The world doesn't fucking make sense anymore, and stopped making sense roughly the time you peeked at Amy Dallon's brain.
Currently, you're staging an internal debate over Cauldron's long series of decisions. Your utilitarian estimate, under the circumstances, is that a 0.5% of stopping Scion from devastating alternate human realities in greater numbers is worth a decade or two of expanded time before this apocalypse.
Objectively, they made the right call. Subjectively, your children probably won't grow up into people with interests and love and intelligence. They're a set of precocious blobs of cells, not working mental structures.
You're fucking angry and have been for weeks. Your husband's going to probably die again once Scion starts raiding the tinker facilities, and you're likely to die as well. You lost weeks of progress on the clone army because of Saint, and lost 56 useful capes to clone because Victoria and Amy decided to come out. Why is everyone, good or evil,
stupid?
The bubble falls. Strider Secundus starts the troop relocation, with usable anti-Scion capes, capes that might produce usable countermeasures, and useless capes being moved rapidly across the world to useful positions. Hopefully the Morrígan's plan will get fewer people killed than Accord's.
"Everyone is working together." Amy says softly. "If we could win, our odds just went up, right?" She's terrified, pregnant, engaged. She has everything to lose in this fight.
"Our odds have definitely improved." Your voice-modulator assures Amy and pats her shoulder. You keep a close eye on the social module. Currently you have six modules running, and social is important, needed to form a consistent identity. Censorship examines social to keep your interactions and feelings consistent. Far engineering also pays close attention to social, to keep the priorities consistent with your stated desires, while near engineering never seeks out the other modules, only taking instructions. Your other two modules, threat assessment and pattern recognition, run in the background.
The social module is the most human, the one with the affection and frustration with Amy, love for your husband and children. You, unlikely almost everyone else in the world, have a fairly good idea what normal emotions look like, and you know social feels very much like how humans feel. There are people who develop affection easily for work associates, and censorship had set the neural incentives of social to do so very early in your subjective life, back when you had to choose between removing your ability to be lonely or trying to find companionship.
Censorship reaches out and deftly prepares the connections to your Toybox for social to find active, the attachment to your tadpoles, your husband. All of them had been put partially on hold for the sake of efficiency while they were impossible to reach. Now it was time to once again make decisions based on their welfare.
It is always best to avoid talking about how your mind works. Most people seem to think the ability to influence your emotions more thoroughly than most makes them less sincere. You don't like to think that way, and as long as social feels differently, you don't think it is. Censorship refuses to submit to social in these matters, so the parts of you that do feel in human ways lacks choice in the matter.
"God I don't want another month like that." Amy says suddenly. "Trapped in something so small and foul. Even being trapped with people I love." You consider this to be a fair compliment.
"It is for the sake of the world." You tap Amy's stomach lightly. "The world is a rather important place." It was definitely best to remind her of her fetal offspring whenever she was a bit down, such as when she was preparing a machine to convert human corpses into feed stock and food, or when she was suffering for her human experimentation. Her self worth was unhealthily attached to how much she could please Victoria. The social scripts she had picked up combined a really terrible combination of sexist masculine and feminine roles to fill Amy's head, while the BDSM influences actually gave it a somewhat less toxic script for her obsession. Still, with limited time and resources, it was easiest to remind her that she was carrying the child of someone she loved. It would be nice if she cared more for her body than it being able to please Victoria and sustain Claire.
"He comes." Sophie says suddenly. Teacher's work, flashes of precognition. Scion should be immune, but she has the vision. Perhaps Eidolon managed to find a way to expose him to sensory powers?
Victoria readies, preparing to raise her shield the moment it is time and not a second sooner. Teacher's work, more control for less power. The result was that Victoria could hold down her shield, suppress it, in exchange for keeping the shield up for longer periods. She had been holding it down for hours, and might be able to keep her shield raised for an hour or so.
Annie's marvelously shortened OODA loop for the allied forces allowed Eidolon and a reconstituted, reduced, Yangban army, the Queen of Diamonds, and several clones of Goddess to teleport in with Sophie's warning. Victoria crashes into Scion, the two doing full battle. Based on normal estimates, her shield would last until Scion got bored and used a trump ability to negate it. There is always the small hope that he would for some reason be unable to negate this particular perfect effect, despite negating the similar force fields of Shielder, Laserdream, and Lady Photon.
Amy and Sophie raise their longshot anti-Scion weapons and fire. There is very little that could be done. There is the tiny, remote possibility that the most potent biological weapon Amy could make, phased into Scion by dimensional abilities, will actually manage to infect him and lead to his defeat. Victoria holds Scion still as the two weapons hit to no visible effect.
To your surprise, Scion goes somewhat crazy, thrashing wildly, but does not vaporize Victoria or escape her grip. The two attacks hit, though Scion does not visibly weaken.
"Germs aren't going to actually work, right?" Amy asks.
"This is not a fucking radio drama from the Depression. Our alien invader is not going down to germs." Sophie grumbles. The earlier effect Victoria talked to you about is in full display, with vast chunks of flesh falling from Scion as Victoria starts to actually punch him. They appear to be pieces of golden flesh and organs, replicated over and over again, streaming like blood from where she punches.
"Scream when I sting you." The voice of Annie buzzes. Certainly an effective signal. You decide to trust the voice, and wait. A moment later, with Victoria holding Scion in place, you feel the sting, and scream.
You don't actually understand the scream. In truth, it seems to be your primary power. Everything else pales in comparison. You're a bad tinker, a minor thinker, a low mid range striker, and sometimes a moderate brute. All of that is little more than claws and feathers and skin, things fitting in with the strange themes of what your scream does. The sonic power understands the human mind, and the mind of everything you have exposed it to except for Endbringers. Your many personalities, your genius, all comes from prying small bits and pieces from the idiot god. The scream bounces into the brain, decodes it, understands it, in less then a second, creating physical triggers and anticipating back doors in the structure of the brain to cause the worst experience possible. The mere trigger mechanism, the parts you can almost comprehend, gave you an entire area of science, made you able to fake conventional genius and tinker abilities in a dozen areas. The scream is the smartest thing anyone has encountered, the best able to think. Only a very small number of agents approach the intelligence of the power that you can trigger.
Scion seems to go catatonic as you scream. A moment later, the Behemoth and Chevalier combination, Lancelot, appears. Scion is in the modified kill range. You see the explosion of the strange flesh, a soup of gold, falling from Victoria's arms. Then the Leviathan and Shadow Stalker combination, Cachalot, arrives, holding a particularly strange looking ranged weapon, and begins to fire. Cachalot is positioned above Scion's head, held aloft by another strange device, while Lancelot stands below. You see vast lines of darkness falling from Cachalot into the flood of gold.
It takes minutes before you exhaust yourself. Around you everyone else is evacuated. It's just you, Victoria, and the two partial Endbringers, with Eidolon holding a shadow of some kind nearby,
Really, bargain bin Endbringers? You can't actually imagine a more risky move that could possibly be done, and you have really tried. You spent a lot of time trying to think of something that might work better.
Finally, after what seems like forever, but is four minutes, your scream dies down in your throat.
Scion unleashes a flash of light, and Lancelot flees, using Dodge's portal technology. Cachalot moves, briefly, before doing the same. The flood of golden blood clears.
Scion is full of rage and
fear. The fear is good, so very good. Scion is wounded. You see the head was severely damaged, somehow. He is regenerating head wounds visibly, now. There are multiple raw patches on his body, most of them small, which take visible moments to heal as Victoria fights again, striking harder than you could imagine. The two duel, and Scion looks more murderous than you had ever seen him. More capes flood in, Shielders and Narwhals, Eidolon clones, more Goddesses, keeping Scion distracted.
"Yangban member 36 is dead. No one else can recover you so quickly. I will tell you when you're supposed to fire again." The voice of Lady Bug, one of the worst things you ever did, whispers in your ear.
Then a thin beam lashes out, and for the first time in your memory you lose consciousness.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
End Interlude
_______________________________________________________________________________________
You look at Cranial's resting body. Hero sits beside you, turning from frantic typing to looking at his wife, pacing, trying to mourn and help at once.
"She might recover." You tell him. "She's a Case 53, most of her is in her agent."
"He cut off her brain, Amy. I'm not
hopeful." The hero, Hero, said to be one of the nicest capes to ever really fight, snaps. You can't even imagine what it would be like to look at a lobotomized Victoria.
"Scion is getting crueler." Annie says over her bugs. After Cranial's attack, he conducted fourteen lobotomies, removed all of the limbs and performed minor healing on another eight, and crushed every Goddess clone he could catch against Glory Girl's force field. We believe Vicky is only alive because he likes to crush people against her."
"Jesus." You whisper, and watch the next victim be taken in.
"Jesus, hear me. Help us!" Hero shouts. "Please,
please help us."
"Have we figured out why he isn't canceling the force field?" You ask Annie, feeling a bit dead inside, imaging Victoria being forced to feel people be crushed against her, knowing if she dropped her force field, she would die. One of the worst things you could imagine for her, having to make the choice to let someone die again and again. Goddess even looks a bit like her, you think.
"Kitsune doesn't think he can, citing Glaistig Uaine's rant. Most people think he wants her to suffer for exposing the Cranial scream, a lot." Annie says. "Oh, he's here. I did just upload. Bring me back as
me, please."
"Wait, what?" You ask the swarm.
"He's crushing me into Vicky's her force field, inch by inch. She's sobbing hysterically, trying to be comforting.
Please, I like who I am. It's really nice, Amy. Tell your Aunt Vicky I'm glad I got the chance to really know her. The screams of pain over here, just-" It's cut off in buzzing.
Sophie
screams suddenly, howling. "You gave her to me, a fucking
sister, someone for me to love. That was the best thing you ever fucking did, fucked up as it was! Now she's fucking..." Sophia Hess stomps her foot into the ground.
Command and control, communications, are down. Naturally, that is nowhere near the worst thing about the Scion rampage.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
You sit with Hero, working on the bio-tech constructs to be outfitted with his weapons. Cheap, easy, a delaying tactic.
The heroes are dying, very quickly.
"It's good, you know." Hero says suddenly. "He's stopped attacking anyone but us. He's focusing all his anger on us. If anything works, we saved a lot of the world."
"He is crushing people face first into someone I love, just so she can feel them die, and has been for half an hour." You say.
"Would she actually feel better if he was burning down cities instead? We're heroes. The word is about the strong sacrificing themselves for the weak, Panacea."
"Haven't we done enough?" You ask him.
"I died, and it wasn't enough. My wife might never come back to me, and I'm still hoping to buy people just a bit of time." Hero says. In Dispatch bubbles, you might spend hours of work to give seconds of time in a fight with Scion. "Do you want to stop?"
"No." You smile sadly. "That was never really an option."
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Victoria doesn't even talk when she arrives, her shield spent. She's fought for hours, and Scion had not hurt her, physically. Instead, he just killed people in the most intimate and horrifying manner he could, hoping to break her.
"He'll do it to you." Victoria whispers. "He said he would. He's just waiting.
"What do you want to do?" You ask her.
"Sleep." She whispers. "Knock me out, please." You do it. Sophie carries her to a cot.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
"Within 20 minutes, we will no longer have the power to occupy Scion." Accord declares. The current command council, what's left of the major players, half of them actively working on something, has convened.
"What are the options?" Saint asks, looking exhausted, dead inside.
"I believe there are three, at the moment." Accord says. "We have learned quite a bit about Scion from the recent battles, and ran it all through thinkers."
"That is comforting." The Queen of Diamond scoffs. "It's not like a
Thinker would ever be
wrong about something. They're all so
smart." Accord and Kitsune glare at her.
"The fact is, every option is terrible, which is why we haven't used them yet, but Scion's going to win if we don't." Kitsune says. "One option is destroying the planet. A tinker made something that self replicates, some seriously messed up tech, a bomb of glass that turns everything it touches into glass ridiculously rapidly. We use a Shadow Stalker and Eidolon power combo to throw it into the well, like we did with the time bombs. The time bombs can only boil a city sized chunk out of the continent sized monster, but this would replicate into the whole thing, and we have a few other things which will prevent him from countering it. The problem is, it will replicate uncontrollably into whatever world he is in, which
will be our world. We won't be able to evacuate everyone, or even most people."
"We're not fucking killing everyone." The Queen of Diamonds says. "Not voting for that, give me another option."
"Panacea bolts someone into what's left of Scion's counterpart's corpse. Lady Bug and Best Girl chewed up a ridiculous amount, but there's a
lot of corpse. It's kind of alive, and we think Best Girl and Panacea, working together, could make a pseudo-entity. It could
probably fight Scion for a long time, long enough to wear him down and force him to give up. The issue is, well, it could give us a new, insane, living entity,
probably will do that, though it wouldn't be quite as bad as Scion it could still be bad. Also, it might not work at all." Kitsune says.
"Better, but still fucking terrible. Give me option three." You are barely paying attention, healing another person Scion had decided to phase a living child into.
"Option three, we have someone who might be able to talk him down." Kitsune pauses. "Um, we're kind of sure she can."
"Perfect!" The Queen of Diamonds shouts. "We do that? Why wouldn't we?"
"She's crazy, evil, and resistant to pretty much anything any of us can think of to control her." Kitsune's fox faced grin shines. "The name is Emma Barnes. She can probably
control Scion, by becoming
really like Eden, disturbingly like Eden. If she'll use that control for anything good, that I'm less sure about." Ah, so that's what her Cauldron vial did.
"I kind of like option two myself." Accord offers. "Neat, efficient, gives us time to try the others."
"Well, there's also that only a handful of people even
might survive it." Kitsune says. "Very few are available. You either need an agent with a nice piece of an entity nervous system, which is basically Skitter or Eidolon, or someone who has an agent that really fucks with agents, like Butcher or Glory Girl." You look up. "What?"
"
Now she pays attention. The force field works by commanding other shards to take the hit, which is why it's so
perfect and Scion can't really fuck with it. It's a parasite. It's basically either draw lose Eidolon, which we've ruled out, make the psychopath serial killer who can't be killed do it, put in
my best friend, or put in
your sister."
"Fuck. You." You glare at her.
"I would much rather trust Glory Girl with such power than the unmodified Lady Bug." Accord says calmly. "Though I admit it's not that one sided. I'm surprised there aren't more options.
"There were, yesterday." Kitsune laughs harshly. "I think we could have used Jack Slash or Contessa, too."
[X] "I'm voting for the new Entity plan." You shudder. Write in: Who do you use?
[X] "Let's just use the weapon to kill him. It feels like the
best option. It's just one world, right?" You feel sickened.
[X] "Let's talk to Emma Barnes." Traitor to her friends, sadist, and apparently channeling Scion's mate, whatever that means. Still, better than choosing between Victoria and the world.