Being frozen in time was an odd sensation.

Of course, there was more to it than that. She herself was not frozen, but Betta's manifested form around her was. The feeling of forced stillness was even more than when Betta tried to remain completely still while the armor was manifested. She wasn't breathing, her heart wasn't beating, her eyes were unblinking, and yet she suffered none of the negative consequences that should have come with such a full-body shutdown.

Her body was frozen but her mind remained aware, and the first thing that she tried to do was reach out to Betta. Several attempts yielded no results, but that was to be expected if he had been locked in time in the same manner that she had.

With nothing better to do until Clockblocker's freezing touch wore off, Taylor continued to watch through her frozen eyes. Through the heavy blue tint of the faceplate and the tiny holes leading to her ears, she watched and listened as Vista began to scold Clockblocker, laughing as much as she could while disconnected from her body.

Then, from somewhere out of her field of view, a disturbingly familiar voice sounded. "Another newbie, huh?"

Time seemed to stretch, ironically for her current situation. As the speaker continued, her voice was distorted as Taylor tried to justify her first thoughts. Sophia was one of the only people she ever heard speak in more than a whisper around her, barring her fellow bullies, the teachers, and her dad on the few occasions he was home. It made perfect sense that if someone sounded close enough to her she would assign them their face, and surely there was no way that someone as horrid as her would be here, right?

Her train of thought continued in this manner, trying to justify the similarities to herself. Halfway through Miss Militia's reprimand, however, the speaker stepped into view, unmasked, a familiar sneer decorating the face of the girl that had tormented her for the past year and a half tearing away the last few lingering doubts she had.

She watched in slowly building rage as Sophia Hess pulled the passingly familiar mask of Shadow Stalker over her face, her last sentence hammering the final nail in the coffin.

"Like some weakling would dare out a Ward."

Being frozen in time was an odd sensation.

Lidong had been following Taylor's directions for the most part throughout the day, offering his own alterations or suggestions at times but generally trying to let her be in control. He was the passenger, after all, and the less he thought about controlling the body of a girl five years younger than him the better. He had been getting better at reacting to her thoughts, and was now able to process and carry them out in around a tenth of a second.

Feeling his hand crack under the hydraulic press had been strange. He felt no pain from the damage, simply an odd cracking sound and the sight of his damaged shell. Once the pressure disappeared, however, the solidified mana flowed back together as if it had never broken. Their lower rating he attributed to his lack of specific knowledge regarding the magic puppets, only having seen Roland use them, and the odd circumstances regarding the one he was residing in.

They had followed the heroine, Miss Militia, through the unchanging hallways until they arrived at an elevator, which the heroine had told them would take them to the Wards common area. The ride had been short, and they had walked out to meet the cast of familiar faces that Taylor had told him about and they had seen while researching the power rating systems. None of them looked surprised to see her, leading him to believe that they had likely been informed of her presence along with the people in charge of their power testing.

Vista, the youngest and longest-serving Ward, looked the happiest to see them. He remembered that her powers had something to do with warping space, and although that wasn't his area of expertise beyond the occasional Dimensional Anchor scroll, Roland had specialized in spatial magic. Perhaps when the two of them reunited, they could enlist her help in finding a way to return to their world. When they ended up working together, he could give her some tips about the ways Roland had used his spatial magic if she hadn't mastered it already.

Gallant was looking at them with a small amount of confusion, but quickly shook it off as he introduced himself. Aegis was much the same, introducing himself as the oldest member and de facto leader of the Wards in Brockton Bay. He couldn't help but draw comparisons between the two of them and Lin Li and Raffel, matching them up with their own counterparts in F6. With Vista as Roland, Shadow Stalker as Husseret, and Kid Win bearing some similarities to Brazil, the roster was almost complete.

The last member of the Wards, the one who was closest to Schuck in terms of abilities, was Clockblocker. Even through the mask, Lidong could tell that he was nowhere near the lady's man that his cousin was, but the listed ability approached the same level of bullshit that Schuck had. Stopping objects in time? If there weren't videos of him doing exactly that on PHO, he would have doubted that such a power was possible, but here he was.

As the two reached out to shake hands, Lidong suddenly had a gut feeling that something was about to go very bad, very quickly. Their hands met, quickly closing around each other, and then the world was plunged into chaos.

Taylor, who had previously been giving off a feeling of nervousness and anticipation, was suddenly filled with an all-consuming rage. All of the Wards in front of them had moved – Aegis and Gallant were seated on two chairs that had previously been bear the television on the far side of the room, Clockblocker's hand was still embraced in his, and Vista was verbally abusing him for having frozen the two of them. The large digital clock on the wall had gone forward two minutes, giving credence to his thought that he had been time-locked. Miss Militia was somewhere between where she had been resting in the corner and the play-fight going on in front of them, her posture indicating that she was hesitant to intervene.

Then there was the target of Taylor's sudden anger, the second-to-last Ward. Shadow Stalker. The comparison he had made between her and Husseret was supported by their similar style of dress. Keeping Taylor from doing anything rash, he asked her a question across the mental link the two of them shared.

"Why are you so angry?"

What he received in response was more of a rush of memories than words. Thousands of short snippets, far too many for him to comprehend in the limited time he had before someone realized he was no longer frozen. The two most pressing ones, the two that stood on top of all the others, were the sight of an athletic-looking girl shoving her into the locker that he had found her in and a more recent memory of the same girl walking into the room and pulling her mask over her face, declaring herself a Ward in front of Taylor's frozen eyes. Connecting the dots fairly quickly, Betta tried to speak to Taylor again.

"Taylor, calm down. If you don't want to do this, you don't have to. I'm here for you, just let me know what you want to do."

The feelings he got back from here were pretty evenly divided, half of them going berserk and attacking Shadow Stalker where she stood and the other half storming out of the building. Discarding the first one, Lidong decided to apply diplomacy where Taylor would have used violence.

Letting go of Clockblocker's hand, he paid just enough attention to make sure that the hero didn't fall too hard on the floor. With a smile, he spoke through Taylor's mouth. "It was nice to meet you all, but unfortunately it's getting late and I need to get back home. I'll see you all around, though."

Fortunately, Noble's Prerogative allowed him to get away with such an out-of-place claim. After a glance at the darkening sky outside of the window, the heroes that had been present when he arrived said their goodbyes. With Miss Militia keeping her company, he walked back into the elevator leading back down to the rest of the Rig.

"So, how did you enjoy your day? Did you enjoy the power testing and meeting your teammates?"

Planning out the length of his response with the time they had left until they would reach the docks, Betta began to speak. "Power testing was certainly useful, I'm so glad that I got a chance to test my fire breath without worrying about burning anything. It was the kind of thing where I knew I could do it, but I wasn't really sure what it would end up looking like. There were a few other things that the scientists asked that I'd like to try out in the future…"

The two of them were waiting at the exit point for the ferry, with the boat less than a minute out as Lidong finally moved on to the topic of the Wards themselves. "Gallant and Aegis reminded me of some friends that I made a long time ago. It was almost nostalgic, I hadn't thought about them in a while and I don't really know how they're doing. I'll try to get in touch with them sometime, wherever they are. Vista… I know she's only a few years younger than me, but her costume just makes her look so much younger! Don't tell her I said that, I know she has more experience than anyone else in the Wards, but whoever designed her costume did either a really good or a really terrible job.

I'm kind of sad that I couldn't meet Kid Win, but it's just life. I'll see him sooner or later, so there's no use complaining about that. Clockblocker…"

Miss Militia sighed as the two of them stepped onto the ferry and the boat immediately began to head back to shore. "I'm sorry about what he did. It's unprofessional and we've lectured him about it multiple times, but it's also the only new thing he can do with his powers. He's been looking for people that his power interacts with in new ways, and in the time he's been with us, he's learned everything we recommended for him. Until he graduates to the Protectorate, there's not much more for him to do when he isn't on patrol."

Lidong shook their head. "Don't apologize, it was interesting for me as well. You know, my armor is linked to the state of my body underneath. I don't feel the pain or anything, but it's a lot easier to regenerate because of how they're linked. While I was frozen, I wasn't able to move or breathe but I was still aware of what was going on outside. It was strange, but I wouldn't mind trying it again. He actually reminds me a bit of myself when I was younger, to be honest. The joker, the comedian."

As he was speaking, they crossed the line where he had seen the forcefield reach from a few of the windows and Lidong felt it was the time to get the heavy topic out of the way. "However, I don't think I'll be joining the Wards in the near future. It's not that there's anything wrong with most of them or that I have any problems with being a hero or the PRT as a whole. It's just that I saw Shadow Stalker's face and heard her voice while I was stuck there, and I'd sooner burn this city to the ground than work with the girl who nearly assaulted me and left me to die this morning."

The boat had finished its journey, arriving at the docks for Taylor to step off while Miss Militia froze in place. "It's nothing personal, Miss Militia, and I won't spread any word of who she was or what she did as a sign of goodwill. I'm sorry for any trouble you may get in for this, for letting me go, for letting me see her face. Still, it's better for everyone for the facts to be clear, and the simple fact is that I'd like to live the rest of my natural life without seeing her."

And with that, knowing that her microphone and the ones attached to the cameras on the boat would pick her final words up, Lidong turned and walked away, fading from their view as the unlit streets and his stranger effect shrouded the blue glow of his armor.

Sitting on the roof of his house, Roland looked over the tops of the nearby trees towards the mountains obscuring the setting sun. It was a beautiful sight and a welcome distraction from the mundanity of his task. Sitting next to him on the roof were his laptop and an ethernet cable that was left over in the town hall from the one time someone had tried setting up a computer system of their own in the town. One end of the cable was plugged into a port on his computer, while the other was inserted into a stone block.

Said stone block was part of a more complex array, where the eight wires carrying the information through the cable were fed by a web of lines, each running up around the dish and antenna resting on top of the circuits that made the whole thing work. He had vastly overestimated the time it would take him to do this, mistakenly accounting for Andonara, Stephanie, Vivian, or Lady Bluebird dragging him away from his work at odd intervals when all of them were left behind in Falan.

How the array worked was relatively simple. Using the antenna and radar dish as a means to focus a signal, an incredibly small beam of magic was sent into the sky at a tenth of the speed of light. Upon hitting a solid object, the array would receive the distance between the two. If it was smaller than the distance between the Earth and the moon, the beam would then lock onto its position and velocity and then make slight adjustments to get a sense of the size of the object. If it was smaller than one square meter of cross-sectional area, it would be discarded and the beam would continue scanning the sky.

Several objects had been caught so far, but none of them had reacted to the various types of signal waves the array was broadcasting. Just as he was about to head inside for the night, however, one last light flashed on the array, prompting him to check the array once more.

Location: 23 degrees west, 55 degrees south

Relative Velocity: 130.49m/s

Cross-Sectional Area: 10.00 square meters

Signal Response: Received – Y; Returned – Y

Ignoring the suspiciously precise numbers for a moment, Roland celebrated the find. Checking his computer, there was indeed a connection over the ethernet. He ran through the computer set-up as quickly as possible, wanting to finish everything before he lost the signal and was forced to wait again.

There were a few noticeable differences between this computer and the ones he had used in his world, but none were too difficult to overcome. The set-up process was informative if nothing else, and it guided him through several of the most popular websites and installed some basic software on his computer.

After installing the text editor and spreadsheet applications as well as several calculator apps, he finally went online. The most popular website was Parahumans Online, and before doing anything else he made an account. Fortunately, 'Roland' was still available for him to use as a username, and after he had come up with a suitable password he began clicking through the tutorial on how the forums were organized.

When he had finished, a notification appeared in his direct messages. Clicking on it, a new window appeared on the screen.

Winged_One: Good evening, Roland. I would like to make a deal with you.