AN: Thanks again to my beta Grey Raven 09 for his assistance!
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to Worm. If I did, I would be FAR more productive.
Please enjoy and let me know what you think in a review if you feel like it!
\/\/\/\/
InertDuel
Fortuna watched the camera footage from the ABB member first. Then, with a small smile, she played the feed from Armsmaster's helmet. After comparing the two, she leaned back in her chair, folded her hands on her lap and let herself stare at the ceiling.
"It's done. This Path is blank. It's done."
She let out a breath it felt like she had been holding for years and sank fully into the seat, her muscles unclenching and the tenseness in her body slowly starting to fade away.
"Now all that's left is to make certain they are actually benevolent. Did you forget that part, Contessa?" Kurt asked, his eyes boring into the back of her head from near the door. "If you can't see past this, how are we supposed to direct things from now? What have we been doing? I joined this group in order to prevent more deaths. Hebert and her shard may be a nascent Entity, but that doesn't mean they will remain grounded or fighting for us!"
"Anything is better than the alternative," Fortuna whispered.
"The alternative is simply destruction and death across everything, everywhere and - " He broke off, frowning. Narrowing his eyes, he stepped fully into the room and walked a full circuit around her. "No. It's worse. What did you see, Fortuna? What do you know?"
"We only ever cared about killing Scion. We never looked past that."
He nodded. "Well killing a god seems difficult enough. There's little point in dealing with the fallout before we know we can even succeed to begin with."
She just smiled and nodded to the computer screen ahead of her. "Do you remember Coil's test after he received his abilities?"
"Of course. I'd never actually seen a precog duel before that. Watching the two of you just stand there for nearly ten minutes and glare at each other was somewhat amusing, but it was also extremely anticlimactic. I was hoping for acrobatics, wall running, nearly impossible to follow karate moves…his ability seemed so impressive." Kurt shrugged. "When he just sat back and nodded, conceding your win, I was most disappointed."
"We had a thousand battles, in a hundred steps, everything he tried I countered, everything I countered he knew how I would do it and tried something different." She leaned forward and pulled up the video file of the test, and skipped to the end. "By the end, the Path that got him closest to defeating me, still resulted in his loss. But I would've been badly hurt. 18 broken bones, unable to walk, a severed spine. But he'd be dead and I could be healed by Eidolon, so I considered it a victory and didn't bother to redo the Path. He also stopped at that point. Do you remember what he said?"
"No. I stopped caring before that."
"Watch."
She hit the key, and the video started to play. Contessa, standing just inside the test room door and Coil, sitting in the chair in the center - though he hadn't been Coil at that point, he had just been Danny. Danny was relaxed and chuckling; he nodded to her and raised a hand in salute. "Well, that was exhausting! I hope there's not many other precogs like you otherwise my career is liable to be short lived."
"There are none like me," the recording of Contessa stated. She turned to leave and Danny swung his legs over the side of the chair.
"Hey, just a note, Ma'am. That one option where you ended up broken nearly in half before killing me? Even if you have healers, that's not a good strategy."
"I won. That is all that was required of this test. The aftermath wasn't important."
"The aftermath is always important," he stood and stretched. "One thing I learned from working with my guys in the Union for so long: actions have consequences. If you don't take those consequences into account, they bite you later. I got my people a job once, paid real well, except after the job was done, three of the guys were shaken down by gang members and the gang as a whole pressed hard against us for the next few weeks because they knew we had money now. I don't know what the goal is for this place, I don't think I want to, but if you're as powerful a precog as this fight made it seem…don't get lost in the goal and forget the bigger picture. That's how people get dead."
Contessa shook her head and started to walk away again. "A lot of people are going to die anyway. My job is to minimize that. This was an interesting exercise. Thank you for the practice."
She stopped the video and looked to Kurt, raising her eyebrows. He had stopped breathing as he stared at the screen. Turning slowly from it to Fortuna she nodded once. "His words stuck with me. I realized that we have never thought of the aftermath. So I tried an experiment. I simulated a world where we won. A world where Scion had been killed and the shards were not constrained to an endless cycle of death and destruction. I simulated…what would happen without an Entity at the helm. I wanted to know where we fit in. I wanted to see how we could pick up the pieces of humanity left assuming we won."
"And what did your shard show you with that simulation?" Kurt asked. "Your power doesn't work like that. You don't get full visuals."
"I did at the very start, when my shard was fully engrossed with the Path and the Plan and their Cycle," she whispered. "When it first connected, I watched a world where the Entities led us along the Eye's Path, and it gloried in it. It wanted to show me exactly what it could do and what it was capable of manipulating. I didn't recognize it at the time, but it was…proud of the chain of events…"
Kurt stepped back and clutched his clipboard to his chest. "And after that test? When you simulated our win, it was proud again?"
"Yes." She started to laugh and her head dropped to her chest as she pulled her legs up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around them. "With Scion gone…The shards were lost and confused and without purpose. They tried to get purpose anyway they could, some attempted to establish a new Entity by themselves. The results were…horrific. The Eye was the most successful of those attempts. It formed a new network. It started to draw in others. We were fighting back, but there were so many…We would've had to hold the line for centuries in order to fight them off long enough. And against my shard for that long? We would never have managed it."
"Worse than the Endbringers…" Kurt murmured.
"It was going to start all over again," she whispered. "And I was going to be the core of it. One lost, pitiful little girl, subsumed by her alien god, and used as a gateway to give itself purpose again."
"We never…my god, we never even considered…"
She shrugged as best she could without moving from her fetal position. "Of course we didn't. We'd have won if Scion were destroyed. Why would we bother to think that things could possibly get worse?"
He sucked in a gulping breath and was silent long enough for her to regain some semblance of her composure. Finally, he had gained enough stability as well to ask, "That's why you've been more emotional lately isn't it? You've pulled back from using your shard for even the simplest of things like you used to."
"I don't want to become that…thing, Kurt. I refuse. I will kill myself and cast it adrift before I let the Eye start down that Path. When I saw what could be coming, I knew we had to find a different way. One that left a replacement for Scion. One that wasn't me. I'm not…human enough anymore to do the job. I wouldn't be able to contain the Eye. I wouldn't know how."
"So you built one from scratch…Fortuna…what did you do?"
She finally lifted her head and looked at him a few tears running down the sides of her face. "I didn't have to do much, surprisingly. Coil messed up his home life all by himself. All I had to do was stop one girl from going to back to school, trip another girl when his mercenaries tried to recruit her, make certain that Coil used his powers near said girl leading to both becoming mutually antagonist, annoy a third after an already bad day so she would overreact at the exact wrong moment, ensure that the Dallons' mother was angry from a bad case at the precise moment, delay reinforcements for a final girl when she asked for help, and then ensure that the local Director was upset at the exact wrong time for a meeting."
"That's quite a few steps for 'not doing much' Fortuna."
She shrugged again. "It really wasn't. Even making my breakfast tends to be quite involved. This was…almost too simple…It's frightening how easy it was. Almost everything else has hundreds if not thousands of steps, this was scarcely a dozen…I barely had to act at all…"
"You threw Queen's team into her path," Kurt murmured, his eyes wide.
"I just needed to arrange the meeting for the first few; the others were organic. Their own personalities and actions took it from there," she confirmed. "Taylor Hebert, she needed to regain a connection to the world…because her shard is so much better suited for this than mine. It cares. It cares about her, it cares about them. It's apparently inspiring other shards to care as well. This is…so much better. Even if we lose, it's better to lose to Scion and have hope that this friendly network of shards will save some of us, than to kill him without assistance. We can't expect to be able to fight a losing war against nearly all of the remaining shards as they fight me and the Eye for dominance. This is better."
"Fortuna," Kurt said stepping forward and laying a hand on her shoulder.
"This is better. This has to be better."
\/\/\/\/
Fanfic Rec: 'Ziz' by Tcurator. On SB. This is a Ziz!Taylor. She literally has all of Ziz's powers, and they're only mildly toned down. It's freaking awesome. Taylor is both amazingly OP and the story is great fun. It's another example of how to write an overpowered character without making things devolve into crazy antics or just be boring. Taylor alternatively working with the Undersiders, then befriending Dragon, and then recruiting Canary is both hilarious and fun as heck. This story is fantastic and the only downside is that it hasn't been updated in years…
