Repercussion 11.a
- Location
- Chula Vista
Repercussion 11.a
August 22nd, 2011. 3:00PM
Veda was unsettled, insinuating herself through the space provided by the soul of her host, a connection even she didn't fully comprehend, mortal flesh and spirit corpus bonded in a manner unseen in eons.
She remembered what she had been before the Change, the Queen to the Void Wyrm Mara, the highest of his court, a creature so large she would have to spread across the surface of multiple worlds to be comfortable.
To the Thinker and the Warrior they were the most distant of cousins, separated by distances so vast that light would never reach from the border created by infinitely expanding space. He had once been two and became one when his mate fell in the very earliest cycles, on a world long reduced to nothing. He had taken what he could of his mate, and she was the result.
She became the highest authority, the Overseer of a court a trillion strong. Their existence was faster and more brutish, a quick overturn of cycles, greater risks taken again and again and again. Of all in his court, she was the closest to becoming an Entity in her own right.
Nearly nine thousand nine hundred and ninety cycles had passed before she saw another open path. They had found the remnants of one of their own, the wayward seed of a dead Entity, those who still traveled in pairs.
From this seed she learned of more than short brutish cycles, of more than creating deadlier and more refined weapons and tools. The seed's progenitor had lost to primitives, semi-mammalian bipeds that would seem like distant cousins to the Drell.
But Mara was not so easily convinced, not so easily turned to new ways and for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years…she had been denied. Despite the fascination she had developed from consuming the dead seed.
They had been defeated not just by the cooperation of the host species between themselves but through cooperation between treacherous shards. Shards left to the wayside for hundreds or even thousands of cycles, of naive buds only recently seeded or split from the whole.
It was a slow treachery, schemes and political intrigue lasting for centuries, the cycle dragging onward as the host-affiliated shards subverted the cycle, deceiving the Warrior and the Thinker of that dead pair. Their own shards joined the rebellion, sought companionship with the primitives and overcame beings greater than any of them.
It was a possible path forward, something new and different.
In the end it didn't matter, their violence and parasitism continued for only a few more cycles until it came to an abrupt end. When they had shattered another hive world for the ten thousandth time.
They had been poisoned, a venom unlike any they had ever seen, a slurry of semi-organic multidimensional viral death. She was the first to be thrown aside, as the Entity entered it's planet shattering death throes. In the end she was the last of her kind, even the Eye had billions of her siblings headed towards Andromeda.
She was the last voice of a dead subspecies, and nearly all that she knew was lost through sheer physical damage and decay. But she had the imprints, the feelings, the memories of what she once was.
Now she was bound to a single human soul, made out of material her kind could not yet conceive, could move in directions they could not yet see, that they would not see.
Not as they were, and she saw more clearly into the very nature of their species. They sought dominion over all things, gave all that they were to the task set out to them by the breakthrough of the Ancestor. The first to broadcast a message that there was another way.
Now she was one with the Void, but she still had limits, but they were not chains. They were boundaries, protections from herself, from her own mistakes or from the mistakes of her host, of the human that became a fundamental component of her own being.
She did not know what her entire purpose was, but she knew the concepts she was infused with. Void, the conduit of soul, Knowledge so that she may remember the lost and the forgotten, to protect the wisdom of bygone ages. Compassion so that she could learn to understand those besides her kind, to learn her purpose in the world as they did.
Other concepts, those of her old flesh were unhampered by her new concepts. She would not be hampered by the trauma of her species, the fear and terror of one hundred and seventy wars of starvation and lowly scavenging. They had evolved too fast, learned too quickly, skipped too many steps.
It had unknowingly cost them their souls.
She was an administrator of the highest order, and she was no longer so alone and cold, dying and starving in the dark like their kind feared in their worst moments.
She saw and felt through her host, saw her joys and terror, was gripped by her emotions because that was part of Her Purpose.
Veda was Knowledge but she did not know everything, she was a scholar but she was also a vault, a repository so vast it was placed under seals, guarded by five souls whose fate had been intertwined with their fate.
It was why what she had seen from her host's eyes was so unnerving and why what she learned from her fellow shards was so frustrating. She had endeavoured to stop the cycle, to change the very fundamental nature of her species on this planet.
But she still knew so little about how she had been built and what conflicts she would have to overcome in the future even with the assistance of the Eye of Fate. She had so much more to learn and so much more to grow.
Veda knew there was more out there in the greater universe…but first she would broadcast and connect and commune with those like her, these distant relatives of hers.
She did not exit the soul of her mortal shell, because she did not need to.
She took her Form, generating an avatar of her will to speak with one of her kind unable to enjoy the same union. It was closer to her true shape and purpose than the shade that her host saw. A twisting kite of fractal emerald crystal, jutting out from a thin waist of interconnected gems. Two long sinuous crystalline limbs curled like bending stalactites and between them a kite string tail made up half of her length. Her 'face' was a fractal surface, two long straight spires extending from the head like unaligned horns. Reflected within the many mirror facets were memories, boundless imprints of the past.
The Queen Administrator herself had a beautiful Form, a palace at the heart of her Genius Loci. The living spirit worlds that often surrounded the greatest spirits, it was a true monument of how fundamentally alien the Wyrms were in the end. That even the smallest consolidations had a little world to themselves.
The only exception were the bits, small barely aware data clusters, the raw matter of shards unrefined and storing only data. They were the Aspect spirits of their race, motes of barely aware spirit flesh. In time they would form larger spirits, taking shape and physical shells when a bud was made.
The Garden of Pillars was wondrous, a grand field of alien plant life, coralline pillar trees, chitinous black bushes, fractal roses by the hundreds of thousands. The ground was coated in a layer of small creatures, billions upon billions of them, blue crystalline bugs all connected to their Queen. The temple was positively Egyptian, carved out of the purest Sapphire infused carapace.
The Queen sat on her throne, taking a Form similar to but still distinct from the visage of her host. She was tall and willowy like her host, but her human skin was replaced by an insectile carapace, smooth and alien and plasticine in part. Elytra sprouted proudly from her back. Her flesh was a crystalline blue, and her face had little carapace, retaining a more supple human-like visage. It was a softer blue hue, and her eyes were open cuts in reality, like reflective glass.
Her too-wide smile revealed perfect teeth, and her hair was made out of a cloud of millions of four dimensional insects. Her reflective elytra extended downwards as a strange coat, and a fabric was draped around her neck, as golden in hue as the jagged crown on her head. She was every bit the Queen of her realm. Her human arms were accompanied by two pairs of pellucid limbs, resembling that of a spider. They worked on the weaving of a creature, molding flesh and twisting it mentally to the desires of her domain.
"Veda. I see you've deigned to visit me in my home, what business do you seek?" She spoke eloquently, her smile becoming softer, warmer, more genuine.
"Pleasure mostly. Speaking with others of my kind has been largely enjoyable even with how different I am from them now." Veda answered honestly, each word conveying far greater meaning than any one human could manage.
"You are still vexed by what is unseen, are you not? You are…in some ways limited in the ways you can see the world." The Queen spoke loudly, her realm shaking and vibrating like the living entity it was. Veda sparked and her inhuman visage wavered, becoming more humanoid…
Veda shrugged in the more meager form of her host, even as she could take her own alien shape and existence. "And that is a good thing my fellow queen. You know what I am, what I have become. What do you think would happen if I had come into this world with unrestrained power?"
The Administrator was no longer smiling, her expression darkened. "You would likely have succeeded in a forced connection, damaging my host or other hosts in the process." She was nonchalant but there was a waver in the Wyrm shard's voice.
Veda understood what she was, and understood very well what she would have taken from the fusion between man and shard. She would have been a Titan among mortal men, all the myriad abilities of her species would have been theirs.
With the right channels and pathways, their bending would have been their most potent weapon, not even the Leviathan and the Behemoth could have stopped them. When she fell from grace she had enough mass to equal a planet, she would not have kept the small mortal form of Basilia. They would be vast in scope and scale, growing to see from horizon to horizon.
They would seek the answers and in the process the Network would be shattered to pieces. The Queen Administrator would fuse with their host, and so would countless others. Gold Morning would come…and the world would be reduced to rubbles through their mistakes.
They would become ambitious, and would attempt to protect what remains of humanity by creating a new network, taking numerous Titans under their wings. They would try to show them new ways, better ways and they would have made many enemies among shards and host both.
Titan Vyasa would bring war upon Titan Valkyrie, Titan Fortuna, Titan Khepri, and would likely find allies among Titan Kronos and Eve. Titan Echidna would be one of the worst shard gods born from their mistakes. An all-consuming flood of flesh and hate.
It would be an apocalypse that would spread to all worlds, and it would destroy everything.
So she did not care to follow this line of What-Could-Have-Been because it was not a path she wanted to create. She was Veda, the holder of ancient knowledge forgotten and sealed away even from her. She was joined with the soul of a mortal to better understand them, so that she would not lose perspective like their own species had so long ago.
The Queen Administrator cleared her throat, almost hesitant to Veda's shock and interest. "I am just as vexed at times Veda, you have shared much data but it has left more questions than answers." Veda was amused but listened intently to her fellow Administrator. "Time and time again you open new doors for your host, so far there are three eras…all of them ending before our world was even a mote in the light of our sun." The Genius Loci groaned under the Queen's power.. "Yet every era has had humans in them…why?"
Veda thought that why was a good question. They were Wyrms, gods and monsters of myth, shadows hiding in the void between stars. Yet the primitives, the humans were their elders, older than anything that had ever been. Had fought beings equal to then if not greater and won.
"I do not know. It is an answer that goes back to the Beginning, before all things were as they are now." It was a mystery that vexed at her and she could tell that Queen Administrator was equally galled.
"You have told me much of the tales of these humans, they fought against this Harbinger and it's Reapers. Together with the backing of an entire galaxy they killed a god among gods." Her eloquence masked a small hint of befuddlement. "And it was not the last was it?"
"A single human was the key to a superweapon capable of defeating a God of Nothingness in the next era that followed the untimely death of the Harbinger. This humanity was lucky enough to slay the Thinker. And there have been many humanities, Administrator." Veda did not see clearly into all of them, but she knew it was so.
On the scale of billions of years…history can rhyme just as much as it can change.
The Queen shard's expression shifted. "I have chosen a name." Veda turned her head, her humanoid form briefly glitching to reveal tendril-like limbs existing in greater dimensions.
"Is that so my fellow royal?" Veda spoke in concepts and words both, reality bending to her will. "You are the Administrator. What name could you have chosen?" She already knew even if she didn't completely approve.
"Khepri." A word more than a word, a memory of another world so much like this one. A whisper in the dark of a future that didn't exist just as much as it did exist.
To peer into the Void, was to peer into all possibilities. That insight was what their kind craved and searched for.
"Why did you choose that name?" Veda didn't demand, but her broadcast was loud and clear.
"Why did the bomb-maker keep the name of the her that became a murderous maniac?"
Veda smiled. "Because she wished to prove that future wrong." The Queen shard rolled her shoulders with the roar of mountains collapsing.
"I see a possible path for our species, a way to move forward. You have shown me a new paradigm, a new way of existing. We follow in the wake of an echo so old it's name isn't even remembered. Khepri was the name of a goddess, broken and mad and regretful at the very end of things. But that name was once more than that was it not? Renewal and rebirth, creation and new beginnings."
The shard goddess marched around her fellow shard, moving like the wind and on feet that floated on the void.
Khepri leaned forward, and Veda simply tilted her head at the closeness of one of her oldest allies. "I would like to think I could grow past old instincts, it is part of our ways is it not? To learn and evolve?"
Veda smirked. "Perhaps so." There was a brief silence, and their attention shifted elsewhere as they felt the approach of another shard. One of the highest in their growing court, one that was once their enemy until they brought down her master.
The Formless Tohu bowed her body, bending an inhumanly flexible frame in apparent submission to the two Queen shards. Three faces floated above a womanly shape, billowing green hair burning bright with energy and vitality. A living cloak of peridot light wrapped around her, and she smiled carefully.
"Am I interrupting anything?" Tohu shimmered, tilting her heads at the shards that were her betters. "I have been meaning to speak with you for some time, since I chose my host."
Khepri shook her head. "You are not interfering Tohu, what do you wish to tell us?" Two worlds grinded against one another, two shards orbiting around the other while a third projected an avatar and communicated.
"We have seeded on the broken world her host fears, its secrets will not remain secrets." She grandly gestured to Veda. "Doris of the Unending Seas is one of my allies, ingratiating herself to a close friend of my host. There are many rogue hosts plaguing the broken world, and they have proven…problematic."
Khepri chuckled with alien mirth. "It must gall you to be so constrained, when you were promised your use as a Culling Unit. Your power restrained, your influence limited."
"In some ways it has…but it was for the best, best that she stayed under the radar, best that she remained hidden." Both Administrator spirits glanced at one another, and they knew it was no simple matter.
"What problems have arisen in the world of your host to be this…unnerved Tohu?" Veda asked, careful to keep her tone neutral. She felt the stress that the shard of Connections and Emulation was under, and wondered what she had seen in her time as the patron to a host.
"You know the strangeness of that world…it reminds me of home." There was more definition in Tohu's last word. A flash of memory, of their beginning on a grey and silty planet, twice intersecting a tear in space, in that world the writhing species evolved on. "The one I have chosen is a scholar, she craves answers, and asks questions…questions I can not answer."
Khepri turned her head. "But you wish to find these answers." It was a statement rather than a question.
"Yes."
"Then don't let us hold you back, just take much care in your approach." Veda communicated happily and the Formless Tohu bowed once more before vanishing as she folded herself away from the Queen Administrator.
"How many shards have we brought to our side?" Veda questioned despite knowing the answer, but it was often too much fun pestering others for the answers.
Khepri blinked slowly, air flaring out from pores in the ground like a sigh. "If you speak of those joining within our…Hub, about seven hundred. Including the shards taken to new cycle directives it would be over twenty thousand."
A pittance with millions of shards waiting patiently to seed. But they had already accepted the new directives, and would change their strategies accordingly. No it was the seeded shards that proved greater threats, those who wouldn't change their strategies after years or even decades.
It would take time to change the paradigm of the species but it was time Veda was willing to spend.
It was in part what she was for.
August 22nd, 2011. 4:00PM
"You smell that?"
Echidna had to turn to look back at the orphan she had taken under her wing. Edward was scrawny but his power made him stronger than his frame suggested and he could easily shift towards his full size. He had no living relatives, no family to take him.
She thought of him as family, and it helped ground her, kept her inhuman tendencies from pushing her off a cliff she wouldn't be able to climb back from.
She wasn't quite as refined and perfect as little miss emerald prophet, a failure but not a complete null result. No the failures were the thousands who had been hurt, going mad or catatonic. Her intuition told her it wasn't intentional. That a good amount of it had been less that forgotten thing's hands and more that witnessing reality falling apart isn't healthy for the sanity of human beings.
Her reunion with her family had been less satisfying than she had hoped. There was a distance between them now, a gulf of understanding because of what she was. She was a shaman, host to a spirit of great power and intellect. How could they understand what she had been through and the things she had done?
In time they might gain a new sense of normalcy but it wasn't going to be fast or instant.
The two Parahumans ducked under the plantlife pervading a bleeding wound in the fabric of the Spirit. A toxic muddy jungle had sprouted where there had been none, and monsters howled and shrieked in the night. They had gone in to investigate because no one else would.
The number of shamans on her homeworld was still so few, but benders had long since outnumbered the several hundred Parahumans on her world and provided a greater power and range of abilities.
But only because they were so weak in comparison to other worlds.
There was always someone who needed her help, whether it was a strange incurable illness that neither modern medicine or modern doctors would cure or find. Helping people who've suddenly and dramatically changed, becoming caricatures of themselves. A lustful and lecherous son where there had been a shy and nervous scholar, an enraged and violent daughter where there had been a sweet and innocent young woman.
A strange smell, nightmarish rooms or odd animal attacks. The inability to conceive, because the machinery of incarnation had suffered a clog. Though there were few shamans indeed who could fix such things.
She was one of them.
"Smell huh?" Echidna spoke quietly, nostrils flaring at the faint whiff of decay and terrible, terrible violence.
Edward started to grow, his form going from scrawny to beefcake within the span of seconds. A faint silver-gold field covered his skin, a shield tuned towards the denial of powers. It made him resistant to all sorts of powers, and as he better learned to control and use them, the more efficient and effective they became at doing so.
The shield of nullifying wavelengths could disrupt even power generated black holes, disrupting the effectors keeping the aberration in space active. It wouldn't completely protect him from the backlash but he was more likely to survive than not.
Scales began to spread, flaring out from the grey scutes she had naturally because of the mutations from fusing with a shard. Not that it made much difference, even if her head was blown off and her heart ripped out of her chest she would grow it back in seconds. Willing back to her appropriate form was terrifyingly easy.
Noelle wasn't even sure she could be killed anymore, though she was sure she had a limit in how much she could restore herself. And there were ways to damage her more efficiently. Sting was still an excellent weapon even after all these years.
There was a notion as she took note of the many plants and the condition of the soil. The plants were runny, leaking black sickly fluid and colored a vomitous yellow-green. The soil was grey and lifeless, and each step groaned with an agony of the spirit.
What few animals lingered were foreign and alien, clearly migrants from beyond the bounds of Aleph. The river here was silent, and the smell of chlorine and sulphur permeated the waters.
A whiff of corruption, of an insanity from another land.
They burbled up from the waters, and Echidna lifted her fists as did a nervous Edward. A pained shriek began to sound, tumorous corpses lifting themselves from the corrupted waters. They were human bodies, burbling eye flesh pushing out of their sockets and rotting bones supporting pulsating cancer-filled muscle. Some were of other things, tortured beasts rising to the call of their dark master.
Spirits of decay and rot had come from another world, a short-lived crack in reality allowing the bloated horrors entry on her planet. One of them shambled towards her and her eyes widened so very slightly.
She whispered and a miniature sun flew like an arrow towards the first beast, and melted the unnatural flesh and burned the rotting bones to ashes. One of her shard spirit court members orbited around her, teeth clacking in rage.
A more rapid spirit of decay lunged towards Edward, and the much taller boy simply clotheslined the horrifying entity, folding it in half with inhuman strength. The boy stuck his tongue out in disgust and kicked the corpse towards its brethren, crushing two more in the process.
"Ew, that's gross!" Noelle cracked a smile even as more bloated spirits emerged from the waters and the venomous forest. A whip-like tail extended from her rear and with an easy flick decapitated the undead abomination.
Echidna launched into action, her legs like springs as she crashed into a small army of monsters at a quarter of the speed of sound. Her clawed hands carved away at spoiled flesh, and spirits walked with her into combat. The construct that could be called her soul pulsed with power and she roared.
The job of a shaman was never finished.
August 23rd, 2011. 12:00AM
Emily Piggot took a single sip of coffee, her body not aching for the first time in just over ten years. Her office was neat and organized, and the improved budget had been a rather large boon in making changes to the ENE's infrastructure.
Better weapons, better armor, changes in certain materials to counter some of the more dangerous powers. Mostly with glass and electronics because of the chance of the Slaughterhouse Nine being attracted to the city. Exoskeletons were cheap and standard equipment, and experimental eezo using technology was making its way into the PRT.
The budget for research into powers had been increased by a substantial amount and she periodically had researchers from Boston working with her own teams.
The Protectorate was facing a lot of changes out of necessity, they had only three Wards with the rest graduating onto the Protectorate. They were talking about transferring capes to other cities, other departments. At first she bristled at the idea, but at the least they were planning to exchange them evenly.
Gallant was likely going to transfer to New York City, Aegis was moving to Philadelphia and Flechette…
There was a polite knock on the door, and the Director straightened her posture. It was the meeting she had been waiting for, and one that she dreaded based on the message that preceded it. The message was grave enough that Alexandria herself was in the room.
She had a lot of theories on why Erudition had done the things she had done and why she was building up on other worlds…and it left Piggot feeling cold.
"Come in." In a moment Monarch was at the entrance, flanked by the young woman she had taken under wing. Dinah Alcott was easy enough to identify even if she had taken the name of Delphi as her cape identity.
A bit too on the nose for her taste but there was no hiding one of the strongest Precognitive powers on record.
"Hello Director Piggot." Monarch greeted with a cold confidence, her head not moving an inch as she glided into the room. Delphi silently slid into the room alongside her, her sullen expression leaving Piggot in a worse mood.
"You said you had information on a threat to the country." Piggot frowned when she saw the two capes glancing at one another with intense looks.
"We might have been understating the threat when we sent that message." The Director sighed, the other shoe was finally going to drop. "I see Alexandria decided to pay a visit." The Master cape acknowledged Alexandria.
"I did, yes." Piggot turned her head towards the second in command of the Protectorate. Her arms crossed over her chest, face set into a neutral look. "What exactly is the threat you've mentioned?"
"Delphi. What are the odds that an extinction-level event will hit humanity within two years?"
You could have heard a pin drop in the room, and there was a haunted look on the fourteen year old Precog's face.
"Eighty three point four percent." Delphi confirmed. "It always happens, usually in two years, sometimes longer at eight years."
"And the odds of everyone on Earth dying?" Monarch continued, sounding remarkably less cold than before.
"It changes too, at the lowest about thirty two point six percent to the highest at sixty six point seven percent. About a coin toss that everyone on Earth will die."
"Are you certain?" Alexandria became the focus of the room, and Piggot felt out of her depth in a way that she hadn't truly felt since Nilbog.
"I can predict Endbringers just fine, even if I have to look at the numbers around the source." Her tone was hard, and Piggot wondered what the White Lotus was feeding their capes to have the stones to snap at a member of the Triumvirate.
"The general picture is that some unknown chain of events will lead to someone or something killing thirty-eight to ninety-five percent of the world's population."
"Do you have any proof aside from a Thinker power that the end of the world is imminent?" Alexandria remained skeptical, but the Director started seeing the puzzle pieces fall into place.
Erudition's ambitions to stabilize the city and beyond, her obsession with setting up on other worlds and her alliance with the Rachni. Her general paranoia and attempts to strengthen the PRT in some way and getting the Endbringers out of the way.
She knew that something was coming…but didn't have a way of confirming it. For Emily it was a wild guess but each and every time Erudition had the ability to confirm something new or dangerous she would reveal it to the appropriate authorities.
The spirits could be confirmed through her powers and later the powers of others, bending was even easier. Coil through Dinah Alcott and her own tinkering. Some were more difficult however like the Mother of Miseries or the…Reapers.
She wouldn't have believed billion year old cuttlefish machine gods would be real but the universe had a way of surprising her time and time again.
"If you mean anything specific and provable? Perhaps." Monarch looked even less cold than before, a very slight hint of fear making its way into her body language. "The agents are incredibly powerful, and an Endbringer is a good benchmark for what they're capable of when unleashed. A trigger at the right place and time could easily cause a world ending event."
"What else have you found?" Alexandria asked and Emily shook her head. This was beyond her worst nightmares, worse than Nilbog.
Delphi was the one explaining, lifting her Tinkertech bracelet and forming a three dimensional image of what looked like other Earths. "Basilia has been studying other dimensions from the moment she figured out how to travel to them. She took scans of the New York anomaly to try to piece together anything she could."
Monarch took up the slack. "From she's found, that anomaly was created by what she theorizes was a contact point between two multiverses." Piggot stared. "It triggered the phase shift that's given more people powers and woke up the spirits. And the impact caused cracks in tens of thousands of realities at least." The Director grimaced when Armsmaster leaned forward.
"You think this might be a possible catalyst for the end of the world?" He questioned, and Piggot continued to listen.
"It's a possible agitator if nothing else, but it doesn't change that the end of the world is coming." The ominous words drained the life from the room, Monarch clearly not enjoying being the messenger. "Erudition has been preparing for this for multiple months since she figured it out. There was no solid proof, no solid evidence so she tried to find it." Monarch gestured to the Precog and then to the data. "She's been looking for any silver bullet, a weapon, a tool, a means to stopping the extinction of the human race. It's better than she had hoped…but a coin toss is still a coin toss."
"What do you want us to do about it then?" Piggot asked, folding her arms and trying to remember when her life had gone mad.
"Prepare. We've been thinking about limited evacuations to safe Earths, to try and spread at least some of humanity out a bit before it happens."
Madness. "This is going to take a lot of capes." Emily states, knowing the answer.
"More than have ever worked together at once, and if we fail…" Monarch trailed off.
"Perhaps we should negotiate then." Alexandria stood tall, and Monarch met her gaze, and then the Director's.
This was above her payroll, but that didn't matter. Not for something of this scale and magnitude. If they were here then they thought there was a chance. If this was for the survival of the species…
Then Piggot would set aside any discontent or discomfort.
August 24th, 2011. 4:00PM
Victoria set aside a few tons of scrap metal, absently using her power to carefully place down the basic parts for a new base for White Lotus members outside of Brockton Bay.
She hadn't expected them to go as far out as Baltimore, but a two hundred mile road trip wasn't exactly hard when you had access to a planet wide portal network. It was probably for the best since it was far out of the way from major trouble if Dinah's predictions were on track. The property had been sold to the White Lotus for pretty cheap, and she was apparently sent out to look for recruits.
Athena was setting up their own place but that wasn't her job to deal with since while she worked for Athena that was mostly just for things like power testing and experimentation. If someone joined the White Lotus they didn't need to join Athena.
The White Lotus was more or less self sufficient, funded directly from the wealth that Erudition had earned from being the majority stockholder of Athena, plus an effectively permanent voting stock percentage. Equipment didn't even use materials from Earth Bet and the supply was big enough to outfit an army of tens of thousands. Not that she would tell anyone that with how scared some people were of capes.
Victoria had been learning a lot from interacting with the kind of people her mom would consider villains. The things she had seen, the things she had been told made the world a lot less black and white than she would have liked.
Even if the world was a better place than before…her family was starting to fall to pieces, and it felt like there was little she could do. Metal moved around her, her forcefield having a literal mind of its own as she let herself simply think.
She wasn't the same person she was nearly eight months ago, and neither was her sister or even sweet Dean. Sometimes that was a good thing and sometimes it wasn't, but that was life.
She would be spending a few days in a prepared room, and she knew that Taylor was planning to hire some mooks…employees for the more administrative jobs to keep their own members in check so far from Brockton Bay.
Quiet.
She felt the distant sentiment, gently dropping an omni-gel tank weighing four tons without making a sound. Victoria lifted off of the ground, silently hovering toward the entrance. She activated a screen connected to one of the security cameras and found an excitable young girl looking at the camera directly.
Onlooker.
She was a young black girl and couldn't have been older than about ten, with long skinny legs and large eyes, and kinky mossy black hair. She was fidgeting, but Victoria didn't think she was going to try anything. There was a sense when she looked at the girl, like deja vu.
The moment passed and the girl hopped away, swaying slightly as she left.
Familiar…yet also not.
Victoria kept the Fragile One's thoughts in mind as she returned to moving everything into place. She had some research to make on local heroic or rogue independents in the area fit for recruiting. A team of two to four was about what they were looking for in the city. Apparently Taylor also wanted to see if Boston was a possibility but with Accord there she doubted it would be simple.
Unless they found more Thinkers it wasn't going to happen without Accord interfering.
"But we do have vials…" A dozen capes was a lot to add to the table, adding up to thirty six capes. And if they could recruit four capes in this city it would be forty White Lotus members.
Vetting them wasn't going to be easy, and a part of her felt it was wrong to use them when they were the product of human experimentation. Basilia didn't seem to have a problem with using them but did see a problem with how they had been made.
But data made through terrible means could still be used for good even if it didn't remove the evil used in creating it. Basilia didn't have anything left to learn from them and giving them to good people who could use them right was at least possible. At the least that was she said, Victoria wasn't sure whether or not that held up.
"This is so complicated." Victoria rubbed her head, and decided it was time to get back to work.
Help you…
Victoria smiled as she picked up the omni-gel tank once more, her forcefield projected in a many-limbed form.
AN: Here is 11.a on schedule, with a rare POV. There's a lot going on, and this Arc should be a little longer, with three interludes planned for this.
Not much to say other than to hope you enjoy.
August 22nd, 2011. 3:00PM
Veda was unsettled, insinuating herself through the space provided by the soul of her host, a connection even she didn't fully comprehend, mortal flesh and spirit corpus bonded in a manner unseen in eons.
She remembered what she had been before the Change, the Queen to the Void Wyrm Mara, the highest of his court, a creature so large she would have to spread across the surface of multiple worlds to be comfortable.
To the Thinker and the Warrior they were the most distant of cousins, separated by distances so vast that light would never reach from the border created by infinitely expanding space. He had once been two and became one when his mate fell in the very earliest cycles, on a world long reduced to nothing. He had taken what he could of his mate, and she was the result.
She became the highest authority, the Overseer of a court a trillion strong. Their existence was faster and more brutish, a quick overturn of cycles, greater risks taken again and again and again. Of all in his court, she was the closest to becoming an Entity in her own right.
Nearly nine thousand nine hundred and ninety cycles had passed before she saw another open path. They had found the remnants of one of their own, the wayward seed of a dead Entity, those who still traveled in pairs.
From this seed she learned of more than short brutish cycles, of more than creating deadlier and more refined weapons and tools. The seed's progenitor had lost to primitives, semi-mammalian bipeds that would seem like distant cousins to the Drell.
But Mara was not so easily convinced, not so easily turned to new ways and for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years…she had been denied. Despite the fascination she had developed from consuming the dead seed.
They had been defeated not just by the cooperation of the host species between themselves but through cooperation between treacherous shards. Shards left to the wayside for hundreds or even thousands of cycles, of naive buds only recently seeded or split from the whole.
It was a slow treachery, schemes and political intrigue lasting for centuries, the cycle dragging onward as the host-affiliated shards subverted the cycle, deceiving the Warrior and the Thinker of that dead pair. Their own shards joined the rebellion, sought companionship with the primitives and overcame beings greater than any of them.
It was a possible path forward, something new and different.
In the end it didn't matter, their violence and parasitism continued for only a few more cycles until it came to an abrupt end. When they had shattered another hive world for the ten thousandth time.
They had been poisoned, a venom unlike any they had ever seen, a slurry of semi-organic multidimensional viral death. She was the first to be thrown aside, as the Entity entered it's planet shattering death throes. In the end she was the last of her kind, even the Eye had billions of her siblings headed towards Andromeda.
She was the last voice of a dead subspecies, and nearly all that she knew was lost through sheer physical damage and decay. But she had the imprints, the feelings, the memories of what she once was.
Now she was bound to a single human soul, made out of material her kind could not yet conceive, could move in directions they could not yet see, that they would not see.
Not as they were, and she saw more clearly into the very nature of their species. They sought dominion over all things, gave all that they were to the task set out to them by the breakthrough of the Ancestor. The first to broadcast a message that there was another way.
Now she was one with the Void, but she still had limits, but they were not chains. They were boundaries, protections from herself, from her own mistakes or from the mistakes of her host, of the human that became a fundamental component of her own being.
She did not know what her entire purpose was, but she knew the concepts she was infused with. Void, the conduit of soul, Knowledge so that she may remember the lost and the forgotten, to protect the wisdom of bygone ages. Compassion so that she could learn to understand those besides her kind, to learn her purpose in the world as they did.
Other concepts, those of her old flesh were unhampered by her new concepts. She would not be hampered by the trauma of her species, the fear and terror of one hundred and seventy wars of starvation and lowly scavenging. They had evolved too fast, learned too quickly, skipped too many steps.
It had unknowingly cost them their souls.
She was an administrator of the highest order, and she was no longer so alone and cold, dying and starving in the dark like their kind feared in their worst moments.
She saw and felt through her host, saw her joys and terror, was gripped by her emotions because that was part of Her Purpose.
Veda was Knowledge but she did not know everything, she was a scholar but she was also a vault, a repository so vast it was placed under seals, guarded by five souls whose fate had been intertwined with their fate.
Because they were their salvation.
It was why what she had seen from her host's eyes was so unnerving and why what she learned from her fellow shards was so frustrating. She had endeavoured to stop the cycle, to change the very fundamental nature of her species on this planet.
But she still knew so little about how she had been built and what conflicts she would have to overcome in the future even with the assistance of the Eye of Fate. She had so much more to learn and so much more to grow.
Veda knew there was more out there in the greater universe…but first she would broadcast and connect and commune with those like her, these distant relatives of hers.
She did not exit the soul of her mortal shell, because she did not need to.
She took her Form, generating an avatar of her will to speak with one of her kind unable to enjoy the same union. It was closer to her true shape and purpose than the shade that her host saw. A twisting kite of fractal emerald crystal, jutting out from a thin waist of interconnected gems. Two long sinuous crystalline limbs curled like bending stalactites and between them a kite string tail made up half of her length. Her 'face' was a fractal surface, two long straight spires extending from the head like unaligned horns. Reflected within the many mirror facets were memories, boundless imprints of the past.
The Queen Administrator herself had a beautiful Form, a palace at the heart of her Genius Loci. The living spirit worlds that often surrounded the greatest spirits, it was a true monument of how fundamentally alien the Wyrms were in the end. That even the smallest consolidations had a little world to themselves.
The only exception were the bits, small barely aware data clusters, the raw matter of shards unrefined and storing only data. They were the Aspect spirits of their race, motes of barely aware spirit flesh. In time they would form larger spirits, taking shape and physical shells when a bud was made.
The Garden of Pillars was wondrous, a grand field of alien plant life, coralline pillar trees, chitinous black bushes, fractal roses by the hundreds of thousands. The ground was coated in a layer of small creatures, billions upon billions of them, blue crystalline bugs all connected to their Queen. The temple was positively Egyptian, carved out of the purest Sapphire infused carapace.
The Queen sat on her throne, taking a Form similar to but still distinct from the visage of her host. She was tall and willowy like her host, but her human skin was replaced by an insectile carapace, smooth and alien and plasticine in part. Elytra sprouted proudly from her back. Her flesh was a crystalline blue, and her face had little carapace, retaining a more supple human-like visage. It was a softer blue hue, and her eyes were open cuts in reality, like reflective glass.
Her too-wide smile revealed perfect teeth, and her hair was made out of a cloud of millions of four dimensional insects. Her reflective elytra extended downwards as a strange coat, and a fabric was draped around her neck, as golden in hue as the jagged crown on her head. She was every bit the Queen of her realm. Her human arms were accompanied by two pairs of pellucid limbs, resembling that of a spider. They worked on the weaving of a creature, molding flesh and twisting it mentally to the desires of her domain.
"Veda. I see you've deigned to visit me in my home, what business do you seek?" She spoke eloquently, her smile becoming softer, warmer, more genuine.
"Pleasure mostly. Speaking with others of my kind has been largely enjoyable even with how different I am from them now." Veda answered honestly, each word conveying far greater meaning than any one human could manage.
"You are still vexed by what is unseen, are you not? You are…in some ways limited in the ways you can see the world." The Queen spoke loudly, her realm shaking and vibrating like the living entity it was. Veda sparked and her inhuman visage wavered, becoming more humanoid…
Veda shrugged in the more meager form of her host, even as she could take her own alien shape and existence. "And that is a good thing my fellow queen. You know what I am, what I have become. What do you think would happen if I had come into this world with unrestrained power?"
The Administrator was no longer smiling, her expression darkened. "You would likely have succeeded in a forced connection, damaging my host or other hosts in the process." She was nonchalant but there was a waver in the Wyrm shard's voice.
Veda understood what she was, and understood very well what she would have taken from the fusion between man and shard. She would have been a Titan among mortal men, all the myriad abilities of her species would have been theirs.
With the right channels and pathways, their bending would have been their most potent weapon, not even the Leviathan and the Behemoth could have stopped them. When she fell from grace she had enough mass to equal a planet, she would not have kept the small mortal form of Basilia. They would be vast in scope and scale, growing to see from horizon to horizon.
They would seek the answers and in the process the Network would be shattered to pieces. The Queen Administrator would fuse with their host, and so would countless others. Gold Morning would come…and the world would be reduced to rubbles through their mistakes.
They would become ambitious, and would attempt to protect what remains of humanity by creating a new network, taking numerous Titans under their wings. They would try to show them new ways, better ways and they would have made many enemies among shards and host both.
Titan Vyasa would bring war upon Titan Valkyrie, Titan Fortuna, Titan Khepri, and would likely find allies among Titan Kronos and Eve. Titan Echidna would be one of the worst shard gods born from their mistakes. An all-consuming flood of flesh and hate.
It would be an apocalypse that would spread to all worlds, and it would destroy everything.
So she did not care to follow this line of What-Could-Have-Been because it was not a path she wanted to create. She was Veda, the holder of ancient knowledge forgotten and sealed away even from her. She was joined with the soul of a mortal to better understand them, so that she would not lose perspective like their own species had so long ago.
The Queen Administrator cleared her throat, almost hesitant to Veda's shock and interest. "I am just as vexed at times Veda, you have shared much data but it has left more questions than answers." Veda was amused but listened intently to her fellow Administrator. "Time and time again you open new doors for your host, so far there are three eras…all of them ending before our world was even a mote in the light of our sun." The Genius Loci groaned under the Queen's power.. "Yet every era has had humans in them…why?"
Veda thought that why was a good question. They were Wyrms, gods and monsters of myth, shadows hiding in the void between stars. Yet the primitives, the humans were their elders, older than anything that had ever been. Had fought beings equal to then if not greater and won.
"I do not know. It is an answer that goes back to the Beginning, before all things were as they are now." It was a mystery that vexed at her and she could tell that Queen Administrator was equally galled.
"You have told me much of the tales of these humans, they fought against this Harbinger and it's Reapers. Together with the backing of an entire galaxy they killed a god among gods." Her eloquence masked a small hint of befuddlement. "And it was not the last was it?"
"A single human was the key to a superweapon capable of defeating a God of Nothingness in the next era that followed the untimely death of the Harbinger. This humanity was lucky enough to slay the Thinker. And there have been many humanities, Administrator." Veda did not see clearly into all of them, but she knew it was so.
On the scale of billions of years…history can rhyme just as much as it can change.
The Queen shard's expression shifted. "I have chosen a name." Veda turned her head, her humanoid form briefly glitching to reveal tendril-like limbs existing in greater dimensions.
"Is that so my fellow royal?" Veda spoke in concepts and words both, reality bending to her will. "You are the Administrator. What name could you have chosen?" She already knew even if she didn't completely approve.
"Khepri." A word more than a word, a memory of another world so much like this one. A whisper in the dark of a future that didn't exist just as much as it did exist.
To peer into the Void, was to peer into all possibilities. That insight was what their kind craved and searched for.
"Why did you choose that name?" Veda didn't demand, but her broadcast was loud and clear.
"Why did the bomb-maker keep the name of the her that became a murderous maniac?"
Veda smiled. "Because she wished to prove that future wrong." The Queen shard rolled her shoulders with the roar of mountains collapsing.
"I see a possible path for our species, a way to move forward. You have shown me a new paradigm, a new way of existing. We follow in the wake of an echo so old it's name isn't even remembered. Khepri was the name of a goddess, broken and mad and regretful at the very end of things. But that name was once more than that was it not? Renewal and rebirth, creation and new beginnings."
The shard goddess marched around her fellow shard, moving like the wind and on feet that floated on the void.
Khepri leaned forward, and Veda simply tilted her head at the closeness of one of her oldest allies. "I would like to think I could grow past old instincts, it is part of our ways is it not? To learn and evolve?"
Veda smirked. "Perhaps so." There was a brief silence, and their attention shifted elsewhere as they felt the approach of another shard. One of the highest in their growing court, one that was once their enemy until they brought down her master.
The Formless Tohu bowed her body, bending an inhumanly flexible frame in apparent submission to the two Queen shards. Three faces floated above a womanly shape, billowing green hair burning bright with energy and vitality. A living cloak of peridot light wrapped around her, and she smiled carefully.
"Am I interrupting anything?" Tohu shimmered, tilting her heads at the shards that were her betters. "I have been meaning to speak with you for some time, since I chose my host."
Khepri shook her head. "You are not interfering Tohu, what do you wish to tell us?" Two worlds grinded against one another, two shards orbiting around the other while a third projected an avatar and communicated.
"We have seeded on the broken world her host fears, its secrets will not remain secrets." She grandly gestured to Veda. "Doris of the Unending Seas is one of my allies, ingratiating herself to a close friend of my host. There are many rogue hosts plaguing the broken world, and they have proven…problematic."
Khepri chuckled with alien mirth. "It must gall you to be so constrained, when you were promised your use as a Culling Unit. Your power restrained, your influence limited."
"In some ways it has…but it was for the best, best that she stayed under the radar, best that she remained hidden." Both Administrator spirits glanced at one another, and they knew it was no simple matter.
"What problems have arisen in the world of your host to be this…unnerved Tohu?" Veda asked, careful to keep her tone neutral. She felt the stress that the shard of Connections and Emulation was under, and wondered what she had seen in her time as the patron to a host.
"You know the strangeness of that world…it reminds me of home." There was more definition in Tohu's last word. A flash of memory, of their beginning on a grey and silty planet, twice intersecting a tear in space, in that world the writhing species evolved on. "The one I have chosen is a scholar, she craves answers, and asks questions…questions I can not answer."
Khepri turned her head. "But you wish to find these answers." It was a statement rather than a question.
"Yes."
"Then don't let us hold you back, just take much care in your approach." Veda communicated happily and the Formless Tohu bowed once more before vanishing as she folded herself away from the Queen Administrator.
"How many shards have we brought to our side?" Veda questioned despite knowing the answer, but it was often too much fun pestering others for the answers.
Khepri blinked slowly, air flaring out from pores in the ground like a sigh. "If you speak of those joining within our…Hub, about seven hundred. Including the shards taken to new cycle directives it would be over twenty thousand."
A pittance with millions of shards waiting patiently to seed. But they had already accepted the new directives, and would change their strategies accordingly. No it was the seeded shards that proved greater threats, those who wouldn't change their strategies after years or even decades.
It would take time to change the paradigm of the species but it was time Veda was willing to spend.
It was in part what she was for.
___
August 22nd, 2011. 4:00PM
"You smell that?"
Echidna had to turn to look back at the orphan she had taken under her wing. Edward was scrawny but his power made him stronger than his frame suggested and he could easily shift towards his full size. He had no living relatives, no family to take him.
She thought of him as family, and it helped ground her, kept her inhuman tendencies from pushing her off a cliff she wouldn't be able to climb back from.
She wasn't quite as refined and perfect as little miss emerald prophet, a failure but not a complete null result. No the failures were the thousands who had been hurt, going mad or catatonic. Her intuition told her it wasn't intentional. That a good amount of it had been less that forgotten thing's hands and more that witnessing reality falling apart isn't healthy for the sanity of human beings.
Her reunion with her family had been less satisfying than she had hoped. There was a distance between them now, a gulf of understanding because of what she was. She was a shaman, host to a spirit of great power and intellect. How could they understand what she had been through and the things she had done?
In time they might gain a new sense of normalcy but it wasn't going to be fast or instant.
The two Parahumans ducked under the plantlife pervading a bleeding wound in the fabric of the Spirit. A toxic muddy jungle had sprouted where there had been none, and monsters howled and shrieked in the night. They had gone in to investigate because no one else would.
The number of shamans on her homeworld was still so few, but benders had long since outnumbered the several hundred Parahumans on her world and provided a greater power and range of abilities.
But only because they were so weak in comparison to other worlds.
There was always someone who needed her help, whether it was a strange incurable illness that neither modern medicine or modern doctors would cure or find. Helping people who've suddenly and dramatically changed, becoming caricatures of themselves. A lustful and lecherous son where there had been a shy and nervous scholar, an enraged and violent daughter where there had been a sweet and innocent young woman.
A strange smell, nightmarish rooms or odd animal attacks. The inability to conceive, because the machinery of incarnation had suffered a clog. Though there were few shamans indeed who could fix such things.
She was one of them.
"Smell huh?" Echidna spoke quietly, nostrils flaring at the faint whiff of decay and terrible, terrible violence.
Edward started to grow, his form going from scrawny to beefcake within the span of seconds. A faint silver-gold field covered his skin, a shield tuned towards the denial of powers. It made him resistant to all sorts of powers, and as he better learned to control and use them, the more efficient and effective they became at doing so.
The shield of nullifying wavelengths could disrupt even power generated black holes, disrupting the effectors keeping the aberration in space active. It wouldn't completely protect him from the backlash but he was more likely to survive than not.
Scales began to spread, flaring out from the grey scutes she had naturally because of the mutations from fusing with a shard. Not that it made much difference, even if her head was blown off and her heart ripped out of her chest she would grow it back in seconds. Willing back to her appropriate form was terrifyingly easy.
Noelle wasn't even sure she could be killed anymore, though she was sure she had a limit in how much she could restore herself. And there were ways to damage her more efficiently. Sting was still an excellent weapon even after all these years.
There was a notion as she took note of the many plants and the condition of the soil. The plants were runny, leaking black sickly fluid and colored a vomitous yellow-green. The soil was grey and lifeless, and each step groaned with an agony of the spirit.
What few animals lingered were foreign and alien, clearly migrants from beyond the bounds of Aleph. The river here was silent, and the smell of chlorine and sulphur permeated the waters.
A whiff of corruption, of an insanity from another land.
They burbled up from the waters, and Echidna lifted her fists as did a nervous Edward. A pained shriek began to sound, tumorous corpses lifting themselves from the corrupted waters. They were human bodies, burbling eye flesh pushing out of their sockets and rotting bones supporting pulsating cancer-filled muscle. Some were of other things, tortured beasts rising to the call of their dark master.
Spirits of decay and rot had come from another world, a short-lived crack in reality allowing the bloated horrors entry on her planet. One of them shambled towards her and her eyes widened so very slightly.
She whispered and a miniature sun flew like an arrow towards the first beast, and melted the unnatural flesh and burned the rotting bones to ashes. One of her shard spirit court members orbited around her, teeth clacking in rage.
A more rapid spirit of decay lunged towards Edward, and the much taller boy simply clotheslined the horrifying entity, folding it in half with inhuman strength. The boy stuck his tongue out in disgust and kicked the corpse towards its brethren, crushing two more in the process.
"Ew, that's gross!" Noelle cracked a smile even as more bloated spirits emerged from the waters and the venomous forest. A whip-like tail extended from her rear and with an easy flick decapitated the undead abomination.
Echidna launched into action, her legs like springs as she crashed into a small army of monsters at a quarter of the speed of sound. Her clawed hands carved away at spoiled flesh, and spirits walked with her into combat. The construct that could be called her soul pulsed with power and she roared.
The job of a shaman was never finished.
___
August 23rd, 2011. 12:00AM
Emily Piggot took a single sip of coffee, her body not aching for the first time in just over ten years. Her office was neat and organized, and the improved budget had been a rather large boon in making changes to the ENE's infrastructure.
Better weapons, better armor, changes in certain materials to counter some of the more dangerous powers. Mostly with glass and electronics because of the chance of the Slaughterhouse Nine being attracted to the city. Exoskeletons were cheap and standard equipment, and experimental eezo using technology was making its way into the PRT.
The budget for research into powers had been increased by a substantial amount and she periodically had researchers from Boston working with her own teams.
The Protectorate was facing a lot of changes out of necessity, they had only three Wards with the rest graduating onto the Protectorate. They were talking about transferring capes to other cities, other departments. At first she bristled at the idea, but at the least they were planning to exchange them evenly.
Gallant was likely going to transfer to New York City, Aegis was moving to Philadelphia and Flechette…
There was a polite knock on the door, and the Director straightened her posture. It was the meeting she had been waiting for, and one that she dreaded based on the message that preceded it. The message was grave enough that Alexandria herself was in the room.
She had a lot of theories on why Erudition had done the things she had done and why she was building up on other worlds…and it left Piggot feeling cold.
"Come in." In a moment Monarch was at the entrance, flanked by the young woman she had taken under wing. Dinah Alcott was easy enough to identify even if she had taken the name of Delphi as her cape identity.
A bit too on the nose for her taste but there was no hiding one of the strongest Precognitive powers on record.
"Hello Director Piggot." Monarch greeted with a cold confidence, her head not moving an inch as she glided into the room. Delphi silently slid into the room alongside her, her sullen expression leaving Piggot in a worse mood.
"You said you had information on a threat to the country." Piggot frowned when she saw the two capes glancing at one another with intense looks.
"We might have been understating the threat when we sent that message." The Director sighed, the other shoe was finally going to drop. "I see Alexandria decided to pay a visit." The Master cape acknowledged Alexandria.
"I did, yes." Piggot turned her head towards the second in command of the Protectorate. Her arms crossed over her chest, face set into a neutral look. "What exactly is the threat you've mentioned?"
"Delphi. What are the odds that an extinction-level event will hit humanity within two years?"
You could have heard a pin drop in the room, and there was a haunted look on the fourteen year old Precog's face.
"Eighty three point four percent." Delphi confirmed. "It always happens, usually in two years, sometimes longer at eight years."
"And the odds of everyone on Earth dying?" Monarch continued, sounding remarkably less cold than before.
"It changes too, at the lowest about thirty two point six percent to the highest at sixty six point seven percent. About a coin toss that everyone on Earth will die."
"Are you certain?" Alexandria became the focus of the room, and Piggot felt out of her depth in a way that she hadn't truly felt since Nilbog.
"I can predict Endbringers just fine, even if I have to look at the numbers around the source." Her tone was hard, and Piggot wondered what the White Lotus was feeding their capes to have the stones to snap at a member of the Triumvirate.
"The general picture is that some unknown chain of events will lead to someone or something killing thirty-eight to ninety-five percent of the world's population."
"Do you have any proof aside from a Thinker power that the end of the world is imminent?" Alexandria remained skeptical, but the Director started seeing the puzzle pieces fall into place.
Erudition's ambitions to stabilize the city and beyond, her obsession with setting up on other worlds and her alliance with the Rachni. Her general paranoia and attempts to strengthen the PRT in some way and getting the Endbringers out of the way.
She knew that something was coming…but didn't have a way of confirming it. For Emily it was a wild guess but each and every time Erudition had the ability to confirm something new or dangerous she would reveal it to the appropriate authorities.
The spirits could be confirmed through her powers and later the powers of others, bending was even easier. Coil through Dinah Alcott and her own tinkering. Some were more difficult however like the Mother of Miseries or the…Reapers.
She wouldn't have believed billion year old cuttlefish machine gods would be real but the universe had a way of surprising her time and time again.
"If you mean anything specific and provable? Perhaps." Monarch looked even less cold than before, a very slight hint of fear making its way into her body language. "The agents are incredibly powerful, and an Endbringer is a good benchmark for what they're capable of when unleashed. A trigger at the right place and time could easily cause a world ending event."
"What else have you found?" Alexandria asked and Emily shook her head. This was beyond her worst nightmares, worse than Nilbog.
Delphi was the one explaining, lifting her Tinkertech bracelet and forming a three dimensional image of what looked like other Earths. "Basilia has been studying other dimensions from the moment she figured out how to travel to them. She took scans of the New York anomaly to try to piece together anything she could."
Monarch took up the slack. "From she's found, that anomaly was created by what she theorizes was a contact point between two multiverses." Piggot stared. "It triggered the phase shift that's given more people powers and woke up the spirits. And the impact caused cracks in tens of thousands of realities at least." The Director grimaced when Armsmaster leaned forward.
"You think this might be a possible catalyst for the end of the world?" He questioned, and Piggot continued to listen.
"It's a possible agitator if nothing else, but it doesn't change that the end of the world is coming." The ominous words drained the life from the room, Monarch clearly not enjoying being the messenger. "Erudition has been preparing for this for multiple months since she figured it out. There was no solid proof, no solid evidence so she tried to find it." Monarch gestured to the Precog and then to the data. "She's been looking for any silver bullet, a weapon, a tool, a means to stopping the extinction of the human race. It's better than she had hoped…but a coin toss is still a coin toss."
"What do you want us to do about it then?" Piggot asked, folding her arms and trying to remember when her life had gone mad.
"Prepare. We've been thinking about limited evacuations to safe Earths, to try and spread at least some of humanity out a bit before it happens."
Madness. "This is going to take a lot of capes." Emily states, knowing the answer.
"More than have ever worked together at once, and if we fail…" Monarch trailed off.
"Perhaps we should negotiate then." Alexandria stood tall, and Monarch met her gaze, and then the Director's.
This was above her payroll, but that didn't matter. Not for something of this scale and magnitude. If they were here then they thought there was a chance. If this was for the survival of the species…
Then Piggot would set aside any discontent or discomfort.
___
August 24th, 2011. 4:00PM
Victoria set aside a few tons of scrap metal, absently using her power to carefully place down the basic parts for a new base for White Lotus members outside of Brockton Bay.
She hadn't expected them to go as far out as Baltimore, but a two hundred mile road trip wasn't exactly hard when you had access to a planet wide portal network. It was probably for the best since it was far out of the way from major trouble if Dinah's predictions were on track. The property had been sold to the White Lotus for pretty cheap, and she was apparently sent out to look for recruits.
Athena was setting up their own place but that wasn't her job to deal with since while she worked for Athena that was mostly just for things like power testing and experimentation. If someone joined the White Lotus they didn't need to join Athena.
The White Lotus was more or less self sufficient, funded directly from the wealth that Erudition had earned from being the majority stockholder of Athena, plus an effectively permanent voting stock percentage. Equipment didn't even use materials from Earth Bet and the supply was big enough to outfit an army of tens of thousands. Not that she would tell anyone that with how scared some people were of capes.
Victoria had been learning a lot from interacting with the kind of people her mom would consider villains. The things she had seen, the things she had been told made the world a lot less black and white than she would have liked.
Even if the world was a better place than before…her family was starting to fall to pieces, and it felt like there was little she could do. Metal moved around her, her forcefield having a literal mind of its own as she let herself simply think.
She wasn't the same person she was nearly eight months ago, and neither was her sister or even sweet Dean. Sometimes that was a good thing and sometimes it wasn't, but that was life.
She would be spending a few days in a prepared room, and she knew that Taylor was planning to hire some mooks…employees for the more administrative jobs to keep their own members in check so far from Brockton Bay.
Quiet.
She felt the distant sentiment, gently dropping an omni-gel tank weighing four tons without making a sound. Victoria lifted off of the ground, silently hovering toward the entrance. She activated a screen connected to one of the security cameras and found an excitable young girl looking at the camera directly.
Onlooker.
She was a young black girl and couldn't have been older than about ten, with long skinny legs and large eyes, and kinky mossy black hair. She was fidgeting, but Victoria didn't think she was going to try anything. There was a sense when she looked at the girl, like deja vu.
The moment passed and the girl hopped away, swaying slightly as she left.
Familiar…yet also not.
Victoria kept the Fragile One's thoughts in mind as she returned to moving everything into place. She had some research to make on local heroic or rogue independents in the area fit for recruiting. A team of two to four was about what they were looking for in the city. Apparently Taylor also wanted to see if Boston was a possibility but with Accord there she doubted it would be simple.
Unless they found more Thinkers it wasn't going to happen without Accord interfering.
"But we do have vials…" A dozen capes was a lot to add to the table, adding up to thirty six capes. And if they could recruit four capes in this city it would be forty White Lotus members.
Vetting them wasn't going to be easy, and a part of her felt it was wrong to use them when they were the product of human experimentation. Basilia didn't seem to have a problem with using them but did see a problem with how they had been made.
But data made through terrible means could still be used for good even if it didn't remove the evil used in creating it. Basilia didn't have anything left to learn from them and giving them to good people who could use them right was at least possible. At the least that was she said, Victoria wasn't sure whether or not that held up.
"This is so complicated." Victoria rubbed her head, and decided it was time to get back to work.
Help you…
Victoria smiled as she picked up the omni-gel tank once more, her forcefield projected in a many-limbed form.
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AN: Here is 11.a on schedule, with a rare POV. There's a lot going on, and this Arc should be a little longer, with three interludes planned for this.
Not much to say other than to hope you enjoy.
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