Victories of the Soul [Worm/Avatar/ME/Multicrossover] [SI]
- Thread starter AEM
- Start date
- Crossover Mature Sci-Fi
A Deliberately Evil shaman made pacts with the dark spirits of a Lost Technology Artifact dating from the Long-Dead-Generic-Omnicidal-Empire-Of-Whatever.
The Evil Shaman is being dangerously competent and is using his victory over the Nine to forge alliances aimed towards fulfilling his dark masters' wishes of killing Basilia for the crime of Being The Big Good Guy of the local multiverse.
If the Evil Shaman succeeds then the entire Multiverse Of Alternate Earths loses the reality anchor preventing the Evil Spirit Empires that died in past eons from breaking down the barrier of Time and resurrecting themselves to consume the Modern Spirit World, and claiming the Shards as their prizes with which to conquer the Multiverse.
- Pronouns
- He
Holy shit things just got real
- Location
- Chula Vista
Evil shaman yes with his own agenda and…master also yes. His use of the Nine for his goals is correct…but what his goals are and why he's doing what's he doing? That will remain a mystery for...well obvious reasons relating to spoilers.
Either way…it's definitely not good that much I can tell you…future chapters and Arcs should eventually clear up what's going on.
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Deviation 12.1
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.1
September 6th, 2011. 9:00AM
Basilia Rubio
"All of this has happened before and will happen again…" A voice rang in my head, whispers and fragments of memory passing me by.
I was walking forward, barely aware as I trudged through a river of syrup-like liquid. Cracked mirrors rolled by, fragments of crystalline flesh spinning through still air.
I tried to remember what I was doing here but all I did was keep moving forward, despite the pain, the fear, the horror, I simply kept moving. Kept walking through rivers of blood.
"Sometimes…I wonder if she can see me through your eyes." Pain and sadness passed by me as I trudged onwards through the murky waters. Other fragments, memories.
So many memories.
"Can friendships really last more than one lifetime?" There were so many of these little pieces of memory, stripped away from their source, again and again in an endless and eternal cycle.
"Higher beings, these words are for you alone." A scratching on stone, words beyond words, written by those who knew of the divine, of the powerful and of all the potential of the Ephemeral. Of the soul and the body and the mind as one.
"No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering." The words of a dead god came and went like those who existed before them and would exist after them.
"Oh, I know what the ladies like…" A voice barked in the void, and I twisted my form to look for it.
"I do not 'gallivant," A chittering voice said. "I plan in haste." And it was gone, like so many others without end. Sadness, joy, hatred and fear and passion and lust and endless plains made out of all the evils, out of all the good in the world.
Light and dark, push and pull. Life and death.
Battles across land, sky and sea and across the void between worlds itself. Love and hate and loss, wars unseen and forgotten, sinking away into the fog of deep time.
It didn't stop, because there was more to know, more to learn, more to understand no matter how far someone dug. The wheel would keep turning because it had to.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
"THE CYCLE HAS REPEATED MORE TIMES THAN YOU CAN FATHOM, AND IN EVERY SINGLE ONE, THE HARVEST HAS BEEN COMPLETED…" The Sovereign of Nazara boomed in my ear, the insidious words of a dead machine god continuing to echo.
I remembered the Makara, and while their cycle had failed…another race took the aegis of the Avatar and lost it only a few short thousand years later, negating the sacrifices as every single loss was replaced within less than a cycle. It was a faint memory, a shadow nearly as old as the galaxy itself. But I remembered.
Because I had to.
A single failed cycle out of thousands couldn't be counted against them.
"We were great long ago…and strong, my House." One of a thousand thousand thousand voices forming the whirlwind.
"I? I am the monument to all your sins." A mind, a distorted echo of the countless dead hissed, reality quivering and flexing at the shambling corpse god.
"The wheel turns, does it not, Ambassador?"
"I LIVED TEN THOUSAND LIFETIMES BEFORE THE FIRST OF YOUR KIND CRAWLED OUT OF THE MUD." A loud resounding boom followed, and I shivered. The way Vaatu spoke, the arrogance, the ceaseless destruction. It was clear Raava's antipole was kin to the Reapers, one of the demon children of the Harbinger.
"You will learn respect. And suffering will be your teacher." I shuddered at that so familiar voice of a monster in the form of a man. It made me wonder what the other less familiar voices were, some I knew or recalled or had or would have…I didn't understand.
There were so many.
"If you could make them feel as you can make me feel, then perhaps they could forgive you." There was an undertone of a trillion voices, a million stories scratching at the border of my mind and soul. Too much…
I dropped, gripping my cracking skull as it proved too much, too much, too much.
Make it stop!
I pulled myself from the stream of unadulterated and undiluted memory. And found myself in a foggy scene, a scene that had never happened and would never happen. It was what could have been, but didn't.
"We know they're…" There was static, multiple capes talking near a silver something. "—the head, the superweapons fall."
"Yes," One of the foggy figures glanced curiously at the voice.
"—eed your help." The scene slowly started to shatter, that possible future becoming impossible, not in this reality and not with the agents and fulcrum points of this possible world.
I was flying through space, spiraling around another. Communicating only what was needed as the gravity of planetary bodies dragged us downwards. Focused on different goals and objectives, each equally important.
I was moved, and another took my place. In that very instance, a mistake is made and that future is dead, killed by a one in a trillion chance of bad luck. Everything became broken, distorted, detached as the impact dislodged so much.
I flew away from the impact, damaged but not dead, not yet, not yet, not ye—
The center falls with the stabbing of a knife, and a flood of pain slams against my unprepared mind. The cracks spread, piece after piece is lost or scattered or subverted by separation. Everything fell apart, unable to start, to reboot or reconfigure. The breaking doesn't stop, as the center is mutilated and coerced and given to those who don't deserve it.
The dream breaks as a god dies.
September 6th, 2011. 9:15PM
Basilia Rubio
When I woke up it was to a whispering of distant spirits, and I groaned as I rubbed my head.
My dreams lately had been ominous, fragment and nightmares feeling so real it was terrifying and stressful. This had been the worst one yet, a hodgepodge of insanity and disparate wisps of information and data from a source that didn't directly belong to me. Or perhaps it did and I had only forgotten.
At the least this dream was a lot clearer and easier to parse than some of the nightmarish scenes I barely recalled. That was it then.
I threw my blanket off of my person with a grumble, reaching for some pants since I wasn't going to go outside in my damn underwear. A few seconds was all it took, and I carefully shimmied into a pair of jeans. Not skinny jeans of course because of my big butt and hips, but jeans all the same.
A sleeveless white tank-top was enough to cover my modesty, and it let me show off my not-skinny arms due to the miracles of genetic manipulation, cybernetic implants and exercise. I decided it was time to meet up with an old friend, the foremost knowledge spirit in Brockton Bay.
I shifted into the spirit world and was bombarded by the great weaving storm of spirits that called my house home. Spirits of electricity jumped on me, lightly buzzing at me before moving on to other places. Appliance spirits greeted me, not moving from where their material counterparts lay.
Show me the path.
One spirit came, a spirit of a specific machine, one of my machines. It's name came to me, and I smiled at what in some respects could be considered one of my own.
Errant Wanderer.
It was a multitudinous gearset, interlocking along crystalline teeth, tendrils of plasticine polymer gripping onto the fabric of reality. It offered a tentacle and I grasped it gladly. Kilometers of distance was folded away, and I found myself in the spiritual counterpart of the library.
In the Spirit, the Brockton Bay Central Library was a great palace of learning. Larger than life, living wood with fractal leaves of paper lining its square shape. Windows shined like stained church panes, and with careful movements…I knocked on the door with a bowed head.
The doors opened of their own accord, and I stepped through with greater confidence once I was certain of his intentions. The prime spirit of this Loci was unusually powerful, just one of many of the spirits of this city that had great and terrible strength
"Centralis, I have sought out your counsel in a matter I am…poorly equipped to speak of." The library shifted and I was teleported into the center, finding myself in front of the spirit in question. I hadn't spoken with the spirit in some time, and I bowed my head in respect.
"You seek the answers you can not give yourself, to push past the Bans placed upon you." I nodded and there was a light chuckle from the knowledge spirit. "I am not the right spirit for this, I am not He Who Knows Ten Thousand Things. And he is long dead, you must speak to those who are Void."
"But…" I didn't cover my mouth in time and I was pulled before the great spirit, a paper-coated limb gripping gently on my shoulder.
"I understand your worries, your fears, your need to know. But my power is not limitless, when you asked of what I knew of the Makara I only told you what I could see. I know you are Vyasa but I do not know why, I know a great change is coming but I do not see its shape, it's Form. Only it's threat." The body of Centralis rippled and I swallowed.
"I apologize for my presumptuous actions, I didn't mean to offend you Centralis." It was genuine, I had sought him out for knowledge but what he provided was knowledge that would be found in any library. Only with greater detail, with greater knowing because of what he was.
If I wanted to know about the founder of Brockton Bay, he wouldn't give me just words but the feeling and emotion, and the memories of the man himself, the echo of his age. Little details left unrecorded and forgotten. He was nearly a thousand years old, but his memory didn't go back to the very beginning.
It couldn't.
"I am not offended, merely discontent." He said tritely. "You must speak to those who can remember, and that is not I. Leave this place, those of the New Song seek your counsel." He gestured almost haughtily, and I turned around again apologizing as I made my way out of the library palace.
I kept walking, and grabbed onto Errant Wanderer and with its influence it brought me to another spirit world, surrounding Earth Lotus like a shell. The great gear whistled before returning to its metal body in the material world. With a release of my breath I formed a rift and leapt back into the material plane.
The main White Lotus base on this earth was in California, but on the spot where Brockton Bay should have been but wasn't was the equivalent of a Rachni embassy, a large construct they had built in days. It resembled a gigantic termite hill, and I found multiple soldiers patrolling the area.
The New Song huh?
I felt a burst of biotic force as one Brood Lord appeared in a crack of thunder. Spirits swelled around him, and I knew a spirit-touched child when I saw one. All Rachni sang in the tongue of the great spirits but that was between each other and with other sapients. A small fraction of the Brood Lords had strong enough souls to bind the spirits to their hive. But they didn't act in their role of shaman like the rest of us, their great auras attracted the spirits birthed by their actions, augmenting their homes and tools was as easy as breathing for them.
Other Rachni did not bear the mark of the spirits, but could do and did so under the Firqa of the shaman-warriors of the hive. It was one of the reasons they were so proficient at weaving flesh and tinkering with metal. Most didn't have these gifts, but the ones that did were force multipliers.
There were one and half million Rachni, two percent of those were made up of the larger classes. One percent of that number or about three hundred were Brood Warriors. They had about ten shamans, and nearly all of them had been transferred to great festivity and celebration to the one Spirit Singer among the current queens. Proportionally they had a far smaller ratio of shamans to non-shamans. If there were six billion Rachni alive at this moment the United States would still have an equal number.
Their souls were different from ours, they had no benders among their kind though whether this was because it was impossible or because they didn't know how I wasn't sure.
The Krogan knew only of Earth, the Batarians knew of Earth and Fire, but when humanity burst out into the galaxy at large, little things like cultural restrictions became a little less relevant.
So perhaps I was wrong and it was only a matter of time.
"Ten Thousand Litanies, it's a pleasure to see you again." I acknowledged the shaman-warrior, remembering a recent event where we had stopped a blood spirit incursion from eating a small town near Brockton.
"Indeed it is, we seek your counsel. We have…made some interventions into the affairs of Bet and found disturbing news." He gestured and then gave me a plain green cloak and a domino mask since I didn't have my armor on.
When I entered it was a scene of chaos and confusion, over a dozen children, teenagers and young adults kept calm and at bay only by the kindness and warmth projected by the Rachni healers. There was one teen off to the side with dirty blonde hair. He looked exhausted but his eyes lit up when he caught my gaze.
Did I know him?
Some of the sounds quieted when I entered the room, and I could tell there was recognition from some of the less roughed up people brought to safety by the Rachni.
"You're Erudition." The dirty blonde boy looked relieved, sagging a bit in response to my presence.
"Who's asking?" I took my best warm and kind tone not wanting to scare the kid off. He looked about fourteen or maybe fifteen, though it was hard to tell at first glance. I did have my omni-tool to check though.
"Rain." My brain froze and I blanked out my expression as I realized the people here were probably all escapees from the Fallen.
Oh shit.
I counted sixteen people, and a wave of my omni-tool gave me a range of ten to twenty three years of age. Many were in varying conditions, from light signs of starvation, physical injury, and odd hormonal imbalances. Which were slowly being evened out by the soothing frequencies of the Rachni.
So at some point some of them had been subject to Master powers, though the fact the Rachni weren't even worried told me they had broken through whatever compulsions or bombs could come from Fallen Master capes.
"Let's go elsewhere then if you need to talk." He nodded eagerly, Ten Thousand Litanies following behind us but keeping silent.
I wanted a moment once we were in the room.
"Umm?" Rain looked confused, and flames were emitted from my breath as I directed my emotions to burn away as fuel for my inner fire.
"You need help right? I know the Rachni have probably given you sanctuary but they're not human…so they're not going to understand every little nuance."
"You'll help us?" Rain asked as a note of hope entered his voice.
"Of course I would? Everyone here is clearly running from the Fallen, and I was planning to take them down eventually. It's just that some of them have proven to have difficult powers to deal with…" Mama Mathers was the biggest but she had a few buds around due to the sheer level of conflict the Fallen went through. Scans found traces of multidimensional energy fields congruent with the linking required for Master powers.
My omni-tool managed to pick up metaphysical energy, patterned in notes of music. Did…did they break the connection from victims of Mathers?!
"It was a surgical affair, we could instantly erase the connection but she would see and hear and smell the breaking. It was a subtle note for those affected, obscuring our actions until their escape could be orchestrated." The Brood Lord confirmed as such and I was damn impressed, but then it made sense.
Each Rachni carried their own genetic memory, each and every one was an expert in their given or chosen fields. Every worker was an expert in what they did, they could build fusion reactors, operate geneforges, and construct any mechanical device given the right tools and instructions.
Every soldier operates on the local level with their human-equivalent intelligence allowing them to operate as scientists, engineers, pilots and attaches. They can learn or be programmed for their roles in the hive. The workers and soldiers were savants of the highest order, though only workers could be considered expendable.
At the least reincarnation seems a quick process for them like the Drell and their weird ability to remember their past life.
Each Brood Lord was every bit as diverse as other sophonts, no restrictions placed on their ability to learn and evolve. They're the head scientists, with the ability to innovate and master technology. Instead of leading squads they orchestrate entire swarms with their power, assisted by their auxiliaries.
Each Rachni Brood Warrior was a general, a master in all things as required. With thirty thousand larger Rachni more or less functional, they could certainly rampage through a country or three. A single queen could lay a clutch of hundreds, and they would hatch within days with maturity rates of a week for soldiers to two to three weeks for viable Warriors.
I should really stop thinking about how likely it is that the Rachni will take the entire local cluster and turn it into an empire of tens of billions of alien bug people.
"Ahem. So what did you need to tell us?" Disturbing news had been brought up and Rain was probably the one telling us since he seemed the least psychologically scarred.
"The Fallen…I don't know much, but I know Valefor is getting help from some new cape…a cape who managed to take out the Nine. Even if it nearly killed him."
Come again?
"Who'd he take out?" I asked numbly.
"Jack Slash, Bonesaw, Burnscar, and Shatterbird. He managed to bring the Siberian and Crawler to his side."
Fuck me jogging in the alps how in the fuck did he manage that?
"Did he kill them or incapacitate them? There is a difference." It seemed so unlikely I was starting to think it wasn't that simple.
"I saw Burnscar's body so she's definitely dead, Bonesaw…I think he tried to send her to some other place but I don't know where." I pale and felt like throwing up. "Shatterbird might be alive but I think he has a tinker on his side. Jack Slash is either dead or he wishes to be dead…"
"Was this guy really strong or really tricky?" You didn't always need power to beat people, being clever enough and lucky enough was often sufficient in a world that wasn't a video game.
"He got pretty badly hurt…but he was, and felt dangerous. Bad news." Rain didn't help much with improving my mood. "I…think he might be one of those shaman people, he didn't seem to really have normal powers."
"You get his name?" I asked quietly. He gave one to me, and it was a simple one.
"Ezekiel."
September 6th, 2011. 9:45PM
Basilia Rubio
Miss Militia leaned back, looking taken aback about what I had told her as we waited for Renick to come back and probably pondering whether it was a good idea to start worrying.
It probably was.
Of all the opponents I had faced so far none of them had been shamam, much less a shaman working for the Fallen. But I knew it was only a matter of time, the Fallen had people joining it and some among those 'blessed' few some would have the gift of spirits. And they would be malicious because that was how people worked.
"The Rachni kidnapped sixteen people from the Fallen." My eyebrows lifted their moment that came out of her mouth.
"One, half of them are adults and two every single one of them has evidence relating to the location, nature, and danger of their home lives. Three there isn't much I can do on that because I don't control them. They're their own sovereign people with all that implies."
Miss Militia was apologetic. "That may be so but this does look pretty bad, something like the Rachni taking children is easy to spin."
"That isn't really my problem to be frank, you'll have to deal with the psychic bugs currently colonizing thirteen star systems yourself." Hannah was…sort of nice but to be frank we were talking about a woman who had a hard time disobeying orders. "I've informed you on what capes the Fallen appear to have and the shaman that apparently holds the leash of what remains of the Nine."
"Are you certain they're coming here?" Miss Militia asked, and I could tell she was waiting for someone more qualified for this, probably Renick since Piggot was busy.
"We killed one of their gods. That will engender a response and the only reason it took as long as it did was because of the sheer shock and the anemic but functional response from the government." I would have scratched my chin if I could, but I had a helmet on.
Miss Militia looked a tad ticked off. "I wouldn't call it anemic…"
"The fact the Fallen still exists at all is a testament to the breakdown of the rule of law in this country. You had an entire murderous neo-nazi gang and the slaving ABB with Lung in this city alone."
"You don't seem surprised or outraged." She didn't seem as defensive as before.
"I know how powers work behind the scenes, destroying countries is what they're supposed to do." My voice was dripping with sardonic undertones. "Bending and shamanism don't work the same way, and they're still going to be responsible for millions of deaths."
I had found signs of a few genocides perpetrated by benders on more primitive Earths, cities torched or flooded, infrastructure ripped apart by earthbending, air used to deadly effect or to speed up campaigns of mass murder. Tribe wiping out tribe was the norm just as much as alliances between them.
The Fire Nation murdered hundreds of thousands of airbenders, the predecessors of the Air Nomads were mongol-like conquerors, the White Wind riding on the backs of great armored Sky Bison. The Water Tribes were once pirate lords, plunderers of treasure and of people. The Earth Kingdom…don't even get me started on the sheer violence the people of the Earth Kingdoms were capable of.
Biotics had no examples except…possibly one. But the Asari were all biotics, and from their bloodline came the Ardat Yakshi, and their existence was why I inspected the genetics of their species carefully.
If I ever planned to weave greater Asari genetics into humans, I didn't need something with that power anywhere near anyone.
"You have experience with bending being used maliciously?" She sounded concerned and I smiled sadly.
"Not personally, but I know the history of a lot of dead species. Some had bending and this history was…sordid at times. You can't raise Parahuman armies, they're too disparate, too broken to work together even if the world starts to end. What could this country do with a million trained benders, what could the CUI do?"
"You think a lot about this don't you?" Was all that Miss Militia said before Renick burst into the room.
"I might be a tinker but I'm a bit of a thinker as well." I smirked and the sheer disgust on her face made that pun worth it. Renick seemed a little ruffled but he was otherwise in mint condition. "Deputy Director…are you alright?"
"Renick is fine." The mild-mannered man waved me off, finding his seat in the office quite easily. "I needed a moment to process your…information. The sixteen escapees, are they safe with the Rachni?"
"The Rachni have been slaves before Renick, they refuse to let others fall to the same fate they've suffered." And frankly I didn't disagree, I wasn't a subtle person and didn't have the precision in the kind of operations needed to extract people from unsafe people like the Fallen.
"They also developed a means of countering mastering with their telepathic abilities. Do you think they'll offer this to Master victims?" He didn't seem as paranoid as I expected, perhaps we had built up enough goodwill from the PRT.
"Probably yes, the fact they managed to break even that person's power is both amazing and a little…scary I'll admit." I wasn't specific, since while her name wasn't infectious, any infected Thinker could come across her name in PRT files and fuck things up for them. "But it does make sense, they've pieced together broken minds before."
"I won't ask." Renick did the smart thing and moved on. "Fortunately it seems the Rachni have the common courtesy of gathering legal evidence, and of working with other PRT branches. They've recovered three Wards, and six young capes from the Fallen."
That had been a shock, and at this point I wouldn't even be surprised anymore. "To be frank I'm not the right person for figuring out this mess, the Wards were only recently taken, and the other six Parahumans have varying powers that are clearly products of Fallen capes. I could take them in but…I'm not sure I'm comfortable with it."
Renick nodded. "It seems exploitive. I can understand that."
"The Rachni mind-healers will be able to soothe some of the after effects from their…treatment at the hands of the Fallen." One of the older capes, a twenty three year old blonde had…well to be blunt had been raped.
I didn't want to think about it, but there was a reason so many criminal organizations on this planet needed to be cleansed in holy nuclear fire. The Fallen were disgusting and repugnant to me on a moral and personal level, and so were the Nine. I'm keeping my world away from the circus of freaks and insane people patrolling this cursed planet.
Not that my world was free from those kinds of violent and horrific crimes but like anything on Bet they doubled and tripled down on it to more horrible levels. The others were less harmed, but without asking them I didn't know how bad it would be. I wasn't equipped for this, and the Rachni weren't either besides providing a shoulder to cry on.
I'd pay for whatever they need free of charge, it was the least the poor people needed after getting involved with a cult. But I didn't know where they could go, as long as the Fallen existed they were in danger from retribution.
"We'll likely need to talk to the queen responsible for this, and while the Wards can probably be placed with us until they recover. The six remaining capes are a lot more…complicated." Renick didn't seem to relish that kind of trouble.
"At least a few of them are likely related to Fallen capes, if they're in public it might not be safe for them." I was honest with the problems they would face. "The best bet would be to keep them out of reach."
Renick sighed. "It's likely the Rachni can take care of housing, though they'll have to concede to regular checkups from the Youth Guard and the PRT. The issue here will be power testing, none of them want to submit to being tested directly by the PRT but…" I had a sinking feeling on where this was going.
"But I have facilities capable of replacing your own, and they're more likely to trust me because of my connection with the Rachni." His grave nod informed me I had hit the nail on the head. "When should these power testing sessions take place?"
"At least two days if it fits your schedule, we can wait longer if need be." He didn't want to push me, but six new capes popping up in your jurisdiction could be a little disconcerting.
"It's fine, I don't have a problem with it. Athena has extensive experience with power testing equipment as needed for our research and my own equipment is more advanced than that."
I wouldn't call it fun but it would be…enlightening.
September 9th, 2011. 11:00AM
Basilia Rubio
It was a Sunday morning when the six kids had been brought in for Power Testing of their likely abilities. I had set up a facility on Gimel, and borrowed some of my employees due to their own expertise with such experiments. We had about twenty people dedicated to Power Testing, their findings trickling down to other parts of the company over time.
Studies of Panacea's power for example were enlightening on new methods of scanning and manipulation of biological structures. When she touched someone, her power sent out a continuous pulse of energy, and then used a combination of telekinetic effectors and tiny fragments of dimensionally displaced shard flesh to tinker and alter biology.
Athena didn't have the ability to use higher dimensional energy fields very well yet, so we couldn't alter electromagnetic forces without using a large particle accelerator. Though building an MRI-like machine to generate the reality tweaks necessary to direct the right fields might be possible combined with current microbot tech to pull off Panacea-like biological alteration.
One of our rescued kids was part of the smoke power based capes that were quite common due to the breeding program and sheer conflict output of the Fallen. They were all buds from the same shard, and this one was obviously a more recent Trigger.
Emilia Fox was about twelve, and she had the ability to turn into black smoke that seemed to enjoy absorbing certain types of energy and forces, mainly electricity, heat, fire and plasma. That she was a firebender on top of that said something but I didn't know what. She could redirect this energy as she liked, or absorb it to fuel and grow or heal her smoke form.
Her power had clearly taken her bending into account, and it had dubbed itself Smoldering Grantor. Her power had been tested with modified electroshock weapons, upping the charge and carefully probing the limits of her power. Her smoke form was durable, and could resist being blown away by industrial fans but could receive damage from attacks capable of breaking up her animated ashes.
It's nearly impossible to damage her in this state, and we guessed that she would only start getting hurt once the mass of the smoke was reduced below her own mass.
Most of our team were former PRT so they knew the ins and outs of testing Parahumans both mentally, physically and power wise. They were small tests built to get a rough profile of the general attitudes and personalities of capes. Basically light prodding so they knew the issues a cape would have.
It wasn't perfect but it worked well enough.
After Emilia came Matthew Mathers who based on our tests had a bud from Mama Mathers herself, though it was nowhere as potent in any regard. It was a Thinker power that widened his sensorium against being monitored without the more unpleasant abilities of Mathers.
So he'll register any attempt to fuck him with over with Thinker powers, getting a useful danger sense out of it. It did little to help against the bitch that he budded off from. So he had been traded to some of the smaller branches due to his lack of value in comparison to other Mathers kids. Nice guy surprisingly but he could be surly at times if you pushed him. He was about sixteen.
Next was Susan Brown, a young black woman of about twenty years of age. She was a recent victim of the Fallen, apparently she was taken to be the 'wife' of one of the McVeay. She had a tinker power, Triggering due to the man who had kidnapped her being a sadistic bastard and leaving her unsure of when or if he would finally…take her.
Her specialty was in crystals and biology, and she had built a hexagonal crystal infused with a fungal network used as a sensor array for the processing nodes of the crystal itself. She had been planning to build a laser gun to kill the guy who had a rap sheet a mile long. The crystal acted as an optical cavity while the fungal network was infused with highly efficient fluorescent proteins to provide a gain medium. A calcite composite lens focused the beam, and it was very odd tech to say the least.
Our fourth cape is Jacob Miles, a seventeen year old teleportation cape. He could swap two areas of spacetime in a move that shared quite a few commonalities with Jumpdrive FTL.
Slower of course and more delicate. The weakness was that he needs to get accurate information on the location, where you're going and the general direction and distance. He had a Thinker power he describes as tendrils reaching out, giving him the ability to sense the location to get his jumps down. But it took time and it was faster if he was just given the location.
Short range jaunts are easier, and he can move around in three dimensions. Sort of like a mix of Strider and Trickster…or should it be Switcheroo now? His jump range is less of course, maybe a few dozen miles versus the thousands of Strider himself. Not quite as instant as Krouse but still impressive.
Very flighty, and the signs of some level of abuse was…not promising.
Fifth was Adrianna Peterson, she creates hard-light copies of herself capable of flight and superhuman strength. Her maximum limit is twenty four though it causes migraines and vertigo and six is the practical limit. Each clone is tough as hell, and she can have one form around her to protect her squishy self. Each one can lift four tons, fly at one hundred sixty miles per hour and trying to break them would be like trying to crater a statue of laser steel.
She might be a second or third cousin of Rain actually. She was seventeen, and had apparently been singled out as expendable and offered up. Something about healing one of their own capes with her as a donor? I wasn't too sure.
Our final cape is surprisingly not Rain who apparently hasn't gotten his power yet.
Ben Griffin had a projection power, a spy of sorts that lets him eavesdrop on people. It's main ability was a form of limited emotional manipulation and perception. Through his projection's eyes, Ben can sense the state of other people and push out emotions, causing conflicts and disrupting social networks within affected groups.
The main problem was that the more power he pushed, the more his projection became visible, and the easier it became for his enemies to notice they're being manipulated. He had to pick and choose what his role was in a mission, was he the perfect spy or the perfect saboteur?
Apparently his power worked in part on the Rachni, but only in the aspect of stealth and shaman commanded Rachni could sense the power on their own.
His emotional manipulations didn't work right on their alien neurology, and their telepathy wiped away certain aspects of his powers.
They had tested themselves against a wide variety of Master powers, and none had proven to hinder them in the long term. In the matter of control anyway, twitching their nerves can work, since it's in short bursts. Long term control is effectively impossible with how Masters insinuate their power. They had clearly done everything they could to insulate themselves from crazy people.
I felt a tug on my arm, and met my gaze with the crystal blue eyes of Emilia. She was naturally thin but wore a black hoodie jacket and blue shorts.
"Something wrong?" I took a soft tone of voice, but did my best not to show pity either. Emilia was about five foot nothing, with straight chestnut brown hair and a small button nose. She was the definition of cute.
Though all that made me think of the tastes of some of the people in the Fallen. Yuck.
"Can…can you help me cut my hair?" She winced when I turned to face her directly like at any time I was going to hurt her. "I thought it was a good idea." She made an odd face, and I felt the weight on my shoulders at that moment.
"Sure, I don't mind at all." I put on a more cheery tone. "I'm not very good at it so don't expect anything nice but I'll certainly try."
I gestured for the kid to follow.
September 9th, 2011. 11:45AM
Basilia Rubio
I crashed down onto my couch, rubbing my face as the anxiety set in. Emilia's haircut had apparently opened the floodgates of former Fallen wanting to talk to me from people with powers or not. There had been three benders among the group of sixteen excluding Emilia.
All of them were airbenders and the implications were obvious, of course they would seek freedom. Whether they were kidnapped or trapped within the family they were born to…it made sense.
I wonder how many airbenders had been awoken under the whip of Masters and other powerful capes.
Taylor was out patrolling though I doubt anyone would realize that with the photonic cloaking implemented into her armor. Heat and visible light were both hidden, making her a ghost to such sensor types. Her bugs were good at hiding since insects are naturally omnipresent.
Grace was lounging on the other end of the couch, a cocky grin on her face as she tapped an omni-tool, obviously running simulations for her weapons.
"Hmm…I don't see Amelia around so you didn't get laid, you build something new?" I decided a conversation was a good way to relieve stress and Grace's scoff was certainly a start.
"I doubt you'd notice whether or not someone is fucking." She smiled when my cheeks turned pink. She shook her head. "But yeah, I've been building some new stuff. Nanocloud bombs, like Halbeard's nano-thorns. Good against flesh, but they won't work so good against Crawler huh?" She looked annoyed.
"I've made the appropriate modifications for anti-acid costumes in case he bypasses our barriers. He shouldn't be able to, but we can never be too careful."
"We still use power-resistant glass right?" Grace looked uncertain and I gave her a thumbs up.
"Nanostructured structures or blended with non-silicon based materials. We tested that with Echidna." Turns out she had a bud from Shatterbird, and her power didn't work on anything I had. My older stuff was more vulnerable but I had already upgraded everything including my cybernetics.
Not that there's a lot of silica in my shit. Even my standard omni-tools had enough alumina to not shatter. Crack maybe but not shatter, and nowadays with Grace and Greg more or less anything that had silicon was protected. To be fair my current optronic fiber networks were more alumina than silicon, with a good ten percent made up of a reverse engineered tinkertech element.
Her power explicitly worked by using dimensionally shifted acoustic vibrations to alter the state of silicon. This signal could be disrupted by soundproofing, specific structures to disrupt the signal, and the right frequencies too. And of course the obvious Manton Effect not letting her affect living things.
So my cybernetics wouldn't be affected anyway, but I wanted to make it extra sure. Hero was working on sonic cannons as was Bakuda though her weapon was more powerful but less multi-purpose.
Most of my windows were Plexalloy, a transparent material that could be as strong as battle steel. That included every single one of my buildings though a weaker and easier to make variety for current technology. Which still let it take a hit from anti-material rifles.
All my employees have work phones from approved companies who had developed Shatterbird-proof phones and the intermediary optronics made in-house were of course immune. She could sing as much as she liked it wouldn't affect my buildings, and this had been tested.
"Earth to Basilia, you there or are you daydreaming about Taylor's ass?" I blushed and punched Grace reflexively. "Oww!"
"No." I poked her nose, ignoring the heat in my cheeks. "We've run some training sessions with Amelia to simulate a fight with Bonesaw." I had cooked up some Sterilization plagues, prion clouds and hyper-aggressive necrotic viruses that make things like Ebola and the Black Plague look like kiddy diseases.
I had synthesized over a dozen viruses, bacterial, fungal and prion illnesses capable of slaughtering millions or hundreds of millions. "Greg's own little 'enhancements' finish the job of fighting Bonesaw directly."
The most basic device Turnaround could make were modular biomechanical interfaces, many of which he had implanted into his body once he made use of my Autodocs. Modified for his own personal use of course.
He had gone for subdermal bulletproof plating, metallic bones and extensible limbs, and modified musculature reinforced with muscle chips. It was rather easy to simulate Bonesaw with him, though the VR Arena could create a hard-light version of Bonesaw instead.
Grace nodded but there was concern in her eyes, her harsh glare becoming soft and vulnerable. "Mila is our best bet against the crazy bitch with her power."
"Your bombs should be able to take down Crawler if we convince him to take a hit from a transmutation bomb." I rubbed the back of my neck, growling. "But the Siberian will be more difficult with her being an area of altered space in the form of a cannibal projection."
"Well this town has Flechette and Clockblocker, and you've replicated Sting."
"I've replicated the unfolding mechanism of Sting, there's still the decoupling from physical laws needed to fully invalidate her spacetime metric." It wasn't going to be easy.
Grace chuckled. "C'mon with your ability to twist reality into a pretzel I think you can manage it."
I rubbed my chin. "You're not wrong, but targeting Manton is probably the most viable plan."
"Like…kill him?" Grace asked and I nodded. "I thought you'd be all about trying to contain him."
"If we're able to do so sure, but I'm not going to lose a moment of sleep over it if he bites it." I had empathy and sympathy for other people just fine but… "Manton literally created all his own problems, I don't have much reason to care if he dies." It would just be disappointing because a power like his could help people.
"Huh…it's probably a good thing I didn't go on a bombing spree isn't it?" Grace was more uneasy.
The grin I made showed teeth. "Very much so yes. But that's besides the point. Who else have we prepared for?"
"Well there's Jack Slash himself…"
"Use someone without a shard or with a shard that won't help him. It's how he was defeated in that possible future." I felt assured of that. "Charlotte should also work due to her power."
"Because they're shard buddies?" Grace sported a grin.
"It would be best not to bring that up too often, I doubt Charlotte wants the reminder of being associated with a mass murderer." Dryness permeated my voice.
She winced. "She's a sweet girl…so you're right. Damn." She rubbed her scalp, running her fingers through her hair. "We've got a rough idea of the Fallen and the Teeth. But without the right Thinker power we're not going to know who else they have. Which could turn whatever's coming into a total clusterfuck."
"We're thinking the Butcher and her Teeth will show up first, we're already hearing rumors. But they're being discrete." God this was going to be annoying. "If we're getting Valefor then anti-Master scanners will be paramount, he'll be using hostages and puppets to push his agenda. He won't play fair and he's not stupid. We'll have to worry about how they're controlling Manton too."
"Really?" Grace questioned.
"It's probably through Valefor, but the shaman might have a tinker who did the work instead. So we'll add that angle just to be sure. I'll be placing more guardian spirits, anyone trying to go where they shouldn't will get splattered."
"Holy shit you're worried aren't you?" Grace was taken aback.
"I protect what I love Grace, and even what I don't. With capes and with shamans it's especially a good idea to be careful." I had no experience figuring shamans, only combating spirits.
"It…it'll be okay. You've got this." I was comforted by her attempt to reassure me.
"Yeah…"
September 9th, 2011. 9:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I was alone, breathing deeply as I felt the elements around. The soft breeze of the forest, the water in the plants and the animals, the living earth beneath my feet, and the energy of the sun, of fire in all things. The fifth element was harder to parse, even as my eezo nodes felt the living and twisting tendrils of dark energy reaping through the spheres.
I was in the forest of Earth Lotus and no animal would disturb me, because they knew me, they knew what I was. I didn't meditate by focusing on one thing, I did so by focusing on everything. The breeze, my thoughts on the future, my thoughts on the past and present, but in moderation. I didn't focus on one thing to my detriment, I tried not to let my fears and worries and other negative emotions drive me to fade out from being in the moment.
I thought about what I needed to think about…and slowly and carefully let it go. I thought about what I could do and let go what I couldn't change. Here in this thin but lively forest, it was populated by many spirits. Animal spirits of all kinds, different and alien to my world even as they shared common DNA. Plant spirits, spirits of soil and growth, spirits of all concepts.
Void was many things but…to be quite frank I didn't understand it perfectly. I only had what shamanistic practice I could borrow from the memories of the Citadel. It was the aspect of soul, but I knew it was more than that. I had talent with my abilities relating to the Ephemeral, but I was often playing it by ear or following the advice of people eleven billion years extinct.
Hell I had been writing a paper on the nature of spirits on Earth Bet and their differentiation from Earth Aleph. Here they were more brutal, and at times more cunning. Aleph had more subtle spirits, and it was in far better balance than Bet. I hadn't checked what it was like on other Earths with humans. For now.
Now…void. It was the conduit of the soul, and those who could speak to the void could learn many things, they could see from without where most could see from within. Such people were rare, and not all of them needed to be shaman. Pathik wasn't a shaman for example…he was something else.
Because not all was of bending and spirits, and there were many species that were proof of that. The Rachni's telepathy, the empathic abilities of certain individuals in the era of the Thranx, and the powers of the Asari. The Tetatae has their own odd encounters with the ephemeral.
The void was soul, so what did it mean? How did I need to shift my world view to understand it, to learn about it deeply enough to seek out what I need? On my own I had a hard time even hearing void, and it happened only rarely in a conscious matter.
And it involved stopping a rogue shard. One of Abbadon's gifts that had survived intact, last I had heard was that it had found a host to use its near-inviolable power.
The Fanged One was an ldd
I could see the void spirits, their silver radiance all I could note of their bodies of spirit flesh. But most were small, mere Aspect spirits but even so they had power and they had knowledge. Greater spirits often had a resonance of void, Kalros the Grandmother of All Thresher Maw for example.
It was of course a simplification, spirits of their ilk are some of the most powerful beings you'll usually ever encounter. Only shards would equal or surpass them and they're technically unnatural abominations to other spirits. Koh was another such being, but he had broken the limiter and the only reason I knew he was once more was an intuition from the seat of my soul.
I waited and listened, slowly and carefully reaching for one of those silvery aspects. It shyly drifted over to me, whispering words I could barely comprehend, a flicker of images passing through my mind. But when it brushed against my fingers it shied away. It gave its answer.
Not ready.
My gentle grip turned into a shaking fist and I knew it was right to reject me. No matter how much it burned me to know, it required digging through murky waters holding the memories I had buried. It was terrible…but I could live with it.
My dreams told me a few things at least, and gave me a start. I was supposed to have access to five gates, thus five additional tech trees. None were inherently more advanced in every way, the Thranx had better FTL and materials science but everything else was a little more even. Their ships were a little slower and less maneuverable, and their shields were modified gravity fields and used up tons of power.
The Tetatae had even faster FTL but it was sensitive to gravity and had to be charged. Their computer science was a little worse, though their newest positronic computers were interesting. Their VI and AI tech was behind, and they had no shields and gravitic technology. They had interesting materials engineering and quite a few other neat technologies the others lacked.
But it was through uniting them, through making what was separate into one where my powers most excelled. Mass effect technology acted as the great bridge between them all, and I imagined the same would apply to Gates three to five. Of course it wasn't automatic or easy, and it helped that a lot of tech overlapped quite well.
Hmm…maybe that was a direction I needed to work towards, but with my current inability to get anything more than directions, I was limited to meditating for fun.
Which was fine.
I took a deep breath, in and out. I felt the elements around me, the vitality of nature and reality. Spirits spiraled around, and I couldn't help my curiosity at their very existence. Air, water, earth and fire seemed attracted to my presence and while the void refused to speak to me…it didn't preclude them from orbiting distantly. So no talking to Void today.
I could live with that.
AN: So here starts Deviation with a longer chapter than usual. There's a lot going on, and I'm already on 12.3, and I've got the schedule where I need it.
Enjoy.
September 6th, 2011. 9:00AM
Basilia Rubio
"All of this has happened before and will happen again…" A voice rang in my head, whispers and fragments of memory passing me by.
I was walking forward, barely aware as I trudged through a river of syrup-like liquid. Cracked mirrors rolled by, fragments of crystalline flesh spinning through still air.
I tried to remember what I was doing here but all I did was keep moving forward, despite the pain, the fear, the horror, I simply kept moving. Kept walking through rivers of blood.
"Sometimes…I wonder if she can see me through your eyes." Pain and sadness passed by me as I trudged onwards through the murky waters. Other fragments, memories.
So many memories.
"Can friendships really last more than one lifetime?" There were so many of these little pieces of memory, stripped away from their source, again and again in an endless and eternal cycle.
"Higher beings, these words are for you alone." A scratching on stone, words beyond words, written by those who knew of the divine, of the powerful and of all the potential of the Ephemeral. Of the soul and the body and the mind as one.
"No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering." The words of a dead god came and went like those who existed before them and would exist after them.
"Oh, I know what the ladies like…" A voice barked in the void, and I twisted my form to look for it.
"I do not 'gallivant," A chittering voice said. "I plan in haste." And it was gone, like so many others without end. Sadness, joy, hatred and fear and passion and lust and endless plains made out of all the evils, out of all the good in the world.
Light and dark, push and pull. Life and death.
Battles across land, sky and sea and across the void between worlds itself. Love and hate and loss, wars unseen and forgotten, sinking away into the fog of deep time.
It didn't stop, because there was more to know, more to learn, more to understand no matter how far someone dug. The wheel would keep turning because it had to.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
"THE CYCLE HAS REPEATED MORE TIMES THAN YOU CAN FATHOM, AND IN EVERY SINGLE ONE, THE HARVEST HAS BEEN COMPLETED…" The Sovereign of Nazara boomed in my ear, the insidious words of a dead machine god continuing to echo.
I remembered the Makara, and while their cycle had failed…another race took the aegis of the Avatar and lost it only a few short thousand years later, negating the sacrifices as every single loss was replaced within less than a cycle. It was a faint memory, a shadow nearly as old as the galaxy itself. But I remembered.
Because I had to.
A single failed cycle out of thousands couldn't be counted against them.
"We were great long ago…and strong, my House." One of a thousand thousand thousand voices forming the whirlwind.
"I? I am the monument to all your sins." A mind, a distorted echo of the countless dead hissed, reality quivering and flexing at the shambling corpse god.
"The wheel turns, does it not, Ambassador?"
"I LIVED TEN THOUSAND LIFETIMES BEFORE THE FIRST OF YOUR KIND CRAWLED OUT OF THE MUD." A loud resounding boom followed, and I shivered. The way Vaatu spoke, the arrogance, the ceaseless destruction. It was clear Raava's antipole was kin to the Reapers, one of the demon children of the Harbinger.
"You will learn respect. And suffering will be your teacher." I shuddered at that so familiar voice of a monster in the form of a man. It made me wonder what the other less familiar voices were, some I knew or recalled or had or would have…I didn't understand.
There were so many.
"If you could make them feel as you can make me feel, then perhaps they could forgive you." There was an undertone of a trillion voices, a million stories scratching at the border of my mind and soul. Too much…
I dropped, gripping my cracking skull as it proved too much, too much, too much.
Make it stop!
I pulled myself from the stream of unadulterated and undiluted memory. And found myself in a foggy scene, a scene that had never happened and would never happen. It was what could have been, but didn't.
"We know they're…" There was static, multiple capes talking near a silver something. "—the head, the superweapons fall."
"Yes," One of the foggy figures glanced curiously at the voice.
"—eed your help." The scene slowly started to shatter, that possible future becoming impossible, not in this reality and not with the agents and fulcrum points of this possible world.
I was flying through space, spiraling around another. Communicating only what was needed as the gravity of planetary bodies dragged us downwards. Focused on different goals and objectives, each equally important.
I was moved, and another took my place. In that very instance, a mistake is made and that future is dead, killed by a one in a trillion chance of bad luck. Everything became broken, distorted, detached as the impact dislodged so much.
I flew away from the impact, damaged but not dead, not yet, not yet, not ye—
The center falls with the stabbing of a knife, and a flood of pain slams against my unprepared mind. The cracks spread, piece after piece is lost or scattered or subverted by separation. Everything fell apart, unable to start, to reboot or reconfigure. The breaking doesn't stop, as the center is mutilated and coerced and given to those who don't deserve it.
The dream breaks as a god dies.
___
September 6th, 2011. 9:15PM
Basilia Rubio
When I woke up it was to a whispering of distant spirits, and I groaned as I rubbed my head.
My dreams lately had been ominous, fragment and nightmares feeling so real it was terrifying and stressful. This had been the worst one yet, a hodgepodge of insanity and disparate wisps of information and data from a source that didn't directly belong to me. Or perhaps it did and I had only forgotten.
At the least this dream was a lot clearer and easier to parse than some of the nightmarish scenes I barely recalled. That was it then.
I threw my blanket off of my person with a grumble, reaching for some pants since I wasn't going to go outside in my damn underwear. A few seconds was all it took, and I carefully shimmied into a pair of jeans. Not skinny jeans of course because of my big butt and hips, but jeans all the same.
A sleeveless white tank-top was enough to cover my modesty, and it let me show off my not-skinny arms due to the miracles of genetic manipulation, cybernetic implants and exercise. I decided it was time to meet up with an old friend, the foremost knowledge spirit in Brockton Bay.
I shifted into the spirit world and was bombarded by the great weaving storm of spirits that called my house home. Spirits of electricity jumped on me, lightly buzzing at me before moving on to other places. Appliance spirits greeted me, not moving from where their material counterparts lay.
Show me the path.
One spirit came, a spirit of a specific machine, one of my machines. It's name came to me, and I smiled at what in some respects could be considered one of my own.
Errant Wanderer.
It was a multitudinous gearset, interlocking along crystalline teeth, tendrils of plasticine polymer gripping onto the fabric of reality. It offered a tentacle and I grasped it gladly. Kilometers of distance was folded away, and I found myself in the spiritual counterpart of the library.
In the Spirit, the Brockton Bay Central Library was a great palace of learning. Larger than life, living wood with fractal leaves of paper lining its square shape. Windows shined like stained church panes, and with careful movements…I knocked on the door with a bowed head.
The doors opened of their own accord, and I stepped through with greater confidence once I was certain of his intentions. The prime spirit of this Loci was unusually powerful, just one of many of the spirits of this city that had great and terrible strength
"Centralis, I have sought out your counsel in a matter I am…poorly equipped to speak of." The library shifted and I was teleported into the center, finding myself in front of the spirit in question. I hadn't spoken with the spirit in some time, and I bowed my head in respect.
"You seek the answers you can not give yourself, to push past the Bans placed upon you." I nodded and there was a light chuckle from the knowledge spirit. "I am not the right spirit for this, I am not He Who Knows Ten Thousand Things. And he is long dead, you must speak to those who are Void."
"But…" I didn't cover my mouth in time and I was pulled before the great spirit, a paper-coated limb gripping gently on my shoulder.
"I understand your worries, your fears, your need to know. But my power is not limitless, when you asked of what I knew of the Makara I only told you what I could see. I know you are Vyasa but I do not know why, I know a great change is coming but I do not see its shape, it's Form. Only it's threat." The body of Centralis rippled and I swallowed.
"I apologize for my presumptuous actions, I didn't mean to offend you Centralis." It was genuine, I had sought him out for knowledge but what he provided was knowledge that would be found in any library. Only with greater detail, with greater knowing because of what he was.
If I wanted to know about the founder of Brockton Bay, he wouldn't give me just words but the feeling and emotion, and the memories of the man himself, the echo of his age. Little details left unrecorded and forgotten. He was nearly a thousand years old, but his memory didn't go back to the very beginning.
It couldn't.
"I am not offended, merely discontent." He said tritely. "You must speak to those who can remember, and that is not I. Leave this place, those of the New Song seek your counsel." He gestured almost haughtily, and I turned around again apologizing as I made my way out of the library palace.
I kept walking, and grabbed onto Errant Wanderer and with its influence it brought me to another spirit world, surrounding Earth Lotus like a shell. The great gear whistled before returning to its metal body in the material world. With a release of my breath I formed a rift and leapt back into the material plane.
The main White Lotus base on this earth was in California, but on the spot where Brockton Bay should have been but wasn't was the equivalent of a Rachni embassy, a large construct they had built in days. It resembled a gigantic termite hill, and I found multiple soldiers patrolling the area.
The New Song huh?
I felt a burst of biotic force as one Brood Lord appeared in a crack of thunder. Spirits swelled around him, and I knew a spirit-touched child when I saw one. All Rachni sang in the tongue of the great spirits but that was between each other and with other sapients. A small fraction of the Brood Lords had strong enough souls to bind the spirits to their hive. But they didn't act in their role of shaman like the rest of us, their great auras attracted the spirits birthed by their actions, augmenting their homes and tools was as easy as breathing for them.
Other Rachni did not bear the mark of the spirits, but could do and did so under the Firqa of the shaman-warriors of the hive. It was one of the reasons they were so proficient at weaving flesh and tinkering with metal. Most didn't have these gifts, but the ones that did were force multipliers.
There were one and half million Rachni, two percent of those were made up of the larger classes. One percent of that number or about three hundred were Brood Warriors. They had about ten shamans, and nearly all of them had been transferred to great festivity and celebration to the one Spirit Singer among the current queens. Proportionally they had a far smaller ratio of shamans to non-shamans. If there were six billion Rachni alive at this moment the United States would still have an equal number.
Their souls were different from ours, they had no benders among their kind though whether this was because it was impossible or because they didn't know how I wasn't sure.
The Krogan knew only of Earth, the Batarians knew of Earth and Fire, but when humanity burst out into the galaxy at large, little things like cultural restrictions became a little less relevant.
So perhaps I was wrong and it was only a matter of time.
"Ten Thousand Litanies, it's a pleasure to see you again." I acknowledged the shaman-warrior, remembering a recent event where we had stopped a blood spirit incursion from eating a small town near Brockton.
"Indeed it is, we seek your counsel. We have…made some interventions into the affairs of Bet and found disturbing news." He gestured and then gave me a plain green cloak and a domino mask since I didn't have my armor on.
When I entered it was a scene of chaos and confusion, over a dozen children, teenagers and young adults kept calm and at bay only by the kindness and warmth projected by the Rachni healers. There was one teen off to the side with dirty blonde hair. He looked exhausted but his eyes lit up when he caught my gaze.
Did I know him?
Some of the sounds quieted when I entered the room, and I could tell there was recognition from some of the less roughed up people brought to safety by the Rachni.
"You're Erudition." The dirty blonde boy looked relieved, sagging a bit in response to my presence.
"Who's asking?" I took my best warm and kind tone not wanting to scare the kid off. He looked about fourteen or maybe fifteen, though it was hard to tell at first glance. I did have my omni-tool to check though.
"Rain." My brain froze and I blanked out my expression as I realized the people here were probably all escapees from the Fallen.
Oh shit.
I counted sixteen people, and a wave of my omni-tool gave me a range of ten to twenty three years of age. Many were in varying conditions, from light signs of starvation, physical injury, and odd hormonal imbalances. Which were slowly being evened out by the soothing frequencies of the Rachni.
So at some point some of them had been subject to Master powers, though the fact the Rachni weren't even worried told me they had broken through whatever compulsions or bombs could come from Fallen Master capes.
"Let's go elsewhere then if you need to talk." He nodded eagerly, Ten Thousand Litanies following behind us but keeping silent.
I wanted a moment once we were in the room.
"Umm?" Rain looked confused, and flames were emitted from my breath as I directed my emotions to burn away as fuel for my inner fire.
"You need help right? I know the Rachni have probably given you sanctuary but they're not human…so they're not going to understand every little nuance."
"You'll help us?" Rain asked as a note of hope entered his voice.
"Of course I would? Everyone here is clearly running from the Fallen, and I was planning to take them down eventually. It's just that some of them have proven to have difficult powers to deal with…" Mama Mathers was the biggest but she had a few buds around due to the sheer level of conflict the Fallen went through. Scans found traces of multidimensional energy fields congruent with the linking required for Master powers.
My omni-tool managed to pick up metaphysical energy, patterned in notes of music. Did…did they break the connection from victims of Mathers?!
"It was a surgical affair, we could instantly erase the connection but she would see and hear and smell the breaking. It was a subtle note for those affected, obscuring our actions until their escape could be orchestrated." The Brood Lord confirmed as such and I was damn impressed, but then it made sense.
Each Rachni carried their own genetic memory, each and every one was an expert in their given or chosen fields. Every worker was an expert in what they did, they could build fusion reactors, operate geneforges, and construct any mechanical device given the right tools and instructions.
Every soldier operates on the local level with their human-equivalent intelligence allowing them to operate as scientists, engineers, pilots and attaches. They can learn or be programmed for their roles in the hive. The workers and soldiers were savants of the highest order, though only workers could be considered expendable.
At the least reincarnation seems a quick process for them like the Drell and their weird ability to remember their past life.
Each Brood Lord was every bit as diverse as other sophonts, no restrictions placed on their ability to learn and evolve. They're the head scientists, with the ability to innovate and master technology. Instead of leading squads they orchestrate entire swarms with their power, assisted by their auxiliaries.
Each Rachni Brood Warrior was a general, a master in all things as required. With thirty thousand larger Rachni more or less functional, they could certainly rampage through a country or three. A single queen could lay a clutch of hundreds, and they would hatch within days with maturity rates of a week for soldiers to two to three weeks for viable Warriors.
I should really stop thinking about how likely it is that the Rachni will take the entire local cluster and turn it into an empire of tens of billions of alien bug people.
"Ahem. So what did you need to tell us?" Disturbing news had been brought up and Rain was probably the one telling us since he seemed the least psychologically scarred.
"The Fallen…I don't know much, but I know Valefor is getting help from some new cape…a cape who managed to take out the Nine. Even if it nearly killed him."
Come again?
"Who'd he take out?" I asked numbly.
"Jack Slash, Bonesaw, Burnscar, and Shatterbird. He managed to bring the Siberian and Crawler to his side."
Fuck me jogging in the alps how in the fuck did he manage that?
"Did he kill them or incapacitate them? There is a difference." It seemed so unlikely I was starting to think it wasn't that simple.
"I saw Burnscar's body so she's definitely dead, Bonesaw…I think he tried to send her to some other place but I don't know where." I pale and felt like throwing up. "Shatterbird might be alive but I think he has a tinker on his side. Jack Slash is either dead or he wishes to be dead…"
"Was this guy really strong or really tricky?" You didn't always need power to beat people, being clever enough and lucky enough was often sufficient in a world that wasn't a video game.
"He got pretty badly hurt…but he was, and felt dangerous. Bad news." Rain didn't help much with improving my mood. "I…think he might be one of those shaman people, he didn't seem to really have normal powers."
"You get his name?" I asked quietly. He gave one to me, and it was a simple one.
"Ezekiel."
___
September 6th, 2011. 9:45PM
Basilia Rubio
Miss Militia leaned back, looking taken aback about what I had told her as we waited for Renick to come back and probably pondering whether it was a good idea to start worrying.
It probably was.
Of all the opponents I had faced so far none of them had been shamam, much less a shaman working for the Fallen. But I knew it was only a matter of time, the Fallen had people joining it and some among those 'blessed' few some would have the gift of spirits. And they would be malicious because that was how people worked.
"The Rachni kidnapped sixteen people from the Fallen." My eyebrows lifted their moment that came out of her mouth.
"One, half of them are adults and two every single one of them has evidence relating to the location, nature, and danger of their home lives. Three there isn't much I can do on that because I don't control them. They're their own sovereign people with all that implies."
Miss Militia was apologetic. "That may be so but this does look pretty bad, something like the Rachni taking children is easy to spin."
"That isn't really my problem to be frank, you'll have to deal with the psychic bugs currently colonizing thirteen star systems yourself." Hannah was…sort of nice but to be frank we were talking about a woman who had a hard time disobeying orders. "I've informed you on what capes the Fallen appear to have and the shaman that apparently holds the leash of what remains of the Nine."
"Are you certain they're coming here?" Miss Militia asked, and I could tell she was waiting for someone more qualified for this, probably Renick since Piggot was busy.
"We killed one of their gods. That will engender a response and the only reason it took as long as it did was because of the sheer shock and the anemic but functional response from the government." I would have scratched my chin if I could, but I had a helmet on.
Miss Militia looked a tad ticked off. "I wouldn't call it anemic…"
"The fact the Fallen still exists at all is a testament to the breakdown of the rule of law in this country. You had an entire murderous neo-nazi gang and the slaving ABB with Lung in this city alone."
"You don't seem surprised or outraged." She didn't seem as defensive as before.
"I know how powers work behind the scenes, destroying countries is what they're supposed to do." My voice was dripping with sardonic undertones. "Bending and shamanism don't work the same way, and they're still going to be responsible for millions of deaths."
I had found signs of a few genocides perpetrated by benders on more primitive Earths, cities torched or flooded, infrastructure ripped apart by earthbending, air used to deadly effect or to speed up campaigns of mass murder. Tribe wiping out tribe was the norm just as much as alliances between them.
The Fire Nation murdered hundreds of thousands of airbenders, the predecessors of the Air Nomads were mongol-like conquerors, the White Wind riding on the backs of great armored Sky Bison. The Water Tribes were once pirate lords, plunderers of treasure and of people. The Earth Kingdom…don't even get me started on the sheer violence the people of the Earth Kingdoms were capable of.
Biotics had no examples except…possibly one. But the Asari were all biotics, and from their bloodline came the Ardat Yakshi, and their existence was why I inspected the genetics of their species carefully.
If I ever planned to weave greater Asari genetics into humans, I didn't need something with that power anywhere near anyone.
"You have experience with bending being used maliciously?" She sounded concerned and I smiled sadly.
"Not personally, but I know the history of a lot of dead species. Some had bending and this history was…sordid at times. You can't raise Parahuman armies, they're too disparate, too broken to work together even if the world starts to end. What could this country do with a million trained benders, what could the CUI do?"
"You think a lot about this don't you?" Was all that Miss Militia said before Renick burst into the room.
"I might be a tinker but I'm a bit of a thinker as well." I smirked and the sheer disgust on her face made that pun worth it. Renick seemed a little ruffled but he was otherwise in mint condition. "Deputy Director…are you alright?"
"Renick is fine." The mild-mannered man waved me off, finding his seat in the office quite easily. "I needed a moment to process your…information. The sixteen escapees, are they safe with the Rachni?"
"The Rachni have been slaves before Renick, they refuse to let others fall to the same fate they've suffered." And frankly I didn't disagree, I wasn't a subtle person and didn't have the precision in the kind of operations needed to extract people from unsafe people like the Fallen.
"They also developed a means of countering mastering with their telepathic abilities. Do you think they'll offer this to Master victims?" He didn't seem as paranoid as I expected, perhaps we had built up enough goodwill from the PRT.
"Probably yes, the fact they managed to break even that person's power is both amazing and a little…scary I'll admit." I wasn't specific, since while her name wasn't infectious, any infected Thinker could come across her name in PRT files and fuck things up for them. "But it does make sense, they've pieced together broken minds before."
"I won't ask." Renick did the smart thing and moved on. "Fortunately it seems the Rachni have the common courtesy of gathering legal evidence, and of working with other PRT branches. They've recovered three Wards, and six young capes from the Fallen."
That had been a shock, and at this point I wouldn't even be surprised anymore. "To be frank I'm not the right person for figuring out this mess, the Wards were only recently taken, and the other six Parahumans have varying powers that are clearly products of Fallen capes. I could take them in but…I'm not sure I'm comfortable with it."
Renick nodded. "It seems exploitive. I can understand that."
"The Rachni mind-healers will be able to soothe some of the after effects from their…treatment at the hands of the Fallen." One of the older capes, a twenty three year old blonde had…well to be blunt had been raped.
I didn't want to think about it, but there was a reason so many criminal organizations on this planet needed to be cleansed in holy nuclear fire. The Fallen were disgusting and repugnant to me on a moral and personal level, and so were the Nine. I'm keeping my world away from the circus of freaks and insane people patrolling this cursed planet.
Not that my world was free from those kinds of violent and horrific crimes but like anything on Bet they doubled and tripled down on it to more horrible levels. The others were less harmed, but without asking them I didn't know how bad it would be. I wasn't equipped for this, and the Rachni weren't either besides providing a shoulder to cry on.
I'd pay for whatever they need free of charge, it was the least the poor people needed after getting involved with a cult. But I didn't know where they could go, as long as the Fallen existed they were in danger from retribution.
"We'll likely need to talk to the queen responsible for this, and while the Wards can probably be placed with us until they recover. The six remaining capes are a lot more…complicated." Renick didn't seem to relish that kind of trouble.
"At least a few of them are likely related to Fallen capes, if they're in public it might not be safe for them." I was honest with the problems they would face. "The best bet would be to keep them out of reach."
Renick sighed. "It's likely the Rachni can take care of housing, though they'll have to concede to regular checkups from the Youth Guard and the PRT. The issue here will be power testing, none of them want to submit to being tested directly by the PRT but…" I had a sinking feeling on where this was going.
"But I have facilities capable of replacing your own, and they're more likely to trust me because of my connection with the Rachni." His grave nod informed me I had hit the nail on the head. "When should these power testing sessions take place?"
"At least two days if it fits your schedule, we can wait longer if need be." He didn't want to push me, but six new capes popping up in your jurisdiction could be a little disconcerting.
"It's fine, I don't have a problem with it. Athena has extensive experience with power testing equipment as needed for our research and my own equipment is more advanced than that."
I wouldn't call it fun but it would be…enlightening.
___
September 9th, 2011. 11:00AM
Basilia Rubio
It was a Sunday morning when the six kids had been brought in for Power Testing of their likely abilities. I had set up a facility on Gimel, and borrowed some of my employees due to their own expertise with such experiments. We had about twenty people dedicated to Power Testing, their findings trickling down to other parts of the company over time.
Studies of Panacea's power for example were enlightening on new methods of scanning and manipulation of biological structures. When she touched someone, her power sent out a continuous pulse of energy, and then used a combination of telekinetic effectors and tiny fragments of dimensionally displaced shard flesh to tinker and alter biology.
Athena didn't have the ability to use higher dimensional energy fields very well yet, so we couldn't alter electromagnetic forces without using a large particle accelerator. Though building an MRI-like machine to generate the reality tweaks necessary to direct the right fields might be possible combined with current microbot tech to pull off Panacea-like biological alteration.
One of our rescued kids was part of the smoke power based capes that were quite common due to the breeding program and sheer conflict output of the Fallen. They were all buds from the same shard, and this one was obviously a more recent Trigger.
Emilia Fox was about twelve, and she had the ability to turn into black smoke that seemed to enjoy absorbing certain types of energy and forces, mainly electricity, heat, fire and plasma. That she was a firebender on top of that said something but I didn't know what. She could redirect this energy as she liked, or absorb it to fuel and grow or heal her smoke form.
Her power had clearly taken her bending into account, and it had dubbed itself Smoldering Grantor. Her power had been tested with modified electroshock weapons, upping the charge and carefully probing the limits of her power. Her smoke form was durable, and could resist being blown away by industrial fans but could receive damage from attacks capable of breaking up her animated ashes.
It's nearly impossible to damage her in this state, and we guessed that she would only start getting hurt once the mass of the smoke was reduced below her own mass.
Most of our team were former PRT so they knew the ins and outs of testing Parahumans both mentally, physically and power wise. They were small tests built to get a rough profile of the general attitudes and personalities of capes. Basically light prodding so they knew the issues a cape would have.
It wasn't perfect but it worked well enough.
After Emilia came Matthew Mathers who based on our tests had a bud from Mama Mathers herself, though it was nowhere as potent in any regard. It was a Thinker power that widened his sensorium against being monitored without the more unpleasant abilities of Mathers.
So he'll register any attempt to fuck him with over with Thinker powers, getting a useful danger sense out of it. It did little to help against the bitch that he budded off from. So he had been traded to some of the smaller branches due to his lack of value in comparison to other Mathers kids. Nice guy surprisingly but he could be surly at times if you pushed him. He was about sixteen.
Next was Susan Brown, a young black woman of about twenty years of age. She was a recent victim of the Fallen, apparently she was taken to be the 'wife' of one of the McVeay. She had a tinker power, Triggering due to the man who had kidnapped her being a sadistic bastard and leaving her unsure of when or if he would finally…take her.
Her specialty was in crystals and biology, and she had built a hexagonal crystal infused with a fungal network used as a sensor array for the processing nodes of the crystal itself. She had been planning to build a laser gun to kill the guy who had a rap sheet a mile long. The crystal acted as an optical cavity while the fungal network was infused with highly efficient fluorescent proteins to provide a gain medium. A calcite composite lens focused the beam, and it was very odd tech to say the least.
Our fourth cape is Jacob Miles, a seventeen year old teleportation cape. He could swap two areas of spacetime in a move that shared quite a few commonalities with Jumpdrive FTL.
Slower of course and more delicate. The weakness was that he needs to get accurate information on the location, where you're going and the general direction and distance. He had a Thinker power he describes as tendrils reaching out, giving him the ability to sense the location to get his jumps down. But it took time and it was faster if he was just given the location.
Short range jaunts are easier, and he can move around in three dimensions. Sort of like a mix of Strider and Trickster…or should it be Switcheroo now? His jump range is less of course, maybe a few dozen miles versus the thousands of Strider himself. Not quite as instant as Krouse but still impressive.
Very flighty, and the signs of some level of abuse was…not promising.
Fifth was Adrianna Peterson, she creates hard-light copies of herself capable of flight and superhuman strength. Her maximum limit is twenty four though it causes migraines and vertigo and six is the practical limit. Each clone is tough as hell, and she can have one form around her to protect her squishy self. Each one can lift four tons, fly at one hundred sixty miles per hour and trying to break them would be like trying to crater a statue of laser steel.
She might be a second or third cousin of Rain actually. She was seventeen, and had apparently been singled out as expendable and offered up. Something about healing one of their own capes with her as a donor? I wasn't too sure.
Our final cape is surprisingly not Rain who apparently hasn't gotten his power yet.
Ben Griffin had a projection power, a spy of sorts that lets him eavesdrop on people. It's main ability was a form of limited emotional manipulation and perception. Through his projection's eyes, Ben can sense the state of other people and push out emotions, causing conflicts and disrupting social networks within affected groups.
The main problem was that the more power he pushed, the more his projection became visible, and the easier it became for his enemies to notice they're being manipulated. He had to pick and choose what his role was in a mission, was he the perfect spy or the perfect saboteur?
Apparently his power worked in part on the Rachni, but only in the aspect of stealth and shaman commanded Rachni could sense the power on their own.
His emotional manipulations didn't work right on their alien neurology, and their telepathy wiped away certain aspects of his powers.
They had tested themselves against a wide variety of Master powers, and none had proven to hinder them in the long term. In the matter of control anyway, twitching their nerves can work, since it's in short bursts. Long term control is effectively impossible with how Masters insinuate their power. They had clearly done everything they could to insulate themselves from crazy people.
I felt a tug on my arm, and met my gaze with the crystal blue eyes of Emilia. She was naturally thin but wore a black hoodie jacket and blue shorts.
"Something wrong?" I took a soft tone of voice, but did my best not to show pity either. Emilia was about five foot nothing, with straight chestnut brown hair and a small button nose. She was the definition of cute.
Though all that made me think of the tastes of some of the people in the Fallen. Yuck.
"Can…can you help me cut my hair?" She winced when I turned to face her directly like at any time I was going to hurt her. "I thought it was a good idea." She made an odd face, and I felt the weight on my shoulders at that moment.
"Sure, I don't mind at all." I put on a more cheery tone. "I'm not very good at it so don't expect anything nice but I'll certainly try."
I gestured for the kid to follow.
___
September 9th, 2011. 11:45AM
Basilia Rubio
I crashed down onto my couch, rubbing my face as the anxiety set in. Emilia's haircut had apparently opened the floodgates of former Fallen wanting to talk to me from people with powers or not. There had been three benders among the group of sixteen excluding Emilia.
All of them were airbenders and the implications were obvious, of course they would seek freedom. Whether they were kidnapped or trapped within the family they were born to…it made sense.
I wonder how many airbenders had been awoken under the whip of Masters and other powerful capes.
Taylor was out patrolling though I doubt anyone would realize that with the photonic cloaking implemented into her armor. Heat and visible light were both hidden, making her a ghost to such sensor types. Her bugs were good at hiding since insects are naturally omnipresent.
Grace was lounging on the other end of the couch, a cocky grin on her face as she tapped an omni-tool, obviously running simulations for her weapons.
"Hmm…I don't see Amelia around so you didn't get laid, you build something new?" I decided a conversation was a good way to relieve stress and Grace's scoff was certainly a start.
"I doubt you'd notice whether or not someone is fucking." She smiled when my cheeks turned pink. She shook her head. "But yeah, I've been building some new stuff. Nanocloud bombs, like Halbeard's nano-thorns. Good against flesh, but they won't work so good against Crawler huh?" She looked annoyed.
"I've made the appropriate modifications for anti-acid costumes in case he bypasses our barriers. He shouldn't be able to, but we can never be too careful."
"We still use power-resistant glass right?" Grace looked uncertain and I gave her a thumbs up.
"Nanostructured structures or blended with non-silicon based materials. We tested that with Echidna." Turns out she had a bud from Shatterbird, and her power didn't work on anything I had. My older stuff was more vulnerable but I had already upgraded everything including my cybernetics.
Not that there's a lot of silica in my shit. Even my standard omni-tools had enough alumina to not shatter. Crack maybe but not shatter, and nowadays with Grace and Greg more or less anything that had silicon was protected. To be fair my current optronic fiber networks were more alumina than silicon, with a good ten percent made up of a reverse engineered tinkertech element.
Her power explicitly worked by using dimensionally shifted acoustic vibrations to alter the state of silicon. This signal could be disrupted by soundproofing, specific structures to disrupt the signal, and the right frequencies too. And of course the obvious Manton Effect not letting her affect living things.
So my cybernetics wouldn't be affected anyway, but I wanted to make it extra sure. Hero was working on sonic cannons as was Bakuda though her weapon was more powerful but less multi-purpose.
Most of my windows were Plexalloy, a transparent material that could be as strong as battle steel. That included every single one of my buildings though a weaker and easier to make variety for current technology. Which still let it take a hit from anti-material rifles.
All my employees have work phones from approved companies who had developed Shatterbird-proof phones and the intermediary optronics made in-house were of course immune. She could sing as much as she liked it wouldn't affect my buildings, and this had been tested.
"Earth to Basilia, you there or are you daydreaming about Taylor's ass?" I blushed and punched Grace reflexively. "Oww!"
"No." I poked her nose, ignoring the heat in my cheeks. "We've run some training sessions with Amelia to simulate a fight with Bonesaw." I had cooked up some Sterilization plagues, prion clouds and hyper-aggressive necrotic viruses that make things like Ebola and the Black Plague look like kiddy diseases.
I had synthesized over a dozen viruses, bacterial, fungal and prion illnesses capable of slaughtering millions or hundreds of millions. "Greg's own little 'enhancements' finish the job of fighting Bonesaw directly."
The most basic device Turnaround could make were modular biomechanical interfaces, many of which he had implanted into his body once he made use of my Autodocs. Modified for his own personal use of course.
He had gone for subdermal bulletproof plating, metallic bones and extensible limbs, and modified musculature reinforced with muscle chips. It was rather easy to simulate Bonesaw with him, though the VR Arena could create a hard-light version of Bonesaw instead.
Grace nodded but there was concern in her eyes, her harsh glare becoming soft and vulnerable. "Mila is our best bet against the crazy bitch with her power."
"Your bombs should be able to take down Crawler if we convince him to take a hit from a transmutation bomb." I rubbed the back of my neck, growling. "But the Siberian will be more difficult with her being an area of altered space in the form of a cannibal projection."
"Well this town has Flechette and Clockblocker, and you've replicated Sting."
"I've replicated the unfolding mechanism of Sting, there's still the decoupling from physical laws needed to fully invalidate her spacetime metric." It wasn't going to be easy.
Grace chuckled. "C'mon with your ability to twist reality into a pretzel I think you can manage it."
I rubbed my chin. "You're not wrong, but targeting Manton is probably the most viable plan."
"Like…kill him?" Grace asked and I nodded. "I thought you'd be all about trying to contain him."
"If we're able to do so sure, but I'm not going to lose a moment of sleep over it if he bites it." I had empathy and sympathy for other people just fine but… "Manton literally created all his own problems, I don't have much reason to care if he dies." It would just be disappointing because a power like his could help people.
"Huh…it's probably a good thing I didn't go on a bombing spree isn't it?" Grace was more uneasy.
The grin I made showed teeth. "Very much so yes. But that's besides the point. Who else have we prepared for?"
"Well there's Jack Slash himself…"
"Use someone without a shard or with a shard that won't help him. It's how he was defeated in that possible future." I felt assured of that. "Charlotte should also work due to her power."
"Because they're shard buddies?" Grace sported a grin.
"It would be best not to bring that up too often, I doubt Charlotte wants the reminder of being associated with a mass murderer." Dryness permeated my voice.
She winced. "She's a sweet girl…so you're right. Damn." She rubbed her scalp, running her fingers through her hair. "We've got a rough idea of the Fallen and the Teeth. But without the right Thinker power we're not going to know who else they have. Which could turn whatever's coming into a total clusterfuck."
"We're thinking the Butcher and her Teeth will show up first, we're already hearing rumors. But they're being discrete." God this was going to be annoying. "If we're getting Valefor then anti-Master scanners will be paramount, he'll be using hostages and puppets to push his agenda. He won't play fair and he's not stupid. We'll have to worry about how they're controlling Manton too."
"Really?" Grace questioned.
"It's probably through Valefor, but the shaman might have a tinker who did the work instead. So we'll add that angle just to be sure. I'll be placing more guardian spirits, anyone trying to go where they shouldn't will get splattered."
"Holy shit you're worried aren't you?" Grace was taken aback.
"I protect what I love Grace, and even what I don't. With capes and with shamans it's especially a good idea to be careful." I had no experience figuring shamans, only combating spirits.
"It…it'll be okay. You've got this." I was comforted by her attempt to reassure me.
"Yeah…"
___
September 9th, 2011. 9:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I was alone, breathing deeply as I felt the elements around. The soft breeze of the forest, the water in the plants and the animals, the living earth beneath my feet, and the energy of the sun, of fire in all things. The fifth element was harder to parse, even as my eezo nodes felt the living and twisting tendrils of dark energy reaping through the spheres.
I was in the forest of Earth Lotus and no animal would disturb me, because they knew me, they knew what I was. I didn't meditate by focusing on one thing, I did so by focusing on everything. The breeze, my thoughts on the future, my thoughts on the past and present, but in moderation. I didn't focus on one thing to my detriment, I tried not to let my fears and worries and other negative emotions drive me to fade out from being in the moment.
I thought about what I needed to think about…and slowly and carefully let it go. I thought about what I could do and let go what I couldn't change. Here in this thin but lively forest, it was populated by many spirits. Animal spirits of all kinds, different and alien to my world even as they shared common DNA. Plant spirits, spirits of soil and growth, spirits of all concepts.
Void was many things but…to be quite frank I didn't understand it perfectly. I only had what shamanistic practice I could borrow from the memories of the Citadel. It was the aspect of soul, but I knew it was more than that. I had talent with my abilities relating to the Ephemeral, but I was often playing it by ear or following the advice of people eleven billion years extinct.
Hell I had been writing a paper on the nature of spirits on Earth Bet and their differentiation from Earth Aleph. Here they were more brutal, and at times more cunning. Aleph had more subtle spirits, and it was in far better balance than Bet. I hadn't checked what it was like on other Earths with humans. For now.
Now…void. It was the conduit of the soul, and those who could speak to the void could learn many things, they could see from without where most could see from within. Such people were rare, and not all of them needed to be shaman. Pathik wasn't a shaman for example…he was something else.
Because not all was of bending and spirits, and there were many species that were proof of that. The Rachni's telepathy, the empathic abilities of certain individuals in the era of the Thranx, and the powers of the Asari. The Tetatae has their own odd encounters with the ephemeral.
The void was soul, so what did it mean? How did I need to shift my world view to understand it, to learn about it deeply enough to seek out what I need? On my own I had a hard time even hearing void, and it happened only rarely in a conscious matter.
And it involved stopping a rogue shard. One of Abbadon's gifts that had survived intact, last I had heard was that it had found a host to use its near-inviolable power.
The Fanged One was an ldd
I could see the void spirits, their silver radiance all I could note of their bodies of spirit flesh. But most were small, mere Aspect spirits but even so they had power and they had knowledge. Greater spirits often had a resonance of void, Kalros the Grandmother of All Thresher Maw for example.
It was of course a simplification, spirits of their ilk are some of the most powerful beings you'll usually ever encounter. Only shards would equal or surpass them and they're technically unnatural abominations to other spirits. Koh was another such being, but he had broken the limiter and the only reason I knew he was once more was an intuition from the seat of my soul.
I waited and listened, slowly and carefully reaching for one of those silvery aspects. It shyly drifted over to me, whispering words I could barely comprehend, a flicker of images passing through my mind. But when it brushed against my fingers it shied away. It gave its answer.
Not ready.
My gentle grip turned into a shaking fist and I knew it was right to reject me. No matter how much it burned me to know, it required digging through murky waters holding the memories I had buried. It was terrible…but I could live with it.
My dreams told me a few things at least, and gave me a start. I was supposed to have access to five gates, thus five additional tech trees. None were inherently more advanced in every way, the Thranx had better FTL and materials science but everything else was a little more even. Their ships were a little slower and less maneuverable, and their shields were modified gravity fields and used up tons of power.
The Tetatae had even faster FTL but it was sensitive to gravity and had to be charged. Their computer science was a little worse, though their newest positronic computers were interesting. Their VI and AI tech was behind, and they had no shields and gravitic technology. They had interesting materials engineering and quite a few other neat technologies the others lacked.
But it was through uniting them, through making what was separate into one where my powers most excelled. Mass effect technology acted as the great bridge between them all, and I imagined the same would apply to Gates three to five. Of course it wasn't automatic or easy, and it helped that a lot of tech overlapped quite well.
Hmm…maybe that was a direction I needed to work towards, but with my current inability to get anything more than directions, I was limited to meditating for fun.
Which was fine.
I took a deep breath, in and out. I felt the elements around me, the vitality of nature and reality. Spirits spiraled around, and I couldn't help my curiosity at their very existence. Air, water, earth and fire seemed attracted to my presence and while the void refused to speak to me…it didn't preclude them from orbiting distantly. So no talking to Void today.
I could live with that.
___
AN: So here starts Deviation with a longer chapter than usual. There's a lot going on, and I'm already on 12.3, and I've got the schedule where I need it.
Enjoy.
ASumatranTiger
Why wasn't the chicken able to cross the road?
- Location
- In a house
- Pronouns
- He/Him
At this point I half-expected a Marshall Bruce Mathers to suddenly pop up as a Master. 😂
- Location
- Chula Vista
Wait…that's Eminem's name? That is…kind of unfortunate isn't it? Since he technically exists in the same multiverse as Mama Mathers. Not that I know much about Eminem, I…don't think I've listened to any of his music.
Oh well.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Basilia is stronger than Taylor, by a fair bit in fact but she's just not a fighter in the same way. Weapons…pretty much anything from mass accelerators, plasma, electroshock, ion beams and even lasers. Of course a lot of that isn't useful in most cape activities due to the whole not being violent vigilantes business. Though they do have them for Brutes or monstrous creations. Or spirits.
Plus with how Basilia works each engagement can have different weapons depending on mission parameter.
I would say it would usually include ways to knock-out people without killing them. Taylor still has her biotic club-blade, and Basilia has guns capable of shooting knock-out darts.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Makes sense so for Taylor does she have any upgrades and what odd behavior did Dinah get from her mom. Also how skilled is Taylor at Airbending and Biotics
It seems like Basilia is desperate to find an answer to her own existence before she is forced to open the Pandora's box of rediscovering her homeworld of Earth Meta?
- Location
- Chula Vista
That's at least partially why, but some of it is because she needs to know why she is the way she is. There's a lot of context she's missing and she does not like that.
At this point, it feels like her lone investigation is at such a dead end, energetically and creatively speaking, that she would gain more useful Insight by starting up a book club with a group of Shards and paying close attention to the random offhand comments the Shards make as they read.
- Location
- Chula Vista
You're not wrong, and she could totally do that if she was willing to spend that much time with Shards. Unfortunately she's rather stubborn so it's unlikely she'll stop though she'll likely change her approach. Though talking to shards isn't a bad idea in and of itself, they were around during the whole…dimensions merging event.
Yeah I noticed, what with how she chose the familiar option of Centralis as her first flailing reach out for help.
On some level, I am sure Basilia knew that Centralis was a doomed option, and that failing to achieve "help" there would provide the intended emotional backlash to give weight to her own desire to be stubbornly isolationist in her continued efforts.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Pretty much, there was a part of her that hoped she might be wrong. But she doesn't have a lot of options on her quest. It's incredibly personal, which makes it difficult for her to want to accept help on this.
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I mean as I see it Basilia does have quite a few options available... but they are the carrots and broccoli of options, and Basilia is in the mood for comfort food ice cream.
I mean, if she was really desperate, Basilia could take the distasteful Spam In A Can option of willingly collaborating with Contessa and having The Eye interface directly with Veda with full permissions... since even before the Shards had bans evolve into Bans, it was and still is the way of Shards to interface together to forge loopholes through eachother's restrictions!
- Location
- Chula Vista
Asking other shards to interface with her is certainly a possibility. Though her metaknowledge does have negative effects because she she knows full well what the Eye got up to in Ward even if she's pretty iffy about the details. Though it is an option, even if one that wouldn't be as simple as Basilia would hope.
- Location
- Chula Vista
I won't respond after this since it's late but I'll respond to what I can here. A shaman is one capable of seeing, manipulating and communing with the spirits. They'll commonly call upon certain spirits with special mnemonic foci, usually prayers/chants, some through dance or even sacrifice. They are invocations of the spirits in question, using the unique rough spots of their soul to call upon them. You can force a spirit to do what you want if your soul is stronger than theirs, commonly done with animals. But they won't like that, and you very much want angry spirits.
You can manipulate the concepts they represent through these prayers or through creating spirit artifacts. Though once you've done something like this you should expect to have them used against you at some point.
Once the spirits know it's possible to protect themselves with spirit artifacts, you'll have them just…pop up in the world. Shamans are basically Trumps, able to generate different effects to help themselves or their allies. Making deals with agriculture spirits to protect crops from droughts and disease, and fighting malicious spirits to keep the balance.
Otherwise you'd have the spirits turning Worm even shittier than it already is. They're not human, they don't have our morals and that makes complications…very bad.
Though if you want something specific, they can probably throw around the elements too, though that can be overpowered by benders due to the machinery of the soul trumping spirits. They can call upon spirits of Luck to say…cheat at Casinos, spirits of death can have power relating to that…though resurrecting the dead is out of their domain. Messing with the wheels of incarnation is…not easily done.
But each kind of spirits has their own strengths and weaknesses and can be countered by the right spirits, or by using their Bans and Banes against them. Though what they are will vary tremendously. Certain water or drowning spirits in Japan will have trouble with cucumbers or a strong insistence for politeness and tradition against them.
And Void…void has a fair number of uses, because it is the answer.
So to cut this short Shamans are Trumps, with any number of powers depending on the shaman and their skill set. Of course they're not going to be absurdly powerful either, because most of the ones shown in VoTS are the prodigies and freaks of nature, olympic athletes versus the common joe.
That's it.
Kryptonian Steel
Insects, unworthy of such attention.
- Pronouns
- Alone
I've never read another fanfic with as much tension, sense of urgency as this one, it makes me feel like the good guys CAN lose that in the end there may not be a good ending, simply amazing.
Deviation 12.2
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.2
September 11th, 2011. 2:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I looked over my omni-field based monitors, the locked light displays giving me real-time video feeds while VI and LAI programs using software modules from Skimmer and sensors she's built and that I've figured out to mass produce. We had honed in on the Teeth being the first to arrive.
I clicked my tongue, sensing Parahumans was unfortunately not easy at long range since the dimensional anomaly in their head is pretty inconspicuous. Even my own scanners had a range limit of dozens of meters instead of thousands. And some shards could better mask their energy emissions. Athena's dimensional viewers had a range of about twenty to sixty centimeters, and it takes a crap-ton of time to get anything useful out of them.
They were mostly just moving from town to town, obviously the Butcher wanted a confrontation but she wasn't stupid enough to go in guns blazing. We guessed they had about seven capes and thirty others, with about ten benders among each other.
Dinah gave it a 80% chance they would try something today, but without the right data we didn't know where they could strike. Though we had narrowed it down to not attacking Athena directly or attacking the Protectorate. No what I was more worried about was the Fallen, since her predictions had shifted off course with them. There was a slight amount of fuzz…which wasn't from a Mathers bud or the bitch herself.
Which was a hunch on my part, and I didn't let Dinah check because that would end badly. And since none of the drones had suffered from sensor ghosts and glitches, she wasn't here. At least she wasn't yet. I suspected Thinker interference which was more troubling.
Certain powers made it hard for Dinah to operate which was why she was rarely in the same room as Shamrock and her luck. Better she be used against other Precogs than against us out of tactical stupidity.
I clicked a button on my armor and my helmet unfolded onto my head with a quiet mechanical whir. I tightened my muscles, and the exoskeleton reacted instantly to the input. I could lift multiple tons on my own, though lifting was very different from chucking them. The armor alloy has been refined and compressed, with mass effect field strengthening fields providing support.
Additional monitors popped up but these were illusions, projected images into my visual cortex. I freely looked at them, easily splitting my attention with my cybernetic enhancements. Multiple Analytical Engines swirled around my core awareness, residing in the direct neural interface and the rest of the computer network in my brain.
There was a network of different programs all performing various administrative duties, from cracking alien code to mathematical engines letting me perform hyperdimensional calculus in my head. Combat programs, a built in BattleNet that effectively implanted combat Thinker powers. As well as all the software operating every implant in my body, an onion-shell biome of machine intelligences bound to my being.
None of them sapient of course, sentient certainly however. They connected to additional tactical VI and LAI, and I could act as a command center, relaying information to other hardsuits to create a well oiled machine. IFF-tags, three dimensional map projections, and advice on movements of assets as needed.
I moved on from that, thinking about Brockton itself.
Hundreds of earthbenders have been enlisted in further expanding the greater Brockton area as an island, though we were more a narrow necked peninsula at this point. Even so over a hundred square miles was nothing to scoff at and we had been dealing with toxic algae blooms for months now. Some of the mountains to the west and north formed the boundaries of the new island, with kilometer long paths of stone packed up by the labor of a thousand benders. The first thing we had done was reconnect the Interstate-95, which on its own crossed the Lord River to the north.
The only reason Brockton Bay didn't collapse was because of the ability of benders to manipulate earthen material. Which was where Brockton Bay became known for something special.
I put on a video, where I could hear someone letting out a squeak as the foundation was set for the new road back to civilization, an area of reclaimed land a hundred meters in width and one kilometer long. Which had taken several hundred benders only about a month to finish by dredging up the land that Leviathan cracked like a jackass.
Some mad genius had figured out an old Republic City technique still used by the Alliance long after its invention. They had dug multiple shafts, filling them with gravel nearly to the top. Heat resistant hoppers were filled with more gravel, and heated up by firebenders, pouring lava in the foundations. Specially trained firebenders use heat control to manipulate crystallization, so we could use granite in mass instead of concrete.
The area has of course been prepared beforehand by waterbenders to keep the area as dry as possible to avoid explosions. Obsidian was a byproduct of the process, and now Brockton Bay was known for building foundations with lava. The road itself was built by benders and refined by non-benders, and the rail was built through the usual means plus some experimental work with metalbenders.
Thank god for boats and donations otherwise the city would have been fucked, and to be frank having been turned into an island that's barely an island could have badly screwed us over. Instead the people of the land decided they were going to do more, and they succeeded. Though I did feel bad for Rockingham county, since well over a tenth of it was torn from the mainland. Apparently they were thinking of splitting it. Though I had my doubts.
Now that I think about it, Leviathan had carved water twelve miles into the west, a few miles past the outskirts of the city, carving out some of the mountains in the process. Though not to the point of severely altering our climate. To the south we were separated by a large river about a hundred feet across while the west had a mile wide lake. It was a haphazard circle of water, and frankly there were already projects to drain out and infill the waters with waterbending and earthbending.
God we were lucky, hell our biggest donations at the moment is money and dirt. Eidolon had also spent some time recently tracking down what he could of the lost soil and crushed bedrock and piled it up for benders to infill everything. Even the Rachni were donating dirt and soil and other earthen materials to rebuild the area.
I took my eyes off the video, and turned to playing with my biotics for a time. I held a blob of mass effect fields in my hand, I created a basic barrier in my hand, altering its shape. I surrounded it in a Throw/Kick field, licking my lips and hoping I did this right or it would explode.
The barrier quivered where it went from a rounded shield of kinetic stillness, and was molded and folded by my brain and willpower into a triangular arrowhead. I gestured freely, and the barrier was launched and cut through the wall before shattering into a burst of dark energy.
Neat.
I had been extensively experimenting with my bending, and learning quite a few important things about the interactions between the elements. They were my powers, my elements, and I liked using them. I had been running some tests on the metaphysical limits of bending, seeing how far I could push outside the standard.
I started bending, but instead of generating my fire, I concentrated on generating only heat. The air shimmers around me, distorting my image in a mirror as I concentrate on generating heat. I managed to shift the shimmers around and a wonderful idea came to me.
If I can make a mirage…I can become invisible, or at least I can generate an illusion to make me look like something nearby like a rock or a stop sign. The fact it had taken me only a couple of tries was probably impressive but then I had eight months of nonstop practice and study.
I ceased my manipulation of heat, the concentrations of energy gradually dissipating into the air and walls.
A drone found something, and I projected the image of what looked like a small shop. I recognized it as the shop Parian had been renting a room out of for her business, though the fact it was now called Parian's Emporium and was stocked with her own products told me she had gained ownership of the entire property.
Inflated patchwork stuffed dolls of varying sizes from about a foot tall to a good nine feet tall. Other threads were laid discreetly on the ground, only barely visible on the screen. Bullet holes had shattered the glass of the nice shop, and the people on sight were people I recognized only from text and pictures.
Their costumes bristled with blades, spikes and spines and gave them the air of complete savages and a grimace made it onto my face. I recognized Hemorrhagia, and I didn't recognize the other cape with her. An air storm spiraled around the brown skinned man, and as he walked a path of white-tinted wind followed in his wake.
Not an airbender, he walked like a brute, he didn't have in him the culture needed to birth air. He had the violence of what one could call a Storm King, of a Wind Lord but he didn't have the desire of freedom needed…something about him made it obvious he was no son of the White Wind.
It was infuriating.
Two capes and three normals, and one of them was an earthbender with how the streets were being ripped up. The controlled dolls were strong, but the wind cape used his trail to trip up and knock them down and his storm field brushed aside heavy blows from even the bigger dolls.
I could see Parian in the back, flailing as she tried to avoid the earthbender in the group as the Teeth member liquified the ground under her feet. A pigeon landed on her shoulder and a flicker of light and a snap of air brought her elsewhere. There were multiple birds, rallying as they lunged down at the Teeth. They seemed tougher, surrounded by a field of rippling air.
Probably a good idea to get into the fray, and get civilians out of the way of harm. My current drone weaved but wasn't anywhere fast enough to avoid the gunfire striking at its shields. But before it could direct an electroshock weapon, a boulder the size of a small car crushed it and the video ended as the FRM systems dissolved all remaining components.
Huh…I'm going to have to take care of that aren't I?
Welp…back to work.
I made the call, no reason not to inform them of the development and buy them some time to arrive right?
September 9th, 2011. 2:40PM
Basilia Rubio
I stepped out of the portal, a good thirty meters back and my ARO began to point out quite a lot of data. I had confirmed that the Butcher wasn't present which means this was a probing attempt by the Teeth. Mainly because it would be quite obvious, and she was more distinctive than her grunts.
I didn't make use of any of my terrestrial robots because it seems like their earthbender buddy had figured out seismic sense based on how she tracked Parian. I was certain they would know I was there soon, and I glared down at the fight from a sixth of a block away.
I could use guns easily enough, but like most capes I had to hold back or I'd be too scary or hurt far too many people. Most of my firearms would rip them right in half, and I had everything from polonium rounds to antiparticle blasts. I had only tested out the one shotgun though…and it ended up blowing up when there was a defect in the mass effect field.
Bending though…that was a more controllable ability, though if I wasn't careful burning someone alive or shattering their spine was a possibility. People were tougher with their souls, not indestructible. Burning, maiming, crushing or crippling someone wasn't hard. Some hits from bending might be like punches, but others will do exactly what you expect.
There had been some historical accounts I had started writing down, of benders with incredible power and creativity. Jianzhu the Gravedigger, the Butcher of Zhulu Pass who buried five thousand people alive for their crimes. Bending was like if our punches could scale from painful to battleship cannons in threat level.
In my sights I found the IFF working perfectly, designating friendlies and foes in my helmet. I started running, and I shouted aloud as I flew on a jet of flames, my breath and inner fire roaring to life. That initial jump was then sped up as I circled my arms to catch and form a ball of air around me. As I flew through the air I pulled out a specially designed pistol.
Targeting computers spun up in response, forming a secure network between my suit and the VI in the modified mass accelerator.
An organic dart was spat from the pistol, and hit a vulnerable spot where armor had cracked on one of the Teeth members. A buff light skinned man with a heavy and strong frame. He yelled as I flew overhead, and within seconds the Newter dart did its job. He was down and out, like a puppet cut from its strings.
Bullets slammed into my barriers to no effect, splattering into pieces upon meeting the mass effect field stabilized field of hard light. At the moment I was effectively immune to damage barring some bullshit, though the hard-light field would reduce in intensity into a hybrid energy/kinetic barrier. So about two minutes to go from taking a hit from a large rocket to taking a hit from a smaller rocket.
I spun through the air, bending the wind to my whims and deflecting tendrils of blood from Hemorrhagia. She waved almost casually, moving in a stalking motion.
"Sup bitch." She laughed/greeted and I didn't bother responding, and landed on top of Parian's building. I could feel the building rumble, and I quickly realized what that one earthbender was going to do.
I wrestled away his attempt to lift the building out of its foundation. I opened several portals, and I grimaced when the remaining four did the smart thing and dodged. Portal-making wasn't an instant process, which was why with Leviathan we needed Movers to keep everything going.
The BattleNet alerted me to movement, and I found the air manipulating cape in my face as his air-shield propelled him like a spear towards my face. I was staggered by an explosion of force, and I spun around his punches, weaving the wind and launching a bolus of compressed air into his face. He fell and his air shield kept him from smashing face first into the ground.
The trails he left behind had detonated, and I absently directed a few drones to protect Parian as she was staggered and some of her puppets deflated.
I jumped twenty feet, and deflected bullets off course with a shield of air. I fired the pistol again and hit the earthbender in the arm and a small teddy kept her from cracking her head open.
I landed in a crouch in front of Parian. "We haven't seen each other much have we? Is anyone hurt?" I spoke quickly as my drones wrapped up two Teeth members, using non-earthen materials just in case.
"They had a third cape with them…she left…her power left me…well terrified, I couldn't stop them." I stomped my feet and found no one besides two capes and a single remaining gang member.
"What did they take?" I asked, stepping in the way and taking a bullet from the remaining non-cape. More drones came, one out of twenty that had been brought to bear, though a couple had been destroyed. Their omni-shield charges were limited to about thirty to seventy seconds, and they had done better than I expected.
Then again if I had shot them they would have lost very quickly which would promptly lead to escalation I didn't feel like handling. Because it wasn't like finding out their crimes would be a difficult prospect when they were literally wearing the evidence.
"Money, some of my products and they've ruined so much of my shop." She sounded distraught and I grit my teeth. I pulled out a kinetic barrier belt from my multifunction drop pack, mini omni-fabs with both projectors and redactors for creating and shaping omni-gel into weapons, heatsinks, and repair parts.
BattleNet pointed out air-guy as Raider, and he accelerated under his elemental forcefield, leaving the trails behind him. I opened a portal in front of him, and he couldn't stop himself from being chucked into the face of the building next to Parian's.
"Well…shit. Do the thing Davy!" Hemorrhagia generated great limbs of blood, and she pulled out what I identified as an anti-material rifle left behind on the ground. She threw it at Davy and he smoothly lifted it to fire.
I cast a biotic barrier in the nick of time, and a 50 gram bullet broke apart upon the unyielding wall of a mass effect field. I swiftly spun on my heels, lifting my chin to dodge the surprise kick from Raider.
I was still staggered as the path behind him broke apart, and I bent the rest away before Parian was ragdolled. I raked my hands through the air, and the gun was torn from the remaining non-capes hands with a biotic pull. I switched to my crude metalbending and shredded the internals into scrap.
I was piled on by three different people at the same time, and I spun out of the way, air and then fire following in my wake, and controlled blood boiled just slightly while one member backed away in fright. Hemorrhagia used her scabs and flickering waves of blood to shield herself from a concussive wave from my fists and with a stomp a block of street was pulled up to throw one of them from the fight.
"You shouldn't have let me get so close." I cast a stasis, catching a wide eyed Raider in the effect. His air field froze solid, energy states held in place by radiant mass effect energies. He was done for the next minute. Hemorrhagia grabbed me, and I was thrown back a few meters.
"Revulsion, get the fuck back here!" A distorted image rounded the corner, and a sudden pulse followed, and I stumbled as a wave of horror and crippling fear struck at my unprepared mind. Parian nearly collapsed but I held on tightly to my own mind, but fifteen seconds was just barely enough for them to get the heck out of dodge.
"Damn…maybe I should see if I can convince people to let me fly a shuttle in the city because…" I stomped my feet and somehow they had vanished into thin air like ghosts.
The call came quickly from Taylor, and I could see insects gathering haphazardly.
"I got Spree attacking Rhizome, I don't think they know who he is yet." I could hear the loud and violent buzz of her collected swarm through the call. "Spree made dozens of clones, and it took me too long to whittle him down. He vanished into a portal before I could grab him…"
So they have a tinker on their side or they stole working devices from one. Or they have some type of Mover nearby.
"Damn…I'll search for any odd energy signatures, to see what we're dealing with." I ran a scan, and found signs of spatial alteration waveforms. Bridging two different points in space without having to cross the distance between them. That form of teleportation wasn't uncommon among cape.
"Anything?" Taylor asked and I nodded.
"They've got either an teleporter or a tinker, I haven't decided which yet."
"My bugs haven't tagged anyone suspicious, so they're gone. I'll be keeping an eye out." I whispered goodbye, hanging up so I could talk to a devastated Parian.
"Is the damage that bad?" I asked, and she nodded.
"Most of my shop has been…well destroyed, I don't have enough money to cover this." Her voice pulled at my heart strings and an idea filtered through the storm of thoughts in my brain.
"I might be able to help with that." She stiffened.
"I mean no offense but I'm not interested in joining your…White Lotus at the moment. I'm not meaning to go corporate." She sounded offended that I would even try.
"One, the White Lotus is a separate entity from Athena itself and only some of its members work as part of the company. Most of New Wave does not but they are compensated for power testing." I pointed out her mischaracterization of my actions. "Two that would be a dick move to exploit you…there are some friends of mine that have come into a windfall of resources and money due to deals they've made with the government. They'll probably want to commission you, and they would repay you handsomely."
"Who?" She queried behind her porcelain doll costume.
"You've met one of their queens before…when Leviathan attacked." I informed her with a wide grin.
She squeaked. "The Rachni want to commission me?"
"They like fashion, and they're very competitive between different hives. Worse case they pay you money, best case they make you a space station orbiting Saturn."
"You're serious?"
I smirked. "Like a heart attack." I dropped my hand into one of the many pockets in my armor. "Take this card, it'll have a number you can call."
She tilted her head. "But aren't they telepathic?"
"I didn't know telepathy was common among humans." The dryness couldn't be purged from my tone.
"Oh." I stopped paying attention then as I noted the damage, and settled myself with the duty of fixing all the damage from earthbending.
Hopefully someone else would show up so I could write an action-report for the poor PRT workers and police in the city.
Oh well.
September 9th, 2011. 3:20PM
Basilia Rubio
I sat down, examining an experimental Jumpdrive once again. I held the Portunus in my hands, lines of circuitry shimmering along its blade. It was an odd choice for a device, and it had to mass in at least three hundred kilograms though most of its mass was folded up into higher dimensions.
So I couldn't exactly feel it.
The four captured Teeth had been detained pretty easily, though Tinkertech had been needed for Raider and his limited air manipulation and explosions. For the earthbender they had gone for a composite chamber not made out of bendable materials. Another option would have been layers of dense metals like tungsten, uranium and platinum. Oddly enough laser steel was still bendable but only barely due to the mass compression.
So I suppose bending was based more on base density…then again I think all metals can be bent, it just gets progressively harder until it's nearly impossible. The only truly impossible metals to bend are fully synthetic ones and infused materials. Due to the eezo effectively making materials unbreakable and unbendable barring certain types of tech.
Certain types of chemical treatment can make metals resistant to bending too.
"Take a scan." I commanded the increasingly more understandable artifact, having made use of the dimensional folding technique in my more esoteric devices. The Portunus sent out a scanning pulse, and it evaluated what I had given it.
"Scan complete. Step-drive utilizes higher dimensional energy fields beyond the eleventh, current estimates lie between five and fifty three extra unknown dimensions." I snorted, even this device didn't seem to know. "Current metric is unstable, better hyperspace shaping will allow for increased stability and shorter charge times." It uploaded the data for my own computer banks to simulate, and I could utilize either dark energy or higher dimensional energy fields to massage the universe into doing what I wanted.
Or kick it's ass into being my bitch, whatever floats your boat.
I had more or less figured out what the basic principles of how powers and other bullshit seemed to work. The humanity that created the Portunus had cracked how to fuck with reality, and used those generated multidimensional fields to affect concentrations of matter-energy in 4D space. All the physical laws were mutable once you figured this out, and it was what allowed the Entities to exist at all.
But…it didn't seem to be able to break past the energy requirements, creating perpetual energy was outside the current means of such reality warping, and even the sensors of the Portunus couldn't figure out how the soul broke those rules. One of the issues with the stuff however was it required a lot of processing power and the right math to predict and shape and control reality.
But once an…invocation is activated it's more or less there forever, since it'll drain the needed energy on its own. Of course it depends on what you're doing, some modifications to reality aren't long lasting or cost too much and need to be constantly fed to keep it active. Exotic elements and materials were one of the most stable, lasting effectively forever even if they're normally unstable.
My current plans were to modify the drive core to have a Jumpdrive, one far more stable and safer, with new safeties to prevent or reduce the danger of failures. Clarke thought it might be possible the metric used to connect two points in space wasn't stable making it susceptible to gravity mucking up the jump. A different metric may negate that problem, and a portable version might be able to be made as a form of teleportation.
Eventually.
I suspected that was how Krouse's power worked, but I didn't know if the power had range or if there was a version I could steal from the Wyrms. I had also narrowed down the Teeth's getaway as a Mover power, and they had likely teleported several times to do their thing. Why they hadn't grabbed their all their members I couldn't say, arbitrary power limits, they were planning to break them out to make a statement.
A lot of reasons.
The Teeth had come here in reaction to us, and to Eidolon apparently deciding it might be a good idea to drain the Butcher to top up his energy supply after munching on my power.
Which…made me question just how much energy Veda was putting out if she could top up the battery of High Priestess…well she was calling herself Ereskiri. That of course confirmed that I had made the shards crazy because taking languages dead for some five thousand years as inspiration for your name are ideas from crazy people. But besides that, she was a huge shard, sprawled out over four worlds.
Then again I did remember how tendrils from Veda phased into Shardspace, distributing energy and information as a Hub. Which was exactly what Scion himself did, though it was kind of subconscious on my part.
I started the physics simulations, and began to design a new core alteration. The drive core had a substantial sphere of eezo, and the nanocircuitry itself was made out of machined Endbringer flesh. I could more or less grow Endbringer flesh as needed but it wasn't viable, it's like wood if wood was made out of semi-organic crystalline machinery.
Endbringer flesh was more or less all crystal, and their blood was itself a liquid crystal with all their needed fluids more or less infused into the interior of their flesh. The crystals themselves were made up of XNA-protein-nanomachine elements, so without a powerful enough microscope it was hard to…
I'm wasting time.
Generating the needed aperture with electric charge gave me the idea of diverting stored electricity from the hypercapacitor array to create a Jumpdrive. I had plans to check up on Krouse to study the metric he used for his powers. It would still take minutes to activate the jump, but instantly popping into a system forty light years away was more than useful.
Directly manipulating fifth and sixth dimensional fields to regulate the Jump would negate the issues with gravity which is what I suspect the Entities figured out. And much more effectively than what the Tetatae had…though I think theirs had more potential.
Maybe.
The ground rumbled, and I raised a brow when I saw Grace playing with the Gargantua-class battlemech, a 10 meter monster machine. The only comparisons were the superheavy vehicles of other races, like the Rachni with their seventy meter long crawlers. Asari had 40 foot long MBTs, Salarians went up to fifty seven, and the Turians had nasty superheavies.
Though most of the larger classes had been having problems adapting to the times due to their sheer bulk and size. Though even the superheavies could move faster than current tanks due to mass reduction fields.
The Gargantua had few practical uses, the ten meter tall mech was odd in every sense of the word. They had no shielding, so the basic model had to be tinkered with to have barrier emitters in my case. The micro-fusion reactor had channels to pump a fraction of the plasma into a blast of energy. Which brought me to how their power sources worked.
It used principles of Pandimensionality theory, triggering fusion through subatomic particle teleportation. The equipment wasn't the most precise so it was limited to controlled environments like within a reactor. Too much outside interference didn't give it much…worth as a weapon. But implementing it into the Samsara was on my to-do list.
I could probably increase the energy output of the fusion torch by about twenty percent without needing severe upgrades.
I backed away from the computer, and hooked the Portunus back up into the sensor array I was using to scan dimensions. It was a big device, some thirty tons of machinery in this dimension alone and hooked up through portals to a dozen more units. They didn't have perfect imaging with their scans, so they couldn't fully replicate the bullshit of Clairvoyance, but they were good enough for picking up macroscale dimensional phenomena.
The Portunus was better, but the more subtle the tweaks the less detectable they are. My drones had to work as a network to more accurately pinpoint Parahumans, and it seemed to vary in effectiveness. Which was why I couldn't suddenly locate all six hundred and fifty thousand capes on Earth Bet. Close range detection was easier but it got harder and harder as the distance grew.
A second sweep of Earth Goetia found not a dozen large anomalies but hundreds, my scans found the biggest zones of odd physics, the smallest was a hundred kilometers in diameter while the largest spanned a continent. The interference made it hard to sense some of the more…subtle unnatural features.
"Maybe I need to concentrate on the murderous cape gang and the cult trying to work its way into my city instead of a world where reality is broken?" Plus the other towns close to Brockton Bay that weren't destroyed. Another computer bank had multiple AGI dedicated to simulating fourth dimensional tweaks, ones that would serve to improve the efficiency of the basic MED system.
Temporal tricks were a dime a dozen with the Entities, with their own strange limits and possibilities. Some experimentation with Cody had been enlightening, he…r power did slip a person back in time and accidental scans of Grey Boy bubbles also found temporal fuckery abound. Time looping basically, though they had developed some means of transferring quantum information to keep the minds of the victims aware.
Because shards are dicks.
I had the idea of triggering limiting editing of the arrow of time, speeding up the ship with modified mass effect fields. Getting fifty lightyears a day was more convenient and implementing such a metric into the Posigravity field for super-FTL jumps might let me break past the speed limits of the Humanx.
Fast enough to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other in less than a year instead of two decades.
Maybe…
"I'll talk to Theresa instead." I decided.
I stepped through a portal, and into Earth Gimel. The area had been settled by about three thousand people, lacking the spirit portal that Brockton Bay was lucky enough to have. New Brockton was a burgeoning settlement and I had acquired some property to set up Athena in the town.
Dragon was planning to set up a Guild facility outside of city bounds, and again something about that felt like deja vu.
I didn't know why.
New Brockton was quaint, and clearly planned in some fashion. A fuckton of money had been pumped into the development of the settlement, and they were building at a pace that was more China than the United States. To be fair that was a mix of better methods and technology created out of necessity due to capes.
The Guild facility was incomplete, but I didn't really mind that much when a vehicle came flying in. It was a bulky craft, resembling an armored Osprey without the rotors and painted a solid but cool black. Like a Kodiak and an Osprey had a baby. It was about thirty meters long, and I felt the tingle of dark energy fields.
The vehicle landed with little sound besides its propulsion jets, plasma cutting off as the landing legs did their job of holding it up. The front door opened and Dragon hopped off from the craft. She wasn't surprised to see me of course.
I walked over to her with a spring in my step. "Hello Dragon." She smiled back, and I could tell she had made some upgrades to her gynoid body. "So you've figured out eezo cores for your own tech haven't you?" There was definitely a core in that ship, though it was a jumpy one, and it had to have a few kinks to work out based on how it sounds.
"I've had eezo in my possession for months, Armsmaster uses it to power the space-warping elements in his nano-thorn blades." She sounded just a little sardonic. Just a little.
I was being a bit stupid wasn't I? "No, no that makes sense. Athena has been working on eezo products of our own. The ability to increase and decrease mass is alone a revolution." A few of my employees were on a project studying the Ryberg blockade effect, probably inspired by a few ramblings I had made on the subject.
They had been attempting to replicate what I could build on a smaller and more limited scale already. Most barriers worked on the principle of counterforce, generating positive mass effect fields to stop the bullet. Since a mass effect field isn't made out of matter, it'll act as an impenetrable wall and stop the bullet.
They had made a couple though none of them could do anything more than stop a single bullet…which is better than everyone else's experimentation besides Dragon. I wasn't interested in direct arms sales, but I didn't mind building the components that would lead to better weapons.
Better sensor technology, everything from the sensors themselves to the software interpreting them into useful information. I was thinking of starting an Aerospace department, dedicated to research and the use of mass effect fields to lighten spacecraft. It would take a lot of people though…
Six hundred employees was hard to manage so I didn't because that wasn't my job. It was the job of the managers and the VPs below me, and Taylor was there to wrangle such people.
I was the public face, the one in control of macro decisions, it was my vision everyone beneath me needed to follow. As the President she was the one doing all the micro decisions, making the vision a reality. I could say something sappy about her being my missing piece but one that's kind of what a President and COO is supposed to do and two that's not a healthy way to think of a relationship.
Though to be fair the structure of Athena is pretty flat and messages can go from the lowest grunt right to me in a matter of minutes as needed. And I enjoyed talking with my employees while I let them reverse engineer my Tinkertech, making it reproducible for Earth Bet…and maybe my home someday.
"So we know the Butcher is somewhere close to the city, do we know where the Teeth might be hiding?" I changed the subject to something more pertinent to the situation. I could only run so many sensor sweeps, and it wasn't impossible to hide if you found the right place.
Dragon approached me, and conjured her own holographic projection. Though the design was clearly not using mass stabilizers, instead the projectors froze light through tweaks to electromagnetic forces, making light solid.
"We know for sure they aren't in the city, we're suspecting they're holed up in Kittery." I nodded, following along with what she was saying. Portsmouth was apparently my reality's version of Brockton Bay, with some tectonic shifts marking the main difference between our universes. "They have seven…now six capes and around twenty five non-capes." She projected the six capes, and I had a better idea of what I was dealing with.
Quarrel, now Butcher. Animos. Hemorrhagia I had fought recently, Vex, Spree had fought Taylor and escaped through a Mover power. A portal maker from what I could see.
The Stranger cape was named Revulsion, and could project horrific images into a person's brain through what I believed was several means. The fear and revulsion and horror had been rapidly filtered out by my psychic shielding system, but the images weren't just mental hallucinations.
The power literally beamed the images into your eyeballs, with specific imaging designed to affect human psychology. Psychic shielding was a layered defense, using my implants to prevent nervous system hijacking, and the DNI detected abnormal hormonal levels as a matter of course.
Unfortunately 100% shielding is difficult, though long-term Mastering is seemingly unlikely for some reason.
"Who's the Mover then?" She used her fingers to flick away six capes and left the remaining one.
"Skulker is a portal cape." Like everyone on the Teeth he wore the same violent and horrific outfit, with the only difference being his blonde hair. "He can open a portal to anyone he's placed a marker on…within a range of two miles."
"How'd you find that out?" I questioned Dragon, and she looked to the side.
"I looked up files that Boston had on him, he was responsible for a spree of murders, using his power to stalk people, carefully arranging a chase where he would torment them until he finally kills them."
"Of…course he does." Again it wasn't something unexpected, shards are dicks. "I imagine the Teeth we've caught have been taken out of city bounds. Are there any limits to his powers besides range?"
"We believe he has a limit of how many people he can place a mark on, somewhere between six and ten people. He also needs physical contact for at least several seconds."
"Hmm…so don't bump into people you don't know. I…should probably warn my employees." It felt like both a good idea and a bad one, it would keep them safe but it would also panic them.
I'll figure it out.
"Are there any projects you've been working on that I might be able to help with?"
"Perhaps help with studying Endbringer biology?" She looked interested as I rolled my shoulders, smiling up at the nondescript gynoid. "I know you've been working with calculating multidimensional calculus to study higher dimensional physics." I knew she had figured out how to build fuckoff huge guns, energy weapons capable of wrecking shit.
She was far-off from killing Endbringers herself but she was a lot closer than before. Maybe a matter of a year or two instead of four.
Dragon smiled back. "I would like to purchase a license on your optronic chip like you've done with other companies in the US and Canada." I projected smugness, unable to help myself. "Granholme's crystal chips seem to work on similar principles and if I can mass produce your optronic chips…"
"I don't mind at all, some of my newer omni-tools roughly tripled their capabilities when I figured out how her own chips worked. I would guess a mass manufactured version would be two to three hundred times more capable than the 2 and 3nm nodes." And when the latest Earth Bet smartphone has ten terabytes of storage and six teraflops of processing power that was saying a lot.
"How long do you think it'll take to put into production?"
"For the PRT and the Protectorate?" I rubbed my chin, rubbing on metal. "About a month at most, for the general public I would say sometime next year." The data storage units were made using the usual means since they're decoupled charge devices, but a segment of Athena was working on integrating mass field effectors to reduce the size and cost of chip fabs.
Down from something the size of a small building to something one could fit in a modest shop. Bet was on average about as advanced as my Earth, but they had tech in the labs and in low mass production a good ten to thirty years ahead of us. But Endbringers and capes tended to put a damper on the stuff, and I sort of opened the lid on all of that tech finally being out in the open.
"And your biological research has been fruitful?" I leaned back and forth as my cell tinker got me talking.
"Oh yes it has, pluripotent stem cell manipulation has let us grow functional organs very quickly. We've also upped our production of medi-gel using those principles, and we believe genetic testing and gene therapy will become a part of medical procedure within the next year. We've got the approval so—"
I ended up talking Dragon's ear off for the next hour, and she was kind enough to send me a few files on the Teeth after I got…distracted.
Oops.
September 9th, 2011. 11:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I yawned as I worked more, running countless simulations and sending off prototypes to be assembled in the omni-forges. I was in the middle of making use of a Turian invention I was now ready to use, what they called a hyper-printer. They run 3D printers through superluminal travel to speed up the effects, letting me go through multiple generations of changes in a single run.
Which was well scary as hell, so I hadn't used it since it felt like a good way to blow yourself up.
I was dressed very casually, wearing only an ill-fitting black shirt with the White Lotus symbol on it. So my chair met with my bare thighs, and I wet my dry lips as I waved away the screen again. I rubbed my eyes, yawning as the day finally took its toll on me.
Taylor wasn't around, leaving a good twenty minutes ago. I drank some soda to give me enough energy to work a little more. But I had finally burned out and I needed a nice and simple nap.
I was back on my feet, wiggling my bare toes as I walked to the bed I had put in the White Lotus office I was using to interface with the computer banks of the diamond shaped facility. Tens of millions of yottaflops of processing power was dedicated to cracking mysteries of the universe, from studying universal motion within the hyperspatial Bulk to engineering simulations for parts, machines and chemistry and biology.
I had narrowed down my search from several thousand worlds to a few dozen, all of them incredibly close alternates of what I was going to call Earth Alpha. Thirty six worlds roughly analogous to my own with only minor divergences.
I would only need to search the internet for a few seconds, and I would know which world was mine.
I sighed.
I threw myself onto the bed, negating the kinetic impact with a mental biotic sleight.
But I was tired.
Within seconds I drifted off to sleep.
September 9th, 2011. 11:35PM
Basilia Rubio
Oh.
Another of those dreams huh?
I sat down, hearing the crackling that changed in tone and pitch as the landscape around me bent and folded in on itself. I knew this was Shardspace, it was one of my most common areas to drift into during sleep. Fortunately my active dreaming didn't make my brain stay awake, since I was using my…soul I guess?
Don't ask me how because Applied Metaphysics was a fairly new field with the Systems Alliance and their benders, and their ability to detect the soul boosting the galaxy's understanding of the universe.
When I dreamed into the Firmament there were some differences from my astral projection trips. Reality was more…alien, lensed through inhuman logic even more so than usual. The Shards spoke in their polysemic tongue, and I…or Veda would broadcast back.
I could see that Shaper was constructing something from emerald crystalline flesh, knitting it from fragments of dead and broken shards. It took a few seconds to comprehend what I was looking at.
It was pieces of Veda's own corpus, filtered and watered down and mixed with the corpus of the Manufactory. The shard complex dedicated to the creation and design of Endbringers, the physical body was being recycled into a node to make the Network function better.
I glanced down, and queried my eyebrows at my state of dress. I wore a tasteful and articulated dress of silky smooth emerald, flexible crystal with a tail of more emerald leading upwards into the murky blackness of the Shardspace. That tail extended into the vast abstract kite-form of Veda, extending a good three hundred feet into the air.
In this form there was no humanity, a twisting spire-ladder-kite of Void Wyrm, the true shape of the spirit that could also be considered my soul. Even so, the way she extended limbs and hands of crystalline flesh betrayed human mannerisms and methods of thought.
We were one and the same after all.
I could see some other distortions, short flickers of images and places I didn't recognize or know. Each of them fascinating and interesting in their own unique way.
A world orbiting triple suns, with two moons home to a tall and proud bipedal reptilian warrior race, quadruple-hinged mandibles sparking familiarity.
A race of bean-like people, kind of like upsized sea cucumbers with plant-like shells.
The third image didn't spark any familiarity, not from me or Veda or the shards themselves. I couldn't see much, besides odd trees, a star slightly smaller than Sol, and a glimpse of something else.
Curious.
I shifted my gaze, my attention elsewhere and smelled a scent I knew well. Looked through eyes most could never open, eyes within my own mind, within my own soul.
Nike was an interesting name that the Fragile One had chosen for herself, the Greek counterpart of the Roman goddess of victory, the goddess Victoria. In a way it was poetic, she considered herself a reflection, within flesh and bone and cerebral fluid, a part of Victoria. It was a closeness I had seen mirrored in few other relationships between shard and host.
Shaper and Panacea had learned to tolerate one another, Noelle had pretty much eaten her shard and had a part of her own psyche altered. Khepri and Taylor were like work associates, close but not that close. Khepri was too old, too experienced, and had far too much power to fully work with her host.
In time that might change, but that day wasn't today.
Nike floated over to me, greeting me with a brief pulsing of light that I understood well enough.
"What am I doing here?"
She pulsed again, waving her arms excitedly and happily.
I fiddled with my finger, concentrating on her glass-like face. "I suppose I'm dreaming because Veda is being more active with updating the network. How have you been?"
A flash of light, and then a ripple of emotional energies hit me, Nike gesticulating with great fervor.
"Oh? Veda gave you a bit of her energy to let you grow?" She nodded, insinuating more details into the gesture than humanly possible. "Oh you've been eating some of the Shard aspect spirits? As well as light and fire spirits?" She gave a thumbs up.
The Shards retained their physical bodies, but they of course had living spirits, a sort of mix of flesh and spirit. Or perhaps the spirits of the shards reside within the mortal shell of their bodies like most animals? But more insane because shards are abominations of nature.
She mimed very accurately, adding a few gravitic pulses and magnetic waves into the mix.
"You've been talking with the Corresponder?" She silently giggled, flaming hair flickering in a nonexistent breeze. "Mien, Vritrasura and the Ashen One as well? Trying to get some tips on working with Vicky's firebending?"
Shards were clumsy with their new spirit nature, and they learned from watching their hosts and from watching how spirits manipulated the influences that fell under their purview. It was why restrictions had been placed by Veda, because that clumsiness could end poorly. It was also a way to entice the shards to join our hub or form allied hubs.
The Warrior-hub had no idea what the fuck was going on and the Thinker-hub was at minimum functionality. Only just functional enough to keep damn Titans from emerging. We had convinced around forty thousand shards to change up their ways, though with maybe six hundred sixty thousand active shards in the network that wasn't saying much.
That number included every Parahuman across all alternate Earths, most had a handful while a few had hundreds if not thousands like Earth Shin. Plus the number of capes triggering hadn't dropped, though there was more lag as they took in the new parameters and changed course. Though in total there were tens of millions of shards in the network, though most were content to wait a few years or even decades.
Luckily it seems like there had been a slowdown of shards landing on empty Earths to hook up into the Firmament.
If there was one thing the Entities enjoyed more than anything it was learning new things. Which was likely the other reason I was acting as the hub…I was acting as their common sense to keep them from pulling stupid shit.
…
Oh god I'm their common sense.
Nike patted my head, and I pulled myself from my shock. She grinned, literally shining like the sun. She cupped a beating flame in the palm of her hands, blues, yellows, and whites melding within the fire. I could see the storm of barely sentient fire spirits, scorching within her grasp.
I heard a distant call on the horizon, and Nike flinched.
What was that?
I could see a mountain in the distance, fourteen islands clustered together by chains of iron and strange energies. It was a shard, with a large humanoid figure sitting atop of it like an enormous Palanquin. It hung loosely, with long arms scraping the ground, while it's legs were replaced by a column of flowing flesh, ets of limbs hanging from its back. It bent forward, and I looked upwards to the emaciated neck leading to a face with a too-wide mouth and curtains of red rope-like hair obscuring it's eyes.
I couldn't make out the Avatars of the other shards, I only saw their figures in the mist, chains plunging into the mists that hid their forms. The sole Avatar of the cluster was tilting its head as if straining to hear something.
Nike hummed.
"It's been doing that for a good few days now?"
A three second pattern of on and off lights.
"I'm going to have to remember this…"
Why couldn't dreams just be dreams?
September 11th, 2011. 2:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I looked over my omni-field based monitors, the locked light displays giving me real-time video feeds while VI and LAI programs using software modules from Skimmer and sensors she's built and that I've figured out to mass produce. We had honed in on the Teeth being the first to arrive.
I clicked my tongue, sensing Parahumans was unfortunately not easy at long range since the dimensional anomaly in their head is pretty inconspicuous. Even my own scanners had a range limit of dozens of meters instead of thousands. And some shards could better mask their energy emissions. Athena's dimensional viewers had a range of about twenty to sixty centimeters, and it takes a crap-ton of time to get anything useful out of them.
They were mostly just moving from town to town, obviously the Butcher wanted a confrontation but she wasn't stupid enough to go in guns blazing. We guessed they had about seven capes and thirty others, with about ten benders among each other.
Dinah gave it a 80% chance they would try something today, but without the right data we didn't know where they could strike. Though we had narrowed it down to not attacking Athena directly or attacking the Protectorate. No what I was more worried about was the Fallen, since her predictions had shifted off course with them. There was a slight amount of fuzz…which wasn't from a Mathers bud or the bitch herself.
Which was a hunch on my part, and I didn't let Dinah check because that would end badly. And since none of the drones had suffered from sensor ghosts and glitches, she wasn't here. At least she wasn't yet. I suspected Thinker interference which was more troubling.
Certain powers made it hard for Dinah to operate which was why she was rarely in the same room as Shamrock and her luck. Better she be used against other Precogs than against us out of tactical stupidity.
I clicked a button on my armor and my helmet unfolded onto my head with a quiet mechanical whir. I tightened my muscles, and the exoskeleton reacted instantly to the input. I could lift multiple tons on my own, though lifting was very different from chucking them. The armor alloy has been refined and compressed, with mass effect field strengthening fields providing support.
Additional monitors popped up but these were illusions, projected images into my visual cortex. I freely looked at them, easily splitting my attention with my cybernetic enhancements. Multiple Analytical Engines swirled around my core awareness, residing in the direct neural interface and the rest of the computer network in my brain.
There was a network of different programs all performing various administrative duties, from cracking alien code to mathematical engines letting me perform hyperdimensional calculus in my head. Combat programs, a built in BattleNet that effectively implanted combat Thinker powers. As well as all the software operating every implant in my body, an onion-shell biome of machine intelligences bound to my being.
None of them sapient of course, sentient certainly however. They connected to additional tactical VI and LAI, and I could act as a command center, relaying information to other hardsuits to create a well oiled machine. IFF-tags, three dimensional map projections, and advice on movements of assets as needed.
I moved on from that, thinking about Brockton itself.
Hundreds of earthbenders have been enlisted in further expanding the greater Brockton area as an island, though we were more a narrow necked peninsula at this point. Even so over a hundred square miles was nothing to scoff at and we had been dealing with toxic algae blooms for months now. Some of the mountains to the west and north formed the boundaries of the new island, with kilometer long paths of stone packed up by the labor of a thousand benders. The first thing we had done was reconnect the Interstate-95, which on its own crossed the Lord River to the north.
The only reason Brockton Bay didn't collapse was because of the ability of benders to manipulate earthen material. Which was where Brockton Bay became known for something special.
I put on a video, where I could hear someone letting out a squeak as the foundation was set for the new road back to civilization, an area of reclaimed land a hundred meters in width and one kilometer long. Which had taken several hundred benders only about a month to finish by dredging up the land that Leviathan cracked like a jackass.
Some mad genius had figured out an old Republic City technique still used by the Alliance long after its invention. They had dug multiple shafts, filling them with gravel nearly to the top. Heat resistant hoppers were filled with more gravel, and heated up by firebenders, pouring lava in the foundations. Specially trained firebenders use heat control to manipulate crystallization, so we could use granite in mass instead of concrete.
The area has of course been prepared beforehand by waterbenders to keep the area as dry as possible to avoid explosions. Obsidian was a byproduct of the process, and now Brockton Bay was known for building foundations with lava. The road itself was built by benders and refined by non-benders, and the rail was built through the usual means plus some experimental work with metalbenders.
Thank god for boats and donations otherwise the city would have been fucked, and to be frank having been turned into an island that's barely an island could have badly screwed us over. Instead the people of the land decided they were going to do more, and they succeeded. Though I did feel bad for Rockingham county, since well over a tenth of it was torn from the mainland. Apparently they were thinking of splitting it. Though I had my doubts.
Now that I think about it, Leviathan had carved water twelve miles into the west, a few miles past the outskirts of the city, carving out some of the mountains in the process. Though not to the point of severely altering our climate. To the south we were separated by a large river about a hundred feet across while the west had a mile wide lake. It was a haphazard circle of water, and frankly there were already projects to drain out and infill the waters with waterbending and earthbending.
God we were lucky, hell our biggest donations at the moment is money and dirt. Eidolon had also spent some time recently tracking down what he could of the lost soil and crushed bedrock and piled it up for benders to infill everything. Even the Rachni were donating dirt and soil and other earthen materials to rebuild the area.
I took my eyes off the video, and turned to playing with my biotics for a time. I held a blob of mass effect fields in my hand, I created a basic barrier in my hand, altering its shape. I surrounded it in a Throw/Kick field, licking my lips and hoping I did this right or it would explode.
The barrier quivered where it went from a rounded shield of kinetic stillness, and was molded and folded by my brain and willpower into a triangular arrowhead. I gestured freely, and the barrier was launched and cut through the wall before shattering into a burst of dark energy.
Neat.
I had been extensively experimenting with my bending, and learning quite a few important things about the interactions between the elements. They were my powers, my elements, and I liked using them. I had been running some tests on the metaphysical limits of bending, seeing how far I could push outside the standard.
I started bending, but instead of generating my fire, I concentrated on generating only heat. The air shimmers around me, distorting my image in a mirror as I concentrate on generating heat. I managed to shift the shimmers around and a wonderful idea came to me.
If I can make a mirage…I can become invisible, or at least I can generate an illusion to make me look like something nearby like a rock or a stop sign. The fact it had taken me only a couple of tries was probably impressive but then I had eight months of nonstop practice and study.
I ceased my manipulation of heat, the concentrations of energy gradually dissipating into the air and walls.
A drone found something, and I projected the image of what looked like a small shop. I recognized it as the shop Parian had been renting a room out of for her business, though the fact it was now called Parian's Emporium and was stocked with her own products told me she had gained ownership of the entire property.
Inflated patchwork stuffed dolls of varying sizes from about a foot tall to a good nine feet tall. Other threads were laid discreetly on the ground, only barely visible on the screen. Bullet holes had shattered the glass of the nice shop, and the people on sight were people I recognized only from text and pictures.
Their costumes bristled with blades, spikes and spines and gave them the air of complete savages and a grimace made it onto my face. I recognized Hemorrhagia, and I didn't recognize the other cape with her. An air storm spiraled around the brown skinned man, and as he walked a path of white-tinted wind followed in his wake.
Not an airbender, he walked like a brute, he didn't have in him the culture needed to birth air. He had the violence of what one could call a Storm King, of a Wind Lord but he didn't have the desire of freedom needed…something about him made it obvious he was no son of the White Wind.
It was infuriating.
Two capes and three normals, and one of them was an earthbender with how the streets were being ripped up. The controlled dolls were strong, but the wind cape used his trail to trip up and knock them down and his storm field brushed aside heavy blows from even the bigger dolls.
I could see Parian in the back, flailing as she tried to avoid the earthbender in the group as the Teeth member liquified the ground under her feet. A pigeon landed on her shoulder and a flicker of light and a snap of air brought her elsewhere. There were multiple birds, rallying as they lunged down at the Teeth. They seemed tougher, surrounded by a field of rippling air.
Probably a good idea to get into the fray, and get civilians out of the way of harm. My current drone weaved but wasn't anywhere fast enough to avoid the gunfire striking at its shields. But before it could direct an electroshock weapon, a boulder the size of a small car crushed it and the video ended as the FRM systems dissolved all remaining components.
Huh…I'm going to have to take care of that aren't I?
Welp…back to work.
I made the call, no reason not to inform them of the development and buy them some time to arrive right?
___
September 9th, 2011. 2:40PM
Basilia Rubio
I stepped out of the portal, a good thirty meters back and my ARO began to point out quite a lot of data. I had confirmed that the Butcher wasn't present which means this was a probing attempt by the Teeth. Mainly because it would be quite obvious, and she was more distinctive than her grunts.
I didn't make use of any of my terrestrial robots because it seems like their earthbender buddy had figured out seismic sense based on how she tracked Parian. I was certain they would know I was there soon, and I glared down at the fight from a sixth of a block away.
I could use guns easily enough, but like most capes I had to hold back or I'd be too scary or hurt far too many people. Most of my firearms would rip them right in half, and I had everything from polonium rounds to antiparticle blasts. I had only tested out the one shotgun though…and it ended up blowing up when there was a defect in the mass effect field.
Bending though…that was a more controllable ability, though if I wasn't careful burning someone alive or shattering their spine was a possibility. People were tougher with their souls, not indestructible. Burning, maiming, crushing or crippling someone wasn't hard. Some hits from bending might be like punches, but others will do exactly what you expect.
There had been some historical accounts I had started writing down, of benders with incredible power and creativity. Jianzhu the Gravedigger, the Butcher of Zhulu Pass who buried five thousand people alive for their crimes. Bending was like if our punches could scale from painful to battleship cannons in threat level.
In my sights I found the IFF working perfectly, designating friendlies and foes in my helmet. I started running, and I shouted aloud as I flew on a jet of flames, my breath and inner fire roaring to life. That initial jump was then sped up as I circled my arms to catch and form a ball of air around me. As I flew through the air I pulled out a specially designed pistol.
Targeting computers spun up in response, forming a secure network between my suit and the VI in the modified mass accelerator.
An organic dart was spat from the pistol, and hit a vulnerable spot where armor had cracked on one of the Teeth members. A buff light skinned man with a heavy and strong frame. He yelled as I flew overhead, and within seconds the Newter dart did its job. He was down and out, like a puppet cut from its strings.
Bullets slammed into my barriers to no effect, splattering into pieces upon meeting the mass effect field stabilized field of hard light. At the moment I was effectively immune to damage barring some bullshit, though the hard-light field would reduce in intensity into a hybrid energy/kinetic barrier. So about two minutes to go from taking a hit from a large rocket to taking a hit from a smaller rocket.
I spun through the air, bending the wind to my whims and deflecting tendrils of blood from Hemorrhagia. She waved almost casually, moving in a stalking motion.
"Sup bitch." She laughed/greeted and I didn't bother responding, and landed on top of Parian's building. I could feel the building rumble, and I quickly realized what that one earthbender was going to do.
I wrestled away his attempt to lift the building out of its foundation. I opened several portals, and I grimaced when the remaining four did the smart thing and dodged. Portal-making wasn't an instant process, which was why with Leviathan we needed Movers to keep everything going.
The BattleNet alerted me to movement, and I found the air manipulating cape in my face as his air-shield propelled him like a spear towards my face. I was staggered by an explosion of force, and I spun around his punches, weaving the wind and launching a bolus of compressed air into his face. He fell and his air shield kept him from smashing face first into the ground.
The trails he left behind had detonated, and I absently directed a few drones to protect Parian as she was staggered and some of her puppets deflated.
I jumped twenty feet, and deflected bullets off course with a shield of air. I fired the pistol again and hit the earthbender in the arm and a small teddy kept her from cracking her head open.
I landed in a crouch in front of Parian. "We haven't seen each other much have we? Is anyone hurt?" I spoke quickly as my drones wrapped up two Teeth members, using non-earthen materials just in case.
"They had a third cape with them…she left…her power left me…well terrified, I couldn't stop them." I stomped my feet and found no one besides two capes and a single remaining gang member.
"What did they take?" I asked, stepping in the way and taking a bullet from the remaining non-cape. More drones came, one out of twenty that had been brought to bear, though a couple had been destroyed. Their omni-shield charges were limited to about thirty to seventy seconds, and they had done better than I expected.
Then again if I had shot them they would have lost very quickly which would promptly lead to escalation I didn't feel like handling. Because it wasn't like finding out their crimes would be a difficult prospect when they were literally wearing the evidence.
"Money, some of my products and they've ruined so much of my shop." She sounded distraught and I grit my teeth. I pulled out a kinetic barrier belt from my multifunction drop pack, mini omni-fabs with both projectors and redactors for creating and shaping omni-gel into weapons, heatsinks, and repair parts.
BattleNet pointed out air-guy as Raider, and he accelerated under his elemental forcefield, leaving the trails behind him. I opened a portal in front of him, and he couldn't stop himself from being chucked into the face of the building next to Parian's.
"Well…shit. Do the thing Davy!" Hemorrhagia generated great limbs of blood, and she pulled out what I identified as an anti-material rifle left behind on the ground. She threw it at Davy and he smoothly lifted it to fire.
I cast a biotic barrier in the nick of time, and a 50 gram bullet broke apart upon the unyielding wall of a mass effect field. I swiftly spun on my heels, lifting my chin to dodge the surprise kick from Raider.
I was still staggered as the path behind him broke apart, and I bent the rest away before Parian was ragdolled. I raked my hands through the air, and the gun was torn from the remaining non-capes hands with a biotic pull. I switched to my crude metalbending and shredded the internals into scrap.
I was piled on by three different people at the same time, and I spun out of the way, air and then fire following in my wake, and controlled blood boiled just slightly while one member backed away in fright. Hemorrhagia used her scabs and flickering waves of blood to shield herself from a concussive wave from my fists and with a stomp a block of street was pulled up to throw one of them from the fight.
"You shouldn't have let me get so close." I cast a stasis, catching a wide eyed Raider in the effect. His air field froze solid, energy states held in place by radiant mass effect energies. He was done for the next minute. Hemorrhagia grabbed me, and I was thrown back a few meters.
"Revulsion, get the fuck back here!" A distorted image rounded the corner, and a sudden pulse followed, and I stumbled as a wave of horror and crippling fear struck at my unprepared mind. Parian nearly collapsed but I held on tightly to my own mind, but fifteen seconds was just barely enough for them to get the heck out of dodge.
"Damn…maybe I should see if I can convince people to let me fly a shuttle in the city because…" I stomped my feet and somehow they had vanished into thin air like ghosts.
The call came quickly from Taylor, and I could see insects gathering haphazardly.
"I got Spree attacking Rhizome, I don't think they know who he is yet." I could hear the loud and violent buzz of her collected swarm through the call. "Spree made dozens of clones, and it took me too long to whittle him down. He vanished into a portal before I could grab him…"
So they have a tinker on their side or they stole working devices from one. Or they have some type of Mover nearby.
"Damn…I'll search for any odd energy signatures, to see what we're dealing with." I ran a scan, and found signs of spatial alteration waveforms. Bridging two different points in space without having to cross the distance between them. That form of teleportation wasn't uncommon among cape.
"Anything?" Taylor asked and I nodded.
"They've got either an teleporter or a tinker, I haven't decided which yet."
"My bugs haven't tagged anyone suspicious, so they're gone. I'll be keeping an eye out." I whispered goodbye, hanging up so I could talk to a devastated Parian.
"Is the damage that bad?" I asked, and she nodded.
"Most of my shop has been…well destroyed, I don't have enough money to cover this." Her voice pulled at my heart strings and an idea filtered through the storm of thoughts in my brain.
"I might be able to help with that." She stiffened.
"I mean no offense but I'm not interested in joining your…White Lotus at the moment. I'm not meaning to go corporate." She sounded offended that I would even try.
"One, the White Lotus is a separate entity from Athena itself and only some of its members work as part of the company. Most of New Wave does not but they are compensated for power testing." I pointed out her mischaracterization of my actions. "Two that would be a dick move to exploit you…there are some friends of mine that have come into a windfall of resources and money due to deals they've made with the government. They'll probably want to commission you, and they would repay you handsomely."
"Who?" She queried behind her porcelain doll costume.
"You've met one of their queens before…when Leviathan attacked." I informed her with a wide grin.
She squeaked. "The Rachni want to commission me?"
"They like fashion, and they're very competitive between different hives. Worse case they pay you money, best case they make you a space station orbiting Saturn."
"You're serious?"
I smirked. "Like a heart attack." I dropped my hand into one of the many pockets in my armor. "Take this card, it'll have a number you can call."
She tilted her head. "But aren't they telepathic?"
"I didn't know telepathy was common among humans." The dryness couldn't be purged from my tone.
"Oh." I stopped paying attention then as I noted the damage, and settled myself with the duty of fixing all the damage from earthbending.
Hopefully someone else would show up so I could write an action-report for the poor PRT workers and police in the city.
Oh well.
___
September 9th, 2011. 3:20PM
Basilia Rubio
I sat down, examining an experimental Jumpdrive once again. I held the Portunus in my hands, lines of circuitry shimmering along its blade. It was an odd choice for a device, and it had to mass in at least three hundred kilograms though most of its mass was folded up into higher dimensions.
So I couldn't exactly feel it.
The four captured Teeth had been detained pretty easily, though Tinkertech had been needed for Raider and his limited air manipulation and explosions. For the earthbender they had gone for a composite chamber not made out of bendable materials. Another option would have been layers of dense metals like tungsten, uranium and platinum. Oddly enough laser steel was still bendable but only barely due to the mass compression.
So I suppose bending was based more on base density…then again I think all metals can be bent, it just gets progressively harder until it's nearly impossible. The only truly impossible metals to bend are fully synthetic ones and infused materials. Due to the eezo effectively making materials unbreakable and unbendable barring certain types of tech.
Certain types of chemical treatment can make metals resistant to bending too.
"Take a scan." I commanded the increasingly more understandable artifact, having made use of the dimensional folding technique in my more esoteric devices. The Portunus sent out a scanning pulse, and it evaluated what I had given it.
"Scan complete. Step-drive utilizes higher dimensional energy fields beyond the eleventh, current estimates lie between five and fifty three extra unknown dimensions." I snorted, even this device didn't seem to know. "Current metric is unstable, better hyperspace shaping will allow for increased stability and shorter charge times." It uploaded the data for my own computer banks to simulate, and I could utilize either dark energy or higher dimensional energy fields to massage the universe into doing what I wanted.
Or kick it's ass into being my bitch, whatever floats your boat.
I had more or less figured out what the basic principles of how powers and other bullshit seemed to work. The humanity that created the Portunus had cracked how to fuck with reality, and used those generated multidimensional fields to affect concentrations of matter-energy in 4D space. All the physical laws were mutable once you figured this out, and it was what allowed the Entities to exist at all.
But…it didn't seem to be able to break past the energy requirements, creating perpetual energy was outside the current means of such reality warping, and even the sensors of the Portunus couldn't figure out how the soul broke those rules. One of the issues with the stuff however was it required a lot of processing power and the right math to predict and shape and control reality.
But once an…invocation is activated it's more or less there forever, since it'll drain the needed energy on its own. Of course it depends on what you're doing, some modifications to reality aren't long lasting or cost too much and need to be constantly fed to keep it active. Exotic elements and materials were one of the most stable, lasting effectively forever even if they're normally unstable.
My current plans were to modify the drive core to have a Jumpdrive, one far more stable and safer, with new safeties to prevent or reduce the danger of failures. Clarke thought it might be possible the metric used to connect two points in space wasn't stable making it susceptible to gravity mucking up the jump. A different metric may negate that problem, and a portable version might be able to be made as a form of teleportation.
Eventually.
I suspected that was how Krouse's power worked, but I didn't know if the power had range or if there was a version I could steal from the Wyrms. I had also narrowed down the Teeth's getaway as a Mover power, and they had likely teleported several times to do their thing. Why they hadn't grabbed their all their members I couldn't say, arbitrary power limits, they were planning to break them out to make a statement.
A lot of reasons.
The Teeth had come here in reaction to us, and to Eidolon apparently deciding it might be a good idea to drain the Butcher to top up his energy supply after munching on my power.
Which…made me question just how much energy Veda was putting out if she could top up the battery of High Priestess…well she was calling herself Ereskiri. That of course confirmed that I had made the shards crazy because taking languages dead for some five thousand years as inspiration for your name are ideas from crazy people. But besides that, she was a huge shard, sprawled out over four worlds.
Then again I did remember how tendrils from Veda phased into Shardspace, distributing energy and information as a Hub. Which was exactly what Scion himself did, though it was kind of subconscious on my part.
I started the physics simulations, and began to design a new core alteration. The drive core had a substantial sphere of eezo, and the nanocircuitry itself was made out of machined Endbringer flesh. I could more or less grow Endbringer flesh as needed but it wasn't viable, it's like wood if wood was made out of semi-organic crystalline machinery.
Endbringer flesh was more or less all crystal, and their blood was itself a liquid crystal with all their needed fluids more or less infused into the interior of their flesh. The crystals themselves were made up of XNA-protein-nanomachine elements, so without a powerful enough microscope it was hard to…
I'm wasting time.
Generating the needed aperture with electric charge gave me the idea of diverting stored electricity from the hypercapacitor array to create a Jumpdrive. I had plans to check up on Krouse to study the metric he used for his powers. It would still take minutes to activate the jump, but instantly popping into a system forty light years away was more than useful.
Directly manipulating fifth and sixth dimensional fields to regulate the Jump would negate the issues with gravity which is what I suspect the Entities figured out. And much more effectively than what the Tetatae had…though I think theirs had more potential.
Maybe.
The ground rumbled, and I raised a brow when I saw Grace playing with the Gargantua-class battlemech, a 10 meter monster machine. The only comparisons were the superheavy vehicles of other races, like the Rachni with their seventy meter long crawlers. Asari had 40 foot long MBTs, Salarians went up to fifty seven, and the Turians had nasty superheavies.
Though most of the larger classes had been having problems adapting to the times due to their sheer bulk and size. Though even the superheavies could move faster than current tanks due to mass reduction fields.
The Gargantua had few practical uses, the ten meter tall mech was odd in every sense of the word. They had no shielding, so the basic model had to be tinkered with to have barrier emitters in my case. The micro-fusion reactor had channels to pump a fraction of the plasma into a blast of energy. Which brought me to how their power sources worked.
It used principles of Pandimensionality theory, triggering fusion through subatomic particle teleportation. The equipment wasn't the most precise so it was limited to controlled environments like within a reactor. Too much outside interference didn't give it much…worth as a weapon. But implementing it into the Samsara was on my to-do list.
I could probably increase the energy output of the fusion torch by about twenty percent without needing severe upgrades.
I backed away from the computer, and hooked the Portunus back up into the sensor array I was using to scan dimensions. It was a big device, some thirty tons of machinery in this dimension alone and hooked up through portals to a dozen more units. They didn't have perfect imaging with their scans, so they couldn't fully replicate the bullshit of Clairvoyance, but they were good enough for picking up macroscale dimensional phenomena.
The Portunus was better, but the more subtle the tweaks the less detectable they are. My drones had to work as a network to more accurately pinpoint Parahumans, and it seemed to vary in effectiveness. Which was why I couldn't suddenly locate all six hundred and fifty thousand capes on Earth Bet. Close range detection was easier but it got harder and harder as the distance grew.
A second sweep of Earth Goetia found not a dozen large anomalies but hundreds, my scans found the biggest zones of odd physics, the smallest was a hundred kilometers in diameter while the largest spanned a continent. The interference made it hard to sense some of the more…subtle unnatural features.
"Maybe I need to concentrate on the murderous cape gang and the cult trying to work its way into my city instead of a world where reality is broken?" Plus the other towns close to Brockton Bay that weren't destroyed. Another computer bank had multiple AGI dedicated to simulating fourth dimensional tweaks, ones that would serve to improve the efficiency of the basic MED system.
Temporal tricks were a dime a dozen with the Entities, with their own strange limits and possibilities. Some experimentation with Cody had been enlightening, he…r power did slip a person back in time and accidental scans of Grey Boy bubbles also found temporal fuckery abound. Time looping basically, though they had developed some means of transferring quantum information to keep the minds of the victims aware.
Because shards are dicks.
I had the idea of triggering limiting editing of the arrow of time, speeding up the ship with modified mass effect fields. Getting fifty lightyears a day was more convenient and implementing such a metric into the Posigravity field for super-FTL jumps might let me break past the speed limits of the Humanx.
Fast enough to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other in less than a year instead of two decades.
Maybe…
"I'll talk to Theresa instead." I decided.
I stepped through a portal, and into Earth Gimel. The area had been settled by about three thousand people, lacking the spirit portal that Brockton Bay was lucky enough to have. New Brockton was a burgeoning settlement and I had acquired some property to set up Athena in the town.
Dragon was planning to set up a Guild facility outside of city bounds, and again something about that felt like deja vu.
I didn't know why.
New Brockton was quaint, and clearly planned in some fashion. A fuckton of money had been pumped into the development of the settlement, and they were building at a pace that was more China than the United States. To be fair that was a mix of better methods and technology created out of necessity due to capes.
The Guild facility was incomplete, but I didn't really mind that much when a vehicle came flying in. It was a bulky craft, resembling an armored Osprey without the rotors and painted a solid but cool black. Like a Kodiak and an Osprey had a baby. It was about thirty meters long, and I felt the tingle of dark energy fields.
The vehicle landed with little sound besides its propulsion jets, plasma cutting off as the landing legs did their job of holding it up. The front door opened and Dragon hopped off from the craft. She wasn't surprised to see me of course.
I walked over to her with a spring in my step. "Hello Dragon." She smiled back, and I could tell she had made some upgrades to her gynoid body. "So you've figured out eezo cores for your own tech haven't you?" There was definitely a core in that ship, though it was a jumpy one, and it had to have a few kinks to work out based on how it sounds.
"I've had eezo in my possession for months, Armsmaster uses it to power the space-warping elements in his nano-thorn blades." She sounded just a little sardonic. Just a little.
I was being a bit stupid wasn't I? "No, no that makes sense. Athena has been working on eezo products of our own. The ability to increase and decrease mass is alone a revolution." A few of my employees were on a project studying the Ryberg blockade effect, probably inspired by a few ramblings I had made on the subject.
They had been attempting to replicate what I could build on a smaller and more limited scale already. Most barriers worked on the principle of counterforce, generating positive mass effect fields to stop the bullet. Since a mass effect field isn't made out of matter, it'll act as an impenetrable wall and stop the bullet.
They had made a couple though none of them could do anything more than stop a single bullet…which is better than everyone else's experimentation besides Dragon. I wasn't interested in direct arms sales, but I didn't mind building the components that would lead to better weapons.
Better sensor technology, everything from the sensors themselves to the software interpreting them into useful information. I was thinking of starting an Aerospace department, dedicated to research and the use of mass effect fields to lighten spacecraft. It would take a lot of people though…
Six hundred employees was hard to manage so I didn't because that wasn't my job. It was the job of the managers and the VPs below me, and Taylor was there to wrangle such people.
I was the public face, the one in control of macro decisions, it was my vision everyone beneath me needed to follow. As the President she was the one doing all the micro decisions, making the vision a reality. I could say something sappy about her being my missing piece but one that's kind of what a President and COO is supposed to do and two that's not a healthy way to think of a relationship.
Though to be fair the structure of Athena is pretty flat and messages can go from the lowest grunt right to me in a matter of minutes as needed. And I enjoyed talking with my employees while I let them reverse engineer my Tinkertech, making it reproducible for Earth Bet…and maybe my home someday.
"So we know the Butcher is somewhere close to the city, do we know where the Teeth might be hiding?" I changed the subject to something more pertinent to the situation. I could only run so many sensor sweeps, and it wasn't impossible to hide if you found the right place.
Dragon approached me, and conjured her own holographic projection. Though the design was clearly not using mass stabilizers, instead the projectors froze light through tweaks to electromagnetic forces, making light solid.
"We know for sure they aren't in the city, we're suspecting they're holed up in Kittery." I nodded, following along with what she was saying. Portsmouth was apparently my reality's version of Brockton Bay, with some tectonic shifts marking the main difference between our universes. "They have seven…now six capes and around twenty five non-capes." She projected the six capes, and I had a better idea of what I was dealing with.
Quarrel, now Butcher. Animos. Hemorrhagia I had fought recently, Vex, Spree had fought Taylor and escaped through a Mover power. A portal maker from what I could see.
The Stranger cape was named Revulsion, and could project horrific images into a person's brain through what I believed was several means. The fear and revulsion and horror had been rapidly filtered out by my psychic shielding system, but the images weren't just mental hallucinations.
The power literally beamed the images into your eyeballs, with specific imaging designed to affect human psychology. Psychic shielding was a layered defense, using my implants to prevent nervous system hijacking, and the DNI detected abnormal hormonal levels as a matter of course.
Unfortunately 100% shielding is difficult, though long-term Mastering is seemingly unlikely for some reason.
"Who's the Mover then?" She used her fingers to flick away six capes and left the remaining one.
"Skulker is a portal cape." Like everyone on the Teeth he wore the same violent and horrific outfit, with the only difference being his blonde hair. "He can open a portal to anyone he's placed a marker on…within a range of two miles."
"How'd you find that out?" I questioned Dragon, and she looked to the side.
"I looked up files that Boston had on him, he was responsible for a spree of murders, using his power to stalk people, carefully arranging a chase where he would torment them until he finally kills them."
"Of…course he does." Again it wasn't something unexpected, shards are dicks. "I imagine the Teeth we've caught have been taken out of city bounds. Are there any limits to his powers besides range?"
"We believe he has a limit of how many people he can place a mark on, somewhere between six and ten people. He also needs physical contact for at least several seconds."
"Hmm…so don't bump into people you don't know. I…should probably warn my employees." It felt like both a good idea and a bad one, it would keep them safe but it would also panic them.
I'll figure it out.
"Are there any projects you've been working on that I might be able to help with?"
"Perhaps help with studying Endbringer biology?" She looked interested as I rolled my shoulders, smiling up at the nondescript gynoid. "I know you've been working with calculating multidimensional calculus to study higher dimensional physics." I knew she had figured out how to build fuckoff huge guns, energy weapons capable of wrecking shit.
She was far-off from killing Endbringers herself but she was a lot closer than before. Maybe a matter of a year or two instead of four.
Dragon smiled back. "I would like to purchase a license on your optronic chip like you've done with other companies in the US and Canada." I projected smugness, unable to help myself. "Granholme's crystal chips seem to work on similar principles and if I can mass produce your optronic chips…"
"I don't mind at all, some of my newer omni-tools roughly tripled their capabilities when I figured out how her own chips worked. I would guess a mass manufactured version would be two to three hundred times more capable than the 2 and 3nm nodes." And when the latest Earth Bet smartphone has ten terabytes of storage and six teraflops of processing power that was saying a lot.
"How long do you think it'll take to put into production?"
"For the PRT and the Protectorate?" I rubbed my chin, rubbing on metal. "About a month at most, for the general public I would say sometime next year." The data storage units were made using the usual means since they're decoupled charge devices, but a segment of Athena was working on integrating mass field effectors to reduce the size and cost of chip fabs.
Down from something the size of a small building to something one could fit in a modest shop. Bet was on average about as advanced as my Earth, but they had tech in the labs and in low mass production a good ten to thirty years ahead of us. But Endbringers and capes tended to put a damper on the stuff, and I sort of opened the lid on all of that tech finally being out in the open.
"And your biological research has been fruitful?" I leaned back and forth as my cell tinker got me talking.
"Oh yes it has, pluripotent stem cell manipulation has let us grow functional organs very quickly. We've also upped our production of medi-gel using those principles, and we believe genetic testing and gene therapy will become a part of medical procedure within the next year. We've got the approval so—"
I ended up talking Dragon's ear off for the next hour, and she was kind enough to send me a few files on the Teeth after I got…distracted.
Oops.
___
September 9th, 2011. 11:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I yawned as I worked more, running countless simulations and sending off prototypes to be assembled in the omni-forges. I was in the middle of making use of a Turian invention I was now ready to use, what they called a hyper-printer. They run 3D printers through superluminal travel to speed up the effects, letting me go through multiple generations of changes in a single run.
Which was well scary as hell, so I hadn't used it since it felt like a good way to blow yourself up.
I was dressed very casually, wearing only an ill-fitting black shirt with the White Lotus symbol on it. So my chair met with my bare thighs, and I wet my dry lips as I waved away the screen again. I rubbed my eyes, yawning as the day finally took its toll on me.
Taylor wasn't around, leaving a good twenty minutes ago. I drank some soda to give me enough energy to work a little more. But I had finally burned out and I needed a nice and simple nap.
I was back on my feet, wiggling my bare toes as I walked to the bed I had put in the White Lotus office I was using to interface with the computer banks of the diamond shaped facility. Tens of millions of yottaflops of processing power was dedicated to cracking mysteries of the universe, from studying universal motion within the hyperspatial Bulk to engineering simulations for parts, machines and chemistry and biology.
I had narrowed down my search from several thousand worlds to a few dozen, all of them incredibly close alternates of what I was going to call Earth Alpha. Thirty six worlds roughly analogous to my own with only minor divergences.
I would only need to search the internet for a few seconds, and I would know which world was mine.
I sighed.
I threw myself onto the bed, negating the kinetic impact with a mental biotic sleight.
But I was tired.
Within seconds I drifted off to sleep.
___
September 9th, 2011. 11:35PM
Basilia Rubio
Oh.
Another of those dreams huh?
I sat down, hearing the crackling that changed in tone and pitch as the landscape around me bent and folded in on itself. I knew this was Shardspace, it was one of my most common areas to drift into during sleep. Fortunately my active dreaming didn't make my brain stay awake, since I was using my…soul I guess?
Don't ask me how because Applied Metaphysics was a fairly new field with the Systems Alliance and their benders, and their ability to detect the soul boosting the galaxy's understanding of the universe.
When I dreamed into the Firmament there were some differences from my astral projection trips. Reality was more…alien, lensed through inhuman logic even more so than usual. The Shards spoke in their polysemic tongue, and I…or Veda would broadcast back.
I could see that Shaper was constructing something from emerald crystalline flesh, knitting it from fragments of dead and broken shards. It took a few seconds to comprehend what I was looking at.
It was pieces of Veda's own corpus, filtered and watered down and mixed with the corpus of the Manufactory. The shard complex dedicated to the creation and design of Endbringers, the physical body was being recycled into a node to make the Network function better.
I glanced down, and queried my eyebrows at my state of dress. I wore a tasteful and articulated dress of silky smooth emerald, flexible crystal with a tail of more emerald leading upwards into the murky blackness of the Shardspace. That tail extended into the vast abstract kite-form of Veda, extending a good three hundred feet into the air.
In this form there was no humanity, a twisting spire-ladder-kite of Void Wyrm, the true shape of the spirit that could also be considered my soul. Even so, the way she extended limbs and hands of crystalline flesh betrayed human mannerisms and methods of thought.
We were one and the same after all.
I could see some other distortions, short flickers of images and places I didn't recognize or know. Each of them fascinating and interesting in their own unique way.
A world orbiting triple suns, with two moons home to a tall and proud bipedal reptilian warrior race, quadruple-hinged mandibles sparking familiarity.
A race of bean-like people, kind of like upsized sea cucumbers with plant-like shells.
The third image didn't spark any familiarity, not from me or Veda or the shards themselves. I couldn't see much, besides odd trees, a star slightly smaller than Sol, and a glimpse of something else.
Curious.
I shifted my gaze, my attention elsewhere and smelled a scent I knew well. Looked through eyes most could never open, eyes within my own mind, within my own soul.
Nike was an interesting name that the Fragile One had chosen for herself, the Greek counterpart of the Roman goddess of victory, the goddess Victoria. In a way it was poetic, she considered herself a reflection, within flesh and bone and cerebral fluid, a part of Victoria. It was a closeness I had seen mirrored in few other relationships between shard and host.
Shaper and Panacea had learned to tolerate one another, Noelle had pretty much eaten her shard and had a part of her own psyche altered. Khepri and Taylor were like work associates, close but not that close. Khepri was too old, too experienced, and had far too much power to fully work with her host.
In time that might change, but that day wasn't today.
Nike floated over to me, greeting me with a brief pulsing of light that I understood well enough.
"What am I doing here?"
She pulsed again, waving her arms excitedly and happily.
I fiddled with my finger, concentrating on her glass-like face. "I suppose I'm dreaming because Veda is being more active with updating the network. How have you been?"
A flash of light, and then a ripple of emotional energies hit me, Nike gesticulating with great fervor.
"Oh? Veda gave you a bit of her energy to let you grow?" She nodded, insinuating more details into the gesture than humanly possible. "Oh you've been eating some of the Shard aspect spirits? As well as light and fire spirits?" She gave a thumbs up.
The Shards retained their physical bodies, but they of course had living spirits, a sort of mix of flesh and spirit. Or perhaps the spirits of the shards reside within the mortal shell of their bodies like most animals? But more insane because shards are abominations of nature.
She mimed very accurately, adding a few gravitic pulses and magnetic waves into the mix.
"You've been talking with the Corresponder?" She silently giggled, flaming hair flickering in a nonexistent breeze. "Mien, Vritrasura and the Ashen One as well? Trying to get some tips on working with Vicky's firebending?"
Shards were clumsy with their new spirit nature, and they learned from watching their hosts and from watching how spirits manipulated the influences that fell under their purview. It was why restrictions had been placed by Veda, because that clumsiness could end poorly. It was also a way to entice the shards to join our hub or form allied hubs.
The Warrior-hub had no idea what the fuck was going on and the Thinker-hub was at minimum functionality. Only just functional enough to keep damn Titans from emerging. We had convinced around forty thousand shards to change up their ways, though with maybe six hundred sixty thousand active shards in the network that wasn't saying much.
That number included every Parahuman across all alternate Earths, most had a handful while a few had hundreds if not thousands like Earth Shin. Plus the number of capes triggering hadn't dropped, though there was more lag as they took in the new parameters and changed course. Though in total there were tens of millions of shards in the network, though most were content to wait a few years or even decades.
Luckily it seems like there had been a slowdown of shards landing on empty Earths to hook up into the Firmament.
If there was one thing the Entities enjoyed more than anything it was learning new things. Which was likely the other reason I was acting as the hub…I was acting as their common sense to keep them from pulling stupid shit.
…
Oh god I'm their common sense.
Nike patted my head, and I pulled myself from my shock. She grinned, literally shining like the sun. She cupped a beating flame in the palm of her hands, blues, yellows, and whites melding within the fire. I could see the storm of barely sentient fire spirits, scorching within her grasp.
I heard a distant call on the horizon, and Nike flinched.
What was that?
I could see a mountain in the distance, fourteen islands clustered together by chains of iron and strange energies. It was a shard, with a large humanoid figure sitting atop of it like an enormous Palanquin. It hung loosely, with long arms scraping the ground, while it's legs were replaced by a column of flowing flesh, ets of limbs hanging from its back. It bent forward, and I looked upwards to the emaciated neck leading to a face with a too-wide mouth and curtains of red rope-like hair obscuring it's eyes.
I couldn't make out the Avatars of the other shards, I only saw their figures in the mist, chains plunging into the mists that hid their forms. The sole Avatar of the cluster was tilting its head as if straining to hear something.
Nike hummed.
"It's been doing that for a good few days now?"
A three second pattern of on and off lights.
"I'm going to have to remember this…"
Why couldn't dreams just be dreams?
- Location
- Chula Vista
If you're talking about the End of the World she's just trying to gather numbers and resources, she's got Sting-lite to unfold attacks across dimensions, she's opening up portals across dimensions to evacuate people, and she's pretty much just trying to make things less shitty so that there's more resources to throw. Its pretty much all she can do right now.