"I don't think your usual methods are going to work," I said. "Mama Mathers can see through the eyes of all of her minions, meaning that she's almost like the leader of a hive mind."
Using illusion to pretend to be one of the crowd wouldn't work if she couldn't see through the eyes of one of her minions. Could she see through the eyes of all of them at once, or one at a time? It made a profound difference in the strategy for dealing with her.
"You're saying that we should simply smash our way inside and kill her?"
Loki seemed skeptical and disapproving. That had been his brother's favorite method of dealing with problems, and he'd hoped I'd be open to other methods.
When you had a big hammer, though, everything seemed like a nail.
"Yeah, and the faster the better. She's claimed that people all over the city will commit suicide. I think she wants me to turn myself in."
"So why don't you?" he asked.
"What?"
"Turn yourself in. Pretend to give her what she wants. As fast as you are, she can probably send out the command to kill themselves faster than you can kill her, especially since she already knows you are coming.'
"But…"
"Do you really think she can overcome you?" Loki asked. "You can read minds. It's how you always know where I'm at, right?"
"Yes."
"So even if she takes over all of your other senses, you'll still have that. If worse comes to worse, you can just destroy everyone in the area."
"Well, I was hoping to save people," I said.
"Kill a few now to save more later," he said. He looked at me closely as I winced. "I see you've already made a similar decision."
"Yeah. It's not something I want to have to do again."
"Being a leader carries with it a heavy burden," he said. "Sometimes you have to make choices you do not want to make."
"The good of the many," I said.
"Or the good of yourself," he said with a shrug. "It depends on what kind of leader you want to be."
"I'm not a leader," I said.
"You certainly led those men," he said.
"I led thirty men for fifteen minutes. They were hardly an army, and they wouldn't even have come if you hadn't talked them into it."
"They wanted to come," he said. "All they needed was a little push in the right direction."
"How to make friends and influence people by Loki Odinson," I said wryly.
"Not Odinson," he said sharply.
"He raised you, right?" I said. "Taught you to be an Asgardian?"
"I'm not sure why he bothered," he said sullenly. "If he's going to deny my birthright."
"Being king?" I asked. "Maybe he thinks you aren't ready. Isn't he supposed to be the god of wisdom or something?"
He stared at me.
"So, what happens if his wisdom tells him that you are worthy?" I asked.
"I've done everything I could," he protested. "But he was never proud of me."
"Maybe he's one of those dads who love you, but don't show it. He can't help who he is, any more than you can help who you are."
"Wise words from a fifteen-year-old," he said dryly.
"Hey, I'm trying to kill less people, and it's actually working!"
"I literally saw you kill fifty thousand Jotuns a few hours ago," he said.
"Jotuns don't count," I said. "They were all dicks."
He looked as though he wanted to say something, but he closed his mouth. I didn't bother to look inside his head.
We were flying over the city, and I saw that her minions were stabbing and hitting each other; apparently that was more efficient than trying to kill themselves.
"Can you make my voice louder?" I asked.
He nodded.
"STOP!" I said. "I WILL GIVE MYSELF OVER TO MAMA MATHERS!"
The crowd stopped and looked up at me, almost in unison.
"If you try to attack us, we will all kill ourselves," an eleven-year-old girl shouted. I had to look to see that she wasn't Vista.
"Come down, and make yourself presentable," a man said.
I nodded, and I slowly floated down toward them.
Loki had made himself invisible the moment we'd started flying. Apparently, he was afraid that they'd try to hit us both with powers he might not be immune to.
I dropped to the ground and was immediately swarmed by the others. Loki remained invisible.
I'd been afraid he might try to blend into the crowd, but he was smarter than that, and he was fast enough to be able to keep himself from being touched by anyone as they swarmed toward me.
Someone produced brute restraints.
I could inventory those in a moment, so I wasn't worried. At my current strength level, I could possibly break through these, although I wasn't sure.
At the very worse, when I turned into a wolf, I'd no longer have hands, which would make it easier to pull out of them.
"These are tinkertech," a woman whispered in my ear. "They shrink when you do."
Well, I had other methods.
They pushed me into a car, and I sensed Loki climbing onto the roof invisibly. I was his only ride home, and he wasn't going to lose track of me.
He seemed to enjoy riding on the roof of the car as we sped through the city. People had been ordered to shelter in place, and they mostly were, because Mama Mathers people were rampaging through the downtown area.
This meant that the rioters had the streets to themselves.
I was driven to the outskirts of town.
Stepping out of the car, I saw four hundred people struggling to carry a ship chain; the kind that was used to anchor ships.
It was 9/16th of an inch thick and likely weighed twenty-five tons. That was well over the weight I could inventory. Had the PRT thinkers figured out my weight limit, or had I let it slip to someone?
They were attaching the chain to my cuffs.
I still wasn't worried; I could planeshift with whatever I could carry, and with my recent increases I could easily carry that.
They had no way of knowing that, of course. I'd only been able to lift eight tons at one point, and she was working with old information.
"If I die, they will all kill themselves," I heard a woman's voice say. "Every one of my children in the city."
I turned my head, and there she was.
Mama Mathers was a thin woman, almost emaciated. She had long hair that was shot with silver, more a sign of over-bleaching than age. She was only in her thirties.
As she approached, I could feel her in my head, trying to get a grasp of my senses. She was struggling, and so when she got close enough, I read what she was expecting to see through my senses, and I used my own illusion powers to give it to her.
"You will make an excellent addition to the family," she said, her hand touching my neck. She intended to give me terrible pain, and so I gave her the illusion of the feedback such pain normally gave her.
"You'll be my lunch," I said. I made my knees tremble, and I created a small grimace on my face.
Even as I did so, I created a small puff of smoke around my chains. It was the smallest puff I could create, but it came out of the seams. I could hear the click as the internal mechanisms to the device melted.
"Foolish child," she said, smiling. "Everyone fights at first, but in the end, they all become my children."
"Remove your order," I said. I reinforced the order telepathically.
She winced, but said, "I think not, child. I'm not a fool."
"You attacked my city," I said. "You are definitely a fool."
Grimacing, she stepped forward and tried to light all the pain sensors in my body at once. She'd done this to innumerable people in the past, and it had always worked, even against brutes.
I let her think it was working, letting my knees buckle.
"I won't follow you," I said. "Remove your order."
"I won't," she said. "You will obey."
"Do it," I said.
She grimaced, and looked confused, but I could feel her will crumble. She reversed the order to the five thousand people she had managed to interact with over the past two weeks.
Well, that was good to know.
"You must…" she said, but she seemed confused.
She tried to push pain into me, but I simply fed what she had tried to send to me back to her. I added other tortures that she'd commonly used, and then I melted my chains with smoke.
Her people were surging toward us, and I grinned.
"I am death," I said. "The destroyer of worlds."
I created an image of myself as a god like figure, like the Simurgh combined with a giant from Paradis Island, mixed with one of the zombies.
I forced Mama to send that vision to all of her people.
"I am the walker between worlds, the death that comes from the darkness. I have turned one world into a wasteland, and I will turn a wasteland into paradise. I have destroyed armies in the millions! I am the death of hope, and the light at the end of the tunnel!"
With each statement, I shoved more and more images into her mind, even as I forced her to keep torturing herself. I showed her Silent Hill, and I showed her the Harvester army in all its millions.
There were other capes around me, who wanted to try to save Mama, but her own powers were assaulting all of them. The rest of the crowd was on the ground as well.
I showed her space as I saw it, and using telepathy, I pulled everyone's image of God from around me, and I shaped it into the most powerful amalgamation I could. I added every bit of awe I could remember having in my life, and stole the best feelings of awe from everyone around me, feeding it all together and pushing it into her mind.
Smoke appeared around my hands, and the cuffs dropped off, unnoticed by everyone around me who were on the ground. I barely noticed; I was focused on Mama Mathers.
I ripped into her mind, and then when it was in tatters, I leaned forward and whispered in her ear.
"You are not worthy of Paradise," I said.
Then I ripped her head off.
Looking around, I saw that everyone was on the ground, including Loki. What had happened to him?
ARCANE EYE HAS BEEN UPGRADED TO A NEW POWER!
MIND'S EYE!
YOU CAN TAG ANYONE WHO CAN SEE OR HEAR YOU AND ONCE TAGGED, USE THEM AS AN ARCANE EYE! YOU MAY STILL USE ARCANE EYES. YOU MAY USE THE FULL SENSES OF ANYONE YOU HAVE TAGGED ALTHOUGH ARCANE EYES ARE STILL LIMITED TO SIGHT. YOU MAY TAG ANY NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS, BUT YOU MAY ONLY USE UP TO TEN AT A TIME.
+2 LEVELS TO ARCANE EYE.
YOU MAY NOW CREATE ANY COMBINATION OF UP TO TEN ARCANE EYES AND MIND'S EYES WITHIN A FIVE THOUSAND FOOT RADIUS.
YOU MAY ALSO COMMUNICATE WITH ANYONE YOU HAVE TAGGED AS LONG AS THEY ARE WITHIN RANGE AND YOU ARE USING THEIR SENSES.
That was…pretty cool actually. It would be a lot easier to protect people if I could check on them.
"Why is everyone on the ground?" I asked.
"She sent it to everybody, you bloody quim," Loki grunted. His mind was surprisingly raw. The images Mama had sent me hadn't seemed that horrifying; just the sensation of being on fire and being trapped in small spaces, drowning in dirt and having your limbs ripped off. Some of the visual images had been pretty horrific, I guess.
Actually, I was having trouble remembering all of them. I must have been too distracted to pay much attention.
"What? I only meant for her to send it to the Fallen," I said.
"She considered everyone her people," Loki said. He grimaced.
Oh.
He'd seen and heard her, and so he'd experienced at least some of it. He hadn't touched her, so he hadn't gotten the full effect, but five thousand people…probably weren't very happy with me.
"You should have just killed her once she rescinded the order," Loki said, rising slowly to his feet.
None of the others were rising. They all seemed too traumatized to move.
"Maybe I went a little overboard?" I said sheepishly.
"You'd traumatize a troll," Loki said. His tone wasn't friendly. "Weak humans probably can't tolerate things like this."
He hadn't enjoyed the experience, but he hadn't been touched by Mama, and so he'd been spared the full effect.
"She was already doing that to them," I said.
"Not all at once!" Loki said. "She kept throwing more and more at you; I doubt most people required a tenth of what you were feeding back to her to follow her."
I grimaced.
"Oops?"
Another screen popped up.
MENTAL ILLUSIONS HAVE GAINED +2 LEVELS!
YOU CAN NOW AFFECT SIXTEEN PEOPLE WITHIN A 160 FOOT RADIUS!
All it had taken was traumatizing five thousand people.
"I'll make it up to them," I said.
"How?" Loki asked.
"Free healing?" I asked. "A contribution toward their kid's college fund?"
I walked over to one of her capes still laying on the ground, and I stomped him in the head. I felt it break under my foot.
Reaching down, I flicked a little brain matter off my foot.
+1 TO FIRE CONTROL!
YOU CAN NOW CREATE AND CONTROL FIRE IN A SIXTEEN MILE RADIUS.
Eh.
It didn't really do enough damage to stop the people I really wanted to stop, and it was mostly good for destroying unpowered mooks. I was hoping to get something better.
"I thought you were trying to stop killing?" Loki asked. He was regaining his aplomb at a rapid pace.
"It's a work in progress," I said. "Nobody can completely change overnight."
I felt a hand on my pant leg.
"Mistress Harvest," the woman said. "Command me."
What?
People were rising around me, and as they stared at me, I could feel connections being made. They could see me, and I was tagging all of them, whether I wanted to or not.
I could see myself through ten sets of eyes at once, and that view kept shifting until I took control of it.
"Make our world paradise!" the woman said. "Save us from the Endbringers and the monsters."
"You were a little too successful in making yourself seem like a god," Loki said dryly.
It had affected even him, if just for a moment, and that was why he was so peeved with me.
I'd just wanted to make Mama Mathers feel that she'd been abandoned by her god before killing her, giving her back a little of what she'd been giving to other people for years.
"Mama Mathers did it!" I shouted to everyone. "It totally wasn't my fault!"
Grabbing Loki, I inventoried him and I blinked away.
We reappeared on top of the remains of Medhall. They still hadn't repaired the hole left from the explosion I'd made in their building, and the slide Kaiser had made was in the process of being dismantled.
Loki reappeared by my side.
"I wish you would ask, or at least warn me before you keep doing that," he said, straightening his clothing.
"What am I going to do?" I asked. It was hard to keep the panic out of my voice. "I can't lead a cult! That's what villains do!"
"I'm sure you'd make a perfectly good cult leader," he said. "Being a sociopath is actually a perk in that industry, the same as being a politician or a business leader."
"How do you know about sociopaths?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"Allspeak translates my words for me. The mind healers probably have a better understanding of it than humans do."
He'd been accused of being a sociopath by the few peers educated enough to understand the term, but the Mind Healers had told him he wasn't.
The fact that it had hurt his feelings before he'd learned to push them down probably meant he wasn't one? I hadn't read any books on psychology yet, so I couldn't be sure.
"I'm not a sociopath," I said. "My power just…protects me from feeling too bad about things."
I was already feeling a little better. I just needed to find a way to avoid being seen by too many of the cultists, and maybe the memory of what I'd done would fade, and the PRT wouldn't accuse me of being a master.
They were already irritating enough without even more freaking out.
The fact that I could still feel the people who'd seen me bothered me, but I could deal with it. I'd just have to find a way to become invisible.
Loki was waving and smiling congenially at something below.
I looked over the edge, and there was a live news crew with cameras pointed at me.
Lights began to appear in my mental landscape all over the city. A hundred, and then a thousand, and then ten thousand.
How many viewers did WGN News have anyway?
I ducked out of the way.
"Shit," I said.
"So…?" Loki prompted.
"I can sense and use some of my powers through anyone who sees me, and communicate with them."
"And the problem is?"
"I was just seen by 10,000 people."
"That seems useful," he said.
"It's the kind of thing that the authorities hate!" I said.
"And you care why? Aren't they already trying to kill you?"
"Well, they were semi-friendly before. They let me take some of their members on fun trips to other worlds."
"Really?" he said skeptically. "I don't think many people share your perception of what's fun."
"Well, they weren't complete assholes before. Now they're going to be asshats about this; I just know they will."
Loki didn't understand, but then he didn't know the PRT. They had graduated levels of being asses, and I was sure that this was just going to make it worse.
Crap.
"It's like we're Simurgh victims," Jeremy said, looking at his hands. "Everybody looks at us like we're going to explode any minute."
He still wasn't sure about this group therapy thing, but at least the other ten members of the group seemed to understand where he was coming from.
"Yeah," Joe said.
He was a muscular black man, which must have been hard in a city like Brockton Bay before the gangs had been eliminated.
"It's like they think we're all Hebert worshippers or something."
There were some crazies who were, but most people accepted the newscast from Taylor Hebert and her companion, the hero Loki that the event had been the result of a weird interaction between her immunity to being mastered and Mama Mather's continued attempts to master her.
Mathers had started believing Hebert was a god, and she'd pushed that belief on all her followers.
Loki had explained that to the interviewers quite eloquently.
Jeremy looked around.
"I'm grateful to Hebert, though," he said. "Mama Mathers never would have let us go. She'd have made us do things that were even worse than what we did."
Everyone winced.
All of them had been forced to do things they hadn't wanted to do; some of them had been horrifically traumatized to realize that they'd killed their mothers, their wives, their husbands.
If it hadn't been for Hebert healing them, many of them would have permanent injuries from what they'd been forced to do to themselves.
"My wife won't take me back," Joe said. His fists clenched. "No matter how much I try to explain that it wasn't me."
Everyone stared at the ground.
What Joe had said was a lie.
As much as they liked to claim to have been mastered, they all knew that they'd done what they'd done of their own free will. Each one of them would bear the guilt of what they'd done for the rest of their lives.
They'd been tortured, true, the kind of torture that would have been inconceivable to a normal person. Jeremy had known that he'd have done anything to make the pain go away, even if it meant that he'd have to smash his face into brick, because that pain didn't even compare to the greater pain that Mama Mathers would give.
"I didn't even know it was her," Joe continued. "Not until after I'd done it."
That's what Mama did. She confused the senses, and the first atrocity was generally done by making the victim look like someone else.
The horror of that, and the realization that you'd already done the unthinkable had made the slide into doing what she wanted so much easier.
It was always easier to compromise after the first time.
The fire and being buried alive only pushed you into doing it much more quickly.
"Maybe we should just move," Jeremy said gloomily. "There's no way anybody is ever going to trust us again."
He looked around the room at the expressions on everyone's' faces. They all looked downcast, beaten and defeated.
"Brockton Bay is a shithole anyway," he said.
"It won't matter," Jennifer said. "The PRT puts you on a list. Try to get a new job, and it follows you wherever you go."
"It's not right," Jeremy said. He grimaced. "Just because some cape decides that she wants to throw her weight around, why should we have to suffer?"
His mind provided the answer.
Because he was weak.
No one else seemed to have an answer, and the session ended on a down note.
"Hey," Joe said as they were walking out of the building. "You're out of a job, right?"
Almost all of them were. Worse, one of the first things Mama Mathers had done was have them empty out their bank accounts and turn the money over to the Fallen.
At least Joe hadn't had much money to start with. Mama had drained the bank accounts of some people who'd had a lot more.
"Yeah."
"Well, there's this new charity," Joe said. "It's supposed to bring the Bay back to where it used to be. They're idiots of course; that ship has sailed. They're hiring though, and I figured we might as well take their money while they still have any."
"What kinds of stuff do they want us to do?"
"General contracting, unskilled labor…it sounds like they want to rebuild the city."
"I could do that," Jeremy said, musing. He'd been struggling even before Mama Mathers, and since then he'd been fired, probably because he'd broken his boss's arm. "Do you think they'll hire…us?"
"They say they want to give people second chances," Joe said. "Depending on whether they're sincere. How they'll know, I don't know. Maybe they've got a thinker doing the vetting."
"Yeah," Jeremy said. "Like some pissant little charity could afford a thinker."
"You want to go?" Joe asked. "Hiring is tomorrow."
"Yeah," Jeremy said. "That'll be…"
He stopped.
There were a group of twenty people standing outside, and all of them had knives and chains.
"We heard about your little get together," one of the men said. In previous years Jeremy would have assumed that he was a member of the Empire, but all of the Empire was gone.
"Plotting what new shit you're going to pull, you and your little cult?"
Everyone in the group looked angry. There was violence in the air. Jeremy had been in bar fights; usually those were preceded by a lot of posturing. These people had weapons already in hand.
Jeremy looked around.
The rest of the group had already left, and twenty to three was terrible odds even if they hadn't been unarmed and faced men with weapons.
It was just him, Joe and the girl.
They didn't start with the knives. They started with the bats. Jeremy felt a pain in his ribs and he suddenly couldn't breathe. As he fell to the ground, people started to kick him and beat him.
A young girl's voice whispered in his ear.
"Are you ready to be strong?"
Yes.
A moment later, everything changed. He was suddenly one with the universe, and he instinctively knew everything that was going to happen.
All he had to do was shift positions just slightly to the left, and the man who was planning to stomp him in the shoulder would hit pavement.
A move to the right, and two men would stumble into each other, falling in each direction, and leaving room for him to lunge forward, roll and rise to his feet.
Joe and Jennifer were already on their feet; their eyes were glowing yellow, and they were already lunging into the fight.
When you knew what everyone around you was going to do, fighting was surprisingly easy.
A twist of the wrist, and a man drops a baseball bat. Reach out with a foot, and a small kick, and the bat was flying back up and it was in your hand.
Once the bat was in your hand, you started hurting people.
It was all over in less than a minute.
The world slowed to a crawl around him, and he looked around.
What in the hell had just happened? There were bodies everywhere. No one was dead, but with broken ribs and arms, none of them were likely to be attacking anyway.
"I am with you," the girl's voice whispered in his ear, and then it faded away.
Hebert.
It had to be.
Maybe the Hebert cult was actually onto something.
"We'd better call the cops."
"It's the fifth case in under a week," Tagg said. "How is she doing it?"
"We know she doesn't get exact copies of the powers of the capes she defeats," Armsmaster said. "Her copy is usually weaker, but grows with time. She's admitted as much."
"So, she can grant powers to people?" Tagg asked incredulously. "That seems like a major upgrade to what Mathers had."
"There's probably a range limit," Armsmaster said. "I believe that there was a member of the fallen who could grant combat precognition to her allies, as long as she could sense them."
"And Hebert can sense anyone who has been compromised by her," Tagg said. "Because she has a variation of Mather's power."
"Yes," Armsmaster said.
"She's affected people who never saw her in person," Tagg said. "Who only saw the live broadcast of her interview."
"That would include you, sir," Vista said helpfully. After several days in quarantine she seemed to take particular pleasure in needling him.
"Which is the only reason you're in this meeting at all," Tagg said irritably. "If she can use the senses of people she's interacted with, then operational security has gone out the window. Even if I stepped down, all she has to do is keep popping in for a visit with whoever replaces me."
"I'd imagine that this would lead the rest of the organization to keep any critical information from the Brockton Bay PRT," Armsmaster said.
Tagg grimaced.
That was going to handicap him in his ability to work with other branches. He was planning to at least try to get information the larger organization didn't care if Hebert had, but it was already an uphill battle.
"I'll deal with it," he said shortly. "We are mostly here to debrief Vista about her experiences in the other Earth and the alien city."
"I got good video this time!" Vista said.
"It was the second alien invasion Hebert has been involved in," Tagg said. "Should we be worried?"
"There are theoretically an infinite number of other universes," Armsmaster said. "And its known that Hebert is attracted to conflict."
"More opportunities to gain powers," Tagg said.
Tagg had gone over the footage over and over again, and he knew Armsmaster had done the same.
"Do you think that the incident in Asgard was an illusion?" he asked. "Powers don't work at a distance farther than the moon."
"It is possible that the existence of the Nexus enabled Vista's powers to work at a distance far beyond normal. After all, theoretically it would work by folding space so that the distance between two points was negligible."
"All right," Tagg said. "But the similarity between their culture and that of the Norse is hard to explain. In their world it could be explained that the Norse took their cues from the aliens, but their culture seemed similar to OUR Norse."
He'd had a team going over everything in Vista's video with a fine-toothed comb; everything from architecture, to dress to speech patterns.
Vista had at least asked her dinner companions a large number of questions about their culture.
"Vista," he said. "About the Meade…"
"I didn't know it was alcoholic!" Vista said. "It just tasted sweet!"
"I've already spoken t her about the dangers of drinking unknown drinks from alien species," Armsmaster said.
"Yeah…bacteria, viruses, fungi, weird alien spores, chemical reactions and allergies."
"Did you speak to her about alcohol?"
Armsmaster frowned, then shook his head.
"I'd say that Harvest should have left you with a hangover, but it was possible that you might have died of alcohol poisoning, so she might not have had a choice."
"I didn't know," Vista said.
The telephone on the desk rang, and Tagg frowned. He was in a meeting, and he wouldn't have been interrupted unless it was important.
At least land lines were harder to intercept than cell phones.
Picking up the phone, he listened, and then he scowled.
"I'll be right down," he said. Hanging up the telephone, he looked at the two heroes.
"Apparently Loki has come to the PRT to register as an independent hero."
Vista frowned.
"He's the god of mischief, and he tried to take over the planet!"
Tagg remembered the video of the war quite well, as well as the pile of alien bodies Harvest had left in central park.
"He hasn't done anything here," he said. "He's already been on television claiming to be a hero who helped take down Mama Mathers."
Vista smirked.
"Taylor's had him entertaining children in the docks while she heals people."
Her popularity had soared since she'd been with Loki. He was running interference with her with the news, and it was no longer as easy to push a narrative against her without pushback.
Tagg had never understood the point of trying to paint her in a bad light. As far as he was concerned, the more connections she had with the human world, the easier she would be to control.
It was almost like upper management had decided to push her off the world entirely. While Tagg could understand the urge, the girl had gotten rid of the Simurgh. Even if it was only temporary, she'd already saved one city. Each time the Simurgh stayed missing was another city saved, more time for the world to recover.
Hebert should have been lauded as a hero instead of the smear job the Protectorate was doing against her.
She'd committed terrible crimes, but now that she'd fulfilled her vengeance, she'd stopped mass murdering, humans at least. She could be of enormous use against the Endbringers.
Give her a pardon and a mansion in Brockton Bay, and she'd have an investment in making things better. She listened to her friends, so make sure she had a lot of friends, and that the friends were invested in getting her to help instead of hurt.
He'd pushed this plan with the rest of the Protectorate, but they'd ignored her in favor of constantly antagonizing her.
"Well, let's go see what he wants," he said. "You can both come with me."
Tagg rose to his feet and the others followed.
"I've got my armor set to a slight delay in both vision and hearing," Armsmaster said. "Our thinkers believe it would require a live broadcast for her to affect someone."
He'd release the delay if he was in major combat, Tagg knew, but not until then. The delay was less than most humans could perceive, but hopefully it would be enough.
"When will we have the equipment to put a delay on the visors and earpieces of the PRT?" Tagg asked as they headed for the elevator.
He'd have gotten some put into glasses and an earpiece if he hadn't already been compromised. Although he hadn't said it to anyone, he fully expected to be fired soon and replaced by someone who was not a conduit to every secret the PRT had.
"Next week at the earliest," Armsmaster said. "The system isn't tinkertech, but mass production takes time to ramp up."
"All right. See that it gets done."
The elevator doors opened, and there was Loki, standing there with a horned helmet in full regalia.
"I was asked to tell you that I have never committed random van murder," Loki said pleasantly to the receptionist. He leaned forward, "Personally I can understand your doubt. What teenaged American girl wouldn't engage in random van murder if she had the chance?"
George looked as though he wanted to beat his head into the counter.
Maybe he wasn't suited to be a receptionist. Back in Marquis day, receptionists had to deal with a lot more than a little needling.
"Mr….Odinsson?" Tagg said. "If you'll follow me?"
Loki was taller than he'd looked in the news. The fact that he had those ridiculous horns probably made him look taller. He didn't have lifts in his shoes, though.
Vista didn't want to admit him as a hero.
The other Asgardians hadn't had anything good to say about him. Worse, he'd tried to invade America.
Unfortunately, he hadn't committed any crimes on Earth Bet, and they didn't even have video of him committing any crimes other than trying to steal a gem from Taylor Hebert.
As they stepped into a conference room, Tagg said, "I'm sure you understand our reluctance to simply take you at your word."
"My people had a poor impression of me," Loki said. He sniffed delicately. "They were brutes who only understood violence."
"You tried to invade America," Tagg said. "Why should we accept you as a hero?"
"I didn't try to invade this America," Loki said. He looked around and sniffed. "At least the Midgardians back in my home universe had a sense of style."
For the first time in a while Tagg was reminded of the status of the PRT. Windows were being replaced with a bulletproof plastic three times as thick and ten times as strong as steel; it was the product of some tinker in Detroit. He could only produce so much at a time, and it was expensive.
"We've had some problems of late," Tagg said. "Many of which can be laid at the feat of your companion."
"Lady Hebert?" Loki smirked. "I'm surprised that you continue to be antagonistic toward her when she hands all of your goals on a silver platter."
"What?"
"Your city was overrun by gangs," he said. "Attacked for the second time by the Slaughterhouse Nine and again by the Fallen. Where are all your enemies now?"
"Dead," Tagg said bluntly. "But it's like calling for bigger monkeys to deal with your small monkey problem. Those monkeys become a problem and then you have to get bigger monkeys. Eventually you are left with a single monkey no one can deal with."
"I've always been in favor of leaving monkeys in my enemies' rooms," Loki said. "At least when I was a child."
He frowned.
"They always seemed to resent that."
Tagg could see why the god of Mischief got along well with Harvest.
"Why should we allow you to sign on as a hero?"
"Because I'll help you manage Lady Hebert," Loki said. He smiled. "She's not that difficult if you know what motivates her."
"And what's that?"
"She wants to be a hero," Loki said. "To have a family, people who love her. It's what anyone wants, I guess. A place in the world where people admire her."
It almost sounded as though Loki was talking about himself. There was a wistful look in his expression as he spoke.
"You'd betray her like that?"
"I'm not betraying her," Loki said. "I'm helping her attain her goals. Fighting the authorities when she will need their help to rebuild the city is just going to make her goals harder to attain."
"She was the one who caused half the damage to the city!" Tagg said.
"Truthfully, I'm not sure she's all that invested in it. I think it's a gift to appease her father so he will be less angry about the death and destruction she has caused."
Hebert's father was dead. Although cape powers really were bullshit, dead was dead. Otherwise Hero would still be around, and so would thousands of other capes. Hebert was crazy if she thought she'd be able to resurrect him.
Of course, everyone thought she was crazy anyway.
"And what do you get out of the deal?"
Loki shrugged.
"Maybe I get a planet of my own to rule somewhere. Maybe my father accepts me with open arms. Maybe I really will become a hero. I'm not sure what profit I will gain, but I do know that a rising tide lifts all boats and I intend to ride the wave rather than be drowned by it."
Tagg thought for a moment, then sighed.
"What would you like your hero name to be?"
"Is there room on the form for the Great and Magnificent Loki, god of mischief, lord of all he surveys and Prince of Asgard?"
"No."
"Loki is fine, then."
Looking down at the form, Tagg realized that this was going to be a long, unpleasant session.
Loki was smirking.
"You can't find any place better than this?" Loki asked.
My old firehouse hadn't been destroyed by some miracle, and I was now in the process of improving it. Loki, as it turned out, was an entitled little prick.
He'd probably detect a pea under thirty mattresses.
"I'm technically a fugitive with a price on my head," I said. "Even if I wasn't, hotel rooms require a credit card and driver's licenses, and I'm only fifteen."
"So, build a palace on the empty earth," he said.
"I can't detect my people from there," I said. "And there have been some incidents."
I'd intervened in some cases, but that had caused more trouble than it was worth. I could detect fear from them, probably an extension of my empathy power, and I'd ended up just lending them combat precognition and letting them deal with it themselves.
Leaving the city or the universe cut me off from them, and there had been incidents.
"I'm sure I could rent a suitable place to live," he said.
"You don't have ID any more than I do," I said. "You are literally an illegal alien. You don't even exist on this world."
"A bag of gold solves all problems," he said. "And it would be simple enough for you to use mind control and illusions to acquire legitimate identity papers."
"I don't have a mailing address," I said. "And if I did, I wouldn't want anyone to know where it was, because someone would probably bomb it."
"So, what are you going to do to make this place worthy?"
"I barely need to sleep," I said. "I don't need to eat. Frankly, I wouldn't bother with any of this if I hadn't agreed to play host to you."
"I am a prince of Asgard. You expect me to live in a hovel?"
"Didn't your father send Thor down to Earth to live as a mortal for a time?"
He'd taken delight in telling me about the time that his father had humiliated his brother.
"Yes," he said slowly.
"At least he left you with your powers," I said. "Suck it up, buttercup."
"Perhaps a cleaning?" he said slowly.
I gestured, and a mop began moving around the room. I had some cleaning products in the bathroom, and I began cleaning as well as I could.
He coughed delicately, even though he'd told me that he could survive in the vacuum of space.
He was right about one thing.
I needed to get a couple of beds, at least, and my last bed was floating around in Harvester space.
"You keep saying you wish to restore this city," he said slyly. "Isn't contributing to the economy one way to do just that?"
I hesitated, then said, "Fine. Whatever."
I'd thought about just stealing furniture from zombie world; the people there likely didn't need it anymore. I wouldn't have gotten anything with blood on it, of course.
However, the businesses in the Bay did need some help, and more business meant more people hired.
"All right, we're going shopping," I said. "But you're in charge of disguising us, and no tricks from you like making me look like a balding fat woman."
"Would I do that?" he asked, smiling slightly.
"You know, I haven't used an illusion to crack someone's mind in a couple of days," I said. "I might be getting a little rusty."
"I'll be good," he said, lifting his hands hastily.
"What should we get?" I asked, looking around.
"Bedding," he said. "Wall decorations that don't make this place look like a prison. Fine carpets. Maybe some braziers and incense."
"You want this place to look like an Arabian harem?" I asked. "Fine. I'm not buying any goats, though."
"Goa…" he scowled.
I grinned at him.
"Let's go."
Inventorying him, I blinked to an area behind the Lord's Market.
Loki appeared beside me, and he immediately cloaked us in the guise of a wealthy older couple, the kind of people who would have money to spend without being suspicious about it.
As we turned the corner, he stared at the stalls.
"This is where you take us? I expected somewhere nice."
"That's the Boardwalk," I said. "The shops there are all insured, and the people running the stores don't need that much help. These people do."
We walked around the market, Loki sneering at the merchandise. The Lord's Market was essentially a combination of a flea market and a garage sale.
"None of this is remotely…" he began, and then his eye caught a rug in a stall nearby.
"Hmm," he said. "This has promise."
"It's from the boardwalk," I said. "Overstock. I can get it here for ten to twenty percent of the price."
"Cheap," he said.
"I've got sixteen or seventeen million dollars," I said. "But I grew up poor. You don't waste money."
I would be happy to help somebody out, but paying a high price for something I could get cheaper bothered me.
Even when I got six hundred pounds of gold as a reward for babysitting Loki, I doubted that I'd go on a spending spree. I had to provide for my Dad in his old age, after all.
Also, I need to provide for a community on Cannibal Earth, and I couldn't just scavenge everything. It would have probably been stupid to loot zombie earth anyway; I doubted that a couch would fit in the decontamination chamber.
"I'd like to see the rug," I said, stepping up to the owner. He'd gotten it as part of a lot, paying ten percent of the normal price.
He was struggling, having lost his house in the bombings. He was living out of a warehouse with his wife and children.
When he asked for a price three times what he'd bought it for, I didn't try to bargain him down. Instead, I pointed at a pile of hoodies he'd gotten from a garage sale. They were my size, or at least close enough.
"I'll take all of those too," I said.
We weren't going to get a bed or mattress here; I'd have to go to a real store for that. Did they have bed stores? Were mattresses separate, or included?
I couldn't ask anyone while looking like I was a middle-aged woman because most adults probably knew these things. I couldn't remember a time when I didn't have my bed.
We wandered around for a little longer.
"We won't find anything here," Loki said. "Perhaps Italy-Venice maybe, Milan?"
"I thought we were here to stimulate the economy of the Bay?"
Looking around, he shrugged.
"It's hopeless. These people will never have anything. It's probably better to burn the place down and start from scratch."
He must have seen the look on my face, because he hurried to explain.
"Not the people…I'm sure they're perfectly fine examples of humanity."
His eyes strayed to a teenage boy walking by in a mohawk and with an admirable number of piercings.
His statement, unfortunately wasn't a compliment.
My head snapped around as Intuitive Empathy told me that capes were coming into range.
"Capes," I said.
I had him pick the rug up and put it on his shoulder; as we turned the corner, I inventoried it.
We reemerged, and I saw two men standing excitedly in front of a stand.
"They don't make these anymore!" the first man said. "You can't even buy these… they buried most of these in a landfill in New Mexico back in the early eighties."
"You don't think there's a reason for that?" the second man said. "They say it's one of the worst video games ever made!"
"Worse than Custer's Revenge?"
"Well, no. That was…bad."
A quick glance through their minds showed that these men were Uber and Leet. They had both almost died when Shatterbird had screamed, and building a way to heal themselves when he had been almost blind and dying had frightened Leet.
Ultimately, Leet wasn't a brave man. His partner Uber was loyal, but didn't understand the depths of Leet's cowardice.
Leet had been afraid, which is why he'd never seriously even tried to be a hero or villain. The jokes weren't just because his inventions were unstable; it was because he himself had never aspired to be anything more than he was.
However, the Slaughterhouse attack had forced him to confront death, and in a way, it had freed him.
He'd faced his greatest fear and he'd survived.
I could use him.
"Hello boys," I said, putting my hand on both their shoulders and leaning in between them.
Although I was wearing a physical illusion of a woman in her late middle ages, I projected a mental illusion of me as myself.
They both stiffened.
"We…uh…haven't been doing any crimes lately," Leet stammered.
"I know," I said. "I really appreciate your trying to fix the plumbing."
"How did you know who we were?" Leet asked.
I projected an image to the shopkeeper that we were having a banal conversation about games.
"I've got powers," I said. "A lot of powers. I've got a business proposition for the both of you."
"Does it involve your beating us to a pulp and taking our powers?"
"It does," I said. "But I can make it so it doesn't hurt, and I can heal you so that you never even notice."
"How much?" Leet asked suspiciously.
"Fifty thousand dollars each," I said. "And my protection."
"What?"
"Anybody who sees me becomes one of my people," I said. "And I protect my people."
"You're here in the middle of a pretty big crowd," Uber said. "All of these people are your people?"
"Unless they are criminals," I said. "I don't like criminals much."
"I tried to take over the Earth recently," Loki said helpfully, leaning forward. "But I was never convicted."
I shot a glare at him.
"Like I said, I don't like criminals much. People who hurt other people, especially people I care about…well, I get creative."
"People like to complain about that Grand Theft Auto thing, but those weren't even real prostitutes. They were just hard light projections. At least we never made Asians fall from the sky."
"I tried to tell her that was racist," Loki said. "That she should treat all people equally."
"Like make everybody fall from the sky?" Uber asked.
"Yes," Loki said. He smirked. "Humans seem to get overly anxious about such things."
"Who's the old dude?" Leet asked. He looked around, and said, "And outing us isn't cool."
"What do you think?" I suddenly asked the video game vendor, who was staring at his telephone in boredom.
"I don't really have an opinion about Sailor Moon," he said. He looked at us. "Are you going to buy anything, or just block real customers. I'm trying to make a living here."
"He can't hear anything we're saying," I said. "And nobody else is listening. I'm a thinker."
Uber was frightened by this; the thought that someone could make you perceive anything was deeply unsettling.
Leet was less concerned.
"Hey, can I still get the copy of ET? I've already got a console."
He made his purchase, and we quickly walked around the corner.
"It's not just about your services," I said. "I want to talk to you about a business deal."
"You know my powers are crap, right?" Leet asked. "Stuff works once, and then it blows up on me."
I frowned, and then Intuitive Empathy gave me the answer.
"Oh, that's because your powers are trying to kill you," I said. "For being such a frightened little bitch."
"What?" Leet's head snapped around.
Before either of them could react, I'd inventoried them both. I grabbed Loki, and he obligingly made us both invisible as I flew us to the top of Medhall.
Reappearing, Leet stumbled forward, and then looked around. He wasn't surprised. He'd made a teleporter early in his career. The next time he'd tried it, a minion had had his DNA mixed with that of a fly and he hadn't been able to reverse the changes that had been made.
He'd always regretted that, and he'd never teleported again.
"Powers are meant for conflict," I said. "They want to be used creatively."
"Powers can't want anything!" Leet insisted. "They're just powers."
I sent him a version of my own certainty. I couldn't read my own powers, but I knew that much; powers were alien, and they had their own agenda.
Whether the were related to Scion, or whether the Harvester golden aliens were even related I still didn't know.
"My own power wants to kill me?" Leet asked.
"Is it any surprise?" I asked. "Don't most people want to kill you?"
He frowned, but deep down, he was afraid it was true.
"I knew a girl who had a similar problem," I said, "She was only using one aspect of her powers, and they were making her depressed."
"But they weren't trying to kill her!"
"She hasn't been in the game as long as you. Now that she's helping me with some projects that are stretching her abilities, she's a lot happier."
The fact that her sister was dead had paradoxically made it easier for her. She'd decided that she'd just confused familial affection with lust, and if it was easier for her to justify that to herself, I wasn't going to correct her.
"And that's what you want me to do…instead of creating video game memes," Leet said. "The last time I tried something like that, I almost died."
"Your robot plumber had nothing to do with Shatterbird," I said. "You were sitting too close to your monitor."
At his look, I said, "There's still some light scarring on your face. Most people couldn't see it, but the patterns aren't right for glasses."
I was lying, of course, but exposure to Loki was making that easier.
"What do you want us to do?" he asked.
"Well, if I get to harvest your powers, then I'll let you in on an opportunity to get better labs, to recreate an entire world. I might even give you Australia on a world where an asteroid destroyed most human life. You could be a king!"
"Why would I want that?" Leet asked.
"Well, I'm agreeing to pay you for something I could do and not let you even know it happened until you found blood on your clothes," I said. "And I'm giving you a chance to be a real hero. I get better with every tinker I acquire, and I might be able to find the flaws in your old design, point them out and help you fix them."
"What?" Leet asked. I could feel his sudden excitement.
"My understanding of tech is only a couple of hundred years ahead," I said. "In the areas I've acquired. But that number gets better the more I get."
I had him at letting him rebuild past constructs. He believed me; I was the girl who'd led an Endbringer to another world.
I gave him an illusion of a sheet of paper with some of my work on Harvester technology.
I could almost hear his heart racing as he stared at it.
"You did this?"
"Reverse engineering the tech from alien invaders from another world. I still don't understand their star drives, or their power systems, but I'm working on it."
"This can be built by anybody with the right tools," he said. He stared at the illusion in front of him.
"All right," he said. "I'll do it."
He closed his eyes for a moment. "All right, get it over with."
"I already did," I said.
"What?" he asked, looking up. "It hasn't been even a second!"
"You aren't all that tough," I said.
I glanced at my screen.
NEW TINKER SPECIALTY!
OMNI-TECH!
YOU DO NOT HAVE A SPECIALITY! ALL TECHNOLOGIES ARE THUS CONSIDERED TO BE RELATED TECHNOLOGIES AT A LEVEL ONE LESS THAN ACTUAL SPECIALIZATIONS.
WITHIN SPECIALITIES YOU NOW HAVE A HIGH INTERPLANETARY UNDERSTANDING OF TECHNOLOGY!
Low interplanetary involved the basic technologies to create small colonies on a single planet, like Mars.
At medium interplanetary, travel became cheaper and faster. Asteroids were mined, travel between colonies became easier.
Now I had plans to make cloud cities on Venus, cities created from comets tethered together, and free-floating O'Neill cylinders.
I even had plans to create bioengineered trees growing out of comets; people could live inside the trunk.
What I didn't have was anything that would get people to another star in even a single lifetime. I did have some theoretical knowledge on how to make generation ships, but I was lacking some of the information needed to make it a reality.
"Uh…I'll pass," Uber said awkwardly.
I considered.
I could take his power, and he wouldn't even know about it if I inventoried his clothes first. However, Loki would make a lot of fun of me for that, and I wasn't sure I even needed his power when all I needed to do was to go to zombie world and start working my way through a library.
It'd be a breach of trust anyway, and it probably wasn't worth it to start a relationship that way.
"It didn't hurt," Leet said.
"It did," I said. "A lot. I just kept you from feeling it."
Leet glared at me.
I slapped several stacks of bills in his hand.
"Fifty thousand," I said. "Enough to buy that console you've been wanting since Shatterbird destroyed your last one."
He couldn't build his own because that had been one of the first things he'd done when he'd gained his powers.
He stared at the money.
"Now what do you know about terraforming?" I asked.
"Terraforming?" he said, still staring at the money. "It takes a long time."
"Do you have anything that would speed it up? Maybe take the ash out of the air from a nuclear winter? Turn ground fertile again?"
"No, I…. wait…maybe," Leet said.
His mind was racing.
"It's not anything I've ever done before, but maybe if you could…"
Slapping my hand over his shoulder, I said, "This is going to be a great relationship!"
"You'll need a new shirt," Loki said dryly.
Leet looked down and realized that his entire shirt was soaked with blood.
He screamed.
"What in the hell did you do to me?"
I shrugged.
"Forgot my own strength," I said. "Don't worry. Your spleen is fine…now."
The blood drained from his face, but I knew that he wanted to continue to work with me. The chance to build devices twice was too much to pass up.
I had him.
"The whole prostitute thing was a lie," I told Loki afterward. "I knew that even without telepathy. They claimed they were just hard light projections when their fans got upset, but there were pictures online of the hookers in the hospital."
"Your morals are highly flexible," Loki said, smirking.
"Why do you think I hurt him as badly as I did…in front of Uber?"
Loki didn't say anything.
"Because Uber has at least some conscience," I said. "He's too loyal to his friend, but he's the more normal one of the two. Leet is…a bit of a sociopath."
"You should get along well, then."
"It's my powers," I said irritably. "But worse, Leet is an idiot. He's not even sure why people got so upset. He sees the whole world like it's a kind of game."
"Again, isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?"
I shook my head.
"Anyway…Leet listens to Uber, and Uber understood the message I was sending him. Hopefully he'll keep Leet in check."
"And if he doesn't?"
"Well, I think Leet will have an unpleasant time of it," I said. "He could probably regrow his limbs, but I'll just take whatever he builds. I'd imagine that trying to tinker with modern prosthetics would be difficult."
"And tinkers have an unavoidable urge to build?" Loki asked. "So not having hands would be torture."
"I'd grow him some new hands when he was sorry enough," I said. "As soon as he stopped being a whiny little bitch."
We were flying toward the furniture store. Loki wanted a bed; he'd probably want some kind of expensive ten-thousand-dollar monstrosity.
If he continued to be irritating about it, I was going to buy him a futon.
"Why aren't you making us invisible?" I asked after a bit.
"We're in costume," he said. "Which means we are meant to be seen."
I could see in his mind that he was really hoping that we would find some trouble. He thought it would be entertaining.
Well, since I might get some powers out of it, I didn't mind.
Unfortunately, nobody intercepted us on our way to the store. The number of fliers in the bay had decreased recently, especially since New Wave was gone.
At the furniture store, Loki naturally gravitated toward the most expensive bed in the store.
"I'm not getting you a $29,000 bed!" I said. "Who even buys something like this? That's an insane price for a bed!"
"Is it?" Loki asked.
He'd been on Earth in the nineties; he had to have dealt with money at some point.
I noticed people taking pictures with their telephones. I ignored them, but Loki didn't.
"Hello girls," he said to a pair of college age girls. "It's nice to have fans."
"You're Loki, right? The cape who's with Harvest?"
"She's with me, I'd say," he said. He smiled, but inside he was irritated by the comparison.
"I think it's great what the two of you are doing!" the girl said. She looked up at Loki and seemed to notice his face for the first time. "I think you two are the real heroes!"
Loki's posture straightened a little, and his irritation faded. His smile widened slightly.
"You saved my mom," the second girl said.
I didn't really remember.
"You healed her, and then my uncle says you gave him some kind of power to fight off a group of looters."
Shrugging, I said, "I do stuff like that sometimes."
I was actually a little uncomfortable with the praise. It didn't seem quite right to be praised for killing people, even if it had been necessary.
"Well, I think you're great. There's a petition on the internet to get your Kill Order rescinded, but they say it'll take a full pardon from the President for that to happen."
"How many people have signed?" I asked, curiosity forcing me to ask the question that I wasn't sure I wanted the answer to. Finding out that less than a thousand people wanted me freed would be depressing.
"We've got 267,000 people," she said enthusiastically. "That's in America. It's a million and a half outside of America, but that's mostly the Australians. Unfortunately, we don't think the President will care about people who can't vote."
I nodded slowly.
"Thanks," I said.
A cape was entering my range. One moment he was not there, and another moment he was just outside the store.
I stiffened.
"We've got company," I said to Loki, using Mama Mather's connection to whisper in his ear. "Just one though."
Blinking outside, I wondered what I'd have to do to keep the fight away from the mattress store. I hadn't even bought my beds yet!
I could always get one in Boston, and maybe the selection would be better, but that would mean that Loki would just ask for something even more expensive.
A figure in a blue outfit with a blue cap was standing outside. He looked nervous.
A look inside my head relieved my fears. I lunched toward him and put him in my Inventory before returning to Loki and inventorying him too.
"We'll be back," I said to the salesman. "I think he'll have the sleigh bed, but I'll get back to you on that. I'll just have the daybed at the end of the row."
I pointed to the beds that I intended to buy, and then I blinked away.
I'd been horrified by the bed prices, and even more horrified at the thought that the salesman didn't think he was ripping us off. The bed Loki had wanted had been an outlier, costing six times as much as anything else in the store.
Still, you could buy a really cheap car for those prices. The daybed was the cheapest thing they had, and it was still several hundred dollars.
Had the Endbringers destroyed the bed manufacturers in an effort to bring minor misery to everyone, or was this the normal state of the world?
Appearing on top of Medhall, I was careful to stay away from the edge where I could be seen.
I released Loki.
At his thought, I said, "It's called a king, but that's a size, not a statement of intent."
"The beds here are tiny!" he said.
Catching a glimpse of Asgardian beds, I had to agree.
"Not all of us are part giant," I said. "If you get a bed the size you want, there won't be room for anything else in the room."
"Then you should get a bigger room!" he said. "These insects should provide you with accommodations suitable for your power."
"They want to kill me," I said.
"Then take what they will not give!"
Looking out at the skyline, I searched the area telepathically. No one knew we were here; it was possible that someone was surveilling us electronically from outside of range, and if I kept having meetings here, that was going to happen.
I released Strider, who looked startled.
"That was…weird," he said.
"I can teleport," I said.
He looked crestfallen for a moment.
"However, I can't carry anyone other than myself, so I have to use a pocket dimension."
He brightened.
"You need someone healed," I said, "And you want to make a deal."
He was officially a rogue; not someone who was a Protectorate member, although he did take contracts from them.
"Other people have done that?" he asked.
"Well, maybe one or two," I said. "Most people seem worried that I'll kill them for no reason."
"People can be unreasonable," Loki said. "She can always come up with a reason to kill people."
"I hear good things about you, though. Show up for all the Endbringer fights even though you aren't a hero and all of that."
He nodded.
I hadn't actually known that until reading it in his mind, but it didn't hurt for him to think that people appreciated what he did. The fact was that without him, large numbers of out of towners would never be able to get to Endbringer fights in time.
"It's my mother," he said. "She's got Huntington's."
I reached up and touched his face.
"You had the genes for that too," I said.
He started to nod, then froze.
"What do you mean, had?"
"Well, you're going to be fine now. That's a freebie since you're doing such good work with the Endbringers. Helping your mother…well, I'd be happy to do it, but the more power I get, the better I'll be able to do my part."
"The PRT wouldn't want me here," he said.
"Nobody saw us," I said. "And nobody has to know."
He hesitated.
"It's my mom, you know," he said. "She's been so brave about the whole thing, but I've heard Dad crying at night."
I had another thirty seconds before I could heal him again, and so I had to listen to him justifying himself. He felt horribly guilty for going to a cape with a kill Order, and he barely seemed to notice me.
I sent a message to Loki, and he covered me with an illusion. He covered me with an illusion of myself, and I blinked this mother's hospital room.
She smelled sick, but I touched her, and she looked up at me.
"What?"
"Your son says hello," I said.
Without asking, I took a selfie with her.
She'd been confused when I walked in; not because I teleported, but because of the effects of the disease. Her mind was already snapping back, although she was still a little confused because her memories of the time she'd been demented were still vague.
She held her hand out to me, and then stared at it. It was rock steady.
"You should have a doctor check you out," I said. "You're going to be fine."
She'd been resigned to dying. Her greatest regret was passing the disease along to her son. She was only in her fifties and she'd already been dying.
I could sense a nurse coming, and so I blinked back into Loki's illusion.
"I wasn't sure I should come," he said. "I tried to get Panacea to help, but there's a waiting list, and she doesn't take requests."
I punched him twice, and then healed him. I kept him from feeling any of it, or noticing it, although I let Loki see what I was doing.
After all, Uber wasn't the only one who needed an object lesson.
Strider was definitely a lot tougher than Leet, although he generally tried to avoid fighting.
"Will you help me?" he asked finally.
"I already did," I said. "You might want to give your mom a call."
I handed him the telephone with the selfie.
He stared at it for a moment.
"Are you a precog?"
"No. I'm just really fast," I said.
"Ok…" he said. He tensed. "I guess I'm ready."
"I already did that," I said. "I got a little blood on your costume."
"But how?" he asked.
"It takes time for the nerves to send a message to the brain," I said. "I just injured you and healed you before the message could get where it was going."
He stared at me.
It was a lie of course, but confusing the Protectorate about my true powers was a good thing. I could always get faster if I needed to.
I checked my status box.
BLINK HAS INCREASED BY TEN LEVELS! YOU CAN NOW BLINK 33 BILLION MILES AT A TIME. YOU MAY NOW TELEPORT ANYTHING YOU CAN CARRY, AS LONG AS YOU ARE TOUCHING IT OR TOUCHING SOMETHING IN CONTACT WITH IT.
That meant I could jump a light year in only 177 jumps. I could reach Alpha Centauri in 712 jumps or so. The problem at those distances would be getting lost. I needed better eyesight and even with that, nothing was where it appeared to be because light took time to arrive, and everything kept moving in the meantime.
It was still worth it.
"Mom?"
There was a sort of stunned sound to his voice, as though he couldn't believe that he was hearing his mother's voice.
Strider was already on the phone. It wasn't my phone; he'd handed it off to Loki.
"I'm so glad to hear from you," he said. His voice trembled, and he was silent for a moment trying to regain his composure. "It's been…a while."
It had been two years since she'd been coherent enough to talk to. She'd had emotional volatility even before that, and Strider had been dealing with his mother's Huntington's for the past fifteen years.
Doctors had given her two months.
No parahuman healer had powers that worked the same, and healers tended to be one of the rarest types of capes. Most could only heal limited categories; injuries say. Healers who could deal with disease were really rare.
Strider turned away from us, and my enhanced hearing could hear the change in Strider's breathing. His shoulders were hunched, and it sounded as though he was trying not to cry.
"No snide comments?" I asked Loki in a low tone.
"Why should I?" he asked, utterly serious for once.
His own adopted mother had been the only one to truly accept him. She'd always supported him, and she'd provided most of the love and affection he'd had in his entire life.
"I'll be over in a little while," he said. There was a hitch in his voice. "I'll call Dad. He'll be so glad."
He was silent for a moment, listening to the telephone.
"Yeah. The number hasn't changed. He's been waiting for you to get better. Just give him a call."
His father had been a ghost of his former self. He really had been waiting all this time. Now Strider's mother wanted to deliver the news herself.
Strider wiped his face, and then straightened his posture. He turned back to us with a professional look on his face.
"Thank you," he said.
His tone belied his expression. It was the sincerest thank you I'd had in a while.
"If you know anybody else who'd like a similar deal, my door is always open," I said, as though I hadn't just seen a grown man cry.
For some reason my eyes burned a little.
The joy I could feel coming from this man was like standing in front of a fire. I could only hope I could feel a tenth of that joy when my own father returned.
Strider nodded, but his joy dimmed a little.
As grateful as he was to me, he was anxious about the PRT asking about the deal he'd made. Much of his income came from them.
He didn't regret it, though.
"What will you do now?" I asked.
He smiled wryly and said, "I just got my family back. What do you think I'm going to do?"
I shook his hand, and I did a quick deeper scan to see if he knew anything about PRT plots against me.
He didn't, but he did know about a planned raid in New York on the Teeth. They were planning to capture the Butcher, despite her ability to jump into the bodies of any capes who killed her and the fact that she had some ability to teleport.
The Teeth had some pretty decent powers, if I could recall, and it would be pleasant to beat the PRT at their own game.
If I had any idea what the inside of the Birdcage looked like, I'd have already gone there. Once my telepathy was strong enough, or maybe the power I'd gotten from Mama Mathers, assuming the prisoners were allowed television, I could look through the eyes of the Prisoners and then I'd be in.
There were people who knew where it was, and I probably could have brute forced my way in, even if I'd had to go to the asteroid belt and pick up some meteors to accelerate.
I didn't want to let any of those people out, however.
Well, I had twelve hours to attack the Teeth, and even though Strider didn't know where they were, someone in the New York Protectorate would, maybe even some of the unpowered members.
"This has been a profitable transaction," I said, my smile widening. "And I'm glad about your mother, really. Give me a minute, and I'll heal everybody in the hospital."
I needed to get back to the hospital I'd made the deal with anyway. It was going to take them a while to get back up to full capacity, but I'd heard that the hospital was actually doing pretty well. The patents would take a while to start making money, though.
"Really?" he asked.
"Totally free of charge," I said. "I like to provide good service."
The moment he left, I told Loki, "Let's roll."
I grabbed his arm, and he tensed, but I simply teleported with him.
My mistake the last time had been spending too much time with each patient. Now I understood exactly what needed to be removed, and I simply inventoried the equipment away and healed the patient before their blood could spread very far.
I then inventoried the equipment back.
At ten seconds per patient, including transit time by blinking from room to room, I healed sixty patients in ten minutes.
The hospital was filled with the sounds of disconnected machines screaming at the hospital staff, who were running around.
Strider's mother had been in a hospice until her condition had grown too serious and she needed extra treatment here. Most of these people had at least a chance of getting better.
I looked outside in the halls, which were filling with people. I hadn't even bothered to speak to any of them, except for two little girls in a pediatric unit that was curiously empty.
Waving to everyone in the hall, I smiled, and said, "Enjoy the rest of your lives! I'm Taylor Hebert. See you!"
MIND'S EYE HAS RISEN ONE LEVEL!
YOU CAN NOW AFFECT UP TO 11 PEOPLE OR CREATE UP TO 11 ARCANE EYES IN A 10,000 FOOT RADIUS!
I was confused for a moment until I realized that someone was holding a camera up. Apparently, they were something called an influencer and they'd been videoing their visit with their mother in the hospital.
I hadn't even noticed them.
I could feel two thousand people within my range lighting up as they saw me live on the web channel or whatever it was. He was apparently pretty popular in Las Vegas.
Before anyone could respond, I blinked myself and Loki away.
"You should do more of that," Loki said.
I looked over at him, surprised. Healing in Brockton Bay hadn't seemed to affect him at all.
Oh.
"You need to drum up support from outside your city," Loki said. "And healing people's dying grandmothers tends to get good publicity."
"Not in Brockton Bay," I said.
"That's a city with their own healer," he said. "They're jaded. People in the rest of the country just don't get free healings. If you do it all the time, people expect it of you. Do it as a surprise, and they're amazed."
I frowned, but he was right. I needed to be more active outside the Bay. I hated leaving the people under my watch; I needed to upgrade Mind's eye. Nine more levels and I'd be able to cover the entire United States and parts of Mexico and Canada.
Maybe if I photobombed a Presidential Address I'd get there.
"We're going to knock some Teeth in tomorrow," I said as we walked back into the furniture store. "What do you think of getting some wicker chairs?"
Loki closed his eyes and sighed.
"I always thought my father hated me. I just didn't realize how much."
Strider had only known about the upcoming attack on the Teeth because he was scheduled to teleport reinforcements in to help the Protectorate.
Legend would not be participating, because the Protectorate's greatest nightmare was the Butcher taking over a member of the Protectorate.
They were bringing in Protectorate members from across the country who had non-lethal abilities to try to help take the Butcher down.
I had no idea how they thought they would contain her. Her short-range teleportation likely wouldn't be enough to escape the Birdcage, but leaving the Butcher inside would allow her to accumulate powers at an exponential rate, to the point that she might be able to escape and become a real threat.
Powers supposedly didn't extend outside the range of the moon; however, mine did, and it was possible that there would be other exceptions as well. I still wasn't sure about the essential nature of shards, but something, possibly intuitive intuition told me that simply dropping the Butcher off into space might not be a good idea.
I wasn't sure whether the Butcher's power would affect me either; Gamer's mind was powerful, but it didn't always trump everything.
Fortunately, I didn't need to kill her to Harvest her, and I could kill the rest of the Teeth. None of them had Kill Orders, probably because of the fear that the Butcher would get in the way and end up more powerful.
The Butcher didn't have a kill order for obvious reasons.
Strider hadn't known where the attack was going to go down, and so I had to blink close enough to the New York Protectorate building to get the agents within range of my telepathy.
From a distance, all I could reach was surface thoughts, but given the anxiety of the PRT agents assisting the Protectorate, that was all I needed.
"That's enough," I said to Loki. "Let's go."
He was keeping up both invisible so that I didn't stir up the Protectorate until I finished what I had to do.
"Can we make this quick?" he said.
"You're just going to watch for people escaping. Don't kill this woman…she can possess people who kill her and take over their bodies."
"I've dealt with creatures like that in the past," he said. He scowled. "Nasty buggers."
"She can teleport, and they say she never misses anything she aims at- it's due to a power, not hyperbole about her skills or anything."
"Why are we doing this again?" he asked. "You promised to make me a throne of glass."
He'd been dead set against wicker chairs for some reason, so I'd settled for making him something. I wasn't sure why he'd want it; even with my abilities I couldn't make a glass chair all that comfortable.
Maybe if I found a furniture tinker.
Accord apparently had skills in that area, although his furniture wasn't exactly tinkertech. I suspected that his skills there were primarily due to and advanced case of OCD.
"Power," I said. "Also, these guys are assholes."
"So, everybody you don't like is an asshole?"
I thought about it.
"No," I said. "People I don't like are jerks. People I don't like who also hurt people are assholes."
"I see," he said. He frowned. "That means I'm an asshole?"
I looked at him and grinned.
"You seem oddly familiar with the state," he said.
"Are you trying to say t takes one to know one?"
He shrugged.
"I don't hurt people who aren't assholes," I said. After a moment, I said, "Well, not usually. I had to mercy kill a few dozen people who were burning alive, and I had to kill a few thousand people infected by a zombie virus."
"You have to kill a lot of people," he said.
"It just seems to work out that way," I said. "I'm not sure why."
"Well, I can't fault anyone for their hobby," he said.
"Kill people is not my hobby," I said.
"Do you get paid for it?"
"Well, I made eighteen million for killing most of the Slaughterhouse Nine," I said. "But mostly no."
"So, killing is your job. That makes you an assassin."
"Soldiers kill people! And they make money!"
"They work under the command of their leaders. Even mercenaries do. You are either an independent contractor, or an enthusiastic hobbyist."
"Fine," I said. "I guess killing is my hobby."
"The first step is admitting the truth to yourself," he said.
We were reaching our destination.
The Teeth had decided to take residence in a ten-story building. Originally, it had been the PRT headquarters, newly build two years after Behemoth first appeared. It had been specially reinforced with everything the tinkers of the time had thought might help it survive an Endbringer attack. They'd been wrong.
It had been damaged in the attack by Behemoth, and it had not been safe to live in since then. It was scheduled for destruction in a few weeks, and so the Teeth had taken it as their temporary base.
Sensors had been installed inside it to make sure that looters didn't try to steal radioactive copper piping, and when the sensors had gone off, the Protectorate had been alerted. They'd been monitoring them since then.
As we approached, I set Loki down on a nearby building.
"Don't get too much closer," I said. "If things go badly, the Butcher might destroy the building.
"The Butcher. Right. You want to destroy the building," Loki said. "Just to see if you can."
"Well, I could if I wanted to," I admitted. "My bomb tinker skills tell me exactly which spots to destroy to bring the whole thing down in a controlled fall, and my smoke is perfect for that kind of thing.
"But you want to do it just to see things fall apart."
"Maybe," I admitted. "I was wondering if the PRT would let me keep some of the materials if I destroyed the building for them."
As soon as I said it, I realized that it was unlikely. The PRT was officially antagonistic toward me, and they couldn't let me steal one of their old headquarters.
For some reason, that made me want to do it even more. It was possible that carrying hundred ton loads out would increase both my strength and my general planeswalking ability.
It was possible that the PRT intended to recycle some of the materials, but I was sure that most of the stuff was intended for the dump, especially as most of it was mildly radioactive.
It generally took radioactivity a long time to go away, but Tinkers had been experimenting on the ruins for years, trying out various methods of decontamination. Some of them had actually worked, at least in part.
I wasn't sure the Teeth knew that the base was still contaminated, or if they even cared. The radiation had dropped to a level where it would take months of exposure for people's health to be severely impacted.
The decontamination chamber the Protectorate had left on cannibal world was too small to help, but I had some plans for lower tech ways to decontaminate materials, even if they'd take much longer to work.
I could build a warehouse sized chamber, and I would have all the materials I would need from this place.
Maybe I wouldn't even ask; they probably wouldn't miss a few thousand tons of the stuff if I took it at night.
Telepathy told me where they all were, since they were less than a block away. I sent my eyes flying in the direction of the building.
They flew inside, and I noticed that the Teeth were spread out in different areas of the building. The non-powered members were mixed in with the others and they were split between five different rooms.
The building was leaning badly, so everything was at a weird angle, and I'd have to be careful to avoid sending the whole thing crashing into the nearest building.
Behemoth's attack had destroyed most of the surrounding buildings, but this one had been built more heavily than the others, and it had been shored up in places by Tinkers shortly after the battle.
They hadn't demolished it at the time for fear that the radioactive interiors would spread a cloud of dust over the entire city, the equivalent of nuclear fallout.
I'd learned all of this from the PRT; preventing the potential fallout had been one of their main concerns. Given the efforts of scores of tinkers over the year, the risk wasn't nearly what it once had been, but there were concerns about lawsuits and an increase in cancer rates.
Avoiding that would probably be my best bet too.
The tinkers had removed all of the radioactive dust, but the sheetrock on the walls was still somewhat radioactive, as were the tile floor and interior furnishings, those that hadn't caught fire immediately from the attack.
A closer look using my eyes showed that the materials were all of very fine quality. I wanted it even more.
Building my own palace out of a PRT base was an attractive thought.
"Well, here goes nothing," I said.
Blinking, I appeared in a room.
Animos was in bed, on top of a non-powered female member of the group. I grimaced, but punched him in the side of the head, sending him flying into the side of the wall where his body almost exploded.
The girl I used mind control to keep quiet. The last thing I needed was for her to scream and to alert the others.
WEREWOLF HAS RISEN TO LEVEL 2! YOU NOW HAVE +20 STRENGTH AND +24 DEXTERITY WHILE IN WEREWOLF FORM.
That was an amazing bonus. If the rest of them were this good, this trip was going to be more than worth it.
A blink, and I was in Hemorrhagia's room. She had victims on a table and their blood was floating in the air above them in complex patterns that were oddly beautiful.
The girl in the room I'd left started to scream.
I should have mind controlled her asleep. Well, hopefully it wouldn't matter that much.
Hemorrhagia pointed at me and nothing happened, likely because I didn't actually have any blood.
She gestured and the eight quarts of blood in floating in the air flashed toward me with a speed that even I had to be on my toes to dodge.
A blink, and I was behind her, and I snapped her neck.
Really, my own physical strength did a lot more damage than any of my other attacks.
NEW POWER CREATED!
BLOOD CONTROL!
YOU CAN CONTROL UP TO 1 GALLON OF BLOOD AT A TIME WITHIN A TEN FOOT RANGE. BOTH WEIGHT AND RANGE DOUBLE WITH EACH LEVEL. INTERNAL BLOOD CONTROL BYPASSES PHYSICAL RESISTANCES!
USING THE BLOOD INSIDE A TARGET WILL DO 50 POINT DOUBLED PER LEVEL, ASSUMING THEY ACTUALLY HAVE AND NEED BLOOD. YOU CAN SENSE BLOOD AT TEN TIMES THE RANGE OF YOUR CONTROL.
The door slammed open, and a group of ten unpowered mooks ran toward me.
I curiously used blood control on one of them, and I had to admit that it seemed pretty gruesome; blood was running from his eyes and ears, and as I applied the effect, blood was coming out of his pores.
The others stopped attempting to beat and shoot me, and they stepped back in horror.
Each of them was dead in less than six seconds, and I kept them from leaving the room by blinking there.
BLOOD CONTROL HAS GONE UP 1 LEVEL! YOU NOW CONTROL TWO QUARTS OF BLOOD AT A RANGE OF TWENTY FEET, AND YOU CAN DETECT BLOOD AT 200 FEET!
I wasn't Manton limited, although I couldn't affect myself, probably because I lacked blood.
I wondered if I ate a bloody steak if I could use my blood sense to detect where the food actually went?
-1 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
The area around me was suddenly filled with shard shaped force fields. I could detect the man who was generating those fields, through Mind's Eye, Telepathy, enhanced hearing, and Intuitive aptitude.
-2 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
My head snapped up. I was taking more damage?
A glance in his mind showed the solution. His force fields got stronger the longer they were generated.
-4 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
I could pulp this guy whenever I wanted, but he was actually making me stronger the longer that I stood there. Instead I used Intuitive aptitude and telepathy to track the others as they came toward me.
-8 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
Considering that it only took ten percent additional points of physical resistance to make me ten times as physically resistance, it was in my best interest to stand here as long as I could.
-16 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
I turned and smiled at Vex. He seemed unnerved for a moment.
It seemed that the Teeth liked to dress up like extras in a post-apocalyptic movie from the 1980s.
-32 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
+60 HP FROM REGENRATION!
The others appeared in the hallway behind Vex.
"What's going on?" I heard the man who called himself Spree say.
"She's just standing there smiling," Vex said. "She's got blood all over her outfit."
What?
I looked down at myself.
Crap.
At this rate I was going to go through my remaining sixteen million dollars in hoodies alone.
"Where's Hemorrhagia or Animos?" Spree asked.
Suddenly, the blood peeled off my outfit and flew toward Spree.
A half dozen clones appeared in front of him, to be cut to ribbons by my blood darts. Spree was unharmed.
-64 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
Wow! I never had to worry about bloodstains in my outfits ever again! I could make a fortune in Brockton Bay just cleaning the motel beds, much less people's clothes!
"Oh," Spree said. He hunched over, and he began vomiting up blood, which surrounded his head, and he began literally drowning in his own blood.
He grabbed at the blood that was covering his nose and mouth, scrabbling to move it away and try to breathe, even as the blood loss drove him to his knees.
-128 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
Vexes force fields were getting stronger and stronger, and I couldn't afford to let him continue.
"STOP!" I said.
I held his mind for the next twelve seconds as I healed all the damage that he'd done and as Spree died.
A gesture, and a drop of his blood flew toward me.
An explosion beside me burned the blood into vapor and it startled me into removing my control over Vex.
Butcher was beside me.
The fire from the explosion did no damage, but Butcher was already trying to hit me.
Her attacks were apparently homing, because no matter how fast I moved back, they twisted and turned to follow me.
-10 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
-256 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
Crap.
I hadn't forced Vex to remove his force fields and so they'd restarted at their former level.
I appeared behind Vex, and I held him in front of me as Butcher's attack flew toward me.
It flew toward his neck, and then it turned, moving around him and hitting me.
-10 HIT POINTS!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
I was getting close to losing all my hit points, and I only had myself to blame.
I snapped Vex's neck, and I contemptuously threw the body toward her.
I blinked outside the building, floating in space.
All I needed was half a minute, and I'd be fully healed. I heard an explosion at the top of the roof, and I saw the Butcher aiming at me.
She was already sending an arrow toward me, but once I used my armored skin power, it bounced off me harmlessly. I'd hoped to be able to get a few more levels of physical resistance before finally having to deal with the Butcher.
"What are you going to do?" Butcher taunted. "You can't kill me, unless you want a bunch of voices in your head."
Hmm.
I blinked toward her, but she was somehow already teleporting away.
Her teleportation was too short ranged to bother me, though. She'd never be able to get away. The only reason she was a step ahead of me was because of her combat precognition power.
"They can't hold me!" Butcher shouted.
"They won't have to," I said.
Blink, burst, blink, burst.
She was getting more and more desperate. The current Butcher didn't want to die, and she thought I was crazy to want to have anything to do with her.
She was tiring, and…
There, I had her.
I inventoried her, and then I waved to Loki sending him a message to enjoy his evening. I flew over him and dropped a couple of thousand dollars from my inventory at his feet.
"Have a night off," I said.
A moment later I was planewalking.
I appeared in London, above the Hellsing building. Apparently, they were in the process of rebuilding.
Appearing in the room Alucard and Sir Integra were in, I blinked in front of them.
Alucard already had his guns out, but I ignored that.
"Hey," I said. "I heard that you absorb the souls of your victims. Do you hear their voices?"
"If I wish," he said.
I tried glancing inside his mind, but I could detect the thoughts of hundreds of thousands of beings, presumably the people he'd killed over the past few hundred years.
"It doesn't drive you crazy?" I asked incredulously.
Even two other voices had been enough to drive a hero mad when he'd been possessed by the Butcher.
"No more than normal," he said. He smiled at me, and I admired his outfit.
I changed into my own, and he stood straighter and smiled even more widely. He probably thought that I was trying to imitate him.
It wasn't that; fedoras were just cool.
"I've got a gift for you then," I said.
I sent both of them an illusion of everything I knew about the Butcher, including her powers. I didn't have long; I'd have to release her from Inventory pretty soon.
Alucard glanced at Sir Integra, who sighed and nodded.
"Well, it's time for dinner then," I said. I smiled and as I released the Butcher, I held her in place using Mind control.
I wouldn't have been able to hold her in place like that for long, but her life was measured in seconds.
As Alucard began to feed, I listened in her mind as all fourteen…no…fifteen of them began to scream.
"This one is strange," Alucard said. "Not human, or vampire, werewolf or anything else I have ever tasted. It's almost like it's not a soul at all, just a simulation of one. All of them are like that, except for one."
"Find out what you can from it," I said. "It might have some answers we'll need. It might have relevance to the destruction of multiple worlds."
I'd managed to grab a bit of blood with blood control, and as I touched it, I got a pop up.
HERE AND EVERYWHERE HAS GAINED THREE LEVELS! YOU NOW HAVE A 40% CHANCE OF RESURRECTION UPON DEATH! HERE AND EVERYWHERE NOW ADDS +6 ADDITIONAL LEVELS TO BLINK, FOR A TOTAL OF +18 LEVELS.
I could now jump two trillion one hundred and twelve billion miles at a jump. A light year was 5.6 trillion miles. That meant that if I had a way to navigate, I could make it to Alpha Centauri in less than twelve jumps.
I could literally start a colony on another star, assuming I could build life support equipment and could figure out terraforming at a level that took less than a human lifetime.
"I'd like to stay, but I think the authorities are going to try to steal corpses from me. I promise I'll be back. Tell me what the alien had to say, and I'll let you fight an Endbringer."
"I'll get right on it," Alucard said. He looked down at my outfit and he smirked. "I can see that your sense of style has improved by leaps and bounds."
Sir Integra had a constipated expression on her face. Didn't she like fedoras? She had a pretty good sense of style herself.
"Well, I can get blood stains out now," I said. "But I still can't make my suits regenerate the way you do."
"I can see how that might get costly," he said.
"Anyway, I'll see you in a few days," I said. "I've got powers to collect."
Before they could respond, I plane shifted back to the old PRT headquarters.
I could sense that the PRT and Protectorate were already nearby. Apparently seeing me in the surveillance footage had moved their schedule up.
Vex was on the ground with his neck snapped.
As some unfamiliar Protectorate members burst into the room, I plunged my finger into Vex's eye, even as I lifted blood from Spree's body and sent it arching toward my neck.
BLADE STORM HAS BEEN UPGRADED! THE DAMAGE PER LEVEL FROM BLADE STORM NOW DOUBLES EVERY SIX SECONDS THAT IT IS MAINTAINED!
That was extremely useful. If I was able to keep fighting long enough, I might even be able to damage an Endbringer, supposing that I could survive long enough. I'd probably have to keep the blade storm going for several minutes before it reached that point, though.
Spree's blood touched my exposed neck, and another popup appeared.
MIND'S EYE HAS INCREASED BY 2 LEVELS! THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE AFFECTED BY MINDS EYE DOUBLES FOR EVERY LEVEL OVER 11. YOU CAN NOW AFFECT UP TO 64 PEOPLE AT A TIME, AND YOU CAN MULTITASK TO AFFECT ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME.
Weird.
Maybe Spree's power had given me the mental abilities of all of his clones at the same time.
I dodged the attacks of the Protectorate members; one had some sort of stunning attack, another tried to wrap me in chains that would still be with me if I teleported, and a third sent black beams that would send me into a sleep like state.
A fourth man, an Asian was behind them. Intuitive Empathy warned me just in time as there was a brilliant flash of light.
That must have been why the others were all wearing Tinkertech goggles.
Despite closing my eyes, my sigh was dazzled.
BLINDNESS RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY 1%.
LEVEL 3.
Shit.
I knew I should have spent an hour just staring at the sun.
Still, I blinked behind them and tapped the light guy on the shoulder.
I grinned at him, pretending I could see when I was just sensing the blood in his body.
"You guys can clean up here. I'm pretty much done."
Before he could respond, I was already on top of a building across the street, one which did not have any agents on it.
It was going to take six seconds for my partial blindness to clear up and so I used telepathy to take stock of just who was here.
There was a hero called Horizon from Alaska; she actually had telescopic and x-ray vision! She was using it to spot for the others, and was coordinating their attacks. She'd already spotted me.
Hidden further down was a tinker named Cask. He made healing potions, and he was also from the Alaska Branch. He had a form of brain cancer that he used his potions to barely keep in control.
I'd have to speak to him in private later. I suspected that we could help each other. As a tinker, he made all sorts of chemical concoctions. Healing potions might be something I could give to people I really cared about. I might even be able to build a cybernetic implant that would automatically deliver a potion to Dad if he was ever critically injured.
There was a cape who could project a sort of Ash that reinforced nearby structures and even herself. Would that all me to reverse the effect of my disintegrating smoke?
She was there to prevent the old PRT building from falling over; a sensible precaution.
There was a force field cape who was there to protect the noncombatants; he was from Boston.
Intuitive Empathy screamed a warning at me, and I sensed a figure moving up the stairs toward me at super speed.
There was a cape with a time bubble power. On himself it gave him effective super speed. On someone else, they would spend hours inside the bubble while seconds passed in the outside world.
I blinked away, coming to stand inside Bastion's force field.
Bastion stared at me, and my vision was already clearing up. He switched his force field to be smaller, but not before I tapped him on the nose.
Horizon was only now noticing that I was right beside her. She screamed something into a radio, and I blinked down to Cask.
"I heal brain cancer," I said into his mind a moment after he saw me. "We'll talk later."
When my vision cleared up, I appeared behind the four capes inside the building, and I tapped all of them on the shoulder. I grinned at them.
I appeared a floor down, tapping the shoulder of a cape who could make crenellated walls. That was an interesting power. It would make building cities in the cannibal world much easier, and I'd be able to keep cannibals away from the farmlands.
"Hey," I said. "You ever need anything, let me know."
He turned and stared at me.
I blinked to a spot over the tower, and then I checked for any nearby aircraft. When I saw that there was none, I used flame control to create an image of a phoenix rising eight miles into the sky. It obscured the entire skyline, and since the sun had just set, it was particularly brilliant.
The hardest part was keeping the heat from affecting any of the nearby buildings or people. There were a lot of skyscrapers in New York, and the last thing I needed was to set half the city on fire.
I made the whole thing move, as though it was roaring and staring down at the city.
I left it up for five minutes, plunging into the fire while dropping my clothes.
There were plans for fireproof clothing in my mind, but there wasn't anything that would survive this intensity of flame.
Hopefully, the PRT would get the message.
I could have wiped their entire team out in the space of an instant, but I hadn't done anything but tap them. The firebird was a declaration.
Attack me again, and I would be less kind.
Also, I'd made sure that all of the members of that team would have seen me up close. I'd be able to use their senses any time I got close to their respective cities, and that would be useful.
They probably thought I was the Butcher.
Would it be more useful to let them think that, or should I come clean?
I blinked, switching back into my hoodie as I did. I didn't want to know what Loki was up to on his night off, but I needed to continue to make a statement.
There was still glass in the building, and I began to pull at it. I made sure I was on the other side of the building from most of the Protectorate heroes, even though there were PRT agents filming me.
I summoned more and more glass.
GLASS MASTERY HAS RISEN TO LEVEL FOUR!
YOU MAY NOW AFFECT ALL GLASS IN AN EIGHTY FOOT RADIUS!
Glass weighed about a hundred pounds per cubic foot, so I was creating cubes of glass five by five by five and storing them in inventory.
By the time the heroes had regrouped, I had already collected thirty of those cubes, and a moment later I was on the moon.
I hadn't really needed the glass from the building; moon dust made perfectly good glass, although I'd have to have an atmosphere to be able to create the fire needed to craft it.
Moon dust was so fine that it would cause lung issues in people, and it tended to get into everything. The original astronauts had difficulty keeping it out of everything.
I expanded the glass into solar cells, using a little extra material I had one hand. At an inch thick, each cube of glass could create a square four hundred sixty-four feet on a side.
I could alter the glass to make it stronger, harder and able to conduct electricity much better. It was all information I'd gotten from my exoplanet exploration tinker ability.
I'd made thirty cubes and so I connected the solar panels in such a way as to form letters on the surface of the moon. These letters spelled a simple message- Save the Bay.
I followed it with an image of a Phoenix.
The city of my father was going to rise from the dead; I'd explain the imagery to a news crew as soon as I could find one.
Hopefully, this would get people talking, and it would inspire people to donate to revive Brockton Bay.
Doing it in New York might have been seen as a little provocative, but I'd been irritated by the attacks by the PRT there.
Some people might even see it as an unspoken message of "Or else."
That didn't bother me much.
As I finished, I thought I might as well look at Sphere's moon base. It hadn't been used since he'd become Mannequin, and I was interested in seeing what he'd built.
Maybe I could even use it as a base. I doubted that anyone on Earth had any technology that could reach me there, although I could be wrong.
It took me only a few moments to find it. The location was well known, and it was high on a cliff.
He'd built the whole thing in a dome, built out of regolith. He'd used equipment to do what I'd use powers for.
Sending eyes inside, I noted that he hadn't bothered putting any traps inside. Presumably he'd either assumed that no one would be able to reach him here, or he'd been the kind of idealist who assumed that space would be some kind of paradise.
Space was the most hostile environment possible for normal people. Not for me, of course.
I blinked inside.
Everything looked like it was made out of concrete; even though it had actually been made out of moon rock.
There was still air here, although it smelled and tasted stale.
The solar array outside still produced power, although meteorite impacts had reduced it to twenty percent power. That was despite the fact that the cells were made to be extra hard and tough.
A quick blink outside and I was able to repair the solar cells. Everything brightened inside when I returned.
Exploring the place showed that he'd included some aspects that I wouldn't have expected. He'd built a bathing area that was built like a lagoon.
In the ten years he'd been Mannequin, the lagoon had evaporated away.
Reaching out with water control I began pulling water from the air. It wasn't good for electronics anyway, and I wanted to see the lagoon as it had once been.
WATER CONTROL HAS GAINED ONE LEVEL!
YOU CAN NOW CONTROL A CUBE OF WATER FOUR FEET ON A SIDE.
LEVEL 4.
This power would be almost worthless against Leviathan, although I could probably use it to create an area of air around other parahuman's heads.
I liked this place.
It had style, and nobody could argue that I was squatting here; the owner was dead, and I wasn't sure property rights even extended to space.
If I declared myself Queen of the Moon, could anybody do anything about it?
I blinked outside and began to inventory moon dust. I'd go the Sahara and turn it into glass, and then I'd return.
Enough solar cells to cover the state of Nevada and I'd have enough power to supply the entire world. I wouldn't need nearly as much power to supply Brockton Bay.
In space, it was hardly ever nighttime. There were only certain periods when the solar cells would be out of contact with the sun. Without the atmosphere, they'd receive twenty percent more energy too.
It was time for me to stop being so reactive. I needed to be more proactive, both about seeking out powers and about doing things to actually help my city.
There were always excuses to do nothing. Doing something was hard. It took effort and was sometimes unpleasant.
I had plans for satellites in my head that would beam power down to the Earth. The cheapest and easiest way for me to create them would be to primarily make them of a hardened, energy conductive glass.
The problem was that eventually, someone would be able to reach those. However, I could simply make several of them and replace them as needed. With my trash tinker skill, it wasn't like I actually had to have any one of them be expensive.
I made one trip down to the Sahara with the moon dust when I realized that it would be easier just to use the Sahara dust instead.
I spend the next few hours turning tons of dust into glass solar panels, and then transporting them to space. I enlarged my words and made the symbols larger. Hopefully someone would be able to see it, and then it would make the news.
GLASS MASTERY HAS LEVELED UP!
YOU CAN NOW CONTROL ALL GLASS IN A 1280 FOOT RADIUS!
LEVEL 8!
That was useful. A few hours work, and I was starting to reach Shatterbird levels of power. It'd probably take four more levels to actually equal her, maybe five or six.
Returning to New York, I sought Loki out. He was in a bar, drinking some kind of mixed drink. It had an umbrella on it.
It seemed like an expensive bar, and so I appeared in the bathroom and stepped out. There was a lot of glass and mahogany.
"Well, how was your evening?" I asked, stepping up to sit next to him.
"I went out for an actual meal," he sniffed. "The food was terrible, of course."
He'd gone to one of the nicest restaurants in New York. Admittedly, the food in Asgard was leagues better than what Earth could provide, but that was no reason for him to be rude about it.
"People were all staring at their telephones and no one was talking to each other," he said.
"Well, the world has changed in the last twenty years," I said. "People just don't connect as well as they used to."
"Apparently someone created an eight-foot bird of fire over New York city, and then reprinted it on the moon. Everybody ran outside to look."
"Did you steal their tip money?" I asked. If he had, I'd have to go back and cover their tips.
He shrugged.
He hadn't, not because he was above that kind of thing, but because he'd been irritated by the waiters leaving at the same time and he'd been in a snit about my firebird interrupting his meal.
"That might have been me," I admitted.
"And the same thing on the moon?" he asked.
"Well, yeah," I said. "Sphere had this amazing battery, way beyond anything I can understand yet. I've got a few square miles of solar cells up there, and I've started building some satellites to broadcast power to the Earth."
"Ones that you left out in the open?" Loki asked.
"Sure. Why wouldn't I?"
"You do realize that at those distances, solar broadcast satellites look a lot like giant space lasers."
"Well, I could probably turn then into space lasers. I'd have to make some adjustments, of course, but I wouldn't do that. It wouldn't work against Behemoth, Leviathan is too fast to hit, and if the Simurgh comes back, she'd know it was coming."
"Well, some people don't seem as convinced about your good intentions."
I glanced through the eyes of the various heroes I'd tagged in New York, and I saw that it was already eleven at night. Too late for the ten o'clock news, but early enough for the morning show.
"Hey kid," the bartender said. "Can I see some ID?"
He was a muscular man in a tight black t-shirt.
"I'm just here to talk to my dad," I said. I pointed at Loki, and he stared at me. "Mom says he's a man-whore and that he's breaking our home apart."
I turned to Loki and forced myself to look like I was crying, even as I used water control to grab moisture from the air. A single fake tear fell down my cheek.
"Why, Dad, why?"
"It's because your mother is a dead fish in bed," Loki said without changing expressions. "Also, college coeds have a certain…something."
"Maybe you two should just get moving."
"Maybe we should," Loki said. He dropped some money on the counter and stepped off his stool.
There were three women in the bar who seemed very disappointed that he was leaving. Presumably they hadn't heard our little conversation.
As we stepped outside, Loki smirked at me.
"So, how do we go about finding a reporter?" I asked.
"I might have a few ideas," Loki said.
Everyone stared at the video in silence.
"If she can make a bird that high vertically," Assault began. "What would happen if she did it horizontally, at ground level?"
No one answered.
It was clearly a message; if Harvest wanted to become the next Endbringer, she could do so easily. Worse, unlike the Endbringers, she didn't have to fight fair.
Leviathan could have destroyed cities from the safety of the oceans. Behemoth could have made earthquakes without ever letting himself become visible.
The Simurgh could have flown over cities, turned them into hell on Earth, and moved on before anyone could react.
Thinkers assumed that they just enjoyed killing capes, which was why they refrained from just murdering cities without impunity. They gave humanity a chance because they didn't really believe humanity could hurt them.
Harvest had no such assurance. For all her power, she could probably still be affected by esoteric effects. She'd always been a hit and run fighter anyway, and now that she was the Butcher, it was going to be even worse.
Tagg shook his head.
"The point was to keep the Butcher away from her," he said. He stared at the monitor, which was frozen on a picture of the firebird.
"Maybe she didn't kill the Butcher?" Vista said. "She's been known to just exile people before. She wouldn't be stupid enough to take the risk."
Vista and Shadow Stalker were in the meeting because they were the only ones who'd actually traveled with the girl.
"She'd have wanted her power though," Shadow Stalker said. "It'd be pretty easy to make a mistake, as strong as she is now."
"She's shown personality changes after receiving powers in the past," Tagg said. "After killing Jack Slash was the most obvious."
"Yeah," Assault said. "It was like she wasn't the same girl."
"What's her rating now?" Battery asked.
"Does it matter?" Tagg asked, exhausted. "Once you have Shaker, Mover and Trump ratings in in the 9+ range, there isn't any point in regular PRT agents participating at all."
"Still," Shadow Stalker said, her voice almost admiring. "To literally tag the moon and build death rays to threaten cities with, I never thought she had it in her."
"It's not Butcher's M.O.," Armsmaster said. "And apparently Harvest has tinker skills; she was definitely using tinker skills to make solar cells; there's equipment that can trace the power moving even from here."
"It'd take months to build something to take it down, and billions of dollars," Tagg said. "Assuming she even let it launch."
"If she's the Butcher now, they won't let Alexandria or Legend near her. Probably not Eidolon."
"She seemed afraid of the time stop guy," Vista said. "Maybe she thought we were trying to put her in a Grayboy loop."
"Where is she now?" Tagg asked the screen. Dragon had been up with the directors all night; he wondered when she ever had time to sleep.
"She's floating in midair staring at the sun," Dragon said. "She was affected by a bright flash of light during the last battle, and presumably she is trying to rectify that."
The more the girl was damaged, the tougher she got, and thinkers said that her regeneration was good enough that she could heal all damage in less than a minute, no matter how damaged she had been.
"Where?" Tagg asked.
"In the mid-Atlantic," she said. "I can give you the actual coordinates if you are interested."
He waved his hand at her dismissively.
Tagg had spent most of the morning being castigated by the other directors for not keeping the girl in check. Piggot had been the one who had mishandled her, but Tagg was the one who was here.
Tagg scowled.
"My predecessor burned a lot of bridges with her," he said. "And upper management refuses to try to repair this. Last night is only going to make things worse."
"Excuse me," Dragon said. "Apparently Harvest is doing an interview with Meredith Viera on the Today show."
"You're sure it isn't live?" Tagg asked.
Given the nature of Mama Mather's power, it would be foolish to allow her access to the national media.
"Quite sure," Dragon said. "She hasn't moved from her spot, and all networks have agreed to a delay of several seconds to help stop these kind of mass control attempts."
Dragon switched the screen.
Harvest was sitting on a chair made of glass and beside her on another similar chair was Meredith Viera.
Behind them was a large window, with a moonscape outside and the Earth hanging in the sky behind them.
"It's a beautiful sight, isn't it?" Harvest asked.
"I…never expected to be doing an interview on the moon," Meredith said. She seemed to be flustered, and it looked as though her makeup hadn't been done and her hair was a little tousled.
"I'm sorry to have gotten you up early," Harvest said. "I didn't want to interrupt your normal work day, and I didn't want to wait until tomorrow because I understand there was some confusion about my actions last night."
Apparently Viera had already been informed, because she said, "It's believed you are the new Butcher. Is that true?"
"Absolutely not," Harvest said. "I abandoned the Butcher on an empty, deserted world after defeating her."
"You gain the powers of those that you…er…harvest," Viera said. "Did you harvest the Butcher?"
"Yes," Hebert said. "I rarely get exactly the same power, but typically get a weaker version that increases the more I use it until it can be quite a bit stronger than the original."
"So, if anyone were to actually kill you…"
"I might end up as a man?" Harvest said. "Maybe even a fat, old dude? I don't think anybody wants a fat, hairy, old version of me still doing my thing."
She hadn't actually answered the question, but the implication was troubling.
"So why threaten New York city if you aren't actually the Butcher?"
Harvest looked suddenly ashamed.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare anyone. It was a publicity stunt."
"What?" Meredith asked, looking shocked.
"You see, my home town is Brockton Bay. It's a wonderful town with good, honest people, but it's been abandoned by the PRT and the rest of the world for as long as I've been alive."
"Abandoned?"
Harvest nodded.
"The current director seems nice enough, but I doubt he can undo generations of neglect and incompetence. The last director was the one who managed to get a kill order signed against me based on false premises."
"Because you were murdering hundreds of people?" Viera asked. Her face paled the moment she said that.
"Don't be silly. Do you know how many Capes have higher kill counts than I do without Kill Orders?" Harvest said. She hesitated. "At least on this planet?"
"None?"
"Twelve," Harvest said.
"You've been killing people on other planets?" Meredith asked.
"I've stopped a couple of alien invasions," Harvest said. "You can't do that without racking up some numbers. But as far as human beings being killed, there's twelve in America alone."
"So why did they issue kill orders against you?"
"They were afraid I'd bring back germs from other universes," Harvest said. "Start a zombie plague or something. I'm immune to diseases!"
"Wasn't there a zombie plague in your town not that long ago?"
"That wasn't my fault! I was being attacked by the Protectorate and accidentally brought a couple of people along with me. Unfortunately, they aren't immune to disease. I had them decontaminated when we got back, but the PRT decided to experiment with the virus. Their security sucks and Bonesaw got hold of it."
Harvest grimaced.
"I'm a lot more careful now. I go through PRT approved decontamination before returning home. I can't let them get hold of any other potential super viruses."
"So, you're blaming the PRT for the zombie plague."
"I've already delivered proof to the New York Times, the Las Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Herald, and the Brockton Bay Cryer."
"Illegally gained?"
"I don't know," she said. "A whistleblower sent me the papers. Is that illegal?"
"So, you're claiming you're innocent of all charges."
"Nope. I've killed a ton of people."
Meredith seemed surprised by that.
"Because the PRT, the Protectorate and the Police in the Bay don't go after the gangs, they ruled the town in little fiefdoms. They killed thousands of people, forced others into prostitution, and they killed my father and my godfather and godmother."
"So, you killed hundreds of people to avenge your father."
"Everybody's father. In an ideal system, when everything is working, there is a social contract. When people attack you, you are supposed to go to the police, and they are supposed to get you justice."
Harvest leaned forward.
"What happens when that contract is broken? People kill you, they rape, they steal and burn, ruin lives, and when you seek justice, there is none to be had. When the contract is broken, people take justice into their own hands."
"Aren't you afraid you may have killed some innocent people?" Meredith asked "In the middle of all that death?"
"I've always tried to limit my attacks to people who are hurting other people. The Empire 88 had an initiation ritual; to get in, you had to brutalize a person of color, maybe even kill them."
Meredith didn't look surprised.
Tagg glanced at the other people around the table. They were all transfixed by the screen. Considering that it was likely that Harvest was going to slander the PRT even worse, he could understand the urge.
"Is there a reason we haven't cut the feed?" he asked.
"She released a copy of this to the Internet in Australia an hour ago," Dragon said. "It's already out there, and attempting to censor it would give some credence to her grievance."
"The ABB enslaved women and forced them into prostitution. Everyone who was a member of the organization knew what they were getting into when they joined." Harvest said. "Since that time, I've developed thinker abilities that help me to separate the guilty from the innocent."
"You're taking the law into your own hands," Meredith protested. "Being judge, jury and executioner."
"I've killed the people that I intended to kill," Harvest said. "Except for Lung. I'll get to him sooner or later."
"The news was that you killed several members of the Teeth before your…display in New York."
"That was purely self-defense," Harvest said.
"She knows we have video of her murdering Animos from behind, right?" Triumph asked incredulously.
Dragon frowned.
"You attacked them," Meredith said.
"Preemptive self-defense. They were going to attack me sooner or later, and they were terrorizing New York. There are forty-seven murders in this city attributed to them over the past two months alone."
"So, you plan to go after villains preemptively," Meredith said.
"If the PRT would do their job I wouldn't have to," Harvest said. "I've healed hundreds of people, and I've seen the results of what happens when villains are allowed to do whatever they want."
"The PRT would say that about you, too," Meredith said. "That you are dangerous, unpredictable, and that you have killed too many people not to be given a kill order, especially since the Birdcage can't hold you."
"I'll tell you what," Harvest said. "If someone will tell me where the Birdcage is, I'll go there myself."
Meredith frowned, looking confused.
Assault groaned.
"She really doesn't get it?"
Everyone else shook their heads.
"There's a lot of people with great powers in the Birdcage," Harvest said. "The more I fight, the stronger I get."
"Why," Meredith asked. "Why bother with all of this if you've already avenged your father?"
"Because I owe a debt to him," she said. "And he loved Brockton Bay. I intend to turn Brockton Bay into a thriving city again."
"How will you do that?"
"I plan to offer the Australians twenty-five gigawatts of solar power, beamed onto solar arrays in several areas of the desert. This will be beamed from the moon and will deliver power at night for eight hours a day."
"What?" Tagg said.
He hadn't heard anything about this. Who would be foolish enough to allow something like that on their land?
"I've already spoken with the Prime Minister," Harvest said.
"I'm not sure I understand," Meredith said.
"The solar panels will deliver their own power from the sun during the day. I will deliver that power for three cents a kilowatt hour, less than half the cost of coal and even less for other sources of power."
A little mental math showed that this would have the Australians paying her $750,000 dollars an hour; assuming she could only provide power for fifteen hours a day…eight hours at night, and whatever power was generated during the day, that would result in her earning something like four billion dollars a year.
The NEPEA advocates were going to have a fit, especially since they had no authority over another country.
"Australia has had a terrible time since Leviathan has crippled the shipping industry. They are highly dependent on fossil fuels from the Middle East, and the lack of power has caused continual issues which have crippled them."
There was no guarantee that the Simurgh wouldn't come back, although it wasn't certain that she could affect things on the moon. Solar panels on the ground could be replaced, though.
"This will give them the power they need to grow," Harvest said. "To help them regain what they lost when Leviathan made people too afraid to reliably ship goods."
"I'm not sure that the United States would allow you to keep that kind of money," Meredith said.
"Oh, the money wouldn't be for me. It would go directly towards starting businesses and restoring the infrastructure in the Bay. Once the Bay was restored, they'd move on to another needy town, and another."
Harvest turned and looked at the screen directly.
"My entire lifetime, people have accepted that the world is going to fall apart around them. People believe nothing matters, because no matter what we do, the government, or the Endbringers, Mannequin or any number of gang members will come and kick over our sand castles like bullies on the beach."
She pointed at the camera.
"Well, screw that! The Slaughterhouse Nine is dead. So is the Empire and the ABB. One of the Endbringers is MIA, and I will do whatever I have to get strong enough to break the others. I will not give up on this world, as much as the PRT or the government would like me to."
Meredith was quiet for a moment.
"It will probably take months to get the details worked out on this," she said. "Politics moves at a snail's pace. There are going to be people who believe that if you can beam thin sunlight over a large area, then you can make a thin beam that is powerful."
"I could," Harvest said. "But I can already destroy cities now. Why would I need to use a machine to do what I'm already more than capable of? I'm a walking nuclear weapon."
"What about accidents, or sabotage?"
"I'll hardwire everything so that the only way it could be used as a weapon was to change things at the source. Most capes seem to have trouble with their powers out here."
"And if a meteor hits it and knocks it off course?"
"It'll give people bad sunburns over the course of thirty minutes. I'll give the Australians the tools to monitor it; the first indication would be when the power stopped."
"And would other nations get similar deals?"
"Well, I'd prefer it to go to uninhabited desert areas, because it could have deleterious effects on wildlife. Also, and country which has a reciprocal agreement with the United States in reference to my Kill Order will not be served."
Harvest seemed to think for a moment.
"Oh, and fuck the CUI. I'm not doing crap for them."
There was a hint of movement from behind Harvest and the interviewer outside on the moonscape.
A figure approached. He was leaping fifty feet in the air and he didn't have a space suit on.
He was waving a faded flag.
Harvest looked back, and a look of outrage appeared on her face.
"That's a historical artifact! Loki!"
She vanished from the screen, appearing beside the man wearing giant horns. A moment later he vanished, and a moment after that they both did.
Meredith was staring at the scene behind her.
"I'm not sure what just happened, but…"
Harvest and Loki reappeared.
"Say it!" Harvest shouted.
"I will not deface a world treasure," Loki said. He said it in a monotone, but looked unrepentant. "I'm not sure why you people consider reaching your moon to be such an accomplishment. Maybe the next star, or the next galaxy, but you could almost take a balloon and reach a moon this close to your planet."
He vanished, and Harvest looked apologetic.
"I'm sorry about that," she said. "I promise I'll take better care of the moon than this in the future."
Meredith was waving her hands and sneezing, and she looked uncomfortable.
"Oh!" Harvest said. "I'm sorry! It's the moon dust! It's a real pain in the butt and it gets in everything."
She touched the interviewer and she looked immediately better. A moment later she vanished.
"I guess I'll have Loki give this place a good cleaning before I have visitors again. Anyway, don't give up, and try to make things better, ok?"
She reached for the camera, and a moment later everything went dark.
Tagg looked around, and it didn't look like anyone wanted to be the first to say something.
"Did Hebert just give Australia cheap power, and then told the U.S. and the CUI to screw off?" Shadow Stalker asked. "Because that's kind of badass."
Tagg glared at her, and he felt his headache intensifying.
If the PRT and US government refused the funds for the city, there would be a lot of questions. It would cause a diplomatic rift with the Australians too.
He wasn't looking forward to the next few days.
Appearing in the jail cell was easy. Avoiding the cameras was harder; my illusions were mental and cameras would not pick them up.
Canary was muzzled like a dog, and shackled so that she wouldn't be able to remove her muzzle. People were afraid of her, and I was here to see if that fear was warranted.
The cameras in the cell were the little black dome cameras, much like the ones in Wal-Marts or other stores. You couldn't exactly tell where they were looking, which is why I'd already appeared in the guard room, mind controlled the guards to sleep, and disconnected the cameras telekinetically, pulling multiple wires while using an implanted virus to keep the alarms from ringing.
Canary sat up and stared at me.
She was afraid; I could feel it. She knew who I was, and she knew that I went after and killed villains.
I stepped forward and touched her on the chin.
Delving into her mind, I looked for signs of guilt. Had she meant to mutilate her boyfriend? In that case, she might get along well with Lustrum in the Birdcage.
Her mind showed the truth, though. It had been an honest mistake, triggered in an act of carelessness.
"You are judged," I said, staring down at her.
I removed her muzzle telekinetically.
Keeping her from sensing what I was doing, I proceeded to beat her, and then heal her.
A NEW ASPECT OF TELPATHY HAS BEEN CREATED!
SIREN SONG!
WHILE SINGING, TELEPATHY ENCOMPASSES ANYONE WHO CAN HEAR YOU, AND YOU CAN MIND CONTROL EVERYONE WHO CAN HEAR YOU SING, WITH A PERCENTAGE ONE HALF OF NORMAL FOR TELEPATHY.
I healed her, and I found her still staring up at me.
"There's no place for you in this world," I said. "People will always be afraid of you."
"Are you going to kill me?" she asked.
"There are other worlds," I said. "The one I'm thinking about is kind of rustic, but the people there need help maintaining morale."
She'd find out about the cannibals later. There had been some attacks recently, and having her there to defend the settlement would help me a lot.
"I'm not really a rustic kind of girl," she said reluctantly.
"Well, there's always the Birdcage," I said.
"I'll take it!" she said. She lunged forward, and I allowed the manacles t drop from her hand "Please. I just can't…"
"I know," I said. "Take my hand."
A moment later, we were in the settlement.
She looked around.
"When you said rustic, I thought you meant like small town. This is…"
"Hey!" William the smaller said. "Are you the bird lady Taylor told us about?"
"Yes."
"She said you sing the prettiest songs in the whole world," William said. He looked down. "I only know three songs."
"He didn't know any before he came here," I said. "His father didn't think it was safe to make that much noise. We're trying to change that."
The other children were running up.
"She's so pretty!" "I love your feathers!" "Will you sing for us?"
Paige Maccabe had always had a void in her life. It was part of what had pushed her to become a performer; seeking adulation to replace that inexplicable thing that she couldn't describe.
What she really needed was acceptance.
The adults were approaching.
I'd already spoken with them about what she had done and what she could do, and I'd promised not to bring her if she was a danger.
They'd accept her, especially since she could keep them safe.
If she ended up truly unhappy here, I'd move her over to Harvest Earth.
Before anyone could say anything to me, I returned to Earth Bet.
Canary's power was a major boost in what I could do; with luck it would work even over live media. I'd have to hide the fact that I had it until I really needed to use it.
I was suddenly in front of a nondescript one-story urban house standing in two feet of snow.
It took less than thirty seconds to deal with the people watching the house and the surveillance systems. I'd stolen PRT manuals from PRT vans before returning them after the attack by the Fallen. I'd devoured them, and was pretty familiar with some of the PRT security setups and procedures.
I returned to the spot I'd been before, and again I was standing in the snow.
Would water control affect ice?
It was slower than what my normal control would do, but the snow moved away from my feet, and after a moment the entire driveway was cleared out.
I was wearing a non-descript hoodie, but it occurred to me that I should have been wearing something more appropriate for the weather. I was in Alaska and normal people would be wearing more than a think sweat suit.
Knocking at the door, I waited.
Lawrence Batson was a tall man with a full beard. An introvert, he didn't have a lot of friends. He did enjoy tinkering, and he enjoyed making a difference.
Despite not being a front-line fighter, he was a hero, just a quiet one.
He paled as he saw me in the door, and he gestured me inside.
"Have you thought about my proposal?" I asked.
"Are you trying to get me fired?" he asked. "I've got PRT agents watching my front door, and they've bugged my house!"
"You mean the guys across the street, and the guys in the alley behind your house? They're taking a nap right now, and their gear isn't recording."
"I'm linked in to headquarters."
"You were just sitting and reading," I said. "So, I put what was going to headquarters on a loop. We've got maybe ten minutes before they notice something is wrong."
"I'm suspended right now," he said. He looked frustrated. "They think I'm a security risk."
"You know what I want," I said. "And you know I can follow through on what I promised. The thing is, are you going to take a risk that someday your potions stop working as well?"
"I'll lose my job," he said.
"I'll get you a better one. It's not like they pay you that well, and there are people who could use your help a lot more than just giving support to people who play fight for a living."
"That's not what we do!"
"Isn't it a cop's job to put people in jail? To get justice for their victims? So, if you catch them when the cameras are rolling, and then let them go a week later, are you really doing anything for anybody?"
"I'm not going to argue with you," he said.
"Are you going to take the deal?" I asked. I looked around. His place was spartan, but it looked like he shared an interest in science fiction and fantasy with me. He had the largest television I'd seen in a home. It was too large for the room, frankly.
He frowned, and started to shake his head.
"They don't respect you, you know," I said. "You don't go out and kick heads with them, and deep down, some of them think it's because you are a coward. If a tinker made a machine to dispense the potions you make, they'd be just as happy."
I wasn't sure that was true or not, but he was afraid it was, and so he finally nodded.
Before he could change his mind, I beat him and took some of his blood.
NEW TINKER SPECIALIZATION!
CHEMICAL TINKER!
TINKER SPECIALIZATIONS ARE NOW AT THE LOW INTERSTELLAR LEVEL WHILE ALL OTHER TINKER SKILLS ARE AT HIGH INTERPLANETARY!
I could feel my mind flooding with concepts. I now knew how to place people in suspended animation. I could create robots to take sperm and eggs and create new life when an automated probe reached another star.
I could build generation ships, solar sails powered by lasers from the home solar system. I could build slightly faster than light drives, although it would still take years to get to the nearest stars.
Theories about higher level skills were there, but no practical applications. They seemed tantalizingly close.
I could build bombs unlike anything people had yet conceived. I could utilize antigravity to make life aboard ship easier; I could only do it with the largest ships, and it was power intensive, but it could be done.
I touched Cask on the head, and I healed him.
I released him from the illusion a moment later, and he staggered back.
"What did you do to me?" he asked.
"Healed you."
"The headaches are gone!" he said. He stared at his hand wonderingly.
"Just pretend you still have them for a while," I said. "You've probably got until your next checkup in three months before they'll realize I got to you."
"They'll know," he said glumly. "Even if they just see your footprints in the snow."
"What footprints?" I asked. I opened the door, and he stared.
"Did you just appear in my house and make me think you were at the door?"
"That would be rude," I said.
I probably should have done that, really. I could have communicated with him from a distance, then attacked him when he was in the hallway between the living room and the bathroom where there was a gap in the camera coverage.
"If you need a job, just let me know," I said. "I can always use parahuman help."
"For what?"
"Saving the world," I said.
A moment later, I blinked out. It took a little longer to restore everything else than it had to cut them off, but I took care of it anyway.
After that, headed for Canada. It had been harder to find Toybox that I would have thought. Even when they interacted with clients, they didn't let them know the location of their base.
I suspected that their base was in a pocket dimension, given the abilities of one of the tinkers.
However, there had to be a link to this world, and I'd eventually found out where it was. They didn't have anyone who could build teleportation devices, and so they had to travel from the portal to wherever they were going.
All it took was physically placing some spy devices on a few surveillance satellites and I was able to piggyback onto them to notice unusual travel patterns.
It was here, in an outhouse on a small farm near Toronto that seemed like the most likely spot.
A quick check inside with an eye showed only an empty void, not the disgusting thing that I'd half expected.
I knocked on the door to the outhouse.
The farmhouse was abandoned, and looked like it had seen better days. The walls were reinforced, though, and there were weapons hidden all over the farm designed to kill intruders.
The Slaughterhouse Nine wouldn't have had trouble with these defenses, but regular people would have.
I kept knocking, and eventually a voice called out "Occupied."
"I'm here to make a deal," I said.
"You've got the wrong place," the voice said.
"Well, I suppose I could tell people where this is on PHO. There's a lot of people who'd be interested to hear anything I have to say."
There was a long pause before the voice said, "What do you want?"
"To copy your powers. It doesn't have to hurt."
"That's a tall order. It would allow you to set yourself up in competition with us."
"You're a little small time for me," I said. "I'm negotiating with nations and dealing with billions of dollars. You guys are dealing with what, a few hundred million a year at best?"
"What would you have to offer?"
"Alien technology?" I said. "Also, I'm able to build tinker tech that can be replicated and maintained. I haven't told anyone else, but each tinker I gain gives me greater skills in all my tinker specialties. I could build a light speed drive right now and sell it to any government in the world. I could also tell them how to make the tools to make the tools that they'd need to build it."
"So, you are saying you could make our tech replicable?" the voice suddenly sounded interested.
"Depends on what level you're working at, but yeah. I can also give healing to anybody that needs it, and I can get you copies of Titanic from a world where Leonardo DiCaprio was the lead instead of Mathew McConaughey."
"Was it better?"
"From what I saw of it, it was," I said. "Earned like a billion dollars or something."
I'd dropped in on Harvester Earth to see how they were doing. They had been making great strides in using the alien ships to lift things into orbit. I'd helped them lift some hundred-ton pieces into orbit and I'd talked with President Whitmore again.
I'd also thrown Chort a few five-gallon water bottles and some dried foods and canned food. I hadn't given him a can opener. He was able to pull the tops off with his strength easily enough.
He was still on Mama Mather's side.
"All right," the voice said. "My colleagues say you'll just find us when we leave and cause trouble."
"Well, I wish you wouldn't sell to villains," I admitted. "But…"
"Step into the outhouse," the voice said.
"I don't think there has ever been a time where that was a good idea," I said. "But I've got bigger fish to fry."
I stepped inside, and a moment later I found myself inside a showroom.
I could sense the others now; they were watching me carefully, but now that they saw me, I could sense through them.
"I can't believe she would just come to our own home," a woman said. "Can't we just collapse that section of the universe around her and get rid of her?"
I blinked behind them.
"You probably can't," I said.
They whirled around, startled and horrified.
"But if you try, you'll make me stronger, so go ahead."
"We aren't villains," the woman said hurriedly.
"You sounded like them a minute ago. You sell to a lot of villains. Why shouldn't I just Harvest you all?"
"We can be useful!"
"She can be useful," I said, pointing at Cranial. "She can restore memories, and I'm planning to restore my father. She might be useful."
"You said you'd make a deal," the man said. He was reaching for a button on his control pad.
I allowed him to spray me with flames. I used my control over flames to keep the flames away from me, and the absorb the heat from the flames.
It wasn't that I couldn't take the heat; my clothes couldn't, though.
A moment later, I was behind Pyrotechnical. I proceeded to beat him, and I used the flames to conceal what I was doing from some of them.
NEW TINKER SPECIALTY!
FIRE TECHNOLOGY!
TINKER SPECIALTIES ARE NOW AT MID-INTERPLANETARY LEVELS!
Cranial gave me MEMORY TECHNOLOGY!
It was able to do more than she used it for. I could make brain downloads now and copies those thoughts and memories into a new cloned body. There was no continuity of consciousness, though. It would strictly be a copy.
Big Rig gave me CONSTRUCTION DRONES!
That would let me build drones that would themselves build things, including buildings. That was exactly the kind of thing that I wanted.
The biggest problem with tinkertech was that it took time and effort to build. If I could build devices that would do all the work for me, then I could actually start doing things.
I was now at low intergalactic levels.
I could create star drives that would allow travel to the nearest galaxy in the space of only a few years.
The last of them was Bauble.
YOU HAVE GAINED A NEW TINKER SPECIALTY!
GLASS TECHNOLOGY!
YOU CAN CREATE TOOLS AND ARTIFACTS OUT OF GLASS AS WELL AS ALTER GLASS IN INTERESTING WAYS!
TINKER SPECIALITIES NOW HAVE A MID-INTERGALACTIC LEVEL!
When I was done, I asked them, "Where are the others?"
"Out on assignment," Cranial said shortly.
"Well, anyway, I've gotten what I've come for," I said. "So, the question is how I'm going to pay you."
I though for a moment, going through the new plans in my head. What would interest them…oh, there.
"How about replicable antigravity?"
"What?"
"I can't make a zero-point module, not yet, but soon," I said. "Antigravity is the best I can do, unless you want something in particular."
"That will be…fine," Pyrotechnical said slowly. "When did you take our powers?"
"Oh, a little bit ago."
I gestured, and glass came from my inventory. I used my power to create plates, etching the instructions in 3-d inside the glass. It was going to take a thousand plates to get through all of it, and given the fact that their lack of specialization in this would make it difficult to understand, I suspected that it would take them a coupe of years to get it.
By then, everything should be dealt with one way or another, and they were welcome to whatever profits they made. Building the factories would take longer, and at the end of the sheets, I'd offered suggestions to subtly alter the tech to make it tinkertech if they didn't want to share the technology.
I also included some blurbs about how Brockton Bay had a lot of factories they could get for cheap.
"Well, it's been pleasure doing business with you."
YOU HAVE GAINED +40% PLANAR AFFINITY TO DIMENSION TOYBOX.
Sweet.
"I might call Cranial again when I'm ready to resurrect my father," I said. "I'll pay in cash, or possibly in gold. I'm not sure which, yet."
A moment later I blinked away.
I felt the world twist around me.
Crap.
It was a misfire.
The world changed around me, showing me an unfamiliar scene.
I found myself in a large oval room. There was computer equipment along the walls. I was standing on a lower level, with a raised area behind three seats in the center of the room.
There were people everywhere wearing one-piece outfits. They were wearing different colors, but everyone was wearing the same basic outfit; it was likely a uniform.
The tech level seemed to be mid-interstellar; most of the people were humans, although I saw some variants who could be mutants, or possibly ridiculously human looking aliens.
They appeared to be moving very slowly, indicating that they had human reaction speeds. They were drawing sidearms. These looked like they were some sort of energy weapons.
Everyone within the range of my empathy was worried; not because of me, but because of some other threat.
A quick look through their minds showed me that they were in route to fight an existential threat. They were all on edge, which is why I found myself hit by four different energy weapons.
-1 HP
NEW RESISTANCE CREATED!
ENERGY RESISTANCE! THIS RESISTANCE APPLIES TO ALL ENERGY TYPES AND STACKS WITH LASER RESISTANCE AND SOMETIMES WITH PHYSICAL RESISTANCE.
1%
-1 HP
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-1 HP
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-1 HP
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
I ignored the damage, and lifted my hands.
"I come in peace?"
The leader, a man with pointed ears stood up. His mind was a pleasure to read; most human minds were chaotic and scattered; his was more like crystal, shining brightly. Underneath it all there was a layer of unexpressed rage. He controlled it through rigid discipline.
His culture was actually alien, although not nearly as much as that of the Harvesters.
"Please stop reading our minds," he said calmly. "Humans consider it to be intrusive."
He was a touch telepath.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm a bit lost, and it seemed the expedient way to learn where I am."
"Who are you, ad how did you come here?"
"I'm Taylor Hebert, and I'm an interdimensional traveler. I had a mishap while traveling. Are we close to Earth?"
"We were leaving the system as you arrived," he said. "Unfortunately, the mission we are on now is of crucial importance, and we cannot divert course."
"Well, if someone will show me the way back, I'll just go home."
I'd look around for a while, of course. This was the first advanced society that I'd seen, and they might have solved some of the problems my society was facing right now. I didn't mind cheating if it would help people.
"I fear that we are currently unable to assist you," he said. "We will be at our destination within eight hours, and hopefully we will be back within a couple of days. I am sure that Starfleet would be interested in your experiences."
I frowned.
A couple of days on a Starship? It'd make a nice change anyway. Maybe I'd get to look through their databanks and see what I could find out.
"Mr. Sisco, would you escort our guest to quarters?"
A bald black man stood up and nodded.
"If you will follow me," he said.
Shrugging, I followed him into an elevator at the back of the bridge. I'd been in tinkertech elevators before, and I suspected that this elevator didn't just go up or down. I didn't feel any inertia, though. That was something that any medium interstellar civilization should be able to manage.
Two other men stepped into the elevator with me.
"I noticed that our phasers didn't seem to have much of an effect on you," he said.
"Actually, they did, a little. Would it be possible to have your men here hit me a few more times?"
He turned and stared at me.
"I have an adaptive physiology," I said. "The more I'm exposed to something, the less it affects me."
"What are you?" he asked.
Shrugging, I said, "Like I said, I'm an interdimensional traveler."
"You don't seem to have any equipment."
"I don't need any," I said. "I've got abilities beyond those of mortal men."
"And where did you get those?"
"I don't know," I said. "Powers just started showing up thirty years ago on my Earth. Nobody knows why."
"Your outfit is…twentieth century?"
He was interested for some reason. Was he a historian, or some kind of hobbyist?
"Twenty first," I said. "2011."
"They still had baseball back then!" he said. "Did you ever go to a game?"
"I went to a Red Sox game with my Dad when I was ten," I said.
His face lit up.
"I can show it to you if you'd like?" I said. "I'm a telepath after all."
For a moment, he looked tempted, but then he shook his head.
"I'd like to trade some technology when you get done with whatever you're doing," I said.
He shook his head.
"We won't do that. Our Prime Directive forbids interfering in the development of pre-warp civilizations?"
"How about post warp?" I asked. "We've got mad scientists, and I'm a power copier. I've got a design for a Slipstream drive that could take you to the closest galaxy in twenty years."
He frowned.
"I'd have to consult my superiors, and we'd have to find a compromise that wouldn't affect the development of your civilization too much."
The elevator door opened, and I found myself in a long hall. Everything was incredibly clean, and I wondered if they had some kind of Roomba to take care of everything, or if there were some poor ensigns using a vacuum cleaner.
"How about robots?" I asked. "You could probably automate half the stuff on this vessel and get rid of most of your crew."
A glance at my guards and I said, "No offense."
"We've grown beyond profit," he said stiffly. "And we don't have money."
"But you still have unions, am I right?" I said. "Like padding the payroll and all that? My dad was in a Union; I know how it works."
"Every person on this crew has a vital role to play," Sisco said stiffly.
For some reason, he almost seemed happy to send me into my room. He did give me a tour; he showed me how to use the restroom and the replicator.
"You won't be able to make weapons with this," he said. "Or poisons."
"Will it duplicate clothing?" I asked. "Or do I have to have it scanned?"
He frowned.
"I can get you a scanner," he said. "Why?"
I made my last clean Armani suit appear in my hand and my best hoodie.
"Could you get these scanned, and get the original back to me? You can call this one Red Armani, and the other Hoodie 2011."
He seemed impatient to leave, but he handed the items off to someone else, and a moment later they were gone.
I received a message a few minutes later that the clothing had been scanned.
I grinned.
"Computer, can you make me fifty copies of a Red Armani suit, and fifty copies of Hoodie 2011?"
I grinned as the items appeared in front of me.
Perfect.
"She's spent the last four hours reading about our history and our sociology," Sisco said. "She hasn't tried to access any data about technology."
The captain frown, steepling his fingers.
"If she truly is from the twenty first century, it is possible that knowledge of sociology could be considered a violation of the Prime Directive."
"Well, she says that she is not from our timeline," a crewman I didn't know said. "And we haven't passed any sort of temporal prime directive yet."
I was watching through Benjamin Sisco's eyes. I'd been watching through the senses of all of the crewmen who had seen me except the Captain, since he'd sense me doing it.
I wasn't sure what kind of sensors the ship would have, so I avoided sending Arcane Eyes out.
"Perhaps we should limit her access," the Captain said after a moment.
"She's also been listening to music the entire time, for twenty years in her future."
I had the ability to control minds through song; I needed cool songs to sing. Fortunately, I'd been able to keep the songs on low and I was able to multitask well enough to do both at once.
I'd been confused at first. Their society seemed to be pretty utopian, at least on the inner worlds of the Federation. There was no racism, at least among humans. There was apparently some for foes of the Federation, especially the Cardassians.
There was no poverty, probably because replicators could make anything small and energy was almost free.
There were things that could not be replicated; land for example, and status, and in the absence of money, these were the things people competed over.
My quarters were pretty spacious; much larger than what I'd had at home. The officers received their own rooms, but the Ensigns had to share rooms.
Rank came with privileges, and people saw doing the grunt work as a stepping stone to better things, the same way that people in my time started at the bottom.
Strife was relatively rare. Almost everyone in this society seemed to toe the party line that the Federation's way of doing things was the best.
I would have assumed that this was just propaganda, that what people said in public and what they thought in private were totally different.
However, every mind that I could reach seemed to believe it fervently.
It took almost an hour for me to find out how they'd done it.
The people of the Federation were indoctrinated from the beginning of their lives. They had holodeck programs involving children's characters who taught that cooperation and sharing were more important than individualism.
Holodecks were much more powerful than television had been, because they were completely immersive. They were the ultimate iteration of video game technology, and apparently there were people who became addicted to them.
The message was continued in school, and it was everywhere to the point that they thought of any other way of living as lesser.
Their psychiatrists were better too; genetic enhancement was forbidden in the Federation, but correcting defects was not. Mental illness as much less frequent because genetic predispositions had been eliminated.
Of course, anyone could get post traumatic stress disorder, but the people who did were treated as quickly as possible.
Without the stresses of poverty, institutional racism or injustice, and through the use of a system that was ultimately fair, they'd managed to almost stomp out a lot of problems that plagued my world.
The order to curtail my searches hadn't come through yet, so I said, "Computer, can I get copies of the information I have been studying bound into book form?
The moment they were created, I devoured the books.
NEW SKILL CREATED!
UTOPIAN SOCIOLOGY!
YOU NOW KNOW HOW TO CHANGE SOCIETY FOR THE BETTER…AT LEAST AS FAR AS YOU ARE CONCERNED.!
I should have started with this instead of actually reading anything.
"Computer!" I said. "Can you tell me about the Borg?"
Apparently, no one had thought to censor this information, and so I was given what little information the Federation had on it.
I listened in to the officer's meeting as well. They'd stopped discussing me and were now discussing their upcoming conflict with their enemy.
"We don't know enough about the capabilities of these Borg," the security officer said. "The Enterprise was forced to run from them, and our own capabilities aren't nearly as good as theirs."
They were barely close enough for me to telepathically read what they all knew; the Enterprise, whatever that was had phasers that were eight times as powerful and shields that were three and a half times as strong, and they'd been forced to run.
What chance did they have?
They were all afraid that they were going to throw their lives away for nothing. However, the Borg were coming straight toward Earth, killing everyone they encountered.
"It'll be a single ship against forty-two of ours," a staff officer I didn't know said.
"It may not be enough," Sisco said. "I wish we'd had a chance to evacuate the civilians."
He had a wife on board this ship, and a child. There were a lot of non-combatants on board, and I had to wonder how confident these people were of their capabilities.
I certainly wouldn't have taken Dad to an unknown dimension. Loki, sure. He could survive in a vacuum and was pretty tough, enough that I could get him out of most situations before he died.
But bringing three-year-old children on war missions? That seemed a little weird to me.
I grimaced and closed my eyes.
As they discussed their respective ship capabilities, I realized that while phaser pistols wouldn't give me much in the way of trouble, ship phasers would kill me. They did fifteen million times the damage of a hand phaser, and there was no way I could survive fifteen million Hit points of damage.
Even in my armored form I'd take 150,000 hit points of damage.
I couldn't see how to get enough resistance to defend myself against it either. I could shoot myself with a phaser, and gain maybe another five percent boost before I was ten times as resistant and immune.
Their phaser rifles could give me another ten times the damage resistance before I was immune.
After that, though, there was a gap where I'd still die from a single shot from their smaller ship weapons.
Yet I was going to be seven light years from home, stranded if this all went wrong suggested that I should try to help these people, even if they didn't really want my help.
The danger was that they would misinterpret my attempts to help, and that they would be distracted from doing whatever they needed to do to survive the upcoming battle was another problem.
They obviously were monitoring my computer and replicator use. Did they have cameras on me?
I opened the door to my quarters.
"Say," I said. "Am I confined to quarters, or is there anywhere else I can go?"
"We're going into battle soon," the guard on the left said. His name was Peterson. "Everybody is confined to quarters."
"What if we have to abandon ship?" I asked. "Isn't it important that I know the way to the escape pods?"
Peterson frowned, then looked at his partner. He sighed, then nodded.
Perfect.
I smiled as I moved through the halls, making eye contact with as many people in the halls as I could. The two men showed me the escape pods, and what to do, and then they escorted me back to my quarters.
I gained another ten people I could use to spy on the ship. Considering that there were only thirty-five crewmen and an equal number of civilians on board, I could now use mind's eye on half the crew.
I was also able to listen in telepathically to the civilians close enough to my quarters. They were afraid too, even the children who were learning calculus at the age of three.
Maybe what I really should have been studying was their educational methods.
Despite listening for hours, and using the senses of engineers at consoles to gain ideas about the ship's capabilities, I had no idea about what I could do to help.
There were people studying the known capabilities and sizes of the Borg cubes, and they absolutely dwarfed the size of this vessel.
This ship, the USS Saratoga was a Miranda Class vessel. It was 833 feet long, 522 feet wide and 200 feet tall. It weighed 655,000 metric tons, so there was no way I'd be able to plane shift it out of harm's way or teleport it, unless I was in wolf form and enlarged.
Now that growth and wolf form were leveled up, wolf form gave me a +20 strength to 88 and growth gave me +60% to my strength- to 140.
Instead of 128 tons, with every five points doubling my strength, I'd be able to lift a little over two million tons.
It suddenly occurred to me that I could now transport large objects to other worlds, objects as large as four skyscrapers. I could transport entire spaceships.
Probably not the Borg ship. It was 9000 feet on each side, and was estimated as weighing ninety million metric tons.
I heard an announcement over the intercom.
"Battle stations," the captain's calm voice said.
Staring out the window, I could see the battle as the ship stopped suddenly.
For some reason the ships had all gotten within visual range of each other. The Borg cube was impossible to miss.
I saw a massive piece of metal flying by outside of my window, not a hundred feet away. There were corpses floating in the vacuum, expressions of horror on their faces.
They were using cutting beams to cut the ships into pieces; from what I'd heard during the meeting they probably intended to assimilate the materials and they didn't want the ships to explode like Federation starships tended to do.
That…seemed like a design flaw.
I was a little suspicious of using plasma as a fuel source, especially for control consoles. Some of the crewmen were worried about their consoles exploding on them.
Well, I guess I needed to see what I could do. I was going to need to be undetected, but there was an unavoidable element of risk. If a Federation ship happened to hit the part of the cube I landed on, I'd die.
Switching to metal, I took a deep breath.
A moment later I was in deep space.
On the surface, the interior of the Borg cube seemed to be one continuous unit. However, with the knowledge my tinker skills gave me, I could see that it was composed of distinctive parts of different ships made to look like they were the same.
Different species tended to prefer different materials; sometimes due to availability and sometimes due to cultural reasons. I could see faint signs everywhere that this ship was composed of the corpses of other ships.
Probably no two Borg ships were exactly alike, even if their overall design was standardized.
The narrow warren of hallways dimly lit were almost Dickensian; why bother with providing an enjoyable environment when you didn't care about the worker at all? They provided the bare minimum of lighting, heating and cooling to be efficient.
It contrasted with the Federation ship, which had wide corridors, bright lighting and a cheerful look. Those ships were designed to keep their occupants happy.
The Borg, frankly, didn't seem to care.
Looking at the place made me want to go back to cannibal world and make the settlement more cheerful looking.
The Borg themselves were cybernetic organisms; they ignored me entirely, as though having an intruder on board was of no concern.
Hearing a step behind me, I turned and saw what had once been a woman. Half her body was gone, replaced with cybernetic parts.
She stepped around me, only registering me as a piece of debris, like a piece of equipment left on the floor. I touched a piece of exposed skin and plunged my mind into hers.
On the surface, it felt like she was in a dream, her body a puppet controlled by something I couldn't sense. Borg telepathy wasn't telepathy at all; it was some sort of technological contrivance.
Further down, though, I could feel her mind screaming. Shewa's a mother, and she'd watched her children being cut down, her family and friends murdered, her husband dismembered. Her entire world had been destroyed. Only the fact that she was walking around in a living nightmare kept her from simply letting herself sleep.
I checked several others, and the story was always the same. The ones that had been in the collective longer were more deeply asleep, but ultimately, none of them was happy to be there.
This was a ship filled with slaves.
I felt conflicted. I could simply start using Bone Garden in as many places as I could, but even asleep the slaves knew some things.
This ship was only one of tens of thousands. Their empire was busy devouring an entire other part of the galaxy, but they fully expected to have the entire galaxy devoured in a couple of hundred years.
After that, they'd spread out to other galaxies, devouring them one after another until they had taken the entire universe.
They didn't know about other universes yet, but I had no doubt they'd be interested in spreading sideways as well as upward and out.
Yet if I didn't do anything, this ship would destroy the fleet outside and go on to assimilate the Earth. After that, they'd devour the rest of humanity and the other races that were part of the Federation.
These people were space hippies, but they didn't deserve that.
Maybe it would be a mercy killing?
I could heal these people's bodies, but I couldn't automatically remove their implants. I couldn't inventory parts of things, not even just stains. I could rip their arms off easily enough, but replacing internal parts would be harder, and there were 76,000 drones on this ship.
Repairing even a single drone would take time. 76,000 would take a long time.
Revealing too many of my capabilities would draw the entire Borg fleet here; they'd see humanity the same way I saw a tasty new power.
It would be almost irresistible.
I hesitated for almost thirty seconds; that was a long time considering the speed I was moving and thinking at.
My best bet was to allow Starfleet to destroy the Borg in a way that was both believable, but not too attention gathering.
People were dying outside every second that I delayed, though, so I had to make a decision.
I plunged into the mind of a drone, getting all the information I could about shield frequencies and the like. I learned that part of the reason the Borg was having such an easy time of it was that they'd assimilated the captain of the Flagship.
I released some of my glass from my inventory, and I began to shape it in my mind. The Borg were using nanites, but they were a couple of levels below my own technology. I was able to build devices that could build other devices, and it was possible to build devices to destroy just as easily.
The Borg wanted to assimilate people?
I began creating my own nanites out of pure hardened glass. They would gain energy from the environment, and they would use something similar to transporter technology to turn material into other devices similar to themselves.
The glass became a cloud around me, invisible to the naked eye, but I sent it into the walls of the ship. They weren't there to destroy the ship itself; instead they were going to destroy the nanites that allowed the ship to heal itself.
It was going to take time for the whole thing to work, and in the meantime, I scanned several drones, gaining as much technical information as each of them had.
I knew where the shield generators were, and I knew what their shield frequencies were.
The first thing that my nanites were focusing on was the subspace relays connecting this collective to the others. The moment I felt that connection go down, I moved.
I blinked toward the last known location of Locutus, and I inventoried him.
This cut him off from the collective, and the Borg surrounded me instantly turned and pulled their weapons.
-1 HP!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-1 HP!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-1 HP!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-1 HP!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
Their weapons were having minimal effect, and so I could sense that they were bringing up heavier weapons.
I lashed out, punching a human looking Borg in the head. These drones all had restorative nanites, something that I was going to look into when everything was done. Maybe I could give Dad some of these.
The drone wasn't a human though. They were from a telepathic species with long range telepathy. Betazoids?
TELEPATHY HAS GONE UP BY TWO LEVELS!
YOU CAN NOW READ AND CONTROL INDIVIDUALS WITHIN A 2560 FOOT RADIUS!
I hit a Vulcan Borg.
TELEPATHY HAS GONE UP BY ONE LEVEL!
YOU CAN NOW READ AND CONTROL INDIVIDUALS WITHIN A 5120 FOOT RADIUS!
A Klingon gave me +2 STRENGTH, to a 70, doubling my normal strength to 256 tons.
I blinked back to the bridge of the Miranda.
Before anyone could react, I mind controlled the officer in charge of communications. He used some esoteric method to broadcast a message to the 30 ships remaining in the fleet.
I could feel the despair everywhere in the ship, and I assumed everyone else in the fleet felt the same. They believed they were all going to die, and that Earth was going to follow, because they were the last, real line of defense.
I'd only hard this song a couple of hours before, but it seemed appropriate to the situation.
"You're broken down and tired,
Of living life on a merry go round,
And you can't find the fighter,
But I see it in you and we're gonna work it out."
As my voice spread out over thousands of miles, I felt myself connecting, to one, to two, ten, a hundred, a thousand mind.
Soon I felt six thousand minds connecting to mine, and fifty percent of them were under my control.
I gave them the frequencies of the Borg shields. They'd change them almost immediately, but it didn't matter.
"And we'll rise up,
We'll rise like the day,
We'll rise up,
We'll rise unafraid,
We'll rise up,
And we'll do it a thousand times again."
I'd changed the lyrics slightly, but it didn't matter. I was linked to the Betazeds in the fleet, and they could sense the dismay of the Borg as their shield generators flickered due to the damage from my nanite drones.
All thirty ships remaining in the fleet fired at the same time and there were explosions all over the hull of the Borg ship. For a moment I felt hopeful.
It was a lot of firepower they were throwing at the ship, right through the hull, but when the debris stopped showering, the Borg adapted. Their shield frequencies changed.
They lashed out, and I granted precognition to the pilot of the ship I was in. Phasers moved at the speed of light, but he knew where the beams would hit before they were fired.
The ship jerked hard to the right, and everyone was thrown to the side. I stood using wall crawling, and continued to sing.
It wasn't going to be enough. The Federation simply didn't have the firepower to deliver on the opening I'd bought them.
I changed into wolf form, and allowed myself to grow.
My feet were firmly planted, and I could feel my strength growing exponentially even as I continued singing.
I could feel the pilot's certainty that even with precognition we would be hit, and then a moment later we weren't there anymore.
My song was interrupted when I jumped, but it didn't matter.
The Borg ship had large empty sections inside, using to devour the ships they captured and disassemble them for materials.
"Fire," I commanded.
The people on this ship were still under my command, and they launched all the photon torpedoes they could launch at the same time.
In this relatively confined space, they would have died, killed by their own torpedoes, especially as there was air inside the space which helped the explosions propagate much better.
Before impact, though, we were already in another space and we were firing phasers even as the crews loaded the next set of torpedoes.
I could feel tractor beams trying to hold us in place, but it didn't matter. First, we were here, and a moment later we were in a third spot, launching more photon torpedoes.
The Borg cube wasn't completely helpless even from the inside, but the interior force shields weren't meant to deal with ships blasting away at them. Ships were supposed to be assimilated before being taken inside for disassembly.
The captain stepped up behind me; he was one of those who were not under my command. His mental training and psychic abilities gave him a measure of resistance.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Saving the fleet," I said, looking back at him for a moment. I was now nine feet tall at the shoulder, and he stared up at me.
I could feel the moment that the Borg came back into connection with the Greater collective.
Apparently, their nanites had been attempting to adapt to mine, and even though mine were better technologically, they were outnumbered, even as they replicated themselves.
They were designed to self-destruct before allowing themselves to be assimilated. The last thing I needed was for the greater collective to gain access to much better assimilation nanites.
I blinked the Saratoga to the outer limits of my ability to blink, a trillion mile away, and then I returned.
Locutus reemerged from Inventory, looking confused as the link to the Collective was restored with a three-minute gap in memory.
He was fully connected, and as the Borg had given him a higher position than the others, something new that they were trying out, he had a heightened connection to the collective.
I returned to my regular form, and I began to sing.
"Do you hear the people sing,
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again."
I felt him connecting to the collective, and they were all listening to me as one. I pushed my will on them; as they all sensed me, I could feel them in return.
With the exception of those who had been raised as Borg since they were infants, they were all angry. They had all been ripped from their homes, they'd seen friends and neighbors slaughtered and converted.
Even as I sang the Les Miserables song, I felt a sense of connection with my mother. She'd loved this play, and she'd given a love of it to me. She'd be thrilled that I was using it to save lives.
"Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade,
Is there a world you want to see?
Then join in the fight,
That will give you the right to be free."
I held it out in front of them. The dream that most of them had long since given up; freedom.
I was connected now to one trillion, two trillion, four trillion souls.
I was only controlling half of them, but that was enough. The collective as a whole tried to cut the connection, to sacrifice Cubes that were acting as relays.
Inside the ships, Borg were fighting with Borg. They were not slaves, not in this moment, and they knew that this might be their only chance to actually win their freedom.
The other Borg, the ones who were still slaves had the advantage of the group mind, but what they had in organization, they lost in creativity.
The singular Borg knew the technology of the cubes, and they turned it against their oppressors. They sent enemy Borg flying out into space by creating explosions.
In some cases, they purposefully destroyed their own cubes when it became apparent that they were not going to win.
In other cases, there were Borg who'd been programmers in their previous lives. They hadn't known the programming code the Borg used before, but they did now, and they were using viruses to disable entire clusters of cubes.
I sang and I continued to sing, repeating the song, and then singing Freedom.
The Borg in this ship were fighting each other. I held the Borg in front of me in tight control, and I continued to sing.
-1 HP
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE
They were flooding the chamber I was in with poison gas. I no longer needed to breath, and the Borg I was singing to no longer needed to either.
They began venting the air from the chamber; even if I didn't need to breathe, I needed to be heard to project my will.
I released some glass from inventory, and it surrounded the Borg and me, leaving a thin atmosphere inside.
-100 POINTS
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
Fuck.
They were trying to transport me outside, and my body was interpreting that as an attempt to disintegrate me.
Borg had anti-transport technology, so I hugged the Borg in front of me, and forced him to surround me with the field even as I continued singing.
If it was part of the collective, the Borg could have dropped the field, but they couldn't force it to stop at the moment.
I began to sing Rise Up again, this time focusing my power on the collective.
Even in this cube, there were Borg who were killing other Borg. They were doing everything they could to disrupt the collective, including using the viruses that had been created by 5283 different programmers that were now being disseminated from Cube to cube.
The collective was trying to fight the viruses at the same time as they were dealing with sabotage from their own people.
I couldn't teleport; even the moment of disconnection would be enough to give the collective time to reestablish control.
I flew through the vacuum, carrying my glass sphere and Borg with me, and as I got close enough to one wall, I tore at the wall telekinetically.
They finally got the idea to transport the glass sphere surrounding us, and in that moment everything went silent.
The connection to the greater collective vanished a moment later.
The saboteurs had finished their work.
Space ships required constant maintenance, which meant that a determined saboteur could do an incredible amount of damage without even trying.
I blinked away from Locutus, and I blinked to the central hub. A moment later, smoke began to expend in all directions.
It was a moment later that the mini-collective collapsed.
The Borg who had been fighting my Borg immediately stopped and stood confused.
A check of the minds of the drones within reach showed that the Federation ships had been doing cosmetic damage only. Even the damage the ship had done from the inside had been healing itself; the main effect had been to damage the power for the weapons systems.
I blinked back to the captain, who was waking up.
Taking him with me to the spot I'd found him in originally, I prompted him to speak on the communications array.
"This is Jean Luc Picard," he said. He sounded traumatized. "Cease fire. The Borg ship has been neutralized."
There was silence from the other side of the line.
"How can we believe that?" I heard a voice on the other end of the line demand.
"There has been a mutiny on board," Captain Picard said. "And the ship is now ours."
"I took over their minds," I said, peeking around the corner. "Same as I did yours."
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"Who is this?"
"Taylor Hebert!" I said brightly. "Captain T'Pok can recommend me."
"I barely know her," T'Pok said over the line. "However, I think we should speak with her."
Privately I was worried.
Although some of the cubes had freed themselves, others hadn't, and it was only a matter of time before the collective managed to regain or destroy its other assets.
It might be months, or it might be years, but when they finally did, I had no doubt that they would be coming to Earth in force.
Maybe I needed to try to negotiate with them to send engineers to Harvester Earth while I helped them speed up their reverse engineering of Borg tech.
I had some designs that might give them even more of a boost, both in defensive and offensive technologies. I'd have to limit myself to things they could make the tools for, but replicators would make that a lot easier.
Hopefully I hadn't screwed up their timeline entirely. I'd just have to do better.
