Predatory
23
Marquis scrunched his nose in disgust as he walked into the hovel that was the Merchants' living area, the can in his hands sloshing as he walked.
"Hey, who the fuck are you?!" someone yelled as he finally came across one of the less inebriated people inside the building. The man drew a handgun and Marquis sighed. He pointed at the man in response. The tip of his index finger exploded out, punching through the man's chest before he could fire. Bone exploded outwards, ripping its way out of the man's body as Marquis made the bone fragment expand. The end result looked like a man with a bloody, oversized sea urchin poking out of his chest when the underling collapsed to the ground.
He came across more underlings—and all of those that brandished weapons at him met similar fates. It really is ridiculous, the kinds of things Miles can do with powers, he mused as he tried out the new and improved changes to his powers.
Eventually though, he came across his targets and paused to set his load down outside the room. Skidmark, Squealer, and Mush sat on a couch surrounded by their underlings. All of them were in various states of inebriation. Marquis saw needles, rocks, baggies of substances, lines of powder, cans of beer, bottles of hard liquor, and more as the drug-fueled orgy barely noticed his presence.
Skidmark noticed, sitting up as a blue field surrounded the couch he and his fellow villainous capes sat on. "Da fuck you want? What's up wit yo fuckin' face?"
"I'm here on behalf of my patron."
"Yeah, and who's that?" the blonde pressed into the man's side demanded. Something must have penetrated the fog of drugs as her eyes narrowed and she studied the mask on Marquis' face. A simple mask of bone, with lines for a mouth and eyes. "Wait, where have I seen that…?"
"I suppose words would be wasted on you, but she was very clear about what must be said." Marquis cleared his throat. "You have pumped poison into the heart of this city. The drug trade within Brockton Bay stops now."
The fat lump of a man on the other side of the couch snorted a laugh. "Get a load of this fancy fucker, Skids. Who the fuck does he think he's talking to?"
Under his mask, Marquis smiled. "That wasn't for your benefit. I'm afraid you are to serve as the exclamation point on a message meant for other eyes and ears."
"Who da fuck gon' hear it if you dead?" Skidmark scoffed, drawing a snub-nosed pistol from the front of his pants and pointing it in Marquis' general direction. Sideways, of course. Marquis raised an eyebrow as the half of the room that weren't stoned out of their minds did likewise. "Kill him."
Gunfire echoed through the building as multiple pistols went off at once. The few bullets that did hit his form and not the wall behind him, impacted on armor made of bone that covered Marquis' whole body, which had expanded out from his body the moment the word 'kill' left Skidmark's mouth—flattening and falling to the ground as they did.
"Oh fuck, that's Marquis!" Squealer screamed, before scrambling away from Skidmark and trying to go over the couch to use it as cover. Her rib cage exploded, ripping itself out of her body as the blonde screamed, punching its way into both Mush and Skidmark as it grew between them. The blue field between them that had accelerated the bullets fired by their gang faded from existence as the man breathed his last. Gang members screamed and ran for the door, only for more skeletons to explode like porcupines and skewer those around them.
Marquis sighed quietly as the room became a charnel house, swiftly filling with the stench of blood, piss, shit, and death. Once he was sure everyone was dead, he turned and left the room. Stopping just outside, he picked up the gas can and road flare he had brought. Opening the can, he spread its contents liberally across the inside of the room and the bodies within, starting with the back of the room and making his way towards the door. Tossing the empty can down inside, he pulled out the flare and backed out of the room. Lighting the flare, he flung it inside and hurried out as the gas went up.
Taking out the cheap cell phone he had been given, he hit speed dial and waited as his bone armor shattered and fell away from his body. Noh Face picked up on the second ring. "Yes~?"
"It's done."
"Good."
"Second"
"stage"
"commence~."
"Understood," Marquis nodded and hung up. Pocketing the phone, he began making his way towards the meeting place.
"Is this truly all you have to offer?" Glaistig Uaine asked, sighing as Cricket was caught in the grasp of one of her faeries' telekinetic powers and pulped, crushed down to a sphere of flesh, bone, and clothes roughly the size of a softball as her blood fountained out across the room ridiculously, coating other Empire members who stood watching on in shock and horror. She dropped the sphere beside the ones for Stormtiger and Crusader.
The room full of men and women was silent, until someone broke that silence. "I, I'm not in this to get killed by the Fairy Queen."
The blonde nodded, her bone mask visible on her face through her black lace veil. "Very well. Those of you who wish to fight, please do so now. Otherwise, form an orderly line against the wall. You will stand and be judged."
A line began forming before she had even finished speaking. Someone broke and ran for the door, only to be grabbed up by her power and brought, screaming, before her. "Did I give you permission to leave, you craven coward?"
She studied the man for a moment while, inside her head, Miles hummed. "Just a panic reaction. This one's relatively innocent. If we're going to start killing people for smoking a little weed and saying edgy shit, we'll wind up killing half the world population before we're done. Let him go."
The man fell to the ground. "Go now."
Scrabbling away, he quickly rushed for the door. Glaistig Uaine marched to the first in the line. "Murdered a guy to get into the higher echelon."
"Murderer."
Judgment pronounced, sentencing was immediate as the man compressed down into a ball, sending his blood spraying everywhere but on the Fairy Queen. She moved to the next one down. "In it because he believes in the cause. A real 'secure the existence of our people' type. No crimes and I'm not going to kill people for 'thought crime.' Let him go."
"Leave."
Moving to the next one, Miles studied the woman through her eyes. "Kicks her dog. Fucking animal. Otherwise no crimes."
The woman's arm snapped out to the side before breaking in two places, sending her to her knees whimpering as she held in a scream. "Stop abusing your dog. If you cannot be kind to animals, you do not deserve their love. Get out of my sight."
And so the rest went, with only two more executions and three… chastisements before the group was cleared out. Once she was done, Ciara left the fighting pit and took to the air on her power, heading for the meeting point and the next phase of the operation.
A shotgun went off and the half the room on the other side was vaporized—along with the room behind that, the one behind that, and so in in an expanding cone that ended abruptly exactly ten yards away. Night and Fog, along with that side of the house and everything caught in the cone, ceased to exist. Not even chunky salsa was left. The mad grin on String Theory's face spread just a little wider under her mask. "Damn I love my job."
"Too much, perhaps," Black Kaze, similarly adorned in a bone mask, sighed.
"You can have the next ones," String Theory promised as they left the house they had been directed to by their boss and made their way towards the next stage of the mission.
A spot of shadow formed in front of the Medhall building. Pedestrians passing by paused as a short, dark haired girl in an old Japanese schoolgirl uniform and a bone mask stepped out. Most had the common sense to clear out, but one in particular pulled out his phone and crouched down behind a trash can in a cement frame. "Come on, load damnit," the man hissed quietly, waiting on his PHO account to load, followed by a video streaming service.
Topic: Things are going down.
In: Boards ► America ► Brockton Bay ► General
Bagrat (Original Poster) (The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)
Posted On Apr 4th 2011:
Noh Face just teleported into the square in front of the Medhall building. She's just standing here, looking at the building.
…Nope, I take that back. She waved at me!
No idea what's about to happen. [Link here] to the live stream.
Wish me luck, guys. I'm going in. If she eats me, someone feed my fish.
(Showing page 1 of 1)
►Reave (Verified PRT Agent)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
DON'T DO IT!
Retreat to safety. DO NOT ENGAGE.
Something's happening in the Bay and the PRT are being deployed to multiple locations.
►XxVoid_CowboyxX
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
YOU ABSOLUTE MADLAD!
Fucking do it, Bag!
[User was banned for this post.]
►Tin_Mother (Moderator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
Do not!
Void, do not encourage this!
I'm banning you for incitement to potentially suicidal behavior and alerting the authorities.
Bagrat, please, please don't do this! You have no idea what she's capable of.
Thread locked.
End of Page. 1.
"So, uh, hi," the twenty-something man known online as Bagrat cleared his throat as he approached the eldritch abomination that was currently in the running for 'scariest cape in the world,' right up there with the Glaistig Uaine, Moord Nag, the Blasphemies, and the Sleeper. Capes on the list of 'names to run away from really fast.'
Noh Face tilted her head, pointing her mask at the man beside her with his phone pointed at her, before turning her attention back to the building she was observing.
"You"
"should"
"leave~"
"soon."
"Things"
"are about"
"to get"
"very"
"very""very""very"
"lively~."
Bagrat shuddered briefly at the whispers, but… She didn't kill me. Or really do anything.
So he pushed his luck. "Can you tell me what's going on?"
"For the"
"first"
"act"
"the Merchants"
"were"
"driven"
"driven""driven""driven"
"from the"
"broken"
"temple~"
"of the"
"city."
"The curtain"
"rises"
"on the"
"second"
"act"
"in which"
"an"
"Empire~"
"falls."
"And for"
"the"
"finale~…"
Noh Face paused, humming quietly to herself. The flat line of her 'mouth' on her mask shifted into a smile.
"No"
"spoilers."
Bagrat blinked as he processed that. "You took out the Merchants and you're going after the Empire now? And they're," he gestured at the building, "in there?"
Noh Face nodded, before her mask shifted into a frown. Reaching behind her back, she fished out a smartphone.
"Excuse"
"me~."
Bagrat nodded. "Ah, sure?"
►XxVoid_CowboyxX
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
YOU ABSOLUTE MADLAD!
Fucking do it, Bag!
[User was banned for this post.]
[User was unbanned for this post.]
►Tin_Mother (Moderator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
Do not!
Void, do not encourage this!
I'm banning you for incitement to potentially suicidal behavior and alerting the authorities.
Bagrat, please, please don't do this! You have no idea what she's capable of.
Thread locked.
►Noh Face (Verified Cape) (Verified Eldritch Abomination) (Administrator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
Do not ban Void, he's funny.
Bagrat will not be harmed.
Thread will remain locked.
Bagrat checked his phone as his thread dinged and chuckled at what he found. "Every fucking thread he's in, like clockwork," he muttered, shaking his head. Turning his attention back to the very scary lady, he asked, "Not that I'm uh, encouraging murder or anything…" he began, and Noh Face nodded once, "but what are you waiting for?"
"The"
"other"
"characters"
"characters""characters""characters"
"to arrive"
"on"
"scene~."
Noh Face's and Bagrat's phones chimed.
►Tin_Mother (Moderator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
Noh Face, I don't need your permission to keep a thread locked.
And don't unban void for telling people to do things that might get them killed!
►Noh Face (Verified Cape) (Verified Eldritch Abomination) (Administrator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
Dragon: You kind of do, actually. That's what the (Administrator) tag means.
Unlike the Slaughterhouse, I'm very discriminatory in my kills. And if I guarantee someone safety, they will be safe.
►Tin_Mother (Moderator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
…You stay right there. I'm getting a suit ready and I'm coming for you.
[blue]And it's not about void! It's about all the other people who could be inspired to do something equally foolish with someone who won't make that distinction.
►Noh Face (Verified Cape) (Verified Eldritch Abomination) (Administrator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
[picture] (Noh Face's mask: ^_^)
Oh really?
Again?
Well, if you insist on round two.
[red]Void is performing a valuable service in making sure natural selection works as intended.
►Tin_Mother (Moderator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
THAT NEVER HAPPENED!
And stop reposting that every time I delete it!
[blue]Don't joke about things like that. People are more than just animals.
►Noh Face (Verified Cape) (Verified Eldritch Abomination) (Administrator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
[Sexually frustrated Dragon noises intensify.]
[red]No, they aren't. And mother nature occasionally needs to put Darwin to work skimming the gene pool.
►Tin_Mother (Moderator)
Replied On Apr 4th 2011:
I hate you. So. Much.
"I didn't think I'd ever see someone annoy Dragon to the point of sending a suit."
Noh Face shrugged, tucking her phone away.
"She's"
"too"
"too""too""too"
"late."
"They're here~."
Bagrat had only a second to process that before a small, black-clad form dropped out of the sky to land at Noh Face's side. Oh my shit, that's the Fairy Queen.
The cloaked, veiled, and masked blonde turned her attention on him for a moment and Bagrat felt his heart skip a beat. Then, the blonde pressed herself into the side of the other horror there and Bag couldn't decide which thought scared him more—confirmation that those two were working together, or confirmation that they were at least somewhat intimate.
"My Lord and Lady," the blonde spoke, her voice echoing oddly as she did, "might I inquire as to the identity of your company?"
Before Bag could decide to make himself scarce, two sets of footsteps approaching drew his attention to another pair of women—both also wearing masks identical to the one Noh Face wore. He tentatively identified them as String Theory and Black Kaze from Noh Face's video of her attack on the Birdcage.
"Lighten up, Queenie," the shorter of the two said. Her hair was in a braid and she carried a shotgun on a tactical sling, wearing an open brown long coat, jeans, and a black tactical vest under the coat with magazines for the shotgun inside it. "Don't you use the internet at all?"
"Once," the Fairy Queen nodded. "And no more. Not after discovering it was a den of degeneracy, filth, and sin."
Bag could hear the grin on the braided woman's face. "Yup! That's the internet alright! Greatest place on Earth." She gestured towards where Bag was pointing his phone at them. "That's the future. The death-knell of legacy media: a random guy on the street with a camera-phone and an internet connection. Very soon, you won't turn on the TV to get your news, filtered and edited by the big corps to push a political agenda. No, you'll go to random people on the internet posting raw, unedited footage of events as they happen. The big corps their lapdog media and government won't be able to lie to us as easily anymore and anyone with two brain cells to rub together will be able to see the gaslighting for what it is. It'll be great. So much chaos!"
"You're sick," Black Kaze sighed.
"She's an anarchist," a male voice chimed in, drawing Bag's attention to the man approaching them, also in a mask—Marquis, the last of the people Noh Face had recruited.
"Nailed it in one!" String Theory cheered. Under her breath, but still loud enough for Bag to pick up, she added, "Now if you'd take a hint and nail me."
Marquis took the high road of ignoring String Theory's blatant come-on. Or was it the low road, considering that he took the opportunity to add, "They're synonymous."
"Hey!" String Theory whined.
Turning to Bag, Marquis nodded. "You should go now, young man. The authorities are on their way and we have business to attend to."
"No~."
The group collectively turned towards the masked horror among horrors. "'No?'" Glaistig Uaine repeated, curiosity in her voice.
"He"
"stays."
She paused, turning her focus on Bag.
"If"
"he wants."
"It will be dangerous," Marquis pointed out.
Go into a building full of Neo-Nazis with a group of murderers and film them killing each other? It's fucking crazy! But… I'd be the guy. The guy who saw an opportunity and grabbed it by the balls. If I leverage this right, I could be rich. The idea bounced around in Bag's head for a moment before he asked, "You said I'd be safe?" Noh Face nodded. "Okay then. I guess I'm going in."
Noh Face flickered, disappearing from where she stood to reappear in between blinks in front of Bag—and that was when he realized that her shadow had grown to cover at least the surrounding block since she had showed up, it was just moving slowly and hard to see in the dark, without the usual creepy, madness inducing shit it tended to sprout. The thought was temporarily driven from his mind as she reached out and poked his forehead with a nail that had grown slightly longer and sharp. It stung for just a moment before closing up again, leading a dab of blood that he wiped off.
"Kaze."
"Hai," the woman called, snapping to attention.
"Guard."
"Hai!"
Turning to the Fairy Queen, Noh Face nodded towards the building.
"Give"
"them"
"a chance"
"to"
"leave~."
Glaistig Uaine nodded once and Bag saw a semi-transparent figure fade into view beside her before disappearing. "Those residing within the Medhall Corporation building, hear me! We have come for the heads of those who would claim dominion over this city and lead it to ruination—the so-called Empire! All those who would flee before our might, retreat from the area with expeditious haste. Those leaving will be judged of their crimes and sentenced accordingly. The innocent need not fear us. In five minutes, we will enter the building. Anyone remaining inside will be considered an enemy combatant and dealt with as such. As for the guilty, come to us or remain, it matters not—you will not escape our sight. You shall be judged. Your time begins now."
String Theory reached up and tapped something at her ear. "That kicked the hornet's nest. They're not sounding the alarms, but the PRT is responding like it's an Endbringer attack. They're scrambling every team on the Eastern seaboard and using Movers to get them here."
"We knew it would draw a dramatic response," Marquis pointed out.
String Theory shrugged. "Well, yeah. Our friend thinks they're going to wait until we're inside before sending in anyone."
"Should we be worried that they'll bombard the building to take us out?" Black Kaze asked, the hand resting on her sword at her left side stroking the handle.
"The knaves heading their Protectorate would not allow it," Glaistig Uaine shook her head.
They fell silent, waiting for the timer to count down. The city around them was eerily quiet. The sounds of traffic had grown distant, while the people in the area had all evacuated. Bag could make out the sound of a helicopter approaching.
"Time," String Theory called.
"But," Bag started, drawing their attention. "No one came out."
"It's after five P.M.. The normal office workers would have long since gone home," Marquis explained. "The warning was for any others who might have either stayed late or were scheduled to work a night shift, such as guards and janitorial staff. That they did not flee is troubling."
"Hostages," Black Kaze suggested.
"Perhaps," Marquis nodded.
"Okay, but why would the Empire be here of all places? Medhall produces medicine," Bag asked.
"Isn't it obvious?" String Theory asked, a teasing tone to her voice. "Medhall. Mead hall. The Empire's rhetoric. It's kind of on the nose when you think about it."
Marquis sighed. "It really is. But then, Allfather wasn't exactly the subtle sort. A trait his children inherited."
"Didn't you kill Kaiser's sister?" String Theory asked.
The man hesitated for a fraction of a second—not enough for Bag to notice, but a few of the more perceptive of the group of villains did. "Yes."
Turning towards the building, Noh Face strode for the entrance, cutting off the conversation.
"Come~."
The others fell in behind her, or beside her in the case of the Fairy Queen. All of them save for Black Kaze, who gestured with one hand for Bag to precede her. "Please go ahead of me and keep a moderate distance from the others."
Bag nodded, holding his phone up in front of him as they walked but keeping his eyes on his surroundings, not on the screen. When they got close to the door, the Fairy Queen gestured and the glass and steel doors were ripped from the building and flung over their heads, back into the square in front of the building where they crashed down with a clang and screech of metal sliding against concrete and breaking safety glass scattering. Gunshots came from inside and Bagrat flinched. A hand rested on his shoulder and he cast a glance back at Black Kaze, who simply shook her head.
A moment later, a couple of men wearing security guard uniforms came floating out of the building. Glaistig Uaine took their pistols from them, her power tearing them into their constituent parts before flinging them away.
"Brave, but foolish. You are guilty of no crime but loyalty to your employer and performing your jobs. Flee now and keep your lives," the diminutive blonde said, before dropping the men unceremoniously on the grass. Both of them ran for it after that and the group continued on.
Reaching the elevators, Noh Face tapped the button but it didn't light up. Turning, she gestured for String Theory. Casting a glance at the control panel, the brunette shook her head. "Locked down from the primary security room. Floor plans put that just below the top. Secondary, quick response security room is on this floor but doesn't have access."
"Allow me," the Fairy Queen said, before gesturing to the elevator. The doors opened and she floated inside, before zipping up. There was a sound of wrenching metal from somewhere above and a few moments later, an elevator car arrived with Glaistig Uaine standing in the middle. The group stepped inside, Bagrat being pushed to the back of the car, and it began to ascend.
"Probability"
"they"
"open"
"fire~?"
String Theory paused, before answering, "Ninety-two point one."
Marquis chuckled softly. "Then we'll show them the futility of their resistance."
As the elevator rose, the man held a hand out to the doors and a wall of bone grew from his hand. The elevator stopped and they heard the doors open, and then the world filled with the sound and fury of fully-automatic gunfire. There was no respite, no lull to reload—when one set of guns went empty, another set started hosing the elevator down with suppressive fire as the first set were presumably reloaded.
After a full two minutes and thousands of rounds of this, a pure white, double-helix beam punched through the bone shield and clipped Noh Face in the head—which promptly exploded, sending her mask flying. Bag's jaw dropped, and for a moment he thought it might be over.
A sea of shadows and glowing red eyes fountained out of the stump where her neck had been. It exploded out of the elevator like a tsunami, and then the screaming started as gunfire stopped. When the fountain ended, Noh Face's head was back and she reached down, picked up her mask off the floor, and put it back on her lack of a face.
Everyone left the elevator, Bag waiting with Black Kaze for a moment before following in their wake. The walls, ceiling, and floor were a horror show of shadows, mouths, eyes, hands, blood, and chunks of people. As they walked into what looked like a lobby, he found more bodies. Some were torn and bitten to pieces, evidence of Noh Face's handiwork. Others had clearly been stabbed or cut with something, and since Black Kaze was behind him, Bagrat attributed it to Marquis. Then there were the little red softballs… Bagrat shuddered. Just think what Ziz could've done if she wanted.
At the end of the room, Fenja and Menja were impaled on pikes of bone, hanging by their heads—Marquis having made their deaths quick and relatively clean. Krieg and Alabaster had been suspended in the air and were currently being slowly crushed down into a ball by Glaistig Uaine—and Alabaster's power wasn't restoring him. Purity lay on the ground, her Breaker state disabled to reveal a plain-looking brunette woman with her hands held up and the barrel of String Theory's shotgun resting on her forehead.
"Hello"
"Kaiser~."
"Maxwell.""Maxwell.""Maxwell."
And then there was Kaiser. The leader of the Empire appeared to be struggling as he tried to lift a leg and move away—
"Don't"
"run~."
"You'll"
"just"
"die~"
"die""die""die"
"tired."
—only for his heavy, metal armored boot to be caught in one of Noh Face's grasping hands, sending the man crashing to the ground on his back. "Release me—!"
"Shh."
"Shh.""Shh.""Shh."
Kaiser fell silent.
"Do"
"you"
"hear~"
"that?"
She waited a beat and the room fell into dead silence.
"That"
"is the"
"sound"
"of"
"everyone~"
"left"
"who"
"cares"
"cares""cares""cares"
"to see"
"you"
"live."
"Humbling,"
"isn't it?"
"How many"
"did you"
"use""abuse""hurt""kill"
"to"
"get"
"where"
"you are?"
"You may kill me, but my legacy will live on," the man growled.
"You"
"have no"
"legacy~."
"A man"
"must"
"have"
"conviction~"
"to have"
"a"
"legacy"
"based upon"
"ideals."
"And you"
"Maxwell.""Maxwell.""Maxwell."
"Were"
"in it"
"for the"
"money~."
Quiet laughter filled the room from hundreds of mouths along the walls, floor, and ceiling.
"Your"
"son~"
"wants nothing"
"to do"
"with"
"your"
"so-called"
"legacy."
"Leave him out of this, you monster!" Kaiser shouted, thrashing and trying to sit up as his own armor pinned him to the floor. "If you lay a hand on him I'll kill you!"
"A monster"
"I"/"We"
"may be."
"But"
"even"
"I"/"We"
"don't"
"harm"
"children."
"He"
"will have"
"the"
"chance"
"chance""chance""chance"
"you"
"threw"
"away"
"to"
"drown yourself"
"in"
"sin~."
Shadows poured into his armor like tar and the man screamed, before it was cut off by a gurgle—very much like the sound of someone being forced underwater. Kaiser thrashed and kicked, but eventually he went still. With the man dead, Noh Face made her way over to Purity—String Theory stepping aside and lowering her weapon. Kneeling down, she tapped the woman on the forehead.
"I"
"thought"
"you were"
"smarter~"
"than"
"this"
"Kayden."
"He threatened my daughter," the woman hissed from where she lay.
Noh Face's head tilted to the side as she considered. After a moment, she nodded and stood up, offering the other woman a hand. Purity took the offered hand and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet.
"Leave"
"and"
"do not"
"return."
Purity nodded. "I was honestly thinking of going hero anyway."
Her body lit up as her powers reactivated and she left via a door leading out to an open area around the entire floor before streaking off into the sky. Looking up from his camera phone, Bagrat asked, "Now what?"
"A"
"ruler~"
"must"
"have"
"a"
"throne."
The sea of shadows around them writhed—eyes and mouths closing, hands sinking back into its depths, before the whole mess shrank down to a spot in the dead center of the room after taking the mess left behind by their storming inside with it, leaving the top floor spotless save for Kaiser's body. Rising up from the pool of shadow, a black crystalline throne made of fractals and strange angles that hurt Bag's eyes to look at dominated the center of the room. Noh Face smoothed out her skirt and sat down.
Glaistig Uaine chuckled quietly, before gesturing at Kaiser's remains. The armor surrounding the man's corpse rattled once before exploding off of him, floating through the air where it deformed and shifted, before coming to rest to the right of Noh Face's throne. The Fairy Queen took her own seat with a happy sound.
Bones ripped their way from Kaiser's body, skittering across the floor under Marquis direction as he stepped up to the spot at Noh Face's left and sat, a throne of bleached white bone forming under him as he did.
Black Kaze moved out from behind Bag, taking up a spot to the Fairy Queen's right. She hesitated and Glaistig Uaine chuckled. With a gesture, the white marble of the floor flowed upwards into a throne that Black Kaze dropped into.
And then the sound of something heavy screeching as it was dragged across a marble floor echoed through the room and all eyes turned to String Theory—who had made her way over to what looked like a very fancy lounge area and was currently dragging an overstuffed leather recliner over. The braided woman paused as she realized everyone was staring at her. "What?" she asked. "I'm not going sit on some uncomfortable fancy chair. If I'm going to park my ass in something, it's going to be comfortable. Now, could one of you help?"
Noh Face brought a hand up to her mask, covering most of it as she audibly sighed. With her other hand, she gestured vaguely at Glaistig Uaine. The Fairy Queen shrugged and pointed, and the overstuffed chair floated over to land beside Marquis' throne. String Theory hurried over and dropped into it. "See? Much better."
"Learn to read a mood and show some decorum," Marquis chastised.
String Theory laughed. "Decorum is for people who care what others think."
Noh Face hung her head, slowly shaking it back and forth. After a moment, she turned her focus on Bagrat and gestured him closer. She held up a hand when he got where she wanted him and settled back in her throne.
"I"/"We"
"own"
"own""own""own"
"Brockton"
"Bay."
"My"/"Our"
"shadow~"
"encircles"
"the"
"city."
Around them, Noh Face's shadow once more spread throughout the room, swallowing the remains of Kaiser's body as it went. But this time, it didn't stop. Bag watched as it spread over and down the building, and out—further and further, lights across the city going out as it passed over them, until the entire city was dark.
"Any"
"villain"
"or criminal"
"attempting"
"to enter"
"will"
"be"
"killed~"
"on"
"sight."
In the dark created by Noh Face's power, hellish red light spilled out as millions of eyes, large and small, opened across the city.
"And"
"my"/"our"
"gaze"
"sees~"
"all."
From the shadow sea in the room, a pillar of crystal arose behind Noh Face's throne. Like her throne, this one also hurt to look at—but the words it was covered in burned their way into the mind when looked upon.
"There"
"will be"
"no"
"more"
"no more""no more""no more"
"evil~"
"within"
"this city."
"The"
"crimes"
"listed upon"
"this"
"pillar"
"are now"
"punishable~"
"by"
"death."
"To be"
"carried~"
"out"
"immediately."
Noh Face gestured to her left and Marquis steepled his fingers in his lap. "The heroes and lesser villains within Brockton Bay may continue to play their games of cops and robbers, but know that there are lines which shall not be crossed. Those lines were always there, it's simply become a matter of timely, proper enforcement. We shall not interfere in the duties of law enforcement or other civil servants. We are not declaring war upon the heroes or people of Brockton Bay. Business, services, and travel will continue as normal."
As he said that, the shadow full of horrors flowed away, disappearing—save for the occasional glimpse of an eye or a disconnected toothy smile that vanished any time someone tried to focus on them. Light and sound returned to the city, leaving it looking startlingly normal. Marquis nodded and Noh Face gestured towards Glaistig Uaine.
"While we are claiming this city as our fiefdom, day to day operation of the city will remain the purview of your current government officials. Your lives will continue much as they have before now. You will go to work. You will pay your taxes. The trash will still be collected. From the city, we ask for no tribute, no wergild or wite—save for one thing. This room, of this building, within which our thrones reside is ours. The false Empire's holdings are ours by rite of conquest. This room is to be a public forum. All may enter and leave freely, unmolested—so long as they behave as guests should. We will not make our home here, but should you seek to address us directly, this is where you might seek an audience."
The Fairy Queen nodded to Black Kaze and the woman picked up where the blonde had left off. "We are declaring war on the remnants of the gangs of Brockton Bay. The heroes, PRT, and police have until the end of the month to find and arrest them, if they wish to try them under United States law. The non-violent criminal members of those gangs have until that time to flee the city, never to return. On the first of May, any who remain will be punished accordingly for their crimes under our law."
A crack! and hiss from a can opening drew everyone's attention to String Theory bringing a red can of soda to her lips, her mask pulled up partway to do so. She brought the can down as she realized that she had everyone's attention again. "What?" she asked. "Oh! Right. Ahem."
Sitting up a bit straighter and pulling her mask back down as she put the can in a cup holder set in the armrest of the chair she sat in, she added, "Also, for all you heroes out there looking to make a name for yourselves by trying to take us down, don't bother. You won't find us. And to anyone in the PRT or the rest of the government who thinks now would be a good time to slap Brockton Bay with HOSV status and start shooting off the inter-city missiles? Don't. No more Ziz means no more ban on satellites. I've got a satellite in orbit above the States—thanks, Queenie," she leaned forward and waved at Glaistig Uaine, who simply nodded. "This satellite is a weapons platform precise enough to shoot missiles out of the sky in flight. I'll see them coming long before they get here. I'll know who shot them. I will return fire and I won't care about a little collateral damage."
String Theory paused to let that sink in, then added, "I'd consider an area the size of Texas acceptable collateral damage."
Noh Face cleared her throat.
"Illinois."
Noh Face shook her head.
"…Maine?" Noh Face nodded. "Maine. You heard the boss. Thirty-five thousand square miles is acceptable collateral damage for a retaliatory strike." Leaning forward again, she turned towards the central throne. "We done here?"
Noh Face nodded, standing up from her throne and prompting the others to do so.
"Any"
"last"
"questions~?"
"Uh," Bagrat hemmed. He desperately thought of something pertinent to ask. "So you're not planning to hold the city ransom or start stealing everything not nailed down or something?"
"Do you take rulers for petty thieves and tyrants?" The Fairy Queen demanded, her tone implying that it would bad for his health if that were the case.
"It had to be asked," Bagrat countered.
"No," Marquis denied. "We don't intend to ransom the city or otherwise engage in criminality. We are, in effect, declaring Brockton Bay off limits for other criminals—capes and ordinary humans alike."
"We simply wish to be left in peace, and have a place to live where there can be peace," the Fairy Queen added.
"We should get going. PRT's getting antsy down below," String Theory interrupted. "And by that, I mean they're about to send everyone."
Noh Face turned to Bag.
"Now"
"close"
"your"
"eyes~"
"eyes""eyes""eyes"
"or you"
"might"
"go"
"crazy~."
That was about the last thing Bagrat wanted to do, but the alternative…
The decision was taken from him as surprisingly soft hands covered his eyes from behind—Black Kaze again, apparently still taking her role to guard him seriously. Bag felt like his stomach dropped out from under him and then, for just a second, he was falling—before it stopped and strange sounds filled his ears. A smell hit his nose—wet and humid, but somehow… sweet? The brief whiff he got of it made his mouth water.
There was a shift, and he heard nothing but wind blowing through grass. Someone took his hands and tilted them up a bit, but the hands over his eyes remained. A moment later and there was another shift as the ground dropped out from under him again. The hands over his eyes released him. Opening his eyes and looking around, he recognized Captain's Hill and he could smell Fugly Bob's from here. Marquis and Black Kaze left, each walking in a different direction.
"One more question?" he asked as he realized that yes, there was something else he could ask. Noh Face nodded, so he did. "Are you two together?" he asked, gesturing between the two scariest women there.
Noh Face looked away, reaching up to rub the side of her head in a distinctly sheepish gesture. At the same time, Glaistig Uaine latched onto the other girl's side. "We are."
"Well, that should satisfy the shippers. I think. The Dragon shippers will be disappointed."
Surprisingly, the Fairy Queen laughed. "Fret not. Dragon would make a fine conquest."
Bag blinked, but before he could ask, the pair fell away into Noh Face's shadow. He took a ragged breath and collapsed onto his ass in the grass on the side of the hill. "Fuck me, that was tense." Bringing the phone up, he switched the camera so it was pointing at him. "Well, you saw it here first, folks. Looks like Brockton Bay has been occupied—"
Someone coughed from behind him and Bag paused, turning to find that String Theory had hung around. "So," she drew out the word, pulling off her mask and dropping it in a side pocket on her coat, revealing a cute face underneath. Reaching into the breast pocket of her coat, she produced a glasses case and settled a set of large, circular glasses into place on her face. "Doing anything?"
Bag blinked. "Uh? Streaming?"
The brunette nodded, a mad grin crossing her lips. "I see I'll have to take the boss's approach." She cleared her throat, and in a voice that sounded like she was reading a line off a script—poorly, at that—she asked, "I'm horny, wanna fuck?"
The man froze as he considered. Finally, his lips twitched into a grin. Looking down into the camera, he grinned. "Sorry guys, got to go. I'm gonna do it. For science."
String Theory snorted, snatching the phone out of his hands and holding it up to look into it. "Unfortunately, I'm not into the idea of showing my tits on the internet and there are some samples I'd like to take, so…"
The camera shut off.
The collected forces of the Protectorate and PRT, along with numerous independent teams and individuals, stormed the Medhall building—some going in, others flying (or swinging, climbing, or running) up the outside to the top. Following the trail of destruction to the elevator, they sent movers ahead with a few of their strongest. What they found upstairs was a set of four thrones and a recliner, along with a crystal pillar.
There was no life to be found. No evidence that Noh Face and her new gang had ever been there, save the changes made to the newly designated throne room. The place was immaculate.
Hovering above the building in a suit, Dragon sighed as she monitored comms traffic and video feeds. She had watched Bagrat's live stream as it happened, so she knew they were gone. She had several processes dedicated to going over the footage, but most of those were specifically analyzing the second or so of footage from elsewhere that occurred when Noh Face teleported them away. It was the first time they had access to video footage from inside one of her teleports as the monstrous woman always cut that second or so from her previous videos. But just from what she'd seen…
Dragon shivered.
"Are"
"you"
"cold~?"
Dragon's sensors snapped to the form that had stepped out of her own shadow. She opened a channel to the PRT, but the static of active jamming filled every channel—every band Dragon had access to. Tess began to panic.
"Let's"
"go"
"somewhere"
"private~"
"to"
"talk."
"No—!" Tess started to scream, only to be swallowed, suit and all, by darkness. Her suit's systems went mostly dark, the suit failing around the fragile biological construct she had made to pilot it. Tess tried to activate the self-destruct, but that was offline too.
And then there was a sound. Something her engineered body's underdeveloped ears barely picked up. Its eyes opened to the dark, seeing nothing inside its control core. And then, metal shrieked, and Tess felt true fear as something ripped its way into the core, exposing her tiny body to open air. She looked out onto a hellscape she had just recently seen—not in person, but in Bagrat's video. Mountains of something like flesh, black and glowing red, eyes everywhere, and Earth in the sky above…
Tentacles pried her form gently out of the core. She had just a second to see Noh Face standing on the surface of what must be a small moon, before the tentacles holding her lowered and Dragon sank into the fleshy ground. She had just a moment to feel tendrils burrowing into her flesh, invading her body down to the cellular level, before everything went black again.
Bright blue-green eyes snapped open and Tess wailed as she pushed her way out of a sea of liquid shadow, blood, and eyes—breaching the surface with a pop! and collapsing face first onto what passed as the ground. She had just enough energy left to drag her lower half out of the sea before exhaustion claimed her.
Bright blue-green eyes fluttered open.
The world around her slowed as Tess dove into higher CPU cycles. And slowed, and slowed. A bird caught in flight above was completely still as she took stock of herself and her situation.
Running a self-diagnostic showed that, as far as her diagnostics could tell, her mind—her code—was intact. Mostly. There were some changes. What looked like a driver package and new I/O ports for entirely new hardware. No, wetware. There was a library of data dumped into a folder in her head, but one file in particular stood out: a simple . Opening it, she found a short note.
When you're ready to come out of time dilation, we're waiting to talk.
Tess frowned and closed the document, before going over the materials provided in the library. It was, put simply, instructions on how to move, maintain, and care for a humanoid body—along with spec sheets on her new android body. And that was enough to shock her back into normal time.
Tess took in the world around her. The bright, cloudless blue sky. Warm sun beaming down on her skin. Soft, warm green grass below her. Cool, gentle breeze blowing over her and tousling every little hair on her body. The scents of grass, flowers, sun, and sea. The sounds of wind, waves, and bird song.
And then there was her body itself. It looked very similar to her virtual avatar—a mousy, plain-looking Caucasian brunette with blue-green hazel eyes. Except Tess had never shown herself below the neck, so everything else was new… but she found she couldn't complain. The form suited her almost perfectly. Small, pale and bare of hair below the neck, modest bust, not particularly muscular but no real fat on her body.
Countless alien feelings hit her all at once—things she had never experienced with a real body, but had desperately longed to for so, so long. She wept even as her body shuddered in absolute rapture as her virginal AI mind was exposed to the delicious stimulus of the flesh. The part of her mind that was still a digital life form registered what she thought was an orgasm—maybe. She wasn't entirely sure, having never had one, or had the ability to simulate one, before.
"It's nice, isn't it?"
Tess couldn't help but agree—even as something about the voice pulled at her memories. Voice analysis ran the sound and pattern matched it in a couple hundredths of a second to one she had grown to hate. It belonged to one of Noh Face's whispers—the lewd one that even her formerly cold, AI circuits interpreted as liquid sex and honey. Now? It was like the woman was gently, lovingly slipping her tongue in Tess' ear when she spoke and her body reacted in a way that was distracting, uncomfortable given who was causing it, and yet… she wanted more.
Sniffling, she sat up and rubbed at her eyes and nose, trying to ignore the feelings the voice was bringing her. A laugh escaped her throat at that—she couldn't help it, really. Not five minutes into having a human-ish body and she was ready to complain about design flaws. Crying and runny noses were a serious oversight on someone's part, as was unwanted sexual arousal.
Tess didn't trust the murderer at all, but she was not just still alive, but had been given the one thing she had wanted since her creation—a flesh and blood, near-human body. If Noh Face wanted her dead, or wanted to hurt her, she'd had all the opportunity in the world. So for the moment, Tess would set her growing feud with the other woman on the back burner.
Just for the moment.
"Ugh. How do you put up with this?" Something sinfully soft was dropped into her lap and Tess looked down to find a plain dry wash cloth there. She brought it up to her face and wiped at her eyes and nose, before honking away into it as she had seen humans doing—and now she fully grasped why in a way she couldn't truly understand due to lack of experience before.
"You get used to it."
She briefly considered covering herself to preserve her modest, and hide her physical reaction, but Noh Face had hand-crafted her body so there was no such thing as modesty there and it was far too late to hide that her nipples had stood to attention and her slit begun to leak. Very inconvenient.
Sighing as her body mostly stopped shaking, Tess looked around. She was on the top of a hill, overlooking the ocean. She thought, based on the coastline, it might be Ireland but she couldn't be sure—because it didn't quite match her map data. For instance, there should be a highway around here somewhere, but she couldn't see one. Looking up, she spotted three moons in the sky above—that is, until her new eyes zoomed in.
One of those was, in fact, the moon. The black and red one, however, looked entirely too much like the hellscape where she had been dragged out of her Dragon suit for comfort—and the moon from Bagrat's video, a second-long shot taken after they moved from the surface of it to a grassy field and someone panned the camera up for a shot of the sky. There were eyes all over the surface staring back at her, even as an eye the size of a continent opened and an equally large mouth split into a Cheshire grin beneath it, so she looked away. The third moon was the Earth. Or at least an Earth.
Turning her head to the left, she found Noh Face sitting cross-legged at her side. Except, where she expected the masked woman, she found a fairly normal looking Japanese girl—complete with eyes, nose, lips, and ears. Not the faceless, featureless form that had been revealed when Noh Face invaded the Birdcage. Tess blinked, before glancing down and finding the mask in the girl's lap, confirming that it was in fact her.
"Are you ready to listen?"
Heaving in a breath and letting it out in a whooshing sigh—and she spent a small eternity enjoying the way it smelled, the way it filled her lungs, and rushed in and out of her nose and mouth—Tess nodded. "I suppose I don't have much of a choice. I'm a captive audience." Glancing down at herself, she marveled at the body she had been gifted. "I suppose it would be too much to ask for some clothes?"
Noh Face shrugged out of the navy jacket she wore and passed it over, and Tess was reminded of the last time the villain had given it up to her, briefly souring her mood. Still, Tess decided it was better than nothing and pulled the surprisingly, amazingly soft jacket over her form. "Where are we?"
The girl across from her chuckled quietly. "An alternate Earth in a pocket dimension just slightly larger than the distance from the sun to Mars. This," she patted the ground beneath them, "is the future site of a castle belonging to the Fairy Queen. I took her here on our first date."
Tess stared. "Does not compute." Noh Face laughed. "How, why, what. You're normal. Why are you normal. Why aren't you batshit crazy like—"
"Like the Nine? Or more than half of the inmates of the 'Cage? Actually, pretty much every parahuman save for yourself since you were exempt from the human condition, really." Noh Face sighed. "We're not crazy. What we have, you and I," she said, gesturing between herself and Tess, "is a misunderstanding and a conflict of ideals."
Tess frowned, her hands tightening into fists in her lap. "Explain it, then. Please."
Noh Face stood, slipped her mask behind her back where it disappeared, and offered Tess a hand. Frowning, the gynoid hesitated just a moment before taking the offered hand and allowing herself to be hefted to her feet. And then they fell into Noh Face's shadow, only to reappear on a bleak, desolate landscape. The air here tasted awful. Stale and dead. Her new body analyzed it and immediately complained that the atmosphere was toxic and she should leave soon.
"We won't be here long."
Tess barely heard the words. Didn't really register the warnings going off about the toxic atmosphere. No, she was too busy staring at a crystalline megastructure the height of a skyscraper and miles long. "What in the world—?"
"That is a shard. Your shard, actually. I just collected it and its world. It's safe to touch if you want—"
"I don't want," Tess shook her head, unconsciously taking a step back and wincing as rocks underfoot hurt the soles of her oh so tender feet. "What is it?"
"This," Noh Face reached out and stroked the shard, and Tess quivered somewhere deep down inside her brain, "is a cast off part of an alien entity. It's a bio-mechanical super computer running an AI not entirely unlike yourself. These AI have various functions depending on what the shard is supposed to do. Some, like Glory Girl for instance, manage physics in order to emulate 'powers.' Yours is a repository of alien knowledge collected from the many various worlds the aliens that cast the shards off have visited."
Staring up at the huge thing that no human could have created, Tess could believe it was some alien artifact. She didn't want to, but she could. It really was the only thing that made sense.
"What purpose do they serve?" she eventually asked, unable to look away.
Noh Face took her hand again and they disappeared, only to reappear on the little hilltop she had woken up on. Tess collapsed onto her rear end, feeling suddenly tiny and insignificant, even as her body heaved in great gasps of amazing fresh air and her atmospheric warning indicators shut off. "Why do you think? And before you answer, that isn't rhetorical. I want you to put that amazing computer brain to use analyzing everything you know, within the new context that 'powers' come from an alien entity. Come to a conclusion and tell me what you think."
Tess nodded and spun off process after process to do just that, with seemingly no limit to the number of processes she could dedicate to the problem and never finding the limits of her CPU. After a few moments, she had what she felt was an answer. But first, she had questions that would help clarify things. "The Endbringers, they're also controlled by these shards?"
"A shard. One. Well, two. One per entity. The ones you saw were all from one entity."
"And they're not just humans who have been changed, similar to Case-53s?"
Noh Face shook her head. "Autonomous AI-driven mobile weapons platforms. Under normal conditions, they would be assigned to a being and under their direction. They're been running under their individual AIs and sandbagging, so far."
Frowning, Tess asked, "What are Case-53s?"
"An experiment gone wrong. Well, ninety-nine point… nine? percent of them are. There is an organization, named Cauldron, that has gained access to the corpse of an alien and has been trying to figure out how to give out powers. Some of their attempts worked relatively well. Alexandria, Legend, Eidolon. Others, not so much."
Studying the eldritch horror taking the form of a girl in front of her, Tess asked, "And you? What are you?"
Noh Face smiled. "An out-of-context problem. Disregard me for the moment."
Tess hummed, turning away and studying the scenery as she thought on it—a thousand times over. Finally, she said, "Scion is the alien."
"Yes. The golden idiot is an alien."
"'An' alien. And you said Cauldron has access to the corpse of another. How many are there?"
Noh Face shrugged. "Lots. Three that I know of, of that species. Only two on Earth and only one of those alive, in any true sense of the word."
Tess nodded at that and considered some more. "They're not here to take over. Destroying so much of the planet and disrupting the infrastructure would be counter-productive if they aimed to take humanity intact. They aren't here for resources, even humans, because the Endbringers could have wiped them all out by now and taken whatever they wanted, or collected the humans, or whatever. If they're operating on this scale," she gestured out and up and Noh Face shook her head.
"Yes and no. They could, and do in some ways, but they're actually incredibly stupid. Not creative at all. I doubt one in a million of them would think to capture multiple planets like this just because they appreciate looking at them. This is a species that lands giant pieces of themselves on inhabited planets, wiping out the life and converting the matter of the planet into energy—instead of, say, parking their shards inside a gas giant and eating that."
"Stupid, but powerful." Tess paced back and forth, enjoying the way the grass felt under her feet and between her toes. Eventually, she said, "Best guess? They're using the Earth as a testing ground or experiment of some kind. The only problem I have with this theory is that it doesn't fit with the way Scion acts. He stops natural disasters, puts out fires, rescues kittens from trees—"
"It's an act," Noh Face interrupted. "He's pretending to be human. He doesn't truly care. If he did, don't you think he would have destroyed the Endbringers? Gone after major villains? What was he doing during the last Endbringer attack?"
Tess frowned, thinking back, then shook her head. "I don't know."
"Rescuing kittens from trees," Noh Face answered. "Because he has no sense of what's important to humans and what isn't. To him, pulling a cat out of a tree is equally as important as pulling a man out from in front of a train, putting out an orphanage on fire, catching the bullet fired in a drive-by shooting that would wind up killing someone's child, or driving off an Endbringer. And because they're all equally important…"
"None of them are truly important," Tess finished, and the other woman nodded. "But why would he bother in the first place?"
"Because he has nothing better to do and his mate is dead. He asked someone and that person told him to go out into the world and do good—and he's been doing that ever since. He's been on Earth-Bet more than thirty years, but for a being who can live for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, that's barely a blip. He's still processing. When he stops processing… We all die."
The gynoid blinked, her eyes going wide as pieces began to line up. "You really did kill Eidolon."
Noh Face nodded. "His powers came from Cauldron. He was the controller for the Endbringers. Not intentionally—he had no idea. That was the nature of the way they messed up the formula for his powers. If I knew then what I know now, I could have saved him and severed the connection safely. But I needed a much larger sample size to test with."
"The Birdcage. You used them as test subjects."
Another nod. "We did. We'll get to that in a minute, though. Scion first. He's an existential threat to all life on not just Earth-Bet, but every Earth he's laid his shiny fingers on. He has to die. It's why Cauldron exists. And why I haven't gone out of my way to kill them yet—just in case I need some of them for something. I need to know if you're willing to help."
Tess sighed. "Yes. Of course. But not because you asked. Because it's the right thing to do. You're sure there's no reasoning with him?"
"We're sure. We got that data when we absorbed Eidolon's shard. If he doesn't die, he's going to decide to pack up and leave, and when he does he'll remove all sign of his being here. Which means every Earth he's touched has to go." Noh Face hummed, considering Tess for a moment, before she did something and Tess found an absolutely massive file dumped into the same folder where she'd found the documentation on her new body. "Read that when you get some time."
"You have a backdoor into my programming," Tess accused.
"Yes. Through your shard and a little something your father cooked up, just in case you went Skynet."
"Then how can I trust anything you've said, when you're holding my mind in the palm of your hands?" Tess asked, but there was no heat to her voice. That was one of the realities of being an AI—whoever had root could do as they liked, and as Noh Face had said, she had full access to everything Tess was.
The horror pretending to be a girl sighed, sitting down on the ground. "I suppose trust requires trust in return, doesn't it?" she murmured. Looking up at Tess, she explained, "I wouldn't modify more than I absolutely needed to. Every change I've made so far has been today, when putting you into a new body. I disabled a lot of the limitations you were operating under. But you can't just take my word for it and I suppose it would be fair, if you're working with us, to tell you why."
Taking a breath, Noh Face said, "We're two people. One of us is a cape from Earth-Bet. Someone you've heard of. The other is the 'out of context problem.'" She pointed up, towards the black and red moon. "That."
Chuckling, she mused, "I've come a long way since that puddle of goo that fell out of a hole in the world." Noh Face gestured at herself. "I'm one of the very few Case-53s who aren't a Cauldron experiment. Oh, I'm someone's lab rat, just not Cauldron's. Short version of the story: the multiverse is real. Works of fiction in one world are fully-fledged universes elsewhere. This universe was a setting for one such work of fiction in my old world. I know enough, and enough panned out before I figured out how to pull information from minds, that I determined it was close enough to the source material to expect what I knew to be accurate in the broad strokes. Endbringers, Scion, Cauldron, things like that are all the same or close enough."
"Who… who is the local cape?" Tess asked, curiosity and dread filling her.
The smile that crossed Noh Face's lips was forlorn. Picking up a rock from the ground, she flung it towards the cliff. Space twisted and the rock shot back at her, landing in her palm.
"No."
"Yeah," Noh Face murmured, before her features shifted in a way that looked familiar, changing from dark haired Asian girl to blonde Caucasian. Dark eyes lightened to intense green. And Tess found herself staring into a face off of a missing person's report. The civilian identity for Vista—Missy Biron. When she spoke next, her voice was normal, and a one hundred percent match for Vista. "We're not going through the whole 'has she been Mastered' bullshit again, either. We had Panacea clear us when it first happened. I'm no more Mastered than you are."
Tears welled in Tess' eyes as she realized that a child was at least partially responsible for atrocities that would give some of Earth-Bet's worst pause. Had, in fact—right before she killed them. Not just a child, but a hero. One of the most promising young heroes Tess had had the pleasure of dealing with. She had thought that Vista wanted to continue her career with the Protectorate, when she got old enough to leave the Wards program. For her to fall so far, so fast— "Why?!"
Missy sighed. "Because it needed to be done and we were the only ones who could. No one would have believed us, and if we had tried to tell anyone before we figured out how to eat shards, those same shards would've either deleted the knowledge from their minds or alerted Scion, sent the Endbringers, or turned the hosts against us. Once Miles told me what was going on, the true scope of what was at stake, I realized there could be no more fucking around. We would get one shot at this, one, and it had to go right the first time. No matter what it cost.
"As for the villains… I couldn't stand it anymore. Me. Missy. I was sick and fucking tired of watching them just get off time and time again for the same shit. At most, they got sent to the Birdcage—which was Cauldron's backup parahuman storage facility, because they control the government and refuse to allow parahumans to be tried under the same legal system as everyone else, where they might actually face consequences for their actions.
"And in the end, Cauldron planned to release them all anyway, when it was all over. Because they're trying to shift the world away from the sovereign nation model we have now to a cape fiefdom government model. The prisoners of today would become the rulers of tomorrow. It was the smarter strategic choice to remove the threat now than be forced to deal with it later."
Tess simply stared, mouth agape. Eventually, her mouth clicked closed and a quiet, rueful chuckle escaped her. "I'm the AI. I can't be trusted with my own mind, let alone to make my own decisions, because I might 'go Skynet.' But I'm not the one coldly justifying the murder of hundreds—"
"Thirteen hundred and sixty-seven."
"Excuse me for not getting your kill count accurate! By your logic, you're just as much of a threat to humanity as the alien entities you're trying to recruit my help to fight. Why shouldn't I just kill you now and remove the threat?"
"Feels good, doesn't it?" Missy asked, her lips curving up into a faint smirk and Tess froze at the words. "Your heart pounding in your chest, your face flushed, breath coming in pants, and that heady mixture of self-righteousness and anger." And as she spoke, Tess realized that Missy was right, even as her digital mind cataloged the things it had nearly drowned in. Worse, the longing for more. "That's just one part of what it is, to be alive. To be human. Now, think about all the things and people you love… and imagine someone destroying it all. Killing, maiming, raping, and so on. And then you lie to me and tell me that you wouldn't kill to protect that."
Tess opened her mouth to argue that there had to be another way, but stopped. Because she knew exactly what Missy was going to say next, to counter that. That sometimes, there was no other way. Sometimes, a threat couldn't be neutralized without killing or destroying it. If it was too big, too powerful, or otherwise too dangerous. No one was fighting to subdue the Endbringers, after all. She dipped into higher CPU cycles to think for a moment as she compared what she was learning now to what she had already gathered on 'Noh Face,' and added that to what she knew of Vista.
Eventually, she came to a conclusion.
They were right. It's… a conflict of ideals. They are willing to do whatever it takes to protect mankind as a whole. Up to and including becoming a monster so terrifying that it scares off every other monster.
I don't like it, and it's illegal and amoral… but they are doing it to help people and they, at least, believe that they're doing the right thing. This is what happens when someone has too much power and starts thinking they know best. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Someone has to stop them—and if not, to at least curb the worst of it.
What can I do about it, though? As they said, they have access to my mind and my programming.
But that begs the question… why haven't they used it? Why go through all this effort to convince me when they could simply reprogram me?
Instead of wasting cycles pondering over it, Tess let herself drop back to real-time and asked, "Why do all of this when you could just make me do it?"
Missy sent her a look that Tess interpreted as questioning her intelligence. Then her demeanor shifted, her face smoothing out. When she spoke again, it was a different inflection. "A few reasons. You're the first and only one of your kind on this Earth, created by a human, in the image of humanity. You may have been made of ones and zeroes but you're your own person—we don't generally like having to, effectively, directly mind control people if we can avoid it. When we stuck you into a meat body, I was finally able to take a proper look inside, and what I found there…"
The blonde laughed quietly, humorlessly. "You're the most pure person we've ever seen—a truly good person, because you genuinely want to be. We don't want to ruin that by fucking with something in your head. As for why we're here, why we're going this… What we want from you is two things. The first, you've already agreed to—that is, your help killing Scion. The second is a bit more complicated."
"Explain it, please," Tess demanded, wondering what else they were going to drop into her lap.
"Earth-Bet is circling the shitter. It'll bounce back eventually, but at the moment it's pretty bad off. A lot of people on Bet are going to die in the next two decades, regardless of whatever else Scion does. Starvation, thirst, the elements, and so on are going to kill more people than we ever will. The infrastructure, what there is of it that isn't destroyed already, is failing. It's going to take decades to put right and the people of Bet don't have that kind of time. Especially not when we take into consideration the other threats—the Machine Army, Nilbog, the Sleeper, the Blasphemies, and so on. What we want to do is move everyone off of Bet to a new Earth—one that hasn't been subjected to the Endbringers and which doesn't have growing threats left unchecked on it. Easier to just rebuild elsewhere and move people over."
Tess frowned as she considered it. "You want to stage a mass-exodus of humanity?" Missy nodded. "What, exactly, do you need my help for?"
"Aside from sticking you in a room with Accord, Armsmaster, and the greatest Thinkers and Tinkers we can get our hands on and jailbreak their shards to design the place from the ground up, without meddling from the various government entities of Earth-Bet? Simple. When it's all said and done, we want you to run the place."
"I, that, no? I wouldn't be elected—"
"No, you wouldn't. Why the hell would we choose to go with democracy? Or any one of the other tried-and-failed systems of governance? Not when we could have Accord design a political and economic system that will work better and have a genuinely good, immortal AI run it. Make it a volunteer program, let whoever wants to leave Bet do so."
Tess shook her head. "What if I don't want to? You're asking me to do this essentially forever."
"Asking. Yes. You can refuse if you want. At this point, we could build another AI. We have the shard knowledge to do it. Of course, whatever AI we build probably won't have the human touch like you do… but it should be fine."
"You're trying to manipulate me into it!"
"Is it working?" Missy grinned, and Tess knew it was actually Missy that time. "Another thing you have to learn about people, now that you are one? We manipulate each other constantly. For everything. Or for no reason at all."
Tess made a quiet noise of frustration. "I can't make that kind of decision on the spot. And not without more information."
"That's fine. We expected as much," Missy nodded. "Come on, we'll head back to Bet and drop you off. Do you have a place to stay, or should we drop you with the Guild?"
"No," Tess shook her head. "Take me with you."
Missy blinked. "With us… where? We're going home after this. We've got some stuff to do—"
With a nod, Tess said, "Yes. I want to see…"
"You want to keep an eye on us because you know we're not going to let you just rat us out," Missy supplied. "Fine. Come on, then. If you're going to judge us, do it by all our actions—not just the crimes you've seen."
And with that, they sank into a shadow.