Chapter Thirteen: Developments

Taylor was lying on a mattress, looking up at the ceiling of her room in a parallel dimension, contemplating the complexity of emotion versus the sincere simplicity of logic. One couldn't tell by looking out the window, but it was night in this world with highly accelerated time. It was the perfect time for such introspective analysis.

Logic was very simple. In a logical world there was only one right answer to every problem. A door is closed and you need to go through it? Open it. Your car is dirty? Clean it. A man punches the strongest of you in the face, knocking him clean out with a single blow? Do not fight him.

Simplicity incarnate.

Emotion, however turned everything on its side, shook it up, pissed on it, and tried to make logic look like the bad guy. Need to go through a closed door? Why? What's behind the door? Is it a bathroom? Is it your lover? What if it's an enemy ambush? Maybe the door itself is evil. Your car is dirty? Why should you clean it? What if you like it dirty? Maybe it's a symbol of what you do for a hobby, a badge of honor, really.

A villainess miscreant somehow becomes so much more powerful than you that the previous rating system would explode if they knew the truest depths of what she could do, beats your ass, see's you break down like a whiny brat with angst issues, hugs you and says it will all be okay?

Logic says that, now that they were on a similar level, the villainess should briefly be used in her attempt to kill off Scion. Immediately afterwards, she should be apprehended and sent to a prison that could somehow contain her.

Emotion muddied the waters with questions. If Tattletale was so powerful already, why did she even allow Saiyan to catch up, let alone surpass her again? She could have just used the chamber by herself and gotten stronger still. Could have kept using it until she was just too much for any single, multi-dimensional space whale to even dream of facing, no matter his stupidly impressive pool of abilities. More than that, why did Tattletale, Lisa, try and comfort Taylor at all? There was no real need for it. She could have just taken the information and gone off to fight against said space whale on her own. She had no reason to try and get Taylor right in the head again. So why?

Was it because she wasn't really evil? Wasn't even all that bitchy, to be honest? Could it be because, deep down, Lisa wanted to be a good guy?

And then the even more complicated emotions got to put their two cents in. What if Lisa liked Taylor? What if she actually thought that the skinny, if muscular, girl was attractive? Did Taylor find Lisa attractive?

Taylor stood up then, going into the bathroom, looking into the mirror with a deep sigh. When she observed her image, she could still see all of her flaws.

She was far more defined now, but she really was still skinny. She couldn't see her own ribs past her eight pack, but she could still be described as needing to run around in a shower to get wet. Her legs were rippling with tightly packed, extremely powerful tendons. Sure, she may have burned them smooth with her Ki, but they were hardly feminine. Her chest… well, she was never going to be gifted up top. Not if genetics were going to have their way. Sure, she had finally grown from her barely A-cup bust to something closing in on a medium B, but compared to other girls, even Lisa, that was hardly noticeable. No matter how much she worked out, her mouth would always be too wide, with lips just this side of too thick. Her eyes were a dull brown. She was too tall and still growing.

She had said it many times, but the only thing she really felt was feminine, beautiful, was her hair. During her first time in the chamber, she had found a book that Lisa had written in her boredom all about about how to use Ki and Chi to make one's hair stronger, shinier, fuller. She abused the hell out of those otherwise useless techniques.

Compared to Taylor, Lisa was a goddess. Her muscles were less defined, leaving her legs and arms far more womanly in appearance. Her bust had finally stopped growing when she hit a mid sized D-cup. Her blonde hair was bright and straight, though she usually had it in a ponytail or bun. She was still short, small in a way that men found attractive. Her freckles added a Girl Next Door feel to her image as well.

The only thing that would offset her appearance was the constant vulpine grin. It was just so infuriating, and was now backed up by power the likes of which the Endbringers could only dream of. Her smug, know it all, condescension was the only, major turn off about the woman.

And Taylor would definitely consider the blonde a woman.

For one, age wise, Lisa was now nineteen. Sure, outside of the time chamber, all the documents said she was only seventeen, but that didn't really matter, when she spent a couple days in accelerated time.

For two, she was, surprisingly enough, willing to put aside her own desires, for a time, to pursue something that would benefit everyone. No selfish kid would do that.

That just added to her attraction, in Taylor's eyes. It wasn't often, she'd say, that you met someone who was willing to set aside their own agenda to do the right thing.

The teen sighed, and moved back into her room, and froze.

Laying on her bed, naked as the day she was born, was Lisa. She wasn't even using a sheet to cover herself. She was grinning, as usual, but not the usual foxy one that got on her nerves. This one was far more sultry and, somehow, intimidating. She was trailing one long, elegant finger up her own leg to her waist and back down.

Taylor's pupils dilated and her pulse quickened, goosebumps going up and down her body.

Then Lisa spoke, her tone becoming honey tinged, auditory sex personified.

"So, are we gonna fuck, or what?"

-9001-

At six months in, Saiyan and Tattletale noticed something disturbing.

Their growth rate had slowed down. A lot. They weren't even sure when it had started.

It couldn't be because of age. They were certainly not past their prime. They were only nineteen and eighteen, respectively.

And it wasn't because of trailing physical growth, either. Taylor's last, unpowered, best was five hundred on the bench press. Lisa's was a less impressive, but still astounding, three hundred ten.

In the bath that night, while they simply cuddled in the warm soapy waters, Lisa looked up at the six and half foot amazon.

"Maybe it's this place," she gestured with one soapy arm to the window, and the white expanse beyond it, "Chi is the energy of the Universe, you said that yourself. Well, this universe is extremely limited. You and I are the only living things here, unlike there. Maybe we can only grow so strong under our own power. Literally."

"I suppose," Taylor shrugged, going back to scrubbing her fingers tenderly through the blonde lockes of the smaller woman.

"I mean, if you think about it," the other woman went on, closing her eyes and enjoying the feeling of being cleansed, "our Ki is what allows us interact with Chi. Chi let's us interact with the world. The world is vast. This place is small."

The brunette just sighed, as she was wont to do, and pulled the other woman to herself, shamelessly groping her in the process, "Stop. I know what you're doing. The more you try to find a good reason for this, the more I'm going to worry about it. Remember," she smiled wearily down at her lover, tapping the side of her head, "I can do that, too."

"Thinker powers are bullshit," Lisa complained.

"Yup."

-9001-

Scion stopped.

It had only been a few minutes since he started towards the city that had seen the complete destruction of a number of his shards.

Since a little over half a solar rotation, he had been aware of two powers growing there. Energy pools that were becoming vast beyond even his comprehension. When he met one of them, a score of cycles ago, she was barely more than a mouse that had gained an awareness.

He was unable to really conceive of how she had gained such power from her shard, but there she was. Worse was the fact that it was something he could not use himself.

He and his partner had tried, once, long ago. They had actually been to a dimension in which the creatures, the universe over, could use it. They had attempted to take it for themselves, to infect the inhabitants of one of their worlds with their shards.

They failed. The shards they had used were lost to them for eternity. The Shard of Growth, the Shard of Evolution, the Shard of Destruction. All of them were long gone from their reach, never to again be theirs. They could feel them, certainly, they were still in operation, being passed around the descendants of those they had been given to, but the simple, singular dimensional peons already had such raw strength that one of them felt the entities interfering and nearly killed Scion in the attempt to drive them off.

It was when he and Eden were young, before they had reached their first million years. He was certain that, should the two of them try again, they would be able to survive. If they hadn't grown at all, in the intervening billions of years.

In a brief moment of curiosity, Eden had looked at that dimension again, to assess their ability to go back and finally retrieve those shards. All she had seen had been a pair of yellow eyes. It had been so shocking that Eden crashed into several different Earths simultaneously, killing her.

Scion frowned then, remembering that. She had shared the horrifying vision with him. The eyes, their owner that is, actually spoke. It was the Shard of Understanding that let him Translate the message, and it confused him further.

"Whis!" it said, not truly speaking to Eden, or Scion, but speaking of them instead, "There is a little fish spying on my dimension. Should I kill it? Do you think it would be tasty in stew?"

Whatever the reply was, the two entities would never know. Eden had died simply from the shock of being so blocked. Well, the collisions that had happened because of the shock, but that was more of a mouthful. Scion himself felt something that he had only felt three times in his eons, Fear.

Those eyes, that voice, it was exuding that natural power so vast that it would be no surprise if that was where the power in that entire universe, aside from the Shards they had mistakenly parted with, had come from.

If two of these empowered apes were attempting to reach that level, it was best he nip it in the bud, now. He did not want to die. It could be billions of years before he found another entity like his Eden. Dying now would see to it that he never found it at all.

Unacceptable.

Remembering what had ultimately killed his partner had made Scion stop cold. The programs that tracked him alerted capes all over the world of his odd behavior. Alarms started blaring when he started blazing with light. People started scrambling when he moved so fast that it left a trail of fire in the skies.

There was no time to be leisurely, he could not imagine why he had ever thought that. He must have been too deep in his mourning to realize the threat as it grew. He turned on all of his combat abilities, clenching his fists, a frown marring his perfect, golden face.

"Let the Harvest begin."

Those were the words that heralded his explosive arrival in Brockton Bar.

-9001-

Taylor and Lisa were standing before the door to the Time Chamber, waiting for the minutes to tick down. The brunette was tapping her foot impatiently, ready to get out into the world, hoping that everything she knew about their abilities wasn't true. Hoping that their previous growth would start again, as soon as they were out in the universe.

"Calm down," Lisa said, clasping her hand, "You're just going to have a fit if you don't stop worrying, and that won't be good for anyone."

Taylor took a deep breath, held it, and let it out with a hiss, "I know. Trust you me, I know. But I can't help it. We've barely gotten any better since the beginning, it seems. My powers can't figure it out. It can't tell me why we've slowed down. If we're wrong about it being this place, we are so incredibly boned that it isn't even funny."

"Yup."

"Yup?" Taylor turned to the blonde with a frown on her face, "I just said that we, and everything we know and love, will die if we can't get any stronger, and all you can say is 'Yup'?!"

"Yup."

Taylor growled picking the other woman up by the front of her shirt, pulling her close so they could be eye to eye, despite more than half a foot of height difference. Her glare was further intensified by her glowing eyes and her featureless black mask.

When she growled it was low and animalistic, primal, tiger-like.

"You are just begging to punished," her growl infected her words, causing them to rumble ominously.

Lisa just grinned, visibly shuddering, "Oh, I know. I can hardly wait for it," she looked over her girlfriend's shoulder, "Door's ready to open, by the way."

"You sneaky little-!" she lifted the edge of her mask, pressed her lips into the blonde's, then dropped her and whirled around to leave and go see if they were right.

Her first step outside of the accelerated time dimension stopped her cold.

Fire.

Everywhere.

Fire and ash and death. She could see countless capes lying about, whole and in pieces.

That shouldn't be possible, since the door to the chamber was inside one of Tattletale's bases. But it was, because the door had opened into a mound of shattered concrete and rubble. The sky was black with smoke, and everything was alight with the oranges and yellows of multiple flames. Explosions kept happening in the background, streaks of light zipping about in the smokey air.

That wasn't what had Saiyan's full attention, though.

When Tattletale came out behind her, only seconds later, she too was witness to what would be the event that would be labeled 'The Birth of Artemis'.

In the air, right above them, was Scion. His white uniform was as pristine as ever, but not for lack of blood that had been spilt in the last eleven hours and fifty eight minutes. Even as they watched, blood was falling down his front from his current victim. It didn't stain, being completely repelled by whatever power the monster was using.

That was horrifying enough for anyone.

It was more so when Taylor and Lisa realized who was being held aloft like that.

Danny Hebert.

Scion closed his fist on the man's head, crushing his skull and destroying his brain.

"Dad?" Taylor whimpered, then fell to her knees, bellowing to the heavens, "DADDY!"

The world was blinded.

-9001-

Power Levels!

Scion- 380,000/?

Danny- 138

Lisa- 214,467,902

Taylor 228,977,145/?

Please Enjoy.