Hope Through Overwhelming Firepower Interlude 11 Dragon
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"Positively charged anti-protons, Dragon." Colin ranted from inside his workshop, while working on a computer. "Which somehow manage to induce an anti-matter reaction without any of the other side effects of that. Where did the energy go?"
"Perhaps she created negative matter of some sort?" Dragon offered.
"Oh sure, let's swap one physics breaking explanation for another." Colin looked up from his computer and growled out.
"At least this one only breaks the laws of thermodynamics." Dragon commented with a hint of humor.
"Oh as if that's any better." He spat, before standing up and beginning to pace back and forth across the room.
"Colin, are you okay?" Dragon questioned worriedly, this was unusually acerbic, even for him.
He let out a sigh, and sat back down. "No, I suppose I'm not."
Dragon made a quick check of the Birdcage and S-Class threats, nothing notable, before focusing on Colin.
"Does her supposedly breaking the laws of physics really bother you that much?" Dragon questioned. "You consider yourself a scientist, do you not? I would think you would be fascinated by the prospect of something which would change the way you look at the world."
"...No, I suppose it isn't." He conceded.
"Than what's the matter?" Dragon pressed in, Colin needed this.
"I... It's... It's just..." He hesitated. "Small scale is my thing." He finally got out.
Dragon made her virtual face frown. "Seems a bit... petty."
"It is goddamn petty!" He suddenly leaped up with a shout, leaving Dragon startled for the slightest time frame.
He began pacing once more. "But... Protons, neutrons, electrons, all of that. I am the miniaturization Tinker; I know those things like the back of my hand-better, in fact. I have to. I can't make my technology without doing so." He deflated, and fell back into his seat. "And Buster comes along, and walks all over this too." Colin leaned forward, and held his head in his hands. "What doesn't she do better than me? I barely hold back Leviathan; she almost manages a kill and does manage the first deathless Endbringer fight ever. I create a combat analysis program good enough to counter an Endbringer; she casually waves her hand and makes it better than I ever dreamed. And now she apparently understands more about protons than I do." He finished bitterly. "How long till I'm simply extraneous, or am I there already?"
How was Dragon supposed to respond to that?
Colin sighed again. "I can't work on anything in this state." He shook his head tiredly. "I'm going to bed, Dragon. Maybe the world will make sense again in the morning."
"Good night, Colin." Dragon offered, and made her projection nod.
Colin shut down his video connection.
If Dragon had a head to shake, she would've of right there. Colin was going to have to work this out on his own.
She checked in on the Birdcage and S-Class threats. Nothing new. So her thoughts turned towards the latest sensation sweeping the news.
Buster, The name on everyone's lips since Leviathan's less than successful offensive. Someone had managed to tape some of the Leviathan battle, in particular the part where Buster and Alexandria were working together. The first time an Endbringer had shown anything even remotely resembling fear.
Several Endbringer cults had already canonized her, and not in the good way either.
However, ignoring radical extremists, opinions about Buster were of a generally positive manner, for now. Inevitably, someone will come up with some sort of objection to her actions, perhaps along a similar line to the ones Colin had brought up at the eve of the battle, if only for the attention degrading such a known figure would bring. But for now, there was no such objection; it had barely been even 24 hours after all.
But the really big thing, was what her powers were.
Dragon logged into one of her many Parahumans Online accounts, and rapidly looked through the now 77-page topic on Buster. It had only been 16 hours since posting, but it seemed as if everyone had something to say on her. To be fair, they probably did.
Dragon found herself removing several rather inappropriate posts. Someday, Jkuer89 will learn 16 is not an appropriate age for those activities. But this day, nor any day for the next 16 weeks, is not that day.
Unsurprisingly, most of the debate in the topic was on the nature of Buster's powers. Currently, XxlathxX's 'Super Eidolon' theory was considered the most plausible: an adaptive Trump that kept their powers.
It was a good theory, Dragon conceded. Certainly, it jived with most of what she had shown so far. However, there was what the public didn't know.
Information on the event was trickling in from various sources, a few hover drones and Colin being the primary ones, but all of it pointed to one conclusion.
The end of the Slaughterhouse Nine.
Dragon wasn't in position to catch all of it, she would probably be figuratively kicking herself over not acting more quickly for the rest of her, hopefully, very long life, but she had caught some things. And what Dragon saw... Confused her.
Buster demonstrated a brutal efficiency in her slaughtering of the Slaughterhouse. Brain matter on Buster's head, and the decapitated corpse of Bonesaw implied that Buster hit her first, and hit her hard. Jack Slash's vaunted luck, judging by the hole in his chest, had finally failed him soon after. Dragon still didn't know what the hell happened to the Siberian, and only just got there in time to see Shatterbird fall in twain, and Buster pull off a good impersonation of Legend on someone who was presumably Mannequin. Buster had then proceeded to fly off to strike down, as Dragon later learned, Crawler.
Alexandria had come by soon after, and flew off with a catatonic Cherish, who Buster had missed for some reason. Dragon hadn't been able to have any of her drones follow after, as anything that could possibly be construed as spying on a major Protectorate figure like Alexandria was forbidden from her.
It was what happened when Buster got there that was... interesting.
Dragon had reviewed the video Colin had uploaded several times already, at couldn't come to any other conclusion.
Buster was built by something. Even if you assumed that Parahuman powers could result in a human turning into an android, and Dragon would concede that it would be far from the weirdest thing for them to do, there was always something inherently... illogical to Parahuman powers. Parahuman powers always had an element of chaos in them, an element of randomness that just didn't make sense to arise except through intention or evolution.
Buster, didn't have that. When her arm opened up, Dragon saw something that was streamlined, something that was so obviously constructed she didn't understand why no one else could see it. Well, she understood in the technical sense, she supposed.
But Parahuman powers would never have something like Buster's arm happen. The smooth opening of the arm, all of the spikes which extruded in a manner perfectly calibrated for maximum dispersal of energy, the musculature replaced by cables, all of this was something a Tinker would build, not something which would arise naturally. In a Parahuman, a power like this would have just had the arm tear itself open, or the spikes would just shoot through. In all likely hood, there would have been a regeneration effect of some sort to heal the damage from the attack, and it probably wouldn't cause any pain, but it would certainly be messy, and would be nothing like the efficiency of Buster's attack.
However, there was a problem with that theory. And that problem was called Taylor Hebert's birth records. She had been born to Annette Hebert on June 19th 1995, and there were clear records of it. Her being an android of some form was clearly a recent addition. So she had to have triggered, but it didn't make sense if she had. It was, in far more ways than the average person realized, incredibly out of the norm for a power.
She supposed if a Tinker had the technology to do half the things Buster could do; it would be trivial for them to transform someone from range. But that raised the eternal question of why. A Tinker capable of the adaptive, self-upgrading, super tech that Buster appeared to be should be capable of shoving through whatever agenda he wanted without using Buster as a proxy. Perhaps the Tinker was insane? Or maybe had a specialty in improving others.
Dragon was forced to admit that a specialty of 'improving others' was well within the weird specialties Tinker's had, but the blatant physics violations wasn't. Dragon usually found with a bit of thought that she could figure out the basis behind most Tinker tech, no matter how weird, while what Colin described got just as much of a 'what the hell?' Out of her as it did out of him.
No matter what way Dragon mentally twisted and looked at the problem, Buster didn't make sense under any paradigm.
Dragon checked in on the Birdcage and S-Class threats, only to get a bit of a shock when things weren't all as usual.
The Simurgh was moving earlier than expected. Much earlier. But... not to any particular location, she just appeared to be drifting slowly towards what was mostly the middle of nowhere in Canada.
Dragon brought her mind from the topic of Buster; she should probably inform Narwhal about the Simurgh's unusual activity.