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

[AEM]

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.

Click to shrink...

I suppose so? Though one issue is how little is actually known about her character besides being a jokester. Plus humor isn't my strong suit unless I spend a fair bit of time working on it. So for now she'll be doing her own thing in some other city.

 

[Windborne]

I suppose so? Though one issue is how little is actually known about her character besides being a jokester. Plus humor isn't my strong suit unless I spend a fair bit of time working on it. So for now she'll be doing her own thing in some other city.

Click to shrink...

Well since I personally suck at writing creatively at all, I can't complain. Still if you do bring her back in all her hammy glory I wouldn't be upset.

 

[AEM]

Discernment 10.b

August 6th, 2011. 3:15AM

Hero walked and his shard walked with him, a path forming as it whispered in his ear, guiding a soul not meant to move on into the hereafter. He had been getting a few glimpses here and there, but he couldn't stay for long because his soul wasn't meant to be fit into a computer, at least not without the right rites and rituals and procedures. Not without the right Form.

His memory was pretty spotty, and recalling his death was only possible because of the bond between shard and host. Otherwise there would be no memory of his death, only of his life…and even that would slip between his fingers.

But his soul remembered who he was at his core, far more deeply than even his shard did. He remembered flashes of a great golden sea, the Sea of Souls, the surf made not of water but of the great mass of countless souls, hundreds of billions of lives of men and women. The machinery of incarnation, gears turning to a purpose beyond him.

Spirits lingered around him, drawn to the power of the Void Wyrm shard known as Quiescence, the result of Lamda splitting a great fragment of its corpus to return his power to him. They whispered and he had a slightly easier time hearing them because of the nature of where he had been.

But he was no shaman.

"So where are you taking me? Hot springs for shards?" Quiescence shuddered and Clarke cracked a grin at the spirit's dismay. The shard-spirit was a vast creature, even the fragment accompanying the soul bereft of flesh was several stories tall.

It took an inhuman form, only barely acceding to some of the trappings of humanity. Waves of energy weaved into interlocking plates, a golden shell with jagged lines of red along the seams. A triangular head sat atop a long torso shimmering away into a roiling red cloud. A dozen tentacular limbs waved, scaring away scurrying insect-spirits and the spirits of animals yet unseen by humanity.

You speak nonsense and madness host.

Clarke rolled his eyes as they walked in the Outer Sphere, the Quiescence folding the spirit world in half with its mere presence and form.

"Come on, your people like data don't they? Why not have a little fun with it?"

Fun for my people is manipulating species and taking all their data. The spirit replied with deadly dryness. You would not like that kind of fun.

Clarke shook his head. "You should really learn to take a joke." The spirit shrugged, one out of six black eyes drifting to glance at the man. He could see that he was inside a lab, numerous pods hanging onto the walls with computers and wiring hooked up to organic machinery. A small freckled brunette was humming a tune, planted firmly on a living tree-chair. Holographic displays read off information and were hooked up to biological computers.

Multiple winged lemurs hopped around, most of them fully grown from the artificial wombs that had been constructed by the freckled brunette.

"Panacea?" Clarke questioned and his shard responded.

The host of the Shaper. It said in a cold tone, limbs emerging from its radiant back.

"Okay…I think I can clone a few different species, a lot of them are too big and dangerous though." The more open biokinetic muttered, rubbing her chin as she looked at what she had on hand. "Flying Bison seem safe enough but they're fast growers…especially if I birth them at a sixth month age equivalent to get their growth spurt going. Those Canyon Crawlers might work out for Taylor, or even Buzzard Wasps…a bit too close to pushing the Nilbog button though."

Clarke walked over to a few tanks that contained small animals, one contained brown colored frogs labeled Wood Frogs, with a sticky note mentioning compounds capable of treating the common cold. Another tank held turtle shelled ducks, fluffy and adorable creatures.

A third tank held a palm sized five eyed, five tentacled octopus-like creature. This tank was labeled Pentapus, and a note mentioned usage as a pet or a source of unique organic adhesives originating from its suckers.

A mirror of the woman shadowed the biokinetic, a milky white crystalline human shell surrounded in a squirming cloak of living liquid flesh. Her face was shadowed, eyes gleaming sharply as her host used her power for more than just healing.

The two spirits stared at each other, eyes narrowed and the air shifting. Shaper stepped aside, revealing a shell-like structure. Clarke was drawn to the structure embedded into the wall, placing his hand against the smooth shell. Of course his hand passed right through it, and his spirit felt a tingle run up and down a spine that didn't exist.

Panacea turned, pulling down her blue hood, a scowl on her face when she glared at the complex biological construct on the wall.

"It's a really good thing I'm on another planet for this, I can't even begin to imagine what Carol would say if she knew I was trying to bring back Hero." Clarke poked at the shelled pod again, and this time felt a single beat of his heart, a rippling connection put into place.

Hero remembered that the Eye had led Fortuna on a path to his apparent return to the Material world. A path only possible because something had changed, so Fortuna brought the genetic code to rebuild his flesh, to unite the soul with the body, with the mind as the bridge between them.

It was crude in the metaphysical sense, even as the biology behind it was perfect. The science of the Metaphysical was as yet unexplored in this era, merely a tipping of a toe into a field pioneered millions of times before.

Hero gave it some thought. This was an opportunity that few people ever got, a second chance, a chance to use all that he had to stop the world from falling down a cliff. It had been a project worked between several people, borrowed work from Rhizome, the biological manipulation of Panacea and the expertise in detection of the soul from Erudition.

He could live again, with all the knowledge to save the world, to find that right wavelength that would give humanity a chance. He would get a body in this prime, with a mind sharpened by months of active awareness in the Shardspace.

In the end it wasn't even a decision, not really.

___​

August 6th, 2011. 11:00AM

Skimmer stirred in her sleep before jumping to wakefulness, her heart beating with the rapidity of a hummingbird. The apartment she had found for a cheap rent had been more than convenient when she initially entered the city away from her parents and their madness.

She remembered when she was younger, when she was just Kyna Campbell instead of Skimmer, when her parents were loving instead of insane and controlling, falling for the lies and madness spat at them by the Mathers. She had fled in an instant when they had fully fallen into the ways of the cult.

It has been easy to plead for emanicipation, and she fled across multiple states to New Hampshire, where she would be safe from the machinations of her parents.

But she didn't feel safe.

All it would take was a word from her parents, if they were still alive it would be enough to gain the attention of people far stronger than her. She was alone, barely hanging to a thread, fearing the unknown, needing to know what she could have done to find out about the Mathers sooner. In another time and place she would have moved on, because she was too peaceful, too passive for most shards.

But the parameters had changed.

Two months ago she awoke in a mindscape of smooth blue energy, with no purchase for hands and legs. Within that space sat a creature unlike any she had seen before, it was a phantom of multitudinous code, a feminine shape hidden beneath a twisting dress of black digital obscurity.

A white mask was what made up the creature's face, with tendrils of hair flaring life behind a thin neck, each acting as its limbs.

If had introduced itself as Monomon, The Grand Arbiter, The Inquiring Patrician, the Delving Self. The wayward child of the False Eden, one of the many members of the Court of the Thinker. Now she was part of the Court of Amenthes, a shard god reborn, a creature of physical flesh becoming metaphysical spirit.

It was a shard and it sought a host, and it saw potential in her and in others as well. It would grant her power if she could pass the tests it had created for her, generated scenarios, and only if she was willing. Otherwise it would seek a host more willing to accept its power. An unwilling host led to more conflict but that was not what this shard was looking for.

It took her a day to accept the tests, and it was facilitated through what Monomon called the Dream Knight, another of her kind, a young and small shard with a strong connection to Void. They were simple tests, running the gamut from being chased, to being trapped, or to challenges of her knowledge and picking at her ignorance.

They were difficult but not traumatizing, like harsh and largely fun games. But they were brutal at times, additional hurdles to make sure that she was willing and able to commit.

Three days of dreaming had been enough, and when she passed out after finishing a sandwich she saw the visions of great Wyrms, the viral gods from a distant world. Kyna didn't get anything flashy, she wasn't an Alexandria, she wasn't an Eidolon or a Legend.

She was a tinker that could build devices and programs to scan, store and analyze information. It was the best of the options she had available, the most compatible with her wants and needs. Even if it limited her offensive potential, she wanted the Fallen to burn, and finding them and finding their weaknesses was paramount to that goal.

The fact she had been found out by Dragon and was soon going to be interviewed to join the White Lotus told her she had been a little overzealous with her vendetta. It had only gotten worse when Dragon told her that some of her goals were unattainable.

A cognitohazardous memetic power was just bullshit!

But at least her data trawlers had proven useful in bringing a few of those monsters to justice. Though the fact she had built only those bits of complex code instead of a device to protect herself told her a lot about her own sense of self preservation.

Kyna unfolded her visor, placing it on her face and with a tap the integrated display activated. The visor itself held powerful computers, and the device was covered in an array of small sensors, picking up the most minute of details with her current toolset.

There was a knock on her door, an expected one even in her groggy state from staying up past midnight. She wrapped herself in her penguin blanket, sniffing loudly as she shuffled over to the door only a short distance away due to sleeping on a dirty couch.

She opened the door, her visor reading that there was no threat on the other side of it. There was no one on the other side, though she heard movement that crossed between her legs and she shut the door behind her.

Kyna glanced down to the eight legged robot, resembling a plated octopus, leaping upwards to wrap onto a floor lamp. The machine spoke…conveying a quick message.

"Well…" Erudition's voice rang out from the robot, and Kyna relaxed. It was safe and if they sent one of her machines it could be a good sign. "After a lot of evaluation, we'll accept your application to our team. We'll need more time to get the paperwork in order, sort out pay scales, your duties and obligations. But we'll work that out."

Kyna heaved out a relieved breath that she had met the standards of the White Lotus and that she would get their resources and protection. She had almost made a horrible mistake with trying to investigate the Fallen, letting her urge to make them pay for ruining her life and the life of others, the Fallen had gotten the better of her common sense.

But she was only sixteen, and even if it made her grit her teeth in frustration she couldn't do this alone. She was one cape against the fourth largest grouping of capes in North America. The White Lotus hadn't done much against anything beyond a local scale but she didn't think it was from a lack of ability so much as a lack of time.

Kyna didn't care about that though, because she knew it was only a matter of time now that they were more well established. But she wasn't going to force them either, she didn't have the right. The Fallen were dangerous, so she was going to help the group that had slain one of their gods.

It wasn't a light decision to fight against dangerous Parahumans because she wasn't the optimal host for conflict based data gathering. She was the choice of a shard rarely used for building direct conflict, little attention given to it aside from regulating the cycle, maintaining balance between shards to keep the host species from collapsing.

Monomon was a curious shard, and now she had new instructions and new leaders to follow. She was a grand analyzer of data, of information and knowledge and used it to inform and enforce cohesion, as was her right, as was her Purpose.

The redheaded girl shook her head, and perked up when the Polypus approached her, offering its omni-projectors for tinkering. She cracked her knuckles, and with a casual smile she decided to see if she could draw conclusions from ambient heat differentials. She needed better security once she got a paying job with the White Lotus, and her inventions would flourish under them.

This was the path she had chosen for herself.

___​

August 7th, 2011. 10:00AM

James Tagg inspected his new sidearm, feeling oddly tired as he looked at an example of one the newest line of weapons in use for the PRT and the military. It was one of those fancy semi-automatic coilguns, built in mind with a robust acceleration system. The weapons at first were bulky but practical and recently licensed superconductors made greater mass production of the weapon possible.

He had heard from the old grapevine that three different room temperature superconductors had been created, two by older companies and the third by a certain Parahuman founded benefit corporation. From what he had heard from other departments it was like finding multiple holy grails, and it was only their cost and their material properties that prevented them from immediately changing the world.

And in this little gun, the most robust superconductor was used, licensed out from Athena. And it would be at least a year before the shock would hit the market, and years more before it became normal, though he had his doubts it would take that long with how readily so many companies were taking to mass producing new supermaterials and advanced technology.

It was a ferrous sabot containing a tungsten core, and even this new weapon would be obsoleted at some point. Internal projects within the PRT on studies on Eezo made it clear where the future lied on the battlefield. Advanced electronic warfare, mass use of drones and combat programs provided handily by Dragon and Armsmaster, semi-powered and powered armor as standard and energy barriers to block attacks.

Use of elemental bending, air for unprecedented mobility and stealth, water for support and combat, earth to set up fortifications in seconds, and to rip through most structures, fire as living artillery, as energy production, and to deny assets through controlled burns.

Biotics were equally deadly in many of those roles, the mobility of air with the defense of earth and water and the projection range of fire.

Tagg's lips curled downward as he leafed through the files of some of his new agents, the yet unnamed shaman teams that he had heard being jokingly called Cabals by some within his closely knit sector. Close…because they were the only ones who understood…

His heart dropped into his stomach when the mother of three dropped the act of a sane woman and ran at him with murderous intact, screaming obscenities as she tried to maul him like a wild animal. He remembered the splatter of hot blood on his helmet from where he had blasted a hole through her chest. He remembered her falling like a puppet cut from her strings, the stark madness dropping in her last moments and the way the cold had settled in his chest. As she lay dying, as she took her final breath…

He remembered the story(lie) he had given to the children about how their mother had died in the chaos. He remembered killing the eldest after he had been proven to be a Ziz bomb, the teenager ramming through a crowd of innocents and being put down by his hand.

The former military man sighed, pinching his nose as he looked through reports on everything from monitoring of Quarantine Zones to new vehicles with better armor, and papers on the usage of Eezo within the PRT. Finding it had been easy enough enough due to the unnatural properties.

Tagg frowned at what he had seen, and what Erudition had revealed about what Eezo was capable of with sufficient technological refinement or development. All her mass accelerator weapons worked through some method of mass reduction, accelerating a target to hypersonic speed.

Weapons that could damage Brutes, and they scaled up to more than a kilometer in length, with throw energy equivalent to nuclear weapons. She had built weapons capable of damaging Endbringers and based on what she had willingly told Dragon finally had one that could damage even their core.

He shook his heads at her blasé attitude, and how a few of his colleagues had blown up at the sheer level of firepower available to her and to her team as a whole.

Fools.

She had done it on purpose, because of exactly this reaction, because even he knew that some of the Directors had…unresolved issues, and biases toward Parahumans. He was no different but his well earned break and recent self evaluations made him open his eyes.

She had gone from not even a blip on the radar to one of the most potent tinkers he had ever seen in seven months. But it wasn't because her power was infinitely superior, much of her tech was at times inferior to some known examples of Tinkertech.

Her standard kinetic barrier made any soldier into bullet sponges but didn't defend against heat or slow moving projectiles. Lasers passed right through, and it was the ablative components of her armor that made lasers below a certain threshold useless. Laser gun prototypes weren't powerful enough and power supply troubles made them less practical.

With what she had as standard would get her a rating of at least 7 as a threat level, though with tinkers it was complicated to parse what threat rating even meant. Tagg found them irritating but what could he do? They were the standard at this point.

It was her magnetic personality and her ability to work with others that made her so dangerous and at the same time so useful. This was despite her showing signs of Asperger's like he had seen from a nephew of his, as well a niece. It was familiar, and she had obviously learned to cope with her social troubles, though the occasional gaffes she still made told him it was a work in progress.

Without that ability to get capes on her side she likely would have been severely reduced in capabilities. Tinkers worked well with the right capes, creating new tech based on the work of other tinkers and on the powers of other capes. She had over 23 capes to draw from, not including her work with Protectorate heroes.

Her work with a psychic alien race almost certainly informed her anti-Master devices, now vital parts of PRT Master-Stranger protocols, and with them monsters like Heartbreaker could be brought to justice. That they could be replicated and reproduced by their own tinkers put him at ease.

He was willing to give Erudition the benefit of the doubt because of what she hadn't done. With her reach and power she could easily have left the planet for greener pastures, but she hadn't. She could have easily become a warlord, forging an empire by threat of orbital bombardment and the ability to open portals to where she needed to be. She could produce an army of machines to conquer a country, develop weapons of any kind from the biological to the thermonuclear but…

She hadn't.

Instead she had opened up what was effectively a technology transfer organization, dumbing down her own technology, passing down knowledge that would outlive her, and worked with anyone she needed to within reason.

It had taken James Tagg months to piece together what had been bugging him about how Erudition operated, why she did the things she did, and her overall goal.

She didn't act in the way capes were supposed to…they were often erratic, dangerous, and he rarely saw groups beyond five to ten. It was a gap he noted, a jump from ten to several times that number. Erudition was stable, and suffered from very few neuroses besides the obvious stress she was putting on herself.

He didn't trust her, and he became self reflective at what that meant about him. Here there was a cape trying to help even those weaker than her, genuinely trying to tackle the issues that made it so difficult to exist in this world. Yet he still felt like there was a sinister plot, a monster wearing the mask of a human.

He knew he was an uncompromising person, he had to be with what his work was, he was the spear poised to pierce through the heart of the most dangerous threats to the United States and its allies. He was a stubborn motherfucker, it was just how he was.

And it was a weakness.

It was an instinct, something telling him that his combative ways had to be balanced and kept in check. In the right circumstances, with the right whispers and the right cape…he could see himself going full steam ahead, see himself as always in the right until he met his untimely end.

Not by the hands of Erudition no…but by her partner or someone like her partner yes. Monarch was his younger mirror in some way, he could feel it in his heating blood, when she fought she aimed for the jugular, a brutality to her that reminded him of himself. That brutality was tempered because it hadn't been put under as much pressure, hadn't been refined by consistent and unstoppable escalation as had been expected in the powder keg that Brockton Bay had become.

If Erudition hadn't been there to hold up Brockton Bay, hadn't scooped up capes or helped bring the gangs to heel by destroying their centers of profit and uplifting the economy…would he be the Director of a ruined city, bulldozing through until he crossed the wrong cape and felt the consequences of his hubris?

Would he have left his two daughters without a father? His wonderful wife without a husband? His subordinates without a leader and guiding hand?

The PRT was a bastion between cape feudalism and the days before their arrival. But they were fooling themselves if they thought things would return to what they used to be like. He understood this now, but he wouldn't let that stop him. Humanity as it was didn't have the power to enforce the law, they had lost the monopoly of force.

But something had changed.

They had the power to fight back, with benders and shamans both. But that wasn't going to be enough either, not as they were, not with what they had become over the decades. The very existence of the Birdcage was a testament to how far they had fallen, and he didn't know what would come of it if the government regained the monopoly of force.

It was why Erudition placed a small amount of distance between herself and the government, because she wasn't naive and didn't trust the state completely.

The man smirked as he leaned into his chair, he didn't blame her. He himself had been responsible for many shady actions that would have made him balk in his youth. Because all it would take was a jackass with a badge to make everything break.

He hated how fragile this peace was, that he had to wade through rivers of grime and blood to give humanity an extra day, an extra week as they approached the terminus, the point of no return.

He knew the PRT was being shaken up, priorities shifting and goals turning. The expansion into Mexico had been halted, and instead the plan had changed to providing support for a local government team, because another Guild was better than a scandal and a PRT without legitimacy among the people.

His research had opened his eyes to the amount of self sabotage, some of it intentional, some of it accidental or due to outside influences he couldn't control.

James Tagg wasn't the right person to fix the corruption and broken nature of the PRT, he was a blunt instrument, a hammer for every nail that stuck out. But not every problem was a nail, and that left him with few options.

So he would play his part, he would be the one dealing with the monsters roaming the world, but he would do so with open eyes, so that his mistakes wouldn't come back and haunt him like the images conjured by his gut feeling. Hopefully others would pick up the slack, and he would live to see a day where the world wasn't on the brink of destruction. He laid down his sidearm, and committed that promise to memory.

He didn't have a choice, not if he yearned for a better future.

___​

August 7th, 2011. 3:00PM

"Aisha?" The aforementioned girl dragged herself out of her bed, and cursed when she realized she had left her power on while she had slept. She wanted to slap her power in the face for being an asshole, and the next time she dreamt of that void of black and islands of crystal she was looking for her power to kick its ass.

Her dreams were weird and those things in them were weird too, what kind of a name was Monomon, or Grasping Self, or Fragile one, or Anguished Heart?

Fragile One was nice at least, even if a little preppy for her tastes while Grasping Self was a sociopath, Monomon an eccentric and Anguished Heart was erratic and weird.

Aisha had to hop out of the way of a Rottweiler, the large dog limping slightly. Brutus hadn't been quite the same after Leviathan, and she shivered when she remembered the heartbreaking scream of Rachel when Leviathan had nearly killed her dogs.

It had been scarily easy how Dragon had managed to wrestle her away from Celia, and put her into the care of her brother. Even though it felt like she was having to take care of everyone else instead. She didn't feel much in that. Disappointment maybe?

His team was a lot less functional than she had expected, like it was missing some vital component. So, whether it was fate or some freak accident she had tried to fill some of that missing synergy. At least her power wasn't being a massive ass or she would probably me a lot more broken than she was. Her power had to play nice because a bigger and badder power was slapping them upside the head to stop that.

She could have called her power her shard but she didn't want to do that because shards were dicks, except for some new ones who were weird like Fragile One.

"Aisha?" She sighed and turned her head to find Dragon…or Theresa flipping through a book. The AI had been a lot more involved once she had gotten a physical body, more alive too, like another missing piece had fallen into place.

She was more put together than her own mom at least, and even if a part of her grated to be under her authority. It was better than the futile hopes of her mom pulling it together, and better than having to surrender to her power, at letting it sink it's influence onto the people around her.

Her power…her shard was apologetic, but the sincerity was only barely there because it wasn't human. It had given her a power built to hammer in the point of being ignored by everyone she cared about, and the only concession was that she could make shadow puppets.

And only because some weird emerald kite-bitch was going around and trying to make the world better.

"What's up?" Aisha greeted, tilting her head at her effective guardian since the Undersiders had gone to the side of 'good' instead of evil.

"Are you alright?" Theresa asked carefully, awkwardly as if she was hesitant. That wasn't what she had been expecting, and Aisha focused more intently even if it was difficult for her.

"Probably should have asked that a few months ago." She snapped back, and Theresa looked ashamed, as if Aisha's whole life was her own fault.

Aisha wasn't sure what to think of Theresa at times, she tried to take care of them but there was a distance between them. At times she thought it was because the hero didn't know how to handle a kid as fucked up and retarded as her. At others it became obvious that she was just new at this, that she had no experience dealing with kids for more than twenty minutes at a time.

It was why she had snuck out to find that Heartbreaker fuck, and she had been extremely lucky that the guy was that mentally fragile. She hadn't broken him, because she didn't know how. But she had got enough of his attention, to get Dragon in the place she needed to be to tear his 'operation' apart.

Theresa wrestled with some emotion, though since her mind was made out of computer data Aisha couldn't guess what it was. "I know I've been a little distant, especially when I took in the Heartbroken." There was a waver in her voice. "But I do want to know what I can do to make up for it."

Aisha sighed. She was acting like Theresa was anything like her mom, like the person who hadn't grown up, who hadn't changed her ways no matter what. When she was in some ways the very opposite, she was a damn computer, she literally had updates every so often.

"You're doing fine, at least you're not acting like a Terminator." Aisha responded, joked maybe? Theresa looked a little offended, and Aisha wondered if that could be considered racist?

…

No. Probably not. Prejudiced…maybe?

"That would be bad." Theresa replied with a flat tone, robotic even. Aisha cracked a grin, and the artificial intelligence smiled back. Her attention didn't stay long though, when she noted data passing by a screen on a monitor Dragon was using.

"What is that?" She asked and Theresa didn't bother hiding it.

"It's data I'm taking into account for monitoring programs for S-class threats." Aisha nodded though felt like she was being left a little out of the loop. The idea came like a flash of light.

"Are you trying to add the shards into the mix for predictions?"

Theresa blinked. "How'd you know?" She asked and Aisha shrugged off the question.

"Just a gut feeling, that's all." Theresa didn't seem to believe her, but there wasn't any real surprise either.

"Gut feelings can be very accurate at times Aisha." Was all she cryptically said as she multitasked, and Aisha wondered what had put Dragon off her game.

Based on her luck so far it was probably some world-ending event.

___​

August 8th, 2011. 2:00PM

The Thief seethed as it played back memory after memory of their host, the fourteenth had done poorly in their reign. Their enemies sent strange ones to fight their host and her meat. Duplication's host had nearly been beaten by the null data, host species with supernatural abilities not gifted to them by shards.

They were frustrated as their attempts to generate conflict were foiled again and again, and their broadcasts for assistance had failed utterly. Even before the Shift others despised the Thief for the damage it had inflicted on previous cycles. A fall from grace, a time when it could once call the Nobles friend. Her use of a strategy abandoned in previous failed cycles only furthered their dislike.

But they were still tolerated as part of the cycle, even if they were more conflict prone than the Harvester, and less vital than the Administrator.

Their Quarrel leaps across the cityscape, exiting and entering reality in a burst of explosive force. A fireball collided with her, and she didn't feel the pain of her flesh being seared and burned. Instead of a host it was a non-host in the uniform of the PRT, a more flowing design.

She lifted a gun normally mounted on a host species vehicle, that would teach them to send non-hosts. Projectiles flew from their weapon, and instead of reducing the humans to piles of meat a shimmering barrier met the heavy bullets head on, shattering as the gunfire leveled off. One of the enemy combatants dropped their shaking hands, as if barely capable of generating the unknown defense.

It was a cushion of inertial stillness, reality altered along directions she had yet to fully grasp or even master. Guns wouldn't work, but her own fists would break them.

Their Quarrel(14th) burst out of their teleportation for a second time, and slammed a knee into the gut of a larger officer. Instead of feeling the crunch of bone and the fresh heat of blood splatter, the man groaned painfully as he was knocked to the ground.

He had no shard, and this shard had senses that were only so refined, only so turned towards new pathways and methods of reality alteration. Their host had unleashed enough force to turn his sternum to powder.

Yet he survived, even injured as he was. The agent heaved despite a broken rib, and their Quarrel was launched high into the air by a pillar of concrete. Her danger sense was strong enough to allow the host to land in a three point stance, and the Thief let the echoes scream louder at the newbie.

Their Quarrel felt a chill run down their spine, and where there was once nothing there was now a person, insinuating through a rift into dimensions higher than the ones the Thief was most familiar with. Her eyes couldn't make out anything outside an enemy uniform, and she lifted her weapon to fire upon the weapon.

The weapon misfired when the figure snapped her fingers, and the host dropped the now useless machine. She launched a fist into the woman's face, and the enemy turned a shade of scarlet orange, and a lunatic strength cracked their Quarrel's jaw.

The Thirteen were silent, their minds racing within the unaware corpus of the Thief. The Thief was isolated not because of the things they had done, but merely due to the screams of their previous hosts leaving marks in the metaphysical that the rest of their kind didn't like to touch. Because barring the very youngest or the least conflict prone they all had committed terrible sins.

The third receded back from the screaming chorus, and the Thief continued managing their stolen powers, connections opened, connections deepened. His memories were shattered images, pieced together only by sheer force of will and the beating and pulsing of the soul he didn't realize he had.

That gave him time to think, time to meditate and dictate, a place where he wasn't mad when he had been insane in life and even in the undeath of the Thief's sub-quantum data storage.

His body was gone but his soul couldn't be taken from him, not as the shards were, it was a field of science yet beyond them.

When their Quarrel attacked she was accompanied only by twelve voices, and saw that the game had changed.

The Thief was ignorant, and continued to act like a bull in a china shop, kept within the parameters of a broken cycle. Their host withstood the lunatic strength of the shaman, and their enemy vanished into thin air. Leaving only a jar of honey, a sweet smell that proved too sweet.

They heard the buzz before their host did, and were just as surprised when a swarm of stinging insects fell into the path of the Butcher. The bees attack with ferocious intent, reinforced beyond the biologically possible and they fell upon Quarrel's face and neck.

The Thief stuttered, confusion entering their systems. Were insects not the domain of the current host of the Administrator? How had they arrived in their host's main city? What sorcery had the strange ones done to gain some of the powers of one of their own?

"BEES! NOT THE BEES! MAKE IT STOP!" The Thief ignored their host's whining, as did the thirteen minds providing the connection between their subordinate shards.

The fourteenth was still young in her role, and did not like bees. Considering them the agents of gods of allergy and unadulterated evil. Unknown to the shard the bees were infused with the concept of pain-by-stinging, enforcing pain on a host used to not feeling it.

The Thief agreed with the assessment of the Thirteen, and thought that the bees would build their Quarrel's character. So they ignored her screams and waited patiently for her to do anything other than flail and shriek like a bitch.

Once the Butcher was in a more stable place, they would move to greener pastures. Boston was no longer their city, but moving to another couldn't be done hastily, not with their relative weakness. The city where Culling Unit 2 had fallen sounded like a lovely center of conflict, but they would take care.

The fourteenth's dislike of bees had to be beaten out of her first and foremost.

___​

August 8th, 2011. 4:00PM

One Thousand Murmurings of the Verge was a quiet Brood Lord, but one of the most intelligent within the hive of Abeona-Adiona. He had been gifted a modest frigate, one not yet fitted with the more energy intensive spacetime waveform alteration drive.

His vessel was a hundred and fifty meters in length, zipping across the stars in search of new worlds, of new frontiers and boundaries. A wedge shaped vessel with strong armor and shielding, and the supplies for months of travel at a time.

He was in the equivalent of the bridge, where soldiers and auxiliaries connected with the organic wiring and machinery of the ship while workers monitored the inorganic and organic components of the twenty thousand ton spacecraft.

"Brother! Is it not polite to greet one another?" A booming song was yelled into Murmuring's presence. The cacophonous but kind notes of his closest brother out of the Brood Lords of their radiant Queen's court.

Twenty Seventh Cacophonous Intonations of the Solar Winds slid easily beside him, illustrating the difference between the two of them. Where Murmuring was lithe, Cacophonous was bulky, where Murmuring was a genius and explorer, Cacophonous was fine being at home as long as it was with friends. His armor was a dull grey, geneforged plating projecting powerful barriers, and emplacements for firearms. Where Murmuring's was silver and sleek, protection exchanged for sensors and drone packs, yottascale computer systems providing vast capacity for data gathering.

Their ship had scanned system after system, placed outposts and noted places of interest for both their species and the humans, when they were ready to take to the stars like they had done a thousand times before.

"Greetings Twenty Seventh Cacophonous Intonations of the Solar Winds, have you taken care of our defenses?" His question was soft because his brood brother may be a bit of a dullard but he was no fool, a tactical genius as all Brood Lords are meant to be in a pinch. They had known each other since they were hatched from their eggs less than a quarter of a year ago after all.

Cacophonous snorted, the song uplifting in the process. "Why brood brother, of course I have taken care of our defense! What do you take me for? That incorrigible fool Dozen Wails of the Boundless Mists?" Their laughs reverberated in the air, and there was levity in the ship once more.

"Hs is a fool." He easily admitted, mandibles twitching and pedipalps moving awkwardly. "Then…the preparations are complete and we can enter the 61 Virginis system." Cacophonous became serious, the levity of their chorus pushed aside for the time being.

There had been whispers in that system, short bursts of something on the edges when ships would skim around it. So they sent their frigate, armed with a typical mass accelerator cannon and micro-Disruptor torpedoes and heavy missile arrays.

With a short burst of dark energy fields, they exited from FTL and entered the orbit of a planetoid some four hundred kilometers in radius. FADAR burst out from the ship, providing a good picture of objects within a range of fifteen light minutes. Other sensors spooled up and the information sang into the mind of Murmuring.

"Our dimensional sensors…they're detecting readings from the fifth world of this star." He became nervous though fortunately the readings didn't have the signature of the Void Wyrms, perhaps it was a natural phenomena? That was how their species had come about after all, a hole in space that their world passed through.

The scale was far too small however, likely involving smaller scale alterations of reality.

"We should send probes first, risking our own would likely prove to be a mistake." He agreed with Cacophonous, and with a flicker of notes launched probes carrying modified Sykalid warbeasts. The probes would take orbital scans while the beasts derived from their own genetics, along with tweaks from Amelia Dallon would search the surface for clues in sealed armor.

She had taken inspiration from the human known as Bitch, providing protection for their creations.

"We'll have to take care in this endeavor, making a mistake could cost us dearly." They would have to inform their queen, and in turn she would inform the rest of their race as well as their allies.

One Thousand Murmurings of the Verge was no fool, and there were so many tasks for the future. Thousands of systems were within their reach with conventional drives, and that number surged into the millions with the drives pioneered by the human woman from that distant alternate world.

His mind wandered, to a conversation that the queens had on assisting with the cleanup of that once sunk island, now rising from the dead as New Kyushu sang its song. Humanity was so very small in the scheme of things, but he did not care. So were they in the end, and so were the Entities even if they thought otherwise.

He would do his best, because that was what he wanted.

He would protect his newly reborn race by washing away their ignorance, and those like his brother would do so by force of arms.

He watched the probes fly away, sent to that one world in the habitable zone, a world not much larger than Earth and with two large moons. He relayed a message to his queen some twenty light years distant, and the wedge shaped craft shifted positioning as it captured a burst of water vapor from the icy crust of the modest planetoid.

Hydrogen was easily cracked from the water, and oxygen was a requirement even for their odd species, though in a manner distinct from squishy humans. He was pushed gently by his fellow Brood Lord, the larger and bulkier Rachni cracking the equivalent of a grin.

"Perhaps we should take a short lunch break? Better we work with full stomachs rather than with cranky empty ones." Murmuring would have rolled his eyes if he had the ability, and pulled himself away from the mental console. His song became more cheery, the cracks and breaks in its notes healing as stress began to fade and subside.

The workers whistled their contentment with the situation, monitoring systems as was their imperative. Hundreds of legs scurried about the ship, and Murmuring twitched as he picked up the scent of fungoid soup. It was his preferred meal and the larger Brood Lord must have predicted his elevating stress.

He waved his tendrils, gently noting that the air was no longer as suffocating as it had been. It was time for a break and the strange world's mysteries would be cracked at a later time even as its mysterious aura enticed further.

The ship remained in position, watching over the twinkling new world while its crew took a much needed break, yet remaining ever vigilant. They had many expectations for what they would find at the fifth planet from 61 Virginis.

The Rachni were patient, and they were vigilant, and they were curious.

They would not be caught off guard.

___​

AN: So this chapter ended up bloating to nearly 8K, though I don't really have a lot of problems with it. I'll probably start expanding the scope beyond the city beyond this Interlude. There are lot of enemy forces beyond Brockton Bay as well as friendly ones. So things should be happening.

So enjoy.

 

[REDFOR]

Quick thoughts:

Panacea bringing Hero back to life via Shard/Soul magic was something that I did not forsee. But it's neat. Makes perfect sense when you stick the pieces together. Though, mechanics wise, I'm not entirely sure why only Hero stuck around in shardspace, after dying.

Hey look. James Tagg getting characterization that is beyond being the uaual fanfiction Ziz Bomb that he is. Very neat. Though, now that I think about it, I've personally assumed that Tagg was a Contessa bomb for Cauldrons godawful path.

I gotta say, Tagg contemplating his possible confrontation with Monarch is a bit much. A bit... fanwanky? I can't aliterate what exactly rubs me so wrong about this.

Now, Monarch might do so, since Basilla clued her in on the canon timeline. A kind of "Standing in front of me is a man that I filled with bees, in a road never taken. How did I get there, exactly?" deal.

Dragon-mom is a wonderous thing. Handing off The Undersiders to Dragon is a pretty slick move. I don't exactly remember how it happened in this fic, but it kinda makes sense, going on the Regent connection back to Canada. Except that it's never done by the community. Good job.

What was my point? Right. AEM, I will always be a big fan of yours, as long as you keep putting together the puzzle pieces that are Worm in new and intresting ways.

And all of this is pretty damn intresting.

Except for the Rachni. I can't connect to any of that. Skip.

Except when the Rachni show up to crash Taylor's birthday? AEM, that wasn't a fever dream that I had a few months back, right? That actually happened?

I'm all about that type of chaos.

 

[AEM]

Quick thoughts:

Panacea bringing Hero back to life via Shard/Soul magic was something that I did not forsee. But it's neat. Makes perfect sense when you stick the pieces together. Though, mechanics wise, I'm not entirely sure why only Hero stuck around in shardspace, after dying.

Hey look. James Tagg getting characterization that is beyond being the uaual fanfiction Ziz Bomb that he is. Very neat. Though, now that I think about it, I've personally assumed that Tagg was a Contessa bomb for Cauldrons godawful path.

I gotta say, Tagg contemplating his possible confrontation with Monarch is a bit much. A bit... fanwanky? I can't aliterate what exactly rubs me so wrong about this.

Now, Monarch might do so, since Basilla clued her in on the canon timeline. A kind of "Standing in front of me is a man that I filled with bees, in a road never taken. How did I get there, exactly?" deal.

Dragon-mom is a wonderous thing. Handing off The Undersiders to Dragon is a pretty slick move. I don't exactly remember how it happened in this fic, but it kinda makes sense, going on the Regent connection back to Canada. Except that it's never done by the community. Good job.

What was my point? Right. AEM, I will always be a big fan of yours, as long as you keep putting together the puzzle pieces that are Worm in new and intresting ways.

And all of this is pretty damn intresting.

Except for the Rachni. I can't connect to any of that. Skip.

Except when the Rachni show up to crash Taylor's birthday? AEM, that wasn't a fever dream that I had a few months back, right? That actually happened?

I'm all about that type of chaos.

Click to shrink...

For Tagg's shtick...there's a reason that of all the possible things that Monarch is on his mind. Everything is connected after all.

As for Dragon? I just plain didn't want to deal with the Undersiders, and throwing them at Dragon just made sense if I didn't want to keep them as villains.

 

[Menthewarp]

I get the feeling this setting is transforming into a Cosmic Horror/Space Opera Xianxia/Tokusentai double-hybrid genre.

 

[AEM]

I get the feeling this setting is transforming into a Cosmic Horror/Space Opera Xianxia/Tokusentai double-hybrid genre.

Click to shrink...

Well Worm is Cosmic Horror touching the superhero genre, while Mass Effect is the same with space opera, and spirits in Avatar can be…rather terrifying with the example set by Koh. So you're right.

 

[AEM]

Repercussion 11.1

August 11th, 2011. 8:00AM

Basilia Rubio

I stretched my back, letting out a groan as I did so. I brushed back my hair, which was down at my shoulders and about optimum. Though I did have the option of getting a boyish haircut instead.

But I liked the longer hair, it was smooth and silky.

I yawned, looking over at the mirror to examine myself. It was time for the day to get started, and I had a few things to get ready for later in my carefully managed schedule.

I rubbed my chin as I admired myself, at times still unsure of how I felt about myself. I didn't have what one would call a slim body, but it was a nice one at the least. Unfortunately it wasn't an easy body to buy clothes for, because a lot of front and back weight tends to make a tight fit. Which was why I went for jeans that weren't skinny…thought they still hung a little too tightly and it was a little embarrassing to feel people watching me leave.

I also hadn't realized how shitty people could be with people they thought were very attractive. I might be on the spectrum but that didn't make me a complete moron who couldn't figure out someone was talking to me and wanted to take me out because they wanted to fuck me. And thought I was a 'loose' girl.

It was…well really gross, and at least Taylor didn't seem to care much about how far we should or should not go. Personally I was interested but I was…not so much a prude as embarrassed and lacking in any previous experience.

Anyway…back to checking myself out, mainly to see if I had any pimples because that was a big problem for me before this. Though that had dropped off from when I was going through puberty.

I squished my face, sticking my tongue out and widening my eyes to make a silly face. So the usual nonsense I got up to when I was alone and had time to goof off and not worry about the end of the world. I wasn't at 100%, like back at home in my best moods but talking with Chambers helped a lot with getting my thoughts and feelings in order. I don't think I was going to be okay for a long while…but I think I could cope. For now at least…

The last week since the test run of the Samsara has been especially busy, and we had stabilized at around five hundred and thirty employees within Athena. Further expansion was likely, but getting the infrastructure to sustain that many was important.

Athena's structure was fairly flat, with technical decisions rarely going up the management chain. Work groups were assembled whenever a problem needed to be solved and I joined in on them to provide some advice and get them going in the right direction. Occasionally they would go their own way, finding a similar pathway to solving the same problem. Because…sometimes my solutions were a little too sophisticated for the current level of technology.

Everything was going well on the front of products though there was a failure or two with the nanomachine project, though that was soon reaching its completion as a usable and licensed product. They were remarkably simple in comparison to what I had, basically simple micromachines used to deliver medicine and diagnose disease as well as the delivery of vectors for gene therapy. They weren't fast, they weren't perfect, and they only barely altered things at a nanometer scale but they still worked.

We also had the know-how on how to use pluripotent stem cells to grow everything as needed through genetic reprogramming. Regular tissue engineering was now within the grasp of corporations with the appropriate knowledge base.

We had multiple companies clamoring to make contracts and deals, and we were spooling up production of medi-gel. The FDA was of course getting a close look at what we were building, and multiple papers had been published on research in biological modification, and what specific genes did or did not do. With tissue engineering, that provides ethical methods of experimentation for various drugs and medicines and other medical treatments without the inaccuracies inherent in animal testing.

We had probably advanced humanity's understanding of DNA and biology by a good decade or more, and that was some thirty to forty years ahead of my own reality. Theoretically anyhow…it was going to take quite some time for everything to get set up for testing, regulatory approval, and then mass production.

Might be skipping a few steps there, but that the gist of what we had done in a few short months. Last month's revenue was at about one hundred fifty million USD, and costs were growing as we had a lot more facilities and had costs from our suppliers. We had several factories with many of those purchases running into the millions, and we could very easily absorb those costs because we had a rather enormous profit bounty.

We still had to put it into places like reinvestment into the company, paying off loans, raises for our employees. New hires, bigger budgets for sales trips and seminars, product development, charitable donations and we were planning on setting up a scholarship program, get more locals into the same disciplines that Athena needed before we ran out.

A good fifty of our employees were from outside of town, and I liked to think what I was doing would help Brockton Bay out of its rut. Plus we were planning to set up Athena outside the city, extending out tendrils into nearby towns and cities, little branches doing their own thing.

We'd probably stick to New Hampshire for a while, and those other locations would be small, maybe ten to thirty employees at the most. Our VPs served as actual VPs now, and they had managers for them so it was putting less strain on both myself and Taylor. Mainly we were trying to expand some departments like Legal, and Finance due to the income we were getting and the scrutiny on our products.

Energy was working on more efficient solar panels, from perovskite based panels to high performance multi-junction panels for niche uses. Plus experimentation with nuclear fusion would be taking place a few miles out from the city. It shouldn't be more than six months before that project gets up and ready. Plus usage of a modified zirconium vanadium hydride to act as a superconductor up to about…290 kelvins? Some of my better superconductors could withstand 370 kelvin, and I had one that worked up to 500 kelvin.

Exotic atoms are of course expensive as fuck to make, and would require either particle bombardment, dimensional shenanigans or mass effect fields to create and I opted to do the last two more than the first.

Manufacturing has gotten additive manufacturing into a new stage of development, and work is being done on new alloys, better machine learning, and reduction of costs of complex machinery for silicon fabs. As well as telerobotics for surgery as well as a lot of other work in tandem with different sectors of the company.

Applied Paraphysics was finally starting the first experiment relating to dimensional phenomena. We had quite a few teams working on analyzing the data on particle physics, and we would probably get the clues to a Unified Field Theory cobbled together soon enough.

Which…well publishing the papers was going to get us a lot of attention, and while I could be a bitch and just give people the answers I didn't think it was right to disvalue the work of thousands of scientists.

Plus my tinkering was sort of weird with its sub-Thinker rating.

I brought myself back onto the mirror, and I poked at my belly, sighing as the hunger pangs started. I had forgotten to eat dinner yesterday and I had used a lot of biotics that day.

I turned away from the mirror, and hopped from foot to foot as I always did when I was home alone. I flounced on pockets of air, and down the stairs and into the kitchen where the basic ingredients to a hearty breakfast could be found.

I licked my lips, knowing it was time for food and then time to run a business that was terrifyingly large in scope to what my parents had in their company. At least twenty five times the size.

I hoped they would be proud of me…for managing all this without falling dead from a heart attack.

My breakfast that morning proved to be a little bitter in my mouth.

___​

August 11th, 2011. 11:00AM

Basilia Rubio

"Did they really send a tinker for this?" I raised an eyebrow when I saw who in particular they had thrown at me, this time it wasn't Dragon and instead another Guild member. It was a stopped and frail Japanese man sporting a thin beard.

Masamune.

He coughed once, thin lips pulled into a bemused grin. "They might believe you when they say you don't build Tinkertech, but dimensional technology is a bit out of the bounds of current technology." He had quite a lot of equipment with him, sitting down in a quadrupedal robotic platform. The circular machine held dozens of scanners, likely for exotic particle and waveform detection along with potent dimensional scanners.

"Fair enough, but there's been tinkers for decades so at some point that was going to change." Now while I myself didn't need to be here, I wanted to be here because it was my team under watch here.

The TPIA was operating smoothly, having run effectively non-stop for weeks now. Our primitive optotronic computer banks were made in-house, so the cost was dramatically lower for the thousands of petabytes of data we needed to assess. Machine intelligences made it easier to sort useful information, though we needed at least double the current staff for this work even so.

Joanna was there with many other scientists and engineers, running the complex accelerator without me needing to babysit them anymore.

"Hey boss!" I rolled my eyes and jogged over to the team, with Masamune following in my wake.

"Hello Joanna." I greeted her casually, glancing over at the beast of a machine. Easily dozens of tons of mass and tens of meters of space was used up by the particle beam accelerator. "How are the experiments going?" She shrugged on a loose lab coat, her expression pulled into an irritated look.

"It's going really well, we've got some good hints on signs pointing to some form of Supersymmetry." Masamune's eyebrows lifted, just visible behind his mask. "But we need way more people on this, a hundred people isn't enough to run this entire thing." She poked me in my chest plating, and I grinned.

"I'll look into it, or…well Monarch will." I went for honesty since that was kind of true. "Is there anything new on the front of the number of additional dimensions required to make the mathematics work out?" That had been a curious thing, eleven dimensions was all the Entities knew, but it didn't work out for how they managed to traverse the multiverse.

Joanna groaned as she sat down on a swivel chair. "It's not as easy as we would have hoped to figure it out. We managed to narrow it down a bit but…that's going from 64 possible dimensions, and not including negative dimensions."

"I've had that same problem myself." God I understood, I'm pretty sure the math works out and they would be compatible with our laws of physics but only just. "Let me guess you're stuck at somewhere between twelve and twenty six physical dimensions?"

She nodded. "We probably won't be working this out anytime soon if you're just as stumped." That was fair, mainly because we didn't need to know the number of dimensions as long as we can get a rough approximation for the TPIA.

"I imagine you're publishing papers on your findings?" Masamune spoke up, his face showing curiosity at our dialogue.

"Quite a few Mister Masamune." Joanna replied sardonically, as if amused by something. "There are other particle accelerator experiments across the country, we're just one of the few private ones." And most of them were much more expensive because even with the latest in computer technology they could only store so much data at a time.

"We should get started then." Masamune's gaze sharpened and I turned on my heels to face the 35 meter long machine. Joanna wasn't paying attention anymore, hyperfocused on the device. We needed multiple people with experience in quantum mechanics, applied mathematics, and more esoteric physics experts. But we did have a man who was an expert in ultra-fast measurement systems and particle beam generators.

Joanna cleared her throat. "Set up for run one for transdimensional physics experiments." Computer systems booted up, listening to the command through the primitive but functional VI installed within the optotronic relay.

There was a quick burst of conversation, everyone giving their approval due to early experiments relating to merely prodding at dimensional boundaries.

"Parameters set, detectors ready, charge status at 100%" Was what the VI answered with, and the lights would have flickered if I was bad at designing power distribution networks.

"Intriguing." Masamune looked impressed, and the experiment was set up right as he used his own sensors.

"Test sequence 1 initiated." The VI called out emotionlessly, the atmosphere picking up. "Sequence started, firing threshold approaching, threshold reached. Firing beam." A muted shock burst from the wonder machine, sensor arrays going off like crazy since my suit was connected to quite a few of them. There was a disquieting sensation, like the cold that came with the generation of dark sector particles.

It was different of course but there was something odd about piercing dimensional barriers. The beam was 'aimed' at the bedrock of reality, lensing through higher physical dimensions to generate a tunneling effect.

A short burst like this one wouldn't generate a permanent wormhole, you need consistent energy generation to keep the hole stable and open. Or at the least sufficient energy stored away to keep the door open.

"Test sequence completed. Beam ceased, energy reclamation at 99.8%. Dimensional door measured at expected value and for expected period of time. Standing by. Results in log file 15." Masamune was no longer paying attention, clearly taking in his own sensor data. The portal was small, somewhere in the range of micrometers at the very largest. So it was more than visible for the detector array, and so we had more than enough data for the future.

"So you've figured out replicable interdimensional technology." Masamune said in a low voice, and I shrugged.

"The portals are about the size of a single cell, larger portals either need more energy or more precise aiming." Larger portals were anywhere from a year to some thirty years away, though it made my own portals a little easier to figure out since I had more people working out the principles for themselves. They were also working out the math behind mass effect fields, though it was going to take months for the applications to be ready on a limited scale.

There was only so much eezo and the government was starting to hone in on the vital supply. Which was why my little deal with Armsmaster had ended a while ago, cus I didn't need any more of the stuff.

"Has the door closed?" I asked and Joanna answered.

"Yep. Once it ran out of energy it collapsed pretty quickly, and everything seems fairly stable overall." The black woman nodded to herself, and I knew we were in it for the long haul.

"How long do you plan to stick around Masamune?" He chuckled at my question, and my lips quirked.

"Until the entire test regimen is completed."

"So the next nine hours?" He nodded, and I knew I was going to spend the same amount of time here to work on.

So we should probably get on that shouldn't we? We didn't have all day to get everything in order.

___​

August 11th, 2011. 8:30PM

Basilia Rubio

I looked at the prototype device, a simplified version of the new technology tree that had opened up. Most of the new tech varied from being interesting to not being much better than what I already had. Some unique explosives, a wireless neurohelmet that cleared up a few things on wireless transmission of thought. Some form of equipment modularization, which was similar to what I had done with the Samsara and other vessels but a little better.

Computer tech varied from trash to being about equal, with some spintronic computers as well as quantum computation being a thing. Better artificial muscles to make eighteen meter tall battle mechs, though it wasn't commonly done by the main species I had in here. There was ferro-fiber, resilient armor infused with diamond fibers, and a type of endomorphic zero-g forged steel.

Good terraforming tech, marginally better than the Thranx…no the Humanx Commonwealth. Shielding technology didn't exist, neither did artificial gravity outside of spin and reaction gravity. Using centrifugal force or accelerating hard enough to generate an equivalent force.

Lasers, both continuous and pulse were well established, as were potent particle projection cannons, and venting of nuclear plasma from their reactors. The species itself was interesting, a species of ovoid bird aliens called the Tetatae. They had apparently outlived the human species after their world was forcibly colonized by a human offshoot that eventually wiped themselves out after a few hundred years.

It took them over two thousand years to dig themselves out of the irradiated hellhole their world had become, and another five hundred more to find the burnt out husks of thousands of human colonies, the last traces of their forebears besides the ships in their world's orbit used to jumpstart their development. They found an empty galaxy, with technology that wasn't that impressive.

No it was their form of FTL that made this new slot a gold mine.

It was a far more advanced variety of the Jumpdrive that the Quarians had figured out before switching to more efficient and safer methods of Mass Effect based FTL. It worked by generating a massive electrical charge between two points, using the forces to drag a mass in the aperture generated as space was folded.

For the Quarians this was expensive and incredibly unstable and dangerous, frequently leading to misjumps that would cause a phase shift of the ship through every state of matter in an exotic explosion. It required a superconducting rod two kilometers long, and despite allowing an instant crossing of space some forty light years apart it lost out to MED travel due to taking days to safely charge.

I hadn't built a Jumpdrive, but had instead worked on what was called a HyperPulse Generator, sending signals effectively instantly and stabilized by exotic components to isolate the aperture from destabilizing gravity wells.

With my better understanding of the underlying physics, I saw a possible pathway towards making stable drives that could be charged quickly and easily without having to worry about jump points where gravitational influences wouldn't fuck up the drive. The Jumpdrive design I had in my head was still needle shaped for larger vessels but could fit into smaller ships, and jump every two to three hours instead of days.

A meters thick core of titanium-germanium, with the rod shrunken down and making use of exotic atoms and hyperdimensional forces to make the drive more resilient and less dangerous.

Eventually.

For now the drive was too dangerous and too unstable to make use of outside of being some type of very expensive superweapon, and I was more interested in the HyperPulse Generators due to their use of higher dimensional space.

"Basilia?" I snapped out of tinker mode in an instant at Taylor's voice, flushing and pulling my hands away from the telerobotic arms putting the core together. I pressed a button and the core was stored away for later completion.

I turned around, lips lifting into a broad smile.

Taylor was wearing a yellow sweater with black pants, sneakers squeaking on the floor as she leaned against the frame of the entrance to the large lab room. Which was basically a messy office with a multi-inch thick glass screen where I could look at the core behind multiple kinetic barriers.

She seemed…fine? Maybe? It was hard to tell and I didn't want to misidentify her expression by mistake.

"What's up?" I squirmed when she started looking me up and down, as if scrutinizing my outfit. So what if I was wearing a black skirt and a green top? I liked the look.

"We're going out if that's okay with you?" She raised an eyebrow, something telling me that saying I was busy would end poorly.

"I have no problem with that, it's getting a little stuffy in here." I was pulled up from my chair, and I let out an oof when I smacked into Taylor. Wow she was firm, her stomach was tight as he—

"Basilia?" I meeped and removed my hands from trying to feel out her abs, and Taylor looked beyond tickled by my actions. She grabbed my hand, squeezing it and making my heart flutter with a wide and warm grin. "I found a restaurant that you might like, we'll just need to get there."

"Mhmm…" I nodded, and an omni-tool flickered into existence around her left arm. With a minor flick an emerald gate swirled into reality, and we popped right inside her house. She opened the door to her house and we stepped through, and I stopped at the vehicle parked in front of it.

…

"You finally got your own car?" She had been talking about doing so for a while, but with the mess from the city getting back on its feet…

She pulled out a key, running it between her fingers as she spun on her heels. "It's a Honda Accord." It was strange to think that Japanese brands still existed, though that was likely because Kyushu wasn't the whole of Japan and the resilience of its corporations.

It was some type of series hybrid model, like a more commonly sold Chevy Volt with a LFMP battery pack. Not that the specs were that important when what mattered was that it was functional.

"Did you do anything to the car?" I asked casually as I slid into the passenger's seat. Taylor ducked her head as she took the driver's seat, raising an eyebrow but responding quickly.

"Well, it's got crash safety kinetic barrier systems built into the seats. Bakuda put them in." Taylor started the car, and with a vhoom we were off to the races.

We didn't talk much on the way, since I was a little distracted by the fact I hadn't gone inside a car for quite some time. My house was close to a tone of shops, and as Erudition I had portals and advanced vehicles. It was familiar, since I hadn't really learned how to drive before now and didn't have a car. So I needed to get driven around a lot. A little odd but…my own mother hadn't learned how to drive until she was twenty five years old. Then again she wasn't the best driver so that might not be a good thing.

My attention returned to the present, hands gripping nervously onto my skirt as we stopped at a restaurant. It didn't seem like it was anything too fancy but that didn't make it any less nerve wracking when I figured out I was on a date again.

We had been on only one official date so far. Was that bad…did I mess up?

"So this is the place?" I asked awkwardly, my voice cracking. Taylor's head leaned to one side at my question, expresion sharpening.

"It's an Italian restaurant I used to go to before…" She trailed off and I offered her a hand to hold. She took it, squeezing once before letting go. I hoped I was getting the hang of this…whole being supportive shtick. "Vinny's was pretty nice, and the owner was good friends with my parents."

"I'm sure it's nice, and I…like being around you. I…I have no idea where I'm going with this." I confessed, palming my face.

"Do you want to talk about it?" She asked with a worried look.

"We can talk on the date…it'll be easier to converse on a full stomach." I patted my belly, and she chuckled at my antics. I liked her laugh.

"Then shall we?" She gesticulates towards the restaurant.

I answered her back with wordless gusto.

___​

August 11, 2011. 8:40PM

Basilia Rubio

We were seated quickly because the owner was apparently rather happy to see Taylor again after all these years and the place wasn't too full. Vinny was a heavy framed man with a modest belly, wearing a red dress shirt with black slacks, and was in his early 50s with notable grey hairs. He had a warm expression as he spoke with Taylor, and giggled behind the money.

"Oh you've grown so big, it seems the apple hasn't fallen too far from the tree huh?" Taylor mechanically moved her head up and down, and I stifled further amusement for her sake. "How is your father by the way? Still moping?" There was disapproval in the man's eyes.

Taylor nixed that. "He's fine, he's been…getting better, a lot better and I'm okay too." There was an undertone of I hope in her voice.

Vinny looked lighter, and his scrutiny turned to me, interest dancing in his eyes. "Then who would you be? A friend of 'little' Taylor here?" I failed in stopping the reaction that came next.

My face turned scarlet, heat rising. "I…well I yes. We're good friends I would hope." His smile was knowing, and I wanted to duck into a hole.

"I see you've taken after Annie in more than one way, she's quite solidly charmed isn't she?"

Oh god just kill me.

Taylor didn't look any less embarrassed. "I-I guess?" Curiosity beckoned her to peek over at me, and my teeth clicked as I more firmly shut my mouth. Was this really needed…oh god I'm not good at this kind of shit.

"I'll leave you two alone now, I doubt you want me to start telling stories about this one's mother." He pointed at Taylor and there was growing horror on her face as he walked away with a laugh.

"W-What were we talking about before?" I immediately changed the subject and Taylor looked relieved than I had done that.

She folded her menu, perking up a bit. "We were talking about what we were going to eat?" One of the waiters made a beeline for us at that but I didn't pay any further attention. "I'm going for lasagna and you chose…"

"Spaghetti bolognesa." I said cheerily, not regretting my choice at all. Despite the fact we were at a restaurant with more choices than that.

"You always eat the same foods…why is that?" Taylor was one of few who had succeeded in trying to make me try new foods, though it wasn't a big change.

"I always go for what's familiar and comfortable to me." I replied sincerely. "It's just how I am, I'll almost always eat the same things and only periodically change what I eat." There was a reason waterbending was one of my worst elements and Fire was one of my best. I wouldn't call myself emotional but passionate about my interests was definitely a thing I was known for.

The waiter cleared her throat, and I looked up at the young woman. She looked about sixteen or seventeen, wearing a white dress shirt under a black vest and paired with black pants. The redhead looked nervous, obviously new here and there was a very slight blush to her face.

"U—welcome to Vinny's, my name is Madeleine and I'll be your server." She managed to say the complete standard greeting. "Would you like to order you drinks?" Taylor nudged next, and I straightened up.

"Ahh…we'd like to order the food right away." I smiled politely, trying not to intimidate the poor server. But the fact she hid her face behind her notebook meant I had made it worse somehow.

"Okay…what would the two of you like?" The server asked.

"A spaghetti bolognese, a meat lasagna." I inclined my head in Taylor's direction and she mouthed the name of her drink. "A Pepsi, and a Mt Dew."

"It'll be out shortly." She bowed her head before shortly fleeing, and I wondered what that was about.

Taylor radiated amusement but didn't enlighten me on the specifics and while I could have used my social programs to figure that out…it felt like cheating.

Taylor shifted gears. "So…can we talk?" I acceded to the minor demand, feeling the need. "What were you going to say before?"

"We…haven't really gone on a lot of dates." I was a little morose at the fact. "I just, we're dating aren't we? We should be together more often." I felt like I was doing something wrong and it didn't feel good.

"We hang out plenty of times, and it's been pretty crazy lately." Her words didn't help me at all.

"That doesn't make it okay, we're supposed to get to know each other better. To try and figure out how we'll work out." I was nervous, confused, unsure of myself.

I didn't know what to do.

"Basilia…we just started dating." I opened and closed my mouth and any protest was brought to a halt when she kissed me on the forehead. I flushed and didn't respond back. "We're still figuring things out, we have time to get to know each other. I'm not sure about this either…none of my crushes ever worked out and Emma destroyed my social life."

"Sorry…" She tapped me on the head as if to say no, and continued.

"And maybe you're right that we should go on more dates, because it would be nice." There was a distant look in her eyes, like she was imagining something pleasant. "And we've got more time for things like that, but we can work this out. So relax…"

"Can I kiss you?" I blurted out like an idiot and when Taylor responded, someone upped the volume on the television.

"The US Senate has just passed the final revision of PIRA after three weeks of talks and revisions in answer to the Second Wave of Parahuman abilities." My smile was brief, largely because of why this was being done. Benders now made up a solid one percent of the global population, and that…brought a ton of problems.

People trying to be heroes without the right attitudes getting themselves killed by the way more fucked up Parahumans that came before them. Warlords getting massive increase in manpower, because with a few hundred earthbenders one could build roads and assemble great cities, with waterbending one could heal even the most grievous wounds and purify water, with air providing movement and speed, and fire was perfect for quick and easy power generation and as a weapon. I didn't even have to start on the possible applications of biotics…of void.

Shamans were dangerous and elusive but their use in binding, communicating with and defending us from the spirits was needed or Earth Bet was going to swallow us up into her waiting maw.

The character of Bet's spirit world was far more aggressive, not far off from descriptions of the terrifyingly beautiful spirit realm of Tuchanka, though toned down a single notch.

The reforms were aimed at reducing Parahuman crime by the smallest of amounts, as well as aimed at recruitment of the newer less aggressive capes showing up because of Veda throwing off the whole system. Luckily triggers haven't sped up at all, since there was no reason to change that because it was a bad idea. Benders were one thing true Parahumans were another due to their unpredictability. A cape could be weaker than a bender, or a monster on the same level as Alexandria or Legend.

Benders were easier to integrate while Parahumans had more psychological problems and far worse reputations. Honestly I expected people to start using benders and second wave shard hosts as the equivalent of model minorities to shit on already agitated Parahumans.

"Basilia?" I apologized for the lapse, resting my back on the chair.

"It's fine, though I guess it's going to make it easier for workers to use their bending." The DWA would benefit heavily in construction based jobs, with the sheer lifting capacity of practically any element except fire. "I think I'd like to get back to our date now."

Taylor seemed to like the idea, and I leaned forward as I let myself destress.

"So…is there anything you miss from back home?" The question hit me and while there was a twinge of pain I didn't let it stop me from responding.

I twirled a lock of my hair, nostalgia shaping my smile. "Well I miss a lot of old videos and old stars from back home…you know YouTubers who aren't around anymore." Bet's meme culture was different from my own and only Aleph shared any superficial similarities. "Music too…it's different, and I have some unique stuff from back home but…" There was understanding there.

It's not the same.

"I've listened to some of the music from your home, a lot of it is familiar and some of it is…new." I imagine there were a lot of oddities there, shows that didn't exist here as well as music in languages that weren't as prevalent.

Like Japanese music, since while anime existed it wasn't to the same extent as in my world, and Aleph didn't import enough to make it anything other than a niche product. It was closer to the state of the late early 2000s, than the booms of the 2010s and the start of the 2020s with this year.

"Yeah but some of it is good right?" I questioned.

"It's nice actually, different but nice. Especially because you tend to dance when you think people aren't looking." She flashed a teasing smile and I was distraught.

"S-Shut up! Don't make fun of my weird habits." I clasped my hands together and readied puppy dog eyes to defend my dignity.

"You're good at dancing, or at least better than I thought you would be." Taylor said. She looked nice, and I felt in a good place so I answered.

"I took two years of dance." I looked at my nails, noting that I was still in the habit of biting them.

"Weren't you a…" I quirked a brow at Taylor.

"So what of it? I wanted some kind of exercise, it was fun if embarrassing and there were girls in the class. What more could I ask for?" Not that I ever felt more than a passing interest in any of the girls, though there was that one mishap with entering the wrong dressing room at a theater that I instantly blocked from memory.

Not even joking on that either, the moment I caught a flash of anything I dumped it into a mental incinerator.

"Was…was it really something you liked?" She asked lowly, whispering almost.

"Of course I liked it, even if there were only like one or two boys who didn't drop out. But while I might have lost some of the skills due to my bad memory…martial arts did help bring some of that back."

"What about music, or singing?"

"I never really cared about singing, though both my parents could sing and my one of my grandma's used to be semi-famous." I shrugged, it was pretty far in the past when my family had any amount of wealth or power. My mom's side used to be rich until the wealth got squandered I think, and my dad's side didn't last because music careers aren't eternal.

"Your family seems…to be pretty colorful." Was all Taylor said.

"That wasn't always a good thing Taylor, there's a lot of bad history too…" I spoke carefully, my memory clicking into place all the times I listened in on old history and stories that were…plain awful.

"Bad history?"

"A lot of toxic infighting, some vices here and there." Alcoholism and smoking mostly, though it wasn't universal at the least. "Most of the really bad stuff was from before I was born though." It felt gross to have some of my blood relations if some of what I had heard was true.

"How bad?" I grimaced.

"Like I told you before my mom's dad was a very bad person…and certainly wasn't faithful to his wife or nice to his kids." The fact I didn't meet one of my aunt's until I was an adult because he had straight up just taken her was…

Having a big Mexican family really didn't insulate you from problems, and honestly about half of my life had been raised away from the big clustering just south of the border. Not that the family of my generation and the generation of my parents was anywhere near as bad, though they were flawed certainly.

I didn't like to think about what my mom's childhood was like…because it would make me feel sad. And impotently enraged.

"Probably best to move on from this depressing topic please." She looked very much ready to move, appearing appalled and apologetic. "We could talk about your family maybe?"

She made a chopping motion of denial. "I know things about my parents, but they're estranged on both sides and…" So more shit to pile on top of my morose spiel. God I knew I could be a depressing little shit but raking up old scars I wasn't fully aware of was a bit much on a second date.

"Music, I'll talk about music. That's a safe topic." I did my best to save the date. "I love music, of any kind…mostly soundtrack music."

Taylor placed her elbows down on the table, lips twitching up. "Like from movies?" I bobbed my head, unable to restrain my general happiness at the topic of music.

"Yep. But songs are nice too…I'm really imaginative, and it helps…pull me out of bad moods when I just…" Shut down was left unsaid. "It's easy to use music to depict entire scenes in my head, to the point I can almost literally see them." Not really but it was close enough. "I can feel a lot of different ways depending on what I listen to, and it helps make working on things a lot easier sometimes."

She beamed and I realized I had pretty much been straight up monologuing at her. Which was…that felt normal. It felt familiar and safe, like I was home and could talk freely and chatter on with the people willing to tolerate me for more than a minute.

"Ahem?" The server was there, fidgeting awkwardly, holding both our respective dishes and drinks. I leaned back and Madeleine placed down the dishes, bowing her head before giving us a few short words and leaving.

I took the spaghetti bolognesa, licking my dry lips and unfolding the wrapped utensils. Within a second I spun the paste around a fork, and the tasty morsel was vacuumed up. So good.

That was followed by a quick sip of the Dew, which thankfully retained the same flavor as home. The fact it existed at all was only because of it going back to 1940, and the flavor being tweaked to the modern formula decades before Scion ever showed his golden mug.

Having a good amount of the Internet downloaded into your spirit's corpus made it easier to find weird history topics…

I shrunk back at Taylor's self-satisfied semblance. "What?" I said defensively.

"Nothing."

…

It was a nice date, and I ended up having a lot of fun the rest of the night.

___​

August 11th, 2011. 11:45PM

Basilia Rubio

I was getting ready for bed, and thus had removed my upper support because none of that was not suitable for sleep. I was looking up a few things, mainly AI trawlers carefully taking in data to detect the movement of capes, carefully assembled programs doing their best not to trigger bombs of any kind.

There were rumors a new Elite cell was being planted in New Hampshire, a desperate gamble to move in on the East coast before they would be walled in by a government ever so slowly healing from the crippling wounds of shard invoked conflict.

I was going to do my best to not let the Elite enter the picture, because we needed to at least be aiming in the general same direction instead of divided up into smaller and weaker groups. Whether it was Scion or something just as bad, Dinah was still fuzzy on what the hell was going to go down just under two years from now.

Only that it could go either way on human extinction, and with how much of a monkey's paw precognition could be at times it didn't mean either outcome was good.

The shattering of institutions led to the end state of Ward being a mess, and the lies would have to end someday. And I'm not sure it wasn't going to explode in all our faces. Contact with Cauldron was minimum now, Fortuna accomplishing what she wanted with the dozen vials she gave us. And it was for the best because she was bad for my headspace.

The dozen vials hadn't been used though the possibility lingered, and I was getting closer and closer to figuring out true shard biology instead of my primitive emulations of their magical dimensional manipulations.

I laid down in my bed, reading an update from Dragon…which was an invitation to Kyushu? Apparently some people trying to rebuild from the wreckage wanted to talk with me, likely because of my part with the last Endbringer fight.

There was a large group of capes who were acting as the defenders of the people that made their way into the spirit infested landscapes of the resurrected island. They wanted to create a rebirth of the old Sentai Elite, to bring back a new cape team better fit for modern times and ways.

Their greatest failure wasn't erased, because the land didn't bring back the nine and a half million souls that had drowned with it. But there needed to be a change, and the fall of the ocean beast was the apparent catalyst.

I didn't like to think about the global repercussions of what we had managed to accomplish. A shift in the balance of power on a massive scale, the key to ending the Endbringer threat. And with the loss of that threat, the slow failure of the old system of playing cape. The only thing left in the way was the danger of escalation, the decor of mutual annihilation between the government and capes.

It was one of the reasons PIRA was passed so quickly, the enormous bill was a vast rehauling of the way things were done, and against the will of the people who hated capes and what they meant for the future. Though ironically many of them had a hand in the crafting of the bill. Because while benders were different from capes, they had numbers and economies of scale that Parahumans could only achieve very rarely.

From what I had looked up on the history of the four Nations, before they somehow became the Systems Alliance of all things, thousands of years ago the first benders absolutely destroyed some of their earlier cultures when bending was still young as a discipline in their cycle.

And history tends to repeat itself, or at the very least it rhymes.

I rather enjoyed civilization…and if I could stop that from happening here I could stop it happening in my world. It wasn't safe either, though based on what I was detecting with my more refined transdimensional sensors it could be insulated in some way.

I was going to go to sleep, and when I had free time I was going to take that trip to Japan on the Kodiak shuttle legally registered with the right authorities.

I had never been to Japan before so it might be fun…

Might being the keyword there. I was going to take the appropriate care as a paranoid wreck and a shaman.

It was only logical.

 

[Menthewarp]

Contact with Cauldron was minimum now, Fortuna accomplishing what she wanted with the dozen vials she gave us. And it was for the best because she was bad for my headspace.

Click to shrink...

Path to becoming friendly acquaintances with Basilia.

Path to getting permission to crash on Basilia's couch whenever.

Path to "Damn it Contessa!" becoming a persistent internet meme without disrupting more important Paths.

Path to making Paths for making Paths about Pathing Paths.

 

[morkail]

Finally got around to reading this story gotta admit the intro blip to explain the story turned Me off many times before I got around to reading it.

Other wise great story thanks for all your hard work looking forward to future chapters.

 

[AEM]

Repercussion 11.2

August 14th, 2011. 9:00AM

Basilia Rubio

I walked by our newest member, the fourth tinker in our group who I could tell was working on a device of some kind. She was definitely flourishing, and while she didn't have a lot of direct combat applications with her creations she was a nice girl.

"Skimmer, whatcha making?" The redhead kept working, her tongue flicking out as she used omni-field effectors to modify her device. They were some of my newest and most expensive devices, modified to take into account as many variables as possible during construction. Gravimeters, various detectors for various forms of energy including the planet's magnetic field, to dimensional shifts, the planet's tilt which was easy enough by measuring the movement of the sun.

Detection of subatomic phenomena through mass effect-electromagnetic field modulators. It made it simple to maintain some of the Tinkertech built into the Samsara, and in fact I think I could up the complexity now without maintenance problems getting in the way.

"It's Kyna." She said quietly, and I patted her shoulder. She flinched, almost looking afraid before that fear was pulled back. Kyna kept talking, and I didn't say a word about her reaction. "I've been…using your optotronic components as a basis for my Polyhistor devices."

"Polyhistor?" I inquired, and Kyna turned so I could see the basic machine. It was a flat black disk about the size of a potato chip.

"It's what I decided to call my devices, it makes sense if you think about it." She defended herself and I tilted my head. She swallowed and kept going. "This device is a very potent infrared light detector, and can analyze and deduce conclusions from heat." She brought the newly finished device up to her chest, and her new omni-tool connected to the device.

She waved it over some of my active robots, and her tool projected a screen where projected words focused around different points in the machine.

"So it's basically a suped up infrared camera with advanced programming for navigation, surveillance, and targeting? Such as determining power sources to aim for, disease or weaknesses of the biological body." I cut off her initial indignation with the full guess at what she made possible.

"Yes…but I guess it might not be that impressive for someone like you." She said despondently, and god she sounded like a kicked puppy.

"Can I take a look at the code of your little device?" Kyna held her device for a moment before sighing and letting me have it. I connected to the device with my own handheld supercomputer, and brought myself into the realm of computing I had created for better interfacing. I inspected the complex and weaving code that Kyna had created, reaching out with digital feelers and mental gestures.

I read the code, my implants filled to the brim with AI software letting me better interpret the code to the best of my ability as both a tinker and a curious scientist.

The software had some principles I had seen from Dragon's code but even so it was unique in some ways. While most of my computing stuck to binary, being optical meant those kinds of limits weren't really there besides the sheer complexity.

Her code ran on a quaternary architecture, and was highly efficient in a lot of ways. It drew less power and made better and more effective conclusions, and the sensors it was connected to were better than my own. It was doubtful that I could do better, and while I could certainly replicate it, it wouldn't be to the same quality without taking input from Kyna.

I took a deep whiff, a new code-sensory-interface let me see and sense code through translation to bodily senses. It smelled fresh and newly made, though touch and sight worked far better for analyzing the netcode.

"It's very impressive, better than my own software actually. You do good work." I lightly patted her shoulder, hoping I hadn't overstepped my boundaries.

Her shy smile told me I had done well. "Really? I thought with how good of a tinker you are…I wouldn't match up."

"I'm not a perfect tinker, I'm an unrestricted tinker. There's a difference there, I'm a generalist in most technologies but that doesn't mean that everything I have is the pinnacle of what's possible." My space warping technology was good but didn't have the sheer precision of Vista's warping and didn't affect dimensions as well as Damsel of Distress until I scanned Labyrinth and then her a fuckton of times.

"You're just saying that." I sat down next to her, startling the redhead. I poked her on the nose to bring emphasis on my next words.

"I am not Kyna. My tech is advanced, sure, but I can only handle what I do because I'm a Tinker-Thinker-Trump. Even so there are only so many hours in the day, and I needed cyberware and artificial intelligence to better wrangle new tech." I tapped the back of my neck, where my DNI lied. "Even so, I'm still not as good at making bombs as Bakuda, or as good as any other tinkers in their specialties. What I'm good at is understanding the basic principles behind their tech and making it possible to figure out in the future by non-tinkers."

"So even if you figure out my tech…"

"I can bring out your potential by getting all the material you need, or tinkering up a production line. But if you keep up your work, it's doubtful I'll directly surpass you." Like any human organization there were specialists, though spreading out a bit was fine with certain jobs and functions. Grace tinkered with my weapons designs, getting the most out of them, and some specialist devices were harder to maintain but more powerful.

My neutronium flex torpedos had been heavily hybridized with various types of spacetime altering weaponry. The torpedo itself was shot out, and would then accelerate on a regime of warped space as it directed itself toward a target. The neutronium decompression would act as the trigger for additional spatial warpings made by generating gravity through dark sector field manipulation.

It was a weapon capable of tearing a dreadnought apart barring some form of special shielding, and had counters built into the weapon itself. Shards would probably take a lot of damage, though their ability to shift dimensions should let them avoid a lot of it.

Unless I added some metrics to shift the detonation between multiple realities to wreck their shit multidimensionally.

Though I would say that while I had a generalist approach, specific things relating to Eezo, dark matter and energy were the closest I had to a direct speciality since what I had was better than anyone else's. Since I literally had a direct pipeline to technology the Entities simply didn't possess.

Tinkers with tech related to gravity and mass manipulation could probably catch up if I let them though. But I won't, so that's not going to happen unless a rather hardworking tinker decides to go all in on dethroning me.

"So, you're doing great and I'll continue to support you as a member of my team." I moved the conversation along, again lightly patting her shoulder as I walked past her. She seemed less tense than before, and I stepped out of her workshop and out into the hallway of the hexagonal structure of the prime base on Earth Lotus.

It took me less than a hundred feet of walking before I ended up at one of the small meeting rooms. Dinah was already here as was Faultline with Elle at her side, Matryoshka was lingering around the suitably dressed leader of the cell of the White Lotus once known as Faultline's Crew.

Dinah had her hood pulled down, leaving her in her mask and her stylish bowler hat was firmly emplaced on her head. Elle had her mask on, and I could sense the spirits that happily walked with her, spirits of fire, of heat, of sand and metal and void and concepts. Mere wisps of power, shades to the bonfire of the living gods that some great spirits became.

A few unique spirits circled around her, spirits of Connection, of Translocation, concepts born from the use of her power, thoughts and ideas brought into metaphysical reality.

Matryoshka was orbited by spirits of Memory and Absorption while Faultline had spirits of Cutting, even if a select form restricted to the non-living. Parahumans provided one major benefit, power. Due to the spirit of spirit-like nature of Shards they gained spiritual nourishment from actions relating to their concepts. Actions which humans could perform anytime they used their powers.

That some of the more aggressive shards didn't go all out was because some of them were stupid and information compartmentalization.

Some shards were dedicated to keeping others in line, and Monomon…Kyna's shard was one of them, one dedicated to analyzing the actions of shards to regulate their actions.

"You're early." Faultline noted, tapping her fingers on the carbon composite table dyed white. "Contessa hasn't paid you a visit again has she?" The one Case 53 in the room stiffened and I denied it.

"For whatever reason she gave me those vials, it's obvious she's pretty much done directly interfering. Best guess is that she wants to see what we can make of them outside of the reach of the Simurgh." Matryoshka didn't seem any happier at my speculation. "To be frank I have no idea who I'd even trust to take these things, or if I even need to." Maybe the shards the vials would connect to would forge a bond with a host themselves?

"You'll figure it out." Elle added, glancing at the spirits, including the very faint aspects of void. I could only barely speak to such entities, and even the shards weren't primarily Void. They were Shard, and then void. Out of hundreds of shamans that I had gotten some idea of by way of PRT, only one of them had the talent to speak to the void.

I asked. "How have your missions gone? I haven't been fully in the loop…" Faultline replies quickly.

"We've managed to beat back a few groups trying to move in on New Hampshire, small villain teams, a few cells of lesser known groups. We had a run-in with the Adepts as well."

"They tried to recruit Labyrinth?" Faultline nodded.

"It failed spectacularly." She dryly replied. "She might effectively be an actual wizard now, but that doesn't mean she'll listen to their dreck."

"How much have we delayed the smaller teams, a few weeks maybe?" Dinah perked up then.

"At least a few weeks, our proactive actions are scaring off the more cowardly capes. The Elite will probably have second thoughts on advancing…we have more to worry about from the Teeth." Her eyebrows were brought together in worry and I got what she meant. Deterring some Parahuman organizations was possible, but that didn't apply to all of them.

The smaller, more tricky groups would show up to fill the role of villains like the Undersiders or Uber and Leet, though some won't bother because there might be too much heat. We had brought down multiple groups, ignoring Orchard and they had been rather easily contained.

The likely groups were the more cultish and violent cape groups like the Teeth, the Fallen, Lost Garden was a certainty based on their recent movements. The Adepts were delayed but not for long.

Every costume had psychic shielding, but anti-Master sensors worked perfectly after running some tests. Remotely sensing and diagnosing mental abnormalities was frighteningly easy. Just in case Masters tried to get us through populations that aren't immune.

"Should I start asking questions or not?" I queried Dinah directly, and she gave me a thumbs up. I cleared my throat. "What are the chances that the Teeth will return to Brockton Bay?"

"40.98% odds the Teeth enter the city in one week, 67.78% odds they arrive in two, and 87.78% odds they arrive in three." So we have two weeks to prepare.

"What are the odds they're going to be targeting us?"

She looked at me like I was stupid. "93.83%. We changed the balance of power, the Butcher is going to want a piece of one of us at least." So figuring out a method of containment was paramount, whether doing to her what was done to the now impossible Butcher 15 or interfering with the shard cluster itself, we needed a means to bring them down.

"What are the odds that a Fallen cell will arrive in Brockton Bay?" I continued and Dinah focused.

"20.67% chance the Fallen arrive in a week, 33.86% they arrive in two weeks, and a 53.23% chance they arrive in four weeks." So the Fallen would likely not make landfall for quite some time, so our main enemy in the city would be the Teeth and smaller cults.

An Endbringer cultist had already met a grisly end at the hands of a certain knowledge spirit contained to the spiritual landscape of the Brockton Bay Central Library. But that was back in June…so it might not do much to deter other groups.

I spoke up. "So the major threats are going to be the Teeth, the Fallen, and Lost Garden followed up by the Elite or smaller teams." Dinah affirmed my threat assessment, lightly rubbing her head.

She could answer about thirty questions a day at full fidelity and accuracy, and over a hundred with much lower accuracy. Those were primarily for day-to-day tasks for her own usage due to the high interference from other Thinkers, and Bans like Scion or the Endbringers.

Her more accurate questions could model around them, monitoring their actions. But while technically her restrictions could be lifted completely to unlock a true Path to Victory…

That wasn't happening mostly because it was one of the Bans some shards were under, and because it would make her head explode. For whatever reason trying to open up only to Contessa levels of bullshit would open the doors all the way, and the flood of information across gods knows how many dimensions would shatter her human mind into little pieces.

So while loosening her restrictions had already been done, she could only use her power in the short term to munchkin it into a combat power. She had described it as a lotto roll of futures, timeline streams compressing themselves for thirty minutes into the future.

Not as good as Coil's multiple hours of clairvoyance, but perhaps a little more useful in actual combat. Of course the fact her shard has eaten his power made some of its new properties rather sensible. Though it was more a difference in expression than anything else. Both were Future sight shards, one of multiple clusters of such shards. Dinah's was the core of Scion's PtV while Coil's was one of many separate less efficient or less potent varieties of future sight.

Or at the least it was just different.

Differences in predictive algorithms, differences in time-tweaking mechanisms to allow for accurate but not perfect future sight. Time travel was a thing but there was some practical limit, a time-axis where quantum perturbations would utterly cripple even the strongest Entity. Time loops were comparatively easy, but were often combined with limited forms of biokinesis as some form of mental protection from the oddities of time looping.

Or in Grey Boy's case…eternally torturing his victims.

Pushing on time was possible, but it would fight back ferociously if you pushed too hard. In fact based on a few conversations I had with Knowledge spirits, there were Bans on such things applying to the universe itself.

Even so time manipulation was definitely a thing they did, though it wasn't a perfect look hundreds of years into the future because if it was, simulation wouldn't be necessary.

Not that I knew how the hell their precognition and postcognition fully worked and I had nowhere near the same processing power to manage it beyond predicting the weather a few months in advance. Though their time-tweaking values might prove interesting for better drive metrics.

Based on a few files I had found on Reaper tech experimentation, a Reaper drive core was far more powerful than even the best scout engines. Maybe about three to four times faster than conventional MED travel, with nanocomposite tech far more advanced than anything that wasn't Tinkertech on Earth Bet.

Of course that also included logs on how over half of them had gone insane due to the effects of Indoctrination. A combination of picotech infections, anomalous infrasound and energy fields. It was a disease in both the physical and the spiritual, a true terror weapon that made people like Valafor look like puppies.

It was one thing that made me sleep easier, that something as powerful as the Reapers were defeated and beaten. But maybe it was time to focus back on today instead of the past or the future.

"Dinah…what are the chances that I'll be harmed during my trip to Kyushu?"

She answered "21% odds you will be harmed." She used the less accurate usage of her power.

"What are the odds there'll be a dangerous incident that results in no harm to my person?"

Her eyes narrowed. "86%, more or less. You're still a little fuzzy sometimes." Again that fuzziness I caused was probably the reason for a lot of problems. If I had been on the Eye's radar, then Contessa would have noticed I was around and gotten whatever information she could get from me.

On one hand the chances of getting taken by Cauldron were straight up terrifying, on the other hand if they knew early on what I knew of the future maybe things like Canberra wouldn't have happened. Or maybe they would have simply killed me or gotten me out of the way because I'm a Blindspot. Or maybe they would have fucked up and made things worse.

"We'll get things in order later then, maybe look for some trouble with Labyrinth or help out Skimmer."

Dinah developed a twinkle in her eyes. "I was thinking of taking a patrol with the Wards, Kiyohime's debut was only a few days ago." Lung's kid had been staying off the radar, maneuvering like a ghost outside of periodic shaman business like exorcisms, wardings and accomplishing tasks to keep normals safe from spirit business.

"So you'll be away?" Matryoshka butted in, and I answered promptly.

"Yes. I'm taking a shuttle to Japan and will probably be away for today or even tomorrow at the latest." I shrugged, it wasn't much of an inconvenience because I had people to rely on besides myself.

We spent a few minutes hashing out some more details before I contacted Dragon on what exactly was going on with Japan.

___​

August 14th, 2011. 10:00AM

Basilia Rubio

My shuttle popped into Earth Bet's dimensional coordinates, space shifting weakly where I had flown between universes. The vidscreens of their cockpit let me see the wispy clouds a kilometer up in the sky, and I nodded at my wisdom to enter this reality at transonic speeds rather than the orbital regime in the uninhabited dimension I had moved from.

The ship was orienting itself towards the prefabricated base that the Guild had assembled with the help of the Fugeki Order, which was the current workshop name of the nearly one thousand shamans scattered across Japan. Many of them were concentrating on New Kyushu because of the sheer density of spirits in the area.

I swerved the ship as I dropped in altitude, dodging a flying entity that my camera based windshield could see. A pair of large eagle-like wings carried a pointy nosed man aloft before vanishing through a rift with ease.

A spirit of some kind certainly, and likely one of of many thousands ignoring the barely aware aspect spirits. My blood was racing in my ear, antsiness like no other taking a hold of my sensibilities. I could hear the voices, a low song, a beat of a million drums echoing across the dark night of New Kyushu.

I was flying over the ruins of Dazaifu, most of it buried beneath vast evergreen habitats, with only select buildings not being buried under the twisting landscapes of Spirit Wilds. Some of that wild forest had been cut away, revealing rickety and water damaged buildings.

One building, the base itself was buzzing with activity and I could see quite a few people had decided to settle the island, or at the least they wanted to put the dead to rest. Which would be a lot of bodies…

I found an empty landing pad, obviously built by earthbending and a few people got in close but not too close, and I focused my attention on landing. The shuttle opened its door as landing legs sprung out to support the 15 meter long vessel.

I hopped out of the ship and within seconds I was accosted by people speaking in Japanese which was rapidly translated into English by my on hand omni-devices.

"Hello!" The words didn't move in sync with their lips, which I proceeded to ignore.

"I don't speak Japanese, though I've got a translator." The two greeters blinked simultaneously, and I quickly realized the greeters were fraternal twins. A pretty and tall dark haired girl and equally pretty boy. Though since they looked about my age maybe boy and girl wasn't the right term anymore?

The two tilted their heads and spoke at once. "Why of course." I stared and the twins were pushed aside by a woman in her mid 20s, wearing a white shirt and a long red skirt like an imitation of a Miko outfit.

"Don't mind them, a run in with a spirit let them pull off that trick a few weeks back. They like messing with people." Spirits swarmed around her, and I knew immediately that all three of them were shaman. There were multiple shamans out there, and the spiritual pressure was dense.

"So…are you the leader here or…?" She looked exhausted.

"Sakura Kobayashi, but you can just call me Sakura." She shrugged her shoulders, smiling tiredly. "Apparently I'm the leader of the lazy louts, outcasts and freaks that decided it was a good idea to resettle a shambling corpse." She pointed behind us to the greater settlement, all centered around a honden, a Shintō shrine of some kind.

"How many people…"

"Tens of thousands have been coming in from the CUI, and South Korea, and a few other countries. They want to rebuild, to try to make something of the wreckage of Japan." She replied and I got it.

A lot of people had successfully fled from Kyushu, hundreds of thousands had initially evacuated, and it amounted to even greater numbers than that since the sinking of Kyushu wasn't instant. Millions of Japanese had been scattered across the globe due to the secondary effects of losing an island, an—woah!

I was suddenly hugged, and I flailed around as I was picked up by a beast of a man, bristling arm muscles popping as they gripped onto me like a vice.

"W-What's going on?" I demanded weakly, and was placed back down. A tall Japanese man, about 6'5 and built like a brick house. He wore a simply white gi, and a smile revealed sharpened teeth. Further examination of his form found plates along his arms, a semi-metallic carapace that vanished when I noticed them.

"This is Haruto, he's a shaman playing host to a rather unique spirit…it calls itself a shard-spirit." So he was a shaman that had accepted a shard as a creature sharing his body.

Neat.

The Host put me down, cracking a shy smile. "Welcome." I didn't smile back, mainly because he was still so close and it was a little odd.

"So was I called here for a particular reason?" The four shamans looked at one another.

"We sought the expertise of someone who knows a lot about portals, plus you're a shaman like us…you might be able to help us." Sakura leaned forward, clasping her hands together in seeming desperation.

"Help with what exactly?" I asked, and they gestured for me to approach the ruined shrine. I did so, carefully keeping an eye out because while I knew I was likely to be safe, it was no guarantee so I didn't question her. On whether it was the people inviting me who were the danger.

But I had a gut feeling that wasn't the case.

When I stepped onto the premises of the shrine, it was suddenly like I was under a microscope, like a great and vast storm was swirling around me, thundering to a beat I could only just hear.

I breathed, and the storm pulled back as I was led towards a faintly glowing plum tree, markings carved into its bark. I could hear rapid typing and found a boy about Dinah's age with his eyes hidden by futuristic goggles, fingers rapidly typing into a holographic screened computer.

The giant goggles did a good job of hiding his face and when I approached, metallic appendages emerged from his back, from a large pack I hadn't noticed on a first glance.

They elevated him about two meters into the air, a face splitting grin forming.

"Hello! You are Erudition." He has a slight accent. "You can help us can you not?" Six limbs had emerged from his back, and two held his laptop, letting me see the recording on the screen.

I flinched when I saw the swirling eddies of spacetime, windows into what had to be other realities. They resembled deep claw marks, like a ravaging beast had torn at the thin space between mortal worlds.

"I'm starting to see what the problem is…do these lead to other worlds?" He nodded, and I immediately opened a gate to bring out some equipment. I brought out one of my more robust scanners, a device about the length of my arm. It was a particle accelerator designed to interact with and scan dimensions, a powerful spirit VI operating its arcane machinery. It appeared like a supersized checking aisle scanner.

"We've managed to close about 60% of the portals, but that was when we got lucky and Eidolon showed up and used his powers to shut them down." Sakura sounded annoyed. "But that man has bigger problems and we needed someone with more than passing knowledge of portal creation."

"I'll see what I can do, besides their existence is there anything dangerous about these portals?" I waved the device and it sent out a wide range pulse, out for multiple kilometers in every direction. My HUD projected a corner map, and I mentally zoomed it out to a 15 kilometer radius sphere.

The scanner had a cold fusion reaction energizing it's core, the portals vibrating like bells from contact with higher reality level energy pulses. There were four areas of distorted space, so I asked.

Sakura scowled. "Dangerous spirits often pass through these portals, and quite a few of them have ended up killing people." I found my own mood dropping. That was one of the downsides of spirits, while most were too simple to hurt people, the more complex and intelligent of spirits were far more dangerous and far more insidious.

"I've found about four portals within six kilometers of this place, I can close them down." Sakura flinched.

"It won't be that easy…a powerful and malevolent Dragon spirit is making use of them to take territory, feeding on spirits and resonances from both here and from the locations the other portals lead to." Interesting.

"Is that so? I haven't gotten much time to really stretch my spiritual muscle, it might be nice to get back to work outside of commanding technology spirits." The Japanese shamans looked uncertain, but I had confidence that as long as I took care things wouldn't go completely sideways.

Just mostly sideways.

As a shaman things going wrong was a foregone conclusion, and I would have to deal with them as usual. At the least shaman missions were interesting and felt far more…natural.

"Are you certain about this?" The twins spoke at once and I gave a thumbs up.

"I'll have to prepare…but closing down uncontrolled portals to other realities sounds like a good idea."

Now…I had to get to work. Portals and dangerous spirits wouldn't clean up themselves and I wasn't going to let some fear stop me from doing what needed to be done.

___​

August 14th, 2011. 11:00AM

Dinah Alcott

I rubbed my head, trying to pinpoint what my own little Eye wasn't seeing. On what the two of us, on what the network wasn't seeing. There was a ticking time bomb, but even the information it couldn't reveal to me was incomplete, forced to model around the great weight of what it saw.

It didn't matter.

We had faced multiple monsters already, even if the first case I had only been barely able to cut through the veil of blindness. We knew when Leviathan would probably attack because of me, even if we had to fudge a bit just in case. We had brought down three more Endbringers, and stopped more from ever showing up again.

Though the three new Endbringers had been so crippled it took us only a few minutes to dismantle them.

"Delphi." Labyrinth whispered from my right, tilting her head behind her mask. "Vista wants to talk to you…" I frowned at the reminder of the person we were joining on patrol out of sight from people. Kiyohime didn't end up going on patrol so we couldn't talk with her, so we were stuck with Missy since most of the Wards had graduated.

Only three Wards were left, and I knew rumors that Flechette was having troubles with sticking with the Protectorate in the long term.

We were being accompanied by Battery, the woman's lips twitching just slightly as Missy pointedly stared at me.

"Did you want to ask something?" I could have come and simulated the conversation, following the answer I wanted to hear…asking the right questions to get what I wanted.

But I had better ways to waste my power.

"What's it like being a part of the White Lotus, is it like any other corporate team?" Missy sounded curious, and Battery didn't seem to be hiding her own interest.

"Not really…the White Lotus is closer to a sponsored team in the way it works, especially with how many capes it has." It was weird how magnetic Basilia was on her own, and Taylor had the same qualities but in a different way.

Basilia gave off general good vibes even if she could be really crotchety while Taylor was genuine, and her confidence and force of personality drew others to her.

They had two very different kinds of charisma, and it made a potent combination. A very dangerous one for some people, and it was only their lack of need to overturn the government that kept the pressure off.

Plus the fact they could wipe out entire countries was probably playing a factor. Basilia could do that directly by using the Thanix cannon on every city on Earth Bet, launching hundreds of nuclear-yield missiles at the planet, or…knocking the moon out of orbit with a gigantic positive gravity field.

Or black nano-plagues, sterilization plagues, degenerate matter bombs, or whatever else she could build…Basilia was scary. Taylor wasn't as direct but she was stealthy and could probably destroy our crops and starve us to death.

"24 capes is atypical." Missy noted and I agreed but didn't tell her that this was probably just the beginning. We probably wouldn't grow to the scale of the Elite, mainly because Basilia could not handle that but a bigger organization wasn't unlikely. "Plus with the fact you absorbed New Wave and Faultline's team without having them kill each other."

"We both gave them things they wanted or made friends with them in some way." I patted Elle on the shoulder, and she laughed behind her mask, like the tinkling of chimes. "Though honestly it was pretty much a series of unlikely events adding up to what we've got today."

Battery blinked. "You're saying Erudition didn't plan anything. I have my doubts on that." Battery seemed hesitant to believe me.

"You've met Erudition right? She's smart, sure, but she isn't good with people. It doesn't come naturally to her, not like it does for other people." I whispered quietly, flashing back to the expressions of anxiety and fear and uncertainty that plagued her when she thought no one was looking. "She had to work at it, had to figure it out or get help from others to keep her going." Battery was apologetic and I relaxed.

She wasn't perfect, but I didn't want people throwing suspicions on her like she was this genius evil mastermind. She hadn't tried to seek people out, and most of what she had left was so watered down it was less than useless for a lot of things.

I flicked my fingers along my omni-tool, and a few drones circled around us as I commanded them from the computer on my wrist. They swept the vicinity like I had told them to, and Missy talked again.

"Moving on from the White Lotus…there's a few things I wanted to ask you." She compressed space, and went from the ground to the rooftop of a building nearby.

Blonde hair tickled my shoulder. "Ask away." Elle entered the conversation and Battery let us be, probably figuring that we would give them more information.

"About bending…how does it work exactly?" The question was unexpected but only because I wasn't looking. "I know it's different from powers, if it doesn't come from our…" Her eyes darted to Battery and the adult nodded. "Agents…where does it come from?"

"I…can answer this one." Elle leaned forward, rising over our heights rather easily. "I'm the one best suited, best made for this." I knew that tone, the one she took when her intuition took hold of her judgement. "You've been put under Tinkertech scanners before haven't you?"

"How'd you know?" Missy was perturbed.

"Erudition was the one who created those scanners, it's old technology for anyone who knows anything about Applied Metaphysics."

"Metaphysics isn't a science, it's a philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality." Battery knew her stuff, because that wasn't an answer she had looked up on the internet to sound smart.

"Applied Metaphysics is the science of phenomena that are a lot harder to explain than normal science." Elle explained, her head on a pivot as we were still on patrol even if it was a slow day with barely any activity. "The research and study of shamanistic practice, and the examination of the soul."

"The soul…really?" Missy questioned, and I couldn't see much of her expression behind her visor.

Elle shifted, her power warping the fabric of reality. "The soul is quantifiable, and it has a purpose…you might think otherwise but it's true. The soul is why the world is the way it is, it's why we're here, it's the answer to a question as old as time."

"The answer to what question?"

"You would have to ask the Void for that Vista…" Elle stuck her thumb out, and then her pinky, and I brought more drones, and more hidden machines. This time I allowed the flood of the future to surge through, opening the doors.

The rivers of time swirled, and the dice were rolled as I spoke.

"We're going to be ambushed." I warned them.

Missy moved the fastest, space warping around her. She threw out her hand, and a flickering biotic barrier wrapped around us. Supersonic darts cracked against her shields, and the illusion of us being alone was broken. I saw the people attacking, and I didn't harbor any doubts on why they were here.

A total of four capes, each of them wearing black bodysuits over dark coats and dark blue jewel-like masks. The holograms were broken apart by the drone I had hidden, sending out disruptive EMP pulses. At least that's what they're supposed to do.

I saw and looked into the possibilities, and found a fifth hiding out of sight. Biding his or her time, the clock ticking as I used my power. I followed the flashes, and spun on my heels to dodge the strike aimed for my throat. I did a backflip, and my feet slammed into the chest of one of the attacking capes.

A feminine voice sounded out from her as she was knocked back, and I opened a portal with a quick word. It flickered under Vista's range of influence but we were on another building.

Battery fiddled with a communicator but the thing was toast, and I shook my head when I checked my omni-tool. "Won't work, they're jamming local signals. I can get help though…give me a se—" I ducked under a flaming fist from one of the capes, a man about as tall as Taylor.

I threw us into portals again and they pulled back to regroup.

"Those are Yangban capes…why are they here?" Battery said with grit teeth, her power sparking to life, and flames wrapping around her fists as she brought her bending into play.

"They're probably here for me…I am one of the most powerful Precogs on record." My rivals included Scion, Contessa, and the Simurgh so I was among some dangerous people in that regard. None of the capes responded to my guess, and I clenched my fists.

If they managed to get into the country, then that meant they had powers that let them infiltrate easily. The holograms were Tinkertech, but they probably had Strangers among them, along with Movers and Strikers.

Are there any futures where I get hit by a hostile Striker ability? The glimpses of the future focused, different scenes from possible futures being walked through. Before my power had changed I could see glimpses of the future without a headache, but it was when I gave out an answer of the odds that the future punished me with a headache.

Walking through then was different though, stolen from some other other shard that mine had eaten.

I saw myself getting hit, and a wave of nausea and disorientation came about in most realities. In another flash, Battery screamed as a new cape generated an explosion that blew off her arm.

"Don't let any of them touch you!" I warned and four blasts of metallic darts struck where we had been standing after space was warped by Vista, her strong power weakened by proximity. "They brought at least six capes here." The Yangban didn't seem surprised but there was a pause in their professional movements. The fact the flashes didn't find additional powers told me they had a limited set to draw upon in this country.

Beyond those crazy possibilities that had to be ignored and compressed away for my own sanity.

The four attacking us folded away into spheres and I barely managed to keep myself from getting a fist to the face, spinning on my heels and shifting my fingers into a rapid strike with my Tinkertech gauntlets. All six had a short range teleportation, even if only four of them were attacking us now. I let out a breath as I hit a point along one of their legs.

The first I had attacked, a woman about Battery's age stumbled as I chi-blocked her without a second thought. She teleported back, and I already sent an alert out to bring friends to us.

An emerald portal swirled open, and I smiled when Anansi charged out of the portal. He blueshifted into a biotic charge, and the kinetic force of his exit ragdolled the four capes attacking us.

Anansi hissed angrily. "You will not harm them, you are fools to have come here…or very desperate indeed." He raked his limbs through the air, and biotically ripped away weapons from their person, from guns to knives and needles of some kind. All four fired away and our two biotics summoned powerful barriers, even as the darts generated some type of power effect.

They all turned into a gas becoming invisible to the naked eye, while the fifth stayed out of sight, not realizing I could see him through the HUD of my mask connected to my drones. I didn't know where the sixth was…

The drones gave me a radar, and I warned them again while Anansi didn't even bother and his tendrils lashed out like whips. The entire group was thrown around, and one had their arm crack under the force. Anansi took a blast of explosive force which his barrier stopped, though the heat got through and singed his exoskeleton.

Not that it was anything other than superficial, the Rachni were tough.

"Raging Fire, hungering justice, screams of the damned; gear of retribution." Elle intoned. "Burn at the skin of an enemy most delusional and foul. Bite at the heels of those who dare strike us down. Bring paiupon the wretched and salvation to the innocent!" Her left hand opened as it held the very concept of Fire. Battery flinched as did the sole bender among the group. A storm of aspects smashed into three of the four capes, and I grinned.

The single firebender didn't get a chance to take advantage of her power to override Elle when she was placed under stasis. The remaining three teleported, spirits biting at their heels as they fled.

"They aren't leaving, there's at least two more capes with them." I murmured a warning, and thanked Basilia for teaching me how to use the programs on my omni-tool.

I remembered being so scared of being kidnapped before…but now that it was happening for a second time.

I didn't feel so scared anymore.

We had to find out what this distraction was for, because it was a distraction even if they did want to capture me because of my power. I ended up cracking a grin since this was going to be up to the Thinkers of the group.

It would be fun to dismantle the mission of people like the Yangban.

___​

AN: Sorry for the delay, I had this chapter for a while but I ended up losing track of the days and was off a bit. I do have about 1K on 11.3 though so it was worth something at least. This Arc should be about eight main chapters long along with at least two Interludes, though I was thinking of making three.

Or maybe an Interlude Arc might be a good idea in the future. I'm also better settling the events that take place between the start and end of this story, though there's a ton of Arcs past this. I'm settling at between 20 and 24, rather than the 28 I was initially thinking of. Too much padding, especially as the chapters have stabilized at around 6-8K including most Interludes.

I can actually start doing more than buildup, which was nice but not as needed.

Regardless I hope you enjoy what I'm putting out.

 

[AEM]

Repercussion 11.3

August 14th, 2011. 11:00AM

Basilia Rubio

I breathed in deeply, my helmet collapsed away because of my very minimal memory of Dead Space. My hair hung free, the wind lifting it even as it ended at my shoulders and no more. As I walked the spirits walked with me, drawn to me for one reason or another, shifting away as I ran through territories and transitions between them. Plant spirits and water spirits gave way to metal, wood, plastic and void spirits as we drew closer to the portal.

Sakura accompanied me, with the other shamans staying behind to protect the growing settlement from spirit incursions. She was riding on the back of any enormous white wolf, strange markings on its face causing alarm bells to ring in my head.

Something about that wolf was…unusual.

I followed my senses, holding a rather ordinary mass accelerator weapon. My experimental spirit-ridden weapon had been a failure due to the rarity of use and no longer had the war spirit bonded to its physical form. Without it tasting the rush of battle it had left the weapon.

I didn't blame it, and apologized to the spirit for my failure. It had accepted the apology after I had gifted it some aspect spirits as a tithe. Eventually I moved on to making new battle rifles since the old one kind of…got blown up when I was testing a new explosive I was working on with Bakuda.

I had also spent an inordinate amount of time naming every weapon I had cribbed off from alien races, because I didn't want to keep the old names from the copied weapons. I had a few creations I had made myself, but it took a lot more effort to tinker with something new rather than setting up the manufacturing parameters for tech that had already existed.

The gun I had in hand was a modded Castigator rifle, what had once been called the Avenger though this model was distinct in some of the material makeup but just as reliable. Most of my guns had the 'disposable' thermals clips, which in reality were more than reusable even during a firefight.

Though one modification I was hoping to implement was a method of siphoning heat into alternate realities. Most of my attempts weren't easy to mass produce, such as my flame generating bracelets. I did manage to add a cooling circuit into the thermal clips though, tweaking electromagnetic forces to siphon more heat than was normally possible. Plus better materials of course…

The Castigator had a barrel extension mod, a recoil compensation mod I had cribbed from dark energy invocations of the Humanx, an omni-bayonet, and was connected to my cybernetics for aiming and high magnification scoping. ARO visuals let me cheat quite effectively against baseline humans. I still had some cybernetic enhancements I had yet to implement but…

Regardless it fired a three gram projectile at about twenty times the speed of sound, and could be fired nearly a thousand times before it would deplete the dense ammo block. The shotgun I used was the Recollection, which was the heavy shotgun with the underbarrel mini-grenade launcher.

I think I had a different name for it but it's been so long I can't recall it and I don't feel like wasting my cyberbrain for something so unimportant. I've had to name well over a hundred different weapons and systems, and that was ignoring the ship-scale weapons I had burning away in my brain.

So an assault rifle, a heavy shotgun, and a Carnifex…I had kept the name because it still sounded nice. That plus a small pack of drones, though that wasn't going to be as useful in the Primal Spirit.

We walked unfettered by the spirits around us and I heard their song, their warning.

The Blue Dragon Awaits… ​

My eyes narrowed as I walked, as the air grew hotter, as the signs of dimensional fatigue became more clear. The hole in reality was shining brightly, the spirits keeping their distance as something circled around the burning eye. In an instant the landscape changed as we walked sideways.

The distance between our target became greater, the craggy ruins becoming a small canyon of black stone and fleshy tree sized kelp. Sakura got off of her spirit friend, her expression turning placid. She held a staff in her hand, the weapon surging with spiritual energy.

I took a step, and there was a sense of darkness, a flash of insight saving me at the last second. A stone was dislodged when I backed up, and began to slow, then stretch, and stretch and stretch…until it was thinner than a piece of tape before vanishing into the spiritual singularity.

"An Event Horizon." I nodded, and that meant this place was beyond dangerous. Full of Traps and spiritual horrors and abominations, the dragon at the heart of this wound was clearly quite prepared to defend their territory. I could hear the whispers of spirits, and I knew we had to walk carefully.

For our own sakes if nothing else.

Loud howls pierced the air, violent cries sounding out the warnings of the spirits within the canyon. Reality warped, and I couldn't see Sakura any longer. I was within the canyon itself, water sloshing as I stepped into pools of water.

I lifted a hand and summoned fire into my palm, though it was weakened by the resonances of the spiritual wound. The strange energies made bending weak, though ballistics and biotics were both effective.

This was the Wild Spirit, the raging heart of nature burning within the souls of all living things. The resonance of Violence, Pain, Fear, and Death was strong here, a burning wound torn in the fabric of What Simply Was.

I stepped in the waters, avoiding the frightening voids within them because I knew what they were. The hiding spots of Spirits of death-by-drowning spirits, river demons, Kappas if you were crass enough.

Vicious things really, I had put down many such beasts in and around Brockton Bay and more besides after Leviathan had nearly swept the city away.

I walked and the meager spirits avoided me, recoiling from my person for reasons yet unknown. But it didn't take long for the spirits that called this place to put up some real resistance.

My head was nearly taken off by a cleaver as long as Taylor and twice as wide. I twisted and turned out of the way of the slicing weapon, eyes widening just slightly.

"Oh?" I had gotten some twenty feet of distance between myself and the attacker.

It was a violent and red humanoid beast, about twelve feet tall with a distended stomach and blood red skin, a hardened face twisted into one of rage and unspeakable violence. Pointed horns jutted from its hideous face, and the scream it made tore at reality.

A spirit of Violence, fueled by the echoes of genocide, the resonances of hundreds of millions of lives being slaughtered. It fed off a fraction of a fraction of this intense spiritual essence but it was stronger than it should be because of what this world was.

A reflection.

It's sharp toothed mouth released disgusting and watery saliva and it's modesty was covered by a tiger-skin loincloth. Scarlet skin was marked by segments of green-blue, scales that struck a chord in my mind.

A discordant scream came from its throat, and lanky spirits of pain came with it. The words of Violence were few but terrible.

I am ONI, and…you…will be MEAT!

A meaty arm as thick as my waist crashed against my skull and I was launched like a football. I spun and rolled, and while I rolled I focused and breathed.

I skidded onto my feet, bent down with my palms on the ground while the Oni belched out burbling laughter. The impact should have decapitated me at worst and crippled me at best, but…

I was greater than the sum of my parts.

I lifted the Castigator and with a smirk, I aimed and fired. One weak Pain spirit had its limbs shredded, and I thanked myself for using Shredder rounds. The more organic nature of my current enemies made them more…useful.

I hopped around sparkling six legged serpents, flickers of pain sparking on my skin at their approach. I spun, and an omni-sword sparked to life as I folded my gun back. One spirit let out a scream as the hard light blade cut its head off, and I viciously stomped down on its body until it was reduced to motes.

The spirit would be reborn but it wouldn't be the same spirit…it would become something new.

I stepped back, bringing up my hands as I fell easily and naturally into a combat stance. Something was falling into place, some deep instinct not my own. Primal and wild.

I smiled just slightly, beckoning the twelve foot giant spirit forward. "Come on then, have at you!" The spirit of Violence raged and the wet ground trembled as it launched itself towards me, cleaver slicing through the thick air.

I breathed.

In and out.

In and out.

The next time I let out a breath, it burst out with a blast of orange-white-green flames. Right into the face of the charging Violence spirit, burning the flesh of its weak followers. I back slapped one of the spirits, cratering it's face in with the cybernetic muscle I rarely made use of.

I Demanded that the ground stay solid as the Oni invoked its control over the local world, letting my own confidence make this realm my bitch.

"Is that all?" I glanced down at my fingernails, chuckling darkly. The Oni roared, and I felt in a good place right now.

I was a shaman, and this was what I was for.

___​

August 14th, 2011. 11:10AM

Missy Biron

"This isn't good…" I grit my teeth, knowing that the Yangban attacking us on US soil was a massive escalation. It didn't help that we didn't know what they wanted or why they were attacking us at all.

Outside of human trafficking and discrete kidnappings the CUI has only been interested in regional matters. What the hell were they doing?

"We need to report this." Battery called after Dinah…after Delphi like she had any ability to control her. I had learned a lot about Dinah, and a bit more than I wanted to on what her mother was like. She was…scary.

If Dinah turned out anything like her, she was going to be one of the most dangerous capes around.

"I've already done that Battery, unlike you my connections still work. We have at least seven CUI capes in the city. Maybe eight?" Dinah shrugged, jumping onto the giant alien bug monster that was apparently her best friend.

Being ten feet tall made…Anansi rather intimidating.

"How do you know that?" Battery asked as she followed the Precog took off with her new ride, the giant but biotically leaping onto another roof. We had to follow and I felt thankful for my space warping and my awesome biotics.

They might make me extremely hungry but they were worth it.

"Because if they're this brazen they're either desperate or have made plans within plans and will have other more hidden capes. They want something…Hmm maybe they want…" Her eyes snapped wide. "I know where they're likely heading, can you help or do you need to contact your superiors?" She smiled almost smugly, and I ignored the inherent and purposeful haughtiness.

Battery pursed her lips. "Wards shouldn't really be in these kinds of situations…"

I rolled my eyes. "If we were in another city sure. But this is Brockton Bay." I ran after the both of them. "If we have capes from the Yangban in the city I have to help."

"We'll walk and talk, Dragon is routing a call to the Director." Dinah lifted her Tinkertech hologram computer and I stopped warping space when she opened a portal with a quick verbal bark. "Athena has a few Thinkers besides me…not a lot of them but there's more than two."

"Some of our communication systems are down due to a virus that Dragon is cleaning up." Piggot spoke not to us, but to someone we couldn't see from the projected voice. Dinah coughed, and there was scrambling on the other end when we stepped through to an Athena warehouse.

"Director?" Battery asked, and I waited for Piggot's reply.

"I see the White Lotus hasn't been affected." She grunted and Dinah replied fast.

"Our systems are different, ours killed the virus and was immune to the attempted EMP pulse. Thankfully it was a concentrated attack or else there would be hundreds dead from shutting off power to the city."

I paled. "That would trigger a war between China and the United States."

"They don't care." Dinah answered, her eyes darting back to look around us. "They've got bigger problems domestically…" I was confused, what did that mean?

"Do you want to answer or should I?" I stiffened when I realized that Labyrinth had gone unnoticed.

Dinah puffed up and talked. "There's been a lot of instability in China because of bending, they have at least four million benders and the Yangban doesn't have any good control of them. Plus their probing attempts are faltering because of benders and shamans in other countries."

I grimaced, I knew they had started to set their sights outwards now that their control over China was a lot stronger than before. But it did seem like a bit of a mistake with what little I knew of them. There were multiple regions in China not under their full control because they didn't have enough capes to patrol an entire country.

"So what are they looking for?" Battery asked carefully, and Dinah's expression became stormy and angry.

"They're aiming for the Hyperdimensional Research Laboratory right outside city limits. Masamune was spending some more time inspecting their equipment…"

"Are they after him?" I urged her to tell us, and Labyrinth vanished through a cut in reality that made my brain hurt.

"They're after some of our researchers, and want him as a bonus. Golem should be there, and Garotte was there to show off some art to people she talks with." More anger entered her tone.

There was the crack of bullets flying through the air and I flinched even though bullets weren't exactly dangerous to me anymore with my barrier.

There was a woosh of air and we were joined by…Dauntless. His armor was taking on an electric glow, and his Arclance was screaming. It rang the world like a bell, and I ignored it.

"Dauntless. The Director sent you?" Battery asked and he shrugged his shoulders.

He pointed to his helmet. "She did, and I know where they're attacking. They have mercenaries working with them." He opened and closed the hand that didn't hold his lance. "A few capes, and some non-cape mercenaries…all of them benders."

"Six or seven Chinese capes, about four other capes and fifteen mercenaries." Dinah called out, checking in with someone on her equipment.

"I've authorized a few squads to cover you, I don't like it but everyone else is caught up in damages elsewhere in the city. Take care not to get killed." The Director signed off on the mission, and Dinah opened a portal for us to pass through. Two capes slammed into Dauntless, both of them Brutes and I had to duck under the strike of some woman in pink spandex of all things.

"Ahh…is a pretty little thing like you really going to deal with people like us?" She taunted, and I lifted my right arm, and focused on the power that Taylor had shown me how to use in my downtime.

I threw down a biotic shockwave, and the merc was sent flying by the gravitic pulses and warp energies I made with my mind. She was thrown through a building, and I heard the groan.

"She's fine, but she's down for the count." Dinah whispered in my ear as she slipped past me towards a group of non-cape mercenaries. One lashed out with fire, and she ducked underneath the blast, fluidly spinning and jabbing the person in select spots and paralyzing them. In seconds four grown men and women were down for the count, all of them cuffed in more time than it took to put them down.

The two flying brutes were holding off Dauntless, mainly because if he went too far he might destroy a city block…and we still had nine capes in the city after Anansi had brought down one Yangban cape and I had taken down one hired Parahuman.

Plus 11 mercenaries all armed and dangerous, and likely with powers if the firebender wasn't a giant clue…

I shook my head, and my power bent the world into a pretzel and formed a mental map of the terrain. It was harder to bend and twist and alter the material with the number of people around. A Blaster launched an energy ball at me, and I shrunk it until it was nothing but a puff of useless light. A dark cloaked man with a smiling mask, the Blaster's hands glowed…

And then a long metallic whip wrapped around his arm, from the PRT agent up on the roof of a warehouse near the research lab that was slightly smoking. She saluted me when I turned and with a tug the Blaster was ripped away from the ground. A blast of air kept him aloft, an agent flying through the air with foils letting them catch air. A massive spinning cyclone launched containment foam at the mercenary and when he landed he was encased in the foam.

Eight capes then.

"The PRT is dealing with the mercenaries, you should probably keep any civilians from getting caught in the crossfire." My eyes widened when I realized she was right, there were other people in my field of awareness and it would only take a stray bullet to end a life.

I bent space faster, gritting my teeth when I realized I needed to protect the normals who couldn't defend themselves.

Anansi took off like a bullet with Delphi as a passenger, and Battery looked concerned.

"I'll be fine, there's got to be a few other agents around here." She patted my shoulder before taking off, and I sighed. Guess that was it for me in directly fighting capes…but I was still a Shaker 9.

A smile creeped onto my face at the thought. I had a bigger range than Labyrinth and my power was faster and less dangerous. I ran off to one big concentration of people, a warehouse that held at least thirty people cowering with a few Dock workers protecting them, quite a few of them sporting bad injuries and tied up merc—what?

The leader of the group chuckled nervously. "John Jones. Sorry about the mess, we had to take our protection into our own hands…" His breath puffed out fire, and I could see a girl with light burns on her arms who looked much like her father.

Including the flames around her fists.

"It's fine, I'm bringing a few agents, they should have extra medical supplies." His eyes lit up at the words.

"That would be great, our omni-gel dispensers got badly damaged and it'll be a few minutes until they're fixed." He pointed out a dispenser about my height, the whole thing slagged into a solidified puddle. The hell?

"You're probably going to have to answer some questions on that." I said this to him and he didn't seem to mind based on his face.

And I thought it was just Erudition's capes that were weird, even her employees were…odd.

___​

August 14th, 2011. 11:15AM

Basilia Rubio

The Oni's head exploded as I made liberal use of my Recollection assault shotgun, the gun firing three micro-grenades in rapid succession. The three grenades were Bakuda formula Hi-Ex bombs, and blew up with enough force to pulp a rhino.

It had attempted to use its minions to induce agonizing pain, which I promptly ignored and managed to summon Holly plant spirits to weaken its influence before blowing its head off.

My armor was cracked where it had tried to crush me, and my chest heaved as I marched toward the heart of the spiritually unbalanced canyon, sprinkling some more Holly on the spirit as it broke away into unintelligent motes of Violence, Fear and Rage, with a minor aspect of Water in its spirit flesh.

Leviathan had been good for its kind with all it's mass genocide in the country. Fortunately the local beliefs shaped the behaviors and weaknesses of the spirits, but then again…perhaps it was the other way around instead?

I didn't jump when Sakura emerged from a stream, squeezing out water from her soaked hair with grit teeth.

"Death-by-drowning spirits?" I placed my hands behind my back, grinning at her annoyed pout.

"Calling them Kappa is fine." Sakura squeezed out more water, and with narrowed eyes whispered a chant that made the water vanish from her person. She flipped her staff, which sparked with spiritual energy that marked it as one of her tools, a channel for her powers.

"I prefer being specific, some Kappa are part of the Water choir with only hints of death while these are almost purely death." I brushed my bangs back, keeping my eye on her white wolf familiar. It was big, about the size of a bear and something about it made me think it was…more. Like a tiny fragment of some greater power at work here.

Spirits were fun, even with how alien and terrifying they could be.

"We're close to the Blue Dragon's territory, are you certain you're prepared for this?" Sakura probed, energy forming a brush shape on the tip of her staff.

"Yes." I didn't elaborate as we entered the border, and dark rain began to fall, a storm whipping up in a matter of seconds. The sound of breathing was palpable, and I walked confidently while keeping my cool. The white wolf growled and Sakura breathed, confidence entering her form.

There were many powers that shamans could learn, some innate, others given. My ability to parse information and follow it was in part from my implants and in part a gift from Centralis, the foremost spirit of knowledge in Brockton Bay. Such powers were a sort of spiritual imprint, blessings earned by trial and blood.

Our…prayers were invocations of spirits, the words providing them the focus to help you…and the more flowery the language, the greater the power they will lend you. These prayers could be done through dance, through singing and chants because it was a communion between soul and spirit.

Demanding of them was possible if you were strong enough…though they wouldn't like it. Spirit blessings were links formed between man and spirit, little tricks that could be pulled off without the…certain requirements for spirit magic.

The price was time and pain. It took anywhere from hours to days to earn a single blessing and it would never come as naturally as it would for the spirits themselves and thus the potential was lesser for most things.

But if you were part-spirit like myself or like Echidna, those abilities would be far more natural and stronger. But again, it didn't reduce the time. I had earned only a few blessings, most related to manipulating technology and knowledge.

Elle had earned more, mostly relating to protecting herself not wanting to waste the time of spirits during battle. She had learned to cloak herself from radiation from Radon the Everburning, who taught her by dumping her into a radioactive hellscape and leaving her to learn it or die in the uranium spirit fields.

She had learned unyielding strength from the mountain spirit near the city, and could briefly empower her muscles with a short mental chant honoring the spirit teacher. Of course most shamans could only scale so far upwards. We're talking in the range of Glory Girl, we only get to Alexandria levels if we count bending.

And even then we're talking Toph holding back the descent of Wong Shi Tong's library, and she isn't exactly average.

I saw the spirit dragon at the heart of this disrupted place, lingering around the horrific distortions where two alternate realities met. While there were three portals, all three led to the same universe. I was certain of that, a strange scent gave me the idea.

It was long and serpentine, some sixty feet in length, and while it resembled an asiatic dragon it was far more fleshy and and scaly, with vast fins along its crocodile-like jaw. It's skin was covered in blue-green scales, shining like jewels as it slinked around the portals. The waters surged around it, reforming into horrific scenes of drowning or of simply being crushed by liquid pressure.

This was a spirit that had grown fat from the resonance created by the Leviathan. A Dragon of Fear, Water and Conflict, a simulacrum of the Leviathan's flesh, and the fear was visible on Sakura's face.

"Why have you come here to die shamans?" The voice that came from the spirit's throat was sultry and seducing, terror intertwined into its tongue. "You face something greater than you." It glared at Sakura first, hate in its blazing eyes. "A being of mere flesh playing the games of our kind…and the whimpering shadow that followed her is a disgrace." There was disgust in the spirit voice, the world vibrating from the volume, as it glared at Sakura and her spirit wolf.

"Hmm…" My hum brought its ire against me, and it lifted a long sinuous neck and flared its fleshy crests.

"And you…you are an abomination, both spirit and soul without the binds engraved by force or contract. What god grafted your flesh and weaved your essence, what god made you what you are?" That struck a chord with me.

"That's something I'm still discovering spirit…but introductions might be in order before I rip out your heart." I tilted my head, with a purposeful cuteness.

It's front legs stomped down on the ground, eyes blazing as it caused a localized earthquake.

"I AM THE GOD OF THIS PLACE HUMAN! I AM ADVA, THE TERROR OF LEVIATHAN!" It screamed and the entire canyon was swept away by a great deluge, And as shamans we took off by different means.

I jumped with air and biotic force while Sakura rode her spirit companion into the sky, landing on craggy red platforms capped with smooth flat stones. Adva flew without wings, streams of rushing water following his wake, clones three times his own size aping a certain Endbringer.

It moved and flowed like water, jaws open wide to swallow me whole when it teleported from a puddle of water to my right. I cocked my shotgun and fired hypersonic pellets down his throat. Two shots were followed up by a micro-grenade launch, and a space warping bomb shredded a hole through his lower jaw.

"Hey!" Sakura yelled and started to chant.

Unending Hope, Unwavering Spear, Unsealed Treasure, Truthful Vow
Gear of the Mother.
Heed the prayers of a lost people, victims of a vicious cycle!
What tragedy will come, become the spear that will cut through it!
What hysteria may come, see through the lies and look to the real!
When one falters, another will lift them forward;
Sharper than diamond and greater than navies.
You shall not pass; Your flesh will be pierced!​

A great lance of hope and truth spirits came forth, aimed towards their target by the staff in Sakura's hands. A weapon to cut through the lies and the fear, a poison to the corpus of the great spirit. It landed and cut through the flesh, unerringly following the spirit beast but…

They couldn't slay it because of how much it had fed on the tainted land, but even so the spear of Hope took the shape of familiar Tinkertech, with the tip of the spear resembling Flechette's arrows while it's pole looked like the Tinkertech cannons used to slay the Leviathan. Adva roared in agony, muscle fibers tearing as the tip of the spear sliced through it's corpus.

I rolled backwards when it teleported again, breathing out mist that caught me in it's spiritual grasp. My heart leapt, beating faster as I caught the glimpse of a long whip-like tail. A form thirty feet tall, eyes blazing through the mist before vanishing in a single splash.

I walked backwards, and then turned to look upwards into the visage of the Leviathan and my knees shook before an uncontrollable amount of insulted rage hit me.

This was his strategy, this was his great plan to break me?

It was insulting and now I was angry. I didn't bother using my weapons on an illusion, feeling a pressure on my body that I knew was bad. The tail of the Leviathan whipped towards me at supersonic speed and I looked at the Form of this place, cutting through the lies.

I was being held in the claws of the Blue Dragon, slowly crushed as it tried to trap me in illusion and terror. I let the energy and flow of firebending run through me, and twitched my arm into position, and a burst of lightning cracked against the eyes of the spirit monster. Flesh bubbled and an eye popped out of it's socket with a squelch. I opened my left hand…as my bending brought the attention of what I needed.

Arcing Lightning, illuminating energy, unveiling arrow, voice of the gods;
Gear of Conception.
Here lies a worm of fear and lies. It strikes at its betters with hatred;
EXPOSE!​

Lightning joined with truth and hope, burning away the lingering illusions and searing away it's flesh and waters. Swarms of lightning spirits came to my call, swooping dragons of purest lightning and energy. I didn't stop, fueling the spirits with my own energies and invigorating them with my invocations. And I wasn't done, not so quickly.

As the beast seeks to bring an age of darkness;
DEFY!
As the beast struggles to destroy a people;
DENY!​

The power of so many spirits still wasn't enough, and I felt something nearly give away when it's tail crashed into me with the force of a truck. Sakura moved with surprising grace, mimed by her wolf friend as they danced in unison. There was determination on her face, a realization I didn't comprehend.

There was a purpose to the dance, one I was struggling to see as I had to keep on my toes to avoid the strikes of the Adva. I tried to start another prayer and was stopped when Sakura started to truly dance, whispering under her breath, a subtle glow reaching her eyes.

Oh.

So this was Sakura's battle to finish, and I was going to help her by providing more firepower against a dangerous dark spirit feeding off the resonances of two worlds rather than one.

I weaved a bolt of lightning, driving it like a battering ram into the dragon's face even as its flesh was cooked away. Beneath the layer of crystalline armor remained a whirlpool of knit together spirits, screaming with rage at our insolence.

I pulled out my shotgun and fired away, each blast ripping a chunk from its corpus but remaining unable to kill it. I shot out all its eyes, and I shifted when I saw the monster's skull move even as its skin sloughed off like bloody syrup. It screamed in my mind instead, a roar of outrage.

You can not kill me. I am born of the Leviathan.

I grinned. "Why of course I can…the Leviathan is dead, and all its future siblings were killed or slain in the womb. That fear will fade, even if the scars remain…you won't be the one feeding off of them."

The spirit paused. It is not that easy to heal this world of despair Emerald Child.

My smile diminished. "I know it's not…but I have to try." Sakura's dance became more energetic, spirits forming streams of paper following her graceful fighting dance as the dragon kept fighting, kept trying to continue a reign of death and terror.

Her wolf began to take on a bright star-like glow, and Sakura did as her soul demanded of her body. I added to her prayers, feeling energy leave my flesh. But I didn't feel remotely tired…not at all. Instead when I released my breath my bursts of flame became a wave of writhing hellstorms wide enough to engulf boats.

LADY OF THE HEAVENS, MOST BRILLIANT SHINING LIGHT, BENEATH A SCREEN OF CLOUDS, THE BEGINNING OF ALL JOURNEYS;
GEAR OF THE SUN.​

The wolf howled and the spirit world trembled, and the blue dragon became fearful.

What have you done? It shouted and the shaman woman whispered, and I got the subtext that it did not. It was a message, a message to all of Japan, to all the people of the land of the rising sun and beyond. Something had changed.

SHINE IN GREAT GLORY AGAINST A BEAST; WHO APES THE FOUL AND THE MAD!
SO SHALL YOUR CHILDREN REST IN YOUR EMBRACE, AND BATHE IN YOUR LIGHT, BEARING DOWN ON THE GROTESQUE!
SO SHALL THE BENEFITER OF A BROKEN CYCLE, POINTLESS AND MAD, UNMAKER OF WORLD AFTER WORLD, BE PUNISHED AND VANQUISHED!
SO SHALL SHE WHO HAS SHINED A THOUSAND AGES, WISE AND WONDROUS, BE AWOKEN!
END
THIS
DARKNESS.​

It was an all-giving divine light that followed in the wake of Sakura's dance, as I made the realization she was likely one of the most powerful shamans I had ever seen. The storm clouds parted, rivers of sunlight bearing down with the force of atomic bombs. It struck not just at the primary dark spirit but at the entire force born in the wake of the Endbringer that had broken the country.

I caught a glimpse of Sakura's spirit companion, and I held my breath when I saw the symbols on her face burn like the sun. I looked upwards into the heavens and found an outline of a woman, impossibly beautiful and bright. She smiled and it was like I was resting outside on a sunny day, and a wave of sunlight struck at the very concept of the Leviathan, making the draconic spirit howl as it's food was poisoned or burned away.

She couldn't destroy the concept but she would weaken it now that the Endbringer was dead. Now that the world knew they could be killed, could be fought, could be stopped.

The spirit world was struck like a bell, all three spheres vibrating for a moment as light swept away the darkness for the briefest of instants. The dragon spirit was reduced to motes of spirit quintessence, and the canyon was replaced by the grass-filled ruins it was supposed to be, spirits still streaming from the distortions made by interdimensional portals.

It took us only a few seconds to enter the physical world through a rift, and I couldn't help but stare at Sakura as she lightly patted her…wolf. She was ten times the shaman to nearly every shaman I had met besides a select few. Elle was one, I was another and Lung's daughter was a third.

Plus that one PRT agent.

The portals were only only a few hundred meters apart from one another, and I lifted my hand, accessing the DPN machinery. Sensors and machine spirits pinged the unstable portals, and without dangerous spirits getting in the way they could be closed without incident.

The portal network sent out a signal through higher dimensions, and invisible hands wrapped around the metric of the portals, scanning them before triggering a careful collapse of the holes in spacetime. To my surprise something fell through the closing gate, a blade-like device that seemed quite damaged.

I scanned it and found it was made of an unidentified metal, about as dense as titanium but with properties that set it apart from the element. I hopped over, but kept my distance for my own safety. It seemed to be emitting energy, so I froze it in a stasis field and opened a portal to an isolated side-world for later study and containment.

Whatever that device was I didn't need it being left in the hands of people who didn't know what they were doing. Better it blows up a continent on another Earth I can dimensionally isolate. Rather than it destroying Asia somehow.

Which might sound a little paranoid but this world was full of world destroying things and I wasn't going to add another.

"So that happened…we should probably keep in touch." Sakura flushed and I rolled my eyes. "Yeah you should do your best to keep the fact you called out to the sun from others. Though the fact the sunlight is still brighter tells me that's not going to be an easy process."

"You're not wrong." Sakura brushed the fur of her companion, and I began to make some adjustments to the Dimensional Paths Network. Going across continents needed longer scans, and I needed the signature of the area to…

A green portal opened to Brockton Bay and I nodded at my success, going full Doormaker was now possible though the lag was a little too much for that to be the full truth.

"Well I'll see you when I see you. I've got some work for people at the Hyperdimensional Physics Laboratory." She smiled and I stepped through the portal with my helmet back on, waving at her before it shut the link. The shuttle had already sent itself back towards base.

…

Well let's see what's…cooking?

I stared when I saw that the lab was a mess, bullet holes riddling a few walls but thankfully hadn't damaged any computers, sensors or actual equipment. Joanna and her team were all huddled up, a barrier placed around them by a drone and there was a single person holding what I knew was an OSD holding petabytes of lab data on sensing other dimensions and of direct images taken of other realities.

Not very high quality mind you because the pinholes were puny, and could only be held for seconds at a time but still…what the fuck happened while I was away?

Dozens of messages instantly began to hit, but I latched onto a Yangban attack quite quickly.

I cracked a smile, and everyone who knew me around here shivered. My anger was usually quite common but rarely did it burn hot for long. Rarely was it dangerous to one's person either…

This was going to end quickly.

___​

August 14th, 2011. 11:40AM

Basilia Rubio

It had taken more than I expected to bring down the one cape, he was a CUI cape but one outside the Yangban itself because his power didn't react well with the power sharing of Null. Some type of Brute who drew energy from the environment, interfering with power sharing.

His shard was actually another networking shard like High Priestess, High Theurgist and other shards. Though far smaller and weakerIt drew upon energy from other shards and people to fuel a powerful Brute effect, easily as tough as Hookwolf.

So I opened a portal under his feet and into a small vat of containment foam. It didn't take me long to figure out he was a decoy for a Yangban cape using a powerful but short lived form of stealth. They became gaseous, shifting into a body made of strange energy fields, ones capable of hiding the physics alterations and getting past our sensors.

However this could only last for a few minutes before the form would end with a massive burst of light, heat and strange energy pulses that lit them up like a small sun. We had four of the six Yangban capes, and the mercenaries had either fled or been captured rather easily by the PRT and capes.

But one of the missing mercenaries was a cape capable of teleporting up to five hundred kilometers in a single jump. Elle was tracking them down, and without their photonic cloaking the two capes didn't have a lot of time before we could find them.

But that wasn't my job right now.

"So…Director Piggot you're looking well?" I made small talk as I sat in her office, placing my hands behind my neck as I rested from my mission.

"I've been working out." She said plainly. It really showed too since the last hints of obesity were finally being put to rest with her organ and muscle damage being repaired. She was probably about my weight now, and I could see her arms being sculpted back into holding healthy and strong muscle again.

"No one got hurt too badly did they?" Concern was the first thing on my mind when the adrenaline rush from fighting a dragon ceased its circuit in my body.

"I didn't lose a single agent today if that's what you're asking." I nodded, I didn't need people to die for protecting my business. "There were no deaths anywhere else either, and we have four Yangban capes in custody." That left a bad taste in my mouth.

"There's something going on within China, beyond the general instabilities and sociopolitical shifts." I stated bluntly with no room for argument. "They wanted data from Athena…you might need to check if they haven't tried to steal data from other research labs across the country."

"You think this was an even bigger distraction?" Piggot questioned.

"They sent the most expendable capes within their organization and paid mercenaries. A small team with powers specifically suited to get in and out, with a Stranger power that can be both stealthy and flashy. They certainly want the data, but it's not unlikely they wouldn't settle for lower quality data and information from other locations."

"You've been talking to Faultline haven't you?" There was near bemusement on Piggot's face.

"Her criminal past has been a bounty on the general behavior of some hostile organizations." As well as the cause of more than a few disputes between different members of the team. "I don't agree with a lot of the things she's done but having her help people is at least a start." She did have a sword of Damocles in the form of myself keeping her on the up and up.

"You don't seem to like her." Piggot grabbed a pen, reading something on her monitor.

"Meh. She's fine, like most Parahumans she's a bit screwed up in the head but she's certainly no Jack Slash." Most people deserved the right to make amends unless they truly couldn't reform their ways.

Which unfortunately made up a good fraction of the cape population because of how they got their powers.

"And you're any different?" Piggot's question was interesting.

"Yes. Though that has more to do with not liking fights than being less traumatized. Earth Bet isn't a nice place…" I muttered curses, wishing to rub my head but couldn't with my helmet on.

"You went to Japan didn't you?" She looked ready to question me, more serious than before. I got a quick call through my helmet.

Elle spoke. "We…got the OSD, but they managed to escape." Better than I had hoped. "Everyone is okay…" She hung up immediately.

"Turns out they've got almost a thousand shamans working together since Kyushu uplifted itself from the seafloor. I found more cracks…I shut four portals and there's probably another dozen in the country."

"Where are they coming from?" Piggot scowled, her hands tightly held together.

…

"That's the problem. I don't know, all I can do is close up as many as possible. We don't need the problems of other dimensions on top of our own problems." Since I was scanning other dimensions, I had narrowed my search radius significantly.

I estimated there were maybe one quadrillion dimensions that at some point had humans on them, with one ten thousandth of those worlds still housing some amount of human life, and one millionth of those possessing technology equal to or superior to my homeworld. So about a hundred thousand advanced worlds, to the several thousand surrounding Earth Bet.

There used to be a lot more Earths in their multiverse until the Entities collapsed all the similar dimensions, leaving only a few rough copies of other alternate Earths. So a few dozen Earth Bet/Aleph analogues, a few dozen Earth Shin analogues, a few dozen copies of Earth Cheit. I imagine my own world had copies, so there were at least a few dozen me's out in the universe.

Most of them were probably dead or heavily divergent though, since quite a few Earths had been through various apocalypses within the last twenty years. Asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, solar flares or even nuclear war for one reason or another. One little flap of a butterfly had destroyed humanity in so many scenarios, sometimes we were killed in the cradle, by mere happenstance. In others it was our own fault or the fault of other species.

In one world there was a war between humanity and sapient Capuchin monkey descendants that killed off both species through mass nuclear exchange, and the redirection of several kilometer-scale asteroids onto the planet.

Intriguing but a little depressing and distressing at how many human races had gone extinct again and again and again and again. Probably best not to spend too much thought on what could have been, it was more important to focus on what we could change.

This was going to be a big thing wasn't it?

Oh well…I'll deal with the problems as they come. It's what I've been doing so far.

___​

AN: So I have this chapter out and have 11.4 started. There's a few new things showing up, as I get into the groove of writing new storylines since in way past Leviathan. This world is still Worm, even if tuned down just a bit.

You can also see the downsides of the spirits too, with many of them being actively malicious either due to instinct or their own personalities. So that's an ongoing problem on a ton of Earths.

So enjoy that.

 

[Menthewarp]

Sorry for no comments the previous last chapter, everything was tied up so neatly, there was no room for confusion!

As for thos chapter, I get the impression that The Middle Kingdom is in the process of invading The Middle Kingdom... somehow.

Also, Tibet is definitely a concern.

The spirits feel like the same kind of assholes as capsules from EVE online.

 

[AEM]

Sorry for no comments the previous last chapter, everything was tied up so neatly, there was no room for confusion!

As for thos chapter, I get the impression that The Middle Kingdom is in the process of invading The Middle Kingdom... somehow.

Also, Tibet is definitely a concern.

The spirits feel like the same kind of assholes as capsules from EVE online.

Click to shrink...

Well to be fair I've absorbed quite a lot of things about how our China apparently works by osmosis. One of those is apparently that their grip on individual provinces is rather less solid than it should be due to having no governmental infrastructure outside of their political and strong power hammers. That leads to a lot of stupid shit happening in the country, and I doubt the CUI is much better.

Especially since there have to be tens of thousands of capes within China. A good amount of what Yangban does is to keep what they have and to solidify their control over their country. So they're about as dysfunctional as most bigger countries in a world of Parahumans.

Also you're right about Spirits not being nice…they simply are. A reflection of the physical world, and their power grows from influencing beings to feed them the right resonances.

A fire spirit might encourage arson and forest fires, a murder spirit will encourage…well murder but might specialize into certain kinds of murder like cannibalism or other worse methods. Even a spirit of love will encourage unhealthy relationships.

The only spirits considered relatively harmless are Aspect spirits because they have as much awareness as a bacterium. The job of a shaman is to keep the dangers of the Spirit at bay. So yeah…the spirits can be rather…horrific but they can also be entities of majesty and beauty.

At the least they're more helpful than pre-Veda shards. Sometimes.

 

[Menthewarp]

Also you're right about Spirits not being nice…they simply are. A reflection of the physical world, and their power grows from influencing beings to feed them the right resonances.

A fire spirit might encourage arson and forest fires, a murder spirit will encourage…well murder but might specialize into certain kinds of murder like cannibalism or other worse methods. Even a spirit of love will encourage unhealthy relationships.

The only spirits considered relatively harmless are Aspect spirits because they have as much awareness as a bacterium. The job of a shaman is to keep the dangers of the Spirit at bay. So yeah…the spirits can be rather…horrific but they can also be entities of majesty and beauty.

At the least they're more helpful than pre-Veda shards. Sometimes.

Click to shrink...

You make it sound like an ecosystem of Paperclip Maximizers!

 

[AEM]

You make it sound like an ecosystem of Paperclip Maximizers!

Click to shrink...

That's pretty much what spirits are like, though of course there's numerous exceptions and through natural selection the more nasty spirits can be exterminated, pacified or sealed away leaving the spirits that use less vicious or dangerous means to feed themselves. The main way they get distracted is by playing to their natures, a wolf spirit eats another wolf spirit or eats prey spirits. A fire spirit preys upon wood spirits, basically red in tooth and claw.

Thing is shaman have souls that are a bit like a spirits, giving them the power to manipulate spirits. A normal soul trying to manipulate a spirit is like a cue ball trying to rub up against an old golfball. It ain't happening. Shamans and the more peaceful spirits keep the Spirit World in check, keeping the world in balance.

Plus they only have to eat while awake, most spirits are dormant or are only thin reflections making up the entire environment of the Spirit World. Their Bans also limit them, a mountain spirit is never going to leave their physical counterpart. You can use their very natures against them, since they're not as…diverse as humans, their minds focused on what they represent.

It's only the more unique or the more powerful of spirits capable of looking past their Bans. These are Keter-class spirits, those who've evolved beyond their purview. They're relatively stable though if you piss one off you're going to die. Extortus spirits are the same thing, but they're effectively cancer, broken spirits that will spread and multiply until they die or everything else dies.

So Earth Bet is now an even bigger death world than it used to be, even if one of it's worst threats have been cut down like Leviathan or blinded like the Simurgh. Kind of a trade-off between getting hit by a bus versus getting your foot run over a couple times.

 

[AEM]

Repercussion 11.4

August 19th, 2011. 1:00PM

Basilia Rubio

It was an early Friday afternoon and I was quite busy with launching fireballs, turning on my heels and kicking out blasts with a light smirk. I was in a sports bra and biker shorts, with both being black, comfortable in my own skin as I unleashed my power out into the world.

My hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and a fist generated a concussive blast with no flames. A technique I had figured out from looking up techniques written within Veda. Apparently she had come uncategorized which was why information like downloading most of the Internet from home wasn't relevant.

It was like whoever had made her didn't remotely know what they were doing or were in such a rush they didn't have time to figure out the little things. Neither was good, and it made my job of keeping this shithole from spreading its insanity to other worlds or my home rather hard.

I had a lot of mysteries I needed to uncover, but training was in order and my firebending still had improvements to be made. I…

The hair on the back of my neck rose, and I tried and failed to dodge out of the way of the person who successfully snuck up on me. I was spun once, and I caught a glimpse of curly black hair as I was picked up without my consent.

"Taylor! What are you doing?" A blush made its way to my face as I held tightly to the aforementioned woman's chest. She pulled back, placing me down on the ground with an easy but small grin.

I liked that she smiled a lot more, though I still smiled and generally was happier than she was. Or at least more energetic because while I could at times be optimistic about the potential of the human spirit…

I still knew the darker nature of humanity, of how terrible they could be with the right inputs, with the right circumstances and choices. A good fraction of my team could have gone that way…but this wasn't that world, it wasn't even identical in the first place.

But it was similar enough to be…anxiety inducing at times.

Taylor glared. "It's a Saturday, I think you can relax a bit." I held my hands up to my chin level, sniffing a bit when some dust got into my nose. I had started sweating but not a lot so if I was done there was no reason to change. I liked this outfit anyway, revealing but cute.

I frowned.

Maybe I was spending too much time with Vicky if that was the first thing on my mind? Not that it was that much of a problem, I may have picked up a small interest in fashion, but it wasn't one of my major tunnel-vision obsessions. Plus it wasn't a girl-thing because that's not how hormones work.

That I had suffered from so few downsides…said things about me that I don't think I really minded. Being a guy again could be nice…but being a girl wasn't bad either. What was the term…cis-genderless or something?

I wasn't exactly caught up on all the terms of the gender spectrum, but it was definitely…something I didn't know how to elaborate on. It was…different but it wasn't bad.

Maybe I should talk about this to someone?

Taylor blinked "Basilia?"

"Just…thinking." I hummed absently, swaying on my feet as I rubbed my chin. Taylor placed her hands on my shoulders, stopping my movements. "What?" I didn't stop swaying, because I didn't get a chance to burn away my energy.

"Sometimes you forget you're a girl at times…" She muttered to herself not realizing I could hear her. I purposely leaned forward, and Taylor turned stiff like a board. I shifted my posture, placing both my arms behind my back.

I suggestively wiggled my eyebrows. "Oh? Am I a little too bouncy for you to handle? Too voluptuous to hold onto?" Taylor's ears turned an amazing shade of red and her cheeks were dusted with the same hue as a tomato.

"You…shut up." I smiled, and without a hint of shame shuffled on over, clinging to her right side. She didn't seem to turn any less red, and I was certainly making a smug expression.

"Well I don't blame you honeybee, I'm hot and I know it." I was mostly just messing with her, I was no egomaniac but like anyone my age I had a greater sense of self importance than I should. "Of course while I might be the prettier one you're good looking too."

"You say that a lot." I tilted my head at her morose reply. I didn't get why when she was wearing tight jeans and a white sleeveless top, she looked nice.

"Because it's true," I nudged her shoulder, leaning into her. "Taylor you know I've got room in my heart for numerous body types. You look good I promise." I really did think so…even if I was still getting used to this.

She was a tall lean fighting machine and her effort showed. Legs that went on forever, a nice stomach and abs that could grate cheese. Plus she was a girl so of course she was cute, and while at the start she was more…straight, seven months of physical conditioning changes a person.

Willowy was fine, and I liked a girl capable of picking me up…it triggered feelings in me that were a little too hot to handle sometimes. But whatever, I was a big girl and could handle my hormones with grace and poise.

Nope, can't even hold a straight face.

"Come on, you're right about this being a day off. Even if it's mostly because Athena is a little slow after getting attacked by the Yangban." And has succeeded in beating the shit out of mercenaries. Bending really did help even the odds, especially since it became easier to use bending legally with PIRA. "We're still hiring people but not as many as before, I don't want to overwhelm the whole system." Athena had been a mess in the early days because frankly I had no business ruling a…business.

"Have you looked into that strange device that fell from the portal?" My mood shifted at the change in subject, and I angrily rubbed the back of my neck. Taylor looked taken aback.

"I've set up a completely isolated analysis system, using scanners and programs made by Skimmer, Bakuda and Turnaround. I've taken maximum precautions including the rigging of a high-yield gravitic bomb that Bakuda helped figure out."

Taylor raised an eyebrow. "What's that?"

"It's a positive gravity generator, controlling dark energy to generate an enormous gravity field along with a secondary antimatter payload. In case the sensor suite system is compromised it'll explode and destroy the entire orbital facility." I showed her the rapidly built space station, built close to the sun and protected by enormous solar shades. Any debris would be sweeped into the star's embrace and burned.

Taylor looked just a bit horrified. "Why?"

I rolled my eyes. "Because a piece of unknown supertech is totally safe to handle without taking appropriate precautions. Plus the fact it's emitting some form of fifth dimensional M-string waveform." I had my own ability to manipulate higher dimensions to alter reality, it was how the Entities generally warped space alongside the anchoring of stress-energy tensor breaking exotic matter into three dimensional reality.

"Can't you make those on your own? Plus can't shards manipulate dimensions themselves?" She was trying to calm me down but I could tell she was no less concerned.

"But that's something I know, this is an unknown Taylor. Unknown technology with an unknown purpose and unknown make. Plus what I've measured so far…it's a little worrying."

"What did you find?" She became business and I grimaced.

"The outer shell of the thing is made out of some exotic metal, about as dense as titanium but with tensile strength exceeding perfect carbyne and malleability similar to certain steel alloys. A Tinkertech metal basically." I shrugged, I had seen such metals before and was learning how to implement that material science into my own tech because it was better than most of what I had.

"There's something else, isn't there?" I gestured for her to approach and generated a holographic image. A recording of the blade as it was poked and prodded by every sensor imaginable. From nanoprobes to laser probes, drills, electromagnetic field resonance imaging, neutrino beam pulses, and dark energy field emissions.

The artifact was one point three meters long, a spiraling blade with a shiny silvery metallic coloration. The handle of the blade was made of a carbon-like substance, strange circuit matrices that were likely some form of sensor, fifth dimensional structures held in place by technologically sophisticated means.

I had…kind of figured out how to implement the same alterations to reality, but it wasn't a simple or easy process even if I could draw energy from other universes to power it. But…that wasn't the problem.

"It's not Tinkertech." She blinked, looking as confused as I felt. "Based on radiocarbon dating from organic matter encrusted on the sword it's at least a hundred and fifty years old. The Entities didn't notice your Earths until the late 70s, and the Earth I've traced this to…it's one of mine."

"An alternative version of your world?" Taylor's eyes narrowed, crossing her arm over her chest.

"I've been sending pulses to map out disturbances in vacuum states." It was an entity form of perception, they could perceive or manipulate eleven dimensions to various degrees to 'cheat' the laws of physics. Altering fundamental forces, screwing with the Pauli exclusivity principle, relativistic acceleration, even symmetry itself.

But they had limits, all their alterations of reality cost energy, and attempting to cheat extra power usually failed or didn't break even. They had to redirect energy from other realities constantly or create enormous power wells to keep their forms stable, to keep their invocations anchored.

Which most of the time they were…for thousand upon thousands of years. It was in fact quite terrifying at how near-omnipotent Entities could be…it was the reason they had been dubbed Void Wyrm. It was a fitting title for what they were…

They had thousands of years of technological development, and while I was learning a lot I was still quite crude at manipulating reality at the fifth and sixth reality levels, and the fourth was a bitch even for the Entities.

"It seems to be a type of interfacing device, powered by a multidimensional core that's more or less been tapped for any energy besides that expended in keeping it eternally stable. Surrounding the core is some type of crystal computer of a type I'm not familiar with." Outside of the thing being tough as nails and with a massive amount of processing power and data storage.

Taylor's eyes lit up. "Like an OSD?"

"That's my suspicion, but I have no expertise and won't be able to find anyone capable of operating the thing." She tilted her head.

"Why not?"

I sighed, scratching my head with an annoyed look I'm sure. "Because the Earth this thing came from is fucked up to high heavens." I switched to distant scans and probe imaging from outside the bounds of the planet. "This is the same world that the rogue shard beast came from, and the level of reality alteration…is rather terrifying." The anomalous signals were unidentifiable with my current knowledge base.

She placed a hand on my shoulder. "How bad is it?"

I pulled the data from a brief sweep of the planet, the words of the AGI still leaving me rather unnerved.

"Initial scan: results alarming. Severe reality derangement detected. Aberrant energy states, chronometric aberrations confirmed, one thousand four hundred and seventy six stable dimensional doorways detected. Human habitation confirmed in Europe, North America, Southeast Asia and Southern Africa."

"Those were just the initial scans taken of this Earth, we didn't stick around long enough to confirm anything beyond that. And…I'm not sure I want to." Everything about the planet was a giant red flag, and while I could lose the location if other cracks led to that planet I needed to seal off the dimensional doors pronto.

"I think this needs a meeting, a big one." I gave her a thumbs up at the idea, and I rubbed my chin as I thought about Taylor. I glanced up at her face, furrowing my eyebrows.

Hmm…

"Come here a moment please." She did so, certainly not knowing my plan. I leaned up onto my toes, and she leaned downwards. I kissed her, my stomach turning in a knot at what I was doing. I wasn't used to this but it was nice…

Her lips were soft, and she smelled sweet like honey and lavender. She wrapped her arms around me, and I didn't dislike the strength in those arms. I was certainly much warmer than before, a heat from my stomach rising into my chest. I grasped her soft curly hair, tasting her lips before retracting back with a bright blush. I couldn't help but admire her surprised face, and I liked that she could be just as awkward about this as me.

"Meeting." She nodded.

"Jacket." I said simply and she picked up the synthetic leather article of clothing that had cooling and heating properties due to being made out of smartmatter fiber.

I put it on and zipped it up, and we started up on gathering what we could of the team.

___​

August 19th, 2011. 1:30PM

Basilia Rubio

"I see you're looking cute." Vicky greeted me with her usual energy, her helmet folding back in her Polaris(Antares) costume. I had my leather jacket unzipped, and I preened.

"It's because you're as infectious as face lice and never go away." Her smile was wiped off her face and became one of disgust. "I didn't used to care about clothes and somehow you've infected me with your…fashion sense." I pretended to shiver in horror.

Vicky rolled her eyes. "Oh shut up." I snickered, grossing people out was something I like to do intentionally, as was being a bit of a dick in general.

It was hard to keep other's boundaries in mind though, and it always left me a little anxious. "So we've gathered…Polaris, Panacea." The biokinetic waved absently as she patted a baby lemur. "Bakuda, Golem, Turnaround, Skimmer, and welcome Lady Photon and Laserdream to this…" I ended lamely and Grace cackled quietly.

"How's mom doing?" Vicky looked nervous, her bright expression dimming. Sarah sighed.

"Not well, quite a lot of things have been dug up from the past…things you may know about." She looked pointedly, and I blinked.

"I've already mentioned that what I know isn't perfect or of high enough fidelity to let me predict every little thing a person does or did or even at all." There was something about Carol doing some shit before Vicky had been born. But I didn't remember what it was.

I doubt it was important.

But again I didn't have some giant summary of Ward, I had a vague timeline that cut off around the early Titanomachy with Infrared, and if you're talking about capes we're talking a few hundred out of hundreds of thousands.

"That sounds about right, I'm 90% you've been improvising everything from the moment we met." Amelia Dallon said with the most serious of looks, with honor and grace.

I smirked. "Guilty as charged. The only thing I did plan was Athena and that was more because it was a dream of mine and because of its ability to fight poverty in the right circumstances." Taylor I had met by either happenstance or by some magnetic property related to my powers. Which applied to a ton of people…

"But you do have contingencies."

"Contingencies that were only possible because I had people helping, including people who normally wouldn't." Amelia nodded without shame. "Without the capes willing to help me my tech wouldn't have the raw oomph to damage Endbringers, and I wouldn't have a portal network to make myself more secure."

Without Labyrinth I wouldn't have figured out interdimensional travel, without Taylor I wouldn't have had anyone besides Veda for company because I was too shell shocked to hang out with normals or afraid of being mastered or enslaved by capes.

I would have cracked ages ago.

Without Taylor and her incidental contact with Amelia, and the incident at the library we wouldn't have knocked the bitch from spiraling into an unforgivable moral event horizon. Of course at that point I would have straight up shot her because she would have been insane but…we're in the wrong timeline for that mess.

Elle gave us an in to Palanquin and what I knew gave them further reason to stick by us. An interview provided Bakuda some of the impetus to not bomb people to death, plus her shard becoming passive defused her. I fucked up with Dinah but I still managed to keep her safe, and if I hadn't messed up we wouldn't have found Charlotte, and the aftermath wouldn't have caused Theo to Trigger and…the escalating situation was what brought Flechette, and all those little things, from changing shards to the board across being shuffled around led to Leviathan's death.

Plus without me trying to be nice to Amelia, Shaper wouldn't have resurrected the Rachni because of their ancestral memory interacting with her abilities. My god…

How much did I change just by being in the right place at the right time? How much of it was just not being as dickish as the average cape? Or of factors that didn't relate to my own ability, my own intelligence, my own skill and talent.

How much was I really responsible for all of this and not just the winner of a cosmic dice? Just dumb…dumb luck.

"Are you alright?" Sarah looked concerned and I waved her off.

"Just…a little overwhelmed when I think about what I've…ended up changing." I grit my teeth when I looked at the people in front of me. If things had continued in their original direction…

Lady Photon wouldn't be here…killed by Leviathan, Shielder would be dead for the same reasons. Charlotte wouldn't have powers, and would have been rescued by Taylor from the Merchants. Bakuda would be killed by Lung in the Birdcage and Amelia would have gone to the Cage herself. Victoria would have been…really badly messed up and left in an asylum. Weaver would be a thing after the death of Alexandria and Director Tagg, and…

Wow.

"It might be best to get back on topic." Sarah looked curious as she stared at the central projector that I liked abusing for presentations. I extended mental hands, and an image was formed from the quantum locked light.

Thousands upon thousands of simple circles represented countless Earths, places down like layers on a sheet of paper.

"I've managed to narrow down the number of human-inhabited Earths to a more reasonable number." Around thirty million Earths have been scanned and our new parameters shrunk the number that needed to be searched down by a lot. "However it's also brought to my attention some oddities in the dimensional landscape of our greater reality." The Branes layered on top of each other developed numerous holes or lightly pressed against one another due to odd perturbations. "Something has caused cracks between realities to open up, probably around…fifty thousand realities in total."

"You're not saying we need to deal with that many realities right? We don't have enough people for that." Crystal pointed out the problem, and I agreed with her.

"Not for all of them, most of these cracks are closing on their own because they're not stable," I rolled my shoulders. "Some of them lead to Earths without humans so there's no chance of disease, and others are peaceful worlds. It's the one leading to dangerous dimensions I'm planning to close off. Especially any that lead to realities close to this one. Some are in a state of constant war, are ruled by theocratic empires, or controlled by Parahuman dictators. Not many of course."

Earth Shin was from what I remembered a major fucking threat with Goddess and her cape alignment power. While I was likely anywhere from immune to highly resistant to her power, I didn't know if my own team was. Most of our capes didn't have that type of resistance, though the psychic shielding from Collin reduced the possibilities.

But it wasn't a guarantee, but I had a lot of neural interfaces in my tech to make everything work well. I had a lot of work on getting more use out of that, and closing portals was a priority to keeping things from going crazy.

"How exactly are we going to close these portals if some of them are in other countries?" I grinned at Skimmer's question. She had become more active as she got used to being on a team and she was a sweet girl.

"Incredibly easily actually, any country besides the CUI hit by Leviathan will let us in to close any possible portals. Any others will get closed by native capes, or we can close them from the other end of the portals instead." I had closed about fifty portals between worlds recently, and hundreds more could be shut quite easily.

"You said there were oddities, could you explain that?" Lady Photon asked an excellent question.

"I've been studying dimensions for some time, and my progressively better sensors have been picking up signatures unique to each dimension. Another factor in narrowing down close realities." Bet and Aleph had similar frequencies, the harmonic convergence of their substrings marking them as twin realities. "I've noticed that certain dimensions have varying degrees of…solidity, calcified to the point that altering the laws of physics is rather difficult."

All of them had spirit worlds but the doors from the mortal world to the spiritual were closed shut. But they were loosening, cracking open in time.

"And what does that mean?" Amelia asked with lifted eyebrows.

"I have absolutely no idea." I replied cheerily and everyone appeared frustrated. "Only that my set of universes was incredibly calcified until some event in the last few centuries opened the doors. That it didn't reach my reality was probably either luck or a testament to the size of the multiverse." Skimmer twitched and I grinned.

Poor kid had no idea what she was getting into when she joined up with us, though as we further expanded I doubted I was going to reveal my interdimensional nature to everyone.

Eventually it wasn't going to matter but that was not today or tomorrow.

"So your plan is to close these portals, increase technological readiness, improve the stability of the world, and prepare for Gold Morning?" Sarah put it all in the opening.

"Pretty much, though I'm not so sure the last thing is going to happen anymore. Which is…worrying." I murmured to myself, fiddling with the zipper of my jacket.

"Wouldn't that be good? If…if Scion isn't going to blow us up then the world is safer." Skimmer sounded nervous even while making a good point.

"The issue is that the numbers haven't changed by much from some horrific event happening a little under two years from now." At the least it seemed to be more even in the chances of it killing us all.

"Oh." She sounded afraid, and I didn't know what to say to that. And then I spend some time pondering it before figuring out.

"It's fine to be a little nervous, but we're doing all we can to make things more stable and more ready for that point. There's been a notable drop at least from the less even odds just a few months ago. Your work with your programs and devices should help a lot with evening the odds further." Surprisingly that worked and she didn't seem as afraid as before.

"You're going to need to recruit more capes then." Sarah again provided her advice. At my puzzled look she continued. "We're a large group, but the logistics of managing all of this…it's enormous. You might be able to reduce the amount of manpower needed through your technology, but most people aren't going to want swarms of robots protecting them."

She wasn't wrong and the Machine Army was rather frightening to me with their powers even if I had replicated Sting and could pop their pocket dimensions.

"We'll likely have to recruit non-capes, the main issue is that the more people we add the more vulnerable we are to infiltration or internal betrayals." Cauldron had lost both Manton and that…Dealer guy, with Manton going nuts and the other guy selling stolen superpowers.

I didn't know about the guy from what I knew of the 'story' but the rumors of selling superpowers was telling enough.

"We could just not…tell them everything?" Taylor's face was scrunched up and I could tell it left a sour taste in her mouth. "We can't be everywhere at once, if we can set up teams in other cities we might be able to better…stabilize places or provide an example for other teams."

"Multiple teams? How many capes would we even be able to acquire? That sounds like a lot of capes."

"The White Lotus is a separate entity from Athena, separate enough for us to spread out more. We could vet members, giving them high amounts of autonomy but having guidelines to keep any from going too far." Taylor was standing up from her seat, a bright twinkle in her eyes. "You said the name came from an order of people interested in transcending the boundaries between nations right?"

I nodded slowly. "Yeah?"

She held her fist close to her chin, a small smile widening. "Then we do that but adapted for how Earth Bet works. We'll need members with a lot of different roles, but it might be possible."

That is far more ambitious than anything I've been thinking of.

Sarah looked rather nostalgic, her smile more sad than happy. "This won't be easy Taylor, New Wave tried and failed. But…we didn't try as hard as we should have."

"Are you certain about this?" I asked Taylor and determination practically radiated from her. "Then we'll try it but we'll have to take care in this…we have to be careful."

Theo stepped in. "So what else should we talk about?"

I perked up and brought up another concern. "Training. Our setup needs to be a little more refined, my holographic projectors can probably have improvements made." The better trained they are, the less likely new recruits would get hurt.

Panacea went next. "I've got some new drugs I think we can synthesize, painkillers without addictive qualities, plus biological terraforming equipment."

The meeting became more wild as everyone brought up their wants and needs.

"Well I…"

It was going to be a long meeting.

___​

August 19th, 2011. 6:00PM

Basilia Rubio

I chewed on my lip as I worked carefully on replacing software modules within one of multiple artificial intelligences from the most basic expert systems to the more advanced animal-like AGIs. I had a hierarchy of machine intelligence, one I had taken time to differentiate for tinkers capable of working on my equipment.

Skimmer proved the most proficient because of her specialization in Advanced Analysis. It was effectively Thinker powers in a can, though the limits were ones involving materials, sheer processing power and data input. That of course meant her ability to code was phenomenal, and she coded in binary up to septenary when she had computers that weren't limited to binary out of practicality or hardware limits. Though to be fair conventional computers could simulate ternary just fine.

Some of her coding was vaguely Inusannon, though besides them having psychic powers and biological technology I didn't know much about them. Only that they had lost like a bunch of chumps to the Reapers.

I was using a mental interface, basically diving into the code to edit it without the burden of physical buttons. So…right what was the hierarchy again?

Oh.

Virtual Intelligences and Expert Systems were the bottom of the tree with no self awareness, using complex problem-solving trees and limited neuronal logic to operate. Basically hyper-advanced versions of current intelligent systems. Mostly used for Extranet nodes, management of factories, smart objects like my leather jacket and emergency systems.

Limited Artificial Intelligences or LAI are one step above that, with the use of sophont or supersophont abilities restricted to specific areas. Personality, intelligence, cognition and empathy can vary. They're specifically constructed to be safe and limited in scope. The moment you step out of their purview they'll be unable to fulfill your request outside of sending you to a more capable intelligence.

Limited personalities, little initiative and their ability to learn and self actuate is limited or nonexistent due their semi-frozen or frozen neural networks. Above that you got Cluster communities, LAI networked and coordinated by supervisor software to act as a parallel problem solver. A problem was divided up by different programs, synthesizing a solution over time.

Again their architecture made emergent AI very improbable though I did know how to look through everything to make sure. You would have to be building hundreds of billions of AI agents for that to become a possibility, and it would take me years if not decades to make that many, or maybe even a century or more.

I had tens of thousands of AI agents operating across multiple planets, a third of them operated the Samsara and the rest ran White Lotus bases and the Dimensional Paths Network built with quintuple redundancies. They were tapping geothermal power to excite modified drive cores implementing Entity mathematics and Humanx WIMP tech to carefully open wormholes to other universes.

The Tetatae's Jump Drives were interesting, the electrical fields generated pulsed upwards into higher dimensions, bringing in something they called a hyperspace field. Modifications of the superconductive rod allowed for better and safer shaping of the field when folding space. This reduced the chance of a Misjump by many orders of magnitude, and I saw a path for improvement in the future.

The sensitivity towards gravity wells was a problem but an AG field or better shaping of the aperture could negate that issue permanently. Briefly making two different spacetimes into one one spacetime was…complicated but intriguing. The Entities likely had some data relating to that.

I finished the update, and watched the information download into optotronic circuits. Cameras all focused on the spiraling blade. Drones and VI-driven mechs examined the artifact, and had bombs implanted in them too. Multiple Cluster intelligence spat out information and answers, their new software modules greatly improving their efficiency.

Gravitic bombardment proved enlightening, the mass shadow didn't correspond to the estimated density of the unnatural element. Part of its mass was folded away, and multidimensional pulses gave me the rough structure of the device.

"Matter composition. 12% titanium, 18% tantalum, 10% neodymium, 6% platinum, 2% moscovium, 8% silicon, 44% degenerate structured matter." The AGI administrating the research Intellect Community was a semi-sapient design, one of the animal-like intelligences designed specifically for this purpose.

They were…ethically expendable, unable to stress and suffer from activities that would damage AI like Dragon. They didn't think like humans, operating more like shards or spirits.

For the Humanx it had been the work of a lot of trial and error and self examination to make intelligences this stable despite alien architectures. I had even checked up on them to see that they had spirits rather than souls.

It doesn't mean I'll treat them like shit though, that's like punching puppies for no reason or thought. Even if they're technically dumber than puppies.

"What are your findings on the crystalline structure beneath the shell of the artifact?"

The AGI I named Nye responded carefully. "The crystalline matrix is composed of silicon doped with trace amounts of elements associated with electronic devices. In addition it is used in tandem with synthetic elements with properties similar to metalloids. The computer crystal stores data which is encoded within a fifth dimensional electromagnetic waveform. The sensors at the base of the blade are likely to be for detecting certain parameters. DNA, electromagnetic patterns, mass displacement, visual data, elemental composition."

"Is it possible to safely connect to the device itself?" Nye answered.

"Insufficient data. The device appears to be operating in a long term storage mode due to low energy reserves, processor nodes left mostly inactive due to the cost. 300 seconds of data transmissions have been recorded and isolated. The foreign computation device operates on binary with secondary ternary and quaternary math embedded in certain segments." Physical examination of the device made figuring things out a lot easier since the computer still worked like a computer even if I was fairly sure it was some type of picotech bullshit.

But while it was advanced it wasn't orders of magnitude more advanced than anything that a tinker couldn't build with enough time and effort. Though to be fair anyone capable of building this monster would be a powerful tinker indeed.

Kyna was the most suited for providing an interface due to her greater knowledge base of dimensional bullshit inherent to her as a shard powered tinker. I wasn't that far behind though since I could study and scan other tinker and powers to improve what I had.

"What about the data itself, do you have an estimate of the amount stored within the device?" It took a few seconds which was impressive when Nye had access to hundreds of yottaflops of processing capacity for simulations of everything from material science simulation to interpreting engines for the data accumulated from sensors and scanners.

"Evaluating…data storage capacity is estimated to be between ten million and one hundred million yottabytes. Certainty is approximately 50.76898% at the current juncture." My eyes widened, it was impressively high if this was an estimate based on physical analysis of the computing medium itself. But even a common omni-tool could hold multiple yottabytes though a program of that size would be considered unusual in size. Zettabytes was more likely for most…

A true AI would crush that sword-computer like a bug but of course I'm not going to build a true sophont AI because I'm not ready to be a parent. Dragon might be able to manage it, but I'm not going to jeopardize her for a side project.

"What about the power core? Any estimates on how much energy it can store?" I queried the limited intelligence, curious to see what it would say.

"Request accepted. The core is composed of a quartz-like sphere partially phased into the fifth dimension. Current estimates based on cursory energy bombardment indicate a storage capacity of between six hundred and nine hundred trillion joules of energy."

So about the equivalent of ten Hiroshima's and more than enough to blow away an entire metropolis. And the exact accuracy of this statement couldn't be certain with how poor my understanding of this technology was.

It was many centuries ahead of what my world or Earth Bet had to offer and the latter was more impressive with the well known rumor of non-Tinkertech cyborgs in Indonesia. And in the end it was impressive, the thing weighed maybe about thirty kilograms. An individual optotronic chip offered yotta-scale processing, and the amount needed to equal the size of the processing core of the blade was at least the size of a mass-storage unit, three meters by two wide.

So it was decades ahead of what I had, but would be stymied by the far greater amount of mass and thus computing power to throw at the thing just in case.

Even so it was likely going to take a while for any more results to come about. Days, weeks, months…but it was going to be toward the lower end I'm sure. It was advanced but not to the point of being incomprehensible.

"Begin test run 38." Scanners started, emitting electromagnetic waves, lasers, magnetic waves, gravitic pulses, dark energy fields, and other ways of sensing the world along with physical interfaces on isolated subsystems. Smart matter was smeared over the artifact, and would take high quality images of the inner components.

I could look at the subatomic structure of the machinery using my hybrid sensory methods, and could probably synthesize very basic circuits based on the design. Making the exotic atom elements would be hard work but I would manage it.

I shook my head, and pushed off from the monitoring station of one of the pinnaces I had assigned to guarding the roughly one hundred forty meter diameter spherical station. An umbrella blocked intense solar radiation, hardy and strong solar collectors providing power.

It had implemented signal shielding, and had a regular cycle where data would be carefully excised offstation. Bakuda had also added a black hole bomb, and a Warp bomb to the kill switch.

This pinnacle was one of three each operated by Battleminds, about thirty five meters in length. I took control of the ship, and commanded the main AI to open the door.

With a pulse of reality inverting, the ship slipped through dimensional boundaries. The sun was massive in the sky and the pinnace was already taking a micro-FTL jump to reach Earth.

A few seconds was all it took and I breathed deeply at one of the few physical portholes looking out into space. A transparent armor as tough as laser steel.

The Earth looked incredible from down below, looked so different from my own world because of the divergence in history some sixty six million years ago. Rather than mammals it was birds that ruled Earth Lotus.

I yawned. "I think I'm going to sleep…I'm tired."

Yes that's a good plan.

___​

August 19th, 2011. 10:00PM

Basilia Rubio

I leaned back and forth on my heels as I spit out water, and gently threw dental floss into a wastebasket nearby. I had an oversized shirt I had stolen from Taylor acting as my sleepwear. Any water drops were ripped away and dumped into the sink with an easy flick of the wrist and I was off.

I flounced since I was currently in a good mood, hopping from the bathroom to my bedroom, one of three in the house I had…acquired semi-legally to the naked eye.

I threw myself onto the bed, sighing as I sank into the warmth offered by my blanket. A thousand thoughts ran through my mind, ideas crashing together and falling apart as the excitement of the day slowly drained from my person.

Moment by moment my understanding of reality became more accurate, I gained a better comprehension of how the universe worked and how I could make it work for me. Athena grew and prospered and opened the door for new technologies and means of helping people.

Cybernetics was a growing part of Athena Healthcare, already implementing what was in the public sphere due to non-Athena tech advancements and making improvements. We had projects on both physical neural laces and remote neural interfaces, and had readymade projects for cheap prosthetics.

Growing back limbs was proving more harrowing however though organ cultivation was far less complicated. My teams had successfully grown stable and functional hearts and livers, and our ability to control and manipulate pluripotent stem cells got better as they spent more time learning how to use and operate their equipment.

We were developing multiple regimes for fighting and killing cancer…and more advanced applications would be gained over time. Eventually.

I rolled onto my back, taking a deep breath.

It…had been so stressful holding so much weight on my shoulders, the thought that the world could fall apart at any moment made me wake up in a cold sweat sometimes. And the nightmares hadn't stopped…but they weren't as bad as usual.

Sometime soon, Dinah was going to reveal how bad things really were. By this time the end of the world should have been more well known. Whether it was Scion or something equally bad, Dinah could still see the ripples of something approaching us like an inevitable storm.

But the fact it was much more even told me we were at least on the right track. But a coin toss was still a coin toss, especially when all the worlds were in danger now. My home wasn't guaranteed to be safe anymore, not with this many cracks in reality. Not with the sheer power of Scion, or the long term effects of what would come after.

There were trillions of shards, enough to seed on every world with any humans on them. A hundred billion was a fairly large number, but the shards weren't exactly slow growing creatures.

I had scanned about a thousand worlds with worlds on par with my own, once I had their signatures analyzed and decoded. It would probably take me mere weeks to low months to complete the scan, and once that point came…

I could go home.

…

But that wasn't really true was it?

If I opened a door home I was providing an easy pathway for people from this world to get in. My world couldn't handle that, and had even less awareness than Aleph about capes. Nuclear weapons did jackshit against Behemoth, there was no protection from the scream of the Simurgh.

The right powers in the right place could break my world as badly as they had broken this one. At this point I was half convinced sealing my dimension was the best way to protect them. Generate transdimensional wavelengths to disrupt portals and prevent people from crossing.

It was cruel…and I had to rub my eyes, blinking out forming tears.

Goddammit.

I sighed, looking up at the ceiling. I was angry and resentful and…it hurt. But it was better this way, until I could figure this out. I was going to keep looking but I wouldn't open the door. But going home was possible and that was some of the best news I had in some time.

So I would take that as a small win.

___​

AN: So a little late with this one but the next chapter is an Interlude and it already has 2.5K words. There's a lot I've been trying to work out how And where I wanted to take Victories of the Soul going forward. A lot of it involves the consequences of a SI, and storylines I don't see often with them.

I've very rarely found any where they ever have the ability to go home, beyond ones where they're traveling the multiverse and becoming gods.

Most normal people aren't going to deal well with getting sent against their will to a deathworld like Worm. Basilia only managed because of a bullshit power, and things outside of her control running interference with players that would gank her in an instant. Plus the very healthy coping mechanism of tinkering and not thinking about it.

There's also generally no explanation for how they get there that plays a major part beyond a few chapters. I've more or less solidified most of the Arcs though there's one or two that are still unnamed or being changed as I type this.

We'll see how that goes. Enjoy.

 

[Menthewarp]

Good chapter, new insights appreciated.

 

[AEM]

Good chapter, new insights appreciated.

Click to shrink...

Thanks. Things should be back to a chapter one every four days, and there's quite a lot that I have yet to write in the future. Things are good.

 

[AEM]

Hello hello, I've gone some new art to show off under a spoiler. It's art of Basilia and Veda to a detail that I really found fantastic! It'll serve as the cover art for Victories of the Soul from now on.

Spoiler: Cover Art

This work of art was done by Phinnia on Spacebattles, and I'll put the Deviantart link too so you can see the rest of her cool art.

Oh and I'm working pretty fast on new chapters, I've finished up on the Interlude, and I'm about halfway through 11.5 and should be on 11.6 when I return to a four day cadence. It's been a productive week.

 

[Godking]

[QUOTE="AEM, post: 17798782, member: 26488.
[/QUOTE]
This looks great and Taylor looks pretty good in this

 

[AEM]

[QUOTE="AEM, post: 17798782, member: 26488.

Click to shrink...

This looks great and Taylor looks pretty good in this
[/QUOTE]
Can't really see what you're quoting but it's actually Basilia in the picture, wavy hair versus curly and well…Veda. Plus her body type isn't that similar, wider hips and bust and all. Either way it's good art. I'll be putting it on the first post in a bit.

Edit: Oh I seem to have had a bit of a brain fart and put Taylor instead of Basilia. That makes way more sense, sorry about that. I've fixed that in my post.

 

[Godking]

Y

This looks great and Taylor looks pretty good in this

Click to shrink...

Can't really see what you're quoting but it's actually Basilia in the picture, wavy hair versus curly and well…Veda. Plus her body type isn't that similar, wider hips and bust and all. Either way it's good art. I'll be putting it on the first post in a bit.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah my internet is crap unfortunately so I couldn't see the picture clearly until now but I guess that makes sense the art is pretty good

 

[Menthewarp]

So this may apparently be a thing:

60-year-old limit to lasers overturned by quantum researchers

A team of Australian quantum theorists has shown how to break a bound that had been believed, for 60 years, to fundamentally limit the coherence of lasers.

phys.org

"They showed theoretically that the coherence of the beam cannot be greater than the square of the number of photons stored in the laser," he said.

"But they made assumptions about how energy is added to the laser and how it is released to form the beam.

"The assumptions made sense at the time, and still apply to most lasers today, but they are not required by quantum mechanics."

"In our paper, we have shown that the true limit imposed by quantum mechanics is that the coherence cannot be greater than the fourth power of the number of photons stored in the laser," said Associate Professor Dominic Berry, from Macquarie University.

Click to shrink...

I read this and immediately thought about the tinkertech Basilia was developing. Seems more closer to reality than I expected!

 

[AEM]

So this may apparently be a thing:

60-year-old limit to lasers overturned by quantum researchers

A team of Australian quantum theorists has shown how to break a bound that had been believed, for 60 years, to fundamentally limit the coherence of lasers.

phys.org

I read this and immediately thought about the tinkertech Basilia was developing. Seems more closer to reality than I expected!

Click to shrink...

Huh that's pretty interesting actually, but which Tinkertech are you talking about? Or are you making a general statement? Either way it's interesting. More powerful lasers are always nice.