BONUS CHAPTER
Lyn Rea-Val Omake

Screaming colors, blurry confusing motion, and disorientation. One moment, she'd had her face in Eelesia's crotch, and the next she felt like she was being torn out of herself. She tumbled through an insane storm of everything and nothing.

And then something sucked her in a direction she didn't have a name for, and it all stopped.

There was no light. No stars. No anything. Just empty blackness. At first, Lyn waited with baited breath. An hour later, she was just floating bored. An hour after that, she thrashed and shouted just for the heck of it, but she couldn't see, hear, or feel anything.

After four hours in the void, Lyn gave up and went to sleep.

Something woke her. Lyn snapped awake instantly, not wanting to miss whatever it was. She hadn't dreamed. With nothing to nourish her, she needed to be conservative, so she'd just shut down entirely. It felt like no time at all had passed, but her instincts told her she'd been asleep for 278,209 years.

"Luck," Lyn swore, the word never forming in the silent void.

Only, the void wasn't empty anymore. Glimmering streamers of light, breaching a thousand invisible surfaces at a thousand incomprehensible angles before diving into something not-there and vanishing again. They were all around her, filling the void for as far as she could see.

For a while, Lyn just marveled at the sight. It was very pretty to look at, at least until one of those streamers emerged right in front of her. She had barely a second to realize that, up close, the things were the size of buildings. It smashed into her, and Lyn felt her sense of pleasure and pain cut off as she was once more torn from reality.

Or in this case, ripped into reality.

With a breathtaking silent crash, star-filled three-dimensional space slammed into her senses. Something massive had engulfed her, a luminous thing of shifting angles and broken light, with a Lyn-shaped crater in it.

A planet loomed, approaching fast enough Lyn could actually see it getting bigger. Terror gripped her as she imagined hitting the planet so hard she was instantly vaporized in a flash of thermonuclear fusion. Except, she had more immediate problems. The planet was fractured, as though seen through a broken mirror, and it was different planet in each view.

The fracturing effect of the thing that had crashed into her was creeping in around her body. Lyn could see her body warping, splitting, like she was being eaten by animated shards of a broken mirror. Her vision fractured, and in her last moments, she felt the instinct that meant her Dreamlink couldn't find a Giaa to upload her to.

Lyn felt her skull come apart, and she screamed with what was left of her vocal chords.

Two vast glittering creatures swimming through space in a gentle spiral, trailing a rain of luminous shards. The Warrior. The Thinker. The cycle will continue on the chosen planet. Appropriate hosts are chosen for each shard...

Disaster, regret. A third. A collision. The Thinker is dying. Horror. Anguish.

The shards, weapons, tools. They grow and reproduce as the hosts use them to war among themselves. As planned. But the Thinker is dead, and the cycle cannot continue without her.

Despair.

For the third time, she slammed back into reality.

I'm alive? I'm alive! she nearly laughed in relief, at least until she noticed where she was.

The first and most pressing thing, was the smell. She blew out a sharp breath in reflexive revulsion and stopped breathing. With the horrific stench no longer overwhelming her, She realized she was crammed into some kind of metal box. It was dark and cramped, but three small horizontal slits in front of her allowed in a faint light. Insects and other little things crawled all over her, and when she tried to slap at them, something bit her.

It was unpleasant, to say the least, but hardly terrifying.

So why was her heart pounding so hard? Why was she shaking, barely able to think anything besides, oh god oh god let me out!

Okay, fuck it, she was not dealing with this!

She closed her eyes and dove into a private virtuality. Awareness of her body faded, and she appeared standing in a white void. And her mind split, a fissure down the center of her thoughts as she became Lyn and Taylor.

"Whoa," Lyn stumbled.

Taylor screamed, a sound of animal fear as she fell to her knees on the featureless white plain, gasping for breath. The girl looked strange to Lyn's eyes, all straight lines and angles, and thin enough to be called spindly even though she was nearly a head taller than Lyn. Taylor's hair was a mass of dark brown waves, falling around her bare shoulders, and her skin was a pale peach color.

In contrast, Lyn was back to normal. Petite and buxom, with dusky blue skin and short neon green hair that matched her neon green lips, nails, nipples, and inner labia. Her eyes were black on black, sclera, iris, and pupil all the same color.

Lyn crouched down next to the shaking, crying girl, and took hold of her shoulders. Taylor's reaction was immediate and violent. She flinched away with a screech and flailed her hands at Lyn, but Lyn just let Taylor hit her as she wrapped her arms around Taylor's shoulders and murmured.

"It's okay. You're okay," Lyn soothed. "Everything's fine. You're safe, Taylor. You're safe."

Taylor didn't know how long she'd lost her mind for, but finally, after what could have been hours, she calmed down enough for the blue girl's soothing murmurs to get through to her. Eventually, Taylor did come back to herself enough to acknowledge her surroundings.

She was laying down, curled into the side of the blue girl on a decadently soft silken bed, in the middle of a featureless white void. As she took stock of herself, Taylor asked the somewhat inane question that popped first into her mind.

"Uh, why am I naked?"

Lyn looked at her in confusion. "Um, because you are?"

Taylor stared blankly, and decided to come back to that later. She sat up and hunched in on herself, looking around.

"Where are we?" Taylor asked. "And who... and how do I know who you are?"

"We're in a virtuality," Lyn explained.

Oddly, that actually meant something to Taylor. She remembered, fleeing from the locker into a construct of her own mind, only that was Lyn that did that. Taylor winced in confusion at the memory.

"I think something happened that linked our minds, and for a moment there we gestalted," Lyn added. "Do you remember the creatures?"

Taylor froze. The vast shards trailing through space. She did remember. Fuck. The shards were powers. It was the only thing that fit. And she had one now.

"Fuck," Taylor whispered. "I'm a parahuman."

"What's a parahuman?" Lyn asked.

"People with powers." Taylor let herself think out loud. "The shards are powers. The powers were given to human hosts. I'm a host, which means I should have a power. Can..." Taylor shuddered. "Can it get us out of the locker? Us. Me. Lyn. Lyn's part of my powers? Lyn, are you part of my powers?"

"Um..." Lyn looked thoughtful. "If I followed that right, I think I know what happened. I was stranded in the void between universes, or something, I'm not sure, but when I was there, a... shard hit me. Your shard, I guess, it collided with me and, I thought, ate me. Next thing I know I'm a gestalt of me and you. So... sort of?"

Taylor's eyes snapped up to look at the exotic naked girl in horror. "My powers ate you?"

"Yeah, I think so," Lyn sighed. "I mean, we're sharing a body right now. I can't imagine how else we could have ended up merged like this."

"And talking like this, this place, its part of the power?" Taylor asked.

Lyn shook her head. "No, not at all. Any Fae can do this."

Taylor blinked. "Fae?"

Taylor squirmed as Lyn stared at her. "You're human. Of course you're human. Duh."

"You're not?" Taylor asked incredulously. "I mean, you're... blue and green, but..."

"I'm... from a very different place," Lyn told her. "They use the term Singularity on your Earth?"

"The hypothetical point where machines surpass humans and take over the world?" Taylor asked.

"Close enough," Lyn laughed. "Well, where I come from, the Singularity happened three thousand years before I was born."

While Taylor was trying to get her head around that, Lyn spread her arms and Taylor jumped, startled, as the white void blipped out of existence. The bed remained, but now it floated in space. The sun blazed bright from behind, and in front of them...

"This is Sol, the way it looked ten years ago when I was there," Lyn said. "All the planets, including Earth, and everything else in the system was repurposed to build this."

Taylor boggled. "This" was a hollow cord of spiraling threads that stretched all the way around the sun, and as the view moved closer, Taylor could see that each thread was nearly as big across as the moon, and lined in six alternating panels of transparency and opacity.

The view blurred, moving inside through one of the transparent sections. On the inside of the opaque sections, were continents. Fields, meadows, forests, rivers, mountains, lakes, gleaming towers or other structures here and there, but nothing like the sprawl of a city or town.

And people, all naked or nearly so, some human-looking, some even stranger than Lyn. Flying. Playing. Building. Fighting. Frolicking. And fucking. Did Lyn really need to show her that? The scene paused, everything freezing in place, and Taylor looked at Lyn with wide eyes.

"Even without these powers, we can get out of the locker, easy," Lyn said.

Taylor shrunk down and shuddered. "I don't want to go back there."

Lyn considered. "You might not have to. We're not a gestalt anymore. It could be that I can leave the virtuality while you stay, or the other way around even. Want me to try?"

Taylor hugged herself, but finally nodded, visibly bracing herself.

Lyn woke up.

Blinking, and only just barely remembering not to breathe, Lyn reflected on her own thoughts, looking for Taylor. Nope, she was just herself. Looks like she was right.

Lyn put a hand on the door of the locker and felt out with her Utility Cloud. It seeped into the mechanism of the lock, and Lyn easily moved the right parts. The locker burst open, and Lyn stumbled out in a shower of putrid filth.

Lyn shuddered and made a disgusted noise, before scouring herself with her Utility Cloud. She stripped off the drab, soiled, stifling clothes, discarding them onto the floor of the dark hallway, and moved aside until she was clear of the mess.

Okay, Taylor, we're out. It's safe, Lyn sent before she could think about it. To her surprise, it worked.

What? Oh. This is weird. Um, how do I come out? Taylor asked. Wait, I think I've...

Lyn winced, squinting her eyes. No wait, that was Taylor. "...got it."

"You're okay?" Lyn asked.

"I guess." Taylor looked around and gasped. "It's the middle of the night! Oh god, I need to tell my dad I'm not dead."

They started walking, only for Taylor to look down at herself and stop in her tracks. "I'm blue! Fuck! I can't go home like this... where the fuck are my clothes?"

Lyn pointed. "Over there."

"Why'd you take my clothes off?" Taylor demanded.

"They were gross," Lyn told the girl sharing her body.

Taylor shuddered in agreement, but went over to pick them up. "We can't leave them. My wallet and keys are in the pockets. And I can't walk home naked either."

"Maybe you can't, but I can," Lyn said, picking the clothes up in her Utility Cloud. "I don't look anything like you. No one will know unless we tell them. And once we get there, we can hide and morph to look like you should."

"Morph? We can do that?" Taylor asked.

"Of course we can," Lyn said, padding down the hall with the bundle of soiled clothes dangling from her hand by invisible lines of magnetic force.

"...right," Taylor murmured. "Um, question, which of us is controlling my body?"

Lyn blinked. "I don't... know?"

"Are we gestalting again?" Taylor worried. "No. Damn, I just noticed how much better my memory is."

"We're sharing control," Lyn said. "Obviously, but I mean, I think our motor cortexes have formed a gestalt, and its just our streams of consciousness that are staying separate."

"That's lucky," Taylor opined.

Lyn winced at that.

Taylor would have been mortified, running across rooftops buck naked, but, well, she was running across rooftops. Lyn wasn't super strong, but she was much stronger than a girl her size should have been, and she had the magnetism thing plus badass parkour skills on top of that.

Practically flying through the night light this... it almost made the locker worth it. Taylor stumbled, but Lyn tucked into a roll and kept their momentum going. Right. Don't think about the locker. Think about the speed. The freedom. Her power.

Taylor knew what her power was, now. She was a sensor. She was perfectly aware of every person in a two-block radius, their presences like a constellation of stars in her mind. She couldn't do much beyond knowing where they were in relation to her and the details of their physical state, but she could already imagine how useful having that information could be.

Distracting herself with the awesome almost worked, but she couldn't help that her first thought was that her power would let her track her bullies and better avoid them. With her power, no one would ever be able to sneak up on her ever again. Of course, that brought her back to why she had powers in the first place. Taylor managed to make it all the way to her own back yard before she broke down crying again.

"They tried to kill me," Taylor gasped out. "They tried to kill me."

"They failed. It's okay, take your time," Lyn told her between sobs. "You've already got a morph profile saved, but the change is still going to take until morning at least."

Taylor nodded, curling up on her side. At least she wasn't cold. The grass was kind of prickly, and she was worried about someone seeing her, but she wasn't cold at all, and her body just didn't develop aches from laying on a hard surface. She could sense someone in her house who had to be her dad, sleeping fitfully. At least he was sleeping. It wasn't very long before she was done crying and just laid there in a stupor while Lyn fidgeted.

"Huh," Lyn said. "That's weird."

"What?" Taylor mumbled.

"It's only been fifteen minutes, but the morph is complete," Lyn said. "See?"

Taylor did, mentally looking over Lyn's shoulder at the morph settings. Taylor looked down at herself and saw her familiar beanpole body. It was huge relief, tinged with a vague sense of loss.

Lyn rolled to her feet, and Taylor retrieved her keys.

They got away with it. Sophia, Emma, and Madison weren't even questioned, as far as Taylor knew. Taylor, on the other hand, was suspended for vandalizing school property. This was so monumentally unfair that Taylor wasn't even angry. Punishing the victim of a murder attempt went so far beyond the pale that she kind of came back around to a sort of incredulous apathy.

Taylor only told her dad the bullies had framed her for it. He believed her. She didn't tell him anything about what really happened. She just couldn't put that on him. He had enough to worry about.

In the months that followed, nothing outwardly changed, but Taylor had her secret. Something the bullies didn't have. Something they couldn't take away from her. Because, weird situation with Lyn or not, Taylor had powers, and she knew what she was going to do with them. Taylor was going to be a superhero.

She had the ability to know the exact location and condition of every single person for two city blocks in every direction, and she could concentrate on any number of them at once. She'd experimented once, walking through a packed crowd with her eyes closed, and she'd been able to do it without bumping into anyone even once.

Her newfound natural grace helped a lot with that. The abilities that came with having a Fae body were cool. Even as a thin girl, she was probably strong enough to match the average big burly man, but much more impressively, she had invulnerability that might actually be on par with some of the big names. Then there was the Utility Cloud, which was about as versatile as powers got, even if Lyn didn't actually know how to do a lot of the things she knew were possible.

Then there were the morph settings. Taylor wasn't sure if these counted as one of her power powers or not. It was a natural ability for Fae, just slower. Larger changes were supposed to take days, but Taylor's finished in less than an hour, much to Lyn's continuing bafflement.

And oh god had Taylor been tempted to make herself sexy and beautiful. Unfortunately, her secret identity had to take first priority. She'd increase her bust just a little, rounded her hips and butt a tad, shaped her mouth as much as she could get away with, and dialed up her muscle tone some, but that was all.

Taylor and Lyn were working together in the virtuality to design an entirely new face and body for her cape persona. Lyn's first idea was to just use her own preferred look, but Taylor had argued against that on the grounds that Lyn was tiny and they'd be better off with as much strength as they could get away with. That was the other cool thing about the morph settings. It wasn't just cosmetic. Adding muscle actually made her stronger, and pound for pound, Fae muscle was worth three times what human muscle was. Adding bone mass increased her magnetic powers, too.

The end result was a body two inches taller than Taylor and built like an amazon. The kind of woman that wouldn't look out of place in a skin-tight costume on the cover of one of those old comic books. Taylor was still fiddling with the cosmetic details. She and Lyn couldn't quite agree on a color scheme, and Taylor hadn't really decided what her name was going to be or how her costume was going to look anyway.

Lyn thought being a cape sounded fun. It never really became completely normal, sharing her body with someone else. They could always retreat to the virtuality if they needed space, but they actually got along pretty well. Lyn was just naturally friendly, and Taylor was perhaps a little more desperate for a friend than she'd imagined herself to be.

Not that there wasn't friction. Lyn came from a culture with very different values than the ones Taylor was used to. Taylor was a little freaked out the first time Lyn tried to pressure her into having sex, but the way Lyn did it was weirdly innocent. Lyn just seemed to genuinely not understand why Taylor wouldn't want to fool around at the first opportunity, or why Taylor might misinterpret Lyn's hurt feelings as a manipulative attempt to hold their friendship hostage in order to get into Taylor's pants.

It didn't come to a fight. Lyn wasn't the type to sulk, and Taylor was rational enough to communicate rather than jumping to conclusions. Lyn's look of baffled shock when Taylor explained virginity was actually kind of funny.

Somehow, that knowledge just made Lyn even more insistent, not to mention more creative. Taylor was caught completely off guard when Lyn sprung a new body on her in the virtuality. Lyn's coloring was the same, but she, or rather he, was suddenly coming on to Taylor in an incredibly handsome and masculine body with a physique worth drooling over and his neon-green-tipped... package... upright and already hard.

Taylor took one look and fled back to the real world, the first time. Only the first time, though. The thing was, Lyn's cheerfully innocent seduction was wearing her down, and she was tempted. She liked Lyn, and Lyn's virtual male form made her deeply reluctant to resist that temptation.

The strangest part of it all was that sometimes Lyn seemed worried about her, when Taylor wrestled with the temptation Lyn presented. Lyn's manner wasn't cheerful or seductive at all, then. It was that, Taylor thought, that eventually made her give in. Lyn was of the opinion that friends didn't let friends languish in lust, it seemed. Even if it was totally Lyn's fault to begin with.

Well, she could always tell herself it didn't really count anyway, since it was in the virtuality. It was just... really vivid cybersex. Right. Taylor admitted to herself that it wasn't a very convincing rationalization, and it certainly didn't keep all the sensations from feeling completely real, but she wanted to let her libido off the leash. So she did, and it felt even better than Taylor had imagined, and then it only got better from there.

The other thing Taylor did during those months was scour the Parahumans Online message boards and the wider internet for anything about the two alien creatures she'd seen when she got her powers.

What she found, or rather, what she didn't find, was by far the most disturbing thing about the whole being-a-parahuman situation. She'd searched through every site she could find, used every keyword combination she and Lyn could think of, and there was nothing. Her memory was perfect, now, and couldn't fade, but once she posted a thread describing her vision on an anonymous account and didn't get any replies, she thought of it less and less.

Taylor sensed them coming, of course. She knew the three girls' biometrics by heart at this point. She was in a bathroom stall, hiding and eating her lunch. Not that she needed to eat, but not bringing lunch might have aroused suspicion.

Carefully, Taylor layered her Utility Cloud over her clothes and backpack, forming a temporary hydrophobic lattice.

Taylor could only barely make out the voices. The noise of the conversation was obscured by giggling and the sound of water from the sinks. Madison came over to Taylor's stall and knocked.

Taylor pretended to guess wrong. "Fuck off, Emma."

"Oh my god, it's Taylor!" Madison exclaimed gleefully.

"The juice, pour the juice," Emma whispered.

"Yeah, do it!" Madison whispered back.

Taylor made a token effort to push the stall door open and escape. Firmly reminding herself that if she revealed her powers, the bullies won, she just shoulder-checked the door a couple times with much less than her full strength. Over the months, she'd been sneaking in tweaks to her 'default Taylor' morph profile. Slowly enough that anyone who noticed would conclude it was merely natural maturation and a fitness regimen. She was half-way through b-cup territory, and she had enough muscle that she could probably pick cute little Madison up and beat Emma to death with her. Not that Taylor would. That was one temptation she was not going to give into, no matter how funny Lyn thought it would be.

Cranberry juice.

Taylor looked up just in time to get a face full of the stuff. She flinched back, sputtering and wiping at her eyes. They didn't stop there. Sophia's face appeared over the top of the stall with more plastic bottles at the ready. Taylor hunched over and covered her head with her hands as Sophia dumped the juice all over her. It ran down her neck and arms, soaked into her hair, and pooled in the folds of her clothes.

The empty bottles bounced off the tile at her feet. Taylor didn't move, gritting her teeth and inwardly repeating what had become her mantra. She would not use her powers on civilians. She would not spoil her secret identity in a fit of revenge. She was going to be a superhero. She was better than them.

The door swung open and Taylor glared at the three girls. Standing carefully, Taylor shoved her drenched hair off her face. The girls laughed and gloated with each other, but Taylor didn't really hear them. If the trio hadn't turned and left the bathroom at that point, Taylor didn't know what she would have done. She watched the three presences move away through her power.

Taylor went to the sinks and looked at herself in the mirror. Taking a deep breath, she used her Utility Cloud to clean and dry her skin and hair. Her clothes and her backpack weren't wet at all, thanks to her precaution. Looking at her pristine reflection, Taylor sighed.

Lyn? Taylor sent.

What is it? Lyn responded.

Tell me again why I put up with this shit? Taylor requested.

Because you're ridiculously paranoid and you'd rather let those horrors torment you than risk drawing attention to yourself? Lyn paused. What happened?

Taylor felt the mental shift as Lyn emerged in their shared body. "They dumped a gallon of cranberry juice on me."

Lyn worried her lip. "Is this really worth it?"

"I'm having a hard time remaining convinced," Taylor admitted.

"Are you sure you don't want me to..." Lyn began.

Taylor interrupted, "No. You promised to stay in the virtuality while I'm at school. Just because I have to put up with them doesn't mean you do."

"Taylor..."

"You promised, Lyn."

"Fine."

By the time she made it home, Taylor had only barely convinced herself that dropping out of school would cause more problems than it solved. Knowing where Lyn came from. Catching a glimpse of where powers came from. It really put high school in perspective. Her reasons for going had dwindled down to just her dad and her secret identity, and the secret identity thing got flimsier every time she thought it over.

"Maybe I can tell Dad I just can't handle it anymore," Taylor said as she descended into the basement of her house. "He might understand."

"You think?" Lyn asked.

Taylor shook her head. "Maybe. I still don't want to worry him, though."

"So..." Lyn said after a bit of silence. "You think we're ready?"

Taylor nodded. "As ready as we're going to get, probably."

"Well, not quite. We really need to think of a name," Lyn pointed out.

Taylor smirked. "We need to stop talking to each other out loud, too. See how well that's working out."

Lyn snorted, and decided that was as good a time as any to switch her morph settings over to the superhero profile. It was Taylor's first time wearing her cape body for real. She'd practiced with it in the virtuality of course, and had plenty of sparring matches with Lyn that always seemed to end in a great deal more thrusting and moaning than planned. Even when Lyn was a girl, a couple of times. Taylor had surprised herself with that, though she still much preferred the other thing.

Taylor pulled the wooden cover off the old coal chute where she'd hidden a gym bag with her costume and equipment. She dumped the gym bag out on the work bench and her batons clattered out with her costume.

The batons were a bit of cleverness Taylor had fashioned after Lyn explained how Fae normally lived in environments where nearly everything was laced with superconductor, because superconductors repelled magnetic fields, meaning you could actually move it around or push off against it like bad movies thought magnetic powers could do with ordinary metal. That was how the Utility Cloud worked. A scaffold of superconducting molecular dust.

Normally, there was so little of the dust that it was invisible, but there was nothing stopping Taylor from excreting enough of the dust to clump it up into a near-solid, and then mix it with a high quality thermosetting polymer she'd blown a month's allowance on at a hobby shop. It was supposed to be the same plastic riot shields were made out of.

The end result was two heavy clear plastic sticks that Taylor could use as blunt weapons or fling around as if she was telekinetic. Each was an inch and a half thick, two and a half feet long, and had blunted ends. She only had the two so far, but she planned to make more weapons in the same vein and leverage the phenomenal multitasking ability her parahuman power gave her.

She could effectively have an arbitrary number of hands and fists, and never get confused. She had some idea how effective that could make her in a fight. It sure made sewing a costume easier, anyway.

After half an hour, the morph was finished and Taylor stripped out of her clothes. Her costume was relatively simple. She was invulnerable. It wasn't like she needed armor. Anything strong enough to seriously hurt her would vaporize even the toughest armor on contact anyway. And maybe she was indulging her vanity a little, but with the gorgeous amazonian body she'd given herself, she wanted to show off a little. Taylor had agonized over how modest to make her costume. Lyn was no help at all, of course; she didn't see why they shouldn't just go out naked.

In the end, she'd bought two dark grey one-piece swimsuits, a dozen plain black belts, and a pair of running shoes. She'd picked the shoes apart until just the soles remained, then stitched together cuttings from a couple of the belts and the second swimsuit to make thigh-high sandal-boots, or whatever those were called. Two of the belts she wore like belts, canted on her hips so they crossed in an X in front and back, and sewn in place. Finally, she cut the rest of the belts apart and sewed them back together into a harness for her batons, which she carried on her back.

Her flowing black hair fell free - she could use her Utility Cloud to keep it out of the way - and instead of a mask, Taylor had dug into the more advanced morph settings and added whorling patterns of silvery skin to her face and arms. Unless someone touched her, they'd think it was face paint. A token attempt at obscuring her identity, to draw attention away from the fact that this face was her mask.

Taylor sheathed her batons and used her Utility Cloud to look at herself. Oh yeah. No one was ever going to connect this to Taylor Hebert.

With a sharp crack of plastic hitting gravel, Taylor's batons slapped down on the rooftop. Not breaking stride, Taylor pushed off her improvised anchors and launched herself skyward. The batons slapped back into her hands, and she gave in to the urge to whoop. It wasn't flying, but it had to be almost as much fun.

Landing and tucking into a roll on another rooftop, Taylor came to her feet and slowed, jogging to the opposite edge before stopping. Her sensor power picked up something interesting.

Ten stories below, two guys and two girls were flying through an alley. They moved like they were riding something too big and unsteady to be bikes. Taylor peered over the edge and blinked in surprise.

"Ooh, let's go see what they're doing," Lyn suggested.

Taylor wasn't sure what they were riding, but the beasts were big and spiny and ran with a loping gait kind of like dogs. There was a guy in black, trailing wisps of pitch black mist, a guy in a renfaire costume, a blonde girl in lavender, and a stocky girl wearing a plastic dog mask. From what she'd read on the wiki, these had to be the Undersiders. A small-time team of teenage villains.

In other words, a perfect target for a teen superhero on her first night out.

"Yeah," Taylor agreed.

Dropping her batons quietly, Taylor leaped and pushed off, soaring across to another rooftop and pulling her batons back to her hands in mid air. She repeated the process several more times, following the Undersiders into ABB territory.

Her last jump took her out beyond the taller buildings, and she pushed hard for extra hang time, almost losing her batons in the process. She landed hard on the brickwork roof of a three-story apartment block. Hard enough to hurt, but only for a moment. It was worth it, because now she was ahead of the Undersiders.

The streetlights were out in this neighborhood, but obviously that didn't impede Taylor's power. One group caught her attention. A surprisingly large crowd was gathered at one end of the street, and many of them were armed. Guns and knives. More guns than knives. And the Undersiders were heading right for them one street over.

Taylor focused on her power, trying to pick out more details.

Mostly it was useless information. She didn't need to know that one thug smoked too much, or that that other guy had a birthmark on his foot, or that one woman waxed her pubic hair. Really didn't need to know. Then her power caught something she'd never noticed before. A difference in the brain of one of the men. The Undersiders had the same thing. Something the parahumans all shared. Shit. Her power let her detect parahumans. That was big.

There were only two known male parahumans associated with the ABB. That meant it was either Lung or Oni Lee down there. Most likely Lung, from the way the others were gathered around him and the way he was giving orders.

"We really need to learn to read lips," Taylor commented. "Something about... shooting... lucky?"

"I think he said something about not giving them a chance to be clever or lucky," Lyn worked out.

Suddenly, the darkness of the starlit night was replaced by the cloying total darkness of what had to be Grue's power. Taylor barely noticed, but down on the street most of the minions were twitching nervously.

"The Undersiders are attacking," Taylor said. "And the ABB were expecting them."

Lung moved, and a blazing flame erupted in he midst of the darkness. Something heavy smashed into Lung, knocking him down and savaging his arm. One of the dog-beasts, probably, but Taylor could only perceive the people. The stocky girl, Hellhound, pointed and barked orders, and the minions reacted like something big was bowling through them.

Another burst of flame cleared away enough darkness for Taylor to see the burned dog-beast flinching away from a man wreathed in fire. Grue had taken Regent's scepter and was moving inside the cloud, methodically tasering the gang members Hellhound had knocked down.

Lung punched another dog-beast away with a flash of fire, while the men who'd escaped the cloud aimed their guns at Hellhound and Tattletale.

Taylor moved before she could really think about what she was doing. Villains or not, she couldn't just stand by and let them get shot dead. Judging by the way Tattletale was diving for cover, they weren't bullet proof.

Batons down with a crack, leap, push, pull the batons back to her hands. Sail through the air. Land hard between the gunmen and the female Undersiders.

Taylor had time for the reassuring thought that she was bulletproof. But her costume wasn't. Fuck.

Her parahuman power didn't work in the virtuality. In all her practice, she'd done without it. Her power made her as aware of her opponent's bodies as she was of her own. In the breathless moment with a dozen guns pointed at her, before they fired, Taylor was aware of exactly where each gun was aimed. She was perfectly aware of how close each finger was to pulling the trigger.

Batons. Same plastic as riot shields. Bulletproof. Taylor raised a baton into the path of the first bullet and braced it magnetically. The gun fired and Taylor felt the impact as the bullet hit her baton and ricocheted into the ground. She rode the recoil to block the third bullet while blocking the second with her other baton. Fourth bullet wouldn't hit anyone behind if she dodged, so she swayed out of the way.

The ABB minions emptied their clips at her, and Taylor held her ground. She had to cheat a little, blocking one shot with her thigh, letting another hit her jaw, and blocking several with her arms when more than two bullets came at her at the same instant. She was by no means faster than a speeding bullet, but Taylor was pleased to learn her powers let her fake it pretty convincingly.

"Who the fuck is this?" Hellhound demanded as the guns ran dry.

About then, Grue finished with the first set of thugs and swept a cloud of darkness over the gunmen before they could finish reloading.

Not replying, Taylor waded into the cloud of darkness. Grue's head snapped around to look at her in surprise as she stepped smoothly among the blindly flailing mooks and began clubbing them over the head with her batons, or delivering a carefully measured incapacitating electric current with her Utility Cloud.

"So," Lyn said, sheathing her batons with a flourish as she sauntered up to Grue. "What'd you guys do to piss these guys off so bad?"

A small bubble in the darkness opened up around her and Grue. "That going to matter?"

Lyn shrugged. "Mostly I'm curious."

Taylor interrupted, pointing at a suddenly charging Lung. "Incoming."

A wall of fire burst out of the wall of darkness around the two of them and Grue threw himself to the side. Taylor threw one of her batons, running towards Lung as he bulled passed. The baton stopped at ankle height and with Lung between Taylor and the baton, she set her feet and pulled. Lung tripped and went down hard.

All the reading and research on Brockton Bay's capes filtered through her mind. Fire. Regeneration. Powers got stronger the longer he fought. The only way to beat him was overwhelming preemptive force. The only viable strategies were murder or retreat.

Taylor threw her batons down in front of her. Leaped. Pushed. Batons back in her hands, Taylor cleared the cloud of darkness and landed heavily where the Undersiders were regrouping.

"Fuck," Tattletale swore.

"If you want a chance to run, now's a good time," Taylor said.

Lyn faced the cloud and twirled her batons. "All the mooks are down and Lung hasn't figured out which way you went, yet."

Tattletale and Grue exchanged a look behind her back. In the cloud, Lung turned and strode purposefully in a random direction. Not towards them. Good. They had time to talk.

"He knows where we're based," Grue said.

"That why you're attacking him?" Taylor asked.

"We were tipped off that he was coming after us," Tattletale explained. "Decided to strike first."

"Why was he coming after you?" Taylor asked.

"We stole all the money and trashed one of his casinos," Regent spoke up. "It was awesome."

"Why the fuck do you care?" Hellhound demanded. One of her beasts growled softly.

Lyn glanced back and shrugged. "Well, I wouldn't be much of a hero if I jumped in to save you and it turned out you were assasins or had maimed his baby sister or something like that. That would be embarrassing."

Hellhound and Grue tensed, but Tattletale was grinning now. "Nothing like that. We're just your not-so-average merry band of thieves. Hmm... you can sense him? Lung?"

Lyn nodded and Taylor pointed. "Over there, nineteen meters."

"Shit!" Grue suddenly exclaimed, blasting out more darkness.

Lung's head snapped around, and Taylor realized he'd finally cleared Grue's darkness. He'd heard them.

"Scatter!" Tattletale yelled.

The Undersiders split off in different directions, but Taylor didn't move. She didn't want to use lethal force, and Lyn was even more reluctant to risk killing someone. Lung was a regenerator, though. As long as she left the brain alone, anything else could be fixed. And Taylor had an idea.

Lung had shrunk back to near-human proportions, while he'd been alone in the darkness, with only a few small areas covered by scales.

Taylor brought her batons up and threw them out to the sides. The clear plastic sticks stopped in mid air, and with twist, began to orbit her. The batons whirled into a blur, producing first a chopping sound, then a high pitch whine. When she had them going as fast as she could without losing her magnetic grip, Taylor launched them like spears.

Faster than Lung could react, the first baton slammed through his neck and blew out the back of his spine in and explosion of blood and plastic splinters. Releasing the first threw off her balance, and the second missed entirely, vanishing into the night sky.

Taylor stood stunned as Lung's headless body crumpled. She made a choked noise of protest, one hand outstretched helplessly. The cloud of darkness vanished. At some point the Undersiders gathered around her again.

"Well, that happened," Regent said.

"I... I was trying to paralyze him," Taylor said weakly.

"Okay, I know you're freaking out right now, and if it helps, if anyone could survive decapitation, it'd be Lung, so he still might survive. But seriously, the Protectorate is going to get here soon, and I don't think you want to be here when they do," Tattletale said. "Now, you helped us out in a big way, so believe me when I say the least we can do is offer you a ride."

She needed a ride, Taylor thought faintly, since her batons were lost. But... is that what a hero would do? Run away and hide from the consequences of a mistake? On the one hand, a hero would stay and turn herself in. On the other, she had to get home, for her dad's sake. Taylor couldn't just disappear for however long.

Lyn took it out of her hands. "A ride would be good. I kind of needed my batons to get around."

"Very specialized telekinetic?" Grue guessed.

Lyn shook her head. "Where are we going?"

Taylor slid off the beast from behind Tattletale. They'd stopped in an alley well outside ABB territory.

"So, what do we call you?" Grue asked.

"Still haven't decided on a name, actually," Lyn admitted. "but I was considering Sentinel."

"Well, whatever you end up calling yourself," Tattletale said. "We owe you."

"I may have killed someone," Taylor cut in. "I don't want to be owed for that."

"Then think of it as us taking responsibility," Tattletale said. "That happened because you jumped in to save us. Doesn't sit right, not doing what we can for you."

Taylor looked at her in surprise, and Lyn said, "It's a nice sentiment."

Tattletale eventually convinced Taylor to meet them on the roof of a building they both knew. As the Undersiders rode off, Taylor turned and started climbing.

"Doesn't it bother you?" Taylor finally asked. "That we probably killed someone?"

"Of course it does," Lyn sighed.

"Why are you acting so casual about it?" Taylor asked.

"Taylor, you live on a death world already," Lyn said. "Tens of thousands of people have died in the short time since we attacked Lung. Tens of thousands, Taylor. And that's a on a good day. Is one lone death, a death that's probably saved many other lives, supposed to matter so much more just because we had a hand in it?"

"Yes," Taylor said emphatically.

Lyn shook her head in exasperation.

Taylor sat in class, practicing her lip-reading. She was picking it up fast.

"...cry yourself to sleep for a week," Emma sneered.

Taylor wasn't listening. It was a small thing, that small anomaly in Sophia's brain that Taylor had never considered before. The same extra piece all the parahumans she'd seen shared. Sophia was a parahuman.

Taylor sat, using her power to spy on the Wards in their base, at the edge of her range.

She felt numb. She felt crushed.

In a way, this was exactly the sort of thing she'd been afraid of when she decided not to join the Wards, writ large, and she could almost laugh at how right she'd been in her fears. Yet, until now, there'd always been a hope in the back of her mind, that maybe there was friendship and camaraderie waiting for her among the heroes.

That hope was dead.

"All this time," Taylor said.

Sophia spun around at Taylor's unexpected presence. She blinked, and her body relaxed, her face a picture of incredulous disgust. "Hebert? The fuck?"

"All this time," Taylor said again. "All this time I've been taking your shit because I didn't want to use my powers on a civilian, and all this time, you weren't."

Sophia laughed in contempt. "Just what the hell do you think you're... doing..." Sophia trailed off as she registered the key part of Taylor's statement, and her eyes widened.

Taylor lunged at the other girl, and Sophia only barely dodged, flickering slightly. Sophia lashed out, and Taylor took a punch to the gut. Taylor retaliated with a kick, but Sophia leaped and went shadowy, gliding straight up and pulling a concealed knife.

Drawing her batons from under her hoodie, Taylor slapped them down and shot into the air. Sophia went solid and plunged towards her, stabbing downwards. Taylor let the knife rip down over her collar bone, tearing through her clothes but failing to penetrate her skin.

Breath rushed out of Sophia as Taylor kneed her in the gut. Sophia kicked off, turning shadowy and leaping off the side of an apartment building. Taylor landed on a fire escape and met the other girl's shadowy charge.

A scream tore out of Sophia's shadowy form as she tried to pass through Taylor's body.

Sophia solidified, falling out of the air, covered in horrific electrical burns. Taylor sprung downwards, caught Sophia, and landed back on the ground. Sophia's right arm broke off and fell to the concrete in a puff of ash and charcoal.

Sophia's eyes were wide and terrified as Taylor held her up by the front of her shirt.

"Superconductors are amazing things," Taylor commented. "Do you have any idea how much live current is circulating in my body at any given time?"

Sophia choked something unintelligible. Taylor slammed her up against the side of the building, then started punching her in the face. It wasn't long before Sophia was a bloody, gurgling mess. She went shadowy one last time, and Taylor's fist sank through her skull.

There was no scream this time, just a soft humming crackle as Sophia's shadow state dissolved into mist. All that remained of the girl was the arm that had burnt off earlier.

The world around Taylor froze.

Lyn stepped around the corner, naked, in her petite blue-skinned girl form with neon green hair and features. "How many times are you going to do this?"

Taylor took a deep breath to calm herself. "Until I've convinced myself it's a bad idea to do it for real."

Lyn came over and hugged her, one hand working its way into the back of her jeans to grope Taylor's butt. Taylor returned the hug, ducking her face into Lyn's hair.

The world around them faded, Brockton Bay backstreet vanishing to make way for a fantasy scene. A vast cloudscape lit by three brilliant moons, with soaring arches of glittering water flowing like rivers through the sky. The two of them stood on a circular platform that floated in the center of the scene. It was twice the size of Taylor's entire house, and furnished like a penthouse apartment. Despite being open to the air, with no walls or ceiling, it was peaceful and undisturbed by wind.

Between one moment and the next, Taylor's clothes were gone. And between another moment and the one after that, Lyn was tall and male and muscular. Taylor jumped to wrap her legs around his waist, and crushed their lips together.

Sentinel climbed the fire-escape, planted one hand, and flipped onto the roof, displaying a casual agility few gymnasts could match. She recognized the three people on the roof as the Undersiders through her sensor power, but this was the first time she'd seen their faces with her eyes.

A fair blonde girl with freckles in a black shirt. A hunky black guy in a tight green t-shirt. A slim pretty boy with curly hair in a white jacket. Three of the Undersiders, out of costume. Taylor was momentarily distracted by the sexy as Sentinel's eyes lingered on Grue, and Lyn smiled slightly in agreement.

"And she arrives," Tattletale said smugly, turning to Regent. "Pay up."

Regent fished a wad of bills out of his pocket and handed it over. "You cost me fifty bucks, you know," he said, "but that entrance? Kinda worth it."

Grue coughed awkwardly, then extended a hand. "Hey, I'm Brian."

Lyn shook his hand, even as Taylor said, "Okay... I'm finding this kind of weird. Why are you guys revealing your secret identities like this?"

"Call it a show of trust," Grue told her.

"I'm Lisa," Tattletale said. "That's Alec, and Bitch... well, you've read her wiki page."

Taylor blinked. "How could you possibly know that?"

"My power's cool like that," Tattletale... Lisa said. "We thought you'd like to know, by the way. Lung survived and is in PRT custody."

A tension seeped out of Taylor as she sighed in relief.

"He's in a coma or something," Alec added. "Busy regrowing his... lungs."

Brian groaned. "Alec..."

Lyn snickered. "So anyway, I'm guessing you didn't want to meet just so you could tell me your real names. What's this about?"

Brian hesitated and looked to Lisa. She bent down and picked up a plastic lunchbox that she held out for Sentinel to take.

"I said we owed you," Lisa told her. "All yours, no strings attached."

"Alexandria," Taylor deadpanned, noting the print on the front. "I think I already have one of those, actually."

Lisa rolled her eyes. "Open it."

Sentinel took the lunchbox and popped it open. Her eyes went wide. Eight stacks of bills, tied with paper bands. Each of the paper bands had $250 written on it in permanent marker.

"Two grand," Taylor breathed, slowly closing the lunchbox and looking up.

"You have two choices," Lisa explained. "You can take that as a gift. A thank you for jumping in to save our asses from Lung. A bit of incentive to talk instead of fight if we wind up getting in each other's way at some point. It'd be nice to have one less person shoot on sight while we're out doing daring dastardly deeds."

"What's the other choice?" Lyn asked curiously.

"You take this as your first installment in the monthly allowance you're entitled to as one of us," Brian answered. "An Undersider."

Following that, Lyn and Taylor had a silent argument, while Brian and Alec looked on, bemused, and Lisa watched them with a little grin that was entirely too smug.

Taylor was actually more tempted by the money than Lyn was, but even if the Undersiders weren't too bad as far as villains went, she still didn't want to go down that road. Lyn was less impressed by the money, but she thought pulling heists sounded fun, and argued that it was kind of lonely with just the two of them.

"It's... an appealing offer," Sentinel finally said. "You guys seem pretty decent. But I think I still want to try to be a hero. Joining a villain team is pretty incompatible with that aim."

"Well shit," Alec said blandly.

"Look, I'm not particularly interested in getting in your way," Sentinel told them. "I don't have any fondness for the Protectorate, either. You can consider me a rogue, I guess, with a thing for protecting bystanders."

Brian nodded. "We'll do that. So... see you around, I guess?"

"See you around," Sentinel agreed. "And if you want, you can call me Lyn."

Taylor's dad had locked them in a room and insisted on a conversation. He wanted to know why Taylor wasn't coming home until sunrise most days. Taylor was less than thrilled.

"Tell him whatever you want, break down the door and leave, I don't care, I quit," Taylor muttered under her breath, before fleeing to the virtuality.

Lyn turned around with a sigh. "Danny, I know you're just trying to be a good dad for Taylor, but you have to realize she feels like you're betraying her."

Danny stared at her. "Taylor, what...?"

"Taylor isn't here right now, Danny," Lyn said.

Striding over, Lyn plonked down in the chair across from him and pulled off her glasses. She planted her elbows on the table and fidgeted a bit. Taylor's morph profile always felt awkward when Taylor wasn't also present. Lyn idly flipped a couple of morph settings for her eyes, figuring it'd be appropriate to provide a visual reminder that she wasn't Taylor right now. With parahuman, or rather parafae speed, her sclera and iris darkened to make the black on black eyes she preferred, which she hadn't actually worn outside the virtuality since the locker.

Danny's eyes went wide and he flinched back, his chair screeching on the tile. Okay, not quite the reaction she was going for. He recovered quickly, settling into an angry glare.

"If you're not Taylor, then who the hell are you?" Danny demanded.

"You want the short answer or the accurate one?" Lyn asked.

"Short, please," Danny bit out.

"I'm Taylor's powers," Lyn told him. "My name's Lyn."

Danny blinked. "You... what?"

"Taylor got powers a few months ago," Lyn said. "Only, some weird chance happened to her powers before she got them, by which I mean me, so when she got her powers, they came with a free Lyn surprise."

"I want, to talk, to my daughter," Danny said slowly.

"Well, your daughter doesn't want to talk to you," Lyn told him, matter-of-fact. "I can't force her to come out, and I wouldn't even if I could."

Danny slammed his hand down on the table, then spun and flung his folded newspaper into the kitchen with a crash when he saw that Lyn was unimpressed. He paced back and forth a couple of times, clenching his hands, and finally sank back into his chair with a broken sigh.

"You've been with her, all this time?" Danny finally asked. "What are you?"

"That's a ridiculously long story," Lyn said. "But the part I figure you care about? I'm Taylor's friend."

Danny stared at her for a long moment. "Fine." He sat back and sighed. "So you've been helping Taylor be a cape? That's what she's been doing?"

"That's what we've been doing, yeah," Lyn agreed. "We're Sentinel."

"Who?"

"I can show you later, if Taylor's okay with it," Lyn said. "Are you satisfied with that? Or am I gonna have to bust down the door to get out of here?"

"I... would like to know my daughter is safe," Danny said. "This cape stuff, its dangerous. What if Taylor gets hurt and can't get help?"

Lyn snorted. "We're the most indestructible cape in the entire city, Danny. It'd take something like that guy who can teleport only half of you to even injure our body, and anything that doesn't kill us outright, we'll heal from. This body feeds on electromagnetic energy and radiation, making us immune to the less esoteric blaster abilities up to and including Behemoth. Taylor is probably the safest person on this hellhole of a planet."

Sentinel strode into the building where all the capes were gathering for the fight against Leviathan. She instantly identified all the locals with her power, but that was only a portion of the crowd, and more capes were arriving through various means all the time.

She'd brought her entire armory of homemade plastic weapons for this. Eight clear batons were sheathed at her back. Six clear orbs, each the size of a fist, were clustered in threes on each of her shoulders, held in place magnetically. Four clear glaives, a foot wide with three razor sharp blades, held against her upper arms and her thighs.

She still didn't have a phone. The Utility Cloud kept its magnetic fields remarkably contained, but delicate electronics still couldn't survive close proximity to her body while she was using that ability heavily. Which was pretty much all the time while she was bounding around the city in costume, looking for trouble.

"Hey," she greeted the Undersiders, who were once again missing Bitch.

Grue startled slightly, staying silent for a moment before he greeted her. "Sentinel."

Sentinel raised an eyebrow. "Worried?"

"No, well, yes," Grue said, shaking his head.

"The team got some disturbing news yesterday," Tattletale explained.

"Disturbing enough to take your mind off an Endbringer fight?" Sentinel asked. "That sounds... bad."

Tattletale shrugged. "It's a thing. We're dealing. How have you been?"

"I broke into a house to save a ten-year-old boy being beaten by his dad the other night," Sentinel admitted. "The sister called the cops on me..."

"Rough time," Tattletale said with a smirk.

"I don't care," Sentinel said, before lightening. "Newter's been hitting on me at every opportunity since he found out I could touch him without losing my mind. I'm... undecided on how to respond."

Tattletale grinned knowingly. "An... internal conflict?"

Sentinel lowered her voice as Taylor spoke. "Yeah, I'm not really interested, but I'll probably end up... stepping out... so Lyn can have her way with him." Lyn added, "Speaking of which, one of these days I've really got to get you to tell me what the hell happened between you and Faultline."

"We'll see about that," Tattletale teased. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I see Armsmaster over there glaring at us, and I think there are words I need to be having with him."

"That's what happens when you infiltrate a fundraiser and sneak motor oil into a man's soup," Sentinel deadpanned.

Sentinel couldn't sense the Endbringer with her power. This, naturally, sucked, but she still had all her normal senses, and she never had to take her eyes off of him to see where all the other capes around her were.

Shooting up from the street, she used a baton to yank a guy in bronze armor out of the way of Leviathan's kick, and punched a whirring glaive into the Endbringer's largest eye. It scratched it. Barely.

Leviathan swatted at her, and she yanked herself towards the steel frame of the building to her left, only for the water afterimage to smash into her and send her crashing through an apartment block. Sentinel didn't even have a bruise, but her costume had been obliterated.

"Oh goddamnit," Taylor cursed as Sentinel picked herself up from the rubble and charged back into the fray wearing nothing but the tattered remains of one sandal.

Life went on. Stuff happened.

Amy Dallon had a minor freakout the first time she shook Sentinel's hand.

Sentinel arm-wrestled Aegis. It was declared a tie when Clockblocker got bored.

Taylor finally went on a date with Brian. She used her cape body, minus the silver markings, a different hairstyle, and in normal clothes. It went well, until it was interrupted by Shatterbird.

The Slaughterhouse Nine were more than a little miffed when Sentinel proved immune to... pretty much everything except the Siberian. Bonesaw in particular was really cheesed off about it, and begged Jack Slash to let her take Sentinel's severed head with them to study, because she maybe actually had more in common with Endbringer physiology than human, even if it wasn't the same thing at all, and her powers just didn't make sense. Sentinel was rescued by Newter and the rest of Faultline's Crew. It took her an hour to regenerate a full body.

One night, Tattletale called Sentinel up at home, freaking Taylor out more than a little, and urgently requested Sentinel's help in her coup against Coil. Sentinel didn't get there in time, and Tattletale didn't survive the attempt.

No one ever figured out exactly who was responsible for posting it, but the photo of Sentinel riding atop Behemoth like a rodeo bull, stark naked after her costume was destroyed for the sixth time, became a viral internet meme.

Taylor eventually became resigned to her alter ego being known as Clothing Damage Girl, even being cited as a Real Life Example on TvTropes. Lyn utterly failed to see what the problem was. Having lived on Earth Bet for years by this point, Taylor didn't buy for a second that it was ignorance rather than stubbornness.

Lyn's homesickness never truly went away, and she missed Eelesia and Zach a lot. Taylor made her a promise, that if they ever found a way to go looking, they would.

(It took me so long to finally settle on where to send Lyn. Eventually I just gave up and gave in to the inevitable, even if it strains credulity for Lyn to land outside the metaverse where the magic that conjured her up actually exists. Worm belongs to Wildbow and can be found at parahumans dot wordpress dot com. What's a metaverse you ask?)

The Terminology I Use in this Story:
Omniverse - The set of all turing-complete universes.
Exoverse - All universes that share the same base quantum equation.
Metaverse - All universes that share the same base physics and base magic.
Multiverse - All universes that share the same physics, magic, and initial conditions.
Universe - A universe.

(Finally, if you haven't already, now would be an excellent time to read the sidestory, It Means Flame. The following chapters of Forever After Earth may not make complete sense to you if you haven't.)