"Brockton Bay PRT speaking," the voice on the other end of the line said professionally. "How may I direct your call?"
"This is Harvest. Put me through to Dragon," I said.
"We've had a dozen people pretending to be Harvest in the last week," he said. "How do I know you are who you say you are?"
"Well, Kevin," I said. "I could talk about the fact that you watch My Little Pony whenever you think nobody is looking, or the fact that you listen to Barry Manilow."
I could hear a choking sound on the other end of the line. When I'd been at the bottom of the Bay listening to the thoughts of the PRT agents, I'd caught some stray thoughts that were mildly incriminating.
"I just killed Heartbreaker, and I've got his kids. I could drop them off in your lobby, but I'm not sure you guys are equipped to handle seven of eight Masters at the same time. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure Van Murder guy will be happy to deal with them."
"I'll patch you through," he said.
Welcome to M/S containment, Kevin.
A moment later, Dragon was on the line.
"Hey Dragon," I said. "I just killed Heartbreaker, but since you asked it as a favor, I've kept them all alive."
"What?"
"I could stick them in the PRT vacation spot, maybe on Madagascar, but that would mean I had to feed them, and Chort already eats enough for ten people."
"You took all of their powers."
"Maybe I didn't," I said. "Maybe it's too much power for one person to be trusted….ha ha ha…just kidding. Yeah. I've got all their powers, and so do they."
She was silent for a long moment, and I was sure that she was patching someone else on the line.
"This is Chief Director Costa Brown," I heard a clipped voice say.
The voice sounded familiar; my enhanced hearing made that somewhat clearer. I couldn't put my finger on it.
"Where do you want me to put these kids?" I asked. "I've stuffed them into a minivan, but I'm pretty sure that you don't just want me dropping them off in front of the New York PRT."
"We do not," she said.
"I'm sure Dragon has a top-secret jail filled with robot guards," I said. "Violating all sorts of human rights. That's the perfect place for these guys…they're pretty much jerks, even if it's their father's fault."
"I do not have secret prisons!" Dragon protested.
"Where's the Birdcage then?" I asked.
She fell silent.
"There is an asylum in Canada," she said. She hesitated. "The people inside are not villains. They need special help."
"I don't steal powers from heroes," I said. "And not from crazy people either…. well, except for the ones who attack me. That's pretty crazy."
The line went dead.
I suspected they were discussing what to do; should they trust me with the location of the asylum?
"I could always split them up," I said. "Drop one kid off in each of the main cities. You might be able to keep some of them."
"What about the victims?" Costa-Brown asked. Her voice was clipped, and it sounded like she didn't like me much.
"I deprogrammed them…maybe? I at least kept them from becoming suicidal."
"You can do that?" Dragon asked. She sounded interested, maybe even a little excited.
"Sure," I said. "I'm a little worried about unexpected side effects, though. Let's say I cure somebody of the craving for drugs without dealing with the underlying issues. They might start coping with alcohol, gambling, sex or something else. I'm not a psychologist."
I couldn't see the downside of preventing suicide attempts, though. From what I'd heard, they happened when people didn't see any hope that anything was ever going to get better.
"How sure are you that they will not be suicidal?" she asked.
"Absolutely," I said. "I tried to cover as many things as I could, but they're likely to have some trauma."
"I'll send a transport," Dragon said.
"How long will that take?" I asked suspiciously. "Because it sounds to me like you're planning an ambush, and that's not cool if I don't get some powers out of it."
"We don't plan to attack you," Dragon said.
I blinked up to the ship, and then blinked down. I stuffed the children in it. I'd disinfected it since my last trip to zombie world; I didn't want to be accused of starting another zombie plague.
"Taylor?"
Closing the hatch, I blinked us all into space.
A quick check of the scanners made looking for energy sources easy. I cross referenced that with known businesses and areas where high energy use was to be expected.
Looking through Canada didn't find me what I needed. Irritated, I used the shuttlecraft computer to use PRT codes to look up the information.
They had a network of parahuman asylums. The closest one was in Philadelphia.
"Got it," I said.
I blinked us over to Asylum East in Philadelphia.
"I'm not ready!" Dragon said. She sounded a little panicked. "There's a maximum-security wing, but there are still staff members in the hallway."
I blinked in, and then I blinked out.
"Not anymore," I said. "Do I just drop them in separate cells, or what?"
She hesitated, then said, "Yes. Make sure the doors are closed."
It looks me less than a minute to get everyone situated.
"That's an interesting ship you have," Dragon said. I could hear one of her dragon suits coming."
"Don't fuck with it," I said. "Or I'll blow up all your dragon suits and dragon ships. That's a starship."
"It's awfully small to be a starship," Dragon said.
"It's got an FTL drive," I said. "And I've been seven light years out. I've got pictures of Alpha Centauri and the planets on it, if you want to look."
Bragging about my starship was fun; admitting it only went four times light speed on its own didn't need to be mentioned. It did what I needed it to do, and if the world's greatest tinker really thought that, then who was I to argue with her?
"Anyway, I told the victims to call 911," I said. "Some of these kids are their kids, and so it's not crazy if they want to see them."
"The police are already there," Dragon said. "You did a number on Heartbreaker. You ripped the top of his head off."
"His power was line of sight, so I poked his eyes out and I pulled the top of his skull off."
"You weren't sure he could affect you?"
"Well, I'd have gotten over it eventually," I said. "But he seemed pretty skeevy. It was better not to take any chances. But I'm pretty much immune to his kids, so I would have probably been fine."
"We particularly wanted to keep him from gaining your powers," Dragon admitted.
"Well, I'm pretty hard to master, it seems," I said. "You'll just have to convince me the old-fashioned way, with good arguments."
I was scanning the area around me for ill intent; if they wanted to ambush me, I wanted a little head's up so that I could prepare. Presumably they'd use people with esoteric powers I didn't have resistances to.
Normally I wouldn't be worried, but the PRT seemed to hate Masters with a passion. Now that I had taken the powers of multiple masters, I was wondering if Dragon would just hit this place with a missile.
Hopefully they'd at least try to evacuate people first.
My scans shocked me, though.
I could see why the people who were incarcerated here needed help. Reading their minds was almost painful.
There was one person in particular who was hurting more than the others. Her body had been horribly mutated by her powers, and she believed that she would never be human again.
She couldn't be around people because she involuntarily attacked people. She'd killed several people already.
Yet her mind shone with a purity that seemed all too rare on Earth Bet.
I blinked into her room.
Her body reacted immediately, lashing out at me with hundreds of tentacles.
"No! No!" she said.
She was crying, traumatized by what she thought she was doing to me. I ignored her; the tentacles couldn't damage me at all.
There wasn't much of her other than tentacles, actually. She was mostly just a head, with tiny lungs, and everything else was tentacles.
"Sveta, it's all right," I said in a calm voice. "You can't hurt me."
It took her a moment to realize that I wasn't being horribly torn apart, although my clothes were.
"This isn't even my favorite outfit," I said.
She stared at me. Even so, it took a few moments for her breathing to slow.
I reached up and touched one of her tentacles. I patted it.
She jerked away from me, shocked.
"None of this is your fault. You're a good person," I said. "You just got a bad deal."
I walked into the middle of the tentacles. They couldn't begin to match my strength or toughness, and so I pushed my way through them.
Tentacles lashed out at my face. I ignored them, controlling my instinctive urge to flinch when they lashed out at my eyes. I used telekinesis to protect my eyes.
"You deserve to have a good life, to have friends, someone to love."
Her need called out to me.
As I reached her head, I ignored the frantic tentacles trying to push me away. I put my hands on her head, and I pulled her to my chest. I wrapped my arms around her.
It was the best hug I could manage given her physical alterations.
She hadn't had a single human touch since she had woken as an amnesiac. She craved it like a plant craved water, and she'd despaired.
I leaned down and whispered in her ear, "Things will get better."
I pushed some of the posthypnotic suggestion into my words, not enough to overcome her will, but enough to make her believe it.
She was crying black tears.
I'd have been upset, but she'd already shredded my shirt and jeans. I'd inventory everything and I'd be clean again.
"My name is Taylor," I said.
"Sveta," she said softly into my shoulder.
Her tentacles were grabbing onto me as though she didn't ever want to let me go. They weren't violent, but they were holding me tightly.
"I can't do anything to help you now," I said. "I'm sorry."
"You already helped me," she said quietly.
"But I copy new powers all the time," I said. "I might be able to do…something in the future. Maybe not make you back to who you were, but better."
She was silent.
"If you could just give me control," she said. Her voice was sorrowful. "But I know it's too much to ask."
"It's never wrong to dream," I said. I pulled her head away from me, and I looked down at her face. "It's what keeps us moving forward. It pushes us to get better. You've got more control over your tentacles than you had when you first came here, right?"
"It's not enough not to kill people," she said.
"If you keep working at it, even if it's one step back for every two steps forward, eventually you'll get there."
"That's what my doctors say," she said.
"Have you considered having Panacea take a look at you? She's more than just a healer."
"She doesn't take requests," she said. "And she has to touch me to use her powers."
"Well, I've got some pull with her," I said. "So maybe we just have to work on getting you safer."
Panacea would probably consider this a little more interesting than fixing some gangbanger's spleen.
"I've got to go," I said.
She looked up at me, black tears running down her face.
"Lots of people want to kill me for some reason, so I've got to keep moving."
It didn't feel like she wanted to let me go; part of that was her tentacles having a mind of their own, and part of it was her.
I blinked out into the hall, and I inventoried all the tears and my outfit, replacing it with a replica.
Dragon was waiting for me in her Dragon suit.
"I thought you said you wouldn't bother the patients," she said.
"I said I wouldn't take their powers," I said. "She needed a hug."
"What would you gain from something like that?" she asked.
"She needed a hug," I said again, with more emphasis. "Why wouldn't I do something to make someone's life better when it didn't cost me more than an outfit."
I had arcane eyes out looking for an ambush, and I noticed that she had drones circling my shuttlecraft.
I blinked into it, blinked it into orbit, and then I blinked back into the hallway. I'd painted over the original name of the shuttle and replaced it with my own.
The SS Danny Hebert.
I didn't want anyone messing with my shuttlecraft.
"Hands off the merchandise," I said. "I don't trade tech with people who have kill orders on me."
"It didn't look like tinkertech at all!" she said. Her voice was wondering. "It looked…developed."
"My stuff isn't tinkertech," I said. "And I bought that anyway, in another world."
"You can buy spaceships?" she asked.
"If you've got connections," I said. I grinned at her. "And I know people who know people."
She was silent for a moment.
"Could you broker a deal?" she asked.
"Nope," I said. "Maybe I'll give the Australians interstellar travel since they aren't total dicks like some people."
"The courts take time," she began. "And a kill order has never been reversed before. It'll probably have to go to the Supreme Court."
So, they expected me to wait years.
Normally I wouldn't care, but once Dad was back, he'd be victim to every bounty hunter after me, and none of the other worlds were particularly safe.
"Anyway, I'm going to play some backgammon with Buzzer."
The recreation room had a backgammon board; one of my eyes had seen it. I blinked to it, and then I blinked into Buzzer's room.
Immediately I felt almost overwhelmed by pain.
He had a power to create deafening levels of sound, and with my enhanced hearing, the pain was even worse.
NEW POWER CREATED!
DEAFNESS RESISTANCE! DEAFNESS CREATED FROM SONIC ATTACKS IS REDUCED BY 1% PER LEVEL. AT 100% YOU ARE IMMUNE!
He had just come out of his private bathroom. He'd washed his hands well, which was a relief as I held up the backgammon game.
He was lonely.
He couldn't hear over his own sounds any more than anyone else could, and he caused so much damage that he was essentially isolated.
I ignored the pain, and set up the table.
I used Mama Mather's power to put my voice in his ear. He looked up at me in wonder. He hadn't heard anything other than his own sounds since he'd gained his own powers.
The first words he heard in two years?
"Red or Black?"
Earl was a bit of a redneck. He'd liked hunting and beer and riding dirt bikes when he was younger.
Now he was afraid that he'd never be able to date or get married, or anything.
I played twice as long as it took to reach 100% DEAFNESS RESISTANCE.
I carried on a conversation with him.
"Maybe date a deaf girl?" I said. "She wouldn't know the difference."
"We'd never be able to have her family over," he said.
"Maybe she has a deaf family," I said. "Or maybe your mother-in-law would be a total bitch, and this way you'd never have to hear her. You never know when things might get better."
After a few more minutes, I put the board away and said, "Well, I've got to go. Good luck on everything."
Blinking outside, I handed the board to Dragon.
"Why are you still here?" I asked.
"These people are in my charge," she said. Her suit was designed to be intimidating. I wondered if she had anything that would damage me, making me tougher.
"I didn't mind control either of them," I said. "I wouldn't need to. All I'd need to do was offer them a chance at a better life than you can offer them. I can't do that yet, but…"
She was silent for a moment.
Without a living person inside, I couldn't really get a read on her, and it was disconcerting to look at her mechanical head without any expression I could get a read on.
"If you can do it, do it," she said finally. It sounded like it pained her to say it. "These people deserve better than they have gotten. Just make sure they don't endanger anyone else."
I was surprised to hear it.
"Page didn't deserve to be Birdcaged," she said softly.
"Maybe you should have declined to accept her?" I said mildly.
"That's impossible," she said, but she wouldn't elaborate.
The silence dragged on for almost a minute.
"Is she well?"
"She's a hero," I said. "To a people who need heroes. What do you need to be recognized as the ruler of a nation?"
"You need a clearly defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and recognition from the governments here," she said. "United Nations recognition is not necessarily needed, but it helps."
"So, if I became the ruler of a world, could I get diplomatic immunity?"
"That would set a bad precedent," she said. "Especially given your history."
I shrugged.
"Well, no harm in asking."
Before she could respond, I blinked back into my shuttle. I blinked back to the moon.
I'd chosen to allow Loki to spend a little time on Cannibal World, since it seemed that Canary was genuinely interested.
The moon base seemed empty without him.
I decided to return to the world of the giants to make sure that Wesker actually died instead of somehow escaping. I hadn't checked on them in a while anyway.
As I plane shifted, I felt something twisting and going wrong.
I found myself in an unfamiliar city.
People were screaming and running past me, and there was a wind strong enough to pick up cars.
I looked up and stared.
A black hole was forming in the sky, and the tops of tall buildings were already being torn apart and pulled inside.
Crap.
I stared up at the black hole, and I felt a moment of panic.
None of my powers could help with this. Even my tinker skills weren't good enough yet.
Black holes were horribly difficult to deal with. Any mass you tried to shoot them with was simply added to their mass, making them stronger.
Hitting them with energy wasn't any better. Within the event horizon matter and energy were the same thing, and the black hole could convert energy into mass.
Using antimatter would just create a huge explosion and add to its mass.
Time could destroy black holes; they would eventually dissipate on their own. If I had Bakuda's full knowledge, I'd be able to use a bomb to contain the Black Hole in an area where time went by faster, maybe a trillion years in a second. But I didn't have that kind of knowledge yet, and even if I did, there was no time to build it.
You could change its angular momentum to get rid of the event horizon, revealing the true black hole underneath. However, that would only help if it was a steady state; this black hole was constantly adding mass, though, even if it was only the air itself.
The longer I waited, the stronger the black hole would get.
Given the exponential nature of the black hole, the city itself only had minutes. The world would be gone in an hour.
After that I'd never be able to come back, unless I wanted to end up in the middle of a black hole.
Nothing could survive the interior of that thing. Eventually it would eat the sun and all of the planets.
I might be able to use this place to dispose of enemies, but I'd have to appear in interstellar space, and if I made a mistake, I'd be drawn into the black hole too.
Too close to the surface and time itself would come to a standstill.
I could feel the terror of the running people around me. They all suspected that they were going to die.
Should I try to save the few I could while leaving six or seven other billion people to die? Would they thank me when I left their father's, their mothers, their siblings and children to die while they went on alone?
It wasn't as though they'd have a guaranteed future in any of the other worlds I had access to. All of those were either destroyed ruins of facing future apocalypses.
An overwhelming feeling of helplessness hit me; there was nothing I could do here. This wasn't some powerful foe that I could run away from and then come back when I was strong enough.
If I ran, everyone would die and there would be no point in coming back. If I didn't run, a few people would survive, but I'd only be able to save a few dozen at most.
I hadn't felt helpless in along time, and I hated that feeling. I'd always hated that feeling. I felt myself getting agitated, and then a cool, clean feeling washed over my mind.
If you couldn't save all the starfish, just save one. You saved those you could save, and that was all you could do.
I turned and scanned the area for busses. That would be my best bet for saving a lot of people at the same time. I would cram them in like college students in a telephone booth back during the 1960s, and I'd drop them off wherever I could.
Why had I overreacted like that?
Sometimes there were forces you just couldn't fight.
There was an empty bus down the street, and I blinked to it. The bus was empty and abandoned.
I began blinking around the area, touching people and blinking them back into the bus. I'd collected twenty people when I felt something change at the edge of my empathic range.
Terror was all I'd felt from people this whole time, but now I felt something that made my head snap up; hope. People were responding to something that I didn't see yet.
A man in a red suit was racing toward me; he had a lightning bolt insignia, and as he ran, I saw small sparks of lightning coming from him. His costume was expertly done; at least as good as those of the Protectorate if not more so.
My mind was running at full speed, the world almost still around me, and despite that he still seemed fast as he raced by me. He saw me; I felt him added to my network as Mama Mathers power included him.
He hit the side of a building, and he ran straight up the wall.
What kind of power did he have?
A glance in his mind showed that he only had a single power, speed, and despite that, he was still going to face the singularity.
I couldn't help but admire him. I had potentially all the powers in the world, but he'd been creative with his one power. He'd twisted and manipulated that power, finding dozens of uses for it, things I wasn't sure I'd have ever thought of.
He wasn't thinking of his own name, but the spectators knew his cape name.
The Flash was a good man; he practically glowed with it. He wasn't as good as a few of the people I'd met, but he was close. He was a hero.
If the heroes of my world were all this good, my world wouldn't have given up. People had faith in this man; he gave them hope that things were going to get better. Heroes like this would never have discounted normal people, thinking that they didn't matter.
They wouldn't have stood by and let my father be murdered, and if it had happened on their watch, they'd have tried to at least get justice.
The Flash's plan was insane. He knew that this likely meant his death, but he was going to try anyway, because this was the kind of person that he was.
I'd once described my full dexterity as dancing between raindrops, but what he was doing was even more impressive. He leaped up from the top of the wall, and he should have fallen, but instead, he somehow found a foothold in midair.
He was running on thin air, his feet finding purchase on the molecules in the air itself. It boggled my mind; he didn't have a native ability to fly, but somehow, he'd managed to make one up.
Even more impressively, he was somehow running in a tight circle, surrounding the event horizon without falling in despite the effects of gravity. It had to be putting a terrible strain on his body, but he ignored that, and he just ran.
He was trying to change the angular momentum of the black hole, but he could only run three thousand miles an hour. It didn't make sense that this would be enough to change things.
Despite that, I could see the event horizon starting to dissipate.
How?
It took me a moment to realize.
His powers had to ignore physics. Maybe he was shifted into a different state like Velocity; whatever it was let him break what should have been immutable laws.
Should I try to help him in a futile effort? Despite his heroic stand, all he was doing was delaying the inevitable. Or should I try to save those who could be saved, to give his sacrifice meaning?
My mind worked fast enough that I could see him up there. I could see the determination in his eyes as he ran, the utter certainty that what he was doing was the right thing.
I turned, looking for more people to blink into the bus. I'd been so quick that the people I'd blinked inside were still confused about what had happened.
I felt other minds come into my radius.
They had a plan; it involved a parahuman with esoteric mastery over physics, a gestalt being. The two men who were part of the gestalt knew it was risky, that they might die, but they were as determined as the man running around in the sky.
The math was simple; if you were going to die either way, and there was a chance that your death could save the lives of the people you loved, why wouldn't you take that chance, no matter how slim?
Should I admit defeat and continue collecting survivors, or should I help buy them some time?
I hesitated for a millisecond. Saving a few people was a certainty; saving everyone was a long shot.
What would I have wanted if I was one of the people collected in the bus? Would I have left a living Mom and Dad to survive on my own, or would I have wanted a hero to take a chance?
I'd been a loner, and I'd had few connections with the world. Most people had a lot more, and they'd have wanted to bring their families with them.
By saving the few and letting the rest die, I'd be subjecting people to dead fathers and mothers just like I'd had to deal with.
The decision was made.
If there was a chance that I could save everyone, I had to take it. It wasn't necessarily the logical course, but it was the only thing I could see myself doing.
I could only fly at twenty-five hundred miles an hour, but that was in a straight line. I wasn't sure I'd be able to fly in a tight of a circle at that speed. It was possible that I could, but without the Flash's physics defying ability, I didn't think it would make a difference.
However, as a man flew by me, his hair on fire, I made sure he looked at me. I added his to Mama Mather's network, and then I activated danger sense.
His eyes were already white, but now they glowed.
I followed him into the sky. He was able to warp matter and energy around himself in a way that he would be able to survive inside the black hole itself, at least for a little while.
Once they were separated, they'd be helpless, and it was likely that they'd die instantly unless they were ejected someone how the warping of physics.
Danger sense would give them a better chance of survival. If there was a way that both of them could survive, even if it was almost infinitesimal, I wanted to give them that chance.
They were good men too, after all.
I didn't have those physics warping powers, and there was still little I could do to help. It was frustrating to me to have to leave this to other people.
The Flash was this world's preeminent hero, at least as far as the people of this city were concerned, and yet he wasn't nearly as strong as me. I should have been able to take care of this on my own, but all I could do was stand by and twiddle my thumbs.
I flew up as close as I dared, watching the people up above me. They were real heroes; I'd never even pretended to be one.
I could see the flaming man enter the black hole. I couldn't see him after that, but I could sense through his eyes.
They were about to separate when danger sense flared. The position they were in would have dissipated the black hole entirely, sending its mass into an extradimensional space, but it would have flung one of them downward, and the other into the black hole to die.
A small adjustment was all it took, and a moment later there was a flash of light.
With Blindness immunity, I could see what happened just fine. I saw the two men separate. One was young, and one was older. The older one was thrown close to Barry Allen, and he grabbed him and leaped for the wall of the building below.
The other one had chosen to sacrifice himself for his friend. He was thrown closer to the retreating black hole, and the forces within tore at his body.
I blinked next to him and inventoried him.
The Flash was already on the ground, and I blinked next to him, releasing the young man.
I put a hand on him, but healing didn't work. He'd been killed instantly.
"Ronnie!" I heard a woman behind me shout. She pushed past me and kneeled next to where I'd propped him against the wall. She was crying.
I stood by uncomfortably.
The older man was damaged too, so I leaned down.
A red glove stopped me.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"A healer," I said. "If I may?"
He hesitated for a moment, but allowed me to kneel down beside the older man.
I touched Martin Stein, healing him. I took a deeper dive into his mind as I did, learning not just his name, but the names of the people around me.
I saw him stiffen, and I helped him rise to his feet.
"Thank you, young lady," he said. He looked down at the young man on the ground. "Ronald…"
The nature of their gestalt meant that the death of one would lead to the eventual decline and death of the other. There was nothing I could do about that, at least yet. It was possible that Panacea might be able to do something, but that was uncertain.
"I can bring him back," I said. "Maybe."
"What?" several people said simultaneously.
I could feel the shock in everybody around me. Disbelief, hope, doubt; everyone reacted differently to my words.
The woman was looking up at me hopefully. Martin Stein had affection for this woman; bleed over from the dead man in front of me when they'd been joined.
She'd been his fiancé.
"I'm an interdimensional traveler, and I've picked up some technology here and there. One sort of tech is supposed to bring people back if they've been dead less than seventy-two hours and aren't too damaged."
They all stared at me like I was crazy.
"Why don't we take this discussion somewhere else?" I said. I reached down and inventoried the woman and her dead fiancé.
The Flash grabbed my arm, and I inventoried him too. I touched Dr. Stein and a Latino guy who was with them, and a moment later were in the middle of their headquarters.
I released them all, and the Flash grabbed me.
"What did you do to us?"
"Teleportation." I said. "And I've got an extradimensional storage space. I've got a lot of powers."
"Who are you?" he demanded.
"Taylor Hebert," I said. "I'm a parahuman from another world. My dimension travel power misfires sometimes, and I end up in random places, usually when things are going to hell. Usually I'm a little more useful."
I looked at them ruefully.
"You said you could save Ronnie?" the woman beside be said urgently.
Stein's memory said she was Caitlin Snow, a medical doctor.
"Yeah," I said. "I picked up some regenerative nanites from a cybernetic hive mind. I haven't used them yet, but I know how to."
"There's a time limit?" the Latino guy asked.
Cisco Ramon, apparently. He was a mechanical engineer. I was surrounded by incredibly smart people.
"Seventy-two hours is the absolute maximum. I'm assuming that earlier is better. It almost always is."
"Can we get started?" the woman asked anxiously.
"Sure," I said. I touched the man, and then I de-inventoried him on a stretcher thirty feet away."
"Could you stop that?" the Flash…Barry Allen asked.
"The body is in stasis, while I've got it stored," I said. "Which extends its lifespan, and besides, this way I avoid damaging the body any further. Also, teleporting things is cool."
Walking over to the body, I pulled a Borg arm from my inventory.
"What's that?" Cisco asked. "That looks like of sketchy."
"The nanites are designed to be delivered by a cyborg arm, and I haven't bothered to build a new delivery system."
A slight telekinetic manipulation, and the arm lashed out with a small tube, piercing his arm. I let it pump nanites into him for ten seconds, and then I released it.
Blackness was already filling his veins, moving up his arm despite the lack of blood flow.
It took almost two minutes before he took a deep breathe. Everyone was staring at the body.
"It's going to take ten hours for it to be finished," I said. "We need to monitor his progress."
"Didn't you say you could heal him?" Barry asked. "Once he's alive I mean?"
"I'm not sure I can heal any memory loss from brain damage," I said. "The Borg promised me that this would do the trick. Besides, I plan to use this to resurrect heroes in my own world, so I need to document the effects."
Dr. Snow looked up at me anxiously.
"I can always heal him if there are any problems," I said. "But this will help a lot of people."
It would also let me know what to expect from my own father once I chose to resurrect him.
They quickly began to put monitoring equipment on him; I was impressed. They seemed to have a lot of experience in working together.
They were a team; not because they were all paid by the government to barely tolerate each other. It was because they wanted to work together for a greater goal.
Was this what made Barry Allen his world's foremost hero? He actually had a team and he was willing to work with people?
"I'm sorry," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. "We've been betrayed recently, and it's a little hard to trust people."
"You guys are going to keep records of this, right?" I called out to the team.
At their affirmative nods, I turned to Barry.
"I'm sure there were a lot of people injured with all of this; I've got healing powers. I can help you get things cleaned up."
He looked almost relieved as he nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "That would be good."
"You really are a healer," the Flash said after the tenth person I'd healed got up.
"You thought I was lying?"
He shrugged uncomfortably as I blinked us to the next victim. He was getting more comfortable with teleportation.
Seeing all the destruction around us was making him feel more and more guilty. If Dr. Snow's fiancé had been permanently dead, I suspected that he wouldn't be taking this well.
Maybe I needed to try to gain a repair power of some kind. It would be cool to take scrap and heal it back into something new, almost like I healed things.
It would make me a lot more popular back on Earth Bet, too.
"I trusted someone for…a long time. He was like a mentor to be. Then he betrayed us…and caused all this."
"He sounds like a real asshole," I said.
He frowned.
"He wasn't, always. He really taught me a lot, and he helped us until he turned around and betrayed us. It was all part of his plan."
"He could time travel?" I asked, catching a stray thought.
"That's weird," he said. "Stop looking through my head."
"It saves a lot of time, keeps misunderstandings at a minimum," I said.
"You're pretty impatient for someone so young." He looked down a street looking for any more wounded. Ambulances were already appearing, but I'd already gotten most of the worst injured.
Their medical system was as expensive as ours, even if their service was a whole lot better. The ambulances here were bright and shiny. They didn't have dents or bullet holes.
I'd bet their police stations even looked nice.
"My world's dying," I said. "And I gain powers by beating people."
"Dying?"
"We've got city destroying monsters," I said. "Any one of them can easily wipe out a city, and they do."
"You don't have any heroes?" he asked.
I chuckled bitterly.
"The villains fight alongside the heroes, and in every fight we lose a quarter to a third of the defenders. Sometimes we drive them back, and sometimes a city is lost."
He stopped and stared at me.
"Leviathan- he can create tidal waves that wipe cities off the map. Behemoth the hero killer…he can boil blood from the inside out, and he can make everywhere he goes radioactive for the next several thousand years. Finally, the worst, the Simurgh."
"What does she do?"
"Drives entire cities mad," I said. "To the point they have to be quarantined and walled in, left to die."
"That seems…harsh."
"She's a mind controlling precognitive, and she can affect people who were never in her range."
"What?"
"Imagine that a man is considering suicide, but a friend shows up and comforts him by chance. The person the Simurgh affects may intercept that friend until it's too late. They can whisper the wrong word in the right ear, or maybe they simply become mass shooters. There's no way to know."
The reason I was telling him wasn't simply to get his sympathy. This was the kind of person who would feel obligated to help, and I wasn't going to turn down help from someone who could maybe make a difference.
He could help evacuate civilians, or heroes so their bodies were in good enough shape for the treatment. He could do a lot of good if he…
"You can stop tidal waves?" I stared at him.
"I have once," he said.
"It wouldn't work if Leviathan was still controlling them," I said. "But you could literally save millions of lives."
I showed him mental images of all of them, of the fall of Kyushu, of Japan being destroyed. I'd seen them on video, but I'd seen the Simurgh in person.
"You've fought one of them," he said.
"I ran from her," I shook my head. "She used me to reach another universe, one controlled by an evil entity. I still worry sometimes about what will happen when she gets free."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I'll help," he said. "I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. We've got some of our own problems at the moment."
"You had a private metahuman prison in your basement?" I asked, astonished.
"We didn't have any other way to hold them," he said, looking uncomfortable.
"Well, I dropped some of mine off in an empty world," I said. "So, I can't blame you for that. I can't help but think that we could help each other here."
"Oh?"
"I get weaker versions of powers that I can make stronger by use…or sometimes existing powers just get stronger. I'd love to beat your villains up, or if you're tired of holding them, why not just give metahuman containment tech to the prison and jail?"
"We've been thinking about that," he admitted. "It never felt right to imprison them without a trial, but we couldn't see any other way."
"Or maybe that was just Thawne leading you away from any other options," I said. "On my world, I wouldn't trust the government to keep a snow cone cold in a freezer, but things seem to be run a lot better here."
"It's that bad?"
"They need villains for Endbringer fights," I said. "So, they give them free reign mostly. If a villain gets too bad, they're given a kill order, or the Birdcage."
"Birdcage?"
"You have roach motels here, right?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said.
"It's like that, except for people. It's impossible for even the authorities to let someone out of the Birdcage. It's life without parole, and without prison guards. The problem is that sometimes they get it wrong and put someone innocent inside."
He looked horrified.
I needed him to understand, because if he did attend an Endbringer event, someone was sure to start making comments about me.
"Our government is corrupt and incompetent," I said. "But that doesn't mean yours is."
I'd been scanning the cops in the area, and while they had their share of people with problems, they were much better than the general run of the Brockton Bay PD.
They didn't have the same feelings of defeat against an implacable enemy.
I sometimes wondered if the reason so many of our cops took bribes was that they thought the world was going to end, so they were seeking as much pleasure as possible.
"There's been a change in Ronnie's condition," Cisco said over Barry's earpiece.
"I'll race you," I said.
I blinked back to the heroes' base. I'd had a look at it from outside, and I'd been impressed. It was at least the size of a football stadium and I had no idea how much a building that size would have cost even without a particle accelerator in the basement.
Dr. Snow started as I appeared beside her.
"I was warned about this," I said. "Sometimes you need to make some small adjustments in the process."
Grabbing the arm from my inventory, I telekinetically made some adjustments and I placed a small amount of additional nanites in his neck. Had I been a Borg I could have done it all at will, but I could manage with telekinesis.
There were no buttons on the arm; why would there be?
I'd jury rigged an interface using an old laptop and some electronic equipment from Radio Shack.
The computer was on; it didn't lose power while in stasis, and old computers like this took forever to boot up.
"That's…"
"A piece of junk? Yeah. This whole thing is supposed to be controlled cybernetically, but I don't have any inclination to get cyborg parts implanted to control it."
I typed frantically and I noted Cisco looking over my shoulder. "That's not a programming language 've ever seen before."
"It's 25th century programming," I said. I'd learned it from skill books to reprogram the replicator. "Things have changed a little since then."
"You're from the 25th century?"
"Nope. But I visited the twenty fourth century once, and I picked up some cool tech and skills."
The Flash appeared behind us. Apparently, he'd been diverted to stop three crimes and two accidents.
"There," I said. "It'll be fine now. Resurrecting people isn't an easy process. The Borg tech was designed to deal with the physiology of thousands of species, but that means that you have to account for the variability in species. The damage to his body isn't something the Borg have experienced before too, and so there's a learning process."
His vitals were all returning to normal.
"How long will this take?" Dr. Snow asked.
"Another nine hours maybe?" I asked. "He's a metahuman, which essentially makes him a new species as far as the nanites are concerned."
She was anxious but hopeful.
"Hey," I said. "Why don't you guys tell me about the escapees, and I might be able to give you a hand with rounding them up again."
Cisco glanced at Barry, who nodded.
I was impressed by their computer system. It couldn't hold a candle to the Federation computers, of course, but it looked expensive, and it was a lot better than anything on Earth Bet despite the fact that Flash Earth was only three years ahead of Earth Bet.
"All right," I said. "Let's take a look."
I blinked over the city, and I cast my telepathic and empathic web out wide.
It had only been a little more than an hour since the prisoners had escaped, and so the possible radius they might have escaped to was limited, even if it was growing by the minute.
Despite that, I spent ten minutes using my trash tinker skill to make repairs to the metahuman prison. Whatever they'd done here had caused some damage.
Not all of them would have been able to acquire a car right away and head out of the city, but my bet was that after seeing the singularity they wouldn't have stuck around.
My empathy could work in a half mile radius. My telepathy, though now worked at a much greater range. The problem was the cacophony of thoughts as I searched through them.
There were people desperately calling loved ones still in the city, desperately hoping that they hadn't been killed. Their loved ones were preeminent in their thoughts. Others were simply glad to be alive.
Triumphant thoughts…those were unusual.
The first one I found was Kyle Nimbus, who had turned into poison gas inside a family's car, killing the entire family. He'd pushed the father out of the driver's seat, and he'd ignored the mother and the two children.
I appeared in the middle of the country road he was driving through, too quickly for him to stop. Because I could fly, I could use my full strength to hold myself still.
He hit me, and the car crumpled around me. He hit the windshield, but his body turned into gas as he flew through the windshield.
"Kyle Nimbus, you are judged!" I said.
I wasn't sure what power would affect his gaseous form, so I started with fire.
He screamed, and he reformed in front of me. He was burned over his entire body.
I stuck my finger in his eye, and then I healed him. I pulled my finger out of his eye, and he was left in horrible pain.
"Turn back into gas and I'll burn you again," I said. "I can keep burning you and healing you forever, or you can go ack to prison. I'm sure the family you murdered would like you to take the first option."
He was screaming and holding his eye, but after thirty seconds he nodded.
I grabbed his shoulder and I leaned down.
"You will not kill."
I gave it the force of a permanent hypnotic suggestion, and I felt him shudder as he tried to resist the order. He knew what I had done, and he stared up at me in horror.
I healed him, and I used blood control to clean his face.
A moment later we were in the first of the prisons.
I checked my screen.
NEW POWER CREATED!
PARTIAL INTANGIBILITY!
YOU MAY TURN INTO A CLOUD AND YOU BECOME IMMUNE TO PHYSICAL ATTACKS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THOSE INVOLVING AIR OR VACCUMS. YOU REMAIN VULNURABLE TO ENERGY ATTACKS.
LEVEL 2
+1 LEVEL PLANAR AFFINITY.
That was going to be really useful.
I went out again, scanning for minds.
The easiest way would be to return to get my shuttlecraft; I was sure that it would be able to discriminate metahumans from other people.
However, I still had more than a fifty percent chance of misfiring. I barely paid attention to planar affinities to places where I had a good chance of getting back, but I'd like to be able to return here instead of jumping into a supernova and losing my shuttle or something.
Scanning minds was stressful, but by flying along the main routes out of town, I was soon able to find a second villain.
Roy Bivololo called himself the Rainbow Raider. He was a master, controlling people's emotions. He'd robbed a bank, but he wasn't a murderer, and he was being pleasant to the people he'd convinced to take with him to escape the city.
I blinked into the seat beside him, punched him in the face, and then took telekinetic control of the car which had almost driven out into oncoming traffic due to the driver's surprise at my appearance.
They were a group of college students. I told them, "Everything's fine; I'm a hero. He'll be all right. I'm just taking him to have a nap."
It wasn't a permanent change; by the time it wore off, hopefully they'd calm down.
I dropped him off at the rig.
+1 LEVEL TO TELEPATHY!
LEVEL 15!
YOU CAN NOW READ MINDS WITHIN A 31 MILE RADIUS!
+1 PLANAR AFFINITY.
That would be useful, although there was still the problem of sifting through all the thoughts.
It would be easier if I knew these people personally; I didn't and so I had to search by type of thoughts.
The range at which I could see through people's eyes was a lot smaller, as was my empathy.
The next person I managed to catch wasn't even on their list. He'd escaped from then earlier.
He was a genius, arrogant enough to stay in the city despite the singularity.
Hartley Rathaway was hiding in an abandoned warehouse, where he'd managed to create an impressive laboratory out of junk. He had super hearing but was unable to control it; it caused him so much pain that he'd had to create noise dampening hearing aids.
Appearing behind him, I yanked one of the hearing aids out of his ear, and I yelled "HARTLEY!"
That was enough to put him to the floor. I kicked him, and touched his blood. I might have worried about the same effect as he was suffering, but I was already immune to deafness and presumably to sonic pain.
If not, it'd be an easy way to level up my sonic resistance.
ENHANCED HEARING HAS GAINED 2 LEVELS!
YOU NOW HAVE HEARING WITH EIGHT TIMES THE RANGE OF NORMAL!
+1 PLANAR AFFINTY.
Considering that I was a teenager who'd never ruined her hearing by listening to loud music, that meant that I could actually hear even better compared to a lot of older people.
There was no pain.
I wasn't sure how valuable the power was going to be; I had vastly greater ranges with my other powers, and eventually the power would be more of a nuisance than a help.
I didn't really want to be hearing everybody in a thirty-mile radius using the bathroom and having sex. That would be a good way to go insane, even despite Gamer's Mind.
Still, I dropped him in the prison, and I continued looking.
Shawna Baez was a teleporter, and I was particularly excited to find her. Gains to my blink skill were exponential, and would make it easier for me to travel to other stars. If I was able to get it high enough, I'd be able to travel to other groups of aliens and bypass the Federation altogether.
I was particularly interested in the Ferengi, since they would seemingly sell anything to anyone for the right price.
It took a while to find her. She'd gotten further than the others, panicked about the singularity, and I'd had to fly outside of town to find her.
She was riding on top of a train, and I appeared behind her.
Somehow, she managed to hear me, and she blinked away. She was worried about having to go back in the pipeline; it was that worry that had clued me in to who she was.
My telepathic range was greater than her ability to teleport; she was limited to line of sight.
She was teleporting in a zigzag patter; she thought the Flash was after her, and she never looked back.
I sighed.
Teleporters were annoying to fight; fortunately, she only had human reaction time.
Furthermore, I could read her mind as to her next location, so I appeared there before she did.
As she appeared in front of me, I said, "Stop."
A moment later she was bleeding and on the ground.
BLINK HAS INCREASED 2 LEVELS!
WITH THE BONUS FROM EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE, YOU CAN NOW TRAVEL FOUR TRILLION MILES PER JUMP!
+1 LEVEL OF PLANAR AFFINITY!
Considering that a light year was only 5.6 trillion miles, I could travel three light years in only four jumps. It was totally worth it.
Delivering her to her mirrored cell, I blinked outside.
It had been a profitable couple of hours. Not only had I gotten some nifty upgrades to my powers, but I'd caught some villains, presumably improved my reputation with the team and made it easier to get back here.
I now had a seventy percent chance of reaching this destination, and a couple more villains and I'd pretty much be able to return whenever I wanted.
This place was an all you could eat buffet!
The villains weren't being stopped by the police, and they were mostly keeping their heads down. That meant that I could harvest them in secret once I got my shuttle over here, and nobody would even have to know.
Also, if there were metahumans who had chosen not to be villains, I could either pay them for powers, or possibly hire them to help in one of my projects.
I almost felt like gloating.
"They decided that death was better than slavery," I said soberly. "And they chose to fight."
Dr. Snow…. Caitlyn and Cisco had wanted to know more about the origins of the nanites, and they'd been horrified.
"They won't win," I said. "They just don't have the numbers, and a group mind can react quicker than a lot of individuals, especially since their ships don't have intraship communications networks."
They could replicate them easily enough, but it would take time to refit their ships and that was time they didn't have.
"And you left them?" Cisco asked.
"There was nothing I could do," I said. "I've got responsibilities in my own world, and even if I could reach the other side of the galaxy, I'm not a general or a military genius."
Maybe I should buy some skill books on military tactics. I hadn't needed it so far, but there might come a time when I had to actually lead, particularly in Harvester Earth.
We were all silent for a moment.
"So, you've been to the future," Cisco asked.
"A future… I'm pretty sure there isn't just one. Time seems to vary in the worlds I end up in, sometimes by a year or two, sometimes by five hundred. I think it might be something as little as a second a year or less."
"A second a year over fourteen billion years would be 443 years," Cisco said instantly. "You'd never know the difference if it was ten years or less, even over a lifetime."
These people were smart; every time I looked inside their heads, I couldn't help but be impressed.
"That repair you did on the Pipeline," Cisco said. "That's not going to hold over the long term. It's basically being held together with tin foil and chewing gum."
"I didn't have a lot of time," I said. "I was afraid the bad guys would get away."
"I still don't see how you captured them so quickly," Cisco said.
"Telepathy and a lot of powers. I've found that it doesn't help to stand around and chat with the villains before you catch them; that just gives them a chance to blindside you."
Barry flushed for some reason.
I'd have figured that with his power he'd have been collecting villains right and left.
"I still haven't caught the others," I said. "Maybe they were out of range or maybe their thoughts just weren't different enough from everyone else for me to catch them."
"That's all right," Barry said. "It was more than we expected. We're going to see what we can do about getting the technology to the appropriate authorities."
I nodded.
It was a pain in the ass to keep people imprisoned. I'd figured that out on my own. They'd been sustaining these people on takeout, and the bill for that kept growing.
They'd already planned on doing it when they'd had to move the prisoners for the first time; my suggestion wasn't anything they hadn't thought of before.
"So, you think this space ship of yours will be able to find every metahuman on the planet?" Cisco asked.
"Yeah," I said. "The Federation might not want to invest so much in weapons or defenses, but their scientific scanners are top notch. My ship is barely a shuttle, and it's still able to do all that."
"I'd love to see it," Cisco said.
"I'll bring it by in a little while," I said. "As soon as Ronnie wakes up."
There had been some discussion about raising their other friend from the dead. He'd been the ancestor of the enemy from the future, and he'd sacrificed himself for the sake of them all.
The paradox had created the thing I'd assumed was a black hole. I'd only assumed that because temporal phenomena were a little above my pay grade technologically. I'd assumed that it was a black hole even though if it had enough mass to be that size it would have sucked the Earth inside like it was a straw.
Eventually, they'd decided against it.
He'd sacrificed himself, and there was some fear that if they revived him, they'd be undoing his sacrifice. I thought about suggesting castration, or at least an irreversible vasectomy, but I didn't bother.
I had a feeling they wouldn't like the castration suggestion, and vasectomies sometimes reversed themselves.
I could have always brought him to a different universe and never brought him back, but the future was unknown. What if he had grandchildren and interdimensional travel became common?
There was a gasp from the man on the table.
"What?" Ronnie Raymond asked. He coughed and a little blood came up. Apparently the nanites were having trouble dealing with some aspects of his nuclear physiology.
Presumably they were trying to deal with whatever it was that caused him to die without periodically reconnecting with his partner, and they were unable to.
I touched his face and I healed him.
I'd gained nothing from his partner, or maybe I had, but had never gotten an alert.
NEW POWER CREATED!
TRANSMUTATION!
YOU CAN TRANSMUTE ELEMENTS. THIS AFFECTS ONE POUND DOUBLING EVERY LEVEL! CHANGES ARE PERMANENT UNTIL YOU CHANGE THEM AGAIN!
LEVEL 1!
Now that was handy!
"The nanites had trouble because of the Firestorm Matrix," I said. "They should work fine on other people."
Nobody seemed to be listening to me. They were gathered around the revived man, congratulating him.
I pulled a little glass from my inventory and I formed it into the shape of a small statue. A small twist, and the statue changed from glass to metal, then to silver, and then to gold.
"What are you doing?" Cisco asked.
"Picked up a new power from Ronnie and Martin," I said. "Didn't really expect that I would. It's pretty cool though."
It solved a lot of my tinkering problems; some of them at least. I could form things from glass and then change them to whatever element that fit. I was presumably picking up air molecules to make up the difference in weight and density between the different elements. In space, the statue would be a lot smaller.
"I get power from defeated people; I don't have to be the one that defeats them. A singularity works just as well. This is about as much as I can do right now."
"A weaker version of their powers," Cisco said. "Did you plan to copy his powers?"
"I'd like to copy everybody's powers," I said. "I don't take powers from heroes without permission unless I'm doing some healing."
"Thank you," Caitlyn said. She hugged me.
"I can't heal whatever connection he has to Martin," I warned. Looking at the excitement and sheer joy everyone was manifesting around their friend, I wondered if that was what I would feel when I revived Dad.
Or would I be condemned by his opinions of the things I had done?
I had never had this kind of connection to anyone, except maybe Emma once, and Mom, and Dad.
Caitlyn raced back to her fiancé.
Would they have some weird kind of threesome relationship, considering that Stein could feel everything that was happening with his partner?
It'd be like being married to a Siamese twin; awkward and weird. However, there had been Siamese twins who had each been married and they'd had a lot of children. Some people could make it work.
"He's going to be all right," Cisco said.
"Yeah, I've healed him," I said. I frowned. The merrymaking was getting on my nerves.
It wasn't that they were doing anything wrong. It was just that it all made me uncomfortable. It wasn't a feeling strong enough that Gamer's mind would override it either.
"Hey," I said. "Would you like to see my moon base?"
He stared at me.
"You're a little young for me," he said. "It's a weird kind of pickup line."
"Eww," I said. "I'm fifteen. I seriously meant it; I've got a base on the moon in my universe. I didn't build it, but I took it over."
"Yeah," he said.
He looked back at the others. He'd already congratulated Ronnie on his resurrection, but he knew Caitlyn wanted time alone with him.
"You can come too," I told Barry, who was watching us.
I looked at Martin and said, "I'm not sure what interdimensional travel will do to the connection between the two of you. It's probably best that you stay here."
"Hold up," Barry said. He vanished for a moment, and then returned. "I made you a guest bedroom up on the second floor."
Stein nodded.
"Let's go," I said. "I'm going to inventory you just in case I misfire to somewhere dangerous. It's rare, but it happens sometimes. I once jumped into the middle of a deadly radioactive zone, so I try to be careful."
I inventoried both of them, and then I returned to my moon base.
Bringing them out of inventory, I gestured at the window, and they stared.
"I think that he chose this location because of the view," I said.
The Earth was high in the sky, and it was beautiful.
"You really have a moon base?"
"It's salvage from a tinker the Simurgh turned into a villain," I said. "He had plans to take humanity to the stars, and she turned him into a monster who killed any tinker who tried to make the world a better place."
"Why?" Barry was staring out the window.
I shrugged.
"Nobody knows. Personally, I think the Simurgh tipped her hand with Sphere. He targeted people who were trying to make things better. Personally, I think that's just a smaller version of what the Endbringers are trying to do to society in general."
I stepped forward and pressed some buttons on the monitors. I'd managed to hook Sphere's computers up with the shuttlecraft's sensors.
I began showing them real time pictures from the internet; of the remains of cities, one after the other.
"They're destroying the economy, destroying the lives of people who may contribute and change the world. They are the death of hope, and in the end, they will destroy us."
I showed them footage of Endbringer battles.
The PRT tried to suppress some of it because they didn't want to scare off volunteers for Endbringer battles, but there was always someone who leaked footage.
"I asked you before if you wanted to help, but I'm not trying to trick anybody," I said. "If you want to back out, I'm not going to have a problem with it."
I showed them footage of Leviathan burying cities under tidal waves, of his speed and power, of the Simurgh screaming and lifting entire buildings. I showed them Behemoth and his nuclear fires.
"We've tried nuclear weapons," I said. "They don't work. Tinker equipment…all failed. People think that we're driving them away, but I think they're smarter than that."
"If Leviathan just wanted a body count, why does he even come out to fight?" Barry asked, staring at the screens. He could just hit coastal city after coastal city."
"Behemoth can attack from underground, create volcanoes in the middle of inland cities," I said. "And the Simurgh can just drive everyone mad and then leave before anyone is able to even try to defend their cities."
"They're deliberately letting themselves be driven back," Barry said, staring at the screen, at all the dead capes. "They're out to kill as many heroes as they can."
"If they showed their true power, nobody would show up for a fight," I said. "Our strongest hero physically is Alexandria; I recently fought a villain with similar levels of strength, and I barely survived his punches. The Simurgh hit me with less than a thousandth of that power, and yet I've seen times the Endbringers overwhelmed her."
"She didn't kill you deliberately," Cisco said.
"She wanted me to take her to…a hell dimension I guess you'd call it," I said. "She needed to almost kill me so that I'd run away and she could use me to get there."
We were all silent for almost a minute.
"It's why I need to collect power as quickly as I can, especially physical strength and damage resistance. I can get tougher by fighting people who are strong enough to hurt me."
"But the tougher you are, the few people and things there are that can make you stronger."
"My powers also stack," I said. "I get two people with super durability, and they both add to my power."
Cisco frowned.
"We've got some weapons that might be able to help you level up some of your resistances, but not much."
"Anyway, that's why I'm so excited about what we see on the shuttlecraft sensors. Let's take a look around this place."
"You've got a pool?" I heard Cisco shout from behind me.
Apparently, he was already looking.
"I didn't build it," I said. Personally, I thought it was a little weird. The lower gravity had weird effects on the pool water too.
"You aren't the only one who was in here, either," Cisco said. He nudged a pair of speedos laying out byte beach.
I flushed.
I was sure Loki had just left those to embarrass me the next time I had guests.
"I'm babysitting the god of mischief," I said. "Long story. He's out on a date at the moment, and so I'm giving him a little time."
"Alien who was worshipped as a god by the ancient Norse," I said. "He's kind of an ass. Don't take anything he says seriously."
"You've met aliens?"
"More than once," I said. "Usually when they're invading. Aliens are assholes, mostly."
"That's a little harsh," Cisco said.
"Well, so far I've dealt with one alien invasion from an insect hive mind that kills entire worlds and uses them for fuel to continue doing that, a second invasion that involved a hive mind group of mercenaries attacking New York, and a third invasion involving a cybernetic hive mind."
I frowned.
It hadn't really occurred to me how many hive minds I was running into.
"Other than that?" Cisco asked weakly.
"Loki's the guy who hired the mercenaries to conquer Earth; I'm apparently his jailer. He's a charming asshole."
"You'd think they'd have a more enlightened view," Barry said. He was staring out the window. "Seeing things like this…it really puts everything into perspective."
"You'd think that," I said. "I wish I had time to enjoy the view, but I've been too busy gathering powers to save my world."
"How long have you been doing this?" Barry asked. "You look pretty young."
"She's fifteen," Cisco said. He was crawling under the control console to take a look at the systems controlling the station.
"I've been in this for three or four months," I said. "I've kind of lost track."
"And you've gotten this strong already?"
"This is all I've been doing," I said. "Other than trying to support a colony and making deals for technology with other worlds."
"You don't have family, friends?"
"Dead," I said. "They were all killed by villains."
He winced.
"It doesn't seem like it would be healthy not to have a personal life," he said.
He was actually concerned about me as a person. That seemed…weird.
Most people saw me as an obstacle or an opportunity; I'd learned that since I'd gained telepathy. Even people like Vista, who secretly sort of liked me often found me annoying.
"We're people first," he said. "And if you lose sight of that, well…there's a guy I know who went a little crazy for a while, started killing people."
I winced.
Should I tell him that I'd almost certainly done more than him.
"I've killed," I admitted. "Mostly aliens; invasions are war, and you can't go without killing in war."
He winced.
"And when the gangs killed my family, I went a little crazy. They were trying to kill me and I didn't have the power I have now, where I have a choice."
Barry was quiet. He wasn't judging me as harshly as I would have thought. He was still worried about me.
"Have you talked to anyone?" he said. "Killing… I think it's tough at any age."
He was a CSI; he worked with cops every day, and he knew cops who'd had to kill. He'd seen the toll it could take.
"I've got a power; it's one of my original one. It keeps my mind clear when I would get too emotional."
"That doesn't seem healthy," he said. "You mean…?"
"I'm not able to feel anything really deeply," I said. "I'm probably never going to fall in love, or have a family, or any of the normal things that people have. My body's not remotely human."
"I'm sure that you can…"
"What kind of guy my age would want a girl who could turn him into paste just by hugging him too hard, who could read his mind every time he looked at a pretty girl, who can't really fall head over heels for anyone because part of that requires that you become irrational?"
"Surely there's someone out there," he said. "It might seem hopeless, but…"
"I can't have children," I said. "I don't even have most of the organs that a regular person has. I can't even have a dog."
"Get a dragon," Cisco said from under the console. "They're cool, and they're also long lived and they have armor and powers. They might even have human intelligence."
"As a boyfriend?" I asked, horrified, but weirdly interested.
"Only if they turn into human form," he said. "Some dragons don't."
"I've never met a dragon," I said. "Haven't been to any fantasy worlds at all."
The thought was oddly cheering. Not that I'd actually date a dragon, although keeping one as a pet might be interesting.
All I'd need would be to find a cape strong enough to keep up with me, or at least with an ego big enough not to be threatened.
Not that I was interested in that kind of thing at the moment.
"It's an infinite multiverse, right?" he said. "If you keep looking, you'll eventually find it."
"If I had time, I might consider it," I said. "But it's only a few weeks until the next Endbringer attack and I have to be ready."
Cisco popped up from where he was looking under the control console.
"I'm not sure how some of this works," he said. "The computer's got to be ancient, like mid-nineties tech, but it works better than the stuff we have, and I'm not sure why."
"It's tinkertech," I said. "We've got people who have powers related to inventing; they take shortcuts that mean that they can produce stuff hundreds of years advanced, but it also means they can't be reproduced."
"That's what you do?"
I shook my head.
"I've got the real deal, but that means I have to make the tools to make the tools. I can't tinker nearly as fast as they can, and so I rarely bother."
"There's ways to deal with that," Cisco said. "It takes a really good lab, though."
"Well, I had a lot of time to do a lot of tinkering," I said. I blinked them both into the shuttlecraft.
"Now let's see how many parahumans we're dealing with," I said as I blinked us into orbit above their world."
"My God," Barry said.
"You're telling me that there are three thousand metahumans worldwide, and at least half of them are in Central City?" Cisco stared at the monitor.
"Yeah," I said. "It looks like it. If it's any consolation, it proves that most metas don't go power mad. If you haven't heard of any of them, it probably means they're trying to stay under the radar and live normal lives."
"Thawne did this to them," Barry said. "Just to get to me."
"If it's any consolation, at least ten percent of them don't have any dark matter in their systems at all," I said. I pressed buttons on the dash quickly. "It looks like there's a metahuman gene."
"We know," Cisco said. "It's that gene's interaction with dark matter that causes powers."
"Maybe the gene can interact with other things, or be activated on its own," I said.
Both of them stared at the screen, still stunned.
Over the past year they'd interacted with less than thirty metahumans. The idea that there were a hundred for every one they'd met blew their mind.
"In my world, one in eight thousand people in rural areas are parahumans, and 1 in twenty-six thousand in rural areas."
"You've got over six hundred thousand metahumans in your world?"
"Yeah," I said. "But parahumans get their powers differently. They have to have brain anomaly, and then they have to experience…. Trauma. Bad trauma."
They both stared at me.
"The kind of serious trauma that causes psychological damage," I said. "Which means the heroes are outnumbered by the capes three to one."
It was dark inside the shuttle; I hadn't bothered to switch on the interior lights. We were lit by the dashboard and the reflected light from the Earth.
"I can't imagine," Barry said.
"It's how I know parahumans are different than metas. I happened to read the mind of a PRT scientist…they're our cops for parahumans. Parahumans are drawn to conflict; it's almost impossible for them to just…live their lives."
I gestured toward the screen.
"But metas…. look at how many people are just sitting there. My home town had seventy metahumans and it almost went up in flames. These people just sat back and lived normal lives."
"We could have used a little help," Cisco grumbled.
"Not everybody is a hero," I said. "But overcoming the urge to use your powers for evil, that's admirable in its own way."
"Maybe some of them have useless powers," Cisco said.
"Maybe," I said. "Which would be another difference from parahumans. Their powers are always usable for combat in one form or another."
We were all silent for a moment.
"I'm going to be pretty happy here," I said. "How much gold do you think I can sell without ruining the market?"
"Central banks are limited to selling less than 400 tons a year," Cisco said.
"I'll be fine then," I said.
"Doing what?"
"Paying people for powers," I said, as though it was obvious. "I need to get strong as fast as I can, and these people could probably use the money."
"How will you pay for it?" Cisco asked. "Don't say gold."
"Gold," I said. "If I paid with money from my world it would be counterfeit. I'll pay them in one-ounce bars."
"So, they can avoid taxes?" Barry asked.
"No," I said.
Yes.
"These people want to be anonymous. If I gave them a ten-pound gold bar, that's going to be tough to sell anonymously."
"So, they keep their powers, and you give them what seems to be free money."
"It's a win win," I said. "What's gold go for in this world right now?"
Before they could answer, I checked the internet. I hoped Federation antivirus programs were up to the task of dealing with the nastiness on the web.
"Twelve hundred an ounce," I said. "So, I'll give each of them ten one-ounce bars, and they can hold them until they need them."
"This seems wrong somehow," Barry said. "But I can't put my finger on it."
Most of the metahumans probably wouldn't pay taxes on their sudden windfall, but that wasn't my concern.
"And if they attack you?" Cisco asked.
"Then I defend myself and they don't get any money," I said. "If they just attack me out of paranoia, I might give them the money anyway, but if they're actually villains they get nothing."
"How would you know?" Cisco asked.
"I'll read their minds," I said.
"You're pretty liberal about that," Barry said. "Don't you think that some people will be offended?"
"Not if I don't tell them," I said. "And if it means that I let an innocent man go instead of throwing him in jail, I'm ok with it."
Before they could muster arguments against my reading everyone's minds, I said, "Does anyone want to try to fly this thing?"
Cisco was enthusiastic, of course, and so I let him fly the shuttle around for a bit. The controls were intuitive, at least for humans, and it moved easily through space.
They wouldn't let me land outside Star Labs; apparently, they were still bothering with secret identities. I could understand that; unfortunately, I didn't have cloaking technology; the Federation knew how to do it, but they'd vowed never to develop the technology as part of a peace treaty.
That sounded like stupid deal making to me, which gave me hope for future negotiations when I squeezed them harder.
Of course, if I could get matter transmutation to a high enough level, all I'd need from them would be technology. As it was, I couldn't make a part weighing more than a pound, and making objects with multiple materials was exponentially harder than one.
"You don't have any place for me to park?" I asked. "Well, I'll just have to take it back."
I planeshifted us back to the moon, and inventoried them to take them back to Star Labs.
"Where are Ronnie and Caitlyn?" Barry asked.
Martin was sitting at one of the consoles, a pained look on his face.
"They're having some…alone time," he said. He grimaced. "It's…strange."
I started to read his mind, but then I shied away. He was loyal to his wife, and he felt terrible about being in this situation. It was awkward as hell for him.
He was only feeling limited sensations, but it was enough to make him flushed. He stared unseeingly at the console and didn't look up at us.
"Anyway," I said. "Do you want me to give you a list of the metahumans I find, or should I keep it a secret?"
"These people deserve their privacy," Barry began.
"But it would help a lot if we knew their names and powers, in case one of them goes rogue," Cisco said.
He frowned though.
"How about I keep a database, and you can ask me if you need some help," I said. "I don't suppose either of you would want ten ounces of gold?"
Barry stared at me.
"The speed force is a huge responsibility," he began.
As a cop his finances might be scrutinized. He was a little uncomfortable with the idea of paying people for powers, especially with transmuted gold.
"My power…isn't that great," Cisco said.
"Postcognition?" I asked. "Clairvoyance? Those are definitely winners in my book."
"Let me think about it," he said.
"Ask Caitlyn for me, won't you?" I said, casually scanning the city map on the board and cross-referencing it with the map I'd seen on the shuttlecraft. I'd taken a picture of it with my phone.
"What?" Barry asked. "Caitlyn's not a metahuman."
"Well, there was one more metahuman than there should have been in Star Labs, and she was really close to another metahuman upstairs…like really, really close."
How had they missed that?
Right; they'd still been dealing with their horror at the number of metahumans in the city.
One in four hundred people were metahumans, but almost none of them were capes. They lived peaceful, normal lives and that was the most exciting thing for me in a while.
"Anyway, I want to start buying powers," I said. "And thanks Dr. Stein for the transmutation powers."
"What?" Dr. Stein looked up.
"I get lesser versions of capes' powers," I said. "Just one even if they have a lot of powers."
"We can't…" he frowned. "It makes sense that it's not just nuclear fire… we might be able to…"
He stood up and rushed for the weird glass chalkboard.
At least it distracted him from his embarrassment. Maybe they could wait until the other one was asleep before they did things with their significant others.
Before anyone could say anything, I blinked out. Flying over the city, I used enhanced sight to find the first address on my list.
Knocking on the door, I waited for a middle-aged woman to answer the door. She wasn't the metahuman I was looking for.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"Can I speak to your…son?" I asked.
"He's not in," she said, and she closed the door.
I used my arcane eyes to look into his room, and then I appeared before him. He was in bed, lying with his face away from me.
He heard me step toward him, and he turned and stepped toward me.
I was shocked.
He looked at least ten years older than his true age. It looked like he hadn't combed his hair, and his entire room smelled of sweat and unwashed body.
I could feel the depression emanating from him.
Leaping out of his bed with unnatural quickness, he lunged toward me.
"What did you do to my mother?" he demanded.
"Nothing," I said.
He grabbed me with enhanced strength, and as he touched me, I did a deep delve into his mind.
Every time he used his enhanced strength, he aged a little more. I had enough skill as a bio-tinker to realize that his power had exacerbated and exaggerated an underlying condition.
Grabbing his arms, I forced them down to his sides.
"Stop that," I said. "You're hurting yourself."
His hands dropped to his sides.
"I copy powers, and I was going to offer you money to copy yours," I said. "But instead I'm going to give you a different deal. I know someone who can stop the aging. I might be able to do it myself, but she's a specialist."
"What?" he asked.
I quickly beat him senseless then healed him, using illusion to keep him from noticing.
+5 TO STRENGTH!
YOU NOW HAVE A STRENGTH OF 83!
YOU CAN LIFT 1024 TONS!
My weight limits seemed to double every five points without incremental points in between making a difference.
That increased my ability to planeshift, since I could transport anything I could lift. It also got me closer to my goal; unless I was a lot stronger and tougher, I'd never be able to beat Behemoth or even Leviathan.
I needed to be as strong as Alexandria at least, and I suspected her strength had to be at least 120 or 130 using my power's scale. It might be a lot higher.
That was the minimum level to even have a chance to doing some of the things I wanted to do.
I suspected that the Endbringers were even stronger, and since I had no idea what their true strength was, I planned on increasing strength as much as possible.
"Anyway, are you ready to go?" I asked.
"Let me put some pants on," he said.
Despite myself I looked down and grimaced. Bringing him to Panacea in his tighty whities probably wouldn't make a good impression.
"Fine," I said.
"Turn around!" he said. He was mortified for some reason. It wasn't as though I hadn't seen more in guys wearing swimsuits. The condition of his underwear was dubious, so maybe he was embarrassed.
"You aren't strong enough to hurt me, even if you hit me in the head," I said. I turned away.
He had a grudge against Star Labs, blaming them for his condition.
"I work for Star Labs," I said.
I could sense him freezing behind me.
"We're trying to correct the mistakes of the past," I said. It wouldn't be right just to leave people to suffer."
He didn't say anything, just finished getting dressed.
Looking back at him, I noticed that he was wearing a hoodie that looked a lot like mine.
I switched to a red dress.
Grabbing and inventorying him, I plane shifted to Amy's room.
"Damnit Taylor," Amy said tiredly as I blinked in behind her. She was switching her computer off, and I'd gotten a view of feminine flesh on the screen. "What did I tell you about calling ahead?"
"To call ahead?"
"And did you?"
"No… but this guy's powers are aging him every time he uses them. I thought you might want a look."
Turning around, she sighed.
"Bring him out."
He appeared beside me, and I said, "He's seventeen."
She stared at him for a moment, and then reached out and touched him. She stiffened.
"He's…not a parahuman," she said. "He doesn't have a gemma or a corona, and his body is all twisted."
"He's from another world…he's not a parahuman. He's a metahuman, which is…somehow different?"
She looked intrigued.
"Can you help him?" I asked. "I think his power just interacted with an underlying genetic condition."
"Don't tell me how to do my job," she said.
It took almost ten minutes for her to finish, and I could see his features becoming younger and younger.
"That'll do it," she said. Looking at me, she said "He had a weird asymptomatic form of progeria. His power changed that."
Progeria itself was due to a genetic mutation, and almost always occurred from birth in a person whose family didn't have the disorder.
"It won't come back, right?" he asked. He was staring at himself in the mirror.
"No," she said.
"You figured out how to reverse aging, right?" I asked. I noticed that she'd added an Alexandria poster to her room.
"Yeah," she said. "It was interesting."
"Welcome to the billionaire's club," I said. "How much do you think celebrities and billionaires would pay for another ten, twenty, thirty years?"
She frowned.
"Millions…apiece," I said. "You'll never have to work again. If you wait until you're eighteen until you admit to it, they won't even be able to force you."
I grabbed the boy and I inventoried him.
"Say…do you think you could copy his powers onto other people?" I asked. "Now that you have the pattern?"
She stared at me.
"What?"
"Well, if you could mass produce capes, you might end up as a trillionaire. I'll want a cut, though, and I'll want you to give my Dad powers when you bring him back."
"Maybe?" she said cautiously. "His cells were filled with something that I didn't understand."
"Dark matter," I said. "Well, if that's what's needed, I'll figure out a way to get you some. Think about seeing if you can mix and match powers."
"Why?"
"I want my Dad to be tough enough to survive people who hate me, but it'd be nice if I could make him able to escape kidnapping attempts on his own."
I wasn't stupid enough to think that I'd be able to guard him every minute. Maybe I should build him a few robotic bodyguards. The Federation had at least one; there'd been one on the Enterprise, although I hadn't had much of a chance to learn much about him.
"I'll think about it," she said.
"Imagine if we could pick and choose who gets powers," I said enthusiastically. "We could pick good people, actual heroes who haven't been traumatized by…all this. People who would actually make the world a better place."
Barry Allen, Steve Rogers, President Whitmore. There were people out there who represented the best humanity had to offer.
Why shouldn't those be the people who got the powers instead of the traumatized, the angry, the violent and evil?
Our world needed people like that, people who could be symbols of hope, who could make other people step up, even if it was just to throw starfish back into the ocean.
Whether it was the first couple to dance at a junior high prom, the first rioter to throw a brick through a window, or the first person to dive out into a raging river to save someone, people needed that first person to make a move.
That was true of both good and evil actions.
"Tell that guy to get a bath," Amy said. She sniffed. "I'm going to have to get my room disinfected."
"I didn't give him time for a shower," I said.
"Why am I not surprised," she said. "I just pray I'm not on a toilet the next time you decide to yank me away on one of your zany schemes."
"I promise I'll give you a couple of minutes before I yank you away," I said.
"I can't go to the bathroom while somebody is on the other side of the door tapping their feet."
"Shy bladder, huh? Well, I don't have to use the bathroom at all anymore, so I don't have those problems."
"Must be nice to be above eating and sleeping and all that stuff."
"I sleep a couple of hours a night sometimes," I said.
"Anyway, get out of here before he pops back and stinks up my room some more."
I popped back into his room.
"There you go," I said to him as I blinked him horizontally onto the bed.
"What?"
"You've got your whole life ahead of you. Just be excellent to everybody, and you'll have a good life unless you get murdered by a villain or sucked into a black hole or something."
"Uhh…"
I blinked out, returning to STAR Labs.
I wanted to ask them about how to create a small dark matter generator. I had some ideas already.
"Guys," I began, but I felt a presence almost appear instantaneously behind me, so fast that I couldn't respond.
I tried to turn around, and I felt Mama Mather's power connect, but before I could move, I felt a massive pain in my chest.
I looked down and I saw a hand vibrating in the middle of my chest.
Everything went black.
Waking was disorienting.
Since I'd gained my powers, waking up had always been easy, band so had falling asleep. Now, though, I felt weirdly groggy.
"Are you all right?" Barry asked me.
He and Cisco were leaning over me.
"You had a hole in your chest the size of my fist," Cisco said. "It was weird watching it just close up."
"I've got a healing factor," I said.
Checking my messages, I winced.
-300 POINTS VIBRATION DAMAGE!
SONIC RESISTANCE HAS BEEN RENAMED SONIC/VIBRATION RESISTANCE AND HAS BEEN INCREASED BY 1%!
-15% DAMAGE FROM VIBRATION/SONIC ATTACKS!
LEVEL 3!
VIBRATION ATTACKS FROM INSIDE THE BODY REDUCE PHYSICAL DAMAGE RESISTANCE BY 99.9999%.
+1 PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
Fuck.
They'd taken me to 3 points over my maximum. I'd suspected that I wouldn't die at 0 hit points; I'd wondered whether I blacked out during the Harvester ship explosion but I still wasn't sure. I didn't know what the cutoff point was for true death; was it -10 hit points? Was it my constitution in hit points? Was it the negative of my maximum hit points?
Any of them were potentially valid, and the fact that I didn't know made it hard to plan for. The only way I'd find out was to actually die, and I wasn't looking forward to that.
Somebody had vibrated their hand into my chest. If I'd had a heart, they could have pulled it out of me.
Of course, that meant that if I could gain that skill, fighting the Endbringers would get a lot easier.
"Somebody vibrated their hand into my chest from behind," I said.
"Thawne," Cisco said, paling. "He killed me that way, in another timeline."
How did he…right.
Postcognition.
"Thawne's dead," Barry said, but he didn't sound sure.
"How long have I been out?" I asked.
"A couple of seconds before you woke up," he said. "I heard you fall."
"You didn't see anybody?"
He shook his head.
Cisco was staring at my chest. Looking down I could see the massive gaping hole regenerating quickly. I inventoried another shirt.
"You really don't have any blood, do you?" Cisco asked, oblivious to that face that he'd been staring at my chest. Of course, he hadn't seen anything other than the injury, and maybe a look at whatever was inside me.
I debated looking through his memory; I had a morbid curiosity. Was I really just a mass of undifferentiated flash, a kind of Case 53 even if I still looked human?
I decided against it.
"Maybe there's somebody else who's figured out how to use the Speed Force," I said. "Maybe when you die at the age of ninety, somebody digs your body up and figures out what makes you tick."
They both seemed to think that was a morbid assumption.
"Or maybe somebody else was what, struck by lightning on the night of the accelerator experiment?"
"What are we going to do?" Cisco asked. The thought of facing yet another speedster was daunting to him. Having a hand shoved through his chest and dying had been hugely upsetting to him, more than he'd admitted to his coworkers.
"Well, do you guys have some kind of sonic weapon?" I asked.
"Yes…" Cisco said slowly.
"I want you to hit me with it," I said. "Over and over again."
"Why?"
"When I get attacked by something, I get more resistant to it, and I somehow doubt that Barry wants to keep shoving his hand through my chest."
Barry stared at me, looking a little green at the thought.
"If I can get immune to that then I won't die, and I'll be able to help you guys a lot more."
"Sonic weapons though?" Barry asked.
"My body considers all vibration-based attacks the same," I said. "I'd like for it to be a nasty surprise the next time he decides to explore my body organs."
"All right," Barry said.
"The guy you put back into the pipeline, the one with super hearing built a pair of sonic gloves. We destroyed them, but I rebuilt them," Cisco said, sounding self-satisfied.
"Why?"
"Well, most of us can't just go buy superpowers," he said. "You never know what kind of villains you're going to meet, and what they'll be vulnerable to."
"All right," I said. "Can you get them?"
"Now?"
"If he realizes that I'm not dead, he'll be back to finish the job, and the next time he'll make sure I'm dead."
"Right," Cisco said. "We've got a testing area."
I followed them down to a largish room, and I waited for him to get the gloves.
"These things can blow up office buildings," Cisco said. "So maybe we should start at a lower level."
I frowned.
"Shouldn't we test these somewhere that we can't blow out a load bearing wall?"
"What do you have in mind?"
I blinked away to space, used my enhanced vision, and then I returned.
"Let's go," I said.
Cisco had already gotten hearing protection for him and Barry, based on Rathaway's designs.
We appeared in the middle of the Sahara Desert. It was seven or eight hours ahead here, so it was still nighttime, although it was in the early morning.
"All right," I said, "Hit me."
"Starting at the lowest setting," Cisco said, after a glance around at the area. "I've had to calibrate it to your specific frequency."
That was a flaw in the design of the instrument, not of sonic weapons in general. I could think of half a dozen ways to make the process either automatic or unnecessary.
It didn't even tickle. I gave him a gesture to raise it higher.
We were halfway up before I felt anything at all. I didn't take any damage even at maximum.
"Well, I've got to put it in my mouth I guess," I grimaced.
"What?" Cisco asked.
"Internal attacks do a lot more damage, and I doubt you could retrieve this if I swallowed it."
He turned it all the way down, and both he and Barry looked away as I switched it on.
-1 HP
VIBRATION/SONIC RESISTANCE HAS RISEN +1 LEVEL!
20% RESISTANCE!
LEVEL 4.
PHYSICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY +1%!
I actually felt that a little.
I switched it to a higher level.
-8 HP!
VIBRATION/SONIC RESISTANCE HAS RISEN +1 LEVEL!
25% RESISTANCE!
LEVEL 5.
PHYSICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY +1%!
The sand around me was shaking; presumably from the vibrations in the soles of my feet. I levitated a few inches and it got better.
"Doesn't it bother your hearing?" Cisco asked. "There's conduction through the bones of your skull."
I shook my head.
Using Mama Mather's power, I said "I'm immune to deafness. I went to a Metallica concert."
I grinned at them to show I was joking. I barely even knew who Metallica was. For some reason they didn't seem impressed. Maybe it was the gloves in my mouth.
I switched it higher.
-70 HIT POINTS!
VIBRATION/SONIC RESISTANCE HAS RISEN +1 LEVEL!
30% RESISTANCE!
LEVEL 5.
PHYSICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY +1%!
I stopped switching it higher. I really needed to raise my constitution to give me more hit points for effects that bypassed my physical resistances.
"That's the sweet spot," I said mentally.
"It's close to the top of what we can do," Cisco said, looking at the monitors at the end of the gloves.
"You take more damage when it's from the inside," I said. "Trust me."
"It's worse when you aren't the tin man," he said. "I actually had a heart and saw it pulled out of my chest."
I frowned.
I didn't have a heart physically, and my emotions were stunted, so it was an appropriate comparison, but it seemed a little mean.
A check of his mind showed that he didn't mean it that way.
Let's keep doing this," I said.
After ten minutes, it was finally done.
-5 HIT POINTS!
VIBRATION/SONIC RESISTANCE HAS RISEN +1 LEVEL!
100% RESISTANCE!
LEVEL 20!
PHYSICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY +1%!
Gaining 18% to my physical resistance was the icing on the cake; it meant that I was now 100 times as tough to things that were covered by physical resistance.
"I kind of feel sorry for all the snakes and lizards around here," Cisco said. "We've probably deafened all of them in a ten-mile radius."
"Well, we could have done it next to somebody's house," I said. "Or maybe the arctic, but I figured you guys would freeze to death."
"I'm not good with cold," Barry said.
"So maybe that's what you use against the other guy?"
"Speedsters are too fast to get hit with a cold gun," Cisco said, "Mostly."
"So, use more than one of them," I said. "Set up a trap. Law enforcement back home had nozzles that would spray containment foam to fill a room if a parahuman got rowdy."
"Containment foam?"
"It's a foam that hardens almost instantly and people can breathe through it," I said. "Standard issue on a world with six hundred thousand parahumans."
"That's… you don't have the formula for that, do you?"
"I can get it," I said. Dragon was able to mass produce it; did that mean she'd gotten rid of the tinkertech weirdness? "I'm assuming that speedsters can walk through walls if they can stick their hands through my chest."
"Most of our villains aren't speedsters," Barry said. He scowled. "There's only been one so far."
"If you've got the money, I'd start trapping your base, assuming they know where it is. Otherwise, I'd trap a warehouse of something."
"Are you related to Oliver Queen?" Barry asked.
"Green Arrow?" I asked, surprised. "He's a superhero and he doesn't even have powers?"
"I'm normally more careful with secret identities, but the mind reader doesn't know a lot about boundaries…" he said.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Usually it helps me not have things like hands through my chest happen. Let's go back."
I blinked us all back to Star Labs, where Caitlyn and Ronnie were stepping back into the room. They both looked disheveled, and they both had a weird smell about them.
I had a feeling I was going to regret getting enhanced smell at some point- and I was only able to smell things twice as well as normal. Dogs could smell forty times as well; it was hard to even imagine how they sensed the world.
"What's going on?" Caitlyn asked.
"Somebody thought it would be funny to vibrate a hand through my chest and leave me for dead," I said. "Fortunately, my heart was in the wrong place."
"What?"
"Well, I don't actually have most internal organs, and so it didn't kill me."
"He's back?" Caitlyn asked.
"Who's back?" Martin asked.
I could smell the alcohol on his breath from here.
"Thawn," she said. Her face had turned as white as a ghost.
"I didn't get a look at him," I admitted. "It could have been someone else. Either they randomly tried to murder me here in the middle of Star Labs, or they intentionally tried it. Either way, it's not good."
"Why would they want you dead?" Caitlyn asked. "How would they even know who you are? You've only been here a few hours."
"Well, wasn't Thawne a time traveler?" I asked. "Presumably I cause them trouble in the future, so they've come back to take care of me before I get stronger."
They all looked upset.
"Well, I'm immune to that kind of attack now," I said. "But no telling whatever tricks they'll come up with next. How'd you deal with it last time?"
"His ancestor killed himself so Thawne was never born, creating a paradox and a singularity that almost destroyed the city," Barry said.
I winced.
"Well, I'd work on anti-speedster measures, and I wouldn't put anything in the computers, just in case a hacker gets to it later," I said.
"If they're from the future, they may know a lot about us," Barry said. "Assuming it's not just Thawne again."
"Well, clearly they know where you live," I said.
I thought for a minute.
"If they wanted to, they could kill everybody here before Barry got back from a fast food run. They were willing to kill me; why not finish the job?"
"Why would they?"
"Imagine that you were a villain who wanted to kill someone just as strong as you, but who's a lot more successful because he has a strong support team behind him. What do you do?"
"Kill the team?" Cisco asked.
"Yeah," I said. "At the very least it would put Barry off his game. It would make him depressed, make him afraid. Tactically it's the smart move. In war, is it better to kill soldiers or the people who supply soldiers?"
"You cut the supply lines," Barry said.
"And who supplies you with tactical and emotional support?" I asked. I gestured. "Team Flash."
"So why didn't they?" Caitlyn asked.
"Well, it's one of two things. Either they want something from the rest of you, or they're a sadist who wants to drag the whole murder thing out to make Barry helpless."
They seemed uneasy at either prospect.
"It's the kind of thing that happened a lot in my world until we came to accept some basic unwritten rules.
"Rules?" Barry asked.
"No going after people's families. No rape. That kind of thing," I said.
In truth, I still wasn't sure what all the Unwritten rules were. I'd never really paid that much attention to them.
"There's always some people who break the rules, but people join together to punish them. They've got families too, and nobody wants people going after families."
"What could they want from us?" Caitlyn asked.
"Well, do either of you have a stalker?" I asked, pointing at Cisco and Caitlyn.
"No!" Caitlyn said, glancing at Ronnie. "Why would you ask that?"
"Well, maybe you have a speedster stalker. You're a lot more likely that Cisco here as the target."
"Hey!" Cisco said.
"You aren't dating anybody," I said. "If they're good looking, and being a speedster probably means they have a great figure…well, they could just talk to you at a bar or an anime convention or something."
"That's true," he admitted. He thought for a moment. "You have anime in your world?"
"No," I said. "Leviathan basically destroyed Japan, so no anime. We get imports from one other universe, though."
"What about Ronnie and Martin?" Caitlyn asked.
"Well, they've been living as a homeless person for the last few months," I said. "And it's hard to catch someone's interest like that."
"So, your guess is a speedster stalker?" Barry asked.
"Or they want them for their nerd skills," I said. "You've got a brain trust going on here, and you guys deal with metahuman things all the time. I just saved a kid who aged every time he used his superhuman strength. He had a grudge against you guys because of that."
"What?"
"I've got people who can fix stuff like that," I said. "He's back to being young now and he's fine. I told him that Star Labs is checking on people to make sure that they are all right and that they can help them."
"What? You can't speak for us without asking," Barry said.
I shrugged.
"I won't tell anyone you don't want me to, but it seemed to make him a lot more well disposed to the lot of you. He probably won't show up and try to kill you in a few months when he's eighteen and looks like Betty White's grandfather."
They all stared at me.
"Anyway, if a speedster shows up and he's got some weird problem, like his speed is aging him, or it's given him like super speed cancer or superspeed hemorrhoids or something…it's probably your guy, even if there's a guy in a different costume doing the crimes."
"What if he's really here needing help?" Barry demanded. "We can't be suspicious of everybody we meet."
"That's why I like telepathy," I said. "It cuts through a whole lot of backstabbing and betrayal."
"It's still a human rights violation," Cisco muttered.
"Well, anyway, if you guys end up needing to hide, I've got a few places I can put you… a moon base, a country rebuilding from an alien attack, a small village of people on a barren world. I don't really have anything cool, unless you want me to take you to Valhalla, and they generally don't seem to care for humans."
"We need to talk about it," Barry said. "Could you…uh…step out of the country?"
I rolled my eyes, and I blinked to the roof of Star Labs listening in to their conversation using telepathy.
They really needed to get cameras for the roof; it was clearly a place people could break in from easily.
"Can we trust her?" I heard Ronnie ask. "We just met her."
"I believe her," Barry said quietly. "She's hinted at doing some bad things in the past, and I think if she was trying to get our trust, she wouldn't have mentioned anything."
"Unless that's what she wanted us to think," Cisco said. "I like her, but I liked Wells too, and I never had an inkling he was bad until he shoved his hand through my chest."
"Let's say she's right," Martin said. "Does that mean that her conclusions are right?"
"I still think it's Thawn," Caitlyn said. "Isn't that a lot more likely than some other speedster? What are the odds of there being more than two in the world?"
"So, what do we do?"
"All we can do is wait," Barry said. "If we knew there was a direct threat to your lives, we might take her up on getting you all to safety. Maybe that was the villain's plan all along; spook you into leaving, and leaving me to deal with it by myself."
None of them had jobs outside Star Labs except Barry, so they could probably uproot themselves a little easier than he could. However, they all had families.
"Would she be insulted if we said no?" Caitlyn asked.
I blinked back into the room.
"You guys ready yet?" I asked brightly.
"Uh, were you listening in to our conversation?" Barry asked.
"Noooo…" I said slowly. "But since I can read your minds, you might as well have left me here."
They all looked irritated at this.
"It's fine if you don't want to go right now," I said. "And if you find somebody you're suspicious of, I'd be happy to take a look into their minds from another room."
I looked around at the people in the room.
"It's just as well. I don't yet have the kind of accommodations you're used to, and I haven't moved all the cannibals to Australia. I'm working on it, but they're kind of scattered out."
"What?"
"It's not important," I said.
Somehow, they didn't seem like the kind of people who would approve of a forced relocation project.
I'd decided on a more nuanced approach.
The cannibals who enjoyed themselves would go to Australia, and the people who'd been forced to cannibalism would get western Europe.
"All right," I said. "I've got to go retrieve the God of Mischief before he wears out his welcome."
With that I was gone.
"I can bring you back to life," I said. "It's not a problem. It's why I took your blood so the nanites could adapt to Jotun physiology."
"I still don't see why you need me here," Loki said. "If this enemy was able to almost kill you, he'll blend my insides with my outsides, and that sounds unpleasant."
"It'll be fine," I assured him. "I'm immune to that attack now."
"I'm not!" he said. "I'm barely more resilient than a human!"
He was quite a bit more resilient than a human, but he was exaggerating because he didn't want people to shove a hand in his chest.
I suppose that not getting more resilient every time you were attacked and not having almost instant fast healing would make being attacked a lot less pleasant.
"Anyway, you're coming because I don't think Canary is ready for a half Jotun child."
"Aren't there ways for mortals to deal with such things?" he asked. "Considering how…loose they tend to be I assumed they had something."
"I'm fifteen," I said. "And my Mom has been dead for a while. I don't know if you need a prescription for birth control, or if you can buy it at the pharmacy or what."
"You've got all that tinker knowledge," he said. "Why don't you make some?"
I stared at him, and then sighed.
"We can ask Blasto when we get done," I said. I scowled. "If he doesn't have anything, you're using condoms."
He scowled, and I shook my finger at him.
"Your world is barbaric," he said. "There are better ways in Asgard."
"Everything's better in Asgard," I said. "I know the drill."
I'd read his mind, and the minds of the others in the community to see if he'd caused them any trouble.
To my surprise, he'd entertained the children with illusions, and he'd used his enhanced strength to help with tasks the villagers were struggling with.
He was good at fooling people, and even better at fooling himself.
His thoughts said that he'd just been good to seduce Canary; getting her approval by getting the approval of her peers.
But empathy told me something else.
The children admired him; they actually looked forward to his visits. He was the fun uncle that they'd never had, and they were ridiculously easy to entertain.
He told himself that it didn't matter; that they were stupid, ephemeral mortals. Their approval and affection didn't mean a thing, and the look in their eyes was just the foolishness of the ignorant.
Yet there was a warmth when he thought of the children, and he'd kept entertaining them even when Canary had been called away.
The older villagers irritated him.
They didn't treat him with the respect he deserved as a Prince of Asgard. Instead, they treated him as a friend, a comrade.
He'd actually given them some good advice, and they respected him for that instead of his position.
The thought that they would all reject him if they knew who he really was bothered him more than he was willing to admit.
"How was the village?" I asked.
"Fine," he said. "They're working on making their hovels a little less like holes. Even the Norse lived better, though.
"Well, do you want to go hunting for Cannibals then?" I asked. "I figured I'd clear them out for a couple of hours before I went back."
"That sounds good," he said. "Humans who you are free to slaughter."
"We're not slaughtering them," I said. "We're sending them to Australia, where they can slaughter each other…or not if they get their act together. If they try to get back, we can release the mecha-kangaroos."
He stared at me strangely.
"You have mecha-Kangaroos?"
"No…but I think it's almost inevitable that we'll find them eventually, right? And if we don't, well, I can probably make some."
"Wouldn't it be kinder to just kill them?"
"Then what would I do with my mecha-kangaroos?" I asked.
"That's…a good point," he said frowning. "I can't see that they'd be useful for anything other than engines of war. They don't have hands."
"Well, in times of peace I could modify them into mecha-riding kangaroos."
"So, this is what you'll be doing when you've killed them Endbringers and Scion and brought your father back to life?"
"I could program them to do housework, maybe," I said. "But the tail would have to be removeable or retractable."
"I don't think even the humans would be foolish enough to buy something like that."
I frowned.
The market outside Australia might be small, although I could provide them to the Australian military for a fair price.
"Maybe electric grandmothers?" I asked.
"What?"
"Robot grandmothers who will never age or die," I said. "And they can share everything they've learned with each other so that they'll become better and better."
"So, like the Borg," he said dryly.
"No," I said. "Maybe they'll only upload after a lifetime with one child."
"Maybe you could focus on not getting us killed by an insane jogger."
"Speedster," I said absently as I checked my screen again.
We blinked into the shuttlecraft, and a check of the scanner showed that there were only 9500 people left on the planet. Somehow, 500 more people had died since the last time I'd checked.
They were scattered out across the continent ad the world in small groups. Large groups were too hard to feed.
We worked our way in concentric rings around the village. My first purpose in all of this was to make the village safer from attack. It wasn't strictly a humanitarian thing.
Appearing in front of the first group, we saw that there were six of them; a large group which suggested that they were probably cannibals. They looked well fed by the standards of this world, although it would be gaunt at home.
They were gnawing at what looked like the remains of a woman's arm.
Glancing at Loki, I moved.
I purposefully broke legs and arms, and I listened to them scream.
I left one for Loki, and I noticed that he was beating the tall man that remained viciously. I noticed that the man had a yellow feather on the bedroll beside him.
"Don't kill him," I told Loki.
He sneered at the man, kicking him and shattering his leg.
"Humans are weak and worthless," he said. "Beasts are below men. These don't even qualify as beasts."
How much of it was the yellow feather, apparently a treasured heirloom of the woman who had been eaten. Did it remind him of Canary?
Blinking, I dropped the men off on a beach by the ocean, blinking Loki first.
I healed them all partially, leaving them in pain as a reminder of what they had done. They'd all be limping for a while.
"Bitch," one of them said.
"You have been judged," I said. I reached down and touched the sand beside me, and I transmuted sand to Ramen noodles in one-pound blocks. I left them ten of them, but I did not give them a pot and I'd left all of their belongings back in America.
"There's water around here…somewhere," I said. "All the people around here are going to be like you…the damned."
"You can't judge us, you bitch," he said. "How many people have you eaten?"
"Not one," I said. I levitated some sand with telekinesis, and then I transmuted it into a cooked steak. "I don't need to."
"This isn't fair," the man with the bad teeth said. The others were all slowly getting to their feet.
I sent a flare up high in the atmosphere.
They all cringed.
"What's that?" another man asked.
"The dinner bell," I said. "This is a place for your kind, and the others have had longer to equip themselves. Also, they're fully healed, and you, not so much. I hope you have the energy left to run, because you're going to need it."
With that, Loki and I blinked away.
"What about the natives?" he asked as we returned to the shuttlecraft.
"Well, only about 1 in 600,000 people have survived," I said. "The Australians did a little better statistically, but there were still only about fifty of them. About one in ten are the cannibals who enjoy it, eight and a half in ten are the cannibals by necessity, and one in twenty have never eaten human flesh."
Those were the statistics so far anyway.
Presumably most people had started out blameless, but they would have either starved or been eaten themselves.
"Let's go," I said, glancing at the next closest group to Blasto's camp.
There were three of them, and they stared at me cautiously as we appeared.
They looked tattered and bedraggled.
"Have you eaten of human flesh?" I asked.
They had, but they'd never killed anyone to do it; they'd only eaten flesh of people who had died, and they were all sick from it.
Loki and I were intimidating figures. We were fully fleshed, lacking the gauntness that had become the norm in this world. To them, that meant that we were highly dangerous people, successful cannibals.
"Don't do that anymore," I said. "Get your stuff together."
"Why?" the father asked.
"I'm taking you someplace a little better than this," I said. When I saw that he might argue, I levitated into the air, and a corona of flame surrounded me, not touching my clothing at all.
They fell to their knees.
I touched down in front of them, and I touched each of them on the shoulders. I healed them of all their diseases, and I said, "Do better. Be the best person you can be, and I will be with you."
A moment later, we were somewhere else.
I'd decided that putting all the people who'd eaten flesh in the same place was cruel and unusual punishment. Those who had only eaten the dead or had been forced to eat by others got better accommodations in France.
Those who had killed would be forced to live in South Africa. The distances involved would keep the communities apart from each other, especially without food sources along the way. They might as well have been on the moon.
There was already a small community here. They'd been building their own houses out of the remnants of dead trees using wattle and daub.
I was impressed with how much they'd accomplished.
They didn't have as many children as the non-cannibals, either someone had eaten them, or it was possible that the non-cannibals had abstained because they'd been more fortunate and had been able to find enough food for their children while these people hadn't.
People were surrounding me.
There was almost a worshipful air about them. Possibly it was my approach; I tended to use the flying thing and fire a lot. It tended to save on the attacks and on damage to my clothes.
There were few women among the Australian contingent; those who had been forced had been placed in the third village. The few women who had deserved to be in Australia I'd placed in New Zealand instead.
The last thing I needed was for the Cannibals to be making and eating babies.
I'd never given these people pizza. That didn't feel fair. I did however blink a pallet covered in cans I'd bought from a Dollar store in Brockton Bay.
I'd given the people in the Blasto's village better canned food simply to give them better variety, but I was making sure they mostly ate fresh foods.
I gestured, and a pallet of canned food bought from a Dollar General in Brockton Bay appeared before them. I could hear the glad cries of the people here.
The people in the third village would get transmuted, dried foods.
It was easier to put them in villages because it made food deliveries a lot easier.
"These people have been judged," I called out. "They are worthy to be among you."
With that, Loki and I levitated into the air. I was holding him up with telekinesis.
"Be better to each other, and you will live a good life."
We blinked back to the shuttlecraft.
"It's barely worth fighting them," Loki said with disgust. "It's like kicking people made out of matchsticks."
"Well, they are almost starved to death," I said. "If you want to beat someone up for fun, let's do Nazis sometimes. Anyway, I've got to feed Chort."
Appearing on the island, I was grabbed from behind.
"Take me home!" he gritted in my ear.
At least he'd stopped calling me names. I'd spent the first few times I'd been back as bitch and slut and whatever other names he could think of to try to hurt my feelings.
"We're not going anywhere until I deprogram you," I said calmly. "You aren't a villain."
"Yes, I am!" he said.
Years of conditioning by Mama Mathers had given him a certain amount of resistance to my mind control. I could still give him general commands, but changing his beliefs was proving to be a lot harder.
I'd told him he was never going to escape, and he'd tried to kill himself. I told him to not try to kill himself, and he'd begun hurting himself.
He hated himself and he hated what he'd become, and yet he didn't see a way out. Even if he somehow became a hero again, he'd never be trusted by anyone else.
"There are other worlds where you can be a hero, you know," I said casually. "Places where you can make a new start, become the person you were once, live like you want."
He froze.
His arms were still around me. I couldn't move them if I tried. I actually appreciate his occasional attacks because it gave me something to test any new strength increases with.
"You are a good person," I said. "And you can be again."
Every time I came, I reinforced that message, and he got a little closer to believing it.
I turned to gaseous form in his arms and spread out along the beach.
A pallet of cans appeared before him. I'd picked some of his favorite foods, even if they were from the Dollar store. I'd even gotten him a few bags of potato chips in the weird redneck flavors he liked and the pork rinds.
Living with the Mathers had permanently damaged his food preferences.
He'd used the wood of the pallets to begin to form a simple shack on the beach.
He'd been good since the last time, and he hadn't tried to hurt himself at all.
I began to transmute the sand beneath me into a hammock, and then a small number of polished tiles.
"For your place," I said as I reformed. "Get you up off the sand."
His face showed no expression, but I could feel the gratitude. He'd suffered Stockholm syndrome with Mama Mathers; he could just as easily feel it with me.
I blinked back to the shuttle, and I blinked us over Central City.
A quick check of the scans and I blinked us both down into the city.
We blinked outside of a junior high school; Loki was making both of us invisible. School had just let out, but the signature I'd found had been around the back of the school.
I could feel the anger and the fear from here. Gesturing to Loki, we moved around the corner.
A chubby boy was shoved up against the side of a brick wall, surrounded by a gang of other boys.
"Chuck the fuck," one of the boys said, and the others laughed. "Give me your lunch money. You could stand to lose a few tons."
A glimpse inside his mind showed me that Chuck had superhuman strength. He'd accidentally killed his dog after the particle accelerator explosion, and he was terrified that he would kill someone else.
Yet a dark part of his mind fantasized about finally letting loose on the boys who had tormented him since elementary school. He could imagine himself punching through their skulls, and he knew exactly what it would look like because of his dog.
I glanced at Loki.
I took the image of their homeroom teacher from the boys' minds, and gave it to Loki. There were too many boys for my own illusion power to work.
"Leave him alone," I said to the lead bully, making it a permanent command.
It meant they'd never be friends, or reconcile. The bully would ignore him for the rest of their time together.
I couldn't protect him for the rest of his life, following him around and deflecting bullies, but I could make this a little better.
I grabbed the arms of the main offenders and said, "Unless you want to be suspended, I'd suggest that you leave him alone."
Hopefully I wouldn't get his teacher in trouble.
The boys reluctantly dispersed.
I waited until they'd all left before I had Loki remove the illusion.
"I'm Taylor Hebert," I said. "And I'm just like you."
He stared at me.
"I copy powers," I said. "And if you let me copy yours, I'll do what I can to help with your bullying problem."
He stared at me, then he nodded.
It only took a moment and it was done.
+5 STRENGTH!
YOU NOW HAVE A STRENGTH OF 88!
I healed him, and he never even knew it was happening.
I'd have helped him even without the power, but I needed to fight the Endbringers, and I couldn't have qualms about beating up a 13-year-old boy.
Besides, he as only two years younger than me anyway.
"We're going to have a talk with your principal and your teachers," I said.
He panicked a little.
"I've got mind control," I said, grinning at him. "Do you know how much trouble I could have saved myself in school if I could do what I'm about to do?"
He frowned.
"Then we're going to have a talk with your parents," I said. "Having powers like yours aren't easy. I'm thinking about creating a support group for people like you…there will probably be adults, but I'll read their minds and make sure that nobody bad gets in."
He looked like he was about to faint.
"Hey, some of them might even have the same powers you've got. I already know one guy who might be willing to help you," I said, even though I had no idea whether he would or not.
"If I can find a psychologist who is like us, he might be able to help," I said. "But that's a crapshoot."
Putting my arm over his shoulder, I switched to my Armani suit.
"Let's go talk to some authority figures," I said.
A simple gesture caused the flames that covered the Dockworker's Union building to vanish as though they'd never been.
Ignoring the orders of the firefighters, I stepped inside. Vista appeared beside me, and I could tell that she wanted to vomit.
The smell was a combination of burned pork, ash and flame and a sewage smell.
The men inside were just skeletons; some of them weren't even that. Borg nanites weren't going to bring these people back.
"What happened?"
I saw red, and while my mind quickly adjusted to cold clarity, the anger itself did not go away. It was the one emotion I was allowed to feel in full, and right now, it was the only emotion I had.
My voice was calm and quiet. It showed none of my rage.
This was the one group of people who had supported me unconditionally. They were people who had wives and children, all of whom were going to have lost their fathers, and someone would have to tell them.
I'd make sure their families were taken care of, but it wasn't the same; it would never be. Money could never replace a loved one; it would be cold comfort, but at least it would mean that their families weren't driven further into poverty by people who had come after me.
"They were dressed as mercenaries," Vista said tonelessly. She knew that she'd been chosen to tell me because she was the member of the PRT that I was least likely to kill.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"They uploaded video of what they were doing," she said. "Live. They'd hoped to draw you to them where they could attack you."
"You have reason to think they weren't mercenaries?"
"One of the men managed to pull a mask off one of their attackers. PRT was able to identify the man as a member of the Yangban."
I didn't have to watch the video; I saw it in Vista's memory. She'd been watching it on her visor as the Protectorate had struggled to get there in time.
She'd stretched space to lift PRT vans over the city to get there. It was the reason that the Yangban had only managed to torture a few of the Dockworkers instead of all of them. They'd burned them alive instead and had all teleported away.
I patted her on the head.
The Yangban was known for kidnapping foreign national capes and making them part of their organization. Had they really thought they'd be able to take me and use me to advance their position in the world?
"Well, I've got some work to do," I said.
She stared up at me.
"You're not going to take on the Yangban," she said, looking up at me. "They've got a ton of powers."
"Don't worry about that," I said. "I'm not taking on the Yangban."
She sighed in relief.
"I'm going to take on the CUI," I said.
"You can't defeat an entire country, no matter how powerful you are," she said. "It's impossible."
"These were my father's friends," I said. "They were good people. The Protectorate's biggest problem is that they're afraid."
She stared at me.
"They never take on a fight they think they can't win," I said. "They're afraid. They stand by and let the world burn because it's the safe thing to do. Well, fuck that. I don't like bullies, and now I'm strong enough to do something about them."
A stray thought from Vista made me frown.
"When did the CUI go to war with India?" I asked.
"Three days ago," she said. "You didn't hear about it?"
"I've been off world," I said.
I felt a moment of intense guilt.
Maybe if I'd been here, I could have done something. My rational mind said that it was unlikely that I'd have seen the video, or even necessarily been in Brockton Bay, but guilt nagged at me.
It faded a moment later, and I sighed in relief, even if it was in the back of my mind.
A moment later, I was up in the sky. A quick check of my cell phone and I had the address of the Indian president. It was 10 AM in Brockton Bay, and now it was 7 PM in New Delhi.
It was a little late for government business, but that wasn't going to bother me. English was the national language of India. India was actually composed of what had once been a lot of small kingdoms forced together.
It was closer to Europe than the United States, and so they had a lot of different languages. English was used to help people communicate.
I didn't bother to learn Hindi; I wasn't sure where I would find a skill book for that anyway.
"Excuse me," I said as I blinked beside a guard at the front of the building. "Please tell me where President Patil is."
"I don't know," he said, stumbling a little. "She has been moved for her own safety."
"Tell me who might know," I said.
"Mohinder Medikondoru," the man said.
I had a mental image of the man and where he was.
Two hours later, I was impressed. It had taken four layers of security for me to find the President's safehouse. The President was surrounded by parahumans for fear of the CUI making an attempt on her life.
She was inside a bunker underground. I could see and hear through an agent I'd seen earlier.
"The American is asking about you," he said.
"The one who led the Simurgh away," the president asked. To my surprise she was a slender middle-aged woman who still had her looks.
He nodded.
I appeared beside them.
The capes in the room tried to move instantly, but I was faster.
"Stop," I said.
They all froze.
If there had been more of them, I wouldn't have been able to control them all; most of the capes were surrounding the perimeter.
The woman was staring at me. She was afraid, but none of that showed in her face, expression or body language. She held herself completely still.
"Madam President," I said. "I'm giving you formal notice that I am going to war with the CUI."
"A single person can't go to war with a country," she said. "It would be a terrorist action."
"All right," I said.
I didn't really care, but if it would make my eventual reintegration into what was left of society easier, I would happily create a legal fiction.
"Do you guys hire mercenaries?"
She nodded.
"Pay me one rupee," I said. "Or a dollar if you have it, and I will work for you."
She glanced at one of the capes in the room, who reluctantly stepped forward with money held out to me.
I grinned.
"How do you think you guys are going to do?" I asked.
Before she spoke, I read her mind.
India had 1.4 million soldiers, and the CUI had 2.5 million, 400,000 more than their Earth Aleph counterparts.
The CUI had stealth fighters, submarines, military satellites, more small vehicles and small arms. They had light tanks designed for the Himalayas and artillery.
The Chinese could mass their troops better as well, and the Yangban could easily overwhelm the Indian capes.
"Where are the Yangban now?" I asked, pushing my will into my voice. "Give me all the information you have on military positions, military satellites, and military bases."
She was more than happy to show me.
"I wouldn't have thought an American would be willing to get involved," she said.
"The CUI killed people I care about," I said. "I'm going to make them regret it."
She stared at me for a moment.
"What are your powers then?"
She really didn't know a lot about me, other than that I was the cape who ran away from the Simurgh and took her to another universe.
"I get weaker versions of cape powers that get stronger the more that I use them. Other capes with similar powers make those powers much stronger."
"And you have a lot of powers?"
"Enough," I said. "As long as I'm careful."
I wanted them to die, but I wanted their powers too. The Yangban didn't even participate in Endbringer battles. They were hoping that the rest of the world would bleed itself dry, while they continued to grow in strength.
Even the Empire 88 had contributed capes in the past. Villains had given their lives to protect humanity while the Chinese Union Imperial had sat by, hoping to expand its powers.
The only reason they didn't dwarf the rest of the world in numbers of capes was that most of Asia hated parahumans and tended to kill them as soon as they were found.
The Yangban had a member who allowed them to share powers between them. I wanted that power not just because it would utterly cripple the Yangban, but because it would open opportunities for me.
If I'd been able to empower even a single dockworker, none of this would have happened.
The President of India wasn't sure I should be so confident, but she hoped that I might be able to at least do a little damage before the Yangban killed me.
I smiled at her, but it didn't reach my eyes.
"Fuck the CUI," I said.
I took pictures on my phone of the screen. Hopefully I'd eventually find somebody with an eidetic memory power, and then everything was going to be much easier.
The Yangban were within the borders of India, creating destruction and confusion among their enemies.
Considering that they were a group of at least fifty capes, she had reason to be doubtful. They shared powers among themselves, so the moment that I killed one of them they were likely to notice as they lost access to that power.
At least one of them was known to have a danger sense, so they'd be somewhat ready for my attack, and nobody was sure what all their powers were.
I'd checked Wikipedia for what was known about it. The CUI had kept trying to delete the page or at least change it.
There was a battlefield here with two armies facing each other. There were tanks on both sides, and the entire field was covered in smoke from artillery fires and smoke bombs.
The yangban were slaughtering the other side, focusing on their artillery.
I sent a wave of fire across the battlefield, beginning at the back of the CUI lines and bursting forward. The army was spread out, but my power stretched outward, stretching across a sixteen-mile diameter.
The people in tanks were unaffected unless they were close to a viewing port. The infantry and people in open vehicles died burning in a conflagration much like the dockworkers.
The Yangban was unaffected.
A quick look inside their minds showed that they had invincibility, but only as long as they didn't move. Their danger sense had alerted them in time, as I knew that it would.
They also had a force field, but it wasn't necessarily inviolable, and so their go to response was to freeze.
I was washed in flames, but my own flame control kept the fire from damaging my outfit. Although I was immune to blindness, the fires still obscured my vision. That would have been a problem except that the Yangban had all seen me, and I could see through their eyes.
They had a vague idea that I could control fire, but they'd hoped to distract me while slow moving projectiles flew toward me. They were slow even by human standards, and the fires distracted them from me.
I blinked behind two of them, and a moment later we were in space. They were still invulnerable, but they still needed to breath. I threw them hard against a Chinese spy satellite; two invulnerable forms thrown with two thousand tons of force, and the satellite was thrown out of orbit.
Their eyes rolled back in their heads, and the air escaped their lungs. They moved, releasing their invulnerability, and it was seconds before they were unconscious.
I shoved my fist in their stomachs, one after the other.
NEW POWER CREATED!
INVISIBILITY!
YOU ARE NOW INVISIBLE TO VISIBLE LIGHT. FURTHER LEVELS OF THIS POWER MAKE YOU INVISIBLE TO OTHER WAVELENGTHS! YOU CAN AFFECT ONE OTHER PERSON OR 100 CUBIC FEET PER LEVEL, DOUBLING WITH EACH LEVEL BY TOUCH.
LEVEL 1
From the second cape I gained another screen.
+2 LEVELS TO FIRE CONTROL!
The entire group was gone by the time I returned. They had instant teleportation as one of the powers shared between them. If the two I'd killed had thought instead of panicking they might have survived.
The Indian military was moving forward on the Chinese tanks. There was a reason that Tanks required military support. Without the Yangban, the Indian capes were also starting to turn the tide of battle.
My telepathy extended a long range by now, and I could feel them where they had teleported, more than ten miles away. They were regrouping and urgently calling their superiors.
I blinked into the middle of them.
-40 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-39 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-38 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-37 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-36 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-35 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
Holy crap.
I blinked away. Maybe jumping into the middle of them had been a bad idea. I waited thirty seconds as they teleported away and I healed.
I'd gotten a look inside one of their heads, and I knew where they were going.
The lasers they were using would easily cut tanks in two; it was part of the reason the Indians didn't have many tanks left. In truth, the lasers were one reason that the Yangban was so feared; they could slice skyscrapers in half.
I blinked ahead of them so that I was waiting at their next teleportation spot. Before they could react, I'd inventoried two of their numbers, and I'd grabbed two more.
They lost access to the powers of two members, and I could feel the members panic a little. One of the people in inventory was the one with the damage resistance.
-34 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-33 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
-32 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
-31 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
I had a huge advantage in terms of speed and agility, especially with the bonuses from Intuitive Empathy letting me know where they were planning to shoot. Despite that, lasers literally moved at the speed of light, and I had forty people firing at me at shirt range.
I blinked away, again into space.
Instinctively they went immobile, which was exactly what I wanted.
One of them was a brute, and he looked Indian. He was a kidnapped member enslaved by the CUI.
I used mind control to make them think that teleporting was impossible. I then proceeded to beat both of them.
+5 STRENGTH!
ENHANCED VISION NOW INCLUDES X-RAY VISION! YOU CAN SEE THROUGH 1 INCH OF MATERIAL DOUBLING WITH EACH LEVEL OF THE POWER.
+1 LEVEL!
LEVEL 4! YOU CAN NOW SEE 10,000 TIMES AS FAR, AND YOU CAN SEE THROUGH UP TO EIGHT INCHES OF MATERIAL WITHIN VISUAL RANGE!
I released the other two, then inventoried the first two.
The man with the danger sense tried to teleport away. I spun them both telekinetically as quickly as I could. They were choking and suffocating and they were growing disoriented.
When the man with the danger sense finally moved, I punched him over and over, ignoring the other Indian.
He was fast, and he was good at dodging, but he wasn't as good as me.
He was dead a moment later.
GRANT DANGER SENSE HAS BEEN IMPROVED! YOU MAY NOW INCLUDE YOURSELF AS A RECIPIENT OF DANGER SENSE!
LEVEL 2!
YOU MAY NOW AFFECT UP TO TWO INDIVIDUALS AT ONCE!
The other one hit me in the back with a laser.
-30 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
He had lost his compatriot's brute power the moment I'd inventoried him, but he still had the power to generate a forcefield around himself.
I couldn't touch him to inventory or planeshift him because of the force field. Instead, I used blood control to pull the blood directly out of his body.
He looked horrified and after a moment, the force field filled with blood. A moment after that the force field winked out.
+1 FLIGHT!
Every power I stole was a power permanently lost to the Yangban. It weakened them and made them less effective.
Blinking to Cannibal Earth, I dropped the two Indian Yangban members off next to Chort.
"Hey Chort," I said. "Can you watch these two assholes for me?"
-29 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
-28 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
They kept their powers interdimensionally?
Grabbing them by the hand, I said, "Sleep!"
As a permanent command, I'd just put both of them in a coma. I suspected t would still allow the Yangban access to their powers.
It didn't matter.
I blinked back to the location of the battle, and I didn't see any of the Yangban. Blinking everywhere in a hundred-mile radius didn't show any of them either.
They'd teleported back home apparently.
Well, the best way to get them back was to get their attention. If they wanted to run, fine, but I suspected the higher ups in the CUI would force them to face me if I did enough damage.
Irritated, I flashed back to the battlefield and I began grabbing tanks and throwing them into the air. The men inside wouldn't survive the landing.
I then checked my phone for the locations of the CUI air bases.
I blinked into the sky over the CUI and with my current level of visual abilities, I could see things two miles away as though they were a foot away.
I was within twenty-five miles of an airbase, and so I blinked to the first one.
"Burn," I said.
I burned the entire air force base. I didn't have time to sort through guilt and innocence, not in groups of thousands of people. I did make sure that the flames did not spread to the city beyond, and I was careful to extinguish the flames before I moved on.
Why should ordinary people suffer when it was their military and their government doing all the damage?
I blinked to the next spot, and I began burning more planes.
It took five to ten minutes minimum to scramble a military fighter. It would take them longer to get to whatever bases they thought I was going to hit.
Right now, I was destroying as many of the planes and bases as quickly as I could, as well as melting the runways underneath.
After fifteen minutes, I'd destroyed forty-five airbases; the CUI had two hundred and fifty airfields.
Missiles were flying toward me from squadrons of airplanes coming from every direction.
They were making it easy for me.
Flame exploded in a sixteen-mile radius around me. I made sure not to hit the city below, although the dozens of fighter planes falling to the ground below probably wasn't good for them.
Fuck the CUI.
I began to dismantle their military. Eventually the Yangban would come out of their holes, and if they didn't, then I would tear the country to the ground.
Contessa didn't always know why she did what she did; sometimes she never found out why a particular action was necessary for a path to be completed.
Why did she have to move a baseball 2 meters to the south of its current location? Why show up in Brockton Bay on a particular street in the Docks area at a particular time, and wave at a large Asian man?
Loosening a face mask in the CUI at a particular time, or keeping a man from making his bus. It was all a mystery, and more often than not she had no idea how any of them fit into the plan.
During the early years she'd been frustrated, and she'd tried to figure out how these things had made a difference. The paths to finding out had inevitably been longer than the original plans, and so she'd eventually learned to simply accept them.
It worked, and that was all that mattered.
Stepping into the white room, she saw that Alexandria was already there, along with Eidolon and Doctor Mother.
"Harvest has gone to war with the CUI," Alexandria said. "Did you know about this?"
Contessa shrugged.
"What are we going to do about this?" she demanded.
"The path says nothing," Contessa said. "Let her alone. Anything else leads to disaster."
Privately she wondered if the path simply didn't want them to get their hands dirty so that they could eventually be in a position to work with her.
"She's dangerous," Alexandria said. "A mass murderer."
"We've worked with worse," Doctor Mother said. "And we will again."
Eidolon was staring at the holographic screen in front of them; it was a piece of tinkertech from a tinker in another world.
Social media was mostly under strict control in the CUI. Any dissent from the party line was met with disappearances or worse.
The still allowed social media, because it was an excellent way for them to allow rebellious citizens to reveal themselves, even if it was only through mild language.
"She'll win or she'll lose," Contessa said. "Either way, we win."
The path suggested that at least, even if Contessa wasn't sure.
"And if the Yangban get her?" Eidolon demanded. "Her powers get stronger with use…the Yangban have a hundred and fifty capes scattered all over the country. If they add her power to theirs will they be able to add to her power progression, and thus their own?"
"A hundred and fifty Yangban Harvests would be worse than all three Endbringers put together," Alexandria said. "Because the Yangban would be happy to just destroy cities without bothering to fight."
"If it would help the survival of humanity, we'd kneel to them," Doctor Mother said. "After all, once the Endbringers and Scion were dead, we'd have an eternity to overthrow them."
Killing Null would have been enough to defang the Yangban Harvesters after all. Unfortunately, they feared Scion might understand that and he'd take care of it.
The sheer number of powers they had in the Garden was proof of how many powers Scion had potential access to. He only used a few of them, and so fighting him would be a nightmare even without his overwhelming power.
"It wouldn't help," Alexandria said firmly.
"She won't be able to rule an entire country," Doctor Mother reassured them. "First, she hasn't show any inclination toward that sort of thing, and even if she wanted to, she can't keep control over billions of people unless she wants to sing all the time, which I imagine would be tiresome after a while."
Eidolon was quiet.
He was always quiet when Harvest was concerned. Did he resent her?
A young girl whose powers kept growing exponentially even as his own were fading? He had all the powers, but he could only use three at once. He was more versatile than her, but she had a dizzying array of powers that seemed to grow every time she was encountered.
She could use more than four at once too.
It had to be like acid to his self-esteem. Unfortunately, Contessa didn't care enough to Path a way to fix his self esteem issues. It didn't seem important as long as he was able to do his job.
Contessa glanced at the screen and winced.
"She's destroyed three quarters of their air force," Doctor Mother said.
Dragon was doing excellent work in gathering all the available information and collating it in a useable form for the PRT. They had the feed tapped, or course.
"She's efficient at least," Alexandria said. "She's hitting the air force bases that are closest to India first."
"It makes her predictable," Eidolon said disdainfully. "It gives them ample opportunity to ambush her."
"She doesn't care," Doctor Mother said. "She's sending out a message to the rest of the world, and she's hoping to draw the Yangban to her."
"If she's not careful, they'll call her an Endbringer and have everyone show up to fight her," Eidolon said. "Even though those CUI bastards have never helped anybody since they took over."
"By the time the teams were formed, it would be over," Doctor Mother said. "And it would be difficult to get people to join up when she's targeting only the military bases and leaving the civilians alone."
They all stared at the screen for a moment before Doctor Mother continued, "There's nothing we can do about it without revealing ourselves, so let's move on to other business. If something pops up that we need to address, I've got people who will alert us."
They all nodded.
"Fuck," Sophia said, staring at the screen.
They'd been pulled from school for this, and it was more than worth it.
Vista was staring too.
"I did this," she said, her voice small. "I told her it was them."
Sophia still wasn't friends with Vista, but she respected her a little more since she was somehow able to deal with Hebert. It took big brass ones to do that, and Vista wasn't afraid of the girl at all.
Not like Sophia was afraid, exactly. She was just cautious in a way that the younger girl wasn't.
She'd read the reports.
Gallant thought that the girl's powers were affecting her mind, keeping her from feeling emotions other than minimally. The PRT assumed that she was a high functioning sociopath.
That wasn't necessarily a bad thing in Sophia's books. Sociopaths were the people who knew how to make the hard decisions while the regular pussies shivered in their boots.
They were politicians, business CEOs, surgeons.
Sure, there were some serial killers who were sociopaths, and technically Taylor was a mass murderer, but at least she was consistent.
Don't fuck with her or hers and she'd leave you alone.
Sophia didn't understand why that was so hard for the PRT to understand. They kept poking the bear, and the bear kept getting bigger.
Once the bear got too big to beat, you started feeding it honey and salmon to calm it the fuck down. It was basic math.
The upper management of the PRT seemed to have a weird fetish for making sure everybody toed the line.
"She'd have found out anyway," Sophia said. "The way she acts, she's gotta have a crapton of thinker powers, and at least this way she's not coming after us."
"She's killing thousands of people," Vista said, staring at the screen without blinking. "And I was part of it."
Sophia frowned.
Why was Vista being a whiny bitch about this? She was usually pretty tough.
"Ask yourself this," she said finally. "What would have happened if you hadn't told her?"
Vista finally looked up.
"She'd have found out," she said. "She always finds out."
"Jack Slash got away with tons of shit for like twenty years because he had that thinker power and nobody knew it. His other power wasn't worth a shit. Hebert's got all the powers plus that one."
Sophia hesitated and put an arm around Vista's shoulder.
"They gambled big, thinking that they could ambush her and then all their capes would have her powers. That would have basically been an instant win for them. They fucked it up, and now they're paying for it. They basically killed themselves."
Vista looked uncertain, but she didn't pull away.
General Wei screamed into the telephone.
"I don't care what you have to do, get those parahuman bastards out there! She's cutting us apart!"
It was like his superiors didn't understand what was happening.
The American Bitch had been periodically taking down satellites. The thinkers believed that she was stealing them instead of destroying them, presumably to take for herself.
With each satellite gone, the fog of war grew worse. It took longer and longer to find her, and that gave her more and more time to complete what she was doing. She'd already destroyed eighty percent of their air force bases.
Any nation that wished it would have air superiority over the CUI, and there would be nothing they could do about it. The CUI had spent hundreds of billions of yuan on updating their air force, making sure that no nation would dare face them in a post-Scion world.
The Golden fool had destroyed the nuclear stockpiles, although he'd ignored newer weapons as long as they were not attached to missiles.
Given that nuclear weapons did not seem to have any effect on Endbringers, most nations had given up on nuclear weapons. The Chinese military was no so foolish.
General Wei screamed at the men on the other end of the telephone. Why were they refusing assistance? Didn't they see that the country was bleeding in a death by a thousand cuts?
He heard a strange sound from behind him; gurgled screams. Looking back, he saw that everyone in the control room was dying, strange, bone like protrusions exploding from their bodies and still growing.
"Hello," he heard from behind him. "Tell me where I can find the Yangban. Also, what are the very worst things I could do to this country?"
For some reason, it didn't even occur to him not to tell her. He spent ten minutes telling her everything he knew.
She left him alive, saying, "You aren't so bad, Chen. You're a lot less corrupt than most of the other people I've looked at. How would you feel about being Emperor?"
"May your ovaries explode and cause you a long and agonizing death!" he said, once he realized what he'd done.
She frowned.
"I don't have any, and I'm not sure that would kill me anyway, even though internal attacks do a lot more damage. I wonder if that's something I could try on someone else?"
He tried to reach for his sidearm, but she ignored it as he shot her in the eye. She didn't even flinch.
"Well, I wouldn't trust you to lead if you felt different. If I pick you as the new boss, I'll convince you otherwise."
With that, she blinked away.
He stared, dazed.
Rising to his feet, he staggered out of the control room. There were bodies everywhere, with bones protruding and forming a kind of flower that was almost beautiful.
Men and women that he'd worked with for years, all for the glory of the Chinese union…they were dead.
There wasn't a single sound anywhere except for the hum of the machines.
"I told you it was a bad idea," Null said.
Officially the Emperor was his employer, but the truth was that the Imperial family had never been anything but figureheads for the Yangban.
Given the hatred that the nation had for parahumans, it would have been impossible for them to have taken over on their own. There were less than two hundred of them, and no matter how powerful they were, they couldn't control more than a billion people at the same time.
There would have been insurrections and revolts, and sooner or later, they would have all been killed. Almost everyone needed to sleep sometimes, and most people were vulnerable while they slept.
The Imperial family had been the necessary compromise.
It calmed the people and gave them the beautiful illusion that the parahumans served the people instead of the people serving the parahumans.
Unfortunately, some of the younger members of the Yangban had grown up with the Imperial family, and they'd bought into the lie.
The Emperor tried to subvert him sometimes by giving orders to the younger members, with some degree of success.
"It would have been the ultimate coup," the fool said, his voice wavering.
"We already planned to acquire her," Null said irritably. "But we weren't such fools as to try to draw her out by killing people she cared about! She has a history of disproportionate retribution, while attacks on her person are dealt with more charitably."
"How was I to know?" the man said. "You keep me uninformed."
"I tell you what you need to know," Null said. "It does not matter; she will be coming for you and so I must leave."
"What?" the Emperor wavered.
"She will kill you and your family," Null said. "And she will vent her rage on this nation. The Yangban will survive."
He already had a patsy in the wings, an undiscovered Imperial ready to take over once the current Imperial family was wiped out.
They were in an underground bunker.
"Of course, we may still win," he said. He looked back at the trembling emperor. "In which case you will not remember this conversation."
The parahuman who could erase memories was not part of the collective. The temptation would have been too strong for the rank and file to use the power, and it was one that needed to be kept secret to be used for maximum effectiveness.
"If her pattern continues, this will be over shortly," he said.
"There," he said.
She was over a military base in Urumchi City.
"Do it," he said into his cellphone.
A moment later the screen went white.
"What happened?" the Emperor asked.
"You detonated a five hundred megaton nuclear weapon on Chinese soil," Null said. "You will abdicate in shame, although you will be lauded for protecting the Chinese people."
There were a lot of Uighur reeducation camps there. The CUI had disappeared most Uighurs to unmarked graves, but had kept some reeducation camps to show the rest of the world that they were generous.
They'd concentrated those camps in a small radius in hopes of doing something like this.
It was a relatively clean bomb, all things considered, and mostly it would only affect unimportant people on the outskirts of the country.
"That wasn't cool," a voice came from behind him.
Null froze.
She didn't sound angry, only resigned. Looking back at her, he could see that her eyes were glowing.
Ah.
She'd vanished with Ching's danger sense.
"Miss Hebert," he said in unaccented English.
"Null," she said. "I'm going to enjoy eating your power."
"As though I would allow anyone to destroy me," he said. He teleported away before she could react.
She was already there when he arrived.
How was she able to follow him?
"I didn't order your people's deaths," he said calmly. They were on the top of a skyscraper.
"Just the deaths of hundreds of thousands of your own people!" she said.
"I'm surprised that you care," he said. "After all, you hate our people. Fuck the CUI I think you said?"
"Maybe I am a little biased," she said. "I lost a good friend once; she was everything to me. She turned evil and tortured me for a couple of years after she was terrorized by some of your people."
"The ABB had nothing to do with the CUI," he said as he teleported to a different location.
"A quarter of its members were people who fled from here, forced to be criminals because the CUI refused to acknowledge them and making them stateless people."
Did she know about the ambush he had planned? Surely not.
She grinned at him.
"I didn't find out until later when I read the mind of…someone else. I already hated you though. So does the rest of the world."
"And why should we care?" he asked. "The CUI stands on its own feet. It needs no other nation."
"You kidnap capes from all over the world, and you do not participate in fighting Endbringers. I've been slaughtering your air force, destroying your military, dismantling your country, and not a single other nation has even offered to help."
"You think yourself an Endbringer?" he asked, sneering. "You are nothing, a flash in a pan."
They were almost ready. He almost grinned in anticipation.
She was grinning too for some reason, although it didn't reach her eyes. Did she know?
If so, then why did she keep following him.
Was she hoping for him to lead her to the others?
It did not matter. They would finish her, and then she would belong to them.
Once they had her power, funneling the usage from a hundred or more capes, her powers would grow to the point that three or four men would be able to overwhelm Alexandria.
The rest of the world would belong to them, and it would be victory everlasting.
He appeared finally in a large clearing.
She appeared behind him, grinning as she saw the group of forty men behind him.
They were the toughest, strongest and most experienced men in the organization.
They parted and a figure strode out in the middle of them.
It had taken effort to get him, but it had been worth it.
"Lung!" she exclaimed. "I thought you'd run off like a coward."
Lung snarled; the mind control hadn't left him able to speak, but it was enough.
Behind Lung, the other men began snarling, and they began to grow. Lung's power wouldn't just increase their strength and regeneration. It would increase all their powers exponentially.
Null grinned, and then he teleported away.
He'd been willing to kill her if he'd been able to, but this was even better. Combining her power with that of Lung would make the Yangban unstoppable in a world that was already teetering on the brink of chaos.
They would bring order to the barbarians, and they would purge the undesirables.
Once they had Hebert, the world was theirs.
The Yangban were worse than I'd thought.
They'd have killed me with that tinkertech bomb if my new Danger Sense hadn't screamed a warning at me; even blinking into space had triggered my danger sense and I'd jumped to the moon.
It was easily visible from space, as part of its power was expelled above the atmosphere. Despite that, I expected windows to be shattered for hundreds of miles at least, despite the Tinkertech being designed to reduce the damage outside its area.
I'd had Null answer a few questions for me while I was beating him.
It would have been more effective to use multiple bombs in the area; it was why militaries had stopped trying to go for bigger bombs and had started using cluster bombs with overlapping areas of effect.
The bomb had already been there; they hadn't transported it there for me.
Null's answers had been chilling.
The Yangban had been funneling their undesirables into that region for years. They'd murdered a large portion of those populations, but had kept some to keep the world from realizing what was happening.
The bomb had been meant as a pretext for war while simultaneously eliminating those peoples who were considered undesirable.
They'd have used it as a pretext to go to total war with Russia or India, claiming it was done by a tinker from one of those governments.
They hadn't needed an excuse to attack India this time, so they'd been saving it for Russia.
It wasn't that they cared about world opinion. They just wanted to give the world an excuse not to act.
Without missiles it was a lot harder to deliver cluster bombs, and it might even be considered unbelievable that the CUI would let more than a dozen bombs weighing more than a car into their country.
The bomb was designed not to spread radioactive fallout; even in the area the radiation would fade away within five years, and after that, the area could slowly be reclaimed for the true Chinese people.
They'd send the lowest classes in at first, just in case their calculations were off a bit.
The CUI made the ABB look like a group of boy scouts. They'd been involved in genocide, in ethnic cleansing, in experiments attempting to create new parahumans that involved torture and brainwashing.
So, I'd made him forget our conversation, and I'd had him lead me into a trap.
Even now, he was watching the battle from within Mama Mather's range. He wouldn't understand why; it was so that I could kill him if this battle turned nasty.
Forty people with Lung's power, weakened, but then boosted back to full power by one of their capes…that was a challenge that I was unprepared for.
I looked at the screen from Null's power again.
GRANT DANGER SENSE HAS BEEN UPGRADED TO GRANT POWERS!
YOU MAY DIVIDE YOUR POWERS BETWEEN YOURSELF AND ONE OTHER PERSON, DOUBLED WITH EACH LEVEL!
YOU MAY NOW GRANT DANGER SENSE TO YOURSELF AND DIVIDE YOUR OTHER POWERS BETWEEN YOURSELF AND FOUR OTHER PEOPLE!
THIS POWER WORKS INTERDIMENSIONALLY!
LEVEL 3!
It would be a perfect way to increase my resistances; by weakening my resistances, I could be damaged by weaker attacks, bypassing the fact that fewer and fewer things could hurt me or give me bonuses.
Between danger sense and intuitive empathy, I had an effective +30 to dexterity against parahumans; it gave me an effective Dexterity of 77 and they had a -20 to dexterity from attacks by me.
So, when I blinked next to Lung and inventoried him, all the other yangban troops began to shrink, losing access to his powers even as they tried to shoot me.
They began teleporting around me, hoping to confuse me enough that they'd get a hit in.
"Bone Garden," I said casually.
All of them shrieked as bones exploded from their skin. They still had a brute rating from the Indian cape on Cannibal world, but without Lung they didn't have regeneration.
-28 HP LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
I gestured, and fire exploded from all around me. Without Lung's power, they weren't immune to flames, although their force fields protected them.
Grabbing one, I said, "Stop."
Her force field went down and I swung her around so that her body was hit by a dozen lasers.
I managed to contort my body so that only half of the lasers hit me.
-145 HIT POINTS!
+6% LASER RESISTANCE!
+6% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
Turning invisible, I also became gaseous, turning into a fog around their feet.
They all looked around, angry and desperate even as my fog covered the body of the woman I'd just killed.
+2 TO MENTAL ILLUSIONS!
MENTAL ILLUSIONS NOW HAVE A 2560 FOOT RANGE AND YOU MAY AFFECT UP TO 256 PEOPLE AT THE SAME TIME!
That was convenient.
I covered one of them with an illusion of me, and the others all lashed out at him with lasers, cutting him in pieces. I created an illusion of myself grinning, and teleporting behind one of them, tearing him apart.
His body fell to the floor, and I kept them from seeing the true wounds on his body.
From below, I drank his blood even as I regenerated.
"Fuck…she killed Fang Fen!"
NEW POWER CREATED!
FORCE FIELDS!
YOU GAIN +10% PER LEVEL RESISTANCE TO ALL EFFECTS THAT DO NOT ORIGINATE FROM INSIDE THE FORCE FIELD, INCLUDING ESOTERIC EFFECTS! THE FORCE FIELD ALSO REDUCES DAMAGE BY 50 HIT POINTS PER LEVEL!
AFTER IT REDUCES THREE TIMES THE DAMAGE REDUCTION, IT SHUTS DOWN FOR ONE MINUTE!
LEVEL 1!
So, Bone Garden would ignore my force field, but weird space warping and the like would not.
I was a little concerned about the limited damage it could take before going down, though. Any effect strong enough where I needed the extra protection would drop the force field in a single attack.
I wasn't going to complain, though. I'd denied them force fields, which would make them easier to kill.
Surrounding a woman with my illusions, I had my image shove a blade of flame through her flesh.
They teleported behind her and all shot at "me."
The lasers shredded her body, and she fell to the ground.
BLINK HAS INCREASED BY 4 LEVELS!
YOU MAY NOW TELEPORT 15.44 LIGHT YEARS PER JUMP!
LEVEL 39!
WITH BONUSES FROM EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE, LEVEL 57!
Well, that was going to make my life handy! It meant that I could travel the entire galaxy in five hours, assuming I did nothing but blink.
I doubted that I'd want to; I had too many things to do here, but maybe in the future I could go exploring.
Also, I could feel the horror and fear in their minds. Without teleportation, their safety net was gone.
I decided to make it even worse.
Blinking, I appeared behind Null. He'd been told to wait on me until I returned. Now that I had, his mind was clearing.
"Bone Garden, Bone Garden, Bone Garden," I said, and then I shoved my fist through his chest.
"I'm going to destroy everything that you created," I whispered in his ear.
The moment he died; I could feel the screams of the others as they realized that their link was gone. They were horrified now that they didn't have their artificial powers.
I blinked into the middle of them, and I grinned wolfishly.
The pressure to release Lung was growing, but I still had a little time left to go.
Appearing before them, I said, "You had a chance to create paradise, and instead you created hell."
A laser blast hit me, but it was only a single one this time.
-21 HP!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
Ignoring that, I punched through the chest of one of them. He died, and I felt his blood on my hand.
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE HAS INCREASED BY +2 LEVELS!
His power was like Alabaster's; he reset, except that he could apply the power to everyone instead of just himself. He had the power of temporal reset, and he'd somehow been denying the power to the others.
He was rebellious and an asshole, but he had been recruited unwillingly.
I turned and ignored him.
-20 HP!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% ENERGY RESISTANCE!
I ignored that as well. I was enjoying leveling up the resistance.
Punching through the head of a slow teleporter, I grinned.
+1 TO BLINK!
YOU CAN NOW TELEPORT 30.88 LIGHT YEARS!
My danger sense screamed, and instinctively I teleported into space.
A nuclear fireball appeared where I had just been, wiping out the remnants of the Yangban.
Fuck.
I'd hoped to get at least twenty more powers before they tried nuking me again.
This wasn't a tinkertech bomb; it was a backpack nuke, presumably brought by a teleporter.
The Emperor was back in control now that the Yangban were shattered.
Worse, Lung was about to reappear.
I appeared in front of the Imperial Palace. I suspected that we were about to do some damage, and since the Emperor was an asshole anyway, I was going to let him see the cost of destroying my friends.
Lung reappeared, and then he stopped.
"So, you killed them," he said.
"They killed themselves," I said. "The same as you when you killed my people."
Lung hadn't run; I could see that in his head. Once he'd been isolated and alone the Yangban had kidnapped him. They had information about his regenerative capabilities; they'd imprisoned him in the past.
He lunged toward me, and he punched me in the face. I didn't move.
"I'm going to play with you for a while," I said.
"Fool!" he said. "I get stronger the longer I fight!"
"What a coincidence…so do I!" I said. "I was going to give you a chance, but if you don't want it…"
Soldiers began firing at the both of us. One hit me with a shoulder mounted rocket. I didn't feel a ping from danger sense, and so I didn't move.
It hit me in the head, and exploded, obscuring my vision for a moment.
Lung chose that moment to lunge forward, hitting me in the face. I stared at him, and then I blasted fire toward him. It didn't affect him at all except to burn his clothing, but the soldiers behind him all died, and the front of the palace was on fire.
He hit me in the stomach, and I could tell that his hit was a little stronger than the one before it, although it still wasn't damaging.
Grabbing him by the arm, I swung him, sending him flying through the concrete of the palace wall and inside. He killed at least three people as his body flew through the wall.
Blinking beside him, I said, "You shouldn't have come after my people. If you'd just come after me, I'd have let you live. If you hadn't come after me at all, you'd rule the Bay now."
In truth I probably would have had to eliminate them eventually to make the Bay the kind of place Dad would be proud of. Still, he would have lasted longer.
He punched me from the ground.
Given my weight, I should have flown through the roof, but I held myself in place with flight.
Looking down at him, I punched him in the stomach.
"What do you think all the women your men raped, the families who had their businesses or their lives ruined, the people who had their fathers, their mothers, their children murdered by your people…what do you think they'd tell me now?"
"They'd say you are a bitch," he said.
We were speaking in Japanese, and his words were more fluent in this language than they had been in English, even though he'd been in the Bay for years.
"I'd think they'd want me to tell you what people really think of you," I said.
"I have no interest in the musings of anyone."
"You're a coward," I said. "You gave up after Leviathan. You settled. Instead of taking the risk of becoming someone powerful, you were content to sit back and be a small fish in an even smaller pond."
"The Endbringers are forces of nature," he said as he rose to his feet. "You might as well fight a hurricane."
He lunged forwards and I let him punch me through a wall, killing a minor functionary on the other side who had been responsible for the murder of an entire village.
I blinked behind him.
"I saw a man fight a black hole to a standstill," I said. "The same man faced a tidal wave and he came out the victor. He would fight a hurricane, and he would win."
He was starting to grow claws and his face was lengthening.
Good.
Punching him in the solar plexus, I whispered in his ear.
"You'll never know what it's like to defeat a force of nature, because you will not try. You are weak, and you have always been weak. For all the power you were granted, it didn't change your intrinsic cowardice."
There was an image in his mind.
A woman in a Fedora had caused his trigger event. She'd appeared in Brockton Bay on the day he had been coming to fight me; he'd changed directions and that had led him directly into the arms of the Yangban.
I switched into my least favorite Armani.
He stumbled back as he saw what I was wearing.
"A little woman in a Fedora terrifies you," I said. "Me…I'm not a woman…I'm a force of nature…and we know how you react to forces of nature."
"I'll kill too!" he shouted.
His mouth was already changing.
-1 HP!
+1 % PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
I grinned at him, and then I punched him harder, though three more walls. I'd been using illusions to gather the fleeing people, confusing them and making them think that the way into the palace was actually the way out.
Theses were the people who made things happen. They were the party loyalists. They were the men and women who signed the paperwork that they knew would result in unending human misery.
Fire covered me as Lung rose to his feet.
I was being careful not to damage Lung more then his regeneration could handle.
"You kept sex slaves," I said. "Was that because you were afraid of real women? I guess the woman in the Fedora made you afraid of women with power."
-2 HP!
+1 PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
Although my resistances were getting better, his damage was growing even faster.
Of course, I hadn't even taken my metal form. I wanted to milk as much physical resistance out of this as I could so that I would be in better shape to fight my true energies.
"The truth is, I'm a little disappointed," I said. "I'd looked forward to having a real fight with a monster; but compared to some of the things I've fought, you don't even rate."
His anger was growing blazing hot.
"Maybe I should let you run," I said. "You throw baby fish back because they're too small. I suppose I could do that to you, except that you're never going to get any stronger than you are right now."
"I ki' ooo," he screamed.
Flames burst from him, catching the wall on fire. The people on the other side of the wall were milling around in confusion.
He reached out and grabbed for me, and I casually forced his hands open.
"I'm always going to be better than you, because I would fight the hurricane. I may not be able to protect my friends, but I can avenge them. You…you don't really care about anyone but yourself."
Grabbing him by the arm, I swung and he flew over my head and into the floor. I swung again and again, and I felt the floor cracking beneath me.
They should have built the palace of more than a few feet of concrete, I reflected as the floor gave way beneath me.
Lung rose out of the rubble, his eyes staring at me.
He breathed fire, and the wall behind me melted. I commanded the flames, and none of them touched me.
The wall collapsed, and I heard the horrified screams of the people behind the wall as they cooked alive.
"Ultimately, you're going to die alone and unremembered," I said. "No one will be there to pray at your funeral. No one will even celebrate your death, because it will be overshadowed by the death of a country. You will be a footnote in history."
-10 HIT POINTS!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
"I told you I would save you for last," I said. "Where are your friends? Where is Oni Lee?"
He'd grown larger, and he had a pronounced snout by now. There were stubs of wings on his shoulder.
"Your family would be ashamed of you if they were still alive," I said. "Murderer, abuser, horror. But I'm better at you in even your worst aspects. I have killed millions. I am the nightmare of thousands."
I was the nightmare of the PRT, but after this, I suspected that every corrupt government official in the world would be having nightmares for a long time.
"You know what?" I said.
He lunged forward.
-20 HIT POINTS
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
"I'd thought about drawing this out, gaining as much power as I could from you before I killed you, but a long drawn out fight…that's actually a form of giving you respect."
I ripped his wing off and he screamed.
"But frankly, you aren't worth my time," I said. "I've got a country to destroy and you aren't good enough."
Grabbing him, I blinked us both into space.
He immediately gasped, and the air left his lungs.
Using Mama Mather's power, I whispered in his ear.
"They'll never even find your body. I'm going to send it out into interstellar space. You will be alone in the afterlife. You will never be able to visit your descendants, and you will never enjoy the company of other spirits. You will be alone for the rest of eternity. Good luck!"
Lung only paid lip service to Shintoism, but deep down he had some of the beliefs.
He was already shrinking, so when I shoved my hand in his stomach, there wasn't all that much resistance!
NEW POWER CREATED!
ESCALATION!
ALL POWERS AND ABILITIES GROW ONE LEVEL FOR EVERY FOUR SECONDS THAT YOU ARE FIGHTING! POWERS DECREASE ONE LEVEL BACK TO BASELINE WHEN YOU ARE NOT FIGHTING!
With the solar system visualized as being horizontal, I jumped a light year vertically and I shoved Lung's body with all the force I could muster.
If it left the galactic plane, I might even be able to keep my promise to him. More likely he'd be caught in a gravitational field eventually.
My new power seemed like it would be pretty useful in fights against my enemies.
DEFEAT THE ABB HAS BEEN COMPLETED!
YOU HAVE GAINED 2 LEVELS!
YOU NOW HAVE 351 HIT POINTS!
LEVEL 13!
Now it was time to finish dismantling a country.
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