Seizure 18.7
The others hadn't been happy with my refusal to explain, but Herb had taken it with grace that this was going to be one of those 'non-controversial' actions that a conversation wouldn't dissuade me from. He'd. . . surprised me, a little, but in retrospect he was acting as he always had. Wanting to help, and supportive, but I just couldn't trust the man. However, while I wouldn't've been okay being kept in the dark, he was perfectly fine with it.
Quinn and Taylor had been less copacetic, but the former had been reserved while the latter. . . the latter I was still annoyed with, so her displeasure meant very little.
Now, checking the clock, it was time. Twelve-thirty, and I finished checking my costume. Head to toe I was covered in deep red robes, with a crimson fabric mask covering my face. My back was bent over, organic looking bulges in the costume tenting it out a little, though they were really just padding to break up my form, as I hunched over, holding a twisted, blackened, iron staff with a space in the top, in which burned a blood-red sun. Beside me, a wooden golem stood, clothed in a copy of Boardwalk's costume, and cloaked in supernatural darkness from Shadow Propagation.
I wasn't able to infuse the golem with Light, doing so would've just made it explosive the second it touched anything, but I instead had grabbed a few rainbow LED strips that I'd stuck to the outside, and set to make constant patterns. In the fluorescent light of the workshop, it obviously wasn't the same, but once I started to cover it with shadows, it matched fairly well.
If we got into a fight, 'he' wouldn't be able to attack with Light, but the Speed Zone enhanced pistol would still work for a few parting shots when we left. Carrying it with my control of the air, I could make it fly a little, using myself as reference to show that, if I just glided, and cloaked myself in shadows, my feet didn't do more than glow as Boardwalk.
Ready, I brought the golem close and Strode out, teleporting high into the night sky, far away from Brockton Bay. Taking out my phone, I was able to home in on my target quickly, finding the enormous wall that quarantined the location. A quarantine that would've held until Golden Mourning originally, but, now, would be broken in three weeks, spreading death and destruction everywhere.
I had a few plans, but the first one was my best shot. With my eyes on the target I teleported, along with 'Boardwalk', to a spot a few hundred feet above the top of the ringed wall, and created a thin disk of solid crimson flame that I 'stood' on, looking to my companion. Using Acoustokinesis, I changed my voice, asking the golem, "Are you sure about this, boy?"
"Don't call me boy," I replied to myself, just in case there were any cameras and microphones able to pick me up, making the sound come from the floating golem, who gestured downwards. "All of it."
Laughing, old, dry, and papery, a bit like Flamel, I smiled underneath my cloth mask. "I wasn't going to do half."
Performance done, I looked down, easily able to pick out what was below me. A little over a mile across, the town looked like a child's idea of a medieval fantasy town, castle and all, but one made with a child's skill in creation as well. Grotesque creatures moved around, a few here and there, but most were sleeping. Inhuman eyes looked up at me, confused.
They wouldn't remain that way for long.
I'd done a few experiments with this, and I should theoretically be able to do so without problem. The only issue she'd had with the power was time, and that was one resource I had quite a lot of. Slamming my staff down onto the sun, I started to feed power into the disk of flame below me, spinning it out further and further and further.
One of Panacea's camera-flies, protected by staying within my five-foot radius, flew directly below the disk, watching the 'town' as the flames obscured my Sight. Its enhanced, single-lens vision allowed me far more clarity than a real insect's would, but it could not see in the dark as I could, only telling me that there was movement, more and more, without telling me what it was.
Further and further the disk extended, now easily over a hundred feet wide, but that was a seventieth of what I needed it to be.
I caught the sounds of alarm from below me, the creatures' pidgin English hard to parse, but they'd caught sight of the 'red light' from above, and were trying to wake my target. While I was sure his power would be Major, and something that I'd be able to pair well with Panacea's, the moral implications of creating sentient life only to use it fight, and die, didn't sit well with me.
Three hundred feet. Five hundred.
The rate of expansion did speed up, the greater surface area allowing me to create more faster, but it was barely enough to keep up with the increasing volume needed to extend the disk ever further.
Alarms sounded from the wall, the guards starting to awaken. The camera-flies in the eyes of 'Boardwalk' showed people scrambling, guns raised and pointed towards the spreading disk.
Continuing to grow the crimson star, I realized I hadn't accounted for the possibility that, in their fear, the defenders might attack me to keep Nilbog alive, so scared of what might happen if the Goblin King's ire was roused. Just like Heartbreaker I realized, forming shells of solidified air around me, just in case. And, in a few weeks, it won't matter in the slightest. With any luck, they'd stand by and watch, but I wasn't a fan of luck nowadays.
One thousand, one thousand two hundred.
Moving this thing was going to be a stone-cold bitch, but it was doable. I'd burned a hole in the dark side of the moon, the Simurgh nowhere to be seen, so, barring something else, I was well on track.
The masses below me started to move more, a voice that must've been Nilbog himself muttering about being 'not ready', and I smiled behind my cowl.
Two thousand. Two thousand two hundred.
A hero, no idea who, took off from the ramparts of the containing wall, flying while glowing brightly, as he approached. Other heroes looked up at me, or at least my star, the lights of the defenses allowing Boardwalk to see them, even as I increased the shadows around him, rising up into the air, disappearing from sight, only his black, matte mask visible, to let my insects see.
Three thousand. Three thousand three hundred.
"What do you think you're doing?" the man asked, flying a good fifty feet above me, and I turned to face him, to See his power. The Flames of Laser Creation burned at a low ebb. Not as badly as Panacea's power first had, but this man's Shard was not happy with him. A few secondaries were present, Flight, Enhanced Sight, and Enhanced Reflexes all clung to him, but they were features of his empowerment, not copiable, like the way Probability Sight was folded into Local Probability Manipulation, or how Mouse's enhanced physique worked, before I pushed it even further.
"Taking out the trash," I commented, wondering why he was so far away, before I realized that the air was shimmering all around me. Oh, right, the sun is quite hot, even away from the surface. Duh.
"I'm gonna need to ask you to stop, and come with me. This is a restricted area," he called back.
Four thousand. Four thousand two hundred.
"No," I replied blandly, as my sun grew more and more, and I started to feel a bit of strain. I did have a limit, but, thin as I was making this, it was well within mine.
The man raised a glowing hand, and yelled, "This is your last warning!" I waited, staring, and he fired a laser at me. I was a bit surprised as the glowing beam passed through my defenses as if they didn't exist, and had a moment of worry, before it hit me and nothing happened.
He shot again, with similar results.
Then a third.
Five thousand. Five thousand two hundred.
After the fourth, I asked, "Was that supposed to do something, young man?" even as I positioned my golem, gun out, just in case. Why didn't it do anything? I wondered, as a fifth shot did jack all.
Right. Lasers, I realized. They passed through my optically clear defenses without issue, but when they hit me, and tried to burn through me, both my immunity to heat meant I wasn't hurt, while Stellar Negation meant it didn't even get above a hundred degrees.
Below me, the goblin hoard was massing, the light of my star turning the area into hellish day.
And. . . target achieved.
Gritting my teeth, and with a force of effort, I started to push the mile-wide disk down, leaving a thin circle for me to stand on. My pulse pounded in my ears, as I strained, and it started to descend. The camera-fly reached the edge of my Stellar Negation and died in an instant, burned up by the enormous amounts of heat being put out by my creation. Thankfully, due to the area's status as a Quarantine Zone, there was no air traffic above me, as the updraft being created would've been extreme.
The Laser Cape realized he wasn't doing anything, and just watched. I moved the Boardwalk golem up, trying to get an angle by which to see the edge of the wall, and pulled the star back a little as it got close, so I wouldn't accidentally burn the defenders. I held no malice towards them, they were doing a needed task, it wasn't their fault their leadership was corrupt.
However, 'I was just following orders' only went so far, and if they fought me, by the same metric, I wouldn't hesitate to kill them all.
Turning to watch the edge, as the star slowly dropped below the top of the quarantine wall, I saw the others had backed up, but were still watching. As it slowly moved down, I grew it out, to the point that it was barely touching the metal, the irregularity of the seemingly circular wall, giving me a little trouble, but I got it, using the resistance of my sun to grow into solid matter as a guide.
Nodding to myself, I continued to force it to descend.
As the temperature around me dropped, the laser cape charged me, fist raised, only to fly face-first into my shield.
Right. It's invisible.
The man dropped, unconscious, towards the fires below and I caught him with solid air. Directing Boardwalk, in full shadow mode, I had him pick up and carry Laser-fist back to the wall. My connection to the golem's eyes broke fairly quickly, but I had eyes on it, the Mark I'd left on its back helping me place it in space. As I watched, it dropped the man off to a woman in swirling green and yellow spandex, who accepted her comrade, not attacking as 'Boardwalk' returned.
I stood, continuing to lower my sun, the effort a strain, though one I was getting used to, as I left the very inner edge of the metal wall glowing faintly. From below, the screams started, something trying to fly up to the star and burning to death, possibly even before it reached the fires proper.
From here, my job was simple, stand and push. I vaguely remembered something about nuking Nilbog not working, because of 'spores' or something, but this way, there'd be nothing left. I felt my sun hit something, probably the top of the scrap castle, and focused more, pushing harder, and forcing the entire thing down.
It was. . . surprisingly boring. I knew the creatures were screaming, both in fear and pain as they burned alive, but I didn't hear it, not really, only aware of it through my Acoustokinesis. Soon enough, I hit more and more resistance I had to burn through, likely buildings, the amount of effort increasing, until I hit the ground.
This was the important part, as one of the reasons that Nilbog's creation likely could survive a nuke was underground structures, and 'surprises' that might be left behind.
The answer to that problem was simple.
Burn. It. All.
The progress was slow, incredibly slow, but there was progress, the swirling sun looking nothing so much as a portal to hell itself as it burned deeper and deeper, baking the ground, then rock, leaving it a glowing cherry red.
Further and further it went, over a hundred feet down, and, looking carefully, I saw no hidden tunnels now exposed, no pockets of material that I'd missed. Fear of those had been the reason I hadn't done so sooner, though that wasn't any excuse for those who already were present. They could've called in heroes to scan the area, use Tinkers to check the limits of Nilbog's progress, but, whatever his plans were, they hadn't even started yet.
In the distance, a large, green, inhuman shaped approached. As I closed on two hundred feet down, no kill like overkill, I waited, Boardwalk floating beside me. The shape was smaller than I thought, only a dozen feet across, almost spherical, and screamed Tinkertech as it approached, a woman's voice calling, "Cease and Desist!"
I turned my back on it, as Boardwalk flew higher, sending my voice to ask, "You think Nilbog's got anything past two hundred feet deep?"
The sphere closed, forcefields shimmering around it, as its controller replied, "No, and you're under arrest."
I made Boardwalk 'float' closer to me, as I dismissed the sun below us, the light fading as it disappeared, revealing a smooth field of lava. I looked to 'Boardwalk', and put a hand on the golem's back. "Then we're even, boy!" I rasped.
And, as a shimmering forcefield tried to appear around us, it hit the edge of one of my air-shells and halted. I cackled as, forming a tendril of air, I touched it to the blood red star under my feet and stopped suppressing its heat, causing the entire thing to explode, using a Mark to return home, dropping back into the same storage bay where I'd left 'Raguel''s sword. Pulling my costume back, the Crimson Oak puppet was lightly charred, the camera-flies having long since died due to the heat. I turned off the rainbow LED strips, and stepped back into my room, leaving them in a cabinet in case I needed them again.
Yawning, I felt drained, pushing the power that much incredibly energy intensive. With a smile on my face, glad at the progress I was making, I went to bed.
AB
Waking up, pulling away from the pseudo-memories of Ziz's data-dump, I considered how to handle the problem parahumans. Simmy's suggestion was to kill half of them, and to traumatize the other half, but while. . . effective, that wasn't what I was going to do.
Thankfully, I was able to review that couple seconds of information over and over again, pulling out more intel each time. With more data, I could narrow down exactly who these people were, in a way that Simurgh just intrinsically seemed to know, and expected me to know as well.
And, slowly, I was, though I couldn't figure out how. Yes, I was hyper-focusing on small details in the threads of possibility, but, I was getting a sense of how they worked, and how, by my actions, I was leaving giant gaps in the weave.
And if I thought, for a second, that I could trust the Simurgh, I'd feel bad about that.
But I didn't.
That didn't mean I was going to act to minimize the damage I was doing to her precognitive predictions, just that it gave me a better sense of how many monkey wrenches I was throwing into the intricate system that'd result in eternal conflict to keep the golden god happy, However, I knew that without my intervention, the Simurgh would either fail just as badly as Cauldron would, or that her plan hinged on Khepri, which wasn't going to happen. Because of that, her information, while useful, was only that, useful, not vital.
Finishing my morning ablutions, I called down to have breakfast sent up to my office, teleporting there, and barely sat down before Quinn stepped in, demanding, "Nilbog?"
"Was going to break out in three weeks," I replied, nodding, checking his power, and finding nothing amiss. "Now I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen, but that Precog's gone back into hiding for a while, so I can't exactly check."
Overwatch stared at me, finally asking, "How many precognitives do you know?"
I considered the question, counting them off in my head. Theo, Dinah, Déjà, my father, my brother has the spidey-sense power, I've claimed Canon was precog so Wildbow counts, and the Simurgh. "Seven."
"Seven," Quinn echoed. "Watchdog has four, and they specialize in that sort of thing."
I shrugged, "Well, Gauge and another are really short term, one's. . . not around, and the others. . . okay, yeah, that's four. The one who gave Break and I a glimpse several years forward isn't around, but the next best one contacted me a bit ago and gave me an. . . update. Her suggestions sucked, but the information's probably good. Actually. . ." I trailed off, sending Quinn the database I'd been putting together.
"What is this?" he asked, almost certainly using his power to peruse the list without looking away from me. "Some of these people are parahumans, but others seem normal."
"They're all recruitment prospects," I replied. "Some of them have Triggered, a few were supposed to Trigger, though with the Simurgh's ass kicked into orbit that might not happen. All of them should be approached for various reasons. Oh, and the ones in red are probably going to go insane and kill a lot of people, but, again, society wide ripples screw up precognitive projections, especially when someone like Boardwalk, Æonic, or I do them."
Quinn frowned, "They haven't Triggered yet? I was under the impression those things could not be predicted."
"There are several reasons that source goes dark for months at a time," I replied, which wasn't exactly the answer to his implied question, but, bad as I often was with people, telling the man before me that my source was the Simurgh herself was probably not going to go over that well. "But, again, a lot of her predictions had the Simurgh attack go off well."
"And she didn't tell you until after you'd acted?" the lawyer asked.
Smiling, I nodded. "Yeah, she was kinda mad about it, but she's one of those 'acceptable losses' types, like Cauldron. It's something to be glad of that she works at cross-purposes with them. Actually had a couple bad experiences with Eidolon, but managed to get away safe."
Quinn nodded, and asked, concerned, "Could we give her a place with us, then?"
I froze, trying to figure out how well that'd go, assuming it didn't immediately kick off Golden Mourning. "Yeah. No. She's constantly moving, and with her here we'd be up to our necks in Cauldron agents." Which, with Rebecca Costa-Brown's position, is a not-untrue moniker for the entirety of the PRT and Protectorate, I considered. "Regardless, her explanations are. . . unclear, to say the least, and that's what I've been able to get out of her so far. I'll update it when I have more."
"And the dates on the red entries?" my vizier asked.
"When the person in question goes on their rampage, if I'd done nothing in DC," I replied. "But with Raguel's appearance, that might already not happen, or it might happen later, or it might happen earlier. Like I said, me stepping in wrecked her plans something fierce, which is why she dropped this in my lap."
The other man nodded, sighing. "Is there anything else you are planning on doing?"
"On the level of Ellisburg? No. Honestly, if Dr. Proton sets off her Tinker-bomb and destroys downtown Atlanta, that's going to be terrible, but it'll just atomize downtown Atlanta," I replied. "Nilbog was going to spread a plague of goblins that would've hit almost every small town in New England, spread further out into Canada and down into the Midwest, and be nearly impossible to fully eradicate. For all we know, the Atlanta Protectorate might actually do their jobs and stop it, now that they've only last one member instead of five." I shrugged. "It's an already broken prophecy, but there's no reason not to go the distance and stomp it into the ground. However, that can be someone else's job, as I'm still semi-Quarantined, and Vejovis has made sure not to leave."
"But not Boardwalk?" Quinn asked dryly.
"That guy's an asshole," I scoffed. "For all I know he doesn't even live in New Brockton Bay anymore."
"And you're sure that Cauldron can't tell the difference?" he inquired, and I nodded, smiling. "I ask," he went on, "because I just received a request from Legend. He wishes to talk to you. Personally. At your earliest convenience."
"Oh," I muttered. "Shit."