Hearing a knock on the door, Linda put down the engine part she was examining and went over to unlock it. Outside were Saurial and Metis. "Hi, come in," she said, stepping back out of the way.

"Sorry we didn't come over earlier, Linda," the smaller lizard said apologetically when the door was shut again. "We had a meeting with the PRT on short notice about something we're helping them with."

"Danny told me," she assured Saurial. "Don't worry, I've found plenty of things to do to fill time."

"It's definitely coming along, isn't it?" Metis said, looking around with interest.

"It sure is. I still can't believe this," Linda said with a smile as she did the same, leading them back to her workbench. "I'm a fuck of a lot luckier than I have any right to be, considering everything. You guys saved me and I can never repay that."

"We've said before, there's nothing to repay," Saurial commented.

"You say that, but you're not seeing it from my side," she shrugged. "To me, there's a lot I owe you."

They exchanged glances. "Fair enough. If you're happy thinking that, don't let us get in the way," Metis grinned. "Just don't think we feel the same." The large black reptile looked her up and down. "The new body working out for you?"

Linda looked down at herself, twitching an ear and waving her tail around. "A lot more than I expected," she chuckled. "This is still pretty cool." Reaching up she pulled the mask she was wearing off and tossed it onto the workbench. "Although that thing itches."

"Any ideas on a proper costume yet?" Saurial inquired, leaning back on her tail and watching her. She shrugged again.

"I haven't put a lot of thought into it yet," she admitted. "I've been too busy sorting this place out and designing stuff. It can wait, aside from the PRT visit I'm not planning on going anywhere right now." Moving over to the side, she picked up a very large transformer and shifted it ten feet away, to make room. "The strength boost is one of the most useful parts of the whole deal," she smiled. "Before I'd have needed three people and a hand truck to do that. Ianthe was right, though, when I'd finished moving all the stuff in here around I was starving."

"She's usually right about things like that," Saurial nodded. "You haven't had any trouble wandering around as Vectura?"

"No. A couple of weird looks for a while, but a lot less than I'd have expected," she replied with a small frown. "Some people stared at me for a second, looked thoughtful, shrugged, and just went on with their day. Most of the others didn't really seem to notice."

The lizard-girl snickered. "Told you."

"You did, but it's weird to see it happen. I wonder how many worked it out?"

"Most of them, I think. But no one cares."

"Kadir definitely knows, as far as I can tell," she said. "He just nodded to me when I bumped into him in the cafeteria and asked how life was treating me since joining the DWU, smiled when I told him, got his coffee, and left." She shook her head in wonder. "Interesting place."

"We like it," Metis smiled.

"I can see why."

"So what do you need to make?" Saurial asked after a moment, looking at the stack of paperwork on the workbench, then at the whiteboard on which she'd fleshed out some of her sketches.

Getting down to business, Linda went over to the board and picked up a marker. "These parts to start with, here, here, and here," she said, pointing. "The outer skin should be EDM, but it doesn't need to be very thick at all considering the stupidly high strength of the damn stuff. Under that, I was thinking a good titanium alloy would do the job, with a thermal insulation between them."

Saurial and Metis both studied the drawings with interest. "I've got a few really good alloys that are even stronger than that," the former said. "I made a costume for Brandish out of it, since her power wasn't compatible with EDM. OK, that looks easy enough. All these fasteners as well?"

"Yes, I've made a note of the threads, lengths, and diameters of all the things I need, along with the numbers of each. I want to be able to take it to pieces if needed, since it's a prototype. When we're happy with the design I'm sure we can optimize it and make it simpler, but unlike Kevin I need to start somewhere and work up." She smirked a bit. "Although I can keep doing it until I get it right, so there's that."

Saurial laughed. "Poor guy, that really annoys him. Sure. Let's have a go and see what we come up with. Metis can probably help with optimizing it, she's good at that sort of thing."

Her cousin looked pleased with herself, and very smug. Linda grinned, then watched as Saurial made the first piece, gray and silver metal appearing from nowhere in a process that made her practically salivate with anticipation.

With friends like these, who needed scrap and junk to make wonders?

"They're having fun," Taylor reported, picking up one of the left-over sandwiches and nibbling it. Assault had made a pretty fair dent in the pile all by himself, and the others hadn't been shy about it either, so there weren't many left. Amy helped herself to a tuna salad one and ate it.

"The way that you're here talking to me, and over there helping Linda make things, at the same time, is really freaky," her friend said, watching her with interest. "You're getting better at the multitasking, aren't you?"

"I think so," Taylor nodded. "Varga and I are time-sharing for the most part, so it's not as hard as you'd think, but it's still a little confusing. He thinks we might be able to work up to having three aspects, but I'm more than happy with two." She abruptly changed into the small dragon version and flew onto the table, picking up another sandwich with both hands. "This is still at least as much fun as it was the first time," she giggled. "I've never seen a sandwich this big."

"Can you even eat tha..." Amy watched as Taylor opened her mouth and virtually inhaled the food, which was proportionately about half the size of a mattress. "...Never mind."

"Nice. The cafeteria really makes good food here," she said cheerfully, flapping over to land on her friend's shoulder, her tail draped over warm scales along her back. "So, what do you want to do now? It's still only about half past seven."

"I'll make a container of the bioagent for the shelter, while we wait for the PRT to call us about it," Amy replied, turning and heading for her lab. "You did reconnect the repeater, didn't you?"

"Ah. I knew there was something I needed to do." Taylor teleported into free air and changed back to her base form in the process, walking over and quickly doing the task. "There, we're back online."

Joining her friend in the workroom she made a pair of suitable containers for the anti-RDX agent, which Amy soon had filled with reprocessed onion biomass. Sealing them, the healer put them under the bench. "Those will keep in stasis for a few hours, I'll activate them when we're ready. Let's have a go at making a biogun docking station."

"What's it going to look like?"

"More or less a sort of plant, which is basically what it is. I figured out how to make it live directly from electricity so we can just plug it into the wall like a charger for a phone. As long as it has air and some water vapor it'll be happy, but we'll need to feed it the right chemical stock for it to refill and service the guns themselves. The entire system will be self-maintaining and should last for years at a minimum."

"How tough is it going to be? Only I remember Dad trying to grow ornamental bamboo, which is supposed to be difficult to kill, and none of it ever lasted more than a month," Taylor said with a roll of her eyes. "Mom laughed every time."

Giggling a little, Amy replied, "You'd have to work at it to kill it. Like the rest of my stuff none of it uses normal DNA, it's much more resilient and error-repairing, pretty radiation proof, and hardly any chemicals would do much. It doesn't grow, though, it merely maintains itself and the guns."

"If you made it grow, like a weed, we could have gun trees all over the place," Taylor suggested impishly. The other girl gave her a narrow-eyed glance.

"Oh, yeah, I can see that ending well..." she muttered. "No, I don't think I want to do that. Stop trying to make me accidentally take over the world."

"What about the healing symbiotes? Which we need to come up with a better name for, now that I think about it. Could you make a sort of plant that produces them?" Now Taylor was genuinely curious.

Amy paused in her preparations for making another oddity of nature, looking thoughtfully at the wall. "I've actually considered that," she finally said. "If we're able to get people to accept them, I can't see myself sitting here making the things by the billion. I've got other things to do, same as you, and if nothing else we don't want to make people dependent on the Family for everything. Or anything, probably. Same reason for the slightly roundabout way of dealing with Coil when we all know we could take him out in minutes worst-case these days."

Taylor nodded slowly, leaning on the bench and watching the large violet lizard-girl form of her friend. "That's certainly a valid point."

"So, yes, I could make a symbiote plant. It's actually pretty simple now that I have the design optimized. The one shot ones are probably better for that part right now, but I could do it for the standard ones as well, and the really advanced things I'm still working on. There's a hell of a lot of stuff I can do which I haven't really even touched on yet." She shrugged, getting back to work. "Like you and Varga, every time I think up something new it triggers a dozen different ideas and possibilities. I could easily spend the next century exploring the various concepts I've had in the last couple of months."

"And now you can actually put that much time in on it if you want." Taylor smiled affectionately at the other girl, who stopped again for a moment, then chuckled.

"You know… I keep forgetting that I really could still be here doing this a hundred years from now. Or two hundred."

"Or two thousand. You're going to crack the limits of the current symbiote sooner or later, that much I'm certain of," Taylor laughed. "Which is a good thing. Varga and I want our friends to come with us."

"You're planning on being around in a couple of thousand years, then?" Amy grinned.

"Oh, sure, that's not likely to be a serious problem," Taylor assured her, making the grin slip a little. "Varga's pretty sure I'm not going anywhere any time soon. Princess Luna was old when she finally left, and he and I have a lot more power than he and she did."

"Doesn't that freak you out?" Amy asked seriously, turning to look at her with a slightly weird expression.

She shook her head. "It did at first. Quite a lot. Right back at the beginning, he told me I wasn't truly immortal in the genuine sense of the word. He might be, he doesn't know for sure, but the only thing that ever existed that really could kill a Varga is both in an entirely different universe, and was destroyed a hell of a long time ago anyway."

"To be accurate, Amy, the only thing I'm aware of that could kill a Varga no longer exists. I can't guarantee, regardless of Taylor's enthusiasm, that there is nothing else out there that could do the job," the Varga chimed in through Taylor. "But I can say that anything that would certainly achieve that result wouldn't be important for humanity, as the planet would be very unlikely to exist any more. Or possibly the solar system. We are indeed very, very difficult to destroy entirely."

"What about Taylor herself?" Amy asked.

"She is less tough, admittedly, but as our merger deepens with time that is becoming less relevant. Even now, as we've discussed, and in her base form, there isn't much that would kill her and leave anything left of the city itself or the surrounding area. In the other forms, she becomes even less fragile, of course. Old age, at least in terms that humans think of it, isn't going to be an issue for a substantial amount of time."

He shrugged her shoulders. "We can't say for sure what the future will bring, but I think that we are going to be together for a very long time indeed. Most likely far longer than any of my previous Brains by a large margin."

"Which I'm looking forward to," Taylor smiled.

"You're not worried about getting bored with god knows how much time in front of you?" Amy queried. "That's always one of the arguments people come up with against living for a really long time."

"Those people don't have the opportunity to actually do it, so that might just be rationalization," she replied. "And no, I don't think we're going to be bored." She put her arm around her currently larger friend's shoulders. "Not with all my friends and family with me, Varga, and the entire multiverse to poke around in. We'll figure out some sort of interdimensional portal sooner or later. Varga knows some really cool advanced magic..."

Amy stared at her, then slowly shook her head. Taylor grinned widely at her. "Sometimes I really don't know how seriously to take you," the other girl said with mild annoyance. "And then I think about all the craziness in just two months or so and wonder what the fuck is going to be happening in a year or two."

"Wonderful things, Amy," Taylor said, waving her free hand around. "Wonderful things. Just think. We can build our underwater city, create an entire species of eldritch horrors, then spread out across the stars, bringing puns and interesting things wherever we go." She adopted a deep resonant voice for effect. "We are the Family. Our biological and technological peculiarities will be added to your own. Prepare for fun."

"Resistance is futile, hmm?" Amy giggled.

"Pretty much," she chuckled.

"You really are crazy." Her friend looked amused. "Well, whatever happens, it sure won't be boring. Now make me something to put this thing in, please."

"Sure." Taylor poised her hands over the bench, then said in portentous tones, "Describe your desires and I shall bring them into existence."

"Are you being this difficult to Linda?"

"No, I reserve the real me just for you, oh cousin," Taylor snickered. Laughing, Amy started to explain what she wanted and Taylor began making parts.

Emily walked into the level 4 classification bio lab, looking around curiously, as she didn't come down here very often. There were half a dozen airlocks to go through, which incorporated a significant number of very lethal contamination countermeasures, both Tinker designed and more common technology. The entire place ran on its own air supply, could be completely isolated from the outside, purged with a number of chemical agents, irradiated so heavily it would be lethal for months from the secondary radiation, and if required utterly slagged in under a minute. Which would kill any known biological organism very effectively, although it would also have done the same for any poor bastard trapped in it at the time.

She wondered for an uncomfortable moment if it would be enough to kill, or even seriously inconvenience, any of the Family…

Hannah was standing next to an isolation chamber talking to a couple of the scientists who were going over a printout with intrigued expressions easily visible. She went over and joined them.

"This stuff is remarkable, Director," Doctor Tiptree exclaimed when she noticed the other woman. "The Family made it?"

"Yes," Emily replied. "Do your findings match what Ianthe told us?"

"Exactly," the scientist nodded. She pointed at one of the graphs on the printout, which Emily couldn't really make anything of. "This organism converts RDX into inert materials at a truly incredible rate, with very little heat given off in the process. It's very efficient indeed. I have no idea what the mechanism is but I'd love to find out. The DNA equivalent is utterly alien, and there's no apparent way it could perform any sort of information transfer with normal bacteria or virii. It does appear to be safe to release. We tried it on a wide range of common materials, and less common ones too, including samples of a dozen different explosives, and the only thing it affected at all was RDX."

"It's extremely targeted," the other scientist, whose name Emily couldn't immediately place, said. "Like a very specific antibody, only more so. We also fed the raw material to a number of test animals directly, which had absolutely no observable effect. It appears to be biologically inert as far as normal life is concerned."

"It definitely doesn't replicate either," Doctor Tiptree added. "The things start dying within a short period of time unless they find RDX, once they're released from the container they were supplied in. It appears to have a coating which keeps them active but in stasis, a complex chemical mix we're still trying to analyze. It would take weeks of testing to be totally certain that there was no possible condition under which it could be some form of hazard, but we're fairly sure that outside something seriously weird, it's as safe as you can get."

"It's against standard protocols," her colleague said to Emily when she finished, "But we believe there's no real risk in using it for the purposes that Ianthe designed it. It's definitely safer than all manner of industrial chemicals that get released into the environment every day without any concern. Or biological agents, for that matter."

She nodded slowly, glancing at Hannah, who seemed a little worried still, but met her eyes and also nodded.

"I see. And the methods for killing it also work?"

"As far as we can see, perfectly," Doctor Tiptree replied. "We don't know the chemical agent Ianthe mentioned, but ordinary aqueous sodium hypochlorite solution above twelve percent concentration kills it in seconds. We tested that several times. You can see the cells disintegrate under high magnification, there's nothing left after less than a minute aside from simple and non-toxic chemicals. It's a very good kill switch. Lower concentrations, around the level of standard household bleach, it ignores. So it will still work even in a place that's been cleaned normally, I would guess is the idea."

"Those lizards might be weird, but they're amazingly good bio-engineers," the man said admiringly. "A lot better than anyone I know about. Even any Biotinker I'm aware of, for that matter. If Ianthe really came up with this in under a day and a half, god only knows what she could do if she really thought hard about it."

"Which is a worry," Emily mumbled, looking at the innocent-appearing vial inside the isolation chamber. More loudly, she asked, "So in your opinion there's no reason other than standard protocols not to use it?"

They exchanged a look. "No, not that we can determine," Tiptree replied after a moment. "Without further testing we can't say any more than we have, though."

"Understood." Emily nodded again. "Thank you."

"What do you want us to do with the remains of the sample?" her colleague asked, also looking at the vial. "We used about sixty percent of it for the tests."

"Put it under maximum level containment in secure storage," she directed. "Just in case we need it later. Write up the report and have it hand-delivered to my desk. Contact Miss Militia when it's ready."

"Yes, Ma'am," Tiptree replied. Emily gestured to the door, Hannah following her as she left. Once they'd made their way back through the isolation locks, she leaned on the wall of the corridor and ran a hand through her hair with a sensation of relief.

"That place always gives me the creeps," she said in a low voice.

"Me too," Hannah admitted. "I'm not sure why, though. Maybe the thought that if the system triggers, I'd be glowing in the dark moments before turning into charcoal."

"That's certainly not something I like to think about," Emily replied. "What do you think?"

"I think we don't have a choice. But if anything goes wrong, you get to explain it to the Chief Director." Hannah smiled a bit.

With a sigh, Emily nodded. "That's my responsibility, and seems to be my life at the moment. All right. I'll call Ianthe and let her know to go ahead." She pulled her secure phone from her pocket and started dialing the number she'd put into the contact list earlier, as they headed upstairs. When the large reptile answered with a polite greeting, she said, "Hello, Ianthe. Our lab is happy that there's no apparent issues with your product as far as can be determined with such a short time available. I'm authorizing its use."

"Thank you, Director," the deep voice said, sounding satisfied. "I'll tell Saurial and Raptaur to go ahead."

"Thank you. I'll talk again with you tomorrow."

"Certainly. Until then." The line disconnected and she put her phone away.

"I hope this doesn't come back to bite me in the ass," she sighed, watching the elevator lights change. "Fucking man. I wish I'd strangled the bastard years ago. The trouble he's caused..."

Oh well. Perhaps she'd get the chance. Or at least get to see Saurial do it.

Danny knocked on the door to his daughter's office, then waited. It opened a moment later to reveal her as Raptaur. "Hi," she said, waving him through. Inside, she led him over to Amy's workshop, where he looked in to see the Dallon girl in her bioconstruct concentrating on a weird looking plant-like thing that was growing out of a transparent container like a flowerpot crossed with a still. "What on earth is that?" he asked curiously.

She looked up at him, then back at the thing she was making. "The docking and servicing station for the bioguns," she replied. "It keeps them charged and maintained."

"What keeps it charged and maintained?" he asked.

"You plug it in, then pour a few standard chemicals in here," the girl said, pointing at a hopper on the side of the container. "The thing is an electrovore, it lives on electricity, air, and water. The chemicals are used to build the consumables for the bioguns, and feed their living components."

"That's… disturbing," Danny noted with slight unease. "I still have trouble getting used to you molding living things like they were modeling clay."

Amy nodded absently as she fiddled with some of the branchlike constructions that fanned out and up from the central structure of the 'plant'. "I know the feeling, I had it a lot when I Triggered," she replied. "Still do sometimes even now. But I guess you can get used to almost anything." She glanced at Taylor, who had turned into the small dragon again and was sitting on her haunches on the bench watching her friend. Taylor waved at her, smirking. "Case in point."

Danny snickered. "I understand. Much better than I'd have expected." He looked at the small flying reptile. "Are you planning on spending all your spare time like that?"

"It's pretty cool, Dad," she laughed. "But probably not. The novelty still hasn't worn off though. It's more fun than I expected."

"I'm genuinely surprised you didn't pull that out for the PRT meeting, just to make them stare," Amy grinned, putting the finishing touches on her latest creation. "There, done. I think."

"I haven't publicly launched the dragon form in any size yet," Taylor explained with a shrug. "And I haven't come up with a good name either. It's difficult, all the best ones are taken. Not to mention I haven't worked out whether to use different names and say the different sizes are distinct individuals, or make it one dragon that can change size. I can see some amusing possibilities for both options."

"Me too," her friend remarked as she picked up one of the bioguns and inspected it, then attached it to one of the protrusions on the servicing plant via a port that opened up on the base when it was applied to the thing. She prodded it a few times then nodded happily. "That works perfectly. Everything's running to design, the gun is happy, so is the plant, and like this it will keep them going for years." She put the rest of the stack of the partially living weapons into place then stepped back and admired the result.

"It's impressive in a somewhat Lovecraftian way," Danny admitted. "Is it meant to be making that sort of… gurgling… sound?"

"Yes."

"And the deep intermittent hiss?"

"That's normal too."

"What about the high pitched chanting in some eldritch tongue, as if a tiny horror from outside time and space was calling its relatives to feast on the souls of an unwitting mankind?"

Amy reached out and swatted Taylor's dragonlet form, causing her to duck and stop making the eerie sounds, replacing them with a laugh.

"Was she always like this as a child, or did it take a demon from beyond to bring it out?" the reptilian Dallon sighed.

"Varga made it worse, but he had a lot to work with," Danny said with a faint grin. "All her mother's fault, of course."

Both girls laughed, Taylor vanishing from the bench and reappearing as her normal more or less human self next to him. "How did your meeting with Director Piggot go?"

"Fine, thanks," he replied. "They want a hundred people or so for crowd control over the weekend for some operation they were dancing around actually describing. The Coil takedown?"

"That's it," she confirmed. "We've got a pretty good plan to deal with him that lets the PRT feel they did a lot of the work and we're only helping out. Without giving away all our good tricks. I need to go out later and do some preparation work for it."

"And we introduced them to just how powerful Family life sculpting is, hopefully in a manner that doesn't freak them out too much too fast," Amy added, turning away from the biogun system, which continued to make contented gurgling sounds in the background. "I really want to bring up the one shot healing devices at least, but I couldn't figure out a way to work it into the conversation."

"Start them off easily," he advised. "If you dump too much information on them too quickly they'll panic. That's pretty normal. But if you ease into it they'll probably end up dealing with it OK."

"Seems reasonable," she nodded.

"That said, I want to have enough of those things to put some in every first aid kit in the entire site, please," he requested. "They're way too good not to be used. The PRT doesn't need to know, of course, but I'd feel better about it if we had something better than bandages and stitches. Can you do that?"

"Sure, Danny," she smiled. "I'll spend time over the weekend making a couple of thousand of them, that's a little time consuming but not hard now I have the design. Taylor and I were discussing making something to make them but that'll take a little work yet. In the meantime I've got a hundred or so here you can have." She rummaged in one of the cabinets next to the bench, then handed him a container. "These ones are pretty much in spore form, they'll keep for years. They're simpler than the full symbiotes."

He opened the metal container and peered in, seeing a number of flat off-white lozenge shapes which were about a third of the size of the symbiote she'd gifted him with. "Same usage as the advanced ones?"

"Yep. You could even swallow one, but your mouth would go numb for a few seconds and I bet you'd cough a lot," she smiled. "On the skin is probably best."

"All right. I'll type up some instructions for them and get some of these to the site medical facility for emergencies, then distribute the rest among some suitable people." He looked at Taylor. "I assume you're carrying some around now too?"

"How did you know?" she asked curiously.

"I know my daughter, even the latest version of her," he said wryly. "You like to be prepared and between you and the Varga generally think ahead. With some notable exceptions."

Taylor grinned, shrugging. "Even a half demon and a full one can't think of everything."

She got an intrigued expression, then smiled again. "You guys need to come see what Linda's made, it's cool," she said, stepping out of the workroom and changing to Raptaur without breaking stride.

Danny watched her with a raised eyebrow, glanced at Amy who was smiling as well, then followed. She made it look so casual these days.

"Has she finished it, then?" he asked as they left the building.

"Structurally, it's mostly done, but the drive systems and electronics need work," Taylor said. "But she's got most of the things needed in the workshop and we can get the rest tomorrow, I think. Should be fully working by the end of Monday worst case, with a bit of luck."

They arrived at the other building, Taylor's second aspect pulling the door open as they walked up.

Both versions of his daughter looked at each other with delight, then waved the others inside in perfect sync. Shaking his head, he walked through the door, then stared in bemusement and growing admiration.

Turning to the cat woman who was studying her creation with an air of quiet satisfaction, cleaning her hands on a rag, he said "Now, that is impressive."

Everyone nodded as one. It really was.