She didn't like this city, Kara decided. Some bizarre quirk of fate had brought them there. Some side effect of whatever Shepard had done at the Crucible. And she didn't understand it.
Physically, it didn't make sense. They were in London. A flash of light, and they're in a city in America that was nonexistent, to her recollection. Even if you believed the parallel universe hypothesis, it didn't make sense. It wasn't time travel, unless they had traveled to medieval times and stepped on a butterfly without noticing. And if it were a parallel dimension, they would have appeared in London. Appearing in a different continent, in a different reality… There has to be a will behind it. An intelligence.
So why would it send them to a shithole?
That's what Brockton Bay was. It was Omega but without the gentle touch of Aria T'Loak, masquerading as a tourist town. But it was failing at that as well. From where she stood at the boardwalk, she could look across the bay to the docks. She could see what the city's locals called the "boat graveyard", and the derelict warehouses. She even thought she could see the warehouse they were using as a base. She imagined the krogan and the geth playing "Go Fish" to pass the time.
That probably wasn't what they were doing.
Evan had disappeared first, saying he was taking the opportunity to discover the neighborhood, get a taste of humanity. He'd smirked at Mar while doing it. Stupid. She left shortly after. The Geth had told them to stay put while it learned, connected itself to the internet and shut off its platform. Its runtimes were spreading through the internet, on a mission to understand this world.
She would do it in a more intuitive way. So she walked through the city. And learned invaluable information.
Notably, this was a shithole. But a specific kind of shithole. It was a shithole with a gilded cover on top. She'd seen similar things in the past. This city used to be a tourist trap of the highest quality, but tourism dropped while the trap remained. The Boardwalk was nice enough, but walk only a little bit away and the nice storefronts disappeared, and then the "local places that the tourists don't know about" that tourists go to disappear fairly quickly, and then… a lot of boarded up stores. A lot of people with unnamed illnesses selling very cheap silverware and electronics and what should not be even classified as food from tiny hole-in-the-wall stores.
It was a dying city. The city's wealthy were in the process of walling themselves away from the misery of the rest. They didn't see what was going to happen. They would get devoured by their own. She'd seen it on Omega. The restless poor, drawn in by Cerberus's promises. It didn't even matter if those promises were true. They never were.
There was some very good coffee, though. Never underestimate the value of good coffee. It's not a great sleep substitute, but twitchiness could be seen as wakefulness in a certain light.
She took another sip of her coffee only to find out it was empty. She threw it to a nearby bin without looking.
"Nice shot." A male voice said. She turned to it.
Blond was her first thought. Very blond. And blue eyes. And large. Her mind organized itself. The guy was large. Muscular, and wearing a shirt and jeans that seemed designed to show it off.
"Thank you." She said, smiling. Just before the pause got awkward, she added "You think you can do it too?"
"Well..." he said, rolling the word out, "I don't have a coffee."
She laughed. "Go get one, then."
"What, and leave you here all alone?" He asked. Definitely very blue eyes.
"What makes you think I'll stay here?"
"Curiosity?" He asked. He managed not to make it sound like a plea.
"I heard that can kill the cat."
"Good thing there aren't any here." This one was cute. She liked cute.
"I'd rather not take my chances." She said. Would he bite?
"Then I guess you'll have to come with me."
"So Jerry looks at our officer, and says, 'trade?'" Kara said.
Blond laughed. "He didn't!"
"He did! I swear, we're all waiting for the shoe to drop, but our officer just drops his voice and says, 'trade.' We hand over his rifle, he gives us back ours, and no one got in trouble." He was laughing. This story always got a laugh. "Well, at least until he found out what we put inside the stock."
"What was it?" he asked, his eyes wide and still very blue.
"That," she responded, in a completely serious tone, "is top secret."
He paused for a second, and laughed harder. She smiled, allowing the story to get the attention it deserved. Ordinarily she added the bit about the live pyjak, but the story would have to suffer for their cover.
"So when did you get out of the military?" He asked.
"Recently." She couldn't think of anything to add. The sounds of waiters putting plates on tables, other diners talking, and the din in the kitchen failed to fill the silence.
"Oh," Blond replied. He was definitely cute. Okay, so first night in this world. Why not.
"You want to go somewhere else?" She asked.
He quirked an eyebrow, "Let me get the bill."
This would be good.
He was finally asleep, lightly snoring. Kara slowly got out of the bed, careful not to wake him. The bathroom was… next door to his bedroom. Not connected directly. She could turn on the light, then. She closed the door slowly behind, listening for the click as it closed, and looked at herself in the mirror for the first time since the Crucible.
In front of her stood a woman in her twenties. Strong, athletic, fit. Pretty, she always thought, and had never heard otherwise. Brown eyes, brown hair, pale skin. Almond shaped eyes. Her hair in dreadlocks, which she usually bound up but were now in complete disarray. The slight pocks on the left side of her face were light enough to be the sort of feature that made her look interesting, the result of a geth grenade two years back. Her right arm had taken most of that scarring, a bit of shrapnel having embedded itself in her forearm. Her chest had a slight mark where a batarian pirate had shot her. The entry wound in her back was much more impressive. Jerry had told her off about letting an enemy get behind her. She'd laughed it off back then, but learned her lesson. She started wearing armor.
Basically, she looked like herself. The twenty seven year old N7 who kicked all sorts of ass. This ruled out her brain being put into the body of a different woman on a parallel earth in some infernal time loop shenanigans meant to stop the Reapers.
Blond was sweet. He didn't comment on the scars, his eyes didn't linger on them. Either he was unfazed, or good at pretending. Based on his own more modest scars, the first seemed more likely. She liked that. On her left was a badge with his face on it. Nice to finally find out his name.
Jason Todd, PRT agent.
PRT… They were some form of police force. For parahumans.
She'd avoided thinking about them until that point, she realized. Because for all the differences in the world, she was hoping this one was a misunderstanding of hers. But it wasn't, was it? This world had superheroes. Flying in the sky, fighting in the streets, doing appearances on talk shows. She'd caught a bit of the last one, going through an electronics store. Some guy called Bastion. Apparently he did things with force fields. There was some scandal involving racial slurs, and he was on a talk show to look like he wasn't a racist, and then to do tricks with a dog. The dog seemed even less into it than the superhero was, but at least the host was enthusiastic.
Realistically, if she wanted to fit into this world, that's how she would do it. Pretend to be one of these superheroes – Her technology was definitely more than that of those superheroes. Join in their pretense of fighting each other. Or stay out of sight, use the geth to siphon money, and hide. But she knew well enough that none of them could be trusted to do that, least of all her. And it seemed her date appeared to be in their police force.
She briefly entertained the notion that he was sent to find out what happened because someone had sensed a temporal distortion, but that was obviously nonsense. No, this was just one of those things. Too vague to be properly called a coincidence but too odd not to be noted.
Slowly, she went back to the room and got dressed, doing her best not to wake him. She walked to Jason's kitchen, and looked around for a pen. There was one by the door, next to a small stack of different colored square pieces of paper. She took the top one, and wrote a brief message on it:
Jason,
We never did see if you could throw the coffee as well.
See you there on
What day was it? She'd seen it mentioned on the TV. Monday.
See you there on Saturday. This time remember to ask my name.
She doodled a winking smiley face, and left. The others were probably already at the warehouse.
She walked through mostly empty streets. It was odd. A pretty woman walking through a bad neighborhood at night? Someone should have accosted her. Or tried, at least. But things seemed quiet.
Not that it would worry her. The Harrier was folded up, but she could easily pull it out of her pocket at any moment.
She reached the derelict warehouses fairly quickly. The signs were mostly rusty, but she remembered where they were. Row 22, number 51. She walked to it, and found it closed. She pulled up the heavy steel door. Empty except for their gear and the geth's body, which was shut off. She kicked its arm. It flopped. The geth was still on the internet.
There was fishing gear there earlier, wasn't there? One of them had gone fishing. Probably Evan, then. She left the warehouse, closing the door behind her, and walked to the docks.
Mar was sitting at a pier, holding a fishing pole. To his right were his hammer and a bucket. His armor, and hammer were all spattered in blood. The bucket had a few fish in it.
"I see you've had a good night," she said, and sat next to him. "Are those bass?"
"Don't know." He responded. "I don't think they're poisonous."
The only sound for a while was the slight lapping of waves against the dock.
"This… isn't your Earth, is it." It wasn't a question. She answered anyway.
"Not as far as I can tell." The wind started to rise, bringing with it some foul smell from elsewhere in the docks. "I think we're in some kind of alternate reality. This city, at least, probably never existed in our reality."
"We are stuck here."
"Probably."
The silence went on a bit longer. The smell got worse. "I killed today."
"I noticed."
"As I was killing him, he started to grow. I had to hit him a few times until he stopped."
She looked at his hammer. She'd seen similar ones pulverize people in a backswing. More than once? This meant something.
"I think you killed your first superhero," she said. "How does it feel?"
"He deserved it."
"I'm sure he did."
"I believe he was important."
"He probably was."
A pause, then the krogan spoke again, "Does Earth have something like varren, only larger?"
"Rhinos?"
"I know of those. Not them."
"Nothing that would remind you of a varren, no."
The silence continued.
"I could use your help."
A krogan, asking for help? From a human? Things must have gone pear-shaped.
"You have knowledge in… devices? Programming?" At her nod, he continued, "If you were to build me a translator, so that I could make myself understood, I would be… thankful. I would return the favor."
"No problem," she said. "Can I ask, though, why not the bot? I mean, I can program, you have to learn to pass N3 Engineers, but he's probably better at it than me."
"I fought alongside the quarians when the geth rebelled. I fought on the battle of the Citadel against them again, when Saren betrayed the Council. An AI is a machine. A tool. I will not ask one for assistance. I will order it to if it's programmed to obey me, but if not, I do not trust them. A tool you don't hold is one held against you. You are alive. You I can rely on, to act in ways that are natural to you. A tool whose masters are not here? That worries me."
It was the longest she'd heard him speak.
"No problem then."
She saw the fishing pole curve, the line taut. Mar slowly and patiently reeled it in. He took the wriggling fish off the hook with one hand, and put the pole on the side with the other. Then he slammed the fish onto the pier, and threw it into the bucket.
"The tin can's awake." A voice from behind them shouted at them. "He wants to talk to all of us."
Evan.
For all that he was as human as she was, she liked him the least of their merry band. The part of her that was rescued from being a lesson to future generations by the Alliance recruiter hated him for being a traitor. For being the enemy. For looking at the Alliance and saying "No". The other part of her, the part that relished being that lesson to future generations, the part that came out to play and left bodies, hated him for being boring.
She rose to her feet, then looked at Mar. The krogan was rising slowly and deliberately. Evan walked up to him, and looked in the bucket. He moved his foot towards it.
"Right now my plan is for the bucket to come with us. But if the bucket goes anywhere else, you follow." Mar said.
"Just wanted to see what you caught. I didn't know you could fish," Evan said. "It smells terrible here."
"Save it." The krogan walked towards the warehouses. Behind his back, Evan gave her a look, as if to say what's the problem?
Idiot.
She looked out to the sea. She thought she could see the boardwalk. She wondered if Jason woke up in the middle of the night. She walked to the warehouse.
The lightbulb in the warehouse was dim. In contrast, the Geth's red light was strong enough to tint everything. It reminded Kara of the emergency power exercises back in Rio. The faces around her took her out of reminiscence easily enough.
Mar had barely managed to close the door behind her when the Geth started talking.
"We have been researching the situation the group is in, and have come to a number of conclusions. The first-"
"Let me guess," Kara said, "we're in an alternate universe, whose history matches Earth's imperfectly, in a city that never existed in our reality, and there are humans with weird powers here. Unless one of those can bring us back to our reality, we are stuck here."
"Yes." The geth said, completely tonelessly. Evan snorted. "We theorize the possibility of a few ways to get to our reality. There does appear to be communication with an alternate Earth, with fewer powers. There are established powers that do seem to work, so if we can get in touch with people with the right powers, we may be able to return to our reality. This will require more investigation, and possibly our work for certain individuals. We have compiled a list of people who may have the resources or abilities to help us, though it is incomplete. The likeliest one to succeed, who has been secretly making inroads on this subject, is-"
"Wait, you're suggesting we go back?" Evan asked. "Seriously?"
"Yes," the Geth responded. She wondered if there was any way to get it to inflect.
"I don't know if you realized this, but our reality? It's dead. The Reapers killed it. We wasted our and resources helping a lunatic build a device that no one understood. And we lost the war. And Reapers destroyed Earth, and were going to destroy the rest of the galaxy. So why would we want to go back?" Evan raised his voice steadily throughout, shouting by the end of it. "Why not stay!?"
"Endbringers." the Geth said.
"What?" Evan asked. The word was unfamiliar to Kara as well.
"Did you not hear this word today?" the Geth asked.
"On a building. Endbringer shelter. Not sure what it meant." Evan said.
"Endbringers are humans – or something else – with very powerful abilities. Each one is destructive, and durable beyond what should be possible. To give an estimate of their power, we believe each one could be considered on the level of a Sovereign class Old Machine." the Geth said.
"Okay, so powerful people exist. What's the problem?" Evan's voice was high pitched now, as well. Don't want to come back to a galaxy that hates you?
"Each one appears approximately once a year, and attacks a city. And destroys it. It is always a large city. Always densely populated. And the attacks always have repercussions. A man whose loss of his family turns him into a monstrous killer. A heroine becomes terrified of leaving her home, and is less effective now than before. Oil fields set afire, damaging a country's future. Each one of their attacks has a theme, and each one causes future damage. Our calculations suggest that if the rate of attacks continues in the same way, human society will have collapsed within thirty seven years. At most seventy years from now, the last human will die. By the time the Old Machines come, their attack will have no meaning to humanity, as humanity will no longer exist. Earth itself will probably be a blackened rock."
A stunned silence followed its words.
"What… what's our plan then?" Evan asked.
"There are a number of powers that may be able to transport us away. We believe they may be the best option."
"I have a better idea." Mar said. "Sovereign was destroyed, why can't we kill these things?"
"We could investigate this further," the Geth said. "It appears they are only fought by the parahumans of this world, but our group has similar if not superior firepower to most of the parahumans. Our group could make an impact."
"You said each one attacks each year? Then we can help the next time, and observe. You can analyze actual video, and we'll figure them out," Kara said.
"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I agree with the krogan. I'd rather fight for Earth than run away." Evan's voice was steady. Even he seemed into it.
"It appears there is consensus" the Geth said. "It is important, however, to preserve the integrity of defending forces. There appear to be many individuals in this city who are very powerful and capable of fighting the Endbringers. One of which, Lung, has survived in close quarters with one."
"Could you describe him?" Kara asked. If this day was working the way she thought it was…
"Large male of Asian descent with tattoos in the shape of the mythological earth dragon, and a mask in a similar shape," the Geth said, "he leads a gang known as the ABB. They wear green, red, and black as markers.
"About that..." Mar said.
She knew it. She could officially call it a coincidence. And shit luck, too.
