"We've completed the virus," my grandfather admitted,"but we are not anywhere close to human trials."

"You understand that this isn't something that can be allowed," Piggot said. "The dangers of biotinkering alone would be enough to get you a kill order. But even if it is as safe as you think, do you really think the government would let you create your own private army of parahumans?"

"You act as though we're villains," he said. "We're simply trying to make the world safer. Wouldn't it be a good thing to have more heroes in the world? More rogues?"

He leaned forward. "The very nature of the triggering process for parahumans is what has the heroes outnumbered by what, four to one? We intend to give powers only to people who are emotionally stable, people who have motivations that are not selfish or criminal."

"There's no way to be sure of that," Piggot said. "Even someone who is normal and honest can be seduced by the allure of power."

Our telepathic abilities would make the judging process a little safer, I thought, but she was right about the tendency of power to corrupt.

"We have access to thinkers," my grandfather said smoothly. "Even precogs if need be."

"Even if you are right," Piggot said. "Which I'm not agreeing to in the slightest. Do you really think that something like this should be left in the hands of an old man and a teenage girl?"

"We're the world's best defense against Endbringers," he said. "Why not let us herald a new age? With enough new parahuman heroes, the government would no longer have to bow to the wishes of villains in hopes that they might show up to Endbringer fights. Isn't that something the Protectorate could get behind?"

"We live in a world of checks and balances," Piggot said. "One where people don't get to shape the world the way they want to simply because they have more power than everyone else."

"Isn't that what governments do?" I asked, interrupting.

Both my grandfather and Piggot looked at me.

"Governments are elected by the people," Piggot said. "They represent the will of the people."

"How much input do the people of Africa have?" I asked. "Or the people in the CUI? Even here... I don't think the people actually elected you, yet you're here trying to dictate to us what we are to do with our own inventions."

"The public has an interest in safety," Piggot said. "If you invented a nuclear fusion reactor and decided to put it in your basement, do you think your neighbors wouldn't have a right to know and maybe veto it?"

I carefully kept my face blank. My grandfather actually had put an arc reactor in the basement of our house, even though the PRT was still studying them for safety. He seemed pretty confident; apparently one of the heroes of his world had used them to power his suits for fifteen years with no cancer of other known ill effects.

"We're trying to save the world," I said. "Why can't you see that?"

My grandfather was staring at Piggot, then he turned to me. "She has no intention of listening. In fact she is planning to destroy our lab and take the samples for the PRT."

A quick glance inside her head showed that he was right.

He gestured, and a wormhole appeared inside the conference room. At this range it was going to play holy hell with their electronics, but I doubted that he cared. He stepped through and a moment later he was gone.

"That was stupid," I said, turning to Piggot.

"So he's a Tinker and a Thinker too?" Piggot asked, staring at the place where the wormhole had been. The lights had gone out and the only lights were coming from a small window.

I could hear alarms blaring in the other parts of the Rig. I didn't particularly care.

"Do you really think that you can fight the entire United States government?" she asked.

"Do you really think we can't?" I asked.

My grandfather had taken on the government before, and while he'd lost, it was mostly because the technology of the world he had come from was substantially better than ours. His world had countermeasures that this world didn't.

"How much of your equipment is made out of metal?" I asked. "How much of it can be disrupted by lightning or gravity or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum? If you can't get behind us, at least get out of the way."

I turned to the wall with the fewest electrical connections and I peeled a hole, stepping through. I turned to her and said, "You wouldn't like what will happen if you don't."

I returned the wall to it's former self, and then I launched myself across the sky.

Meeting with Piggot had been a mistake. It had obviously been a diversion designed to let the PRT take the virus for themselves. I wasn't surprised that they knew where my grandfather's base in Boston was; they had enough thinkers and spies to make that reasonable.

What wasn't reasonable was what my grandfather's response would be.

He'd been playing nice so far, but I doubted that would continue in the face of an actual attack on him. His sanity was tenuous at best.

My phone rang.

"They've taken it and destroyed the lab," my grandfather said curtly on the other end of the line. "I put a metallic element in the solution holding the virus preparing for just this scenario. It's the closest copy I could make to the element I showed you recently."

Apparently the elements for adamantium didn't exist on my earth, but they did in the asteroid belt. He'd been collecting minute quantities from asteroids, hoping to create his own. He'd been trying to copy it for a while now, and I supposed that he'd found a use for his discarded experiments.

How that would affect the users of the virus I wasn't sure.

I'd heard that wine could be authenticated by the fact that the atomic tests of the forties and fifties had scattered nuclear material throughout the world, impregnating our food and our bodies. Wine that did not have those elements was older than the date the tests began.

Was he planning to put that element into the people who he gave powers to so that he could track them if need be? It didn't seem like them; it seemed like the kind of thing the government could find out about and use to track down his people.

Of course, it was possible that he might not consider them to be "real" mutants, in which case he'd only see them as tools.

"They have already left the city," he continued. "I will check north of the city, and I want you to check the area between Boston and Brockton Bay."

He acted as though there wasn't any chance that I would disobey. Of course, given that I understood the importance of this, I didn't plan to.

"What do I do if I find them?" I asked.

"Take it and make them pay," he said curtly.

"That'll mean war," I said.

"They started it," he said. "We will finish it."

I shook my head, even though there was no way he could see it. "Do you really want to fight the whole world?"

"We are doing what is best for them. They will see it eventually."

I winced. I'd been thinking that way for a long time, and I was starting to have second thoughts. Hearing it from him only made it sound worse.

"I'll try to get it from them," I said. "But I won't hurt anyone."

The Protectorate didn't need to get the virus. Given how lax their operational security was, it would be only a matter of time before the villains got hold of it, and then there really would be armies of parahuman mercenaries and villains stalking the world.

The world was already on the verge of collapsing. Multiplying the number of villainous parahumans by a factor of ten would only hasten the collapse. We wouldn't even need Endbringers.

I suddenly wished I'd said as much to Piggot.

It was a little like all the times that I'd thought of the perfect response to Emma's gibes, only hours after the event when it was too late. I wished I was a little quicker on the uptake when it came to social events, but that was something I was working on.

I closed my eyes and reached out, looking for unusual magnetic signatures. I was getting better at this too; there had been a time when all the metal in buildings would have interfered with my ability to detect people; that wasn't the same kind of issue anymore.

As I floated north of Brockton Bay, I realized that I could detect a fleet of PRT vehicles just coming into town. Their vans were distinctive in interior design and were easily distinguished from similar vehicles because of all the extra hardware under the hood.

Furthermore, one of the vehicles was carrying something more; a metal signature that I didn't recognize but seemed likely to be what I was looking for.

I shot through the sky, heading for their location. As I came close I realized that something was wrong. I could see smoke rising up into the sky and I could hear the sounds of gunfire.

It clearly wasn't my grandfather attacking the convoy and the gangs left in Brockton Bay were either under my control or gone. It had to be an outside interest, and they had to have had some sort of inside information that let them know how important the cargo was.

The one advantage of all of this was that I wouldn't be accused of attacking the PRT directly. I could simply make sure that the virus was "lost" and that no one got hold of it.

As I approached the scene, I saw that three of the vans were on fire and there were bodies on the ground.

The virus was moving rapidly away.

I flew after them. I saw a group of seven capes fighting the PRT. One of them was wearing white clothes that clung closely to their body. I couldn't tell if it was a woman or an effeminate man, not in the costume of the half mask they were wearing.

Another was wearing a costume that looked like it was made of Rhino plates. He was waving his hands, and whenever he did, PRT agents armor exploded in blood. I could see blades of wind slicing through the air, even though they didn't at all look like what Stormtiger had done.

The third was wearing a mask that looked like it was made of a horse's head. It was disturbingly realistic, almost as though he'd actually cut up a horse's head to use for his costume. He was covered in tatoos and was wearing chains.

He was businlly creating clones to attack the PRT.

A man wearing an oval face mask with multiple reflective lenses on it was staring up at me. I felt something pass by me; a wave of energy that seemed to have no effect on me.

From the look of the the man this was unexpected. I wasn't sure what it was supposed to do, but it didn't matter.

I reached out with my powers and I grabbed the guns from the fallen PRT soldiers. I launched them through the air, kneecapping all of the men below me except the man in white who somehow managed to avoid it. I heard screams of horror from the men, but a look at the dead and dying PRT agents below me left me with no pity.

I grabbed the vials holding the mutagenic virus and pulled them toward me.

"Blasphemer!" one of the men shouted at me.

It took me a moment to realize who these were. These were the Fallen, the Endbringer worshiping fanatics that had an unpleasant reputation. They weren't up to the reputation of the Nine, obviously, but they weren't pushovers.

The man in the Rhino armor sent a slashing wave of air up at me, but it splashed harmlessly against my shields.

"Whore of Babylon!" the man in the mirrored mask shouted.

"False prophet!" Another shouted. "Telling the lie that Leviathan is lost to us. The world will know the truth!"

The man in white simply stared up at me, and suddenly I found myself on the ground standing in front of him with no memory of how I'd gotten there. He was holding the virus that I had grabbed, and he was speaking to the others.

"We shall use their own whore against them. She shall tear down the walls of this place that has made a mockery of great Leviathan! We shall rain death and destruction on the heads of those who would shower the world with lies!"

I wanted to move, but I didn't want to at the same time. My body seemed to have a mind of its own. I'd felt this before, and I realized that I'd been mastered.

My grandfather would have been able to fight it off, but I didn't have that power.

I still had a trickle of my own power though. He'd made certain that I couldn't attack him or his apparently, but he hadn't thought to completely stop me from using my powers.

I reached through the crust of the earth, pulling up wires and other metals. I would apologize to the city later and repair everything, assuming that there was a later.

I carefully sent molten metal up the back of my legs, with a force field the only thing keeping my legs from being burned hideously. The metal was creeping up under my hair and around my skull.

I couldn't be sure that my grandfather's helmet would protect me from this world's mastering, but it was the only thing I had so I had to try it.

If I didn't I'd wake up to find out just how much damage I could do to a city.

It would be so easy to destroy everything. The world was like cardboard to me, and there was always a temptation to lash out and simply destroy everything, like a child playing Godzilla in a town made of small boxes. Unfortunately if I let loose real people would lose not only their lives but their livelihoods.

The economy that I'd worked so hard to restore would be burned to ashes. The people might be as well.

I wanted to tell him he wouldn't get away with it; I was sure that some of the super heroes my grandfather had fought would have. However, I kept my face impassive. The last thing I wanted was to let him realize that his power wasn't total.

"The people of this city have claimed that they are the ones who have saved the world, that theirs is the city that sent Leviathan to an unearthly grave in between the stars. Thus they are the ones who will pay!"

The man seemed quite enthusiastic in his preaching, but the other capes on the ground didn't seem as enthusiastic, probably because I'd broken their legs.

He turned to me, and his eyes widened as he realized that I'd closed my eyes.

I'd finally remembered who he was, and how his powers worked. He had to look you in the eyes to master you, and that made you incredibly suggestible.

I could feel metal moving around my head in a crown of iron, a combination of metals that wouldn't give me the same kind of coverage my grandfather's helmet would, but that was all I could manage on short notice.

I could feel the pressure on my mind lessening. Whether the crown was working, or whether it would have vanished anyway I didn't know.

Either way, I felt a pressure on my mind, presumably from his former control and I struggled to overcome his last command.

I needed to attack them; they were going to ruin everything and everyone that I loved.

I told myself this over and over, pushing myself to overcome a control that felt like a three hundred meter tall wall; I could feel cracks in it, and I could feel the others trying to attack me through my shield, but nothing they did worked.

The moment that I broke through the control I sent shards of metal flying in their direction. I knew their signatures now; the unique bioelectric patterns that made them all up. Targeting them was easy. I heard screams and crying and I simply stood there with my eyes closed, listening to the wet, gurgling sounds of men dying around me.

In my former assaults on enemies I hadn't been standing two feet away; it was horrifying to hear just how wet death sounded.

Still, I didn't open my eyes for five minutes, until the man in white's bioelectric signature faded to the point that I was sure he was dead.

When I opened my eyes I looked down at his body, which was contorted. I'd filled him with metal.

Glancing at his hand, where he held one of the vials I froze.

The vial was open, and I could almost feel the wind blowing the uncontrolled virus in the direction of Brockton Bay.

It turned out that only the solution holding the virus had the metal permeating it. The virus itself did not. I couldn't sense it at all; it didn't have a bioelectric signature, and even with all my power I couldn't control the wind.

I stared helplessly as the mutant virus headed for the city, the Fallen's last vengeance on the city that I loved.