Eidolon 2005 Janaury 1st

Rome Italy

This is the second time Italy has been attacked. I'm in the air, Vatican city is covered with a multilayered dome of energy, that's currently being bombarded. I was providing overwatch.

"She's going left."

The parts of Sharr's body were moving independently, like some fucked up game of centipede, but Rome's streets were at times narrow. All we had to do was corner her, stop her main body from escaping and we would win this, we-

"Ironwood she's right in front of you."

He charged forward, the Italian capes cut off her escape and Woody jumped on her. Explosions rained down like hellfire and then the noise stopped and went quiet.

"Endbringer down."

I heard cheers from throughout the city, and I landed on the ground were Sharr's corpse laid. Woody looked scuffed, his coat burned and ruined.

"I can make another one now."

I blinked.

"Another?"

"World, another seedling...I went over board on Mars, with what I know now this should be enough."

I took in a breath.

"That's big."

"Bigger, I've been working with project Phoenix on the Mexico city find and we could do a full terraform, using Venus. It would be a long term poverty trap and we wouldn't be able to craft the land masses like Mars, but it would be ready to go in days rather then decades."

I thought about it and looked at the burning city.

"And?"

"The seedling has the needed programming, we just need the batteries."

"I will forward the message."

Eidolon March 4th 2005

"More of them escaped."

The mood was depressing and somber, 5 dead endbringers, as of today 13 active ones. Doctor Mother turned her head to Number Man.

"How bad is it?"

He sighed.

"We need Venus terraformed now?"

"Resource crunch?"

He shook his head.

"Refugees, simply put there isn't enough room, resources, or space and it's fucking with stability."

"How badly?"

"We're looking at total collapse of all of the countries in red, distabilization of all the countries in green, and the blues are not going to have a good time either, because they're next."

Number Man looked tired.

"We need to increase production of case 53s."

I kept silent as the others thought about it, Doctor Mother nodded.

"They're a good use of our low quality vials and since we gained the ability to flip them it's given us some leverage, so the numbers on that?"

"United States, with current propaganda and easy acess, 92.75% take the offer. Of this 41.32% have Tinker capabilities, the number of people who take the offer gets lower the further away you get from North America. Of course some people can't be helped, this happens roughly 1 in every 10 thousand times. The most recent being the Alabaster case."

"The nazi."

"He took the news... badly, it was an acceptable loss though. We're currently pushing the Tinkers into the space program. Between the war, violence in the streets, and other issues our former case 53 capes who go into the PRT tend to die... a lot."

"How bad is 'a lot'?"

"At current rates half die their first year, but we need cannonfodder for the war, so it's well within acceptable margins."

Good.

"Scion hasn't shown up to any of the fights since Ironwood showed up."

Number Man shrugged.

"Smart money is he has some really advanced anti Thinker power, I mean you don't want to risk your medic right?"

Which led us to the current issue.

"Project Spear, how's it going?"

A big massive gun hidden in space worked by our special Tinker conclave, Hero looked up.

"It took the help of a fuck load of Thinkers and Tinkers, but..."

He smiled and pushed a button we stared at the bizarre sight ahead of us.

"That's him, the real him."

Scion.

"We can win."

The others turned to stare at me.

"Dave, he's huge we don't know what defenses he has and-"

"I know that, but we know he has a weak point, for all of our problems we have time, we have options."

"Which doesn't help the Endbringer situation."

I shrugged.

"The Endbringers are bad, but we have the option of leaving Earth now, whether it's through dimeinsion hopping or going into space, we can run. Zion's going to kill potentially an unlimited number of Earths, and look I know it's bad. But we can win, it's going to be hard, it's going to take us to the limit but we can do this."

I stared at the image of a being that could be considered a god and smiled.

"We can win."