The bus was extravagant, the sort used by pampered millionaire musicians when they were touring. It was more of narrow apartment with wheels under it than anything else, perfect for an entitled arrogant monster and her entourage. And it was parked outside the Drake Hotel in Boston, which had just thrown out Chevy Chase to clear out the penthouse suite for the new visitors. This was a very unusual thing for the management of the hotel to do, certainly. Half the hotel's staff was in attendance, standing at the position of attention all along the south wall. The maids would bustle about to clean after their guests immediately, the concierge was serving drinks continuously, bellhops were running errands or rearranging the suite to the satisfaction of their new guest. Room service was arriving continuously, bringing the best the kitchens could create.
Valefor lounged on the white satin couch, his boots up on the matching ottoman. He was wearing a costume designed to emulate the Simurgh, his pale skin powdered even whiter where it showed. He wore a white leather corset that cinched his waist to feminine proportions, and a white skirt-like kilt with gauzy feathery white fringe that could be thought of as looking like broad white wings wrapped around his waist. He wore a couple of sleeves strapped on with no shirt, the sleeves dripping with gauzy white feathers as well. His mask was feathered, flared about his face to draw attention to his eyes. His lipstick was smeared away, mostly left behind on the oversized turkey-leg drumstick that lay on the floor beside the lamp and the huge fishbowl goblet of wine that was balanced on the corner of the couch arm. "Now this," he declared, "is living."
Eligos nodded and burped. He was stocky despite his medium height, his costume made almost entirely of black leather bands that crisscrossed, overlapped, buckled to each other and bolted in place, until they were a thick leather sheath several layers thick. His gloves and mask sat to the side, but near at hand. The mask was a full-face helmet with a dozen horns projecting from the faceplate, slightly curved, with a neckpiece that was built up like a crash helmet to absorb great force. The gloves were stiff and misshapen, as useless as the real Behemoth's hands, but built in with tazers to emulate the Endbringer's powers over lightning. He leaned against the wet bar, drinking the oldest Scotch on the premises because he knew that old Scotch was good Scotch, and watched as a couple of the more attractive linen maids danced clumsily together.
Crocell was the only Leviathan-themed member of the Fallen left, the others had shifted their costumes months ago after the death of Leviathan. But Crocell was loyal, and also very committed to the theme because his powers were particularly suited to that Endbringer. And that was why he was so determined to be part of this mission, to kill the people responsible for the death of his idol. He was shirtless, with green scales tattooed over his torso and arms. He wore heavy gauntlets with long bladelike claws on the fingertips, painted the same green. His mask was gauzy Lycra, green with red baleful eyes painted on, one on one side and three on the other side. From the waist down he wore blue jeans, motorcycle boots and a leather belt with metal pyramids. He did not partake like the others or enjoy his surroundings, he just sat on a stool with his arms resting on his knees.
Marchosias was also modeled on the Simurgh, but she did it by simply wearing a white body-stocking and wearing a floor-length white cape with scalloped edges to look like flight feathers, bleaching her hair white and wearing a silver tiara shaped to look like a crown of wings arcing up from her scalp. She was a pinch-faced woman, unhealthily skinny with a sadistic gleam in her eyes all the time. She was presently sampling every delicacy the kitchen sent up, taking a nibble from each plate and chewing thoroughly before spitting the food back out onto the plate and complaining loudly, as if her refined palate was offended by these offerings. Her accent was small-town deep-south, but without the usual soft tones and charming warmth.
"We're wasting time," Crocell grumbled. "You three are just drinking and eating instead of getting ready. We're going to have to delay a whole day just so you can sleep off your little party."
"We're gonna gather intel," Valefor replied. "We just got to the city, we can't go straight from the bus to a battle, now can we? We need to be rested up and ready before we free the demigod." He smirked as his words earned a rough glare from Crocell.
Marchosias waved an indolent hand. "The prophet will be there tomorrow, Crocell, and then we can take her to get revenge on those who killed Leviathan. Don't-" she was interrupted when a mass-driver sniper rifle shot a milligram sliver of iron through the window at supersonic speeds. The speed of the thing created enough air friction that the heat it generated was incandescent white, the air molecules stripping off its electrons as it passed to create an arc of lightning that circled around what looked like a flash of white laser-light. But the heat, the light, the sonic boom, and the electricity were all for show, the real danger was the sliver of iron in the center of all of this, that penetrated Marchosias's head at the center of the back of her skull and drilled through in an instant, leaving an entrance and exit wound the size of a pinhole, before the kinetic energy expanded out through her brain tissues and cracked her skull into hundreds of slivers. The heat bleed-off into her gray matter vaporized it hard and added enough overpressure that the skin and membranes tore away and her head literally exploded, showering everyone in the room with brain chips and steaming meat before the broken glass had time to fall.
"That's the reality warper," Uber said, waiting for the sniper rifle to quit beeping its cooldown cycle. He took aim as the other Fallen scrambled for cover. "Next priority is the Stranger."
"On it," Benthic said, as she kicked open the heavy wooden double doors. Brass deadbolt parts rained down across the carpet as she stalked forward, rats sweeping in like a living carpet of brown fur. Eligos cast back his hand to throw a blade of sharpened wind at her, but the rats shot forward, using their massed bodies to hit him at the ankles and knock him to the floor. Crocell concentrated and felt out for the water in the pipes of the walls. He didn't have enough strength to just rip the water out through the pipes or wreck them with his hydrokinesis, but his power did have an unusual wrinkle to it, a subpower of thermohydrokinesis. He felt the joints in the pipes with his power, then he froze the water tight in the pipes for several feet above and below the joint. Then, he took the center of that ice and converted it to steam, bursting the pipes and melting the ice. He waved his hand about, and the water flowing from the broken pipes punched through the sheetrock and collected in the air, forming a sphere above his palm that hovered in the air. Streams of water poured out of the pipes and fed into the sphere, expanding it all the time. He spared a gallon of water to sluice over his body, forming a layer much like the Leviathan's after-image. Meanwhile Benthic was striding straight for Valefor, who was pressed flat against a pillar to shield him from the sniper, glaring straight at her eyes and barking out orders for her to stop, to kill herself, to jump out the window, anything. She raised her sword and swatted him with the flat of the blade, dropping him in place. His power worked through eye contact, easy enough to foil if one simple switched one's visor from regular vision to sonar projection. "Stranger's down, next is the hydrokinetic."
"On it," Panacea repeated, and punched Crocell in the back of his head. Her suit slipped out of camouflage, moving quickly to lunge forward and slam him with a fist the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. He was knocked out of his after-image and sent flying, hitting the ground in a heap of stunned limbs before he started pulling himself upright. A half-dozen stingers the size of knitting needles were lodged in his back, pumping him full of sedatives, and he collapsed after getting himself only halfway to his feet. Eligos froze where he was, darting his eyes from the armored swordswoman, to the giant chitinous monster, to the window where the sniper shot had come from. He raised his hands to shoulder-height and told them everything they wanted to know.
The knock came three times, sharp and loud. The Hispanic man startled at the sound, and looked around his lab as if to count how many major felonies he was presently guilty of, and measure the weapons available to him against the risks of using them. He laid his hand on the table, and came up with a weapon that looked like a high-pressure caulk gun, and a rat clinging to it, staring him right in the face. The man stared back at the rodent, then set the weapon down amidst the clutter of the lab. Every surface was covered in papers or dishes, three or four computers spaced out across the tables and counters were half-buried in specimen samples and potted plants of a wild variety. And as his eyes swept around, he noticed things out of place; dozens of rats stood or crouched all around, all staring straight at him. And then the knock came to his door again.
"I think I'll just be answering that," he said, keeping his hands raised in a position of surrender that seemed almost casual or nonchalant. He turned and walked up the stairs, to the front door, aware that from every angle there was a rodent staring at him. He unlocked, unchained, and unbolted the front door, and tried a half-smile as he greeted the parahumans on his doorstep. One was wearing a full set of Scavenger black, a full head taller than the scientist with broad shoulders and obvious muscles, the other wore deep blue powered armor that featured sleek pods half-projecting from the surface at her shoulders, hips, forearms and thighs. "Afternoon," he said, trying to show how nonthreatening he was.
"This is Blasto?" the big man in black asked.
"For the last time, it has nothing to do with blasting anything," said a voice from the right side, and a massive figure he could not really make out sidled closer to the door. It looked like a distortion in the air, some sort of real-time camouflage. "Sir, would you be so kind as to invite us in?"
"Yeah, I think I should," he said meekly, stepping back. "Would you like something to drink? A look at my work? How can I help the Scavengers today?"
"First of all, tell your lab assistant to stop dialing that phone," the armored woman said.
Blasto grimaced, and turned to call over his shoulder, yelling something out in Spanish. The homunculus loped forward out of the kitchen, glaring at the interlopers.
The distortion in the air solidified, showing itself as a hunched figure nearly eight feet tall, with heavy chitinous plating covering its body, thick limbs showing obvious power and strength. Its face looked sinister and threatening, with long teeth and black staring eyes and jagged tearing talons on its wide-palmed hands. But its vicious appearance was belied by the tone of voice it spoke in, its gnashing mouth and guttural throat somehow shaping words that sounded calm and reasonable. "Sir, we intercepted a contingent of the Fallen in this city, who had arrived with the purpose of killing you. Four of them, and some of them were particularly dangerous, high-ranking members of that group. And I think you know what they were here for."
Blasto sagged a bit, leaning on the railing of the staircase. "Yeah, I think so. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, really. Some things just don't stay secret, not in this world of ours. I have to admit I never really considered the Fallen, though. They worship the Endbringers, right?"
"Right, and as far as they're concerned you're holding the daughter of the last god as a hostage in your lab," Panacea said. "It's like their prophet or demigod. And they want her. And they'll keep sending people until they have her, or she's dead, or they're dead. Now, we've given you a headstart with four Fallen captured or dead, but without our protection you probably won't be able to hold them off. And if you do, you'll have mustered so much force that the PRT will finally label you as a Class-S threat."
Blasto winced. "I sure don't want that. This is a bad year to be a Class-S threat. Two Endbringers down, Slaughterhouse Nine, then Nilbog dead... I understand that the Protectorate is looking at ways to take out the Ash Beast permanently, after that it's just the Simurgh, the Sleeper and the Blasphemies. I sure as hell don't want that kind of force coming down on me, no thanks."
The armored woman nodded. "Now, we came here to take Morrigan away from you. I hope you can understand that a hybrid Endbringer is far, far too dangerous to keep in this environment, or to keep at all."
Uber chuckled. "Classic Ian Malcolm moment. You were so concerned with whether you could do the thing that you never stopped to ask yourself if you should."
Blasto sighed, shaking his head. "People find out you do genetic engineering, all they want to do is quote Jurassic Park at you. Whatever. Are you going to kill her here, or are you at least going to spare me the need to clean up after?"
A hologram projected from out of Benthic's chestplate, hovering in the air in the middle of the group, six inches tall. "Actually, Blasto," the Wharf Rat said. "We've got a bit of a job for her. We need a little help saving the world."
"Help me, Obi-Wan," Blasto snickered. "Wait, run that back and say it again. You need my Morrigan to help save the world?"
The Wharf Rat nodded. "Exactly. She is uniquely suited to the job, I think that literally nobody else in the world could pull this off. The fact that she is also an incipient threat to you and everyone else in Boston is just a two-bird-one-stone situation for us. One of the guiding principles of the Scavengers is that we try to turn potential liabilities into actual assets, recruiting villains as heroes and turning our enemy's weapons into our weapons. Or in this case, turning a hybrid Endbringer into a key element of our goal to save the world."
Blasto straightened up. "Well, I'm part of this world too. If you need help saving it, then I'm ready to help."
The hologram projection sighed, and its shoulders sagged. "Look, Blasto, it's not that we don't trust you. But you have made your living with petty theft, extortion, and violence. Your powers are explicitly about creation, and you chose to use them for criminal enterprise."
"Now hold on!" Blasto blurted, coming off the railing. "This wasn't my choice! It's illegal to use tinker powers for profit, especially bio-tinkers! They made it illegal for me to use my powers constructively!"
"It's also illegal for you to use your powers destructively, but that didn't stop you," the little man made of light said. "But look, that's really neither here nor there. The only single thing we need to finish out our plan, is Morrigan. We'll try to keep her comfortable and at ease, and if she seems like she could be redeemed and reformed we may wind up returning her to you, it depends on a whole lot of different factors. But Blasto, if you're really serious about using your powers for good instead of personal enrichment, then consider moving to Brockton Bay. I'm sure it'll be a matter of time before someone takes you to court for violating the statutes against parahumans interfering in human development. But if it happens in our courts, I think you've also got a great shot at getting a jury nullification."
Uber spoke up. "That's what happens when a jury decides that the accused is not guilty of a crime because the law itself is in the wrong. I can hire some very, very good lawyers for you, and the residents of Brockton Bay tend to be really understanding of parahumans integrating into society. It started with the PRT director, Piggot, who worked really hard at the PR of this sort of thing, then the next director was a professional PR flack. After that, people got used to the Wharf Rat being everywhere and involved in everything, defeating Class-S threats two at a time. Now we own factories and move the local economy. It's a good town to get a friendly jury."
Blasto looked torn. "I mean, I get what you're saying, but... I've got a really good lab here. Accord set it up for me just before you guys killed him. I can't walk away from an asset like that. Maybe I can start making arrangements to transport it, and move myself over there in a few weeks?"
Wharf Rat considered it. "That may be just fine, actually. I fully expect that by then those NEPEA laws will be a lot more toothless anyway."
"Why is that?" Blasto asked.
Benthic raised one hand, finger extended and wagging. "Ah-ah-ah! No hints, let him learn at the same time as everyone else," she admonished her father. "Gambler's estimates get a lot uglier if we go talking about this stuff."
Danny rolled his eyes so much it was obvious even through his mask. He was eager to tell and share, he wanted to tell Blasto about their plans. That soon the laws against parahumans involving themselves in human society were going to be nearly meaningless, because they would be routinely broken by the parahuman that nobody was ever going to arrest or fine or censure at all. And if he could get away with it, it created a legal foot in the door for others to violate those laws and get away with it. But instead he shut down his hologram and let his daughter and the other two Scavengers make the arrangements to pick up Morrigan.
When he had heard descriptions of Morrigan, he had expected a girl. Five years old, maybe twelve like Gambler. Instead what he got was a seven-foot-tall figure whose age was impossible to place at all, as close to fourteen as she was to forty. Her face was wide and round with close-set eyes, not very attractive features, but her brown hair fell to her knees in a long straight sweep, and her brown eyes were overlarge in their sockets, seeming to bulge slightly. Her brown-feathered wings were folded close against her back but the top of them still extended a full foot above her head. She followed Blasto down the stairs from her room, stepping carefully with her lip between her teeth in concentration. Her clothes looked more like bedsheets that had been conscripted to garment duty. Between her height and wings it would be hard to find clothing to fit her. So her outfit seemed to be a wrap skirt and a long broad scarf wrapped and woven around her torso to keep her decent, both in autumnal earth tones that did a good job of complementing her colors.
She swept her eyes across the three Scavengers, looking at them with detached curiousity, and they stared back at her. Benthic spoke first. "This is the first time you've seen anyone with powers like your own," she said.
Morrigan nodded, her features mild and disinterested to the point of being blank and expressionless. "Only him," she said, gesturing to Blasto.
"You understand that you are dangerous?" the young heroine asked.
"I do," Morrigan acceded.
"And you are unknown, unpredictable," Benthic added. "And you understand what kind of position that puts people in, right?"
"I do," the tall winged woman said. "If I threaten them, I will need to be killed. It is not my fault I scare them, nor is it their fault that they are scared. But what I am is dangerous in a way that does not allow them to take many risks."
Benthic nodded, a bit sadly now. "You should not be, Morrigan. But maybe the world can find room for you, maybe there is a way for you to live safely with the rest of us."
Blasto looked back and forth between them, trying to measure the atmosphere, then turned to Morrigan. "Okay, Em, I'm going to send you with these people. Help them, and take care of them, as best you can. And I hope that they'll bring you back to me so I can keep taking care of you. Okay?"
"Okay," the tall woman said calmly.
"And you guys," he turned to the Scavengers, "try to take care of her. She doesn't know a lot, and she has huge powers that she has barely any experience with. But the important thing is that you guys save the world. Do that."
"We will," Panacea said, nodding. "Now, we need some open space, we should get back out onto the street."
Morrigan walked the halls, watching everything around her with the same even, detached interest that reminded Taylor of Oni Lee only a couple of months ago. The tall winged woman stared at the factory workers that shared the walkways with the Scavengers, most of whom minded their own business and did not stare back. Working in a parahuman-owned tinkertech factory that was also headquarters to an active hero team created some very jaded employees very quickly. The corridors included shelves well above head-height on both sides of the walkway that were wide enough for rats to walk along without getting into anyone's way, watching all the comings and goings. Then the three parahumans and the hybrid Endbringer turned down a central hallway that ended in a formidable-looking door and a gap in the wall that led to a dark opening. Uber took off his glove as they approached, and put a bare hand into the opening, holding it there for a second before the door opened up and admitted them.
The half-Endbringer stepped in with the others, looking all around her. Panacea reshaped her Crawler-suit, opening it up so she could step out. She wore only a light undersuit beneath it, made of the same flesh and imbued with the same powers but much thinner and more comfortable. Benthic unclasped her helmet and tugged it off, then started the disengage sequence to release the rest of her armor while Uber pushed back his hood and started unzipping the nanotube-infused fabric that Pariah had made for him. Morrigan shrugged and started unlooping the scarves from around her body, before Uber realized what she was doing and stopped her. He showed how the rest of them were just stripping down to their comfortable casual wear, and Morrigan was already wearing that.
From the other end of the corridor, Taylor was pulling her father aside. "I'm not wild about bringing her here," she stage-whispered. "She's still growing, learning, evolving at a fast rate. She could easily go unstable and without her father we've got almost no way to restrain her at all."
Danny nodded. "I understand. But compared to the sacrifices I expected us to make to save the world... this seems pretty manageable."
"What sort of sacrifices?" Pariah asked, walking up on them.
He blew out a long breath. "Well, our lives. I honestly thought a lot more of us would be dead by this point. I've worked hard to keep everyone safe, I've scouted ahead and I've made the safe calls and checked in with Gambler and I've always worked to find us the plan that involved the least danger. But even when things went wrong, we were luckier than we could have expected. We lost Circus, and Trainwreck... Mouse Protector, even. But it makes me think about how many we'd have to lose before I would stop trying. I... tend to lose myself when I'm thinking about the big picture. I can get caught up in what I'm doing. I have to stop and ask myself if I'm still doing the right thing, because I'm not sure I'd stop if I was doing the wrong thing. Would I keep pushing this plan if half the team were dead? If half the city was dead? If you two were both dead?" He paused, caught his breath, and shuddered. "I don't know. I just really don't know."
"We have been through a lot," Pariah pointed out. "Lamia, the Slaughterhouse Nine, the Elite, the Fallen, the Empire Eighty-Eight, Accord. Most superhero teams would be proud of even one of those accomplishments, and they would consider their career to be worthwhile just for having one of those successes. If Myrddin or Chevalier ever took down one of the Class-S threats, they would probably announce their retirement because there wouldn't be anyplace to go after that. But you kept going, and you've done even more. You rebuilt the city, you've helped your friends, you've cleared corruption out of the PRT. You're convincing Cauldron to quit its operations. And you're going to save the world." She patted his shoulder. "Look, you feel a bit down. People died. Friends died, people you've had drinks with and rescued again and again. But I don't want to hear you talk like this was wasted or that we didn't accomplish anything. Got it, old man?"
Danny looked up, half-smiling. "Where is this coming from?"
"It's coming from someone who gets stronger every time things go wrong, like you showed me," she said, crossing her arms. "I was a marshmallow, I would fall apart if I didn't imagine that people liked me. Now look at me! I am, at least, a rice-crispy treat. And you taught it to me. So I have to wonder why you're sitting here at your desk, acting like the world is falling apart because a thirteen-year-old girl quit the team and you didn't like the reason she gave for it. Fuck, Rat, you've still got your own daughter on the team. She knows she can quit, but she stays. And you know damn well that nothing matters except that, right? Not what Gambler does, or Uber, or even me. Right?"
"Right," he said, scrubbing at his face with his hands. "This is for Taylor, and as long as she's on board, it's all worthwhile."
Taylor grinned and hugged him around the waist. "Sweet of you to say. But I'm not going to pretend like I'm more important than the world."
"And Gulliver's still with you, and Oni Lee," Pariah continued. "And I'm gonna stick this out for a while too. I've been with you since Leviathan, it'd be ridiculous to leave now. So it's okay if you have a little crisis of conscience, if you lose faith in yourself. Because plenty of the rest of us have faith in you."
Danny stood up and grinned at her. "I'm glad to hear that."
"Good," the fashion designer turned hero said. "Now, can I tell you one thing, and ask for one thing, without ruining the message of what I just said?"
He stared at her a second, his grin fading and falling. "Sure, shoot."
"The Fallen killed Flechette day before yesterday, she was their first target on their revenge-killing for Leviathan," Sabah said, her head dropping forward. "Can I get a hug?"
Danny wrapped up the young woman in a hug and held her while she cried for the girl she had loved and left and lost. Taylor stepped in and helped comfort her teammate.
"Sounds like you're damn close," Barry said, filling up a paper cup with water from the water cooler. Danny was standing by in civilian clothes, out of uniform for the first time since they'd left Somer's Rock with Uber falling-down drunk and Leet laughing about it.
"Yeah," Danny said, frowning. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and leaned against the rough concrete wall. "It's going to get harder, real hard, for a while here. But it's almost over. I've just got a couple more jobs to do, and then I'm hanging it up. I've had a good run, I can retire after a good run like that."
"Retire?" Barry scoffed. "Danny-man, it's only been about six months since you handed me your two-week notice. You've only been doing this hero thing for just about half a year."
"I was doing some hero stuff before I gave notice," Danny pointed out, a bit defensively. "And I was in training for months before that."
"Okay, so, let's say you take your time fading out, finishing these last couple jobs, handing off the reins to your replacement. That's still a year, Danny. We've had people take off a year as a vacation. This hasn't been a lifetime of work here, The Year of the Rat. And you're acting like it's going to be a major transition, retiring." Barry pulled himself up tall and stared Danny right in the eyes. "Look, maybe you're just done pushing yourself as hard as you've been pushing, yeah? From here on out, you split your time. Some Wharf Rat, some Danny Hebert, some Taylor's Dad. You don't have to walk away forever, and nothing's permanent if you don't want it to be. You're famous, world-famous, Danny. You're an icon among parahumans. Word is that you give Legend little "keep up the good work" pep talks. So yeah, that's pressure, and it's okay to want out from under it for a while."
"Okay, that was not the kind of pep talk it was," Danny objected.
"Oh shit, I thought that rumor was absolutely false," Barry laughed. "You mean it really did happen?"
"Not like that," Danny said, taking down his glasses and polishing them. "It was just that the Protectorate is going through a hard time, and it needs him as a stable anchor. So if he needed someone to talk to-"
Barry cut him off with his laughter, and Danny laughed too. He put the glasses back on, they were just plain glass and didn't actually help his vision, Panacea had fixed his eyes a while ago. But the glasses were part of Danny Hebert. "So, Barry, tell me about owning this factory."
"Well, actually the owners of the factory are Solidarity Holdings, LLC," Barry said. "It's a company that was created, chartered, funded and chaired by the Dockworkers. The Dockworkers Association doesn't actually own the factory, that would be illegal as hell. But creating a company specifically to own the factory, run the factory, and distribute all profits to the Dockworkers, that actually is pretty legal. Well, anything generated as profit after reinvestment I should say, they're looking to buy more factories so they can generate more profit and distribute that too. And, they may expand the profit-sharing to all the employees and not just the dockworkers. It's a damn good market for it, we're lucky that the new mayor has been making the moves he has been. Local economy and cost of living put us in a good place for manufacturing and export."
"Yeah, Accord's binders really helped with that," Danny chuckled. He caught Barry's puzzled glance, and explained. "I killed an evil thinker who knew how to end poverty and crime and stuff like that. I took his research and gave it to the mayor, and he's been using that. That's why the city's been doing so well."
"But you killed him."
"Really evil, trust me."
"Okay, it just seems like a stretch," Barry shrugged. "Though, I am pretty surprised by how okay I am with you talking about killing people."
Danny froze up, and he remembered Trainwreck and Circus, and Mouse Protector, their blood and deaths. "Well, sometimes," Danny said. "Sometimes it's okay, and sometimes it's not."
"Noted," the accountant said. "Now then, let's go meet Kurt and Lacey, and get some drinks. You should bring Taylor."
The doorway opened, showing the brightly-lit white hallway, and the woman in the lab coat. "Afternoon," Danny said.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Hebert," she said, with the soft consonants of a French accent. "Why have you called today?"
He stepped forward through the doorway, and stood in the hallway with her. "I have called to ask you to shut it down," he said.
"I may have little choice soon. Contessa has told me that she will not be conscripting any more test subjects, or helping me to harvest more materials, or taking punitive measures to maintain our operation. There are a group of Case 53s, the errors of our trial and error, who have begun collecting together to discuss their plight, and they are also speaking to some of our former customers. I asked Contessa to show them the error of their ways, but leave them alive. She refused. She said that she was not willing to do violence to innocents to cover for our own-" she paused, checked her clipboard, flipped a few pages, "-shortsighted arrogance, is how she put it. Without her, I could rely more on the Number Man, but he has begun to show his own doubts about our mission. And while I have mechanisms to brainwash anyone, this job would become unbearably tedious if I had only drones to support me."
"Not to mention it would reflect badly on your operation if they only way you could maintain it was through coercive force," he pointed out.
"But I have thought about what you said," she went on, only grimacing slightly. "About my being a closet narcissist or egomaniac-"
"I never said closet," he said. "I said that it was very obvious to anyone who ever checked to see if there were big red flags."
"-as I was saying," she said through gritted teeth. "I think you draw a very big conclusion from a small detail, if anything an insignificant detail. How far must you be reaching, if you are willing to excuse what you characterize as abduction, torture, brainwashing, mutilation and vivisection, but you seem to think that tattooing someone is a bridge too far, the straw that broke the camel's back."
"First of all, I don't excuse those things, I just understand that you think you can excuse those things," he said. "You have convinced yourself that you need test subjects, so you abduct them because you think nobody would undertake this willingly. Then you test your formulas, disfiguring them, because you are convinced that is the key to assembling the army to save the world. Then you keep them alive in inhumane captivity, but you excuse it because you think it is more humane than killing them and cremating them. Then you decide to let them free, because that is more humane than captivity. Then you brainwash them, because you believe that your secrets are important and you can only justify releasing your prisoners if they cannot share your secrets. All of these are tenuously justified, clumsily rationalized, but there is a point of view where these things can make sense. Maybe some of them are just ill-advised and you are continuing bad policies out of habit. But up to this point, in your own mind you could twist those to be required, sensible steps. And then you brand them, so that when they are released into the world they will know that it was no accident that they were abducted, mutilated, brainwashed, and dumped. Why the brand? What possible excuse for that is there, other than to torment their minds and make sure that legends of you grow in hushed whispers?"
"And this is your justification for wanting to shut down the world's best chance at salvation?" Doctor Mother protested. "We have done great things, astounding research, amazing secrets. We have created a network of high-powered heroes who stand ready to help us against our enemy. We have assembled enough clout and influence that we can pull the major power players of the world into a single cohesive network and multiply our power many times over. But all you can think of is the tattoos?"
"Never trust a skinny chef," Danny said. "A proverb on my version of Earth, does your world have that?"
"No," she said.
"Well, Doctor, you have not taken your own formulas. Would you care to tell me why?"
"That is hardly appro-"
"This is why I refused to step into your office in the first place," he sighed. "You just deflect what you don't like. It helps keep you cryptic and inscrutable, it helps keep the mystique that you need so badly. It makes you unquestionable and irreproachable. But you are not a world-class scientist, you are a peasant girl with a knife who made slaves of superhumans and has been riding on their backs for decades. You keep your findings hidden, you deny the benefits of your research to the world, and you don't take your own potions. Is it because you don't trust your own work, but you give it freely to thousands of others, charge them millions of dollars for a product you would not trust to take for free? Or is it because you know that you will someday crack the code and find the perfect formula, the ultimate formula, and you don't want to miss that chance?"
"Perhaps it is necessary that someone in this organization be untouched by the Entity's mind, thinking clearly, unlike the parahumans that are twisted into its image," she said coldly.
"Man that sounds like Director Piggot," he sighed.
"That is not at all what I mean," she retorted, scowling. "I meant only that there are other explanations that you had not considered."
"Such as an abiding disdain for parahumans of your own creation," he said. "We're coming back to all these reasons to never trust a skinny chef. Look, just a couple months ago I dealt with someone else that mass-produced brainwashed, mutilated parahumans. She was named Lamia, she was a Class-S threat that could have done unfathomed harm if I hadn't disintegrated her. And the only meaningful, substantive difference between her and you, is that she never attempted to corrupt any political organizations."
"Hyperbole," she said dismissively. "There are plenty of material differences between the Lamia creations and the products of Cauldron."
"We're back to arguing over details and subjective abstracts," he said, leaning back against the wall. "Okay, let me bring this back to familiar ground: are you getting what you want?"
"I want you to leave my organization in peace so we can save the world."
"Presume I do this. Was Cauldron actually saving the world before I got involved?" Danny asked.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Just pause a moment, deep breath, clear your mind, and address one question: were you saving the world before I got involved? Or maybe, were you doing it in the best way?"
"We were doing an adequate job, before you began cutting our legs out from under us, yes," she said, glaring.
"So, you've identified his weakness?" Danny asked, poker-faced and guileless.
Doctor Mother froze. "What? What weakness? He has none at all, he has all the powers that he could want, all the invulnerability he desires, nearly-infinite durability. The forces he could survive would destroy our world several times over."
"So, that would be a no, then," Danny said, nodding. "I on the other hand do know how to kill Scion. And I-"
"Impossible," she declared, shaking her head. "I know you think the Simurgh can give you an edge. That is why you have recruited her cloned daughter. But it is not a weakness you can use to kill him. He has a minor difficulty with precognition, the Simurgh herself can trick him for a period of time, but no parahuman precognitive can even perceive Scion, so it's a weakness we can't exploit. And it only works well enough for him to dodge him or deflect him, never to attack him. He has some precognition of his own, but our simulations show it to be somewhat limited, but still greater than any single parahuman except Contessa."
"Contessa's not that great a precog," Danny pointed out. "She's a very, very narrow focus, and can see nothing outside of it."
"She can see everything that matters," Doctor Mother snapped.
Danny shrugged. "Only if you think that the only thing in the world that matters is defeating others. But that belief, taken literally and to the logical extreme, is evidence of highly disordered thinking."
She frowned at him. "You have been entirely flippant and facetious this entire conversation. You are hampering the most important work in the world. I have studied the entity for thirty years, his nature and his powers and his movements. There is no way that you can have deciphered an Achilles' heel that I do not know about. We have run simulations against power-nullifying Trumps, and there is a zero-percent chance. He is immune to the Manton effect, but also protected by it to a higher degree than most, even Manton-penetrating attacks are ineffective. The closest he has to a weakness is that the Simurgh can distract him for a while. Now, I know that your plan involves the Simurgh, but I assure you it will fail entirely."
"You're positive?" he asked.
"Absolutely," she said, biting the words off. Her tone made it clear that she was speaking the literal truth. She had absolute, all-encompassing belief that he would fail.
Danny cleared his throat. "Well, against a zealous, fervent faith like that, I know now that it is useless to try to speak reason to you. If you'll see me back out the way I came, I'll be on my way. I'll make sure you have a good close-up view when I do your job for you, without corrupting any world governments or abducting tens of thousands of innocents."
She paused, tapping her chin with one slender finger. "Out of the idlest of curiosity, how did you learn Scion's purported weakness?"
"I learned a lot about him from you and your people, and from news reports and other experts. But it really came down to my daughter."
She arched an eyebrow skeptically. "Your daughter?"
"Sure. Ever since I first started looking into capes and superheroics on my own, I have kept files in the basement of my old house. Pages, cards, dossiers, whiteboards, that sort of stuff. And every so often I have thousands of mice gather together, and review the information. When I do that, I can see all of the facts at once, I can put together a truly big picture all at once, where I am aware of all the information at the same time and can cross-apply every fact with every other fact. You've got too much information, you could spend a century just matching facts up next to each other to draw conclusions. But when Taylor reads your mind, she's reading your whole mind at once. Like every single book in a library. So, she can see patterns that would take you centuries to notice."
She shifted her stance, her heels clicking. "Bluffing. Your only plan is the same plan you always have: you intend to go face-to-face with the entity, and to expect it to listen to reason."
"About that door?" he said.
"Easy enough to keep you prisoner," she said.
"Sure," he said. "And it would take very little coercion to get me to tell you Scion's weakness. I've no stomach for pain, I've learned that. It would be exceedingly easy to have your people beat the answers out of me. Just admit that your methods have always been unnecessary, that your research was always pointless cruelty, that you have all this time been bringing evil into this world just to appease your own narcissistic ego, and then give the order that I am to be held prisoner until I tell you what you want to know. And give up the very last shred of pretense you've got left that you're not the real villain here."
She glared at him coldly, and made a small gesture with her fingers. A doorway opened in the air, leading back to the room that Danny had walked out from. He shrugged, and stepped through, pausing to look over his shoulder. "Doctor? Most people are not more willing to condemn a world to die than they are to admit that they were wrong." The doorway snapped shut behind him.
The conference room was well-lit and airy, with a window that faced onto the sea. The angled sunlight on the water looked like a sheet of satin and glitter. The room should have been dark and oppressive, with dry-ice fog filling the corners and swirling around the lighting fixtures. A handful of the Scavengers sat around the room. Danny and Taylor sat at opposite ends of the conference-room table, Oni Lee and Morrigan sat in lounge chairs in the corners. Pariah was sprawled in a hammock that hung in the air alongside one wall, Salvage was slumped down in one office chair so his face barely showed above the table, and a foot-tall Gulliver sat in the middle of the table, cross-legged as he fidgeted with a ball-point pen that looked like a spear in his hands. Uber and Leet were busy negotiating the sale of the factory, Panacea was on one of her hospital trips, and Gambler was home with her family.
"So, the odds have changed dramatically," Danny said, steepling his hands in front of his face. "When we first discovered the Eschaton, the odds were one-third, one-third, and one-third, for five and thirty and three hundred years. Now, they've gotten worse, and better, since we brought Morrigan onboard. I checked in with Gambler this morning; the odds that the world ends in the next week shot up from zero-point-oh-nine percent chance up to twenty percent. The odds of the world ending in the next five years after that dropped to about four percent. The odds of the world ending in three hundred years is at about twenty-eight percent. And the odds that the human race is still thriving after that is about forty-eight percent, with a forty-percent chance that humanity still exists a thousand years from now, and a twenty-five percent chance that humanity continues when the sun goes red giant and consumes the planet. Though, there was trouble getting some of those latter readings, it gets difficult to define what humanity is and is not under some conditions."
"So, we either screw it up in the next week, or we stay on the original plan of three centuries, or we're good forever," Pariah summed up.
"Which is a huge shift," Danny said, pulling out a chart. "Our five-year projection had been thirty percent, now it's twenty-four. Our thirty year projection projection had been sixty percent total including the five year, now it's about twenty-five. Our three-hundred year projection had been ninety-nine percent plus, now it's at fifty-two percent. There had been no measurable chance that the world was going to continue after the twenty-fourth century, but now there's an almost-even chance of that. In a lot of ways our odds look a lot better than they ever did before. But the scary thing is that twenty-percent next-week forecast. There's a statistically-significant chance that the world will end real damn soon, and it'll be our fault. Or my fault, really," Danny ducked his head.
"I think the difference between the world ending in five years and five days is insignificant next to the difference between humanity lasting for three centuries or three eons," Morrigan said dispassionately. "Five years is nothing, just enough time to really suffer adequately. If the goal is to secure humanity's success and prosperity, then you have to look at the long view, and by that measure this is definitely the correct track."
Taylor raised a hand. "Dad? No offense, but I'm inclined to disagree just because of the way she phrased that."
"I can't help being concerned by this idea that we might die really soon," Pariah said. "I'd rather have five years than not."
"I'm concerned about the part where it's our fault," Gulliver said, his eyes down as he spoke. "I can't have that on me."
Oni Lee sat up a bit straighter. "I think we'd have to be unreasonably stupid to turn away now. We're clearly on the right path, the numbers show it. We just need to do what we can to minimize that twenty percent. We need Dinah, we need thinkers, we need to shift those numbers as much as we can, but we need to push forward."
"That's a pretty strong opinion," Taylor said, craning her head around. "I'm not used to strong opinions from you."
The Asian man shrugged. "Maybe I'm biased in this matter. After all, my only powers, skills, and experience have all been with fighting. And I like fighting for the right cause, it's far better than fighting for Lung and the Azn Bad Boys. But if we just stand down and wait five years, or thirty years, to die... I've got nothing. Everything I have rides on us fighting, and winning. So, like I said, maybe that influences my decision."
"I think that all of you need to take a statistics class," Pariah said. "Look at these numbers: this is two different scenarios mashed in together. We need to pick them apart. Look, there's a twenty percent chance that we try the plan and fail, and doom everyone this week. There's a four percent chance that we don't try, and the world ends in five years. There's a twenty-eight percent chance that we don't do anything, and the world ends in three hundred years. And there's a forty-eight percent chance that we try, and succeed, and we're good forever. Line those numbers up against each other: if we try, there's a twenty percent chance to fail and a forty-eight percent chance to succeed. If we don't, there's four percent and twenty-eight percent. So, there's a sixty-eight percent chance that we try, and a thirty-two percent chance we don't try. If we don't try, the odds are, uh, one in eight that the world ends in five years, and so on. But if we do try, there is about a five-in-seven chance that we save the world forever."
Taylor squinted at the numbers. "Okay, that's a bit more persuasive. But I come back to what Oni Lee had to say, about minimizing the odds and trying to shift them in our favor a bit."
Gulliver snorted and scoffed. "Really? Trying to hedge the odds? What happened to your spirit of adventure? Defy the odds! Charge the breach! Nobody ever wrote an exciting tale of the people that sat around and talked about probabilities and did the safe thing! Heroics is about do-or-die, and damn the consequences!"
"Are you feeling okay?" Danny asked.
"I'm just filling in for Leet and Uber," Gulliver admitted, slumping a bit. "They're the funny ones, and it feels like someone should be trying to make jokes out of this."
Salvage snorted. "You should leave it to the pros, buddy."
"I miss Mouse Protector," Taylor said, her hand going to her waist to tap the hilt of the sword she carried. "But if any of you ever repeats that, I'll deny it."
"Are you feeling okay?" Danny asked, swiveling his gaze to his daughter.
"Copacetic," she said with a strained grin.
Oni Lee slouched back down in his lounger. "We're already committed. We put in a ton of time, effort, we took chances, we've unbalanced power structures just to get where we are. We've sacrificed a hell of a lot just to get this five-in-seven chance of success. Lives, resources, our consciences... if we turn back now, we sacrificed all of that just to get to the precipice and walk away. Now, I'm not fond of doubling down on a bad bet, but five in seven is damn good Vegas odds. And if we don't take those odds, the world ends soon enough anyway, with or without us."
Salvage scooted up in his chair. "Fuck it, let's go for it."
"I'm sold," Taylor said. "But I still wish we weren't relying on her," she said with a glare towards Morrigan.
"I'd rather you all had thought of a plan that didn't involve me," Morrigan agreed.
Salvage laughed quietly at that.
Gulliver looked around the room, and back at Danny. "I guess I'm the last to vote. I'm in. It's unanimous."
Danny sighed in relief. "I was really hoping you'd all say that, but I thought you all deserved to know what Gambler said to me. Now then, let's talk about the last Endbringer."
"Let's talk about the irony that we're using something called an Endbringer to save the world from the golden god, the greatest hero on Earth," Taylor chuckled.
"Irony later, plans now," Pariah said, sitting upright in her hammock.
The Simurgh hung in the upper atmosphere, at the point where it was hard to say whether one was in space or the sky, on the border between hovering and orbiting. Her wings were folded about her, some large that wrapped her like a cocoon, other smaller ones that added little flourishes to her appearance. One small slender wing was laid over her eyes like a sleep-mask. Her hair waved around her face and shoulders, blowing in a wind that only she could feel. This high, the air was too thin to generate a decent breeze, but her hair responded anyway.
And then the wing across her face lifted away, tucking itself among the rest of her white-feathered limbs, and her eyes opened. Two black orbs in a beautiful, all-too-human face, they stared blindly at the world as she turned her head to face downwards at an angle. Her silent song echoed all about her, a warbling psychic trill that needed no air to carry it. And it described a radius in which her mental powers were effective. And at the border of that radius was a new song, quieter and stifled, like half the notes were missing off the sheet music. But, it was close enough for the alien being to recognize what it was.
And at the edge of the Morrigan's range, in the opposite direction, was a helicopter. The chopper hovered above the North Atlantic, piloted by remote control, with only one passenger on board. Oni Lee sat in the cabin chair with the big can-style earmuffs fitted over his ears and a bone-induction mike taped to his jaw. He sat back with his eyes closed, listening carefully in more ways than one. The chopper hovered above the water, swaying slightly, and the man inside felt the brush of telepathic contact with Morrigan, and listened to his team leader over the headphones.
And then Danny, on the ground back at the city, carefully operated the controls for the chopper as he carefully chose his words through the comm unit plugged into his ear. "Wharf Rat to Oni Lee, it looks like everything is in position right now."
"Roger, Wharf Rat. We're arranged and online, go ahead and transmit on your signal."
The Wharf Rat took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. It was a momentous occasion, the first time that a human or parahuman had managed to successfully communicate with an Endbringer. It had been tried before, when the Simurgh first appeared, and that had ended... badly. "This message is for the individual or intelligence known as the Simurgh. Please confirm that you receive and understand this message."
Oni Lee heard the words and placed them at the front of his consciousness, framing them clearly in his mind's eye. Morrigan hovered in the air, and plucked Oni Lee's message out of his mind and then translated it into something that the Simurgh could perceive and recognize. The Endbringer unfurled its wings, a vast corona of feathers that opened almost like an umbrella to reveal the humanoid torso in the center. The woman's shape was slender and shapely, though the details were largely lost in the white-on-white color scheme. The reaction seemed to be the closest that it could manage to a gesture or facial expression.
Morrigan received its reaction and deciphered it into thoughts modeled on a human mind and projected them back down to Oni Lee. The man murmured for the bone-induction mike to hear his words and relay them to Wharf Rat. "She hears you. She is.. surprised or something, at the idea that we could or would communicate to her as equals. She is used to taking what she wants to know and, um, forcing what she wants people to think."
"Thanks Oni Lee. Okay, does she seem offended at all?"
"I don't think the Simurgh would know how to be offended," Oni Lee said, trying to wrap his mind around the concepts that were in his mind. Morrigan's mind was almost alien, abstract ideas that he could not fathom swam like heaving whales under the surface of her mind, and he could almost glimpse the shape of the Simurgh's thoughts as if through a distorted mirror, and it was not only alien it was almost mechanistic, more like a checklist of stimuli and responses with conditional modifiers and if-then trees.
"Good. Ahem, to the Simurgh: Are you amenable to communicating with us at this time?"
There was a pause as the message was relayed, then Oni Lee said, "She is."
"Thank you. First I have a question:" he said, and steadied his breath. "Are you getting what you want?"
The silence ticked by in seconds. "She asks you to clarify what you mean by 'want'," Oni Lee said.
"She is familiar with the concept of goals, because she has exhibited a capacity for long-term planning," Danny said. "Ask her to consider that concept, and then compare the current state of her existence and the world to the state that the world would be in after she has accomplished her goals. Then ask her if her current actions and reactions, in the context of current events and status quo, will bring her to the goals that she aspires to."
The pause was longer. "She says no."
"Anything with that?"
"Just.. I don't know, sadness? Regret?"
"Resignation?" Danny prompted.
"Yeah, like that," Oni Lee said. "But not much of it."
"Ask her if it is an internal matter that keeps her from achieving her goals, or an external obstacle, or both," Danny spoke into the microphone.
"I'm asking... " Oni Lee replied. "Her response is basically: why do you want to know?"
"Tell her that depending on the outcome, we may be able to help her accomplish her goals to a degree."
"Okay, this reply had bullet points, or something. Bear with me. She believes that her methods are too confined, her opportunities have been squandered, her limitations are too great, her timeline has been interrupted, she has no assistance from her counterparts, her energy source has been rescinded, and she fully believes that she will be destroyed the next time she activates, in about a year and a half."
"Is she capable of overcoming any of those obstacles?"
"Um... not by herself. I think she's starting to get excited, she's starting to see the potential for us to help her. Boss, just gotta remind you, this is a genocidal monster that wants all humanity dead."
"Understood, thank you," Danny said. "All right, ask her if she has any goals that are compatible with our own preferred outcomes, either individually or in combination?"
"Okay, I asked... it's taking a bit to answer, she either doesn't understand the question or she's taking her time thinking about it..." his voice trailed off, then came back again. "All right, she starts by stating that her primary goal is to kill/injure/terrorize humanity on as large a scale as possible. She wants to know how much of humanity she could be allowed to kill, injure or terrorize, and the vibe I'm getting through Morrigan is sort of 'it can't hurt to ask', sort of."
"Tell her that the answer to that is zero, and will always be zero. There is no room for negotiation on that point. Does she have other goals that we may consider? Her current position is that she will not be able to accomplish any of her goals at all, so if we can assist with even some of the minor goals, she is better off with us than without us."
"Morrigan says that's too complicated for this interface, but she'll try to break it down into smaller parts," Oni Lee said. "Boss, from what I'm getting, the Simurgh is more of a computer than a parahuman. It's like everything in her head is just lists of information connected to other information. Like her prime directive is to kill, her secondary directive is to turn others into killers, tertiary directive is to injure people, et cetera."
"I'm not as surprised by that as I should be," Danny considered. "Each of them is intelligent and problem-solving, but they are also completely unique and have never been known to communicate at all. So there is obviously some sort of thought process but it would have been designed and implanted rather than developed organically."
"Yeah," Oni Lee agreed. "Okay, she's got four options for us that she thinks we would not be entirely averse to. First, she wants us to help her break her programming that forces her to attack humanity. She knows that if she attacks us again, we will kill her, and one of her lesser goals is self-preservation. She would rather fight and win, but she'd rather not fight than to fight and lose and die. Second option: she wants us to grant her enough energy to either fight and win, or to survive the loss. Apparently she and her brothers have been losing energy for several months now, since immediately before Leviathan died, but I don't understand that entirely. The third option: she wants us to help her kill Scion and, uh, Eidolon. Apparently that's just a straight-up revenge thing, but it's got lots of connotations and inferences I'm not getting. And the fourth proposal: she wants to be allowed to attend to scenes of human suffering even if she does not cause them. If she can't cause it, she wants permission to at least witness it."
"Gross," Danny said. His pen scratched on a notepad, detailing the options. 1: deprogram hostility for self-preservation. 2: give energy? 3: kill scion and eid. 4: omen of doom? He looked them over. "Okay, tell her we would willingly assist with the first, we need clarification of the second, the third is negotiable but complicated, and the fourth is unexpected but we could hear more about that."
"Sent that. And now Morrigan is trying to restrain a massive info-dump in my brain," Oni Lee grimaced. "Okay, in short: her power source has always been finite, and depleting, but recently the energy from it has been actively diverted to something else, and closed off from her, she's running on fumes. She wants us to help explain what we need to help her kill Eidolon and Scion. And if she is going to be witnessing human tragedies, she will need help with both the deprogramming and the energy. She is arranging these in levels of priority, like she's creating new subroutines. She's worked out some sort of internal unit of measure for how much we have to give her depending on the degree of her help."
"Weird. All right, Oni Lee, explain to her that we want her to communicate directly with Scion, much as we have communicated with her."
"She wants to know why."
"Tell her I intend to ask Scion whether he is getting what he wants."
The seconds stretched out. "She is.. I don't know, she wants confirmation to clarify. She wants to make sure that you mean to negotiate a truce with Scion, and with herself?"
"Exactly. We will help her live peacefully, if she will help us help Scion to live peacefully."
"She wants confirmation again."
"Try a different explanation. Tell her that our first priority is to cooperate to mutual benefit, our second priority is to cohabitate in mutual non-interference, our third priority is to destroy our enemies, and our fourth preference is to fight and lose. With those priorities, we can cooperate with both the Simurgh and with Scion."
"Okay, I think she gets it this time. So, she can use her powers to speak to Scion, and to Morrigan, and down the relay chain like we're doing now. And in so doing, she could help us to converse with Scion and achieve the cooperation and mutual benefit."
"Just so, that's right," Danny said. "And that if that is impossible, we have our third priority, we can destroy Scion and the Simurgh to no mutual long-term benefit but no long-term loss, either."
Oni Lee frowned, then grinned. "I think she understands that we are warning her not to fuck with us. But, she wants to point out that cutting off the discussion at the third level is to assign a zero-percent chance to fourth-priority, that we could fight and lose."
"Tell her that Scion has an easily-overlooked but easily-exploited fatal weakness that we can use to kill him with a minimum of trouble, risk and sacrifice. And that Eidolon can de-nature her core and get rid of her in a second, because we've been getting steadily more efficient at killing Endbringers."
"She seems to understand that easily enough. Funny, she has trouble understanding the idea of 'want', but she understands death threats on the first try."
"How she's programmed,. I guess," Danny said. "Ask her how much of her demands we have to fulfill to get her assistance with this."
Oni Lee pinched the bridge of his nose to stave off a headache. "This is getting complex. She's trying to phrase this discussion in terms of descending priorities again. Okay, to make the attempt she requires us to help her reprogram so she doesn't have to keep fighting us. If she succeeds in convincing Scion, she will need a new energy source or a top-up to sustain her for a while. If negotiations with Scion break down, she wants to help us killing him. And if your plan to kill Scion fails, she wants guarantees that she will be allowed to travel freely to witness the destruction of humanity."
"Jesus," Danny said, making a face at the pad of paper he was keeping notes on. "This bitch is just icky. Okay, counteroffer: we will assist in her deprogramming as soon as we have instructions and assistance with that task. And we will find her new energy sources if she is able to successfully negotiate Scion's cooperation, or a temporary measure if she manages to negotiate Scion's promise of non-hostilities. If she cannot achieve either his assistance or neutrality, then the Simurgh dies before Scion so she will not get to confirm the death of her enemy. And if she manages to get his cooperation, she will get to travel freely provided she does no harm."
"More complicated, not less," Oni Lee complained. "But... she seems to get it just fine. She notices the way that you stack consequence to condition to create incentives for her to succeed, and penalties should she sabotage this action."
"I wasn't particularly subtle," Danny chuckled. "I wanted to make sure that the terms were clear and the communication unambiguous."
"I'm telling her," Oni Lee said. "And... and I think we have a deal. Boss, I think you just recruited the Simurgh to your mission. What the actual entire hell."
"I'm going to flip out as soon as we're done here," Danny said. "But first, we need to know what will be required for us to break her programming."
