Lots of d'aaw & WAFFs here, well, other than the part where they find that Taylor & Amelia are gone.
Missy, Clarice, & Theo discovering the joys of power interaction bonds, and being quite happy with the result. Sure that they'll be one big happy family, with lots of kids, even if 30 would be a bit much.
Little Princess Taylia Rose(?) ...[however many more middle names she might get because its a royalty thing & to honor other friends & family] Hebert sounds like the cutest little girl other than ones own ever, and sounds like she'll grown up to become an amazing young woman who her parents would be proud of were they to be able to see her. Though is it too early to wonder which of the next generation she'll end up finding her power bond with?
Had kind of figured that Vicky would have been one of the most likely candidates to end up raising little Taylia, though her having her sister's kid does feel like things going full-circle, with a reference to where they started from in an odd sort of way, if not quite in the manner that pre-POD Amy dreamed of.
Also interesting that besides it apparently being quicker to carry Taylia to term naturally rather than growing her to a certain point in a vat, the reason Vicky chose to do things the old-fashioned way was because it felt more human, which Clarice agreed with. Does make one wonder just how many things that they could do with their biotech, but choose not to because it'd somehow feel off or they think would somehow compromise their humanity...
Did feel sad for Lisa during the scene in Eve's bunker, seeing that her best friend (and probably one of the handful of people who really liked her in spite of everything she got up to) was truly gone.
And too bad about Earth Bet, which is now facing ecological collapse- that world just does not get many breaks. Though it would be ironic if the reason behind that was because too many insects got zapped in the Scion battle, but it would have been something that Taylor could have fixed if she were still around.
I took it back to words. "Okay, Clarice. How is it that I can hear your thoughts and still have no idea what the words mean?"
LOL
Eve's were far more alive, despite her AI status. "Not dead. Just... it's hard to explain."
Vicky chuckled, there was no happiness in it. "What's to understand? They became Heiress. Murdered and ate Scion. And are now space whales or some such bullshit. And as a final fuck you to life, they deleted their own backups. That's pretty much fucking dead."
Ah, Vicky, finding a way to be both right & wrong about things at the same time
"Oh, fascinating. It's encoded using the same language that allowed me to transfer sense of taste through the changelings. They didn't want anyone else, not even Eve, figuring this out first."
Interesting that they wanted Clarice to be the first one to figure it out- wonder if there was anything else besides the instructions on how to create one baby Taylia
And when you get older I'm going to use this to embarrass the hell out of you in front of your future boyfriends. Or girlfriends, depending on just how much you take after your mothers."
Oh,and Vicky's totally going to do that. Poor Taylia, having her aunt/adoptive mother having fun at her expense.
"Still can't believe you went with a natural pregnancy."
Vicky shrugged. "Woulda required months longer if we went with vat birth. Plus vat birth just sounds horrible. No offense to your tech, Clarice."
"No, I agree with you fully. Natural is better. More human."
You really have changed a lot since Amelia decided to pull you from the clutches of the S9, Clarice.
...And what Brian's been up to. Did he participate in the final fight, even?
IIRC the last time he was mentioned in the story prior to his shard coming up in the final chapter was something about him getting away from a Pantheon strike team & driving off, and IIRC, a while after that, there was either an author's note or a comment from TanaNari where he said that Brian was basically being stuffed down a convenient plot hole as kind of boring and too tangential to the plot to be worth spending time. As Avalon gave his shard to Becky as a replacement for the powers she lost when all the Cauldron capes had their shards taken away, then presuming he lasted until the Scion battle and survived it, he would have been one of those that Avalon depowered because her Taylia half deemed them unworthy of having powers.
Suppose it'd be something to ask about if we could get questions about the fates of characters that aren't clear from the story & epilogues answered after the last bits go up.
Wouldn't that just make it take a while? I mean it is just two shards out of a body mass of thousands of not millions. If they decided to cannibalize some shards they took from villains that would provide the materials and they do have the massive solar arrays to collect energy. Sure they can't do it instantly but why not spend some time making copies and just tell them to hold off on resurrecting Taylor and Amelia for a couple months.
Even if it was practical to grow a couple extra shards without doing destructive space whale stuff or re-purpose a couple existing ones to serve the purpose, its possible that the 'data' that was Taylor & Amelia's identities would have been too heavily altered & intermixed with other stuff by the process of merging with Heiress to form Avalon, followed by all the shard re-absorption & re-distribution to create a copy that was close enough for that, leading to the same issue of that although Taylor & Amelia's bodies could be resurrected, whomever came out of those cloning chambers would be fairly different people because their identities were too mixed up with their pre-merger shards that led Avalon to erase their backup files in the first place