts.
"Maybe it's time to get to the point then…why are you doing this? Trying to uplift humanity, trying to get us to figure out powers, giving us the tools to work with bending and Eezo and spirits?" Theresa asked and I obliged.
"I'm sure you've seen my history haven't you? I doubt you haven't seen that it's not entirely…true am I right?" I took off, and she followed to the room I was leading her towards.
It took a few minutes, and we stepped into a bay for a few vehicles and Theresa slowed to a drop when she saw how I had the corpse of Leviathan draped over a giant workbench. Most of his mass had been obliterated by Sting, disconnected and scattered across hundreds of universes. So while his corpse still had quite a bit of mass, it was far less without a central core of portals.
What was left had been desecrated rather purposely and there was a flash of emotion on Dragon's new face. Well…I suppose gift wrapping the monster that killed your creator might put someone in a good mood.
"Yes I did see that, so I helped make some further adjustments to your records, we don't need problems cropping up for you." I smiled at the kindness though it was a little worrying. "But where are you going with this?"
"Have you ever thought about other Earths before? About what they're like, about the kind of people that live on them?" Out of millions of realities I had passed over, most weren't the kind of worlds I was looking for. Too alien, diverging hundreds of thousands to billions of years ago. Or they were empty and dead worlds, whether by natural or unnatural disaster.
"Not often." She replied with no change in inflection, and I felt terribly terribly bitter, fury coursing through my veins. A quick breathing exercise dulled my hot resentment
"I didn't either, because I didn't think it was possible to travel to other alternate realities. I didn't even think they existed." She went still, and I waited for her to make her response. I had already checked with Dinah and made a judgement call.
"You're not from Earth Bet…are you from Aleph?" I snorted at the idea.
"I'm not from any universe in the domain of powers actually, though my world would be most similar to Earth Aleph minus Brockton Bay and Parahumans. From what I've pieced together, my universe seems to be part of a different but similar multiversal cluster that…collided with your reality cluster causing a massive shift in the laws of physics."
"How would you know that?" Dragon questioned me and I gestured for her to sit down near the corpse of the Leviathan.
"It's not as difficult as you would believe to talk to shards, at least not for someone like me." I peered over to a Kodiak shuttle, blinking rapidly. "The worlds I've found are slightly off center, corresponding to the structure of my multiverse. A slightly different frequency the shards can detect, but have a hard time peering into without a rupture to project their senses." The barrier between the two clusters was thinning or even broken in parts, but it was enough to disrupt powers not given the data to transition. "Either way my Earth never had anything like powers or alterations of the laws of physics." We didn't even have proof other dimensions existed in both the sense of extra spatial dimensions like in M-theory, and other alternate worlds like Brane Cosmology.
"I believe you, multiple multiverses isn't a very big deal on Earth Bet." Dragon pointed it out, and I understood that too. "But why are you telling me this?"
"I'm telling you this because you're one of the most powerful capes on Earth and can do your own thing, open channels that I can't." I spoke honestly, genuinely. "I've got a ton of resources, and what I did with Leviathan has probably gotten a lot of goodwill…but to be frank I know jackshit on how to exploit that, or on how to navigate the political landscape of Earth Bet." I kneaded the back of my neck with a strained smirk. "And because I need other people with a lot of power that I can trust…trust with dangerous secrets."
"And what are these secrets?" Dragon asked, a hint of nervousness in her voice.
"I've mentioned the shards haven't I? The multidimensional crystalline life forms gifting us powers." She nodded and with a wide gesture I projected a screen on a wall, hard light providing a flat surface. "Shards are colony organisms, countless fractal fragments working together to form a greater cohesive whole. So why did they come here?"
"It wasn't to help us…it couldn't be with how they manifest." She had the right idea from the start.
"The shards are the cells of a greater Entity, multidimensional life with the ability to warp reality and process information and compute at scales beyond anything on Earth. The smallest of the shards would crush city blocks, while the greatest could outmass planets." The screen showed the Fragile One, showed Greg's own shard, showed High Theurgist covering several Earths as well as QA doing the same. "They are able to traverse the void between galactic clusters in search of other worlds in their Imago stage, trillions of shards in unison insinuating themselves at vast speed."
"So they grant powers?"
I grimaced. "It's a part of their cycle of reproduction and data gathering." I elucidated, waving my hands. "They seek an ever better understanding of reality, acting as parasites, absorbing and taking the knowledge and ways of thought of their victims. They sow conflict by manipulating their hosts, creating new data through that conflict between their chosen species. They cordon off worlds for their vast bodies, and collapse near-identical realities to reduce needless redundancy of data. For hundreds of years they spread through all the alternates of their species, wrecking alien civilizations under Host assault, and once the world is saturated…" The screen shifted to millions of alternates exploding, sending off thousands if not millions of offspring into space.
"That…that would be the extinction of the human race." She said with a note of horror.
I shook my head. "They've done it at least three thousand times before this, but that's not a problem…because the cycle is broken. The subspecies of Void Wyrm that came here evolved and requires a pair, a Thinker and Warrior if you would. To keep the cycle on track, both pairs would generate a single avatar to protect their main mass from destruction. The Warrior would protect them from external or internal threats while the Thinker would plan the cycle and alter it on the fly as needed."
Scion was put on the screen. "You're saying Scion is this…Warrior?" She was gripping tightly onto her seat, the metal creaking under her strength.
"Only a tiny fragment of the full scale entity, less than one millionth the size and with only a handful of shard clusters. Even that small handful makes him the most powerful being on Earth. The most powerful Precog in the world, the ability to peer and step between dimensions, the unrestricted version of Hero's wavelength tinkering, and an untold number of perception abilities. When I came to this place, I knew he was the one that was going to destroy the world."
"Him?" She said in reasonable disbelief.
"The Warrior is a broken being Theresa, his partner was killed due to a mistake while simulating their cycle, and killed by a human who took a third entity's path to victory and lobotomized her. Without her the cycle is dead, and due to his human simulacrum he's taken a gigantic whammy of depression. But eventually he's going to get tired of moping around…and he'll start experimenting with violence. And when you can flick your finger and destroy hundreds of British isles at once?"
"He's going to destroy humanity…how do you know all of this, and what else do you know?" I raised an eyebrow and she elaborated. "There's a pattern of behavior here, you know things you shouldn't, know the nature of the Endbringers and shards…how?"
"The simple version is that my world for lack of better words…has certain myths and prophecies about a world like this one, about the calamities that would befall this world." My world was eventually going to gain a connection to this one, and that was going to open Pandora's box.
Honestly I was seriously contemplating making a security detail for Wildbow so he couldn't get murdered by his own stories. God that's existentially terrifying isn't it?
Writing your fiction, and then getting ganked because you know details about the lives of very dangerous real people, or your hand being directly responsible for the death of billions of people. Though the third option was horror that the multiverse existed and had room for the all consuming nature of the cosmic horrors he had created.
"So you know the future?" I almost burst at the question, at this point I didn't know anything.
"I knew a future, one that has been derailed so much so that anything I know is either suspect or only semi useful."
"The Siberian…you said you suspected she was some type of area of altered space, and there were signs of it being similar to Fantasm creations. That was giving us a head's up on her being a projection wasn't it? How specific were these myths?"
"Very specific in some ways and very vague in others, and the information at times was either not useful, inapplicable or they wouldn't help. I had raw information, not the ability to apply it or the resources to make use of it immediately. It does not help that like any normal human being I didn't expect miscellaneous myths to be useful in saving the world." I showed teeth, bitterness seeping through.
"How much of what you've been doing is cleaning up future threats?" She asked slowly.
"Not as much as you would think, I'm a fucking mess Theresa…I've fucked up at least a few times and what I know is less than perfect. The Mother of Miseries was a surprise, the spirits being this fully formed was another, Lung's kid was another, everything with what went down with Leviathan was a shock barring his possible arrival in the city."
"You knew…?" I sighed, feeling a shudder run up and down my body, and my lip trembled.
"There were a few possible Endbringer attacks…but it wasn't anything I could influence. Not with the Simurgh in play with her Precognition, and any future attack has to be predicted with Dinah instead of me. I built space warping weapons and got Bakuda building Halcyon cannons so you could copy off the same principles, and that was all dumb luck too. Bakuda was a monster in the myths, a mad bomber." Dragon probably bought it and I knew that my friends didn't buy it completely, but respected that it was probably weird and uncomfortable.
"Could Eidolon have learned to control them if you had told him?"
"Absolutely not, his power was broken, not insane. Killing him wouldn't have worked either, all it would have done was set them free." I shivered at the idea of what the Simurgh has been planning. "Which is much, much worse than the prospects right now. At this point I've shattered the original path and we're in a new world of possibilities."
"Then how do we know Scion is going to snap in the first place?"
"We don't…but that says very little about the world spiraling down the drain. Or about other apocalyptic threats showing up from out of nowhere. But admittedly I checked with Dinah." I lifted my shoulders up and down, bringing up the numbers. "I asked her about the chances of an end-of-the-world event occurring two years from now. It was at about eighty four point six percent." I wasn't smiling.
"The PRT has to know! Keeping this a secret is…" I stared at her, and she paused.
"And that is why you're here, I'm not sure what this end of the world scenario is, only that it's coming. It might be Scion or it might be something new and equally threatening, which is why I asked what the odds of humanity going extinct was. About forty eight point six four percent chance humanity goes extinct, which of course still means billions upon billions of deaths."
"And you want my help because of my abilities as both an AI and a tinker." I gave her a thumbs up.
"Whatever we're looking at is at least two years from now, but there's projections out to about eight. It's fuzzy and that's rather worrying." Precognition like Dinah's was incredibly powerful, and she had several hundred exatons of mass to process information and see the future. "It's why I've gathered as many capes as I could, and why I've set up safe bases on other worlds. There will be a tomorrow if I have anything to say about it."
"There's more you aren't telling me." She stated and I didn't deny it.
"Some of them are things I don't know about while others I want to set up for later, we've talked a fair bit already." The conversation was tiring and I wanted some alone time to finish up here.
"Fair enough…but I did have one other reason to talk with you…the new cape I brought with me the other day…Skimmer, there's a reason I brought her with me."
"Did she do or try to do something incredibly stupid?" Her silence was an answer in and of itself.
"She tried to investigate the Mathers branch of the Fallen." I choked at the sheer outright madness of what she just said.
"That's never going to work, not with…" I snapped my mouth shut and Dragon glared.
"You also know about their anti-Thinker asset?"
"I'm immune to that because of the deep connection between myself and my shard, but I have no way to convey that information without screwing you or other people over. Plus…I didn't know until I managed to jog my memory with my DNI. I had an awful memory before coming here." Plus I wasn't even sure my own equipment was immune, and didn't like the idea of turning my infrastructure into a memetic hazard. Spirit cybersecurity might be able to block the transmissions or they might not be able to.
Mama Mathers was something I would have to search for manually, and without her power she was a simple human woman. The Fallen as an organization had to be ripped to pieces, anyone who could be saved would be saved and then it would burn.
I would tear apart every truly evil Parahuman organization that I could, and try and hope that by the time I returned home that it would be safe…that the sins of this world wouldn't follow me across dimensions.
Dragon let out an unneeded breath. "I managed to dissuade her from looking too deeply, and thankfully it doesn't seem like she managed to trigger their asset though she did discover a few Fallen locations for the PRT and Protectorate to raid. My main trouble is that she isn't willing to join the Wards, doesn't fit with the teams I'm sponsoring, and is unlikely to go independent." I had a feeling I knew where this was going.
"You want me to take her under my wing?" I questioned, wondering where I had become the dumping ground for capes. That made nineteen. "I suppose that's alright but what kind of cape do we have here?" I didn't find anything on Skimmer, but that could have because she was new rather than anything else.
"She's a Tinker, I managed to detect her programs crawling through the Internet for information on the Fallen."
"When do you want me to talk to her?"
"A few days, Lady Photon will likely want to speak with you on integrating New Wave into the White Lotus."
…
Ignoring Carol that makes twenty four.
Because of course it does.
___
July 31st, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
A spear slammed into the wall behind me, and I didn't even blink as I stepped into a portal to dodge when it attempted to cut through brick to cut off my neck. Even if it had hit, the attack would have failed when it slammed into an omni-shield.
"Hmm…seems like the drones didn't see you, some type of Stranger power?" I called out while stepping between worlds, and the cape trying to murder me growled.
It was a woman wearing leather armor of vaguely Nordic style, body hugging and tight. Smoke hung around her and my nose picked up the stench of Shadow, Denial, and Strength. It was some type of subtle Breaker state, a sort of shadowy mass that made her body much stronger at some unknown price. Some powers could hide more easily from sensors, and this woman was one of them.
She looked a lot like an emulation of a Valkyrie, though not a very good one. She accelerated like a bullet, and a biotic charge let me dodge the subsonic charge of the cape. I spun on my heels and hopped sixty feet in the air on a blast of wind and called for assistance. My thoughts accelerated.
Shadow Breaker state, provides durability and speed. Some drone sensors wash off of her state, but it would be ineffective against…I saw a few flecks of metal and I realized it wasn't as bad as I thought. Some sensors failed but cameras did not and they shot at her before she had launched the spear infused with her power.
She shot off again, her weapon spinning as she launched it like she had a cannon for an arm. Always a straight line attack…
"Why exactly are you doing this? You know this isn't going to end well for you."
"The Empire 88 is dead! Without them, there's nothing keeping those damn chinks down, nothing to keep in check the filth stealing the riches of their betters! If my power can take one of the Leviathan-Killers down…we can work on putting down those spics and ni—" I launched a biotic kick, a wave of biotic force slamming her into a building.
I felt dirty hearing those words, and I had never in my life been called an ethnic slur before. Even if she only did it indirectly.
She coughed, and I finally identified her as Gungnir, a white supremacist cape from northern New Hampshire and a murderer. She had personally speared half a dozen Mexicans and three African Americans, and lynched one of them the old fashioned way.
So if she was here…that means so was he…
I raised a biotic barrier with a wave of my hand, and the resounding boom of an anti-material rifle round exploding with the force of a bomb echoed. I stepped again until I was a good twenty feet in the air, and generated a wall of air to block a second round when it blew up.
A tall man in a one piece black-white jumpsuit was on the roof of a warehouse, with ceramic armor on top of the reinforced polymer suit. He was thin and lanky, and wore a crow-like mask, black as death and with red eyes.
Crow Salvo was her main partner in crime, a cape who could imbue kinetic and explosive force to any metallic projectile shot at a speed above ten meters a second. His kill count was twice as high, and at one point he had blown away a mayor with his power. The only reason he hadn't gotten heavy resistance was because of the third…
Someone tried to touch me and a flick of my wrist launched a Throw at their chest. There was a laugh from the wound be attacker and I used a feed from a drone for this.
A waifish redhead woman wearing a frilly black Victorian dress, a domino mask and holding a spiked metal bat. Banshee was a teleporter with a Blaster power, focusing her power into her hands to form concussive blasts. I took some deeper scans as she shot out a blast, turning on my heels to dodge the attack. Channeling her power from her hands into her weapons provided a stronger and more efficient focus for the Blaster power.
"Hmm…some limited application of teleportation, causing explosions by disrupting air molecules." I spoke to myself as I stepped back, a hand shifting down to my Glaive weapon. It would…
Gungnir flung herself forward, spear in hand and in a flicker of emerald I was no longer alone. Laserdream emerged from the portal and generated red beams from her hands, Gungnir was knocked off course, spinning like a top from the force. The blonde cape created a shield, narrowly deflecting a bullet from Crow Salvo.
"So…is this a team up or has your mom made it official?" A bullet slammed into a barrier, and the compressive blast was blocked easily by Crystal's new shield generator. She lifted an arm, and I grinned at the newly assigned omni-tool on her wrist.
"Everyone except aunt Carol is joining up, and that makes what…twenty three capes?" I didn't bother correcting her and I stepped and brought us onto the roof of a nearby warehouse.
"You aren't going to leave this place without a fight." Crow Salvo lazily let his rifle wander, sights aimed on people scattering from the fight. My hands tightened into fists.
I commanded numerous Cercopes units and stealth Trapeza units to tail civilians, guiding them and protecting them from the white supremacist capes. Their shields would block bullets and they had enough strength to hold off Gungnir. Once the fight was done or they were out of range they would leave.
I stepped forward, and with a jab a blast of fire slammed into him. He rolled out of the blaze that remained, and in less than ten seconds reloaded and fired off another exploding bullet. I placed down a barrier and it took the impact, holding solidly. I smiled when someone else popped into view, and their sole getaway dropped instantly when Newter placed his hand on her neck.
Banshee was down for the count, and Gungnir had shifted into her Breaker state before Newter could have knocked her out. It didn't matter though, because I was starting to get the pattern.
Straight-line acceleration, only able to make small turns when moving, and switching between her normal state and her Shadow state to make straight turns. She had massive acceleration, but little maneuverability but every hit was like a train crash.
I nodded to myself in that moment as Crow fired again "Buy me me about three seconds." The two launched themselves, one flying into the air while the other bounded forward. The Breaker took the beam from Crystal while Crow moved quickly and easily, clearly experienced in the art of not getting his legs snapped like twigs.
I focused my breath, and Demanded that Crow's gun turn against his master. The gun turned to shrapnel, and the cape had a long orange tail knock him off his feet. There was a cut along his pants and Newter flicked a few drops and that was that.
I followed with a biotic pull and ripped Gungnir's spear from her hands. It was made out of metal, so I warped it into scrap with my modest metalbending. She charged, and I blinked out of the way, and when she snapped out of the Shadow cut through her costume with a carefully aimed shard of glass with a slight biotic pull.
Newter was there and even getting close was enough exposure and in an instant she was down for the count. A few drones hung around, effectors and limbs generating non-metallic restraints and I could hear the PRT on the way.
I called my partner. "Taylor, was this a distraction?" I asked and Crystal seemed to nod.
"They had a cape trying to rally up new members for a gang, Terra and Manpower broke them up and caught a fourth cape. Someone from the Herren clan…the question would be who brought them here or if this is on their own?"
"Well there's a lot of suspects there, the Elite might be trying to soften us up, Accord could be probing us, or some of the other Neo-Nazi groups might be trying to fill the vacuum left by the E88. Or some other fourth or fifth thing might be gunning after us." We were a big target now, and that meant capes and it meant cape organizations.
Cauldron certainly wasn't going to do their part because they were certainly busy patching up since all their plans were getting cosmically screwed in the ass. I had a total of twelve vials I frankly didn't know what to do with other than study and mad science and…
"Keep me in the loop for anything weird, getting caught flat footed is a good way to get shanked." I liked living and I liked the idea of people I cared about living too.
Which reminds me that I need to check up on the Voyagers, see what they're up to. I don't want the surprise of Blasto…sorry Rhizome trying to clone Endbringers behind his teammate's back.
So that should be done soon.
___
July 31st, 2011. 6:00PM
Basilia Rubio
Asami was an odd member of the Voyagers, which made sense since she used to be the Yangban cape known as Thirty-Two. Her power was the use of Nullification waves, a power similar to Stilling though perhaps not quite as powerful, not quite as broad in potential.
She was happily chatting with the young boy known as Pax to the rest of the world, a shy kid who wouldn't look out of place in the Wards. I was busy inspecting Rhizome's tanks and found his equipment interesting. It was advanced and very clean, clearly not his work.
"A few people owed Noelle a favor and she managed to con them out of everything in this place." The biotinker replied to my unspoken question within missing a beat. A few of his Homunculi were roaming and performing various duties for him, ape-like creatures with dexterous hands and heavy frames.
"Any updates on Earth Aleph?" I had given the Voyagers limited access to the portal network, so they could transport themselves to anywhere on Earth Aleph within a couple of seconds. There had been few improvements since Leviathan besides energy efficiency and increased redundancy.
"Noelle set up a base on some small island right off the east coast, she managed to drag a forest over the island and covered everything up." I nodded, telling nature spirits to create forests where there was none previously was difficult but not impossible.
Especially with a soul as wild as Noelle's.
"Have they talked to their families at all? I imagine quite a few of them aren't going to be in the best shape." It was hard not to empathize with them though it didn't quite a few of them were jackasses.
"Most of them have, but they've kept a lot of things quiet, and didn't want the attention that going public would get." I nodded, carefully analyzing the machines he used to build his artificial life forms.
So far everything was in order, and I had a good idea that while Rhizome wasn't really a good person he wasn't going to return to his old life of crime out of either self preservation or pragmatism. If not both.
"Well everything seems to pretty much be quite safe, so if you wouldn't mind. I'm going to check up on a particle accelerator." He waved me off with a quiet grunt, and I stepped backwards through a portal and onto the physics laboratory right outside city boundaries and heavily guarded by both machine and man. A few former military gents were given armor, barriers and less-lethal weaponry but were allowed lethal weaponry in a worse case scenario.
Against Brutes mostly or to break through shielding. The guns were modified normal weaponry, hybrid chemical/mass accelerators simple enough to be fixed up by them in a pinch.
The Transdimensional Physics Interaction Accelerator hummed before a muted thud followed. There was a sensation of cold, as WIMPs were accelerated, and the detector array did its job for the test. The basic scientific virtual intelligence did its job of compiling data for others to analyze and process and understand.
"Johanna." The young black woman who had taken charge of the project through sheer force of will jumped when I ambushed her, and she smiled lightly.
"Erudition, I see you've graced us with your presence." Hee team gave her worrying looks and I snorted.
"Anything new on your experiments?" I asked and she nodded as her team scrambled to her ready for the influx of data, it would take hours to analyze what they needed, and the data would be passed on to the Eezonics team to better improve their rudimentary comprehension of element zero.
"We're going to need a lot more scientists on board for this thing. We've got well over a 100 TeV of collision energy with some of our experiments, and the high luminosity of the TPIA makes it a lot easier to get good data…but we need more people." I sighed, agreeing with the woman.
"You're right, TPIA is taking up a lot of our resources though thankfully quite a few of it's discoveries have practical applications." Plus most of the technology that made it possible were being licensed out, and a room temperature superconductor was going to be considered normal soon.
"Is that why you're trying to get research grants?" I tilted my head at Johanna, smiling slightly.
"Of course, it might be money with strings but it's money that can be put to good use on research and development."
She smirked. "Then maybe you'll be interested in the next experiment, and I think the PRT will have the same interest." I leaned forward, crossing my arms over my stomach.
"You're finally going to do more than probing other dimensions?" She nodded.
"Well…we've taken every safety precaution, and proven that the experiment will be easy to perform. Our sensors are primed for the data influx, and with more grunts it'll be easier to manage."
"Hmm…perhaps I should offer a few tips then? I'll tell you a few basic things about other dimensions, it should be enlightening…"
I spent the following hours talking shop, and taking the data from today's experiment home and comparing it to my own work.
Today was a good day.
___
AN: I feel a bit like the pace of things has slowed down a bit post-Leviathan, which is intentional but I don't want to go the opposite and have things slow to a crawl either. Things are starting to move though, it just took some time for decisions to be made due to the ripple effect from one third of the Endbringers being dead while the others are currently dormant.
I've got the general events for future Arcs down at least, so I'll keep writing chapters as needed. Enjoy.
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- Location
- EU
You're making my brain hurty, AEM. But, this is a great implication for an SI who can engineer a way to go back to their old world.
I'd be scared if I was an author. Wait. Is the author God, or is the author channeling visions of some far off world from the noosphere or something. Oh no. Is free will a thing? Do I even exist!?
It's fun seeing Basilla struggle and bungle her way through the plot twists so far.
And as far as unforseen twists go, I especily like what you've done with Noelle, AEM. For most of Worm fanfiction, The Travelers end up being an annoying shopping checklist item.
[X] Remove Powers
[X] Dump on Earth Alpeph
[X] Shake your own hand for being da best SI in the world.
I think this mostly happends because the Travelers are too insular and distant to try to "friend ship" with whatever SI, OC or Alt-Taylor might be running the show that day.
Having Noelle and the Travelers develop into their own kind of unique group that Basilla can reach out to - when BS shaman/spirit expertise is needed, is a pretty great and novel resolution.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Huh…you know what you're right about that. I've seen the Travellers resolved the same way at least three or four different times. Seems kind of a waste actually, though to be fair all of them were Simurgh bombs in some way. It also took months of offscreen development and hijinks to make them into a semi-stable grouping of capes for that to happen here.
But yeah, something important here is that Basilia isn't the only one trying to change things around, there are other people trying to make the world less of a shithole, trying to break through the narrative of things getting worse. She's only one person out of hundreds of thousands of capes and out of billions of people. She has more influence than most but it took more than just herself to push forward.
Discernment 10.8
- Location
- Chula Vista
Discernment 10.8
August 2nd, 2011. 11:30AM
Basilia Rubio
I waited patiently for Sveta to calm down, her tendrils lashing out in anger, and raking through solid metal in the process. I rubbed the tiredness from my eyes, holding back a yawn due to my lack of sleep.
I had dreamt I was being drowned…so I wasn't at my best.
"Cauldron was the one who did this to me?" She reversed her unraveling, control returning to her as Victoria placed a hand on her shoulder.
"Yes. They are responsible for your condition, for the appearance of other Case 53s. They're responsible for hurting a lot of people and for a lot of shitty things, just as much as they're somehow keeping the world from collapsing into complete anarchy." Revulsion hit me at the admission, Cauldron was confusing, the things they had done were monstrous yet they were trying to save the world.
I didn't hate them, but neither did I find them worthy as heroes…but that was the point wasn't it? They weren't heroes, simply people scrambling to stop the end against an enemy that had known victory for longer than the human race had existed.
Maybe things would have been different if Hero still lived, but that wasn't the world we lived in.
"How many Case 53s know about this?" Sveta spoke weakly and I sagged…
"If they're on the team they know, if they're not…I have a presentation I'm setting up." I wasn't joking, eventually they would know or figure it out and eventually something would screw us over. The PRT was a mess internally, and cleaning that up was going to be a priority before something else revealed the global spanning semi-evil conspiracy.
"How long have you known?"
"Since I got thrown across universes." I revealed.
Her expression twisted, glaring at the vials being placed under a microscope.
"If you knew what they were…why did you ally with them?"
I bristled at the Sveta's comment.
"We're not allies, on the side of not going extinct sure…but trustworthy allies no." I was turning my head, grimacing. "I don't have the power to really stop them without their organization's death throes causing everything to fall apart, and I'm doubtful I'm completely immune to their ace capes. To be frank these vials were completely unsolicited, and I'm not even sure if I can wipe them out."
Sveta glanced intently "R-Really?"
I grimaced and nodded "Cauldron has a cape among them whose power is literally to win, to walk a path to victory." I scratched my neck, curling my fingers as I sagged into my seat in no armor. "They've been doing this for thirty years, and they've been…hardened to the atrocities they've committed for the survival of the human race. I don't condone them, but I don't have the power to punish them without punishing people who don't deserve it."
I hated it but Cauldron was vital in keeping the old machine running, but it wasn't running at the best or with the most effectiveness because PtV is not a perfect power. You had to ask the right questions, have enough resources and support, and manage to navigate past the casualty interference between other future sight shards.
You had Scion doing his mopey bullshit, had the Simurgh screwing the hell out of her power with every single Trigger event creating a new variable screwing over the steps. The Entities have their cycle down pat even in a broken one.
Sveta had moved to the art wall in the room we were using to talk, an arm unfolding to paint pretty and soft complex patterns in many colors. Scrap fell with the sound of screeching metal, and Sveta flinched.
"Sorry, I just…don't understand." She curled up and Victoria placed an arm on her shoulder, one of the few capable of withstanding her limbs without augmentation.
"That's pretty fair, it's not everyday when someone tells you they know a lot of secrets they really shouldn't." I leaned back, lip quivering as I stayed calm. "Removing Cauldron is impossible with current means, so the next best thing was trying to help the people they hurt to the best of my ability. I was lucky that I could work with Panacea to at least give you guys human forms."
"So you can't expose them because it'll cause chaos on Bet and you can't make them face justice because it would be even worse?" Sveta asked slowly, looking unsure of herself.
"It's…a conundrum I really don't like at all." I said with an added shrug. "I don't really care about Cauldron as people, because well…they're monsters, even if monsters with understandable reasons. They could have done things better, but they were too flawed as people and went through too many setbacks to even consider a kinder way."
"Are you trying to defend them…?" I shuddered at her question.
"Reasons aren't a defense, not unless they involve Mastering or incredibly specific scenarios." In the particular case I was speaking of anyway. "They did terrible things, and didn't bother with the right paths and the right actions because they aren't all knowledgeable gods. But…"
It didn't make anything they did okay, it didn't make giving up on what made them human okay.
"I…think I need a moment. Sorry." I shook my head at Sveta. The former Case 53 gestured and Vicky hesitantly moved away from the poor girl.
"Don't be sorry, you shouldn't have to be sorry for something like this." I turned around to march out of the door, rubbing my face to straighten out the wrinkles that were surely forming from the stress.
Vicky hovered around me as we shut the door behind Sveta as she furiously started to draw using her powers. We didn't speak, the blonde equally sullen and far less energetic than usual. It made me a little nostalgic for when she was a lot more annoying and way too peppy.
Apparently telling a girl the world was ending tended to sap a bit of a person's energy. But she was a determined young woman, far more than I ever was as a person. She was certainly more likable than her sister, and she was…well growing up I guess.
"You want to talk about it?" She asked sincerely, her expression bright but tempered. She had changed a lot in the six months, and I imagined she would keep changing as the deadline got closer and closer. We had roughly two to three years based on Dinah's predictions, taking into account whatever new data the Eye of Fate had found.
"Not particularly, it's just a little stressful to have someone so…fragile on the team." I found a sink in a small lobby area in the base, one of many going unused. I cupped some water and lightly splashed it into my sweaty face, washing off with a towel.
Vicky looked amused at the statement. "Basilia, we're Parahumans. Most of us are going to be fragile in some way and you know that." I was going to object by saying I didn't count and then remembered I was going to therapy to treat likely mental and emotional trauma and stopped.
"It's just frustrating having to keep their mistakes from screwing up the world." I had gone through a lot of threads on PHO and other sites, and the PRT was a mess outside of certain spots and under competent directors. Piggot was competent enough but had biases and limited resources, Armstrong wasn't the best at PR due to his focus on research, and many of the directors were nasty pieces of work.
Strangely enough Tagg was one of the nicer directors out of the more dangerous lots, especially after taking a two week break and letting his deputy director take the reins. I don't think the guy was ever a Ziz bomb but I doubt murdering victims of her scream was going to leave him mentally well.
Hell his department was our biggest customers of the Tinkertech I was willing to sell, the anti-Master equipment I had managed to crib together from Rachni, Salarian, Asari and fragments of Prothean technology. They could detect very subtle abnormalities in brain patterns, which would include everything from subcellular nanomachines to manipulation of the brain with effectors.
For the Entities almost all of them took place through rather typical forces but they were applied through exotic means. It made them no less dangerous though, and distinct enough from more metaphysical methods of mind or mental manipulation.
Apparently the Rachni had developed a method of countering it, scrambling the signals with their own energy. Some application of chi control…I think? It was apparently easier than countering the more insidious Indoctrination of the Reapers, but the use of micro-portals was different enough to merit a new technique.
I sighed. "We had a few people helping with rebuilding other towns right?" I asked and Vicky delivered as she floated forwards as I marched.
"Charlotte helped clear debris from some of the water left behind by Leviathan, and my sister helped dry a lot of places and kept water damage from setting in even more. It's a lot less difficult since the towns close to Brockton Bay have a lot of benders of their own." I wordlessly reacted with a nod. "We…have a few capes asking about the chances of joining the White Lotus, but they don't want to move from their hometowns."
"What did they tell them…and you were there too weren't you?" I asked carefully, gripping my hair and twirling strands between my fingers.
"We managed to get about half of them to go to the Protectorate, and the other half still wants to join." I twitched visibly at that, wondering just how many capes were going to be in the White Lotus.
24 was a big number in one city though technically speaking Palanquin moved around a lot as needed and took contracts from cities to bring down villain groups in one or two quick sweeps. That many capes in a city was unnecessary…
But if we opened offices in other towns and cities, we would have room to grow.
"So what…four or five capes?"
"Six actually." I let out a huff and reached out to some smooth stones, distracting myself with some bending practice.
"I didn't really expect many capes being willing to join my team when I started this off. Taylor and I only became a team because I was lonely and because she did something stupid." Her counterpart had thought infiltrating a villain team with a Thinker on it was a good idea, and went full in on fighting an escalating dragon.
She was smart but intelligence didn't shield one from their own stupidity as much as one would hope. I doubt I was any different in that regard, because I wasn't special.
Not that I had a problem with that…usually anyway.
"You're a nice person who takes care of her own, it's hard to find that for a lot of Parahumans. Taylor is the same way if a little more…brusque about it, and the White Lotus has a mostly peaceful mission statement. That'll attract a few rogues on top of the less vicious independents." Vicky pointed it out, sticking out an index finger while her left hand brushed her blonde hair.
"Sometimes I forget you're a total nerd." She stuck her tongue out at me, and I relaxed. "You're probably one of the people among us with the best knowledge on powers outside of myself, Taylor, Elle, and your sister." Especially since her shard was the most fit for cooperation due to its love for her.
She preened. "Thanks." I rolled my eyes and continued walking.
It was easy to note the relationship between Vicky and her shard from how Fragile One acted with her, and the barrier between shard and host was…narrow in their case. It made sense though because of the relative youth of the tiny little shard.
Taylor was close with Queen but her shard was one of the biggest and baddest there were, and had been though likely thousands of cycles. There was a degree of separation there, because there had to be. There were exceptions of course, like the Demesnes-Keeper and Elle due to her ability to communicate with him in new ways.
Amelia had hated Shaper for a good while and it had taken a lot of pushing to get her to use her power more. Even so she had required adding mental switches so her power wouldn't be on all the time and tempting her. Cauldron capes had somewhat friendly shards due to minor damage from the crash and dismantling of Eden, and it was…
Only young shards had good or close relationships, because they weren't polluted by the end of a cycle and the callousness of millions of former hosts within their corpus. Which made me question what had happened to those hosts, had they been absorbed into the spiritual mass of a shard, moved on to the hereafter and left a mere data imprint or were they still there?
I didn't always like the questions I had to ask, but there wasn't much I could on that front. Asking uncomfortable questions was what I did best.
I was getting closer to figuring out how to create powers, but I needed time and resources and lots of help to succeed. Shard powers were the only ones I could likely replicate barring the manipulation of the soul and that was a science one had to be careful with.
The only example I had was what I had done to jumpstart Taylor's soul, and that was likely a limited or even one-time resource.
I was going to need to have another talk with Veda, and maybe some with Balaam too. Then I remembered that it was time.
Let's see the ship I had spent months of my life on, and see where we can go from there.
August 2nd, 2011. 2:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I glanced all around me, lips curling smugly as I examined the bridge. I was at the rear, taking from the Turian way of things. At the moment most of the bridge was empty, with the only people 'manning' the ship being myself, numerous AI, a few borrowed Rachni soldiers and Anansi and some of my team.
I had allowed a suit from Dragon to join us mostly to provide some oversight, and because I just wanted to show off. She had the other end of a QEC relay which actually worked by quantum entanglement through fifth and sixth dimensional space. That was quite literally the only way that shit worked because quantum entanglement didn't work that way. Anyway…
The drive core of the ship had been tested with a mass simulator, and every system was double, triple, quadruple and quintuple checked beforehand.
"So you're recording this right?" I asked Dragon as I lazily leaned back, and the artificial intelligence made the suit nod. "Then it should be time to start off the maiden voyage of…" I paused, eyebrows furrowing as I realized I had never given this beautiful armed exploration vessel a—
"You never gave the ship a name." Taylor reminded me, the wings from her organic suit fluttering as a few insects orbited around her, including her Noble bugs, the larger more intelligent insects she used to relay commands and signals.
"What should I name it then?" I called out to the people onboard, which consisted of the Dallon sisters, Taylor, Charlotte and Grace. Everyone else except Elle were on the surface of Earth Lotus, while we were parked behind Deimos. She was on the small asteroid moon, due to her sensing of dimensional effects.
"You built it, you name it." Grace bluntly said, her voice distorted by her armored helmet. I shut my eyes as I thought about why I had gone all out with a ship this advanced, this culmination of every technology I had either been given as ideas in my head or taken through scanning.
This ship was built to traverse the void between stars, to go farther than any human I knew about. It was a rebirth of technology long forgotten, and technology from the cycle of the Void Wyrms, of the Entities.
Cycle.
This ship was a wanderer of the stars, a wanderer of other realities even with the dimensional skipping implemented into the HECATE drive. A million tons of metal, plastic and composite and the thrum of dark energy and dimensional twisting was clear.
I cleared my throat, and gestured for Charlotte to take the pilot's seat. While the ship did most of the work, a little human feedback wasn't bad. Dragon found her own seat though she wasn't connected to the ship's systems because that was a terrible idea for cybersecurity until I could trust her more. Which was why machine spirits swirled around her, for multiple purposes. Though really the biggest defense was that the suit was merely a mobile communication device.
"This is the maiden voyage of the exploration cruiser Samsara." I flushed when the people in the room glanced over to me. "All systems are green, and the ship should take off in…" Charlotte flicked a few holographic interfaces, and she wore a space rated helmet herself like everyone else on board. The Rachni crooned, commanded by Anansi to take a few consoles for themselves for a moment.
The ship activated its engines, inertial confinement keeping the dozens of Gs of acceleration from the drive core from affecting us. It looked very much like a larger version of the Normandy SR2 bridge, with a JJ Abrams Star Trek glow. There were viewscreens depicting space, though we were under dozens of meters of ship so there wasn't much to see in that department without them.
"Initiating FTL field geometries." Dark energy flooded into reality, erupting as the ship took off, with a lag of a tenth of a second…the ship said jump and reality said how high.
Space-time screamed as we surpassed the speed of light, breaking a fundamental law of reality with the flick of a switch. The screens simulated the stars turning white before it was displaced by darkness, and I directed us towards Alpha Centauri.
It took us minutes to get up to speed, and we sat at the current speed limit of conventional mass effect field geometries. Dragon was acting twitchy but she seemed otherwise fine, and she spoke up.
"How…fast are we going?" I would have shown her a cocky grin if I could.
"About 7500 cee, we're at about the limits of the current field geometry for Mass Effect based FTL. But the Samsara hasn't reached her limit just yet." I nodded at Charlotte and she flicked a few more buttons.
"Transitioning to Alcubierre-like Spatial Waveform." An AI replied excitedly and more power was pumped into the highly efficient drive core. Waveguides directed tendrils of dark energy, space warped by the generation of both gravity and dimensional tweaks. In tens of seconds we rocketed past ten thousand cee, and in that moment I was grateful for the massive power output of the Samsara.
Otherwise this wouldn't be possible.
We passed twenty thousand times the speed of light, then in the same amount of time passed forty, the numbers ticking upwards as we pushed at the limits of my current understanding of bending space.
The ship was steady and from my perusing of the ship data, the dark energy field sensing and dimension sensing machines said everything was green even if the power output was a little terrifying.
"Waveform stabilizing at maximum cruise velocity." The ship added cheerfully, and I could tell Dragon was still curious even through her suit, though it didn't translate as well due to the limit's of the QEC relay. It only transmitted visual data and limited feedback for piloting the thing.
"Which means we've hit ninety thousand times the speed of light boys and girls." I gestured mostly to Anansi since we had…only a few men, most of them coming from the teams we recruited. Out of twenty three capes, six of them were men and the rest were women. To balance that out we would need eleven more guys, to make a team of thirty four.
Which would probably be more comparable to the larger cape teams in more stable cities. New York for example had nearly a thousand capes, with a single Wards team having around ten to twenty capes, and five teams in total from what I had heard.
"So this is what you took away from Vista's power?" Dragon asked through the heavy clumsy suit. "It's…well incredible."
"I've only implemented some of the math behind her power, because this form of travel was known to me already. Mainly I've used it to make the drive more efficient, since my attempts at dimensional manipulation are still rather clumsy." The Entities made use of their nature to ride on the gravity of heavy wells of mass, along with intense warpings of space to enter a hyper-FTL regime to cross to other galactic clusters.
That was way beyond anything we were capable of, anywhere from years to decades if not centuries away from figuring out. Honestly crossing the Spirit Roads would be easier than replicating the Entity method of hyper-FTL.
"It should be about twenty five minutes before we arrive at Proxima Centauri. We'll make a stop at Heryshaf and see how they're doing."
"Heryshaf?" Dragon asked from a world away, and I relaxed into my captain's chair.
"The hive of Euphonium Clef of the Boundless Shaping Melodies. She's the prime life manipulator of the Rachni Swarm. She's colonizing the entire Alpha Centauri since it has three habitable planets." They were hiking their reproduction rate right again, now that they had the room to spread out and ships to send their children on. Just under a hundred thousand Rachni were in the system, a fifth of the species though that percentage would diminish as the Rachni reproduced and more Queens were raised.
"Are all Rachni named after instruments?" Dragon questioned, perhaps a little dumbfounded at the idea.
"Rachni don't speak in the way we do, they communicate through the Ephemeral rather than the Material…connected across vast distances, so some of their concepts have to be translated to something we can understand." I readily explained to her as the ship continued moving, thrusters shifting us a bit while under gravitic influence.
"How vast…?" She really likes asking questions doesn't she?
"Instant communication between Rachni at even interstellar distances." Dragon went silent, and I took the time to twiddle my thumbs. The Parahumans among us were doing alright, their shards easily channeling powers through spiritual means. Though when I looked at Fragile One I saw something different…
Vicky's shield was flickering gold, and when I opened the World Eyes I saw that Fragile One was like a star in the ship's very new Spirit World. She was more solid, like concrete versus the thin glass of the shades of Shards. Almost like she had brought the entirety of her corpus with her…
The Fragile One brought a finger to a crack in her form where lips should be, radiating smugness. Spirits of light, of fire and heat and void hung around her, tiny wisps of power, shades of the world itself flitting about the new existence of the Samsara.
…
So Fragile One had compacted away her mountain sized body and hitched a ride on my ship. She was also swallowing up a spirit of void or two, with a good mix of light, fire, and a few concepts relating to strength and will. The fractal nature of a shard came through for her, making it easier to sort the appropriate spirits.
She was apparently a curious type and didn't much care for having to take off so far from the heart of the network. The few people on board chatted with each other, and I simply relaxed and kept an eye on the Fragile One.
She had obviously grown, her corpus shining brighter and space warping a bit more than before. When I had first met her she was probably about a city block or three in size, millions of tons of mass. Now…I'd put her at billions of tons though as a shard-spirit that meant effectively nothing. That gave her the needed energy to power fourteen dimensionally folded layers of hard-light, and increased the output for the flight segment of Vicky's power. She could probably go transonic, though it would take her…a while.
Her aura had been turned into a wide field, providing a precise sense of emotions, allowing her to find people in a sub-Thinker power. Of course she could also send a blast of different emotions…though she had kept it at awe and fear for obvious reasons. Actually going for her Fanon powers was not a good idea…at all.
Amy's attraction towards her had more to do with Carol being a terrible parent to all her kids, her isolation, her age when adopted and a tiny nudge from the aura. Add superpowers and you get delusional and overpowered biokinetic, plus a ton of stress from the Undersiders and then the Slaughterhouse 9 and subsequently spending two years in the Birdcage and then 'fixing' the problem she could have fixed years ago made her even nuttier.
There was a reason I was never going to read Ward…because the Red Queen was a fucking nightmare.
I shut my eyes for a bit, listening to the hum of the drive core, feeling the resonance of dark energy fields. Maybe it was a bad idea to focus too much on the actions of alternate versions of people you considered your friends. This world was different enough that I should really have stopped relying on metaknowledge for anything.
Not that I used it that much anymore…it was kind of useless now, outside of knowing a few important people along with a lot of nothing.
Charlotte moved something on the holographic screen hooked to an optotronic device and the drive core began to reduce power output, fields untwisting spacetime and dropping in velocity as we approached our target. The field geometry went from the Positive Gravity metric to the Mass Effect metric and the ship slowed down.
It took us less than a minute to enter a sub-light regime, but that still meant we were going a small fraction of C. Anansi lifted his head, mandibles shivering.
"The Rachni have given you permission to dock." I nodded and the screens showed us what it would have looked like if the bridge wasn't dozens of meters deep into the vessel. Multiple ships buzzed about, sleek vessels that looked very vaguely insect-like. The organic sleekness was interesting but little more than that.
Another space station hung in orbit like a living hive, buzzed around mostly by small and heavy patrol boats. Cutters and corvettes effectively. There were well over a hundred cutters in this system, and the scanner put the size of these at about thirty to fifty meters at the largest and built more for interception against civilian ships.
The Corvettes were larger at about sixty to a hundred meters at their largest and thus numbered maybe about twenty five. Their weapons were just heavy enough to threaten a frigate if they grouped together. A few were obviously brought from other systems, and the real number was likely about thirty two Cutters and eight Corvettes per system.
About two hundred eighty vessels, a hefty amount until you realize my one cruiser has more Eezo than all of them combined. And that most of them were maybe twice the length of a Kodiak.
A Destroyer escorted us, maybe half our length and a tenth of our mass with plasma exhaust behind it as it flew. We slowed our velocity, clamps coming down to hold us in place. The planet was more visible from this angle, a large planet about 40% more massive than the Earth and the first world from the star.
It was in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance like Mercury, so it would rotate on its axis every week and twenty two days would elapse between sunrise and sunset. It had a wider band of areas suitable life around the equator, and a powerful magnetic field to deflect solar wind. The forests were fields of black and dark purple, with the waters seen even from here. It had an eccentric orbit and a dense atmosphere and that combined to place less than a third of the planet in eternal darkness.
Funny thing was the surface gravity was lower because much of the additional mass was made up of light mantle rock. It was a layered cat's eye, with its pupil being a Pacific sized expanse of dense humid jungle and desert in areas conducive to their formation. Beyond that was a colder but larger area, an uneven ring experiencing something like a day and night cycle. About as warm as Earth rather than the forty to sixty C temperatures of the Heart.
The ship was stopped, and I could see that Dragon was getting a little twitchy.
"We'll be switching to comm buoy, you should be able to send a projection easily enough." The robot was shut down and a hologram popped up, letting me see that Dragon was in her gynoid body. "Dragon, I welcome you to Nikkal." I bowed slightly, unable to keep a stupid grin off my face. "We're forty trillion one hundred forty three billion and twenty three million kilometers from Earth."
"I believe I've been left behind a bit haven't I?" Dragon expressed distinct amusement. "I'm getting quite a few ideas of my own, you wouldn't mind if I was inspired would you?"
"As long as you don't directly take my tech you're good and as long as you're careful, sure, I'm not your mom." I said dryly, and she laughed lightly, eyes distant as if seeing the future. "We'll be taking a quick trip to the surface, and I'll leave the ship's robotic crew to inspect the ship and see if everything is in order."
Having eleven thousand robots made the task of running a ship two thirds of a kilometer in length rather simple.
I cracked my knuckles as I signaled for the bulkhead door to open, and I was going to take my sweet time getting to the vehicle bay where multiple craft sat waiting.
I was finally going to set foot on another planet outside the solar system, and that was going to be swell.
"Why are you skipping?" I flushed when Taylor called me out, bemused by my childish actions.
"No reason!"
I fled the scene in embarrassment, the seriousness utterly ruined.
August 2nd, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
It was a good thing I had told everyone to stay in their suits, because even under the suit I could feel the additional weight of the atmosphere at 3.2 times the pressure of Earth, though the gravity was a touch lighter here. The Rachni of course didn't care because they could survive a hard vacuum for much longer than a squishy human could. As well as acid rain, low gravity, low oxygen, burning sulphuric death…
The oxygen percentage was 16% but the partial pressure was greater than even the Carboniferous at its peak. I hopped without a care in the world though, looking out to the vast plains of purple-black vegetation out for miles and miles. Most of them consisted of tube-like plants, coated in a foamy shell structure. There were sparse trees, large wispy things about ten meters high and with fractal branches and leaves.
I think I remember this one…most animals and plants had some type of layer of organic matter, sort of like bone mixed with keratin to bounce deadly radiation with a second layer of gel sacks infused with graphite to bounce more radiation. It was very much like the same mechanism in Turians and even still they needed a robust genetic repair system and immune system response to survive.
I was outside while everyone else was indoors getting shown around by the Rachni, on the world over fifty thousand individuals called home. The light from the massive red orb in the sky wasn't bright, but there was strong heat in the air, the infrared light being the source.
Something large flew overhead, the vast and terrifying shadow of the largest flying creature I had seen in my life. It's chitinous wings were over sixty feet from tip to tip, a forelimb bipedal organism. The creature was decidedly unique, with archosaurian, arthropodal, and mammalian traits mixed together.
It had two pairs of segmented limbs bunched against dense purple fur with radiation blocking properties, the rear pair had killing claws, while the middle pair had four dexterous grasping fingers on each arm. Like a little Puss Moth and a Quetzalcoatlus has been turned into paint and repainted into an alien beast.
The neck extended out for about half the length of the body, and it landed gracefully on a one toed wing-arm-leg. The beak split into spiked mandibles for chewing and crushing and slicing food, and I kept my hand on a gun just in case.
Of course that didn't help much when it was 36 feet tall and weighed half a ton.
I had taken to calling it the Lavender Stymphalian Moth-Beast, because I had too much time on my hands for coming up with names for alien species. It liked eating things about my size and bigger, but it had learned to be wary of Rachni territory as they dug their tunnels for their colony. It was big and mean, and intelligent with this species being equal to corvids and great apes.
Even so I kept an eye on it or others of its kind, they weren't pack hunters, acting more like Tigers mixed with orangutans in behavior.
I stepped backwards, listening as the sun shifted ever so slightly within the Ring of Nikkal, the lopsided area between the Heart and the Freezing Dark, as the Rachni has come to call it. The burning orb of Proxima Centauri…a fine mist obscuring the light of life and death. Voices began to rise, only one at first, then a hundred then a million, hundreds of songs by mouths I had never seen or heard before but felt anyway because of what I was.
An echo of something long dead, whispers that burned into my mind in remembrance. Demanding respect, demanding attention and awe and fear and terror and love in both equal and unequal measure. The song of Nikkal was clear and something fell into place, rusted gears turning and spinning upwards, groaning violently and viciously.
When I opened my eyes I was no longer in that field, my body driven towards a room before shutting it behind me for isolation, following instinct and memory. I was no longer in that room either, and for the first time in weeks since I had started visiting the inner machinations of my soul, I wasn't alone.
But it wasn't a cranky old man I would get to meet this time. Instead it was a dark dressed figure, spinning and turning with streams of water following her graceful movements.
"Hello?" The woman turned around and I recognized her species in an instant. Reptilian features stared back at me, almost uncanny in how human they were, like another possible path to take. She had vibrant green skin, almost plated in some way with the strange…dark frill thing on her neck. Amber eyes blinked back at me, large lips twitching in what seemed like a bemused grin.
A black coat hid whatever she wore underneath, and I tilted my head at her.
"You're…I know you somehow." She hummed and that tickled a part of my brain, a memory trying to insert itself back into place. "Have we met before, before now at least?" I asked carefully and couldn't help but be mesmerized, there was an alien beauty to her, that much I could say.
"We have…the circumstances were not…the best." Her voice was like silk, warm almost despite the very light gurgling. But I caught an edge to it, a tiredness not from exhaustion but from a life that was harder than mine. "What I can tell you is that you wouldn't be alive if we hadn't stepped in."
Sometimes I'd almost prefer that to the endless terror…
The errant thought made me freeze, and that I had even thought of that was a little disconcerting. I took a breather, and then moved on…because I knew it wasn't a serious contemplation, like those weird compulsions to fall off high places that people got out of confused monkey brain instinct.
"You seem a lot nicer than that curmudgeonly old man." The guy obviously had a lot of experience but he was a bit of an ass.
"I doubt you would say such a thing if you knew the things my body has done in the name of the Hanar Primacy." I raised an eyebrow, a tidbit emerging from my sea of unsorted memories.
"Well it's a good thing it's your body that was the one doing so rather than you yourself." She didn't seem surprised and I took a seat on a solid ball of water, like a waterbed without the membrane. "Now who were you?" I asked politely, curious to see what the answer would be.
"I am Uyemu Leos, the last daughter of Rakhana. I am the source of the Depthless Waters." She gestured to the great palace of towering waterfalls, a great ocean, the last whisper of an old race. This place flooded with Power and Knowledge in equal measure. I could feel Veda turning her vast mind towards us, my own mind breaking into a thousand images, static and data interlacing between my fingers.
"Well I'm Basilia." It was the name I had picked out for myself at least, something close enough without being too similar. "I'm not really the last of anything so no fancy titles there."
"Are there not those who title you the Leviathan-killer?" I flushed.
"There are like a dozen people who could deserve that title, Flechette used Sting on his core after all and Taylor helped coordinate the fight when I…" I trailed off, indignation rising as I realized someone could actually answer me.
"You want to know why your power multiplied against Leviathan." She stated rather than asked, and I nodded fiercely. "It was a risky plan…because we couldn't allow you to die, and because we refused to let fate take its course."
"So what did you do?" I couldn't help but ask and she answered readily, the Waters drifting away into the landscape of the Firmament, red twinkling islands of multidimensional crystalline flesh. She gestured to myself, and I saw that my torso displayed the complex markings of Veda's basic shape.
"The Force that gave you your power, and released your potential made you for a purpose, and while I can't fathom the reasons I know enough about the machinery etching your core." Tendrils extended out from my spirit, attaching to hundreds upon hundreds of shards, and broadcasting into the void. "You offer another way, provided through the guise of their kind. They reach out to those who can process and organize, or to the Warrior-hub. You give to them of yourself, and they follow something new."
I think I had the basics, shards worked together, they shared power and resources, exchanged wells of power and stores of data and conflict. If I was an Administrator then it had to apply to me too…
"You diverted the power I was giving out to other shards back to me, charging my body with enough spiritual energy to not die. But it was never meant to work like that…I wasn't built to the standards to withstand that kind of unadulterated energy flow." I flashed back to that long dead Avatar who had held off a Reaper on foot with the power of the Avatar state.
The Avatar was a demi-god, at its peak the power to destroy a world was within their grasp. I didn't have anywhere near that power and it had still nearly torn me apart.
"That is not what you are for." She confirmed and I didn't ask what I was for, because I wasn't sure if it mattered. "You are not meant to be a war machine, not meant to be an avatar of vengeance against the Wyrms infesting this reality. That much I know…" I didn't nod, feeling anxious.
"So I'm being kept around because I'm useful is that it?" I replied hotly, something foul sinking into my chest, anger bubbling up.
She looked sad. "You're alive because we wanted to save you…you didn't deserve being killed by this world. My body has commited many terrible acts, I have committed many many terrible acts. But you have not, and we refused to let you die a meaningless death."
I…feel oddly comforted by the sentiment, that someone was willing to look out for me even against a monstrosity like an Endbringer.
"Will I ever need to do a repeat performance?" I asked quietly, wavering at the idea. The power had been intoxicating but the terror was far too costly, and I didn't like the idea of losing control like that again.
"Perhaps, but that would be a question to ask of oracles and void spirits rather than one of us." Fair enough then, I didn't have the ability to see the future so that made sense. I leaned back, narrowing my eyes as I prepared myself.
"Why now? Why wait all this time to talk with me?" I questioned her and she seemed to agree with me, doing her species equivalent of a nod.
"That was the time it took to give you space and the time to make sure our decision didn't have lasting consequences. You are whole and you are safe so the time for silence is over."
"How much do you know about the entity that made me this way?"
She shrugged. "Only that it gave us a decision to make, whether you would live or die. We chose life." Despite my misgivings, despite my fears and resentment and anger I didn't have it in me to hate the people residing within Veda's vast corpus.
"Can I find out more?"
She chuckled. "Isn't that why you built this ship, to find the answers out there instead of down here on your homeworld?"
Uyemu wasn't wrong, if there were answers on Earth in any dimension it would still need dimensional skipping to find. Something from the past had fallen down from the stars, the old ghost of the Makara couldn't be the only source and my gut told me there was so much out there, a story untold for billions of years.
I needed the resources for the end of the world, and a functional interstellar capable starship certainly brought that onto the table. A stable base outside Scion's range and with the infrastructure a more secure form of evacuation regardless of what Scion did.
"I guess I'll have to get to work then, I refuse to stay ignorant." Uyemu turned her head, and whispered.
"Then the time has come to learn something new." I looked above to find a second swirling gate, the door opening wide to release a deluge. I let out a tell as I was taken by the stream, flashes of memory not my known surging by my head as I spun out of control in the turbulent waters.
I was thrown out of the sea, race to race with a rusted bipedal machine some eighteen meters in height, twisted and half buried under disturbed soil. Looking up I found a long and cracked valley, the husk of a long needle vessel some two kilometers in length. I looked back at the river behind me, and yelped when I saw I wasn't so alone.
The creature had a long ovoid body with bright iridescent feathers, a bird-like creature with six toes and an articulated pair of arms, skin more leathery than scaly legs. It held a spear with a threatening pose, and when I blinked the great ruins were replaced by a cityscape around the corpse ship, a quaintly early industrial town, perhaps centuries after the ship had crashed on their world.
More time passed until towers reached hundreds of meters in height, tree-like buildings spread out across kilometers. Great metal ships rose on blasts of flame, and in the darkness of space they found more hulks, and from them learned principles of science lost for more than a thousand years.
They traversed their stare on their own needle ships, superconductive rods using strange electrical charges to generate foldings of space itself. They…they…
…!
I was sitting on the bed of the room I had locked myself in.
I exhaled tiredly.
August 2nd, 2011. 8:00PM
Basilia Rubio
We had returned home after about an hour and everything had been nominal, though I saw a need for some minor reinforcement of the armor and a few design changes I could now make.
I was outside my armor, wearing a plain white shirt and black gym shorts and being as comfortable as possible as I rubbed a pen on my nose, writing a few things down despite not needing paper anymore.
I stuck my tongue out, wetting my dry lips as I leaned forward.
"You're thinking about recruiting that tinker?" I jumped when Taylor emerged silently from the door I left open, leaning against the frame while crossing her arms.
"I have three tinkers already, but a fourth would be nice and you don't really have the time to do the same." Taylor had briefly opened up a tinker power but she didn't have the time so it had been dialed back to nothing, leaving only a limited Thinker power relating to certain principles of science.
Even so apparently she developed her own aptitude for science, taking online courses once she had finished up school early. She was a good programmer and coder, better than anyone who wasn't a master of the craft or a Tinker.
"Have you ever asked Dinah about how big the White Lotus could become?" I frowned and shook my head.
"24 capes is already more than the Protectorate, and I'm not really in the mood for that sense of impending doom of having that many capes already." I groused.
"Hmm…and have you thought about the idea of attending your accelerated courses on campus?" She changed the subject and I perked up at a more mundane topic.
"Chambers talked about that, said it might be a good idea to get more of a life outside of my work. Talk to more people, stuff like that." I waved my hand up and down, not disagreeing with the advice. "I've gone through a few and frankly I'll probably have a Bachelor's as Basilia quite quickly."
She smiled. "I think it would be good for you…and I'm starting class too, since I have the money for it…" She trailed off, and I felt just a little happy at the thought of attending college with her. "There's a lot of work to do, but we can take our time and take a break."
Funny hearing that from Skitter but then…she really wasn't the same person was she?
"We'll have to be as ready as possible for future arrivals, with the current vacuum we might have a second Boston Games on our hands." We had preemptively taken Orchard down for that reason, but there were other groups out there.
The Slaughterhouse 9 wouldn't be showing but we didn't have a guarantee, and hadn't yet refined the question to avoid the tricks possible through our wording of the question.
The Voyagers had made enemies of the Yangban, and the White Lotus had made enemies of the Fallen by slaying one of their gods. Parahumans followed conflict, it was simply a part of who they were, with only certain exceptions due to their shards or due to being subsumed by Amenthes. We would have to be ready, because this world wasn't one for holding back.
I would have to try my best because it would require no less.
August 2nd, 2011. 11:30AM
Basilia Rubio
I waited patiently for Sveta to calm down, her tendrils lashing out in anger, and raking through solid metal in the process. I rubbed the tiredness from my eyes, holding back a yawn due to my lack of sleep.
I had dreamt I was being drowned…so I wasn't at my best.
"Cauldron was the one who did this to me?" She reversed her unraveling, control returning to her as Victoria placed a hand on her shoulder.
"Yes. They are responsible for your condition, for the appearance of other Case 53s. They're responsible for hurting a lot of people and for a lot of shitty things, just as much as they're somehow keeping the world from collapsing into complete anarchy." Revulsion hit me at the admission, Cauldron was confusing, the things they had done were monstrous yet they were trying to save the world.
I didn't hate them, but neither did I find them worthy as heroes…but that was the point wasn't it? They weren't heroes, simply people scrambling to stop the end against an enemy that had known victory for longer than the human race had existed.
Maybe things would have been different if Hero still lived, but that wasn't the world we lived in.
"How many Case 53s know about this?" Sveta spoke weakly and I sagged…
"If they're on the team they know, if they're not…I have a presentation I'm setting up." I wasn't joking, eventually they would know or figure it out and eventually something would screw us over. The PRT was a mess internally, and cleaning that up was going to be a priority before something else revealed the global spanning semi-evil conspiracy.
"How long have you known?"
"Since I got thrown across universes." I revealed.
Her expression twisted, glaring at the vials being placed under a microscope.
"If you knew what they were…why did you ally with them?"
I bristled at the Sveta's comment.
"We're not allies, on the side of not going extinct sure…but trustworthy allies no." I was turning my head, grimacing. "I don't have the power to really stop them without their organization's death throes causing everything to fall apart, and I'm doubtful I'm completely immune to their ace capes. To be frank these vials were completely unsolicited, and I'm not even sure if I can wipe them out."
Sveta glanced intently "R-Really?"
I grimaced and nodded "Cauldron has a cape among them whose power is literally to win, to walk a path to victory." I scratched my neck, curling my fingers as I sagged into my seat in no armor. "They've been doing this for thirty years, and they've been…hardened to the atrocities they've committed for the survival of the human race. I don't condone them, but I don't have the power to punish them without punishing people who don't deserve it."
I hated it but Cauldron was vital in keeping the old machine running, but it wasn't running at the best or with the most effectiveness because PtV is not a perfect power. You had to ask the right questions, have enough resources and support, and manage to navigate past the casualty interference between other future sight shards.
You had Scion doing his mopey bullshit, had the Simurgh screwing the hell out of her power with every single Trigger event creating a new variable screwing over the steps. The Entities have their cycle down pat even in a broken one.
Sveta had moved to the art wall in the room we were using to talk, an arm unfolding to paint pretty and soft complex patterns in many colors. Scrap fell with the sound of screeching metal, and Sveta flinched.
"Sorry, I just…don't understand." She curled up and Victoria placed an arm on her shoulder, one of the few capable of withstanding her limbs without augmentation.
"That's pretty fair, it's not everyday when someone tells you they know a lot of secrets they really shouldn't." I leaned back, lip quivering as I stayed calm. "Removing Cauldron is impossible with current means, so the next best thing was trying to help the people they hurt to the best of my ability. I was lucky that I could work with Panacea to at least give you guys human forms."
"So you can't expose them because it'll cause chaos on Bet and you can't make them face justice because it would be even worse?" Sveta asked slowly, looking unsure of herself.
"It's…a conundrum I really don't like at all." I said with an added shrug. "I don't really care about Cauldron as people, because well…they're monsters, even if monsters with understandable reasons. They could have done things better, but they were too flawed as people and went through too many setbacks to even consider a kinder way."
"Are you trying to defend them…?" I shuddered at her question.
"Reasons aren't a defense, not unless they involve Mastering or incredibly specific scenarios." In the particular case I was speaking of anyway. "They did terrible things, and didn't bother with the right paths and the right actions because they aren't all knowledgeable gods. But…"
It didn't make anything they did okay, it didn't make giving up on what made them human okay.
"I…think I need a moment. Sorry." I shook my head at Sveta. The former Case 53 gestured and Vicky hesitantly moved away from the poor girl.
"Don't be sorry, you shouldn't have to be sorry for something like this." I turned around to march out of the door, rubbing my face to straighten out the wrinkles that were surely forming from the stress.
Vicky hovered around me as we shut the door behind Sveta as she furiously started to draw using her powers. We didn't speak, the blonde equally sullen and far less energetic than usual. It made me a little nostalgic for when she was a lot more annoying and way too peppy.
Apparently telling a girl the world was ending tended to sap a bit of a person's energy. But she was a determined young woman, far more than I ever was as a person. She was certainly more likable than her sister, and she was…well growing up I guess.
"You want to talk about it?" She asked sincerely, her expression bright but tempered. She had changed a lot in the six months, and I imagined she would keep changing as the deadline got closer and closer. We had roughly two to three years based on Dinah's predictions, taking into account whatever new data the Eye of Fate had found.
"Not particularly, it's just a little stressful to have someone so…fragile on the team." I found a sink in a small lobby area in the base, one of many going unused. I cupped some water and lightly splashed it into my sweaty face, washing off with a towel.
Vicky looked amused at the statement. "Basilia, we're Parahumans. Most of us are going to be fragile in some way and you know that." I was going to object by saying I didn't count and then remembered I was going to therapy to treat likely mental and emotional trauma and stopped.
"It's just frustrating having to keep their mistakes from screwing up the world." I had gone through a lot of threads on PHO and other sites, and the PRT was a mess outside of certain spots and under competent directors. Piggot was competent enough but had biases and limited resources, Armstrong wasn't the best at PR due to his focus on research, and many of the directors were nasty pieces of work.
Strangely enough Tagg was one of the nicer directors out of the more dangerous lots, especially after taking a two week break and letting his deputy director take the reins. I don't think the guy was ever a Ziz bomb but I doubt murdering victims of her scream was going to leave him mentally well.
Hell his department was our biggest customers of the Tinkertech I was willing to sell, the anti-Master equipment I had managed to crib together from Rachni, Salarian, Asari and fragments of Prothean technology. They could detect very subtle abnormalities in brain patterns, which would include everything from subcellular nanomachines to manipulation of the brain with effectors.
For the Entities almost all of them took place through rather typical forces but they were applied through exotic means. It made them no less dangerous though, and distinct enough from more metaphysical methods of mind or mental manipulation.
Apparently the Rachni had developed a method of countering it, scrambling the signals with their own energy. Some application of chi control…I think? It was apparently easier than countering the more insidious Indoctrination of the Reapers, but the use of micro-portals was different enough to merit a new technique.
I sighed. "We had a few people helping with rebuilding other towns right?" I asked and Vicky delivered as she floated forwards as I marched.
"Charlotte helped clear debris from some of the water left behind by Leviathan, and my sister helped dry a lot of places and kept water damage from setting in even more. It's a lot less difficult since the towns close to Brockton Bay have a lot of benders of their own." I wordlessly reacted with a nod. "We…have a few capes asking about the chances of joining the White Lotus, but they don't want to move from their hometowns."
"What did they tell them…and you were there too weren't you?" I asked carefully, gripping my hair and twirling strands between my fingers.
"We managed to get about half of them to go to the Protectorate, and the other half still wants to join." I twitched visibly at that, wondering just how many capes were going to be in the White Lotus.
24 was a big number in one city though technically speaking Palanquin moved around a lot as needed and took contracts from cities to bring down villain groups in one or two quick sweeps. That many capes in a city was unnecessary…
But if we opened offices in other towns and cities, we would have room to grow.
"So what…four or five capes?"
"Six actually." I let out a huff and reached out to some smooth stones, distracting myself with some bending practice.
"I didn't really expect many capes being willing to join my team when I started this off. Taylor and I only became a team because I was lonely and because she did something stupid." Her counterpart had thought infiltrating a villain team with a Thinker on it was a good idea, and went full in on fighting an escalating dragon.
She was smart but intelligence didn't shield one from their own stupidity as much as one would hope. I doubt I was any different in that regard, because I wasn't special.
Not that I had a problem with that…usually anyway.
"You're a nice person who takes care of her own, it's hard to find that for a lot of Parahumans. Taylor is the same way if a little more…brusque about it, and the White Lotus has a mostly peaceful mission statement. That'll attract a few rogues on top of the less vicious independents." Vicky pointed it out, sticking out an index finger while her left hand brushed her blonde hair.
"Sometimes I forget you're a total nerd." She stuck her tongue out at me, and I relaxed. "You're probably one of the people among us with the best knowledge on powers outside of myself, Taylor, Elle, and your sister." Especially since her shard was the most fit for cooperation due to its love for her.
She preened. "Thanks." I rolled my eyes and continued walking.
It was easy to note the relationship between Vicky and her shard from how Fragile One acted with her, and the barrier between shard and host was…narrow in their case. It made sense though because of the relative youth of the tiny little shard.
Taylor was close with Queen but her shard was one of the biggest and baddest there were, and had been though likely thousands of cycles. There was a degree of separation there, because there had to be. There were exceptions of course, like the Demesnes-Keeper and Elle due to her ability to communicate with him in new ways.
Amelia had hated Shaper for a good while and it had taken a lot of pushing to get her to use her power more. Even so she had required adding mental switches so her power wouldn't be on all the time and tempting her. Cauldron capes had somewhat friendly shards due to minor damage from the crash and dismantling of Eden, and it was…
Only young shards had good or close relationships, because they weren't polluted by the end of a cycle and the callousness of millions of former hosts within their corpus. Which made me question what had happened to those hosts, had they been absorbed into the spiritual mass of a shard, moved on to the hereafter and left a mere data imprint or were they still there?
I didn't always like the questions I had to ask, but there wasn't much I could on that front. Asking uncomfortable questions was what I did best.
I was getting closer to figuring out how to create powers, but I needed time and resources and lots of help to succeed. Shard powers were the only ones I could likely replicate barring the manipulation of the soul and that was a science one had to be careful with.
The only example I had was what I had done to jumpstart Taylor's soul, and that was likely a limited or even one-time resource.
I was going to need to have another talk with Veda, and maybe some with Balaam too. Then I remembered that it was time.
Let's see the ship I had spent months of my life on, and see where we can go from there.
___
August 2nd, 2011. 2:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I glanced all around me, lips curling smugly as I examined the bridge. I was at the rear, taking from the Turian way of things. At the moment most of the bridge was empty, with the only people 'manning' the ship being myself, numerous AI, a few borrowed Rachni soldiers and Anansi and some of my team.
I had allowed a suit from Dragon to join us mostly to provide some oversight, and because I just wanted to show off. She had the other end of a QEC relay which actually worked by quantum entanglement through fifth and sixth dimensional space. That was quite literally the only way that shit worked because quantum entanglement didn't work that way. Anyway…
The drive core of the ship had been tested with a mass simulator, and every system was double, triple, quadruple and quintuple checked beforehand.
"So you're recording this right?" I asked Dragon as I lazily leaned back, and the artificial intelligence made the suit nod. "Then it should be time to start off the maiden voyage of…" I paused, eyebrows furrowing as I realized I had never given this beautiful armed exploration vessel a—
"You never gave the ship a name." Taylor reminded me, the wings from her organic suit fluttering as a few insects orbited around her, including her Noble bugs, the larger more intelligent insects she used to relay commands and signals.
"What should I name it then?" I called out to the people onboard, which consisted of the Dallon sisters, Taylor, Charlotte and Grace. Everyone else except Elle were on the surface of Earth Lotus, while we were parked behind Deimos. She was on the small asteroid moon, due to her sensing of dimensional effects.
"You built it, you name it." Grace bluntly said, her voice distorted by her armored helmet. I shut my eyes as I thought about why I had gone all out with a ship this advanced, this culmination of every technology I had either been given as ideas in my head or taken through scanning.
This ship was built to traverse the void between stars, to go farther than any human I knew about. It was a rebirth of technology long forgotten, and technology from the cycle of the Void Wyrms, of the Entities.
Cycle.
This ship was a wanderer of the stars, a wanderer of other realities even with the dimensional skipping implemented into the HECATE drive. A million tons of metal, plastic and composite and the thrum of dark energy and dimensional twisting was clear.
I cleared my throat, and gestured for Charlotte to take the pilot's seat. While the ship did most of the work, a little human feedback wasn't bad. Dragon found her own seat though she wasn't connected to the ship's systems because that was a terrible idea for cybersecurity until I could trust her more. Which was why machine spirits swirled around her, for multiple purposes. Though really the biggest defense was that the suit was merely a mobile communication device.
"This is the maiden voyage of the exploration cruiser Samsara." I flushed when the people in the room glanced over to me. "All systems are green, and the ship should take off in…" Charlotte flicked a few holographic interfaces, and she wore a space rated helmet herself like everyone else on board. The Rachni crooned, commanded by Anansi to take a few consoles for themselves for a moment.
The ship activated its engines, inertial confinement keeping the dozens of Gs of acceleration from the drive core from affecting us. It looked very much like a larger version of the Normandy SR2 bridge, with a JJ Abrams Star Trek glow. There were viewscreens depicting space, though we were under dozens of meters of ship so there wasn't much to see in that department without them.
"Initiating FTL field geometries." Dark energy flooded into reality, erupting as the ship took off, with a lag of a tenth of a second…the ship said jump and reality said how high.
Space-time screamed as we surpassed the speed of light, breaking a fundamental law of reality with the flick of a switch. The screens simulated the stars turning white before it was displaced by darkness, and I directed us towards Alpha Centauri.
It took us minutes to get up to speed, and we sat at the current speed limit of conventional mass effect field geometries. Dragon was acting twitchy but she seemed otherwise fine, and she spoke up.
"How…fast are we going?" I would have shown her a cocky grin if I could.
"About 7500 cee, we're at about the limits of the current field geometry for Mass Effect based FTL. But the Samsara hasn't reached her limit just yet." I nodded at Charlotte and she flicked a few more buttons.
"Transitioning to Alcubierre-like Spatial Waveform." An AI replied excitedly and more power was pumped into the highly efficient drive core. Waveguides directed tendrils of dark energy, space warped by the generation of both gravity and dimensional tweaks. In tens of seconds we rocketed past ten thousand cee, and in that moment I was grateful for the massive power output of the Samsara.
Otherwise this wouldn't be possible.
We passed twenty thousand times the speed of light, then in the same amount of time passed forty, the numbers ticking upwards as we pushed at the limits of my current understanding of bending space.
The ship was steady and from my perusing of the ship data, the dark energy field sensing and dimension sensing machines said everything was green even if the power output was a little terrifying.
"Waveform stabilizing at maximum cruise velocity." The ship added cheerfully, and I could tell Dragon was still curious even through her suit, though it didn't translate as well due to the limit's of the QEC relay. It only transmitted visual data and limited feedback for piloting the thing.
"Which means we've hit ninety thousand times the speed of light boys and girls." I gestured mostly to Anansi since we had…only a few men, most of them coming from the teams we recruited. Out of twenty three capes, six of them were men and the rest were women. To balance that out we would need eleven more guys, to make a team of thirty four.
Which would probably be more comparable to the larger cape teams in more stable cities. New York for example had nearly a thousand capes, with a single Wards team having around ten to twenty capes, and five teams in total from what I had heard.
"So this is what you took away from Vista's power?" Dragon asked through the heavy clumsy suit. "It's…well incredible."
"I've only implemented some of the math behind her power, because this form of travel was known to me already. Mainly I've used it to make the drive more efficient, since my attempts at dimensional manipulation are still rather clumsy." The Entities made use of their nature to ride on the gravity of heavy wells of mass, along with intense warpings of space to enter a hyper-FTL regime to cross to other galactic clusters.
That was way beyond anything we were capable of, anywhere from years to decades if not centuries away from figuring out. Honestly crossing the Spirit Roads would be easier than replicating the Entity method of hyper-FTL.
"It should be about twenty five minutes before we arrive at Proxima Centauri. We'll make a stop at Heryshaf and see how they're doing."
"Heryshaf?" Dragon asked from a world away, and I relaxed into my captain's chair.
"The hive of Euphonium Clef of the Boundless Shaping Melodies. She's the prime life manipulator of the Rachni Swarm. She's colonizing the entire Alpha Centauri since it has three habitable planets." They were hiking their reproduction rate right again, now that they had the room to spread out and ships to send their children on. Just under a hundred thousand Rachni were in the system, a fifth of the species though that percentage would diminish as the Rachni reproduced and more Queens were raised.
"Are all Rachni named after instruments?" Dragon questioned, perhaps a little dumbfounded at the idea.
"Rachni don't speak in the way we do, they communicate through the Ephemeral rather than the Material…connected across vast distances, so some of their concepts have to be translated to something we can understand." I readily explained to her as the ship continued moving, thrusters shifting us a bit while under gravitic influence.
"How vast…?" She really likes asking questions doesn't she?
"Instant communication between Rachni at even interstellar distances." Dragon went silent, and I took the time to twiddle my thumbs. The Parahumans among us were doing alright, their shards easily channeling powers through spiritual means. Though when I looked at Fragile One I saw something different…
Vicky's shield was flickering gold, and when I opened the World Eyes I saw that Fragile One was like a star in the ship's very new Spirit World. She was more solid, like concrete versus the thin glass of the shades of Shards. Almost like she had brought the entirety of her corpus with her…
The Fragile One brought a finger to a crack in her form where lips should be, radiating smugness. Spirits of light, of fire and heat and void hung around her, tiny wisps of power, shades of the world itself flitting about the new existence of the Samsara.
…
So Fragile One had compacted away her mountain sized body and hitched a ride on my ship. She was also swallowing up a spirit of void or two, with a good mix of light, fire, and a few concepts relating to strength and will. The fractal nature of a shard came through for her, making it easier to sort the appropriate spirits.
She was apparently a curious type and didn't much care for having to take off so far from the heart of the network. The few people on board chatted with each other, and I simply relaxed and kept an eye on the Fragile One.
She had obviously grown, her corpus shining brighter and space warping a bit more than before. When I had first met her she was probably about a city block or three in size, millions of tons of mass. Now…I'd put her at billions of tons though as a shard-spirit that meant effectively nothing. That gave her the needed energy to power fourteen dimensionally folded layers of hard-light, and increased the output for the flight segment of Vicky's power. She could probably go transonic, though it would take her…a while.
Her aura had been turned into a wide field, providing a precise sense of emotions, allowing her to find people in a sub-Thinker power. Of course she could also send a blast of different emotions…though she had kept it at awe and fear for obvious reasons. Actually going for her Fanon powers was not a good idea…at all.
Amy's attraction towards her had more to do with Carol being a terrible parent to all her kids, her isolation, her age when adopted and a tiny nudge from the aura. Add superpowers and you get delusional and overpowered biokinetic, plus a ton of stress from the Undersiders and then the Slaughterhouse 9 and subsequently spending two years in the Birdcage and then 'fixing' the problem she could have fixed years ago made her even nuttier.
There was a reason I was never going to read Ward…because the Red Queen was a fucking nightmare.
I shut my eyes for a bit, listening to the hum of the drive core, feeling the resonance of dark energy fields. Maybe it was a bad idea to focus too much on the actions of alternate versions of people you considered your friends. This world was different enough that I should really have stopped relying on metaknowledge for anything.
Not that I used it that much anymore…it was kind of useless now, outside of knowing a few important people along with a lot of nothing.
Charlotte moved something on the holographic screen hooked to an optotronic device and the drive core began to reduce power output, fields untwisting spacetime and dropping in velocity as we approached our target. The field geometry went from the Positive Gravity metric to the Mass Effect metric and the ship slowed down.
It took us less than a minute to enter a sub-light regime, but that still meant we were going a small fraction of C. Anansi lifted his head, mandibles shivering.
"The Rachni have given you permission to dock." I nodded and the screens showed us what it would have looked like if the bridge wasn't dozens of meters deep into the vessel. Multiple ships buzzed about, sleek vessels that looked very vaguely insect-like. The organic sleekness was interesting but little more than that.
Another space station hung in orbit like a living hive, buzzed around mostly by small and heavy patrol boats. Cutters and corvettes effectively. There were well over a hundred cutters in this system, and the scanner put the size of these at about thirty to fifty meters at the largest and built more for interception against civilian ships.
The Corvettes were larger at about sixty to a hundred meters at their largest and thus numbered maybe about twenty five. Their weapons were just heavy enough to threaten a frigate if they grouped together. A few were obviously brought from other systems, and the real number was likely about thirty two Cutters and eight Corvettes per system.
About two hundred eighty vessels, a hefty amount until you realize my one cruiser has more Eezo than all of them combined. And that most of them were maybe twice the length of a Kodiak.
A Destroyer escorted us, maybe half our length and a tenth of our mass with plasma exhaust behind it as it flew. We slowed our velocity, clamps coming down to hold us in place. The planet was more visible from this angle, a large planet about 40% more massive than the Earth and the first world from the star.
It was in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance like Mercury, so it would rotate on its axis every week and twenty two days would elapse between sunrise and sunset. It had a wider band of areas suitable life around the equator, and a powerful magnetic field to deflect solar wind. The forests were fields of black and dark purple, with the waters seen even from here. It had an eccentric orbit and a dense atmosphere and that combined to place less than a third of the planet in eternal darkness.
Funny thing was the surface gravity was lower because much of the additional mass was made up of light mantle rock. It was a layered cat's eye, with its pupil being a Pacific sized expanse of dense humid jungle and desert in areas conducive to their formation. Beyond that was a colder but larger area, an uneven ring experiencing something like a day and night cycle. About as warm as Earth rather than the forty to sixty C temperatures of the Heart.
The ship was stopped, and I could see that Dragon was getting a little twitchy.
"We'll be switching to comm buoy, you should be able to send a projection easily enough." The robot was shut down and a hologram popped up, letting me see that Dragon was in her gynoid body. "Dragon, I welcome you to Nikkal." I bowed slightly, unable to keep a stupid grin off my face. "We're forty trillion one hundred forty three billion and twenty three million kilometers from Earth."
"I believe I've been left behind a bit haven't I?" Dragon expressed distinct amusement. "I'm getting quite a few ideas of my own, you wouldn't mind if I was inspired would you?"
"As long as you don't directly take my tech you're good and as long as you're careful, sure, I'm not your mom." I said dryly, and she laughed lightly, eyes distant as if seeing the future. "We'll be taking a quick trip to the surface, and I'll leave the ship's robotic crew to inspect the ship and see if everything is in order."
Having eleven thousand robots made the task of running a ship two thirds of a kilometer in length rather simple.
I cracked my knuckles as I signaled for the bulkhead door to open, and I was going to take my sweet time getting to the vehicle bay where multiple craft sat waiting.
I was finally going to set foot on another planet outside the solar system, and that was going to be swell.
"Why are you skipping?" I flushed when Taylor called me out, bemused by my childish actions.
"No reason!"
I fled the scene in embarrassment, the seriousness utterly ruined.
___
August 2nd, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
It was a good thing I had told everyone to stay in their suits, because even under the suit I could feel the additional weight of the atmosphere at 3.2 times the pressure of Earth, though the gravity was a touch lighter here. The Rachni of course didn't care because they could survive a hard vacuum for much longer than a squishy human could. As well as acid rain, low gravity, low oxygen, burning sulphuric death…
The oxygen percentage was 16% but the partial pressure was greater than even the Carboniferous at its peak. I hopped without a care in the world though, looking out to the vast plains of purple-black vegetation out for miles and miles. Most of them consisted of tube-like plants, coated in a foamy shell structure. There were sparse trees, large wispy things about ten meters high and with fractal branches and leaves.
I think I remember this one…most animals and plants had some type of layer of organic matter, sort of like bone mixed with keratin to bounce deadly radiation with a second layer of gel sacks infused with graphite to bounce more radiation. It was very much like the same mechanism in Turians and even still they needed a robust genetic repair system and immune system response to survive.
I was outside while everyone else was indoors getting shown around by the Rachni, on the world over fifty thousand individuals called home. The light from the massive red orb in the sky wasn't bright, but there was strong heat in the air, the infrared light being the source.
Something large flew overhead, the vast and terrifying shadow of the largest flying creature I had seen in my life. It's chitinous wings were over sixty feet from tip to tip, a forelimb bipedal organism. The creature was decidedly unique, with archosaurian, arthropodal, and mammalian traits mixed together.
It had two pairs of segmented limbs bunched against dense purple fur with radiation blocking properties, the rear pair had killing claws, while the middle pair had four dexterous grasping fingers on each arm. Like a little Puss Moth and a Quetzalcoatlus has been turned into paint and repainted into an alien beast.
The neck extended out for about half the length of the body, and it landed gracefully on a one toed wing-arm-leg. The beak split into spiked mandibles for chewing and crushing and slicing food, and I kept my hand on a gun just in case.
Of course that didn't help much when it was 36 feet tall and weighed half a ton.
I had taken to calling it the Lavender Stymphalian Moth-Beast, because I had too much time on my hands for coming up with names for alien species. It liked eating things about my size and bigger, but it had learned to be wary of Rachni territory as they dug their tunnels for their colony. It was big and mean, and intelligent with this species being equal to corvids and great apes.
Even so I kept an eye on it or others of its kind, they weren't pack hunters, acting more like Tigers mixed with orangutans in behavior.
I stepped backwards, listening as the sun shifted ever so slightly within the Ring of Nikkal, the lopsided area between the Heart and the Freezing Dark, as the Rachni has come to call it. The burning orb of Proxima Centauri…a fine mist obscuring the light of life and death. Voices began to rise, only one at first, then a hundred then a million, hundreds of songs by mouths I had never seen or heard before but felt anyway because of what I was.
An echo of something long dead, whispers that burned into my mind in remembrance. Demanding respect, demanding attention and awe and fear and terror and love in both equal and unequal measure. The song of Nikkal was clear and something fell into place, rusted gears turning and spinning upwards, groaning violently and viciously.
When I opened my eyes I was no longer in that field, my body driven towards a room before shutting it behind me for isolation, following instinct and memory. I was no longer in that room either, and for the first time in weeks since I had started visiting the inner machinations of my soul, I wasn't alone.
But it wasn't a cranky old man I would get to meet this time. Instead it was a dark dressed figure, spinning and turning with streams of water following her graceful movements.
"Hello?" The woman turned around and I recognized her species in an instant. Reptilian features stared back at me, almost uncanny in how human they were, like another possible path to take. She had vibrant green skin, almost plated in some way with the strange…dark frill thing on her neck. Amber eyes blinked back at me, large lips twitching in what seemed like a bemused grin.
A black coat hid whatever she wore underneath, and I tilted my head at her.
"You're…I know you somehow." She hummed and that tickled a part of my brain, a memory trying to insert itself back into place. "Have we met before, before now at least?" I asked carefully and couldn't help but be mesmerized, there was an alien beauty to her, that much I could say.
"We have…the circumstances were not…the best." Her voice was like silk, warm almost despite the very light gurgling. But I caught an edge to it, a tiredness not from exhaustion but from a life that was harder than mine. "What I can tell you is that you wouldn't be alive if we hadn't stepped in."
Sometimes I'd almost prefer that to the endless terror…
The errant thought made me freeze, and that I had even thought of that was a little disconcerting. I took a breather, and then moved on…because I knew it wasn't a serious contemplation, like those weird compulsions to fall off high places that people got out of confused monkey brain instinct.
"You seem a lot nicer than that curmudgeonly old man." The guy obviously had a lot of experience but he was a bit of an ass.
"I doubt you would say such a thing if you knew the things my body has done in the name of the Hanar Primacy." I raised an eyebrow, a tidbit emerging from my sea of unsorted memories.
"Well it's a good thing it's your body that was the one doing so rather than you yourself." She didn't seem surprised and I took a seat on a solid ball of water, like a waterbed without the membrane. "Now who were you?" I asked politely, curious to see what the answer would be.
"I am Uyemu Leos, the last daughter of Rakhana. I am the source of the Depthless Waters." She gestured to the great palace of towering waterfalls, a great ocean, the last whisper of an old race. This place flooded with Power and Knowledge in equal measure. I could feel Veda turning her vast mind towards us, my own mind breaking into a thousand images, static and data interlacing between my fingers.
"Well I'm Basilia." It was the name I had picked out for myself at least, something close enough without being too similar. "I'm not really the last of anything so no fancy titles there."
"Are there not those who title you the Leviathan-killer?" I flushed.
"There are like a dozen people who could deserve that title, Flechette used Sting on his core after all and Taylor helped coordinate the fight when I…" I trailed off, indignation rising as I realized someone could actually answer me.
"You want to know why your power multiplied against Leviathan." She stated rather than asked, and I nodded fiercely. "It was a risky plan…because we couldn't allow you to die, and because we refused to let fate take its course."
"So what did you do?" I couldn't help but ask and she answered readily, the Waters drifting away into the landscape of the Firmament, red twinkling islands of multidimensional crystalline flesh. She gestured to myself, and I saw that my torso displayed the complex markings of Veda's basic shape.
"The Force that gave you your power, and released your potential made you for a purpose, and while I can't fathom the reasons I know enough about the machinery etching your core." Tendrils extended out from my spirit, attaching to hundreds upon hundreds of shards, and broadcasting into the void. "You offer another way, provided through the guise of their kind. They reach out to those who can process and organize, or to the Warrior-hub. You give to them of yourself, and they follow something new."
I think I had the basics, shards worked together, they shared power and resources, exchanged wells of power and stores of data and conflict. If I was an Administrator then it had to apply to me too…
"You diverted the power I was giving out to other shards back to me, charging my body with enough spiritual energy to not die. But it was never meant to work like that…I wasn't built to the standards to withstand that kind of unadulterated energy flow." I flashed back to that long dead Avatar who had held off a Reaper on foot with the power of the Avatar state.
The Avatar was a demi-god, at its peak the power to destroy a world was within their grasp. I didn't have anywhere near that power and it had still nearly torn me apart.
"That is not what you are for." She confirmed and I didn't ask what I was for, because I wasn't sure if it mattered. "You are not meant to be a war machine, not meant to be an avatar of vengeance against the Wyrms infesting this reality. That much I know…" I didn't nod, feeling anxious.
"So I'm being kept around because I'm useful is that it?" I replied hotly, something foul sinking into my chest, anger bubbling up.
She looked sad. "You're alive because we wanted to save you…you didn't deserve being killed by this world. My body has commited many terrible acts, I have committed many many terrible acts. But you have not, and we refused to let you die a meaningless death."
I…feel oddly comforted by the sentiment, that someone was willing to look out for me even against a monstrosity like an Endbringer.
"Will I ever need to do a repeat performance?" I asked quietly, wavering at the idea. The power had been intoxicating but the terror was far too costly, and I didn't like the idea of losing control like that again.
"Perhaps, but that would be a question to ask of oracles and void spirits rather than one of us." Fair enough then, I didn't have the ability to see the future so that made sense. I leaned back, narrowing my eyes as I prepared myself.
"Why now? Why wait all this time to talk with me?" I questioned her and she seemed to agree with me, doing her species equivalent of a nod.
"That was the time it took to give you space and the time to make sure our decision didn't have lasting consequences. You are whole and you are safe so the time for silence is over."
"How much do you know about the entity that made me this way?"
She shrugged. "Only that it gave us a decision to make, whether you would live or die. We chose life." Despite my misgivings, despite my fears and resentment and anger I didn't have it in me to hate the people residing within Veda's vast corpus.
"Can I find out more?"
She chuckled. "Isn't that why you built this ship, to find the answers out there instead of down here on your homeworld?"
Uyemu wasn't wrong, if there were answers on Earth in any dimension it would still need dimensional skipping to find. Something from the past had fallen down from the stars, the old ghost of the Makara couldn't be the only source and my gut told me there was so much out there, a story untold for billions of years.
I needed the resources for the end of the world, and a functional interstellar capable starship certainly brought that onto the table. A stable base outside Scion's range and with the infrastructure a more secure form of evacuation regardless of what Scion did.
"I guess I'll have to get to work then, I refuse to stay ignorant." Uyemu turned her head, and whispered.
"Then the time has come to learn something new." I looked above to find a second swirling gate, the door opening wide to release a deluge. I let out a tell as I was taken by the stream, flashes of memory not my known surging by my head as I spun out of control in the turbulent waters.
I was thrown out of the sea, race to race with a rusted bipedal machine some eighteen meters in height, twisted and half buried under disturbed soil. Looking up I found a long and cracked valley, the husk of a long needle vessel some two kilometers in length. I looked back at the river behind me, and yelped when I saw I wasn't so alone.
The creature had a long ovoid body with bright iridescent feathers, a bird-like creature with six toes and an articulated pair of arms, skin more leathery than scaly legs. It held a spear with a threatening pose, and when I blinked the great ruins were replaced by a cityscape around the corpse ship, a quaintly early industrial town, perhaps centuries after the ship had crashed on their world.
More time passed until towers reached hundreds of meters in height, tree-like buildings spread out across kilometers. Great metal ships rose on blasts of flame, and in the darkness of space they found more hulks, and from them learned principles of science lost for more than a thousand years.
They traversed their stare on their own needle ships, superconductive rods using strange electrical charges to generate foldings of space itself. They…they…
…!
I was sitting on the bed of the room I had locked myself in.
I exhaled tiredly.
___
August 2nd, 2011. 8:00PM
Basilia Rubio
We had returned home after about an hour and everything had been nominal, though I saw a need for some minor reinforcement of the armor and a few design changes I could now make.
I was outside my armor, wearing a plain white shirt and black gym shorts and being as comfortable as possible as I rubbed a pen on my nose, writing a few things down despite not needing paper anymore.
I stuck my tongue out, wetting my dry lips as I leaned forward.
"You're thinking about recruiting that tinker?" I jumped when Taylor emerged silently from the door I left open, leaning against the frame while crossing her arms.
"I have three tinkers already, but a fourth would be nice and you don't really have the time to do the same." Taylor had briefly opened up a tinker power but she didn't have the time so it had been dialed back to nothing, leaving only a limited Thinker power relating to certain principles of science.
Even so apparently she developed her own aptitude for science, taking online courses once she had finished up school early. She was a good programmer and coder, better than anyone who wasn't a master of the craft or a Tinker.
"Have you ever asked Dinah about how big the White Lotus could become?" I frowned and shook my head.
"24 capes is already more than the Protectorate, and I'm not really in the mood for that sense of impending doom of having that many capes already." I groused.
"Hmm…and have you thought about the idea of attending your accelerated courses on campus?" She changed the subject and I perked up at a more mundane topic.
"Chambers talked about that, said it might be a good idea to get more of a life outside of my work. Talk to more people, stuff like that." I waved my hand up and down, not disagreeing with the advice. "I've gone through a few and frankly I'll probably have a Bachelor's as Basilia quite quickly."
She smiled. "I think it would be good for you…and I'm starting class too, since I have the money for it…" She trailed off, and I felt just a little happy at the thought of attending college with her. "There's a lot of work to do, but we can take our time and take a break."
Funny hearing that from Skitter but then…she really wasn't the same person was she?
"We'll have to be as ready as possible for future arrivals, with the current vacuum we might have a second Boston Games on our hands." We had preemptively taken Orchard down for that reason, but there were other groups out there.
The Slaughterhouse 9 wouldn't be showing but we didn't have a guarantee, and hadn't yet refined the question to avoid the tricks possible through our wording of the question.
The Voyagers had made enemies of the Yangban, and the White Lotus had made enemies of the Fallen by slaying one of their gods. Parahumans followed conflict, it was simply a part of who they were, with only certain exceptions due to their shards or due to being subsumed by Amenthes. We would have to be ready, because this world wasn't one for holding back.
I would have to try my best because it would require no less.
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- Location
- Under Leviathan's left foot
I really had a hard time keeping track of who was speaking. eg:
Basilia speaks and Sveta reacts mashed together.
Sveta speaks and Basilia reacts mashed together, confusing who's who.
I wondered why Basilia would say this, then I realized she didn't. It was just two different peoples' dialogue and reactions mashed together again.
Basilia speaks and Sveta reacts mashed together.
Sveta speaks and Basilia reacts mashed together, confusing who's who.
I wondered why Basilia would say this, then I realized she didn't. It was just two different peoples' dialogue and reactions mashed together again.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Thanks for that. It's hard to catch mistakes since I don't have a Beta to check. I think I managed to fix it at least a bit.
One more chapter until the name for the new tech tree is revealed!
- Location
- Chula Vista
Are you including or excluding an Interlude in that one? Eight main chapters is about the limit nowadays since that one arc with eleven dragged on far too long.
I am working on the Interlude though.
???????
I am merely noting that the new gate was opened, and Basilia recognized the species, but no name was given in the narrative, so I assumed the name would appear in the next update.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Okay. I suppose that makes sense, I got a little confused there. Though yeah the species name will show up soon enough.
Hey, I've just wanted to say that I like the story so far, but one thing I recommend is adding a more comprehensive summary to the first post, talking about SI and his abilities as well as how multicross elements will work.
I'm assuming that many others like me skipped reading your fic for a long while since they didn't really have any idea what they would be getting into, especially with the high word count. Would be really nice to have a paragraph or two giving a detailed summary, even if it is in spoiler tags.
I'm assuming that many others like me skipped reading your fic for a long while since they didn't really have any idea what they would be getting into, especially with the high word count. Would be really nice to have a paragraph or two giving a detailed summary, even if it is in spoiler tags.
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- Location
- Chula Vista
I can't confirm that, but I can say that on the scale of billions upon billions of years of deep time, gods rise and fall all the time. And in the cosmology that Basilia finds herself involved with…this has gone on for a long, long, long time. She's a minnow in a vast cosmic ocean, and she'll have to learn to deal with that.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Oh she's been laying low, mostly to keep the Slaughterhouse 9 off her back due to escaping. She was mostly relevant in the sense of Basilia not wanting her to die a horrible, horrible death. She might show up again, but I can't make any promises.
Windborne
Devourer of Stories
- Location
- Oregon
That's a bit sad to hear, if only because she's so cheesy (pun fully intended). She could add a lot of levity to the story and I personally would love that.