2.C

-- Fortuna Contessa --

I ducked into a doorway just as the man rounded the corner, hearing him call out as he caught a brief glimpse of my back. What had set him off? I carefully wondered without wondering. It was late, but the building was hardly empty, and my clothing shouldn't arouse any suspicion; I'd taken it off someone who was meant to be here. On the other hand, I'd clearly arrived at a stressful moment for these people. Not quite a kicked over anthill but not far from it. Perhaps he was just feeling jumpy. Whatever it was, he picked up his pace as I failed to respond, barging into the dark office.

By all rights he should have noticed me, just standing against the wall to the right of the door. It was the sort of trick a child might pull. But I had done it, so it obviously was the right thing to do, somehow. He stopped a few feet into the room, looking around, then started turning. To his left, though that wouldn't buy me more than a second. Of course, I didn't need a second. He silently jerked as my knife plunged through the back of his head, now angled such that the blood splatter entirely missed me. He went limp and I grabbed him around the waist, dragging his body off to the side before he finished twitching.

Had he been important? He needed to die, obviously, or I wouldn't have killed him. But there could be a lot of reasons for that. Was he actually important, actually culpable for the things I'd see later tonight? If I asked my power, I'd know in an instant. I didn't ask.

I exited the room, locking the door behind me with a key I'd gotten with the uniform. Then why move the body? I entertained myself with increasingly implausible theories as I moved back down the hallway and around the corner, the way the man had come from. The right side was lined with nondescript wooden doors like the one I'd just exited, presumably leading to more offices. The doors on the left were more widely spaced, heavy steel.

I stopped in front of the first one (on the left, of course) and waited long seconds, only raising my knife as the lock clicked. The door opened out, naturally -- wouldn't want to put the hinges on the inside -- so the man was already stepping forward as he opened it, face creasing in confusion as he noticed me. I stabbed him through the side of his head, clearing away his expression just as quickly. Why had he come out now? Had he heard the other man call out? Actually, I suspected these rooms were well sound-proofed.

Regardless, I didn't bother lowering this one down quietly. I pushed him out of my way as I slipped into the cell, tossing my knife into another's eye as he fumbled with his holster. The third and final man watched him slump over with an unreadable expression, which he then turned on me. Not much else he could do, hanging by his wrists from heavy manacles, bare torso colored in startling variety with bruises.

"Batyushka Mishkin?" I asked, already bending to retrieve my knife and collect a key from the corpse of the second man. He nodded, of course. I spoke quickly and passionately as I freed him. What did I say? I had no clue. I didn't actually know... whatever language this was. Something Slavic. I could have known, had I wished, like just about any other question I could imagine. Paths to not knowing, on the other hand, were never so easy. Ignorance had become precious to me over long years of acting out scripts I knew by heart.

He lit up at my words regardless, babbling out an excited reply. He quickly pulled the boots and pants off the second man, spry despite his injuries. Adrenaline, likely. I stopped him before he could start on the jacket, though, offering a clean spare. He didn't think to question why I'd been carrying it around, of course. I grabbed the man's pistol while the former prisoner dressed, discreetly emptying it before I handed it over. He wouldn't leave without a weapon, I figured, but he'd panic and blow our cover if it was functional. I gave him some quick instructions as I led him out.

We had a lot of work to do tonight.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I was alone, so it wasn't some manipulative performance. I guess my power decided I needed a break, and I couldn't disagree. It was mid-morning now. I'd killed three dozen people and freed near as many more, broke us all into a different, even more imposing building, and then got right back to it. All without raising any kind of alarm, somehow.

I'd locked and unlocked doors without rhyme or reason, burned a stack of documents I couldn't read, gave reams of instructions I couldn't understand, tampered with two specific guns in the armory, left all the faucets running in one bathroom, and moved every chair in a big office three inches left. It'd have all taken forty minutes tops if I'd had access to Clairvoyant and Doormaker, but if they could have seen me here, there'd have been no reason to come.

It was nostalgic, almost. Not that I'd been happy, exactly, in those early days. I'd certainly been a lot less tired, for all that every task had taken so many more steps. For that matter, it had been years since I'd last had to stage a proper coup. It was generally more efficient to ensure the wrong people never rose to power in the first place. And then there was the moment that had started the whole chain of events, all my paths shifting in an instant. The emergence of Behemoth. The creation of Doormaker. The Subway Cluster's trigger. A bare handful more over the decades.

And this one hinged on a single window of opportunity that would last seconds mere minutes away. David's fault, naturally. Scrambling to gather the necessary equipment and capes, moving up the most essential actions, scribbling out a couple quick notes... Even with a perfect plan perfectly executed, I'd had to make sacrifices to get everything lined up in time. The others would have to hold things together without me for a while.

But it was worth it. A world Clairvoyant couldn't see? That I couldn't see until the path had opened? How had I not realized the opportunity Noelle Meinhardt had represented? By forcing the creation of endless permutations on powers, she effectively constituted a fuzzing attack on the Entities' restrictions. The Entities and their agents weren't perfect, as I knew better than anyone. But what had they wanted to hide here? I had my suspicions.

Recentered, I strode confidently into the conference room, the gathered... soldiers? agents? breaking off their conversation and watching with some confusion and signs of lasting stress. Not one female face in the crowd. When I reached the head of the table, I abruptly turned and dumped out the sack I'd stolen from the mess hall. Four heads rolled out onto the table, prompting startled exclamations, but I started speaking immediately to head off the uproar. Hard to imagine what words could possibly do that, but I'd found them, of course. They quieted and listened intently as I continued.

It must have been quite a speech. My body language was dynamic. I made eye contact with each member of my audience at just the right time. My tone was furious and longing in turns. At one point I dramatically ripped my holster from my belt and tossed it down, as though to signal I wouldn't fight back, should they reject my judgment.

It went on long enough that I started to notice patterns in my speech. Names. I harshly denounced Pasternak, Dzhugashvili, Nikolaev, and, above all, Loria. The heads? A couple of them had been rather well guarded. I spoke in loving praise of Popov, Gabriel, and Babin, the last of whom, it turned out, was in attendance. He stepped up to stand beside me after a particularly ardent exhortation.

The whole sequence of events was a bit confusing. The men I'd killed had been my audience's comrades -- their leaders, if I didn't miss my guess -- but they certainly didn't seem upset to see them dead. I'd just walked into a meeting and everyone there was on board? Were these people all members of a rebellious faction? Personal enemies of my victims? Had I already killed anyone who should have been here who would have objected? Perhaps they were simply so broadly despised no real selection had been necessary. I suppose it didn't matter. It took some wrangling, but they all ultimately joined in on my coup. Not that any other outcome was possible.

I clapped my hands and, heeding the signal, my small army of former prisoners streamed in from an adjoining room to raucous cheers from their former captors. I sent them off with a final fiery enjoinder.

I grabbed a chair and slumped back into it, finally permitted to truly indulge my exhaustion. No one would disturb me here, not for hours, and when they did, it would be to report 'our' triumph. Not that that would be the end of my work. Nothing ever was. As I drifted off, my final words echoed in my head. I suddenly found I did want to know what I had said, what words had driven these men to treachery and murder. I asked my power.

... What? 'God wills it?'

A\N:

This one is going to take some explanation, I think.

Explicitly dimensional powers are rare, but even among those powers, access is limited to a safe subset of dimensions. Not because the restricted dimensions are threatening to the Entities themselves, necessarily -- there's very little on that level -- but because they might cause a variety of headaches for the cycle, some more serious than others. Obviously this includes Earth 91, because Contessa hasn't already stopped over there to supplement her parahuman 'army' with mages, who are superior in most ways, and neither did Taylor on Gold Morning.

The dimensions Scrub's shard dumps stuff on are restricted, as it happens. It's pretending to provide an annihilation effect, so it can't have anyone stumbling across all the 'annihilated' stuff. Obviously, these are some of the very least interesting restricted dimensions, but they are restricted. Which means Scrub's shard has permission to access restricted dimensions. (At least below a certain 'clearance level.' The dimensions holding Scion's real body, for example, are much more heavily protected.) Not a big deal in general; its effect is purely unidirectional and the worlds it chooses are dead and empty. The stuff might as well be annihilated for all the influence it could possibly have on the cycle.

When it suddenly had to come up with several new variations on Scrub's power, though, it might have overstepped a little bit. But really, how much damage can a few mages do? And, anyway, it's still unidirectional. It's not like it's providing free access to-- Oh, it turns out it is possible to travel the other way with the right Trump powers and Tinker tech? Oops. Well, it was just one cape, and, now that the clone is dead, there's definitely no way back.

Precogs, including Contessa, can't foresee the outcome of trigger events, which I believe should extend to the creation of Echidna clones. So the moment all her paths shifted was the birth of the Scrub clone. As it turned out, she'd have had over a day before the clone died, and she obviously could have saved his life before then. But between the involvement of Eidolon, his clone, and any new clones with unpredictable powers, she had very little ability to foresee events in that fight. She decided not to chance it and took advantage of the very first time the Scrub clone used his power, summoning some poor, confused bastard who Alexandria pulped seconds later.

I had a surprising amount of fun writing this. Contessa is basically the perfect vessel for awful writing. Dumb plans that should never work, only to be saved by impossibly lucky coincidences? Ridiculous and completely unearned skills? Persuading others to act completely out of character with a short conversation? That's literally her power.

And of course she's completely sick of it. She acts exactly as her power directs, reducing her role in her own life to that of audience, effectively, to all that terrible writing. And worse, she already knows exactly how it'll all play out. I think there's some real promise in dropping a young Contessa into, I don't know, a schlocky spy thriller and watching her die inside. Has anyone done something like that?

Sidenote: I reread her interlude before starting on this, and I'm unreasonably annoyed that her power just answers questions like 'What does that mean?'. It's supposed to be Path to Victory, not a general purpose oracle. Of course, PtV could answer questions via circumlocutions like 'path to writing down an accurate translation of that statement' and then looking at the steps to see what she'd write, but she doesn't even have to be that tiny bit clever about it. I get her power doesn't have the normal restrictions, but still.