"It's certainly a puzzle, Colin." Dragon's face on his monitor showed a thoughtful expression as he glanced to the side, meeting the camera with his eyes. He nodded, before going back to studying the recorded results of the scanning equipment from that morning. Every piece of technology he'd had available had been brought into play, and the readings were annoyingly unhelpful. Mainly by telling him all the things that hadn't happened.
"Indeed," he commented quietly as he flicked from window to window, paging through the various graphs produced from his software, alongside those from other sources. On another monitor he had a display of the blueprints that supposedly represented the old and unfinished Endbringer shelter that should have been where the mercenaries Calvert had hired claimed it was. "The complete lack of any usable information is frustrating, and confusing."
"The part I find strange, or stranger, is that you were able to find hidden doors in the places your prisoners claimed they were," she continued. "If there was nothing behind them, why put them there in the first place? From the data you showed me, someone went to a lot of effort to install those things. What's the point of doing that if they don't do anything useful? It seems like too much trouble just to act as a distraction or something of that nature, especially as you'd have to pretty much know they were there to begin with or you might never find them. As proven by the fact no one did find them until you went looking."
He sat back in his reinforced chair and turned his attention fully to her. "I know, I thought the same thing. That's only one of the many oddities of this case. And in some ways not the most baffling part."
"Did you consider that perhaps the doors led through some form of portal, possibly done in a way that even the mercs didn't notice? So they thought they were going into an underground base, but were actually ending up somewhere completely different. A pocket dimension, possibly, or being teleported elsewhere in the city or even country?"
"Of course. But as you can see from the readings here and here, there's no residual traces of dimensional breakthrough radiation," he replied immediately, highlighting a couple of graphs on the exotic energy scanner output. "That immediately eliminates almost all methods of teleportation we have in the records as well as four of the five known pocket dimension portal technologies including those Toybox sell."
"And the fifth variant of that technology?" she questioned with a lifted eyebrow.
"Background gamma level is completely normal, which eliminates it as a possibility," he responded, bringing up another graph. "It would take at least three weeks for the levels to normalize after such a portal was created, and there would also be minor traces of pion irradiation modification to the quartz microcrystals in the soil left behind. Nothing of that nature was found."
"All right, that does seem to eliminate portals, I agree." Dragon nodded slowly. "And the teleportation methods that don't produce dimensional breakthrough radiation…"
"Aren't capable of transporting something as large as a human being, or have other problems. Exactly," he confirmed. "Leet has made at least three teleporters I'm aware of that used completely different fundamental principles to anything anyone else has, but two of them would have been lethal for a living organism and the third one could only transport approximately twenty pounds without causing significant gravitational distortion, which we'd have noticed from the Rig instruments. And as far as I'm aware that specific device was destroyed six months ago anyway."
"So not a portal, and not teleportation. They weren't ending up somewhere else after going through those doors."
"The evidence suggests not," he agreed.
"A potent Stranger effect?" she suggested after a moment. "Making them think they were going there, even though they were going somewhere else? Or a Master doing the same sort of thing via a different method…" His friend frowned slightly as she thought it through.
"It's not impossible, admittedly, but the medical reports tend to refute that as a likely reason," he said with a shake of his head. "Deep neurological scans of their brains didn't show any of the usual minute traces of neural damage long term Mastering often produces, and a Stranger effect is not normally capable of working in quite that way. I can't completely eliminate it but I don't consider it to be a high probability solution to the problem. A high level Stranger making everyone ignore the whole area is plausible, and may in fact have happened based on what we found, but causing several dozen people to repeatably think they were in one place while they were in another over at least months, if not years, of time seems a stretch."
"Some form of perception-altering Tinker tech?"
"Again, not completely outside the bounds of possibility, but we couldn't detect any signs of the exotic emissions that sort of technology has been known to emit in many cases. As you're aware, such residual traces tend to be detectable for at least a week if the area covered is anywhere near that large, and there was absolutely nothing of the nature found." He sighed faintly. "If it's a Stranger, Master, or Tinker, based on our current information it's not one we've ever come across in the past. As we know that the Endbringer shelter Calvert managed to lay his hands on was built more than ten years ago, unless all the paperwork is entirely fictitious, that would necessitate him having acquired suitable Parahuman aid that long ago."
"And if that was the case, why have we never seen any traces of a Parahuman capable of doing this sort of thing other than his base?" she commented thoughtfully, making him nod. "A Parahuman of that level of power being content to do that one job and nothing else for a decade seems… unlikely." After a moment, she smiled a little. "Although if such a person existed and had powers so effective perhaps no one has noticed even if they're doing things all over the place…"
He scowled. "I'm trying not to think about that possibility, as it's rather unnerving. But that said I think it somewhat unlikely." With another sigh, he added, "The problem is that none of those options are completely impossible, but by their very nature there's almost no way to prove, or disprove, the truth. All we can do is work on the basis of probability and as far as I can see none of them are at all likely even if they are possible. Due to Parahuman psychology if nothing else."
Dragon thought it over then nodded. "All right, that's reasonable and I can't see any obvious holes in your thinking. So if we eliminate Stranger, Master, or Tinker somehow manipulating all the mercenaries into thinking a specific place was a different place, and also eliminate portals, pocket dimensions, and other teleportation methods, what's left? Say his base was there and now it isn't. What happened to it?"
He spread his hands a little helplessly. "That of course is the big question. A question that, as I told Director Piggot, I have no good answer to at present."
"Which is driving you nuts, isn't it?" she said with a knowing smile.
"It's certainly irritating me somewhat," he admitted ruefully. "It's unusual that I find myself without any good theories for a strange event, but that's happened several times recently."
"Do you think those warehouses and the ship vanishing are connected to this situation?" his friend asked curiously.
"A part of me says they may well be connected, simply because three separate types of mysterious occurrence in such a relatively short period of time each being completely unique seems improbable, but the problem with that is that the warehouses and ship were obviously removed. The method used is one I still have no idea of, but there was plenty of evidence left behind that something that used to be there had been somehow erased from existence. Clearly the warehouses and the ship were caused by the same type of device, whatever that is, but Calvert's base… We don't actually have any real proof other than some fifteen year old and quite possibly very suspicious paperwork to show it ever existed at all."
Colin shook his head. "Something is under that site, the core samples showed that well enough. Plenty of concrete, old rebar, general rubble, and so on. It certainly isn't virgin soil and rock. But as far as an actual underground construction on the scale of an Endbringer shelter, even a half-finished one, goes? We should have ended up drilling through at least two yards of heavily reinforced high-strength concrete and what we actually hit was nothing remotely like that."
"That ship completely vanished and took a big chunk of the reef with it when it went," she pointed out. "Anything that could remove thirty thousand or so tons of steel and at least the same again of reef could probably do the same thing to an Endbringer bunker."
"I'm not denying that," he replied. "But that would inevitably leave a very large void where the shelter used to be. Which in turn would result in immediate and total collapse of a wide area, directly underneath a rather substantial office building that by the looks of it is no more than a few years at best from spontaneously collapsing without any provocation at all. It's so decrepit that even a few inches of subsidence would undoubtedly cause it to simply fall over, yet it was undisturbed. None of the ground anywhere near it showed the slightest signs of construction, destruction, or interference of any sort. And we have all the proof we need that there isn't a void under it even if by some miracle that could have happened without the surface showing any signs."
They looked at each other for a few seconds. "I have to admit I'm running out of ideas," she finally said.
"As am I, annoyingly enough," he grumbled. "Based on the available evidence the alleged base doesn't exist and depending on just how much paperwork was altered may well never have existed, but there's also enough contradictory evidence to say it must exist. But I can't find it or any real proof it was ever there. Without being able to question Calvert properly it's very difficult to know what the truth of the matter is, which is frustrating in the extreme."
"Can you find anyone who worked on the construction at the time?" Dragon asked.
"So far I've been unable to trace any of the workers involved," he replied, shaking his head. "Two companies are listed in the records as having been involved, but both went bankrupt over a decade ago, their assets were bought by another company that was almost immediately sold to yet another one, which in turn also became defunct less than a year later around two thousand and one. The timing of all of that is highly suspicious and is certainly yet again Calvert's fault, but the end result is that other than the documents filed with the city administration, essentially all the paperwork has vanished. We don't have any records of who actually built the facility, where the materials came from, or in many cases where the money went."
"It sounds like someone went to a lot of trouble to hide the paper trail," she said.
"Very much so, and we both know who that was." Colin frowned. "The only people who might know anything useful are currently being prosecuted for more fraud, bribery, and embezzlement cases than I can easily believe, and as such are extremely unreliable witnesses even if I can manage to get access to them. So we're left with documentation that is suspect at best, since we know Calvert was altering records for literally years to cover his tracks everywhere from right here in Brockton Bay all the way to multiple federal agencies, and even the military. We can't trust anything he might have had access to, and even working that out is going to take weeks to months."
She nodded slowly. "Well, it's certainly not going to be easy to discover any useful evidence by the sounds of it, but if you want I can do some digging myself. I might find something you missed."
"Feel free if you wish," he replied, smiling a little. "I would certainly find any new data helpful."
"I'll see what I can do, Colin," she assured him with a small grin. "It's got me very intrigued. I like a good mystery story."
He chuckled for a moment. "Few people would believe a work of fiction based on what happens in this city," he replied in good humor. "Fiction is supposed to be plausible according to what I'm told. Real life often isn't, especially around here."
Laughing, the woman nodded. "That is all too true. Brockton Bay is a strange place even in our world. I've seen stories on the internet that are more sensible than some of your actual after-action reports…"
She looked to the side for a moment. "My transport is on finals about ten miles out now, so you'll have your deep scanning equipment in under fifteen minutes."
Colin smiled. "Thank you, Dragon. It's good of you to rush it here so fast."
"It was my pleasure, Colin," she responded. "You're my friend, and this is bothering you. It was no trouble. I had a delivery scheduled for you in a day or two anyway so moving that up and adding the extra equipment didn't take much effort."
"Nonetheless I am in your debt yet again."
"There's no debt between us," Dragon laughed. "Or if there is, it's been satisfied one way or the other so many times it's irrelevant. Any time you need my help, I'm happy to provide it."
"The feeling is mutual," he assured her, while checking the Rig's ATC system. "I'll go and meet your transport on the pad," he added, standing up and picking up his helmet from the bench nearby, then putting it on.
"I'm going to have to come down and visit you in person soon," she said through his comms system as he strode out of his lab, the door whipping open then shut behind him fast enough he didn't even have to pause. "It's been too long."
"As always I'd enjoy your company," he replied. They chatted as he walked through the Protectorate base, nodding now and then to various staff members, then took the elevator up to the VTOL pad on the top. Just as he got there the force field dome over the facility flickered off for a few seconds, allowing the remote-piloted Dragon aircraft to drift past where it had been, hovering on spears of transparent blue flame. He stood and watched as it slowly descended in the precise center of the allocated landing area, the ground crew standing back until it had settled onto its gear, slightly bouncing once. The engines throttled back, then whined down to silence from the deafening roar they'd been emitting, while the crew approached and began tying the vehicle down and connecting fueling hoses to the relevant ports.
Motioning to a pair of loaders, he accompanied the two man team towards the aircraft. Dragon opened the cargo bay door, which dropped outwards to form a ramp. "Your package is the blue box right at the top of the ramp, in front of everything else," his friend noted. He nodded, walking into the hold and looking around, before pointing at the indicated box which was nearly four feet on a side. "Transport this to my lab, please," he instructed the two handlers who immediately moved to lift the crate. Shortly it was sitting on the powered sled waiting outside, which one of them started moving towards the cargo elevator. The other man joined the rest of his crew to unload the remaining material while Colin followed his crate back to his lab.
Once it had been dropped off inside, he closed the door behind the staff member who smiled at him as he left, then turned to the box from Dragon. Unlocking it he opened the lid, then started unloading the various items from inside, checking there was no damage as he piled all the equipment on one of the workbenches. Even as he did this he admired the sheer quality of Dragon's work. As usual it was incredibly well made.
"Excellent," he finally said, having unpacked the whole thing and spread it all out. "This should resolve at least one question. One way or the other."
"Hopefully," she said from the monitor, smiling at him. "If you connect the control unit to your system and power everything up I can run a remote diagnostic from here. Once we're sure it's all fully interfaced with your own equipment we can launch the drones and start a full deep radar scan of Calvert's home away from home. And with luck figure out what on earth is going on."
"That would be ideal," he muttered, already connecting cables to the relevant ports on both her equipment and his. It didn't take long to get everything ready, and he sat down to monitor the process as she began running functional tests. Tally lights came on one after the other and various items made faint sounds indicating activity, while reams of sensor data scrolled past on several monitors. Eventually she nodded.
"Looks good from here. We've got full integration with the Rig external antenna array, all the power cells are fully charged, and internal systems are all in the green. You can go whenever you're ready."
"All right." He got up and picked up the tubular launcher, a foot in diameter and three feet long, that contained a swarm of two dozen autonomous drones of Dragon's design, taking it to the far side of the lab and inserting it into the mechanism on the wall set up for this exact task. Once it was plugged in, it beeped twice to indicate it was ready. Returning to his chair he sat down and brought up the control interface, tapping the arm icon immediately, then the launch initiate one.
The drone launcher made a whirring noise for ten seconds or so as it loaded all twenty four drones into the system that would transport them to the outside of the Rig. That only took another thirty seconds. Once he got acknowledgment that they were ready, he confirmed the launch authorization with a third icon, both of them watching the readings from the swarm as the drones took off one after another in quick succession, their antigravity generators propelling them through the hole in the force-field that opened momentarily then closed behind the tiny aircraft. Within a minute they were nearing the shore at a hundred feet of altitude, moving at over a hundred and thirty miles an hour.
He'd already entered the area of interest into the navigation system so all they had to do was wait while the swarm positioned itself, which didn't take long. Soon the drones were hovering in a stable pattern directly above the location that supposedly contained, or had contained, Thomas Calvert's hidden base deep underground. He hit the control to begin the scan process and the swarm moved as one, each drone transmitting a powerful directional chirp of energy in turn, all the others receiving it as it bounced back from discontinuities under the surface up to a depth of over two hundred feet. As they moved slowly across the area, scanning back and forth to cover the whole zone, the transmitted results were processed by his computers to build up a three dimensional image of what lay underground, color coded based on density and conductivity among other parameters.
The amount of computing power needed to make sense in real time of the huge amount of data being produced was remarkably large, but his system was easily capable of the task. Both watched with interest as the image developed, the drones cycling through multiple frequencies, phase relationships, and power levels to refine the data. "The resolution is excellent," he observed. "Although you may get a small efficiency boost by changing the interleave factor."
"I'm interested in any suggestions you can come up with to improve it," Dragon replied. "The end goal of this system was search and rescue after disasters, but it's got a lot of other applications and this is a good test."
He nodded absently, tilting his head a little as he stared at the current results. Reaching out he put his hand on the multi axis controller and manipulated it, rotating the image, while fiddling with the false color control with his other hand. "That is…" he began slowly.
Dragon was clearly thinking the same thing he was. "...not an Endbringer shelter."
"No."
They exchanged a wondering look.
"But I suspect it was an Endbringer shelter," he finally said, turning back to study what was now quite a detailed outline of something very odd.
"The hole is approximately the right size and shape, at least if you assume Calvert expanded it as the mercenaries stated," Dragon noted with fascination. "Although 'hole' isn't the correct word. It's completely filled in."
They were looking at a display that showed a clear discontinuity between a block three hundred and fifty feet across, a good fifty feet high, and shaped roughly like a stubby-armed letter K with a third arm between the angled ones, and what was obviously untouched substrate with shallow indications of service facilities such as sewer, water, and power feeds. On the side away from the road they could also see the main storm drain that one of Calvert's hidden routes had opened into, proving that the system was working perfect. Of the actual base that should have been there, nothing was left.
It was only Dragon's high sensitivity scanning system that made even this visible, Colin thought. Excavations would have done the same thing, but it would also have required a huge amount of effort, not least due to the presence of the office block directly above the site and covering a very large percentage of it. And leaving aside the sheer risk of doing any digging anywhere near the damn thing in case it promptly fell over on you.
As the scan results kept coming in, he overlaid his data on where they'd taken core samples, showing that if what had been down there was what was supposed to be down there they'd have drilled right into it, so it wasn't as if he'd managed to miss six times in a row. That was yet more proof, if it was needed, that there was no Endbringer shelter under the site. Not any more.
"What the hell happened to it?" he finally said in stunned horror. "That's…" Running a quick mental calculation he worked out the rough volume of the missing construction. "Approximately six million cubic feet of material that's been removed and replaced. Without disturbing the surface at all. How? Ignoring the mass of the original construction the infill would be nearly half a million tons, based on this density reading. That's… almost impossible."
"It would appear to have happened though."
"Which is why it's almost impossible," he muttered, staring at the 3D display. "It wasn't teleported away, we already established that. And it's orders of magnitude more mass than any teleporter I've ever heard of could manage in one operation, Mover or Tinker tech. It would have to be done in a single operation too, not piecemeal, without some method to hold up the overburden. And that would also require impeccable timing to remove the target and replace it with the infill before anything shifted, unless… force fields to hold everything up?" He thought, then shook his head even as Dragon started to say something. "No. We've ruled out teleportation, so that doesn't work. Portals are absurd, and also ruled out. Clearly it wasn't excavated unless somehow the entire building and overburden was moved first, which takes the problem from absurd to completely insane. And someone would have noticed in that case, surely, Stranger or not…"
He wound down into almost silent mumbling as he tried to work out what had happened, until Dragon cleared her throat, making him twitch then look sideways at her. "Look here," she said, highlighting several areas in the now-finished scan. The drones had gone to standby, he noticed absently as he turned his attention to what she'd pointed out.
"What is that?" he queried after a few seconds.
"By the sensor readings, these are reinforced concrete slabs, which to me look like they were used for something else originally, based on the shape and the holes down the edges," she replied, setting the relevant sections to an orange color. "And these are prefabbed concrete girders. Big ones, like the sort of thing they used to use for some of the larger factories around Brockton Bay back in the fifties. A lot of those were build out of standard units, if I recall, since they were expanding the port rapidly after the war and it was the fastest way to put up buildings." She set the mentioned items to blue. He studied the image carefully, nodding slowly as she spoke.
"They've been used to form a support structure under the foundations of the office building," he finally said, shaking his head in wonder. "A valid technique and one I've seen used in a couple of cases when a historic building needed to be physically moved for some reason, but never on this scale. And in those situations it took months if not years of careful excavation around the foundations to insert the supports. I can't see any signs that those were the result of any digging at all, and for that matter I still suspect doing that sort of thing near the damned place would immediately provoke a disaster."
"I don't know how it was done, or who did it, but I think that's the clue we were missing," his friend commented. "Somehow someone managed to get that whole array of material into the exact right place to prevent anything happening, then… just vanished the entire shelter? I can't believe it, but that's sure what it looks like. And afterwards they filled the entire cavity with an insane amount of what looks to be building rubble, again in precisely the right way to support everything on top so nothing shifted. God knows where they even got it from, because it's clearly old material from the readings."
"There's millions of tons of similar material throughout the older Docks area, and the wastelands past that," he finally said. "I suspect it came from there although it would be hard to locate the exact place. It might have been collected from multiple locations, for that matter, which would make it nearly impossible to precisely match to a specific area. I'm less concerned about where it came from than how it got there." He pointed at the display.
"It could be some sort of Shaker affect?" she posited.
"There are no Shakers of that level in the entire state, leaving aside Labyrinth," he replied after a moment. "And her power results in very distinctive effects, which are also temporary. The material isn't made of metal such as Kaiser, for example, could produce, and based on his exhibited powers it would take him literally months to form that sheer quantity even assuming he could. The same goes for every similar power I'm aware of, aside from perhaps something Eidolon might come up with. I highly doubt Eidolon is moonlighting as a super-villain base removal company."
Dragon started giggling. "That was about the closest to a real joke I've heard out of you for months," she said when he raised his eyebrows at her.
Smiling a little, he decided he liked the sound of her laugh, then pushed that thought to the side as there were more important things to think about right now.
"Some form of spatial manipulation might manage to do this," he finally said. "I can think of ways that Vista, for example, could achieve at least part of the process. But there are a number of issues with that idea."
"She doesn't have the technical knowledge to design the support structure, or place the infill," Dragon noted.
"That is indeed the main issue. Another is that it would still take her a considerable time even if she had instruction, probably longer than whatever did this took, and it would be very noticeable. Whoever managed to literally steal Calvert's base out from under his nose and ours did it, I suspect, in mere days at most. Likely just after he was captured." He shook his head in what was almost awed respect. "I'm not entirely sure why anyone would do that even if they could though. It's a very large amount of work to go to merely to obtain a huge underground facility. If nothing else, what do they intend to do with it?"
"Perhaps the point wasn't to use it for anything, but to deny it to others?" Dragon suggested. He contemplated the idea, then slowly nodded.
"Plausible. Very plausible. I could see that being the goal, yes." He sighed slightly. "And all this data taken together suggests the people responsible for this are almost certainly the ones who captured Calvert in the first place. Otherwise how would they even know it was there? Or that it was now empty? Or did they take the thing complete with occupants? If so why didn't Calvert and his people notice and escape?"
"Your mysterious intelligence group?" she asked, smiling for a moment. He nodded.
"Precisely. Leaving the issue of how it was done to the side for the moment, the way it was done shows that whoever did the work had significant knowledge of multiple fields of engineering, such as structural design and construction. Calculating the loading, placement of the supports, infill density, and numerous other parameters would require a lot of specialist experience. It definitely wasn't some newly Triggered Parahuman we've never encountered before unless they were a civil engineer with years of experience beforehand. This took an entire team of experts just to work out how to proceed even before you get to the method used to do the task." He turned to her, waving a hand at the display.
"That is the result of a group who are exceptionally good at their job, very well funded, and experienced. They've done this sort of thing before. Probably multiple times. I have no idea how though. We seem to have eliminated all the plausible powers that could do it, unless someone has managed to come up with a completely novel twist on an existing technique. My best guess is some very exotic form of teleportation that they've kept highly confidential. I would assume classified to a level far beyond top secret. Anything that could move that much mass without leaving any traces at all would be tactically immensely valuable. And incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands."
"That much I can certainly agree with," she replied with a frown. "I can think of quite a few fairly horrific results of something like that if it was weaponized. Depending on how large and reliable the machinery was, and how much power it consumed, there are a lot of very good peaceful uses too."
He looked back at the display, reaching out to rotate it a little, then looked back. "Whatever Tinker came up with this outdid themselves. It's incredibly impressive. I'd very much like to inspect the hardware at some point although I doubt that is likely to happen."
"I wonder if it could be a Parahuman power rather than a Tinker device," she mused.
Colin snorted. "Unless it is Eidolon, I very much doubt that. It would count as a Shaker power as high as it goes, I think, and there's no way this was the result of someone new to their powers. It's too clean, too carefully done, to be anything other than someone with years of experience and practice. And in that case, considering how Parahumans operate, we'd almost certainly have encountered them in action before. There would be records, some sort of prior action, which we could correlate to this situation, but there simply isn't to the best of my knowledge. It's vastly more likely in my opinion that it's an extremely powerful and completely novel teleportation system, classified to the highest level, in the hands of a governmental organization who are operating deep into the black side of such things."
"I wonder why they went after Calvert?" Dragon commented.
"Perhaps they met him?" he suggested dryly, causing her to laugh again. "That would be enough for many people. More seriously, I strongly suspect he stepped on some toes he very definitely shouldn't have, and is lucky to be alive. Albeit rather mentally… fragile… at the moment."
"And now they're after the E88…"
He smiled in a rather vicious manner. "I wish them good hunting to be honest. Despite the Director's views on someone else doing our job for us. We could do with the help in all honesty, and so far the complete lack of any collateral damage at all is rather a refreshing change for the better."
"It's certainly somewhat unusual," she nodded, grinning. "Oh well. I suppose we've probably hit a dead end at this point."
"I can't see any particularly useful way to find out more," he agreed. "And I suspect that investigating too deeply might attract a level of attention that would be annoying to deal with. This seems to be something that is, as some put it, above my pay grade."
"Probably not a bad way to look at it," Dragon remarked as he issued the return command for the drone swarm then checked that they were following orders, before moving to shut down the imager system. "Director Piggot may feel otherwise though."
"Possibly. Possibly not. I consider the Director to be admirably pragmatic in most respects, despite some of her biases," he said. "She can be remarkably efficient at times. We both have other matters to deal with which are much more immediately important, and I suspect she'll read the report I'll produce based on this, complain about no one keeping us in the loop for a while, then move on to more productive work. That's the usual pattern."
"Fair enough." His friend nodded with a smile. "I can't disagree. But I'll still poke around and see if I can find out more of what Coil was up to just out of curiosity if nothing else."
"I'll be interested in anything you discover," he responded gratefully. "You're better at this sort of thing than anyone else I know. And if I find out more of our new colleagues I'll inform you, although I suspect I won't. Their opsec is first rate to put it mildly."
"It will be interesting to see which villain is the next to mysteriously disappear without a trace," she snickered, making him grin.
"Indeed. Assault is running a book on it even now. I have twenty dollars on Krieg."
Dragon grinned back. "I'll take a piece of that action. I'd better talk to him."
They moved onto other matters, soon becoming deeply involved in the latest design of his halberd, and Colin spent a productive evening enjoying his friend's virtual company. To the point that he was slightly taken aback when she wished him a Happy New Year at midnight, not having noticed the time...
Stepping forward Taylor hugged Zoe, who smiled at her. "Thank you for coming tonight," the older woman said quietly, but with feeling. "It means a lot that you're still part of our family and we part of yours."
"I feel the same way, Aunt Zoe," Taylor replied completely honestly. "I can't say I'm over what happened, or how long it will take for that to happen if it ever does, but as I've said, I don't blame you. Or Uncle Alan or Anne either." She sighed faintly. "Or in some ways even Emma, although I'll never forget she did those things."
"No one will," Zoe whispered, holding her tightly for a moment, then releasing her. "But that you're willing to move past all that is amazing, and I'm proud of you."
Taylor smiled a little, feeling sad. She meant what she'd said, but always lurking at the back of her mind was a sort of anger she didn't like to think about. Hopefully one day it would subside, and perhaps at some point in the future she might be able to meet Emma again on at least a reasonably neutral basis. But for now she had no intention of seeing her former friend because she very much didn't want to let those memories flare up and ruin the way her life had improved.
So she'd steer clear of the younger Barnes sister for the foreseeable future, not a hard task as Emma was spending a lot of her days in the hospital. From a purely humanitarian viewpoint Taylor hoped the other girl managed to recover from her illness despite their recent history.
"Happy New Year, anyway," the girl said as she stepped back. "And thanks for the wonderful meal."
"You're more than welcome, dear. We had a fantastic time at your house at Christmas so it's only fair to reciprocate." Zoe smiled widely. "Good thing it's not a school day tomorrow though." Glancing at her watch, she added, "It's nearly one in the morning now."
With a yawn Taylor nodded, the comment making her realize she was indeed more than ready for bed. Turning to her father who'd been talking to Alan, she waited for him to finish, while Lisa who was next to her shook Zoe's hand and thanked the older woman for the invitation. Alan nodded to her dad, then looked at her. "As Zoe said, thanks, Taylor. And it was nice to see you again, Lisa."
"Likewise," Lisa smiled, before also yawning widely. "God. I really am tired. All that food didn't help."
"It was nice though, right?" Anne, who was sitting on the bottom of the stairs watching asked with a grin. Lisa grinned back as Taylor nodded vehemently.
"It was really nice. I'm certainly not going away hungry."
"At least Dad and Uncle Danny didn't try to outdo each other this time," Anne commented with a sly look at the two men, who exchanged a rueful glance.
"We learned our lesson, Anne," Alan said.
"Did you? Did you really?" his daughter asked, smirking a little.
"...Probably not," he admitted after a pause, making Taylor's dad start chuckling. Zoe shook her head, sighing.
"I can almost guarantee that, based on past performance of these two," she muttered, giving Taylor a long-suffering look.
"Mom would have said the same," Taylor giggled, able to do so without more than a momentary pang of loss. It was slowly getting easier, with time and how things had worked out, although she was sure she'd never get used to a gap in her life. Nor did she want to.
"Probably quite loudly," Zoe agreed, laughing for a moment. Looking past them through the window next to the front door, she added, "Drive carefully, Danny. It's icy out there."
Taylor's father nodded, spinning his car keys around one finger and smiling. "At least it hasn't snowed for a few days, so the roads are pretty clear. But don't worry, I'll take my time."
Zoe moved to hug him too, then stepped back. "Keep in touch, all of you."
"We're not going anywhere," Taylor assured her. Pulling her coat on, she zipped it up, then turned to her dad. "Age before beauty," she invited, waving at the door, which made Alan crack up and Zoe and Anne grin. Lisa shook her head with a smile while her dad sighed.
"No respect for your elders, that's the problem with the youth of today," he grumbled in a good-natured manner, opening the door and preceding the two girls outside. Taylor looked back with a smile, waved to Anne who waved back, then closed the door. Soon they were driving home, full of food and feeling fairly contented all things considered. By the time they arrived Lisa had fallen asleep on Taylor's shoulder and she herself was starting to drift a little. It had been a long day, after all, although a good one.
She managed to poke her friend awake long enough for them to get into the house, but all three headed to bed almost immediately. Ten minutes after arriving Taylor was lying under the covers smiling a little to herself. Within another ten minutes the house was completely silent aside from faint creaks from the wind over the roof, and a subliminal rumble from the furnace in the basement as it kept them nicely warm.
Gently drifting at the threshold of sleep, she let her mind wander. Beneath flowered into existence around her as it tended to these days, her skill at performing the operations needed to view reality as it truly was so practiced it was second nature. Even with her eyes closed she watched how the infinitesimally thin skin of the world about her floated above an infinitely deep lake of possibility, something that she sometimes felt should have been more than a little unnerving but for some reason in actuality far closer to utterly fascinating. She couldn't find it in herself to find it frightening at all, although she couldn't have expressed just why.
A sleepy thought crossed her mind and without really considering whether it was possible, she tried looking back at herself through the eldritch medium that underlay everything real. Unlike the previous times she'd attempted that sort of thing, which had always produced somewhat inconclusive even if fascinating results, this time she hit on something new. In essence looping her own senses through beneath she managed to finally observe herself properly.
And it was amazing.
'I can see you,' she thought with a sort of detached amusement, almost asleep, as she noticed a faint thread that led from deep in her own brain through the underlayer of reality in a direction that didn't properly exist. Following it in a manner she was quite used to now, she found herself finally observing a truly massive eldritch construction, which in turn was watching her right back while emanating a sense of curiosity, pride, and amusement. 'Hello, Administrator. Happy New Year. You're going to like some of the ideas I've had recently…'
The mindbogglingly enormous alien biocomputer somehow managed to emote what she'd be prepared to swear was a sort of a snicker, and pushed a sensation that reminded her of a gentle pat on the head down the infinitesimal link they shared. Taylor smiled to herself in the darkness, before falling asleep in the middle of tweaking a design she'd been considering for some days by this point.
Oh yes. The proto-Host was utterly fascinating even beyond the New Data.
It wondered with anticipation what the next stage of their relationship would bring, knowing only that it would be a surprise.
Which was the best part of the entire process. It had been so long since anything had truly surprised it, yet her… friend… managed to do that constantly.
And with luck, at some point, between them and those that aided them, they could find a solution to the vexation caused by a Top Level Node who was a complete and utter waste of resources.
That would be a good day to gather New Data.
Settling back to watching over everything, it pondered options even as it made sure nothing got in their way.
