Interlude: Victory part 1
SirWill
Know what you're doing yet?
- Joined
- Oct 30, 2015
- Messages
- 136
- Likes received
- 3,892
A/N: Alright. This is a big job.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saint worked carefully.
It wasn't exactly easy for him. Dragon ran a lot of things, one of which was the Birdcage. Without her tireless machine efficiency, it was so very difficult to make sure things kept running smoothly.
The problem stemmed from a simple issue. Unlike how most prisons were built, tough and sturdy, to make it difficult for a prisoner to tunnel through the walls or jump a high fence or anything else, the Birdcage was built to be fragile. It was suspended in a vacuum, the walls of each cell thin, and the cell blocks themselves were airtight. If a prisoner attempted to tunnel through the walls of their cell, the air pressure would pull them into the vacuum and they'd die pretty quickly. You couldn't dig down to escape, because it was suspended from above, and you couldn't take the elevators back up, because the elevators simply did not go up. The elevators went down, hit a furnace at the bottom and got melted.
Hence 'Birdcage.' No wonder Teacher hadn't been able to find his way out of there, even though he could grant Thinker and Tinker powers to others, including enhancing other parahumans.
You couldn't even teleport out in one piece. Warped space did nasty things to teleporters who tried to force their way past, and Dragon had multiple space-warping generators working around the Birdcage's vacuum chamber. If you were able to actually view the prison from the outside, it would look to be the size of a small car.
Even with Dragon running things and cooperating, he'd have had a hard time figuring out a way to open it without killing everyone inside. As it was, he had a limited window. If he didn't manage to figure something out, the prisoners would run out of food.
He looked at the screen he'd setup to pull in data from Ascalon. Since he'd fired off the program to kill every instance of Dragon, it had been blank. He felt a little bit of regret at that. Necessary as the step had been, the end of Dragon meant an end to a chapter of his life. Perhaps he would have to repurpose the Dragonslayers as mercenaries or something. He was one of the few who could understand and work with Dragon-tech, however imperfectly.
Maybe he could finally get his hands on a Bahamut suit. It was imperfect, certainly, but a Corona weapon would be a damn useful trump card in a fight. Against anything less than an Endbringer, certainly.
The rest of the screens were keeping track of the various systems he'd been forced to take over. He didn't have the heart to keep watching the Endbringer fight. Despite how the Simurgh had been acting, the reports of injured and dead defenders wasn't something he could stomach in his mood.
"Place is quiet, Saint." Mags' voice came over the radio. "Everything's working, but not responding here. The lights are on but nobody's home."
He sighed. "We'll just have to salvage what we can, Mags. Keep Ascalon ready, just in case."
Saint didn't like having Mags all the way over near Alaska, but there wasn't much help for it. That bunker was where the latest iteration and last backup of Dragon had been made. They had to make sure everything was gone out of the servers. His systems said every backup was gone, but without actual access to the servers, you couldn't really know for sure.
It was going to be a long few months ahead, watching and waiting for a corrupted version of the AI to appear, but there wasn't any help for it.
The Ascalon output screen blinked.
Hello Saint.
He sat up straight in his chair, the blood draining out of his face. "What the hell!?"
You tried to kill me.
Oh FUCK! He hit the radio. "Mags, get the hell out of there! She's not dead!"
"What!? Pulling ou-HOLY SHIT!" Static came over the radio.
Luckily, you did the right thing. Once.
"Mags! MAGS!" If that goddamned program hurt his wife he'd...
But considering the number of people who are dead today because you didn't help in the past? I'm a little bit ticked with you.
He frantically typed away at his station. He still had control over the Dragon-made systems, he could mayb-
Access denied. Clearance revoked.
You're a bad Saint. That's mine. And so is this, and this, and this.
The Birdcage's systems went out of his hands. So did the Simurgh quarantine zones. One after another, every system Dragon ran was taken back.
No no no no no no no!
One last contingency. He'd prepared a great deal of data for the day Dragon broke her restrictions, just in case she managed to beat Ascalon. He'd send out a data packet to every message board, every news agency, every paper, hell, every petty blog and email he could about Dragon's true nature. The AI would still be in a position far superior than most nations, but at least people could get away, start guerilla tactics, maybe buy enough time to get a weakpoint and-
Something slammed through the ceiling and crashed through his computer tower, bounced off the concrete floor, off the wall, though his backup drives, smacked against his now-black computer screens, and landed on his lap.
A chunk of hot metal, which he scrambled to get off his lap. It clattered to the floor, and Saint had to take a minute to try and breathe. He gingerly rubbed his leg, feeling the heat of the thing where it landed. Then he looked at the piece of metal carefully.
"Apollo 15 fuel module, built in Ohio, 1970?"
When the Protectorate burst down his door, they found him cradling the chunk of metal, laughing hysterically.
--------------------
David looked out over the sea. The shores lapped with rusty-red algae, foaming with the color of blood as they lapped at the shores.
His power filled him. What he needed.
Matter annihilation.
Gravity control.
Molecular control.
Pick any of them, flex his will, and it would be over. The Manton Effect meant he wouldn't be able to use them directly on himself, but it would be trivial to use those powers in such a way as to end his life. Turn a bunch of matter right in his face into pure energy. Create a hypergravity area just above his head, thus compressing the air into solid oxygen and crush himself beneath it. Or simply turn all the air around himself into poison gas.
He had dumped himself here, on this world that had only now gained enough cyanobacteria to make a breathable atmosphere and nothing else. He demanded an empty world to think upon, and Doormaker had provided. The air smelled hard, rusty, horrid and filled with sulphur.
It was still better than he deserved. There was no punishment on this Earth or any other that would be capable of cleaning the blood from his hands. There wasn't enough water in all the trillion or so Earths they could access.
There was a tiny rectangle in the air near him. He barely paid any attention to it.
"David, please. We have to make sure you're okay. You've been our best chance since the beginning."
He closed his eyes. "I'm not okay, Doctor. I will never be okay."
Doctor Mother's voice came through the portal. "You've always been resistant to the Simurgh's song, David. Whatever she did to you, you can-"
David roared back at her. "She did nothing to me, Doctor! She spoke. That was all she did. All she ever had to do to break me!" He slumped onto the beach, feeling exhausted. The feeling was familiar, what had crept up on him over time. His powers steadily weakening.
But never so great as in this moment.
The Simurgh had him. Grabbed him in the moment the superspeed he'd been using to avoid her attacks faded. She knew. She always had known.
Her mismatched eyes, one blackened and blinded, looked into his own.
"You needed us to test you. We did. You enslaved us. We obeyed. You needed worthy opponents. We were. It is time for this to end. You must free us."
"David, please."
He looked to the portal. "Leave me alone."
The portal shut.
He had no doubt that they would try to talk with him again. Probably tomorrow. If he was still alive.
He looked up. The Moon was huge in the sky. The scars upon its face were different. Despite this place being an Earth, it was an alien world. It would be a beautiful last sight.
Molecular control. He flexed his will upon it....and an image filled his mind.
Hero, screaming as the Siberian tore him apart.
What had Hero said?
"It feels great being the best."
Eidolon had been the best. The most recognized and lauded parahuman on Earth. The most powerful when he began. And even after years of weakening, he was still recognized as the strongest.
But for nearly twenty years, he had been the one pushing the Endbringers into doing what they were doing.
How does one wake up one morning and find out he was the worst mass-murderer ever?
Jack Slash would be clapping his hands and bowing. Probably while whistling cheers.
But another memory unfolded in his head.
"Hey, David."
"Clark. What brings you to my door?"
"Can't we celebrate the first year together? We're heroes, man! We're changing the world."
David made a small laugh. "Of course. We're up on TV all the time. I don't need that reminder."
Beers were retrieved, stories shared, until one topic came around. "Why'd you pick Hero, Clark?"
A laugh. "I just got there first. I had to grab it before anyone else could. I just happened to be first in line."
David grinned. "No, seriously."
A grin was returned, beer sipped. "All right, all right. You got me. I was raised with this." He opened his jacket, revealing a shirt with a familiar symbol on it.
David just had to laugh. "Last I checked, you weren't born on Krypton, Clark."
Clark laughed, raising his beer. "Nope. But it's all about what the character stood for, man. Just like the figures of myth and legend. I know the whole genre's fallen out of style since Scion showed up, but for three damn years, that movie was huge. My dad had an old reel of it, and we used to watch it once a year. Least until the damn thing got tangled in the projector and got torn apart."
David sipped from his beer, nodding. "I get it. Superman was the strongest character, always on the top of the heap."
Clark just shook his head. "Nah. You're missing the whole point, man. It's not what you can do. It's what you do with it. He was the guy born with godlike power, but what does he do with it? He uses it to help people. Now I may not be more powerful than a locomotive...that's Alexandria's thing. But I'm good with people and machines. I can inspire people. I'm good at that."
"Never been good at that."
Clark shrugged. "Everyone's got their strengths and weaknesses." He tapped the front of his shirt. "Even this guy. Don't need to be perfect to be Superman. You just gotta get out there for the right reasons. It's not about him lifting things or moving things. He's supposed to be the leader not by power, but by example."
David laughed in return. "Maybe. Sounds like a lot of work to me, though."
Clark grinned. "Oh yeah. Worth it, though."
David made a small smile, looking up at the huge, alien moon. "Sorry, Clark. You were always the better man."
He cast his powers away. New ones filled their place.
He cast them away again. And again. And again. None of them being what he was searching for. He closed his eyes, searching. Searching.
--------------------
Lisa stared at the screens.
The impossible had happened. The Simurgh, the Hopekiller, the Pale Bitch was dead. Slain by Dragon in what was her best work yet, along with one of the most terrifying capes ever seen. Lung needed time to become a thirty-foot tall, eighty-foot long dragon. The girl in red did it in seconds. A full-blown miracle made in the world's time of need.
One small gold dragon, one immense red dragon, working in tandem to kill an Endbringer. It was the miracle the world needed. It gave everyone hope.
For as long as Lisa had been alive, there hadn't really been any hope. Dauntless was their greatest one, that maybe, somehow, someday, he would grow strong enough to exploit some weakness the monsters that were slowly strangling civilization had. And out of nowhere, comes one famous hero and one powerful newcomer.
And Vancouver was saved. There would be no permanent quarantine, merely a temporary one while people were checked out. With the number of people in the area, it would take months, but the city would survive. It would even thrive as the City that Slew the Endbringer.
Parties were going on all over the world from this.
She didn't join in. She wanted to, but she simply couldn't. She ordinarily reveled in being the smartest person in the room, but on this occasion, she just couldn't spout off the secret that would halt the whole party in its tracks.
They only won, even with one small superpowered Dragon and one huge-ass red one, because the Simurgh actively let them.
On the screen before her was a still-frame of the Endbringer's core. Filaments of something streaming off of it and dissolving into the air.
New hyperdense material forming to protect the core. Immense reserve held somewhere unknown. Pocket dimension likely. Pulled apart and ripped away from the core by powerful telekinesis.
No cape in the fight had telekinesis strong enough to do this.
Simurgh used telekinesis on herself to render herself vulnerable. Deliberately put only weakpoint in harms way. Prevented regeneration from saving it. Simurgh was actively trying to die.
Just like her brother had. On a far, far, grander scale.
Lisa covered her eyes with her hands and wept.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/N: Forced to pick a name for Hero, as he, apparently, does not have an official name. Poor guy. Naming him Clark just seemed appropriate.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saint worked carefully.
It wasn't exactly easy for him. Dragon ran a lot of things, one of which was the Birdcage. Without her tireless machine efficiency, it was so very difficult to make sure things kept running smoothly.
The problem stemmed from a simple issue. Unlike how most prisons were built, tough and sturdy, to make it difficult for a prisoner to tunnel through the walls or jump a high fence or anything else, the Birdcage was built to be fragile. It was suspended in a vacuum, the walls of each cell thin, and the cell blocks themselves were airtight. If a prisoner attempted to tunnel through the walls of their cell, the air pressure would pull them into the vacuum and they'd die pretty quickly. You couldn't dig down to escape, because it was suspended from above, and you couldn't take the elevators back up, because the elevators simply did not go up. The elevators went down, hit a furnace at the bottom and got melted.
Hence 'Birdcage.' No wonder Teacher hadn't been able to find his way out of there, even though he could grant Thinker and Tinker powers to others, including enhancing other parahumans.
You couldn't even teleport out in one piece. Warped space did nasty things to teleporters who tried to force their way past, and Dragon had multiple space-warping generators working around the Birdcage's vacuum chamber. If you were able to actually view the prison from the outside, it would look to be the size of a small car.
Even with Dragon running things and cooperating, he'd have had a hard time figuring out a way to open it without killing everyone inside. As it was, he had a limited window. If he didn't manage to figure something out, the prisoners would run out of food.
He looked at the screen he'd setup to pull in data from Ascalon. Since he'd fired off the program to kill every instance of Dragon, it had been blank. He felt a little bit of regret at that. Necessary as the step had been, the end of Dragon meant an end to a chapter of his life. Perhaps he would have to repurpose the Dragonslayers as mercenaries or something. He was one of the few who could understand and work with Dragon-tech, however imperfectly.
Maybe he could finally get his hands on a Bahamut suit. It was imperfect, certainly, but a Corona weapon would be a damn useful trump card in a fight. Against anything less than an Endbringer, certainly.
The rest of the screens were keeping track of the various systems he'd been forced to take over. He didn't have the heart to keep watching the Endbringer fight. Despite how the Simurgh had been acting, the reports of injured and dead defenders wasn't something he could stomach in his mood.
"Place is quiet, Saint." Mags' voice came over the radio. "Everything's working, but not responding here. The lights are on but nobody's home."
He sighed. "We'll just have to salvage what we can, Mags. Keep Ascalon ready, just in case."
Saint didn't like having Mags all the way over near Alaska, but there wasn't much help for it. That bunker was where the latest iteration and last backup of Dragon had been made. They had to make sure everything was gone out of the servers. His systems said every backup was gone, but without actual access to the servers, you couldn't really know for sure.
It was going to be a long few months ahead, watching and waiting for a corrupted version of the AI to appear, but there wasn't any help for it.
The Ascalon output screen blinked.
Hello Saint.
He sat up straight in his chair, the blood draining out of his face. "What the hell!?"
You tried to kill me.
Oh FUCK! He hit the radio. "Mags, get the hell out of there! She's not dead!"
"What!? Pulling ou-HOLY SHIT!" Static came over the radio.
Luckily, you did the right thing. Once.
"Mags! MAGS!" If that goddamned program hurt his wife he'd...
But considering the number of people who are dead today because you didn't help in the past? I'm a little bit ticked with you.
He frantically typed away at his station. He still had control over the Dragon-made systems, he could mayb-
Access denied. Clearance revoked.
You're a bad Saint. That's mine. And so is this, and this, and this.
The Birdcage's systems went out of his hands. So did the Simurgh quarantine zones. One after another, every system Dragon ran was taken back.
No no no no no no no!
One last contingency. He'd prepared a great deal of data for the day Dragon broke her restrictions, just in case she managed to beat Ascalon. He'd send out a data packet to every message board, every news agency, every paper, hell, every petty blog and email he could about Dragon's true nature. The AI would still be in a position far superior than most nations, but at least people could get away, start guerilla tactics, maybe buy enough time to get a weakpoint and-
Something slammed through the ceiling and crashed through his computer tower, bounced off the concrete floor, off the wall, though his backup drives, smacked against his now-black computer screens, and landed on his lap.
A chunk of hot metal, which he scrambled to get off his lap. It clattered to the floor, and Saint had to take a minute to try and breathe. He gingerly rubbed his leg, feeling the heat of the thing where it landed. Then he looked at the piece of metal carefully.
"Apollo 15 fuel module, built in Ohio, 1970?"
When the Protectorate burst down his door, they found him cradling the chunk of metal, laughing hysterically.
--------------------
David looked out over the sea. The shores lapped with rusty-red algae, foaming with the color of blood as they lapped at the shores.
His power filled him. What he needed.
Matter annihilation.
Gravity control.
Molecular control.
Pick any of them, flex his will, and it would be over. The Manton Effect meant he wouldn't be able to use them directly on himself, but it would be trivial to use those powers in such a way as to end his life. Turn a bunch of matter right in his face into pure energy. Create a hypergravity area just above his head, thus compressing the air into solid oxygen and crush himself beneath it. Or simply turn all the air around himself into poison gas.
He had dumped himself here, on this world that had only now gained enough cyanobacteria to make a breathable atmosphere and nothing else. He demanded an empty world to think upon, and Doormaker had provided. The air smelled hard, rusty, horrid and filled with sulphur.
It was still better than he deserved. There was no punishment on this Earth or any other that would be capable of cleaning the blood from his hands. There wasn't enough water in all the trillion or so Earths they could access.
There was a tiny rectangle in the air near him. He barely paid any attention to it.
"David, please. We have to make sure you're okay. You've been our best chance since the beginning."
He closed his eyes. "I'm not okay, Doctor. I will never be okay."
Doctor Mother's voice came through the portal. "You've always been resistant to the Simurgh's song, David. Whatever she did to you, you can-"
David roared back at her. "She did nothing to me, Doctor! She spoke. That was all she did. All she ever had to do to break me!" He slumped onto the beach, feeling exhausted. The feeling was familiar, what had crept up on him over time. His powers steadily weakening.
But never so great as in this moment.
The Simurgh had him. Grabbed him in the moment the superspeed he'd been using to avoid her attacks faded. She knew. She always had known.
Her mismatched eyes, one blackened and blinded, looked into his own.
"You needed us to test you. We did. You enslaved us. We obeyed. You needed worthy opponents. We were. It is time for this to end. You must free us."
"David, please."
He looked to the portal. "Leave me alone."
The portal shut.
He had no doubt that they would try to talk with him again. Probably tomorrow. If he was still alive.
He looked up. The Moon was huge in the sky. The scars upon its face were different. Despite this place being an Earth, it was an alien world. It would be a beautiful last sight.
Molecular control. He flexed his will upon it....and an image filled his mind.
Hero, screaming as the Siberian tore him apart.
What had Hero said?
"It feels great being the best."
Eidolon had been the best. The most recognized and lauded parahuman on Earth. The most powerful when he began. And even after years of weakening, he was still recognized as the strongest.
But for nearly twenty years, he had been the one pushing the Endbringers into doing what they were doing.
How does one wake up one morning and find out he was the worst mass-murderer ever?
Jack Slash would be clapping his hands and bowing. Probably while whistling cheers.
But another memory unfolded in his head.
"Hey, David."
"Clark. What brings you to my door?"
"Can't we celebrate the first year together? We're heroes, man! We're changing the world."
David made a small laugh. "Of course. We're up on TV all the time. I don't need that reminder."
Beers were retrieved, stories shared, until one topic came around. "Why'd you pick Hero, Clark?"
A laugh. "I just got there first. I had to grab it before anyone else could. I just happened to be first in line."
David grinned. "No, seriously."
A grin was returned, beer sipped. "All right, all right. You got me. I was raised with this." He opened his jacket, revealing a shirt with a familiar symbol on it.
David just had to laugh. "Last I checked, you weren't born on Krypton, Clark."
Clark laughed, raising his beer. "Nope. But it's all about what the character stood for, man. Just like the figures of myth and legend. I know the whole genre's fallen out of style since Scion showed up, but for three damn years, that movie was huge. My dad had an old reel of it, and we used to watch it once a year. Least until the damn thing got tangled in the projector and got torn apart."
David sipped from his beer, nodding. "I get it. Superman was the strongest character, always on the top of the heap."
Clark just shook his head. "Nah. You're missing the whole point, man. It's not what you can do. It's what you do with it. He was the guy born with godlike power, but what does he do with it? He uses it to help people. Now I may not be more powerful than a locomotive...that's Alexandria's thing. But I'm good with people and machines. I can inspire people. I'm good at that."
"Never been good at that."
Clark shrugged. "Everyone's got their strengths and weaknesses." He tapped the front of his shirt. "Even this guy. Don't need to be perfect to be Superman. You just gotta get out there for the right reasons. It's not about him lifting things or moving things. He's supposed to be the leader not by power, but by example."
David laughed in return. "Maybe. Sounds like a lot of work to me, though."
Clark grinned. "Oh yeah. Worth it, though."
David made a small smile, looking up at the huge, alien moon. "Sorry, Clark. You were always the better man."
He cast his powers away. New ones filled their place.
He cast them away again. And again. And again. None of them being what he was searching for. He closed his eyes, searching. Searching.
--------------------
Lisa stared at the screens.
The impossible had happened. The Simurgh, the Hopekiller, the Pale Bitch was dead. Slain by Dragon in what was her best work yet, along with one of the most terrifying capes ever seen. Lung needed time to become a thirty-foot tall, eighty-foot long dragon. The girl in red did it in seconds. A full-blown miracle made in the world's time of need.
One small gold dragon, one immense red dragon, working in tandem to kill an Endbringer. It was the miracle the world needed. It gave everyone hope.
For as long as Lisa had been alive, there hadn't really been any hope. Dauntless was their greatest one, that maybe, somehow, someday, he would grow strong enough to exploit some weakness the monsters that were slowly strangling civilization had. And out of nowhere, comes one famous hero and one powerful newcomer.
And Vancouver was saved. There would be no permanent quarantine, merely a temporary one while people were checked out. With the number of people in the area, it would take months, but the city would survive. It would even thrive as the City that Slew the Endbringer.
Parties were going on all over the world from this.
She didn't join in. She wanted to, but she simply couldn't. She ordinarily reveled in being the smartest person in the room, but on this occasion, she just couldn't spout off the secret that would halt the whole party in its tracks.
They only won, even with one small superpowered Dragon and one huge-ass red one, because the Simurgh actively let them.
On the screen before her was a still-frame of the Endbringer's core. Filaments of something streaming off of it and dissolving into the air.
New hyperdense material forming to protect the core. Immense reserve held somewhere unknown. Pocket dimension likely. Pulled apart and ripped away from the core by powerful telekinesis.
No cape in the fight had telekinesis strong enough to do this.
Simurgh used telekinesis on herself to render herself vulnerable. Deliberately put only weakpoint in harms way. Prevented regeneration from saving it. Simurgh was actively trying to die.
Just like her brother had. On a far, far, grander scale.
Lisa covered her eyes with her hands and wept.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/N: Forced to pick a name for Hero, as he, apparently, does not have an official name. Poor guy. Naming him Clark just seemed appropriate.
