{Author Note: Made an edit in previous chapter's author aside regarding OC's age as the OC's age had to be adjusted. I had originally planned for the character to arrive only a few months prior to Taylor's trigger event, but after I'd decided that he would have to learn the local language wholesale, I bumped the arrival back a few years, and in the process completely forgot about how that would impact the character's age.
Don't worry about this being related to shipping. There is one character that I thought might work in the abstract, or two if I am being honest about the apparent Saiyajin taste for fiery women, but Sophia is a bit too unstable for a relationship without doing some major therapy. She might destroy any hope for that happening all on her own even if it became an option.
The one I had in mind would actually work better if my OC was a bit older, but I wasn't really planning for shipping to be a big deal early in the story anyway. He's got time to age before that becomes an issue, and plans could always change there. The main problem with regard to age, is that if I have him age to 19 at around the time Taylor triggers, the various local authority figures would take him too seriously too easily, and he would be too old for the Wards to be an option. I want him to be underestimated.}
Cauldron HQ, Earth Bet Date: March 6, 2008
Rebecca Costa-Brown, Director of the Parahuman Response Team, and also secretly the parahuman Hero known as Alexandria, stepped through a portal that had opened in a closet of her office. On the other side she found Doctor Mother, Number Man, Eidolon, and Legend already seated around one of the conference rooms within the multi-dimensional lattice that constituted Cauldron HQ.
"I received a high priority alert for an emergency meeting. Do any of you happen to know whats going on?" she asked the group assembled there.
"Contessa called for the meeting. She seemed quite bothered about something but hasn't divulged the reason as yet" answered Number Man. As soon as Number Man had finished speaking, another portal opened and Contessa stepped through looking somewhat haggard, a distinct departure from her normal appearance of being extremely well groomed and dressed to kill, both literally and figuratively.
"The paths have all changed" she spat out in a rush.
"Hasn't this happened before? I thought the paths change frequently." said Number Man.
"Not like this. Usually extra steps will be inserted to deal with emergent obstacles, or removed as the obstacles clear themselves from the path without intervention or the landscape of probabilities changes. Every step from beginning to end is completely different now. This has never happened before." Contessa said, expressing clear frustration and exhaustion in trying to deal with the current situation.
"Have you tried to create a path to figure out who is responsible for the shift and deal with it? Can you path a return of the situation as close to the status quo as prior to whatever caused the shifts? Also, can we do some kind of risk/reward analysis for this? Are the new paths largely better or worse than the old ones were in terms of number of steps and ethical costs? I know we haven't placed a high value on prioritizing ethics against the survival of all earths, but maybe this has a silver lining somewhere." Alexandria said, jumping into damage control mode.
"Moral costs are largely unaltered, but the involved parties and particular circumstances are still different. The number of steps and their difficulty can not be easily compared given the tasks are entirely different now. I'd call this an acceptable result ,but I don't LIKE it. The paths have never changed wholesale like this before. I don't know if this might happen again. My power has informed me that if I were to eliminate the individual responsible that it would come at the cost of a potentially powerful asset for other paths, making them significantly harder as a result. Stranding or killing him doesn't restore the status quo either, it makes things worse. Should we eliminate this individual, even through stranding on another earth rather than outright murder, the paths all suddenly stop several years later. I don't know what that means, but it doesn't seem like trying to eliminate this individual is a good idea." Contessa said wearily.
"Can you walk us through what you learned from attempting to path those solutions, even if they were sub-optimal? It might give us insight into what we're dealing with." Legend said.
"The possible paths to kill the individual either involve constructing scenarios incompatible with the survival of organic life using exotic effects, causing an encounter with a power that ignores normal physical rules, or placing the individual in the path of a strong master effect and ensuring his self termination. I am wholly incapable of doing the deed myself. If I try to specify the rules for a path requiring that I am the one to directly induce the fatal wounds, my power utterly fails to produce a path. This holds true for the rest of you as well, except for Eidolon, who, being a blind spot, I can't include in my paths. It probably depends on what selection of powers he can pull up when facing this person, but that still doesn't make it a good idea."
"I had thought they might be a cape with a strong brute power or some sort of thinker or trump ability that would allow them to avoid oncoming attacks, but further attempts at producing investigatory paths indicate this individual is not a cape. I don't know what is going on quite frankly. If he has no powers, I ought to be able to kill him myself, but I can't produce any such path." Contessa explained.
Alexandria's interests shifted at the mention of this individual potentially being able to trigger and become even stronger than they must already be. "Can we work this individual's presence into our plans? Can we make use of them to further our goals, maybe increase our chances of surviving, or lower the number of steps in the paths?" Alexandria asked.
In the throes of the panic attack induced by the sudden disruption of her paths, Contessa had been so focused on seeking an expedient method to return things to normal or eliminate the obstacle that this approach hadn't occurred to her at all. Querying her power, she received a promising response, and she replied "Yes, it appears that we can do that. It adds a few hundred steps to the near future, but eliminates several thousand steps from several future sub paths. It doesn't require specific action for several months, but we will have to prepare." she answered, her confidence in the future predicted and produced by path to victory beginning to solidify once again.
"Good, Keep us all posted on any future developments. Until something actionable comes up, we need to get back to our respective duties and day jobs." Alexandria said, rising from her seat. "Door me." she spoke in a flat tone. In response a portal opened near the wall behind her, and she stepped through, back into her office at PRT HQ.
Brockton Bay Shoreline, Boat Graveyard, March 15 2008
Kotoro had over the past week used the Techne's fabricator to generate several more spy-bots to produce a covert surveillance network to study the goings on and culture of the local populace. When he had set out on the expedition, the pocket dimension that served as the larder had been well stocked, but it hadn't been refilled completely while on Yardrat. He had spent most of his meals planet-side, eating what the friendly aliens had provided instead. Now, due to absurd Saiyajin appetite, he was beginning to run low on supplies. The spy drones had done several scans of texts that were stored in the local book repositories, apparently called libraries, and listened in on verbal communications throughout the city. Epistēmē had managed to produce a proper cognitive map of the dominant local language, and had insisted on communicating in said language as much as possible, forcing Kotoro into a crash course via full language immersion. Eventually, however, Kotoro would need to engage with the locals and become fluent through verbal and written communication with a number of different native speaking individuals. He had fitted himself with upgraded versions of his KI limiter equipment after waking to find his older ones had failed.
For the first several days they had been limited to what they could find in academic texts, but after they had built up a working knowledge of the local language, Epistēmē had been able to decipher the communication protocols for both wired and wireless data, and they had "plugged in" to the local network, which had opened up SO MANY avenues for the AI to pursue. He had spent the majority of the last several days copying and deploying subroutines into machines all over the planet, covertly digesting as much of the collective knowledge humans had made accessible via the internet, reporting back to Kotoro when he found something interesting or tactically relevant.
Of particular note, the local species, like most of the sapient species from their home universe, were 4 limbed creatures with 2 arms and 2 legs, and a head with a pair of eyes and hair. This was not unusual per se, but what WAS unusual was that like the Centurion people, they appeared to be almost biologically identical to the Saiyajin, with only very subtle differences. That had been astonishing in itself the first time it had happened, but to run into another species like this couldn't be a coincidence. According to Kotoro's mother, much like the Saiyajin, the Centurion people only had a handful of animals and plants living with them that shared fundamental biological traits and a genome with which meaningful comparisons could be made.
Some of the texts they had scanned from the local libraries indicated strong evidence that every species on this planet shared a common ancestry, and that there was an entire GROUP of species called the Simians, and a subgroup of those called Apes, from which the Humans were believed to have evolved. Saiyajins, and Centurions as of yet had no explanation for their origins or the origins of the organisms that seemed to share some degree of common biology with them. They had noticed similar patterns of common traits in OTHER species on their respective worlds, however.
The Saiyajin knew they were not native to planet Vegeta as they had fairly recently migrated from Sadala after decades of strife had destroyed the biosphere rendering the planet incapable of supporting life for the foreseeable future, so it hadn't bothered them very much, as they already knew they didn't share common descent with anything on their current world. Comparing against samples of organisms that had been brought over from planet Sadala, other than disease causing microbes, domesticated creatures, and common vermin and pests, had not produced anything that had common biology with them at all. More militaristic pursuits had dominated their culture, and since this line of research hadn't been productive, it had quickly been abandoned.
The Centurion people had developed rudimentary sequencing technologies for both their own and the normative local-genomic molecular structures, and were still actively investigating the local biota of their home-world with gusto, but had found that only very few species presented with any degree of biological overlap with themselves, also mostly being species that were involved with agriculture or living within and around their settlements much like the Saiyajin had noted.
As a result, research of this nature hadn't progressed within either culture nearly to the degree that it had advanced to on this Earth. This merited aggressive inquiry. Epistēmē had already begun prototyping improved sequencing technologies based on a fusion of technological advancements from all 3 cultures, using what they had been able to gather from Earthlings' scientific discoveries as a foundation. Most of the early earthling technologies involved the use of gels of varying densities to separate molecules of different size, but more recent advancement had capitalized on one of the techniques that had been used with gels to eliminate the use of radioactive isotopes, by replacing them with fluorescent molecules, and had forgone the use of gels entirely, opting instead to bind shredded pieces of the genome onto a plate and replicating them in place several times before doing a step by step round of the replication process using the light-emitting molecules, capturing the entire thing as a series of photographs, and decoding the sequence fragments from that. This was something that could be built upon and scaled up, using technologies from the other races, but this sort of engineering design was more Epistēmē's realm of expertise. Kotoro could assist with the practical elements of constructing and operating the prototype devices when the plans were completed.
Approximately 20 or so years ago, humans with special abilities had begun to appear, destabilizing society in general, resulting in some cultures and nations regressing into warring fiefdoms as the balance of power was upended, and in those nations that held together, resulting in a complete restructuring of society around these parahumans, largely divided into classification as heroes, rogues, and villains. Beyond this particularly interesting line of inquiry, Epistēmē had learned that this planet was being totally fucked over by entities known as endbringers. There were 3 of them, so far, although the gradual emergence of the second and third left open the possibility that more might eventually appear. They attacked population centers on a semi-regular basis, rotating which entity attacked each time, quite often resulting in total destruction of the target area, significant depopulation, or rendering the area uninhabitable or too dangerous to evacuate, due to extended exposure to the Simurgh, which was apparently that winged entity they had seen staring at them upon their arrival.
In the meantime, Kotoro was making preparations for his first foray into the outside world. He had the fabricator produce a set of Saiyajin armor, boots, and protective under-layers modified to appear visually similar to the clothing styles the local populace wears, with the added feature of a pocket, similar in concept to a belt loop, to hide his tail. He had also added a request for Epistēmē to tinker with the new scouter-scope and scouter-visor technology specs that they had stolen from the Cold Empire's databases before fleeing to Yardrat, to see if he could produce something that would blend in as normal eye-wear. This would not be ready for quite some time, as the Cold Empire's technology was built using unfamiliar circuitry and hardware designs that still needed to be reverse engineered and analyzed in depth before they could understand how it worked.
Donning an outfit resembling blue genes and a black t shirt, and footwear that resembled green sneakers, Kotoro exited the vessel and stalked his way out onto the beach. He began to jog at a brisk, but still seemingly normal, pace, at least for a baseline human, heading toward the Boardwalk.