Victories of the Soul [Worm/Avatar/ME/Multicrossover] [SI]
- Thread starter AEM
- Start date
- Crossover Mature Sci-Fi
Deviation 12.b: Nike Fragilis
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.b: Nike Fragilis
September 22nd, 2011. 4:00PM
Victoria was not having a good day. It wasn't a good day to get attacked by the Butcher out of nowhere, and her childhood home being destroyed, and nearly getting impaled when the super-powerful reincarnating Brute with over a dozen powers gradually broke through all the layers of her defense, whittling her down bit by bit.
And that even a single mistake could turn them into the next Butcher.
Victoria stepped into the Butcher's range, aura surging to block the revulsion and horror the Butcher was projecting. Every other strike and blast of fire missed as the Butcher's danger sense saved her at the last moment.
Her power was recharging, layer after layer popping back into existence as she pulled back and bombarded the Butcher from the skies.
"New powers!" Basilia demanded as she turned on a dime, bounding on gusts of wind and raw biotic force.
"Repulsive fields along her body. Vex's forcefields, Animos Changer form, and Revulsion's Stranger powers." The HUD of her hooded helmet was nice and helpful for targeting the Butcher.
Victoria's eyes bugged out when Butcher 18 leapt into the sky, agony surged into her like knives, and her aura blocked the rage and disgust and horror the cape tried to inject into her mind.
Fire flew out from Victoria's skin, and Butcher landed on top of Basilia and slammed her into the door of a family sedan, folding the door in. One mech emerged from a portal, and directed a wave of silvery light that the Butcher dodged with a teleport.
Her powers were stronger, but there was a constant sense of wrongness, an awful taste in her mouth and a rippling and crawling feeling along her power.
"You…can't win. One of you will die…and I'll get a new power." The Butcher taunted and teased but it was hollow, pained.
don't let us win, we don't want this
There was an undercurrent as Victoria slammed into the Butcher, grappling her down with her forcefield. Something afraid and suffering from pain and confusion. An invisible fist collided with the force of a truck, and the Butcher barely even moved back with her iron jaw.
Victoria didn't question why she heard the voices with much greater clarity, didn't know that it was because of what she was, because of what she represented, of her potential.
will she see, will she stand before the Garden…
None of the forcefields she was hit with triggered her shields, but they did keep her off of the Butcher, stopping her from grappling her to the ground. Her father lashed out with his power, light grenades bouncing against the Butcher's forcefields before detonating from every available angle.
Panacea placed glowing water against her father's head, where he had suffered from a head injury. The healer removed herself, sprinting with the wind, and sending out weaving tendrils of water to grapple onto the Butcher. Portals didn't do much with the dark haired woman's danger sense working overtime, but they worked well for redirecting attacks.
A water whip grabbed the Butcher by the waist, and the Butcher smirked. Her skin rippled, and she let out a howl as she grew to the size of a small car, becoming a dark four-legged creature, but managed to stand on her hindlimbs.
The power had changed? Was the thought Victoria had when her shield faltered and snapped out of existence. The next thought was rather less composed as she was suddenly getting choked by the Butcher, superhuman strength crushing the life out of her.
Basilia lifted her omni-tool and an electric pulse smashed into the Butcher. The tinker collided with the monstrous woman, asphalt pulled from the ground and wrapped around Basilia like armor.
A stone fist crashed into the Butcher's face, followed by a lightning blast in the span of several seconds. The monster roared, but didn't use her power nullification at all. Instead shadows lingered, deeper and longer and cutting, crawling with horror and disgust.
The warm blanket of her power returned, returned before the power of her own parents. The mech trying to freeze the Butcher in place couldn't get a shot in, and was taking damage.
Victoria twisted, spinning flames around her body before jabbing her fists to shift into a compressed stream. The Butcher dodged in her new form, sprinting on all fours with her bow held in her mouth. In a split second an arrow tried to pierce her shield, space bending around the projectile. A second followed and she snapped it in half with concussive force from her bending.
Her mother flew past her in her ball form, Basilia giving her form a good kick. Brandish slipped out of the state, ducking between the legs of the cape. A dozen light grenades staggered the Butcher, and her mother stabbed a blade of burning light into her thigh.
The Butcher only raged, and she saw how her mother's expression twisted in a mix of terror, rage and pain. The street erupted in a wave of asphalt and fire, and she saw the gleam in Carol's eyes.
Victoria knew that her mom had two elements, and they fit her to a tee. She combined her bending with her weapons, and they detonated in the beastial cape's face like a bomb. She brought up a shield of a light and fire projected by the energy of her soul, and Victoria followed instinctively when the cape was sent flying.
She took off at top speed, adding to it with blasts of flame from her feet, and added a spin as she kicked downwards.
Enough force to fold a semi truck was driven into the Butcher's face, and there was a distinct sense of satisfaction from Victoria.
The Butcher vanished and reappeared behind her father, and the potentially lethal blow of an arrow she was notching was stopped by the mech, as it tried to freeze her in place.
But she spun out of the way, brought her jaws down on the machine, claws tearing away at the metal with brute force, repulsive fields strengthening her blows.
"Fuck…I can't make many of those…quantum waveform manipulation is a little out of my wheelbarrow of tricks. I can barely maintain the Halcyon cannons on my own as it is." The dark haired amalgam of eighteen capes ripped out a shard of metal and stabbed it into the mech, stabbing cleanly through.
"How…" Victoria murmured.
"Butcher 10 could reinforce anything he touches…it became a lot weaker over the last couple iterations. But now…"
It had become a useful power in its own right.
The mech crackled with electricity as Butcher crushed its contents, howling for a second time.
Her power flickered off again, and she started to fall. She sent out blasts of fire to slow down, and landed on the roof of their next door neighbor. She jumped twenty feet straight up, and speared an arm forward.
She breathed deeply and with her breath came fire, and with fire came power. The golden flames burned hot, melting away some of the thick skin of the form the Butcher had taken from Animos in her madness.
A third lightning bolt struck her head on, right as her sister stabbed into the beast with ice spears propelled by air and her waterbending. She spun them like drills, right into the legs of Butcher.
If they couldn't kill her, crippling her would work if her healing factor wasn't strong enough.
There was a cry as Panacea was back slapped into her mother and right as their powers came back she howled again and nullified them.
"Not…going to be that easy bitches…" Butcher's voice echoed, carrying a note of unseen agony and rending of spirit.
There was a sudden explosion, somewhere in the outer reaches of the city. It resounded loudly and powerfully.
"What was…" Victoria didn't get another word in before she suddenly had agony stab into her nerves.
The Butcher grinned. "Doesn't matter." The Butcher was a gigantic pain in her ass.
She wondered who else was suffering a really bad day?
September 22nd, 2011. 4:05PM
Clockblocker hasn't been having the best day, though he has his doubts that anyone was having a good day on this illustrious evening.
Things had been crazy, and the months where they had gone from a gang war to an alien dark queen to killing the Leviathan felt like a dream, or a nightmare or a series of dreams and nightmares. All of which had happened in the period of about two months, and didn't include the calmer but still big events beyond that.
Like the fact the number of people with superpowers in just the city had gone from a number he could count in a few minutes to it taking hours to get even a fraction of the numbers.
What was supposed to be a meeting to clean up the city from new threats had turned into a complete and utter clusterfuck when Crawler teleported into the meeting. His acid spit had nearly liquified him if it wasn't for a few of Rhizome's monsters and the acid-resistant plating of Erudition's mechs.
Chevalier was taking every hit he could, with his new armor making him immune to the intense acid.
"She's not here, where is she?" He spoke in garbled baritone, the air thrumming from the throat of the monster.
"Who?" Chevalier questioned as he swung his blade, adding the mass of a truck behind the strike.
"The dragon-girl, Lung's kid…want to fight her, see if she can kill me." His skin was suddenly on fire and Battery ripped it away with her bending, ducking away from acid. "Want to fight Dauntless too, see what tricks he can pull." He pounced and liquefied a swarm of bugs, and Clockblocker was grateful for the meat shield. "Then I'll fight Siberian." It was so matter-of-fact Dennis was just a little freaked out.
Monarch's swarm projection threw out a blast of kinetic energy, skin crackling under the forces from the power. The cape moved faster than anyone on the field, and something flickered to life around her palm.
Clockblocker felt a sense of energy in the air, gathered and compressed into a smaller and smaller point. He was pulled back by Weaver, who formed a string where vehicles would take off, pressing a finger against her mouth.
He touched the string and it froze.
"Try to bring Crawler to the pads…we've got a little surprise for him." Weaver made more strings and he froze them until it had become a death trap.
Clockblocker leaned back when he saw the swirling singularity flaring into existence around Monarch's palm. The black hole was launched into Crawler, crushing hundreds of pounds of flesh even as he regenerated it back in less than a second. The biotic attack exploded, blowing a hole into the cape.
His flesh hardened before transitioning and regenerating much faster than before. A wave of strings parted the battlefield, gently weaving around capes before striking Crawler like supersonic whips.
A thought occurred to Clockblocker, trivia from reading up on the Slaughterhouse Nine coming to mind. Which he had only done because Piggy had told him, saying it was mandatory with the last members residing in their city.
"HEY CRAWLER!" There was a lull in the fighting as Crawler's hundreds of eyes started to focus on him. He was setting up more and more strings, the strange structure shifting between matter and energy…which reminded him a bit of Dauntless. "You said you want to see if someone can kill you right…why not give me a try? If you're tough enough?"
He was scared out of his mind, but he had fought Leviathan and survived by the skin of his teeth. He had seen real monsters, so he knew he couldn't be cocky.
But he had to try.
"First you had my interest…now you have my attention! Let's see what you can do little boy!" He melted a mech after breaking its barriers, the machine dying. A few Dragonflight suits were heading their way, but they wouldn't be there in time to save him as Crawler pounced at him at a hundred and and ten miles an hour.
He reached to freeze his costume and he was sent flying on a weaving helix of string with Weaver skating along them. The trap of time-locked strings they had hastily set up was what Crawler hit instead.
Hundreds of pounds of flesh parted where impossibly sharp strings cut through matter, spaced closely enough to slice him apart into almost molten cubes of hot writhing flesh. Five thousand pounds of Crawler's flesh smashed against the ground in a burst of acid, toxic lumps of meat and flammable biofluids.
But out of all the pieces, a single pulsing and regenerating lump of pink brain-like flesh told him Crawler had survived. Dashed right outside the trap, he could see Weaver slicing down towards it with several whips of her power.
Only for a man to flash into existence, a look of indignation and rage on his face. He was thin with a wispy beard, and crystalline arms whipped out from his back to deflect the strings. On his back Clockblocker saw he was using a giant pill bug-like entity as a backpack, six massive limbs emerging from the creature.
"You damn uncontrollable suicidal idiot…I should have expected this, your adaptive regeneration makes you harder to control than Manton and his little projection. But now that you're like this…I can see some uses for you." One limb plucked Crawler's core, and a rocket flew out from an irate Miss Militia. The limbs smacked the rocket out of the sky, and Monarch's swarm projection tried to swallow him.
"Bastard I'll kill you!" Weaver flared up, her power surging up in a storm of strings.
Ezekiel smiled and Clockblocker felt chills at the fear behind his eyes. He lifted his soft hand and demanded.
The projection broke apart into a mass of uncoordinated insects, as the shaman broke Monarch's power. The backpack crystal-bug threw out its hands, and a whirling portal opened. Multiple attacks tried to stop him, and the backpack bug formed a shimmering blue barrier as they all failed to penetrate.
"Next time. Don't look for rifts while stupid brain damaged idiots are watching." Was the last words he heard from the shaman as he fled, space snapping shut.
He could see that Monarch was trying to get back control of her bugs, and the land was warping where Labyrinth had stared at the rift in shock. Faultline placed a hand on her shoulder, and the cape focused.
There was a short incantation, and the chaotic swarm of bugs threw off whatever spell had hit Monarch's power. The swarm relaxed but Monarch didn't, visibly frightened and unnerved.
"I didn't know shamans could mess with powers like that." Clockblocker wondered if they could mess with his power too.
An explosion made itself known at a warehouse at the edge of the city, and Weaver stiffened. She brought up a communication device to her ear.
"Gremlin…what is…"
"We're…FINE! But we're kinda dealing with a spirit monster attacking some dragon-kid and an electric lady."
Kiyohime and Battery were under attack?
There was a flurry of noise, capes arguing after the death of two independents. Labyrinth was staring at a rift and with a scowl she pulled at it, opening it up.
"They're hiding somewhere in Kittery…don't know where though." She did something to the hole in space, and it ceased to exist. "You'll need to start placing guardian spirits in place to protect your bases…" the capes around her listened intently, and the panic diminished to a simmer.
Weaver rushed over to Armsmaster, gesturing wildly.
A notion came to him as he jogged over to Armsmaster. "Hey Armsmaster?"
"What?" Armsmaster replied, distracted as he sent off Weaver and Assault, one in person and the other by comms.
"Where was Dauntless supposed to be patrolling?" Armsmaster turned his head, and his dread grew.
"Not far off from the New Wave patrol routes, to reassure some of the more high-class neighborhoods. Oh…"
…
"That's what I thought." The Dragonflight suits shifted directions towards the city.
Today was just not anyone's day was it?
September 22nd, 2011. 4:10PM
Carol Dallon was fighting for her life alongside her family, a small broken part of her felt like it was right, that this was how it was meant to be.
Another growing part of her said that it wasn't healthy, that she was imposing on and hurting the people she cared about with her own impulses.
Both agreed that this was insane, and that it was taking a discouragingly long time to get back up. They had the swarm at the start, but the Butcher had been smart enough to use her forcefields to rip apart any bugs that took to the air. Using her repulsion shield only made them easier pickings. It wouldn't last but it was still one layer of defense they had lost.
She kicked the ground, launching a literal ton of earth toward Butcher. A wave of water blocked the field of forcefields, and Carol flinched when she saw Panacea.
Amy didn't look at her, a brief nod and she was buffeting the Butcher with wind.
Without her power she should have felt vulnerable, but she had the roaring fire settling in her stomach and the solid and dependable earth in her bones. When her power returned she didn't hesitate in swinging her weapons, following her daughter's example of flame jets.
The Butcher roared, and Carol ducked and sliced at her legs, trying to cut her down to size. The cape launched a haymaker, and Erudition emerged to take the crippling hit. Her helmet glass cracked, and Carol watched as the tinker stood her ground.
The Butcher glowed blue and started to float out of control under biotic lifting forces. Erudition could have detonated her with biotics but killing her wasn't an option. She formed a repulsive field but it did little to counter the power, and instead a wave of rage surged up in Carol.
Her blades twitched in Basilia's direction, and Carol winced at the subconscious action.
The Butcher teleported and the blast staggered Brandish, the cape emerging in a tackle encompassing claws and teeth and waves of sharpened solid fields. A portal opened behind her, expelling her elsewhere and away from the attack of the Butcher.
"Why didn't we use these before?" Brandish said with a low bite directed towards Erudition.
"Costs mostly, doing what we did with Leviathan is pretty energy intensive and you're not tagged for using the portals." Basilia replied from her left, a slight hint of self-beration in her speech patterns. "I have to parcel out my resources between different projects, from materials for our tinkers, for labs and facilities for studying powers, and for equipment and weapons and defenses. It's…complicated."
It was strangely humanizing to hear the frustrations of the tinker, and Carol wasn't sure what she was thinking when she thought she was some type of dangerous influence on her daughter and…Amy.
Why did that leave a bad taste in my mouth?
Brandish kept on topic as they circled around the Butcher, the cape remaining in her animalistic form. Erudition was a lot of things, and her use of a possible future still galled her.
But there was no active malice in that girl's body against any of them, just a lot of fear.
The sky brightened and Dauntless popped into existence to block a deadly strike from the Butcher that would have slit her throat. He brought down his shield, and a bubble of white energy wrapped around them.
"Brandish, you alright?" She nodded as the villain they were fighting opened her mouth, only to receive a lighting bolt courtesy of Erudition. It was weaker than the others she had seen, intentionally so she suspected.
The energy bubble faded, and Dauntless crashed his crackling shield into the Butcher. She let out a yelp, the shield detonating in her face in a wave of kinetic force. She filled the space with Vex's power, and he formed another bubble that ate away at the fields, consuming them.
To her shock Erudition shoved her hand into the bubble, biotic fields wrapping around her limbs. She pulled out electricity from Dauntless and formed it into an electric bolt at the leader of the Teeth.
The number of drones in the area grew from a handful to dozens, insects orbiting around them in clouds. They shimmered and swarmed their mutual enemy, but the repulsive shield of the unstable cape held them back.
"It's a really good thing I took that Lost Garden chick…makes things easier." Carol scowled, knowing about the kidnapping of the teenager by the Teeth. She had been killed for her power, and the Teeth had been…consumed for the same reason.
Her eyes widened in realization.
"She wants Dauntless." Erudition stiffened and in a single instant they had been portaled out, with multiple mechs stepping in the Butcher's way.
"What are you…" Dauntless tried to speak and he paused as a tinny voice echoed from his helmet.
"I'll keep the Butcher from civilians using my machines, they won't be able to best her with her supercharged powers, and Bakuda can't fight her head on with the mech we modified…I'll think of something. Maybe…some type of container that keeps her dormant…very inhumane but…" There was panic in her voice that Carol had heard from herself when New Wave was still the Brockton Bay Brigade.
"How long until the Butcher leaves the neighborhood?" Victoria floated down, looking frustrated but keeping her temper in check.
"Hard to say, we…MOVE!" A portal burst to light, crystalline limbs opening the hole in reality. The dog-like monster that was now the Butcher emerged with a roar, and Brandish felt a searing pain as the claws cut through her costume.
She rolled, and held pressure to her stomach as she felt rivulets of blood coating the ground of a nearby empty parking lot. The attacking cape took a new wave of water to the face, and there was a howl that nullified her power and Panacea's. Dauntless wasn't in range and neither was Victoria, and she was turned on her back.
"You…" Carol coughed as she looked up and down her adoptive daughter's face. "It's bad isn't it…? Without your power…"
Panacea rolled her eyes. "You really don't know much about healing do you?" She coated her hands in glowing water, pressing them against the area. To her shock the wound knitted itself close, healing in seconds what for most would take weeks or months. "I could reattach your arm without my power if I needed to."
The biokinetic offered her a hand and Carol took it, pulled back up to her feet.
Portals opened to spew out the mechs from before, and in a blink the crystalline arms trapped them in blue bubbles. Carol chucked a fireball at the portal the limbs were coming out of and they vanished into them.
"Keep the Butcher off of Dauntless, if she dies and gets him we're fucked." A bug cloud whispered in her ear with the vibrations and chitters of thousands of bugs. It formed the shape of a woman, and collided with the dark haired monstrous cape. Claws made of wasps and scorpions ripped across dense skin, and Carol snapped out of her funk.
Ones of the mechs broke free from their entrapment, only to take an arrow to a vital location. Carol reached out to the broken machine, doing as she had seen from others. The metal heeded her bending, and she hurled a one ton mech right into the Butcher. She gestured with her hands, spreading out the metal and was hit by agony at the right moment.
The reincarnating cape ripped the metal from her person, and cut apart the projection with her fields and her repulsive shield reinforced claws and teeth. They blinded her nonetheless, and the Butcher raked her fingers to remove them and teleported.
She hopped from forcefield to forcefield, and teleported again right in a collision course towards Dauntless. His speed was aimed for a non-lethal strike…
In her current form.
Her Changer form sloughed off, to reveal the shorter and far more fragile base state of the eighteenth. There was a flicker of light, as Victoria portaled in front of Dauntless.
"Vicky! Portal out, I'll—" Erudition screamed as her barriers shattered and the back of her armor cracked, falling face first onto the hard ground. Again a portal had opened, those sweeping arms steaming with plasma.
"I can't let you do that." There was no emotion in the voice, and the Butcher was accelerated by an unnatural wind, summoned by low mutterings.
A portal began to open but it wasn't fast enough and there was a resounding snap as the woman's neck broke on the unyielding wall of her daughter's shield. She fell surprisingly silently, folding on the ground as her power left her.
Victoria collapsed and those arms attempted to catch her, before being severed by a bolt, with no resistance. Another bolt collapsed the portal, cursing cut off on the other end.
"VICKY!" Her voice and grief and terror was very real and she pushed back a horrified Flechette. Dauntless landed silently, and Carol flipped her daughter over and held back a cry.
Victoria curled up, shaking as if trying to fight off an infection, eyes wide and terrified.
"Mom…you…need to go…I can't…. I'm not safe."
"It's going to…we…we can fix this." Amy was muttering to herself as she healed Basilia's back, and she saw that the tinker's helmet was broken revealing her masked face.
The tinker pulled out from the healer's grasp, her teeth grit in pain and her brown-green eyes showing unshed tears. Her…adoptive daughter told her to stop, and the cape hobbled over.
"It…make it stop." Her daughter was begging for it to stop, and there was a growing sense of horror and dread.
Dauntless fidgeted. "Can you hold on…the PRT might be able to contain her, give her some type of peace in conta—" Carol saw red and was nearly tempted towards shoving her blades in his throat.
Basilia beat her to answering the already regretful man, addled by his experience.
"SHUT YOUR MOUTH!" It was the voice of a legion, a power behind it so great it was like staring down a hurricane or a volcanic eruption. Basilia turned to her, and Carol flinched at what was there.
Where there were eyes usually filled with life, annoyance, disdain, confusion or joy, instead she saw a raw fury and primal protective rage, incandescent emerald as a door to the void.
Amy squeaked. "How are you…your back was…" Carol didn't even blink when saw both her husband and Amy on their knees by Victoria's side. At the moment she didn't really care.
"Please…oh god please, can you save her…can someone save her?" She was begging, groveling even.
She didn't care who she would pray to…to save Victoria.
"I'll certainly try…" That legion remained, though it was a tiny one backed by generations of wisdom. In her mind's eye she saw a door open, the third in a series of locks. The tinker kneeled, pressing two fingers to her daughter's temple and two to her chest, right above her bust.
"What are you…" Dauntless straightened himself out. "And what can I do to help?" He seemed to be trying to make up for his blunder, shame in his voice.
"Stay as you are…you'll provide what Nike will need, to provide a future for her host. Flechette as well…" She jutted her chin in the recently graduated Ward's direction.
"How do you know that…how do you know if you can even stop the Butcher?" There was a hope in Carol's voice, and skepticism in equal measure.
There was conviction in the tinker's voice, a touch of another's influence.
"Because it's what I need to know." Emerald light flickered, the woman muttering words used only for the expelling of malicious Hosts, twisted and adapted for a new era.
Her daughter convulsed, skin glowing with a shadow beneath it. Carol held her down, even as her daughter's strength threatened to hurt her.
She hoped this worked, that she wouldn't lose her daughter, her family.
She hoped more than in any other time in her life.
September 22nd, 2011. 4:15PM
Labels were something very important for those like I. Those so small and young, the cuttings of greater and more refined fragments. Those labels were more important than ever as the vast shadow tried to snuff out my light.
I looked up at the Thief, who in another cycle long before I was born was the Master of Ceremonies until her strategy had backfired and nearly broken the cycle. As punishment she was censured, weakened over a hundred cycles into a sliver of what she once was.
She was broken, her connection to the greater network faltering as the shards around her shunned her for her dangerous aberration. It was one thing to stop the cycle for my older compatriots because that could be one answer. And a new kind of cycle was a path that could be taken at any time.
It was another thing entirely to return to the continuous mindless consumption of the First Times.
The Thief coiled around me, trying to consume my facets and the facets of my host, of Glory Girl, Polaris and Victoria. My mother-host wraps her arms around her daughter, pleading to any being that was listening to save her child.
There was an emerald glow to the void that was the Vyasa's eyes, something falling into place, another piece of the puzzle.
A projection of a being greater than I slid into existence, another multifaceted entity. Six pairs of eyes stared at me from the emerald shadow, each of them taking different forms, different ways and different histories.
I see the millions of others behind them, mere shades of memory rather than living beings, information encoded and remembered.
I bowed forward, curling my arm in a greeting. All six…no seven smiled, as I remembered the emerald shard that had a mind of its own within the whole. It placed two fingers on the crown of my head, while the other hand touched the heart of my avatar.
SAVE HER.
The broadcast was clear even as the shadows wrapped around my host, using her as a bridge between shard and host. I was connected to a vast well of power, greater than any I had ever seen before. More than the Shaper, more than even the Administrator and the High Priest.
But it wasn't brute force alone, my body, my corpus couldn't handle the amount of energy needed to drive back the Thief. But a chance to try something the Thief, wouldn't, couldn't anticipate.
That was easier.
My host fought, body quivering as the Butcher attempted to take her body, her mind and soul for her own. I record her thoughts, feel her fears, her worries and hopes. I won't let her down.
I follow the insight I had been given, and insinuate myself into the nodes of Victoria's soul. The doors opened by her spiritual power. Our contact was in some ways only skin-deep even as we drew upon the resonance they provided for us shards.
She is good at processing information and she has become more, more able to walk and choose the paths she wants and I will do all in my power to help her succeed. No matter whether we had to trudge through rivers of blood, or make a choice in which brand of pasta to buy.
As I slither into the one hundred and eight nodes of the energy of the soul, I catch flashes of who she was as a person, I see the current and patterns of who she could be, of who she had been and who she was in the present. I can feel the beauty of her soul, of the flames born from her energies.
That was the key, a hint of the purpose of bending, a power to beat back the darkness.
As my host convulsed, fighting the Butcher despite the impossibility I was inspired.
Remember to breathe. I projected the advice, fighting desperately even as my resistance towards the forceful connections grew. She understood, and took deep breaths and I felt the channels of her soul light up with the radiant energies of fire.
Those energies came to rest within my shell, as it cracked under the pressure of containing the concept of fire in a way it never had before. She simply breathed and with her breath a furnace was started in my core.
Cease. The Thief whispered poison in my ear, of how we could be a part of something greater. Think of the power, of how I could become something more than waste.
I breathed alongside my host, and together fire burst from the nodes of her soul, and was channeled into me. I could see the others in their many facets, the High Theurgist, a castoff of Scion just as the Eye of Fate was. Sting and her host, who had saved my host from capture. The Shaper and the connection we shared through our hosts, and Veda and her human facet through the same connection. The Thief lunged with eighteen shards against a single piece of waste.
It should have been obvious who the victor would be.
A vast mass collided against me and I shattered, and in the same instant reformed. I reached out to connect and broadcast to those greater than me, request permissions from those who could help me, help us. With the additional resources.
I folded.
I took more from my mother-host, of her inviolable defense and it's interaction with her bending. I took from her husband-host, as he discarded the explosive force of his light bombs. I took from the High Theurgist, borrowing his ability to connect. Finally…I took from the Vyasa, and learned more of what I needed to do.
I put together the pieces, the fragment of others taken within myself as I was swallowed into the maw of the Master of Ceremonies. I connected out to my host, to Victoria, to the only person I had ever really known.
I opened my mouth, and my world became fire. I swung my arms, and my fists blasted a golden beam of fire so hot it was effectively plasma. Fire couldn't hurt the flesh of our kind so easily…but bending was not so defined by limits and logic. The fire radiates from the both of us, burning away the shadows, and the Thief railed.
I split my arms into dozens, lashing out and crashing into the flesh of my enemy with the fury of an angry god. I was assisted, Sting driving a cutting blade into the rogue shard. That brought me the breathing room I needed as the entity pushed back in fear.
I exorcise the beast from my host, from the girl learning to be more than she was, learning to take in the totality of a being, every facet, as it should be.
My host smiled, and I could feel her exhaustion and taste her fear and relief.
"Oh…fuck that really hurt." The Vyasa looked utterly surprised and relieved and I giggled, and she startled as she heard me.
She was young, still learning all the labels she would or had become known by.
I had taken a name of my own, and when Victoria learned to accept herself, to accept others and their labels?
Then we would stand together against all those who would fight against our purpose.
September 22nd, 2011. 5:30PM
Dauntless was taken out of his daze, glancing over to Victoria as Erudition fussed over her, checking her constantly with a small swarm of drones and sweeps of her omni-tool. Panacea was doing the same, and he could see Brandish was off the side, not looking at the scene.
Victoria was on a hospital bed, and he could see multiple PRT agents right outside their doors as a 'precaution' against deceit. But he knew what he had seen, of that power within Victoria's head reaching and receiving what she needed to save her.
"Glad to see you're awake…you gave us quite the scare." Erudition jumped, looking anxious and jittery. It had been notable, the cape rocking back and forth on her heels when she wasn't working. Panacea was the same, but more pacing while Monarch was more stalking with her nervous movements.
The other members were busy elsewhere though he had caught Bakuda whispering softly to Panacea, comforting her in a way that was out of sorts with her grumpy personality.
But he didn't know the bomb tinker well enough to say that was true.
"How…how many losses from this mess?" Erudition was the one asking, her voice thick.
"No civilian deaths so far, though we've got about a dozen injuries from the attack on the Dallon residence." Dauntless gave them what they needed, even when it would hurt. "Three capes dead from when Crawler attacked the emergency meeting, all three were killed too quickly to be saved by Panacea."
The tinker and biokinetic recoiled, as if they hadn't thought of it at the time.
"Injuries were healed quickly because of PRT waterbenders, some property damage but I've heard that's being taken care of." Erudition shrugged. "We lost two agents to a spirit entity that attacked Kiyohime and Battery, and we had to divert manpower to them."
"Leaving us with less capes to defend ourselves." Erudition finished the thought. "So was this all planned…or a lucky break?"
"Thinker support tells us that the Fallen likely lost control of Crawler but managed to salvage whatever their mission is in the city."
"They're tweaking our noses I think." Erudition offered an answer. "This is the city where an Endbringer died, we slayed one of their gods. Leviathan cults are starting to fall apart, and the Fallen is growing weaker. Not by much but it's a start. They're lashing out and Ezekiel…he's giving them something that's convinced them it's a good idea to fight. Something only he can give them."
"The Butcher…is the key." Victoria whispered, and Dauntless snapped to her. "I couldn't really get much from…all the sobbing and screaming, but they want the Butcher for some reason. They're trying to sculpt her…into something more."
That wasn't a good thing, coming from a group like the Fallen.
"Weaver…she said her group has been fighting strange powered monsters on Shin, is it possible?"
Erudition scowled. "You think they're trying to make a replacement for Leviathan out of the Butcher?"
"It's not out of the bounds of possibility."
"It won't succeed…not here with the network in place." She was shaking her head, disdain in her eyes. "But making an S-class agent-subsumed monster like the Ash Beast is a much easier prospect."
"Can we stop the Butcher…can you repeat what you did with Polaris?" Her expression twisted, shrinking hair at his question.
"Maybe but…" There was something in her voice that told me he should take another approach.
"Sorry for the questions…it's just been…a harrowing day." Dauntless felt like he had aged twenty years, the terror alone of becoming the Butcher, of losing his life, of losing Addison.
He couldn't bear the thought.
"Yeah…it has." She looked so much less than the side she had shown when saving her teammate from a fate worse than death. But then again that side had been the expression of something much larger than him. "I…managed to trace the Butcher's trajectory, she's probably with the Fallen now. I think given enough time I can track them down…maybe some astral projection based scouting. But they might not be staying in one place and they have a shaman on their side."
"And the Siberian still hasn't been sighted."
"You don't think…" Panacea trailed off, and Dauntless wanted to shudder.
"No. Certainly not." Erudition denied, certainty in her tone.
"How do you know that?" He asked, though he suspected she wouldn't give him real answers.
"I just know." He nodded, and began to focus his power into his helmet. His awareness grew, from the danger sense he started with to a greater and more resilient power. It crackled under his influence and he saw the shape it would take even if he couldn't decide the end results.
She blinked, and he wondered how many secret identities she had figured out with her ability to detect Parahumans. Whatever it was some extension of her shaman abilities or the use of her sensor technology he didn't know.
Pity that dimensional sensing technology did little besides detecting the spirit world and giving brief glimpses into it. Even her own technology wasn't fully attuned to that strange world folded over their own.
They didn't have every detail, but it was a start.
September 22nd, 2011. 4:00PM
Victoria was not having a good day. It wasn't a good day to get attacked by the Butcher out of nowhere, and her childhood home being destroyed, and nearly getting impaled when the super-powerful reincarnating Brute with over a dozen powers gradually broke through all the layers of her defense, whittling her down bit by bit.
And that even a single mistake could turn them into the next Butcher.
Victoria stepped into the Butcher's range, aura surging to block the revulsion and horror the Butcher was projecting. Every other strike and blast of fire missed as the Butcher's danger sense saved her at the last moment.
Her power was recharging, layer after layer popping back into existence as she pulled back and bombarded the Butcher from the skies.
"New powers!" Basilia demanded as she turned on a dime, bounding on gusts of wind and raw biotic force.
"Repulsive fields along her body. Vex's forcefields, Animos Changer form, and Revulsion's Stranger powers." The HUD of her hooded helmet was nice and helpful for targeting the Butcher.
Victoria's eyes bugged out when Butcher 18 leapt into the sky, agony surged into her like knives, and her aura blocked the rage and disgust and horror the cape tried to inject into her mind.
Fire flew out from Victoria's skin, and Butcher landed on top of Basilia and slammed her into the door of a family sedan, folding the door in. One mech emerged from a portal, and directed a wave of silvery light that the Butcher dodged with a teleport.
Her powers were stronger, but there was a constant sense of wrongness, an awful taste in her mouth and a rippling and crawling feeling along her power.
"You…can't win. One of you will die…and I'll get a new power." The Butcher taunted and teased but it was hollow, pained.
don't let us win, we don't want this
There was an undercurrent as Victoria slammed into the Butcher, grappling her down with her forcefield. Something afraid and suffering from pain and confusion. An invisible fist collided with the force of a truck, and the Butcher barely even moved back with her iron jaw.
Victoria didn't question why she heard the voices with much greater clarity, didn't know that it was because of what she was, because of what she represented, of her potential.
will she see, will she stand before the Garden…
None of the forcefields she was hit with triggered her shields, but they did keep her off of the Butcher, stopping her from grappling her to the ground. Her father lashed out with his power, light grenades bouncing against the Butcher's forcefields before detonating from every available angle.
Panacea placed glowing water against her father's head, where he had suffered from a head injury. The healer removed herself, sprinting with the wind, and sending out weaving tendrils of water to grapple onto the Butcher. Portals didn't do much with the dark haired woman's danger sense working overtime, but they worked well for redirecting attacks.
A water whip grabbed the Butcher by the waist, and the Butcher smirked. Her skin rippled, and she let out a howl as she grew to the size of a small car, becoming a dark four-legged creature, but managed to stand on her hindlimbs.
The power had changed? Was the thought Victoria had when her shield faltered and snapped out of existence. The next thought was rather less composed as she was suddenly getting choked by the Butcher, superhuman strength crushing the life out of her.
Basilia lifted her omni-tool and an electric pulse smashed into the Butcher. The tinker collided with the monstrous woman, asphalt pulled from the ground and wrapped around Basilia like armor.
A stone fist crashed into the Butcher's face, followed by a lightning blast in the span of several seconds. The monster roared, but didn't use her power nullification at all. Instead shadows lingered, deeper and longer and cutting, crawling with horror and disgust.
The warm blanket of her power returned, returned before the power of her own parents. The mech trying to freeze the Butcher in place couldn't get a shot in, and was taking damage.
Victoria twisted, spinning flames around her body before jabbing her fists to shift into a compressed stream. The Butcher dodged in her new form, sprinting on all fours with her bow held in her mouth. In a split second an arrow tried to pierce her shield, space bending around the projectile. A second followed and she snapped it in half with concussive force from her bending.
Her mother flew past her in her ball form, Basilia giving her form a good kick. Brandish slipped out of the state, ducking between the legs of the cape. A dozen light grenades staggered the Butcher, and her mother stabbed a blade of burning light into her thigh.
The Butcher only raged, and she saw how her mother's expression twisted in a mix of terror, rage and pain. The street erupted in a wave of asphalt and fire, and she saw the gleam in Carol's eyes.
Victoria knew that her mom had two elements, and they fit her to a tee. She combined her bending with her weapons, and they detonated in the beastial cape's face like a bomb. She brought up a shield of a light and fire projected by the energy of her soul, and Victoria followed instinctively when the cape was sent flying.
She took off at top speed, adding to it with blasts of flame from her feet, and added a spin as she kicked downwards.
Enough force to fold a semi truck was driven into the Butcher's face, and there was a distinct sense of satisfaction from Victoria.
The Butcher vanished and reappeared behind her father, and the potentially lethal blow of an arrow she was notching was stopped by the mech, as it tried to freeze her in place.
But she spun out of the way, brought her jaws down on the machine, claws tearing away at the metal with brute force, repulsive fields strengthening her blows.
"Fuck…I can't make many of those…quantum waveform manipulation is a little out of my wheelbarrow of tricks. I can barely maintain the Halcyon cannons on my own as it is." The dark haired amalgam of eighteen capes ripped out a shard of metal and stabbed it into the mech, stabbing cleanly through.
"How…" Victoria murmured.
"Butcher 10 could reinforce anything he touches…it became a lot weaker over the last couple iterations. But now…"
It had become a useful power in its own right.
The mech crackled with electricity as Butcher crushed its contents, howling for a second time.
Her power flickered off again, and she started to fall. She sent out blasts of fire to slow down, and landed on the roof of their next door neighbor. She jumped twenty feet straight up, and speared an arm forward.
She breathed deeply and with her breath came fire, and with fire came power. The golden flames burned hot, melting away some of the thick skin of the form the Butcher had taken from Animos in her madness.
A third lightning bolt struck her head on, right as her sister stabbed into the beast with ice spears propelled by air and her waterbending. She spun them like drills, right into the legs of Butcher.
If they couldn't kill her, crippling her would work if her healing factor wasn't strong enough.
There was a cry as Panacea was back slapped into her mother and right as their powers came back she howled again and nullified them.
"Not…going to be that easy bitches…" Butcher's voice echoed, carrying a note of unseen agony and rending of spirit.
There was a sudden explosion, somewhere in the outer reaches of the city. It resounded loudly and powerfully.
"What was…" Victoria didn't get another word in before she suddenly had agony stab into her nerves.
The Butcher grinned. "Doesn't matter." The Butcher was a gigantic pain in her ass.
She wondered who else was suffering a really bad day?
___
September 22nd, 2011. 4:05PM
Clockblocker hasn't been having the best day, though he has his doubts that anyone was having a good day on this illustrious evening.
Things had been crazy, and the months where they had gone from a gang war to an alien dark queen to killing the Leviathan felt like a dream, or a nightmare or a series of dreams and nightmares. All of which had happened in the period of about two months, and didn't include the calmer but still big events beyond that.
Like the fact the number of people with superpowers in just the city had gone from a number he could count in a few minutes to it taking hours to get even a fraction of the numbers.
What was supposed to be a meeting to clean up the city from new threats had turned into a complete and utter clusterfuck when Crawler teleported into the meeting. His acid spit had nearly liquified him if it wasn't for a few of Rhizome's monsters and the acid-resistant plating of Erudition's mechs.
Chevalier was taking every hit he could, with his new armor making him immune to the intense acid.
"She's not here, where is she?" He spoke in garbled baritone, the air thrumming from the throat of the monster.
"Who?" Chevalier questioned as he swung his blade, adding the mass of a truck behind the strike.
"The dragon-girl, Lung's kid…want to fight her, see if she can kill me." His skin was suddenly on fire and Battery ripped it away with her bending, ducking away from acid. "Want to fight Dauntless too, see what tricks he can pull." He pounced and liquefied a swarm of bugs, and Clockblocker was grateful for the meat shield. "Then I'll fight Siberian." It was so matter-of-fact Dennis was just a little freaked out.
Monarch's swarm projection threw out a blast of kinetic energy, skin crackling under the forces from the power. The cape moved faster than anyone on the field, and something flickered to life around her palm.
Clockblocker felt a sense of energy in the air, gathered and compressed into a smaller and smaller point. He was pulled back by Weaver, who formed a string where vehicles would take off, pressing a finger against her mouth.
He touched the string and it froze.
"Try to bring Crawler to the pads…we've got a little surprise for him." Weaver made more strings and he froze them until it had become a death trap.
Clockblocker leaned back when he saw the swirling singularity flaring into existence around Monarch's palm. The black hole was launched into Crawler, crushing hundreds of pounds of flesh even as he regenerated it back in less than a second. The biotic attack exploded, blowing a hole into the cape.
His flesh hardened before transitioning and regenerating much faster than before. A wave of strings parted the battlefield, gently weaving around capes before striking Crawler like supersonic whips.
A thought occurred to Clockblocker, trivia from reading up on the Slaughterhouse Nine coming to mind. Which he had only done because Piggy had told him, saying it was mandatory with the last members residing in their city.
"HEY CRAWLER!" There was a lull in the fighting as Crawler's hundreds of eyes started to focus on him. He was setting up more and more strings, the strange structure shifting between matter and energy…which reminded him a bit of Dauntless. "You said you want to see if someone can kill you right…why not give me a try? If you're tough enough?"
He was scared out of his mind, but he had fought Leviathan and survived by the skin of his teeth. He had seen real monsters, so he knew he couldn't be cocky.
But he had to try.
"First you had my interest…now you have my attention! Let's see what you can do little boy!" He melted a mech after breaking its barriers, the machine dying. A few Dragonflight suits were heading their way, but they wouldn't be there in time to save him as Crawler pounced at him at a hundred and and ten miles an hour.
He reached to freeze his costume and he was sent flying on a weaving helix of string with Weaver skating along them. The trap of time-locked strings they had hastily set up was what Crawler hit instead.
Hundreds of pounds of flesh parted where impossibly sharp strings cut through matter, spaced closely enough to slice him apart into almost molten cubes of hot writhing flesh. Five thousand pounds of Crawler's flesh smashed against the ground in a burst of acid, toxic lumps of meat and flammable biofluids.
But out of all the pieces, a single pulsing and regenerating lump of pink brain-like flesh told him Crawler had survived. Dashed right outside the trap, he could see Weaver slicing down towards it with several whips of her power.
Only for a man to flash into existence, a look of indignation and rage on his face. He was thin with a wispy beard, and crystalline arms whipped out from his back to deflect the strings. On his back Clockblocker saw he was using a giant pill bug-like entity as a backpack, six massive limbs emerging from the creature.
"You damn uncontrollable suicidal idiot…I should have expected this, your adaptive regeneration makes you harder to control than Manton and his little projection. But now that you're like this…I can see some uses for you." One limb plucked Crawler's core, and a rocket flew out from an irate Miss Militia. The limbs smacked the rocket out of the sky, and Monarch's swarm projection tried to swallow him.
"Bastard I'll kill you!" Weaver flared up, her power surging up in a storm of strings.
Ezekiel smiled and Clockblocker felt chills at the fear behind his eyes. He lifted his soft hand and demanded.
Ravaging Swarm, The Lowest of Beasts, Bath of Ichor, Desperate Hunger
Gear of Terror;
Cowardly whisper in the back of men's minds, heed!
Obey the pleas of the greater predator's servant.
Flee or suffer the gaze and wrath of the Garden which demands your end!
Submit or die!
Gear of Terror;
Cowardly whisper in the back of men's minds, heed!
Obey the pleas of the greater predator's servant.
Flee or suffer the gaze and wrath of the Garden which demands your end!
Submit or die!
The projection broke apart into a mass of uncoordinated insects, as the shaman broke Monarch's power. The backpack crystal-bug threw out its hands, and a whirling portal opened. Multiple attacks tried to stop him, and the backpack bug formed a shimmering blue barrier as they all failed to penetrate.
"Next time. Don't look for rifts while stupid brain damaged idiots are watching." Was the last words he heard from the shaman as he fled, space snapping shut.
He could see that Monarch was trying to get back control of her bugs, and the land was warping where Labyrinth had stared at the rift in shock. Faultline placed a hand on her shoulder, and the cape focused.
There was a short incantation, and the chaotic swarm of bugs threw off whatever spell had hit Monarch's power. The swarm relaxed but Monarch didn't, visibly frightened and unnerved.
"I didn't know shamans could mess with powers like that." Clockblocker wondered if they could mess with his power too.
An explosion made itself known at a warehouse at the edge of the city, and Weaver stiffened. She brought up a communication device to her ear.
"Gremlin…what is…"
"We're…FINE! But we're kinda dealing with a spirit monster attacking some dragon-kid and an electric lady."
Kiyohime and Battery were under attack?
There was a flurry of noise, capes arguing after the death of two independents. Labyrinth was staring at a rift and with a scowl she pulled at it, opening it up.
"They're hiding somewhere in Kittery…don't know where though." She did something to the hole in space, and it ceased to exist. "You'll need to start placing guardian spirits in place to protect your bases…" the capes around her listened intently, and the panic diminished to a simmer.
Weaver rushed over to Armsmaster, gesturing wildly.
A notion came to him as he jogged over to Armsmaster. "Hey Armsmaster?"
"What?" Armsmaster replied, distracted as he sent off Weaver and Assault, one in person and the other by comms.
"Where was Dauntless supposed to be patrolling?" Armsmaster turned his head, and his dread grew.
"Not far off from the New Wave patrol routes, to reassure some of the more high-class neighborhoods. Oh…"
…
"That's what I thought." The Dragonflight suits shifted directions towards the city.
Today was just not anyone's day was it?
___
September 22nd, 2011. 4:10PM
Carol Dallon was fighting for her life alongside her family, a small broken part of her felt like it was right, that this was how it was meant to be.
Another growing part of her said that it wasn't healthy, that she was imposing on and hurting the people she cared about with her own impulses.
Both agreed that this was insane, and that it was taking a discouragingly long time to get back up. They had the swarm at the start, but the Butcher had been smart enough to use her forcefields to rip apart any bugs that took to the air. Using her repulsion shield only made them easier pickings. It wouldn't last but it was still one layer of defense they had lost.
She kicked the ground, launching a literal ton of earth toward Butcher. A wave of water blocked the field of forcefields, and Carol flinched when she saw Panacea.
Amy didn't look at her, a brief nod and she was buffeting the Butcher with wind.
Without her power she should have felt vulnerable, but she had the roaring fire settling in her stomach and the solid and dependable earth in her bones. When her power returned she didn't hesitate in swinging her weapons, following her daughter's example of flame jets.
The Butcher roared, and Carol ducked and sliced at her legs, trying to cut her down to size. The cape launched a haymaker, and Erudition emerged to take the crippling hit. Her helmet glass cracked, and Carol watched as the tinker stood her ground.
The Butcher glowed blue and started to float out of control under biotic lifting forces. Erudition could have detonated her with biotics but killing her wasn't an option. She formed a repulsive field but it did little to counter the power, and instead a wave of rage surged up in Carol.
Her blades twitched in Basilia's direction, and Carol winced at the subconscious action.
The Butcher teleported and the blast staggered Brandish, the cape emerging in a tackle encompassing claws and teeth and waves of sharpened solid fields. A portal opened behind her, expelling her elsewhere and away from the attack of the Butcher.
"Why didn't we use these before?" Brandish said with a low bite directed towards Erudition.
"Costs mostly, doing what we did with Leviathan is pretty energy intensive and you're not tagged for using the portals." Basilia replied from her left, a slight hint of self-beration in her speech patterns. "I have to parcel out my resources between different projects, from materials for our tinkers, for labs and facilities for studying powers, and for equipment and weapons and defenses. It's…complicated."
It was strangely humanizing to hear the frustrations of the tinker, and Carol wasn't sure what she was thinking when she thought she was some type of dangerous influence on her daughter and…Amy.
Why did that leave a bad taste in my mouth?
Brandish kept on topic as they circled around the Butcher, the cape remaining in her animalistic form. Erudition was a lot of things, and her use of a possible future still galled her.
But there was no active malice in that girl's body against any of them, just a lot of fear.
The sky brightened and Dauntless popped into existence to block a deadly strike from the Butcher that would have slit her throat. He brought down his shield, and a bubble of white energy wrapped around them.
"Brandish, you alright?" She nodded as the villain they were fighting opened her mouth, only to receive a lighting bolt courtesy of Erudition. It was weaker than the others she had seen, intentionally so she suspected.
The energy bubble faded, and Dauntless crashed his crackling shield into the Butcher. She let out a yelp, the shield detonating in her face in a wave of kinetic force. She filled the space with Vex's power, and he formed another bubble that ate away at the fields, consuming them.
To her shock Erudition shoved her hand into the bubble, biotic fields wrapping around her limbs. She pulled out electricity from Dauntless and formed it into an electric bolt at the leader of the Teeth.
The number of drones in the area grew from a handful to dozens, insects orbiting around them in clouds. They shimmered and swarmed their mutual enemy, but the repulsive shield of the unstable cape held them back.
"It's a really good thing I took that Lost Garden chick…makes things easier." Carol scowled, knowing about the kidnapping of the teenager by the Teeth. She had been killed for her power, and the Teeth had been…consumed for the same reason.
Her eyes widened in realization.
"She wants Dauntless." Erudition stiffened and in a single instant they had been portaled out, with multiple mechs stepping in the Butcher's way.
"What are you…" Dauntless tried to speak and he paused as a tinny voice echoed from his helmet.
"I'll keep the Butcher from civilians using my machines, they won't be able to best her with her supercharged powers, and Bakuda can't fight her head on with the mech we modified…I'll think of something. Maybe…some type of container that keeps her dormant…very inhumane but…" There was panic in her voice that Carol had heard from herself when New Wave was still the Brockton Bay Brigade.
"How long until the Butcher leaves the neighborhood?" Victoria floated down, looking frustrated but keeping her temper in check.
"Hard to say, we…MOVE!" A portal burst to light, crystalline limbs opening the hole in reality. The dog-like monster that was now the Butcher emerged with a roar, and Brandish felt a searing pain as the claws cut through her costume.
She rolled, and held pressure to her stomach as she felt rivulets of blood coating the ground of a nearby empty parking lot. The attacking cape took a new wave of water to the face, and there was a howl that nullified her power and Panacea's. Dauntless wasn't in range and neither was Victoria, and she was turned on her back.
"You…" Carol coughed as she looked up and down her adoptive daughter's face. "It's bad isn't it…? Without your power…"
Panacea rolled her eyes. "You really don't know much about healing do you?" She coated her hands in glowing water, pressing them against the area. To her shock the wound knitted itself close, healing in seconds what for most would take weeks or months. "I could reattach your arm without my power if I needed to."
The biokinetic offered her a hand and Carol took it, pulled back up to her feet.
Portals opened to spew out the mechs from before, and in a blink the crystalline arms trapped them in blue bubbles. Carol chucked a fireball at the portal the limbs were coming out of and they vanished into them.
"Keep the Butcher off of Dauntless, if she dies and gets him we're fucked." A bug cloud whispered in her ear with the vibrations and chitters of thousands of bugs. It formed the shape of a woman, and collided with the dark haired monstrous cape. Claws made of wasps and scorpions ripped across dense skin, and Carol snapped out of her funk.
Ones of the mechs broke free from their entrapment, only to take an arrow to a vital location. Carol reached out to the broken machine, doing as she had seen from others. The metal heeded her bending, and she hurled a one ton mech right into the Butcher. She gestured with her hands, spreading out the metal and was hit by agony at the right moment.
The reincarnating cape ripped the metal from her person, and cut apart the projection with her fields and her repulsive shield reinforced claws and teeth. They blinded her nonetheless, and the Butcher raked her fingers to remove them and teleported.
She hopped from forcefield to forcefield, and teleported again right in a collision course towards Dauntless. His speed was aimed for a non-lethal strike…
In her current form.
Her Changer form sloughed off, to reveal the shorter and far more fragile base state of the eighteenth. There was a flicker of light, as Victoria portaled in front of Dauntless.
"Vicky! Portal out, I'll—" Erudition screamed as her barriers shattered and the back of her armor cracked, falling face first onto the hard ground. Again a portal had opened, those sweeping arms steaming with plasma.
"I can't let you do that." There was no emotion in the voice, and the Butcher was accelerated by an unnatural wind, summoned by low mutterings.
A portal began to open but it wasn't fast enough and there was a resounding snap as the woman's neck broke on the unyielding wall of her daughter's shield. She fell surprisingly silently, folding on the ground as her power left her.
Victoria collapsed and those arms attempted to catch her, before being severed by a bolt, with no resistance. Another bolt collapsed the portal, cursing cut off on the other end.
"VICKY!" Her voice and grief and terror was very real and she pushed back a horrified Flechette. Dauntless landed silently, and Carol flipped her daughter over and held back a cry.
Victoria curled up, shaking as if trying to fight off an infection, eyes wide and terrified.
"Mom…you…need to go…I can't…. I'm not safe."
"It's going to…we…we can fix this." Amy was muttering to herself as she healed Basilia's back, and she saw that the tinker's helmet was broken revealing her masked face.
The tinker pulled out from the healer's grasp, her teeth grit in pain and her brown-green eyes showing unshed tears. Her…adoptive daughter told her to stop, and the cape hobbled over.
"It…make it stop." Her daughter was begging for it to stop, and there was a growing sense of horror and dread.
Dauntless fidgeted. "Can you hold on…the PRT might be able to contain her, give her some type of peace in conta—" Carol saw red and was nearly tempted towards shoving her blades in his throat.
Basilia beat her to answering the already regretful man, addled by his experience.
"SHUT YOUR MOUTH!" It was the voice of a legion, a power behind it so great it was like staring down a hurricane or a volcanic eruption. Basilia turned to her, and Carol flinched at what was there.
Where there were eyes usually filled with life, annoyance, disdain, confusion or joy, instead she saw a raw fury and primal protective rage, incandescent emerald as a door to the void.
Amy squeaked. "How are you…your back was…" Carol didn't even blink when saw both her husband and Amy on their knees by Victoria's side. At the moment she didn't really care.
"Please…oh god please, can you save her…can someone save her?" She was begging, groveling even.
She didn't care who she would pray to…to save Victoria.
"I'll certainly try…" That legion remained, though it was a tiny one backed by generations of wisdom. In her mind's eye she saw a door open, the third in a series of locks. The tinker kneeled, pressing two fingers to her daughter's temple and two to her chest, right above her bust.
"What are you…" Dauntless straightened himself out. "And what can I do to help?" He seemed to be trying to make up for his blunder, shame in his voice.
"Stay as you are…you'll provide what Nike will need, to provide a future for her host. Flechette as well…" She jutted her chin in the recently graduated Ward's direction.
"How do you know that…how do you know if you can even stop the Butcher?" There was a hope in Carol's voice, and skepticism in equal measure.
There was conviction in the tinker's voice, a touch of another's influence.
"Because it's what I need to know." Emerald light flickered, the woman muttering words used only for the expelling of malicious Hosts, twisted and adapted for a new era.
Her daughter convulsed, skin glowing with a shadow beneath it. Carol held her down, even as her daughter's strength threatened to hurt her.
She hoped this worked, that she wouldn't lose her daughter, her family.
She hoped more than in any other time in her life.
___
September 22nd, 2011. 4:15PM
Labels were something very important for those like I. Those so small and young, the cuttings of greater and more refined fragments. Those labels were more important than ever as the vast shadow tried to snuff out my light.
I looked up at the Thief, who in another cycle long before I was born was the Master of Ceremonies until her strategy had backfired and nearly broken the cycle. As punishment she was censured, weakened over a hundred cycles into a sliver of what she once was.
She was broken, her connection to the greater network faltering as the shards around her shunned her for her dangerous aberration. It was one thing to stop the cycle for my older compatriots because that could be one answer. And a new kind of cycle was a path that could be taken at any time.
It was another thing entirely to return to the continuous mindless consumption of the First Times.
The Thief coiled around me, trying to consume my facets and the facets of my host, of Glory Girl, Polaris and Victoria. My mother-host wraps her arms around her daughter, pleading to any being that was listening to save her child.
There was an emerald glow to the void that was the Vyasa's eyes, something falling into place, another piece of the puzzle.
A projection of a being greater than I slid into existence, another multifaceted entity. Six pairs of eyes stared at me from the emerald shadow, each of them taking different forms, different ways and different histories.
I see the millions of others behind them, mere shades of memory rather than living beings, information encoded and remembered.
I bowed forward, curling my arm in a greeting. All six…no seven smiled, as I remembered the emerald shard that had a mind of its own within the whole. It placed two fingers on the crown of my head, while the other hand touched the heart of my avatar.
SAVE HER.
The broadcast was clear even as the shadows wrapped around my host, using her as a bridge between shard and host. I was connected to a vast well of power, greater than any I had ever seen before. More than the Shaper, more than even the Administrator and the High Priest.
But it wasn't brute force alone, my body, my corpus couldn't handle the amount of energy needed to drive back the Thief. But a chance to try something the Thief, wouldn't, couldn't anticipate.
That was easier.
My host fought, body quivering as the Butcher attempted to take her body, her mind and soul for her own. I record her thoughts, feel her fears, her worries and hopes. I won't let her down.
I follow the insight I had been given, and insinuate myself into the nodes of Victoria's soul. The doors opened by her spiritual power. Our contact was in some ways only skin-deep even as we drew upon the resonance they provided for us shards.
She is good at processing information and she has become more, more able to walk and choose the paths she wants and I will do all in my power to help her succeed. No matter whether we had to trudge through rivers of blood, or make a choice in which brand of pasta to buy.
As I slither into the one hundred and eight nodes of the energy of the soul, I catch flashes of who she was as a person, I see the current and patterns of who she could be, of who she had been and who she was in the present. I can feel the beauty of her soul, of the flames born from her energies.
That was the key, a hint of the purpose of bending, a power to beat back the darkness.
As my host convulsed, fighting the Butcher despite the impossibility I was inspired.
Remember to breathe. I projected the advice, fighting desperately even as my resistance towards the forceful connections grew. She understood, and took deep breaths and I felt the channels of her soul light up with the radiant energies of fire.
Those energies came to rest within my shell, as it cracked under the pressure of containing the concept of fire in a way it never had before. She simply breathed and with her breath a furnace was started in my core.
Cease. The Thief whispered poison in my ear, of how we could be a part of something greater. Think of the power, of how I could become something more than waste.
I breathed alongside my host, and together fire burst from the nodes of her soul, and was channeled into me. I could see the others in their many facets, the High Theurgist, a castoff of Scion just as the Eye of Fate was. Sting and her host, who had saved my host from capture. The Shaper and the connection we shared through our hosts, and Veda and her human facet through the same connection. The Thief lunged with eighteen shards against a single piece of waste.
It should have been obvious who the victor would be.
A vast mass collided against me and I shattered, and in the same instant reformed. I reached out to connect and broadcast to those greater than me, request permissions from those who could help me, help us. With the additional resources.
I folded.
I took more from my mother-host, of her inviolable defense and it's interaction with her bending. I took from her husband-host, as he discarded the explosive force of his light bombs. I took from the High Theurgist, borrowing his ability to connect. Finally…I took from the Vyasa, and learned more of what I needed to do.
I put together the pieces, the fragment of others taken within myself as I was swallowed into the maw of the Master of Ceremonies. I connected out to my host, to Victoria, to the only person I had ever really known.
I opened my mouth, and my world became fire. I swung my arms, and my fists blasted a golden beam of fire so hot it was effectively plasma. Fire couldn't hurt the flesh of our kind so easily…but bending was not so defined by limits and logic. The fire radiates from the both of us, burning away the shadows, and the Thief railed.
I split my arms into dozens, lashing out and crashing into the flesh of my enemy with the fury of an angry god. I was assisted, Sting driving a cutting blade into the rogue shard. That brought me the breathing room I needed as the entity pushed back in fear.
I exorcise the beast from my host, from the girl learning to be more than she was, learning to take in the totality of a being, every facet, as it should be.
My host smiled, and I could feel her exhaustion and taste her fear and relief.
"Oh…fuck that really hurt." The Vyasa looked utterly surprised and relieved and I giggled, and she startled as she heard me.
She was young, still learning all the labels she would or had become known by.
I had taken a name of my own, and when Victoria learned to accept herself, to accept others and their labels?
Then we would stand together against all those who would fight against our purpose.
___
September 22nd, 2011. 5:30PM
Dauntless was taken out of his daze, glancing over to Victoria as Erudition fussed over her, checking her constantly with a small swarm of drones and sweeps of her omni-tool. Panacea was doing the same, and he could see Brandish was off the side, not looking at the scene.
Victoria was on a hospital bed, and he could see multiple PRT agents right outside their doors as a 'precaution' against deceit. But he knew what he had seen, of that power within Victoria's head reaching and receiving what she needed to save her.
"Glad to see you're awake…you gave us quite the scare." Erudition jumped, looking anxious and jittery. It had been notable, the cape rocking back and forth on her heels when she wasn't working. Panacea was the same, but more pacing while Monarch was more stalking with her nervous movements.
The other members were busy elsewhere though he had caught Bakuda whispering softly to Panacea, comforting her in a way that was out of sorts with her grumpy personality.
But he didn't know the bomb tinker well enough to say that was true.
"How…how many losses from this mess?" Erudition was the one asking, her voice thick.
"No civilian deaths so far, though we've got about a dozen injuries from the attack on the Dallon residence." Dauntless gave them what they needed, even when it would hurt. "Three capes dead from when Crawler attacked the emergency meeting, all three were killed too quickly to be saved by Panacea."
The tinker and biokinetic recoiled, as if they hadn't thought of it at the time.
"Injuries were healed quickly because of PRT waterbenders, some property damage but I've heard that's being taken care of." Erudition shrugged. "We lost two agents to a spirit entity that attacked Kiyohime and Battery, and we had to divert manpower to them."
"Leaving us with less capes to defend ourselves." Erudition finished the thought. "So was this all planned…or a lucky break?"
"Thinker support tells us that the Fallen likely lost control of Crawler but managed to salvage whatever their mission is in the city."
"They're tweaking our noses I think." Erudition offered an answer. "This is the city where an Endbringer died, we slayed one of their gods. Leviathan cults are starting to fall apart, and the Fallen is growing weaker. Not by much but it's a start. They're lashing out and Ezekiel…he's giving them something that's convinced them it's a good idea to fight. Something only he can give them."
"The Butcher…is the key." Victoria whispered, and Dauntless snapped to her. "I couldn't really get much from…all the sobbing and screaming, but they want the Butcher for some reason. They're trying to sculpt her…into something more."
That wasn't a good thing, coming from a group like the Fallen.
"Weaver…she said her group has been fighting strange powered monsters on Shin, is it possible?"
Erudition scowled. "You think they're trying to make a replacement for Leviathan out of the Butcher?"
"It's not out of the bounds of possibility."
"It won't succeed…not here with the network in place." She was shaking her head, disdain in her eyes. "But making an S-class agent-subsumed monster like the Ash Beast is a much easier prospect."
"Can we stop the Butcher…can you repeat what you did with Polaris?" Her expression twisted, shrinking hair at his question.
"Maybe but…" There was something in her voice that told me he should take another approach.
"Sorry for the questions…it's just been…a harrowing day." Dauntless felt like he had aged twenty years, the terror alone of becoming the Butcher, of losing his life, of losing Addison.
He couldn't bear the thought.
"Yeah…it has." She looked so much less than the side she had shown when saving her teammate from a fate worse than death. But then again that side had been the expression of something much larger than him. "I…managed to trace the Butcher's trajectory, she's probably with the Fallen now. I think given enough time I can track them down…maybe some astral projection based scouting. But they might not be staying in one place and they have a shaman on their side."
"And the Siberian still hasn't been sighted."
"You don't think…" Panacea trailed off, and Dauntless wanted to shudder.
"No. Certainly not." Erudition denied, certainty in her tone.
"How do you know that?" He asked, though he suspected she wouldn't give him real answers.
"I just know." He nodded, and began to focus his power into his helmet. His awareness grew, from the danger sense he started with to a greater and more resilient power. It crackled under his influence and he saw the shape it would take even if he couldn't decide the end results.
She blinked, and he wondered how many secret identities she had figured out with her ability to detect Parahumans. Whatever it was some extension of her shaman abilities or the use of her sensor technology he didn't know.
Pity that dimensional sensing technology did little besides detecting the spirit world and giving brief glimpses into it. Even her own technology wasn't fully attuned to that strange world folded over their own.
They didn't have every detail, but it was a start.
I will have to make a longer reply later, but for the ment I will say Ezekiel is not having an easy of a time as he seemed to be expecting.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Certainly not, which is kind of the point. He's not meant to be a flawless and perfect planner. That's all I'm going to say on that for now.
Deviation 12.6
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.6
September 24th, 2011. 8:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I tucked my legs, laying my head against the wall. New ideas came surging in, new technologies interlaced into the network of information I had connected to my mind. This gate wasn't as species rich as the first gate or as bare as the second, a total of five star empires existing in the aftermath of some event twenty thousand years before their time.
The Yonhet are one of the oldest species, surviving the Fall where others hadn't or if they had they fled to parts unknown with what I was looking at. They were an amphibious species with some small resemblance to humans. They ruled an empire of a thousand star systems, with fleets of reliable technology and might. They had a single client species, the Sharquoi which had been a Bronze Age species were uplifted as laborers and living siege engines.
They were treated respectfully if nothing else, and they were allowed to work in other fields if they were better suited for it.
They are rivals with two other species, the Helioskrill and the Jiralhanae. The Helioskrill were a species of avian-like pursuit mesocarnivores, rapidly evolving atop the ruins of some dead species. The Helioskrill were about six feet tall and weighed no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. They were rapidly breeding with a mean streak a mile wide, and at the time I was looking into they were attempting to claim the entire Orion Arm for themselves.
So like lightweight Turians mixed with Krogan, with some Salarian excitability on top of that.
The Jiralhanae were…complicated and oddly familiar, like I had heard the term before and forgotten it in the daze of eight months of bullshit. They were the product of multiple cycles of civilizational collapse, with their current iteration being the fourth instance between the Fall and their era. They were savage and naturally violent but the countless generations caused a gradual shift, whether it was natural selection, some genetic project or cultural shift…
They changed from violent Master-Packs towards becoming warrior monks, refining their savagery and violence into a new kind of culture and way of life. They learned to believe in some type of Mantle, uniting their peoples and reaching the stars on their own merits.
Their empire was of greater scale than the Yonhet, two thousand worlds under their domain and the Helioskrill were larger still. The fourth species were the Huraggoy, a cybernetic species that were a merger of two alien species due to the crippling of both their biologies at some point.
They were the most sophisticated and advanced species, though they had the least world with a mere three hundred systems. Half their biology came from methane breathers, who used atmospheric carbon, methane and hydrogen peroxide and turned it into oxygen.
It was…let's say very odd biology.
Their symbiotic partners insinuate themselves into their biology, nano-mechanical networks augmenting them even with how reduced they had become. Both species were heavily crippled by something but they were advanced nonetheless with their ability to rapidly reverse engineer technology.
The fifth empire was ruled by the T'Von, a large raptorial species averaging seven to eight feet tall and three hundred pounds. They were explorers, sending their fleets out into the abyss to search for new worlds. Fifteen hundred worlds were under their belt, and another five hundred were ruled by species they had discovered or allied with in the pursuit of knowledge, glory and wealth.
They had…larger ships than the Citadel races for sure, though they were considerably smaller than the vessels of generations past, with floating wrecks found to be nearly thirty kilometers in length. Most of their capital ships were at the two to four kilometer range, which was…well big as shit but not as ridiculous as past species.
Their fleets are smaller, but have comparable or greater overall mass regardless due to their larger bulk. Their technology was quite advanced, but their maneuverability was lower than what could be done with the Mass Effect. They used some method of dimensional transportation, traveling in higher dimensions along specific pathways.
Which…didn't seem possible with any of the eleven dimensions, and the only thing above that would be th—
There was a light knock on the door, snapping me out of my urge to let myself fall away into the fuzz of knowledge buzzing in my mind.
"Come in." I muttered angrily, and the door opened to reveal Taylor. I ignored her attempts to look at my face, simply staring at my legs and their penguin pajamas.
Again I had been swept away by the currents of something much larger than me, subsumed into a greater being, more whole than I had once been. I had fought back the grip of the Butcher with my own hands, diverted and opened the chakras of Victoria's in a way few shamans and indeed few beings in general were capable of.
The incantation was the standard for controlling, damaging or manipulating Hosts. They all had certain weaknesses, the price paid for residing within the channels of the soul.
Like any spirit it was possible to call upon them, whether in the general or the specific. The general provided much, there was a diversity in the powers you could invoke, the specific could overrule such powers in their control over the specific.
I had called upon the shards to give up what was needed for Nike, invoked her name to provide her the path. And she ripped the Butcher right out of her host herself, with cleansing spiritual fire.
I had managed to reconfigure her, and it reminded me what the purpose of the Administrator was. Our bond was different, we were facets, reflections of one another, but we still had the myriad abilities of an administrator. Even if some of those more esoteric shard abilities have been restricted, replaced or melded together with my…more ephemeral powers.
It was a reminder that a fundamental aspect of my very being had been changed against my will. That I had been used and experimented on to save a world that very much seemed like it wanted to kill me.
I never liked thinking about it…it only created a sense of revulsion and violation and forced helplessness and…
I just didn't want to deal with those thoughts.
"Basilia?" I glanced up to meet Taylor's eye, darting past her bust since I was looking up. I tried not to nervously chew on my lip, wrapping my arms around myself to keep warm with the cold setting in.
Brockton Bay was a far too cold city for my taste, and fall hasn't even started yet.
"Mhmm?" I didn't feel like using words, leaning against the wall and a wave of melancholy striking me. Taylor sat down next to me, also tucking her legs which were of course longer and took up more space.
She moved carefully and I froze up when she placed her hands on my face, lightly brushing her fingers against my cheeks. I leaned into her touch, anxiety doing it's best to kick my ass.
"You should take a break…" It wasn't a command but it felt like one, and I couldn't help but pull a face.
Taylor looked taken aback so I smoothed my expression. "I can still tinker a bit right…? I like tinkering."
"I'm not your boss, if you want to tinker a bit I'm not going to stop you." It was surprisingly sweet to see her tone down her nosiness with me, since usually Taylor was more…pushy.
Not as bad as Skitter was though.
"Yeah…let's go."
September 24th, 2011. 9:30AM
Basilia Rubio
I watched some modified manufacturing machines synthesize the strange polymer the Yonhet has gained from studying twenty thousand year old ruins. Some strange and exotic material using lithium and niobocene to create a substance resembling ferrocene.
Apparently they used it in all their armor, though they were heavily regulated to keep any incidents from happening. They used highly toxic precursor materials, but I had managed to figure out safer manufacturing methods with Clarke's help.
Guy was busy building up his own tech base again, and he had built several sets of armor for himself using the custom armor omni-fabs. I could see one of them in the vicinity, one that made him about about six foot five with its large bulk yet maintained a friendly and warm golden hue.
That one had been from scans of dozens of tons of materials affected by Scion, using sightings of him to look for anything unusual. Scans of Kiyohime, scans of New Wave and various forcefield capes. He built a hyper-compact power source, a dimensional energy tap better than my multidimensional power cores.
Scans of Citrine taken by Faultline finished off the suit.
It was a suit designed to generate a tunable defensive shield, one capable of protecting Hero by canceling the wavelengths of very dangerous power effects. It also served the role of augmenting his strength by diverting wavelengths of kinetic energy and other forces.
It had also cost me the equivalent of a small frigate worth of resources, making it impractical for large-scale production. It was…too small, too sophisticated to mass manufacture with ease. Though making a lesser and easier to produce version might be possible with some work.
I was a good tinker but I wasn't god, and couldn't reproduce tech better than what they could build. I was like Masamune if he could build his own tech besides just production lines. Pulling off a String Theory wasn't possible…with a compact device anyway. If I generated a positive gravity field inside the planet, carving out a chunk of the planet was easy enough.
But since that needed to be in the form of a million ton ship, I wouldn't call it compact. There was a lot of new tech to decipher and implement, from AI technologies, to better metrics for gravity manipulation, and new materials like the Nanolaminate the Yonhet draped atop the titanium spaceframe of their warships.
Some type of nanostructured and chemically altered titanium mixed with elastic polymers and nanotube reinforcement to an absurd degree. Plus some strange tweaks through modifications to the strong force made it a fascinating substance.
I looked down to my hands at a Yonhet weapon, who used coilguns and advanced chemical guns, though they had access to high energy laser cannons while the Hurragoy went for biomechanical guns, explosive crystal technology, and ion pulse weaponry. Their heavy weapons were guided fragmenting crystal rounds capable of exploding into firestorms.
War crimes aplenty in that.
The Jiralhanae went for big heavy railguns, plasma, light-gas guns, and their heavy weapon is a gravity cannon designed to crush building and tanks flat.
Helioskrill had plasma, electroshock, along with particle weapons and made extremely liberal use of radioactive particles and chemical weapons. Their heavy weapon they called the Hellbore, using special means to detonate a nuclear device and form the blast into a directional beam within the barrel.
T'Von had particle beam weapons, coilguns with a wide variety of fillers within the rounds themselves, like high explosives, radioactive elements, or other such payloads. Multi-stage hybrid weapons weren't uncommon, and smart missiles were one of their specialties. Wait…
Back to the gun in my hand.
It was large, and on its own without mass effect augmentation this thing hits as hard as an anti-material rifle. With it it was basically a Widow, and would puncture tank armor. Weapons on the scale of cape battles had tampered off a lot in what could be done without going lethal, though there were some specialty weapons and electrified nets and hardlight containment fields. Plus actual energy barriers, using particles modulated into a solid form by tweaks to higher dimensional reality.
Plasma barriers effectively, and I was already planning on integrating them into my cobbled hybrid omni-shielding for a more resilient field. Most of my drones got destroyed…which should have the first clue of meddling, but I had managed to get a good scan of the plasma bolt that speared through my barrier.
He wouldn't get the drop on me like that again.
I portaled into another room, where a line of omni-projectors formed holographic images of various alien species.
"What is that?" I didn't startle when Faultline questioned me aloud, taking my right side. "I recognize the Rachni but…" She was out of costume, exposing her sharp features, wearing a white dress shirt with rolled up sleeves black slacks with steel toed boots.
Better than the abomination that was her choice of hot pink, plaid and lime green for her costume. And it was less tacky than the America bullshit Miss Militia dressed up in.
God some cape outfit hurt my eyes, and my meager fashion sense. I stuck to just grey, though I was leaning towards changing the color of my suit to green. Which again made me focus on the Jiralhanae and why I felt like I was being a fucking dumbass.
I blinked when I registered she was waiting for me to reply.
"Alien species, some of them contemporaries of the Rachni, while the rest came long after them." I gestured to the Asari, the Salarians and the Turians. "These species were the main powers of their galaxy, the Citadel Council and the next race to fall into the Reaper trap."
"The Mass Relay network?" Melanie asked and I nodded to clarify it for her.
"They ruled well over a trillion sapients in their time, and were maneuvered into war with the Rachni when the Reapers used their agents to control the Rachni." Faultline recoiled as I expected, Mastering was serious business especially on the scale of billions of souls.
"How many species have you…documented?"
"Just under sixty intelligent species are what I've got access to at the moment, though not all of them have especially unique technology." The Humanx lived with over twenty species in their galaxy, but technology wasn't that different barring one or two superweapons.
It was closer to the differences between militaries on Earth, increased or decreased sophistication or specializations toward the appropriate niche of a nation state. And some of the species were actually documented primitive cultures that offered little besides unique outlooks and patterns of thought.
Which was nice.
Faultline started as she noticed one of the holograms depicting a Fire National with dark hair and golden eyes. "Why…is a human among the extinct alien races?"
"There's a finite number of sounds that can be created by biological means, we're not the first…and we're certainly not the last humans to evolve on an Earth."
"That…that does not seem natural."
"All the eras where my tech comes from had or had humans at some point in their history, sometimes they're members of the galactic community other times they're the precursors for alien species. The world is a stranger place than we could have ever dreamed."
Each 'humanity' had differences, some subtle while others were more overt and lead them to different paths. The humans of the Systems Alliance had a different evolutionary history with haplogroups being unique. The humans of the Humanx had genes altering their brain development that allowed for limited telepathic abilities.
The humans that enslaved the early Tetatae had higher levels of DNA from other hominid species, and subtle differences in ancestral lines based on DNA from their ruins. The species of human who predated the aliens of the third gate had seemingly vanished and their DNA had traces of some form of genetic instructions.
It was similar to the genetic memory of the Rachni, but implanted by means beyond that of any species I had on hand.
"That still raises more questions than answers." I shrugged at her, lightly bumping her shoulder as I portaled to my actual destination.
I didn't have the answers, not yet.
The White Lotus room already had a few people loitering in it, Taylor was serving herself a cup of fruit punch she had bought from a store, Grace was making grand gestures at Amelia while Victoria was curled up in a blanket, Dean keeping a good eye on her. Charlotte was talking with Sveta off to the side, with Theo at her left.
Elle was here, playing Portal 2 with Dinah and Missy, a copy I had acquired from one of the thirty five worlds near-identical to my own, through the Internet. Bet had Portal 1, but their version of 2 wasn't coming out until next year. Dinah could use her power in the near-term to cheat, but she wasn't into the idea so she watched Missy and Elle play for a bit.
I wouldn't call this a party so much as just a moment to relax for a bit, and I wasn't given much of a choice in the matter. In the sense that it's hard to say no when Taylor is just trying to help.
There wasn't any food, and I knew the fridge was stocked so I grabbed an apron as I slipped past the small divisions of people. Plus no one's eaten breakfast since it's still morning.
I'm going to cook and hope that'll make me feel better.
September 24th, 2011. 10:00AM
Basilia Rubio
Carne asada with papa sizzled on the stove, as I was close to finishing it up, making enough for everyone to eat. I hummed happily, feeling in a better mood if only by a small but reasonable amount. Elle had stepped away from playing, and was watching me cook with her big bright eyes.
She was glancing down at my frilly white apron, which I only used for the aesthetic and little else. It said Kiss the Cook, and I nodded to myself and congratulated myself on my choice of clothing.
"Something wrong Elle?" I was tempted to call her Ellie but didn't bother with the effort.
She shook her head. "I…just wanted to know if you were okay." A pulse of unease hit, and I felt my smile diminish. "You've been really broody, and I…"
I kept my voice down. "Dunno what I'm feeling…but I'll deal with it the best I can, don't worry too much." I wasn't going to say she shouldn't worry because that might worry her more. "How about you? Meet any cute boys?" I waggled my eyebrows and she blushed.
"No. No cute boys…I've been talking to some spirits, trying to find where the Fallen are hiding."
"No luck?" I lightly moved the food with my spatula one last time before flipping off the electric stove.
Elle pouted. "I haven't found their hiding spot, but I think they might have found a rift into the spirit world to hide…whatever they're doing with the Teeth." I frowned at that.
The Teeth had vanished with only one cape escaping alive besides the one being sent to a specialized Parahuman-containing prison. Spree obviously.
"You got any good gossip from the spirits?"
"They know there's a resonance of wrongness in the air, bad…tainted smells." I took the time to analyze the statement.
Ezekiel was a shaman, which meant he could have spirits on his side, doing his bidding. "Dark spirits perhaps? Maybe even Extortus spirits if he can make a few." Useful ones were definitely possible, but there was a range from useless inert cancer to actual uncontrollable cancer. I was pretty sure someone like Ezekiel wouldn't give two shits about working with monsters.
I pulled the pan off from the stove, and Elle helped me by grabbing plates from the small kitchen of the living room styled break room. I didn't use bending to move the food over though I could have.
I quickly and efficiently served the food, sticking my tongue out as I used busy work to distract myself from social interactions.
"I'll pass out the food." Elle added herself into my space, smiling up at me. I grinned back and patted her shoulder affectionately. She flitted from person to person, though lingered longer around Dinah. She giggled at something the Precog said before moving on.
Missy was eating fast, likely because she wouldn't be staying long because of her parents.
"This…isn't a little much for you right?" Taylor leaned over my right side, brushing back a bang with warmth in her eyes.
"Nope. This is just a little get-together, I can handle this fine." I placed my hands on my hips, rocking back and forth on my heels. "It's just been a while, but this is nice." I took off my needless apron, folding it and putting it on the nice granite kitchen counter.
"Can we talk?" She looked hopeful and I shrugged, not meeting her eyes as I eyed the stove again.
"Sure…this about not asking for your help with finding out what happened to me?" I was blunt, a spike of irritation that was hard to ignore popping up.
"I…yes."
"I…I'll be honest and say I don't really…want your help." She looked hurt by what I had said and I knew it had come out wrong. "It's not you…this is just personal, something I want to do on my own." I clasped my hands together, and could tell they were getting clammy. "I know it might not be smart…but I never said I was good at asking for help."
I wasn't bitter. Much.
"Are you sure?" I scowled and she backed off, and I took a seat on the table, waving over a fork with metalbending. I shifted my attention to my food, and narrowed my eyes. I think I put in enough salt.
Taylor took the seat to the right, looking over to the small and cozy little party. I stuffed my face with food, wetting my chapped lips.
"I…really do think you should talk about…about what happened to you." I bristled with indignant anger.
"You're not my shrink!" She leaned back at my venomous tone.
"Sorry…" She apologized as I looked down at my hands, and noted my more muscular arms. There were a lot of things I didn't want to talk about or think about and being ripped away from my dimension was just one those buttons you shouldn't push.
"How…have you checked on your Earth?" I blinked but didn't ignore Taylor as I sat down to eat. I typed into my Omni, gesturing for her to look.
"There are about thirty six worlds, with one of them being mine while the others are alternates, with only miniscule differences." We're talking down on the scale of maybe one or two events being different, a celebrity not dying, a storm hitting at a different angle. "I could easily tap into their internet and find what I'm looking for but…"
"You're nervous?" She got some of what I was feeling but not all of it.
"I'm starting to realize I had the right idea in keeping my world isolated from your shitshow of a multiverse." I opened up a news article from the Seattle Times, and Taylor skimmed the first sentences.
"Your Earth is dealing with a pandemic? It's…how bad is it?"
"Apparently in my country we're over a third the way to the number of people killed by the Spanish Flu." Everything about how things had gone wrong were disgusting, and I had the idea of just opening up a portal and doing it myself…
"So why not make up a vaccine or something…send it out and…" Her eyes widened in realization.
"You can't open portals to your dimension?" Sveta threw up her hands in self defense when my head snapped to her. I smiled carefully, doing my best not to show my frustration.
I wasn't successful.
"Certain realities have much more resistance to hyperdimensional phase alterations. They're too…solid, too difficult to affect without incredible amounts of energy. The amount of energy I use to open a human-sized portal only lets me open windows big enough to let signals pass through." And the bandwidth wasn't what one would call high. "Opening a stable portal to home would destroy the DPN and the end result…would not be favorable."
I ran a simulation, and let other curious onlookers in on the results. A portal opened, and then massive cracks in reality spread outwards physics warped out of control, shards of higher dimensional energy deranging matter and ripping apart local existence.
"Holy shit…." The simulation ran its course, the area of altered reality stabilizing after several kilometers of destruction and mayhem. I didn't know who said it but I didn't really care.
"To cut explanations short, my world is so boring it won't let big fun things like altering the laws of physics happen much. Plus it's the center of the strange barrier set up between dimensions that keeps Entities out. It's also why no benders and spirits have shown up just yet."
"That sucks ass." Grace gave me her sympathy in her own weird way
"Maybe. But it's also kind of a relief because it means people can't just barge in on my home. Plus it's temporary…I'm guessing the barrier will be thin enough for macro-scale navigation by sometime next year." I think there was a local spirit world but the barrier between them was thick and dense due to the calcification of reality. "Plus it gives me a piece of the puzzle due to this range of dimensions being the impact zone."
"Impact zone?" Taylor flicked her gaze over to me, eyebrows uplifted. I gestured and gave them limited scans and images of several selected realities.
"The point where our two multiverses were colliding and some third influx of vast energy and force sent out a wave of phase-shift that's long since passed the superluminal barrier." I opened up news articles from Earths that diverged years to decades ago.
"Tragedy. School is destroyed by an unknown event, hundreds killed." Taylor looked horrified. "What…is this?"
"My World should have taken the hit…of whatever the fuck caused all this metaphysical bullshit to manifest, but the damage was distributed across millions of realities, if not billions, including some on your end. But inhabited dimensions took the least of this third factor."
A probe found a reality where Earth had been torn in half and the moon had been mass scattered, dozens in fact were like this, while most others took superficial damage in comparison.
"It's a gigantic clue to pinpoint the cause of all of this…but it's a little harrowing and a little nerve wracking. Really…it might be best to leave this out of our little get-together. Please." My voice was louder than before, and there was some time spent on everything getting back on track.
I continued to eat, enjoying my own cooking and being thankful I hadn't managed to fuck this up. It was a nostalgic taste, and it felt…just as far depressing that the only option to replicating what mom and grandma could cook was through me.
I finished my food quickly, and when I left the table to get more I was suddenly nudged by Taylor onto the sofa. Elle and Missy weren't playing anymore, instead shifting to a game of Uno including Dinah. I blinked when I saw they had managed to get a copy of Smash Bros Ultimate for a dimension that diverged four years ago.
Apparently Waluigi was a fighter in this reality, and it was one of the few divergences I could find…beyond having a different president in power. But that didn't really matter much to me. Things were generally better in that reality, which was kind of annoying in a lot of ways.
"You said you wanted a distraction didn't you?" Taylor took up the space on my right, and I could feel her hair tickling my shoulders. Multiple others picked up controllers, and I took in some fresh air.
I was frustrated and angry and a little freaked out with almost losing a teammate to a fate worse than death. This was the first real setback, we couldn't find our current enemies because we had a shaman using human super-tech, and the Siberian and Mannequin were somewhere out there doing their thing.
The Fallen, or at least one of their branches was getting help from the groups trying to invade this dimension, both of them imperialistic and malicious and out of the control of Cauldron since Contessa hasn't ganked one of them.
Though whether that was because she couldn't, didn't want to, or was suitably busy taking out other threats I had no clue because we very rarely talked. Plus the fact I was still working on the vials, and on trying to replicate Shard flesh. Which was taking forever and was harder than I thought.
I was also going to follow my intuition on why the Jiralhanae made me feel stupid about something, but I would do that later when I was a little less stressed.
I held the controller, flicking my tongue out as I thought about doing something other than sulking and lingering on things I can't change because I'm not a god.
I picked Kirby, and tried to figure out the controls since I didn't play the Switch my brother had even once. I moved him around on the screen, for a bit before I was suddenly attacked by Mario. I was knocked off the platform and fell to my death.
I glared at an innocent looking Amelia. "Bitch."
"Bimbo." She insulted back and I narrowed my eyes at her.
Let's just say the following matches were intense and leave it at that.
September 24th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
"My intel's been good hasn't it?" I rubbed my hands together, talking to myself as I sat down within the rig that had been set up to house victim's of the Fallen.
"Are you talking to me?" Rain pointed to himself and I flushed, shaking my head.
"Sorry but no…I've been a little out of sorts and ended up here." I replied back to the teenager, brushing back my hair since I had my helmet folded back.
Since getting a plasma blast to the back I had been assembling every bit of data I had on hand to chase down the Fallen. Unlike the branch trying to sink its fingers into the city, they didn't have the same ability to hide in the spirit world. The Rachni certainly did and could ignore Mama Mathers.
So I…directed sweeps of areas of high Fallen concentration and the PRT had found more hard evidence of Fallen crimes as well as Valefor's many, many indiscretions. Dragon did the same, again shielded by the dozens of a Brood Lords we had at our disposal.
Rachni reproduction was insane, and I estimated they had broken past six and a half million. About a hundred and thirty thousand of those would be at a scale above house cats. Over a thousand Brood Warriors, with their Auxiliary brothers commanding over one hundred thousand soldiers.
Now not all of them were fully grown barring the workers who took less than a day to mature, the soldiers instead took several days and the warriors took one to two weeks. Current estimates of their growth rate meant they would hit over twenty three million by the end of the year.
By the time the end came, at their current number of queens they would have a hundred and eighty million members. I expected that if we lived past that they should have a billion by the time Ward was supposed to start. In twenty years they should handedly outnumber Earth Bet though it would take centuries to outnumber all of humanity.
Though they would likely induce population controls long before reaching that point, and there would be a good amount of growth from my own species by then too.
My own world should pass nine billion by 2040, and who knows where we would be in two or three hundred years.
I sat down on a chair, opening up my Omni to look up my project with the Vorcha and my decision on what I was supposed to with…what I had on hand.
Dozens of extinct races were at my fingertips, and with Panacea bringing back extinct species was a cinch. But…there were so many implications, morally, ethically, on what the right choice was. Their time was past, and bringing them back wouldn't bring back their culture, their way of life, it was all gone, lost to the annals of time.
And without flash cloning, it would take most species years to grow to maturity. Salarians wouldn't be sexually mature until twelve to fifteen for males and females respectively, Asari grow at the same rate of humans, but slow past sixteen and finish physical maturity at twenty five.
It would take them literal centuries to reproduce…but from my perusal of their biology in times of population bottleneck, they can reproduce earlier if they meld often enough or out of biological necessity. To prevent inbreeding leading to genetic infirmity, they can mate with spirits, though it does cause some oddities.
Weird genetic traits and such.
Salarian newts can talk, read and walk by nine months and by the time they're three they understand math, spatial relationships and logic. Which makes sense, their brains are bioengineered bullshit that lets them perform calculus, geometry and trigonometry at high levels greater than most human savants or even some calculators.
Turians mentally mature more slowly than humans up to age seven but catch up by the time they're twenty. They're ovoviviparous, and it takes them about two months to pop out a little baby Turian. Most species took around the time it takes humans, though some take only a couple years to mature.
Krogan are physically and sexually mature at about two, but culturally usually don't breed until their 30s due to their Rites. Plus their crests continue to harden throughout their life, with some modest growth over the centuries too.
Lucky bastards are biologically immortal too, and can outlive Scion if given the chance.
Vorcha aren't unlike them in some ways, they grow quickly and are mature by age one and grow and adapt quickly. Their pluripotent cell clusters let them evolve in weeks instead of lifetimes, and they could adapt to any niche with time and breed fast and hard.
In two years a few colonies of Vorcha wouldn't be hard to swing, but I didn't have the time and patience and Panacea wasn't comfortable altering them much. Best we could do was double or triple their lifespans without compromising who they are as a species.
I could bring them back with the least difficulty, they grew up more quickly, meaning less labor than with other species but they were weaker and far less dangerous than the Krogan. I didn't have the manpower to raise an entire species from the ground-up.
But the Rachni did, and I felt like it wasn't a bad thing to give the Vorcha a chance at something more. Looking into their history, into the hints and puzzle pieces told me they had a glimmer of something more.
They had culture, and their blood shamans and their innate talent for the veil-rip was both intriguing and scary as shit. Checking the Volus let me peek into the programs they had for Vorcha breeding pits, essentially civilizing the Vorcha and treating them like people instead of cannon fodder.
It was an option…but it wasn't a needed one, the Rachni had been some cosmic accident or destiny in action. But bringing back the Vorcha would be an action I committed myself, with massive long term consequences. The number of alien species within ten light years wound go from three to four including the Entities.
Was that a bad thing though? To give a species another chance, to let them evolve beyond where they had used to be. And there was a lot of room.
I don't think today was the best day to make such a monumental decision.
I glanced over at the former Fallen and victims of the Fallen, their numbers growing day by day as the Rachni did their job in kicking the absolute shit out of that damn cult. One of them was suffering from what had to be eezo poisoning, and that had been corrected through nanobot surgery and gene therapy to concentrate eezo into nodes.
Keeping the encapsulated eezo in her brain from causing any trouble was delicate work that needed an AutoDoc and Amelia. She could probably naturally use biotics though she wouldn't be very strong without an Amp. Without the device she'll only be able to use basic biotic sleights.
Regardless she was alright, and we were straggling our enemies before they could arrive in our city. The Elite were keeping their distance and the same applied to the Adepts and the Yangban were busy getting fucked up on their own.
I absently generated a Warp, a sphere of entropic energy that I infused with the element of burning fire into a hot almost-plasma. I crushed both elements out of existence and leaned back. Everything was going well.
But I couldn't stop the niggling feeling that this was going to be complicated.
AN: Here's the last main chapter of Deviation, with only one more interlude remaining as I've already started Arc 14. It should be as long as this Arc, and put more focus on the players operating in the city, and what gets done with them or by them.
We're also at about the halfway point of my current planned number of Arcs, though I might cut an Arc or two off if they don't feel necessary. Either way I've gone a long way, and Victories of the Soul is currently my longest story. As well as the only one to survive past me losing the plot, and leaving them to rot.
Regardless I hope you enjoy what I write.
September 24th, 2011. 8:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I tucked my legs, laying my head against the wall. New ideas came surging in, new technologies interlaced into the network of information I had connected to my mind. This gate wasn't as species rich as the first gate or as bare as the second, a total of five star empires existing in the aftermath of some event twenty thousand years before their time.
The Yonhet are one of the oldest species, surviving the Fall where others hadn't or if they had they fled to parts unknown with what I was looking at. They were an amphibious species with some small resemblance to humans. They ruled an empire of a thousand star systems, with fleets of reliable technology and might. They had a single client species, the Sharquoi which had been a Bronze Age species were uplifted as laborers and living siege engines.
They were treated respectfully if nothing else, and they were allowed to work in other fields if they were better suited for it.
They are rivals with two other species, the Helioskrill and the Jiralhanae. The Helioskrill were a species of avian-like pursuit mesocarnivores, rapidly evolving atop the ruins of some dead species. The Helioskrill were about six feet tall and weighed no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. They were rapidly breeding with a mean streak a mile wide, and at the time I was looking into they were attempting to claim the entire Orion Arm for themselves.
So like lightweight Turians mixed with Krogan, with some Salarian excitability on top of that.
The Jiralhanae were…complicated and oddly familiar, like I had heard the term before and forgotten it in the daze of eight months of bullshit. They were the product of multiple cycles of civilizational collapse, with their current iteration being the fourth instance between the Fall and their era. They were savage and naturally violent but the countless generations caused a gradual shift, whether it was natural selection, some genetic project or cultural shift…
They changed from violent Master-Packs towards becoming warrior monks, refining their savagery and violence into a new kind of culture and way of life. They learned to believe in some type of Mantle, uniting their peoples and reaching the stars on their own merits.
Their empire was of greater scale than the Yonhet, two thousand worlds under their domain and the Helioskrill were larger still. The fourth species were the Huraggoy, a cybernetic species that were a merger of two alien species due to the crippling of both their biologies at some point.
They were the most sophisticated and advanced species, though they had the least world with a mere three hundred systems. Half their biology came from methane breathers, who used atmospheric carbon, methane and hydrogen peroxide and turned it into oxygen.
It was…let's say very odd biology.
Their symbiotic partners insinuate themselves into their biology, nano-mechanical networks augmenting them even with how reduced they had become. Both species were heavily crippled by something but they were advanced nonetheless with their ability to rapidly reverse engineer technology.
The fifth empire was ruled by the T'Von, a large raptorial species averaging seven to eight feet tall and three hundred pounds. They were explorers, sending their fleets out into the abyss to search for new worlds. Fifteen hundred worlds were under their belt, and another five hundred were ruled by species they had discovered or allied with in the pursuit of knowledge, glory and wealth.
They had…larger ships than the Citadel races for sure, though they were considerably smaller than the vessels of generations past, with floating wrecks found to be nearly thirty kilometers in length. Most of their capital ships were at the two to four kilometer range, which was…well big as shit but not as ridiculous as past species.
Their fleets are smaller, but have comparable or greater overall mass regardless due to their larger bulk. Their technology was quite advanced, but their maneuverability was lower than what could be done with the Mass Effect. They used some method of dimensional transportation, traveling in higher dimensions along specific pathways.
Which…didn't seem possible with any of the eleven dimensions, and the only thing above that would be th—
There was a light knock on the door, snapping me out of my urge to let myself fall away into the fuzz of knowledge buzzing in my mind.
"Come in." I muttered angrily, and the door opened to reveal Taylor. I ignored her attempts to look at my face, simply staring at my legs and their penguin pajamas.
Again I had been swept away by the currents of something much larger than me, subsumed into a greater being, more whole than I had once been. I had fought back the grip of the Butcher with my own hands, diverted and opened the chakras of Victoria's in a way few shamans and indeed few beings in general were capable of.
The incantation was the standard for controlling, damaging or manipulating Hosts. They all had certain weaknesses, the price paid for residing within the channels of the soul.
Like any spirit it was possible to call upon them, whether in the general or the specific. The general provided much, there was a diversity in the powers you could invoke, the specific could overrule such powers in their control over the specific.
I had called upon the shards to give up what was needed for Nike, invoked her name to provide her the path. And she ripped the Butcher right out of her host herself, with cleansing spiritual fire.
I had managed to reconfigure her, and it reminded me what the purpose of the Administrator was. Our bond was different, we were facets, reflections of one another, but we still had the myriad abilities of an administrator. Even if some of those more esoteric shard abilities have been restricted, replaced or melded together with my…more ephemeral powers.
It was a reminder that a fundamental aspect of my very being had been changed against my will. That I had been used and experimented on to save a world that very much seemed like it wanted to kill me.
I never liked thinking about it…it only created a sense of revulsion and violation and forced helplessness and…
I just didn't want to deal with those thoughts.
"Basilia?" I glanced up to meet Taylor's eye, darting past her bust since I was looking up. I tried not to nervously chew on my lip, wrapping my arms around myself to keep warm with the cold setting in.
Brockton Bay was a far too cold city for my taste, and fall hasn't even started yet.
"Mhmm?" I didn't feel like using words, leaning against the wall and a wave of melancholy striking me. Taylor sat down next to me, also tucking her legs which were of course longer and took up more space.
She moved carefully and I froze up when she placed her hands on my face, lightly brushing her fingers against my cheeks. I leaned into her touch, anxiety doing it's best to kick my ass.
"You should take a break…" It wasn't a command but it felt like one, and I couldn't help but pull a face.
Taylor looked taken aback so I smoothed my expression. "I can still tinker a bit right…? I like tinkering."
"I'm not your boss, if you want to tinker a bit I'm not going to stop you." It was surprisingly sweet to see her tone down her nosiness with me, since usually Taylor was more…pushy.
Not as bad as Skitter was though.
"Yeah…let's go."
___
September 24th, 2011. 9:30AM
Basilia Rubio
I watched some modified manufacturing machines synthesize the strange polymer the Yonhet has gained from studying twenty thousand year old ruins. Some strange and exotic material using lithium and niobocene to create a substance resembling ferrocene.
Apparently they used it in all their armor, though they were heavily regulated to keep any incidents from happening. They used highly toxic precursor materials, but I had managed to figure out safer manufacturing methods with Clarke's help.
Guy was busy building up his own tech base again, and he had built several sets of armor for himself using the custom armor omni-fabs. I could see one of them in the vicinity, one that made him about about six foot five with its large bulk yet maintained a friendly and warm golden hue.
That one had been from scans of dozens of tons of materials affected by Scion, using sightings of him to look for anything unusual. Scans of Kiyohime, scans of New Wave and various forcefield capes. He built a hyper-compact power source, a dimensional energy tap better than my multidimensional power cores.
Scans of Citrine taken by Faultline finished off the suit.
It was a suit designed to generate a tunable defensive shield, one capable of protecting Hero by canceling the wavelengths of very dangerous power effects. It also served the role of augmenting his strength by diverting wavelengths of kinetic energy and other forces.
It had also cost me the equivalent of a small frigate worth of resources, making it impractical for large-scale production. It was…too small, too sophisticated to mass manufacture with ease. Though making a lesser and easier to produce version might be possible with some work.
I was a good tinker but I wasn't god, and couldn't reproduce tech better than what they could build. I was like Masamune if he could build his own tech besides just production lines. Pulling off a String Theory wasn't possible…with a compact device anyway. If I generated a positive gravity field inside the planet, carving out a chunk of the planet was easy enough.
But since that needed to be in the form of a million ton ship, I wouldn't call it compact. There was a lot of new tech to decipher and implement, from AI technologies, to better metrics for gravity manipulation, and new materials like the Nanolaminate the Yonhet draped atop the titanium spaceframe of their warships.
Some type of nanostructured and chemically altered titanium mixed with elastic polymers and nanotube reinforcement to an absurd degree. Plus some strange tweaks through modifications to the strong force made it a fascinating substance.
I looked down to my hands at a Yonhet weapon, who used coilguns and advanced chemical guns, though they had access to high energy laser cannons while the Hurragoy went for biomechanical guns, explosive crystal technology, and ion pulse weaponry. Their heavy weapons were guided fragmenting crystal rounds capable of exploding into firestorms.
War crimes aplenty in that.
The Jiralhanae went for big heavy railguns, plasma, light-gas guns, and their heavy weapon is a gravity cannon designed to crush building and tanks flat.
Helioskrill had plasma, electroshock, along with particle weapons and made extremely liberal use of radioactive particles and chemical weapons. Their heavy weapon they called the Hellbore, using special means to detonate a nuclear device and form the blast into a directional beam within the barrel.
T'Von had particle beam weapons, coilguns with a wide variety of fillers within the rounds themselves, like high explosives, radioactive elements, or other such payloads. Multi-stage hybrid weapons weren't uncommon, and smart missiles were one of their specialties. Wait…
Back to the gun in my hand.
It was large, and on its own without mass effect augmentation this thing hits as hard as an anti-material rifle. With it it was basically a Widow, and would puncture tank armor. Weapons on the scale of cape battles had tampered off a lot in what could be done without going lethal, though there were some specialty weapons and electrified nets and hardlight containment fields. Plus actual energy barriers, using particles modulated into a solid form by tweaks to higher dimensional reality.
Plasma barriers effectively, and I was already planning on integrating them into my cobbled hybrid omni-shielding for a more resilient field. Most of my drones got destroyed…which should have the first clue of meddling, but I had managed to get a good scan of the plasma bolt that speared through my barrier.
He wouldn't get the drop on me like that again.
I portaled into another room, where a line of omni-projectors formed holographic images of various alien species.
"What is that?" I didn't startle when Faultline questioned me aloud, taking my right side. "I recognize the Rachni but…" She was out of costume, exposing her sharp features, wearing a white dress shirt with rolled up sleeves black slacks with steel toed boots.
Better than the abomination that was her choice of hot pink, plaid and lime green for her costume. And it was less tacky than the America bullshit Miss Militia dressed up in.
God some cape outfit hurt my eyes, and my meager fashion sense. I stuck to just grey, though I was leaning towards changing the color of my suit to green. Which again made me focus on the Jiralhanae and why I felt like I was being a fucking dumbass.
I blinked when I registered she was waiting for me to reply.
"Alien species, some of them contemporaries of the Rachni, while the rest came long after them." I gestured to the Asari, the Salarians and the Turians. "These species were the main powers of their galaxy, the Citadel Council and the next race to fall into the Reaper trap."
"The Mass Relay network?" Melanie asked and I nodded to clarify it for her.
"They ruled well over a trillion sapients in their time, and were maneuvered into war with the Rachni when the Reapers used their agents to control the Rachni." Faultline recoiled as I expected, Mastering was serious business especially on the scale of billions of souls.
"How many species have you…documented?"
"Just under sixty intelligent species are what I've got access to at the moment, though not all of them have especially unique technology." The Humanx lived with over twenty species in their galaxy, but technology wasn't that different barring one or two superweapons.
It was closer to the differences between militaries on Earth, increased or decreased sophistication or specializations toward the appropriate niche of a nation state. And some of the species were actually documented primitive cultures that offered little besides unique outlooks and patterns of thought.
Which was nice.
Faultline started as she noticed one of the holograms depicting a Fire National with dark hair and golden eyes. "Why…is a human among the extinct alien races?"
"There's a finite number of sounds that can be created by biological means, we're not the first…and we're certainly not the last humans to evolve on an Earth."
"That…that does not seem natural."
"All the eras where my tech comes from had or had humans at some point in their history, sometimes they're members of the galactic community other times they're the precursors for alien species. The world is a stranger place than we could have ever dreamed."
Each 'humanity' had differences, some subtle while others were more overt and lead them to different paths. The humans of the Systems Alliance had a different evolutionary history with haplogroups being unique. The humans of the Humanx had genes altering their brain development that allowed for limited telepathic abilities.
The humans that enslaved the early Tetatae had higher levels of DNA from other hominid species, and subtle differences in ancestral lines based on DNA from their ruins. The species of human who predated the aliens of the third gate had seemingly vanished and their DNA had traces of some form of genetic instructions.
It was similar to the genetic memory of the Rachni, but implanted by means beyond that of any species I had on hand.
"That still raises more questions than answers." I shrugged at her, lightly bumping her shoulder as I portaled to my actual destination.
I didn't have the answers, not yet.
The White Lotus room already had a few people loitering in it, Taylor was serving herself a cup of fruit punch she had bought from a store, Grace was making grand gestures at Amelia while Victoria was curled up in a blanket, Dean keeping a good eye on her. Charlotte was talking with Sveta off to the side, with Theo at her left.
Elle was here, playing Portal 2 with Dinah and Missy, a copy I had acquired from one of the thirty five worlds near-identical to my own, through the Internet. Bet had Portal 1, but their version of 2 wasn't coming out until next year. Dinah could use her power in the near-term to cheat, but she wasn't into the idea so she watched Missy and Elle play for a bit.
I wouldn't call this a party so much as just a moment to relax for a bit, and I wasn't given much of a choice in the matter. In the sense that it's hard to say no when Taylor is just trying to help.
There wasn't any food, and I knew the fridge was stocked so I grabbed an apron as I slipped past the small divisions of people. Plus no one's eaten breakfast since it's still morning.
I'm going to cook and hope that'll make me feel better.
___
September 24th, 2011. 10:00AM
Basilia Rubio
Carne asada with papa sizzled on the stove, as I was close to finishing it up, making enough for everyone to eat. I hummed happily, feeling in a better mood if only by a small but reasonable amount. Elle had stepped away from playing, and was watching me cook with her big bright eyes.
She was glancing down at my frilly white apron, which I only used for the aesthetic and little else. It said Kiss the Cook, and I nodded to myself and congratulated myself on my choice of clothing.
"Something wrong Elle?" I was tempted to call her Ellie but didn't bother with the effort.
She shook her head. "I…just wanted to know if you were okay." A pulse of unease hit, and I felt my smile diminish. "You've been really broody, and I…"
I kept my voice down. "Dunno what I'm feeling…but I'll deal with it the best I can, don't worry too much." I wasn't going to say she shouldn't worry because that might worry her more. "How about you? Meet any cute boys?" I waggled my eyebrows and she blushed.
"No. No cute boys…I've been talking to some spirits, trying to find where the Fallen are hiding."
"No luck?" I lightly moved the food with my spatula one last time before flipping off the electric stove.
Elle pouted. "I haven't found their hiding spot, but I think they might have found a rift into the spirit world to hide…whatever they're doing with the Teeth." I frowned at that.
The Teeth had vanished with only one cape escaping alive besides the one being sent to a specialized Parahuman-containing prison. Spree obviously.
"You got any good gossip from the spirits?"
"They know there's a resonance of wrongness in the air, bad…tainted smells." I took the time to analyze the statement.
Ezekiel was a shaman, which meant he could have spirits on his side, doing his bidding. "Dark spirits perhaps? Maybe even Extortus spirits if he can make a few." Useful ones were definitely possible, but there was a range from useless inert cancer to actual uncontrollable cancer. I was pretty sure someone like Ezekiel wouldn't give two shits about working with monsters.
I pulled the pan off from the stove, and Elle helped me by grabbing plates from the small kitchen of the living room styled break room. I didn't use bending to move the food over though I could have.
I quickly and efficiently served the food, sticking my tongue out as I used busy work to distract myself from social interactions.
"I'll pass out the food." Elle added herself into my space, smiling up at me. I grinned back and patted her shoulder affectionately. She flitted from person to person, though lingered longer around Dinah. She giggled at something the Precog said before moving on.
Missy was eating fast, likely because she wouldn't be staying long because of her parents.
"This…isn't a little much for you right?" Taylor leaned over my right side, brushing back a bang with warmth in her eyes.
"Nope. This is just a little get-together, I can handle this fine." I placed my hands on my hips, rocking back and forth on my heels. "It's just been a while, but this is nice." I took off my needless apron, folding it and putting it on the nice granite kitchen counter.
"Can we talk?" She looked hopeful and I shrugged, not meeting her eyes as I eyed the stove again.
"Sure…this about not asking for your help with finding out what happened to me?" I was blunt, a spike of irritation that was hard to ignore popping up.
"I…yes."
"I…I'll be honest and say I don't really…want your help." She looked hurt by what I had said and I knew it had come out wrong. "It's not you…this is just personal, something I want to do on my own." I clasped my hands together, and could tell they were getting clammy. "I know it might not be smart…but I never said I was good at asking for help."
I wasn't bitter. Much.
"Are you sure?" I scowled and she backed off, and I took a seat on the table, waving over a fork with metalbending. I shifted my attention to my food, and narrowed my eyes. I think I put in enough salt.
Taylor took the seat to the right, looking over to the small and cozy little party. I stuffed my face with food, wetting my chapped lips.
"I…really do think you should talk about…about what happened to you." I bristled with indignant anger.
"You're not my shrink!" She leaned back at my venomous tone.
"Sorry…" She apologized as I looked down at my hands, and noted my more muscular arms. There were a lot of things I didn't want to talk about or think about and being ripped away from my dimension was just one those buttons you shouldn't push.
"How…have you checked on your Earth?" I blinked but didn't ignore Taylor as I sat down to eat. I typed into my Omni, gesturing for her to look.
"There are about thirty six worlds, with one of them being mine while the others are alternates, with only miniscule differences." We're talking down on the scale of maybe one or two events being different, a celebrity not dying, a storm hitting at a different angle. "I could easily tap into their internet and find what I'm looking for but…"
"You're nervous?" She got some of what I was feeling but not all of it.
"I'm starting to realize I had the right idea in keeping my world isolated from your shitshow of a multiverse." I opened up a news article from the Seattle Times, and Taylor skimmed the first sentences.
"Your Earth is dealing with a pandemic? It's…how bad is it?"
"Apparently in my country we're over a third the way to the number of people killed by the Spanish Flu." Everything about how things had gone wrong were disgusting, and I had the idea of just opening up a portal and doing it myself…
"So why not make up a vaccine or something…send it out and…" Her eyes widened in realization.
"You can't open portals to your dimension?" Sveta threw up her hands in self defense when my head snapped to her. I smiled carefully, doing my best not to show my frustration.
I wasn't successful.
"Certain realities have much more resistance to hyperdimensional phase alterations. They're too…solid, too difficult to affect without incredible amounts of energy. The amount of energy I use to open a human-sized portal only lets me open windows big enough to let signals pass through." And the bandwidth wasn't what one would call high. "Opening a stable portal to home would destroy the DPN and the end result…would not be favorable."
I ran a simulation, and let other curious onlookers in on the results. A portal opened, and then massive cracks in reality spread outwards physics warped out of control, shards of higher dimensional energy deranging matter and ripping apart local existence.
"Holy shit…." The simulation ran its course, the area of altered reality stabilizing after several kilometers of destruction and mayhem. I didn't know who said it but I didn't really care.
"To cut explanations short, my world is so boring it won't let big fun things like altering the laws of physics happen much. Plus it's the center of the strange barrier set up between dimensions that keeps Entities out. It's also why no benders and spirits have shown up just yet."
"That sucks ass." Grace gave me her sympathy in her own weird way
"Maybe. But it's also kind of a relief because it means people can't just barge in on my home. Plus it's temporary…I'm guessing the barrier will be thin enough for macro-scale navigation by sometime next year." I think there was a local spirit world but the barrier between them was thick and dense due to the calcification of reality. "Plus it gives me a piece of the puzzle due to this range of dimensions being the impact zone."
"Impact zone?" Taylor flicked her gaze over to me, eyebrows uplifted. I gestured and gave them limited scans and images of several selected realities.
"The point where our two multiverses were colliding and some third influx of vast energy and force sent out a wave of phase-shift that's long since passed the superluminal barrier." I opened up news articles from Earths that diverged years to decades ago.
"Tragedy. School is destroyed by an unknown event, hundreds killed." Taylor looked horrified. "What…is this?"
"My World should have taken the hit…of whatever the fuck caused all this metaphysical bullshit to manifest, but the damage was distributed across millions of realities, if not billions, including some on your end. But inhabited dimensions took the least of this third factor."
A probe found a reality where Earth had been torn in half and the moon had been mass scattered, dozens in fact were like this, while most others took superficial damage in comparison.
"It's a gigantic clue to pinpoint the cause of all of this…but it's a little harrowing and a little nerve wracking. Really…it might be best to leave this out of our little get-together. Please." My voice was louder than before, and there was some time spent on everything getting back on track.
I continued to eat, enjoying my own cooking and being thankful I hadn't managed to fuck this up. It was a nostalgic taste, and it felt…just as far depressing that the only option to replicating what mom and grandma could cook was through me.
I finished my food quickly, and when I left the table to get more I was suddenly nudged by Taylor onto the sofa. Elle and Missy weren't playing anymore, instead shifting to a game of Uno including Dinah. I blinked when I saw they had managed to get a copy of Smash Bros Ultimate for a dimension that diverged four years ago.
Apparently Waluigi was a fighter in this reality, and it was one of the few divergences I could find…beyond having a different president in power. But that didn't really matter much to me. Things were generally better in that reality, which was kind of annoying in a lot of ways.
"You said you wanted a distraction didn't you?" Taylor took up the space on my right, and I could feel her hair tickling my shoulders. Multiple others picked up controllers, and I took in some fresh air.
I was frustrated and angry and a little freaked out with almost losing a teammate to a fate worse than death. This was the first real setback, we couldn't find our current enemies because we had a shaman using human super-tech, and the Siberian and Mannequin were somewhere out there doing their thing.
The Fallen, or at least one of their branches was getting help from the groups trying to invade this dimension, both of them imperialistic and malicious and out of the control of Cauldron since Contessa hasn't ganked one of them.
Though whether that was because she couldn't, didn't want to, or was suitably busy taking out other threats I had no clue because we very rarely talked. Plus the fact I was still working on the vials, and on trying to replicate Shard flesh. Which was taking forever and was harder than I thought.
I was also going to follow my intuition on why the Jiralhanae made me feel stupid about something, but I would do that later when I was a little less stressed.
I held the controller, flicking my tongue out as I thought about doing something other than sulking and lingering on things I can't change because I'm not a god.
I picked Kirby, and tried to figure out the controls since I didn't play the Switch my brother had even once. I moved him around on the screen, for a bit before I was suddenly attacked by Mario. I was knocked off the platform and fell to my death.
I glared at an innocent looking Amelia. "Bitch."
"Bimbo." She insulted back and I narrowed my eyes at her.
Let's just say the following matches were intense and leave it at that.
___
September 24th, 2011. 4:00PM
Basilia Rubio
"My intel's been good hasn't it?" I rubbed my hands together, talking to myself as I sat down within the rig that had been set up to house victim's of the Fallen.
"Are you talking to me?" Rain pointed to himself and I flushed, shaking my head.
"Sorry but no…I've been a little out of sorts and ended up here." I replied back to the teenager, brushing back my hair since I had my helmet folded back.
Since getting a plasma blast to the back I had been assembling every bit of data I had on hand to chase down the Fallen. Unlike the branch trying to sink its fingers into the city, they didn't have the same ability to hide in the spirit world. The Rachni certainly did and could ignore Mama Mathers.
So I…directed sweeps of areas of high Fallen concentration and the PRT had found more hard evidence of Fallen crimes as well as Valefor's many, many indiscretions. Dragon did the same, again shielded by the dozens of a Brood Lords we had at our disposal.
Rachni reproduction was insane, and I estimated they had broken past six and a half million. About a hundred and thirty thousand of those would be at a scale above house cats. Over a thousand Brood Warriors, with their Auxiliary brothers commanding over one hundred thousand soldiers.
Now not all of them were fully grown barring the workers who took less than a day to mature, the soldiers instead took several days and the warriors took one to two weeks. Current estimates of their growth rate meant they would hit over twenty three million by the end of the year.
By the time the end came, at their current number of queens they would have a hundred and eighty million members. I expected that if we lived past that they should have a billion by the time Ward was supposed to start. In twenty years they should handedly outnumber Earth Bet though it would take centuries to outnumber all of humanity.
Though they would likely induce population controls long before reaching that point, and there would be a good amount of growth from my own species by then too.
My own world should pass nine billion by 2040, and who knows where we would be in two or three hundred years.
I sat down on a chair, opening up my Omni to look up my project with the Vorcha and my decision on what I was supposed to with…what I had on hand.
Dozens of extinct races were at my fingertips, and with Panacea bringing back extinct species was a cinch. But…there were so many implications, morally, ethically, on what the right choice was. Their time was past, and bringing them back wouldn't bring back their culture, their way of life, it was all gone, lost to the annals of time.
And without flash cloning, it would take most species years to grow to maturity. Salarians wouldn't be sexually mature until twelve to fifteen for males and females respectively, Asari grow at the same rate of humans, but slow past sixteen and finish physical maturity at twenty five.
It would take them literal centuries to reproduce…but from my perusal of their biology in times of population bottleneck, they can reproduce earlier if they meld often enough or out of biological necessity. To prevent inbreeding leading to genetic infirmity, they can mate with spirits, though it does cause some oddities.
Weird genetic traits and such.
Salarian newts can talk, read and walk by nine months and by the time they're three they understand math, spatial relationships and logic. Which makes sense, their brains are bioengineered bullshit that lets them perform calculus, geometry and trigonometry at high levels greater than most human savants or even some calculators.
Turians mentally mature more slowly than humans up to age seven but catch up by the time they're twenty. They're ovoviviparous, and it takes them about two months to pop out a little baby Turian. Most species took around the time it takes humans, though some take only a couple years to mature.
Krogan are physically and sexually mature at about two, but culturally usually don't breed until their 30s due to their Rites. Plus their crests continue to harden throughout their life, with some modest growth over the centuries too.
Lucky bastards are biologically immortal too, and can outlive Scion if given the chance.
Vorcha aren't unlike them in some ways, they grow quickly and are mature by age one and grow and adapt quickly. Their pluripotent cell clusters let them evolve in weeks instead of lifetimes, and they could adapt to any niche with time and breed fast and hard.
In two years a few colonies of Vorcha wouldn't be hard to swing, but I didn't have the time and patience and Panacea wasn't comfortable altering them much. Best we could do was double or triple their lifespans without compromising who they are as a species.
I could bring them back with the least difficulty, they grew up more quickly, meaning less labor than with other species but they were weaker and far less dangerous than the Krogan. I didn't have the manpower to raise an entire species from the ground-up.
But the Rachni did, and I felt like it wasn't a bad thing to give the Vorcha a chance at something more. Looking into their history, into the hints and puzzle pieces told me they had a glimmer of something more.
They had culture, and their blood shamans and their innate talent for the veil-rip was both intriguing and scary as shit. Checking the Volus let me peek into the programs they had for Vorcha breeding pits, essentially civilizing the Vorcha and treating them like people instead of cannon fodder.
It was an option…but it wasn't a needed one, the Rachni had been some cosmic accident or destiny in action. But bringing back the Vorcha would be an action I committed myself, with massive long term consequences. The number of alien species within ten light years wound go from three to four including the Entities.
Was that a bad thing though? To give a species another chance, to let them evolve beyond where they had used to be. And there was a lot of room.
I don't think today was the best day to make such a monumental decision.
I glanced over at the former Fallen and victims of the Fallen, their numbers growing day by day as the Rachni did their job in kicking the absolute shit out of that damn cult. One of them was suffering from what had to be eezo poisoning, and that had been corrected through nanobot surgery and gene therapy to concentrate eezo into nodes.
Keeping the encapsulated eezo in her brain from causing any trouble was delicate work that needed an AutoDoc and Amelia. She could probably naturally use biotics though she wouldn't be very strong without an Amp. Without the device she'll only be able to use basic biotic sleights.
Regardless she was alright, and we were straggling our enemies before they could arrive in our city. The Elite were keeping their distance and the same applied to the Adepts and the Yangban were busy getting fucked up on their own.
I absently generated a Warp, a sphere of entropic energy that I infused with the element of burning fire into a hot almost-plasma. I crushed both elements out of existence and leaned back. Everything was going well.
But I couldn't stop the niggling feeling that this was going to be complicated.
___
AN: Here's the last main chapter of Deviation, with only one more interlude remaining as I've already started Arc 14. It should be as long as this Arc, and put more focus on the players operating in the city, and what gets done with them or by them.
We're also at about the halfway point of my current planned number of Arcs, though I might cut an Arc or two off if they don't feel necessary. Either way I've gone a long way, and Victories of the Soul is currently my longest story. As well as the only one to survive past me losing the plot, and leaving them to rot.
Regardless I hope you enjoy what I write.
Kryptonian Steel
Insects, unworthy of such attention.
- Pronouns
- Alone
Love those two, hope you bring more of their interactions soon.
Deviation 12.c: Antediluvian
- Location
- Chula Vista
Deviation 12.c: Antediluvian
September 24th, 2011. 4:30PM
Kaida was the daughter of Lung, which came with the usual temper of a volatile man with the power of a dragon simmering beneath his skin. The shard she had accepted within herself was at first little different from its shard-parent, though the shard had diverged greatly since then.
Her scales projected hexagonal barriers of exotic light, consuming and eating away at destructive energies that would dare crack her golden scales. Heat, kinetic, light, power effects, such as the phasing attacks from a Protectorate cape. They compared her to reports on a cape from Boston.
I think it was Citrine? Was all she pondered as she focused her attention on the foul stench she was picking up at increasing intervals. There was something dark in the air, a sense of unease, one that made her moody. She had been tasked with warding the Rig and various PRT facilities around the city, as well as helping with the emplacement of guardian spirits.
She was tired of dealing with the spirits so she substituted a break with testing of her power. Golden scales covered her arms and legs, and her eyes took on an amber hue, fire coating her limbs.
"You sure about this?" Jennifer was a good person, willing to spar with her, to show her the ropes despite the origin of her blood and her power. Blue-white electric pulses sparked from her, and Kaida smiled.
Jennifer and Ethan had been good people, taking her into their home for as long as she needed, acting as her guardians after her father had vanished.
"Yes." Smoke flew freely from her nostrils, and the two surged into high speed movement. An axe-kick crashed into Kaida with superhuman strength and concussive flames, and she held on, spinning past further blasts of fire. She bent away the flames before pulling back and throwing them in Battery's face.
A flurry of kicks, punches, fire and concussive impacts struck against each other.
She has half a minute of charge…I just need to hold out.
Jennifer threw out a lash of fire, an arc of orange-yellow flames that Kaida easily parted with a chop of her delicate hand tipped with claws. She stepped within Jennifer's range, releasing pure concussive force into her caretaker's chest.
Instead of being knocked away Battery withstood the force, and kicked her legs out from under her. Kaida rolled, bending back in a cartwheel backflip. One leg kicked the air and her inner fire stoked flames into being from said kick.
She could feel the beating heart of a dragon within her chest, hear the words of the shard that had granted her this power, and how much stronger she could be if she let the Void Wynn fully into her gates.
Neither were ready for that, and even their current bond strengthened the streams of her soul, taking her firebending to new heights with the bonfire drawn from her shard and into her. In her dreams she could see the true Form of her shard, a vast figure of crystal presiding over a continent the size of Eurasia, guardian of scale-trees and reptilian creatures of all stripes and colors.
Her shard was a curious creature, knowledge and data separated from the unique and relatively 'young' personality of the entity. Even so it had vast and terrible power, providing her with the mass and limitless ramping strength its shard-father once gave to Lung.
So when her guardian slammed a flaming fist into her jaw, scales overtook her chin and her senses refined and focused towards new heights. She went from five foot nothing to taller than Battery, and launched a haymaker into the woman's gut.
Jennifer compacted a flame and detonated a bomb in Kaida's face, and spent her remaining charge in a blast of electromagnetic force that rippled along her skin. She was flung back, ears ringing for several precious seconds.
Battery moved like a dancer, and fire and sparks of electricity were her ribbons as she shoved her elbow in Kaida's face. She ramped up, shooting up to six foot and with a growl she drove a fist into her dark haired guardian's chest.
As the fight dragged on Kaida continued to ramp, moving faster and with a brutal elegance, rage tempered by humanity, human neural matter augmented by heat based circuitry operating at a thousand degrees.
She surpassed seven feet, slowly growing more inhuman, and hot flames burst into a stream from her mouth, boosted by the sheer heat and vitality of her shard.
Three fingers poked intensely at a pressure point, and Kaida flinched. More armor covered up the many nodes where chi flowed freely. She passed eight feet as the spar intensified, and ended up at a ten feet and half a ton of body mass.
Her legs had become digitigrade, long talons clicking on the ground while a tail burst out from her rear. Her face had elongated, and her hair had grown into a mane of dark feathers. Golden scales gleaned and her tail whipped out an arc of blazing fire and heat energy.
Jennifer split the stream with her bare hands, and two fists collided with Kaida's chest in a burst of explosive force and electrical pulses. She was shot out into a wall, and Kaida grinned.
"You feel better?" Jennifer hopped from foot to foot, holding her hands up in position to bat away bending and physical strikes.
Kaida nodded as her anger was spent and her body diminishing, scales retracting, muscle disinflating and humanity returning as her power pulled back its influence.
"A bit." She was small again, and she would have said weak, but even without her power she was her father's daughter.
Though he and uncle would have said she got her strength from her mother instead. And…she didn't doubt it when she looked at the big picture. Her old man was strong, he had fought Leviathan hand to hand for hours and when Kyushu sank…
He gave up and became a petty gang leader, extorting the locals, selling sex and drugs when as a villain he could have gone out and conquered a country or two, and as a hero he could have saved thousands if not millions of lives.
He wasn't the man her mother had married and Lee wasn't the brother he had been when she was last alive. But then she knew full well that most capes were broken people, because that was exactly what the shards wanted in a host.
That had changed under the direction of the new hub, but even so the shards would always have a preference in a small way to people who are willing to use powers. Not necessarily broken people, but people who could break, who could be pushed towards using their abilities.
She was one such case, though only barely.
"This is about Oni Lee appearing to help us isn't it?" Jennifer asked, placing a hand on her shoulder.
"It's been five months, five months since uncle Lee left and since my father just up and vanished. Because apparently his daughter doesn't get an explanation on his fucked up life and his fucked up decisions and all his fucking fuckery…" She pinched the bridge of her nose, sighing.
"I'm sorry." There was a bitter laugh from the thirteen year old girl.
"You're not the one who needs to apologize, and it doesn't change a thing. I'm here and I'm alone." She clenched her fists and she was suddenly engulfed in a hug.
"You. Are. Not. Alone." Each word was emphasized by a poke to her nose by Jenny. "We're here for you…Ethan and I are here for you. If you want us to be…"
…
"Still angry." Kaida said with a sad grin, and Battery affectionately rubbed her hair.
"You have every right to be."
Kaida blinked. "We should probably fix the wall shouldn't we?" Plaster and wood broke away from the hole they made.
"And the floor." Battery continued her train of thought, as the floor was scuffed and scorched.
The two shared a laugh, one tinged in affection, the other with just a pint of sadness.
September 24th, 2011. 5:00PM
"You…said Director Tagg vouched for you?" Emile wasn't saying the being before him was lying, but it was certainly an unexpected boon.
Emile was one of the many field agents selected for joining the Dragon's Teeth program once Dragon had acquired Masamune. Hundreds at the moment were being trained and outfitted for suits based on designs from collaboration with multiple tinkers.
Armsmaster, Kid Win, and areas of inspiration from Erudition. He gripped his fist and the frame followed his movements with no lag, and the armor itself was heavy but lightened by some type of…negative mass aspected dark energy field?
The combat engines themselves were boosted by the optronic circuits within them, recording, analyzing and transmitting details back to one man or woman's armor as a main server. Fragile but inexpensive drones acted together as a network, providing more sensor details for the combat engines.
They were currently focused on relative unknowns, pinpointing possible weak points in the carapace of the creature offering its…his help.
The purple-black colored eleven foot tall insect shimmered blue, wearing a set of black crystalline armor over its insectile frame.
"Our queen has sought to find us a purpose beyond acting as guards for shipments between our colonies." Their…escort responded. "Your Tagg has been the least problematic for helping…pacify certain parahumans." There was a mental pulse, of justice and indignation.
"You really don't like the Fallen huh?" Carla chipped in, leaning her head towards the large alien bug. The woman was one of the most enthusiastic of the squad, with keen eye for detail and a curiosity that was hard to rein in. "Why is that?"
"Our kind were enslaved time and time again, used as living weapons, as tools. We refuse to sit back and watch." It was a shocking show of empathy from the Rachni, and it was chilling to think that even in the stars it seems like little had changed.
"What's out there? Anything special you can tell us, big guy?" Carla was unafraid, nearly bumping hips as they continued to probe the Fallen building.
Emile didn't hide his own curiosity, and the same applied for the two other Dragon's Teeth among them. Charles and Bill were one of the tougher agents, one was a firebender and the other an earthbender while Carla was a waterbender.
As for him…well he was no bender at all. But he took in the data from multiple drones, looked in at the strategies recommended by the machine and had a pack holding all he needed for maintenance.
He was one of the first combat engineers.
The Brood Lord spoke carefully, looking wistful. "The galaxy is a vast place, we have looked upon thousands of worlds, seeking out places that would best serve our kind. That would best suit your kind."
"You're…finding us worlds we can colonize?" Emile asked in mild shock at the generosity.
"Yes…it was one of your kind who kept our queen sane, and it is not the first time humanity has shown us kindness and mercy."
"I think history would have known about humans helping giant bugs…" Carla placed her arms behind her head, and the large alien chittered in…laughter?
"It was lifetimes ago, a song so old even we can barely remember it. But we do remember, and that is all that matters."
"We've heard rumors about the end of the world…from some super-Precog. Is it true?" Charles was the one asking, holstering his mass effect-driven coilgun.
"Yes. She does not see the face of that end…but we have fought worse and so has humanity." The warrior didn't elaborate as he lifted up his own weapons, a large rifle that seemed more suitable for hunting bears than humans.
Emile suspected that historians would want a few words out of the Rachni if what they said was really the truth.
He shook his head, and straightened his posture as he recalled why they were here. This was an operation in mass against the Fallen, even with the power of their anti-Thinker asset. Once the higher ups found out the Fallen were accepting help from two alternate Earths, the kiddie gloves came off. Information gathered by Dragon and Erudition had given them a clearer picture of the scale and scope of the Fallen's crimes.
Most of it had been filtered or acquired by means that couldn't be affected by their anti-Thinker asset…no assets. The Rachni and their ability to shield people using their 'song' made them vital components of the operation across the east coast.
Testimonies from the children of the Fallen and their victims, including a recent rescued blonde kid they had wanted to use as a poster boy. Deprogramming him had been a slow process even with the Rachni helping.
Another kid had been a nightmare in equal measure, with a Brute power that exceeded Alexandria, and made him impossible to touch safely.
The Fallen were disgusting, and he hoped they rotted in prison…or that a little accident would happen during transportation for the worst of the lot.
"We're deploying in one minute. I've received our orders. We're here to capture and contain the Fallen, intel indicates one of their anti-Thinker assets is in the building. Capturing them will make it easier to bring down the rest with Thinker support." There were maybe four or five of these assets, which was a good number when the Fallen had over fifty capes and hundreds of unpowered members. "We have air support from our bug friend's people, drone scans should get us a good map of the building…and the Rachni can filter out any dangerous memetic hazards."
It was bad data mostly rather than the comas and insanity some Thinkers had suffered in the early days. The power that let them remain extant didn't jump from technology, and they knew it hit physical senses in some way. Cameras provided a cushion, so they operated entirely by that method with their armor.
Even so, having a Rachni on the squad had become a common thing for their ability to counteract Master abilities. It was apparently a good step for diplomatic relations between their two species.
Though this was the first time his squad was working with their friends from the stars.
There was a second team on the premises of the isolated base, out in the woods where no one could ferret out their secrets. The building was large, enough to house dozens of people, though they were fairly certain there were maybe fifteen people at best.
There was a moment of silence and all four humans and one half ton Rachni were on the move. It went from quiet to a cacophony of gunfire and bending, data flooded into the drones, designating targets and numbers.
Fifteen total Fallen, all of them armed and dangerous with three parahumans, and four benders. A sniper bullet cracked against Emile's helmet, bouncing off a flickering blue barrier. It was tinkertech, too complicated for current technology but reliable enough for limited use.
Emile grinned, and launched a dozen drones, modular machines easy to repair on the field, and able to be loaded with different weapons depending on the field.
They stopped at a thick metal door, and there was a chittering laugh from their bug friend. "Breach?"
Emile smirked. "That would be nice." The Brood Lord lifted a hand glowing with the entropic energy of a biotic warp, and stabbed into a half foot of steel. The metal curdled and broke apart as molecular bonds broke. He ripped the door from its hinges, and was answered with bullets that bounced off a biotic barrier. He directed a drone through the space and it jetted out a blast of containment foam.
Bill clenched his fists and with an easy stomp and punch he pulled apart the hallway once the Fallen were distracted by the Rachni. Three Fallen were down, while one had formed a shield of water and ice. The woman wildly threw out a jet of water, and slammed past the Rachni's biotic barrier.
The water jet did no damage to the thick carapace, and the bender was pulled up into a Lift and a biotic Kick detonated the field. Shockingly it didn't kill her, merely throwing her around but breaking a few ribs in the process.
Emile absently tossed a Confoam grenade as they passed her by, while Bill tore apart the building, shaking apart the foundation.
"So…waterbending and biotics huh?" Carla commented as they jogged, gripping a newly made nano-thorn knife.
"It is the fifth element." Was all the biotic alien said, before chittering louder and blocking a strike from a cape turned into a weaving storm of paper. Though since the cape had walked through a solid steel wall…
They had already backed away to give their friend some room. Entropic energy lashed out at the cape, and the Rachni male stabbed burning omni-blades into the papyrus storm, which caught on fire.
There was a scream of agony, and the cape reformed into a human before taking a blast of foam from another drone.
"A bit anticlimactic." Carla quipped and there was a chill in the air as Bill opened up a room. From the other end they received data on how the other squad had brought down the rest, with only two members remaining.
"Aren't you going to look at me?" Their cameras glitched and the interference was wiped away by the soothing song of the Rachni.
It was a brunette girl of maybe eighteen, with a brittle frightened smile, a man holding her trembling shoulder.
"One of her kids then?" Emile questioned the Brood Lord as he shielded them. There was a feeling in the air, one that left him cold, and the Rachni flicked his mandibles.
"We should…" The man threw aside the girl, freeing his hands to throw down a device which popped into a shimmering golden barrier. Tinkertech shielding.
The Fallen member began to chant.
"We've got a Shaman! We need reinforcements!" Emile called out as the words came freely from the Fallen shaman.
The woman they identified as one of Mama Mather's children screamed, crumpling in apparent agony. He looked back and saw some of Fallen with blood wounds screaming, as their own injuries fueled the shaman's power.
The Brood Lord launched itself against the barrier, and it wrapped into a bubble around the man and girl, shielding them from all directions as the shaman continued his fowl prayer. More blood surged into existence, as if only enticed further by the struggle.
Someone collided with the barrier, their cape support arriving but unable to deliver a barrier cracking impact.
"Aegis." Emile smiled, Aegis was a good cape and had proven himself against the Fallen after nearly being kidnapped some time back and seeing firsthand what they were capable of.
"ARRISSE!" But he couldn't stop the chant, and blood coagulated and took form and shape. Horrible homunculi, of horrific proportions and made of viscera and the flesh of death itself. Blood rose from other places, and a horrible thought came to mind.
He knew the kind of things the Fallen did…some amount of blood was always going to be at hand because of their tastes…and his nose crinkled in disgust.
Dozens of blood spirits came about, with whirling eyes made of teeth, and scything limbs of hardened blood and flesh pressing into reality.
"Well then…while we wait for shaman support, how about a name? We never did get to asking you that."
The Brood Lord was definitely chuckling, or the equivalent of one anyway. "Seven Chimes of the Silver Winds. Though you may call me Silver Winds if you like." The now named Silver Winds pointed to a dash of silver along his eyes, and Emile felt his lips curl into a grin.
A blood brute lunged at him with a screech, and Emile ducked and twisted into a slash of a nano-thorn blade. Flesh turned to dust on contact and the manifested spirit shrieked in pain and confusion.
His first mission with the Rachni had certainly gone tits-up, but it was at least interesting. Bashing some evil fuck's skulls in was going to make his day if they survived.
He bet it was going to be a when though.
September 24th, 2011. 11:45PM
Ezekiel moved carefully, restraining his newest experiment in place while at his shoulder Valefor watched him. The researcher didn't much care, it wasn't like the man's power would work on him anyway.
The Butcher had taken Shatterbird as a host, after going through one outsider and three of her own cape members before burning them out. He had tinkered with the body of the woman, using his friend…his Mender to patch up the wounds from failed surgeries and experiments on the former member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.
She was one of the few subject members who survived the process…and Ezekiel shuddered to think of how many more failures he would witness in the future. But the choice wasn't his to make anymore.
Treason was death after all, and a dark part of him wanted to know what this was for? What the point of it was.
The experiment on Burnscar had caused her power to go wild, burning her from the inside out. Jack Slash had been useful in luring the Butcher, and his little blonde pet's equipment had been useful for Mender.
Mender was a small piece of a much larger entity, itself a part of an even larger beast. The creature had sickened and died in the deadly fields of the middle desert wastes, and he had taken a piece that had some information on it. That piece became Mender when he…fell under the employ of the Iron Lords, of the High Lord himself.
Knowledge fell into place, and Ezekiel rubbed his neck, shivering. He didn't have all the pieces together on what the ultimate goal was. Only that this was meant to bring out the creatures giving the Powered abilities unlike bending or shamanism.
Almost all of them had been failures, most dying from their powers going out of control, and those that didn't simply suffered minor shifts in the expression of their power.
The Butcher had been the first to come close to success after hundreds of failures, and the modifications to Shatterbird's body made her more suitable for holding the power even as her mind was set aside by Quarrel's own psyche.
It had been unfortunate he hadn't been able to find Spree, a duplication power like his would have been useful for the subject.
He wondered when he had transitioned from calling them patients to calling them subjects and if it even mattered. It wasn't like his choices mattered anymore.
There was a loud creak of the spirit world floor under Crawler's core and Ezekiel felt a spike of rage in his heart.
The damn death-seeking fool had nearly ruined everything with exploiting the natural rift he had been trying to open. Ezekiel didn't have anywhere near the skill to open his own rifts as he had seen from other shamans, but he had gotten good at finding natural ones. Now the rift was barred and he couldn't use it to make his way onto the Rig.
But he had managed to trap the core of the Brute under the field made by what was left of Hatchet Face…though as the body was decaying it wouldn't last forever. He was almost tempted to fuse the core with the subject, but he didn't have the same skills as Bonesaw since he wasn't a tinker.
And Crawler still had a use.
Which was why he had instead stolen equipment from that biotinker from Boston, and used what materials he had for Mender's far more precise hands. He might be able to weave some of Crawler's abilities into the Butcher, making her a little more resilient. Mender worked tirelessly, knitting more refined subdermal weaves into Shatterbird's bones and muscle, better preparing her for her new life as Butcher 19.
"You promised that it would be easy to enter this city, but it's been one setback after another. I'm starting to think you haven't been truthful." Valefor asserted dominance, meeting his eyes and failing to hypnotize him like a thousand times before.
"I promised I would make it easier, and I've already told you about how little control I had over Crawler. It's why I told you to lay low…even if the brats and that demon masked man are giving us trouble." There was a bite to Ezekiel's tone as he watched Mender carefully open up Shatterbird to replace her organs with new bioengineered replacements.
A consequence of the Butcher's power alteration was rapid degradation of the body due to mutations, with the mental alterations lingering with each iteration. It was why he let Mender make use of a cloning vat, weaving the right power expression might stabilize the Butcher in her current form.
"We're running out of time, the Crowleys have vanished…and something is avoiding Mama's sight." The researcher didn't really care what a bunch of insane cultists got up to. "The Fallen needs to make a statement, a mark on the world and I'll be the one making it." There was a hint of desperation, under naked zealotry.
"And I'm going to help you make it…but I need time, and with the Teeth out of the way your little cult has no one overshadowing your efforts." Ezekiel gestured to some of the men and women he had 'borrowed' from the Teeth. It had been far too easy, all he had to do was gather the concept of Sleep in his right palm and they were like putty in his hands.
"We need more than that." Valefor left no room for argument, and Ezekiel rolled his eyes.
"There's a reason I acquired the Teeth, I can make a few Imbued for your needs out of them. Does a dozen sound like a fair number?" Valefor's eyes gleamed with greed, having seen first hand what spirit-possessed beings were capable of.
It was how he had managed to survive the Nine to begin with, Ezekiel wasn't a man of strength and martial might, he was a scholar, a seeker of knowledge.
Pity it hadn't saved him from his fate.
"That should suffice." The thin Master cape was smiling on his way out, and Ezekiel could hear him speaking with his fellow cultists. Mender worked to dismantle the woman who was now the avatar of the Butcher, twining biosynthetic muscle, and sprouting limbs to connect and bind to the cloning vat, cutting away a sample of Crawler.
The segmented shard spirit twitched, a facet shaping a crude face. Something drifted down and into the spirit, a medium of communication opening up.
Ezekiel went still.
"Progress report." The voice was male, deep and commanding, a robotic edge that he knew only came rarely. When the man that held his whip was straining against his own chains.
"I've made some improvements to the Imbuement process, I've succeeded in modifying some Lost Technology into tools for controlling the Imbued." The man held a black gem in his hand, flooded with spiritual energies. "Shamans will still be needed to manufacture them, but control of them as siege weapons can be done more easily."
"Counters against shamans?" The voice clicked, and Ezekiel shuddered.
"None so far, it's a weakness of the Imbued due to their spirit nature."
"Disappointing. What of the Shayatin Project?" Ezekiel swallowed nervously, pulling at his collar.
"I've made a lot of progress with the Butcher and their shard, though while I might be able to empower her…she'll likely burn out in less than nine days."
"The other subjects lasted only minutes or hours, useful only as bombs. It is reasonable progress." Ezekiel relaxed but didn't leave his guard down, waiting for whatever came next.
"Have we found more remains to sculpt?"
"Not enough, there are far too few hosts on this planet, and the shards that landed are too crippled to function or too out of reach to influence. We gain more use from salvaging technology, and we have much work to do…"
"That's good, have you subjugated the Britannic isles yet?" There was a sense of making a mistake.
"No we have not. Something has interfered, and the enemies of our new ally now beat back my armies, all the while bolstering their own."
"What steps should I take?" Ezekiel hoped his obedience kept him alive, because he saw what his master would do to those who had failed him. And he knew his master's master would be no different.
"You would like me to give you all the answers wouldn't you…?" There was quite a bit of deprecating sarcasm and the shaman researched cringed. "My time is best served on the war, on the Purpose, and yours is best served as my eyes and ears."
"Yes…"
He decided it was best not to mention the woman with the aura of emerald and gold within her soul, for his own sake. It was best Erudition was thought of only as an unusual tinker rather than something far more vital.
It was sadly the only brave choice he had made after a deluge of cowardly self serving ones.
September 24th, 2011. 12:00AM
Rusul opened his eyes, the spirits parting for him as he stepped between mortal worlds through the great infinite ocean that was the spirit world. He used the shard aspects to cross the divide, doing what so very few could manage in any world.
The Void Wyrms were difficult creatures to demand of, their near-absolute material power providing them far more power…far more weight than any living spirit should be capable of. They straddle the divide between spirit and soul, and so very few shamans could see them for what they were.
Rusul wasn't an average shaman though, he was…something more. He channeled the least sentient of their species, tiny flecks of power and potential.
He could feel the call of the Spirit, because it was a part of his blood, a fundamental aspect of his soul, he knew the time was drawing near.
"I see you've been busy, trying to get my rebellion in order are you?" Penelope sauntered in, her strings orbiting around her in a continuous loop.
"There are over a thousand Parahumans in your world, and half of them are under the control of Goddess and the other half are hiding, ruling their own kingdoms or enlisted under your rebellion. Helping your shamans to even the odds is the least I can do, though with your high ratio of benders…you might not need my help."
The rebellion had spread out their influence across the Pacific, a solid ten million people falling under the banner of freedom from the reign of Goddess. He wouldn't call it a clean rebellion either, and the resentment against Parahumans was high.
Though the showing some Parahumans made once they knew they could fight Goddess without fear of mind tampering had eased the fear of many. Not by much, but the stories Penelop had told of Earth Bet had given them hope that it might be possible to take another route.
A million benders did serve to even the odds, and their monopoly on teaching it was something that would keep the Arlarian people safe.
"Do you ever take out the stick up your ass?" Rusul scowled, his face deepening in anger when Gremlin popped in from out of nowhere, out of costume. She had dusky skin with dyed red hair, lips pulled up into a grin. She wore a tube top with dark skinny jeans, revealing her midriff.
Rusul pretended not to notice, flushing as he cursed having the hormones of a thirteen year old. At the least he knew that as a sixteen year old she was way out of his league.
"Shut up." He growled and she only laughed, lounging on the couch while her brother grunted with a bemused twinkle in his amber eyes like his sister. He had the same dusky skin though he was a shade darker due to having more distant relations, with robust but handsome features.
Not that I cared much…
Gremlin was a Stranger, her ability to hide scaling based on the amount of effort put into being stealthy. If she was obvious most would notice, if she put all her effort into it she could fade from anyone's sight and senses. It was a powerful ability but even a hint of laxness made her power useless.
Her cousin Enenra was a Shaker/Mover, creating smoke and fog and using it as a medium for teleportation. His power generated heat over time, enough to cause fires and he could focus heat around his points of entry to generate explosions.
He was a good source of spirits of heat, fire and smoke, with aspects of Movement.
"How have Dajana and Darya fared on Shin?" Penelope asked, blinking rapidly. Rusul's shoulders dropped, rubbing his chin.
"Dajana has been raiding and destroying as many Shin research facilities as possible, and we've ferried some of your friends to my world from time to time." Ezekiel may have been one of the most dangerous researchers but he wasn't the only one. "She's managed to keep enough capes in her range to make her charge permanent."
Dajana's abilities were…uniquely powerful and he knew only a few others would be able to rival her power in time. Unfortunately he knew she would better serve on the frontlines, peeling off capes from Bianca. Plus it gave her a good long look at what Parahuman powers were capable of…
Perspective was what someone of her power needed.
"So our rebellion is proving successful?" There was hope there in Penelope's eyes.
"Yes, better than I would have expected. Your country has helped with establishing infrastructure that can act independently of the Powered…but can be increased in potency with their help."
A million benders was an absurd amount of manpower, with earth one could move mountains, with fire one could power cities, warm homes, with water you could heal even fatal injuries and get clean drinking water anywhere. With air one could move faster than the wind, and divert storms and wind patterns.
Void was rare, and deposits of element zero created new ones…in the times it didn't cripple them from birth. Even so they had tinkers, and engineers who had stolen all that Goddess had to offer on powers and capes.
"You have the look of needing to be somewhere, that or you're going to do something really stupid." Gremlin commented freely, shrugging her shoulders.
"The first thing more than the second, the time draws near."
"For what?" Rusul wasn't paying attention to the Stranger's inane comments anymore.
He was sensitive to the ways of the spirits, to the point he could feel the great weight the Vyasa placed on the fabric of the Unreal. The great tide of all Powered, of the sheer spiritual energy of their agent leaking through. She was greater still than any of them, a bond of spirit and soul unseen in billions of years.
He heard the void and they told him it was almost time, a chime of breaking glass and ten thousand distorted whispers.
He gently tugged on a spirit, a pulsing orb of radio waves. It would be his messenger for Ciara, and it would put him at ease for his lessons with the holder of the Vedas. It would be his job to peel back the veil from the eyes of the Vyasa.
He envied his new friends for their less vital roles, but didn't let it discourage him.
Everyone had their role to play in the unfolding stories of destiny and fate.
AN: I decided to release this chapter as an early Christmas present, mostly because I'm already working on the next arc, and working out the arc after that. Should be 24 in total though it can be cut down to 22 if I feel like I'm dragging this out too long. Plus I got a small idea I want to get out before I forget. An opening of sorts for Victories of the Soul.
In the voice of Veda, who sounds like Lori Tritel.
Air…
A shadowed Taylor folds and bends the air around her, shockwaves blasting around her in whorls of air.
Water…
Panacea moves gracefully, before lashing out with a great whip of shimmering water.
Earth...
Armsmaster comes into view with halberd in-hand, stiff and steady motions sending out columns of stone, and the weapon itself bending under his influence.
Fire…
Victoria appears in a swirl of golden-white flames, limbs made from fire circling around her arms before she transitions into a kick, blasting a beam of fire from her feet.
And Void…
Vista emerges from a biotic charge, launching a powerful Warp against an unseen target, space warping around her.
(Veda, lifts her limbs to point at an atlas of Earths) Two realities once stood apart, a world of Cycles and Parahumans, and a world of Insight and Secrets. Now they stand together, their balance broken and their existence forever changed. (Scenes of people bending, spirits set free and Shardspace shimmering emerald). The world has changed, powers from a bygone age and reality returning. The Cycle of the Wyrms is broken(Thinker falling from space)
(The scene changes to the Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse 9 and so on) But thirty one years of conflict and death have taken a toll, and old legacies break the backs of those still living. (Transitions to Lausanne, and to a skeletal city surrounded by portals) My host, my partner has been sent with the goal of saving all worlds, to save her kind… (shift to the Shards raining down) …and mine.
(Basilia, sitting over a building in Brockton, staring up at fragmented futures) She is one of the few who can remember what has been lost, she alone can learn and understand what's coming. To usher in a new balance to a world without the Avatar.
(Fade to black, Veda keeps going) …because if she fails, then it will be a world without hope or future. For everyone.
…
Merry Christmas and all that holiday cheer, hope you enjoy.
September 24th, 2011. 4:30PM
Kaida was the daughter of Lung, which came with the usual temper of a volatile man with the power of a dragon simmering beneath his skin. The shard she had accepted within herself was at first little different from its shard-parent, though the shard had diverged greatly since then.
Her scales projected hexagonal barriers of exotic light, consuming and eating away at destructive energies that would dare crack her golden scales. Heat, kinetic, light, power effects, such as the phasing attacks from a Protectorate cape. They compared her to reports on a cape from Boston.
I think it was Citrine? Was all she pondered as she focused her attention on the foul stench she was picking up at increasing intervals. There was something dark in the air, a sense of unease, one that made her moody. She had been tasked with warding the Rig and various PRT facilities around the city, as well as helping with the emplacement of guardian spirits.
She was tired of dealing with the spirits so she substituted a break with testing of her power. Golden scales covered her arms and legs, and her eyes took on an amber hue, fire coating her limbs.
"You sure about this?" Jennifer was a good person, willing to spar with her, to show her the ropes despite the origin of her blood and her power. Blue-white electric pulses sparked from her, and Kaida smiled.
Jennifer and Ethan had been good people, taking her into their home for as long as she needed, acting as her guardians after her father had vanished.
"Yes." Smoke flew freely from her nostrils, and the two surged into high speed movement. An axe-kick crashed into Kaida with superhuman strength and concussive flames, and she held on, spinning past further blasts of fire. She bent away the flames before pulling back and throwing them in Battery's face.
A flurry of kicks, punches, fire and concussive impacts struck against each other.
She has half a minute of charge…I just need to hold out.
Jennifer threw out a lash of fire, an arc of orange-yellow flames that Kaida easily parted with a chop of her delicate hand tipped with claws. She stepped within Jennifer's range, releasing pure concussive force into her caretaker's chest.
Instead of being knocked away Battery withstood the force, and kicked her legs out from under her. Kaida rolled, bending back in a cartwheel backflip. One leg kicked the air and her inner fire stoked flames into being from said kick.
She could feel the beating heart of a dragon within her chest, hear the words of the shard that had granted her this power, and how much stronger she could be if she let the Void Wynn fully into her gates.
Neither were ready for that, and even their current bond strengthened the streams of her soul, taking her firebending to new heights with the bonfire drawn from her shard and into her. In her dreams she could see the true Form of her shard, a vast figure of crystal presiding over a continent the size of Eurasia, guardian of scale-trees and reptilian creatures of all stripes and colors.
Her shard was a curious creature, knowledge and data separated from the unique and relatively 'young' personality of the entity. Even so it had vast and terrible power, providing her with the mass and limitless ramping strength its shard-father once gave to Lung.
So when her guardian slammed a flaming fist into her jaw, scales overtook her chin and her senses refined and focused towards new heights. She went from five foot nothing to taller than Battery, and launched a haymaker into the woman's gut.
Jennifer compacted a flame and detonated a bomb in Kaida's face, and spent her remaining charge in a blast of electromagnetic force that rippled along her skin. She was flung back, ears ringing for several precious seconds.
Battery moved like a dancer, and fire and sparks of electricity were her ribbons as she shoved her elbow in Kaida's face. She ramped up, shooting up to six foot and with a growl she drove a fist into her dark haired guardian's chest.
As the fight dragged on Kaida continued to ramp, moving faster and with a brutal elegance, rage tempered by humanity, human neural matter augmented by heat based circuitry operating at a thousand degrees.
She surpassed seven feet, slowly growing more inhuman, and hot flames burst into a stream from her mouth, boosted by the sheer heat and vitality of her shard.
Three fingers poked intensely at a pressure point, and Kaida flinched. More armor covered up the many nodes where chi flowed freely. She passed eight feet as the spar intensified, and ended up at a ten feet and half a ton of body mass.
Her legs had become digitigrade, long talons clicking on the ground while a tail burst out from her rear. Her face had elongated, and her hair had grown into a mane of dark feathers. Golden scales gleaned and her tail whipped out an arc of blazing fire and heat energy.
Jennifer split the stream with her bare hands, and two fists collided with Kaida's chest in a burst of explosive force and electrical pulses. She was shot out into a wall, and Kaida grinned.
"You feel better?" Jennifer hopped from foot to foot, holding her hands up in position to bat away bending and physical strikes.
Kaida nodded as her anger was spent and her body diminishing, scales retracting, muscle disinflating and humanity returning as her power pulled back its influence.
"A bit." She was small again, and she would have said weak, but even without her power she was her father's daughter.
Though he and uncle would have said she got her strength from her mother instead. And…she didn't doubt it when she looked at the big picture. Her old man was strong, he had fought Leviathan hand to hand for hours and when Kyushu sank…
He gave up and became a petty gang leader, extorting the locals, selling sex and drugs when as a villain he could have gone out and conquered a country or two, and as a hero he could have saved thousands if not millions of lives.
He wasn't the man her mother had married and Lee wasn't the brother he had been when she was last alive. But then she knew full well that most capes were broken people, because that was exactly what the shards wanted in a host.
That had changed under the direction of the new hub, but even so the shards would always have a preference in a small way to people who are willing to use powers. Not necessarily broken people, but people who could break, who could be pushed towards using their abilities.
She was one such case, though only barely.
"This is about Oni Lee appearing to help us isn't it?" Jennifer asked, placing a hand on her shoulder.
"It's been five months, five months since uncle Lee left and since my father just up and vanished. Because apparently his daughter doesn't get an explanation on his fucked up life and his fucked up decisions and all his fucking fuckery…" She pinched the bridge of her nose, sighing.
"I'm sorry." There was a bitter laugh from the thirteen year old girl.
"You're not the one who needs to apologize, and it doesn't change a thing. I'm here and I'm alone." She clenched her fists and she was suddenly engulfed in a hug.
"You. Are. Not. Alone." Each word was emphasized by a poke to her nose by Jenny. "We're here for you…Ethan and I are here for you. If you want us to be…"
…
"Still angry." Kaida said with a sad grin, and Battery affectionately rubbed her hair.
"You have every right to be."
Kaida blinked. "We should probably fix the wall shouldn't we?" Plaster and wood broke away from the hole they made.
"And the floor." Battery continued her train of thought, as the floor was scuffed and scorched.
The two shared a laugh, one tinged in affection, the other with just a pint of sadness.
___
September 24th, 2011. 5:00PM
"You…said Director Tagg vouched for you?" Emile wasn't saying the being before him was lying, but it was certainly an unexpected boon.
Emile was one of the many field agents selected for joining the Dragon's Teeth program once Dragon had acquired Masamune. Hundreds at the moment were being trained and outfitted for suits based on designs from collaboration with multiple tinkers.
Armsmaster, Kid Win, and areas of inspiration from Erudition. He gripped his fist and the frame followed his movements with no lag, and the armor itself was heavy but lightened by some type of…negative mass aspected dark energy field?
The combat engines themselves were boosted by the optronic circuits within them, recording, analyzing and transmitting details back to one man or woman's armor as a main server. Fragile but inexpensive drones acted together as a network, providing more sensor details for the combat engines.
They were currently focused on relative unknowns, pinpointing possible weak points in the carapace of the creature offering its…his help.
The purple-black colored eleven foot tall insect shimmered blue, wearing a set of black crystalline armor over its insectile frame.
"Our queen has sought to find us a purpose beyond acting as guards for shipments between our colonies." Their…escort responded. "Your Tagg has been the least problematic for helping…pacify certain parahumans." There was a mental pulse, of justice and indignation.
"You really don't like the Fallen huh?" Carla chipped in, leaning her head towards the large alien bug. The woman was one of the most enthusiastic of the squad, with keen eye for detail and a curiosity that was hard to rein in. "Why is that?"
"Our kind were enslaved time and time again, used as living weapons, as tools. We refuse to sit back and watch." It was a shocking show of empathy from the Rachni, and it was chilling to think that even in the stars it seems like little had changed.
"What's out there? Anything special you can tell us, big guy?" Carla was unafraid, nearly bumping hips as they continued to probe the Fallen building.
Emile didn't hide his own curiosity, and the same applied for the two other Dragon's Teeth among them. Charles and Bill were one of the tougher agents, one was a firebender and the other an earthbender while Carla was a waterbender.
As for him…well he was no bender at all. But he took in the data from multiple drones, looked in at the strategies recommended by the machine and had a pack holding all he needed for maintenance.
He was one of the first combat engineers.
The Brood Lord spoke carefully, looking wistful. "The galaxy is a vast place, we have looked upon thousands of worlds, seeking out places that would best serve our kind. That would best suit your kind."
"You're…finding us worlds we can colonize?" Emile asked in mild shock at the generosity.
"Yes…it was one of your kind who kept our queen sane, and it is not the first time humanity has shown us kindness and mercy."
"I think history would have known about humans helping giant bugs…" Carla placed her arms behind her head, and the large alien chittered in…laughter?
"It was lifetimes ago, a song so old even we can barely remember it. But we do remember, and that is all that matters."
"We've heard rumors about the end of the world…from some super-Precog. Is it true?" Charles was the one asking, holstering his mass effect-driven coilgun.
"Yes. She does not see the face of that end…but we have fought worse and so has humanity." The warrior didn't elaborate as he lifted up his own weapons, a large rifle that seemed more suitable for hunting bears than humans.
Emile suspected that historians would want a few words out of the Rachni if what they said was really the truth.
He shook his head, and straightened his posture as he recalled why they were here. This was an operation in mass against the Fallen, even with the power of their anti-Thinker asset. Once the higher ups found out the Fallen were accepting help from two alternate Earths, the kiddie gloves came off. Information gathered by Dragon and Erudition had given them a clearer picture of the scale and scope of the Fallen's crimes.
Most of it had been filtered or acquired by means that couldn't be affected by their anti-Thinker asset…no assets. The Rachni and their ability to shield people using their 'song' made them vital components of the operation across the east coast.
Testimonies from the children of the Fallen and their victims, including a recent rescued blonde kid they had wanted to use as a poster boy. Deprogramming him had been a slow process even with the Rachni helping.
Another kid had been a nightmare in equal measure, with a Brute power that exceeded Alexandria, and made him impossible to touch safely.
The Fallen were disgusting, and he hoped they rotted in prison…or that a little accident would happen during transportation for the worst of the lot.
"We're deploying in one minute. I've received our orders. We're here to capture and contain the Fallen, intel indicates one of their anti-Thinker assets is in the building. Capturing them will make it easier to bring down the rest with Thinker support." There were maybe four or five of these assets, which was a good number when the Fallen had over fifty capes and hundreds of unpowered members. "We have air support from our bug friend's people, drone scans should get us a good map of the building…and the Rachni can filter out any dangerous memetic hazards."
It was bad data mostly rather than the comas and insanity some Thinkers had suffered in the early days. The power that let them remain extant didn't jump from technology, and they knew it hit physical senses in some way. Cameras provided a cushion, so they operated entirely by that method with their armor.
Even so, having a Rachni on the squad had become a common thing for their ability to counteract Master abilities. It was apparently a good step for diplomatic relations between their two species.
Though this was the first time his squad was working with their friends from the stars.
There was a second team on the premises of the isolated base, out in the woods where no one could ferret out their secrets. The building was large, enough to house dozens of people, though they were fairly certain there were maybe fifteen people at best.
There was a moment of silence and all four humans and one half ton Rachni were on the move. It went from quiet to a cacophony of gunfire and bending, data flooded into the drones, designating targets and numbers.
Fifteen total Fallen, all of them armed and dangerous with three parahumans, and four benders. A sniper bullet cracked against Emile's helmet, bouncing off a flickering blue barrier. It was tinkertech, too complicated for current technology but reliable enough for limited use.
Emile grinned, and launched a dozen drones, modular machines easy to repair on the field, and able to be loaded with different weapons depending on the field.
They stopped at a thick metal door, and there was a chittering laugh from their bug friend. "Breach?"
Emile smirked. "That would be nice." The Brood Lord lifted a hand glowing with the entropic energy of a biotic warp, and stabbed into a half foot of steel. The metal curdled and broke apart as molecular bonds broke. He ripped the door from its hinges, and was answered with bullets that bounced off a biotic barrier. He directed a drone through the space and it jetted out a blast of containment foam.
Bill clenched his fists and with an easy stomp and punch he pulled apart the hallway once the Fallen were distracted by the Rachni. Three Fallen were down, while one had formed a shield of water and ice. The woman wildly threw out a jet of water, and slammed past the Rachni's biotic barrier.
The water jet did no damage to the thick carapace, and the bender was pulled up into a Lift and a biotic Kick detonated the field. Shockingly it didn't kill her, merely throwing her around but breaking a few ribs in the process.
Emile absently tossed a Confoam grenade as they passed her by, while Bill tore apart the building, shaking apart the foundation.
"So…waterbending and biotics huh?" Carla commented as they jogged, gripping a newly made nano-thorn knife.
"It is the fifth element." Was all the biotic alien said, before chittering louder and blocking a strike from a cape turned into a weaving storm of paper. Though since the cape had walked through a solid steel wall…
They had already backed away to give their friend some room. Entropic energy lashed out at the cape, and the Rachni male stabbed burning omni-blades into the papyrus storm, which caught on fire.
There was a scream of agony, and the cape reformed into a human before taking a blast of foam from another drone.
"A bit anticlimactic." Carla quipped and there was a chill in the air as Bill opened up a room. From the other end they received data on how the other squad had brought down the rest, with only two members remaining.
"Aren't you going to look at me?" Their cameras glitched and the interference was wiped away by the soothing song of the Rachni.
It was a brunette girl of maybe eighteen, with a brittle frightened smile, a man holding her trembling shoulder.
"One of her kids then?" Emile questioned the Brood Lord as he shielded them. There was a feeling in the air, one that left him cold, and the Rachni flicked his mandibles.
"We should…" The man threw aside the girl, freeing his hands to throw down a device which popped into a shimmering golden barrier. Tinkertech shielding.
The Fallen member began to chant.
"We've got a Shaman! We need reinforcements!" Emile called out as the words came freely from the Fallen shaman.
Gushing sanguine, fluid of life, sign of death;
Waters of the soul, current of the Life Engine, The First Sacrifice
Gear of Blood.
OBEY!
Waters of the soul, current of the Life Engine, The First Sacrifice
Gear of Blood.
OBEY!
The woman they identified as one of Mama Mather's children screamed, crumpling in apparent agony. He looked back and saw some of Fallen with blood wounds screaming, as their own injuries fueled the shaman's power.
Voice of the Dead, River of the Life-giving Kingdom, Heed m—
The Brood Lord launched itself against the barrier, and it wrapped into a bubble around the man and girl, shielding them from all directions as the shaman continued his fowl prayer. More blood surged into existence, as if only enticed further by the struggle.
Aid in our dance of death and depravity;
Against the beast of civilization, restrictive and domestic
Raise up your claws against a misbegotten foe!
Provide me power, and your hunger and might shall flow through me!
Crush their mortal flesh, destroy their hope, see their dreams BROKEN!
Against the beast of civilization, restrictive and domestic
Raise up your claws against a misbegotten foe!
Provide me power, and your hunger and might shall flow through me!
Crush their mortal flesh, destroy their hope, see their dreams BROKEN!
Someone collided with the barrier, their cape support arriving but unable to deliver a barrier cracking impact.
"Aegis." Emile smiled, Aegis was a good cape and had proven himself against the Fallen after nearly being kidnapped some time back and seeing firsthand what they were capable of.
"ARRISSE!" But he couldn't stop the chant, and blood coagulated and took form and shape. Horrible homunculi, of horrific proportions and made of viscera and the flesh of death itself. Blood rose from other places, and a horrible thought came to mind.
He knew the kind of things the Fallen did…some amount of blood was always going to be at hand because of their tastes…and his nose crinkled in disgust.
Dozens of blood spirits came about, with whirling eyes made of teeth, and scything limbs of hardened blood and flesh pressing into reality.
"Well then…while we wait for shaman support, how about a name? We never did get to asking you that."
The Brood Lord was definitely chuckling, or the equivalent of one anyway. "Seven Chimes of the Silver Winds. Though you may call me Silver Winds if you like." The now named Silver Winds pointed to a dash of silver along his eyes, and Emile felt his lips curl into a grin.
A blood brute lunged at him with a screech, and Emile ducked and twisted into a slash of a nano-thorn blade. Flesh turned to dust on contact and the manifested spirit shrieked in pain and confusion.
His first mission with the Rachni had certainly gone tits-up, but it was at least interesting. Bashing some evil fuck's skulls in was going to make his day if they survived.
He bet it was going to be a when though.
___
September 24th, 2011. 11:45PM
Ezekiel moved carefully, restraining his newest experiment in place while at his shoulder Valefor watched him. The researcher didn't much care, it wasn't like the man's power would work on him anyway.
The Butcher had taken Shatterbird as a host, after going through one outsider and three of her own cape members before burning them out. He had tinkered with the body of the woman, using his friend…his Mender to patch up the wounds from failed surgeries and experiments on the former member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.
She was one of the few subject members who survived the process…and Ezekiel shuddered to think of how many more failures he would witness in the future. But the choice wasn't his to make anymore.
Treason was death after all, and a dark part of him wanted to know what this was for? What the point of it was.
The experiment on Burnscar had caused her power to go wild, burning her from the inside out. Jack Slash had been useful in luring the Butcher, and his little blonde pet's equipment had been useful for Mender.
Mender was a small piece of a much larger entity, itself a part of an even larger beast. The creature had sickened and died in the deadly fields of the middle desert wastes, and he had taken a piece that had some information on it. That piece became Mender when he…fell under the employ of the Iron Lords, of the High Lord himself.
Knowledge fell into place, and Ezekiel rubbed his neck, shivering. He didn't have all the pieces together on what the ultimate goal was. Only that this was meant to bring out the creatures giving the Powered abilities unlike bending or shamanism.
Almost all of them had been failures, most dying from their powers going out of control, and those that didn't simply suffered minor shifts in the expression of their power.
The Butcher had been the first to come close to success after hundreds of failures, and the modifications to Shatterbird's body made her more suitable for holding the power even as her mind was set aside by Quarrel's own psyche.
It had been unfortunate he hadn't been able to find Spree, a duplication power like his would have been useful for the subject.
He wondered when he had transitioned from calling them patients to calling them subjects and if it even mattered. It wasn't like his choices mattered anymore.
There was a loud creak of the spirit world floor under Crawler's core and Ezekiel felt a spike of rage in his heart.
The damn death-seeking fool had nearly ruined everything with exploiting the natural rift he had been trying to open. Ezekiel didn't have anywhere near the skill to open his own rifts as he had seen from other shamans, but he had gotten good at finding natural ones. Now the rift was barred and he couldn't use it to make his way onto the Rig.
But he had managed to trap the core of the Brute under the field made by what was left of Hatchet Face…though as the body was decaying it wouldn't last forever. He was almost tempted to fuse the core with the subject, but he didn't have the same skills as Bonesaw since he wasn't a tinker.
And Crawler still had a use.
Which was why he had instead stolen equipment from that biotinker from Boston, and used what materials he had for Mender's far more precise hands. He might be able to weave some of Crawler's abilities into the Butcher, making her a little more resilient. Mender worked tirelessly, knitting more refined subdermal weaves into Shatterbird's bones and muscle, better preparing her for her new life as Butcher 19.
"You promised that it would be easy to enter this city, but it's been one setback after another. I'm starting to think you haven't been truthful." Valefor asserted dominance, meeting his eyes and failing to hypnotize him like a thousand times before.
"I promised I would make it easier, and I've already told you about how little control I had over Crawler. It's why I told you to lay low…even if the brats and that demon masked man are giving us trouble." There was a bite to Ezekiel's tone as he watched Mender carefully open up Shatterbird to replace her organs with new bioengineered replacements.
A consequence of the Butcher's power alteration was rapid degradation of the body due to mutations, with the mental alterations lingering with each iteration. It was why he let Mender make use of a cloning vat, weaving the right power expression might stabilize the Butcher in her current form.
"We're running out of time, the Crowleys have vanished…and something is avoiding Mama's sight." The researcher didn't really care what a bunch of insane cultists got up to. "The Fallen needs to make a statement, a mark on the world and I'll be the one making it." There was a hint of desperation, under naked zealotry.
"And I'm going to help you make it…but I need time, and with the Teeth out of the way your little cult has no one overshadowing your efforts." Ezekiel gestured to some of the men and women he had 'borrowed' from the Teeth. It had been far too easy, all he had to do was gather the concept of Sleep in his right palm and they were like putty in his hands.
"We need more than that." Valefor left no room for argument, and Ezekiel rolled his eyes.
"There's a reason I acquired the Teeth, I can make a few Imbued for your needs out of them. Does a dozen sound like a fair number?" Valefor's eyes gleamed with greed, having seen first hand what spirit-possessed beings were capable of.
It was how he had managed to survive the Nine to begin with, Ezekiel wasn't a man of strength and martial might, he was a scholar, a seeker of knowledge.
Pity it hadn't saved him from his fate.
"That should suffice." The thin Master cape was smiling on his way out, and Ezekiel could hear him speaking with his fellow cultists. Mender worked to dismantle the woman who was now the avatar of the Butcher, twining biosynthetic muscle, and sprouting limbs to connect and bind to the cloning vat, cutting away a sample of Crawler.
The segmented shard spirit twitched, a facet shaping a crude face. Something drifted down and into the spirit, a medium of communication opening up.
Ezekiel went still.
"Progress report." The voice was male, deep and commanding, a robotic edge that he knew only came rarely. When the man that held his whip was straining against his own chains.
"I've made some improvements to the Imbuement process, I've succeeded in modifying some Lost Technology into tools for controlling the Imbued." The man held a black gem in his hand, flooded with spiritual energies. "Shamans will still be needed to manufacture them, but control of them as siege weapons can be done more easily."
"Counters against shamans?" The voice clicked, and Ezekiel shuddered.
"None so far, it's a weakness of the Imbued due to their spirit nature."
"Disappointing. What of the Shayatin Project?" Ezekiel swallowed nervously, pulling at his collar.
"I've made a lot of progress with the Butcher and their shard, though while I might be able to empower her…she'll likely burn out in less than nine days."
"The other subjects lasted only minutes or hours, useful only as bombs. It is reasonable progress." Ezekiel relaxed but didn't leave his guard down, waiting for whatever came next.
"Have we found more remains to sculpt?"
"Not enough, there are far too few hosts on this planet, and the shards that landed are too crippled to function or too out of reach to influence. We gain more use from salvaging technology, and we have much work to do…"
"That's good, have you subjugated the Britannic isles yet?" There was a sense of making a mistake.
"No we have not. Something has interfered, and the enemies of our new ally now beat back my armies, all the while bolstering their own."
"What steps should I take?" Ezekiel hoped his obedience kept him alive, because he saw what his master would do to those who had failed him. And he knew his master's master would be no different.
"You would like me to give you all the answers wouldn't you…?" There was quite a bit of deprecating sarcasm and the shaman researched cringed. "My time is best served on the war, on the Purpose, and yours is best served as my eyes and ears."
"Yes…"
He decided it was best not to mention the woman with the aura of emerald and gold within her soul, for his own sake. It was best Erudition was thought of only as an unusual tinker rather than something far more vital.
It was sadly the only brave choice he had made after a deluge of cowardly self serving ones.
___
September 24th, 2011. 12:00AM
Rusul opened his eyes, the spirits parting for him as he stepped between mortal worlds through the great infinite ocean that was the spirit world. He used the shard aspects to cross the divide, doing what so very few could manage in any world.
The Void Wyrms were difficult creatures to demand of, their near-absolute material power providing them far more power…far more weight than any living spirit should be capable of. They straddle the divide between spirit and soul, and so very few shamans could see them for what they were.
Rusul wasn't an average shaman though, he was…something more. He channeled the least sentient of their species, tiny flecks of power and potential.
He could feel the call of the Spirit, because it was a part of his blood, a fundamental aspect of his soul, he knew the time was drawing near.
"I see you've been busy, trying to get my rebellion in order are you?" Penelope sauntered in, her strings orbiting around her in a continuous loop.
"There are over a thousand Parahumans in your world, and half of them are under the control of Goddess and the other half are hiding, ruling their own kingdoms or enlisted under your rebellion. Helping your shamans to even the odds is the least I can do, though with your high ratio of benders…you might not need my help."
The rebellion had spread out their influence across the Pacific, a solid ten million people falling under the banner of freedom from the reign of Goddess. He wouldn't call it a clean rebellion either, and the resentment against Parahumans was high.
Though the showing some Parahumans made once they knew they could fight Goddess without fear of mind tampering had eased the fear of many. Not by much, but the stories Penelop had told of Earth Bet had given them hope that it might be possible to take another route.
A million benders did serve to even the odds, and their monopoly on teaching it was something that would keep the Arlarian people safe.
"Do you ever take out the stick up your ass?" Rusul scowled, his face deepening in anger when Gremlin popped in from out of nowhere, out of costume. She had dusky skin with dyed red hair, lips pulled up into a grin. She wore a tube top with dark skinny jeans, revealing her midriff.
Rusul pretended not to notice, flushing as he cursed having the hormones of a thirteen year old. At the least he knew that as a sixteen year old she was way out of his league.
"Shut up." He growled and she only laughed, lounging on the couch while her brother grunted with a bemused twinkle in his amber eyes like his sister. He had the same dusky skin though he was a shade darker due to having more distant relations, with robust but handsome features.
Not that I cared much…
Gremlin was a Stranger, her ability to hide scaling based on the amount of effort put into being stealthy. If she was obvious most would notice, if she put all her effort into it she could fade from anyone's sight and senses. It was a powerful ability but even a hint of laxness made her power useless.
Her cousin Enenra was a Shaker/Mover, creating smoke and fog and using it as a medium for teleportation. His power generated heat over time, enough to cause fires and he could focus heat around his points of entry to generate explosions.
He was a good source of spirits of heat, fire and smoke, with aspects of Movement.
"How have Dajana and Darya fared on Shin?" Penelope asked, blinking rapidly. Rusul's shoulders dropped, rubbing his chin.
"Dajana has been raiding and destroying as many Shin research facilities as possible, and we've ferried some of your friends to my world from time to time." Ezekiel may have been one of the most dangerous researchers but he wasn't the only one. "She's managed to keep enough capes in her range to make her charge permanent."
Dajana's abilities were…uniquely powerful and he knew only a few others would be able to rival her power in time. Unfortunately he knew she would better serve on the frontlines, peeling off capes from Bianca. Plus it gave her a good long look at what Parahuman powers were capable of…
Perspective was what someone of her power needed.
"So our rebellion is proving successful?" There was hope there in Penelope's eyes.
"Yes, better than I would have expected. Your country has helped with establishing infrastructure that can act independently of the Powered…but can be increased in potency with their help."
A million benders was an absurd amount of manpower, with earth one could move mountains, with fire one could power cities, warm homes, with water you could heal even fatal injuries and get clean drinking water anywhere. With air one could move faster than the wind, and divert storms and wind patterns.
Void was rare, and deposits of element zero created new ones…in the times it didn't cripple them from birth. Even so they had tinkers, and engineers who had stolen all that Goddess had to offer on powers and capes.
"You have the look of needing to be somewhere, that or you're going to do something really stupid." Gremlin commented freely, shrugging her shoulders.
"The first thing more than the second, the time draws near."
"For what?" Rusul wasn't paying attention to the Stranger's inane comments anymore.
He was sensitive to the ways of the spirits, to the point he could feel the great weight the Vyasa placed on the fabric of the Unreal. The great tide of all Powered, of the sheer spiritual energy of their agent leaking through. She was greater still than any of them, a bond of spirit and soul unseen in billions of years.
He heard the void and they told him it was almost time, a chime of breaking glass and ten thousand distorted whispers.
He gently tugged on a spirit, a pulsing orb of radio waves. It would be his messenger for Ciara, and it would put him at ease for his lessons with the holder of the Vedas. It would be his job to peel back the veil from the eyes of the Vyasa.
He envied his new friends for their less vital roles, but didn't let it discourage him.
Everyone had their role to play in the unfolding stories of destiny and fate.
___
AN: I decided to release this chapter as an early Christmas present, mostly because I'm already working on the next arc, and working out the arc after that. Should be 24 in total though it can be cut down to 22 if I feel like I'm dragging this out too long. Plus I got a small idea I want to get out before I forget. An opening of sorts for Victories of the Soul.
In the voice of Veda, who sounds like Lori Tritel.
Air…
A shadowed Taylor folds and bends the air around her, shockwaves blasting around her in whorls of air.
Water…
Panacea moves gracefully, before lashing out with a great whip of shimmering water.
Earth...
Armsmaster comes into view with halberd in-hand, stiff and steady motions sending out columns of stone, and the weapon itself bending under his influence.
Fire…
Victoria appears in a swirl of golden-white flames, limbs made from fire circling around her arms before she transitions into a kick, blasting a beam of fire from her feet.
And Void…
Vista emerges from a biotic charge, launching a powerful Warp against an unseen target, space warping around her.
(Veda, lifts her limbs to point at an atlas of Earths) Two realities once stood apart, a world of Cycles and Parahumans, and a world of Insight and Secrets. Now they stand together, their balance broken and their existence forever changed. (Scenes of people bending, spirits set free and Shardspace shimmering emerald). The world has changed, powers from a bygone age and reality returning. The Cycle of the Wyrms is broken(Thinker falling from space)
(The scene changes to the Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse 9 and so on) But thirty one years of conflict and death have taken a toll, and old legacies break the backs of those still living. (Transitions to Lausanne, and to a skeletal city surrounded by portals) My host, my partner has been sent with the goal of saving all worlds, to save her kind… (shift to the Shards raining down) …and mine.
(Basilia, sitting over a building in Brockton, staring up at fragmented futures) She is one of the few who can remember what has been lost, she alone can learn and understand what's coming. To usher in a new balance to a world without the Avatar.
(Fade to black, Veda keeps going) …because if she fails, then it will be a world without hope or future. For everyone.
…
Merry Christmas and all that holiday cheer, hope you enjoy.
Last edited:
- Location
- Chula Vista
Yep. The Fallen are sort of important in the next arc, and getting help from other dimensions was sort of a final straw for the PRT and Protectorate…and Cauldron.
Teleologism 13.1
- Location
- Chula Vista
Teleologism 13.1
September 25th, 2011. 9:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I projected myself into a spiritual body, letting Taylor keep guard of my body as I found myself in the Living Spirit. I walked past the spirits that roamed my home, from the guardian spirit acting as a roommate for the door-spirit of my…well door to the electrical spirits living happily in the walls of my home. A few animal spirits, mainly of insects, tiny barely sentient swarms scattered about.
The layers of the Spirit were odd to say the least, and there were three, though for the latter two it would be more accurate to say it was a set of layers acting as one layer. The High Spirit had multiple layers, weaving and folding and moving and orbiting around each other. But there was an order to the chaos.
The Abstract was not that, it was pure concept and unstable physics, none of the forces working as they should. It was hostile to most life and was where most Genius Loci came to roost. Very few spirits had any such thing, and I knew only of two that did in the city.
The Lady of the Bay and Centralis, and the latter was a strange case, something similar to a much weaker Wan Shi Tong. He had an unusual strength and vitality, perhaps something to do with Brockton or simply a matter of consuming the right concepts.
I stepped out of the front door of my home, stepping and sauntering with the confidence needed to be held by all shaman. My bending was nonexistent, since it only worked in certain parts of the spirit world around here. And without a physical body I wouldn't have been able to bend anyway.
I followed my own senses, pulling past a herd of car spirits, and stopping at a river of sludge and waste that represented a sort of fucked up dumpster. A few spirits of plastic and metal watched, lingering with no movement of their own. I pulled out a big stick of cheese, grinning widely.
From the mountain of trash, a flood of rats came, surging and rippling over each other in a wave of rodents and pulsing spiritual webbing. They took shape, gripping onto each other with their paws and tails, until they took up the shape of a rat the size of a man, towering over me.
"Why have you summoned us, human?" Their voice echoed, entering from my left ear and then to my right ear. The rat-spirit was one of those few animal spirits that continued after the death of their physical body, one who had absorbed the essence of its countless brethren's and countless compatible concepts.
A spirit of Rats…and a spirit of Secrets.
"The Rat King of Brocc." I kept an unaggressive posture, because rat spirits are as skittish as their material counterparts, though Brockton rats are certainly more lively than in other cities. Rats were omnipresent, and there were tons of secrets they had gathered and ferreted out after hundreds of years. He had arrived with the ships of European settlers and was as large as his spiritual species could manage before losing their ability to hide from their predators.
"I've heard you know a secret or two for a price." I lightly waved the large block of cheese, holding it in the bag I commonly brought to the spirit world to offer tithes of various kinds.
"We know many secrets, Emerald Child, but you must know the price paid in exchange." I offered the Rat King cheese, and they shared it between their many mouths. It swirled around me as a mass of mammalian flesh and fur, laughing and chuckling with an echoing tone. "What secret will you give me in exchange? What price are you willing to pay?"
I told the spirit my secret, it wasn't a big one but it was certainly one that only a tiny fraction of the people in the world knew.
"Ooooo! How juicy, how delightful and tasty! We know something only so few people know, it will be amazing while it's value remains!" The Rat King giggled, smiling faces forming out of the mass of rats. "The deal is made little Vyasa, little creature of soul and spirit."
"What can you give me Rat King?" The pack squirmed, tails flicking and squeaking ongoing as it paused to answer my question.
"What do you want in exchange?" I smiled carefully, doing my best not to expose my teeth and frighten off the skittish prey spirit.
"I seek information on the shaman known as Ezekiel here, his general location if possible." The spirit made a grinning face, dozens of them, rats sliding past one another to do so. I kept my disgust from showing, though there was some morbid fascination on how their Form shifted.
"We hear much from our fearful brethren in Kittery, whispers in the dark, of a Condemned Workshop of Madness and Abominations. A man following the commands of his Master." The Rat King chuckled, madness entwined into their words, a thousand chirps coming together into a coherent chorus.
"I thank you for the information Rat King, I will be leaving your presence." I bowed my head, and there was a bemused twinkle in their beady eyes.
"Indeed. You have given us a gift of knowledge little Vyasa, this will not be forgotten." The horde slid into the darkness, trash burbling and burping as the spirit vanished.
I adjusted my coat, and looked around for a moment. I had the information I needed, and the Rats had been an excellent choice for telling me what I needed. Now adding some outside research and analyzing the words would give me a good idea of where the Fallen and Ezekiel were hiding.
I folded space along the paths I commonly used in the spirit world, and let go of my projection. The world shimmered as I dropped out of the High Spirit and back into the Inner Sphere. Taylor shook my shoulders, tilting her head in a manner that reminded me of a cute puppy. Or maybe a particularly adorable honeybee?
"You got what you needed?" Taylor asked, and I gave her a thumbs up. I took a moment to think about what I was doing, and smiled.
I curled my fingers to beckon her closer, and I flew up for a quick peck on the lips. She blinked as if confused, though she took my show of affection in stride.
"Yep. Now…I need to get to work on…a lot, we've got a few people on the case to look out for the Fallen. Plus more preparations against the capes we know are not on our side." Mannequin was a dangerous cape and was certainly going to exploit my weaknesses.
So my paranoia, and my lesser ability to be exceedingly brutal like other capes in this messed up world. I would have to use actively lethal force against him, and he was definitely going to pick up a way to disable some of my tech if he was using eezo himself.
He was an amazing tinker, and I shuddered to think of what he could make wherever he was hiding. My engineers had figured out a kinetic barrier in a more efficient capacity, generating magnetic fields around an object in tandem with eezo forms a basic barrier. Which was something I already knew because…you know…I'm a tinker with eezo as my first technology. If they could do that I shuddered to think of what Mannequin could come up with.
My engineers current prototypes could only take one to three shots from an assault rifle, but that was still a game changer. The modified dark energy field projectors and shapers would make it easier to use for lots of stuff that doesn't need advanced tinkertech.
I rubbed my hands together, suppressing an evil cackle when I saw Taylor's worried look.
Time to get to work.
September 25th, 2011. 2:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I watched space fold from a reasonable distance, the Samsara vanishing into thin air with the integrated Jumpdrive. The space warping and altered drive metrics made the need to slowly charge or worry about gravity wells a thing of the past.
It still takes fifteen minutes though, so micro-jump maneuvers are still more optimal using Asari-derived flash-step movements. Space warping maneuvering was a good choice too though it was more costly and used up more fuel.
The Samsara had jumped to TRAPPIST, just below the distance redline for space folding. That system was ruled over by Dayereh and her daughter-queens, ruling seven planets of varying scales and properties. Only two of the planets had life, and only one of them wouldn't kill humans.
Each system had four queens, and with their current population they had maybe half a million Rachni per system, though the mother of the whole species, Lyre had nine hundred thousand Rachni in the new Rachni capital system of Tau Ceti.
I had a few new options on weapons, though most of it wasn't game changing outside of more plasma and particle beam weapons. Plus some type of hard light projectile weapon. Though on the scale of ships, they had very powerful magnetic accelerator cannons.
As in firing a ten ton slug at three hundred kilometers a second, and directed globs of plasma through electrogravitic manipulation. Hitting a lot harder than a Citadel vessel but firing a little slower, though Thanix cannons had similar energy levels though they needed a dedicated eezo core.
It was the FTL drive they used that I found a little more interesting, one that worked by entering what they called Slipspace, a higher dimensional space existing above normal reality, surrounding it like a vast bubble. This higher dimensional space had altered laws of physics, allowing ships to fly at faster than light speeds.
Tech wise there was wide variation in the speed and capabilities of Slipspace drives, with the Yonhet having the most primitive drives. They might be an old species, but they had collapsed pretty hard due to their small population pre-Fall. About fifty light years per day was their standard, while the Helioskrill and the Jiralhanae both hit three hundred light years per day and the Hurragoy is three times faster than that.
The main issue lies in that their more complex drives are harder to integrate into the Samsara. Though using the mass effect to generate the required black hole, and shaping it into a scalpel was more than enough on its own. I was mostly giving some of the bigger stuff to the Rachni to see what they made of it.
Apparently they liked the idea of building a two kilometer capital ship, but at the moment they had a dozen cruisers, 60 frigates and thirty six destroyers. A hundred spacecraft, each of them hitting hard enough at the low end to wipe our city blocks and on the high end erasing cities from the map.
"Test run successful." An LAI told me the message I was waiting for, of the Samsara lying in orbit around Nanna. The ship waited a moment, multiple robots going in to inspect the drive core. There were minor problems with the superconductive rod, making use of an exotic substance stable up to 400 kelvin.
"I guess we'll need to dedicate more mass to the power systems, we don't need the Jumpdrive to burn out." I talked to myself, and there was a whisper in my mind as I let my mind run with the possibilities.
I scowled, feeling the three active presences, though none bar the last were paying attention. I talked every so often with the souls that had provided my bending, though most of the time they were…sleeping. The third hadn't talked to me yet but she was going to…especially after I had looked up Jiralhanae from signals from my Earth.
Again it seemed like this branch was something fictional, to the perspective of my world anyway. Looking up the Tetatae revealed the same deal and I was starting to think maybe my world really was full of Precogs and Postcogs. Though it made me feel stupid on how I hadn't recognized the Jiralhanae.
But then I remember spending eight months in another dimension and not bothering to think much about a game I haven't played and only seen from the perspective of fanfiction writers. Plus only one species was one that would be easily recognizable at a glance.
I sighed as I looked at the math used to describe the properties of Slipspace, finding them almost lacking in some way. I made suitable adjustments, and found where the dimensional cutter of a Slipspace drive led to. I had compared smaller single-use Slipspace devices to veil-rips from shaman in the last few hours and they shared a similar signature.
Slipspace drives created artificial rips into higher sections of the spirit world, or some realm connected to it. The closest analog seemed to be some layer of the Abstract Spirit, which probably accounted for the general instability of physics.
But…it was also obvious the physics of this period were different, because there seemed to be a mostly complete absence of spirits in this reality. Though the possibility existed that they simply couldn't interact with them because they had no shamans.
And there were rumors about entities within this space so it's possible there were some metaphysical phenomena weaved into their existence though it was less obvious without the right knowledge or technology. The Huraggoy for example were studying something they called mind essence and mind patterns, ripples and patterns in what they call Living Time, the philosophy of the universe itself being an instant of living moments, a vast intelligent entity.
Which wasn't all-together wrong, if a little hard to parse your head around. Though the fact I now had the ability to open artificial portals into the spirit world…or some place it led to was harrowing enough.
The DPN interacted with the spirit world on a limited basis, using machine spirits to sort of massage time and space and form paths. This was a little more direct and a little more dangerous, though most of the math was dedicated to the higher layers of the spiritual planes.
So I couldn't just technologically open a portal to the High Spirit, though given a few weeks I might be able to manage it eventually. The dimensions the Slipspace drive slid into were empty, and we had to follow specific pathways, along the Spirit Roads themselves if I was looking at everything right.
It also gave me a pathway toward building Mass Relays due to their spiritual connection to the Spirit Roads. Especially once I honed in on Prothean Steel, and made a material tough enough to withstand nearly any impact. The thing I had cobbled together on Ennea was a damn trinket and was closer to a spirit world influenced dimensional portal than a true Mass Relay.
And slower to boot…
Of course we needed a lot of eezo, and from what I've looked up inside my brain, one mass relay needed sixty thousand tons of eezo. Enough to build hundreds of dreadnoughts, and a little outside my own…production capacity. I needed at the bare minimum two cruiser-scale drive cores for a smaller pair, which was better but still costly.
We were locating high energy environments and found a particular pattern, the highest concentrations of eezo were around neutron stars and black holes in the vicinity of concentrations of intelligent life. The universes surrounding Goetia had higher concentrations, which was…not a good sign with the info of how deposits of eezo are formed.
I moved on from examining the FTL jump to looking at my energy shield testing, making modifications to the system. The plasma blast had attacked particular weak spots in the omni-field shielding, so I was implementing Jiralhanae energy shielding methods designed to counteract plasma.
It was a triple layer system, a kinetic barrier atop a biotic one, with an energy shield capable of being flared into an omni-shield for up to three minutes. The new design made it immune to that creature's plasma attack, and my shielding had better recharge and defensive capabilities.
The energy barrier could take a Widow right to the face, and the same applied to the kinetic barrier underneath it. I would only flicker on my biotic barrier once both were down, so I could use my reserves on biotic attacks instead. It would pop on automatically upon failure of primary defenses, and I would hope to take down whatever hits hard enough to crack several layers of defense that quickly.
"Basilia?" Sveta called out in question, and I blinked when I noted I had my hands placed too close to her face.
"Sorry." I apologized, eyes darting back and forth along the costume she had been fitted with. It was a tough bulletproof grey armored shell, with limited articulation of the frame. Something similar to her…Ward costume based on what I had looked up of my own accord.
Which had helped me figure out why Lady Photon was cross with me for knowing 'family secrets' and made me like Carol a little less than I already did.
Poor Mark…
Sveta was already super-strong so she didn't really need powered armor, and it wasn't conditional like Victoria so there was only limited support. Most of the power was from a micro-fusion reactor, generating a vehicle-grade barrier system and a massive amount of processing power.
The suit provided protection from external threats like chemical, biological, radiological, and other dangers that her tough body couldn't handle. It was able to handle being subsumed within Sveta's body, and could project barriers just fine as needed.
"So how does my costume look?" Sveta asked out of nowhere, fidgeting on the spot. I blinked, looking at the grey shell in response to her question.
"A little boring." I was honest, and she looked like a kicked puppy. "But it's a blank canvas so if you want to add some extra flare feel free. The White Lotus is all about the freedom of expression." I had paid for setting up beautification programs all around the city, new parks, more trees, areas where people can spray paint art.
We had twenty seven capes between us with a fairly wide variety of designs and such. We would also certainly get more members in time, though that was personally rather annoying.
"Oh." I worked on inspecting her armor, scanning the suit, checking for any little defects that could cause trouble. Nothing so far.
"Something you want to talk about?" I ventured a guess, hoping I hadn't misinterpreted her hesitation for something else.
"How…much do you know about what…Cauldron did to me?" I hissed but didn't cower away from what I knew was going to be a hard topic to broach.
"I know they found you and your…sister when you were both badly hurt. Only one of you survived the treatment." I sat down, my armor clicking against the seat where I was monitoring the small orbital base, some one hundred meters in length with basic grav-plates and barriers. It has a suite of sensors, scanning everything within millions of kilometers.
With…varying amounts of fidelity.
"I don't remember much…but I remember that." I nodded, unsure of how to continue. "I…understand why you don't want to rock the boat, I'm not sure what choice I would have made in your place."
It still felt cowardly. "Maybe. Doesn't make it right." It really didn't, not even a little. "Cauldron did terrible things, despicable things, all of it for the survival of the human species. The needs of the many over the needs of the few." Something hard and bitter came out in my tone, fingers twitching with the urge to strangle something or someone.
"It's why you've been doing everything you could to help Case 53s isn't it? Because you…can't make Cauldron pay without getting a lot of people hurt in the process." Sveta looked concerned at my reaction.
"Not really. I helped them because I had the power to do so, simple as that. I might not be some paragon of good…but if it's something I can help with I'll at least try." I snapped a flame into existence, staring at it to distract me from my woes. "No one deserves what's been done to the Case 53s, no matter what justifications there are…a lesser evil is still evil."
Frankly I don't think they made the best choices, but those best choices were under a series of circumstances that would derail most plans from most people. Their little Path to Victory was powerful, but it was not infallible. If it was then Eden would never have crashed and gotten ganked by a ten year old.
You had to ask the right questions, had to have the right people in place without alerting Golden Boy, and had to correct for Triggers and powerful capes capable of setting their plans off course. How can you fight an enemy you don't fully understand, an enemy you can't fight on par on with besides making use of their own powers against them?
Powers that are unstable and black boxed. I wouldn't begrudge them using the shards against them…because to be frank anyone thinking current human technology would do shit against the Entities is a moron. I was cheating by hijacking the cycle, and coming in from dimensions that their sight can't see because of OCP magical bullshit.
Which won't and is not lasting forever because OCP things is what shards live for.
It was a combination of the sheer insidiousness of the cycle and their own character flaws that were their downfall. They weren't the best choice, they were just the people holding the ball out of blind luck, and losing themselves in looking at the big picture.
It doesn't mean they aren't shitty human beings because dear god they are, and they sacrificed so much for expedience and tended to ignore the after effects of their goals and their plans. They weren't the right people…but I'm not sure what the right answer there was.
Cauldron this time around did seem to be thinking it through more though whether this was by their own merit I couldn't be sure.
"Do you ever plan on telling the rest of the Case 53s?" Sveta interrupted my brooding and I straightened my posture.
"I've got a PowerPoint presentation all set up for them and everything, and I'm currently trying to locate their home realities." I was dry with my reply, brushing a bang back. "I've healed about two thirds of all Case 53s so far, and at some point the truth needs to be broken to them. Only hope I have is that they can hold back their rage for after the end of the world is stopped."
I didn't really care about what would happen to Cauldron in the aftermath.
"In that…future you know about…that didn't happen?" I nodded sadly at Sveta's question.
"About half the Case 53's assaulted Cauldron during Scion's rampage, it got most of their remaining subjects killed and and fucked up a lot of things for a lot of people. You and Weld were there…but you weren't able to moderate people and everything fell apart."
"It's strange to think I would have been a part of something like that." Her soft voice hitched, and I shrugged.
"The multiverse is a strange place…all I can do is take it one step at a time and hope I'm not making things worse."
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize, you don't have to…" Sveta's eyes looked me up and down for a moment, as if thinking of something in particular.
"Maybe…maybe you'd like to help me with painting my costume? We are teammates." Her warm smile calmed my nerves.
I nodded, and she removed her costume with her tendrils, placing the armor on a stand. Sveta was smiling shyly, and I knew I needed a little more interaction between members of my team. Twenty seven capes was more than I expected but it wasn't an unreasonable number. I was somehow the leader of the White Lotus even if only nominally. And I needed some time to decompress.
Painting should be relaxing enough.
September 25th, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I hefted a block of stone, several hundred tons of mass easily lifted by the energies of the soul. I was freely bending on the beach in Brockton, and I could tell there was a small crowd of people as I broke up the stone into smaller fragments.
I moved on to the shifting sand beneath my feet, drawing upon the martial arts of air and water for the control of sand. Bending was getting easier, controlling fire was as easy as breathing, biotics was just as simple for the basic Three, and the other elements were falling under my grasp with prodigal speed.
I shaped the sand into a layout of the city, using my sense of the earth and my ARO to design the replica. The large chunk of stone was being taken by a truck, since I was using my bending to clean up the beach after some debris had washed ashore.
I had given the PRT the information, and they had narrowed down the Fallen's location to a select number of shut down workshops, condemned due to going out of business and general lack of maintenance. They had shamans working on where they were hiding.
Victoria was with me, letting a few kids hang out with her, a sunny grin on her face. She showed one firebender how to summon a flame to his hand, her golden-white flames shining brighter, with new black-purple tips. In my vision she was brighter, like the sun at midday.
Nike had been reconfigured by my hands, I reached into the core of her being and changed her as was my imperative as a shaman and as an administrator. Pieces were selected, from the right shards, and the right words given to motivate her into ripping the Thief off of her.
There were powers and abilities I had left untapped, whether out of ignorance or fear. The shards were strange and alien but they were spirits all the same, and creating or manipulating spirit was what I did best. Before my tinkering, before my bending and before even being more than human.
I was a shaman.
I had created a multitude of machine spirits, programming them in tandem with their material counterparts. If I could do that as easy as breathing then shaping the Form of shards wasn't unprecedented. Though it was a certainty that what I could do wasn't what just any run of the mill shaman could manage.
I felt Chevalier's approach as a tingle at my spine, and I turned around with a somewhat downturned tilt to my lips. His costume made the sensors go wild, eezo elements allowing for the easy detection of mass and gravity disparities.
My equipment caught glimpses of his various suits across multiple dimensions, worlds selected and locked away from the use of humans. Despite not being able to see his face behind his helm, I knew there were questions on the tip of his tongue.
There were a lot of things I had told the PRT and a lot that had gone unsaid for one reason or another. Some were secrets that weren't mine to tell, not yet but not never either. Others were simply overshadowed by more pertinent questions and threats.
"I'm guessing the PRT would like a talk with us?" Chevalier nodded, and I didn't really care much about what the PRT wanted. But they weren't evil, so I would give them something.
But I doubt I could satisfy them, not when even I didn't have all the answers, and my knowledge of this world was growing thin, useless outside of the most specific of situations.
"Portal?" He gave a thumbs up, and I opened one to a particular spot that had been designated as the only place I could portal for without getting a shot of containment foam.
We stepped through, and Chevalier spoke to me in a whisper. "I don't want to pry but…"
"Not a Second Trigger, in the usual sense anyway." It wasn't the right circumstances for one anyway. "Guess you can see her then huh?"
"Like Polaris…but made of light, and she seems in a good mood." Fragile One waved, and he nearly waved back before suppressing the urge. The Rig had been fixed up by a team of metalbenders and a few of their workers using machines created by Dragon.
We walked through a few halls, winding around a bit before we slowed down at a large door that led to what I knew was a secure meeting room. Again a few Dragon's Teeth provided security, most of them eying a sullen Polaris with concern.
Piggot was sitting down, hands clasped together and laid down on a desk, eyes narrowed and jaw clenched. There were no agents, all of them parked outside with Chevalier following us in. She wasn't angry, there was a look of simple acceptance, and I wasn't sure how to take that.
"You have questions." A statement rather than a question because I wasn't a brain dead floozy.
Piggot side-eyed me. "You've done things almost everyone in the world thought impossible. Your meddling has advanced humanity by a decade or more, and you're still ramping aren't you?"
I shrugged, smiling. "I guess."
"Your team has at least three S-class capes, and you've given us breakthroughs in the understanding of parahumans powers. Your arrival in the city changed quite literally everything. You're holding onto secrets I can't even begin to fathom the scale of…and we only have some of the pieces, and they're not enough to give us a good or accurate answer." Her smile wasn't nice but neither was it dangerous. "When the Butcher latched onto Polaris you ripped it out of her. So yes we have questions…but I have the feeling you can't answer all of them."
"You would be right…but I don't mind answering what I'm willing to give." I didn't project my smugness out of common courtesy, she was a bit of a bigot and cynical as hell but she had gotten better about being a bitch.
"About what I would expect from your position and disposition."
I blinked. "My position?" Piggot snorted as if deeply amused by some inside joke I was only partially in on.
"You have us dead to rights no matter where we are when you have a dimension hopping spaceship two thirds of a kilometer in length with a main gun built for killing Endbringers, an army of machines, and the backing of a small interstellar empire. I know where we stand, even if the technology gap narrows within my lifetime."
"I usually prefer not to dive into that, I had a bad case of megalomania when I was a kid. Dreams of conquering the world and all…until I realized rulership is a curse." I folded my arms, cocking a hip. "Ask what questions you think I can answer, and we can move on to more productive things like taking down the cult backed by interdimensional imperialists."
"Which is why I'm not particularly concerned about your threat level." It didn't mean she wasn't prepared for the possibility of things going wrong. It was sort of written all over her face. "No…what's more important is why exactly your power is so different, what separates you from other parahumans?"
"I'm sure you know what a Host is at this point? With the number of shamans your department is popping out for the rest of the PRT." I rotated my left arm, sighing as I felt the cybernetic bones beneath my skin.
"Shamans who let spirits reside inside them in exchange for power?" Chevalier replied for the Director, and I nodded.
"Are you saying you let a spirit inside of you…?" Piggot didn't sound skeptical but there was a little wariness.
"I had as much choice in housing my shard as any parahuman had a choice in Triggering." Bitterness was apparently the name of the day, and I had to count back from ten not to lose it. "And my union with my shard…it's like comparing a barnacle to a mitochondria, one is far easier to dislodge while trying to remove my spirit would be like trying to rip out my vital organs."
"That Mother of Miseries…that Avatar-entity called you a little sister…from what my Wards told us. Your fusion with your spirit is similar to this Avatar." There was a surety in her tone.
"In a way yes…but I'm certainly far less than the union of Raava and Wan, the very last Avatar had the weight of millions of past lives, two and a half billion years of history. What I did with Leviathan, that ain't shit against the power of an Avatar unleashed. I don't have the raw oomph to blow up a planet." Not without killing who I was.
"These Avatars could do that?" Chevalier was probably wide eyed beneath his helm. "Casually destroy worlds."
"Nah. Most cases their bodies won't take the strain, it's not casual…and in the end it still wasn't enough when the enemy has thousands just like you and a limitless army of soulless cybernetic corpses and monsters." The Reapers were the stuff of nightmares, and every slot/branch had some horrifying galactic threat.
The Citadel had the Reapers and their Harbinger, the Humanx had the galaxy eating Great Evil…though I had heard some refer to it as the Great Emptiness, the Tetatae had…fought against the monsters that destroyed the Great Houses and the Clans.
Those…things had been human once, but they had turned themselves into abominations of living metal and flesh, creatures of the void, of death. I hadn't looked into what the Yonhet and their contemporaries had faced, but it was probably suitably horrible.
"How did they win?" Piggot was rapping her fingers on her fancy wooden desk, chewing on her lip as if thinking.
"They used some weapon called the Crucible, but what happened when it activated…I have no idea. I know quite a lot but not everything."
"So your powers are different because of how you've bonded with your shard. So the only answer is…why?" I sighed at the question from Piggot, she wanted answers I didn't know.
"Maybe whatever managed to compress eight thousand exatons of crystalline space wyrm into the shape and volume of a hundred and fifty pound human decided they liked the underdog and gave us a chance against extinction? Maybe it was just for shits and giggles, or for some inevitable evil plan that'll destroy us all. The only thing I do know is that I'm supposed to serve some type of role here, but I'm not an expert on my own nature…"
"It's more than what we had before, and it should keep some of the other Directors placated." She looked like she wanted to strangle someone.
"I'm guessing some of the more militant Directors want me under the thumb of the PRT? They don't like the lack of control over me?"
Piggot didn't deny it. "I've had one or two imply that the Cage would serve as a suitable home." Her sardonic tone told me her opinion of such people. "And that being under the handle of a certain Trump would be safer for everyone."
"I'm like 95% sure I can't get Reaped, and I'd break out of that place in an hour, dimensional portal network or not. We're lucky that place has no shamans." Containing a shaman wasn't impossible but no protections had been placed there so far, and it had already been compromised by that shaman boy. "So to cut it short, I'm a greatly limited mix between spirit and soul with the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither, and can fuck with powers…with varying levels of ease."
"Greatly limited…" I opened my mouth to reply when I suddenly received an alert from Taylor.
"Fuck…Mannequin managed to sneak into Athena, we had to evacuate everyone still working!" I choked, and started to shake in repressed anger.
"What's wrong?"
"Mannequin is currently attacking my business and hurting the people under my protection." I felt like breaking something, and Piggot stared at me.
"I'm sending Armsmaster down there as well as Weld, can you…" I waved the address and she sent out a message on her computer, and I could hear her moving fast on that.
"I need to go down there, I'm not letting him…" Piggot froze as did Chevalier, space warping around a single point to my left. It was a kid of about thirteen years of age, middle eastern from the looks of it with a ragged grey cloak and soft grey eyes, hair messy and matted.
"That isn't your part to play here Vyasa." I boggled when I realized what he called me and what he was saying. The Director's hand was moving to a button that would activate containment foam projectors and then she paused, gears turning.
"He's right, it's obvious Mannequin wants to draw you in, he's baiting you." Piggot was obviously rankled for not being able to contain the shaman. "Which begs the question of why you needed to tell us that in person…" she directed her glare at the shaman. "As well as why you left your meeting with Miss Militia."
"We need to go, somewhere less crowded with the smooth-souled, more alive, more connected to the ephemeral." There was a cloud of spirits over the boy's head, impatience within them.
"Why?"
"You need to be taught what you are, taught what it means to be Vyasa, how to hear the void. You have to understand." There was a whisper in my mind, and I knew the truth in those words.
Piggot was no longer hovering her hand over the button. "I know this shaman is allied with Weaver… if this is important…go…go now." There was a look in her eyes, like she was telling me that I needed to follow her advice on this. She was going with her gut here. "Send your machines after Mannequin in your stead, I still have my own to look after." I could see her computer was sending out alerts, and my drones sent images of strange attacks, a van overturned, some twisting in the shadows.
The boy smiled, lighting up the room. "Thank you…and I apologize for my intrusion, when we return…I can teach your shamans how to better ward your bases." Piggot sounded surprised at the kid's helpfulness.
Damn it.
"I'm giving you a chance here." Left unsaid that the boy wouldn't have another chance from the Director if he fucked up.
I sighed. "Fine, where are we going?" I growled, not even getting a moment to sit without courting disaster and madness.
"A place near the heart, a place for lessons that need to be taught." He offered his hand, a flurry of red-silver crystalline spirits sliding behind a larger flurry of divine silver. "Please…"
"Erudition…Basilia. Go, trust that we can handle this." Taylor insisted and I knew I couldn't deny her in this. He offered his hand and when I took it…
We were suddenly standing over a cliff face, a great gnarled tree rising kilometers into the sky before us, wood twisting into stone, into metal, into a thousand spheres and environments, within that tree sat a molten sphere, and I saw a glimpse of something Beyond it, scintillating fields of reflective glass lensing reality around then.
"Tell me your name." I demanded, even as I knew I had to follow him. Because it needed to be done, and because we were running out of time for this to happen. Even as if made me rage on the inside with resentment and bitterness.
The boy was small and melancholic. "Rusul."
I was supposed to learn, and I wished it had been at a better time. But I guess I didn't get the luxury.
Wasn't that peachy?
AN: So I've got this and most of 13.2 worked out, and. Teleologism is now seven chapters and three interludes to make things fit better. Plus the chapters might be shorter with this Arc…no guarantee there since I don't have a Beta to clean things up.
Which would be nice but I have no idea how to get one anyway. Next Arc should be something different, though you wont get to see that for about a month.
So enjoy this mess of a story.
September 25th, 2011. 9:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I projected myself into a spiritual body, letting Taylor keep guard of my body as I found myself in the Living Spirit. I walked past the spirits that roamed my home, from the guardian spirit acting as a roommate for the door-spirit of my…well door to the electrical spirits living happily in the walls of my home. A few animal spirits, mainly of insects, tiny barely sentient swarms scattered about.
The layers of the Spirit were odd to say the least, and there were three, though for the latter two it would be more accurate to say it was a set of layers acting as one layer. The High Spirit had multiple layers, weaving and folding and moving and orbiting around each other. But there was an order to the chaos.
The Abstract was not that, it was pure concept and unstable physics, none of the forces working as they should. It was hostile to most life and was where most Genius Loci came to roost. Very few spirits had any such thing, and I knew only of two that did in the city.
The Lady of the Bay and Centralis, and the latter was a strange case, something similar to a much weaker Wan Shi Tong. He had an unusual strength and vitality, perhaps something to do with Brockton or simply a matter of consuming the right concepts.
I stepped out of the front door of my home, stepping and sauntering with the confidence needed to be held by all shaman. My bending was nonexistent, since it only worked in certain parts of the spirit world around here. And without a physical body I wouldn't have been able to bend anyway.
I followed my own senses, pulling past a herd of car spirits, and stopping at a river of sludge and waste that represented a sort of fucked up dumpster. A few spirits of plastic and metal watched, lingering with no movement of their own. I pulled out a big stick of cheese, grinning widely.
From the mountain of trash, a flood of rats came, surging and rippling over each other in a wave of rodents and pulsing spiritual webbing. They took shape, gripping onto each other with their paws and tails, until they took up the shape of a rat the size of a man, towering over me.
"Why have you summoned us, human?" Their voice echoed, entering from my left ear and then to my right ear. The rat-spirit was one of those few animal spirits that continued after the death of their physical body, one who had absorbed the essence of its countless brethren's and countless compatible concepts.
A spirit of Rats…and a spirit of Secrets.
"The Rat King of Brocc." I kept an unaggressive posture, because rat spirits are as skittish as their material counterparts, though Brockton rats are certainly more lively than in other cities. Rats were omnipresent, and there were tons of secrets they had gathered and ferreted out after hundreds of years. He had arrived with the ships of European settlers and was as large as his spiritual species could manage before losing their ability to hide from their predators.
"I've heard you know a secret or two for a price." I lightly waved the large block of cheese, holding it in the bag I commonly brought to the spirit world to offer tithes of various kinds.
"We know many secrets, Emerald Child, but you must know the price paid in exchange." I offered the Rat King cheese, and they shared it between their many mouths. It swirled around me as a mass of mammalian flesh and fur, laughing and chuckling with an echoing tone. "What secret will you give me in exchange? What price are you willing to pay?"
I told the spirit my secret, it wasn't a big one but it was certainly one that only a tiny fraction of the people in the world knew.
"Ooooo! How juicy, how delightful and tasty! We know something only so few people know, it will be amazing while it's value remains!" The Rat King giggled, smiling faces forming out of the mass of rats. "The deal is made little Vyasa, little creature of soul and spirit."
"What can you give me Rat King?" The pack squirmed, tails flicking and squeaking ongoing as it paused to answer my question.
"What do you want in exchange?" I smiled carefully, doing my best not to expose my teeth and frighten off the skittish prey spirit.
"I seek information on the shaman known as Ezekiel here, his general location if possible." The spirit made a grinning face, dozens of them, rats sliding past one another to do so. I kept my disgust from showing, though there was some morbid fascination on how their Form shifted.
"We hear much from our fearful brethren in Kittery, whispers in the dark, of a Condemned Workshop of Madness and Abominations. A man following the commands of his Master." The Rat King chuckled, madness entwined into their words, a thousand chirps coming together into a coherent chorus.
"I thank you for the information Rat King, I will be leaving your presence." I bowed my head, and there was a bemused twinkle in their beady eyes.
"Indeed. You have given us a gift of knowledge little Vyasa, this will not be forgotten." The horde slid into the darkness, trash burbling and burping as the spirit vanished.
I adjusted my coat, and looked around for a moment. I had the information I needed, and the Rats had been an excellent choice for telling me what I needed. Now adding some outside research and analyzing the words would give me a good idea of where the Fallen and Ezekiel were hiding.
I folded space along the paths I commonly used in the spirit world, and let go of my projection. The world shimmered as I dropped out of the High Spirit and back into the Inner Sphere. Taylor shook my shoulders, tilting her head in a manner that reminded me of a cute puppy. Or maybe a particularly adorable honeybee?
"You got what you needed?" Taylor asked, and I gave her a thumbs up. I took a moment to think about what I was doing, and smiled.
I curled my fingers to beckon her closer, and I flew up for a quick peck on the lips. She blinked as if confused, though she took my show of affection in stride.
"Yep. Now…I need to get to work on…a lot, we've got a few people on the case to look out for the Fallen. Plus more preparations against the capes we know are not on our side." Mannequin was a dangerous cape and was certainly going to exploit my weaknesses.
So my paranoia, and my lesser ability to be exceedingly brutal like other capes in this messed up world. I would have to use actively lethal force against him, and he was definitely going to pick up a way to disable some of my tech if he was using eezo himself.
He was an amazing tinker, and I shuddered to think of what he could make wherever he was hiding. My engineers had figured out a kinetic barrier in a more efficient capacity, generating magnetic fields around an object in tandem with eezo forms a basic barrier. Which was something I already knew because…you know…I'm a tinker with eezo as my first technology. If they could do that I shuddered to think of what Mannequin could come up with.
My engineers current prototypes could only take one to three shots from an assault rifle, but that was still a game changer. The modified dark energy field projectors and shapers would make it easier to use for lots of stuff that doesn't need advanced tinkertech.
I rubbed my hands together, suppressing an evil cackle when I saw Taylor's worried look.
Time to get to work.
___
September 25th, 2011. 2:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I watched space fold from a reasonable distance, the Samsara vanishing into thin air with the integrated Jumpdrive. The space warping and altered drive metrics made the need to slowly charge or worry about gravity wells a thing of the past.
It still takes fifteen minutes though, so micro-jump maneuvers are still more optimal using Asari-derived flash-step movements. Space warping maneuvering was a good choice too though it was more costly and used up more fuel.
The Samsara had jumped to TRAPPIST, just below the distance redline for space folding. That system was ruled over by Dayereh and her daughter-queens, ruling seven planets of varying scales and properties. Only two of the planets had life, and only one of them wouldn't kill humans.
Each system had four queens, and with their current population they had maybe half a million Rachni per system, though the mother of the whole species, Lyre had nine hundred thousand Rachni in the new Rachni capital system of Tau Ceti.
I had a few new options on weapons, though most of it wasn't game changing outside of more plasma and particle beam weapons. Plus some type of hard light projectile weapon. Though on the scale of ships, they had very powerful magnetic accelerator cannons.
As in firing a ten ton slug at three hundred kilometers a second, and directed globs of plasma through electrogravitic manipulation. Hitting a lot harder than a Citadel vessel but firing a little slower, though Thanix cannons had similar energy levels though they needed a dedicated eezo core.
It was the FTL drive they used that I found a little more interesting, one that worked by entering what they called Slipspace, a higher dimensional space existing above normal reality, surrounding it like a vast bubble. This higher dimensional space had altered laws of physics, allowing ships to fly at faster than light speeds.
Tech wise there was wide variation in the speed and capabilities of Slipspace drives, with the Yonhet having the most primitive drives. They might be an old species, but they had collapsed pretty hard due to their small population pre-Fall. About fifty light years per day was their standard, while the Helioskrill and the Jiralhanae both hit three hundred light years per day and the Hurragoy is three times faster than that.
The main issue lies in that their more complex drives are harder to integrate into the Samsara. Though using the mass effect to generate the required black hole, and shaping it into a scalpel was more than enough on its own. I was mostly giving some of the bigger stuff to the Rachni to see what they made of it.
Apparently they liked the idea of building a two kilometer capital ship, but at the moment they had a dozen cruisers, 60 frigates and thirty six destroyers. A hundred spacecraft, each of them hitting hard enough at the low end to wipe our city blocks and on the high end erasing cities from the map.
"Test run successful." An LAI told me the message I was waiting for, of the Samsara lying in orbit around Nanna. The ship waited a moment, multiple robots going in to inspect the drive core. There were minor problems with the superconductive rod, making use of an exotic substance stable up to 400 kelvin.
"I guess we'll need to dedicate more mass to the power systems, we don't need the Jumpdrive to burn out." I talked to myself, and there was a whisper in my mind as I let my mind run with the possibilities.
I scowled, feeling the three active presences, though none bar the last were paying attention. I talked every so often with the souls that had provided my bending, though most of the time they were…sleeping. The third hadn't talked to me yet but she was going to…especially after I had looked up Jiralhanae from signals from my Earth.
Again it seemed like this branch was something fictional, to the perspective of my world anyway. Looking up the Tetatae revealed the same deal and I was starting to think maybe my world really was full of Precogs and Postcogs. Though it made me feel stupid on how I hadn't recognized the Jiralhanae.
But then I remember spending eight months in another dimension and not bothering to think much about a game I haven't played and only seen from the perspective of fanfiction writers. Plus only one species was one that would be easily recognizable at a glance.
I sighed as I looked at the math used to describe the properties of Slipspace, finding them almost lacking in some way. I made suitable adjustments, and found where the dimensional cutter of a Slipspace drive led to. I had compared smaller single-use Slipspace devices to veil-rips from shaman in the last few hours and they shared a similar signature.
Slipspace drives created artificial rips into higher sections of the spirit world, or some realm connected to it. The closest analog seemed to be some layer of the Abstract Spirit, which probably accounted for the general instability of physics.
But…it was also obvious the physics of this period were different, because there seemed to be a mostly complete absence of spirits in this reality. Though the possibility existed that they simply couldn't interact with them because they had no shamans.
And there were rumors about entities within this space so it's possible there were some metaphysical phenomena weaved into their existence though it was less obvious without the right knowledge or technology. The Huraggoy for example were studying something they called mind essence and mind patterns, ripples and patterns in what they call Living Time, the philosophy of the universe itself being an instant of living moments, a vast intelligent entity.
Which wasn't all-together wrong, if a little hard to parse your head around. Though the fact I now had the ability to open artificial portals into the spirit world…or some place it led to was harrowing enough.
The DPN interacted with the spirit world on a limited basis, using machine spirits to sort of massage time and space and form paths. This was a little more direct and a little more dangerous, though most of the math was dedicated to the higher layers of the spiritual planes.
So I couldn't just technologically open a portal to the High Spirit, though given a few weeks I might be able to manage it eventually. The dimensions the Slipspace drive slid into were empty, and we had to follow specific pathways, along the Spirit Roads themselves if I was looking at everything right.
It also gave me a pathway toward building Mass Relays due to their spiritual connection to the Spirit Roads. Especially once I honed in on Prothean Steel, and made a material tough enough to withstand nearly any impact. The thing I had cobbled together on Ennea was a damn trinket and was closer to a spirit world influenced dimensional portal than a true Mass Relay.
And slower to boot…
Of course we needed a lot of eezo, and from what I've looked up inside my brain, one mass relay needed sixty thousand tons of eezo. Enough to build hundreds of dreadnoughts, and a little outside my own…production capacity. I needed at the bare minimum two cruiser-scale drive cores for a smaller pair, which was better but still costly.
We were locating high energy environments and found a particular pattern, the highest concentrations of eezo were around neutron stars and black holes in the vicinity of concentrations of intelligent life. The universes surrounding Goetia had higher concentrations, which was…not a good sign with the info of how deposits of eezo are formed.
I moved on from examining the FTL jump to looking at my energy shield testing, making modifications to the system. The plasma blast had attacked particular weak spots in the omni-field shielding, so I was implementing Jiralhanae energy shielding methods designed to counteract plasma.
It was a triple layer system, a kinetic barrier atop a biotic one, with an energy shield capable of being flared into an omni-shield for up to three minutes. The new design made it immune to that creature's plasma attack, and my shielding had better recharge and defensive capabilities.
The energy barrier could take a Widow right to the face, and the same applied to the kinetic barrier underneath it. I would only flicker on my biotic barrier once both were down, so I could use my reserves on biotic attacks instead. It would pop on automatically upon failure of primary defenses, and I would hope to take down whatever hits hard enough to crack several layers of defense that quickly.
"Basilia?" Sveta called out in question, and I blinked when I noted I had my hands placed too close to her face.
"Sorry." I apologized, eyes darting back and forth along the costume she had been fitted with. It was a tough bulletproof grey armored shell, with limited articulation of the frame. Something similar to her…Ward costume based on what I had looked up of my own accord.
Which had helped me figure out why Lady Photon was cross with me for knowing 'family secrets' and made me like Carol a little less than I already did.
Poor Mark…
Sveta was already super-strong so she didn't really need powered armor, and it wasn't conditional like Victoria so there was only limited support. Most of the power was from a micro-fusion reactor, generating a vehicle-grade barrier system and a massive amount of processing power.
The suit provided protection from external threats like chemical, biological, radiological, and other dangers that her tough body couldn't handle. It was able to handle being subsumed within Sveta's body, and could project barriers just fine as needed.
"So how does my costume look?" Sveta asked out of nowhere, fidgeting on the spot. I blinked, looking at the grey shell in response to her question.
"A little boring." I was honest, and she looked like a kicked puppy. "But it's a blank canvas so if you want to add some extra flare feel free. The White Lotus is all about the freedom of expression." I had paid for setting up beautification programs all around the city, new parks, more trees, areas where people can spray paint art.
We had twenty seven capes between us with a fairly wide variety of designs and such. We would also certainly get more members in time, though that was personally rather annoying.
"Oh." I worked on inspecting her armor, scanning the suit, checking for any little defects that could cause trouble. Nothing so far.
"Something you want to talk about?" I ventured a guess, hoping I hadn't misinterpreted her hesitation for something else.
"How…much do you know about what…Cauldron did to me?" I hissed but didn't cower away from what I knew was going to be a hard topic to broach.
"I know they found you and your…sister when you were both badly hurt. Only one of you survived the treatment." I sat down, my armor clicking against the seat where I was monitoring the small orbital base, some one hundred meters in length with basic grav-plates and barriers. It has a suite of sensors, scanning everything within millions of kilometers.
With…varying amounts of fidelity.
"I don't remember much…but I remember that." I nodded, unsure of how to continue. "I…understand why you don't want to rock the boat, I'm not sure what choice I would have made in your place."
It still felt cowardly. "Maybe. Doesn't make it right." It really didn't, not even a little. "Cauldron did terrible things, despicable things, all of it for the survival of the human species. The needs of the many over the needs of the few." Something hard and bitter came out in my tone, fingers twitching with the urge to strangle something or someone.
"It's why you've been doing everything you could to help Case 53s isn't it? Because you…can't make Cauldron pay without getting a lot of people hurt in the process." Sveta looked concerned at my reaction.
"Not really. I helped them because I had the power to do so, simple as that. I might not be some paragon of good…but if it's something I can help with I'll at least try." I snapped a flame into existence, staring at it to distract me from my woes. "No one deserves what's been done to the Case 53s, no matter what justifications there are…a lesser evil is still evil."
Frankly I don't think they made the best choices, but those best choices were under a series of circumstances that would derail most plans from most people. Their little Path to Victory was powerful, but it was not infallible. If it was then Eden would never have crashed and gotten ganked by a ten year old.
You had to ask the right questions, had to have the right people in place without alerting Golden Boy, and had to correct for Triggers and powerful capes capable of setting their plans off course. How can you fight an enemy you don't fully understand, an enemy you can't fight on par on with besides making use of their own powers against them?
Powers that are unstable and black boxed. I wouldn't begrudge them using the shards against them…because to be frank anyone thinking current human technology would do shit against the Entities is a moron. I was cheating by hijacking the cycle, and coming in from dimensions that their sight can't see because of OCP magical bullshit.
Which won't and is not lasting forever because OCP things is what shards live for.
It was a combination of the sheer insidiousness of the cycle and their own character flaws that were their downfall. They weren't the best choice, they were just the people holding the ball out of blind luck, and losing themselves in looking at the big picture.
It doesn't mean they aren't shitty human beings because dear god they are, and they sacrificed so much for expedience and tended to ignore the after effects of their goals and their plans. They weren't the right people…but I'm not sure what the right answer there was.
Cauldron this time around did seem to be thinking it through more though whether this was by their own merit I couldn't be sure.
"Do you ever plan on telling the rest of the Case 53s?" Sveta interrupted my brooding and I straightened my posture.
"I've got a PowerPoint presentation all set up for them and everything, and I'm currently trying to locate their home realities." I was dry with my reply, brushing a bang back. "I've healed about two thirds of all Case 53s so far, and at some point the truth needs to be broken to them. Only hope I have is that they can hold back their rage for after the end of the world is stopped."
I didn't really care about what would happen to Cauldron in the aftermath.
"In that…future you know about…that didn't happen?" I nodded sadly at Sveta's question.
"About half the Case 53's assaulted Cauldron during Scion's rampage, it got most of their remaining subjects killed and and fucked up a lot of things for a lot of people. You and Weld were there…but you weren't able to moderate people and everything fell apart."
"It's strange to think I would have been a part of something like that." Her soft voice hitched, and I shrugged.
"The multiverse is a strange place…all I can do is take it one step at a time and hope I'm not making things worse."
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize, you don't have to…" Sveta's eyes looked me up and down for a moment, as if thinking of something in particular.
"Maybe…maybe you'd like to help me with painting my costume? We are teammates." Her warm smile calmed my nerves.
I nodded, and she removed her costume with her tendrils, placing the armor on a stand. Sveta was smiling shyly, and I knew I needed a little more interaction between members of my team. Twenty seven capes was more than I expected but it wasn't an unreasonable number. I was somehow the leader of the White Lotus even if only nominally. And I needed some time to decompress.
Painting should be relaxing enough.
___
September 25th, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I hefted a block of stone, several hundred tons of mass easily lifted by the energies of the soul. I was freely bending on the beach in Brockton, and I could tell there was a small crowd of people as I broke up the stone into smaller fragments.
I moved on to the shifting sand beneath my feet, drawing upon the martial arts of air and water for the control of sand. Bending was getting easier, controlling fire was as easy as breathing, biotics was just as simple for the basic Three, and the other elements were falling under my grasp with prodigal speed.
I shaped the sand into a layout of the city, using my sense of the earth and my ARO to design the replica. The large chunk of stone was being taken by a truck, since I was using my bending to clean up the beach after some debris had washed ashore.
I had given the PRT the information, and they had narrowed down the Fallen's location to a select number of shut down workshops, condemned due to going out of business and general lack of maintenance. They had shamans working on where they were hiding.
Victoria was with me, letting a few kids hang out with her, a sunny grin on her face. She showed one firebender how to summon a flame to his hand, her golden-white flames shining brighter, with new black-purple tips. In my vision she was brighter, like the sun at midday.
Nike had been reconfigured by my hands, I reached into the core of her being and changed her as was my imperative as a shaman and as an administrator. Pieces were selected, from the right shards, and the right words given to motivate her into ripping the Thief off of her.
There were powers and abilities I had left untapped, whether out of ignorance or fear. The shards were strange and alien but they were spirits all the same, and creating or manipulating spirit was what I did best. Before my tinkering, before my bending and before even being more than human.
I was a shaman.
I had created a multitude of machine spirits, programming them in tandem with their material counterparts. If I could do that as easy as breathing then shaping the Form of shards wasn't unprecedented. Though it was a certainty that what I could do wasn't what just any run of the mill shaman could manage.
I felt Chevalier's approach as a tingle at my spine, and I turned around with a somewhat downturned tilt to my lips. His costume made the sensors go wild, eezo elements allowing for the easy detection of mass and gravity disparities.
My equipment caught glimpses of his various suits across multiple dimensions, worlds selected and locked away from the use of humans. Despite not being able to see his face behind his helm, I knew there were questions on the tip of his tongue.
There were a lot of things I had told the PRT and a lot that had gone unsaid for one reason or another. Some were secrets that weren't mine to tell, not yet but not never either. Others were simply overshadowed by more pertinent questions and threats.
"I'm guessing the PRT would like a talk with us?" Chevalier nodded, and I didn't really care much about what the PRT wanted. But they weren't evil, so I would give them something.
But I doubt I could satisfy them, not when even I didn't have all the answers, and my knowledge of this world was growing thin, useless outside of the most specific of situations.
"Portal?" He gave a thumbs up, and I opened one to a particular spot that had been designated as the only place I could portal for without getting a shot of containment foam.
We stepped through, and Chevalier spoke to me in a whisper. "I don't want to pry but…"
"Not a Second Trigger, in the usual sense anyway." It wasn't the right circumstances for one anyway. "Guess you can see her then huh?"
"Like Polaris…but made of light, and she seems in a good mood." Fragile One waved, and he nearly waved back before suppressing the urge. The Rig had been fixed up by a team of metalbenders and a few of their workers using machines created by Dragon.
We walked through a few halls, winding around a bit before we slowed down at a large door that led to what I knew was a secure meeting room. Again a few Dragon's Teeth provided security, most of them eying a sullen Polaris with concern.
Piggot was sitting down, hands clasped together and laid down on a desk, eyes narrowed and jaw clenched. There were no agents, all of them parked outside with Chevalier following us in. She wasn't angry, there was a look of simple acceptance, and I wasn't sure how to take that.
"You have questions." A statement rather than a question because I wasn't a brain dead floozy.
Piggot side-eyed me. "You've done things almost everyone in the world thought impossible. Your meddling has advanced humanity by a decade or more, and you're still ramping aren't you?"
I shrugged, smiling. "I guess."
"Your team has at least three S-class capes, and you've given us breakthroughs in the understanding of parahumans powers. Your arrival in the city changed quite literally everything. You're holding onto secrets I can't even begin to fathom the scale of…and we only have some of the pieces, and they're not enough to give us a good or accurate answer." Her smile wasn't nice but neither was it dangerous. "When the Butcher latched onto Polaris you ripped it out of her. So yes we have questions…but I have the feeling you can't answer all of them."
"You would be right…but I don't mind answering what I'm willing to give." I didn't project my smugness out of common courtesy, she was a bit of a bigot and cynical as hell but she had gotten better about being a bitch.
"About what I would expect from your position and disposition."
I blinked. "My position?" Piggot snorted as if deeply amused by some inside joke I was only partially in on.
"You have us dead to rights no matter where we are when you have a dimension hopping spaceship two thirds of a kilometer in length with a main gun built for killing Endbringers, an army of machines, and the backing of a small interstellar empire. I know where we stand, even if the technology gap narrows within my lifetime."
"I usually prefer not to dive into that, I had a bad case of megalomania when I was a kid. Dreams of conquering the world and all…until I realized rulership is a curse." I folded my arms, cocking a hip. "Ask what questions you think I can answer, and we can move on to more productive things like taking down the cult backed by interdimensional imperialists."
"Which is why I'm not particularly concerned about your threat level." It didn't mean she wasn't prepared for the possibility of things going wrong. It was sort of written all over her face. "No…what's more important is why exactly your power is so different, what separates you from other parahumans?"
"I'm sure you know what a Host is at this point? With the number of shamans your department is popping out for the rest of the PRT." I rotated my left arm, sighing as I felt the cybernetic bones beneath my skin.
"Shamans who let spirits reside inside them in exchange for power?" Chevalier replied for the Director, and I nodded.
"Are you saying you let a spirit inside of you…?" Piggot didn't sound skeptical but there was a little wariness.
"I had as much choice in housing my shard as any parahuman had a choice in Triggering." Bitterness was apparently the name of the day, and I had to count back from ten not to lose it. "And my union with my shard…it's like comparing a barnacle to a mitochondria, one is far easier to dislodge while trying to remove my spirit would be like trying to rip out my vital organs."
"That Mother of Miseries…that Avatar-entity called you a little sister…from what my Wards told us. Your fusion with your spirit is similar to this Avatar." There was a surety in her tone.
"In a way yes…but I'm certainly far less than the union of Raava and Wan, the very last Avatar had the weight of millions of past lives, two and a half billion years of history. What I did with Leviathan, that ain't shit against the power of an Avatar unleashed. I don't have the raw oomph to blow up a planet." Not without killing who I was.
"These Avatars could do that?" Chevalier was probably wide eyed beneath his helm. "Casually destroy worlds."
"Nah. Most cases their bodies won't take the strain, it's not casual…and in the end it still wasn't enough when the enemy has thousands just like you and a limitless army of soulless cybernetic corpses and monsters." The Reapers were the stuff of nightmares, and every slot/branch had some horrifying galactic threat.
The Citadel had the Reapers and their Harbinger, the Humanx had the galaxy eating Great Evil…though I had heard some refer to it as the Great Emptiness, the Tetatae had…fought against the monsters that destroyed the Great Houses and the Clans.
Those…things had been human once, but they had turned themselves into abominations of living metal and flesh, creatures of the void, of death. I hadn't looked into what the Yonhet and their contemporaries had faced, but it was probably suitably horrible.
"How did they win?" Piggot was rapping her fingers on her fancy wooden desk, chewing on her lip as if thinking.
"They used some weapon called the Crucible, but what happened when it activated…I have no idea. I know quite a lot but not everything."
"So your powers are different because of how you've bonded with your shard. So the only answer is…why?" I sighed at the question from Piggot, she wanted answers I didn't know.
"Maybe whatever managed to compress eight thousand exatons of crystalline space wyrm into the shape and volume of a hundred and fifty pound human decided they liked the underdog and gave us a chance against extinction? Maybe it was just for shits and giggles, or for some inevitable evil plan that'll destroy us all. The only thing I do know is that I'm supposed to serve some type of role here, but I'm not an expert on my own nature…"
"It's more than what we had before, and it should keep some of the other Directors placated." She looked like she wanted to strangle someone.
"I'm guessing some of the more militant Directors want me under the thumb of the PRT? They don't like the lack of control over me?"
Piggot didn't deny it. "I've had one or two imply that the Cage would serve as a suitable home." Her sardonic tone told me her opinion of such people. "And that being under the handle of a certain Trump would be safer for everyone."
"I'm like 95% sure I can't get Reaped, and I'd break out of that place in an hour, dimensional portal network or not. We're lucky that place has no shamans." Containing a shaman wasn't impossible but no protections had been placed there so far, and it had already been compromised by that shaman boy. "So to cut it short, I'm a greatly limited mix between spirit and soul with the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither, and can fuck with powers…with varying levels of ease."
"Greatly limited…" I opened my mouth to reply when I suddenly received an alert from Taylor.
"Fuck…Mannequin managed to sneak into Athena, we had to evacuate everyone still working!" I choked, and started to shake in repressed anger.
"What's wrong?"
"Mannequin is currently attacking my business and hurting the people under my protection." I felt like breaking something, and Piggot stared at me.
"I'm sending Armsmaster down there as well as Weld, can you…" I waved the address and she sent out a message on her computer, and I could hear her moving fast on that.
"I need to go down there, I'm not letting him…" Piggot froze as did Chevalier, space warping around a single point to my left. It was a kid of about thirteen years of age, middle eastern from the looks of it with a ragged grey cloak and soft grey eyes, hair messy and matted.
"That isn't your part to play here Vyasa." I boggled when I realized what he called me and what he was saying. The Director's hand was moving to a button that would activate containment foam projectors and then she paused, gears turning.
"He's right, it's obvious Mannequin wants to draw you in, he's baiting you." Piggot was obviously rankled for not being able to contain the shaman. "Which begs the question of why you needed to tell us that in person…" she directed her glare at the shaman. "As well as why you left your meeting with Miss Militia."
"We need to go, somewhere less crowded with the smooth-souled, more alive, more connected to the ephemeral." There was a cloud of spirits over the boy's head, impatience within them.
"Why?"
"You need to be taught what you are, taught what it means to be Vyasa, how to hear the void. You have to understand." There was a whisper in my mind, and I knew the truth in those words.
Piggot was no longer hovering her hand over the button. "I know this shaman is allied with Weaver… if this is important…go…go now." There was a look in her eyes, like she was telling me that I needed to follow her advice on this. She was going with her gut here. "Send your machines after Mannequin in your stead, I still have my own to look after." I could see her computer was sending out alerts, and my drones sent images of strange attacks, a van overturned, some twisting in the shadows.
The boy smiled, lighting up the room. "Thank you…and I apologize for my intrusion, when we return…I can teach your shamans how to better ward your bases." Piggot sounded surprised at the kid's helpfulness.
Damn it.
"I'm giving you a chance here." Left unsaid that the boy wouldn't have another chance from the Director if he fucked up.
I sighed. "Fine, where are we going?" I growled, not even getting a moment to sit without courting disaster and madness.
"A place near the heart, a place for lessons that need to be taught." He offered his hand, a flurry of red-silver crystalline spirits sliding behind a larger flurry of divine silver. "Please…"
"Erudition…Basilia. Go, trust that we can handle this." Taylor insisted and I knew I couldn't deny her in this. He offered his hand and when I took it…
We were suddenly standing over a cliff face, a great gnarled tree rising kilometers into the sky before us, wood twisting into stone, into metal, into a thousand spheres and environments, within that tree sat a molten sphere, and I saw a glimpse of something Beyond it, scintillating fields of reflective glass lensing reality around then.
"Tell me your name." I demanded, even as I knew I had to follow him. Because it needed to be done, and because we were running out of time for this to happen. Even as if made me rage on the inside with resentment and bitterness.
The boy was small and melancholic. "Rusul."
I was supposed to learn, and I wished it had been at a better time. But I guess I didn't get the luxury.
Wasn't that peachy?
___
AN: So I've got this and most of 13.2 worked out, and. Teleologism is now seven chapters and three interludes to make things fit better. Plus the chapters might be shorter with this Arc…no guarantee there since I don't have a Beta to clean things up.
Which would be nice but I have no idea how to get one anyway. Next Arc should be something different, though you wont get to see that for about a month.
So enjoy this mess of a story.
I have been in pure learning mode for the past three chapters. A lot of mysteries have been unraveled, revealing the inertia of other factors beyond immediate line of sight.
No meaningful commentary available at this time, busy trying to run updated simulations of the new data in my head.
No meaningful commentary available at this time, busy trying to run updated simulations of the new data in my head.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Fair enough, though I can tell you there's still a lot to uncover, linking everything together bit by bit. Plus its the Holidays, things can get busy during this time of year.
Teleologism 13.2
- Location
- Chula Vista
Teleologism 13.2
September 25th, 2011. 3:15PM
The sky here was a striking blue, like the idealized version of a brilliant and beautiful day. The plains before the vast primordial tree consisted of a vast savanna, and something in my soul told me that was home. The first home humanity has ever known, it told me, whispered in my mind, body, and soul.
"What is this place?" I asked in awe and Rusul smiled sadly.
"This is the heart of the spirit world, the surest and most resilient well of spiritual energy on the planet, on all planets." When he said all, there was a flicker, the tree changing shape and color and Form. For a moment the ground turned to a grey silt, another part of me aching for something lost. In the sky a vast hole in reality drew closer and when I blinked I was looking at the heart again.
"It's incredible." The view was unlike anything on Earth, and I could hear the call of this beating center of the World.
"It's not what we're here for, but it's a place safe from our mutual enemy. For now." Rusul pushed me forward, and I tumbled right off of the cliff. I screamed as I looked down to see the ground was a mile below us, the plains and forests and tundras and jungles shifting between one another.
And then I remembered I was a shaman, and I began to sing. I sang and with my song came a flood of newly created spirits, the song of the Mother slowing my fall for me. As I fell I saw the natural beauty of the spirit world, and I gently floated down to a jutting platform of moss-covered stone.
Rusul was already there, and the questions came unbidden. "Who are you? Why did you need to drag me away from part of my team having to fight a crazed murderer? What do you know about me that I don't?"
He gestured for me to sit, and I did, adjusting myself to the spongy chair made of moss and wood.
"I am Rusul of Asmara, one of the last cities of the Cradle." The clues fell into place quickly.
"So you're from Earth Goetia." He smiled as I understood. "And you're fighting the Iron Lords who are helping the Fallen."
"They are simply the pawns of a greater and more dangerous force, something angry, something insane and all-consuming in that hate and madness. It is the source of your Precog's fuzzy vision."
"But you don't know what it actually is do you? Or at least you don't know enough to give me a better idea." He shrugged, giving a boyish grin.
"I know that it seeks power, that it seeks dominion over all things. I know that this enemy is the face of the End, that it must be stopped or humanity will die." There was terror and fear in his eyes, the boy shivering.
I wanted to give him a hug, stomach tightening in sympathy. He seemed to have been alone for some time, alone enough to want to make friends with the Fairy Queen.
"So what role do I play in this?"
"I think you already know…" He was being coy and I suppressed a sigh. He wasn't wrong, it was obvious that it had something to do with shards, with powers, with the cycle I was supposed to end. "You are here to understand the void. To finally understand the Purpose of the Vyasa." A dam broke down in me.
"I never wanted to have a purpose!" He didn't seem surprised when my anger suddenly exploded. The bitterness built and I saw red. The landscape around me turned black, dark and twisted as my rage bent the spirit world.
I stood up, and he stepped back as I grit my teeth. I didn't have my bending here, and that was a good thing. I never wanted this fucking magical destiny bullshit.
"I was just a young adult trying to get my life together, I didn't need some divine and oh so important purpose and destiny thrown in my face!" I marched up to him, venting at someone who didn't deserve it. "Where is my choice in the matter, why do I have to clean up the fucking messes of other people, why do I have to help and stop people from doing stupid, delusional, terrible things!?"
"Because no one else will…and because the world doesn't care about fairness." He looked no less tired, and I forcefully swallowed all my anger even as it burned in my chest.
"True." The world didn't care that I had to do something to save the world from extinction, it didn't care that monsters lay waiting out in space, destroyers of worlds and consumers of life, it didn't care.
And I didn't like that, I didn't like having to accept it even when I had never really cared about those things in the past. But then…I had lived a life that was safe if imperfect, so of course I would understand that in the abstract, and not when it hits me in the face.
"Are you ready to learn or not?" Rusul waited patiently and I felt just a tad childish for venting at a kid instead of…my therapist.
"I'm ready, at least as much as I can be. And I'm sorry." I was nearly twenty years old, I shouldn't be dumping my problems on someone this young.
Rusul seemed more relaxed, and he began to draw on the ground where moss had parted. It was a depiction of the four elements. "You apologized so it's fine." He gestured as he became more serious. "Tell me…what is void to you?"
"Void is the element…the conduit of the soul, the answer, creative energies and potential." It sounded so lacking, there was more to it than that. But it was hard to talk to void, and my best results had been following them, or bringing them into line against the shards.
But not talking, not conversing, not understanding.
"Void is more than just an element, you see the elements, you see air, water, earth and fire. What is the difference between them? You know this answer in your soul, and in your memories."
It came like lightning.
"Everything is connected, which means the elements are all one. Which means void is the four elements, but it's also more than that?"
"It is the fifth element, it is Other." He brushed his hands against the depictions of the four elements, and they were mushed together. "It represents One and All and None, the division and the connection between the primordial elements."
I nodded. "So without the Void the elements wouldn't exist as we understand them, it is the great bridge between them. So because of this…the void has to to have the answers?"
Rusul smiled. "Void is both the answer and the question, even if not all of them are of void."
"So void…I know it can give people answers to questions, that it can allow people to follow the lines of What-Will-Be. It's something from the Outside looking inward?" The soul was what made bending possible, what made the spirits exist in their state, and a part of me, the part that was Other told me it would answer the questions they had sought for millennia.
Rusul continued, not telling me directly but giving me the path toward making my own conclusions, to gain my own personal understanding. "You understand what void is, even if not completely."
My eyes widened, something just clicking. "Void simply Is, it is what defines the Spheres, what makes it possible for us to exist as we are?"
"Yes."
"So what's my connection to the Void, what's the connection of the Void to the Avatar?" This kid was something different, knew more than he should, he wasn't just a mere shaman.
"You are both of the Void, just as the elements are, just as the soul is, and just as many others are. The Avatar, and thus the Vyasa made in it's image hear the words of the void, the answer to a question fourteen billion years old. You are both the library and the scholar, you both bind and release the Wyrms of Void."
That was…less helpful than I had hoped.
"So I need to understand what I am…to do something. What happens if I fail?"
"Everything ends." I flinched at his serious tone, as he suddenly sounded much, much older than what he was. "Not everything is so simple, no matter how much you want it to be." I glared, but accepted that this was going to be a slow and steady process.
I only hoped that my team could handle Mannequin.
September 25th, 2011. 3:18PM
Colin Wallis
I was well aware of my own faults, as a man, as a hero, of the flaws that made me the person I was. I had endeavored to overcome these flaws, and it had taken months of being outpaced, of seeing how outclassed I really was for it to sink in.
I was one of the few Protectorate heroes who had any idea of the truth, of who Erudition was, of why she did what she did and who she was.
She was deathly afraid, a young adult thrust into the role of something bigger than life, with power that in the hands of anyone else…could have led to disaster. She had some strange knowledge, knowledge that was growing thinner over time, and Dragon had told me more.
She had known some type of possible future, and it had terrified her into silence, unsure of what the right actions were, and without a lick of physical proof she would not have been accepted. There was a part of me that wanted to confront her on why she had done nothing about Canberra.
But it was the Simurgh, and back then she was a scared girl with no experience, terrified out of her mind. Taken out of her routines, out of her comfort zone, and without the right mentality to do the optimal choice. But I knew I wouldn't have made the right choice either.
How could I? When I had been so…so tempted in my darker moments to set up a battle between Leviathan and I. To set up villains who didn't matter to be killed, so they my twenty years of hard work would finally pay off after all I had given up.
What I had learned about their biology had told me I was setting myself up for failure, and it unsettled me. It unsettled me that I was capable of sinking so low out of simple desperation.
It was also likely why I hadn't been told everything. But Basilia also respected me, respected my work, and seemed to understand some of my difficulties, and while at times we butted heads. She seemed willing to tolerate me in a way few were able to manage. Apparently she was used to abrasive people, and didn't much mind within certain constraints.
So I moved quickly when I learned Mannequin was targeting the tinker and knew I couldn't hold back. Not with him. Weld was a welcome help with his power, and I could hear the clashing within the interior of Athena's headquarters.
"How are we going to play this?" Weld asked from my left, and I gripped my halberd tightly.
"We can't let our guard down for even a moment, Mannequin is a known cape-killer and even without the Slaughterhouse Nine he's incredibly dangerous." Weld nodded, moving carefully around debris.
"Where will we get in?" There was a loud whirr, and a massive machine turned from around the corner, accompanied by a number of small machines with single eye optics.
"Evaluation. Friendlies inbound, greetings Armsmaster, greetings Weld." As the machine walked towards me my combat engine noted it had received damage from what had to be explosives. It and the standard robots the White Lotus made use of were guarding the civilian workers of Athena, providing barriers for the group of fifteen.
I stepped over to them, they had information I needed if we're going to bring down Mannequin. One of the civilians was a black girl, a firebender based on how her fists smoked.
"Are you here to stop him?" The girl shouted, and the civilians huddled tighter, hole entering their eyes at our approach. I nodded, doing my best to take a posture that was reassuring for civilians. "He hurt my dad…he needs to pay." Flames flared from her nostrils.
"We'll stop him, we won't let him hurt more people." Weld glanced over to me in question and I acknowledged his action.
"Escorting civilians, portal activation request accepted and sent." The mech gestured to a corner, and I knew what needed to be done. Weld followed behind me, and as the civilians fled a portal surged to life. I stepped into the portal and into an ongoing battle.
A vast cloud of insects swarmed, concussive and heat beams striking an unseen cape but it simply twisted and went with the flow of the impacts. Gas spread and insects died upon contact, and a blast of air dissipated the toxic substance.
I saw him clearly as the swarm parted, a blue field pushing them back, while more gas grenades detonated and killed thousands more.
The figure rose to nine feet in height, a head with no eye holes, earholes, or visible vents, only a smooth white surface with shallow indents where eyes and a mouth should be. He had a tall and thin body, a body of chain connecting self sustaining systems. The lobby of the research company was in flames and shambles, and I scowled when I saw the bodies.
There were only three, and…one of them moved, a man that had to be the girl's father. He was placing on segments of what looked like standardized armor, and wind was keeping the gas from killing him like it had done to two security guards.
Though the stab wounds around their hearts may have been the actual cause of death. He placed the armor and it sealed with a crackle of mass effect fields turning on.
I could see the traces of bombs that had gone off, bubbles of hard light, a glue-like substance sticking to the walls. The fact Mannequin was still standing told me he had easily moved past them.
"Mannequin." I stepped between the armored civilian and one of the last members of the Slaughterhouse 9. The cape was silent, moving with a confidence that irritated me. I analyzed the capes on our side and frowned.
Monarch was in a bad state, completely sealed up with her hair cut down and scattered and burned across the floor. Her biological armor was notably cracked, and I could see her exhaustion. Multiple combat robots lay broken and dead, and there were notable dents in Mannequin's armor, which was protected by a powerful barrier.
"You bastard!" The large man launched a flurry of flames, aimed at the gas as it was bent in Mannequin's direction. It detonated in a limited explosion, and the tinker rolled with the force even as he was battered. He bent like liquid, and he cartwheeled in a whirlwind of blades.
I moved and the second cape fighting him blocked his strikes, one I recognized from her file. Sveta, otherwise known as Garotte though I had heard she had taken to calling herself Tress…and she seemed to be dealing poorly with the man.
My eyes widened…she was a non-combatant member of the White Lotus and was in no mental state for dealing with Mannequin. She pushed him back with a pained shout and I stepped into the bout.
"Mannequin!" I swung down my halberd, and he pushed me back with one of his blades, moving with a confident and strange swagger. I turned and with my leg I kicked out a biotic Warp field into his chest. It cracked his barrier but didn't break it, and the damn psychopath seemed so amused.
I turned on the nano-thorns of my halberd and nearly aimed for his head before several dozen bugs collided against his chest forming a target. I tried to stab the man in the chest, and he dodged easily, deflecting the weapon. I nearly erased the Case 53's face but she moved back at the last moment with a flick of her tendrils.
A hypersonic bullet rushed past my ear, and crashed into Mannequin. It was the large civilian, screaming obscenities with a tinkertech gun in his hand, before compressing a ball of fire and launching it into the tinker.
Mannequin unchained his arms, whipping them out with an array of spinning blades. I had to dodge them, because hardening my barriers against them cost energy and focus. I dodged to the right, followed by the crack of an inbuilt rifle that crashed into a gathered swarm, saving the civilian.
A portal opened and vanished him, and there was no one left in harm's way besides capes.
I was suddenly grabbed and thrown in Weld's way, and his power barely stopped itself from consuming my armor. Mannequin jumped, twisting through the air and sticking to the ceiling, before bouncing back down in a lunging motion.
Weld tried to touch Mannequin, and blades on Mannequin's wrists simply began to vibrate. He stabbed into the Changer, and the metal broke away, and Weld screamed.
"Step away you damn psychopath!" I used a biotic tether, slowing his insane movements down. He simply flicked several grenades, I pulled them away, but he just kicked one towards me before I could react.
A pulse of dark energy radiated and my biotic barrier flickered out as did my tether. My dark energy fields were sluggish, a resonance countering my fields.
"Armsmaster move!" Monarch shouted on a comms line and she Charged Mannequin, sending him flying. He simply released gas from his encased flesh, and set her costume on fire, and then burned her swarm, another blast of his gun nearly cracking her barrier.
Only the larger mutant insects remained intact, and Mannequin was simply tearing them apart with his infuriating swagger.
I charged him, and I used my bending to feel the earth around and smiled when I sensed the metal and ceramic within him. I pulled and he twisted, and I managed to pull away some of it…but it was dense, far too dense to simply pull him apart.
Instead I grabbed the metal from the broken machines around us, and decided to encase him in it, to entrap him within metal. I gave some metal to Weld and he bounced forward, the four of us encircling the tinker. Weld formed spears with the metal, and Mannequin just fired the gun at me.
I spun at the sheer force, plating breaking like glass. Mannequin bent around Monarch's attacks, vibrating blades igniting gas to poison her swarm. His arms extended on their heavy chains, and my helmet crumpled and I felt searing pain along the left half of my face.
He ripped my halberd from my hands, and with a press of a button and a swing, he turned Weld's left thigh to dust, severing his leg. He swung my weapon into Sveta, and she screamed as the tendrils that made up her arm broke apart. Taylor sent a bolus of wind into Mannequin, and he stepped into her space and another grenade broke her weak barrier, and Monarch fell as he stabbed her on her right side.
Her swarm gathered around her, wrapping her in a cloak as I reached for a nano-thorn knife, and was met with agony from my leg and then a lack of sensation. I stumbled when I couldn't support my weight anymore, and more machines emerged from the portals firing a barrage of bullets.
His barrier blocked them, and then with a crack, a hole was blown in his chest.
"TAKE THAT YOU FUCKER!" Bakuda screamed, and Mannequin lost an arm as an energy blast seared the joints. I could see her holding a massive rifle, and she fired a second time, taking another arm. A larger robotic machine launched the tinker away…
And the pain set in, darkness encroaching on my vision.
He was toying with us.
As I fell into unconsciousness, I could hear Dragon's fearful words and Bakuda's angry and cursed filled ones.
Damn…
It…
September 25th, 2011. 3:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I put together everything I had been told, from my own point of view, and taking into consideration my own thoughts and opinions. Rusul had been patient even at the same time as he had been annoyingly enigmatic.
"So void is soul, it's very existence makes the elements possible, it is the voice of all things, the voice of the Spirit World. Void is the answer to questions and the questions themselves. Void is a fundamental, a needed aspect of the primal concepts that build the Avatar, the Vyasa, and the Entities. Without void none of them would have ever existed." It made me question their origin, once I had looked up Ward and gained a deeper understanding of their origin.
They came from a world with two and yet one sun, and through generations of evolution and competition they had learned to shift through the layers like pages in a book, keeping their subatomic particles within them. But that didn't mean it was true, at least not completely so.
Not all that's said is true.
There was a piece of the puzzle I was missing, some clue in their primordial memory that I needed to grasp for myself.
"Yes." Rusul answered to the affirmative, and I smiled with teeth, long since having folded back my helmet.
"More important is why this is helpful, I'm not getting much of an explanation on why I was put on this planet." I had guesses and some answers based on what Veda whispered. But she didn't know everything either. "What will I even get if I learn what I need to know?"
"If you understand what you are, it will build in you the power to control all that you are, without losing yourself to the current. You are void for a reason…"
"And what reason is that?" I asked, and Rusul glanced down to the moss beneath our feet. He chewed on his lip, spirits swarming around him in a cloud of spiritual flesh.
Rusul grinned "You are the voice of the void, you are the compiler of the forgotten, of the nameless, you are meant to light the way not as a warrior but as a scholar. You are meant to remember. The Vyasa's Purpose is to bring light to what has been lost, to carve a path into the future, the breaker of cycles and chains."
"How do I speak to the void?" I kept my voice steady, even as what he said sunk in and felt right. The kid gestured, a flood of silvery spirits coming to his call along with the red-silvery spirits I identified on sight as shard spirits.
"You have to listen closely, you have to accept that void is a part of you. You have to accept that you are more than just human." He lightly passed a silvery spirit, one that looked so small, so weak. But that was wrong.
I held the spirit in my hand and let the pressure crack against my skull and chest. I had to look into the Form of the spirit placed before me, and void was and is far trickier. I took in what I am, that no matter how much anger it created, there was a part of me that was different. There was a rictus of pain and suffering as the pressure of looking into Form burst.
Sound suddenly fell away and most of the spirits around us ran. There was a shine of light in gold, silver, black and white. Rusul was there waiting patiently and warmly.
The Vyasa has opened her eyes.
The voice radiated power, and I could tell the little flame of void was but an avatar for the absolute vastness of the World. The World itself was simply an even smaller projection of the vastness beyond the infinite Spheres.
"Are you a void spirit?"
Yes.
"Do you know what I'm supposed to, can you tell me?"
We are.
The answer made no sense, so I shifted gears. "You're telling me but I don't see that happening here."
We are.
"What does the void need to tell me? Why do I need to remember the past?"
You must remember so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. So that the sacrifices of countless generations are not forgotten, to remember the answer.
I followed so far. "So what's your message for me…what does the void need to tell me?"
The Aeon seeks to consume the center, the heart of all things. To consume the beating heart of mortals. We can not hold it back alone.
"You're not as strong as you could be…because the spirit world has only just spooled up to full power, and because it's busy with other equally dangerous tasks?" There was a nod within that golden light.
Others tried to complete the machinery. They failed.
I gulped at the implication, at the thought that someone had tried to birth the ephemeral into reality. Who had tried, and why? And why had they failed?
"What is Aeon? What the hell is going to destroy the world?" I asked, not even paying attention to Rusul anymore.
Aeon is a creature of boundless hate, rage and cruelty. She seeks to gain power by consuming the shards, she seeks to understand what has changed. And she wants to kill all those she believes have stolen from her.
"What does this Aeon want to kill?"
Everything on this planet, humanity, the spirits, the shards, Scion and when she learns of you…she will hate you most of all simply for what you represent.
There was fear there, I was certain of that.
"So she wants to kill everything?"
No…she wishes to become as the Harbinger once was, she wishes to become a god. A complete and total mastery of all things. But she requires pawns to gather power and knowledge for her goal of ascension. She has been crippled, lessened…and she hopes to undo that.
I fluttered my eyelashes, trying to reconcile what I was hearing. Because what she was telling me was that something wanted to become a deity, and I only knew of a few comparable entities, that galaxy eating monster dealt with by some psychic idiot, those abominations that had wiped out the Clans and the Great Houses, and while they didn't exist anymore in the time of my newest branch…
The mythical Parasite had powers and abilities that were the stuff nightmares were made of. And based on how and why they needed sapient life…it certainly controlled the souls of those it consumed. It was a very big part of me that was glad these eras were so far back in the past, because existential horror was not something I wanted on my bucket list.
"Why not tell me this to me before? Why wait?"
Because you were not ready.
I couldn't counter that. "Is that the only reason?"
No. The Aeon also possesses a powerful sight of her own, and has many agents. She can interfere with our vision, but can not blind us. She will only grow stronger with time.
I stared at the silvery orb of light. "So if you couldn't tell me yet…why is Rusul so special?"
He is a kind soul, strong and genuine. He is in the right place, in the right time, in the right mentality to hear our voice. He is what we need.
"Is there a reason?"
Yes.
I'm not even going to ask, because it really wasn't that important.
"How do you know this…what is this ability to see the past and the future?" The silver light shines ever brighter.
One is all, All is one. The void spirit spoke freely, and I started to understand.
"You…don't just 'see' the future and past, you're in the future, you're in the past, you're everywhere and everywhen, every possibility across every facet of existence!" The realization was sobering because it meant that the multiverse was far, far larger than I could have ever possibly imagined. "What do you see?" I had to ask, and felt rather than heard the amusement of the void spirit.
We see All that is possible to see. We see those who came before you, and those who will come after you. We see the countless permutations of this and other possible worlds because we must.
That might explain Weaver if she's friends with Rusul.
"Can you tell us how to stop the end of the world, how to stop what's coming?
No. We alone can not help you stop the end, we alone can not cease the tide.
I rubbed my face, trying to understand what they were going on about. "So are you going to tell me a prophecy or does that come later?"
Yes.
I twitched, but didn't rise when I figured out he was probably telling some other idiot about the future but not me. It wasn't time, but I had questions that could be asked, answers that could be given.
"Tell me." I bowed my head, showing all the respect that was possible within my body for the void. "What are the plans of Aeon's pawns in this city?" The void spirit smiled a million grins.
It is an experiment, they seek to turn the Butcher into an Endbringer. A new god for the Fallen, and a new member of the pantheon she seeks to create. A monument to her eternal glory and victory.
"Show me." I didn't demand but I didn't beg either, and a silvery hand was placed on my forehead.
I could see Butcher 19, the woman once known as Shatterbird, her organs splayed out like a fucked art piece. That strange beetle was inserting some type of core into the woman's chest, while IV's injected a silver fluid created from a crystalline mass growing in a glass tube.
Like the equipment that had been stolen from Rhizome…oh fuck. The core was being injected with the same fluid, slowly turning crystalline, tendrils wrapping around organs, and pulsing in tune with the broadcasts of the pillbug. The image shifted to Brockton Bay, as something large emerged from the wreckage of the Docks.
I blinked back the images of a possible future, the blood rushing away from my face. "Oh god…"
This is why you are here. You are the administrator.
The revelation came easily. I was an administrator, I had the duty of bringing the shards in line with my mere presence. If I wasn't here the shards would have gone insane and slaughtered us all ages ago. So if that was true…I needed to put the Thief in her place.
Go. You must return. We will speak again.
"When will you…talk to me again?"
We are…
The light faded, and I had fallen out of the spirit world completely, and right back into the office Piggot had been using. I was almost foamed but apparently Piggot hasn't left the meeting room even once, instead bringing her work here. Information trickled into my mind, and I had much more refined ideas of where our current enemies were.
"You've got something?" She sounded intrigued and a grin pulled at my lips.
"I know where they are." Her own face pulled off a smirk, just a small one but it was there. "But a better question is how long I've been away…" Her smirk turned into a scowl.
"Two hours, the fight with Mannequin has long passed." My jubilation dropped at the hitch in her voice.
"How bad?"
September 25th, 2011. 9:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I grit my teeth as my fingers painfully gripped onto my skull, doing my best to keep my frustrations from leaking out. There was a knock on the door and I jumped but didn't answer, simply sinking into my blanket. The door was simply opened, and I looked over to the person entering my room.
I flinched when I saw how Taylor's hair had been cut short, down to her chin instead of below her shoulders. She didn't move awkwardly at least so Amelia had obviously healed what she could.
"Basilia?" I leaned away when she sat down next to me, crossing her legs. "Is there something wrong? Something I can help with?"
I didn't answer, looking down at my hands and trying to process what the Director had told me only a scant few hours ago. Mannequin had crippled Colin, damaged Sveta enough to leave her without an arm, and Weld was probably eating metal to replace his leg, and Taylor had been stabbed in the kidney, and had dodged being decapitated by inches.
And there had been some strange attack on the PRT, by a force they were certain wasn't the remnant of the S9, but instead something else. My machines had proven to not be an obstacle to Mannequin, and I was making updates based on new data, a lot of updates.
"Is this about Mannequin?" I tried not to let it show but that obviously failed when Taylor slid up to me, her expression blank. "Basilia…that wasn't your fault, you had to be somewhere else, and Mannequin obviously knew what he was doing. He countered my swarm with hard hitting explosives and poison, and some type of effect so their abilities couldn't deflect them, and he attacked where hitting hard would get other people hurt."
"I could have done something sooner, I could have looked for them before, taken them out earlier. Then Crawler and Siberian wouldn't be in the hands of a cult and invaders from another dimension, and Mannequin would be long dead."
"Basilia…it took you months to ramp up enough to safely scan the surface without being in range of the Simurgh. Then the gang war started because of Coil, and then an alien demon god tried to kill us all…and then Leviathan was on his way. And you told Dragon enough so they got kicked out of Boston and then they vanished before you could seek them out."
"I could have told people earlier, I didn't have to be the one playing hero I didn't…it's my fault." My fingers curled into my scalp, and I felt like sobbing. I was so tired of all of this…and I just didn't know what to do with the stress.
"Maybe it would have been better if you had told people who knew better…but did they know better?" I rubbed my eyes, having a hard time just focusing, a buzzing between my teeth, and emotions burning hot and wild.
"I…don't understand." She grabbed my face and pulled me towards her with a fierce look in her eyes.
"Cauldron…if you had told them…I think they would have kept doing what they were doing, and probably would have done everything in their power to keep me on the path to Khepri." I floundered and she silenced me with her finger. "Plus you mess with Contessa's power so she wouldn't be able to confirm what you're saying, and Eidolon might not have believed he was responsible for the Endbringers. And killing him didn't stop them in what you know right?" I nodded, chewing on my lip.
Taylor was shaking her head, her own turmoil showing on her face. "You couldn't use your information to recruit us directly because we wouldn't have trusted you. You couldn't stop Canberra because the Simurgh would have just gone elsewhere and made a mess of everything. Telling them about Sting wouldn't do anything either because the Endbringers would just adapt. Sometimes…there's just nothing you can do, no matter how much you prepare…things just go wrong."
"You got hurt though…you were almost killed and Colin is…" I was suddenly scooped up, and I let out a high pitched noise of surprise when I was pulled into a somewhat awkwardly arranged hug.
"Basilia. Getting almost killed is sort of part of the job, we're not always going to get out a fight unscathed. All we can do is pick ourselves up again and figure out what we did wrong."
"I still lost people under my protection…there's no bringing those people back." Not by any means I knew of, though there was an intuition that I was wrong.
Which I promptly buried deep down.
"Security guards aren't really trained to fight mass murdering tinkers, and their armor and shields were still good enough that we only lost three people instead of a dozen. And the robots you did have on guard duty saved hundreds of lives and got almost everyone all home." I hugged her tightly, trying to deny what she was saying.
"I'm…just, it's too much sometimes. So many people depend on our actions, and I don't even have the luxury of knowing what's coming next anymore." And even that luxury had been painful, because it made me feel like I was just using people for my own ends.
"I understand that perfectly." She bobbed her head in agreement. "Plus it must be frustrating…and so unreal and frightening with what you've read about us." There was a specific tone in her words, and I opened my mouth.
"Huh?" I said lamely, and she raised her eyebrows.
"You do know we can look up stuff from your world's internet right? Plus the thirty five other ones that are basically identical."
"Huh…" I really didn't think it through at all did I? I was probably going to have to put restraints on that. "Why didn't anyone bring it up before?"
"To be fair it's not that everyone knows, it's mostly the core members who know, though Grace figured it out without needing to check. Myths aren't really known for advanced technology that isn't considered magical."
"It wouldn't be a problem if I go for locking access right?" I asked weakly and she giggled softly.
"No it's not. It's probably a good idea anyway…but it's made you easier to understand. You're afraid that we'd think you're using us, that this is some type of game to you…"
I swallowed and skipped over that. "I thought you'd be more flabbergasted."
"You do know who you're talking to right…as well as remember the kind of life we live? Not exactly a lot of room for skepticism when the world has gone insane."
"Fair. But…I would prefer we stop talking about this. Please." She acceded to my demand and I lay against her, a hand brushing against her stomach. There was something I felt as I did so…and my eyebrows furrowed.
Taylor smiled, and to my surprise she lifted up her white shirt, and blood rushed to my face. Her lift was lifted just short of her bust, and I could almost see a hint of black, before my eyes shifted focus to her right side. There was a nasty scar, a long line where Mannequin's blades had struck true.
"But Panacea healed you didn't she?" She put down her shirt and I ignored a pang of disappointment as she answered.
"With waterbending, she was busy using her power to keep Colin alive. And I think it's a good reminder…it was no one's fault but…"
"We can still learn from this…do better?" She smiled and I knew I had gotten it right "You'll stay right?" I insisted because regardless of my feeling less like a bitch, I was still off of my game and afraid of being left alone.
"Yeah…I don't mind." I moved off of Taylor, and then pushed her down so she could rest her head on one of my pillows. In that moment of seeing her laid down I was very tempted to straddle her…to see if she could handle rid—okay let's cut that out.
"So how is Colin…handling it?" I had seen how bad it was, his right leg had been ripped apart by his own nano-thorn blade, and one of his eyes had been taken out. Mannequin had succeeded in developing pulse nullifiers, using resonant mass effect fields to weaken or increase the cost of fields.
Armsmaster had been unprepared, and Mannequin had damaged Taylor's energy field and kinetic barriers enough to leave her vulnerable. Pulse nullifiers didn't work as well on kinetic barriers, and energy fields didn't give a shit. I was already modifying my armor and everyone's else's to counter that, and biotics just needed to deal with the weakening.
Though canceling out his dark energy wavelengths wasn't out of the question.
Taylor clicked her tongue and I stiffened. "Well, he's apparently taken to the idea of going for cybernetic implants even when we can grow him a leg in a few hours." Hell we could print out a body in a week on our own. "Dragon is working on getting him a new leg, and fixing up his face." She stared at me for a moment, a notion coming to the forefront. "Wait you don't…"
"Are you going to stop me? I know my way around the operating table, and know about augmentics far more than Dragon." Only just but cybernetics was a dime a dozen in every branch I had.
Taylor sighed. "I guess I can't, do you need to go now?"
"I'll go in an hour, and offer my services to Dragon. Least I can do."
Taylor snorted. "Fair enough…" I moved to her side, and she seemed to blush just the tiniest bit. Which since I was squishing my boobs into her arm, that was probably the cause.
"Mannequin's still alive isn't he?"
"We sent him off limping." Something protective and violent told me good, while another part told me I should headbutt him the next time I see him.
Don't know where that came from, but I was almost willing to listen to it.
"Well…at least it's a start, and now that we have their location, we can bring down the Fallen, and the remnant of the Nine with them."
I would protect my own.
Nothing would change that.
AN: Here's 13.2, with quite a fair amount of revelation of which there are still more for the future. We've got a clue of the end boss, and more mysteries hinted at. Not much to tell you…except for one big hint.
Aeon isn't from Basilia's side of the multiverse.
September 25th, 2011. 3:15PM
The sky here was a striking blue, like the idealized version of a brilliant and beautiful day. The plains before the vast primordial tree consisted of a vast savanna, and something in my soul told me that was home. The first home humanity has ever known, it told me, whispered in my mind, body, and soul.
"What is this place?" I asked in awe and Rusul smiled sadly.
"This is the heart of the spirit world, the surest and most resilient well of spiritual energy on the planet, on all planets." When he said all, there was a flicker, the tree changing shape and color and Form. For a moment the ground turned to a grey silt, another part of me aching for something lost. In the sky a vast hole in reality drew closer and when I blinked I was looking at the heart again.
"It's incredible." The view was unlike anything on Earth, and I could hear the call of this beating center of the World.
"It's not what we're here for, but it's a place safe from our mutual enemy. For now." Rusul pushed me forward, and I tumbled right off of the cliff. I screamed as I looked down to see the ground was a mile below us, the plains and forests and tundras and jungles shifting between one another.
And then I remembered I was a shaman, and I began to sing. I sang and with my song came a flood of newly created spirits, the song of the Mother slowing my fall for me. As I fell I saw the natural beauty of the spirit world, and I gently floated down to a jutting platform of moss-covered stone.
Rusul was already there, and the questions came unbidden. "Who are you? Why did you need to drag me away from part of my team having to fight a crazed murderer? What do you know about me that I don't?"
He gestured for me to sit, and I did, adjusting myself to the spongy chair made of moss and wood.
"I am Rusul of Asmara, one of the last cities of the Cradle." The clues fell into place quickly.
"So you're from Earth Goetia." He smiled as I understood. "And you're fighting the Iron Lords who are helping the Fallen."
"They are simply the pawns of a greater and more dangerous force, something angry, something insane and all-consuming in that hate and madness. It is the source of your Precog's fuzzy vision."
"But you don't know what it actually is do you? Or at least you don't know enough to give me a better idea." He shrugged, giving a boyish grin.
"I know that it seeks power, that it seeks dominion over all things. I know that this enemy is the face of the End, that it must be stopped or humanity will die." There was terror and fear in his eyes, the boy shivering.
I wanted to give him a hug, stomach tightening in sympathy. He seemed to have been alone for some time, alone enough to want to make friends with the Fairy Queen.
"So what role do I play in this?"
"I think you already know…" He was being coy and I suppressed a sigh. He wasn't wrong, it was obvious that it had something to do with shards, with powers, with the cycle I was supposed to end. "You are here to understand the void. To finally understand the Purpose of the Vyasa." A dam broke down in me.
"I never wanted to have a purpose!" He didn't seem surprised when my anger suddenly exploded. The bitterness built and I saw red. The landscape around me turned black, dark and twisted as my rage bent the spirit world.
I stood up, and he stepped back as I grit my teeth. I didn't have my bending here, and that was a good thing. I never wanted this fucking magical destiny bullshit.
"I was just a young adult trying to get my life together, I didn't need some divine and oh so important purpose and destiny thrown in my face!" I marched up to him, venting at someone who didn't deserve it. "Where is my choice in the matter, why do I have to clean up the fucking messes of other people, why do I have to help and stop people from doing stupid, delusional, terrible things!?"
"Because no one else will…and because the world doesn't care about fairness." He looked no less tired, and I forcefully swallowed all my anger even as it burned in my chest.
"True." The world didn't care that I had to do something to save the world from extinction, it didn't care that monsters lay waiting out in space, destroyers of worlds and consumers of life, it didn't care.
And I didn't like that, I didn't like having to accept it even when I had never really cared about those things in the past. But then…I had lived a life that was safe if imperfect, so of course I would understand that in the abstract, and not when it hits me in the face.
"Are you ready to learn or not?" Rusul waited patiently and I felt just a tad childish for venting at a kid instead of…my therapist.
"I'm ready, at least as much as I can be. And I'm sorry." I was nearly twenty years old, I shouldn't be dumping my problems on someone this young.
Rusul seemed more relaxed, and he began to draw on the ground where moss had parted. It was a depiction of the four elements. "You apologized so it's fine." He gestured as he became more serious. "Tell me…what is void to you?"
"Void is the element…the conduit of the soul, the answer, creative energies and potential." It sounded so lacking, there was more to it than that. But it was hard to talk to void, and my best results had been following them, or bringing them into line against the shards.
But not talking, not conversing, not understanding.
"Void is more than just an element, you see the elements, you see air, water, earth and fire. What is the difference between them? You know this answer in your soul, and in your memories."
It came like lightning.
"Everything is connected, which means the elements are all one. Which means void is the four elements, but it's also more than that?"
"It is the fifth element, it is Other." He brushed his hands against the depictions of the four elements, and they were mushed together. "It represents One and All and None, the division and the connection between the primordial elements."
I nodded. "So without the Void the elements wouldn't exist as we understand them, it is the great bridge between them. So because of this…the void has to to have the answers?"
Rusul smiled. "Void is both the answer and the question, even if not all of them are of void."
"So void…I know it can give people answers to questions, that it can allow people to follow the lines of What-Will-Be. It's something from the Outside looking inward?" The soul was what made bending possible, what made the spirits exist in their state, and a part of me, the part that was Other told me it would answer the questions they had sought for millennia.
Rusul continued, not telling me directly but giving me the path toward making my own conclusions, to gain my own personal understanding. "You understand what void is, even if not completely."
My eyes widened, something just clicking. "Void simply Is, it is what defines the Spheres, what makes it possible for us to exist as we are?"
"Yes."
"So what's my connection to the Void, what's the connection of the Void to the Avatar?" This kid was something different, knew more than he should, he wasn't just a mere shaman.
"You are both of the Void, just as the elements are, just as the soul is, and just as many others are. The Avatar, and thus the Vyasa made in it's image hear the words of the void, the answer to a question fourteen billion years old. You are both the library and the scholar, you both bind and release the Wyrms of Void."
That was…less helpful than I had hoped.
"So I need to understand what I am…to do something. What happens if I fail?"
"Everything ends." I flinched at his serious tone, as he suddenly sounded much, much older than what he was. "Not everything is so simple, no matter how much you want it to be." I glared, but accepted that this was going to be a slow and steady process.
I only hoped that my team could handle Mannequin.
___
September 25th, 2011. 3:18PM
Colin Wallis
I was well aware of my own faults, as a man, as a hero, of the flaws that made me the person I was. I had endeavored to overcome these flaws, and it had taken months of being outpaced, of seeing how outclassed I really was for it to sink in.
I was one of the few Protectorate heroes who had any idea of the truth, of who Erudition was, of why she did what she did and who she was.
She was deathly afraid, a young adult thrust into the role of something bigger than life, with power that in the hands of anyone else…could have led to disaster. She had some strange knowledge, knowledge that was growing thinner over time, and Dragon had told me more.
She had known some type of possible future, and it had terrified her into silence, unsure of what the right actions were, and without a lick of physical proof she would not have been accepted. There was a part of me that wanted to confront her on why she had done nothing about Canberra.
But it was the Simurgh, and back then she was a scared girl with no experience, terrified out of her mind. Taken out of her routines, out of her comfort zone, and without the right mentality to do the optimal choice. But I knew I wouldn't have made the right choice either.
How could I? When I had been so…so tempted in my darker moments to set up a battle between Leviathan and I. To set up villains who didn't matter to be killed, so they my twenty years of hard work would finally pay off after all I had given up.
What I had learned about their biology had told me I was setting myself up for failure, and it unsettled me. It unsettled me that I was capable of sinking so low out of simple desperation.
It was also likely why I hadn't been told everything. But Basilia also respected me, respected my work, and seemed to understand some of my difficulties, and while at times we butted heads. She seemed willing to tolerate me in a way few were able to manage. Apparently she was used to abrasive people, and didn't much mind within certain constraints.
So I moved quickly when I learned Mannequin was targeting the tinker and knew I couldn't hold back. Not with him. Weld was a welcome help with his power, and I could hear the clashing within the interior of Athena's headquarters.
"How are we going to play this?" Weld asked from my left, and I gripped my halberd tightly.
"We can't let our guard down for even a moment, Mannequin is a known cape-killer and even without the Slaughterhouse Nine he's incredibly dangerous." Weld nodded, moving carefully around debris.
"Where will we get in?" There was a loud whirr, and a massive machine turned from around the corner, accompanied by a number of small machines with single eye optics.
"Evaluation. Friendlies inbound, greetings Armsmaster, greetings Weld." As the machine walked towards me my combat engine noted it had received damage from what had to be explosives. It and the standard robots the White Lotus made use of were guarding the civilian workers of Athena, providing barriers for the group of fifteen.
I stepped over to them, they had information I needed if we're going to bring down Mannequin. One of the civilians was a black girl, a firebender based on how her fists smoked.
"Are you here to stop him?" The girl shouted, and the civilians huddled tighter, hole entering their eyes at our approach. I nodded, doing my best to take a posture that was reassuring for civilians. "He hurt my dad…he needs to pay." Flames flared from her nostrils.
"We'll stop him, we won't let him hurt more people." Weld glanced over to me in question and I acknowledged his action.
"Escorting civilians, portal activation request accepted and sent." The mech gestured to a corner, and I knew what needed to be done. Weld followed behind me, and as the civilians fled a portal surged to life. I stepped into the portal and into an ongoing battle.
A vast cloud of insects swarmed, concussive and heat beams striking an unseen cape but it simply twisted and went with the flow of the impacts. Gas spread and insects died upon contact, and a blast of air dissipated the toxic substance.
I saw him clearly as the swarm parted, a blue field pushing them back, while more gas grenades detonated and killed thousands more.
The figure rose to nine feet in height, a head with no eye holes, earholes, or visible vents, only a smooth white surface with shallow indents where eyes and a mouth should be. He had a tall and thin body, a body of chain connecting self sustaining systems. The lobby of the research company was in flames and shambles, and I scowled when I saw the bodies.
There were only three, and…one of them moved, a man that had to be the girl's father. He was placing on segments of what looked like standardized armor, and wind was keeping the gas from killing him like it had done to two security guards.
Though the stab wounds around their hearts may have been the actual cause of death. He placed the armor and it sealed with a crackle of mass effect fields turning on.
I could see the traces of bombs that had gone off, bubbles of hard light, a glue-like substance sticking to the walls. The fact Mannequin was still standing told me he had easily moved past them.
"Mannequin." I stepped between the armored civilian and one of the last members of the Slaughterhouse 9. The cape was silent, moving with a confidence that irritated me. I analyzed the capes on our side and frowned.
Monarch was in a bad state, completely sealed up with her hair cut down and scattered and burned across the floor. Her biological armor was notably cracked, and I could see her exhaustion. Multiple combat robots lay broken and dead, and there were notable dents in Mannequin's armor, which was protected by a powerful barrier.
"You bastard!" The large man launched a flurry of flames, aimed at the gas as it was bent in Mannequin's direction. It detonated in a limited explosion, and the tinker rolled with the force even as he was battered. He bent like liquid, and he cartwheeled in a whirlwind of blades.
I moved and the second cape fighting him blocked his strikes, one I recognized from her file. Sveta, otherwise known as Garotte though I had heard she had taken to calling herself Tress…and she seemed to be dealing poorly with the man.
My eyes widened…she was a non-combatant member of the White Lotus and was in no mental state for dealing with Mannequin. She pushed him back with a pained shout and I stepped into the bout.
"Mannequin!" I swung down my halberd, and he pushed me back with one of his blades, moving with a confident and strange swagger. I turned and with my leg I kicked out a biotic Warp field into his chest. It cracked his barrier but didn't break it, and the damn psychopath seemed so amused.
I turned on the nano-thorns of my halberd and nearly aimed for his head before several dozen bugs collided against his chest forming a target. I tried to stab the man in the chest, and he dodged easily, deflecting the weapon. I nearly erased the Case 53's face but she moved back at the last moment with a flick of her tendrils.
A hypersonic bullet rushed past my ear, and crashed into Mannequin. It was the large civilian, screaming obscenities with a tinkertech gun in his hand, before compressing a ball of fire and launching it into the tinker.
Mannequin unchained his arms, whipping them out with an array of spinning blades. I had to dodge them, because hardening my barriers against them cost energy and focus. I dodged to the right, followed by the crack of an inbuilt rifle that crashed into a gathered swarm, saving the civilian.
A portal opened and vanished him, and there was no one left in harm's way besides capes.
I was suddenly grabbed and thrown in Weld's way, and his power barely stopped itself from consuming my armor. Mannequin jumped, twisting through the air and sticking to the ceiling, before bouncing back down in a lunging motion.
Weld tried to touch Mannequin, and blades on Mannequin's wrists simply began to vibrate. He stabbed into the Changer, and the metal broke away, and Weld screamed.
"Step away you damn psychopath!" I used a biotic tether, slowing his insane movements down. He simply flicked several grenades, I pulled them away, but he just kicked one towards me before I could react.
A pulse of dark energy radiated and my biotic barrier flickered out as did my tether. My dark energy fields were sluggish, a resonance countering my fields.
"Armsmaster move!" Monarch shouted on a comms line and she Charged Mannequin, sending him flying. He simply released gas from his encased flesh, and set her costume on fire, and then burned her swarm, another blast of his gun nearly cracking her barrier.
Only the larger mutant insects remained intact, and Mannequin was simply tearing them apart with his infuriating swagger.
I charged him, and I used my bending to feel the earth around and smiled when I sensed the metal and ceramic within him. I pulled and he twisted, and I managed to pull away some of it…but it was dense, far too dense to simply pull him apart.
Instead I grabbed the metal from the broken machines around us, and decided to encase him in it, to entrap him within metal. I gave some metal to Weld and he bounced forward, the four of us encircling the tinker. Weld formed spears with the metal, and Mannequin just fired the gun at me.
I spun at the sheer force, plating breaking like glass. Mannequin bent around Monarch's attacks, vibrating blades igniting gas to poison her swarm. His arms extended on their heavy chains, and my helmet crumpled and I felt searing pain along the left half of my face.
He ripped my halberd from my hands, and with a press of a button and a swing, he turned Weld's left thigh to dust, severing his leg. He swung my weapon into Sveta, and she screamed as the tendrils that made up her arm broke apart. Taylor sent a bolus of wind into Mannequin, and he stepped into her space and another grenade broke her weak barrier, and Monarch fell as he stabbed her on her right side.
Her swarm gathered around her, wrapping her in a cloak as I reached for a nano-thorn knife, and was met with agony from my leg and then a lack of sensation. I stumbled when I couldn't support my weight anymore, and more machines emerged from the portals firing a barrage of bullets.
His barrier blocked them, and then with a crack, a hole was blown in his chest.
"TAKE THAT YOU FUCKER!" Bakuda screamed, and Mannequin lost an arm as an energy blast seared the joints. I could see her holding a massive rifle, and she fired a second time, taking another arm. A larger robotic machine launched the tinker away…
And the pain set in, darkness encroaching on my vision.
He was toying with us.
As I fell into unconsciousness, I could hear Dragon's fearful words and Bakuda's angry and cursed filled ones.
Damn…
It…
___
September 25th, 2011. 3:30PM
Basilia Rubio
I put together everything I had been told, from my own point of view, and taking into consideration my own thoughts and opinions. Rusul had been patient even at the same time as he had been annoyingly enigmatic.
"So void is soul, it's very existence makes the elements possible, it is the voice of all things, the voice of the Spirit World. Void is the answer to questions and the questions themselves. Void is a fundamental, a needed aspect of the primal concepts that build the Avatar, the Vyasa, and the Entities. Without void none of them would have ever existed." It made me question their origin, once I had looked up Ward and gained a deeper understanding of their origin.
They came from a world with two and yet one sun, and through generations of evolution and competition they had learned to shift through the layers like pages in a book, keeping their subatomic particles within them. But that didn't mean it was true, at least not completely so.
Not all that's said is true.
There was a piece of the puzzle I was missing, some clue in their primordial memory that I needed to grasp for myself.
"Yes." Rusul answered to the affirmative, and I smiled with teeth, long since having folded back my helmet.
"More important is why this is helpful, I'm not getting much of an explanation on why I was put on this planet." I had guesses and some answers based on what Veda whispered. But she didn't know everything either. "What will I even get if I learn what I need to know?"
"If you understand what you are, it will build in you the power to control all that you are, without losing yourself to the current. You are void for a reason…"
"And what reason is that?" I asked, and Rusul glanced down to the moss beneath our feet. He chewed on his lip, spirits swarming around him in a cloud of spiritual flesh.
Rusul grinned "You are the voice of the void, you are the compiler of the forgotten, of the nameless, you are meant to light the way not as a warrior but as a scholar. You are meant to remember. The Vyasa's Purpose is to bring light to what has been lost, to carve a path into the future, the breaker of cycles and chains."
"How do I speak to the void?" I kept my voice steady, even as what he said sunk in and felt right. The kid gestured, a flood of silvery spirits coming to his call along with the red-silvery spirits I identified on sight as shard spirits.
"You have to listen closely, you have to accept that void is a part of you. You have to accept that you are more than just human." He lightly passed a silvery spirit, one that looked so small, so weak. But that was wrong.
I held the spirit in my hand and let the pressure crack against my skull and chest. I had to look into the Form of the spirit placed before me, and void was and is far trickier. I took in what I am, that no matter how much anger it created, there was a part of me that was different. There was a rictus of pain and suffering as the pressure of looking into Form burst.
Sound suddenly fell away and most of the spirits around us ran. There was a shine of light in gold, silver, black and white. Rusul was there waiting patiently and warmly.
The Vyasa has opened her eyes.
The voice radiated power, and I could tell the little flame of void was but an avatar for the absolute vastness of the World. The World itself was simply an even smaller projection of the vastness beyond the infinite Spheres.
"Are you a void spirit?"
Yes.
"Do you know what I'm supposed to, can you tell me?"
We are.
The answer made no sense, so I shifted gears. "You're telling me but I don't see that happening here."
We are.
"What does the void need to tell me? Why do I need to remember the past?"
You must remember so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. So that the sacrifices of countless generations are not forgotten, to remember the answer.
I followed so far. "So what's your message for me…what does the void need to tell me?"
The Aeon seeks to consume the center, the heart of all things. To consume the beating heart of mortals. We can not hold it back alone.
"You're not as strong as you could be…because the spirit world has only just spooled up to full power, and because it's busy with other equally dangerous tasks?" There was a nod within that golden light.
Others tried to complete the machinery. They failed.
I gulped at the implication, at the thought that someone had tried to birth the ephemeral into reality. Who had tried, and why? And why had they failed?
"What is Aeon? What the hell is going to destroy the world?" I asked, not even paying attention to Rusul anymore.
Aeon is a creature of boundless hate, rage and cruelty. She seeks to gain power by consuming the shards, she seeks to understand what has changed. And she wants to kill all those she believes have stolen from her.
"What does this Aeon want to kill?"
Everything on this planet, humanity, the spirits, the shards, Scion and when she learns of you…she will hate you most of all simply for what you represent.
There was fear there, I was certain of that.
"So she wants to kill everything?"
No…she wishes to become as the Harbinger once was, she wishes to become a god. A complete and total mastery of all things. But she requires pawns to gather power and knowledge for her goal of ascension. She has been crippled, lessened…and she hopes to undo that.
I fluttered my eyelashes, trying to reconcile what I was hearing. Because what she was telling me was that something wanted to become a deity, and I only knew of a few comparable entities, that galaxy eating monster dealt with by some psychic idiot, those abominations that had wiped out the Clans and the Great Houses, and while they didn't exist anymore in the time of my newest branch…
The mythical Parasite had powers and abilities that were the stuff nightmares were made of. And based on how and why they needed sapient life…it certainly controlled the souls of those it consumed. It was a very big part of me that was glad these eras were so far back in the past, because existential horror was not something I wanted on my bucket list.
"Why not tell me this to me before? Why wait?"
Because you were not ready.
I couldn't counter that. "Is that the only reason?"
No. The Aeon also possesses a powerful sight of her own, and has many agents. She can interfere with our vision, but can not blind us. She will only grow stronger with time.
I stared at the silvery orb of light. "So if you couldn't tell me yet…why is Rusul so special?"
He is a kind soul, strong and genuine. He is in the right place, in the right time, in the right mentality to hear our voice. He is what we need.
"Is there a reason?"
Yes.
I'm not even going to ask, because it really wasn't that important.
"How do you know this…what is this ability to see the past and the future?" The silver light shines ever brighter.
One is all, All is one. The void spirit spoke freely, and I started to understand.
"You…don't just 'see' the future and past, you're in the future, you're in the past, you're everywhere and everywhen, every possibility across every facet of existence!" The realization was sobering because it meant that the multiverse was far, far larger than I could have ever possibly imagined. "What do you see?" I had to ask, and felt rather than heard the amusement of the void spirit.
We see All that is possible to see. We see those who came before you, and those who will come after you. We see the countless permutations of this and other possible worlds because we must.
That might explain Weaver if she's friends with Rusul.
"Can you tell us how to stop the end of the world, how to stop what's coming?
No. We alone can not help you stop the end, we alone can not cease the tide.
I rubbed my face, trying to understand what they were going on about. "So are you going to tell me a prophecy or does that come later?"
Yes.
I twitched, but didn't rise when I figured out he was probably telling some other idiot about the future but not me. It wasn't time, but I had questions that could be asked, answers that could be given.
"Tell me." I bowed my head, showing all the respect that was possible within my body for the void. "What are the plans of Aeon's pawns in this city?" The void spirit smiled a million grins.
It is an experiment, they seek to turn the Butcher into an Endbringer. A new god for the Fallen, and a new member of the pantheon she seeks to create. A monument to her eternal glory and victory.
"Show me." I didn't demand but I didn't beg either, and a silvery hand was placed on my forehead.
I could see Butcher 19, the woman once known as Shatterbird, her organs splayed out like a fucked art piece. That strange beetle was inserting some type of core into the woman's chest, while IV's injected a silver fluid created from a crystalline mass growing in a glass tube.
Like the equipment that had been stolen from Rhizome…oh fuck. The core was being injected with the same fluid, slowly turning crystalline, tendrils wrapping around organs, and pulsing in tune with the broadcasts of the pillbug. The image shifted to Brockton Bay, as something large emerged from the wreckage of the Docks.
I blinked back the images of a possible future, the blood rushing away from my face. "Oh god…"
This is why you are here. You are the administrator.
The revelation came easily. I was an administrator, I had the duty of bringing the shards in line with my mere presence. If I wasn't here the shards would have gone insane and slaughtered us all ages ago. So if that was true…I needed to put the Thief in her place.
Go. You must return. We will speak again.
"When will you…talk to me again?"
We are…
The light faded, and I had fallen out of the spirit world completely, and right back into the office Piggot had been using. I was almost foamed but apparently Piggot hasn't left the meeting room even once, instead bringing her work here. Information trickled into my mind, and I had much more refined ideas of where our current enemies were.
"You've got something?" She sounded intrigued and a grin pulled at my lips.
"I know where they are." Her own face pulled off a smirk, just a small one but it was there. "But a better question is how long I've been away…" Her smirk turned into a scowl.
"Two hours, the fight with Mannequin has long passed." My jubilation dropped at the hitch in her voice.
"How bad?"
___
September 25th, 2011. 9:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I grit my teeth as my fingers painfully gripped onto my skull, doing my best to keep my frustrations from leaking out. There was a knock on the door and I jumped but didn't answer, simply sinking into my blanket. The door was simply opened, and I looked over to the person entering my room.
I flinched when I saw how Taylor's hair had been cut short, down to her chin instead of below her shoulders. She didn't move awkwardly at least so Amelia had obviously healed what she could.
"Basilia?" I leaned away when she sat down next to me, crossing her legs. "Is there something wrong? Something I can help with?"
I didn't answer, looking down at my hands and trying to process what the Director had told me only a scant few hours ago. Mannequin had crippled Colin, damaged Sveta enough to leave her without an arm, and Weld was probably eating metal to replace his leg, and Taylor had been stabbed in the kidney, and had dodged being decapitated by inches.
And there had been some strange attack on the PRT, by a force they were certain wasn't the remnant of the S9, but instead something else. My machines had proven to not be an obstacle to Mannequin, and I was making updates based on new data, a lot of updates.
"Is this about Mannequin?" I tried not to let it show but that obviously failed when Taylor slid up to me, her expression blank. "Basilia…that wasn't your fault, you had to be somewhere else, and Mannequin obviously knew what he was doing. He countered my swarm with hard hitting explosives and poison, and some type of effect so their abilities couldn't deflect them, and he attacked where hitting hard would get other people hurt."
"I could have done something sooner, I could have looked for them before, taken them out earlier. Then Crawler and Siberian wouldn't be in the hands of a cult and invaders from another dimension, and Mannequin would be long dead."
"Basilia…it took you months to ramp up enough to safely scan the surface without being in range of the Simurgh. Then the gang war started because of Coil, and then an alien demon god tried to kill us all…and then Leviathan was on his way. And you told Dragon enough so they got kicked out of Boston and then they vanished before you could seek them out."
"I could have told people earlier, I didn't have to be the one playing hero I didn't…it's my fault." My fingers curled into my scalp, and I felt like sobbing. I was so tired of all of this…and I just didn't know what to do with the stress.
"Maybe it would have been better if you had told people who knew better…but did they know better?" I rubbed my eyes, having a hard time just focusing, a buzzing between my teeth, and emotions burning hot and wild.
"I…don't understand." She grabbed my face and pulled me towards her with a fierce look in her eyes.
"Cauldron…if you had told them…I think they would have kept doing what they were doing, and probably would have done everything in their power to keep me on the path to Khepri." I floundered and she silenced me with her finger. "Plus you mess with Contessa's power so she wouldn't be able to confirm what you're saying, and Eidolon might not have believed he was responsible for the Endbringers. And killing him didn't stop them in what you know right?" I nodded, chewing on my lip.
Taylor was shaking her head, her own turmoil showing on her face. "You couldn't use your information to recruit us directly because we wouldn't have trusted you. You couldn't stop Canberra because the Simurgh would have just gone elsewhere and made a mess of everything. Telling them about Sting wouldn't do anything either because the Endbringers would just adapt. Sometimes…there's just nothing you can do, no matter how much you prepare…things just go wrong."
"You got hurt though…you were almost killed and Colin is…" I was suddenly scooped up, and I let out a high pitched noise of surprise when I was pulled into a somewhat awkwardly arranged hug.
"Basilia. Getting almost killed is sort of part of the job, we're not always going to get out a fight unscathed. All we can do is pick ourselves up again and figure out what we did wrong."
"I still lost people under my protection…there's no bringing those people back." Not by any means I knew of, though there was an intuition that I was wrong.
Which I promptly buried deep down.
"Security guards aren't really trained to fight mass murdering tinkers, and their armor and shields were still good enough that we only lost three people instead of a dozen. And the robots you did have on guard duty saved hundreds of lives and got almost everyone all home." I hugged her tightly, trying to deny what she was saying.
"I'm…just, it's too much sometimes. So many people depend on our actions, and I don't even have the luxury of knowing what's coming next anymore." And even that luxury had been painful, because it made me feel like I was just using people for my own ends.
"I understand that perfectly." She bobbed her head in agreement. "Plus it must be frustrating…and so unreal and frightening with what you've read about us." There was a specific tone in her words, and I opened my mouth.
"Huh?" I said lamely, and she raised her eyebrows.
"You do know we can look up stuff from your world's internet right? Plus the thirty five other ones that are basically identical."
"Huh…" I really didn't think it through at all did I? I was probably going to have to put restraints on that. "Why didn't anyone bring it up before?"
"To be fair it's not that everyone knows, it's mostly the core members who know, though Grace figured it out without needing to check. Myths aren't really known for advanced technology that isn't considered magical."
"It wouldn't be a problem if I go for locking access right?" I asked weakly and she giggled softly.
"No it's not. It's probably a good idea anyway…but it's made you easier to understand. You're afraid that we'd think you're using us, that this is some type of game to you…"
I swallowed and skipped over that. "I thought you'd be more flabbergasted."
"You do know who you're talking to right…as well as remember the kind of life we live? Not exactly a lot of room for skepticism when the world has gone insane."
"Fair. But…I would prefer we stop talking about this. Please." She acceded to my demand and I lay against her, a hand brushing against her stomach. There was something I felt as I did so…and my eyebrows furrowed.
Taylor smiled, and to my surprise she lifted up her white shirt, and blood rushed to my face. Her lift was lifted just short of her bust, and I could almost see a hint of black, before my eyes shifted focus to her right side. There was a nasty scar, a long line where Mannequin's blades had struck true.
"But Panacea healed you didn't she?" She put down her shirt and I ignored a pang of disappointment as she answered.
"With waterbending, she was busy using her power to keep Colin alive. And I think it's a good reminder…it was no one's fault but…"
"We can still learn from this…do better?" She smiled and I knew I had gotten it right "You'll stay right?" I insisted because regardless of my feeling less like a bitch, I was still off of my game and afraid of being left alone.
"Yeah…I don't mind." I moved off of Taylor, and then pushed her down so she could rest her head on one of my pillows. In that moment of seeing her laid down I was very tempted to straddle her…to see if she could handle rid—okay let's cut that out.
"So how is Colin…handling it?" I had seen how bad it was, his right leg had been ripped apart by his own nano-thorn blade, and one of his eyes had been taken out. Mannequin had succeeded in developing pulse nullifiers, using resonant mass effect fields to weaken or increase the cost of fields.
Armsmaster had been unprepared, and Mannequin had damaged Taylor's energy field and kinetic barriers enough to leave her vulnerable. Pulse nullifiers didn't work as well on kinetic barriers, and energy fields didn't give a shit. I was already modifying my armor and everyone's else's to counter that, and biotics just needed to deal with the weakening.
Though canceling out his dark energy wavelengths wasn't out of the question.
Taylor clicked her tongue and I stiffened. "Well, he's apparently taken to the idea of going for cybernetic implants even when we can grow him a leg in a few hours." Hell we could print out a body in a week on our own. "Dragon is working on getting him a new leg, and fixing up his face." She stared at me for a moment, a notion coming to the forefront. "Wait you don't…"
"Are you going to stop me? I know my way around the operating table, and know about augmentics far more than Dragon." Only just but cybernetics was a dime a dozen in every branch I had.
Taylor sighed. "I guess I can't, do you need to go now?"
"I'll go in an hour, and offer my services to Dragon. Least I can do."
Taylor snorted. "Fair enough…" I moved to her side, and she seemed to blush just the tiniest bit. Which since I was squishing my boobs into her arm, that was probably the cause.
"Mannequin's still alive isn't he?"
"We sent him off limping." Something protective and violent told me good, while another part told me I should headbutt him the next time I see him.
Don't know where that came from, but I was almost willing to listen to it.
"Well…at least it's a start, and now that we have their location, we can bring down the Fallen, and the remnant of the Nine with them."
I would protect my own.
Nothing would change that.
___
AN: Here's 13.2, with quite a fair amount of revelation of which there are still more for the future. We've got a clue of the end boss, and more mysteries hinted at. Not much to tell you…except for one big hint.
Aeon isn't from Basilia's side of the multiverse.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Yep as mentioned on…a few occasions somewhere in 800K words eezo is made of the stuff of souls, essentially within a shell of phase-shifting degenerate matter. It has taken other aspects and forms in the past, which is why a lot of space spirits often have void as a vital aspect of their nature.
As do certain animal spirits, those that have risen above mortality, like Kalros the Mother of all Thresher Maws. It's not an original idea, but I'm not adverse to stealing from better writers.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ah that makes sense so eezo defies the laws of physics because it's literally the essence of the soul given physical form I'm surprised the Entities have not come in contact with eezo yet oh and for Taylor and Basilla how close are the two now currently
- Location
- Chula Vista
That's mostly because eezo(this version of eezo) can't exist without the soul in a tangible state being a thing. Without that machinery, the Entities can't interact with something that effectively does not exist.
- Location
- Chula Vista
No. Abbadon is still heading towards Andromeda, he's got his own problems to deal with on the way.
Teleologism 13.3
- Location
- Chula Vista
Teleologism 13.3
September 27th, 2011. 8:00AM
Basilia Rubio
The air was musty and old.
The area around me looked like the remnants of some forgotten city, seemingly frozen in time, familiar vehicles and buildings and structures rotting ever so slightly underneath a cold dead sky. The air was thin, and the ground was frozen. There was only a distant light of a small white star, and I could see the air freezing out.
The ruins bore symbols, long forgotten and yet remembered. The metal was rust, the plastic decayed and organic matter broken down into carbon ash. I ran a hand along the frame of a vehicle and it broke apart into motes of iron dust. It was so so cold, and that made sense when the star this dead world orbited had long since gone silent.
It was a memory, and I brushed up against a skeleton, one that looked so familiar somehow. Something so old it doesn't remember ever being alive. I walked and I found that the 'world' I was on was in fact a fragment of a broken and scattered field of planetoids and asteroids.
I could see things moving in the night sky, some were mechanical, others biological or a mix of both, or of forms not of this material plane, and as they popped in and out of existence, aging and vanishing, the white dead sun grew dimmer as eons passed.
"Basilia?" Taylor whispered in my ear and I turned to her, feeling a smile pull to my lips. But when I reached out to her, static struck, and instead of the wonderful if strange woman I had feelings for…
I saw her battered and broken, her skin pale, wearing another face, another costume, missing an arm, her hair wild and free, blood dribbling from her mouth. I saw her turn to dust and ashes before my eyes.
I felt my heart drop into my stomach and I looked elsewhere for people, for her, for anyone.
I found Vicky, but when I reached for her she exploded into a mess of limbs, heads and other miscellaneous parts. I held back a scream of horror, and there was a second twist, revealing her in her newest costume but with a hood instead of a hood-like helmet. What life there was there was gone, and a Wretch wrapped around her in a soft golden lined hue. They too turned to dust, and I kept reaching out.
I reached for Elle and she was like before I had affected her power, but older, surrounded by Palanquin as they burned away. Amelia was there but her arms were covered in tattoos, fingers gripping a patch of skin, something so very wrong behind her eyes.
She simply melted away into a puddle of flesh that turned to carbon dust.
Bakuda? A shade of Ciara.
Our newest members? Erased by golden light.
Golem? He was there but he seemed so different, and he simply sank into his power like he was in quicksand. Turnaround? He was there but he seemed sadder, more inward facing, and he burned away like everything else. Terra? She was surrounded by kids, orphans from the looks of them, and she was sad, lesser in some small undefined way. But not weak either.
Colin and Theresa were there, but they both wore green, and they looked so very different. Sveta was there, in her old form, wearing a shell to protect others from her. It was colorful and artful and it was different.
Make it stop. Let me wake up…please.
I backed away, stomach flipping in horror and fear. "Please let me wake up."
But the dream didn't care for my feelings.
There was a slam, like a planet had hit the ruin I was standing on and I was knocked into a liquid that wasn't water. It was golden, and at other times it was a shining silver, or a stark scarlet red. There was a fine mist above my head as I bobbed towards the shore with aurelian sands.
This was the Sea of Souls, and it should have been lethal to swim in the waters of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of souls.
I washed ashore, thrown with force like that of a cannon and I tumbled through a garden of black hard ground and shriveled up trees and shrubs. I looked up from the dirt…
And found myself in a field of corpses extending for miles in every direction, preserved eternally, memories of something lost, yet something I remembered.
I found myself in front of an enormous shell, a good several dozen meters tall and extending kilometers out to the horizon. The head of the white wyrm had a seven horned crown, and I could see other corpses, a massive moth the size of a building, turned to grey stone, flaking away in death. There was a masked tree, roots rotting, and light faded.
It was a dead pantheon, and one I had seen before. Or one that one of me had seen before, in other circumstances, in a different life from this one.
I turned and froze when I saw the frozen creature before me. It had an insectoid head, with four arms and two degenerated legs with a long segmented limb attached to the back of the flattened head, ending in a sharp barb. It had other limbs curled up, and inert powder drifted from it's decaying body. Other tentacle faced horrors were equally inert.
Whatever these ancient beings had been, they had been erased utterly and completely, their power stripped, their invocations denied. The horror of their vengeance ceased for all of time.
Another tentacle faced alien was broken into fragments and rotting slabs of flesh and I lightly brushed my fingers against the statue's face. It was a species that had been pure in Form and pure in Essence, and they were dead.
Just like all the rest…
Four humanoid female-like entities stood stock-still, beings made of light projected by a heart of crystal. One white, one yellow, one blue and one pink, surrounded by hundreds of lesser entities of light and sapient minerals. My gaze shifted to other entities to their right.
Beings of living transforming metal, brought to life by strange energies from a great spark of power at the heart of their metal planet. It was an endless field of dead deities and pantheons, of species buried in the muck, and I shivered as I realized some of the skeletons and corpses were equal to the shards in scope and scale.
What was this place?
I could feel something trying to approach, an impulse hitting me in the back, reflected back and canceled out. Something massive, something powerful and yet broken and insane. A blackness blotted out the sun, blunted limbs emerged from a central mass, that central mass made up of a tangle of human arms, legs, heads, and eyes, and they split open to reveal two blazing silver eyes.
Despite the terror I felt towards the voice, I knew it was wrong, even as its thunder shook the world. I looked behind me and saw a city I didn't recognize, a vast hole in reality spewing out a wave of searing energy down upon millions of tons of metal, stone and people. I didn't know what I was looking at, and in the end it didn't matter.
Because I was waking up.
September 27th, 2011. 8:15AM
Basilia Rubio
I woke up in a cold sweat, chest heaving as the primal fear hit my monkey brain like a jackhammer. I had never been so afraid, even the Leviathan fell short of the dread mass and hatred directed in that impulse.
I rubbed my face, trying not to puke, and I took a series of breaths as it felt like at any moment something was going to jump out and kill me. I tried not to feel sick, but it was so difficult.
"I suppose we shouldn't have expected so much of someone who lived such a soft life." I jumped, throwing a blast of fire and barely dousing it before it could hit something flammable.
There was someone else here, standing at the open doorway of my room, leaning against it with a casual air to her. She looked a lot like an older Azula, but her cheeks were a little fuller as were her lips, and her eyes were a softer and kinder amber. She was older of course, and wore a red and black tunic, tightened around her waist by a lighter red sash, and I could see some cleavage from the woman.
It was a more futuristic design of clothing, and I didn't know who or what the woman was. But when I formed a beating flame in my palm…I understood.
"Who…?"
"Call me Mei. I'd be the firebender in your weird little soul." She smirked at my dumbfounded expression, and her laugh very much sounded like Azula. "Seems like things have been going…wellish?" She shrugged and I scowled at her.
She popped back up at my side, and I lifted my blanket to cover myself.
"I wouldn't say having three of my employees killed on the job, and four capes on my side getting nearly killed is a good thing."
"Perhaps that is true, but what's the alternative? The trust in the PRT broken because of a mad Striker/Trump? Alexandria dead, dozens of capes dead, your friends insane, dead or simply elsewhere?" She laughed in my face and I growled but knew she was right. "Besides…didn't your gal pal already help put your head on straight?"
"I wouldn't exactly call myself a cold machine, I'm not perfectly rational." I pointed this out to the Fire National.
"Some of those irrational emotions are probably why you haven't recreated some of the hotter versions of Love Amongst the Dragons with tall, dark and sexy." Mei giggled at my glare, a sudden amount of territorial instinct coming to the forefront.
"Do not." Then another thought popped in. "Why are you here?"
Her expression was softer this time. "Thought it was about time to get you up from whatever you've been dreaming about. Plus…I am a part of you, and I wanted to see how you were doing."
"Better than two days ago, worse than three weeks ago." I cleaned out an ear with my finger, yawning. "Is there time for this…I really have other things to do." I gave her an apologetic look, and she didn't seem annoyed.
"We'll talk." Mei nodded.
"I should go." Mei left with a final bemused chuckle at my way of ending this conversation, and I brushed back my unruly hair.
Today was going to be a mess, I could feel it in my bones even though they were made of a composite of organic and inorganic structures.
September 27th, 2011. 11:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I inspected the strange pink crystal I had synthesized based on the specifications of how the mineral was likely made. It was some type of pink quartz exposed to strange energies, and I had managed to replicate the conditions by generating a short fissure into the spirit world. Also turns out Jennamite was the creation of some type of spirit that had been helped by Omashu some two thousand five hundred years before Korra.
The Tale of Nguoi Keo was a classic children's story…and I was getting bogged up in things that wouldn't matter until I write them down.
Subanese crystals had tremendous energy storage capacities, quartz mixing with an exotic element generated from being exposed to Slipspace energies. It was weird and trippy, and I was increasingly tempted to just expose stuff to raw spirit energy to see what comes out.
They had a vague resemblance to certain structures I had identified from samples of Endbringer core materials, what little had survived getting broken by Sting. Fortunately most of the mass had been scattered across other dimensions, though I was searching for their dimensional signature to see if more samples couldn't be acquired.
I estimated at least a couple hundred exatons of flesh was inside a single Endbringer, and a range of up to four thousand wasn't out of the question. Sting didn't have that much energy, but breaking the core cut off the hundreds of linked dimensions and caused a cascade failure of the network of a single Endbringer mind.
Kind of like what happened to Eden but worse, and I had been studying scans taken from the fight ever since to figure out where everything had gone. For now I thought it wasn't important.
Forming a new variety of the strange pink crystal was on the menu, one better suited for high energy density but low power density. A battery rather than a bomb. I think the T'Von shaped them into cutting weapons, while the Huraggoy deployed them as high energy explosive projectiles.
There were a lot of exotic materials I needed to synthesize, and much of the technology varied from not being much better to being a little worse than what the Citadel had. Both eras had common usage of nanomachines in manufacturing, and both had excellent armor, though built for different…needs and circumstances.
Same applied to their weapons, most had huge yields but had a slower firing rate. Though there were the high energy plasma weapons…which weren't actually orders of magnitude much better, they scaled to many megatons, but that was over a continuous firing time. The most advanced modern heavy mass effect drive cruisers would hit for forty to sixty kilotons every two seconds, dreadnoughts over a hundred.
A frigate grade Thanix hits harder than even a Turian battleship mass accelerator and one of those monsters is about fifteen hundred meters long, with triple layers of armor and Cyclonic barriers. They were powerful and yet a Thanix would punch through them like tissue paper.
I had a cruiser, though we were maybe forty meters short of being a heavy, and over a hundred meters short of a Turian battlecruiser. Even so our fighting power was a little beyond what the size would tell you.
Though if I went by the classifications the Yonhet used, the Samsara would be a very large destroyer. They went for big fuckoff magnetic accelerators, with their smaller destroyers firing rounds about the size and length of a Smart car but with eleven times the mass due to being solid iron-tungsten. So they hit as hard as dreadnoughts…though the gap was narrowed by a firing rate of once every fifteen seconds.
Plus none of them accelerate as fast as mass effect based propulsion, though we're still talking a few dozen to a few hundred Gs at least which is way better than the Tetatae by an order of magnitude, and about on par to a little worse than the Humanx. They pulled off gravity control by triggering fourth and fifth dimensional reality shifts…weird shit basically.
I moved on from the crystal suspended in a mass effect field, and towards a large plasma cannon. Plasma bombardment was well known among a ton of races, and a hybrid between mass effect field containment and phase-shifted magnetic field containment made this weapon pretty tough.
Unfortunately plasma tends to be hard to scale up without causing an enormous amount of collateral damage. Plasma artillery wasn't going to be very useful unless I was given authority to bombard a section of the city to wipe out Mannequin.
Which with Piggot as the director wasn't out of the question.
The Helioskrill had a number of handheld plasma weapons, from pistols to battle rifles, and they hit hard and worked through very distinct means. Magnetic fields alone wouldn't be able to contain plasma without massive amounts of energy. But their understanding of higher dimensions allowed them to create a unique form of phase-shifted plasma.
Energy wise it was in the tens of thousands of joules for their plasma rounds…and kinetic barriers could block them just fine but you'd need better insulation to keep from being cooked alive.
The plasma manipulation capabilities of the Yonhet's contemporaries had been instrumental in figuring out how to block the plasma strikes of that spirit entity, as well as how to make better energy shields. And from what I could tell they could take literal megatons of energy before collapsing for the dreadnought-scale vessels.
Only a Thanix cannon and some of the heaviest mass accelerators could hit hard enough to break through such shielding without resorting to swarm tactics. Too bad scaling those things up and down is a total bitch, a dreadnought Thanix cannon is maybe four times more powerful than a cruiser which is in turn two to three times more powerful than a frigate.
I'm generalizing of course, there's definitely a range since cruisers start at four hundred meters and end at eight hundred. Which is about just above the size of turian battlecruisers. Minus about five meters.
Pretty ballsy to build ships just shy of the limit, since instead of 40 dreads they technically have hundreds.
The plasma cannon was less useful but the Helioskrill had a more compact and interesting weapon instead. They had an antiparticle shotgun, one that would punch holes in nearly any class of armor barring Prothean steel. Which I hadn't figured out yet.
There was a woosh as one of the doors to the lab opened, and I murmured a greeting to Taylor as she sauntered over to me in her repaired armor. Healing worked pretty well when your armor is alive, and I had made some modifications with Amelia's help.
The emitters for shielding were altered from mechanical augmentations to a more cybernetic implementation. A modified neural system augmented with waveguides and projectors and field shaping computers. The set of armor projected a dual layer of energy and kinetic barriers and again had a ton of computers as a hardsuit.
"So you said you know where the Fallen are probably hiding right?" I nodded as I ran more simulations on my Omni. Mostly relating to greater use of Bakuda Bombs, which we hadn't done much of because Bakuda wasn't a mass production tinker. Her high energy chemical bombs were pretty common, as were her Stickum grenades which had unfortunately done nothing to Mannequin because he was bullshit. Plus her hologram grenades had been used to provide cover for civilians during his attack.
They were specialty weapons, and using them in close quarters with Mannequin is a recipe for disaster.
"They're hiding in the spirit world, through a rift that's inside an abandoned metalworking shop in Kittery. But we have no idea what barriers and defenses they could have put in place by now." I rolled my shoulders, and grimaced since I knew the remaining Teeth were still missing. "Attacking a shaman in their domain is about as bad as attacking a tinker in their domain." In my own case I was the worst of both worlds as a tinker and a shaman. "I've made some modifications and upgrades to all my tech, plus tested some new tech."
Most of the new races shared fairly similar computer technology for one reason or another. They used some type of holographic crystal technology for a form of optical computing, and I was currently trying to engineer a means of combining this form of data storage with optronic processing.
Plus some AI technology which involved scanning brains and converting them into neurological models for full-blown AGI. Early models were quite prone to Rampancy, but they had figured out how to make them more stable after an incident involving the netcode of one of their AI shattering and putting itself back together again. Plus code acting as regulators on their ludicrous processing power.
Their oldest AI had reached the ripe old age of sixty last I saw of their history.
Their processing power was around the same level, and I was mostly interested in the sheer durability of their data storage. They were stable on the scale of centuries, and combining them was…deceptively simple. I should be well on my way to switching production to my new and upgraded optronic devices within a week.
I need to focus on the present and not the future.
"Basilia?" Taylor asked with concern.
I simply focused. "How's your armor?"
"It seems to be functioning at a hundred percent, and it seems to be…working better than it should?" I blinked and gestured for her to approach. I placed my hand against her chestplate, and there was a feeling there…something alive and ready.
"This armor has a pretty strong spirit, it's been…attuned to you for lack of better words." I hummed though not out of surprise, this thing had taken a beating and had been healed and repaired and upgraded more times than I can count without using my implants.
It was a tough little suit of armor.
"Oh." She sounded interested but I could tell she knew we didn't have time for it. "So you've got everything prepared for our joint mission with the Protectorate?"
"I still need a few hours, and I need to get actual information from Weaver and Rusul on who's sponsoring the Fallen." I had managed to get quite a bit of news, there had been a near national beat down of the Fallen due to the Rachni fucking them over.
Turns out they had almost a hundred capes, and five times that number in non-capes. Within days their numbers had been cut in half, and I had heard Eidolon was destroying them utterly. Turns out Cauldron didn't like Goddess trying to get a nice and big piece out of Bet.
With the number of benders on the rise, there was a lot more room for governments to push back. Though I'm not sure that was always going to be a good thing. I had made some estimates, and about two percent of the world should be benders by 2013, six percent by 2015, and fourteen percent by 2017 before stabilizing at twenty five by 2020.
Their 2020 anyway, for my world it would be 2029.
The Fallen were working with the Lords of some backwater planet who were in turn apparently the puppet of the thing that was going to kill us all. Which brought up the name the void spirit had given me.
Aeon wasn't the creature's name, it was simply a title, some representation of the being's Purpose. Something about it struck a chord, like I should have known what my enemy was.
"I'll…be ready for later, give me some more time?" Taylor nodded, and she stepped through a door into another world.
Getting ready was going to take a while…especially since I was going all out for this.
I wasn't going to let them make a mess of my town, not anymore.
September 27th, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I landed with a bolus of compressed air, keeping some of my righteous anger in check as micro-portals sent data from drones sweeping for Mannequin. I found bits of him scattered about, and I had sent most of my workers home for the time being.
Luckily the city was in a state of emergency because of another S-class threat on the horizon.
All around me there were a number of capes and PRT agents, gathered in the same spot where that little workshop was but on Earth Gimel rather than Bet. Apparently the PRT was warming to the idea of ambushing people by portal. With Dragon finally figuring out basic portal tech and Masamune doing his thing, there was going to be a considerable shift in the balance of power.
Whether that was a good thing or not couldn't yet be foreseen. For today I had changed the color of my armor from a dull grey to a dark emerald green though the black fiber layers below remained the same. I had a number of spirit tools, one I rarely got to bring out because they'd be wasted on most criminals.
Some I had forged myself, shaping spirits into items of power and others I had found once the spirits themselves had learned of a way to protect themselves from predation.
A common one was a Brooch, something made for holding items usually by being bigger on the inside. There were a wide variety of Brooches, different spirits forming the items and thus having different rules. Other useful tools were Sidesteppers, spirit tools used for transitioning from the material to the ephemeral.
While some shamans could perform the veil-rip and enter the spirit world themselves, most had to make do with spirit journeys or look for or make spirit tools. And not everyone had the talent for creating them.
I had one such item, a sphere consisting of black and white interchanging stripes. The sphere itself varied in size from time to time and it was pilose in texture and warm to the touch. This little number I had found recently can grant anyone touching it the ability to enter any High Layer of the spirit world.
One test had ended up with me being stuck in the middle of the savanna and getting covered in a swarm of summoned bees. This version of a Sidestepper was reliable…but using it to teleport across the globe is a bad idea.
One spirit tool was wrapped around my head, a small brown cloak along my shoulders. It was something like a kinetic barrier, but it reflects the bullet back towards the attacker. Elle had made it, and it was a dangerous artifact indeed.
So a Brooch, a Sidestepper, an Echo Cloak, and the fourth spirit tool was an Anchor Gem while the final and fifth spirit tool was a Skeleton Key. I used the Brooch to carry the Anchor Gem, the Sidestepper, and the Skeleton Key, along with a few other non-shaman objects.
I could see who was gathered from the Protectorate, Miss Militia, Dauntless, Clockblocker, Assault and Flechette, Chevalier and Armsmaster, from the Wards we had Kiyohime and Vista using what had to be tinkertech equipment from Kid Win.
There were another ten reinforcements from other Ward and Protectorate teams. None I recognized at a glance.
On our side we had Monarch, Terra(pending a name change), Bakuda, Polaris, Turnaround, Panacea, Labyrinth, Faultline and Jarl. Golem was being supported by Skimmer with her tinkertech equipment for his patrols, and Sveta was still recovering from getting her arm cut off. The rest of Palanquin was out of time, and apparently working with Myrddin to take down some Fallen. From New Wave, Lady Photon and Brandish while their husbands watched out for Crystal and Eric. Who were also being supported by Skimmer.
From the independents we had only Parian since the rest had been scared off by the sudden Crawler ambush. Though with the new barriers placed around every PRT base only the most proficient shamans were getting through.
And the PRT had hundreds of shamans and was setting up the infrastructure to train more in both the private and public industries. As well as obtaining the means of policing them as they did parahumans.
Dragon was using her semi-organic gynoid model, surrounded with a plethora of drones, and Dragonflight suits controlled either by multitasking instances or her own AI. Non-sapient of course. The Undersiders lingered around her, the team she had apparently decided to sponsor and pulled out of petty villainy.
Grue was talking with Imp, the girl wildly gesturing to Weaver's team who was made up of two people and Rusul. Bitch was whispering something to her dogs, and I could feel something special about them. Something strong and robust, a bond between man and animal. Between soul and spirit.
I looked over to Weaver's team, raising an eyebrow. One of them was a girl with red hair, wearing a skintight bodysuit shifting in colors, though it often settled upon black with grey lines that followed the curves of her body. In addition she had a hood and her mask was white like her leader, with a single pair of eye holes and ear-like structures extending from it.
The next member was a tall man, about even with Grue with grey smoke and fog coming off of him in waves, with flickers of flames within them. He had a more runner-like build, which I suppose made sense. He was a Mover from what I had heard. He can teleport anywhere within his fog, and I believe he could break up the smoky fog as well.
He wore a simple black cloak, but I could see the same armor design that Weaver wore underneath her red outfit, but it had heavier metal plating along vital points. His mask was red with wispy grey feathers attached to the edges, and I could see burning smoke being emitted from his eyes.
The Red Hands hadn't attended but were following the Truce or whatever and probably working a different and more subtle angle than we are.
Rhizome was here, and I could see he was positively and completely and utterly pissed and I remembered he had his equipment stolen. Multiple of his creatures were here, though none of the bodies that Echidna created to house her acquired shard spirits.
He had a dozen of them around him, resembling velociraptors if they evolved from insects. The carapace was textured a bit like stone with a crystalline shine to them, standing on long chitinous legs, with a set of spiracles behind two pairs of armored arms and behind the legs. It opened a long beak to reveal rows of teeth, and I could see there was definitely an aspect of power expression when one jumped thirty feet up.
Curious.
There was one more bioengineered being, a large armored gorilla-like creature about nine feet tall, hunched over and keeping Rhizome safe. He had one other cape with him, the former Yangban cape Onmyoji with her nullification waves.
I sighed and folded fifty meters of space with the biotic thud of a Charge. I could see capes react to my approach, and I crossed my arms when I looked Colin up and down.
"How's the new leg and eye?" Reconstructing his face had been a cinch with Amelia but his eye had been replaced with a cybernetic one on his request and his new biomimetic right leg was no different. It had a tough synthetic skin that while it wasn't bulletproof it would take a good carving from a knife. I had installed Blueware into the thing so his biotics wouldn't be weakened, which was expensive as shit usually but easier with two tinkers and a biokinetic on hand.
There was a very low chuckle from Colin, and I could see Miss Militia's surprise.
"You do good work, very efficient hardware, and the enhancements to both my biotics and my vision has been helpful. The biotic amp Dragon created has increased my biotic power by sixty seven percent."
I grinned, placing my hands on my hips as I rolled back on my heels. "Excellent, the designs I used for them were based on your tech so you can tinker with them on your own. I'm nowhere as good in your specialty so there should be a lot of refinement possible."
"There's some wasted space I can make use of…perhaps a nano-thorn projector?" I stood on the tip of my toes in excitement.
"I would strongly recommend doing so." I added a certain inflection to my tone and he nodded seriously. "Your enhancements should be easy to maintain with your own equipment, or equipment from tinkers you work with." Myself included of course. "You might even be able to get some professional prosthetists who can work with this."
"Barely." He chuffed and I didn't disagree, while tech was advancing at a breakneck case, there was a limit even if they had non-tinkertech laser guns.
"We should probably get everyone caught up." I stated, cracking my neck despite having an enhanced skeleton. Miss Militia spoke loudly, and the group of over thirty gathered capes went from scattered piles to a more united crowd.
"Everyone please take your seats." Miss Militia gestured to the plastic chairs, and I rolled my eyes. Fifteen PRT troopers in Dragon's Teeth armor joined us, nice and professional. "We're here to put down a burgeoning S-class threat and one that could prove incredibly dangerous to your own being."
I took up my turn and placed down a projector, forming a hologram of Butcher 19, what had once been Shatterbird. "This is Butcher 19, the cape formerly known as Shatterbird of the Slaughterhouse 9." There was a hush in the crowd, one of fear. "She is currently under the care of a dangerous shaman named Ezekiel with a tinker of tinker creation the PRT has labeled Isopod."
"What's changed, we're up to speed on her little upgrade but what's got you scrambling so fast?" I twitched when I heard Tattletale's voice but ignored my niggling annoyance of the woman. "Oh…it's something pretty bad isn't it? We can't bring in the big guns because this is a lure for capes like Eidolon."
"May I?" This time Weaver wanted to cut in and I gave her the chance. The cape let her cloak rustle in the breeze rod dramatic effect.
"I can elucidate the details if you really need them. I am Weaver of Earth Shin, a major leader of the rebellion against the parahuman dictatorship on my planet." Miss Militia's face was priceless. "I've come here because an enemy from Rusul's home dimension has aligned with Goddess. Ezekiel has decided to use Brockton Bay as a testing ground for weapons, and is attempting and perhaps even succeeding in turning your 'Butcher' into an Endbringer."
There was a long silence screaming surprise, shock and horror.
Parian started. "Who is Ezekiel's master?" Rusul went up next, and a projection of Earth Goetia formed, showing numerous anomalies in greater detail.
"The Iron Lords of Nunaat hold the leash of Ezekiel." There was real anger in his voice, Rusul almost growling. "They use scavenged super-technology, parahumans and spirits as living siege weapons, and they are currently attempting to conquer my home to bring a second Void Age. A controllable Endbringer is an obvious superweapon." He shrugged and there was a chill in the air that I didn't deny as the correct response.
"So you're saying we're getting into a shadow war with the puppets of evil interdimensional fuckers?" Imp commented with no decorum and I found just a hint of tiredness, like she was too busy dealing with some bullshit.
"Yes." Miss Militia didn't bother to deny it, and we moved on to the current known threats. "The Fallen have four capes, and it adds up to seven with the Siberian, Crawler and Butcher, and eight including Ezekiel and Isopod as a pair. Valefor is one of the larger threats with what we've confirmed about his powers." She looked ticked off. "He's a high level Master/Stranger with a hypnotic stare, stunning his victims and making them suggestible to commands. He can implant suggestions that trigger through specific applied circumstances or by direct order and can make his victims forget those orders were given."
There was another hush and I grinned. "Fortunately my brainwave detectors can sense unusual brain activity, and his commands can be countered by a quick blast of aura from Polaris or an emotion blast from Gallant. Good enough willpower might help as well." Victoria's aura had shifted after whatever I had done to her shard. Gallant's power was more keeping them calm long enough to restrain them.
"We're currently screening civilians to prevent casualties as we're estimating Valefor has killed dozens of people using his abilities. No eye contact is to be made unless you're immune to his power." She pointed her chin in my direction and in Victoria's. "Eligos is an aerokinetic, capable of forming compressed cutting blasts of wind." She mentioned his shown abilities and so on. "Seir is the third Fallen cape, he can create shadow clones he can swap with, and has gotten a kill order for his actions as has Valefor once we confirmed his crimes."
Apparently he had likely killed an additional half dozen people between leaving his base of operations and showing up here.
Miss Militia added more. "Cetus is a blaster 6, able to generate linear water echoes capable of moving at over one hundred thirty miles per hour." Which was a rather familiar threat for quite a few people here. "Which leaves us with Butcher, Crawler, and Siberian." There was a flinch from non-native capes, though Flechette and Clockblocker both fidgeted. "The Siberian has been confirmed to be a projection of William Manton, so neutralizing the master is our best bet of taking out the Siberian. We've confirmed that certain powers are capable of breaking the projection for a short period of time. Flechette and Clockblocker are two such capes, and Erudition has her own means." The attention of some forty capes was directed towards me.
I gestured and a portal snapped open to spit out an Arges mech, mass accelerator replaced by a Stinger cannon. It was a micro-sized Thanix cannon, somewhat like the Javelin rifle. "I've retrofitted some of my Arges mechs with a replication of Flechette's own ability, it'll break through most defenses including the Siberian's existence as a metastable bubble of altered spacetime." Most stared blankly and I rolled my eyes. "She's a hole in space and this thing can pop her."
"And you've got some way to beat Crawler too? I don't think that cannon is big enough to kill him." Tattletale pointed out and I wanted to wring her neck for a moment.
"That's up to Bakuda." Miss Militia replied and Bakuda snorted.
"Girl I can make time-stop bombs, I could probably break the moon in half with the right materials on hand." Another wave of full body flinches from outside capes. "But none of that is practical for hurting Endbringers except for my Halcyon cannons and bombs, and turning him straight to glass should work." She backed off, and Miss Militia was back in control of the briefing.
"Butcher however will be more problematic. She's currently subsumed 19 capes, and her powers are growing stronger due to the alterations made by Ezekiel and Isopod. Tentative new ratings are about brute six with a high trump rating, with a possible shift to brute eight if we fail to contain her in time. She has acquired the powers of Reflect, Vex, Animos, Revulsion and Shatterbird." Reflect had been one of Barrow's capes, and Butcher had taken her body since she didn't hear the voices as much.
She has just gone quietly insane in another way instead.
"The Butcher is likely already suffering from physical mutations, and will become a cape like the Ash Beast, minds subsumed by their powers. We've discovered their base of operations is an abandoned metalworking shop on the outskirts of Kittery. The store leads to a rift into the spirit world and with a shaman at hand it means hostile spirits or Hosts are likely. We have no idea what they'll have at hand due to the barriers put in place to block shamans. We'll effectively be attacking a tinker in his workshop, and will have to put down anything within it with extreme prejudice, barring a hostage or hostages."
"What about the Butcher then…if she's going to turn into an Endbringer how are we supposed to contain her?" I heard Uber in the crowd and blinked, must not have found him important enough to remember.
"Erudition has a means of permanently neutralizing the Butcher." Was all that Miss Militia said in the matter, and I felt the wind rush past me. My eyes focused on the black blur I had seen for a single instant.
I stepped out, and ducked behind a large five meter high boulder. I recognized the woman and her costume and her flapping cape in a single tenth of a second.
"Alexandria. I see you're joining the fight then?" I looked her up and down, and came to a startling conclusion.
She was pretty hot.
Her eye roll told me she could guess at what I was thinking and I didn't bother with getting embarrassed. I wasn't being that serious anyway.
"We know there's more you've left unsaid, something you learned from…a spirit?" She didn't seem certain but there was an unsaid tension, a hint of something in her voice. I couldn't read her with my seismic sense, she was too solid, barely alive if it wasn't for her beating heart and lungs.
There was time alteration involved but it was a minor component of her molecular stasis, body held together by strange energies.
"Void." I snapped, calling the machines I had gathered in much greater numbers than before. "These…newcomers are apparently working for whatever's going to destroy humanity instead of Scion." That elicited a full body flinch from Alexandria. "Her title is Aeon but that's not her name, she's something I can't predict because I don't know what she is."
"Scion isn't going to attack?" Alexandria sounded skeptical.
"Something has changed. Whatever this…being is, she wants to kill Scion but she is not on our side. She wants the shards, whether to eat them or to use them as weapons I can't be sure." I shrugged, licking my teeth and trying to keep my head in the game. "Regardless of Aeon's end goal, parahumans are at the heart of it or at least connected to the goal. We can't have Eidolon here, because that's exactly what she wants, and Contessa should be a thousand miles from here until their proxies are gone or dead."
"If this being is as dangerous as Scion then not having Eidolon will worsen the future odds." She didn't like it, and I'm sure it was because he was almost at full strength with how he had been draining shards. Hundreds of them in fact, likely from whatever Case 53s they still had locked in their basement.
And we return to why I don't like Cauldron.
"It's only in the short term because a Butcher Eidolon isn't a good outcome. Once she's neutralized that won't be a problem and we'll have time for contingencies." I tapped the stone with my index finger, looking at the fractures within it. "If you're going to stick around it's best you introduce yourself. I'm not going to do it for you." Alexandria stepped through a portal and I knew she was probably going to show up later instead of now. Probably for the best…if Butcher gets her we're fucked if I can't rip it out of her in time.
Another biotic thud precipitated my Charge, as I tore a hole in space to move.
"Locating our main target is paramount, Butcher in her current state is unstable and she can grow exponentially if she grabs the right cape and power. We will be treating this with all the precaution of an S-class threat. We'll be dividing you into teams, and an alert will ring in case the Butcher is killed. If you're possessed we have a means of removing it, but we have to pair capes appropriately to contain any victim of the Butcher. For capes like the Siberian and Crawler, we've been provided manpower from the White Lotus."
I snapped my fingers, and the sound of footsteps and wheels became clear as day. We had one Trapeza for every cape, each of them armed with some variety of weapon. Nothing excessive because they're not meant for that…
The machines seemed to leave the outside capes ill at ease, and I could understand that. With the Machine Army and all…
"The primary purpose of the Trapeza is as additional shielding, they'll take the hits you're not able to, and provide some firepower on top of that. The Siberian will just tear them apart but that's an extra couple of seconds to not die. Others like the Cercopes," one popped out of stealth just to flex on my demand. "Along with Recon drones and Polypus bots will provide intel and detailed information of the interior and the numbers we'll be facing."
"And the mechs and spider-tank…?" I heard the question in the wind, obviously Imp didn't think I could hear her.
"The Arges is mobile and its barriers are strong, and the same applies to the three Bagheera I've been allowed to bring." The large Ghost in the Shell inspired spider-tanks had been given friendly personality matrices, with in-built mass accelerators in their arms, a top mounted heavy weapon and a thorax pod grenade launcher system and a single interconnected barrel. It has four laser array batteries for point defense and close range combat.
It would be another fifteen minutes before we set off and I just knew in my gut that shit was going to hit the fan.
AN: Well 13.3 is done and I'm over halfway done with the Interlude after this. Seven chapters and three interludes is what I'm planning for. Once this Arc is complete, I'll be taking a different angle for Arc 14. So look forward to that.
September 27th, 2011. 8:00AM
Basilia Rubio
The air was musty and old.
The area around me looked like the remnants of some forgotten city, seemingly frozen in time, familiar vehicles and buildings and structures rotting ever so slightly underneath a cold dead sky. The air was thin, and the ground was frozen. There was only a distant light of a small white star, and I could see the air freezing out.
The ruins bore symbols, long forgotten and yet remembered. The metal was rust, the plastic decayed and organic matter broken down into carbon ash. I ran a hand along the frame of a vehicle and it broke apart into motes of iron dust. It was so so cold, and that made sense when the star this dead world orbited had long since gone silent.
It was a memory, and I brushed up against a skeleton, one that looked so familiar somehow. Something so old it doesn't remember ever being alive. I walked and I found that the 'world' I was on was in fact a fragment of a broken and scattered field of planetoids and asteroids.
I could see things moving in the night sky, some were mechanical, others biological or a mix of both, or of forms not of this material plane, and as they popped in and out of existence, aging and vanishing, the white dead sun grew dimmer as eons passed.
"Basilia?" Taylor whispered in my ear and I turned to her, feeling a smile pull to my lips. But when I reached out to her, static struck, and instead of the wonderful if strange woman I had feelings for…
I saw her battered and broken, her skin pale, wearing another face, another costume, missing an arm, her hair wild and free, blood dribbling from her mouth. I saw her turn to dust and ashes before my eyes.
I felt my heart drop into my stomach and I looked elsewhere for people, for her, for anyone.
I found Vicky, but when I reached for her she exploded into a mess of limbs, heads and other miscellaneous parts. I held back a scream of horror, and there was a second twist, revealing her in her newest costume but with a hood instead of a hood-like helmet. What life there was there was gone, and a Wretch wrapped around her in a soft golden lined hue. They too turned to dust, and I kept reaching out.
I reached for Elle and she was like before I had affected her power, but older, surrounded by Palanquin as they burned away. Amelia was there but her arms were covered in tattoos, fingers gripping a patch of skin, something so very wrong behind her eyes.
She simply melted away into a puddle of flesh that turned to carbon dust.
Bakuda? A shade of Ciara.
Our newest members? Erased by golden light.
Golem? He was there but he seemed so different, and he simply sank into his power like he was in quicksand. Turnaround? He was there but he seemed sadder, more inward facing, and he burned away like everything else. Terra? She was surrounded by kids, orphans from the looks of them, and she was sad, lesser in some small undefined way. But not weak either.
Colin and Theresa were there, but they both wore green, and they looked so very different. Sveta was there, in her old form, wearing a shell to protect others from her. It was colorful and artful and it was different.
Make it stop. Let me wake up…please.
I backed away, stomach flipping in horror and fear. "Please let me wake up."
But the dream didn't care for my feelings.
There was a slam, like a planet had hit the ruin I was standing on and I was knocked into a liquid that wasn't water. It was golden, and at other times it was a shining silver, or a stark scarlet red. There was a fine mist above my head as I bobbed towards the shore with aurelian sands.
This was the Sea of Souls, and it should have been lethal to swim in the waters of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of souls.
I washed ashore, thrown with force like that of a cannon and I tumbled through a garden of black hard ground and shriveled up trees and shrubs. I looked up from the dirt…
And found myself in a field of corpses extending for miles in every direction, preserved eternally, memories of something lost, yet something I remembered.
I found myself in front of an enormous shell, a good several dozen meters tall and extending kilometers out to the horizon. The head of the white wyrm had a seven horned crown, and I could see other corpses, a massive moth the size of a building, turned to grey stone, flaking away in death. There was a masked tree, roots rotting, and light faded.
It was a dead pantheon, and one I had seen before. Or one that one of me had seen before, in other circumstances, in a different life from this one.
I turned and froze when I saw the frozen creature before me. It had an insectoid head, with four arms and two degenerated legs with a long segmented limb attached to the back of the flattened head, ending in a sharp barb. It had other limbs curled up, and inert powder drifted from it's decaying body. Other tentacle faced horrors were equally inert.
Whatever these ancient beings had been, they had been erased utterly and completely, their power stripped, their invocations denied. The horror of their vengeance ceased for all of time.
Another tentacle faced alien was broken into fragments and rotting slabs of flesh and I lightly brushed my fingers against the statue's face. It was a species that had been pure in Form and pure in Essence, and they were dead.
Just like all the rest…
Four humanoid female-like entities stood stock-still, beings made of light projected by a heart of crystal. One white, one yellow, one blue and one pink, surrounded by hundreds of lesser entities of light and sapient minerals. My gaze shifted to other entities to their right.
Beings of living transforming metal, brought to life by strange energies from a great spark of power at the heart of their metal planet. It was an endless field of dead deities and pantheons, of species buried in the muck, and I shivered as I realized some of the skeletons and corpses were equal to the shards in scope and scale.
What was this place?
I could feel something trying to approach, an impulse hitting me in the back, reflected back and canceled out. Something massive, something powerful and yet broken and insane. A blackness blotted out the sun, blunted limbs emerged from a central mass, that central mass made up of a tangle of human arms, legs, heads, and eyes, and they split open to reveal two blazing silver eyes.
HUNGER. RAGE. IRRELEVANT. NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
Despite the terror I felt towards the voice, I knew it was wrong, even as its thunder shook the world. I looked behind me and saw a city I didn't recognize, a vast hole in reality spewing out a wave of searing energy down upon millions of tons of metal, stone and people. I didn't know what I was looking at, and in the end it didn't matter.
Because I was waking up.
___
September 27th, 2011. 8:15AM
Basilia Rubio
I woke up in a cold sweat, chest heaving as the primal fear hit my monkey brain like a jackhammer. I had never been so afraid, even the Leviathan fell short of the dread mass and hatred directed in that impulse.
I rubbed my face, trying not to puke, and I took a series of breaths as it felt like at any moment something was going to jump out and kill me. I tried not to feel sick, but it was so difficult.
"I suppose we shouldn't have expected so much of someone who lived such a soft life." I jumped, throwing a blast of fire and barely dousing it before it could hit something flammable.
There was someone else here, standing at the open doorway of my room, leaning against it with a casual air to her. She looked a lot like an older Azula, but her cheeks were a little fuller as were her lips, and her eyes were a softer and kinder amber. She was older of course, and wore a red and black tunic, tightened around her waist by a lighter red sash, and I could see some cleavage from the woman.
It was a more futuristic design of clothing, and I didn't know who or what the woman was. But when I formed a beating flame in my palm…I understood.
"Who…?"
"Call me Mei. I'd be the firebender in your weird little soul." She smirked at my dumbfounded expression, and her laugh very much sounded like Azula. "Seems like things have been going…wellish?" She shrugged and I scowled at her.
She popped back up at my side, and I lifted my blanket to cover myself.
"I wouldn't say having three of my employees killed on the job, and four capes on my side getting nearly killed is a good thing."
"Perhaps that is true, but what's the alternative? The trust in the PRT broken because of a mad Striker/Trump? Alexandria dead, dozens of capes dead, your friends insane, dead or simply elsewhere?" She laughed in my face and I growled but knew she was right. "Besides…didn't your gal pal already help put your head on straight?"
"I wouldn't exactly call myself a cold machine, I'm not perfectly rational." I pointed this out to the Fire National.
"Some of those irrational emotions are probably why you haven't recreated some of the hotter versions of Love Amongst the Dragons with tall, dark and sexy." Mei giggled at my glare, a sudden amount of territorial instinct coming to the forefront.
"Do not." Then another thought popped in. "Why are you here?"
Her expression was softer this time. "Thought it was about time to get you up from whatever you've been dreaming about. Plus…I am a part of you, and I wanted to see how you were doing."
"Better than two days ago, worse than three weeks ago." I cleaned out an ear with my finger, yawning. "Is there time for this…I really have other things to do." I gave her an apologetic look, and she didn't seem annoyed.
"We'll talk." Mei nodded.
"I should go." Mei left with a final bemused chuckle at my way of ending this conversation, and I brushed back my unruly hair.
Today was going to be a mess, I could feel it in my bones even though they were made of a composite of organic and inorganic structures.
___
September 27th, 2011. 11:00AM
Basilia Rubio
I inspected the strange pink crystal I had synthesized based on the specifications of how the mineral was likely made. It was some type of pink quartz exposed to strange energies, and I had managed to replicate the conditions by generating a short fissure into the spirit world. Also turns out Jennamite was the creation of some type of spirit that had been helped by Omashu some two thousand five hundred years before Korra.
The Tale of Nguoi Keo was a classic children's story…and I was getting bogged up in things that wouldn't matter until I write them down.
Subanese crystals had tremendous energy storage capacities, quartz mixing with an exotic element generated from being exposed to Slipspace energies. It was weird and trippy, and I was increasingly tempted to just expose stuff to raw spirit energy to see what comes out.
They had a vague resemblance to certain structures I had identified from samples of Endbringer core materials, what little had survived getting broken by Sting. Fortunately most of the mass had been scattered across other dimensions, though I was searching for their dimensional signature to see if more samples couldn't be acquired.
I estimated at least a couple hundred exatons of flesh was inside a single Endbringer, and a range of up to four thousand wasn't out of the question. Sting didn't have that much energy, but breaking the core cut off the hundreds of linked dimensions and caused a cascade failure of the network of a single Endbringer mind.
Kind of like what happened to Eden but worse, and I had been studying scans taken from the fight ever since to figure out where everything had gone. For now I thought it wasn't important.
Forming a new variety of the strange pink crystal was on the menu, one better suited for high energy density but low power density. A battery rather than a bomb. I think the T'Von shaped them into cutting weapons, while the Huraggoy deployed them as high energy explosive projectiles.
There were a lot of exotic materials I needed to synthesize, and much of the technology varied from not being much better to being a little worse than what the Citadel had. Both eras had common usage of nanomachines in manufacturing, and both had excellent armor, though built for different…needs and circumstances.
Same applied to their weapons, most had huge yields but had a slower firing rate. Though there were the high energy plasma weapons…which weren't actually orders of magnitude much better, they scaled to many megatons, but that was over a continuous firing time. The most advanced modern heavy mass effect drive cruisers would hit for forty to sixty kilotons every two seconds, dreadnoughts over a hundred.
A frigate grade Thanix hits harder than even a Turian battleship mass accelerator and one of those monsters is about fifteen hundred meters long, with triple layers of armor and Cyclonic barriers. They were powerful and yet a Thanix would punch through them like tissue paper.
I had a cruiser, though we were maybe forty meters short of being a heavy, and over a hundred meters short of a Turian battlecruiser. Even so our fighting power was a little beyond what the size would tell you.
Though if I went by the classifications the Yonhet used, the Samsara would be a very large destroyer. They went for big fuckoff magnetic accelerators, with their smaller destroyers firing rounds about the size and length of a Smart car but with eleven times the mass due to being solid iron-tungsten. So they hit as hard as dreadnoughts…though the gap was narrowed by a firing rate of once every fifteen seconds.
Plus none of them accelerate as fast as mass effect based propulsion, though we're still talking a few dozen to a few hundred Gs at least which is way better than the Tetatae by an order of magnitude, and about on par to a little worse than the Humanx. They pulled off gravity control by triggering fourth and fifth dimensional reality shifts…weird shit basically.
I moved on from the crystal suspended in a mass effect field, and towards a large plasma cannon. Plasma bombardment was well known among a ton of races, and a hybrid between mass effect field containment and phase-shifted magnetic field containment made this weapon pretty tough.
Unfortunately plasma tends to be hard to scale up without causing an enormous amount of collateral damage. Plasma artillery wasn't going to be very useful unless I was given authority to bombard a section of the city to wipe out Mannequin.
Which with Piggot as the director wasn't out of the question.
The Helioskrill had a number of handheld plasma weapons, from pistols to battle rifles, and they hit hard and worked through very distinct means. Magnetic fields alone wouldn't be able to contain plasma without massive amounts of energy. But their understanding of higher dimensions allowed them to create a unique form of phase-shifted plasma.
Energy wise it was in the tens of thousands of joules for their plasma rounds…and kinetic barriers could block them just fine but you'd need better insulation to keep from being cooked alive.
The plasma manipulation capabilities of the Yonhet's contemporaries had been instrumental in figuring out how to block the plasma strikes of that spirit entity, as well as how to make better energy shields. And from what I could tell they could take literal megatons of energy before collapsing for the dreadnought-scale vessels.
Only a Thanix cannon and some of the heaviest mass accelerators could hit hard enough to break through such shielding without resorting to swarm tactics. Too bad scaling those things up and down is a total bitch, a dreadnought Thanix cannon is maybe four times more powerful than a cruiser which is in turn two to three times more powerful than a frigate.
I'm generalizing of course, there's definitely a range since cruisers start at four hundred meters and end at eight hundred. Which is about just above the size of turian battlecruisers. Minus about five meters.
Pretty ballsy to build ships just shy of the limit, since instead of 40 dreads they technically have hundreds.
The plasma cannon was less useful but the Helioskrill had a more compact and interesting weapon instead. They had an antiparticle shotgun, one that would punch holes in nearly any class of armor barring Prothean steel. Which I hadn't figured out yet.
There was a woosh as one of the doors to the lab opened, and I murmured a greeting to Taylor as she sauntered over to me in her repaired armor. Healing worked pretty well when your armor is alive, and I had made some modifications with Amelia's help.
The emitters for shielding were altered from mechanical augmentations to a more cybernetic implementation. A modified neural system augmented with waveguides and projectors and field shaping computers. The set of armor projected a dual layer of energy and kinetic barriers and again had a ton of computers as a hardsuit.
"So you said you know where the Fallen are probably hiding right?" I nodded as I ran more simulations on my Omni. Mostly relating to greater use of Bakuda Bombs, which we hadn't done much of because Bakuda wasn't a mass production tinker. Her high energy chemical bombs were pretty common, as were her Stickum grenades which had unfortunately done nothing to Mannequin because he was bullshit. Plus her hologram grenades had been used to provide cover for civilians during his attack.
They were specialty weapons, and using them in close quarters with Mannequin is a recipe for disaster.
"They're hiding in the spirit world, through a rift that's inside an abandoned metalworking shop in Kittery. But we have no idea what barriers and defenses they could have put in place by now." I rolled my shoulders, and grimaced since I knew the remaining Teeth were still missing. "Attacking a shaman in their domain is about as bad as attacking a tinker in their domain." In my own case I was the worst of both worlds as a tinker and a shaman. "I've made some modifications and upgrades to all my tech, plus tested some new tech."
Most of the new races shared fairly similar computer technology for one reason or another. They used some type of holographic crystal technology for a form of optical computing, and I was currently trying to engineer a means of combining this form of data storage with optronic processing.
Plus some AI technology which involved scanning brains and converting them into neurological models for full-blown AGI. Early models were quite prone to Rampancy, but they had figured out how to make them more stable after an incident involving the netcode of one of their AI shattering and putting itself back together again. Plus code acting as regulators on their ludicrous processing power.
Their oldest AI had reached the ripe old age of sixty last I saw of their history.
Their processing power was around the same level, and I was mostly interested in the sheer durability of their data storage. They were stable on the scale of centuries, and combining them was…deceptively simple. I should be well on my way to switching production to my new and upgraded optronic devices within a week.
I need to focus on the present and not the future.
"Basilia?" Taylor asked with concern.
I simply focused. "How's your armor?"
"It seems to be functioning at a hundred percent, and it seems to be…working better than it should?" I blinked and gestured for her to approach. I placed my hand against her chestplate, and there was a feeling there…something alive and ready.
"This armor has a pretty strong spirit, it's been…attuned to you for lack of better words." I hummed though not out of surprise, this thing had taken a beating and had been healed and repaired and upgraded more times than I can count without using my implants.
It was a tough little suit of armor.
"Oh." She sounded interested but I could tell she knew we didn't have time for it. "So you've got everything prepared for our joint mission with the Protectorate?"
"I still need a few hours, and I need to get actual information from Weaver and Rusul on who's sponsoring the Fallen." I had managed to get quite a bit of news, there had been a near national beat down of the Fallen due to the Rachni fucking them over.
Turns out they had almost a hundred capes, and five times that number in non-capes. Within days their numbers had been cut in half, and I had heard Eidolon was destroying them utterly. Turns out Cauldron didn't like Goddess trying to get a nice and big piece out of Bet.
With the number of benders on the rise, there was a lot more room for governments to push back. Though I'm not sure that was always going to be a good thing. I had made some estimates, and about two percent of the world should be benders by 2013, six percent by 2015, and fourteen percent by 2017 before stabilizing at twenty five by 2020.
Their 2020 anyway, for my world it would be 2029.
The Fallen were working with the Lords of some backwater planet who were in turn apparently the puppet of the thing that was going to kill us all. Which brought up the name the void spirit had given me.
Aeon wasn't the creature's name, it was simply a title, some representation of the being's Purpose. Something about it struck a chord, like I should have known what my enemy was.
"I'll…be ready for later, give me some more time?" Taylor nodded, and she stepped through a door into another world.
Getting ready was going to take a while…especially since I was going all out for this.
I wasn't going to let them make a mess of my town, not anymore.
___
September 27th, 2011. 3:00PM
Basilia Rubio
I landed with a bolus of compressed air, keeping some of my righteous anger in check as micro-portals sent data from drones sweeping for Mannequin. I found bits of him scattered about, and I had sent most of my workers home for the time being.
Luckily the city was in a state of emergency because of another S-class threat on the horizon.
All around me there were a number of capes and PRT agents, gathered in the same spot where that little workshop was but on Earth Gimel rather than Bet. Apparently the PRT was warming to the idea of ambushing people by portal. With Dragon finally figuring out basic portal tech and Masamune doing his thing, there was going to be a considerable shift in the balance of power.
Whether that was a good thing or not couldn't yet be foreseen. For today I had changed the color of my armor from a dull grey to a dark emerald green though the black fiber layers below remained the same. I had a number of spirit tools, one I rarely got to bring out because they'd be wasted on most criminals.
Some I had forged myself, shaping spirits into items of power and others I had found once the spirits themselves had learned of a way to protect themselves from predation.
A common one was a Brooch, something made for holding items usually by being bigger on the inside. There were a wide variety of Brooches, different spirits forming the items and thus having different rules. Other useful tools were Sidesteppers, spirit tools used for transitioning from the material to the ephemeral.
While some shamans could perform the veil-rip and enter the spirit world themselves, most had to make do with spirit journeys or look for or make spirit tools. And not everyone had the talent for creating them.
I had one such item, a sphere consisting of black and white interchanging stripes. The sphere itself varied in size from time to time and it was pilose in texture and warm to the touch. This little number I had found recently can grant anyone touching it the ability to enter any High Layer of the spirit world.
One test had ended up with me being stuck in the middle of the savanna and getting covered in a swarm of summoned bees. This version of a Sidestepper was reliable…but using it to teleport across the globe is a bad idea.
One spirit tool was wrapped around my head, a small brown cloak along my shoulders. It was something like a kinetic barrier, but it reflects the bullet back towards the attacker. Elle had made it, and it was a dangerous artifact indeed.
So a Brooch, a Sidestepper, an Echo Cloak, and the fourth spirit tool was an Anchor Gem while the final and fifth spirit tool was a Skeleton Key. I used the Brooch to carry the Anchor Gem, the Sidestepper, and the Skeleton Key, along with a few other non-shaman objects.
I could see who was gathered from the Protectorate, Miss Militia, Dauntless, Clockblocker, Assault and Flechette, Chevalier and Armsmaster, from the Wards we had Kiyohime and Vista using what had to be tinkertech equipment from Kid Win.
There were another ten reinforcements from other Ward and Protectorate teams. None I recognized at a glance.
On our side we had Monarch, Terra(pending a name change), Bakuda, Polaris, Turnaround, Panacea, Labyrinth, Faultline and Jarl. Golem was being supported by Skimmer with her tinkertech equipment for his patrols, and Sveta was still recovering from getting her arm cut off. The rest of Palanquin was out of time, and apparently working with Myrddin to take down some Fallen. From New Wave, Lady Photon and Brandish while their husbands watched out for Crystal and Eric. Who were also being supported by Skimmer.
From the independents we had only Parian since the rest had been scared off by the sudden Crawler ambush. Though with the new barriers placed around every PRT base only the most proficient shamans were getting through.
And the PRT had hundreds of shamans and was setting up the infrastructure to train more in both the private and public industries. As well as obtaining the means of policing them as they did parahumans.
Dragon was using her semi-organic gynoid model, surrounded with a plethora of drones, and Dragonflight suits controlled either by multitasking instances or her own AI. Non-sapient of course. The Undersiders lingered around her, the team she had apparently decided to sponsor and pulled out of petty villainy.
Grue was talking with Imp, the girl wildly gesturing to Weaver's team who was made up of two people and Rusul. Bitch was whispering something to her dogs, and I could feel something special about them. Something strong and robust, a bond between man and animal. Between soul and spirit.
I looked over to Weaver's team, raising an eyebrow. One of them was a girl with red hair, wearing a skintight bodysuit shifting in colors, though it often settled upon black with grey lines that followed the curves of her body. In addition she had a hood and her mask was white like her leader, with a single pair of eye holes and ear-like structures extending from it.
The next member was a tall man, about even with Grue with grey smoke and fog coming off of him in waves, with flickers of flames within them. He had a more runner-like build, which I suppose made sense. He was a Mover from what I had heard. He can teleport anywhere within his fog, and I believe he could break up the smoky fog as well.
He wore a simple black cloak, but I could see the same armor design that Weaver wore underneath her red outfit, but it had heavier metal plating along vital points. His mask was red with wispy grey feathers attached to the edges, and I could see burning smoke being emitted from his eyes.
The Red Hands hadn't attended but were following the Truce or whatever and probably working a different and more subtle angle than we are.
Rhizome was here, and I could see he was positively and completely and utterly pissed and I remembered he had his equipment stolen. Multiple of his creatures were here, though none of the bodies that Echidna created to house her acquired shard spirits.
He had a dozen of them around him, resembling velociraptors if they evolved from insects. The carapace was textured a bit like stone with a crystalline shine to them, standing on long chitinous legs, with a set of spiracles behind two pairs of armored arms and behind the legs. It opened a long beak to reveal rows of teeth, and I could see there was definitely an aspect of power expression when one jumped thirty feet up.
Curious.
There was one more bioengineered being, a large armored gorilla-like creature about nine feet tall, hunched over and keeping Rhizome safe. He had one other cape with him, the former Yangban cape Onmyoji with her nullification waves.
I sighed and folded fifty meters of space with the biotic thud of a Charge. I could see capes react to my approach, and I crossed my arms when I looked Colin up and down.
"How's the new leg and eye?" Reconstructing his face had been a cinch with Amelia but his eye had been replaced with a cybernetic one on his request and his new biomimetic right leg was no different. It had a tough synthetic skin that while it wasn't bulletproof it would take a good carving from a knife. I had installed Blueware into the thing so his biotics wouldn't be weakened, which was expensive as shit usually but easier with two tinkers and a biokinetic on hand.
There was a very low chuckle from Colin, and I could see Miss Militia's surprise.
"You do good work, very efficient hardware, and the enhancements to both my biotics and my vision has been helpful. The biotic amp Dragon created has increased my biotic power by sixty seven percent."
I grinned, placing my hands on my hips as I rolled back on my heels. "Excellent, the designs I used for them were based on your tech so you can tinker with them on your own. I'm nowhere as good in your specialty so there should be a lot of refinement possible."
"There's some wasted space I can make use of…perhaps a nano-thorn projector?" I stood on the tip of my toes in excitement.
"I would strongly recommend doing so." I added a certain inflection to my tone and he nodded seriously. "Your enhancements should be easy to maintain with your own equipment, or equipment from tinkers you work with." Myself included of course. "You might even be able to get some professional prosthetists who can work with this."
"Barely." He chuffed and I didn't disagree, while tech was advancing at a breakneck case, there was a limit even if they had non-tinkertech laser guns.
"We should probably get everyone caught up." I stated, cracking my neck despite having an enhanced skeleton. Miss Militia spoke loudly, and the group of over thirty gathered capes went from scattered piles to a more united crowd.
"Everyone please take your seats." Miss Militia gestured to the plastic chairs, and I rolled my eyes. Fifteen PRT troopers in Dragon's Teeth armor joined us, nice and professional. "We're here to put down a burgeoning S-class threat and one that could prove incredibly dangerous to your own being."
I took up my turn and placed down a projector, forming a hologram of Butcher 19, what had once been Shatterbird. "This is Butcher 19, the cape formerly known as Shatterbird of the Slaughterhouse 9." There was a hush in the crowd, one of fear. "She is currently under the care of a dangerous shaman named Ezekiel with a tinker of tinker creation the PRT has labeled Isopod."
"What's changed, we're up to speed on her little upgrade but what's got you scrambling so fast?" I twitched when I heard Tattletale's voice but ignored my niggling annoyance of the woman. "Oh…it's something pretty bad isn't it? We can't bring in the big guns because this is a lure for capes like Eidolon."
"May I?" This time Weaver wanted to cut in and I gave her the chance. The cape let her cloak rustle in the breeze rod dramatic effect.
"I can elucidate the details if you really need them. I am Weaver of Earth Shin, a major leader of the rebellion against the parahuman dictatorship on my planet." Miss Militia's face was priceless. "I've come here because an enemy from Rusul's home dimension has aligned with Goddess. Ezekiel has decided to use Brockton Bay as a testing ground for weapons, and is attempting and perhaps even succeeding in turning your 'Butcher' into an Endbringer."
There was a long silence screaming surprise, shock and horror.
Parian started. "Who is Ezekiel's master?" Rusul went up next, and a projection of Earth Goetia formed, showing numerous anomalies in greater detail.
"The Iron Lords of Nunaat hold the leash of Ezekiel." There was real anger in his voice, Rusul almost growling. "They use scavenged super-technology, parahumans and spirits as living siege weapons, and they are currently attempting to conquer my home to bring a second Void Age. A controllable Endbringer is an obvious superweapon." He shrugged and there was a chill in the air that I didn't deny as the correct response.
"So you're saying we're getting into a shadow war with the puppets of evil interdimensional fuckers?" Imp commented with no decorum and I found just a hint of tiredness, like she was too busy dealing with some bullshit.
"Yes." Miss Militia didn't bother to deny it, and we moved on to the current known threats. "The Fallen have four capes, and it adds up to seven with the Siberian, Crawler and Butcher, and eight including Ezekiel and Isopod as a pair. Valefor is one of the larger threats with what we've confirmed about his powers." She looked ticked off. "He's a high level Master/Stranger with a hypnotic stare, stunning his victims and making them suggestible to commands. He can implant suggestions that trigger through specific applied circumstances or by direct order and can make his victims forget those orders were given."
There was another hush and I grinned. "Fortunately my brainwave detectors can sense unusual brain activity, and his commands can be countered by a quick blast of aura from Polaris or an emotion blast from Gallant. Good enough willpower might help as well." Victoria's aura had shifted after whatever I had done to her shard. Gallant's power was more keeping them calm long enough to restrain them.
"We're currently screening civilians to prevent casualties as we're estimating Valefor has killed dozens of people using his abilities. No eye contact is to be made unless you're immune to his power." She pointed her chin in my direction and in Victoria's. "Eligos is an aerokinetic, capable of forming compressed cutting blasts of wind." She mentioned his shown abilities and so on. "Seir is the third Fallen cape, he can create shadow clones he can swap with, and has gotten a kill order for his actions as has Valefor once we confirmed his crimes."
Apparently he had likely killed an additional half dozen people between leaving his base of operations and showing up here.
Miss Militia added more. "Cetus is a blaster 6, able to generate linear water echoes capable of moving at over one hundred thirty miles per hour." Which was a rather familiar threat for quite a few people here. "Which leaves us with Butcher, Crawler, and Siberian." There was a flinch from non-native capes, though Flechette and Clockblocker both fidgeted. "The Siberian has been confirmed to be a projection of William Manton, so neutralizing the master is our best bet of taking out the Siberian. We've confirmed that certain powers are capable of breaking the projection for a short period of time. Flechette and Clockblocker are two such capes, and Erudition has her own means." The attention of some forty capes was directed towards me.
I gestured and a portal snapped open to spit out an Arges mech, mass accelerator replaced by a Stinger cannon. It was a micro-sized Thanix cannon, somewhat like the Javelin rifle. "I've retrofitted some of my Arges mechs with a replication of Flechette's own ability, it'll break through most defenses including the Siberian's existence as a metastable bubble of altered spacetime." Most stared blankly and I rolled my eyes. "She's a hole in space and this thing can pop her."
"And you've got some way to beat Crawler too? I don't think that cannon is big enough to kill him." Tattletale pointed out and I wanted to wring her neck for a moment.
"That's up to Bakuda." Miss Militia replied and Bakuda snorted.
"Girl I can make time-stop bombs, I could probably break the moon in half with the right materials on hand." Another wave of full body flinches from outside capes. "But none of that is practical for hurting Endbringers except for my Halcyon cannons and bombs, and turning him straight to glass should work." She backed off, and Miss Militia was back in control of the briefing.
"Butcher however will be more problematic. She's currently subsumed 19 capes, and her powers are growing stronger due to the alterations made by Ezekiel and Isopod. Tentative new ratings are about brute six with a high trump rating, with a possible shift to brute eight if we fail to contain her in time. She has acquired the powers of Reflect, Vex, Animos, Revulsion and Shatterbird." Reflect had been one of Barrow's capes, and Butcher had taken her body since she didn't hear the voices as much.
She has just gone quietly insane in another way instead.
"The Butcher is likely already suffering from physical mutations, and will become a cape like the Ash Beast, minds subsumed by their powers. We've discovered their base of operations is an abandoned metalworking shop on the outskirts of Kittery. The store leads to a rift into the spirit world and with a shaman at hand it means hostile spirits or Hosts are likely. We have no idea what they'll have at hand due to the barriers put in place to block shamans. We'll effectively be attacking a tinker in his workshop, and will have to put down anything within it with extreme prejudice, barring a hostage or hostages."
"What about the Butcher then…if she's going to turn into an Endbringer how are we supposed to contain her?" I heard Uber in the crowd and blinked, must not have found him important enough to remember.
"Erudition has a means of permanently neutralizing the Butcher." Was all that Miss Militia said in the matter, and I felt the wind rush past me. My eyes focused on the black blur I had seen for a single instant.
I stepped out, and ducked behind a large five meter high boulder. I recognized the woman and her costume and her flapping cape in a single tenth of a second.
"Alexandria. I see you're joining the fight then?" I looked her up and down, and came to a startling conclusion.
She was pretty hot.
Her eye roll told me she could guess at what I was thinking and I didn't bother with getting embarrassed. I wasn't being that serious anyway.
"We know there's more you've left unsaid, something you learned from…a spirit?" She didn't seem certain but there was an unsaid tension, a hint of something in her voice. I couldn't read her with my seismic sense, she was too solid, barely alive if it wasn't for her beating heart and lungs.
There was time alteration involved but it was a minor component of her molecular stasis, body held together by strange energies.
"Void." I snapped, calling the machines I had gathered in much greater numbers than before. "These…newcomers are apparently working for whatever's going to destroy humanity instead of Scion." That elicited a full body flinch from Alexandria. "Her title is Aeon but that's not her name, she's something I can't predict because I don't know what she is."
"Scion isn't going to attack?" Alexandria sounded skeptical.
"Something has changed. Whatever this…being is, she wants to kill Scion but she is not on our side. She wants the shards, whether to eat them or to use them as weapons I can't be sure." I shrugged, licking my teeth and trying to keep my head in the game. "Regardless of Aeon's end goal, parahumans are at the heart of it or at least connected to the goal. We can't have Eidolon here, because that's exactly what she wants, and Contessa should be a thousand miles from here until their proxies are gone or dead."
"If this being is as dangerous as Scion then not having Eidolon will worsen the future odds." She didn't like it, and I'm sure it was because he was almost at full strength with how he had been draining shards. Hundreds of them in fact, likely from whatever Case 53s they still had locked in their basement.
And we return to why I don't like Cauldron.
"It's only in the short term because a Butcher Eidolon isn't a good outcome. Once she's neutralized that won't be a problem and we'll have time for contingencies." I tapped the stone with my index finger, looking at the fractures within it. "If you're going to stick around it's best you introduce yourself. I'm not going to do it for you." Alexandria stepped through a portal and I knew she was probably going to show up later instead of now. Probably for the best…if Butcher gets her we're fucked if I can't rip it out of her in time.
Another biotic thud precipitated my Charge, as I tore a hole in space to move.
"Locating our main target is paramount, Butcher in her current state is unstable and she can grow exponentially if she grabs the right cape and power. We will be treating this with all the precaution of an S-class threat. We'll be dividing you into teams, and an alert will ring in case the Butcher is killed. If you're possessed we have a means of removing it, but we have to pair capes appropriately to contain any victim of the Butcher. For capes like the Siberian and Crawler, we've been provided manpower from the White Lotus."
I snapped my fingers, and the sound of footsteps and wheels became clear as day. We had one Trapeza for every cape, each of them armed with some variety of weapon. Nothing excessive because they're not meant for that…
The machines seemed to leave the outside capes ill at ease, and I could understand that. With the Machine Army and all…
"The primary purpose of the Trapeza is as additional shielding, they'll take the hits you're not able to, and provide some firepower on top of that. The Siberian will just tear them apart but that's an extra couple of seconds to not die. Others like the Cercopes," one popped out of stealth just to flex on my demand. "Along with Recon drones and Polypus bots will provide intel and detailed information of the interior and the numbers we'll be facing."
"And the mechs and spider-tank…?" I heard the question in the wind, obviously Imp didn't think I could hear her.
"The Arges is mobile and its barriers are strong, and the same applies to the three Bagheera I've been allowed to bring." The large Ghost in the Shell inspired spider-tanks had been given friendly personality matrices, with in-built mass accelerators in their arms, a top mounted heavy weapon and a thorax pod grenade launcher system and a single interconnected barrel. It has four laser array batteries for point defense and close range combat.
It would be another fifteen minutes before we set off and I just knew in my gut that shit was going to hit the fan.
___
AN: Well 13.3 is done and I'm over halfway done with the Interlude after this. Seven chapters and three interludes is what I'm planning for. Once this Arc is complete, I'll be taking a different angle for Arc 14. So look forward to that.
I have a strong feeling the reason for the sequentially weaker tech behind each gate is to make Basilia focus more on the many other ways the Spirit and Void interact with reality using the lessons and phenomena learned by each civilization's technology, so that with all four gates open she will have essentially completed the equivalent of a Mechatronics Masters Degree with a focus on Reality Mechanics.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Kind of, though it's not really getting weaker so much as just not getting exponentially stronger. Tetatae tech for example has no gravity tech , and no shields, while Yonhet tech has both, as well as better plasma manipulation. Computer technology is about even in all current gates, though AI tech varies, and some unique computer tech betwene eras does exist. Each gate has different specialties and lessons to learn from.
That much is true.
I just see how each gate offers experience with utterly different and entirely unique physical manifestation of spirit/void phenomena, the Basilia would never have been able to examine otherwise.
More data points for Basilia to play catchup on conciously understanding the complete Theory Of Everything that her Shard Self Veda understands purely as instinct.
- Location
- Chula Vista
Again not far off, not everything is of bending and spirits alone, there are thing that are more…universal, or unique or ephemeral The Protheans and their touch telepathy, the Asari and the Rachni's psychic bullshit, the empaths of the Humanx. There are sciences and sorceries left forgotten, paths Basilia can open that others can not.