Amelia, Worm AU [Complete]

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 201- Lisa

Crystal was the first to arrive, looking more than slightly shaken. Recently learned disturbing news. Won't make eye contact. Afraid I'll learn details. Afraid I'll use information. Doesn't relate to her. Relates to a friend. Afraid of information upsetting someone important. Afraid I would tell that person. Information will upset Taylor. Crystal's not conflicted in loyalties, doesn't percieve hiding it as a betrayal. Doesn't believe information will hurt the group. I let it drop. Crystal was one of the only people around here whose judgment I trusted. Her and, disturbingly enough, Riley. Says a lot about the rest of the team.


She sighed. "So, did you catch the news last night?"


"Indianapolis, right?"


"That'd be the one, got any ideas?"


"May as well wait for the others before we start that up," I answered. "It's boring, anyway. I know you have better to dish, just the two of us."


"And save you the joy of showing off how you already know?" she snarked. Nervous. Afraid I've discovered the secret. Certain I'll act on the information. Afraid it represents a threat to Pantheon as an organization if I do.


"You just don't want to admit I was right," I smiled broadly.


"About what?" she asked.


"Kinda want to hear it myself," Taylor said as she walked in, already costumed. I watched the color drain from Crystal's already fair skin tone.


"Zach and Emma got back together last night," I taunted. Relief flooded Crystal's face. Wow, I thought. Teasing like this might even be more fun than actually knowing all the answers. Probably not, though.


"Wow," Taylor chuckled. "Fifty bucks says it'll take Amelia and Riley days to put Emma back together once Vicky finds out."


"You're on!" I declared.


"That was not a real bet!" Taylor complained.


"Too late," I insisted. "Vicky's the reason they got back together. Isn't that right, Crystal?"


"Umm, yeah," she agreed just a little too quickly for it to sound casual. "Don't know all the details, but she decided she wants to be single for the time being. Something about, well, it's personal. So she took a page from Lisa's book and, I quote, 'shoved Emma into his lap, figuratively speaking'." Taylor's not surprised by Victoria's sudden choice of celibacy. Knows the cause. Learned during Houston mission. Victoria learned of her aura's effect on Amelia.


"She should have done it literally," I teased.


"Seriously, Lisa," Taylor sighed. "What is with you and trying to get Zach laid? Is he bribing you? Does he have a strangely specific low level master power that we don't know about?"


"I like a challenge?" I offered. Really, I just did it for the laughs. People get so worked up over relationship drama, and I couldn't help but dip my feet into that pool. And then kick the water at everyone else.


"That might even be more disturbing," Taylor sighed. "Amelia's going to be a bit late. Her other little sister has been moody lately, too." Riley's emotions have been in flux since after Dream Girl. No, somewhat before then. Upset, lonely, feels left out. Afraid of losing her place. Emma's improving as a tinker. The zerg project is nearing the limits of what Riley's knowledge can accomplish. Her new project is the brain tech and Taboo. Is frustrated at lack of progress. Is frustrated at a lack of recognition from Amelia for bringing Victoria back.


I rubbed my eyes a little. Using my power too much in planning missions. Moving on seven cities in four states simultaneously takes freakin' work. And I hadn't tapped my new power in so long that I may as well not even have it. "It's okay," I sighed. "We'll just wait for Emma, Lily and Rey to show up. Help yourself to the coffee."


Our morning meeting didn't start until after the kids had left for school, for a few reasons mostly revolving around the rest of us making sure we wouldn't miss it for some issue on that front. Lily arrived a bit ahead of schedule, as was her habit. Emma and Rey, just a little late. Amelia didn't show up by the time I started talking.


"So, first bit," I started. "Have you all heard the news about the Fallen members that were mutilated in Indianapolis?"


"No," Emma confessed. "Fuckers did something to deserve it, I'm sure."


"I heard," Taylor's voice went a little cold. "People killing in our name like that? We have to stop it."


"If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure it's bullshit," I offered.


"Pretty sure?" Crystal asked.


"Well, yeah, pretty sure. There's not enough material for me to really turn my power on," I explained. "But I can't imagine that any supposed criminal mastermind would do something this idiotic. I can think of a lot of scenarios, too many. Most of them involve this being a frame job. Either to draw our attention or to deflect it away. Could even be the Fallen, themselves, trying to fake their own deaths. I don't know. Like I said, too many possible ways this could be explained, and that's without factoring in any number of powers that can complicate matters."


"It does, of course, mean we do have to go there," Taylor concluded.


"Absolutely," I agreed. "We can't let people get away with this."


"Killing Fallen?" Lily asked. "If you saw the shit we saw in Tennessee, you'd be all for it. I thought E88's dog rings were fucked up..."


"I'm with her," Emma added. "We can't do worse to them than they've already done."


"The problem is using us as a justification," Crystal corrected. "That's dangerous. We act like we approve of this, for even half a second, and others are going to start doing the same thing. Sooner or later, someone's going to get hurt that doesn't deserve it."


"Yeah," Lily agreed. "I get it. I'm just saying if this is what it looks like, we should go easy on them. Might be better off running the recruitment strategy instead of just stomping on them until they stop moving."


Still blaming herself for Missy's injuries. More cautious now. Perhaps overly cautious, afraid to make a mistake. Wants to allow someone else to control her to free her from responsibility. Sabah. Sabah was deeply upset by what she saw. Lily wants to keep her away from further conflict for a while. Hoping for a peaceful resolution as much for that reason as any.


"I'll keep that in mind," Taylor agreed. "This will be a scouting mission, first and foremost. No decisions until we know exactly what we're dealing with." That earned a nods from Lily, Emma and Crystal.


"I had one of Accord's people write up a draft for you," I told Taylor. "You're on for an announcement at noon."


"God damn it," Taylor sighed. "Is it too late to go back to being a supervillain? I never had to give speeches then."


==============

A/N- Lisa hasn't had an interlude in a while, either.

 

[Daunmi]

On a side note, what are the odds Dinah would give...

Click to shrink...

Taylor: "Status report!"
Lisa: *sigh* "Before you start..."
T: "Jesus Christ, what have you done to her?!"
L: "OK! Before. You. Start."
T: "Make her stop!"
L: "Would you care for me to explain?"
T: "Oh yes Lisa, I would love to know why our resident precog is unable to do anything other than laugh and gasp for air between bouts."
L: "I asked a question."
T: "You asked a question?"
L: "I asked. A question."
T: "Oh, well I guess she should answer it then?"
L: "Well, it's gunna be kind of hard, 'cause, uh, what with the lack of being able to breath."
T: "Brilliant. So what are we supposed to do?!"
L: *Grunting, whilst standing up from her incredibly comfortable high back red chair* "Huh. Well, I guess I have to be our precog now!"
T: "What."
L: "Yep. No other option."
T: "How about any other option. ANY AT ALL?"
L: "No use trying to put the breaks on this, it's going down!"
T: "... You planned this."
L: "What?"
T: "You planned this, I know you did!"
L: "Pffft, you honestly don't trust me?"
Riley: *Bursting in through the door* "Lisa! The surgical tools have been secured. Unfortunately Big Sis said she didn't want anything to do with modifying how powers connect to our brains but..." *notices Taylor* "Oh..."
T: *Stares*
L: "You wont believe how little she's charging me for this."
T: "Fffff-"
L: "She'll do it for nothing!"
T: "Lisa!"
L: "LET ME HAVE MY DAY IN THE SPOTLIGHT!"

Originally I was just going to say that they'd have to get Amelia to keep Dinah's body oxygenated as she laughs. Then it ran away from me.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 202- Lily


"We're doing what!?" Taylor exclaimed.


"You heard me," Lisa replied.


"I know I heard you, I just can't believe it," she retorted. "You're basically putting Victoria in charge of a team."


Amelia's head nodded in agreement. "Can you maybe elaborate a little?"


"She and Riley are ideal for the investigation," Lisa insisted. "So we let them handle it. Pantheon needs to show it has the ability to be subtle. Going out in full regalia is going to give people the impression that we found our hammer and are using it to smash everything we see."


"Vicky's not what I'd call subtle," I retorted, and the others looked at me. "I mean, she's cool to spend time with, but she's kinda... well... I'm not really one to talk, but she's a real hothead."


"Yeah," Amelia agreed. "There's gotta be a better choice for this."


"Who else?" she asked. "Can't send you or Taylor, you're too high profile. We have to focus on our lower hierarchy members. Of those we have Crystal, who's not equipped for this sort of thing. No offense."


"I'm not equipped to do something so stupid it borders on the insane?" Crystal snarked. "I'm taking that as a compliment. The part where you imply I'm 'lower' on the hierarchy than you? That's the insult."


"We can't send any of our other tinkers," she continued, ignoring Crystal's comments. "The stuff with Chevalier and the Zerg upgrades are too critical. Zach's staying because he won't be much help in the mission, and it would disrupt Emma since they're in that squishy happy phase of the relationship. Speaking of which," she looked directly at where Taylor and Amelia were sitting. "When are the two of you going to grow out of that?"


"When you stop being a deranged bitch?" Amelia suggested. Taylor gave her fiancee a half hearted backhand that was less a reprimand and more a show of support for the comment in and of itself.


"This is likely to take a couple days," Lisa continued. "Which means Missy's not really an option. We're on thin enough ice with her mother as is. Theo is an option, but we really shouldn't be putting everything on him. He's a good leader, but others need to have their chance as well."


She's right about that, I agreed. Theo really came through for us after I fucked up. Putting him in charge would have made sense to me. Hell, I'd settle for dragging Lisa along and making her the leader for this.


"But Vicky?" Amelia asked.


"Trust me, she needs this," Lisa insisted. "We can send someone else with the group. Lily, would you like to go?"


What? "What?" I asked. Seriously, what the fuck?


"Yeah," Lisa insisted. "You're pretty good friends with Vicky, right? And you're the one advocating we do this the peaceful way. And you scare the hell out of people. When you say you're not there to fight, they'll respond with 'thank god'. You're perfect for this!"


"You're doing this to fuck with me on purpose, aren't you?" I glared at the blond. She was and I knew it. Eliminating all the better options and setting this up to make it so easy for something to go wrong. If I didn't go, there'd be an even bigger mess, and then Sabah would be even more worried. I shouldn't go, she needed me right now, and I sure as hell wasn't going to bring her along. She's been through enough.


"Would it make you feel better to know I already ran this past Dinah?" she smiled.


"We rely on her too much," Taylor complained, but I knew she'd already been persuaded.


"Fuck my life," I surrendered to the inevitable. "What's the plan?"


....


I held Sabah from behind, almost apologetically. "Really?" she asked. "Vicky? Why?"


"I guess she impressed them in Houston," I half lied. "And you have to admit, her powers make her really good for tracking and investigation work. Plus her powers mean she might even be better in a fight than I am."


"Then why do you have to go?" Sabah asked, turning in my arms to look up at me. "I don't want you getting hurt."


"If I go, there shouldn't be any fighting at all," I told her. I won't put you through that, I added silently. "Didn't you get the memo? You're being held by one of the deadliest parahumans on the planet."


"You're not scary at all," she smirked, then gave me a kiss. "Just a cute little kitten."


"Rawr," I whispered, then bit her bottom lip. "A tiger, maybe. I could eat you alive."


"Not if I don't let you," she teased back. I felt my clothes tighten as her power infused the fabric. I could have broken the hold at any time, since my power nullified hers unless I was very careful with how I used mine. But where was the fun in that?


"Seems I've caught the tiger," she put her hand on my chest and pushed me back onto her couch, then straddled my lap and leaned against me. Her next words were a whisper. "Don't worry, I'll still let you."


I smiled up at her. All games aside, I was going to protect her. As long as I can fight, she won't have to.


....


"So, are you excited?" Vicky asked me when I showed up. I glanced at the others. Riley and Theo. It was a well balanced team, I was forced to admit. High end on both offense and defense, a couple fairly powerful thinkers, and a healer if things did go south. I tried not to think to hard about again having to work with Bonesaw again. Naturally, I kept that detail from Sabah. She wouldn't understand.


There wasn't any point in trying to lie to the girl. "Nervous, honestly," I answered. "First time we've been given this level of autonomy on a mission. That takes a lot of trust." The last time was pretty much fed to me word by word. This was, as Lisa had put it, a kind of team building exercise. It probably was a good idea, except for the whole 'trial by fire' part. I really could live without that.


"Really?" Riley asked with a smile.


"Yeah," I confirmed, knowing my discomfort toward the girl was easily detectable by both her and Vicky. Fuck, Theo was smart, he probably knew it as well. If anything, that'd just make my words more meaningful. "This isn't like our missions against the Teeth and Fallen where we had side missions or direct supervision. This is just us on a mission that's going to be front page news no matter how it turns out. If we screw up it makes the whole team look bad. That takes trust."


"I hadn't thought of it like that," Vicky replied. "That's kinda big, isn't it?"


"Yeah." Well, that's a bit lame. "So I'm nervous." We all glanced at each other.


"Hey, don't let nerves get to you," Vicky insisted. "We're still a collection of crazy powerful badasses. We just have to find a killer and explain to them how badly they fucked up. The only hard part is they're only guilty of murdering Fallen. Who fucking deserve it."


"Without starting a small war," I reminded. "If this turns large scale violence, we failed our win condition."


"Shouldn't be so hard," Vicky replied. "I mean, look at us. No one wants to start a fight with us. All we really need to do is ask a few questions. Second anyone lies to us, we know where to look. Pretty easy, all considered."


============

Someone asked for a Lily chapter.

Also, I think I'm starting to get the hang of this telling the story around the main characters instead of through them experiment I've been doing lately. What do you think?

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 203- Riley


Missy opened up the path for us, and led us through. While she didn't need to, it was easier for the others to follow the path if they were led. Maybe Victoria could have figured it out, thanks to the power she got from my Passenger, but it was easier to be led. Clarice followed me, of course.


Our world was finally comfortable to breathe without special help, now. Still a very warm environment, especially compared to the mid fall weather on the other side. That allowed Missy and Theo to say their goodbyes with their faces exposed.


"I'll miss you," Missy told Theo, giving him a quick hug.


"I'll miss you, too," he kissed her forehead. "With any luck, we'll only take a few hours."


"I can still miss you that long," she replied.


They're so cute together. I focused on what Emma told me, about being happy that they were happy. Missy and Theo were my friends, and I would be happy for them. Vicky stepped up near me and put her hand on my head, rubbing my hair. It was nice.


"You know," there wasn't room for doubt.


"Won't breathe a word of it," she answered, then she switched to the private com system. "I take it no one else does?"


"Emma," I informed her, following suit and going over to com. "Lisa, probably, but if she does then she's keeping it to herself."


"Probably doesn't," Vicky told me. "I know more about the flaws in Lisa's powers than she does. Her ability's pretty brute force. Like a battle axe. Lots of power for smashing through obstacles, in exchange for giving up a lot of efficiency and accuracy. Mine's more like a scimitar. I can't get as deep, but mine's faster and more effective at handling the things it can handle."


"How do you know about weapons like that?" I asked.


"Emma asked Zach and I to do her a favor and help her name Chevalier's new weapon," she shrugged. "Besides, with my powers it can't hurt to find a few ideas for weapons to use. Besides, you'd be amazed at how boring things can get with the lack of sleeping."


"I thought you liked Zach," I asked. "Why?"


She understood my meaning. "Hard to explain. Probably the same reasons you have. They're good together, and it just doesn't feel right to get in the way of that."


I smiled and looked at her. "You know, Emma said something a lot like that when she thought you and Zach were together."


She blinked "Really? I guess that means I made the right choice." She wrapped her arm around me. "For what it's worth, I think you did, too. I'm glad Amy decided to adopt you."


"You mean that?" I asked. I didn't need to, my own skills and info coming off Clarice confirmed she was telling the truth. She could hide from my tech, perhaps fool it, but not all of it at once, and not without me at least knowing she was trying to beat that tech.


"Yup," she gave a light squeeze. "Ever since Amy spontaneously grew up into a badass overlady, I've been missing a cute little sister to take on shopping trips and give advice about boys and life. Guess who just got drafted?"


"So, what's the plan, anyway?" Lily interrupted. "We should probably know how we're handling this before we go in." She was right, this was important. And they were trusting us with it. It wasn't because it was something only we can do, it was because Big Sis believed we could handle it.


"First, we go by the PRT and let them know what we're doing," Vicky answered, letting me go, but still staying near. It was a nice gesture. "As much fun as it would be to just solve the problem before anyone even knows we're here, that'd probably just fuck everything." I resisted the urge to tell Vicky to stop swearing. But she was older, so I'd just have to accept adults did that sort of thing, like Lisa told me.


Lily nodded. "Fair enough."


"If we're lucky, we can get permission to see the bodies and the crime scene," Vicky continued. "Between my powers and everything Clarice is capable of, that should give us everything we need. If not, well, I'll see if Lisa can talk the Chief Director into yelling at a few people."


"And if that doesn't work?"


"We go around asking all the gangs in town what they know," she concluded. "All our suits have lie detection tech, except mine. Not a lot of parahumans out there that can really threaten me or Clarice. You two play backup since your powers require a bit more concentration."


"We could use the dimensional viewing tech," I volunteered. "I can look at everything from this side and no one will even know I'm there."


"Wow," Vicky chuckled. "When the PRT calculates our ratings, do you think they even bother to use numbers anymore? Or do they just write 'good fucking luck' down next to our profiles because it's less intimidating that way?"


"Close enough," Lily laughed. "All of our profiles have six page long notations that come out to 'you can't run, you can't hide, and you can't fight back'. Half of us have our own individual trump ratings. Mine's a four for bypassing any possible defence."


"Awesome," Vicky approved, then she turned her head toward Theo and Missy. "Hey, Horus! I'd threaten to leave you behind, but I'm afraid the bosses would blame me for any unplanned pregnancies!"


My friends quickly broke their hug, and I couldn't help but giggle at how sheepish they looked. With one last glance at each other, Missy moved and vanished, taken hundreds of miles in a single footstep. Theo jogged over to us. "Sorry about that, ma'am," he apologized. "Won't happen again."


"Don't be so uptight," Vicky insisted. "I'm not mad at you. Hell, I used to do the same thing. So did Lily, here, right?"


"Yeah, kinda," she admitted.


"So, on to the Protectorate," Vicky's voice shifted to business. "Here's how we approach this..."


....


We manifested atop the roof of the Indianapolis HQ. Or everyone else did, at least. I sat behind in our hidden world controlling Clarice. Alerts went off as guns were drawn and pointed directly at us. A meaningless gesture from them, as Clarice was the only one in the group that could be threatened by a firearm, and it would need to be one with more power than what they were carrying.


"Relax," Vicky raised her hands. "We come in peace."


"Identify yourselves!" one of the PRT troopers demanded.


"Pantheon," Vicky answered, allowing her armor to project her voice. "I'm Victoria. I have Aceso, Horus and Atropos with me," she gestured at us as she announced our names, and I watched the combat alerts adjust as the soldiers' attentions did.


"We weren't informed of Pantheon coming here," the man insisted.


"When a serial killer starts emulating our more public victories, it counts as an open invitation," she pointed out as if it was the most obvious thought in the world. "We just wanted to keep things quiet. I'd say we didn't want the perp to know we were coming, but he no doubt already knows. It'd take a real moron to not realize we'd have to show up for this. But we'd like to keep him from knowing we're already here."


"Pantheon could have sent a warning to us," the man replied.


"Not my responsibility," she replied dismissively. "It's an unofficial meeting, anyway. Just to let you know we're here before we start the investigation. We'll be on our way, now. Please keep this visit quiet."


"Wait!" the soldier shouted. "Director Nicholas would like to have a word with you before you go. He said to let you know it wouldn't take long."


"We can spare a few minutes," Lily suggested to Vicky.


"Very well," Vicky replied. "We're happy to accept."


We were led through the halls of local PRT building. It was still an impressive building, despite not being quite on par with what I'd seen in Brocton Bay or New York. But our trip didn't last very long. For reasons that I didn't understand, all the Directors like to keep their offices way up near the top. Which was stupid, making them less safe and meaning they had to travel further to get to work, unless they came in through the helipad entrance. I resolved to ask someone about that.


Clarice analyzed Director Nicholas quickly and easily. Age 44, or near enough to it. Excellent physical condition for his age, though clearly he'd been dealing with a lot of recent stress and little overall sleep for some months. Further back than the New Delhi crisis, even. I had no way of guessing the source of that stress, as it seemed a bit too recent to be a matter of the job alone.


"I must admit, I had expected Pantheon sooner," he replied. True. But wouldn't have said so if he hadn't heard Victoria's comments from earlier. "I also expected a phone call to let us know you were here."


"Sorry," Vicky replied. Lie. "As you might imagine, Pantheon is quite busy."


"Is that why Gaea chose not to come?" he asked.


"Gaea and Khepri felt their particular method would be a bit... heavy handed," she answered. "We only need to track down the guilty party. There's no need to startle the whole city over the actions of one or two dumb asses."


"No, I suppose not," the man responded. He had an admirable poker face, but Clarice knew he was disappointed. So did Victoria, I was certain. He was also more than a little annoyed with Vicky.


"Mind if we examine the bodies, sir?" Theo asked. He was fully sealed in his armor, which made his voice echo significantly, distorted into something deep and hollow. Coupled with his natural height and bulk, it was unlikely anyone would guess him still a teenager.


"I can arrange that," he agreed. "I'll let the coroner know to expect you, though it will likely be an hour before they're ready for you. We could have arranged it sooner, if we'd known you were coming." Untrue, Clarice told me. It wouldn't take long at all, he was just choosing to delay us. His disguised resentment of Victoria probably played a part of that. But, then, that was the plan from the beginning.


"We understand," Vicky replied. "Would you mind giving us a guide? We need to arrange for accommodations while we're here, and it would be nice to be brought up to speed on the local cape environment while we handle that."


"You expect to be here long?" he asked.


"As long as it takes to find the killer or killers," Vicky replied. "We can't just run around kicking down the doors of every two bit crook and torturing them for information, after all. That's not how we do things."


"I'll arrange something," he agreed.


============

A/N- And Riley's new chapter.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 204- Victoria


The Director assigned us a rather unassuming looking hero by the name of 'Brain' to be our escort. Skinny, in his early thirties with a bit of a pot belly, and a little shorter than me. He was easily the least imposing person in the room, in his business suit styled costume that was just a little too plain to believe it wasn't on purpose. He would probably be the least imposing person in a gradeschool.


And my power was completely terrified of him. Every combat strategy involved 'shunt out, attack from other dimension', and even that didn't work so much as keep me alive. With Theo, my power simply told me I couldn't win. With Brain, it told me that I would lose. He was easily one of the most dangerous parahumans I'd ever met in person, and judging by his emotional disposition, he knew it.


"Mind powers," Riley answered my unspoken question. Can inflict debilitating sensory disruption on the brain. Believed to need line of sight."


"He doesn't," I answered quietly. "If he's in my range, then I'm in his."


"Good morning," he said with a slightly too wide grin. "I must admit this is something of a surprise." Partial truth. My power didn't give any insight further than that, but it was easy to guess he expected Pantheon, just not us specifically.


"It was something of a complicated decision," I claimed. "But we're more than up to the task."


"Yes, you were the one who killed Baal, were you not?" I sensed no ulterior motive, merely curiosity over my power. "Was that... difficult... killing someone like that? Under orders from a superior who couldn't do it themselves?"


"Khepri killed Siberian," I replied dismissively. "Baal was arguably just as bad, if not quite as famous. We had only intended to engage a scouting mission, perhaps lure him out of the compound and then destroy his base of operations while he wasn't able to defend it. My power made it clear I could beat him, if I was willing to kill him. Considering we were about to witness a child being raped, it was the right decision."


"Ah, right, you have different powers after you were restored from being transformed by Bakuda's weapon, correct?" Some tactic to confuse me by changing subjects?


"You've read up on us," Theo spoke up. He was slightly unnerved by the creepy man and his questions as well.


"Of course," he answered Theo. "You've made quite the splash. I've also read up on the Triumvirate and almost every parahuman on the continent ranking an eight or above. One of my powers, you see, superhuman learning rates." He turned back toward me, still smiling that creepy smile. "Speaking of, may I ask your name?"


"Victoria," I replied easily. I watched with amusement at his confusion and annoyance.


"I'm afraid I may have misspoke," he replied. "I meant your cape name."


"Victoria," I repeated. "The Roman goddess of success in battle, from which the word 'victory' originates. Appropriate for a combat precog, wouldn't you agree? My identity's already public, after all."


"Ah, I see," he agreed cheerfully.


"The fact that it confuses everyone and forces them to ask, thus making you that much more memorable, had absolutely nothing to do with it," Atropos added dryly. Over the com system, of course.


"Not all of us can kill Endbringers to get famous," I quipped right back, still paying attention to our guide. "So, what kind of powers are we expecting in town?"


"You don't know?" he asked.


"We know what's in the dossiers," I answered smoothly. "But it would be foolish to assume that's the whole story. Every one of us here has one or more powers, ranking at least a five, that aren't on our list." That shocked him, especially considering how high they put our ratings to begin with. "I'd like to hear what we're going into down on the streets, if it even comes to that. Bad intel is the easiest way to fail a mission."


We spent the next hour and a half getting the full story. It seems the city only really had one major criminal organization with parahumans. A mafia outfit, no less. All other criminal parahumans were either of the sort that didn't draw attention to themselves, or had already been recruited or driven out of the city one way or another. Apparently, the boss had a very 'old school' way of doing things, and claimed to be a blood relative of Capone. Brain expressed doubts about that. Apparently every criminal in the midwestern states liked to pretend they had a famous crook ancestor.


All told, they had eleven known capes on their roster, covering every base. The scariest of which went by the unlikely name of 'Playmate'. Unfortunate connotations aside, she was a shaker 8/master 4/trump 4 whose power was to create board game like scenarios and force people to obey the rules of the game. These games could be incredibly unfair, but there was always a win condition of some manner. She was under no obligation to tell you what it was, however. She even altered powers to obey the rules of the game. She'd be rated higher, but the 'games' were mostly illusions. Dying just meant you lost and were removed from the 'board', no real harm done.


We were also given the name of an excellent five star hotel in which to stay for free. Apparently the PRT permanently rents a few locations for guests. I politely turned Brain, and the PRT behind him, down. We instead rented our rooms from a generic low price hotel chain, much to our guide's confusion and annoyance.


"Trying to keep a low profile," I reminded the man. An answer he seemed less and less happy about every time I gave it. Anyone could see that they wanted our presence in town to be more visible, I just wasn't sure why, yet.


And, finally, we got permission to examine evidence. I sent Atropos and Aceso to the bodies. Riley's powers made her better suited for pulling information off corpses than I was, and as much as Lily may have still really disliked Riley, it was better than sending Theo that way. Riley's feelings for him, and the really weird emotions that Theo had toward Clarice, just screamed bad idea. Seriously, what was up with Theo and Clarice? And was Tattletale high when she decided this was the team to send?


Theo and I handled the crime scene, under the wary gaze of the actual investigators. We used our hover tech to keep from touching anything important, and maybe to show off a little. The three were killed in a bar, after hours. Minimal signs of a struggle. A shattered floor where the one was smashed downward into it. I let my power do what it could, running scenarios that would allow this to happen to these parahumans, and it found nothing. "They weren't killed here," I stated.


"You're certain?" the lead investigator asked. I could read the doubts in his emotions, but there was no certainty one way or the other.


"Impossible to be completely sure, when it comes to powers," I answered. "But the battle was decided before. Either they were killed and brought here to be mutilated, or they were subdued, brought here, and then executed."


"There's evidence of defensive wounds on the bodies," he pointed out. "And a great deal of physical damage in the area indicative of a fight."


"Faked," I answered. "The battle wouldn't have been carried out this way by these parahumans. They would have parted immediately after the conflict started, taking cover. Belthegor was a shaker with control over soil and stone, he didn't even use his power."


"He may have been killed first," Brain suggested from the corner.


"Maybe, but not from the direction the attacks would have had to approach, based on the rest of the scene," I countered, gesturing toward the corner of the bar where the attack would, presumably, have come from. And they wouldn't have been here in the first place. Too vulnerable. They were placed here after being rendered unconscious."


And the local Protectorate just happens to have a parahuman whose main power is damaging people's minds and rendering them functionally helpless. Which was too fucking obvious to be trusted. Plus he didn't show any sign that he was involved. I tapped the private com. "Aceso, how's the autopsy going?"


"They were drugged before they were murdered," she informed me. "Theoretically untraceable substance, broken down into hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide. If it were anyone other than us, I think it would be the perfect murder."


"Except," I prompted.


"Except that's way too easy, because they knew it would be us," she continued. "Besides, I've seen this drug before. Or one nearly identical to it. A west coast chemical tinker produces it, along with super tear gas and a few other things. It breaks down too quickly to form addictive traits in the brain, so it never became popular as a street drug, but there are a number of wealthy individuals who keep the market alive."


"Good to know," I replied. "Look for evidence of where the were before they got to the crime scene. They were subdued and brought there." So it could be Brain running a double blind, or it could be someone who didn't have access to a mind influencing power. I could have asked him, but that might just piss him off, even if he's innocent.


"Something wrong?" the investigator asked.


"Our instruments discovered evidence of a tinker drug in the victims bodies," I informed him, speaking loud enough to be properly overheard. I noted the reactions of shock and concern from Brain. But, then, I saw very similar emotions in the investigator, and I was certain he didn't have anything to do with the crime. Dammit, if I have to call Lisa and ask her for help because my power isn't good enough... I'd never live it down. She wouldn't let me.


"I'm assuming these instruments are not approved and verified forensics technology that we can submit in court?" Brain asked.


"Afraid not," I sighed. "Luckily, we don't have to prove that they were murdered, just who did it. Unfortunately, now we've got a sudden overabundance of suspects. They could have been brought here from practically anywhere. Anyone with a moving van, some good knives and a sledgehammer could have done this."


I watched the emotions of frustration and disappointment hit both Brain and all the investigators that had overheard. It was, again, impossible for me to know if that was a matter of a greater conspiracy, or simple realization that this crime might not be solvable.


==============

A/N- Murder mysteries are fun! They'd be more fun without super lie detectors everywhere. But still fun.

Also: none of you guessed Vicky's cape name. Which is a shame since it's been on the front page since Friday.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 205- Theo


Victoria was really stealing the proverbial show. I'd seen it before, my father was a genius at it, and there was a time when I was younger when he had some hope of grooming me to continue the family business, and had given me a few tips. Even instructed Victor to do the same. Victoria was good at it. Not nearly to the level my father was, of course, and certainly not a match for Victor's stolen talents. But still, she was good.


There just wasn't much her talents could do here, besides look good while doing nothing. The battle occurred elsewhere, and we had no way of knowing where. We left disappointed, if not completely empty handed, to meet with Aceso and Atropos. But a fairly common, if expensive, drug was no kind of evidence.


"So, now that we know we have no leads, what do we do?" Atropos asked, and gave a wary glance at Brain. She and I had been warned that our powers wouldn't shield us from his attack. If it came to fighting him, Aceso was the only weapon we had which might work. It might not even be safe for Taylor's bugs to be in range of this guy. But, for all his power, he was still physically human.


I took advantage of my armor's more or less amorphous shape to look at Aceso covertly. Clarice. She's unfairly beautiful, my traitorous mind told me yet again. As all the other times, I forced myself to remember that she was not real. She was never real. And, as all the other times, it didn't work. It was like telling myself she was dead. How did Zach cope? Oh, right, he didn't have to. She couldn't use this part of her power on him.


I closed my eyes. It's not his fault, I told myself. And he didn't get away unscathed, either.


"Hey, you okay over there?" Victoria asked, tapping on the armor.


"Yeah, sorry," I tried to mean it. "Just lost in thought."


"We're going to stir up a couple hornet nests," Vicky told me. "If your head's not in the game, let us know. We're here for the weekend, we can take a bit of time to make sure things go the best they can go."


"No, I'm fine," I insisted. I wasn't going to slow us down just because of something like this.


"Taking your word for it," she responded. "Okay, so we're still trying to be covert about it. Suggestions?"


"I can show you some of their suspected safehouses," Brain suggested.


"That's certainly an option, any others?"


"Neutral ground," Aceso spoke up. "Every city has two or three of them. Big ones can have lots more. Locations where villains will meet up to discuss major problems, even inviting indie heroes and rogues if the situation's bad enough."


"Would revealing you're in town be considered 'bad enough' for them?" Brain suggested.


"Doubtful," I replied. "They'd rather go to ground and hope we pick off their enemies for them in situations like this. When they ally together, it's for things like a mad bomb tinker blowing up the city one block at a time."


"Our town doesn't have other villains or independents," Brain pointed out. "What would they do under those circumstances?"


"Should still have the neutral locations," I insisted. "Visiting out of towners, friends on the opposite side of the law. Usually the owners of such establishments are well liked by the villains. Even if there's no need to keep them, they'll remain out of sentimentality."


"They're supervillains," Brain scoffed. "They don't strike me as sentimental."


I couldn't help but smirk, fortunately it didn't show through my armor, nor would my tone carry through the echo my power created. "If anything, the criminals are more sentimental than normal people. It's part of the criminal culture. Or, at least, any criminal culture that manage to last. Lunatics like the Teeth and the Fallen play by their own set of rules, of course. But more established criminal groups like Empire Eighty Eight and the Mafia like to pretend they're civil and even cultured. They'll go to absurd lengths to keep that illusion alive."


"Horus is our resident psych expert," Vicky patted my shoulder. "There's a reason I brought him along to the crime scene."


"You have a parahuman psychologist?" Brain asked, sounding more than a little doubtful.


"Of course," Vicky answered. "Why not?


"Just seems odd that you would have powerful parahumans doing mundane careers," he pointed out.


"Blame my mother for that," she dismissed. "She became a fairly successful lawyer in addition to her career as a crime fighter with no secret identity. We have a doctor, a very skilled business executive, even a fashion designer. Just because you're a parahuman doesn't mean you can't have a normal job. In fact, Pantheon encourages it."


"Fascinating," Brain replied. "And how do you plan to locate one of these meeting places?"


"I'm sure there's a place suspected of money laundering that you haven't been able to prove, right?" I asked.


"A few," he admitted. "What do you have in mind?"


....


An 'Authentic Italian' restaraunt owned by the mob, huh? I might have mocked them for playing up the stereotype, but E88's holdings mostly consisted of drug houses and dogfighting rings. Bribing or intimidating enough of the police that they didn't even need to hide it. We of course left Brain behind to return to his bosses. We didn't need the Protectorate here for this. They just didn't know how to think of villains as people.


The greeter's eyes widened. We must have been imposing in our costumes. Vicky and I might have been recognized, we'd been on the news often enough. Aceso probably was, she was a little media darling because she gave them some great sound bites. Atropos, I was certain was identified immediately. The Azrael armor was more well known than most countries. That's what happens when you're an Endslayer, after all.


The man was impressively quick on his feet. "How may I help you?" he asked.


"We're interested in ordering a table," I informed him. With my armor padding my figure and adding a few inches of height, I'm sure I cut an imposing figure. Vicky was letting me take the lead on this one. Criminal culture was something I'd been raised in, and I understood it intuitively. May as well put that understanding to use doing something decent.


"I- I'm sorry, sir, but we don't have any tables available," he lied fluidly. I didn't even need the tech, I could see into the establishment, and the place wasn't much more than half full. Although even that was impressive since it wasn't quite time for Saturday dinner to kick off. It'd be much busier later in the evening. A man with hard eyes watched me from one of the back tables. He's the one, I decided. Not because he was the only crook in the place, but because he was the one who looked confident. He was either a trusted member, or a parahuman. In E88, he would have to be both, but this group may not work the same.


"That's fine," I responded back. "We're willing to wait a while."


The greeter's lips thinned. He had hoped it was a coincidence, now he knew for certain we were there for a reason. "Perhaps it would be easier for you to make a reservation and return later?" he offered. Meanwhile, the scanners in my armor showed that he had hit a button beneath his podium. Some kind of panic button, most likely. They wouldn't attack us, not this openly, but they knew we were here now.


The man inside glanced somewhere I couldn't see a couple seconds later, and then got up and approached us. The social reading tech confirmed what I already knew, he got the permission he needed.


"How's it going?" he asked the greeter smoothly, with the smile of someone who knew he was in charge, and had done this before.


"I was just apologizing to these folks that we weren't ready to receive more guests at the moment," he replied. Also part of the act.


"They can come sit at my table, then," the man offered smoothly. "In fact, put their meal on my tab. Not every day I get to buy lunch for an Endslayer."


Smart ploy, I thought. Something right out of Victor's playbook. Taking food from him would create a subliminal rapport, even though I was aware of the tactic. In addition, accepting a meal from a suspect was basically idiotic, so he'd know how much he had to worry based on whether we accepted. And, for all I knew, his sentiment was genuine. You didn't need to be a good person to have a grudge against the Endbringers.


"That is most generous of you, sir," I answered. "Although we wouldn't want to impose on you and your friends." Of course I intended to accept, but you had to show the initial reluctance, that was just a matter of politeness.


"Nonsense, we'd be happy to have you," he smiled. He knew by my tone that I was accepting. All part of the game. "I'm Angie. Pleasure to meet all of you."


"Horus," I responded as I shook his hand. "This is Atropos, Victoria and Aceso. Apologies for using their costumed names."


"That's fine. I've seen enough capes come and go to understand the score," he smiled broadly as he shook all their hands. He even managed to be charming about it. He stopped at Atropos for an extra moment. "I hope it won't come off as me only doing this for selfish reasons, but would you mind signing an autograph. Y'see, Arianna, my niece, is gay, and it would mean a lot to her. You're one of her heroes." To my surprise, he was telling the truth.


"Oh," Lily hesitated, looking like she wanted to ask us if it was okay. Angie caught on immediately, and it probably didn't tell him anything he didn't already know.


"It can wait, of course," he added. "Let's get you fed first. I insist." He led us in and snatched a few menus with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this often. "You can meet my pals, Joel and Brick. Dunno what Brick's real name is. Not sure he does, either."


The men he named weren't especially notable, physically. Big, but not especially so. Barrel shaped, I think was the term. They wouldn't stand out in a crowd, but they had the same eyes that Angie had when he first looked at me. These are men who've killed before, I was certain of it. They were also clearly hangers on, perhaps even a little insecure in their positions as they glanced at our host for cues. They could be relied on to do exactly nothing but what they thought he wanted.


The next few minutes were mostly small talk about the food, of which he was both familiar and passionate. We made our orders, and Angie's companions were content to let him do all of the talking. Eventually we got to the important question. "So, I hope you don't think it's rude of me, may I ask why you're visiting our lovely city?"


"Probably not the best topic over a meal," I replied, feigning hesitation.


"We're big boys," he gave Brick's back a good smack. "I think we can handle it."


"Don't worry about us," Joel agreed.


"It's the murders of the Fallen," I answered with a quieter voice, as if I didn't want the other patrons to hear. In truth, I didn't care that much, more because I knew we had a place that would make it hard for others to listen in, and the wait staff wouldn't dare.


"That's what I figured," Angie nodded. "Is there a reason you came to this restaurant?"


"Lunch," it was a lie neither of us believed, of course, but such was the game. "We're faced with a bit of a problem. We want to get in touch with the local villains, to see if they have any clues as to who might be trying to frame them for this."


"You don't think they're responsible?" he asked. The suit told me he was shocked by that possibility, and really wanted to pump us for more information without making it too obvious that he was. He was also suspicious I was saying all this, of course.


"It's either a setup, or a single lunatic serial killer," I answered. "Possibly an out of town group hoping we'll come in and clear out the locals so they can move in on the suddenly open market. Hard to say for certain this early in the investigation, but that's why only us four are here, for the moment. If we don't get what we need in a couple days, we might have to bring reinforcements. We cannot ignore a serial killer sending us a direct message like this, but it would be a tragedy to let someone manipulate us into giving them what they want by turning this into a major spectacle."


There was more suspicion than relief by my statement, but then I expected there to be. Still, I had achieved what I'd come here to achieve. My message would make it up the command chain, and someone would find a way to contact us. Probably tonight. No more conversation was had on the subject of heroes and villains, as we talked about stuff already public, like the Endbringer battles. The whole time ignoring our suits' alerts that we were being listened to by hidden microphones.


Angie really did go out of his way to charm Atropos, and in the end it earned him an autographed picture signed to his niece, and he promised she'd cherish it. The whole encounter only lasted at most thirty minutes, but it did seem faster than that.


"Hard to believe he's a criminal," Atropos observed as we left with our doggie bags, intended for Riley who of course missed out on the actual meal.


"I know," Vicky agreed.


"Exact opposite for me," I replied. "Everything about him screamed obvious crook. Of course, I grew up around men like that."


"He reminded me a lot of Jack," Riley whispered her agreement through the coms.


That ended any discussion on that subject.


==============

A/N- One day, I might write a Theo chapter I don't enjoy. This is not that day.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 206- Geoff


I rubbed my eyes, willing the sting of too many nights without sleep away. "Hey, Mags, how're things going in your section?"


"Slow," she answered. "There's just too much data here. Even with Richter's keys, decryption is going to take days."


"That's to be expected," I sighed. "We did just capture multiple terabytes worth of information." It had been a timing critical mission, targeting one of Dragon's servers in the middle of a data transfer to another server. To call it stealing would be wrong. In fact, Dragon would never be aware that we had the information, since she still retained a copy of her own. It was still a risk, but her code had changed in the last few months, faster and more chaotically than it should have. We needed to know why.


"Do we at least know what we're decoding?"


"We have the data on Pantheon, including subsections titled 'Avalon', 'Genesis', 'Nemesis' and 'Ragnarok'."


"Well, those names aren't ominous or anything," I muttered. "Put priority on Ragnarok and Nemesis, in that order."


....


"Geoff, you have to see this," Mags insisted.


I turned in my chair and rolled it over to her desk. "What's the news?"


"Looks like our Dragon is trying to build herself a human body," she replied, pulling up the schematics.


"That's not new," I told her. "She already has one."


"No, I mean an honest human body," she replied. "It seems one of the pieces of tech she's working on with Pantheon is capable of converting human neurology into data, and then transfering it into another body. Most of it was memory implantation technology acquired from Toybox, but they've taken it well beyond its original applications. Coupled it with some other tinker tech. Dragon seems to be experimenting in ways to adapt it to her artificial mind, and implant that into a completely organic clone body."


"Why would she do that?" I asked.


Dobrynja chuckled. "Sounds to me like Richter's little Pinochio wants to become a real girl," he suggested.


"Seems she and Defiant are even talking about the possibility of a family," Mags informed us.


It's possible, I thought. But I don't trust it. "Would this let her bypass Richter's restrictions on multiple copies? Could that be her intentions?"


"Maybe," she replied. "Tough to say. I do know she's hit a roadblock in the process. She doesn't understand the tech well enough to adapt it for what she needs. She's trying to find a way to request Pantheon do it, without letting them know what they're doing."


"So she hasn't told them what she is?" I ran my hand over my forehead and through my hair. "That's good information to have. We might need to make them aware of just what they're working with. Look into what she knows about Pantheon. Maybe there's something more we can use."


....


"Y'know that blackmail material you wanted?" Dobrynja looked at me with that face he only shows when there's trouble. "Well, I found a couple of doozies. I'm pretty sure this is the block where Dragon keeps her blackmail material on them."


"Do share," I frowned.


"Turns out, they have another tinker," he answered. "Remember how they supposedly killed the Slaughterhouse Nine?"


Oh fuck me. "Please tell me it's Mannequin," I requested.


"Fraid not," he shrugged. "Turns out she's been on the team since the beginning. The social dynamic program Dragon's using theorizes that Gaea must have joined the Slaughterhouse Nine in order to take control of it from Jack Slash. Specifically in order to recruit Bonesaw for Pantheon. Possibly Cherish as well. She's the one member of the Nine that seems to have escaped Brockton Bay alive."


"Christ," I muttered. They have Bonesaw. "I guess I can't say I'm surprised. Look at the monsters they're using."


"We could use it against Pantheon," Mags suggested. "But considering the power and influence they have right now, I'm not sure it would be enough. They killed one Endbringer and made the fight with another almost trivial. All for the low low price of ignoring the fact that they're the most powerful Class S threat on the planet right now."


"And it would tip our hand," I added. "We do this, and Dragon will know we have this database. And we make an enemy of Pantheon."


"Fuck," Dobrynja cursed. "Even if the authorities wanted to do something about it, what options do they really have? They're buying their law enforcement tools from them. The Triumvirate has equipment built by them. If we had this information three months ago, we could have done something. But now?"


They're untouchable, I added silently. We can fight Dragon, we have the tools for that. But how do you fight the most powerful parahuman force on the planet?


....


"We missed our opportunity," Mags whispered in dread. "I've decoded Avalon. Ascalon won't work anymore."


My stomach dropped. "What?"


"Well, it will," she corrected. "But it won't make a difference. Pantheon has found a way to access other dimensions. Like Aleph, only with a portal that lets people through as well. They found a new world of their own to claim."


"They conquered another earth!?" Dobrynja exclaimed.


"Not exactly," she replied. "It appears the planet they picked was scoured of life millions of years ago. Some kind of massive solar flare or something. They used that Yggdrasil of theirs to completely cover the entire world and are restoring it to life. Building a garden out of ash and stone."


Dobrynja sighed. "Well, that's comforting at least. They can have all the lifeless rocks in the universe, far as I'm concerned. Now how does this apply to Ascalon?"


"She has a fully dedicated backup server there, and she's building another one," Mags informed us. "If we were to use Ascalon, it would purge her presence on our earth, but..."


"But she'd restore herself from outside our reach," I concluded, slumping into my chair. "Richter's safeguards didn't anticipate multiple dimensions. If we got through and destroyed that as well, we'd be in business. But that requires fighting our way through Pantheon's territory to find a building that could be anywhere on the planet."


"It doesn't matter anyway," Mags joined me in deflating. "Dragon's intel on Pantheon is terrifying. Turns out, their leaders are more dangerous than Dragon ever was. Her, humanity could survive. We'd have to sacrifice our technology to do it, but we could survive as a species. If Gaea or Khepri wanted to, they could wipe our planet free of human life in a matter of days. Maybe weeks, when you factor parahuman involvement."


"Fuck," Dobrynja muttered. "Are you sure?"


"I'm sure," Mags confirmed. "Look at Gaea's Yggdrasil. Early in its existence, it was used to wipe a plague off the planet. One specifically designed to be immune to being wiped off the planet. It's a lot like computers. If you can eliminate a virus that trivially, then you can build a virus."


"Anything that can destroy a plague can be used to create one," I stepped the analogy over.


"It took them weeks to cover their world with that plant," she added. "An entire planet subsumed to the point that there is only one lifeform."


"That's intimidating," I acknowledged. "If they turned that plant on our world..."


"They could kill everyone and everything with almost laughable ease," Mags replied. "And that's before considering what Bonesaw might be capable of. But they're not even the most frightening method Pantheon has at its disposal. You know Khepri's power?"


"Controlling bugs, including mutant bugs they build for her to fight the Endbringers," I replied. "She can hear through them, see through them, use their unique senses not found in humans, and she's even figured out a way to use them to emulate human speech." I'd been studying up on them after learning how closely they were working with Dragon.


"She has no upper limit," Mags informed us. "She has a range limit, but Gaea found a way to use the Yggdrasil to extend it. She can handle their entire world, and all the modified insect life on it, simultaneously. The more bugs under her control, the more brain power she has access to. If they did that on earth, she'd be able to have individual conversations with every person on the planet simultaneously with no difficulties."


"Fuck," I muttered. "Even if Dragon were fully unleashed, she wouldn't have that kind of power. There aren't enough computers on earth for it."


"And bugs are everywhere," Mags continued. "If human beings even can live there, bugs already do. Even with normal insects and spiders..." She trailed off, leaving us to think about the devastation you could inflict. Even if she merely used it to destroy food stockpiles, she could win a war against the world. "Dragon at least has to have technology, and technology can be beaten. How do you fight almost all of the life on Earth?"


"They're still human," Dobrynja pointed out. "One good sniper round ends the threat."


"Nope," Mags shook her head sadly. "Remember that mind copy tech Dragon wants to use so she can fuck her boyfriend?" I was shocked. Mags rarely cursed like that. She must be really upset.


"Oh for Christ's sake," Dobrynja sighed.


"Dragon knows for a fact they have used the technology to create backups of themselves," she informed. "She believes they used it to restore several members of their team after New Delhi, including Minerva and Eki. She knows they used it to restore Khepri after they defeated the Butcher."


We've been fighting the wrong threat, I realized. Dragon might be the only thing on the planet that can stop them.I buried my face in my hands.


=============

A/N- You guys kept bringing up Saint. Here, have some Saint.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 207- Geoff


"God Fucking Almighty," Dobrynja swore. "I just broke the Nemesis encryption."


Despite Nemesis and Ragnarok being the highest priority, they were also the best encoded, using new techniques that Richter's keys didn't understand. We had to create new programs to decrypt the information they contained. This did mean they were the most recently created files in our captured database, however. It also meant that if we did this again, we might be looking at a completely alien system. We still hadn't solved how was her code evolving so quickly, and as a whole we had started to give up on even trying. Dragon was small potatoes compared to Pantheon.


"What did you get?" I asked hesitantly. After all the news about Pantheon, I had just about given up hope. I had also convinced myself that it couldn't possibly get any worse.


"The Endbringers are made by people," he replied.


It turns out, I was wrong. "What?"


"You're fucking kidding me," Mags muttered.


"Pantheon's convinced of it, and has been sharing information with the Guild and the Protectorate where they find any," he informed us. "Both of them are returning the favor. It's pretty much the world's most prestigious think tank right now."


"So they're all convinced?" I asked. "Could they be wrong?"


"Dunno," he answered. "That behaviorist Tinker from Haven. Rapture, the one working on Heartbreaker's offspring. She's applied her tech to the Endbringer patterns, and she's convinced they're at least partially guided by human beings."


"Partially guided?" I asked.


"That's what they're not sure about," he replied. "They aren't directly controlled the way Khepri controls her monsters, but they're less independent than, say, the Blasphemies or Nilbog's monsters. The closest thing I have to compare them to is Dragon's suits. They're smart in their own way, probably way smarter than any human being, but they're not capable of making their own decisions. Guided, reusable, autonomous WMDs."


"God, just when you think it can't get any worse," Mags sighed. "Dragon might evolve into a threat to all humanity. We don't know if she will, and if she does she might choose not to use that power. Pantheon already can kill everyone the moment they choose to, and haven't thus far. But the Endbringers... if someone's controlling them, then they already are trying to kill everyone. No maybes about it."


"There's also a lot of details in here about what Pantheon has dubbed 'Power Synergy'," Dobrynja added. "They have examples of certain powers becoming exponentially stronger when used with each other. It's how they broke across dimensions, and how their Endslayer weapon works. Plus the obvious example of Khepri and Gaea becoming Class S threats. They believe the Endbringers are created the same way. They theorize that a power similar to Midas might interact with a power like Nilbog's to get what we see in the Endbringers. Not actually them, of course, but parahumans with similar powers. Plus a third for interdimensional access, since the Endbringer power source, and likely their control system, exists in another dimension."


"So yet another potential world threatening conspiracy?" I sighed.


"They're using Nemesis as the de facto code name for the makers of the Endbringers," he informed us. "Thus far it's been more about ruling out suspects. It's not the Yangban or the Thanda, or any of South America's major players. According to this, the behavioral tech suggests a North American being at least one member, probably the leader. Based upon the forms the Endbringers take, whomever is in charge of their creation is most likely male and an avid reader of philosophy and mythology."


"Which doesn't narrow it down nearly enough," I concluded. "I'll send that information to Teacher as well. See if his group can puzzle something useful out of it. Locating the source of the Endbringers... if nothing else, it opens up a lot of possibilities in the future."


....


"Multidimensional space whale parasites?" I just stared at the screen. I started laughing. This was just fucking absurd. "That's it. It officially, literally, cannot possibly get any worse than this."


"Geoff?" Mags' voice carried her concern. "Are you okay?" She put her hand on mine, and I focused on that. Something familiar, someone I could trust. She was always an anchor when I needed it the most. "You should get some sleep. I know things look bad, but we're still here."


"Oh, yeah, I'm just peachy," I fought to steady my voice. "Apparently Pantheon thinks powers come from parasites from another dimension."

"Like Aleph and Avalon?" Mags asked.


"Turns out, there might not be numbers big enough to express how many universes there are," I informed her. "Remember the information we got off the PRT networks about the end of the world? That we thought Dragon might cause? And then we thought Pantheon might cause? And then we thought Nemesis might cause? Well, scratch all of that. Apparently Scion is the real source of Dinah's doomsday."


"How? Why?" she asked, moving her hand to my mouse.


"Because he's an alien and that's how they breed," I told her. "They travel between worlds, using people the way flowers use bees. Giving us powers, and then using our natural tendencies toward violence in order to advance their own evolution. Then, when they believe the process is complete, they eat everything. And I do mean everything. When they're done feeding, only dead space will exist where our world use to be."


"Can't we find another world, then?" Mags suggested. "Pantheon-"


"Won't matter," I told her. "These creatures are going to do the same thing to all of them. When I said everything, I mean everything. Every Earth in every dimension without any exception. Total omnicide."


"Holy fucking Christ," she whispered. "Are you certain about this?"


"Dragon's certain," I offered. "So is Pantheon and the Triumvirate. And remember that shadow organization that Teacher was so obsessed with finding before he wound up in the cage?"


"I remember," she agreed.


"I found it," I replied, tapping the screen. "They're called Cauldron. Somehow, they found the corpse of one of these aliens. What they call 'Entities', and are harvesting it to grant powers. The Case 53s are what happens when something goes wrong in the process. Dragon's been compiling a list of these artificial capes, but it's not stored on the database we acquired. I only know because one of Pantheon's members, Hecate, bought her powers from them."


"So one more giant conspiracy to the list," she laughed unhappily. "Got any idea how powerful they are?"


"Powerful enough to take down Teacher when he prodded them," I told her. "Enough that they functionally own the Protectorate, one way or another. Dragon seems to be legitimately scared of what they're capable of. The Triumvirate are also members, if the snippets of notes in Nemesis are any indication. Which means if we go after Cauldron, we could get a face full of Alexandria's boot."


"And they're all working together on the Nemesis and Scion threats," Mags added unhappily. "We can't really play them against one another when there's that to worry about. They're united until those threats are dealt with. And even if by some miracle we did win... it would be like killing a bunch of jackals, only to be eaten by the lion that they were keeping at bay."


"I know," I agreed. "We're just mortals. This is a battle between gods."


"Company!" Dobrynja shouted. Screens flickered to show the approaching person. A woman in an impressive suit. Her features suggested Mediteranean ancestry, but in a world of shapeshifters and tinker grade plastic surgery, that meant nothing.


She casually typed the code to the electronic lock for our current hideout. What confused me was that it worked- the code was irrelevant, it read your fingerprint to determine if you were allowed in. But apparently it worked for her, as the blast door opened. Dobrynja took point, being the only one of us in battle armor. Mags had rushed to get into hers.


The woman regarded us for a half second, then stepped into the bushes, out of our sight. A ball of mud sailed into the room and caught Dobrynja's visor. The woman rushed in a half second later, easily dodging the shots from my tinker handgun without even glancing toward me, diving for cover before throwing one of our wrenches at me. It wasn't hard to avoid at this distance, but I couldn't believe how she moved. How does someone dodge automatic weapon fire?


She jumped toward me the moment I ran out of ammo. Less than half a second later both my arms were behind my back and I existed as a human shield between the woman and Dobrynja and Mags. If either of them pulled the trigger on their better weapons, both the woman and I could be buried in the same coffee can. Something that didn't seem to bother her at all. She dragged me to one of the computer terminals, all the while ignoring the threats issued by my friends.


Seconds of typing later, both their armors lost power, and they were trapped in hundreds of pounds of tinker weapons and exotic alloys.


Suddenly my arms were freed and I stumbled forward. I briefly considered attacking the woman.


"Now we can talk," she spoke casually, without any indication that she had just performed feats reserved for Olympic athletes while being shot at.


============

A/N- What? Cauldron's allowed to do things too, you know.

Also: poor Saint. As if two potentially world ending forces weren't enough, it turns out they're teamed up against A Whole Lot Worse (tm).

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 208- Riley


The others shunted moments after they entered ordered our hotel rooms, leaving only Clarice behind in the room. I sat down to eat the meal, or fragments of meals, that they brought me. The food was really good even if it was leftovers, and especially nice since they didn't need to bring me anything at all. The Yggdrasil was completely safe to eat and some portions of it were more nutritious than any natural food could hope to be. Even if it tasted like mushy apples and tree bark.


In the time they'd been gone, a series of small bedrooms had formed for all of us, allowing us to sleep here instead of inside the building. Our rooms were geoanalogous to the ones we had rented in Bet, and we had the dimensional viewing tech hard at work.


"That looks eerily like my actual room," Lily said as she walked out of hers.


"It's suppose to," I answered proudly. "My Big Sister used it as the model when she grew this one."


"Sometimes I forget just how insane her power is," she muttered. "She can do something this fine detailed from a thousand miles and another dimension away."


"Eight hundred and seventy three point four miles," I replied, having accessed the mapping program I plugged into Clarice. "From your bedroom and this one."


"How do you think I feel?" Vicky laughed. "I remember when she was my mostly helpless baby sister who was afraid to use her power for anything. Now here we are on a planet where she is pretty much a literal god."


"She's just that amazing," I agreed happily, then I hesitated. Clarice's motion sensors detected someone approaching, and strangely the spacial distortion senses I used to navigate Clarice through Missy's power were activating as well. "Umm. Looks like we got our company."


We turned our attentions to the dimensional overlay, allowing us to watch everything. "Ooh, he's good," Vicky noted with approval. "Case 53, looks a lot like Newter, but he's got some really good camouflage so I can't be sure his actual colors. And somehow, he's crawling on a ceiling made of those cheap panels that couldn't hold the weight of a large housecat."


"Doesn't match any records I have," I replied as I ran the description through our databank. "Wish we could have brought the command center with us."


"I'll go greet him," Theo replied as he covered himself in his liquid metal yet again. I smiled as he shunted over. The advantage of his power being so defensively perfect is that I could build his suit for features and battery life, since I didn't need all the armor reinforcement. It wasn't an unusual design, fairly standard equipment profile for the brutes who were receiving our equipment, but I made his better than those. He deserved it.


We watched, using his armor and Clarice to provide what sound the could. I was a tinker and even I didn't know why light could cross like this, but sound couldn't.


"Open the door, take a half step out the door and turn your head to the left and up," Vicky instructed. Theo followed the instructions. "Perfect, you're looking more or less right at him. He can't see your eyes.


"Good afternoon," Horus replied calmly. "To what do I owe your visit."


"Uh... you can see me?" the invisible lizard man asked.


"No," Horus responded calmly. "But I don't need my eyes to know you're there."


"I heard you were asking about us," the man replied. "You made quite a scene."


"Not nearly the scene we could have made," Theo shrugged dismissively. "Honestly, at this point it'd be simply just to request all the villain groups give us their phone numbers. Save everyone the headache of doin' it like this."


"I wonder, did you pick up that attitude from your bosses, or from Kaiser?"


Clarice's sensors noted Theo's heightened emotional state, but he recovered masterfully. "I was hoping to keep that one a secret until after I turned eighteen," he sighed. "I don't suppose you'll keep that tidbit quiet."


"Don't worry, I ain't a snitch," he answered. "So, you were sayin' you don't think we did the killing?"


"This guy's weird," Vicky spoke up. "My combat sense isn't working on him. He might be some kind of really impressive illusion. Keep your armor at full strength, we can't be sure what to expect."


"Probably," Theo clarified. "It's too obvious a setup. Then again, it's also too obvious a setup. It could be you, trying to run a double bluff."


"Wheels in wheels bullshit, huh?" came the dismissive reply. "Nah, we ain't so, wassa word..."


"Machiavellian?" Theo suggested. "Elaborate?"


"Yeah! Elaborate," the voice agreed. "Now, I ain't sayin' this ever happens, mind you, but if it did. We wouldn't leave them to be found. Lotsa places to dump a body out there. Lotsa powers to make sure there's no body to be found. Hypothetically speakin, of course. You bein' here is real bad for our business."


"So who would you sus-" The area was bathed in a soundless white light. I had just enough time to register Clarice's damage alerts before her automatic defenses shunted her over to our dimension. The bitter sweet scent of burnt sugar poured off the changeling. She was still alive under the armor, in as much as she could be called alive. I did a quick estimate of how much heat it would have taken to do that damage that quickly. If it wasn't an exotic power based attack, which of course could break any rule, I was absolutely certain the building was already destroyed.


All this had happened in the two seconds. In the third, Vicky shouted commands. "Spread out! Find the attacker!" I couldn't see what the others were doing, and chose to stay in the center. It was a good thing the dimensional viewer tech had upper limits on energy transfer, it saved my retinas from being burned out.


There was a thud as a large body hit the ground, followed by sizzling. Theo. My world stood still. I moved toward the metal shell, only to hesitate when I got close. The heat from the armor was incredible, hot enough to overwhelm and burn a plant that had withstood New Delhi. One which pulled much of its power out of active volcanoes. I wanted to get closer, but discretion was the better part of valor. I can't help anyone if I burn myself. I accessed the badly damaged Clarice doll, commanding her to move while observing how it was killing her. Perhaps only two minutes left.


She activated her absolute zero weapon, draining massive amounts of heat away from herself and Theo's armor. I hoped my calculations on where to fire were correct, considering all I had available for senses was Clarice's badly damaged echolocation system. Theo's power should be able to protect him. I hope.


The light was still blinding, though it had faded to that of natural flame instead of whatever attack started this. Clarice, with only a little bit of strength left to spare, was used to cut through Theo's armor. At some point it had converted to the standard metal state, meaning he lost concentration on his power. Don't die. Don't die. I screamed internally as my changeling did all the dangerous work of peeling him out of his suit. I didn't speak, I simply stood there operating the controls and idly listing off the symptoms of shock that my body was exhibiting.


The armor was empty. Or at least empty of Theo. The metal was there, and the completely ruined bioarmor was there. Theo was not. How? I was so caught up in hope and confusion and fear that I didn't even notice when Clarice stopped functioning, slumping over the semi molten then flash frozen metal and baked Yggdrasil.


Vicky shouted a couple command that I didn't register. I was too stunned to care. I heard a body land next to me, and a hand rest on my shoulder. "Is... is he?" A voice asked hesitantly. It took me a moment to recognize it as Atropos.


"I don't know," I answered, trying to keep my emotions under control. "He wasn't in the armor. I don't know where he is."


"We'll find him, she insisted, placing her hand on my shoulder. "Now let's get you away from here. We have to regroup and figure out what to do. Victoria's already gone over to help with the fires and rescue survivors. My power's not so good for that. Do you have anything that can help?"


"No," I admitted, allowing myself to be guided by her hand through the blinding light. "Clarice didn't survive the explosion. Do you think Theo will be alright?"


"His armor's indestructible, remember?" She tried to sound comforting, but I could hear the doubt in her voice. "I'm sure he's fine. Just needs us to pick him up."


"Yeah," I responded. Lying my agreement to her lie. I knew we had the clone technology, but I didn't want to think about Theo being dead even for a little while. I didn't want to think about Missy crying. I calmed myself by counting my own tears, and a promise to myself that I would find whoever did this and extract a scream for every last one of them.


================

A/N- I get to torture Riley now!

Aww. Now I feel bad.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 209- Victoria


I shunted over above the motel we had chosen to stay the night in, and the inferno it had become. I didn't need my power to tell me there were no survivors. a hundred feet back, my armor was alerting me to the dangerous heat levels. Easy enough to change that, however. A couple quick cryo blasts siphoned massive amounts of heat and prevented the spread to other buildings. Thanks to whatever tinker bullshit was going on, it would wind up in the batteries of the Ultralisks. Somehow. After that, a few more targeted shots reduced the flames to something approachable. Guess combat precognition extends to firefighting. Awesome.


I dropped down in front of the building, doing everything I could to get my power locked on to whatever asshole torched a building with... whatever the fuck that stuff was. I'd need to ask Riley, all I knew is it wasn't alive and probably wasn't a power, maybe. There was a lot of other stuff coming over my suit's sensors. Riley went all out with my armor's sensor suite, and what she couldn't give me, Emma and Trevor did.


My arm snapped out, grabbing the invisible Case 53 by the arm. "Fancy finding you here," I said with nothing resembling the light humor my words suggested.


"Hey!" he shouted, startling a couple of others who had come here to gawk at the now mostly dead flames. Many of them woefully underdressed for the chill of a mid October night. "Ya gotta believe I didn't have shit to do with this!" My power told me he was telling the truth. Then again, I didn't trust my power against him.


I took off, slowly, while my electrical power recharged the batteries of the suit. That ice weapon drained it fast, and shunting was fucking expensive. "The only thing I gotta do is find out how you survived that inferno."


"I..." he hesitated, and I knew he was about to either lie or refuse to speak. I let the antigrav deactivate, dropping us both toward the ground. "Okay! It was Playmate's power!" I reactivated the field. "Look, we use her to keep us safe. Walkin neutral ground, with rules that you can't fight at all. Even if the other guy wants to fuck us, they can't. Yer pals should be alright. Can't die in her power's field."


Made sense, and my power still believed him, regardless of my suspicions. "Sounds like something that'd be a real hit at the Endbringer fights," I pointed out.


"Don't work," he answered. "They're special or somethin', I dunno. You'd have to ask her how her power works, all I got is rumors."


Atropos' voice came on over the com. "Is Th... Horus with you? His suit's on this side, but he wasn't in it."


My eyes narrowed. "Apparently Playmate was doing her thing," I informed her. "Everyone got out, but Horus isn't with the others saved from the fire."


"Kaiser's kid?" he asked. "Unless he's immune to powers, he should be out." Oh, I spoke out loud. Well, nothing damaging was said.


"We lost Clarice," Atropos added. "What do we do?"


God damn it. "What we should do is call in the reinforcements," I answered to my new de facto second in command. "But what I want to do is fix this ourselves. We're putting this to a vote, though. Call the big guns, or follow my plan and handle this by ourselves?"


A few seconds later, I got my response. "We're in," Atropos replied.


"So," I spoke to my captive. "Do you wanna help find out who napalmed your neutral ground?"


....


"They tipped their hand," I told the girls. "They used a teleporter to deliver that attack, and to abduct Theo. I know almost exactly where they are, but we have to hurry."


"Then we can save him!" Riley exclaimed. She was sitting next to a badly mutilated Clarice. The doll had been split open in a way that my senses were certain came from Atropos' power. Dozens of mechanical bits had been pulled out of its insides and were strewn about, along with segments of two sets of bioarmor.


She's not going to let them live through this, I realized when I got a look at the girl. Her emotions were the slow boiling rage of a murder waiting to happen, and Riley had killed enough times already that she wouldn't blink an eye at another. Fuck. How was I going to handle that? I decided that question would have to wait until after we got Theo back. Depending on how we find him, I might just give them to her, I added.


"Atropos," I instructed. "We're going right now, along with a few of the Mafia capes. I told them we wouldn't wait for them, but I'd keep them updated by GPS and if they think they want to join in, I wasn't going to stop them. Riley, you tell us what you learned while we're en route."


Lily and I shunted over, using her system to do it. "Turn off your defensive power," I instructed her. I waited for her nod, and then grabbed her hand. "I can fly faster." I told her, and pulled her along toward our destination. Our antigrav flight had a max speed of just above three hundred miles an hour. The extra tech loaded into mine afforded me over twice that max speed. Still nothing compared to Sabah's armor, but pretty damn fast.


"They used some kind of thermite bomb," Riley informed as we started in the direction the armor's senses led me.


"So not a power," I replied. "I was pretty sure it wasn't."


"It was sort of," she answered. "The chemical residue is a tinker recipe."


"First tinker tech drugs, now tinker tech chemicals in bombs," I replied. "Does anyone else find that suspicious?"


"Same guy, probably," Riley agreed. "But he's virtually a rogue. Works for the Elite, but all he does is make and sell stuff. It's not impossible that he's involved, I guess, but it's much more likely that he's just selling the weapons."


"Not quite a dead end, then," I replied. "I bet that stuff costs a lot of money."


"Yeah, lots," Riley agreed. "Enough material to do that kind of damage would run a quarter of a million dollars or more."


"So well funded, whoever they are," I acknowledged. "Okay, Atropos, you know the score."


"You kick their asses, I nuke their gear?" she snarked. "I miss the good ol' days when I was allowed to point weapons at people without needing a kill order first."


"Well, next time you'll think twice before making confetti out of an Endbringer," I retorted. "Personally, I think there's something to be said for making your enemies soil themselves just by standing in front of them. Although it's kinda gross when it actually happens."


"There's no way that actually happens," she insisted.


"My old power made it pretty easy, actually," I replied. "But I'm willing to bet you could do it on rep alone. Plus or minus a crossbow bolt a couple inches away from the throat."


We spent the next ten minutes talking about various strategies to, perhaps literally, scare the crap out of our enemies. It wasn't like we could travel any faster than we already were, without Missy around to help.


"There's the building," I replied as we approached the farmhouse well outside of the city. "Theo's alive," I informed them both. "Doesn't look like he's in any danger. A teenage girl in the room with him. Both seem calm and in good health."


"Another captive?" Lily asked.


"Dunno, maybe," I responded. "They're not leaving and I'm seeing no other living being. Shunting over, we'll check things out from the safe side." A second later, Atropos and I were back in the familiarly endless expanse of Yggdrasil.


We dropped into the ghost of the farmhouse, looking around. My powers didn't see any threat to traversing the house. No threat of injury, no real threat of discovery past the occasional floor panel to avoid stepping on. Judging by the age of the building, I would be surprised to learn there weren't creaky boards. Theo wasn't under any apparent duress, sitting in an old fashioned rocking chair, talking to a girl around his age, perhaps a little older.


Her, on the other hand, my power saw as incredibly dangerous. Deadly, even. Line of sight power, if she could see me she could hurt me. She probably wouldn't be able to kill me, but I got the impression that my regeneration and shapeshifting powers were the only reason for that.


"Lily, stay here," I instructed. I activated my stealth systems and watched as all the power to my other systems were quickly draining. With only the cloak active, I had at most twenty minutes of power. I was about to cut that in half. I shunted into the room. I couldn't touch her, either. It was unlikely she could hurt me if I did, but the risk was still pretty high. High enough that my power didn't like the idea. Besides, I had another option. One magnetic pulse later, and we were plunged into absolute blackness. Less than two minutes of power left in my suit.


"No!" the girl shrieked. "You were supposed to stop them! How did you even find me!"


I sense Theo diving sideways, using his armor to propel him quickly away from the girl. So, she was responsible, I thought. I couldn't touch her, I didn't have enough power to reliably blast her with the nonlethals. So I went with the next best option and hit her upside the head with an end table.


To my surprise, the table shattered into pieces that looked like it had gone through a wood chipper. Her power at work, because I didn't hit her nearly hard enough to break the table naturally. Much less to shatter it like that. Still, it was hard enough to send the girl face first into the couch, unconscious. Minor concussion at worst, my power informed me.


I let the stealth function drop. Theo couldn't see me either way. "So, I know there's a story here, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is."


"I'll fill you in," he answered.


==============

A/N- And to this bitch, I bequeath a boot table to the head!

 

[Hexed999]

Seeing as there appears to be a demand for Omakes I figured I'd try my hand at one. This is the first time I've written in over two years and my first attempt at writing Worm, so please be gentle.

Without further ado, Zach's close call, or why you should never assume people are talking about the same things you are.



Trevor was enjoying a quiet evening tinkering when Zach burst into his workshop looking like the hounds of hell were after him.

"Dude, thank god you're here, listen I need your help, my life depends on it" The other boy looked genuinely terrified, something that Trevor had never seen before, even in the face of the Simugh.

Trevor felt the rush of adrenaline flow through his system, something that could make Zach fear for his life was formidable, and could either be a huge asset or a huge threat to Pantheon "Ok, let me call Khepri and -"

"NO!" Zach screamed "They don't need to know! We can deal with this ourselves! It's for the best!" With that he grabbed Trevor and dragged him to where his Chariot was, stopping once to crumble to dust and regenerate. Trevor noted that Zach's terrified expression never ceased despite the mental balancing effect his powers normally had. "We need to get up in the air, where no one can hear us" he muttered in his rush, barely giving Trevor enough time to grab his helmet before forcing him to fly the panicked boy into the clouds, well beyond even Khepri's ears.

"Ok" Trevor said calmly, attempting to soothe Zach "What's this all about? Why didn't you want me contacting the others? Are we facing another Master/Stranger situation?" His mind was reaching for the worst possible conclusions, if Gaea and Khepri were compromised then the best case scenario was the fall of Pantheon, worst case was an extinction level event.

In response Zach handed Trevor the laptop that the tinker hadn't realized he was carrying "I need you to delete something from my computer and make sure no one can ever, ever recover it"

...What?

Faced with Trevor's blank stare Zach elaborated "A couple days ago I got curious and decided to see what kind of porn of us there was, most of it was pretty straight forward, usual stuff, you know" Trevor nodded, while he doubted his and Zach's idea of "usual stuff" was the same, the plot of pornos was fairly generic no matter what you were into "One of the more popular videos out there was titled 'Sister appreciation' and I was feeling a bit down about Victoria so I figured I'd see what it was about. I started downloading it but then Emma came to talk to me and I forgot all about it until now and I really need you to make sure no one can ever find out I downloaded it!" Zach was pleading by the end of it

Trevor put his hand on his forehead "you know you can just delete it?"

"But it might not be enough!"

"Why not? Neither Amelia nor Victoria are tinkers and even if they do find out it's not like they can hurt you..." Trevor paused upon realized that there was another member of Pantheon the public accepted as Amelia's sister, the only person who had managed to physically harm since he triggered "It wasn't Victoria was it?"

Zach shook his head "Give it here" Zach handed the computer over and Trevor plugged in a USB that he'd gotten in the habit of carrying around from his days as a spy for the Wards. It contained a program that made all deleted data completely irretrievable without damaging any saved data.

"Here, you computer should be pretty slow for a few hours but no one will every find that video. Just don't download porn of you teammates again ok?" With that Trevor turned to the controls and flew them back to base, eager to be back in his workshop. With any luck he'd be able to complete his current project before something else dragged him away from his workbench.

Hopefully.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 210- Lily


"So, four against a dozen?" I asked. "We're really doing this on the say so of that girl?"


"Doubt they'd bring all of them," Vicky spoke, lazing easily against a tree. "Besides, they're all a bunch of b-listers. If you're scared, I can fight them all myself. Don't worry, I'll let you take a couple selfies next to them after. Y'know, so you can impress your girlfriend."


"Says you," I couldn't help but smile. The girl's confidence was infectious. "You can take all the credit you want. I'm the only one here with 'Endslayer' on the resume. I don't need to prove shit. I'm the biggest badass in any room I choose to be in."


"Says the girl with the rope marks across half her body," Vicky countered. Theo chose to fake a cough and look away, and all I could do was thank my armor for hiding my blushing. Damn it, Vicky. Why would you even say that? "Yeah, that's what I thought," she teased.


"Oh, go fuck yourself. Sideways. With a cactus."


"Wow," she replied easily. "You really are into the rough stuff. Speaking of, I think our guests are arriving."


She gestured toward the cars coming from the west. "Only three," I observed. "They could have piled everyone in."


"Most of them are gonna be normals," Vicky answered. "My combat sense is entirely unimpressed, except by the second car. That's the threat."


"They keep all their capes in the same vehicle?" I asked. "That seems kinda fucking stupid, to be honest."


She shrugged. "Hey, they're probably expecting us to handle the fighting. They're here for mop up and maybe trying to steal a captive or two from us, if they're particularly stupid. They think this is an alliance. And until they say otherwise, we'll keep treating it as such. Pantheon doesn't start fights, we just finish them."


I nodded my agreement. Good line, I'll have to say that one to Sabah. It'd put her mind at rest about things like the missions last week. She was upset by the idea that we were going on the offensive so much. When she joined, it was with the promise that Pantheon was in support of rogues like her, that this wasn't a military organization like the Protectorate. And yet here we were, kicking down doors and doing so much of the same shit that defined what she hated about cape culture.


I was still thinking about the issues in my relationship when the cars pulled up. The men with the guns were negligible. They'd run out of ammo before they scratched me or Horus. Victoria might be in danger, if she wasn't capable of all the insane shit she was capable of. I kept my eyes on the capes. Three men, two women. My suit's auto highlight system lit them up in order as Riley announced the details.


"Cage," he was a bigger man. Clearly older, with gray hair, but still in pretty good shape. "Creates invisible bubble forcefields. Can make them selectively permiable in either direction, giving him a barrier he or his friends can shoot through, or a trap to hold enemies. Upper durability limit, fifty tons of force. Approximately a vehicular collision at 30mph." He's not a problem for me.


The light jumped to the next. "Shockwave. Allegedly Cage's son. Generates fields that explode like landmines. Similar destructive power as his father's defensive one." Okay, so he might be a problem.


"Deadweight," the third highlight settled on a petite brunette. Smaller than Sabah, even, though not quite as little as Missy or Riley. Is this gonna be one of the ones that contribute to little kids having more power stereotypes? "She creates powerful localized gravity up to nine times Earth's normal. Thirty foot radius centered on herself. Isn't influenced by her own power. " Oh, well, that's not so bad. Lots you could do with that, though.


"Arc," the last guy was highlighted. "Electric blaster. Lower power than a police taser, but long range and can jump from target to target without power loss.


The last highlight was the older woman. Twenties or thirties, probably. "Playmate, you already know about." With long black hair, olive toned skin and an imposing six foot tall figure, she looked the name.


"Don't be too impressed," Vicky snarked over the com. "She's got more artificial parts than Clarice."


Well, there are worse ways to spend money, I thought.


Cage approached us. "So, you found your serial killer?"


"We did," Vicky agreed easily. "We found something else that's really interesting as well. A lot of somethings, actually. Let's just say that in that building is the key to destroying your entire crime family. Of course, you probably figured that much out the moment you saw the place. In case you're wondering? Yeah, we'll be using it."


"A double cross?" Cage growled.


"Not at all," Vicky answered. "You're free to leave and we won't stop you. Or you can start a fight, and we're okay with that. We were willing to accept your help fighting criminals. We're not willing to let you kill the captives or destroy the evidence we've found."


"Doesn't give us much choice, does it?" he asked.


"Well, I'd go with 'stop being a bunch of scumbags', if I were you," Vicky shrugged. "There's also accepting our offer to let you go so you can prepare for when we come after you for real. Maybe grab what you can and run like cowards. Surrender. All nice options."


"Or destroy what you have in there," he added. "We'll be doing that. Playmate's already made sure you can't hurt us. Offensive powers can't be used here. Defensive ones work just fine." Bubbles of swirling light formed around us.


"Okay, I lose," Vicky replied, instantly vanishing. Cage didn't have time to react before there was a crackle pop and a scream. Vicky was standing next to a now very unconscious Playmate. "Turns out, her power doesn't work on herself."


I infused my power through my armor and let the wings snap out, shattering Cage's barrier with no effort at all. With my superhuman accuracy and Azrael's computer targeting systems, dozens of bolts fired from the wings. Striking every gun the goons held. The bolts sank into the metal thanks to the precision use of my power. The weapons would never be usable again except as maybe clubs.


"That could have just as easily been your hands," I informed them, allowing the armor's voice enhancement to carry my words. Azrael's wings fanned to their widest span, and then folded slightly inward, pointing at the crooks.


Arc decided to try to be a hero, and blasted me with the full charge of his power. The energy jumped away from my body and through the wings before jumping back to my body. Other than my armor registering a 2% increase in battery charge, there was no effect. Two could play at that game. I altered the bolts and then fired a full volley straight at him. He didn't even have a chance to scream before the bolts passed right through him and turned the car behind him into so much scrap metal.


Then he screamed, falling to his knees in shock and terror, yet physically unharmed. Others around him shouted and cursed, retreating from the swiss cheesed sedan. Let them wonder how I fired my shots through the kid without touching him only to annihilate the vehicle.


"Okay!" Cage shouted. "You've made your fucking point. We're leaving."


"Not so fast," Vicky answered, tossing the limp Playmate over her shoulder. "Walking away was your option before you started this fight. Now you're our captives. Cops'll be here in a little while. Horus, would you mind going into the house and seeing if there's a pair of pants available for the big bad supervillain? Also, you're a witness that I was right and Atropos owes me fifty dollars."


Really? That is both awesome and disgusting. Best fifty bucks I ever spent.


....


"I must say, Pantheon does fantastic work," Director Nicholas was all smiles and praise. "The murders solved, two of their most powerful capes, and enough evidence to break their entire crime family. Incredible."


My hands clenched in the suit as I watched out the window. It was well past midnight, now, though the lights of a city this size turned the late autumn cloud cover into a deep bronze haze in the sky.


"I must admit," Brain spoke up. "I was a little put off by your methods, but I can't argue with the results."


"All in a day's work," Victoria answered calmly. "Sorry for getting you out of bed at this hour."


"No, that's perfectly fine," he answered it. "As much sleep as they've cost me over the years, I can afford a little more."


"So, if you don't mind answering a question," Vicky replied. "Was it worth it?"


His smile faltered some. "Was what worth it?" he asked.


"Your career," she answered. "We figured out what you did. Covering up one crime with another. Mutilating corpses. Fabricating evidence. Buncha other shit I'm not gonna bother naming because the cops will take care of that for us later."


"I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about," he answered. It didn't take our tech to know he was lying.


"Sir?" Brain looked at his boss. "Is this true?"


"Of course it isn't!" the man insisted. Ah, the wonders of redundant blinking lights in front of my face, telling me things I already know.


"Then you have nothing to worry about," Vicky responded. She leaned over the man's desk pressed a button just moment after it started to beep. "Sorry for the late call, Chief Director."


"I'm accustomed to it," she replied. "Director Nicholas, do yourself the dignity of not trying to lie to me. What we say will remain confidential, right Victoria? Completely off the record, legally speaking."


"We already know the score," she replied. "We don't need his confession to bury him. Have your chat."


"Thank you," she replied. "Nicholas. The truth, as they say, will set you free."


He sighed. "We discovered the bodies of the Fallen when they were somehow dropped in one of our smaller conference rooms, along with a note and some minor physical evidence tying them to the Capello crime family."


"Fits what we know so far," Victoria informed.


"And from there, what happened," Costa-Brown prompted.


"We knew it wasn't enough," he explained. "To say nothing of evidence tampering simply by dropping the bodies there like that. At best, it would be yet another unsolved case. A waste of Protectorate time and resources." He looked toward all of us before his eyes went back to the viewscreen which I assumed the Chief Director was watching from. "After the events in Houston and other areas to the south, I took a gamble. Doctoring a crime scene that would point evidence to the gang it belonged on, while baiting Pantheon here in response to it. I expected them to come in force and deal with the problem for us."


"And that worked wonderfully for you," the Chief Director replied dryly. "Next time you want to do something this stupid? Don't."


Next time? I thought.


"Next time?" Victoria asked.


"Ignoring this one poor decision, Director Nicholas has been an excellent employee and a significant asset to the PRT," the voice over the phone was calm and commanding. "In addition, word of this could... muddy... legal actions against the villains you've worked so hard to put away tonight."


"And the PRT's reputation," I added angrily. The fuck?


"Now," she continued, ignoring my comment. "I would like to believe the PRT has been more than generous in how we've handled of the criminal history of some of Pantheon's members." Oh fuck. "Is it too much to ask you for a similar accommodation, now? After all, the Director's actions here were, if gruesome and poorly thought out, ultimately victimless. In fact, I do believe they've resulted in a net gain for Pantheon. A gain that could easily be lost if this situation became public knowledge."


Oh fuck you, I thought.


"You make a good point," Victoria gritted her teeth. My lie detector continued telling me things I already knew. I would have turned it off, but my newest armor 'upgrade' meant that I couldn't. "But it's not my call to make. I'll talk to my sister in the morning and see how she feels about all of this."


"Very well," Costa Brown answered. Her tone didn't change in the slightest and yet, somehow, she sounded painfully pleased with herself. "I believe in the time I've worked with your sister and her partner, I've come to know them well enough. I anticipate no future problems will arise from this incident. Now, if you please, may I talk with Director Nicholas in private?"


"Yes," Victoria agreed, standing and turning away. I quickly followed after her. How the fuck do I explain this to Sabah?



================

A/N- Vat ah tweest!

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 211- Arianna


Head hurts. Dark. I slowly came to. I was laying face down on what felt like a giant gel pack. It was warm. And smelled like wet grass.


"Oh, good, you're awake," a girl spoke. "Before you do anything, I'm going to explain your situation. I have very powerful taser weapon. I can promise it won't kill you, and I can promise it will stop you. I can't promise it won't hurt you. Then we'll probably have to hand you over to a girl who's very close friends with the boy you kidnapped. She's our healer. I can't promise she won't kill you. Or a whole lot worse. So for your own sake, don't try anything."


I reached out with my power and felt... nothing. Nowhere. All of my anchors are gone. "How... how did you disable my power? How did you even find me?" I managed to croak, despite the pain radiating from my skull. I reached back and gingerly touched the back of my head. It was sore, and my hair was damp.


"Pixie flatulence," the girl answered dryly. "And Santa Claus owes us a favor ever since we saved Christmas from the mole people. Turns out murder, kidnapping, and dropping tinker napalm on a bunch of civilians gets you on the naughty list real fast."


Well, shit. "They weren't in any danger," I insisted. "Playmate's power was already active." I slowly climbed to my feet.


"Yeah, we figured that out, too," the girl replied. "So mind explaining what you were thinking? I mean, most of it's pretty transparent, you want to bring down the Capello crime family. You framed them for the Fallen murders, knowing we'd have to come along and do our thing. When you figured out it wasn't working, you tried to draw the big guns by kidnapping Horus and murdering the rest of us."


"No!" I insisted, and immediately regretted raising my voice. I hissed in pain. "No," I said again, much quieter this time. "I didn't kill anyone."


"Okay, let's say I believe you," the girl agreed too quickly, I realized. She already knew I didn't do it. "Why the fuck did you do all of this? For that matter, your power is strong enough to take them out yourself. Why bring us into this mess at all?"


"I didn't," I told her. "That incompetent Director did. I practically gift wrapped his case for him, and then he goes and sets up a fake crime scene. Then I kinda got my hopes up when you showed. I mean, if he was too chicken shit to handle it, maybe you would. Then I found out you were just going to let them get away with everything like you didn't care at all, so I was trying to give you more reasons to go after them."


"Well, yeah, all evidence suggested they didn't do it," the girl replied. "We kinda need a reason before we start kicking ass. It sucks, but that's how it works.


"Oh, they did it," I insisted. "And a lot of others. Thirty murders that I know about, probably lots more. I just never had a chance to prove it before. The mob's been doing business with the Fallen for years. Buying drugs, selling guns and forged documents and even homeless people. After you happened, those three showed up looking for a place to stay. They were given an overdose of Bliss. Then suffocated."


"And you didn't go to the police?" she asked. "With any of this?"


"They own the fucking police," I growled. I wanted to yell at her, but I learned my lesson last time. "And the courts. And the Mayor. Wouldn't be surprised to learn they own the Director, too."


"Doubt it," she answered. "At least about the Director. If he was on the take, those deaths never would have made it on the news. I have to ask, why are you so obsessed with the mob? And how do you know so much about it?"


Okay, she has a point about that. "Oh, pardon me, I must have forgotten my manners when I was knocked unconscious," I grumbled. "Arianna Capello. Pleased to meet you." I held out my hand to the darkness, but the woman didn't bother taking it.


She laughed. She actually laughed at me. I bit off a smartass remark or stream of profanities. "Sorry," she spoke after a moment. "I'm not about to fall for that trick. Touching you is a bad idea. While we're on that subject, just what is your power, anyway?"


"You don't know?" I asked. "How did you disable my power if you don't even know what it is?"


"It's not," she answered. "One of my powers is combat precognition. It tells me how to beat you. It doesn't tell me why it works, just that it will work."


"Teleporting," I answered. "I can teleport anything I can see into touch range of myself. Anything I'm already touching, I can teleport to anywhere I can see. And I can teleport myself, of course. It's pretty useful."


"Maybe I should have mentioned I have thinker powers. Emotion reading is one of them. Making me a damn near perfect lie detector. Want to explain the rest of your power? Like travelling almost a hundred miles. Pretty sure that's not line of sight. Or how you destroyed that table."


God damn it. "Umm... I can set places. I call them anchors. I can teleport things to or from an anchor like I'm there and can see it." I paused for a moment. The woman said nothing, and I reluctantly continued. "I don't really know how the destroying things works. I just teleport something, but halfway through I kinda cancel the effect. I learned I could do that by accident."


"Show me," she instructed, and I felt something tap my side. I reached out and touched it. A stick of some kind? Too heavy, too thick, too smooth. I focused, and activated the teleport. Without anchors and without the ability to see, there wasn't anywhere I could send it. I obeyed her request and it returned to normal. The process took less than a blink of an eye. The object was gently removed from my hand. "So... Arianna..." she said after what felt like an eternity. "How would you like a job? The pay's slightly less than wonderful, but the perks are amazing."


....


I thought this would be more fun, I thought as I watched police ransack my house in the middle of the night. I glanced over at Atropos. She was even more awe inspiring in person. It gave me confidence, knowing I was standing beside her. She glanced over at me and I looked away immediately.


"What?" she asked.


"Nothing..." I looked down. "Just. Thank you. And I'm sorry. Again."


"Don't worry about it," she responded. "Most fun I've had in a while." She gave a hard look at Victoria, who simply clasped her hands together behind her back.


"Really?" I asked. I chose not to ask what that was about between them.


"At work, at least," she answered. "Murder mysteries, intrigue, politics. We were one scantily dressed actress and a carton of cigarettes away from film noir. I give it a nine out of ten, would recommend to friends."


"Thanks," I smiled.


"Miss Capello?" a man asked as he approached. He was smartly dressed.


"Yes?" I asked.


"I'm Agent Mallory, FBI," he introduced himself. "First, I would like to commend you on your bravery. I know it must be difficult, but you're doing a good thing."


"Not nearly as difficult as you think," I shrugged. "I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm not so fragile. I'm now functionally homeless, you're putting half my living relatives in a cell tonight, and the other half are probably going to hire someone to murder me with piano wire. Wouldn't be surprised if they're already making the phone calls. And I'm a major witness for a federal case that could define careers. Witness protection is a thing I know about."


He blinked. Feels good to know I can still throw people off their game. "Err, as you wish Miss Capello," he recovered quickly. "That does make this a great deal easier."


"I'll be turning it down," I informed him.


"Uh... excuse me?"


"Got a better offer," I told him. "Don't worry, I'll be there to testify and do all the stuff you need me to do. But I've seen my father get to people who were supposedly safe before. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he bought your boss a prostitute for his or her birthday. I can't trust you to keep me safe."


"Miss Capello, I assure you we can provide the best possible security," he continued. "Better than anyone else can offer."


"Except them," I gestured at Victoria. It was fun watching his face and the barely visible look of shock. He was good at hiding his reactions, but not perfect. "They can give me a new name, a new identity, even new fingerprints and DNA. Can you offer that?"


"I... no," he admitted. "I suppose we cannot." He looked toward Victoria. "And you're going to do all this? Why?"


"I found out she's never seen The Godfather and I'm really looking forward to movie night," she replied. "Besides, I have to continue my family's tradition of abducting children from supervillains. It's worked out awesome so far."


===========

A/N- Vicky gets the best lines. It's in her contract.

 

[Daunmi]

A/N- Vicky gets the best lines. It's in her contract.

Click to shrink...

I'm not happy with it but...

"Too bad."
"No!" Tattletale, or Minerva or whatever that bitch was calling herself now threw her hands up as she shouted at me. "It doesn't work like that!"
"Too. Bad. They want me on the team. You guys want me on the team, even if you won't admit it. Write it up."
"Look, Victoria," if it wasn't for my sister trying to keep Tattletale calm, this would have been hilarious... or hilarious-er anyway, "it won't work. We've already got Zack and with the way his power works he tends to, well, run his mouth non-stop."
"I want the best lines. You want me." Something seemed wrong with the room when I said that. I ignored it for the time being. "Ergo, supply and demand, to get me you have to give me the best lines."
That bug bitch wasn't in the room itself, but the contract that had gone flying at some point after the little addendum was requested was being picked up by her things and placed back onto the desk. In order. I suppressed a shiver; there was just something wrong with the way she worked.
"We can't guarantee it." Amy said. Amelia, I reminded myself. Wait...Oh shit, they're going for it! "But... we'll tell Zack to, I don't know, ham it up I guess. Go for the corny lines when he can. You'll have to do the rest yourself."
The top of my head almost fell off, I swear I was smiling that hard.
"Write it into the contract and you've got yourself another cape!"

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 212


I woke up in a nice hug. Taylor decided to be the big spoon... wait, when did she get all the extra arms? "Gah!" I shot up in my bed, only to drag the grasping arms with me. WorryConfusion. I looked down at the thing wrapped around me. Riley's damn spider. I tried to will my heart to stop beating so fast and took some slow, deep breaths. "Don't worry, Taylor, I'm fine." Then I slowly pealed the fuzzy little abomination's legs off of me. It purred at the attention I was giving it like the worlds friendliest, and dumbest, cat. I tossed the thing on my bed and hit the shower.


After that and getting dressed, I walked out where the ever friendly plant spider sat attentively on my pillow. I sighed. "Okay, Snowball, hop up." It climbed up onto me and wrapped its arms around me like a backpack while purring the whole time. I can't believe I'm saying this. "Don't worry, your mama will be home soon."


I walked out into the group area, still toting the albino furball. Lisa just looked at me. "Dammit."


"What?" I asked.


"Well, ordinarily I would have teased you mercilessly for this, but we actually have business to discuss today," she informed. "At least you won't need the coffee. It's already gone cold anyway."


"Blasphemy," I muttered as I took the pot and started pouring the lukewarm fluid into one of the disposable cups. "Coffee is life. And try working at a hospital. You learn to drink this stuff even if it's achieved a solid state."


"Your sister reports her mission as, and I quote, 'complete success, until government corruption fucked us'. Turns out, the PRT Director was responsible for the message we responded to. He didn't do the killings, he just doctored up a crime scene."


Oh god damn it. "Is this going to be one of those messes where we overthrow a PRT office and install our own puppet government? Because honestly that wasn't nearly as fun as I thought it'd be the last time. Now it just sounds like a headache."


"Nah," she replied. "Costa-Brown stepped in and saved the Director's ass. Vicky says she's 'fucking blackmailing us'."


"Is she?" I asked, then took a deep drink of my coffee.


"Pretty much," Lisa shrugged. "Slightly more polite than that. 'We wanna keep this guy, yadda yadda, we've ignored worse from your team's members, calling in the favor' stuff, no big deal. I'm not sure if the Director in question is one of Cauldron's agents or this is just a power play by Cauldron by holding it over the guy's head in the future. Either way, I talked with the Chief Director about it and very politely agreed with her assessment. Something was said about us doing them a favor, and that favors made good currency. You'll have to sell it to your sister later."


"Okay, that doesn't sound so bad," I muttered. Really didn't like us letting this kind of corruption slide, but such was our reality these days. "Anything else?"


"Yeah, Vicky's found a pet mob princess that she's inviting over for tea," Lisa added dismissively. "So, y'know, plan for a new roommate."


What? "What?"


....


"Her power's more like Lachesis than Trickster," Trevor kindly informed me. "Pretty sure she has a cousin Passenger."


"What's a passenger?" Arianna asked.


"I'll explain later," Vicky answered. "For now, they're just what powers come from. The detailed explanation is gonna take a few hours and a bottle of whiskey to wash it all down with. Then some more whiskey. Then another few hours because you forgot it all."


Trevor politely waited for them to finish, then started up again. "She compresses space and time, things go Taboo, and the target moves. If Lachesis' power works like a warp drive, then Arianna's is a wormhole generator."


I looked at him blankly. I wasn't surprised by the 'Taboo' part. Almost every power, if you analyzed its functions deeply enough, stumbled into 'Taboo'. Tinkers were the most obvious, preventing people from understanding the technology that might be used to fight the Entities. All powers that had to do with dimension warping ran into similar barricades. The Entities obviously feared what would happen if we could access Passenger dimensions. The blank look had nothing to do with that. "Explain it in layman's terms?"


"Her power works by creating a tunnel in space and time between two points," he answered. "It also temporarily accelerates her mental functions to process the information when her power's active, giving her the equivalent of several minutes to handle computing that would melt a supercomputer. This allows her to envision a scene, then scan the planet to find a matching location. She then generates a tunnel the physical size of a hydrogen molecule, compresses the target down to that size, moves them through the space between dimensions that we observe in the Labyrinth-Atropos interaction, and decompresses them on the other side. All in a span measured in nanoseconds. Like I said, wormhole drive."


"Holy fuck!" Arianna gasped. I agreed fully. "How do I do all that? I barely passed algebra!"


"It's actually only a fraction of what Khepri does," he added. "Passengers handle incredible amounts of information like it's nothing. This isn't anything new."


"Wow, way to make me feel special," Arianna pouted.


"And she has no Manton Limit?" I asked. Seriously, this could be gamebreaking.


"One," he replied. "Like Lachesis, she can't actually cross dimensions. Even right at the border of our gate, she can't cross it with her power. Not really a surprise. If she was capable of dimension jumping, she could accidentally teleport into any number of dimensions that look almost exactly like ours and never even realize it."


"Whoa..." Arianna muttered. "So there's an existential crisis waiting to happen. Good thing I'm used to those already. So now that we've tested my powers to exhaustion, am I on the team now? I'd like somewhere to put my stuff before the police sell all of it at auction."


"I'll find space to give you a room," I agreed. "We'll need a little bit of time before putting you on the team officially."


"Trust me," Vicky added. "You're not missing out on much. Our job basically consists of looking badass for the press. Pretending we don't know we're badass for the press. Avoiding the press. And making it very clear to the bad guys that we're totally badasses while our bosses are having snuggle time." Vicky had lifted up fingers as she went over each point.


"It's all here in this pamphlet that Zach made." she lifted up a sheet of paper that unfolded like a small map. "See this picture right here?" she tapped the paper. It was one of the photos of me and Taylor sitting under that tree at school. "Yeah, isn't it adorable? We have to make that look intimidating."


"Oh, I love that one!" Arianna agreed happily. "Especially the motivational poster one online!"


I actually facepalmed. God damn it. EmbarrassedAmusedProud. Glad you like it, I thought at my partner.


"Which one?"


"The 'For their one month anniversary, they gave each other a dead Simurgh' one," she chuckled.


"Really?" Vicky asked excitedly. "That one was totally my idea! I made Zach make it, but it's totally mine."


"Seriously?" she asked. "I've got a few ideas of my own! How does 'Diamonds are forever, Endbringers are for play' sound?" I cringed.


"It sounds horrible," Vicky answered with a deadpan voice. Oh thank god. "Which means it's perfect!"


God damn it, Victoria.



==============

A/N- A fun little chapter showing how the new girl's power and personality works.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 213


"Have to admit, for a cold recruitment, this works out really nice," Taylor said as she plopped down next to me in bed. She and her dad had worked out a sort of Sunday tradition where she stayed there Saturday night and they spent most of Sunday together. Weekends were sort of a dead time at the base anyway. I usually spent that time with Riley. Or sometimes I just got a nice day off from talking to former supervillains about world threatening crisis. There was a lot to be said about vacations. At least things are getting better, I told myself. Fallen gone, Teeth gone, more and more groups joining our alternative-to-the-Protectorate alliance. Other than the Elite, there no longer were any human threats on this continent that would require our direct intervention. It was nice.


"Definitely could have been worse," I agreed, snuggling up against my partner. Mutant plant spiders just didn't compare. Although Snowball had decided its new place was on Taylor's lap. The thing was cute, in a weird sort of way. I idly scratched between its large, shiny, and numerous eyes.


"Knock knock, lovebirds!" Lisa shouted from outside our door. "I'm coming in! Please have your pants on this time!"


AnnoyancePride. "She only ever does that when she's bringing a visitor," Taylor observed. I, meanwhile, had sent the command for the door to open. Riley rushed in first, while Lisa and Arianna stood in the doorway. ConcernWorrySecrecy.


"Snowball! I've been looking for you everwhere!" Riley chided the gigantic albino spider. It seemed excitedly happy to see her, in as much as the thing had no actual emotions. It quickly hopped off Taylor's lap and scuttled energetically toward its creator. "See, isn't he adorable?" Riley picked up the easily four foot long imitation arachnid. Arianna seemed only slightly put off by the display.


"Umm... sure..." the girl gingerly reached out and patted Snowball, which resulted in much happy purring. "This is easily the cutest spider in the world. I think. Either that or it's the most horrible cat?"


"It's actually made of plant material," Lisa informed. "It's never been a cat or a spider or any other animal. Pretty much a walking Chia pet."


"You made this out of a plant?" she looked at me like I'd just performed a miracle. I guess, in a weird way, it was.


"See, told you she can do pretty much anything," Vicky answered.


"So, umm, what's going on?" Taylor glanced from Lisa to Arianna and Riley. I felt the same concern. We sorta didn't want the newbies around the child formerly known as Bonesaw. That was never the recipe for anything good.


"Relax," Lisa replied. "She's okay with it. Easier to get it out of the way. Like ripping off a bandaid."


"Yeah," Arianna agreed. "Riley's adorable. You two must be so proud."


"Proud?" Taylor asked. ConfusionMisgiving.


"Of your daughter, yes," Arianna replied. "I swear I won't tell anyone that you two created a test tube baby with each other and then accidentally accelerated its growth to the point where she was a teenager."


What? I blinked. ConfusionHorror.


Vicky started laughing hysterically, followed quickly by Lisa. "What have you been telling the new girl?!" I yelled.


"I'm just. Messing around," Arianna said as she laughed so hard that she struggled to speak. "I know. Bonesaw. Not a deal. Can't. Breathe. Pay up."


"Please tell me you got that on camera!" Zach shouted from the other room.


"The fuck do you actually want?" Taylor sighed. ResignationAnnoyanceAmusement. She couldn't hide the smile on her face. Honestly it was kinda funny. I would be getting my revenge, of course, but I gave up pretending not to smile.


"Well, I was just going over new identities with Arianna here, and she's kinda got an interesting request," Lisa informed. "Not a difficult one, but pretty major for us to take care of before all the paperwork is created and passed through the PRT."


"Alright, what do you need?"


"Umm... Vicky said you can change everything, right down to the DNA if you wanted?" for the first time since I met her, she seemed hesitant. One would imagine everything else, plus or minus Bonesaw, would be the scary part, but not in this case.


"Pretty much," I replied. "It's a little imprecise at that level. I can't really predict the changes or understand them. All I do is decide I want the results to be permanent, and my power handles the rest. I also won't be able to change you back to your original genetics afterward. I might be able to get close, but certainly not exact. Too many variables in the code, plus junk DNA, plus innumerable other factors. Once we do something like that, there really is no changing you back."


"But that's okay because we already have your DNA on file for your clone, plus the brain scan," Riley volunteered. "We've had some bad luck with our revival tech and incorrect genetics. Without your original code, we might not be able to restore your powers when we bring you back."


"Good to know," Arianna agreed. "So, umm... you'd be able to turn me into a boy?"


"I... sure?" I answered. "You know you don't need to go to that extreme. I could even make you cosmetically male without doing genetic alterations. A lot easier to reverse that way."


"No, I want the full package," she answered. "Err, no pun intended this time."


"You're absolute certain you want to do it like this?" I asked.


"Ever since I was twelve years old," she insisted. "You're just correcting a mistake nature made. Can you do it?"


RealizationUnderstanding. "Oh... sorry for being so obtuse about it," I apologized.


"Hey, I don't like to talk about it much, either," she shrugged.


"Look at it this way," Vicky added. "We go in, kick ass, walk away with the supervillian mob boss's daughter, and suddenly add a new heroine on our team. Strike me as something people are gonna figure out. This is the best disguise ever. And it's not even like this is a life altering decision or anything. If he doesn't like it, he's back to being a she in a day or two at the most."


"Yeah. It'll be a little more complex than what I usually do when working on people," I told her. Him? Whatever. "The Yggdrasil is easy because it's customized to respond to my power perfectly. You're not. So, first, how old are you?"


"Just turned twenty, why?" she asked.


"There are laws about this sort of thing," I answered.


"Which we'd probably break anyway," Vicky added. "Like I said, this job has the best perks. Ever. Of all time."


"Probably," I admitted. I appraised Arianna. She was pretty tall for a girl, maybe a little taller than Taylor. A nice face, pixie style haircut that suddenly took on a new meaning to me. A fair amount of pudge. Not a huge amount and with her height she carried it nicely, but I'd guess her weight at around a couple hundred pounds. Yeah, there was certainly mass enough to work with. No need for extreme measures to do what needed to be done here. "So, any preferences?"


"Well... I've already got the Italian thing going for me," she started. "So... think you can do a young John Stamos? Sure, he's actually Greek, but close enough."


"Umm, maybe if you get some pictures?" I offered.


"You don't know who I'm talking about, do you?" she looked disappointed.


"Not even a little bit," I admitted. I looked over at Taylor, who simply shrugged.


"Great," she sighed. "Now I feel old. So, uh, will the process be difficult?"


"Not really," I answered. "You have the mass I need. The rest is the easy part. I can't just pull matter out of nowhere when using my power, and fusing other lifeforms together gets ugly really fast."


"So, if I asked you to make me taller, it wouldn't work?" she sighed unhappily.


"Not without it hurting like hell and taking an hour or two," I told her. "But I can tweak your growth patterns a little. Minor growth spurt, not much different than all the others you go through as a teenager. You'll have to wait a few months to get the extra height, but we can totally make it happen."


"Sounds good to me," she agreed.


==============

A/N- I keep making that RvB reference. No one ever spots it.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 214


"That sounds so boring," Vicky argued. "You have all this cool stuff. You should use it mercilessly." I paused to listen, it wasn't like I had much else to do right now. Taylor was off with her dad again. I probably could have went with, but it didn't seem right cutting into their family time like that. Despite the public identity, Taylor liked to keep her father away from her cape life, and vice versa.


"But that's not how it's done!" Riley whined. "It has to be normal or it's not fun!"


"Never thought I'd hear you say something like that," Zach spoke up. "Oww. Riley, please stop teaching people how to not set off my rejuvenation power. It's lost its charm."


"She has a point," Missy replied, completely ignoring Zach's comment. "All the cool toys just get in the way. It needs to be the traditional way. Especially since this is Riley's first time." The fuck are they talking about?


"Really? That's awful," Theo spoke up. "Okay, normal way it is. Missy, you need to change. Vicky, you too."


"No I don't," Vicky insisted. "You can do what you want, but I make this look way too good to give it up. Just check out these curves."


"Yes ma-oww!" Zach exclaimed.


"Emma," Theo continued. "You can find something to put on. Sorry."


Okay, now I have to know. I finally walked into the group area. Riley was closest, wearing a headband with two red puffballs held up cheap aluminum stems. Vicky was dressed up in a very realistic copy of Alexandria's costume, though without the helmet. She'd even turned her hair black.


Missy was dressed up as a knight, although the outfit looked far too realistic to be any kind of store bought costume. I saw Zach and just sighed. "Zach... why are you dressed up like a princess?"


"What?" he put his hand on his hip in a complete mockery of feminine grace. "Oh, I see how it is. Missy gets to anachronistically cross dress and you're not asking her any questions. But when a maaaan does it, suddenly it's wrong."


"I wanted Theo to wear it, but he chickened out," Missy complained.


"He doesn't have the hips to pull it off anyway," Emma teased, putting her arm around Zach. "But now I don't have a costume. Do you know how hard it was to get a dragon costume to go with the theme? From Dragon, no less."


"You're suppose to be giving her armor a biotech interface upgrade," I pointed out. "Not wearing it to go trick or treating."


"Well, it needs field testing," Emma argued.


"Where's Eric?" I asked.


"Oh, apparently he's too old for trick or treating," Vicky informed us. "He's at a party with Crystal, Sabah and Lily. I'll probably swing by later, after the bartender gets too bored to check for ID. It'll be just like old times."


"Vicky," I replied dryly. "You do realize that regeneration means you're immune to alcohol, right?"


"What?" she asked. "Seriously?"


"Yup," I confirmed. "And pretty much every other drug, illegal or otherwise, that you can come across."


"Well, fu-udge me then," she sighed. "No wonder Lung had anger issues. Can't get drunk, there's nothing left to punch, can't even take a cat nap. How is a girl suppose to relax around here?"


"Speaking as someone in the same boat," Zach spoke up. "Whenever I need some good stress relief, I-"


"Finish that sentence and you won't get any 'relief' for a month," Emma threatened darkly.


Zach paused. "Babe, you know I love you, but if you threaten to take away my video games I will have to break up with you."


Emma glanced around. It was Vicky who started laughing first, and then I followed. That was the permission that everyone else needed to join in.


"Umm... I don't get it?" Riley spoke up. We just laughed harder. And then the alarms went off. Fuck.


I pulled out my phone and my stomach dropped. "Endbringer," I stated. ConcernAnticipationFocus. "The prediction tech thinks it's Behemoth."


"He pussed out last time," Zach replied. "I bet a fifty he does it again."


"I'll bet you five grand that you won't keep the princess costume on during the fight," Vicky added. "And it doesn't count unless it's over the battle armor."


"You're on!" Zach ran off, and everyone else started scrambling as well. We needed our costumes, the real ones this time. The others would arrive in their own time. Honestly, we probably didn't need to rush, we had almost thirty minutes of warning time before they could even narrow down the target location. Over an hour of total ready time. New Delhi, we had over four hours of warning, but that was a fluke brought on by the Simurgh for maximum devastation. Over four times the number of capes were there as was typical, and it resulted in the highest casualties of any Endbringer, or for that matter any anything, in history.


I slipped into my standard costume, then opened the floor beneath me so I could drop into the labs. My Dryad was now officially the least advanced tech in the building, but it was still my battle harness. Riley had her Clarice controls on and was waiting for me. "Think I can take Clarice into the front lines this time?" she asked.


"Didn't you just finish making the new one?" I asked.


"Yeah," she admitted. "But she's extra powerful now. I think she's good enough to fight Behemoth."


"Let Taylor handle that," I told her while fusing my armor to my Dryad and climbing in. DeterminationThrill. I smiled. The SEB upgraded Zerg were incredible, and my General was just aching for a chance to really use them. "You focus on saving lives and running analysis with the rest of our tinkers. You're our best hope for learning how they're made, and how to shut down their makers. That's more important."


Emma was busy suiting up as well. Her armor was, well, I wasn't sure how it worked. But it could give her over an hour in her hybrid state, with all the data collection advantages which that entailed. My armor overheard her conversation. "Behemoth's core should be in its lower body, if our estimates are correct," she spoke. "Try to sever a leg if possible, we want the densest EB tissue we can acquire for our tests and future weapon development. Atropos already knows. Sorry I couldn't get the majority of the tech completed. No, thank you. We're about to jump over, see you at the fight."


Who was she talking to? I was about to ask her when I was interrupted when Crystal appeared in the middle of the lab, followed a minute or so later by Eric, Lily and Sabah. "Sorry it took so long," he apologized. "Took a bit of effort to sneak out of the party."


"Our reputations are ruined forever," Lily complained.


"I'm sorry!" he insisted. "I panicked. It was the first thing I could think of..."


"Telling my classmate we were going off for a threesome was the first thing you could think of?" Lily growled.


"It worked, didn't it?" he defended. "Did you have a better idea?"


"How about anything?" she suggested. "Anything at all would have been a better idea. You're lucky I don't turn you back into a girl the hard way."


"Well, at least I didn't say it was going to be a threesome with me," he argued. "So you don't have to worry too much."


Sabah just stood there looking embarrassed.


"Get in your costumes," I instructed. "You can vent your frustrations on Behemoth."


Lily moved toward her armor, giving Eric one last glance. Sabah followed suit, and Eric started putting on his own suit. It was one of the generic outfits. The teams hadn't had a chance to really optimize his power, except to provide tinker bombs to teleport to the Endbringers. He'd mostly be watching from a safe location and rescuing the injured and teleporting the occasional Zerg into combat range for Taylor.


We started shunting over. The mobile command center was already waiting, flanked by over a thousand zerglings and a hundred gargants. Most were the old fashioned variants, but we had plenty of the SEB upgraded versions, shimmering an unnaturally flawless white in the afternoon sun.


"Rey called in," Trevor informed us from the command center. "He'll be catching a ride with Rapture."


We destroyed the Simurgh with less than a quarter of these forces, I smiled. DeterminationCertainty. I looked over at Taylor who was only barely visible, but heading toward us fast. Today the hero killer would die.


============

A/N- Yay Endbringers!

... Also, for anyone who can't figure out who Eric is? Let me preemptively call you a moron.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 215- Taylor


I landed next to Amelia. ConfidentSafe. "Welcome to the party," she greeted.


We took our position, with everyone else forming clusters in front of us. The tech group was the obvious one, with Emma, Trevor and Riley for now. We'd fill out the ranks later with Ray and Rapture, the latter of whom might be instrumental in learning more about how the Endbringers thought and acted as a whole. Clarice would of course swap out with Riley instead of simply stand dumbly off to the side of the platform.


Lisa also took her place in that group. She wasn't a tinker, but in many ways she was better equipped to understand the Endbringers than anyone. With any luck, Victoria's power would be useful as well, but I wasn't holding a lot of hope. A lot of thinkers get pointed at Endbringers, only a rare few have ever got anything useful from them.
Then there was the 'big kid table' with Lily, Sabah, Crystal, and now Eric. It was remarkable how few on this team were actually adults, in retrospect. Eavesdropping was something I normally tried to avoid, but under the circumstances I wasn't so concerned.


"Are you okay?" Crystal asked Eric.


"Umm... not really," he admitted. "This is... I've only been a parahuman for about six months. I've never been in a real fight before, and my first is an Endbringer." Six months and he's never been in a fight? Six months ago was right around the time when Leviathan attacks Brockton Bay. I couldn't even remember the last time my life was so peaceful. Though, granted, things had gotten less dangerous of late. Having an army of monsters did that for you.


"My first real fight was Leviathan," Sabah added, showing a rare amount of initiative. I liked the woman, but she really wasn't the leadership type.


"Yeah," Crystal agreed. "Look, you won't even be in the thick of the battle. We've got an army of bug monsters that are going to do most of the heavy hitting. You just worry about getting people to safety. And that includes keeping yourself safe."


"Thanks," he replied. "I guess I'm just afraid of fucking it up on my first time out."


"Most veteran heroes are afraid the Endbringers," Lily replied. "You'd have to be insane or insanely powerful to not be. Just remember to stay calm and follow instructions. Trust that your team knows what it's doing. We've killed one Endbringer, we can kill another just as easily."


They don't need our help, I decided.


It would be a misnomer to say I turned my attention to the younger group, since I had the ability to focus on both. Zach, Theo, and Missy made up that core for now. They'd normally have all three of the tinkers with them, but those we needed in position and getting all the equipment up and running. Zach, for reasons I really didn't want to speculate upon, was wearing a 'slutty princess' halloween costume over his armor. Their conversation seemed fairly mundane, with Zach teasing Theo about radiation and glow in the dark sperm.


AmusementAnticipation. "You probably shouldn't 'inspect the troops' when your girlfriends right next to you," Amelia teased. "You might make me think I'm not attractive anymore."


I leaned over and gave her a peck on the cheek. "Whatever. We both know you're the one who gets to enjoy all the eye candy. Fifteen people, only five are guys. Of those guys, one is way too old, one was a girl, one is gay, and one is Zach."


"You didn't even mention Theo," she pointed out.


"Because Theo's not a guy anymore, he's Missy's property," I explained. "And if we're being honest, she's one of the capes I think could take us. Let's not tempt that fate. Besides, I'm happy right here." I wrapped my arm around her suit's arm. WarmSafeLove.


"You really know how to butter a girl up," she smiled at me.


"Yup," I agreed. "I know how to butter up exactly one girl. Luckily it's you, or things could get really awkward." AmusedPleased.


Dragon's voice came on over the command center. "Tentative confirmation of Behemoth," she informed our tinkers and thinkers. "Tracking estimates surfacing to occur in East South East Asia."


TrepidationConfusion. Oh, she must have picked up on my emotions. I opened all the coms just so no one was left out. "It's going to be China," I stated, there was no doubt. All the conversations died.


"Probably," Lisa agreed. "It makes sense. We either go for the kill and potentially start a massive international incident, or we let the Endbringer do its thing and make ourselves look weak in the process." FrustrationAnger.


"Another no win scenario," I agreed.


"Dragon's making calls on our behalf," Emma informed us. "Alerting the Chinese government about the potential danger and offering our help. There's a chance that China will accept it."


"They won't," Lisa responded. "What happened in New Delhi is being surpressed as much as possible by the CUI. They don't want to give their people the idea that outsiders are powerful enough to kill the Endbringers when they cannot."


DisgustCertainty. "We're going anyway," Amelia commanded. Riley turned and jogged toward us. Clarice robotically moved into position at her station. "At least we're getting close. Whether we choose to attack, we'll worry about later. If we're lucky he'll go after somewhere else." HopeDoubt.


"I'll relay that back to Dragon, if that's okay?" Emma offered.


"Do it," I agreed. She took a minute speaking into the interdimensional com in the command center.


"Dragon's acknowledged our decision, and is sending more detailed coordinates," Chariot informed us. Why hasn't he ever picked out a thematic code name, I wondered idly. Something to ask him about one day. "I'm uploading it into Lachesis' targeting system."


We waited in silence for a few minutes. "Damn," Emma muttered. "I know it's not a surprise, but Lisa was right. They're claiming they have a plan of their own and that we can fuck off. In words only slightly more polite."


ConcernDisgustDismissal. "We're still going anyway," Amelia insisted. "We are not going to let Behemoth destroy any more lives than we absolutely have to. If they want to bitch about it afterward, we'll deal with the consequences then."


"Damn straight!" Victoria shouted. No one objected, not even Lisa. And I was sure she would have.


"I've got the location," Lachesis informed us. "Chongqing."


She stepped forward, or what would become our forward, which was more to our right. I watched space twist and ripple from her power. Creating tunnels of this size took time for her, more for the risk of accidentally cracking continents than any actual difficulty. Our command center passed through first, guided by Clarice. Then the zerg poured through, using the infrared trackers left behind for them to follow. Amelia and I waited as everyone filed through. We were the last ones to pass through the passageway to our analogue of southern China.


"You know," I smiled at Amelia. "When you promised me an army, I was expecting giant hornets and relay bugs, not anti-Endbringer monsters."


"And when you agreed to be my partner, I was expecting you to help lead the team, not an engagement," she teased right back.


"I helped!" came Riley's muffled shout from her place in Amelia's armor.


In thinking about it, she was right on both counts. "Yeah, you helped," I agreed. "Keep up the good work."


=============

A/N- Has it really been 25 chapters since we got a Taylor perspective? Wow.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 216


"Establishing dimensional tunnel," Trevor spoke up after the command center landed in place. "Shunting over the relay bugs." The portable relays were built from slightly modified, especially fast dragonflies. They wouldn't be out of place in any part of the world, so we felt confident we could use them without our presense being noticed. The zerg all served as relay bugs as well, of course, but there was no way to use those without being noticed.


I got my first look at Chongqing. The city was drizzly and dirty and looked cold. The relay bugs aren't going to do well in this weather, I realized. Of course, Taylor was smart. She'd probably fan them out and have them latch under trees or ledges of buildings. Hopefully the native insects would do better, but this was late October, not exactly the best part of the year for bugs. Then again, bugs aren't how you fight Endbringers. I looked at the literal army of zerg around us. Those are how you fight Endbringers.


ConfusionWorry. "They haven't even started the sirens," Taylor muttered. "I don't know Chinese, but there's no panic at all. These people have no idea what's coming."


"Maybe the C.U.I. didn't believe us?" Missy suggested.


"No, the Yangban are out in force," she told us. "Ten full divisions. Two hundred and fifty parahumans grouped twenty five at a time. Near the edges of the city. They seem to be practicing drills. There's also several thousand normal soldiers. There's not enough bugs for me to get a thorough count. They seem to be setting up barricades of some sort, but again I can't be certain."


"Barricades? Against Behemoth?" Lily this time. "Are they on drugs?"


"Tinker tech," Emma spoke up. "I'm running the scans now. It's gonna take a while, this stuff is like Dragon's work. Or mine, even. A hybrid of multiple Tinker disciplines. It's really elegant, can't wait to see how it works. I do recognize what I think are forcefield components, but like nothing I've ever seen before. Please tell me there's a chance we can steal some of this tech in the confusion? Dragon will want to have our babies if we get her some of this stuff. Fuck, I'll have your babies to get my teeth into this."


ConcernCuriousity. "If there's a way to get away with it without violating the Endbringer Truce or starting an international incident? I'll consider it."


"Woo! Bonus mission objective!" Vicky declared. "I'll scout the perimeter and look for weak points. Beats all this 'hurry up and wait' bullshit."


I need to talk to her about playing too many of Zach's games, I thought. "Go for it," I told her. "But our priority is Behemoth."


"Understood," she saluted us in a mockery of military discipline. "Hey, Khepri, mind lending me a couple of the ghost cats? I'm pretty sure we'll need them for this."


"Okay," my partner agreed. Her undercurrents led me to believe that if we had a good shot, she'd okay the mission. We aren't even officially our own nation yet, and we're already committing international espionage.


It was another ten minutes of waiting before Behemoth arrived. A small skyscraper collapsing into the street below heralded the first and most deadly Endbringer. It was hard to place a value on which of the three was ultimately most devastating. They all had their place. Simurgh was, to quote something Zach had said, the 'mind killer', using paranoia and psychological weapons to incredible effect. Leviathan was the city killer, destroying our homes and our security. Behemoth was the hero killer. The one that took our best hopes for the future away from us.


The monster's head peaked out of the rubble, and the people which had moments before been gawking at the collapsing building turned and fled. They should be in shelters, I couldn't help but think. Behemoth opening attack was a roar that thankfully stayed silent from our side of the dimensional shell. Glass exploded even where we were positioned, over a mile away. People dropped in agony around us, their screams as visible and as silent as Behemoth's.


Those nearest the monster. I had to turn away. Skulls had shattered just as thoroughly as the glass, leaving gore and mess in the street. It was all I could do to not be sick within my suit. There were cries on our side, shrieks of horror and disgust. Taylor tried to offer me some comfort through our link, but she was too upset. The best she could maintain was anger and determination. I latched onto that, and returned it in kind. A feeling turned idea turned oath. No matter what the future consequences might be, we would not let Behemoth leave this city alive.


A lance of unidentifiable energy struck Behemoth from the side. His skin went from reddish brown to a neon green color, and then shattered into some kind of crystalline dust.


"Looks like a variant of Bakuda's glass," Riley informed us impassively. Of course she'd be one of the ones who could watch this without looking away. "It won't work. EB tissue is too dense, at most it could influence three layers deep. Superficial. Cosmetic damage."


"Anything that doesn't damage the core is cosmetic," Lisa replied. She, at least, sounded tense and nervous. "I didn't have a good position to see it with Leviathan, and by the time we were really hurting the Simurgh, I had already shunted out. But I'm getting the idea now. Victoria, what are you seeing?"


"A whole lotta nothin'," she answered. "I can anticipate his attacks, sort of."


Three bolts of lightning streaked toward three different Yangban divisions. They were almost annihilated. Moments later, they had reformed as if nothing happened. They have a variant of Zach's power?


"Dude, they're ripping me off!" Zach exclaimed.


"No, it's a form of time manipulation," Lisa replied. "A several second step backward in time, undoing Behemoth's damage. You were saying, Victoria?"


"Those three bolts could have been three hundred, maybe three thousand," she answered. "I'm sensing every possible attack he can make. This is like watching Bruce Lee fight a room full of toddlers, and letting the toddlers think they stand a chance of winning. If Behemoth wanted, this city would already be gone."


RealizationFearFocusDetermination. "Nothing we didn't already know," Taylor replied, her voice calm and commanding. "We know the Endbringers are far more powerful than they pretend to be. We also know we can kill them. If they want to hold back, then so be it, that just makes our jobs easier."


Meanwhile, Behemoth and the Yangban traded blows while the city around them suffered the consequences. At some point, they started switching attacks and combining energy types. Seems we weren't the only ones with cryo blasts, and somewhere they found a cape that could summon serpent like forms made of water. The Yangban's power sharing and amplification techniques meant they could literally flood a city block with the things, forcing Behemoth to boil away the mass even as more came to replace it and the ice power made it all the more difficult to burn through. It was an effective tactic in keeping the monster's attacks from reaching them.


Behemoth unleashed its roar again, shattering the water, the buildings, and countless people.


"One minute and six point six seconds between roars," Lisa replied. "This one's following the rule of threes as well, if a slightly more sinister variant."


"It doesn't have to," Victoria answered. "It could keep that attack going constantly for days if it wanted to."


"Part of the human controller's bias," Lisa answered. "Remember, we're still recording this data for Rapture and Dragon to chew over for patterns and psychological profiling of the Endmakers. Anything you can contribute will only help."


The Yangban switched to another tactic, turning the street around Behmoth into some kind of liquid substance. The matter then warped and moved, wrapping itself around the creature and pinning its arms and legs together. He fell and was immediately fired upon by dozens of energy attacks. Many, but not even close to most, were deflected away by his dynakenetic powers.


"They think they're winning," Vicky informed us.


"By the Endbringer's programming, I think they are winning," Lisa answered. "They follow a script. It's like a video game. The game programmer could easily create a game that instantly kills you in the first four seconds, but where's the fun in that?"


"These fights are suppose to be fun?" Zach asked. "Is Tarn Adams a suspect?" He stopped for a second. "...aaand I'm the only one who gets the joke."


"Oh fuck," Lisa muttered. "He's right. Or my power thinks he's right. The video game analogy might be more apt than I thought. It's possible the Endbringer battles are someone's idea of a game. Like gladiatorial combat on a mass scale."


================

A/N- Losing is Fun!

... Honestly, after you get familiar with the interface, Dwarf Fortress is pretty easy. I quit playing after it became clear that FPS drain would kill all my fortresses.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 217


ReluctantAdmiration. "They're actually very good," Taylor admitted. It was true, we'd been watching the dance between Behemoth and the Yangban for nearly half an hour. One thing that surprised me was there were no losses. Well, there were many losses, Behemoth was doing an excellent job of burning through Yangban groups, only for them to recreate themselves moments later. They focused heavily on mobility and ranged assaults, having a hugely versatile array of tools to escape Behemoth's close range options. And, of course, all the civilians.


"We can take them," Victoria replied dismissively. "They have to call each attack. It slows them down, makes them predictable. The restoration power creates confusion in their ranks as the troops have to adjust to the changed perspective. They also have pretty much no thinker powers in the mess, so they're vulnerable to stealth attackers."


"They probably have other groups with those powers," Lisa informed. "Strangers, too. No sense in deploying powers that won't work on Endbringers in the first place. The C.U.I. knows what it's fighting. In as much as anyone without our intel could know."


HorrorDisgustAnger. "They're shooting the civilians!" Taylor exclaimed.


Reflexively we turned toward the nearest barricade. The dimensional display tech reacted and dimmed the area around us and highlighted the more distant location. It pays to have so many talented tinkers on the team. Taylor was right, of course. The civilians had been retreating toward the barricades, trying to find anywhere to escape Behemoth. Now they were running from the barrier as dozens were mowed down by automatic weapons fire.


The ground beneath me shuddered, at it took a second to realize it was me causing it. The Yggdrasil trying to reach up and block the bullets. An impossibility, of course, from this side of the barricade.


"What do we do?" Sabah asked, her voice small.


I froze. This wasn't something I knew how to handle. These weren't just some gang. This was the single most populous nation on the planet, and if we jumped in we would be sparking an international war. One that we might very well lose to sheer numbers.


"We can't help them," Taylor spoke. "If we do in the middle of a Behemoth fight... it doesn't matter our reasons. We lose our allies. Almost all of them. If the Yangban tries to fight us instead of fighting Behemoth, it'll cost more lives in the long run than doing nothing."


"Fuck!" Vicky exclaimed. "Promise me that after we're done with the Endbringers and fucking Scion, we come back to these fuckers. We can't let them get away with this." She punched one of the shadowcats hard enough to knock the three ton SEB armored creature on its side. It climbed to its feet without even a noise of objection.


"Yes," I agreed. "We'll make our stance known, take this footage to the international community and let them figure out what to do with it. When we start the portal system, we're leaving them out. I refuse to give people like them a world to exploit." DoubtConcern. Taylor was right, I was bluffing about giving this to the world as a whole. Doing so would prove we could spy across dimensions. This was something that Dragon was okay to know about, and it was something we couldn't hide from Cauldron if we tried, so we pretended we trusted them enough to just tell them, but this was functionally the perfect Stranger tech. Unless they invented something that could beat it. Better that they didn't even know to try.


"Is it wrong that I'm suddenly cheering for the Endbringer?" Eric asked. "Like we should just go home and let the Endbringers go after China as much as they like? Because right now, I'm hoping they drop right into the capital and have the time of their lives stomping on a royal family or two."


CruelAnger. None of us said anything, but judging by the quiet responses, I couldn't help but feel most of us agreed with him on this, at least on some level. Certainly none of us felt the need to voice a disagreement.


Meanwhile, Behemoth decided he'd had enough punishment and it was time fight back again. Wrenching himself free of the liquefied earth with a massive leap, he traveled far more rapidly than I would have expected something that size to be able, and slamming into a group of Yangban, quite literally. Caught within the kill aura, they somehow managed to avoid bursting into flame. A defensive power of some sort, I would assume. Whatever it was, it wasn't a match for the incredible strength of the Endbringer, which crushed them without difficulty. That Yangban division was killed permanently.


A stream of exotic energies cut into Behemoth, leaving further gouges in the mostly restored flesh. That's why he stayed so long in the gunk, I realized. It let him regenerate from the damage they'd inflicted, however meaningless that damage may actually be.


"It has to obey the rules," Lisa observed. "If enough damage is inflicted it retreats because it's suppose to, not because it has to, but it's also allowed to buy time and recover. It's a psychological mechanism to punish hesitation and nonlethal attack styles. Encouraging conflicts to be as destructive and aggressive as possible."


"Sounds like everything we've learned about Passengers thus far," Clarice added. "They compel their hosts toward this."


"Untrue," Lisa replied. "Yes, they compel hosts toward conflict, but not toward this kind of mindless slaughter. They want evolution, and killing hosts in large numbers limits that. Small numbers of death are fine, of course, but there's a certain point where it becomes a problem. It's why Nilbog stopped with his city instead of overwhelming half the country. Why Jack Slash refused to let his people cross certain thresholds. The Passengers want a cold war. The Unspoken Rules, or something similar to them, are a psychological compulsion. Endbringers are the antithesis to that goal."


"It suggests a host like me," I spoke. "One with a Third Trigger." RealizationFearConcernSupport. I felt Taylor's hand on my shoulder. Or, more appropriately, her suit's interaction with mine. It wasn't quite the same comfort, but it was nice.


"Putting special notes in describing Third Triggers," Lisa replied. "We're drifting dangerously close to the Taboo, here. This could limit our results."


Behemoth leapt again, and then promptly stalled in mid air. He was locked there as the Yangban took the opportunity to fire every attack they had at the trapped Endbringer, which roared and launched streams of lightning at his opponents.


The attacks took their usual toll, shattering already damaged buildings and reducing Yangban divisions in number, only for them to suddenly be restored. It was certainly an incredible power, significantly stronger than the Adepts' leadership.


The lightning around Behemoth stopped tracking toward enemies and turned inward, bouncing along his skin and the scars inflicted by the battle. The monster's skin started to glow white hot with power.


"Oh, fuck," Lisa muttered. "I think they've finally managed to piss him off. This is a new attack."


The Yangbang switched back to the water snakes, putting a huge amount of water around Behemoth. Thirty seconds had provided a quarter mile thick shell of water. Then he unleashed all that power, flash boiling the water and drowning much of the area in superheated steam. It poured forth and scoured Yangban and civilians alike, leaving them with horrific burns. The time manipulation was invoked again. Was there a limit to that power? I wondered.


"I don't understand," Lisa replied. "He should be withdrawing now. They've done more damage than he's experienced in his last three fights combined, and forced him to use a new power. What's he staying around for?"


"Uh... looks like they're starting up that barricade," Emma spoke. "I... have absolutely no idea what I'm looking at."


We looked around us, viewing the polyhedron dome that suddenly formed over the city. It was mostly clear. Behemoth roared again and sent lightning into the shielding. It turned nearly black in the panels that had been struck, then the color faded, leaving the entire dome slightly darker, but uniformed in shade.


"Okay, still don't know what I'm seeing," Emma muttered. "It's diffusing the energy through the field and into the area inside."


"I just lost my bugs," Taylor informed us. "I can't sense them in that dimension."


"The tunnel collapsed," Trevor responded. "I don't know why. Probably something to do with that shield."


Behemoth dropped and rushed the nearest part of the barricade, which was still well over three miles away from him, ignoring everything the Yangbang threw at him. It took him under a minute to arrive, colliding with the shield. Amazingly, it held. And the shield dimmed enough that the city was plunged into instant night.


"Holy fuck!" Emma exclaimed. "I know what it's doing! I think. It's using the energy directed against it to create a localized spatial anomaly. A naked singularity." She paused for a couple seconds as she realized that most of us didn't know what that meant.


"Umm... it's randomly warping the laws of physics inside it. There's no possible way to predict or control it, but the more power that field absorbs, the stranger things are going to get in there. And I mean that in a 'one plus one equals tapioca pudding' type physics breaking."


"Is that even possible?" Lily asked.


"Normally? No," she answered. "In there? Probably not, but things equally impossible are going to happen, one way or another."


"They're trying to kill him by changing reality enough that whatever allows him to function simply stops functioning," Lisa replied. "They're trying to make it so he cannot exist anymore." ConfusionTrepidationHope.


Behemoth attacked again, and our visual vanished. We still had displays from further away, but everything inside the dome was no longer visible. We no longer knew what was happening on the other side.


==============

A/N- Ah, if only the cycle hadn't broken. That's the kind of thing that might let the Entities overcome the entropy problem. But Eden had to faceplant into a planet. Dumbass.

 

[Flukes]

So I've been reading this for a while.

And my mental image of Case 53 Emma was really cool, especially at her first appearance with all the ice and whatnot.

My drawn image wasn't anywhere as cool, but might as well post it up.

Achievement unlocked: FANART!

.... this should be a PNG. Weird. Oh well.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 218


"That can't possibly work," Zach muttered. "Can it?"


"Not a chance in hell," Lisa replied. "The Endbringers already can't exist by the natural laws of our reality. What they're doing's going to put one hell of a dent in the fucker. Probably. Even that's questionable. But only attacks that can hurt the core will actually kill an Endbringer."


"Can we break the field?" I asked. "Maybe save the people caught inside? Their lives are being thrown away for nothing."


"No," Emma answered. "Opening the containment now would let the exotic effects pour out into the rest of the world. The results could easily be worse than New Delhi. It might even make our whole world uninhabitable." HorrorDismay.


"And they're using this on their own people," Taylor growled. "When that weapon shuts down, we're taking at least some of those barricades. The whole fucking thing if at all possible. We need to know how that tech works. This is a whole new kind of WMD. It might even be a way to attack Scion directly. If nothing else, if we have it that means they don't."


"And the possibility of an international incident?" Lisa asked.


"Fuck to that," I said, adding my support to Taylor. "They just unleashed that... that! On their own people. No one's going to blame us for doing what we must to stop it from happening again."


"Right. Just making sure," Lisa replied. "Any objections to Operation: World War Three?"


"Umm... if I may?" Trevor spoke up. "If you're willing to cannibalize some of our equipment, we might be able to do this without them being able to prove we were ever here in the first place."


That would be nice. "I'm listening," Taylor spoke for us.


....


The shield was still up, or at least we were unable to scan into its location and Behemoth had not left the containment, almost an hour later. We finished our project within that time. Over two hundred of our zerglings were cut open to remove the shunting components, but we finished our new device. A nearly sixty mile long tube of modified Yggdrasil. Crystal and Vicky were busy pumping it with as much power as they could, and I was adding the amount of power I could by drawing off the normal Yggdrasil mass. We were ready.


"The power signatures are fading," Emma informed us. "Exotic physics effects are being detected. Either it's shutting down, or it's about to rupture. No way to know until we see it happen."


The shields didn't shatter so much as they evaporated, leaving behind a desert of twisted shapes existing without rhyme or reason. Several large slabs of matter had fallen into the blue sand that was all that existed of the soil. Crystals and metals were strewn about. Strange and colorful corals extended out of the sand, and birdlike creatures started falling from the sky and shattering into goo. A goo which struggled to move before breaking down into mist.


"Life?" I asked. "That field created living things?"


"It makes as much sense as anything else," Emma replied. "The laws of reality changed, but they didn't stop existing entirely. They're dying because whatever chemical properties allowed them to exist in the first place no longer apply. As lethal to them as the weapon itself was to the people caught within."


One of the crystal forms shifted and shattered. Beneath was Behemoth. He was reduced to a skeleton. Or, skeleton might be the wrong word. Perhaps more like an artist drawing the proportion lines before getting to the rest of the drawing. Litte more than stick figure with extra details. If anything, somehow, he looked even more terrifying this way than he did with his flesh intact.


"Now!" Victoria shouted, and the ring of plant material shunted over. Taylor had six and a half seconds for the matter to completely encase the ring of barricades and shunt back. Any longer, and its cloaking effect would fail. She did it in five and a quarter. The massive wall of rings took their geosynchronous place in our dimension. Could the theft be attributed to us? I asked myself. Maybe. Our teleportation equipment was already pretty well known, but only a few knew we were using an alternate earth as a planet sized staging platform and at-will base of operations. Either way, they certainly couldn't prove anything.


Behemoth charged the line not far from where he was trapped, smashing into the soldiers who had, not long ago, murdered innocent people who were simply trying to flee. The Yangban moved quickly, opening up with similar tactics as before. This time, the eldest of the Endbringers was done playing games. Now he fired at three divisions instead of one at a time. Now when he shot, he got the whole group. In three seconds, seventy five Yangban and hundreds of soldiers died.


"They broke its program," Lisa spoke in horror. "They follow a mantra of hitting harder than they are hit, and that was one hell of a hit. It's not going to retreat. It's not going to hold back. If we were to try to kill Behemoth now, it's just going to result in a slaughter. It's going to keep killing until it feels it's achieved enough of a body count to match was just happened."


"That could take hours," I replied.


"It will take days," Lisa corrected. "Well, Eric, you get your wish. I don't think China will survive this."


"Is there anything we can do?" I asked. Fuck, didn't we just basically say we wanted this?


"Unless Chariot has a way to evacuate entire cities?" she responded. "No, there's really not."


Behemoth's next attack was a new one. He smashed the stub that was once his fist into the ground and it rippled outward, a shockwave in the earth. Where people were standing, there was no warning. They didn't fall or scream or even see their deaths coming. They simply exploded into gore.


"He's still holding back," Lisa continued her analysis. "Less than before, but that was nothing but theatrics. Taking time to telegraph his attacks unnecessarily. He could easily do that without the stomp."


Behemoth moved into the part of the city which hadn't been functionally removed from the face of the planet. His kill aura no longer simply killed people, it caused the glass of the buildings to melt.


"Radiaton output is off the charts," Emma informed us. "Much higher and your insides would simply liquify. As it stands, lethal exposure would occur in minutes. If you survive everything else for that long, at least. I think he's trying to lure the defenders into following his trail and killing themselves."


"Would the Zerg do anything to help?" Taylor asked. "Slow him down at least?"


"No," Lisa responded. "He'd just burrow underground to avoid them and start killing from beneath the earth. Fighting us in person is... more like a polite formality than anything. He certainly doesn't need to do it."


"So what do we do?" Vicky asked. "Let him go on his killing spree across China until he gets bored and takes a nap? Then kill him after he's calmed down a little?"


"That's exactly what we have to do," Lisa responded. "There are no other possibilities."


The visual display flickered again, and then fuzzed into near nothing. "What happened? Another reality weapon?" Taylor asked.


"Close," Trevor answered. "According to Dragon's tech, her satellites have gone dark as well. It's Scion. He's finally showed up."


"I hate to say this," I spoke up. "But that's good, in a twisted sort of way. The fuckers run from Scion, right? He'll go back into hibernation before killing most of China. Hell, maybe he won't run. Maybe he'll fight back and at least do some damage to Scion."


"We'll have to find out later," Lisa replied. "Whatever else happens, there's nothing more we can do here. Pack it up, head home, and hope like hell he didn't see us watching the battle from this side. The idea of him knowing where to find our dimension worries me.


===========

A/N- And, sometimes, no matter how far off the rails you go, you intersect canon.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 219


Thankfully, China's city killer weapon was designed to be transportable by convoy truck. Ultralisks were more than capable of doing the lifting needed, and with Missy there to do the work, it only took us a fairly short amount of time to put the devices in our storage location. Our Tinkers were quite excited to work with the devices, of course. Or, at least, Emma and Trevor were. At the very least, they were going to talk with Dragon about tech trading. Not really Riley or Rey's specialty. I, meanwhile, was simply in shock. We watched them murder a city.


"Why'd they do it?" I asked as we finally got into our home. I could have asked sooner, but somehow I had to wait until we were inside a familiar setting. Lisa just looked away. She had an answer, she just didn't want to say it.


"Reputation," Eric volunteered. "My father's like that, too. If someone outstaged him, he had to find a way to outstage them right back. You can't run a gang without being the scariest fucker on the block."


"Sounds about right," Theo nodded. "It's about power and image. We killed an Endbringer. They had to kill one or they would look weaker than us."


"They are weaker than us," Victoria replied. "When we kill Endbringers, they actually die. Behemoth lived through their attack."


"They got what they wanted," Lisa informed us. "Behemoth was destroyed."


"Not by them," Vicky retorted.


"The story they tell is quite different," she sighed, holding up her smartphone. "Heroic sacrifice, yadda yadda, shield yadda yadda, prevented Behemoth from destroying China the way the Simurgh did India, more yadda yadda. Victory for the CUI, and proof of the Mandate of Heaven, or whatever bullshit propoganda they're using this week. Doesn't matter what the truth is, they only have to fool their own people. Imperial China has won its internal PR war." DisgustHate.


"By killing millions of their own?" I voiced the outrage all of us were feeling. "They didn't even let the ones who could escape get out. They were gunning them down like they were already dead."


"I wish I could say it was even something so callous as removing witnesses," Lisa replied. "This was... fuck, I guess it's analogy time. Did you know grenades aren't designed to kill people?"


"No," I admitted.


"I do, ma'am," Theo simply closed his eyes and put an arm around a very upset looking Missy. "We can leave, if you want," he offered her.


"No, I need to hear this," she answered. "I want to know why."


"I know it sounds counter intuitive," Lisa continued. "Until you start thinking economics." DreadDisgust. "A dead soldier costs the enemy a patch of dirt and a gravestone. A wounded soldier costs hospital beds, doctors, food and money. It's functionally the same thing here. A good chunk of the city was destroyed, along with all its residents. Now they'll build a monument to all the dead in its place. If the people had escaped, there'd be refugee camps and aiding the homeless. Or, maybe they wouldn't, and they'd just tell the refugees to suck it up. But that would still be disruptive and remind their people that this so called victory of theirs had victims instead of heroic sacrifices. Easier just to let everyone pretend this is a happy occasion."


"That's beyond fucked up," Zach replied. "Can they really do that?"


"Already did," Lisa answered. "In the time it's taken us to get home, their royal family has already declared it a national holiday. Something which, I remind you, no one did after the Simurgh's death. We mourned the lives lost in India as one of the greatest tragedies in human history. China celebrates its dead as heroes, and brags that its forward thinking prevented the damage from being worse. Welcome to propaganda."


"Fuck," I cursed.


"It's not all bad," Lisa replied. "Thanks to this being such a 'great victory', it means they have to stay silent about anything that disproves that claim. They're not going to say anything about the stolen tinker tech. At least as long as we don't say anything about their little mass murder spree, they won't be able to officially complain about us walking away with their doomsday weapon."


"So, basically, we're looking at the glass as half full," Zach replied. He waited a beat. "While ignoring the part where the liquid inside is cat piss concentrate. Know what? Fuck it. I'm done. If you need me, I'm going to be online finding a shooter game that involves mowing my way through a Chinese army. Killing Nazi zombies just isn't going to cut it for me anymore."


"Aww," Riley whined. "I worked so hard on that Christmas surprise, too." AnxiousHorror. We all went silent and looked toward the girl. Every last one of us. She looked at our expressions. "What?" she asked.


"Don't worry," Lisa cut in. "She was just telling a joke." The rest of us breathed a collective sigh of relief.


....


"No, dad, we didn't even do anything," Taylor spoke into the phone. "We geared up before finding out he was going after China. They refused to let us help. Sat around and waited to see if they'd change their minds. Not much we could do without starting World War Three. No, they don't. Scion did it. I think he always could. I don't know why he didn't. Hard to figure out a guy who doesn't speak and spends as much time rescuing kittens from trees as he does stopping volcanoes. Sorry our dinner went to waste." MisgivingReluctantHappy. "Oh, well that's good. I'm just going to stay here tonight, I thought you wouldn't mind. Sounds good. Love you too."


She sighed after hanging up the phone. "How is it that I lie to my dad more now than before he knew I was a cape?" She sat down on 'her side' of the bed.


"Welcome to international politics, I guess," I turned and crawled up behind her.


"Know what sucks the most?" she muttered as I brushed her rather abundant hair off to the side. "This feels like something Piggot would do. Like we're leaving the victims to suffer because the abuser's more useful to us than they are."


"We're not," I insisted. Taylor let out a light moan as I pressed the balls of my thumbs into her back. "It's more like a hostage situation. If we go in now, it's going to hurt a lot of innocent people. Unacceptable amounts of them. China still has almost a billion people in it, and they'll all suffer if we attack the CUI."


"And we have 'more important' monsters to go after," Taylor sighed. "Scion takes priority. Fucking moral arithmetic."


"Even you can't be everywhere and do everything," I offered.


"I probably cou-," she gasped as I sent a pulse of my power through her body, lightly stimulating her entire nervous system. "That's cheating," she finally managed to form words. "That is so not fair."


"Hey, you're the one who used her doppleganger," I pointed out. "You don't get to complain when I use my powers." I pressed my elbow against a spot on her lower back that my power kindly informed me was a prime location. I smiled as she moaned softly.


"I didn't hear you complaining," she replied, pushing her back against me in a way vaguely reminiscent of a cat. For the briefest second, that caused me to freeze up. Her body was so absurdly strong and flawless, reminding me that she was the copy, not the original. I crushed that thought immediately. She's still Taylor.


"I don't hear you complaining either," I countered, hitting her with another pulse that caused her to slump back against me.


"Why would I?" she asked happily. "Oh, by the way, your Aunt Sarah says hi."


"When did you ta-" I hesitated for a second. "Oh. You mean?"


"Yup," Taylor answered. "They apparently decided that it would be wrong to let dinner be wasted. And then she stayed over."


"Eww," I responded.


"I know," she agreed, still leaning up against me. I allowed myself a look down her shirt when she did. AmusedPleasedConfident. "So I'm staying here tonight."


"I should charge you rent," I teased.


"You still owe for that house I got you," she argued.


"Okay," I agreed. "So we're even. Are you feeling better?"


"A little," she replied.


"Good," I scooted a bit away from her and rolled face down over on my side. "My turn."


=======================

A/N- mood whiplash! I never tire of it.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 220


"Hey, Ames," Vicky spoke as she walked into my brand new office. Yes, I have an office now, instead of just remodeling my bedroom. Once upon a time, that bedroom had been an office that I just created a bed in when I chose not to go home to sleep. At this point, it had been months since I even set foot in that house. Time to give up and simply admit I live at my job. "Your birthday's in May. So why are you celebrating it in the middle of November? Are you in that big a hurry to turn eighteen? Because we can have a perfectly ordinary party, if you're bored."


I hesitated for a moment. She's not going to like this one, I thought to myself. Sorry, Vicky, but I promised myself this when I took my birth name. "It's my real birthday," I told her. "Or my real birth month, at least. Apparently finding out who my birth mother was still isn't an option. And it's looking more and more like my father renamed me after getting me, so nuts to having an identifiable birth certificate."


"And what's wrong with you being Amy Dallon?" Vicky argued, staring me down. "I get that you were pissed at mom. I even get why. But this is like you're saying you don't want to be my sister."


Ouch. "That's not..." I sighed. "That's not what it's about. It's about being me, instead of what other people try to force me to be. I stopped pretending to be Amy Dallon because I wasn't happy. I've found who I am now, who I want to be."


"So you don't want to be my sister," she pressed.


"No!" I repled. "I do. I just... honestly, I want to be your sister now more than I did... before." I looked away.


"Oh, right," she muttered. "I kinda try not to think about that."


I cringed. "I spent the last three and a half years of my life trying not to think about it." At least it's comforting how I don't really find her attractive anymore. Lisa said it was because her aura warped my memory of her. What she really looks like is really very different than what my mind saw. Rose colored glasses, superpowers edition. "You can understand why I'd like to put that part of my life behind me."


"So you'd rather be Marquis' daughter than Mom's?" she asked.


"If you asked me that a few months ago, I would have said 'fuck yes'," I told her. "Now? Yes, as a matter of fact, I think I would have. I still have some memories of what my life was like. Before. They're happy memories. Whatever Marquis might have been, he was a caring father. I'd like to think that, maybe, we'd have a relationship a little like Taylor and her dad. Fuck, even now Danny treats me more like a daughter than either of them did for the whole ten years of my life I spent with them."


"Except the part where he was a supervillain," she argued. "Probably would have turned out more like Eric or Theo and their fathers. Is that the kind of parental relationship you'd rather have?"


"Maybe," I shrugged. "But at least there's a chance. Maybe he would have cared about me. Maybe I wouldn't have been treated like a ticking time bomb or completely ignored or... everything else. You can't blame me for choosing 'maybe okay' over 'guaranteed suck', can you?"


"Was it really all bad?" she asked. I almost backed out then. SupportLove. I drew on my link with Taylor. This was a long time coming, and I'm not going to chicken out of it yet again just to spare Vicky's feelings.


"Other than you?" I replied. "It really kinda was. Sure, it was all first world problems. I wasn't starved or sold into slavery or beaten or molested, so there are plenty of people who've lived through a lot fucking worse. But I was raised to by a father who couldn't love me and a mother that didn't even pretend not to hate me. Parents I desperately tried to earn some kind of approval from for years and at best got indifference. Yeah, I know they're both trying to make up for it now, and I'm even trying to let them. You should thank Taylor for that, by the way, because she's the only reason I didn't tell Mom to get fucked by Behemoth."


"I... that mindlink between the two of you?" she asked. "You're using it right now, aren't you?"


"Yes," I admitted.


"Is that healthy?" she asked.


I paused for a second, thinking back to what I was like before the link. What Taylor was like. What we were like when we went without it. What happened to Taylor, especially. ConcernInsecurityLoss. I focused back on the link. Don't worry, Taylor, never again. She probably got something closer to comfort and certainty. It was still hard for us to communicate more than the simplest ideas through the link.


"Is it healthy for Eric to be Eric instead of Arianna?" I asked. It may have been a deflection, but it was an analogy I could work with as well. "I'm sure there are people out there with really good arguments why it's not. And ones with equally good arguments why it is. He's happy how he is, and he'd be miserable if I, for whatever reason, decided that what he was asking for was wrong. He gets to live the life he wants, now. So do Taylor and I." AgreementCertaintyLove.


"Well, aside the Endbringers and Despotisms and Space Whales," I added. "But we're kinda stuck with those."


She stood there, chewing over my answer. Or, more likely, trying to find an argument against it. "I kinda hate how much smarter you are than me, sometimes," she finally answered. "This philosophy shit isn't my thing, so I can't really say anything without looking stupid or like a complete bitch."


"Yeah, well, Lisa's tried her best to talk us out of it, too," I smirked. "She finally gave up." After Taylor's death and her own Second Trigger. "If it makes you feel any better, we don't leave the link on constantly. It basically turns off when one of us falls asleep. We also have cutoffs that we can can use to deactivate it temporarily. Like when we're going to the bathroom. We don't have a lot of privacy between us, but there are limits."


"Yeah, I get the idea," Vicky scrunched her face in what I had to assume was exaggerated disgust. "So... yeah... you'd rather be Amelia."


"That doesn't mean I don't want you to be my sister!" I exclaimed. "You have to believe that."


"I know. Lie detector, remember?" she tapped the side of your head. "Sure, your link messes with the emotion part of the bioscan some, but I'm pretty sure you can't actually get a lie through."


"Umm, I've always kinda wondered, what does that look like?" I started. "You know... Taylia... how our emotions look to an outsider. Call it my birthday present."


"Well, okay," she sighed. "The first thing is that the two of you don't get angry. Or, not as angry as you should. Whenever anything really starts to get to you, it's quickly replaced by a sort of... intensity... kinda like when my power starts running and telling me what to do to kill something."


"That one's mostly Taylor," I replied. "She's really big on taking action when something looks bad. Kinda like you, honestly. Whenever you get mad, you turn it toward something productive. Like punching Nazis." I wonder if that's part of why I was attracted to her in the first place. That and the legs. Oh, yes, the legs.


"Well, I do love punching me some Nazis," she agreed with a smile. "You also never stay sad for very long. Like, at all. I get the feeling that if I stormed out of here in anger and swore never to talk to you again, you'd be over it in, like, a day or two. And that might be my ego refusing to let me admit you could get over it sooner."


"You're my sister and I love you." I insisted. " I couldn't just forget about you like that. We put so much time and effort into saving you in the first place."


"Believe me, I'm glad you did," she replied. "But it's... fuck, after Behemoth was destroyed, you and Taylor retreated to your bedroom and by morning you were fine. Not even pretending to be fine. You were both honestly over the whole thing."


"We're not over it," I insisted. DisgustDetermination. "We're still going to make them pay for what they've done."


"I know," she replied. "But then look at everyone else. Missy spent some time crying on Theo's shoulder. Lily and Sabah went straight to one of their bedrooms, and I'm pretty sure they skipped their usual nightly routine of wild sex followed by one or the other stumbling back to their apartment next door because for whatever reason they refuse to actually move in together." Yeah, I still wasn't sure what the story was with that, myself.

Victoria continued running down her list. "Zach and Emma both got themselves banned from PHO. Granted, that happens like once every other week anyway, but they really went all out this time. Eric decided to go after the punching bag until his hands bled."


I remembered that, of course. "He said he just needed to work out some frustration and went overboard," I told her.


"Yeah, doesn't surprise me, he's really hung up on that whole 'real men don't show weakness' shit," she replied. "And I got to lay in bed all night cuddling Riley while she whimpered in her sleep. And the next three nights I spent sparring with Zach and Emma and Crystal and Eric while Riley stayed with you. The only person who didn't seem bothered by all this is Lisa. I'm pretty sure she's decided there's exactly one person on this planet that she actually cares about, and it's not the eight or nine million Chinese who died."


ConcernSurprise. "Wow... I didn't realize... are we really that oblivious?"


"Kinda," Vicky answered. "You two get so caught up in the grand mission and each other that there's not a lot of space in those noggins of yours to notice everything else going on around you." RealizationWorryFailure.


"Pot calling the kettle black here, sis," I retorted.


"Hey, I'd be doing the same thing if I could," she argued. "But there aren't any more Nazis left to punch, and there aren't any heterosexual life partners for me to cuddle with in our underwear. Don't say Lisa, because there's literally no one worse."


"What? You prefer Riley?" I teased.


"Okay, I was wrong."


==============

A/N- Yeah, I know the formatting got borked in the last bit. Fixed now.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 221


"Surprise!" Riley shouted as I followed Vicky into the main area.


"Hey, Mushroom," Zach stage whispered. "It's not a surprise party."


"So what?" she asked. "It's fun."


"Well, can't argue with that logic," he agreed. "So, what's first? Cake, icecream or presents. Just remember to unwrap Taylor last." AmusementAnnoyance.


"Don't you mea..." I stopped for a second. "No, of course you don't." Of course, it did invoke a thought or two. PleasedProud.


"Oww!" Zach exclaimed, looking over at Riley, who had given him a good jab in the sides. She really dug into his rib with that one.


"No, we gotta talk serious for a minute," I insisted. "I've just found out I suck at considering other peoples' feelings. Like really, really bad."


"To be fair, most of us do," Vicky responded. "We're allowed to. It's called being a teenager. Pretty much on the front page of the user manual. I can see feelings and I still suck at it most of the time. You can ask anyone."


"Yeah, took us two hours to get her to understand that some of us actually have to work to keep our figures, and that means we have to eat something other than pizza once in a while."

"You mean there are things other than pizza that you can eat?" Zach cut in. "What is this strange idea that you speak of?"

"He acts like he's joking, but he's really quite serious," Emma added. "Takes him half an hour to figure out how to make a sandwhich. Which isn't half as long as I'll make him suffer if he makes the obvious joke." She growled the last few word at him.


"Yes, mistress," he fake whimpered. "Please don't hurt me again."


"All joking aside," I insisted. "I mean it. We kinda get caught up in the, well, everything. No need to go over all the shit we have to worry about. I'm trying not to murder the party completely. So, yeah, I was saying. We get distracted by all the huge shit and start to ignore some stuff. Like how sometimes we have to do things that upset some of you. And that's the kind of thing we can't afford to ignore. You're important. Not just because of your powers, but because you're my friends. Except maybe you, Lisa. Depends on how much shit you'll give me for saying that. And Rey... maybe I should worry about him some more, too?"


"Don't worry on either account," Lisa replied. "It's your birthday, you're entitled to exactly one soppy speech without me using it against you. But only one, everything else will be used against you. As for Rey, I don't think you have to worry. Except maybe that he's having way too much fun at his job, especially with the new Endbringer tissue. I'm more than half expecting to walk in on him hugging the samples and telling them how much daddy loves them."


AmusementConcern. "I'll... umm... try to keep a better eye on him," Taylor offered.


"Don't worry about it," Trevor replied. "I think he's finally discovered his real specialty."


"His specialty is Endbringers?" Zach exclaimed.


"More like artificial life," he responded. "Yeah, I know, not news. But they confirm his skills aren't just for things that we know of a life. He can work with inorganic things like Endbringer tissue. And probably a number of other things. Doesn't get much more alien than Endbringer. Maybe some of the weirder Case 53s."


"Okay, so that's him out of the way," I agreed. "Let's get to everyone else. I'm sorry things went so badly in Chongqing."


"Not your fault," Crystal insisted. "There's no good way to handle that shit. We should just be glad Scion wiped Behemoth before it could go on a complete rampage. At least now we know more about how they think, and what we have to do to kill them. Like making damn sure we do it on the first hit."


"Thanks," I smiled. "I just want you to know that, as completely dense as I can be, it's not because I don't care. I'm just busy and... fuck, how is it that my life was less complicated when we were planning to overthrow the PRT? There's just so much to worry about now. I just want you to know that if you have any problems, you're free to bring them up with me any time."


"You heard it here first, folks," Zach announced. "Amelia just gave us all permission to walk in and have a chat with her when she and Taylor are in mid c- Oww god dammt!" Emma and Riley jabbed his ribs, and Vicky zapped him in the face. "I was going to say cuddle time!"


"Holy shit, he's telling the truth," Vicky informed us.


"See, told you!" he insisted.


"But only because you figured someone would interrupt him so you could say that," she added, doing her best 'mom' impersonation.


"That? You can really tell that?" Zach asked, and Vicky simply nodded. "Okay, that's it, your power is completely unfairly bullshit."


"Says the guy who even my power can't figure out how to kill," she muttered. "So, is all the heavy shit done? Can we get to the gifts? Or the cake. Or how about gifts made out of cake? One of you can tinker that up, right?"


"Okay, Vicky, what's your gift?"


"Crystal and I got this one together," she announced.


"We may have let Eric help," Crystal added. "Someone needed to carry the bags."


"It's not like I know what you like," he shrugged. "And they seemed to know what they were doing."


"We got you your entire winter wardrobe update!" Vicky announced. "The miracles of weird ass thinker powers, I can just envision you in each outfit so you don't even need to be there, they'll all fit perfectly and look awesome."


"She did the fitting, I did the awesome," Crystal added. "When you pulled her out of stasis, you left her fashion sense behind."


"Don't look at me," Eric replied. "I have less than zero fashion sense. I'm still wearing the same clothes I did in highschool."


"Okay, where are they?" I sighed. Damn Vicky and her damn shopping.


"Your closet," she informed me. "We knew you would just keep using your old clothes, so we replaced everything for you. Now you have no choice but to look good. So give up and deal with it."


"Thanks," I replied dryly.


"Emma and I got you one together," Riley smiled, holding out a box. I opened it, and a large parakeet with a gorgeous green coloration hopped out onto my hand. It didn't seem upset to have been in a box. "It' a songbird," Riley informed us. "It's designed to be the perfect singer."


"It's Yggdrasil based, of course," Emma informed. "About a terrabyte worth of memory storage for plenty of storage space, and it has hundreds of songbird types it can sing, either in imitation of actual birdcalls, or simply singing along to whatever music it's playing."


Meanwhile the construct had hopped its way up my arm, and was nuzzling my ear. I reached up and rubbed its back, which it seemed to enjoy.


"Also, it's pretty much made of adorable," Emma finished up.


"Me next," Zach declared, holding up box that could have held clothes. He handed it over and I nearly dropped it for the weight. I peeled off wrapping paper of some cartoon character I didn't recognize, and looked at the contents.


"Massage oils?" I asked.


"Hey, those are the high quality kind," he replied.


"Okay, this was actually surprisingly thoughtful," I admitted.


"There's another box in there, too," he added. "Edible massage oils. Y'know, just in case." I simply handed the box over to Taylor. AmusedIndignation. "Okay, you got me," I admitted. "I didn't see that coming."


Theo gave me a remarkably well sculpted model of a tree. He is getting really good with his powers, I noted.


Missy's was next. "It's a collection of extra music for your songbird. And instructions on how to use it since tinkers don't know what user documentation is." The bird chirped happily at Missy.


"I made you a nightgown," Sabah offered hers next. "It's some of the finer spider silk. There are no words for how comfortable that stuff is."


"More music," Lily shrugged. "Sorry, I don't have one of those cool making things powers. But then I got to thinking about that bird and wondering what it can do. Everyone else kept picking out soft rock, so I got you some good metal, just for variety's sake. Also, it's kind of hilarious watching that little thing go."


We were down to just Trevor and Lisa, and Lisa simply smiled and waved in his direction. It was a smaller box. A couple long boxes, I realized as I opened the wrapping. "They're a matching pair, for you and Taylor." I opened it and lifted the silver chain. It had a lovely rendition of the globe on it. I found the other was shaped like a scarab beetle, wings open.


"They're meant to lock together," he informed us. Taylor and I fiddled with it for a little bit before figuring it out, but he was right. The final product had the beetle sitting on the globe and shielding it with the wings.


"It's beautiful," I replied. I meant it, too. The artist who created this was a genius.


"And the best for last," Lisa announced, holding up an envelope and handing it over. "Don't worry about all the words. It's really quite simple. The UN's finally agreed to everything. You're holding official recognition. Pantheon is now its own sovereign state, with recognized domain by the majority of our world's nations." SurpriseAwe. "Congrats you two, you can call yourselves the Queens or Empresses or whatever you like of your own planet sized country. And the magic tree house is now, officially, a magic tree Embassy."


"Holy fuck," I muttered.


=============

A/N- Woo, birthdays! And recognizing a bunch of kids as a sovereign power.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 222


"Accord and Dragon have already done the heavy lifting," Lisa replied as we sat down to our first real development meeting. "There's about twenty seven hours of technical reading, but Dragon will be kind enough to summarize all our plans." Lisa pressed the button that activated our meeting. Multiple holograms popped up. Dragon, Accord, Rapture and Halo. Why's he here for this one? For our part, only myself, Taylor and Lisa and Emma were here for this one. Due to her multidiscipline tinker specialty, she was functionally our tech advisor for this meeting.


"Good morning, Pantheon," Dragon acknowledged. "Esteemed guests. We are here to discuss the management of the newly established nation-world. Pantheon has, of course, been acknowledged as the rulers of an interim government presiding over their earth Avalon. This meeting is an unofficial discussion of the intended management of that world, both in the nature of its laws, and the nature of its role in the international, and soon to be interplanetary, community. I would remind those present that this is unofficial. Any suggestions and agreements made here today are, as such, also unofficial and nonbinding."


We all nodded in understanding. This was too massive to just decide in a single day. We'd need to hire legal experts and god only knows what others to get everything smoothed out perfectly. On the other hand, we had the world's ultimate think tank here. Details would be handled over time, but the broad strokes would be established here. If, as Dragon put it, unofficially.


"Accord has drawn up an excellent development model for the effort of Avalon's industrialization," Lisa announced first. "I apologize for being unable to review it fully before this meeting, but as always the plan is brilliant. We can basically just hand a copy to the city government and walk away. I appreciate the extra effort put into creating a model which does not take parahuman involvement into account, beyond the ever present Yggdrasil."


"You're welcome," Accord replied, sounding about as happy as I've ever heard him. Which was still about the same as a slightly annoyed Carol. "I felt it was necessary to recognize that not all locations would have access to appropriate parahuman resources. The intent was to allow natural development to occur at a rapid but stable pace on its own."


"Industrial resources, we can supply," Emma replied next. "In what is a gross waste of our tinker talents, we've designed a series of organisms that can provide basically any form of oil or gas product. I won't go into too much detail, but suffice it to say a couple thousand square miles of Yggdrasil dedicated to the process, and properly supplied by solar energy surrounding the region and garbage for mass, could provide pretty much all the crude oil consumption needs of Earth Bet. We will be able to get even more efficiency once we switch to biodiesel, but we'd still have need for petroleum for plastics and the like, so the designs will continue to have value."


"Also a good way to keep the country funded," Lisa added. "The US and UN have made it abundantly clear that any attempt to get into the oil industry on Bet world would result in some problems, but on our own world? Well, if we're charging for gas, we probably won't even need taxes to pay for anything. Or at least very little for a long time. Plus or minus rent."


"I would be willing to purchase fuels for a number of my projects," Dragon offered. "I prefer not to get political, but there is an appeal in not giving my money to oil companies."


"Of course, there is the issue of money and economy," Lisa added. "Accord has drawn up points in that regard as well. As a nation functionally lacking in 'fiat' wealth, we have to back our economy on reality as opposed to perception. Having a reliable trade partner helps. We can also count land ownership as a pretty strong basic wealth, but that will have less appeal as there's not a lack of places to live."


"I've already created a system for specialized Yggdrasil that will merge into the normal replace the old with new features and structures," I replied. "Food will be unlimited. I can create versions that become roads or grow into small houses. Nearly instant small communities. Bigger ones will need metals and construction materials, of course."


"With my help, that likely won't be an issue," Dragon offered. "I have need of a larger manufacturing base than Bet can currently provide me. You have already generously provided a region for me to work with, and I would continue to do so. In the process, I'd hire my own people and purchase my own construction equipment and transport it to Avalon. Once my needs are fully met, I could provide a seed from which other development companies could start and expand. In fact, I would like to invest in those companies, myself. Your world currently has a great deal of untapped exploitable resources. Once your industrial age begins, it won't take long to reach modern development status. Albeit with a significantly lower population than most industrial nations."


"Which brings us to finding colonists," I stated. We'd all given this a great deal of thought, after all. "Atropos made an interesting suggestion the other day. We can, essentially, recruit Japan." ConfusionInterest. I smiled. "She said her parents are immigrants, came over before Kyushu. Japanese culture is strongly focused on family and heritage, and the collapse of their country into third world status is understandably heartbreaking to them. She suggested we could give Avalon's Japan to Bet's Japan, with similar governing concessions that they've already had with America since after World War Two. It might take some convincing, but she really thinks it could work. And there's always refugees from elsewhere."


"That would be a significant head start," Lisa agreed. "We can even do better since our governing system would give them worldwide influence. A lot of it considering they could instantly become the most populous region on the planet. It also brings us into governing as a whole. Dragon's provided us an excellent design that I could only call a 'Constitutional Federal Monarchy'. She's probably better equipped to explain."


"Yes," Dragon responded. "It would function fairly similarly to the British Empire at the height of its power, with a various local governments working alongside a powerful but distant monarchy. You would provide the monarchy, and with it the military aspect of your world."


"At the representative level, the government is not that different from American states," Lisa added. "They assign their own chosen leaders to be, functionally, our own brand of Congress and Senate. Though who they select is more the way governments send people to represent them in the United Nations. Just like the states, they'll be their own countries, but you wouldn't know it by looking at them. It's an ideal hybrid of independence and interdependence. And takes care of most of the effort of managing a planet from us."


"That sounds pretty good," I agreed. It really does. Totalitarian government, even benign totalitarian government, wasn't something I wanted to be a part of. Controlling the military was fine, if only because I didn't want anyone else controlling it. I had memories of the PRT and fucking China to teach me why putting that power in the hands of people was unacceptably frightening.


"As for us?" Lisa continued. "We're the military branch. Police, too. We have less power than, say, the US President. Bit of veto power, but our legal systems pretty automated thanks to the contributions of what's going to be an extremely powerful judicial system, compared to the USA. Be sure to thank Rapture and Emma for this baby."


Oh boy. "Yes," Rapture spoke. "We've developed a mass production system for what are, essentially, perfect lie detectors." SurpriseAnticipation. "In essense, your legal system will never be held back by the need to consider whether a criminal is actually guilty or not. With exception to parahumans who might have resistance to the tech through any number of possible methods. They'll be considerably more difficult to handle, but are fairly rare."


"As such," Dragon responded. "Law will focus on determining the extent of punishments appropriate for particular crimes. A less costly and more streamlined affair. It will provide equal protection thanks to unbiased, AI systems. Although determining a punishment for a given crime will be handled by jury, guilt itself can never be in doubt and no agency will be able to cover up a crime's occurance. Although investigative work will likely still be needed to find criminals quickly, citizens will be required to regularly submit to an automated interview to catch people whose crimes have gone unnoticed."


"That... that's insane," Taylor spoke. "A system that can honestly protect everyone equally." Her emotions were complex and hard to parse, combining mixtures of anger, regret, frustration, hope and vindication. She must be thinking of what might have happened for her if she had been able to rely upon such a system.


"You'd have to rewrite at least three amendments to make it happen in the US," Lisa smirked. "Also it'll be a while before we have the infrastructure to really produce judges, juries and overall legal systems. So here's hoping the other incentives keep people away from being criminals for a while."


"There's an entire section in here regarding the legal rights applying to, and I quote 'unnaturally created, modified, nonhuman and otherwise unusual sapient beings'?" Halo spoke up.


"Yes," I answered. "In addition to the various forms of Case 53s, there is the fact that my sister's currently in a body she wasn't born with. There's been a few years for the law to catch up to stuff like that, but at this moment you could argue that she's not entitled to legal recognition under US law. And there's the possibility of AIs, or a power like mine in the hands of someone who'd actually use it that way."


"Fair enough," he replied. "While we're on the subject of legal rights, your stance on religious freedom?"


"Similar to America," I answered.


"Even if we wanted to take a different approach, we really couldn't," Lisa replied. "We will enforce strictly protected equal rights for everyone, and beyond that we're just going to leave it to our individual nations. In fact, the brilliant part of this system is we can do that with almost everything. Our function here is basically the same as on Bet. We exist to eliminate problems and make sure others don't want to become problems."


============

A/N- Isn't it lovely when a plan comes together? And makes a world.

 

[Hexed999]

PHO Omake


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■
♦Topic: A New World? (LOCKED)
In: Boards ► Theories ► Conspiracy ► World ► Pantheon
Acolyte (Original Poster) (Cape Groupie) (Pantheon Loyalist)
Posted on October 12, 2011:
Early August/Late July Pantheon began utilizing a new form of teleportation technology. Intially it seemed to be just like any other, except for the fact that there appeared to be no limit to how much they could transport and how far it could go. On August 15th they transported a massive army that no one had seen before from a unknown location and then saved the lives of several capes by teleporting them to an unknown location, saving them from the Simurgh's final strike.
Like everything Pantheon does, their teleportation devices are shrouded in mystery. Where did they store their army of beasts? Where did Minerva and Chariot take the capes they saved and why did they return to New Dehli?
I've heard rumors from the tinker community that Pantheon's devices are immune to regular anti-telepotation countermeasures. One tinker got his hands on one of their devices and made a post claiming it was closer to Haywire's technology then a teleporter. The post was deleted and no one's heard from him since.
And now closed door meetings are being held across in the highest levels of government. Meetings on everything from colinization plans to Interdimensional politics to the sovereignty of a Parahuman State.
It is clear that Pantheon has discovered a new world and remade it in their image and our Overlords are doing their best to get a slice of the pie. The only question is what do we do?
I for one will be immigrating to Pantheon's world at the first available opertunity. The chance to escape our oppressors and enter Pantheon's loving embrace shoudl not be passed over.
THIS THREAD HAS BEEN LOCKED, ANY POSTS MADE HERE WILL BE DELETED IMMEDIATELY AND THE POSTER WILL BE BANNED FOR ONE DAY

(Showing Page 30 of 31)

► Judge (Moderator)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Pantheon has done nothing but protect and aid people and has proven essential to preserving our rights and freedoms, including developing a extremely effective anti-master drug. The claim that they are intending to take over and "put the people with real power in charge" is extremely offensive and completely unfounded. Enjoy your ban.
► Zero Sum
Replied on October 16, 2011:
You clearly haven't seen Pantheon in action. If they wanted control of BB, or the New England for that matter, they would have it.
► Judge (Moderator)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Not helping
► Stone Face
Replied on October 16, 2011:
This is all very interesting but can we get back to the topic at hand? All evidence that Pantheon has access to an alternate universe is both flimsy and circumstantial. While I'm not putting anything past them I'd like to see some hard evidence before I assume they have a spare world.
► Acolyte (Original Poster) (Cape Groupie) (Pantheon Loyalist)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Just like a shill, to deny the evidence that is right in front of you. Pantheon is more powerful then they let on and the government is trying to cover it up so you don't realize that there's a better option then letting them grind you into the dirt.
► Acolyte (Original Poster) (Cape Groupie) (Pantheon Loyalist)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Just like a shill, to deny the evidence that is right in front of you. Pantheon is more powerful then they let on and the government is trying to cover it up so you don't realize that there's a better option then letting them grind you into the dirt.
*User as recieved an infraction for this post*
► Judge (Moderator)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're a shill
► Chrome
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Yes, because a bunch of teenagers who think they're gods are a way better option then our rightfully elected leaders.
► Acolyte (Original Poster) (Cape Groupie) (Pantheon Loyalist)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
If you think we actually have a say in who gets elected then you're dumber then I thought.
► Chrome
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Says the guy whose too dumb to avoid double posting. If we're not choosing who gets elected, who is? The lizard people? Giant alien space whales? Democracy is a tried and tested method that protects us from one that one person with power who wants to screw us over. History has shown us that every time power is handed to one person they go mad with it. And that's without Big Sister seeing your every move through her creepy bugs. Pantheon has too much power as is and sooner or later they're going to decide that they need more for the "greater good". They need to be restrained now, before it's too late.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 28, 29, 30, 31
(Showing Page 31 of 31)

► Newter (Verified Cape)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Man I wish I was the secret power behind the government, that would be awesome
► Stone Face
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Man where the hell did Judge go? This is getting bad, fast.
► Acolyte (Original Poster) (Cape Groupie) (Pantheon Loyalist)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Maybe Pantheon should seize power, they've certainly shown that they have the ability to get things done. I bet that if they took over we'd be looking at cleaner cities, less crime and a fuckload of dead Endbringers. They're certainly more suited for the task then anyone you voted for
► Chrome
Replied on October 16, 2011:
And what are you going to do when they decide that regualr humans aren't good enough for their new and better future? Just shug and submit to modification? Pantheon has shown time and time again that the're willing to pervert nature to complete their goals. Right now they're sticking to big emergencies but what happens when they kill the last S-Class threat? They'll look for other ways to imporve things and decide that humans would be better if they were a little less human. They've already started experiments with Acesco. And what about behaviour modification? Do you think Blasto and Accord just gave up crime because Pantheon asked them to? Why would they imprison criminals when they can "reeducate" them? I guess you think free will's overrated.
► Ekul (Banned)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
*Your post has been deleted, you are not a member of the PRT, you haven't killed 300 C.U.I. agents and the tech guys assure me you can't trace anyone's IP. This is the fifth time you've attempted to derail a thread with this stupid, violent rant of yours despite our warnings and temp bans. You are no longer welcome on this site*
► Acolyte (Original Poster) (Temp-banned) (Cape Groupie) (Pantheon Loyalist)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
The day you get reeducated I'll fucking celebrate
► Chrome (Temp-banned)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
Ha, you'll probably sacrifice yourself to your "gods" before that ever happens
► Judge (Moderator)
Replied on October 16, 2011:
I step away from to computer to have dinner and come back to this. I'm giving you both a month and half to cool down and I'm locking this thread. The only people who know what Pantheon can do is Pantheon and the lot of you seem incapable of speculating civilly. 31 pages of this crap is more than enough.
End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 29, 30, 31



So this derailed far faster then I expected it would, apparently crazy and discussion just don't mix

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 223- Melanie


"So, how's Pantheon's toy treating you?" I asked Newter as he lounged in one of the private booths. Recently he'd been acting a little unusual, as evidenced by the lack of attractive girls who were often too young to purchase alcohol. He of course never did anything untoward to them, and in fact made them sign wavers before allowing them to recreationally try his drug. I was initially hesitant to allow him to do that at all, but he had proven discreet and it tended to draw in men wealthy enough to pay good money, and girls attractive enough to get wealthy men (or women) to pay good money.


Remarkably enough, it actually reduced the other recreational drugs making their way into my club. Or at least it did, before Pantheon put the kibosh on that market entirely. Every few weeks, some fucker would still bring some date rape drug in here. They were given the option of being taken out back, beaten by a couple of the bouncers, and then given to the police. Or taken out back and left for Khepri to deal with. I almost felt sorry for the bastards who chose option two. Almost.


"Oh, the usual," he answered, lounging back with his wine glass. I knew from experience that it wasn't wine. Likely a clear soda, possibly sparkling water. He always said it was a waste of good booze, since his powers meant he couldn't get intoxicated. "My IQ's gone up a few more points, I'd be in the top five percent of non-parahumans except," he gestured by spreading his arms and then bending his hands inwards. "My reaction speed and hand-eye coordination deserves its own thinker rating, with both hands. And I keep having those dreams about the mildew room."


"It's something, at least," I replied. Not long after Newter started the treatment, he began having the vivid lucid dreams about a room with a mildewy smell, but he couldn't see or hear or touch anything, he was simply in the dark with the smell. We asked Yum Kaax about that, and he said something about smell being the sense most strongly tied to memory. Nothing was certain.


"Everything we were promised and more," he agreed, with his usual cheer.


But not the one thing we were hoping for, I frowned. "Sounds like we should consider having all of us use it," I replied. We had tried it on Elle, but that failed to show results. Patheon's tinker theorized it was because her power caused the problem. The neural regeneration tech could repair any biological and even a lot of psychological disorders, but much like Case 53s regenerating their bodies back to their nonhuman state if someone like Gaea repairs them, the ones that altered the mind wouldn't allow that mind to be altered back. Elle could never be normal unless her power was removed.


"Couldn't hurt," he replied, then took another swallow of his drink. "Anyway, I'm feeling a bit peckish. Can you let the doorman know to expect a couple pizzas in an hour or so?"


"Will do," I agreed as I turned and left. It was an obvious dismissal, and I tried to respect my employees' wishes when it didn't interfere with the job. Newter wished to be left alone to gorge himself on junk food. We all had our ways of coping.


....


Elle was staring at the wall, slowly running her hand across it. As she did so, the Yggdrasil's dark teal coloration would shift, changing color and texture at random. Over the course of hours, it would fade back to its original color. Pantheon had given us a special house for her, and any of us, to stay in. Being alive, the Yggdrasil was resistant to alteration Elle's power. Not completely, for reasons no one quite understood, but it was enough that the girl could safely stay in this home without any risk to herself, us, or the property. Any damage caused by her power's 'friction' against unchanged Yggdrasil would regrow quickly.


Emily was attempting to feed the girl while she played. Mashed potatoes and peas. Something she could eat safely if she forgot to chew, which could happen on a bad day. Pantheon talked about permanent power removal, I reminded myself. Elle might be able to be restored to normal, at the cost of her powers. I pushed that thought back. We needed her, no one else could provide the dimensional gates. And those gates, the safe havens they represented, were what was going to give humanity a real hope for the future.


I didn't believe Pantheon could end the Endbringers. They got the Simurgh, somehow. Maybe they could even kill Leviathan and Behemoth, but Barghest was custom designed to beat Pantheon, that was obvious to everyone that was actually paying attention. All the replacements would be as well. The only real solution was to get off of Bet. Find worlds where there might be some hope in the future. If an Endbringer crosses into another dimension, seal it off and leave them trapped inside. It was a cruel sort of math. Sacrificing a world, maybe a million people, so that the rest of us could have a future. But it was our only real hope.


"Good morning, Elle," I said as tenderly as I could. She didn't respond at all, hadn't seemed to hear me at all. I hadn't expected that she would. I'm sorry, Elle, you have to be one of the sacrifices. As she absently swallowed her food, I examined her art. Crudely drawn, but angry seeming stick figures and faces. Some held objects that may have been sticks, or perhaps guns. Bars, cages and chains were strewn about. Strangely, those were done in disturbing detail, each link painstakingly drawn. Another aspect of the damage her power had done to her.


"So, Tattletale just called," I informed Emily. I don't care what she calls herself, she'll always be Tattletale to me. "Our negotiations are locked in and agreed upon. "There's still stupid arguments over where to establish portals, and the order of priority, and other shit that the talking heads won't finish until Christmas or the next Endbringer fight, whichever happens first. And then suddenly everything will be solved in a couple days and they'll all announce success and then go give each other congratulatory handj-" I remembered the little girl in the room. "shakes in the back room."


"I still don't know how you managed to negotiate pay of two million dollars a portal during an international mandate that the Sanctuary Initiative was a humanitarian aid project and to remain completely nonprofit," Emily smirked. "Seriously, are you sure you don't have a Master or Thinker power?"


"Simple," I answered. "I didn't negotiate for the portals. I negotiated for security."


"Security?" She asked. "Oooh, I think I get it. There's all kinds of dangerous people out there who might want to capture or kill the portal makers. You'll need to provide bodyguards and parahuman protection over us during the trip and the stay in hotels. You could probably make that a lot more expensive than a couple million a pop."


"Right on the money," I confirmed. "Plus or minus a few other details. I let them talk me down from three, just so they could feel like they won something. It's not like they won't profit from this. New land, new people, new taxes. It's only fair we get our part of the pie." And to ensure that Elle gets the best care for the rest of her life, we owe her so much more than that.


"Unlike Pantheon, we're not getting a shiny new planet of our own."


"Wait," she blinked. "They're asking for a planet!?" she stressed the last word hard enough that it even got Elle to glance over at her, though only for a second before she returned to her art.


"I bet it'll end up being more than one," I shrugged. "Remember how they were talking about Gaea's dead playground world when we did that first portal?"


"Yeah," her eyes widened. "That place was a wasteland. Like. A billion nuclear bombs level wasteland. They fixed it?"


"Yup," I answered. "Safe for humans. Or will be in a month or two. They're arguing that it's not private exploitation of a Sanctuary world, because their Avalon. That's what they named it, by the way. Could never have supported life without them."


"Think it'll work?" she asked.


"Oh, absolutely," I agreed. "They need it too much to say no. Besides, the experimental tunnel showed there are hundreds of habitable worlds without any humans. Selling something that was never theirs and they couldn't use anyway? Easiest price in the world to pay. It's the next two parts that are going to make them drag their feet, and that won't take much longer."


"Please dish," Emily leaned toward me, while Elle continued to work her art.


"First," I started. "Think about it. They've got one dead world. There are easily dozens of others in similar states. They can keep claiming those without making many waves. Maybe they'll make a token gesture and give away half their salvaged planets. By the time we run out of acceptable options, Pantheon will have five times as many worlds as their next two competitors combined."


"Shit," she agreed.


"Second," I finished. "They're not negotiating over the planet. That's a given. What they want is recognition from the international community that they are a country. In short, Pantheon's members are one rubber stamp away from being one of the most powerful nations on earth. Seems fair to me that we walk away from this with about thirty mil each, give or take."


"You're not getting paid enough," she informed me.


"I know."

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 224- Melanie


"I'm not getting paid nearly enough," I muttered. Atropos had finally arrived, in full costume, with a travel pack that was pretty much an oversized six legged suitcase. Literal legs, it trotted near her like an obedient dog. Along with her were three others. Eki and Victoria, I recognized. The young man that could have been Latino or Mediterranean in ancestry, I had never seen before. All were, of course, also in their armors.


"I dunno," the tall blond in front of me smirked. "I'd say you're making bank right now. Two mil a portal? All five of you? That's two hundred grand per job, and each job can be done in a few hours for basically no risk. No one ever paid me that kind of money. One guy did try to hire me for a job that paid almost as good a while ago. I inquired as to what company made such a generous offer, but for some reason he had come down with a sudden case of knocked the fuck out. Later we had a conversation but we got too busy talking about my family life. Like how my mother was just made a senior partner at her lawfirm, and how I planned to celebrate my seventeenth birthday. We forgot all about his job offer in the excitement."


"You're making all of that up," the remarkably good looking young man insisted. Now that he was closer, I noted his armor was one of the rather bland and generic battle armors that Pantheon mass produces for the Protectorate. He probably doesn't have an abusable power type, I decided.


"Nope, all true," Victoria smiled cheerfully. "I may have embellished a little bit at the end. The conversation was pretty one sided, seeing as his jaw was wired shut. Other than that, all true. But I digress. We were talking about Faultline's career, not mine." Is this girl taking notes from Tattletale? Or she could even be Tattletale. I knew who she was suppose to be, but a little bit of Blasto's cloning and some body shaping with their bullshit powers... couldn't rule out anything.


"Miss Dallon?" I asked, trying to get her attention focused, though I knew she was doing this on purpose.


"Wow," Vicky replied. "So you do remember me!"


"It's hard not to," I answered as noncommittally as possible. "Victoria Dallon, recently brought back from the dead with a brand new powerset. One that makes your old one look boring by comparison."


"How is making villains drop to their knees and weep in front of me a boring power?" she retorted. "Sure, maybe I got better powers now, but you can't call my old set the least bit boring. Maybe it's just because you were too smart to start trouble in the same city as me?"


Tattletale clone, I would bet money on it. "Or Armsmaster," I replied.


"Oh god!" she exclaimed. "Best gossip ever!"


"What?" Atropos asked with the kind of familiar confidence that led me to believe they'd done something similar before. The man, who I still hadn't put a name to, was less assured. A new recruit, I decided. Wonder what kind of top tier power this one has. I didn't put too much concern into it. Power follows power, after all, and Pantheon had absurd amounts of power. Besides, I was more concerned with Tattle-two-point-oh.


Victoria's grin widened into something just a little less malicious, but not less infuriating, than the real Tattletale's. "Turns out, Faultline here had a crush on Armsmaster." God damn it.


"Really?" Atropos laughed.


"Can we just get to the point?" I insisted, trying very hard to sound more bored and less annoyed. "There's no point in talking about the dead."


"Oh, right, knew we forgot something," Victoria responded. "Well, the bosses agreed that your point about needing security was a good one. So we're here to provide security for our half of this equation."


What? "What?" I asked. "Your half is an Endslayer. What does she need protected from?"


"That's what I said," the blond sighed. "But they were pretty insistent that we go along. I tried to argue with them, but they wouldn't listen. My sister and her fiancee are like the most overprotective parents ever."


"Hey, I got the cameras," Eki replied as she held up a bag. "Do you think eight extra memory sticks will be enough?"


I looked at her, and back toward Victoria. "Cameras?"


"We gotta make sure we document any incidents, right?"


"So how many boring places do we have to go through before Milan?" Eki asked.


I raised an eyebrow. "Hey, if I have to go anyway, I might as well try to make the best out of a bad situation," Victoria added. "Plus since we have an Italian speaker on the team anyway..."


"I'm looking forward to England, myself," the young man added.


"Just because you think British accents are hot," Eki teased, jabbing him lightly with her elbow. He blushed slightly. Well, he won't have any trouble finding girls who'll appreciate the attention, I added internally.


"Just remember that if my sister has to cure anyone's herpes, she will tell me, and I will tell everyone else," Victoria practically sang.


"You spend way too much time around Zach," Eki said dryly.


"Not my fault the only good shooter game involving the CUI pretty much requires co-op mode," she replied. "Would you rather I have the shitty AI soldiers run the chain gun mounted on the back of the Puma? Sure as hell ain't gonna play with those creepy fucks online. I swear to god, if another nasally pimple infested thirteen year old asks me to send pictures of my tits, I will use my power to find a way to kill the internet forever."


This is hell, I decided. This is Tattletale's revenge for outsmarting her and making money off of this in spite of all her efforts to make that impossible. Well played, bitch. Well fucking played. "Are you going to introduce me to the new guy?" I asked, hoping to change the subject.


"Oh, right, where are my manners?" Victoria smiled. "This is Janus. He'll be our chauffeur for this event."


"Good to meet you, ma'am," he smiled and extended his hand. I accepted it, expecting a handshake. Instead he lifted it up and gave my fingers a light kiss. Really laying on the charm there, huh kid? I smiled back. He's a little too effeminate for my tastes, but if I'm not careful I'll need a crowbar to pry Emily off.


"Charmed," I answered. "So, I know the powers the others bring to the table. What are you capable of?"


"Long range teleportation," he answered. "I can teleport things to myself, or I can choose a location anywhere on the planet and send them there instead. Pantheon bought an abandoned oil platform a couple miles off into the ocean that I can put trouble makers, and a hospital to send civilians if we need to."


"That is quite an ability," I responded. Screw the crowbar, I'm going to give Emily some champagne and my finest tips for dealing with men. "So, how much are they paying you? I could use an extra hand around here." I of course expected to be turned down, but it opened the dialogue for the future.


Atropos laughed. "I remember when you were trying to recruit me."


"And if you had accepted, we could charge a hundred times as much for these gateways and no one would bat an eye before paying up," I pointed out. "We could have all been billionaires in a couple years."


"True," she agreed. "But instead, I get to be an Endslayer. One of the most talked about badasses on the planet. And now a member of the Japanese Imperial family. You should have seen the look on my parents faces when they found out about that."


"And laid," Victoria added. "You get that a lot, too."


One of the wings from Atropos' costume snapped out. Victoria was knocked back several feet. Remarkably, she back flipped a couple times and landed feet first on the wall, then dropped to the ground, standing.


"You let her hit you!?" Eki declared in shock.


"If I didn't, she'd have plotted something even worse. Probably got her girlfriend to help, and that's a fight I would lose so hard," Victoria replied. "Anti precog battle armor is such bullshit."


Janus had the good sense to look embarrassed by the display. "Sorry, ma'am," he shrugged sheepishly. "I do appreciate the offer, but I'm not the sort that's really concerned with money. If I was, I'd have just continued living the good life as the child of a supervillain mob boss."


"Well, I had to try," I responded. Okay, Emily, ball is entirely in your court now.


=================

A/N- I had fun with this chapter. I also nearly missed a continuity error with jokes involving Dragon by forgetting that Armsmaster is thought to be dead.

 

[TanaNari]

Amelia, Ch 225- Riley


It's cold here. That wasn't exactly a surprise, of course, it was the middle of winter. But on Avalon, the temperatures tended to be pretty even thanks to the Yggdrasil's regulation of the weather. Or maybe it's because I'm accustomed to the weather near the coast, which is still warmer than this far inland.


"Are you going to be okay?" Amelia asked. No, I reminded myself. This is a mission, she's Gaea here. I smiled as she placed a hand gently on my shoulder. She's concerned about my wellbeing.


"Dinah gives me almost ten percent better odds than anyone else," I answered, looking up at her. "Besides, it's Clarice, not me. I'm perfectly safe."


"I know," she answered, her breath visible in the chill air. "But this is still Nilbog."


She's scared of him, I realized. What he is, what he represents, what he's done. A dark mirror to her own power, what she could have become. What she would have become, if Jack had gotten ahold of her. "I know," I answered with confidence, though it didn't seem to make her feel better. "You don't have to worry, there's nothing he can do that compares to me. He's a fairy tale. I'm a goddess."


She didn't seem comforted by that, either. If anything, it seemed to upset her more. I suck at making people feel better.


"Everything's ready on this end," Khepri responded. "Relay bugs are through, I'm expanding out to cover the city. It's strange, though. Even for this time of year, there should be more bugs. There's barely even any worms in the soil. I don't have the ability to search for anything."


"There's still time to cancel the mission," Defiant asked us. He had been the one most vocally opposed to this plan from the beginning. He was also the one that Dragon trusted to monitor this mission up close.


"No," Minerva answered immediately. "Our odds plummet if we wait much longer. Whatever inconveniences we face now, keep in mind we have an over ninety eight on this. Besides, we need this victory now, after the destruction of Behemoth got claimed by the CUI."


"Hardly seems we can consider Behemoth and Nilbog to be equivalent," Defiant countered. He doesn't like Minerva. That's a point in his favor. Then again, that was a point in almost everyone's favor.


"Not even close," she agreed. "But better than nothing by far."


The pair of them and Yum Kaax were managing our command center for this mission. Our other tinkers all had their own projects. Tir was working on large scale shunt devices for Japan alongside Hecate. Dragon would listen in, but she was putting most of her efforts on our world into establishing an industry base and moving the core of her operations to our world. Who knew populating our own nation-world would take so much work?


Their advice wouldn't make the difference in this mission, anyway. I'm the key component, I'm the one whose actions determine success or failure.


We had positioned at the epicenter of the city, the heart of it. Finding the Goblin King would be Taylor's job, but it was likely near us, or in the most impressive looking building left standing.


"The scan's complete," Yum Kaax informed us. "We're bringing up the dimensional viewer system."


There was a shimmer as the sky changed and our otherwise barren landscape was replaced by buildings. Most suffered from general lack of repair, but were mostly intact. Snow coated the ground in thick drifts. Old snow, from the looks of it, but still pristine. Throughout the city there was no sign that the smallest bit had been touched by life since it had fallen.


Big Sis saw it, too. "Everything's dead," she muttered.


"Not everything," Minerva answered. "We're getting life signs. Nilbog's monsters. There's not a lot of them, but they're there. Buried under the snow or hibernating in buildings. You'd think they were dead. In fact, a lot of them are dead."


"It's the cold," Yum Kaax replied. "His creations, they've stripped this city of resources. Probably running on solar energy just to keep themselves alive. But Nilbog isn't like Amelia. He can't just magic up biosystems and remodel them at will. He imagines and he creates, but that's it, there's no understanding of how or what he's creating. More like Genesis than anyone on our team. They may be stronger than anything Amelia or I can build conventionally, but they're starved for raw material. Proteins. Some of the complex saccharides, perhaps. And he doesn't know how to grow something that can make more."


"Wasteful," Defiant muttered. "He could have grown gardens. Potatoes and soybeans would cover most needs."


Yum Kaax simply shrugged. "I never said that he was smart. Clever, maybe, but definitely not smart. Then again, by the time he ever realized he needed seeds and other supplies, they were probably eaten by something."


"He'll wait until spring and have the living bring him the dead," Minerva added. "Then he'll consume what he has to and replace what he can. That's why Dinah said it had to be now, during this cold snap. It's the time when he's weakest, when he's most aware of the inevitable point when he no longer has the resources to keep his creations alive."


"If we were going for an assassination," Defiant volunteered, "Now would be the time. Or we can simply allow him to die of starvation."


"Dinah says that results in the death of millions of people," Minerva responded. "No matter what plan I suggest, or what counters we propose, it always results in millions of deaths. And, yes, I verified that it's human people, not Nilbog monster people. Yes, that applies to just leaving him alone. Eventually he'll get desperate enough to break out of containment."


"I believe I've found him," Khepri answered. "It's the one building with heat, and it's about a block from here. Aceso, time for you to shine."


"On it," I responded, taking a seat. Clarice and Bella, or stripped down models of them both, started to move. A couple buttons pressed, Bella stretched her beautiful wings, and they both shunted over into the heart of Nilbog's realm. My sensors started relaying data immediately


It was far colder here than on Avalon. Temperatures well below freezing, although nothing that could threaten our constructs. Calmly, I approached Nilbog's throne through Clarice. The building was obviously once the town hall, but was now covered in wild growths of plants and vines that had either died or went dormant. Flags and other colorful cloth draped the area like something from a medieval reenactment, but had long ago started to tear and fade. Now they were mere rags.


Two monsters barred the door. Both were large, feline in nature. Their heads were distinctly humanoid, however, and they had almost comically large breasts with much of their torsos keeping to a mostly human form. Their eyes were enormous in proportion to their faces, and they had minuscule mouths in comparison. This is the work of a man who forgot what humans looked like, I realized. Something intended to be beautiful, but instead only fit to disgust and disturb. This is why I'm the ideal candidate. I know how he thinks.


"Sphinxes," Minerva informed. An obvious statement, if there was ever one. But I waited for the insight that should come. "Nilbog's put more effort into these than most, and he's keeping them active despite the cold. They're some of his favorites. There were three, but they died recently. These two are what he had the supplies to rebuild. This is why Dinah's numbers spiked recently."


I might be able to use that.


"Who are you," one demanded. Her voice was wrong, irregular, an unnatural combination of high pitch and loud that wouldn't happen in most normal life. It was more like listening to Minnie Mouse with the volume up far too high. And her inflections were stressed, as if from a second rate actress trying to mimic royalty or dramatic speech. Or a child imitating something she watched.


"I wish to speak with Nilbog," I told them. "I am an emissary from the gods."


"Going a bit off script there," Gaea whispered, although there was no need to.


"No, it's perfect," Minerva insisted. "Riley, you're a genius." To my surprise, the insulting comment comparing me to Doctor Frankenstein or something similar didn't follow, a rarity. Probably just doesn't want to be unprofessional during the mission.


The sphinxes moved toward me, but a simple command brought Bella back and took her further off the ground. The gust from her wings disturbed the snow only barely. Neither of Nilbog's guards came out to mar the perfect white. "I will speak with your master, he is worthy," I told them. "You are not."


"Offer him a gift," Khepri responded. "Or, no, call it a blessing. We'll get it ready."


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A/N- Next chapter is either meeting Nilbog, or me cutting to a different scene entirely. Guess which!