I blinked. All of me blinked. "Beg pardon?" I asked, unthinking, with both mouths, while my minds went blank. In the brief silence that followed, the drizzle against the window grew slightly, but noticeably, more intense.

Then I realized my mistake, and belatedly had Fionnuala and Morven look at each other in (feigned) surprise. Fionnuala's lips quirked in a half-smile, while Morven huffed a soft laugh. Taisto glanced between Piggot and my selves, a blend of nervous uncertainty overtaking his expression.

The seemingly permanent furrow between the Director's eyebrows deepened minutely, and I feared I'd overplayed it a little. But, the show must go on. My bodies' expressions traded brief, affected amusement for real, renewed tension, and returned their attention to Piggot.

The Director laced her fingers together atop her folder. "Please understand, my intent here is not to reprimand, or punish, or entrap, or anything of the sort. All I'm doing is raising some concerns that came up while verifying your story. You could say that I'm placing our cards on the table."

She unlaced her fingers and raised a hand slightly, and Armsmaster stepped up beside her. He opened a compartment on his armor's thigh and pulled out a lumpy, unpainted metal box the size of a small lunch box, which he placed on the table, before returning to stand at parade rest. Rough, unpolished welds marked some seams, and obvious screws and hinges held it together. Cut-outs in the shell opened onto a screen, some buttons, and connection ports. The casing was entirely mundane, but what lay within felt so very soft and fuzzy to my power's senses, like all the rest of his tinker tech.

"This is a prototype of the lie detector I have installed in my armor," he said. Inadmissible in court, my memory chimed; but then, this wasn't a courtroom, nor was this likely to reach one, by my estimate. "It actually has more functionality than the final version does, components and such that I deemed unnecessary for its intended use and pruned when miniaturizing it. While that extra functionality in the prototype was superfluous when tested on other people, for the two of you it eliminated the majority of the uncertainty the final version has when applied to the recordings of two of you. And while you rarely told any outright lies, much of what you said was done with deceptive intent. Deliberate partial-truths, primarily."

Fionnuala's eyes strayed to Armsmaster's back; specifically, halberd on his back. While I could only see the part that stuck out past his shoulder, my power told me that it was just under seven feet long, or would be when not folded in two places. A fragment of myself noted in a slightly detached manner that it was likely his version of a sidearm, a backup weapon he carried around when the halberds that I assumed had solid, non-folding hafts would be awkward or infeasible to carry around. But the rest of me was focused on that visible handspan of blade, the inherent threat it possessed, whether the man intended it or not. It didn't matter that my outer power was essentially the natural enemy of power armor, nor that my inner power would likely ensure that I'd survive any first conflict we could possibly have. I hadn't even been here, had my powers, for even a week yet. Six days wasn't nearly enough time for my reflexive reactions to weaponry to be worn down.

Wait. Hold up. Piggot just said they weren't trying to entrap me or anything. All I had done was play my cards close to the vest. Their motives were fairly clear, too; they had hopes for what could be done with my Shaker power that allowed me to manipulate solid matter, and they were justifiably paranoid about the harm that could be done with it in the wrong hands. They were trying to keep things above-board and in good faith, even. So why was I on the precipice of a miniature doom spiral as if I were being backed into a corner?

I flexed small muscles near all my ears, and their muffled rumbling fuzzed up my thoughts. A few seconds of that helped reset my train of thought towards something more productive. I'd come here today with items on my agenda, as it were. Information that needed sharing.

Fionnuala leaned forward and sighed, letting her elbows rest on the table while rubbing her face with her hands. I almost had the bone mask that I'd grown from the base of her ocular horns lift up so she could rub under it, but I suppressed the urge. Doing so wouldn't help in the slightest.

Armsmaster's head tilted the slightest bit, and even with eyes on him I only knew it'd happened from feeling it through my outer power. "For clarity's sake, neither this," he gestured at the chunky piece of tinker tech, "nor the lie detector in my suit are currently active. My suit's systems are recording video and audio, but should either of you request it I am willing to deactivate that function."

The Director glanced at him with an expression I couldn't quite decipher. Not my strongest suit, I'll admit. I wasn't totally hopeless, thankfully, but some aspects of it eluded me to various degrees. Stuff like reading people's eyes; I'd never understood what it meant when a story referred to a glint in a character's eyes conveying some emotion, at odds with the rest of their expression and body language or not. But I was letting myself get distracted.

I thought for what was, objectively, a mere moment, but subjectively, thanks to the tweaks I'd made to my brains, felt like thirty seconds or so. I considered the arguments against what I was thinking of doing, then decided to do it anyway. "Don't shut off the recording," Fionnuala said as I let my thoughts relax to their usual speed. "It could be useful. The lie detector might be of use as well. I, uh, have some things I need to talk about, and having corroboration that I, that we, believe what we are saying to be true could help."

Piggot's eyes narrowed slightly. "If you're willing, I see no reason to deny that." My selves nodded. She nodded to Armsmaster, who opened a compartment on his armor's thigh and pulled out a neatly braided extension cord, the kind one could get at any hardware store or the like, and used it to connect the lie detector to a wall outlet.

I considered bringing up the agents outside the door, and how soundproof this room might be, relatively speaking, but I decided not to.

Piggot met Fionnuala's gaze (well, some of it), then deliberately turned her eyes to the side towards Taisto. The poor guy just looked lost.

Fionnuala let out a soft huff. "I think I'd prefer if only you and Armsmaster were in the room for this. No offense, Taisto. Just, some of what I have to say is a touch… sensitive."

He looked to Piggot, who nodded. "Go," she said. "I'll notify you when you're needed again."

"Oh. Uh." He looked between Fionnuala and the Director a few times, then hurriedly stood. "I'll, ah, go work on paperwork while, uh, yeah." He pushed his chair in, then paused, eyes on his folders of papers on the table. "Should I—"

"Leave them," Piggot said. "They won't go missing."

Taisto nodded and hurried out of the room, edging past Armsmaster in the process, who barely moved in response. The door closed behind him, and Piggot gestured for Fionnuala to proceed.

She took a deep breath and let it out as "Hhhhokay." She started popping the knuckles of her left hand with her thumb in quick succession. "So, there's a lot to cover. Honestly, I know a lot of things — facts and details, information — that I really shouldn't know. Runs the gamut from trivial and irrelevant to deadly important."

"I see," Piggot said with an edge of sarcasm, but a glance at the screen on the lie detector appeared to prevent her from dismissing my words out of hand. Her eyes flicked to Morven. "Do you happen to know what she's referring to as well?"

My quieter self nodded and replied, "I know everything Fionnuala knows."

Another glance at the device, then up at Armsmaster, who looked at the display and said, "Truthful, with a sliver of deceptive intent." Morven inclined her head in acknowledgement.

Fionnuala cleared her throat. "I won't tell you everything I know, not even everything relevant. There are some things I know that I'd do more harm telling you than I'd help. Some things, if I told you, could endanger you; some, there's just no reason to reveal. Some are too personal or invasive, to myself or others, or it's just not my place to say. So, y'know, I'll be keeping some things secret. Just wanted to get that out in the open before anything else."

The Director frowned slightly, but nodded.

"So I assume one of the instances where your device detected deceptive intent was when we told you about our powers?" Fionnuala tilted her head towards Armsmaster, who, after a moment, also nodded. "What we said about what we can do is true, but not the whole truth. We don't actually have minor aspects of the other's powers. We share our powers in full."

Piggot glanced at the device's display, then up at Armsmaster. "Minimal deceptive intent used," he said.

Piggot returned her gaze to Fionnuala. "So why lie about it at first? It's not too unusual for twins to have the same powers."

Fionnuala's shoulders hunched inward before I could stop them. "It… just seemed like the thing to do, at the time."

The Director studied my white-clad self for a few moments. "So each of you has the same two powers, then."

"Something like that? I don't want to go into it right now. Suffice to say that I don't believe there is anything about our powers that'd be of particular concern."

"That is reasonable," Piggot acknowledged after a brief glance at the device.

Fionnuala shrugged. "It is what it is. It's not like we triggered, even, we just got hooked up to the powers and dropped in the forest." She shook her head and plowed on before any questions could be asked. "All that aside, there are more pressing matters to cover. Yesterday, while Morven was busy working on that fire station that got hit by a Bakuda bomb, a man approached me with a phone. On the other end of the call was Coil, who offered me a lump sum of cash so that I'd leave Brockton Bay in a timely manner. There was the implication that he had a sniper ready to take my head off if I refused, but he didn't say outright that there was one." Piggot blinked, looked at the device's display, then blinked again. "I have an idea why he wants us gone, but I'd rather not say. What I can tell you, however, is Coil's name, and how his power works." Because honestly, despite all the money he'd bribed me with? Fuck Coil. I may not be willing to go up against him personally, but I had no problems with screwing him over by spilling what I knew to the PRT.

"That's a dangerous game you're playing there," Piggot interjected grimly.

Fionnuala shook her head. "I know about the unwritten rules. They're an important stopgap to help prevent cape conflict from devolving into outright chaos where no one can afford to pull punches. I also know that they're merely an informal agreement that relies on community enforcement, and that capes who think themselves powerful enough to weather or outright avoid reprisal have no reason not to break them. For the rules to work, everyone involved has to uphold them. Coil doesn't give the rules so much as the value of the paper they're not written on." She grimaced apologetically, but forged on. "You'll find Coil's name to be rather familiar, Director. He's Thomas Calvert."

Piggot froze, then let her gaze fall to the lie detector. She stared at the display silently, what I could only call a crack forming in her mask of professionalism, and I held my tongue while she processed it all.

A low cough broke through the awkward silence that had grown, and both of me looked at Armsmaster, whose hand was returning to its spot behind his back. Piggot blinked as well, then straightened up and fixed Fionnuala with a hard glare. "So, you know…?" she asked, trailing off at the end.

"I know the history you share with him. Some of it, at least. Not planning on bringing it up." Piggot inclined her head. "He wants to take your place as Director of this branch, while retaining the control of the city's underworld he's working his way towards seizing."

"And his power is?"

"It's an odd form of precognition. From his perspective, he splits reality in two, and is able to take different actions in each reality while knowing what's going on in both simultaneously in real time; he can drop either reality at will, and while any actions he took in the dropped reality essentially never happened, he retains whatever information he might have learned in it. He can use it to, say, order a team of his mercenaries to go forward with a mission in one reality while holding them back in the other, and if the mission goes poorly he can drop that reality and refine his plan with what he learned from it. He could also brutally interrogate someone without them ever knowing; or he could ask questions of a precognitive who can only use her power a limited number of times per day until she reaches her limit, then drop the reality in which he asked them before splitting reality again to ask even more questions. Which brings us to Dinah Alcott."

I could only imagine how overwhelmed Piggot must be feeling, because if she was none of it showed on her face. "What— Oh. She's the precognitive."

Fionnuala nodded. "The Undersiders are in his employ, and while they didn't know it, the bank robbery they pulled was intended to distract the Wards and other responders while his mercenaries kidnapped Miss Alcott. He's likely spent the time since then getting her addicted to a cocktail of drugs. If that's finished, then he's started exploiting her power." She laced her fingers together in front of her face, elbows resting on the table. "She's quite the powerful precog, too. Her power can answer questions about the future asked of it by looking at all the possible futures it's simulated, then reducing the results into a percentage chance, usually with a great many digits after the decimal point. Limited number of questions per day before a thinker headache sets in. In addition, she can single out a potential future and let it 'play out', as it were, to see what happens in it, but doing so quickly becomes punishingly painful for her and renders her useless for the day, if not longer. The saving grace of Calvert having her is that her power interferes with his to a certain extent, so each time he asks questions in one reality and then discards it to ask some more, it interferes with his power's reliability. Or something like that, I'm not fully certain. Point is, he can't spend all day splitting and discarding realities over and over to get predictions from her about anything and everything he can think of."

Piggot and Armsmaster consulted the lie detector again. "You fully believe all that you said is true, save what you admitted you are uncertain about, and you said it with next to no deceptive intent," Armsmaster said, his voice starting out faint but gaining strength and a calculating undercurrent as he went.

"We will have to confirm what we can of this for ourselves, of course," the Director said warningly.

"Of course," Fionnuala nodded.

"In the meantime, we are willing to do what we are able to so you won't have to leave the city."

Fionnuala waved her hand dismissively. "Oh, don't worry about that. We want to leave regardless, and would even if we didn't have a megalomaniacal villain bribing and threatening us to go."

Piggot paused, blinked. "You want to comply with his demands?"

Fionnuala shrugged. "That info dump I gave you about him and his power is mostly a sort of 'fuck you' to him for the threats, and also because he's an awful person only too happy to order his men to ruin the lives of anyone in his way, if he doesn't just have them killed. We want to leave because we don't want to get involved with any fighting, and there's going to be far more than that when Leviathan comes calling."

"... No one can predict the Endbringers," Piggot frowned.

"And neither of us is a precog. We know he'll attack the same way we know about Calvert and his power." Fionnuala shook her head. "All the conflict here, the whole ABB mess, Coil anonymously releasing the civilian identities of all the Empire 88 capes and their subsequent violence, plus whatever other factors feed in to how Endbringers choose their targets, results in Leviathan attacking Brockton Bay early in the morning on May fifteenth. Armsmaster's tracking program gives early warning about the attack," the tinker stiffened in his armor, "a defense assembles, Leviathan kills many defenders and civilians, and then Scion shows up to drive it away before it can sink the city or whatever its goal is." Fionnuala places her hands flat on the table and leans forward, continuing before either member of her audience can interrupt. "That is a future. Things are different now than what led to it. Whatever future we end up seeing, it won't play out just like that. Leviathan might attack somewhere else, or attack at a different time, or on a different day. Scion, wherever he is now, can't be counted on to swoop in at the end and drive it off. Hell, technically speaking there's no guarantee that they won't switch things up and have Behemoth hit somewhere instead." She sighed and leaned back in her chair. Even boosted as their number might be in the wake of my depression's unmourned death, that little rant had eaten up a good chunk of my spoons. "I want to avoid fighting an Endbringer. I don't want Morven anywhere near one, no matter how much she could help. And even though circumstances have changed, I still want us away from Brockton Bay, because there's something new here I wouldn't be surprised if an Endbringer shows up to fuck with it."

"What— oh." Piggot's shoulders dipped noticeably, as if a weight had been placed on them. Armsmaster remained standing, seemingly impassive, though I suspected he'd locked his armor's joints and slumped inside it. "The portal."

Fionnuala nodded. "Yes. The portal Scion made when he fucked off to who-knows-where. Which still isn't a guarantee Leviathan will come here, but regardless." She cocked her head. "I'm curious, by the way. What's on the other side?"

Piggot took a deep, slightly shaky breath, then let it out. "I do not believe you are cleared for me to tell you." She fixed Fionnuala with a glare. "You say the most outlandish things, assertions I ought to reject out of hand as the ravings of a madwoman, and to make matters worse you say them fully convinced that you are telling the truth, with not an ounce of deceptive intent, if this toy of Armsmaster's is to be believed! Give me one reason why I should believe anything you've said!"

Fionnuala grimaced. "Alright, I'll tell you how I know all the stuff I've said. I'll tell you what my source is. I'll even tell you more information I remember from that source! But please, tell me, tell us, what's past Scion's portal, or, failing that, how to be cleared to learn. Because as far as I can tell, it's directly above where we first woke up here on Bet, and that makes it seem kind of relevant to our situation."

Director Piggot stared hard at Fionnuala, hard enough that I'd worry about eye lasers drilling holes through Fionnuala's head were Piggot a parahuman. After more than a minute of this stand-off, Piggot's lips twisted into a grimace. She undid the cord securing her folder, opened it, and leafed through the papers within, until finally she pulled out two of them and gave one to each of my selves. "It's not a matter of clearance, in truth. The top brass, myself included, accept that no amount of secrecy will keep the portal's nature from reaching the public forever. We chose instead to keep the situation quiet in the short term. Thus, the NDA's. Please read and sign, both of you."

Both of my selves scanned over the forms, then went back for slower, more in-depth readings. I had to ask about a few of the terms used in it, which Armsmaster helpfully explained, before I felt I understood them enough to sign, using pens Morven had retrieved from within her armor. When Morven asked, he agreed that their civilian names would be better to sign with than their cape names, even though either would suffice under the law, apparently. Once signed, the forms disappeared back into the Director's folder.

"So. What's on the other side of the portal?" I both hoped and dreaded in equal measure that the answer was my home.

Piggot folded her hands again. "It's us."

"... Beg pardon?"

"We are on the other side. Or rather, alternate versions of us are. The portal leads to another Earth Bet."