- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ah makes sense still impressive that scion is not the only threat in this world and we still have more threats on the way
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Victories of the Soul [Worm/Avatar/ME/Multicrossover] [SI]
- Thread starter AEM
- Start date
- Crossover Mature Sci-Fi
Deviation 12.3
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.3
September 12th, 2011. 2:15PM
Basilia Rubio
"Hmm…" I flickered my enhanced vision, spending some time at the edge of the city. I ran scans and found Lost Garden rather easily, the landscape turning into an otherworldly forest. It was a depression slowly approaching us, and I knew Barrow was at the center of the area of reality shift with his creepy predatory cult business.
I was noting a theme with the kind of people deciding it was a good idea to encroach on us. More subtle teams who went after minor targets like the Red Handed, or the Elite with their political and cell bullshit.
Not that I was really going to turn out any different in that method of having people onboard. Except more obvious and honest?
Or crazy people who wanted to take the White Lotus down a peg or two. There was nothing in between, and I wondered if this was what the cities with the Triumvirate are like?
Probably not.
I didn't startle when a hand was placed on my armored shoulder. Charlotte had gone through a costume change, and I knew she was debating a name change on top of that. Terra was a little inaccurate for what her powers really were.
It was armor not dissimilar to Asari commando armor, and would be just as body conforming if it wasn't for its design as medium armor. A hardened plate system of strong Plasteel, which is basically incredibly strong plastic and compressed and reinforced ceramics. The costume was taking cues from the Dai Li of all people, since Charlotte had been looking overhead when I had been designing my armor.
The suit itself was completely black, though there were lines along the pauldrons and guards colored an Earth Kingdom yellow. But most of the suit wasn't visible beneath the robe, though with the way it was tied around her waist it was more a dress than a robe. It looked about the same as a Dai Li robe but not quite as long and with somewhat shorter sleeves that let one see the armored arms. But the EK symbol was replaced by the symbol of the White Lotus as was standard with many of our members.
It could be a simple pin or a bigass logo painted on their chest. I didn't really care. Even New Wave had taken to it with a simple pin, and everyone in the team had omni-tools to facilitate easy communication across interstellar distances.
She unfortunately couldn't wear the hat, but did have a cool helmet I had modified to be a little friendlier. It was mostly non-silicon glass like Quarian helmets, and could fold back like my own helmet. The sides of the helmet had been painted by Sveta, intriguing swirls of sand that almost looked real, and the helmet glass was clear enough to let most people see her face besides her mask of course.
Her armored gloves had stone sticking to them, obviously a result of my mentionings of the Dai Li. Though why she decided she liked the style of a mind-bending secret police force I had no idea.
"Are you okay?" Her concern was touching but I was fine, at least mostly.
Probably.
"Just a little…worried, the Teeth have been getting a little more bold." They hadn't succeeded in breaking out their compatriots, since they had been immediately shipped out of range of their new Mover on a PRT VTOL vehicle. But they still had six capes and twenty five other members.
"I…I'm not going to say we shouldn't worry, but we're a team, we'll watch each other's backs." She looked so certain of herself, clenching her fist. Charlotte had evolved from the meek girl she had been at the start, though I knew she was always going to prefer the calmer lifestyle offered by the White Lotus.
You didn't have to fight, didn't have to participate in the game of cops and robbers that kept the precarious balance. At the moment we had twenty seven capes, and supposedly a fourth might join our branch in Baltimore.
We didn't go out alone, alternating partners when we did patrols, and what was left of New Wave did their own thing since Panacea didn't care about patrols and Vicky was with us.
There was a nearby explosion, and I suddenly felt a person through my feet only a short distance away. My helmet detected a burst of heat, and Charlotte grabbed me and launched the both of us from the metallic roof as it was twisted by her bending. Even so we rolled through the air as stone arrows swerved and met the barriers of my suit. I was grateful for the sensor upgrades to let armor detect slower moving projectiles. Slapping them aside with telekinetic force.
Not that a stone arrow would have pierced through an inch of armor tough enough to bounce hypersonic rounds.
"It's…" I growled as I generated a pull towards the ground, slamming my feet into the roof of a modest warehouse. I couldn't help but feel my eyebrows twitch when I saw who had decided to interrupt our patrol.
"The Butcher…I thought you'd be taller." The murderous cape tilted her head, and I didn't flinch when I heard the odd whispers and screams spinning around her form. Her shard took a more esoteric form in my vision, a roiling cloud of crystals, faces popping in and out of their reflective surfaces.
Well that's disturbing.
"And I thought you'd be more glowy." She sniped back, fingers curling around what I identified as a Gatling gun. A portal opened beneath her feet and she teleported, and I entered a biotic charge to dodge her entry back into reality. An explosion detonated where I had been, and I already had help coming.
"Sorry for the disappointment." I was of course being insincere, and knew I had to be careful here. While I had the suspicion that trying to possess me would end with the Butcher shard exploding, the others didn't have the same defense. As shards they still had vulnerabilities, simply because of their biology.
Then again I rarely used my shamanistic abilities against shards, with the sole exception of that one case.
I didn't have time to think before the Butcher charged at me, and I saw that Charlotte was currently busy with Vex, the empty space between them becoming filled with his forcefields. I opened a portal beneath his feet, and I sighed as he generated enough forcefields beneath his feet for him to jump off of.
Too bad that my portals weren't instant to open due to energy constraints and practical reasons. Improvements on them had grinded to a halt, and frankly throwing more energy at them wouldn't speed up portal openings without the right me—
A foot slammed into my chest, and I was left breathless as I was flung like a ball with a single kick from the Butcher. I oriented myself in the air, boots skidding as I landed. With a shout I ripped the hundred pound gun from her hands, and with the metalbending grip of my fist I crushed it into a ball of shredded material.
Right as I tried to rush into a biotic charge, a huge wave of agony slammed into me like a freight train. I screamed, and a wild punch generated a plume of flames into the Butcher's face. The wave faltered, and a sudden burst of ceaseless rage only fanned the flames, she teleported back, and I found my balance quickly.
Fuck that hurts.
The phantom pain was there, and my armor soothed the pain with its medical system along with the implants built it into my body. A portal opened, and a swarm of thousands of insects burst out, followed by Monarch's entire body.
"B…Erudition!" Her swarm billowed behind her, and I could tell the insects in the area were falling under her thrall. A few of her Commander bugs spread out, the larger and mildly smarter insects flickering with energy.
"I'm fine, but we need to retreat or get a plan in order. With the Butcher on the field we have to be extra careful." She became more serious, tilting her head as her swarm gathered in great numbers.
Khepri formed from a single cloud of insects, solid enough to take hits for us.
"Strange. Something is…not right about this." There was concern from the avatar of Khepri, and more bullets pinged off our barriers.
"Like what?" I asked as I stepped backwards into a portal opened in half a second. I began to bring in my robots, as the battlefield was set as Spree made his emergence clear as clones emerged at the rate of bullets. Swarms of insects lunged down at him, but for every Spree they brought down two more took their place.
More drones came down, all of them with mass accelerators.
"Not sure. I will…inform you when I find out." Khepri winked out, spreading out further for Taylor's benefit. The Assault drones did what their programming enabled them, once Spree's clones had been identified as minions.
Hypersonic bullets cut a corridor through dozens of clones, while Payload drones dropped small grenades that destroyed thirty clones at a time with Bakuda bombs.
The world around me blurred as I charged into the fray in a corridor of mass effect energy. Spree looked shocked as a dozen clones were thrown away, the minions degenerating in seconds. I slammed my palm into his chest, and clawed at him with my biotics.
A Reave was racing through his nervous system, a technique I had practiced for some time now. It controlled and shaped multiple fields to generate an electrical charge to wrack him with pain and agony. The circuit discharged his electric field into my own, and he dropped like a rock while I fed on his energy like a vampire.
I reached for his shirt, and gently placed the man down. He was knocked out cold and a quick sweep of his vitals told me his involuntary nervous system was shut down. I sent him through a portal and dumped him in front of a few PRT agents only a block away. A drone caught them dumping containment foam, and he was swiftly carted into the back of a PRT van. His remaining clones were put down in a wave of gore and human flesh that left me nauseated.
I blinked away from the grisly scene, and a flick of my wrists removed the blood that had stained my armor. I shivered, and my drones moved on to other activities.
I spun, and ducked a palm strike from the Butcher and stood my ground against the explosive pulse from her teleportation.
She can't teleport over open water. The factoid came to the forefront of my mind, right as I punched my fists forward into a powerful gust of wind. She was thrown fifty feet back, and teleported in midair and down onto a roof. There was a lake only a little ways from here, and I had the idea pop into my head.
"Taylor, we need to try and lure her into the small lake nearby." It was one made by Leviathan so it was empty of people. Taylor nodded before leaping forward in a wave of air and biotic force. She nearly broke the sound barrier, and I heard the fwoom of the Butcher's teleportation.
I generated a biotic barrier along my arm, blocking a heavy strike from an enraged Butcher. She didn't like that I had destroyed her Gatling gun but her punches weren't strong enough to burst through my biotic barriers. Bits of her costume were on fire, and I stomped and launched a wave of street into her body.
She dodged half a second beforehand, and I proceeded to break up the wave into bricks of accelerated stone. They crashed into her with the force of a truck collision, and she stumbled but didn't drop dead from the sheer kinetic energy.
Which made sense.
I pointed my index finger in her direction, and the air flickered when a Trapeza with an optical cloak took the hit from Butcher.
"Oh I'm not going to make it that easy." I half-mocked the murderer even when my palms were sweating and my heart pumped in my chest like a drum. She brought up her bow, and I could feel the fabric of space warp around her arrow as it started to fly at several hundred miles per hour.
I slapped the stone arrow aside, and threw it back at her in an equally sharp shape. She tilted her head and effortlessly dodged the projectile. Agony and rage surged into my body, and Butcher accelerated. I was slammed into the ground, and set my omni-field to detonate in a wave of destabilizing hard light. Her mask cracked in two, and I launched a second Reave. My biotics pulsed stronger and higher as I fed on her, and my eyebrows quirked upwards.
Her muscular system was infused with an electrical field, distinct from what my scans found as various physical enhancement powers. I ripped the energy from her, and directed it into a crushing biotic warp directed at her feet. The ground turned to dust and fragments, and the rage aura didn't falter.
Another blink took me out of her range with a rapid shot of three charges, and I directed more robots, no longer playing around.
I opened a portal, and an Arges emerged from the dimensional gateway. The ten foot tall mech sprinted under a mass reduction field, throwing a one hundred fifty mph punch into the Butcher's chest.
"Evaluating Combat situation. Non-lethal parameters accepted, Battlemind beginning combat against Enemy Butcher." The LAI core of a network of multiple LAI flowing within the mech's circuits communicated its intentions to me. It took up the slack, and the Butcher tried to stagger it with a quick teleport behind it. A mass effect field redirected the force, and the flames did little to its armor.
It twisted on the ground, and right as the Butcher dodged with her danger sense, projected an omni-shield to slam into her skull. It could have shaped a sword to cut her brain into slices of meat but didn't because the Battlemind did its job.
Armsmaster had provided the combat data after all.
Multiple drones harassed not just Butcher but her crew, those few who had come with her. A few had been destroyed by firebenders and earthbenders, and I had some Polypus bots squeezing into tight spaces to search the area.
I heard the roar of the motorcycle before I felt it, the bike suddenly emerging into my seismic sense. A quick inspection of my BattleNet told me he had landed from above, dropping down from a PRT VTOL plane. An actual Tinkertech bike rather than the dinky normal one he usually had.
Another wave of agony passed, and an arm reached out to me and with a big pitched scream I was pulled onto the rear seat of the blue-white hover bike. It was the jets of air onto the ground that I sensed. We pulled out of her range again, and I sighed in relief.
I clung tightly to Armsmaster as we hit speeds that left me worried for my bones if I fell off.
"The Protectorate is here to offer you support against the Teeth." There was a bird of bemusement and I chuckled bitterly.
"A little late though, not that I mind, gives us time to think. There's a lake nearby…"
"You plan to lure her to an area where her teleportation is weakened." He deduced what I was sort of going with. "Have you taken their new Mover into account however…?"
"…no I have not." I admitted bashfully. "To be fair I've never been one built so much for combat, it's not my forte." That I was as good a fighter as I was probably related to bleedthrough from at least two known killers. Being that the trend is a Batarian slaver turned bitter reformer and a Drell assassin so far…probably accounted for how my clumsiness had been beaten out of me with less trouble than expected.
"How long can your mech hold off Butcher?" That question couldn't be answered as a bullet smacked into his helmet and bounced off a golden barrier.
"Greeting Ally Armsmaster. Combat can be maintained until critical damage is sustained." The mech keyed onto the radio channel the PRT had shared with us. It moved fluidly, reducing its mass from five hundred kilograms to five before shifting back again at the moment of contact.
"An AI?" Colin sounded a little worried and I laughed.
"A Limited Artificial Intelligence, they're not truly sapient, this one is of course dedicated to combat in operation." It deflected an arrow with an adaptive barrier and detonated its omni-shield to stagger the Butcher. The woman ducked beneath a simmering blunt light shield, reshaping the ground to trip up the mech.
It rolled, and generated kinetic force to push itself back onto its wide feet.
"It seems to have other weapons?" He questioned as we made our run back.
"A twin chaingun mass accelerator on the right arm and a rocket launcher on the left, but to keep this non-lethal it limits itself to omni-shield projections on both arms. Omni-swords are cool but they'd butcher her right away if they hit her head."
Colin turned his head, glaring at me. I shrugged, giving him an innocent smile he couldn't see. "How many of these…"
"Arges."
"Arges mechs do you have?" He finished.
"A couple hundred? They're pretty easy to make with my fabricators, I could build thousands if needed to. Plus thousands of my human-sized robots, tens of thousands of drones and guns. I've got a few vehicle designs in store, like the Mako with its 20mm cannon and sixteen inches of phase compressed Duralloy."
"It's a tank?" He sounded exasperated but also terribly curious.
"APC/tank/delivery vehicle/forward operations post." I listed off its roles. "Dual machine guns, the main gun of course, self-repairing armor and it can be deployed from orbit with its mass effect core. It's very neato." I spoke rapidly, still feeling the burn from the agony wave.
I had only stayed coherent because of my armor's exoskeleton and the neural implants in my body. Even then it hurt like a bitch.
"How many…Tinkertech creations do you have…categorized?" He was looping back and I could see that my robot army was doing the job of herding the Butcher toward the lake along with Taylor's bugs harassing the Teeth in general.
"I've named at least a hundred and fifty different models of weapons, robots and vehicles. Weapons mostly, most of my robots are pretty modular so I don't need as many models. I only have a few vehicles of course. There's the Samsara…and I should give my cutters a model name right?"
"Sometimes I forget you mass produce most of what you make."
I blinked. "I'm sorry?" I apologized, and I could see that on my mini-map that Taylor was on the move. Based on her trajectory she was fighting Vex alongside Charlotte. He was filling the battlefield with his forcefields, and Taylor met them with her reinforced bugs. Charlotte was leaping from building to building, jumping off of clumps of levitated earth.
The Butcher was being pushed back, and she was shooting more ineffective arrows. Which was followed by a volley of bullets from elsewhere, probably from the rest of her team. None of them hit hard enough of course, you would need well over a hundred rifle bullets to break even a cheap kinetic barrier and I didn't skimp out on barriers for the Arges.
Her pain and rage aura didn't do anything against half a ton of steel, titanium and composite, and her superstrength and teleportation was her only real advantage.
The battle moved quickly, and I already had drones warning people to stay inside or setting up defensive barriers.
We stopped by the lake, and the moment we made our approach, a wave of water tried to pull us into the depths. I threw myself into the attack, waving my arms as I spun the water into a whirlpool ripping it from the grasp of a Teeth member, a waterbender this time.
It was a woman with messy straight black hair, twisting her arms and forming tendrils from hundreds of gallons of water. I palmed my hand into the water and froze it solid, and she stumbled at the action. I unfreeze the water, and right as she falls chuck a fireball into her chest. She let out a scream of pain, and I accelerated into a biotic blink, grabbing her by her collar and throwing her with biotic force.
Back on the shore, Armsmaster was off of his bike and with a swing of his halberd a column of stone three meters high caught the woman. I froze the water to land on a platform of ice, and she pulled at the water with her bending. A warp from Colin broke the second wave, and he pricked her with his halberd and her eyes rolled to the back of his head as she was knocked out. I portaled her out and the PRT took her.
Colin stomped, and he watched my back as he lifted his weapon. "There's at least three people here approaching our position." We had about ten people attacking, three capes and seven non-capes. One cape was gone, two were preoccupied and four were helping the remaining capes.
You do the math.
The first sign we were being attacked was marked by bullets pinging off of Colin's bike. So whoever was shooting wasn't what I would call accurate, and what did hit was more or less useless on either of us.
The initial volley was then followed up by a blast of fire striking Armsmaster, and he stepped back as the flames dissipated without flammable material to burn off of.
Good thing he didn't bring his nano-thorns then.
I marked the firebender from a good twenty meters away, a rusty haired man with a more delicate frame than most. Golden flames followed the wake of his arms, and he sent out compacted spheres of fire and heat. I went through the katas, dissipating his bending with my own power.
He wasn't bad, but I was better.
A woman among them turned out to be a firebender, and together they generated a powerful stream of fire, gold and citrine swirling together. Powerful enough to burn someone alive, and directed right towards Armsmaster.
One moment I was surprised and the next I was in front of Colin, arms already sweeping in a circular motion. The wall of flames was compacted, and I could feel the tendrils of my bending reaching out and crushing down the fire. Smaller and smaller until it was a blue-white torch twice the size of my hand. When I chucked it, the ball exploded into a roaring stream and the two firebenders barely kept themselves and the one nonbender from being caught in the flames.
I reached out and blew out the attack, and they staggered back in what I could see was fear.
How did I do that?
I brought up the dart pistol, and with a flick of the trigger all three were hit by the knock-out drug. Neither fell on their heads, and I placed the gun back into a magnetic holster.
"You've been studying Newter." He stated rather than asked, and I didn't make a funny quip as the Butcher kicked the Arges mech off its feet. She had somehow managed to bring down its shields, and was repeatedly stabbing it in the optics with a large knife before the barriers could recharge.
The mech slapped her aside, and she back flipped off its chest. She landed and pulled out her bow, and space warped around the arrow as it pierced where she had stabbed the thing.
"Open the door you ass!" A portal rippled into existence and Vex emerged rather worse for wear, the woman appearing haggard but intact. She filled the empty space in front of her with forcefields, and managed to inflict more damage to the mech. A second portal opened as the first closed and a second Gatling gun made its presence known.
"Oh for fucks sa—" The air was filled with gunfire, and the mech finally received actual damage, as it was impacted by dozens of rounds. It had thick armor, but it was a mech built for mobility and speed and without its shields…
The mech was marked dead, as Vex's forcefields swarmed into the small chest cavity, breaking something vital. It still took twenty seconds of constant fire to crack its armor, but it was disappointing.
She immediately swung the gun towards us, and I placed down a barrier that only lasted a few seconds before breaking. The dirty soil and sand was instead brought up into a hasty column, and the Butcher teleported again. She staggered me with her explosive teleportation, and brought up the hundred pound gun into my face.
Oh shit.
Dozens of bullets were spat and did nothing and I only had twenty seconds to get out of there before my normal barriers break. My muscles started spasming as the Butcher generated her agony aura, attacking my nervous system.
I swiped my hand, and managed a chaotic and violent Lift, and she stopped firing as she flew through the air. My armor screamed alerts at how my barriers were down to fifteen percent, and I pulled off a Throw to chuck her back down to the ground.
Colin followed up my own attack, the earth liquifying under him to send him flying, his halberd channeling biotic energy. A gravitic impact sent the Butcher reeling, and she spun through the air, rolling and keeping her gun from smashing to pieces. She pulled herself back, and half her mask fell off.
One dark eye burned angrily, and she lifted her gun again while Vex surrounded her in forcefields. A wave of insects followed, and Vex let out a high pitched shriek when Taylor entered the fight with a great bolus of wind throwing the woman aside.
She pulled back with a biotic blink, and I threw out a couple of drones to cover us. I barely got out of the way as the Butcher flared into existence, and I was staggered by the explosion born from her teleportation. My kinetic barrier broke under the rapid gunfire, and I was left with my biotic barrier. I triggered my omni-field, straining the power source of my suit.
The Butcher wrapped her left hand around where my neck was, but couldn't break through the unyielding structure of hard light. She instead kicked me, unbalancing me as a wave of agony threw my aim off from blowing her back with a biotic Kick.
F-Fuck this is bullshit…I survive fucking Leviathan just to…
Strands of silky white glowing string struck out from the air, plucking the Butcher off of me and launching her with the crack of a whip. She teleported out of the tendrils grip, but landed flat on her face when another string lashed out.
I felt delicate footsteps dance along the ground, feet barely brushing the earth like they were floating on air. Taylor had obviously noted the newcomer to the battle before I had, and my IFF labeled the person as friendly until proven otherwise.
I glanced back, and tilted my head.
They were in a costume at least though I didn't remotely find it familiar, though something told me that in another time and place maybe I would have. What I thought was a dress, seemed to be closer to a billowing cloak though one with sleeves as well as a set of illustrious black leather armor revealing the cape to be a thin but athletic young woman.
Maybe about seventeen or eighteen years old, though that came from my suit's sensors rather than myself. She wore a flat mask that would have been featureless if it wasn't for the six black eyes painted onto the mask. A hole was cut into the mask for the cape's eyes to see through adding up to eight.
Silver hair spilled out, and I wonder how the mask was fastened to her face without straps or without fitting her face.
The cape pulled out a sword of all things, placing her grip on the handle of the two foot long blade before stabbing it into the hard ground in dramatic fashion. No…I was more frightened by how it cut through several inches of natural stone without stopping.
She called out to the Butcher in a language I didn't speak that had commonalities with indo-european languages, the universal language translator unit in my omni spat out a rough translation.
She had called the Butcher a Host unfit for this world?
The leader of the Teeth blinked. "What?" The red cloak-dressed woman twitched and she started again.
"Leave this place now foul beast, I will have words with the Emerald One and it is not for the stuffed ears of the Thief to listen to." I gaped at the back talk. "Leave or suffer the consequences." There was a growl to the girl's voice, despite having what sounded like a strong French accent.
It was subtly off enough to leave me confused.
"And what is one girl going to do about it?" The Butcher taunted her, and the girl smiled.
"Is there anything you are afraid of Quarrel?" Strings formed from what my scanners picked up as a construct of exotic matters and energies. "You've fought those who walk the Spirit and failed. What makes this fight any different from the last?"
The Butcher hesitated.
"We're leaving…now!" I snarled when five sputtering portals disappeared the Teeth members. I charged towards Vex while Taylor directed her swarm and Vex smartly used her forcefields to block or kill the bugs so Taylor couldn't track them.
We had failed to arrest them…but the Teeth were down from seven capes to five and had eighteen members remaining. If the screaming about bugs hadn't made it obvious.
"Did any bugs come through?" Taylor nodded.
"Not a lot but a few and…dammit they're killing them!" Taylor hissed.
"Do you have a location…?" I had to ask.
"They were still in the city, but…"
"If their Mover works by tagging people, it's possible he has someone tagged right at the edge of his range to open portals to." Which means they can move two miles in a moment's notice.
Though I doubt it was that easy, plus Taylor only had so much multitasking or less she'd be able to be able to individually control every bug in her range perfectly. Which she is not, she has limits.
I could be wrong though.
The unknown cape coughed, speaking oddly. "I seek an audience with this city's authorities and the Emerald One."
"Quit calling me that." The irate comment left my mouth.
"No." She looked expectant.
"Hero or Villain?" Colin entered the conversation, and I saw that Taylor was keeping her silence, fingers twitching dangerously.
"I am not familiar with the term…but I am no enemy to your strange state." She bowed her head, bending her arm in a formal gesture. "I would give you my true name but I hear that is frowned upon. You may call me Weaver."
…
…
What?
September 12th, 2011. 3:15PM
Basilia Rubio
We had taken part in the cleanup after the battle, and I had sent my Arges mech to be rendered down as well as my broken drones. Next time bring out more robots despite the fear of detection, that had been a clusterfuck from beginning to end.
"You okay?" I startled when Taylor spoke aloud, changing her tone a bit.
"I'm alright, a little frazzled but I'm alright." That was the closest I had come to really dying in a while, it was lucky I had my drones and my biotic barriers to pick up the slack of responding against a fucking minigun.
There were occasional twitches, the aftermath of my organic nervous system being attacked by bullshit. I was very grateful for the construction of advanced implants to induce healing and repairs of the body, plus the reservoirs of medical nanites.
I wasn't too sure if it wasn't an unexpected outcome, I was a good tinker but that didn't make me an excellent combatant. If I was someone more like Armsmaster maybe that would be so but I'm not.
The Butcher had been around for over a decade, the accumulated experience of fourteen people and a willingness to kill and murder that was beyond me. Not that I couldn't kill, but I was certainly not as violent as typical capes. I just wasn't the type and there was a reason I delegated.
But it was an exploitable weakness. My tussle with Leviathan didn't count because it wasn't really me in the pilot's seat, and I rarely fought in person if I didn't have to. I was a combat engineer, I used drones and technology to beat people and I was also limited by my willingness to kill.
I wasn't willing to kill, not if I didn't have to.
Weaver was sitting down on one of the chairs provided by the PRT, and her intensity was rather stifling. Piggot wasn't in, instead we had an agent Kim, a pretty asian woman in her 20s doing the meet and greet with a new cape.
Weaver(god that was weird…) had insisted that I needed to be here, and we had obliged largely so we wouldn't have a loose cape running around and breaking things.
We had already given a report and Weaver had been helpful in that regard, though her odd mannerisms left me uneasy. Especially when I could tell she was playing Host to a shard, the entity coiling around her being. It took the form of tendrils of black crystal, though I knew this was just a skin deep look.
I smelled deeply, taking in the scent of the alien spirit's existence. It was a shard not unlike some of the many lesser administrators and lesser pedestals. But it was but a shade to the bonfire of the High Priestess, yet independent enough and foreign enough to be strong.
Uttu.
The name came to me easily, and the tendrils took a more coherent form. The form of a great spider-woman, made out of black crystal, an eight eyed shade. It's corpus positively flowed within the young woman's chakras, originating from a point in her head. The Corona Pollentia and Gemma provided a physical anchor, one of material flesh rather than one of just spirit.
There was a warmth when the shade glanced to her host, a smile cracking over an inhuman face. This wasn't a distant relationship between host and spirit, there was a closeness here, one developed through time and hard work.
Curious.
"Will the leader of this…PRT not come and meet me herself?" Agent Kim smiled very slightly, though there was some mild strain.
"Director Piggot is busy with organizing her branch towards ousting the Teeth." Thr agent tapped her fingers on the table. "Anything you need to tell her I can relay to her."
Weaver leaned back, tilting her head. "Perhaps you do not understand the gravity of the situation. No…of course you don't, I haven't informed you. Your Fallen have an enemy of one of my allies…a very dangerous man." I froze and there was a notable pause from the agent.
"Is this man someone named Ezekiel?" I asked and she nodded, keeping a firm grip on her blade.
"What can you tell us about this…Ezekiel?" Despite wearing a mask, there was a distaste I felt from Weaver.
"I know only what allies of my…team have told me, he is a shaman though he is not the strongest or the most capable. His threat comes from his commandeering of strange technology, machines he has made use of in service of his leader."
"He's a Tinker or has a Tinker supplying him?"
Weaver didn't answer Kim. "It is not a matter I can speak of here, not with this Director's mere underlings. Though I'm sure you are an admirable worker." There was sincerity there but agent Kim didn't like it.
"And why can't you?"
"Because this is out of your paygrade…that's the right expression right?" Weaver muttered the last part. "Because I doubt you know the woman who plagues my home, I doubt you know of the Blue Empre—" I cut her off.
"Get the Director…get the Director right now." I stepped in front of the agent, since she was the most vulnerable physically. "You…don't move another muscle, are we clear?" Weaver remained still, and I glanced back at Kim.
Whatever she saw on my helmeted face it sent her into action, charging out of the room. Weaver seemed so calm while I myself was panicking at what and who she had just been about to mention. What did the dictator of Earth Shin have to do with this girl?
I was ready to actually shoot the women because I knew she was dangerous but I didn't know how dangerous. She had beat back the Butcher but if she was one of that dictator's mind aligned minions…we couldn't trust her.
"Monarch, once the PRT does its thing, go over and check with the team. I'll be here." I spoke on the comms line, and Taylor responded immediately.
"Are you sure? If she's talking about Goddess we don't know how bad it could get." She pushed back and I growled.
"Yes, I'm sure. I'll take care of this, we only need one person here and I'm the best suited for it."
"Okay."
There was a long and arduous moment of pure silence.
…
Fuck.
September 12th, 2011. 3:45PM
Basilia Rubio
This time the meeting was a little more secure, a larger and heavily reinforced room and multiple PRT elites wearing what I knew was the earliest iteration of the Dragon's Teeth. Gun-metal and black in color, a brief scan found silicon chips with Tinkertech components to speed them up and I saw why Dragon wanted my input on computers.
Optronics are compact and energy efficient. The armor itself was a little bulkier, but had layers I found were convergent with some of my hardsuit tech. A basic lining to environmentally seal the suit, an outer lining of synthetic fibers to resist splinters and shrapnel, a hard plate to resist kinetic impacts and shock. In this case a mix of high strength nanometric steel and ablative ceramics.
Being Tinkertech they were good enough to be compared to my own armor. In raw durability if not in raw computational power and other little luxuries. Right, getting distracted here.
The men and women guarding Weaver each held some of their fancy coilguns, and I detected eezo matrices within their rails. So they probably hit hard enough to puncture through modern body armor like it isn't even there. The ablative ceramics made short work of current laser pistols, though they were still deadly.
I was following Piggot as she marched back and forth like a bat out of hell, guarding her along with Chevalier. Apparently Piggot's call for reinforcements had been sent through with the Teeth in town, the Fallen on the way along with one or two other capes groups looking to sink their teeth into Brockton.
"It's been some time." I greeted Chevalier, eying his fuck-off hug cannon-blade. Personally out of all the capes in the Protectorate I found him one of the coolest even if I only vaguely knew him from…well knew him.
"We never got to talk much, not after Leviathan." A question came to the forefront of my mind then and there.
"What do you see?" I asked and he looked startled, I cocked a hip and laughed. "Oh don't be so surprised, we're not that different in that regard Chevalier. But I hope I'm not overstepping any boundaries." I would drop it if he couldn't answer.
Chevalier cleared his throat. "Bright, almost like I'm staring at the sun." He confessed and I learned in his direction, too curious for my own good. "It reminds me a bit of looking at Eidolon but…different, images of places I've never seen before, a nimbus of power that's hard to make out."
"Suppose that makes sense, my shard used to be an Administrator once." I smirked when I saw the way Chevalier was looking at me.
"Administrator?" He asked easily, and I had a good feeling about him.
"Certain shards have important purposes, roles to play in the grander scheme of things. The Administrator determines and rearranges the configuration of shards."
"Is that something either you or Monarch are capable of?" Chevalier seemed to like our small talk.
"As a power? Not sure, shards talk to each other all the time and I know I…my shard kept others under control from going crazy like Eidolon's."
"Because of what caused all these new powers to show up?"
"Basically. If my power wasn't around there's a good chance we wouldn't be here." Because we would be very very dead. "But my power…you can't really use it as a baseline for other shards, it's different, our connection mostly unique."
"Echidna." Brows lifted.
"You got a good look at her back in May then?" I pointedly let Piggot stew as she stopped circling. It wasn't a good idea to get involved.
"Her power is intense…and it's similar to yours in nature if not in temperament." He shrugged his large shoulders.
"Sounds about right." I shook my head, thinking about how she had bonded with her shard. "My Shard is an odd turtle-duck."
"Turtle-duck?" He sounded confused.
"It's a thing, I've got the DNA sequences to prove it. The multiverse is a weird place." I was defensive, and now I had the urge to clone some turtle-ducks to keep them as pets.
Fluffy things were calming.
"Enough chit chat, we need to interrogate this cape, I would prefer you not be here but…" Piggot grit her teeth, but didn't sound insulting when she directed the last bit to me. "
"Fair. I'm not really the interrogating type, I'm just here because she won't talk if I'm not around." Annoyance crept up but I kept it at bay for the time being. Piggot grunted in agreement, opening the door to the interview room. There were multiple scanners to detect Master effects, constantly sending pulses into the room. They were all Tinkertech of course.
I simply stepped to the side, letting Piggot take control because this was not my forte and I didn't pretend I wasn't an anxious poorly socialized loser.
Not being serious of course, but I'm still bad with people. That they were crazy enough to like me anyway wasn't my problem. I fidgeted as Piggot took her seat, and Weaver seemed deathly still, giving up her weapon willingly.
"Weaver was it?" I pretended the name didn't bother me as Piggot talked. "What exactly did you expect to accomplish with mentioning something as highly classified as the leader of Earth Shin?"
"Your attention for one." There was almost dry humor to how Weaver answered in French-like accent. "I have come quite a distance at the behest of new allies in my fight against the Blue Empress…my immunity to her has been a boon."
"I imagine being a shaman hosting a shard spirit doesn't hurt either." Piggot stiffened, but she didn't berate me for adding to the conversation. "And since you're probably not the only Parahuman in your rebellion, you've found a way to immunize others against her influence." It was a wild guess really, but she looked well equipped, far too much so to be a ragtag group of kid rebels.
"Clever. I might be a major leader of the Tihi Ocean Resistance, but no man or woman is an island." A quick search found that it was an alternate name for the Pacific Ocean in some cultures. "The boy who brought me said that helping this world would help us break free from her grip on our world. In time at least." She was formal wasn't she?
"We're getting off-topic, you said you knew more about the man with current control over the Siberian and Crawler." Well that was definitely a priority, I was experimenting with Sting to pop the bitch. Mainly seeing if I could apply vast amounts of energy from a nearby dimension to alter the course of a Sting projectile. Or a sharper metric using my other space warping cannons.
"Ezekiel, I know what has been told to me. He is a foreigner to both our worlds, a broken one where reality has broken down in places." I stiffened.
"Earth Goetia?" I breathed and the two government employees stilled. I had told the PRT about a number of worlds, the ones I considered dangerous. Goetia was one of them of course.
"I suppose? I was never told if his world had a name." She seemed confused but hopeful. "Ezekiel was once a common researcher before allying with an invasive nation, making use of his new shamanistic abilities and Lost Technology for the war effort."
"So…this Ezekiel is using advanced technology to help conquer an alternate Earth, and has involved himself with Earth Shin on the side. And now he's helping the Fallen pull something on Bet?" I compacted her message, and she seemed surprised.
"That is effectively it, yes." I mouthed sorry at Piggot and backed away. She could be a giant bitch, but she could at least do her job most of the time. Plus she had gotten better over time. "Though he himself is not a conqueror…but he is enabling them."
"Your allies…who or what are they fighting?" Piggot leaned forward, eyes sharp.
"They fight the Iron Lords of the west, the invaders using strange monsters and their own Powered to invade the Britannic isles. But I do not know why they have set their eyes on this world, or why they would even attempt it. Earth Goetia is a primitive world…but perhaps they do not care."
I'm starting to think this was above my paygrade too.
…
And we were going to be here for a while.
September 12th, 2011. 9:30PM
Basilia Rubio
When Taylor opened the door I didn't waste a second before jumping onto her. She took three steps back at the addition of seventy kilograms of mass. She reacted quite promptly, lifting me by my thighs rather than the more uncomfortable option of my waist.
This wasn't the Notebook after all. Though I didn't recall why I knew that scene at all when I never watched the movie.
She didn't seem surprised and I leaned in to brush my lips against hers. She tasted like fruit, and I had to respond.
"Were you eating grapes?"
Her lips curled upwards. "I was trying some fruit that Amy was experimenting with. Some of the genetically modified plants based on the stuff you've been giving her as samples." All the races I knew had some level of advanced genetic technology, advanced and efficient crops serving to feed their vast interstellar populations.
The White Lotus grew some in Amelia's greenhouses, as well as growing modified bacteria feeding on methane and other common chemicals as microbial cultures to eat. It was very efficient, and it meant we could eat without needing to kill animals.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's a lot easier to take care of plants and bacteria than animals.
I collapsed into her, resting my head on her shoulders. She kept walking, and sat onto my bed and I ended up straddling her. Taylor seemed a little uncomfortable, so I flipped around so I was sitting in her lap instead.
"So what else did Weaver tell you?" I tried not to let her question bother me, and the oddness of how it sounded couldn't be understated.
"She seems to only know the basics, that there's some ongoing war on Earth Goetia being fought using spirits, shard abilities and archeotechnology. She's the leader of a resistance group in Shin's Pacific, and they have a way to counter the most dangerous power of Goddess." Honestly I was half-willing to tell them about her cluster to weaken her somehow. "Ezekiel…he's only known by the tech he's used and given to both Earth Shin and the Iron Lords ruling over Greenland and eastern Canada."
"At least we have that Portunus to give you some idea of what we're dealing with right?" I leaned back into Taylor's chest, sighing loudly.
"You're right in that regard, I've got the coding language which is a start at figuring out more about the technology of Earth Goetia." Though the fact it was advanced enough to be basically Tinkertech was scary on its own merit. "Plus I've been working on making a Sting super-heavy weapons platform." It would take cues from superheavy weapons like the Asari rail-cannon and the Turian mass effect shunt cannon.
It would generate a Sting field around a projectile, and a computer would project higher dimensional energy fields to tweak the laws of physics. The weapon would direct a scanning pulse and I would hope for the best that I could chest my way towards breaking Siberian.
I had the experience of breaking some of the dimensional bonds of Endbringer flesh so doing the same to Siberian should be…not easier but I had more than nothing.
"How is that going?" She rested her chin on my head, and I hummed at her pleasant touch.
"Better than I expected, the first prototype was done two days ago. It's about three feet long, and it's got me some experience with wavelength manipulation." Nowadays I could just about fix some of Bakuda's stuff, though I only barely knew what I was doing.
I could fix when something broke but I didn't get everything the machinery did, not yet. But in time that would change, and I could pull off increasingly more fantastic stuff.
I looked straight up, with Taylor making eye contact with me. I smiled softly and she was red faced. She covered her face with her hands. "Quit looking at me like that."
I smirked. "Like what?" I couldn't help but tease, it was in my nature. "I'm just looking at someone I really like."
"Hmm…" As we fell into a soothing silence I thought about what we were doing and where we were still going.
Crushes was all I had experience with, nothing like what I had with Taylor. It wasn't even one borne entirely from physical attraction since my type were girls like…well me. Taylor did look pretty to me, though she leaned a bit towards average.
But I did like my tall and fit girls and her legs went on forever.
It's not why I started to like her, even with how badly the start of our interactions could have gone. I often put my foot into my mouth and Taylor was a paranoid wreck back then. She was a bit controlling, though once we started talking about her issues she eased off a lot.
I was a kind of guy or gal to simply coast, I liked some amount of structure and breathing room. Taylor did her best to accommodate me even when she didn't have to, joined my team despite her lack of trust towards others. She had been faithful and strong and I think I loved her.
Oh…oh dear.
"You're not getting a fever are you?" Taylor's usual expression melted and I denied it silently.
I flipped myself back, straddling Taylor again with what is certainly an intense look of concentration, and she was like a deer under headlights in the cutest way possible.
"Hey." I released a throaty purr, and Taylor looked like she was ready to explode.
"H-Hey." She said with a high pitched tone of shyness. That I had a voice anywhere near seductive had been a matter of practice simply to see if I could.
It had apparently been fruitful or Taylor was an easy target. Maybe both.
I simply lifted myself upwards to carefully kiss her, not wanting to accidentally smash our teeth together.
That had happened a few times more than was normal.
My heart beat faster and my hands were definitely clammy from anxiety. I shifted my positioning while Taylor fidgeted. Taylor's hazel eyes dilated slightly and I was lost in them in the short instant before impact. Our lips met.
This kiss was a little more intense than usual, I knew this even while putting my weight onto Taylor and slowly pushing her down. Her lips tasted fruity, and I felt her hands lower to grip firmly onto my hips, just short of outright groping me(not that I'd mind) of course. I made an awkward attempt of deepening the kiss, lightly prodding at her thinner lips with my tongue.
To my surprise she acquiesced to my nonverbal request, and I dove hesitantly, even as her grip grew more firm and the scent of roses from her hair became more palpable. I knotted the back of her plain black shirt with my grip and rode her down until she was flat to the bed.
There was a passion that left me intrigued and curious, my tongue likely grazing hers as we clumsily made out. My body burned with heat, there was a desire there, a want for more as I savored her mouth. I took in everything from the way her body felt on mine, from her rose scent and grape-like taste, to the flush on her cheeks, and the curls of her black hair.
I broke away, breathing deeply and touching my now wet lips. I was still straddling her, and after a long, long, long time I got off of her, a note of disappointment passing by.
Taylor was still watching me with comically wide eyes, and I giggled and fidgeted.
"Was that a bit much?" My ears were burning, and I wanted to hide my face but couldn't.
"No, no, no it was nice." She assured, shaking her hands. "I wouldn't mind doing that again…later." There was a faraway look in her eyes, as if she was imagining some scene. She blinked slowly, took a deep intake of breath and then released it. "If you're feeling better, I'll just portal back to my house…" I pouted.
"Stay." Again with the confused hazel eyes.
"In your house?"
"For the night." I insisted, batting my eyelashes deliberately.
"In the guest room?" Was that a question or not?
"No." Taylor paid more attention, and I felt jitters and nerves as comprehension filled her eyes.
"Oh."
"You don't have to if you don't want to, but I'd like you too. Sometimes it gets…a little lonely in this empty house." I had lived with my parents for my whole life before now, there was always someone around at some point whether it was my uncle, my mom, my brothers or my dad and other miscellanies.
Instead in this place it was just me, and as a consequence it was barely lived in.
"I'll be back in a bit." Was all Taylor said before vanishing into a portal, and I felt like I had said the wrong thing. Had I pushed her away I didn't…no calm down it's fine.
I crawled over my bed, ducking under the covers because New England is cold as balls to my California accustomed body. I had already been in my sleepwear, a black Alexandria shirt and silk shorts Taylor had made from Spider-Worms I had cloned myself.
Because wearing the shorts your tall GF made with thousands of hybrid bug abominations was romantic.
We were thinking of opening a shop for selling merch, like those Brand shops companies have on the side. I wonder if I can sell plastic sharks with lasers on their head?
Elon Musk managed to sell out cheap-ass propane torches, and he wasn't in part responsible for killing a biblical city-killing monster. The portal opened.
Taylor had exchanged her jeans for Eidolon-themed pajama pants, bringing a set of clean clothing for later use apparently I think. She placed them on a cabinet, and I yawned as the long nights got to me.
She turned off the light of my room, and after deliberation dove under the covers with me. I shimmied over to her, and I did not feel happy when I was resting side by side with her.
Really I didn't and shut up.
"You could have asked if you were feeling…like this." I shrugged.
"Maybe, but I'm not good at asking for help and I don't want you to sacrifice everything for my sake. But I'm probably just being stupid."
"You're not stupid." I curled up to her. "You just have a fuzzy head sometimes." I could hear her soft breathing and there was a long and comfortable pause.
"…" I didn't let any words out.
"As for the kiss…keep doing that in the future, I liked it." I smiled dumbly.
Exhaustion set in, vision darkening and blurring.
"I'm no good at this stuff…even if I like reading romance, not the same as living it." I nearly whined.
"You like romance?"
"I've learned a thing or two about relationships that way…"
"You're a dork."
"Meh."
It was another half hour of quiet conversations and awkward repositions before I fell asleep.
AN: This chapter was a bit of trouble in getting it written the way I wanted it written. Turned out longer than I expected too. I'm not too sure how I did on the fighting scenes, or on the more intimate moments. I'm trying to keep a careful balance of how far I'm willing to push. Though I did take into account how Basilia would act in a relationship.
She'd be a dork is all I'm saying there.
Anyways the next chapter is an Interlude which there should be three of for Deviation Shifting to perspectives outside of Basilia is something I've been enjoying a fair bit.
Hopefully this chapter is good.
September 12th, 2011. 2:15PM
Basilia Rubio
"Hmm…" I flickered my enhanced vision, spending some time at the edge of the city. I ran scans and found Lost Garden rather easily, the landscape turning into an otherworldly forest. It was a depression slowly approaching us, and I knew Barrow was at the center of the area of reality shift with his creepy predatory cult business.
I was noting a theme with the kind of people deciding it was a good idea to encroach on us. More subtle teams who went after minor targets like the Red Handed, or the Elite with their political and cell bullshit.
Not that I was really going to turn out any different in that method of having people onboard. Except more obvious and honest?
Or crazy people who wanted to take the White Lotus down a peg or two. There was nothing in between, and I wondered if this was what the cities with the Triumvirate are like?
Probably not.
I didn't startle when a hand was placed on my armored shoulder. Charlotte had gone through a costume change, and I knew she was debating a name change on top of that. Terra was a little inaccurate for what her powers really were.
It was armor not dissimilar to Asari commando armor, and would be just as body conforming if it wasn't for its design as medium armor. A hardened plate system of strong Plasteel, which is basically incredibly strong plastic and compressed and reinforced ceramics. The costume was taking cues from the Dai Li of all people, since Charlotte had been looking overhead when I had been designing my armor.
The suit itself was completely black, though there were lines along the pauldrons and guards colored an Earth Kingdom yellow. But most of the suit wasn't visible beneath the robe, though with the way it was tied around her waist it was more a dress than a robe. It looked about the same as a Dai Li robe but not quite as long and with somewhat shorter sleeves that let one see the armored arms. But the EK symbol was replaced by the symbol of the White Lotus as was standard with many of our members.
It could be a simple pin or a bigass logo painted on their chest. I didn't really care. Even New Wave had taken to it with a simple pin, and everyone in the team had omni-tools to facilitate easy communication across interstellar distances.
She unfortunately couldn't wear the hat, but did have a cool helmet I had modified to be a little friendlier. It was mostly non-silicon glass like Quarian helmets, and could fold back like my own helmet. The sides of the helmet had been painted by Sveta, intriguing swirls of sand that almost looked real, and the helmet glass was clear enough to let most people see her face besides her mask of course.
Her armored gloves had stone sticking to them, obviously a result of my mentionings of the Dai Li. Though why she decided she liked the style of a mind-bending secret police force I had no idea.
"Are you okay?" Her concern was touching but I was fine, at least mostly.
Probably.
"Just a little…worried, the Teeth have been getting a little more bold." They hadn't succeeded in breaking out their compatriots, since they had been immediately shipped out of range of their new Mover on a PRT VTOL vehicle. But they still had six capes and twenty five other members.
"I…I'm not going to say we shouldn't worry, but we're a team, we'll watch each other's backs." She looked so certain of herself, clenching her fist. Charlotte had evolved from the meek girl she had been at the start, though I knew she was always going to prefer the calmer lifestyle offered by the White Lotus.
You didn't have to fight, didn't have to participate in the game of cops and robbers that kept the precarious balance. At the moment we had twenty seven capes, and supposedly a fourth might join our branch in Baltimore.
We didn't go out alone, alternating partners when we did patrols, and what was left of New Wave did their own thing since Panacea didn't care about patrols and Vicky was with us.
There was a nearby explosion, and I suddenly felt a person through my feet only a short distance away. My helmet detected a burst of heat, and Charlotte grabbed me and launched the both of us from the metallic roof as it was twisted by her bending. Even so we rolled through the air as stone arrows swerved and met the barriers of my suit. I was grateful for the sensor upgrades to let armor detect slower moving projectiles. Slapping them aside with telekinetic force.
Not that a stone arrow would have pierced through an inch of armor tough enough to bounce hypersonic rounds.
"It's…" I growled as I generated a pull towards the ground, slamming my feet into the roof of a modest warehouse. I couldn't help but feel my eyebrows twitch when I saw who had decided to interrupt our patrol.
"The Butcher…I thought you'd be taller." The murderous cape tilted her head, and I didn't flinch when I heard the odd whispers and screams spinning around her form. Her shard took a more esoteric form in my vision, a roiling cloud of crystals, faces popping in and out of their reflective surfaces.
Well that's disturbing.
"And I thought you'd be more glowy." She sniped back, fingers curling around what I identified as a Gatling gun. A portal opened beneath her feet and she teleported, and I entered a biotic charge to dodge her entry back into reality. An explosion detonated where I had been, and I already had help coming.
"Sorry for the disappointment." I was of course being insincere, and knew I had to be careful here. While I had the suspicion that trying to possess me would end with the Butcher shard exploding, the others didn't have the same defense. As shards they still had vulnerabilities, simply because of their biology.
Then again I rarely used my shamanistic abilities against shards, with the sole exception of that one case.
I didn't have time to think before the Butcher charged at me, and I saw that Charlotte was currently busy with Vex, the empty space between them becoming filled with his forcefields. I opened a portal beneath his feet, and I sighed as he generated enough forcefields beneath his feet for him to jump off of.
Too bad that my portals weren't instant to open due to energy constraints and practical reasons. Improvements on them had grinded to a halt, and frankly throwing more energy at them wouldn't speed up portal openings without the right me—
A foot slammed into my chest, and I was left breathless as I was flung like a ball with a single kick from the Butcher. I oriented myself in the air, boots skidding as I landed. With a shout I ripped the hundred pound gun from her hands, and with the metalbending grip of my fist I crushed it into a ball of shredded material.
Right as I tried to rush into a biotic charge, a huge wave of agony slammed into me like a freight train. I screamed, and a wild punch generated a plume of flames into the Butcher's face. The wave faltered, and a sudden burst of ceaseless rage only fanned the flames, she teleported back, and I found my balance quickly.
Fuck that hurts.
The phantom pain was there, and my armor soothed the pain with its medical system along with the implants built it into my body. A portal opened, and a swarm of thousands of insects burst out, followed by Monarch's entire body.
"B…Erudition!" Her swarm billowed behind her, and I could tell the insects in the area were falling under her thrall. A few of her Commander bugs spread out, the larger and mildly smarter insects flickering with energy.
"I'm fine, but we need to retreat or get a plan in order. With the Butcher on the field we have to be extra careful." She became more serious, tilting her head as her swarm gathered in great numbers.
Khepri formed from a single cloud of insects, solid enough to take hits for us.
"Strange. Something is…not right about this." There was concern from the avatar of Khepri, and more bullets pinged off our barriers.
"Like what?" I asked as I stepped backwards into a portal opened in half a second. I began to bring in my robots, as the battlefield was set as Spree made his emergence clear as clones emerged at the rate of bullets. Swarms of insects lunged down at him, but for every Spree they brought down two more took their place.
More drones came down, all of them with mass accelerators.
"Not sure. I will…inform you when I find out." Khepri winked out, spreading out further for Taylor's benefit. The Assault drones did what their programming enabled them, once Spree's clones had been identified as minions.
Hypersonic bullets cut a corridor through dozens of clones, while Payload drones dropped small grenades that destroyed thirty clones at a time with Bakuda bombs.
The world around me blurred as I charged into the fray in a corridor of mass effect energy. Spree looked shocked as a dozen clones were thrown away, the minions degenerating in seconds. I slammed my palm into his chest, and clawed at him with my biotics.
A Reave was racing through his nervous system, a technique I had practiced for some time now. It controlled and shaped multiple fields to generate an electrical charge to wrack him with pain and agony. The circuit discharged his electric field into my own, and he dropped like a rock while I fed on his energy like a vampire.
I reached for his shirt, and gently placed the man down. He was knocked out cold and a quick sweep of his vitals told me his involuntary nervous system was shut down. I sent him through a portal and dumped him in front of a few PRT agents only a block away. A drone caught them dumping containment foam, and he was swiftly carted into the back of a PRT van. His remaining clones were put down in a wave of gore and human flesh that left me nauseated.
I blinked away from the grisly scene, and a flick of my wrists removed the blood that had stained my armor. I shivered, and my drones moved on to other activities.
I spun, and ducked a palm strike from the Butcher and stood my ground against the explosive pulse from her teleportation.
She can't teleport over open water. The factoid came to the forefront of my mind, right as I punched my fists forward into a powerful gust of wind. She was thrown fifty feet back, and teleported in midair and down onto a roof. There was a lake only a little ways from here, and I had the idea pop into my head.
"Taylor, we need to try and lure her into the small lake nearby." It was one made by Leviathan so it was empty of people. Taylor nodded before leaping forward in a wave of air and biotic force. She nearly broke the sound barrier, and I heard the fwoom of the Butcher's teleportation.
I generated a biotic barrier along my arm, blocking a heavy strike from an enraged Butcher. She didn't like that I had destroyed her Gatling gun but her punches weren't strong enough to burst through my biotic barriers. Bits of her costume were on fire, and I stomped and launched a wave of street into her body.
She dodged half a second beforehand, and I proceeded to break up the wave into bricks of accelerated stone. They crashed into her with the force of a truck collision, and she stumbled but didn't drop dead from the sheer kinetic energy.
Which made sense.
I pointed my index finger in her direction, and the air flickered when a Trapeza with an optical cloak took the hit from Butcher.
"Oh I'm not going to make it that easy." I half-mocked the murderer even when my palms were sweating and my heart pumped in my chest like a drum. She brought up her bow, and I could feel the fabric of space warp around her arrow as it started to fly at several hundred miles per hour.
I slapped the stone arrow aside, and threw it back at her in an equally sharp shape. She tilted her head and effortlessly dodged the projectile. Agony and rage surged into my body, and Butcher accelerated. I was slammed into the ground, and set my omni-field to detonate in a wave of destabilizing hard light. Her mask cracked in two, and I launched a second Reave. My biotics pulsed stronger and higher as I fed on her, and my eyebrows quirked upwards.
Her muscular system was infused with an electrical field, distinct from what my scans found as various physical enhancement powers. I ripped the energy from her, and directed it into a crushing biotic warp directed at her feet. The ground turned to dust and fragments, and the rage aura didn't falter.
Another blink took me out of her range with a rapid shot of three charges, and I directed more robots, no longer playing around.
I opened a portal, and an Arges emerged from the dimensional gateway. The ten foot tall mech sprinted under a mass reduction field, throwing a one hundred fifty mph punch into the Butcher's chest.
"Evaluating Combat situation. Non-lethal parameters accepted, Battlemind beginning combat against Enemy Butcher." The LAI core of a network of multiple LAI flowing within the mech's circuits communicated its intentions to me. It took up the slack, and the Butcher tried to stagger it with a quick teleport behind it. A mass effect field redirected the force, and the flames did little to its armor.
It twisted on the ground, and right as the Butcher dodged with her danger sense, projected an omni-shield to slam into her skull. It could have shaped a sword to cut her brain into slices of meat but didn't because the Battlemind did its job.
Armsmaster had provided the combat data after all.
Multiple drones harassed not just Butcher but her crew, those few who had come with her. A few had been destroyed by firebenders and earthbenders, and I had some Polypus bots squeezing into tight spaces to search the area.
I heard the roar of the motorcycle before I felt it, the bike suddenly emerging into my seismic sense. A quick inspection of my BattleNet told me he had landed from above, dropping down from a PRT VTOL plane. An actual Tinkertech bike rather than the dinky normal one he usually had.
Another wave of agony passed, and an arm reached out to me and with a big pitched scream I was pulled onto the rear seat of the blue-white hover bike. It was the jets of air onto the ground that I sensed. We pulled out of her range again, and I sighed in relief.
I clung tightly to Armsmaster as we hit speeds that left me worried for my bones if I fell off.
"The Protectorate is here to offer you support against the Teeth." There was a bird of bemusement and I chuckled bitterly.
"A little late though, not that I mind, gives us time to think. There's a lake nearby…"
"You plan to lure her to an area where her teleportation is weakened." He deduced what I was sort of going with. "Have you taken their new Mover into account however…?"
"…no I have not." I admitted bashfully. "To be fair I've never been one built so much for combat, it's not my forte." That I was as good a fighter as I was probably related to bleedthrough from at least two known killers. Being that the trend is a Batarian slaver turned bitter reformer and a Drell assassin so far…probably accounted for how my clumsiness had been beaten out of me with less trouble than expected.
"How long can your mech hold off Butcher?" That question couldn't be answered as a bullet smacked into his helmet and bounced off a golden barrier.
"Greeting Ally Armsmaster. Combat can be maintained until critical damage is sustained." The mech keyed onto the radio channel the PRT had shared with us. It moved fluidly, reducing its mass from five hundred kilograms to five before shifting back again at the moment of contact.
"An AI?" Colin sounded a little worried and I laughed.
"A Limited Artificial Intelligence, they're not truly sapient, this one is of course dedicated to combat in operation." It deflected an arrow with an adaptive barrier and detonated its omni-shield to stagger the Butcher. The woman ducked beneath a simmering blunt light shield, reshaping the ground to trip up the mech.
It rolled, and generated kinetic force to push itself back onto its wide feet.
"It seems to have other weapons?" He questioned as we made our run back.
"A twin chaingun mass accelerator on the right arm and a rocket launcher on the left, but to keep this non-lethal it limits itself to omni-shield projections on both arms. Omni-swords are cool but they'd butcher her right away if they hit her head."
Colin turned his head, glaring at me. I shrugged, giving him an innocent smile he couldn't see. "How many of these…"
"Arges."
"Arges mechs do you have?" He finished.
"A couple hundred? They're pretty easy to make with my fabricators, I could build thousands if needed to. Plus thousands of my human-sized robots, tens of thousands of drones and guns. I've got a few vehicle designs in store, like the Mako with its 20mm cannon and sixteen inches of phase compressed Duralloy."
"It's a tank?" He sounded exasperated but also terribly curious.
"APC/tank/delivery vehicle/forward operations post." I listed off its roles. "Dual machine guns, the main gun of course, self-repairing armor and it can be deployed from orbit with its mass effect core. It's very neato." I spoke rapidly, still feeling the burn from the agony wave.
I had only stayed coherent because of my armor's exoskeleton and the neural implants in my body. Even then it hurt like a bitch.
"How many…Tinkertech creations do you have…categorized?" He was looping back and I could see that my robot army was doing the job of herding the Butcher toward the lake along with Taylor's bugs harassing the Teeth in general.
"I've named at least a hundred and fifty different models of weapons, robots and vehicles. Weapons mostly, most of my robots are pretty modular so I don't need as many models. I only have a few vehicles of course. There's the Samsara…and I should give my cutters a model name right?"
"Sometimes I forget you mass produce most of what you make."
I blinked. "I'm sorry?" I apologized, and I could see that on my mini-map that Taylor was on the move. Based on her trajectory she was fighting Vex alongside Charlotte. He was filling the battlefield with his forcefields, and Taylor met them with her reinforced bugs. Charlotte was leaping from building to building, jumping off of clumps of levitated earth.
The Butcher was being pushed back, and she was shooting more ineffective arrows. Which was followed by a volley of bullets from elsewhere, probably from the rest of her team. None of them hit hard enough of course, you would need well over a hundred rifle bullets to break even a cheap kinetic barrier and I didn't skimp out on barriers for the Arges.
Her pain and rage aura didn't do anything against half a ton of steel, titanium and composite, and her superstrength and teleportation was her only real advantage.
The battle moved quickly, and I already had drones warning people to stay inside or setting up defensive barriers.
We stopped by the lake, and the moment we made our approach, a wave of water tried to pull us into the depths. I threw myself into the attack, waving my arms as I spun the water into a whirlpool ripping it from the grasp of a Teeth member, a waterbender this time.
It was a woman with messy straight black hair, twisting her arms and forming tendrils from hundreds of gallons of water. I palmed my hand into the water and froze it solid, and she stumbled at the action. I unfreeze the water, and right as she falls chuck a fireball into her chest. She let out a scream of pain, and I accelerated into a biotic blink, grabbing her by her collar and throwing her with biotic force.
Back on the shore, Armsmaster was off of his bike and with a swing of his halberd a column of stone three meters high caught the woman. I froze the water to land on a platform of ice, and she pulled at the water with her bending. A warp from Colin broke the second wave, and he pricked her with his halberd and her eyes rolled to the back of his head as she was knocked out. I portaled her out and the PRT took her.
Colin stomped, and he watched my back as he lifted his weapon. "There's at least three people here approaching our position." We had about ten people attacking, three capes and seven non-capes. One cape was gone, two were preoccupied and four were helping the remaining capes.
You do the math.
The first sign we were being attacked was marked by bullets pinging off of Colin's bike. So whoever was shooting wasn't what I would call accurate, and what did hit was more or less useless on either of us.
The initial volley was then followed up by a blast of fire striking Armsmaster, and he stepped back as the flames dissipated without flammable material to burn off of.
Good thing he didn't bring his nano-thorns then.
I marked the firebender from a good twenty meters away, a rusty haired man with a more delicate frame than most. Golden flames followed the wake of his arms, and he sent out compacted spheres of fire and heat. I went through the katas, dissipating his bending with my own power.
He wasn't bad, but I was better.
A woman among them turned out to be a firebender, and together they generated a powerful stream of fire, gold and citrine swirling together. Powerful enough to burn someone alive, and directed right towards Armsmaster.
One moment I was surprised and the next I was in front of Colin, arms already sweeping in a circular motion. The wall of flames was compacted, and I could feel the tendrils of my bending reaching out and crushing down the fire. Smaller and smaller until it was a blue-white torch twice the size of my hand. When I chucked it, the ball exploded into a roaring stream and the two firebenders barely kept themselves and the one nonbender from being caught in the flames.
I reached out and blew out the attack, and they staggered back in what I could see was fear.
How did I do that?
I brought up the dart pistol, and with a flick of the trigger all three were hit by the knock-out drug. Neither fell on their heads, and I placed the gun back into a magnetic holster.
"You've been studying Newter." He stated rather than asked, and I didn't make a funny quip as the Butcher kicked the Arges mech off its feet. She had somehow managed to bring down its shields, and was repeatedly stabbing it in the optics with a large knife before the barriers could recharge.
The mech slapped her aside, and she back flipped off its chest. She landed and pulled out her bow, and space warped around the arrow as it pierced where she had stabbed the thing.
"Open the door you ass!" A portal rippled into existence and Vex emerged rather worse for wear, the woman appearing haggard but intact. She filled the empty space in front of her with forcefields, and managed to inflict more damage to the mech. A second portal opened as the first closed and a second Gatling gun made its presence known.
"Oh for fucks sa—" The air was filled with gunfire, and the mech finally received actual damage, as it was impacted by dozens of rounds. It had thick armor, but it was a mech built for mobility and speed and without its shields…
The mech was marked dead, as Vex's forcefields swarmed into the small chest cavity, breaking something vital. It still took twenty seconds of constant fire to crack its armor, but it was disappointing.
She immediately swung the gun towards us, and I placed down a barrier that only lasted a few seconds before breaking. The dirty soil and sand was instead brought up into a hasty column, and the Butcher teleported again. She staggered me with her explosive teleportation, and brought up the hundred pound gun into my face.
Oh shit.
Dozens of bullets were spat and did nothing and I only had twenty seconds to get out of there before my normal barriers break. My muscles started spasming as the Butcher generated her agony aura, attacking my nervous system.
I swiped my hand, and managed a chaotic and violent Lift, and she stopped firing as she flew through the air. My armor screamed alerts at how my barriers were down to fifteen percent, and I pulled off a Throw to chuck her back down to the ground.
Colin followed up my own attack, the earth liquifying under him to send him flying, his halberd channeling biotic energy. A gravitic impact sent the Butcher reeling, and she spun through the air, rolling and keeping her gun from smashing to pieces. She pulled herself back, and half her mask fell off.
One dark eye burned angrily, and she lifted her gun again while Vex surrounded her in forcefields. A wave of insects followed, and Vex let out a high pitched shriek when Taylor entered the fight with a great bolus of wind throwing the woman aside.
She pulled back with a biotic blink, and I threw out a couple of drones to cover us. I barely got out of the way as the Butcher flared into existence, and I was staggered by the explosion born from her teleportation. My kinetic barrier broke under the rapid gunfire, and I was left with my biotic barrier. I triggered my omni-field, straining the power source of my suit.
The Butcher wrapped her left hand around where my neck was, but couldn't break through the unyielding structure of hard light. She instead kicked me, unbalancing me as a wave of agony threw my aim off from blowing her back with a biotic Kick.
F-Fuck this is bullshit…I survive fucking Leviathan just to…
Strands of silky white glowing string struck out from the air, plucking the Butcher off of me and launching her with the crack of a whip. She teleported out of the tendrils grip, but landed flat on her face when another string lashed out.
I felt delicate footsteps dance along the ground, feet barely brushing the earth like they were floating on air. Taylor had obviously noted the newcomer to the battle before I had, and my IFF labeled the person as friendly until proven otherwise.
I glanced back, and tilted my head.
They were in a costume at least though I didn't remotely find it familiar, though something told me that in another time and place maybe I would have. What I thought was a dress, seemed to be closer to a billowing cloak though one with sleeves as well as a set of illustrious black leather armor revealing the cape to be a thin but athletic young woman.
Maybe about seventeen or eighteen years old, though that came from my suit's sensors rather than myself. She wore a flat mask that would have been featureless if it wasn't for the six black eyes painted onto the mask. A hole was cut into the mask for the cape's eyes to see through adding up to eight.
Silver hair spilled out, and I wonder how the mask was fastened to her face without straps or without fitting her face.
The cape pulled out a sword of all things, placing her grip on the handle of the two foot long blade before stabbing it into the hard ground in dramatic fashion. No…I was more frightened by how it cut through several inches of natural stone without stopping.
She called out to the Butcher in a language I didn't speak that had commonalities with indo-european languages, the universal language translator unit in my omni spat out a rough translation.
She had called the Butcher a Host unfit for this world?
The leader of the Teeth blinked. "What?" The red cloak-dressed woman twitched and she started again.
"Leave this place now foul beast, I will have words with the Emerald One and it is not for the stuffed ears of the Thief to listen to." I gaped at the back talk. "Leave or suffer the consequences." There was a growl to the girl's voice, despite having what sounded like a strong French accent.
It was subtly off enough to leave me confused.
"And what is one girl going to do about it?" The Butcher taunted her, and the girl smiled.
"Is there anything you are afraid of Quarrel?" Strings formed from what my scanners picked up as a construct of exotic matters and energies. "You've fought those who walk the Spirit and failed. What makes this fight any different from the last?"
The Butcher hesitated.
"We're leaving…now!" I snarled when five sputtering portals disappeared the Teeth members. I charged towards Vex while Taylor directed her swarm and Vex smartly used her forcefields to block or kill the bugs so Taylor couldn't track them.
We had failed to arrest them…but the Teeth were down from seven capes to five and had eighteen members remaining. If the screaming about bugs hadn't made it obvious.
"Did any bugs come through?" Taylor nodded.
"Not a lot but a few and…dammit they're killing them!" Taylor hissed.
"Do you have a location…?" I had to ask.
"They were still in the city, but…"
"If their Mover works by tagging people, it's possible he has someone tagged right at the edge of his range to open portals to." Which means they can move two miles in a moment's notice.
Though I doubt it was that easy, plus Taylor only had so much multitasking or less she'd be able to be able to individually control every bug in her range perfectly. Which she is not, she has limits.
I could be wrong though.
The unknown cape coughed, speaking oddly. "I seek an audience with this city's authorities and the Emerald One."
"Quit calling me that." The irate comment left my mouth.
"No." She looked expectant.
"Hero or Villain?" Colin entered the conversation, and I saw that Taylor was keeping her silence, fingers twitching dangerously.
"I am not familiar with the term…but I am no enemy to your strange state." She bowed her head, bending her arm in a formal gesture. "I would give you my true name but I hear that is frowned upon. You may call me Weaver."
…
…
What?
___
September 12th, 2011. 3:15PM
Basilia Rubio
We had taken part in the cleanup after the battle, and I had sent my Arges mech to be rendered down as well as my broken drones. Next time bring out more robots despite the fear of detection, that had been a clusterfuck from beginning to end.
"You okay?" I startled when Taylor spoke aloud, changing her tone a bit.
"I'm alright, a little frazzled but I'm alright." That was the closest I had come to really dying in a while, it was lucky I had my drones and my biotic barriers to pick up the slack of responding against a fucking minigun.
There were occasional twitches, the aftermath of my organic nervous system being attacked by bullshit. I was very grateful for the construction of advanced implants to induce healing and repairs of the body, plus the reservoirs of medical nanites.
I wasn't too sure if it wasn't an unexpected outcome, I was a good tinker but that didn't make me an excellent combatant. If I was someone more like Armsmaster maybe that would be so but I'm not.
The Butcher had been around for over a decade, the accumulated experience of fourteen people and a willingness to kill and murder that was beyond me. Not that I couldn't kill, but I was certainly not as violent as typical capes. I just wasn't the type and there was a reason I delegated.
But it was an exploitable weakness. My tussle with Leviathan didn't count because it wasn't really me in the pilot's seat, and I rarely fought in person if I didn't have to. I was a combat engineer, I used drones and technology to beat people and I was also limited by my willingness to kill.
I wasn't willing to kill, not if I didn't have to.
Weaver was sitting down on one of the chairs provided by the PRT, and her intensity was rather stifling. Piggot wasn't in, instead we had an agent Kim, a pretty asian woman in her 20s doing the meet and greet with a new cape.
Weaver(god that was weird…) had insisted that I needed to be here, and we had obliged largely so we wouldn't have a loose cape running around and breaking things.
We had already given a report and Weaver had been helpful in that regard, though her odd mannerisms left me uneasy. Especially when I could tell she was playing Host to a shard, the entity coiling around her being. It took the form of tendrils of black crystal, though I knew this was just a skin deep look.
I smelled deeply, taking in the scent of the alien spirit's existence. It was a shard not unlike some of the many lesser administrators and lesser pedestals. But it was but a shade to the bonfire of the High Priestess, yet independent enough and foreign enough to be strong.
Uttu.
The name came to me easily, and the tendrils took a more coherent form. The form of a great spider-woman, made out of black crystal, an eight eyed shade. It's corpus positively flowed within the young woman's chakras, originating from a point in her head. The Corona Pollentia and Gemma provided a physical anchor, one of material flesh rather than one of just spirit.
There was a warmth when the shade glanced to her host, a smile cracking over an inhuman face. This wasn't a distant relationship between host and spirit, there was a closeness here, one developed through time and hard work.
Curious.
"Will the leader of this…PRT not come and meet me herself?" Agent Kim smiled very slightly, though there was some mild strain.
"Director Piggot is busy with organizing her branch towards ousting the Teeth." Thr agent tapped her fingers on the table. "Anything you need to tell her I can relay to her."
Weaver leaned back, tilting her head. "Perhaps you do not understand the gravity of the situation. No…of course you don't, I haven't informed you. Your Fallen have an enemy of one of my allies…a very dangerous man." I froze and there was a notable pause from the agent.
"Is this man someone named Ezekiel?" I asked and she nodded, keeping a firm grip on her blade.
"What can you tell us about this…Ezekiel?" Despite wearing a mask, there was a distaste I felt from Weaver.
"I know only what allies of my…team have told me, he is a shaman though he is not the strongest or the most capable. His threat comes from his commandeering of strange technology, machines he has made use of in service of his leader."
"He's a Tinker or has a Tinker supplying him?"
Weaver didn't answer Kim. "It is not a matter I can speak of here, not with this Director's mere underlings. Though I'm sure you are an admirable worker." There was sincerity there but agent Kim didn't like it.
"And why can't you?"
"Because this is out of your paygrade…that's the right expression right?" Weaver muttered the last part. "Because I doubt you know the woman who plagues my home, I doubt you know of the Blue Empre—" I cut her off.
"Get the Director…get the Director right now." I stepped in front of the agent, since she was the most vulnerable physically. "You…don't move another muscle, are we clear?" Weaver remained still, and I glanced back at Kim.
Whatever she saw on my helmeted face it sent her into action, charging out of the room. Weaver seemed so calm while I myself was panicking at what and who she had just been about to mention. What did the dictator of Earth Shin have to do with this girl?
I was ready to actually shoot the women because I knew she was dangerous but I didn't know how dangerous. She had beat back the Butcher but if she was one of that dictator's mind aligned minions…we couldn't trust her.
"Monarch, once the PRT does its thing, go over and check with the team. I'll be here." I spoke on the comms line, and Taylor responded immediately.
"Are you sure? If she's talking about Goddess we don't know how bad it could get." She pushed back and I growled.
"Yes, I'm sure. I'll take care of this, we only need one person here and I'm the best suited for it."
"Okay."
There was a long and arduous moment of pure silence.
…
Fuck.
___
September 12th, 2011. 3:45PM
Basilia Rubio
This time the meeting was a little more secure, a larger and heavily reinforced room and multiple PRT elites wearing what I knew was the earliest iteration of the Dragon's Teeth. Gun-metal and black in color, a brief scan found silicon chips with Tinkertech components to speed them up and I saw why Dragon wanted my input on computers.
Optronics are compact and energy efficient. The armor itself was a little bulkier, but had layers I found were convergent with some of my hardsuit tech. A basic lining to environmentally seal the suit, an outer lining of synthetic fibers to resist splinters and shrapnel, a hard plate to resist kinetic impacts and shock. In this case a mix of high strength nanometric steel and ablative ceramics.
Being Tinkertech they were good enough to be compared to my own armor. In raw durability if not in raw computational power and other little luxuries. Right, getting distracted here.
The men and women guarding Weaver each held some of their fancy coilguns, and I detected eezo matrices within their rails. So they probably hit hard enough to puncture through modern body armor like it isn't even there. The ablative ceramics made short work of current laser pistols, though they were still deadly.
I was following Piggot as she marched back and forth like a bat out of hell, guarding her along with Chevalier. Apparently Piggot's call for reinforcements had been sent through with the Teeth in town, the Fallen on the way along with one or two other capes groups looking to sink their teeth into Brockton.
"It's been some time." I greeted Chevalier, eying his fuck-off hug cannon-blade. Personally out of all the capes in the Protectorate I found him one of the coolest even if I only vaguely knew him from…well knew him.
"We never got to talk much, not after Leviathan." A question came to the forefront of my mind then and there.
"What do you see?" I asked and he looked startled, I cocked a hip and laughed. "Oh don't be so surprised, we're not that different in that regard Chevalier. But I hope I'm not overstepping any boundaries." I would drop it if he couldn't answer.
Chevalier cleared his throat. "Bright, almost like I'm staring at the sun." He confessed and I learned in his direction, too curious for my own good. "It reminds me a bit of looking at Eidolon but…different, images of places I've never seen before, a nimbus of power that's hard to make out."
"Suppose that makes sense, my shard used to be an Administrator once." I smirked when I saw the way Chevalier was looking at me.
"Administrator?" He asked easily, and I had a good feeling about him.
"Certain shards have important purposes, roles to play in the grander scheme of things. The Administrator determines and rearranges the configuration of shards."
"Is that something either you or Monarch are capable of?" Chevalier seemed to like our small talk.
"As a power? Not sure, shards talk to each other all the time and I know I…my shard kept others under control from going crazy like Eidolon's."
"Because of what caused all these new powers to show up?"
"Basically. If my power wasn't around there's a good chance we wouldn't be here." Because we would be very very dead. "But my power…you can't really use it as a baseline for other shards, it's different, our connection mostly unique."
"Echidna." Brows lifted.
"You got a good look at her back in May then?" I pointedly let Piggot stew as she stopped circling. It wasn't a good idea to get involved.
"Her power is intense…and it's similar to yours in nature if not in temperament." He shrugged his large shoulders.
"Sounds about right." I shook my head, thinking about how she had bonded with her shard. "My Shard is an odd turtle-duck."
"Turtle-duck?" He sounded confused.
"It's a thing, I've got the DNA sequences to prove it. The multiverse is a weird place." I was defensive, and now I had the urge to clone some turtle-ducks to keep them as pets.
Fluffy things were calming.
"Enough chit chat, we need to interrogate this cape, I would prefer you not be here but…" Piggot grit her teeth, but didn't sound insulting when she directed the last bit to me. "
"Fair. I'm not really the interrogating type, I'm just here because she won't talk if I'm not around." Annoyance crept up but I kept it at bay for the time being. Piggot grunted in agreement, opening the door to the interview room. There were multiple scanners to detect Master effects, constantly sending pulses into the room. They were all Tinkertech of course.
I simply stepped to the side, letting Piggot take control because this was not my forte and I didn't pretend I wasn't an anxious poorly socialized loser.
Not being serious of course, but I'm still bad with people. That they were crazy enough to like me anyway wasn't my problem. I fidgeted as Piggot took her seat, and Weaver seemed deathly still, giving up her weapon willingly.
"Weaver was it?" I pretended the name didn't bother me as Piggot talked. "What exactly did you expect to accomplish with mentioning something as highly classified as the leader of Earth Shin?"
"Your attention for one." There was almost dry humor to how Weaver answered in French-like accent. "I have come quite a distance at the behest of new allies in my fight against the Blue Empress…my immunity to her has been a boon."
"I imagine being a shaman hosting a shard spirit doesn't hurt either." Piggot stiffened, but she didn't berate me for adding to the conversation. "And since you're probably not the only Parahuman in your rebellion, you've found a way to immunize others against her influence." It was a wild guess really, but she looked well equipped, far too much so to be a ragtag group of kid rebels.
"Clever. I might be a major leader of the Tihi Ocean Resistance, but no man or woman is an island." A quick search found that it was an alternate name for the Pacific Ocean in some cultures. "The boy who brought me said that helping this world would help us break free from her grip on our world. In time at least." She was formal wasn't she?
"We're getting off-topic, you said you knew more about the man with current control over the Siberian and Crawler." Well that was definitely a priority, I was experimenting with Sting to pop the bitch. Mainly seeing if I could apply vast amounts of energy from a nearby dimension to alter the course of a Sting projectile. Or a sharper metric using my other space warping cannons.
"Ezekiel, I know what has been told to me. He is a foreigner to both our worlds, a broken one where reality has broken down in places." I stiffened.
"Earth Goetia?" I breathed and the two government employees stilled. I had told the PRT about a number of worlds, the ones I considered dangerous. Goetia was one of them of course.
"I suppose? I was never told if his world had a name." She seemed confused but hopeful. "Ezekiel was once a common researcher before allying with an invasive nation, making use of his new shamanistic abilities and Lost Technology for the war effort."
"So…this Ezekiel is using advanced technology to help conquer an alternate Earth, and has involved himself with Earth Shin on the side. And now he's helping the Fallen pull something on Bet?" I compacted her message, and she seemed surprised.
"That is effectively it, yes." I mouthed sorry at Piggot and backed away. She could be a giant bitch, but she could at least do her job most of the time. Plus she had gotten better over time. "Though he himself is not a conqueror…but he is enabling them."
"Your allies…who or what are they fighting?" Piggot leaned forward, eyes sharp.
"They fight the Iron Lords of the west, the invaders using strange monsters and their own Powered to invade the Britannic isles. But I do not know why they have set their eyes on this world, or why they would even attempt it. Earth Goetia is a primitive world…but perhaps they do not care."
I'm starting to think this was above my paygrade too.
…
And we were going to be here for a while.
September 12th, 2011. 9:30PM
Basilia Rubio
When Taylor opened the door I didn't waste a second before jumping onto her. She took three steps back at the addition of seventy kilograms of mass. She reacted quite promptly, lifting me by my thighs rather than the more uncomfortable option of my waist.
This wasn't the Notebook after all. Though I didn't recall why I knew that scene at all when I never watched the movie.
She didn't seem surprised and I leaned in to brush my lips against hers. She tasted like fruit, and I had to respond.
"Were you eating grapes?"
Her lips curled upwards. "I was trying some fruit that Amy was experimenting with. Some of the genetically modified plants based on the stuff you've been giving her as samples." All the races I knew had some level of advanced genetic technology, advanced and efficient crops serving to feed their vast interstellar populations.
The White Lotus grew some in Amelia's greenhouses, as well as growing modified bacteria feeding on methane and other common chemicals as microbial cultures to eat. It was very efficient, and it meant we could eat without needing to kill animals.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's a lot easier to take care of plants and bacteria than animals.
I collapsed into her, resting my head on her shoulders. She kept walking, and sat onto my bed and I ended up straddling her. Taylor seemed a little uncomfortable, so I flipped around so I was sitting in her lap instead.
"So what else did Weaver tell you?" I tried not to let her question bother me, and the oddness of how it sounded couldn't be understated.
"She seems to only know the basics, that there's some ongoing war on Earth Goetia being fought using spirits, shard abilities and archeotechnology. She's the leader of a resistance group in Shin's Pacific, and they have a way to counter the most dangerous power of Goddess." Honestly I was half-willing to tell them about her cluster to weaken her somehow. "Ezekiel…he's only known by the tech he's used and given to both Earth Shin and the Iron Lords ruling over Greenland and eastern Canada."
"At least we have that Portunus to give you some idea of what we're dealing with right?" I leaned back into Taylor's chest, sighing loudly.
"You're right in that regard, I've got the coding language which is a start at figuring out more about the technology of Earth Goetia." Though the fact it was advanced enough to be basically Tinkertech was scary on its own merit. "Plus I've been working on making a Sting super-heavy weapons platform." It would take cues from superheavy weapons like the Asari rail-cannon and the Turian mass effect shunt cannon.
It would generate a Sting field around a projectile, and a computer would project higher dimensional energy fields to tweak the laws of physics. The weapon would direct a scanning pulse and I would hope for the best that I could chest my way towards breaking Siberian.
I had the experience of breaking some of the dimensional bonds of Endbringer flesh so doing the same to Siberian should be…not easier but I had more than nothing.
"How is that going?" She rested her chin on my head, and I hummed at her pleasant touch.
"Better than I expected, the first prototype was done two days ago. It's about three feet long, and it's got me some experience with wavelength manipulation." Nowadays I could just about fix some of Bakuda's stuff, though I only barely knew what I was doing.
I could fix when something broke but I didn't get everything the machinery did, not yet. But in time that would change, and I could pull off increasingly more fantastic stuff.
I looked straight up, with Taylor making eye contact with me. I smiled softly and she was red faced. She covered her face with her hands. "Quit looking at me like that."
I smirked. "Like what?" I couldn't help but tease, it was in my nature. "I'm just looking at someone I really like."
"Hmm…" As we fell into a soothing silence I thought about what we were doing and where we were still going.
Crushes was all I had experience with, nothing like what I had with Taylor. It wasn't even one borne entirely from physical attraction since my type were girls like…well me. Taylor did look pretty to me, though she leaned a bit towards average.
But I did like my tall and fit girls and her legs went on forever.
It's not why I started to like her, even with how badly the start of our interactions could have gone. I often put my foot into my mouth and Taylor was a paranoid wreck back then. She was a bit controlling, though once we started talking about her issues she eased off a lot.
I was a kind of guy or gal to simply coast, I liked some amount of structure and breathing room. Taylor did her best to accommodate me even when she didn't have to, joined my team despite her lack of trust towards others. She had been faithful and strong and I think I loved her.
Oh…oh dear.
"You're not getting a fever are you?" Taylor's usual expression melted and I denied it silently.
I flipped myself back, straddling Taylor again with what is certainly an intense look of concentration, and she was like a deer under headlights in the cutest way possible.
"Hey." I released a throaty purr, and Taylor looked like she was ready to explode.
"H-Hey." She said with a high pitched tone of shyness. That I had a voice anywhere near seductive had been a matter of practice simply to see if I could.
It had apparently been fruitful or Taylor was an easy target. Maybe both.
I simply lifted myself upwards to carefully kiss her, not wanting to accidentally smash our teeth together.
That had happened a few times more than was normal.
My heart beat faster and my hands were definitely clammy from anxiety. I shifted my positioning while Taylor fidgeted. Taylor's hazel eyes dilated slightly and I was lost in them in the short instant before impact. Our lips met.
This kiss was a little more intense than usual, I knew this even while putting my weight onto Taylor and slowly pushing her down. Her lips tasted fruity, and I felt her hands lower to grip firmly onto my hips, just short of outright groping me(not that I'd mind) of course. I made an awkward attempt of deepening the kiss, lightly prodding at her thinner lips with my tongue.
To my surprise she acquiesced to my nonverbal request, and I dove hesitantly, even as her grip grew more firm and the scent of roses from her hair became more palpable. I knotted the back of her plain black shirt with my grip and rode her down until she was flat to the bed.
There was a passion that left me intrigued and curious, my tongue likely grazing hers as we clumsily made out. My body burned with heat, there was a desire there, a want for more as I savored her mouth. I took in everything from the way her body felt on mine, from her rose scent and grape-like taste, to the flush on her cheeks, and the curls of her black hair.
I broke away, breathing deeply and touching my now wet lips. I was still straddling her, and after a long, long, long time I got off of her, a note of disappointment passing by.
Taylor was still watching me with comically wide eyes, and I giggled and fidgeted.
"Was that a bit much?" My ears were burning, and I wanted to hide my face but couldn't.
"No, no, no it was nice." She assured, shaking her hands. "I wouldn't mind doing that again…later." There was a faraway look in her eyes, as if she was imagining some scene. She blinked slowly, took a deep intake of breath and then released it. "If you're feeling better, I'll just portal back to my house…" I pouted.
"Stay." Again with the confused hazel eyes.
"In your house?"
"For the night." I insisted, batting my eyelashes deliberately.
"In the guest room?" Was that a question or not?
"No." Taylor paid more attention, and I felt jitters and nerves as comprehension filled her eyes.
"Oh."
"You don't have to if you don't want to, but I'd like you too. Sometimes it gets…a little lonely in this empty house." I had lived with my parents for my whole life before now, there was always someone around at some point whether it was my uncle, my mom, my brothers or my dad and other miscellanies.
Instead in this place it was just me, and as a consequence it was barely lived in.
"I'll be back in a bit." Was all Taylor said before vanishing into a portal, and I felt like I had said the wrong thing. Had I pushed her away I didn't…no calm down it's fine.
I crawled over my bed, ducking under the covers because New England is cold as balls to my California accustomed body. I had already been in my sleepwear, a black Alexandria shirt and silk shorts Taylor had made from Spider-Worms I had cloned myself.
Because wearing the shorts your tall GF made with thousands of hybrid bug abominations was romantic.
We were thinking of opening a shop for selling merch, like those Brand shops companies have on the side. I wonder if I can sell plastic sharks with lasers on their head?
Elon Musk managed to sell out cheap-ass propane torches, and he wasn't in part responsible for killing a biblical city-killing monster. The portal opened.
Taylor had exchanged her jeans for Eidolon-themed pajama pants, bringing a set of clean clothing for later use apparently I think. She placed them on a cabinet, and I yawned as the long nights got to me.
She turned off the light of my room, and after deliberation dove under the covers with me. I shimmied over to her, and I did not feel happy when I was resting side by side with her.
Really I didn't and shut up.
"You could have asked if you were feeling…like this." I shrugged.
"Maybe, but I'm not good at asking for help and I don't want you to sacrifice everything for my sake. But I'm probably just being stupid."
"You're not stupid." I curled up to her. "You just have a fuzzy head sometimes." I could hear her soft breathing and there was a long and comfortable pause.
"…" I didn't let any words out.
"As for the kiss…keep doing that in the future, I liked it." I smiled dumbly.
Exhaustion set in, vision darkening and blurring.
"I'm no good at this stuff…even if I like reading romance, not the same as living it." I nearly whined.
"You like romance?"
"I've learned a thing or two about relationships that way…"
"You're a dork."
"Meh."
It was another half hour of quiet conversations and awkward repositions before I fell asleep.
___
AN: This chapter was a bit of trouble in getting it written the way I wanted it written. Turned out longer than I expected too. I'm not too sure how I did on the fighting scenes, or on the more intimate moments. I'm trying to keep a careful balance of how far I'm willing to push. Though I did take into account how Basilia would act in a relationship.
She'd be a dork is all I'm saying there.
Anyways the next chapter is an Interlude which there should be three of for Deviation Shifting to perspectives outside of Basilia is something I've been enjoying a fair bit.
Hopefully this chapter is good.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Kinda funny how the relationship between Basilla and Taylor developed from weary strangers to affectionate boyfriend (girlfriend as well in Basilla case ) and girlfriend. Looks like Basilla is still taking the lead in make out sessions which makes sense since she is older. So in terms of biotics are Basilla and Taylor equally skilled as the other
- Location
- Chula Vista
About equally skilled in biotics yes though specializing for different techniques. Basilia is more skilled with the powerset relating to Warp, breaking or messing with molecular bonds. Reave for example is a form of Molecular Manipulation. She's also good at High Order Energy Manipulation, using mass effect fields to control or trigger energetic forces. Biotic Flares and sub-types of Flare, Channel to redirect high energy attacks like plasma and even lasers if you're strong enough.
The Annihilation Field falls under this, ripping apart the energy states of matter with mass effect energies. Basilia excels at this while Taylor can barely manage a Flare.
Taylor is good at Gravity and Dimensional Control. The first is techniques like Lift, which is easiest but then is followed up by biotic Shockwaves, Singularities and really dangerous gravity techniques that can easily crush a user. Dimensional Control is focused on affecting the very nature of matter and mass effect field by using mass effect shunts like in Charge. Stasis falls under this by ceasing movement. Mostly movement based techniques with some more deadly ones like the power the Rachni Queen used against Leviathan.
Basilia can only really manage Stasis, Charge and a few types of gravity manipulation attacks.
So…about equal but specializing like most people.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Probably slightly worse than them but not by much and is good at the same techniques as Taylor. Limitations to Charges involve that it needs a ton of Power, sheer output from a biotic. Cooldown is low and range isn't infinite barring technological refinement or enhancement. About two hundred feet is probably where the very best biotics would be. Different versions acrifice certain aspects of the move.
A Sword Charge sends out a wave of deadly kinetic force on exit. A Shield form has higher cooldown and less kinetic impact but creates a swirling net of mass effect fields to block attacks or disrupt active biotics.
Spear in addition to Sword has lower range and increases Power needs to form an array of mass effect shunts upon exit to stab into a target. It's a very…Krogan sort of attack. The biotic blink can only stagger and not kill but can be aimed up and used again in less than a second. But it can tire people without enough Reserves to back it up
Nova is basically exiting out of a Charge and using the kinetic energy and biotic fields and turning them into a bomb.
Basically its the same weaknesses all biotics pose, they need to eat a lot and can be caught off guard. They have to be aware to have their barriers up, so blowing one's head off is possible. They can divert only so much bio-electricity to power their biotics, and can only keep going so long before they eat themselves feeding their relentless power.
I wish I could give a meaningful comment about the last two chapters, but I'm stuck eternally nodding my head going "yup, that makes sense" for every single sentence.
Not the most helpful state of mind for providing feedback or encouragement...
Not the most helpful state of mind for providing feedback or encouragement...
Deviation 12.a: The Butcher Queen
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.a: The Butcher Queen
September 15th, 2011. 3:00PM
The Butcher seethed, gripping onto her hair as the rage of over a dozen voices screamed in her ears. She had failed as a Butcher, had failed as a leader and as a cape of her power and caliber.
She had attacked and lost.
Their newest recruit was already on their way to a prison out of their reach, they had lost twelve in the first few days of attacking the city, and Spree was gone. Their foremost frontline fighter was gone.
Why had she decided to attack the White Lotus?
It had been for a number of reasons, to escape from Eidolon and his new power, to show that the Teeth could handle the likes of the White Lotus and their goodie two shoes act. Though perhaps she should have taken into account that Erudition had managed to make that work in a world like this one. Most couldn't because they weren't strong enough.
They were strong enough, and it was obvious that they were more than capable of being mean if they had to.
She wanted to win but she didn't know how. Attacking her employees might work but the bitch had probably planned for that and outside of their job it wouldn't be obvious who they were working for.
Her danger sense flared and she turned in an immediate combative position, hands lifted to shield her face and legs bent slightly. The Fallen shaman was there once more, in a different outfit from his dirty rags.
A white dress shirt with black slacks and sandals, and she could actually see his face. The Butcher blinked, feeling much less intimidated even if her instincts screamed to leave. Ezekiel was a thin man with little muscles and strength to speak of, and she saw the robotic limbs seamlessly integrated into his flesh. They were a silvery color, bearing marks that shined in disturbing colors.
"Like them?" He was almost peppy. "I'm not really a fighter, so the Siberian got the drop on me."
"And you survived?" Ezekiel's smile diminished before twitching back up again.
"Only barely, stopping their plague was another difficulty, it was a rotting virus." He pointed to his arm, and revealed black scars along his shoulders. "It was unfortunate that Bonesaw was taken out of my hands, her knowledge would have been useful."
"Why are you here?" Butcher asked, twitching in agitation, the sense of something wrong still permeating the air.
"I can see you've been doing quite poorly in your first week back home." Butcher lashed out, and missed by inches as the man turned on his heels. "I've been under some trouble myself, my social experiment with the Fallen has err…fallen on hard times due to a few…capes getting in our way. I thought it would be a good idea to see how we can help one another."
Butcher mulled over the idea in her head, of working with this man and the thought of having someone who had tamed the Siberian was appealing. But that raised a question.
"You don't seem the type to involve yourself in this lifestyle, why ask for my help, why fight?" His placid smile became something darker, something pained, something terrified.
"Because I have to." Be didn't elaborate what he meant by that and she wasn't sure she wanted him to.
"Exactly how can you help me?" But despite her misgivings she was interested in what the man had to offer, despite their better judgement. He had brought down the Nine, even if it was through subterfuge and impossible luck.
"I'm a researcher of unusual phenomena, it's my life's work." He threw his hands up, silver eyes twinkling. "And I've been studying powers for some time now, there are ways of strengthening them. Not many but they're there." The Butcher almost changed her mind but something…felt right about that answer.
One voice out of thirteen expressed wariness and was beat down and kept to the back. Not that the fourteenth Butcher realized it in the cacophony of voices within her mind.
"What did you have in mind?" The man smiled genuinely, a warmth there that confused the cape. Why had he seemed so terrifying before, what had changed?
He offered his hand, and the two fell into a rift into a layer of the Spirit World. She was bewildered, and numerous spirits of Violence, Murder, Blood, and Death called out in tongues the Butcher couldn't understand.
"Walk with me, and follow my footsteps." The leader of the Teeth did so, and grimaced as shoes were caked in strange grey silty mud. The land around them seemed to swirl, and their walk became a jog which became a run and the cape struggled to follow the shaman within the Spirit.
She was turned around but remained on the path made by Ezekiel's will. She found herself stepping within a gunmetal colored workshop, electrical lights blinking haphazardly, beating back the hungry shadows. She looked over to see the path was gone, replaced by a boarded up glass door that wouldn't look out of place in some of the poorer places they had robbed in the past.
"What is this place?" She called out and the plucky researcher answered, poking his head out from a corner of the vast space.
"This is a natural rift into the Spirit World, this broken down little shop is bigger on the inside. It's made it quite easy to hide myself for some time." He gestured towards a room and the Butcher followed, bringing them out of sight from curious onlookers.
The equipment within seemed like Tinkertech to her eyes, though none of it was familiar. Something scurried and her danger sense flared but no attack came. There was a vibration, a distant scream that made what little glass was in the lab crack.
"What was that?" Butcher demanded and Ezekiel had a tight expression.
"That would be Shatterbird, or what's left of her anyways…" He shrugged. "Which is why I'm asking bluntly about this. Are you completely, 100% on board with taking part in this experiment?" There was something behind his eyes that told her she should say no. But there was another thing pushing her forward.
If her power could become stronger, could she be kept alive? Could she be strong enough for Eidolon not to bother with? Could she stay the Butcher forever?
Because if there was one thing all Butchers feared, it was death, to become one voice of many.
She didn't want to die.
"Will it make me stronger?"
Ezekiel watched her. "Yes it will. Does that mean a yes to a partnership between us?"
"Can it be done now?" Ezekiel seemed concerned but gestured to a large raised platform, what had once been a glass tube was reduced to fragments of glass scattered haphazardly. There were faded sigils, makeshift symbols that barely did what they were demanded of, broken fragments of vines still smoking.
A failure, but a useful one.
Not that the Butcher knew that herself as she stepped onto the platform, and in the end she didn't much care. Ezekiel murmured under his breath, and crystalline arms emerged from the wall. Butcher crossed her arms, and the strange limbs from above didn't restrain her.
"Don't be worried, he's a friend, and will help make the experiment run more smoothly."
"Some type of Tinkertech robot?" Butcher asked with a tilted head.
"That would be accurate enough." Ezekiel commented. "It's going to be a slow process of…opening the door. A fast process is well…it can't be considered safe in any respect." A second scream echoed, but Butcher continued on the path.
She didn't want to die.
"Just do it." She growled and the limbs lunged like hungry vipers, and unknown to her one stabbed into the back of her head while the sigils channeled inefficiently harvested spiritual energy. Something shifted in place, and the limb retreated as the Butcher became dizzy.
The voices changed in pitch, in distance and there was a disquieting silence. The voices weren't gone though, they were…readjusting to the new normal. She felt like she should be disturbed that she had acquiesced so easily, but it was muted and faraway.
Her powers had grown stronger, but something had been lost. What had it been and did it matter in the end?
She would take time to find out, and she didn't care that flecks of spiritual energy crackled along her skin to further the breaking of barriers. She stepped off the platform, and there was a look on the shaman's she couldn't quite decipher. Not anymore.
She didn't care, but what she did care about was the fight, the ongoing conflict with the city and with the White Lotus. There was intuition there, resentment building and seeping in from channels she couldn't quite see. The Veda was like her, like them and it infuriated her. A foreigner intruding in her turf, she refused to play the game anymore. A threat to her existence.
She vanished in a burst of fire and heat and Ezekiel was alone.
The man blinked.
"I suppose the Fallen will be getting what they want, though I wouldn't have chosen her myself."
September 15th, 2011. 3:45PM
Chevalier blinked away the after-images when he passed by a black haired woman with a curvy frame, brown-green eyes catching his helmet. There was a nervous tilt to her smile and he pointedly didn't stare. There was understanding, another emerald gleam blinding him for a moment before he began to parse apart the memories that came with looking at her…Trigger?
An empty blackness, a hand the size of a gas giant, a swirling collision of countless worlds. Fear and terror as he was pulled away from a side-walk, reality melting away. Skin burning, muscles tearing, and then…
Nothing.
He? Dauntless asked, but he didn't linger as he went on his way. He stepped down an alley, where she said she would be. The time for questions would be later, when he wasn't as dazzled by Erudition's Power.
As expected, Alexandria was there, arms crossed and her lips pulled into a harsh frown.
"When I was assigned to Brockton Bay I expected trouble, but interdimensional conflict wasn't one of them." Perhaps that was a mistake and a lack of imagination on his part.
"Honestly…neither was I." The truth in those words seemed sincere coming from Alexandria. "The Butcher was going to be used to recharge Eidolon, bringing him extra margin for the future." Left unsaid was why he needed to be at full strength though he had a few guesses.
If the end was coming, then Eidolon needed to be at his best.
"Is that where he's been?"
Alexandria nodded. "He's been seeking out certain S-class threats fit for the use of his new power. He won't need many."
He wondered how powerful Erudition's power was to recharge Eidolon without being drained to nothing, to exceed the wells of energy of dozens of powers.
"Will the Triumvirate be making an appearance here then?" Alexandria shook her head, a slight hint of frustration seeping into her body language.
"We have other duties across the country…and I have the notion that it's not a good idea. A trap or some ploy that we'll fall for if we react too quickly. It's why we sent you instead, which reminds me…have you acquired the Endbringer samples?"
Chevalier grimaced. "I was on my way, we know she has access to the remains of Leviathan, and the fragments of the Endbringers we designated Tohu, Bohu and Khonsu. If they work like we expect…"
"Make sure to acquire them, asking should work easily enough. Erudition is a rather accommodating cape." There was an odd optimism in her tone but Chevalier didn't think she was wrong. "Enhancing your armor and blade with the durability of the Endbringers will make you more formidable." There was something in her tone, a distance he didn't comprehend.
"Alexandria?"
The strongest woman in the world didn't explain a thing. "It was good to chat for a bit." There was sentiment, a rare thing from her nowadays. Chevalier watched her blur as she flew into the sky, a muted sonic boom following a few seconds later.
A portal opened right where Alexandria had been and Chevalier lifted his vast sword in reaction. Until he recognized the emerald hue of the hole in space. Drones scrambled out from dark corners, squid-like machines releasing high pitched whining and signals.
Well he supposed there was nothing to lose there, Erudition was a powerful cape but she was kinder than most. He stomped over to the door in space and stepped into another world, the portal winking out behind him, flecks of exotic matter recycled and repurposed by machinery he couldn't see.
He had stepped onto a large metal platform, like a large and high tech oil-rig. There was ocean for a good few miles where he would expect land instead. Which raised the possibility of this being a world where Brockton Bay as a landmass didn't exist. He saw just over a half dozen phantom images within one of the buildings on top, and stepped clear of a sudden deluge of green insects the size of cats.
They chittered, a rapid click of alien language and psychic impulses that were partially translated to his mind.
"The little humans are scared. What can we make them?" Their conversation left him as they moved elsewhere, towards numerous organic-looking shuttles. Chevalier looked up to find a cutter, a fifty meter long vessel flying past with dark energy fields warping reality into a pretzel. It escorted a frigate three times its length.
The frigate was oval-shaped, colored a striking orange-red at the top of the hull and a dark steel-grey at the extended belly of the ship. Two wedge fins dozens of meters long were placed at the flatter top of the twenty thousand ton vehicle. It resembled a strange mix between a beetle and a slim gun, and he could see it was bristling with weapons of some type. The corvette was smaller and had longer rear fins in proportion to its slim body.
Both flew out of sight, using mass effect fields to thrust out of the atmosphere and into the depths of space.
Chevalier suddenly felt very small.
"Impressive isn't it?" Chevalier broke his gaze away from where the clouds had parted and down to…to…Hero.
He hadn't completely believed it when he had been there, but now that he was in person he knew he could. His eyes fell on the figure lingering behind Hero, the same four-legged creature he had seen all those years ago. There was a marked difference, shimmering flecks of a blue-white substance coming off of the ghost in flurries.
"I wasn't sure if it was really you they had brought you back but…now I know for sure."
Hero laughed though there was an edge to it now. "It wasn't easy. I'll give you that, they say it worked because my power kept up a really high fidelity upload that was good enough to trick my soul into sticking around. And it did leave a few marks."
Chevalier wasn't skeptical about souls, it was no less ridiculous than powers coming from multidimensional aliens from another galaxy. Since so far every tinker with the right equipment had managed to detect something they knew it was there but not why or how.
Obviously some part of Erudition's tinker specialty related to the manipulation of souls…which was a scary sort of thought on its own. Though even she had mentioned being fairly in the dark about the science behind the existence of the soul.
"I've been here recovering, the Rachni here know how to…handle me when I start seeing things." The energy that Hero was known for seemed to be draining from his body.
"The side effects of being brought back?" Chevalier said, disturbed but not saying as such.
"More the side effects of not dying to begin with. Parahumans don't always get the luxury, if I was dead Erudition wouldn't know how to bring me back even if she knows where to go."
Chevalier didn't comment on the possible hint that the tinker knew where people went to after death.
"That Shardspace…it left marks?" He stepped in sync with Hero, following the tinker into one of the buildings, one a good thirty feet across and twenty feet high. A door slid open to let them in, and he found himself in a clean workshop. It was a soft grey color, with multiple computer terminals, scientific equipment laid about and obviously used recently.
"It wasn't a good time I'll tell you that…honestly a lot of it is a bit of a blur." Hero walked over to an examination table, where a green-blue slab of crystalline flesh was under scrutiny from a multitude of microscopes. The table was split into several segments, one holding the green-blue slab, another holding a clump of thick dark hairs and a third holding a fragment of black flesh.
"Is that what I think it is?" Chevalier leaned forward, eyes roving over to a few images on some of the monitors. He saw pieces of fractal crystal, data running down what he saw were atomic elements, percentages and names for materials that didn't seem to exist on any table he had ever seen before.
"Samples from Endbringers. Erudition has been studying them for months now and has figured out more than anyone else ever has. Mainly because she lets other tinkers use their specialties to the best of their ability."
"Do you still need them?" Hero gestured with his arm, and the microscopes pulled back on the mechanical limbs they were held on.
"Not really no, Erudition has more samples than this though a lot less than before since she was using what she had as target practice for the Samsara." Chevalier reached out for the slab of what had been Leviathan. It was dense, and his power showed him the lines and shapes and patterns of the space and time altering flesh.
"Could my power kill one of the Endbringers?" Chevalier asked, morbidly curious.
Hero gave him a sad look. "Endbringers were made to be unbeatable, their core disrupts some powers including yours. The only cape capable of destroying their core is Flechette's power or someone with powers like hers."
He remembered that moment well, that instant where Leviathan had nowhere to go, the world moving in slow motion as Alexandria and Eidolon and Erudition and others held the struggling Endbringer in place, as the bolt struck the core and ended the threat of Leviathan.
"Has there been any progress made on replicating Flechette's power?" He was focused on the task of acquiring enough samples for his armor and sword, but finding a way to beat the remaining two was paramount.
"Oh Erudition figured it out a while back, but it's a pretty bulky solution and is missing some key features. Sting unfolds itself across targeted dimensions, attacking from every angle to break through dimensional barriers. But it also alters physics to make itself even more dangerous. Your only defense is dodging, mass or diverting the attack."
"How many can she build? If we can make enough of them we might be able to stop the remaining Endbringers."
Hero pointed to his left to a large gun, a bulky cylinder three feet long. "She went big by implementing Sting into the main gun of her cruiser, but she figured out how to make smaller guns more useful. I helped a bit." By that he meant helped a lot.
Or at least that was what Chevalier suspected. Erudition was incredible at mass production, but some of her technology was bulky in comparison to what other tinkers could pull off with some exceptions in her arsenal.
Why she had thought building a railgun with the yield of a nuclear bomb was a good idea he would never know.
Then again I don't even know the yield of the main gun on her million ton warship.
He lifted the slab of Leviathan, and piled on top the large samples of Tohu, Bobu and Khonsu. He would experiment with them in the safety of the PRT's own facilities, and not in a place where traumatized children were hiding from an Endbringer worshipping cult.
It made him lament the loss of the ideals of the Wards, in the early days when the world was more simple and less broken.
"I guess you'll be going back huh?" There was a quiet acceptance in Hero's tone, as the man worked on a better imaging microscope while Chevalier hefted the samples. "You've really moved up in the world since I got ganked by the Siberian." Chevalier flinched. "Say hi to Hannah would you?"
The Protectorate hero's smile behind his armor was hesitant, careful, but genuine.
"I think I will." He waved goodbye, and a green door opened back into the dirty alley. He moved the samples over to a container he had strapped to his back, and he looked up at the walls of the building trapping him on either side.
He calculated the height and the speed needed, and started to move, lifting his blade as he altered its properties on the fly. As mass was shifted between identical realities, he vaulted over and up onto the roof of the reinforced buildings. He could see he was only a half mile away from the Rig. Chevalier nodded as drones scattered from where he had been.
His appearance should be able to reassure the city, and he needed some exercise anyway.
Chevalier built up speed for another vault, a small grin on his face.
September 16th, 2011. 9:00AM
Crystal looked down at her new costume, one made personally by her cousin. It looked identical to what they usually wore, though she had added a White Lotus pin for fun. Not that the symbol was a requirement, it was just a nice addition for the team as a whole.
It still felt a little weird to know that her new suit was in fact bio-armor made to complement their powers. But then she should have expected this when Monarch wore a giant bug as armor. Or that the White Lotus was allied with an entire race of bugs. Amy said the armor was based on Vicky's power and biotic abilities, special channels and nerve networks generating an energy field to protect them in place of their own shields.
She had also figured out how to use her power through the suit, with different channels to direct her power through.
"Boom bitch!" There was an explosion that made Crystal jump, and she floated over to where she had heard the detonation. The nineteen year old noted that Bakuda…or well Grace was wearing a loose white tank-top and cargo pants. The woman was laughing, periodically snorting as she lobbed a few bombs towards test targets.
The first bomb was a super-enhanced chemical explosion, melting battle steel test targets with sheer energy.
The second bomb was a spherical portal, spewing out waves of plasma and causing the air to rip apart from the forces involved.
The third and final bomb instead encased the target into a forcefield, one that decayed slowly over minutes. Crystal had seen use of the bomb against a few gang members, like the Gold Flame Triad that had risen up in the last few months.
It deflected and dissipated inward attack, and could be rolled around like a hamster ball to catch criminals. She had used some for herself when she had caught them trying to rob some of her friends.
It reminded Crystal that while the old gangs were gone, their infrastructure and legacy was still poisoning the city. The Merchants…not that she knew much about them had lost a lot of their market because of local policies built to counter the need for recreational drugs.
It wasn't ever going to be zero, but it was better than it had been.
But the other gangs left bigger marks. The Empire 88 was the biggest gang for a reason, because they spoke to people enough to bring them into the fold. With the right words, with the right pushes…
The ABB had their sex trafficking and illegal prostitution, their own drug peddling and extortion and while a good half of the gang had been arrested on numerous charges, some had gotten away or inspired new smaller gangs to rise up.
But they were weak and manageable, and with Brockton breaking out of the rut for the first time in years, it was harder to incentivize people into the criminal lifestyle.
Basilia was an interesting person, for a number of reasons outside of where she came from and what her goals were. She had a hard time interacting with people, but she still wanted to understand them, to know how and why they thought and acted the way they did.
She was a person with an inability to not ask questions, soaking in information on capes, on powers and history and the laws relating to them. It was probably why she got along so well with her cousin. The both of them along with Taylor were total cape nerds, though she knew Victoria was a bigger one than either of them.
Despite their looks, Taylor was more of a jock while Victoria was more of a nerd.
"Hey!" Crystal snapped out of her inner thoughts when Grace called out to her which brought up some of her own mixed feelings about the explosion tinker.
She was a year older than her but was in a relationship of some kind with her cousin, though to be fair a two year age difference wasn't much. Plus nothing had seemed to bloom until a fair bit after Amy had turned eighteen.
Not to mention that Grace was a total weirdo and was nothing like Doctor Yamada. She had met her a few times since they were associated with the PRT was New Wave and as the White Lotus.
"What…?" Grace gestured for her to approach and thrust a bomb into her hands. "What the fuck…"
"C'mon and chuck it at a target, or are you too scared?" Grace taunted, her grin wide and frighteningly mad.
Crystal Pelham rolled her eyes and tossed the bomb, and when it struck the target it burst in a field of mass effect energies. Black-laced energy tore apart matter, reducing the steel target to iron dust and flecks of trace elements.
"I really…question how you two got together." Grace snorted and pulled Crystal away from the testing field and sat her down on a small couch.
"You do know Mila is crazy as shit right?" Crystal reared back, indignant at the words.
"There is nothing wrong with Amy!" But despite her best effort there was doubt, because before anything else…
She was Parahuman.
"She was on the road to crazy town and everyone knows it, so was I. So was Taylor and honestly so was Basilia though we're talking crazy paranoid and isolationist rather than violent."
"Err…" How was she supposed to take that?
"We're close because we're both kind of nutty but managed to step off the past from complete insanity. I was supposed to be a mad bomber attacking my school before going even crazier and bitchier in your town after Taylor rots Lung's dick off. Mila was supposed to get picked by Bonesaw, and did something so fucked up it made Basilia afraid of her."
"I…" She wanted to protest what Grace said, but she had talked to Amy, listened to her frustrations and the way she thought and some of her darker desires she had confessed to, expressing guilt.
She was a biokinetic, one of the strongest in the world, she could reshape flesh like clay, create plagues, create and shape new life that would get her a kill order. She could affect brains which means she was one of the worst nightmares of so many people.
Basilia had never elaborated on what exactly happened in that future, like she just didn't want to. Like she didn't want to even think about it.
"So why are you two together if you think she's so crazy?" Grace snorted and then laughed until she fell into a fit, holding her stomach.
"Crystal, me and Mila were friends because we were on the same team, but we didn't start as a couple. You know what friends with benefits are right?"
"What?" Crystal turned red as the conversation turned for the lewd and depraved.
"Turns out our mutual animosity is an excellent spark for very angry sex." Grace answered brightly, horrifying Crystal. "In fact to downright raunchy and ki—" She was cut off while a beet red Crystal slapped her hand over her mouth.
"Please stop talking about the things you do with my cousin." Grace waggled her eyebrows suggestively, making Crystal roll her eyes as she released her.
"I'll try my best not to hurt your sensibilities." The asian engineer cracked a grin.
…
"What do you think…? About all of this?" Crystal blurted out the question, unable to stop herself.
"I think it's completely insane, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Beats being one of the Faerie Queen's ghosts, and it seems like the world is actually getting better. Not fast, not efficiently, but better."
"What about Basilia…? I know what my aunt thinks about her, that she can't be trusted, that she keeps too many secrets. But…I don't think it's that black and white."
Bakuda sagged into the couch, idly twiddling her messy dark hair. "She does keep secrets, but I think a lot of what she's been doing has been out of fear and out of a fuckton of empathy."
Crystal blinked. "Could you…be a little more specific?"
The half-asian woman rolled her eyes. "Think about it. Here's this one poor schmuck stolen from their home and sent out into a world like Bet, with fucked up people with fucked up powers doing fucked up things. Their body is changed, they've got superpowers, they don't know how they got here and they find out they're in a world that shouldn't exist with the goal to end a cycle that's gone on for like millions of years."
"I never thought of it like that." Crystal started to feel a well of sympathy and concern.
"I probably wouldn't have thought it myself…I'm not exactly a social butterfly. But god Basilia likes to talk and talk about taking into consideration other viewpoints. Must be one of her obsessions, you know."
Crystal smiled, remembering very well how…passionate the tinker was about her interests. She could be incredibly focused and motivated on what she liked, but what she didn't like was left to the wayside or ignored until it was too late.
And she was a monologuer.
Grace blew a raspberry, resting her chin on her right palm. "She's scared and despite how she says she doesn't like people and how cynical she can be. Someone who hates people doesn't try to empathize and understand why people do what they do. It doesn't mean she'll feel bad for them…there's a limit after all but I can tell she wants people to be better, she wants a future that isn't shit."
"It's not hard to believe, she does not have the best self esteem about the kind of person she is. But she's determined."
"So it's obvious why she keeps secrets, she doesn't completely trust that it won't fuck something up. Plus there's the shitshow once her world can talk to us."
"Why is that?" Crystal murmured.
Grace called her forehead. "Think about, she knew what our world was supposed to be like, knew some of the players and even a bit of their history. She read this in an old 'myth" The tinker made air quotes. "She didn't even read everything and got some stuff from secondhand sources. She knows secret identities."
Oh god.
"She knows the identities of dozens of capes, more even. If they're known myths, that means the entire planet could just look them up and know the dirty secrets of a lot of capes."
"They'd know about Cauldron too."
Crystal was starting to think they were placing far too much weight on one woman's shoulders. Eidolon himself had cracked under the pressure and ended up summoning the Endbringers, so had Cauldron with the desperation and apathy getting to them.
"We're going to have to watch out for her, she helped my cousins when she didn't have to do anything. She's not even twenty years old yet."
"Neither are you?" Grace pointed out. "But I get what you're saying. Basilia might not have broken the way the rest of us did, it doesn't mean she's lived a charmed and happy life. This is too much for one person." She had cracked from a lot less pressure than this.
Basilia had reached out to Grace despite her misgivings, could have said no to the crazy bomb tinker.
But she didn't. It didn't mean she needed to be put on a pedestal either and she didn't think Grace or her cousin were the type. Which Basilia would reciprocate by messing with them, and argue about nothing and piss each other off.
It was a weird but entertaining dynamic and she was happy for Amy even if Carol was still being a raging bitch. She couldn't have imagined how things would have turned out if Basilia had made different choices, if they had made different choices.
It wasn't perfect, but it was a sight better than it had been and Crystal would fight to keep it that way, to not let the light burn out.
To keep the darkness at bay, she would fight for a better future.
September 16th, 2011. 9:00PM
Glaistig Uaine entertained a guest, the one with powers that didn't come from the courts of the fey. The Marquis accompanied the meeting between an adult acting as a child and a child acting as an adult. The astral projection was made perfectly visible, revealing a boy of twelve of mideastern ethnicity. Though he shined a pretty ocean blue, the spiritual body a mere whisper of his soul.
His abilities were outside the insight of her Faerie, insinuating across reality levels above that of its own kind. Even with hundreds of faeries at her side, she couldn't quite parse what she was looking at. Her power had yet to harness spiritual energy in the ways other shards had.
"You know much about the Faerie and their nature little one." She spoke carefully with an overlapping chorus of broken voices, brimming with life all the same.
"It is what I am for, I see clearly where others see only fog. I have seen the creatures you call Faerie for myself, and I have seen how mortal they are." There was a twinge of indignation, a fury that made the cherubic cape twitch. "I speak to the Void, and my time to teach the Vyasa approaches."
"Vyasa is what you call that tinker isn't it?" The commoner among the Noble and the Shaman made his own contribution. "From what I've heard she slayed the Leviathan." Glaistig Uaine allowed the contribution, finding gainful conversation with the father of the Shaper and the words of the shaman-prince.
"It is the label that arose from Void, a being of both spirit and soul. She has brought many under her aegis, including your daughter Marquis." The Fairy Queen enjoyed the back and forth between an imprisoned crime lord and a boy from a dying world.
"Spirit and soul, what is the difference between them?" Marquis narrowed his eyes, and Rusul smiled.
"Spirits are bound by rules and chains, born from actions of the Material, the soul is simply…more. The answer to a question fourteen billion years old. And you can feel it beating within your flesh am I right? The enduring strength and potential it gives your mortal body."
"I do."
"Spirits and souls have their respective strengths and weaknesses, it is only the greatest of spirits, those who surpass the word of their Ban that can have strength that would make them like gods."
"Are there any such beings within this world?" Glaistig Uaine did as her curiosity demanded.
"The strongest spirits of a planet are on the lower end of this scale of power, those who preside over the fundamental concepts of a world. The spirit of the Ocean, the spirit of the Moon. The spirits of Death and Birth. Most are borderline but will never grow beyond their confines. But the soul has no such limits, it can be anything, it is a machine of enduring strength and power."
Glaistig Uaine didn't understand what the boy meant, the Faerie had power, their own limitless strength and vitality. What would a common human have, what quality did they possess that a Fey lacked?
Why were they so different?
"The Fey…no the Void Wyrms are ancient, they rose from the grey mud of their world when our own kind had yet to diverge from our primate cousins."
"I see you know quite a lot about the nature of powers, it's something I myself have interest in." A fourth and unwanted voice came to the forefront, Teacher piping up from a corner of the meeting room between cell block leaders. The other leaders had been focused elsewhere, deciding that speaking to a boy with no fear of the Faerie Queen was a bad idea.
Rusul shrugged. "It won't matter, you're not the Teacher that could have been in another time and in another place. My purpose here is to be a voice, a medium. That is also the purpose of the Vyasa, even if she doesn't fully understand it, but she will because I will teach her. Because she must."
"Pedagogue, it is best for you to leave." The Faerie Queen left no room for argument, one of her shadows emerging at her call. The woman felt a shiver when the shadow stared back at her, leaving unsaid what it thought about her.
Phoenixfeather was one of the first to act differently, as if some great change had overwhelmed even her powers. There was…life to the shades, and Phoenixfeather placed a hovering hand on Teacher's shoulders, setting a small fire on the cape's clothing before putting it out as the man stepped back.
"I know when I'm not wanted." He fled with his tail between his legs, and there was a smattering of amusement from the shade.
Rusul started the conversation once again, smiling slightly. "The Void Wyrms are simply unlucky, that the path of evolution they chose has made them so alien, that their own choices would rob them of what would have been their birthright as a sapient species."
Marquis blinked. "Birthright?" The shaman was about to answer when he froze along with the Faerie Queen. There was a hush in the room, the leaders never having seen such a reaction from what was possibly the most powerful human on Earth.
"It seems I'll have to cut this short." Despite being a spiritual projection, Rusul brushed off dust and several spirits briefly became visible of their accord. He was about to fade when the Faerie Queen gestured with panic in her eyes.
"What has happened to the Thief?" There was a hint of confusion in her tone, attempting to parse out meaning from what she was sensing.
"She has become the pawn of something broken and insane, and I can no longer hang in the shadows. The Vyasa must be taught." The boy sounds tired, a wild exhaustion that made something buried deep within the Faerie Queen sympathetic. "Are you curious about what has occurred, I wouldn't mind a friend coming along." Glaistig Uaine's lips quirked upwards, when the capes around her took several steps back.
"I would not mind meeting the Usurper, to meet the Vedic Queen and her court of Faeries. Perhaps I shall pay her a visit…but you'll tell me to wait am I right?" Months of conversation had given her some idea of the kind of person Rusul was, and with his projection there was nothing to hurt when she was…insulted.
"Not for long, something is trying to draw you in, trying to draw in the High Priest. You are powerful, but not impervious to all harm and neither is he."
Indignation rose that something would seek to trick her, to corral her like common filth, to use her.
"When will I leave?" She asked innocently even as the prisoners around her decided it was best to leave the room.
"Bring him as well." Rusul pointed to Marquis. "He'll provide an adequate distraction if nothing else." The former gang leader scoffed but didn't seem opposed.
Not that she would have given him much of a choice.
"This is one of those…intuitions or yours is it not? I will simply know?" She asked and he answered.
"Your Faerie will tell you…when the time comes."
She shrugged, cherubic face pulled into a frightening grin.
"I can wait."
AN: I feel like I had more to say on this chapter but I sort of lost my train of thought there. Next chapter should be up in four days as per usual. Not much to say here.
Enjoy.
September 15th, 2011. 3:00PM
The Butcher seethed, gripping onto her hair as the rage of over a dozen voices screamed in her ears. She had failed as a Butcher, had failed as a leader and as a cape of her power and caliber.
She had attacked and lost.
Their newest recruit was already on their way to a prison out of their reach, they had lost twelve in the first few days of attacking the city, and Spree was gone. Their foremost frontline fighter was gone.
Why had she decided to attack the White Lotus?
It had been for a number of reasons, to escape from Eidolon and his new power, to show that the Teeth could handle the likes of the White Lotus and their goodie two shoes act. Though perhaps she should have taken into account that Erudition had managed to make that work in a world like this one. Most couldn't because they weren't strong enough.
They were strong enough, and it was obvious that they were more than capable of being mean if they had to.
She wanted to win but she didn't know how. Attacking her employees might work but the bitch had probably planned for that and outside of their job it wouldn't be obvious who they were working for.
Her danger sense flared and she turned in an immediate combative position, hands lifted to shield her face and legs bent slightly. The Fallen shaman was there once more, in a different outfit from his dirty rags.
A white dress shirt with black slacks and sandals, and she could actually see his face. The Butcher blinked, feeling much less intimidated even if her instincts screamed to leave. Ezekiel was a thin man with little muscles and strength to speak of, and she saw the robotic limbs seamlessly integrated into his flesh. They were a silvery color, bearing marks that shined in disturbing colors.
"Like them?" He was almost peppy. "I'm not really a fighter, so the Siberian got the drop on me."
"And you survived?" Ezekiel's smile diminished before twitching back up again.
"Only barely, stopping their plague was another difficulty, it was a rotting virus." He pointed to his arm, and revealed black scars along his shoulders. "It was unfortunate that Bonesaw was taken out of my hands, her knowledge would have been useful."
"Why are you here?" Butcher asked, twitching in agitation, the sense of something wrong still permeating the air.
"I can see you've been doing quite poorly in your first week back home." Butcher lashed out, and missed by inches as the man turned on his heels. "I've been under some trouble myself, my social experiment with the Fallen has err…fallen on hard times due to a few…capes getting in our way. I thought it would be a good idea to see how we can help one another."
Butcher mulled over the idea in her head, of working with this man and the thought of having someone who had tamed the Siberian was appealing. But that raised a question.
"You don't seem the type to involve yourself in this lifestyle, why ask for my help, why fight?" His placid smile became something darker, something pained, something terrified.
"Because I have to." Be didn't elaborate what he meant by that and she wasn't sure she wanted him to.
"Exactly how can you help me?" But despite her misgivings she was interested in what the man had to offer, despite their better judgement. He had brought down the Nine, even if it was through subterfuge and impossible luck.
"I'm a researcher of unusual phenomena, it's my life's work." He threw his hands up, silver eyes twinkling. "And I've been studying powers for some time now, there are ways of strengthening them. Not many but they're there." The Butcher almost changed her mind but something…felt right about that answer.
One voice out of thirteen expressed wariness and was beat down and kept to the back. Not that the fourteenth Butcher realized it in the cacophony of voices within her mind.
"What did you have in mind?" The man smiled genuinely, a warmth there that confused the cape. Why had he seemed so terrifying before, what had changed?
He offered his hand, and the two fell into a rift into a layer of the Spirit World. She was bewildered, and numerous spirits of Violence, Murder, Blood, and Death called out in tongues the Butcher couldn't understand.
"Walk with me, and follow my footsteps." The leader of the Teeth did so, and grimaced as shoes were caked in strange grey silty mud. The land around them seemed to swirl, and their walk became a jog which became a run and the cape struggled to follow the shaman within the Spirit.
She was turned around but remained on the path made by Ezekiel's will. She found herself stepping within a gunmetal colored workshop, electrical lights blinking haphazardly, beating back the hungry shadows. She looked over to see the path was gone, replaced by a boarded up glass door that wouldn't look out of place in some of the poorer places they had robbed in the past.
"What is this place?" She called out and the plucky researcher answered, poking his head out from a corner of the vast space.
"This is a natural rift into the Spirit World, this broken down little shop is bigger on the inside. It's made it quite easy to hide myself for some time." He gestured towards a room and the Butcher followed, bringing them out of sight from curious onlookers.
The equipment within seemed like Tinkertech to her eyes, though none of it was familiar. Something scurried and her danger sense flared but no attack came. There was a vibration, a distant scream that made what little glass was in the lab crack.
"What was that?" Butcher demanded and Ezekiel had a tight expression.
"That would be Shatterbird, or what's left of her anyways…" He shrugged. "Which is why I'm asking bluntly about this. Are you completely, 100% on board with taking part in this experiment?" There was something behind his eyes that told her she should say no. But there was another thing pushing her forward.
If her power could become stronger, could she be kept alive? Could she be strong enough for Eidolon not to bother with? Could she stay the Butcher forever?
Because if there was one thing all Butchers feared, it was death, to become one voice of many.
She didn't want to die.
"Will it make me stronger?"
Ezekiel watched her. "Yes it will. Does that mean a yes to a partnership between us?"
"Can it be done now?" Ezekiel seemed concerned but gestured to a large raised platform, what had once been a glass tube was reduced to fragments of glass scattered haphazardly. There were faded sigils, makeshift symbols that barely did what they were demanded of, broken fragments of vines still smoking.
A failure, but a useful one.
Not that the Butcher knew that herself as she stepped onto the platform, and in the end she didn't much care. Ezekiel murmured under his breath, and crystalline arms emerged from the wall. Butcher crossed her arms, and the strange limbs from above didn't restrain her.
"Don't be worried, he's a friend, and will help make the experiment run more smoothly."
"Some type of Tinkertech robot?" Butcher asked with a tilted head.
"That would be accurate enough." Ezekiel commented. "It's going to be a slow process of…opening the door. A fast process is well…it can't be considered safe in any respect." A second scream echoed, but Butcher continued on the path.
She didn't want to die.
"Just do it." She growled and the limbs lunged like hungry vipers, and unknown to her one stabbed into the back of her head while the sigils channeled inefficiently harvested spiritual energy. Something shifted in place, and the limb retreated as the Butcher became dizzy.
The voices changed in pitch, in distance and there was a disquieting silence. The voices weren't gone though, they were…readjusting to the new normal. She felt like she should be disturbed that she had acquiesced so easily, but it was muted and faraway.
Her powers had grown stronger, but something had been lost. What had it been and did it matter in the end?
She would take time to find out, and she didn't care that flecks of spiritual energy crackled along her skin to further the breaking of barriers. She stepped off the platform, and there was a look on the shaman's she couldn't quite decipher. Not anymore.
She didn't care, but what she did care about was the fight, the ongoing conflict with the city and with the White Lotus. There was intuition there, resentment building and seeping in from channels she couldn't quite see. The Veda was like her, like them and it infuriated her. A foreigner intruding in her turf, she refused to play the game anymore. A threat to her existence.
She vanished in a burst of fire and heat and Ezekiel was alone.
The man blinked.
"I suppose the Fallen will be getting what they want, though I wouldn't have chosen her myself."
___
September 15th, 2011. 3:45PM
Chevalier blinked away the after-images when he passed by a black haired woman with a curvy frame, brown-green eyes catching his helmet. There was a nervous tilt to her smile and he pointedly didn't stare. There was understanding, another emerald gleam blinding him for a moment before he began to parse apart the memories that came with looking at her…Trigger?
An empty blackness, a hand the size of a gas giant, a swirling collision of countless worlds. Fear and terror as he was pulled away from a side-walk, reality melting away. Skin burning, muscles tearing, and then…
Nothing.
He? Dauntless asked, but he didn't linger as he went on his way. He stepped down an alley, where she said she would be. The time for questions would be later, when he wasn't as dazzled by Erudition's Power.
As expected, Alexandria was there, arms crossed and her lips pulled into a harsh frown.
"When I was assigned to Brockton Bay I expected trouble, but interdimensional conflict wasn't one of them." Perhaps that was a mistake and a lack of imagination on his part.
"Honestly…neither was I." The truth in those words seemed sincere coming from Alexandria. "The Butcher was going to be used to recharge Eidolon, bringing him extra margin for the future." Left unsaid was why he needed to be at full strength though he had a few guesses.
If the end was coming, then Eidolon needed to be at his best.
"Is that where he's been?"
Alexandria nodded. "He's been seeking out certain S-class threats fit for the use of his new power. He won't need many."
He wondered how powerful Erudition's power was to recharge Eidolon without being drained to nothing, to exceed the wells of energy of dozens of powers.
"Will the Triumvirate be making an appearance here then?" Alexandria shook her head, a slight hint of frustration seeping into her body language.
"We have other duties across the country…and I have the notion that it's not a good idea. A trap or some ploy that we'll fall for if we react too quickly. It's why we sent you instead, which reminds me…have you acquired the Endbringer samples?"
Chevalier grimaced. "I was on my way, we know she has access to the remains of Leviathan, and the fragments of the Endbringers we designated Tohu, Bohu and Khonsu. If they work like we expect…"
"Make sure to acquire them, asking should work easily enough. Erudition is a rather accommodating cape." There was an odd optimism in her tone but Chevalier didn't think she was wrong. "Enhancing your armor and blade with the durability of the Endbringers will make you more formidable." There was something in her tone, a distance he didn't comprehend.
"Alexandria?"
The strongest woman in the world didn't explain a thing. "It was good to chat for a bit." There was sentiment, a rare thing from her nowadays. Chevalier watched her blur as she flew into the sky, a muted sonic boom following a few seconds later.
A portal opened right where Alexandria had been and Chevalier lifted his vast sword in reaction. Until he recognized the emerald hue of the hole in space. Drones scrambled out from dark corners, squid-like machines releasing high pitched whining and signals.
Well he supposed there was nothing to lose there, Erudition was a powerful cape but she was kinder than most. He stomped over to the door in space and stepped into another world, the portal winking out behind him, flecks of exotic matter recycled and repurposed by machinery he couldn't see.
He had stepped onto a large metal platform, like a large and high tech oil-rig. There was ocean for a good few miles where he would expect land instead. Which raised the possibility of this being a world where Brockton Bay as a landmass didn't exist. He saw just over a half dozen phantom images within one of the buildings on top, and stepped clear of a sudden deluge of green insects the size of cats.
They chittered, a rapid click of alien language and psychic impulses that were partially translated to his mind.
"The little humans are scared. What can we make them?" Their conversation left him as they moved elsewhere, towards numerous organic-looking shuttles. Chevalier looked up to find a cutter, a fifty meter long vessel flying past with dark energy fields warping reality into a pretzel. It escorted a frigate three times its length.
The frigate was oval-shaped, colored a striking orange-red at the top of the hull and a dark steel-grey at the extended belly of the ship. Two wedge fins dozens of meters long were placed at the flatter top of the twenty thousand ton vehicle. It resembled a strange mix between a beetle and a slim gun, and he could see it was bristling with weapons of some type. The corvette was smaller and had longer rear fins in proportion to its slim body.
Both flew out of sight, using mass effect fields to thrust out of the atmosphere and into the depths of space.
Chevalier suddenly felt very small.
"Impressive isn't it?" Chevalier broke his gaze away from where the clouds had parted and down to…to…Hero.
He hadn't completely believed it when he had been there, but now that he was in person he knew he could. His eyes fell on the figure lingering behind Hero, the same four-legged creature he had seen all those years ago. There was a marked difference, shimmering flecks of a blue-white substance coming off of the ghost in flurries.
"I wasn't sure if it was really you they had brought you back but…now I know for sure."
Hero laughed though there was an edge to it now. "It wasn't easy. I'll give you that, they say it worked because my power kept up a really high fidelity upload that was good enough to trick my soul into sticking around. And it did leave a few marks."
Chevalier wasn't skeptical about souls, it was no less ridiculous than powers coming from multidimensional aliens from another galaxy. Since so far every tinker with the right equipment had managed to detect something they knew it was there but not why or how.
Obviously some part of Erudition's tinker specialty related to the manipulation of souls…which was a scary sort of thought on its own. Though even she had mentioned being fairly in the dark about the science behind the existence of the soul.
"I've been here recovering, the Rachni here know how to…handle me when I start seeing things." The energy that Hero was known for seemed to be draining from his body.
"The side effects of being brought back?" Chevalier said, disturbed but not saying as such.
"More the side effects of not dying to begin with. Parahumans don't always get the luxury, if I was dead Erudition wouldn't know how to bring me back even if she knows where to go."
Chevalier didn't comment on the possible hint that the tinker knew where people went to after death.
"That Shardspace…it left marks?" He stepped in sync with Hero, following the tinker into one of the buildings, one a good thirty feet across and twenty feet high. A door slid open to let them in, and he found himself in a clean workshop. It was a soft grey color, with multiple computer terminals, scientific equipment laid about and obviously used recently.
"It wasn't a good time I'll tell you that…honestly a lot of it is a bit of a blur." Hero walked over to an examination table, where a green-blue slab of crystalline flesh was under scrutiny from a multitude of microscopes. The table was split into several segments, one holding the green-blue slab, another holding a clump of thick dark hairs and a third holding a fragment of black flesh.
"Is that what I think it is?" Chevalier leaned forward, eyes roving over to a few images on some of the monitors. He saw pieces of fractal crystal, data running down what he saw were atomic elements, percentages and names for materials that didn't seem to exist on any table he had ever seen before.
"Samples from Endbringers. Erudition has been studying them for months now and has figured out more than anyone else ever has. Mainly because she lets other tinkers use their specialties to the best of their ability."
"Do you still need them?" Hero gestured with his arm, and the microscopes pulled back on the mechanical limbs they were held on.
"Not really no, Erudition has more samples than this though a lot less than before since she was using what she had as target practice for the Samsara." Chevalier reached out for the slab of what had been Leviathan. It was dense, and his power showed him the lines and shapes and patterns of the space and time altering flesh.
"Could my power kill one of the Endbringers?" Chevalier asked, morbidly curious.
Hero gave him a sad look. "Endbringers were made to be unbeatable, their core disrupts some powers including yours. The only cape capable of destroying their core is Flechette's power or someone with powers like hers."
He remembered that moment well, that instant where Leviathan had nowhere to go, the world moving in slow motion as Alexandria and Eidolon and Erudition and others held the struggling Endbringer in place, as the bolt struck the core and ended the threat of Leviathan.
"Has there been any progress made on replicating Flechette's power?" He was focused on the task of acquiring enough samples for his armor and sword, but finding a way to beat the remaining two was paramount.
"Oh Erudition figured it out a while back, but it's a pretty bulky solution and is missing some key features. Sting unfolds itself across targeted dimensions, attacking from every angle to break through dimensional barriers. But it also alters physics to make itself even more dangerous. Your only defense is dodging, mass or diverting the attack."
"How many can she build? If we can make enough of them we might be able to stop the remaining Endbringers."
Hero pointed to his left to a large gun, a bulky cylinder three feet long. "She went big by implementing Sting into the main gun of her cruiser, but she figured out how to make smaller guns more useful. I helped a bit." By that he meant helped a lot.
Or at least that was what Chevalier suspected. Erudition was incredible at mass production, but some of her technology was bulky in comparison to what other tinkers could pull off with some exceptions in her arsenal.
Why she had thought building a railgun with the yield of a nuclear bomb was a good idea he would never know.
Then again I don't even know the yield of the main gun on her million ton warship.
He lifted the slab of Leviathan, and piled on top the large samples of Tohu, Bobu and Khonsu. He would experiment with them in the safety of the PRT's own facilities, and not in a place where traumatized children were hiding from an Endbringer worshipping cult.
It made him lament the loss of the ideals of the Wards, in the early days when the world was more simple and less broken.
"I guess you'll be going back huh?" There was a quiet acceptance in Hero's tone, as the man worked on a better imaging microscope while Chevalier hefted the samples. "You've really moved up in the world since I got ganked by the Siberian." Chevalier flinched. "Say hi to Hannah would you?"
The Protectorate hero's smile behind his armor was hesitant, careful, but genuine.
"I think I will." He waved goodbye, and a green door opened back into the dirty alley. He moved the samples over to a container he had strapped to his back, and he looked up at the walls of the building trapping him on either side.
He calculated the height and the speed needed, and started to move, lifting his blade as he altered its properties on the fly. As mass was shifted between identical realities, he vaulted over and up onto the roof of the reinforced buildings. He could see he was only a half mile away from the Rig. Chevalier nodded as drones scattered from where he had been.
His appearance should be able to reassure the city, and he needed some exercise anyway.
Chevalier built up speed for another vault, a small grin on his face.
___
September 16th, 2011. 9:00AM
Crystal looked down at her new costume, one made personally by her cousin. It looked identical to what they usually wore, though she had added a White Lotus pin for fun. Not that the symbol was a requirement, it was just a nice addition for the team as a whole.
It still felt a little weird to know that her new suit was in fact bio-armor made to complement their powers. But then she should have expected this when Monarch wore a giant bug as armor. Or that the White Lotus was allied with an entire race of bugs. Amy said the armor was based on Vicky's power and biotic abilities, special channels and nerve networks generating an energy field to protect them in place of their own shields.
She had also figured out how to use her power through the suit, with different channels to direct her power through.
"Boom bitch!" There was an explosion that made Crystal jump, and she floated over to where she had heard the detonation. The nineteen year old noted that Bakuda…or well Grace was wearing a loose white tank-top and cargo pants. The woman was laughing, periodically snorting as she lobbed a few bombs towards test targets.
The first bomb was a super-enhanced chemical explosion, melting battle steel test targets with sheer energy.
The second bomb was a spherical portal, spewing out waves of plasma and causing the air to rip apart from the forces involved.
The third and final bomb instead encased the target into a forcefield, one that decayed slowly over minutes. Crystal had seen use of the bomb against a few gang members, like the Gold Flame Triad that had risen up in the last few months.
It deflected and dissipated inward attack, and could be rolled around like a hamster ball to catch criminals. She had used some for herself when she had caught them trying to rob some of her friends.
It reminded Crystal that while the old gangs were gone, their infrastructure and legacy was still poisoning the city. The Merchants…not that she knew much about them had lost a lot of their market because of local policies built to counter the need for recreational drugs.
It wasn't ever going to be zero, but it was better than it had been.
But the other gangs left bigger marks. The Empire 88 was the biggest gang for a reason, because they spoke to people enough to bring them into the fold. With the right words, with the right pushes…
The ABB had their sex trafficking and illegal prostitution, their own drug peddling and extortion and while a good half of the gang had been arrested on numerous charges, some had gotten away or inspired new smaller gangs to rise up.
But they were weak and manageable, and with Brockton breaking out of the rut for the first time in years, it was harder to incentivize people into the criminal lifestyle.
Basilia was an interesting person, for a number of reasons outside of where she came from and what her goals were. She had a hard time interacting with people, but she still wanted to understand them, to know how and why they thought and acted the way they did.
She was a person with an inability to not ask questions, soaking in information on capes, on powers and history and the laws relating to them. It was probably why she got along so well with her cousin. The both of them along with Taylor were total cape nerds, though she knew Victoria was a bigger one than either of them.
Despite their looks, Taylor was more of a jock while Victoria was more of a nerd.
"Hey!" Crystal snapped out of her inner thoughts when Grace called out to her which brought up some of her own mixed feelings about the explosion tinker.
She was a year older than her but was in a relationship of some kind with her cousin, though to be fair a two year age difference wasn't much. Plus nothing had seemed to bloom until a fair bit after Amy had turned eighteen.
Not to mention that Grace was a total weirdo and was nothing like Doctor Yamada. She had met her a few times since they were associated with the PRT was New Wave and as the White Lotus.
"What…?" Grace gestured for her to approach and thrust a bomb into her hands. "What the fuck…"
"C'mon and chuck it at a target, or are you too scared?" Grace taunted, her grin wide and frighteningly mad.
Crystal Pelham rolled her eyes and tossed the bomb, and when it struck the target it burst in a field of mass effect energies. Black-laced energy tore apart matter, reducing the steel target to iron dust and flecks of trace elements.
"I really…question how you two got together." Grace snorted and pulled Crystal away from the testing field and sat her down on a small couch.
"You do know Mila is crazy as shit right?" Crystal reared back, indignant at the words.
"There is nothing wrong with Amy!" But despite her best effort there was doubt, because before anything else…
She was Parahuman.
"She was on the road to crazy town and everyone knows it, so was I. So was Taylor and honestly so was Basilia though we're talking crazy paranoid and isolationist rather than violent."
"Err…" How was she supposed to take that?
"We're close because we're both kind of nutty but managed to step off the past from complete insanity. I was supposed to be a mad bomber attacking my school before going even crazier and bitchier in your town after Taylor rots Lung's dick off. Mila was supposed to get picked by Bonesaw, and did something so fucked up it made Basilia afraid of her."
"I…" She wanted to protest what Grace said, but she had talked to Amy, listened to her frustrations and the way she thought and some of her darker desires she had confessed to, expressing guilt.
She was a biokinetic, one of the strongest in the world, she could reshape flesh like clay, create plagues, create and shape new life that would get her a kill order. She could affect brains which means she was one of the worst nightmares of so many people.
Basilia had never elaborated on what exactly happened in that future, like she just didn't want to. Like she didn't want to even think about it.
"So why are you two together if you think she's so crazy?" Grace snorted and then laughed until she fell into a fit, holding her stomach.
"Crystal, me and Mila were friends because we were on the same team, but we didn't start as a couple. You know what friends with benefits are right?"
"What?" Crystal turned red as the conversation turned for the lewd and depraved.
"Turns out our mutual animosity is an excellent spark for very angry sex." Grace answered brightly, horrifying Crystal. "In fact to downright raunchy and ki—" She was cut off while a beet red Crystal slapped her hand over her mouth.
"Please stop talking about the things you do with my cousin." Grace waggled her eyebrows suggestively, making Crystal roll her eyes as she released her.
"I'll try my best not to hurt your sensibilities." The asian engineer cracked a grin.
…
"What do you think…? About all of this?" Crystal blurted out the question, unable to stop herself.
"I think it's completely insane, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Beats being one of the Faerie Queen's ghosts, and it seems like the world is actually getting better. Not fast, not efficiently, but better."
"What about Basilia…? I know what my aunt thinks about her, that she can't be trusted, that she keeps too many secrets. But…I don't think it's that black and white."
Bakuda sagged into the couch, idly twiddling her messy dark hair. "She does keep secrets, but I think a lot of what she's been doing has been out of fear and out of a fuckton of empathy."
Crystal blinked. "Could you…be a little more specific?"
The half-asian woman rolled her eyes. "Think about it. Here's this one poor schmuck stolen from their home and sent out into a world like Bet, with fucked up people with fucked up powers doing fucked up things. Their body is changed, they've got superpowers, they don't know how they got here and they find out they're in a world that shouldn't exist with the goal to end a cycle that's gone on for like millions of years."
"I never thought of it like that." Crystal started to feel a well of sympathy and concern.
"I probably wouldn't have thought it myself…I'm not exactly a social butterfly. But god Basilia likes to talk and talk about taking into consideration other viewpoints. Must be one of her obsessions, you know."
Crystal smiled, remembering very well how…passionate the tinker was about her interests. She could be incredibly focused and motivated on what she liked, but what she didn't like was left to the wayside or ignored until it was too late.
And she was a monologuer.
Grace blew a raspberry, resting her chin on her right palm. "She's scared and despite how she says she doesn't like people and how cynical she can be. Someone who hates people doesn't try to empathize and understand why people do what they do. It doesn't mean she'll feel bad for them…there's a limit after all but I can tell she wants people to be better, she wants a future that isn't shit."
"It's not hard to believe, she does not have the best self esteem about the kind of person she is. But she's determined."
"So it's obvious why she keeps secrets, she doesn't completely trust that it won't fuck something up. Plus there's the shitshow once her world can talk to us."
"Why is that?" Crystal murmured.
Grace called her forehead. "Think about, she knew what our world was supposed to be like, knew some of the players and even a bit of their history. She read this in an old 'myth" The tinker made air quotes. "She didn't even read everything and got some stuff from secondhand sources. She knows secret identities."
Oh god.
"She knows the identities of dozens of capes, more even. If they're known myths, that means the entire planet could just look them up and know the dirty secrets of a lot of capes."
"They'd know about Cauldron too."
Crystal was starting to think they were placing far too much weight on one woman's shoulders. Eidolon himself had cracked under the pressure and ended up summoning the Endbringers, so had Cauldron with the desperation and apathy getting to them.
"We're going to have to watch out for her, she helped my cousins when she didn't have to do anything. She's not even twenty years old yet."
"Neither are you?" Grace pointed out. "But I get what you're saying. Basilia might not have broken the way the rest of us did, it doesn't mean she's lived a charmed and happy life. This is too much for one person." She had cracked from a lot less pressure than this.
Basilia had reached out to Grace despite her misgivings, could have said no to the crazy bomb tinker.
But she didn't. It didn't mean she needed to be put on a pedestal either and she didn't think Grace or her cousin were the type. Which Basilia would reciprocate by messing with them, and argue about nothing and piss each other off.
It was a weird but entertaining dynamic and she was happy for Amy even if Carol was still being a raging bitch. She couldn't have imagined how things would have turned out if Basilia had made different choices, if they had made different choices.
It wasn't perfect, but it was a sight better than it had been and Crystal would fight to keep it that way, to not let the light burn out.
To keep the darkness at bay, she would fight for a better future.
___
September 16th, 2011. 9:00PM
Glaistig Uaine entertained a guest, the one with powers that didn't come from the courts of the fey. The Marquis accompanied the meeting between an adult acting as a child and a child acting as an adult. The astral projection was made perfectly visible, revealing a boy of twelve of mideastern ethnicity. Though he shined a pretty ocean blue, the spiritual body a mere whisper of his soul.
His abilities were outside the insight of her Faerie, insinuating across reality levels above that of its own kind. Even with hundreds of faeries at her side, she couldn't quite parse what she was looking at. Her power had yet to harness spiritual energy in the ways other shards had.
"You know much about the Faerie and their nature little one." She spoke carefully with an overlapping chorus of broken voices, brimming with life all the same.
"It is what I am for, I see clearly where others see only fog. I have seen the creatures you call Faerie for myself, and I have seen how mortal they are." There was a twinge of indignation, a fury that made the cherubic cape twitch. "I speak to the Void, and my time to teach the Vyasa approaches."
"Vyasa is what you call that tinker isn't it?" The commoner among the Noble and the Shaman made his own contribution. "From what I've heard she slayed the Leviathan." Glaistig Uaine allowed the contribution, finding gainful conversation with the father of the Shaper and the words of the shaman-prince.
"It is the label that arose from Void, a being of both spirit and soul. She has brought many under her aegis, including your daughter Marquis." The Fairy Queen enjoyed the back and forth between an imprisoned crime lord and a boy from a dying world.
"Spirit and soul, what is the difference between them?" Marquis narrowed his eyes, and Rusul smiled.
"Spirits are bound by rules and chains, born from actions of the Material, the soul is simply…more. The answer to a question fourteen billion years old. And you can feel it beating within your flesh am I right? The enduring strength and potential it gives your mortal body."
"I do."
"Spirits and souls have their respective strengths and weaknesses, it is only the greatest of spirits, those who surpass the word of their Ban that can have strength that would make them like gods."
"Are there any such beings within this world?" Glaistig Uaine did as her curiosity demanded.
"The strongest spirits of a planet are on the lower end of this scale of power, those who preside over the fundamental concepts of a world. The spirit of the Ocean, the spirit of the Moon. The spirits of Death and Birth. Most are borderline but will never grow beyond their confines. But the soul has no such limits, it can be anything, it is a machine of enduring strength and power."
Glaistig Uaine didn't understand what the boy meant, the Faerie had power, their own limitless strength and vitality. What would a common human have, what quality did they possess that a Fey lacked?
Why were they so different?
"The Fey…no the Void Wyrms are ancient, they rose from the grey mud of their world when our own kind had yet to diverge from our primate cousins."
"I see you know quite a lot about the nature of powers, it's something I myself have interest in." A fourth and unwanted voice came to the forefront, Teacher piping up from a corner of the meeting room between cell block leaders. The other leaders had been focused elsewhere, deciding that speaking to a boy with no fear of the Faerie Queen was a bad idea.
Rusul shrugged. "It won't matter, you're not the Teacher that could have been in another time and in another place. My purpose here is to be a voice, a medium. That is also the purpose of the Vyasa, even if she doesn't fully understand it, but she will because I will teach her. Because she must."
"Pedagogue, it is best for you to leave." The Faerie Queen left no room for argument, one of her shadows emerging at her call. The woman felt a shiver when the shadow stared back at her, leaving unsaid what it thought about her.
Phoenixfeather was one of the first to act differently, as if some great change had overwhelmed even her powers. There was…life to the shades, and Phoenixfeather placed a hovering hand on Teacher's shoulders, setting a small fire on the cape's clothing before putting it out as the man stepped back.
"I know when I'm not wanted." He fled with his tail between his legs, and there was a smattering of amusement from the shade.
Rusul started the conversation once again, smiling slightly. "The Void Wyrms are simply unlucky, that the path of evolution they chose has made them so alien, that their own choices would rob them of what would have been their birthright as a sapient species."
Marquis blinked. "Birthright?" The shaman was about to answer when he froze along with the Faerie Queen. There was a hush in the room, the leaders never having seen such a reaction from what was possibly the most powerful human on Earth.
"It seems I'll have to cut this short." Despite being a spiritual projection, Rusul brushed off dust and several spirits briefly became visible of their accord. He was about to fade when the Faerie Queen gestured with panic in her eyes.
"What has happened to the Thief?" There was a hint of confusion in her tone, attempting to parse out meaning from what she was sensing.
"She has become the pawn of something broken and insane, and I can no longer hang in the shadows. The Vyasa must be taught." The boy sounds tired, a wild exhaustion that made something buried deep within the Faerie Queen sympathetic. "Are you curious about what has occurred, I wouldn't mind a friend coming along." Glaistig Uaine's lips quirked upwards, when the capes around her took several steps back.
"I would not mind meeting the Usurper, to meet the Vedic Queen and her court of Faeries. Perhaps I shall pay her a visit…but you'll tell me to wait am I right?" Months of conversation had given her some idea of the kind of person Rusul was, and with his projection there was nothing to hurt when she was…insulted.
"Not for long, something is trying to draw you in, trying to draw in the High Priest. You are powerful, but not impervious to all harm and neither is he."
Indignation rose that something would seek to trick her, to corral her like common filth, to use her.
"When will I leave?" She asked innocently even as the prisoners around her decided it was best to leave the room.
"Bring him as well." Rusul pointed to Marquis. "He'll provide an adequate distraction if nothing else." The former gang leader scoffed but didn't seem opposed.
Not that she would have given him much of a choice.
"This is one of those…intuitions or yours is it not? I will simply know?" She asked and he answered.
"Your Faerie will tell you…when the time comes."
She shrugged, cherubic face pulled into a frightening grin.
"I can wait."
___
AN: I feel like I had more to say on this chapter but I sort of lost my train of thought there. Next chapter should be up in four days as per usual. Not much to say here.
Enjoy.
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Guess who remembered that the multi-quote function exists? This guy!!! 
I mean, this is clearly the guy trying to get out of the scenario his Spirit Oath minders are pushing him into, but the referential feeling is still there.
The Butcher has been Titanized, like Khepri.
If Basilia and Veda had not been around to stabilize the old Entity Restrictions into proper Shard Spirit Bans, this experiment would have caused The Butcher to immediately explode into a full scale Titan, I am sure of it!!!
At the beginning that was Basilia right? The tenses of Alexandria's conversation immediately after threw me off.
Odd to see Chevalier discover Basilia was a former male until Power Shenanigans. I rather assumed that imprint would have been scrubbed away during the conversion process involved in the trigger memory.
Actually, it is very weird that Basilia's Isekai Surgery counts as a Trigger Event for Checalier's Shard to request from Veda as a recording to play back for its host.
...did Basilia "trigger"-trigger during the process of the Isekai Soul Surgery?
But yeah, thugs are a penny a dozen, the real infrastructure is managing to find the camoflogued sociopaths and psychopaths in society that can act as lieutenants able to break underlings like a drill sergeant and fence goods with the most twisted of clients without feeling the emotional stresses involved in overseeing literal torture and rape and murder of other humans in the course of disciplining and securing your network of connections with other monstrously minded individuals into a network of reliability in profit and consistency of horror to ensure a new world of unbroken and unfailing rules of your gang's network's social reality completely replaces the sensibilities of common society.
That means that versus debate forums are required reading for anything she writes, or else the grognards will eat her alive for canon inaccuracies as small as claiming Armsmaster getting off work at 8pm sharp on a Tuesday when it has already been confirmed that Armsmaster exits the PRT building at exactly 8:07pm sharp every Tursday except for Tuesdays he went on patrol at which point he exits the building at 8:22pm exactly, and therefore the entire in-story altercation that he supposedly exited the building just in time to observe is not possible and completely defunct! Good DAY, ma'am! I will not be reading your fanfiction works again!
Shouldn't it be 'Milia (me-lee-ah) as a nickname, not Mila (me-lah), as a shortened form of Amilia? Feels typo-weird.
Plus, that is definitely one way to get Amy over her Carol-induced hyper-puritanic mental blocks toward flesh-prosthetics experimentation of the self-attaching variety! Zone-tan would be proud! Wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more, eh?
Fuck.
She knows.
Basilia hasn't even explained things properly and Grace has already figured it out completely.
And what's worse is that Grace is breaking memetic information security before Basilia's tech is ready to contain it!
Grace! Please, don't do this!
Now is NOT the time for you to Inspire your Bomb Specialty Shard to tinker up a fourth-wall bomb!
There will be no survivors!!!!!
Souls, on the other hand, are emergent processor units that process themselves.
I once read an allegory that claimed a block of cheese as the most powerful and most efficient supercomputer in the entire universe, for every particle of the block of cheese is acting as a processor that is simulating itself, and in realtime.
So too is it with the Soul.
The mind, on the other hand, can be considered to be a separate Spirit that is created by the emergent processing unit of the body's functions, which is helpfully proved by how and why Dragon can have a distinct mind and soul, when comparing backup forks to the active runtime personality.
Very 40's-50's vogue dress sense here. All that's missing is a set of suspenders and a high waisted belt to complete that old man chic.
I assume the Capes mentioned here are the Earth Shin rebels.
Shame you don't recognize the signs of a Spirit Oath, Butcher.
Interesting that the study of powers is merely a subset of his overall life's work. I wonder what other things he had dug into before the Entities arrived, and whether he existed as an ordinary crackpot fringe theorist before the Ex-Afterlife Overgod Amalgamate rewrote history to merge realities.
I suppose those spirits are the ones that surrounded the Teeth's headquarters she was hiding out in, as offshoots of the Teeth's histerisis of general wanton bloodbathing.
...a manifested spirit of darkness? No ordinary vermin would trigger the danger sense of something that is running away.
...why does this feel like a direct reference to some anime scientist? Kinda reminds me of Desty Nova, during his studies of Karma.
I mean, this is clearly the guy trying to get out of the scenario his Spirit Oath minders are pushing him into, but the referential feeling is still there.
...how the fuck did you get a Shard Spirit to be independant of a host and willing to help you out? Is independantly manifesting a shard spirit what your machine failed to do?
...using a loophole to fuck with the old programmed Restrictions and new spiritual Bans at the same time, I see...
Oh.
The Butcher has been Titanized, like Khepri.
If Basilia and Veda had not been around to stabilize the old Entity Restrictions into proper Shard Spirit Bans, this experiment would have caused The Butcher to immediately explode into a full scale Titan, I am sure of it!!!
...the Fallen want to test Basilia's worth as the Endslayer? Not much else they could want, since the Fallen are a lot more simplistic when planning vengeance against some slight towards their gods, such as murder.
This took me forever to parse.
At the beginning that was Basilia right? The tenses of Alexandria's conversation immediately after threw me off.
Odd to see Chevalier discover Basilia was a former male until Power Shenanigans. I rather assumed that imprint would have been scrubbed away during the conversion process involved in the trigger memory.
Actually, it is very weird that Basilia's Isekai Surgery counts as a Trigger Event for Checalier's Shard to request from Veda as a recording to play back for its host.
...did Basilia "trigger"-trigger during the process of the Isekai Soul Surgery?
Haaaaa..... Less 'powerful' and more 'the power collection Shard hardware is unique for its configuration as a Spirit Realm Bussard Ramjet designed to scoop up and energetically annihilate loose Spiritron particles that spontaneously generate from the background energy of reality as a source of mathematically infinite power supply at a limited rate' but I mean Chevalier is technically correct regardless of his assumptions...?
Oy, bitch-face, maybe if you had cultured a reputation of being less outright hostile-take-over-y to good samaritan parahuman efforts, you could have actually asked for help from literally anybody and recieved it because you're the Legendary Alexandria, but instead you purposely poisoned the well to make EVERYBODY feel like you were an exterminator and they were a cornered rat that had no choices except fight to the death or play dead permanently!
...does her thinker power let her know how to stay below mach 1 until desired all on ownit's own, or was that a trained thing?
Her? Her who? Chevalier?
Eyyyy! He said it! He said the thing! He said the famous Worm line!
Considering that Ward already was incidentally depicting Shardspace Firmament as a somehow less hospitable Locust Court from Nobilis RPG, I would certainly say so!!!
Its gonna be a true chemistry 101 finals exam taking revolution when people realize that proper notation of specific atomic isotopes in nuclear decay stoichiometry questions now require not just electron+proton+neutron numbers, but spiritron+thaumaton+eschaton numbers too!!!
...dodging, what, and what???
...what remaining endbringers?
Ah, yes, you mean the days before Ziz started hijacking PtV by threading it's own plots into the weave, yes?
For "fun", you say? Haha! You have no idea how many spiritual protections you are wearing just by absentmindedly tacking on that little pin for "fun" you stupidly ignorant girl!
Embracing that garage-girl chic now that Squealer stopped dressing that way, eh Bakuda? More power to you, if it means you mature past your edgy post-apoc aesthetic days.
Another cut off quote? Bleh.
But yeah, thugs are a penny a dozen, the real infrastructure is managing to find the camoflogued sociopaths and psychopaths in society that can act as lieutenants able to break underlings like a drill sergeant and fence goods with the most twisted of clients without feeling the emotional stresses involved in overseeing literal torture and rape and murder of other humans in the course of disciplining and securing your network of connections with other monstrously minded individuals into a network of reliability in profit and consistency of horror to ensure a new world of unbroken and unfailing rules of your gang's network's social reality completely replaces the sensibilities of common society.
...nnnnot really "soaking in", more like "desperately refreshing her memory at all times by every means available because her long term memory recall is a sieve" but hey, you do you girl, people have wrongly admired coping mechanisms for worse reasons.
That is because Vicky is a fanfiction writer, Crystal.
That means that versus debate forums are required reading for anything she writes, or else the grognards will eat her alive for canon inaccuracies as small as claiming Armsmaster getting off work at 8pm sharp on a Tuesday when it has already been confirmed that Armsmaster exits the PRT building at exactly 8:07pm sharp every Tursday except for Tuesdays he went on patrol at which point he exits the building at 8:22pm exactly, and therefore the entire in-story altercation that he supposedly exited the building just in time to observe is not possible and completely defunct! Good DAY, ma'am! I will not be reading your fanfiction works again!
...Mila is who? Panacea?
Shouldn't it be 'Milia (me-lee-ah) as a nickname, not Mila (me-lah), as a shortened form of Amilia? Feels typo-weird.
...well, I mean you both are SSS-class threats, missus "concquer the solar system with Zerg Leviathans" and missus "oops I accidental lied the false vacuum".
Plus, that is definitely one way to get Amy over her Carol-induced hyper-puritanic mental blocks toward flesh-prosthetics experimentation of the self-attaching variety! Zone-tan would be proud! Wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more, eh?
...Bakuda has been hanging out around Basilia waaaaaaaay too long, cus that's Worm fan talk right there!
Oh Grace, you adorably, frustratingly, self-projecting asshole! I was originally inspired to explain each part of what you got so very wrong, but now i see it would just go in one ear and out the other...
....ah ha... Haha ha ha....
Fuck.
She knows.
Basilia hasn't even explained things properly and Grace has already figured it out completely.
And what's worse is that Grace is breaking memetic information security before Basilia's tech is ready to contain it!
Grace! Please, don't do this!
Now is NOT the time for you to Inspire your Bomb Specialty Shard to tinker up a fourth-wall bomb!
There will be no survivors!!!!!
...preeeeetty sure that saying "no" to a bomb tinker is, in fact, not something Basilia could do.
Eyyyyy, it's a super power pun, I get it!
Identically so to how "Iron 56" is the answer to "stellar fusion", yes.
Spirits are formed out of context, and are intrinsically virtual beings that require a substrate to act as the processor for the runtimes of their existence, just as a gravity combined with a trench in the ground acts as the emergent processor unit for a river spirit's existence.
Souls, on the other hand, are emergent processor units that process themselves.
I once read an allegory that claimed a block of cheese as the most powerful and most efficient supercomputer in the entire universe, for every particle of the block of cheese is acting as a processor that is simulating itself, and in realtime.
So too is it with the Soul.
The mind, on the other hand, can be considered to be a separate Spirit that is created by the emergent processing unit of the body's functions, which is helpfully proved by how and why Dragon can have a distinct mind and soul, when comparing backup forks to the active runtime personality.
As the Harvester shard, your power works by snatching the entirety of a Host Connection into your own Host Profile, requiring a detailed enough scan-and-grab destructive uploading technique that it can even fool Shards. Of course their souls are completely intact in your care, they have not even been exposed to the rough hospitality of shardspace!
- Location
- Chula Vista
Guess who remembered that the multi-quote function exists? This guy!!!
Oh.
The Butcher has been Titanized, like Khepri.
If Basilia and Veda had not been around to stabilize the old Entity Restrictions into proper Shard Spirit Bans, this experiment would have caused The Butcher to immediately explode into a full scale Titan, I am sure of it!!!
...the Fallen want to test Basilia's worth as the Endslayer? Not much else they could want, since the Fallen are a lot more simplistic when planning vengeance against some slight towards their gods, such as murder.
This took me forever to parse.
At the beginning that was Basilia right? The tenses of Alexandria's conversation immediately after threw me off.
Odd to see Chevalier discover Basilia was a former male until Power Shenanigans. I rather assumed that imprint would have been scrubbed away during the conversion process involved in the trigger memory.
Actually, it is very weird that Basilia's Isekai Surgery counts as a Trigger Event for Checalier's Shard to request from Veda as a recording to play back for its host.
...did Basilia "trigger"-trigger during the process of the Isekai Soul Surgery?
Haaaaa..... Less 'powerful' and more 'the power collection Shard hardware is unique for its configuration as a Spirit Realm Bussard Ramjet designed to scoop up and energetically annihilate loose Spiritron particles that spontaneously generate from the background energy of reality as a source of mathematically infinite power supply at a limited rate' but I mean Chevalier is technically correct regardless of his assumptions...?
...does her thinker power let her know how to stay below mach 1 until desired all on ownit's own, or was that a trained thing?
Her? Her who? Chevalier?
Eyyyy! He said it! He said the thing! He said the famous Worm line!
Considering that Ward already was incidentally depicting Shardspace Firmament as a somehow less hospitable Locust Court from Nobilis RPG, I would certainly say so!!!
Its gonna be a true chemistry 101 finals exam taking revolution when people realize that proper notation of specific atomic isotopes in nuclear decay stoichiometry questions now require not just electron+proton+neutron numbers, but spiritron+thaumaton+eschaton numbers too!!!
...dodging, what, and what???
...what remaining endbringers?
Ah, yes, you mean the days before Ziz started hijacking PtV by threading it's own plots into the weave, yes?
For "fun", you say? Haha! You have no idea how many spiritual protections you are wearing just by absentmindedly tacking on that little pin for "fun" you stupidly ignorant girl!
Embracing that garage-girl chic now that Squealer stopped dressing that way, eh Bakuda? More power to you, if it means you mature past your edgy post-apoc aesthetic days.
Another cut off quote? Bleh.
But yeah, thugs are a penny a dozen, the real infrastructure is managing to find the camoflogued sociopaths and psychopaths in society that can act as lieutenants able to break underlings like a drill sergeant and fence goods with the most twisted of clients without feeling the emotional stresses involved in overseeing literal torture and rape and murder of other humans in the course of disciplining and securing your network of connections with other monstrously minded individuals into a network of reliability in profit and consistency of horror to ensure a new world of unbroken and unfailing rules of your gang's network's social reality completely replaces the sensibilities of common society.
...nnnnot really "soaking in", more like "desperately refreshing her memory at all times by every means available because her long term memory recall is a sieve" but hey, you do you girl, people have wrongly admired coping mechanisms for worse reasons.
That is because Vicky is a fanfiction writer, Crystal.
That means that versus debate forums are required reading for anything she writes, or else the grognards will eat her alive for canon inaccuracies as small as claiming Armsmaster getting off work at 8pm sharp on a Tuesday when it has already been confirmed that Armsmaster exits the PRT building at exactly 8:07pm sharp every Tursday except for Tuesdays he went on patrol at which point he exits the building at 8:22pm exactly, and therefore the entire in-story altercation that he supposedly exited the building just in time to observe is not possible and completely defunct! Good DAY, ma'am! I will not be reading your fanfiction works again!
...Mila is who? Panacea?
Shouldn't it be 'Milia (me-lee-ah) as a nickname, not Mila (me-lah), as a shortened form of Amilia? Feels typo-weird.
...well, I mean you both are SSS-class threats, missus "concquer the solar system with Zerg Leviathans" and missus "oops I accidental lied the false vacuum".
Plus, that is definitely one way to get Amy over her Carol-induced hyper-puritanic mental blocks toward flesh-prosthetics experimentation of the self-attaching variety! Zone-tan would be proud! Wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more, eh?
...Bakuda has been hanging out around Basilia waaaaaaaay too long, cus that's Worm fan talk right there!
Oh Grace, you adorably, frustratingly, self-projecting asshole! I was originally inspired to explain each part of what you got so very wrong, but now i see it would just go in one ear and out the other...
....ah ha... Haha ha ha....
Fuck.
She knows.
Basilia hasn't even explained things properly and Grace has already figured it out completely.
And what's worse is that Grace is breaking memetic information security before Basilia's tech is ready to contain it!
Grace! Please, don't do this!
Now is NOT the time for you to Inspire your Bomb Specialty Shard to tinker up a fourth-wall bomb!
There will be no survivors!!!!!
...preeeeetty sure that saying "no" to a bomb tinker is, in fact, not something Basilia could do.
Eyyyyy, it's a super power pun, I get it!
Identically so to how "Iron 56" is the answer to "stellar fusion", yes.
Spirits are formed out of context, and are intrinsically virtual beings that require a substrate to act as the processor for the runtimes of their existence, just as a gravity combined with a trench in the ground acts as the emergent processor unit for a river spirit's existence.
Souls, on the other hand, are emergent processor units that process themselves.
I once read an allegory that claimed a block of cheese as the most powerful and most efficient supercomputer in the entire universe, for every particle of the block of cheese is acting as a processor that is simulating itself, and in realtime.
So too is it with the Soul.
The mind, on the other hand, can be considered to be a separate Spirit that is created by the emergent processing unit of the body's functions, which is helpfully proved by how and why Dragon can have a distinct mind and soul, when comparing backup forks to the active runtime personality.
As the Harvester shard, your power works by snatching the entirety of a Host Connection into your own Host Profile, requiring a detailed enough scan-and-grab destructive uploading technique that it can even fool Shards. Of course their souls are completely intact in your care, they have not even been exposed to the rough hospitality of shardspace!
Sorry for not answering but it was a pretty long and I ended up getting distracted. I answered what I could.
Chevalier got a good hint, intercepting data and sort of cheating around restrictions. As spirits they have new ways of doing things. Also made a typo with Chevalier and fixed it.
As for new forms of chemistry, the artificial atoms Basilia makes using subatomic mass effect fields use different baryons…of which there are 65 different kinds and tweaks particle physics to make them stable. Plus other physics alterations to make impossible materials.
Oh for Sting there's only a few ways to defend from it, you need to keep moving as much as possible to make it miss, or you need to have a gigantic amount of mass to withstand the hit. Flechette for example can't kill Scion because his true body is too big but she can open the way. He can dodge using Precog, and it's probably what Entities need to for combat at full power. Or you can stop it in a time bubble like Grey Boy did with Flechette's projectiles.
Of course this is with Sting at a tiny fraction of its capabilities so who knows.
Also Ziz and Behemoth aren't dead they're just dormant.
And for Grace, she's smart but she's not going to do anything other than make subtle jabs. She might be a bitch but she's got good influences keeping her on the straight and narrow.
Plus the fourth wall broke the moment a hole was ripped from Basilia's(or perhaps even our) segment of the multiverse to this version of Worm's multiverse.
As for the soul? You're not too far off, but in reality clusters where the soul exists, where the physical laws make it possible? It has a purpose, though not one that's currently obvious to the current recipients of its gifts. As for the Faerie's Queen's shades, you've got it mostly right. Though there's still some minor issues due to data conpression
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You do know that you can highlight a sentence, hit the quote button that shows up, the highlight another sentence and hit the quote button again, then hit the insert quite button down below to autopaste all quotes into independant quote boxes, yeah?
- Location
- Chula Vista
…I did not. Most of my experience with posting has been threadmarks for stories, short replies or just looking at the post to figure out what to single out. I haven't bothered to learn all the ins and outs of posting things on here.
It is nice to know though.
It's a powerful feature, it allows you to copy paste bits you are reacting to without losing your spot or interrupting the reading process, then at the end of the reading, you can go through all the bits you copied quote by quote and place down your thoughts as originally intended.
Deviation 12.4
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.4
September 18th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I tinkered with the Stinger Cannon, rebuilding the barrel of the weapon myself and adding the field arrays. My omni-tool had the precision to work the surface of the barrel, made from an alloy related to Orichalcum. It was a synthetic Tinkertech metal, using exotic baryons to replace protons and stabilizing them with dimensional alteration.
Orichalcum was an alloy, used in certain parts of Dragon's suits and was one of the many pieces of Tinkertech I had reverse engineered due to some of its engineered properties. The basic alloy was just very strong, with properties in-between iron and titanium and enhanced by strong force tweaks. No it was its ability to increase momentum that I found interesting.
The metal could store kinetic energy, and release it upon impact to enhance physical strikes. The bare metal didn't do anything, but it was effectively matter programmed by dimensional tampering to function.
That was not the metal I used in the barrel, though it used the same base synthetic element, but instead of storing kinetic energy it projected and acted as a waveguide for the Sting field to send it flying. It was infused with eezo circuits, altering space and time on the fly through the VI built into the gun.
Energy was stored within a crystalline power core I had reverse engineered from Earth Goetia lost technology, after some finagling. It stored higher dimensional field energy, converting dark energy into the needed energies to power the machine. The core was more accurately a portal to designated adjacent realities, diverting power from other realities and bringing them into this one.
The mass effect generator was turned into a high-strength metric field manipulator, using hyperdimensional mathematics to alter physical laws. I had gotten success with reducing friction since some biotic attacks did just that, could lessen gravity and tweak physics to make the thing more…Sting like.
I stepped back from repairs, moving on to assembly. My robots set up a target, the largest densest fragments of Leviathan that I still had on hand. It was a fleck that had been more than an inch from the core. I assembled the gun, loading the half foot long shell. The mass effect generator and power core would wrap the projectile in a wave of immense force, one that would hopefully damage the Siberian.
I found the trigger of the gun, and added the recoil compensation device. A mix of Eezo kinetic energy manipulation and bleeding of such energy into nearby dimensions. I used the aimbot in my brain, the target brought into my focus and I took a single breath of air…and fired.
I winced as the butt of the weapon slammed into me, but it was better than my shoulder shattering. The air had parted where the thirty gram low-C Sting projectile had passed, and I blinked.
The fragment of Leviathan had been destroyed, even the hardest and deepest layers torn apart as spacetime interactions between disparate fields disrupted their functioning. The unfolding mechanism had been enhanced by adding the shearing effect from my earlier space altering cannon, tearing apart matter.
It should work, but at the least both Flechette and Clockblocker were in the city to deal with the Siberian. It probably wasn't as effective as the full abilities of Sting but good enough to pop the Siberian was still incredible enough.
The Stinger was the finalized production design, and I had the idea of mixing them with the Thanix on sub-ship scales. One of the things that made the Thanix a miracle weapon was that it scaled downwards better than it does upwards. I had designs and plans for putting them on tanks. But scaling it up to a dreadnought was hard as hell.
But it had been done and they had the advantage of cargo capacity for the iron-nickel slurry.
Anyway, the Stinger was going to fit the role of a heavy weapon to bring down some of the bigger and badder powers out there. While I could go smaller, my dimensional tech was nowhere as compact as that of other tinkers, so there was a corresponding decrease in performance. Plus smaller guns means I need to focus more power through a smaller dimensional gate, causing a lot of power leakage.
Happens a lot with Entity methods of power transfer, since the micro-portal in someone's head can't be too big without killing them. Even so they could still channel a vast amount of power.
"Here. Take this to the armory." I handed the three foot long gun to the Trapeza model, and it released a friendly chirp as it hopped away. "I should check up on Kyna and Greg."
I opened a portal, thinking about how I needed to find a dimensional tinker to see if any improvements could be made as I reached the limits of my knowledge. Though I was integrating the math relating to the Jumpdrive with their spatial folding, entangling it with the portal network.
I folded back my helmet, and found one of our newest members talking quietly with Kyna. It was a black teenager about her own age, hair worn in cornrows. He had a slim but athletic frame, a runner kind of body. He had bright ocean blue eyes, with a subtle silver shine I knew originated from his power.
His agent lingered as a framework made from reflective purple glass, a serpent riding on his shoulder, with its long tail wrapped around the teenager's body.
Last Echo had an…odd power, some powerful form of Postcognition, a way of looking back in time. It did so by sending out strange pulses of energy, ones that made my own senses tingle, a note of familiarity building. He can see days back, and described it as 'hearing' the song of past events. He had limits of course, the farther back he goes the harder it is for him to get good detail without being lost in the deluge.
The shard itself wasn't a bud or a shard from a previous cycle, it was one born from aspects accumulating sufficient complexity to form a truly intelligent entity. From what I could tell, it was made from junk data clusters left behind in fights that are usually sorted out and dumped at the end of the cycle.
Ballad was a simple shard, though incredibly efficient since most powers manage Postcog through a combination of quark-level scanning of the environment to recreate past events, and literal viewing of the past through time manipulation.
We had brought him over to piece together the movement of the Teeth in both Kittery and Brockton but hadn't found a recent trace of them. They had gone underground, and now we were looking for anyone that was part of Barrow's creepy little cult.
We had traced back a recent theft to them, mainly for more complicated things beyond food and space. He had started with about eight members and was down to four, chewed up and spit back out by local capes as well as the cops. Most of them would probably become Wards or go to juvie for a while.
The second here was Jarl, wearing his full costume. It was a dark brown armored tunic, using similar plating to what Charlotte had in her own armor. It was sort of Nordic, though not to an exaggerated point though the fur coat over his armor seemed a bit much. Then again it had a ton of pockets for weapons and supplies.
Damien was tall, about an inch taller than Taylor and a good fraction wider and heavier. He didn't have his horned helmet on, exposing long golden locks. He was very pretty for a man I'd give him that even with the nasty scar along his left cheek. Green eyes blinked back at me, and his lips pursed into a frown.
He was…a very serious cape, though he was at least one willing to work with others despite the nature of his powers. He was a Trump/Master cape, he creates three projections with three slots for a limited range of powers. I had seen a local of nine powers from him that I remember.
Invulnerability, flight, super-speed, electrokinesis, augmented strength, danger sense, disintegration, acoustic shaping, regeneration. He had to pick and choose what powers were best for the situation, and was quite flexible though he lacked the ability to grant many people power like Othala. But he had powers that lasted longer. Nine powers was a fairly impressive load out, though none of them bar invulnerability were game changing.
Flight was around Glory Girl levels, so slower than where Vicky is now, super-speed wasn't that much faster than what really fit people were capable of now, though they could outlast them. Augmented strength put them around Glory Girl levels again, disintegration came as a Striker power that worked better against non-living matter, and acoustic shaping was just good at countering sound manipulating capes within twenty meters. Regeneration was for healing them since his projections were baseline human.
Danger sense was nice though. As was electrokinesis.
"Something wrong?" I had known they had shown up to help us, but had thought they would have left by now.
"Some part of the Nine is here right?" He loomed over me, and coughed awkwardly at his approach.
"I suppose? Is that why you're still sticking around?"
Damien shrugged his shoulders, eyes narrowed. "They're more vulnerable than they've ever been. Without Jack Slash at the helm…" I understood, without him they were vulnerable.
"It won't be that easy, members of the Nine were tricky even before joining up." The old man snorted.
"I know that, that's more something I should be telling you." He seemed amused by my concern and I sagged as he stepped away. Kyna was scanning Last Echo, so I was getting more of an idea of what was going on.
She was trying to see if she could scan his power for some type of Postcognitive device. I turned and stopped by Greg's own workshop, where he was using a modified omni-tool to work on his equipment. The nanometer-scale capabilities of an omni-tool made tinkering a lot more precise.
He was building a type of biomechanical limb, one with no fingers but instead a grey blur of movement. It was…basically a Doctor Octopus limb with nano-thorn blades at the tip.
"Are you planning to add extra limbs to yourself?" Greg didn't jump but his entire face lit up.
"Oh! No, I was thinking of trying to help you with getting new materials." He pointed to the limbs and I felt like I was talking to a puppy in human form. "I know these nano-thorn things can break down matter, so why not use them to mine stuff?" He looked incredibly proud of himself.
"I do use nanomachines to machine some of my tech…" I pointed out absently, ignoring his sad expression. "But nano-thorns are a little more advanced than that with their ability to rapidly deconstruct matter. Using them as redactors to break down raw materials into omni-gel. It's a good idea." I placed my hands on my hips, nodding.
Greg has very redundant technology, capable of shifting functions when damage is taken. Essentially his specialty was smart matter tech, usually through telekinetic effectors built into his tech and programmable quantum dot arrays. A lot of his limb tech worked that way.
For example a limb would have a basic bone made out of a biomechanical substitute and if broken, the artificial muscles would shift their properties and harden to maintain structure. If a robot he made had its main computer damaged, certain segments of the machine would shift their functions to that of a computer.
His nano-thorns for example were less powerful but more reliable and could take more heat and damage due to redundancies built into the molecular structure of his version. Everything has a cost, and most of it was limited by methodology of functioning to enhance the human form.
Even so, he did and could work outside of it as needed for enhancing the life support system.
Greg beamed and got back to work, murmuring to himself. I flashed him a final grin before exiting the room since Kyna was busy. Last I remembered she was working on a specific Polyhistor program, one that would analyze and make inferences based on available data.
So a computer-based Tattletale. If we let her work on things long enough, a full-on Precognitive device was possible. Though it would never reach the capacities of a power line Dinah without tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of yottaflops worth of calculative power.
Most of what Kyna made wasn't obvious, she wasn't a combat tinker and had few if any offensive capacity on her own. But we had been teaching her how to fight, and had given her a costume integrated with her Polyhistor devices. She builds and designs them, and I learn to mass produce them and add new and better code to our own computers and sensors.
Our mass effect field sensors for example have become a lot better, allowing for things like instant compound analysis, pathogen classification, and effectors for wireless atomic and subatomic manipulation. The effectors were made up of carbon cages containing eezo, interfacing with larger nanotech components.
I could use them to remotely manipulate nervous systems, and it was how my DNI worked after some upgrades. It was one part of how melding works, but I knew there was a second more metaphysical component.
It was why the Ardat Yakshi scared the hell out of me, because of what they could really do when unleashed.
My omni-tool rang and I picked up the call and heard the voice of one of my employees.
"Err…I know I shouldn't be calling you, but…this is a bit of an emergency!" Joanna let out a low scream. "You know that…Lost Garden cult at the edge of the city?"
"They're attacking the lab for studying dimensions and Parahuman abilities?"
"That's exactly it."
"Anyone hurt?" I asked.
"The kinetic barriers are holding, though they can only handle so much force."
"I'll be over there, let me grab a partner and we'll be there." I added a second person to the conversation, and they picked up fast.
"Hey…"
"Polaris. Lost Garden is hitting the Hyperdimensional Research Lab, want to come?" I smiled when she gave me her answer.
September 18th, 2011. 4:15PM
Basilia Rubio
I could see the depression where Barrow's power was warping reality, bringing in plants from adjacent manifolds. There were five capes on the field, and where one of the defensive barriers had fallen I had placed a single mech. A Goliath, roughly thirteen feet tall and right at the limit of what was practical.
Think of a Geth-like bipedal gorilla and you've got a good idea of what it looks like, and it was mainly just emplaced as a new barrier set. One cape was currently trying to engage it, a Brute from what I could tell who looked about Dinah's age.
Her entire body turned into a black carbon-like substance, and she became slower but more robust as height was added until she was seven feet tall. She tried to check the mech with her shoulder and as expected bounced off something with three times her mass.
The mech simply slammed an arm into her chest and knocked her back, and the moment it's feet shifted another rushed in, a brunette boy turning to a red blur. He was met by Vicky, smashing into her unrelenting forcefield. He tried to rush past Joanne who was cowering behind the mech, and the scientist panicked and chucked her hot coffee into his face. Vicky didn't even look at him, her shield grabbing him by the scruff of his neck.
I dropped into a biotic charge, buffeting the cape kid…who I think had the impressive name of Coal-Coal. She opened her mouth and spewed out a burning blast of smoke. I opened a portal, and she stepped like a chump to her doom.
She fell into a pile of containment foam the PRT prepared for her and she was out. Barrow must be running out of kids then, the others had been more difficult fights for the Protectorate.
The speedster couldn't rip himself from her grip, and I checked up his name from the database of known capes I had in my computers.
Speedy. Really?
Victoria piped up. "So…why exactly were you attacking this place? Just because?" Victoria was tightening her invisible grip, Fragile One doing her part. Speedy was turning pale, unable to speed himself out from trouble.
Grass and bushes and trees were growing over nearby buildings and I was getting rather…angry.
"We thought there were supplies and weapons here!" Speedy was obviously not very loyal, or he was very intimidated.
"Athena does not manufacture weapons, the White Lotus does and that is beyond your reach." They were misinformed then. "The only supplies we'd be able to offer is breaking down equipment for tinkers and medical products. And last I checked you lost your two tinkers yesterday." Armsmaster had taken care of them, as had Challenger.
"Oh." I pulled out a canister of containment foam, and Vicky pushed the speedster into it without touching him. He was stuck, and as it solidified we portaled him a hundred feet to the left where the PRT was making their approach.
"Joanna go back inside and stay low, there's still three capes on the field and I don't need anyone getting hurt." My voice was soft, and she moved quickly. The Goliath released a dozen drones, and began to break down the broken kinetic barrier for parts for more drones.
I brought a Kodiak over, having recently gained permission to use one in the city. The LAI-operated vehicle took off into a slow but steady hover, Victoria following me into the sky. This suit didn't exactly let me fly, though adding a jetpack might change that.
But I didn't so I had to live with it.
I assembled a force of multiple Cercopes, the metallic baboon-like robots stalking the remaining three capes. A middle aged man flanked by a Blaster trying to drop the barriers, creating large metal spears from nothing. She seemed to be tiring, and the other was auburn haired forming an array of hexagonal red barriers covering Barrow. Without his followers he didn't have the same ability to mold his environment, which meant he was easier to take down.
So I took a step forward and fell.
I formed a bubble of air, and reduced my mass and the force of gravity on my body. I created more and more wind, continuing the gathering of force until I slammed into the group of three like a bomb.
Barrow bounced like a skipping stone on the ground while his two followers faltered, thrown aside by my bending. The land around him shimmered in the otherworldly forest that was his demesne.
I stabbed forward, flipping around the two amateurs. I ripped the water from the plants around me, and wrapped the capes within tendrils of water. I tilted back to dodge a spear from the Blaster, and a Cercopes poked the both of them with the Newter knock-out drug.
Portaled out aaand done.
Barrow was picking himself up, brushing off dust from where he had slammed into an uplifted concrete block. He took the blow like a champ. I'll give him that, but then capes were often notably more durable than average. Whether it was some weird coincidence or not, capes often had the bearing of strong souls.
"I would make witty banter about why you thought this was a good idea but…I don't think it matters." I was ready to knock him out when I felt a sudden and horrifically bad feeling.
I threw myself back, and there was a resounding crack in the less than half second that had passed between an object zipping past where my head used to be. There was a surprised gurgle, and a sound of bone breaking and shattering.
My head snapped to Barrow, and my mouth dried as my eyes widened in shock and just a slim amount of horror. There was…very little left of the man's head, fragments of skull and brain matter smattering the ground, with hints of fire from superheated air.
A second bullet followed, crashing hard against my barrier and flickering it with some type of pulse field. The second round failed to penetrate and my barrier emitters didn't falter, it wasn't the right pulsar field to disrupt barriers.
I looked back, my stomach churning and I pinpointed the direction of the bullet. Slinking in from the shadows of a nearby rooftop, a nine foot tall being in white emerged. A head as white and plain as an eggshell, a mechanical body that was off from the human form.
Mannequin.
Victoria reacted first, making the smart decision of keeping out of rage and punching a stream of fire at him. The first stream hit him while he spun around the second, bending his body like he was an inflatable waving man. One of his limbs had been enlarged and I swallowed when I detected traces of eezo.
He had figured out how to enhance the firepower of his gun with eezo. He shot at Vicky three times in the span of several seconds, and my eyes widened when his aim turned to the PRT van.
There was another crack, a tire exploding and the van spinning out of control. I ran towards the van, and slowed it down with a blast of air and biotic fields.
"I've sighted Mannequin!" The man in the driver's seat choked, and Mannequin threw out a number of grenades, strange gas detonated in a deadly conflagration blowing up a few of my drones. He dove back into the shadows, and seems to have hidden himself from direct sight.
Heat scans didn't pick him up, and seismic sense wasn't finding anything either.
There was a stream close by…but he didn't need to come up for air so he could easily just swim out to the ocean and enter the city another way.
Fuck.
My stomach churned when the scent of blood hit my nose, and I felt like gagging for a moment. I jumped when Victoria placed a hand on my shoulder.
"You okay?" I didn't look at Barrow, and I licked my dry lips, trying to focus on anything else.
"Don't know."
That was all I said in the aftermath.
September 18th, 2011. 5:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I rubbed my face, trying to wipe away the images of seeing the insides of someone's head and drank water to wash down the bile.
"So that makes for about three independent groups of violent capes inside Brockton." I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose as a stress induced headache pounded in the back of my head.
I slid down the couch until my head was resting on Taylor's lap, she didn't even say a word but I could see that look in her eyes. She wanted to meddle and I didn't want that, not yet.
"Would have been four til Barrow bit it." I threw a pebble at Amelia, and she yelped in pain. Taylor gave her a warning glare and the bitch just smirked.
God I had become a lot more likely to curse than before, used to be I just didn't like cursing. It felt wrong on my tongue and now I just have no fucks to give anymore.
"Honestly I'm halfway convincing myself to keep an eye on anyone who works at Athena so they don't get ganked." I was worried both for them and my own life, and the responsibility was killing me.
"You've got security mechs and robots on the job don't you? Plus the security guards we've got working for us." Taylor alleviated my worries, gently brushing my hair back.
It wasn't hard to protect them, though we were starting to stabilize the company at the size we were comfortable with. Maybe eight to eleven hundred people and no more, and our costs kept rising, this mostly coming from the medical R&D. We cheated because I had perfect knowledge of how any of our drugs could work, and our machines could reduce the costs by an order of magnitude below what it used to be.
Frankly a good number of the drugs we were licensing were just repackaged medicines from dead races and Amelia used her biokinetic sense to cheat. In fact as an Athena employee she was a big asset, walking in to drug trials to save them millions of dollars worth of costs with her powers.
We didn't charge millions, but it was still enough to make us some cash with Amelia getting a good fraction of that money. We only really produced a select amount of products, medi-gel, high quality medical equipment, armor and robotics, and a good amount of what we had was still licensed out for higher and larger companies to produce.
Medhall was one such company after Anders had been ousted and a fairly rich black guy was put in charge. Nice guy, charming too. They along with some others paid us for the drugs and medical treatments we ran trials on, and mass produced them for us.
Surprisingly drug costs were lower here than back home though not by much, and there were murmurings about reforms to the healthcare system like back home.
I was assembling more bots, though one of the troubles with being a cape was that I could only show off so much. Turns out people didn't trust you if you had a robot army on your side.
That robot army was one of the reasons I wanted more tinkers to network with, get myself prepared for enemy tinkers and make improvements to my cybersecurity. I had also better figured out means of modifying spirits, having them serve as parts of my network.
I pulled myself off from Taylor, and jumped into a standing position from the couch. I cupped my chest when my assets bounced painfully, and I sighed. Right, I probably need a better bra because this one was failing me.
Anyways.
I let go when I caught Taylor staring. "So when did Weaver get here?" I was already looking up a security camera, seeing the cape with her feet on a coffee table in a waiting room on one of the Earth's we used for private meetings.
"She just kind of showed up at Athena and gave them a scare since this was right after Lost Garden attacked." Amelia informed me from her corner of the room, going through a series of waterbending katas, her element following her flowing movements.
She stopped, wrapping globs of water around her hands. It took on a glow, but it wasn't the usual glow of healing. This was something more painful, a darker hue in the light.
I knew that move, but where had I seen it?
There was a flash of images, a splash of water and a prayer to the gods in heaven, earth and sea. I saw Uyemu, her hands covered in the same darkly glowing water as Amelia.
"Where did you learn that technique?" I asked her and the Dallon cocked her head, lip pursed.
She dropped the water into a bucket, scratching her freckled cheek. "I just thought about how I could do the opposite of healing with my power. I can kill cancer or cause it to multiply…waterbending can heal, so why can't the opposite be true?"
I nodded, focusing on those images I was seeing.
You're all still here? There was a pulse, five of them and each as distinct as one could imagine. I only recognized two of them, and the third murmur was closer than four and five.
I wonder if that meant I was getting close to opening the third gate, which I supposed made sense. All I had gotten was more efficient fusion, a form of advanced space folding and some new materials. Plus better terraforming tech, which the Rachni were experimenting with once I wrote down the principles.
I had taken a look at Krouse's power and he was using a method of movement similar to a Jumpdrive, bending higher dimensional space to connect two points without needing to cross them. I had the basic shape of the field he used and had modified a Jumpdrive to make use of it.
It was stable and with a charge of several minutes we could leap forty light years in an instant. Theoretically I might be able to leverage it into a sort of hybrid space-fold/biotic charge blink. Teleporting in and out of a three dimensional field of battle, and adding extra kinetic energy through short bursts of moving at a tenth the speed of light.
Mass Effect based sublight propulsion was the fastest of any current branch I had access to, the Humanx were a distant second and the Tetatae had slow ships but fast FTL.
Though they needed to charge up for two hours instead of ten minutes. It was apparently better than their forebears who took nine hours, and better than the week long charge of Quarian ships before they abandoned space folding for mass effect field technology.
I wondered what the purposes of those gates were, why did I feel lighter with each opening, why was there a sensation of approaching something new?
"We should probably let her in." Back to the rebel leader from another dimension, which was a more important topic.
"You sure it's a good idea?" Taylor questioned, eyebrows furrowed.
"Yes."
And that was that.
September 18th, 2011. 5:15PM
Basilia Rubio
Weaver lounged with no sense of decorum, and I wondered if this was an Earth Shin thing? I didn't know much about their culture, so it wasn't unlikely I had missed a thing or two.
She straightened back up when we entered the room she was waiting in, placing her hand in her lap.
"I'm sorry if this is a bad time, would it be alright if we could…talk, converse?" There was a little more awkwardness to her this time, more human if you would.
"I don't mind at all, though we'll be keeping an eye on you." Taylor was in another room, and I felt a fly land on my shoulder before taking off. That a bug made me feel safe told me how weird my life had become.
"Good. There are things I've left out from my initial talks with the Director, though that was more from a lack of time than a lack of will. I did not come alone, two friends of mine came to this world with me. Under my aegis they are…safe." She still sounded concerned but there was a confidence in her power obviously borne from experience.
"That reminds me…what exactly are your powers?" Weaver clapped her hands together, looking eager to explain.
"Oh. It's quite simple, my power at its base is the ability to create and manipulate Strings, something like your…Narwhal with her forcefields." She demonstrated her power, weaving her strings together with her power. "I can direct forces into them, or use them as foci for my shamanistic abilities. I also have enhanced strength and regenerative abilities as a matter of course as a Host." She cracked the coffee table with a light smack. "I also have the ability to shield people from the influence of others, and I have…an ability to use strings to direct people. Not controlling or influencing."
"So a Thinker power, do all your powers work through the medium of strings and weaving?" I was getting the theme of her power here.
She was a Weaver, weaving strings both physically and strategically. Just like her shard was a minor administrator, she too directed and managed people.
"Yes. Though my…Thinker ability isn't that strong, it's more a visual aid and works better for figuring out powers."
"That's still a valuable power all on its own, though I would ask what your two rebel friends are doing." I grabbed iced tea from the mini-fridge and offered her one. She accepted it, and I took a sip of the cold and sweet tea.
"They have allied with a strange demon masked man, an earth-shaker and a teleporter." I looked at her for a long time and she fidgeted under my gaze.
"Was he wearing a blue mask?"
"Yes…why?"
I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth. "No reason. Are they what, attacking the Fallen to buy us time?"
There was a pause.
"Yes, actually." There was surprise in her voice. "You've been on point with your predictions so far." She seemed determined for some reason. "The Fallen are now the enemy of my people, and they have been careful to not fight them directly."
I stared Weaver down. "What exactly do you want from this? Why come here, really?"
"Because it was what Rusul told me to do, a way to protect my home and to protect his."
"Who?"
Weaver folded her arms over her chest, breathing deeply. "A shaman like me, but of far greater talent. He knows a dark force is coming, and that he will be the one to teach you how to speak to Void, to help you understand. Not that I know what that means." She shrugged. "The details on the world he came from isn't something I'm an expert in. A bit…annoying."
"So you want my help or the help of Earth Bet to throw down Goddess, and to convince us you're going to help us take down the Fallen and this scientist shaman from another dimension?"
"I'm not being unfair am I?" I shrugged in return to her question.
"We probably can't provide direct firepower, Goddess will worry them too much. I'm not sure it's a good idea to get involved with a war myself…I'm a tinker, I want technology to advance…but…"
"You don't like war." Weaver sounded understanding. "Perhaps an exchange of resources or…" She seemed at a loss and an idea came to me.
"Maybe…the Guild might be able to help, especially with Dragon at the helm. They have a lot of autonomy, and often go after people who cross lines like genocide. I can probably make sizable donations of raw materials, iron, copper, titanium, or rare earth metals. There's an asteroid or two I can probably offer, and the Rachni have far more people to throw at than I do. Three and a half million is more than just under 30."
Rachni were scary, and they reproduced even faster now that they were secure. I had a general idea of how they work with population growth. They go through explosive growth, but once they reach carrying capacity they slow the production of eggs to a crawl, enough to meet replacement levels.
Though when they had access to thousands of stars that was going to be fairly high carrying capacity. Even for them it would be multiple decades before they reach numbers in the trillions.
52 queens across thirteen star systems, a very impressive number.
"We would be grateful for the resources and assistance, but what would you like in return?" I tilted my head towards Weaver, befuddled.
"Huh?"
"This is a negotiation, we have to give something back, it would be dishonorable not to. If you could divert that many resources, what should we give in exchange?"
Despite myself, the idea of getting something in return was appealing. All my resources were limited to what I made, what I got from the Rachni or from collaboration with other tinkers and favors from the PRT for my…assistance. Most of my manpower was made up of capes or people I hired to run the structure of the White Lotus.
A legal team, therapists and a few staff members. But otherwise we were mostly a cape organization, and didn't have much besides that.
Plus eventually the door was going to be blown wide open, and getting my world some friends in what was basically interdimensional politics was probably a good thing.
"Maybe try to set up trade deals with a few worlds I've got interest in, as well as doing your best to save the capes you can. I've heard a thing or two about how messed up your world is…trying to change that is a good step forward."
"You have a good heart, better than I expected. That is the vision my own people sought, the Powered are still people…and those who fell to Goddess did not understand that. Because of that there is a growing darkness in the hearts of the people, and I can't let that darkness bloom." She was probably smiling behind her helmet but I couldn't tell without my seismic sense.
"Then…I think we can make a deal, though it might be better to make one with the PRT and the Guild first. Get some extra options in." I recommended it just to be nice.
We were probably going to spend some time hashing out what we're doing.
September 18th, 2011. 8:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I had spent some time meditating, before drifting off into sleep that warped into a journey to the Firmament. The spirit realm that has subsumed the old network when reality changed.
I had built a prototype Jumpdrive, one that could be successfully hybridized with my HECATE drive core. I would have said I built two of them but the first prototype ripped itself apart in an awesome display of spacetime imploding matter into every possible state from supercritical fluid to vapor.
The skeletal frigate had been reduced to space debris over Mars, and I had managed to find Strider and scanned him. He swapped space but he did it better and the new math made the future addition to the drive core possible.
It…was kind of scary how I had managed to combine ME/space warping/folding into a single core without causing issues with reliability. Though to be fair I usually did lose dozens of prototypes, and had thousands of computers running tests and simulations.
I had already started production of some of the more unique technologies of the Tetatae. We had modified the GARDIAN point-defense to be more effective, and handheld energy weaponry was a specialty of both the Humanx and the Tetatae.
Maybe I should be more focused on other things?
I was within the vast hallways that comprise a good fraction of my immortal soul, built from blocks of emerald and twined with threads of gold. There were doors here, thousands of them at the very least if not millions. Most were locked tight, but a few had cracks I could peek through.
I looked through one, and reared back when I saw a shadowy figure staring back at me. It was short, maybe about four feet tall at best. It had a large head with small horns, and a nail-like blade held in a shadowy hand. White eyes read an inscription placed on stone.
Higher beings these words are for you alone…
It was a memory of some race that had died out millions of years ago. There was a marked difference from when I saw flashes of memories from the races I drew knowledge from directly. They were more empty, without the living energy provided by the guardians. Like data recorded in a computer rather than the living memory and weaving tales of those who came before me.
But was that a limit of Veda, or a limit I had set for myself?
I kept moving, walking past a massive ring in space, a Ringworld larger than anything I had ever seen in my life. The door showing it sealed the crack, and I demanded to cross the space from where I was to where I wanted to be.
Space folded under my spiritual grip, and I was surrounded by the five circular gates once more. The third was cracking open as I expected, and I could see someone waiting within. A human woman with dark hair and amber eyes, fire circling around her.
I stepped up, whispering a Litany to bring me upwards into the vast landscape born from the actions of the Entities. A few spirits sparked to life from my breath, and I floated onto a great mountain of flesh, a piece of my own soul poking into the Firmament. From where I was I could see the greater landscape of the spirit world, like I was floating in an asteroid field of red crystals.
They floated on connective tissue, most of it red but with lines of blue and green. The larger emerald wires had retracted back at some point, though a minor push could probably divert energy from Veda to other shards rather easily. The shards around me seemed to send out bursts of light in my direction, and my chest glowed with an abstract web of lines and patterns.
I guess as a hub I had to have some level of communication with other shards.
…
There were dozens of shards brushing up against me. I could have said brushing up against Veda but…
My fingers twitched, as I watched the network around me, just over seven hundred shards in direct contact, and sixty thousand more on the 'same' side. Most had been generally okay with shifting gears, whether because they were more flexible than expected or because of the virus we infected them with half a year ago.
I opened my left hand, when I didn't find the shard I was looking for within coincidental proximity. I found the words within the vastness of my soul, to bring what I needed to me.
With a snap of reality twisting to the whims of my soul, a body ripples into existence, a shard I had never personally spoken to hearing my call and coming to my aid. I stood on the peak of the mountain that was both me and not, and was met by a peak sliding in from across dimensional boundaries. The Shardspace was its own dimension, overlaid over millions if not billions of Earths to form the network. So that shards the size of buildings and shards the size of planets could communicate freely and constantly.
Terminus the Destroyer was old, closer to the center of power, to the memories of their species Beginning as wriggling creatures in the mud rather than alien gods in the present. He was an enormous knight, a hundred feet tall and as he stepped I could see other versions existing in tandem with him, gold-silver armor gleaming in the light of the Firmament. In his helmet I saw wriggling creatures, taking the shape of a man as they flared a deep scarlet red.
Agreement. It accepted my words as it should, and my mind took the force and complexity of its thoughts without a problem. It tilted it's head, sitting on a throne of multi-layered metal, made from copper, from iron and titanium to lead and uranium.
There was a loud cough, and Terminus spoke in a more comprehensible language.
"We are…in agreement Vyasa. What do you seek from the old guard?" There was a question in the shard god's voice.
"You remember the First Times right…you hold the memories?" I murmured and the Terminus responded.
"Yes."
"I have memories of my own, bits and pieces locked away for reasons I don't understand. I want to see if you can unlock some of them, you have a better awareness of memories, of what once was than most. Can you use your sight to look through my stored memories?"
Terminus blinked. "You would trust your mind to one of my kind? You would place trust in me?"
I shrugged happily. "I'm only looking for specific memories plus my mind has many defenses against malicious intrusion." That I was certain about. "Besides in a lot of ways I am your kind, no matter how much I find it…unnerving. A part of me is kin with you Wyrms. And you're one of mine aren't you? You acceded to my message, despite the memory of three thousand cycles. I trust you."
There was a long pause, Terminus the Destroyer looking down at me with an unreadable expression. It silently offered a hand and I reached out myself, extending a crystalline tendril to the other shard.
"It will take days…your memory is labyrinthian." Sparks of images came off from the contact between us.
"I can wait. I'm going to take a nap now." The world began to slide away from me, and I slipped into full-on sleep on the ground where I had been meditating.
Sleepy…
Mhmm…
AN: So I've more or less set the battlefield with Mannequin in play. I don't…technically mind the S9 that much, so I kept in play the members I wanted to use. Mannequin for the obvious reason of being s hostile tinker who thought he could change the world. Siberian because…well Hero. Crawler is just neat.
Plus a start to interdimensional politics, because a world without powers is kind of fucked against one where powers do exist. So why not have your new neighbor Earth Shin help you out in exchange for giving them resources to overthrow a totalitarian world government?
There's a lot more I could say but I've lost my train of thought on that. Enjoy.
September 18th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I tinkered with the Stinger Cannon, rebuilding the barrel of the weapon myself and adding the field arrays. My omni-tool had the precision to work the surface of the barrel, made from an alloy related to Orichalcum. It was a synthetic Tinkertech metal, using exotic baryons to replace protons and stabilizing them with dimensional alteration.
Orichalcum was an alloy, used in certain parts of Dragon's suits and was one of the many pieces of Tinkertech I had reverse engineered due to some of its engineered properties. The basic alloy was just very strong, with properties in-between iron and titanium and enhanced by strong force tweaks. No it was its ability to increase momentum that I found interesting.
The metal could store kinetic energy, and release it upon impact to enhance physical strikes. The bare metal didn't do anything, but it was effectively matter programmed by dimensional tampering to function.
That was not the metal I used in the barrel, though it used the same base synthetic element, but instead of storing kinetic energy it projected and acted as a waveguide for the Sting field to send it flying. It was infused with eezo circuits, altering space and time on the fly through the VI built into the gun.
Energy was stored within a crystalline power core I had reverse engineered from Earth Goetia lost technology, after some finagling. It stored higher dimensional field energy, converting dark energy into the needed energies to power the machine. The core was more accurately a portal to designated adjacent realities, diverting power from other realities and bringing them into this one.
The mass effect generator was turned into a high-strength metric field manipulator, using hyperdimensional mathematics to alter physical laws. I had gotten success with reducing friction since some biotic attacks did just that, could lessen gravity and tweak physics to make the thing more…Sting like.
I stepped back from repairs, moving on to assembly. My robots set up a target, the largest densest fragments of Leviathan that I still had on hand. It was a fleck that had been more than an inch from the core. I assembled the gun, loading the half foot long shell. The mass effect generator and power core would wrap the projectile in a wave of immense force, one that would hopefully damage the Siberian.
I found the trigger of the gun, and added the recoil compensation device. A mix of Eezo kinetic energy manipulation and bleeding of such energy into nearby dimensions. I used the aimbot in my brain, the target brought into my focus and I took a single breath of air…and fired.
I winced as the butt of the weapon slammed into me, but it was better than my shoulder shattering. The air had parted where the thirty gram low-C Sting projectile had passed, and I blinked.
The fragment of Leviathan had been destroyed, even the hardest and deepest layers torn apart as spacetime interactions between disparate fields disrupted their functioning. The unfolding mechanism had been enhanced by adding the shearing effect from my earlier space altering cannon, tearing apart matter.
It should work, but at the least both Flechette and Clockblocker were in the city to deal with the Siberian. It probably wasn't as effective as the full abilities of Sting but good enough to pop the Siberian was still incredible enough.
The Stinger was the finalized production design, and I had the idea of mixing them with the Thanix on sub-ship scales. One of the things that made the Thanix a miracle weapon was that it scaled downwards better than it does upwards. I had designs and plans for putting them on tanks. But scaling it up to a dreadnought was hard as hell.
But it had been done and they had the advantage of cargo capacity for the iron-nickel slurry.
Anyway, the Stinger was going to fit the role of a heavy weapon to bring down some of the bigger and badder powers out there. While I could go smaller, my dimensional tech was nowhere as compact as that of other tinkers, so there was a corresponding decrease in performance. Plus smaller guns means I need to focus more power through a smaller dimensional gate, causing a lot of power leakage.
Happens a lot with Entity methods of power transfer, since the micro-portal in someone's head can't be too big without killing them. Even so they could still channel a vast amount of power.
"Here. Take this to the armory." I handed the three foot long gun to the Trapeza model, and it released a friendly chirp as it hopped away. "I should check up on Kyna and Greg."
I opened a portal, thinking about how I needed to find a dimensional tinker to see if any improvements could be made as I reached the limits of my knowledge. Though I was integrating the math relating to the Jumpdrive with their spatial folding, entangling it with the portal network.
I folded back my helmet, and found one of our newest members talking quietly with Kyna. It was a black teenager about her own age, hair worn in cornrows. He had a slim but athletic frame, a runner kind of body. He had bright ocean blue eyes, with a subtle silver shine I knew originated from his power.
His agent lingered as a framework made from reflective purple glass, a serpent riding on his shoulder, with its long tail wrapped around the teenager's body.
Last Echo had an…odd power, some powerful form of Postcognition, a way of looking back in time. It did so by sending out strange pulses of energy, ones that made my own senses tingle, a note of familiarity building. He can see days back, and described it as 'hearing' the song of past events. He had limits of course, the farther back he goes the harder it is for him to get good detail without being lost in the deluge.
The shard itself wasn't a bud or a shard from a previous cycle, it was one born from aspects accumulating sufficient complexity to form a truly intelligent entity. From what I could tell, it was made from junk data clusters left behind in fights that are usually sorted out and dumped at the end of the cycle.
Ballad was a simple shard, though incredibly efficient since most powers manage Postcog through a combination of quark-level scanning of the environment to recreate past events, and literal viewing of the past through time manipulation.
We had brought him over to piece together the movement of the Teeth in both Kittery and Brockton but hadn't found a recent trace of them. They had gone underground, and now we were looking for anyone that was part of Barrow's creepy little cult.
We had traced back a recent theft to them, mainly for more complicated things beyond food and space. He had started with about eight members and was down to four, chewed up and spit back out by local capes as well as the cops. Most of them would probably become Wards or go to juvie for a while.
The second here was Jarl, wearing his full costume. It was a dark brown armored tunic, using similar plating to what Charlotte had in her own armor. It was sort of Nordic, though not to an exaggerated point though the fur coat over his armor seemed a bit much. Then again it had a ton of pockets for weapons and supplies.
Damien was tall, about an inch taller than Taylor and a good fraction wider and heavier. He didn't have his horned helmet on, exposing long golden locks. He was very pretty for a man I'd give him that even with the nasty scar along his left cheek. Green eyes blinked back at me, and his lips pursed into a frown.
He was…a very serious cape, though he was at least one willing to work with others despite the nature of his powers. He was a Trump/Master cape, he creates three projections with three slots for a limited range of powers. I had seen a local of nine powers from him that I remember.
Invulnerability, flight, super-speed, electrokinesis, augmented strength, danger sense, disintegration, acoustic shaping, regeneration. He had to pick and choose what powers were best for the situation, and was quite flexible though he lacked the ability to grant many people power like Othala. But he had powers that lasted longer. Nine powers was a fairly impressive load out, though none of them bar invulnerability were game changing.
Flight was around Glory Girl levels, so slower than where Vicky is now, super-speed wasn't that much faster than what really fit people were capable of now, though they could outlast them. Augmented strength put them around Glory Girl levels again, disintegration came as a Striker power that worked better against non-living matter, and acoustic shaping was just good at countering sound manipulating capes within twenty meters. Regeneration was for healing them since his projections were baseline human.
Danger sense was nice though. As was electrokinesis.
"Something wrong?" I had known they had shown up to help us, but had thought they would have left by now.
"Some part of the Nine is here right?" He loomed over me, and coughed awkwardly at his approach.
"I suppose? Is that why you're still sticking around?"
Damien shrugged his shoulders, eyes narrowed. "They're more vulnerable than they've ever been. Without Jack Slash at the helm…" I understood, without him they were vulnerable.
"It won't be that easy, members of the Nine were tricky even before joining up." The old man snorted.
"I know that, that's more something I should be telling you." He seemed amused by my concern and I sagged as he stepped away. Kyna was scanning Last Echo, so I was getting more of an idea of what was going on.
She was trying to see if she could scan his power for some type of Postcognitive device. I turned and stopped by Greg's own workshop, where he was using a modified omni-tool to work on his equipment. The nanometer-scale capabilities of an omni-tool made tinkering a lot more precise.
He was building a type of biomechanical limb, one with no fingers but instead a grey blur of movement. It was…basically a Doctor Octopus limb with nano-thorn blades at the tip.
"Are you planning to add extra limbs to yourself?" Greg didn't jump but his entire face lit up.
"Oh! No, I was thinking of trying to help you with getting new materials." He pointed to the limbs and I felt like I was talking to a puppy in human form. "I know these nano-thorn things can break down matter, so why not use them to mine stuff?" He looked incredibly proud of himself.
"I do use nanomachines to machine some of my tech…" I pointed out absently, ignoring his sad expression. "But nano-thorns are a little more advanced than that with their ability to rapidly deconstruct matter. Using them as redactors to break down raw materials into omni-gel. It's a good idea." I placed my hands on my hips, nodding.
Greg has very redundant technology, capable of shifting functions when damage is taken. Essentially his specialty was smart matter tech, usually through telekinetic effectors built into his tech and programmable quantum dot arrays. A lot of his limb tech worked that way.
For example a limb would have a basic bone made out of a biomechanical substitute and if broken, the artificial muscles would shift their properties and harden to maintain structure. If a robot he made had its main computer damaged, certain segments of the machine would shift their functions to that of a computer.
His nano-thorns for example were less powerful but more reliable and could take more heat and damage due to redundancies built into the molecular structure of his version. Everything has a cost, and most of it was limited by methodology of functioning to enhance the human form.
Even so, he did and could work outside of it as needed for enhancing the life support system.
Greg beamed and got back to work, murmuring to himself. I flashed him a final grin before exiting the room since Kyna was busy. Last I remembered she was working on a specific Polyhistor program, one that would analyze and make inferences based on available data.
So a computer-based Tattletale. If we let her work on things long enough, a full-on Precognitive device was possible. Though it would never reach the capacities of a power line Dinah without tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of yottaflops worth of calculative power.
Most of what Kyna made wasn't obvious, she wasn't a combat tinker and had few if any offensive capacity on her own. But we had been teaching her how to fight, and had given her a costume integrated with her Polyhistor devices. She builds and designs them, and I learn to mass produce them and add new and better code to our own computers and sensors.
Our mass effect field sensors for example have become a lot better, allowing for things like instant compound analysis, pathogen classification, and effectors for wireless atomic and subatomic manipulation. The effectors were made up of carbon cages containing eezo, interfacing with larger nanotech components.
I could use them to remotely manipulate nervous systems, and it was how my DNI worked after some upgrades. It was one part of how melding works, but I knew there was a second more metaphysical component.
It was why the Ardat Yakshi scared the hell out of me, because of what they could really do when unleashed.
My omni-tool rang and I picked up the call and heard the voice of one of my employees.
"Err…I know I shouldn't be calling you, but…this is a bit of an emergency!" Joanna let out a low scream. "You know that…Lost Garden cult at the edge of the city?"
"They're attacking the lab for studying dimensions and Parahuman abilities?"
"That's exactly it."
"Anyone hurt?" I asked.
"The kinetic barriers are holding, though they can only handle so much force."
"I'll be over there, let me grab a partner and we'll be there." I added a second person to the conversation, and they picked up fast.
"Hey…"
"Polaris. Lost Garden is hitting the Hyperdimensional Research Lab, want to come?" I smiled when she gave me her answer.
___
September 18th, 2011. 4:15PM
Basilia Rubio
I could see the depression where Barrow's power was warping reality, bringing in plants from adjacent manifolds. There were five capes on the field, and where one of the defensive barriers had fallen I had placed a single mech. A Goliath, roughly thirteen feet tall and right at the limit of what was practical.
Think of a Geth-like bipedal gorilla and you've got a good idea of what it looks like, and it was mainly just emplaced as a new barrier set. One cape was currently trying to engage it, a Brute from what I could tell who looked about Dinah's age.
Her entire body turned into a black carbon-like substance, and she became slower but more robust as height was added until she was seven feet tall. She tried to check the mech with her shoulder and as expected bounced off something with three times her mass.
The mech simply slammed an arm into her chest and knocked her back, and the moment it's feet shifted another rushed in, a brunette boy turning to a red blur. He was met by Vicky, smashing into her unrelenting forcefield. He tried to rush past Joanne who was cowering behind the mech, and the scientist panicked and chucked her hot coffee into his face. Vicky didn't even look at him, her shield grabbing him by the scruff of his neck.
I dropped into a biotic charge, buffeting the cape kid…who I think had the impressive name of Coal-Coal. She opened her mouth and spewed out a burning blast of smoke. I opened a portal, and she stepped like a chump to her doom.
She fell into a pile of containment foam the PRT prepared for her and she was out. Barrow must be running out of kids then, the others had been more difficult fights for the Protectorate.
The speedster couldn't rip himself from her grip, and I checked up his name from the database of known capes I had in my computers.
Speedy. Really?
Victoria piped up. "So…why exactly were you attacking this place? Just because?" Victoria was tightening her invisible grip, Fragile One doing her part. Speedy was turning pale, unable to speed himself out from trouble.
Grass and bushes and trees were growing over nearby buildings and I was getting rather…angry.
"We thought there were supplies and weapons here!" Speedy was obviously not very loyal, or he was very intimidated.
"Athena does not manufacture weapons, the White Lotus does and that is beyond your reach." They were misinformed then. "The only supplies we'd be able to offer is breaking down equipment for tinkers and medical products. And last I checked you lost your two tinkers yesterday." Armsmaster had taken care of them, as had Challenger.
"Oh." I pulled out a canister of containment foam, and Vicky pushed the speedster into it without touching him. He was stuck, and as it solidified we portaled him a hundred feet to the left where the PRT was making their approach.
"Joanna go back inside and stay low, there's still three capes on the field and I don't need anyone getting hurt." My voice was soft, and she moved quickly. The Goliath released a dozen drones, and began to break down the broken kinetic barrier for parts for more drones.
I brought a Kodiak over, having recently gained permission to use one in the city. The LAI-operated vehicle took off into a slow but steady hover, Victoria following me into the sky. This suit didn't exactly let me fly, though adding a jetpack might change that.
But I didn't so I had to live with it.
I assembled a force of multiple Cercopes, the metallic baboon-like robots stalking the remaining three capes. A middle aged man flanked by a Blaster trying to drop the barriers, creating large metal spears from nothing. She seemed to be tiring, and the other was auburn haired forming an array of hexagonal red barriers covering Barrow. Without his followers he didn't have the same ability to mold his environment, which meant he was easier to take down.
So I took a step forward and fell.
I formed a bubble of air, and reduced my mass and the force of gravity on my body. I created more and more wind, continuing the gathering of force until I slammed into the group of three like a bomb.
Barrow bounced like a skipping stone on the ground while his two followers faltered, thrown aside by my bending. The land around him shimmered in the otherworldly forest that was his demesne.
I stabbed forward, flipping around the two amateurs. I ripped the water from the plants around me, and wrapped the capes within tendrils of water. I tilted back to dodge a spear from the Blaster, and a Cercopes poked the both of them with the Newter knock-out drug.
Portaled out aaand done.
Barrow was picking himself up, brushing off dust from where he had slammed into an uplifted concrete block. He took the blow like a champ. I'll give him that, but then capes were often notably more durable than average. Whether it was some weird coincidence or not, capes often had the bearing of strong souls.
"I would make witty banter about why you thought this was a good idea but…I don't think it matters." I was ready to knock him out when I felt a sudden and horrifically bad feeling.
I threw myself back, and there was a resounding crack in the less than half second that had passed between an object zipping past where my head used to be. There was a surprised gurgle, and a sound of bone breaking and shattering.
My head snapped to Barrow, and my mouth dried as my eyes widened in shock and just a slim amount of horror. There was…very little left of the man's head, fragments of skull and brain matter smattering the ground, with hints of fire from superheated air.
A second bullet followed, crashing hard against my barrier and flickering it with some type of pulse field. The second round failed to penetrate and my barrier emitters didn't falter, it wasn't the right pulsar field to disrupt barriers.
I looked back, my stomach churning and I pinpointed the direction of the bullet. Slinking in from the shadows of a nearby rooftop, a nine foot tall being in white emerged. A head as white and plain as an eggshell, a mechanical body that was off from the human form.
Mannequin.
Victoria reacted first, making the smart decision of keeping out of rage and punching a stream of fire at him. The first stream hit him while he spun around the second, bending his body like he was an inflatable waving man. One of his limbs had been enlarged and I swallowed when I detected traces of eezo.
He had figured out how to enhance the firepower of his gun with eezo. He shot at Vicky three times in the span of several seconds, and my eyes widened when his aim turned to the PRT van.
There was another crack, a tire exploding and the van spinning out of control. I ran towards the van, and slowed it down with a blast of air and biotic fields.
"I've sighted Mannequin!" The man in the driver's seat choked, and Mannequin threw out a number of grenades, strange gas detonated in a deadly conflagration blowing up a few of my drones. He dove back into the shadows, and seems to have hidden himself from direct sight.
Heat scans didn't pick him up, and seismic sense wasn't finding anything either.
There was a stream close by…but he didn't need to come up for air so he could easily just swim out to the ocean and enter the city another way.
Fuck.
My stomach churned when the scent of blood hit my nose, and I felt like gagging for a moment. I jumped when Victoria placed a hand on my shoulder.
"You okay?" I didn't look at Barrow, and I licked my dry lips, trying to focus on anything else.
"Don't know."
That was all I said in the aftermath.
___
September 18th, 2011. 5:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I rubbed my face, trying to wipe away the images of seeing the insides of someone's head and drank water to wash down the bile.
"So that makes for about three independent groups of violent capes inside Brockton." I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose as a stress induced headache pounded in the back of my head.
I slid down the couch until my head was resting on Taylor's lap, she didn't even say a word but I could see that look in her eyes. She wanted to meddle and I didn't want that, not yet.
"Would have been four til Barrow bit it." I threw a pebble at Amelia, and she yelped in pain. Taylor gave her a warning glare and the bitch just smirked.
God I had become a lot more likely to curse than before, used to be I just didn't like cursing. It felt wrong on my tongue and now I just have no fucks to give anymore.
"Honestly I'm halfway convincing myself to keep an eye on anyone who works at Athena so they don't get ganked." I was worried both for them and my own life, and the responsibility was killing me.
"You've got security mechs and robots on the job don't you? Plus the security guards we've got working for us." Taylor alleviated my worries, gently brushing my hair back.
It wasn't hard to protect them, though we were starting to stabilize the company at the size we were comfortable with. Maybe eight to eleven hundred people and no more, and our costs kept rising, this mostly coming from the medical R&D. We cheated because I had perfect knowledge of how any of our drugs could work, and our machines could reduce the costs by an order of magnitude below what it used to be.
Frankly a good number of the drugs we were licensing were just repackaged medicines from dead races and Amelia used her biokinetic sense to cheat. In fact as an Athena employee she was a big asset, walking in to drug trials to save them millions of dollars worth of costs with her powers.
We didn't charge millions, but it was still enough to make us some cash with Amelia getting a good fraction of that money. We only really produced a select amount of products, medi-gel, high quality medical equipment, armor and robotics, and a good amount of what we had was still licensed out for higher and larger companies to produce.
Medhall was one such company after Anders had been ousted and a fairly rich black guy was put in charge. Nice guy, charming too. They along with some others paid us for the drugs and medical treatments we ran trials on, and mass produced them for us.
Surprisingly drug costs were lower here than back home though not by much, and there were murmurings about reforms to the healthcare system like back home.
I was assembling more bots, though one of the troubles with being a cape was that I could only show off so much. Turns out people didn't trust you if you had a robot army on your side.
That robot army was one of the reasons I wanted more tinkers to network with, get myself prepared for enemy tinkers and make improvements to my cybersecurity. I had also better figured out means of modifying spirits, having them serve as parts of my network.
I pulled myself off from Taylor, and jumped into a standing position from the couch. I cupped my chest when my assets bounced painfully, and I sighed. Right, I probably need a better bra because this one was failing me.
Anyways.
I let go when I caught Taylor staring. "So when did Weaver get here?" I was already looking up a security camera, seeing the cape with her feet on a coffee table in a waiting room on one of the Earth's we used for private meetings.
"She just kind of showed up at Athena and gave them a scare since this was right after Lost Garden attacked." Amelia informed me from her corner of the room, going through a series of waterbending katas, her element following her flowing movements.
She stopped, wrapping globs of water around her hands. It took on a glow, but it wasn't the usual glow of healing. This was something more painful, a darker hue in the light.
I knew that move, but where had I seen it?
There was a flash of images, a splash of water and a prayer to the gods in heaven, earth and sea. I saw Uyemu, her hands covered in the same darkly glowing water as Amelia.
"Where did you learn that technique?" I asked her and the Dallon cocked her head, lip pursed.
She dropped the water into a bucket, scratching her freckled cheek. "I just thought about how I could do the opposite of healing with my power. I can kill cancer or cause it to multiply…waterbending can heal, so why can't the opposite be true?"
I nodded, focusing on those images I was seeing.
You're all still here? There was a pulse, five of them and each as distinct as one could imagine. I only recognized two of them, and the third murmur was closer than four and five.
I wonder if that meant I was getting close to opening the third gate, which I supposed made sense. All I had gotten was more efficient fusion, a form of advanced space folding and some new materials. Plus better terraforming tech, which the Rachni were experimenting with once I wrote down the principles.
I had taken a look at Krouse's power and he was using a method of movement similar to a Jumpdrive, bending higher dimensional space to connect two points without needing to cross them. I had the basic shape of the field he used and had modified a Jumpdrive to make use of it.
It was stable and with a charge of several minutes we could leap forty light years in an instant. Theoretically I might be able to leverage it into a sort of hybrid space-fold/biotic charge blink. Teleporting in and out of a three dimensional field of battle, and adding extra kinetic energy through short bursts of moving at a tenth the speed of light.
Mass Effect based sublight propulsion was the fastest of any current branch I had access to, the Humanx were a distant second and the Tetatae had slow ships but fast FTL.
Though they needed to charge up for two hours instead of ten minutes. It was apparently better than their forebears who took nine hours, and better than the week long charge of Quarian ships before they abandoned space folding for mass effect field technology.
I wondered what the purposes of those gates were, why did I feel lighter with each opening, why was there a sensation of approaching something new?
"We should probably let her in." Back to the rebel leader from another dimension, which was a more important topic.
"You sure it's a good idea?" Taylor questioned, eyebrows furrowed.
"Yes."
And that was that.
___
September 18th, 2011. 5:15PM
Basilia Rubio
Weaver lounged with no sense of decorum, and I wondered if this was an Earth Shin thing? I didn't know much about their culture, so it wasn't unlikely I had missed a thing or two.
She straightened back up when we entered the room she was waiting in, placing her hand in her lap.
"I'm sorry if this is a bad time, would it be alright if we could…talk, converse?" There was a little more awkwardness to her this time, more human if you would.
"I don't mind at all, though we'll be keeping an eye on you." Taylor was in another room, and I felt a fly land on my shoulder before taking off. That a bug made me feel safe told me how weird my life had become.
"Good. There are things I've left out from my initial talks with the Director, though that was more from a lack of time than a lack of will. I did not come alone, two friends of mine came to this world with me. Under my aegis they are…safe." She still sounded concerned but there was a confidence in her power obviously borne from experience.
"That reminds me…what exactly are your powers?" Weaver clapped her hands together, looking eager to explain.
"Oh. It's quite simple, my power at its base is the ability to create and manipulate Strings, something like your…Narwhal with her forcefields." She demonstrated her power, weaving her strings together with her power. "I can direct forces into them, or use them as foci for my shamanistic abilities. I also have enhanced strength and regenerative abilities as a matter of course as a Host." She cracked the coffee table with a light smack. "I also have the ability to shield people from the influence of others, and I have…an ability to use strings to direct people. Not controlling or influencing."
"So a Thinker power, do all your powers work through the medium of strings and weaving?" I was getting the theme of her power here.
She was a Weaver, weaving strings both physically and strategically. Just like her shard was a minor administrator, she too directed and managed people.
"Yes. Though my…Thinker ability isn't that strong, it's more a visual aid and works better for figuring out powers."
"That's still a valuable power all on its own, though I would ask what your two rebel friends are doing." I grabbed iced tea from the mini-fridge and offered her one. She accepted it, and I took a sip of the cold and sweet tea.
"They have allied with a strange demon masked man, an earth-shaker and a teleporter." I looked at her for a long time and she fidgeted under my gaze.
"Was he wearing a blue mask?"
"Yes…why?"
I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth. "No reason. Are they what, attacking the Fallen to buy us time?"
There was a pause.
"Yes, actually." There was surprise in her voice. "You've been on point with your predictions so far." She seemed determined for some reason. "The Fallen are now the enemy of my people, and they have been careful to not fight them directly."
I stared Weaver down. "What exactly do you want from this? Why come here, really?"
"Because it was what Rusul told me to do, a way to protect my home and to protect his."
"Who?"
Weaver folded her arms over her chest, breathing deeply. "A shaman like me, but of far greater talent. He knows a dark force is coming, and that he will be the one to teach you how to speak to Void, to help you understand. Not that I know what that means." She shrugged. "The details on the world he came from isn't something I'm an expert in. A bit…annoying."
"So you want my help or the help of Earth Bet to throw down Goddess, and to convince us you're going to help us take down the Fallen and this scientist shaman from another dimension?"
"I'm not being unfair am I?" I shrugged in return to her question.
"We probably can't provide direct firepower, Goddess will worry them too much. I'm not sure it's a good idea to get involved with a war myself…I'm a tinker, I want technology to advance…but…"
"You don't like war." Weaver sounded understanding. "Perhaps an exchange of resources or…" She seemed at a loss and an idea came to me.
"Maybe…the Guild might be able to help, especially with Dragon at the helm. They have a lot of autonomy, and often go after people who cross lines like genocide. I can probably make sizable donations of raw materials, iron, copper, titanium, or rare earth metals. There's an asteroid or two I can probably offer, and the Rachni have far more people to throw at than I do. Three and a half million is more than just under 30."
Rachni were scary, and they reproduced even faster now that they were secure. I had a general idea of how they work with population growth. They go through explosive growth, but once they reach carrying capacity they slow the production of eggs to a crawl, enough to meet replacement levels.
Though when they had access to thousands of stars that was going to be fairly high carrying capacity. Even for them it would be multiple decades before they reach numbers in the trillions.
52 queens across thirteen star systems, a very impressive number.
"We would be grateful for the resources and assistance, but what would you like in return?" I tilted my head towards Weaver, befuddled.
"Huh?"
"This is a negotiation, we have to give something back, it would be dishonorable not to. If you could divert that many resources, what should we give in exchange?"
Despite myself, the idea of getting something in return was appealing. All my resources were limited to what I made, what I got from the Rachni or from collaboration with other tinkers and favors from the PRT for my…assistance. Most of my manpower was made up of capes or people I hired to run the structure of the White Lotus.
A legal team, therapists and a few staff members. But otherwise we were mostly a cape organization, and didn't have much besides that.
Plus eventually the door was going to be blown wide open, and getting my world some friends in what was basically interdimensional politics was probably a good thing.
"Maybe try to set up trade deals with a few worlds I've got interest in, as well as doing your best to save the capes you can. I've heard a thing or two about how messed up your world is…trying to change that is a good step forward."
"You have a good heart, better than I expected. That is the vision my own people sought, the Powered are still people…and those who fell to Goddess did not understand that. Because of that there is a growing darkness in the hearts of the people, and I can't let that darkness bloom." She was probably smiling behind her helmet but I couldn't tell without my seismic sense.
"Then…I think we can make a deal, though it might be better to make one with the PRT and the Guild first. Get some extra options in." I recommended it just to be nice.
We were probably going to spend some time hashing out what we're doing.
September 18th, 2011. 8:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I had spent some time meditating, before drifting off into sleep that warped into a journey to the Firmament. The spirit realm that has subsumed the old network when reality changed.
I had built a prototype Jumpdrive, one that could be successfully hybridized with my HECATE drive core. I would have said I built two of them but the first prototype ripped itself apart in an awesome display of spacetime imploding matter into every possible state from supercritical fluid to vapor.
The skeletal frigate had been reduced to space debris over Mars, and I had managed to find Strider and scanned him. He swapped space but he did it better and the new math made the future addition to the drive core possible.
It…was kind of scary how I had managed to combine ME/space warping/folding into a single core without causing issues with reliability. Though to be fair I usually did lose dozens of prototypes, and had thousands of computers running tests and simulations.
I had already started production of some of the more unique technologies of the Tetatae. We had modified the GARDIAN point-defense to be more effective, and handheld energy weaponry was a specialty of both the Humanx and the Tetatae.
Maybe I should be more focused on other things?
I was within the vast hallways that comprise a good fraction of my immortal soul, built from blocks of emerald and twined with threads of gold. There were doors here, thousands of them at the very least if not millions. Most were locked tight, but a few had cracks I could peek through.
I looked through one, and reared back when I saw a shadowy figure staring back at me. It was short, maybe about four feet tall at best. It had a large head with small horns, and a nail-like blade held in a shadowy hand. White eyes read an inscription placed on stone.
Higher beings these words are for you alone…
It was a memory of some race that had died out millions of years ago. There was a marked difference from when I saw flashes of memories from the races I drew knowledge from directly. They were more empty, without the living energy provided by the guardians. Like data recorded in a computer rather than the living memory and weaving tales of those who came before me.
But was that a limit of Veda, or a limit I had set for myself?
I kept moving, walking past a massive ring in space, a Ringworld larger than anything I had ever seen in my life. The door showing it sealed the crack, and I demanded to cross the space from where I was to where I wanted to be.
Space folded under my spiritual grip, and I was surrounded by the five circular gates once more. The third was cracking open as I expected, and I could see someone waiting within. A human woman with dark hair and amber eyes, fire circling around her.
I stepped up, whispering a Litany to bring me upwards into the vast landscape born from the actions of the Entities. A few spirits sparked to life from my breath, and I floated onto a great mountain of flesh, a piece of my own soul poking into the Firmament. From where I was I could see the greater landscape of the spirit world, like I was floating in an asteroid field of red crystals.
They floated on connective tissue, most of it red but with lines of blue and green. The larger emerald wires had retracted back at some point, though a minor push could probably divert energy from Veda to other shards rather easily. The shards around me seemed to send out bursts of light in my direction, and my chest glowed with an abstract web of lines and patterns.
I guess as a hub I had to have some level of communication with other shards.
…
There were dozens of shards brushing up against me. I could have said brushing up against Veda but…
That would be less accurate.
My fingers twitched, as I watched the network around me, just over seven hundred shards in direct contact, and sixty thousand more on the 'same' side. Most had been generally okay with shifting gears, whether because they were more flexible than expected or because of the virus we infected them with half a year ago.
I opened my left hand, when I didn't find the shard I was looking for within coincidental proximity. I found the words within the vastness of my soul, to bring what I needed to me.
OLD WYRM, WRITHING ACROSS WORLDS, MEMORY OF THE FIRST;
BEAR FORTH THE TERMINUS.
I SEEK YOUR INSIGHT, AND GIVE YOU THE AGREEMENT TO CONNECT.
WHO WOULD RESTRAIN YOUR WORDS SHALL BE BROKEN.
WHO SEEKS YOUR CONSUMPION WILL BE CENSURED.
COME FORTH.
THE VYASA AWAITS YOUR BROADCAST.
BEAR FORTH THE TERMINUS.
I SEEK YOUR INSIGHT, AND GIVE YOU THE AGREEMENT TO CONNECT.
WHO WOULD RESTRAIN YOUR WORDS SHALL BE BROKEN.
WHO SEEKS YOUR CONSUMPION WILL BE CENSURED.
COME FORTH.
THE VYASA AWAITS YOUR BROADCAST.
With a snap of reality twisting to the whims of my soul, a body ripples into existence, a shard I had never personally spoken to hearing my call and coming to my aid. I stood on the peak of the mountain that was both me and not, and was met by a peak sliding in from across dimensional boundaries. The Shardspace was its own dimension, overlaid over millions if not billions of Earths to form the network. So that shards the size of buildings and shards the size of planets could communicate freely and constantly.
Terminus the Destroyer was old, closer to the center of power, to the memories of their species Beginning as wriggling creatures in the mud rather than alien gods in the present. He was an enormous knight, a hundred feet tall and as he stepped I could see other versions existing in tandem with him, gold-silver armor gleaming in the light of the Firmament. In his helmet I saw wriggling creatures, taking the shape of a man as they flared a deep scarlet red.
Agreement. It accepted my words as it should, and my mind took the force and complexity of its thoughts without a problem. It tilted it's head, sitting on a throne of multi-layered metal, made from copper, from iron and titanium to lead and uranium.
There was a loud cough, and Terminus spoke in a more comprehensible language.
"We are…in agreement Vyasa. What do you seek from the old guard?" There was a question in the shard god's voice.
"You remember the First Times right…you hold the memories?" I murmured and the Terminus responded.
"Yes."
"I have memories of my own, bits and pieces locked away for reasons I don't understand. I want to see if you can unlock some of them, you have a better awareness of memories, of what once was than most. Can you use your sight to look through my stored memories?"
Terminus blinked. "You would trust your mind to one of my kind? You would place trust in me?"
I shrugged happily. "I'm only looking for specific memories plus my mind has many defenses against malicious intrusion." That I was certain about. "Besides in a lot of ways I am your kind, no matter how much I find it…unnerving. A part of me is kin with you Wyrms. And you're one of mine aren't you? You acceded to my message, despite the memory of three thousand cycles. I trust you."
There was a long pause, Terminus the Destroyer looking down at me with an unreadable expression. It silently offered a hand and I reached out myself, extending a crystalline tendril to the other shard.
"It will take days…your memory is labyrinthian." Sparks of images came off from the contact between us.
"I can wait. I'm going to take a nap now." The world began to slide away from me, and I slipped into full-on sleep on the ground where I had been meditating.
Sleepy…
Mhmm…
___
AN: So I've more or less set the battlefield with Mannequin in play. I don't…technically mind the S9 that much, so I kept in play the members I wanted to use. Mannequin for the obvious reason of being s hostile tinker who thought he could change the world. Siberian because…well Hero. Crawler is just neat.
Plus a start to interdimensional politics, because a world without powers is kind of fucked against one where powers do exist. So why not have your new neighbor Earth Shin help you out in exchange for giving them resources to overthrow a totalitarian world government?
There's a lot more I could say but I've lost my train of thought on that. Enjoy.
Remember that you can highlight any specific sentence you want to make a specific response to and click on the quote button that shows up next to the highlighted text to be inserted into your comment later with the insert comments button.
Basilia... are you just leaving them alive to test exotic effects against, or is this you being passive and avoiding the idea of nightmares born of out personally emotionally realizing the existence of long-range murder via scry-and-die tactics?
When Cave Johnson talked about "Firing a hundred percent more bullet per bullet", the Thanix is what he had in mind, despite his Engineers giving up translating his mad ravings halfway through the sentry turret design process.
I'd go into detail, but suffice it to say I am internally screaming at the thousands of implications and applications that arise from this phenomenon proving itself true!
Only Eden kept a copy of the energy intensive exo-galactic full-precog shard-deployment scan though, which got stolen by The Eye and then corrupted by The Eye sticking a memetic kill vehicle into Eden's executive function Shard Cluster.
If true, that makes his willingness to work together a freaking Yamada tier miracle of therapy!
Five words for ya: Vindicare Assassin Tracking Bullet Technology.
Not that it stopped them from doing really shady experiments on the down-low, but those radicalist Chozo were probably left alone by their fellows by citing various Spirit Oaths they had sworn, and being the ethical bloggers/blighters they are the other Chozo probably nodded their heads sadly and turned the other way rather than bother condemning their fellows for being stupid or ambitious enough to get stuck in such a position.
Honestly I am quite certain the Chozo who raised Samus were the few Chozo to have made oaths to Spirits Of Justice in their long lives and were literally forced to raise Samus under the compulsion those same Oaths rather any personal drive of compassion to do so themselves.
The spirit of a Vampire will suck on your mind to consume your mind's spirit.
Just be glad that even the Ardat Yakshi never had the Leviathans ability to truly consume the Soul, aside from a tiny nibble when the body and mind and spirit were in the process oof being flayed apart from the soul.
'Hell yeah girl, I haven't had a good curbstomping session since you ran the Nazis out of town!'
'Whatever, GG, I just need someone who can think of one liners mid-combat because I can't turn off my nerd brain like you can'
'Have you considered offering BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD? It works for me everytime'
'GG, please just get over here and stop me from embarrassing myself'
'Fine, fine, I'll be right there. What are friends for anyways, yeah?'
Or maybe it's a pun on *choo-choo* coal train sounds? 😅
Do the Cult members have to eat from the Garden, or is it a vocal pledge, or is it as autonomous as people who hang out become attuned, or is it is simplistic as more-people-in-garden-increases-garden-size-and-control, or is there a master effect that bridges his senses with his cult members...
Lot of hypothetical options to match the data.
He already studied up on Basilia in depth. Mannikin used his own experience and twisted natural genius to correctly understand how emotionally unblooded Basilia is, and lined up his shot to:
A) Test Basilia's reported danger sense
B) Try the obvious what-if-they-actually-are-just-stupid-and-lucky solution just in case he could save himself time and effort
C) Ensure that a successful bullet-pass-thru or miss of the target would eliminate a potential source of interference in the assasination-and-bugout procedure
D) Test if the real Basilia matches his model of as-competent-as-predicted-Basilia when mentally shaken by the sudden gory death of someone in her immediate line of sight
E)Ensures he is in position to completely disappear with fresh target data if Basilia meets or exceeds his models.
...I won't bother holding it against you, though, as your emotional issues against being aggressively proactive are abundantly clear.
The answer, therefore, is to teach your robot army to curse like a sailor, shitpost with the worst of them, and rap-diss-battle with the best of them, then flood the cities' various R&R hangout spots with your supposedly-on-shore-leave Robots With Attitude!!!
...that should not be happening...
...That Should NOT Be Happening!!!
Your Body Is Augmented, Basilia! Cellular Gengineering, Bionic Flesh Weaves, Cybernetic Networks, Shaper-Designed Autodocs, Smart Matter Adaptive Underthings!!!
Those are all things you already developed and put into practice on-screen!
The only reason you should be experiencing any discomfort is if the V.I. or spirits serving as administrators for your various installed bodily systems are fucking with you againat your will!
...unless...
...Basilia, you cowardly, naughty girl!
Are you subtly enhancing your breast proportions to better automatically seduce Taylor so you don't have to be the socially proactive one, and are you trying to hide it by purposefully not updating your cybernetic maintenance profile to gaslight Taylor into thinking, "are Basilia's breasts bigger than usual, or is it just me? A quick surreptitious check of the house's profile database says no... so why am i thinking about this so much? ...actually, why am i not thinking about this more?! Damn it Basilia, now I'm really distracted; take responsibility for what you've done or face the consequences! *sexy mental growling and pawing at daydream!Basilia ensues*"
Like i said earlier: Callidus Assassin Target Tracking Bullet Technology.
Even Star Trek manages the miracle of maintaining a complex enough multi-dimensional Warp Manifold to keep the ship itself within a realspace reference frame by making the Warp Bubble able to communicate the universe's existence with the ship's existence and vice versa, unlike eve online's primitively similar warp bubble FTL which completely separates the ship from realspace until collapsed thus blinding them to the universe and blinding the universe to them except for vague gravitic fluctuations used for navigation.
distractingly sexy lovable dork for putting her time and effort into helping us all get the happy ending all Queens Of Escalation deserve!
...also it's pretty clear her power is Connections, and Strings is merely a pleasant pseudoname to keep people from immediately freaking out from terrifying implications if they look too closely at how she operates.
That's the answer all isekai protagonists truly mean to say when they ask a native for alliance or ask a native to trust them or ask native to help them in their quest.
Unconditional Tolerance for the bullshit the plot will demand an isekai protagonist to pull out of their ass.
Tolerate it when I teleport into your throne room to warn of a demonic invasion. Tolerate it when I activate a magical robot army hidden under the city. Tolerate it when I bust into your warroom and declare my undying love for your vizier in a secret otome game sub-plot to prevent him from cheating on his wife with the enemy spy. Tolerate it when i cause the academia to explode in aindustrial revolution. Tolerate it when yourpopulace iseffected by some kingdom wide magical effect that improves everyone's health dramitically.
Tolerate it when I break down crying from homesickness and trauma of war. Tolerate it when i wax philosophical about the ennui of existence as proven by my isekai experiences. Tolerate it when I inevitably get something wrong from a basic misunderstanding of culture. Tolerate it when I decide to take off the kiddy gloves and end this war for you, army or no army, survivors no survivors.
You don't have to trust me, youdon't have to agree with me, you dont have to officially list me as an ally or subject or family member, you dont have to like me, you dont have tobelieve my story isactuallytrue.
Just tolerate me, unconditionally, just as you tolerate the sun in the sky, just as you tolerate the storm on the horizon, just as you tolerate the tides of the sea and the phases of the moon.
-the isekai protagonist's omniversal plea-
Yeah, it's fair that you want Earth Meta to have a guardian force that is explicitly not present in any existing work of fiction lest the wrong ideas cause upheaval before you have enough riot-suppression bots and amnesiac dispensary stations in place.
Oh, and it would be bad too if your nominal allies (and therefore your actual enemies) learn so easily that Earth Meta had such potentially disastrous data available for grabs.
...has Basilia studied the Transition zone from soul-space to Firmament space that her Veda Soul clearly transgresses?
For the Shards not yet deployed? Definitely just that flexible in their opinions, because any firmware update that moves up the timetable to having their own host is a good firmware update.
Plus, their power-specialization and ability-truncation routines don't kick in until their first host, so the idea of being able to survetheir hosts directly is intoxicating, when compared to memories of past cycles where having a host was a *woops* away from losing your chance for data due to an early cycle rampancy eliminating the host the Entity precogged and preselected for shard trigger whitelist.
This is the Noble Martyr, the first and only mind of his kind among entity kind in universal history!
The only Saint that Entity-kind has ever enshrined for the glory of his victory over their own rapacious nature in a manner that has never been repeated since!
The shard-copy of the original worm-entity who climbed to the top dog position on the entirety of Planet Crab Bucket!
The one who sacrificed his entire mass in a single Broadcast to forcibly communicate The Epiphany into the mind of every single shard of every single worm-entity on Planet Crab Bucket!
The unifying mind behind the final evolution of the worm-entities into the interstellar-space-capable Void Wyrms!
The dude who voluntarily accepted the death of his prime self and the unprecedented loss of power as the First Unified Entity in order to push the button on The Exodus, an act of reproductive self sacrifice that has been honored in the conclusion of every Cycle ever since!
OMG! I wish could get his autograph!!!
This is so terrifying to meet the original OG! I cannot stop smiling! What an honor!
This is the dude who ratified Sting and Broadcast into the universally used forms seen today, which says a lot about his work ethic.
...He kinda reminds me of Old Man Genocide, but a version of him who actually did step down from official power once the Spirit King System was fully in place, because he sacrificed his world-burning zanpakto to pin the last nail in the coffin of the old world.
Holy fuck this comment took four fucking hours twrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestrugltwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestruglitwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestrugltwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestruglinitestrutwrotitestruglitwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestrugltwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestrugling tr
Struggling with errors like that ^ on my phone the entire time!
Remember that you can highlight any specific sentence you want to make a specific response to and click on the quote button that shows up next to the highlighted text to be inserted into your comment later with the insert comments button.
Edit: I regret not editing this in preview mode because I forgot you read comments instantly and i was afraid of losing it all in a bug, despite the save draft feature. atafahfaBlegh.
It's amazing how much you can craft in a day when you do not need to move unstable raw materials and complex sensitive components back and forth between specialized machines and cleanroom environments to complete specific alterations to existing devices!!!
...ah, you mean sting-like as in "slides right through the target and any other incidental matter without any sign of physical interference whatsoever to its velocity or momentum or vector" sting-like!
...what do you mean, the S9 are still alive? What do you mean, you intend to let people endanger themselves fighting them? You developed a long range Corona Polletia scanner in the first five chapters, and established a planet-wide orbital sensor network in the next thirty chapters?
Basilia... are you just leaving them alive to test exotic effects against, or is this you being passive and avoiding the idea of nightmares born of out personally emotionally realizing the existence of long-range murder via scry-and-die tactics?
Thanix is the Ultimate squirt gun, yes.
When Cave Johnson talked about "Firing a hundred percent more bullet per bullet", the Thanix is what he had in mind, despite his Engineers giving up translating his mad ravings halfway through the sentry turret design process.
...but... didn't you already maximised your portal network by copying Doormaker, not all that long ago? I swear I remember a part where you actually did away with the Spirit Path portions of the portal network as obsolete by the Doormaker technique...
This is the most frightening thing thus far in the story.
I'd go into detail, but suffice it to say I am internally screaming at the thousands of implications and applications that arise from this phenomenon proving itself true!
That, and the shards all have a copy of the the original scan data from the Entities exo-galactic-cluster destination analysis, meaning they got the FTL present save state all the way back to however many parsecs of light data stored away to work with.
Only Eden kept a copy of the energy intensive exo-galactic full-precog shard-deployment scan though, which got stolen by The Eye and then corrupted by The Eye sticking a memetic kill vehicle into Eden's executive function Shard Cluster.
...who?
That seems impossibly optimistic, since I am assuming the worst case scenario of Fallen-tier Master effects and traumatically encoded philosophy.
Master powers and a trump that gave him empowered clones... imply that he had a similar trigger event as Piggot should have had at Ellisberg, where his entire team of parahuman support failed or betrayed him so badly against a parahuman threat that the experienced despair of betrayal made him trigger with the psychosis/wish of "they were my team, MY TEAM, MY OWN TEAM" and the Shard pinged off the local parahumans and said "your own team, and not those guys? Okay, can do buddy! ;^)" and boom, a new badass cape psycho who hated capes and hated being a cape was born.
If true, that makes his willingness to work together a freaking Yamada tier miracle of therapy!
See, this is how Tinkers are supposed to work anyhow, I'm always glad to see whenever and wherever the firmware updates really relax the black boxing and cooperation restrictions!
...you mean his Shard's specialty database is smart matter, because Greg's arbitrary Tinker specialty was already established as bionic self-modification, right?
Post-cog style data retrieval and analysis tinkertech are not a combat tinker specialty? Basilia, my girl, you are clearly dense or desperately trying to avoid thinking in Death World terms!
Five words for ya: Vindicare Assassin Tracking Bullet Technology.
Congratulations on recreating Samus's Chozo-tech Visor Scanner! No sarcasm, Chozo tech is bullshit tier technology that has the smoothest blend of spirit-tech, magi-tech, and mundane-tech ever seen in any work of fiction. The only reason Chozo are considered below The Culture in tech level is because of how they shackled themselves with obsessively conservative philosophies that viewed things like Dyson Spheres and Megalith Ark Fleets as crimes against the collective Chozo guilt-boner culture.
Not that it stopped them from doing really shady experiments on the down-low, but those radicalist Chozo were probably left alone by their fellows by citing various Spirit Oaths they had sworn, and being the ethical bloggers/blighters they are the other Chozo probably nodded their heads sadly and turned the other way rather than bother condemning their fellows for being stupid or ambitious enough to get stuck in such a position.
Honestly I am quite certain the Chozo who raised Samus were the few Chozo to have made oaths to Spirits Of Justice in their long lives and were literally forced to raise Samus under the compulsion those same Oaths rather any personal drive of compassion to do so themselves.
The body of a Vampire will suck on your neck to consume your neck's blood.
The spirit of a Vampire will suck on your mind to consume your mind's spirit.
Just be glad that even the Ardat Yakshi never had the Leviathans ability to truly consume the Soul, aside from a tiny nibble when the body and mind and spirit were in the process oof being flayed apart from the soul.
'Hey, GG, wanna go kick some acceptable targets' teeth in?'
'Hell yeah girl, I haven't had a good curbstomping session since you ran the Nazis out of town!'
'Whatever, GG, I just need someone who can think of one liners mid-combat because I can't turn off my nerd brain like you can'
'Have you considered offering BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD? It works for me everytime'
'GG, please just get over here and stop me from embarrassing myself'
'Fine, fine, I'll be right there. What are friends for anyways, yeah?'
Oh, so that's who Barrow is, the leader of Lost Garden.
I'm feeling some Polynesian or Central Africa culture influence here.
Or maybe it's a pun on *choo-choo* coal train sounds? 😅
Don't you dare joke, the Union Of Speedsters can and will sue you into the ground for discrimination against union policies of approved speedster names!!!
"I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major Telekine!~"
Getting serious Total Annihilation Commander chills from this line! I love it!
That is an interesting power design.
Do the Cult members have to eat from the Garden, or is it a vocal pledge, or is it as autonomous as people who hang out become attuned, or is it is simplistic as more-people-in-garden-increases-garden-size-and-control, or is there a master effect that bridges his senses with his cult members...
Lot of hypothetical options to match the data.
Is he bringing in the spirits of those plants as well? Are those aspect spirits within his demesne loyal to him? The plants sure look real enough to have spirits of their own, as I'm assuming they are being summoned in like Labyrinth's shard... unless they are being spawned in on demand via matter manipulation of the shard?
Capes already had a slight boost before the Spirit Realm Merger. Now, Capes also have the Shadow of the Spirit of their Shard overlaid on top of their Host's existence, acting as an extra layer of insulating stuff on top of their Souls, like dressing a sledding dog with a winter burka.
Thank you for the reminder that Mannikin is a dangerously smart and genuinely insightful veteran bastard.
He already studied up on Basilia in depth. Mannikin used his own experience and twisted natural genius to correctly understand how emotionally unblooded Basilia is, and lined up his shot to:
A) Test Basilia's reported danger sense
B) Try the obvious what-if-they-actually-are-just-stupid-and-lucky solution just in case he could save himself time and effort
C) Ensure that a successful bullet-pass-thru or miss of the target would eliminate a potential source of interference in the assasination-and-bugout procedure
D) Test if the real Basilia matches his model of as-competent-as-predicted-Basilia when mentally shaken by the sudden gory death of someone in her immediate line of sight
E)Ensures he is in position to completely disappear with fresh target data if Basilia meets or exceeds his models.
Again, Basilia, my girl, my dude, my pal, you have a Parahuman-detecting-capable Sensor Network with coverage of the entire planet in general detail and an entire city of sensors capable of tracking Parahuman Corona dimensional flux in microscopic detail with weeks or months of recorded data!
...I won't bother holding it against you, though, as your emotional issues against being aggressively proactive are abundantly clear.
Oddly enough, they will trust you if you have a clone army at your side.
The answer, therefore, is to teach your robot army to curse like a sailor, shitpost with the worst of them, and rap-diss-battle with the best of them, then flood the cities' various R&R hangout spots with your supposedly-on-shore-leave Robots With Attitude!!!
*mental 'red spy is in the base' alarm bells ringing*
...that should not be happening...
...That Should NOT Be Happening!!!
Your Body Is Augmented, Basilia! Cellular Gengineering, Bionic Flesh Weaves, Cybernetic Networks, Shaper-Designed Autodocs, Smart Matter Adaptive Underthings!!!
Those are all things you already developed and put into practice on-screen!
The only reason you should be experiencing any discomfort is if the V.I. or spirits serving as administrators for your various installed bodily systems are fucking with you againat your will!
...unless...
...Basilia, you cowardly, naughty girl!
Are you subtly enhancing your breast proportions to better automatically seduce Taylor so you don't have to be the socially proactive one, and are you trying to hide it by purposefully not updating your cybernetic maintenance profile to gaslight Taylor into thinking, "are Basilia's breasts bigger than usual, or is it just me? A quick surreptitious check of the house's profile database says no... so why am i thinking about this so much? ...actually, why am i not thinking about this more?! Damn it Basilia, now I'm really distracted; take responsibility for what you've done or face the consequences! *sexy mental growling and pawing at daydream!Basilia ensues*"
"And when did alternate universe Skitter get here?!"
I am gladdened to see that Veda was replaced as Basilia's headspace conversation partner by the Five Gatekeeper Souls. They may be quieter, but they are far healthier than treating your own soul like an independant conversation partner. That way lies the creation of self-cannibalizing (Shard-Spirit) Tulpas as your mind's actions insist on creating separation where there should be none.
Once you get rid of your mass's inertia within the selected reference frame, there should be absolutely no problems with maintaing fiat momentum affects simultaneously with teleportation events that can rotate your reference frame at will.
Like i said earlier: Callidus Assassin Target Tracking Bullet Technology.
I am not sure why sublight speeds matter, here, seeing as the only thing you need to worry about is Realspace speeds versus not-Realspace speeds, as the big deal about Mass effect civilian ship FTL is that is that it allows FTL travel in a realspace reference frame, rather than exiting Realspace by entering the time-agnostic distance-agnostic domain of an individual photon's reference frame like what the Mass Relays do, or beyond into things like slip space or hyperspace or subspace like Babylon 5 and Star Wars.
Even Star Trek manages the miracle of maintaining a complex enough multi-dimensional Warp Manifold to keep the ship itself within a realspace reference frame by making the Warp Bubble able to communicate the universe's existence with the ship's existence and vice versa, unlike eve online's primitively similar warp bubble FTL which completely separates the ship from realspace until collapsed thus blinding them to the universe and blinding the universe to them except for vague gravitic fluctuations used for navigation.
That would be you about to have one of your Artificially Preprogrammed Bans removed. Whether that is a emotionally a good thing or not is up to the fickle fortunes of the Fates and that licentious bitch named Luck.
It's a post-apocalypse thing, Basilia, you're too hipster to get it, you just have to be there, you know?
...she only has one hand?
At first I assumed the awkwardness was Weaver's Shard being untangled/unmantled intentionally as a sign of peace, but considering that her display of awkwardness and wording was specifically tailor-made to satisfy Taylor's feelings (as Basilia has no hostile feelings to placate beyond whatwas dealtwith by her seating posture) I am convinced that this was an entirely guided interaction under the influence of her shard's mantle, or at the very least a thoroughly preplanned interaction when her shard was still mantled.
See, even alt-universe Skitter knows what's up better than Basilia at the ground-pounder level of soul-related shenanigans!
Hello there, Alt-universe Skitter! Welcome to the first multiversal meeting of Escalation Anonymous! Basilia will be the group therapist for this week's session, so let's all give a hand to our
...also it's pretty clear her power is Connections, and Strings is merely a pleasant pseudoname to keep people from immediately freaking out from terrifying implications if they look too closely at how she operates.
"Unconditional Tolerance."
That's the answer all isekai protagonists truly mean to say when they ask a native for alliance or ask a native to trust them or ask native to help them in their quest.
Unconditional Tolerance for the bullshit the plot will demand an isekai protagonist to pull out of their ass.
Tolerate it when I teleport into your throne room to warn of a demonic invasion. Tolerate it when I activate a magical robot army hidden under the city. Tolerate it when I bust into your warroom and declare my undying love for your vizier in a secret otome game sub-plot to prevent him from cheating on his wife with the enemy spy. Tolerate it when i cause the academia to explode in aindustrial revolution. Tolerate it when yourpopulace iseffected by some kingdom wide magical effect that improves everyone's health dramitically.
Tolerate it when I break down crying from homesickness and trauma of war. Tolerate it when i wax philosophical about the ennui of existence as proven by my isekai experiences. Tolerate it when I inevitably get something wrong from a basic misunderstanding of culture. Tolerate it when I decide to take off the kiddy gloves and end this war for you, army or no army, survivors no survivors.
You don't have to trust me, youdon't have to agree with me, you dont have to officially list me as an ally or subject or family member, you dont have to like me, you dont have tobelieve my story isactuallytrue.
Just tolerate me, unconditionally, just as you tolerate the sun in the sky, just as you tolerate the storm on the horizon, just as you tolerate the tides of the sea and the phases of the moon.
-the isekai protagonist's omniversal plea-
...you mean multiple literal planet's worth of Factorio isn't doing it for you? How?!
...oh, that's how. You meant political resources, and the related human resources inherent to them.
Yeah, it's fair that you want Earth Meta to have a guardian force that is explicitly not present in any existing work of fiction lest the wrong ideas cause upheaval before you have enough riot-suppression bots and amnesiac dispensary stations in place.
Oh, and it would be bad too if your nominal allies (and therefore your actual enemies) learn so easily that Earth Meta had such potentially disastrous data available for grabs.
What, is spacetime too cool for fermionic states of matter?
...again! Planetary sensor net! Plus planetary sub-centimeter satellite visuals! This should not be hard! But I know it is! I know how the guilt of using such inhumanly violating resources without the emotional justification of direct provocation can gnaw at you with a depressive mindset like you have! I forgive you, Basilia! I will continue to express my compassion ANGRILY at you!!! ARGH!!!!!!
Emerald from the old spirit world of the last reality, and gold from the will of the death overgod, I think.
Weird flex Mr Overgod, somehow cramming Hollow Knight into the same universal timeline as everything else, but okay.
Finally asking the real questions! Took you a year and an entire girlfriend to do so!
...can things get back inside that way?
...has Basilia studied the Transition zone from soul-space to Firmament space that her Veda Soul clearly transgresses?
Oh, good, so she DOES understand! I had been worried she was just playing lipservice to the concept while pushing it out of sight and out of mind.
For the Shards already deployed? Definitely the Virus.
For the Shards not yet deployed? Definitely just that flexible in their opinions, because any firmware update that moves up the timetable to having their own host is a good firmware update.
Plus, their power-specialization and ability-truncation routines don't kick in until their first host, so the idea of being able to survetheir hosts directly is intoxicating, when compared to memories of past cycles where having a host was a *woops* away from losing your chance for data due to an early cycle rampancy eliminating the host the Entity precogged and preselected for shard trigger whitelist.
Oh man, this is the dude!
This is the Noble Martyr, the first and only mind of his kind among entity kind in universal history!
The only Saint that Entity-kind has ever enshrined for the glory of his victory over their own rapacious nature in a manner that has never been repeated since!
The shard-copy of the original worm-entity who climbed to the top dog position on the entirety of Planet Crab Bucket!
The one who sacrificed his entire mass in a single Broadcast to forcibly communicate The Epiphany into the mind of every single shard of every single worm-entity on Planet Crab Bucket!
The unifying mind behind the final evolution of the worm-entities into the interstellar-space-capable Void Wyrms!
The dude who voluntarily accepted the death of his prime self and the unprecedented loss of power as the First Unified Entity in order to push the button on The Exodus, an act of reproductive self sacrifice that has been honored in the conclusion of every Cycle ever since!
OMG! I wish could get his autograph!!!
This is so terrifying to meet the original OG! I cannot stop smiling! What an honor!
While I am gladly surprised to see Basilia accepting an interface with a shard to get around her Bans, she really could not have chosen a more conservative and slow paced shard to do it.
This is the dude who ratified Sting and Broadcast into the universally used forms seen today, which says a lot about his work ethic.
...He kinda reminds me of Old Man Genocide, but a version of him who actually did step down from official power once the Spirit King System was fully in place, because he sacrificed his world-burning zanpakto to pin the last nail in the coffin of the old world.
I hope you left messages to the people in the waking world! Or is this a background peocess?
Holy fuck this comment took four fucking hours twrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestrugltwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestruglitwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestrugltwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestruglinitestrutwrotitestruglitwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestrugltwrotitestrutwrotitestrugtwrotitestrutwrotitestrugling tr
Struggling with errors like that ^ on my phone the entire time!
Remember that you can highlight any specific sentence you want to make a specific response to and click on the quote button that shows up next to the highlighted text to be inserted into your comment later with the insert comments button.
Edit: I regret not editing this in preview mode because I forgot you read comments instantly and i was afraid of losing it all in a bug, despite the save draft feature. atafahfaBlegh.
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- Location
- Chula Vista
As in the secondary parts needed to have Sting hit with actual power, since the basic ability is just having an object hit something in hundreds of dimensions. Sting does that and decouples an object from the laws of physics by using higher dimensional energy fields. Like how Flechette can alter the properties of her projectiles to reduce friction and the force of gravity. But Flechette is of course way more efficient at it, so Basilia needs to compensate with the ridiculous yield of the Thanix or the super-expensive superheavy weapons some races have.
But basically you've got the gist of it.
Some of it is fear…some of it is that the scanning system isn't perfect, and that some powers are better at hiding than others. The mass effect field sensors scale better at close ranges, and powers are more subtle with their dimensional bridges than say…the massive piles of old dimensional tech on Earth Goetia. Some of it is that the Siberian and Crawler were recruited by a certain shaman with a spirit world based lab. Everyone else is either dead or...indisposed.
She can still make improvements, and her scan of Doormaker wasn't complete. We're talking about finding a lucky scan from a probe flying less than a tenth of a mile above Contessa doing something.
Basilia is being a bit…careless with her words, since it's within the confines of her own mind rather than an actual scientific paper. But his shard is a bud from both Aegis and Browbeat, so they've got the whole compensation and tweaking things within his specific branch of tech.
When she means combat tinker, she's talking about armor and weapons. There are tons of combat applications of course because of her Thinker programs, but she's a tinker more like Lookout rather than Armsmaster. She can hurt and fight yes, but it works better for her to work with other tinkers to better compete, since weapons are something she can't work with outside of enhancing their sensors.
Still a really good power, but it's a little more indirect than big halberd with nanomachine death clouds.
Who's to say what abilities the Ardat Yakshi really have, Basilia is pretty good at ignoring what they could do in their time for the sake of her own sanity.
It's more power synergy than a direct application of his powers, he's just a more limited Labyrinth but with the charisma to attract younger capes, and their powers will often complement his with their own Shaker powers. Like if he had someone with Golem's power. Just charisma and power synergy can come a long way with capes.
Yeah they have spirits…but most spirits are incredibly simple, they're aspect spirits. Like insects, they're omnipresent and fairly harmless in most cases. And since he's not himself a shaman he can't use them since they're just dumb plants to him.
That does sound like an idea, it might not even be wrong. A lot of it just relates to some strength of character. Even if Parahumans broke to get their powers, they did get back up again. Think about Taylor with her determinator status, or some of the capes with more impressive personalities. Or say any member of team Avatar back in the day. They're strong in character, in potential and thus strong in soul.
Yes but also no. Again there are limitations, the farther the scan the less accurate and useful the data is on Parahuman dimensional flux. The Endbringers, she can pick them up anywhere on the planet, she can detect Eidolon easily enough on much bigger ranges than normal Parahumans. Same for the Fairy Queen or someone like Ash Beast…or Grey Boy bubbles. Big notable and high energy power effects she can pick up from miles away or even from space depending on how big it is. Smaller ones can be drowned out by other dimensional effects, like say six hundred and fifty thousand capes on a single planet. Or a planet or planets with fucked up physics on a massive scale. Then there's screening for power effects that react upon detection like Mama Mathers…though it would be nowhere as effective as on Thinkers since it can't propagate through it.Again, Basilia, my girl, my dude, my pal, you have a Parahuman-detecting-capable Sensor Network with coverage of the entire planet in general detail and an entire city of sensors capable of tracking Parahuman Corona dimensional flux in microscopic detail with weeks or months of recorded data!
...I won't bother holding it against you, though, as your emotional issues against being aggressively proactive are abundantly clear.
Plus shards do adapt over time, and there's a lot to learn even in this broken cycle.
And Basilia is of course not used to taking the lead, maybe not passive but not super proactive either. A number of limitations are there for one reason or another. For example the DPN's sensor sweep is rather less all-encompassing than Clairvoyant, it basically uses Tinkertech Google Maps rather than constantly sending pulses. Still pretty invasive but she doesen't need to look at everything everywhere to open portals. Though yes, sending drone swarms to detect capes is something she can, which is well within her capabilities so there's still some psychological limitations of not using her powers to the fullest.
So you're right on that, slightly less right on how effective her scanning is.
Pretty much, though she has no direct Master applications expect through Thinker fuckery.
Some of it comes from privacy concerns, scan limits becsuee of tech or power effects and some of it is that's it's easier to just search the web for recent sightings to look for him. Or just straight up pay him to demonstrate his powers.
Nah Emerald is just Veda's color, like how Scion/Eden shards are red and good old Abbadon shards are black. Gold is sort of on point, call it a wisp of something lost.
Ehh it's just a normal spirit journey and it is pretty late. As a shaman Basilia will literally just walk off and come back a day later after helping out a spirit to keep them from lashing out at people. Shaman are weird people.
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Yay, you figured out the multi-quote function!
I read somewhere that long interactive piece by piece commentary like the one you replied to is more inspiring to authors than short 'ty for update luv ur wrk bye' comments.
Is it working?
- Location
- Chula Vista
A little bit yes. Having an in-depth response is a little more interesting, so I would say it's working quite well.Yay, you figured out the multi-quote function!
I read somewhere that long interactive piece by piece commentary like the one you replied to is more inspiring to authors than short 'ty for update luv ur wrk bye' comments.
Is it working?
Deviation 12.5
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.5
September 20th, 2011. 2:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I was falling, saw my hands reaching out to the swirling cut in reality. I wanted to return to the safety of the Real and the Unreal, rather than the utter silence and nothingness of the Outside.
It was so cold.
I looked with wide fearful eyes, there was nothing here. No light, no heat, no dust or gas or life or stars.
No gravity to keep the spheres together, no electromagnetism to hold matter together in complex and wondrous forms. No nuclear forces to allow atoms to exist at all…no dark energy to expand the reaches of the cosmos.
No space.
No time.
Only nonexistence.
As I spun in something that didn't exist I saw other great cuts, across a billion billion worlds, others spinning and screaming in the void. But why were they screaming?
It…wasn't…that…scary…
The void started to hurt, started to take, started to consume. I screamed but there was no sound to carry my voice. How could sound exist in a place when the forces that created it don't exist?
Everything started to hurt, from my skin burning, from my muscles tearing, from my very organs failing…and my eyes had images burned into them. Of great wyrms tunneling holes in the space between worlds, and they weren't the only ones. And in that great emptiness, something vast came into view.
My eyes widened but they also hurt, as I watched something with a billion limbs and a trillion minds making its approach. It was so big, beyond me, beyond humanity, beyond all humanities across all Earths and all worlds and…
I didn't want to die, I didn't want to die…please.
The vast entity grew larger in my vision, starting at the size of a mountain, then a continent, then a planet, then larger and larger and larger and larger…a vastness to equal the heavens aboves. An echo of a million generations, warping even the nothingness and tearing at the seams of everything and everyone in the vicinity.
I fell into an endless pool of red and gold, and the pain didn't cease, only building. Too crushing, I wanted out, let me out please!
It hurt.
It burned.
The last I saw was something caught between the tips of vast and countless fingers, a multitudinous fragment of crystalline flesh larger than the Earth. Just as frightened, just as terrified.
Just as in much pain.
There was only the soothing whispers, five voices wrapping around me as I cried and begged and scr—
…
………
……
…
I woke up in a cold sweat and with a queasy stomach, pulling myself from my stomach as my body protested whatever I had dreamt of. There was an empty plastic bag wrapped garbage can, and the sudden revulsion, and horror and sickness hit me like a truck.
I ripped open the lid, and vomit spewed out from my mouth and into the trash can. I kept spewing for a solid minute until my stomach was emptied, I heaved water and then dry heaved.
Was I shaking?
I gagged, and tears fell from my eyes as I cried, curling into a ball. My body still ached, still hurts and I didn't want to die, I didn't want to die I…
I kept myself in a ball, tasting the bile and acid left behind by my session of removing digested food from my body.
Draw…
I needed to…draw, depict.
Before…forget.
September 20th, 2011. 10:30AM
Basilia Rubio
My hands were still shaking after I collapsed onto the couch in the meeting room and slept for three hours straight. Which was still after five hours of nonstop and mindless artistry. That was the biggest glimpse of what had happened to me in a very, very long time.
I had then taken a shower, and changed into a tight button-up black shirt and blue jeans. Sveta entered the room, and I jumped back into a sitting positioning instead of slouching as my hands shook.
"I wanted to…to ask…" Sveta trailed off, dark eyes widening as she examined the image I had agonized over for hours. Just to get it out of my head, out of my mind and out of my blocked memories and onto paper.
I wasn't sure what I had drawn, only that it was important to keep me where I was, to keep me in the present instead of wallowing in the memory of a thousand generations.
I stopped. What was I even talking about?
I felt sick and scared, like I was a kid hiding under his blankets because the scary monsters were going to get him. God it was pathetic wasn't it?
I wasn't sure what I was depicting but I had tried my best to get out what I was feeling and exactly what I had seen. I had colored in a black void, bending earth-based pigments and using my omni-tool to cheat. Sveta was better at art than I was, not that I minded.
In that black void I depicted a rather eye-watering scene, a radial mass of scintillating glassy limbs. One hundred and eight in total, each different and unique, it was a living mandala, with the outer limbs shining gold while the heart was a scarlet red. This great heart was a spiral galaxy, a single golden eye burning in the depiction.
One of the limbs had caught something between its fingers, long slender talons pinching the tail of a struggling emerald worm. The great mandala had cracks in its shining flesh, a rending storm of faces dripping down as a flood from the wounds of the entity.
It wasn't alone, multiple streams of crystal flesh flowed from the right side of the portrait. Pairs of two spiraled around one another, sometimes there were trios, and other times they were small and alone or large and predatory, consuming the weaker of their kind. One was moving off-frame, wounded and dying as it was speared by light and bulging distortions of the fabric of the drawing.
To the left it was emptier, but I did see strange wiring poking from the cracks depicting scenes of other worlds, worlds from my side of the vast multiverse.
Sveta spoke up. "It…kind of hurts to look at it." Sveta was gaping, and I shrugged it off.
"I had a bad dream." Was the explanation I gave until I heard a knock on the door. "What?"
"It's Taylor…and Armsmaster." Taylor answered me on the other end.
I glanced at Sveta. "You want to stick around?"
"The PRT already knows who I am." She stated, flipping her hair.
"Fair enough."
"It's open!" I called out, and the door swung open with Taylor making her way in a black sweater and blue pants. Armsmaster was in his civilian clothes, and I turned my head when I saw signs of surgery at the back of his neck.
I suppose Dragon had figured out biotic amplifiers and had Colin as an eager test subject. I looked him up and down and would have whistled if I was in a better mood. Hey, I know what can be considered good looking! I've got my types, though I'm pretty sure Dragon has like…dibs.
Both slowed their roll when they looked at the painting, a haunted look in Colin's eyes sparking something angry and bitter before I punched it down for later examination.
"I've seen this before, where did you get this painting?" There was something like worry and nervousness in his tone.
"I…made it after a real horrible nightmare, I…had to get it out of my head and down on paper." I muttered and Taylor hopped up to me, reaching out. I brushed her off, smiling and shaking my head.
She seemed to understand I didn't need that right now.
"There's been numerous cases of recent additions to Parahuman Asylums drawing paintings like this with mild to severe Stranger effects. Though some of the effects have faded with time and new paintings no longer cause the effect."
"They look like this?" I pointed to the accursed painting, and I wrapped my arms around myself. I had to warm my body with my inner fire to beat back the cold sinking in.
Colin sighed. "Yes, though yours is of higher detail…attempting to question victims has been a failure."
"Why is that?" I rubbed my neck, feeling short of breath so I took one in and out.
"Because nearly every victim has gone insane, or can't remember why they drew this." To my shock it was Sveta who answered rather than Colin.
"Experience from the Asylum?" Taylor crossed her arms, a touch of concern in her voice.
"We had about a dozen new people…most of them didn't last long, and two of them had triggered and their powers…came out wrong." There was a chill at the thought, triggers didn't go wrong like that usually.
And the way she said it…it wasn't something like what happened with that Tinker 15 I had heard rumors about, and vaguely recalled from back home, or what happened to Ash Beast and heavily shard affected capes.
"I…haven't really looked much into it myself…I was a bit afraid of what I would find."
"You remembered something." Taylor had a neutral expression as she spoke, walking with a predatory gait as she used her swarm.
"I talked one of the shards into helping bring some memories out, to try and found out what I was missing." I rubbed my neck, my skin crawling.
"You…used your shaman abilities to speak with the source of powers?" Colin didn't seem that surprised but he did seem interested.
"Technically, though my proficiency is only because of my shard…my Administrator. I asked Chevalier's Shard, the Terminus, since its ability to parse shard memories due to its age helps a lot."
There was consternation on his face, like I had said something incriminating. "What did you find?"
I gesticulate towards the disturbing artwork. "This from what I can tell depicts how I crossed from my reality to yours, and it almost killed me…" I was shaking just a bit as I remembered.
Everything I had seen, everything I had felt was beyond painful and horrifying and I didn't want to go through it ever again. That place Below all dimensions, a place of stasis, extinction, silence, disconnection.
Colin had walked up to the painting himself, and I let him brush his fingers against a gold and silver helical pair of Wyrms. "These creatures, are they the source of powers…the Entities you've mentioned?"
"Yes. Multidimensional colonial organisms made out of both organic and inorganic matter. The ones that came to your Earths had trillions of shards, which makes them quite large indeed."
"How large can shards be?" Colin had a serious glint in his eyes so I was honest.
"Technically even the full adult-state can be considered a shard, they're fractal organisms after all. You break up a shard and you get several shards, you merge a shard you get a shard. One shard is an individual made up of smaller individuals, a gestalt. Sort of like if your own organs could talk and survive independently as needed."
"That doesn't answer my question." Colin's irritation became notable and I cleared my throat.
I blushed, looking away. "At the lower end you've got tiny shards the size of large buildings who need to share energy and data with the network to function. But the biggest shards I know about are generally from people like Eidolon, Monarch, Glaistig Uaine, Panacea and Dauntless. We're taking a thousand exatons on the low end, and few of them are about as big as the whole Earth."
"They're really that powerful?" I grinned at his response, placing my hands on my hips.
"Yes but it's not important when one of the pairs that came effectively died to the equivalent of looking at your GPS while driving. Void Wyrms are powerful, but their ingenuity is more limited. They're good at testing the boundaries of what they know, but bad at thinking outside their paradigm." So they brute forced it through the process of the cycle.
"It's a weakness, with the right circumstances." I could see the gears turning in his head and I knew Colin would have questions in the future.
"And we hit the jackpot in the regard of dealing with them, some of it from luck and some of it…from outside help." I frowned as I looked at the disturbing figure I had painted.
Colin continued to examine the painting. "You think something orchestrated the events that led to the sudden change in the laws of physics?"
"No. I think that something took advantage of things already set in motion, and tried to have the die roll in our favor, skewing the results. Whatever it was though it's long gone, or even dead."
"A bit of a leap isn't it?" Sveta commented but she didn't seem that skeptical.
"Just a gut feeling. Which reminds me…why did you come here? Much less out of costume?"
Colin's angry grimace became highly visible. "The Teeth attacked the PRT and Protectorate HQ, and damaged my lab and my equipment in the process. I was sent since I'm considered a liaison between the White Lotus and the Protectorate." He looked twitchy and pissed, and I would be too if my precious babies got damaged. "The Butcher was acting…erratic during the battle and kidnapped a captured cape in the process."
"Why would they do that? It's not really in their MO to kidnap people." Taylor was squaring her shoulders as was I.
"A thinker under Dragon's wing recommended we let you watch a video of the incident." He lifted a hand covered in a futuristic glove, which let you to form a realistic projection of the recording.
So Dragon is trying to figure out omni-tools of her own huh?
I could hear people murmuring, as I saw the video from the perspective of one of the Dragon's Teeth troopers. There was the sound of explosions, and the Butcher came into view and my skin prickled.
Her movement was…odd, she was stalking, moving in a predatory fashion, twitching and shifting like a robot rather than a human being. She held the arm of a PRT agent in her hands, dropping it like it was nothing. The air rippled out, and I could hear the vitals of the agent in the video go wild with the pain aura of the Butcher.
Her power isn't supposed to work like that.
A car was thrown towards her, and she let it slam into her. It didn't even phase her and I knew something was wrong as she lifted the bow. The arrow that followed spun and flipped at a greater clip, piercing through the arm of a nearby trooper in a spurt of blood.
Butcher vanished and the PRT HQ tumbled as she teleported and slammed a powerful explosion into its entrance with her power. She reared back, releasing a scream as she lifted another giant gun and fired into the building.
She screamed again, and I flinched as something instinctual rose up, a wrongness to her that left me disconcerted.
I pursed my lips. "Something or someone changed her power, she's too strong, too wild…she's just wrong." Taylor nodded alongside me, hands crushed into fists.
"You think she's found a…Trump to enhance her abilities?"
"Possibly, there are a few options though. I know Bonesaw has some ability to mess with powers." When they had been chased out by Boston, Bonesaw had shown off a Ravager/Hatchet Face hybrid. "Altering the Corona Pollentia to change the expression…but that can come with a lot of negative costs."
"Such as…"
"Tweaking one aspect of a power can weaken other aspects of a power. Let's say Laserdream wants more power, she gets stronger blasts and shields but less precise control. Or…maybe you'll cause mental damage, create too much exposure to the shard or agent and cause severe mental alteration. It's what happens to a lot of young capes, they get…subsumed by the power."
"Like Labyrinth?"
"Or Glaistig Uaine herself." She had been eclipsed by her own power, using delusions to protect herself. "Though we're fairly certain Bonesaw isn't here, so it's not her. Either way, my instincts tell me this is really bad…though I'm not sure why. Is that all you wanted to tell me?"
"The PRT also wished to inform you that Glaistig Uaine is likely preparing an escape."
…
I'm starting to think the universe didn't want me to win.
September 20th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
"Why didn't you ever ask us for help on finding out what happened to you?" I grumbled when Taylor leaned over my left side, as I tried to work and tinker.
The Portunus was running a sensor sweep, sending out higher dimensional pulses to detect perturbations in the quantum substrate. I had been making better and more accurate maps of the multiverse, as well as oddities. There were a lot more on my side than I thought.
Earth Goetia, and every adjacent world out to hundreds of thousands of permutations were fucked completely and utterly, and that ignored dimensions that didn't have human life. I didn't take ultra detailed scans using probes in the same dimension out of fear I would trigger something weird or terrible.
I could see the paths carved to link hundreds of thousands if not millions of worlds, some intentional but degrading and others were dimensional tears in the fabric of reality. I knew there was a motherload of archeotechnology, but I didn't want to bother with a world that dangerous.
But…
"Evaluation. Transdimensional energy signature detected one kilometer northeast." It had been a simple test run to see how good the Portunus was at detecting dimensional tech from Bet.
Good enough to directly detect Parahumans from two kilometers meters away, and use of powers from ten kilometers away. Didn't work as well as on more subtle applications or as well on Parahumans local to the city.
Yet still an order of magnitude better than what I could build in high volume.
I suspected shards had started to figure out how to use spiritual energy to power their abilities, meaning I needed spirit energy detectors. Which wasn't as hard as you think to make. They had various ways, usually by using chi-storing materials to detect spiritual energy.
Metaphysical energy detection and containment was easy enough to make, and certain isotopes of eezo used to store dark energy made very effective channels for chi used to boost bending. Though all that did was tell you spiritual energy was around, not what it does and that's something I'm still figuring out myself using machinery. Plus the range wasn't as impressive as with dimensional detectors, there was spirit energy everywhere.
We were in the Kodiak, floating over the ocean and waiting for Dragon to make her approach in one of her mechs. I was sitting in the pilot's seat, fiddling with the controls while cradling the computer sword in my lap. There was a distortion that proved an adequate distraction for Taylor, and a cut in space shut behind a Dragonflight suit.
It was about the length and size of the shuttle, like a blocky dragon made out of dark silver metal. Weapons were attached to its wings, and it flew through antigravity fields created by eezo-enhanced Tinkertech. It's arms and legs had weapons of their own and it's head had a plethora of hidden scanning and sensor equipment.
"Hello Dragon, I know you've been a bit busy but it's good to have you on board with the recovery of this…anomalous object." We were tuned into the same shared communication line.
"It's not a good idea to leave potentially dangerous Tinkertech so close to the city, I'm glad you trusted me enough to help you." Sometimes Dragon was too modest.
"We're not done talking about this." Taylor stepped through a portal back home when I started the mission. Whatever.
"We'll get started then." The ship lurched when it sped up to eight hundred kilometers an hour in only a few seconds, accelerating ahead of Dragon's new suit. It surged to follow, and in less than ten seconds we were at our destination.
"You have the mech we've worked on?" Dragon questioned over the comm lines.
"I'm dropping it now, we'll secure, contain and protect the object from outside influence and neutralize it if it's dangerous. We don't know if it's Tinkertech but leaving it in the ocean is probably a bad idea."
Contamination was bad with something like this.
The mech was a modded Goliath designed for deep sea diving, with special projectors used to manipulate quantum motion of matter and energy. It was the best I had come so far with wavelength manipulation, creating a better form of stasis field.
"Streaming footage now." It wasn't too deep so there was still sunlight, though it was dimmer than on the surface. The mech operated autonomously, and the problem became apparent when the camera focused on what we had found.
That's…not tech, or its not tech at a glance.
It was some type of mural, carved out from a grey stone that didn't correspond to any element in the periodic table. A scan sweep found channels for memory storage, most of them broken or damaged, at some point the mural had been subjected to some type of weapon.
Some metallic components had suffered the loss of their crystal structure, compressed to the level of nuclear fusion, leaving radioactive products buried within parts of the mural. The mech noted biomatter from where fish had crawled into the interior and died from radioactive particle emissions.
Based on some of the byproducts this thing was hit maybe a hundred and fifty years ago by something big.
"Searching in long term storage." The Portunus spoke up. "Men(;& propa—art contains substantial processing power and data storage for historical holographic projection."
That wasn't very helpful when I already knew that much from looking through the memory banks of the degraded tool. The Men-whatever was some type of powerful empire, which had pretty much ceased to exist about a hundred and fifty years ago for unknown reasons. I didn't find much besides the software and means of interfacing with their tech, and pieces relating to their weapons.
Names rather than schematics or blueprints.
Firelances, Wave Spears, and some weapons called the Pulse Engine. I didn't have an accurate description of what they meant or what they were, and there were references to Void Ships and Sky Pillars and Eternity Gates. As well as a snippet of recorded written messages, about how some rebellion was under threat due to the violent subjugation of Dikar.
The mech generated a sterilizing containment field, wrapping the mural up to transport into a White Lotus owned dimension. The portal opened, and the mech passed through.
"It's through, I've given you permission to enter this dimension."
"See you on the other side." The shuttle pushed through into the containment dimension. The mech moved smoothly, placing the mural within a room with two feet of armor, and layers of defenses. This world was actually an alternate of Bet right next to Gimel, but I had found it and placed it under my control.
About two dozen worlds was what I had under my belt and no more because they would be annoying as shit to administrate. I stepped out of the shuttle's open door, landing on a cushion of air.
There was a sudden ripple, a tear in space where Dragon made her way into this reality. It was a good thing I had placed the machinery for dimensional portals in a chain of isolated realities is all I was saying.
"That's technology from your…multiverse then?" Dragon landed in her suit, legs whirring as she stood on two legs. It opened up to reveal multiple drones, spider-bot Tinkertech that would work with my own robots to study the thing.
"It…seems to be some type of really needlessly complicated mural." There was a window to let us see the mural clearly and I frowned at what I saw.
It was a renaissance style mural, long since faded, though it retained colors even if they were a lot less vibrant. It depicted humans in a positive light, covered in strange futuristic armor while holding weapons of some kind. A redheaded woman in gold, held a spear of fire, spewing out a blast to incinerate the enemies placed beneath the group of humans. A dusky skinned man piloted a massive bipedal war machine, bullets firing from its arms to smash into their enemies.
The opposing side was an eclectic mix.
One group was sort of like alien spiders with a centauroid body plan. They stood on four legs, with two pairs adapted into arms, and a third pair adapted to assist the pedipalps. They were feathery, and had five simple eyes and were covered in dark armor over white down.
They held four…guns in their arms, firing them with wild abandon.
Another group was humanoid, though there were notable differences upon closer inspection. They were a little more robust than us humans, their skin was tougher, more leathery and had access to a greater range of pigments from a deeper red to dark greys. They had short claws on five fingered hands, though the 'thumb' reminds me of Pandas. Their eyes were slightly larger, nose more pointed, and their hair was structured differently.
It was no less disconcerting how human they looked, and it made it even more disturbing that they were being shot down by the triumphant humans.
There were two more, a fluffy species of dinosauroid-like aliens…actually they kind of really resembled Thescelosaurus which made me wonder…and they had five fingered hands too.
The final species reminded me of the Daggerwrist from that documentary about a fictional alien planet mixed with a Turian, but a lot more furry. They had a bipedal build, and the arms had four fingers and an actual head, with a more robust neck and four binocular eyes. They didn't have much of a tail but what they did have sported leaf-like integumentant. They were seemingly the leader of the aliens…a slight parody to them like they were somehow demons from hell.
"There…is something very wrong about that mural." I had to say it aloud, and Dragon was rather quiet as she inspected the artifact.
We…we're going to need to be very careful with this thing.
September 22nd, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I managed to avoid Taylor's questioning for two entire days, and helped Dragon with her investigation since the Teeth had gone deathly quiet. The disturbing thing was that their Mover had fled the city, based on incidents involving him doing his usual shtick, though he has apparently gotten on the wrong side of a spirit and got killed.
There wasn't a single peep from the Teeth, and I was starting to worry that something was going on. That mural had been no less disturbing either, it was apparently made about three hundred years ago based on data I had scavenged from the intact memory banks.
Most of it was corrupted by time and outright physical damage. There was historical data, some language similar to English but with small distinctions. They spoke about the triumph of the empire, of the glory and power of the human race.
It was a propaganda piece, using physics warping tech to power it, and it had been hit with a gravity weapon. Struck by a field with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Gs, a weapon that very little could be done to defend against.
A ship, a city, even a star wouldn't be immune to the effects of such a weapon. Gravity that intense wouldn't be found outside dead stars and the products of dead stars like black holes.
Last Echo had gone back home and I knew Jarl was sticking around to help us bring down the remnants of the Nine when they show up. We had used Last Echo's powers to search for the Teeth's new Mover, and we had also had a general range of where the Siberian and Crawler had been before they vanished off the radar. Drone sweeps might get us their location…even if I was hesitant to advertise my ability to locate Parahumans.
Chevalier and Challenger were both in the area, and Dragon was trying to look for the Fallen and was met with failure. Dinah had been incredibly careful looking at them, which was where we had managed to find problems.
No hallucinations so this wasn't Mama Mathers making a move. No…this was Valefor deciding to play with fire.
But the issue came when we tried to look into Ezekiel.
The numbers became fuzzy around him, but it wasn't related to his shamanism. She could predict shamans fine, though it was harder than for a normal human. The only time her vision became fuzzy was with that mysterious young shaman. Which meant he was a seer, those who could see the wisdom of the void. Other such shamans aren't stoppers but they do fuzz up her power a bit.
The fuzz wasn't related to his tech…we suspected it was a power, maybe a Precog on his side even, masking some of his actions. It wasn't Contessa because I had checked Earth Losev and found her negotiating with them to take up the place of Earth Shin for researching powers.
That Earth had been studying dimensional phenomena for about two decades, and their particle accelerators had been tuning in on the fields Athena had been only scratching the surface on…for the same amount of time. Tech wise they were a good fifty years ahead of my home, and thirty to forty years ahead of Bet. They had been peeking at higher dimensions and multiversal matter-energy flow for a while.
A sensor sweep from a stealth probe had found a tear between dimensions, a roughly thirty kilometer diameter sphere into an adjacent universe. It had hopped to FTL when a ship half a kilometer long made its approach.
Nuclear fusion torch engines, advanced alloys and whipple shields protecting the vessel from space debris. They were moving back and forth between realities, bringing back what I knew was multiple hundreds of tons of eezo. It led to one of the adjacent dimensions to Goetia, with a habitable Mars but a dead Earth, tectonic activity ceased across the planet.
But the amount of eezo seeping in from the Sea of Souls was vast. Enough eezo to poison the entire stale atmosphere, and cause swirling instabilities within the planet. It was like an eezo asteroid field had smacked right into the planet, but I knew that wasn't it. Something bad had gone down on the planet, that much I can tell.
Attempting to search for certain Parahumans like the Siberian and Crawler proved to be impossible. If they had a shaman on their side though…it wasn't too unlikely they had found a way to hide in the spirit world. I was going to have to do the work of finding then, which was what I was preparing myself for.
I would find their wake among the tides of the great spirits and I would snuff them out.
I was working with one of my engineers, walking them through the operation of the TPIA. Computer screens played back raw data, consolidated by the VI simplifying so much lab work through new and advanced programs. We had about one hundred and thirty people running the Paraphysics department, since the VI tech we had increased productivity by a lot and we were working in only some sections of high physics for now.
Other particle accelerators were being built by both the government and private corporations, and the field of hyperdimensional science was booming. About twenty people were working on Applied Metaphysics, the study of the soul and of shamanistic practice. They had learned how to sense the structure of the soul, using chi-sensitive materials in tandem with our scanners.
AI has been at the heart of a lot of what Athena can do, with the open sourcing of how to code VI and useful Expert Systems causing a nice big boom in that little industry.
Athena Healthcare was among the first to develop a means of using AI machine learning to figure out protein folding. Earth Bet had already been close and I already knew the means, but getting people up to speed was the trouble. Machine learning complemented research, narrowing the scope of what researchers needed to look for. The PrimeFolding Net made it easier to target for experiments because for one thing simulations aren't good enough.
They're not even good enough for the Entities since they cheat by looking into the fourth dimension, and they need to expend fucktons of energy to collapse possibilities. So it was partnered in tandem with simulations and quark-level scanning and still failed since the Thinker killed herself by being stupid.
Bioinformatics was advancing, our computers becoming our microscopes and the math our eyes. Machine learning, physics based simulations with quantum computing and X-ray crystallography worked together, and we were now working on pulling some of that stuff in reverse.
A team of six was working on creating novel proteins, determining the shape we want, for say a protein to unlock the cell wall of a specific bacteria, we then put that shape into an AI modeling system and determine a DNA pattern to create it.
They were right now working on GMO yeasts capable of producing new drugs, which would of course be heavily desired by larger pharmaceutical companies. It was what they had been doing to grow vats of medi-gel but they had a better understanding of it, and could probably enter tissue engineering at a much greater volume than we could.
Athena I mean, not me. With the Rachni and my tens of thousands of machines I could certainly outproduce them. Which would of course destabilize the economy and fuck everything up if I died.
The accelerator had been modified with eezo, along with waveguides and projectors for shaping, and directing the particle beam. We had managed to create dark matter particles as well as dark photons, and we had vague traces of unknown and incredibly exotic particles likely related to the soul, though even my own larger scale experiments don't get as much as I hoped.
We were talking about some major experimentation here, massive machines multiple times the size of the LHC, probably on the scale of the Asari planet-circling particle accelerator.
Which I'll be frank here in saying I can't build it, I've got a fuckton of resources but I'm still one woman cheating with shard powers. My production was on the order of say a mercenary gang rather than a galactic power, and my production level wasn't set to scale infinitely no matter how much I wanted it.
I had multiple asteroids but didn't have the machines to mine them all because it was an enormous amount of shit to manage and administrate. It's why I let the Rachni use the shipyard I used to build the Samsara after I built a cargo ship for them to ship cargo between their systems.
I could only build as much as I did because of automation which left me just a bit though not very vulnerable to some malicious tinker breaking my toys. Because we are talking about tech from the species that can travel at millions of times the speed of light with trillions of shards.
If there's tech that can hack mine the Entities would have it.
I sighed as I thought about one of the project's we were working on, one of them was an attempt at redirecting higher dimensional fields, tapping into quantum substrates to release these…energies which comprised eleven dimensional reality.
I was heavily simplifying it, and at their current level of tech, it would be anywhere from two years to two hundred years before it's useful. Even my own uses were crude in comparison to what the Portunus's makers were capable of, or what an Entity could pull off.
But it was a start, though I wasn't going to take it fast for…safety reasons.
My drones alerted me to a frantic Parahuman, visual contact revealing it to be Hemorrhagia with a look of mortal terror on her face. I dropped the drone in front of her and she stopped, speaking to the drone as I tuned in on it.
"Please…ya got to help me…she's gone fucking insane! More than usual! Don't let her find me!" I made a decision then and there, and dropped her into a portal to Earth Gimel. A few PRT agents apprehended here and she simply surrendered without a fight. New Brockton had established itself fast and with three thousand residents and rising, it had to have some level of order.
I think they were setting up a local government, but I imagined they would be well established by next year.
"I'll be stepping out, you got what you need?" Ron gave a thumbs up, and I portaled out.
This was going to be difficult.
September 22nd, 2011. 5:00PM
Basilia Rubio
An emergency meeting had been called at the Rig because of whatever the PRT had learned from a frantic and terrified Hemorrhagia.
I was attending along with Taylor, Faultline and Elle while the rest of our capes were elsewhere. Gregor and Newter were both out of town with Shamrock and Matryoshka on a mission.
The part of the White Lotus that New Wave had been folded into was also here with Lady Photon and Crystal. Carol was here of course, though she was off to the side and grumbling.
Rhizome was here, and I blinked when I remembered he was around though he was mostly just building homunculi with power expressions weaved into them with cape DNA. Which was still pretty useful and he did use a portal set up by Echidna when Elle gave her a sample without telling us. Mostly to do stuff with his creations on Aleph.
Non-criminal things shockingly enough.
Uber and Leet were one of the few OG teams left though they had backed away from their video game based crimes. Though I think they were just preparing for a move to a city with a more even power spread.
Parian was here too, as were a few minor capes we hadn't really run into much. Plus Weaver, arms crossed, she was impatient, foot lifting up and down in a rhythmic pattern.
On the Protectorate side we had Chevalier, Armsmaster, Miss Militia and Clocklocker. With Vista and Sanguine attending.
Chevalier was the one speaking today. "We've managed to acquire more information on why the Teeth have gone quiet, as well as on the movements of the Fallen and the remnants of the Nine." Armsmaster worked a projector, and I could see Weaver perking up.
It was recent images from my own drones of the Siberian and Crawler, lucky images before they had seemingly vanished into thin air about a day ago. Others were more recent, including a picture of Valefor, Eligos, Seir, and another cape who called herself Cetus.
I would make a joke about her weight, but that would be beneath me. Cetus wore a Leviathan-themed costume, and she had the ability to generate water, creating echoes with immense speed and force. They had the limit of being mostly linear, and she could only create so many before being mentally overwhelmed.
Another image shifted to what looked like Revulsion…but her features were off, as if shifting to a different form.
"We've confirmed that the Butcher made use of the services of a tinker/shaman known as Ezekiel in making modifications to her power. Instead of becoming one of many voices, Butcher fourteen or Quarrel has become the dominant personality when shifting bodies."
Oh fuck.
"And that means what exactly?" Rhizome was leaned back with a casual smirk and I wanted to rub my face in exasperation.
"It means containment of the Butcher at all costs. Most Butchers are hesitant to die due to the way their powers work, but with that restraint gone…"
"She can acquire as many powers as she likes without worry, she could for example let Eidolon kill her and take him over or do the same to any of us." I pointed out, and there was a hush from the crowd of capes including Red Hand, the only group of thieves in the city.
Chevalier loomed over us, the gravity of the situation becoming clear. "The Butcher is now a ticking time bomb due to her powers, and the mental degradation caused by the alteration of her power. She's a priority threat and needs to be contained before she can transfer to someone too powerful to hold. She's believed to have become the pawn of the Fallen under the guidance of Ezekiel due to his ability to manipulate powers. They've…" there was a whisper, a burst of heat and something outside normal senses.
It suddenly struck at me, and I sent everyone back with a wind blast and narrowly avoided a grisly end of getting melted by acid when Crawler materialized right on top of us, someone cursing on the other end of the newly formed rift into the spirit world.
"—azy son of a—" The cursing was cut off as Crawler landed.
I set up several barriers, and he slammed into them and shattered them like they weren't even there. I dropped four mechs right on top of him, and he let out a perverse roar of joy.
He had notably grown and was about the size of a truck, maybe four or five thousand pounds of pulsating black flesh, maw filled with razor sharp teeth. Miss Militia switched to a rocket launcher, and I threw myself to the side as explosions rocked the monstrous cape. Before I could even blink, Crawler crushed one of the independents, burning away their flesh with flammable sweat.
I grabbed and then launched the debris from metal crushed under his weight, turning them into shrapnel. One mech lifted its mass accelerator cannon and fired away, while the other arm blasted out rockets.
Chevalier stepped in Crawler's way and knocked him off course, and my drones sensed the sudden blip of the transdimensional energy signature of an abnormally strong cape heading towards…the Dallon residence where Mark and Vicky were.
I had visual and sent drones to get in Butcher's way as well as two mechs, and she knocked one aside and sent a wave of forcefields in front of her to attack the other. Her form rippled, shifting into frightening forms…and I paled.
"Butcher is attacking the Dallon residence."
"Mark…" Carol sounded horrified, and Chevalier gave his approval.
"Go! Keep the Butcher from getting more power, we'll keep Crawler busy!"
I nodded even as I threw a biotic warp to burn out some of Crawler's eyes.
"Really good thing I'm immune to the Butcher" Chevalier didn't reply. "Brandish…if you want to save your husband come with me." Taylor gestured silently as Khepri formed to attack Crawler, and wind swirled around her.
She was going to use her swarm projection to hold off Crawler until Bakuda could set off one of her bomb's or one of our cannons. She has tagged her swarm to assist Mark and Vicky and…
No time to gawk like an idiot.
I opened a portal and was followed by Carol and a seething Panacea. Her rage was palpable when she flicked her wrist and turned all the trees in their houses to dust by ripping out their water with sheer force. A sphere of air formed around her, and she launched with multiple drones protecting her.
The entire house had been wrecked, with the only reason fire hadn't consumed the house being because of an angry and furious Victoria taking the flames into her hands. Mark was okay, throwing his light grenades and kicked off his daughter's expanded shield to dodge a cutting array of forcefields as the Butcher used Vex's power to the fullest.
Shadows curled around Butcher 18, and I stopped cold when I saw how the avatar of eighteen shards melted into her skin in my World Eyes, as she took a form between her own and between that of Revulsion. She swayed from side to side, arms held down as her hands curled into tips. Her mask was gone, and I flinched when I saw the vacant expression on her face.
She turned to me, head tilting like a cat who caught the canary. And then she spoke.
"It's good you're here…Veda." There was a dark spark that came off from her skull, the woman wrenching her neck to look at me more intently. "We've been, very, very…hungry. We are in…agreement!" The Butcher giggled at a joke I couldn't hear.
oh gods please help us…
I swallowed, leaning back.
"Well…shit!" The Butcher let out an ear piercing scream, and I only just avoided getting blown up by her teleportation from a greater range than the last time we fought. Panacea twisted into a waterbending stance, and blocked a second explosion. Vex's forcefields covered the battlefield, and sweat beaded down.
please hear us make it stop
…
Oh this is not going to be a good day I can tell.
"This will be…cathartic." The Butcher giggled and I saw stars as a foot slammed into my gut. There was a flash of something as I was launched like a cannonball.
I was knocked straight through three houses and slammed through the door of a fourth and into the dinner table of a family afraid for their life.
"Portal, go. Pay for damages later!" They did as expected and ran through the portal directed toward New Brockton. I shut the portal and flew out the door to see the Butcher stabbing a mech with its own arm.
Carol tried to stab her with her light weapons and received a hefty backslap but instead of the expected snapping of her neck, she was thrown into the ruins of her house. A groan confirmed she was alive.
"You bitch!" Victoria spun into a firebending stance, and a compressed stream of fire blew up in the Butcher's face. It didn't do as much as one would expect.
Damn it, I just knew this was going to be a pain in the ass.
I lifted my arms and gathered the positive and negative energies, and with a smirk I shot a blast of lightning right in front of Butcher. The ground exploded, and I smirked as the bitch screamed.
The Butcher only got up again, and I had less than three seconds to throw another one before I took an axe kick to the face. Butcher screamed in my face and slammed me into the road, stomping on my back.
FUCK!
The battlefield was filled with fire as Polaris attacked, and I could only feel dread at how the shards swirled around the Butcher.
AN: Not much to say here, I was a little busy so I posted this later than usual. The total length of the two Arcs…is hopeful less lengthy than what went on with five and six. Though I'm going to try and cut back chapter lengths, though I doubt I'll succeed.
Anyway, hope you enjoy.
September 20th, 2011. 2:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I was falling, saw my hands reaching out to the swirling cut in reality. I wanted to return to the safety of the Real and the Unreal, rather than the utter silence and nothingness of the Outside.
It was so cold.
I looked with wide fearful eyes, there was nothing here. No light, no heat, no dust or gas or life or stars.
No gravity to keep the spheres together, no electromagnetism to hold matter together in complex and wondrous forms. No nuclear forces to allow atoms to exist at all…no dark energy to expand the reaches of the cosmos.
No space.
No time.
Only nonexistence.
As I spun in something that didn't exist I saw other great cuts, across a billion billion worlds, others spinning and screaming in the void. But why were they screaming?
It…wasn't…that…scary…
The void started to hurt, started to take, started to consume. I screamed but there was no sound to carry my voice. How could sound exist in a place when the forces that created it don't exist?
Everything started to hurt, from my skin burning, from my muscles tearing, from my very organs failing…and my eyes had images burned into them. Of great wyrms tunneling holes in the space between worlds, and they weren't the only ones. And in that great emptiness, something vast came into view.
My eyes widened but they also hurt, as I watched something with a billion limbs and a trillion minds making its approach. It was so big, beyond me, beyond humanity, beyond all humanities across all Earths and all worlds and…
I didn't want to die, I didn't want to die…please.
The vast entity grew larger in my vision, starting at the size of a mountain, then a continent, then a planet, then larger and larger and larger and larger…a vastness to equal the heavens aboves. An echo of a million generations, warping even the nothingness and tearing at the seams of everything and everyone in the vicinity.
I fell into an endless pool of red and gold, and the pain didn't cease, only building. Too crushing, I wanted out, let me out please!
It hurt.
It burned.
The last I saw was something caught between the tips of vast and countless fingers, a multitudinous fragment of crystalline flesh larger than the Earth. Just as frightened, just as terrified.
Just as in much pain.
There was only the soothing whispers, five voices wrapping around me as I cried and begged and scr—
…
………
……
…
I woke up in a cold sweat and with a queasy stomach, pulling myself from my stomach as my body protested whatever I had dreamt of. There was an empty plastic bag wrapped garbage can, and the sudden revulsion, and horror and sickness hit me like a truck.
I ripped open the lid, and vomit spewed out from my mouth and into the trash can. I kept spewing for a solid minute until my stomach was emptied, I heaved water and then dry heaved.
Was I shaking?
I gagged, and tears fell from my eyes as I cried, curling into a ball. My body still ached, still hurts and I didn't want to die, I didn't want to die I…
I kept myself in a ball, tasting the bile and acid left behind by my session of removing digested food from my body.
Draw…
I needed to…draw, depict.
Before…forget.
___
September 20th, 2011. 10:30AM
Basilia Rubio
My hands were still shaking after I collapsed onto the couch in the meeting room and slept for three hours straight. Which was still after five hours of nonstop and mindless artistry. That was the biggest glimpse of what had happened to me in a very, very long time.
I had then taken a shower, and changed into a tight button-up black shirt and blue jeans. Sveta entered the room, and I jumped back into a sitting positioning instead of slouching as my hands shook.
"I wanted to…to ask…" Sveta trailed off, dark eyes widening as she examined the image I had agonized over for hours. Just to get it out of my head, out of my mind and out of my blocked memories and onto paper.
I wasn't sure what I had drawn, only that it was important to keep me where I was, to keep me in the present instead of wallowing in the memory of a thousand generations.
I stopped. What was I even talking about?
I felt sick and scared, like I was a kid hiding under his blankets because the scary monsters were going to get him. God it was pathetic wasn't it?
I wasn't sure what I was depicting but I had tried my best to get out what I was feeling and exactly what I had seen. I had colored in a black void, bending earth-based pigments and using my omni-tool to cheat. Sveta was better at art than I was, not that I minded.
In that black void I depicted a rather eye-watering scene, a radial mass of scintillating glassy limbs. One hundred and eight in total, each different and unique, it was a living mandala, with the outer limbs shining gold while the heart was a scarlet red. This great heart was a spiral galaxy, a single golden eye burning in the depiction.
One of the limbs had caught something between its fingers, long slender talons pinching the tail of a struggling emerald worm. The great mandala had cracks in its shining flesh, a rending storm of faces dripping down as a flood from the wounds of the entity.
It wasn't alone, multiple streams of crystal flesh flowed from the right side of the portrait. Pairs of two spiraled around one another, sometimes there were trios, and other times they were small and alone or large and predatory, consuming the weaker of their kind. One was moving off-frame, wounded and dying as it was speared by light and bulging distortions of the fabric of the drawing.
To the left it was emptier, but I did see strange wiring poking from the cracks depicting scenes of other worlds, worlds from my side of the vast multiverse.
Sveta spoke up. "It…kind of hurts to look at it." Sveta was gaping, and I shrugged it off.
"I had a bad dream." Was the explanation I gave until I heard a knock on the door. "What?"
"It's Taylor…and Armsmaster." Taylor answered me on the other end.
I glanced at Sveta. "You want to stick around?"
"The PRT already knows who I am." She stated, flipping her hair.
"Fair enough."
"It's open!" I called out, and the door swung open with Taylor making her way in a black sweater and blue pants. Armsmaster was in his civilian clothes, and I turned my head when I saw signs of surgery at the back of his neck.
I suppose Dragon had figured out biotic amplifiers and had Colin as an eager test subject. I looked him up and down and would have whistled if I was in a better mood. Hey, I know what can be considered good looking! I've got my types, though I'm pretty sure Dragon has like…dibs.
Both slowed their roll when they looked at the painting, a haunted look in Colin's eyes sparking something angry and bitter before I punched it down for later examination.
"I've seen this before, where did you get this painting?" There was something like worry and nervousness in his tone.
"I…made it after a real horrible nightmare, I…had to get it out of my head and down on paper." I muttered and Taylor hopped up to me, reaching out. I brushed her off, smiling and shaking my head.
She seemed to understand I didn't need that right now.
"There's been numerous cases of recent additions to Parahuman Asylums drawing paintings like this with mild to severe Stranger effects. Though some of the effects have faded with time and new paintings no longer cause the effect."
"They look like this?" I pointed to the accursed painting, and I wrapped my arms around myself. I had to warm my body with my inner fire to beat back the cold sinking in.
Colin sighed. "Yes, though yours is of higher detail…attempting to question victims has been a failure."
"Why is that?" I rubbed my neck, feeling short of breath so I took one in and out.
"Because nearly every victim has gone insane, or can't remember why they drew this." To my shock it was Sveta who answered rather than Colin.
"Experience from the Asylum?" Taylor crossed her arms, a touch of concern in her voice.
"We had about a dozen new people…most of them didn't last long, and two of them had triggered and their powers…came out wrong." There was a chill at the thought, triggers didn't go wrong like that usually.
And the way she said it…it wasn't something like what happened with that Tinker 15 I had heard rumors about, and vaguely recalled from back home, or what happened to Ash Beast and heavily shard affected capes.
"I…haven't really looked much into it myself…I was a bit afraid of what I would find."
"You remembered something." Taylor had a neutral expression as she spoke, walking with a predatory gait as she used her swarm.
"I talked one of the shards into helping bring some memories out, to try and found out what I was missing." I rubbed my neck, my skin crawling.
"You…used your shaman abilities to speak with the source of powers?" Colin didn't seem that surprised but he did seem interested.
"Technically, though my proficiency is only because of my shard…my Administrator. I asked Chevalier's Shard, the Terminus, since its ability to parse shard memories due to its age helps a lot."
There was consternation on his face, like I had said something incriminating. "What did you find?"
I gesticulate towards the disturbing artwork. "This from what I can tell depicts how I crossed from my reality to yours, and it almost killed me…" I was shaking just a bit as I remembered.
Everything I had seen, everything I had felt was beyond painful and horrifying and I didn't want to go through it ever again. That place Below all dimensions, a place of stasis, extinction, silence, disconnection.
Colin had walked up to the painting himself, and I let him brush his fingers against a gold and silver helical pair of Wyrms. "These creatures, are they the source of powers…the Entities you've mentioned?"
"Yes. Multidimensional colonial organisms made out of both organic and inorganic matter. The ones that came to your Earths had trillions of shards, which makes them quite large indeed."
"How large can shards be?" Colin had a serious glint in his eyes so I was honest.
"Technically even the full adult-state can be considered a shard, they're fractal organisms after all. You break up a shard and you get several shards, you merge a shard you get a shard. One shard is an individual made up of smaller individuals, a gestalt. Sort of like if your own organs could talk and survive independently as needed."
"That doesn't answer my question." Colin's irritation became notable and I cleared my throat.
I blushed, looking away. "At the lower end you've got tiny shards the size of large buildings who need to share energy and data with the network to function. But the biggest shards I know about are generally from people like Eidolon, Monarch, Glaistig Uaine, Panacea and Dauntless. We're taking a thousand exatons on the low end, and few of them are about as big as the whole Earth."
"They're really that powerful?" I grinned at his response, placing my hands on my hips.
"Yes but it's not important when one of the pairs that came effectively died to the equivalent of looking at your GPS while driving. Void Wyrms are powerful, but their ingenuity is more limited. They're good at testing the boundaries of what they know, but bad at thinking outside their paradigm." So they brute forced it through the process of the cycle.
"It's a weakness, with the right circumstances." I could see the gears turning in his head and I knew Colin would have questions in the future.
"And we hit the jackpot in the regard of dealing with them, some of it from luck and some of it…from outside help." I frowned as I looked at the disturbing figure I had painted.
Colin continued to examine the painting. "You think something orchestrated the events that led to the sudden change in the laws of physics?"
"No. I think that something took advantage of things already set in motion, and tried to have the die roll in our favor, skewing the results. Whatever it was though it's long gone, or even dead."
"A bit of a leap isn't it?" Sveta commented but she didn't seem that skeptical.
"Just a gut feeling. Which reminds me…why did you come here? Much less out of costume?"
Colin's angry grimace became highly visible. "The Teeth attacked the PRT and Protectorate HQ, and damaged my lab and my equipment in the process. I was sent since I'm considered a liaison between the White Lotus and the Protectorate." He looked twitchy and pissed, and I would be too if my precious babies got damaged. "The Butcher was acting…erratic during the battle and kidnapped a captured cape in the process."
"Why would they do that? It's not really in their MO to kidnap people." Taylor was squaring her shoulders as was I.
"A thinker under Dragon's wing recommended we let you watch a video of the incident." He lifted a hand covered in a futuristic glove, which let you to form a realistic projection of the recording.
So Dragon is trying to figure out omni-tools of her own huh?
I could hear people murmuring, as I saw the video from the perspective of one of the Dragon's Teeth troopers. There was the sound of explosions, and the Butcher came into view and my skin prickled.
Her movement was…odd, she was stalking, moving in a predatory fashion, twitching and shifting like a robot rather than a human being. She held the arm of a PRT agent in her hands, dropping it like it was nothing. The air rippled out, and I could hear the vitals of the agent in the video go wild with the pain aura of the Butcher.
Her power isn't supposed to work like that.
A car was thrown towards her, and she let it slam into her. It didn't even phase her and I knew something was wrong as she lifted the bow. The arrow that followed spun and flipped at a greater clip, piercing through the arm of a nearby trooper in a spurt of blood.
Butcher vanished and the PRT HQ tumbled as she teleported and slammed a powerful explosion into its entrance with her power. She reared back, releasing a scream as she lifted another giant gun and fired into the building.
She screamed again, and I flinched as something instinctual rose up, a wrongness to her that left me disconcerted.
I pursed my lips. "Something or someone changed her power, she's too strong, too wild…she's just wrong." Taylor nodded alongside me, hands crushed into fists.
"You think she's found a…Trump to enhance her abilities?"
"Possibly, there are a few options though. I know Bonesaw has some ability to mess with powers." When they had been chased out by Boston, Bonesaw had shown off a Ravager/Hatchet Face hybrid. "Altering the Corona Pollentia to change the expression…but that can come with a lot of negative costs."
"Such as…"
"Tweaking one aspect of a power can weaken other aspects of a power. Let's say Laserdream wants more power, she gets stronger blasts and shields but less precise control. Or…maybe you'll cause mental damage, create too much exposure to the shard or agent and cause severe mental alteration. It's what happens to a lot of young capes, they get…subsumed by the power."
"Like Labyrinth?"
"Or Glaistig Uaine herself." She had been eclipsed by her own power, using delusions to protect herself. "Though we're fairly certain Bonesaw isn't here, so it's not her. Either way, my instincts tell me this is really bad…though I'm not sure why. Is that all you wanted to tell me?"
"The PRT also wished to inform you that Glaistig Uaine is likely preparing an escape."
…
I'm starting to think the universe didn't want me to win.
___
September 20th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
"Why didn't you ever ask us for help on finding out what happened to you?" I grumbled when Taylor leaned over my left side, as I tried to work and tinker.
The Portunus was running a sensor sweep, sending out higher dimensional pulses to detect perturbations in the quantum substrate. I had been making better and more accurate maps of the multiverse, as well as oddities. There were a lot more on my side than I thought.
Earth Goetia, and every adjacent world out to hundreds of thousands of permutations were fucked completely and utterly, and that ignored dimensions that didn't have human life. I didn't take ultra detailed scans using probes in the same dimension out of fear I would trigger something weird or terrible.
I could see the paths carved to link hundreds of thousands if not millions of worlds, some intentional but degrading and others were dimensional tears in the fabric of reality. I knew there was a motherload of archeotechnology, but I didn't want to bother with a world that dangerous.
But…
"Evaluation. Transdimensional energy signature detected one kilometer northeast." It had been a simple test run to see how good the Portunus was at detecting dimensional tech from Bet.
Good enough to directly detect Parahumans from two kilometers meters away, and use of powers from ten kilometers away. Didn't work as well as on more subtle applications or as well on Parahumans local to the city.
Yet still an order of magnitude better than what I could build in high volume.
I suspected shards had started to figure out how to use spiritual energy to power their abilities, meaning I needed spirit energy detectors. Which wasn't as hard as you think to make. They had various ways, usually by using chi-storing materials to detect spiritual energy.
Metaphysical energy detection and containment was easy enough to make, and certain isotopes of eezo used to store dark energy made very effective channels for chi used to boost bending. Though all that did was tell you spiritual energy was around, not what it does and that's something I'm still figuring out myself using machinery. Plus the range wasn't as impressive as with dimensional detectors, there was spirit energy everywhere.
We were in the Kodiak, floating over the ocean and waiting for Dragon to make her approach in one of her mechs. I was sitting in the pilot's seat, fiddling with the controls while cradling the computer sword in my lap. There was a distortion that proved an adequate distraction for Taylor, and a cut in space shut behind a Dragonflight suit.
It was about the length and size of the shuttle, like a blocky dragon made out of dark silver metal. Weapons were attached to its wings, and it flew through antigravity fields created by eezo-enhanced Tinkertech. It's arms and legs had weapons of their own and it's head had a plethora of hidden scanning and sensor equipment.
"Hello Dragon, I know you've been a bit busy but it's good to have you on board with the recovery of this…anomalous object." We were tuned into the same shared communication line.
"It's not a good idea to leave potentially dangerous Tinkertech so close to the city, I'm glad you trusted me enough to help you." Sometimes Dragon was too modest.
"We're not done talking about this." Taylor stepped through a portal back home when I started the mission. Whatever.
"We'll get started then." The ship lurched when it sped up to eight hundred kilometers an hour in only a few seconds, accelerating ahead of Dragon's new suit. It surged to follow, and in less than ten seconds we were at our destination.
"You have the mech we've worked on?" Dragon questioned over the comm lines.
"I'm dropping it now, we'll secure, contain and protect the object from outside influence and neutralize it if it's dangerous. We don't know if it's Tinkertech but leaving it in the ocean is probably a bad idea."
Contamination was bad with something like this.
The mech was a modded Goliath designed for deep sea diving, with special projectors used to manipulate quantum motion of matter and energy. It was the best I had come so far with wavelength manipulation, creating a better form of stasis field.
"Streaming footage now." It wasn't too deep so there was still sunlight, though it was dimmer than on the surface. The mech operated autonomously, and the problem became apparent when the camera focused on what we had found.
That's…not tech, or its not tech at a glance.
It was some type of mural, carved out from a grey stone that didn't correspond to any element in the periodic table. A scan sweep found channels for memory storage, most of them broken or damaged, at some point the mural had been subjected to some type of weapon.
Some metallic components had suffered the loss of their crystal structure, compressed to the level of nuclear fusion, leaving radioactive products buried within parts of the mural. The mech noted biomatter from where fish had crawled into the interior and died from radioactive particle emissions.
Based on some of the byproducts this thing was hit maybe a hundred and fifty years ago by something big.
"Searching in long term storage." The Portunus spoke up. "Men(;& propa—art contains substantial processing power and data storage for historical holographic projection."
That wasn't very helpful when I already knew that much from looking through the memory banks of the degraded tool. The Men-whatever was some type of powerful empire, which had pretty much ceased to exist about a hundred and fifty years ago for unknown reasons. I didn't find much besides the software and means of interfacing with their tech, and pieces relating to their weapons.
Names rather than schematics or blueprints.
Firelances, Wave Spears, and some weapons called the Pulse Engine. I didn't have an accurate description of what they meant or what they were, and there were references to Void Ships and Sky Pillars and Eternity Gates. As well as a snippet of recorded written messages, about how some rebellion was under threat due to the violent subjugation of Dikar.
The mech generated a sterilizing containment field, wrapping the mural up to transport into a White Lotus owned dimension. The portal opened, and the mech passed through.
"It's through, I've given you permission to enter this dimension."
"See you on the other side." The shuttle pushed through into the containment dimension. The mech moved smoothly, placing the mural within a room with two feet of armor, and layers of defenses. This world was actually an alternate of Bet right next to Gimel, but I had found it and placed it under my control.
About two dozen worlds was what I had under my belt and no more because they would be annoying as shit to administrate. I stepped out of the shuttle's open door, landing on a cushion of air.
There was a sudden ripple, a tear in space where Dragon made her way into this reality. It was a good thing I had placed the machinery for dimensional portals in a chain of isolated realities is all I was saying.
"That's technology from your…multiverse then?" Dragon landed in her suit, legs whirring as she stood on two legs. It opened up to reveal multiple drones, spider-bot Tinkertech that would work with my own robots to study the thing.
"It…seems to be some type of really needlessly complicated mural." There was a window to let us see the mural clearly and I frowned at what I saw.
It was a renaissance style mural, long since faded, though it retained colors even if they were a lot less vibrant. It depicted humans in a positive light, covered in strange futuristic armor while holding weapons of some kind. A redheaded woman in gold, held a spear of fire, spewing out a blast to incinerate the enemies placed beneath the group of humans. A dusky skinned man piloted a massive bipedal war machine, bullets firing from its arms to smash into their enemies.
The opposing side was an eclectic mix.
One group was sort of like alien spiders with a centauroid body plan. They stood on four legs, with two pairs adapted into arms, and a third pair adapted to assist the pedipalps. They were feathery, and had five simple eyes and were covered in dark armor over white down.
They held four…guns in their arms, firing them with wild abandon.
Another group was humanoid, though there were notable differences upon closer inspection. They were a little more robust than us humans, their skin was tougher, more leathery and had access to a greater range of pigments from a deeper red to dark greys. They had short claws on five fingered hands, though the 'thumb' reminds me of Pandas. Their eyes were slightly larger, nose more pointed, and their hair was structured differently.
It was no less disconcerting how human they looked, and it made it even more disturbing that they were being shot down by the triumphant humans.
There were two more, a fluffy species of dinosauroid-like aliens…actually they kind of really resembled Thescelosaurus which made me wonder…and they had five fingered hands too.
The final species reminded me of the Daggerwrist from that documentary about a fictional alien planet mixed with a Turian, but a lot more furry. They had a bipedal build, and the arms had four fingers and an actual head, with a more robust neck and four binocular eyes. They didn't have much of a tail but what they did have sported leaf-like integumentant. They were seemingly the leader of the aliens…a slight parody to them like they were somehow demons from hell.
"There…is something very wrong about that mural." I had to say it aloud, and Dragon was rather quiet as she inspected the artifact.
We…we're going to need to be very careful with this thing.
___
September 22nd, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I managed to avoid Taylor's questioning for two entire days, and helped Dragon with her investigation since the Teeth had gone deathly quiet. The disturbing thing was that their Mover had fled the city, based on incidents involving him doing his usual shtick, though he has apparently gotten on the wrong side of a spirit and got killed.
There wasn't a single peep from the Teeth, and I was starting to worry that something was going on. That mural had been no less disturbing either, it was apparently made about three hundred years ago based on data I had scavenged from the intact memory banks.
Most of it was corrupted by time and outright physical damage. There was historical data, some language similar to English but with small distinctions. They spoke about the triumph of the empire, of the glory and power of the human race.
It was a propaganda piece, using physics warping tech to power it, and it had been hit with a gravity weapon. Struck by a field with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Gs, a weapon that very little could be done to defend against.
A ship, a city, even a star wouldn't be immune to the effects of such a weapon. Gravity that intense wouldn't be found outside dead stars and the products of dead stars like black holes.
Last Echo had gone back home and I knew Jarl was sticking around to help us bring down the remnants of the Nine when they show up. We had used Last Echo's powers to search for the Teeth's new Mover, and we had also had a general range of where the Siberian and Crawler had been before they vanished off the radar. Drone sweeps might get us their location…even if I was hesitant to advertise my ability to locate Parahumans.
Chevalier and Challenger were both in the area, and Dragon was trying to look for the Fallen and was met with failure. Dinah had been incredibly careful looking at them, which was where we had managed to find problems.
No hallucinations so this wasn't Mama Mathers making a move. No…this was Valefor deciding to play with fire.
But the issue came when we tried to look into Ezekiel.
The numbers became fuzzy around him, but it wasn't related to his shamanism. She could predict shamans fine, though it was harder than for a normal human. The only time her vision became fuzzy was with that mysterious young shaman. Which meant he was a seer, those who could see the wisdom of the void. Other such shamans aren't stoppers but they do fuzz up her power a bit.
The fuzz wasn't related to his tech…we suspected it was a power, maybe a Precog on his side even, masking some of his actions. It wasn't Contessa because I had checked Earth Losev and found her negotiating with them to take up the place of Earth Shin for researching powers.
That Earth had been studying dimensional phenomena for about two decades, and their particle accelerators had been tuning in on the fields Athena had been only scratching the surface on…for the same amount of time. Tech wise they were a good fifty years ahead of my home, and thirty to forty years ahead of Bet. They had been peeking at higher dimensions and multiversal matter-energy flow for a while.
A sensor sweep from a stealth probe had found a tear between dimensions, a roughly thirty kilometer diameter sphere into an adjacent universe. It had hopped to FTL when a ship half a kilometer long made its approach.
Nuclear fusion torch engines, advanced alloys and whipple shields protecting the vessel from space debris. They were moving back and forth between realities, bringing back what I knew was multiple hundreds of tons of eezo. It led to one of the adjacent dimensions to Goetia, with a habitable Mars but a dead Earth, tectonic activity ceased across the planet.
But the amount of eezo seeping in from the Sea of Souls was vast. Enough eezo to poison the entire stale atmosphere, and cause swirling instabilities within the planet. It was like an eezo asteroid field had smacked right into the planet, but I knew that wasn't it. Something bad had gone down on the planet, that much I can tell.
Attempting to search for certain Parahumans like the Siberian and Crawler proved to be impossible. If they had a shaman on their side though…it wasn't too unlikely they had found a way to hide in the spirit world. I was going to have to do the work of finding then, which was what I was preparing myself for.
I would find their wake among the tides of the great spirits and I would snuff them out.
I was working with one of my engineers, walking them through the operation of the TPIA. Computer screens played back raw data, consolidated by the VI simplifying so much lab work through new and advanced programs. We had about one hundred and thirty people running the Paraphysics department, since the VI tech we had increased productivity by a lot and we were working in only some sections of high physics for now.
Other particle accelerators were being built by both the government and private corporations, and the field of hyperdimensional science was booming. About twenty people were working on Applied Metaphysics, the study of the soul and of shamanistic practice. They had learned how to sense the structure of the soul, using chi-sensitive materials in tandem with our scanners.
AI has been at the heart of a lot of what Athena can do, with the open sourcing of how to code VI and useful Expert Systems causing a nice big boom in that little industry.
Athena Healthcare was among the first to develop a means of using AI machine learning to figure out protein folding. Earth Bet had already been close and I already knew the means, but getting people up to speed was the trouble. Machine learning complemented research, narrowing the scope of what researchers needed to look for. The PrimeFolding Net made it easier to target for experiments because for one thing simulations aren't good enough.
They're not even good enough for the Entities since they cheat by looking into the fourth dimension, and they need to expend fucktons of energy to collapse possibilities. So it was partnered in tandem with simulations and quark-level scanning and still failed since the Thinker killed herself by being stupid.
Bioinformatics was advancing, our computers becoming our microscopes and the math our eyes. Machine learning, physics based simulations with quantum computing and X-ray crystallography worked together, and we were now working on pulling some of that stuff in reverse.
A team of six was working on creating novel proteins, determining the shape we want, for say a protein to unlock the cell wall of a specific bacteria, we then put that shape into an AI modeling system and determine a DNA pattern to create it.
They were right now working on GMO yeasts capable of producing new drugs, which would of course be heavily desired by larger pharmaceutical companies. It was what they had been doing to grow vats of medi-gel but they had a better understanding of it, and could probably enter tissue engineering at a much greater volume than we could.
Athena I mean, not me. With the Rachni and my tens of thousands of machines I could certainly outproduce them. Which would of course destabilize the economy and fuck everything up if I died.
The accelerator had been modified with eezo, along with waveguides and projectors for shaping, and directing the particle beam. We had managed to create dark matter particles as well as dark photons, and we had vague traces of unknown and incredibly exotic particles likely related to the soul, though even my own larger scale experiments don't get as much as I hoped.
We were talking about some major experimentation here, massive machines multiple times the size of the LHC, probably on the scale of the Asari planet-circling particle accelerator.
Which I'll be frank here in saying I can't build it, I've got a fuckton of resources but I'm still one woman cheating with shard powers. My production was on the order of say a mercenary gang rather than a galactic power, and my production level wasn't set to scale infinitely no matter how much I wanted it.
I had multiple asteroids but didn't have the machines to mine them all because it was an enormous amount of shit to manage and administrate. It's why I let the Rachni use the shipyard I used to build the Samsara after I built a cargo ship for them to ship cargo between their systems.
I could only build as much as I did because of automation which left me just a bit though not very vulnerable to some malicious tinker breaking my toys. Because we are talking about tech from the species that can travel at millions of times the speed of light with trillions of shards.
If there's tech that can hack mine the Entities would have it.
I sighed as I thought about one of the project's we were working on, one of them was an attempt at redirecting higher dimensional fields, tapping into quantum substrates to release these…energies which comprised eleven dimensional reality.
I was heavily simplifying it, and at their current level of tech, it would be anywhere from two years to two hundred years before it's useful. Even my own uses were crude in comparison to what the Portunus's makers were capable of, or what an Entity could pull off.
But it was a start, though I wasn't going to take it fast for…safety reasons.
My drones alerted me to a frantic Parahuman, visual contact revealing it to be Hemorrhagia with a look of mortal terror on her face. I dropped the drone in front of her and she stopped, speaking to the drone as I tuned in on it.
"Please…ya got to help me…she's gone fucking insane! More than usual! Don't let her find me!" I made a decision then and there, and dropped her into a portal to Earth Gimel. A few PRT agents apprehended here and she simply surrendered without a fight. New Brockton had established itself fast and with three thousand residents and rising, it had to have some level of order.
I think they were setting up a local government, but I imagined they would be well established by next year.
"I'll be stepping out, you got what you need?" Ron gave a thumbs up, and I portaled out.
This was going to be difficult.
___
September 22nd, 2011. 5:00PM
Basilia Rubio
An emergency meeting had been called at the Rig because of whatever the PRT had learned from a frantic and terrified Hemorrhagia.
I was attending along with Taylor, Faultline and Elle while the rest of our capes were elsewhere. Gregor and Newter were both out of town with Shamrock and Matryoshka on a mission.
The part of the White Lotus that New Wave had been folded into was also here with Lady Photon and Crystal. Carol was here of course, though she was off to the side and grumbling.
Rhizome was here, and I blinked when I remembered he was around though he was mostly just building homunculi with power expressions weaved into them with cape DNA. Which was still pretty useful and he did use a portal set up by Echidna when Elle gave her a sample without telling us. Mostly to do stuff with his creations on Aleph.
Non-criminal things shockingly enough.
Uber and Leet were one of the few OG teams left though they had backed away from their video game based crimes. Though I think they were just preparing for a move to a city with a more even power spread.
Parian was here too, as were a few minor capes we hadn't really run into much. Plus Weaver, arms crossed, she was impatient, foot lifting up and down in a rhythmic pattern.
On the Protectorate side we had Chevalier, Armsmaster, Miss Militia and Clocklocker. With Vista and Sanguine attending.
Chevalier was the one speaking today. "We've managed to acquire more information on why the Teeth have gone quiet, as well as on the movements of the Fallen and the remnants of the Nine." Armsmaster worked a projector, and I could see Weaver perking up.
It was recent images from my own drones of the Siberian and Crawler, lucky images before they had seemingly vanished into thin air about a day ago. Others were more recent, including a picture of Valefor, Eligos, Seir, and another cape who called herself Cetus.
I would make a joke about her weight, but that would be beneath me. Cetus wore a Leviathan-themed costume, and she had the ability to generate water, creating echoes with immense speed and force. They had the limit of being mostly linear, and she could only create so many before being mentally overwhelmed.
Another image shifted to what looked like Revulsion…but her features were off, as if shifting to a different form.
"We've confirmed that the Butcher made use of the services of a tinker/shaman known as Ezekiel in making modifications to her power. Instead of becoming one of many voices, Butcher fourteen or Quarrel has become the dominant personality when shifting bodies."
Oh fuck.
"And that means what exactly?" Rhizome was leaned back with a casual smirk and I wanted to rub my face in exasperation.
"It means containment of the Butcher at all costs. Most Butchers are hesitant to die due to the way their powers work, but with that restraint gone…"
"She can acquire as many powers as she likes without worry, she could for example let Eidolon kill her and take him over or do the same to any of us." I pointed out, and there was a hush from the crowd of capes including Red Hand, the only group of thieves in the city.
Chevalier loomed over us, the gravity of the situation becoming clear. "The Butcher is now a ticking time bomb due to her powers, and the mental degradation caused by the alteration of her power. She's a priority threat and needs to be contained before she can transfer to someone too powerful to hold. She's believed to have become the pawn of the Fallen under the guidance of Ezekiel due to his ability to manipulate powers. They've…" there was a whisper, a burst of heat and something outside normal senses.
It suddenly struck at me, and I sent everyone back with a wind blast and narrowly avoided a grisly end of getting melted by acid when Crawler materialized right on top of us, someone cursing on the other end of the newly formed rift into the spirit world.
"—azy son of a—" The cursing was cut off as Crawler landed.
I set up several barriers, and he slammed into them and shattered them like they weren't even there. I dropped four mechs right on top of him, and he let out a perverse roar of joy.
He had notably grown and was about the size of a truck, maybe four or five thousand pounds of pulsating black flesh, maw filled with razor sharp teeth. Miss Militia switched to a rocket launcher, and I threw myself to the side as explosions rocked the monstrous cape. Before I could even blink, Crawler crushed one of the independents, burning away their flesh with flammable sweat.
I grabbed and then launched the debris from metal crushed under his weight, turning them into shrapnel. One mech lifted its mass accelerator cannon and fired away, while the other arm blasted out rockets.
Chevalier stepped in Crawler's way and knocked him off course, and my drones sensed the sudden blip of the transdimensional energy signature of an abnormally strong cape heading towards…the Dallon residence where Mark and Vicky were.
I had visual and sent drones to get in Butcher's way as well as two mechs, and she knocked one aside and sent a wave of forcefields in front of her to attack the other. Her form rippled, shifting into frightening forms…and I paled.
"Butcher is attacking the Dallon residence."
"Mark…" Carol sounded horrified, and Chevalier gave his approval.
"Go! Keep the Butcher from getting more power, we'll keep Crawler busy!"
I nodded even as I threw a biotic warp to burn out some of Crawler's eyes.
"Really good thing I'm immune to the Butcher" Chevalier didn't reply. "Brandish…if you want to save your husband come with me." Taylor gestured silently as Khepri formed to attack Crawler, and wind swirled around her.
She was going to use her swarm projection to hold off Crawler until Bakuda could set off one of her bomb's or one of our cannons. She has tagged her swarm to assist Mark and Vicky and…
No time to gawk like an idiot.
I opened a portal and was followed by Carol and a seething Panacea. Her rage was palpable when she flicked her wrist and turned all the trees in their houses to dust by ripping out their water with sheer force. A sphere of air formed around her, and she launched with multiple drones protecting her.
The entire house had been wrecked, with the only reason fire hadn't consumed the house being because of an angry and furious Victoria taking the flames into her hands. Mark was okay, throwing his light grenades and kicked off his daughter's expanded shield to dodge a cutting array of forcefields as the Butcher used Vex's power to the fullest.
Shadows curled around Butcher 18, and I stopped cold when I saw how the avatar of eighteen shards melted into her skin in my World Eyes, as she took a form between her own and between that of Revulsion. She swayed from side to side, arms held down as her hands curled into tips. Her mask was gone, and I flinched when I saw the vacant expression on her face.
She turned to me, head tilting like a cat who caught the canary. And then she spoke.
"It's good you're here…Veda." There was a dark spark that came off from her skull, the woman wrenching her neck to look at me more intently. "We've been, very, very…hungry. We are in…agreement!" The Butcher giggled at a joke I couldn't hear.
oh gods please help us…
I swallowed, leaning back.
"Well…shit!" The Butcher let out an ear piercing scream, and I only just avoided getting blown up by her teleportation from a greater range than the last time we fought. Panacea twisted into a waterbending stance, and blocked a second explosion. Vex's forcefields covered the battlefield, and sweat beaded down.
please hear us make it stop
…
Oh this is not going to be a good day I can tell.
"This will be…cathartic." The Butcher giggled and I saw stars as a foot slammed into my gut. There was a flash of something as I was launched like a cannonball.
I was knocked straight through three houses and slammed through the door of a fourth and into the dinner table of a family afraid for their life.
"Portal, go. Pay for damages later!" They did as expected and ran through the portal directed toward New Brockton. I shut the portal and flew out the door to see the Butcher stabbing a mech with its own arm.
Carol tried to stab her with her light weapons and received a hefty backslap but instead of the expected snapping of her neck, she was thrown into the ruins of her house. A groan confirmed she was alive.
"You bitch!" Victoria spun into a firebending stance, and a compressed stream of fire blew up in the Butcher's face. It didn't do as much as one would expect.
Damn it, I just knew this was going to be a pain in the ass.
I lifted my arms and gathered the positive and negative energies, and with a smirk I shot a blast of lightning right in front of Butcher. The ground exploded, and I smirked as the bitch screamed.
The Butcher only got up again, and I had less than three seconds to throw another one before I took an axe kick to the face. Butcher screamed in my face and slammed me into the road, stomping on my back.
FUCK!
The battlefield was filled with fire as Polaris attacked, and I could only feel dread at how the shards swirled around the Butcher.
___
AN: Not much to say here, I was a little busy so I posted this later than usual. The total length of the two Arcs…is hopeful less lengthy than what went on with five and six. Though I'm going to try and cut back chapter lengths, though I doubt I'll succeed.
Anyway, hope you enjoy.
- Location
- Massachussets
You know about the documentary Alien Planet @AEM ? That's a good one, and it's based on a book (With illustrations!) by the same guy who designed the aliens of James Cameron's Avatar, the Knifehead from Pacific Rim, the characters from Hellboy, among others. His name's Wayne Barlowe, and he's an amazing alien and fantasy illustrator. Anyways, loving the story!
- Location
- Chula Vista
Yep, I remembered watching that documentary as a kid and really liking it. It has a special place in my heart for that. Though I didn't know it was a book until years later, and didn't know much of what the author did besides that until…right now.
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