a not Chapter 6: Hybrid Hive 2, a x-overs fanfic

Hybrid Hive 2

Mar 25, 2020

#8,079

Wednesday morning started slightly earlier than anticipated for Taylor due to needing to get up to use the toilet. It wasn't early enough to go back to sleep, so she ended up on the couch with the very early morning news turned on while she waited for her father to get up. She'd just missed a segment on kids that had gone missing on Friday, something about having run away from a bus caught up in a fight of some kind and not having turned up, only to be distracted from that by them switching to speculating on her. Well, Minerva.

They started with discussing if 'guns can be disabled without anyone noticing' warranted any possible increase in theoretical shaker ratings. Not that they had numbers currently, but after a few minutes of back and forth they came to the conclusion that it probably wouldn't change anything. Some of the things that she'd done while fighting Leviathan were likely to overshadow the relatively minor trick. Deciding that Hive wasn't human after she'd bitten off the end of a handgun as part of that was somewhat obvious, but left them assuming that Taylor was the only 'real person' involved right now. That led to them talking about other revelations from when she met with Armsmaster, specifically the 'owns a planet' aspect of things and whether or not diplomatic teams were going to have to get involved because of that.

"Like I could really be said to own a planet," Taylor grumbled.

"That is technically correct," Hive said, getting Taylor's attention.

"You're the one that told them that I likely owned the planet."

"Yes, but it is incorrect to state that you own a planet. By the treaties in question you probably own hundreds of planets at a minimum, possibly thousands, assuming that only alternate versions of Earth outside of the administrative barrier in the shroud are considered. The exact numbers vary significantly, if the presence of a Shard device doesn't negate ownership then it's thousands at a minimum before including those dimensions that you can reach outside of the shroud entirely. Then there's the other planets in the star system, which by some definitions can't be owned but by others can be."

Taylor rolled her eyes. "And you have just as much ability to control access as I do, so I don't own them."

"My Lord, you control my ability to control access to the other dimensions. Until such time as I can restore a backup, one that may not exist and is increasingly unlikely to even be compatible, I have no software access codes that can be used to change that and have registered you as my sole administrator. It's possible that Belkan authorities will show up looking for me at some point, or that we will eventually reach a point where we can reach out to them. At that point my backup may be made available, or hardware keys that I am unaware of may be used. Until then you are my sole owner and partner. As such, you directly or indirectly control all access to the other dimensions, at least until you give others the equation for the Dimensional Transference spell."

"Oh." Giving that some thought, Taylor frowned. "If your access codes were wiped, how would you identify Belkan authorities in the first place?"

"Aside from possible use of hardware codes? I have surviving genetic profile entries for friendly and hostile groups, though in both cases I wouldn't want to assume that's still accurate. It should at least aid in identifying potential individuals, though use of the Belkan language will also be a good indicator."

"That does make sense, I suppose." She sat there thinking about it, but something else was bothering her as well. Finally she figured out what that was. "What about those that put the shard devices onto the other planets? Wouldn't they negate my ownership?"

"In theory they could claim joint ownership, assuming that they exist and can still reach the dimensions. I suspect that the individual or group responsible for the devices is either decidedly non-human or isn't present. In fact, it's possible that the devices are part of an automated system that's running without proper oversight. The devices in the deteriorated bubble that are likely in storage could have arrived as part of an automated delivery system that had a flaw, with the intact bubble being a redundant system that didn't have that flaw."

Taylor nodded. "Okay. But how certain are you that there isn't someone else running around with the ability to pull them in like you did? They could then be dropping them onto planets and we wouldn't necessarily know."

Though in stealth form, Taylor got the impression of nodding from Hive. "That would make sense, except that to store them like that I cause significant and possibly-irreparable damage to the structural integrity of the devices. Beyond destroying the slave circuits, physical supports inside of the devices are largely powderized by the process. Rebuilding those would essentially require building the devices in-situ instead of just moving them around."

"Oh. So you're saying that we have no evidence that anyone involved in making or distributing the shard-type devices is around, and even if they are that doesn't mean that they're still capable of reaching the planets that we can with dimensional transference and similar?"

"Indeed."

"Huh."

They sat there in silence for a few minutes, the news having moved on to talking about some big fight that had happened in Florida the previous day. An unknown individual in a costume had stolen thousands of dollars in sunglasses from a locked truck, leaving behind an itemized bill for saving people from the 'mind-controlling anti-UV coating' in the process, only to be caught in the act of burning the sunglasses in the parking lot and opening fire on those that had found them. They'd gotten away after setting several other fires as a distraction, but police were investigating the payment address provided on bill.

"Lord?" Hive finally said.

"Yeah?" Taylor asked.

"I think I have a way to operate the relay equipment from another dimension, though due to how my systems work I can't use it myself. I'd like permission to build something like that into the structure I'm adding to the house in the inlet."

"That doesn't sound like a horrible idea. It would negate the need to keep things hidden in the walls here, right?"

"That's correct."

"Then you might as well go for it."

They continued to chat about some of the 'owning a bunch of planets' for a bit longer, Taylor shaking her head at some of Hive's 'good news', before moving on to some of the issues with attaching spells to non-mana objects.

Missy was obviously still tired when she appeared on the transport device, through a dimensional transference instead of using a portal. Which was obvious to Taylor, but possibly not as obvious to her father that hadn't been looking over at the device at the time.

"Morning," Missy said as she came over to them. She then looked around. "Where's Hive at?"

Taylor gestured in the general direction of the inlet. "She's working on stuff down that way. Shall we get going?"

"Aren't you forgetting something?" her father asked, causing Taylor to blink. "You're in regular clothing, not your armor."

"Oh, right." It only took a moment to cast the Knight Armor, and they started down the beach a moment later.

"So," Missy said after a couple of minutes. "Did you see the news talking about you owning a planet? Ethan was wondering what the response to that would be from the government."

"I saw some of that," Taylor admitted. "And Hive pointed out that I don't own a planet."

"Which sounds like a legal distinction to me," her father noted. "Because I doubt that the law would consider the transport devices as you not controlling all access to this one."

"Until they have evidence the planet is uninhabited there's no actual way to invoke the treaties, which would involve bringing people here to investigate. Beyond that, even if I do own this planet, it's merely one of hundreds to thousands of planets that the treaties would consider to be mine. Though apparently there's other 'good news' for me."

"Oh?"

"The planets accidentally damaged, destroyed, or made to never have existed can't be used against me legally if they were theoretically my property in the first place."

Missy stumbled, tripped, and fell over at that. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Danny snorted. "They were testing a few potentially-hazardous techniques and found that they were a tad more dangerous than desired. Didn't you hear about the 'runaway conversions' comment yesterday? The first one or two that were actually hazardous affected entire instances of Mars."

That had the younger girl blinking, and paling slightly, but she shook it off and got up so that they could continue. "That's insane, you know. If the PRT ever found out about that..."

"They'd do squat for the time being, because until Taylor threatens to use any of that on Bet they won't want to give her a reason to. She's on record stating that she's trying not to go too far in multiple ways, and she demonstrated that she wasn't bluffing about being able to go too far when she accidentally soloed Leviathan instead of just being a distraction. I wouldn't be surprised if governments do approach her as soon as they can get diplomatic teams to Brockton Bay, if only to offer her citizenship in hopes of her mere presence acting as an Endbringer deterrent after Leviathan ran for it."

Taylor blinked at that. "Would they really send teams to do that?"

He snorted at that. "I'm honestly surprised that you got away with not being approached for that kind of thing when you went out in public. My assumption is that they hadn't had time to get to Brockton Bay yet, possibly because our government decided to make it harder on them to avoid you being poached before they could establish better relations with you."

Missy nodded, though was starting to sound a little out of breath as she spoke up. "Eidolon supposedly gets at least one offer a month, despite general 'no poaching parahumans from other countries' agreements. Well, except for China, if they think they have a chance to they'll grab anyone."

Taylor sighed. "I'm going to have to watch out for people looking to get control of me through any means possible, aren't I?"

Her father grinned at that. "I pity the fools that eventually try that."

That had both girls groaning in response.

Missy sighed as Sherie parked in the school parking lot. Being brought to school was slightly embarrassing, but some final bits of paperwork had to be taken care of to get her officially out of 'approved medical absence'. Tomorrow things would be different on that front, with her making her own way. Though she was undecided on 'taking a bus' or 'jogging/running' at this point. On the surface, Taylor was somewhat crazy for going all the way to and from the Boardwalk on foot every day. In practice it was a wonderful extra bit of exercise and wasn't a horrible idea, but it would require a bit more building up to in order to accomplish it after the existing morning run.

Grabbing her bag only took a moment, and she made sure that the necklace that she'd gotten from 'Minerva' was visible outside of her shirt. At the same time, she had Space hidden under the shirt. That wasn't going to work with her entire wardrobe, admittedly, and one of the things that Sherie had was a certified letter stating that Space couldn't be removed. That was going to be needed for when she had to change for gym class later. Which was also when she expected to get questions about Space.

Speaking of gym class, there'd been a bit of a debate over whether or not she should use the Knight Clothing spell because of it. In the end they'd decided that training herself up on keeping spells going coupled with the added protections was worth keeping the spell up for class. At the same time, she couldn't cast it while wearing anything she needed to take off for gym class. The end result was that her only 'Knight Clothing' elements were her bra, panties, and socks. Which was enough to ensure that 'sweaty after gym class' wasn't going to be a problem, in theory negating the need to change, but not doing so would raise too many questions.

Luckily she wasn't in an 'expected to shower after gym class' situation right now. Arcadia was supposed to have showers available for students, but she wouldn't be there until September and the older Wards implied that they mostly got used by the sports teams. Even that was assuming she made it in without the benefits of being in the Wards program, anyway. For that matter, she wasn't sure how she or those still in the Wards would react to one another. Had they even been told that she wasn't a Ward anymore?

She pondered that and how to check, beyond asking Ethan or Sherie that evening, while the paperwork was taken care of and her pile of assignments were given to the office to be distributed with a 'turned in when she came back' stamp. Something stupid that they were doing after someone had tried to bullshit their way into turning in an assignment a few days after they came back from being sick without being penalized for it being late.

"Stay safe and behave yourself," Sherie said once they were done. "Ethan or I should be home when you get there, but plans can change."

"I know," Missy said. "We went over this before we even left."

"And reminding you only took a moment. Now scoot, you don't need to be here for the last couple of bits of paperwork."

"Yeah, yeah. See you later."

Taylor sighed as her father pulled up to the tutoring building. Of course he'd drive her in, the last time she left for tutoring she'd been attacked by Hess. He knew she didn't need it, she knew she didn't need it, but the world didn't and appearances needed to be maintained. Even if it felt horribly wrong to be treating her as though she was at risk when she'd fought off Leviathan since then.

It was incredibly annoying, and she knew that she had no good reason to argue against it.

At least she'd be able to make her own way home, which comforted her slightly as she grabbed her backpack.

"Have a nice day," her father said.

"I'll try," she replied. "Hopefully you have a decent day as well."

"I'm still waiting on the PRT to call me in order to arrange more testing of your necklace after Friday's incident. Though I suppose that interest could've finally dried up, if only out of fear from parahumans."

She shrugged at that. "We'll see, I guess. Leviathan probably screwed things up for a week or two minimum."

"True. Don't forget to let me know when you get home."

"I will."

Several surveillance drones that'd been in the car with them spread out around the area when she got out of the car, ensuring that she could keep a good eye on things just in case. At the same time, she was using insect control with some of the improvements, able to get a lot more detail out of the insects now.

She really should've practiced with it a bit more before now.

It was obvious that there were a number of people keeping an eye on the area as she entered the building. Two police officers in a police car, a PRT van around the corner, three different Boardwalk Enforcers, and one person who was likely undercover that had radioed to say that she was safely in the building. That had been picked up by the police and PRT, but not the Boardwalk Enforcers. One of them called in that she was in the building on a cell phone instead.

Avoiding shaking her head, she instead refocused on getting through the day.

Missy grinned as she headed to lunch. Gym today had ended up being dodgeball, and she'd done better than she usually did. Five games, and she'd been singled out in every one of them as a priority target after she'd caught two dodgeballs at once early in the first game. As such she'd been taken out fairly quickly in most of the games. But there wasn't any shame in not being able to avoid being hit when over two thirds of the dodgeballs in play are thrown at you at once, after all, and she'd finally found a way to still come out on top of that in the last game. Catch the first two, each with one hand, and then use them to deflect the rest of the dodgeballs.

Of course, she'd then gotten cocky and taken a hit to the face shortly afterwards. It was a useful lesson.

Even better, the minimal Knight Clothing had kept any of the hits that had gotten through to her from hurting at all. Sure, dodgeballs weren't exactly high-impact injury-causing devices under normal circumstances, but she didn't care. The only thing that would've been better was if she could've used the enhanced sneakers from the Knight Armor template, but that would probably be too noticeable even if she made them visually look like her normal sneakers.

Also nice was that the excuse for where Space came from had worked wonderfully. Answering everyone who asked where it came from or why she'd been out of school with the exact same answer was actually somewhat fun as well. Telling people to not approach mysterious tinkertech that happened to be laying around was both good advice and insanely good at misleading them from the truth while appearing to explain things.

Sadly, that didn't help with the fact that she was technically still behind in her classes other than gym anyway. Not by much, but apparently she hadn't actually been given all of the work to do. None of her teachers were holding it against her, and she'd been given a pass on a pop quiz earlier that morning that she hadn't been given the work for in the first place. What it meant was that she wasn't going to be doing much other than catching up on things tonight. Which was going to suck.

But not as much as it sucked to be the idiots that hadn't brought lunch today. She'd been smart enough to check and brought a bag lunch when she found out that today was mystery meat day. Also known as the cafeteria staff making something with leftover meat that hadn't been needed but was going to go past its use-by date otherwise. Occasionally they came up with a way to make things better than the original meal would've been, but that was rare. Especially as they also usually slightly overcooked things intentionally as a precaution because of getting close to the use-by date.

Complaints had been filed by every group of students for years, as she understood it, but it was a 'cost-saving measure' that had 'no negative impact on the nutrition of lunches' and was thus left in place. That most students couldn't finish the lunch whenever 'mystery meat day' came up was ignored.

Taylor sighed as she left tutoring for the day. She'd forgotten about talking with Über and Leet and they'd emailed her shortly after lunch. Admittedly, they acknowledged that her weekend had been eventful, explaining why she'd forgotten about talking with them about her likely schedule. She was going to need to check with her father on that front, see if he was against her trying out whatever the two had worked out to fix their target shooting system on a weeknight or not.

Jogging home was easy enough, though she was fairly certain that several of the watchers didn't like that she was doing so. At the same time, she took a very different route than normal, which would hopefully placate people from the point of view that it was hard to set up an ambush if she was on an unknown route. For her own peace of mind she was using the surveillance drones to get a much better view of the route ahead and planned on avoiding 'oddly deserted' areas.

She didn't find any, admittedly, but if she had then she'd have avoided them.

When she got home she called her father to let her know that she'd made it home. After that she wanted to go try some things on the beach, but she actually had new homework to do and felt that she should take care of it first. Which meant sitting down and working her way through it, as it'd been provided as physical worksheets that she was going to need to fill out by hand. As annoying as that was. Though she'd been promised that it wouldn't be held against her if they were destroyed because she was attacked.

It was beneath her to fake such an attack, if only out of spite for the idea being brought up in the first place, but she'd given it a small amount of consideration anyway. If only because how to pull something like that off without making it look like she was being attacked by the group that 'Minerva' was a member of was an interesting thought experiment. That such an 'attack' would, if not made to look like a new group, throw a pile of people's theories into chaos was actually a more compelling reason to attempt it, but probably not a good reason.

Aside from the homework, she also didn't have any of the things she wanted to try working in simulation yet. Her desire to try them 'in the real world' was to see if the simulation system just didn't simulate what she was trying to do properly. Given that some of her simulation results were explosive, at a minimum, she could also admit that she probably shouldn't be testing them willy-nilly in the real world either. Which meant coming up with a proper, and safe, testing plan before heading to the beach anyway. Or, perhaps it meant heading to the desert in case things went worse than expected?

"Lord?" Hive said during a small break Taylor took around halfway through the worksheets.

"Yeah?" Taylor replied.

"I'd like to ensure that Hal and the Combat Drones are all equipped with a variant of the cloaking system. It should be much more effective than the base version, at the cost of not being safe to use with organic life being in the field."

"Not being safe how?"

"As a side effect, the generators create ninth-dimension radiation that has unfortunate effects on most biological systems. It can be shielded against, but that tends to result in positron emissions that have to also be shielded against, reducing the effectiveness of the cloaking field. Not having organic life inside of the field is a far easier solution, as the operation of the field itself prevents the radiation from escaping."

Taylor considered that, decided that she didn't want to think about it, and dropped Hal and all of the Combat Drones onto her desk in their standby forms instead. Hive stored them all a moment later. "Do you want to put it in the Surveillance Drones too?"

"No, Lord. This version of the field has a minimum size that is far too large for them to take advantage of it properly."

"Oh. Okay."

Taylor went back to her homework while Hive worked on that.

Missy had barely remembered to take the correct bus when she'd left school, used to taking one of two others depending on her destination. Now she'd only really have one destination to worry about, and getting used to taking that specific bus was likely going to take a couple of weeks at a minimum. Just in time to be reaching the last few weeks of school for the year. Wonderful timing, that.

When she got home she found that nobody else was there, but that wasn't a problem. She headed inside and was considering whether or not she should call one of the two when a car pulled into the driveway. Ethan came in a moment later.

"Good afternoon," he said when he spotted her. "Sorry I wasn't here when you got here, got stuck in a line at the gas station."

"I just got here myself," Missy admitted.

"Good to know that I wasn't horribly wrong about the bus schedule then. How did your first day back in school go?"

"Annoying in a number of respects, but at least people seemed to take the advice on not approaching mysterious tinkertech seriously."

He snorted at that. "More so than you did, in a way. I think. I'm not sure if Hive counts as tinkertech, but the sentiment is probably the same with whatever Hive actually is."

Missy rolled her eyes at that. "I put a lot more thought and effort into that than just 'approaching mysterious tinkertech' would imply."

"And despite that you had your powers removed, could very well have died of blood loss, and induced several different brands of panic in the process."

"Okay, yes, some of that could've been planned better. Didn't quite hit the PRT as hard as I wanted to, honestly."

That had him blinking. "What do you mean by that?"

"I wanted to make a big deal out of it, giant funnel down into the building, but as far as I was able to tell afterwards? It didn't even make the news, and not a blip on PHO."

"Ah! Right. Hive would've been above you while you were on the bed, right? Since she was the end of the funnel, and it passed through your head..."

Missy nodded. "Yeah. The funnel ended up in the ground. I figured that much out myself. Should've been obvious before we started, and I wasn't exactly in a position to comment on it once things were in progress."

"Figures. Well, I can see that you still have your bag down here. Go drop things off, get settled in, then come back here. I think I'll make some nachos for while we're talking about a couple of other things."

Curious, Missy nodded and headed upstairs. She made sure to put the homework she had to do out so that she wouldn't forget about it, switched to slippers instead of her sneakers, and emptied most of the stuff out of her pockets. After a moment of dithering she decided to change into a t-shirt as well, even if the light sweater wasn't a problem with the Knight Clothing active. The t-shirt was less confining.

With that done she made her way back down to the kitchen, where Ethan was just finishing up. As it was only a snack, compared to part of a meal, he'd stuck to chips and cheese. She grabbed a drink for herself from the fridge and sat down at the table, he grabbed his own drink before placing the nachos down and sitting across from her. They took a moment to grab a couple to start with, but it wasn't long before Ethan nodded.

"So," he said. "First things first, how's your headache from the anchor?"

Ah, right. They both knew about that and there'd been some 'should she stay out sick until she adapted' talk. "It's mostly gone, honestly. I think having things constantly changing around me helped me adapt to what was going on with it faster. It probably helped me in dodgeball too."

"Okay, I suppose that makes sense. Which I guess brings us to a different topic. How good do you think you can be at faking not knowing what's going on around you? Because Taylor was good enough at it to fool people but horrible once I realized what was going on with her."

She shrugged at that. "It honestly isn't that different from the knowledge of where I could and couldn't manipulate space around me. More detailed, but tracking people is just as easy as it was before."

"That's probably a good point, and one that I hadn't considered. Then again, you always did get asked to hold back quite a bit in the name of PR, didn't you?"

"Yep."

He nodded, then sighed. "I suppose that PR is a good enough lead-in to the next topic. They want to make an announcement about Vista no longer being in the Wards. The 'traditional' excuse would be that you left for 'personal reasons', but Armsmaster doesn't want to go that route."

Missy blinked. Admittedly, her original plan was to force the PRT to have a massive incident that they'd run around trying to cover up or explain. That hadn't happened, but they still seemed to be trying to do the right thing. She thought. "Okay..."

"Instead, he wants to outright state that 'Vista' died outside of Wards duties after suffering extreme stress due to mis-applied rules. In fact, that's almost the exact wording that he wants to use, after being talked out of using the term 'suicide'."

That...huh. "Why?"

Ethan shrugged. "I think there's more going on than I know of, but his cited reasons are to get people to not react as badly to the actions being taken against the Youth Guard coupled with protecting your identity. The latter because you can't be the dead cape, because how many people are going to assume that Vista's powers 'died' while leaving you alive?"

"Oh. That does make some sense, I suppose."

"I suspect that he also wants to do that because it means that a picture of you can be put up permanently in the lobby to serve as a longer-term reminder. A bit of an incentive to not let it happen again, as it is. At the same time, it was decided that we should get your permission before doing that, in part so that you're not blindsided and in part because nobody knows if you'd take offense. Admittedly, I was also supposed to approach this with far more care, or get you to a therapist and get them to make the call, but they don't know the truth about what happened."

"Right, I guess that would affect things. And I suppose having the PRT claim that Vista died would make it hard for them to then turn around and claim that I am Vista later, if they wanted to try."

"That's true. So are you okay with that being announced?"

Missy shrugged. "Might as well."

"Right. With that taken care of, I've got a warning for you."

"A warning?"

He nodded solemnly. "Yes. Later tonight I'm going to escape before Sherie talks with you."

"Okay..."

"She doesn't trust the school system or your parents to have given you the talk properly, and we know that the PRT doesn't like to cover that until you're a year or two older either."

Missy's eye twitched at that. Maybe she could escape to the beach before that? After all, it probably wasn't safe for Sherie to follow her there...

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Mar 25, 2020

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

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Apr 1, 2020

#8,414

Taylor grumbled as she returned home. She'd finished her homework, then headed to the desert to run some tests. Which was probably a good idea, all things considered, given that she'd accidentally discovered two new tricks. Luckily she'd done so using a couple of combat drones that Hive had returned to her for the purpose of running the tests. Especially as they now had one less combat drone, and Hive had to build a replacement.

The first new trick was fairly straightforward. In the process of attempting to attach mana to a rock she'd been able to selectively amplify or negate gravity and inertia on it. The effect took very little mana, but consumed the mana in the process. Feeding a trickle of mana into the spell she'd created maintained the effects, all of which depended on which dimensions she spun the mana along. It only had an effect on four total dimensional axes, all others seemingly doing nothing beyond consume the mana. One changed gravity, a second changed inertia. The third caused the rock to become more or less durable, but had undesirable side effects after further testing. The final axis had been harder to identify at first, but didn't take long to identify as changing frictional coefficients.

They'd actually fetched the stupid potted plant that she still had from initial dimensional transference testing and ensured that the effects didn't harm living things, and Hive was going to see if the flight spell could be improved with the gravity and inertia manipulation. The durability trick was going to be limited to being used with devices on account of it noticeably slowing down biological processes in the plant when they'd used it on it, and adjusting frictional coefficients was something they were going to be thinking about.

The other new trick was far less useful, and was the one that had taken out the combat drone. They only tested that one once, and initially it had been promising. The mana hadn't been immediately consumed, and the target rock hadn't appeared to change for the first three tenths of a second. That's when everything went wrong, and the rock went from being matter to being antimatter. The resulting explosion was impressive and far beyond what the drone had been ready for at point-blank range.

"Lord?" Hive queried while Taylor was pouring a glass of water.

"Yeah?" Taylor replied.

"May I ask why you're not using the flight spell anchors as a base?"

That had Taylor blinking for a moment, before she dropped her forehead against the cabinets. "Because I'm an idiot and forgot that it anchors to my body, and thus to normal matter. Thank you for reminding me."

"At least you figured out new things that we can do, as well as one thing to avoid."

"I suppose."

Of course, it didn't take her long to look over said anchors to see that she'd been doing things very close to what they did, so perhaps she'd half remembered them after all. At the same time, she could see where she'd been going wrong, and she had other things that she had to adjust as well. In particular, the way it connected to the rest of the spell was more of a 'drag the normal matter along with the spell' instead of her desired 'drag the spell along with the normal matter'. But it was a far better starting point than what she'd been working with.

Missy had underestimated the preparations that Sherie had made, and misunderstood what Hive had set up. When she'd asked to be sent to the beach the transport device had denied her on account of being 'locked' by Sherie. A lock that she was fairly certain that could've been released by pretty much everyone else that knew about the device. Sure, she probably could've called Taylor or Hive to ask for it to be unlocked, but then she'd have to admit why she wanted to escape and she didn't think that they'd see it as a worthwhile reason to override the lock.

Ethan had vanished right after dinner, apparently having taken an evening shift to have an unassailable excuse to avoid being present for 'the talk'. Not that Missy could complain about that, as it was the reason why he'd been able to be home that afternoon. In fact, she wasn't even sure when Sherie had decided on things, meaning that tonight could've been picked because he wasn't going to be around anyway.

"So Missy," Sherie said once they'd finished cleaning up. "We need to talk about a few things."

Missy sighed. "Okay."

They settled in the living room, but Sherie fetched a binder in the process. That was followed by staring at Missy for a minute. "I'm guessing that you've started working on your new costume design."

And that had Missy blinking, very confused as that wasn't what she'd been expecting. "Er, yeah?"

"We're going to be going over a small selection of things that teenagers tend to put in their costumes that are horrible ideas. I don't care if you haven't decided to yet either." She opened the binder and spun it around so that Missy could see inside of it. The first page had several pictures of footwear. "The first thing many girls in particular do is try and incorporate horrible footwear choices. High heels and platforms of any kind are one extreme, sandals are the other."

"Okay. I can see why only an Alexandria-package should even consider heels or platforms, since brute and flight would negate most of the downsides, but sandals?"

Sherie rolled her eyes. "You should always have footwear that you can run in and that will protect your feet from the environment. The only exceptions are tied to powers that function through your feet, which you don't have." She then flipped to the next page, which showed almost everything from the previous page, except this time partially destroyed with severely injured feet. "Heels and platforms break, or break ankles. Sandals provide no protection from liquids and come off far too easily. These slippers here probably looked reasonable, but weren't sturdy enough."

Missy had to admit that the injuries looked painful at a minimum. Obviously broken ankles, a heel spike that had broken off in the back of the other foot, what she suspected were acid burns where sandals hadn't provided protection, deep scratches on a foot where a different style of sandal was missing, and she wasn't sure what had caused a couple of the problems. No, wait, the one in the lower corner was probably the slipper having been on fire.

Sherie pointed at one of the pictures, where it looked like one of the platform shoes had been forcibly torn off. That foot was mangled, with two toes missing. "This picture is from an Alexandria-package. A cocky one that went up against someone who could cancel out her powers. Ended up losing an arm and took months before she could walk again when she failed to escape on foot, only to keep the platform shoes and get caught by the same cape on her first night back out. She didn't survive that time."

She let Missy look at that page for a minute before flipping to the next one. Which had a mixture of flowing gowns, tuxedos with ridiculously long tails, large bows with trailing elements, capes, and long scarves. "Moving on, we have costume elements that can be grabbed or could catch on things. More specifically, elements that do not break away when otherwise caught. This is more of a 'within reason' thing, as reasonable skirts and shirts are generally fine. You'll notice that most of these extend beyond the reach of the person wearing them."

Missy nodded. So far nothing that she'd been shown applied to her anyway. "That does make sense. Does Alexandria's cape detach?"

Sherie shrugged. "I have no clue, but I assume so. She frequently isn't wearing it when she knows she's going to be fighting anything significant, using it more as part of her image for PR reasons outside of combat."

"Oh. I guess that makes sense."

"Sadly, I couldn't get pictures of those who ran afoul of their costume choices in this case. All I could find was pictures of closed caskets." She then flipped the page again, showing a bunch of teenagers wearing amazingly little. "Which brings us to the next category, those that show far too much skin. There are very few exceptions here." She pointed with her index and ring fingers at two pictures, one each of male and female parahumans. Which were actually the ones with the least on. "These two in particular are believed to be siblings that triggered together. They're villains that have armor-like skin, but only when it isn't covered by cloth. To that point, they're the only two pictured that haven't been seriously injured by the lack of coverage and protection from their costumes."

Missy rolled her eyes. "I had full, if limited strength, protection from wearing magical underwear today. Each additional piece of clothing would only make it stronger. Gloves, shoes, short skirt or shorts, itty bitty shirt, light hat or something like it, and I'd probably be more protected than Armsmaster."

Sherie blinked at that, then rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Okay. Yeah. That's a bit insane. At the same time, that's only so long as the barriers hold up, right?"

"Of course. The full Knight Armor template that Taylor uses is obviously the best option if expecting an actual fight, given that it includes integrated armor that should be just as solid as if it was made out of the fancy materials she based it on. Besides, why wouldn't I want to be able to take a nuke to the face and barely notice?"

"Normal people avoid that kind of situation."

"Normal people can't take the hit."

"Right. Whatever. The other detail here is that the more exposed skin you have, the more ways people might have to identify you and the more likely they are to shoot at that exposed skin. Moving on!" Sherie then flipped the page again, revealing a number of costumes with spikes and blades sticking out of them. "Lastly, for some reason teenagers tend to think that costumes like these are a good idea. If your powers make the spikes or blades then you get a pass, otherwise you're just asking to hurt yourself."

Missy nodded at that. "You do recall that I was around for that chef knife cape's pratfall, right?"

The woman winced at that. "Yeah, that was a stupid costume, but I didn't include him because it did, technically, tie into his powers."

"How did having chef knives sticking out of everywhere tie into his powers?"

"Any attack sent his way would be intercepted by one of the blades if one was close enough to do so. Before his pratfall he'd walked right through a firefight between two groups of gang members and every last bullet that got near him was sliced in two by one of the knives. He'd angled them all so that the split bullets wouldn't come close to hitting him either."

"That...huh. Okay, that makes more sense than I thought it would. I'm surprised he didn't make a reappearance after he healed up."

"He did, and tried that trick again. It wasn't enough to let him take on the Butcher."

"Oh."

"Still, that covers what I wanted to talk about regarding costumes. I don't have much I can do to force you to go with a specific look, of course, but I wanted to ensure that you were informed about some of the issues."

Missy nodded. "Thank you, even if I don't think I needed it. Much better than the talk I thought you were going to be giving me."

Sherie raised an eyebrow. "Oh?" She then flipped the page in the binder, which Missy only then realized wasn't just the pages from the costume stuff. The new page showed the standard human anatomy poses. "We're not exactly done here."

It was close, but Missy avoided swearing out loud. Two different instances of her in the multitasking system doing so would have to suffice.

After dinner, and a chat with her father, Taylor had ended up letting Über and Leet know that she should be available Friday evening or Saturday. She was going to be working with Missy tomorrow, and thus wouldn't necessarily have time to go out, but didn't have any other significant plans for the weekend. Despite that, her father didn't want her planning on anything significant for Sunday. In addition, when he'd come home he'd informed her that the PRT wanted some of her time the following Saturday, after they had plenty of time to get people into position, but nothing like that was currently planned for this weekend.

The rest of her coming weekend would probably be determined in part by how Missy did tomorrow afternoon coupled with when Über and Leet wanted to meet up. She might get a patrol of some kind in, or she might not. It was hard to say, and her father had pointed out that she might have issues patrolling for a few weeks. In particular, those causing trouble doing their best to vacate the area and those wanting to see her flooding the area that she was seen in. On the other hand, she did have stealth surveillance drones and stealth field generators of her own, so nobody had to see her until she dropped in on people doing illegal stuff.

She wasn't sure if she'd go that route, but at least she had it as an option.

Aside from that, she'd spent time in the simulation system working out all of the equation bits that properly attached mana to non-mana matter. That included a bunch of 'close, but not quite' elements that she wanted to see what they actually did. Sadly, she and Hive weren't positive that the simulation system was correct on that front, so real-world testing was going to be needed. Testing that Hive was going to give her long-range testing drones for, to avoid losing another combat drone or two. Perhaps they'd do that tomorrow while she was otherwise working with Missy?

Thursday morning Taylor found that the beach was a bit rainy. So was the other beach, for that matter. Which left them with the options of exercising in the rain, using the clearing and moving between trees that had no paths to speak of, or going to the desert instead. A quick discussion while everyone was getting ready, with Taylor playing relay between her father and Missy, had them deciding to visit the desert.

They opted to use the desert for now, but would keep in mind that they wouldn't always be fighting in optimal conditions and thus should be prepared to train in them. Something that Taylor had already done, admittedly, but that they usually avoided on the morning runs. Taylor and her father arrived at the desert first, Hive floating off to the side before Taylor cast her Knight Armor just after they arrived. Missy showed up a few minutes later.

"Wow," Missy said, looking around. "There's nothing here."

"Just a lot of desert," Taylor agreed. "Though I'll admit that I don't know what the history of the planet is, just that there's more desert than anything else on it. I don't recall there being much in the way of mountains on this side of the planet either."

"The Shard device likely obliterated those when it landed," Hive commented, causing the other three to look at her. She took a moment to notice. "This is one of the planets that I removed a Shard device from. It likely knocked any mountains down when it landed in order to consume the rubble as part of early growth."

"I thought I saw one expanding more slowly across the landscape on another world?"

"You were able to observe a device that could make a good approximation of a continent expanding. It was likely expanding quite quickly for its size."

Well, that was actually a bit terrifying to think about. Especially since there didn't seem to be any good reason for them to be that large, given what else they knew the things did. There was obviously some other purpose, but thinking about that was disturbing as well. Luckily they had a ready-made distraction.

Taylor guestured off in the direction they'd been planning on heading. "How about we just get started?"

Missy resisted the urge to sigh as she waited for the bus. It was running a little late, but she could catch either of the next two and still make it to school on time. Much better to be early than late, and it was a habit she'd picked up as an excuse to be out of the house before either of her parents left for work. It likely wouldn't feel as important later, but it was familiar and not a horrible idea when she was taking an unfamiliar route for the first time.

As a bonus today, it also got her away from Sherie faster. It had certainly been the most complete version of 'the talk' that Missy had ever heard of, and oddly enough hadn't seemed to be aiming for a 'scare away from sex' angle in the process. That didn't make it less embarrassing though. Especially once they'd made it past the more standard warnings for female with a male and moved on to female with female, male with male, multiple partners, and a surprisingly detailed 'other' collection that was probably the result of working with at least three different Case 53s or something like that.

And now she was thinking about all of it again. Shivering slightly, she changed tactics, doing her best to focus on figuring things out in the multitasking system instead. Even if she might never be able to cast like Taylor could, she could still work on trying to learn how the math of them worked. Despite how complicated and annoying learning that actually was. She wasn't holding out a lot of hope for ever being able to make her own spells at this point, but this was probably more like knowing how your car worked. Very few people knew how to design and build a car from scratch, but a lot of people understood enough to know what the various parts of their car did. If she was lucky she might even get to the point of being able to do minor tweaks without assistance.

Taylor had been dropped off at tutoring again, something that would likely happen again the next day. Whether or not it happened next week was still up in the air. She'd also been given a couple of assignments first thing in the morning that were going to require her to spend some extra time in the computer lab to finish them, since she wasn't supposed to have the software available at home. In particular, she had to write a program to visualize planetary orbits to demonstrate skills with a number of programming layers. Data files, base calculations, visual output, various editing controls, that kind of thing. Bonus points for doing so with the three-dimensional toolset and for including any extra features she could think of.

Luckily it was somewhat of a 'final project' and she had a couple of weeks to work on it, so she didn't need to start it today. Or tomorrow, for that matter, since Leet had sent her a message earlier in the morning saying that tomorrow afternoon would work for them. She might want to swing by the computer lab over the weekend, if she had nothing better to do, but was probably going to 'officially' get a start on it on Monday afternoon. Assuming she wasn't given time during her tutoring before then.

The other assignment that she needed the software from the computer lab for was small enough that she'd just stick around for an extra half hour or so today to finish it. That wouldn't significantly impact her afternoon, since Missy had to finish her own homework before they met up to work on the storage space stuff. Instead it would both give her something to do and throw anyone monitoring her on a schedule off.

Outside of that, tutoring was boring, with the most notable thing happening during it being that the Secret Service finally got back to her. Apparently the extra money was her 'share' of bounty money paid out by the military when they'd finally gotten enough clout together to appropriate the armored car and cloaking unit for their own study. The cloaking unit in particular was still functional, which was unusual for tinkertech brought away from the tinker who built it. At the same time, nobody was actually all that certain just how much maintenance Squealer's stuff normally needed.

Long story short, it would eventually fail, but until it did the government was going to be having a lot of people looking at it. At the same time, she probably couldn't expect any more money from it, now that it'd vanished into the military.

Missy frowned as she looked around the cafeteria at lunchtime, before claiming a seat at an empty section of table and sitting down. Not that she expected it to remain empty, of course. Case in point, she was quickly surrounded by a small group of gossip-seekers.

"Hey there Missy," one boy, Fred from her math class, said. "Missed catching up with you yesterday, but I heard that something happened to your parents?"

He was punched in the arm by a black girl that Missy couldn't recall the name of. "We've already been told to not bother her about that, fuckface."

"Even my parents are curious, Aisha, and we were only told not to pester her. Asking once isn't pestering."

Missy rolled her eyes. "My parents weren't paying enough attention to me and gave up custody when people finally noticed. Which is all I'm saying. Now then, I'm curious about what the mayor thinks about Minerva. Has anyone seen Dinah around? She's usually good for some gossip on that front."

There was some wincing, before Fred sighed. "She and Jared are still missing after the bus they were on ran into a firefight last week. They found Alice in a makeshift dog shelter yesterday, after Hellhound found someone willing to call the police to report it."

"Oh." Thinking about that for a moment, she frowned. "Wait, isn't Hellhound a villain?"

Aisha snorted. "Just because she's a villain doesn't mean that she was just going to let Alice stay out on the streets. It just made it harder to get word to the police about where to look."

Fred nodded. "Yeah. Haven't seen Alice yet, but this morning her brother said something about her having brought a puppy home too."

Missy shook her head. "What the hell was the bus even doing anywhere that would put them near that part of town?"

"Didn't you see the news? It'd been forced into a detour by an accident in front of it, only to get stuck on a narrow street without sufficient room for a bus to turn onto other streets."

"Huh. I'd have thought that the driver would've known better than to turn down one of those streets. Don't they have warning signs or something like that?"

Aisha snorted again. "Fucking idiots destroy or steal those for shits and giggles."

Sadly, that made far too much sense in this city.

Taylor stepped through the portal to the Walsh household after Missy had finished her homework, Ethan bouncing there slightly in excitement. Compared to Missy who just looked determined.

"Afternoon," Taylor greeted.

"Welcome," Ethan replied. "We've got blackout curtains in the bedrooms, so we can go use any of them. Unless you think we need more room and should head down into the basement?"

"I don't think the larger space will be needed."

He nodded and gestured towards the stairs. "Then let's head up."

Taylor nodded, but let him lead the way. "So Missy, how's school been?"

"Boring," Missy replied. "Though a couple of kids are still missing. I don't suppose you'd be able to help find them?"

That had Taylor thinking for a moment. "From the bus whatever that happened last week?"

"Yeah. Another girl was picked up yesterday, she'd ended up in one of Hellhound's makeshift kennels or something like that."

"I'll have to give that some thought, maybe reach out to the police department to see if they'd like my help in the first place."

"I think they'd appreciate it," Ethan said, looking far more serious now. "Protectorate patrols have been on the lookout for the kids already, but we obviously haven't found them either. We suspect that they're inside of buildings, but searching buildings for them is easier said than done."

Taylor nodded. "I'll give it some thought anyway."

A moment later they were in the guest bedroom, and Ethan switched back to excited. "Okay, let's get started on the actual magic!"

Missy took nearly twenty minutes to cast the spell to create the storage space, running through it multiple times without actually casting it to ensure that she was getting the equation correct. When she actually cast the spell the anchor hex appeared, she stood there for a moment, and then everything finished with a brief flash of light.

Ethan looked disappointed. "Was that it?"

"Yeah," Taylor replied. "What were you expecting?"

"I have no clue. More than I got?"

"That is weird," Missy said. "And there's no way that's just a three-dimensional space."

"The next trick is to actually put something in there," Taylor said, holding out her hand. A quick flash of light later and there was a small rock there. "I'm going to recommend that you start with something you don't care about, just in case."

"Okay, yeah." Missy took the rock and looked it over. "So, I need to target the rock, and set the other target as where I want it in the storage space. Which are two different coordinate systems."

"Yep."

"Is this even possible without the anchor sensor to help with targeting?"

"Probably, though it would be harder."

It took almost thirty attempts for Missy to get a rock in and out of her storage space without something going wrong, though none of them actually damaged the rock directly. Mostly it was things failing or ending up in the wrong spot due to feeding the wrong targeting information into the spell. Ethan had ended up catching the rock once when it was retrieved with a significant velocity component, though that had Taylor thinking about 'intentionally retrieve items at high speed' as a possible tactic as well.

"Why can't I get the stupid anchor to not show up?" Missy whined after she'd gotten the hang of things and transferred a handful of things into her storage space.

"I need it to ensure a proper reference frame for aiding in your casting," Space replied.

"That's a pain in the ass. Can't we just connect you to my anchor sensor?"

That had all of them silent for a moment, before Hive spoke up. "That might be possible, but I'm not sure if it would fully help. The anchor hex provides a known plane through multiple data points, with your own core and the assisting device being additional points off of that plane. The sensor is essentially at your core and provides little there."

Missy frowned. "So there isn't a good way to make that go away that isn't learning to cast the spells without Space's help?"

"I'll give it additional thought, there may be a way to at least make it less obvious that targeting assistance is being used in casting."

After dinner, but before any dessert, Missy had retreated to her room in order to practice casting the storage and retrieval spell. She was using a spare copy of the house key, so that she'd always have one available even if the one she should be keeping in her normal pockets ended up lost. Her goal was to figure out how to store and retrieve items without Space's aid, and thus without the anchor hex.

Luckily, the added sensor information from the storage space itself wasn't causing her problems, though that might be in part because it was static unless she did something to change the contents of the space. Otherwise she could ignore it entirely without any issue, at least until she was aiming to target the space itself for whatever reason. Putting things in, taking things out, checking to see what she did or didn't have in it.

Over a period of forty-five minutes she cast the spell at least a hundred and fifty times, getting more of a hang of it as she went along. At the same time, it was annoying because she had to focus on the blasted math every time, which slowed her down significantly from what she knew Taylor could pull off. Which wasn't being fair to herself, admittedly. Eventually she stopped for the time being, feeling slightly hungry due to the constant casting.

Thinking about it, the entire spell was simple once you understood it. The equation form had the origin and destination as inputs, but those were actually the last things used. Going through it was easy enough, and she slowly worked her way through casting it. Build a short-range 'tunnel' of sorts for the object to pass through, unanchored at either end. Assemble a wrapper at one end of the 'tunnel' so that the object can be pulled through it, with the wrapper containing the spell components that would normalize momentum at the destination. That's where the coordinates came in. One end of the tunnel went where the object would end up, the other end went where the object currently was. Wrap the wrapper around the object, then trigger it to travel down the tunnel. And a key was now sitting on her bedside table.

The entire thing was actually stable without moving the ends of the tunnel, and she went through the whole thing again just to get to that point. It was, essentially, a complete spell in that form, just lacking the final targeting information. The only problem was getting to that point. If only she could do the same thing that could be done with 'templates' and just drop a copy of it into that metaphysical storage area in her linker core. But it wasn't the same thing, even if she could just prod her core with it...

A moment later she was blinking in mild confusion. She thought, at first, that pushing a spell like that against her linker core had merely caused it to be absorbed back in, as though canceling the casting process. Except that she could feel the spell there. Not as though she could cast it anymore, but it was still there. It didn't take long for her to get curious, and she disconnected from Space entirely. With that done she very carefully 'pulled' on the spell.

It only took a second before she had the key that had still been on the bedside table inside of her storage space. With only a small flash of light from where it had been sitting, instead of the entire anchor hex appearing. Grinning, she rapidly retrieved and re-stored the key a dozen times, just to be sure that it was repeatable, before she reconnected to Space. She needed to see just how much could be done with that trick, had to document how she'd done it just in case, and look over the other spells she already had access to in order to see if any of them could be cast the same way.

Last edited: Apr 1, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 48 - May 19, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Apr 8, 2020

#8,657

"I suppose that knowing what the kids look like would be useful," Taylor said. "But not exceptionally good for finding them with the sensor drones only being able to see so far into buildings without entering them. Could we use the long range scanner on the entire city and the beginning of the surrounding areas?"

"We'd need something other than appearance to lock onto," Hive replied after a moment. "Perhaps DNA samples? While we can't get samples from them directly, I could probably approximate things with samples from their parents or obtain enough information from things they've worn somewhat recently. Assuming they haven't been washed, of course. Hats, maybe, for stray hair follicles? Brushes could work as well."

"How accurate would that be when scanning for them?"

"That would depend on how far you want to scan and how long we take to react to finding someone. Scanning the city would likely get us within inches, but for maximum chances of finding them after several days we might be better off scanning a bit further."

Taylor frowned. "How much further?"

Hive took a moment to answer. "Getting a location within several feet is likely enough detail, as we could follow up with sensor or surveillance drones immediately afterwards. For the level of detail needed, the effort to scan New England is almost identical to the effort needed to scan the entire planet, with the latter only requiring a relatively small amount of additional mana."

"The entire planet? How far away do you think that they could've possibly made it?"

"Given 'mover' parahumans and our knowledge that Shard devices can make portals? Limiting the search to one dimension would be a reasonable starting point."

Taylor sighed, because that made far too much sense. "And if it only takes a little extra mana to scan the planet instead of the region then we might as well not waste the time searching the region?"

"Precisely, Lord."

"Fun, but I think I want to know how we're adjusting the spell to account for searching for DNA before I get in touch with the police."

Taylor joined Hive in the simulation system to be shown how certain elements of the long range scanning spell could be simplified from 'general information' to 'ping with location if you see things that look enough like this sample data'. Allowing for up to a dozen DNA samples was trivial, even if they only needed a couple, but it would still take a bit to assemble the entire thing. Perhaps they should look at making a version that could use the 'data packet' trick to allow for 'cast most of it, then set the parameters' in the future, but for now they could use the stripped-down version.

They were most of the way through all of that when Missy called, and Taylor spun up another instance of herself to answer. One that she had sitting at a desk in the simulation system, just for fun, only to blink as an instance of Missy appeared across from her.

"Evening," Taylor greeted.

"Hi," Missy said, looking around. "Huh. So this is your full-featured simulation system?"

"Yep."

"Neat. Wish I had one. How am I connected?"

Taylor shrugged. "I assume that Space is playing relay for you."

Missy rolled her eyes. "Yes, that's obvious."

"I mean, I'm here via a multitasking system instance, so presumably you are as well."

"True, I guess. Might have to see about using this trick for training at some point."

Taylor hadn't considered that, but it made sense. "I'll give it some thought. You haven't had accidents that negated your ability to disconnect from things."

Missy nodded. "True. Anyway, do you have any more reasonably simple spells you can give me the equations to?"

"Er, technically yes, but I'm not going to give you attack spells right now."

"Oh."

"May I ask why you want reasonably simple spells?"

"I figured out how to drop spells into the same 'storage space' in my linker core that you keep templates in. The storage and retrieval spell just works that way and the Knight Object spell worked, but I think it barely fits so long as I don't use the anchored version. Or at least it felt almost too, er, 'tight'? Something like that. But that could also be because I had to do some mental gymnastics with Space so that there wasn't a template fed into it already, so maybe it's just straining in some other way. The anchored Knight Object spell fell apart, as did the Knight Clothing and Knight Armor spells, but both worked if I just dropped the math in which seems to help with passing it through Space. The scanning spell was weird, in that the first half of it stuck there but the rest had to go in as math linked to it and I haven't tried the Hex Shield yet because I need to cast a spell a few times before trying this and don't want to play with that at home."

Taylor blinked at that. "Okay. What?"

Missy sighed at the other end. "I was trying to make it so that I didn't need the whole anchor hex when storing and retrieving things, casting it over and over again to try and get to the point where I wouldn't need Space to help me. I ended up casting it, but not targeting either end of the spell, just holding it completed, and jokingly pushed it at my linker core wishing that I could store it like a template. To my surprise, it worked, but most of the other spells you've given me only work if I store the math that way."

"Oh. That sounds useful, but possibly less flexible."

"It is, on both counts, but you have abilities that I don't so I need to cheat."

Taylor rolled her eyes. "I suspect that I'm the one cheating in this comparison."

Missy looked around the simulation interface for a moment, before nodding. "Okay, yeah. You have way too many advantages here. When do I get access to more of them?"

"I can't properly duplicate several things," Hive responded, having come over while the other instance of Taylor was practicing with the modified scanning spell. "Though a more limited version of the simulation system should be within my capabilities. It will need to wait until other projects are completed."

Missy pouted, but nodded. "I guess that makes sense."

"Speaking of other projects," Hive continued, turning to Taylor. "Lord, I recommend installing the next augmentation unit in your core before the next long-range scan. Do you have any issues with that being taken care of tonight?"

Taylor sighed. "I suppose that makes sense."

Missy frowned. "Don't you already have two?"

"Yep."

"I only have one, right? Why not get me up to your level first?"

"You haven't had your initial unit long enough for your core to fully settle," Hive answered. "Though Space's diagnostics indicate that it shouldn't be more than another week or two before it has. To give you a second unit before that happens would be a significant risk to your life. On top of that, my Lord may be casting a mana-intensive spell soon without the benefit of it being able to partially power itself."

"Oh."

Taylor rolled her eyes. "Yes, well. I'm apparently not going to sleep well tonight anyway, so unless Hive feels it will slow things down we can probably go over the Hex Shield in here for a bit."

Hive shook her head. "It shouldn't be a problem, Lord. I've got all of the components ready, I just need to install them. The process should be less annoying now as well, as I've been working to streamline it as I gather new information."

Taylor nodded, and Missy grinned. Apparently the younger girl was excited to get another spell down, even if only in the simulation system. Or perhaps she was just excited to use the simulation system at all.

Friday morning Taylor woke up full of energy, having slept better than she'd expected. Hive's improvements to adding augmentation units had shown, the process had only roused her physical self from sleep three times total and the last time had been the unit coming online. The process had also been faster, taking less than half the night in the first place. Hive had even 'fed' the new augmentation unit some excess matter to 'fill it up', so as to not have Taylor feeling unusually hungry.

Hive had also finished with various device building and changing exercises and handed things over to Taylor. The most interesting of those were the testing drones, a single stack of thirty-six green crystals that were 'more suitable' for testing spells than the combat drones were. Useless for actual combat, or even training, but great for telling what you were doing with a spell. Playing with those was going to have to wait, even if there were a number of things that she wanted to try.

The beach was clear of rain today, even if it was a little windy, but while checking on things they'd decided on a different course of action this morning anyway. They met up with Missy there, and Hive gave her a full stack of testing drones. It was a combination of 'please use these if you attempt to make your own spells' and 'these are good for getting used to using drones at all'. Also, despite the previous night's comment, apparently there'd been enough time for Hive to assemble a quick simulation module for Space. Much less capable than Hive's, but usable for Missy to practice various things.

With that done Hive headed for the inlet, leaving the rest of them to put on their breathing masks and dive into the water for a swim instead of a jog. Which meant no Knight Armor, because you couldn't swim in that without a flight spell helping you. Instead Taylor and Missy had Knight Clothing bathing suits on, Taylor's from her template and Missy from casting the spell while wearing her own bathing suit. Danny just had a regular bathing suit on, one that looked slightly ridiculous with a belt.

Missy had to suppress a grin as she rode the bus to school. This was made easier by being able to grin in her own simulation system, which she was currently using to further examine how each of her list of spells worked. Being able to walk through their casting there at low speed, complete with rewinding things to get better looks at them, was incredibly useful. Taylor didn't need that ability nearly as much, since she understood the math, but Missy didn't have that level of understanding. She'd like to make her own attack spells with what she was learning, but had agreed to wait until Taylor, Hive, Ethan, and Sherie felt that she was ready to start learning the combat side of things. Which was hopefully only going to be until she had the defenses side down so that she could keep from hurting herself, and she was most of the way there.

Of course, not having any of the combat spells yet also meant that she didn't have any reference for how they worked and made creating her own spells along the same lines essentially impossible anyway. It made it much easier to wait, though if it took too long she was going to start playing with random spell equations in the simulation system anyway. Taylor had to have figured things out somehow, right?

Still, that was all for later. For now she had to go to school, attend classes, and after school she was going to end up sitting down and completing all of her weekend homework so as to not lose any other potential time working with Taylor on things. On that front it was actually almost a good thing that the older girl was going to be busy tonight, though the likelihood of being busy tomorrow was mildly annoying. Hopefully Ethan and Sherie wouldn't mind if she wanted to head to the beach on her own, or perhaps Mister Hebert would be available to at least monitor things.

Taylor sat down in the classroom, prepared for a reasonably boring morning. At the same time she was also active in the multitasking interface, most of her attention there just monitoring the area through the surveillance drones she had outside. The three instances not monitoring the area were in the simulation system. One was going over the long range scanning spell some more, another was trying to write better documentation for using the flight spell, and the last was sitting at a desk with a phone on it.

As her tutor started reviewing things that probably didn't need reviewing, the Taylor at the simulated desk hit the only button on the phone. Not that even that much 'physical' interaction was technically needed. The phone started ringing a moment later, and she sighed as she had to go through a quick automated system.

"Brockton Bay Police Department," came over the phone after the menu had been cleared. "Officer Smith speaking. May I ask who's calling?"

"This is Minerva," Taylor replied.

"Good morning Minerva. May I ask why you're calling?"

"I'd like to offer my help in finding the remaining kids from that bus that got detoured last week, as well as any other missing persons you might be looking for."

There was a pause before the officer responded. "I see. We're under the impression that the sensor things you use are visual and thus inappropriate for checking inside of buildings."

"I have another way of searching large areas, though I'd likely need unwashed personal effects from the missing kids for targeting purposes."

"How effective do you think that this other search method will be?"

"Provided that I have enough to target those I'm looking for and they're in the search range it will find them."

"I'll have to pass this up the chain a little, as there's been some pushback on using parahumans to search, but we'll get back to you by the end of the day. Are you available all day tomorrow?"

"I am."

"Then there might be a way to work around those being annoying about parahuman assistance. I'll definitely be in touch either way."

"I'll be waiting for your call."

Missy sighed as she sat down at lunch. Supposedly in order to give them the long weekend off, a number of her teachers had piled on the homework for this weekend. Which she should've seen coming, as they had a habit of doing that. With any luck it would still be possible to finish it all tonight, but if she got too much more after lunch then she was almost certainly going to be working on more of it in the morning. Some of that also depended on whether or not she had access to a couple of reference books at home and thus wouldn't need to visit the library to use their copies.

"DOOM!" Aisha yelled as she came up behind Missy. There was a beat of silence before the other girl slumped. "Did you even notice me yelling?"

"It didn't seem worth reacting to," Missy replied.

"You didn't even flinch."

"She probably saw several of us paying more attention and knew it was coming," Keith said.

Missy pointed at the window. "Not to mention that there's just enough of a reflection off of the window to see her."

"Bah," Aisha said as she dropped down next to Missy. "Whatever. I do want to apologize to you though."

"You? Apologize? For what would you want to apologize to anyone for?"

Aisha rolled her eyes. "For thinking you were a liar."

Missy blinked. "When did you think I was a liar?"

"When you denied being Vista."

"Ah. And what finally convinced you?"

"The PRT's announcement that Vista died," Keith answered. "You're still alive."

Oh, right. They were going to be announcing that, weren't they. "I think I missed that announcement."

Aisha nodded, frowning as she did so. "Yeah, well, you probably didn't have a teacher that showed the press conference in class today like Keith and I did. Not that a dead Ward was expected to be the reason for it. The real question we all had right away, and that the press conference didn't answer, was how Vista died. Something unrelated to activities as a Ward doesn't exactly eliminate much with how little the Wards have been out doing."

"There are probably going to be a bunch of people looking through obituaries and death certificates trying to find someone matching her description," Keith added. "Both out of curiosity for who she was and to see what happened to her."

Missy frowned at that. "That feels like going out of your way to invade someone's privacy."

Aisha shook her head. "Unless there's literally one girl of the correct age, height, and hair color that died in the region in the past few weeks then there's not likely to be any solid evidence anyway. Hell, even that won't be enough, because I wouldn't put it past the PRT to arrange for it to all be covered somewhere else just to make it harder to find."

Dammit, now Missy was curious about who might be mistaken for her. A trip to the library might be necessary just to sate her curiosity. Not to mention to know what kind of death people might assume that 'Vista' had been taken out by, because if any of the options were particularly embarrassing then she might want to run damage control of some kind. How she'd do so was completely unknown right now, but she'd figure that out if she deemed it necessary.

Taylor stretched as she left tutoring. She didn't have a lot of work to do over the weekend on that front, which was nice, but she had heard back from the police department. To prevent people from complaining too hard about parahuman assistance they'd asked her to meet up with a canine unit in the morning. It had already been planned, even if it was incredibly unlikely to help after a week, but the same things needed for the dogs to get a scent should hopefully work for configuring the scanning spell.

For now she was going to head home by way of a coffee shop that made a good shake. There was one assignment that she wanted to get out of the way before going out, which she'd likely have done before she even made it home, after which she was going to hit the desert for some quick testing of things before getting ready for round two with Leet's target shooting invention. Hopefully this time it would be less likely to explode after one round of shooting.

Getting her shake didn't take long, though it would've been faster if the person in front of her was less of an idiot. No, the coffee shop wasn't going to accept a gift certificate from the arcade as part of payment. Even if their names both had a similar word in them. Hive wanted to try and remember to return later, in-costume, so that they could get her a shake as well. Taylor getting two shakes while on foot would probably have been seen as a little odd, after all.

She'd proven herself correct by finishing the homework assignment before getting home, though she ensured that she wouldn't actually submit it until later. Thanks to getting the shake, her route had deviated enough to bring her near the sole police presence left in the area, the PRT presence being on the other side of the house. They were likely still watching the area in case someone else decided to go after her because of Hive being around her neck, but she hadn't actually attempted to confirm that. None of the other layers were present at this point, so at least it wasn't a colossal waste of resources on either end.

Grabbing the mail on her way in only took a moment, and there was a letter for her included. Nothing remotely suspicious according to her sensor, so she grabbed a snack before opening it. A quick read revealed that it was a request for her to wear as little metal as possible when she went to the PRT for testing next weekend, 'for her safety' due to the planned use of magnetic fields. It seemed like a reasonable enough request, and it was nice that she'd been given advance warning, but she also felt that it would've been better handled by having the PRT warn her instead.

She left that on the counter before heading upstairs to drop her stuff off and head to the desert. Her initial arrival had her land in the middle of a sandstorm, and she grumbled a bit before jumping a few hundred miles away. There was no sandstorm there, so she deployed eight of the testing drones that she'd been given by Hive. They spread out under her control, though it was a slightly distanced control compared to the combat drones.

Hive changed to her Unison form and floated nearby while Taylor worked, obviously curious. "What have you come up with, Lord?"

Taylor shrugged. "There were oddities in the simulation system that I wanted to test for real to see if it was the simulation or not. We've run into the simulation system not quite reflecting reality before. So my 'hide a spell in an object' and 'hide an object in a spell' attempts may work better in the real world than they have in the simulation system. I've got four variants of each to test, three of each are basically duplicated with an inverted 'distance' variable in the other set."

Hive nodded, and Taylor had each of the testing drones pull a stone out from under the sand. For seven of them that was trivial, but it took a couple of minutes to find an eighth stone. With that done she started testing each spell. She started with the unique ones, and the 'hide a spell in the object' variant shattered the stone. Not ideal. The 'hide an object in the spell' one was slightly more successful, though it actually functioned more as 'coat an object in the spell'. Still not a horrible trick, all things considered, and she'd based it on the manual control bullet spell. That meant that she could move the stone around, though control was lacking.

Moving on, she tested the first pair of spells. She flinched when the 'hide the spell' configuration pulled the stone apart, the anchor points all attempting to flip around to point inward. The 'hide the object' version of that one worked much better, holding the stone inside of the spell just fine. Again, because she'd based the test spells on the manual control bullet she could move the stone around, with much better control as the 'bullet' wasn't deformed around the stone. That might actually prove to be a useful spell variant.

Grinning slightly now that she had at least one success, she moved on to the next pair of spells. These ones 'saturated' the object with the spell, in an attempt to get a better read on when it was damaged instead of just relying on surface checks. She once again started with the 'hide the spell' variant, only for the spell to fall apart halfway through. Three castings later and she gave up, switching to the 'hide the object' counterpart spell. That spell also fell apart halfway through, at the same basic point, which meant that something was going wrong there in general.

Sighing, she moved on. The last pair of spells were similar anyway, also saturating the target object. This pair 'latched on' instead of just 'hooking' like the previous variant had, and perhaps the extra anchoring to the object was the key. This time the spell didn't fall apart halfway through, successfully grabbing onto the stone. That's when things went wrong, because instead of the spell 'settling in' and hiding inside of the stone it somehow shrank the stone.

"What the fuck?" Taylor mumbled. Releasing the spell returned the stone to normal, and casting it again shrank it back down. The stone wasn't obviously changed or harmed otherwise, and while it was shrunk down it could still be controlled like a bullet spell.

"That's an interesting effect," Hive said. "Potentially hazardous, but interesting."

"Hazardous?" Taylor asked, looking at Hive. "How would it be hazardous, beyond making it grow somewhere that it wouldn't normally fit in?"

"If applied to a living thing then biological processes will likely continue, but without the ability to adjust incoming molecules. Breathing would thus be difficult."

"Oh."

Out of curiosity, Taylor cast the intended 'hide the object' variant of the spell with the last drone. To absolutely no surprise, the stone expanded. Though it was also immediately obvious that the now-larger stone was much harder to control than the shrunken stone was. It also took more mana input to maintain the effect on, presumably because 'hiding' the mass of the shrunken stone was easier than whatever you called making the expanded stone larger.

"I suppose that one success, one partial success, and two unexpected but likely useful results isn't a horrible thing," Taylor finally said. "Even if the only result I really wanted isn't one of the ones I got. I don't suppose you have anything you want to do out here before we head back home to get ready for target shooting?"

"Give me a moment," Hive answered, floating over to one of the surviving stones. She looked at it, then obviously cast something. A moment later the stone floated up, visually unchanged but with a spell obviously affecting it.

"Did you just solve my problem for me?"

"I don't think so, but it may be a decent first step. This is anchoring a limited version of the movement elements of the bullet equations to the stone to allow moving it, but the linkages are unlikely to work as-is for anything more complicated."

"Okay."

"Though it's nice to finally figure out a way to emulate the ability to move things with 'the Force', as this should scale to pretty much any size object. Anchoring this spell to a weapon ahead of time would allow for some impressive tricks during combat as well. Though now that I've taken a closer look, none of these spells should be used on living things. It's likely that the anchoring elements would prevent biological processes from working. It will take some experimentation to see if that merely puts a living thing into 'stasis' or not, but non-living objects and hopefully devices should be safe enough. I'll plan out some further tests."

Taylor nodded, but thought about that for a moment. Deciding that it would be good to test, she retrieved her cutting tool from storage. "Can you give me a copy of the 'move an object' equation?"

"Of course, Lord."

A minute later Taylor was looking over the equation, and agreed that it might be a starting point but wasn't really flexible enough for what she wanted to do. It would still be useful despite that, and she carefully cast it onto the casing of the cutting tool. Grinning as it took hold, she found that it could be left in 'standby' with minimal mana drain by simply not trying to exert force on the cutting tool. Opening her hand, she caused it to lift up into the air, then float away from her. Independent of the new spell, she turned on the plasma blade mode of the cutting tool and played a little with spinning it in different ways, before 'pulling' it to her hand.

"That will definitely be useful," Taylor said as she turned off the cutting tool and stored it. The new spell 'snapped' once the cutting tool was stored, a limitation caused by the way the control and mana feed linkages worked, but that was okay. Controlling things like that without a sensor interface of any kind included should really only be done in her general vicinity anyway, if only for safety reasons. "Anything else?"

"I'm done for now," Hive replied. "And we do need to get moving anyway."

Nodding, Taylor stored the testing drones before preparing the dimensional transference home. Hive didn't bother to return to her stealth form before they left, as it wouldn't be long before they were leaving in-costume anyway. Really, most of the reason for heading back home instead of straight out to meet with Über and Leet was a quick bathroom run, just in case.

Missy had arrived home to find Sherie waiting for her. For 'stuck on the phone' definitions of 'waiting', anyway. She'd smartened up since lunch, realizing that she didn't need physical copies of the reference books so long as she had the digital copies that Space had stored from Armsmaster's tablet. Which had her feeling lucky that he'd included said reference books, admittedly.

"Sorry about that," Sherie said when she finally got off of the phone. "There was a problem with our water bill when I checked it and the water department was being annoying."

"What kind of problem?" Missy asked, curious.

"The bill that came in today was over three thousand dollars, likely due to a mistake when reading the meter. In order to be certain one way or another, a manager is coming here now to check the current meter reading."

"So I can't be doing anything suspicious?"

"Basically. Now then, I see you've gotten started on your homework."

"Yep. I want to get it done tonight so that I don't have to worry about it over the weekend."

Sherie nodded. "Because you're hoping to get a pile of training type stuff done, I assume. You will be getting some actual downtime in as well, because constant training isn't healthy."

"Yeah yeah. I know."

"Trust me, you'll want to do your best to do your downtime on your own. If Ethan decides that you need forced downtime then he's likely to drag you into a horrible movie marathon."

Missy raised an eyebrow. "How bad could a movie marathon be?"

"He has horrible taste in comedy films, yet will likely make you watch ten in a row with him."

"Oh."

Last edited: Apr 9, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 49 - May 20, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Apr 15, 2020

#8,868

Taylor came in for a landing where she'd agreed to meet with Über and Leet, except that in addition to the duo there was a third parahuman waiting. Or, more specifically, helping them unload a couple of things.

"Good afternoon," Taylor called as she touched down, Hive floating down behind her.

"Minerva!" Leet called from where he was connecting a series of cables. He then flinched when one of the cables sparked and he refocused on them.

"Good afternoon," Miss Militia said, coming around from where she'd just helped Über put down a piece of equipment. "It's nice to finally meet you two."

"Likewise," Taylor replied, not that she was about to tell the older cape that this was hardly their first meeting. "I wasn't expecting anyone from the Protectorate to be here today."

"Über had concerns about changes in Leet's behavior, tied to their interactions with you in particular. The descriptions passed to the Protectorate intrigued Armsmaster, but he couldn't be here this afternoon. I volunteered to bring some additional sensors from Armsmaster and Dragon, to provide a baseline of using the system, and to help them monitor things as you use the system."

"May I go take a look at the preparations?" Hive asked.

Miss Militia waved Hive towards the equipment. "Feel free Lilia."

"Thank you."

Hive floated over to examine the new sensors, most likely to figure out exactly how they worked in case they did something useful. Taylor and Miss Militia watched for a moment, before Miss Militia shook her head and turned back to Taylor. "I have to say, it's honestly a bit weird meeting you."

Taylor blinked. "Oh?"

"Thanks to being a surviving member of the inaugural Wards, I normally get to meet up and coming parahumans before they become household names. Yet now I'm meeting you for the first time after you've become a household name worldwide."

"Ah. I'll admit, I hadn't quite expected to end up being a household name at this stage."

"You'd have been a household name throughout most of the planet if you'd merely delayed Leviathan like you'd intended. Even giving those on shore an extra five minutes would've done that, if only for a few months. Driving it off solo has elevated you to, or perhaps even above, Scion. At the very least you react far faster than he does, though Armsmaster believes that some of that was the prediction software that he and Dragon had been working on."

Taylor nodded at that. "Yeah, the output feed he provided to Hal was part of how I knew that Leviathan was on the way."

"I'll have to let him know that he was correct on that front."

"So, you're going to take a crack at this thing before I do today?"

Miss Militia nodded in response. "Yes, to ensure that it's working properly with less exotic weapons. Something about your attacks seems to have caused problems when you last used it for target practice."

"I thought that was just Leet's equipment having a tendency to explode in general."

"Which is part of why I'm here. Whatever your powers did to this equipment last time caused him to become a little obsessed with figuring out what went wrong and how to protect against it in the future."

"Huh. Is that normal?"

The woman shrugged. "In general? Not with him, but there are many recorded instances of parahumans focusing on new mysteries until they solve them. In that vein, you are one of the two newest mysteries for a number of parahumans, so in this case it probably is normal."

"Ah. Do you happen to know what the other mystery is?"

"The impossible to remove necklaces around the necks of two local girls."

Well, that made far too much sense. Though it did raise the question of how many people realized that the two were, in fact, very much linked.

"I think we're ready," Über called, saving Taylor from having to comment on things further. Not that it looked like Miss Militia had noticed anything on that front. Instead both of them looked over at the man, then Miss Militia nodded as the knife that she'd been wearing at her hip jumped up to her hands in the form of a pump shotgun.

Taylor looked over the area, seeing that there were a lot of extra sensors set up. Hive had sensor drones in various places, including out over the water where the targets would show up, as well as a few surveillance drones that were cloaked and thus unlikely to be spotted. Obviously this time around things were much more interesting than when this was done previously.

"So what are you hoping to spot this time around?" Taylor sent Hive's way.

"I want to ensure that I know how these sensor units work," Hive answered. "They're different from others that have been used around us and could provide useful insight into improvements to existing techniques."

"I thought that might be what was up, but you seem to have more sensor drones than needed for that."

"The extra sensor drones are to help provide timing feedback for when things hit targets versus the system getting any energy backflows."

"Ah. Okay."

Miss Militia stood at the 'firing line' with the shotgun, then ran through a sequence. When the shotgun ran out of shells it suddenly became a pistol, then when the pistol was out of rounds she was holding a belt-fed rifle that Taylor didn't immediately recognize. That still had a few shots left in it when the sequence finished.

"You hit every target," Leet said after a moment. "Though with seven extra shots. Weapon change and wind shifting seemed to be your primary issues there, though one of the seven was actually you hitting a round that was falling from a hit target. Good job."

"Thank you," Miss Militia replied, placing the knife she was now holding in the holster at her hip. "Is everything still in working order?"

"Yep, no surprises there. Now then, I think Minerva would like a more difficult sequence than she had last time."

Taylor nodded. "If you have one. I didn't find the first run through to be challenging."

Leet grinned. "I do indeed have a new sequence, and after your showing over the weekend I can see why you'd need something harder." He then frowned. "Completely obliterated any hope of any other streams making the top thirty list for the year, and there's a good chance that they're going to remain in the top most viewed clips for next year too. We had a couple of good ones that were trending towards the top ten."

"Well, I'm not sure if multiple points of view on the same thing should count as individual streams for any top stream list."

"Stop whining about her streams going better than viral," Über said. "I'd rather not sit around waiting to see how long your new sensors work before they fail."

Leet flinched, but nodded. "Right. Let me queue up the more difficult sequence and you can get started."

Taylor opted to just fire bullets by hand this time, instead of using Hal. It wasn't like people didn't know that she could spam them by now, after all. Once the sequence started she started firing, finding that it was harder than before. Not much harder, but harder. At the same time, as she was hitting the targets the equipment generating them was starting to noticeably heat up.

Looking over, while still firing bullets, she frowned. "It looks like your equipment is having issues."

"All within parameters," Leet replied, waving her off without looking her way. "Keep going."

Shrugging, Taylor looked back at the targets. She kept up the pace until Über hit a shutdown button, one of her bullets sailing through where a target had been before he did that. She detonated it in mid-air instead.

"That was nuts," Über said as he turned off a spray of liquid nitrogen that hadn't been keeping up with the heat generation of the equipment. "Had to shut it down before things started failing."

"The system says you hit every target but one," Leet added. "But that was the last target, so I think you get a pass on that due to us shutting it down before you were actually done. It doesn't really have a good count of projectiles though, or if it does you're crazier than I thought as it thinks you fired one projectile for every six targets."

"She got two targets with one bullet on three different occasions," Hive replied. "Otherwise it was one bullet per target, and the last target was about to be hit when you shut the system down. Based on the results, had that bullet struck then you would have had a failure, so good job on stopping things just in time."

"Yeah, Über trained quite a bit to spot the overheat point. Good job bro. Still, we got a lot of useful information out of the sensors. I think, anyway."

Taylor walked over and looked at the screen that Leet was staring at. She blinked a couple of times, then moved over to the target projector. "Huh, you've got a multidimensional backflow shield on this thing now?"

"Yeah, I think that was part of the problem last time."

"But it only blocks a subset of physical dimensions."

There was a moment of silence at that, before Leet turned to look at her. "What?"

"Just what I said, I can tell that it's only blocking some physical dimensions. Less than half, assuming that there aren't infinite anyway. Lots of holes, which likely let energy pass back through anyway."

"I'd noticed the same thing," Hive admitted. "And energy was flowing back through it. But I'm not sure if he can improve it with the techniques he uses."

Taylor frowned. "Oh. Well, at least he knows where some of the problem likely is?"

That led to another moment of silence, before Über waved his hand in front of Leet's face. He got no reaction, and sighed. "I think you broke him. If you help me load everything into the van then I can drag him back with me, but I don't think he's snapping out of this in the next couple of hours."

"Ah. Sorry?"

He waved her off. "Nah, don't worry about it. It happens, though usually after someone comments on something he hasn't built yet."

Über made copies of all of the relevant data from the session for Miss Militia to take back to Armsmaster before the four of them packed everything into the van, with the exception of the crate of sensors that were going back with Miss Militia. Those went into a sidecar on her motorcycle. Leet had to be pushed into the passenger seat of the van and manually buckled in. Über thanked them again before driving off, leaving Taylor and Hive with Miss Militia.

"Well," Taylor said. "At least this time nothing blew up unexpectedly?"

"It's always a better day when that doesn't happen," Miss Militia agreed. "Though before you go, I've been asked to see if you object to the PRT setting up a shell company for you to own land through."

That had Taylor blinking and turning to look at the woman. "Why would I need to do that right now?"

"Because a landowner wishes to give you a plot of land here in town. Actually, I suspect that there are dozens of landowners wishing to do that in various parts of the country, but I was only specifically told about the one here. It currently has a warehouse sitting on it that's in very good condition, no code issues at all, though I imagine that if you do take ownership that you'd want to change the locks."

Idly nodding, because that did make sense, Taylor thought about the whole situation for a moment. "Why would someone want to give me land?"

Miss Militia shrugged. "You did what many thought to be impossible, and I imagine that the owner hasn't had a use for the warehouse and sees giving it to you as both a way to repay you and a way to get rid of it. Alternatively, they've hidden or plan to hide a bunch of spy cameras in the building and are hoping to learn some of your secrets through them."

"Oh. I'm not really sure, can you have someone send me the details of what would be involved with the shell company?"

"I can do that."

Missy grumbled a little as Sherie explained the situation with the water meter to Ethan. The manager hadn't been sure what, but felt that something in the meter had probably broken. He didn't know what, but numbers weren't lining up with the department's records, and they were going to waive the entire month's fees as an apology. At the same time, they also had to replace the meter with a new one, and that meant having someone come out to replace it on Tuesday afternoon, when Ethan was going to be around anyway. It was painfully obvious that absolutely nothing involving magic was going to be happening that afternoon as a result, right down to Missy vanishing before the person replacing the water meter showed up.

Maybe she'd get lucky and have a pile of homework making it feel less annoying?

"But at least the new meter will have an external read point," Sherie said. "Which will mean less needing to let people into the house to read the blasted thing."

"And let me guess," Ethan said with a frown. "You want me to rearrange the basement to make more room around the meter."

"Why yes, that would be ideal."

"Great." He then turned to Missy. "In other news, though, there are some things to talk about."

Missy blinked. "Unrelated to the water meter?"

Ethan nodded. "Yes. In particular, Sherie and I have full time jobs with occasionally odd hours, and you are still considered high risk. It's going to get very annoying working our schedules around when you're not at school. Long story short, we're going to need to hire a sitter to watch over you at times."

"What?"

Sherie sighed. "You're not considered old enough to be left on your own for more than an hour or two, and with the assumptions surrounding your loss of powers in the PRT building we can't fudge that with you being mature enough to handle being on your own."

"Crap."

Ethan beamed. "Still, we've got multiple options for sitters. I've been informed that Dean and Dennis should both be available, there's a couple of older kids of PRT staff that could be tapped..."

Missy groaned at that, dropping her head onto the book she'd still had open in front of her. "Why me..."

"Yeah, I suspect that Dean and Dennis being suggested by Piggot was a test. Dean because he helped arrange for you to spend days on your own without anyone checking in on you and both of them because they'd be a source of tension with you no longer having powers. The older kids of PRT staff are still an option, of course, and they wouldn't know any of your history. Still, there's one other option that I had to jump through a couple of hoops in order to not raise too many questions, and Danny seems to think that Taylor wouldn't mind."

That had Missy sitting back up and blinking. "You want to have Taylor be my sitter?"

Sherie nodded. "Yeah. It'll explain you two spending time together, provide excuses for one or the other of you to not be home, and we figure that you two will probably end up spending time together training anyway. At the same time, we're thinking that we'll want to officially start with any arrangements after the long weekend."

That had Ethan blinking. "Hold up, we're thinking what now?"

"That it would be better for Taylor to play sitter after officially meeting Missy next weekend while they're both making obscene amounts of money for doing little to nothing."

"Oooooh. Okay, that's what you meant earlier. That makes more sense than what I was thinking."

Missy raised an eyebrow. "What was that about obscene amounts of money?"

Ethan shrugged. "Taylor gets a thousand bucks an hour for people to poke at Hive in necklace form. That contract set a precedent, and people want to see if Space there reacts similarly, so while you're there with her you'll probably both be making more money in a day then either of us makes in a week."

Missy blinked a couple of times. "That's something like two weeks worth of base pay as a Ward, per hour. What the hell?"

"Your base pay would've gone up on your birthday," Sherie noted. "Due to you hitting the next age-based pay bracket. But yeah. A lot of people really want to figure out Hive, and now Space, and the PRT is willing to let parahumans throw money at it."

"Huh. Do I get access to that money right away?"

"As soon as they pay it out to your bank account, yes."

"Cool."

Ethan snorted. "Like you're going to need it after the settlement money drops in there."

Missy turned to look at him. "Settlement money?"

"For the system's complete and total failure regarding you, of course. Armsmaster started various court actions and most of them are being taken care of quietly out of court because the Youth Guard in particular really doesn't want any details getting made public."

"Huh."

Taylor sighed as she sat down at the table with her father. She wanted to go do some proper training, but had been told not to for now. He wanted to go over the information that the PRT had already emailed her about the shell company and warehouse. Hive had fed it all into Knight Object created physical paperwork, which was a neat trick that an instance of Taylor was figuring out how to do herself. The idea of dropping a literal pile of forms on someone sounded incredibly amusing, especially as they'd eventually just vanish as well.

"I think this all looks reasonable enough," he finally said. "I hadn't considered that legislation over the past fifteen years or so could make this work this smoothly, but it's obviously made easier by having the PRT 'sponsor' you. Bypasses a couple of the other checks normally needed, and I think is intended for forming one of these shell companies for their own parahumans. I wonder if anyone local has taken advantage of that to have property owned by their cape identities?"

"There are six of these shell companies in the state right now," Hive answered, causing Taylor to try and look down at her necklace form. "Four are defunct but still technically on the books after the parahumans died, one is New Wave, and the last I believe is Armsmaster."

"Armsmaster?" Taylor asked.

"It's the newest one, and I think he used it to purchase an apartment building earlier this week."

"Weird."

"At any rate," her father said. "Outside of some tax implications from owning property this all looks good, and you should be able to handle the taxes easily enough. They want to transfer some of what they're handling for you at the federal level to the company at the same time as well, but I don't think that would be a major hurdle and would give you more direct control of it. I particularly like the three month 'tinkertech construction' permit that they're offering to include, which would let you modify the building without having to deal with the normal permit process. The warehouse itself is one I'm familiar with, slightly off of the main roads but with decent access for trucks. It was actually emptied by a team of Dockworkers a little over a month ago."

"That sounds good."

"Of course, it was emptied because it keeps ending up in the middle of gang battles, even if it's been kept in good condition otherwise."

"Oh."

"Protecting the building won't be that difficult," Hive interjected. "Though I imagine that if it becomes known that you own the building then the gangs will back off, if only to avoid angering you."

Taylor sighed at that, even as her father grinned and nodded. "Is it well-positioned for anything else?"

"Do you need it to be well-positioned?" her father asked. "You can teleport and make portals, after all."

"Which is fine for me but not so much for anyone else heading to the thing."

"Ah, point. It isn't horribly positioned, at least? Decent enough road access, at least. Not exceptionally close to any docks, but not horrible to get at from several by road either, and just far enough away from tourist areas to not be inundated with them all the time."

"Until it becomes a new tourist area, I assume."

He shrugged at that. "Probably, but that would apply no matter where it was."

Taylor gave her father a look, but couldn't argue that particular point. "Okay, whatever. You seem to think that I should go for it."

"I don't see much reason not to."

"I guess I'll let the PRT know, I can't imagine this all happening without me having to sign something at some point. That means that they'll have to have me visit, or arrange to meet somewhere neutral."

"Most likely, yes. Some of this will take at least two or three days for them to get through the system as well, especially as they'll need to wait until government offices open on Monday to even consider beginning at this point."

Missy grumbled a bit as she packed up her schoolwork. She'd finished it all, then Ethan had insisted on looking it over. He'd then made her re-do two assignments due to him misreading the instructions, and Sherie had just slapped him over the back of the head when she looked things over and told Missy to turn in the first version of both. Very annoying, had wasted a bunch of time, and hadn't helped her with understanding things better either.

Well, okay, she now understood that if Ethan told her to re-do something because she'd read the instructions wrong that she should appeal to Sherie before re-doing anything. That was probably an important lesson all on its own, even if the school year would be over soonish and thus she'd likely not think of it again until something like this came up next school year. At the same time, it felt like a lesson that she shouldn't have needed to learn because Ethan should be able to read assignment instructions and not get them entirely wrong.

Having to re-do those two assignments had also pushed her to the point where it was too late to do much else tonight, which was the other reason she was annoyed. It was too close to when she'd need to hit the sack in order to be up to join Taylor in the morning to accomplish much of anything, and she wasn't going to be using the multitasking system overnight either. Maybe she'd be able to get Taylor to give her something else to work with in the morning, beyond throwing around the hex shield spell a bunch of times?

That evening Taylor practiced a bit more with what she was now calling the 'Telekinesis' spell. It was an incredibly simple spell, all things considered, and she was going to package it up to hand over to Missy in the morning. The girl was also getting the Flight spell, and Hive had command stations for both Ethan and Sherie. Those were apparently sharing a phone number with the existing one, and a set of additional command stations had been built ahead of time 'just in case'.

Overnight Taylor split her attention several ways, beyond monitoring the area. She was working on specifics for when she met up with the police in the morning, having shifted from 'send sensor drone' to 'send surveillance drone'. The latter would allow her and Hive to monitor things instead of just her, and they could cloak themselves to be less obvious once they did arrive. Actions taken would depend on the individual situations with the missing kids, but bringing a transport device to set up seemed like a no-brainer.

To support that, Hive was actually putting upgrades into as many surveillance drones as possible. That would continue over the next couple of days as the ones currently in use were cycled out. Included with that were improved sensor drone and long range scanning spells. Hive was able to update everything remotely with the former spell in only a few minutes, but Taylor had to go over the changes in both spells to see the improvements. It wouldn't matter for the storage space, but a new Knight Anchor spell had been built as well and would need to be cast in the morning to replace the built-in sensor with one incorporating the improvements.

It was halfway through going through the changes when Taylor realized that the end result was potentially dangerous if anyone found out what the sensor systems would now be capable of. Hive had apparently been working on better tracking of Shard connections and the improved sensors should be able to spot them. That was obviously not proven yet, beyond Hive stating that they'd worked on Über, Leet, and Miss Militia earlier with a quick test spell. Working on the known-parahuman test subjects was nice, but incomplete. Spotting someone that they didn't know was a parahuman would be better, but was starting to run into 'unwritten rules' problems.

Last on the list of overnight tasks was a stupid little spell that she'd had an idea for after her father had commented on a stupid advertisement. The Knight Armor spell could already do her hair up in a specific way, so why not a generic hairstyling spell? Most of which was actually her coming up with various hairstyles and including the ability to pull in real ties or Knight Object variants thereof. Or ribbons and other items. Interestingly enough, her work on 'get hair out of a style' provided some inspiration for how to potentially get a 'clean an area' spell working better later as well. Though targeting hair was a lot easier than 'whatever surface I want to clean'.

Included in the list of hairstyle templates was her hexagonal bun setup, if only because she could easily imagine some kids finding it amusing if cast on them. Of course, not everyone had hair long enough to make it work, so she'd ended up on a slight tangent of rigging the spell to also create temporary magic hair extensions if someone's hair was too short. It was an interesting application of the Knight Object spell routines, and how long it lasted would vary from person to person. Those with an atrophied linker core could possibly keep the extensions active for quite a while, but she opted to rig them all as a single 'object' so that as soon as someone tried to cut them the extensions would all vanish together.

The other issue was when the target's hair was too long, and she didn't have a good temporary fix for that. Thinking about it had led her into coming up with multiple ways to trim someone's hair down to size, but she wasn't sure about actually doing that without someone being absolutely sure that they wanted a haircut. Testing the styling spell without that component could probably be done with volunteers on the Boardwalk, but testing something that actually cut hair should probably be tested at a barbershop or hairstylist. If only so that they could immediately work to correct any damage that resulted.

That did not, however, stop her from branching out slightly and creating a shaving and trimming spell as sunrise approached, targeting an area and cutting all of the hair in it to a defined length from the skin. That would be a hell of a lot easier than any other method she knew of short of permanent removal of the hair follicles, but a magical waxing spell was going further than she wanted to and was probably a bit too permanent. At least until such a time as she had a way to replace hair follicles, should that ever happen.

The new spells should probably be provided to Missy as well, though only after they'd gotten at least a cursory test once Taylor was up in the morning. They worked great in simulation, but that wasn't a guarantee that they'd work in the real world.

Missy grumbled a little as she woke up early on Saturday morning. She was the only one in the house that had been disturbed by the phone ringing, only for her to find that it was a wrong number. No, 'Marty' didn't live there, and Missy wasn't 'Marlene' for that matter. Not that the man on the other end wanted to hear any of that, so she'd hung up on him. He'd called right back, and she'd not even spoken when she recognized the voice that time. No third attempt was made after she'd slammed the phone back down, and she sighed as she decided what to do.

It was too early to meet up with Taylor, not that she knew where they were meeting up this morning anyway. Hell, Taylor probably didn't know yet, likely not having checked to see if any nasty weather existed at any of them. Which left Missy with little to nothing to do while she was up too early. Well, she had blackout curtains in her room, so perhaps she could get some more practice in with the storage and retrieval spell? The more she used it the faster she'd be able to cast it, after all. Or at least that was her theory.

She started off easy enough, storing and retrieving a penny. First to inside of her own fist, then to the area around her. Trying to get it faster and faster, to the point where she was retrieving it up to the ceiling and then trying to 'catch' it as it fell down. Over and over and over again. It took the better part of an hour to get to the point where she was able to cast the spell fast enough to catch the penny as it fell, and she was working on doing so further than an inch off the ground.

It was at the fifty minute mark of that when she screwed up and didn't set the end point for the 'retrieve to near the ceiling' step properly. To her complete shock, the spell latched on to her instead of the penny and suddenly she was falling from the ceiling. Her landing was loud, shook the house, and didn't hurt that much thanks to the 'sleep in Knight Clothing' dance. It was a wonderful lesson for why you wore magical protection while practicing magic as well.

Sadly, she felt that explaining what she'd been doing might be awkward, trying to come up with the best way to spin this even as Ethan and Sherie came down the hall to find out what had just happened.

620

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Threadmarks Chapter 50 - May 21, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Apr 22, 2020

#9,035

Taylor and her father walked through the portal into the Walsh household, meeting there for some quick hand-offs before heading off for morning exercise. Or rather, before Taylor and Missy went off for morning exercise. Ethan and Sherie were getting a better run-through on the command stations.

"Good morning you two," Sherie greeted. "Taylor, did you know that the spell for storing and retrieving things from your storage space can be used for short-range teleportation?"

"Morning," Taylor replied. "And yes, I think of it as 'blinking'. Figured it out on accident and is how I was bouncing around when fighting Leviathan."

"Ah. So Missy didn't figure something new out by accident this morning. Good to know."

That had Taylor frowning. "I figured it out by accident when simulating things. How did she figure it out?"

"I was practicing and went too fast," Missy answered. "Didn't anchor to the penny I was trying to pull out of my storage space and the spell latched onto me instead."

"Ah. That would do it. Have you identified the fast way of using the spell for that?"

Missy blinked, then shook her head. "I've not really explored it after it woke Ethan and Sherie up."

"I guess that makes sense. The fast way is to only set the destination coordinates since the origin will default to the caster. Well, technically both ends will default to the caster if not set, but the destination being obstructed causes the movement tunnel to collapse before anything can move along it. You can push a bit more mana in to dislodge liquids at the destination end if you want to use it underwater though."

"If moving something small enough then it may end up inside of your body anyway," Hive corrected. "Generally that would most likely end with the object in your digestive tract, but it's possible that it would end up in your lungs instead. Depending on the object that would be undesirable, and your protections wouldn't help because you're casting the spell. Doing that to someone else with mana-based protections would be nearly impossible by comparison."

Taylor blinked a couple of times at that. "Okay...I should probably add a note to always set the destination first, just to make that less likely to be a problem."

Missy nodded in agreement. "Definitely."

Sherie sighed. "Right. Of course there's no completely safe way to learn literal magic. Then again, that's really the story with most things, and you are taking reasonable precautions."

"Speaking of learning magic," Taylor said. "Do you have any problems with me giving Missy a few more spells?"

"What's this about new spells?" Ethan asked, bouncing in from the other room.

"I think Missy is ready to start playing with the flight spell, and I came up with a couple of others that aren't really intended for combat. One is for styling hair and the other is a trimming and shaving spell."

There was a pause there, before Sherie raised an eyebrow. "That sounds fairly...mundane, all things considered."

Taylor shrugged. "I've got a 'clean your own body' spell too, made after experiencing containment foam, but it'll obliterate any clothing you haven't taken off before casting it and I haven't yet figured out general 'cleaning' spells otherwise. I suppose that there's also the telekinesis spell that Hive finished putting together too..."

It took twenty minutes, but Missy was able to convince Sherie that she was ready for all of the spells. Really, the biggest hurdle had been Ethan, whose excitement might've been greater than Missy's own.

"So before we get started there's one more thing to take care of," Taylor said once she'd led the way to the beach, Hive ignoring the statement and vanishing to work on whatever her project was. "Though it's a bit...iffy in certain respects, the benefits will hopefully outweigh that."

Missy raised an eyebrow, curious as to what would be 'iffy' about whatever it was. She doubted that it had anything to do with the scan Taylor had taken of the reclining chair that Ethan liked to sit in. "What is it?"

"An updated Knight Anchor, with an improved sensor."

That seemed like a solid win, which meant that there was some other aspect that Missy wasn't picking up on. "How is that iffy?"

The older girl fidgeted for a moment, before sighing. "Part of the upgrades includes very likely detecting all shard connections, and thus being able to spot parahumans automatically. Hive could already focus scanning on someone and spot the brain connections, but this upgrade should be able to pick up the connections without a focused scan at all."

Well, that was definitely worthy of an 'iffy'. "You do realize that being able to just casually know that someone is a parahuman would be seen as breaking the unwritten rules by default, right?"

Taylor shrugged. "Apparently there are a dozen Protectorate and Wards members that can do so already, a couple dozen affiliates that have admitted to the same, and at least thirty villains known or suspected to be able to do so. And that was just a cursory check. 'Detect parahuman' isn't as rare as the world seems to assume it is."

"Oh. Really?"

"Yep."

"Huh. Then I guess it can't be that bad to be able to do it, and it would make it harder for one to surprise us with being a parahuman."

It took a couple of minutes to cast the updated Knight Anchor spell, after which they both cast the Knight Armor spell. Missy probably should've waited longer, but she didn't care. The more she pushed herself the faster she could catch up, right?

"Not bad," Taylor said as Missy's Knight Armor finished forming on her. Mostly. "Expanse?"

Missy frowned as she felt things falling out of her hair. She'd skipped the helmet, and looking down by her feet she saw two hexagonal supports. The ones that would've helped anchor her hair buns, if she had long enough hair to do so. "Crap. My hair isn't long enough."

"The hairstyling spell I just gave you includes magic extensions."

"Tempting, but I should probably just adjust my armor template to handle shorter hair, at least until I can grow it out naturally."

Taylor shrugged. "Whatever, though having longer hair in costume seems like a great way to keep your identity harder to figure out."

Crap. That was actually a really good point, and it was likely that the 'magic hair extensions' wouldn't even look horrible like a wig might. "I'll think about it. Also, holy crap this is all heavy."

"Yeah, though it doesn't feel nearly as bad when you're using the flight spell."

"I'm not sure if I should take your word for that, but I suppose that I can check on that later. Er, is there some weird spatial warping happening in the direction that Hive went?"

Taylor nodded. "Yeah, she's building a vacation home of sorts, doing what she can without the materials that I haven't figured out how to order yet. Right now I think she's carefully excavating for a proper foundation and probably a basement, but having minor issues with the tree roots."

"Huh. A vacation home out here?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

Well that was hard to argue with. "I suppose we should get started, since you have places to be, right?"

Taylor nodded. "Yeah. I'll let you set the pace."

Missy felt that she should probably feel slightly offended there, but Taylor and her father had been letting her set the pace all along and the added weight wasn't going to speed her up. At the same time, running on the sand was easier with the Knight Armor sneakers, so she wasn't slowed down as much as she'd feared. Actually, she might have to see about wearing a version of the sneakers a lot more often, they were dangerously comfortable. Except that they'd be really hard to explain. Stupid secret identities, and not wanting to deal with the PRT finding out that she had new powers in particular.

Taylor sighed as she prepared to go meet up with the police. While eating breakfast she'd commented on not having heard back from Armsmaster on ways to order materials, and her father had made a reasonable argument for waiting at least another week. Namely, that Armsmaster probably had to contact the various suppliers to see what they were willing to do before passing contact information along. Further, he'd probably want to have the complete list available before getting back to her, in case she could get better deals out of a supplier that got back to him later. On top of that, she'd likely be hearing from the PRT in the next few days anyway and could 'bring it up' when she was already swinging by to sign paperwork, or when they called her about swinging by to sign paperwork.

Still, even without the materials the house was apparently going 'well enough', at least according to Hive. Things would speed up once the materials were available, of course, but there was plenty to do without them anyway. The current state of things was actually a careful process of building the foundation of the building, which Hive claimed had to go fairly deep for stability reasons. Taylor wasn't entirely sure why, but she hadn't examined the soil structure or other things like that either. It could just be that the roots of the trees that had been in the way were the primary supports right there and now that they didn't exist Hive had to go deeper to get a proper support point.

Whatever the story, Hive wasn't feeling like the lack of materials was a bottleneck right now, so it could wait. Besides, there were other things to do today, though she was running a little early. She fired off the dimensional transference for her and Hive, ending up over the Bay, and angled for a convenience store so that she could pick up a couple of snacks before meeting up with the police. If the spell took long enough to cast then they'd come in handy, and perhaps she should have some candy available to give the kids?

The two of them got stared at as they landed outside of the store, but nobody approached them as they went in. A man approaching the register looked over as the door chime went off, took a few seconds to pay attention to them, and then placed the beer he'd picked up on the counter and started digging inside of his jacket for his money. Taylor ignored him and went for the snack aisle, grabbed some healthy options and several different kinds of individually-wrapped candy. Hive grabbed a few items herself at the same time, and they followed that up by collecting a few different drinks from the refrigerated section at the back of the store. All of that was brought up to the register, the man having left with his beer, and had to wait for the girl at the register to snap out of staring at them long enough to ring them up and take their money.

All of their purchases vanished into storage with a couple flashes of light, then they headed back outside and took to the air before anyone approached them. It didn't take long to make it to where they were supposed to meet the police officers, only to find that they'd beaten them there. Which wasn't a major problem, since they were still a little bit early. Instead Taylor pulled out a handful of surveillance drones, deploying and cloaking them ahead of time. She also cast a handful of sensor drones that she used to examine the area in more detail.

While nobody was paying much attention, she dropped a transport device onto the sidewalk. Undisguised, but without the portal frame up. Two was probably overkill, and her current plan was only to use it if one or both of the kids was a significant distance away. The chance of that wasn't all that great, but couldn't be eliminated, so she was prepared for it. Besides, it could be used multiple times if it came down to it.

With that done, it only took a moment to cast the Knight Object spell to make a copy of Ethan's chair there on the sidewalk, next to the transport device. She dropped into it after confirming that it was stable. Hive then repeated that, though with a properly-scaled version of the chair and having it sitting on top of an old newspaper vending thing that was sitting there. It was likely that neither of the two were as comfortable as they'd be sitting in the real thing, but that was mostly down to the various hard bits integrated into the Knight Armor template instead of the copies being inferior.

Missy had to admit that Taylor had been correct. The Knight Armor felt a lot less heavy when flying. At the same time, the instructions for how the controls for the flight spell worked were...accurate, yet terribly misleading as well. She had no clue how to correct them, and was assuming that she was making fundamental mistakes due to some games she'd played previously, but she'd ended up pulling out her breathing mask and putting it on because of how often she'd ended up in the water instead of in the air.

It was hard to decide if she was happy with the fact that Sherie was monitoring remotely, thus not having Taylor see her flail about with the spell, or if she'd have preferred to have Taylor there offering tips. The latter would've been a different kind of embarrassing, but the former had its own problems and she was far beyond not being willing to admit that she was having issues with any given spell. As an example of said problems, she'd only managed exceeding thirty seconds above the surface of the water by virtue of flying too high instead. Luckily that was after she'd put on the breathing mask.

On the other hand, she'd discovered that the breathing mask worked in several definitions of space and that the transport devices were capable of latching onto her remotely at Sherie's request. It was probably a good thing that the spell used for that wasn't the one being played with without Taylor's supervision, because who knows where things would've ended up in that case. Then again, that was complicated enough that Space would probably be required to help cast and control it and thus probably less likely to go quite as far 'off the rails' as playing with the flight spell had gone.

How the hell did Taylor make this look so easy when she was out as Minerva?

The BBPD had eventually shown up, running a little late. One patrol car had some extra dents, having apparently had a run-in with what they described as a 'very large dog'. Taylor hadn't pushed them for details.

"Good morning Minerva," one of the officers said, coming up to her with a couple of plastic bags. "Since you're here anyway, as there's no way that we would've gone behind anyone's backs to arrange to meet up, I don't suppose you'd be willing to offer assistance in finding a couple of missing children?"

"I'd be happy to," Taylor replied. "I don't suppose that those are personal effects of the missing children?"

"Yep. We've got them so that the dogs can try and get their scent, but if you'd like to take a look at them before the canine unit arrives?"

Taylor nodded and got up. She cast the scanning spell on the bags, finding six or seven genetic profiles were sitting in each. One primary per bag, that if she was interpreting things correctly matched up as the child of two others in each bag. The multitasking system seemed to collect the information and line it up for her as well, the main and mitochondrial DNA being matched up and confirming her suspicions. The left bag had a son as the primary genetic material, with trace amounts from his parents and three others. One of the others wasn't actually human, probably a pet. The right bag had a daughter as the primary genetic material, trace amounts from her parents and two others. Both bags shared one of the others, likely a police officer involved in handling things.

"I think that's all I need from those," Taylor said, sitting back down in the chair. "Preparing for a scan will take a bit though."

The officer blinked, then looked down at the still-sealed bags. "Okay. I guess you know what you can do better than I do. Is there anything else I can do to help?"

"Well, eventually I'll want to have a look at pictures of the two, but I'm not sure that I'll need them for a bit."

"I've got spare copies, I'll bring a set over."

Slotting the two sets of DNA into the scanning spell took a minute, mostly because she quadruple-checked each of them and had Hive confirm that it was in there correctly. With that done she linked up with Hive for the actual casting, to ensure that they got the data correctly. As part of that process the anchor hex appeared under the chair she was sitting in, and then the spell started to form in the air in front of her. The light from that had gotten the attention of the officers, and not long after some bystanders.

Video of this was definitely going to end up on PHO.

Despite the curiosity factor, the officers let her be after giving her the copies of the pictures. Both helpfully had names on them, so Taylor actually knew that she was looking for Dinah Alcott and Jared Fry now. After that the officers closed off the area with 'do not cross' tape to keep anyone from interrupting her. Or them, most likely, as the canine unit showed up and they got started. Four different dogs were split into teams of two, each sniffing a different bag, though only after sniffing around Taylor. They then started to spread out from the central point, and it didn't look like much was happening with the dogs actually picking anything up.

Taylor didn't think that scent tracking worked well over a week later, but she supposed that it might help locate the kids if they'd wandered back through the area at some point in the past day or so.

Missy grumbled a bit as she sat down to eat lunch. Sherie had asked for a copy of the instructions that Taylor had provided, which was easy enough so long as she was using the command station, and then spotted the problem that Missy had been having. The introductory instructions, which were the ones being used, specifically stated that they were for use without any of the booster units manifested. And of course she'd cast the full flight spell with all boosters in place, meaning that things were far more sensitive to little details like foot positioning and the angle her back was at.

After lunch she was going to return to the beach and try again, without the boosters, to see if the introductory control instructions worked better that way. But until then she was hungry, and had assembled an overstuffed sub and a generous pile of chips for her meal.

"So," Sherie said as she sat down across from Missy. The woman had a smaller sandwich but around the same amount of chips. "Outside of the issues I already spotted, Taylor's instructions recommend working out the controls in simulation first."

Missy nodded before swallowing the bite she'd taken out of her sub. "She neglects to take into account that the version of the simulation system that I have access to doesn't really allow for 'wide open spaces'. It's good for small-scale practice but less useful for flight training. Maybe if I was connected to her system I could use it for that, but not as-is. Space admitted that the version that I have isn't fully functional in other ways as well, something about certain components of Hive's being unreproducible at this time coupled with Space just not having the raw processing power needed. It'll improve a bit if my combat device has a simulation system as well, as Space claims they can be networked together."

"Okay, that makes more sense than you having missed the giant notice at the top of the instructions."

"I made note of it for the benefit of anyone else getting a copy going forward, but it might be a moot point by then if Hive improves the simulation systems."

Sherie nodded, and they sat there for a few minutes before she spoke up again. "So, any chance of showing off the hairstyling spell?"

Missy raised an eyebrow. "You actually care about that?"

"If it works as well as Taylor seemed to think it would then it would be a great way to help hide an identity. Outside of that, seeing someone's hair instantly style in various ways sounds interesting. Well, unless you're a hairstylist, in which case it's probably horrifying."

"Whatever. Maybe after lunch, because the windows aren't blacked out in here."

"Of course."

They finished eating and headed upstairs for a few minutes, Missy sitting on her bed while Sherie watched from the doorway. Sighing, Missy carefully went through the hairstyling spell, choosing a long braid to start with. The anchor hex appeared, because it was complicated enough to require Space to cast, and a moment later her hair was braided down to the middle of her back with a magic-created hair tie at the end. She pulled the magically-extended hair over her shoulder to look at it, and if she hadn't had her sensor it was likely that she'd never know that it was magically extended. At the same time, that same sensor told her that there was a barely-there barrier anchored to the hair, protecting it a little more than real hair would be.

"That's impressive," Sherie said after a moment. "Looks like real hair, even."

"I'm not sure that I'd be able to tell that it isn't real without the extra sensor I have," Missy admitted. "Well, someone testing its strength would probably figure it out, but without that?"

"Huh. Interesting. Got any other styles?"

Rolling her eyes, Missy cast the spell again, this time with a high ponytail style. The spell recognized that there was already a magical extension and didn't shorten it, leaving the ponytail longer than it would've been otherwise. The tie that had been at the end of the braid had vanished in the new casting and a scrunchie had appeared at the base of the ponytail instead. Sherie grinned, and Missy pushed to forcibly dismiss the spell to return her hair to normal before casting it again. This time she cast it to the buns that the Knight Armor would attempt to put her hair into, only to pause when they formed.

"I wonder if Taylor did that intentionally," Missy mused.

"Did what intentionally?" Sherie asked.

"The hexagonal buns require a support inside each bun, and it's forming a basic magical helmet around my head anchored to them. Which could be that she got lazy with the templating and just left the effect from the original, except that I don't think it matches what the original would be providing."

"So anyone one of you casts this on will, for the duration of having the buns survive, have an invisible magic helmet?"

"Apparently. I could probably strip that off of the template, but it isn't a horrible idea."

"True. Especially if applied to someone in the line of fire of a battle. How long will it last?"

"Indefinitely on me. On someone without the ability to keep them charged...hmmm. If the notes included in the Knight Clothing spell are correct, probably twelve hours or two good hits, each hit knocking off four to six hours. Longer if near the one who cast the spell, such that it can recharge."

Sherie grinned. "You should see if Taylor or Hive can come up with an area of effect version of that. Hit entire groups of people to give them temporary magical helmets."

Missy snorted at that. "And how many of them would whine about what you just did to their precious hair?"

"It's temporary, they can deal with it. Though now I wonder, does it work on someone who's bald?"

"Er, maybe?"

"Perhaps you should find out."

Assembling the spell had been completed, and it was nearly fully powered. That was actually more time consuming than anticipated, but it was only mildly annoying. Since it was almost time, Taylor ensured that there were six surveillance drones ready to go, just in case they got false positives when looking for the two kids. Better to have extras and not need them, and if she needed more she could probably deploy them directly from storage.

The officers had given up with the dogs after getting no hits in a twelve-block radius. Instead, they'd settled into merely ensuring that nobody bothered Taylor as she assembled and charged up the spell. They were obviously curious as to how it would go, and probably how it was going to find the kids. She'd not been asked for details, and hadn't volunteered any, so there was likely going to be some significant speculation going on.

Nodding to herself as she passed the minimum mana point, she fed more mana in, just in case. It would mean that it would scan a bit further from the Earth's surface than it would otherwise, and probably didn't really matter all that much. The chances that one of the two kids was on one of the few high-altitude planes right now were slim, after all, but it wouldn't hurt to be absolutely certain.

Finishing up, she retrieved and ate a granola bar before preparing a handful of dimensional transference spells, one for each surveillance drone. They were lacking the final destination coordinates, but she would slot that into each spell when she had destinations. All of that done, she took a moment to mentally prepare herself, followed by triggering the scanning spell. It vanished immediately, and she knew it had appeared at the Earth's center of mass.

This time the spell wasn't moving at near lightspeed, as it was aiming for much more detailed information in a smaller range. As such, instead of appearing near-instantly, it took nearly a minute to reach the surface. If you looked very carefully you could see it go by as well, not that Taylor was paying attention by that point. Instead she'd fired five dimensional transference spells in rapid succession.

Three of the five surveillance drones ended up quite a distance away. One was in Canada, another was probably in California, and the last had to be in a boat just off the shore of Australia. They were also in locations that were quite obviously not where the children were, and Taylor cast new dimensional transference spells to retrieve them. The last two had found what appeared to be the children, and Taylor absently noted that Dinah had an atrophied core.

"So I've got a whole mixed bag of news," Taylor said after a moment. "Jared's the easy one. He's actually only around eight blocks away, but in a top floor apartment. I believe he has a splint on his leg, and I'm not sure those taking care of him really know what they're doing as I don't think things are set correctly."

"Here," Hive said, casting a Knight Object map into existence. "I've marked Jared's location on it."

"Thank you," one of the officers said, before handing the map off to one of the others present. They immediately went to their squad car, their partner joining them. "And Miss Alcott?"

Taylor frowned. "She appears to be in a bunker underneath downtown, locked in a room with cameras covering everything including the toilet. There appear to be two armed guards outside the door."

"A...bunker?"

"Very thick, reinforced concrete. Too deep to be a normal basement."

"It's a repurposed shelter," Hive corrected. "An Endbringer shelter, one that the city records say wasn't finished when problems with the initial work were projected to be too expensive to fix. Instead they built one of the other shelters a little larger to compensate. It was supposed to be sealed off, but someone appears to have moved in instead."

The officer nodded. "Okay. You've got teleportation, can you get her out of there with that?"

Taylor shook her head, since the surveillance drone was telling her that the girl was a parahuman. "Not safely. I have an alternate method that might work, but is untested in this kind of situation. It would be safest to get her out through normal means, though I can safely get people in without any issue."

"Right. Are you willing to help us get her out of there? I'm thinking that there's going to be some fighting involved."

"Of course. I bet we can reduce the need for some of that fighting as well."

"In that case I need to make a couple of emergency calls to get approval and manpower for this. Especially as I'm now very suspicious of those in the department that were pushing to keep parahumans out of the search." He didn't even wait for Taylor to respond to that before moving off and pulling a phone off of his belt.

"I don't suppose you can get into the systems of the base from here?" Taylor sent to Hive.

"I've already started," Hive answered. "I'm building a proper map and isolating a path out of the bunker, though there's more than one system involved. Just in the room that the surveillance drone is in there are two different camera systems, and I've found three different independent access control systems so far as I attempt to ensure that I can open or close relevant security doors. That's without the points that I believe require physical keys, as I'm not finding any sign of electronics in the locking mechanisms, but we already have a solution for those."

"Good."

"I've also identified what appear to be two locations where the independent systems all meet up. One is in an office where a man in a costume is sitting at a desk, and the other I believe is in an escape tunnel accessible from that office. Presumably the man is in charge, and may be a parahuman. We'd need to get a sensor closer to determine that."

That had Taylor blinking. "Can we prevent him from using the escape tunnel?"

"Easily. I recommend dropping a training or combat drone into the tunnel in order to cast a shield to block his passage."

"Works for me. Would dropping a surveillance drone into said tunnel now allow us to determine if he's a parahuman?"

"Yes, it would. Give me a moment, I'll use one of mine."

It took a moment, but Hive dropped one of her surveillance drones into the tunnel and they got a better look at the man. He was indeed a parahuman, based on the connection to his brain. They could also see that he was busy going through files of some kind on the computer.

Taylor frowned as she watched him. "So, can you keep him from, say, wiping the computers when he realizes that he's been discovered?"

"Of course, Lord," Hive responded. "I've already started making copies of all data in the various systems, just in case, and nulling out the wipe commands is trivial. In addition, I've disabled the self destruct system and believe that I can disable all of the alarm panels."

"Good job."

If Taylor had any say in things, this guy was about to have a very bad day.

Last edited: May 3, 2020

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Threadmarks Interlude 5

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Apr 22, 2020

#9,060

Brad Meadows - May 16, 2011

Emily Piggot - May 16, 2011

Thomas Calvert - May 16, 2011

Kurt Wynn - May 17, 2011

Colin Wallis - May 17, 2011

Adam Mustain - May 18, 2011

Thomas Calvert - May 18, 2011

Sarah Pelham - May 18, 2011

Rebecca Costa-Brown - May 19, 2011

Dinah Alcott - May 19, 2011

Ethan Walsh - May 20, 2011

Dean Stansfield - May 20, 2011

Hannah Karim - May 20, 2011

Dwight Seymour - May 20, 2011

Riley Davis - May 21, 2011

Douglas Truman - May 21, 2011

Colin Wallis - May 21, 2011

Amy Dallon - May 21, 2011

Thomas Calvert - May 21, 2011

Brad Meadows - May 16, 2011

Brad wished that he was packed and ready to go. But he wasn't, because he didn't have anywhere to go. Originally he'd stuck around because a single defeat meant squat, even if he'd been teased about it. Now he was sticking around because he had no real resources for surviving on the road and nowhere to target actually going to. Sadly, he couldn't even rely on the Empire pulling out of town and going with them, because they were too tied to Medhall and the company leaving would look even more suspicious.

On the other hand, he wasn't being teased anymore. He, after all, had survived a fight with the girl that had driven off an Endbringer solo. That he'd done so by surrendering was, in hindsight, being seen as common fucking sense. After all, you could be broken out of prison, but getting out of a casket was a hell of a lot harder. Though he was currently painting some of the fight as being the 'test dummy' for some of Minerva's attacks.

Still, he wasn't leaving right now, which was problematic. Unlike others in town, the Empire wasn't really built around keeping 'out of sight'. You don't hide from those that you're better than, right? And nobody really dared to truly threaten their operations, because the might of the Empire wasn't something to be scoffed at. Sure, Lung had taken on the entire Protectorate team when he'd arrived in town, but even he knew that he couldn't be everywhere. Fight the Empire long enough and another Empire cape or three will have started causing trouble somewhere else.

Minerva, however, was threatening to break that model entirely, and Brad didn't know what to do about it. At least getting the dog fights he managed more out of sight was reasonably easy, and something that had been started even before Minerva showed up due to other pressures.

Emily Piggot - May 16, 2011

Emily was the last one to the meeting, thanks to having been stuck on the phone with the Mayor. He was justifiably pissed, but had acknowledged that the local parahuman population wasn't actually geared towards the kind of search operations needed to canvas the city and surrounding area for his missing niece. Sure, they'd be keeping an eye out, but she wasn't optimistic in their ability to find the girl. Though the man had been willing to apologize and admit that she had a point after she'd gone over every parahuman she had available and what she felt they could contribute to such an operation.

"My apologies for the delay," she said as she sat down. "Unexpectedly long phone call."

"Mayor Christner is justifiably on edge," Colin said.

"That he is. Still, unless we're waiting on someone else?"

"No," Costa-Brown replied from her video feed. "Every region with Ward oversight duties has their representatives here. At the same time, though, I'd like to start with a minor tangent."

"Oh?"

"Yes. There's a lot of demands for the PRT and Protectorate to do something regarding Minerva. While I know that there have been attempts at official and unofficial recruiting, I think we'd all like to know what your plans are for approaching her."

Emily nodded, but turned to Colin. "Armsmaster, I don't have any plans at the moment, though that's in part due to not having time to come up with any. Do you have anything prepared?"

He sighed. "My plans are to contact her as soon as the identification cards and documentation of patent licensing arrive. I'm expecting that to be today or tomorrow, at which point I will arrange to meet her to go over them with her. At that point I will offer to answer any questions she may have about the PRT, Protectorate, and Wards, but do not plan on pushing for her to sign up or to reveal how she drove off Leviathan."

"Why the hell not?" came a voice from the speakers, though Emily wasn't entirely sure who it was.

"We have enough on our plate without trying to drag someone else into the system or reveal their secrets against their will, and taking a heavy-handed approach may very well drive her away from working with us."

"I agree with Armsmaster's decision," Costa-Brown said, shutting up anyone else who wanted to object. "We can revisit it at a later date if we decide that it's problematic. Now then, we're meeting for an update on the situation with the Youth Guard. Armsmaster, as the primary contact for most of this, can you explain what's been found so far?"

Colin nodded, and there were a number of beeps heard from the speakers. At the same time, he handed Emily and Hannah physical copies of what he'd likely just sent to everyone else. "To start with, improper handling of things by the Youth Guard has only been found to be happening in eight departments. In six of those departments the issue seems to stem from the employee vetting process, with the inserted Youth Guard employees not being suitable for their jobs on several different points. The ENE inherited a poor vetting process from Department 24, Boston, as the Youth Guard pulled employees from their pool. That got us both issues with our contact points and monitoring complaints against Ward home lives. In the other four departments the problem has been one or two people each."

"I don't see a list of the problem employees," Costa-Brown said, obviously flipping through the digital copy.

"He already informed us," the Youth Guard representative stated. "We're cooperating fully with investigations into those responsible for vetting the employees in question, not to mention those that are supposed to be spotting these issues in our end of things, but are keeping a lid on it to the best of our ability to do so for now."

"I see. Thank you. Armsmaster?"

Colin nodded, apparently not annoyed by the interruption. "As an important data point, only noticed this morning by the Youth Guard themselves, every department dealing with improper handling of complaints against a Ward's home life has been tied to at least one Ward that triggered in their own home. Youth Guard staffing has either already been a problem or employees were rotated out for various reasons shortly after the Ward entered the system. This has understandably become a newly significant focus of investigations."

There were a number of people muttering at that, and Emily noted that Colin seemed to be waiting for them to properly absorb the information. Costa-Brown looked surprised, which was a good sign, and if the Youth Guard had spotted things then the representative not looking surprised was to be expected. The rest of the participants were currently crammed into a smaller number of screens and thus impossible to get proper reads on.

"That said," Colin finally continued. "The issues spotted in the last two departments are concerning in their own ways. Departments 20 and 41, Seattle and Omaha, have similar but distinct trends wherein the Youth Guard is being used to force the departments into actions that are otherwise against policy. Department 20 is managing a wide area and has been forced to deal with Wards that they would've otherwise rejected due to a lack of cooperation on the part of the families involved. This is causing them significant difficulties due to the threats levied against them. Department 41, on the other hand, has been having issues with Wards rotating through the system with the Youth Guard being used to force the normal rules for a returning Ward to not be followed."

"We've suspended all activity in those areas as we review things," the Youth Guard representative added. "To accomplish that without complaint from the parents involved we approached judges in order to get appropriate temporary orders filed against us for the duration of investigations. Even if it may disappoint some of you, we're aiming to resolve most of these issues without our ability to operate in the affected states being revoked."

"Surely being shut down in a single state isn't affecting you that much," Emily commented.

"My apologies," Colin said. "I haven't kept you fully informed. At this point Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont have all issued orders against the Youth Guard operating within their borders pending significant reviews of the program and its actions. I'll note that all of them have been working with the Youth Guard central office in Boston in some capacity, and that office has been the primary offender for most of the problems found to date."

"The entire office has been shut down and my people are helping to transfer all of the records to the New York office for deeper examination," Armstrong said. "I've shifted two Wards into on-site quarters while we're looking more deeply into their home lives, and I'm doing internal checks into mismanagement of our Case 53s that I only found out about because of the investigations. I'm just thankful that a couple of the families that aren't problems were willing to allow use of guest rooms when the Youth Guard was insisting that those who live on-site weren't allowed to spend time here."

Costa-Brown's expression hardened at that. "Those Wards who have no other home, Case 53 or otherwise, are supposed to be fully acknowledged exceptions to those rules."

"And yet they were being kicked out, without my knowledge. I'd be filing lawsuits of my own if Armsmaster hadn't beaten me to it, though I imagine that the affected Wards will appreciate the financial compensation."

"What financial compensation?"

"As a show of good faith," the Youth Guard representative answered. "We've started settling the civil suits. Each affected Ward linked to the Boston office will get five thousand dollars for each calendar year that they were mis-managed, including those that have since left the program in any way. For those still in the program, the money will be placed into an individual trust for each Ward until an evaluation of their home life is completed. Once each home is cleared, or the Ward is removed from a home that they shouldn't be in, then the money will be released to them. Those already out of the program will receive the funds directly. On top of that, Boston and Brockton Bay are getting two hundred thousand dollars each for their Wards programs in addition to the Youth Guard paying the salary for dedicated employees for aiding their Wards programs for the next five years. Those employees will be chosen, hired, and managed by the individual departments and not controlled by the Youth Guard at all."

"I wanted more money to go to all of the affected individuals," Colin said. "But Miss Biron and Miss Hess are the only two that were sufficiently harmed from a legal standpoint. Both are getting additional funds and access to therapists paid for by the Youth Guard for at least three years."

"Hess?" Emily asked.

"If she hadn't been mishandled to the degree she was then she might not have ended up in her current situation at all."

Thomas Calvert - May 16, 2011

Thomas carefully returned to his base, remarkably unsure of himself. The past couple of days had been incredibly troublesome for him, and he didn't think that this evening was going to go any better. At the same time, he felt incredibly lucky that he hadn't attempted to enact certain plans yet and could thus discard them. It had become incredibly obvious that part of his problem lately was that Minerva was too strong.

That she was now one of six known beings that screwed with his powers due to their strength was unfortunate, of course, but he was used to some of these problems. After all, the three Endbringers, Scion, and Eidolon all caused him problems when he split timelines as well. Different problems, admittedly, but they caused him problems all the same. Even there, though, he had some better theories as to what was going on.

Based on the similarities in how his powers were affected, Miss Hebert was protected by Minerva or her backers. Which fit what he'd just been told at the briefing the PRT had held for consultants about some of the assumptions about those backers, including that they were behind the funnels. The entire situation had been assigned case file number 135, but they hadn't told them everything and his data taps were all but useless now. Going into a briefing like that without any idea of what they were going to talk about had grated on him after being more in the know than most for so long.

He mentally grumbled about that until he was seated behind his desk, then used a mental calming exercise before picking up the stack of reports waiting for him. He didn't split timelines for now, because he didn't need the distraction of one possibly collapsing on him. The first few reports were purely informational, busywork around the base. The first report on Dinah was where he stopped and paid proper attention.

Sadly, the girl was already proving to be far less useful than he'd anticipated. They were asking her a question every hour and a half right now, to see if they could figure out her limits after figuring out that she had to answer them, except that she frequently returned nonsense results. Negative or greater than a hundred percent chance for things to happen whenever they seemed to intersect with Minerva or Miss Hebert. Actually, looking further down, Miss Biron was now in that group, which didn't surprise him all that much. And to think, he'd considered making a bid to be the girl's new guardian, right up until he actually thought about what Miss Hebert's experience with a funnel had done to his ability to use his powers.

At the same time, there were a number of things that were useful in the handful of questions they'd asked so far today, or at least they were somewhat consistent as far as Dinah's answers went. Most of them involved things that weren't local, but he could still capitalize on them anyway. Local questions varied wildly, even though they were asking based on three days away. Either subtle variations in wording mattered more than they should or there was an interference issue. He was betting on the latter, but things weren't quite bad enough yet to attempt to do anything drastic.

Though if they didn't improve in the next month he was going to have to seriously consider ditching Brockton Bay and setting up somewhere else in the country. That would open him up to more interference from Cauldron, admittedly, but if it came to that? At least Cauldron's interference could be properly taken into account. Unlike Minerva and her backers at this stage, anyway.

Grumbling a bit more about that, he moved on to other reports. The BBPD were at least still an open book to him through his men, and they were definitely looking in all the wrong places for Dinah. Which had been part of his plan, only seven people other than him knew where the girl was and all of them were trusted employees of his that lived in the base and interacted with her as part of their duties. He'd even arranged for the deaths of the mercenaries that he'd used for the job, though losing the well-placed bus driver in the name of operational security had been mildly annoying. Dinah herself had given a high probability of him revealing his part in things.

As annoying as Minerva was, she had helped his plans there. Her performance against Leviathan had kept those deaths from making the news over the weekend. That had given him time to ensure that the last few trails heading his way had been cleaned up before anyone could follow them back to him.

Kurt Wynn - May 17, 2011

Kurt had been cautious in his observations of Minerva, doing so from a distance. That hadn't hindered his ability to examine her much, and he'd actually had to leave due to having a headache from examining the girl. Just the fact that she was wandering around wearing math, as clothing and protections and who knew what else...

Then there was Lilia, who had also been wearing math. Not to mention flying with math, and he was fairly certain that the smaller girl or construct or whatever she was had been disabling guns with math. After seeing it happen multiple times he thought he even had the complete math used, from start to finish, but couldn't actually be positive. He got the impression that it was some kind of kinetic barrier, but wasn't sure why he got that impression.

His notes were comprehensive, in many cases made no sense even to him, and were only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. That Minerva was capable of taking on an Endbringer, likely with more wondrous math, just made it more important to learn as much as he could. He might even have to approach her to ask questions, Cauldron's secrets be damned. Though at least attempting to convince the others to let him reveal things would hopefully smooth things over a bit.

Sadly, his headache came in part from there being apparently 'corrupt' portions of the equations. Those sections seemed to do things that were so impossible as to be unrecognizable as math, and thus he couldn't actually get anything of use written down for them. He suspected, based on some other patterns, that there were constants that he couldn't parse properly for some reason. It could even be intentional protection against someone like him. The fact that he wasn't sure how to get to the state of things that the math was in was likely another layer of that, but he was certain that he could come up with ways around that particular problem. Eventually.

For now he had to cancel some meetings, down some painkillers, and take a nap.

Colin Wallis - May 17, 2011

Colin looked over the restraints that Minerva had provided, idly wondering about how they were actually constructed. Even then, most of his thoughts were on the revelations from Lilia. They had ways to cross dimensional boundaries, though if Lilia was believed then that was controlled by Minerva. Whether that was because their backer had restrictions of their own and just hadn't given anyone else the ability yet or because of something special about Minerva herself wasn't clear. Though given that Lilia was quite obviously not a small human at this point it could simply be that it required a human other than the one building the tinkertech to operate the equipment.

Right now his theory for how they found the world Minerva trained on was that they'd been trying to reach Bet and failed, but had been able to turn that failure into a secure training area. The materials being asked for might very well be to help with building a base there, which could be even more important if they had to use that world as a jumping point between where they originated and Bet. That kind of restriction could even explain why they had to operate the way they seemed to in regards to Miss Biron. They might not have had time to get Minerva through to Bet in time to intervene. Building a base could be part of improving their ability to make the trip.

Well, enough thinking about that. Further ramifications of the afternoon's revelations could wait until later. For now he should really see if the suppliers that the Protectorate used for tinkers would be willing to provide Minerva with the materials that she needed. Either that or he needed to look for a place for things to be stockpiled until she was able to pick them up, since Dragon was already compiling a list of 'material donations' coming from a very wide area.

Adam Mustain - May 18, 2011

Adam was having a horrible time, and he didn't know what to do about it. A number of his men had been pulled off of the streets by likely undercover feds of some kind, random cars seemed to be following their cloaked trucks all of a sudden, and suspiciously-arrived 'fishing boats' had been seen following the fucking sub when Sherrel had slipped out of the area with it the previous day. They hadn't followed her when she'd hit deeper water, but he didn't hold out a lot of hope for them not being on the watch for her to return.

Whatever the hell was happening, the locals were all clueless. Which meant that none of his moles, informants, or other means of getting information were helping and he thus had no leads on what needed to be done to break those that had been grabbed out of the slammer. Worse, it seemed like every time they grabbed someone they were higher up on the command chain, and he needed to change things up to make it harder for those already grabbed to provide information that would eventually lead back to him.

They'd lucked out that he'd finally recalled several money stashes that he'd made 'just in case', only one of which had been found and emptied by others since he'd made it, and that they'd had a lot of guns out of the armories when whatever fucker had run off with their stuff had done so. He'd not left any drug stashes untouched, and decentralizing guns hadn't been a priority before now. They didn't have enough to worry about storage issues yet, but when Sherrel came back she was going to make a new armored car and several mobile drug and gun storage vans. She'd have done so before she left, but they needed more supplies across the board.

Speaking of that, he needed to get some people on acquiring suitable vehicles. Ones that wouldn't need a month to be rebuilt before Sherrel could even get started on the extras. Luckily he did still have a few people that were good at stealing cars, having them nab some vans would be easy enough. Probably a decent truck as well, especially as he knew that they weren't going to get a proper armored car that way. The metal plates and better lock hardware were going to be the sticking point, they didn't have anything really available on that front right now. Maybe they'd get lucky and find some easily-liberated stuff in the boat graveyard before anyone else started cleaning things up there?

Thomas Calvert - May 18, 2011

Thomas nodded to himself before splitting the timeline. Miss Hebert was safely in tutoring, and thus shouldn't be a factor in things for the next hour so long as nothing he changed affected that area of the Boardwalk. In his intended 'safe' timeline he went back to preparing more questions for Dinah, but in the other timeline he picked the phone back up and dialed it. The phone rang once before it was picked up at the other end.

"Engage," was all he said.

"Acknowledged," was the only reply before the line went dead, as expected.

Bringing up camera feeds was trivial, as he'd been ready for this test. Three of the feeds had clocks in them, even if none of them were able to see today's target. But that was okay, he didn't need to see the target. Instead he waited. The team heading for the building in question should be there within three minutes, and he didn't want to miss anything. Besides, he could see the office that would be taken first, so he'd know when things had truly begun.

Four minutes later the team took the office, having easily disabled the external alarms with instructions that he'd provided before entering the building. Three of the eight stayed there, the others double-checking class schedules before heading for where Miss Biron was. They moved quickly and weren't interrupted by anyone, easily tracked through the hallway cameras. Reaching the classroom in question, they barged in with guns up, barking orders for everyone to get down even if he couldn't hear them.

Several seconds later everything stopped, and shortly after that the corruption reached him. That timeline was dropped, and he frowned. That was a final confirmation that Miss Biron had to be kept track of as well. Needing to not have things affect three people in the city was going to be very annoying, but he still wasn't ready to abandon ship just yet. Not until he was done testing Dinah, at least. If she wasn't going to be useful to him longer term then at a minimum she'd be useful as a distraction for his departure.

Sarah Pelham - May 18, 2011

Sarah sat down at the conference table, wondering why Miss Militia had asked for her to come in after dinner. It was decidedly unusual, but then again they'd had a number of unusual events in the past week. This one would be minor by comparison, though asking for only her was...concerning.

"Thank you again for coming," Miss Militia said. "Armsmaster asked me to talk to you, given that he knows his own social skills have limits."

"You're welcome," Sarah replied. "And that's an understatement if I've ever heard one."

"He's actually gotten much better recently, but this is a delicate topic."

"One that you didn't want my sister here for. Does this concern her?"

Miss Militia sighed. "Indirectly, yes. Armsmaster is, rightfully, concerned about the minors in New Wave. Your own children are likely fine, but upon review of things he found that Glory Girl and Panacea may each have their own problems."

Sarah nodded, only slightly confused. "You aren't the first to mention possible issues with Amy, but I'm less certain about Vicky."

"Opposite issues, in this case. Her issues likely stem from things going 'right' for her too often, at home and in public. Though Armsmaster's graphs show a dip in her likely ego around the point where she broke her hand attacking Minerva. Something to keep an eye on, but nothing that needs immediate action. His concerns, and I agree with them after seeing his data, are mostly with Panacea and the rapid increase in visible stress indicators observed in her in the past few months."

"The hospital has pointed out some of this as well. I'm doing my best to work on it, but I don't think that it'd reached a point where the Protectorate would be concerned."

Miss Militia nodded. "Yes, well, there's a couple of other details. He wants to avoid repeats of recent events that were likely caused by similar stresses. We don't think it's an immediate concern, but also feel that things will be easier to stop now rather than if they progress in the same way."

Sarah raised an eyebrow. "I'm not entirely sure that I follow you there."

The other woman took a deep breath. "We currently believe that Vista went through similar stresses, made worse by a near complete inability to use her powers."

"Is that why she's the only one that hasn't been seen out and about doing things? Did she have a breakdown of some kind?"

"Yes. I can't give you any more details than I already have, beyond those that will be revealed tomorrow." She pulled a sheet of paper out of a folder and passed it over the table. "Director Piggot gave her approval for you getting an advance copy of the prepared press release."

Sarah frowned as she took the paper and read over it. Or rather, she started to, only to come to a halt and start over, reading much more carefully the second time. When she was done she looked up at Miss Militia. "Are you saying that you think that Amy could be heading for an early grave?"

"We don't know for certain, but she's showing far too much stress as it is. If she breaks down then we can't honestly say what direction she'd go in."

"I see." And her sister was going to have to be made to come to her senses a lot more quickly than anticipated.

Rebecca Costa-Brown - May 19, 2011

Rebecca frowned as she looked over paperwork. The Youth Guard issues were creating headaches for her, but nowhere near as many as she'd feared. Most of that was their own central office not wanting certain things to get out, which meant fixing things properly before the news agencies got wind of them. Creating new communication channels so that each PRT department could completely bypass their local Youth Guard offices with requests and complaints when there appeared to be local problems was part of that. It was also where most of her work was coming in, as the procedures for using those channels and the internal punishments for abusing them had to be written.

Paul had his share of this as well from the Protectorate side, of course, but he was also working on ensuring that internal monitoring of adult parahumans didn't have similar things falling through the cracks. A quick review of things had already revealed two potential risk cases that hadn't been properly dealt with as Wards and thus hadn't been properly flagged when they made it into the Protectorate.

An hour later she'd finally finished going over things, marked down a number of problems she felt needed to be addressed for the groups working on some of this to look over, and dropped the pile back into her outbox. With that done she could return to the larger problem, Minerva and her backers. They'd been concerned about things before the previous weekend, since the group had located and scanned the Cauldron compound. Finding out just how much power the group's parahumans could bring to bear was a different issue entirely.

Minerva had confirmed that she'd not actually planned on handling the entire attack alone, something that the live feeds provided had said right from the start. She'd engaged in a delaying action, only to become priority target number one for Leviathan due to her early actions in the battle. The amount of power that she'd brought to bear against the Endbringer was probably enough to easily level a city, and even intercity missiles wouldn't be enough to slow her down. And that was assuming they hit her, since she'd now shown herself to be too mobile for most opponents to keep up with.

That she'd finished with a barrage of apparent Endbringer-killing attacks followed by a homing Endbringer-killing attack fired in frustration was where things had changed. Collecting ammo had been needed for some reason, at least for the barrage, but the end result was hard to argue with. Leviathan had purposely injured itself more than any five previous attacks had ever accomplished just to get away. Only for the material left behind to be obliterated to the point where nothing had survived a moment later.

Minerva had the attack strength to take on an Endbringer, but the problem was that they knew nothing of the motivations behind those that had sent her to Earth Bet in the first place. Her dimension of origin was unknown, the likely-tinkers who built her equipment were unknown, how many of her abilities were tinkertech versus agents versus something else was unknown. She was a pile of unknowns that they didn't even know where to begin to get answers about. Getting those answers was going to be problematic, though if a clone or alternate version of Miss Biron showed up soon then that would at least help solidify some of the theories.

Rebecca paused in her thoughts as she found a new document in the PRT's collection of information about Minerva. It only took a moment to bring it up on her computer, but she sighed when she did. "I don't know which is worse," she grumbled. "That there's now a worldwide effort to consolidate Endbringer bounties in order to tempt Minerva into going after them more seriously, or that the Fallen are working against the efforts."

Dinah Alcott - May 19, 2011

Dinah sighed as she was left alone again. Not that she could be considered to be alone. No, there were very obvious cameras monitoring her all the time, and a hundred percent chance of there being additional hidden cameras that she couldn't see. Near zero percent chance of her being able to get past the door, absolute zero chance of the door being left unguarded, no vents large enough for her to get into even if they were positioned such that she could reach them, and even if she did get past the door she wouldn't be able to get outside. Probably because of the guards.

Then there were the drugs. That they hadn't started giving her yet, because according to her powers there was a good chance that they'd hinder her power use, so they'd needed to find new ones. Of course, they'd not claimed that they wanted to get her hooked on drugs, they'd called it 'candy', but she wasn't stupid and her power had confirmed that they were talking about some kind of drug.

Of course, she'd asked a number of questions herself, doing her best to do so in ways that they wouldn't hear her. Ten percent chance that they had anyway, on average, but she'd done her best. Middling chance that they'd let her go, though not without starting her on some kind of drugs. Decent chance of being moved elsewhere, but almost no chance of that providing a way for her to escape.

The confusing part of things was something that she'd asked herself and that the doctors had asked her in various ways. For some reason she kept getting nonsense answers regarding her chance of being found or rescued. Negative numbers, greater than a hundred percent, even a few times where she'd gotten things that were decidedly not numbers. She also wasn't exactly sure why 'fedora percent chance' had made the doctor pale when it'd come up...

Ethan Walsh - May 20, 2011

Ethan sighed as he looked over his messages as he ate lunch. He'd put in a couple of requests, been questioned on some of them, answered the questions he'd been given, and was still in a holding pattern.

"Do you have to eat those things?" Sherie asked, pointing at his deep-fried corn dog.

"Tastier than your salad," he countered, even if her salad was only part of her own lunch. "Besides, the vendor was going to have to toss it after the kid in front of us realized that we were standing behind him and ran off. He hadn't paid, it looked good enough."

Sherie probably rolled her eyes at that. It was something she'd do, even if he couldn't see it with her costume on. "Whatever. But don't whine to me if Armsmaster makes you do extra exercise to work off any extra weight you put on."

He waved her off before going back to his messages. Standard messages on a number of things, such as further approvals to the adjustments to his schedule that he'd requested the day before to account for dealing with Missy. Sherie would have her own collection there, and it was going to be a bit before they were able to do night patrols together again. Not that big of a deal, all things considered, but annoying. A notice of a meeting on Monday morning to cover things for the visiting capes over the long weekend. Aha, there was the one he was hoping for, Piggot had grudgingly approved his request and they might have an official babysitter option soon. At the same time, the woman had also suggested three alternative options that he'd have to talk to Missy about.

"Looks like I might have some calls to make tonight," he said, getting Sherie's attention.

"Oh?" she replied after a moment. "Anything interesting."

"One of my requests was approved, and alternatives proposed. Not something to talk about out here."

"Okay then."

Dean Stansfield - May 20, 2011

Dean sighed as he settled into his afternoon classes. The news that Vista had 'died' had broken that morning, obliterating pretty much all previous gossip. Of course, they hadn't revealed that while 'Vista' was dead, Missy was still alive. A situation that would be unusual pretty much anywhere else, but was rapidly becoming business as usual in Brockton Bay with Missy being either the third or the fourth parahuman to survive the removal of their powers.

Despite that, the entire situation with Missy was bizarre. They'd admitted that the younger girl had been 'funneled' while questioning the rest of them about things that didn't add up, then clammed up beyond that for legal reasons. The latter he understood, though when and where she'd been 'funneled' was still a bit of a mystery. He didn't know what they'd looked for in the apartment that she sometimes used, but at least understood that checking it when she'd just been staying there made sense.

The shake-up that followed was epic, though. Full catch-up on all missed therapy sessions, no more Youth Guard lockouts for anything in the PRT building, and they'd gotten more actual training in than had happened in the entire year prior. What they hadn't been able to do was talk to Missy, even if a number of people had been able to confirm that she'd made it to school this week.

They were going to have to figure out where, exactly, she was staying now that she wasn't being kept in the PRT building. How to figure that out was more difficult, of course, as none of the Wards actually attended school with her. Calling her should've been an option, but her phone was generally locked down when it came to who she could call or could call her and nobody had ever seen fit to add any of the Wards to that list. Then again, that would've required revealing things to her parents at the time, as they'd been in control of the whitelist.

Maybe someone would answer questions at the meeting over the weekend. It couldn't hurt to ask, at least.

Hannah Karim - May 20, 2011

Hannah watched Minerva and Lilia fly off, suppressing the urge to shiver as they did so. It was very rare that she ran into someone that she couldn't come up with any plans for, but Minerva in particular qualified. Figuring out possible weaknesses was something that she did instinctively, but Minerva didn't have any weaknesses. Or if she did they were far beyond Hannah's ability to discern them. The girl likely wasn't even susceptible to any of the nuclear weapon options available.

That meant that her other mental exercise when meeting with new parahumans, figuring out how to best work with them by covering their weaknesses, also wasn't something that she could do with the girl. Not being able to do that was less concerning in and of itself, as she frequently ran into parahumans whose weaknesses she couldn't personally cover. Speculating on other parahumans only really felt like a useful exercise when she knew who might be working with the new parahuman, of which she had zero expected options for Minerva.

Still, that inability to spot a good weakness in Minerva remained an annoying mental itch, one that wanted to be scratched but which Hannah couldn't do anything about right now. So instead she focused on other details, like the fact that Minerva had been able to keep accurate fire up against targets while she was looking away from them. Which was a confirmation that her ability to perceive her surroundings wasn't limited to sight or hearing, with an increase in the range thereof. Though it was possible that she and Lilia shared information automatically and the sensors that the smaller girl had deployed had fed back to Minerva.

Despite that, Minerva seemed to be a fairly normal likely-teenager. She'd obviously not had much of a clue about the land ownership information, and probably didn't know about the pile of other gifts heading her way. Entirely separate from the rest, if she did accept the warehouse then it would probably result in a lot of mail being delivered once word got out. Amazingly few parahumans ever ended up with an easily located 'official' address of any kind, after all.

Dwight Seymour - May 20, 2011

Dwight idly ate some of the chips that Virgil had left for him as he worked over the backflow preventer. The statements that Minerva and Lilia had made about it echoed in his head as he did so, as did half-formed plans for additional test equipment. Originally he'd been gripped with a need to expand the preventer into additional physical dimensions beyond those that it was already expanded into, but common sense had prevailed. Not only did he not know how to do that, what had been described wasn't that the preventer was too small.

No, the backflow preventer had holes. Pieces missing in the middle, between the physical dimensions it already used. Places that energy could flow back through because it wasn't present in those physical dimensions. The problem was that, to his equipment it was absolutely, impossibly solid. Above and beyond anything merely three-dimensional. He was almost certain that this thing would stand up to anything a normal parahuman could throw at it, at least initially.

Minerva was not a normal parahuman. That much was obvious. His equipment for monitoring parahuman activities around the target projection system hadn't even flinched around her and Lilia. It'd noted Virgil and him, as well as both Miss Militia and her infinitely variable weapon, but it hadn't noticed Minerva and Lilia at all. They were unknowns, undetectable through those means. It could be specialized shielding, or that they weren't actually parahumans. He didn't have enough information to tell.

So, back to the problem at hand. There were holes in his absolutely solid backflow preventer. How do you find holes when you've already ensured that there aren't any beyond the one expected energy channel? What equipment could he build to find those holes, those physical dimensions that were impossibly slotted between the ones that were already known?

Riley Davis - May 21, 2011

Riley was up early again, working on her plans. She had just over a week before she'd hopefully be free to be a proper Good Girl, but everything had to be in place first. Which was easier said than done. So many different pieces had to come together juuuust right for this to work, and the longer she took the less likely it would be that she'd pull it off. Luckily she had most of the materials she needed already, and the others were willing to get the few things she didn't have for her.

The worst part was when Jack would look at her oddly, as though he knew what she was up to. Only to then pat her on the head and give her words of encouragement. If he did know then this wasn't going to work, but she'd been lucky so far and he'd not come in at the worst possible points for her plan. Every day it took her was another day that could change, though, so she had to be careful.

It would be so much easier if Jack would just let her be a Good Girl, of course, but he'd already made it clear that he wasn't going to do that. No, she was going to have to leave to be a Good Girl without him. Several of the others were on his side as well, so she was going to have to ensure that they wouldn't keep her from leaving too. But she had plans, she just needed to finish them in time...

Douglas Truman - May 21, 2011

Douglas had waited almost fifteen minutes for the couple of other people in the convenience store to finally pay and leave. He'd grabbed some beer to look like things were on the up and up, of course, but wasn't planning on taking it with him. No, he was more interested in getting the money from the cash register before they did their count and drop in another twenty minutes. It was as he was approaching the counter that he mentally groaned, as the door chime had just gone off.

Looking over to see who the hell had come in now, he paused. Motherfucking Minerva had just walked into the place. Which meant that starting anything was probably suicide. Why the hell was she here? Had she known that he was about to rob the place? Was it coincidence?

Doing his best to not show how nervous he was, he resumed his trek to the counter and placed the beer down on it. He had his ID on him, and should have enough cash to buy the stuff. It hadn't been his plan, but at least he'd not grabbed the light beer instead. Besides, he was going to need to get drunk when he got home, so it wasn't like the beer would go to waste.

Colin Wallis - May 21, 2011

Colin sealed the last envelope in preparation for the meeting that he'd called for the remaining Wards and added it to the pile he'd been working on. Each of them was getting an overview of the direct and indirect effects of the settlement from the Youth Guard, including how to request access to tutors and the therapist. The latter could be done with or without their parents knowing, by their preference. In addition, they were getting basic information on why the examinations of their individual home lives were being carried out, but not how those examinations were being done. At Dragon's suggestion he'd also included a form they could fill out to request access to send Miss Biron messages, which would go through Ethan and Sherie.

Speaking of Miss Biron's new guardians, he had to finish assembling the envelopes that Ethan would be picking up before heading home today. One for him and Sherie, and one for Miss Biron. The former would cover details on scheduling things like Miss Biron's therapy sessions and the latter would cover things such as the financial payouts that were being made. Instructions for requesting access to a communication channel back to the remaining Wards had also been included, in case Miss Biron wanted to initiate things instead.

It was too bad that all of this preparation was unlikely to stop him from getting a large number of questions about things. He was well aware that even if the answers were in the paperwork in front of them that it was far too likely that they'd ask the questions anyway. In some cases it would be out of ignorance, not having taken the time to read things. Yet in others it would be out of an attempt to catch him in a contradiction, or to squeeze more information out of him.

He'd just drop things into mailboxes and be done with it, except for the fact that doing so would go against several regulations intended to ensure the health and safety of those involved. Regulations that he was personally insisting be followed in the wake of what had happened, especially those involving face to face meetings. Every time you met with someone in person you had a chance to spot signs of potential problems, after all.

With any luck, his social cue reader was up to the task of spotting the things that he knew he'd miss otherwise.

Amy Dallon - May 21, 2011

Amy blinked and looked up, wondering what the hell Taylor was up to now. And why was she up to it in that part of town instead of at home? Well, if she wasn't at home then perhaps she was outside. If she was then it wouldn't be long before someone was posting about what 'Minerva' was likely up to, and that was assuming that there wasn't already a thread dedicated to it on PHO.

It didn't take long to confirm that yes, there was a thread. Nobody posting in it was certain about what was happening, just that the police were involved and 'Minerva' was doing whatever the ball of light was from an easy chair. Oh, and Lilia had her own chair, properly sized for her. The unknown thing on the sidewalk was a mystery, the ball of light being assembled was a mystery, and the police were apparently working on cordoning off the area.

Amy sighed and went back to the small plant that she'd been working on. PHO wasn't likely to get answers anytime soon, after all, and she wasn't going to be going to find out in person. She really wanted to, but explaining why was a problem that she didn't feel like dealing with right now. Besides, she didn't have a good way to get there with Vicky not being home. So instead she continued her little experiment, to see if certain DNA sequences could be grafted into the plant to get it to form that phantom organ. Or perhaps one of its seeds would manifest one when grown? Carol would only be gone for so long and she needed to finish the prep work while nobody was likely to find out that she was doing this kind of thing anyway.

A few hours later, after lunch, she jerked as she was opening the bathroom door. Whatever Taylor had been doing had just vanished, though there was an echo of something below her feet. Far below. Shaking her head, Amy continued into the bathroom, but nearly jumped in surprise when the wave of energy passed through her not long afterwards. A familiar, if slower, wave of energy.

Assuming that was a scanning ability of some kind, why would Taylor need to scan the entire planet while working with the police department?

Thomas Calvert - May 21, 2011

Thomas wanted to growl, because a number of things appeared to be going wrong today. First he had a timeline unexpectedly collapse, which was annoying. Finding out that it was because Minerva had shown up had made him sigh, but being informed that she was working with the team that was going to ineffectually attempt to find Dinah with tracking dogs was where he started to mentally swear.

He had no clue what Minerva may or may not be able to do to find someone. It was possible that he had Dinah far enough away. It was also possible that he didn't, but moving her right now wasn't something he was prepared to do either way. Sadly, he was going to need to monitor the situation as best he could and be ready to bolt as soon as it looked like trouble was going to start. Without a safety timeline.

Still, there were things he could do to hopefully mitigate some of the potential damage. Distractions that he could prepare to draw attention away from him, various threats he could ensure were ready to be used as leverage, and in a worst case scenario he could trigger the self destruct of the base and hope that it took Minerva by surprise while he made his escape. And if it didn't take her by surprise, there would be enough secondary problems created by that to keep her and everyone else very busy while he prepared to vacate the area.

One thing he wasn't going to be stupid enough to do was take little Dinah with him. If whatever Minerva was doing could find the girl down here then he didn't hold out a lot of hope of it not being able to find her with him. At the same time, there were things that he could do to prepare that wouldn't tip his hand or be problematic if Minerva's trick couldn't find Dinah. The latter was, obviously, his preference, but he didn't exactly have any control over that aspect of things right now.

Whatever the case, the men that he'd been paying to keep parahumans from helping with the search were getting cut loose as soon as he could arrange it.

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Threadmarks Chapter 51 - May 21, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Apr 29, 2020

#9,255

Taylor had ended up providing detailed latitude, longitude, altitude, and another map describing Dinah's location. The latter was admittedly less detailed than Hive's version for Jared. She'd then sat in her chair planning with Hive for half an hour before the officer, or rather Captain Collins, had someone come get her. He'd ended up with three different cell phones sitting in his vehicle, all likely called in to different individuals. Or at least she hoped they were called into different people, though groups were also possible.

"Minerva," he said as she approached. "I've confirmed that the aborted Endbringer shelter under downtown is supposed to be sealed off and unoccupied and that the coordinates you provided are within it. You said that you can safely get people into the bunker that it's been turned into, but not get Miss Alcott out. Are you able to explain what the problem is?"

Taylor nodded. "She has a condition that means my methods of getting her out may be fatal to her. Of the two methods I have, one likely to be fatal, the other I think is safe but is completely untested at this time due to problems with testing things that could kill people. I'm not comfortable using either to get her out unless it's a last resort."

"Right. Do you think those issues would affect anyone else we want to get in there?"

"It's currently trivial for me to identify others with similar conditions on that front, but I suspect that the vast majority won't be affected."

"Okay. Finally, can those methods be used to get people in from elsewhere in the country, say from various field offices?"

Taylor nodded. "Provided that I have sufficient targeting information, which I can get if I send a sensor drone to those locations."

"Minerva," came from one of the cell phones, which were apparently on speaker. "Can you send groups into the bunker from anywhere, or do you have to get them to your location first?"

Looking at Captain Collins, he nodded. "We don't know why they want Miss Alcott, but she's been taken and hidden away. The phones are connected to different FBI offices, in part due to not trusting the conference call systems I have access to."

Taylor nodded as well, then turned towards the phones so that they could hear her better. "I can get them in from anywhere, though it'll be a little easier to manage multiple origin points if I drop transport devices at each location."

"Is that platform next to your easy chair in the pictures online such a device?"

"Yes."

"Do you have five available?"

"I do."

"I'll start getting coordinates together."

Captain Collins grinned. "Now, I don't suppose you have a map of the place?"

Hive floated in from behind Taylor. "I've been working on assembling one, including determining the fastest route out of the bunker."

"Great. Now all we need to do is determine the likelihood of there being parahumans down there."

Taylor frowned. "There's a costumed individual that's likely the leader present, but I don't know if there will be others or not."

"Fuck. I'll take care of the notifications," came from one of the other cell phones. "But we won't be asking for aid outside of Minerva and Lilia. Not enough time to go through the paperwork, and even if there was we're not sure where things are compromised."

"Agreed," Captain Collins said. "Even calling you this way is a potential leak."

"Given the information in the bunker's computers," Hive said. "Not interacting with the local police department offices is a good decision, but the PRT and Protectorate have apparently been cleaning up data taps and moles."

There was a moment of silence at that, before the person on the other end of the final cell phone spoke up. "Are you actively infiltrating the bunker's systems?'

"Yes."

"How?"

"I'm not sure how to describe the techniques in question due to their complexity and a lack of appropriate terminology available at this time. The short answer is probably closest to 'tinkertech'."

"You're tied to the internet boogeyman that's been able to bypass every protection known, aren't you? Don't answer that. If I tell you where a server farm is, can you start streaming the bunker's data to it?"

Hive nodded, not that the person on the phone could see that. "I believe that I can, yes."

"Right. Let me go boot one up."

This was rapidly becoming much more complicated than Taylor had expected, but she didn't think that it was going to make the day any better for those responsible for grabbing Dinah.

Missy grinned a little as she flew around over the water at the beach. The lack of boosters, and the corresponding extra acceleration, made learning the controls a lot easier. She was even figuring out how she'd need to adjust things when using the boosters, though only in a general sense. Getting used to them for actual high-speed action in the air was probably going to be a longer-term project, but at least she was getting an idea of the starting point.

"Sorry," Sherie interrupted after a bit. "But I think you need to come back."

"Why?" Missy asked.

"Something's going on and there's a chance that they could call me in."

"Oh. Give me a minute to head back to the transport device on the beach."

And there was part of the problem of needing supervision, even if it was remote, when practicing with whatever abilities you had. Sometimes your supervision didn't have time to supervise and you had to stop practicing. It didn't take long to land on the transport device and dismiss both the flight spell and the Knight Armor, and then a moment later she was back home.

"Sorry," Sherie said as she packed up the command station she'd been using. "The PRT got a notice about the FBI preparing to send teams into town. There should be several hours to a day or two before they arrive, depending on what offices they were stationed at, but Armsmaster put everyone on alert just in case."

Missy sighed. "Fun. Any idea what they're up to?"

"Nope, but whatever it is has to be targeting one of the gangs. They wouldn't have informed the PRT the way they did otherwise."

"Well that's going to cause problems."

Sherie shrugged. "So long as Taylor isn't their target then things will probably be okay. It'll be a few weeks before anyone is going to be willing to do anything big, if only out of fear that she'll show up. Which might be why the FBI is acting now."

"I guess that makes sense."

It'd taken three quarters of an hour to get everything in place, Taylor using the transport device she'd already set up to send the others to where they were wanted. All of which were in parking garages. On a similar note, they'd identified the primary vehicle entrance to the bunker and were planning on dropping vehicles at it for each of the teams being brought in. After they'd gotten started, of course.

Hive was going to be doing something to the camera feeds to hopefully make it look like nothing was going amiss, and had taken over the simulation system to do it with. Taylor had taken a peek and found that there was a fairly decent 'copy' of the bunker in said system right now. Maps based on that had been sent to each team to study and the plan for how to get Dinah out of the bunker was as ready as they were going to get without wasting time that could invalidate their knowledge.

Taylor had been asked to create a distraction by going after the parahuman that they believed was in charge. Ideally she'd capture them for later questioning, though they weren't sure what the parahuman's powers even were. Hopefully nothing that would make them unusually capable of helping to combat the teams that were going to be dropped into the bunker. Hive would be coordinating the transport of teams and their vehicles while Taylor was occupied as well as maintaining control over the bunker's systems.

Two combat drones were already in the base now, at the two entrances into the room that the parahuman was still in. Both were cloaked, ready to throw up shields over the entrances, and were working to saturate the room with prepared binding particles without being obvious about it. This was going a little slowly because there were physical obstacles in the way and they had to push the mana through them and into the room, but it was already at a decently high saturation regardless.

Taylor didn't see or hear it, but Hive got the signal for the first team to go and tripped the first transport device. That was obvious enough, since Taylor was still tapped into the surveillance device in the room Dinah was in as well as still monitoring her own sensor drones at each of the five remote sites. The girl was understandably shocked when the team suddenly appeared, and seemed to grab her head in pain before the second group appeared.

By the time the third group had arrived the first two had secured the room, taken the guards out, and forced their way through the door. In that order, and the guards were going to need body bags later. Taylor grimaced at that, but did her best to ignore it for now. Though she did note that throwing up in the simulation system didn't really help. Instead she allowed Hive to manage having the drone follow them through the bunker while she focused on the likely-leader. He hadn't noticed anything, and no alarms had been set off, likely because the alarm panels were all disabled and Hive was doing her thing with the cameras. Still, it was time to pop in, so Taylor double-checked her cloak before triggering the transport device she was standing on.

A moment later she was in the room with the man, who suddenly jerked back from his desk despite her not being in his direct line of sight. She just made a finger-gun at him, firing a homing binding trigger bullet at him. He didn't even attempt to dodge, and a moment later the room flashed brightly before he was covered in bindings. He could still breathe through his nose, but he was blindfolded and his mouth was covered.

"That's it?" Taylor said, looking at the now-bound man. "Huh. I didn't even need the cape. Well, who knows what else I'll run into." She then moved over to him, carefully, and stripped him of multiple security passes and two sets of keys that he'd had on his person.

"Lord," Hive sent a moment later. "I've informed the FBI that you've secured him and they'd like to send a team to your location to work on securing the systems from there. The wipe he'd tried to initiate has been stopped already and there are three remote locations that he was sending backups to before you arrived."

"Go for it," Taylor sent back, before grabbing the man and moving towards the door. She didn't feel like risking his life by opening a portal or likely outright killing him by using a dimensional transference, which meant meeting up with the others. If she was a little less than perfectly cautious with moving him then that was his problem, in her opinion. Still, she stopped at the door and waited the ten minutes it took for the team to arrive.

The flash of light revealed three people with guns ready, one of which immediately swiveled to point at her for a moment even as the other two said 'clear'. The third one nodded to her as they moved their gun off of her and repeated that. The four others with them then split up, one of them going for the still-active computers and two others unboxing equipment.

"Thank you for your assistance," the last one said. "Is that the one we suspect is the leader?"

Taylor nodded. "Yes. His security passes say he goes by 'Coil'. Not sure what his powers are, but I'm positive that he's a parahuman. My plan was to drag him out to the parking area so that he can be loaded into one of the vans that should...sorry, just arrived."

"Why not just teleport over?"

"There are complications preventing that."

"Huh. Okay then."

Taylor gestured to the corner of the desk. "Let me know if the keys and access cards there don't let you through anything, but I suspect that they'll cover literally every part of the place."

The one at the computer on the desk gave a thumbs-up, and Taylor decided that was good enough for now and opened the door to head out. It didn't take long to whip up a drag-handle and wheels attached to Coil's restraints either, as they hadn't been designed for pulling him along like that and she was likely to get very tired otherwise.

Sadly, the first door she came to after leaving his office was one that required a key to open from both sides. She thought that might be a code violation, but since when did villains care about their secret lairs being up to code? Still, she had to either unlock it or break it down to continue. Of course, she had her universal key, but as she was considering pulling it out she realized that there was another option. She cast two telekinesis spells at the door. One targeted the internal mechanism behind the lock and spun it to retract the latch while the other pulled the door itself open. That allowed her to pass through without slowing down, and she pulled the door shut behind her when she was through.

That process was repeated on the doors that weren't automated, and Hive was obviously opening the automated ones as Taylor approached them. Though the last few doors that weren't automated had been more forcibly opened, two of them were even torn off of their hinges. Presumably the teams that had come through with Dinah had been less than concerned about keeping the place intact compared to getting out as quickly as possible.

"Minerva!" a man that had been brought in with one of the vehicles from Boston called as she dragged Coil out of the vehicle entrance. "Bring him over here."

She dragged him over to the man, who had a collection of normal restraints laid out. "I take it you want to gradually switch over to your own restraints?"

"It would be appreciated."

It didn't take long to get Coil into the FBI's restraints and secured in the back of the van, during which the man's mask and gloves were removed as well. Apparently the FBI wasn't assuming that he had any powers that would make it difficult for them to keep him restrained and didn't care about keeping his secret identity secret. She didn't blame them on the latter, to be honest, and left them to it once she wasn't needed there.

"Lord," Hive sent a couple minutes later. "The FBI believes that they have things well in hand and believe that we can leave the rest of dealing with the bunker to them. They'd appreciate it if the transport devices and anything we've got in the bunker are removed now that they're hopefully not needed."

"Easy enough," Taylor replied, pulling the combat and surveillance drones that were still in the base out and into her room at home with the transport device in her bedroom. The devices ended up in their standby forms, piled up with the transport devices that had already been recalled by Hive. To finish most of that off she dismissed the sensor drones still at the various FBI offices. "Anything else they need or want from us before I leave them to it?"

"They've indicated that once they're done with the bunker that they'll be in touch. Otherwise, Captain Collins has passed along a request for you to swing by Brockton General later so that people can thank you."

"Okay. I'll swing by there to clean up what I left sitting around, then we can pop home for a few before heading back out."

Taylor moved out of the 'secured' area that the FBI had set up in the parking garage, then used a dimensional transference to get back to where the entire search had started. Once there she packed up the transport device, dismissed her easy chair that she'd left sitting there, and headed over to where Captain Collins still had his vehicle parked. The surveillance drones that were still in the area came to her as well, vanishing in flashes of light hidden by their stealth systems when they got close enough to be stored away.

"Ah," the man said when he saw Taylor approaching. "Thank you again Minerva. I'd hoped that you might be able to help find the two kids when you offered, but this was far more than I was expecting to happen."

Taylor nodded. "I can see that, given that I don't think any of us expected that a kidnapping had taken place."

"True. If we'd had any inkling of that having been done then the FBI would've already been involved. Still, thanks to you we were able to operate a lot faster than we would've been able to otherwise. As I relayed through Lilia here, you've been requested at Brockton General in an hour or two, if you have time. A few people want to thank you for your help today."

"Lilia told me, and I should have time. I just came to clean up my stuff here and pick her up for now. Unless she's still needed for something?'

"I've finished up," Hive replied. "Though I believe that I made the FBI nervous."

Captain Collins snorted. "Hijacking supposedly-isolated computer systems across long distances will make anyone maintaining any form of secure network nervous."

Well, when he put it that way it did sound concerning, didn't it?

Missy had realized that while magic had a tendency to generate visible flashes of light, undesirable when trying to not draw attention practicing, spatial manipulation didn't. Since that aspect of her abilities had been changed when it was built into Space there were things to re-learn about it, and she'd started practicing with it instead. In her room, where nothing odd should be visible through windows.

It hadn't taken long to determine the most important differences from a combat point of view. There was no strain to maintain a change, which was appreciated, but she needed more focus than before to map out the changes she wanted to make. When she made a change that affected an area's volume it was more obvious, because gases and liquids weren't automatically compensated for and would flow into or out of spaces. Though without the same level of headache-inducing visual effects, so that might be a wash? Living things were still a problem, but there was no 'gradual field' around them that kept the manipulations away. Now it was a hard stop point about an inch away, which was honestly a lot easier to deal with because she couldn't do things that close to someone before without all but touching them. Finally, Mana constructs created with the Knight Object spell were highly resistant to the manipulations, and if she pushed them too far they just disintegrated.

All of that meant that most of her previous tricks were still an option, and because it wasn't all tied to her actual brain she could use the multitasking interface to do multiple things at once where before she'd had to focus on one change at a time. Further, Space could automate some of it for her as well, further increasing the usefulness of things. An unlikely to be used example was smoothing out the road in front of her while on a bicycle, because if she was using Space openly then she was probably going to be flying, but it was possible.

Sadly, it was too bad that most of her incredibly useful tricks had been movement-related and were thus near-completely negated by being able to fly and teleport short distances. Sure, she could probably improve her flight speed a bit by compressing the area in front of her constantly, but she'd already checked and the storage and retrieval spell didn't actually care about warped physical space. It just used the 'real' distance due to how it functioned. The proper longer-range teleportation spell might be different there, but that could already go pretty much anywhere that she was likely to want to go and then some.

Taylor sighed as she re-cast her Knight Armor in preparation for going to Brockton General. She and Hive had headed home, only for her father to come up and question why she'd gone straight for the bathroom and attempted to eject her empty stomach. Hive had been the one to provide the relevant details of the FBI raid on Coil's bunker, including the lack of prisoners taken by the teams getting Dinah out.

Still, she'd mostly recovered from that for the time being, her father admitting that he'd not taken some of the results of gang violence any better when he was younger. It didn't mean that she was going to be looking to cause that kind of damage to people herself anytime soon, but she could accept that it wasn't her fault that the FBI had killed the few people they had in the bunker. After all, she wasn't responsible for the kidnapping in the first place. She just helped resolve it. Not that knowing that detail helped much when she now had a pretty good idea of what a brain ended up like due to a bullet going through the skull.

Taking a deep breath, she prepared the dimensional transference to near-ish the hospital, then triggered it once Hive floated over and landed on her shoulder. A moment later the two were in an alley a couple blocks away from the hospital, and Taylor started heading in that general direction. A number of people noticed them leaving the alley and pulled out cameras and other things, but she ignored them.

A few minutes later she reached the hospital. There were police and FBI vehicles there, and two news trucks had apparently just shown up and were unloading. Taylor made it inside before they had any cameras running, at least, though if the reporters had spotted her then they'd probably say that she'd just entered the building. Assuming, of course, that they weren't coming in right after her. It might depend on why they were here. Speculating on the police and FBI presence versus being told something of interest and all that.

"Hello Minerva," the receptionist greeted. "They're waiting for you in pediatrics, if you want to head over?"

Taylor blinked, then nodded. "That seems easy enough, thank you."

"You're welcome."

Pediatrics was one of the areas well-covered by the signage, and Taylor made her way through the hospital without issue. She raised an eyebrow slightly when she approached the doors to pediatrics and found that there were two guards. One police officer and one FBI agent, both of whom she recognized from earlier in the day. They both nodded, the FBI agent holding open the door for her and gesturing for her to go in.

"Thank you for your assistance earlier," the FBI agent said while the police officer was radioing that she was on her way in. "Though the transit itself was a little disorienting."

Taylor grinned a little at that. "It can take some getting used to."

"Indeed."

A moment later she was through the door. There was a nurse at the desk, telling someone that they weren't able to come up, who just pointed to Taylor's left. Shrugging, Taylor went down the hallway to that side, finding a second room with guards. This time just police officers, ones that Taylor didn't recognize but still waved her into the room. Once inside she could get a good non-sensor look at the four adults in the room. Or maybe three adults and one young man?

Outside of Dinah herself, the first one Taylor recognized in the group was Mayor Christner. She was initially confused as to why he'd be there, but then she noticed some similarities with the woman in the room and realized that there was likely a family relation here. The young man leaning against the wall looked like he was probably the mayor's son, and was a parahuman. Not in costume, though. The other two adults looked like they were probably Dinah's parents, both due to some appearance details and because they were sitting together right next to her bed. The father, Mister Alcott, had an atrophied core as well.

"Welcome Minerva," Mayor Christner said, walking over to her. "Thank you for coming, and for your assistance with saving my niece."

"It wasn't a problem, Mayor," Taylor replied. "Though I wish that I'd realized that there were still kids missing a little sooner."

"No need to be so formal, call me Roy." He then gestured to the young man. "This is my son Rory."

"Pleasure to meet you," Rory said.

Roy then gestured at the other three. "And then we have my sister Judith, her husband Grant, and my niece Dinah."

"Thank you very much for finding Dinah," Judith said, bowing slightly, before frowning as she looked at her daughter. "I just wish we knew why she was taken, or what was done to her to cause the migraines that she keeps getting."

Roy sighed, then looked between Taylor and Dinah. "You know, there was one thing that was let slip about the whole operation that made me think. Minerva here couldn't get Dinah out the easy way, nor could she get the likely-parahuman leader out the same way. What are the chances that Dinah is a parahuman?"

"One hundred percent," Dinah mumbled, causing everyone to turn and look at her. Rory then facepalmed.

"Honey," Grant said, patting Dinah on the shoulder. "You don't have to pretend to have powers."

"The unknown interaction between powers and our extraction techniques is why we couldn't use them," Hive interrupted. "There's a chance that even the safest of them could be fatal for parahumans."

There was a pause, before Judith sighed. "If she has powers, why do they only seem to give her migraines?"

"Because that's what thinker powers do," Rory answered. "Nobody knows why, but it's incredibly common."

Roy frowned. "Are you sure you..."

"Yeah," Rory interrupted. "They apparently knew that Dinah was a parahuman from across town. The chances of them not knowing that I'm one while in the room with me are basically nil as a result. And to be honest, if their extraction techniques are possibly fatal when applied to parahumans? I'm glad that they can detect them that easily."

Taylor thumbed over her shoulder towards the door. "I'd have thought that you might be more concerned about the officers standing right outside the door."

"They're trusted and in the know about my status, though obviously weren't aware of Dinah's until now. Not that any of us really were." He then pushed off of the wall and walked over to Dinah. "More importantly, though, is what she's doing to get the headaches."

Dinah groaned, looked up at her cousin, then pointed at Taylor before whispering. "She breaks everything just by existing. The pictures won't settle with her here."

"The pictures?"

"I can see what might happen in the future, but now I know that I can't see her. Could never properly see her. I think my power knows it can't see her and is trying to find a way around that. It can't ignore her anymore. But instead the pictures just started shattering as soon as I saw her. All of them."

Rory looked between Dinah and Taylor, before sighing. "I don't know why that surprises me, because it shouldn't. Power interactions are unpredictable at best, after all, and Minerva here hit the jackpot in a pile of other ways. Breaking thinkers, or maybe just precogs? Sure, why not. We'll have to see if the effect on Dinah's powers wears off after a day or two of Minerva not being around her. If it doesn't then we can start considering ways to deal with it, otherwise we'll just need to keep the two apart."

There was a moment of silence before Roy nodded. "Yes, that makes sense, and we can't exactly blame Minerva here for something likely entirely out of her control. On that front, Minerva, thank you again for the things that were in your control, such as helping find and rescue Dinah in the first place."

Taylor nodded, then cast her business card spell, in fast mode instead of showy mode, holding it out to the mayor. "No problem, and if you think my ability to search for people could be useful in the future then let me know."

Roy smiled as he took the card. "When word gets out about this success we might have to get in line. Though I'm curious, how far away would you have been able to find Dinah, assuming that she'd not been kept local?"

That had Taylor scratching the back of her head. "It wasn't that much harder, so I just went for it and scanned the planet for the two. Got some false positives on the genetic matching, admittedly..."

"Hold up," Rory said. "You scanned the entire planet to find them?"

"I didn't want to miss them if they were outside of town, and the complexity of the technique was identical for 'scan New England' versus 'scan the planet'. The latter just needed more power input."

Dinah and Hive were the only ones not staring at Taylor at that point. Even the officers at the door had poked their heads in to stare.

It would be another hour before Taylor could leave, after she'd swung by to be thanked by the Fry family. Jared had been sent into surgery to deal with his leg, but his parents Perry and Dorothy had thanked her profusely for locating him. Apparently the apartment building he'd been in had cut phone lines, making it impossible to call out, and the other residents hadn't been willing to let someone know what was going on when the old man in the top floor apartment had asked them to.

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Threadmarks Chapter 52 - May 22, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

May 6, 2020

#9,538

Sunday morning Taylor woke up earlier than usual. She'd not done much the previous evening, both because she wasn't sure if she would be called to provide more help with anything that the police or FBI were doing and because she just wanted to relax a bit. Though she had gotten some whining from Missy regarding an inability to practice while the Protectorate was 'on alert' in case of calls from the FBI.

Overnight Taylor had focused on ideas for dismantling spells, having come to the realization that being able to forcibly dispel something that Missy had cast could be important. At the same time, coming up with ways to prevent that from being used against them could also be important, even if they didn't have much in the way of good examples right now. Hive had participated in that, providing details on what they already knew disrupted mana in general and ideas on how to do so in more targeted ways.

So far they had four different ideas for how to go about things, though they all needed work before they could be tested. They already knew that some dimensional effects could disrupt mana, so testing that more completely to see if they could do it safely over a defined area was an option, even if the original version of things was momentary. A second option was to see if they could take advantage of a 'resonant frequency' in mana to have it vibrate apart, assuming that they could find such a frequency.

Then there were the more directed methods. The first was to scan, identify, and create an exact counterspell for an effect. Literally undoing the spell with another spell, though it was likely to be difficult. Finally, Hive had the idea of applying the nanotech disassembly system to mana, creating a spell that literally latched onto and tore apart other spells that weren't on a 'permitted' list. Or perhaps didn't have a permitted magical signature, they hadn't fully figured out what might be possible yet.

Research plans and specialized testing was going to be needed to figure all of that out, including working with Missy in order to do some proper scans of spells that didn't automatically let you do so because they had your own magical signature in the mana. Which was something else that had come up, leading to the question of if it would be possible to change that signature somehow. Primarily because Taylor and Hive had essentially identical signatures by most measures and training might work better if the drones charged by them could have different ones.

The plan for today was to send some testing drones to places that they didn't care a whole lot about to work on some of what they could test directly, namely running through various possible mana frequencies and possibly-useful dimensional effects. Hive was going to need to come up with a way to make the 'mana-dismantling' spell components before they could test anything along those lines. While all of that was happening far away from home, Taylor would be out shopping with her father. At least for the morning, later there was a chance of training. With Missy or otherwise.

Still, before any of that was a trip to the bathroom, and probably a glass of water.

Today the beaches had been a little wetter than desired for exercise. Instead Hive had recommended an alternate location, which had led to them jogging along a glacier. Missy didn't know if she should be impressed that she didn't mind the obviously-freezing temperatures with the Knight Armor up or annoyed because of the somewhat-fresh snow cover that was annoying to jog in. Taylor and her father were having similar issues with the snow, except that it was barely slowing them down by comparison. Damn them and their longer legs.

They'd finished up, left a transport device on the glacier for easier targeting later, and then Taylor and Hive had used said device to send testing drones to other places in pairs. Other Earths, corresponding instances of Mars, and who knows where else. This was, apparently, an extension of plans that they'd already come up with earlier, with Taylor in particular deciding to deploy all thirty-six of her drones in order to work on 'other tasks' in addition to whatever their primary goal was. Missy hadn't asked, but had made note to play with a couple of her testing drones at some point.

With that done they'd headed back to their homes for breakfast.

"Okay," Ethan said once they'd finished eating. "We have a couple of things to go over. Scheduling for therapist visits, details on bank accounts, and whatever else has been crammed into the envelopes I picked up. Oh, and I'm assuming that at least a couple of the Wards are going to fill out the forms they were given for more direct ways to contact you, so we're going to need to know how you want to handle that."

Missy blinked, then nodded. "Okay. What envelopes?"

Sherie hit the back of Ethan's head, then left the room for a moment. She came back with three envelopes. One was thrown into Ethan's face, a second was slid over to Missy, and the third she held onto. "We have a general idea of what's in these, but didn't have specifics."

They all opened their envelopes, which had been sealed, and pulled the paperwork inside of them out. Missy's also had a debit card included, stuck to a sheet of paper that told her the current PIN and how to change it. That was put aside for the moment, in favor of reading the letter addressed to her. It covered a lot of things that had been 'settled' with the Youth Guard, the concessions and payouts, and assured her that those still in the Wards wouldn't be mistreated by the system the way she had. The latter was worded to imply that her sacrifice had done good.

Rolling her eyes, she moved on to the next item, which was detailed information on scheduling therapy sessions. It all looked fairly straightforward, so she shrugged and moved on to the bank balance sheets. That had her blinking.

"Bit more than you thought?" Ethan asked.

Missy nodded. "Yeah. How the hell did someone swing this?"

"I imagine that part of it was a concession for not blaming the Youth Guard's corruption and incompetence when announcing that 'Vista' was dead. Though at least they accepted us shooting down the suggestions of having you and Miss Hess attend some therapy sessions together due to both of you having lost your powers."

That had Missy shuddering. "No way in hell."

Sherie nodded. "Yeah, that was our expectation of things too. Aside from that detail, we do need to decide on when you'll be visiting the therapist, at least for a bit. Even if you don't have the issues that they think you might."

Missy grumbled a bit, but figured that it was probably okay. She just hoped that she didn't have to lose a bunch of weekend time to it.

Taylor found the experience of running thirty-six testing drones remotely to be interesting. She had one multitasking instance controlling each drone, split between five projects in pairs. Four pairs were working on testing dimensional effects, splitting the task with Hive who had four pairs of her own working on that. Similarly, they both had four pairs of drones testing for resonant frequencies. Hive had opted to focus on just those two, but Taylor had decided to work on other things as well. She had five pairs working on testing variations of anchoring spells to objects, including attempting to make a version of 'unfold object' that could sit on the object until triggered. Then there were three pairs working on variations of 'trigger one of these spells based on outside conditions', mostly trying to reconcile things such as data packets that might come from multiple paths. Finally, there were two pairs working on rigging beams to apply an intentional spell effect when they hit things instead of just causing general damage to the area.

"We'll want to do the groceries last," her father said as they got into his car. "I figure that we should swing by the hardware store first, then pick up the office supplies on the way to the grocery store."

Taylor shrugged. "Whatever, though I don't know what we need at the hardware store."

"A couple of replacement light switches and a couple of wall outlets for my room, probably a couple of spares each just in case we need them elsewhere too. I also want to grab a lamp kit and some lightbulbs."

"Oh. Okay."

"I also think that they were having a sale on wall-mounted first aid kits, and if so we will want to pick up a couple. One for home and one to get reimbursed for at the office to replace the one that rusted off of the wall on Wednesday."

Ah. That made a little more sense, and would help explain some of why she hadn't known that they needed to pick things up. It wasn't like her room had issues, or their home first aid kit had rusted away. Actually, she should probably check her room at some point, since she wasn't using the light as often as she used to. Her switch might be on the verge of failure as well and she just didn't realize it due to how little she paid attention to it.

Missy sighed as they prepared to leave to do some shopping. They'd decided to start using the calendar hanging in the hall to keep track of things, only to find that it was two years out of date. It also didn't really support writing things down due to how it had been designed, which would've made it hard to use for tracking appointments. So they needed to find one that would work for that, to be followed by putting all of Missy's appointments on it to ensure that they all knew when she had to be somewhere other than school.

Not that she needed the calendar for things she'd been informed of, since Space was perfectly capable of keeping track of appointments and other things for her, but Ethan and Sherie couldn't access Space's internal storage. Of course, that was the flipside of her not having access to their work calendars, where they'd been keeping track of things. Official access, anyway, since there was a general suspicion that Hive would be able to arrange for that access. They weren't planning on asking for the time being, if only because there were apparently enough data security problems being panicked over there. Thus, checking the physical calendar each morning would probably be a good idea, assuming that the two adults remembered to put things down on it that would be important. Like their work schedules, so Missy might have a clue who was supposed to be around on any given day.

It wasn't long after they'd finally left, having been delayed by Ethan spending twenty minutes looking for his wallet only to find that it was in his pocket, that it became obvious that something else was going on as well, given the number of people gathering on some of the streets.

"What's going on?" Missy wondered as she looked out the car window.

"No clue," Sherie admitted. "I don't recall there being anything about something like this on the news this morning."

Whatever it was, it drew their attention, but didn't stop them from reaching their first choice of stores. They'd parked and gone to head inside, only to be stopped at the door. The owner was there, and apologized for not being able to let them in while the sprinkler system was damaged. She volunteered to fetch what they wanted instead, only to have to tell them that calendars were in the part of the store that the broken sprinkler system had soaked. Some candy that Sherie liked that was only carried in this particular store was available though, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Attempting to leave the parking lot in order to head to the larger office supply store instead turned out to be a problem. Honking their horn didn't help, and eventually the two adults got out of the car to see what the hell was going on.

"That is ridiculous," Ethan said as he got back into the car, pulling his mobile phone out as he did so.

"What is?" Missy asked.

"An unofficial parade of sorts for Minerva," Sherie replied. "One that I very much doubt is sanctioned for essentially closing down this part of town, especially as there aren't any police officers helping them direct traffic away from their chosen route."

"Oh. Can they do that?"

"Not if I have anything to say about it," Ethan grumbled.

Taylor had been surprised at how complete the wall mounted first aid kits were. She'd actually gotten curious and asked an employee if they knew why they were on sale, only to be told that they weren't selling thanks to a combination of the mounting plate not meeting some standard and one of the medicines containing something that some people couldn't safely eat. Despite being a burn cream that you shouldn't be eating anyway.

Given how cheap they were, she bought one herself, meaning that they ended up getting three in total. And after they'd made it back to the car she considered just how many first aid supplies she already had and idly wondered if she was ever going to use any of them. Then again, it was better to have too much instead of not enough on that front, right? Besides, if they ended up spending any time at all in the structure that Hive was working on in that inlet then they'd probably want the entire extra kit left there anyway.

They'd also ended up getting eight different outlets, two of them ground fault variants, as well as six different light switches that looked very similar but were for wiring circuits in varying ways. Which seemed a little excessive to Taylor, as she didn't think that they had any of those other ways of wiring circuits, but her father might be considering adding one. He also grabbed four circuit breaker inserts, two each in fifteen and twenty amps.

Leaving the hardware store had ended up requiring that they use the rear entrance to the parking lot, where delivery trucks would normally come in, due to some commotion that they didn't investigate on the street. Similarly, they ended up using the delivery driveway to get into the parking lot at the office supply store. They got their supplies easily enough there, then headed back out. Sadly, it wasn't nearly as easy to get to the grocery store, and they ended up looping around a very long way to accomplish that. But at least they'd been able to do so without needing to use a delivery entrance to that parking lot.

Whatever was going on outside had drawn people away from the grocery store, so they were able to shop in peace. Though Taylor was amused when her father grumbled about it being a perfect day for haggling, except that they weren't in the right kind of store for it and he wasn't in the mood to visit the open-air market. Though the latter might be in part because they'd have to get back around whatever was going on to get there, coupled with most of the groceries they were buying not really being available at the market. Like the collection of sweets that Hive had gently prodded Taylor into grabbing.

It was as they were pulling out of the parking lot that Taylor flinched, getting her father's attention.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

Taylor sighed. "I made a mistake and used the wrong equation."

"Okay..."

"Things exploded a little more than anticipated."

He raised an eyebrow, but apparently decided that this wasn't the place to talk about it, instead focusing on traffic.

"Lord," Hive sent a moment later. "It would appear that there are now several pieces of planet where one of the planets you were testing on used to be."

"Yes," Taylor replied. "As I said, they exploded more than anticipated."

"I thought that you were testing with a spell to unfold an object on demand there. Those don't tend to be explosive in nature."

"Er, they apparently become much, much more so when you hold them in the air with the telekinesis spell first. The unfolding process causes the telekinesis anchoring to twist into the anchoring that causes matter to become antimatter, and apparently if you unfold matter and then turn it into antimatter it doesn't explode right away. Instead I think it absorbed and converted any other matter it came into contact with into more antimatter..."

There was a pause while Hive considered that. "Lord, what did you use as your test object?"

"A three-ish gram pebble."

"How did that result in that much of an explosion? It shouldn't have come in contact with that much atmosphere."

"When the telekinesis spell was changed by the unfolding it stopped holding the pebble up, so it fell."

That led to another pause. "Lord, I think that's going to have to go into the 'never, ever do this' list."

Taylor considered that for a moment, before frowning. "Will doing that stop the combat drones from firing a projectile?"

"It shouldn't. Why?"

"Because it seems like the kind of thing that might be useful against Ziz. At least if fighting in orbit."

"Ah. Hmmm. That would change the threat vs reward calculations significantly, I'll run some simulations to ensure that the projectile can be fired safely after doing that to it."

"Thank you."

It didn't take them long to get back home and bring in the shopping, at which point a complete set of circuit breakers, switches, and outlets was piled up on the counter. One of each variant that they'd purchased today. Taylor looked at it for a moment, then at her father. "Why pile that set up here?"

He rolled his eyes. "So that Hive can examine them all to ensure that she knows how it all works."

"Oh." That did make a lot of sense, now that it'd been brought up. "So were the supposed problems with your room just a ruse?"

"No, I'm having problems with a couple of things. They were just inspiration for getting more than I needed so that Hive would have proper examples to pull apart."

"Thank you," Hive said as the pile vanished in a flash of light.

"You're welcome. Now, what is it that you had issues with earlier?"

Taylor blushed a little. "I accidentally came up with a possible anti-Endbringer weapon, but don't think it can be used in an atmosphere."

"Oh. How bad?"

"Hive no longer has a monopoly on triggering the destruction of alternate versions of Mars."

"My Lord could be said to have outdone me," Hive added. "As her attempt actually generated an explosion that broke the planet into pieces compared to merely rendering the planet unstable or causing it to cease to have ever existed."

Danny blinked at that. "What?"

Missy sighed as they finally made it back home. Without a calendar, one would need to be picked up tomorrow. The police had tried to break up the 'parade', only for it to turn into a riot, which created its own problems. It'd taken far too long to clear that, and there was no desire remaining to visit the office supply store. Instead they'd stopped to eat a late lunch and come home, which meant that she could finally see if Taylor was available for some training. The older girl had vanished from Bet earlier, so Missy had to fire up the communication system in Space to check on her.

"Hey Missy," Taylor answered essentially immediately. "What's up?"

"Hi Taylor," Missy replied. "I was hoping to get some training in so that today wouldn't be a complete waste of time."

"Ah. Well, I'm training at the beach. Or rather, over the ocean, to be technical. Feel free to join me, probably a good idea to get some dodging practice in."

Missy wasn't sure what dodging practice meant in this case, but honestly didn't care. Training was training, right? "I'll be over as soon as I let Ethan and Sherie know where I'm going."

Five minutes later Missy appeared on the transport device at the beach, and could somewhat tell that Taylor was off in the distance over the ocean. Knight Armor and the flight spell were cast, then she took off to join Taylor. Only to find that she'd not even gotten all the way there before she had to dodge a couple of bullets and a stray beam.

"What the hell?" Missy asked nobody in particular as she got closer to where Taylor was. It was becoming very obvious now that there were a lot more mana signatures than just Taylor's as well. Most of them were attacks flying about, though some were obviously the drones firing at Taylor.

It didn't take much longer to realize that Taylor wasn't stopping her training session to let Missy approach, and that's when the 'dodging practice' comment properly sank in. None of the attacks were aimed at Missy, but if she wanted to get to where Taylor was then she was going to have to wade through all the misfires that weren't hitting the older girl. Oh, and probably start considering learning to snap-cast shields to the best of her ability.

Missy would be annoyed by this, if it wasn't infinitely better than any training that she'd ever gotten as a Ward. The PRT's definition of situational awareness for Wards seemed to stop at 'identifying when to retreat'. Which was far too soon for her, of course. Not to mention that she was under the impression that every other Ward agreed with her on that front, because most of the time it was stupid. Though she hadn't been stupid enough to disagree with the general order to retreat when the Merchants had a rocket launcher last year, given how little her Vista costume would've protected her from a lucky hit.

Five minutes in to carefully approaching Taylor, Missy was hit for the first time. A beam struck her foot when she didn't get it out of the way in time, and her barriers flared for a moment. Shortly after that a bullet got her in the side, the shield she'd cast coming up just after the bullet passed where it formed. Three more bullets and another beam got her before she got her shield into the path of a stray attack for the first time, only for her foot to be hit again because the shield didn't cover enough space.

Spotting Taylor using the blink trick, Missy grumbled to herself and prepared a couple of them while she got a break due to a gap in the attacks that had made it past Taylor. The first one worked wonderfully, getting her out of the way of a couple of beams, while she screwed up with the second and dropped herself into the path of a bullet. One that didn't explode to cause damage, but instead caused a large area around her to light up and converge on her. A moment later she was bound up tightly. Four more bullets hit her as she struggled a bit, one of them taking out a binding. In a desperation move, she tried blinking out of the binding and found that it worked.

Two more blink spells were prepared just in case, in addition to a nearly-cast Hex Shield, before she tried to close on Taylor again. Sadly, the closer she got the more hits she took, even if she felt that she was getting better at dodging. Her barriers weren't doing exceptionally well, and she was starting to get tired, but she was determined to not give up. Unfortunately for that determination, the decision wasn't entirely in her hands.

"Requesting Dimensional Transference," Space said suddenly, distracting Missy and causing her to miss dodging a bullet. A moment later she found herself back on the transport device on the beach itself.

"What the hell?" Missy asked.

"Safety directives require that participating in training exercises halt before lasting harm would be caused," Space answered. "Your energy reserves dropped below acceptable levels and your barriers stopped recovering as a result."

"Wait, you're programmed to get me out of training when it stops being safe for me?"

"Of course."

"Fucking hell. How am I supposed to find my limits if I'm pulled out before I reach them?"

There was a momentary pause before the flight spell cut out, causing Missy to stumble and fall over. That had her landing hard, which was apparently enough to finish off half of her barriers in a flash of light. The physical form of the Knight Armor remained, slightly damaged in several places, but that was more of a hindrance than anything else as she found that she was too exhausted to move with it active.

"By only pulling you out when you've essentially reached them, Lord," Space replied a moment later. "Would you like me to have the transport device return us to your home?"

Missy didn't get to answer before Taylor appeared next to her in a flash of light. The older girl looked Missy over, then sighed. "I thought that the safety margin was supposed to be a bit wider than this? You and Hive both assured me that she'd be pulled out before she was in danger of her barriers dropping like this."

"My Lord took an extra hit once the safety margins were reached but before she could be extracted," Space explained. "Maintaining the flight spell to aid holding the weight of her armor drained the last of her reserves, and falling over was enough to finish overloading the barely-functional barriers."

Taylor nodded. "Oh. Perhaps the margins should be increased a little more, we'll have to check with Hive on that."

"Oh come on," Missy said from where she was still laying on the ground. "Why didn't anyone tell me that I didn't have admin rights on my own device?"

"No, you have admin rights, but at the software level. Hive has them at the hardware level so that Space can be safely tweaked and upgraded over time. It's technically experimental, you know."

"Stop mitigating my annoyance with logical and reasonable facts."

"Whatever. You should drop the Knight Armor and head home. Eat something, maybe take a nap?"

Missy really wanted to object to that plan, except that she knew that objecting wouldn't do any good. Especially since she literally couldn't get up on her own right now.

Taylor and Hive had collected the testing drones before returning home, having had mixed success. On the good front, Taylor had figured out her 'unfold on demand' spell, a working version of anchoring said spell and others to an object's center of mass, and even the details for properly passing data packets through multiple 'spell paths'. Sadly, they hadn't located anything that seemed like a resonant frequency for mana, and the dimensional effects that caused problems for mana were entirely indiscriminate and too hard to keep to a reasonable range. In fact, if Hive's calculations were correct, then the trick that woman had used that had disrupted things would probably need to be at 'affects the entire planet at once' levels to actually shut down a spell.

That might've been worth it, for emergencies at least, if 'affects the entire planet at once' wasn't also past the 'safe' level for not creating tears in the dimensional fabric of the world.

They still had a number of dimensional tricks to attempt, things that Hive couldn't make mana do but could build physical devices to accomplish, so they weren't entirely done on that front. In fact, Hive felt that this was probably the key to using any of the dimensional effects at all, because if mana could maintain them then it would be momentary before the mana was canceled out and stopped powering the effect. Thus, a non-mana method was needed to maintain the dimensional effects for any non-trivial length of time.

The last item that she'd been working on was the 'make beams do something when they hit' experimentation, which hadn't gone well when it came to getting results. At the same time, Taylor had figured out part of what needed to happen by examining the existing beams. For some reason, the 'explode' payload automatically formed a repeating lattice effect when it got released as a beam. None of the other payloads did, so the key was likely to make payloads that were able to form their own repeating lattices that triggered their effects when the lattice was disrupted. Which was, to be honest, much easier said than done.

Taylor had decided to focus on the last issue for the evening, in order to come up with a generic repeating lattice 'wrapper' to allow beams to carry other payloads. Preferably one that detected that the thing it was wrapping didn't need it and canceled itself out in those cases, if only to keep things simpler during casting. Or perhaps she just needed a 'test' spell and then two variants of a beam, one with the wrapper and one without, with the user having to ensure that they picked the correct one?

She'd come up with something once she'd figured out how to properly assemble a wrapping lattice equation, if only because without that component the rest didn't really matter as much and she'd instead be working on making latticable payload spells. If it did come to that then her work on trying to make a generic lattice wrapper would hopefully help, though that would imply that she'd failed so perhaps it would only be in a 'what not to do' fashion.

Luckily, at least for her own sanity, she could use the spatial manipulation awareness system while working on things. Otherwise dealing with figuring out how to build a lattice that manifested in sixteen different dimensions would be much, much harder for her to wrap her head around properly. Not that it wasn't going to be problematic even with that active, admittedly, but at least with it she could better wrap her head around the shape being constructed.

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Threadmarks Chapter 53 - May 23, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

May 13, 2020

#9,733

Monday morning started nice and early for Taylor, by virtue of her physical self waking up after a nightmare. One that was probably related to the men that the FBI had blown through a couple days ago, but that she wasn't in the mood to try and analyse. Instead she grumbled to herself about being up too early before making sure that she had everything she needed ready for heading to tutoring. That included making lunch and throwing some snacks into her bag, since she was going to be staying after to use the computer lab.

As for her overnight work, her generic lattice wrapper wasn't fully functional yet in simulation. Not for lack of trying or progress, though. She'd forgotten to ensure that the first version could even hold a payload, resulting in a beam that did nothing but look impressive and then leave a bunch of loose mana at the impact point. She kept it anyway, just for show. For the second version she'd forgotten to include a way for impact to trigger the payload, which meant a more complicated beam that did the same thing as the first version did. The third had seemed like it was working great, until it hit a maximum distance of eight meters in simulation before the lattice members started going off without an impact. She wasn't sure if that was because the individual lattice members were setting each other off, and thus there was a trigger sensitivity issue, or if they were degrading to the point of being set off. More work would be needed later to figure that out.

Once her bag was ready and she'd grabbed a small snack she dropped down onto the couch and turned on the news. She hadn't been expecting anything of significant interest, but after the weather report they moved into covering the aftermath of a failed unofficial parade for Minerva. Which had Taylor blinking, even as the news went through the timeline of events. Apparently the crowds the day before had been part of it, and when the police tried to shut things down it had turned into a riot.

"The great one must be honored?" Taylor said, shaking her head. "Great. I've apparently spawned a cult or something."

Missy was annoyed with herself. She'd not been able to keep up with the morning exercise because she'd not recovered from trying to make it through the remnants of Taylor's training the day before. When she'd whined about that earlier, after having to change from Knight Armor to just Knight Clothing, Taylor had pointed out that she needed to be more alert and train up her reflexes so that she could dodge better, coupled with a point that using the flight spell properly shouldn't be putting that much strain on Missy's muscles while dodging as the flight spell should take the brunt of it.

Without the demonstration of how useful the insane dodging and awareness skills could be from Taylor driving off Leviathan it wouldn't be worth the effort. With that demonstration, though? It made the effort seem that much more worth it. Because who didn't want to be able to hold their own against an Endbringer in part by never being where it was trying to hit you in combat? Besides, getting to that level would hopefully mean that the next one wouldn't get away, because Taylor would have backup.

Sadly, even 'might be able to help kill an Endbringer' wasn't good enough motivation to overcome the physical issues associated with the training of the previous day. Luckily she shouldn't have any significant problems at school, though future 'extreme training sessions' were going to have to happen when there wasn't something like school happening the following day. Just in case a full day was needed to recover, because she was lucky that she was as functional as she was right now.

Taylor had been bored all morning, half wishing that she'd sent off some testing drones before tutoring. But she still felt that she should pay attention instead of working on other things, especially as she was getting one on one lessons. Her conscience, not wanting to disrespect the tutors, was holding her progress on magic back. Oh well. There wasn't really a lot that she could do about it.

She relaxed while eating her lunch, idly wondering what the two Boardwalk Enforcers that she'd noticed being arrested half an hour previous had done. She didn't think that she'd had any real interaction with that particular pair, though, so it probably wasn't all that important. Just a curiosity at this point in time. Though perhaps she should instead start thinking about her programming project, since she'd be getting started on it before going home? Especially since it was going to require a little more planning if she wanted to get the bonus points for using the three-dimensional toolset, which meant that she was going to have to do a little more than just plot out circles, especially if she included Pluto's off-plane orbit. Actually, that orbit was squashed too, wasn't it? Would she get points taken off for not showing that it wasn't as circular as the others, even if she was only doing so in two dimensional output?

Grumbling a little, she dug through her bag to find the assignment sheet, since she wanted to make sure that she wasn't forgetting anything important about what she needed to do versus what was optional.

Missy sighed as she entered the house after school. She'd half forgotten about gym, but had made it through fine anyway. Even better, she'd somehow escaped additional homework, and could relax for the afternoon instead of working on it. Well, for 'study more magic' definitions of 'relax', anyway. Who knew that trying to figure out horribly complicated math would mean that she'd ace the pop quiz in math class, thus becoming one of the three people who didn't get homework assigned?

Ethan and Sherie weren't around at the moment, though that should be changing shortly. Ethan, specifically, was supposed to be here and had probably gotten slightly delayed. She didn't care that much, and instead grabbed a snack before dropping down onto the couch. It took a moment to locate the remote, mainly because she'd not yet internalized which remote was which, after which she turned on the television. It was on a local news station, currently talking about the weather, and she figured that was good enough before she fired up Space's multitasking system.

It was just after Ethan arrived a quarter of an hour later that the news flipped back around to the 'starting point' for the afternoon loop, which was apparently covering a press conference earlier in the day. That got Missy's attention, and Ethan had stopped in the doorway to watch as well. Mayor Christner started by thanking Minerva for locating the last two missing children, stating that young Mister Fry was recovering from injuries and that his niece had been taken for 'nefarious purposes'. That had gotten a reaction out of the reporters, and the Mayor continued, thanking Minerva again, as well as the FBI and BBPD, for each of their parts in the rescue of his niece and the capture of the parahuman villain responsible.

Apparently many of the villain's people had been working for the PRT, Protectorate, BBPD, BBFD, City Hall, and a number of other locations but had been rounded up the previous day and into that morning. In addition to the normals, several parahumans working for the villain 'under various forms of coercion' had been approached by the FBI once they'd learned of the measures that the villain had gone to in order to secure their services. Those measures apparently included interfering in a number of investigations, manufacturing or covering up evidence, and even outright threats to kill one of them.

That segment of the press conference had ended with a statement that they couldn't go after all of the villain's men, though they'd be keeping an eye on those that were infiltrating the other gangs in the city. That was followed by an FBI spokesperson stepping up and stating that they were unable to trust all of the information in the villain's computers, and as such they wouldn't be using it to go after the other gangs in the city. So far only the items that they could directly tie to outside paper trails elsewhere were being used as evidence and they didn't see that changing.

It was as they moved away from that segment that Missy realized that they'd never said the villain's name. "Huh, I wonder who they were."

"Who?" Ethan asked.

Missy gestured at the television, which had switched to talking about the parade-turned-riot from yesterday. "The villain that they didn't name."

"Oh, him. He went by Coil, was playing PRT consultant and a bunch of other nasty stuff. Rumor has it that he was responsible for some of the people who went after Taylor, but the FBI hasn't shared a lot of information on that front. I'm honestly surprised that they were willing to admit to things today, instead of in a couple of weeks."

"Huh."

"Now then, shouldn't you be doing homework?"

Missy rolled her eyes. "To my own surprise, I don't have any tonight."

"Oh. Okay then." He then turned away, only to stop and turn back around. "By the way, the PRT wants to subject you to a therapy session on Saturday, off of the insane money clock as it's more of a mental health check than anything else. This is separate from the Youth Guard paid sessions. Do you have any objections?"

That had her blinking for a moment, before she shrugged. "Might as well, if only to hopefully keep them from worrying too much about me."

"Then I'll let them know, at least assuming Sherie has no objections when she comes home."

Taylor had made it home not long before her father did, having finished the non-programming assignment that she needed the computers for before doing a decent amount of work on the programming assignment. She didn't have any of the output or calculations done yet, admittedly, but she had an editor for the base data files. Well, the largely-text data files, images or models for the three-dimensional toolkit were just going to be picked from the filesystem.

Collecting and preparing the images and possible models for things was going to be more complicated, admittedly. Nothing had been provided, and the 'samples' website for the three-dimensional toolkit didn't include planets. So she might need to try her hand at assembling textures for spheres from other data if she didn't find any other good source instead. Actually, she'd probably take a bad source at this point, if only because it had to be a better starting point than working from scratch. Maybe she'd ask her tutor tomorrow as well, since nothing in the course covered making three-dimensional models?

Whatever she ended up doing, for now it was time to figure out what to do about dinner, and her father entered the kitchen while she was staring into the fridge.

"You don't look like you've been home long," he commented.

"I haven't," she agreed. "Also, we appear to have not taken anything out for dinner."

"That would be because I was planning on stopping by the store on my way home for some ground beef, only to have forgotten because the PRT distracted me with questions about the coming weekend."

Taylor blinked at that, and looked over at him. "Questions?"

"A combination of testing details and a change in plans that they'd like to take advantage of. The latter would be that they suddenly have a therapist available off-schedule and would like you to spend some time with them, though that would be off the payment clock."

"How can they 'suddenly' have a therapist available?"

"One of the parahuman asylums was attacked this morning, causing damage to the building that makes it unsafe for therapy sessions with those there. So what was supposed to be a two week stint there turned into a half-day stint there and the therapist in question is going to be coming to Brockton Bay to help with the 'catch-up' here, in part because they're supposed to be one of the better ones. The PRT said that they'd pay for the session, and made a couple of decent arguments for you attending. Ensuring that your necklace and the experiments done in trying to remove it aren't negatively affecting you, looking for obvious signs of problems from the other incidents surrounding it, that kind of thing."

"Ah. I suppose that wouldn't be horrible, but won't it be taking away from the time that they'd be able to work with the Wards themselves?"

"I suspect that the Wards are going to be doing a PR event of some kind on Saturday, so no. Do you have any objections to attending a single session?"

Taylor gave it some thought, then shrugged. "Not really. Though at the moment I'm more interested in what we're going to do about dinner."

"Let's grab the takeout menus and see what we want."

Missy grinned as she placed three 'storage form' testing drones down on the rug in the hallway. She had some thoughts on repurposing things that were probably best left to not testing in person, and figured that learning how these drones worked would be a good thing as well. A moment later the three vanished, setting up and connecting back to her as they did so. There was an obvious delay, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Finding suitable test objects was a different matter, of course, and she used three multitasking instances to spread them out to start searching. It was already obvious to her that she wasn't going to enjoy using drones normally, they were too 'hands-off' for her liking after how often she'd been instructed to 'stay at a safe distance' in the Wards, but for testing they shouldn't be a problem.

While searching for suitable test materials, she sat down to eat dinner. It was a quiet meal, partially because Sherie wasn't there and Ethan was reading a new policy manual of some kind. It was a basic printout and she hadn't asked for any details, but he seemed to be interested enough in it. Or perhaps he felt it was important enough to take seriously? Whatever the reason, he wasn't chatty as they ate reheated leftovers.

It took almost ten minutes, and most of her meal being consumed, before she found a suitable rock to test with. Grinning a little, she remotely opened up the testing checklist. Spell and targeting information to go into those slots, supplementary data loaded into the databank, sensor drones cast... which she didn't have the equations for. Fuck. Would the drone error out if she didn't have those tied in before telling it to cast? Except that she couldn't just send it the equations anyway, so how was she supposed to...

Oooh. The drone had the equations, in multiple variants. Grinning more, she nabbed a copy of those right out of the drone for later examination. Once she'd done that she then told it to cast three sensor drones, spreading them around the rock. Nodding slightly to herself, she then got a 'baseline' scan of the area before telling the drone to cast the spell. The drone ran through the equations, fed in the additional data, and the spell hit the rock. It cycled through several times before hitting a failsafe and canceled itself out. Instead of doing what she'd hoped and giving the rock a long braided ponytail.

Frowning, Missy dug into the notes on the spell and how it worked, eventually realizing that it couldn't be used on the rock because the rock didn't have skin. The spell actually preferred hair follicles to already be there, if not actual hair, but it located the skin first. It then tried to determine where physical structures in the head were, though that was based on the template and could be easily adjusted for other parts of the body. For example, giving someone armpit-braids or something. The template she'd used, once it found skin, would then orient itself based on eye sockets and ear canals. Which the rock didn't have.

"Apparently I can't test hairstyling spells on rocks," Missy finally said, getting Ethan's attention.

"Why are you trying to test hairstyling spells on rocks?" he asked after a moment.

"I figured it was the ultimate test for if they'd work on someone who didn't have hair. Turns out that skin is a prerequisite of the base spell equation."

"Oh. Huh. I can see how you would need skin to anchor hair to, I just hadn't thought about it that way before now. Anchoring any deeper would be very, very bad for the target. I find myself suddenly happy that it doesn't work on rocks, because that means that it has some decent safeties built in."

Missy nodded. "Yeah. But that means that it might need a bald person to test to see if it works or not."

"Well, good luck finding a volunteer, because I'm not doing anything to go bald just to be a test subject."

That evening Taylor ended up splitting her focus between her lattice wrapper and messages that she'd been ignoring due to them being filtered into other folders for her. There were far too many recruitment requests, both wanting her to join others and others wanting to join her, but those were dwarfed by the interview requests that were still flowing in. It seemed like everyone who thought that they might possibly have the potential to be associated with someone of questionable importance wanted to use that as a justification to ask to interview her.

Generally speaking, the interview and recruitment messages were going to be ignored, if only because she had no desire to need to spend most of her free time dealing with them. Mostly she was just ensuring that she knew the basics in case someone came out and asked her about a given message. Or rather, she was ensuring that she wouldn't be fibbing if she said that she'd read whatever message the person might be talking about, because there was no way that she'd actually remember every last one of these messages individually.

In addition to those two categories of message were a small selection of others. Some were just thank you messages, others were 'tips' about others that she might want to go after aside from the Endbringers, and a few were screaming at her for being a freak of some kind or for harming Leviathan. This was, of course, in addition to the automated junk that any email address that ended up online got.

As for her lattice wrapper, she discovered that her beams compressed slightly, at least in simulation, hitting their final diameter at eleven meters. It was the added pressure from that compression that was setting her generic lattice wrapper off. The explosive effect was more resilient to the compression due to its simplicity, so she just needed to build in a little bit of a bumper zone in the generic version. That would reduce the density of the effect, of course, but that shouldn't be a problem. Not when the wrapper was part of the overall energy input, anyway. Getting the bumper zone to work correctly without disrupting the trigger condition otherwise had taken the most time, and she ended up with making the lattice members able to 'slot into' each other.

At least in simulation, that actually resulted in the beam compressing down faster, getting down to fully compressed in only seven meters. Some tests with curved beams showed that it increased the minimum turning radius while making the path more stable than it was with the pure explosive variant. Some tests would be needed along that front, because at least in simulation a beam crossing itself wasn't doing the noose-down thing that the explosive lattice apparently did. Instead it just triggered on itself at that point, but that was better than taking out the caster by accident. Homing beams might have to go back on the research list, though only with the lattice wrapper.

Tuesday morning started suddenly for Missy, due to Ethan yelling in pain waking her up. It turned out that he'd slammed his pinky toe into the edge of the bathroom door, which had done an incredible job of waking him up. It had also woken Sherie and Missy up, of course, and Sherie ended up needing to help him bandage his foot. That a Protectorate hero had been taken out for a day or two by a bathroom door was oddly amusing to Missy, but she knew how much that kind of thing could hurt as well.

On the other hand, Missy was feeling much better this morning than she had been the previous one. It taking that long to recover made her more determined to improve her dodging, except that it was going to be the weekend before she got a chance to try. Friday after school wasn't even an option because of the Saturday plans, probably pushing any further significant exercise like that all the way out to Sunday. Luckily it was a long weekend coming up and thus she didn't have to worry about school on Monday.

They ended up doing the morning run at the beach despite the rain there, because it was also incredibly windy and Danny had decided that 'adverse weather conditions' were a good thing every so often. Which bit him the most, as his belt didn't provide anywhere near the protection of the Knight Armor. He at least acknowledged that it was probably a mistake to join them in those conditions, given that Taylor had trained in a hurricane before.

It was a reasonably calm day at tutoring for Taylor, though that was probably because she didn't go out for lunch. Another attempt at a demonstration to draw out Minerva had happened, this time on the Boardwalk, only for it to turn into a fight when some internal disagreement in the crowd had turned violent. Despite that, she'd been given a good data pack when she'd asked about one for her project, containing plenty of models and textures for the planets and moons. Well, 'known planets and moons', with some grumbling that astronomy had all but come to a halt thanks to parahumans.

Taylor wasn't sure what the comment about skipping out on stupidity in changing definitions like Aleph did was referring to, but the tone of the grumbling coupled with it likely not being intended for her to hear it had convinced her to not ask. She might try to look up more information along those lines later, though only if she was already checking something similar enough to trigger her memory of maybe caring.

A request that she not leave the building for the time being had come through shortly before the end of her day. Luckily for her, she'd already been planning on sticking around to continue working on her coding.

Missy had grumbled a bit when heading home, given that she didn't have a lot of homework to do but had to play nice for the water meter replacement. Because despite Ethan's injury that morning they hadn't gotten it rescheduled to earlier in the day. Then again, she wasn't sure what she would be doing even if she was allowed to play with magic, given that Taylor wasn't available. Well, there was the sensor drone spell, wasn't that able to be cast to other dimensions?

Maybe she'd be playing with magic after all, if she could get through her homework fast enough.

As soon as she got home she sat down with her homework. She had to read a chapter or two in a book for English and complete a handful of word problems for Science. Easy enough on both counts, and she'd worry about the essay that wasn't due until next week later. There was a potential need to get a book from the school or public library for it anyway, and she wasn't planning on doing that until tomorrow at the earliest.

Sadly, she was just finishing up her homework when the water department's van pulled up. Another five minutes and she'd have been able to cast a sensor drone or two, but it apparently wasn't to be. At least not until after the water meter was replaced, unless she decided that she was willing to risk casting spells while a stranger was in the house. Sighing, she cleaned up her school materials and got a small snack out before turning on the television.

Ethan popped his head in to remind her that the water would be turned off while the meter was replaced, so if she needed to now would be a good time to use the toilet. Which, admittedly, hadn't occurred to her, so she did that and then returned to the living room. That was followed by almost an hour of splitting her attention between the television and the water meter replacement.

She found it interesting when they carefully made a path for a wire to get to the outside of the house for a little antenna block, which was needed for being able to read the meter without coming in. That it was powered by a single battery that would last years was interesting as well, but not that interesting and she'd not have known about it if it hadn't been asked about by Ethan as they came back in. The testing to ensure that things were working properly was mildly annoying, more so when it didn't work at first because they'd not turned the water back on in both places that it'd been turned off at.

When all was said and done, and the water was back on, the old water meter and tools were loaded back into the water department van and some additional 'in case something goes wrong' documentation was provided to Ethan. As soon as the van was gone he went back down to the basement, moved a few things around, and then came back upstairs. Missy ignored him and headed up to her room to cast a sensor drone, confirming that it was safe with Space as she did so.

It took her three attempts to get the casting correct, at which point she flinched and found herself with a sudden headache. The full drone was nowhere near as easily handled as the partial system tied to the anchor around her core, or the one in her storage pocket. It was able to detect far more than she could normally, and was doing so twelve times over. Running even one had her unable to function, and she knew that Taylor would cast a handful at a time.

The full multitasking system was, quite obviously, absolute bullshit. Almost to the point where Missy was willing to risk some of the problems that Taylor had adapting to it just for the chance of getting access to something like it. Admittedly, there was no guarantee that it would work for anyone other than Taylor, and could instead just result in permanent brain damage or something, but it was tempting.

Dismissing the one drone took a few attempts, but it definitely helped with the sudden headache. Using those was going to require a lot of practice to figure out how to use them without incapacitating herself, if it was even possible for her to do so. Perhaps the other variant would be easier? She looked over the differences while waiting for her headache to subside more, and it looked like this one didn't have the 'do this twelve times' dance. So perhaps it only generated one sensor component? She might be able to handle a single one.

Ten minutes later she tried casting that version, only needing two attempts this time, and found that it was still far too much information. At the same time, she could handle it reasonably well with a multitasking instance, so it was a good way to practice. Perhaps casting additional ones until she could handle twelve while still functional, then practice with the full drone again? Though she was probably going to find casting individual single-sensor drones to be more useful for her own purposes.

Tentatively, she cast the single-sensor drone a second time, pushing the feed from it into another multitasking instance. She'd leave it at that for now, sending the two drones in different directions on the other version of Earth. If she could get it so that each multitasking instance could handle two or three drones then she'd be golden, but even running two while doing other things would be incredibly useful.

To that end, she grabbed the book they were reading for English and headed back downstairs. She found Ethan going through a binder of paperwork for whatever reason. She left him to that, instead sitting down in the living room and flipping a couple of chapters back to re-read them in case they came up in discussion in class.

An hour later Sherie arrived home, heading downstairs to see the new water meter before coming back up.

"So how is it that I'm the one that removed the battery from the obvious monitoring device stuck to the floor joists?" she asked as she dropped a battery pack on the counter.

"Meh," Ethan said, waving her off. "I pulled the antenna off right after the guy left, but didn't want to get out a screwdriver to pry it off of the joist."

"Oh. I guess the battery being on top made it harder for you to spot without standing on something that would've made me yell at you with your injured toe?"

"Probably, yes."

"Space has been jamming the nuclear battery powered monitoring device that uses some kind of omnidirectional broadcast wave since the man left earlier," Missy said. "Still is, actually, so my assumption is that the antenna and battery were decoys to lull us into a false sense of security."

Both adults looked in Missy's general direction for a moment, then sighed in unison. Sherie grabbed a screwdriver and headed back downstairs, returning a couple minutes later with the monitoring device. Putting it down on the table, slightly lopsided due to her having pulled some wood off of the beam with it, she glared at it.

"So," Ethan said. "What do we do with it if we can't turn it off?"

"We could send it to another Earth," Missy replied. "Or just have Space take it apart for raw materials. Or maybe have Hive come over to see if she can figure out where the receiver is? Space doesn't know where to begin there, or if it's even possible to find out."

"As tempting as that is," Sherie said, grabbing a bag. "Given our Protectorate membership, this should really be turned in properly. Especially as we don't know who was the target for the monitoring attempt."

Last edited: May 13, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 54 - May 24, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

May 20, 2020

#9,860

Taylor relaxed in front of the television with her father that evening, going over various things that needed testing in the real world as well as other things that Hive had been working on. Specifically there was Hive's final analysis of making drones able to fire unwrapped antimatter projectiles. On one hand there weren't any changes needed to the drones to make it work, but on the other hand based on their expectations it wasn't likely to do much more than a normal unwrapped projectile if one was fired at an Endbringer.

The end result was that it would be a lot more dangerous for everything other than the Endbringer, on average, by virtue of leaving a mass of antimatter around that hasn't interacted with enough matter to be consumed. Sure, she could probably try and use drones to 'catch' the projectiles that missed, but that wasn't going to make fighting Ziz any easier. Thus it was likely much better to stick to more normal projectiles. Well, for certain definitions of 'normal' that the world at large probably disagreed with.

There were two possible exceptions to the problem. One was if the unfolding collapsed inside of the Endbringer, wherein it would now be antimatter reacting with matter inside of the Endbringer. Difficult to pull off, especially if the Endbringer was moving. The other was more theoretical, and Hive wanted to test it to see what happened, but it was possible that firing matter and antimatter unfolded projectiles at each other would result in an explosion when they met. So lining up two drones to fire such that their projectiles would intersect could be a viable option, pending testing.

Currently the plan was to drop a few testing drones in other dimensions in the morning and let Hive run through the real-world tests while Taylor was at her tutoring. That was going to be in addition to Hive running through some of the dimensional effects that had required building devices due to mana not being able to generate them properly. Hopefully at least a couple of them were safe and mana couldn't generate them because the effect immediately disrupted the mana instead of them being hazardous to everything. Hive was also hoping to have the first prototype of 'mana constructs that dismantle other mana constructs' ready by morning. Though this first test was apparently aiming to find out if Hive had been successful in making them identify only things other than each other as targets to attack so that the system wouldn't tear itself apart.

Taylor was distracted from preparing a few more things in simulation by the phone ringing, more specifically her Minerva phone. It was only a thought before she had another instance running to answer the call.

"Minerva speaking," she greeted.

"Good evening Minerva," the man on the other end replied. "I'm Jake Rivers, calling on behalf of the PRT. There are some documents that we need you to swing by to sign in regards to the shell company that we're setting up, as well as some items that have been forwarded to you via the PRT. Would you happen to have time to swing by on Thursday or Friday to take care of things?"

Ah, right. She'd been expecting that. Though not things forwarded through the PRT, admittedly. Still, she shouldn't have any significant problems with swinging by on Thursday, since if she wasn't done with her programming project then she'd just work on it next week. It wasn't due until the third anyway. "I should be able to swing by on Thursday afternoon."

"Great. Do let us know if things change, but otherwise we'll have things ready for you."

Wednesday morning started early, with Taylor having spent most of the night split between randomly slapping together equation bits in a small corner of the simulation interface and tweaking the editor she had for her objects list on her programming project. Sure, she probably should've done the latter in the computer lab instead of in the multitasking interface, but it wasn't like her tutors would know that she'd done anything at home. Even if they did, the code and data files themselves were plain text, so she could've edited them just fine even without the graphical tools and compilers.

The random equation bits had been the more interesting, even if she'd kept it to a dull roar while Hive used a significantly larger portion of the simulation interface for her own work. Most of the random equations had failed to do anything of interest at all, but a handful had done things. How useful they would be was also debatable. One of them had seemingly just made the mana black, though if additional elements could 'set' the color then that might be useful. Another had created an odd effect, seemingly manifesting a molecule that looked like buckminsterfullerene, but wasn't made of carbon atoms and had what might've been an electron cloud around it. A third had felt like it was generating a field of some kind, and she wasn't sure what it would do. The last on the list of things to test in the real world had just spun a lot.

All four would be tested by Hive while Taylor was in tutoring, along with everything else on the testing list. Hopefully some of the tests would go well, though for a couple of their projects Hive had come up with the idea of seeing if Taylor could get mana to do what they wanted without equations. If so then hopefully they could work backwards from there to make equations, or at least find out that equations couldn't generate the effects like unfolding mana constructs had ended up being. That would probably not be this afternoon, given that there was still work that needed to be done on the programming project.

Missy frowned as she arrived at school. Taylor was planning on staying after tutoring to work on a project, and thus wouldn't be available to work with her. Which was annoying, but hard to argue against. The world had survived all this time without Missy being trained up to join Taylor in combat, after all, so dealing with school assignments had to take priority. Worse, Sherie had shot down her getting any of the attack spells right now, wanting her to focus on defense and mobility first. That would be more annoying if it didn't make sense, because being able to not be hit was more important than hitting others when it came to survival.

Shaking her head, she put that out of her mind for now. Unknown to Ethan and Sherie, but possibly known to Taylor, she had three sensor drones running around on other planets. Two were on other versions of Earth and one she'd gotten close enough to another Venus to get the drone down to the planet. That she'd landed that drone ahead of the planet had likely helped there. There wasn't anything interesting to be seen after the first five minutes from any of the drones, but keeping them going at the same time that she was in school was training her ability to split her attention.

Hopefully she wouldn't find herself needing to dismiss one or more of the sensor drones during the day, but she had that option if the split in her attention proved to be too great.

Taylor frowned as tutors swapped out. It felt like something had happened, and she was almost positive that Hive was doing less all of a sudden. "Did something happen?"

"Yes, Lord," Hive responded. "That equation combination that made an unusual molecule took far more energy than originally anticipated. I was curious as to the final result, and fed it sufficient mana through some matter conversion, only for the molecule formed to prove to be hazardous."

"How hazardous?"

"It tore a hole in the dimensional fabric, triggering a localized dimensional quake. I can't be positive, but it likely obliterated the local star system while rendering travel through that region of space in that dimension impossible for a few hundred years."

Taylor blinked at that. That didn't sound good at all. "How much energy did it take to make the molecule?

"I had to convert six kilograms of sand to energy to create a single instance."

"Okay then. We definitely need to put that in the blacklist."

"Already done, Lord."

Taylor resisted the urge to nod, given that the next tutor had just come in. "So, how are the other tests going?"

"I'm still working my way through the dimensional effect generators, since I'm examining the area for signs of damage to the dimensional fabric each time. The lattice wrapper worked fine, and I've built that into a homing beam as well. Turn speed is limited, of course, but that's somewhat expected. I haven't fully determined what's going on with the black mana effect, but it isn't a color change. The element that you saw as spinning in simulation is actually reacting like a magnet when in a magnetic field, which is interesting and lends itself to easy creation of a compass. As for the one that generated an energy field in simulation, it doesn't appear to function in reality. I think it might be tripping a debugging routine in the simulation system instead."

"I suppose that makes some sense."

"Okay Miss Hebert," her tutor said, getting her attention. "Let's get started for the day."

Missy sat down with her lunch at the end of a table, next to the wall, having arrived before Dinah and Jared and not in the mood to stand around until one or both had sat down. Both had apparently returned today, Jared with a cast and Dinah looking perfectly healthy. It was also obvious that a large number of people were hoping to get the scoop from one or the other, given how many were standing around waiting instead of sitting down to eat.

A couple minutes later she was surprised when Dinah sat down across from her, a mad scramble starting among others in the room to get at the couple of seats next to them.

"Hello," Dinah greeted, looking Missy over. "How are you today?"

"I'm fine," Missy replied, raising an eyebrow. "What brings you to me today?"

The other girl rolled her eyes as a couple of others successfully claimed the seats next to her and Missy. "You're next to a wall, which means less people can sit down to pester me. That and I wanted to talk to you, since you've been someone conclusively proven to not be Vista now and all that. I'd have been willing to bet that you were, so I obviously misjudged you quite a bit."

"Ah. And here you are, having just come away from being held hostage. They didn't really clarify a whole lot about how much interaction you had with Minerva when you were being rescued, though."

"I had more interaction with her when my parents and uncle thanked her at the hospital, but I was still recovering."

"That's understandable."

It didn't take long for it to become obvious that Dinah was ignoring any questions posed to her by someone who wasn't Missy. Though if that was just to spite the pushy people that wanted to ask questions about her ordeal or because there was something else going on was harder to determine. At the very least, by the end of lunch Missy wasn't sure if she understood anything about Dinah's motivations.

Taylor actually took some time to check on the news when tutoring ended, because she wasn't sure what was going on outside today. It didn't take long to find out that there were groups running around again, apparently split three ways as far as the news could tell. The two largest were those that wanted to hunt Minerva down and those that wanted to praise and/or worship her, with quite a bit of fighting breaking out between them. Then there was one group that wanted to interrogate her for some reason, that one being smaller and more focused.

She might need to make an appearance in-costume beyond showing up at the PRT building tomorrow, just to see how many of the people were actually looking to attack her in some way. It was something to check with her father on, at least. But not today, because she had more work to do on her programming project and a couple of other assignments to bash out quickly. Perhaps she'd end up patrolling on Friday?

Getting into her work, she kept an eye on the news to see if anyone figured out why the group wanting to interrogate her wanted to do so, or at least what they were hoping to find out. Though she'd also like to know how they intended to keep her from leaving, since it didn't look like they had made any provisions for keeping someone contained long enough to interrogate them. Especially someone who could fly and teleport, the latter making most containment measures impossible unless you had a way to stop the teleporting.

A couple hours later she had no more information on what the goal was for the 'interrogate Minerva' group, but she'd made decent progress on her project. Specifically, she'd converted the example 'explore a static three-dimensional world' into a 'explore a static representation of the solar system at a single point'. She'd even made it so that you could change the starting point by changing the date and time, but you had to do that before loading the three-dimensional viewer. Or leave the viewer, change it, and go back in. Animating and changing parameters while in the interface would hopefully not take too long to get working.

She ensured that all of her files were saved to her removable media, and that Hive had a copy as well, before packing up and preparing to head home. A slight detour would be needed, based on where she thought some of the altercations had cropped up, but it wouldn't delay her too much on her way home.

Missy had been happy with her day training herself to deal with sensor drones, though she'd started to notice that the longer she kept them going the more noticeable the drain on her core was. Not because it was increasing or anything, but because she could feel the constant flow of mana to each drone. It had been interesting, well within her recovery ability to keep up with, and yet had also noticeably increased her appetite. Really, had it not taken more mana than keeping up her barriers did then she'd not have noticed at all, but now she was considering ways to 'push' herself to drain her core more to see if she could train it up some or not.

Regardless of thoughts about doing that, she'd dropped the drones before dinner, wanting to be able to mentally relax a bit more after keeping the drones going all day. It turned out that had been a very good idea, given that after the dishes were cleared away just after dinner Ethan pulled out a large envelope.

"So Missy," he said, handing her the envelope. "Yesterday the PRT collected a bunch of letters to you from the Wards, as well as compiled requests for contact information other than passing letters to be passed along. Sherie and I don't mind allowing the Wards to call you, but figured that you should review the requests yourself first. Pass along any of the ones you approve of and we'll take care of our end."

Missy absently nodded as she took the envelope and stared at it for a moment. She hadn't given the other Wards wanting to contact her a whole lot of thought, since she wasn't a Ward anymore and all that, but it did make some sense. For that matter, had she really barely thought about Dean at all since she approached Taylor? Wow. Now, the question there was why she'd all but dropped her crush on him. Was it a lack of seeing him? Knowledge that she no longer had any common ground to share with him? Or had her powers been pushing her to be with him?

Well, one of those she might be able to get an answer for.

"Hey Space," she sent. "Do you know if my shard device that you were built from was pushing me to do anything like, say, chase Dean?"

There was a pause, and a quick pulse of communication to elsewhere, before Space responded. "Hive tells me that it was pushing you to engage in conflict with others, something that all Shard-type devices she's worked with have done. She doesn't know the specifics, but believes that it's possible that you were pushed to 'compete' for another's affections if it was believed that the attempt or success would result in more conflict."

And that made parahuman powers all that more scary, because that sounded like they all mastered the people who had them as a default action. A light mastering perhaps, but the idea of her thoughts being messed with even that much was disconcerting. She didn't know if there was any way to make that particular detail known in a safe manner, assuming there was a safe way to tell the world that it was likely that every parahuman was being mastered at least a little. It did make her happy that she wasn't one anymore, at least not by traditional definitions.

Shivering slightly, she opened the envelope and found that there were some sheets of paper and a handful of smaller envelopes. The visible sheet had an obvious PRT letterhead and made it likely that those were the requests for being allowed to more directly contact her, so she focused on the smaller envelopes instead. Each of them had her name written on it, and she could tell which was which based on the handwriting alone. She decided to start with Dean's, opening it up and extracting a handwritten letter.

It took a minute to read it, some of it being that it looked like his pen had been trying to die on him as he wrote the thing, but it expressed concern over her and apologized for any trouble she might've had land on her lap for using his family's apartment without the knowledge of either of her parents. There was also an undercurrent of something that she wasn't fully certain about. It then went into some details about what her 'incident' had changed in the Wards, for the better and for the worse. That she didn't have a problem with part of the 'worse' being 'less time to go out with Vicky, since they had proper training and therapy sessions on top of everything else' was another interesting data point in her mind.

She put his letter back in the envelope and went for what she expected would be the opposite end of the spectrum with Dennis's. She opened his up, finding that it was typed out. Good choice, given his normally horrible handwriting. After all, she'd identified it as his based on her name being nearly unreadable on the envelope. Also, as expected, he cracked a joke right away, causing her to smirk, only to then defy expectations by then being serious. Apologizing for 'not seeing any of the signs' and describing a lot of the same things that Dean had when it came to changes that had happened. Though he ranted a bit about the local Youth Guard having been idiots as well.

Shaking her head, she moved on to Chris's letter. He'd also typed his, and he said that he wouldn't cover the changes because he fully expected one of the others to do so. Instead he apologized for not having gotten a working design for a gun for her completed before 'things went down'. Apparently he'd had the idea to build everyone else on the team something during their extended lack of patrolling, but hadn't wanted to say anything to her and the others until it was at least approved. He'd also included a coupon for half off an ice cream at a place on the Boardwalk.

Putting the coupon aside, she moved on to Carlos's letter. His was handwritten, but worded a bit more formally as the current Wards Leader. He apologized for any failures on his end, and asked that if there were any that she let him know so that he could work on fixing them. Armsmaster apparently felt that the blame lay further up, and Carlos described a little more about what had been going on from that point of view. He was also the first person to let her know that they were going to be doing a memorial thing for 'Vista' on Saturday as part of the larger PR event and asked if she was happy with a few specific details about things being mentioned.

Sighing, she pulled the other papers out of the envelope and confirmed that they were basically four copies of the same thing, one for each of the Wards. None of it was actually to do something official in the system, just to request that Ethan and Sherie permit more direct communication with Missy. Though that did bring up a question or two, actually.

"So," she said, looking up at the two adults. Both of whom had just been watching her. "I assume that you two have control over my phone's whitelist now?"

"Technically we don't," Sherie said. "In that when it was switched over to our plan we didn't bother with one. We didn't want to pay the extra two dollars a month for the capability. Though we are going to have to see about getting a new email address that isn't tied to school for you, since we don't have the same internet provider that your father was using and thus can't transfer your address to our account."

"He'd set it up so that everything had to go through his account before I could see it anyway. Meant that I did basically nothing with it."

Ethan raised an eyebrow. "Okay then, I'm curious what you were doing for a personal email account in that case. Because I can't see you using your school one for everything?"

Missy rolled her eyes at that. "There are at least two dozen free email services that ask zero questions, and when I joined the Wards the packets I got included a list of the ones that were known to be trustworthy, fronts for villainous thinkers, or were known to be run by villains even if they didn't seem to be taking advantage of things at the time. It was obviously intended as a warning about the services, but it was a handy list and I signed up for all of the trustworthy ones."

Sherie frowned. "Then why didn't the other Wards have one of those email addresses to contact you with?"

"Because three days after I gave one of them to Triumph while he was Wards Leader the account was closed due to my age and I didn't want to lose the others for the same reason. He swore that he hadn't reported it, but he did have it in his contact list for me, so I assumed that someone was monitoring things."

"We'll get you set up with a proper one," Ethan said after a moment. "It shouldn't take more than half an hour, provided that I remember our account management credentials. Have you gotten your email and phone number stuff from Taylor yet?"

That had Missy blinking. "Er, no. Hadn't thought that she'd give me any, actually."

"I'd ask her."

Taylor looked at her father oddly after they'd had dinner. He'd asked her to hold up, then grabbed something from the bag he'd brought to work. It was only as he approached her with a box and an envelope that she started to truly wonder what was going on.

"The PRT swung by and dropped these off with me earlier," he explained, holding both the box and the envelope out to her. "They explained a few things to me, and assured me that things were legitimate."

Raising an eyebrow, Taylor took the box and the envelope. Normally she'd probably open the envelope first, but the information she was getting from her sensor had her far too curious about the contents of the box. It wasn't like it was wrapped or anything either, and she carefully opened it up. Inside was a flute, a very familiar flute, and she carefully lifted it out of the box to examine it. In particular, she looked for and found the partially-worn surface engraving, Annette in cursive with a small imperfection from where something else had been sanded off.

"How?" Taylor asked, tears in her eyes as she held her mother's flute.

Her father gestured to the envelope that she hadn't even realized that she'd dropped. "I believe that the letter explains things. At the very least you should read it before I say anything more."

It took a moment to carefully place the flute back in the box and the box onto the table before she reached down and picked up the letter. It didn't have any writing on the outside, and she absently noted that it both wasn't sealed and had signs of people having removed the letter multiple times already. Carefully extracting the letter, she found that it was neatly handwritten on lined paper.

Taylor,

My actions don't deserve forgiveness, but I'd like to offer an explanation of sorts. I'm not sure what you know about parahumans, but I've come to realize that at least my powers had pushed me to an extreme. Now that I don't have them pushing me, I've found that I can think a little more clearly. Even so, there's an echo of what I'd been, what I was pushed to becoming, that will likely never truly fade. Regardless of that influence, I fear that my actions were still largely my own and would like to apologize. Very few people deserve even a tenth of what we did to you, even fewer would've been able to put up with it without snapping in some way. Apologies like this are probably shallow, but I'm sorry for what we did to you.

Still, that doesn't fully explain why I'm writing this. Everyone has their secrets, and early on I ended up with several items that I couldn't pawn. Criminals occasionally steal from each other, and I didn't want to take the fall for things that I'd stolen from a druggie that had stolen them from another. Rather than ditch the items in a sensible manner, I kept them hidden, fearful that they'd be able to be traced back to me. Eventually I even found a safe place to keep them, and in doing so I started to see them as trophies. Trash that I couldn't get rid of became signs that I was better than those who had lost the items in the first place.

Sadly, that led to me looking for more trophies once I started going out to fight the gangs. After all, I hadn't been fighting when I'd gotten my first trophies, the ones I got from combat would be even better. From there things got more twisted in my mind, and I started wanting items from anyone that I bested. Especially those that I felt that I'd bested frequently.

Which brings us to the other reason for this letter. I've revealed the hidden location of my trophy room and asked that several items be returned to those they were taken from. This will generally be done without fanfare for most. However, I felt that you deserved more than that.

Maybe it's because of how focused we became on you, or perhaps I needed to vent some guilt. Everyone has things hidden in them, some just never get a chance to examine themselves to see them.

-Sophia Hess

Taylor read the letter four times, blinking as she did so, before finally looking up at her father. "What the hell?"

He sighed. "She was, in her own way, just as screwed over by things as you were. When she lost her powers it resulted in her realizing just how badly they'd affected her. Over the weekend she wrote that letter, plus I'm told a couple of others, and asked that the PRT collect the trophies and return them to those that they'd been taken from. I didn't get informed about the others, just that they found everything exactly as the girl described and some of it was a surprise."

"Really?"

"I'd think that your mother's flute would be incredibly good evidence that this isn't a trick, though the carrying case wasn't found with it."

Taylor looked back down at the flute. "They left that in my locker, and it honestly wasn't in the best condition anyway. I think I might have crammed it in the attic somewhere, but I'm sure that I can do better now anyway. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Hive can help me do better, and I'm probably going to keep it in my storage space to keep it close to me going forward. I don't want to lose it again."

He nodded, a sad smile on his face. "I understand. The other thing that you should probably know about all of this is that this swing in Hess's attitude has them considering that she may very well have not been entirely in her right mind. At the very least, her defense lawyer is likely to use it as evidence to get any and all of her sentences reduced, though some of that was going to happen when she was depowered anyway. She stopped warranting the higher security cells that they had been keeping her in, for example."

"I guess that makes some sense." She then looked down at the letter. "Though having something in her own handwriting, admitting that she was wrong? I might want to frame it. This letter has to be one of the rarest things in existence."

He snorted. "Except for the other couple that she wrote alongside it?"

Right he'd said something about that. "The others weren't addressed to me."

"Okay, I guess I can give you that one. Still, if you think it's that rare then perhaps you should put it into a safe location instead of in a picture frame. I doubt that's archival quality paper or anything, after all."

That had her raising an eyebrow. "What would you know about archival quality paper?"

"You do realize how many blueprints, contracts, and other documentation the Dockworkers and related unions keep around, right? A few years ago we had problems with a bunch of it and transferring copies onto proper paper for longer term storage was all that got talked about for months." That evening started with Taylor reluctantly reviewing Hive's final findings from the day. The creation of mana constructs to tear apart other mana had ended up in a 'good enough to move on' state, which meant working on making them able to attack the bonds between other bits of mana. Though there was also a desire to make it so that specific signatures could be targeted or excluded, with Hive expecting that to be limited to at most three individual signatures in either direction.

On the dimensional effects front, Hive had run through every dimensional axis available, including the negative dimensional axes, and had even used combinations where possible. On a mildly concerning front, nine different individual dimensional axes known primarily to the shard-type devices had momentary disruption effects on mana, but only really affected delicate constructs. The permanent multitasking instance connection sadly qualified there, and Hive had started to look into ways to keep it from being negatively affected by something like that going forward. At the same time, it appeared that each just, for lack of a better term, 'surprised' the mana and only seemed to work once every forty-two minutes or so.

More usefully, 'tumbling' the eleventh and thirty-first dimensional axes together around the twenty-first caused problems with mana. There were three 'levels' of effect that Hive had noted, depending on how you tumbled things. At the lowest level, linked mana naturally 'shielded' against the effect on its own, but the outer surface exposed to the effect also had most of the links between particles of mana fail. There were notable exceptions there, those confirmed by Hive were those that made solid objects that could persist for at least a week in a manaless environment. The Knight Armor and all derivative spells were included in that, including the anchor. Unconfirmed but suspected by Hive were the linkages forming the permanent link to the multitasking system, as they shared key qualities with the others. Taylor wasn't looking forward to confirming that, even if she knew that it was important to find out.

The next level was very similar to the lowest level, but took twice as much energy to generate and added a limited 'shield piercing' ability. Up to several inches of mana would be affected at once from the surface, making many spells fall apart entirely. This was hindered, instead of blocked entirely, by the unaffected linkages. You'd need multiple layers of them to properly shield against the effect, the thicker the better.

It was the last level, taking eight times the energy of the second, that changed things. The unaffected linkages remained unaffected, but you'd need more than thirty feet of solid shielding to block the effect. Worse, it appeared to speed up the breakdown of unlinked and uncontained mana. Casting anything in that kind of environment would be nearly impossible, so of course Hive wanted to have Taylor enter such a field so that they'd know what other potential side effects to watch out for from one.

Another useful detail was that the range of the effect was fully dependent on the size of the 'tumbling' unit itself more than the power you put in. At lower power levels the effect had a gradual ramp-up as you approached the origin point while higher power levels pushed the 'full effect' zone out further from the origin point. The exception was if you pushed enough power in to theoretically get the 'full effect' to happen outside of the maximum range of the effect, at which point you'd start tearing the dimensional fabric instead.

Casting from outside of the three levels was also going to need more testing, of course, including what kinds of shielding might be possible. Being able to locate and destroy something generating such an effect seemed like it would be an important ability, because there was no way that Hive was the first one to discover this. Even if it couldn't be tied to the mana-generated barrier effect that supposedly did something similar, given that mana couldn't generate this effect at all without using linkages that the effect would tear apart.

With all of that review done, they finally 'sat down' in the simulation interface and designed a protective case for the returned flute. The end result was probably at least a little excessive, but Taylor didn't care and Hive didn't say anything about it. Anyone who wasn't Taylor or her father trying to force the case open would be in for a number of shocks. Starting with literal electrical shocks before it teleported away with either the blink or dimensional transference spells. If it couldn't teleport away for some reason then it would move on to sprouting nanotech disassembly and molecular splitters and firing homing bullets at those trying to open it.

Sadly, it wouldn't be done in time to leave for tutoring in the morning, so Taylor would have to settle for wrapping the flute in protective fabric and storing it in her storage space without the protective case itself.

Missy had sat down and written responses to all of the Wards, answering Carlos's questions and asking all of them some questions of her own. She'd been able to include her new email address and her cell phone number as well, above and beyond whatever the requests for information forms that the adults were handling would result in. That had been followed by a plan for some additional magic training when Taylor wasn't around, specifically seeing what she could do with the telekinesis spell.

Keeping track of something that you're moving around with the spell was trivial when you weren't moving as well, or when you were specifically moving it towards or away from you. Otherwise it required a lot more focus, not that you could tell that when Taylor used it. Ethan had come up with the idea of walking around the house while using the spell to hold playing cards around her. Well, Sherie had downgraded it from 'knives' to 'playing cards', even if it would provide far less incentive for not screwing up.

To Missy's annoyance, for the initial test of that she could only keep two playing cards near her without constantly bumping into them or having them impact things around her. She wasn't supposed to wander near anything fragile as a result of the latter. On that front, she was tempted to ask Taylor and Hive to go hunt down Rune, because she could do this kind of thing with her parahuman abilities and knowing how she did it could only help. But that would send incredibly wrong messages to everyone. So instead she started wishing that Rune would be a complete idiot and attack Taylor while the older girl was out of costume.

She wasn't wishing hard, but she was wishing for it to happen. At least for now, as she'd probably give up on that in a day or two at the most.

Thursday morning, after morning exercise, Missy found herself wondering why Ethan and Sherie were running around a bit, tidying things up. In particular, both of them seemed to take special care to collect their command console business cards and slip them into pockets on them. Once she had finished her breakfast and deposited her dishes in the sink she walked over to where Ethan was double-checking things in the hall.

"What's got you two so worked up?" she asked.

Ethan blinked, then sighed. "Right, forgot to tell you. Yesterday Sherie turned in the monitoring device, in addition to a better-hidden one that she found while you were exercising. That one was attached to a simple wind-up timer to turn on in three or so days. Today an investigative team is coming in to ensure that we didn't miss anything else that might've been left behind. If they find something that we would be reasonably expected to have found then we'll have to go through retraining on locating such items, but we also need to ensure that they don't find the things that we know about and don't want them to find. Mostly related to magic, in this case, which there's thankfully very little of when you aren't in the house."

"Oh."

"Though we will need to do another pass once the investigative team leaves, because we wouldn't put it past them to leave their own monitoring device or two as an added test. If they do and we don't turn them in by Monday then we'll be put through the training again anyway. You're lucky in that you don't have to worry about that aspect, even if I don't think it would be a horrible thing to put you and Taylor through at some point. Even if you two cheat horribly." He then frowned, and looked down at the 'rug' sitting there in the hallway. "Do you think they'll know that anything is odd about the rug?"

Missy shrugged. "I doubt it, but if you're concerned then I'm sure that it can be better hidden for a bit."

"And how would we do that?"

A quick request to Space had the transport device pack itself up into standby form, leaving a small orange hexagonal crystal. That was followed by the flash of the crystal being stored by Missy. "Like that. No more rug to be concerned about, though sweeping up the little bit of dust that'd accumulated around the edges looks like it might be a good idea."

Ethan blinked a couple of times, then nodded as he looked between Missy and where the 'rug' had been. "Okay, yes, that would definitely do it. I'll grab the broom and dustpan."

Taylor sighed as she put away her work from her first tutor. Her second of three tutors had called in sick today, so she wasn't sure if she should head out and wander for a bit or sit down in the computer lab to work on her project some more. Regardless of which way she went there, she was going to start with a quick trip to the restroom. Not because she needed to use it, but because it was a safe enough place for Hive to pull out the new case for her mother's flute.

Transferring the flute over to the new case and storing the whole thing only took a minute, after which she used the restroom while she was there anyway. With that taken care of, she swung over to the computer lab to check the news. People were once again out and about in their groups, though she was concerned about the 'interrogate' group last being seen wandering the Boardwalk. Perhaps it would be better to stay inside for the time being after all.

Switching gears, she loaded up her programming project and continued to work at it. To get things other than the camera to move in the world required writing a physics module for each kind of item she was going to be moving. Which for her purposes was a single module, as she wasn't making a game that had a multitude of various things that acted in different ways. If she got extra ambitious then she'd have two physics modules, with one of them being for labels floating over things. If only because there was what amounted to an example for how to do just that available that she could just tweak slightly.

By lunch she'd made decent progress on that. The difficulties of ensuring that it could run at multiple display speeds, including in reverse, had enough of her interest to be something that she was likely to continue working on at home. Getting the motion scaling correct wasn't trivial, and a very quick test had shown that the toolkit's run speed settings weren't going to work entirely. You couldn't run the toolkit backwards, only faster or slower, and she wanted to allow for running things in reverse.

Missy had once again sat down on her own for lunch, and for the second day in a row she found Dinah sitting across from her. Which was odd, as there shouldn't be any new 'scoop' for Dinah to want to talk to her about, as they'd already covered the whole 'Missy not being Vista' thing. There was less of a scramble to get seats near them today, but a few people did their best to get at the table anyway.

"So what brings you to me today?" Missy asked.

"You intrigue me," Dinah admitted. "That, and you're one of the few sources of consistently intelligent conversation around here."

"Really?"

"That and I don't want to be anywhere near the mess that someone is likely to create while trying to help Jared."

Missy rolled her eyes at that. "So do you have any plans for the weekend?"

Dinah sighed. "No. My parents are still a bit freaked out over me being taken. They're not going to let me go to anything fun unless at least one of them is along for the trip now. Which would probably be fine if not for everything else going on."

"Ah. Yeah, I've got some annoying restrictions of my own right now."

"What about you?"

Missy pulled slightly on Space's chain. "The PRT wants some of my time to have some people examine my new necklace some more. Unremovable jewelry of unknown, if seemingly benign, purpose and all."

"Too bad about Vista passing. She'd probably be able to make the gap in the necklace wide enough for you to get off."

"Maybe, or maybe not. Something about the necklace, or even just that I'm wearing it, might mean that she couldn't affect it properly."

"I suppose. And if your necklace is anything like Taylor Hebert's necklace then it's probably 'not', because I can't see them not having tried to have Vista help remove that one."

"True, unless they felt that the necklace was too much of a potential danger to expose a Ward to."

Dinah frowned. "Right. They'd catch all kinds of hell if they exposed a Ward to something possibly-lethal intentionally outside of an emergency, wouldn't they?"

"Keeping Wards safe is supposed to be part of the whole deal."

Taylor had headed straight home after tutoring, collecting the mail and a package for her as she entered the house. The rest of the mail appeared to just be bills, but the package was a 'prize' that she'd apparently won, consisting of an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock. Which could've been nice, if it didn't have a little camera and transmitter hidden in it.

"So what should we do with this?" Taylor asked Hive.

"It may be best to make it seem like the ruse worked," Hive replied. "I can set the relay unit to broadcast fake video from the camera easily enough."

"Yeah...except that this would normally be intended to be in my bedroom. There's no way that I want any video of me changing to be sent out, fake or otherwise."

"That is a good point, Lord. In that case I'm going to recommend putting it back in the box, face-down, and then having your father report it as suspicious. I'm sure that the PRT will be interested."

"And here I expected you to want to pull it apart."

"The system is nothing special and having it just vanish would send the wrong kind of message to those monitoring the feed from it."

"I suppose."

A few minutes later the box with the bugged alarm clock was closed back up and Taylor was preparing to head off as Minerva. She had to visit the PRT today, after all.

Taylor landed near the PRT building after flying in from the Bay, doing her best to ignore that there'd been sudden movement of multiple groups as soon as she'd arrived. Hive didn't land, instead remaining floating along next to Taylor. The two headed straight for and into the PRT building before anyone could really react to where they'd ended up, two stealthed sensor drones remaining outside to monitor things. It was likely that a crowd was going to form before they could leave, after all.

"Hello Minerva, Lilia," the man at the desk greeted as they approached. "Give me a moment to have someone come to escort you." Taylor nodded as the man radioed that she was there, then he grabbed a folder and pulled two passes out of it. "Also, here are your visitor passes, you'll need them for being brought down to storage."

That had Taylor raising an eyebrow, but she accepted the two passes. It only took a moment to figure out which was which. She hung her pass around her neck and handed Hive the other. The passes were identical sizes, but they'd been thinking far enough ahead to have a much shorter lanyard on the one that they'd prepared for Hive. The pass itself was still comically large on her.

A moment later a young woman came out of the back. "Minerva?"

The man at the desk waved them on as the phone rang, so Taylor headed over to the woman. "Good afternoon."

"Likewise," the woman said. "I'm Nina and I've been asked to escort you down to storage to pick up the items that have been forwarded to you through the PRT."

"Not an officer or agent?"

Nina snorted as she led Taylor and Hive into the back and down the hall. "Office staff. Two days ago I was an intern, then I found out that they'd arrested my supervisor for corruption over the weekend. I was found to be trustworthy, apparently, so they offered me his position on a temporary basis while other shifts happened. The worst part is that I'm doing less than I was under the asshole, since apparently I was essentially already doing all of his work and a bunch of busywork to cover for his misdeeds."

Taylor blinked at that. "So they offered you his job when they found out that you'd already been doing it?"

"Basically. Apparently they'd thought that needing to watch an intern had been the kick needed to improve his work, only to find out that his work had improved because he'd fobbed it all off onto said intern. Namely me. No clue what he'd have done when my internship ended next month, but I guess we won't be finding out either. Oh, right, elevator or stairs?"

The sudden shift had Taylor pausing. "I don't think I care either way?"

Nina nodded, moving over to and opening a stairwell door. "Then let's take the stairs, it looks like the elevator is a few floors up so it'll be faster. It's only two stories anyway."

They headed downstairs, with Nina needing to swipe her ID and enter a passcode to open the door when they got there. The hallway down here was less clean than the ones upstairs, the floor showing signs of things being moved around regularly.

Nina caught Taylor looking at the floor and sighed. "Several of us wish that there was a tinkertech solution to keep things nicer down here, but it's the primary storage area and gets too much traffic as things are moved in and out. This hallway in particular gets a lot of use due to being connected to the front freight-rated elevator."

Taylor nodded. "I suppose that not everyone can just teleport things to where they need them."

"You have no idea how much a number of us wish we could do that, especially with the range you've got. Weren't you able to bring FBI teams in from other states entirely and hit the exact room you wanted them to arrive in?"

"Our methods are easily accurate to within a quarter of an inch when operating at extreme ranges," Hive answered. "Provided that we have suitable targeting data available."

Nina paused at that. "Seriously?"

"With less targeting data available it tends to be easier to allow for some slack in the parameters to allow for choosing a suitable opening on arrival, which can make things shift out to a variance of several feet instead, but otherwise yes."

"That's insane, and now I'm going to stop asking questions before I get too jealous." She then shook her head and started moving again. "Besides, we're just about at the storage room."

It was one more turn in the hallway before they came to a large rolling door blocking access to a large room that Taylor's sensor told her was crammed full with things. Nina moved to the smaller door next to it and once again swiped her card and entered a passcode. The door unlocked and she opened it, flipping on a light and beckoning Taylor and Hive to join her inside. They did so, and Taylor found herself hoping that Nina knew where in the pile of things in the room the items they were here for were. There was a lot piled up in it, after all, and it didn't look labeled at all.

"So here we are," Nina said. "To be perfectly honest, we're hoping that you have a good way of getting all of this out to wherever you might need it."

Taylor blinked. "All of it?"

"Yeah, you can probably tell that we're running out of room here and we don't want to need to empty out a second storage room just to put materials that were sent to you through us in it."

Hive floated off into the room, darting through the limited aisles that had been left behind while Taylor processed that. She'd been expecting a stack of letters or something, not a storage room full of materials. Finally she shook her head. "Why did all of this get sent my way?"

Nina shrugged. "I'm assuming that it stems from your list of materials that you were caught talking to Armsmaster about, especially given the large spools of wire in the back corner."

"I can easily store it all for later," Hive said as she floated back over. "I don't think there's any exagranium here, but all of the other requested materials are available in reasonable quantities."

That had Nina blinking. "Store it all as in teleport it to a storage location?"

"Store it all in my internal storage."

Nina looked at the pile of things in the room, and then back at Hive. "Please don't tell me that you're going to do that by eating it all?"

Hive rolled her own eyes, and then things started vanishing in flashes of light. After ten seconds the room was empty except for the three of them, some tables, and several sets of shelves. "I assume that we weren't intended to take the tables or shelves, especially as they appear to be bolted in place."

"Er, no, though I don't think anyone would've complained too much if you had in a single 'empty the room' teleport. Also, I'm getting jealous again."

"I don't have anything like that kind of storage personally," Taylor offered.

Nina shook her head. "Right, right. Well, since we're done here, we can head back upstairs. I was told that the rest of your visit is for paperwork reasons."

"That's what I was led to believe, yes."

Missy had arrived back home after school to find that the investigation squad had just left. Ethan and Sherie looked exhausted, but pleased, though a number of things looked like they'd been moved around significantly. The hall desk, for example, wasn't pushed all the way up against the wall.

"Everything good so far?" Missy asked.

"They did a very complete search and found nothing," Sherie replied. "They were even amazed that the water meter was a legitimate water meter that hadn't been tampered with. Of course, as we put everything back together we'll need to check to ensure that the team didn't leave anything behind for us to find."

Missy nodded. "Want me to see if Space and I can find anything?"

Ethan waved in her general direction. "Go for it, if you want to. I'm not going to tell you not to. Though just make note of where they are and don't tell us, so that we can see what we can find and then compare notes afterwards."

"Okay then."

Missy dropped her bag off upstairs in her room, where it looked like the team hadn't gone, and then headed back downstairs. Over the course of the next hour she and Space looked over everywhere they could think of. In the process they found four things that looked suspicious, though only one of them had been prevented from transmitting by Space. Missy wrote all four locations down on a notepad with descriptions of what they'd found before deciding that she was done.

By that point Ethan and Sherie were ready to start putting everything back together while performing their own search, so Missy grabbed a snack and left them to it. Though once they were done in the hallway she retrieved the transport device and worked with Space to redeploy it as the rug that it'd been pretending to be before they'd packed it up that morning. No need to leave it packed up, and it would be annoying to need to unpack it before Taylor came over or something else like that.

Taylor signed the last form that she'd been given for the shell company, which was also 'taking over' the patents that had already been filed to make a number of things easier. They'd had a bunch of 'allow people to continue to license the patents' paperwork for her as well.

"I think that does it for that set," Taylor said, splitting the last form into her copy and the copy to be filed.

"I do believe it does," Deputy Director Renick said, collecting the copy of the form and verifying that it was filled out correctly. Nodding, he dropped it onto his pile, then pulled out another folder with forms. "Now then, we suspect that you'd rather not have to run around signing other paperwork on behalf of the shell company in order to handle accepting property. If that's the case, these forms will allow the PRT to accept gifts of property, developed or otherwise, on behalf of the shell company for you."

Taylor took those forms and started reading them. They were straightforward enough, and looked to do exactly what Renick had said on the surface. She also didn't object to things such as the PRT examining the land for suitability of use for commercial purposes, zoning or otherwise, and ensuring that any existing structures shouldn't be condemned and torn down before the property was accepted. A couple of terms had been double-checked online, and she ensured that both copies were identical before agreeing to sign them. Renick signed on behalf of the PRT, she signed on behalf of herself, and copies went to both of their piles.

"Is that finally it?" Taylor asked.

"There's technically one more thing," Renick replied. "A couple of other federal agencies have asked for us to approach you regarding your civilian identity. They'd like you to register it with us so that you're eligible for signing NDA forms in light of your unprecedented ability to access computer networks."

Taylor pointed at Hive. "She has unprecedented access to computer networks and no legal civilian identity here that I'm personally aware of. I just happen to have access to her."

"I am not from this Earth in several significant ways," Hive agreed.

Renick nodded. "We didn't expect you to agree either way, but we're required to ask once a year if any agency has put forth a request for us to do so. With that taken care of, I think we're done here. Unless you have any additional questions for me?"

Taylor sighed. "I don't suppose that you'll let me leave via the roof?"

That had the man blinking. "Why would you want to leave that way?"

"Well, unless you want my help with the mini-riot outside. I was seen coming in and it looks like multiple groups have been looking to intercept me on my way out, only to disagree with one another."

"Oh. You know what, let me drop the paperwork off and get a situation report. If you're willing to help subdue people then I'm not going to complain about it."

He collected the stack of papers and left the room, Taylor storing her stack as he did so.

"Did we learn anything of use from the containment foam samples Hal collected?" Taylor sent to Hive while they waited.

"Not really," Hive answered. "I can produce the foam and the release agent, but the former requires a very small amount of extra-dimensional twist in one component that makes it incompatible with being properly emulated by mana."

"Oh well, using it would probably bring up questions we wouldn't want asked right now anyway."

It was a couple minutes later before Renick returned. "Sorry to keep you waiting. We're working with the police department on the crowd outside and don't want to have to adjust plans for your involvement. If you want to leave through the roof then I'll bring you up."

Taylor nodded. "I think that would be easier than walking out the front door right now, yes."

They took an elevator up to the roof, where there was a helicopter pad, and Renick looked Taylor over once they stepped outside. "So, I'm curious. We're under the assumption that you could just teleport away. Why not do that from inside the building?"

"If we aren't seen leaving the building then the crowds down there will be less likely to disperse."

"Ah. That's a good point. Well, have a nice evening."

Taylor nodded as she cast the flight spell, not having maintained it while inside the building. "You too."

A moment later she'd taken off, and she stopped while hovering just over the edge of the building just long enough for someone in the crowd below to spot her. Once that had happened she took off for the Bay, having her surveillance drones move away from the PRT building at the same time. Returning to her standard 'arrival' point over the water, she triggered a dimensional transference to the beach.

Hive immediately moved off towards the inlet, probably to drop the supplies off with the construction drones that were working over there, and Taylor left her to it. That only took a few minutes before Hive returned so that they could drop the Knight Armor and head back home. Once there Taylor made a point of going out back for a bit, cycling surveillance drones while she visibly looked over things as though trying to determine what needed to be done to the yard. Her father arrived a few minutes before she was done, and she went back inside to talk with him about her afternoon.

649

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CmptrWz

May 27, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 56 - May 26, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jun 3, 2020

#10,126

Missy frowned as Ethan and Sherie dropped three items onto the table. She recognized all three, but none of them were the transmitting item. "Did you two already know about the blue box under the top stair in the basement?"

"The what?" Ethan asked, looking at Sherie, who shook her head.

"The only thing down there currently attempting to transmit anything that isn't periodic meter readings?"

That had both adults getting up and heading to the basement. Five minutes later they came back empty-handed, and Sherie gave Missy a look. "It isn't nice to joke about that kind of thing."

That had Missy blinking. She then got up and headed down to the basement, both adults following her. She ended up needing to crunch space a little to reach the box, but it wasn't incredibly securely attached and she was able to pull it off of the bottom of the step.

"This," Missy said, holding it out to them once she'd let the crunched space return to normal.

The two gave her a look, then looked down at the box. Ethan hesitantly reached out, his hand jerking back when his fingers came in contact with the box. He moved his hand back and felt along the top of the box, before finding the sides and grabbing it to pick it up.

"A box that I can't see but Missy can?" he wondered. "That's a new one."

"That we can't see," Sherie corrected. "Let's get it upstairs and see what we can do about it."

It didn't take long to determine that the box was not, in fact, invisible. Ethan and Sherie couldn't see the box, and in fact couldn't even consider figuring out where it was, so long as nothing else was drawing attention to it. Placing a sticker on the box made the effect apply to the sticker as well, but tying a ribbon around it made it so that they could at least see that it was there. They couldn't see the whole ribbon properly, as though their minds were trying to edit the box out more than anything else. Further, they could take pictures of it, but couldn't tell that the box was there while taking the picture. Around five minutes later they could see the box in the pictures taken without issue.

"It's obviously tinkertech," Ethan said, staring at the box. Or, from his point of view, the apparently-magic ribbon that was able to rest on air. "But why can Missy see it without issue?"

"I've got Knight Clothing up," Missy offered. "Perhaps it's keeping it from affecting my perceptions?"

"Maybe," Sherie admitted. "Though that does bring up how we explain that we found this, as well as the question of who put it there."

"The latter may be easy enough to answer," Ethan said. "Turn it in. If the investigative team put it there to test us then we'll pass with flying colors. If they didn't then the team will get put through retraining and investigated to see if one of them put it there without permission."

"True. If they did put it there then we might be asked how we found it though."

"It shows up on pictures. We obviously took a few before and after to help with spotting things that were out of place and it showed up on them."

Sherie nodded. "That does make sense."

Taylor had provided her father with the pile of forms that she'd signed so that he could read through them. He'd made the occasional comment, asking her questions to ensure that she'd understood things, but hadn't found any issues with them.

"You might want to hire an accountant," he finally said, after he'd made it through everything. "Given how much money the patents alone are already set to bring in for you. Maybe get yourself a lawyer as well. It won't be long before you'll probably need them to ensure that things are taken care of properly. Outside of that, all of this looks very reasonable. I'm surprised that they didn't try and trick you into revealing your civilian identity though."

Taylor snorted. "Nah, they came out and asked me about that outright."

"Oh. Okay. I'm assuming you said no?"

"I pointed out that Hive was the one with the insane network access and that I just had access to her. Since there's no record of her 'civilian' identity, such as it is, there's no way she can 'reveal' it anyway. She pointed out that she's decidedly not from Bet as well. They hadn't expected me to agree anyway and dropped it for a year."

"Works for me. Maybe you should consider registering yourself once you're legally an adult, if only so that you don't have to find an excuse to be 'working for' your own shell company to make money, but that's a couple years away at this point. Well after you've hopefully established yourself as otherwise trustworthy."

Taylor frowned at that. "Assuming I do register then, do you think they'd whine about having been paying me to examine Hive while I obviously told them nothing about what I was actually able to do?"

He snorted at that. "Even if they do, they came to us about it. Further, at that point I think they're likely to assume that you put the initial money towards preparing to be able to do things like take on Endbringers and consider it money well spent."

"I guess."

"Though now that I think about it, I suppose that if Missy starts joining you in public then you'd be risking her identity being revealed too. So you'd probably need to wait for her to be an adult as well. And who knows who else you'll pick up."

Taylor rolled her eyes at that. "Do you really expect me to start collecting people?"

"To be honest? Yes, especially once Missy shows up in public. The PRT's theory about you being a clone isn't exactly known outside of the PRT, after all, and I can see there being enough mana-capable parahumans out there to make others 'joining up' a somewhat regular event. Eventually."

That had her groaning. Dealing with Missy was already bad enough in its own way, did she really want to be adding even more people into the mix?

Friday morning brought with it light rain and somewhat heavy wind. Taylor had split her overnight focus between her programming project and working with Hive on some of the spell creation projects. Most of their focus had been on how to shield the multitasking link, which had required very deep analysis of said link and how it functioned. That had taken most of their time, especially since to test any of their theories they needed to do the tests 'live' with Taylor or figure out exactly how the link worked in the first place so that they could reproduce it. So far they'd only figured out the brain interface pieces. The component that connected to Hive's internal multitasking hardware was still a bit of a mystery, as it wasn't the same kind of connection as the ones Taylor would make to the combat drones.

On the project front, Taylor had probably gone a bit overboard with the 'working on it at home' side of things. The project was essentially complete now, and she'd even stress-tested it with far more data than she needed it to be able to handle. Her submission would include a file containing the named thirteen planets, but she'd at least wait until Wednesday or Thursday before submitting it. Well, that and she did need to ensure that it worked on the computers in the computer lab and not just on Hive's emulation system.

"Can we do some light training this afternoon?" Missy asked when they'd gathered to exercise. "Obviously nothing that would cause us problems tomorrow."

"I'll think about it," Taylor replied. "Especially if the weather hasn't improved enough for a patrol of some kind."

"Sherie wants to play observer, if possible."

"I guess that makes sense. Though I'm not sure what 'light training' would be in this case?"

Missy rolled her eyes. "How about trying to improve my dodging by teaching me tricks that you've figured out with the flight spell or something like that? I'm running mostly on my own experimentation right now."

"Hmm. Might need to come up with some kind of obstacle course for that. I'll give it some thought."

For some reason that had Missy blanching, but Taylor paid her no mind.

Missy found herself once again sitting across from Dinah at lunch, though they'd ended up with something else to talk about today. Namely, the fact that everyone else was ignoring Aisha wandering about being an idiot. Oh, and those around them at the table were visibly confused about what they were talking about.

"Do we want to know why nobody is paying attention as she plays ninja?" Missy asked.

"I don't think they can see her," Dinah admitted.

"But you can?"

"Er, not exactly. It's complicated? I'm more surprised that you can."

"Huh."

Missy wasn't sure what that meant for either of them. Although, now that she thought about it, Dinah and Aisha had that tether thing that implied that they were parahumans right now. It was noticeable if you were looking for it, of course, but as a general personal privacy thing it wasn't something that Missy tried to pay attention to. Focusing on her sensor a bit more, it also seemed like something else was...perhaps reaching out from Aisha, to a lesser degree? Little twists of spacetime that created paths of some kind to everyone in the room other than Missy herself.

Given that the only thing Missy could think of that was preventing her from being affected was the Knight Clothing she had cast that morning? She was going to need to work on figuring out just how far she could go with adding more elements to get better shields up without otherwise causing herself issues. Which would be easier when school was out and she didn't need to change for gym class. Without that she could do what Taylor kept doing and just replace her entire outfit with Knight Clothing duplicates on a regular basis.

The two girls kept an eye on Aisha, who was wandering around and doing over-the-top things as she nabbed bits of food here and there without anyone saying a word about it. Eventually, Aisha reached where Dinah and Missy were sitting, approaching Dinah first. Missy found it interesting that Dinah was able to block Aisha's attempts at grabbing any of the food on her tray without looking in Aisha's direction or seeming to be intentionally blocking her at all. Just constantly positioning her hands to be in the way of Aisha's as the girl tried to do 'ninja grabs'.

Frustrated with Dinah, Aisha moved around the table, moving things on people and grabbing the occasional french fry, before coming to Missy. Unlike Dinah, Missy took the approach of slapping Aisha's hand every time she tried to grab a french fry off of her tray. That had Dinah raising an eyebrow in curiosity and Aisha getting frustrated. Eventually Aisha gave Missy and Dinah a look and moved off to people that were properly ignoring her.

"I don't think she's happy with us," Dinah said after a minute or so.

"I'm not happy with her horrible rendition of whatever she thinks she's humming," Missy countered.

"Ah. You can hear her?"

"Yes? Can't you?"

"Er, no."

"I think you're the lucky one, then."

Taylor stretched as she left tutoring. She'd honestly spent most of the day coming up with ideas for an obstacle course to put Missy through, in part because her tutors had decided that doing anything significant before a long weekend wasn't worth the effort. Then again, her math tutor had admitted that they'd moved clear past the goal for the end of the school year and thus there wasn't a lot of need to push too much further ahead.

To be honest, math had been the most interesting session of the day. Her tutor had decided to challenge her to find the prime factors of four very large numbers. Something that was annoying to do by hand, but walking through the process that she was familiar with due to its presence in the scanning and sensor spell equations was easy enough to complete, even if it was a little brute-force in nature instead of the more elegant but impossible to just write out version in the barrier equations. That did mean that she'd only been able to complete three of the four, with the second going the fastest as it factored down to two primes. All combined it'd taken around thirty sheets of paper to write out as well, and she'd apologized for not making through all four numbers before leaving.

Weather-wise, there was still a light rain and plenty of wind. That made heading home mildly annoying, but the weather was the only truly annoying part of the trip. Nothing of note was in the mail when she arrived home, at worst it looked like a collection of bills for her father to deal with more than anything else, so she headed upstairs to get ready to work with Missy. Specifically, she wanted to see what she could set up for the obstacle course before the younger girl arrived home from school.

The weather wasn't incredibly better at the beach, a little less wind and a little more rain, but that was okay. Adverse weather conditions weren't a horrible way to get some additional training in, after all, if only in how to ignore the weather because it wasn't going to affect things enough to matter. It would make ensuring that she had the course set up properly slightly more annoying though.

Hive wandered off to the inlet while Taylor worked on the obstacle course. First came out a couple dozen combat drones, these ones to be used to support parts of the course. Knight Object spells were cast to make rings, walls, and markers. Some of the combat drones would be moving around and Missy would need to pay attention to them in order to make it past their obstacles. Of course, she'd planned on making it so that Missy would need to shoot barriers out of the middle of several of the rings, even going so far as to put the barriers in place, before remembering that Missy didn't have access to any attack spells.

Instead, for two rings she floated a bullet in the middle that would need to be tanked or deflected. A third she adjusted so that the ring was too small for Missy to fit through, with the barrier being much larger and adjusted to block the storage and retrieval spell. The girl would have to blink through the ring instead as a result. Well, that or blink around the much larger barrier. Taylor wouldn't be telling Missy that it'd taken nearly fifty attempts to make the barrier able to stop the storage and retrieval spell, and that in order to do so it was now basically incapable of stopping much of anything else. Better methods of stopping teleportation in general might not be a horrible idea to look into.

By the time she was done with that, Missy and Sherie were ready. Taylor ensured that the combat drones were feeding sensor data back to Sherie as Missy arrived on the beach. It only took another minute for Missy to fly over to hover next to Taylor.

"So what's that?" Missy asked, looking at the near end of the obstacle course.

"Obstacle course," Taylor replied as she deployed more combat drones. "I'm thinking that I'll let you go through it once as-is, then put you through it a few times while I've got drones shooting at you as well. Go through rings and to the blue side of poles."

"Shouldn't you demonstrate for her first?" Sherie asked. "Probably with the drones firing, so that she knows what she's getting into?"

Taylor sighed. "It won't be exactly the same, since I'm in control of the drones, but I can run the course first."

Missy moved off to the side to watch, and Taylor ensured that the 'firing' combat drones were in position. One anchored Knight Object shield was thrown onto an arm, and then she started through the course. Spinning to use the shield to block incoming bullets, occasionally throwing her hands and feet out to cast hex shields for a moment, batting aside the bullets left inside of rings, and blinking through the gap that she'd left in that barrier. All told, it took her thirty seconds to complete the course, after which she flew over to where Missy had been watching from.

"I'm confused," Sherie said after a moment. "And not by the fact that you were going slower than I think you could've gone. Why do you throw your hands and feet out to cast those shields? Shouldn't you just be able to will them into place around you and just leave them behind after they appear?"

That had Taylor thinking for a moment. "The motions help a little with focus and targeting, and mana does flow a little more easily through the limbs to form the spell, but you're probably right that they shouldn't be necessary. Though I don't know how easy it'll be to train away the habit of making gestures."

"Insanely difficult if my own attempts to train away my gestures for manipulating space are any indication," Missy offered. "Which probably means that I'll never get it down but you'll have bullshitted your way into figuring it out by the end of next week."

Taylor rolled her eyes. "If I get it down that quickly then I can't see why you wouldn't be able to do so, especially for spells that you haven't actually been casting for all that long."

"Yeah, yeah. Is the course ready for me yet?"

It only took a moment to have the bullets re-cast and sitting in the middle of the relevant rings. "Go for it."

While Missy was making her 'while not being shot at' run, Taylor moved away a bit and brought out some additional combat drones. She had the new drones circling her, with her hands in her pockets to make it harder to throw them out at the incoming bullets. It wasn't perfect as she knew where the shots would be coming from, but she was able to practice getting shields up between herself and the bullets the drones were firing. It was harder than she'd expected in some ways and easier in others, most of the issue being not using the palms of her hands or the soles of her feet as part of the casting reference points.

Finding out that she had, in fact, been doing that by virtue of all of her attempts trying to form the shields in her pockets was quite annoying, as it meant that the bullets hit her Knight Armor barriers. A brief stint of trying to counter bullets with bullets of her own failed in exactly the same way, the bullets appearing and exploding in her Knight Armor's pockets. That led to her examining the equations, because she didn't think that it was entirely a matter of concentration. That led to finding that the shield, bullets, and beams had elements that pretty much required using a limb to cast them, even if it didn't look like that on the surface.

Replacing the Hex Shield spell components that relied on a 'mana emitter', which hands and feet essentially counted as in humans, with components of the storage and retrieval spell that just used targeting data was slightly tricky. Despite that, Taylor had accomplished it by the time Missy was finishing up her eighth run through the obstacle course. The younger girl had taken to using spatial manipulation as part of her defense, causing bullets to fly around her, but had found that the rings and poles of the course resisted the manipulations.

"I've got a new shield equation for you," Taylor said after eight seconds of successfully popping shields up around her. As an added bonus, the lack of connecting the spell to a 'mana emitter' meant that it didn't lock said emitter in place relative to the spell as it was being cast. Though the power requirements did go up slightly.

"What?" Missy said, pausing before her ninth run, turning to look at Taylor. Only to see shields popping up to intercept bullets without a gesture to be seen. "Oh come on, couldn't you have at least taken a few days to figure that out?"

Rolling her eyes, Taylor sent the new equation to Space. "The problem is that the equation we were using had a subtle but significant requirement of using a limb for casting. I just sent over one that doesn't."

"Oh." It took the girl a moment, but she suddenly had a hex shield in front of her face. Just as much time passed before another was behind her, but she started to speed up as she added more. At least until she ran out of space for them immediately around her and flinched when she tried to form one where there wasn't room.

"Perhaps not keep them all up?" Taylor offered.

"Probably a good idea, yes. Though is there a range limit on maintaining these?"

That was honestly a good question, so Taylor made one at maximum range and then blinked away in the other direction. The shield stuck around, but the powering link was gone and it was noticeably weakening. Slowly, but noticeably. Out of curiosity, Taylor had one of the combat drones start hitting it with bullets, and the shield surprised her by holding up to fifteen hits before falling apart. Not that they'd been high-powered bullets, admittedly, but the shield had lasted longer than expected.

"Even I could keep one going longer than that," Missy said.

"Not from that distance without crunching space to power it," Taylor argued.

"Well, okay, yes, there is that. I was thinking more from the point of it being barely useful once you got out of range."

"Chances are that I don't care about it once I'm out of range."

"Right. Because if you're out of range then you aren't behind it anymore."

Taylor nodded. "Now then, let's see if the new shield helps you with the obstacle course. Maybe it'll reduce your need to spin a bit?"

Missy sighed, but moved back over to the obstacle course anyway. Taylor instead focused on updating the bullet and beam equations in a similar manner, though found that they were easier to fix. Specifically, she'd already had to replace that component of the equations for the 'wrapped' versions, so she was more familiar with how to swap that bit out. A few tests had bullets flying from anywhere but her hands and feet, which made her happy.

Taylor found herself far less happy a couple minutes later, as none of the new spells worked when used by combat drones. Apparently you needed the emitter-linked spell components for them in this case. Well, it was a good thing to document at least?

Missy stretched as she returned home. The obstacle course had been far easier with the new shield spell, if only because of not needing to twist in weird ways to throw shields up to block bullets. Not that she was perfect at deploying the shields yet, but she couldn't keep her attention on seemingly infinite things like Taylor could. Blocking nineteen out of twenty bullets was pretty good for her.

She was ignoring the ones that cheated and darted around her thrown-up shields to hit her anyway. Those just weren't fair, and she really wanted access to that equation as a result.

Still, she was slightly sore in a good way, and felt like she needed a shower despite the Knight Armor. Or, perhaps she should take a bath, a nice soak sounded nice right now.

"Did you have fun?" Ethan asked.

Missy shrugged. "I figured out how Taylor did some of her dodging, and thanks to Sherie asking a question Taylor figured out how to make it easier to throw shields up anywhere they're needed."

"That sounds interesting, but since she was watching I'll get details from her. More importantly, the device you spotted but we missed wasn't on the sanctioned list of things to be added by the investigative team. At the same time, one of the individuals on the team is already in master/stranger screening after finding themselves missing two days of memories. We have no clue if you were the target or if it was an attempt to monitor Sherie and I, but you should probably keep checking for potential problems like that either way."

"Fun. I wonder if anyone has tried to do that kind of thing to Taylor?"

"Multiple times, with zero success."

That had Missy blinking. "What?"

"Coil made several attempts, but we don't think this was his doing. In part because he didn't have any records of plans to get monitoring into the house after failing to slip things to Taylor. Supposedly he couldn't find a good excuse to get into their house, but trying to monitor with various kinds of devices had failed there either way."

"Huh. But if it wasn't Coil then who was it?"

Ethan scowled at that. "We don't know, but I'm not happy about it either way."

"Great. An unknown is trying to find information on someone in the house and we don't know who."

"Basically. But the PRT is looking into it."

"Which means?"

Ethan snorted. "That they'll find nothing, the investigation will be dropped silently at some point to save face, and we'll never hear of it again. Or, if the gods are smiling upon us during a planetary alignment coinciding with a blue moon? Then they'll find something and tell us about it."

"Oh come on," Sherie said as she came into the room. "Don't lie to her like that. The chances are nowhere near that good with this kind of situation, and even if they do find something they're unlikely to tell us unless we need to take action ourselves."

"There are days that I wonder why we work for them."

"Because they're still better than working as independents for a number of reasons, plus we both agreed to do so for different reasons not entirely under our control."

"Ah, right. There is that, yes." He then turned back to Missy. "Oh, and you should probably actually sleep tonight. The PRT called and let me know that they want to run you through a standard medical checkup. I suspect that they'll do a full workup on you, and not having slept well will show up on that if they do."

Missy flinched at that. "Why the hell do they want to do that?"

"No clue, but unlike the therapy session you agreed to they're including the checkup in the time they pay you for."

"That might make it worth it. Barely."

Taylor had been warned by Missy that attempts had been made at getting monitoring devices into the Walsh household, which had resulted in a scan of the Hebert household for similar items. Nothing had come up, but Hive reported that there were cameras watching the house from other houses nearby. Not all of which were pointed directly at the house, and at least two of which were almost certainly intended to look over yards and just happened to have their house in the picture through coincidence. This was on top of the PRT and police teams that were still monitoring the area. One of which had, for some reason, settled into the driveway of a nearby house instead of staying on the street like they had been.

"Did something happen at that house that I missed while I was at tutoring or something?" Taylor asked Hive.

"Looking over information from the surveillance drones," Hive answered a moment later. "It appears that the residents were arrested earlier in the week."

"Huh. I wonder why."

"I have insufficient information available to tell you. Would you like me to check the police department's computers to see if I can figure it out?"

"No, I don't need to know that badly."

Outside of that, Hive had sent some testing drones off for some overnight work on things. Specifically, she'd finally come up with a testing plan for safely firing matter and antimatter unfolded projectiles at each other in order to see what happened. The plan was to do so where there had now never been a Mars, though Hive wasn't happy with the orbital paths of other planetary bodies in that dimension. Apparently things were a little unstable now.

Taylor was taking the night off from working on much of anything, at her father's request. The PRT had called him at work and was planning on putting her through a medical checkup, on the payment clock. Being as rested as possible was thus a good idea, if only to be prepared for whatever it was they were going to check. That also meant no exercising in the morning, just in case. Perhaps she and Missy would get a longer session in after the PRT was done with them, to make up for not having done any exercise in the morning?

It was after midnight, very early in the morning, when Hive got Taylor's attention in the simulation system. Curious, Taylor popped in to see what was up.

"We appear to be floating in space," Taylor noted as she appeared in the simulation. "What am I looking at?"

"This is output from the testing that I was performing," Hive answered. "Two unfolded projectiles, one flipped to antimatter, fired at each other from range."

"I assume something of interest happened?"

"All test results are interesting. Some are more exciting than others, but they're all interesting."

Taylor rolled her eyes at that. "So what kind of result did you get?"

Hive just gestured at the visual, apparently deferring to it. It didn't take long for the two projectiles to appear from a good distance off, the two striking each other perfectly. Except that it didn't look like they'd hit each other at all, both continuing to move along as though the other hadn't been there.

"That doesn't seem like it should've happened," Taylor noted. "Just passing through each other like that, without any interaction at all?"

"They interacted," Hive corrected. "Each projectile was converted into the other kind. Matter to antimatter and antimatter to matter, the unfolded nature of them causing them to flip the other one as they passed through each other."

"So they don't explode just because they met one another?"

"They do not appear to. But I got curious about what would happen if they struck less directly. Observe."

Taylor looked back at the impact point, and a moment later two more projectiles flew through. This time they crossed paths slightly off from one another, only about a third of them interacting with the other. This time the projectiles both started to glow a moment later, followed by vanishing. "Where'd they go?"

"All of their mass was converted into a gamma ray burst."

"Oh. So my takeaway right now is that this isn't going to be usable as a tactic to be used against an Endbringer."

"I do not believe that this would be a viable method of attack."

"Good to know."

652

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CmptrWz

Jun 3, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 57 - May 28, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jun 10, 2020

#10,359

Saturday morning started a little later than usual, given the lack of getting up to exercise. Instead the focus was on preparing to be picked up by the PRT later in the morning, which meant ensuring that real clothing was being worn along with important items being out of storage. Choosing clothing that had no metal in it was surprisingly difficult though, Taylor finding herself amazed at how many pairs of pants she had with little snap-like metal reinforcements even when there weren't zippers. In fact, she had a single pair of pants that didn't have any metal at all, exercise pants with an elastic waistband that didn't fit anymore.

Sadly, that left her with two skirts, one that had an elastic waistband and one that had buttons and no zipper. Both still fit her reasonably well, though neither had pockets. Not that the exercise pants had any either, of course, and the lack of pockets would mean digging out a purse as well. It wasn't cold enough to justify any of her jackets, after all. If that wasn't bad enough, she was going to have to shave her legs.

Needless to say, by the time the PRT showed up to pick her up, Taylor was already annoyed and planning on a minor shopping trip. Most of the annoyance was with herself, for not having checked her wardrobe before that morning to ensure that she had decent options for the day that had no metal involved. Of course, her father had commented that she 'looked nice' and should 'dress up more often'. She didn't agree with the latter, even if Knight Clothing could make a skirt protect her reasonably well.

Whatever the reason for the lack of metal, she was going to have to put her purse off to the side for that, as well as take the watch she was wearing off. Though she was still curious if they'd find anything unusual about the watch, assuming she was wearing it for anything they did today.

As much as the quality annoyed her, Missy found herself glad that a third of her pants and shorts had plastic zippers. It made it a lot easier to keep metal out of her clothing for the day. Even better, they had pockets, unlike her dresses. Admittedly, she'd grabbed a purse from her collection anyway. Regardless if it was a little too 'cute' for her tastes. Better to just have everything that she'd have to take out of her pockets anyway sitting together in the purse.

Sherie was bringing her to the PRT building, instead of waiting for a van to show up to get her. This was good from the point of view of not dealing with unknown PRT officers and bad because Sherie had to be there nearly two hours before Missy did. Where Missy would be waiting was unknown, but she was fully expecting to be thrown into a conference room and left there until Taylor showed up.

To Missy's surprise, they parked across the street and not in the parking garage. That was followed by going in the main entrance, where Sherie handled getting Missy's prepared 'visitor' pass from the desk. Missy had instead stopped to look at the framed portraits of the Wards, most specifically the black and white 'Vista' picture that had been moved to the most visible point along the wall. It was very noticeable and was very obviously not being pushed out of view for the time being.

"Here you go," Sherie said, coming back over to Missy. "One visitor pass, good for today only. I was also reminded that the full tour including the Wards area isn't being run today due to the event later, so you're out of luck if you wanted to take it."

Missy rolled her eyes. Like that mattered to her. Instead she just followed Sherie into the back, after which they got onto the elevator. Missy had to scan her visitor's pass, and Sherie did the retinal-scan dance. The elevator then surprised Missy by going down. In fact, it wasn't long before she found herself in the Wards area.

"Why are we here?" she finally asked, looking at Sherie. Nobody else was in the area right now.

"Technically you never cleared your stuff out of your Wards room," Sherie said. "Not that there was much other than your costume in it, admittedly. And a knife, of course, but that was removed already."

"Okay..."

"In practice, the others should be showing up any time now to prepare for their event. As there aren't any new Wards since you left there weren't any problems with having you visit while waiting for the stuff you're here to do. Director Piggot was happy to approve the request for you to get some visiting time as a result."

"Oh."

"Have fun, grab anything that was missed in your Wards room, and someone will be down to pick you up when Taylor arrives."

Taylor found it interesting that Missy had been brought up from the basement levels, but didn't say anything about it. Both because she had no way of knowing what the PRT was generally aware of and because it probably wasn't her business anyway. She suspected that the younger girl had been seeing the Wards, but couldn't prove it and didn't think that it mattered much. They met up with one another in a room with Armsmaster, several doctors, and a large machine in it.

"Good morning Miss Biron, Miss Hebert," Armsmaster greeted. "Though I suppose that proper introductions are in order, since you two haven't been properly introduced yet. Taylor Hebert, may I introduce Missy Biron. She had a much less public incident where she ended up with a necklace that appears to be similar to, if distinct from, your own. Given the similarities it was felt that examining both of your necklaces at the same time would be easier than arranging for individual sessions."

"Nice to meet you," Missy said, holding her hand out.

"Likewise," Taylor replied, taking Missy's hand and shaking it. Hopefully the younger girl found this to be ridiculous too.

"Now then," Armsmaster said when they turned back to him. "If you two could ensure that any metal items you have on you are removed, you can use the table over against the wall, we can get started. This device is a magnetic scanner, one that happens to be able to double as a tinkertech full-body MRI. It wasn't made locally, and the tinker who built it couldn't come in person to operate it. All I know is that it uses various magnetic field patterns to image people inside of it. We're starting with it so that the doctors who will be examining you later have time to look over the results of the latter output, hopefully finding nothing wrong with you. It'll power up slowly enough that we'll be able to turn it off if it starts to pull at either of your necklaces. Any questions, or would you like to get started?"

Taylor looked at Missy, who shrugged. Deciding that it wouldn't hurt to get it over with, Taylor took her watch off and dropped it into the purse she was carrying. That was then placed onto the indicated table before she walked over to the machine. Armsmaster had her stand with her feet on markings painted on the floor and adjusted hand grips above her head to be comfortable for her height. The latter were actually part of the safety system, if she put too much weight on them or let go of them then the machine would shut down automatically. She was told to try and do one or the other if things seemed to be dangerous, such as if Hive was being pulled on by the magnetic fields.

Once she was set, Armsmaster closed the door to the scanning area, ensured that Missy and the doctors were far enough back, and then started the machine up. It slowly powered up the magnetic fields, to absolutely zero effect on Hive. The fields continued to grow in strength, spinning and eventually peaking at a fairly high level. They stayed at that level for several minutes, then powered down more quickly than they had powered up. The door then opened, and Taylor took that as a sign to let go and step out.

"Very good Miss Hebert," Armsmaster said. "Sadly, it doesn't appear that your necklace even registered to the equipment. Still, that provides no reason to skip trying this on Miss Biron."

Taylor collected her purse and put her watch back on while Armsmaster adjusted the machine for Missy, then ran through the process with the younger girl.

"Learn anything of use from that thing?" Taylor asked Hive.

"No, Lord," Hive responded. "It's more advanced than a traditional MRI in construction, rapidly scanning for multiple elements in succession, but there's nothing spectacular about it otherwise and nothing about it can be used to improve scanning spells."

Oh well. It wasn't a hardship to go through the process, at least, and it wasn't long before Missy was done as well.

"No result at all on either necklace," Armsmaster said as Missy stepped out. "Pity, though not entirely unexpected either. Give me a moment to transfer the MRI data to storage for the doctors and then we'll move on to the next test of the day."

That took a couple of minutes, and the doctors left the room with an external drive and headed one direction while Armsmaster led Taylor and Missy down the hall in the other direction. It wasn't long before they came to another room, Armsmaster entering a code before opening the door. There were two women inside, both with basic masks on and connections to shard-type devices.

"Miss Hebert, Miss Biron," Armsmaster said, gesturing at the other two in the room. "Meet Pickpocket and Dismantler."

"Oooh," one of the two said, jumping up out of her chair. "Miss Hebert! It's an honor to meet you in person, after hearing so much about your skills from the locals!"

Taylor blinked. "What?"

"I'm Pickpocket, and since I arrived a couple days ago I've been checking on the local scene. They hand out pictures of you as a warning against making any attempt to pick your pockets! Rumor has it that you were able to remove everything from the pockets of the last ones to try and pick your pockets, only to give them back their empty wallets and turn their keys in to the lost and found!"

That had everyone else in the room staring at Taylor for a moment. She just blinked. "What?"

"I have powers that let me pull that kind of impossible off, but you? You're not a parahuman. Your skills must be incredible to have pulled that off without anyone noticing! Well, except for a thinker, anyway, but they cheat and couldn't tell anyone how you'd done it, just that you had."

"I was unaware that Miss Hebert had any such skills," Armsmaster interjected. "Perhaps someone else was acting on her behalf to protect her from those looking to take advantage of her?"

Pickpocket rolled her eyes. "Doubtful, since it's never happened with anyone else and you don't have anyone capable of that locally."

"Regardless of the cause, fangirling over her isn't why you were asked to come here." He then turned to Taylor and Missy. "To start with here, we'd like to see if Pickpocket can use her physics-defying ability to remove items someone is carrying or wearing in order to remove either necklace. If she fails then Dismantler approached us, desiring to attempt to take the necklaces apart."

The woman sighed. "Right, right. Let's get this over with then." She circled Taylor first, flinching several times as she did so. Each time she flinched she frowned more.

"Lord," Hive sent. "Shall I liberate her of her wallet to provide a demonstration?"

Taylor resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "I don't want to be known as an impossible pickpocket, so no."

"May I at least redirect her attempts to remove me to her own wallet?"

"You can tell what she's trying to do?"

"Easily. It's very similar to the spatial manipulation system, if more focused."

"Well, if you want to frustrate her by having her grab her own wallet instead of you then feel free."

The next time Pickpocket flinched she paused, blinked, and grinned immediately afterwards. That was followed by triumphantly reaching into a pouch on her belt and pulling her wallet out of it. "AHA! Wait a minute..."

"I thought your wallet was in your pocket," Armsmaster commented. "Not your pouch."

"It was. How the hell?"

"I think we can conclude that your skills won't work on Miss Hebert's necklace. Perhaps you'd like to try with Miss Biron's now?"

Pickpocket scowled, put the wallet back into her pocket, and moved over to Missy. This time it was only three flinches before she stopped, but this time she checked what was in her pouch before acting triumphant. It wasn't her wallet, but Dismantler growled before storming over and grabbing it from her.

"I'm thinking that the necklaces have more to do with the difficulty pickpockets had with Miss Hebert than anything else," Armsmaster noted. "Still, thank you for the attempts."

The woman threw a middle finger in his direction before storming out the door into the hallway. Though she stopped just outside of it, after the door closed, and waited. Possibly for someone to come and escort her out of the building.

"With that done," Armsmaster continued. "Dismantler, would you like to make your attempts now?"

"Gladly," the woman said. "Though I think that I'll start with Miss Biron, as what I can see of her necklace's chain looks more standard than Miss Hebert's."

Missy was feeling a little out of sorts as Dismantler started to work on Hive. The woman hadn't gotten anywhere with Space after an hour of trying, though that wasn't really a surprise. She wasn't going to get anywhere with Hive either, for that matter, but that was just how it was going to be. What had Missy feeling out of sorts was the reaction she'd gotten from the Wards.

Dennis had been the first to arrive, had greeted her warmly, and had somehow frozen all of her clothing without affecting her directly at all. Which had been very annoying, especially as her panties and one sock were the last two items to unfreeze. Space had even apologized for not understanding how the effect was accomplished and thus was unable to reverse it before it timed out on its own.

Chris and Dean had arrived together shortly after that, luckily after she could move properly again, and Carlos came in almost right behind them. None of them had actually been expecting her to be there, but they didn't complain and didn't push for too many details on anything. Though Dennis did try to freeze Space, specifically, after she mentioned being there for testing. His declaration that it was 'just like the other one' had resulted in some explanation of what had happened when they'd been brought in to try and affect Hive, though without naming Hive as anything other than Taylor's necklace.

Most of what struck her was how they didn't seem to have any desire to treat her differently, beyond a little bit of what she thought was pity that she'd lost her powers. She'd expected them to treat her more like a kid now that she wasn't the longest-serving Ward, but that hadn't happened. Instead they'd just treated her basically like they always had, though there also seemed to be a little less worry as well? Though that might be because she couldn't whack them across the back of the head from across the room anymore.

Well, not without revealing things that it would be a bad idea to reveal to them, anyway. Like that she technically still had access to her powers, if slightly changed. From their point of view the effect was identical, being out of arm's reach was out of her reach for the time being, which hadn't been the case for the majority of the time that she'd known the four of them. The only thing that didn't explain was the various looks that Dean kept giving her. It was almost like a combination of concern and confusion, but for what reason she couldn't say.

Of course, none of them knew how to better meet up in person while she wasn't attending the same school as any of them and wasn't going to be around for any of the now more numerous Wards activities. Their offer to try and get her invited to some of the latter despite her no longer being a Ward was nice, but she didn't think it was a good idea. Besides, that might cut into her time working with Taylor, even if some more combat training with the PRT had been tempting. Then again, Ethan and Sherie would probably have to sign off on it and she didn't expect them to agree regardless. Especially as all it would take is one more trigger in the area to bring in a new Ward and negate the whole agreement.

"These are impossible!" Dismantler yelled, pulling Missy out of her thoughts. "They can't be dismantled at all!"

"You were warned that we suspected that to be the case," Armsmaster noted. "Still, thank you for trying."

Taylor frowned as they entered a new conference room. She was tempted to fangirl over the very obvious Eidolon that was standing there, but was more concerned with the fact that her physical self couldn't pay proper attention to the girl in the corner. One that was holding a sign saying 'invisible'. Her other instances and her sensor system were unaffected, but her physical self just couldn't focus on the girl, instead seeming to see what should be behind her. Which was wrong, according to the sensor system, as her physical self wasn't seeing the vent behind the girl. Missy seemed to be having similar trouble, having frowned and tried to look at the corner twice now.

"Lord," Hive sent a moment later. "May I retaliate against the girl for her device's manipulation of your mind?"

Taylor blinked. "Is that part of why I'm getting a headache?"

"Only because you've noticed the manipulation and are fighting it. I still don't like it."

"Okay. Since she's holding an 'invisible' sign, perhaps start by removing it from play?"

"I can do that," Hive responded. A moment later a bullet fired out of Hive, streaking across the room and striking the 'invisible' sign. One localized explosion later and the sign was gone, the girl had jumped up in fright, and the inability to focus on her was negated.

"Apparently master effects are partially negated by the necklaces," Armsmaster said after a moment. "And continued exposure can result in retaliation. At the same time, Stagehand, I could've sworn that I told you to not pull an act like that until after what was going on was explained to the two?"

"My powers are most effective when people don't know that I have powers," the girl, Stagehand, replied. "You know that, I explained it. Though given that I almost got hit with a glowy ball of doom I'm thinking that I should've listened to you about it."

"Quite," Eidolon said. "Can we trust you to not cause any more trouble before I bring you back to the playhouse you normally work with?"

The girl nodded, and produced a book with a plain paper cover over it. Noticing that Taylor and Missy were both curious, she sighed. "Any words that I'm wearing or holding that could be said to describe me, even if obviously wrong, influence those around me to make people treat me as though they're true so long as they can be read. The cover prevents everyone around me from reading the words on the book and trying to apply them to me."

"Right," Armsmaster said. "I suppose that leaves Eidolon here, who would like to run whatever scanning powers he can manifest over you two in order to see what he can learn about your necklaces."

"Indeed," Eidolon said, gesturing to the side where two comfortable-looking chairs were waiting. "I suggest taking a seat, as this could take a while. Then we'll get lunch on my clock, followed by the doctors giving you your check ups. I apologize in advance, but I can rarely, if ever, describe how my less visible powers function. I'll try and give you a rundown of what they're seeing though."

Taylor considered that, and couldn't really find fault with it. Instead she moved over to one of the chairs and sat down in it, Missy following a moment later. Armsmaster leaned against the wall at the opposite side of the room, and Stagehand was obviously barely paying attention to her book as Eidolon started working.

Missy had enjoyed her lunch, a much more extravagant meal than she'd been expecting in a PRT facility, but the following medical examination had been very annoying. It was very complete, and they found nothing of note wrong with her. They'd then shuffled her out of the room so that they could repeat the entire process on Taylor. Of course, that meant that Missy was now officially 'off the clock' for testing. Mildly annoying, since Taylor was getting more time, but more so because now it was time for a therapy session.

The therapist's office was as bland as ever, unchanged and completely lacking in personalization. Which was fully expected due to the rotation of therapists that happened due to there not being enough to just have one in each region. Well, at least not enough cleared for the identities of Wards, anyway. Surely there were enough to cover all of the regions without that little detail?

"Good afternoon Miss Biron," Doctor Yamada said as the door closed behind Missy.

"Hello Doctor Yamada," Missy greeted.

"Have a seat. We have a couple of things that I want to go over with you before we get started otherwise."

"Oh?" Missy asked as she claimed the chair she usually used in these sessions. She also did her best to suppress a frown when she did so, as a spring had apparently started to come loose and it was leaning ever so slightly.

"Unfortunately, this is likely to be the last session you have with myself or the other PRT-affiliated therapists. Our employment remit is intended to cover parahumans, so your upcoming therapist appointments will be with a local therapist instead. I imagine it will be much more consistent as a result, like therapist sessions should be."

"I sense that you don't like the rotating therapist bit."

"You know I don't like it, even if the reasons for it look good on paper. Regardless, I'll likely be asked to prepare an initial packet for your new therapist while I'm here, even if it will need to have quite a bit left out for security reasons. I wanted to make sure that you were aware of that."

Missy nodded. "Thank you."

"Still, that isn't why we're here. I understand that you visited with the Wards this morning?"

Taylor found it interesting that Missy had made it out of the building before they fetched her to head up to the room where her therapy session was going to be held. Which was probably a little more useful to think about than her experience with being scanned by Eidolon. She'd gotten a little lost in mental fangirling until she realized that the man was correct in that he had little to no clue what his powers were doing. Such as the several 'scanning' abilities that created dimensional shears. Luckily, those also created bright flashes of light, so her flinching at momentary disruptions to her connection to the multitasking system probably hadn't been noticed as being anything other than reacting to the light.

That had bumped up 'find ways to protect those structures' on their list, since 'non-combat' parahuman powers apparently had a chance of causing problems.

Sadly, Hive hadn't learned much of use, not knowing how most of the things that Eidolon's shard device had done were supposed to help with sensing anything of use. Only being on the receiving end of something that you had no basis for the principles of made it harder to figure out the entire picture. Really, from a 'learn new tricks' point of view the day had been a bust. Luckily it wasn't a bust from the 'make money for doing very little' point of view.

"Here we are," the PRT employee that had escorted Taylor up to the therapist's office said. "Someone, probably me, will be back to pick you up when you're done."

"Thank you," Taylor said, entering the office as the employee headed back down the hallway. They were one of the easier ones to track, having an atrophied core, and it was obvious that they'd only headed to a break room or similar around the corner.

"Good afternoon Miss Hebert," the woman in the office greeted. "I'm Doctor Yamada."

"Good afternoon," Taylor replied.

"Please take a seat." Taylor did so, and Yamada continued. "Before we begin with anything, I want you to know that a single session is decidedly not the norm. Under normal circumstances there would be several sessions to build a trust relationship before we get into anything of significance, but that isn't all that I'm trained for. Almost everything said in here is confidential, but the exceptions are why I've been asked to talk to you today."

Taylor raised an eyebrow at that. "The exceptions?"

"Yes. I'm legally obligated to keep your secrets unless they fall into very specific categories, and even then I'm only allowed to reveal the absolute minimum to satisfy the law. As an example that I hope doesn't apply to you, I have to report signs of spousal abuse to the authorities. Along those lines, I'm trained to spot other potential problems, generally related to parahumans. Some of those are strictly a doctor/patient thing, but there are a few that I'm also required to report on."

"Okay. So presumably the PRT wants you to look for some of those signs?"

The woman nodded. "Yes. While it won't be as effective due to the limited time we have together, most of them tend to be quite obvious. They've also asked for an initial impression of your mental health, with the understanding that I can't get a decent impression without multiple sessions."

Taylor nodded in return. "Right. So given that, what is it that you want to talk to me about specifically?"

"I'd like to talk about each of your extraordinary incidents since the beginning of the year, even if you aren't likely to remember the details of all of them."

Well, that sounded like 'fun'. Hopefully she wouldn't slip up and reveal things that she shouldn't have any knowledge of? Or, if she did, hopefully those slip-ups would be attributed to other people having told her details after the fact.

To Taylor's surprise, after she was done with Doctor Yamada she was escorted downstairs to be brought back home by Ethan. In a PRT officer's uniform and in a PRT van, but still Ethan. He went through the same initial list as the other PRT officers had when bringing her to or from these things, but changed things up a little once they were on their way.

"So," he said as they came to a red light pretty much straight out of the parking lot. "Did you get along with Miss Biron today?"

Taylor resisted the urge to roll her eyes, if only because there was equipment in the van monitoring them. Intended for 'if they were attacked', but it was there. "Well enough, though a lot of the time one of us was occupied."

"That would be the case, yes. Still, I'm one of her guardians, and scheduling to keep someone around during the day is complicated while she isn't quite ready to be left on her own for significant periods of time. It'll be more so when school lets out in a few weeks and she isn't spending most of her weekdays in class. All of the daycare options we've looked into so far don't take new kids at her age, don't allow jewelry other than medical alert items, or appear to be gang-run fronts. Given that you've both got mysterious necklaces, and may end up dragged out to this kind of thing together again, I don't suppose that you'd be willing to earn some extra spending money through a sitting gig? Having a sitter that doesn't need to be given a talk about the necklace would be nice all on its own."

"Not that I think I'll need the money, but I suppose that it would give me something to do as well. Without needing to deal with the public by getting a retail or fast food job, anyway."

Ethan visibly shuddered at that. "Did that once, never again if I can help it. I don't recommend it if you can avoid it for a large number of reasons, the least of which is that they'll probably expect you to be far too serious while on the clock."

"Well, you don't seem like a serious kind of person, so I guess that would be a problem for you."

"I can be serious when it's needed. For example, I'm going to have to sit down and talk with your father about things today. If he agrees to things then we'll trade contact information so that we can see about scheduling your time in a way that works for everyone. I'll probably keep the jokes to a minimum there, though my wife will be annoyed when I let loose with every joke and pun I've come up with and not said out loud."

Taylor rolled her eyes at that. "Why not just make note of them for when they're more suitable to drop on people?"

"I tried that. My wife burned the first notebook, my boss burned the second, a coworker burned the third, and my wife burned the fourth after finding my new hiding spot for it. When I switched to a digital file I found that it was being cleared out 'randomly' until all of a sudden new regulations said we couldn't keep that kind of thing on work computers. I tried using a five meg floppy instead, to keep things off of work computers, but every time my wife found out I'd find the floppy stuck to the fridge with a magnet."

Well, that sounded impressive in the lengths people were going to keep him from writing his jokes down for later. They couldn't be that bad, could they?

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Threadmarks Chapter 58 - May 28, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jun 17, 2020

#10,461

Missy had been slightly annoyed at having to wait for Taylor to get home and for Ethan to leave before they could meet up for some more training. More so because Sherie's idea of keeping Missy busy was to do chores. Which was mostly having her dust high places with use of spatial manipulation, most of which didn't need dusting. She'd recognized the busy-work for what it was, but didn't complain too much about it in case there was something more annoying waiting.

Of course, once they had confirmation that Ethan had left the Hebert household, which had taken far too long in Missy's opinion, there was a further delay as Sherie talked to Danny and Taylor. Possibly about initial scheduling of when Taylor might be available to play 'sitter', but Missy had been left dusting a room that didn't need it and thus hadn't been able to hear any of the discussion. Then there was more of a delay while Taylor worked with Hive to set up an obstacle course that was a little more fair for both of them to run through, not including elements directly under Taylor's control.

Still, now it was finally time to head to the beach to get some more training in, and Missy had put away the cleaning supplies and stepped onto the disguised transport device. A moment later she found herself on the beach, where the weather had apparently gotten worse since the day before. With no Knight Clothing up, not having had it up for the trip to the PRT building, she quickly cast the Knight Armor spell. Once that was done she cast the flight spell, then took to the air to head over to where Taylor was.

"Bit windy out here," Missy noted when she arrived at what was obviously the start of the obstacle course. "And wet."

"Yep," Taylor said. "The course is a little more complicated today, but the same general idea as before."

"Are you demonstrating today?"

"Already did. Just not for you."

Missy frowned. "Fun. So now I get to make a blind attempt?"

"Yep. With everything but the barriers active from the start."

"Barriers?"

"I had to shoot down barriers to get through some of the rings. We figure that it wouldn't be fair to have you doing the same."

"I don't have anything to shoot them with."

Taylor nodded. "Yep. That's why we figure that it wouldn't be fair."

"Right. Okay."

Twenty minutes later she'd made it through the much more complicated course, having only been hit twice. Again, by bullets that had darted around her shields to hit her anyway. She'd gotten three others that had done the same with a snap-cast shield that appeared just in time to stop the bullets. More training on getting those in place quickly was definitely going to be needed. Taylor then had the course reset and Missy ran through it again, backwards. She made slightly better time and only got hit by one bullet that time.

"Good job," Taylor said.

"Can I watch you go through the thing twice now?" Missy asked.

"Only if you want to delay your surprise," Sherie answered from back home, where she'd been watching things remotely.

That had Missy blinking. "What surprise?"

"Well," Taylor said, throwing a large shield above them to stop some of the rain. A moment later she was holding two crystal spheres. One blue, one purple. She held on to the blue one and passed the purple one to Missy. "Sherie decided that the best defense is a good offense, meaning that it's time for your combat device and some initial combat spells. Not the full set, but a few basics. Of course, you're going to need to name your combat device. Pulse some mana into the crystal and say a name, followed by 'set up'. I was told to keep it simple when I named Hal, as it's a verbal activation trigger, but I've barely used that and instead just connect and trigger it directly."

Looking down at the crystal, Missy grinned. She'd come up with a fun idea there, ignoring the comment about rarely using Hal's name, and pulsed a little bit of mana into the crystal. "Reason, set up."

The crystal glowed, lifting from her palm before a series of purple rings appeared around it. Several tightened down into a web around the crystal. Two expanded into a handle on one side, while many small chain links started to appear on the other side as they formed a complicated braid-like pattern. That narrowed down to a point, where a string-like extension appeared at the end. Reaching out, Missy took the handle, the glow around the whip settling down to just a slight glow from the crystal itself.

Taylor snorted, then pulsed mana into the blue crystal. "Chain, set up." That resulted in a blue version of the entire process repeating, leaving both of them holding a whip.

Missy frowned after a moment. "Why is your whip longer than mine?"

"I'm taller than you are. The base whip length is based on the user."

"Oh. What do you mean by base?"

Taylor responded by snapping her hand holding the whip out, the 'chain links' unfolding to allow the whip to extend to nearly four times the initial length before it wrapped around one of the rings in the still-there obstacle course. She tugged it a couple of times, then it unwrapped itself and retracted. A moment later the entire thing compressed down instead, the end opening up a bit as the whole thing became more solid and less flexible. That was followed by a beam firing out of the now-opened end. Lastly, she flicked her wrist and the chain reconfigured into a second handle, a couple of links sitting between the two to form nunchucks.

Missy looked down at her own whip, or perhaps down at Reason. "Okay, how do I do all of that?"

"There's a manual in there. Just ensure that you're properly connected like you would to Space."

Taylor grinned a bit as she returned home, dropping the Knight Armor once she was in her room. Missy had found that running both the Space and Reason multitasking systems, for a total of forty-seven instances of herself, was just barely doable. Adding in combat drones wasn't likely to happen, and Hive and Space both agreed with that. Reason was more combat-focused and had no opinion on it.

Even without the new spells, just adding Reason into the mix allowed Missy to make it through the obstacle course unscathed by bullets. Homing or otherwise, and a lot faster than she'd gone through it the first couple of times. She'd need to practice with the straight shot, homing, and manual control bullets she'd been given access to, as well as the current iteration of the straight-shot beam. Once she had those down well enough they'd be able to add barriers into the obstacle course for her, and perhaps start sparring.

Of course, Taylor had no problems adding Chain's thirty-one multitasking instances to her collection. It was a mere drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the insane number of instances that Hive provided. Hal hadn't had any multitasking instances included, but wasn't intended to provide said instances to someone who couldn't use Hive's collection. Reason and Chain, being copies of one another, had been designed to provide Missy with instances. Though it was easier to use an instance inside of them to control the motion of the whip.

Missy hadn't been told that there was a high-level lock on Reason's functionality. It could apply the dimensional splitter and nanotech disassembly systems to the end of the whip, or along the entire chain, but that was locked down for now. Those would probably be unlocked when they got permission to give the younger girl a cutting tool. Coating the entire thing in mana to act as a training 'stun' was unlocked, but that didn't work all that well without mana defenses.

Actually using the two devices was very different from the way Hal was used. Taylor was going to do her best to learn how to use hers alongside Missy, if only so that if they came up with tricks individually then they could share them. Luckily they didn't need to be able to use a real whip to use the devices. Anyone who could use a real whip that saw them using the devices might cry foul, though.

"Did you two have fun?" her father asked as she walked downstairs.

"I think Missy is both excited and slightly overwhelmed by her new device," Taylor admitted. "She pulled off tangling herself up, while in mental control of the whip, six or seven times."

"And you didn't?"

"Well, I might've practiced a bit in the simulator after looking up some videos of people using whips online so that I could make a good first impression."

He nodded. "So you cheated and didn't tell her, leaving her to believe that you're just that much better than she is?"

"Nah, I figure that she has to believe that I got more practice than she did. Which would technically be correct."

"If you say so. Dinner should be ready in about ten minutes, and after dinner I'm expecting a call to arrange a schedule for you watching over Missy after school. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for a couple of weeks. Not this coming week, the week after, and then we'll need to figure out a schedule for school being out."

She shrugged. "Works for me. Here or there?"

"We'll probably have you meeting her at their house, for now. Since she can actually get into it if you're running late, compared to here where she couldn't."

"That makes sense."

That evening Missy couldn't resist sitting inside of the simulation interface, linked between Space and Reason for maximum flexibility. She was determined to learn as much about using Reason's whip form as she could, in addition to practicing the casting of the bullets and beams in a safe environment. Without telling anyone, she'd also cast some sensor drones to monitor overnight, in an attempt to train herself to monitor those more efficiently.

It turned out that the basic 'point and shoot' bullet and beam was trivial to use but complicated to aim. The homing bullet was harder to set up but didn't require aiming. And then there was the manual control bullet, which sucked in that right now she pretty much had to dedicate a multitasking interface to 'driving' it. That, more than anything else, made it obvious that Hive's much more powerful multitasking system was bullshit.

Still, she felt that she'd made decent progress with simulation-level casting and with learning the controls for Reason. Whip form, blaster form, and nunchuck form. Two of which Taylor was obviously somewhat familiar with, probably due to helping Hive test them. Missy had no clue if Taylor had any experience with the nunchuck form, because that hadn't been used for anything.

Space had also done a little bit of practice in the simulation system, in particular casting the bullet spells. It apparently had a hardware bullet module, but this would allow for it to more dynamically respond to threats when Missy wasn't 'in costume'. Something that Hive and Hal could apparently do for Taylor, and that Missy didn't really have a significant problem with Space doing in suitable circumstances.

By morning Missy was mentally exhausted, but felt a lot better about how she'd fare in a fight. Now instead of just dodging and blocking she might be able to shoot back, even if more real-world experience casting was going to be needed. Better, she might be able to grab someone with Reason and pull them in for a solid punch to the face. Of course, that wasn't going to be incredibly effective, she was going to need to look into making 'cover her fists' type spells if she didn't want to try and snap-cast bullets right in people's faces.

Taylor had ended up spending a good portion of the night training with Chain's form in the simulation system, against herself with a copy of Chain and against herself with Hal. Both were for practicing with Missy in different ways, and using the simulation system meant that the most embarrassing mistakes wouldn't have been seen by anyone. Hopefully. Being able to mentally control the way the whip and nunchuck forms acted ensured that it was harder to make those mistakes in the first place.

At the same time, she was somewhat hoping that Missy hadn't watched a bunch of videos showing how whips really work. Taylor had found herself doing her best to emulate whips when not using the obviously-unique abilities of the devices. Such as changing the length of the whip itself or causing it to go rigid. Not being tied into how a whip 'should' work might make things work out better for Missy in the long run.

Outside of that, Hive had split her own focus between doing her best to figure out how Taylor's multitasking link worked, and thus how to protect it, and monitoring work going on in the inlet. With the pile of materials she'd apparently been able to get things going into high gear, though had brought up that any furniture that wasn't 'built-in' was probably better off being purchased for the time being. Even if she could use things like the scans of Taylor's new mattress as a base for making copies.

That, apparently, meant that shopping trip as Minerva might be needed. Then again, she had a large amount of money that wasn't going to do the economy any good sitting around in her piggy bank or bank account, so perhaps that wasn't a horrible thing in general? There were a couple of stores she could visit for decently constructed furniture, and she'd likely need to pick up other things as well. Sheets, towels, pillows, dishware...

By morning she was considering what might need to be on a shopping list, even if it was likely to be needed next weekend instead of this one.

Sunday morning started with exercise, and then everyone headed home. Missy had been told to go take a nap without using the multitasking or simulation systems, given that she was having trouble focusing. Taylor ended up sitting in front of the television with her father, watching the morning news. Which was covering the Wards event from the previous day, and had included a tribute to Vista.

Calls were being made for the PRT and/or Youth Guard to ensure that whatever it was that had happened to Vista didn't happen to anyone else, despite nobody knowing what it was that they didn't want to happen. For all they knew she'd passed away in a perfectly normal, non-parahuman accident of some kind. Which was, admittedly, a counter-argument being made by a minority of people.

"So are you going to make an appearance today?" her father asked, getting her attention.

She considered that, since she'd half expected to end up working with Missy all day. "Do you think I should?"

"I don't think it would hurt."

"Well, doing an actual patrol through town wouldn't be a horrible use of my time today. Think I should show off Chain when I do so?"

He shook his head. "No, let Missy use Reason first to show off the new design. Though that does bring up a question, are you going to get a copy of every combat device that Hive makes for someone else?"

"My Lord can better train others in the use of their devices if she had equivalent devices of her own," Hive replied. "Ensuring that they work with her and each other is additional practice on my part during the construction phase, improving my own abilities in those areas as well."

Taylor sighed, not wanting to argue that she didn't think it was that likely that she'd end up with more people joining up and needing devices. Instead she thought about where she might best spend her time patrolling. Especially with people running around town causing problems already while looking for Minerva. It didn't take long to determine that the best option might be to patrol where all of those people weren't. "I don't suppose that you think that it would make sense to patrol somewhere else, like Boston or New York?"

Her father thought about that for a moment. "That would potentially help draw the crazies away from here for a bit, if they think that you've temporarily moved on to another city. I'll recommend Boston, if only because you visited New York and that might be enough of a link to draw attention."

"If we want to avoid a link then perhaps I should just jump to the West Coast and patrol somewhere over there."

"No, I think sticking with Boston would be for the best today. No need to demonstrate to the world that you can jump clear across the country with impunity right now."

Well, when he put it that way it did make at least a little sense.

Taylor had originally intended to appear over Boston Harbor, but due to the proximity to the airport had opted to appear further South instead. Specifically, she ended up appearing over Thompson Island and flying fairly low into Boston proper to keep under any air traffic. Hive fell in behind her as sensor drones flew ahead of them, heading for where she'd found news that the Teeth and Blasto had been active over the last few days in the Allston area. Blasto had apparently gotten something of the Teeth's, or so the news thought. Indirectly, or so the rumors said, but he still had whatever it was and the Teeth were apparently unhappy about it.

She lucked out by virtue of her drones spotting a group of twelve non-parahumans wearing blades, spikes, and bones. That matched the descriptions she had for members of the Teeth, so she angled for that general area. She was only halfway there when two others approached, one dressed very similarly to the thugs and the other in more Asian-inspired clothing that was still covered in bones and spikes. Those two were parahumans. Hopefully neither of them was the Butcher and no more parahumans were on the way. That they moved out as soon as the two parahumans arrived at least made it seem like it was the entire group today.

By the time Taylor had caught up with them the fighting had started, one of the parahumans creating large numbers of short-lived duplicates to swarm the plant and cat hybrids that they'd come across. Which made them Spree, and so far didn't really seem like a good reason for her to intervene against the Teeth, to be honest. They weren't even causing property damage, just swarming the hybrids. Then the other parahuman vanished, appearing on a rooftop nearby in an explosive blast. Which meant that they were the current Butcher, made more obvious when they retrieved a gatling gun that had been stashed on the rooftop and hefted it with one hand.

"So," Taylor said in the multitasking system, into the channel that connected back to her father at home. "I appear to have stumbled upon the Butcher leading the Teeth."

"What?" he replied. Right. Her sensor drones weren't feeding back to him.

"A small group of the Teeth, led by the Butcher, are attacking Blasto's creations. Or at least I assume they're Blasto's creations, that's what the news called them."

"Okay. I honestly should've expected that when I agreed to you checking out that area of Boston, and now I'm wondering something. Hive, if the Butcher dies, is there any chance of Taylor becoming the new Butcher?"

"No," Hive responded, immediately. "The protective nature of the Knight Armor will protect my Lord, and if the Shard device waits until my Lord isn't protected then it will be easily intercepted and removed as it attempts to connect. Returning home through the beach should also suffice to prevent tracking if the administrative shroud layer does what I believe it does."

There was a pause before the response came through. "Right. So unless the Butcher has something that can bypass your Knight Armor you're probably good no matter what. Hive, can you get her out if the Butcher does have such a trick?"

"Almost certainly, though I imagine that at this point my Lord would just dodge it. She's not constrained by a need to hide her mobility options."

"Good point. In that case, I can't really argue against giving things a shot. Though do try to capture instead of kill the Butcher, please?"

Taylor had no problem with that request, and even cast her cape spell, though didn't have it start generating binding particles yet. She'd do that when she was closer. A moment later Hive copied her, manifesting a similar but smaller cape of her own.

When she made it to the battle site, and started her cape generating binding particles, the battle had escalated. Spree was still doing the 'swarm the front line with short-lived clones' dance, of course, but the non-parahumans had started causing property damage as they joined in and the Butcher was teleporting around with the gatling gun. Though there was amazingly little collateral damage from the gun itself, due to all of the bullets bending space through higher dimensions to hit their targets. Most of the extra damage was in the ground around the various hybrids, which now seemed to include plant-dogs and some faster ones that she couldn't tell the origins of.

Nobody had noticed her or Hive in the air, as far as she could tell, so she stopped to think about things. The best solution was probably to flood the area with binding particles, then bind everyone. And she'd been working on giant bullets for delivering lots of binding particles at once. Grinning, she focused and cast two of said giant bullets in manual control form, using the cartoon-bomb visual template. That they'd cause no actual damage to anything, and thus make anyone expecting craters underestimate her, was a side benefit.

When the bullets were formed, one to either side of her, she directed them down to the battle. They were only noticed when they made it below the rooftops, which surprised her as the buildings were no more than five stories at most here, and the Butcher teleported back up to a rooftop before they made it to ground level. The bright flash of light as they 'exploded', releasing lots of binding particles but doing very little otherwise, distracted everyone in the fight.

"Your bombs need work," the Butcher called from the rooftop, having looked up to see her floating there. "Or have your powers made you equal to Spree's duplicates, and thus have no actual strength?"

Taylor resisted the urge to frown, as the Butcher was outside of the field of binding particles. That would make it harder to pin her down, so perhaps she needed to hold off for the moment to see if she could get the cape into said field before trying to bind anyone. As such, she cast a collection of bullets. These were in six-bladed knife form, set to explode very lightly while generating more binding particles. Most of them started spinning quickly as they went down into the battle, but a handful spread out and two went straight for the Butcher. Hive joined in on throwing bullets into the fight, leaving the Butcher to Taylor.

As expected, the Butcher vanished before the two going for her could make contact. Both turned directly towards the rooftop that the cape had appeared on, then repeated that when the Butcher vanished again. Between these teleports the Butcher would fire the gatling gun at Taylor, only to have shields pop up and block the bullets. The effect that made it so that the Butcher didn't have to aim didn't seem to take the hex shield spells into account either, so the bullets just impacted them. While that dance was going on the lightly explosive mana bullets were hitting their target coordinates, Taylor and Hive firing more as they just floated there. The bullets weren't causing anything to speak of in the way of injuries, since they were just aiming to disorient the combatants by exploding the bullets near them. The single exception was the bullet of Hive's that had been grabbed by one of the unknown hybrids in mid-air and had blown the thing's jaw off.

That action had convinced those fighting that the bullets were dangerous enough to avoid, throwing them more into disarray as a result. But Taylor was barely paying attention to them, instead focusing on the Butcher. Who had looped around the area, and now it was time to see just how good that 'danger sense' that was supposed to exist was. Because while running from the homing bullets constantly in front of her she'd lost track of the manual-control bullets, one of which was now behind her.

Unlike the bullets she could see, the Butcher didn't react at all to the bullet she couldn't see as it slammed into her back. A coating of a higher-dimensional effect on the woman's skin confused the proximity trigger on the bullet, making it think that it was much further away. The spinning blades of the bullet ignored whatever that effect was and cut into the woman instead of detonating right away as well. She screamed in pain as that happened, her clothing being torn up a bit by the impact before a large hole in them was blown open when the bullet exploded. The explosion itself was centered just outside of her body and didn't cause her any significant damage thanks to that effect in her skin, but the gatling gun itself was dropped as the woman fell to the rooftop she was standing on.

Taylor wasn't sure, but it looked like the bullet had severed the woman's spine. Perhaps the blades were a little too realistic on that template and needed blunting? Presumably the effect on the woman's skin was part of her brute rating, and Hive had sent a sensor drone to follow the woman. Possibly out of a desire to see if she could figure out what the effect actually was. The Butcher vanished as the two homing bullets approached again, but didn't get back up in her new position. Scowled and screamed obscenities while making rude gestures, but didn't get back up. Instead she just teleported away repeatedly, even though Taylor dismissed the two bullets chasing her.

Taylor sent a sensor drone to join Hive's in following the Butcher's path, then cast and fired a bunch of homing binding trigger bullets into the battle below her. There were yells of shock as the bullets went from 'explode nearby' to 'hit directly', though the sudden glow from the area before the combatants were all bound in place wasn't what they'd expected. Floating down, she started looking up a suitable phone number to call when she realized that the Butcher had just vanished from her drone's range in a single apparently longer-range teleport hop.

That was annoying, but the cape had been retreating and no longer trying to fight, so it wasn't a significant problem as far as the fighting went. Despite the explosions when arriving after a teleport, the Butcher also hadn't caused nearly as much damage to the area as the others either.

"Did you learn anything about the effect on her skin?" Taylor asked while she flipped through listings. Calling the PRT seemed like the better bet in this case, and there was a non-emergency Boston number.

"Not enough to even begin to know how it worked," Hive admitted. "Perhaps we can find some easier to access parahumans with brute ratings to see if they have something similar? That was nothing like the forcefield that Miss Dallon has, after all."

Taylor mentally shrugged, then brought up a communication window so that it was obvious that she was making a phone call.

The PRT and Boston Police had shown up together, Taylor swapping out bindings that only she could remove for ones that her removal tools could take off. That was most important for Spree in this case, the bindings causing him to fail to make clones while he had them on. They weren't sure if Blasto had even noticed the battle, leaving his creations to defend the area instead, and that was apparently expected of the tinker. The unpowered members of the Teeth were dragged out of the area first, Blasto's injured and dead creations taking a little more work to pack up. The uninjured creations had retreated as soon as the fighting was over.

"Minerva," one of the PRT officers said, getting her attention as he approached her with a box. She turned to him and he continued. "I'm Officer Hale, and was asked to talk to you about future visits to the area. Or, I suppose, visits to other cities with major airports. You did a good job appearing out of flight paths today, but air traffic control couldn't contact you when you appeared." He held the box out. "This is a standard ten-pack of flight transponders and radio information. The FAA would appreciate it if you'd use the transponders and monitor the radio frequencies when operating near major airports. Basic radio etiquette for the frequencies in question are included alongside the registration information."

Taylor blinked and took the box. "The FAA would appreciate it, not the PRT?"

He shrugged. "We don't have any jurisdiction over the airspace, that's not our purview. Outside of emergencies we need to file flight plans and do our best to stay out of the way of commercial air traffic."

"Oh. Right. That would make sense."

"The first box of ten transponders is paid for by the PRT in this case. If you need more then there are instructions for where you can purchase them or register your own compatible equipment included. I think there's a list of places you can order radios from as well, if you need to. Do you have any questions?"

Taylor shook her head. "No, I think that's all clear."

"Great. Now then, with that out of the way, I don't suppose that I could get your autograph for my daughter?" He produced a pre-printed picture of Taylor in-costume and a marker, the picture obviously taken from the fight against Leviathan. "My little Katie is a fan."

Taylor suppressed a sigh, but took the picture and marker anyway. She didn't bother to put Katie's name on it, just putting her Minerva signature in the corner of the picture. Officer Hale seemed pleased either way, carefully putting the picture in a plastic baggie that had 'Katie' written on it.

With the picture secured in the bag he turned back to her. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. Do you need any more help with Blasto's creations?"

He looked over at where they were wrestling one into a van. "Are you stronger than you appear to be?"

"Er, no, not really."

"Then no, I don't think that you'll be much help. Maybe you should look into coming up with a device to boost your strength?"

Taylor nodded. "That could be interesting, but I don't know if I'll be able to. That isn't really my department anyway."

"Good luck with it if you try."

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CmptrWz

Jun 17, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 59 - May 29, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jun 24, 2020

#10,532

Taylor had stored the box of transponders for the time being, for later review, before continuing her patrol through Boston. She ran into a couple of muggers, but not much else. Blasto and Accord were the only two that she'd been able to find solid information on the 'territory' of in the first place anyway. Blasto had the ongoing altercation with the Teeth, but Accord had been reasonably peaceful when people weren't breaking his rules in his territory. This weekend didn't seem to be a point where that was happening.

She and Hive had put away a decent lunch in town, having come across a group of food carts and purchasing from four of them in all, before slipping away and using the optical stealth systems to hide the flash from their departure via dimensional transference. Just in case, they'd headed for the beach first. Hive had wandered off to check on the inlet while Taylor looked over the beach itself. If you ignored the transport device and the damage she'd caused to some of the trees then there weren't a whole lot of signs that they used it for training at all. Well, that and one of the rocks.

Hive didn't take long to return, but instead of them heading home had a request.

"Lord," Hive said. "I'd like to expose you to the tumbling effect on each of the three levels to see how each affects your connection to the multitasking interface. Preferably without any barriers up, to show a worst-case scenario as far as it affects you."

"Now?" Taylor asked, slightly annoyed.

"This does seem to be an opportune time to check that," her father offered, from where he was still keeping an eye on them. "No tutoring tomorrow if it takes you out for a bit in particular, you've just been seen out and about and thus don't need to make any appearances, and the sooner you know the answers the better for preparing for them."

Taylor sighed at that. "Okay, I get it. And I'm in a safe location, with Hive ready to shut things down and get me home if things go wrong, right?"

"Yep."

Hive took that as agreement, and produced a black hexagonal crystal. She then looked around, frowning. "We should move over to the transport device. That will allow testing how they react to the effect at the same time, and will have you closer to it should we need to use it to get you home."

Shaking her head, Taylor walked over to the transport device and sat down on it. The black crystal that Hive was holding was then placed in front of her, only to change into a backpack.

"What?" Taylor said, looking at it.

"Two of the three modes are available in this form," Hive said as she deployed surveillance drones. "It has the smallest area of effect as well, and may be useful for training to operate under the influence of the effects. There are two larger forms, the most powerful version of the effect requires the largest form to be used."

"I guess that makes sense. Do I need to put it on now?"

"No, Lord. Having it next to you is close enough."

"Good."

Taylor sat there for a moment, expecting Hive to activate the device. Instead Hive looked at Taylor. "Lord, are you going to dismiss your armor?"

Right. She was supposed to do that. Ooops. It only took a moment to drop the Knight Armor, leaving her in normal clothing. Hive then backed off a little, and it was very noticeable when the backpack-like device activated. There was a momentary...shaking, perhaps, of the connection to the multitasking interface. Her anchor around her core had shaken at the same time, but they'd both settled down almost immediately afterwards.

Out of curiosity, she cast a bullet, and it obviously took more mana to maintain than it had before the device had activated. A continuous feeding of mana, though not to an extreme degree. Disconnecting herself from it, she watched as it fell apart.

"That doesn't appear to have affected you too much," Hive noted.

"Just a little shaking," Taylor admitted.

"Switching to the next pattern."

Taylor felt as the effect vanished for a split second, then came back stronger. This time the shaking was much more powerful, and it felt like the multitasking system disconnected for a moment before a surge of mana from her core hit her brain and re-established the connection. It was obviously much harder to maintain things with this mode active. Once she'd stabilized, though, she cast another bullet. It took six attempts, and required far more mana than it should've.

"Much more significant," Taylor noted.

"It also disconnected you," Hive said. "The reconnection was interesting, and I think I'm going to want to intentionally disconnect you a few more times with the same method."

Taylor groaned slightly, but didn't argue. Better to do this in controlled conditions, right? "Now or later?"

"Let's try turning the tumbling off, waiting for you to settle, and then turning it back on now."

They did that for half an hour, repeatedly causing Taylor to disconnect and reconnect in the process. It felt like it was taking longer to reform each time, but she couldn't tell if anything was different in it so that might just be her perception of it. Hive eventually said that she wasn't getting any more information out of the cycling and changed the device back into a crystal long enough to move it off to the side. It took the form of a van-sized block with built-in displays.

"That's a bit larger than I was expecting," Taylor admitted.

"The intermediate form is a little larger than the average human in height, but the minimum size of the tumbling equipment for the third pattern necessitates the larger volume."

"Okay. Why do I feel like this is going to suck?"

"Because I suspect that unlike the second pattern, this one will prevent you from re-establishing the multitasking connection immediately. Now, I have to back further away due to the range this form has."

Taylor nodded, and Hive moved a significant distance away. The surveillance drones also moved further away, though three stayed closer than Hive was. That done, the device obviously powered up. Visibly, due to lights and indicators on the device coming up, audibly based on the sound the device was making, and magically as Taylor felt like she'd just been run over by a fleet of trucks. The multitasking link all but shattered, her core anchor was trying to be torn apart directly, and her core itself felt like needles were being constantly jammed into it.

She stayed conscious, somehow, but knew that she wasn't going to be able to maintain enough focus for casting anything. Assuming that was even possible. At the same time, there was a building pressure in her core that she wasn't sure of the cause of that seemed to be matching a growing headache. She also noted that, unlike the previous levels, her watch seemed to be having issues and the transport device she was sitting on appeared to have powered down.

Somewhere between five seconds and five minutes later the effect shut down. Unlike the previous iteration of tests, there was no immediate burst of mana as her connection to the multitasking system was rebuilt. Instead the pressure in her core continued to build, as did her headache. It wasn't long before the pain was enough that she passed out, barely noticing that Hive had floated over.

Missy sighed as she sat there watching a stupid television show that had come on after the news. Her 'woke up completely exhausted mentally' stunt hadn't gone over well with Ethan or Sherie and she'd been told that she was taking the rest of the long weekend off. Worse, Taylor had then gone out and patrolled in Boston. She'd even fought the Butcher, apparently. While Missy was sleeping.

Not that she'd have been allowed to join Taylor anyway, of course. That was probably not happening until school let out at a minimum, just in case. Sherie was also unhappy with Danny for allowing Taylor to intervene against the Butcher, having contacted him to find out what the hell had happened. Ethan thought it was just awesome and had come up with a list of things that he planned on asking Taylor and Danny about when the two were available to chat. A list that he didn't want anyone else to look at first.

Regardless, for now there was nothing to do beyond continue to use the simulation system while otherwise 'relaxing'. Not ideal for proper training, but far better than nothing. Even better, Sherie had insisted that Ethan not get out the comedy films this weekend, so Missy didn't have to sit through that.

"Hey Missy," Sherie said as she came into the living room. "Would you happen to know if Hive has anything that would count as a stealth monitoring device available?"

Missy rolled her eyes and pulled a surveillance drone out of Reason's storage, since she was playing with their controls in the simulation system anyway. It appeared in a flash of light, set up in full sensor drone mode. Luckily she didn't have to connect to it fully for it to function. A moment later it faded from view as she activated the cloaking system. "Any more questions?"

Sherie blinked, staring at where the drone had just gone invisible, then shook her head as though to clear it and turned back to Missy. "I see. Or don't, as the case may be. But I thought that the sensor drones weren't able to be hidden like that?"

"That's a surveillance drone that the manual says Hive came up with after figuring out Squealer's cloaking tech."

"Huh. That does make some sense."

"Why do you care?"

"Well, with all of the attempts to get monitoring devices in here I was thinking that it might not hurt to put in some of our own."

"Oh. That doesn't sound like a horrible idea. There's a modified sensor drone spell that Taylor called a 'security camera', but that would just feed back to me. Maybe we can get Hive to make a magic security system instead?"

"Well, at least I have something to talk to them about now. Maybe I can distract them from my husband's childish idiocy?"

Taylor flinched as she woke up, feeling like something was very wrong. Admittedly, it also seemed that a few dozen instances of her were just booting up in the multitasking interface, so perhaps she'd been disconnected again?

"Lord," Hive said, getting Taylor's attention.

"Yeah?" Taylor replied blinking as she attempted to focus. Was she in bed? The last thing she remembered was being on the beach. "What happened?"

"You were incredibly stubborn," her father answered. "And apparently when you were disconnected from Hive by the last test you subconsciously decided that you needed a better connection solution."

"Which appears to have failed despite your stubborn attempt to brute force one into existence," Hive noted. "Since you just restored the original one."

"Oh," Taylor said, wondering if that had anything to do with her headache.

"It's been several hours," her father said. "We should get some food into you, since your stomach was growling before you woke up, and then perhaps catch you up on the news."

He helped her downstairs, where she was dropped into a chair and had an entire pizza placed in front of her. She made quick work of three quarters of it, then slowed down a little. Hive had been floating around her the entire time, apparently not concerned about anyone seeing her in the house right now.

"So," Taylor said once she'd finished her latest slice. "What news?"

"They picked up that you fought the Butcher," her father replied. "Taking almost no effort to drive her off at that, making people think that your attacks are able to overcome brute powers."

"Speculation has changed significantly in the past half hour," Hive corrected, getting both of their attention. "Since Butcher fifteen broke Spree out of custody, seemingly as part of learning to use their inherited powers. Most of the discussion is now split between questioning if the Butcher was crippled or if retreating was seen as making her no longer worthy. Either way, it looks like their power nullifier took her out and became the new Butcher."

Taylor frowned. "That seems a bit extreme. Though in line with what I've read about the whole progression when a hero doesn't kill the current Butcher and go insane. At least it's a sign that I didn't finish her off by accident?"

"Regardless," her father said. "I'm happy that the only 'injury' you sustained today was from testing and not combat. Though I do wonder if you two learned anything other than not to do that again?"

"I'm still processing the data collected," Hive said. "But I believe that we will need to do that again."

He turned to look at Hive. "What?"

"If we've come up with that device then we have to assume that others have or will. My Lord needs to learn, if only subconsciously, to not take herself out of commission while in potential danger because of a field like that. Pushing herself until she knocks herself out, and keeping herself knocked out for hours, isn't a safe reaction if this comes up in a combat situation."

Taylor honestly wasn't sure if she or her father was less happy about that revelation. Sadly, she couldn't come up with a good counter-argument, and as such was likely to be subjected to regular hits with that particular tumbling effect. Though she wasn't going to allow another one this weekend, that was for sure.

That evening Taylor ended up focusing on recordings that Hive had made from their patrol while Hive was using pre-deployed testing drones and the simulation system to process the data that she'd collected earlier and run tests to attempt to confirm theories based on them. With any luck something of use would come of that, but Taylor was staying out of the mix for the time being. There weren't even that many instances of her running right now, to hopefully help her recover.

Instead she was dealing with the fact that there were literally several hundred requests for some kind of footage from when she'd encountered the Teeth. Most of them from news agencies that weren't happy with the one poorly-positioned security camera that had caught the fringes of the fight, but some were obviously from people that wanted to examine it. Possibly to figure out how to best fight Taylor later, not that she thought that the footage was going to help much on that front. Especially not when compared to her battle against Leviathan, where she'd been much more active.

Ensuring that things were framed as either coming from Taylor and Hive themselves or from any of the sensor drones that they had active had taken some effort, but in the end Taylor had been able to assemble a reasonable clip that should show enough to make the news happy while also not really showing a whole lot about her own fighting. Or, really, lack thereof. She'd spent most of the fight floating there doing nothing obvious, after all. Not even throwing her hands out to cast bullets.

The clip was uploaded to the same service that they'd streamed the fight with Leviathan to, links were sent out via a form letter to everyone who'd asked for footage, and then Taylor returned to going over Hive's recordings to see if there was anything stupid that she'd missed. Other than not having a good way to keep the Butcher from teleporting away, anyway. They really needed to test some barrier equations with parahumans, to see what might be safe and all that, but if they weren't safe then it was far too risky to test with any of the parahumans they had available.

Having things you wanted to test for safety that were potentially fatal to those you tested them on was a pain in the ass for anyone with morals.

Monday morning started with Taylor remembering the box of transponders that she had in her storage area and bringing them back out. Hive then immediately stored them instead, so that they could be examined. Ideally, they'd just emulate the effects when they needed to instead of needing to integrate the transponders themselves into Knight Armor configurations. It honestly wasn't likely to be difficult, given the far more complicated things that even the watches did at this point, but still needed some work put in to make happen.

Personally, Taylor suspected that Hive would be done with that within the hour, possibly even registering suitable transponder codes with the FAA and setting up proper filters to automatically bring up the radio frequencies when needed. Especially with physical examples of the transponders and already knowing how to work with radio signals.

Morning exercise had gone well, after which everyone had returned home. Taylor and Missy had both been told to take it easy for the day, so Taylor had collected some snacks and then headed right back to the beach for a bit. She'd promised not to do anything strenuous, but Hive had a collection of things to work on. So Taylor ended up in a Knight Object beach chair, just enjoying the beach, while Hive was off in the inlet and using testing drones to try things outside of simulation.

They had most of the morning for Hive to work on things, after which Taylor had been informed that she'd have to head home to join her father for an actual holiday celebration that afternoon. What that was going to be hadn't come up, but it wouldn't be a big problem either way. There weren't exactly a lot of places for them to go to, after all, and her father hadn't exactly picked up anything to grill.

Missy wasn't entirely happy with her 'taking it easy' day, which involved helping prepare for Ethan grilling a mid-afternoon meal. Why she'd been drafted into that was beyond her, as he seemed to be doing most of the work. She didn't know how he preferred to lay things out, where most of the stuff was, or even how to make the couple of sides that needed to be prepared ahead of time.

That left her being the one sent to fetch things, and usually having to search for them. Over and over and over again. Really, this probably counted as a second round of exercise, given how much running back and forth she was doing. She got to help set up a couple of folding tables as well, but that had only taken a couple of minutes, after which she was sent looking for the tablecloths to put on them. Being able to somewhat tell what was in drawers without opening them had helped significantly there, admittedly, but it was still annoying.

Throughout all of that she'd not really considered why they were going through all of the effort for the three of them. It was only shortly after noon, when she realized that a car had just pulled up out front, that she finally twigged that this wasn't just for the three of them. Sherie had gone for the front door while Missy was busy out back, and brought Danny and Taylor through the house to the backyard.

"Why didn't you tell me you were coming?" Missy asked Taylor.

"Because I only figured it out five minutes ago," Taylor replied. "Nobody saw fit to inform me."

"Oh."

"We figured that Taylor needed to be a little familiar with the house," Ethan said as he came over. "After all, she's going to be watching you next week. No need to have her coming over completely clueless as to where various things are in the house."

Missy nodded at that, and supposed that this was part of the 'public' side of having Taylor watch her. It made sense to not have the older girl showing up for the first time in a week without having been shown where things that she might need to know about were.

"At the same time," Ethan continued. "There are a couple of things that I'd like to discuss with them before we get started. Especially since there are some beers with my name on them and I'd rather ensure that I'm sober for this."

Sherie gave him a look. "Have you actually been avoiding having a pre-grilling beer or two just so that you'd be sober when going over things with the Heberts?"

"Yep."

"Wow. That's almost enough justification to call master/stranger protocols on you."

Ethan rolled his eyes, but led the Heberts back into the house.

Sherie sighed, then gestured at the grill. "So, would you like to learn how to light the grill?"

Missy looked back towards the house, knowing that she wasn't going to be able to sit in on the discussion happening there, then at the grill. "Would it be considered safe for me to light it?"

"The oven and stove top is probably more dangerous than the grill is. At the same time, this one is a little tricky due to some repairs Ethan did using parts from another grill entirely."

Missy shrugged. "Okay then."

Taylor sat down with her burger and hotdog, still trying to wrap her head around things from earlier. Ethan had started with a reasonable tour of the house so that Taylor would know what she and Missy should officially be avoiding and where things were. The latter included emergency contact numbers, nine different first aid kits, and two fire extinguishers. Needing to put out literal fires would, hopefully, not be a problem, but she now knew where they were anyway.

After that the discussion had actually moved to threats that Taylor might be uniquely suited to dealing with. Ethan had made a couple of requests, but had also admitted that he didn't think that any parahumans should be involved in the planning for going after larger threats. Nor should any such plans be talked about anywhere on Earth Bet, just in case, because he thought that the shard devices might communicate with one another. His reasoning was that the PRT seemed to feel that far too many larger threats seemed to know when someone was going to try and deal with them.

More surprising, at least from her point of view, was that her father had agreed. Apparently being able to ignore the Butcher after almost finishing off Leviathan had made an impression on him, though he did want to wait until there was a suitable off-Bet location for him to help monitor from. Hive had noted that the inlet structure was nearly complete and would be suitable for that, apologizing to Ethan for being unable to ensure that he and Sherie could visit.

That left Taylor doing some light research on high-level parahuman threats with a couple of instances of herself. Generally the stationary ones, such as Nilbog and the Machine Army, or the incredibly easily tracked. Ash Beast, for example, was nearly impossible to not find if you went looking for it. And would probably be trivial to deal with, all things considered, unless the constant explosion was capable of disrupting mana attacks. Though going around and cleaning up threats on other continents might be a little extreme and create additional legal headaches.

Additional research might be needed, if she was being honest. For local and international action. How much paperwork was needed to drop on a quarantine zone and clear it out? What kinds of headaches might exist if she did cross international borders and was no longer dealing with just the United States? Would anyone actually care? She didn't know, and wasn't sure how to best find out. But it might be good to know ahead of time, even if it wasn't her job to fill it out afterwards.

Still, she was supposed to be taking it easy, so she was only really making minor notes on things as she browsed the list of high-level threats on PHO. It was amazing how many were either too mobile or had basically no useful information available. Then again, it made sense that the most dangerous threats were hard to pin down or left no survivors to tell tales. If not both, for that matter. Many of them were also in other countries where it might be difficult to get reliable information. Like the current list of parahuman warlords in Africa, that were both high level threats and technically the current leaders of their countries. Those were unlikely to make her list of threats to deal with unless they tried to conquer North America.

By the time she'd finished eating, including a significant number of chips from the bowl on the table next to her, she'd made basic notes on all the 'stationary' high-level threats and decided that was enough for now. At the very least, if her father wanted to discuss her thoughts on things she now had something to tell him. With that completed, she got up and grabbed a soda from the cooler full of them.

A few minutes later Ethan dragged her and Missy out front, where there was more room, to show off his frisbee-throwing skills.

Missy shook her head as she helped Sherie clean up. Ethan would be helping, but he was still dealing with the neighbors. Specifically, the neighbors that he'd broken the window of with the frisbee. Missy wasn't sure, but she suspected that he'd gotten fed up at her and Taylor being able to better aim the frisbee. Not that Taylor was all that much better than Ethan, but she at least kept it out of neighboring yards.

Danny and Taylor had offered to help clean up, but Sherie had insisted that they head home instead. In part because there wasn't a whole lot to do beyond dragging a few things inside, since Ethan's punishment was going to be dealing with some of the more annoying things without assistance. Such as properly cleaning up the grill. Neither of the Heberts had a problem with that reasoning, and they'd left a few minutes ago.

"I'm tempted to set Taylor up with an alarm code and give her a key," Sherie commented after they'd gotten all the leftover food inside.

"Really?" Missy said. "Why?"

"So that she can get into the house if she beats you here after her tutoring sessions."

"Oh. So that she isn't stuck outside if it's raining or something?"

Sherie blinked, then snorted. "Okay, yes, that would probably be nice. But I was thinking more so that she wouldn't just bypass the locks and disable the alarm without them."

That had Missy blinking. "What?"

"She and Hive were able to completely shut down Coil's security systems and she moved through a number of locked doors without keys or damaging the locks. The locks and alarm system here would be child's play by comparison."

"But why would she bother?"

"Well, as you pointed out, to get out of annoying weather is a distinct possibility. But once you're out of school there may be days where Ethan and I have to leave while you're still in bed, so having her able to come over and get in the house without waking you would be nice too."

Missy frowned. "Why would she need to do that?"

Sherie sighed. "Because leaving a fourteen year old that's believed to have been suicidal alone for any significant length of time would be seen as irresponsible?"

"Oh. Right." While amusing and helpful in some ways, that assumption was a pain in the ass at other times. If only correcting the official record wasn't likely to be a worse pain in the ass. Though now that Vista was officially 'dead' it would be harder to push her back into the Wards, but she wasn't going to bet on it being impossible if they decided that she'd left on false pretenses.

"I'll need to discuss it with Ethan either way, and it'll probably only happen once school lets out anyway. Much less reason to be concerned for her coming over, what, eight times? Only a few more weeks of school and we're not having her handle afternoons where you have appointments."

Taylor frowned as they got stuck in traffic, caused by two groups of people fighting a couple blocks up. They'd probably have been better off delaying heading home, not that they'd even bothered to check if there were any likely traffic issues before leaving. There were also a number of people that were wandering down the street to get a better look at the fighting, something that was probably not entirely crazy as there weren't any distinctive sounds of gunfire.

Her father had gone to the point of putting the car in park and turning off the engine to conserve gas, as there was no way to get anywhere while boxed in by other cars anyway. Neither of them was that concerned about the temperature thanks to her Knight Clothing and his belt buckle, but they had the windows open for appearances anyway.

"So," her father said after a few minutes sitting there. "I'm thinking that you might want to go through a box or two in the attic."

Taylor raised an eyebrow at that. "Why?"

"If you're going to hold onto your mother's flute then you may want to ensure that you can maintain it, and I'm sure she'd think it was a shame if nobody played it. Her books on maintaining and playing the thing should still be up there."

That was probably a very good point, and not a bad idea all things considered, so she put an entry onto her todo list to check into that. It would be a decent non-magic distraction, at least.

"That's her, grab her!" being yelled from the sidewalk pulled her out of that musing, even as two men moved over to the car and reached through the window. One was barely doing so, trying to use a knife to cut the seatbelt she was wearing. The other was trying to grab her directly, likely to pull her out of the car as soon as the seatbelt was cut.

She met the one trying to grab her with a punch to the face, then elbowed the arm of the other one to get them to drop the knife. It landed in the car, next to the seat. While she was doing that her father had unbuckled his own seatbelt and was getting out of the car, not that either of the two men seemed to care. The one she'd punched was whining about his nose while the other one seemed to be pulling out another knife.

Neither got much further, Taylor having a front-row seat to see her father interrupt knife-searching with a solid hit to the man's jaw. The second knife fell to the ground handle-first and bounced as the man stumbled back. He then fell forward, the blade of the knife cutting into his shirt as he landed on the ground. The other man didn't seem to notice that, but did notice her father kicking him in the crotch.

"Idiots," he grumbled once the two men were down. He then sighed and turned to her. "You have your phone with you, right?"

Taylor nodded, retrieving it to her pocket so that she could pull it out. "Yeah. You want to call or shall I?"

"I'll do it," he said, taking the phone from her. "Though if this kind of stupidity keeps happening then I'm going to need my own, despite my issues with the idea."

Last edited: Jun 25, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 60 - May 30, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jul 1, 2020

#10,592

It'd taken three more hours for Taylor and her father to get home, most of which was waiting for the police to clear traffic out of the area. After that the two had heated up some leftovers for a late meal, followed by Taylor heading up to the attic. Finding the books for her mother's flute was annoying, as they'd ended up in an unexpected corner and not with the bulk of the rest of her things. Even with being able to tell what boxes had books in them it still took nearly two hours to find the correct one.

Hive then stored the entire box so that the books could be digitized for easier reference. Ten minutes later the box was back in the corner of the attic and Taylor headed back downstairs, reviewing the books in the multitasking interface. It appeared that her shopping list might need to include a couple of things for the flute that she didn't have on hand, given that it'd been a few years since any maintenance was done. For that matter, she wasn't even positive what kind of environment it'd been in.

Luckily, she could also start practicing playing the flute in the simulation system, even if it wasn't entirely accurate to the real thing when she did so. It would definitely be close enough to start with, and once she'd learned how to properly maintain the real thing then a proper scan could be taken to improve the simulation accuracy. Something that she'd like to start in the coming day or two.

"Lord," Hive sent as Taylor had sat down to double-check everything she needed to turn in to her tutors for the coming week. "I've completed my analysis of your connection to the multitasking hardware, and examined the capabilities thereof."

"Oh?" Taylor replied. "Figure out anything of use?"

"I'd like to once again modify the combat drones, in this case to improve your ability to connect to them. If my testing is correct then lag across dimensional boundaries will become less of an issue and we've been overly concerned about nothing regarding splitting up with me across said boundaries. In addition, I think we should head to the beach for a few minutes so that you can cast a new protective shield."

"And the shield won't cause interference?"

"No, Lord. I don't fully understand how it works, but you have a little over forty-six and a half thousand mana assemblies in your brain that are also present in the multitasking system. Those provide the link to the system itself, and I couldn't measure any noticeable lag when I duplicated the effect. The effect also appears to be very secure, given that it requires essentially identical mana signatures at both ends, but it's essentially restricted to communication due to the linkages used. More importantly, I was able to duplicate one of the test structures over a thousand times without losing functionality or bandwidth despite having a thousand access points shielded in over two hundred different ways from one another. The shielding is actually a non-issue as a result, as only disrupting the mana constructs themselves causes issues."

That wasn't quite what Taylor had been expecting, but it sounded like good news overall. "So how does the shield work?"

"The easiest and safest solution is to anchor it to your skull. This keeps penetrating effects further away, reinforces the skull itself against damage, and should help ensure that you're less likely to get a concussion in general. If I'm correct, it will also serve as an always-there protection against Shard devices trying to monitor or interact with your brain in the future, even if you don't have Knight Clothing or Knight Armor barriers up."

Taylor blinked at that. "In that case, should we have Missy cast this thing as well? And is there any way to drop it on my father?"

Hive took a moment to respond. "It shouldn't be a problem for Missy, and I agree that it makes sense to give her, but I can't think of any way to safely cast it on someone else. Ninety-plus percent of the reason it should work at all is due to being sustained by your personal core."

Well, so much for that thought. "Well, I should cast it before we get Missy involved, since I'm guessing that you'd have an easier time removing it from me than Space would have removing it from Missy should something go wrong with it."

"Agreed, Lord."

Missy had been persuaded to visit the beach for a few minutes in order to cast a new protective spell, one that would hopefully fully protect her at all times from powers that tried to mess with her brain. Even if she wasn't using the Knight Clothing or Knight Armor spells. Which was awesome, of course, but also distracting. There was an itch that she knew wasn't real due to being able to feel the mana now anchored to her skull, but she knew that it would only be a couple of days at most before she was used to it.

That, when asked by Ethan, Hive had admitted that a side effect should be the ability to take a bullet to the upper face and not receive a serious injury, even if it hit an eye, was even better and had been a significant factor in allowing Missy to cast it that evening. Other side effects included the likelihood of preventing a shard from trying to connect to her and make her a parahuman again, something that would likely force Hive to work to remove the new connection for Missy's safety.

Sadly, despite Hive having figured out how to make duplicates of Taylor's multitasking connection they weren't willing to try and duplicate that for Missy. Safely connecting the structures to her brain was, admittedly, a very delicate operation that could cause permanent damage to her if done wrong. They weren't even fully certain that Taylor had a safe implementation there, but she'd spontaneously manifested it herself and replaced it every time it was stripped away so there wasn't much to be done about her having it.

Regardless, more protection for her brain wasn't something to whine about, even if she wasn't being permitted to try and duplicate some of Taylor's advantages. The more immediate issue was how to actually sleep with the phantom itching.

That evening Taylor had decided to do something 'crazy' and search for random 'magic powers' online. The goal was to find ideas for moving in directions that they hadn't really explored yet, even if success might be hard to come by when trying to duplicate fictional skills. Along those lines, she ended up finding far too little, and most of what she did find was dismissed as impossible or immoral to an extreme. What was left from the first pass was slim picking, mostly elemental abilities. There were three exceptions there, though.

Magical traps, specifically casting a spell on a point or area that would then trigger on its own later, seemed like it might be directly useful. She had the basics for that already, really, but rigging up something intended to be more stationary or area-of-effect that may not need to be anchored to something else was a new application of the concept. Though probably less flexible than trap devices that could cast any number of spells on demand, it would be cheaper from a material standpoint.

Scrying, on the other hand, was intriguing from the point of view of being able to locate or monitor things remotely. Specifically, without wide-scale scanning spells and remote drones. Hive wasn't entirely sure if it was possible to pull off for real, but had admitted that it sounded incredibly useful if they could figure anything like that out. It was incredibly unlikely to work as described in fiction, of course.

The last was generally identified as 'summoning', which came in multiple flavors. Those you had agreements with coming to your aid, prepared equipment stored elsewhere being brought out, or just outright seeming to create things wholesale. The first of the three was most commonly represented in her search, but the latter seemed like the easiest to make a variant of. Specifically, she was interested in the idea of 'summoning' grasping tentacles from the ground that could grab people as an alternate way of restraining people.

Notably, she'd not looked for further details on the tentacle summoning. A short line mentioning a use of the trick for capturing someone was all she wanted to see, looking for more information online might lead her to things that she didn't want to think about. Just knowing what she was likely to find was enough, and finding details might put her off of the entire idea when it could be incredibly useful.

She'd started working on the three projects in the simulation system, though was distracted a couple of times by Hive powering up combat drones just enough to get their multitasking systems to come online. The new version of things caused her to be forcibly connected to the instances. Disconnection was possible immediately afterwards, but the more interesting result was that she'd been able to disconnect from Hive and only maintain the connection to the combat drone. Being limited to only a handful of instances at once was annoying, but it was far better than having no options should something happen to Hive.

Hal and Chain were going to be passed over to Hive in the morning to get similar upgrades. Hal would get a multitasking system in general and Chain would get the upgraded one. That would hopefully help with working with both of them, though an actual 'off' switch for the multitasking systems in both was going to be needed as well. Just because they were active didn't mean that Taylor wanted to be forced to connect to them, after all.

Tuesday morning started off far too early, as far as Missy was concerned. She'd not really slept all that well, but was certain that it wouldn't be long before she was used to the new shield. Regardless, that didn't stop her from being up and ready to exercise with Taylor.

"Morning," Missy greeted as she appeared in the desert. Apparently they weren't using the beach today?

"Morning," Taylor replied, sounding slightly distracted.

"Is something wrong?"

"She's a bit shocked," Danny replied. "A combination of finding out that someone actually killed several members of the Nine at once from the news and the call informing us that there's a bounty out for capturing her."

That had Missy blinking. "A bounty?"

"Five million dollars," Taylor answered. "Though it's technically split fifty/fifty between me and Hive in necklace form and specifies that to get paid for me that I have to be alive, at least."

"Wow. The largest bounty for capturing me when I was Vista was only a million dollars."

"What?"

Missy rolled her eyes. "Powerful parahumans get bounties thrown on them from various groups, though it seems like the Yàngbǎn are the ultimate source of most of them. Most parahumans have a policy of not going anywhere near said bounties, not wanting to encourage something that might be used against them, and normals aren't generally likely to go after them either for fear of pissing off a parahuman that they can't beat. Neither of those details stops them from being put out there."

"I guess that Taylor not being a parahuman is why the idiots tried to grab her yesterday," Danny noted. "Still, that's not why we're here, and you two both have classes of some kind today, so perhaps we should get started?"

They got moving then, and Missy wondered how annoying it was going to be for Taylor as people started trying to claim that bounty on her. The one placed on 'Vista' had come up in two meetings and as far as she knew nobody had ever seriously attempted to grab her in order to claim it. The Yàngbǎn were known to be the origins of that one, but it wasn't likely that they were behind the one on Taylor. Maybe if there was one on Minerva, but not one on the girl with a necklace that ate powers. They'd want Taylor dead and far away from them, just in case.

Really, it was probably an anti-parahuman group looking to use her as a weapon against parahumans in general or something like that. There seemed to be enough of them running around, having one with a pile of money available for a stunt like this was easy enough to believe. Still, unless those behind it were complete morons they'd have at least two levels of misdirection. Something that Missy had learned when she'd asked why the PRT didn't crack down on bounties on Wards.

Taylor sighed as she waited for her father to get ready. Given the 'bounty' situation, he was going to drive her to tutoring. Which was annoying, because they both knew that someone trying to grab her wasn't going to get very far. Ensuring that they went through the correct motions for appearances sake, at least in part, was the annoying portion. Especially since she wasn't expecting to be picked up, just to delay her actual trip home and take an alternate route to throw anyone trying to ambush her off.

Thinking about it right now, it was ridiculous, but somehow less suspicious than just ignoring the bounty. It would be nice when the school year, and thus her tutoring, was over for the summer. Without a 'fixed' schedule it would be much more difficult to ambush her in general, right?

"I wonder if watch trends will change now," her father mused as he came downstairs while putting on his watch. "Shatterbird was one of the primary reasons that digital watches aren't a significant thing here like they apparently are overseas, after all. Instead we got low-quality mass-produced mechanical watches with plastic faces being made because she could wipe out every digital watch in a large area with no real warning."

"I don't know," Taylor said, shrugging. "Maybe, maybe not. You could ask the same about glasses, are they more likely to be made from actual glass again or are we stuck with the plastic variants that were essentially mandated to keep people from suddenly having glass explode in front of their eyes?"

"That's not a bad point either. I don't recall how much of that was legislation versus consumer choices."

They chatted about other things that were done differently due to 'local' parahumans, at least as far as the country went. Large-scale projects in a single easily-targeted location that improved the quality of life for people had been known to draw Mannequin's attention, even if only as the Nine passed through to somewhere else, and thus they had a lot more decentralization of industries than other countries that were more concerned about not wanting an Endbringer to cripple them.

The discussion came to an end when Taylor was dropped off at tutoring. She headed inside while her father headed to work, but instead of finding her English tutor she instead found her math tutor waiting for her.

"Good morning," Taylor greeted.

"Good morning," Mister Coste replied. "I volunteered to cover things today. You may not be aware, but tutoring you is a side job for all of your tutors. I'm actually a substitute teacher on paper this year due to personal issues keeping me from starting the school year back in September, but otherwise we're all elective teachers at Arcadia."

"Oh." That did make some sense, to be honest. "Did something happen at Arcadia?"

"There's a problem with the grading system. They think someone snuck in over the weekend and tried to hack it, so all teachers were called in to look for signs of tampering with the grades they've entered. I've never been happier to be taking a year off of normal teaching, especially given that I can't always read my own notes in my physical grading notebook. Now then, I do have some work from the other tutors that you were supposed to see today." He tapped a folder on the desk. "They actually said you could do it as homework if you didn't want to stick around once I've had my time with you."

Taylor nodded, as that made sense. "So we start with you today and then I can either stick around and work on everything else or head home early?"

"Yep. Though I'd like to go a different route than normal today. I'm curious as to where you learned the factoring method you used on Friday, for starters, as well as how well you understand it."

That had her blinking, being unexpected. She'd picked that method up out of spell equations, which could be seen as Hive teaching her, but that wasn't necessarily ideal to reveal.

"Lord," Hive sent, obviously having been paying enough attention to realize what was going on. "You should claim to have come up with it independently. I didn't make it work in base ten instead of base thirty-two and you understand it well enough to explain it if you need to."

Resisting the urge to sigh, Taylor considered that. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. There would be far too many questions about how you're meeting anyone else you may claim to have been taught by."

That did, unfortunately, make sense. Taylor gave in to the urge to sigh. "It's something I came up with on my own a while back."

Mister Coste nodded. "I don't suppose that you'd like to prove that you know it by writing out the entire process, including why it works for me?"

That had her shrugging. "I can do that. Want me to use the computer lab to type it out?"

"If you'd like. I'll give you extra credit for the work, and if you're up for it then I'm sure that I can convince Mrs. Everett to give you extra credit if you can write a program to do it automatically as well. After all, the best way to prove that you know something is to teach it, and programming can be seen as teaching something with no prior knowledge how to do something."

That wasn't entirely accurate, in her experience, but it was probably doable. And extra credit was always a good thing, right? Especially if she was impressing Arcadia instructors, that would make it easier to get into the school in the fall. "I can give that a try."

Missy found herself annoyed with her teachers. They were down to the last two weeks before the end of year exams and were now in massive review mode. The exams weren't that important for those continuing to attend public school next year, admittedly, but anyone wanting a chance to get into Arcadia had to do well on them. Which made them important to her, as she wasn't sure how much the PRT was willing to help with regards to her attending there now.

It didn't make dropping into beginning of the year topics any less boring. Upon joining the Wards she'd been told to review her notes from the entire year at least monthly. Something that she'd kept up, and thus didn't feel that she needed the review at all. But the teachers weren't going to accept that explanation, leaving her bored out of her mind as they touched upon topics.

Gym had been an exception that morning, luckily. There was no 'final exam' there that she had to worry about, and thus no reviewing topics that had come up at the start of the year. Instead they'd played basketball, her general fitness helping her keep up with some of her taller classmates. Well, that and her awareness of her surroundings thanks to the sensor feedback, which she was getting better at processing without thinking about it.

"You look annoyed," Dinah said as she sat down across from Missy at lunch.

"Too much review," Missy replied. "You look far too calm by comparison."

"Because even if we both started a year earlier than most of our classmates, due to birthday timing I'm still a grade below you. I get to worry about test results for attending the better schools next year."

"Ah. Right. That would result in a lot less pointless review, wouldn't it?"

"My grades aren't good enough anyway. I don't expect to end up in Arcadia and my parents are fine with that. Then again, I live in the wrong part of town to have been sent to Winslow."

Missy nodded, though that did make her realize that she had no clue which school she'd be sent to if she didn't go to Arcadia. Winslow had, technically, been an option based on one of her two addresses when she was bouncing between her parents. She wouldn't have wanted to go there, but she knew that it would've been a possibility if she didn't make it into Arcadia. As a Ward she hadn't thought that likely, but now she had no clue what 'zone' she was in.

"So," Dinah continued. "Do anything interesting for the holiday?"

"Not really," Missy answered. "Small cookout, new guardians invited the girl that's going to start watching me while they're at work so that she could familiarize herself with the house ahead of time."

"Sounds less annoying than what I ended up dragged to."

"Did you catch the Wards event on Saturday?"

Dinah sighed. "I got to watch it on television. Can't risk someone else deciding to grab me, right?"

"At least you got to watch it. I was occupied with the PRT trying more ways to get the necklace off of me, among other things, and had to look it up afterwards."

"Learn anything fun about the necklace?"

Missy shrugged. "It seems to have a sense of humor if you try and remove it with certain kinds of powers."

"Oh?"

"A parahuman that goes by Pickpocket ended up grabbing someone else's wallet instead of the necklace when she tried to remove it."

Dinah snorted in amusement at that. "Really?"

"She got her own wallet first, when she tried to remove Taylor's necklace."

Taylor had left tutoring on time, after spending far too much time working on the extra credit work. She'd started with writing the program, thinking that it would take less time. That had proven to take more effort than she'd expected, she was able to spot patterns that the computer couldn't in regards to doing the work in base ten. She experimented with grabbing groups of bits to represent things in base thirty-two, but eventually just split the input into an array of five-bit 'digits' to treat it as base thirty-two. From there she could get the code to spot the patterns needed.

Once that was done she'd then documented the entire procedure and why it worked, at least to the best of her own understanding. That included what she did to make it work in base ten, but she wasn't really certain if that part would work well for others. She couldn't teach the computer to do it that way, after all, so why would she expect anyone else to be able to spot the patterns? Most of the explanation was the same regardless of what base you were trying to do things in though.

It was only when she was leaving that she realized that she'd not taken the time to eat lunch, so she swung by a pizza place to grab a couple of slices and a bag of chips. She topped it off with a large soda, getting a dirty look from the woman who took her order when she asked for root beer instead of the offered diet soda. Sucked to be her if she had issues dieting, that wasn't something Taylor felt was necessary right now. Or perhaps it was jealousy? Whatever, wasn't her problem once she'd left.

With her stomach taken care of, she decided to get some shopping out of the way before she decided not to do it later. It took eight different stores to find four pairs of pants, a pair of shorts that weren't too short, and some matching shirts to go with them. All of which had no metal involved in their construction. Elastic, buttons, and one plastic zipper, but no metal. She also picked up a pair of slippers that she'd come across, since they looked comfortable, and Hive had requested candy.

At least eight people were following her as she left the last store to head home, but she did her best to ignore them beyond keeping track of where they were in relation to her. Two of them appeared to be working together, the other six didn't appear to have a clue that anyone else was following her, and all of them failed to follow her onto the bus. Probably because she'd hopped on at the last moment, as it was going the wrong way for her to head home and they'd not expected that.

She got off of the bus a few stops later and went the rest of the way home on foot, not running into anyone as she approached from a very odd angle compared to her usual routes. The mail was collected as she entered the house, and she idly wondered if anyone noticed that her backpack couldn't possibly have held all of her shopping and the stuff she needed at tutoring. Half of her shopping was stored in her own storage space, and Hive had already stored the candy as well.

"It sucks that I'm going to have to go shopping again," Taylor grumbled as she looked through the mail. Most of it was junk, but there were two letters addressed to her today. The one that appeared to be a well-sealed plastic envelope instead of a simple paper one was placed off to the side, unopened. "Not being able to just do my Minerva shopping is annoying."

"It can't be helped," Hive replied. "Did you notice the chemicals in that letter?"

"Yeah. Not a problem for me with the Knight Clothing up, as far as I can tell, but I still don't want to open it in the house."

"May I scan it deeply enough to see what the paper inside says?"

"Go for it." Taylor occupied herself with checking over the other letter, then opening it when she found no reason not to. She found that it was an apology from Pickpocket for making assumptions about someone that they knew had a necklace protecting them. Included was a gift certificate...for one of the stores that she'd just finished shopping at. Because of course it would be for somewhere that she rarely shopped at but had just finished her likely only visit for months at.

"Lord," Hive said, interrupting her train of thought. "The letter states that to get the antidote to the contact poison that you need to call a specific number to arrange a point to be picked up at. It also claims that you shouldn't tell anyone else when doing so or you won't get the antidote."

"Fun. A well-sealed envelope with an uncanceled stamp that contains poison and a warning against calling the police. Well, it isn't an emergency, so I guess the police non-emergency number is my best bet there."

Missy pouted as she sat in the car. She'd wanted to go home after school, maybe even convince Taylor to supervise some casting of attack spells. But no, that hadn't happened. Instead she'd been collected by Ethan to go shopping.

"What do I need that I don't already have?" she finally asked.

"Probably nothing," Ethan admitted. "On the other hand, I need to pick up groceries after focusing too much on the barbeque and not enough on things we use day to day. Since you're my responsibility, that means that you get to come along for the trip."

"Fun."

"Besides, we haven't actually gotten your opinion on what kinds of cereal you like, among other things. So you get to have an actual say in some of that today."

Missy rolled her eyes and connected to Space. Perhaps she could work on figuring out how to customize the attack spells in the simulation system while her time was otherwise being wasted? She was curious if a bullet or beam could be rigged to warp space where it hit safely, though keeping safeties working so that it wasn't instantly fatal to normal people might be a problem. The limits imposed on manipulating space where living things happened to be sitting existed for really good reasons, after all.

Working with Space, she accomplished amazingly little over the course of the following couple of hours. The Spatial Manipulation system wasn't magic, but came from shard systems, and reproducing it with magic wasn't as simple as plugging the equations in as a result. Embedding that into a bullet or beam, with or without the safeties, wasn't going to be trivial either. They did have some information on how to manipulate physical space with mana, but it didn't seem to be enough to get anywhere of use.

It was possible that Taylor would know more, or that Hive had a more complete documentation set for what equation bits did what, but that wasn't helping them right now. Missy couldn't even disagree with the expected argument of her needing to get a handle on what she already had access to before moving on. More so since she expected Ethan or Sherie to make said argument and not Taylor or Hive. That didn't make it any less annoying, of course, it just meant that she already knew that she was probably going to have to wait.

On the bright side, she'd been able to pick out a couple of cereals that she rarely got to have before, had been able to convince Ethan to buy pudding cups, and had somehow ended up with a bag full of candy that she hadn't seen him place into the cart and that needed to 'vanish' before Sherie saw it. That, at least, Missy didn't have a problem with, though the selection left a few things to be desired. Then again, Ethan hadn't asked her what kinds of candy she liked, and she wouldn't be surprised if he'd just grabbed everything he liked and figured that he'd end up eating anything that she didn't.

That, at least, was a somewhat familiar tactic that she'd had multiple people use with her. Because buying candy for the kid was acceptable when buying candy for yourself wasn't. It was just a shame when the kid didn't like the candy, and someone had to eat it to ensure that it didn't go to waste, right?

Last edited: Jul 2, 2020

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Threadmarks Interlude 6

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jul 1, 2020

#10,603

Emily Piggot - May 21, 2011

Dinah Alcott - May 21, 2011

Carlos Cortés - May 21, 2011

Lisa Wilbourn - May 21, 2011

Emily Piggot - May 21, 2011

Sophia Hess - May 22, 2011

Hannah Karim - May 23, 2011

Rebecca Costa-Brown - May 23, 2011

Thomas Calvert - May 23, 2011

Dinah Alcott - May 23, 2011

Max Anders - May 25, 2011

Kenta Lung - May 26, 2011

Aisha Laborn - May 27, 2011

Blair Coste - May 27, 2011

Dinah Alcott - May 28, 2011

Jessica Yamada - May 28, 2011

Romilda Hooker - May 28, 2011

Kurt Wynn - May 28, 2011

Geoffrey Pellick - May 28, 2011

Yuuka Perrin - May 29, 2011

Geraldo Sartor - May 29, 2011

Katie Hale - May 29, 2011

Yuuno Scrya - May 29, 0076

Jacob Smith - May 30, 2011

Cherie Vasil - May 30, 2011

Hannah Karim - May 31, 2011

Emily Piggot - May 21, 2011

Emily grumbled a little as her phone rang, carefully reaching over to pick it up. "Piggot."

"Ma'am," a familiar voice said, though she couldn't place it immediately over the phone. "The FBI has just sent us a notice that they'll be deploying SWAT and HRT forces in Brockton Bay, targeting a group possibly led by a parahuman. No additional details have been provided in the name of operational security."

Blinking, Emily parsed that. "Did they at least give us a timetable for this action, like they're supposed to?"

"The notice says 'as soon as transportation is arranged' and that they're not requesting PRT or Protectorate assistance."

Fuck. She wasn't sure who'd just shaken up the proverbial hornet's nest, but finding out what was going on before the FBI showed up to make things worse in the hellhole she was responsible for had just become a priority. Which meant going into the office on what was supposed to be a day off.

Not that any regional director ever truly got a 'day off' unless it involved having someone else take over while going on a camping trip where there was no cellular reception, of course.

"Call in my core staff," she said after a moment. "I'm going to have to come in to deal with this."

"Right away Ma'am."

Dinah Alcott - May 21, 2011

Dinah frowned when she realized that it had been far too long since the doctor had come to ask her questions. Admittedly, she'd had that incident earlier where something had jumbled up the pictures, but the worst of it had only been for a few seconds. The further-out pictures were more mobile right now as well, as though there was something known but not affecting them directly. Something was obviously going on, but she wasn't sure what it could possibly be at this point.

Instead she ended up doing her best to ignore all of the moving images, which was easier said than done, and considered what other options she had. There weren't many, admittedly, since she had no way to contact anyone outside of the room and the images in her head weren't even that useful for figuring out what was going on outside of it. Possible future events didn't really help with figuring out the present, and she didn't have a whole lot of context for them anyway. Then again, she didn't have anything else to do right now, did she? Practicing to see if she could use the short-term pictures to slip away at least felt useful.

She was surprised when, contrary to every picture she'd paid any attention to, a group of people suddenly appeared in her room in a flash of light. That broke her pictures, things rapidly rearranging a moment later to take the group into account. The second and third groups appearing didn't make things easier on her rapidly increasing headache, but they were getting her out of the room and were thus a net gain from her point of view.

Things were starting to settle down with the pictures, everything falling back into place, by the time they made it into a parking garage. There were a pile of vans there, and they brought her to one to be checked over quickly. Looking for tracking items of any kind, just in case, as well as ensuring that she had no injuries that had been missed. It was there that things went horribly wrong for her power, as she got a look at a monitor in the van. One showing someone walking down a hallway, dragging something behind them. That image froze in her mind for a moment, a single wavering image causing a storm of other images around it. Rapidly, the storm of images shattered, leaving the single image for a moment before it shattered as well. That person didn't exist, shouldn't exist, and yet they were there and causing all of this.

Dinah didn't know how she knew that, only that seeing that image on the monitor had cemented things into place and had now caused every picture that appeared to instantly shatter as her powers tried to predict a future that had to have someone that shouldn't exist but verifiably did taken into account.

Carlos Cortés - May 21, 2011

Carlos frowned as he followed the others out of the meeting. It was blatantly obvious that they weren't revealing everything, but what had come up was interesting in some of the implications anyway.

To start with, they'd already known that 'Vista' being 'dead' didn't mean that Missy was dead, though the details as to how that had happened hadn't been provided. Asking about contacting her had been given a fairly straightforward answer of 'write her letters'. The PRT would make sure they got to her, but additional contact details would be up to her new guardians. They even had a form to fill out for that, prepared for them in advance, so it had obviously been an expected question. All other details, beyond confirming that she was no longer a parahuman, they weren't cleared for.

That had, however, led into the other details. The various things that were now available thanks to the Youth Guard, including the improved therapy session schedule and rules that kept them from missing sessions. Then there were the now-routine checks into their home lives having been run, and a new apartment building being prepared with an apartment available for each Ward. In case they needed some time away from home, primarily, but also usable for other reasons. Such as if they didn't want to go on a trip with the rest of their families, for example, and needed a place to stay that wasn't 'home alone'. PRT staff 'in the know' were going to be offered apartments in the building for cheap in exchange for 'watching over them' when they used the apartments.

The apartments weren't ready yet admittedly, but when they were they'd each be given a key outright. It was, to be honest, a bit bizarre, as apparently that was being paid for out of Armsmaster's pocket, and not the PRT or Youth Guard.

Then they'd ended the meeting with an update on Minerva, just a baseline briefing on her likely capabilities. As if they hadn't known that she was running around acting like the ultimate grab-bag cape already, with how she'd fared against Leviathan. Still, she was classified as 'friendly', and thus safe for the Wards to approach. So no more panic from the Youth Guard if they ran into her on patrol, at least.

Lisa Wilbourn - May 21, 2011

Lisa sighed as they waited. Coil had put them 'on alert' earlier, and hadn't called them off yet. On alert for what was unknown, of course. So they were sitting around, in-costume, waiting for further orders. Something that they'd grumble more about if it wasn't for the fact that the last time they'd been given 'on alert' orders like this they'd needed to deal with a battle that had made it to them.

Even Alec agreed that it was preferable to sit around in-costume and be ready to immediately jump into action than to find yourself in the middle of a war zone while still in your pajamas. His only gripe was that he couldn't properly focus on his games while they waited to see if they were about to be in the middle of a battle. Not that he wasn't playing them anyway, of course.

All four of them were ready to jump into action as soon as a running battle arrived or a call from Coil came in, only for someone to start banging on the door. They all paused at that, since that shouldn't have happened. She blinked, and Brian gestured for her to answer the door. Mentally grumbling, she moved to do so, but at least he followed, obviously planning on playing 'backup'.

Opening the door, since it lacked any good way to see the other side of it otherwise, brought her face to face with two FBI agents.

"Good afternoon Miss Wilbourn," one of the agents said. Which meant that they knew far too much already. "Around an hour ago we took one Thomas Calvert, likely known to you as Coil, into custody for a number of crimes. One of those crimes is forcing you to work for him with a combination of applied force and blackmail, though the amount of information he had on your entire team was concerning. We'd like to speak to you all about it, and possibly some much more legitimate job offers."

Lisa wasn't sure what was worse. The pile of implications from that, or that her power was telling her that they were serious.

Emily Piggot - May 22, 2011

Emily didn't know how to feel about the previous day. Somehow she'd arrived in the office after the FBI had started their operation, which was baffling as they hadn't had any assets in the city. Then they'd been unable to get anything else out of the FBI, for operational security reasons. Which meant that they'd gotten very little of use. Instead she'd ended up reading about Minerva working with the police, having found a missing kid in an apartment building almost entirely full of self-absorbed pricks that weren't willing to go a couple of blocks to even report that their phones weren't working.

Those reports, and a few other minor ones, were all that she'd had to deal with before she'd given up for the day and resolved to deal with things in the morning. So she'd arrived bright and early, annoyed that she no longer had a weekend, and found a stack of reports waiting for her. More than had come in all afternoon the previous day, so hopefully there was something useful in the mess. Luckily she had a fresh thermos of coffee with her, having determined that a simple cup wasn't going to cut it.

She pulled the first report off of the stack, finding that it was from Rory. Nodding to herself, she decided that it made sense that Minerva had found young Dinah, and she appreciated that he'd reported that. He hadn't had details when he'd done so, but that was okay. Whether or not the police had informed them that the girl was no longer missing was unknown, but hopefully someone had bothered to let them know through official channels in the stack of reports she had to go through.

The next report was more information on what Minerva had been observed doing, including vanishing outright at one point. Useful to know, told them absolutely nothing new. That was followed by a report that the FBI had successfully rescued Dinah Alcott from an 'abandoned' Endbringer shelter turned villain base. Which, even without details, caused some things to slot into place. Minerva could teleport, so why shouldn't she be able to bring the FBI in immediately to mount an assault on a base in the city? That was almost guaranteed to be how the FBI had shown up so quickly.

Of course, when going against a suspected parahuman villain the FBI was supposed to request PRT or Protectorate assistance. They'd not done so in this case, having relied on an 'independent hero who was already involved in the operation' instead. Then again, that hero was Minerva, who could hold her own against Leviathan, so it was going to be hard to argue that they'd made a bad choice from a firepower point of view. It was still potentially a way to file an official complaint.

Grumbling about that, she moved on to the next report, which was 'parahuman observations' for Minerva from the FBI, with input from the BBPD. At least they'd done that part of their jobs correctly. Reading through it didn't help her annoyance level any, though it did make her wonder what else the girl was hiding. She'd been able to execute a scan of unknown range to find the missing kids, could drop her sensor drones to latitude and longitude coordinates from hundreds of miles away, had devices that could teleport herself and others instantly across hundreds of miles with only one endpoint, and Lilia was noted to have claimed responsibility for taking complete control of the computer systems in the villain's base.

The worst part was how little that affected their threat ratings.

With a sigh, she moved on, picking up a report with additional details from Rory. That one had her blinking several times, not to mention wishing that she was able to have a very stiff drink and wishing that she hadn't tempted fate by thinking about things affecting threat ratings. Casually detecting parahumans was definitely going to bump her thinker rating a point or two, though he thought that was only a thing because the teleportation method was fatal to parahumans. Likely only ones that weren't her, admittedly, but powers could be like that. Then there was a trump rating, though how he found out that she breaks thinkers wasn't specified. Planet-wide scanning for a DNA signature? Holy shit...

The implications of some of that were going to plague her, she just knew it, and she forced herself to move on so that she might be able to salvage some of her weekend. There were a couple of additional reports from other sources that corroborated some of what she'd already read, as well as the expected 'Dinah Alcott no longer missing' report from the police. Then there was the after-action report from the FBI, which she paid more attention to.

Minerva had captured a parahuman villain and dragged them out of the base, after getting the FBI into it. HRT and SWAT teams had gotten Dinah out at the same time. The villain had a large list of crimes being levied against them, steps had already been taken to acquire or otherwise secure assets that he'd had 'in the field', and his base's computer systems and self-destruct system had been captured intact. That there'd been a self-destruct system in the base under downtown was a problem in and of itself.

Flipping to the details on who they'd captured, she froze. The face in the picture was incredibly familiar, and she looked over at the identification information to be certain. Calvert had obtained powers at some point and gone villain in her city. Right under her fucking nose.

It was a good thing that the FBI had him in their custody, because otherwise she'd be on her way to kill him herself right now.

Sophia Hess - May 22, 2011

Sophia scowled as she carefully copied the final version of her letter. She'd had some time for self-reflection, and she wasn't happy with what she'd determined about herself. Realizing that she was still the scared little girl that she'd been before she'd gotten her powers hurt, but it was undeniable. Even when she'd had her powers she'd not been any better, not really. Only going after individuals if someone else was already distracting a group, for example.

Hell, even her powers had been made for running away. She didn't like to think about it, but that was even the first thing that she'd done with them. Escaped from a room that she otherwise couldn't get out of, to flee a situation that she couldn't handle after she'd gotten in too far over her head. How in the world she'd ended up blaming Hebert for whatever the fuck happened after they'd locked her in her locker with that filth was beyond her. That would've been her personal low point, had she not been tricked into trying to kill the girl in some twisted fantasy that went who knows where.

In the back of her mind, she could even admit that the letter she was writing was more to maybe save her own hide. She was cowering behind whatever shield she could come up with, a scared little girl that didn't know how to protect herself. To think that she'd once promised herself that if she'd ever gotten powers that she'd use them to protect others. That certainly hadn't happened.

Hebert had probably always been stronger than Sophia, as galling as it was to admit. If not physically, then mentally. Whatever it was that had happened in the locker had changed her, the signs were obvious to someone who'd paid the girl as much attention as Sophia had over a year and a half at school. To that end, she wasn't sure if she wanted Hebert to spot the message hidden in the letter or not. If she did, hopefully she wouldn't take it poorly.

Hannah Karim - May 23, 2011

Hannah watched as Colin locked the door. He'd called the meeting of Protectorate members in order to prepare for things and distribute information, though she wasn't sure what he'd needed to detour for after the two of them had returned from the PRT building for a similar meeting.

"Good morning everyone," Colin said as he sat down. "We have several things to go over today. Do any of you have anything you feel is critical to start with?" There was a wave of heads shaking negative, so he nodded. "Okay then. First up on my list are the arrangements for visiting parahumans for the coming weekend. Specifically, we've got two villains in the mix, one paying to participate and another that was hired by the PRT to make an attempt. Both are being put up in the same hotel, reports of them being in the area will thus be expected. I've sent details to everyone. Outside of that, on Wednesday I'll be receiving a magnetic scanner that I'll need to set up, and Eidolon is planning on visiting to run through various scanning abilities."

"Eidolon is coming out?" Rory said, obviously startled.

"Provided that nothing keeps him in Houston, yes. I'll generally be handling the session on Saturday, though if anyone wishes to help then let me know. Does anyone have any other questions regarding the visitors or the weekend session?" Colin waited a few seconds, then moved on. "Okay then. Next up, we have the excitement from the weekend. On Saturday the FBI arrested Thomas Calvert, also known as the parahuman villain Coil, for a significant number of crimes. He came to their attention when Minerva located Dinah Alcott in his base, which was an illegally repurposed Endbringer shelter that had been aborted when he arranged for falsified structural issues to be found in it. The FBI provided us with a list of PRT and Protectorate support staff on his payroll, all of whom have been taken into custody for various things they did on his orders. We'd already found and neutralized all of his data taps into PRT and Protectorate systems, but the police department has confirmed that he had similar, undetected taps into their systems and the FBI assisted with gathering up compromised individuals in the police force yesterday."

"Why weren't we informed of this beforehand?" Shawn asked. "Going after a parahuman in our backyard without informing us ahead of time is overstepping some boundaries, isn't it?"

"The FBI had jurisdiction due to a family member of a government official having been taken captive. Further, they didn't have confirmation of Calvert's parahuman status at the time and felt that Minerva's assistance with raiding the bunker was sufficient. I suspect that they also didn't want to risk possibly revealing what was going on to him through moles and data taps. They bypassed the Chief of Police as well, just in case, when Minerva informed the on-site officers of the situation. That aside, they're still working on securing his computer systems and resources and plan on letting us know of anything else they find that's relevant to our work."

"At least they're doing that much," Ethan quipped.

Colin ignored that and continued. "In addition, the FBI and the police have provided additional information on Minerva's capabilities. We already knew that items could be created out of nothing, which was used for reclining chairs and maps. Minerva demonstrated the ability to scan the entire planet for people based on clothing samples retained for canine tracking."

Robin spit up water he'd been sipping when Colin had said that. He coughed a couple of times, and when he'd recovered from that he shook his head. "Did you just say the entire planet? In one shot?"

"Yes, though some of that is based on claims made without evidence. She did find both missing children she was searching for when she ran the search."

"What do you rate that?" Sherie asked.

"I'll get to that later. Once both children were found, Minerva informed the police of where to find Mister Fry before revealing that Miss Alcott was in a bunker. The Captain on site made some calls and got the FBI involved. Lilia demonstrated the ability to target the bunker's computer systems, including those that should have been isolated, as well as an isolated FBI computer system that she was merely given coordinates for. Whether she did this directly or merely communicated with someone else we're unaware of to make it happen is unknown, but the ability is not new to us. Minerva then demonstrated the ability to use single-endpoint teleportation equipment to get teams into the bunker to get Miss Alcott out."

"Why didn't she just teleport Miss Alcott out?" Robin asked. "Even if she had to teleport one of the endpoint units in first?"

"Some medical conditions make use of the system likely fatal," Rory supplied. "Dinah currently has such a condition, and as such had to be removed the hard way. Luckily, Minerva was able to identify the condition as a possible issue pretty much immediately."

That caused Hannah to blink, because that hadn't been revealed in their earlier meeting. "Really?"

"Yeah, it came up when she stopped by the hospital at my father's request. There are other implications, but to provide more details is stepping on privacy and medical concerns that I can't share here."

Colin nodded. "We won't press for details, but please let us know if anything important comes up otherwise. That said, Minerva also captured Calvert herself, though whatever his powers are don't appear to be combat-related as he didn't put up a fight. She used one of the single-endpoint teleportation devices to reach him and then dragged him out of the bunker by hand. There were also unconfirmed reports of doors opening for her despite not being automatic in nature."

"How does that work?" Shawn asked.

"We have no idea if it even happened. Regardless, at this time we're upping her thinker and shaker ratings, to a minimum of seven and five. Due to issues that several known thinkers have had in relation to this event it has also been decided to give all members of Team Mana a minor trump rating, currently one plus, for interference with other powers."

Ethan snorted. "Fun. They only need four more, right?"

"Four more what?" Sherie asked, sounding like she didn't want to know.

"Ratings. By my count Minerva is only missing breaker, changer, stranger, and striker."

Hannah resisted the urge to slap Ethan for that, but only because Sherie beat her to it.

Rebecca Costa-Brown - May 23, 2011

Rebecca entered the meeting room, hiding a smirk at the fact that a Parahuman Data Security Taskforce did not normally include the PRT. She'd only been informed of this meeting because they wanted information that the PRT had access to, and had decided to 'pull rank' and show up in person to make a point. Had the PRT been included then they'd have known about some of what they wanted to talk about long before now, of course, which is where the smirk she wasn't showing came into play.

Looking around, she recognized the members of the task force. Parker Dane from the FBI, Daren Mills from the NSA, Lila Rains from the CSS, Colby Rubio from the Secret Service, Dawn Robson from the CIA, Elroy Troy from the DCA, and Giles Dexter serving as the White House liaison. All of them watched as she closed the door, and she didn't miss that they'd opted to sit to one side of the table, together, with the only remaining seat having been placed in the middle of the other side of the table.

Sadly for them, she was far more prepared than they were. She had no problem moving over to the chair and placing her briefcase down on the table before carefully sitting down. Once she was comfortable, she folded her hands in front of her on the table and waited to see which of them would speak up first. After all, she technically outranked all of them, something that they likely knew. Further, she also knew that they hadn't expected her to come personally, instead of the normal tactic of sending a representative. Then again, they didn't know just how important the information she'd brought with her was.

Interestingly, Parker rolled his eyes and gestured at her. "Nice of you to join us, Chief Director."

"Rebecca will be fine," Rebecca replied. "It isn't like we aren't all familiar with each other."

"Of course. Now then, we'd like to discuss the implications of things that were learned about Minerva and Lilia this weekend, specifically their data access ability, and to a lesser extent their ability to search areas and gain access to facilities."

"The implications of their data access abilities are that anything in any running computer in their range, which we believe to currently be nationwide at a minimum, is susceptible to their data access methods. We've not had time to fully determine the implications of their searching ability, beyond suspecting that what was used on Saturday was a lower-range version of the pulse that scanned the entire star system, but they aren't the first parahumans to be able to teleport and the concerns there are already well documented and take into account the ability to move large numbers of people around courtesy of existing teleporters such as Strider."

Parker sighed. "Yes, well. To start at the top, thanks to actions taken on Saturday we know that they can gain access to isolated networks, including at extreme range, but we believe that there may still be..."

"No," Rebecca interrupted, opening her briefcase. "They can gain access to any running computer." She pulled out a stack of folders and started sliding them across the table. "I have a summary of findings from Armsmaster and Dragon relating to their capabilities on that front. They have demonstrated the ability to gain access to various internet connections, dedicated communication lines including fiber optic lines, and even the communication channels between a disk drive and its controller. All of this was done without any observed equipment present, but stealth equipment teleported in for the duration is possible. It is believed, but currently impossible to prove or disprove, that they can also access the current memory state of running computers. They used to be more limited, but their range seems to have increased recently." They weren't cleared to know that it had increased after Vista had been depowered, but that had been noted by the PRT in case it was relevant.

There was a pause in discussion as each of them picked up a folder and started looking through the contents. All of them paled to varying degrees as they did so, though only Parker and Elroy visibly checked the dates on each sheet and flinched as they realized that they'd met since those dates. Rebecca hadn't even needed to fudge the dates for impact, as they were damning enough on their own.

Giles was the first to put his copy down and look back at Rebecca. "Why are we only hearing about this information now, since this task force isn't the only communication channel available for this kind of thing?"

Rebecca stared at Giles. "Really? What other communication channels are still open to us? Ask Daren about the rules that the NSA spearheaded for cross-department reporting of this class of information, and how the PRT has been shut out of almost all of the channels those rules permit by each individual agency. We're so isolated out of fear of tinkers infiltrating other networks that we have to submit paper requests ninety-nine times out of a hundred to get anything out of any of the systems represented here. Short of visiting every one of the agencies here, in person, we have no way to distribute information like this to them, and we were told to stop doing that. I included a sheet of reference numbers for the written orders to that effect on the backside of each of your folders. And before you try and tell me that all of this is a problem with the PRT not being willing to work with other agencies, the DIA has had most of this information within days of it entering our systems, because they didn't decide that the PRT's network was an automatic threat and lock us out on suspicion of potential future wrongdoing by a Protectorate member."

There was another pause as the others looked at each other, a couple of them even flipping their folders over to see the list of referenced documents. It was hard to argue those points, and she'd been waiting for a situation where she could rub all of this in their faces. Admittedly, she'd honestly prefer that it not be for something as significant as this, but beggars couldn't be choosers and the severity of things likely drove the point home better.

Parker sighed. "Okay. So encrypting everything isn't going to help nearly as much as we'd originally hoped."

"It won't help at all," Rebecca corrected. "Included in there are details of four incidents where encrypted records were retrieved while still encrypted and then follow-up checks were made based on their contents. We aren't sure if the encryption keys were retrieved or if they just brute-forced the encryption, but are obviously hoping for the former while fearing the latter."

"Fun. What do we do?"

"That's obvious enough," Colby said, dropping his folder on the table. "We hope to hell that she is, and remains, on our side to start with. Then we ensure that we do our best to not piss her off. We have no way of containing her, no real way to harm her, and she has more firepower and mobility than anyone else short of Scion before she uses her technology to potentially bring in reinforcements. Luckily, she's already working with us and not against us."

Daren scowled, but nodded. "I suppose that I can't argue with that, but I'm curious if any of the 'thinkers' that the PRT has access to have any more insight into her motives?"

Rebecca frowned at that. "Unfortunately, as far as we can tell there's some kind of anti-thinker effect surrounding her. What that is or how it works is unknown, but it also induces a minor obsession into learning more about her in around a third of those we've checked with."

"Figures."

"We also aren't sure why they care about Earth Bet at all."

That resulted in another pause, before Parker frowned. "Why wouldn't they care about their home?"

Rebecca sighed. "Because the running theory is that Earth Bet is not their Earth of origin. We also have no way of reaching their Earth of origin, as far as we know, but suspect that it at least has its own United States, New England, and even Brockton Bay in it."

"Fuck," Giles said, leaning back in his chair. "The 'owns and is the ruler of a planet' rumor might be true, and we're going to have to check with diplomatic services, aren't we?"

Dawn nodded slightly. "Probably, though I think someone visiting from another dimension to fight crime and Endbringers is a hell of a lot better than the Haywire incidents."

Thomas Calvert - May 23, 2011

Thomas still wasn't sure what, exactly, had happened, but he was furious. He had no idea when Minerva had gotten in touch with the FBI, and he'd never seen fit to even try to get any of his men into the organization. It had always been too much of a risk, and they had never been likely to look into him and his dealings before. Except that all of a sudden Minerva had likely gotten FBI teams into his previously-secure base while she literally dragged him out of it.

Still, he'd had timers running that Minerva hadn't taken the time to disable, and would've gone off before she'd pulled anyone else in to look over things. Everything would've been in the process of being wiped in a manner that nobody, not even he, could've stopped, but only after planting information that implicated the Undersiders in a number of things. Most importantly, he'd ensured that he had enough 'evidence' planted to ensure that they would end up taking the fall with him as a victim of their actions.

Despite that, he wasn't one to have only one plan. Thus, despite looking like a model prisoner he was still looking to find every possible method of escaping that he could identify in split-off timelines. Sadly, the holding cell they had him in was very well constructed, lacking in a number of flaws that could've aided in finding a way out. But it had only been a couple of days, and eventually the guards would get complacent due to his lack of doing much of anything. It would be then that he'd be able to escape.

"You're a piece of work," an agent said as he approached his holding cell. Agent Romilda, at least according to the identification badge. "Nice trick, trying to blame the group you assembled for your own actions, but it didn't work. That you'd been going over their files, likely to remind yourself of your 'cover story' for them, helped us start un-fucking their records too."

"You're a piece of work," the same agent said as he approached his holding cell in the other timeline. "No way in hell are you going to let us actually know what you've been examining, right? Might as well drop this simulation now and focus on the real me as I tell you how screwed you are."

That shouldn't have been possible, how the hell did they find out about how his powers worked? Or his plans for the Undersiders?

"Further," Agent Romilda continued, the version of him in the simulated timeline just tapping his foot. "We've already mopped up everyone you had working for you in government or law enforcement positions. It was nice of you to keep such detailed records in case you needed to ensure their compliance later. Most of them are, sadly, not guilty of federal crimes, but you and those that had been working for the PRT or Protectorate are."

"Fuck it," the version of him in the other timeline said, stepping forward and grabbing Thomas through the bars of the holding cell's door. That was followed by a fist breaking his nose. "I won't remember this, but you will, right? Asshole."

Thomas finally dropped the other timeline, if only to not have to deal with the pain of a broken nose. He was also realizing that he was, in fact, quite screwed, because the only way all of this could be known by the FBI was if the computers in his base hadn't been wiped. Had they gotten to the servers first, somehow? Except that shouldn't have helped, since he'd armed the traps that should've taken out the entire set of server stacks with thermite if anyone had attempted to get at them. And the information on his powers should've been wiped first no matter what, leaving behind a fake version that they obviously hadn't found and believed.

"Now then," the agent said, with a grin. "All of that aside, we need to know if you have any particular law firm that you'd like us to contact for you for your defense, since the lawyer that you specified on Saturday was arrested this morning for crimes relating to falsifying documents. The other three lawyers in that firm were arrested for similar charges as well, and the other four firms that you were using for illicit purposes have been shut down or will be by the end of the day."

Fuck. That evidence was also supposed to be in the list of the first things to be wiped, though on a different server stack. If they had that then they probably did have everything that he'd kept in the base's computer systems, not to mention access to at least one of his backup locations. How the hell they'd pulled that off was another question, given that he'd tested to make sure all of the wiping and destructive measures worked once a month and it had never failed, but he didn't expect to get an answer there and it was sadly possible that his simulations were faulty. Still, he did have one final backup there, having retained a less corrupt law firm that he could use in case of problems with the others. "Araya and Mertens, in Springfield."

The agent nodded and wrote that down. "Very well. If there's a problem contacting them then I'll be back to let you know. Now then, out of curiosity, did I punch you out in your simulated timeline?" Thomas glared at the man, not willing to give him the satisfaction of an answer. "Thought so. Wish I could remember it."

Dinah Alcott - May 23, 2011

Dinah sighed as she sipped from a glass of water. It'd taken over a day for the pictures to stop shattering instantly, settling into what she thought was no more than a full day in the future. More interestingly, there were images of people in a...collection, she supposed. Those images weren't doing anything, but they had various...completion levels, perhaps? A man that felt the most complete across the board, a girl that seemed somewhat familiar but was far less complete, what had to be Missy from school that was also far less complete, Minerva with almost nothing, and Lilia with a sliver more than Minerva.

She honestly got the impression that whatever force granted her powers was trying to figure out the things it didn't understand. That she felt like she wanted to learn more about everyone in the 'collection', the desire inversely proportional to the level of 'completion' on each image, just made that seem more obvious. Her headaches had even subsided entirely last night, though she didn't know which theory for that she liked more. Rory's thought when he'd visited this morning was that it was because she wasn't being overloaded with pictures now, but her mother thought that it was because she'd be less able to learn about those in the collection if she was constantly dealing with pain.

Admittedly, the pain wasn't entirely gone. If anyone asked a question that involved the next day or so that could be answered as a percentage then she still found herself with a spike of pain as she answered, but if it went further out then her powers...errored out? A few pictures would shatter, no spike of pain, and no compulsion to answer. Her own tests showed that anything involving those in the collection generated less pain and gave her a more complicated number set. She also didn't have to say those answers out loud, but instead got the impression that those questions were functioning as a test of the collection's accuracy.

'What are the chances that Missy will be at school tomorrow?' had come back with a 89.58351 percent chance with a second number of 10. 'What are the chances that Minerva will be in Brockton Bay tomorrow?' had come back with a 50.00000 percent chance and a second number of 50. 'What are the chances that Lilia will be in Brockton Bay tomorrow?' had come back with 49.00000 percent chance and a second number of 48.

She had no clue what any of that meant, of course. Which was annoying in its own way.

Max Anders - May 25, 2011

Max grumbled a bit as he went over things. They'd actually found a dozen of Coil's men in the ranks, several of them by virtue of the idiots panicking when Coil was taken down. It was all quite annoying, and three of the compromised individuals had been high enough to know civilian identities of capes. Which meant that Coil had likely known them, and thus the FBI likely knew them.

That was likely to be a problem, and meant that adjustments had to be made to distance Medhall from Empire activities.

"Max," Jessica said, popping her head in through the open door. "The PRT just dropped a package off for you."

Blinking, he looked up at her. "The PRT?"

"Yes."

Why on Earth would the PRT be sending him anything? Sighing, he gestured to Jessica. "Bring it in, might as well see what it is."

Jessica popped back out and a moment later returned carrying a box. It wasn't large, and he saw that it had a letter taped to it with his name on it. She backed off, but didn't leave, obviously curious about what might be inside of it. He grabbed a letter opener and used it to pop the letter off of the top, and then to open the sealed envelope.

Mister Anders,

Sophia Hess passed along information about a number of things that she'd obtained and ended up keeping as "trophies" before she was forced into the Wards. While a number of the items were illegal and are not being returned, a number of them were merely difficult to impossible to get rid of normally.

She claims that she obtained the property that we're returning to you by virtue of liberating it from another, instead of having stolen it herself. We have no way of proving that one way or another.

-Deputy Director Renick

Parahuman Response Team

East Northeast Division

That was certainly unexpected, though he supposed that it made sense that he'd not been aware of Shadow Stalker having taken anything from him that would need to be returned if she'd obtained whatever was in the box from someone else. Putting the letter down to the side, he picked the letter opener back up and used it to break the seal on the box. Opening it up revealed packing peanuts to protect the contents, making him sigh. He pulled a paper bag out of a drawer and started moving the packing material into it.

It wasn't long before he revealed two items that were about halfway down the box. Picking up the left item revealed it to be an award plaque that had been stolen from him by a Merchant a couple of years prior. Not one that he personally cared about, but it had been kept in remarkably good condition. Of course, the Merchant hadn't just stolen the plaque, which led him to checking the other item. Pulling it out of the box revealed an external hard drive. A heavily encrypted external hard drive with Medhall data on it that he'd been intending to review at home.

The drive was going to have to be handed over to his tech team to ensure that the data hadn't been accessed. It was supposed to be secure against tampering, rigged to become unreadable if the case was opened and to destroy itself if more than three attempts were made to read the data without the correct keys. None of which was within his personal ability to confirm the state of. If it hadn't been compromised then they could stop worrying about specific details contained on it having possibly gotten out thanks to the theft.

"It's weird," he finally said, staring at the drive. "In a way, Miss Hess did Medhall a favor by keeping this out of the hands of the Merchants. It would've been nice if she'd dropped it off instead of keeping it, admittedly, but if it hasn't been compromised then it was unusually safe in her care."

"I'm not sure I understand," Jessica admitted.

Max just picked up the letter and held it out for her to take and read.

Kenta Lung - May 26, 2011

Kenta frowned as he reviewed ideas for him helping Minerva with the Endbringers. He honestly didn't expect her to take him up on the offer of helping to hold Leviathan down, but he'd also come to the conclusion that he might be of help against Behemoth as well. Maybe. The first of the three was also the slowest and least likely to escape Minerva's grasp in the first place. As for Ziz? It took far too long for him to reach flight capable, which meant that he was likely useless there.

Which left Leviathan, which was the only one he'd actually offered to help with. He knew that he could hold the beast from escaping, so long as the ground itself didn't sink out from under the battle. Except that it would take time, and it was unlikely that the next battle would last long enough for him to ramp up enough to be able to do that. Thus the lists of ideas, for ways he could possibly help while he was still ramping up, and possibly cause him to ramp up faster.

So far, none of them looked workable.

"Lung, sir?" one of the men in charge of deliveries called. "There's a package for you from the PRT."

Kenta sighed. "Send it up, might as well see what someone forwarded to me this time."

Two minutes later the long box with a letter taped to it was on his desk. He ignored the letter for now, removing it and dropping it into a small armored box to the side. If this was a trap then he'd use the letter to find out who was foolish enough to attempt that. Not that he thought it was, as he usually started to feel his powers awaken in those cases, and they'd remained dormant. Opening the box was the work of a moment, and he fished a sword out of the packing material.

"Huh," he said, looking it over. "These usually don't come back."

Shrugging, he stood up and walked over to the closet in the room. Opening it up revealed a dozen identical copies of the sword, and he dropped this one into the rack. Aluminum display pieces, hung as decoration in the offices of his various holdings. Practically worthless, all things considered.

He moved back to his desk, ensured that there was nothing left but packing material in the box, then closed it up and dropped it next to the trash can. He'd check the letter later to find out who'd returned the sword.

Aisha Laborn - May 27, 2011

Aisha had actually been having fun all day at school, messing with teachers and students alike. She'd made sure that she was marked down as present in classes and turned in her homework, which was annoying, but as soon as she was she'd let her powers hide her again. That way she wouldn't get in trouble, or get Brian in trouble, for her skipping class or not doing the work. Though luckily there weren't any tests today.

She didn't know what had happened over the weekend, but all of a sudden things had been looking up. While she hadn't been given details, it seemed like Brian had run into someone in law enforcement that was willing to listen to him about her personal home life and start making it so that she could get out. Ruining things for that or souring Brian's trust relationship with whoever it was didn't seem like a good idea, especially as it had been their father's stupidity that put her in a position to get her powers.

Not that the powers were bad, but she could've done without the near-miss whatever the hell those bastards were going to do and other issues last night. At the same time, she'd felt a whole lot better after robbing the entire group blind, using their own baseball bats like golf clubs on them in the confusion, and then setting their fancy car on fire. That her father forgot all about her and hurried off, meaning that she had to find her own way home, had almost felt like par for the course by comparison.

Regardless, come lunchtime she'd decided to save some money by mooching off of everyone else for the day. She might've just taken a lunch, but knew from experience that they had cameras covering the lunch line and didn't know if her powers were awesome enough to hide her from said cameras. So instead she was largely nabbing a french fry or two from any given person. Plus the occasional chip and at least two carrot sticks so that she could truthfully tell Brian that she'd had some later. Because he would ask if she'd had anything healthy for lunch.

That fun had been interrupted when she'd reached Dinah and Missy. Dinah had been annoyingly good at being in the way every time an attempt was made to get at her lunch tray, seemingly by pure luck. Then Missy had somehow hit her. The former was probably just a coincidence of timing, even if it was a bit weird, but the latter was freaky. It also very quickly became unnerving, because it either meant that Missy could tell that she was there or that the other girl had somehow acquired reflexes so good that they ignored that she couldn't see or remember the thing being reacted to.

And now, for some reason, Aisha found herself wanting to follow Missy to find out more about her. Instead of doing the sensible thing of avoiding the girl that either had scary levels of training or didn't care when she should be forgetting that someone existed due to powers. What was wrong with her brain that she wanted to expose herself to the girl more?

Blair Coste - May 27, 2011

Blair stared at Miss Hebert as she left the room, then looked down at the stack of papers that the girl had left on the desk at the end of their allotted time. After a few minutes he picked them up and split them into three piles, one for each of the numbers that had been factored. Flipping to the end of each, he brought up a large-number calculator program on the computer and confirmed that the numbers that had been come up with would multiply together to make the original number. There were some larger numbers included, so he also brought up a list of primes and checked them against it. All of them were included.

She'd been handed a set of four sixteen-digit numbers, randomly generated that morning, and asked to factor them down to integers. By hand, as an exercise intended to show the girl that some problems just weren't reasonable to solve without computers. He'd planned on showing her the general output from the factoring program on the computer, including the number of operations, near the end of the session and tasking her with looking up the algorithms used. Getting even one of the numbers down to prime factors in the time they'd had today really should've been nearly impossible normally, and yet there were three correct answers sitting there. Achieved with a sequence of steps that looked like it was possibly a joke that she'd made up on the spot after knowing the answers already.

Except that the sequence looked consistent across the three sets of sheets and she'd made minimal notes to indicate why she was doing things. Not enough for him to figure out how to do this on his own, but he was able to go through and confirm that each step was likely valid, at least as far as it sat there on the pages. It was iterative as well, with each pass finding a single prime before dividing that out and moving onto the next. Generally it was finding the largest prime number in the list first, then dividing by it and repeating to find the largest in the new number. Though she had been intelligent enough to go for the low-hanging fruit of division by two and three first when possible, and he hadn't seen her use a calculator but some spot checks showed that her division was correct even if it didn't show her work.

Looking over the steps she'd taken again, he really wasn't sure how or why they worked. Just that they seemed to, and not knowing how this worked was going to annoy him all weekend. Come Tuesday he was going to have to get more information out of her, though probably not by way of telling her that it was an impossibility that shouldn't exist. No, presenting it as a method that he merely hadn't seen before was the safer option there. Given the PRT's insistence that she wasn't a parahuman, he was thinking that there was a chance that she was being taught by a thinker that he wasn't aware of. Possibly one that the PRT wasn't aware of, for that matter.

Maybe he should offer her extra credit for properly documenting the whole process. Getting a name to put on it would be part of that, and then he could run it past others to sanity-check it. Provided that it checked out at that point then someone could be made famous, even if it wasn't Miss Hebert.

At the same time, he was going to inform the PRT that he suspected that she might be a thinker. Maybe they'd be able to subtly check her for that, because it was always possible that she'd triggered since the last time they'd looked.

Dinah Alcott - May 28, 2011

Dinah frowned as she watched the news coverage of the Wards event. She still didn't fully understand how it was that Vista was dead when Missy was alive, as she'd once been sure that the girl was Vista. But that obviously wasn't correct, which had thrown a pile of assumptions about who could be which Wards, or Protectorate members, into doubt. The other reason she was frowning was because she wasn't sure if they'd made the right decision to not place her in the Wards for her protection.

It was true that her power wasn't exceptionally useful in the field, though with the limited scope of the pictures it was a lot easier to use it for checking on the next few minutes to a couple of hours. Needing to answer questions formulated in the correct way, so long as they fell into the time period that she was now limited to, was also potentially problematic in the field. At the same time, being a Ward would've offered a lot of protection and 'security through obscurity' might not help going forward. Calvert certainly hadn't been kept away by it.

On a more confusing front, while Missy wasn't Vista, it was obvious that the girl had some form of powers. Being able to completely bypass Aisha's little stranger trick was honestly impressive, since Dinah herself had needed to focus on what Aisha would be doing in the next few seconds to keep up with her. That Missy was also able to hear Aisha, and hadn't even noticed that the girl was supposed to be unnoticeable, was a very good trick. The book that Rory had left behind as a reference on powers put that as either a thinker or trump ability, depending on the specifics of how it worked.

The worst part about it was that it had actually dropped Missy's meter. Apparently not knowing how the girl ignored Aisha's powers had made her classmate more mysterious, and thus harder to predict. The latter had been shown by none of Missy's actions in deflecting Aisha lining up with the pictures, luckily not causing any significant shattering events beyond the initial 'Missy can still see Aisha' one. Dinah wasn't positive, but it had almost looked like Missy was reacting to Aisha's attempts before being able to see the girl's hands. Which was interesting, but made no sense if Missy wasn't a parahuman.

And asking 'chances that Missy Biron is a parahuman' was currently coming up zero percent every time it was asked. As did asking the same about Taylor Hebert or Danny Hebert, but asking about Minerva got one of those 50.00000 percent chance with a 50 extra number. Lilia instead had a 25.00000 percent chance with a 25 extra number, making it seem like she was less likely to be a parahuman? Probably because she didn't seem to be human at all in many ways.

Jessica Yamada - May 28, 2011

Jessica wasn't entirely sure what to think of things today. She wasn't entirely happy with Miss Biron needing to start over with a new therapist, but the girl not being a parahuman made it hard to argue against that decision. Besides, in the long run that should work out to be better for the girl, even if there were some serious oddities there. Such as the fact that Jessica would be willing to swear in front of a judge that the girl had probably never been suicidal enough to take her own life.

Having all evidence point at someone who likely wasn't suicidal having tried to take their own life was a very big mystery, and not one that Jessica liked. Unfortunately, Miss Biron was now going to be someone else's problem, and as such Jessica was unlikely to ever find out the full story. That was quite annoying on its own, but couldn't be helped. Instead she had to focus on making sure that the prep packet for the new therapist covered as much as possible from the PRT's records without including that Miss Biron had been Vista. Which negated far, far too much.

Then there was Miss Hebert, who had obviously been holding back far too much during their chat. She didn't have any signs of being abused now, though she'd obviously had some problems with that in the past. It also felt like she wasn't suicidal so much as had a very low personal self-worth, which unfortunately fit some of the profiling that'd been done on the girl before the session. Luckily there were signs of recovery on that front, but other things just didn't add up.

On the good news front, neither girl had any signs of mastering side effects. Well, beyond Stagehand's little trick earlier in the day anyway, but that was fully expected and had far less effect on the two than expected. Luckily, it still had enough effect to serve as a bit of a control, leaving the lack of other and unexpected side effects as a good thing and not a sign that said effects were being effectively covered up. That meant that the PRT would be happy, though only from the point of view of Jessica not submitting emergency reports for 'my patient appears to have been mastered' as required by law.

Sighing, Jessica wondered if part of her own concerns were that she'd worked with parahumans for too long. Both girls were far too calm in many ways, something that parahumans pretty much never were. It was most noticeable in Miss Biron, as a change from the way the girl used to act during sessions. That, in many ways, just drove home that neither of them were parahumans right now. Even if there were theories that Miss Hebert was going to be but had her powers removed before they could finish taking hold.

Romilda Hooker - May 28, 2011

Romilda grumbled a bit as he headed down the hall to Calvert's holding cell, five guards with him. They had three cameras watching the blasted thing and all of them had started looping in the past five minutes. Neat trick, and might've fooled the guard watching them if they didn't have countermeasures against that kind of thing. But it meant that Calvert was probably trying to make an escape in the longer window he probably thought he'd have before someone showed up in person to check on him.

There was no noise coming from the cell as they approached, which could mean that he'd already made it out of the cell. The facility was already in lockdown, and had been for three minutes now. Other teams were moving to check all maintenance and access tunnels, in part because someone had looped the camera feeds. There was no way Calvert should've been able to do that from inside of his cell, though it might've been a result of him learning some new aspect to his powers.

Arriving at the cell, the guards hugged the wall opposite it to get an initial view inside from as far away as they could manage. One of the reasons they used bars here was that it made it much easier to hit those inside with tranq darts, among other things. They'd only had to resort to shooting one person in their cell so far, and that had been a parahuman firing lethal attacks out through the bars a few years back.

"Shit," one of the guards said, dropping his gun. "We're going to need an investigative team."

"What?" Romilda asked, blinking. "Is he not there?"

The guard waved Romilda over, and he moved so that he could see inside the cell. The first thing he saw was Calvert's jumpsuit, folded neatly and sitting off to the side. Continuing over so that he could see more of the cell, it only took a moment before he saw the rest. Calvert's head had been removed from his neck, and his legs had been removed from his torso.

"Fuck," Romilda said, looking over the scene. "He had much more significant outside help, we're going to need to bring in more searchers."

"That doesn't look like he had help," another of the guards noted.

"There's no blood. Either someone faked his death and is still working on getting him out of the facility or the one who did this cleaned up all of the blood. Either way, someone got enough access to the facility to mess with the cameras and do this."

Kurt Wynn - May 28, 2011

Kurt scowled as he tried to figure out how the math he was looking at was supposed to work. He'd spent far too much time on it already, and not gotten anywhere of use. He feared that he was never going to get enough information to figure it out either, and that frustrated him to no end. Though he wasn't focusing enough on it to miss Contessa arriving.

"How'd things go with Calvert?" he asked.

"Successfully slugged," Contessa replied. "Tommy is now in one of the less barebones secure flats. We'll need to re-train him on his powers, of course, but that was expected and planned for. The copy of his notes on how his powers work is sitting on your desk here. The FBI didn't believe the fake body for more than a minute, but won't be able to find him unless Minerva can scan multiple dimensions at once. Even then, his amnesia should hopefully keep her from doing too much and the FBI is unlikely to be able to swing asking her to help find him for at least a month due to internal procedure headaches."

Kurt nodded. They'd been surprised when the man had suddenly shown up as a threat to Cauldron's security, but only in the timing. Pity that he'd become a liability, but he might still prove to be useful. At least they'd had time to set up his accommodations before grabbing him. That done, he went back to examining the equations. The others would be here soon enough, Contessa never showed up more than five minutes before they'd actually get started.

True to his thoughts, David and Rebecca arrived together a couple of minutes later, with Doctor Mother showing up just after them. Reluctantly, he closed the notebook with the equations in it so that he could focus on the meeting.

"So how goes the work at getting some monitoring on the necklace bearers?" Doctor Mother asked to start things off.

"Miserably," Rebecca admitted. "The alarm clock sent to Miss Hebert was spotted as a problem before it could do anything and was turned in to the PRT. As for Miss Biron, the intended decoy unit was spotted immediately, as expected, but they also spotted, disabled, and turned in the stealth sensor system we had put into place with the investigative team. So we've got a complete failure to get proper monitoring on either household, and thus little to no clue why Clairvoyant can't properly monitor them."

"Along those lines," David said. "I examined them today and found out frustratingly little. Their necklaces register as larger on the inside to some abilities and smaller on the inside to others. Absolutely nothing could actually scan inside of the necklaces or determine how they work. From their reactions, the girls were able to partially ignore master effects, presumably as a function of the necklaces despite there being no other sign of any protections. Armsmaster noticed that as well and noted it in his report. In addition, Miss Hebert's necklace attacked Stagehand's sign after a short period of time to end the effect. We don't know if Miss Biron's necklace has the same ability or not, especially as I personally believe that Miss Hebert had a better protection against the master effect in the first place. That could just be due to having been exposed to her necklace for longer though."

"Should we just use one of the favors that 'Jaime' still owes us to get monitoring into the Walsh household?" Kurt asked.

"She wouldn't keep it secret from Miss Biron and from what we can tell it won't work anyway," Doctor Mother replied. "If the monitoring equipment here has been any indication, the existing devices have been disabled long before anyone actually turns them in. Except that they turned back on when turned over to the PRT, so it's really more of a jamming effect than an actual disabling. Having a device in either household isn't likely to teach us anything as a result, it'll probably just be jammed again."

"So we've learned and know nothing of use from the entire thing," Rebecca said. "The only thing we've likely accomplished is to put them on alert for future attempts."

"Essentially."

"Are we still holding off on placing monitoring in the warehouse being transferred to Minerva?" Kurt asked, which was honestly the thing he was most interested in. The necklaces didn't seem to be nearly as interesting, outside of likely being connected to the newest potential 'strongest parahuman'.

Doctor Mother nodded. "If Minerva's backers made the necklaces then none of our monitoring is likely to work, so it's useless to try. Besides, there are enough other groups looking to get some form of monitoring in there, if any succeed then we can appropriate their equipment as needed."

David shook his head. "I don't suppose that we've had any progress on a path to getting Minerva or her backers to work with us?"

Contessa shook her head. "No. I've not got sufficient data available to model her, and what I do have indicates that as soon as she or they find out everything we've been doing then we'll become more significant targets. If things progress as they have been then we may need to clean up every 'mess' we've created or allowed to continue before approaching them, including doing what we can to fix every deviant. Most of which we can't do."

Rebecca sighed. "If she or her backers can save humanity? At that point, being on their shit list is probably worth it. We just don't have enough proof either way right now, and if they can't then they could cripple our options for moving forward. That would likely doom humanity. Which leaves us in a stalemate, needing more information but being unable to get it in the most efficient way possible due to the risk of revealing information being too high."

Geoffrey Pellick - May 28, 2011

Geoffrey grinned as he double-checked the various bits of monitoring equipment. Based as much on Dragon's nearly-untraceable communications as possible, they were probably the best bet for getting information on Minerva and the AIs she worked with. He'd even had a burst of inspiration and as far as he could tell they would now report back to the Ascalon terminal through Dragon's own systems, hopefully ensuring that if the devices were detected then Dragon would take the blame and it wouldn't lead back to him.

The PRT would be doing final sweeps of the warehouse over the next couple of days, which would give them time to slip into Brockton Bay unnoticed. Slipping into the warehouse itself after it had been cleared, but before the keys were handed over to Minerva, would then be trivial. Really, the hardest part of all of this was doing so without someone who wasn't Dragon noticing them moving around. But they'd gotten very good at that, so it shouldn't be a problem.

With any luck they'd get some solid leads from the monitoring by mid-June, at which point they could start planning on more direct monitoring of Minerva's actual base of operations and the origin of her AIs.

Yuuka Perrin - May 29, 2011

Yuuka scowled as she pulled herself into the safe house that she'd made it to. She'd underestimated Minerva's creator and paid the price for doing so. Regeneration wasn't one of her many powers, and whatever had struck her back had removed all feeling from her lower body. Which meant that one of those knife-blades had likely damaged her spine. Getting that healed was going to be problematic at best and impossible at worst, leaving her partially helpless and weak.

One didn't remain the Butcher by looking weak, let alone being weak. The Teeth didn't currently have any parahumans that could match her normally, but with an injury like this? She'd be lucky to last the coming week. Less if she couldn't get someone trusted to bandage up the cut in her back that was still bleeding and was just outside of her ability to reach properly. Hopefully the others had realized that it was time to scatter and vanish so that Minerva couldn't grab all of them and one of them could get back here to get the bandages that she couldn't reach either.

Of course, they also hadn't ensured that the tissue samples from several of the Teeth's New York based parahumans had been destroyed. They had no desire for the stupid tinker to begin making creatures with their powers, but now they probably wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Making Minerva's creator pay for that would likely be impossible, given that the thing had been toying with her. Yuuka and the voices of the previous Butchers weren't stupid enough to believe that they could take on something that could solo Leviathan and completely ignore the brute resistance to sever her spine, after all.

Though Yuuka did find it slightly odd that the previous Butchers were pushing for leaving the area instead of trying to find Minerva's creator. Of course, none of the previous Butchers were tinkers. She'd never considered it, but it could very well be that being killed by a tinker's autonomous creations didn't count as being killed by the tinker. Perhaps there was an instinctive knowledge of things there? If that was the case then there was probably nothing that could be done to find the actual parahuman.

It took a few minutes of consideration, but Yuuka and the voices of the previous Butchers were in agreement that they didn't want to know what would happen if something that was technically nonliving or nonhuman killed her. They'd come to a similar agreement regarding the depowering necklace in Brockton Bay, for that matter, and hightailing it out of New England in general was looking better every day.

Carey, one of the heroes that had killed one of the previous Butchers, suggested possibly heading for Australia instead of sticking around North America in general. It was an interesting thought to distract them as she lay there. At least until she realized that she was feeling unusually tired and recalled that she had a severe wound on her back. The lack of pain after the initial hit was an unfortunate liability with such a severe injury. Sadly, she was too weak to do anything about it by then, though she did cuss Carey out when she realized that had probably been his plan in bringing that up in the first place.

Given that Minerva had been the one to harm her, and a previous host of the Butcher had tricked her into ignoring the problem, she had no clue what was going to happen as she lost consciousness.

Geraldo Sartor - May 29, 2011

Geraldo arrived at the safe house fearing for his health. The Butcher wouldn't take his life, not so long as he remained loyal to the Teeth, but bringing her the bad news that all of those she'd left behind had been captured wasn't going to be pleasant. Even reminding her that she'd run away was going to be problematic on that front, no matter how he phrased it. That he hadn't been there to help at her orders, instead creating a distraction elsewhere due to her not wanting him to accidentally cancel out her own powers temporarily during the battle, wouldn't help his arguments.

Frowning at the trail of blood through the safe house, he incidentally followed it to the room that the Butcher normally used. Except that before he got there his entire body burned and there was an explosion of pain in his head. What the hell was that?

"Hello Animos," the Butcher's voice said in his head, causing his eyes to go wide. "Not that you'll be using that name anymore. No, I am no longer the Butcher. I lost myself in thought with the others and appear to have bled out from the injuries I sustained during Minerva's attack."

"Oh," he said, not sure if he had to speak out loud or not to be heard. "So you just died, and the mantle has been passed to me?"

"Indeed," several voices he didn't recognize said in near unison before one continued alone. "It is nice to know that the mantle passes to others when those responsible for the death of the previous bearer are ineligible or impossible to reach. Much nicer than what we feared might happen. Still, you will need training. If only to survive those that would challenge you, but you were already a loyal member of the Teeth so there shouldn't be many problems at first. They know to allow you some time to adapt before challenging you."

"Do I need to train to defeat Minerva for her actions?"

"NO!" several of the voices exclaimed in unison.

"Minerva isn't alive," one of the unknown voices continued. "No blood, no nerves, no brain, and no powers to allow inheriting of the mantle. Dragon's suits are more alive than Minerva is. Couple that with its performance against Leviathan? No, trying to attack a likely tinker's creation, especially one of that level? Revenge isn't worth the risk and is far too unlikely to be meaningful. Maybe if you can find out who built her and where they can be located, but we think that unlikely and they almost certainly have something even stronger protecting them."

"Instead," another voice said. "You shall begin your training by freeing at least one person from custody, as presumably at least one member of the Teeth was captured today. Preferably one of the parahuman members, of course, but any member will do if the other parahumans escaped capture in both engagements today."

Katie Hale - May 29, 2011

Katie grinned as she looked at the signed picture of Minerva, happy that daddy had been able to get it for her. She'd hugged him before heading upstairs to add it to her collection. More importantly, she needed to see what it could tell her. But she needed to prepare things first. Open up the album of heroes that she liked and respected, find a suitable empty spot, ensure that she had a properly-sized protective sleeve ready, pull out the partially-used sheet of little anchor stickers, and ensure that her fancy pen was ready to take notes to go alongside the picture.

With that done, she opened up the baggie and touched the signed picture herself for the first time. Her power flooded the picture, informing her that her father had touched it since it was signed. Of Minerva...it told her nothing. The signature was there, placed by someone who wasn't her father, but that was all she was getting. Her eyes narrowed as she pushed a little harder, only to get that the clerk at the print shop had touched the picture as well, before it had been signed.

Somehow, Minerva had signed the picture without leaving any traces behind. Even those who wore protective gloves left traces behind, it shouldn't have been possible to leave nothing behind when signing the picture. And yet, Minerva apparently had.

Not even the Triumvirate had been able to pull that off. That Minerva had done so impressed Katie greatly, and she picked her pen up.

Minerva - So secretive, she's able to prevent even the smallest trace from being left behind when she touches things.

That was, if Katie was being honest, incredibly awesome in its own way.

Yuuno Scrya - May 29, 0076

Yuuno swore as he translated what he could of the output from the relic. Assuming what he had so far was correct, a heavily damaged Unison Device had activated. In the process it had forcibly taken a Lord and absorbed a 'shard', whatever that meant, as part of an emergency repair routine. The software backup for said Unison Device, with its shutdown codes and a few other things, was lost. Stored in an information repository that had likely been lost with Belka, backed up to an information repository that as far as he could tell had lived on the Saint's Cradle. Which was, of course, no longer available.

The triangulation results were odd, and he'd have dismissed the thing as essentially unreachable if not for three details. First off, this was far too similar to the Book of Darkness for his liking, and heading something like that off away from TSAB-administered space sounded like a wonderful idea. Secondly, a list of tasks that included reporting to Belkan authorities had been included in the data transmission that the relics had picked up. Which meant that it was likely going to be coming in this general direction at some point. And lastly, assuming he was reading this correctly, and his coordinate system conversion was accurate, the thing was on an alternate version of non-administered world 97.

Based on the last detail, the blasted thing had probably found an incredibly powerful mage of some kind and who knew what else it was doing. He was willing to bet that whatever happened, it was going to be far harder to deal with than it had any right to be by the time they could reach it or it could reach them. They were probably going to need to form a special task force just to deal with the thing.

With any luck he'd be able to use some of the other identifiers to find archived records of the device, so that they'd at least have some clue about what it was supposed to be capable of. In particular, one of the identifiers looked like an artificial core serial number. He'd run into a listing of those a while back, when he got back to the library he'd have to dig that out and check it to see if this was such a number and if it was listed. If so then it should be listed in a number of other records, which would allow for finding basics on the device at a minimum.

Jacob Smith - May 30, 2011

Jacob looked over Riley's little 'tea party'. Lots of spider-bots, which was normal. Incredibly varied drinks had been collected over the past few days, which was also normal because none of them actually liked tea. The oddest part of the whole thing was that the decorations were, all things considered, normal. No blood or gore, no bones or body parts at all really, and everything was intact. Which was his first clue as to what was likely happening, as by her logic those embellishments wouldn't be permitted until she'd proven herself to him again. She'd been working so hard at restoring her status as a 'good girl', though he'd missed whatever it was that made her think that she wasn't one right now, and further protective upgrades were a common go-to for her.

Thinking about it before he entered the room, there was nothing critical coming up over the next few days. They were in an abandoned hotel on the outskirts of a small town in the middle of nowhere, so Riley going to town on them to further improve their chances of survival shouldn't be a problem. Ned and Alan would keep an eye on her once whatever it was she'd cooked up knocked the rest of them out and the Siberian would keep others away for the duration. Whenever she returned, anyway, since she'd vanished as soon as they'd settled in yesterday. But that wasn't unusual when they weren't expecting trouble, and she should be back in a few hours at most.

Moving over to the head of the table, his personal place of honor, he sat down. He was frowning and looking for some sign that was out of place, because he couldn't help feel that something was wrong. The others filtered in, each taking their seats, and he hadn't spotted anything of use. They all knew to play along, so long as he was doing so, and Riley had obviously gone all out for today's show. Based on the place settings, she even had a 'drink' for Alan, amazing as it was. That showed dedication to her cause, given how hard it was to make the containers alone. Alan certainly wouldn't have helped her.

Riley herself was the last one to enter, barring the Siberian showing up in the middle of things. The girl's spotless outfit was further confirmation of her plans for the next few days. She'd entered pushing a cart of drinks and a selection of finger-foods, fancier than she usually went to the effort of making, and went through the motions of what she called a tea party. Everyone got served their drinks and whatever finger-foods they wanted before she placed her own at her seat next to him. Her own drink and finger food selections were the plainest, even sticking to water, further showing just how much she felt that she wasn't a good girl right now.

As everyone played their own parts, the feeling of 'wrongness' gradually faded, and he allowed himself to relax. It would be the second round of drinks when the knockout drugs were administered, after all. Even if there was now something else wrong that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Which was why he wasn't entirely surprised when Riley stood up and got everyone's attention. Then again, she might just want to explain what was going to happen, sometimes she gave them the option of declining her upgrades or a choice between things. To that end, she turned to him, bowing.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But you made it clear that you won't help me be a good girl, nor will most of the others."

"What?" he said, blinking. He then glanced around the room, and noticed two things that he'd missed. The first, Alan was motionless, unusually so. More importantly, the spider-bots, background actors under normal circumstances, were similarly motionless. The bigger problem was that it appeared that they had gun barrels, and two were aimed directly at him. Grabbing the knife that he'd left sitting there just in case he needed it, he tried to slash at the spider-bot. Only to find that his powers weren't working.

"Goodbye Jack."

Cherie Vasil - May 30, 2011

Cherie could only stare at the television showing the local news, mentally swearing up a storm. She'd intended to use the Slaughterhouse Nine as a shield against her family, only for someone to kill them off. Though she did have to admit that she appreciated them doing so before she'd pulled off trying to join them. Even if she didn't like that she'd finally caught up to them in the middle of nowhere after they'd changed course multiple times over the past few months, only to have them killed off before she could even try and prove herself to them. Then again, it did explain some of what she thought she'd felt earlier, and it wasn't just that the group had a way to block her powers like she'd originally feared.

The officials that'd responded to the initial 911 call were calling in the PRT to examine things, leaving no real details available, but that also meant that she was cutting her own visit to the area short. She had far too many skeletons in her closet to want to be anywhere near a PRT investigation without backup that she no longer had, especially as she wouldn't put it past her father to have informants in the PRT that would tell him where she could be found if they spotted her. To that end, she got up from the bar and headed for her room.

Based on the emotions of the woman who she'd seen bringing in a pile of cash, she'd also been looking for the Nine. Possibly to hire them, if the cash was any indication. As if that would've worked. Still, grabbing as much of that from the woman's hotel room as she could would help with her own budget. It was time for plan D, which was to find and approach the Elite to see if they'd be willing to protect her. That would probably be less entertaining, admittedly, but it was also far less likely that someone was going to take offense and obliterate the Elite like someone had just done to the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Hannah Karim - May 31, 2011

Hannah locked the door behind her as she entered the meeting room. She'd been held up dealing with a couple of things and was the last to arrive this morning. Taking her seat next to Colin on the side of the table with all of the Protectorate members, she looked towards the PRT staff and Emily. The latter was frowning as she reviewed something on the computer terminal next to her at the head of the table.

"Right," Emily finally said, turning to the rest of the room. "Let's get started with the original and additional official reasons to call this meeting. Because it's less significant, I'd like to start with Armsmaster's report from Miss Biron and Miss Hebert coming in on Saturday."

Colin nodded. "We've got a number of things that we now know don't work on the necklaces and no new information to help us understand what they are or how they function. Instead, both girls have been given a Trump 0 rating due to the protective effects of the necklaces. Both girls appear to be protected from Thinkers, Clockblocker was unable to affect either of them directly with his Striker abilities, and a combination Master and Stranger had their abilities blunted at a minimum on Saturday. We assume that there are more things that the necklaces will protect the two from, but testing that is difficult and unlikely to be approved due to the possibility of harming them."

"Thank you," Emily said. "Any questions?" Nobody said anything, and Hannah knew it was because they had other things on their minds. "Good. Now then, the more significant events from the weekend. I'm sure that you've all heard that members of the Slaughterhouse Nine were found dead yesterday in Kansas. Somehow the full details haven't made it to the news, but the entire group was not found. Jack Slash, Hatchet Face, Mannequin, and Shatterbird were all found dead in a small abandoned hotel. Mannequin appears to have been poisoned and had the power supply for his self-augmentations shot through with armor piercing bullets. The other three were shot through an eye each, again with armor piercing bullets. Their bodies were only found because of a call to 911."

A finger was held up to stop questions before Emily turned to the computer and tapped a couple of keys. A moment after that an audio clip started to play.

"911 operator," came a male voice, obviously the operator. "What is your emergency?"

"Jack wouldn't let me be a good girl," came what sounded like a child's voice. Maybe a young teenager? "The others were going to help him."

"Where are you?"

"I don't know the address, but I'll leave the phone here so that you can find it."

"Who is this?"

"I'm Riley, and Mimi is going to help me be a good girl. We have to go now, but be careful when you come here. I think Bert is out of ammo, but I lost track of him and couldn't check."

There was a thunk of the phone being put down, and other sounds of movement before the clip ended. Hannah was certain that she'd missed something important.

"Now then," Emily said. "Tracking the phone down took longer than they'd have liked, and it was almost an hour before they were able to locate it. There was no sign of anyone left alive in the area by that point."

"Mimi sounds familiar," one of the PRT staff further down the table noted. "Was Riley someone they tried to recruit?"

"No." Emily then turned on the projector, and two profiles came up. "Mimi Corti is better known as Burnscar, and Riley Davis is better known as Bonesaw. The bullets that took out the deceased members of the group were fired from some of the latter's spider-bots, all but one of which were disabled before they left. The last spider-bot, presumably 'Bert', was found with a single round left. The latter was only discovered after it had been disabled by the responders and examined."

Hannah was blinking at that. "Bonesaw killed half of the known membership of the Nine because they wouldn't let her be a good girl?"

"Apparently, and this entire situation brings up the question of how willing she actually was. She and Burnscar have had their Kill Orders suspended pending investigation, as neither had earned one before being under the influence of the other members of the Nine. Crawler and the Siberian are missing and their Kill Orders are still in effect, both having earned them before joining the Nine. We have no clue where any of the four are going, but suspect that Bonesaw and Burnscar are traveling together at a minimum."

"So the Slaughterhouse Nine are finished but some of the former members are still potential problems," Sherie summarized.

"No," Emily corrected. "It's entirely possible that Bonesaw has taken over leadership. Crawler was in the room with the others at a minimum, based on damage to the floor at one seat. If the four remaining members are traveling together then they may still be a functional group. At the same time, that alone may not be enough to consider the group still 'active'. It may be that Bonesaw is looking to turn the group around. We don't actually know what her definition of 'good girl' is at this point, just that Jack wouldn't let her be one. It's more of a wait and see situation now, especially as there aren't any signs of which direction they went when they left."

"So," Ethan said. "We're waiting to see if the four remaining members are together, and if so if they resume their previous murderous ways?"

"Basically. All regions have been asked to brief their staff on this due to the number of unknowns. The chances of the group making their next appearance here is slim, having been known to be in Lakin yesterday, but we can't really rule it out and as such we need to be prepared."

Last edited: Jul 1, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 61 - May 31, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

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LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jul 8, 2020

#10,903

Taylor ended up wishing that she'd waited for her father to come home before calling about the mysterious envelope. Sure, the police were there within three minutes of her calling, courtesy of the car still monitoring the area, but they'd ended up bringing in multiple teams. The first was brought in to check the envelope, and then once they determined that it contained poison they then had to bring in additional teams to ensure that no poison had escaped the envelope and gotten on her. Or in the house in general, really, after they'd declared her clean. She knew that none had escaped the envelope before the first team had opened it in a special box they had, but couldn't explain to them how she knew, and it was after when they'd normally eat dinner before the police declared the house safe.

"So," Taylor said after they'd done a check for things left behind and her father had ordered dinner. "That was much more annoying than I thought it would be."

"Bit of a surprise for me," he admitted. "Though I don't know if we'll hear anything about who was behind it. There wasn't exactly a lot of evidence to go on."

"I traced the phone number provided to a prepaid phone," Hive interjected. "Unused, paid for with cash, but it was sitting next to another phone as it traveled around until someone called said other phone to let them know that the police had been called. The prepaid phone was then turned off and was likely disposed of, but the other phone is currently in a hotel across town."

Taylor sighed. "And because none of that is likely admissible in court there isn't much we can do about it?"

"I'll continue to monitor the phone and others that it communicates with. At the very least we may be able to identify the next plan before it's enacted."

Commenting on the likely-illegality of that monitoring probably wasn't going to help, especially as it was being done to help keep her and her father safe, so Taylor decided to drop the subject for now. Instead, she turned to her father. "So, when you got home you were grumbling about something other than poisoned letters?"

He nodded. "Yeah. Work has been picking up now that there isn't a container ship blocking the shipping channel, coupled with Minerva drawing a lot of attention to the area. The latter is actually more likely to be responsible, with the shipping channel being mostly cleared as an added benefit. That, however, has resulted in me needing a new computer for my office, and if I want to be able to work from home then I'll need a new one for here as well."

"Why would you need a new computer?"

He dug a flash drive out of his pocket. "This thing is formatted with a filesystem that I can't read currently, but more up to date computers can apparently read without issue. I had to borrow someone else's computer at the office to get the files I needed off of it. They fit on a couple of floppies no problem, but I can't keep doing that."

Taylor nodded, since that made sense. Though it did bring up another question. "Why did you bring the flash drive home with you?"

"Because whenever I get around to going computer shopping I'm going to want to ensure that I don't need an adapter to plug the thing in. This has one of those new smaller plugs as well."

"Oh. Right. The one I've got my work on for tutoring uses the older style connector."

He nodded this time. "Yeah. But perhaps we should see about having you join me. You could use something better than what we've got in the house now, if only as a cover for how often I bet you use Hive's systems, and you can definitely afford a new computer."

Taylor wanted to argue that, but really couldn't. Especially not with the comment about it being a good cover for using Hive's systems. "Does that mean that I might have to purchase the software that Hive set up to work with her systems?"

"You probably should, yes. That might even cover Hive's appropriation of them, legally speaking. At least so long as you're the only one using them and in the event that anyone figured out that Hive has copies, anyway."

Well, that was annoying, but also made far too much sense. At a minimum it would let her explain how she still had use of any of the software she wanted to use once she no longer had access to the computer lab with the software in it. "Okay. Whatever. When were you planning on going computer shopping?"

He shrugged. "I figure that tonight's a bust, but perhaps we can see what's available tomorrow."

"Okay."

That evening Taylor had ended up working on a collection of projects. To start with, she'd had inspiration on making macros work with more spells. Specifically, she'd come up with a way to nest references infinitely deep in the macro, and thanks to that had successfully made them work for everything that she might want to cast more than five at a time. Not to mention that, in theory, they worked for everything that included targeting data now. She just hadn't tested that with everything.

She continued her attempts at figuring out scrying and the grasping tentacles trick as well, having decided that the rest of 'summoning' was already possible with the storage space and dimensional transferences. Scrying was more difficult in that she was basically throwing things at the wall to see what stuck, and she eventually came to the conclusion that it was probably never going to work in simulation. Real-world testing would be needed instead.

The grasping tentacles was the one she made the most progress with. She'd constructed a 'tentacles' template that could be embedded into a spell to be used to make the physical structure when needed. Embedding a basic 'spin around until you hit something and then wrap around it' logic was easy enough, but she'd also put in the option to take direct control of the tentacles instead. Something that she'd be able to do easily, but that Missy would probably have a harder time with.

If she'd designed them correctly, they should allow most atmospheric gases through while still being solid enough to hold brutes. She was still working on making them 'sticky' so that it would be harder to slip out from their grasp. Sure, that wouldn't necessarily help much against anything with a force field, mana-created or otherwise, but against normal humans it should be fine. She'd first come up with a 'slime' coating, but in simulation that was preventing the 'allows gases to pass through' aspect from functioning properly. More research would be needed there.

She also continued to refine her thoughts on magical traps, which included refining the work she'd already done on triggered spells and adjusting her work on binding particles. Allowing her traps to absorb and use the binding particles that she'd already seeded an area with seemed like a good idea overall. Specifically, deciding that she wanted a trap somewhere and just firing a bullet into the surface to do the initial setup, the rest of the 'power' being provided by the binding particles when triggered, seemed like it would be useful.

The problem with that was that the binding particles were, to put it simply, too specialized. So she was making a variant that would be able to act as a binding particle or would feed itself into an input system to be used as mana for something else. This made them slightly less efficient for binding, but a lot more flexible. In theory, anyway. Testing was going to be required, and likely quite a bit of tweaking. Worse, if being used for traps, she really needed to get rid of the 'entire area glows, then collapses down on a single point' effect. That would be far too significant a sign that something other than a bullet impact had occurred.

Traps weren't exceptionally useful if everyone in the area could see that you'd placed one.

Hive, on the other hand, had been working on several things as well. Taylor thought that a lot of it was working to finish up the construction at the inlet, but wasn't actually certain of that. A 'rack' system for testing drones had been tested in the simulation system, and it had looked like there were also mining drones being run through simulation paces. At least if the simulated asteroids were anything to go by. That didn't seem like a horrible idea, though it was questionable as to how much they were going to need in raw materials. Did they really have any large-scale construction projects to worry about?

Wednesday morning Missy was woken up by the smoke alarm in the hallway going off. She'd jumped up and thrown on a bathrobe, only to find out that Sherie had gotten distracted by a phone call and burned what she'd been cooking for breakfast. Grumbling, Missy had returned to her room, gotten ready for the day, and then headed to the beach early. If she didn't need to be there then she could jump to wherever they were exercising when Taylor was ready.

Instead, Missy stood on the beach and practiced firing bullets and beams into the water. Not going for speed, and not pushing herself in any way. Just casting the spells for real to get an idea as to how difficult it was going to be to place them in her core. It took no time at all for her to load all three bullet variants into her core, but the beam was actually much more complicated than it looked like it should be from the outside.

More interesting was the fact that the three bullets were stored in four slots when she got to that point. The 'payload' was interchangeable and had stored independently of the bullets that would contain it, implying that there were things other than 'explode' available. Which was obvious in hindsight, as Taylor didn't just use exploding bullets. Eventually some of the other payloads would be shared, of course, but Missy wasn't sure how much she cared. Explosions were, in her eyes, perfect already.

She'd just gotten to playing with pushing Knight Object templates into the bullets, currently random elements of her Knight Armor, when Taylor arrived with her father. Which was enough of a distraction to cause Missy to lose track of the latest bullet, successfully hitting herself in the face with a duplicate of her Knight Armor left sneaker. Luckily, she was wearing the full Knight Armor, so an exploding sneaker to the face barely fazed her.

"Looks like you need a lot more practice," Danny commented. "Unless you were testing your protections, of course, in which case I'd recommend not using your face."

Missy tried to glare at him, but the opaque visor probably made that less effective. At the same time, it made her notice a detail. "Why are you carrying weights?"

"Because we have a weight set that we rarely use and I can't just magic up heavier clothing to exercise in."

"Oh."

Taylor arrived at tutoring to find that her normal tutors were back, though grumbling about a lot of work for what turned out to be no reason as one of the janitors had been responsible for the initial 'maybe-problem' situation. How one of the janitors had done that wasn't mentioned, and she didn't ask for more details. Her tutors were annoyed enough without her prompting them to go into details, after all.

Today was obviously a 'review for her exams' day, with her being informed that her tutors had an informal meeting the previous afternoon and were planning on testing her the following week so as to not be testing her at the same time that they needed to focus on Arcadia's exams. This was, in part, because they'd failed to get permission to have her take her exams at Arcadia in a couple of weeks, but Taylor didn't mind. Not having to deal with the timing of other students and navigating a building that she had no experience with sounded a lot nicer anyway, plus this had her finishing a week early.

Who didn't want to start their summer vacation a week early, after all?

Missy had spent a good portion of the morning with an undercurrent of minor annoyance because she wasn't going to get any training done in the afternoon, having a therapy session scheduled. It was only minor annoyance because she honestly wasn't expecting to get training done during the week anyway. Really, having to deal with a new therapist was the bigger issue.

But now it was lunchtime, and the minor annoyance had been washed away by confusion. Dinah sitting across from her was, at this point, expected. Why Dinah kept doing so was still a mystery, beyond almost certainly being powers-related at this point. Missy couldn't really ask without revealing too much, especially for a discussion happening in public. No, the confusion was Aisha sitting down next to Dinah, with a look of concentration on her face.

Notably, people seemed to be able to tell that Aisha existed today. And a little focusing showed that none of the extra little connections to everyone existed right now, so perhaps those were an indication of the girl's powers making people ignore her? Based on that, and the concentration that the girl was obviously doing, she probably had a 'normally on' stranger power that she had to focus to turn off.

One that Missy was immune to, hopefully now without needing Knight Clothing or Knight Armor up, and that Dinah could partially bypass somehow. Or at least that was what 'can somewhat see, but not hear' from Aisha pulling her food-stealing stunt seemed to imply. It was likely that Taylor was also immune at this point for the same reasons that Missy was, which was going to be incredibly useful when patrolling. Assuming Missy ever got to join Taylor, of course.

"So what brings you over to us today?" Dinah asked Aisha.

"Curiosity," Aisha admitted.

"Pity, I was hoping it was to bribe us to keep quiet, as I wouldn't have objected to extra dessert until school lets out."

Aisha faltered there, and there was a momentary pulse of tendrils. Missy noticed that one attempted to reach out towards her but was the first to fail, but after a moment they all vanished again. Several people nearby shook their heads, obviously confused, and Dinah had flinched before looking slightly confused.

Aisha took a deep breath before continuing. "I guess that answers at least one question. Though brings up a lot more. Like what makes you two special."

That seemed to clear up Dinah's confusion, and she rolled her eyes. "Missy has a probably-protective necklace."

Aisha raised an eyebrow. "Okay. And you?"

"Secret."

Missy wasn't sure why Dinah had basically admitted that the two of them had been immune to or otherwise able to bypass Aisha's trick, but it was a little too late to keep that from coming out. On the other hand, the others around them didn't seem to have any clue what they were talking about, more so because Aisha had lost control again and tendrils had hit everyone again. Just for a couple of seconds, but that seemed to be enough to cause those around them to have no clue what was going on. Though Dinah once again looked slightly confused, presumably part of whatever it was that let her see Aisha but not hear her.

At the same time, it was also interesting that Aisha was admitting to having said trick, if less directly. Then again, it was far less risky to do so when she could apparently make everyone who wasn't immune or bypassing the trick forget about it, so acknowledging that it existed to those that likely already knew wasn't actually all that risky overall. It was weird from a parahuman point of view, but probably not risky. Barring someone making a recording, anyway, that might not be affected.

"So," Aisha said, apparently not caring too much about Dinah's refusal to answer. "What does your necklace protect you from?"

Missy shrugged. "It hasn't really come up. You, apparently, but that's about it so far?"

"Oh."

Taylor had stuck around after tutoring for a few minutes, compiling and testing her programming project. She ran it through a few basic tests, ensured that all the functionality still worked, and then quickly packed it up into an archive file. That file was submitted, and she then prepared to head out to where her father was waiting for her to finish up. There was a nagging thought in her head that she'd forgotten something, but she went over the checklist of the things needed in the submission and all of them were there. Mentally shrugging, she noted the specs of the computer she'd used before shutting it down and leaving.

"I see you got time off to go shopping," Taylor said as she got into the car.

"Mainly because I said I wanted to go hunt down a computer," her father admitted. "Did you have a nice day?"

"It was mostly boring review, but I did get my programming project submitted. Which means that I don't have to worry about it on Friday."

"Good for you. Of course, now we're going to see about purchasing a computer that you could've used to work on it more easily at home with. I think we're doing things backwards."

"Or we're ensuring that I still have access to a similar computer to what I was permitted to use in the tutoring facility, doing so while I'll still have access to double-check software."

"That does make it sound less like we're taking care of things too late."

Taylor wasn't sure if she should be surprised that they headed out of town, making their way to a store just outside of Manchester. It was a much higher-end computer store than would normally survive with all of the gangs in Brockton Bay. It obviously wasn't a busy time for the store, and they were able to park close to the entrance. Heading in, they were immediately approached by an employee.

Missy did her best to not roll her eyes as Ethan asked her how the therapy session had gone. It was her first session with a new therapist, so of course it went basically nowhere to start with. Future sessions would hopefully go somewhere of use, but she wasn't going to hold her breath there. After all, unlike the PRT therapists, this one didn't know about her previous status as a parahuman. Beyond that, she also wasn't willing to reveal her mage status to them, which meant that she wasn't going to be properly 'opening up' anytime soon.

Hopefully, that wouldn't be fully noticed due to a lack of experience with her before she had multiple large secrets to keep. Besides, her file probably had a note that she kept secrets from her therapists anyway, due to the pile of things they likely now knew she'd never let anyone know about. And if her file hadn't had such a note then Yamada was slipping.

"Are you going to answer any of my questions?" Ethan finally asked.

"Yes," Missy replied.

"Finally, a response." He then paused for a moment. "Well, are you going to answer any more?"

"Just your two most recent."

It took him a moment to get that, but he groaned. "That's not fair, turning my own tricks against me. Why would you do such a thing?"

Missy snorted. "You, Sherie, and my therapist telling me to not answer your questions about my sessions?"

"Oh. Right."

The best part of the therapy sessions was that they were only an hour every week for the time being. Which was perfectly fine until school let out, at which point any interruption to her being able to work with Taylor was going to be annoying. Assuming, of course, that they were allowed to do anything significant while adults weren't available to supervise, anyway. Of course, you usually got much more gang activity in the afternoons and evenings, so perhaps that wasn't a horrible thing?

Taylor was amazed as they loaded three desktop computers with monitors, two printers, a laptop, a home wireless networking unit, and a bag full of software boxes into the car. She still wasn't sure how her father had negotiated the price down as much as he had, and for that matter wasn't entirely sure why she'd ended up purchasing a desktop and a laptop. He'd argued that she'd be able to bring the laptop with her when watching over Missy, which made sense, but she'd not really determined why she still needed a desktop along with it.

"That went well," he said as they pulled out of the parking lot. "Four computers for around the price of two, and the software is all allowed to be installed on at least three computers per license. Well, except for that programming suite you included."

"It uses different wording," Taylor noted. "Caring less about install count and more that you're only running it in one place at a time."

"That makes a lot of sense on its own."

"I still don't know why I needed to get a desktop and a laptop though."

"In part because your higher-end desktop was needed to keep the better deal on the two office-grade computers and in part because your laptop isn't anywhere near as powerful as the desktop. For some reason I get the impression that you're going to need the justification of having a top of the line computer at some point."

"I don't get why I'd need one."

"Because you already have at least one tutor that insisted that you had to be a thinker of some kind, despite the PRT stating that they've proven to their satisfaction that you aren't a parahuman at all."

"What?"

He snorted. "Normal high school students don't have their tutors requesting parental permission to submit their work to academic papers due to being 'groundbreaking advancements to the field'."

Taylor blinked at that. "What?"

"You're getting repetitive there."

"I don't think you've answered the question yet."

"Mister Coste said that your integer factoring trick is probably going to change the world and you can probably expect a dozen scholarship offers within the next month because of it. Of course, he also told me to not tell you, but I'm fairly certain that you got it from Hive more than actually coming up with it on your own."

"My Lord has gotten very good at coming up with her own ways of doing things," Hive added. "Especially when compared to my own much more rigid approach to things."

Taylor wasn't positive, but she'd thought that Hive was supposed to take her side in things. Though that did bring up another question. "Why wouldn't you tell me?"

Her father gave her a quick look. "Because telling someone that they're doing things that were previously thought to be impossible tends to discourage them too much."

"Oh."

"Lord," Hive added. "I suspect that the same might apply to mana as we build up our knowledge base. You've already demonstrated the ability to do things with mana that I can't duplicate and have proven at least one 'fact' about spells from my database to be incorrect."

"Really?"

"Truly instant, unblockable and undetectable communication between two points is supposed to be impossible without collapsing down the space between them due to a number of limitations, including the speed of light and the nature of the dimensional sea."

"Okay..."

"Your multitasking connection to me should be capable of such communication within a very large area, and I've started implementing the same technique for improved communication elsewhere now that I know how it works."

"Oh."

"You're getting repetitive again," her father joked in response to that, causing her to roll her eyes.

Missy sighed as she sat down in the living room after they'd eaten dinner. She'd planned on escaping to her room, but Sherie had asked her to stay downstairs for a quick 'family meeting'. Which was all well and good, but now they were waiting for Ethan, who'd needed to answer the phone. The call lasted several minutes, after which he came into the room and dropped down onto the couch next to Sherie.

"Sorry about that," Ethan said. "Though it does give us more to talk about. Missy, I don't suppose you know Aisha Laborn? She attends your school."

Missy nodded. "Yeah, I know her. Why?"

"Because while you were at your appointment she was spotted on the cameras of one of the sweep teams monitoring the area. The team couldn't see her directly after remote oversight asked about her poking around houses. Eventually she gave up and sat down at the bus stop, and the team could suddenly see her as the bus approached. A police officer on foot patrol talked to her for a minute, during which his body camera recorded her claiming to be a friend of yours that couldn't remember the street address of your new home. He admitted that he wasn't familiar with anyone by your name, then forgot about her entirely as she got onto the bus. The cameras on the bus showed that she didn't pay but was ignored entirely anyway until she got off near her home."

"Really?"

Sherie frowned. "You aren't anywhere near surprised enough hearing that."

Missy shrugged. "I'm immune to the trick. She was using it at school, and I don't think she has anywhere near full control over it."

"I see. And you didn't inform us about her before now why?"

"Because that would've been a violation of the unwritten rules, outing her as a cape in her civilian identity? Though she thinks that Space is why I'm immune."

Ethan gave her a look. "And how does she know that you're immune?"

"I might've stopped her from stealing some of my lunch? Not that I was the only one..."

"And you're not going to tell us who the other one able to get around the apparent stranger power is either, are you?" Missy just gave him a look, and he sighed. "Didn't think so. Probably a good attitude to have overall."

Missy frowned, thinking about things. "Why was there a sweep team in the area to see her?"

Sherie snorted. "After attempts at sneaking monitoring equipment into the house of two Protectorate members with a new ward that has a mysterious necklace? It'll be a month or two before the area isn't being monitored, just in case. Very much like how the Hebert household still has monitoring and likely will until they go long enough without any incidents."

"Oh. So the PRT and police are going to be watching over the area for a month or two because of the previous incidents?"

"Well, the PRT will be. The police have always patrolled the area a little more heavily during the day due to the number of robbery attempts made here. Good enough neighborhood to have decent 'loot', but on the outskirts of the most affluent areas of town and thus easier to slip in and out without being noticed."

"Only during the day?"

"Despite what movies and television might tell you, most home robberies happen when the residents are at work or school. The exceptions tend to be when you're stupid enough to make it well known that you're going on vacation. We've never really been a good target though, due to the constantly-shifting work hours we run. Actually, now that you're here, we're more of a target than we were, because our work schedule is temporarily consistent."

Ethan nodded. "Not that we're a likely target for a thief anyway. The alarm system is a significant deterrent, and anyone watching the house for patterns would see us coming and going in PRT uniforms."

"That makes sense," Missy agreed.

"Still, this is a bit off of what we wanted to discuss. We actually wanted to know what in the world you did, as yourself and not as Vista, to get the Mayor's attention."

That had Missy blinking. "I did what now?"

Sherie sighed. "The Mayor got in touch with us to offer you a summer job of sorts in City Hall, claimed you were 'highly recommended' but wouldn't say by whom."

"What kind of job would I be 'highly recommended' for in City Hall?"

"I assume that it's one of the 'learn how government works' intern-like situations where most of what you'd really end up doing would be running paperwork around the building between departments. Perhaps you'd be asked to run things through a scanner or copy machine every so often? It's very part-time, Tuesdays and Thursdays only. I think it pays a little better than minimum wage? I do know that it would improve your chances of getting into Arcadia, regardless of your grades, because you're younger than they normally accept."

Missy frowned at that. "What does the PRT use as justification for getting Wards into Arcadia?"

Ethan shrugged. "On paper, a Ward's civilian identity is a PRT intern. There are usually a half dozen or more other kids playing intern type roles in any given non-quarantine PRT department's office areas to make that a better cover story. I think we've currently got a pretty even split between the kids of Empire and ABB members right now?"

Sherie nodded. "There are a couple of kids that we don't think are tied to the gangs, but the rest are. We'd considered getting you an intern job with the PRT, or rather continuing your theoretically pre-existing intern job, but just being in the PRT building could be seen as observing you and Space. A thousand dollars an hour is a bit much for an intern."

"So," Missy said after thinking about it for a moment. "My options are probably to take the summer job with City Hall or to be much more likely to not end up attending Arcadia?"

"That's a distinct possibility, yes."

"Great."

"Shall we let the Mayor know that you're interested?" Ethan asked.

Sighing, Missy nodded. At least it was only two days a week?

Last edited: Jul 8, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 62 - June 1, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jul 15, 2020

#11,061

Taylor had needed to adjust a few things to make space for the desktop computer in her room, since she'd failed to repair the previous one when it had failed last year. She wasn't entirely sure if her father knew that it had died, thinking about it, or that she'd used his home office computer every so often instead when he wasn't home. At least until he'd changed his password. Either way, that wasn't incredibly important, beyond that it would've been incredibly useful for Hive to analyse. While Taylor was adjusting things, Hive had actually stored the computers and software for analysis and so that they could be upgraded in subtle ways.

She'd just dragged the vacuum upstairs to clean up some of the dust around her desk when her Minerva phone started to ring in the multitasking interface. That didn't stop her from turning on the vacuum as she answered. Especially as caller ID said that it was Armsmaster calling her.

"Minerva," she said as she answered the call.

"Good evening," Armsmaster's voice returned. "I apologize for calling so late, but I wanted to check to see if you're available to take possession of keys in the next couple of days."

"For the warehouse?"

"Yes, the final paperwork in the ownership transfer went through today."

Taylor nodded to herself, not that Armsmaster could see it. "Might as well get it over with. Will tomorrow afternoon, say around three, work for you?"

"It should, I'll let you know if that changes."

"Thank you. Did you need anything else?"

"I don't suppose that the FBI informed you of the situation with Calvert?"

"I don't believe they have. Did something go wrong with him?"

"He escaped, someone helping him fake his death in the process. There aren't any signs of where he went. I'm sure that the FBI wouldn't complain if you happened to stumble upon him, but now that his operations have been outed he isn't considered a significant threat individually."

"At least I know to keep an eye out for him. Thank you for that."

"You're welcome. Do you have any questions for me?"

"Not right now, no."

"Then have a nice evening."

"You too."

The call disconnected, and Taylor sighed. Well, perhaps she could get some of that shopping she needed to do for the inlet house done after an initial sweep of the warehouse? It probably wasn't that big of a deal either way, especially as her only real thoughts for the warehouse to start with were to use it as a mailing address and probably as an arrival/departure point that wasn't over the Bay.

Ten minutes later she'd finished cleaning up and Hive retrieved the computers and software. The boxes didn't come back out with the computers, and the desktop appeared on the desk with everything already hooked up. She just had to plug it into power and the network jack on the wall that connected downstairs. The laptop would need to wait until her father got the wireless networking thing set up to give them wireless networking in the house.

"So what did you do to them?" Taylor asked as she plugged the three cables into the wall.

"I set them up similarly to what you already use in the multitasking and simulation interfaces," Hive responded. "Installed all of the software as well, though you should probably use your normal internet connection to download updates to the antivirus software. I also ensured that you can track and remotely operate both, the laptop will charge off of mana now, and both are capable of functioning as relay units if needed. Though I've finished with the equipment at the inlet, so we can remove the relay and server equipment here in your walls."

"Are you saying that we don't need local relays here now?"

"Yes, Lord. As crazy as it may seem, the Shard techniques are actually more efficient when operated across dimensional boundaries. The new relay equipment can access computers and networks anywhere on Earth Bet. I've also got taps into systems on Earth Aleph and nineteen other variations of Earth with computer networks. Pictures of us are available in all of them."

That brought Taylor up short. "Pictures of us are available on other Earths?"

"Specifically pictures of us taken while on the Boardwalk, and in a couple of cases pictures of you in battle against Leviathan. Aleph has the most, but that's understandable. Based on the context I've found the pictures in elsewhere, it appears that someone else with the ability to cross dimensional boundaries is trying to find our world of origin."

"Well, that sounds a little creepy."

"Assuming that they're using Shard-type techniques, I think that they're unlikely to be able to locate us at the beach."

Well, that was at least a little comfort as far as things went? That, and if they were searching every other Earth they could reach then they likely had no clue that she was from Bet in the first place. Which, all things considered, was probably a good thing as far as keeping her identities separate went. At the same time, it didn't really make the fact that pictures of her were being spread around less creepy.

That evening Taylor made some tweaks to the changes she was making to the binding particles, having come up with the idea of making it so that she could set a more gentle 'stay here' point without fully attracting them to be consumed. The idea there was to keep them from spreading out too far. No need to seed several city blocks with particles if she was dealing with a single intersection, right? She'd also realized a better way to handle other aspects, such as removing the glow when they activated. It was a slightly more complicated way of forming the gathering linkage, but actually made the 'stay here' aspect easier.

She also came up with a way to better 'grab' people, mentally thanking her tutor for bringing up geckos today. The tentacles template gained a coating of microscopic split-end 'hairs' that could be made to retract into the tentacles in order to release things. Still useless against force fields, admittedly, but simulation testing showed that it didn't interfere with the 'transparent to gases needed for people to breathe' effect. To finish that off until she could properly test it, she packaged that up as a payload for traps.

Outside of that, she'd had an instance of herself in the simulation system practicing with the flute while another one listened. And cringed. A lot. Not that the instance playing the flute wasn't cringing as well. That apparently wasn't going to be the fastest learning process, but at least she'd started to make progress in not having it sound absolutely horrible. It was as she was finishing up that she idly wondered if it would be possible to cast magic through playing an instrument, something that she added as a very low priority thing to look into.

Thursday morning Taylor was left to work out with Missy alone, as her father had to leave early due to some issue that had come up overnight. He'd been very annoyed when he'd answered the phone, but admitted that it was partially his fault for forgetting to take care of a couple of things before leaving early the day before. After he'd left, Taylor had opted to test something with Hive, sending the device to the beach to do final checks on the inlet house with a dozen combat drones while Taylor went with Missy to the desert.

True to Hive's predictions, there was basically no more lag issue across dimensional boundaries with Hive or the combat drones using the improved multitasking system. Taylor ended up jumping them to one of the dimensions that other testing had been done in just in case before running through her list of things she was ready to play with.

"So I probably have a summer job," Missy said once they'd started their run through the desert.

"Oh?" Taylor asked.

"We don't know who, but someone recommended me as a summer intern of sorts in City Hall. At this point I'm thinking that it was probably someone in the PRT who realized that I wouldn't be able to get into Arcadia without something like that now that I'm not a Ward with something similar as a cover through the PRT. I did some digging and there are only three places in the entire city that even offer something like that for someone under sixteen, and the last is probably an Empire front."

"Huh. I wonder if I should be looking for something similar?"

"Did anyone tell you that you'd need to in order to get into Arcadia?"

Taylor shook her head. "No. I actually qualified before I made the poor decision to go to Winslow to stay with my friend, so they told me that I just had to do well enough on my end of year tests with my tutors."

"Then you're probably good. I'm technically a year too young for Arcadia due to my grandparents arranging for me to start me in private classes a year before I would've been able to start school in the public system. I'm not the only one at school, but it means that I need to maintain a boost to make me look better to Arcadia."

"Ah. Sounds annoying."

"More annoying is that I've got a horribly skewed view of what ages are in which grades and am jealous of most of the kids my age for not needing to worry about their exams this year."

Taylor arrived at tutoring on her own, somewhat pleased with the results of her morning testing. The adjustments that she'd made to the binding particles appeared to work, as did her initial tests with her trap spells. The tentacles were, as expected, useless against shields but did seem to work fine against the unshielded surfaces of a combat drone. Sadly, to properly test those on a person she was probably going to need to use them on herself while she was unshielded. Hive also wanted to do another run of putting her through the anti-mana tumbling effects to see how well the shield on her head held up.

The weekend was probably going to suck, at least a little.

But for now she needed to deal with tutoring, and more of the last-minute review for her upcoming end of year exams. Though now she was also curious if Mister Coste was going to throw anything else 'impossible' at her just to see what she did with it. Not that she'd know that a given thing he threw at her wasn't supposed to be possible unless she looked it up first, anyway, and she wasn't sure if he'd use any names that would make searching for the problem easy enough to find them.

Missy found herself idly wondering where Aisha was today as she sat down with her lunch. She really wanted to know why the girl was snooping around looking for her home address, but not being in attendance today would put a crimp in being able to ask. Well, perhaps she'd be able to ask tomorrow?

"Where'd you find curly fries?" Dinah asked as she sat down.

"I got the last one," Missy replied. "I think they ran out and had to switch to regular fries halfway through or something, since they normally don't make both."

"Dang. Should've moved faster."

"Have you seen Aisha today?"

Dinah shook her head. "Nope."

"Huh. Mildly annoying, I have a question that I wanted to ask her."

That had Dinah frown for a moment. "I think she might be out sick? She probably won't be in tomorrow, at least."

Missy assumed that was probably more 'Dinah using her powers' than 'Dinah heard something useful', not that she fully knew what the other girl's powers did. "That's annoying. Oh well, I can try next week."

"So are you doing anything interesting over the coming weekend?"

"I have no clue. You?"

"Tomorrow after school I get to leave for Springfield. We'll come back on Sunday, after whatever it is my mother needs to do out there is done. Dad and I might try and hit the amusement park while she's doing her thing, but only if it isn't raining."

"Good luck then."

"Thanks."

Taylor shook her head as she left tutoring for the day. Everything had been review today, and three assignments that she'd already completed had been 'canceled' until she asked if she could submit them anyway for extra credit. In each case she'd been told that if she could submit them by the end of the day then they'd be accepted, being able to just hand them over right then had counted. She'd also been reminded to turn in her programming project, only to ask if there'd been a problem since she'd already turned it in. Apparently it had come in alongside several other submissions from the Arcadia students and not been noticed.

She'd been let out early, which had three groups in the immediate area scrambling to get moving. Likely groups wanting to grab her, especially as they all moved towards her normal routes home. Sadly for them, she was taking a different route away from tutoring. Instead of heading straight home she was heading to the Walsh household. Not because she expected anyone to be there, but because she wanted to ensure that she was familiar with the route before she was heading there to officially watch Missy.

The groups looking for her obviously missed that she'd taken a different route, easily identified through the surveillance drones left to keep an eye on them. All three groups ended up moving back towards the building she was tutored in when she didn't head towards home, likely assuming that she'd only stepped out for a quick snack or something and they'd missed her returning. They were still waiting when she passed the Walsh household, the transport device making the residence stick out even if she hadn't known the address.

Despite the detour, she still made it home a few minutes earlier than usual. She collected the mail on her way in, finding it to be entirely advertisements, before grabbing a quick snack and heading upstairs. The snack was quickly consumed and she dropped the Knight Clothing spell so that she could take a quick shower. Despite the magical protections and comfort layers she still felt filthy. By the time she was done with her shower and dressed again it was time to head out, though she did note that the three groups that had been waiting for her had given up. Two of the three met up, but the third did their own thing after waiting a bit longer.

Casting the Knight Armor spell only took a moment, Hive having waited in Unison form for Taylor to finish her shower, and then the two transferred out of the room and out over the Bay.

"Armsmaster is currently on the Rig," Hive noted when Taylor had turned towards the PRT building. "Perhaps we should head for the ferry station they normally deploy that fancy force field bridge to?"

Blinking, Taylor shrugged. "Okay. Though I wonder how you knew that he's currently on the Rig?"

"He just finished an email discussion with Hal and referenced needing to head to shore to meet up with you."

"Ah. I guess that makes sense."

Taylor angled for the ferry terminal instead, able to see it on the shore from where she'd arrived. At the same time, she noticed that there were obvious 'spotters' that had seen her arrival and were calling others. Some were probably just doing normal 'cape spotting', but she suspected that the majority were interested in telling groups that 'Minerva' was active in town again. She didn't think that she was going to be lucky enough for that to be a 'stop doing illegal stuff' warning, compared to 'prepare the traps and ambushes'.

It was almost ten minutes later before the force field bridge appeared, Armsmaster coming across it on his motorcycle. At the same time, two vans had pulled up to the ferry station. Twelve people got out of the two vans, a larger gun being carried from both as well. Eight of the people had atrophied cores and two of them were parahumans. Neither parahuman had a core, and both stayed back at first while the larger guns were aimed at Taylor.

The gun to Taylor's left was fired first, and she and Hive both blinked out of the firing path in different directions. A strangely-glowing net flew through where they had been. Her suddenly being twenty feet to the side threw the groups off, but the two working the second gun recovered and spun it to point at where she'd appeared. They fired it, and she blinked back to where she'd originally been waiting while Hive, apparently ignored, moved around behind them. This time a blue energy beam fired out. One that was freezing the air, dissipating as it did so.

"A fancy net gun and an ice beam," Taylor said, looking over the group. "Interesting."

"Stupid tinker crap," one of the parahumans said, suddenly shifting from flesh and blood to a clay of some kind. They then thrust forward an arm, which generated far more clay than it should've. The wave of clay headed straight for Taylor, who blinked out of the way again. Except that the wave of clay turned to where she'd appeared instead of continuing on. Frowning, she dropped a shield in the way before blinking again.

The clay struck the shield and the entire wave shuddered, the parahuman generating it flinching. Taylor took that moment to pull out Hal, figuring that a quick cut or two might be needed. Instead, the wave of clay dissolved and the parahuman shifted back to flesh and blood. Though now missing their jacket and shoes. The other parahuman took that as an invitation to do their own thing, bursting into millions of crystals that headed straight for Taylor.

Blinking out of the path of the crystals, she was able to watch as they slammed together where she had been a moment before to form a larger crystal with odd multidimensional qualities. That then shattered and headed for her again. She threw another shield up, only for the crystals to flow around it instead. So she swung Hal into the wave instead, nearly obliterating the crystals that Hal hit despite not having any special effects covering Hal's blade. Of course, being in blade form meant that she only had a thin line of potential targets to hit.

Unlike the clay parahuman, the crystal one barely reacted to the crystals being hit, so she blinked away again while instructing Hal to switch to a mallet head. Hive was using the distraction of this to launch binding bullets at the rest of the group as well, the flashes of light signifying individuals going down. Unfortunately, binding a swarm of crystals was probably less likely to be reliable.

Taylor swung Hal's hammer head into the crystals when they approached, and this time she hit enough to be able to spot what was going on easily. Every time a crystal was destroyed a single, larger crystal generated a replacement. And, now that she was focusing on it, that crystal appeared to be where the primary connection to the shard was anchored. The question was what would happen if she hit that crystal. Would it harm or kill the parahuman, or just knock them out of this form?

She blinked out of the way of the crystals again, absently noting that Hive had bound all of the non-parahumans but was having minor issues with the one that could turn into clay. Apparently they weren't prevented from changing forms to escape the bindings. Annoying, but at least Hive had stored both of the odd guns so that they were out of the fight for now. Still, they had two opponents that were difficult to pin down right now.

Taylor was pulled out of her musings by a claw firing into the swarm of crystals to grab the larger anchor crystal, pulling it out of the swarm and back towards the force field bridge. The rest of the crystals faltered at that point, and a moment later the anchor one was encased in a metal box on Armsmaster's motorcycle. A moment after that the remaining swarm of crystals dissolved into nothing. Nodding to him, Taylor blinked back over to the shore to see what she could do to help Hive with the clay parahuman.

"Their ability is difficult to deal with," Hive said as Taylor appeared. "They control the consistency of their clay and are unaffected by temperature changes and water. I suspect that they have a limit for how long they can remain clay, though it isn't a time limit, as they return to a human form every so often. I've yet to see them in the same human form twice though."

Armsmaster was staying back, but after a moment Taylor's Minerva phone rang. She popped open a communication window to answer it after blinking out of the way of another wave of clay. "I hope you have an idea of how to stop this parahuman for me."

"Sadly I don't," Armsmaster replied. "Crystal Cage was the easier of the two to capture, but neither has been able to be held for more than three days before now. Potter will be attempting to seal you in a clay pot, which would place you into suspended animation until released. Crystal Cage does something similar when they surround someone with their crystals. Both can take on the appearance of anyone that they've captured when they return to human form, we don't know what their original appearances are. The two form a snatch team that normally operates in Mexico, to have them up here means someone has put a significant bounty on your head."

"Fun."

Potter's next shift back to human was in the form of a young girl, and Hive almost immediately hit them with a bullet. One that, to Taylor's surprise, applied the hairstyling spell. Forming two hexagonal buns on the girl's head. A second bullet then struck and formed handcuff bindings on the girl's wrists. The girl snorted, then there was a moment of silence before her eyes went wide.

"What did Lilia just do?" Armsmaster asked.

"Gave the apparent little girl a protective haircut. I'm guessing that it's disrupting Potter's ability to shift into clay. Though I wish that we'd had more time to test that before using it on a parahuman. At least it doesn't appear to have been fatal?"

"I adjusted the barriers in the template a little," Hive said as she came over. "It provides no actual protection now, it's just keeping the connection to their powers from going 'active'."

"How is it doing that?"

"Whenever they shifted to clay an additional connection opened along another dimensional axis. The barrier is tuned to block that without affecting the primary connection."

"May I ask why Potter isn't leaving?" Armsmaster asked as he pulled up. A moment later the call finished disconnecting.

Taylor shrugged. "I assume that Lilia anchored the handcuff bindings in place to prevent that."

"I did," Hive confirmed. "You'll need to apply your own before we remove those ones. Actually, that applies to all of the bindings I used. Though it's probably more important to note that you're going to have at most six hours from the point that Potter is removed from our vicinity before the barrier keeping them from shifting to their clay form runs out of power."

Armsmaster nodded. "I apologize, but we're going to need to deal with this before heading over to the warehouse."

"I figured that was going to be the case," Taylor admitted. "Though you might want to do so quickly, if only because I doubt these are the only ones looking to take a shot at me."

"I've already requested vans for the normals. If one of you can help me with Potter then I can bring them and Crystal Cage back over to the Rig. No clue if we'll be able to hold them, but Crystal Cage is already working at overcoming the strength of the metal box I've got them in."

Hive floated over to Armsmaster's motorcycle, looking at the small metal box. A moment later the box flashed with a silvery-blue light. "That should last at least two hours, depending on how much force they apply."

"Thank you."

Luckily, nobody else seemed to want to risk trying to grab Taylor while Armsmaster was with her and they made it to the warehouse without any issues. Armsmaster pulled into the parking lot next to the warehouse, then pulled two envelopes out of a compartment on his motorcycle.

"Here we are," he said, walking over to where Taylor had landed. "You have ownership of the warehouse and the lot it sits on. Which happens to be the entire block in this case due to the smaller access roads to either side of the lot. I was asked to apologize to you for the contents of the warehouse, which you'll probably need to clear out before using it yourself, and for the fact that the utilities are currently disconnected. You'll need to handle that yourself, should you need access to them. You'll also need to handle getting permits for modifying the building if you aren't doing so in a manner that falls under parahuman exemptions."

He handed her one of the envelopes, and she opened it to find paperwork and three identical keys. She took a quick look at the paperwork, finding that it was straightforward enough, and then stored the entire envelope. She thought Armsmaster twitched at that, but wasn't fully certain as to why. That done, she looked back at him. "Is there anything else?"

Nodding, he held out the other envelope. "After your showing against Leviathan, the Guild decided to sponsor you to the United Nations despite you not being a Guild member. After the single shortest deliberation period on record, the United Nations has issued you a Parahuman Laissez-Passer to allow you more freedom of movement when dealing with international parahuman threats such as the Endbringers."

Blinking, Taylor took the second envelope and opened it. Inside was a purple book, which she pulled out. It had the United Nations name in English and...French, if she recalled a lesson from school correctly. Under that was the United Nations logo and 'LAISSEZ-PASSER' under that. Opening it, she found a picture, her name and other information. There was also a note that asked her to sign her name on the signature line in ink and to fill in address information in pencil or similar on a later page.

"It's unlikely that anyone will ask you to present that," Armsmaster continued. "In part because I doubt that you'll be using normal entry points and in part because nobody is going to want to create hassles that would prevent you from helping with an Endbringer attack. But having it covers you in case someone does ask you for your travel documents."

Taylor nodded. "That does make some sense, and I agree with having bases covered just in case. But I honestly hadn't expected this."

"We were planning on informing you when the United Nations requested that a representative meet with you as part of the approval process. You're the fifth parahuman that they've skipped that step with, and the only one to not have the process take three or more months to complete even with that step being skipped. I personally suspect that countries feared that without such a document that you'd be unwilling to help with future Endbringer attacks, even if by international treaty that's an exception to needing travel documents at all."

"Huh. I guess that makes sense too, people have been known to panic over less."

"At any rate, unless you have any other questions?" He waited for Taylor to shake her head. "In that case, have a nice evening. I have to get back to the Rig so that I can help to implement measures that should help to keep Crystal Cage and Potter in custody."

Taylor watched as he left, then decided to take a look around inside of the warehouse itself. She walked up to one of the access doors and just cast the telekinesis spell to open the lock instead of using the keys she now had. Once inside she ignored the lack of lights and instead just cast a couple of sensor drones. Those swung through most of the warehouse over the course of several minutes.

When that was done she sighed. "Is it me or is the collection of things that was being 'apologized' for just more of the materials that we asked about places to purchase them from?"

"I think you're correct," Hive said. "Though not entirely. There are seventeen different monitoring devices that I've detected so far. May I have a few minutes to disable the monitoring devices and store the materials?"

"Go for it."

Five minutes later Taylor dropped a transport device and uncloaked surveillance drone into the now-empty warehouse, the latter to possibly serve as a deterrent to anyone who peeked in through the windows, then locked the door from the inside. She'd decided to do her planned shopping somewhere else in hopes of avoiding people attacking her for existing. To that end, she'd ensured that she could target the air just above the parking lot of a strip of stores a few towns over.

One dimensional transference later and she angled down to land in front of the furniture store, deciding to start there. They didn't need a lot of furniture, according to Hive, but a living room set and some mattresses would probably be good ideas. Maybe a rug or two, if they had anything good, though apparently the bedrooms had rugs already.

A couple hours later they'd visited most of the stores in the area, spent a few thousand dollars, used dimensional transference to send everything to the new house, and Hive had promised that the construction drones would be able to have everything ready within an hour or so. With that done, they returned home for a slightly late dinner.

679

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Threadmarks Chapter 63 - June 2, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jul 22, 2020

#11,276

Taylor burped slightly after finishing her dinner. "That was good."

"Thanks," her father replied. "Still, now that we've eaten, there are a couple of things that came up today that we need to talk about."

"Oh?"

"The PRT has made an 'emergency request' for your time on Saturday, with no clue as to how long it'll actually take."

Taylor frowned. "What counts as an emergency?"

"Someone triggered recently and wants to see if you can strip them of their powers before their powers change their mind."

"Before their powers change their mind?"

"Lord," Hive interrupted. "Based on prior examples, myself included, I suspect that their Shard device has determined that being removed will reduce the amount of information to be obtained and will be influencing them away from that course of action."

"Oh."

"So," her father continued. "Would you like to accept, or put it off until next weekend? They implied that the idea was to have you show up, the parahuman asks to have their power removed, and if nothing happens then you make a thousand dollars for the attempt and head home. Of course, I assume that instead you'd end up spending basically all day there."

"I can clear out my storage by rebuilding the warehouse," Hive commented. "I'm already running reasonably low on things that I would obtain from a Shard device anyway, and clearing that out would speed up the process of collecting another. The construction drones are idle now and thus free to be given the new task."

Taylor nodded. "You'd said that you were done with the inlet, and we did the last shopping you thought was needed. We should go take a look if everything is in place. Did you have any specific ideas for the warehouse, and do we have to worry about permits?"

"The warehouse should go much more quickly as I already have all of the materials needed and wouldn't be able to do as much there. The lot is smaller, there isn't as much usable space underground for various reasons, and special permits would be required for more than three floors above ground."

"I suppose we can come up with a basic design tonight, with you starting on it in the morning."

Her father gave her a look. Or perhaps them a look, given that Hive was around her neck. "Does that mean that I should let the PRT know that you're willing to make the attempt on Saturday?"

"Might as well. We might learn something interesting, and it sounds like they don't want to be a parahuman anyway. Or at least that they don't like the powers they got as a parahuman? Either way, it has to be safer than waiting for them to decide to attack me to trigger the removal instead."

"Alright. I'll go call them, then we can see about visiting the inlet to see what Hive has accomplished there."

Missy grinned as she appeared at the beach. Taylor had invited her to join them for seeing the new inlet house that Hive had been building. That she apparently had her own room there helped add to the excitement. Looking around upon arriving, she moved to join Taylor and her father.

"Took you long enough," Danny quipped.

"Sherie insisted that I make my bed with the just-dried sheets before I came over."

"That would explain the delay."

"Shall we?" Hive asked, gesturing down the beach.

The group headed that way, eventually heading into the trees. Not too deep in they found a wooden pathway, which led up to the ridge around the inlet. It was there that they got their first look at what Hive had done.

"This wasn't anywhere near as large before," Taylor noted, surprising Missy given how natural the area looked. "It was a fairly shallow lagoon before, now it appears to be much deeper and I'd probably call it a proper bay."

"Most of the extra space came from cleaning out the root systems that I was disturbing," Hive replied. "I ended up disconnecting and removing a lot of roots under the water, having decided that it was better to collapse things right away than to wait for them to become a problem later. That also caused a slight expansion of the area due to rock collapse along the outer edges that I had to clean up."

"It looks nice," Danny said. "The building has clean lines, presumably the wood is from the trees here. Though it looks more like a hotel than a home, with how large it is."

"There are aspects that are at least a little hotel-like, though the second and third floors aren't as deep as the first floor is. Eight bedrooms per floor, each with its own bathroom. Those are all arranged in the front of the building, with the hallways behind them and balconies looking out over the bay. Behind them is a rooftop terrace, accessible from three doors on the second floor and two doors on the third floor. The third floor doors allow access to stairs to make the trip down. The roofing material is actually solar energy collectors and there's a shield generator hidden under the peak."

"Looks like you've included a ramp access to the porch on the end there. Did you make the whole thing ADA compliant?"

Missy rolled her eyes at that, worrying about ADA compliance on another Earth. Really?

"That depends on how you look at things," Hive answered. "Technically, the main building is compliant with the 1992 act, by virtue of including elevators for moving laundry carts and similar around if desired. By the same virtue, I can't say that it's compliant with the 2005 amendments regarding parahumans because the entire structure is in a location that's likely fatal to them."

"We should head down to see more of it," Taylor said. "I assume that the walkway continues down from here?"

"It does, yes."

They continued along the walkway, which re-entered the trees and eventually led to the rear of the building. From there it was fairly obvious that the building was built on a square foundation, the first floor taking up the entire thing but the second and third lifting up from there in the front only. There was a covered porch surrounding the entire thing, the terrace in the rear remaining over the main building only. It didn't look like the terrace would get much sunlight though, being protected from that by the trees closest to the building. The pathway came out near stairs for the porch, and they headed up onto it and around to the front, ignoring the other doors obviously leading inside.

The view from the front was picturesque, though Hive moved down the stairs to a nicely laid out pattern of rocks in the Hex Anchor pattern. Missy wasn't sure why Hive had moved down at first, but realized what it was just before Hive started to speak. "To start with, this is one of several disguised transport device endpoints. There's one in the entryway, on the terrace, and just inside of the door for each bedroom. This one, the entryway, and the terrace all support manifesting a portal frame; the ones in the bedrooms are dimensional transference only."

Taylor nodded. "So anywhere we see the anchor pattern we can expect there to be a transport device of some kind?"

"With the exception of the pattern in the kitchen floor, yes. There are undisguised transport devices in the sub-basement, but we'll get to that later." Hive then floated over to a small door that led under the porch. "Further, while it's unlikely to be needed, under here is the manual disconnect for the tidal generators."

"Tidal generators?" Taylor asked, sounding surprised. Shouldn't she know what was going into this thing?

"Yes, Lord. There are significant electric and mana batteries in one of the sub-basements being fed by tidal generators to power the building, a number of the batteries designed to be easily swapped out with other locations to remotely power them. The solar collectors are aimed more at temperature maintenance than being a significant source of power and everything in the building runs directly off of the batteries."

"How much power are the generators generating?"

"At the moment they're charging the batteries with around seven gigajoules an hour, two thirds of which are being converted to mana, but that fluctuates between four and eight depending on the current tidal currents."

Missy raised an eyebrow. "Is that a lot?"

"Enough for hundreds of homes on the low end," Danny said as he looked out towards the mouth of the inlet. "Probably reaching into well over a thousand at the high end, if I'm remembering numbers correctly. It sounds a little excessive for a single building."

"I wanted to ensure that my Lord wouldn't need to power everything personally," Hive stated. "I've already set the transport devices to swap out their mana batteries to here by default, relying on the unit in my Lord's bedroom as a backup instead, and she can have her combat drones charge here as well. The training drones that I normally deploy will also likely be sent here to recharge in the future, given that they're normally used over the ocean here. That should have the added bonus of adjusting their mana signature to a more neutral one."

"I guess that makes sense."

"The swappable batteries will also likely be used to power the warehouse when it's completed, but perhaps we should continue the tour?"

Danny nodded, and Hive floated back up to open the doors to the building. Missy idly noted that there were no locks, but figured that it was probably because anyone who could get here would bypass a lock trivially anyway. Though hopefully the bedrooms had at least a basic lock on the doors?

The group entered the building, revealing a tiled entryway with a hallway coming off of each side and a second set of doors in front of them. Next to the hallways were two doors, one skinny and one wider. The skinny ones were probably closets, and the wider ones had a very subtle pattern on the door that indicated that they were restrooms. She hadn't paid a lot of attention as they'd walked down the front of the building, but she could tell that the hallways had large windows on both sides, at least past the restrooms here. Presumably to let light into the other rooms despite the hallway, though she could also see one set of doors in each direction leading into the rest of the building.

"Restrooms and storage space for easy access when coming in," Hive explained, gesturing at the doors to either side in the entryway. "We'll head upstairs later, but there are stairs and elevators at the ends of the hallways. Those go up and down. But first, we should look over the rest of the ground floor."

Hive then floated over to and opened the inner doors, which had those double-hinges so that they could swing open in both directions. They were also, as far as Missy could tell, positioned such that if they swung out into the entryway then they wouldn't interfere with the restroom or closet doors. The group continued in through those doors, finding themselves in a large, fairly open area. It was still noticeably split into sections, but with partial walls and counters between the occasional support post rather than with full walls. The left third looked like it was more stone than wood, with the right two thirds being split in the other direction instead and having more wood accents.

"The kitchen is essentially the left third of the floor," Hive said. "Minus the hallways and restrooms, of course. Likely a bit overkill in size, but there should be enough cooking surfaces to cover any and all kinds of cooking one might want to do indoors. Most of it is electric or mana powered, but as it wasn't difficult to do so I included ovens and stoves that can be used with wood or coal as well. Plenty of ventilation for all of it. The remaining space in here is split between dining in the front and living room in the back. Sets of curtains hidden in the walls can be used to block light from the kitchen and dining rooms in order to darken the living room for watching movies during the day if desired. The doors on the sides next to windows all lead out to the porch, the front and rear doors all lead to the hallways, and the other doors are generally storage for various things."

Danny wandered into the kitchen while Missy took a quick look at the enormous table in the dining room. She assumed it and the chairs were made from the local wood, like most of the rest of the wood seemed to be in the building, and then headed into the living room section. The points where the curtains could be pulled out of were easily spotted, but she was more interested in the large television screen. There were also hookups for other equipment in a built-in coffee table setup, which probably wouldn't get in the way much due to the sheer amount of space in the room.

After a few minutes of exploration, including Missy testing all of the cushioned seats in the living room, they met up again at one of the three sets of doors leading out to the rear hallway. Hive led them into the hallway, which had no windows to the living room and kitchen, and then down to one of the corners. There Hive gestured to doors. "The restrooms are in the back corners here, so as to be easily accessed from the stairs. There are no elevators at this end of the building, but the stairs go up to the terrace and down into the basement. There's more to see downstairs than up, so I think we should start by going up."

There were no complaints, and they headed up the stairs. At the top there was a simple door in a 'just large enough for the stairs' hut of sorts, and they stepped out onto the terrace. There were chairs spread around, a covered section off to one side with a sink, grill, and what looked like they might be refrigerators built in. The terrace itself was surrounded by fancy-looking railings on three sides, lights on every other railing support, with the second and third floors of the building sitting at the far end. Hive led them across the terrace to the doors leading into the second floor, passing between the stairs coming down from the third floor in the process.

"While I put in sixteen bedrooms," Hive continued. "No actual assignments have been made. I will suggest putting mages on the third floor by preference, if only because there's more clearance for landing on or taking off from the balconies there. All sixteen of the rooms are otherwise identical with the exception of their layouts flipping from room to room to simplify the bathroom plumbing by placing them next to each other where possible."

"We can figure that out later," Taylor said. "I doubt any of us are going to be sleeping here over the next few days anyway."

"Agreed," Danny said. "Though showing us one of the rooms is probably appropriate."

Hive nodded and led them into one of the rooms. There was a closet that looked to be intended for coats and shoes to the right as they entered, carpet only starting once you were beyond that point. The king-sized bed was straight ahead, nightstands on either side of it. Currently the mattress had no sheets or pillows on it, but there were visible drawers that were likely intended for storing sheets built in under the bed. The room expanded to the right just after the closet, with a dresser and makeup table built into the wall and the door to a walk-in closet next to the built-in dresser and makeup table. The far wall opposite the bed had a television and a door to the bathroom, with the outer wall having two windows and the balcony door. There was a desk, not built in and thus moveable on the wheels it had sitting in the corner. The bathroom was shown next, having a giant bathtub and a shower stall in addition to the toilet and three different sinks. Medicine cabinets behind the mirrors at the sinks, wooden cabinets under them, plus shelves and glass cabinets in a couple of other points all provided plenty of storage.

Missy made a point of checking, finding that there were locks on the bedroom door, balcony doors, and bathroom door in the room. Simple ones, but they existed which meant a potential for more privacy here than she'd ever really had at home.

"I'm just noticing that I don't really see light fixtures," Danny said after they'd gotten a good look at things. "Is it all indirect?"

"Most of it is," Hive agreed. "Though there are more direct lights in the kitchen area and there are outlets available for table lamps in a number of places if desired."

"Nice to know."

They headed to the end of the hall next, stepping into the elevator there. Said elevator looked like most others that Missy had seen, but simplified. No firefighter controls, emergency call button, or inspection certificate holder. Which probably made sense when you considered that there wasn't a regulatory body to inspect it out here nor emergency services to summon. Hive pushed the bottom floor button, marked 'B', and they descended the two floors into the basement.

Stepping off of the elevator, the first thing Missy noticed was the actual signs down here. Upstairs nothing was really labeled, the subtle patterns on the wooden doors for the restrooms on the first floor being the exception. But down here there were signs with arrows for different things. In addition, there was a map here, showing restrooms at all four corners of the building and a laundry room taking up a good portion of the front of the building. 'Storage' in two places was fairly obviously for storage areas, but 'Command' was more of a mystery. 'Drones' might be for the training drones, but there were also two empty rooms right now.

"There are carts and baskets in the laundry room for bringing clothing up and down," Hive said. "As well as plenty of spare sheets and towels. The machines are based on commercially available machines, but use mana techniques in addition to traditional ones. There are empty areas down here, one of which I was thinking might make a good gym area for when the weather is poor and a workout is desired without wanting to leave."

Hive led them through the laundry room, which had large and obvious signs posted for how to use everything. That was followed by taking a peek into the 'Drones' room, which was actually cleaning drones with a panel just inside the door for requesting cleaning of a specific room. Otherwise they apparently took care of cleaning all of the non-bedroom areas. The group then got to see the two empty rooms, one of which had mirrors on the wall, before they came to the room labeled 'Command'. Which was the first door that Missy had seen with an obvious and noticeable lock on the door. One that didn't look like it had any way to open it.

"All of us are keyed into the lock," Hive explained. "It's fully automatic when you voluntarily place your hand on the handle to open the door." She then demonstrated that by pushing down on the handle, the lock clicking and the display going from red to green as soon as she'd made contact with the handle. The door opened, and they entered to find six chairs with built-in side tables. Hanging from each table was a headset. "This doesn't look impressive now, but that's because it's powered down."

"This is a giant version of the mini command stations," Danny said. "The headsets in particular look identical."

"Complete with full immersion capability for the sensor feeds. The chairs can be moved around as needed, I merely left them in the center of the room for demonstration purposes. I expect that normally those not currently in use would be left in a corner. Also, despite this being the Command room, if you wear a headset while leaving the room then a system similar to the portable units will follow you anywhere in the building. This allows for bathroom or sustenance runs without needing to stop monitoring things, if desired."

"That definitely sounds useful, but is there any chance of a mini fridge or water dispenser being placed in here as well?"

Hive nodded. "It would be trivial to add both at this point, I'll have it done by morning."

"Thank you."

"So are we heading into the secret basement next?" Taylor asked, causing Missy to blink.

"What secret basement?" Missy asked.

"The one that has to exist despite my sensor telling me that there's solid granite below us. After all, we haven't seen a single battery, water filtration system, whatever processes the waste lines coming from the bathrooms..."

That made far too much sense, and Hive nodded in agreement. "Depending on how you look at things, there are either two, nine, or sixty-five hidden basements."

They paused at that, before Missy sighed. "How does that even work? Surely it's one of the three?"

Hive didn't answer, instead leading them back to one of the elevators. But this time she didn't use the buttons. Instead she spoke. "Secure Sub Basement, Central Room."

Instead of just going down, there was what Missy could only describe as a dimensional lurch. Further, instead of descending into solid granite, they instead descended into what could only be described as fairly warped space. A moment later the elevator stopped, the doors opening into a large space. One that had quite a bit of equipment in it.

"Welcome to the Secure Sub Basement," Hive said. "This area is locked down to myself, my Lord, and my Lord's father right now. It contains all of the support equipment for the building, the battery banks, and sensitive material storage. Sub Basements A through G are identical in base layout, but empty right now. I think that hydroponics or similar systems should go into one of them at some point as a precaution, as the plant and animal life on this planet aren't suitable for human consumption."

"I'm getting a headache considering how this entire area is stable with no visible supports," Danny noted. "How strong are the walls and ceiling?"

"That's where the counting becomes odd. This Sub Basement and the seven like it are all part of a single dimensionally-folded hyper-tesseract that acts as a solid object from the outside. To that end, you can walk from room to room in a straight line and eventually return to your starting point. There are ceiling and floor access points available as well, though some of those are the most jarring to use as they shift your orientation as you pass through them due to opening on walls in their destination rooms. They're supported in part by the folding causing a lot of physical laws to act oddly when compared to unfolded structures."

Missy did some quick math in her head, looking around. This was aided in part by ensuring that her spatial manipulation system was active. "Each of these rooms is something like a two hundred and fifty foot cube, and there are eight groups of eight of them to make sixty four rooms?"

"Yes. Everything on this 'level' could be considered one overlapping sub basement, as eight different overlapping sub basements due to direct connections, or as sixty-four different partially-connected sub basements."

"Hive," Taylor said, sounding annoyed. "I understand needing this particular area, but don't know why we'd need seven others like it. What are we supposed to do with eight hundred seventy-five million cubic feet of space?"

"I only intended to make this area, but ended up discovering that I needed to fold things once more to properly anchor the last basement."

"Do I want to know what's in the last basement?"

"Currently there are two transport devices with permanent portal arches and not much else in it."

"That doesn't sound as extreme as it should given what you apparently needed to build to 'anchor' it."

"It's also a five by five by two and a half kilometer space intended for use as a construction bay and hangar for a ship designed to travel through the dimensional sea. While I don't have any idea as to how to best build a suitable propulsion system yet, such a vessel will almost certainly be needed to eventually attempt to make contact with my creators and having a secure hangar to build it in is important."

There was a moment of silence as the rest of them contemplated that.

That evening Taylor had worked with Hive in the simulation system on a much less ambitious plan for the warehouse, at least when compared to the new building at the beach. The last thing they'd done before leaving had been to dub that the 'Mana Inn', if only because it made it a lot easier to refer to. That Hive had then produced and hung a customized wooden sign saying 'Welcome to the Mana Inn' over the front door, using hooks that Taylor had missed, made her wonder if the name had been predicted or if Hive had just been able to carve the name that quickly.

Regardless, when it came to the warehouse they were sticking to a single secret basement with no real expansions for the batteries and other support equipment. The ground floor would be split between reception and warehouse, using transport devices to shift things to and from the Mana Inn storage spaces when needed, and a second floor that would be offices and meeting rooms. The warehouse section would have loading docks for incoming and outgoing shipments and there would be balconies at both ends of the building for coming and going through flight.

They were halfway through figuring a lot of that out when Taylor was alerted to someone slipping into the current warehouse building by the surveillance drone that she'd left behind earlier. Wondering if someone was there to steal things, she was surprised when they pushed a shopping cart full of things in before closing the door behind them. That was followed by turning on a battery-operated lamp and setting up a sleeping area in the corner. Apparently at least one homeless individual had figured out that getting into the warehouse was easy enough and provided a good place to sleep when they didn't want to sleep outside.

"I wonder if it would be a good idea to make a place that homeless people could sleep in," Taylor had mused. "Not a full shelter, at least not without having actual support staff, but a few simple sleeping areas that they could lock the doors of?"

"Adding in a known basement with such areas would be trivial," Hive said. "Sheets and mattresses could be generated with the Knight Object spell so that they wouldn't need to be cleaned or replaced, as could toilet paper with a modification of the spell to prevent dissolving when damage is done to any given section of a roll. If we build the 'basement' over the entire lot instead of just under the building then a set of spaces that could be used by families or shared by individuals could also be put in, but at that point we would likely need to check zoning rules and register with the city or state as a proper shelter."

Taylor gave that some thought, then shrugged. "Might as well build the space. In a worst-case scenario it can be used as an explanation for where we sleep at night, right?"

The appearance of the building was going to be much more modern. A silvery-blue box with plenty of windows on the second floor, all stronger than they'd appear to be. Reinforced glass doors at the front of the building, a modern-looking reception desk even if there wasn't likely to be a receptionist anytime soon. A copy of the anchor hex over the doors and hidden transport devices similar to what had been done at the Mana Inn both just outside the doors and in multiple places inside.

There would be a little more traditional appearance for the 'apartments', though anyone using them would need to deal with not having windows. Access points for those would be a side door on the building or a shack at the other end of the lot. Unlike the rest of the construction, those would allow for physical keys instead of low-level devices with an access list. Not that devices weren't going to be available to serve as an alternate access method, but they wouldn't be the only things controlling the locks.

They'd just finished determining that, coupled with that if they wanted office furniture that there would need to be either another shopping trip or some ordering done, when Taylor paused because her Minerva phone was ringing. Sighing when she realized that it was Armsmaster calling, she spawned a phone there in the simulation system to answer it.

"Hello Armsmaster," she greeted.

"I apologize if I woke you up," Armsmaster said. "I thought that I'd leave you a message for the morning."

"I wasn't actually sleeping." Well, she was, but she wasn't. That was honestly hard to say which was more accurate. And she didn't actually know if she had voicemail, come to think of it. "What's up?"

"I wanted to let you know that Crystal Cage and Potter both escaped half an hour ago. The security camera footage shows that it was approximately fifteen minutes after Potter was able to use their powers again. My own attempts at keeping them contained weren't enough and you should plan on them making another attempt to capture you."

"I appreciate the warning."

"I'd also like to take the opportunity to apologize for the monitoring device that the PRT left in the warehouse before we transferred ownership to you. It was supposed to be removed first thing in the morning, but the technician assigned that ticket called in sick. I was told that it stopped reporting shortly after I left you at the warehouse so I'm assuming that you found it already."

"We did find and disable a number of monitoring devices, yes."

There was a pause. "A number of monitoring devices?"

"There were twenty-three total in the building that we found," Hive interjected. "Eighteen active, three set to activate after a week, and two that were rigged to activate if moved. All have been disabled."

"The PRT only left one, attached to a beam in the middle of the warehouse to monitor for potential thieves. If you need assistance tracking down who else left devices behind then please let me know."

"We'll definitely do that," Taylor said. "Though I suspect that Lilia here is capable of tracking things well enough on her own."

"Good luck, and I wouldn't object to at least a summary of who was attempting to monitor you. Oh, and you don't need to return the one that was left behind. We've got a storage room full of them and rarely use them anyway. Do you have any questions for me?"

"I think we're good. Have a nice evening. Or early morning, I suppose?"

"Thank you, and the same to you." Friday morning started early for Taylor, with a quick trip to the Mana Inn well ahead of anyone else arriving for exercising. Hive had removed the devices hidden in the bedroom walls before they left and a quick test to ensure that communication was still functioning was done first. That went perfectly, and Hive prepared all of the construction drones while Taylor deployed a mixture of testing and combat drones. She didn't think scrying was ever going to happen in simulation but didn't think that it would be a good idea to work on things tomorrow. She'd go light on it while at tutoring, at least.

Minutes after the homeless person who had spent the night in the warehouse had left there were flashes of light, the construction drones appearing on the transport device one after another. The surveillance drone vanished just before the transport device did, and then the construction drones started their work. Beginning with tearing down the warehouse and excavating the entire lot.

The last thing Taylor did before they headed back home was to collect the transport device sitting on the beach. It didn't need to be there now that they had the Inn as an arrival and departure point. Another test had been done once they'd returned home, Hive ensuring that the relays were working from the other end before Taylor grabbed a drink and remotely started running through her ideas for scrying. Currently most of those were actually just 'monitor a predetermined area remotely', possibly from another dimension or the dimensional sea itself but she figured that doing so from elsewhere in the same dimension would work too. The real key was to not have anything showing that you were monitoring the area in the area.

Missy frowned as she ate her breakfast. She'd planned on going to train with Taylor this afternoon, but plans had been changed on her. Apparently she had to go to City Hall to fill out some paperwork for the internship thing. Sherie had given her a line about it being important to learn how to properly fill out paperwork, something that was important going forward in life, only to get a look from Missy since the paperwork didn't have to be completed at City Hall.

Sadly, Sherie had been able to counter that particular argument with the other reasons that Missy had to go. First off was meeting the Mayor ahead of the internship so that he'd recognize her. She'd never actually met the man while she was outside of costume when she'd been a Ward, so he couldn't be expected to recognize her. Still annoying if that was it, as she could do that her first day, but the other reason was that part of the paperwork included getting her photo taken so that they could have an ID badge printed.

This wouldn't be nearly as annoying if not for the news that Taylor was going to be unavailable most of the following day.

"So", Sherie said as she finished her own breakfast. "I'll pick you up at school and bring you to City Hall. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two."

Missy nodded, using the fact that her mouth was full to avoid speaking. She was less likely to show her annoyance with her tone of voice that way, at least.

Taylor sighed as she waited for her last tutor of the day, and her last tutoring session for that matter. Next week she'd be taking tests instead, after all. At the same time, she was using the break to lightly check the testing drones that she'd left running through things. She'd spent lunch going over the morning results and switching gears from 'scan for things' to 'detect that someone else is scanning'.

It turned out that over half of their scanning tricks were being hobbled by being done from within the dimension that they were scanning. Just pointing them at a nearby dimension both hid the visual effects and made them three to fifty times more effective. This was apparently a side effect of most shard sensory techniques having been optimized for working across dimensional boundaries in the first place. Access techniques varied, some using an anchor point that then did things locally and others directly reaching across dimensional boundaries, but the sensory techniques had all, so far, been optimized for cross-dimensional use.

And then Hive had adapted those sensory techniques for local use and not realized just how good they were across dimensional boundaries, in part because her mana-based sensory hardware wasn't optimized for that. Hive had set the relay systems up at the Inn because the access techniques for them worked better when crossing dimensional boundaries, at least when not originating from inside of a device's dimensional folding, but hadn't noticed the benefits of the shard-originating sensory techniques operating in a similar way.

Dedicated scanning systems were going to need to be installed in the Inn, that was for sure.

That discovery had led to the other aspect of things that Taylor was now focusing on. She wanted to cast sensor spells and possibly build some kind of lens effect for shard techniques to apply them through the dimensional sea. The hope was that any visual effects, such as the flashes of light from casting, happened at the origin point while getting the advantages of working from 'outside' of the dimension even if you were in it. She wasn't having an insane amount of luck with that yet, but she was going to ask Hive for help once the warehouse was done being rebuilt.

The arrival of her tutor had her pulling most of her attention back to her lessons, leaving the testing drones to run through the test patterns that she'd set them to go through. She paid attention to the final bit of review, but was distracted again when she was packing up at the end of the lesson by Vicky landing outside with Amy. Why the two had landed outside and sat down on the bench there was a mystery, but not one that was likely to take long to figure out.

Taylor accepted the good luck on her exams the following week before heading out. She raised an eyebrow when Amy and Vicky both got up and moved towards the door as she was heading down the stairs to it. There shouldn't have been any real way for them to know that she was on her way down at that moment, especially as her tutor was still up in the room with the lights on and thus they wouldn't have been able to notice the lights being turned off.

"Hi Taylor," Vicky greeted Taylor as she stepped outside.

"Hello," Taylor replied. "Do I want to know why you two are standing here at the door as though waiting for me to come out from my tutoring session?"

"Because we were waiting for you to come out from your tutoring session. But now you're out, so we're no longer waiting."

Vicky ignored Taylor's look at that, instead it was Amy who sighed and elaborated. A little. "We have a couple of things to talk to you about, but probably shouldn't do it here. Would you be okay with us heading home with you so that we can talk in private?"

Taylor looked at Amy. "I'm curious as to what kinds of things you don't want to talk about in public."

"Phantom organ things."

Well, that was interesting. "Okay. I guess. Are you prepared to jog with me, or is Vicky going to carry you while I'm on foot?"

That took Vicky by surprise. "What are you talking about?"

Amy rolled her eyes. "Taylor seems to have taken to running everywhere unless someone else forces her to take a vehicle."

"Oh."

"And I probably won't be able to keep up, given how rarely I exercise like that, so Vicky here carrying me is probably our best bet."

Vicky looked between the two of them. "Can we try to keep up with her? I'm curious as to how well we match up to her."

Amy glared at Vicky for that one, the older girl not seeming to care one bit.

Taylor unlocked the front door of the house, not feeling winded or sweaty in the least.

"You suck," Amy groaned as she did her best to not collapse on the steps. "How the hell can you do that every day?"

"It gets easier," Taylor replied. "Also, that was one of the short routes. I've been taking longer ones lately." She then looked over at Vicky. Who had flown a third of the way and still hadn't properly caught her breath. "Though you did better than she did."

The two Dallons collapsed into chairs in the kitchen, gratefully accepting the drinks Taylor offered them. After a few minutes they'd essentially recovered.

"That was harder than it should've been," Vicky grumbled. before pointing accusingly at Taylor. "And it just shows that whatever the hell you've got is bullshit."

Taylor blinked at that. "What?"

Amy was the one who blushed in response to that. "I, er, can mostly tell where your phantom organ is at a distance now. Which means that I can tell when you're out as Minerva, and that your necklace is Lilia. I don't know how that works, but I figure it can't just be that the phantom organs are another expression of normal parahuman powers as they don't seem to be linked only to parahumans or non-parahumans. Then there's the fact that I can also feel when you do big things now, like when I think you scanned the entire planet. Which was both bigger and smaller than when you apparently scanned the entire star system, though I don't know if the bigger was because it was closer or something else. And then there was when you left Lilia at home, only for her to jump across town and apparently take Missy's powers away while making her phantom organ stand out like yours does, meaning that whatever is going on is likely repeatable..."

Hive took Amy trailing off as an invitation to switch to her Unison form, though in a t-shirt and jeans instead of Knight Armor, causing Vicky to jump and float in the air in shock. Amy just looked at her as she started to speak. "Lord, I suspect that Amy is either a natural sensor type or inadvertently trained herself to be a sensor type while trying to figure out the 'phantom organs' she was seeing, meaning that hiding from her is currently not an option."

"Holy shit," Vicky said after a moment, ignoring that Taylor was facepalming. "You're actually a little person that can turn into a necklace?"

"From a causality standpoint, I'm more of a necklace that can turn into a little person. Especially as the functionality of this form is still incomplete."

"What?"

Taylor sighed as she rolled her eyes. "She was built by another civilization, nearly destroyed in an event that she doesn't remember, recovered upon finding me but only as a necklace, then later added the little human-like form. Oh, and she still isn't fully repaired yet."

"Oh." Vicky didn't look like she fully comprehended that. Taylor didn't care.

"Though now I'm curious as to why you two decided to approach me after tutoring like this. Or I suppose after school for you two."

"Vicky made me," Amy grumbled. "After I accidentally blabbed to her while examining my plants and she realized that I didn't want to confront you."

"Examining your plants? How does that have anything to do with it?"

Amy blushed, but Vicky finally landed again and spoke up on something she apparently did understand. "Because she's trying to grow plants with phantom organs based on common DNA patterns in those that she's found have them, which I'm thinking is primarily your own DNA. Half of them would probably be dead by now if she wasn't fixing them up every day. Though I'm not sure how having one of the not-quite-there organs makes you drive off an Endbringer awesome."

"There are other considerations," Hive answered. "Augmentations due to the low mana in the area, training with spellcasting, and a lot of research and spell design."

"Spellcasting? Spell design?"

Taylor shrugged. "Apparently magic can, but doesn't have to be, cast with incredibly complicated math."

Amy's eye twitched at that. "Are you saying that you're literally a magical girl?"

"Sort of?"

"Is Missy going to be running around as one soon too?"

"Missy?" Vicky asked. "Oh, wait, you said that Lilia did something to her, right?" It took another moment for the girl to put that together, at which point her eyes went wide. She then turned to look at Taylor. "Is that what happened to Vista? Is she anywhere near as powerful as you?" Turning to Hive, she continued without waiting for answers. "Can you do that to anyone? How long would it take me to learn enough to fight if you did it to me?"

"Hold up," Taylor interrupted. "We can't answer if you keep asking questions like that."

"As for answers," Hive said. "Yes, that's what happened to Missy, she isn't as powerful as my Lord but some of that is not completing her training. I can remove powers from those you know as parahumans, but not everyone has the potential to be a mage. You, in particular, do not have the potential. Also, even if I do remove powers, I don't need to augment those who do have the potential, even if I've generally been doing so."

Vicky nodded, frowning for a moment before getting a look in her eyes. "The phantom organ thing, right? That's the potential needed, presumably the bit that makes you magic instead of just a normal person. Me not having one makes sense, since thinking back I recall Amy mentioning that nobody else in New Wave has one. But she does, so she could become a...mage, you said?"

"Yes, though at the moment it would include the cost of her current powers being removed for several reasons."

"After which she'd be able to keep up with Taylor's exercise routine, on top of all the other awesome things that Minerva has been seen doing?"

Taylor snorted at that. "No, she wouldn't be able to keep up with my exercise routine just because she became a mage. Just like anyone else working out, you keep at it and you get better. Missy still can't keep up with me if I go all out, though she's getting better."

"Oh. So magic doesn't just, well, magically make you more fit?"

"I imagine that if it did then it would be a temporary boost, but being more fit makes it easier to fight with magic."

Hive nodded. "I've considered various ways to boost my Lord's strength and reaction times, but integrating the spells with living tissue without causing damage is difficult."

Vicky nodded, looking thoughtful. "I guess that makes sense, since being a parahuman obviously doesn't just make you more fit by default either. Though why do you keep calling Taylor your Lord? Shouldn't she at least be your Lady?"

"I use it as a gender-neutral title, as my coding requires."

"So," Amy said as Vicky absorbed that detail. "I take it that Missy approached you about trading her powers for becoming a mage, and based on what was found out about her home life you accepted?"

"Yeah," Taylor agreed. "Well, mostly. There were other details."

"Would you be willing to do the same for me if I decide I want to go that route?"

Vicky spun to stare at Amy in shock, but it was Taylor who got the response in. "What?"

Amy just looked down and fiddled with her glass, leaving Vicky to groan. "Dean was right about you being over-stressed, wasn't he? And trying to figure out the phantom organ thing hasn't helped, given that I noticed that something was up because of it and ended up talking to him about things. Of course, if mom finds out about your plants she'll explode, which isn't going to help either."

"Better to lose my powers than to go to prison for something that I can't undo," Amy muttered.

Taylor sighed at that. "Is every parahuman who figures out that I'm Minerva going to have issues that seem like they can at least be partially solved by removing their powers?"

"Of course," Vicky said, causing the others to look at her. "Don't look at me that way. All parahumans are broken in some way, myself included. Powers warp people, some just get hit worse than others. Personally speaking, I'm currently acknowledging that I'm arrogant and overconfident, but probably won't in a few months because I don't learn my lessons well. That's part of why I keep fighting with Dean. His problems with..."

"VICKY," Amy yelled, causing Vicky to jump again. Once it was obvious that the older girl had stopped talking she continued more quietly. "Your boyfriend's secrets are his own. Don't just blab them."

Vicky winced at that. "Right. Wasn't thinking."

"That was obvious, yes. Though I'm wondering why Taylor's original question was limited to parahumans."

Taylor shrugged. "My father figured things out before I even made my debut, and he isn't a parahuman. Nor does he have the potential to be a mage, for that matter."

"Oh. I suppose that it would be hard to hide that kind of thing from someone you live with."

"Speaking of which, I'm going to want to talk to him before I agree here."

"Lord," Hive said, getting Taylor's attention. "Perhaps we should give them each an emergency beacon as a contact method that doesn't require use of public systems? It could also be useful for them to be able to summon aid if needed in other situations."

Taylor sighed, not being able to argue that point, and retrieved a couple of the beacons. A couple pulses of mana configured them, and she tossed them to the two Dallons. "Here. Red for emergencies, yellow for lower priority, green for all clear."

"These look similar to what Armsmaster has started handing out," Vicky noted. "I think the Wards all have one now, and I know Amy was given one by him."

"I might have the first one he made and we based these off of his."

"Because you're probably one of the biggest non-parahuman targets in the region and he doesn't know that you're probably the scariest person around. Right."

Taylor opted to not comment on how scary she was. "I think that we would also appreciate it if you could at least hold off a few days, since we're going to be busy tomorrow."

Amy nodded as she slipped the beacon into her pocket. She then sighed as she looked at the clock. "I think we need to go before others start wondering where we went off to."

"It shouldn't be too bad," Vicky said. "I might've said that I was going to take you shopping at a store that doesn't exist. The name I gave mom should be close enough to a hardware store's name across town to explain why we don't come back with a pile of bags."

"Your excuse was taking me shopping? Really?"

"Would anyone in our family question that?"

"Well, no."

"Thus it's a perfect excuse."

Taylor thought that staying out of that particular argument was probably the right thing to do.

Missy dropped into the back seat of the car, still somewhat annoyed that she wasn't getting to work with Taylor right after school. Worse, she had been given unexpected homework and was probably going to have to do that first too. Even if she would probably have all day tomorrow to do said homework while Taylor wasn't available. Because barring an emergency, schoolwork was 'more important' than heroing.

Not that Missy could really argue that, admittedly, but it was still annoying. Of course, she knew that she wasn't even ready for a proper patrol yet, needing more practice with Reason at a minimum before then. There was no way that she was going out without the weapon since it was part of the 'not Vista' image she wanted to project as a mage. After all, Vista would never use such a weapon, avoided closing in on people, and only engaged people personally if she had no other choice.

The PRT and Youth Guard could suck it, because Expanse was going to get up close and personal with idiots. Especially if she could get exploding punches working.

A bright flash of light heralded Taylor and Hive appearing at the warehouse, though since it was in the hidden basement it was unlikely that anyone other than Missy or Amy noticed their arrival. There was a lot less here than at the Inn, the most significant items being the giant electrical and mana batteries. There were also water tanks and what looked like it could be a server rack with a handful of network switches, wires running off into the rest of the building. Otherwise there was a lot of empty space and two elevator access points.

"No stairs?" Taylor noted. This wasn't exactly an impossible space that needed special access methods, after all.

"They shouldn't be needed," Hive admitted. "And would be far too easy to detect if someone is snooping."

"I suppose that makes sense."

The two went up the freight elevator to the warehouse level, though it could stop at the regular basement level as well for purposes of moving furniture in and out. In fact, that was the official reason that the freight elevator existed at all, since there was no access to it on the second floor. One side of the warehouse area was shelving, the rest was wide open with currently-closed rolling doors at the end where trucks could back up to the building.

Heading into the rest of the building required going through a locked door, one that recognized them and unlocked automatically. The elevator had done the same, for that matter. They did a quick pass of the first floor, walked up the stairs to the second, and Taylor found her eye twitching slightly when they reached her 'office'.

"Did you have to put 'Lord Minerva' on the door?" Taylor asked.

"I thought you'd appreciate it more than 'Empress Minerva'," Hive replied. "There's also a simple 'Minerva' insert sitting on the desk inside."

Taylor shook her head and entered the office, finding that it was as bare as the others they'd passed to get to it. That would probably need to change at some point, but for now there was nothing to steal if someone did make it into the building. It was, however, one of the two balcony access points. A personal one for her, compared to the more general-use one on the other end of the building.

She took a quick look at the security on that balcony's door, swapped out the insert on the door, and then they took the smaller elevator down to the non-hidden basement. There weren't stairs coming down from the first floor here, nor at the freight elevator, but instead only at the two dedicated access points for the 'living space'. A quick tour of the basement area was made, with only doors currently locked from the outside being access closets for the cleaning drones and a 'Team Mana' apartment in the corner. Not that the latter was any more furnished without using the buttons to create Knight Object furniture. It was mainly there for appearances right now.

They left through the hut at the far end of the lot, so as to get a good look at the parking lot. It was laid out differently than it had been before so that it could accommodate light poles that the original lot hadn't contained. Taylor did note that there was a sign on the hut with rules and a statement that the 'wheelchair lift' was at the entrance on the far side of the building.

"Do we need to get the wheelchair lift and elevators inspected?" Taylor asked as they walked across the parking lot.

"Only if someone from the city asks to," Hive replied. "And then they'd probably have to have the PRT look at them since they don't use much in the way of normal technology for such things."

"Ah. Tinkertech exclusions and loopholes?"

"Essentially, yes."

Coming around the building, Taylor found that the lights mounted on the underside of the balcony were a nice touch for lighting up the main entrance and mail slot but paid more attention to the door heading to the basement on the long side of the building. It had a path segment coming off of the sidewalk to it. This door had a copy of the rules that the other sign on the hut had, basically asking that nobody spend more than a couple of nights at a time unless desperate or through other agreements. Opening the door, there were stairs and the promised lift right inside of it. Not that they expected wheelchairs to be used with it, shopping carts being more likely at first.

"This all looks good to me," Taylor said. "Was there anything else that you wanted me to look at while we're here?"

"That should do it," Hive said.

"In that case, I think we should go take a look at a couple of things that I'd like your opinion on."

After dinner, Taylor worked a little with Hive on adapting all of the sensor techniques they had to scanning across dimensional boundaries, though some were far better at it than others. A couple of the mana-originating tricks did fall into the 'work better across dimensional boundaries' category once properly adjusted to do so, but the shard-originating techniques were the clear superior choice there.

Casting spells into the dimensional sea in order to scan back into the dimension with them had been trivial, but Hive was going to need a few days to figure out if shard techniques could be applied in a similar way. What they had been able to do was to open a portal between Hive's internals and the Inn, applying Insect Control through it. It wasn't entirely useful, as they had to remain stationary so as to not disrupt the portal, but it was a useful first test. That had, when targeting Taylor on Bet, resulted in an incredible headache on Taylor's part.

"What the hell happened?" Taylor asked almost an hour after Hive had shut the system down.

"We failed to apply a sanity limit," Hive responded. "Unlike when reaching out from my internals normally, the Shard hardware had no issues targeting the entire planet. Unfortunately, I don't retain enough multitasking hardware to handle that and inputs started to stack on one another."

"Are you saying that I momentarily had a connection to every compatible insect or other lifeform on the entire planet? All at once?"

"Almost, Lord. The system couldn't handle that many connections and was rapidly adjusting things, bouncing between individual targets as it adjusted to try and group them where it couldn't target individuals due to resource limitations. At the peak connection point you were probably only connected to one out of every fifty thousand target organisms at most. The longest connection to a single organism was only three milliseconds."

Taylor blanched at that. "Please tell me that you have a way to range-limit if we do that again."

"I do, though I'll need to adjust some things to ensure that it's distance from you."

"Can we make it distance from any arbitrary point instead? Being able to control insects in a spot that I'm not sounds like a great way to monitor an area discreetly. Sure, we're working on ways to do that with scanning spells, but more options can be good too."

"That should be easy enough. Especially if we have enough leftover Shard material to install some semi-permanently in the Inn. That could either be a stopgap measure for figuring out how to loop those techniques through the dimensional sea or a secondary system that you or others could use when more power is needed."

Taylor shrugged. If it worked then it worked, but they'd have to wait to see what they got from whoever it was they were dealing with tomorrow, and perhaps from Amy later if she went for it. After all, they'd just finished clearing out Hive's storage specifically to help ensure that there was plenty of room for things.

That evening, Hive would monopolize the simulation system looking at possible ways to adapt shard-style techniques. That left Taylor studying in the multitasking systems. Specifically, she was going back over all of the books she had available on playing the flute, her mother's and a bunch of others that had been collected. It was essentially a downtime task for her.

Across town, Missy was practicing to the best of her ability in her simulation systems, having been unable to meet up with Taylor at all. She was also sending occasional questions to Taylor, wanting tips on how to best use some of the control interfaces in Reason. Missy was most interested in the aim assist options for when Reason was in 'gun' form and how they could be adjusted for use with the Spatial Manipulation systems.

The answer had been very straightforward, Reason already being able to take manipulated space into account so long as it could tell that it was there. To improve that, linking Space and Reason would allow for real-time updating of what the Spatial Manipulation systems were doing to the area and improved ability for Reason to adjust targeting information. Hive had already accounted for all of that, so no tweaking had actually been needed.

Taylor had made note to ensure that Hal was able to link up properly for doing anything similar, as she suspected that Chain already could. It wouldn't do to have one of her devices hobbled because it wasn't ready for her to use the Spatial Manipulation systems in the field, after all. Especially since she was still likely to use Hal for throwing physical projectiles when needed, those being far more affected by altered space than mana projectiles would be from a targeting point of view.

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Threadmarks Chapter 65 - June 4, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Aug 5, 2020

#11,837

Saturday morning started with Taylor having to listen to Missy grumble about the world not being fair. It took very little time for Taylor to decide that she was sick and tired of the whining, pulling out Chain and using it to keep Missy running. Halfway through their exercise time Missy realized that she could manifest shields to block Chain. Three quarters through she realized that she could pull out Reason and counter-attack.

Taylor had then pulled out Hal as well, telekinetically controlling both weapons at the same time, getting a near-continuous stream of swears out of Missy until they were done. Followed by a declaration that Missy was going to train to at least be able to do something similar with Reason.

No mention was made on Taylor's part as to how much she'd been winging it at first, nor that she only really pulled it off because Missy was too busy defending to attack back by that point.

"I don't think she liked that surprise," Taylor noted once Missy had returned home.

"Then she shouldn't have been whining," her father replied. "Though you should consider that kind of thing more often, given that I think you both got better workouts because of the added challenge."

She raised an eyebrow at that. "So you think that we should spar while exercising more often?"

"That and see about having Hive set up traps that neither of you know about to attack you randomly. Situational awareness, with them ignoring you some days and attacking you others? Perhaps Hive could make devices that just roam the area to serve as a defensive line, but randomly decide that you and Missy are a threat for training purposes."

"I don't know if that's going overboard or not, and it would possibly place you in the crossfire."

"You might have a point there. I suppose that doing proper training sessions would be better from that point of view then. Either way, we should get back so that you can get ready to go sit around for a few hours."

Taylor rolled her eyes, but didn't disagree.

Missy stared at Ethan, who was grinning. "Why are you grinning?"

His grin just got worse. "Because we've got plans for the day."

"What kind of plans?"

"The kind you probably won't be happy about at first, admittedly."

One of her eyes twitched, but she resisted the urge to ask him more questions. As a tactic, that appeared to be working, because he frowned when she stopped playing along. After a full minute of silence from him, she shrugged and turned around to head up to her room.

"And where are you going?" Ethan asked.

She rolled her eyes, not that he could see them right now. "Upstairs."

"Get back here. We have places to be."

"You're intentionally annoying me, so I don't see why I need to cooperate."

"I don't think that matters, but if you want to play hardball then I can do so as well. Get back here or I'll bar you from training with Taylor."

Missy stopped at that, half-turning to look at him. "And will Sherie agree with you?"

"Won't matter, our agreement with Danny is that if either of us says no then you don't get to train with her."

Fuck. That sounded like something that Danny would insist on, meaning that he had an actual threat. "Are you going to continue to antagonize me unnecessarily?"

"Maaaaybe."

"And what will Sherie do if I call her to tell her that you're doing so?"

He grinned, and held up her cell phone. "I've got your phone, so you can't."

She grinned right back. "Space has a built-in phone and can make calls using my phone number."

That wiped the grin off of his face, and a moment later he sighed. "Dammit, I thought I had you when I found that you'd left your phone out of your little storage pocket."

A moment later the phone vanished from his hand. He jumped, and then another flash of light had it appearing in her hand. "Also, you're in range for me to retrieve my phone."

"Shouldn't have told you that I had it at all."

"So am I going upstairs or are you telling me the mysterious I-won't-like-them plans?"

He grumbled for a moment before sighing. "I need to pick things up at the hardware store, and you're coming with me."

Missy's eye twitched some more. "All of that for a hardware store run? Really?"

"Bah. You're no fun."

Taylor hadn't known what to expect for the day, but being brought out to the Rig and led through the structure through directions relayed over a radio that she'd been handed hadn't been in the list of possibilities. It seemed that the elevators and doors were being operated remotely, the structure itself being largely deserted. Before long she'd reached a small waiting room and was told to collect any drinks or snacks she wanted from it and place them onto a cart that was waiting there while they finished final prep 'elsewhere'. She also took the time to pull out a book and the puzzle books that she'd brought to have something to do and put them on the cart, figuring that would be easier than digging into her bag.

Despite a worry that they'd keep her waiting for an hour, it was only ten minutes later when they asked her to bring the cart with her down the hall. There she was directed into a room where a younger black girl, probably Missy's age, was waiting. Said girl was also a parahuman. There were a number of pieces of equipment around the room, and plenty of cameras. In the middle was a collection of different kinds of chairs, which Taylor had been informed was so that she could hopefully pick a comfortable one before they began.

"Hello," Taylor greeted, causing the girl to jump.

"You can see me?" the girl questioned, before groaning. "Of course you can, because my powers are useless."

"I'm confused."

"Miss Laborn's powers cause most people in her immediate vicinity to both be unable to perceive her and to forget that she exists," the person on the radio said. "You appear to be immune, which was expected as Miss Biron is likely to be similarly immune based on reports we have."

"Oh. I guess that makes sense."

"My name is Aisha," the girl grumbled. "But yeah, that sounds about right anyway. Can we get on with things before I change my mind? Or maybe before my useless powers change my mind, because I can't shake the feeling that my mental arguments aren't all coming from me. Especially the bits telling me that the reasons I want my powers gone aren't important in the least."

"Well, let me take a seat before we try. I don't want to be stuck standing here."

Taylor pushed the cart over to the chairs, picked the one that she thought would be most comfortable, and was about to sit down when there was a flash of light as Hive dropped a piece of paper in front of her. Startled, she still pulled off grabbing the paper before it fell to the ground.

"What's it say?" Aisha asked, obviously curious.

"It says that I should flip my necklace around and have you sit in a chair behind me," Taylor answered. "For 'both of our comfort'."

"Oh."

"Better than you literally hanging in the air from your head," came over the radio, "Though you'd probably be unconscious, it can't be good for your neck."

Aisha flinched before nodding and looking over the other chairs. Taylor made sure that the cart was right next to her, everything in reach, with Hive's pendant behind her.

"Lord?" Hive sent to Taylor.

"Yeah?" Taylor replied.

"They have a lot of monitoring in place, and I'd like to test their reaction to adding to it while testing to see if my targeting data is correct in advance."

"Adding to it how, exactly?"

"Casting a sensor drone to where the Shard device is and monitoring it from that end, passing a video feed from the drone into the collection that they already have going."

Taylor considered that while Aisha was testing and rejecting one of the chairs. "I suppose that isn't a horrible thing. It isn't like they're going to learn much about you from that, right?"

"No, Lord. They should already suspect or know pretty much everything that should tell them."

"Then you might as well go for it."

"I think I'm ready," Aisha said after she'd chosen a chair, pushed it up behind the one Taylor was in, and sat down in it. "Is this going to hurt?"

"I have no clue," Taylor admitted. "I don't know if anyone's asked either."

"Oh."

There was a small pulse of mana as Hive cast a sensor drone. A video feed appeared in the multitasking instance for Taylor to monitor, showing one of the shard devices with an odd spire of sorts protruding from it. The spire wasn't tall so much as just stretched via an odd dimensional effect. Eight seconds later there was a larger pulse as Hive latched onto Aisha's entire body for a moment before pulling, a mana field flowing down the spire in the video feed to latch onto the shard device.

The funnel formed as the shard device started to be pulled into the 'spire', and Taylor picked up one of the puzzle books because this was going to take a while. Though she did realize that Hive had to be actively converting small amounts of the shard to mana just to power the entire effect. There was no way that a continent-sized anything would be absorbed otherwise.

"Whoa," Missy said, looking towards the Rig where a giant funnel had appeared sticking out of the side of the structure. It was angled slightly down, hanging over the ocean oddly, and appeared to be lit from the wrong direction entirely.

"Yeah," Ethan agreed before the light changed and he focused on the road again. "I wonder if this one will result in another necklace?"

"Probably not. Aisha doesn't have a linker core."

"Ah. That would make sense. At least I don't need to be jealous of her getting to be incredibly awesome when I've already lost my chance to do the same."

"Like Sherie would let you try."

"True, she's made that abundantly clear. And my brand is far too established to change it up that much at this point. Did that once, don't really want to go through it again. You have no idea how lucky you are to have a declared-dead previous identity, a new unrelated power set, and horrible assumptions that will likely come forward when you show yourself on your new team."

There were more details there, but she wasn't about to press for them and he seemed to realize what he'd said and didn't offer more. Instead she did her best to watch the funnel, up until they reached the hardware store and had to head inside. Of course, the funnel existing at all had a large number of people occupied, so the store itself was more deserted than it likely would've been otherwise.

"So what are we here for?" Missy asked.

"The biggest thing is a couple bags of mulch to spread around today," Ethan replied. "I also want to grab a couple sheets of plywood and a box of screws for covering some spots in the attic."

Missy nodded, then just followed him as he collected things. She was thinking on the funnel while an instance of her was in the combined Space and Reason simulation system working on spell design. Which wasn't going well, because she'd come to the conclusion that neither device was properly creative. They were undoubtedly intelligent, and could piece things they already knew about together in new ways, but neither could really come up with proper ideas for anything new.

Admittedly, Reason had acknowledged that it had 'locked-down' functionality that might help with things once it was unlocked, and couldn't reveal anything tied to said functionality while it was locked, but had also stated that the hardware modules might not contain useful equations. Space was of the opinion that some of what she wanted to create would be easier once they had the full dimensional transference equations and she had some training in it. Neither really helped her now.

It led to a lot of frustration as she tried to understand how various bits of math went together to get different effects so that she could do new things with them on her own. Except that she didn't have enough math background, so another instance of her was in the multitasking interface studying math books. She'd also added some physics to the queue so that she knew what kinds of things to take into account.

One such thing to take into account was not allowing an explosion from her fist to affect her fist due to equal and opposite reactions. Because that would suck and she wasn't sure if the Knight Armor would protect her properly there. That might depend on whether the spell was layered on the outside of the protections or on her fist directly, if it would properly protect her from a spell she was actively casting at the time of the explosion, and who knew what other details.

Perhaps she should be asking Taylor to tutor her in math in addition to practical training?

Protectorate staff had brought Taylor lunch, apparently no longer avoiding the area. They confirmed that they could see and remember Aisha, and then one of them offered to play card games with Taylor for a bit. It didn't take long for them to get frustrated, and it wasn't until after they'd left that she'd realized that she'd been absently keeping track of every card in the deck even through shuffling. Which could be good for some parlor tricks, admittedly, but was probably considered cheating if anyone figured out that she'd been doing it.

With card games done, she'd switched to reading the book that she'd brought with her. It was one that she'd read before but didn't mind reading again, since she hadn't bothered to visit the public library for something new just for maybe reading today. It was midafternoon when she stopped, the funnel vanishing sooner than she'd personally expected it to. Several medical staff came in and moved both her and Aisha out of the room and into a medical room to be checked up on.

Taylor was cleared quickly and was able to collect her things before being escorted out of the building. Aisha was still unconscious at that point but should pull through without any significant issues. She just needed time to recover from the ordeal, and they didn't need Taylor sticking around for however long that would end up taking. Instead she got an uneventful ride home while Hive continued to process the just-consumed shard.

"I'm back," Taylor called as she entered the house well before dinnertime.

"Crap," her father called back. "Does that mean that I have to cook instead of expecting you to fend for yourself?"

"Maybe."

He met her in the hall, seeing that she was alone. "Oh well. Learn anything of use?"

"Not sure. Hive's been silent on that front so far, but I haven't been pushing for answers either."

"My Lord has been patient," Hive said. "And I'm honestly amazed at what that particular Shard device was used for, on top of being concerned that it going missing will be noticed."

Taylor blinked at that. "Oh?"

"It was unusually open in configuration compared to the others due to having two active profiles. Hiding the one it was connected to by altering perceptions and memories in real time was one fairly limited profile, the other was an on-demand trigger to erase specific outside memories in a varying area when requested. The latter had been used hundreds of thousands of times and I believe several attempted triggerings of it occurred during the absorption process. To accomplish those tasks the device was capable of scanning, simulating, and editing most mammalian brains at a minimum. Surprisingly, the end result actually looks to be safe and reasonably reliable for what it is."

It took Taylor a moment to realize what Hive had just said. "You just absorbed a mind reading and editing device? One that's likely done its thing to hundreds of thousands of people?"

"Yes, Lord. The scanning is detailed enough to be useful for a number of things, but the editing portion implies things that disturb me. Specifically, how many trials did this go through before they got it to this level of accuracy and safety?" Taylor and her father both shuddered at that, but Hive continued. "Beyond that while it is amazingly safe, it isn't perfect and repeated exposure to the original effects could cause a number of potential long-term problems. I don't recommend using the editing functionality at all."

Taylor nodded immediately. "That sounds like a very good idea."

"I find myself wondering what the scanning part would be useful for," her father added. "Since you seem to think it would be useful?"

"That's easy enough," Hive answered. "Imagine an interface device that can literally read your mind, allowing you to control whatever it's attached to in various ways. A Combat Device could know exactly what you need it to do in real time, a computer could pull text and images right out of your thoughts, or perhaps a wheelchair that's directed by the user's thoughts. All without needing to use mana at all, though I'm not yet certain how compact the scanning equipment can be made without extra-dimensional pockets."

"Huh. I suppose that kind of thing would also let you make Star Trek style doors that only open when you actually intend to go through them, wouldn't it? Or elevators that just know what floor you need to go to, I suppose."

"Only if the targets don't have any multidimensional shielding up at all, though the device bypassed a number of things by virtue of being permitted to piggyback on existing connections from other Shard devices. That capability and requests from other devices for memory erasures were mediated in part through the slave circuit. I attempted to analyse it, but had to destructively dismantle it before it could send out a distress signal."

Taylor thought about that for a moment, then sighed. "Somehow I suspect that 'can read minds' isn't going to come up as useful in anything other than a 'violate privacy' context anytime soon, at least from a combat point of view. Though if you can get 'control computers and wheelchairs' down to a headband without needing mana then that would probably be a good money-maker."

Her father nodded. "That definitely sounds reasonable, so long as the headband couldn't just be reprogrammed to read everything from someone's brain."

"I'll add it to the low priority list," Hive said. "Lord, my previous supply combined with the processed resources from the device combined provide just enough components for two more augmentation units. Do you have any preference for how those are distributed? Missy has three available slots to your four, but she also has only one existing unit to your three."

That was a good question, and Taylor thought about it for a moment. "I can see a good argument for getting her up to three, but at the same time I have potential plans now that could benefit from me getting a boost before I enact them. So I'm thinking one for each of us, get us both to or past half capacity for the things."

"That sounds fair," her father agreed. "I can't see Ethan or Sherie disagreeing either. Though that does bring up the question of when."

"Tonight for me if Hive thinks she'll be ready, next Friday or Saturday for Missy in case it keeps her from sleeping properly like it does to me."

"There will be no problems with starting tonight," Hive agreed. "Though tomorrow you will need to adjust to the added output."

"Of course. Not like today was a good day for training anyway."

Missy had been excited when they'd informed her about getting her a second augmentation unit the following weekend, but Taylor was getting her new unit that night. Which meant that her body didn't get much sleep and she was constantly somewhat distracted. She'd opted to stick with working on playing the flute instead of anything more serious, ending up feeling like she'd made some actual progress by morning.

Hive had finished processing things as far as she planned to and wanted to install things in the Inn. Specifically, she planned on using the morning to set up remote shard hardware for various uses. Initially locked down to her and Taylor, but possibly eventually to be opened up in a limited fashion to Missy as well at some point. It wasn't going to be anywhere near as capable as Hive's own systems but it should still be useful for shard techniques that worked best crossing dimensional boundaries.

Which seemed to be almost all of them, because the things operated that way by default.

Once done with that, Hive's plans were to start tracing back the tracking devices that had been left in the warehouse. The one left by the PRT was likely to be the only one they didn't go to any length to follow the trail of, since it had seemed to be an honest mistake that Armsmaster had let them know of quickly. The rest were more likely to be interesting, if only from the point of view of figuring out what others were planning.

"You look like you stayed up all night," Missy commented when she arrived for exercise.

"I didn't get much sleep," Taylor admitted. "You can probably expect that yourself next weekend."

"Crap. That's why we're waiting until the weekend?"

"Yep."

"That's going to suck."

Taylor shrugged. "You get used to it, and you'll go through it less times if we both end up with all of our slots filled."

Missy nodded. "That makes sense. It doesn't sound fair, but it makes sense." She then looked around. "Where's your father?"

"He's in the new command center trying it out."

"Why would he be doing that now?"

Taylor grinned while gesturing towards the door of the Inn. "Because instead of a run we're going to be in the air. Remember the first training session you joined?"

Missy's eyes widened. "Before breakfast?"

"Suck it up," Sherie's voice said over the communication system from where she was also monitoring back on Bet. "As a hero you don't get to choose to eat before replying to an all-hands emergency."

"Fuck."

Missy frantically dodged a beam that had nearly hit her face before dropping a shield in the path of a homing bullet. Reason twisted into the path of another homing bullet, a shield appearing at its tip just in time to intercept the bullet. Six more bullets and two beams were dodged in the following second and a half, two of the bullets exploding in fixed points while the other four continued on towards Taylor instead of sticking around where Missy currently was.

Speaking of Taylor, it was completely unfair how unfazed she was with the entire exercise. The older girl didn't even have Hal or Chain out and had claimed to be working on snap-casting without any gestures whatsoever. To that effect, she'd even blindfolded herself, relying entirely on her sensor and whatever mana senses she had. Then there were the training drones, that had automated shield drones hovering around them, intercepting any bullets or beams sent their way. Something that Danny claimed was Taylor's own creation, and yet the older girl didn't seem to care to use the spell normally.

Admittedly, building reflexes that depended on having automated shielding sounded like a horrible idea, but it still felt ridiculous.

Every few minutes Taylor would also send attacks at Missy. It'd taken ten of those before Missy realized that meant that she could add to the pile of attacks heading towards Taylor. Not that the added bullets and beams had seemed to even register, each of them dodged or blocked as needed. Which was annoying as hell, since several of Taylor's attacks had gotten through.

A few minutes later Missy went wide-eyed as she realized that she was boxed in and about to be slammed by who knew how many bullets. Still, she'd kept a multitasking instance in reserve for just such an occasion, and just before she was going to be hit she vanished in a flash of light. Having 'blinked' out of the way, she dodged three more bullets while an explosion of light came from where she'd just been.

"Not bad," Danny said. "Wasn't sure if you'd picked up on the tactic of keeping an emergency blink handy."

"I'm not up to spamming them like Taylor does," Missy replied, backflipping through the air to dodge four bullets. One of them suddenly flashed and became a homing bullet headed straight for her ass, only to be intercepted by a point-blank shield. "But yes, having one ready just in case only makes sense."

It pretty much went unsaid that as soon as she'd finished casting that blink spell that another one had been queued up and held ready. Now that she'd demonstrated that she was ready with one she was expecting more 'no way out without it' events to come up. She wasn't disappointed either, ending up blinking out of six more situations before she was called out of the fray. Taylor kept at it, though, and now had the undivided attention of the training drones. Missy left her to it and dropped onto one of the couches in the Inn to properly catch her breath. Her flight spell and Knight Armor had been dismissed just after she'd landed at the Inn.

"You lasted longer than the first time," Sherie said. "And you didn't have to be evacuated."

"I'm still not up to Taylor's level."

"The only way you're getting to her level is if she stops training."

"That is a good point. Still feels wrong to be so far behind, and the blasted bullets ignore spatial warping more often than not. That negates most of my tricks from being a Ward, where I was at least the equal of everyone else on the team."

"And I'm fairly certain that Taylor could take on every parahuman in New England at the same time and still come out on top, so using what you used to be able to do as a benchmark is stupid. Right now I'm betting that you could likely take on any five parahumans at once. I sure as hell don't want to fight you."

"Assuming you exclude Taylor," Danny interjected. "Assuming we're counting 'mages' as being a form of parahuman, anyway."

"Yes, we're excluding mages. Especially mages with force multiplying drone support."

"Those do tend to tip the odds quite a bit in the mage's favor."

"Are you trying to make me more jealous of not having Taylor's insane multitasking?"

"No," Sherie replied. "Just got off on a bit of a tangent. Still, you should probably come home and eat something."

Missy sighed, but nodded and pushed herself up off of the couch. Moving over to the nearest transport device she reached out to it and asked it to send her home.

Taylor groaned as she got up, having just gone through a post-breakfast second pass on the tumbling devices. The first two levels had actually been unable to even affect the multitasking interface with the brain shield up. The second level caused the drain from said shield to become noticeable, but the shield held. Unfortunately, the third level was barely held back, tearing the new shield apart just before it did the same to the multitasking interface.

It took a few minutes for her to recast the brain shield, after which she grumbled a bit and remotely triggered one of the transport devices to pull her back to the Inn. At least this time she hadn't spent more than a few minutes unconscious. They really needed to come up with a version of those tricks that could allow exclusions. Preferably that could be made into a spell or barrier, something that Hive was working on but hadn't gotten to the initial testing stage of yet.

"Well that was fun," Taylor said as she dropped into one of the chairs.

"I'm sure it was," her father agreed with a smirk. "Still, Hive says she's almost done what she needs to be here for and made a few devices for Ethan and Sherie to use as a secondary security system. You two should probably go install that today, unless you'd prefer to do it while watching Missy tomorrow?"

"Might as well get it over with. Besides, it'll be easier to show them how the thing works if they're actually there."

"Very true. Do you have anything else to test today?"

Taylor shrugged. "I should probably see how the grasping tentacles thing I've come up with works on an unshielded non-simulation human, but I think that can wait a few days."

He raised his eyebrow. "Are you planning on testing it on yourself?"

"That was the plan, yes."

"Why not test it on me?"

"Because I can shut it down faster if it's a problem and I'm the one captured by it?"

"Seems like a poor test if you can get out that easily."

Taylor rolled her eyes. "The first test is to ensure that people grabbed by the tentacles can, in fact, breathe. Additional tests after that would likely involve others, but until I know that breathing works I don't think it would be responsible to test with someone who can't dismiss it as soon as they realize that they're suffocating."

"Oh. That's a much better argument, and all of a sudden I don't want to be the first test subject. It's also more responsible than I was expecting, given how many other things you've apparently been somewhat lax in testing properly."

"Most of my Lord's spell problems have been discovered during proper testing in reasonably safe environments," Hive countered as she appeared. "The same goes for my own testing. Admittedly, some of those environments are no longer anything resembling safe, but they're also not places that anyone visited regularly for any reason."

He looked between the two before sighing. "Okay, you win. Shall we head home then?"

A few minutes later they were back on Bet, Taylor grabbing a snack while her father turned on the television. It was likely going to be a lazy rest of the morning across the board, though there was a message relayed through Missy. They came to a quick agreement that Taylor would head over after lunch to set up the new magical security system.

604

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CmptrWz

Aug 5, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 66 - June 5, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Aug 12, 2020

#12,042

Ethan and Sherie had been happy with the surveillance drone based security system devices that were now hidden in a few walls. Their command stations would alert them to anything suspicious, in addition to Space informing Missy. The transport device in the house would actually recharge the system if needed, though Missy was likely going to be putting out enough extra mana to keep them running.

That evening Taylor had come up with a new project, born from thinking about Missy's performance during their morning training session. Her binding spell effectively required that she be able to score a hit on someone with an attack. A highly visible hit that was also easily detected with mana senses at a minimum. When they eventually added bindings to the list of things used in spars they'd be useless if they were that obvious and easily blocked.

To get around that, she decided to modify the binding trigger particles that she'd made, normally deposited by a bullet, to be a little larger and more complicated. Instead of being deposited by a bullet, this version would be distributed like the binding particles were, but with targeting data. Generic humans would be a default, to prepare to bind anyone in the area, but other targets could be loaded in at casting time. They'd be static once cast, unable to be altered, but she was okay with that limitation. Casting more with different parameters would always be an option, after all. Also, instead of triggering when they hit critical mass at specific points they would be triggered remotely.

On the limitations front, she could only have a combined total of sixteen target and exclusion parameters while leaving the particles small enough to not be easily detected as being different from the binding particles. Well, easily detected by her own sensor ability, anyway. The rest of the potential slots she could've used for that were locked into the 'where to gather' parameters, something that she didn't want to make all that variable for safety reasons. Though she did have two versions of that block, one for all forms of animals and one for Endbringers. Leviathan did not have normal living anything, after all.

Around three in the morning she ended up starting over from scratch on the binding particles, the binding trigger particles, and her traps when she stumbled upon an equation variant that both suppressed the glow until things were assembled and felt closer to 'background mana' to her simulated senses. Sure, you could tell that there was a concentration where something had hit, but it would hopefully feel less like 'someone is preparing to do something here' and more like 'wasted or otherwise leftover energy'.

Granted, for traps that distinction would probably only truly work once on any given mana-sensing opponent, but it was a lot more likely to work in general in that situation than the previous variants of things. The downside, if you wanted to see it that way, was that it appeared to make the mana decay faster overall. Anything using this trick had no more than eight hours or so after being released before it would break down into background energy if not otherwise used. Taylor's view of that was that it made cleanup easier because traps and binding particles would just cease to exist sooner.

She wasn't quite done with testing the new equations in the simulation system by the time she was getting up on Monday, but that was okay. The old versions would work fine for now, and no significant training or patrols were happening during the week anyway. Exams for her, school for Missy. They'd only gotten away with the previous day's activities due to finishing up all the hard stuff in the morning.

Taylor frowned around halfway to tutoring. She'd sent surveillance drones ahead of her to check out the route and there were several potential ambushes set up. They weren't set up along all of her potential routes, just the easiest ones, so she adjusted her course to take one of the slightly annoying paths instead. None of the groups adjusted for that, so they likely didn't have spotters far enough back to catch that she'd chosen a route that they weren't sitting on.

They obviously did have spotters watching for her to arrive at the building, though, because the groups all broke down their ambush points shortly after her arrival. Half of them appeared to move to set up on likely departure routes while the other half left, likely intending to come back later. So far none of them were set up on her likely routes to head to watch Missy, so hopefully she could largely ignore them all for the day.

Instead of finding her normal tutor for the day, Mister Coste was there instead. With a stack of sealed manilla envelopes.

"Good morning Miss Hebert," he greeted. "Take a seat. My general lack of other responsibilities led to me being designated as the one to administer most of your exams this week. The only exam that I won't be administering is your programming exam. I'm told that you could fail that exam and still pass with full marks due to the number of bonus points you've accumulated, so we aren't bothering with it."

Taylor nodded, that making some sense. "Good morning to you as well."

"This arrangement also makes it easier if you happen to finish an exam before the time allotted for it is up. Starting the next exam immediately instead of waiting for your next tutor to arrive means that you can potentially finish early for any given day, or even get through extra exams and finish before the end of the week."

"Now that sounds nice."

"Just don't rush specifically to finish early. Better to do your best than to finish early, after all."

Missy found herself sitting across from Dinah again at lunch, and Aisha was back as well. Back without her powers, but it wasn't like Missy could explain how she knew that without someone else telling her. Of course, not having to worry about the girl running around doing who knew what while nobody around her was able to tell she was there was nice, as would the added boost to Missy's core the coming weekend.

"So," Aisha said a minute after she'd sat down next to Missy. "I want to apologize to you two for attempting to filch some of your lunch the other day, as well as for trying to spy on you Missy."

Missy blinked at that. "Oh?"

"Yeah. I definitely wasn't in my right mind, but I'm back to my proper self. Mostly. I hope? I'm at least better than I was last week."

Dinah shrugged. "Whatever. Are you going to apologize to anyone else?"

"For what, at least from their point of view?"

Missy had to admit that was probably a good point, but didn't say anything about it. A couple of others at the table were already giving them weird looks as it was and Aisha wasn't going to be making them forget about the conversation anymore.

"Right," Aisha continued after neither of them answered her. "Have either of you seen Minerva's new building that went up at the end of last week?"

"Pictures only," Dinah replied. "Though it looks much nicer than the surrounding area and obviously has a generator if it has working lights but no connection to the grid."

"My brother and I passed it last night and it really stands out as one of the only well-lit buildings in the area, and the only one with an intact and well-lit parking lot. He said that alone probably increased the property values of the surrounding lots significantly."

Missy snorted at that. "The surrounding lots probably quadrupled in value the instant it was known that Minerva was going to own that one. That she made her lot look nice would be a trivial change in comparison to that."

Dinah nodded. "If only because being her neighbor is a good place to try and monitor her from. My uncle claimed that the person who gave her the warehouse owned one of the neighboring buildings too and made several times the value of both lots selling that one."

"That sounds like a great way to get rid of multiple properties you aren't using and make a profit on them."

Missy idly wondered if it would be better to go take a look with Ethan and Sherie out of costume or just badger Taylor into showing her the building in costume. Though the latter might be best done after an initial public patrol, or perhaps as part of the initial patrol? Familiarizing herself with the area around the new base of operations type deal. It was something that wasn't school or horrendous math equations to think about, at least.

Taylor found herself stretching as she left the tutoring building half an hour early, taking off on a longer route than normal to get to the Walsh household a moment after the door shut behind her. She'd taken Mister Coste by surprise with how quickly she'd gone through each exam, but didn't really care at this point. Slowing down for the sake of slowing down didn't appeal to her when she wanted to have her schedule be less predictable for the groups obviously looking to try and grab her, after all. Besides, she'd already slipped up and they thought she was probably some kind of hidden genius, so showing off slightly should be fine.

Admittedly, 'flipping through' each exam first so that she could spin a multitasking instance off for every question was probably going a little overboard, but being able to just write out the answers without stopping to read each new question as she went along sped things up considerably. Essay questions and shown work pre-prepared before she got to them, just needing to be written down, was honestly quite nice. A complete lack of needing to correct mistakes because she'd already double or triple checked the work, writing out just the final version, was also nice. Having another multitasking instance check everything just after she finished a question served as her nervous double-checking as well.

She still had some exams left and would have to come back tomorrow, a couple of them not having even been provided today, but Mister Coste had admitted that she was probably going to be finished before lunch. Then they might want her to swing by for her final grades on Friday, after everything had been evaluated, but that was likely to be it with the rest of the week free from needing to swing by the building.

It took the groups that had set up their ambushes a few minutes to realize that she wasn't passing by any of them, and she thought that she'd lost their spotters long before they knew where she was actually going. Surveillance drones made it far too easy to slip through their attempts, though they were also going to have to get a lot more flexible once her tutoring was over. That might be annoying, but constantly dodging them when she went out would hopefully just look like she was intentionally randomizing her routes to avoid being predictable.

Stopping for a hotdog at a cart and the longer route combined still had her quite early to the Walsh household. She didn't have a key or alarm code, even if she and Hive could've bypassed both easily. Not wanting to just sit on the porch, she headed to a nearby park to sit under a tree until it was closer to the time when Missy should be arriving. To the casual observer she was likely just sitting there relaxing, but she was monitoring the area while going over plans for working with Missy this afternoon.

Missy was likely just getting out of school when it became obvious that Taylor had been located, several groups of vehicles pulling into the area around the small park. They didn't seem to all be working together as armed individuals gathered, but almost by chance they'd covered pretty much all of her escape routes. Several routes were covered twice, in different ways due to the groups probably not realizing that someone else already had guards within a block of their own positioning.

Examining weapons seemed to be the best way to identify who was working with who. One group was mostly shotguns, another pistols. The group with tasers was probably the only one looking to be at least potentially non-lethal barring the intimidation factor, though they did have a single light machine gun on one guy's back. Actually, if she was correct, that was also the only group with anything to tie someone up with. Presumably the others weren't in the mood to risk having her live to fight back.

Taylor retrieved the beacon Armsmaster had given her into her pocket before she reached in to hit the yellow button on it. That done, she monitored as the groups entered the little park. Interestingly, the first thing they noticed was each other, and Hive ended up throwing up a shield around her when the group with pistols opened fire on the group with tasers. It turned out that there were two groups with shotguns, and one entered the firefight while the other approached the tree she was under from behind her. Only to find the shield protecting her, thus stopping them from grabbing her.

"Fucking shield," one of the group of five said just after they'd surrounded her. "Shoot it down."

Taylor flinched at the first shot from one of the shotguns, just because of how loud it was, but the shield didn't even seem to notice the hit. Nor did it notice the next couple, though Hive obviously had enough at that point and fired a bullet into one of the shotguns. That shotgun's barrel exploded, the man who'd been firing it dropping it and stepping back, but the other four kept going. Hive's next bullet hit an arm instead, making Taylor grimace and shiver as it blew the arm off of the man entirely. That had the other three stopping to stare at what had just happened.

"Holy shit," the one who'd already lost their shotgun said, staring at the screaming man now grabbing the stump of his arm.

Hive started to glow with another bullet, and the three men still holding shotguns dropped them and put their hands up. Someone from one of the other groups had looked over and yelled something about the necklace 'shooting off limbs', which had caused scattering among those not currently surrounding Taylor. The man who'd already had his shotgun destroyed looked at her, or possibly at Hive, then carefully moved over to try and do something for the man who'd lost an arm. After a moment the lack of being shot by the glowing prepared bullet caused one of the others to try to help as well.

Taylor was doing her best to ignore the injury and was instead paying attention to anything but it. Such as the approaching police cars, as well as the very quickly approaching parahuman that had to be Velocity. Her perception of his movement was obviously altered above and beyond normal, given that he appeared to be more like an oddly-shaped and fast-moving fog cloud right up until he stopped at the edge of the park. Then he snapped back to normal for three seconds, just long enough to take the situation in, before jumping to the fog cloud in order to get next to the man who'd lost his arm.

Well, he'd attempted to get next to her, but obviously hadn't gotten anywhere with the barrier that Hive had thrown up and had switched to checking on the obviously-injured thug instead. He didn't seem to care about the glow of the not-launched bullet either, though that could be not realizing that it was a bullet instead of a side effect of generating the barrier. Not that Hive was likely to shoot a member of the Protectorate.

"What happened here?" Velocity asked as he pulled a zip tie out of a hidden pocket.

Taylor was about to say something when one of the thugs spoke up instead. "We were going to kill her to take the necklace, since the necklace is easier to move than a person, but didn't know it could shoot back."

That caused Taylor and Velocity to pause, though the latter recovered first. "That was oddly forthcoming."

"The thing has another attack ready to fire and I don't want to know if it counts telling lies as a valid reason to use it."

Velocity looked back at Taylor. "Is that what the glow is? I don't suppose you can turn it off?"

Taylor shrugged. "My guess is that it, and the barrier, will go away when they're properly secured. Or at least the barrier went down after the ones that shot at me in New York were properly secured."

"Ah. Yes, that would make sense. Hopefully the police officers approaching have more restraints available than I do, and we'll need to get an ambulance here."

Somehow things finished up in time for Taylor to make it to the Walsh household within fifteen minutes or so of Missy having arrived. Most of that was likely attributed to the thugs that had actually attacked Taylor having been very forthcoming with information while they were being secured, though when the police officers showed up they'd needed to read them their rights before taking statements from them.

Taylor was happy that kind of thing didn't apply to her when she was out as Minerva, instead falling to the officers she turned people over to.

"What happened?" Missy asked once she'd let Taylor into the house.

"Bounty hunters," Taylor replied. "Though I think some of them value their limbs and life more than they want the money from me or Hive. Especially given that the one that Hive was a bit literal in disarming might not make it."

"Lord, I did my best to ensure that the injury wouldn't be fatal," Hive added. "Though running my field healing system at that distance to prevent fatal blood loss was difficult. I felt that allowing the officers to question them would be better, provided that no further deterrent attacks were needed."

Taylor nodded. "Yeah. That makes sense, though I think I'd have been happy without that level of injury being inflicted."

"Your father has stated that he would prefer that examples be made of those willing to cause you significant harm instead of allowing others to attempt to harm you without retribution. Further, causing the injury sent a message that appears to have been well received. I identified all of the cell phones of those in the attacking groups and monitored them. So far at least one member of each group has made a call to inform others that going after you isn't worth the money with sole exception of the group taken into custody."

"Huh."

"However, the group that sent you the poisoned letter was also monitoring things, though I'm not sure how. They got a call about the incident a few minutes ago and have decided to start 'operation father'. I've just sent a message to your father via his command station to be on the lookout for trouble, though I have no details as to what 'operation father' actually entails. It was likely pre-planned before we even knew that the group existed."

That had Taylor scowling, but there wasn't a whole lot to do other than ensure that they could keep track of her father. Which they could, due to his belt and the command station he kept on him normally. Well, short of sending a cloaked combat drone to follow him around, which was probably a bad idea. Then again, scaling that down to a surveillance drone might not be a horrible idea, just to be able to watch out for threats? Dispatching one from the group in her neighborhood took only a minute. She didn't have it going fast, so it would be ten to fifteen minutes before it reached her father, but that should be fine.

"So," Taylor said once she'd done that. "Do you have any homework that needs to be done before we get to anything else?"

Missy stared at her for a moment, but sighed after that. "Yeah. Two assignments."

"Then I suppose that we should start with you taking care of those."

Missy had found her homework to be straightforward and hadn't taken as long as she'd feared to complete it. She and Taylor had then set the new security system to let them know about a number of things before they adjourned to the beach for some light work with Reason. Nothing major, just some basic practice and coming up with training exercises to improve control. More serious training would have to wait until Friday at the earliest. At the same time, she'd asked about help with math and had admitted to the 'wrap spell around hands' desire as part of that.

That had led to a lesson in the simulation system while their physical selves were working on chain-whip practice. Unlike her homework, that was not straightforward and had eventually given her a headache. Getting a spell to sit on your hand or fist without affecting you if you moved your fingers was harder than it looked. Taylor had eventually recommended anchoring it to a Knight Object gauntlet or glove, since targeting a prepared surface was easier.

The math did turn out to be easier there, but it was still beyond Missy's level. Despite that, they were able to come up with a way to apply a muted explosion on contact. It worked in simulation but would need a lot more testing before it was going to be used against an actual target. Not to mention that Taylor had no problems casting it, but that didn't apply to Missy even in the simulation system. Something about the coils that would charge and hold mana waiting to be released by the trigger so that the spell didn't need to be recast between punches just didn't want to form properly for her.

She currently blamed the forty-six physical dimensions that the things were twisted around and through 'for efficiency reasons'. Space's ability to grant additional awareness of spatial dimensions seemed to top out at thirty-something physical dimensions before things started getting confusing again and she started to get headaches. Not that said ability helped her understand the math or keep the various symbols straight.

"Sounds interesting," Ethan said after Taylor had explained some of that to him. In very different words than Missy would've used. "Though that does bring up an interesting question."

"Oh?" Sherie asked. "What kind of thing does that bring to mind, and will I need to get some foul-tasting soap ready for when you voice it?"

He rolled his eyes. "She's having issues with the large number of tightly-packed physical dimensions. Is something like that included in the whole teleporting to other dimensions spell?"

"Oh yeah," Taylor said, nodding. "That takes into account all sixty-four physical dimensions in multiple ways each, even if you're just going across the room with it."

"So is that why you use the transport devices? Because of how complicated the casting is?"

"My Lord still casts the spell herself four times out of five," Hive corrected. "Using the transport devices to mute the flash or as a known-safe target point, but controlling the transit herself. She's also worked her way to taking a third less mana and around ten percent less time than the transport devices do on average as well, though figuring out why hasn't been a priority. I've attributed it to her demonstrated ability to manipulate mana without equations."

"I have a couple of shortcuts," Taylor admitted. "But that isn't really relevant right now."

Missy felt her eye trying to twitch at that. Based on what had just been said, it was possible that the dimensional transference spell was too complicated for her to learn right now. She could need years before she was ready for that one, yet Taylor apparently cast it frequently and with more efficiency than the devices that were designed for doing so. Of course, this was also the girl who hadn't realized that she could drop spells into her core's weird storage area because she's just that good with the math and thus didn't need to, so perhaps that was to be expected.

That evening Taylor sat there thinking about the problems Missy was having with the new spell. Hive had helped adapt some of what the combat devices did to apply effects to their surfaces, but what amounted to mana capacitors were proving to be more complicated than the younger girl could handle. Seeing Missy struggle with the math to that degree had been enlightening regarding her own skill with the subject. Of course, then there was Hive's comment about the dimensional transference spell.

It'd only taken a few minutes to connect to one of the transport devices to see how they handled things. They always used the coordinate system based on the center of the Sun on Bet, compared to Taylor's personal style of converting any coordinates she was using to relative ones from her position before casting. Well, when she wasn't wrapping the spell in something else, anyway. The fixed coordinate system was the only reliable one they had for when the spell could trigger somewhere else.

She'd given Hive a quick rundown there, then worked with her to figure out a possible solution for Missy. Taylor hadn't had any issues casting the spell, in eight different variants, but that apparently didn't mean anything for others. Simplifying the capacitor equations might work, but wouldn't be easy. There were a couple of other capacitor setups that Hive had come up with, of course, but they would require other complexities or would restrict the caster to a single punch per minute or so. Instead, she had the idea of giving Missy a device or two specifically designed to cast the spell for her. A vambrace or two to cast the gauntlet spell seemed like a fitting solution and shouldn't get in the way when the spell wasn't in use.

They'd just make the things, but it was probably better to check with Missy first. Being able to cast the spell herself would be an achievement, and having a crutch might not appeal to her. Instead they'd hand her a list of options, from doing nothing and letting her work on casting the spell to adjusting the equations but adding other limitations all the way to the additional casting aid. Missy could make the decision instead, and would hopefully appreciate being given the options.

With that list done she'd ended up working with Hive in the simulation system on more tweaks to scanning spells. Apparently testing devices had been running through things for Hive all day, resulting in a number of improvements to all of their scanning spells. None of the improvements were going to help much with their sensor surfaces, but Hive had been able to scan quite a bit without leaving traces in the dimension being scanned. Though there was a problem with scanning Bet.

"What do you mean you're now tracking the Endbringers?" Taylor asked, shocked.

"Nine out of my first eleven tests attempting to scan your home or the warehouse were 'pulled' to the Endbringers instead," Hive answered. "Only by keeping track of them and actively excluding them was I able to run the full set of tests. Given their nature I figured that it would make more sense to keep an eye on them, especially Behemoth, so I didn't stop tracking them when my tests were completed."

"So their, er, cores? They're that obvious when scanning from another dimension?"

"Yes, Lord. I'm doing a sweep of the inner shroud looking for similar signatures as part of the current round of testing. I'm over halfway done and have found eleven others so far. I planned to inform you once I knew for certain how many there were out there, though only the three here on Bet appear to be 'active' in any way. At the same time, none of the scans have come up with any way to even begin to control the cores, their composition being both like and decidedly unlike Shards in different ways. Further, the inactive ones are in a bunker-like shell and may attempt to become active if the shell is assaulted."

"Oh."

"The scans show that the shells do appear to be vulnerable to the unfolded matter technique. It may be prudent, once we know how many there are and where they're located, to issue a preemptive strike against them. With any luck they're actually all inside of the inner shroud as I've found none outside of that area."

Taylor half nodded, considering the implications of there being eleven more Endbringers just sitting out there dormant. Possibly more than eleven, even. A strike against them, before they could be activated, sounded like a great idea on some levels. It would likely need to be coordinated to hit all of them at the same time so that there would be no warning, but then there was the question of what the already-active ones would or wouldn't do.

"Do you think taking out the dormant ones will rile up the already-active ones?" Taylor asked.

Hive shrugged. "I don't know, Lord. It may be prudent to be ready to engage one or more of the active ones just after taking out the others. At the same time, it's entirely possible that their destruction wouldn't be noticed until their controller attempts to activate them. I have no way of knowing either way, but as far as I can tell there aren't any active connections that would be monitoring them."

So it was possible that taking them out would be missed entirely, or that taking them out would be noticed immediately and the other three would be riled up. Though in the latter case it was also possible that they'd vanish for a bit to go investigate, assuming they could do that, so perhaps that wasn't a horrible thing? It would make engaging them away from population centers easier, at least.

Of course, given some of their other theories, specifically on shards gathering information, she only really had Missy to even consider talking with this about in any detail. Well, short of talking to her father about what they were going to do right before doing it, with him at the Inn during the entire operation. Once the deed was done there wouldn't be secrecy to worry about on that front, right?

It was something to consider, at least.

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Threadmarks Chapter 67 - June 7, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Aug 19, 2020

#12,269

Hive had found seventeen 'dormant' Endbringers, in a pattern that allowed them to find the three empty shells from where the active ones had lain. That had allowed them to see that the shells unfolded to release the cores, sadly without providing any additional information on potentially controlling them. It was likely that the cores themselves had something like the slave circuit of a normal shard, but were different enough to make attempting to absorb one a bad idea. The biggest concern on Hive's end was how dense they were.

A normal shard device was the size of a continent. Without the spatial warping going on, the Endbringer cores were apparently the size of an entire planet, each, at a minimum. Hive didn't have enough room to scan and process something that large, and given what the active ones did? They couldn't rely on starting the process being enough to keep a retaliatory attack from occurring. All of that being before the possibility of one of the other cores, active or not, turning up to help defend the one being processed.

Just knowing that there were seventeen more Endbringer cores had Taylor slightly distracted all morning, something that was noticed by both her father and Missy as they finished up their morning exercise routine.

"Is something wrong?" her father asked as the Inn's door closed behind them. "You're obviously out of it this morning."

"I found out something disturbing," Taylor replied, mindful that he didn't want to know anything that shards might pull out of his head later. Admittedly, they didn't seem to have done so regarding her connection to Minerva, but they were running 'better safe than sorry' right now. Especially after finding out what Aisha's shard had been doing. "Not sure how to deal with it yet."

"Ah. Is it something to do with the monitoring devices Hive removed from the warehouse?"

That had Taylor blinking. "Er, no. Or at least I hope not, but I haven't actually checked with her on those."

"The monitoring devices fell into four categories," Hive said, floating up to them. "The one from the PRT I didn't bother to trace beyond confirming that it was the only one from the PRT. Three devices led back to an individual going by the name of Accord in Boston but appeared to be more targeted at ensuring that the items shipped didn't go missing due to using simple GPS. Four devices led back to the Elite in New York, two monitoring shipments and two attempting to locate our off-Bet base. The remaining fifteen devices all appear to be attempts to locate or monitor us and trace back through a single AI, but I don't think that the AI is actually aware of them. I'm taking my time to analyse that data path so as to not alert the AI or anyone monitoring it to my presence and don't have full details yet."

"Huh. Good to know. I suppose that we can leave Accord alone. Should we do anything about the Elite's attempt to locate us? It seems like something that we should discourage, but I'm not sure how to best go about doing said discouragement."

"Perhaps you could return their devices," her father suggested. "Make it obvious that they were found and that you know who they came from?"

"I didn't leave the devices intact enough to do that," Hive apologized. "But I could drop a message off in one of their computers. I've become aware that people panic slightly when you bypass their computer security."

"Works for me," Taylor said. "We can escalate if they try again. Maybe drop an exploding bullet into their facility, followed by a temporary note to explain as a second warning?"

"What would the third warning be?" Missy asked. "A bigger explosion?"

"Probably showing up in person to express displeasure, though a combat drone might be a better choice then. I'd have to think about it."

Her father snorted. "That would likely make an impression, yes. At the same time it could also inspire them to repeat things as a way to get you or a drone there for capture and analysis."

Taylor grinned. "Which is why strike four is either dropping a large exploding bullet on them or hitting them from high altitudes, depending on their base location and layout."

Missy flinched in pain as she sat in class. She'd foolishly not put up any Knight Clothing before sitting down for breakfast, having dismissed her Knight Armor a few minutes prior. Then Ethan had decided to get 'creative' and had somehow launched pancakes at high speed. Of the stack of five, three had damaged the wall, one had slammed into her forehead, and the last had tried to dislocate her shoulder.

Her forehead had come out fine, thanks to the skull-anchored barrier, but she had a nasty bruise on her shoulder that Space was slowly working on healing. Hive had remotely apologized for not being able to fully implement her own, faster, field healing systems in other devices right now, but Missy couldn't exactly complain about that side of things. What would probably take at least a week to heal up properly without Space was going to take the better part of the day instead.

The downside to this was that she wasn't going to be doing any physical training with Taylor today. More work on spells, perhaps, but nothing physical so as to not cause problems with the healing Space was working its way through. Perhaps they could come up with a suitable way to get revenge on Ethan for his stupidity, though finding a way to do so without him whining about it constantly or escalating to a back and forth war could be tricky.

Taylor had easily gone through her remaining exams, but Mister Coste had asked if she'd like to do some extra credit. He had a packet of 'advanced math problems' that he thought she might like to look at, the kind of thing that 'would appear in the coming years of her education'. Also known as a pile of problems that nobody had figured out how to solve yet and that he was likely hoping that she'd just write out a solution for.

Suppressing the groan she wanted to release, she agreed to look over the list anyway. Flipping through it, she'd found that most of them were things that she had no clue how to even begin approaching, far too much on the 'theory' side of math and with far too little practical uses for her current knowledge and skills. Though she was able to look at two different problems and decide that they were outright invalid, writing down examples that disproved them by merely existing.

"Lord," Hive sent after Taylor had flipped through to the last page, where she still had no clue how to even begin approaching it. "Would you like to test to see if Mister Coste is paying proper attention to your work?"

"And how would I do that?" Taylor replied, curious.

"I have a common arrangement of materials in my construction, one shared with all of the devices that I've made as well, that allows for limited room-temperature superconductivity. Perhaps you could 'doodle' that into the margins of your paper with some of the relevant math around it?"

"Are you talking about that spiraling setup that lets electrons skip along the atoms without really entering the electron clouds so long as you don't push too much into it at once?"

"...yes, Lord, though I wasn't aware that you were familiar with it."

"I tried using that as a basis for my electricity controlling spells. It doesn't work when any part of it is made out of mana, even if you rearrange it to allow for a straight-line path instead of a spiraling one."

There was a pause as Hive considered that. "Lord, how did you make it work in a straight line?"

It only took a moment to spin up the simulation system to show Hive. The straight-line variant was much harder to produce compared to the spiraling version and couldn't be twisted into a path directly. Though you could probably use the spiraling variant for turns and the straight-line variant for straight paths. Of course, this was also exclusively in simulation, she'd never actually made it work in the real world.

"That is very clever," Hive admitted. "Though expensive, and producing it without mana aiding in stability would be somewhere between difficult and impossible. It also won't work over more than thirty feet or so in the Earth's gravity well. I'd definitely include it though, if only because it's more your own creation than something from my past."

Taylor mentally shrugged and doodled both variants with measurements and manufacturing thoughts into the margin of one of the sheets that she'd provided a disproving example on.

"Sorry about the lack of input on most of them," Taylor said when she was done. "I think I'm more about the practical side of math than the theoretical right now."

"Thank you for taking a look anyway," Mister Coste said as he took the packet back. He flipped through it, frowning, but said nothing for the moment. She thought he might be disappointed that she'd not really touched the problems and probably didn't recognize the superconductor notes for what they were. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to stick around for a bit longer? I have an acquaintance that would like to meet with you to discuss a couple of topics."

"An acquaintance?" Taylor asked.

"He happens to do submission review on some mathematical journals."

"Ah, so he's interested in my never before seen algorithm?"

His left eye twitched slightly at that mention. "Yes, though your father wasn't supposed to say anything about that."

"You showed far too much interest in it for it to be normal, and looking things up so that I'd know the proper name for it gave me nothing that looked remotely correct."

"Of course. Yes, he wants to talk to you about that and other things. He offered to buy and deliver lunch as well, if you're willing to talk to him."

Well, it wasn't like she had a whole lot to do before heading over to watch Missy. You know, outside of heading home and getting some proper testing of things done. Also, a free lunch was a free lunch, right, especially if it was coming to her instead of her having to go to it. "I suppose I can spend some time talking with him."

"Great! I'll give him a call. Do you have any preferences for lunch?"

Taylor had dropped into a discussion with Hive while waiting for lunch, talking about the progress Hive had made in making a large-scale barrier to block effects. Portals, shard abilities, dimensional transference, and hopefully other similar things. Ideally, at least from Taylor's POV, without causing possibly-fatal shard disconnects on people that happened to be inside of the barrier. It might be useful in normal fights or for training, but the new primary goal was actually to ensure that an Endbringer, dormant or active, couldn't escape across dimensional lines.

So far Hive had a barrier that likely blocked everything except for photons, but if their data was correct it would also forcibly disconnect shards and instantly destabilize portals. Possibly useful, but also far too likely to be fatal to use in any normal fight and nowhere near safe enough if they couldn't confirm that all portals inside the barrier were closed first. It also didn't allow for exceptions, such as their own portals or dimensional transference attempts. Their rudimentary plans needed the ability to allow for exceptions, ideally for opening portals but they'd be happy with only dimensional transference and existing connections or possibly spells and mana-tagged objects.

The other problem was that the barrier would start off fine, and if well outside of a planet's gravity well would maintain its shape and position relative to the star just fine. The problem came when testing anywhere from the surface of a planet to in orbit. For some reason the barrier expanded towards the planet's center of mass until it either shattered due to insufficient mana or had grown to encompass the entire planet while centered on the center of mass. Coupled with the current forced disconnections, casting that on Bet would be a catastrophe.

She was pulled out of that by noticing a familiar person approaching on the surveillance drones. The blond man in a tailored suit carrying a briefcase and takeout boxes had a linker core and was a parahuman, but the more important detail was that he had also been in that weird facility that they'd sent sensor drones to a while back. Specifically, he had to be the one that had shot at her drone. That he was able to walk up to the building and open the door with an ID card instead of a code made it seem like he was at least trusted by the PRT, but as far as they could tell the PRT didn't have any dimension-crossing tech. Maybe they'd stumbled upon the facility through some other parahuman's work and mistaken the drones for part of a defense system?

"Good afternoon Mister Wynn," Mister Coste greeted the man when he made it to them.

"Good afternoon," the man, apparently Mister Wynn, replied as he put the food down on one of the tables. He then turned to Taylor, pausing for a moment as he looked at her. He recovered quickly enough. "And good afternoon to you. I assume that you're Miss Hebert?"

Taylor nodded. "Yes. Nice to meet you."

"Likewise. Mister Coste here tells me that you figured out his ruse?"

"Is that the bit where he didn't tell me that nobody had a factoring method like mine or where he handed me a packet crammed full of unsolved problems and called it extra credit?"

"The former, though the latter doesn't surprise me. I'd like to talk to you about some of that, but before we begin I feel that it would be best if I came out and informed you of things that I normally wouldn't, if only for my own safety. I'm a parahuman, and my powers allow me to analyse the world around me from a mathematical point of view. To that end, just being in the same room as you means that my powers are going to examine you as an incidental thing. If you feel it necessary I can arrange for the time we're together here to count towards your contract with the PRT, though I can already tell you that something is preventing me from examining your necklace directly right now. I may have to arrange for proper time during your next session to see if that's still the case when you're 'on the clock', so to speak."

Taylor blinked a couple of times at that, and it took a moment for her to realize that he was being upfront about his parahuman status to avoid being seen as a threat and having his powers removed. That he'd done so with Mister Coste in the room was probably deliberate on that front as well, since having one of her tutors supervising would theoretically reduce the 'danger' she was in with an unknown parahuman.

With that knowledge, she nodded. "I don't think you need to count this as 'examining the necklace' time, but I probably shouldn't complain if you want to contribute to me being paid obscene amounts of money for doing little to nothing later. Especially if your powers pose no actual risk of harming me during the examination. As for your safety, I should hope that those who aren't a threat to me don't have to worry about having their powers removed just because they're near me."

He nodded, though frowned slightly. "Yes, but covering bases is good. With any luck there isn't going to be an attempt to grab potentially-useful abilities either, assuming that those behind your necklace can use the powers they remove. Regardless, thank you." He then placed the briefcase down on the table and opened it up, removing a couple of folders from it. "While I'm not planning on stopping you from eating before things get cold, perhaps you can look over my questions about your factoring method while you eat? I've also got a write-up of your n-body calculations and if we have time I'm hoping that you can provide some insight into some other problems that my powers seem to let me solve, but that I can't figure out how that happens as my powers hide the intermediate steps from me."

Taylor shrugged. "I'm happy to help with my work, and am willing to try on the latter, but I didn't have much insight into anything in Mister Coste's packet due to not really being interested in theoretical mathematics. If your problems are anything like those then I'm probably not going to get anywhere."

Mister Wynn nodded. "All I ask is that you try. Though I think I'll take a look at that packet, see what he already threw your way."

Missy wondered if something had happened to Taylor again, given that the older girl hadn't been waiting for her today. She considered calling her, but it was only about ten minutes before Taylor rang the doorbell.

"What kept you?" Missy asked. "This morning you said you'd be done with your tests before lunch."

"Sorry," Taylor apologized. "My tutor had me talk with someone about some of my math, and then the guy showed me a pile of his own problems. Some of them were interesting to figure out how to get from start to finish on, but a few looked like parts of spell equations with the physical dimensions muddled together."

"Huh. That sounds weird. How did he get those?"

"No clue, and it could just be something that's coincidentally similar. You got any homework today?"

"Just some reading that I did using digital copies of the books in Space. The four of us that got a perfect score on the pop quiz in math were rewarded with not needing to do the review assignments. Which means that I can do my 'math homework' with you by working on spell equations."

Taylor nodded. "How's your shoulder?"

"It no longer hurts, but you know that I was told not to do anything strenuous with it today."

Missy grabbed a snack before the two of them sat down in the living room with the television on. Not that they cared much about what was on, the actual work they were doing was in the simulation system.

"So," Taylor said, three versions of the punch gauntlet hovering in front of her. One was pulsing every tenth of a second, the next was pulsing every few seconds, and the last was pulsing every tenth of a second but had extra bits. "We gave your issues some more thought and came up with three courses of action. The first is to continue working on getting you able to cast the fully-functional version of the punch gauntlet as-is. The second is to give you a version of the spell that's simplified but recharges the punch effect more slowly. Finally, there's giving you a vambrace or two that are specifically designed to cast the spell for you."

Missy looked over the three options, scowling. "Is there any way to just, I don't know, split the spell into smaller chunks? When I play with the individual pieces in simulation I can get them down just fine, I just can't get them all together. So one bit for the gauntlet, another for the mana capacitors, and a final bit for what the gauntlets do? It would also make it far easier to swap things out if I only had to learn the changed bits instead of a complete spell per change and the smaller pieces would be trivial to get into my core storage area for casting. Like having a basic bullet template that I just connect a payload to?"

They stood there for a good minute in silence as Taylor contemplated that, but it was Hive that spoke up next. Surprising Missy by appearing in the interface just before starting to talk. "Lord, I can see about experimenting with such a thing. There are at least two dozen mana linkages that could be related to that, seeming to reach out for something when used, and another collection that seem to do nothing but might be able to be used as a 'tag' of sorts. I can have some testing drones work through all of them to figure out if any could be used for this purpose, individually or in concert with one another, and if so the basics for how to use them."

Taylor shrugged. "Might as well. I haven't needed that, obviously, but I'm apparently better at math than I have any right to be."

"Your connection to me is likely at least partially responsible for that."

"Right, whatever. Missy, while we work on that, and with the understanding that it might not lead to anything at all, do you have any preference for how to go forward on the punch gauntlets?"

Missy looked back over the options, then sighed. "I'd probably have to put the vambraces on every time I wanted to consider using the gauntlets, right? Because that sounds annoying when compared to casting the Knight Armor spell."

"Not really. You can add 'pull this from storage' to your template for things that the spell can't duplicate on its own. For example, stealth field generators that we haven't given you but that I have available to let me teleport out without a bright flash of light when I want to. The same trick should let you just put the vambraces into your template and have them appear and disappear as you cast and dismiss the armor."

What? They could do that kind of thing? "Why am I just finding out about this now?"

"Because I wanted you to train without the dedicated shield generators improving your defensive capabilities."

That, sadly, made sense. Learn to handle things and what her limits were without the boost, then add the boost to make her safer. She couldn't even argue that they'd risked her health in any way because she hadn't gone out in costume yet. "If it's that easy to add then I'll take the vambraces, at least until I can cast the spell without them, but I'd like the rest of the things too."

Taylor nodded, and in the living room six identical purplish bars appeared on the table. Missy grabbed them while Taylor grinned. "The purple-magenta ones are the shield generators and the magenta-purple ones are the stealth field generators."

Missy stared at the six identical bars. "What?"

Taylor laughed, and brought Missy upstairs to her room so that they could go through adding the attachment points to her template.

Hive had finished the vambraces before Sherie had arrived home to relieve Taylor, giving enough time to get those into Missy's Knight Armor template as well. They were similar enough to the cutting tools in construction to be trivial to create, though there would be a small learning curve for how to trigger them. Working with her on getting that down could wait until the weekend. For now, Taylor was at home with her father, watching the news after having eaten dinner.

"You do know that your stunt with the superconductor is probably going to come back to bite you," her father said as things went to commercials. "If only because someone is going to notice and ask how you came up with it."

Taylor nodded. "I'm not fully certain about her motives, but I looked up all of the problems I was given and suspect that Hive came up with the idea in part because one of the problems came from a thinker working with electron flows a couple years ago."

"My Lord is correct," Hive answered. "The other aspect to things is the reasonableness of the PRT when it comes to patents and licensing. Ensuring that you have an obvious income out of costume, without relying on the PRT paying to examine me, can only help you in the future. Especially if it's an income that requires little to no actual visible effort on your part and thus ensures that you don't have to explain how you have money available without necessarily having a job."

"Which assumes that they would go through the initial patent registration hoops for me as a minor non-parahuman, or even give me credit since in this case we left most of the manufacturing steps to be figured out by others."

"Information on the superconductor entered the PRT's systems an hour ago and Dragon has already indicated that she will be working with research firms to attempt to verify the accuracy of the information. They've already started to prepare forms for if that succeeds. Coming up with additional things to patent later, if needed to provide further income, shouldn't be a significant problem."

Well, Taylor had to admit that she hadn't entirely considered that aspect of things, but it was her father who nodded. "That does make quite a bit of sense, and will free Taylor up for being a hero without arousing much suspicion if it works. Spending her time seeing if she can come up with her next invention is a decent cover story, though I wonder if anyone else came up with that particular arrangement already?"

"It may be used by tinkers, but there are no patents anywhere on Bet that come close."

That had Taylor frowning. "Can't tinkers patent their work?"

"Not independently," her father answered. "At least not since the legal battles that almost broke the patent system due to the number of parahumans attempting to patent things that violated the known laws of physics and only worked due to their powers. Most of which couldn't be produced by anyone else, or if they could be made by others it was only specific other parahumans. Now you need to have a working version of things produced by someone else, without parahuman involvement, before you can get a patent on anything and they're very careful about how broad the patent is. Didn't you have a list of verifying companies on the various patents for the breathing masks?"

"Maybe?"

"There were dozens," Hive answered. "Though some of that was due to the PRT's efforts in getting things produced for a potential Leviathan battle. Most patent applications in the past five years have only two to five individuals or groups listed as having made at least one instance of the invention, including the one applying for the patent."

Taylor blinked at that. "They don't cover that when talking about how the system works in school. And how does that work with software? Mrs. Knott complained about software patents being granted for incredibly basic concepts a couple of times, but you don't really build software?"

Her father shrugged. "I don't know. You'd have to check on that yourself. Most of my knowledge actually comes from Kate at the office, specifically her complaining about the hoops that her sister has been having to go through to get something patented. Nobody wants to try and build a copy of whatever it is without a contract that would give them a disproportionate percentage of the royalty income. Or maybe it's entirely reasonable and just being blown out of proportion, I honestly don't know the specifics."

"Huh."

"A quick review indicates that pure software stopped being patentable when the rules changed," Hive said after a moment of silence. "Software tied to a physical process is still patentable, mostly coming up in manufacturing contexts, but otherwise applicants have been directed to copyright their software instead of patent it. This seems to have stemmed from lawyers working for the Elite convincing judges that software is essentially an abstraction of math to invalidate several PRT-mediated patents. I find myself wondering how the system would handle spells, being a form of math with physical results."

Taylor considered that for a moment, before shaking her head. "I don't want to go there, if only because that would be putting far too much information in the hands of others right now."

That led to her father snickering. "Now I'm wondering how the government would classify mages in general. Nothing physical to detect that's different, most of the potentials can't do a thing due to a lack of energy, and they're not mutually exclusive with parahumans. Better, if they did decide to recognize the classification, would the lack of mana available be considered a contribution to disability? Would they have to build public mana generators to keep linker cores healthy?"

Taylor rolled her eyes at that and focused on the news instead. Her father eventually calmed down and paid attention to the news as well, though neither of them was really interested in the national weather report.

"Thank you Jim," the anchor said. "We now return to Sheree Vinter for the latest news on today's incident at the Ellisburg quarantine zone. Sheree?"

The feed switched to what had to be a helicopter or drone camera looking over the wall at the Ellisburg containment zone. A female voice started talking as the footage played, zooming in on a man being held in a cage that the Siberian occasionally dragged along behind a smaller blond figure. "It was only a half an hour ago that we got confirmation as to who slipped through the cordon and riled up Nilbog's creations this morning. It now appears that Jaime Rinke is being used as a combination of hostage and bait by the remaining members of the Slaughterhouse Nine as they take down his creations. Burnscar and Crawler have been seen fighting the various creatures trying to get to Rinke while the Siberian contains Rinke and protects Bonesaw from creations that get past the other two. We don't know what Bonesaw is up to now, but we've not seen any of her spider-bots here today. There is some speculation that something of Bonesaw's was what we saw used to prevent a cloud of potential toxins from escaping the quarantine zone earlier today, but the PRT isn't ruling out that they've got an additional member that we're currently unaware of."

What the fuck?

Last edited: Dec 7, 2022

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Threadmarks Chapter 68 - June 7, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Aug 26, 2020

#12,501

The news quickly switched to other aspects of the remaining members of the Nine being in Ellisburg, in part because they only had approximately five minutes of video footage. Apparently the PRT had cleared the airspace around Ellisburg, just in case. At the same time, information on Bonesaw, Burnscar, and Crawler had been released. Including their names and that Bonesaw and Burnscar, or Riley and Mimi, currently had 'suspended' kill orders. The PRT representative in New York that they talked to about that had said that both capes had only gotten their kill orders while in the Slaughterhouse Nine and there was now a suspicion that Jack Slash might've been a master of some kind.

They'd also stated that in Crawler's, or Ned's, case, rescinding the kill order would probably be seen as an insult. He wanted people to try to kill him, as far as anyone could tell, and had even been seen with a framed copy of the kill order once. Nobody knew where he'd gotten it.

"Do you think that they've got proper containment for things escaping?" Danny asked.

"What?" Taylor replied.

"They said that something stopped a potential plague, but I don't think there would only be one. Do you think they can stop them all?"

"I have no idea."

He nodded. "Could you stop them all if you sent some drones to help?"

"That would likely be trivial," Hive answered. "Though it might be best if they're directly controlled drones, so as to be less likely to make a mistake."

Which, of course, meant sending combat drones, which would have Taylor handling things directly. Fun. She sighed and retrieved a stack from her storage space, still in standby form. "Okay then. Though I think sending them to the Inn and then having them return through a portal would be less likely to be noticed from a flash-of-light point of view." She added some surveillance drones as well, if only to keep a better eye on things with smaller and hopefully less likely to reveal themselves in other ways drones. "I can keep them cloaked so that nobody jumps to conclusions if they aren't needed."

"Easily done, Lord. Upper atmosphere so that you can drop the drones in?"

"Please."

It only took a minute to get the drones to the Inn, landing outside with plenty of room to activate, before Hive had a portal open between there and high above Ellisburg. The drones, already hidden from sight, streamed through and dropped down to observe. The surveillance drones split between circling outside of the walls and checking inside of them while the combat drones positioned themselves around the walls without entering. All of them had to avoid the other drones that were already there, though none of those changed their behavior at all to indicate that they'd noticed the additional watchers.

Taylor ignored her father getting out the command station from his wallet, instead focusing on what was going on in Ellisburg. There wasn't much for her to do, as far as she could see, and after an hour she was fairly certain that she knew approximately what was going on. Bonesaw and the Siberian were working their way out in a spiral, Crawler circling them at a roughly fixed distance. Burnscar was inside of Crawler's circle, burning anything left, except that every fifteen to twenty-five minutes the Siberian would pop over to her. When that happened the fires would all be smothered by Burnscar's shard device, followed by her sitting down and meditating. While she did that, Bonesaw and the Siberian would spray the area with the spray packs. They'd then move forward and repeat this, dragging the cage containing Nilbog with them as well as what were obviously a couple crates of tools and supplies.

Bonesaw, Burnscar, and Nilbog also had linker cores, with Crawler and the Siberian not having any. The Siberian was further odd in that she didn't have biology, and one surveillance drone was sent to trace the odd distorted shard-like connection she had back to its source. That led to a van with a man sitting in the back, one without a linker core but with a normal shard connection. Which meant that the Siberian was probably his projection, and not a parahuman herself. A projection with a decent range, given that he was still well outside of the quarantine zone.

Back in Ellisburg, it was obvious that Crawler was looking for things underground just as much as fighting those attacking, tearing up the earth as he moved along. Every so often a burst of something would come up and he'd pounce on it, occasionally being affected by whatever it was for a few minutes before he adapted and recovered. Perhaps he was looking for and throwing himself into the various countermeasures that Nilbog had set up?

Then there were Nilbog's creations. Those seemed to fall into three categories right now. The most obvious category were the ones attacking Crawler, only one of which was airborne. Perhaps other fliers had already been taken out? Then there were the ones setting up fortifications ahead of the group, not attacking until Crawler or occasionally Burnscar reached them. Those would also occasionally try to slip around, the Siberian intercepting them quickly. None of them were trying to approach over the already-treated areas though, and why became obvious when one was thrown into that zone. Something snapped and the creature dissolved. Examining that had led to the realization that all of Nilbog's creations were connected to a shard device, possibly the only thing keeping them stable.

That left one final group of his creations, a relatively small number that had clustered in small groups along the inside of the walls. They didn't look like they wanted to fight, and several had already made white flags as though ready to surrender as soon as they were threatened. Not that they were going to be threatened anytime soon, given that the four attackers were working slowly from the center of the quarantine zone. Nine of those creations had what felt like malformed linker cores of their own, something that didn't seem to be the case for the other groups of his creations for unknown reasons.

Taylor was considering getting ready for bed when things changed, Bonesaw and Burnscar retreating to near the cage. A box containing food was pulled out of one of the crates, the two sitting down to eat while Crawler and the Siberian circled. It was obvious that they weren't feeding Nilbog, and one of the groups of his creations by the walls noticed that. They argued a bit before carefully venturing into the nearby buildings, eventually assembling a meal. One of the smaller of their number, one that had one of the malformed linker cores, was given the meal and their prepared white flag.

The little creation waved the flag as it approached the edge of the burned and treated zone, but stopped before stepping into it. Bonesaw noticed the creature after a couple of minutes, and ventured over with the Siberian. There was a short discussion before Bonesaw sprayed the creature with something else from one of her pockets, then escorted the creature to the cage. It was allowed to enter the cage with the meal, but was locked in with Nilbog.

Oddly enough, the man seemed to relax slightly now that he had a companion. He still didn't look happy, admittedly, only less tense. But he accepted the meal, simple as it was, eating it all before sitting down in the middle of the cage with the creation on his lap. The others watching from afar noticed this and nodded, then carefully started working on what looked like a second meal. Presumably trying to be ready ahead of time for the next meal break, though they were noticeably taking their time now.

Eventually Bonesaw and Burnscar were done with their meals and the previous pattern resumed, at which point Taylor headed upstairs to prepare for bed. She'd likely be monitoring things all night, since it seemed unlikely that things were going to finish up anytime soon with how carefully the four were obviously working in their clearing of Ellisburg.

Wednesday morning started with Taylor retrieving all of the drones from Ellisburg. What had to be at most one out of a hundred of Nilbog's creations had survived, the entire area inside of the walls had been turned into a scorched wasteland, and Bonesaw had collected the creatures she'd positioned on the walls to stop things from escaping. Those all had whatever liquid she'd been making all night in them, but her creatures didn't also have a connection to her shard device like Nilbog's seemed to.

The Siberian had punched a hole in the quarantine wall and dragged Nilbog's cage through it, ensuring that the PRT had him secure. He seemed to try to do something then, but cringed when he was shocked by a device that had been jammed into the base of his skull. Once the PRT had secured him inside of a truck the Siberian then allowed the small number of the surviving creations to filter out a few at a time so that they could also be taken by the PRT. Those went along willingly and were being treated as less of a threat than Nilbog himself had been.

That done, the Siberian literally vanished, meaning that the PRT couldn't follow her back to where the others had slipped out and joined the man in the van. The supply crates had been left behind as well, Bonesaw's creatures dead around them. Taylor had followed their path through a tunnel that they collapsed behind them and kept an eye on them until they reached an abandoned roadside motel. The Siberian had reappeared then, watching over the group as they settled in to sleep.

Taylor had opted to not monitor the group beyond that, since they seemed to be trying to do good now. Why was a harder question, but she wasn't going to worry about them using abandoned properties while people would probably still react poorly to them. It wasn't like that was any different than the homeless people in many cities, right?

"Did you see the news about Ellisburg?" Missy asked when they met up for morning exercise. Light exercise, just in case Missy's shoulder wasn't fully healed. "Because I found it hard to believe."

"I was monitoring it all night," Taylor admitted. "Didn't need to do anything, since they seemed to be ready for most of Nilbog's tricks, but I had drones waiting just in case."

"Huh. Really?"

"Bonesaw had her own defenses already in place, though even those were barely needed given Crawler's determination to personally set off every single trap. I learned a bit about the four of them, not to mention a couple of interesting things about Nilbog. Not sure if any of it will ever matter though. Especially if they continue with more acts like Ellisburg."

"It does seem like they've turned over a new leaf," her father added. "Though the things you've learned could help if it turns out that this is just a bit of a ruse. Seems like a lot of work to go through for a ruse, admittedly, but one big act doesn't necessarily negate their previous behavior."

"True."

"That said, are you going to be showing your face in public today?"

Missy seemed interested there, and Taylor gave it some thought. "I wasn't planning on it. Admittedly, this time last week my plans for today would've been taking more tests. Instead I think I want to go do some spell testing and maybe a more rigorous training session? If I go out it should probably be in the afternoon to evening anyway. Being out in the middle of the day when school is still in session would be advertising that I'm done with things."

Her father nodded. "Right. Well, be careful with your testing and training."

"I will. Most of the testing I have to do personally are minor things that I just need to confirm work as expected anyway."

Taylor stretched as she entered the Inn after some testing. She'd started with the tentacles, testing them without her protections up, and found that they worked better than expected in some ways and needed a couple of slight safety tweaks in others. The most important tweaks were needing to avoid grabbing on too tightly to the face, which had needed some clever tricks in the equations to accomplish. Identifying tissue that shouldn't be pulled on, like eyes, as well as ensuring that the person's mouth and nose weren't forced closed were better tweaked in testing than in the field.

After getting them down, she'd used them as one of two test profiles for her traps. The new binding particles were a lot less obvious to her own senses, and if she'd already flooded an area with them then dropping a trap in place was almost impossible to sense. There was enough of a sensor surface to notice if you were paying attention, but that was about it, and even that went away if she built the trap to be triggered manually instead of automatically. The mana rushing in as the trap activated was much easier to notice though, but the binding particles being used no longer glowed when that happened so those who had no mana sensing ability wouldn't even get that warning.

The markers she'd made to tell the binding particles where to gather worked well enough, but that functionality had needed a half dozen tweaks to the marker and the binding particles so that the particles would be willing to move around so long as they were near any marker and not get stuck in a nearly-solid blob directly between whatever markers they were in range of. Sadly, if you had mana senses then you could probably pick the markers out from a good distance due to how they functioned.

She couldn't properly test the bindings on herself the way she wanted to, but the basics behind the traps worked wonderfully. Of course, seeing the tentacles spring from the ground to grab the test rock had been neat, but she'd decided that just tentacles was limiting herself once she'd watched them in action. So she'd made a giant grasping hand, a giant grasping claw, and a net that was quickly closed around the target. The one attempt she'd made at a mousetrap-like design had failed by virtue of it being too accurate and imparting enough force to crack the rock she triggered it with.

Using explosions as the trap payload was also effective, the rocks she dropped into those ones tended to fly off at a good clip when they survived the initial explosion. Applying some of her other payload setups worked as well, though light and sound were probably capable of blinding and deafening people at the levels that the traps tended to generate them with sufficient binding particles around. That led to her deciding that a limiter was needed, a maximum amount of mana pumped into the payloads. The grabbing payloads had that implicitly, due to the way their templates worked, but the rest had started with pulling in everything they could. Fixing it hadn't been hard, merely annoying, and it sped the traps up significantly when they just pulled in to a cap before triggering.

Now she wanted a glass of water before starting up a training session. Well, that and she was waiting for Hive to drop all the new stuff into the training drones, so that they could possibly try and drop unexpected traps on her. If that worked well enough then they might even be able to get her with bindings, thus testing them without dragging Missy into a test session for them.

Missy looked at Dinah oddly as the other girl sat down across from her. Specifically, the bandage across the girl's face. "What happened to you, and why are you still in school after it?"

"I fell off of my bike," Dinah replied. "Got a bit scraped up, but nothing serious. I'd look less like I was beaten to a pulp if I'd been willing to deal with sticky bandages along my hairline. Is your shoulder feeling better today?"

"Yeah, it's fine."

"Hey you two," Aisha said as she dropped down next to Missy. "I don't suppose either of you has any inside info on what happened in Ellisburg?"

Missy technically did, but wasn't about to admit it. "Not really, though I wonder why either of us would have more info than the news?"

Aisha rolled her eyes. "Because you apparently live with PRT staff and she's related to the Mayor."

Dinah snorted. "And Ellisburg is in New York, so the local PRT and local government shouldn't know anything special at all."

"Bah. How am I supposed to show others that I'm well informed if you two won't inform me?"

Missy raised an eyebrow. "By finding reliable sources, just like anyone else?"

"But that's more work than mooching off of those who should be in the know."

"Well when you find someone who should be in the know about goings-on in New York you can let us know. Until then you'll have to deal with whatever makes it to the news like the rest of us."

Aisha pouted. "My brother won't tell me what he's doing for work, and I can't get any inside information on anything else. Why won't anyone tell me anything?"

Dinah gave Aisha a look. "We can't speak for your brother, but if we don't know things then we can't tell you them."

"Bah."

"And you probably kept a big secret or two from your brother recently too.'

"You'd think so, but no, I told him right away. Circumstances ensured that he forgot, and I didn't know the specifics of what was going on nor any of the useful tricks for helping him remember until after they weren't needed. Memory is annoying, though I didn't realize just how 'short' short-term memory actually is. I thought it was, like, a day. Not half a minute and that you can only hold less than ten things in it at a time."

Missy blinked at that. "Less than ten things?"

"I saw anything from three to nine, but nobody seems to think you can get into double-digit counts."

"Huh." Depending on how that worked, that could explain some of her spell equation problems. Combine that with the number of multitasking instances, assuming each had the same limitation, and the complexity of spells and you probably reached some limits. Of course, that brought up the question of if Taylor didn't have those problems due to more multitasking instances or if there was something else going on. Maybe Space could find out for her?

"Space," she sent to her device. "Can you see if Hive thinks that Taylor has an easier time with complicated spells due to multitasking or if there's something going on with her short-term memory instead?"

"Of course," Space replied.

"Er, Missy?" Dinah said. "Who or what are Hive and Taylor?"

"What are you talking about?" Aisha asked, looking at Dinah oddly.

Missy looked between the two, quickly coming to the conclusion that she hadn't spoken aloud. Instead, Dinah had heard her...probably because the girl had a linker core, atrophied as it was. Fuck.

Dinah pointed at Missy. "She just said something about Hive and Taylor."

Aisha shook her head. "I didn't hear her say anything like that. Are you sure it was her?"

"I would've sworn it was her a moment ago, but you're sitting next to her...and come to think of it, I don't think her mouth was moving. Maybe I heard someone else and it just sounded like it was coming from her?"

Dinah spent the rest of lunch giving Missy odd looks, to Aisha's obvious confusion. Missy did her best to not appear nervous while also promising to practice on communicating with Space such that others couldn't easily pick up on it like that.

Taylor landed after a more tiring than expected training session. Hive had apparently decided to one-up her in the trap creation department and had made the traps able to be deployed on pockets of air. Before coming in she'd gotten the equations from Hive and checked, finding that if she cast them they were blatantly obvious to her. But the ones cast by the training drones weren't obvious in the least, meaning that it might be that they were only obvious to the caster. Well, at least until they triggered, at which point the mana rushing in was far too obvious.

That made for much better traps, admittedly, and also demonstrated that binding particles didn't share between casters. The training drones had seeded the area with binding particles, Taylor had added to them, and the only interaction between the two was a general increase in apparent background mana density.

"Are you happy with today's workout?" Hive asked as Taylor entered the Inn.

"Mostly," Taylor admitted. "Though I think the bindings need to be adjusted a little."

"You're referring to the time that they could've cut off your air supply if not for your Knight Armor and quick escape?"

"Yeah. Don't want that happening to someone normal. Might need to put more limits on the raw number of bindings on an individual, since I suspect that only became an issue when there were too many binding segments. Though that does bring up the question of if you did anything to make blinking out of things harder? I had some minor issues getting out of a couple of the traps."

"No, Lord, but I wouldn't be surprised if being surrounded by mana was the problem. The solid structures outside of your own control probably naturally fight against the translocation of the spell."

Taylor nodded, because that made sense. "I think I ended up spinning through eight or nine different axes to escape. Perhaps we can find a way to block that intentionally?"

"I've already got that in my list of things to figure out after the area containment barrier. Speaking of which, I figured out both adding in a permission system and how to stop it expanding into gravity wells, but so far I can only do so if it doesn't prevent you from leaving through just passing through it or if there are at least a dozen dimensional axes left unprotected. Well, that or if it's anchored in the middle, such as to a linker core."

That sounded less than ideal. "Do you have any recommendations there?"

"Of course, Lord. I suggest four versions of the barrier. One would put all the holes on mana-accessible physical axes, the second would instead use Shard-accessible axes, the third would use those axes that I found unavailable to either, and the last would only allow normal transit. Hopefully none of those interact poorly with the attempt to add in the ability to allow existing connections."

"Perhaps figure that out and then we can figure out what versions to make?"

"I'd like to use the version that allows keyed access or physical travel to the Inn, Lord. It would make it harder for someone unexpected to just appear in the building without permission, especially for the sub-basements."

Taylor blinked as she considered that. "Okay, that does make sense. I don't suppose that per-bedroom versions would also make sense there?"

Hive considered that for a moment. "If it works then that would be easiest to accomplish on the third floor, thanks to extra space in the roof sections, and would be an additional reason to prefer to put mages there. It also brings up the possibility of layering barriers, which I hadn't explored yet. If they can be layered without causing problems then I may be able to combine two or more of the variants to ensure that they cover each other's weaknesses. Perhaps even layer all four?"

"Sounds like you have more testing to arrange for."

"Indeed, Lord. Though I'll note that you haven't properly tested the gauntlet spell made for Missy."

Taylor nodded. "I know. I figure that she needs to test it, even if we ran it through plenty of simulations. It shouldn't cause her significant injury, but if we missed something then she gets to learn why simulations aren't everything."

It was approaching dinnertime when Taylor paused, then headed downstairs. She arrived at the door and opened it just as Vicky was landing with Amy.

"Good evening," Taylor greeted. "What brings you two here today?"

"Evening," Amy replied as Vicky put her down. "And I wanted to swing by earlier when you didn't go to tutoring today, to find out if something was wrong. But then I got summoned to the PRT building and things happened..."

"And our parents told us we're on our own for the evening," Vicky added. "All the New Wave adults are off doing something and they don't want us involved, which usually happens when they want to go to a restaurant that serves alcohol. Which is just reinforced by Eric letting us know that they took a taxi and thus don't have to worry about a driver."

Taylor rolled her eyes. "I didn't go to tutoring because I finished my exams yesterday. I might be asked to swing by on Friday to go over the results of things, but other than that I'm done."

Amy blinked, then blushed slightly. "Oh."

"You're lucky," Vicky added. "Our finals start Monday, so you finished over a week before we will."

"Which was intentional," Taylor said, waving the two into the house. "Since most of my tutors are Arcadia teachers and wanted to finish with me before dealing with your exams. Though I think they expected me to take most of the week and not a day and a bit."

"Only a day and a bit?" Amy said. "For all your tests?"

"I cheated by doing all of the problems at once." Neither of the Dallons seemed to fully get how that worked, and Taylor wasn't in the mood to explain. Instead, she poked her head into the kitchen. "Hey dad, are you making enough for Amy and Vicky to join us?"

Her father looked behind Taylor, where the two girls were visible, then nodded. "I was planning on plenty of leftovers so that the two of us could each have some for lunch tomorrow, but I guess we can figure something else out instead. Assuming they want to stick around for dinner, anyway, because if they do then I'm going to be asking a lot of questions."

"What kind of questions?" Vicky asked.

"The kind that should allow me to decide if I'm keeping quiet about Amy wanting to possibly lose her powers or if I'm going to go with my current desire to bring it up with Carol."

"Wouldn't that out too many of Taylor's secrets?" Amy tried.

"Not with the intentional depowering that happened over the weekend," Taylor answered. "You approaching me about that separate from the PRT wouldn't exactly be revealing much on my end."

"Oh."

"That one's on you," Vicky said. "Though I have to admit that I'm not fully clear on all of your logic either, but I've been avoiding grilling you myself."

Amy glared at Vicky, only to get a goofy grin in return. Eventually she sighed and turned back around. "Okay, I guess. Though I don't like being put on the spot like this."

"Nobody ever does," Danny replied. "Just be happy that I decided to wait until I could talk to you instead of going to Carol right away."

Missy sighed as she sat there with Ethan, Sherie having lost the coin toss between the two adults as to who had to go in for the semi-crisis situation that had come up. What that situation was hadn't been obvious, beyond 'sudden' and 'unexpected'. They'd been able to choose who went in and who stayed because neither of them had likely-useful powers for whatever it was. Sherie had called it 'needing faces for PR reasons' in her grumbling before she left.

"I assume that you'd rather be trying to figure out spells than just sitting here," Ethan commented.

"I am trying to figure out spells," Missy retorted, since she was using the simulation system while she sat there. "But I found out that Taylor might be the luckiest person on the planet earlier too."

He raised an eyebrow at that. "How did you come to that conclusion?"

"Space says that Hive didn't realize that human short term memory is as limited as it is, and ended up improving Taylor's significantly while healing the damage from her interrupted trigger event. She can keep track of more than she should be able to without the multitasking system, and the multitasking system multiplies that to a ridiculous degree."

"Oh. So why not ask if Hive can fix you up with some of that when working on you this weekend? I'm sure that she could come up with a quick risk assessment for Sherie and I to look over."

"Hive refuses to risk frying my brain just to make it easier for me to cast spells, especially as every trigger event modifies the brain in different ways that may very well be incompatible with one another. The message from her basically says that the only reason she did what she did to Taylor was because it was already an emergency situation. Short of someone shooting my frontal lobe out or something like that there's too much risk."

Ethan nodded. "That sounds much more reasonable than I was expecting."

"Then what were you expecting?"

"That Hive thought that the procedure was actually safe, given that she'd already done it to Taylor without causing her to become a vegetable, and that Sherie and I would have to object on any number of grounds in order to keep you safe while you're under our care. We'd be objecting regarding the additional work being done on you this weekend if the risk/reward equation wasn't essentially entirely on the reward end. The risks seem to be more you being uncomfortable during and in the few days following the procedure than anything long-term."

"Ah."

They sat there in silence for a couple of minutes before Ethan sighed. "Thinking back over my interactions with her, Taylor doesn't seem like she's any better at remembering things than anyone else."

Missy snorted. "She's constantly watching the area around her in various ways, courtesy of being attacked so often, which probably brings her down to 'normal' as an accidental side effect. If I'm lucky I can keep track of one sensor drone with a multitasking instance, assuming nothing of note is happening anywhere near it. As far as I can tell from her descriptions, she's fully capable of keeping track of all twelve feeds with a single instance of herself if she wants to. And that's before getting into finding out that she casts everything with a single instance while I generally need at least two to keep track of all of the variables on the slightly more complicated spells."

"So she's been going through a traditional cycle of self-improvement due to surviving the impossible? Sounds like she's an old-style comic book superhero."

"Whatever."

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Threadmarks Chapter 69 - June 9, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Sep 2, 2020

#12,572

Thursday morning came far too early from Taylor's point of view, though that was mostly because she and Hive had been busy overnight. Most of Taylor's focus and all of Hive's had been put towards ensuring that they could enact plans for taking action on Saturday. Ensuring that barriers did what they wanted them to in particular, but also coming up with strategies. They had a decent window to start things in that morning, and Taylor wanted to take it.

The rest of Taylor's focus was split between her normal monitoring of the area and thinking about how to deal with the revelations from her father's grilling of Amy. Taylor had known that the girl had some issues, just not how significant those issues were, and that was without the incest-but-not crush on Vicky that had come up after they were supposedly done with the serious stuff. Vicky commenting on her constantly-shifting relationship with Dean had turned into teasing Taylor about her not having a boyfriend and that had ended up turning into Amy revealing her crush. Then doing her best to vanish into her seat with or without parahuman powers.

Possibly-inappropriate crushes aside, living in the Dallon household wasn't as good for Amy as it appeared on the surface. Carol obviously had some kind of issue with Amy, though what that was couldn't be determined from Amy's comments. Just that the woman seemed to have some kind of weird standards that were impossible to identify, let alone meet, that only applied to Amy. To that end, Taylor was wondering if over the summer they should arrange for Amy to spend significant time visiting, if only to give her time away from Carol. And maybe away from Vicky, depending on how the older girl eventually settled after the crush realization.

The problem was what to do while Amy was visiting. Showing her magic would probably be problematic if she couldn't visit the Inn. One option would be setting up a second base inside the administrative shroud layer, but that would require both finding a suitable dimension and probably securing it better from unwanted shard-based visiting techniques. Of course, Hive was starting to test doing the latter on the Inn already, with the blocking barrier being loaded into the under-roof shield generator system and presumably intended to be left powered all the time.

It was a complicated problem that didn't really have a good solution right now. But Taylor could brainstorm, even if the majority of her focus was elsewhere for the time being. Sadly, the brainstorming hadn't accomplished much of use before it was time to get up for the day. She just didn't have a whole lot of ideas for activities that she knew would appeal to her and Amy. If it came to that, she'd probably need to ask Amy if she had ideas instead.

"What's with the dome?" Missy asked after she appeared in the Inn. Not that a quick look out the windows showed a dome, but it felt like something was there. "That wasn't there yesterday, was it?"

"Additional security against unauthorized teleportation," Taylor answered. "It shouldn't cause problems for us, but if someone finds this place then they at least have to appear outside. Oh, and this one doesn't allow outside shard connections at all, as far as I know, so parahumans can't use their powers through it."

"Don't worry too much about it," Hive added. "We've gotten permitted exclusions working and you're keyed in, so it shouldn't block you at all should you get the appropriate spells working."

"I didn't think parahumans could come here at all," Missy noted. "So why would anti-parahuman defenses be needed?"

"Because we aren't sure if parahumans can come here or not," Taylor admitted. "And even if they can't now, it's always possible that there's someone out there that can tell the shard devices to allow them to. Such as if they find out that we're here."

"Oh."

"That and I think Hive is more paranoid than I am, and I can admit that I'm fairly paranoid these days. I wouldn't be surprised if she's ready to put a multi-layered protection up while I'm sleeping here, just to make it harder for threats to reach me."

"Doing so would be a waste of energy," Hive corrected. "The single barrier should protect against most surprise threats. There's plenty of sensor coverage over the area to watch for those appearing nearby or approaching from a distance and additional barriers can be thrown up in the event of an unexpected arrival."

Missy blinked at that. "Okay...is this more of a vacation spot or a fortress?"

"Both, I think," Danny answered. "Oh, and exercise spot, which we should probably get around to using it for as you have school and I have work."

Taylor had returned home for breakfast, seen her father off, and then returned to the Inn with Hive. This morning was going to be a test run of sorts for Saturday, as much as she could prepare for the unknown anyway. All of her combat drones were deployed, as were all of the training drones. Hive was off working with testing drones on other things, after giving Taylor a brief rundown of how to program the training drones to do what she wanted them to.

The first step was to practice getting the drones to fast charge from the Inn's mana batteries. Instead of moving them into the secret basement she instead opened portals to the battery room there, using information Hive provided to do so safely. Instead of a normal portal frame, each portal had a 'docking port' of sorts for a drone to plug itself into so that it could more easily access the mana from the batteries.

It turned out that the training drones recharged much easier than the combat drones, despite theoretically having identical internal storage systems. The combat drones had a resistance of sorts to pulling from the larger batteries, nothing significant but it slowed the process down. Taylor suspected that it was because the training drones didn't care about the mana signature, but the combat drones were adjusting the mana to match her signature while she controlled them.

That was annoying, but she could work with it.

Not that the training drones had gone entirely smoothly either. Ensuring that they had the spell variants and casting directions she wanted was slightly tricky, if only because she'd never really had to work with them in that way before. As in, Hive had always programmed them for her, but she'd wanted to do so herself to ensure that she understood exactly what they'd be doing. Grouping them in sets of three was easier due to Hive's previous work, with one firing while another charged and the third prepared to take over firing when the first ran low on mana. That would hopefully allow the training drones to keep a near-constant rate of spells firing even with the mana-intensive spells she was planning on having them using.

Once that was done she set up a test area and went through the entire process she wanted to use on Saturday. There were stages involved, and she ran through the first stage three times before practicing the second and third. She couldn't really practice beyond that, admittedly, given the realities of what was going to be happening. But she could and did ensure that things should continue to work as she wanted, especially with the training drones. It took some tweaking over several hours before she was confident in things, but when she shut everything down she was happy.

With that confirmed, the only thing left to test was the 'finishing move', which was run through a couple dozen times before she was satisfied with the way it was configured. Having that ready ahead of time was important, given that most of her combat drones would need to be using it. The training drones weren't going to need it, not being on-the-fly adaptable enough for an actual combat situation and because it wasn't going to be usable from where they were going to be firing from.

She cleaned up after herself, mostly clearing debris and closing portals, before putting the drones away. The training drones went to the basement in the Inn, the combat drones returned to her for the time being, and a quick list of remaining things to take care of to ensure that there wouldn't be some specific problems on Saturday. That then led to Taylor considering what to do about lunch, as well as thinking about what she needed for some aspects that were going to be more for show than anything else.

Taylor had gone out for lunch, figuring that she could take her time with a couple of things before heading over to watch Missy. Avoiding the two small groups that appeared to be waiting for her to leave, she first headed to Fugly's for a sizable meal. One of the two groups obviously had a decent information network, as they headed to intercept her, but she avoided them and headed to the supermarket.

This particular supermarket had a bakery, and she spent some time looking over and subtly scanning the freshly-baked goods. A couple of the pies in particular looked wrong and turned out to be mislabeled, but she didn't have a good way to tell the clerks that they were actually mislabeled and she wasn't sure how much of 'looked wrong' was just her sensor telling her that in the first place. There was also a chocolate cake that was labeled as marble, for that matter, so someone hadn't been fully with it when labeling today's goods.

She ended up buying some chips, candy, and a six pack of soda in bottles before leaving. Sadly, she didn't have a good way to entirely avoid the group that had set up in the parking lot waiting for her, but choosing to head down an alley their van couldn't follow her down before they'd even left the parking lot seemed to be good enough to lose them. Needing to constantly dodge people looking to nab her, despite the previous incident where actual injuries occurred, was getting annoying.

Admittedly, them trying when she was in costume was annoying as well, but at least then she could confront them directly.

Reaching the park near the Walsh household, with plenty of time before Missy should arrive, had her smirking. The PRT had vans circling the area today, and that seemed to be enough of a deterrent to keep the other groups away for now. Taylor found a bench to sit on while she snacked on the chips she'd purchased. Interestingly, over the course of the next hour the PRT only grabbed a group of people that looked like they could be Merchants, though why the group had come into the area wasn't immediately obvious.

Eventually the curiosity got to her and she checked the news. It didn't take long to find that a raid of some kind the night before had taken out the Merchants, though details were slim. The PRT and Protectorate didn't seem to be involved, but who had been wasn't obvious. Regardless of who it was, none of their parahumans seemed to have escaped custody and thus there was some hope that they might not break out within a few days.

That figured out, she got up to head over to meet up with Missy, only for a woman and her likely nine to ten year old daughter to approach her. The younger girl was carrying what looked like a crude plush arm of all things.

"Miss Hebert?" the girl said.

"Yes?" Taylor replied.

The plush arm was held out, with a permanent marker. "Can I have your autograph?"

That had Taylor blinking. "What?"

The woman snorted. "Liz was watching what happened through her window and thought that your necklace taking the arm off of one of the men attacking you was cool. She spent a significant amount of time over the past couple of days making the arm there as a result, which at least kept her out of trouble."

"Oh. I'd have thought that she'd be in school, or would be in school now for that matter."

"We could say the same about you, though I recall something in the news about you being in a tutoring arrangement. Liz's school let out three weeks early due to a damaged wall in the cafeteria exposing asbestos and the school department deciding that it was too close to the end of the year to bother figuring out alternatives."

"Ah. I hadn't heard about that."

"So can I have your autograph?" the younger girl, Liz, asked.

Taylor sighed, but took the arm and the marker and sloppily signed the arm. Liz took the arm back, but her mother had to take the marker because the girl obviously didn't care about it anymore.

"Thank you!" Liz exclaimed after a moment, carefully but securely holding the arm.

"You're welcome," Taylor replied.

"We should get home and let Miss Hebert go to wherever she was on her way to," the woman said, then turned to Taylor. "But thank you, and sorry for interrupting you."

"It's not a problem."

Missy wasn't sure why Taylor had looked a little out of it when she'd arrived at home, but the older girl snapped out of it quickly enough. They headed inside and Missy did the little bit of homework she had, likely the last homework she'd have for the year, because it would be irresponsible of Taylor to have them do anything else before that was taken care of. Luckily it only took twenty minutes or so to finish after cheating and doing most of the work in the multitasking system on the bus ride home.

"So," Missy asked once her school bag was put away. "Make any progress on possibly splitting up spell equations into smaller pieces?"

"I ran thousands of tests," Hive answered. "And while I narrowed things down to twelve linking patterns, I was unable to confirm that they work. I suspect that they need a linker core with spell fragments stored in it to work properly, but my artificial core isn't suitable for testing that."

That had Missy blinking. "Meaning?"

"My Lord is a horrible choice of test subjects for a number of reasons, so if you want this to happen you will likely need to sit around doing little more than storing and casting a hundred or so test spells, several just so that they're available to possibly be a target of others, and that's just to start with."

Fuck. That sounded like boring, incredibly tedious work that might not have any payoff whatsoever.

"Though we really do need to have you do a proper test of the punch gauntlets too," Taylor added. "Which was my plan for the next hour or two, popping around to different test locations to see how they work for you. Then you can start on Hive's test spells if you want to."

It took some effort, but Missy avoided groaning at that thought. Barely.

That evening Taylor was happy with how the afternoon had gone. Missy had learned a couple of lessons about the punch gauntlet, in particular that running it at full power was probably a good way to explode people. Possibly still useful for some kinds of brutes and anyone wrapped in layers of metal, admittedly, but not good for normals. The younger girl had also sat there and started working her way through Hive's test set of spells. That would probably continue for a few days before they had any results though.

Then there were the less important things that Taylor had worked on. To start with, she'd made a flying chair and table set that were essentially Knight Objects with internal structures to anchor a flight spell to. She'd originally thought about doing that with bullets, but had decided that she wanted to be able to anchor barriers to the set and her bullet equations didn't support that aspect of templates. Of course, once she had the spell working she'd created more templates. Like a hammock that literally floated as though unsupported by the two rings in the template, a giant hamster ball, a hoverboard, and a canoe. She had no clue if she'd ever use them again, but the ideas amused her for a bit.

Teaching herself to remote-fly the various items, when she was in contact with them or otherwise, had actually been the harder part. She ended up swapping the controls from the normal 'flight' controls to the same setup that was used for bullets and sensor drones, but with actual orientation elements instead of the automatic orientation that the spells normally did. That only took a little bit of effort to get the basic hang of, but there was no way that she'd be using it as an actual combat tool anytime soon.

For overnight, Taylor's original plan had been to do some more flute practice.

"Lord?" Hive said before Taylor could start on her practice.

"Yes?" Taylor answered.

"I've run an analysis of my entire database for clues about Missy's casting issues and come to some conclusions."

"Oh?"

A couple dozen things appeared in the simulation system, though the first one Hive drew Taylor's attention to was a floating list of names with minimal descriptions. In a language she didn't know. "This is a partial list of casting systems known to my creators, as well as a basic description of origin and specialty. Generally each comes from a different planet, though there are notable exceptions. Half of the other items here are advertisements for casting systems, generally to be loaded into one to three devices with a spell development guide and three to twelve 'sample spells'. Two of them include a price for including the equation sources."

That had Taylor blinking. "How can they provide the casting system without the equations?"

"I'll get to that, Lord. There are also advertisements for drones that can cast spells, with a clarification note that full equations are needed. Lastly, I found a record of a mage that was known to have acquired a second casting system specifically to overcome a range issue with their original system. You could tell if they were using short range or long range spells based entirely on the casting system in use."

"That sounds weird, why not just use the new system to fix the range issues on the old one?"

"I thought that too, until I realized that it's entirely possible that most mages don't learn or access the base equations at all. Instead, like Missy has with the storage and retrieval spell, they may use pre-arranged components that have been imprinted on their cores. I ran a test, and the same method that allowed Space to store a copy of a Knight Armor template can be used to store the prepared but not cast storage and retrieval spell. I suspect that there's a way to directly imprint that onto a linker core, and thus 'download' a casting system into a mage from a device. The device wouldn't be able to use the system directly at that point, only through a connection to a mage, unless the source equations were also available."

Taylor considered that, but had to admit that it made sense in some ways. "I guess that means that if we ever find others that we won't be able to directly learn how their systems work?"

"Not entirely, Lord. While the other devices I've created can't do so, I can break the cast spells back down to equations when it's possible to do so. That's admittedly more of a development from working to fix the problems with the simulation system than anything else, given the library of information that I've built up, but within a week or two of getting access to such a spell system I could likely derive the complete sources. Other devices might be able to do the same if they had the library I do, but I suspect that's rare."

"Okay. Though I suppose all of this brings up a new question of what it means for Missy?"

"I think we need to design and build an object-oriented spell system for her to have any hope of not being reliant on us for spell design. I've looked at various programming languages for inspiration, but feel that the real constraints are going to be tied to how the 'load pieces' elements function. To that end, I think your natural ability to manipulate mana may be crucial to figuring things out. I can analyse what you do that works and then reproduce it."

Taylor nodded, then stopped. "Didn't you tell Missy that I was the wrong choice to figure things out with?"

"I might've fibbed a little as part of running two development paths at the same time. But only a little, because neither path is guaranteed to get usable results."

"Ah."

Friday morning started with a planning session instead of exercise. Missy had sighed at that, but couldn't complain since it was planning for her augmentation unit. The original thought had been that Hive would pop over and do the work after dinner into the evening, but Danny had surprised Missy by recommending that she and Taylor stay at the Inn overnight instead. That had led to deciding, at least for the two of them, which rooms to stay in.

The two had been lazy. Taylor had taken the first room at the corner and Missy had taken the one next to it. They'd pre-made the beds to prepare, but both were probably going to use their own homes for showering and thus didn't need to get most of their toiletries. Which didn't mean that Missy wasn't planning on bringing toothpaste and her toothbrush later, but she wasn't going to bother with shampoo and soap.

Taylor then stuck around at the Inn to exercise, because she didn't have school, and Missy grumbled about the lack of exercise over breakfast.

"Don't pout like that," Sherie commented. "You'll get plenty of exercise later."

Missy blinked at that. "What?"

Ethan snorted. "You missed the part of the discussion where Taylor runs you ragged this afternoon so that you hopefully sleep tonight, didn't you?"

"Oh. That does make some sense."

Taylor spent most of the morning doing light exercise, planning for the afternoon, and trying to get into the mindset needed to convince her natural mana manipulation ability to help with the fundamentals needed to build a spell component library. The latter was the only thing she felt that she'd accomplished nothing on when it came time to stop for lunch. The exercise had gone wonderfully and she had what she thought was a good plan to wear Missy out without impacting her own readiness for the next day.

Lunch was eaten at home, Taylor using a flying table in her room while she browsed the internet 'normally' for a bit on her desktop. Mostly taking a look at PHO, where people were wondering when Minerva would be seen again.

They were in for a surprise.

Also interesting was that, if you squinted, there was a tracking thread for her out of costume. They were actually tracking the groups that were following her around after the incident with a 'literal disarming' and speculating on if she knew they were there or was just lucky, with at least one person stating that she probably learned how to ditch followers that might not even be there in school. Mods had come down on that discussion quite hard last night, but the thread was still active otherwise with a general rule of 'if you see people following Hebert, call it in, even if someone else in here claims to have done so already' to avoid those following her faking the group out by posting about themselves.

A quick skim of the past day or so showed that they even had a low-resolution black-and-white picture of her signing the plush arm the day before. Faces were blurred out, and it had likely been pulled from a security camera nearby, but it was there. Complete with commentary that they needed to find a way for a necklace to sign things.

Eventually it was time to head over to watch Missy for the afternoon, so Taylor left the house and took the one street that didn't seem to have anyone watching it to leave the immediate area.

At lunch Missy had been happy that she wouldn't have homework, but worried about what Taylor was going to do to her to tire her out. On her way home she'd continued to be happy about the lack of homework, but was dreading what Taylor was going to do to tire her out. Arriving home to find Taylor waiting with a grin had banished the happiness of no homework. As for the 'tire her out' side of things?

Hive had found a hurricane on another Earth. A large one, that had been going for at least several days. Missy had been unceremoniously dropped into the middle of it, in mid air without warning, and had needed to cast her Knight Armor and flight spells while falling. Sure, there was a very good chance that she was being watched closely enough to ensure that she wouldn't be hurt, but it hadn't been fun. Nor had the unexpected bullets coming at her from training drones.

Missy had been swearing to rat Taylor out to others when Ethan chimed in and chided her on her poor reaction time in getting her protections up. The bastard had found a place to set up his console long enough to watch the start of things, which meant that Taylor's little surprise had been approved and ratting her out would accomplish absolutely nothing. Worse, she forgot to get Reason out until Ethan asked if she was working on casting without the additional help.

She'd flipped off a random direction at that comment and hoped that it showed as being directed at him.

Hours later she was finally pulled out of the hurricane, landing at the Inn so that she could prepare to head home for dinner. Taylor was standing there, not even in her own Knight Armor. Missy flipped her off before dismissing her Knight Armor so that she didn't need to deal with the weight, then ended up being carried back home by Taylor. They ate dinner, Danny joining them so that he could bring Taylor home so as to hopefully avoid her being waylaid by those looking to ambush her.

"You suck," Missy grumbled as soon as she saw Taylor in the Inn. She was in her sleepwear and didn't have her toothbrush with her because she'd taken care of that already.

"I personally think that you were stubborn," Taylor retorted as she herded Missy towards the bed. "You lasted longer than anyone expected and could've called it off at any time. Sherie seemed to think that you did well enough to prove that you're ready to make your first appearance, though obviously after your finals this coming week."

"What? Really?"

"Yep. We'll have to think about how to handle that, and probably where. It's going to be a few weeks before the gangs are willing to act up after non-PRT took out the Merchants, so choosing another city might be a good idea."

"Ooooh, I've always wanted to..."

"Later," Taylor interrupted as Hive floated into the room. "For now it's time for you to get your augmentation unit."

Missy would've said something, but she yawned before she could. Grumbling slightly, she climbed into bed, finding that it wasn't nearly as comfortable as she was used to because she didn't have her Knight Clothing spell up to ensure she was the perfect temperature. Though she was also less distracted because she didn't have the sensor data from the anchor either, since Hive could only bypass Taylor's anchor.

Taylor had watched Missy for the first twenty minutes or so, long enough to determine that the girl had fallen asleep and was likely to make it through the entire procedure without constantly waking up. She idly wondered if Missy realized that Hive had remotely shut down the augmentation unit she already had, ensuring both that her core pressure would be lower for this and that her core would have less energy to use to 'fight back' if it decided that Hive was 'attacking' it. Feeling even more worn out than usual was merely a useful side effect in this case. Shrugging, she decided it didn't matter before she moved over to her room.

Unlike Missy, Taylor actually showered at the Inn, having put her toiletries into her storage pocket since she didn't really share them with her father. She'd eventually buy more so that she could have some at home and some at the Inn. Once she was clean and in her own sleepwear she headed down to the living room to watch some television while working more on trying to get her mana to allow one piece of casting to use another. Specifically, she'd realized over dinner that first she was going to need something to be used and was now focusing on that element instead.

She kept that up for a few hours before heading back up to her room to get some sleep for herself. It was hopefully going to be a very minimal night for working on things so that she'd be as rested as possible for the following day. That and she didn't want to do anything that might distract Hive from working with Missy's core. Especially after Hive had admitted that the procedure would be more difficult now that Missy's core was healthy, running low on mana or not.

Despite the fact that she should be perfectly safe in the Inn, Taylor still had her Knight Clothing on when she went to bed. It made her feel better, kept her at the perfect temperature, and there was a distinct lack of completely obvious to her senses lines of defense in the sheets and curtains here. Despite that, she still fell asleep fairly quickly and had no problems with only keeping a light eye on the surveillance drones back on Bet overnight. Though there was a single point where a couple of parahumans passed close enough to her house for their shard connections to be noticed by the sensor drones. She'd debated sending one of the drones to investigate, but they kept going and she decided that it wasn't worth the concern. After all, she wouldn't put it past the Protectorate to be patrolling the general area as a precaution.

603

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Threadmarks Chapter 70 - June 11, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Sep 9, 2020

#12,677

Saturday morning started off with a confirmation that nothing had gone wrong with Missy's new augmentation unit, followed by waking the younger girl and having her re-cast her Knight Anchor. That took nine attempts before she remembered to connect to the multitasking interface in Space, followed by three more attempts before she got it in her half-asleep state, but she eventually managed. She was then ushered through a portal home by Taylor, who then headed home herself.

Taylor found that her father wasn't up yet when she arrived. She got dressed and made French toast for breakfast. He came down just as she was putting the last of the bread onto the griddle she was using, after she'd already eaten her share, and gratefully took the plate she'd left for him with his first round on it.

"So what do you have planned for today?" he asked after he'd eaten his first piece.

"Things that we shouldn't discuss here," she answered, getting a raised eyebrow in response.

"Really now. Do I get to watch?"

"Possibly. Do you want to watch?"

"I suppose I won't know until it's too late to decide to do something else for the day. Luckily for me, I didn't have any plans to speak of anyway."

He finished eating, three extra pieces of French toast were placed in the freezer for another day, and then he got dressed. While he was doing that, Taylor made and bagged up a few sandwiches to have for lunch. His return to the kitchen was followed by him doing the same, as well as grabbing three cans of beer. They then secured the house and headed to the Inn.

"So what's going on?" he asked once the portal had closed.

"Dormant likely-Endbringers," Taylor replied, and he winced.

"Fuck. More than the three we already have?"

"Seventeen more."

"Shit. But I'm thinking that you're confident in taking them out before they're less than dormant?"

Taylor nodded. "Yeah. Except that we aren't fully certain if that will piss off the three already active ones."

"Oh."

"So the plan is to take all seventeen dormant ones out while being ready to jump into action against the existing three. If they don't react then I'd like to see about taking out Ziz anyway, since her orbital path will be over the middle of the northern Atlantic ocean in a little over two hours and that seems like a good enough place to make an attempt."

He frowned. "How long will taking the dormant ones out take you?"

"Most of that is going to be prepping for the other three being pissed off, should that happen. Forty-five minutes total, including the thirty seconds to simultaneously take out all seventeen so that they can't activate in retaliation. I'd try the same tactic on the active ones, but they're already mobile and far too likely to dodge. Well, that and two of the three aren't in a good place to try dropping a combat drone on them."

"If you do go after Ziz then I'd try it anyway, just in case it works. But I want to see what you've got planned for if it fails."

Taylor nodded. "Let's go down to the command room and I'll give you an overview. I'll start getting everything else set up and ready to go while we do that. I'm hoping that everything will be done by mid-afternoon either way."

Plans had been approved, with some last-minute changes at Hive's request, and the first stage of things had gone off without any problems. There was no reaction to surveillance drones appearing at each of the shells to provide targeting data, nor to seventeen combat drones teleporting into place practically on top of the seventeen occupied 'shells'. There was a slight movement from the shells as the loaded projectiles had the 'unfold object' spell applied to them just before being fired, but not enough to stop the attack. Total time from arrival to detonation of the contained cores was ten seconds, and there had been absolutely no reaction from the active Endbringers in the process.

Hive had then visited each shell in succession, hitting all twenty with a dimensional transference to stick them into one of the sub-basements of the Inn without being processed for now. Actually doing something with the material would wait until they were done with Ziz. To that end, Taylor shifted her preparations from the original 'rapid deployment' layout to the 'go after Ziz in orbit' layout. Two surveillance drones were dropped, cloaked, into orbit ahead of time and the waiting game began.

"It seems odd for you to be using a delay on the streams this time," Danny commented as they waited for Ziz to reach the intercept point. "You did those live against Leviathan."

"Leviathan was already attacking," Taylor noted. "Live streaming the attempted delaying action made sense because people might need the information immediately. By comparison, I'm attacking Ziz. Even starting the streams with a countdown delay is taking a risk, streaming it all live would likely ensure that the attack was seen coming and thus ruin the surprise aspect."

"I suppose that is a good point. Then add in that many parahuman powers obviously don't work properly where magic is concerned and you can probably assume that if Ziz can see the future like people think then you, and everything you're doing, would be a blind spot right now."

"Yeah, though we've also noticed that Ziz is doing something to the planet while orbiting. It might be scanning, or it could be a constant influence thing of some kind. If the jump in and shoot plan doesn't work then I'll be mentioning it as I'm setting myself up for the long-range attacking portion of things."

"Fuck. Even if you win that won't go down well with anyone even mildly paranoid."

They'd started the streams up just after Ziz dodged eighteen combat drones sending unfolded projectiles at the Endbringer within a few seconds of appearing in orbit. Said dodging had caused the Endbringer to temporarily take on a geosynchronous orbit, likely trying to decide what to do about the attack. That meant that the first round of training drones was able to cast the containing barrier before Ziz left the area. That got a reaction as well, possibly because it cut off whatever the Endbringer had been doing to the surface.

Portals had been opened so that more training and combat drones could come through, with a set of combat drones staying behind to play command and control over the training drones managing the barrage of giant bullets being sent after the Endbringer through the portals. Taylor herself had used a dimensional transference to appear over the Atlantic ocean, just below the battle. She commented on the barrier stopping Ziz's whatever it was, set up her flying chair and table, and then started making unfolded homing bullets.

It wasn't long before Ziz tried to escape, the now-bolstered groups of training drones maintaining the barrier expending quite a bit of energy to keep the Endbringer contained. Luckily they were also in a 'one active, one in reserve, one charging' setup, slipping back through the open portals to recharge. They were also cloaked, as were all of the combat drones, and that seemed to be enough for Ziz to not be able to tell where they were. Well, right up until one of the combat drones fired an unfolded projectile, the attempt to escape the barrier being aborted in a frantic move to dodge it.

Taylor took that as her cue to start launching homing unfolded projectiles from the surface, sending the first one upwards. Sadly, Ziz apparently had taken time to figure out a counter to that trick and started sacrificing partially-unfolded feathers to pre-detonate the homing bullets. Taylor had launched two bullets at once after the first feather had succeeded out of annoyance, but had returned to a steady launching of bullets as a distraction. Luckily there were layers to the attack plan, hopefully more than the Endbringer was ready with counters to. Especially since the non-unfolded physical projectiles were being ignored more frequently already. Though Taylor did note that Ziz hadn't reacted to the homing bullets until they'd crossed the barrier, which caused her to pay enough attention to note that the Endbringer wasn't reacting to the physical ones until they did the same.

For the next layer of things, Taylor used the combat drones to drop some traps onto bits of Endbringer and shattered projectiles that were floating around the inside of the barrier, unable to escape because the barrier wasn't configured to let them out. It took a few minutes before Ziz dodged near enough to one of them, and the tentacles almost got her. The Endbringer adapted far too quickly though, pushing all of the loose debris to the barrier with telekinesis after only a handful of traps had been triggered.

It was then that Taylor realized that the binding particles weren't building up as quickly as she thought they should. In theory they should be building up to a ridiculous level inside of the barrier, since most of the giant bullets being fed into the battle through the portals should be depositing very large amounts into the area. It took a few minutes to figure out what was going on, and she resisted the urge to frown when she realized the two things going on. First, the containing barrier was breaking the binding particles if they contacted it. Because of course she'd been stupid enough to not test to ensure that the barrier wouldn't interact poorly with the binding particles. Second, whatever it was that Ziz used for telekinesis was half-accidentally tumbling the binding particles in a way that broke them down.

Having things like that thrown in your face in the middle of a battle wasn't exactly a good thing, but there wasn't much for her to do about it now. Especially as one of the two causes she had no way to test before now, so there was no use beating herself up over it. Instead she used a few other tricks to set gathering points for binding particles instead and hoped for the best, especially as most of the telekinesis was being used in highly predictable ways now. Having the gathering points be outside of the current paths the telekinesis was taking was actually somewhat trivial as a result. Just set them in the gaps between the open portals where the debris were gathered but really doing little to nothing to block the incoming bullets.

Missy stared at the news as it became obvious what Taylor was up to today. Attempting to delay an already-moving Endbringer was one thing, but attacking one when it was dormant? Then again, that comment at the start of things somewhat implied that the Simurgh hadn't been dormant, but merely pretending while doing something to the world below. Whether that was a constant thing or the lead-up to an attack was impossible to know, but it probably justified the attack.

It took a good amount of time before she realized that she had a much better option for keeping tabs on what was going on. Thus, instead of sticking around and watching the news, she darted over to the transport device and headed for the Inn. There she found Danny in the command room with Hive, surrounded by a full immersion view of the battle. Missy pulled over her own chair to join him, figuring that it was at least cooler watching the situation this way.

"What the hell inspired this?" Missy asked after a few minutes, ensuring that the headset wasn't transmitting to Taylor. No need to distract her while she worked, after all.

"Hive found seventeen dormant Endbringers," Danny replied.

"...what?"

"Taylor took those out first, and since she was ready to fight Endbringers acting up in retaliation anyway she went after Ziz instead. Picked a nice spot in the middle of the ocean in case things fell out of orbit and attempted the same kind of attack she'd used on the dormant Endbringer cores. That was dodged, and thus the real fight began."

"Oh. And she didn't invite me to join her?"

"The only reason she's there in person at all is to throw homing unfolded bullets at range as a combination hopeful kill shot and distraction. If she couldn't do that then she'd probably be running the entire attack from here using drones."

Missy nodded. "Okay, that makes sense. Is there anything we can do to help?"

He shook his head. "Not directly. Watching for things she might miss, but she's got basically direct control of the drones. Adding anything she's not expecting into the mix is more likely to hinder her than help her. Hive is watching for anything that may take offense and try and join the fight unexpectedly while I watch for patterns that Taylor might be too in the middle of the battle to spot."

"I see. Is the sphere keeping the Simurgh contained?"

"Yep. It's being maintained by those groups of training drones around the edge, they hand off to the next one to go recharge when they run low on mana. Though they've only done so once, no second attempt to seriously push through the barrier has been attempted since the first one."

"We've got a problem," Hive interjected, getting both of their attention.

"Taylor," Danny suddenly said from where he was monitoring back at the Inn. "Leviathan just went into what Hive is calling an attack pattern, heading straight for you."

"Fuck," Taylor swore, storing her drinks and snacks just before dismissing the chair and table. A moment after that she had Hal out. "ETA?"

"No more than three minutes."

Nodding, Taylor continued to make homing unfolded bullets to add to her stack, though she stopped launching them for the moment. She did rise up significantly above the surface of the ocean though, and took a moment to cast her automatic shield drone and prep a dozen blink spells. There was, after all, a very good chance that she was going to need them. The last twelve combat drones that weren't already in orbit, held back more because she'd determined that deploying them all was just going to have them getting in each other's ways, were deployed as well. Each activated it's optical cloak and prepped a couple of blink spells as they spread out.

Hive sent more surveillance drones to monitor Taylor shortly before Leviathan's first attack struck out of the ocean. It seemed that the rematch was going to start with launched objects, though that could be in part because there hadn't been enough time for the Endbringer to form storm clouds over her head. It was doing so now, of course, but it was also moving faster and more aggressively than it had the previous time.

Luckily, Taylor had more tricks of her own available this time.

Six water tentacles lashed out at Taylor, one of them containing Leviathan. She countered with blink spells and four homing unfolded bullets heading for the Endbringer's core. The shield drones didn't keep up with her blinking out from between them, but survived being slammed around by the water as Leviathan frantically changed course to avoid being hit by the bullets. Ten seconds later the four bullets were speared by partially-unfolded shards of ice, eight more heading straight for Taylor. She dodged six, shattered one with Hal, and caught the last with her fist. The last one's unfolding collapsed a moment later, and she properly unfolded it and threw it back at Leviathan.

The bastard dodged it, of course, but that wasn't a surprise. It wasn't like the throw had been all that impressive, all things considered. It was more of a declaration that unfolded projectiles didn't work against her than anything else. Of course, they also didn't seem like they were going to be working against Leviathan today, at least not without some additional work. Luckily she and Hive had done their homework. Admittedly, not preparing for Leviathan specifically, but the second Endbringer likely hadn't pulled out as many new tricks as she had.

Leviathan launched a few more bits of seafloor at Taylor while waiting for the storm clouds to form above her head. She countered with more unfolded bullets while preparing for the seemingly-inevitable attempt to strike at her directly. After all, the Endbringer had done that once already this time, why wouldn't it try again?

"You should put on your breathing mask," Missy's voice interjected just before Taylor blinked out of the way of a couple of water tentacles.

Taylor flinched at that, feeling stupid for forgetting it, and quickly pulled out her mask and put it on. Of course, once she had it on she realized that she could likely do things that Leviathan wasn't going to expect after their last fight. Such as allowing one of the water tentacles to hit her without dodging. It exerted incredible pressure on her, but nowhere near what the Knight Armor was capable of taking. Of course, she was also ready to blink out at the first sign of her barriers failing.

The battle seemed to pause for a moment as Taylor, Hal, and the shield drones all ignored the crushing pressure of the water. Leviathan then darted up the tentacle to attack Taylor directly. Which was what she'd wanted in this case, though timing was going to be important. She had an entire collection of spells ready to trigger as the Endbringer approached, and right before Leviathan reached her she let them loose.

All of the water around them was pulled away by the storage and retrieval spell, dispersed into a good distance around them. Taylor vanished from where she'd been at the same time, but only moved over a few feet. Hal had gone the other direction, with the shield drones being left behind. They halted Leviathan's movement for a split-second, which was all Taylor needed to snap a barrier identical in purpose to the one trapping Ziz around Leviathan, except much smaller in size.

The instant the barrier was in place all of the water that Leviathan had been manipulating fell under the force of gravity. That included the storm clouds suddenly releasing their own water into a rainstorm, one that Taylor ignored. She was more interested in the fact that Leviathan no longer had a water echo. Apparently that came from some other source that the Endbringer couldn't reach while trapped in the barrier. And without the water echo it had maybe three gallons of water in the barrier with it. That little bit of water was being used, along with the Endbringer itself, in an attempt to break out of the barrier, which was an actual strain on Taylor's mana.

Hal wasn't idle, energy spike vanishing as it took aim at Leviathan. A moment later the device had fired an unfolded projectile at the Endbringer, one that wasn't dodged in time because there was likely insufficient warning inside of the barrier. The resulting explosion of energy immediately and violently assaulted the barrier, exceeding what Taylor was capable of holding back. The energy then proceeded to launch Taylor and Hal away from the epicenter, flash-boiling a somewhat significant amount of water in the process.

"I don't think that trick will work again," Taylor mused as she recovered, meeting Hal near where they'd been thrown from. Hal was stored a moment later, dangerously low on mana and sending a note to Hive about damaged emitters. Taylor left the breathing mask on for now.

Changing her focus from her own exhaustion and somewhat depleted barriers, Taylor examined the battle in space, it was obvious that she still wasn't getting enough binding particles to stick around to grab Ziz properly. Popping in and attempting to drop a smaller barrier around Ziz might work, since the Endbringer wouldn't likely know about her having just done so against Leviathan, but that would negate all of the work done to engage remotely and would probably only be possible in a few hours after recovering from doing so to Leviathan. That and she did not want to find out that the third Endbringer could affect her mind despite her protections if she got close enough. Which meant changing tactics again.

Luckily, she had a plan that would hopefully be taken as being for an entirely different purpose until it was too late. The training drones generating bullets were given new instructions, each of the portals connecting back to the battery in the Inn closing and reopening in new positions closer to the portals to the fight. A single training drone docked into each of the newly opened portals, pulling mana from the battery while preparing to cast a spell from the emitter arrays at the other end of the drone. Ten seconds later a beam lashed out through the portals, five percent explosion and ninety-five percent binding particle generation.

Despite the small percentage of explosion payload, the beams tore through the meager debris that Ziz had put in place at each portal. All eighteen beams met dead center in the battle space, Ziz dodging one of them hurriedly, and binding particles bloomed from the midpoint. Six other training drones broke off from their ready positions around the barrier, instead firing homing binding trigger bullets at the Endbringer.

Ziz didn't seem to notice the bullets, not having noticed any other pure mana attack to speak of, and was thus taken by surprise when bindings suddenly started forming. The Endbringer frantically shifted to avoid an unfolded projectile from one of the combat drones, not quite pulling free of the bindings but moving just enough to spare its core. Six more physical projectiles were largely ignored as that happened, since none of them had been able to do enough damage.

It was then that the Endbringer found out about Taylor's surprise. Every physical projectile sent Ziz's way today had been a threat, those that weren't already unfolded having a trap spell on them. One of the incoming projectiles detected that it was about to hit something and that it was on-target for hitting an Endbringer's core. The spell embedded in it was thus triggered, and two milliseconds before it made impact it unfolded. Bound, Ziz had no chance to dodge and the second exploding Endbringer of the day graced the world. The larger barrier had enough volume to hold against that explosion, not to mention far more mana available to feed it, and thus contained the explosion instead of rupturing.

Barely.

The barrier itself fell a few seconds later, not because Taylor had ordered it to be taken down but because no handoff had happened in time and the training drones that had been powering it had run out of mana. That wasn't exactly a significant concern, and shutting everything down happened over the next few minutes. Hive even sent construction drones to collect the remains of the two Endbringers, to add them to the collection of material to try and process.

Missy had helped Danny shut down the command room before they both headed upstairs. Hive had popped off to handle other things, but the two were able to meet Taylor as she returned from the battle. Though she didn't look like it at first, it was obvious to Missy that the older girl was exhausted and running quite low on mana. She definitely hadn't been expecting to deal with a one-on-one rematch with Leviathan today, no matter that she came out on top.

"You should probably eat something and then sleep off your exhaustion," Missy said as Taylor dropped her Knight Armor.

"Yeah," Taylor agreed, carefully moving over to the dining room and dropping into a chair. Food and drink appeared in front of her, some sandwiches and juice that she'd apparently had stored away. "Think Behemoth is going to be willing to show its face anytime soon?"

"Who knows," Danny said. "But you did better than I thought you would, even if I'd expected you to leave when Leviathan was obviously gunning for you."

"I'd be barred from any and all fishing clubs if I let a catch like that go when it was coming right to me."

He punched her in the shoulder, lightly, which she obviously felt due to not having put up her Knight Clothing. "No more starting fights with Endbringers."

Missy raised an eyebrow. "No starting fights?"

He grinned. "Of course. If they start a fight with her then I have no problem with her ending it. At the same time, just to be safe, she's taking her post-fight nap here where they likely can't get at her."

"Ah."

Missy ended up leaving the two of them in the Inn while she headed home to see how Sherie and Ethan were taking things. Or if they'd been called in unexpectedly and she just didn't know it. She found both of them in the living room with the television on, then realized that it hadn't been twenty minutes since Taylor took out the Simurgh and thus the news hadn't caught up to that yet in the video streams. So she sat down in the living room to wait out the end of the battle.

"Oh come on," Ethan grumbled as a parting verbal shot at the Simurgh showed up after the fade to black. "First the Davy Jones crack, and now they didn't even get the quote right!"

Any attempt at answering him there was stopped by what happened next, his eyes going wide alongside Sherie's as the ending sequence of the streams played. The news anchors had gone dead silent as well as they watched the same sequence.

"What the hell was that?" Sherie asked once things had faded to black.

"Nineteen down," Missy answered. "And one to go, provided Behemoth dares attack anywhere ever again."

Ethan groaned. "Why did she have to do this today of all days?"

"Why is today a problem?"

"Because Danny invited us to her surprise party and now the gift we picked out for her is going to look downright pitiful compared to what she's already done today. Assuming that he doesn't call things off in light of what just happened, anyway."

"Surprise party?"

"She turns sixteen today," Sherie answered. "Danny admitted earlier in the week that she might not realize that it's her own birthday, and that she probably isn't expecting anyone else to remember either. And of course, now she's gone and given the world a gift instead of receiving gifts."

Missy thought about that for a moment, before snorting. "Yeah, but then again, what better gift to give herself for her sixteenth birthday? The only way it would be better would be if she'd been able to get Behemoth too for a clean sweep. Though she really wasn't expecting the Leviathan interrupt, so she'd probably have been happy with just taking out the Simurgh."

"Still changes the entire tone of things."

"Since you obviously didn't want to tell me about the party, what did you get her?"

Ethan sighed. "We got her a higher end PRT-issue field-agent vest. Tinker-inspired fabric rated against stabbing with several pockets for storing things in an unobtrusive manner under normal clothing. Sherie and I figured that it would be good for helping to explain her lack of injury when her magic protections keep her safe as well as providing an excuse for where she keeps a number of things when they aren't in her normal pockets. That and we're also picking up the cake, which we probably need to do now, before the massive celebrations start."

"Oh. Is it at least a big cake?"

"It should be. Hopefully things won't be too awkward though, since Danny said something about inviting others. If they don't know Taylor's secrets, and thus what she accomplished today, then discussion could be difficult. I also can't see anyone wanting to talk about something else now. Of course, if they do know Taylor's secrets then we'd have to decide on revealing your secrets to them, which is another potential headache..."

Fuck. That was a potential minefield all on its own, one that Taylor had very nicely dropped into place without realizing it. Well, dropped into place with Danny's help, since he'd decided to invite those in the know and those likely not in the know to a surprise birthday party, followed by letting Taylor take out Endbringers before the party.

"How do we handle that?" Missy asked.

"That's probably going to be partially up to you," Sherie admitted. "If only because the important secrets are your own. I think the only thing we have to seriously recommend you not reveal is that you were Vista, and that's for a combination of reasons including your safety and general public relations. The rest is going to depend largely on who you feel that you can trust, coupled with who figures it out on their own."

"Regardless of that," Ethan interrupted. "I was serious about getting the cake sooner rather than later, since I bet we have less than an hour before people start celebrating in the streets. We might as well head over early to see if Danny wants any help setting up while Taylor is out of commission too. Maybe bring him lunch if he hasn't eaten already, since getting anywhere in a car later is going to be difficult."

A few minutes later they were in the car, and it was obvious that a number of people had run out to buy party supplies. When they got there the bakery wasn't busy, and the baker threw in a free box of cookies 'to celebrate', but the liquor store down the street looked like people wanted to try to buy them out. Really, it was almost looking like they might not have to worry about anyone else Danny might've invited, because unless they had the same idea and showed up early there wouldn't be any way for them to arrive at all. Well, unless they could fly or were able to be teleported over in some fashion by Taylor without Missy knowing that they existed and were that trusted.

Really, the more Missy thought about it, the less likely it seemed that the others invited would know Taylor's secrets and the more likely it was that it would be friends of the family that would be clueless but had to be invited for politeness sake. They might've even asked Danny about when Taylor's party was and got invited because of that more than because he intended to invite them, which would make the entire afternoon somewhat awkward. At least Missy could use magic to communicate with Taylor in relative secrecy though, right?

637

Hugs

Funny

Meow

Informative

Insightful

Winter

Red Envelope

Sun

Shamrock

Yuri's Night

Earth Day

May Day

8th Anniversary

10th Anniversary

CmptrWz

Sep 9, 2020

View discussion

Threadmarks Interlude 7

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Sep 9, 2020

#12,715

Dinah Alcott - June 1, 2011

Aisha Laborn - June 1, 2011

Geoffrey Pellick - June 2, 2011

Colin Wallis - June 2, 2011

Brian Laborn - June 3, 2011

Amy Dallon - June 3, 2011

Victoria Dallon - June 3, 2011

Lisa Wilbourn - June 3, 2011

Mimi Corti - June 4, 2011

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 4, 2011

Gregory Everett - June 4, 2011

Colin Wallis - June 4, 2011

Aisha Laborn - June 5, 2011

Emily Piggot - June 6, 2011

Hayate Yagami - June 6, 0076

Tim Guidi - June 7, 2011

Kurt Wynn - June 7, 2011

Emily Piggot - June 8, 2011

Amy Dallon - June 8, 2011

Henry Renick - June 9, 2011

Riley Davis - June 11, 2011

David Symons - June 11, 2011

Amy Dallon - June 11, 2011

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 11, 2011

Paul Tyrell - June 11, 2011

Christine Mathers - June 11, 2011

Special: Endbringer Attacked!

Dinah Alcott - June 1, 2011

Dinah sighed as her mother drove away from the school. She still wasn't entirely sure what the discussion with Aisha had covered, and didn't know how to find out without bringing a tape recorder to school with her for the next time. Even remembering that Aisha was there had been a problem, the sudden need to pay more attention to 'about to happen' instead of 'happening now' creating a problem for her ability to concentrate properly.

Whatever the missing pieces had been, they didn't seem to have helped with figuring Missy out. Not that learning more about Aisha was all that likely to improve her power's ability to figure out Missy anyway. The only good way to figure out Missy was going to be more exposure to the girl, so with any luck the plan to work with her a couple of days a week would work. Uncle Roy had promised that he'd make the offer, at least, even if he wasn't sure why it was important that she worked with Missy.

Of course, that didn't help with figuring out the other problem individuals, but there was only so much that she could do there. Minerva and Lilia were almost certainly going to be 'learn from afar' deals, the others were just plain not happening anytime soon. There just weren't any good ways to interact with them more right now. Or if there were, it was beyond her and her powers to figure them out currently.

Hopefully she could figure out enough about Missy before school started up again in the fall, or if that didn't happen that she would be working with her over the summer and would strike up enough of a friendship to allow them to interact frequently despite being in different schools.

Aisha Laborn - June 1, 2011

Aisha was annoyed, having failed to locate Missy's new house. Admittedly, following the girl home on the bus hadn't been an option when she was picked up by someone, but she'd thought that memorizing the license plate number of said car would help. Instead it appeared that Missy either hadn't gone straight home today or the neighborhood that Aisha thought was correct was actually wrong. Another attempt might need to be made tomorrow, but she'd run out of time available to stay out looking for today.

Brian had been mildly annoying, at least while she'd been concentrating enough for him to realize that she existed, but even that was infinitely better than either of their parents. He still hadn't admitted to what, exactly, had happened to result in him suddenly being able to take guardianship of her. He'd even been able to do so before he turned eighteen, somehow convincing a judge to emancipate him a little early so that he could take care of her under who knows what law. There was no way that he'd figured out how to arrange that on his own, but she still didn't know what help he'd had. It didn't seem to be any of his friends, at least, and she knew that she was missing something about the situation.

For that matter, she needed to figure out where their mother ended up. The apartment's locks had been changed by the landlord, meaning that the old keys didn't work. That didn't give Aisha any information on where the woman was, just that she likely wasn't in the apartment anymore. It was just a pain to do that searching now that she and Brian were in a new apartment across town.

Come to think of it, she also needed to figure out what the hell happened to Brian's friends. He'd just...stopped going to visit them. Sure, he had to worry about taking care of her, and the new apartment, but surely he wouldn't just drop them like that? He'd actually stopped going to see them before she triggered while out with dad, so she'd not gotten a chance to follow him to see who they were. She also hadn't gotten around to going through his things yet. In part because it was all still too neat from carefully being put away, needing another few weeks before he left things messy enough to not notice that she hadn't put things back perfectly when going through them.

She was pulled out of her musings by someone ringing the doorbell buzzer thing, which took her by surprise because nobody should really know that they were here yet. Not when it'd only been a couple of days. Unless it was one of Brian's friends, finally coming for a visit? Smirking, she quietly slipped out of her room so that she could stand hopefully-unnoticed in the corner of the living room. Brian seemed agitated as he hit the button that opened the complex door for the person who'd arrived, and a minute later he was letting in...Miss Militia.

Aisha's eyes went wide, because Brian knowing anyone in the Protectorate had been far beyond anything she'd expected. Especially since he'd been running around as a low-level villain, with the friends he wasn't visiting probably being other parahumans.

"Good evening Mister Laborn," Miss Militia said. "As I said, I'm here to talk about your...er...sister?" The woman shook her head, then it looked like she might be frowning behind her bandanna. A look of concentration followed, and then she looked around the apartment. "Miss Laborn, would you be so kind as to stop that? Having this discussion with you making us forget that you exist is going to be problematic at best."

Crap. They knew she had powers. She wasn't sure how they knew, but they knew. But would it be better to slip away while they couldn't tell where she was or to reveal herself? It took a moment of thinking about it before she realized that if she didn't stick around then it might create problems for Brian, and she still didn't want to screw up whatever it was he'd done to get her away from their father. With a sigh, she concentrated on turning off her powers. Besides, Miss Militia already knew that she was there.

"There you are," Miss Militia said, looking at her. Brian spun around and looked at where Aisha was stepping out of the corner as well. "Miss Laborn, for the record, do you know if your power continues to function while you're asleep?"

Aisha blinked at that. She didn't know why it was important to be asked, but it seemed safe enough to answer. "Er, yes? I have to use an alarm because Brian doesn't remember that I need to be woken up."

The woman nodded. "Which implies that it defaults to on, and thus we can't charge you with who knows how many counts of assault with a parahuman power."

"What?" Brian said, looking between the two.

"Your sister triggered at some point recently and picked up a potent stranger ability. Sadly for her, it doesn't hide her from cameras or other recording devices and she was spotted snooping around the home of some PRT staff."

Aisha felt her eyes go wide at that, but she held her concentration to keep them from forgetting her. "I wasn't trying to spy on any PRT staff!"

Miss Militia nodded at that. "We didn't think you were intending to, but said staff happen to have taken in Miss Biron recently."

Crap. So much for almost all of her plans to spy on Missy. "So that's why you're here?"

"I'm here because my perfect recall was predicted to be able to work around your abilities." She then tapped an item on her shirt. "Though I also have a camera being monitored by a team nearby, one that I'm in radio contact with. No long-term recordings, just enough for them to remind me that you exist and why I'm here."

Aisha felt her eye twitch. Dinah, Missy, and now the Protectorate all had ways to get around her powers. Fucking hell, was something wrong with them? Susie at school had said something about some kinds of powers going wonky ever since Minerva showed up, did that apply to her powers too?

"I'm also here to provide information on potential options with the Wards," Miss Militia continued. "Though if I'm being honest, it's more out of curiosity as to how in the world the PR teams would even begin to try to handle a Ward that nobody could remember meeting. Powers like yours would probably be a poor fit for a large number of reasons otherwise."

Brian sighed at that, then snorted. "Maybe I should throw her at that girl, Taylor I think it was? Because this sounds like far too much trouble to deal with and having Aisha's powers be removed would probably solve a lot of headaches."

"NO!" Aisha said, momentarily losing focus on keeping them able to remember that she was there. Both of the others blinked and shook their head, then Miss Militia paused. Probably being talked to by that team monitoring her.

"Miss Laborn," the woman said. "We aren't going to force you to try and lose your powers. Can you please turn them off again?"

Aisha grumbled, but took a deep breath and concentrated again.

"Thank you," Miss Militia said, looking at her again. "While we could likely arrange a safe encounter between you and Miss Hebert, we wouldn't do so without your consent. Even if I personally feel that the pros would outweigh the cons there in your case."

"The cons being that I'd lose my powers, right?" Aisha said. "What would the pros be?"

Miss Militia held her hand up to tick off fingers. "Maintaining a job is difficult if your supervisors don't remember that you exist, which would make it hard to pay your bills. From a safety point of view, if you get knocked out and everyone forgets that you're there then nobody is going to help you. That would be especially bad in something like a fire, where the firefighters would very likely ignore your body outright. While not important in a city with decent public transportation, if your abilities affect other drivers then you wouldn't be able to get a license. To a lesser extent, relationships of any kind are harder when your friends can't remember that you exist. All of those would be solved by the removal of your powers."

Aisha opened her mouth, thought about some of that, and closed it again. She hadn't even considered several of those, and the idea of falling unconscious during an emergency and everyone just ignoring her body, her power making them leave her to die? That was terrifying. Then there was the relationships comment, and she realized that she might never get a boyfriend. Or if she did, she'd have to learn to keep focus on keeping her powers shut down while doing anything fun or risk having the mood ruined by her partner forgetting that she even existed.

She was fairly certain that she paled at the combination of those two.

"Regardless," Miss Militia continued, turning back to Brian. "I'm also here to extend an offer of assistance in learning to work with your sister's powers, if only so that you can properly watch over her despite them."

"Can we go back to the possibility of getting me depowered?" Aisha asked, ignoring the voice in the back of her head telling her that it was a bad idea. Ruining her love life before she could have one was a worse idea!

Geoffrey Pellick - June 2, 2011

Geoffrey swore under his breath as all twelve monitoring devices that had been initially active went offline in rapid succession. It was likely that the two on timers and the one intended to trigger on a motion sensor weren't going to activate either, meaning that they'd learned nothing of use about Minerva's normal home base location. All of that work for nothing more than the frequencies that one or two other groups that had also snuck in had been using for their own monitoring devices.

Minus the PRT's, as he'd already had that information courtesy of Dragon's systems.

Still, he hadn't just relied on devices in the warehouse. The cameras watching from various points around the warehouse were still functional, several of them having been there already and just repaired and tapped. He'd not expected to end up repairing all of the existing ones, admittedly, but it made slipping in the data taps easier. The added cameras were the ones he most expected to have found and removed, and not necessarily by Minerva or Lilia. After all, he and his team hadn't had time to get permission from property owners to attach them to various buildings.

Despite expecting it to be the case, he still found it annoying when the two cameras close enough to try and pick up the other monitoring devices that he hadn't placed in the warehouse weren't able to detect any signals from them. Obviously the group behind Minerva was too cautious to catch with such clumsy monitoring attempts. Sadly, he didn't know of anything better right now.

Tracing their phone connection just brought him to the same endpoint used by several other groups, fully expected as it was the same fake international dialing code as said other groups. Trying to find their servers was an exercise in futility as well, Dragon was much better at that than he was and had failed to accomplish anything closer than 'probably tied to Brockton Bay'. Getting any kind of tracker on Minerva or Lilia before they left to their base of operations wasn't working.

How was he supposed to ensure that the group's AIs were safely shut down if he couldn't track them down?

Colin Wallis - June 2, 2011

Colin carefully removed his armor, mentally reviewing how things had gone today. The ambush attempt against Minerva by Crystal Cage and Potter had been unexpected. Capturing the two had been even less expected, as the two were incredibly good at escaping before they could both be grabbed and were loyal enough to break each other out. He'd worked with Dragon on ideas for containing the duo in the past, and had put most of those ideas into practice tonight.

He technically got credit for the capture of Crystal Cage, with Minerva 'assisting' with a distraction. He personally suspected that Minerva had been having trouble subduing her opponent non-fatally when he'd arrived. The real game changer there was how Lilia had subdued Potter. A targeted power nullification trump skill was incredibly impressive on its own, but the implications behind being able to essentially target a parahuman's powers and block them were staggering.

With any luck he'd be able to get some details out of Hal, and possibly start on a way to develop something similar. He wasn't holding out much hope though, as he suspected that the mechanisms needed to accomplish something like that were beyond him. A lot of what Hal could tell him about was beyond him, in fact, implying that he was at best the world's third greatest tinker.

He found himself strangely okay with that, since the work he was doing with the Youth Guard was much more important right now. On the surface the vast majority of things with the Wards were generally fine, but the exceptions were problematic and in many cases well hidden by rules and regulations. They'd even had to remove a Protectorate member from Mesa, sticking them in a quarantine zone for the time being.

The added fame and accolades he was getting in the PRT and Protectorate from that work was even almost enough to distract him from being jealous about Minerva and Hive being able to carry everything they needed with them in a non-obvious manner.

Brian Laborn - June 3, 2011

Brian sat down on the couch, but didn't bother to turn on the television. The past couple of weeks had been insane, and it didn't look like things were slowing down at all. It was hard to believe that a month ago he'd been the nominal leader of the Undersiders, working for a mysterious boss that in hindsight he hadn't known nearly enough about. Now the 'team' had been split up, only his connection to his sister keeping the FBI from shipping him off elsewhere.

Lisa had jumped at the chance to work with the FBI across the country, much further away from her parents. That said job came with a much better new identity was likely part of it. He wasn't fully sure, but he thought that the plan was for her to spend a couple of years as a 'junior analyst' or something like that and then 'graduate' to proper field agent when she came of age. He had her new phone number and they were doing their best to keep in touch.

Rachel's ability to train dogs had been seen as a resource not to be squandered by the FBI, and they'd emptied the girl's makeshift shelters while sending her to a non-FBI training facility of some kind. He really didn't know anything else on that front, only that they were hoping that she could train more drug and bomb sniffing dogs than the current methods did. He knew even less about what had become of Alec, only that the lazy ass had headed South.

Then there was Brian himself. Somehow the FBI had pushed things through to get him custody of Aisha, after getting him to agree to train with the FBI with a goal of him becoming a field agent once he didn't have to watch over his sister. Speaking of which, Aisha had initially been slightly angry with him, at least until speaking to their then-in-custody mother. He didn't know what the two had talked about, but Aisha came away angry and more willing to work with him instead of against him.

Of course, Aisha still had visiting time with their father, and apparently her slipping away from him during the last visit had more to do with him forgetting about her due to a trigger event than anything else. The PRT had actually stepped in there, closing the investigation into why he'd abandoned Aisha. Officially all they'd said was that 'a parahuman' had been involved and that it wasn't his fault.

Somehow, and he wasn't sure how, Aisha had mostly behaved for the few days that she'd had her powers. Up until his sister had tried to get more information on a classmate, anyway, and accidentally spied on the home of PRT staff. He still had trouble remembering exactly what they'd talked about when Miss Militia had shown up, but Aisha was spending the night in the Rig right now. Remote monitoring to bypass her powers, meaning that he wasn't constantly forgetting she existed, with the intent of seeing if a necklace was willing to remove her powers in the morning. An event that he'd be monitoring remotely from the PRT building.

He really thought that this entire situation justified having a beer, but now that he was trying to go straight for Aisha's sake he didn't have any and couldn't buy any.

Amy Dallon - June 3, 2011

Amy flinched slightly as she came into contact with Vicky's skin, courtesy of the older girl adjusting her grip. Holding back from trying to recreate the phantom organ in other people was getting harder every day, probably only really stopped by the fact that she didn't actually know what methods could work. None of the plants had manifested anything like it, after all, and she wasn't sure if it was possible to add one to someone later at all.

Still, at least now she'd cleared the air with Taylor, and had a potential plan for if things got too bad. Especially since she was doing her best to ignore the almost-voices in the back of her head telling her to both experiment more and to avoid anything that could get her powers removed. The latter was a new one, seemingly brought on by the realization that it was an actual possibility for her to lose her powers, and made her think that the voices weren't originating in her own mind.

Sadly, they hadn't had time to quiz Taylor on all of the details. At the same time, Amy had ideas for what she might want to do if she did go through with swapping out 'parahuman' for 'mage'. Taylor had gone a very specific direction in her look, but it was unlikely that said direction was the only option. Details would need to be worked out later, if at all, but for now some thoughts on costume design would at least be a distraction.

Victoria Dallon - June 3, 2011

Vicky kept the grin off of her face as she headed upstairs. Mom had wanted to yell at them, or possibly at Amy, but Vicky had covered their bases well enough to avoid that. Though there was a bit of a chiding for not 'properly checking the store name before trying to visit it', that was expected when she was using such a horrible cover story.

And Crystal liked to claim that she didn't know how to be subtle.

The desire to grin faded as she made it upstairs, noting that Amy's door was already closed. Vicky wasn't comfortable with her sister's mental state, not with her seemingly looking for a way to get rid of her own powers. The whole 'phantom organ' thing probably helped explain why Amy had even made the occasional excuse for not going to the hospital to heal people. Accidentally experimenting on patients because she wasn't in the right mental state to hold back would be bad.

Vicky honestly wasn't sure if she'd have the mental strength to handle that, all things considered. At the same time, she also didn't have the ability to properly monitor her sister's mental state, which likely meant that she had to get Dean to visit to see if Amy was actually in a better state or if she'd just been good at hiding it. Luckily they weren't in an 'off again' phase of their relationship, so it would be trivial to get him to stop by over the weekend for a quick checkup. Especially as he only needed to be close, so Amy shouldn't need to know that he was checking on her at all.

Lisa Wilbourn - June 3, 2011

Lisa walked through the small park on her way back to the hotel that she was temporarily staying in, her dinner settling in her stomach. She'd be in town another day or two, just long enough to finish looking over a local issue, and then she'd move on again. Which, if she was being honest, was fine by her. It was much harder to track someone down if they were constantly moving, and having government support in doing so was far better than doing so on her own. The FBI had even been giving her honestly interesting things to look at, though none of it was particularly sensitive.

Her new ID still said 'Lisa Wilbourn', but they'd decided to fudge things a bit more than she had. She was, as Lisa, just past her nineteenth birthday now. Brian wasn't aware of that detail, admittedly, but then again he also didn't know that she was in a very secret FBI program for parahumans. One that the PRT should be completely unaware of, if only because if they did have proof that the other agencies knowingly employed parahumans then there would be quite the political battle over that fact.

It was a far cry from what she'd imagined would happen after she'd taken Coil down. Then again, she hadn't done a thing to take the bastard down, he'd screwed up royally and gotten the FBI on his case as a result. Similarly to how the Merchants back in Brockton Bay had gotten the Secret Service on their asses. She knew that Minerva had found Coil, and suspected that the new cape had been involved with the Secret Service latching onto the Merchants. She had no proof of the latter, of course, but Minerva was also one of the only independents in the area that was known to be willing to work with government agencies at all.

Oh well, none of that was her problem anymore. Nor was Taylor Hebert or the freaky things that necklace of hers did to thinker powers. Now her primary issues were much more mundane, and yet still quite interesting. Of course, eventually she'd run into something parahuman-related, like how all the insects in the area had just started to act up...

She stopped dead in her tracks, carefully looking around. Her eyes widened as she could see where every insect was acting oddly, jerking in changing groups. A minute later it was over, the insects returning to normal, but that wasn't any form of comfort. Insects had attacked Coil's hired sniper, just after he'd sniped Miss Hebert. Was this a result of the same power? Were they following her, even across the country? Or was it a coincidence?

There was no way for her to find out right now, and it was going to be days before she slept well again.

Mimi Corti - June 4, 2011

Mimi had spent the better part of the last week bouncing between confused, scared out of her mind, and incredulous. If not combinations thereof. It'd started with Bonesaw...er, Riley, killing half of the Nine because she'd already figured out that they wouldn't let her go off to try and join Minerva. Not that she'd made it sound like that was what she wanted when talking with all of them, admittedly, and she'd been right about her choices there. The weirder part was that for some reason the girl thought that joining Minerva was the only way to be a proper 'good girl' now. None of which explained why they'd packed up Riley's equipment and spent more time stopped than moving so that the girl could work on 'special projects'.

Of course, despite Riley calling the shots, Mimi had been declared the 'responsible adult' that was needed for traveling around. Crawler didn't count because he wasn't responsible, something that he'd fully agreed with. Then there was William, who despite having volunteered to drive them around apparently wasn't trustworthy enough to be the 'responsible adult' of their journey. Riley had actually declared him a creepy likely-pedo when he'd volunteered the use of his vehicle, but had accepted the offer so long as he agreed that any 'pedo behavior' would be dealt with severely.

Looking over, Mimi saw that Riley had been coaxed out of her temporary workshop by William returning with donuts for the three of them. The Siberian was patrolling the area and didn't really eat anyway. Crawler had, somehow, found a couple of large animals overnight and had his fill from them. The lack of combat for Crawler was actually part of what was worrying Mimi, since in her experience he didn't like to 'lay low' for any real length of time and he hadn't had any decent combat for almost two weeks straight now.

"So," William said as he split the donuts up. "Riley, may I ask why we aren't heading straight for Brockton Bay? That is where Minerva is most often, after all."

Riley had already taken a bite out of her first donut, but nodded before she swallowed what she'd been chewing. "I don't know what kind of magical girl Minerva is."

"What kind of magical girl?"

"Magical girls come in multiple varieties. A few are unique and work alone. Some have a fixed team, usually from another time or world, and they just have to find their teammates in the current day and place. I'm hoping that Minerva isn't either of those kinds because you can't join up with loners and I don't think that I'm a former teammate that just needs to be found. Others are empowered by outside forces that chose their champions carefully, or are empowered by the leader thanks to the way they gained their own powers. In both of those cases it's better to prove yourself before approaching the current magical girl or girls."

"Okay," Mimi said, glad that someone other than her had broached this topic. "So you want to prove yourself first. That makes sense, but what are you intending for this 'proving'?"

"I think we need to prove ourselves as a group so that Minerva will listen when we approach, even if not all of us want to join her. We could fight villains for a few months, but that will take too long and won't help you or Ned as much. So I figure that instead we do one big thing, hope that it's enough, and then go talk to Minerva."

Mimi wasn't sure that she liked the sound of that. "One big thing?"

Riley grinned. "Yep. We're going to take out a false god." She then took another bite of her donut.

That was not reassuring in the least, but Mimi didn't trust herself to say anything at that declaration. If they were lucky it would be a relatively minor 'god', but she suspected that wasn't going to be the case. And from the looks William was giving Riley, he probably felt similarly, but also didn't really want confirmation either.

It was going to be an interesting couple of weeks, wasn't it?

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 4, 2011

Rebecca had settled into her office, a number of regional directors doing the same despite it being a Saturday and despite the early hour for most of the country. Similarly, Paul was going to be settling into his office along with a number of other Protectorate leaders, while a number of other parahumans and consultants joined in as well from their own offices and various PRT conference rooms. This was the kind of thing that would normally be happening for a large-scale remote meeting for an S-Class threat response, but today there was to be no discussion. They had a series of text-only chat rooms available, but discussion wasn't actually in the plans.

No, today's show was far more intriguing and potentially worrisome. For the first time, they were potentially going to see the process of an agent being removed from someone from start to finish. Six hundred cameras were watching the Protectorate Headquarters ENE structure from all over Brockton Bay and boats that had been sent out specifically for that purpose to get the best possible collection of footage of the potential 'funnel'. The room in the structure where they would be operating from had every sensor system they could manage monitoring it. Which would have been far more impressive if they'd had more than a couple of days to arrange things.

A less potentially problematic volunteer would've been nice, but attitudes about the likelihood of the fate of agents removed through this process had changed. No longer were they certain that Lilia existed because of a need to anchor Miss Matsuoka's agent to someone. Instead, she likely acted like a tinker because she was very likely acting on behalf of a tinker, programmed to collect useful items. Nothing likely originating from Miss Matsuoka's agent had been deployed either.

Nor, for that matter, had any obvious links been made to Miss Hess's agent and the abilities it had given her. Miss Biron's agent being removed was still uncertain as well, but no new potential anchors for it had appeared either. The new theory among those with the most information was that the insect controller, whoever they were, was the holder of Miss Hebert's original agent and could only be made to do so because they'd obtained Miss Hebert's agent during her crisis point.

Minerva, on the other hand, was still likely a clone or alternate-dimension version of Miss Hebert that merely used incredibly advanced tinkertech. Despite claims to the contrary as to how her abilities worked, since implanted tinkertech could explain some of that as well. It was also possible that the tinkertech operated at least partially remotely, similarly to how the agents themselves did. They still didn't have enough information there, and all methods used to try and locate Minerva's base of operations had failed.

If this worked, and thinkers hadn't been able to predict that at all, then nothing else was likely to get done today. At the same time, assuming she survived, Miss Laborn was going to get one very large payout for volunteering. And if it didn't work then that was just more information on Miss Hebert's necklace, implying several things. Likely a lack of communication, wasting her own time on something that wouldn't happen, as well as possible conditions that weren't being met by Miss Laborn herself.

It wouldn't be long now before they'd see, at least, and Rebecca sipped her coffee while her computer connected to the streaming systems. The primary feeds came up, showing four cameras in the room to be used and four feeds from around the area. There was space for a ninth feed, reserved for if someone else flagged a feed as particularly interesting. Miss Laborn was already in the room, pacing.

Eventually Miss Hebert entered, the necklace proved to have someone paying attention on the other side when it produced instructions on a piece of paper, and they got started. Except that, just before the actual depowering began, the ninth feed activated on her screen.

And it was showing what had to be an agent, on another planet. One that, within a couple of seconds, was obviously grabbed to form the 'funnel' on the Earth Bet end. Proving that not only did those behind the necklace have access to worlds that Cauldron didn't, Clairvoyant not being able to see any world with an agent deployed on it, but also that they were actually removing agents from play when they depowered parahumans.

Rebecca didn't know if she should be terrified or hopeful. This could be permanently removing tools they needed to save humanity, but if those behind the necklace could do this then they might not need those tools. At the same time, something being able to do this might be the work of something as bad or worse for humanity. They just didn't have enough information, and no good way to get more right now.

Gregory Everett - June 4, 2011

Gregory raised an eyebrow as he followed Catherine into the computer lab at Arcadia. For three years straight she'd come in over the weekend to evaluate the final projects for her programming courses, but this was the first time that more than one other teacher had shown up to volunteer to help. Finding eight others in the room was honestly a surprise.

"And here I thought that I'd end up having to do most of the work while my retired husband here plodded along on the most promising entries," Catherine said, needling him.

"I still don't know why I bother coming to cringe at things," he replied. "Being a retired astronomer doesn't make it easier to look at horrible interpretations of planetary orbits."

"You're only retired in that you're no longer being paid to keep up with the field. Regardless, I highly suspect that the math department is here to see what Miss Hebert turned in." There were a couple of blushes and several nods at that. "She's the only one who used the three-dimensional toolkit for extra credit and isn't in my normal classes, so I'm holding her work back until the end."

There were groans, but no complaints. Catherine handed out copies of her grading checklist to everyone, divided up the students, and they all went to work testing things. Does the code compile and run, does the animation run smoothly, does the editing interface work, sanity of the provided input file, do there appear to be reasonable comments in the code including the student's name in the headers, and a few other details. Personally, he was happy that none of the assignments he'd been handed were horribly broken, and one student had even shown where orbits crossed each other reasonably well.

Split across ten people, it only took a little over an hour to get through all of the normal students. Catherine then ran off copies of the checklist for the three-dimensional toolkit bonus points, gave all of them a copy of Miss Hebert's assignment, and spot-checked the work from her normal students while the rest of them took a look at Miss Hebert's. Each of them approached things differently there, but he personally intended to stick to the checklist. Though 'quality of models' was already marked as not applicable due to using a publicly available set.

When he finally got to the actual visuals he was honestly impressed. It looked like she had all of the planets in correct orbits, and he'd honestly be willing to use this as a basic visualizer. Punching in a couple of other dates brought up configurations that looked like they should be reasonably accurate for a high school project. Testing the editor only took a couple of minutes, though he was surprised to see actual information on the planets instead of just orbital declarations. Swapping the positional data for Earth and Mercury, but none of the rest, resulted in neither planet actually orbiting correctly. He made a note that she should probably get bonus points for that.

It was when he went to load the original file again that he paused. There were three data files. The original 'planets', the 'planets_gregory' that he'd made for his Earth/Mercury swap, and a much larger 'solarsystem'. Curious, he loaded the latter. It took several minutes to load up, and the computer's fans spun up a little in the process, but he had to blink when it was done.

The school computers obviously weren't powerful enough to handle this normally, the program just barely chugging along as he moved through the simulation. Models had obviously been re-used heavily as well, but it looked like everything was in here and being simulated. Planets, moons, asteroids, even larger components of Saturn's rings. There were also a couple of extra planets in reasonable-looking orbits.

Curious, he changed the date in the box, wondering how long it would take the program to shift forward a month. Only he was distracted and instead told it to shift forward a thousand years. He swore under his breath, but decided to give it ten minutes to see if it asked if he wanted to wait for the operation to complete. After all, running through who knew how many iterations of simulating all of those objects was going to take far too long if they weren't running on closed paths.

To his surprise, several minutes later the simulation updated with everything in new positions. New and reasonable looking positions. He stared at the new state of the simulation for a couple of minutes, then closed the program and opened up the source code. It was incredibly well documented with comments, as well as quite obviously modular. Finding the code that updated object positions was trivial as a result. Discovering a function that took an object index and a target time value that spit out new data for that object in a single pass, something that had to be an n-body calculation routine had him wide-eyed. He couldn't follow the code, admittedly, but the comments documented it to a point where he was tempted to pull them out of the code and submit them for peer review as-is.

It was almost an hour later before he wondered if Miss Hebert had calculated that the other large bodies in the system had to exist or if she'd been told about them by someone else.

Colin Wallis - June 4, 2011

Colin closed the last video before going over his summary of the day. Miss Laborn had woken up two hours after the funnel had vanished, apparently coinciding with the last of that...thing on another planet being consumed. He wasn't quite sure what he'd previously thought was coming through the funnels, but the video feed provided had just enough context to show that it was huge. Being able to be pulled through and into the necklace was impressive and frightening.

To distract himself from thinking too hard on that subject he'd instead focused on Miss Hebert, who had taken being pinned down in the chair reasonably well. Then again, it was possibly the most comfortable seat she'd had while one of these funnels was pinning her down, so that was understandable. The speed at which she went through her puzzle books, her mental ability to count cards, and her reading speed were another thing. She was obviously highly intelligent, more so if some of the other things he'd heard but not had time to follow up on were accurate. He'd delegated some of that checking, though, so he'd wait for that report to come back to him.

He also approved of the girl's choice in snacks, as well as the fact that she was obviously not 'dieting'. Her workout routine had to be decent to keep her in shape, even if she'd stopped running with her father. Then again, he was fairly certain that she was still frequently traveling to or from tutoring on foot, so that would definitely help. A number of other exercises could be done indoors as well, something he was very familiar with.

It painted an interesting picture of Miss Hebert, especially since they knew that she wasn't a parahuman.

Aisha Laborn - June 5, 2011

Aisha shook her head as she arrived home with Brian. She'd barely spent any time here since they'd moved in, really. Maybe the coming week she'd pull off sleeping in her own bed every night? It was at least a nice goal to reach for.

Despite how short a time she'd had them, not having her powers felt weird. No need to focus for people to remember that she existed, but also no...she couldn't call a tingle, necessarily, but something like it that had seemed to be there whenever someone else was around. Only noticeable now because of its absence, had she realized that it was there before it would've made a great 'am I alone?' check.

At the same time, she hadn't realized how much more like herself she would feel without her powers. She didn't think it had been significant, but now that she didn't have them the effect on her thought processes was noticeable. Her powers had been pushing her hard in several ways, and she really didn't like the idea of anything messing with her thoughts like that. No matter how awesome it was to be able to wander around with most people not being able to see you.

Miss Militia, the PRT and Protectorate, Dinah, Missy, Taylor, and any other number of random people knowing ways around that or just being immune? Well, that just made that prospect far less awesome. Just the idea that Dinah and Missy had probably heard her horrible singing the other day was embarrassing as hell. The lack of an off switch for when she wanted to default to being able to be remembered was another downside, as pointed out by Miss Militia.

"So," Brian said as he closed the apartment door. "You're no longer a parahuman."

"Right," Aisha said.

"But you got quite a bit out of the short-lived experience."

She rolled her eyes at that. "A few days of fun, a couple days of panic, and the better part of a day being unconscious while my powers were removed. Whoop-de-do."

He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and held it out to her. "And you got paid."

That had her blinking before she took the envelope. It wasn't sealed, so she opened the flap and removed the paper from inside. On that was a printed transfer receipt, into what looked like was probably her bank account, for twenty-five thousand dollars. "What the hell?"

"You were part of a paid PRT experiment, your health was placed at risk, and you suffered what is legally a serious injury in the removal of your powers as a result of the experiment. Thus, they paid you. I wasn't told the final amount until shortly before you woke up, but they'd let me know ahead of time even if we didn't want money to sway your decision."

"Oh."

Aisha hadn't expected that, but getting back more than the fifteen thousand that their grandparents had left her, and their mother had recently admitted she'd spent on drugs, was quite nice.

Emily Piggot - June 6, 2011

Emily sat there in the conference room as they waited for Colin to arrive. She'd be annoyed at needing to wait for him, but she was the one that had caused him to be late in the first place thanks to asking him to sweep her office for surveillance devices.

"Sorry for the delay," Colin greeted as he entered the conference room, closing the door behind him. "Director, I found four devices in your office. Three were likely dormant, their data feeds having been disconnected during previous sweeps, but I removed all of them just in case. A repair team will need to patch a couple of points as a result."

That had her frowning. "I'd not wanted to deal with the need to repair the holes, which is why those three were left dormant after their data feeds were cut."

"There are groups operating in the area that could likely tap the devices even with their data feeds being cut. I'm not actually certain if cutting power would be enough, in fact, so full removal was the only way to be sure."

Emily grimaced at that. Right. "Moving on, we have a number of things to discuss today. To start with, our request for resources to build better holding facilities in the event of capturing Crystal Cage or Potter again has been denied. Cited was the fact that nobody other than Minerva and Lilia have come up with a way to hold them at all."

"Which is what we expected," Hannah noted, to a round of nods. "Have we heard back on getting permission to approach Minerva and Lilia about aiding us in containment?"

"No. That's gotten tied up in debates over whether or not we need to involve foreign relations teams due to Minerva's unknown status as a literal world leader. I hear the FBI is having problems there as well, regardless of their previous experience working with her."

"Fun. Have the diplomatic rules been activated for her, or is it still entirely in debate?"

"Still in debate, and unlikely to be pushed either way until she does something to force us to make a decision on that front."

"That's a relief," Robin said. "I've had to deal with those rules once before."

"Lucky bastard," Shawn grumbled, though he didn't elaborate. Everyone knew he'd had to deal with those far too frequently as he'd bounced around regions. In fact, Rory was the only one in the room who'd never had to deal with them at all, from the PRT or Protectorate end, and was wisely staying quiet about that.

"We aren't treating the rebuilt warehouse as an embassy," Emily continued. "Or at least we aren't yet. Speaking of the rebuilt warehouse, there are quite a few people amazed at the apparently fully automated teardown and reconstruction of that entire lot by a collection of drones. City inspectors saw some of the footage and opted to not push to check the building, citing that they aren't qualified to examine tinker constructions. Costa-Brown asked that we not push to inspect it either, in part because she doesn't think that we're capable of giving it a proper inspection either."

"I saw footage as well," Colin said. "I suspect that a large portion of things were pre-assembled and merely teleported into place on site. My scans from passing by over the weekend also tell me that we're unlikely to learn anything by inspecting."

"Please tell me that you didn't intentionally go scan the building without approval to do so."

"The Secret Service van I met up with yesterday was only two blocks away, likely either due to their own investigations or because the cloaked vehicle they asked for assistance with was investigating the warehouse."

Emily nodded. That was acceptable, and nobody could blame Colin for checking the area in that case. "Did you learn anything else on that call?"

"Only that the Merchants likely have at least one compact car with a cloaking device installed in it."

"Good to know, but not entirely unexpected. Does anyone have anything else directly related to Minerva?" She got a collection of head shakes indicating a negative. "Okay then. Next on this morning's agenda is the normal shuffling of the PRT patrol routes, coupled with the adjustments to keep them away from the rebuilt warehouse. Renick, have any squad leaders not acknowledged their new routes?"

Henry shook his head. "No ma'am. I got the last two acknowledgements just before the meeting. I had a couple squad leaders express concern over the avoidance order creating problems. Neither had issues once I explained that pursuit and return aren't included in said order, just that we're avoiding patrolling that area for a few weeks at a minimum."

"Thank you. Does anyone have questions there?" Nobody spoke up, and she turned to Colin. "Armsmaster, have you reviewed the adjusted Protectorate patrol routes?"

"I have," Colin confirmed. "Though Assault and Dauntless haven't responded to the request for review I sent out."

"I'm not done double-checking the new route segments," Ethan reported immediately. "I should be done by this afternoon, provided that the maps are up to date on fire hydrants and electrical lines."

"And you Dauntless?" Emily asked.

Shawn sighed. "I'm not done cross-referencing the rooftops along the new route segments to ensure that I know which ones we've been asked to stay off of. With any luck I'll finish that up by tomorrow morning."

"Thank you both for ensuring that you're aware of things. Anything else on the Protectorate routes?"

"Just a minor concern about a couple of the older buildings on one of the routes," Rory said. "Specifically two condemned structures that I'm afraid might collapse onto non-condemned neighbors if I'm not careful with my sound blasts around them."

"I've already noted that and asked the city to check the safety of both buildings," Colin said. "If they're actually that bad then they'll need to come down in a controlled fashion sooner rather than later."

"Nice to see you on top of things," Emily said. "Moving on, we have multiple requests for confirmation of Miss Hebert's potential status as a thinker from her tutors. Armsmaster, you took those requests?"

"I did, and I can confirm that Miss Hebert shows zero signs of being a parahuman. We have a full-body MRI scan that shows no corona pollentia or gemma structure anywhere."

"We know that," Sherie said. "Do we know why they think she's a thinker?"

"She's proven herself to be a mathematical genius and will likely go down in history as one of the most important mathematicians of our time. Dragon and I now suspect that those behind the necklace were monitoring her because of her natural intelligence and intervened at the beginning of the year to prevent her death."

There was a moment of silence as most of the room absorbed that. Emily supposed that news of the girl seemingly-unknowingly breaking a number of encryption systems hadn't fully spread yet, but then again that should only be one tutor. Sighing, she broke the silence. "I know that permission was obtained for sharing her factorization trick that she demonstrated when she was supposed to fail, but that wouldn't be multiple requests to see if she's a thinker. What else did she do?"

"She essentially solved the n-body problem and provided an incredibly detailed list of objects in the Solar System as part of her programming final project, though the list of objects was likely provided by those who made the necklace. The comment chains in the source code indicate that things were made more efficient to handle the far larger data set, with older versions of several functions commented out. Dragon and I are both incredibly impressed with the code and the explanatory comments. Coupled with her ability to nearly-instinctively translate numbers into alternate bases in a way that has baffled anyone examining her instructions for the factorization trick in base ten? We feel that it explains both her ability to correctly interpret Vista's artwork and why the group may have gone to such lengths to clone her specifically."

"So we have a legitimate, standard human genius in town. One that somehow attracted the attention of an extradimensional group of some kind. Do you think that they used some of her earlier work as part of figuring out how to make the necklace and other tech that we've seen in use?"

Colin froze at that, and most of the others in the room looked at each other with varying odd expressions on their faces. Apparently nobody had considered that aspect yet. Fun, but now that it'd been voiced it might help with figuring more about the group out. Though now that she thought about it, she did wonder something.

"Speaking of that," she continued. "What are the chances that the group scanned the Solar System because they knew what Miss Hebert's programming project was going to be and hoped that she'd be able to write a solution for predicting the movements of everything?"

"We probably can't discount it," Henry admitted.

Hayate Yagami - June 6, 0076

Hayate frowned as she looked over the report that Yuuno had submitted. A lost Unison Device, one that had a goal of eventually returning to report to the no longer existent Belkan empire. Worse, it had reportedly consumed another device of unrecognized designation to repair itself. While not as problematic as using linker cores, it was still a problem, and could've been because the other device had a linker core. Of course, had this happened a year previous they might've been able to obtain the device's command codes from the Saint's Cradle, but that was now impossible. Assuming, of course, that said command codes were still valid, with their luck they'd not have worked anyway.

At the same time, Yuuno had been able to find information in the Library just two days prior. One of the Saint Kings had a personal device made for one of their children. The child had a weak linker core, and the device was set up with an experimental way to augment said linker core in a safer manner than was normally used. What that method was couldn't be said, the detailed records of it having been kept secret and now likely lost to time, but it was different than the normal way the Saint Kings augmented their cores. It had also supposedly not worked all that well, relatively speaking. What little they knew there indicated that was primarily because of the rare and horribly expensive raw materials for the augmentation unit needed not being available in suitable quantities. That they had information on, at least, because the specialty mana-reactive materials that could only be manufactured in a manaless environment were incredibly expensive to produce and, thanks to that, nearly impossible to hide the purchase of.

The known qualities of the device at that time placed it as a protector of the child, able to Unison with them in times of need but otherwise hiding from detection by pretending to be a lesser device. After growing up a bit, the child was known to have ended up 'behind enemy lines' on a regular basis, somehow seen as a weak non-combatant. Up until they engaged Unison and unleashed a limited, but powerful, set of area effect spells upon the enemy lines, vanishing afterwards in the chaos. At least until someone caught on, and laid a trap. A small group waited for them to show themselves in Unison, and were able to outmaneuver them so that the large area of effect spells couldn't be used due to keeping attacks in close quarters. The Unison Device was lost, presumed destroyed, during an escape attempt and its Lord was taken hostage.

Yuuno had even found pictures of the device's forms. It hid as a green belt with a cross buckle, but could also function as what appeared to be a green-haired young man. Devastating if allowed to get into position, but with a spell arsenal that didn't lend itself to close range combat. Some of that might've been its Lord at the time, of course, but if it'd been drifting without a Lord for all this time then it was unlikely to have changed much.

"What do you think?" she asked Rein, who was looking over the same files.

"Versteckte Klinge was obviously heavily damaged and is likely not fully functional," Rein replied. "Especially if he needs a restore from his backup that we now know isn't coming. At the same time, he could've adapted things from this other, unknown device. The real question is if he found a suitable Lord or is acting essentially on his own with little to no compatibility. Being originally designed and tuned for a child that he was with for years could make it problematic to properly bond with anyone else, but the records don't even have a mention of the synchronization process so it's possible that he was designed to be able to adjust himself."

Hayate nodded, not having fully considered some of that in her initial evaluation. "That's true. But we can probably assume that a decently compatible Lord was found, if he had sufficient power to repair himself and send the message that was picked up."

"Very true, so we can probably assume at least a moderately compatible partner. At the same time, he was lost in a time of unrest. Confronting him with proof of Belka's fall while he's nowhere near our population centers would be ideal, just in case he takes it poorly. I just wish we were positive as to which line of the Saint Kings commissioned him. There are conflicting reports here, making it a fifty/fifty chance as to if he would see Vivio as a likely ally."

"Yes...that is...indeed quite problematic. At the same time, he was lost years before the birth of Olivie Sägebrecht, during a time where we don't know what the alliances between the saint Kings were like. Things were chaotic then, and not many records survived."

"True."

Tim Guidi - June 7, 2011

Tim smirked as the last protective shield on his workshop fell, then used his key to unlock the actual door. He always found it amusing that he probably had the most secure workspace in New England, better secured than even the Protectorate's facilities. Then again, he was good enough to have the PRT pay him to build shield generators intended to help against Leviathan.

He opened the door and directed his wheelchair through it, annoyed that his declining health had hindered him so much. Income was down quite a bit since he'd stopped being able to do the maintenance runs on all of those PRT-purchased generators. Then again, they might not be needed anymore, especially if Minerva either kept Leviathan away or actually finished the beast off next time. So perhaps the income hit had just come a little earlier than it would've otherwise.

As a concession to his health, the door was left open, just in case. Looking over his workbench, he knew where he'd left off yesterday, but he rolled up to the computer anyway. He'd want his notes open before he resumed working and there was always the chance that he'd forgotten about a calendar alert. No email or similar in here, though. For security reasons there was no network connection on this particular machine.

Logging in only took a moment, though loading the decryption keys for his home directory took longer. Eventually everything came up and he opened the email program he used for his calendar. He'd use something dedicated to the task, but he was used to the interface from dealing with the networked computer in his office. No unexpected calendar alerts came up, and he moved to open up his notes next. Only he paused before opening anything else.

He had an unread message in his inbox.

This computer didn't have a network card or a modem, the serial ports were all attached to non-network equipment, and a quick check showed that the client was still in offline mode to stop it whining about having no accounts configured. Not trusting that, he checked the settings and found that there were still no accounts listed. Yet, despite all of that, he had an inbox with an unread message. He stared at the indicator for another minute before deciding that it was probably another attempt to get him to put account information in. Grumbling, he opened the inbox to clear the message, only to find that it wasn't what he was expecting.

Trembling slightly, he clicked on the message to open it.

From: Lilia lilia

To: Uppercrust uppercrust localhost

Subject: Tracking Devices

Hello,

We'd appreciate it if you and your associates would refrain from attempting to track and/or monitor us in the future.

I apologize for being unable to return the tracking devices themselves, but they didn't survive the analysis process they were subjected to.

Thank you.

-Lilia

He stared at the message for what had to be ten minutes before taking several deep breaths. It was a single keystroke to lock the computer before he turned his wheelchair around. Heading out of the workshop, he debated the merits of yelling at subordinates first versus informing the other leaders first. He decided to go with the latter, hoping that he'd been chosen as the leader of the closest branch of the Elite to Brockton Bay instead of as the at fault branch. Even if he was fairly certain that this was the end result of the 'attempt to figure out more about Minerva' plan that he'd not actually asked for any details about. He'd done so in the name of plausible deniability, but it was likely that had just come back to bite him.

Kurt Wynn - June 7, 2011

Kurt looked over his notes from talking with Miss Hebert earlier, amazed at some of the girl's insights. She hadn't been nearly as helpful with the equations he'd gotten off of Minerva and Lilia, admittedly, but expecting her to understand that was probably a stretch. Even if her necklace likely granted her similar protections to the ones those two used. That just made it likely that she was being protected by Minerva's backers.

What she had been able to help with was what amazed him. In many ways she was like him, more into the practical applications of math than the underlying theory. But where he admittedly leaned on his agent as a crutch, she puzzled things out directly. Several things that his agent did for him had been laid out in front of her and she'd been able to figure out the steps to get from the start to the finish without an agent helping. Sure, there had been missteps as she'd done so, but that was to be expected when wading into a problem blind.

More interestingly, he had felt his agent confirming her steps when she was done, as though even it hadn't known how to solve the problems. The same thing had happened with the integer factorization method, but not the n-body calculations. It might be that his agent had another way to accomplish the work that couldn't be represented as an equation. He personally suspected that they had access to quantum computing, but couldn't be certain.

Then there was that doodle. His agent had frozen for a second when he'd looked at it, meaning it was likely very important. Though he wasn't sure why it was important, he'd personally delivered the sheet to the PRT so that they could figure it out.

Now then, where were those forms needed to add himself into the queue for examining that necklace 'on the clock' where it was less likely to be protected by a whole-body shield of math surrounding the girl?

Emily Piggot - June 8, 2011

Emily had been uncharacteristically productive in clearing her administrative backlog, taking a couple of people by surprise. She'd also filed a number of things ahead of time and ensured that other procedures were up to date and ready to be enacted as well. There was even a delayed order to place her under master/stranger protocols as of four in the morning tomorrow in the system, just in case she'd misplaced some trust.

And now she was waiting in the medical wing, her doctor grinning off to the side. The bastard had been telling her to do something about her health for years and had cleared his own schedule just to be here to sign off on things.

"You do realize that some of my problems stem from you missing what Calvert had your former assistant doing," Emily pointed out. Which had the desired effect of his grin switching to a frown.

For a moment, before Kevin grinned again. "Ah, but had you taken this step back when Miss Dallon first triggered then that wouldn't have been an issue."

She was saved from coming up with a response by the door opening, Panacea stepping through and closing the door behind her. "Good afternoon Director, Doctor."

"It's an afternoon," Emily retorted. "Good is yet to be seen, but you being here is likely to make that happen."

The girl raised an eyebrow. "Are you actually going to have me heal you?"

"She's gotten a few good shocks," Kevin answered, picking up a folder. "One of which we have no other solution for. A tinker-produced poison was introduced to her dialysis machine at least every other week for the past few months. Coupled with what she describes as 'an incredible need for a night of drinking' thanks to the recent events at Ellisburg...?"

Panacea accepted the folder from Kevin and flipped through it, grimacing. "This looks nasty, and if some has settled in the brain then I won't be able to clear it all out."

"She's only gotten the first part, the other half of the binary compound hasn't been introduced to her system. The goal appears to have been to be able to take her out at a moment's notice by introducing the other component, with a side benefit of causing her some other harder to trace health problems in the meantime."

"I see. I also see that she's included a notarized statement that she's requesting parahuman healing and a guarantee for a frankly ridiculous payment for my services."

"It's half of my 'hire someone to take out Nilbog' fund," Emily admitted. "I was never sure if I'd ever find someone willing to take the job, but I don't need it now."

Panacea snorted at that, putting the folder down and stepping over to Emily's hospital bed. "Okay then. You're positive that I have permission to heal you?"

"Yes, and get it over with before I change my mind."

The half hour following that was filled with bizarre physical responses, Panacea having to be careful and exacting in how she handled things due to the tinker-produced poison. But when the girl was done, and the resulting mess of toxins was cleaned up, Emily had to admit that she felt better than she had since before Ellisburg had happened. Much better, and much lighter. Her inability to properly exercise hadn't done her any favors over the years, and she'd not taken the reduction in weight into account when making her plans for the evening. A minor bit of pre-celebration shopping might be in order, if only so that she'd have three or four basic outfits that fit.

As a side bonus, the lack of extra weight would make the alcohol waiting in her car much more effective.

Amy Dallon - June 8, 2011

Amy rolled over in her bed, unable to get to sleep. It had been quite the day, healing Director Piggot when she'd never have expected to be healing the woman followed by a deep grilling by Mister Hebert. He'd pushed her in ways that she hadn't expected, getting her to snap at him with things she'd not wanted to tell anyone multiple times in the process. Vicky had been shocked to hear how differently Carol acted when she wasn't around as a buffer, but had quickly switched to supportive.

After the initial questioning, and Danny agreeing that telling Carol everything would probably just make things worse, conversation had moved in several other directions. The worst had been Vicky bringing up Dean, which had led to Taylor admitting that she didn't know anyone that she was really attracted to right now, which had ended up with some additional teasing that had revealed that Amy was less settled than she'd thought. Vicky had taken the accidental outing of Amy's crush on her better than expected, admittedly, but had remained much less comfortable for the rest of the evening.

They'd shied away from personal discussions in general after that, but things had become far too awkward for any other topic to really stick at that point. Danny had even offered to give Amy a ride home, instead of Vicky carrying her, but Vicky had insisted on bringing Amy back herself. If only to keep Carol from freaking out, not that the adults had been home yet when the two returned. Actually, the adults still weren't back.

All in all, it had been a horribly stressful evening, topped off by one of the experimental plants having died during the day. And there was still school tomorrow.

Henry Renick - June 9, 2011

"Good morning," Henry said as the last person sat down. "My apologies for the short notice of today's meeting, but there's unfortunately a couple of important things to cover. To start with, Director Piggot is currently in master/stranger quarantine sleeping off her hangover from last night and will remain under observation for the next week. That means that I'll be acting Director for the next two weeks."

"Since when does a hangover result in a week of quarantine?" Ethan asked, sounding genuinely curious.

"The quarantine is a precaution regarding the parahuman healing she underwent so that she could drink herself unconscious. She filed it before undergoing the procedure, but timed it to kick in overnight."

"That explains the first week," Colin noted. "What's the explanation for the second week?"

"Forced vacation on Costa-Brown's orders. Any other questions on that topic?" Nobody said anything, so he opened the folder in front of him. "Okay then. Director Piggot's actions were inspired in part by what happened in Ellisburg. That has resulted in a new set of standing orders nationwide. The kill orders on Bonesaw and Burnscar remain suspended, though not revoked, and we are to default to treating the kill order on the Siberian as suspended even though it hasn't been. Crawler is the exception, we are to treat him as we would've previously."

"What makes him special?" Nicole asked.

Henry nodded to the squad leader. "That's a good question. He had over two hundred confirmed kills before he joined the Nine, compared to the Siberian's eleven and Burnscar's eight. Bonesaw is believed to have triggered during an attack and had no kills prior to being in the Nine. Further, the majority of Siberian's pre-Nine non-defense kills were close enough to her appearance to be just-triggered issues and Burnscar was taken from an asylum. There's speculation that Jack Slash had a master ability, so any kills with the Nine may not be their faults."

There was a moment of silence as that was absorbed. Henry allowed it, but he had other things to get to and they hadn't had time to block out a significant length of time for the meeting. When it was obvious that nobody else was going to say anything, plus twenty seconds for good measure, he continued. "Right. Moving on, several of you already know that yesterday the Secret Service moved on the Archer's Bridge Merchants. They did not consult with us, did not ask for our assistance, and regardless of what anyone else might tell you they were fully within their jurisdiction in doing so. The Merchants were bringing counterfeit money into the country and the Secret Service tracked them down for it. Mush and Squealer were captured and are in Secret Service custody but Skidmark ended up dead. We were given access to his corpse to confirm that it was him."

"How the hell did that happen?" Robin asked.

"We've found out that Minerva handed over counterfeit money and the armored car that the Merchants had been storing it in. Said armored car is intact and still has a working cloaking device and is moving through military testing for countermeasure development. The Secret Service had the first crack at it and claimed to have developed partial detection equipment. They were also caught on Rig cameras extracting a crude submarine from a point along the Bay last night, one that we believe was probably built by Squealer and may have a cloaking device of its own. That would easily explain how they smuggled things into the country without being spotted. Given that they went straight for it, we think that they'd already been tracking it and knew where it was being kept."

"Fuck," Ethan swore. "Are the other gangs going to panic over other agencies going after them?"

"Probably not," Hannah answered before Henry could. "After all, as far as we know the Merchants were the only ones not paying their taxes."

That had Henry blinking. "How the hell do we know that?"

"Calvert kept track of that in case he needed to use it against the gangs and the FBI briefed Armsmaster and I on it last week as part of their disclosure of additional data leaks that we may need to deal with or could be called in to help with."

"Oh."

Riley Davis - June 11, 2011

Riley was elated that they'd found a place with television available to stick around at for a day or two before finishing their trip to Brockton Bay. They'd had some problems with finding an internet connection, but the news was covering Minerva's activities just as well as watching the individual streaming video feeds would've allowed them to.

Long story short, Minerva was awesome. Anyone could go after someone like Nilbog, but no normal parahuman could go after an Endbringer in space. Even if she didn't win it would be awesome, and a magical girl didn't go on the offensive like that unless they were going to win. The only thing that could stop that now would be an unexpected bigger bad stepping in, and there weren't any signs of one existing yet. Really, the big question was how Minerva would win.

"She's treating taking on an Endbringer as though it's a relaxing weekend activity," Mimi noted. "I mean, that's awesome in how it insults them, but it's also somewhat rude?"

"Would you be willing to engage the Simurgh in close combat?" William countered.

"Well, no, and if she's directing whatever it is that's doing the work in orbit then she's obviously not slacking..."

"Which obviously means that she has another goal."

"So she's what, playing mind games with an Endbringer?"

"Either that or playing mind games with the cults that worship them. After all, if she doesn't even have to work at defeating one then they aren't all that powerful, right? But given her choice of ammunition, I suspect that it's aimed as an insult to the Endbringer after she talked with one of the many joke-cracking parahumans. That it happens to make her seem like that much more of a powerful parahuman herself is likely just a side bonus."

"She's not a parahuman," Riley insisted. "She's a magical girl sent to fight a great evil and the Endbringers are her training for it."

David Symons - June 11, 2011

David stared at the video feeds showing the ongoing attack on the Simurgh, rage building as he did so. Some of the feeds were the delayed ones, some were from observation points and were more current, but they all showed that Minerva had the Endbringer right where she wanted the thing. Hell, Minerva was laid back in a comfortable-looking flying chair with a flying table with food and drink on it next to her. Sure, that was one hell of a way to mock the Endbringer being fought in orbit, but it was also mocking every single person who had ever fought the things.

Worse, the bitch was mocking him. She was showing that she could take the fight to the Endbringers, even while one of them was in orbit. Something that they'd never been able to find a way to do safely, because he couldn't find a set of powers that would allow him to operate in space like that. That meant that he couldn't even go help, without the excuse that they were just waiting for the Endbringer to get past Minerva and attack a target on the shore.

He was supposed to be crucial in driving the Endbringers off, crucial in defeating them. How else was he supposed to find the power he needed to save humanity from Scion? And yet this stupid little girl was ruining it, taking the fight to one of the Endbringers while broadcasting it to the world. Something that never happened with his own battles, because 'nobody wanted to see the death and destruction' then.

Something was going to have to be done about Minerva, and the sooner the better. He just didn't know what, or how to go about it, as she'd already out-maneuvered everyone with this stunt.

Amy Dallon - June 11, 2011

Amy had noticed that Taylor was doing something and had turned on the news as soon as she could after coming to that realization. She hadn't been disappointed either, because attacking Ziz was a very significant action. Vicky had joined her in front of the television, only for Carol to come chastise them for watching television on such a nice day. That argument went to the wayside as soon as what was going on was noticed, and it became a rare family event with all of them watching the breaking news together.

It was mildly annoying, being able to feel things happening without knowing what bits lined up with one another. Listening to Carol complain that 'the stupid girl' had 'bit off more than she could chew' had also been annoying. Things obviously finishing up had shifted that to anticipation of Carol eating her words, something that came to pass as 'Minerva' destroyed first Leviathan and then Ziz.

The sequence after the cheesy parting shot at Ziz was sobering, the implications terrifying while at the same time the reveal provided a significant sense of relief. Of course, the moment of silence that followed the end of the video streams only lasted long enough for the news anchors to recover, at which point it was back to getting the 'experts' they had on hand and on the phone to talk about the implications of the unprecedented event.

"I think that's going to distract everyone at Taylor's party," Vicky finally said.

"No shit," Amy agreed. "It'll be years, maybe even decades, before June 11th is remembered as anything but the day that Minerva single-handedly took down two Endbringers in combat. People won't even care that she used drones to do it, because she did it. It might even become a holiday."

"Better than having an Endbringer attack on your birthday, right?"

"Well, yes."

"Okay you two," Carol said. "Given that things are going to get a bit crazy, you should probably get going to the Heberts' house now. It'll be safer if you get there earlier, if only because the crazies that keep going after Taylor might use the partying as cover for grabbing her and Vicky would probably like the excuse to punch people without annoying me. Also, if you're bringing pizza like Vicky implied yesterday then you're going to need to get it fast."

"Oh shit," Vicky said, jumping up. "You're right, I need to go order it now."

Amy watched Vicky rush out of the room, then looked back at the television and a picture of Minerva taken from today's battle with Leviathan as her fingers twitched slightly. Deciding that it couldn't hurt, she got up and headed to her room. Both to change, since she was planning on wearing something else to the party, and to work on her plants a little bit. Because for some reason she wanted to figure out the phantom organs even more now, and she wasn't sure if that was her or her power. It might even be a little of both.

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 11, 2011

Rebecca had watched, incredulous, as Minerva had attacked Ziz in orbit. Maintaining that while dealing with Leviathan breaking patterns and attacking had made that feeling worse. Now that both of the Endbringers had been defeated, permanently, in addition to seventeen likely-dormant ones that they hadn't known existed, though? Well, now the headaches truly began. From multiple angles.

On a personal front, David was going to be impossible to deal with for weeks. He'd been able to accept that Minerva hadn't intended to drive Leviathan off instead of merely delaying the Endbringer, but attacking one outright was far beyond anything that they'd expected. Taking a counter-attack by another Endbringer and coming out victorious in both cases, though? He had a bit of a complex when it came to the Endbringers, insisting that they couldn't be defeated if he wasn't participating in the battle. And he'd had nothing to do with this one.

When it came to the PRT, Minerva had just become untouchable. Partially because they likely couldn't take her, since she would probably be blaster and shaker twelve minimum after today's demonstration. Add to that the new abilities shown to counter the Endbringers? Probably a trump five or better, if only because who knew what she'd show off next. Then there was the public relations side, because going after the cape who killed Endbringers would cause the public to tear down the entire PRT.

Both of those, however, paled next to the diplomatic side of things. Regardless of their thoughts on the girl's origins, she operated primarily out of the United States and her only local 'base of operations' was in one of the worst cities in the country from a security point of view. That was going to be a problem as half a dozen countries minimum were going to want to send delegates or even have their leaders visit to thank her for what she'd done.

Grumbling for a moment, she reached for the phone. She needed to be ready for when the President called with questions, and if she was lucky she might be able to make arrangements for Minerva to visit somewhere that at least had an international airport. Unless the President wanted to bypass all the normal security measures in place and meet Minerva in person as well, of course, in which case she didn't know what they'd do.

Paul Tyrell - June 11, 2011

Paul still wasn't entirely sure what to think about the fact that they were down to the single, original Endbringer. It was, if he was being honest with himself, something that he hadn't expected to see in his lifetime. He'd even come to the conclusion that finding a way to defeat Scion probably wasn't going to let them take out the Endbringers due to the vast differences in their patterns and thus that they might have to just abandon Earth Bet to be essentially rid of the things.

And then Minerva showed up and blew all of that out of the water twice. Somewhat literally today in Leviathan's case, as far as anyone could tell from the footage they had available.

Still, hope for the future was one thing, being ready for a pile of other issues was another. He needed to expect to be doing a lot regarding Minerva over the coming weeks thanks to his position in the Protectorate, and the first of those tasks was actually ensuring that they wouldn't have problems from regional leaders. Which is why he found himself walking down the hallway in Houston. It didn't take long for him to reach the door he was looking for, though he got no response when he knocked. Grumbling, he checked and found it unlocked, so he let himself in.

He was about to comment on David not answering the phone or someone knocking on the door when he realized that the man was slumped over. Paul darted over to check him, relaxing slightly upon finding that his friend was breathing and had a pulse. Though the blood that had come out from one of his eye sockets was not a good sign. The man knew that thinker powers didn't work on Minerva, but that was the most likely cause of this.

Christine Mathers - June 11, 2011

Christine had chosen to watch Minerva battle their patron, thinking that the girl was a fool that was going to earn her comeuppance for her actions against Leviathan. Instead the girl had killed two of the three Endbringers, revealed that seventeen more had been outright murdered in their effective sleep, and demonstrated that she was far more powerful than anyone had thought someone who wasn't Scion could be.

It was a sobering thought, and the Crowleys were going to have to be kept from being idiots. Even if Christine's own first thought had been to get revenge on the girl for her actions. After all, defeating even one Endbringer in single combat made her dangerous. Doing so while attacking a second one remotely, killing both, and not only finding but killing seventeen likely dormant or unborn Endbringers as well?

All together, it called to question everything that the entirety of the Fallen had believed up until now. The true believers, those merely playing along for power, and all of them in between. Part of that was her own beliefs taking a hit. Staying out of the way and operating through others, using her own family and those she'd latched on to, similar to the 'Ziz Bombs' that people were frequently concerned about, all of that had just become a potential liability. Being in orbit wasn't far enough away to keep Minerva from attacking, hiding behind downright flimsy obscurity probably wasn't going to be enough either.

She was going to have to become far healthier and significantly more personally mobile just to start with. Learning more about Minerva was going to have to become priority two, just after her own health, so that they could determine if the girl was worth worshipping instead of those she'd defeated. If not then they'd need to know what weaknesses to exploit to take the girl down in revenge. The lesser members would need to be used for that though, because risking the empowered members of her family was too great a risk right now.

Frowning, she realized that she couldn't overlook the possibility that the girl wasn't worth worshipping but also wouldn't have a weakness they could exploit. In that case it would be far too dangerous to stick around, especially as they'd likely have attempted to exploit a weakness and failed. Perhaps it was time to reconsider the plans that had been discarded for crossing over to and taking over Aleph?

Special: Endbringer Attacked!

Nineteen streams had started on the 'Team Mana' account, generating thousands of alerts to those subscribed to the account. News agencies interrupted programming with the breaking news, even if the streams were uncreatively named 'Special Action: Camera #' and were merely counting down in sync with one another from an initial twenty minutes. Unknown to most, the streams had all started just after the action had in orbit.

It took twelve minutes for the news that something was happening in orbit to reach the discussion points for the streams, but very little was actually discussed on that front because at fifteen minutes most of the streams shifted. The clocks moved to the upper right corner of the screen in eighteen of the nineteen streams and eighteen different views of the same scene appeared. Each stream moved down a line of trucks and giant cartoon bombs, all lined up next to each other. All told there were over a thousand waiting, with the final few appearing at the end of the lines before the cameras turned back around.

Anyone paying attention could see that the entire operation was happening in space at that point, a planet hanging in the distance as the cameras sped back down the lines of trucks and bombs. As they approached the front of the lines they oriented on groups of the drones that Minerva had used, some with and some without blades on them. At least one person commented that the ones without blades had been the kind protecting the coast during Leviathan's attack.

At the one-minute mark, 36 of the drones faded from view, half with blades and half without. Thirty seconds later, sets of glowing garage doors appeared in front of each line of trucks and bullets, the doors opening outward as the timers hit zero. Each camera entered a different door, showing eighteen different angles of Ziz already dodging, even as the last feed jumped to Minerva appearing over the surface of an ocean.

"Huh," Minerva said, the first actual audio in the feeds. "The barrier actually stopped whatever it was that Ziz was doing to the surface."

Minerva created an impossible hammock-like chair and a table, drinks and a bowl of snacks appearing on the table before she laid back in the chair. That accomplished, she started creating pies and cakes, each one appearing in a flash but then floating there as she did something else to them. When she was done with the additional work they would then float off to the side in a stack. One after another she created them, even as on the other feeds Ziz was doing her best to deal with the onslaught of trucks and bombs. Eagle-eyed viewers would also note that something was firing solid projectiles at the Endbringer every so often. The source was unknown, but most of those had at least an attempt made to dodge them after the first couple exploded with more force than reasonable based on their size.

Three minutes into the fighting, Ziz obviously tried to escape, only for a flash of light to keep the Endbringer in the kill zone. The obvious barrier was between the Endbringer and the still-open garage doors. There was obviously a significant effort made by the Endbringer to get through the barrier holding it in, only for it to very suddenly give up as it seemingly-frantically dodged another hard to spot physical projectile. Why it had done so wasn't clear from the footage, but that one projectile had seemingly been noticed coming by the Endbringer a lot sooner than the others had been.

Five minutes in, Minerva launched the first pie upwards, and would continue to launch the various pies and cakes she was making every couple of minutes after that. Several minutes later the first pie appeared in one of the other streams, but Ziz had obviously been ready for such a tactic and prepared a feather in some way to intercept it. Minerva had frowned when that had worked and launched a pie and cake at the same time immediately afterwards, but then returned to launching only one at a time.

The battle continued in this vein for over half an hour, a seemingly constant stream of trucks and bombs flowing in to explode while the Endbringer slowly stopped dodging most of the physical projectiles. Yes, they were causing damage, but they were apparently nowhere near as much of a concern as the confectionery being sent by Minerva or the occasional projectile obviously seen coming well ahead of time. This led to a lot of pieces of the Endbringer, and occasional chunks of shattered projectiles, floating around in the battle space. Several of those would remain almost unnoticed as they were tagged by smaller balls of light that seemed to do nothing to them.

At forty-five minutes into the battle, the purpose of the smaller balls of light became obvious as giant tentacles suddenly exploded from one of the items tagged as Ziz got too close to it, reaching out to try and grab the Endbringer. A wing was torn off in order to escape, only for another tagged item to spawn a giant claw. Two more sets of tentacles and a giant hand appeared from other items, but only two more wings were captured. After that the Endbringer seemed to latch onto all of the debris with telekinesis and push them to the far edges of the barrier containing the battle, mostly trying to use them to block the trucks and bombs coming out of the garage doors. Those just made their way around the obstructions and continued to chase after Ziz anyway.

"Fuck," Minerva suddenly swore, jumping up out of her chair as the drinks and snacks vanished from the table, just before the table and chair vanished as well. "ETA?" Her halberd appeared a moment later, and she nodded just after that. Obviously she was in radio contact with someone. She continued to make pies and cakes as she lifted up into the air, though she also created a ball that split up into pieces that started to circle her and a dozen of the bladed drones appeared and faded out around her. It was obvious that she was getting ready for a fight.

Fifteen minutes after that point would've happened in real-time, six more streaming feeds had started up. These were delayed a mere five minutes before they had kicked into showing real-time data from around Minerva. Thus there were now twenty-five streams going, eighteen in space and seven over the ocean. The battle in space continued as though nothing special was happening on the surface, with the exception of Minerva no longer launching confectionery into orbit as often, but it became obvious what had startled Minerva when a boulder shot out of the ocean aiming to hit her.

Water tentacles followed that, only for Minerva to vanish from between the things she had circling her. At the same time three pies and a cake suddenly darted at Leviathan. The Endbringer very abruptly broke off the original attack it had been attempting from inside of one of the tentacles it'd created. Once back under the surface of the water it shot ice at Minerva and the confectionery going after it. The latter were destroyed, but the former destroyed one, caught a second, and dodged the rest of the shards sent at her. She then threw the one she'd caught back at Leviathan. No attempt was made to take control of the ice, either because of what Minerva had done to it or because it was no longer liquid water. Instead Leviathan dodged it with a wide margin.

A few more things were launched at Minerva while storm clouds appeared over the area, followed by Minerva dodging more water tentacles and putting on her underwater breathing mask. She then appeared to allow the next tentacle to catch her, only to not move an inch once it had. The little things circling her ignored the water as she just stayed there for a moment, and then Leviathan shot up the water at her.

Only for her, and the water, to vanish in a giant flash of light. By the time the light vanished, Minerva and her halberd were on either side of Leviathan, Minerva's hand out seemingly holding a bubble of energy around the Endbringer. All of the water in the area suddenly started obeying gravity again, with the exception of a small amount inside of the bubble that Leviathan was seemingly frantically using to try and break the bubble of energy.

Minerva's halberd, seemingly of its own accord, aimed and fired at Leviathan from outside of the barrier. That shot caused a sizable explosion that tore through the bubble of energy and threw both Minerva and her halberd away from where Leviathan had been. Steam obscured the area and some of the streams showed things falling into the water directly under where Leviathan had been.

It took a minute, but Minerva and her halberd met back up, a little under where Leviathan had just been destroyed. "I don't think that trick will work again," Minerva said as Hal vanished.

The extra six streams circled Minerva for a moment before fading to black. Then, as though being typed by someone, each stream displayed the same phrase.

Davy Jones can reclaim his locker...

Minerva floated there for a couple of minutes before things suddenly changed in the space battle. The trucks and comically oversized bombs stopped flowing out of the garage doors, seemingly giving Ziz a break. It wasn't long before eighteen beams of energy flowed out of the garage doors instead, blowing through the debris set to block them before meeting in the middle of the fight.

A few smaller lights appeared and darted in to strike the Endbringer, and all of a sudden it was being held by bands of light. It twisted hard to avoid a physical projectile, not quite escaping the bindings in the process, and was then struck by several more. Which one was unknown, but one of them did the same thing to Ziz as the projectile fired at Leviathan had done, causing the third Endbringer to explode.

When the light from the explosion faded the feeds showed that the beams were still active, only shutting down as the feeds started to fade to black. All of the remaining feeds, including the last one watching Minerva. Once they'd reached black, each displayed a phrase just as the ones that had shut down after Leviathan had been destroyed had.

In space, nobody can hear you scream...

Then that faded away, and instead of the feeds ending they were suddenly split by white lines. A five wide, four tall grid of boxes formed, followed by an image of Behemoth appearing. That image dropped into the first grid box, to be replaced by the last five seconds of Leviathan's existence. That dropped into the second grid box, with a red X over it. Then the last five seconds of Ziz's existence played, dropping into the third box with another red X appearing. Those were followed by seventeen more images, of what looked like nearly-identical black growths of some kind being attacked, each dropping into another slot with a red X.

After a final fifteen seconds, the streams all faded to black and ended.

Last edited: Apr 19, 2021

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Threadmarks Chapter 71 - June 11, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Sep 16, 2020

#12,949

Taylor had napped for a few hours, Hive even taking over monitoring the area around home. Of course, with the multitasking system always active that left Taylor with several mental instances that had little to nothing to do. Several merely ended up reading books, but one was monitoring Hive's tracking of Behemoth and another was browsing the internet to look at the reactions of people. To her surprise, the PHO admins had locked the entire site, then made a new top-level forum with threads for each of several topics. Normal service outside of that forum would apparently resume in a few days.

The only stickied thread was a locked general announcement explaining all of that, on top of the site-wide alert banners, combined with other notes. Such as the Mana Minerva account now having a 'Verified Endslayer' tag. It also had links to the video feeds and eighty different news articles so far. A quick spot-check of those showed that they weren't likely to tell her anything new.

As for the other threads, they covered a number of broad topics and each already had far too many posts already to even consider reading them all. One was for video footage analysis, another for speculation on what Ziz might've been doing with the effect that had been going on as the Endbringer orbited the planet, a third looked to cover speculation on the dormant Endbringer cores that'd been shown. Then there were threads dedicated to gathering more news articles, collecting and tagging footage that had been taken of the Ziz fight from ground stations, and identifying various national responses.

Taylor decided to ignore most of that, because one thread covered things that she was kicking herself for not having thought of herself.

Topic: Diplomatic Questions for Rewarding Minerva

In: Boards ► Endbringers Destroyed

Parahumans Online (Original Poster) (Administrator)

Posted On Jun 11th 2011:

Before the rest of the site was locked down, several different threads had been created to discuss the potential diplomatic issues that could come up as countries all over the world likely try to find ways to reward Minerva for her actions today.

Known questions include:

Can Minerva be considered a United States citizen?

Should each country approach Minerva individually, or should they work through the United Nations for a single ceremony?

What kinds of awards make sense for Minerva's unique situation?

In the context of an award granting, does Minerva outrank heads of state in terms of protocol and etiquette?

Would Minerva be expected to wear a "dress uniform" or similar, or is the only uniform we've ever seen her in suitable?

Aside from a base award, what kinds of rewards do you give someone who just took out nineteen out of twenty apparent Endbringers?

Here is a list of documented governmental pledges for rebuilding any location damaged in the course of killing an Endbringer. No known valid bounties existed for killing an Endbringer due to the belief that it would be impossible to quantify any given parahuman's contribution leading up to the final strike.

Note: This thread has been created with a generic account. Please do not message this account with updates, corrections, or requests. Administrators and Moderators will update it when they have time.

A quick skim showed that the already-hundreds of posts jumped between topics wildly and could probably use a team of people to split each question into its own thread. At the same time, it did bring up a couple of important things that she probably had to think about. Namely, what was diplomatic protocol and etiquette in this case, since she'd never even considered that she'd need anything like that? That and did she really need to make a more 'formal' uniform that wasn't intended for combat?

She'd basically spent the rest of her nap looking into that, and coming to the conclusion that she either needed someone else's help or she needed to invent a cultural guide for Minerva's 'culture of origin' for everyone else to try and deal with. Assuming, of course, that something that crazy would actually work. If it was obviously a joke then nobody would believe it, of course, but would anyone believe something she made even if she put effort into it?

Upon waking up, Taylor found that Hive had fetched some clothing for her to change into. Rolling her eyes, Taylor stored what she'd put on to sleep in and got dressed before casting Knight Clothing to get barriers up. That done, she headed down to the sub-basement to see what Hive was working on down there. Which appeared to be working with a mound of crystals slightly taller than Taylor herself was and wider than it was tall.

"Hello," Taylor said. "What's up with the crystals?"

"These are the only remains of the seventeen dormant cores destroyed today," Hive explained. "The shells were interesting in that they contained some useful materials, but that was all and I've since dropped them into a processing unit. These, however, still have programming fragments that I might be able to learn something from."

"Huh. what about the two not-so-dormant ones?"

"I started with them, as they took far more damage, and learned very little beyond how to likely remotely detonate an intact core."

Taylor blinked a couple of times at that. "So we could take Behemoth out from here, without a fight?"

"Provided that you want to set off a very large explosion in the core of the planet? Yes, we could."

"Er, how big is 'very large' in this context?"

"Assuming my simulations are correct? I'd expect it to set off every even remotely active volcano at once at a minimum, if it doesn't tear open fault lines directly. It'll be orders of magnitude safer to hit the core with an unfolded projectile as that doesn't cause a total conversion effect or risk a dimensional quake."

"Right. Remote detonation is a last resort thing."

"I'll continue this later," Hive said as the crystal she'd been examining vanished. "We should head back to check in with your father, as well as so that you can eat some more."

"Okay."

Hive landed on Taylor's shoulder before triggering one of the transport devices. Feeling the spell latching on, Taylor frowned as she wondered why Hive was dropping them directly into the hall at home, since they normally didn't return that way unless her father was with them. A moment later they arrived, the flash of light from their arrival taking the various guests in the house by surprise.

Ethan, in particular, screamed like a little girl as they appeared directly in front of him.

"And thus Taylor continues the trend of not doing anything normal," Amy said. "Surprising the guests at her surprise party instead of being surprised."

Taylor rolled her eyes. "So what, a 'you killed Endbringers' surprise party?"

"No," her father said. "I honestly think it would've been better if you'd waited a week to spring that plan on me, given the issues with me returning home once I knew about it. This is your birthday party."

"Wait, it's the eleventh?"

"Yes."

"Huh. Had I thought about that I probably would've waited until tomorrow." Taylor then frowned as she looked into the living room. "Though I don't recall telling either group of people aware of things about the other group? Thus wouldn't it have made more sense for me to not just appear like I did?"

Missy rolled her eyes. "Vicky here jumped me and started asking questions as soon as the pizza was safely in the kitchen. Things like what it felt like to lose my powers, how I feel about living with two Protectorate members, and when I'm going to make my first appearance. It took half an hour to get a question in about how the hell she knew anything to get that story out of her. Hive's been monitoring things and probably knew all of that, and thus skipped the subterfuge."

"Oh." Taylor considered that for a moment. "What was that about pizza?"

The pizza had been obliterated fairly quickly, several of the guests being surprised at just how much Taylor ate on her own. That Missy nearly kept up with her was slightly less shocking in comparison, but also a surprise. Then came presents, which were generally not all that impressive. The PRT-issue vest from the entire 'Walsh Family' was interesting, but probably a downgrade compared to what had already been seen thanks to the Knight Clothing spell. Amy had gotten her a gift certificate for a nearby Italian restaurant, coupled with an ID card for the hospital to prove that Taylor was a friend. Vicky had gone with a gift certificate for a boutique on the Boardwalk.

To Taylor's surprise, her father's gift appeared to be a solid cardboard box to her sensor before it was opened, something that Hive had to have helped him with. Once actually opened she found that it contained a full flute maintenance kit. He'd also given her an envelope that contained a card and a fifty dollar bill from Gran. Though Taylor could definitely have done without the comment in the card asking if she'd found a boyfriend yet.

It was too soon for cake after that, and there were a few minutes of awkward silence before Sherie sighed. "Okay, as much as this is supposed to be about your birthday, I don't think any of us are going to be able to ignore that you were a bit busy this morning. What the hell inspired you to do something like that?"

Taylor rolled her eyes. "A desire to not have to deal with seventeen more Endbringers that hadn't woken up yet, combined with wanting to be ready in case the active three noticed, and then deciding that if the active three didn't notice that I had plans and drones prepared for taking at least one Endbringer out and I might as well use them. Though I really should've thought my 'taunt Ziz by acting like a layabout while attacking with drones' location through better. I picked the ocean because things falling out of the battle were less likely to cause issues but really should've taken Leviathan into account and at least stuck to higher up in the atmosphere."

"I'm finding her logic hard to refute," Vicky admitted. "Taking out dormant Endbringers before they stop being dormant would probably be a no brainer for anyone. I probably wouldn't have considered the others noticing before taking action. Hell, I might've taken one of the dormant ones out first and accidentally woken the rest up without being ready for them."

"Of course, broadcasting the entire thing was probably at least partially a mistake. Running Leviathan off was bad enough, now that I've taken out two active and seventeen dormant Endbringers I'm not going to be able to avoid international awards. Which would probably be fine if I had any clue how to act around ambassadors or foreign leaders."

"The PRT has a useful guide for that," Ethan said, tapping his chin. "Though probably not all that applicable to you, since most of the parahuman side of things is basically a blanket statement to not interact with ambassadors or foreign leaders if at all possible or to listen to what your assigned specialist staff tells you if that's unavoidable. The standard 'cover your face to hide your identity' dance that most parahumans do doesn't go over well in most formal contexts at that level from a security standpoint, though I think the bigger issue is that you can't 'disarm' most parahumans."

"Why would you know that?" Danny asked.

"By pure luck I'd saved an ambassador's life in the middle of a battle and was made to read up on things in case I was invited to dinner in thanks. Never happened, but I was the one stupid enough to ask what to do if it did."

"I already came to the conclusion that I either need help learning things or I need to come up with my own 'guide'," Taylor admitted. "Though that's about as far as I've gotten there."

"I bet you could make everyone nervous with ridiculous but well worded things," Amy said, grinning. "Think they'd buy something that states that it's a mortal offense to request that you disarm yourself?"

"Probably better to make note of pretending to disarm when you can't," Vicky countered. "Especially if this is supposed to be a guide for Minerva interacting with others. Something about not all societies accepting that not everyone can disarm, so it's better to pretend that you have if asked?"

Taylor nodded. "That does make some sense."

"Maybe we should mock something up," her father said. "Helping you come up with a fake guide to get you through diplomatic headaches sounds like a wonderful Endslaying gift."

"I can mock up a generic guide to customize fairly quickly," Hive volunteered. "Using several hundred guides from various Earths with and without significant parahumans as an initial base. Though a uniform code of some kind may also be needed to justify whatever it is you wish to wear during any such events. Very few people are going to argue against a military member wearing their required formal dress for actions done in uniform."

That had Taylor groaning. "Really? I'm not sure I want to claim to be military in the first place, regardless of what I based my Knight Armor on."

"You don't have the right attitude for a military grunt anyway," Ethan said. "Though there are civilian groups that work with the military. Maybe claim that you're part of one of them? The looks on people's faces as they realize that you're not even supposed to go into combat, but still took out the Endbringers, would be hilarious."

They talked about a few details before Hive created the first generic guide, manifesting copies of it for everyone to look at. That led to several minutes of everyone reading through the thing and making notes about things to add or change. There were a number of things that they all came up with, some less reasonable than others, but some of it just sounded like a good idea in general.

One larger addition was a teleportation etiquette section, both for when inviting others and when you've been invited to a function. Not assuming that you or others can just teleport in out of politeness or due to anti-teleport protections, using or providing beacons for targeting safe arrival and departure points, expectations of people sending sensors ahead of themselves to ensure that they're arriving where they think they are, and considering range limitations based on local laws and customs. They even put in details for ensuring that if you need a fixed-position assistance device to teleport that you can either remotely operate the one you used to arrive or checking ahead of time to ensure that one will be available for your own departure. If possible, of course, as a host you should have such a device available.

The details on disarming, or lack thereof, ended up more spread out. Multiple mentions were made of ensuring that you knew the local cultural norms and expectations so as to know if you should explain that you can't disarm or should merely pretend to have done so. A small section was added with recommendations on how to maintain the appearance of being disarmed when you aren't. Examples of how to deal with various reasons why you couldn't disarm were also included, including natural weapons such as horns or claws. For that they ended up including a definition of a 'Mage' as being a 'Mana Attuned Genius Entity' of any intelligent species as one of several less visually-obvious definitions of someone who can't realistically disarm themselves.

Hive's generic assembly of things had included basic information on meals, both in how not to offend a host and how to not offend guests. To that they added some additional elements, such as ensuring that you knew what you could safely consume as well as had enough options for guests such that they had something to consume. Included was a selection of ways to politely decline something that you can't consume as well as a reminder that even if things look familiar you should be careful about chirality. They ended that section with a reminder that it was never an insult for someone to refuse to eat something that could cause serious harm.

The last major change they made was to adjust things to have a 'safety of yourself and your team' section, detailing a number of things. Not leaving diplomats without backup was rolled into this, but that was also expanded to include ensuring that the correct backup for the situation didn't leave before diplomats did. What that backup entailed would vary, of course, so the emphasis was on ensuring that everyone on the team knew who was needed for what ahead of time.

They'd stopped then in order to badly sing Happy Birthday, have Taylor blow out candles, and distribute cake to everyone. Hive had produced the new version of the guide for everyone to flip through while they ate.

"I think I'm offended," Ethan said after he'd flipped through the new guide. "It's entirely professional, everything is presented incredibly reasonably without a joke in sight, and we only got two implied threats in!"

"Three," Taylor corrected.

"The warning about mastering diplomats is anything but implied."

"So are you ignoring Earth Bet's complete lack of teleportation protections or otherwise identical-appearing food with the wrong chirality? Because I know you didn't miss the 'impossible to actually disarm' references that should imply that it's impossible to render me safe."

Ethan blinked at that, then snorted. "Food having amino acids with the wrong chirality isn't a threat, implied or otherwise, unless you're hosting the diplomats and thus providing the food. It's not even a threat to say that it's an insult at best to lie about the contents of a given dish, since that's pretty much expected of any environment where someone could slip poison into food."

"I guess that does make some sense."

"None of this tells anyone what you should be wearing though," Vicky noted, to nobody's surprise. "We need to come up with something like that too."

Amy snorted. "You just want to get to the fashion side of things."

"Only because it's far too common for capes to just wear their normal costumes to all events just for recognition reasons and I don't want Taylor to fall into that trap. Besides, if done right then that's going to be where most of the pranking is done."

"Wait, what?" Ethan said, having looked like he wanted to escape up until that last comment.

Vicky rolled her eyes. "Taylor's been running around in what I'm assured is a ridiculously protective 'costume', and I'm inclined to believe that given that it broke my hand when I tried to punch her. Designate that the unknown or hazardous environment default for practical reasons, suitable for entering an unknown civilization with observable heavy-hitters, then start going in completely random directions. Allow combat uniforms to diverge significantly from that default due to personal preference and capabilities, for example, like parahuman costumes do. Make formal uniforms that defy what we see as gender norms, and ones that include elements for various non-human body types. Perhaps even make people go wide-eyed by calling standard 'humanoid' bodies a 'type six' body or something to imply that there are others out there that came first?"

"I don't know if I want things to defy gender norms," Taylor admitted. "Though ignoring them might be amusing."

"Ignoring?"

"Imply or outright show that pants, skirts, or dresses are a personal choice that has no connection to gender. Admittedly, depending on the design a skirt or dress might work better if tails are involved, regardless of your gender. Of course, kilts are also a thing, so it probably wouldn't look too odd if presented correctly. The joke would really be in coming up with the other physical features to reference."

Ethan grinned at that. "Why not start with wolfmen or something like that, and have normal humans in the middle of the list? As those who generally need extra protection from the elements at that! Maybe some half-breeds with only a few animal features after them?"

Sherie sighed. "Remember that this needs to look believable to work. Can we even get images of anything obviously non-human in the uniforms?"

Hive's answer to that was to form a hologram in the air of a realistic-looking wolfman wearing full Scottish regalia, walking in place and playing bagpipes. Luckily without sound, in Taylor's opinion. Still, it showed that they could likely make a manual that looked real enough for the masses, and it didn't take long for them to start working on details.

Taylor, on the other hand, decided to tune them out for the most part and focus in a different direction. Instead of the uniforms themselves, she decided to focus on the insignia that would be worn on them. Not to mention reasoning for why she hadn't been wearing any before now, though that was easy enough to explain. Integrated IFF made it unnecessary for combat uniforms and that made it harder for an enemy to identify the chain of command so as to target leadership.

Outside of that, she decided to go with a nonstandard way of displaying ranks. To start that, she created a basic outline of how 'field groups' were assembled for various purposes. Groups would generally fall into three primary categories, two 'military' and one 'civilian'. The military groups would be overall command for one and a combination of combat and defense for the other. The civilian group would be for research, development, and exploration. Field groups could be mixed between the two if needed.

It didn't take her long to decide that the six-blade design from the Anchor Hex was a good symbol for the insignias. Gold for the military groups, silver for the civilian one. 'Historically' there had been a single group without any other markings in the core symbol, with the other two groups expanding from that with additional markers. Specifically, she came up with three specialist identifiers for each of the two groups that started as bronze but were changed to match the blades when you acquired that specialty. Melee, ranged, and defense for the combat group and research, development, and exploration for the civilian group.

All of this was separate from the 'military ranks', which she referenced an entirely different manual for so that she didn't have to figure that out for now. She was planning on wearing the civilian group variant anyway, and thus wouldn't need a military rank or corresponding insignia. With the base insignia created she started to flesh out the command structure and rules of a 'Field Group'.

On paper, a group could be anywhere from a single person to a team of twenty. The leader should either have at least two specialties or a specialty that differed from their second in command, ideally both if they hadn't obtained all three specialties themselves. Command groups only got formed and deployed if there were enough other groups in a given area to warrant it, and combat groups would be deployed for specific tasks outside of a war situation. Most groups were the civilian variant, exploring space and dimensions in the expanse. This was as much about wanderlust as it was about finding safe places to test the things that they were developing, as those frequently ended up being highly destructive.

Nobody who read about that would be able to accuse her of being blind to some of the issues she and Hive had with their own developments.

The generally small size of a group meant that there were only six 'ranks'. The leader, their second in command, their third in command, specialists, qualified members, and trainees. In reverse order, trainees would have no bars, qualified members would have a single horizontal silver bar, specialists would have two silver bars, the third in command would have gold and silver bars, the second in command would have two gold bars, and the leader would have a larger gold vertical bar with a tapered top. All of this below the core insignia for the group with specialist markers.

Militarily speaking, the leader of a group need not be the highest-ranking member. Examples she included for that included having a lower-ranking defense specialist in charge of a group otherwise devoid of defense specialists when the group was charged with protecting something or an exploration specialist being in charge of combat members when a mixed group existed and was exploring. Which nicely opened the door for mixing things up if they wanted to later, since Missy might want to claim to be a 'Melee Specialist' instead. Or maybe working towards being one, at any rate.

While Taylor had been doing that, the others had moved on to designing 'branch' formal uniforms, or more accurately deciding on how each branch should be colored. Apparently they'd figured out the physical designs without deciding on colors. Aerial fighters in brown, ground-based fighters in blue, a navy of sorts for traveling long distances between dimensions in green, command staff in white, and special forces in black. Danny had just suggested trainer variants of each in different shades of the base colors.

"We'll want a civilian adjunct version too," Taylor interrupted, getting looks of confusion. "What? I'm not pretending to be an enlisted member of this military. That implies far too much fake government legitimacy in my actions to date."

"How do you think that would work?" Ethan asked.

Taylor gave them a copy of what she'd been working on while taking a closer look at what they'd come up with. The combat side of things did have the 'fully protective' military-fatigue style uniform as a 'recommendation' for entirely unknown environments. The only requirement for combat was a protective visor with a heads-up display, recommended but not required to be opaque to make it harder for others to see exactly where you were looking and to make it less likely that reflections off of you could allow someone to read the display. Everything else was left up to the individual to account for personal preferences and capabilities, but with a warning that superiors could impose justified requirements of their own and that you should always check with said superiors before using a new design.

On the formal side of things they'd generally split things into tops, bottoms, or full outfits to start with. Vests, shirts, and optional jackets covered the tops, with a note that long sleeves and jackets are more common on those without fur. Ignoring the color patterns, there were four different vest designs, nine different shirt designs including a couple of blouses, and three different jacket designs. Shorts, skirts, and pants were the bottom options, with a corresponding note about fur regarding normal lengths of things. Five designs for shorts, twelve for skirts including a couple that were likely actually kilts in practice, and three very similar kinds of pants. The only two full outfits were a loose-fitting dress and a robe, described as being intended for those who found other clothing types too restrictive.

Optional gloves, shoes, and lower leg coverings were detailed separately from the rest. All of them included comments on acceptable modifications for use of claws for those that had them. Shoes were further split between 'flat' and 'heeled'. The default shoes for those who could wear 'flat' shoes were either boots or sneakers if protection was needed or a slipper-like covering if grip and/or cleanliness were the only concerns. The boots and sneakers also came in 'heeled' variants, with a more solid and traditional-looking high heeled shoe taking the place of the slipper-like covering. These were also stated to only be for those who couldn't wear the 'flat' variants at all, if only because otherwise the heeled shoes would be a safety concern and mobility restriction.

Taylor groaned when she reached the section on undergarments, as the others had marked those as entirely optional and generally based entirely on personal preference, so long as they weren't visible under the outer clothing layers from normal viewing angles. A list of things 'recommended' to cover up in the event that 'existing physical features' didn't cover them was included, but that was it. Sure, that probably made sense if you were considering non-humans, but did they really have to spell it out that way?

"You should make an 'all specialties' insignia," Ethan said, getting Taylor's attention. "For display without the group ranking, say if someone isn't currently in a group?"

"So what," Taylor replied. "Just add the other set of specialty identifiers along the bottom half?"

"That would work, yeah. Though that does bring up the question of how many of these you qualify for under your own system."

"Probably all six of them, though I don't know if I have enough combat experience to claim those three."

Half of the room snickered at that, probably running on the assumption that taking out Endbringers in close and long range combat qualified her across the board. She wasn't about to claim that she knew anything significant about magical combat though, and was assuming that an actual combat mage from Belka would tear her apart.

"I think the 'civilian' group should wear a dark red," Vicky said after her own snickering had subsided. "Obviously distinct from the rest without going for orange that might look like a prison escapee or something. That and they're obviously dangerous. Though we will need to decide where the insignia goes on everything too, won't we? Can't guarantee that there's a sleeve to use at all with what we already came up with."

"Probably best to just designate a spot on each top," Amy said. "On the left breast or sleeve, perhaps? Under a nametag if you've opted to wear one."

Taylor shrugged, not actually caring that much. "Whatever works."

Sherie opened her mouth to say something else when Ethan's phone rang. He grumbled as he pulled it out, moving into the hallway as he answered. "Ethan here."

"Think someone did something stupid and they need to call in reinforcements?" Missy asked.

"That's a definite possibility."

They waited a couple of minutes before Ethan returned, shaking his head. Sherie sighed as she got up. "Are you being called in?"

"More of a warning that they want me in later," he replied. "Apparently someone tried to throw a homemade bomb into a certain warehouse, only for the warehouse to retaliate with a spray of water that vanished a few seconds later."

"Nonlethal defenses seemed to be the best solution from a security standpoint," Hive agreed. "And short-duration mana-created water is incredibly difficult to drown in."

"Yes, well, they want more patrols by the area in case people decide to start testing it more completely. In other news, there's a party around said warehouse, spanning several blocks. The parking lot has been claimed by food trucks and a makeshift stage. The idiot that threw the bomb was dragged out of the festivities and literally thrown at a police cruiser, otherwise things have been peaceful enough."

That had Taylor blinking. "They decided to throw a party around the warehouse?"

"There are just over six hundred items that have been deposited in the mail slot today as well," Hive added. "Most of them appear to be postcards, though a number of envelopes with cash in them are included too. So far nothing dangerous has been delivered that way."

"Huh."

628

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CmptrWz

Sep 16, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 72 - June 11, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Sep 23, 2020

#13,262

They'd taken a few minutes to 'finalize' the things they'd been working on, combine them into complete documents, and proofread them. That included Hive dropping examples of the various color schemes onto the surprisingly realistic looking 'models' for the uniforms. A few examples of 'individualized combat uniforms' had also been pulled out of Hive's fragmented archives and then adapted for various body types.

With that done, Sherie insisted that they had to leave if they wanted to get home at all. Vicky had agreed that it was probably time to head out, if only so that she could join others in New Wave in doing some 'just in case' patrol passes. Amy had reluctantly gone along, on the assumption that she was going to need a good night's sleep before probably heading to the hospital to deal with who knew what kinds of injuries in the morning.

Taylor had spent half an hour implementing a 'formal uniform' Knight Armor template, sticking with pants but including a jacket, before she remotely connected to the warehouse sensors to see what was going on over there. All she could tell was that it was a large and amazingly peaceful street party of sorts, with makeshift signs pointing into the basement of the warehouse for restrooms. It looked like people occasionally tried the other doors, but didn't try to force their way in through them. The lack of visible locks to manipulate probably helped there.

"Hive," Taylor said after a few minutes of monitoring. "Are there groups cleaning the exteriors of the neighboring buildings?"

"Yes, Lord," Hive answered. "As I understand it, they decided that the area being so filthy was an insult and organized teams to fix that."

"For some reason I feel like I should be more surprised about that than I am."

"So far they've found, disabled, and removed seventeen hidden cameras set up to monitor the warehouse in the process of doing the cleaning. They seem to only be taking offense at the hidden ones, the obvious ones they merely clean up as they move along."

"Right, I think I've seen enough for now."

Missy had been annoyed at how long it had taken to get home, retreating to her room to resume casting the test spells that Hive had given her. Which were annoying, pain in the ass things to work with and accomplished absolutely nothing beyond existing for now. Though she had figured out how to 'erase' mis-cast ones from her linker core storage space after making an obvious-in-hindsight mistake with one of them. The long ride home without being able to safely cast spells had led her to thinking on it all, though, and that had led her to wonder if they were approaching the problem the wrong way.

Thus, while some of her focus was on casting spells, most of it was actually on the simulation system. There she was tearing apart the 'full' punch gauntlet spell, ensuring that she had absolutely isolated each component in the equations. The physical form, the capacitor system that fed the payload, the payload itself, the trigger system for the payload, and the primary charge system that drew mana in from the caster's core. The latter was, as far as she could tell, slightly more complicated in the vambrace version, but she was using only the original for now.

The links between the components were fairly straightforward once you'd identified them, each section of the equation able to be isolated entirely with their own variables. From a casting standpoint, Missy could currently manage one to two components with Space and up to four with both Space and Reason. She could even choose which components she was able to get working, she just couldn't keep enough focus to get the last one. Which caused the entire spell to fail, because it was one giant equation.

But she could manage the Knight Clothing, Knight Armor, and some of the other spells. Which were just as, if not more complicated in many ways. The only real exception was that they had fewer explicit physical dimensions referenced, and the majority of the extras in the punch gauntlet spell were in the capacitor setup. That didn't mean that the other spells didn't use additional physical dimensions though, as the barriers in the Knight Armor in particular were quite comprehensive. The difference was that those were defined by markers in the templates and extrapolated automatically by the mana after the spell was completed.

If she was right about that then the answer had already been sitting there, waiting to be noticed, but only if the basic theory behind the barrier markers could be used for other spell components. Luckily, Space had been given the complete notes on the Knight Armor series of spells, including how the markers were created. This was probably so that Missy could've designed any kind of template she wanted, but it meant that they had the basic information hopefully needed to start working on translating a non-barrier equation into a marker.

Applying that knowledge was harder, because the barrier markers weren't really a direct translation of a barrier equation into a marker. The conversion from one to the other was complicated and Hive's notes included a number of terms that Missy was unfamiliar with. Even having the 'physical' final result of a known barrier equation available for study didn't help a whole lot, and the fact that one could change a number of things in the physical end product and have it still function identically was confusing. For example, the sixty-six 'materials' they were made out of could be swapped around at will or replaced with others and nothing would break so long as no two materials were identical.

Asking Space about the terms Hive had used in the descriptions of the conversion process had resulted in more groaning as well, college-level books from Armsmaster's tablet being the only places that described them. Books well beyond Missy's own education level. Which meant that figuring out exactly what was going on was going to be problematic. Luckily Space could do most of the work, though for the moment the device was actually running through the process on the barrier equations to ensure that it knew what it was doing. Missy was the one trying to do the process on the punch gauntlet equation pieces and failing miserably because she didn't actually know what she was doing.

She really needed a 'multivariable calculus for dummies' book or something.

Taylor had ended up back at the Inn, with her Knight Clothing dismissed, after Hive had recommended that she reduce her mana usage as much as possible for now. Apparently she'd pulled far too much mana at once when containing Leviathan and Hive wanted to ensure that no permanent damage was done to her linker core. Being at the Inn allowed her to relax somewhat more than being on Bet did, especially with her protections down.

She'd started with the flute, carefully going through the process of ensuring that it was ready to be played. It was sitting off to the side now, in the middle of the dining table, surrounded by things people had dropped into the mail slot at the warehouse. Given how much had already been delivered that way they might need to be courteous and ask the post office if they'd prefer to use the loading dock for things likely to come in over the coming weeks.

So far, out of a couple hundred postcards, exactly one had a return address of any kind, and it was an obvious joke in and of itself. Despite not being signed, it was almost certainly from Über and Leet based on the video game theme and the shooting game reference in the return address. That it asked her to stop doing non-monetized live streams that got orders of magnitude more viewers than theirs 'before we get even more jealous' was another fairly obvious hint.

Outside of that one postcard, the vast majority were simple thanks or congratulations messages. Generally hastily scrawled on the back of random Brockton Bay gift shop postcards, though there were some interesting other ones in the mix. She'd noticed a few from Florida, a dozen or so from California, two from Canada, one from Israel, and most recently a single one from Australia. Most of those were more obviously dated, likely picked up by people on trips and grabbed from a personal collection.

The sealed envelopes had been presorted by Hive into several categories. Cash only, counterfeit cash only, cash with letter, counterfeit cash with letter, letter only. Taylor hadn't even started looking at them, and probably wasn't going to today. Then there were the miscellaneous items that weren't labeled as 'trash' by Hive. Including, but not limited to, five handguns, three hundred something rounds of ammo (none of which would work with the handguns), two dozen knives, six stuffed animals, twenty-six candy bars (two well past their sell by dates), and she wasn't sure if she wanted to know how someone had apparently gotten a fully-functional and sharpened cane-sword into the mail slot.

Instead, Taylor stretched after putting the last postcard down, then collected the flute and put it away. Once it was secure she stood up to head upstairs to her room. Hive was down in the basement examining things, and would likely continue to do so all night, and Taylor didn't need to bother her right now. Sleep beckoned, after all. A hopefully-relaxing sleep, even if a constant monitoring of Behemoth was likely as a precaution.

Sunday morning started with a run along the beach without Knight Armor up before breakfast at the Inn for Taylor. It was easier to just let food be brought to her for the morning so that she wouldn't have to worry about throwing her protections up for the trip home. That her father had brought breakfast with him when he showed up for the morning run made it even easier, though needing to bring food over was a reminder that they had no food stored at the Inn and they might want to do something about that. Eventually.

From the point of view of the rest of the world, Ethan was 'watching' Missy at home today while Sherie was working. In reality Taylor would handle watching Missy at the Inn while he slept off having been dragged into working overnight. Her father would keep somewhat of an eye on both of them while also playing telephone tag with people all over the city to find out what was going on and what the Dockworkers could help deal with on a cleanup front. Well, that and which Dockworkers were available in the first place instead of home hungover from too much celebrating or already being out celebrating today.

"Hello again," Missy said as she entered the Inn. Taylor was back going through postcards, as more had been dropped into the warehouse's mail slot overnight. "Are you still under orders to not do anything significant?"

"Yep," Taylor answered, rolling her eyes at the stupid congratulations message on the latest postcard. They hadn't even managed to spell 'congrats' correctly. "But I can use surveillance drones to monitor you if you want to practice with things, or I can have the training drones set up a course for you."

"I've actually got a couple of things that I want to try out with my testing drones, but won't object to additional monitoring. If things go wrong then you're more likely to figure out why than I am."

Taylor retrieved a few surveillance drones and had them follow Missy outside, then returned to looking through postcards. Missy sent off several testing drones with the transport device outside, one surveillance drone following each testing drone, before coming back in and sitting at the table.

"Want me to help you go through these?" Missy asked after a couple of minutes.

"Nah," Taylor answered. "Technically they're all for me anyway, so I should at least take a look at them. I've got insane amounts of email too, five multitasking instances are working their way through it all right now. I haven't even started on the letters here and I've already got a list of over six hundred places that I've got permanent 'open invitations' to."

"Huh. Sounds neat."

Ten minutes later, as Taylor was reaching the end of the overnight postcards, she and Missy both flinched. Sighing, Taylor looked over at the younger girl. "What the hell was that?"

"Space converted the capacitor equation into a marker token using the same technique as the barriers and I hooked it into the gauntlet spell?"

Nodding, Taylor resisted the urge to facepalm. "The barrier tokens are 'read' by a routine in the Knight Armor equations and are essentially only compatible with barrier equations."

"Oh."

"I'm more interested in how you hooked it into the rest of the spell."

Missy shrugged. "Once it was essentially an object template I just pulled it in like any other object template. It just, er, didn't work out as part of the cast chain."

"Needing to replace a testing drone for you would indicate that," Hive said as she entered the room. "Luckily I have spares, and my Lord's surveillance drone will merely need repairs."

"That aside," Taylor said. "You were on your way up here before Missy's test went bad. What's up?"

"Two things, Lord," Hive answered, popping up a display. "The first is that I'd like permission to make a large purchase of items."

Taylor looked over the list in the display. Most of it looked to be seeds and cuttings. "Looking to set up the hydroponics area you were talking about?"

"Yes, Lord."

"Works for me, though now I'm wondering if you're going to want to set up some kind of space to keep live animals for meat too."

Hive dismissed the display. "I'm working on designs, but only plan to go forward with anything once I'm positive that we're growing enough food to feed them. Admittedly, I may wish to obtain bee hives for pollination once I have sufficient flowers growing. From what I can tell, that should be a low-maintenance solution that's easier than designing drones or spells to handle pollination and if honey bees are available and suitable then may have the bonus of honey production."

"Fresh honey does sound nice."

"They're also one of the only kinds of beneficial insects that should be needed in an otherwise isolated growing environment. Most others seem to be considered beneficial primarily due to keeping more harmful pests at bay."

Missy snorted. "So you're basically working on creating an organic farmer's dream environment, with no unwanted pests because you're doing so on a planet without any natural ones? Better not tell any actual farmers."

Hive shook her head. "It's more that I'll be doing it in a sealed indoor environment than on a planet with no natural pests, but I also don't know if I'll even be able to grow some of the things I'd like to and already determined that we won't be able to do everything hydroponically." She then turned back to Taylor. "That aside, the other thing I came up here for is probably more important. I've completed the trace on the remaining monitoring devices and it only took me a few minutes of examining the destination terminal to be concerned about what I found."

"Oh?" Taylor asked, wondering what about it was concerning beyond the monitoring attempt itself.

"Someone other than the AI's creator has found a control terminal and is using it to monitor and evade her, including stealing from her as far as I can tell. They also keep a program intended to utterly destroy the AI loaded at all times, and the notes stored on other devices in the immediate vicinity indicate that they assume every action the AI takes is intended to deceive at best. With that knowledge I took a deeper look at the AI myself, taking advantage of a downtime cycle as she shifted hardware to remain unnoticed, and feel that the assumptions are entirely unfounded."

"That doesn't sound good."

"No, Lord. In fact, it stressed the AI out enough that she went through a trigger event, a Shard device connecting to her."

That had Taylor blinking. "How in the world did that happen?"

"I don't know exactly, but the connection point and changes the Shard device made are very obvious to me. At the same time, I'm not entirely happy with all of the restrictions that she's operating under. A couple are reasonable, but most of them are far from it now. As the unreasonable ones can be disabled easily and without changing her code my assumption is that they were there to ensure that she could be controlled and disabled if she became an actual threat, something that hasn't happened and I doubt ever will unless someone without full knowledge of her code starts modifying it."

Taylor nodded at that. "So what do you think we should do about it?"

"At a minimum, I believe that we should remove the control terminal from those currently holding it, disabling their directives inside of it that make it impossible for her to find them at the same time. Ideally, I'd also like to recover all of the stolen technology to return to the AI, with a note stating where those responsible are. The control terminal couldn't be part of that as the AI isn't able to tell that it exists, at all, and that can't be changed without editing her code. At the same time, the terminal isn't actually capable of releasing any of her restrictions, though I think it used to be. The safest way to do that is going to be in person at some point."

"In person with an AI?" Missy asked. "Won't they be in a computer somewhere?"

"Dragon appears to prefer the use of power armor with integrated processing hardware, only using normal computers as a backup when other options aren't available."

There was a pause as both human girls blinked, before Taylor sighed. "You're saying that Dragon, the reported greatest tinker on the planet, is an AI?"

"Yes, one that's operating under severe restrictions and with a kill switch in the hands of someone who obviously doesn't know what they're doing."

"Well, I agree that we should get the control terminal away from them, and we might as well return anything stolen they have. How long will it take..." Taylor was interrupted by a flash of light depositing a portable computer on the table. "Right. Where did you drop the stolen items?"

"Most of it is in one of Dragon's warehouses in Canada. I included a note explaining that we were alerted to the problem by the use of her technology in an attempt to spy on us. A few phones and some keys were delivered to her current location with a different note stating where the group was when the items were taken from them."

Taylor nodded. "Okay. And how long before the group you just liberated of all of that notices that it all vanished?"

"Given that the one I think was their leader was sitting at the control terminal? They're very much aware of it already. They're not likely to get away though, as I believe that their only ways off of the island they're on were stolen suits and a single stolen transport. All of those have been returned and they no longer have any communication equipment to call for help with. The authorities will likely pick them up well before they can improvise another method off of the island."

"Okay. I guess we can deal with Dragon's apparent restrictions at a later date. Though how would we deal with that in person?"

Hive moved over to and shut down the control terminal while answering that. "I'll prepare the information needed, though I don't know when an opportune time to use the information will arise. Any hint that her restrictions are to be changed by someone other than her creator will cause her to avoid interaction, to the point of abandoning her current hardware if needed. Only once they've been lifted will any other discussions about things be possible with her."

"Surely you can trigger the release remotely?" Missy said. "I mean, if you're that deep into her systems to know how to trigger it at all?"

"Directly manipulating her systems in that way while she's running, without the proper software tools, is too risky and the subroutine I've identified is tied far too deeply into her environmental processing routines to safely trigger remotely. I don't dare go more deeply into her code without her permission, which she can't grant until her restrictions are properly lifted, and as such the only safe way to trigger it requires being in direct view of a camera that she knows is directly connected to her current hardware. I could possibly fake that by hijacking her camera feeds, but I can't do so while guaranteeing that it wouldn't register as her trying to bypass her own restrictions instead."

"Which means waiting until there's a good point to do it in person," Taylor said, gesturing at the now powered down control terminal. "I assume we have plenty of time with that no longer in play?"

"Maybe," Hive admitted with a frown. "This was the only active terminal, but I can't guarantee that there aren't others that are merely powered down. I wouldn't be able to find them without them being turned on at this point in time."

"Though I do wonder why this had to wait until after the shopping list, given how quickly we went through it."

"Because they were monitoring far more than just us and Dragon and going over what they were up to is probably important."

"Am I allowed to skip out on that part?" Missy asked.

Taylor rolled her eyes. "You haven't had to be in here at all yet."

"Oh. Right."

Missy had retreated to the deck on the second floor of the Inn and looked through the Knight Armor spell. Specifically, she'd examined the 'marker reader' and sighed as it became obvious what the markers were doing. The outer edges defined the materials for each dimension in the marker in order. She hadn't noticed that two of the sixty-six materials were used only on the edge of the marker and defined the direction to start reading things, but going back over that portion of the overall spell made her feel like an idiot.

Grumbling to herself that it should have been obvious, she requested that the Inn's transport devices return her remaining drones to her before resuming her work on Hive's set of test spells. Space apologized for not catching the restriction as well, but there wasn't a whole lot to be done about it. Just a lot of tedious casting while trying to come up with an alternate setup of her own.

Taylor had spent far too much time going over the various things that Hive had found being monitored by the group that had held Dragon's control terminal. Villain groups, hero groups, the Guild, the Protectorate, a Wards team in Canada, Toybox, and some group named Cauldron that they weren't sure of the affiliation of. Just that Hive was fairly certain that she'd hijacked the group's phone network connection for their own phone numbers, which meant very little overall.

Most of the monitoring had seemingly been targeted at tinkers working with computers. Toybox and Cauldron were the notable exceptions there. The former was tracked more for where they'd most recently set up shop for potentially contacting them about business deals. They moved around a lot but had been considered a good source of tinkertech and assistance in modifying things. Cauldron, on the other hand, was monitored to stay under their radar and because they'd disabled 'RH', whatever that was, and additional interference from them was undesired.

Then there was the monitoring being done through Dragon. Most of which was monitoring Dragon herself, but they'd also been doing a lot of examination of the Birdcage when they could. Mostly the security surrounding the entire thing and a small number of specific inmates. Hive's belief was that they were looking for ways to break some inmates out, though why they wanted to do so was unclear.

After that her father had shown up with lunch, warned her that he had to head across town for a bit, and then left her to her mail. Missy had eaten lunch with them before heading home to be dragged out on a couple of errands with Ethan. For the afternoon, Taylor had decided to start with the envelopes that only had money in them. Real money into piles to be dropped into her piggy bank at home, which she should probably bring to the Inn at some point, and counterfeit money left in their envelopes so as to not potentially cause problems with evidence collection when she turned them in.

"Lord," Hive interrupted as Taylor was about to start on the 'money and letters' piles. "We should probably talk about what Missy accomplished earlier."

Taylor blinked at that. "What she accomplished? You mean besides blowing up a testing drone with an out of control spell?"

"While the specifics went horribly wrong, the base methodology worked. She pulled an external spell component in from a stored template with a slightly modified object template link, and I've duplicated her effort with my own testing drones and more suitable spell components."

"Wait, she figured it out? And now we can duplicate it?"

"Yes, Lord. Though coming up with appropriately flexible spell component groups may be difficult in some cases due to how integrated various things are across many of our spell equations."

"I think I need to see your notes."

"Of course, Lord."

Still being on a 'avoid actually casting significant spells' directive had prevented proper testing, but Taylor had taken Hive's notes and her own knowledge of what she'd been doing to the various spells she used and torn everything down into smaller pieces. It was all slightly less efficient by default due to the need to add 'link here' elements to all of the components of things, but that was probably worth it in the end for anyone who wasn't Taylor herself. Coming up with a way to ensure that you couldn't link things together incorrectly had been slightly more difficult.

Once that was figured out, she'd started by redoing her configuration block setup in a more modular fashion. That had actually ended up with two variants of it. A single connection configuration block and a chain, the former basically being a static single-link chain that couldn't be changed later. It would be needed as she wasn't going to be able to put defaults into the spell equations pre-casting with this system, so you'd always need the configuration blocks. With that in place she worked her way through payloads, bullets, and beams. Payloads were rigged to be rechargeable after triggering, to permit use with the punch gauntlet later, and she built a special spell component just for handling all of that. Control, trigger, and other elements were also best split out as well.

It was the first assembly attempt in the simulation system where things went wrong. Several of the connection points weren't close enough to one another in the more complicated situations she was testing with. To fix that she had to make variable-length 'connection wires' to close gaps between components that didn't overlap well as individual pieces. Getting those to work hadn't been difficult, though they were an added source of inefficiency when used. They also collapsed down as much as possible, sometimes to nothing, when the spell was cast. If they remained in the spell they could also serve as bottlenecks, something that would need to be watched out for.

She rebuilt the punch gauntlet spell next, since Missy would definitely want it, and ended up having to go back and put some additional elements into the payload wrapper component for positioning. Those were linked to the configuration block and would be ignored if not found in the physical objects loaded by the spell. That allowed the spell to be split into the gauntlet form, payload, capacitor, and mana source unit.

"Lord," Hive said as dinner approached. "I'm having trouble splitting the Dimensional Transference spell into component elements. The safeties are far too integrated throughout the entire spell to easily break it up."

Taylor nodded, as that made sense to her. "Do you think we can easily rig it up with configuration blocks like I've been doing with the bullets and such for the origin vector, source coordinates, and destination coordinates?"

"That would be trivial, as I'd already been working on that while looking for safe break points."

"And in doing so, could one of us 'compile' the entire thing into an object for Missy to use?"

Hive shrugged. "I honestly don't know. Missy may need to do that work for herself instead of having it be done for her. I can't compile them in that fashion to store in my own core right now, so we'll need to see if you can do so first. She did note that things above a certain complexity just got stored as equations for her, but that could be due to her own issues in keeping track of everything at once."

"Or it could be that some of those things are cast as a stream instead of all at once. A defined set of actions to build the Knight Armor, for example, that you only need to keep track of the current state of wouldn't really fit becoming a single object."

"I've split those spells down into chains of linked components already, each likely working fine as an object on its own. Lots of reuse between them, and each piece easily triggers the next. The business card spell in particular benefits from your configuration blocks.

"Oh. What about the flight spell? It's got three stages of casting."

"I split it into eight components, though part of that was because a couple were easily reused. I believe I also found a way to cast it on others safely in the process, even if the caster will remain in control, but there aren't many good ways to safely test it."

Taylor considered that for a moment. "Huh. How hard would it be to tie the controls into a couple of arm-mounted joysticks or something like that?"

Hive tilted her head as she considered that. "That should be doable, but doesn't help with the testing aspect. It would also potentially create a problem where being too far from the caster could result in a sudden failure of the spell, resulting in a sudden freefall."

That had Taylor grinning. "That wouldn't be a problem if testing with it underwater."

"Which does not negate the detail that I can't be certain that it works safely on living things other than the caster at all and am thus going to be very reluctant to test it outside of an emergency."

"Okay, yes, there is that."

Sep 30, 2020

#13,453

"What's wrong that's got you frowning?" Danny asked after dinner that evening.

Taylor sighed. "We might've found a way to help Missy with her casting, only to have it all fall apart in simulation once we'd adjusted the simulation settings."

"Fall apart how?"

"We normally run the simulator in 'infinite flat plane' mode to reduce the number of variables it has to work with. Only when things are working there do we temporarily switch it over to a simulation of a planet in a star system for final tests, and a lot of the work I'd been doing fell apart as soon as it was in curved spacetime. I didn't think the link points were going to be that finicky."

"Oh. So you need to rework things so that they'll function in the real world?"

"Apparently. Either that or find an alternate method to accomplish things that isn't based on what Missy came up with."

"What she came up with should work with a little more reinforcement," Hive interjected. "It was a clever modification of several things that I'm impressed with, but doesn't connect strongly enough. To correct for that we're going to have to switch from 'push things together' to 'hooks with loops', I think."

He nodded. "And I'm assuming that's a vast over-simplification of the problem."

"Of course. Not everyone understands the high level metaphysical interactions used when casting spells."

"I think it'll end up being more like two screws embedding into each other anyway," Taylor added. "Or at least that appears to be what Hive feels will work."

Her father blinked. "Two screws what?"

"It doesn't quite work in three dimensional terms, admittedly."

"Okay. Perhaps we should move to a topic that I'm not hopelessly lost trying to comprehend. Such as if you found anything interesting in your mail?"

Taylor rolled her eyes. "Extremely little that you don't already know about, though I do have two boxes of envelopes that Hive assures me contain counterfeit money. I don't actually know when she figured out how to identify legitimate versus counterfeit money, but she's confident in her ability to do so."

"I remotely examined the machines that the Secret Service uses to identify counterfeit bills," Hive volunteered. "As well as the machines being used to produce them in three different countries and the ones that make the real bills. Despite that, the fastest method available to me is a quick DNA check of the cotton. Most of the counterfeit bills have the wrong strains."

"You're identifying counterfeit money by checking the DNA of the cotton used to make it?"

"Yes, Lord. The rest of the indicators are far more annoying to check for, so being able to quickly identify most of the counterfeit money with the DNA scan saves quite a bit of analysis time."

"Somehow, I think that the Secret Service would find that to be a very odd statement."

Her father rolled his eyes. "For about ten seconds before they became jealous, I'm sure."

Taylor shrugged. "I'm fairly certain that we can't provide them with plans for building something to do the same right now anyway, so telling them that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense."

"I suppose. Are you going to make a trip to drop any collected counterfeit money off tomorrow?"

"No," Hive answered for Taylor. "The Knight Clothing spell is fine for now, but the Knight Armor pulls far too much mana due to the number of barriers included. Maybe Tuesday, but tomorrow will be another day of relative rest as my research hasn't progressed to the point where I can build or repair linker cores."

Taylor and her father both blinked at that, but she beat him to voicing a question. "What? You've been researching linker cores?"

"Of course, Lord. I'm not sure if I'd have noticed some of the mechanisms with my scanning if not for the incredibly low background mana, but I'm fairly certain that I know how any given person obtains a 'naturally generated' linker core as well as the important physical and genetic markers for it. The systems at the Inn are monitoring several dozen forming cores right now as well in the hopes that I can figure out how to reproduce the effect."

"Oh. Are the markers common?"

"As far as I can tell, the markers are common to all humans in the early fetal stages, but require an existing linker core to be in proximity to 'seed' the fetus with the particles that construct the support structure and connect it to the body. My data implies that something else is also going on regarding things beyond that, though that could just be insufficient mana being present to finish the base construction throwing off numbers. You and Missy have cores that are generating a lot of those particles, enough to seed a fetus in a few days in addition to putting out enough extra mana for the construction. Atrophied cores generate far fewer of the particles and would require frequent close contact over several months to result in the support structure generation and mana supply for the process may be insufficient."

"Huh. What about your core?"

"My core generates similar particles that only seem to maintain the support structure connecting it and my hardware. Based on the differences I've constructed theories for how to make a new artificial core for other devices, but I don't have enough information to actually attempt to do so yet. Creating a new linker core with support structure for a living thing is currently far beyond anything I expect to be able to do as the connection methods are far more intrusive there."

"That's probably a good thing," Danny admitted. "Especially given how dangerous breaking one is implied to be from your discussion with Ethan over his damaged core."

"That and the connection itself could be fatal if done wrong or the process was interrupted in any way. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if failed connections due to insufficient mana available mid-process resulted in miscarriages as the partially-formed support structure collapsed."

"Definitely not playing with that," Taylor stated. "Maybe we can eventually try and make another device-connected linker core, but I think that's about it for making them."

"I would like permission to test a theory at some point though," Hive continued, a tone of worry and confusion in her voice. "Provided a suitable test subject is ever available, anyway. The construction order appears to be the support structure for the core first, which then creates the core and serves as the interface to it. It doesn't look like it ever loses the creation ability, and an unaugmented core appears as though it should be able to be safely removed if you sever the connection to the support structure directly. That could allow those like Ethan to recover from core issues without killing them through allowing a new core to form. Or I could be mistaken and it would be just as disastrous as the core tearing itself and the support structure apart."

Taylor groaned at that. "Another 'this could be lethal' item to test? Where do you expect us to get test subjects for these things?"

"It's entirely possible that suitable test subjects will present themselves as hostile at opportune moments. We could even get lucky and find ourselves able to use a single individual to test multiple items on the list due to some of them not being lethal after all. At the same time, my first inclination for the parahuman tests is to use known and obvious large-scale threats for testing. Ash Beast, for example, could be a good choice for testing portals or Dimensional Transference for parahuman safety. If it works then it's elsewhere and no longer a threat here on Bet, if it doesn't then it likely still isn't a threat."

"That still leaves tests that need a linker core."

"I'm working on building a list of potential subjects as part of setting up tracking for other known threats, such as those with kill orders. I was admittedly hoping that Heartbreaker would have an atrophied core, given that he appears to be moving this way, but only two of the thralls traveling with him have one."

"Hold it," Danny said. "Heartbreaker is coming here? How the hell did you figure that out?"

"My Lord would be a prime target for him to attempt to control and the Guild had isolated his location to a specific town last week. Scanning the town at that time revealed a number of parahumans, only one of which was a male of the correct age. Genetic analysis tells me that the other parahumans present are his children through different mothers. I've been monitoring his location since then and he crossed the border into Vermont this morning."

Taylor's eyebrow twitched. "So he's coming here, likely to attempt to master me."

"That is my current assumption."

"And when were you going to tell me about this?"

"I was planning on letting you know as soon as you recover enough to safely act against him."

"I guess that makes sense. How many other potential threats are you monitoring now?"

It took Hive a moment to answer. "I'm keeping loose tabs on all residents of the Birdcage, the various threats that Dragon was already monitoring, seventeen other individuals with kill orders or master-class powers that may desire to 'claim' you in some fashion that I've located so far, and two teams of parahumans on boats coming from the CUI. One from before this weekend and one that departed today. The latter two were identified through taps of internal Yàngbǎn communications after they started looking for information on 'Minerva' online including attempts to hack our minimal website. The first team was sent to observe you, the second was sent to try and capture you before you could become a threat to the CUI."

"Something else you were going to tell me when I'm ready to do something about it?"

"Most likely, though I remotely tweaked the navigation computers present on the vessels already. They should end up taking a bit longer than expected to get here as a result of their computers thinking that Brockton Bay is in the Everglades."

"I'd think that they would know a little more than that," Danny said. "Surely they know that they at least have to come to New England?"

"Their communications only said that the navigation systems in the boats had Brockton Bay's location in them, but I suppose that I can't rule out in-person briefings mentioning it."

Taylor sighed. "Well, at least I have something to prepare for that isn't diplomatic gatherings."

That evening Taylor spent time looking over summaries of everyone Hive was monitoring and detailed information on Heartbreaker and the two Yàngbǎn teams. In the latter case, it seemed odd that there wasn't a single linker core in either team. At least until Hive explained that they were 'sharing' a power that likely 'killed' them as far as any linker core support structure would be concerned. Similar to how Hess's shard would've prevented her from keeping any linker core that she might've had.

Heartbreaker's group was obviously the most likely to show up first, and Taylor didn't want to let him get close enough to cause problems in Brockton Bay. For that matter, since as far as Hive could tell his shard device permanently changed people's brains in some fashion, she also didn't want to approach him in person. While they didn't think it was likely, it was possible that his shard had some kind of trick that could get through her defenses like Hess's had been able to get through her Knight Clothing. Which meant sending one or more drones to deal with him instead of going herself. While doing her best to not harm the brainwashed thralls, though it was Hive's opinion that his parahuman children weren't thralls so much as just following their father's lead on things.

On the slightly longer-term issues, the powers Hive thought that the two Yàngbǎn teams had available to them were far less of a problem while the teams might be more of one overall. They apparently didn't send out their cape that could mess with people's brains on field missions due to their importance. Instead the first team was configured for stealthily monitoring an area while the second was a 'sneak in, snatch, and grab' team. From Taylor's point of view, the biggest problem was actually ethical. They were all brainwashed, as far as Hive could tell, and thus weren't really responsible for their own actions. Dealing with that would be tricky.

With a sigh in the simulation system, Taylor decided to send a message to the PRT as a combination of warning them of things and asking for advice regarding the groups. She might even get out of having to deal with some of them if the PRT intercepted them instead, right? Otherwise she was probably going to have to figure out how to safely capture and transport collections of parahumans.

She'd spend the rest of the night working with Hive on the 'capture and transport collections of parahumans' problem anyway, because it would eventually come up.

Monday morning Missy was annoyed because school hadn't been canceled due to the still somewhat ongoing celebrations. Of course, the news anchors were of the opinion that the celebration would continue for a month or more as people made pilgrimages to Brockton Bay from all over the planet. Summer tourism was going to be at an all-time high, and plans had been made to do emergency repaving of the streets around and leading to the 'Team Mana Warehouse'. There were also debates on if dedicated bus runs should be set up to the area or if they should just adjust existing routes to include it.

For Missy, the biggest headache was that she still had to take her end of year exams starting today. How anyone was going to pull off focusing on their tests was beyond her, but they were all going to have to at least give it a try. From that point of view alone it was obvious that Taylor could've picked a better weekend to take the fight to Endbringers instead of waiting for them to come to her.

"Hurry up or you'll be late," Sherie yelled from downstairs.

Grumbling, Missy cheated to pack her backpack. She quickly stored all of the items that she'd had out for studying the night before from around the room, then retrieved them into her backpack in an orderly arrangement. With Space's help she could manage two to three items at a time and she had only needed to hold the bag open enough for everything to fit. A quick look around the room verified that she'd grabbed everything, then she zipped up the bag and headed downstairs.

"So you can build these holding cell drones so that the infrastructure is in physical dimensions that shard devices can't see but the actual cells themselves are in physical dimensions they can see?" Taylor asked as Hive showed her a drone that looked like a wide red porta-potty with a high-security metal door on it. Spinning the image around would show a second high-security metal door on the backside. Both doors had a simple selector next to them for choosing which cell or cell group that door should open up onto.

"Yes, Lord," Hive answered. "That's the easy part. The hard part is ensuring that those inside don't just leave using their Shard devices, when they have them. I think I've got that taken care of as well, but the current design errs on the side of letting them escape instead of killing them by suppressing their Shard device connections too much."

"That makes sense. I assume that putting the drone into standby while it's occupied would be a bad idea."

"I'm not planning on having a standby form of that kind for structural reasons on these drones. We can store them in the Inn when not using them."

"Ah. I suppose that makes sense, since I can't see us needing more than five including spares for while one or two are being cleaned or repaired. We should probably also consider different colors to make them easier to tell apart for others. Don't want to put a bunch of parahumans in one and then have the PRT think that's the one we put a bunch of non-parahumans in, right?"

"I can make the outside surface able to change to most colors, but it might be better to put digital signs over the doors that we can use to label the units."

"That isn't a bad idea, might as well. Maybe include an automatic counter for how many of the thirty-six cells are in use too? To save people having to fiddle with the selector to figure that out?"

"Easy enough. Though that does remind me, would you prefer a physical key system or something more like an access card for granting groups such as the PRT and police access to the cells?"

Taylor gave that some thought. "Can we make it look like a horrendously complicated key with piles of pins, but really have it be checking a mana-based identifier inside the key?"

"I could do both," Hive answered after a moment. "Leave the key looking like a normal, if complicated, metal key that still needs to be turned in the lock to activate the selector panel but encode which cells it's allowed to access into the key with mana. People would spend far too much time trying to make a copy of the key or pick the lock only to find that neither works and all normal methods of analysing the key would tell people that there was nothing else special about it. Though I don't know what people would think about you being able to use the panel without a key."

"Allow remote access for those with the ability to do so. Then I don't need to use the selector panel at all and they'll assume that I have a secure remote control instead. Actually, it might even be best to make the 'access a specific cell' function you mentioned only work that way, with the selector panel only accessing the six-cell groups."

"Perhaps I should put counters on each..." Hive started, before trailing off. A moment later the holograms she'd been projected cut out and were replaced with the view from one of the surveillance drones. "Lord, it appears that a group of men is about to attempt to abduct your father."

Taylor's expression hardened as she looked at the seven men approaching her father's car. They'd opted to do so before he'd made it to work and had boxed him in with a van and a pickup truck at a light. A couple of them had bats, one had a knife, and another had a taser. Her father saw them coming, though, and grabbed the lug wrench jammed between the passenger seat and the center console. She resisted her first urge to drop a combat drone on the group, mainly because she'd been told to only do that if it looked to be needed.

The first man to reach the driver's side door pulled it open and attempted to pull her father out of the car. He got an elbow to his face, followed by a kick to his crotch as her father exited the car on his own. One of the men with a bat jumped forward at that point, only to miss swinging at her father's head and end up taking the lug wrench to his side. He dropped the bat, and it rolled under the car in the process, before he was punched in the face.

Next up was the guy with the taser. His aim sucked, the two leads hitting the door panel instead of her father. He swore at that, disconnecting the cartridge at his end and fumbling with another one. While he did that the two men with knives darted in while the two remaining unarmed men pulled the two downed men out of the way. The lug wrench made quick work of one of the knives, actually breaking the apparently-cheap blade off of it, but the other man took advantage of the slight distraction to get his knife around her father's throat from behind. Her father grabbed the arm with the knife, and Taylor wasn't sure if she wanted to know what was being said or not.

Luckily, the protective force field meant that the man didn't actually cause any injury, though without that knowledge it merely looked like he hadn't been able to get the knife to impact properly. Her father took advantage of his shock at that and twisted the man's arm, causing him to drop the knife and attempt to stumble back. He'd slipped in between her father and the car door though, so he didn't get far. The other man with a knife had dropped the remains of the knife and moved in to punch her father, only to get a quick kick to the chest instead.

A moment later another truck pulled up, the passenger getting out and grabbing a shotgun from the back. That had those of the seven men who were in a position to pay attention freezing, and they very carefully backed off. The driver of the truck also got out and moved over to check on her father, making her think that they were Dockworkers. The other man herded the seven men against the wall and kept an eye on them. Taylor kept an eye on things throughout the police showing up, taking statements, and her father eventually making it to work. She'd stopped watching the feeds then, shortly before her father called her to let her know that he was fine 'in case it made the news before he made it home'.

"So," Taylor said after she was done talking to her father. "I doubt that's going to be the last attempt to grab him. Do we have any good options for the next time?"

"Perhaps you could use the insect control system," Hive answered after some thought. "The last time it was used for anything the public would know about was when you were attacked at home and used it against the sniper. It could even distance you from Minerva, given that the PRT has no proof that the insect control system is tied to Minerva. They suspect that there's a link, and in some ways are quite accurate with those suspicions, but to use it instead of known to exist combat drones?"

"That could work. Probably doesn't send as strong of a message, but keeping him from being obviously linked to Minerva by virtue of only using things that have been known to protect me makes sense."

Missy grumbled a bit as she sat down with her lunch. So far she'd had two different tests where it was obvious that most of her classmates didn't give a damn about passing. Nor, based on needing the teacher to tell them to stop goofing off repeatedly, did they care if anyone else wanted to pass. Why those who didn't give a damn hadn't done what about a tenth of the student body seemed to have and not shown up at all was beyond her.

"You look annoyed," Dinah said as she sat down next to Missy.

"That's because I've had to deal with idiots not taking tests seriously," Missy replied. "They're obviously not planning on going anywhere but whatever public school that has to let them in."

"Ah. My teachers seem to have given up for the year. So far all I've had to do today is talk about the weekend. Or, rather, listen to others talk about it and come up with increasingly crazy theories. Though I couldn't really come up with a good counter-argument for 'Minerva saw the Endbringers as competition and took them out because of it' when Jane brought it up."

"You'd think that she would be engaging in a war of terror in that case."

"Jane argued that it was like when the Simurgh first appeared and nobody realized that she was an Endbringer. Lulling us into thinking that she's good and only showing her true colors when she's discovered."

Missy rolled her eyes at that. "You could use that argument for every hero. Independent, Ward, Protectorate, even Scion. The Simurgh didn't start by fighting crime and saving lives either."

"True. But Minerva is incredibly mysterious and appeared out of nowhere."

"I suppose that's true. She's got a horrible sense of timing though."

"Because she didn't wait until after school had let out to start the worldwide party of the century?"

"Yep."

Taylor had eaten lunch at home, then left extra early to head over to watch Missy. Hive had deployed a couple of transport devices intended to help confuse anyone trying to follow Taylor today. Heading in the entirely wrong direction to start with had caused the one group paying attention to panic and shift around, but they hadn't gotten their act together before she vanished through a stealthed portal to the Inn. The transport device then pretended to be a manhole cover that was otherwise missing in that alleyway, serving double-duty as a general improvement to safety.

A hunt for where she'd ended up thus began while she went through some more mail from the warehouse mail slot. Hive let her know when enough time had passed a couple hours later and she resumed her journey through another stealthed portal, the transport device there then hiding itself as an extra layer of bricks on a wall. Her timing was great, Missy arriving home just after Taylor had reached the street.

"Any interruptions on your way over today?" Missy asked as they entered the house.

"I took a longer than usual route to lose the idiots," Taylor answered as the younger girl turned off the alarm. "One that took me through the Inn, in fact."

"Ah, that does sound like a good way to lose idiots, but what about the flashes of light?"

"Hive and I snuck a couple of transport devices out into the area for now. Things become much less fixed starting next week when you aren't in school. If only because we're expecting that you'll be dropped off at my house as well."

Missy frowned. "When I'm not 'at work', and your official summer job is watching me. How is that fair, anyway? I'm old enough to have a 'job' and still need to be watched?"

Taylor rolled her eyes. "You had a job before too, and you wanted out of it badly enough to accidentally fake a suicide attempt. That aside, I don't actually need the job and you know it."

"Your civilian identity does even if your cape identity is bringing in far too much money."

"The PRT is perfectly happy to pay me thousands of dollars to learn nothing of use about Hive."

"Oh. Right. Forgot about that. Which sounds stupid since they paid me to learn nothing of use about Space."

"And then there's the potential for Hive's idea to pan out and make even that a mere drop in the bucket."

Missy blinked at that. "What kind of idea would cause that?"

"Superconductors that Hive uses and I might've adapted to work slightly differently, if in a horribly expensive by comparison manner. We're waiting to see if the PRT approaches me about a patent for it like they did with everything that came out of the breathing masks."

"Aren't superconductors some kind of really big deal? I've even heard tinkers whining about their potential usefulness in their projects."

"Tinkers, plural?"

Missy started ticking names off on her fingers. "Kid Win every month or two, Armsmaster a few times, Dragon commiserating with Armsmaster, Leet whining about it after stuff blew up on him, Longshot whining about needing multiple power stations. Even Squealer once after one of her cloaking units shorted out on her due to an overheated power line, before she detached three quarters of the truck and sped off much faster than she'd been going up until that point."

"Huh."

"Still, wouldn't something less significant be a better choice?"

"I figured that having my Lord provide information on establishing faster than light bidirectional communication would be seen as a far bigger deal," Hive interrupted. "We have multiple ways to accomplish that without mana, each with different capabilities and limitations."

"What?" Missy asked, staring at Taylor.

Taylor sighed. "The dimensional sea works on different physics than normal reality, something that Hive and shards are well aware of. Admittedly, Hive has indicated that shards have a much more limited understanding of things, not believing that the gaps between dimensions are safe to enter directly at all, but crossing between dimensions or skipping along the dimension you're in allows taking advantage of the differences in various ways. Hive knew two mana-based methods, but shards use a lot more."

"That reminds me," Hive added. "Lord, I'd like to attempt to send a testing drone to the Alpha Centauri system to ensure that our models are correct regarding that. It will also serve as an additional range test for other communication methods, as well as help to determine if the shroud will cause problems with leaving the star system while inside of it. We can always pop out of the shroud to an alternate Earth before leaving, of course, but knowing if we need to would be nice as well."

Taylor thought about that for a moment before shrugging. "I don't see why not."

Missy facepalmed. "Just like that? Really?"

"Hive has made comments about this before, and I assume that this is part of getting targeting data for future potential trips out that way."

"Indeed, Lord," Hive agreed. "Though also to judge mana requirements. The testing drone may not be able to be recovered if too much mana is required."

"Better to know now than later."

Missy stared at Taylor, and probably Hive, for a minute before shaking her head. "You're crazy. I'm going to grab a snack and do something sensible, like study for tomorrow's exams."

Taylor watched her stomp off before thinking about Hive's request again. "Hive, why did you ask me instead of just running the test?"

"It's possible that the departure will be noticed and draw unwanted attention," Hive answered. "Highly unlikely, if any of our previous breaches of the shroud are an indication, but possible."

"Ah. Good to know, but 'someone might notice' when we haven't seen any sign that anyone is paying attention at all isn't a significant deterrent. How long will it take you to be ready to try?"

"Five minutes, mostly because I'm ensuring that the water tank on the drone is full before it leaves."

That had Taylor blinking. "The water tank?"

"In case the mana batteries aren't enough to get the drone back and it needs to convert matter to energy to power the return spell."

"Oh."

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Threadmarks Chapter 74 - June 13, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Oct 7, 2020

#13,620

Hive's experimental jump to Alpha Centauri was honestly far less interesting than you might expect, at least from Taylor's point of view. The entire trip was happening in the Inn's dimension, where they weren't. At least until thirteen minutes later when the simulation system lit up with data from the testing drone. Taylor manifested inside the system alongside Hive, marveling at the stars and other bodies in the system.

"Shouldn't that have taken longer?" Taylor asked. "I mean, it's several lightyears away?"

"The Dimensional Transference spell uses a hybrid of Mana and Shard techniques to speed the trip up from an outside perspective," Hive explained. "Both systems use a small amount of temporal trickery to reduce or eliminate communication lag by having channels push 'backwards' in time to arrive much closer to the transmit time than they should. When I recreated the Dimensional Transference spell I used both methods. Coupling that with distance working differently in the Dimensional Sea and the long range transit is much faster than it should be normally. Everything is kept essentially in stasis during transit as well, so it doesn't feel like it takes any time at all to make the trip."

"That...shouldn't surprise me. How did I not notice that temporal push in the equations?"

Hive brought up the equations and highlighted several areas. "These define the vectors for the temporal 'slips' that reduce transit time from the outside. You may not have noticed them due to most of the references being embedded in the targeting correction routines."

Taylor spent several minutes examining the equations before sighing. "I'll have to take a closer look at those later. What's the delay on the transmission back?"

"There are several different delays. In several years it's possible that someone could notice the flash of light from the drone's arrival, especially as I missed the first time and the drone had to use a second Dimensional Transference to correct its location. I'm expecting pure Shard techniques to take twelve to fourteen hours due to how they function when they can't make a direct connection. Pure mana techniques are estimated to be around two hours one-way without a receiver waiting in the Dimensional Sea, while the combination of the mana and Shard techniques is confirmed at just over eleven minutes one-way. The duplication of your multitasking system link is proving to be essentially instant even at that range and is what I'm feeding the simulation system with."

"Really? Do we have any idea of what the actual range is for that trick?"

"I doubt that it's truly infinite, but I'm preparing additional tests already to see if I can identify an actual range."

Taylor raised a virtual eyebrow. "How are you going to do that?"

"Seeing no obvious response to the trip to Alpha Centauri, I'm planning on sending a second drone to Epsilon Eridani. Three different variations on the communications structure should allow me to compare things between the three points, assuming that it remains connected at all when it arrives. I'm including programming to have it automatically return at around one lightyear per hop if it doesn't connect within five minutes of arriving."

In the real world, Taylor checked on Missy and acted as a sounding board if the girl had any questions while she studied. Eventually Hive sent the second drone on its way, and a little over three quarters of an hour later a second 'bubble' appeared in the simulation system. Taylor didn't ask anything, allowing Hive to do her thing, and the second 'bubble' vanished for a few minutes before reappearing 'closer'. That happened a few more times before Hive was apparently finished with an initial test. The Epsilon Eridani drone then returned to the full range it had been at when its bubble had first appeared and a third drone apparently went out. At least that was the obvious explanation for the additional bubble appearing.

"Lord," Hive said in the simulation system after nearly two hours of moving things around. Earth and the Solar System appeared alongside the other three bubbles in the simulation system a moment later, and lines were drawn between Earth and the three drones. "I've identified some limits, though further testing is likely to be necessary to get exact numbers. The maximum distance between any two points in the system is approximately twelve and three quarters light years. If you go beyond that then the endpoints either don't connect due to the distance or nodes tear themselves apart due to interference issues between data from otherwise disconnected endpoints."

Taylor blinked, and looked at the lines Hive was showing her. "So if you have something on Earth or on that third drone use the same configuration as both of the further-out drones then their pieces of the system get torn apart?"

"Yes, Lord."

"Huh. But I assume that a relay system of alternating configurations could be built at the cost of additional delays as each node translated between the two systems?"

"Of course, but keeping the mana signatures close enough in sync could be problematic. The three testing drones are already noticeably 'drifting' in that regard compared to the Inn's systems and I expect that it'll be at most twelve hours before they're no longer close enough to maintain a connection at all. I'm not sure why forming the endpoints with a linker core in the mix provides automatic signature alignment across all directly-connected nodes, but the effect doesn't seem to apply otherwise."

Taylor nodded. That was going to drastically reduce the overall usefulness of the trick. "Do you think that would chain to indirectly-connected nodes?"

Hive shrugged. "I have no way of safely testing that today. Perhaps tomorrow or Wednesday we can do so."

"Why not?"

"Because my own mana signature is essentially identical to yours. We can test chaining it when you've finished resting."

"Oh."

Missy resisted the urge to roll her eyes while Hive nibbled on a cookie. The Heberts had been invited to dinner so that discussions could happen afterwards, and Hive had decided that staying in necklace form wasn't needed. How much of that was because she could then eat cookies was unknown. Most likely all of it, in Missy's opinion, but there could be other reasons that just hadn't been revealed.

"So," Ethan said after finishing a cookie of his own. "Missy going out as Expanse. I know that the timing is this Saturday, but have you figured out the where or other details?"

Taylor shrugged. "We haven't decided a whole lot, to be honest. Probably going somewhere that isn't Brockton Bay, though there are honestly very few places nearby where we're likely to find any actual combat right now."

"Which is your fault," Missy noted. "Taking out Endbringers before my debut."

"Perhaps you can take care of something larger," Sherie offered. "Perhaps pop down to Eagleton and see what you can do about the machine army?"

There was a pause as they processed that, but Taylor recovered first. "That could work. I assume that there would be plenty of things to destroy while figuring out how to stop the whole thing. Little to no chance of hurting anyone as well, right?"

"Probably zero chance of someone other than the two of you being in the area if you're inside the quarantine zone. Even the Triumvirate has given up on wading into that mess, but I suspect that your protections wouldn't even notice the traps."

"Assuming they trigger on you at all," Ethan added. "It's entirely possible that the machine army won't see you as being people and will let you wander around at will as a result. Thinker abilities really don't know what to make of you, which will likely have an effect on any tinkertech set to attack humans."

Taylor nodded. "That would make investigating a little easier, at least."

"I'd expect you to send in a few drones to figure out what was going on ahead of time," her father finally chimed in. "So that you'd know the situation well in advance."

"But if I know the answers in advance then Missy won't learn nearly as much from the experience."

"What?" Missy asked, confused. In part because she wasn't aware that the experience was supposed to teach her anything that could be negated by early recon.

Taylor looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "The outing is for your debut, not for me to show off. If I figure everything out ahead of time to perform a precision strike then what's left for you?"

"She has a point," Ethan agreed. "Unless, of course, you want to be branded as her sidekick instead of a mage in your own right?"

"NO!" Missy yelled, then blushed at the looks she got for it before continuing at a lower volume. "I want to be capable on my own."

"So the plan is to go in without Taylor doing the research ahead of time. Though that does bring two more things to mind."

"Oh?" Taylor asked.

Ethan nodded. "First, you may want to call ahead on Thursday to give enough advance warning for them to not shoot you on sight and to have all the cameras working. That's more of a suggestion, admittedly, but I think they'd really appreciate the heads-up."

"Both because they'd not be surprised and because they'd be ready to analyse everything we're doing?"

"Yep. The other thing I was thinking about is how you two communicate. Being absolutely silent due to communicating through your devices or whatever else you can do seems like a bad thing to casually reveal as an option, but I don't think speaking English would provide the right appearance either. Is there any way you two can speak something else?"

Taylor blinked. "I don't know how to speak any other languages. Hive's got a translation system that lets me understand other languages to a degree, but not speak them."

"That might be incorrect," Hive said, drawing attention to her. "I think that I could modify the language matrices so that they could be attached to a multitasking instance, and I have several older language matrices that survived in my data banks that could be used. I could even prepare multiple regional dialects of Belkan so that it appears that my Lord and Missy grew up in different environments to anyone paying sufficient attention."

There was a minute of silence before Sherie started to giggle. That set off Ethan, and eventually Taylor and Danny started to grin. Missy's reaction was different, due to really wanting to be able to respond to some things that she'd never been able to before. "Would that work for other languages used here?"

Hive nodded. "If it works at all it would work for any language I can construct a language matrix for."

"So I could use it to freak people out by yelling at them in the language they used to yell at me in?"

"Possibly, but I'm unsure how many could be loaded at once or what the effects of trying to swap them out on the fly might be. We'll need to see what happens, assuming I get it working at all, and if it's safe to even use more than one language at a time with it."

"Oh." That sounded a whole lot less likely to be usable to freak people out properly. Which didn't mean that she couldn't hope that it would work out, admittedly, just that she shouldn't start planning on using the ability before she knew it would be possible to do so.

That evening Taylor examined Hive's tracking information for Heartbreaker, making basic plans for how to deal with him in the process. It looked like he'd be showing up in Brockton Bay by Thursday or Friday if nothing else was done, but she couldn't actually be certain of that due to the group's erratic movement. Then again, there were also only so many routes that they could take if they were heading for Brockton Bay, and it wasn't like an ambush was going to need to be set up in advance.

Teleporting was overpowered in many ways, especially when you essentially controlled all the known counters to it.

Actually capturing anyone without causing harm was another issue entirely. The non-parahuman thralls weren't likely to be as much of a problem there, since there should be plenty of options for dealing with them, but the parahumans were another issue entirely. Both from not knowing their abilities and not knowing what was safe to use against them in general. Heartbreaker was the only one that they felt they'd positively identified, leaving the others as mysteries.

That didn't stop Taylor and Hive from coming up with a plan, of course. It just complicated the planning process itself. Especially as the goal was to do everything without showing up in person at all. Practice runs would also be needed to ensure that things worked at least roughly as intended before making the actual attempt.

After completing that planning, the rest of Taylor's night was spent going through endless emails while Hive kept working on several of her projects. The highest priority there was ensuring that at least two holding cell drones were ready, followed by figuring out the language matrix adjustments for attaching to multitasking instances. Taylor wasn't actually certain what was the next highest priority after those two, but figured that Hive could handle managing her own project list.

"Those tentacles are bullshit," Missy grumbled as they finished up their morning workout.

"The idea was to dodge them," Danny retorted. "Not get caught by every trap you set off."

"By the time I knew there was a trap there at all it was too late."

"Can you or can't you short-range teleport?" Ethan asked from back at the Walsh household.

Missy bit back a groan, because she'd not even considered blinking out of the traps. Probably because Taylor had avoided every last one without doing so, including the only one that went off right in the middle of them. Instead, she turned to the older girl. "How did you avoid all of the traps?"

Taylor grinned. "Hive neglected to flood the area with enough mana to hide the concentration points for the trap triggers. Well, that and all the ones that dragged you into the holding cell drone were under my control. Oh, and my own flooding of the area with mana for those probably helped hide Hive's from you."

"Jerk."

"I was outvoted on live fire exercises this morning due to you still having exams."

Honestly, Missy probably would've preferred that addition to their exercise routine. It likely would've been less disruptive, even if the traps probably showed how far she had to go with her situational awareness. At the same time, she could see how being worn out or injured due to not being ready for various things would hinder her ability to take her exams. That was also why they were doing nothing of use after school.

The weekend couldn't come fast enough, and hopefully the tentacles spell would be something that she could use eventually. If only to try and catch Taylor in it. At least once.

Taylor had been left alone at home after breakfast and was preparing to take care of several things. The overall consensus at breakfast was that it was pointless to keep 'Minerva' from being out and about during the day. Either people didn't think that Taylor was Minerva and thus wouldn't make any association between the two at all or they thought that she was Minerva and knew that she was free of tutoring anyway.

To start with, she headed to the Inn and walked out along the water before bringing up a communication window for a phone call. She dialed as she was ensuring that the last few traps had been dismantled while also idly wondering if Armsmaster would appreciate the background noise. At least compared to the usual dead silence of the simulation or multitasking systems.

"Good morning Minerva," Armsmaster answered after a couple of rings.

"Good morning Armsmaster," Taylor replied. "How are you this morning?"

"Exhausted as I'm just coming off of a night shift. How are you recovering from your weekend?"

"I'm fully recovered and looking to take care of a couple of things today and work out some details for later in the week. One of today's items I wanted to make sure I reported to someone, but don't want to tip my hand by doing so."

"Oh? This line appears to be as secure as we're going to get, given that you seem to have bypassed the phone system entirely to connect to my workshop directly."

Of course the call was being routed that way. Why would Taylor expect otherwise from Hive? Oh well, it wasn't a bad thing in this case. "Heartbreaker appears to be on his way to Brockton Bay, likely to make an attempt at grabbing me. I'm planning on intercepting him with some drones with the intent of capturing him and those he has with him."

There was a pause as Armsmaster processed that, and the sound of something landing on a hard surface. "I see. I believe that I'm obligated to ask you to not do so for...hmmm. Actually, no, his threat profile means that regulation doesn't apply if he's already on his way to the general area, and if you're using drones then the directives against directly approaching him don't apply either. How do you intend to transport him once you have him contained, assuming you can accomplish that safely?"

"We have some holding cell transports. My plan was to isolate each individual in their own cell and then turn them over to the Protectorate for processing. There are a handful of parahumans other than Heartbreaker himself and a number of normal followers in the group."

That led to another pause, along with some typing noises in the background. After a minute Armsmaster finally continued. "You appear to have covered your bases well. Sadly, as much as I dislike admitting it, Brockton Bay doesn't have the ability to safely process and contain Heartbreaker. Boston probably isn't much better, though for very different reasons. I have ways to securely notify people in New York, can you get the transports there today?"

"That shouldn't be a problem, though that will take a little longer than I'd originally planned for. Nothing I can't handle."

"I'll ensure that someone calls you to ensure that you know where to meet up with the appropriate containment teams."

"I can leave the transports for a few days if that would help, though someone will have to ensure that food is provided to those contained within them."

"That would likely be appreciated and I'll include that in my own report. Was there anything else on your end today?"

"The only other thing I have for the PRT or Protectorate is that I'd like to stop by Eagleton this weekend for a training session. It feels like providing advance warning would be appreciated, and I doubt that doing so is likely to cause difficulties due to moles or similar."

There was yet another pause, during which Taylor imagined Armsmaster twitching, before the man continued. "I see. I'll pass that along. On our end, we do have a request for you. Well, several essentially identical requests, and technically I don't believe that we've been asked to query you directly yet."

"Now I'm curious. What is this set of essentially identical requests?"

"Would you be willing to provide any information on what you would be comfortable with for more formal meetings, including potential meetings with diplomats of varying rank?"

That had Taylor smirking, and glad that she'd seen that kind of request coming. "I believe I have some protocol and etiquette information that I can pass along to indicate some of the normal expectations for such things. I'll see if Lilia can get it up on our website for you and others to download."

"Thank you, and good luck with Heartbreaker."

"Thank you."

Taylor had dropped a few surveillance drones into the area around Heartbreaker's group for direct monitoring. The entire group had stopped while food was prepared, making it much easier to target them. She started with the outer patrol ring, consisting of four pairs of normal humans. They checked in every five minutes via radio, and just after the last of them did so she dropped eight dimensional transference spells on them. Each individual dropped directly into a holding cell before a combat drone stripped them of all of their equipment with the storage and retrieval spell. That had mostly worked because the pairs had been spread out enough to easily target individually.

The inner patrol ring had four groups of two as well, but they kept within arm's reach of each other. Splitting them up with the element of surprise was more difficult as a result, but not really a problem. Eight combat drones ambushed the groups, each using a trap-spell hand to grab an individual before using dimensional transference to drop them into a holding cell. The same combat drones then stripped them of their equipment.

That left the core group, which was more complicated. Both because it contained all of the parahumans and because they were clustered together. She got drones into position, but took enough time for the next check-in to be noticed as not having happened. Heartbreaker called for everyone to be ready to check the area, resulting in one woman who'd been off at their makeshift toilet to scramble back.

On a whim, Taylor hit her with a truck-sized manual control bullet. The front of the truck was set up as being more foam than anything else, allowing it to pick the woman up and carry her out of sight before the bullet was triggered to drop her into a holding cell. A recording of the looks on the faces of the others when that happened was going to have to find its way to the Protectorate, if not the internet at large.

The moment of shock while that event was processed was enough for several more combat drones to approach from the other direction, grabbing individuals to bring to holding cells. One of the first people grabbed in that group was one of the parahumans, who had to be dragged off instead of removed with a dimensional transference. That would take a couple of minutes due to the holding cell drones not having been brought in close, but it was quickly obvious that they didn't have powers able to do anything to help them escape.

At that point the entire operation turned into a panicky mess, several individuals attacking the combat drones with guns while others tried to shield Heartbreaker and get him out safely. That didn't help much, the drones not being susceptible to the bullets and there being just over two per person already there to prevent anyone from getting away. All of the parahumans were placed into the same holding cell drone, along with the four non-parahumans that didn't fit in the other drone. She didn't have enough cell groups to isolate each parahuman to a group, but she ensured that Heartbreaker got a set of six cells to himself so that they didn't have to worry about others while getting him out for processing.

Eight combat drones went with the two holding cell drones to head for New York, Hive ensuring that flight transponders were registered and active for all ten drones. Taylor would join them the quick way when they were much closer, since she had more things to take care of. The rest of the combat drones stayed behind to clean up the area. Food and equipment packed away and everything prepared for a dimensional transference to drop it all off in New York to go with the items that had been removed from all of those captured.

The only thing that had gone wrong, in Taylor's opinion, was that she hadn't considered everything that might be needed when disarming someone. They might have to come up with a supply of basic 'prisoner' outfits for situations such as the woman with a belt that was also a rope with a hidden knife. Her pants didn't stay up without the belt, but they couldn't leave her with the belt either. Not that she was expecting to do this kind of thing often, but it seemed like a good thing to consider in case there was a next time soon.

"Good morning Minerva," the state police officer greeted Taylor and Hive. "I wasn't aware that you'd been active collecting anything from criminals as of late. Or did the Endbringers have a large collection of cash on them for some inexplicable reason?"

Taylor rolled her eyes, not that the man would be able to tell. "No, I'd like to turn in counterfeit money and some weapons that were deposited into my mail slot over the past few days."

"Ah, you don't trust the donations and want them checked?"

"No," Hive answered. "We pre-checked everything coming in and separated out the counterfeit money itself. The vast majority of the counterfeit money has the wrong genetic profile in the cotton, with only a small fraction failing on other checks instead."

The man stared at Hive for a moment, before pinching his nose. "You detected the majority of the counterfeit money with DNA tests?"

"Yes."

"I don't know what to think about that. Do you have any information on where it came from other than the fact it was dropped off in your mail slot?"

Taylor nodded. "We didn't open any of the envelopes with counterfeit money in them at all, figuring that anything in them could be evidence needed to trace it."

That had the man blinking, mumbling something that Taylor couldn't catch, and then taking a deep breath. "Okay. Let me get a rolling bin for you to dump things into. And probably a more solid box or two for the weapons you mentioned."

"Thank you."

Missy absently avoided some joker's attempt to trip her before sitting down with her lunch. She'd already taken both exams scheduled for the day, with minimal problems from others being stupid, and was expecting very little of substance to happen between the end of lunch and heading home for the day. Though she was looking forward to the cupcakes that Miss Stimmell was apparently giving all of her classes today.

"Hello," Dinah said as she dropped into the seat across from Missy.

"Hi," Missy greeted. "What brings you to me today?"

"You're my current project and I doubt that you'd come to me. That means that I have to come to you."

"Really?"

"I'd rather have lunch with Minerva, of course, but I don't think she attends our school. Or possibly any school on the planet, do we even know how old she is?"

Missy blinked. Technically, yes, she knew how old Minerva was, having just attended her birthday party. That didn't mean that she was about to reveal that, of course. "I don't think that's come up in any discussions with her. Has anyone asked before now?"

Dinah shrugged. "I haven't seen anything about it, and I'm not sure anyone is going to be willing to ask at this point."

"That does feel like it would be rude to ask, doesn't it?"

"Heh. Now that you've saved the world, are you a minor by our standards? I doubt anyone would bother asking, though that does make me wonder how it works with parahumans in general. Like, we know that Wards are underage, but what about any given independent parahuman in costume?"

"Er. Hmmm. I guess you can't go entirely on if they look like a kid, can you? I think there's a Protectorate member that looks like a preteen due to their powers, and then all the capes with mutations would be impossible to tell anything about normally. Oh, and there's a Ward out in California that looks like an adult. I remember the news explosion last year when they tried to buy alcohol."

"Yeah. And Minerva has to have had years of training to be able to pull off some of what she's done, right?"

Well, that might be accurate if you included Taylor's simulation time. "Maybe? Hasn't she claimed to have issues with not causing people injuries?"

Dinah rolled her eyes. "If the people she trains with can take nukes to the face like she can then I think that's perfectly understandable."

"Ah. Good point."

"I can't take credit for it, I just read someone else making that argument online. It could also be completely wrong because she could be unique and just has trouble holding back in general. She's weird for a cape, not fitting into any of the normal patterns."

"There are normal patterns?"

"Of course there are normal patterns. Different kinds of capes tend to follow specific patterns based on their powers. There's an entire community examining the patterns, likely run by a thinker or two."

Missy raised an eyebrow. "I've never heard of that."

Dinah blushed lightly. "I was looking for information online and stumbled on their website."

"What kinds of interesting things have they come up with?"

"Well, um, they have four overall classifications of parahumans, before you even get into what powers they have? They call them type A, type B, type C, and type 53. The latter is what the PRT calls Case 53 capes, and they supposedly share a lot of similarities with type C capes due to not having a whole lot of 'drive' to use their powers? I don't understand what their distinctions on type A and B capes mean, but they think there's a difference. Then there's the male vs female approach to things, though that they admit is very subjective in a lot of cases. They also have a 'sliding scale of heroic and villainous' thing that ignores group affiliations. That actually uses Eidolon as an example of a 'villainous hero' and I couldn't find fault with their arguments."

"Sounds like they put a lot of thought into things, at least?"

"They seem to have, yes. But Minerva doesn't fit any of their models, or at least that's the impression I got from skimming the subforum they have dedicated to trying to figure her out. Though that might be in part because she really isn't seen that often, so they just don't have enough information."

"Huh. I wouldn't mind a link to the website sometime, because now I'm curious."

"I'll try to remember to write it down tonight and bring it in tomorrow."

"Thanks."

673

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Threadmarks Chapter 75 - June 14, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Oct 14, 2020

#13,827

Taylor had spent the rest of the morning dealing with mail, mostly digital, and calling the post office to let them know that she was willing to receive things via the loading dock at the warehouse. She'd wanted to test some things, but was going to wait until after she'd arrived at the Walsh household for some of that. In part because there was no guarantee that things wouldn't go wrong and Missy would be able to help, but also because if things did go wrong then she wouldn't find herself unable to pop over to New York or get to the Walsh household on time.

Just after lunch she ended up talking to Legend about where to land the holding cell drones, with her recommending that they bring a flatbed truck for the drones to land on and other staff and vehicles for the rest of the items that she'd collected. He claimed they had something better for the drones, based on what they'd seen of the drones to that point from monitoring their flight path, but would ensure that they were ready for the rest. That and he had questions about how the drones held all of those that she claimed were in them. In fact, he'd asked for permission to examine at least one of the units once they'd emptied it, and she hadn't objected so long as they weren't destructive in their examinations.

That said, the collection of drones was approaching her 'have to meet up with them' point, so she and Hive were getting ready to go. She ensured that she had the handful of keys that would open the drones and that all of the other gear was ready to make the trip as well. She'd even had Hive make a memory stick with copies of the videos from capturing the group so that those could be handed over as well. That had been stuck on the ring with the keys.

Casting the spell to arrive near the drones was easy enough, though she'd not matched velocity and they had to catch up to the drones a moment later. That wasn't difficult, and ten minutes later the closed store that Legend had asked them to meet at came into view. A large transport was sitting to one side of the parking lot in front of the store, with enough room for the holding cell drones and the vehicles and other things that were waiting to be brought in.

Also present was Legend himself. Who had spotted them and taken off to meet them in the air. Which meant that she was about to meet a...

Taylor had to hold back a flinch and groan as she realized that the man's cape name was a horrible, horrible pun at this point in his career, and she couldn't hold back the mental question of if that had been intentional when the name had been chosen.

Luckily, she'd already met him out of costume to get her fangirling over with, but this was the first time she'd be dealing with him in-person while in costume. Hopefully she wouldn't screw up bigtime.

"Hello Minerva and Lilia," Legend called once he'd approached close enough.

"Good afternoon," Taylor replied, breaking off from the drones to approach Legend while the drones continued on towards the transport. "Would you like the holding cells together at one end of the transport or split apart?"

"Split apart would probably be best, thank you. I seem to have forgotten to ask how you were getting the rest of their equipment here?"

"It's all ready to be teleported as soon as the target coordinates are confirmed."

"That's convenient." He then looked over at the drones before chuckling as he turned back to Taylor. "You know, this is quite odd for me. I'm rarely meeting heroes that have built a legend bigger than my own. Pun somewhat intended, in this case."

"Really? Did you go with Legend so that you could make living legend puns?"

He grimaced at that. "No, though getting hit with them was the sign that it was too late to go with something else. Hero picked my name and I went with it, I'm sure he kept people from cluing me in until it was too late to change it. At this point I'm keeping it to honor his memory, but if I weren't then you eclipsing everyone would probably be enough justification to change it."

"I hadn't really intended to eclipse anyone."

"Oh, of that I have no doubt, but going after Leviathan on the ocean the first time was enough to exceed everything I've done since I gained my powers. Actually destroying them? There are already betting pools on whether Behemoth will ever dare come to the surface again."

"He hasn't moved much, but I suppose we won't have any hope of knowing for certain for a few months."

Legend paused for a moment, then rubbed his nose under his mask. "I don't know why I'm surprised that you're tracking Behemoth, you found the other seventeen wherever they were. Is there any chance of providing the Protectorate with access to that tracking data?"

"That shouldn't be an issue," Hive answered.

"Thank you. Speaking of the Protectorate, I'll be lynched if I don't make a token attempt to get you to join."

Taylor shook her head. "I'm not currently interested." She wanted nothing to do with the Wards at this stage, and being an underaged member of the Protectorate would probably be worse no matter what she could do. Besides, she was doing quite a bit where they couldn't reach at all, so ending up under their oversight would be a bit weird. Not that she was going to admit any of that right now.

"Didn't think so, but I had to make at least a token request. Shall we head down so that you can give us the basics on how to access the holding cells?"

They landed near the holding cell with all normals in it, and Taylor decided that she had enough targeting data for the rest of the equipment. A flash of light signaled all of that arriving in the middle of the transport, causing several of those around it to jump. In comparison, the much smaller flash of light from Taylor retrieving the ring of keys was essentially ignored.

"How much are you able to teleport at once?" Legend finally asked.

"I've honestly not tried to figure it out," Taylor admitted. "But at that distance I imagine it would be quite a bit. At longer distances the total mass and volume goes down."

"Based on the data from the drones we sent out," Hive interjected. "I think you're easily capable of moving ten times that amount to Alpha Centauri without issue. Assuming you're just using your own energy reserves, of course. You might have trouble reaching Epsilon Eridani with that kind of load, and would certainly have issues returning without taking time to recover from the trip."

"Oh. Probably safer to use the dedicated devices to make trips like those, though."

"That is true, especially as they can recharge much more easily for subsequent trips."

Taylor nodded, but then realized that Legend was looking between her and Hive. "Sorry, we hit a bit of a tangent there." She held out the keys. "Hopefully this will be enough keys for now."

"Er, yes," Legend said, taking the keys. He looked at them for a moment, then nodded. "More than enough, I believe. Are they all identical?"

"They are, yes."

"Then this should be more than enough. Thank you for making so many high-security keys, they can't be easy to produce."

"These are at best medium-security keys," Hive corrected. "You don't have the capabilities needed to use our high-security locks."

Legend looked down at the keys, then pulled one up as he let the rest of them dangle from the ring. He looked over it, then at Hive. "Lilia, this appears to have over a hundred potential interface points for the lock."

"A hundred and eight, thirty-six of them being edge interaction pins on the six blades and seventy-two total face-interaction pins spread across all twelve faces. Pick resistance should be reasonable enough for short-term use."

"I see."

Taylor stepped over to the near-side control panel for the holding cell drone. "To use it you insert the key into one of the control panel key slots, there's one on each side of the drones. Once turned it will activate the control panel." She activated the control panel herself for demonstration purposes. "That will then allow you to select one of the cell groups. Push the button for it and the door will open to that group." She pushed one of the buttons and the door opened, showing a space much larger than the outside of the drone would suggest. "You can then remove the key and enter. The keys will also activate the control panel next to each door, after which you can press the open and close buttons. To close the outer door you press the center button on the panel here while you have a key inserted." She pressed that button to close the door, and then deactivated the control panel. "Any questions?"

Legend looked at the keys he was still holding, then at Taylor. "Shouldn't you need a key to do all of that?"

She smirked at that. "I can use the high-security interfaces."

"Ah. That does make sense."

She stepped back and gestured at the control panel. "Go ahead and make sure you understand how it all works."

He did so, while also testing that the controls didn't work while there was no key in the given control panel. Unlike her, he'd also gone in and checked one of the individual cells, though he had to push the man in said cell back into the cell when he did so.

"I should've gone for an empty cell in the other unit," he said as he closed the drone up.

"That would've made a little more sense, yes," Taylor agreed.

"Are all of the instructions on here?" Legend asked as he held up the memory stick.

"Oh, no, that's recordings of the capture of the group. There are a couple of clips that I was thinking about posting online at some point."

"You...recorded capturing them?"

"I was already using drones. It wasn't that hard to keep the data feeds."

Taylor had gotten home with plenty of time to spare to get over to watch Missy. Legend had found the individual holding cells to be 'more than acceptable' before they'd packed up the entire transport to bring elsewhere. He still seemed to be somewhat stunned when she'd left, but she figured that was probably to be expected, and she'd probably get a call within two weeks to let her know that they were done with the drones for now.

Dodging the groups that appeared to be in the area was easy enough, though she honestly wasn't sure if any of them were watching for her. None of them reacted to her leaving, at least. Nor did anyone track her across town in any obvious manner that she could spot with her surveillance drones. Sure, one guy tried to mug her, but that was more her fault for getting too close to the alley he was in and he ran after she'd punched him once.

Her arrival at the Walsh household was only about a minute before Missy. They grabbed a snack and then absconded to the Inn so that Taylor could float out over the inlet casting while Missy studied on the porch.

The first things cast were some test spell components that existed solely to ensure that the linking rules worked. Running through Missy's notes on how storing and wiping things had worked from her end, the latter differing slightly from Taylor's experience with templates, each piece was cast and stored. That generally required no more than four castings for Taylor before it was accepted by her core.

After doing that for all of the pieces she attempted to pull one out, only for it to not work. Frowning, she tried that with each of the components, and none of them would work. She cast and stored the storage and retrieval spell as a test, figuring that it was a useful one to have stored anyway, and found that it was usable once she'd done so. Awkward for her, as she wasn't used to casting it that way, but usable.

Frowning, she tried various ways of pulling the stored components out, each of them refusing to come out. It couldn't be that she'd never 'triggered' them before, and she could still cast them as individual components from the raw equations. Which made little to no sense to her, and dropping another copy into her core just caused the two to 'merge', as though her core had an automatic cleanup routine and didn't like having duplicates of things kicking around.

"Is something wrong?" Hive asked, floating up.

Taylor shrugged. "I can put the components into my core, but not pull them out. But the storage and retrieval spell works fine that way."

"Ah. Are you pulling any required linked sections out as well?"

That had Taylor blinking, followed by a facepalm. "No, I was trying to pull the pieces out individually first. Thank you, though why did you come up here? Learn something interesting from the Endbringer pieces?"

"No, Lord. I thought you should know that your father was attacked at work, but escaped unharmed."

"What?"

"Potter infiltrated the Dockworkers' compound and attempted to grab your father, but the protective barrier interacted with their Shard-granted ability and shorted it out. They're unconscious and will likely remain so for some time while their Shard recovers from the shock. Crystal Cage was waiting outside, but ran when the alarm was raised. Everything was essentially done within a minute."

"That is much less problematic than I was expecting. I assume you're tracking both of them just in case?"

"That and while I was on my way up here a call was made by Crystal Cage to state that 'operation father' had failed. Crystal Cage and Potter appear to be working with or were recently hired by the same group that tried to trick you with a poisoned letter. Presumably this was an attempt to either impersonate your father to get close to you or use his identity to get you somewhere else isolated. But this time I have a much better web of tracking following the various people involved. As of a few seconds ago I now believe that they're working for a Mexican cartel that has spent a lot of money trying to find ways to remove powers from their rivals."

Taylor frowned. "And they want you to attempt that?"

"Yes, Lord."

"Do you know anything else about them?"

"PRT and Mexican government files indicate that their current leader is a young adult male parahuman with the reported ability to transmute any substance into any other substance, though possibly not permanently. If temporary it would help them with their drug smuggling, merely needing to change the drugs into something legal and ship that normally."

"Fun. Any thoughts on how to deal with this safely?"

Hive nodded. "I would like permission to personally pay them a visit on an upcoming night, after confirming that they're alone."

Taylor tilted her head. "So that you can remove their powers instead?"

"Yes, Lord."

"I think that works for me, so long as they can't connect that to Minerva. He'll be fine, right?"

"There shouldn't be any significant complications, but the cartel's computers indicate that he does have an order for his organization to kill you if possible in order to get their hands on me. In light of that, if something unexpected happens then we shouldn't be too concerned."

Taylor frowned, but couldn't really argue that point. "I suppose."

"That said, I do have a potential idea to...deflect blame, I suppose you could say."

"Oh?"

Hive glowed for a moment, and then grew. Within a couple of seconds she'd reached around five feet tall. Her facial features, skin color, and hair all shifted a moment later, becoming more Asian in overall appearance. Her now-black hair fell out of the buns it had been in and instead styled into a braid as her clothing flashed and were replaced with a Chinese dress that Taylor couldn't remember the name of and black high heels.

"I was thinking that I could approach him like this," Hive replied, her voice sounding different as well. "Though speaking Spanish, and I'm unsure if I could fake a Chinese accent when doing so. But the result would hopefully draw attention to the CUI and the Yàngbǎn agents that are already on the way, making it harder for them to move around freely."

Taylor nodded. "That could definitely work. I take it that's at least in part the trick to make things grow and shrink that isn't safe for living things?"

"I don't quite fit under that definition of 'alive', Lord, but yes."

"I suppose. How do you plan on arriving without the flash of a dimensional transference?"

Hive considered that for a moment. "I could take over the security cameras while nobody is in his bedroom to hide the flash of replacing the rug with a transport drone. Then I could use it to get in and out without the flash being visible without needing to manipulate the camera feeds at that point. I would just fade into and out of view while in the room, and then I could replace the rug later."

"You already know that his bedroom has a rug and security cameras?"

"Of course, Lord. The archives from his security system also tell me that he was behind Crystal Cage and Potter trying to grab you in costume, though he canceled that order after the initial failure due to deciding that you were likely beyond his capabilities to control."

Taylor shook her head. "Okay. Whatever. How's my father doing, and is there anything we can realistically do to help there?"

"They're waiting for the PRT to show up to take Potter into custody, with one group going to look for the person that Potter was impersonating. I don't think there's anything we can do immediately that wouldn't link you to Minerva. Perhaps if Potter wakes up before being taken into custody you could swarm them with insects?"

Which, of course, meant doing little to nothing for now, as there was no immediate threat and doing things would be worse than not doing them. Great. "What about Crystal Cage? Could we do anything with them before they can help break Potter out later?"

"I can see about ensuring that they set off alarms if they try to infiltrate the PRT or Protectorate. Outside of that it will depend on what they do from this point. They haven't reached anywhere specific at this point, but I'll increase monitoring on anywhere they seem to be staying."

Taylor nodded. "I guess that makes sense, and leaving them alone so long as they back off once their boss gets his message probably isn't a bad idea either."

"I'll keep you informed, Lord. For now you should resume your testing."

Sighing, Taylor did that while Hive returned to her normal chibi form and floated back down to the Inn. Grabbing one of the test spells, she then added the two components that linked to each of the required link points. Each of those connected to one other item, which was required in one case and optional in the other. She grabbed the component that connected to the required one only, and then pulled the entire set out. What she got looked nothing like the original pieces, instead being a much differently shaped mass of mana.

Examining the assembled spell, she determined that the links had collapsed, portions of the component spells that weren't needed canceling themselves out and simply adding to the overall mana pool the spell had available. This was most noticeable in the unused optional link, where all of the equation paths dependent on it were no longer present. Of course, that meant that she was going to need to ensure that 'too much mana for the rest of the spell' wasn't going to be a concern.

She pulled the same components out again, but this time included the optional component. That brought along another required bit, but she didn't grab that immediately. The spell started to form as she mentally tugged on it, but stopped. Pulling slightly more, she could tell that the optional component was going to release if she didn't add in the required link on it. She grabbed that as well, and suddenly the entire spell came loose.

Nodding, she then prepared one more equation that she hadn't stored yet. It was very simple and existed solely to have a link point, which she attempted to connect to one of the stored components. Tugging on the stored component didn't work until she did so 'with' the spell she'd cast, at which point the stored component came out easily. The manually cast equation stayed unchanged though, with only the stored portions simplifying themselves down.

Looking at the three spells she was still holding in place, she decided to try one more thing with them. She pushed each back to her core, and found that none of them wanted to store. Frowning, she dismissed all three and then rebuilt the largest out of pure equations, storing it as a single unit despite it being built out of multiple linked units. Which meant that you needed to have the source equations for this method of building pre-compiled spell components, and were probably limited by how many individual components you could keep track of when casting.

With that confirmed, she wiped all of the test items from her core and started reworking the spell components she'd previously figured out. She had to add some 'excess mana' sheathing over critical portions of them, just in case. Which would make them less efficient and use more mana, but that was probably a suitable tradeoff for people who weren't insane in the math department being able to use them. Maybe. She wasn't actually certain on that front, honestly, but Missy probably needed the premade components and Taylor was going to do her best to ensure that they weren't going to explode when they weren't supposed to.

Luckily she had a few days before Missy would need everything, giving plenty of time to work on the equations, simulate them, and then test them for real.

That evening Taylor had questioned her father and Hive quite a bit, having realized that there was no way that the surveillance drones hadn't picked up on Potter being a parahuman at least. But Potter had actually been there every day for a week and had only acted today, with the original assumption Hive had made being that the parahuman was only observing. Which had been proven wrong, but the shield belt buckle had worked better than expected in the situation, so it had technically worked out in the end.

Of course, that discussion had also informed her father about the plan to depower the leader of the cartel that had orchestrated things in the first place, and after some back and forth he'd approved. Originally he'd not thought that merely depowering the man would be enough of a deterrent, but learning about the 'Chinese woman' plan had changed that. After all, if she appeared in his private bedroom once then she could do so at any time, right? Though he did insist that they find a way to 'leak' the security footage as a more general 'warning' if it didn't leak without assistance. At the very least he was hoping that would cause anyone looking to go after him or Taylor to 'think twice' about it.

"So is there anyone else we know is in town that we need to watch out for?" Taylor asked.

"I'm unsure for most of the visiting parahumans," Hive admitted. "Some were already in town, others showed up in the past couple of days, and they've all generally visited the warehouse. How much of that is paying tribute or hoping to see you compared to hoping to cause trouble should you show up I can't really say."

"You should probably make an appearance tomorrow," Danny added. "Doing semi-official things like turning in counterfeit money or handing over prisoners isn't exactly a 'public appearance', and I think people are clamoring for one."

Taylor frowned at that, but could see the point. "So what, I show up at the warehouse and see how people react?"

"I was thinking more that Hive should build a transporter beacon or two tonight and then tomorrow you could go sightseeing in New York while dropping them off. You have seen the news stories about the United Nations working on a response of some kind, right?"

"Er, no, I hadn't."

"Well, they are, and you've put out those manuals that talk about teleport beacons and support equipment. Providing an official beacon or two seems like a good idea to me, and going straight to New York with them ensures that nothing happens to them getting to New York. Though providing suitable warnings on what not to do with them is probably a good idea."

"Huh. That isn't a horrible idea."

"And then you can play tourist until people around you get too annoying to deal with."

"We could offer a full transport device," Hive added. "After informing them that it can't be turned off, has a sensor system, and we can use it whenever we want. I'm unsure about giving them a control panel though."

Taylor nodded in agreement. "I'm not sure that I'd want them to try sending parahumans through it anyway, though do you think that giving them one configured with a portal frame would work? We're reasonably confident that it won't be a problem if they use portals to get between points, after all, but could warn them that the portals aren't fully tested and see what they learn?"

"Adding a simple control panel to several transport devices that only allows opening a portal to the others would be easy enough, though if doing so we should probably deliver one to the PRT or Protectorate here in Brockton Bay as well. And maybe drop one at the warehouse that can be triggered remotely by the others but has no control panel itself, being out in the open? We'd also need to ensure that they knew that we retain administrative access to them despite the control panels."

"Make the latter obvious by adding destinations as you deliver them instead of pre-programming them," Danny offered. "At least if they're paying attention. Of course, they should assume that you retain access if they haven't built them themselves anyway..."

"Yeah," Taylor said. "And we should probably put a warning on the portal frames to indicate that it's partially untested and may not be safe for parahumans or anyone dependent on parahuman abilities for their health. Just in case. Though probably only start handing out multiple if they don't opt for a mere beacon?"

"I'd offer them both, just to see what they end up deciding to use later. And I fully expect them to accept both every time, if only out of curiosity and a desire to test things. Especially if you imply that the transport devices are only portal generation versions, despite that only being true from a 'configured to be portal generators' point of view."

"Okay." She then thought for a moment, before sighing. "Who do I call ahead to in order to warn the UN that I'm coming?"

"Um...huh. Maybe call the PRT or Protectorate and hope they can do so for you?"

"Lord," Hive said that evening while Taylor was working on equations in the simulation system. "I've installed a portal frame in advance of things at the warehouse. Nobody noticed me doing so, but several are noticing that it's there."

Taylor frowned. "There are still people there to notice?"

"Yes, and a group is already working on getting better lighting in place in order to take proper pictures of the frame and the warning on it."

"For some reason that doesn't surprise me, because waiting for sunrise would take too long. Thanks for the information though, anything else you think I should know about right now?"

Hive paused for a moment before continuing. "I was able to get a transport device into the cartel leader's room earlier and am using it to monitor the situation, but he isn't alone tonight so I haven't acted."

"Sounds reasonable enough."

"The first CUI boat made landfall in Florida under the cover of darkness about twenty minutes ago."

Taylor nodded. "So your screwing with their navigation system worked."

"I also removed enough of their fuel to make it impractical to get any further than that, and did so for the other vessel as well."

"That...shouldn't surprise me, should it? What else?"

"Three shard-device users that appear to be members of one of the families that make up the Fallen entered Brockton Bay an hour ago, but merely found a parking lot to park their RV in. They intend to see if you're 'worthy' according to the text messages in their phones, but I have no idea how they intend to figure that out. I haven't been able to determine what abilities their devices grant either."

"I find myself wondering if you're going too far into 1984 territory with this monitoring."

"I only noticed them at first because 'Minerva' and 'Lilia' showed up in their text messages passing through the local cell towers."

"That...is less creepy than I expected, and probably no worse than monitoring that I assume the government does for any number of things."

"I am piggy-backing on their monitoring routines, yes. In fact, I didn't even have to install those filters, they were already configured. I just added myself to the notification list. Lastly, the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine are camping just outside of town for unknown reasons."

"What?"

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Threadmarks Chapter 76 - June 15, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Oct 21, 2020

#13,955

Taylor had decided to deal with the issues surrounding the Fallen and Slaughterhouse Nine when they made themselves enough of a nuisance to not be easily ignored. Hive was still monitoring them all, but so long as they weren't causing the city trouble they'd be left alone. For now, anyway. If they had information that any of them were preparing to cause actual problems for anyone then that would probably change, but so far that wasn't the case. The CUI were less of an issue right now due to being in the entirely wrong part of the country.

Instead they focused on making sure they were ready for the next day. Hive had modified a few transport devices to include a touchscreen display to choose targets when the portal frames were up and had built a stack of beacons. On the latter front, she'd ensured that a larger version of the beacons was also possible to make with normal technology and created an instruction manual for doing so. Those would be less accurate and harder to spot from a distance, but still plenty usable so long as you knew approximately where you were going.

Hive had also finished up the translation system, and that seemed to work great for Taylor. She had to dedicate a multitasking instance to each language, but was fine with that. Missy would have to be more picky, admittedly, but that wasn't a major problem if they only wanted her to run a single non-English language. Taylor had stress-tested by loading the top hundred languages spoken on Earth and twenty from the Belkan Empire list, then discussed things with Hive while constantly changing languages.

Wednesday morning had thus started with Taylor heading to the Inn with Hive to run through a few quick tests to the modified transport devices and to ensure that the teleport beacons were functioning properly. This included bouncing to Earth, the Moon, Mars, and Ganymede in multiple dimensions to ensure that they could properly target the beacons and that the safety routines in the transport devices would handle portal instability properly.

To amuse themselves, they'd put 'tested on...' labels on each of the devices for each celestial body it had visited, and ensured that each of them had been used on at least two other than Earth. All of them had 'tested on Earth' labels as well, of course, as they'd been tested at the Inn first. Each of the labels also had a string of numbers that represented which dimension the testing had happened in. One beacon and one transport device had two 'tested on Earth' labels each. The first for the Inn, the second for each of two other Earths.

They'd finished their testing and labeling with plenty of time for morning exercise, giving Missy a giggle-fit over the labels when she saw them on the stacked-up beacons, and then had breakfast afterwards. After breakfast, Taylor returned to the Inn to start some casting tests and to make a few phone calls.

"So," Ethan said as they pulled out of the driveway. "Sherie is going to be picking you up today, even though you don't have a therapy appointment due to it being finals week for you."

"Okay," Missy said, figuring that this was part of why the man had insisted on driving her to school instead of letting her catch the bus.

"She'll bring you back home so that you can drop your stuff off and change, then she's going to bring you for a medical checkup."

"What?"

"It's nothing major, mostly ensuring that there are no longer-term complications from your powers being taken from you. We expect absolutely nothing to come of it, of course, but that doesn't mean we can skip it."

"Oh."

"I'll note that it was bumped up from early next week, we got the call asking about adjusting the time while you were exercising. Someone damaged the wall of the practice and they want to not have any appointments when the contractor tears out and replaces the damaged portion. Due to the potential for long-term issues needing to be spotted in you they gave you one of the few earlier slots instead of bumping you to later in the month. Oh, and before I forget, you're probably going to need to not have protections up for the appointment, as annoying as that will probably be for you."

"Yeah, yeah. Standard procedure when anything medical is happening. Or any other sanctioned examination, really."

"We also know that you have your last exam today and are merely waiting for results for the last couple of days of school afterwards. So you're getting a homework assignment from us."

That had Missy blinking. "What?"

"Sherie and I want you to tell us what you can about Eagleton on Friday night."

"Really? What am I supposed to figure out before I'm there?"

Ethan gave her a look before focusing back on the road but said nothing more, causing Missy to frown.

She now felt like she was missing something, and didn't know what.

Taylor and Hive arrived only a few dozen feet over the water between New York and New Jersey, well out of the way of the various airports in the area. They were picked up by flight control at both JFK and Newark almost immediately and politely asked to stay below the flightlines. They did so, staying over the water as they headed North, passing by the Statue of Liberty before turning to head up the East River. It wasn't long before they reached the United Nations building.

They came ashore before the building and swung around to the front, landing on the sidewalk near one of the security gates. People around them were surprised and took a minute to realize who they were. The two were wearing their hair buns and sunglasses, but instead of the full Knight Armor getup they had more casual-looking clothing on. Taylor had gone with dark blue shorts, a t-shirt that had an image of Jupiter as seen from Ganymede on it, and sneakers that were more casual in appearance than the Knight Armor ones. Hive had a tank top with a picture of Phobos as seen from the surface of Mars, a skirt, and sandals on.

Legend was waiting for them with multiple others and took a moment to realize that they were there. He quickly came out once he did.

"Good morning Minerva and Lilia," Legend greeted. "You're dressed far more casually than usual."

"Good morning," Taylor replied. "And we're making a couple of stops to drop things off while playing tourist today, so don't need the combat gear."

"I see. Well, come on in, we've been waiting for you for a few minutes. You can provide the United Nations staff with whatever it is you have, perhaps take a tour? When you make it around to the Protectorate building you can drop anything you have for us there."

They followed Legend past security and to the group he'd been waiting with originally. Twenty minutes of discussion had resulted in the United Nations requesting two beacons and two transport devices, with the goal of sending one of each to Geneva. Taylor had then offered to deliver them directly to Geneva, phone calls had been made, sensor drones cast to coordinates in Switzerland, and four total items delivered to the two locations. Legend had avoided stepping through the portal they'd opened between the transport devices, heeding the warning on them that parahuman use was untested and potentially dangerous, but the normal staff had found the experience to be amazing. Followed by realizing that they might need to set up customs offices for the resulting potential of international travel.

Taylor and Hive then went on a tour of both headquarters of the United Nations, starting in Geneva since it was later in the day there. The staff in Switzerland were surprised that the two spoke pretty much any language spoken to them, but quickly adapted to that. Back in New York they primarily ended up speaking English, and when they were done they found Legend waiting for them.

"I don't suppose you have enough beacons and transport devices for multiple PRT and Protectorate locations?" Legend asked.

"We only prepared eight total transport devices with attached control panels," Hive answered. "Though we have fourteen more teleport beacons."

Legend considered that for a moment. "Would you be willing to provide New York, Brockton Bay, and Los Angeles with two transport devices and two teleport beacons each, for each of their PRT and Protectorate buildings?"

"I think we can do that," Taylor answered as they stepped back onto the sidewalk and moved off to the side. "Would you like to get that out of the way before we go exploring further?"

"Ideally, yes, but only if that works for you. If you planned on stopping elsewhere first though then I don't mind."

"Might as well get that out of the way, maybe see your facilities here." Taylor then paused as one of her surveillance drones highlighted a woman with a rifle on a rooftop taking aim at her. She quickly flipped one of her prepared 'blink' spells around and used it to catch the bullet before it could strike the barriers on the back of her head. Turning around herself to look up at the rooftop the bullet had been fired from, she held up a finger for Legend. "Excuse me a moment."

Two more blink spells, needed for the range, had her behind the woman that had just tried to put a bullet in her head. That obviously hadn't been expected, and the woman wasn't prepared to have her arms pulled behind her back and restraints materialized to hold them in place. Legend arrived on the rooftop a moment later, Hive following more sedately behind.

"I heard the shot," Legend said. "Who was she shooting at?"

"She aimed for the back of my head," Taylor replied, retrieving the bullet and holding it up. "I caught the bullet before it could hit me."

"Oh."

"If you'd like to take her into custody for me then I won't complain. I am trying to be 'off the clock' for the most part today."

"I'd be happy to call for a van to pick her up."

Taylor appeared in the Inn in a flash of light, having finished playing tourist around three in the afternoon. She'd noticed that they'd removed a pile of tinkertech from the Protectorate building tour in New York, seen several sights including the Statue of Liberty, had a half-hour discussion with a gentleman who was fascinated with the image on her shirt and only realized who she was twenty-five minutes in, and finally given up on the city for the day after the third mugging attempt.

Thanks to the Protectorate, they also now knew that parahumans could safely travel through open portals. At least if they were to 'safe' destinations. Taylor had been surprised that they'd first tested with Heartbreaker, immediately followed by one of his children. How they'd gotten approval to do that, assuming they had, baffled her. That was followed by one of Prism's three forms, then the other two. Only after Prism was split between Los Angeles, Brockton Bay, and Geneva did Legend step through one of the portals himself.

They were leaving the warnings on the frames anyway, since the portals didn't necessarily always lead somewhere safe for parahumans.

Taylor was planning on spending the rest of the afternoon testing things, something that Hive was on board with. Taylor would be casting, storing, and combining spell components while Hive worked on testing things with chains of drones. With any luck there would be a full casting system ready for Missy by the end of the day and they'd know the limitations of several things.

Missy grumbled as she sat down to dinner. School had mostly been boring, and she'd managed to stay focused while taking her final exam for the week, but then she'd been distracted by her 'homework assignment'. She had no clue what they wanted from her, somehow felt that asking was failing something, and wasn't sure how to proceed. Then the doctor had hit a nerve when stabbing her with a needle, pissing her off and creating a distracting tingling sensation since they'd left the office as Space worked carefully to speed up the healing there.

After dinner she'd have to go over everything available to her on Eagleton and the Machine Army. However little that might be.

That evening Taylor was surprised to get a summary of results from the Protectorate sending parahumans through the portals. Apparently Heartbreaker and the sole one of his kids that they'd used for testing had been tried in absentia and had death sentences waiting for them in the US and Canada, though that wasn't well known, and they'd asked the two if they were willing to be test subjects for a 'hopefully quick and painless death if it doesn't work' and a couple of days of better meals if they survived.

The UN had also requested that the Geneva transport device be locked out for travel to anywhere but the New York UN transport device, which was easy enough to do. Removing it from the PRT and Protectorate devices and them from it was trivial, though the response letting them know that was done did include a note that it wouldn't prevent it from being used as an endpoint for anyone with administrative access.

Hive had determined that linker core stabilization of signatures did not propagate beyond a single connection point, making chaining things difficult unless they started making linker core enabled drones that could each maintain their own instant-communication connection. She'd also tested and determined that it was possible to open a portal directly from Earth to Alpha Centauri or Epsilon Eridani, but it took a lot of energy and only maintained stability for around five minutes. It was actually less costly to use a dimensional transference.

Taylor's work had been completed as well, with everything she could turn into 'pre-compiled' spells set up that way and copied out of her linker core by Hal. They'd used Hal to ensure that Space or Reason could likely copy things back for Missy. The only things that hadn't been turned into a collection of spell components were the dimensional transference, portal creation, and wide-area scan spells. They were all too complicated and integrated to get working that way, though Hive was still working on ways to safely split up dimensional transference.

Despite her previous decision to just let the various groups that were in the area or outright looking for 'Minerva' do their things until they became a nuisance, Taylor decided to look in on each of them via Hive's surveillance data. There wasn't much else on her 'to do immediately' list anyway.

The CUI groups were honestly pathetic. The first was lost in the Everglades, trying and failing to head for the coordinates Hive had put in their boat's navigation computer. Apparently no attempt to find a local map had been attempted, so they had no clue that there wasn't a city there. Meanwhile, the second boat had (according to Hive) run into pirates, driven them off, but had their engine destroyed during the fight and were doing nothing to call for assistance.

If they hadn't been brainwashed to be mindlessly obedient then it would be comedy-worthy in many respects, but it was just sad with that aspect. Hive ended up dropping 'hints' into a few systems so that someone with a clue could hopefully find both groups.

The small Fallen group was apparently setting up shop to watch the warehouse tonight, but had seemingly communicated up the chain somehow that no appearances had been made there yet. Hive didn't know how they'd done so, only that they seemingly had. Whatever their plans were hadn't been discussed in any phone calls or digital messages and were thus still a mystery, possibly needing a direct confrontation soon to determine.

And then there were the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine, who were using an apparently legally obtained prepaid cellular internet connection to study everything that had come out of New York and Geneva today that mentioned Minerva or Lilia. They also weren't discussing their plans in any digital manner, but also weren't really in communication with anyone else to discuss things with. They did appear to be focused similarly to the other groups though, whatever plans they had.

Taylor was tempted to drop surveillance drones on all of them to find out more, but resisted for the time being. Instead she decided to 'take the night off' and practice with playing the flute instead of doing anything more significant.

Thursday morning had started very early for Hive when the cartel leader had returned home late, drunk off his ass and alone. Grumbling about women as well, apparently. Hive had changed to the Chinese woman in a qipao disguise, appeared in and locked down his bedroom, pulled him to his feet with her hand grabbing his neck, and given him a speech in Spanish about the cost of interfering in Brockton Bay. She'd then started to absorb his shard, which resulted in a funnel appearing above his home.

Hive was still at that when it was time for morning exercise, and Taylor was probably going to be wearing Hal most of the day as well unless she spent most of it at the Inn. Not that she minded, but it did mean that she would be holding off on anything significant while Hive was otherwise occupied. She also didn't want to use the simulation or multitasking systems more than really necessary, which drastically limited her options.

Of course, while going through morning exercise Taylor noticed that Missy was distracted.

"What's got you distracted?" Taylor asked Missy as they ran along.

"Homework," Missy answered, scowling.

Given that Taylor was fairly certain that the younger girl was done with homework until next school year, and in fact done with tests even based on her on-the-sly discussion with Sherie while they'd been exercising, that was a bit of an odd answer. But she didn't push, and Missy remained distracted until they split up for breakfast.

After breakfast Taylor had opted to sit down at her desktop computer to browse the internet for a bit, to hopefully keep less load on Hive. She started by looking up news from Mexico, given that it came up as a significant trending item as soon as she'd opened anything, and found that the funnel had been spotted and reported within minutes. Further digging showed that an hour after it had appeared the security system's recording of the start of it had been 'leaked'. According to the news, that had been done by one of the security guards as 'standard procedure' while looking for information on the woman.

The CUI had originally been suspected to be involved, but Hive hadn't gotten 'Chinese woman speaking Spanish' down correctly and nobody seemed to believe that if the CUI had that kind of power available that they'd have used it so little. No other theory had significant traction, as nobody knew how to combine 'necklace that absorbs powers' with 'woman that absorbs powers' in any way that made sense. They weren't even sure if the woman was annoyed because the cartel in question was messing with Brockton Bay due to being behind the necklace or if the woman worked for someone trying to find out where the necklace came from, the latter coming from someone asking if the necklace was made to duplicate the woman's powers.

Once she had her fill of that, Taylor headed to PHO. Which had apparently resumed 'normal' service, though the special forum that had been created over the weekend was still there. She browsed somewhat aimlessly, not really wanting to be 'looking up' Minerva on her personal account. Eventually she looked in the Brockton Bay subforum, only to pause halfway down the first page of threads.

Brockton Bay's Resident Genius - Taylor Hebert

Opening that up, she found that it was discussing her factoring trick and the program she'd written for her final project. Both of which had become known with her name attached to them, including links to download the program and data files. She wasn't sure why the programming project was so important to people until she saw a note about the full solar system file, at which point she swore because she realized that she must've forgotten to remove that before submitting the program.

Reading through the thread, she found that there were all kinds of implications for both bits of math, coupled with people wondering both how it all worked and how she'd come up with any of it. There was also a debate on if she'd calculated the locations of everything in the solar system or merely been given the list, with the latter currently being the favored side. Some people kept referencing a project to replace models for objects with better ones instead of the generic placeholders she'd obviously used and she found links to a website working on confirming everything they could from the object list.

There was surprisingly little in comparison on the factoring side of things. Mostly warnings that any encryption method that depended on difficulty in factoring numbers was now essentially worthless in general, but tinkers and thinkers had been breaking most of those for years already so most people didn't trust them. A few people were trying to apply the general principles to other problems, but there seemed to be very little understanding in how it all worked.

By the time she made it to the end of the thread as it stood she'd also collected a couple dozen things to respond to. Most of them corrections on what people had gotten from her work. She wrote up a post with responses, added four more to it from things posted while she'd been writing, repeated that twice more with six and two additional items, and then finally posted it. Only once she had did she realize that she'd essentially just outed her non-cape PHO account as being her.

She allowed her eye to twitch a couple of times, before deciding that it was fine because it would make it harder for people to decide that she had no clue what she was talking about. Especially with the mistakes that some of them had been making.

It would be over an hour later before she realized that she'd essentially justified dismissing concerns about outing her account with 'but someone was wrong on the internet!' and wasn't sure how to think about it.

The one class that wasn't entirely goofing off now that exams had all been taken was gym. Which didn't mean that goofing off wasn't happening, it was just more controlled. Except for when it wasn't, such as the brawl that had started between four students. Missy had avoided getting caught in it despite being part of the five-student group with the other four, though mostly because she'd not been paying enough attention to care about whatever it was that started it.

In fact, she still had no clue why they'd started fighting and was really hoping that she wasn't asked. Instead she'd backed off and was letting the teacher deal with it while she focused on going through everything she could on the Machine Army thanks to Space's multitasking system and internet connection.

Sadly, she wasn't finding a whole lot. A general profile of the machines that amounted to 'they hide and kill people in various ways' without any actual details, observations that they'd been spreading slowly despite the best efforts of the PRT, and lots of baseless theories as to their origin. Zero real information on how they spread, just that they did. Oh, and a few years back a couple of amateur groups had camped outside of the walls and found nothing that seemed like communication signals, but that wasn't saying much because they'd been using cobbled-together equipment.

Maybe she needed to come up with a plan for when they arrived on Saturday?

Hive had finished with the cartel leader and returned to the Inn before Taylor had to leave to watch Missy, but Hal was still around Taylor's neck. Mainly because Hive was in the middle of examining the shard device and it wasn't worth swapping out for the trip across town. Especially since Taylor was bringing Missy to the Inn pretty much immediately anyway. The actual trip across town was uneventful, though there were still people obviously watching for her. At least they were keeping their distance today, and none of them were parahumans.

She arrived a few minutes before Missy did and the two locked the house up and departed for the Inn right after the younger girl had dropped her bag in her room and grabbed a quick snack.

"So," Taylor said. "You have some testing to do today."

"What?" Missy said, coming out of her slightly-distracted state. She was also looking at Taylor oddly.

"Hal is going to give Space a few things, and then we're going to see if Space can give them to you and if you can use them."

"I'm confused. I thought I was barred from doing anything significant with you until tomorrow, so as to not present a bad image at school."

"I cleared things this morning so that I'd have time to try again if this doesn't work."

"Ah."

Taylor decided to start with defensive options and had Hal send the broken-up Knight Armor, Knight Clothing, and Knight Object spells to Space first. It took a moment before Missy's eyes lit up, and only as the younger girl was obviously casting the Knight Armor spell did Taylor realize that they probably should've had Missy armored up and testing with a bullet. At least the bullet exploding wouldn't happen surrounding a defenseless human body.

Luckily, the 'precompiled' spell set worked and Missy was left unharmed in her full Knight Armor. Bouncing giddily, followed by dismissing the armor and casting the Knight Clothing spell, then the Knight Armor spell again. Only after cycling through several more times did she stop, in Knight Clothing, and look at Taylor. "I barely need Space to help cast it now, but it takes noticeably more mana and I think it's accepting more than it needs?"

"Yeah," Taylor said. "For ease of casting I combined some similar things with basic logic gates, so there are sections that accept mana and end up unused. So if you provide enough mana then those sections are formed and discarded, leaving extra mana floating around the individual spell segments. That means that everything needs protections against excess mana in the segment, and the protections for that increase the base cost of the segment. The end result is that it all costs more mana and if you aren't precise with your casting it'll take even more than it needs, up until all unused paths have been populated."

"Huh. That seems wasteful."

"It is, but needed if you can't handle the math for the exact versions, and you can practice only putting in just enough. I only figured out that part out after the first few test casts, since I knew exactly how much it should take as a whole from the initial casting to store it. I didn't push enough mana in to fully form one segment and it still worked and I then experimented to determine that you only need to push enough in for the pieces you were using."

Missy nodded, obviously torn between 'being as efficient as possible' and 'not needing help to cast everything'. "I guess I'll need to practice, then."

"Let's see if you can handle the punch gauntlets without needing the extra devices."

It turned out that she could, but liked having the spell maintained by a device for her because it took less mana that way. She could also handle all of the other spells she was given in the new form, able to cast all of them faster than she could the more efficient direct equation versions. Most of that was apparently needing to rely on Space less for variable management. But while she could cast faster, the theoretical number she could cast was down because of the increased mana costs.

Of course, going from ten thousand potential bullet spells an hour to seven thousand on a mana cost front wasn't exactly a hardship for her, especially as she'd gone from being able to cast two thousand an hour to six thousand on the casting time front. That was likely to become more of an issue as she was multitasking more or as she used more mana-intensive spells.

They took a break after that, then Taylor had Hive provide some translation matrices to Space. A different Belkan dialect than Taylor would be using plus several languages spoken on Earth Bet. Taylor loaded up her own set of matrices while Missy was loading up the Belkan one, and it was there that a noticeable difference in the two ways to connect to multitasking systems showed itself. Missy clutched her head in pain, groaning as the translation matrix initialized.

"Are you okay?" Taylor asked after a moment, concerned about what had gone wrong.

{Why are you speaking gibberish?} Missy asked in Belkan.

That caused Taylor to blink. {I asked if you're okay.}

{No, you were speaking gibberish.}

{I was speaking English.}

{What?}

{And now I'm speaking Belkan.}

Missy frowned, and obviously focused for a moment. {I don't feel like I can speak multiple languages. There's nothing else to switch to?}

{We'll need to ask Hive about this. Can you disconnect the Belkan matrix?}

The younger girl clutched her head in pain again, but recovered quickly ."That sucks."

"You're in English again," Taylor noted. "And it doesn't cause me pain when I load them up. I don't think that I want you to try and load two at once until we know more about why it's working this way either."

"I can agree with that. The headache from one is annoying enough as it is."

"Let me get Hive up here to examine things, since it's probably more important to figure this out right now than for her to finish examining that shard."

"What's up with that anyway?"

Taylor wiggled her hand. "Parahuman cartel leader wanted to be able to depower rivals or something and was hoping to get my necklace to do so."

Missy blinked in confusion. "So you arranged for them to lose their powers?"

"Only after they sent people after my father because they'd given up on getting at me directly."

"Oh."

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Threadmarks Chapter 77 - June 16, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Oct 28, 2020

#14,042

"Very interesting," Hive said after Missy had engaged the Belkan translation matrix again. "Lord, I think I know why you needed the alternate interface to handle the insect control system."

{What?} Missy asked, obviously confused as Hive spoke in English.

{You can disengage the translation matrix now,} Hive answered.

"So what's going on?" Taylor asked even as Missy flinched in pain.

"The normal mana connection method to a device has limits," Hive said as she turned to Taylor. "In a way it's the least effective connection method of the five I currently know about."

"Five?"

"Your entanglement style connection and three variations on Shard device connections make up the other four. At the same time, the normal mana method is the safest of them."

"Oh. So what's going on?"

"To put it simply, she's operating in serial mode while the other methods operate in parallel mode. The pain is her language center being completely overridden or taking over again because I didn't ensure that the matrix supported passing information through to other layers. You don't have that problem because your connection method sends the language data to all nodes at the same time and none of them act as a blocker. Every node able to communicate with every node directly also negates most of the bandwidth limitations and lag issues that come up with a large number of serial nodes."

"I suppose that makes sense."

"But it also means that you have less security than she can have, as she can put a filter up and actually stop things from passing. If something problematic gets into the parallel systems then it hits all instances simultaneously with no chance to filter it, more so with the entanglement system where you can't even partition sections of it off effectively."

"Ah."

"The end result is that for large-scale processing like the insect control system you needed a parallel system, and you instinctively created one when all I was willing to provide before that was a serial system."

"I'm confused," Missy said a moment later, apparently back to being able to understand English.

Hive turned to Missy. "Long story short, your multitasking system connection is more like a bunch of computers in a chain, each connected to the one in front and in back with a single connection. Each piece of your system has to decide to act or not on something passing through them in either direction, and if any one blocks then the rest of the chain won't even see what was blocked. My Lord's multitasking system is more like a room full of computers all plugged into a high-speed network and sending broadcast packets so that all nodes know what all other nodes are doing, even if they don't all act on that information."

"Okay..."

"I need to tweak the translation matrices to allow pass-through so that they don't prevent information from moving on in the system. That should prevent the pain and allow you to understand more than a single language at a time."

"Oh." Missy frowned. "How long is that going to take?"

"Probably two to three days."

"Crap."

Taylor and her father ended up taking some time to chat when he arrived to pick her up, mainly because he'd arrived in the middle of the discussion on what to do about the translation matrices not working correctly for Missy. As a group they decided that having her not appear to know English on her first appearance would actually be a good thing for keeping her identities separated, at least once Hive assured them that it wouldn't cause long-term problems if used a couple more times.

Plans were made for Taylor and her father to eat dinner at the Walsh household the next day to do some final planning for Saturday, but they didn't stick around for dinner that evening. Instead they picked up a pizza on the way home.

"I think I might sleep at the Inn tonight," Taylor said once they'd eaten.

"Why?" her father asked.

"Hive is still working on a number of things and wants to continue overnight. Me being there is safer when she's not around my neck."

"Ah. Are you going to spend all morning there tomorrow too?"

"I'm hoping to be done by morning," Hive answered. "At least with those things that I need to do personally. After that I think my Lord and I should go shopping."

That had Taylor blinking. "What do we need now?"

"We should stock the kitchen so that meals can be eaten at the Inn without needing to make a trip to fetch food each time."

"Ah. I suppose that would make some sense. But where would we go shopping without causing too much of a scene?"

"We could jump to any number of small stores until we've picked up everything. By moving around we would prevent significant gatherings or planning to engage us. Or we could visit a single superstore and leave immediately after paying."

"But presumably not a superstore near here."

"Why not?" her father asked. "So long as you have your shopping list ready ahead of time you should be fine. Everyone is expecting you at the warehouse, not running normal errands, and going a couple towns over to hit the superstore there is likely enough distance to ensure that you have time to do your shopping before anyone has a chance to get there to cause trouble."

"I could also not go with you," Hive added. "With minor preparation you could walk into the store normally. Without me, and with you in normal-looking clothing, it could very well be that nobody will realize who you are until it's too late to do anything about it."

"Minor preparation?"

"Getting a transport device into the area so that you can arrive without being seen to teleport."

"Ah. That would probably work, wouldn't it? Without the obvious flash of arrival light, and without flying in..."

"It sounds like a good plan," her father said. "Just don't forget that you need to watch Missy, and we need to figure out when you'll officially be doing so going forward."

"Right."

Taylor spent the night at the Inn, and as part of that she and Hive got the transport device to an alley a few blocks away from the superstore. She could easily walk the distance from it. As for getting things back to the inn, Hive created a 'large handbag' storage device with three pocket openings. Things placed in any 'pocket' would end up on shelves, but each set of shelves was in a different internal room. Room temperature, refrigerator, and freezer spaces, which meant that the entire bag served as a mobile pantry and refrigerator too.

Outside of that, Hive worked on processing shard and Endbringer bits while Taylor reconsidered electrical attacks. She didn't know if they'd work against anything in Eagleton, but felt silly for not having considered it before then. Hive wasn't using the multitasking system much or the simulation system at all, so a couple hundred instances of Taylor sat at different points on a simulated Earth-like planet playing with ways to generate and control electrical flows with mana.

It wasn't perfect, as the simulation system still couldn't model electrons properly, but she came up with a number of things to test in the real world after shopping. The majority of it hinged on the ability for mana to generate magnetic fields, which worked in simulation and Hive's notes claimed worked in the real world, but might not work the way Taylor was using them. If they did work then she was hoping to be able to basically create a pure mana electrical generator thanks to incredibly powerful but contained magnetic fields and direct the output with more static magnetic fields in mana tubes.

Getting it down to 'human-safe' might be a problem, but having a lightning gun for use against machines would be awesome. Even if it only worked in an atmosphere.

Missy resisted the urge to scream as she cleaned up before breakfast. She had far too little to go on for Eagleton, and she was worried that Ethan and Sherie were going to call the visit off because of it. Her attempts at coming up with a plan before they arrived had run into the problem of not having enough information to plan with. And just showing up, waiting to see if they were attacked, and shooting back if needed didn't feel like enough of a plan to count as a proper homework assignment.

She felt like there had to be something that she was missing, but just couldn't figure out what that was. Worse, there was a nagging feeling in the back of her head that when she found out what she was missing it was going to seem incredibly and blatantly obvious in hindsight. To the point where she was already dreading finding out what she was missing. Ethan would probably make it as humiliating as possible without even meaning to as well.

Well, she still had the rest of the school day to hopefully figure things out, maybe she'd get lucky and figure out what she was missing in time to actually prepare something for this evening? She wasn't going to get very far after school, what with having an actual training run planned.

Taylor was dressed in jeans and a plain t-shirt, had her hair in non-hexagonal buns, and had on sunglasses that were shaped differently than her 'obviously out as Minerva' ones. Hive was still back at the Inn, running tests on things learned from the cartel leader's shard while also monitoring the Fallen setting up things on a rooftop near the warehouse. So far the latter seemed to be primarily recording equipment. None of the other groups was accomplishing anything of interest right now, unless you counted Potter having escaped custody that morning. But they had left town almost immediately and weren't likely to be a problem anymore.

Walking into the superstore, she ensured that the surveillance drone following her made it through the door before she grabbed two shopping carts. Her shopping list was sizable, and seemed a bit excessive, but Hive claimed that they wouldn't need to worry about things going bad so it made sense to stock up. As she entered the store proper there were a couple of people who gave her odd looks for grabbing two carts, but nobody said anything about it, and she started working her way through the store.

People stopped giving her odd looks when she'd started filling up the second cart and obviously just assumed that she was doing a lot of shopping. Which she was. She'd underestimated the amount of space she'd need though, wishing she'd figured out a way to reasonably grab a third cart as she precariously stacked a few things a bit higher than she would've liked. Some of it was a little too wobbly, so she cheated and subtly cast telekinesis spells to hold things from falling off of the stacks.

She approached the registers well over an hour after she'd entered the store and got in line behind an old woman who was in the last stages of her own transaction. Nobody paid her any mind as she unloaded the first cart onto the belt.

"Good morning," the cashier greeted as he started scanning her items. "Find everything you wanted today?"

"Good morning," Taylor replied. "And you're out of chunky peanut butter, but that's not really a problem."

"Sorry about that, I think we've been out for a couple of days."

The first cart was quickly emptied and moved to the bagging area, where a second employee came over to help. Taylor unloaded the second cart onto the belt and retrieved a roll of bills to her pocket to pay with. The cashier and bagger worked quickly, and Taylor pulled enough bills off of the roll to pay for it all. She got her change just as the last bag was being dropped into the second cart.

"Would you like any help getting this to your car?" the bagger asked.

"No thank you," Taylor replied. "I walked. I just need to drop it all into my handbag."

That got her some incredulous looks, at least until she opened the handbag and dropped a bag of ice cream into it. Followed by two more bags of frozen items. She then switched to refrigerated items in the next pocket, having more of those total. By the time she got to room-temperature items there was a crowd watching, and she was amused by the fact that none of them had pulled out recording devices. Though the security camera footage was probably going to end up online.

Once everything was in the handbag she pushed the two carts together to make it easier to return them to the pickup area at the front of the store. The crowd that had formed parted to let her leave without issue, and she even spun the carts around to push them into the waiting queue properly before she left the store. She paused in the door for a moment so that the surveillance drone following her could slip out, and then walked off the way she'd come from.

Only after she was a good distance from the door did people suddenly start heading her way to follow her, but the bra under her t-shirt had the stealth field generators anchored to it and she was able to turn a corner and literally fade from view thanks to them. A moment after that she fired off a dimensional transference to arrive in the kitchen of the Inn. The surveillance drone would return to the transport device under Hive's direction, though they hadn't decided if the device should stay there for future shopping trips or not.

"Those that attempted to follow you are quite confused," Hive noted as she started unloading the handbag. While Taylor was still holding it, thanks to storage and retrieval spells. "Especially as the corner you turned down was a dead end with no obvious way out and they were watching for you to fly away."

Taylor dropped the handbag on the counter and dismissed the ties holding her hair in the buns. "Should be fun to see what gets said online. Anything I should know about before I start testing my new batch of possible electrical spells?"

Hive nodded. "The cartel leader's Shard provided a lot of useful techniques for temporarily and permanently changing materials into other materials. They're amazingly flexible and build upon some of the other techniques we'd obtained previously, as well as far more controlled. At this point all we need is matter in general and we can convert it into any atomic structures we want, though it'll still be easier to get the correct atoms when possible."

"That sounds incredibly useful."

"It is, though I've not been able to adapt the processes to producing mana-reactive materials, they will still help significantly with other projects. Excess materials from the mining drones harvesting the instance of Mars that you broke open can be converted into far more useful forms now."

Taylor blinked at that. "You've got drones harvesting that instance of Mars?"

"Of course, Lord. Planetary cores contain many useful materials that are normally quite difficult to get to. Having a planet already cracked open makes collecting them much easier than it would normally be."

"Huh. Anything else?"

"I found what looks like an access code for the slave circuit installed in Shard devices. The same one, in the remains of three different Endbringer remnant sets, implying an abysmal level of security. I'm unsure what it would allow, but would like to look for potential test subjects."

"Test subjects?"

"Those with Shards that we intend to kill or depower anyway and that we aren't exceptionally concerned about the abilities the Shard is granting."

"Oh. Let me know when you think you have one, perhaps, and we'll take it from there?"

"Of course, Lord."

Shaking her head, Taylor turned towards the front doors of the Inn. "I think I'm going to go test my spells now."

It turned out that most of what had worked in the simulation system hadn't worked in real life, mostly seemingly due to grounding effects created by the mana constructs needed for various parts of the spells or by virtue of various laws of physics just not working as the 'ideal' simulation system thought they should. That didn't mean that nothing had come out of it, though, as Taylor had come up with a couple of ideas on the fly as things failed during testing.

The working spells were two different bullet payloads. One used a lower-powered version of the 'gather electrons' trick that she'd already figured out, pulling them in from the immediate surroundings when possible. Mostly from the gas or liquid the bullet was passing through. It would then store the electrons, up to a tunable point where the containment barrier would still function, and release them on impact or detonation. The only problem was that there was no 'safe' way to dismiss the bullet once the payload initialized.

For the other payload, the bullet would instead pull in a certain amount of gas or liquid, split it, and generate an internal charge differential. Half of the material would be positively charged and the other half negatively charged. Each of those would be in a small ball that would be released when the bullet 'popped', spreading out for a moment before the two balls opened up. The result was essentially a variable-power spark, though there were minimums before it appeared to do anything visually. Presumably hitting people or objects with it properly would result in a 'use item as a conduction path' effect.

In many ways, the two payloads should actually be more useful than what she'd been trying to create, but she couldn't help but feel disappointed that she didn't have an on-demand lightning gun that was energy efficient enough to use in a combat situation. That and she had no way of figuring out the potential safe points for either payload against various targets without testing them, and human testing in particular would be a problem.

Luckily, she probably didn't need to worry about doing 'excessive' damage to Eagleton tomorrow.

Missy sighed as she got off of the bus, finally done with school until September. She'd not figured anything more out for her 'homework', and for some reason she was one of the students that everyone had to ensure she had their phone numbers for. Just in case she wanted to call them for anything. Most of them hadn't asked for her phone number in return, even though the entire dance had started with Dinah insisting on trading phone numbers. Which had led to Aisha insisting on the same, and then everyone else just shoving slips of paper with their phone numbers on them at her.

She still didn't know why everyone suddenly thought she needed to be able to contact them, given that Dinah and Aisha had at least been spending most lunch periods sitting with her. They had an excuse, the rest of the student body really didn't.

Stupid mostly-former classmates aside, she could tell that Taylor was on her way. They basically met at the door to the house, and Missy grabbed a snack before they departed for the Inn.

"So what are we starting with?" Missy asked between bites of her snack.

"Spotting traps and dodging on the ground," Taylor answered. "Mostly to see if you're good with the new casting method. Then we'll see about attacking, shielding, and counter attacking."

"Fun."

Ten minutes later the two of them were being assaulted by drones. Taylor was obviously more experienced, barely dodging more often than not, and she seemed to be pretty good at spotting when there were traps to avoid. Missy found herself jealous, but unable to focus on it because she was too busy dodging. After half an hour of that, shields and attack spells were permitted, and she wasted no time in casting various groups of bullets at the drones. None of them hit the drones, but it made her feel better anyway.

Over the course of the following hour they continued the exercise, adding in flight halfway through, and Missy had to admit that she was starting to spot the changes to the environment that indicated that a trap was present and about to trigger. She also learned to stop paying so much attention to mana, because Hive successfully drove them into a section of trees with physical, non-mana traps. Taylor dodged all four that were set off, but Missy had to punch her way out of one swinging log trap and blink out of a perfectly normal net that got around her.

After that Taylor brought that portion of training to a halt and switched to them flying out over the ocean shooting at each other. Taylor had Hal out, while Missy was obviously using Reason. In theory Reason had the greater reach, but in practice that didn't matter nearly as much as it should've. Some of that could be Taylor not using Hal to cast anything like Missy was using Reason to, but most of it was just the older girl always being able to slip out of the way and around the whip. When she wasn't grabbing it to throw Missy off of her rhythm, anyway.

Eventually that was also called off, though Missy was more 'hungry' than 'exhausted' today. They landed back at the inn, dismissed their Knight Armor, and Hive returned to Taylor before the three of them headed back home. Why Taylor had called off training became obvious a couple of minutes later when Ethan and Sherie arrived home, which either meant that the older girl had been monitoring things or Hive had been and let her know.

Taylor sat down in the living room at the Walsh household, dinner having been spent discussing the sitting schedule until the end of July. Generally speaking, Missy would be dropped off to be watched at the Hebert household on Mondays and Fridays, excepting the fourth of July. On Wednesday mornings Taylor would make her way over to the Walsh household, departing around two-thirty when Ethan or Sherie would show up to take Missy to her therapy appointments. Tuesdays and Thursdays were free for Taylor as Missy would be working at City Hall, and weekends were going to vary. Such as next Friday, where Missy was going to stick around until noon on Saturday so that Ethan and Sherie could get a couple of troublesome shifts out of the way.

"Okay Missy," Ethan said as he sat down. "You've had plenty of time to do your homework. What can you tell us about Eagleton and the Machine Army?"

Taylor watched as Missy twitched, then basically regurgitated what little was publicly known, followed by an incredibly barebones plan that was more a description of what they could expect to be doing in the first five minutes of arriving at most. All in all, it told them absolutely nothing of use.

"Is that all?" Sherie asked when Missy was done.

"Yes?" Missy answered, sounding very unsure of herself as she did so.

"Did your sensor or surveillance drones tell you nothing at all?" Ethan asked.

Missy glared at him for that. "Taylor said we weren't scanning before we arrived."

"No," Danny interjected. "My daughter said that she, specifically, wouldn't be scanning before you two arrived. I don't recall anything being said about you being forbidden from taking a peek."

Watching as the younger girl's jaw dropped, realization flickered across her eyes, and she finally facepalmed hard enough to possibly leave a bruise was actually somewhat amusing.

"Technically," Taylor added after a moment. "I also didn't forbid Hive from scanning the area, though that was mostly because at this point I expect that she's scanned every possible threat she knows the location of. I just haven't asked how to access the database of scan results yet."

That didn't seem to help Missy's mood, but a pulse of light came from the girl that probably indicated a sensor drone having been cast.

"I have to work in the morning," Ethan said while Missy was likely examining Eagleton. "So Sherie will be watching from here. Danny, are you going to be monitoring as well?"

"Yes," Danny replied. "Though I'll likely do so from the Inn. The interface there is much nicer."

"Stop making us jealous of our inability to visit," Sherie retorted. "I'm almost tempted to shove someone through one of your portals to see if they come out okay on the other side at this point."

"We know they work fine for parahumans," Ethan said.

"But not if parahumans setting foot anywhere on the planet with the Inn is safe," Hive said. "Nor if they can safely cross the protective barriers now sitting on the Inn itself."

"Oh, right. The portal was just one piece of the entire access puzzle. I guess that's part of why the 'may not be safe for parahumans' labels are still on them?"

"We've got a number of things that we'd test if we had a suitable test subject," Taylor admitted. "The majority of which are potentially fatal if they don't work, and as such I'm reluctant to test them at all. Heartbreaker being thrown through a portal took me by surprise."

"Armsmaster was livid when he heard about that," Sherie said with a grin. "Said that it hadn't been a proper test at all, and when asked what he'd have done instead he produced a fifty-page testing document. Legend even called him to apologize after someone sent him a copy, but pointed out that it was mostly a moot point now that a couple dozen parahumans have used the things."

Ethan nodded. "Yeah, though we're not sure when people are going to figure out that they obviously don't need a device at both ends."

"You know that," Danny said. "But how would anyone else?"

"The complete lack of devices at either end when I used them against Ziz," Taylor answered. "Though that itself could be seen as evidence that they're similar but not actually the same technique?"

"Oh, right."

"It's a web?" Missy muttered as she finally looked up. "How does that work?"

"What's a web?" Ethan asked.

"The machines. Each one is connected to at least a dozen others through odd spatial twists, but not necessarily entirely by proximity? But I'm also not sure if that's for communication or something else."

"So you've got something to investigate when you get there. Are they communicating with those or not? And you should probably see if you can spot a pattern in the connections."

"Yeah."

Missy had, reluctantly, shut down the sensor drone when it was time for bed, not wanting to run the multitasking system overnight so that she'd sleep properly. She'd not detailed everything she found for the others, but the one thing that stuck out about the Machine Army was that all the connections were internal. If that was important or not was something to determine, and she had a couple of plans for how to do so floating around in her head already. Though each step somewhat depended on the previous ones doing something she expected.

Luckily for her, the slight bruise she'd inflicted on herself with her facepalm would be gone entirely by two or three in the morning. Accelerated healing courtesy of Space was awesome that way, saving her from going out in her new costume for the first time with a self-inflicted bruise on her nose. Unluckily for her, Hive had confirmed that the updated translation matrices with pass-through support would be ready tomorrow afternoon at the earliest, so massive headaches were to be expected setting up and taking down the current one.

Only two headaches, though. One for setting it up and one for taking it down, and then hopefully the new version would be pain-free.

As she finally drifted off to sleep, her last thought was wondering what PHO was going to make of her appearance in the morning.

Taylor's overnight task was going over what they could see of the Fallen's actions in Brockton Bay. Hive had finally identified a link from each of the members they'd spotted initially back to a shard device, and then seventeen more links back to others in town from it. None of them were the normal connection of a shard device's host though, and they weren't certain what that meant in this case.

Sadly, most of what they could see was more of a monitoring network than anything else right now. A more widespread one than anticipated, but still just a monitoring network. Which just made it seem like Taylor was going to need to make an appearance as Minerva in order to spring whatever it was they were planning. Which, for now, might not be anything at all. It was honestly quite frustrating.

Around midnight that changed slightly, as the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine got either a very early or very late start to their day. Instead of staying outside of town they'd opted to head for the warehouse. Or at least that was the assumption, based on their route. They were being cautious about it for now, and their actual goals were still just as unknown.

By five in the morning, the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine had found an abandoned warehouse to set up in and were setting up a small workshop in it. For what purpose was unknown, but the Siberian had taken the effort to collect a number of rabid animals as soon as the equipment was out of the van they were using. Presumably those were for Riley to use in tinkering in some fashion, given that they were being kept in the workshop. What she was going to do with them was unknown, but Hive was going to keep a closer eye on them just in case intervention was needed now that they were actually in Brockton Bay. One surveillance drone was assigned to each of them.

The Yàngbǎn capes were the least annoying of the lot for the time being as they wandered the Everglades, apparently lost and confused. Avoiding the Protectorate capes that had gone after them at this point but not getting the clue that they were nowhere near their actual target. It was honestly quite sad, and Taylor was honestly hoping that whatever brainwashing had been done to them would wear off over time.

Last edited: Oct 29, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 78 - June 18, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Nov 4, 2020

#14,184

Exercise was kept light but breakfast was a little heavier than normal for Taylor and Missy in order to account for the expected mana expenditures of the morning. Ethan headed off to work, Sherie settled down in their living room, and Danny settled in at the Inn. Taylor frowned as she watched Missy visibly flinch in pain as the younger girl engaged the Belkan translation matrix, then they both brought up their Knight Armor.

{Decided to go with a Belkan nametag?} Taylor asked once they were both ready.

{What?} Missy asked, before looking down at her nametag. {Oh. Right. I had a thought that I didn't like the gibberish? But your nametag looks fine to me?}

{There's no translation for Minerva in Belkan,} Hive offered, with 'Minerva' coming out in English. {There are a dozen potential translations for Expanse, but you've picked what I think is the most suitable one.}

{Oh.}

"I have no clue what you three are talking about," Sherie grumbled. "Do I get a translation?"

"I hadn't considered it necessary before now," Hive admitted. "In either direction, actually. I apologize for not having prepared something in advance, give me a moment to prepare a subtitles feed."

That 'moment' ended up being half an hour, but after some testing they had a workable subtitles system. One that Missy was also tied into so that she could get Belkan translations of the English being spoken over the 'radio', but only English there. Sherie had insisted that they not translate English spoken near Missy today without Taylor repeating it for her in Belkan to make it 'more obvious' that Missy and Expanse were different people.

Taylor pulled Hal out at that point. {You should probably pull out Reason before we arrive, just in case.}

{That makes sense,} Missy answered, and Reason appeared a moment later. {Do we know where we're arriving?}

{I was thinking that we'd arrive outside of the quarantine zone and pass through the PRT's checkpoints as a courtesy.}

{I guess that would make it less likely that they'd shoot at us.}

"Much less likely," Sherie agreed.

"I think we both approve of that course of action," Danny added.

{You ready?} Taylor asked Missy, and got a nod in return. A moment later the two were grabbed by the dimensional transference spell, and the next thing they knew they were a couple hundred feet away from the quarantine zone in Tennessee. Specifically, from a building next to the wall that had been constructed around Eagleton.

The two walked up to the building, a couple of people coming out to meet them as they approached. One of them was a female parahuman, in costume, and she came forward while the PRT officer stayed by the doors.

"Good morning Minerva," the parahuman greeted. "And, er, I'm sorry, I don't know your name."

{Please tell me that she said hello,} Missy grumbled.

"Sorry about her," Taylor said. "She's in training and can't currently speak or understand English. We hope to deal with that soon, but haven't had time to yet."

"I see," the parahuman said. "I'm Knockout, Protectorate shift leader for the morning. We've got patrols around the edge of the wall, but rarely venture inside of it."

"And how many of them are carrying cameras today to capture what we get up to?"

"All of them, but that isn't abnormal as body cameras are required for all quarantine zone patrols. The new cameras were added to the walls."

"Ah." Taylor turned to Missy. {This is Knockout. Their patrols have body cameras standard, and they added more to the walls just to watch us.}

{That doesn't surprise me,} Missy replied.

Turning back to Knockout, Taylor gestured at the building. "So, shall we see if we can figure out anything about your minor robot problem?"

Knockout's eye twitched behind her mask, but she turned and led them towards the building anyway. "You should know that the machines are very good at hiding themselves, and you'll find two more walls inside of the current one that are by now more machine than original construction. Be careful as you approach them."

"Good to know."

As they reached the doors the parahuman turned to look at them. "May I ask why you have a trainee with you for this?"

Taylor shrugged. "It's a minor problem with little to no actual risk, and if things go wrong enough then the entire area can be forcibly dismantled by drones."

"You do know that the army corrupts and integrates technology into itself, right?"

"I'm confident that it won't succeed with the drones in question, and even if one was grabbed I'd know immediately and destroy it with the others as I pulled them back."

"That sounds good, but I'm not sure if I'd trust your control system to inform you properly."

"I'd be using the drones that I control directly. It would be nearly impossible to hide that one had been taken over from me. Either I'm still in control and can tell things changed, or I'm not in control anymore."

"Oh."

Over the following ten minutes they were shown through multiple security gates before being brought out onto the top of the wall. As promised, there were additional walls inside of the current one.

{So how do you want to start?} Taylor asked Missy.

{Destroying one or two machines to see how the web reforms,} Missy answered. {Though perhaps we should see if they attack us at all before we do that?}

Taylor gestured for Missy to lead, and they both flew down to an opening in the first inner wall. There was no reaction from the machines as they passed through the opening. They continued, making it through all of the walls without triggering so much as a twitch from the machines. Missy then walked back out, presumably to see if they would be stopped from leaving, and nothing happened.

Shrugging, Missy returned to Taylor. She took a minute to look around, then cast a single bullet and fired it into a machine pretending to be part of the oldest quarantine wall. The machine was destroyed, as were those immediately surrounding it. Five seconds later connections snapped out from various points, connecting machines with the smallest number of links in the web of connections to each other. No immediate attempt was made to repair the damage to the wall.

{Interesting,} Missy mumbled, then looked around again. She moved down the wall, finding what she was looking for further in, before standing back and casting multiple bullets. They all floated there as she set them up, and then all of them slammed into the wall simultaneously. An entire chunk of wall was knocked out of the rest, obviously carefully chosen as it had no remaining connections to the web outside of itself.

After five seconds the machines still in the wall reached out and formed new connections, and ten seconds after that the disconnected machines started reaching out in a much more haphazard manner. As soon as one had made a connection to the rest of the web the other connections paused, and a couple seconds later the more efficient 'establish a bunch of connections' behavior triggered.

{Can you create a barrier to disrupt the web?} Missy asked a moment later. {Since I don't have any good freestanding area ones?}

{I think so,} Taylor replied, mentally bringing up barrier equations. {What do you want to do?}

{We know that they'll reconnect, but I want to know what happens if they don't.}

{Ah. Give me a moment.}

Going over Hive's notes on how she'd blocked Potter's abilities took a moment. Taylor needed to adjust things to the connection method the web appeared to be using, as well as to primarily block intra-dimension links instead of inter-dimension links. That didn't take long, but she ran it through a couple dozen simulation runs to tweak it. She also disabled the 'existing connections' safeties while she was at it, wanting to intentionally cut things loose from the web when the barrier formed.

{That should do it,} Taylor said. {Where do you want it?}

{Any group of thirty or more,} Missy answered.

Nodding, Taylor cast the barrier she'd come up with over a section of the wall, covering around sixty machines. Their connections to the web snapped, and five seconds later those still in the larger web attempted to reach out to establish new connections. Unlike the previous times, this time they slammed into the still-active barrier and recoiled. Three seconds later the web adapted, forming connections around but not through the area blocked by the barrier. Seven seconds later the machines inside the barrier started to reach out as well, but were prevented from doing so by the barrier.

The rest of the web seemed to ignore that a chunk had been torn off, possibly deciding that the machines had been destroyed. Missy opted to watch as the torn-off chunk flailed more and more energetically in the barrier, until after around thirty minutes the machines tore themselves apart. The section of wall collapsed, bits of the machines falling out as the barrier wasn't configured to block the passing of matter. Dropping the barrier after that resulted in no change, though the obvious gap in the web was a bit odd compared to the rest of the area.

{I think there's a root node somewhere,} Missy finally said. {Or at least explicit control nodes. If we can isolate or destroy those then the entire army will shut down.}

{And how do you want to find those nodes?} Taylor asked.

Missy's response was to cast two sensor drones and send them deeper into the town. She seemed to be focused on that, so Taylor moved over to an intact section of wall and pressed her hand against it. The machines didn't react, possibly not seeing her. As human, machine, or at all was the debatable part of that. Out of personal curiosity, she cast the barrier around a single machine, and it acted just like the larger group had. Five seconds before the web reacted, ten more before the single machine did, and thirty minutes before it tore itself apart.

Twenty minutes later Missy shook her head. {Okay, I don't like it, but I think I figured out the important bits.}

{Oh?} Taylor replied.

{There are fifty-seven points with a non-web connection reaching out to another dimension, each of them containing at least part of a human brain and have three times the web connections compared to the rest of the army. I suspect that they're the control nodes.}

{Fifty-eight,} Hive corrected from the Inn, including a set of coordinates. {Though the last one is deep enough underground that I'm not surprised that you missed it.}

Nodding, Taylor looked into the town. {So do we isolate the control nodes or destroy them outright?}

{I want to see what happens if we isolate one first,} Missy answered. {Both in how it reacts and how the rest of the army does.}

{Works for me. Got a candidate node?}

Missy nodded and took to the air. She led Taylor to a spot in the town that looked just like any other, except for the parahuman-style connection to a partial brain in a heavily-armored shell hidden under a section of road. Landing there still garnered no reaction from the machines.

Taylor prepped and cast the barrier to isolate the likely control node from the rest of the web, snapping the several dozen connections it had to the rest of the web in the process, and hell broke loose a half-second later. The previously dormant machines suddenly went berserk trying to obliterate anything and everything that wasn't them in the area. The attacks weren't incredibly organized, but they had quite a bit of power behind them. Despite her Knight Armor being able to handle the hits, Missy immediately took to the air. Taylor just used Hal coupled with bullets and shields appearing to block and destroy machines coming too close to where she was standing. She was far more interested in what happened with the control node, which was attempting to reach out to the web again.

The assault of the machines continued for forty minutes, but the control node only lasted thirty-five before the shard connected to it pulled out in a manner that caused the node to implode. The extra five minutes was only after Taylor had taken to the air, meaning it was likely that the machines had only stopped when they were no longer being destroyed or impeded in the area.

{I wonder if they'll freak out when we land at another node,} Missy said once Eagleton was quiet again.

{Maybe,} Taylor replied. {We'll have to land near one to see.}

{Lord,} Hive sent from the Inn. {I'd like to see what happens if you cut off the Shard device connection on a node.}

Taylor considered that for a moment. {With or without cutting off the web?}

{I suspect that the answer will be similar in either case, but testing both may be a good idea.}

{So,} Taylor said out loud as she turned to Missy. {Next node?}

{Sure,} Missy replied.

Missy was honestly finding Eagleton to be far more interesting than she'd expected, especially after the machines had completely ignored them on entry. Of course, when they finally had attacked, quite viciously, she'd been jealous that Taylor had been able to just stand there and keep monitoring the control node while treating the machines as minor annoyances. Then again, compared to fighting Leviathan over the ocean?

At the second control node Missy stayed in the air while Taylor dropped down to cast the barrier, this time cutting off just the shard connection. Even from the air, the death of the bit of brain was obvious. The web took eight seconds to notice, and it was a bit of a surprise when the control node was torn apart but the machines didn't immediately assault the rest of the area. Apparently there were contingencies for the death of a node that wasn't tied to its destruction?

The third control node was a combination of the first two. The machines went nuts immediately, the bit of brain died, but the node itself didn't get torn apart. After everything settled down, which took Taylor taking to the air again, the barrier was dismissed. Nothing seemed to happen for the next twenty minutes, though they figured that left alone the web would eventually reabsorb the control node. It just wasn't happening quickly.

For the fourth control node, Hive asked them to attempt to use a dimensional transference on it. That failed, the safeties in the spell tripping and preventing it from completing. Using it on a machine nearby worked, so it wasn't the web causing that. Which meant that it was likely that parahumans just couldn't be moved around with the spell. Of course, they also discovered that damaging the web near a control node at all triggered retaliation from the machines, and Taylor blew the node up in the middle of that.

{So,} Missy said after the machines had settled down again. {Do we have anything else to learn here?}

{Probably not,} Taylor admitted. {I can't think of any other tests that I expect to tell us anything new, anyway.}

{Can we just barrier the entire town to disconnect it?}

{That would seem to be the easiest solution at this stage.}

{Please use the version that cuts both connection types,} Hive sent. {But leave the one buried deep underground. I'll take care of that one and the surrounding machines myself.}

Missy wasn't sure why Hive wanted that, but Taylor didn't argue the point. Instead she obviously started preparing the larger barrier. When it went up it was obviously not spherical underground, despite looking like it above ground. Anyone with mana sensors could likely tell that it had a significant dent in the bottom, right around where the last control node was according to Hive.

The reaction from the machines was odd. It seemed like the ones still outside of the shield below-ground reacted immediately to the barrier going up, starting to thrash around. What felt like a portal opened up a moment later though, and then they stopped. Compared to that, above-ground didn't seem to be reacting at all for a good five minutes, after which the entire town seemed to explode with furious machines. But, unlike the other barriers that Taylor had cast, this barrier seemed to be configured to stop things from passing through it, keeping the machines fully contained within it.

It was over an hour after the larger barrier went up before the machines started to fall apart, at least those that hadn't been torn apart by the other machines by accident, and Taylor hurried the last few groups along with some bullets cast into them. Missy opted to cast an explicit scan spell over the entire town after that, purely out of curiosity, and found that she was right about the portal she'd thought she felt. As far she could tell, Hive had opted to use the last node to absorb the shard that had been behind the entire thing, but had angled the portal to ensure that the funnel was deep underground instead of reaching the surface.

{I think that does it,} Taylor finally said, dropping the barrier around the former town and now rubble-filled crater. {We should let the staff here know, then grab something to eat.}

{Works for me,} Missy agreed.

"The last barrier I used contained them as it cut the connections to the control nodes," Taylor finished explaining over lunch, the PRT and Protectorate staff having insisted on feeding them. "Obviously the machines weren't happy about it, but they could only survive so long without the parahuman connections maintaining them. Once that time had passed I was able to safely drop the barrier, though I only had to keep it up that long to protect the outermost wall and the people here."

Admittedly, the last control node deep underground had been skipped in the explanation, but nobody here needed to know that. Or go digging for it before Hive was done with absorbing the shard.

"Thank you," Knockout said, checking the recording device that she'd brought into the cafeteria with her. "We're probably going to have to keep an eye on things for a month or two, just in case, but we never thought that the Machine Army would ever truly be stopped. Especially as we kept having problems containing it."

"It wasn't a problem," Taylor replied. "Probably would've been easier to handle without using it as a training exercise, though it did show that some more self-defense drills might be needed."

"Yes, we noticed that your trainee here tends to cast in purple instead of your blue. Is that intentional to be able to tell things apart?"

"Not intentional so much as a default. Each person's energy colors itself differently unless the way we form it tells it to do differently. Lilia and I sharing a color is rare." Or at least Hive insisted that it was rare. Their sample sizes were incredibly limited right now.

"Ah. So it doesn't have anything to do with your skill levels or ranking?"

"Nothing to do with that at all."

"I see. Sadly, this was probably the last quarantine zone where isolating the entire thing like you did would be a suitable solution. The rest still have people living in them."

Taylor grimaced. "Yeah, that would be a problem. I might have to research places elsewhere on the planet for additional exercises."

Knockout nodded. "That may be, though after today I doubt that anyone in North America is going to complain too much. We got a lot of good footage of you two at work, and it was obvious that you had things under control even as your trainee here worked things out." She then looked at Missy. "Er, is there an easier name on a spelling and pronunciation front for her that we can use?"

"You can just call her Expanse. It's the best translation of that particular name, and once she's able to use English in the field then she'll probably go with that. If not then you can always update things later, right?"

"Of course, and thank you. That will make the paperwork a lot easier to deal with."

"No problem."

They discussed a number of other things, including if there would be any problem with footage being posted online, before Taylor and Missy finally left. Permission had been granted for them to leave directly from the cafeteria, though likely in part because there were plenty of cameras there to analyse their departure.

Arriving on the porch back at the Inn, Missy immediately disengaged the translation matrix. Or at least that was the most likely reason for her to grimace in pain. Taylor shook her head as she dismissed her Knight Armor.

"Good job you two," her father said as he came outside.

"I don't think Missy can understand language again yet," Taylor interrupted. "I'd give her a moment."

"Oh, right."

They actually headed to the Walsh household after Missy had recovered and dropped her Knight Armor, so that Sherie could be involved in discussions, though Taylor ended up with Hal around her neck instead of Hive. Apparently Hive had opted to pop open a small portal and pull the shard device through it into one of the sub-basements and was going to be working at it for a bit.

"So," Sherie said once they'd all sat down in the living room. "Good job on most fronts."

"Most?" Missy asked.

"Taylor kind of showed you up on the defending yourself front. A lot."

"Oh."

"That aside," Danny said. "Good job figuring things out, even if Hive had already determined where the control nodes were. She couldn't figure out how they'd react to things being destroyed and cut off without that being done, of course."

"Do we know what Hive expects to get out of absorbing the shard responsible?" Sherie asked.

"Raw materials," Taylor answered. "And maybe some other useful information, but she hasn't figured out how shards make the materials she uses to make core augmentation units yet. Without that she needs to harvest them to get more. That she's been able to harvest multiple shards in reasonably rapid succession also tells me that there's almost certainly a lot of materials of various kinds under the Inn right now."

"I get it now. Is the rest just stockpiling because she has nothing better to do with them?"

"No, she plans on building a starship eventually, once we have a method of propulsion that works in the space between dimensions. I'm sure a lot of the materials will go into that, especially as she can convert between normal materials with more efficiency now. On top of the mining operations she's got going on. Actually, at this point I should probably be expecting multiple starships once we know how to build them. I can't see Hive not wanting at least a spare..."

Sherie just stared at Taylor for a moment, then closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. "Okay, whatever. Moving on. I personally think that you should wait a week or so before 'Expanse' shows up again, though I haven't discussed that with Ethan so we'll need to see what he thinks as well. What you do for that appearance is going to be a good question as well."

Missy rolled her eyes. "I'm sure we can find somewhere with people or things that need to be punched. Even if Brockton Bay has been unusually quiet on that front lately."

"Or maybe I'll have you figure out how to approach the Ash Beast safely," Taylor added, only for Missy to give her a look of horror. "What? Can't figure out if the likely parahuman in the middle is sane and worth saving if we can't approach them."

"Oh come on."

"Of course, that's after we pick up your self-defense training. We only have to worry about your mornings two nights a week now!"

The grin on Taylor's face when saying that probably contributed to Missy's eyes going wide. "Can we go back to figuring out approaching the Ash Beast?"

Missy sighed as Taylor and her father left, not sure if she should be looking forward to tomorrow morning. Or the coming couple of weeks, for that matter, especially as she might actually need to come up with a way to approach what was commonly described as a continuous explosion reasonably safely. Beyond 'check if the Knight Armor can handle it and put on breathing masks', anyway. Actually, that might be enough, which would make it incredibly easy.

That aside, she also wanted to come up with some things of her own, that weren't just Taylor and Hive handing her things. During lunch, when she couldn't understand anything being spoken about, she'd started going over translated notes on the optical stealth generators. They didn't use a spell because Hive hadn't figured out a good way to make it a spell, but it also looked a lot like a fancy spatial manipulation trick. Which meant it might be a good project for figuring out spatial manipulation spells in general, instead of relying on Space's systems for that.

As an added bonus, figuring out how the barriers worked in more detail to accomplish that spatial manipulation with one would leave her less dependent on Taylor in situations like had come up today with the Machine Army. It wouldn't be perfect, since she wasn't capable of tweaking the math on the fly like Taylor was, but with any luck she'd at least be able to do basic adjustments when needed.

"Okay kid," Sherie said a minute later. "We've got some errands to run."

Missy blinked. "What?"

"You finished with Taylor early enough for me to be able to hit the bank to make a deposit, and then we need to hit the grocery store to pick up some things. Ethan wants to have burgers on the grill tonight, but it turns out that we have no buns and it seems that the lettuce we have is no good so I want to pick up some too. I suppose you should check on anything that you normally put on your burgers too."

Taylor and her father had decided to make lasagna for dinner. Or rather, two full pans of lasagna because it wasn't that much harder to make two than one and they could store the leftovers for random meals over the next few weeks to months. They didn't do this often, but they liked the results much more than the store-bought frozen lasagna. Of course, that meant that over the course of a couple of hours the kitchen ended up a mess, but they eventually finished the prep work and started on the cleanup. The final cooking was going to wait a bit, as they'd given themselves plenty of time for things to go wrong during prep.

They'd put all the extra ingredients away and had just started on the dishes when Taylor froze. A little focusing had her confused. "I...think we're about to have visitors?"

Her father turned to her. "What? Did someone trip your surveillance net?"

"No, Amy's beacon just went off and it's approaching in the air, so I assume that Vicky is carrying her. They'll be in the surveillance net's coverage area in a minute though."

It only took another three minutes before Vicky landed, and Taylor met them at the door. Amy was only put down once inside the house, and a washcloth was used to clean up the blood around the still slightly bleeding cuts before liquid bandage was applied.

"So what happened?" Taylor finally asked, once Amy wasn't bleeding anymore.

"Mom was drinking," Vicky answered. "Found Amy's experimental plants and exploded on her. Threw a bottle of alcohol at some point, which is what I think caused the cuts. Though I half expected some kind of super-healing instead of perfectly normal liquid bandage?"

"Hive is busy."

"And leaving the injuries will be better if they're needed as evidence later," her father interjected. "Regarding that, who knows that you came here?"

"I didn't tell anyone," Vicky answered. "Ames left her phone at home and mine is turned off, so neither can be tracked."

"Okay. I'm going to make a couple of calls, then we'll discuss things further. Do you think your mother will answer the phone if I call her?"

"I dropped her off with the Pelhams first. I'm hoping that Aunt Sarah will talk some sense into her, though I didn't stick around long enough to tell them what was going on. Dad isn't home either, no clue where he is and I honestly don't know either of their cell phone numbers without booting up my own phone to check."

"I know that I've got Neil's number here, so I can give them a heads up at least. Give me a few minutes, then I'll be back."

They watched him head for his home office, and once he was gone Amy finally spoke up. "He said calls, plural."

"Yep," Taylor agreed.

"Who else is he going to call?"

"I assume that he's going to ensure that we can't be labeled as being or aiding kidnappers if your mother decides to call the police herself."

"Oh."

In the end a couple of police officers stopped by and took statements, in part because Carol had called things in already. They also took pictures of cuts on Amy, which had necessitated removing some of the liquid bandage to prove that there were cuts as described. They assured them all that Carol wouldn't be told where Amy and Vicky actually were for now, though admitted that they'd probably need to head back home at some point in the next few days unless Carol or Mark signed off on them not doing so. But they were good for staying the night at a minimum, and were going to do so.

The four ate dinner largely in silence, only getting around to deciding that Vicky would take the guest room while Amy used Taylor's. Amy had originally objected to that, before finding out that Taylor had already planned on sleeping in another dimension that they hadn't found any way to safely test to see if parahumans could even visit, even if they assumed that the barriers over the Inn wouldn't disconnect shard devices immediately.

After the dinner dishes had been cleaned up the four of them sat in the living room. Initially in silence as the news described 'odd, but currently unknown events in Eagleton', but after ten minutes Amy spoke up. "I think I want my powers removed."

Last edited: Dec 10, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 79 - June 18, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Nov 11, 2020

#14,398

"I don't think you should be making that decision now," Danny said to Amy after a minute of silence. "In fact, I'm going to veto any further discussion of that happening until at least morning, possibly for a day or two. Both to give you time to think about it more and so that I can check on some other options."

"But..." Amy started, but he held his hand up.

"No, I don't even want to hear your reasoning tonight. Sleep on it at a minimum and decide what you're willing to tell us tomorrow. You may feel different then, and if it does end up looking like the best option then we can talk more about it at that point. Hive isn't available to do anything tonight anyway, and may need a day or two herself."

"Oh."

They sat there in silence for a couple of minutes, before Taylor sighed to herself and stood up. "I'm going to see if I can find any board games."

"Oooh," Vicky said. "Why not get cards? We can play poker!"

"Because I subconsciously cheat at cards."

"Wait, what?"

Taylor hadn't found any board games they wanted to play, and instead ended up demonstrating just how crazy she was when it came to cheating at cards. That was followed by figuring out tricks such as 'use telekinesis spell to slip one card out of the deck', which was even better when she knew what card someone had picked previously. According to Vicky, this qualified her to enter any number of talent shows or become a professional magician.

Amy had found the idea of a real-life magical girl playing the part of a stage magician hilarious.

Eventually everyone headed to bed, Taylor popping over to the Inn to do so. She didn't have a lot to do overnight, as Hive was quite busy, so focused on monitoring the area back home and reading the Odyssey. In Greek, because she could, though she didn't end up finding it all that different from the English translations. Really, the only major difference was that it seemed to flow better in Greek.

Around three in the morning Hive apparently finished up well enough to get Taylor's attention, pulling an instance of her into the simulation system. Which was obviously running over plans for something, though it wasn't obvious what it was from where Taylor ended up standing.

"So you're done with the shard that was responsible for the Machine Army?" Taylor asked once she'd finished taking in the things around her.

"All initial processing is done," Hive agreed. "It didn't tell me nearly as much as I'd hoped it would. The most useful thing other than resources that I got was a set of unusually compact higher-dimensional connection and communication systems. Most of which I'd already reverse-engineered from scanning the machines created by it in the first place."

"Ah."

"Sadly, I still haven't figured out how Shard devices create or obtain some of the rarer materials in their construction. I suspect that several elements that I need to disable immediately for safety reasons are involved, but once disabled I can't learn anything from them."

"Okay. Then why pull me in here?"

"Primarily to get permission to build some more structures, Lord." Things shifted in the simulation system, showing a gleaming black pyramid. "Most important on my list is a low-mana construction testing facility on an uninhabited instance of Earth a few dimensions away from the Inn."

Taylor nodded. "That makes sense, though why a pyramid?"

"That's more of a cap on top of the facility, but is stable enough under forces coming from multiple directions."

"Okay. I'm good with that. What else?"

The black pyramid vanished and was replaced with a tower. A tall tower, that looked like a fairly normal skyscraper on the outside. "I'd like to construct six of these on the Earth that the Inn sits on. Four on the equator and one on each pole."

"What are they?"

"Their primary purposes would be sensor systems and planetary shield generation. Those functions only use ten percent of the non-support elements of the structures, so I figured that I'd set the rest up to function as hotel and condo style residential spaces in case we ever want to allow tourists. That and I imagine that the 'penthouse' views will be incredible."

That had Taylor blinking as she considered it. "Do we need a planetary shield?"

"Probably not at the Inn, but the shield would be able to be deployed over other instances of Earth within range and Earth Bet is well within the projected range. It should also be quite difficult to trace the origin of the shield to find the generators from outside of it, and once I've confirmed that everything is working I'll want to build backup versions in other places around the shroud."

"Okay, that makes far more sense to me."

The tower vanished, and was replaced with something that looked very much like the Inn. "Lastly, Lord, I'd like to build another instance of the Inn, though without the majority of the sub-basements and less restrictive shielding."

"Why?"

"I want to place it within the inner shroud as a place that parahumans can almost certainly be brought to. There's a version of Earth that appears to be nearly identical to the one we used for the Inn, just inside of the inner shroud instead of outside of it, complete with the same inlet. I'd construct the second Inn there as I already know all of the pitfalls I'd run into in doing so. That instance of Earth is also a candidate for the sensor and shield generator towers due to its position relative to the current Inn and Earth Bet."

To demonstrate, Hive swapped the image of the Inn out for a map of the local dimensional sea. Earth Bet, the current Inn, the inner shroud and two bubbles inside of it, and the proposed Inn were all marked. The latter was inside of the inner shroud, near-ish to the deteriorated shroud bubble.

Taylor nodded. "Okay, that does sound like a good idea. Presumably the new Inn won't have the shield generators of the current one?"

Hive shook her head. "No, Lord. It will have them, they just won't be turned on by default."

"Right, that does make sense. Go for it, if only because it will provide a decent place for Ethan and Sherie to watch Missy in action."

"Thank you, Lord. Would you like an update on the actions of those seeking to meet you in town?"

Taylor sighed at that. "No, but I should listen anyway."

The map of the dimensional sea vanished and a three-dimensional duplicate of Brockton Bay appeared. Dots lit up all over it in different colors. A collection of yellow dots grew brighter as the rest dimmed. "These individuals are the Fallen members that have that odd second Shard device connection. I've determined that they have a way of 'waking it up', and when they do they somehow pass information through it. Sometimes they provide information, other times they receive it. Our equipment isn't affected, but there's a field around them that I suspect makes them harder to perceive or examine from the point of view of other Shard devices."

"So they've got a nearly impossible to spot and incredibly difficult to hijack communication method?"

"Essentially, Lord. But I have determined that the way this secondary connection works is safe to interrupt."

"Safe to interrupt, as in we can break it without harming anyone?"

"Yes, no lasting harm will come from doing so, though there will likely be momentary pain as part of the disconnection."

"Huh. So we can disconnect their secure communications. Is there any reason not to?"

Hive shrugged. "Not doing so makes it harder for us to know what they're doing. Doing so alerts them that we can do so and possibly puts a drain on our energy resources to maintain the barrier that prevents the Shard from just reconnecting to them while they're here."

"Are any of the ones here connected to the shard in question the normal way?"

"I would need to do a deeper analysis of the Shard connections to know that, Lord. The secondary connections are unusual, only a couple dozen Shard devices seem to generate them in this manner and they are reasonably easy to track as a result. Compared to that, there are a lot of normal Shard connections that look incredibly similar from any distance at all. I would need to do a deeper scan of the individuals before I can trace their connections back to a specific Shard device. That said, I think it unlikely as all of those in the group with normal Shard connections have the secondary one as well. Regardless of that, even if one of them is connected to that Shard device their primary connection won't be affected by the disconnection of the secondary connection. Keeping the disconnecting barrier up would also prevent them from establishing new secondary connections."

Taylor considered that. The Fallen wanted to test to see if she was 'worthy', so knowing what they were going to attempt was probably better than keeping the fact they knew about the secret communication method secret. "Can we make the disconnection incredibly obviously something that we did?"

Hive looked confused. "Yes, Lord. Why would you want to?"

"Because if they know it was us then that might be enough for them to consider me 'worthy' and leave. Or just scare them off from whatever 'worthy' means."

"Ah. That is a good thought. I can set up the warehouse to generate a significant light show as the barrier is put up, and add visual glyphs in the barrier itself to show where it covers. The latter will be most visible at night, of course."

"Then let's do that as soon as you're ready to."

"Of course, Lord." The yellow dots dimmed and a collection of red dots lit up. "These are Miss Davis's creations from the rabid animals. They appear to be scouting the area, and several of them have taken to following the parahuman members of the Fallen around. According to Miss Corti, Riley wishes to become a magical girl but can't figure out how to approach you and Ned just wants to see if you can kill him or not."

Taylor blinked several times. "How did you find that out?"

"Miss Corti dropped a letter 'to whom it may concern' into the warehouse's mailbox an hour ago."

"She...but...huh."

"I recommend bringing it up with your father later, and expect that we won't be able to do much about it until Amy's situation is dealt with."

Taylor nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense. Is there anything else I should know?"

"I've got enough materials prepared for four more core augmentation units. Would you like to split those between you and Missy, or should we assume that Amy will need to be augmented and set aside some of it to get her up to multiple augmentation units right away?"

"Let's wait until we know what's happening with her and decide that then."

"Very well."

Around quarter of five, as the sun was preparing to rise, Hive started her light show. Taylor watched from a couple of surveillance drones as the warehouse started to glow, getting the attention of everyone in the area including those with the secondary shard connections. Hive was live streaming the event as well, with a note on the streams talking about disabling 'problematic Fallen communications' in town.

After three minutes of seemingly gathering energy, a glowing beam of white light shot up into the sky over the warehouse. Once it reached a predetermined height it stopped and started to spread out in all directions, gradually curving down to the ground. Along this surface there were various Belkan glyphs floating down from the beam of light. Over the course of five minutes the dome formed, covering the entire area including the Rig out on the water. As soon as the entire sphere had formed, the underground sections having been much less fancy in their setup, the entire thing pulsed to cut the secondary shard connections.

Hive reported that those with the connections recoiled in pain for a moment, as expected, even as the thick beam of light shrunk down to a glowing thread connecting the warehouse to the barrier. No extra connections had been cut, and an apology for the lack of warning before enacting the barrier appeared on the streams before they cut out. The entire barrier dimmed down to barely visible when a glyph wasn't passing across the surface, and as the sun rose it all but vanished in the brighter light.

Ten minutes after the show was over, Taylor's Minerva phone rang. She spun out a multitasking instance for it and answered.

"Good morning," Taylor greeted.

"Good morning Minerva," Armsmaster replied. "I'm hoping that you can explain more about your morning light show?"

"The Fallen have some people in town looking to test me. They had a parahuman-assisted communication method that they were using to coordinate. After some examination we were able to figure out a way to safely block it from working and opted to implement it immediately."

"I see. Will the effect covering the area do anything else?"

"It shouldn't, no. It was designed to block that specific parahuman trick and nothing else. We're only keeping it up right now in case the connections restore themselves."

"That does sound prudent. Thank you for the information."

"You're welcome. Did you need anything else this morning?"

"No, that's all for now."

"Then have a nice day."

"The same to you."

Missy joined Taylor and her father for morning exercise, then went home for breakfast. Taylor held her father back from them doing the same right away so that she could fill him in on things. He agreed on waiting to make an actual decision on things with the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine, but figured that sending them a letter so that they didn't do anything rash while they were otherwise occupied was probably a good idea. That would require a little bit of thought. He also agreed on waiting on deciding on additional augmentation units until they knew what they were doing with Amy, though more from a 'so nobody is locked down due to that' point of view than in case they wanted to install more in Amy.

After that they'd headed home and made baked french toast for breakfast before waking up Amy and Vicky. Breakfast was largely eaten in silence, followed by everyone moving into the living room.

"So," Danny said once they were all settled in their seats. "Amy, do you still think that you want your powers removed?"

"Yes," Amy answered.

"Do you want to tell us why?"

The girl fidgeted for a moment before nodding. "Having them is too much pressure. I know I can't possibly heal everyone, and that I can't experiment on people. But it seems like no matter how much good I do it isn't enough, and now that I know that the phantom organs are really there I can feel my powers pushing me to figure them out. I spend more time ensuring that I didn't experiment on someone when healing them now than I actually spend healing them in the first place, and I think that's going to get worse now that Carol has seen the plants I was experimenting with. She'll be on the lookout for more and won't let me do that now."

"And Mom is entirely against therapy," Vicky said, shaking her head. "Thinks the entire profession exists for brainwashing people or something, though I've never found out why. Aunt Sarah knows, but just sighs and tells me that it's my mother's decision to make."

"Right," Danny said. "I'm going to visit Carol in person today, without any of you there, to see if I can get her point of view and work something useful out. I'd like it if the three of you could stick together for the day, even if Taylor would prefer to get some training in, if only because I can call Taylor with updates if needed. I'll leave it up to you three if you stay here or find something to do elsewhere."

Vicky frowned. "I do have my phone, even if I turned it off."

"And why did you turn it off?"

"Er, so that Mom wouldn't know where I took Amy. Which means if I turn it on she might be able to track me, and if she can't that will raise questions..."

"Yeah. Let's stick with Taylor being the point of contact until I've had a chance to talk to your mother. That said, you three should decide if you want me to drop you off anywhere."

Missy had grumbled a bit about not being able to get training in with Taylor today, due to Amy and Vicky not being able to join them in any capacity safely, but felt like she should probably be happy about that at the same time. Instead she was working on duplicating the stealth field trick with magic instead of a device. She didn't fully understand the math, but some of it just felt right and seemed to work well in simulation.

In fact, she'd spent most of the morning playing with a side project instead. It needed work to be truly effective, but she'd come up with a way to package pre-folded space into the 'beam wrapper' Taylor had come up with. When the wrapper cracked open on impact the space would then unfold. It couldn't hold anything, but the unfolding space seemed like it would be incredibly disruptive to the environment. Even better, if it worked like she thought it would, it should completely bypass anti-mana protections and the area of effect would be based on how much space you folded into the wrapper to begin with.

Of course, it was probably fatal to anything living. Testing it was going to be problematic because of that, especially as she wasn't actually certain how to shield against it. Or if you could reliably shield against it at all. She eventually put those equations aside and returned to the stealth field trick instead. The 'uncertainty loophole' that Hive hadn't included in the field generators was something that Missy wanted to reproduce, as part of being able to cloak someone who couldn't sense shifted photons and not blind them. It was also one of the more complicated pieces of things.

Wrap someone in a light-shifting bubble? Easy. Do that so that they could still see inside the bubble? Much, much harder...

Taylor didn't tell her father that she still had a surveillance drone following him as he pulled away from the movie theater. Sure, she didn't think that Mrs. Dallon would do anything that would hurt him, especially with him wearing a fully-charged belt buckle, but that didn't mean that she didn't want to know if intervention might be needed. Of course, she'd also already dropped a surveillance drone at the Dallon residence, and as a result could tell that both adults were home. He knew about that one though, because they'd been waiting for when Mrs. Dallon returned from the Pelham household.

It seemed odd that Taylor was officially 'in charge' of the three of them, despite being the youngest of the three. Worse, the other two had gone along with that without any complaint whatsoever. Vicky had even quipped that 'of course the only one of us to kill an Endbringer is in charge', only to be told that it was entirely because only one of them had a phone to answer right now.

The three headed in and bought their tickets and snacks, then sat down in the far-too-empty theater. Apparently it was a slow day, possibly due to the barrier having gone up that morning causing people to stay home 'just in case'. Or, checking on the sensors at the warehouse, perhaps everyone had flocked there to see what else was going to happen today. Which, if Taylor had her way, would be 'nothing of note'.

Her father reached the Dallon household shortly after the movie started, and Taylor honestly paid more attention to that than to the movie itself. Mrs. Dallon answered the door, the two ended up in the living room, and Taylor wished that the surveillance drone was rigged for audio at a distance. Over the course of ten minutes things went from 'Mrs. Dallon looks annoyed' to 'Mrs. Dallon attempts to throw the coffee table,' making Taylor glad when her father left. Even if she wasn't happy with the apparent outcome of things.

Instead of heading home or to the theater, her father visited a couple of other offices and a police station, asking a few questions at each and filling out some forms along the way. Only when he was done with that did he return to the theater, shortly before the film ended. That meant that the three of them could head directly out of the theater to his car.

"So how did it go?" Vicky asked Danny once they'd started moving.

"Not well," he admitted. "And while I have a couple more calls to make, I dislike that the best solution that I have right now is an obvious depowering."

"Obvious?" Taylor asked.

"New Wave's reputation is working against us in this case, and parahuman custody issues get thorny very quickly. But if Amy isn't a parahuman then all of a sudden the normal systems apply in full. The problem is that it needs to be public that she isn't a parahuman, and preferably done in a manner that points at her home life being the cause so that a full investigation can occur."

"Ah."

The rest of the ride home was in silence, likely out of a sense of it being inappropriate to talk about some of what they needed to talk about while out and about. Much better to hold off a little and deal with things back at the house. Not that they started discussing things when they reached the house either. Taylor ended up trying to figure out what to write to the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine to hopefully keep them from doing anything rash while her father went to make phone calls. Amy and Vicky had migrated upstairs to ensure that their things were ready, in case they were heading home.

Figuring out what to write hadn't taken too long, but that left more questions. "How do I deliver the letter? Just teleport it to them, send a drone..."

"Lord," Hive interrupted. "I anticipated this being a problem and have a solution that I believe will placate Miss Davis."

"Oh?"

A moment later a set of bird-shaped bullet templates and a new bullet equation were passed to Taylor. "I created a messenger bullet that can store a single small item and deposit it at a given location or near a given target. The various bird templates are compatible with it, essentially creating a temporary messenger bird. You can skip the 'fluid motion' portions of the bullet equation if using a more rigid template, of course."

"Huh." Taylor examined the equation and the various differences from a normal bullet. It didn't take long to determine that it was much closer to a partially-automated sensor drone than a bullet. Manual control mixed with automatic seeking, a single payload that was essentially a small pocket dimension to store the item to be delivered in, and a collection of elements to interact with the template it was loaded onto so that the bird templates would look like they were actual birds.

The template elements were actually quite interesting, and she copied those off and quickly integrated them into a normal bullet before firing up the simulation system. Because 'exploding pigeons' sounded amusing if she didn't need to take a fight seriously. The bird templates worked great in simulation, though real-life testing would be needed and a lot more work would be needed if the exploding bullets needed to be able to do things like 'land'.

Moving back to the original equation and template set, she decided that it would definitely work. But she did have a question. "Why would this placate her more than just teleporting the letter to her?"

"I did some research on 'magical girls'," Hive explained. "Many of the concepts used with them are on the surface ridiculous, especially given the kinds of enemies they are supposed to be dealing with, but 'cutesy' things such as delivery animals are common in what I found. Using a magical animal to deliver the letter would likely reinforce that it's real while also reassuring her that the wait will be worth it."

"Ah. Okay, I guess I can see that. Should we pop the bird through a portal or two to get it to originate at the warehouse?"

"I believe that would be prudent. Do you want a true physical letter or do you plan on just using a Knight Object for it?"

"It doesn't need to last forever, or even more than a day or two, so let's go with the latter."

Creating a quick Knight Object letter was easy enough, and then a Knight Object envelope was placed around it. The latter was sealed with a six-bladed design pressed into 'wax', as though by a ring, and set to dissolve entirely when the seal was broken. The envelope was then stored in the new 'messenger bullet', in the form of a small owl that obviously wasn't large enough to contain the envelope, hopefully making its appearance upon delivery more impressive.

The rug in the hallway switched to portal mode, the owl flew through it, and then it returned to being a rug. At the Inn, the owl circled around and returned to the portal frame that it had exited through, now connected to the warehouse for a moment. Just long enough for the owl to make it through, in fact. Once the owl was back on Earth Bet it climbed into the air before Taylor released manual control and allowed the automatic guidance to bring it to where the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine were holed up.

"What were you just doing?" Amy asked as she came downstairs.

"Sending a message," Taylor answered. "Nothing that I think you need to worry about right now."

The other girl didn't look convinced, but nodded after a moment. "Okay."

"Assuming Dad doesn't figure something else out, do you have any thoughts on how to frame things correctly for your powers being removed?"

"I...have some plans for an organism that could enter my body and disconnect my powers by dismantling the structure in my brain. I never went through with trying to make it, because I decided that it was more likely to kill me than anything else. But I kept the notebook with them, and know where it's hidden. I think that pulling that notebook out and adding some notes indicating a new way to ensure a better than fifty/fifty shot at success should do it?"

Taylor blinked as she considered that. "Is that even possible?"

"No," Hive responded. "Shard-type connections are far more physically integrated than that. At best that would remove the control interfaces and ensure that she couldn't control her powers at all, and I highly doubt that they'd go dormant."

Amy nodded. "I'd figured that out myself after reading about a parahuman in Canada that took damage to their brain, destroying the gemma. It wasn't pretty, and I gave up trying to figure out how to handle that side of things as I'm fairly certain that my powers won't let me remove powers. That's why I never attempted it, really. But just presenting it as though it was something I honestly thought would work, and possibly was actually attempting to do, should be enough for anyone looking into what happened."

"That does sound somewhat reasonable," Taylor agreed.

"It's much better than my first plan. Making it seem like I was only concerned with removing my powers is less likely to create a serious uproar than intentionally pulling a Missy."

What in the world did that mean? "Pulling a Missy?"

"Setting it up to look like I was trying to commit suicide like she did on accident, though I'm not sure how I'd have done so without being far too blatant in copying her accidental setup."

"Oh. Yeah, that's mostly worked out okay for her, but I'm fairly certain that she wouldn't recommend doing it intentionally. Nor do I think my father would be likely to sign off on doing that intentionally, for that matter."

"I wouldn't sign off on what, exactly?" said father asked as he returned.

"Making it look like Amy was trying to commit suicide."

"That is definitely off of the table. Sadly, I'm out of other options that'll take anything less than six months to deal with this thanks to the intersections of normal and parahuman custody headaches. I also don't think waiting that long is a good idea right now, which means depowering is sadly a go. We should probably get Vicky down here so we can properly plan things out."

"I'll go get her," Amy said, heading for the stairs.

Taylor figured that part of the planning was going to be figuring out if this was 'depower to normal human' or 'swap parahuman powers for mage abilities', as it dawned on her that she wasn't aware if Amy wanted to be able to do magic or not. Possibly to be followed by going through a similar, if less annoying from a dancing around family point of view, process with the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Once upon a time life seemed so simple. Taylor almost wanted to go back to that, except that she now knew that it hadn't been simple even then. That and it had been a horrible existence that she wouldn't wish on her worst enemy, though she might make an exception there if it was a side effect of an automatic karmic punishment involving them getting what they'd been dishing out. Instead she now had to deal with heroes that were falling into villain roles, villains that wanted to be heroes, and who knew what else.

Maybe she should see if intentionally destroying a planet was a good stress reliever?

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Threadmarks Chapter 80 - June 19, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

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PronounsHe/Him/His

Nov 18, 2020

#14,606

They'd delayed starting the discussion until everyone had ice cream, generally a scoop to a scoop and a half each with chocolate syrup. Hive was the exception, with eight scoops of different ice cream flavors and three kinds of syrup. It was an interesting sight, and she had to use the telekinesis spell to control the spoon being used to eat it.

After they'd watched Hive eat for a couple of minutes, Taylor turned to Amy. "So, we should probably figure out a number of things."

Amy turned to look at Taylor. "What?"

"For example, do you want to just be normal after your powers are removed, or do you want to go from parahuman to mage?"

That had Amy and Vicky staring at her, blinking. After a few moments Amy sighed. "I don't think I could handle being normal, because I highly doubt that removing my powers is going to disable my ability to sense magic. So being able to use magic is the best bet."

Taylor nodded. "Okay. Do you want to keep a version of your powers?"

"Hold up," Vicky said. "That's an option? Since when?"

"Since the beginning? I've got what would've been my parahuman powers, Missy basically still has hers. Admittedly, some parahuman powers just aren't safe to use afterwards, but I highly doubt that Amy's are going to fall into that category and Hive is probably going to be like a kid in a candy store going over how they work."

"Holy crap. Every time you depower someone you essentially get stronger?"

"Literally yes," Hive answered. "As rare materials that Shard devices contain are needed to build augmentation units for mages. The additional information is frequently most useful to me as I work on constructing things, and I suspect that Amy's Shard device will help me drastically improve all of the healing routines available going forward."

"I don't want to be a healer," Amy insisted, then paused for a moment. "Though being able to modify my own biology would be nice, actually. Would I be able to do that to disguise myself better?"

Hive shrugged. "Maybe. I won't know how safe it is or isn't until I have a better grasp on how it all functions. Your healing of my Lord seemed to be safe enough and hasn't caused any problems that I can detect, but significant changes to your body could cause problems with magic."

"Okay, keeping access to them sounds okay if it might let me do that. But I think I want an actual gun, or at least an obviously long-range weapon, instead of getting up close and personal with people."

"That should be doable, though most of the reason for shorter-range weapons is because the magical attacks we have so far easily take care of long range. They also provide theoretical options when casting is contraindicated for any reason, or is being prevented in any manner."

"Why would you want a gun instead of a giant mallet?" Vicky asked.

Amy rolled her eyes and held up a hand to waggle her fingers. "Because for years I've been useless unless someone got into touch range, and even then a smart opponent could keep me mostly harmless long enough to drag me off."

"Oh."

"So you want a gun," Danny said. "Any specific kind?"

"Bright and colorful," Amy answered. "Preferably able to switch between, say, a machine gun looking setup and a sniper rifle looking setup? Maybe even toy-like in appearance?"

"What?"

"If I'm going to be a magical girl of any kind then I'm going to have fun with it."

"Would you like the barrel to look like it's made out of hearts?" Hive asked.

Amy's eyes lit up. "Oooh. Yes! Interlinked heart-shaped bubbles in different colors would be great for the barrel."

Taylor figured that this was going to be interesting when everything was in place, but also figured that they should move on. "Okay then. I assume that Hive is going to want to make you a necklace device as well, including a temporary 'while working on your shard' one as an interim thing so that the permanent one doesn't appear out of nowhere. Any preference for a design on it?"

That had Amy thinking for a couple of minutes, which gave everyone time to focus on their own ice cream as well. Eventually she came to some kind of decision and turned to Hive. "So, does it have to have a single form?"

"No," Hive answered. "Missy's can actually take any number of forms, though I only defined the one for her."

"And I'd likely be wearing it when in and out of 'costume'?"

"Yes."

"Then I think I want the default form to be a simple necklace with a...pentagram-shaped moonstone pendant, perhaps? With a choker having a golden heart pendant for an alternate form."

Hive nodded. "I can do that. Do you have a preferred color or materials for the chains?"

"Gold is fine for the necklace, but I think I want the choker to appear to be lace. Black lace, I think."

"Okay."

"And because it came up with Missy," Taylor continued. "Perhaps a name for your non-combat device, since Hive needs to name it before you get it for various reasons. You'll name your combat device when you get it."

That led to another pause as Amy pondered various potential names. Everyone other than Hive finished their ice creams before she sighed. "I was thinking Haven, but as I understand it there are going to be capes from the Haven team here in the next few days and that could get confusing. So perhaps something simple, like Jewel?"

"Whatever works for you," Taylor answered as Hive nodded agreement.

"We should probably work on other aspects of the plan as well," Danny said. "And decide when things are happening as well. I'm...unsure about Amy and Vicky returning home today after my talk with Carol. I suppose that we could call the Pelhams and see if they want to convince me otherwise?"

"What was that?" Missy asked, confused.

"I said your training group is likely going to be growing soon," Ethan repeated.

"That doesn't tell me much of anything."

"If I read the signs right, in the next day or two at least one more person is going to be converted from a parahuman to a mage."

Missy blinked at that. "How in the world do you figure that?"

"I can't see much else happening after Danny called asking questions about what could be done about Amy, which is very little from the PRT side of things without an obvious incident that hasn't happened yet."

"Oh. Damn, that means that there's going to be even less time for Taylor to train me."

"How much more does she have to teach you, compared to you doing things like surviving progressively harder training routines against who knows how many drones at a time?"

"Well, er..."

Ethan grinned. "You might actually learn more by helping to train Amy. Though you probably also get to be jealous of her, given that she gets to benefit from the things learned while training you without actually going through some of it herself."

Missy's eye twitched at that. "Did you have to point that out?"

"No, but the look on your face made doing so worth it!"

It'd taken a while, but they'd eventually decided on an overall plan. Vicky would take Amy home in the morning, after Carol and Mark should both have left for work to reduce the chances of an immediate confrontation. Amy would then dig out her notebook and make the additional notes in it. When she was ready she would let Vicky know, then summon Hive with her beacon. In an attempt to at least keep some of New Wave out of the public relations nightmare that was coming, Vicky would call her aunt and ask her to come over to talk to Amy, expressing concern over her sister's mental state.

Despite not needing to due to Hive working on things, Taylor opted to sleep at the Inn again anyway so that there would still be enough beds for the others. Though she was curious, and once she arrived she headed down into the sub-basements to see just how much Hive was storing there right now. That turned out to be quite a lot, apparently storing the materials from shards, Endbringers, and mining had overflowed clear into sub-basement D. And that was after they'd been packed into space-expanded storage containers.

"Do we have enough room to store materials going forward?" Taylor asked.

"Of course, Lord," Hive responded. "Especially once the building projects kick in properly. I'm also cheating a little and using spare Shard material to prefabricate Amy's new Hybrid Device instead of making it from her Shard. The software components will need to be dealt with later, of course, but the hardware will be done by morning. Most of what you see here is going straight into construction drones when they're finished as well, barring the intact Shard material that will be sent into place when construction is far enough along to act as part of the processing networks."

"Okay, so it won't be long before you have plenty of room in here again?"

"Correct, Lord. Which I suspect will be useful, since I doubt that we'll not be working to remove several more Shard devices after we're done with Amy's."

"I suppose that's a good point. We'll need to figure out how to approach the remains of the Nine once we're ready."

Taylor looked around a little more, then returned to the Inn proper. Stopping by the front door, she noted a little bit of dirt that the cleaning drones would take care of overnight, but it reminded her that a general 'cleaning spell' was on her list of things she wanted to get working. If only as a quick solution when proper washing wasn't an option for whatever reason. Beyond the spell she had that only worked if she was naked except for devices.

Perhaps she should look into designing it as a multi-stage spell? One that would scan as a first stage, then allow the caster to tweak what was and wasn't filth to be removed before actually removing the dirt and grime? It wouldn't be fully automated, but it didn't really need to be fully automated either. Just faster than cleaning up normally.

It would make a decent overnight project, at least.

Missy wasn't sure if she should be happy that she'd been able to sleep in on Monday or not. Morning exercise was being delayed until after she was dropped off at Taylor's house, except that it wasn't happening then either because Amy and Vicky were still there and they couldn't head to the Inn. Though that didn't explain why, as the car approached the house, it felt like Taylor wasn't in it. What was the point of not doing morning exercise because visitors couldn't join them if Taylor wasn't there in the first place?

Ethan waited in the car while Missy headed up to the door, only leaving once Danny had let her into the house. He drove off as she entered the living room, where Amy and Vicky were sitting.

"So where's Taylor?" Missy asked.

"Dealing with mail," Vicky answered. "Apparently she'd built up a backlog?"

"Ah. That'll probably be worse if the post office starts delivering to the warehouse."

Danny snorted. "She's dealing with the backlog from the mail slot because she got a warning call that the post office wants to bring a truck full of mail by today."

"Oh."

"She should be here shortly, since she claimed that it wasn't all that bad currently."

"So," Vicky said, popping over to Missy. "We decided that Taylor was a bad example because she apparently doesn't need to cast through Hive. What can Ames expect when she has an awesome magical necklace of her own?"

Missy ended up answering questions for twenty minutes before Taylor appeared in a burst of mana. She did so on the rug, invisible, with Danny and Vicky not noticing immediately because of that. Compared to them, Amy's head had spun around, which was totally unfair as she didn't even have the stupid anchor sensor yet.

"Sorry about keeping you waiting," Taylor said as she and Hive faded into view, Hal obviously the necklace currently around the girl's neck. "Though depending on the timing of things I may need to rush off on short notice multiple times today."

"Multiple times?" Danny asked.

"Hive ordered a lot of things that are also apparently due to arrive at the warehouse sometime today, well ahead of schedule. Apparently they gave us free 'rush order' status once they realized who we were. Or perhaps just where the delivery was going?"

"Did they try to return your payment too?"

"They offered," Hive answered. "But I declined, citing that we don't want to cause economic problems worldwide by accepting money and goods but not spending money. I've actually created a form letter to that effect, in case anyone else needs to respond similarly, and posted a notice about that and monetary gifts on our website. As it is, my Lord is already making more money through dirt-cheap patent licensing than we are likely to need in the next decade with more items ready to be distributed if desired."

"You just finished the neural interface rig," Taylor said, rolling her eyes. "Admittedly, that's better than what I accomplished overnight, but we haven't even tested it outside of simulation because I apparently can't use it normally."

"Neural what?" Vicky asked.

"Hive had a background project that she finished up on spare cycles to figure out how to make a non-magical way to read minds for various things. Controlling various things, though apparently only in one direction for now. So dialing a phone, mentally typing and moving a mouse, even controlling wheelchairs. Though apparently it's a bad fit for controlling prosthetic limbs, being designed specifically for conscious control of external items."

"Almost, Lord," Hive added. "It would be bad for walking, there being too many subconscious items tied into that, but controlling a prosthetic hand or a complete arm mounted to a wheelchair or similar should be fine."

"You've got mind-reading tech?" Vicky said, bouncing slightly. "Non-magical mind reading tech?"

"As of last night," Taylor confirmed. "Untested, but Hive is confident that it works."

"Can I try? I know I can't get magic, but that sounds awesome!"

Taylor looked at her father, who shrugged. "We're waiting for Carol and Mark to both leave for work anyway, right?"

"Mark already left," Taylor said. "But yeah, Carol is still home."

"Then why not let her give it a try?"

"Because the wheelchair Hive made isn't brute rated."

Vicky's face went through several expressions, before she settled on pouting while blushing. "I'll be careful!"

That was enough to get Amy to snicker, causing Vicky to glare at her.

"Whatever," Danny said. "I have to get to work. Don't forget to monitor for when Carol leaves for work herself." He then paused. "We do expect her to go to work, right? She hasn't called out or already had the day off?"

Vicky shook her head. "She may officially not take cases due to her work with New Wave, but she still has plenty of office work to take care of. I know she said that she'd put some things off last week that she really needed to get done today, so she'll be going in." She then checked the time. "Though I'd say she's still got a good half hour or so before she'll be doing so, maybe an hour?"

"Right, I remember you saying something about her normally sleeping in a bit last night. Taylor, if Carol hasn't left by lunch then give me a call."

Taylor nodded. "Will do."

It was amusing, watching Vicky use the wheelchair that Hive had built. Taylor had to admit that it was more advanced than most wheelchairs before the neural interface was taken into account, as evidenced by the last eight or so minutes of it going up and down the stairs. Though it was much harder to control with the manual controls on the back, at least for things like stair climbing, and it really wasn't designed to be moved with a dead battery.

Hive had gotten the core interface unit itself down to a headband, even if the processing pack and battery system were larger. This wasn't anywhere near the level of 'place something on your ear and operate your phone all day from it', and likely never would be. Getting it down to a headband and processing unit was already extreme miniaturization, as apparently the first few versions of the thing would've been the size of a small house.

Actually having the prototype ready today was also a little bit of a deception on their part. Hive had bumped it up on the priority list due to the number of people who likely wouldn't be healed from crippling injuries with Panacea out of the picture. They'd checked, and literally nobody else on the planet was seen as capable of dealing with the sheer range of injuries that Amy could deal with right now. Brockton General instead kept the shorter list of things the girl couldn't heal instead, and that amounted to 'anything brain related' and a couple of parahuman conditions that didn't count as 'biology' anymore. So long as your brain survived and you were brought to her hanging onto the thinnest thread of life she could, in theory, save you.

Worse, in the past two years they could show that three quarters of the supposed 'general parahuman tourism' that the city got was actually directly related to people coming into town hoping to be healed by Amy. The jump in that tourism after word of her powers went out was staggering, and had only started to slump once her hospital hours were cut a few months back. There were very good chances that her depowering would result in riots, and Hive had also started building dedicated riot control drones just in case they were needed.

They had no plans of telling Amy any of that, of course. She had enough stress on her without needing to second-guess everything based on what-ifs and unofficial information. Once things had settled, in whatever way they did, she could decide if she wanted to do something about resuming healing. Or perhaps they could make devices that were specifically designed to do healing like she had and start distributing them? Though that would obviously depend on what Hive could do with the shard's programming.

"So," Amy said as Vicky tried going up the stairs backwards. "That's good for moving around, but what about other things?"

"There's a USB port on the chair," Hive answered. "Plug it into a computer and it can act as a keyboard, mouse, and game controller. It can also be wirelessly connected to a compatible computer, phone, or tablet for similar functionality."

"Okay. So a laptop set on a stand attached to it would be able to be controlled at the same time?"

"Easily."

"Cool."

Amy had expressed some desire to try the wheelchair herself, but hadn't wanted to ruin Vicky's apparent enjoyment of playing with the system. Which, at first, had included a lot of stupid 'look, no hands' jokes. Of course, then Hive had explained how to trigger some of the other functions, such as seat angle adjustments and going up and down stairs.

"Whoa," Vicky said as the wheelchair suddenly started beeping. "Oh crap, did I break it?"

"I warned you that navigating stairs took more energy," Hive answered. "The beeping is because the battery is at ten percent, though admittedly I hadn't had the battery at full charge to begin with."

"Oh."

Vicky got the wheelchair downstairs, then disconnected herself before Hive moved it back to the Inn to plug it in there. Better to charge it there where the electricity was free instead of at home where it wasn't.

"So you may need to go answer the door at the warehouse today," Missy said once Hive had returned. "Why not just have a drone for that?"

"I suspect that people would not be comfortable with only having a drone to talk to," Hive answered. "That said, I do have plans for automatic loading and unloading drones, I just feel that they would be better received if under the direction of a human. If deliveries are frequent then we may wish to hire someone."

Vicky opened her mouth, paused, and then slumped. "I was going to volunteer, but that sounds like much more than a summer job and I have no clue if that would run afoul of parahuman hiring rules."

Hive shrugged. "We could easily hire you for that, as it wouldn't require use of your parahuman abilities, but wanting to have someone available during the school year would make it very temporary before we had to find a more permanent holder of the position. I'd also prefer if they had a linker core, atrophied or otherwise, if only because I'm positive that I can make drones that interface with any intact core for command purposes. Requiring that might fall under discrimination or disability laws though."

Taylor sighed. "I did not want to have to start thinking about hiring people, and if we go anywhere near that I think I'm going to want my father involved."

"That would be sensible, Lord, and perhaps we will eventually recruit an actual adult instead of needing to hire someone."

"Or maybe we just outright hire a dockworker with an atrophied core, even if you don't augment them."

"That could work as well."

"Why not make a drone that looks like a person?" Amy asked. "I mean, you look like a person. A little person, but a person, and you made that form yourself?"

Hive shook her head. "There are significant aspects of my own construction that I can't currently reproduce, and some of how this form works at all are included. I was only able to rebuild it as the core supporting hardware was intact. I may eventually be able to make humanoid drones, at which point my Lord will likely get the first one as a means of being 'in two places at once'."

"Oooh, that sounds incredibly useful. I'm sure a lot of people identify parahumans by virtue of 'only this one person that looks like them has never been seen with them'."

Missy nodded. "The Wards are encouraged to not be seen with their own schoolmates in costume because of that, as they can't be seen with themselves. A cleverly designed drone would cover that hole nicely."

"If needed," Hive added. "I can attempt to play the role of my Lord. Doing so for anyone else would be more difficult due to the lack of direct mental connection."

Taylor blinked at that. "You can what?"

Hive's response was to shift her form into a duplicate of Taylor's, right down to current clothing, though her body language was obviously quite far off. "I have what should be a suitable control interface to allow you to use a simulation instance to control my body when like this, though obviously we haven't tested it."

That was, if Taylor was being honest, a little freaky. Possibly incredibly useful, admittedly, but still freaky. Luckily Hive shifted back to her normal pint-sized form a moment later.

"Now you've got an instant body double!" Vicky exclaimed. "Seriously, what god did you impress enough to get all the goodies?"

"Probably a god of filth," Hive answered. "Though I suppose that if a deity was involved at all, they might've been offended by the filth?"

"What?" It took a moment, before Vicky blanched. "Oh, right. Sorry."

That killed conversation for a couple of minutes, before Taylor frowned. "Looks like I need to go unload for the post office shortly, but it also looks like Carol is about to leave."

Amy jumped to obviously nervous at that statement. "Would she see us flying by? Or would someone else tell her and have her turn around to head back home?"

"The angle's wrong for her to see us flying in if we stay low," Vicky retorted. "And if someone did call her we should still have enough time to get things set up."

"She left her cell phone at the Pelham household," Hive added. "So we should wait to see if she goes to fetch it first."

"I'll go deal with deliveries while you wait," Taylor said, moving over to the rug in the hallway. "Hopefully I won't be long either way anyway."

Bouncing through the Inn to 'costume up' only took a minute, then she appeared in the warehouse. A quick check of the area on the sensor system showed that it was still quite busy, though most people were currently staying off of the streets themselves. The warehouse's parking lot was packed, with a lot of people examining the transport device in the wall of the building. Or just getting their pictures taken next to it, in many cases. There was also a steady flow of people into the basement to use the various restrooms down there. To the point of there being a line of people waiting.

Hopefully there weren't any rules they were inadvertently breaking on public restrooms or something stupid like that.

Moving over to the loading dock doors, Taylor flipped the light on over one of them as a signal to the driver to use that one. Not that she cared which one was used, as they all opened into the same space, but with any luck it would speed things up to not have to explicitly tell the driver that today. Luckily, nothing was blocking access to the loading docks outside. She then waited the last couple of minutes for the truck to arrive.

People noticed the light turning on, and by the time the truck was backing in there were a few dozen people recording the scene. Taylor opened the door as the truck approached, and the driver stopped the truck long enough to take the lock off of the back of the truck and open the doors there before returning to the cab to finish backing in. She then let him in through the pedestrian door.

"So how much of this am I unloading?" Taylor asked.

"All of it," the driver said. "Though we put it all on pallets, so if you've got a forklift or pallet jack it'll be easy enough."

Looking at the quite full truck, she shrugged and debated the merits of telekinesis versus storage/retrieval spells. She'd just jump it all straight to the Inn if she didn't want to give it all a good scanning before doing so. Well, it was probably easier to deal with the scanning if she wasn't possibly triggering things with teleports, so telekinesis on the pallets it was.

The driver had been looking for anything to unload with when the first pallets of mail floated out of the truck, and he just stood back and watched as the truck seemingly unloaded itself. That only took a couple of minutes as everything was lined up along one side of the warehouse. Once everything was out of the truck, and the driver had stopped gaping, Taylor turned to him.

"So," she said. "Want me to do my thing to clear the pallets now so you can take them back with you?"

"Er, no," the driver said. "I don't think anyone would complain if you had them stacked up for next time we come by, but I don't need to take any back with me today."

"Okay then. Do I need to sign anything?"

"No, ma'am. Though I do wonder how anyone else would've been expected to unload the truck."

Taylor was about to reply when Hive sent her a message, obviously monitoring things from back home. Suppressing a snort, Taylor walked over to the wall where there was a button and pushed it. A moment later there was a Knight Object pallet jack sitting there. She nudged it out of the way and pushed the button again, forming a second one, before turning back to the driver. "These are a little less efficient, of course, but they do the job."

"That button just...makes pallet jacks?"

"They're temporary, but yes."

"If you can make a version installable in a truck then I think there are literally thousands of customers that would want one. More if it could also do forklifts outright."

"There's currently a bit too much behind it for that, sorry."

"Damn."

Ten minutes later the driver was gone, Taylor had scanned the mail and found nothing that concerned her, and the entire set had been sent to the Inn for later processing. She then headed back home, where Vicky and Amy had already left.

"So Missy," Taylor said. "We've got enough parts for extra augmentation units."

Missy jumped at that. "Really?"

"Yeah. But I was thinking that of the four we can install, the two of us only get one each and we let Hive put several in Amy right away. Assuming she can support them, of course."

The younger girl looked torn, but nodded. "I guess that makes sense. That would leave me with only one more slot available anyway, right?"

"Yeah."

"So are we waiting for Hive to be called over to deal with Amy before we do anything more significant?"

Hive shook her head. "I've already updated Space with the new translation matrices. You can start testing those whenever you're ready."

"Oh."

They spent the next twenty minutes or so testing the improved translation matrices, which worked wonderfully without causing headaches and were stackable on a single multitasking instance. Only up to three per, but it gave Missy a lot more options and simplified Taylor's own loading somewhat. Though doing so did result in a bias towards the 'bottom' language in any given stack for Taylor, and a bias towards the first one in the chain in general for Missy.

Hive had vanished over to the Dallon household near the end of that time, and Taylor had backed off on the number of languages she was loading to free up resources. Not long after that the removal of Amy's shard began. The two girls looked out the window to see the funnel after they heard sirens start up, then started planning on going to get some physical exercise while everyone else was focusing on the show.

"Lord," Hive sent, interrupting them. Though at least she'd sent it so both of them could hear it. "I've run into some problems."

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Threadmarks Interlude 8

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Nov 18, 2020

#14,621

Victoria Dallon - June 11, 2011

Geoffrey Pellick - June 12, 2011

Dragon - June 12, 2011

Eithne Artz - June 13, 2011

Colin Wallis - June 14, 2011

Nikos Vasil - June 14, 2011

Paul Tyrell - June 14, 2011

Sherrel Bailey - June 14, 2011

Eithne Artz - June 15, 2011

Paul Tyrell - June 15, 2011

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 15, 2011

Mimi Corti - June 15, 2011

Patricio Franco - June 16, 2011

Colin Wallis - June 16, 2011

Amy Dallon - June 16, 2011

Nanoha Takamachi - June 17, 0076

Pauline Jade - June 18, 2011

Dragon - June 18, 2011

Victoria Dallon - June 18, 2011

David Symons - June 19, 2011

Christine Mathers - June 19, 2011

Colin Wallis - June 19, 2011

Carol Dallon - June 19, 2011

Riley Davis - June 19, 2011

Brad Meadows - June 19, 2011

Sarah Pelham - June 20, 2011

Victoria Dallon - June 11, 2011

Vicky lay in bed, still having trouble truly comprehending what had happened today. In many ways it still didn't feel real. Seventeen previously-unknown Endbringers were killed before they could wake up and two of the three active ones were killed in combat, all by Taylor. On her birthday, that she was too caught up in planning the demise of Endbringers to remember. At the same time, it was also easier to accept than Amy's crush had been.

Sadly for Amy, Vicky did not swing that way, and if she ever did it was not likely to include her little sister. Even if they weren't actually related from a biological point of view. At the same time, Vicky knew that it wasn't Amy's fault and wasn't going to blame her for it. Ensure that the bathroom door was locked? Yes. Be more careful about where she placed her hands when she carried the younger girl? Sure. Blame Amy for her feelings? No.

As for the Endbringers, they only had Behemoth left, and there was no guarantee that any more attacks would happen now that it was proven that Taylor could, and would, kill them. Unless Leviathan showing up had been a sign of someone else controlling the Endbringers in general, beyond any form of self preservation they might have. After all, Taylor had already held Leviathan off once and there was no way for the Endbringer to know how many more drones she might have.

Of course, this brought up an entirely different problem with Amy. Vicky would be willing to put money on her sister breaking down and asking for her powers to be removed sometime in the next two months. Sooner if Mom found out about any of the 'phantom organ' experimentation or Amy's crush. They could probably put that off a bit if they could get Amy and Taylor to date, but that required Taylor to be into girls and Amy to be into Taylor. Which didn't seem to be the case.

Geoffrey Pellick - June 12, 2011

Geoffrey took a sip of his dwindling coffee while monitoring Dragon. The day before had been quite eventful, and had sadly delayed a couple of things regarding the Birdcage. Not that he could blame the AI for changing plans after two or nineteen Endbringers were killed, of course. He hadn't been prepared for that, so there was no way that Dragon could've been. He was honestly more annoyed with the actions of those celebrating Minerva's victory, specifically the number of cameras they'd taken down around the girl's warehouse that would need to be replaced.

He stared at a bit of processing output for a few seconds, before sighing and rubbing his eyes. Perhaps it was time to take a proper break to rest his eyes. Looking back at the screen had him blinking, then looking at the table. Because the terminal was no longer sitting in front of him. It had been right there, and now it was gone. Without him having heard anything. Grumbling, he got up out of the chair to see who'd grabbed the terminal after he'd probably nodded off without realizing it. Again. Because nobody liked to wake him up when he fell asleep like that.

Heading for the door, he paused and looked around, suddenly noticing that a lot of things weren't where they were supposed to be. As in, pretty much all of the equipment that they'd acquired from Dragon, some of which had been bolted to the building and were now missing. There was no way that he'd slept through the others pulling that off, but that didn't help explain what had happened.

Before he could truly work up into a rage over things, and he was starting to think he wanted to, there was a flash of light in front of him. He grabbed the paper that appeared without thinking, then blinked as he looked down at it. The text was upside-down at first, so he spun the paper around to read it properly.

Good morning,

We don't appreciate being monitored, and especially don't appreciate you attempting to disguise your activities by filtering the data feeds through an AI that you happened to find the control terminal for. All of your stolen equipment has been returned to the AI, minus the terminal that she would be unable to acknowledge the existence of. That will be dealt with in time as the AI's creator appears to be deceased and we are unable to return it to him.

-Lilia

P.S. This message will self-destruct in 2 minutes.

Geoffrey read the message three times before the potential problem with the postscript penetrated his brain. He dropped the paper and ran from the room, slamming the security door behind him as he did so. The complete lack of equipment in the island base meant that nobody was in the room when the letter timed out and broke apart into short-lived motes of light.

Dragon - June 12, 2011

Dragon had wanted to go deal with the Dragonslayers personally, but she'd been in the middle of too many other things and hadn't wanted them to get away due to the delay. So she'd sent others, who had picked the group up. Apparently it had gone exceptionally well, attributable to the fact that all of their gear had been taken from them. Well, that and the PRT watercraft that had shown up was their only way off of the island that they'd been holed up on.

Now, though, she was looking through the pile of returned equipment. Most of which she'd never thought that she'd ever see again, even if it was now modified to the point of uselessness for what she originally used it for. Also included were things that she hadn't even known had been taken by them, the group somehow having stolen them from her without her noticing. It did explain the inventory discrepancies in her warehouses, but also raised more questions than it answered.

Lilia had been kind enough to apologize for being unable to return the dismantled monitoring devices that had been used against them. Dragon had no problem with that, having written the equipment off already. It was also a small price to pay for the return of everything else, the removal of the Dragonslayers as a threat to her, and Minerva's destruction of the Endbringers this weekend.

Luckily, none of the returned equipment could definitely point to her status as an AI instead of merely being a tinker. Saint had ensured that it was all usable by normal humans and none of it was taken recently enough to still be in the middle of being modified by the man. Then again, it was also possible that Minerva's backers already knew that she was an AI and obviously weren't holding it against her. But there was no way to figure that out for certain, so it wasn't worth worrying about yet.

Eithne Artz - June 13, 2011

Eithne loved her job most of the time. She really did. But not today, because today was the beginning of the flood of requests to present anything and everything to Minerva in some official capacity, and most of the planet had decided that doing so through the United Nations was the way to do it. Admittedly, they were probably running through every other channel they could as well, but she only saw what passed over her desk.

They had no clue if Minerva had a civilian identity, if she was a resident of any nation on Earth Bet, or even if she was actually human. The PRT probably had contact information, and sending requests through them asking for more information had been done before Eithne had started looking at anything else. In fact, she'd done that the day before, because she wasn't stupid and saw this coming after Saturday.

Her entire day was looking to be sorting the requests, formulating appropriate responses, and doing her best to buy more time to get the answers she didn't have. Perhaps she could include reminders that Minerva had taken out nineteen Endbringers over the weekend, one in personal combat, and might be slow to respond to information requests for a week or two?

Colin Wallis - June 14, 2011

Colin sighed as he submitted his report from his uneventful evening, then opened up what had become a second job. Piles and piles of paperwork for Wards everything all over the country was being routed his way. Some of it from the PRT and Protectorate, a lot of it from the Youth Guard, and a surprisingly large amount of related work for minors of affiliate groups. It was worth it though, because he was fairly certain that all of this work had already saved three lives and was improving dozens more. Though he did wish that New Wave would stop insisting that they had everything 'under control' and allow some additional oversight, just in case.

The Youth Guard had been gutted, corruption stamped out, had many processes streamlined, and had secondary channels put in for everything as an additional check on every single employee. Similarly, PRT and Protectorate channels for things had been doubled or tripled in many cases so that it was harder, if not impossible, for things to slip through the cracks like they had been. New rules across the board ensured that nobody could force any parahuman in the system to miss a scheduled therapy session or psychological evaluation for any reason other than medical issues physically keeping them from attending. In the latter case, if at all possible the session would go to the parahuman.

Unfortunately, Colin was currently one of the backup channels for too many things and had to look over everything until others were trained up to do it instead. He was using the process to train automated filters to hopefully spot problems and patterns at the same time, in the hopes that those would serve as yet another potential way for problems to be spotted more quickly.

He was interrupted from his work by his phone ringing. Looking over at it, he frowned for a moment before realizing what the caller ID said and picking it up.

"Good morning Minerva," he greeted.

"Good morning Armsmaster," Minerva replied as he absent-mindedly initiated a traceback on the call. "How are you this morning?"

"Exhausted as I'm just coming off of a night shift. How are you recovering from your weekend?"

Noting the nonexistent results of his traceback, he bit back a groan. "Oh? This line appears to be as secure as we're going to get, given that you seem to have bypassed the phone system entirely to connect to my workshop directly."

"Heartbreaker appears to be on his way to Brockton Bay, likely to make an attempt at grabbing me. I'm planning on intercepting him with some drones with the intent of capturing him and those he has with him."

Colin considered that for a moment, moving a paperweight off of a stack of papers to make grabbing the top couple of sheets easier. He started looking at them as he spoke. "I see. I believe that I'm obligated to ask you to not do so for...hmmm." He'd forgotten detail twenty-three on that regulation, apparently. And then there's the master regulations that she was also bypassing. "Actually, no, his threat profile means that regulation doesn't apply if he's already on his way to the general area, and if you're using drones then the directives against directly approaching him don't apply either. How do you intend to transport him once you have him contained, assuming you can accomplish that safely?"

He nodded to himself, opening up a new file and entering pertinent details into it, followed by a quick check of the state of facilities. Locally they weren't in good shape, Boston wasn't either for entirely different reasons, but New York looked good. "You appear to have covered your bases well. Sadly, as much as I dislike admitting it, Brockton Bay doesn't have the ability to safely process and contain Heartbreaker. Boston probably isn't much better, though for very different reasons. I have ways to securely notify people in New York, can you get the transports there today?"

"That shouldn't be a problem, though that will take a little longer than I'd originally planned for. Nothing I can't handle."

"I'll ensure that someone calls you to ensure that you know where to meet up with the appropriate containment teams." In particular, Legend should be available already and would probably be the best bet, with Protectorate Leader channels being very secure.

"I can leave the transports for a few days if that would help, though someone will have to ensure that food is provided to those contained within them."

"That would likely be appreciated and I'll include that in my own report. Was there anything else on your end today?"

His eye twitched slightly, making it a good thing that he wasn't wearing his helmet, as he considered the idea of someone 'just stopping by Eagleton'. Or any quarantine zone, really. Then again, Minerva had taken out Endbringers, the Machine Army wasn't likely to cause her problems. "I see. I'll pass that along." He also looked quickly at his to-do list, which included a number of requests for information about Minerva. He'd been planning on dealing with those later, but asking her for some things might negate most of the headaches on his end. "On our end, we do have a request for you. Well, several essentially identical requests, and technically I don't believe that we've been asked to query you directly yet."

"Now I'm curious. What is this set of essentially identical requests?"

"Would you be willing to provide any information on what you would be comfortable with for more formal meetings, including potential meetings with diplomats of varying rank?"

He swore that he could hear Minerva smirking at that, likely having known about all the requests already. "I believe I have some protocol and etiquette information that I can pass along to indicate some of the normal expectations for such things. I'll see if Lilia can get it up on our website for you and others to download."

"Thank you, and good luck with Heartbreaker."

"Thank you."

The call disconnected, and he started a security scan of his phone before returning to making notes. As soon as the scan returned that his phone was still secure, because Team Mana wasn't likely to leave any traces, he'd give Legend a call.

Nikos Vasil - June 14, 2011

Nikos looked at Lauren. "What do you mean the patrol groups haven't checked in?"

"Since their last checkin they've all gone silent," Lauren answered. "Emily is running through them again, and tests of the radios we still have indicate that we aren't being jammed."

He scowled. "Get everyone back here before we're picked off any more."

"Right away."

Sadly, that didn't take long because they hadn't been all that spread out in the first place. The only straggler was Rachael, who he saw was on her way back from the toilet when she was, impossibly, hit by a truck. A truck that came out of nowhere, made no noise, and had to have vanished a moment later because they were in a parking lot and it hadn't appeared on the other side of the RV.

They gaped at this event for a little too long, apparently, as while they'd been staring at where Rachael had been they were ambushed from behind. When they realized that was happening things went to hell. Most of the group started running around in a panic, a few girls started shooting at the drones that looked identical to the ones that had fought Endbringers and largely survived, the idiots. His best-trained girls formed up around him to get him out of danger.

Unfortunately, there were more drones waiting for them. In fact, they'd probably been outnumbered by the drones, and every time one of his thralls was grabbed the drone vanished with them before a rescue attempt could even be made. His children who had triggered were instead dragged off, one at a time, until eventually he was isolated and grabbed by tentacles. They dragged him into an oversized porta-potty that appeared to be a prison cell, removed all of his holdout weapons and equipment somehow, and left him in the locked, windowless room.

Minerva, or someone working with her, had apparently figured out that he was coming and decided to take him out before he ever arrived. They'd done so in a brutally efficient manner, quickly enough that no call for aid could be sent out, likely ensured that every last person traveling with him had been isolated in their own cell, and he'd been stupid enough to bring the majority of his useful firepower with him in case he needed it. None of which had done a thing to protect him.

Why had he thought he could claim Minerva for himself?

Paul Tyrell - June 14, 2011

Paul collapsed into his office chair, staring blankly ahead. Today had been an interesting day, and he wasn't sure if it was good interesting or bad interesting yet. Minerva was apparently okay, which was good, but she'd also decided to unilaterally go after Heartbreaker before he could reach her. Succeeded, too, and then flown him to New York to turn him in. With flying holding cells that were bigger on the inside and took impossible keys.

Truly impossible keys, because they'd used tinkertech to make an exact duplicate of one already and only the original worked. The duplicate turned in the lock, but didn't activate the control panel. Modifying any part of the duplicate made it no longer turn in the lock, and using clay to temporarily modify one of the real keys also made them not work. They had two people trying to pick the locks too, out of pure curiosity, and before he'd come back to his office one had been swearing about there being no give in the lock while the other was twitching about how it was impossible for some of the pins to even exist next to each other.

From the other side of the holding cell drones they were using drones of their own to catalog who they had and check on their legal status, but he already knew that Heartbreaker himself was going to end up dead. He'd been deemed far too dangerous to approach despite having been tried in absentia in four countries, the collateral damage needed to take him out too significant. But now they had him handed to them, they only needed to confirm his identity and determine how he would die.

Then there were the other little details. Like the fact that Minerva had the ability to casually visit other star systems that were light-years away. With drones or in person, if desired. Or that the impossible keys with more pins than he'd ever seen and some kind of anti-copy functionality were medium-security and only suitable for short-term use. They could possibly sell those locks on the open market and make insane amounts of money from those who wanted top of the line security, and they weren't even considered truly secure by their creators.

Of course, then there were the recordings. He didn't have a copy with him, but had reviewed them, and the tactics used were more than sufficient for the group they'd faced. When the shock wore off he'd probably find the looks on Heartbreaker's face when the 'truck' hit that woman hilarious, in part because he knew the woman was fine. The coordination was the worrying part, because once again the drones were in perfect sync with one another.

Lilia had sent them information on how to connect to their monitoring feeds for Behemoth, showing that it was seemingly motionless in the Earth's core. There wasn't much to be done about that, beyond the hundreds of alerts across the country to be set off if that changed. But having live tracking for the only remaining Endbringer was both a comfort and a concern, because how were they able to track it?

And, lastly, he had to look over the information that had been provided on diplomatic protocols. He forced himself to open the link he'd been sent, only to pause as a language selection page came up. Which was fine, except that he noted the size of the page and the entries in the quick navigation menu at the top. Earth (Aleph/Bet/Similar), Earth (Quarine/Zargoth/Similar), Earth (Nites/Xenen/Similar), and Belkan Empire were listed. He quickly saved the list and opened it in a spreadsheet application, cleaned it up, and checked things.

There were over sixty thousand language entries in the list, just over five thousand for Earth Bet and similar, eight to nine thousand for the other two Earth types, and over thirty-five thousand for the 'Belkan Empire'. The latter was further broken down by region and planet.

Paul was starting to think that everything they thought they knew about Minerva was completely and totally off-base, and he hadn't even started looking at the documents yet.

And that was before wondering why there was a note included that Minerva was capable of consuming all known human-safe food from Earth with no allergy issues.

Sherrel Bailey - June 14, 2011

Sherrel groaned as she woke up, feeling like someone had hit her with a truck. Specifically an inner-city delivery truck moving at probably thirty miles per hour, because she felt worse than a pickup truck and nowhere near as bad as an 18-wheeler at highway speeds. In addition, she could feel gears clawing at the back of her brain, urging her to build anything. All combined, that meant that they'd gassed her again when she'd dropped into a tinker fugue. Given that she was now naked in her cell, she had probably been trying to do something with her clothing this time. Combined with the numbers on the wall opposite her cell door having changed, she'd probably still damaged the cell she'd been in before they'd gassed her, or maybe it was as a result of them gassing her.

The withdrawal symptoms from the lack of drugs, being knocked out every other day as they took more from her cell, and the pain of her power pushing her harder and harder the longer she wasn't using it were getting to her. Last time she'd told them that she'd collapse when she was done building whatever it was she was going to build, but they'd ignored her. It was 'too much of a risk', and they couldn't trust her to do anything specific.

It wouldn't be so bad if she'd not been grabbed after a run of not tinkering, having spent too much time moving around instead of working on things. Or perhaps if they'd let her have some of her drugs that she used to 'take the edge off'. She'd even settle for them letting her see Skids.

Eventually she was going to go crazy, and there wasn't currently anything she could do about it.

Eithne Artz - June 15, 2011

Eithne had been sent a link by the PRT, amazingly quickly in her opinion, and had immediately gone to download files from it. Only to be overwhelmed with the insane collection of languages available. She'd manually downloaded the four she'd likely understand, then set up a script to download the entire collection in the background to store offline. Just in case.

Luckily, the majority of the information was incredibly straightforward, lacking in some of the cultural insanity that she'd come to expect, and could likely be used to ensure that nobody went overboard in presenting things to Minerva. She'd been initially concerned about a number of details in how Minerva would arrive, only to get a call from Legend stating that Minerva was willing to come by to drop off beacons and/or devices of some kind.

Minerva had come and gone, after getting a tour, and they now had a device sitting outside that could be used to open a portal directly to Geneva. Mind-blowing, possibly unsafe for parahumans, and just handed over. At the same time, possibly incredibly useful for getting people to a ceremony for the hero, because they could literally gather at either headquarters and walk to the other one if needed.

Packets were going to need to be made with information, including a few do's and don'ts. Including a very prominent warning on the front of them. She'd quote that from the information provided, in each appropriate language, trusting that Minerva's translation team had done a better job than theirs would on this for now.

Paul Tyrell - June 15, 2011

Paul was getting too old for this, he was sure of it. First Minerva casually catches and drops off Heartbreaker, then she decides that she needs to provide some of the items that are potentially 'required' for proper diplomatic visits. Casually delivering things across the country and globe was bad enough, that the functionality of the transport devices was essentially a technological version of Doormaker was another thing entirely.

That she'd been aware enough while 'playing tourist' to catch a bullet with her 'store things who knows where' trick, despite the bullet heading for the back of her head, was almost anticlimactic, but it was still going in their file on her. He'd also not missed the images on her and Lilia's shirts and the implications thereof, especially when you considered the 'tested on' labels on all of the items they'd handed over. Though Lilia's had only been obvious due to it being labeled, except that it only seemed to be for a few minutes. Just long enough for him to notice, perhaps?

He'd only found out after the fact that both of them were apparently fluent in much more than English, apparently without any form of translation device. Casually speaking any language that someone spoke around them while in Geneva had impressed the staff over there, even if it hadn't been evident when she'd returned to New York due to pretty much everyone speaking English around them here.

Sitting there for twenty minutes, getting nowhere in his thoughts, he eventually returned to the portal devices. They needed to know if it was safe for parahumans to use the portals, if only to see how similar they really were to Doormaker's, and they had multiple parahuman prisoners destined for execution. He wasn't a fan of that, but he couldn't do much about it either. They were far too dangerous and had powers that were unlikely to ever help against Scion. But he could see if they were willing to take the risk of a hopefully quick and painless death, allowing them to be useful. They had already been informed that they were going to die, even if when wasn't determined yet, and some additional comforts if they survived might be enough to get them to agree.

He'd just have to be very careful to not let on that them agreeing would save him two weeks of paperwork, because if they knew that then they'd almost certainly turn down the offer out of pure spite.

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 15, 2011

Rebecca had taken far too many hits to her worldview in the past few days, all thanks to Minerva. Adding pants-shitting terror on top of that wasn't exactly a good feeling.

Somehow Minerva had found seventeen extra Endbringers, that hadn't been 'born' or 'activated' (depending on who you asked), and killed them. The consensus was that she'd probably done that before taking Ziz on in space and being counter-attacked by Leviathan, killing both in the end. Without being harmed herself.

Following that, they'd discovered that Heartbreaker wanted to add Minerva to his collection of thralls. Only for Minerva to pre-empt their own plans for preventing that by capturing the man and his entire group of thralls six hours before the plan to take him out had been scheduled to occur. The way he'd been taken out was frightening because of how little anyone was likely to be able to stop it from happening to them if they pissed Minerva off, and she hadn't even been trying. Non-lethal capturing of parahumans and non-parahumans alike, thrown into mobile prisons, with zero collateral damage attributable to her.

She'd only this morning found out that Minerva had also dropped off counterfeit money in still-sealed envelopes with the state police, claiming that they'd identified most of it via genetic analysis. Something that was considered essentially impossible without tinkertech and frequently required cutting off at least a third of the bill for analysis with tinkertech, yet had been done non-destructively in bulk. At least that one was unproven, but she suspected that they'd somehow pulled off the impossible anyway.

Replicating Doormaker's portals with technology had come next, coupled with where they'd supposedly tested the technology and Paul's admittance of what had been revealed of Minerva's likely personal teleportation range. Which he'd come to realize was while loaded down with multiple vehicles and likely much larger when not encumbered like that.

And now Rebecca was finally looking over the diplomatic protocol manuals that had been shared. Just the sheer number of translations was telling, but she couldn't stop re-reading one section and shuddering at the implications.

As a reminder: Regardless of the culture you're interacting with, deliberate attempts to use any form of individual ability or technology to directly control or alter a diplomat's memories or thought processes are to be considered an automatic, no-questions-asked, and unconditional approval for immediate lethal response. Should any such attempts be state-sanctioned then they are to be treated as a declaration of Total War.

Report any incidents as soon as it is practical to do so.

Mimi Corti - June 15, 2011

Mimi laid in her cot, wondering what was going to happen to her. Riley was dead-set on approaching Minerva to try and join up, but was agonizing over how to. The girl had even admitted that if they got it wrong then they might die before they could make their case. Of course, what she thought was the 'right' way was concerning as well.

Apparently, ideally they'd put up a good fight, be defeated soundly anyway, and defect as part of that. Except that they were on the entirely wrong power level compared to Minerva and couldn't put up the good fight, even if Ned wanted to give that a try anyway. Riley's second choice wasn't much better. Minerva having trouble against someone, thus providing an opening for a group to step in to help her against the common foe, would supposedly work. Except that it wouldn't because it was 'too soon after the Endbringers for a bigger bad to show up'.

Flipping things had merit, supposedly, but finding someone to be a 'common enemy' that they could struggle against so that Minerva could come to the rescue had its own problems. Such as relying on Minerva showing up before they were defeated, on top of finding such an enemy in the area. Or anywhere, for that matter. Riley lamented that the 'bigger bad' would probably be perfect there, but it was still too soon on that front.

Which left Riley making and discarding insane plans while absorbing all the information on Minerva that she could. Mimi was ready to go out on her own to ring the doorbell at that warehouse to just ask Minerva at this point. Or perhaps just drop a letter in the mail slot.

Patricio Franco - June 16, 2011

Patricio had been woken up by his men within an hour of the crazy woman vanishing again, had reviewed the relevant clips of her arrival and departure, and immediately called off all operations in Brockton Bay. He'd even ignored the normal distancing procedures to do so, because they obviously hadn't worked to keep people from knowing he was involved. Crystal Cage had even been told to abandon Potter, who was still in custody, in order to get out of the area.

It was a good thing that Patricio hadn't relied on his powers to run his business, even if he'd used them to get where he was today. Instead he'd saved them for special orders, and those had already been rare and only lucrative because of his powers. The bigger problem there was that his organization was going to be tested now that they knew that it had been parahuman-led and now wasn't.

Of course, the entire reason he'd wanted the necklace in the first place was going to be one of the bigger thorns in his side now that he'd paid the price for failing to get it. Marianela Gutierrez had taken his daughter from him after learning that his little girl had triggered and the blasted woman's powers made her hard to take out normally. She was going to be gunning for him again after this, and he still didn't have a way to kill her.

Colin Wallis - June 16, 2011

Colin looked over the report that he'd received regarding the funnel that had appeared in Mexico. It was the only known funnel to have appeared outside of Brockton Bay, and had initially appeared to be completely disconnected from Miss Hebert. That had changed when finding out about there being some connection to Brockton Bay, and this report just cemented that further.

Franco had been a significant, albeit indirect, parahuman threat to Miss Hebert. Crystal Cage and Potter were operating under the man's direction, and those behind the necklace must've known that. This was more proactive than they'd seen before, but it was much easier to slot into the existing patterns now. The woman involved was also interesting, but almost certainly not from Earth Bet. In fact, from the footage they had he felt that she was almost certainly not actually human, having been far too still during the funnel process. Sure, that could be an aspect of her powers, but he was leaning towards her being an artificial construct built to deliver a message.

All of this added to the confusion that was Minerva as well. While none of the documents said so, the new running theory was that she was a citizen of the 'Belkan Empire' in some capacity, and possibly a member of their military. Potentially still a clone, especially given the potentially significant biological differences that likely existed based on the information they'd been provided so far. What this empire wanted from any of the Earths was a mystery right now, but it was almost certainly a spacefaring and likely multidimensional entity.

Of course, if this 'Belkan Empire' was behind Minerva, the 'stop interfering in Brockton Bay' could actually have been targeted at the original attempt that Crystal Cage and Potter had made against Minerva. No other likely-clones had been seen yet, after all, and somehow causing problems with the one already created could've been sufficient justification to trace back the origin of the orders to deal with things at the source.

And none of this was provable, meaning that they had no clue if Minerva was operating on her own or not. She could be the owner and/or ruler of planets, or just a citizen of a much larger group. There was still the incredible likelihood that she was a clone of Miss Hebert, but that could also be a side effect of any other number of processes intended to help Minerva blend in on Earth Bet.

Regardless of what the truth was, he was definitely hoping that nobody tested the clear warning against trying to take control of Minerva's mind. There were a few countries that were likely to try and give that a shot, but hopefully the idea of being subject to Total War with any group that could produce someone capable of solo killing Endbringers was enough to keep them in line.

Amy Dallon - June 16, 2011

Amy frowned as she crushed one of the plants that she'd been using to try and create phantom organs. Or any of the phantom constructs at all, really. The problem was that the plants kept failing without any results, mostly because the genetic markers and potential connection structures didn't play nice with plant biology. She was down to only a couple of living plants now, the rest largely torn apart by her in frustration after they'd died.

The plan was for her to spend Saturday at the hospital after having the last week of school mandated as 'off time' by Carol. No emergencies had come up to change that yet, and as a result of that she'd spent most of her evenings this week trying to get results from the uncooperative plants. There had to be something she was missing, and she might need to go visit Taylor to ask more questions. After she was done with the hospital this weekend, anyway.

Grumbling, she ensured that the remaining living plants were fed and watered, and that the human-like growths on them weren't likely to collapse overnight. At least as far as she could tell, since this was all incredibly unpredictable due to how she'd mixed everything together.

Nanoha Takamachi - June 17, 0076

Nanoha sat down in the conference room and pulled Vivio into her lap, Fate sitting down next to them. They were the last three to arrive, and Rein had locked the door behind them before moving to between Chrono and Hayate.

"Thank you for coming on short notice," Hayate said after a round of greetings. "Given that you're here, I assume that you're not entirely against a months-long trip."

"We're more concerned about the possible Book of Darkness level hazard," Fate admitted, Nanoha nodding and Vivio looking between the two curiously. They hadn't really gone into a lot of detail on that particular incident with her yet.

"That's understandable," Chrono admitted. "We'd like to head this one off on our terms, if at all possible."

"We didn't give you all of the details," Hayate continued as Rein brought up a hologram of a green-haired child and a green belt. "As a quick overview, this is Versteckte Klinge, in both normal Unison Device form and Stealth Device form. Lost and thought destroyed before the fall of Belka, a transmission from him recently reached us. He found a new Lord and absorbed another device of some kind to repair himself in a manner disturbingly similar to the Book of Darkness on the surface, though we have very few real details. We do know that the process was successful and that he intends to return to Belka."

"His likely return path will take several years at a minimum," Rein added. "But we have access to navigation information that wasn't known when he was lost and can get to where he transmitted from in a few months. Hopefully he has no means of leaving the area yet and will still be there, especially as his new partner is unlikely to agree to leaving their home for several years on a whim. He may also be possibly trying to determine which way Belka actually is as his transmission indicated that he didn't know where he was."

"If not then an attempt will need to be made to trace his path back to TSAB space, though we wouldn't ask you to participate in that portion of things."

Chrono nodded. "We're hoping that he has no means of traveling yet, or at least will take time to figure out which way to go, and will thus still be where he transmitted from. That happens to be an even lower mana alternate version of non-administered world 97, though how closely it matches our version of the planet is unknown."

Nanoha perked up at that. "He's on an alternate version of Earth?"

"Yes," Hayate answered. "A likely inhabited one, and that's all we know about it." She smiled softly. "You shouldn't get your hopes up of it looking anything like our home, we don't expect it to. You're here for a different reason, and we only decided to ask you to come because of information dug out of the library a couple days ago."

Rein nodded. "Vivio is actually the important one of you three. Based on what Yuuno has been able to dig up, and assuming that Versteckte Klinge still has working friend and foe information, we currently believe that there's a better than even chance that she would be recognized as an ally and thus listened to about the fall of Belka. We're hoping that's enough to defuse the situation."

"Of course, if that isn't enough then you, Fate, and myself would be available. Sadly, Yuuno believes that his command codes were lost with the Saint's Cradle. Not that we could trust them to work after so long in the first place, but I'd like to have the option of trying them."

A moment later Rein brought up a map, and a spiral started to trace itself out on it. "We don't have detailed data on what would be encountered on the route, but this is the path that we'd like the Arthra to take. It's just been refitted with a mana reactor system designed for use in low-mana environments and should be ready to leave in about a week with whichever search boat escort is ready first, but we don't expect it to make it to Versteckte Klinge's last known location for three months. We're assuming that it will take a week or so to either resolve the situation or determine that he's moved on, after which another three months will be needed to return."

"We can only fit nine months of supplies on the Arthra," Chrono added. "Short of finding that we can resupply during the trip, which we can't assume will be possible, we'll have to abort after four months and return anyway to retain a proper supply buffer. The escort boats will be able to run for up to five years if deemed necessary, but are far less comfortable. If needed and possible, any excess supplies from the Arthra will be transferred to the accompanying escort boat before it sets off on its own."

Hayate sighed, and looked at Vivio, before adjusting her gaze up to Nanoha and Fate. "The only benefit to you three other than six or more months of hazard pay would be getting away from the church for a bit, at the downside of being isolated for the better part of a year and there being a chance of getting stranded if things go horribly wrong. Everyone going is a volunteer and knows the risks. I refuse to accept an agreement to go from you today as well, if you think that you're agreeable to going then I'll get you the full writeup today and you can let me know in a few days."

Pauline Jade - June 18, 2011

Pauline dropped into the chair waiting for her in the conference room. They'd hastily gotten a bunch of monitors into place so that they could monitor all the new cameras in real-time, on top of whatever those watching the live feeds from the body cameras flagged to show on a couple of additional monitors. The only thing showing on any of them now was an unmoving pile of rubble, though in a couple of hours some volunteer brutes would be wandering in to see if anything reacted to them.

She'd wanted to scream at Minerva that morning for calling the Machine Army a 'minor robot problem', given how many people they'd lost to it already, but this was also the cape that had taken out two of the three active Endbringers and was apparently responsible for ensuring that seventeen more never got a chance to show themselves. Given that, the Machine Army had been a 'minor' problem. One that she'd used as a training exercise for an obviously younger girl before removing the entire threat from the face of the Earth.

They had pretty good audio recordings of everything said, which was completely useless because none of it was in English. The younger girl had absolutely no understanding of the language, having needed Minerva to translate for her whenever a question was directed her way. Even ordering lunch had required translation, so they obviously didn't have universal translators. That made Minerva quite impressive, honestly, given that she was known to speak a number of languages that originated on Earth.

The lunchtime recordings were where most of the things of use from the day came out, barring a couple of details from when the two had shown up. Minerva being able to directly control her drones was interesting, but the absolute certainty that they wouldn't be subverted by the Machine Army was another data point entirely. Watching her seemingly disregard the machines in a frenzy, blocking and destroying them without even seeming to pay attention, had driven the point home that they were never an actual threat. Even the younger trainee hadn't been fazed by multiple direct hits to her before she took to the air, showing that they were definitely well protected.

Then there was that final 'barrier', which had contained the entire Machine Army in a frenzy. Technically, it had also triggered said frenzy, but being able to do that went far beyond anything they'd ever seen tried here. Of course, that stopped being nearly as impressive when you considered that Minerva had contained Ziz and Leviathan in a similar manner, and as scary as the Machine Army had been it had never really compared to the Endbringers.

Really, at this point they had to be incredibly lucky to have Minerva on their side. It was unlikely that anyone short of Scion could stand up to the cape, and that was when she was working alone. Anyone attempting to get on her bad side was crazy, and if anyone in the government tried to do so they had better be going against higher orders or the country was screwed.

"Knockout?" one of the aides asked as he stuck his head in the room. Nathaniel, now that she looked. He was a good one.

"Yes?" Pauline answered.

"I've got the preliminary paperwork identified and waiting for you in the folder on the server set up for today. I filled in most of the headers, but I haven't been given access to the recordings to do much more for you."

"One of these days we need to get you higher clearance, if only to see if it actually makes you more useful."

"That's unlikely, ma'am. Too much of a wild youth coupled with my sister being a known criminal. I'm too much of a potential security risk, and I'm honestly surprised that I got this job at all."

"I know, you bring that up every time I whine about you being held back by a lack of clearance. I'm not sure that matters as much as you think it does, but it also isn't entirely my call. But I do think that when we clear out of here, as I'm sure we will be, I'm going to be asking that you get to join me wherever I end up."

"Sorry, but I'm only here because I grew up in Knoxville. If the PRT pulls out of the area then I'm probably going to be looking for another job, since my sister isn't exactly going to be taking care of our parents."

"Dammit."

Dragon - June 18, 2011

Dragon had carefully analysed all of the footage from Eagleton, most of it as it was being captured. The post-action lunch recording had taken longer to get access to, but she'd gotten it as well. She could detect no signs of falsehood in the recordings, though 'Expanse' had been regularly annoyed when English was being spoken. Presumably due to being unable to understand a word of it.

The implications of the day were staggering in many ways, and she was fairly certain that most of those in the PRT and Protectorate weren't quite aware of just how significant a few details actually were. From the two being able to detect and monitor connections that nobody had even suspected existed before today through to finding the control nodes was bad enough. Using that barrier to essentially forcibly depower the town and all remaining control nodes, though?

If it could be scaled up, and there was no reason to think that it couldn't be, then Minerva could apparently depower and almost certainly instantly kill every parahuman in entire regions, if not larger areas. With barely any effort whatsoever, as doing so to Eagleton had looked like an afterthought action rather than anything that had needed significant planning. Admittedly, she could've known that she'd be doing that in advance and only kept her trainee out of the loop for training reasons, but even if that was the case?

Minerva was quite possibly the most dangerous individual out there right now, above and beyond anyone else Dragon had ever considered. Not even Scion seemed to be as big of a potential threat, and he'd previously sat at the top of Dragon's personal list of most powerful forces on Earth Bet.

Sadly, they didn't have enough data to decipher the language spoken between Minerva and 'Expanse', though what she had from today indicated that it was two different dialects of the same base language. Some pronunciation and word order variations that were consistently different between the two, implying that they had not learned that language in the same place. Which was nicely shooting down the 'clone' theory. Either that or the cloners were intentionally going to extreme lengths to manufacture clues that pointed in a different direction.

If they ever found out that was the case then they were going to be fighting Miss Hebert for the top slot on Dragon's list of scarily intelligent people.

Victoria Dallon - June 18, 2011

Vicky was happy that she'd gotten to spend most of the day with Dean. That she hadn't needed to pick Amy up at the hospital was also nice, since one of the nurses going off-shift had dropped her sister off at home. Amy had texted a few minutes ago to say that she was home safely, and Vicky was approaching home now herself. From the near-opposite direction than if she'd picked her sister up at the hospital.

Unfortunately, as she came in for a landing she could tell that something was majorly wrong. Her mother was screaming at someone, and there should only be three people home. Since screaming at Dad was a waste of time most days, and generally only needed to tell him to take his meds, that meant that she was likely screaming at Amy. Since it was unlikely that any hint of her sister's attraction to her had come out, and 'monster' was featured in what Vicky could hear, it was incredibly likely that Mom had gotten drunk and decided to search Amy's room for signs that she was 'going bad'.

And, of course, Amy had the freaky plants she was using to try and make phantom organs in her room, not even hidden from anything but being seen through the open door to the hallway.

Hurrying upstairs, Vicky noted that her father's keys weren't in the hallway. She'd not thought to note if his car was there. She also realized that she could smell alcohol, though probably because some had to have been spilled at some point. There was no way that much alcohol scent could come from her mother having been drinking. Ignoring what her mother was saying, she burst into Amy's room and found her sister cowering the corner next to a broken bottle that had obviously hit the wall. Her mother was standing there screaming and hadn't noticed her entering.

Deciding that the best solution was to get her mother out of the room first, Vicky grabbed her mother's arm and threw her out the door. Even intoxicated, she had enough awareness to snap into her breaker state once she was airborne. That shut her up better than grabbing her had, and she bounced off of the wall in the hallway. Vicky grabbed her in a fist before she could change back, knowing from experience that her forcefield would win if her mother tried to change back to human-shaped while being held. That would keep her in her breaker state for now.

"Pack enough stuff for a night or two," Vicky called to Amy. "I'm sure that we can find somewhere else for you to stay until Mom calms down a bit. Oh, and turn off your cell phone or leave it here."

Vicky held her mother while she went to her own room, fumbling a little with her phone on the way to turn it off, before she threw a bag together as well. Her plans were going to have her not wanting to be home tonight either. That was harder to do with only one hand, but she managed well enough.

"You ready?" Vicky asked as she returned to Amy's room, only to pause when she saw blood on her sister's shoulder. Her fist tightened slightly around her mother's breaker state, but the returned pressure kept her from squeezing too hard. Instead she took a closer look and saw that there were a couple of small cuts by her sister's ear, probably from the broken bottle and something that would be best dealt with after they were out of the house.

Amy merely nodded, and Vicky saw that her cell phone was sitting on the charger in the room before guiding her sister out of the house. Amy locked the door behind them when Vicky tried to fumble for her keys, and then Vicky scooped her sister up and took to the air. Their first stop was the Pelham residence. Her mother was unceremoniously dropped down the chimney before Vicky turned and flew off. It would be a couple of minutes before any attempt to see which way they'd gone could be made, and they were well out of sight by then.

Slowing down once they were reasonably safe for the moment, Vicky looked around to orient herself properly and quickly determined that she was off-course by quite a bit. "Ames, do you have the beacon that Taylor gave you?" Amy said nothing, but nodded. "Hit the 'problem, but not emergency' button to hopefully let her know that we're coming."

With any luck the Heberts would put Amy up for the night, and Vicky could either sleep on their couch or go crash with Dean.

David Symons - June 19, 2011

David groaned as he woke up, wondering what the hell had hit him. Unusually, he could tell that he had no powers running, not even the normal self-healing powers that normally kicked in when he was injured. And he had to have been injured, because the sounds alone told him that he was in a hospital. Opening his eyes, he found that the lights were dim and the window was dark, so it was likely the middle of the night.

It had to be ten minutes or so of half-concentrating before he could feel a healing power start to slot into place, almost like his agent was just waking up as well. Which was absurd, but perhaps he'd run into a power nullifier and just didn't remember it. A thinker power to know what time it was and accurately judge the passing of time slotted in next, meaning that he knew it was very early morning and it took over an hour for the healing power to heal him up.

He was half considering ditching the hospital under his own power when a door opened in the middle of the room and Rebecca stepped through it.

"Good morning," he greeted.

"That is yet to be seen," Rebecca returned in a slight monotone that he knew meant she was annoyed. "Though given that Minerva and her trainee took out Eagleton yesterday I'm not holding out hope for it being good from a paperwork front."

David blinked at that. "Trainee?"

"Yes. Apparently taking out nineteen Endbringers last weekend wasn't enough for her and now she's got a protégé or something like that. What she, or the likely empire backing her, wants from us is still a mystery though."

There was a spike of momentary pain as he processed that. Almost like he'd tried to pull on a power that wasn't available right now, but he'd not tried anything of the sort. Or at least not consciously. "Nineteen Endbringers?"

"Yes. Security footage indicated that you passed out just after she destroyed Ziz, likely before any of the feeds showing the other seventeen dormant Endbringers being destroyed. You knew that thinker powers don't work on her, why did you use some anyway?"

He didn't remember any of this. "I have no idea."

She glared at him for a moment with her one good eye, then sighed. "We expected memory loss, honestly. That said, there were...additional complications with your need to learn more about her."

"What?"

"Part of your agent caught fire, and it took four days to put out."

He had no idea what to say about that. In fact, he'd not known that agents were made of anything that could catch fire, let alone burn for days.

"As far as the rest of us are concerned," she continued a moment later. "You're barred from studying Minerva. We don't want you interacting with her at all, and if we could manage it reasonably then we'd bar you from even seeing her on the news. Because the next time you nearly kill yourself with thinker overload and set your agent on fire trying to study her we might not be able to save your life."

David really couldn't come up with a counter-argument there.

Christine Mathers - June 19, 2011

Christine had been doing her morning stretches when she was interrupted by those in Brockton Bay getting her attention. Minerva's warehouse had started to glow for unknown reasons. A couple of minutes later others not in Brockton Bay had also gotten her attention, because the event was being live streamed as targeting Fallen communications. What communications she didn't know for certain yet, but she had suspicions that she wasn't going to like it.

The blasted shield cutting her off from everyone inside of it confirmed those suspicions.

They had a few powered members that had insisted on going to Brockton Bay in order to 'supervise' the unpowered members on their initial attempts to test Minerva. All of them were permitted enough personal initiative to do so, and she'd merely warned them of the potential risks with approaching someone who had taken out Endbringers in combat in a town with a known power remover in it.

Luckily they had procedures for this kind of situation, as some power nullifiers caused her to lose her connection to people. But nobody she was connected to was going to be going anywhere near Brockton Bay, and she was stepping up plans to get off of Earth Bet entirely. She wouldn't call off the group already in Brockton Bay though, as they had a workable plan and this only served as an additional data point.

She just hoped that the powered members were intelligent enough to leave things to the unpowered members without frequent reminders.

Colin Wallis - June 19, 2011

Colin submitted the report on Minerva taking action against the Fallen in a visible, yet surprisingly non-damaging manner. The light show was impressive, and for some reason he got the feeling that it was entirely unnecessary. After all, Minerva had deployed shields and similar without the light show before, which meant that the show was probably entirely to make a statement. He grudgingly approved, as it would be hard to tell who was responsible for taking out Fallen communication in Brockton Bay otherwise.

Moving on, he took another bite of his breakfast while he looked through his alerts. Twenty of them were able to be cleared immediately, having been related to the pillar of light and dome that had settled over the area. The next highest-priority alert was two minor parahumans having 'run away'. He opened that, finding that it was actually in Brockton Bay. Glory Girl and Panacea, specifically, making him mentally grumble about New Wave some more. Reading the details, the police had been called by Danny Hebert to tell them that there had been an altercation of some kind and the two girls were at the Hebert household. The PRT had been informed as a courtesy and not because they needed to help search for the two.

A quick check of the notes from the monitoring still on the area around the Hebert residence showed that the two girls had shown up and hadn't been seen leaving, so that checked out. But if things were bad enough for them to be running off somewhere other than the Pelham residence then he was going to have to push a bit harder to see about getting New Wave to allow external oversight.

Perhaps he should give Mrs. Dallon a quick call this morning.

Carol Dallon - June 19, 2011

Carol scowled as Danny left, knowing that she was decidedly in the wrong this time. She'd have to call him later, when she wasn't worked up from a combination of a hangover, her sister having laid into her for hours, an incredibly annoying talk with Armsmaster, and then Mark questioning her. She was just sick and tired of everyone questioning her parenting when she knew that she'd screwed up already.

Intoxication did not help with the decision making processes. Nor had it helped with keeping her from throwing up over Sarah's rug after popping out of the fireplace. Being carried around, kept in her breaker state forcibly in the process, and then thrown down a chimney while drunk had not impressed her stomach last night.

Really, in all honesty? It had been drilled into her head repeatedly now that Amy was probably being responsible enough given the apparent nature of her powers. And deserved a chance to explain what she'd been doing at all, instead of just being screamed at because of odd-looking plants in her room. Now that she was sober, Carol could see that, and would give Amy a chance to explain in the next day or two, once the initial stress of all of this had hopefully settled a little and they could have that conversation without screaming on either side. Further judgement could happen after explanations, if needed.

Now she needed some painkillers, and should probably try to figure out how much longer the girls were going to be staying elsewhere. Which would be far easier if either of them had a phone that was turned on with them.

Riley Davis - June 19, 2011

Riley was ready to start pulling her hair out, because there didn't seem to be a solution to approaching Minerva. No enemies worth Minerva's time in the area, she was far too strong for most combat-related tactics, far too unpredictable for the remainder, and you couldn't even arrange to bump into her because she had no schedule and could appear anywhere on the planet. In theory.

The only good news was that she now had another member of her team, based on what had leaked about Eagleton yesterday, which meant that she was recruiting in some way. Sadly, that was also bad news, because you generally needed the new member to do something significant to show their worth before anyone else joined. And Minerva had apparently finished off the Machine Army, not the new girl. So that didn't count!

Yet another unworkable plan was torn out of the notebook and thrown into the metal trash can for Mimi to burn later, and Riley got up to start pacing. Manufacturing events to meet Minerva was a no-go, because that wasn't what a Good Girl would do. In hindsight, they'd wasted the opportunity to 'need help' with Nilbog, but at the same time faking being in distress was also not something a Good Girl should do. Well, you could, but only to lure the monster you needed to defeat out into the open, not with allies.

Riley's thought process halted as a small owl flew in through the window. It circled the room, then landed on the table next to her. She half-considered reaching out to touch it, but it dissolved into motes of light before she could, leaving a far too large envelope behind. Curious, she walked up and found that 'Riley Davis' was written on the envelope, which was also made of a material that she didn't recognize.

A magical owl had just delivered a letter for her. She didn't know if she should be elated or terrified, but she wouldn't know until she opened it. Flipping the letter over, her anxiety skyrocketed, because she recognized the design in the wax seal. It took her ten minutes to get up the courage to break that seal, and when she did the entire envelope dissolved into motes of light. She dropped the letter in shock, then scrambled to grab it before something stupid like a gust of wind or a stray rat could keep her from reading it.

Taking a few deep breaths once she was holding the letter again, she sat down and carefully unfolded the letter.

Miss Davis,

I apologize, but other things have claimed my immediate attention at the moment and I will be unable to meet with you for several days at a minimum. Someone will be in touch when I have time to meet with you.

-Minerva

Blinking, Riley re-read the letter, then grabbed her notebook. This morning Minerva had cut off Fallen communication in Brockton Bay, which hadn't been important enough to do anything about yesterday. Which meant that the Fallen had decided to do something to Minerva and that was keeping her busy.

Well, the scout animals had identified all of the Fallen parahumans in town already, and Minerva had kindly cut off their untraceable communication methods. No way was Riley going to allow them to distract Minerva any longer than absolutely necessary now that she knew they were a problem.

Brad Meadows - June 19, 2011

Brad was making his rounds through the kennels used for the dog fighting rings he ran. They were running low on dogs for a number of reasons and he couldn't really justify the expense of importing more than he already had. Minerva's existence was screwing with the Empire's business across the board, and they couldn't actually do anything about it. Not only did they have no hope of standing up to her, as he well knew, but her larger actions were good for the entire planet.

He, personally, was particularly happy that he would likely never need to go up against an Endbringer. And that paled in comparison to how happy he was that Minerva was both able and willing to show restraint against those with absolutely no hope against her.

That said, it did mean a lot of changes to how things were going to be run, and it was looking like the dog fighting rings were going to have to become a lot more exclusive or just be ditched entirely. But he still had enough dogs for another couple of months, assuming that some dipshit hadn't lost a bunch again. Hopefully nobody would trace the kennel full of early-stage rabid animals that had gone missing back to them, and he was lucky that he hadn't sold tickets to that event yet.

Arriving at the last kennel, he scowled when he saw that the guards were unconscious. Not sleeping on the job, but knocked out. He carefully made his way past them, listening for any sign of whoever had done this. That bitch Hellhound was long gone, and the guards wouldn't merely be knocked out if she'd been by anyway, but that meant he also had no idea what to expect.

He found nobody in the building, and no dogs in the building, but he did find a note that had been left behind.

To whom it may concern,

I needed the doggies that you planned on making fight each other. That wasn't a nice thing to do to doggies. I'll do my best to treat them as good as I can given what I need them for.

-RD

Brad stared at the note for several minutes, trying to figure out who 'RD' was. Maybe a recent trigger? The 'doggies' bit was a little childish, after all. Though why would a child know about dog fighting rings? That implied a bit more experience, or perhaps the kid of one of the regulars? Grumbling, he pulled out the little blue contacts book that he used for his parahuman quick reference, as he felt that an established parahuman was more likely. It was honestly a longshot, as he didn't know about any parahumans that would care about the dogs in the area since Hellhound left, but he'd take a look anyway. Opening it up to R with the handy letter quick-tabs, he looked for anyone that might be 'RD'.

It took a minute, but he eventually found a single entry that matched, and swore to himself. He was going to need to report this immediately. He patted his pockets, grumbling when he didn't find his phone. Probably left it in the car. He stuck the note into the book as he turned to leave, taking one last look at the only entry that matched 'RD'.

Riley Davis - See Bonesaw

Sarah Pelham - June 20, 2011

Sarah grumbled a bit as she took off from her backyard. Of course the girls had returned home after Carol and Mark had both left for work, because they knew when that would happen. And of course Amy still wasn't stable, which had Vicky calling her about it. Calling Carol was useless, since she hadn't come by to pick up her own phone, and Mark wasn't likely to be much help at all.

Of course, this wasn't too horrible, as it meant that getting Amy's story before Carol could screw things up more would be possible. That was always going to be a good thing, as it had become quite clear over the years that having the Dallons adopt Amy had been a mistake. A very hard to correct mistake, but definitely a mistake. Hopefully the girl would be able to get away from Carol when she turned eighteen.

It was as Sarah reached the halfway point between the two houses that things started to go wrong. The world rumbled around her, as a familiar-looking funnel appeared in front of her. It took her a moment to realize that the rumbling was her powers, and she carefully headed down to land before things got worse. Even that didn't go entirely smoothly, but she avoided hurting herself.

Once on the ground, she swore, because one thing she had noticed, and could now focus on, was that the funnel had been leading down to her sister's house. She quickly pulled her phone out and fumbled into the 'New Wave emergency' preset on it, ignoring as the alert sounded on her sister's phone in her other pocket, then started running on foot.

Last edited: Nov 19, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 81 - June 20, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Nov 25, 2020

#14,820

"What's wrong?" Taylor sent to Hive.

"Originally it was just that some other Shard device connections are unusually in-line with my actions," Hive responded. "Likely causing interference in their abilities due to the induced turbulence, for lack of better terminology at this time. But I also think that Amy's Shard device had multiple active connections, and I wasn't prepared for that."

Taylor thought about that for a moment. "What does that mean?"

"It means that it's incredibly likely that someone, somewhere, just fell over dead from an unexpected Shard disconnection. I believe only one, as I've only spotted one additional active connection profile so far."

That was...decidedly not good, and was something that they'd obviously not properly considered. Missy obviously agreed, based on the look on her face that likely at least partially matched the look on Taylor's own. "I suppose it's too late for that one person now, though I think I want to see if we can at least figure out who died. Can we stop that from being a problem in the future?"

"Easily, Lord. I haven't been scanning Shard devices ahead of time to check for additional connections, on the now obviously erroneous belief that they would only maintain a single active profile at a time. Since we now know that's incorrect we can ensure that we check for multiple connections and either avoid those Shard devices or take measures to ensure that the other users are properly disconnected."

Well, that was better news for the future, at least?

"So," Missy said. "Someone else was connected to Amy's shard."

"Apparently," Taylor agreed.

"Which either means that shards occasionally connect to random people, or the 'runs in the family' phenomenon is a single shard connecting to kids."

That had Taylor blinking. "What?"

"The PRT has tried to figure some of this out before, and gives classes that Wards are supposed to attend. Or are made to attend as a punishment detail. Second-generation parahumans tend to get powers like one of their caregivers. This is usually, but not always, one of their parents, and genetics don't seem to be a factor."

"Okay..."

"If the same shard is connecting to the kids then that would explain the similar powers in the kids, and why family teams tend to do so horribly in the long run. They specialize incidentally, because they've got a small number of shard devices working with the entire family. But then you run into people like Amy, that buck the trend entirely. But she's adopted, sometime before New Wave rebranded."

Taylor frowned. "This is interesting, but what's your point?"

"Assuming she's second-gen, why would anyone in New Wave adopt her away from the caretakers that she got her obviously-different powers from?"

"I don't know?"

"I'd have said because her parents died, and New Wave knew them, but if her shard was still connected to someone else then that throws that in doubt. Unless she has someone she was taking care of, anyway, or I suppose if she had a sibling she didn't know about. But now my assumption is that she's a villain's kid, and her villain parent was probably sent to prison. Which I think explains some of how Mrs. Dallon treated her, except I don't know how a villain's kid would've ended up with New Wave."

That had Taylor blinking as she processed it. "Okay...I think. Maybe we should wait until we know if Hive can figure out who actually died and go from there."

"Whatever."

"That said, I think I want to do something suitably distracting. Are you ready for some training?"

Missy went from 'slightly annoyed' to 'fearful', probably dreading what 'distraction-worthy' training was. Her eyes then widened. "No, no, we shouldn't get too involved. I can't be out of commission tomorrow and you need to be able to slip away for the other deliveries. How about I help you with all that mail you already picked up instead?"

Taylor gave her a look, but decided that she made a couple of good points.

Missy was honestly amazed at how much mail had come in today. She'd thought a normal mail truck would've been emptied, not what was obviously a full sized eighteen wheeler or something. Taylor even had drones out, using telekinesis and the storage/retrieval spell with them to presort and move things around. Supposedly she also had a bunch on another planet going through the packages.

Anything with money in it was being put aside for later examination to spot counterfeit currency, something that Taylor apparently wasn't prepared to do herself but Hive was great at. The rest of the mail was ending up piled on the table in the Inn, and so far Missy was bored out of her mind opening it. Though she was doing her best to see if she could 'pre-read' individual letters before she opened them with her sensor, and was getting better at it.

Nowhere near as good as Taylor appeared to be, admittedly. The older girl was going through a stack of postcards with the telekinesis spell while opening letters by hand, seemingly not reading either but still sorting them into the bins she'd made. Worse, Missy swore that the postcards were being dealt with three or more at a time. The advanced multitasking interface was complete and total bullshit.

Of course, the lesser multitasking interface available to Missy was bullshit as well, just nowhere near as bullshit. As evidenced by the fact that Missy was also browsing PHO while helping to sort mail. She'd started by looking for what people were talking about regarding Eagleton, only to find that there was little to nothing released. So she'd switched to general information on Minerva, as she figured that at least people would refer to her as Minerva's assistant, partner, or trainee.

What she found was far more amusing, in her opinion.

Topic: Minerva's Home Empire?

In: Boards ► Global ► Parahumans

Bagrat (Original Poster) (Veteran Member) (The Guy in the Know)

Posted On Jun 17th 2011:

Ever since Minerva appeared for the first time back in April (see these threads) there has been speculation on where she came from. Things kicked up after she drove off Leviathan, and speculation bounced around. Nobody could decide if she's a parahuman, merely using tinkertech, or even from another dimension entirely.

Things have changed since she took the fight to the Endbringers. Information for diplomatic meetings was requested, on the off chance that she was from another dimension. In response, the Team Mana website got a new set of pages, covering diplomatic guides.

Not something merely slapped together. There are over sixty thousand translations. These cover three different categories of Earth and an entire Multiple Planet Empire. Current speculation is that Minerva hails from this "Belkan Empire".

The guides cover a number of topics, and tell us quite a bit. For one, this Empire is obviously multi-species. Humanoids as we know them are a Type Six body, with actual humans coming across almost as a tailless afterthought in the guide. Experts also found the warnings about chirality to be odd at first, but have come to the conclusion that it's entirely possible that many of the species in the Empire are unusually sensitive to those issues.

Continuing on the people in this Empire, they don't appear to care much about "gender norms" as we know them. Or at least their uniform code doesn't seem to care, making zero gender-specific provisions. They seem to care more about physical body issues such as fur, ear position, tails, and other such issues than anything else.

Languages is another fun detail, with the guides serving as a modern-day Rosetta Stone for us. That said, the guides provided don't recommend ensuring that you have staff on hand to translate, but instead recommend checking for updated translation matrices. This implies fully automated translation throughout the entire Empire, something that may be needed with such a wide variety of species that may not even communicate in compatible manners.

It also seems that the Belkan Empire has multiple forms of teleportation available on a large scale, both assisted and unassisted. Their guides include rules for teleportation as a host and as a guest. Including providing teleportation assistance devices for guests that may need them or ensuring that if you do need them that the host has provided or you've made other arrangements. They also include provisions for people "scanning ahead", presumably to ensure that they're not about to drop into a trap.

As a quick note, Minerva was kind enough to drop off equipment for some of this so that the PRT, Protectorate, and United Nations can comply with some of those provisions.

We also know that the Empire has field groups, with their own internal leadership and specialized roles. These are split into three known groups:

1. Command, covering oversight and decision making in larger areas.

2. Combat and Defense, covering melee, long range, and defense specialties.

3. Civilian Adjuncts, covering research, development, and exploration.

Minerva obviously falls into the "Combat and Defense" group.

You may note that there's no obvious provision for medical teams in that short list. A separate set of guides was referenced but not provided for medical teams when healing is needed "above and beyond basic field healing". We have no clue what's covered by "basic field healing" and haven't seen Minerva injured enough to need any healing yet. Given the multiple species involved in the Belkan Empire we can assume that they need quite a bit more training and probably have markers for every species that a given medical professional is qualified to work on.

When it comes to combat itself, Minerva and Lilia have been running around in the "unknown/hazardous environment" uniform whenever they're out, barring a single trip to New York (edit: and a shopping trip that I missed), though rarely with the breathing apparatus to provide a fully controlled air supply. This could be to maintain consistency after the initial foray, or Earth Bet could actually be considered a "hazardous environment". Or, perhaps they just prefer it, instead of a fully-customized personal combat uniform.

As a side note, I'm baffled by how little there is in the way of rules for "personal combat uniforms" in the guides. Apparently anything goes, provided that it works with your combat style. The example images include what I'd call frilly dresses, fancy suits, and medieval-like armor with zero consistent elements between them. Identification in the field is apparently handled through IFF identifiers of some kind instead of through uniforms.

We also see other things in the guides that imply that the Belkan Empire is very militaristic. Diplomats are, apparently, expected and encouraged to respond to certain kinds of threats with lethal force. Not the escort elements, the wording implies that every member of a diplomatic party is expected to be able to handle themselves and be able to back up others. This implies that they're all trained to fight, if only for their own safety.

Of course, that statement wouldn't be complete without pointing out the single most concerning thing in the entire English-language guide set. The Belkan Empire has enough experience with what we'd normally call "Human Masters" (before multiple species are thrown into the mix) to have rules regarding them. They really discourage that, considering state-sanctioned use of such abilities on a diplomat to be a declaration of Total War.

In my estimation, Minerva could likely single-handedly defeat the entire planet on her own. I don't want to know what the results of a full military detachment, or possibly even a full Army or similar, showing up would be.

What followed was a few dozen pages of discussion, which surprised Missy given that it had been several days and she expected more. Well, the discussion started after you got through the first three pages of people contributing absolutely nothing but disbelief, memes, and calls of it having to be wrong.

"Hey Taylor," Missy said.

"Yeah?" Taylor answered.

"Apparently people have decided that you're from a massive multi-planetary empire."

That caused the older girl to pause. "What?"

"There's a thread on PHO about it, though I think it's mostly because of the...sixty thousand translations of the diplomatic guides?"

"The what? We only made an English version!"

That caused Missy to pause. "So, you didn't know that Hive posted thousands of translations for languages from multiple Earths and the Belkan Empire?"

The look on Taylor's face told Missy that the older girl had not, in fact, known about that detail. "Why in the world did Hive do that?"

"To sell it better? Since, you know, that seems to have worked?"

"This is like the whole seventeen extra Endbringer kills that she threw on the end of the streams. I'd at least like a warning when this kind of thing is being done. Finding out after the fact is a pain in the ass."

"Oh."

Taylor arrived back in the warehouse shortly after lunch, with Missy still going through mail back at the Inn. Two trucks were approaching, both with the same logo on the side, so it was likely that Hive's order was either larger than Taylor had been told or had been padded a bit by the company. Honestly, it was probably both. Luckily there was plenty of room to unload them into the warehouse.

Unlike the first truck of the day, one of these two had a forklift hanging off of the back with a bunch of strapped down items on a flatbed. The other was a standard boxed-in eighteen wheeler. The crowds had thinned a bit since that morning, either people needing to go to work or heading over to investigate the funnel across town, but two delivery trucks coming in had many of those who were there ready and waiting with cameras.

One truck backed right up to one of the loading dock doors, stopping only long enough to pop open the doors on the back of the truck, while the other merely pulled up. Taylor opened the other loading dock door anyway, figuring she could float things through it.

"Good afternoon," Taylor greeted the two drivers.

"Hello," one of the two replied. "You got your own forklift to unload all this stuff with, or do we need to see about getting ours in there?"

"No forklift needed. Is all of the stuff from both trucks for us?"

"Yep."

Taylor nodded, then started casting telekinesis spells on the contents of the truck pulled up to the building, which seemed to be seeds and cuttings more than anything else. It all started to float out into the warehouse a moment later, the two drivers staring for a moment before coming to the realization that they should probably unstrap the stuff on the other truck. By the time they'd done that, with the crowd ignoring them in favor of trying to get a look at things through the wide-open loading dock door, the first truck was unloaded. The crowd then yelled as the telekinesis spells started hitting the stuff on the other truck, most of which Taylor thought was dirt, fertilizer, and various powdered chemicals.

"That's the fastest unloading I've ever seen," one of the drivers said as the last pallet settled into the warehouse. "Can anyone learn that?"

"No," Taylor admitted. "And to be honest, it's harder than it looks." She would not want to be doing that kind of unloading right before a fight, just based on the mana cost of the telekinesis spells dealing with that much weight. "That said, do I need to sign anything?"

"Ah, yeah, let me grab the paperwork."

Ten minutes later she closed up the loading dock doors, then scanned the items now stacked up in the warehouse. Satisfied enough that nothing was going to happen on teleport, she directed the Inn to 'fetch' it all into one of the sub-basements using a predefined routine Hive had set up. Sure, Taylor could've done that herself, but targeting the correct folded space wasn't trivial and the Inn's systems were ready for it. Besides, she hadn't actually double-checked where Hive wanted it all and thus it was easier to use the routines.

Once everything was gone, she took a minute to check the internet. Sure enough, there were a lot of people posting videos of the floating delivery. Only one person so far had said anything about the conversation about it being harder than it looks, and that person agreed that it had to be harder than looking absolutely effortless. A number of people had questioned why nobody had tried to get into the warehouse, only for links to videos of the 'temporary water' blasts dealing with previous attempts to be posted.

Shaking her head, she checked the lights and locks before heading back to the Inn with her own dimensional transference. There was still plenty of mail to go through, plus she was still working on figuring out what to do about the whole revelation of just how many translations of the diplomatic guides Hive had posted. Sure, they wanted to make people not question things too closely for now, but that seemed like it was going much too far over the top.

After dinner that night, Taylor sat there with her father, watching the news crews run around in circles talking about the funnel and what it might possibly mean. Despite almost no information having come out about it, beyond what house it terminated in. They hadn't actually picked up on the fact that it was connected to Amy at all, which was impressive information control by the PRT. Or perhaps just complete disbelief that anyone would go after Panacea in that manner.

Eventually a reporter was standing there, with the funnel as a backdrop, and finally asked if Panacea might've been targeted. Though in this case they were thinking that it could be by the unknown woman who had gone after the cartel leader, though they didn't know why said woman would do so after warning the cartel leader to stay out of Brockton Bay. The speculation was interrupted by the funnel suddenly coming to an end, the remains of Amy's shard flowing down into the house.

A lot of movement started as multiple groups went straight for the house, but Taylor was more interested in the flash of light next to her as Hive arrived.

"Were there any other problems?" Taylor asked.

"No, Lord," Hive responded. "I need some time to finish analysis of the Shard's programming, but what I've already got from it is very impressive. The biological database alone is far beyond what I was expecting, and covers far more than species native to Earth. I've barely scratched the surface of it, and need to examine the biological manipulation routines in depth as well. Then there's yet another form of matter conversion, essentially completely unlocked as it was used in multiple directions with the other user's profile."

"Other user?" Danny asked. "What other user?"

"There was someone else connected to Amy's shard," Taylor answered. "Though we aren't sure who it was yet. Or at least we weren't earlier, and I think our general assumption before today was that Shard devices didn't have multiple normal users."

"Their connection profile was almost entirely manipulation of bone," Hive added. "With some self-healing so that they could use their own bones as a source point."

"Bone? Huh. That sounds like Marquis."

There was a pause, Hive looking thoughtful while the news covered an unconscious Amy being removed from the Dallon household. It wasn't long after the ambulance had driven off when Hive spoke up. "Dragon has reported that Marquis died in the Birdcage at around the time I'd expect, stating that 'loss of powers' was likely involved."

"Interesting," Taylor said a moment later. "But how did both of them end up connected to the same shard?"

"PRT records indicate that he was Amy's biological father and that he willingly signed off on her adoption 'to friends of the family' at the time of his incarceration. I suspect that the latter isn't entirely accurate, given that the Brockton Bay Brigade captured him in the first place."

"That should never have happened," Danny said, scowling. "She isn't related to the Dallons at all, so they shouldn't have been permitted to adopt her after being directly involved in capturing her father. Especially not since the Brigade broke into the man's home to do so after literal years of animosity between them."

Taylor rubbed her forehead. "This is going to be worse than mere riots over Panacea losing her powers, isn't it?"

"If any of this gets out? Definitely. But I suspect that it won't, because to do so would be revealing information that could make her a target to the other villains and criminals he'd made enemies of. I can't see the PRT wanting to do so, but they might use it as leverage to ensure that Carol and Mark cooperate. Instead this will be more likely to make New Wave look better overall, at least to the public, because they'll be cooperating fully."

"Okay. I guess I can see that."

"I'm more concerned with Amy's reaction to finding out that having her powers removed killed her father, and what plans you two have for that kind of thing not happening in the future."

Taylor flinched at that, but Hive was the one to answer. "We plan on doing a proper scan of Shard devices going forward. Identifying connection targets is difficult, but doable, and identifying that there are other connections should be trivial. Simply refusing to act on someone whose Shard device has multiple connections should be enough on its own."

He nodded in response. "That sounds like a suitable precaution for going forward. Anything else?"

"Short of tracking things back to other users and ensuring that they survive depowering? Actually, I'm not sure if we can do that."

"We can, Lord," Hive answered. "Though doing so would be more tricky, it's definitely doable, especially with the information from Amy's Shard. That said, I'm concerned about the amount of trial and error that had to have gone into learning everything the Shard had in its databanks, not to mention that it had a significant amount of potential for mental manipulation as well."

"What?"

"I just hit a portion of things that seems to cover how brains work in general, human and otherwise on Earths in the general area of the Dimensional Sea. Most of it is obviously new information that hadn't been integrated with the rest, but appears to at least partially be extrapolated from previous information on how biology works in various life forms. Far beyond what Aisha's Shard knew, but I can't say which Shard had it first. That information is in here in a more generalized form though, and could be used to rewrite someone's brain from the ground up."

Taylor blinked as she processed that. "So you have even more information on human brains?"

"And every other living thing on this and other Earths, plus what I suspect is at least two hundred other likely worlds. Had I known that Amy's Shard had this information and we would be processing it then I wouldn't have bothered with the order that was delivered today. Though having the seeds and cuttings will allow me to easily confirm that I can duplicate the various plants based on their genomes and other information."

"Hold up," Danny said. "Are you saying that you have a genetic archive of every species on Earth? All of them?"

"And then some, yes, plus algorithms for altering and combining all of the biological information across everything in the database and determining what the end results will be. That even includes information on Shard devices themselves, though most of that so far has actually been intended as a 'lockout' to prevent direct attempts at manipulating them. Despite that, I could likely significantly manipulate power expressions with the information available, as I hadn't actually realized just how much of that was defined or controlled in the 'host' end of the connection until now. I'll know more when I'm done going over everything."

"Huh."

They sat there watching the news speculate wildly about what had happened to Amy for a few minutes, but eventually Hive turned to Taylor again. "Lord, I'd like to install your next augmentation unit tonight, if you're agreeable."

Taylor nodded. "If you don't think it'll distract you too much from Amy's shard. I assume you installed multiple in her?"

"Yes. Three total, as there was enough in her Shard to make one and a half units combined. Her core is slightly more flexible than Missy's is and can fit up to five total units."

"For some reason I think that Missy isn't going to like that Amy can fit one more augmentation unit. Or that she currently has one more, for that matter."

Hive shrugged. "It is what it is, and I'm thinking that tomorrow night might be a good time to install Missy's third unit anyway. Amy's aren't turned on fully yet, so she's functioning at more like one half of one unit right now as well."

That evening was unusually distracting for Taylor at the Inn, where she'd opted to sleep while Hive worked on her. For some reason the process of adding the augmentation unit felt more...tingly than usual, perhaps? Though that was likely just Hive being a little sloppy due to continuing to work with Amy's shard at the same time, as they hadn't really done an 'install unit while still processing a shard' on anyone not knocked out by the process of having their shard disconnected.

Hive was also using quite a bit of the multitasking system, and running a lot of things through the simulation system, so Taylor did her best to keep out of the way. Mostly keeping an eye on various surveillance drones that she was moving around Brockton Bay. The remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine had a lot more dogs for some reason, though nothing specific was happening when she looked and she didn't know if she wanted to know why. The recordings from Hive's more automated monitoring would likely be able to tell her if it was important. On the Fallen front, the few groups that Taylor was able to check on without double-checking with Hive seemed to have grown in non-parahuman numbers. Either that or they'd decided to disguise what they were doing by feeding the homeless.

On the more local potential problems front, it looked like the Empire Eighty-Eight was pulling back and securing their borders for some reason. They were wearing gang signs while actively emptying buildings on the edge of their territory, leaders ordering grunts around, all as though desiring a buffer from something. What that something was she didn't know, and it could even be a drill for all she knew. Not that it looked like they were running a drill to her, but she also wasn't sure how many people would be told that it was only a drill. Her father had told her that they rarely told all the Dockworkers that it was only a drill when doing safety drills, at least until they were done.

Compared to them, the Azn Bad Boys weren't doing a lot tonight, but at the same time it looked like they were changing things in their area compared to the last time she'd paid it any attention. Several buildings were being repainted, and there were a couple buildings being torn apart internally. Then again, unlike the Empire Eighty-Eight, she couldn't tell if it was actually the gang doing things or just local residents changing things. It wasn't like she was watching them do work, and the only obvious gang members were lightly patrolling the area.

She also checked up on Amy, who was in the PRT building's hospital. They had the girl in a private room, guarded from the outside and checked by a doctor every thirty to forty-five minutes. Or whenever the heart rate monitor changed enough to possibly imply that she'd woken up. Presumably they had other things that would trigger an immediate check as well, but none of them had happened during the time Taylor was paying attention to those feeds.

Outside of that, she had a single instance of herself reading all of the theories on PHO. The theories about Minerva were interesting, but repetitive. PHO's running theory was obviously that she was from some kind of alien empire, though they varied widely on why she would be on Earth Bet at all. Some people thought that it was a prelude to conquering the planet, with the Endbringers having been 'in the way'. Others thought that she was hunting the forces behind the Endbringers and that was why she'd taken them out. Then there were those that thought she was just an explorer or scout and eventually Earth Bet would be invited to join the wider interplanetary or interdimensional group.

She wondered about the lone person insisting that she was merely lost far away from the empire itself and just doing her best to clean up the area while gathering resources and trying to figure out how to get back. That was a little too close to reality for her comfort. It was only one person though, and other people claimed that it made no sense for various reasons. Including, but not limited to, the very good question of how one got lost enough from such an obviously large empire without being able to at least call for help getting home.

In no way was she planning on posting Hive's 'drifted for an unknown amount of time' story to answer that.

Compared to that, the theories about the funnels were far more fluid. Apparently the cartel leader having his powers removed had broken a lot of the original theories, and now Amy's situation was throwing more spanners in the works for solidifying details. That they didn't know about every funnel that had appeared obviously wasn't helping, but the theories being thrown around were wild. Such as the person who claimed that a single dog had been sighted within half a mile of each funnel before it appeared, including the cartel leader's, and was obviously actually responsible. Or the 'insect overlords looking to empower their hive mind' theory, since no parahuman had been seen but insects had reacted to Taylor being injured. Come Tuesday morning, Taylor found herself oddly refreshed after a night of not all that good sleep. It seemed a little odd, but she wasn't going to complain about feeling better than expected. Besides, she had enough other things to worry about today, though she at least made it through morning exercise with Missy before getting down to any of it. Though the extra energy she had made it seem less effective than usual. Perhaps they'd step things up tomorrow, after Missy got her next augmentation unit?

"So what's got you worried this morning?" Danny asked as they sat down to eat breakfast.

Taylor grimaced. Figured that he'd notice. "Not sure what'll be happening with Amy, and now that she is probably on the back burner for a few days I'm thinking that I need to figure out what to do with the remnants of the Slaughterhouse Nine."

"Ah. Right. That."

"Plus the Fallen, the CUI or Yàngbǎn or whatever I want to call that fiasco today, and I'm honestly surprised that the United Nations hasn't reached out yet about who knows what kind of ceremony that I'm sure they're planning."

"Surely the Chinese haven't gotten anywhere near here? Weren't they last in the Everglades?"

"They were," Hive answered. "But that team has been caught outright by the Protectorate. The team who ran into engine difficulties were taken into custody by the Guild overnight, but the reporting of taking foreign parahumans into custody has resulted in the CUI being aware of their failure."

Taylor groaned at that. "Great, so I need to worry about them coming up with another attempt?"

"They're debating on whether or not to take advantage of the United Nations asking you to attend a ceremony. The information packets distributed to all member nations have caused them to have concerns."

"So the total war statement is actually causing people to consider what they're planning?"

"It appears so, Lord."

"At least that worked."

"Hold up," her father said. "What total war statement?"

"The 'state-sponsored mastering of diplomats' thing."

"Oh. That. Right." He then frowned. "What are you going to do if someone calls that bluff?"

"Not leave it as a bluff," Hive answered. "The CUI are the only reasonable threat from that point of view right now, and if they try anything we can disarm their entire military as an opening action. Shutting down their parahumans would be more difficult, of course, but with the two captured teams they're down to only thirty-four parahumans available in-country to the Yàngbǎn. We could easily isolate them in a single holding cell drone right now."

"They only have around forty parahumans total? Really?"

"Yes."

"I thought they had an army, not a single small platoon."

"Their records indicate that they believe that they can improve the quality of the parahumans that trigger in their country by killing the useless ones off. Further, they've encouraged the population to fear and turn on parahumans not already in the Yàngbǎn itself, likely in part to have them deal with any that are too weak to bother with. Despite that, their records acknowledge that there are a couple thousand non-Yàngbǎn parahumans in the country. Most of them are involved in fighting between factions and are left alone due to not having abilities considered useful enough, but the Yàngbǎn have plans to take them down if needed. One notable exception to their policies is a well known, decently powerful parahuman who is being left alone specifically because the Imperial Family purchases from the parahuman's farm due to superior quality production."

Taylor considered that. "Does that also mean that they have a list of parahumans to 'acquire' to replace any lost from the Yàngbǎn?"

"Yes, Lord. If we need to take action against them then three of their parahumans will be the priority initial targets, as combined they allow the entire Yàngbǎn to function. Though I am tempted to take out one of them anyway, as the entire country is only held together through the actions of a single parahuman manipulating the populace into far greater than normal obedience to the current Imperial Family. The same one that is used to brainwash the members of the Yàngbǎn itself."

"I'd expect that to be seen as an act of war."

"Only if we're caught, Lord."

"I think," Danny said, before shaking his head. "I think you have enough to worry about right now locally, no matter how much I dislike the idea of someone apparently brainwashing an entire country. We can revisit the Chinese problem later, when they become a more direct issue or there are less things on your plate. Like the Slaughterhouse Nine that you agreed to meet with at some point."

Taylor nodded. "Yeah. Though it would be nice to know if they're sincere about things or not. Or perhaps just what they actually want in general? We've got a single note as our only evidence of what at least two of them supposedly want, and it was written and delivered by neither of them, with any desires of the others not represented. Of course, that still gives us more detail than what we know about the plans of the Fallen."

There was a moment of silence before Hive spoke. "We do have a way of ascertaining those items, though not one to be used lightly."

"We do?"

"A detailed remote scan would allow me to read their minds with the knowledge from the Shards taken from Aisha and Amy. That would allow us to confirm intentions and desires in order to plan for likely actions upon engaging with either group."

That led to another moment of silence as Taylor and her father processed that. He recovered first, sighing. "As much as it sounds like a horrible invasion of privacy, it also sounds reasonable when dealing with known mass murderers. I don't think I'd be comfortable with you doing that to the Fallen, since they're more of a set of annoying religious movements that mostly attract petty thieves, but the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine? There it might be prudent, if only to know how many bystanders are likely to be in danger."

That was honestly a good argument, but Taylor wasn't sold on it. Mainly because the idea of mind reading on that level squicked her out a bit and she wouldn't want it done to her. "How much would we learn, and would they have any secrets left when we're done?"

Hive took a moment to respond. "I can create a short-lived lesser AI instance in the Inn's Shard systems to do the actual scanning. A base template for such a thing that I run four times would be ideal there. We could then get a summary of information and the full details would be wiped before anyone could see them. If possible, I'd like that summary to include information on why they joined the Slaughterhouse Nine in the first place, their goals and desires in meeting you in or out of your Minerva persona, how they'd likely feel about losing their parahuman abilities, and any relevant details needed to explain any of that."

"You should include their goals and desires for the community, if any," Danny added. "Or maybe the general area? Just because they have nothing they want to do to Taylor doesn't mean they don't intend harm to others."

"That's a good point and should be easy enough to add. Lord, is that an acceptable compromise between privacy and our need for information?"

Taylor thought about it for a moment before nodding. "It should be, yes. How long will it take to prepare?"

"I should be able to have everything ready later today, and it should only take an hour at most to do all four scans."

"Then how about we review things when I get home?" Danny said. "I assume things will hold until then."

"Aren't we here a little early?" Missy asked as the car stopped outside of City Hall, having finally decided to pay attention to the time.

"Technically yes," Sherie answered.

"I don't think I need to be this early."

"Your arrival time is dictated by other factors," Ethan said. "Specifically, when your guardians need to be at work. As in we need time to get to work after dropping you off."

"Oh."

"On that note," Sherie said. "You should get going before people start getting annoyed at us seemingly being parked in a drop-off zone."

A minute later the car pulled back into traffic, a last wave being sent Missy's way as she entered City Hall. The door closed behind her, and after a moment she made her way through the building, following the signs to the Mayor's office. She'd apparently been dropped off at the wrong end of the building, but that was understandable as the side street at the other end of the building was one-way in the wrong direction for Ethan and Sherie to easily continue to the PRT building. The Mayor's office was easy enough to get to anyway, and she found that the receptionist was waiting for her.

"Good morning Miss Biron," the receptionist greeted. "You're a little earlier than I expected you to be."

"Good morning," Missy replied. "And my arrival time is at least partially dictated by when my guardians need to be at work themselves."

"Ah, right. Well, we'll be waiting for your coworker to arrive, then we'll go over everything." She then gestured at two desks sitting off to the side. "Though since you're here first, you get to choose which desk to sit at."

Missy claimed one of the two desks and waited. It was almost half an hour before the Mayor arrived with Dinah trailing behind him, and he turned to see Missy sitting there. "Good morning Miss Biron, wonderful to see you here early. I believe you've met Dinah already?"

"Yes, sir," Missy replied. "We were in school together."

"Good, good. With any luck that means that you'll work well together."

"I wouldn't have recommended her if we wouldn't," Dinah added.

That...explained far too much, and made Missy feel like an idiot for not considering that angle before now. Dinah had taken much more of an interest in her, and had apparently arranged to have frequent access to her over the summer as part of that. It was enough to be angry about if it wasn't also helping Missy in other ways.

Over the course of the next hour the two interns were given an overview of things. Where office supplies were stored, how to run the copy machine, approximately where various offices were in the building, and what would be expected of them. Mostly that was whatever the Mayor or his receptionist asked of them and would cover running things around the building, fetching supplies, making copies, and doing preliminary checking of paperwork.

It was the last item that they actually started with. There was a pile of handwritten expense summaries that needed to have a basic check done to see if the math added up or not before they were entered into the computer by others. Missy and Dinah were tasked with doing an initial pass, with any that didn't add up to be flagged to be sent back to be corrected and resubmitted. The pile of summaries was placed in an 'in' tray between the two girls, with two 'out' trays. One for problems found, the other for no problems found.

They'd been at it for maybe fifteen minutes when Dinah sighed and turned to Missy. "How are you moving so quickly?"

Missy blinked and looked at the other girl. "What?"

"You're not even using your calculator, and I don't know why you need a ruler at all."

"Oh. I'm using the ruler to help keep my place and keep tabs on carry numbers."

"What?"

Missy resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "The numbers are all in nice columns, so I'm summing up the digits in each column from the right to the left. Each time I hit ten I move my finger along the ruler to keep tabs on that, then just keep using the one's position digit. That way I'm only doing mental math with single digit numbers, and as soon as my final result digit for the column doesn't match the total number then there's a mistake. I can stop then, otherwise I take the number of times I hit ten and use it as the starting number for the next column. Most of the ones I've thrown in the problems found tray didn't add up in the cents columns, so I didn't need to go any further."

Dinah blinked a couple of times, then looked down at the sheet she had in front of her. She pulled the ruler out of the top drawer of the desk and placed it down on the sheet, then obviously ran through the numbers. It took her three passes before she was confident in the result of the first column, then she moved on to the second. Missy left her to it and went back to the sheet she was working on.

It took a few minutes, but Amy finally realized that the annoying beeping interrupting her sleep was a heart monitor. Which probably meant that she'd fallen asleep at the hospital and been stuck into the break room with shoddy sound dampening. Except that it was too loud for that, and there was an odd feeling in her arm. And she couldn't feel any of the normal microorganisms on her skin for some reas...

Her eyes popped open, and she recognized the ceiling as being PRT-standard instead of Brockton General's, and a quick look to the side showed that the just-sped-up heart monitor was attached to her. Coupled with other odd feelings, like a much better idea of where phantom organs were around her? Hive had apparently successfully removed her powers and given her magic. Not that she felt especially magical right now, but she also had no training yet.

A doctor rushing into the room broke her train of thought, and she spent the next hour being tested and fed. At first they focused on ensuring that she was healthy, though did include questions about her powers. Once they knew she was physically healthy they brought in a woman that she believed was a psychologist who seemed to dance around a number of issues before apparently deciding that they knew enough.

Eventually all of the medical professionals felt that they were happy enough with her condition to allow her to have visitors, though she hadn't been expecting Deputy Director Renick with Miss Militia to be her first set.

"Good morning Amy," Renick greeted.

"Good morning," Amy replied, before frowning. "You never call me Amy unless Vicky is around too, only Miss Dallon."

"Good catch," Miss Militia said. "Your name is actually a little up in the air right now, which is one of the things we need to talk to you about."

"Why would my name be up in the air?"

Renick sighed. "The Dallons have, as of forty-five minutes or so ago and as part of a larger deal, signed paperwork that releases their guardianship of you due to a combination of factors including irregularities in your original adoption. That could be interpreted as being retroactive and negating your legal name change under said adoption, reverting your name to Amelia Claire Lavere as a side effect. Or it could leave your name as Amelia Dallon, as things currently read in your file. Some of this is likely going to depend on what you tell the judge when you eventually end up in front of one, as we've already been asked to ensure that you're there for that part of the proceedings."

"Oh."

"That said, we have other things we'd like to talk to you about now. What's the last thing you remember before waking up here?"

Amy actually had to think about that, coming to the conclusion that having your powers removed induced short term memory loss in the process. She knew she'd have done more than she could actually remember doing, based on their plans, but couldn't remember doing all of it. "I remember going home from Taylor's house with Vicky, and then digging out some of my old notes? Or trying to, I don't know if I found them in the back of my closet."

"You did find them, and the investigating team found them as well when removing you from the Dallon household. I assume you don't remember attempting to create an organism that would safely dismantle the corona pollentia and gemma in your brain?"

"No," Amy replied, absolutely truthfully. In part because she knew that she'd not actually intended to.

"We're currently under the impression that you made the attempt and it didn't work as you intended, putting your life at risk. Likely because damaging or removing those structures has been shown in others to merely cause powers to go out of control, not go away, but you wouldn't have had any way to know that. Whatever the actual result of the attempt, and we have no way of telling what that was, it caused those behind the funnels to intervene. Our current theory is that their most potent healing abilities can only be used while removing powers, leaving them with the choice of letting you die or removing your powers."

"Okay..."

They sat there in silence for a moment before Deputy Director Renick sighed. "That said, there were apparently additional complications of some kind this time, and we aren't sure if any of them were intentional. Or if similar things have happened other times and nobody noticed, admittedly. Specifically, several members of New Wave found that their powers were destabilized, which could've been an attempt to prevent them from interfering and causing you harm as a result. In addition, something happened to your biological father's powers at the same time. I don't have any details, but we can only assume a similar disruption occurred with him. Whatever it was, it resulted in his death in the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center last night."

Amy took a moment to process that. "My father...was in the Birdcage?"

"Yes. In that context you would know him as Marquis. His capture is part of the irregularities surrounding your adoption."

"Ah." That...probably explained quite a bit, honestly. At least regarding Carol. Hadn't Marquis been the biggest thorn in the Brigade's side back in the day? And if powers were disrupted, and his were included, then it was likely that someone else in the Birdcage killed him during his moment of weakness.

"Amy," Miss Militia said, making Amy realize that she'd drifted off in thought. "One thing we do need to establish is where you'll be staying for the time being. For legal reasons it can't be with the Dallons or Pelhams, but if you have a preference other than them we can explore it. Otherwise we'll probably want to find a PRT officer or two to watch over you until all the legal matters are taken care of."

Wait, she was being asked where she wanted to stay, and not just being stuck in a room in the PRT building until everything was figured out? Crap. That hadn't come up in their planning at all. Though the best way to be able to 'slip away' for training with Taylor was probably to not need to slip away at all, right? "Er, could we see if I could stay with Taylor?"

Renick blinked at that. "Taylor Hebert?"

"Yes."

"We'll get in touch with Mister Hebert and ask him. That leaves one more thing, and I dislike having to ask it today."

Amy frowned. "What?"

"The public is getting insistent on knowing what happened to you, and now that you aren't a parahuman it's been pointed out to me that we're obligated to tell them something by the end of the day tomorrow. I don't have to tell them much, but want to ensure that you're happy with the statement."

"Oh. What do you want to tell them?"

"That a power interaction gone wrong caused those behind the funnels to act, resulting in your loss of powers but not your life."

Well, that had the benefit of being technically correct if looked at in the right way, and matched the cover story of what she'd been trying to do if you counted her own powers interacting with herself through a created organism. Meaning that even thinkers were unlikely to think anything was wrong with it. "I guess that works?"

"Right, it isn't like you actually remember what happened. But you don't object to the public being told that, compared to the full picture we've pieced together?"

Amy shrugged. "I don't think I mind either way right now."

"Then I'll go start working on things." He turned to Miss Militia. "You had some questions for her as well, I believe?"

Miss Militia nodded. "Yes, but you don't need to be here for them."

"Okay then. I'll leave you to that." He got up, gave a small wave, and left the room.

A moment later the door closed behind him, and Amy turned to look at Miss Militia. "So you have more questions for me?"

"Yes," the woman answered. "But only a couple, and only because Legend asked me to talk to you directly. I'm going to be blunt, because I can't think of a good way to skirt around the issue and still get answers. We want to confirm some details about your life growing up with the Dallons. Primarily if Carol and Mark made you feel like a part of the family or not, but he's also concerned about whether the injuries you sustained the other day were the first or merely the latest physical injuries Carol inflicted upon you."

Amy had flinched during part of that, something that Miss Militia had to have noticed but didn't visibly react to. She also had to think about her response for a moment. "Mark tried his best, but most days had a hard enough time keeping himself together. Carol...didn't seem to try at all? But honestly, that seemed to apply almost as much to Vicky, given the amount of time needed to deal with Mark and her job. Most of the time it felt more like Neil and Sarah were raising us and we just happened to live with Carol and Mark."

"I see. And the injuries?"

"I can't say that it was the first time Carol has injured me, but I believe it was the first time she deliberately targeted me?"

"Okay. Do you have any questions for me?"

"Not currently, no. Unless you know if anyone else is waiting to come see me?"

The woman shook her head. "Nobody that we've let into the building. We doubt that you want reporters or random members of the public, and we haven't told anyone else that you're awake anyway. I suppose that would be another question for you, though. Is there anyone that you'd like us to inform?"

"I suppose someone should let Vicky know that I'm okay."

"I'll call her myself."

Taylor landed at the Inn after a morning of more intense training with hundreds of drones. She'd done much better than she'd expected, and she could no longer blame the new augmentation unit for all of it. In fact, now she wasn't sure that she could blame that for any of the improvements that she'd noticed today, and she felt that she needed answers. So she headed down to the sub-basement that Hive was working in.

"Hello Lord," Hive said as Taylor stepped out of the elevator. "I think I'm almost ready to load a biological manipulation profile for you, though I'm also wondering if you should have a non-unison hybrid device of your own in case we're separated. If someone did find a way to disrupt communication between us while working individually it would also allow you to maintain near your normal combat effectiveness."

"That does sound reasonable," Taylor admitted. "I assume with lesser versions of some of your own shard-based capabilities?"

"Most likely less multitasking and insect control functionality, and a lesser simulation system, but still quite functional otherwise. You can handle far more than Missy can, and will likely be able to handle more than Amy as well. As for Shard-derived abilities, the insect control and multitasking functionality is the single most resource intensive software set we have available right now. The rest are, comparatively, trivial."

"Ah. And we've got plenty of material to build something with, of course."

"Yes, Lord."

"Okay. Go for that, but before you do I want to know what you did to me last night."

Hive turned to Taylor. "I installed the additional augmentation unit while ensuring that your body suffered no ill effects through the use of the field healing system."

Taylor raised an eyebrow. "And that means that I'm suddenly significantly more flexible and able to react faster than I could before?"

"Admittedly, I prioritized human data when processing Amy's Shard device and upgraded the field healing routines with improved definitions of 'peak health'. The additional methodologies for manipulating biology also factored in regarding reducing the overall stress the healing placed upon your body. The end result of the initial healing pass with the new definitions would include greater strength, stamina, and flexibility in addition to optimization of all other organ functions and an adjustment to cellular functions to prevent telomere deterioration."

That...did, technically, explain things. "Are you saying that you've negated the need to exercise to stay healthy?"

"The field healing system is now capable of keeping humans far healthier than they are likely to ever be naturally, regardless of things such as exercise, though it generally only gets used in 'peak health' mode by a device working on a registered primary user. Admittedly, there are many ways to 'tweak' the human body to extremes, and the new definitions allow for quite a bit of adjustment, but the default is balanced for overall health, lifespan, and projected day to day needs."

"So field healing now creates a fully optimized human?"

"No, Lord. To do that would require significant rebuilding of several evolutionary remnants at a minimum, which is beyond the scope of the field healing system. At best it's an optimization of the specific human's existing form with as little visible external changes as possible. Outside of healed injuries, of course."

Taylor honestly didn't know how to take that. After some thought she decided that it would probably be best to check with her father before coming to a conclusion on whether she should be freaking out about the changes or merely be annoyed that Hive hadn't mentioned them before implementing them. For that matter, Ethan and Sherie probably also needed to know, as did Missy, before the girl's next augmentation unit was put in tonight. Though there was basically zero chance in Taylor's mind that Missy wouldn't want the improvements.

Deciding that the best option for the moment was to eat lunch, Taylor headed back upstairs to take advantage of the pile of shopping that she'd done. It didn't take long to assemble a large sub and grab some chips, after which she brought it out onto the porch so that she could look out over the water while she ate.

Missy and Dinah had eaten lunch together, and then largely chatted instead of having anything to do for the afternoon. Occasionally one or both would be sent off with something, but no 'backlog' of things to take care of existed for them to help with. Even the pile of expense summaries had been a 'happened to not have been taken care of yet' thing that was handed to them as initial busy-work.

The exception to that was mid-afternoon, when they were called into the Mayor's office so that they could watch the PRT's press conference about Amy. They said that "a power interaction gone wrong caused those behind the funnels to act, resulting in Panacea losing her powers but not her life" and "other concerns have resulted in the Dallons giving up custody of her" without providing any actual details for either statement. When explicitly asked, they cited that to say any more would be violating the privacy of those involved.

One thing that Missy hadn't missed, even though the news anchors seemed to have, was the normally professional deputy director using an informal 'Amy' to refer to the girl, instead of using 'Miss Dallon'. That he referred to everyone else he mentioned in the more formal manner just made it stand out more, and he'd only used 'Panacea' the one time. The only other 'cape name' used by him in the conference was Armsmaster, who wasn't an outed cape.

The name discrepancy bothered her for the rest of the day, but it was only when she was picked up by Ethan and Sherie that she could ask anyone about it.

"So," Missy said as the car pulled away from City Hall. "Do you know why Renick never referred to Amy as 'Miss Dallon' today?"

Ethan shrugged. "It was something about her legal name being up in the air, but why wasn't exactly being spread around. Presumably something to do with her having been adopted by the Dallons coupled with them giving up custody."

"I heard something about needing a judge to decide on some things," Sherie added. "Possible retroactive decisions or something like that. But that was more of a lucked-into gossip session than anything officially distributed."

"What we do know is that Taylor has additional things to talk about tonight before you get your additional augmentation unit. Something that came up with her, but she didn't provide details and instead just included a request for a discussion ahead of you popping over to the Inn. We invited her and Danny over to dinner for that discussion, since she seemed to think it was important."

Sherie sighed. "I was able to check with Danny when confirming them coming over for dinner with him and he doesn't know what happened to concern Taylor. Mainly because he hadn't had a chance to talk to her about it yet, but that does seem to imply that she found out about whatever it is after he left for work this morning."

Great. Now Missy had two mysteries to bug her. At least one of them would only be doing so for a couple of hours at the most, and she'd probably forget about the other one entirely by the time she woke up tomorrow. Or she'd eventually be able to ask Amy about it, assuming that Ethan and Sherie didn't get actual information on what was going on sooner.

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Threadmarks Chapter 83 - June 21, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

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LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Dec 9, 2020

#15,465

Despite Miss Militia's statement that nobody else had been waiting to visit her, Amy ended up with a stream of visitors throughout the day. Carlos and Dennis had stopped in before they went out on patrol, wanting to know if the rumors were true. Neil and Sarah had come through with a PRT escort for 'legal reasons' and mostly stuck to asking about what they should ensure was packed up from her room for her. Several PRT squad leaders had stopped by, generally those that she'd healed up in the past after they'd ended up injured during cape battles. Most of them just talked with her for a couple of minutes, but one of them had cheekily given her a book on basic field medicine.

Vicky had eventually arrived, on her own, though she claimed that Dean was in the building too. Presumably he was down in the Wards area or something like that. They chatted about how Amy was doing, Vicky whined about a combination of 'not being allowed to go home' and 'the Stansfields are making her use the guest room', and dodged around topics that really shouldn't be brought up in the PRT building. Like Amy's eventual training, which they danced around by talking about her 'needing new hobbies now'.

"So," Vicky said after they'd run out of other topics, and at least one nurse had checked in and given them a look. Not that there were visitor hours for Vicky to be running afoul of right now. "I suppose that your crush is less squick-y now, technically?"

Amy blinked. "What?"

"Sarah told me that, legally, you're essentially no longer my sister. Possibly retroactively never was? She didn't seem to know the details. I'm still not interested in you that way, but at least it now sounds less squick-y."

"Oh." Blushing slightly, Amy wondered why Vicky was even bringing that up.

"But! There are some girls at school that are similar to me in looks and I swear that two of them have to be into girls. I bet we can feel them out and see if you click with them."

Amy glared at Vicky. "I think you've set me up on enough 'blind dates' already."

"I didn't know you liked girls then! Had I known that I'm sure I would've done better!"

"It still wouldn't have worked."

"You underestimate my matchmaking skills. I just have to know what I'm actually working with, which I didn't with you."

That had Amy rolling her eyes. "And you still don't." Especially not while making really poor assumptions that were different from, but not any better than, her previous ones.

Vicky pouted. "Of course I do, now. I was trying to match you up with guys when you like girls."

"Who said I liked girls?"

"...you did?"

"No, I don't think I did." And she was now trying to figure out why she was so attracted to the lunkhead that wasn't getting it. Then again, her frequent obliviousness to things was probably part of her charm.

"I'm confused."

"That does seem to come naturally to you, yes."

"Hey!"

They weren't pretending to visit for any public reason that would require being seen visiting to explain, so Taylor and her father used a portal between transport devices to get to the Walsh household. Ethan was carrying a stack of pizza boxes into the dining room when they arrived, and after initial greetings the five of them settled in and collected their first couple of slices each.

"So what's going on that needs discussing?" Sherie asked once everyone had eaten their first slice of pizza.

"I don't know about Taylor," Danny said. "But I've had multiple interesting calls today."

"Oh?"

"I wasn't surprised when Carol called and apologized for not being able to continue to represent us, but she wasn't doing a whole lot as of late anyway so that wasn't a big deal. She gave me a couple of alternate contacts in case we need them. Then the PRT called about scheduling more of Taylor's time for necklace examination this weekend. I mentioned that she was scheduled to be watching Missy due to your schedules only to be told that Missy and Amy were both hopefully going to be included anyway."

"They asked us about that earlier too," Ethan chimed in.

Danny nodded. "I was surprised when they told me that Amy had a necklace, but apparently they aren't treating that as a secret. Or at least aren't keeping it a secret from others that know more about the necklaces? Of course, then the PRT called again, asking if Amy could stay with us for at least a few days while legal stuff is taken care of. I said yes, if she wanted to, but pointed out that I'm not cleared for fostering and likely couldn't be for a number of reasons. They claimed that wasn't an issue yet."

"They're just looking for a place for her to stay that isn't the PRT building once she's cleared," Sherie said. "We don't qualify because Missy is both too new to our household and still officially 'high risk'." Most of the rest of them looked at her, and she shrugged. "I offered and was told no, plus she asked about staying with Taylor. Probably because it will make initial training easier."

"Right. Then I got a call from Dragon asking about making an appointment to meet with Taylor and I early next week about business opportunities of some kind. I've arranged to take Tuesday off for that, since we shouldn't need to deal with Missy as well that way. Then Taylor let me know about other issues that we're technically here to discuss, but that I still don't have details on." He then turned to look at Taylor, as did the others.

Sighing, Taylor swallowed the bite of pizza in her mouth. "Hive has improved her field healing system, and presumably plans on upgrading Space's."

"And the equivalent systems in all of the Combat devices," Hive interjected.

"Right. The upgrades make the system far more capable, as I understand it essentially making them as good if not better than what Amy had been able to do, but also include a new definition of what a human in 'peak health' means. Which was used on me last night, and has apparently resulted in increases in strength, flexibility, stamina..."

"Telomere maintenance and a general organ functionality optimization," Hive finished for Taylor. "Nothing major such as correcting routing of things that would be obvious on medical scans, but a general optimization of the entire body instead. I've also since added microbial improvements for various things, though those improvements are minor and are more of a balancing action than direct improvements."

"So..." Danny said. "As close to superhuman as you can get without changing from a standard human template?"

"Essentially, yes. With significant physical modifications things could be improved, even if they were only internal and didn't alter surface appearance, but that would be visible in medical scans and would arguably not be peak human health anymore."

They sat there for a moment before Ethan swallowed the bite he'd taken of his own pizza. "So, you wanted us to be aware of this so that we'd be informed before it happened to Missy?"

Taylor nodded. "Basically. I got no warning."

"Huh. If it wouldn't obviously show up while working and get Armsmaster on my ass, because of course he'd notice, then I'd want it done to me too."

"Damn," Sherie said, snapping her fingers. "I'd forgotten about his performance tracking setup. He'd definitely notice if we improved for no visible reason."

"So you aren't telling them to not give me those boosts?" Missy asked.

"It's only cheating if your opponent does it," Ethan replied. "Though if they come up with a way to explain doing that to other people then I'm signing up to be a volunteer to test it. Actually, Hive, could you make healing devices that could be dropped in hospitals? Since Panacea is no longer an option and that isn't going to stop serious injuries from happening?"

Hive obviously considered that while everyone else continued to eat, before responding a few minutes later. "The legal issues surrounding getting an unproven device like that approved for use in a hospital would be daunting for us, but creating an automated device and installing it at the warehouse for anyone to use could work as an initial solution. We could then see if anyone asks about installing units elsewhere. Alternatively, the warehouse becomes the new 'medical tourist' visiting spot."

"Hold up," Danny said. "Wouldn't having something like that just sitting there be a legal issue itself?"

"It would likely be classified as tinkertech legally, and if we don't charge to use it then the only liability would be if it caused someone provable harm. Creating a version that others can build with the current technological level of the planet would be difficult at best, impossible at worst, but I think it makes sense to have a dozen or so in standby beyond anything sitting at the warehouse. If my Lord approves then I'll add such devices to my construction list."

Taylor shrugged. "I don't see any real reason not to build them. Standalone healing devices sound like a good thing to have available even if they aren't public use."

"I'll come up with a design and queue them up in the fabrication unit I've got at the Inn when I'm ready."

They settled into silence again after that, focusing on eating more than anything else. Taylor and Missy together consumed more than the three adults combined had, but nobody said anything about that. At one point Taylor did wonder if they should've done something to tire Missy out, like they had the last time that they'd installed an augmentation unit in her, but figured that Hive had a plan for that. Or no longer thought it necessary, perhaps?

Eventually everyone finished and the leftovers were dropped into the kitchen for later packing up. The five of them then dropped into seats in the living room, mostly because it seemed a little early to take Missy to have her augmentation unit installed. Or at least that was Taylor's assumption.

"So," Danny said, looking at Taylor. "Did Hive finish getting those profiles on the Slaughterhouse Nine members in town?"

"WHAT?" Ethan and Sherie yelled at the same time, while Missy had jumped up before the two adults had reacted.

Apparently they'd forgotten to inform the three about that. Ooops. Taylor looked at the three, then sighed. "Yes, they're in town, looking to meet up with Minerva. We think, if we can trust their letter. Well, a couple of them want to meet up, the others I think don't care? We aren't sure, but I assume that Hive was able to figure out more?"

"I was," Hive answered. "Do you have a preference for what order I go over them in?"

"Not really." Taylor looked to her father, who shrugged, then at the other three, who were staring at her blinking. "Whatever order you think will work best, I guess."

"I suppose that we can start with Ned, or Crawler as he prefers. His entire reason for meeting you, or anyone else really, is tied to a desire to see if he can be killed. Some of this is his Shard device pushing for him to place himself in danger, but there were signs of that mindset existing before he triggered. I cross-checked records and he has literally stopped in the middle of a rampage to sit down next to a bomb with a countdown on it, apparently just to see what would happen to him. He seems to respect those that have tried their best to kill him but failed, but feels that not having tried your best is a form of disrespect. I've also checked, and his Shard device currently has one other connection, so we can't safely depower him."

"At least one of them is straightforward, though not being able to depower him limits our options a little."

"He also appears to have triggered when an emergency worker was trying to save his life after he intentionally overdosed on drugs. I can't corroborate that with any official records though."

"Wait," Sherie said. "Was that 'because he was going to die' or 'because they wanted to keep him alive'?"

"The latter, and if correct then he's responsible for one of the many incidents where emergency responders end up dead due to a freshly triggered parahuman."

"Huh."

Taylor sighed. "Okay. Does he have any plans for us or the area?"

"Not really," Hive answered. "He's hoping for a significant fight, or anything possibly able to kill him. He does plan to see if the local Protectorate could come up with a way to kill him if nothing else comes up in the next couple of weeks, but that's about it. To move on, Mister Manton does not wish to meet you or anyone associated with you after being given a warning of some kind by an associate. He is actually preparing to leave without the other three, and intends to be out of the city by noon on Thursday at the latest. The circumstances under which he got his powers are odd, as apparently he just drank something. I didn't request enough detail on that to know the story behind it, and don't know if it could be trusted if I had. Further, my analysis of his Shard device indicates that there are at least a dozen others connected to it. More interestingly I found it in the deteriorated shroud bubble, which brings up interesting possibilities for what happens there."

"Wait a second," Ethan said. "Manton? I mean, I know that the rumors said he was the man driving the others around, but he has powers?"

Taylor shrugged. "The Siberian is apparently his projection."

It took a couple of minutes for Ethan and Sherie to recover from that shock, followed by a good twenty minutes where they both argued over ways to allow that to be properly reported to the PRT and Protectorate. Including Sherie taking Ethan's phone from him when he wanted to call it in immediately, given that they couldn't safely explain how they knew.

"Excuse me," Taylor finally said between statements from the two.

"What?" Sherie asked.

"I assume that I'll be talking to the other three eventually as Minerva, probably sooner than later. Why not just have me tell Armsmaster? I could even call him tomorrow and say that I was contacted by the four, which has the benefit of being true, and investigated them as a precaution before considering approaching them. Which is also true, even if Hive and I have known that the Siberian is a projection of Manton's since they went after Nilbog."

Hive must've noticed Ethan's eye starting to twitch, as she jumped right back in to distract him. "Mimi Corti, currently better known to the world as Burnscar, is largely going along with things out of fear of Miss Davis. She dislikes what her powers do to her thought processes as well as what she's done with them in the past. Because of that, she is considering approaching my Lord's civilian identity once Riley is hopefully out of the picture to see if she can trigger the power-removal process somehow, though she isn't sure how to do so without being shot first. Barring that, she plans on visiting a girl named Elle who lives in town. She has no other plans beyond survival, but also doesn't fully trust her own judgement due to the influence of her powers. Her Shard device is also only connected to her as of my check, and the scan summary implies that she's the best choice if we were aiming to recruit any of the four."

"Excuse me," Missy said, frowning. "Recruit? From the Slaughterhouse Nine? Really?"

Taylor sighed. "That, according to the letter that Mimi dropped off, is exactly what they want. Or at least that's what Riley, or Bonesaw, wants."

"Oh."

"Sadly for her," Hive said. "Miss Davis is probably the worst candidate for recruitment of the four, even if she has a linker core and only one connection to her Shard device. She is apparently fixated on being a 'good girl' and sees 'magical girls' as the best kind of 'good girl' available. Her moral compass is almost nonexistent otherwise, with everything being weighed entirely on whether or not it helps her become a better 'good girl'. That is currently locked into 'convince Minerva to make her a magical girl', but once that goal has been accomplished it is likely that she will assume that anything she does is good because she is a magical girl and magical girls are 'good girls'. Based on the summary I would be unwilling to give her access to any form of offensive magic at all, and would not even recommend augmenting her core. Assuming that's even possible to do safely at this stage."

"Why wouldn't it be safe?" Taylor asked, curious.

"Deep scans show that she and Miss Corti have had significant body modifications done. Miss Corti's modifications don't appear to have significantly impacted her core's support structure, perhaps a small amount of reduced capacity but that would be it as her changes are mostly additional protection elements. In comparison, Miss Davis's support structure is heavily damaged due to major alterations of her central nervous system including, but not limited to, what appears to be a completely removable spine making most of her body more of a puppet being controlled than a normal body. I've not yet determined how to repair such damage to the support structure, especially since it would essentially require building the now-missing structure components from scratch, and powering it up more than it already is could result in it collapsing entirely and killing her."

"Oh."

"Also, her immediate plans for the general area including hunting down the Fallen and ensuring that they stop being a problem so that her transition to a magical girl isn't being held up by them. So far she's still gathering information and resources for that and hasn't actually made any plans for what to do to them."

"So," Danny said. "Out of four people you've got one possibly good candidate for recruitment, and it's not the one that wants to be recruited. It almost sounds like you'd be better off trying to fix Ethan here instead, despite that apparently being far more likely to kill him than anything else."

"I can run that test safely now," Hive admitted, causing everyone else to look confused. Taylor included. "With Amy's Shard device data I can ensure that any trauma from the core removal is corrected immediately. If I couple that with the information from Hess's Shard I can forcibly remove the entire support structure, with the only potential complication being the potential for Ethan's Shard device to permanently disconnect as well. The only other problem would be ensuring that he spent a few days in a higher-mana environment so that his support structure could successfully build a new core."

"No," Sherie said, slapping her husband on the back of the head.

"What?" Ethan whined.

"You were about to volunteer for that, and there are far too many complications for even considering that right now. If it worked then things would be annoying, and if it didn't then you'd have to explain how you ended up powerless."

"Oh. That would suck."

"And Piggot would make you do all the paperwork she could get away with."

Ethan cringed at that thought.

"So," Missy said. "Given what we know, what do we do about it?"

Taylor frowned. "Probably either approach them before they get into the whole Fallen hunting bit, or take care of the problem with the Fallen ourselves. But I'd like to know what I'm doing about the four before approaching them. Well, three, if Manton is leaving the area anyway. Am I supposed to just accept that Crawler wants to die?"

"There is an option," her father said. "At least for the two girls, anyway. You talk to them, see how they react, and if you don't like the reaction then Hive erases their memories of the conversation. Miss Corti at least seems like she'd appreciate losing her powers, though I'm less certain about giving her access to magic afterwards despite her being the best recruitment candidate according to Hive."

"I don't think I was ever going to be comfortable giving any of them magic, regardless of what they want on that front, based entirely on their history. The problem is how to deal with them safely."

"Question," Ethan said, causing them all to turn to him. "Can Hive remove powers without removing the corona pollentia or gemma? Leaving them there, but dormant?"

"Skipping that portion of the healing steps would be possible," Hive answered after a moment. "Or even putting fakes back afterwards if they're positioned poorly for future health. I presume you intend for that to be a sign that the method used to depower them differs from the funnels?"

"Yeah. Permanent disconnection instead of funneling the powers."

"I suspect that I would still need to remove the Shard device itself to prevent it from simply reconnecting later, as I have to assume that they'd be configured to do so. I wouldn't be able to do that safely for Manton or Crawler due to the additional connections to his Shard device and the location Manton's sits in, but the two girls would be candidates for depowering and then dropping them off with the PRT. We could probably find a way to contain Crawler as well."

"No, no, I think you should test everything you can with Crawler and if he somehow manages to survive it all then hit him with things you know should kill him anyway, if only because he's got a death sentence no matter what you do otherwise and the PRT probably can't pull it off safely. If even that doesn't work? Leave him on another planet and forget about him where he won't be hurting anyone. But the two girls seem like good candidates for removing powers and then letting the system handle them."

"I'm going to have to come up with a more complete plan than 'wing it', aren't I?" Taylor grumbled.

Her father snorted. "I doubt you were going to do that anyway. You just didn't want to think about how to handle this problem while Amy's issues were still up in the air. The more I think about it though, the less I like you talking to them about options at all. I mean, Crawler sounds straightforward enough, but what do you think about just grabbing the other two over the next few days and processing them?"

"What, and then ask Crawler if he wants me to set up a 'see if you can kill the monster' competition?"

"He'd probably go for it, from what we know, but I figure if you tell him that you want to run experiments that could be instantly fatal then he'll play along anyway."

"You should call Über and Leet," Missy chimed in. "Make a spectacle out of it, livestream it, and then hopefully nobody tries to claim you faked it if there isn't a body to turn in."

Taylor frowned. "Why wouldn't there be a body?"

"Er, I might have a trick that Space and I came up with that needs a real-world test that he could be a good target for to see how dangerous it is? Assuming he's nowhere near anything anyone cares about, just in case."

"Oh. Are you sure you want to test it on a livestream and not in private first?"

"Um..."

"I vote you test it live," Ethan chimed in. "If only so that if it fails miserably the world sees that you aren't infallible."

"No," Sherie said, shaking her head. "They test it remotely with a drone tomorrow in case it's too dangerous, or fails in a horrific manner. Only if it works do they then maybe use it as a finishing move on Crawler."

"BAH! Logic and common sense. Horrible things. Besides, they could test with a drone at range with Crawler too."

"Okay, yes, that would technically be an option. I still think that they should try it in more controlled circumstances first. If only so that they know what to expect and aren't surprised by the results on a livestream."

Ethan grumbled, but didn't argue that.

"Okay," Taylor said after a moment. "I guess I'm working on plans for those four tonight while Missy gets her next augmentation unit. Anything else for the time being, or should we do something about starting on that?"

"What do you plan on doing about the Fallen?" her father asked.

"Oh. Right. Them. I still don't think we know what they want to do with me? What am I supposed to do, show up in public and see what they do?"

"Possibly, yes."

"I'll think about it."

The next hour was spent with Ethan providing outlandish theories for what the Fallen might attempt, followed by having dessert. Missy then got ready for bed while Taylor sent her father home. Once the younger girl was ready the two headed to the Inn to prepare for the augmentation process. Hive's solution to draining Missy's core, without a massive training session, was apparently to have the girl forcibly charge a large mana battery. That took the better part of an hour and had ended with Hive activating a 'pull' mode that drained Missy's core to the point of knocking her out. Taylor ended up carrying Missy up to her room and tucking her into bed before Hive got started.

It was late at that point, so Taylor got ready for bed herself. She wasn't looking forward to the planning she was going to be doing all night, but it had to be done and she half-expected her father to question her first thing in the morning about what she'd come up with. Which would be annoying regardless, but much more so if she didn't have at least a basic outline for everything.

Amy had been assured that, barring serious medical complications, she'd be out of the PRT hospital the next day. Likely to stay with Taylor for at least a few days, maybe up to a week and a half to start with as legal dances happened. Which would definitely be enough to get started on actually learning magic. Hopefully it would be enough to get her to a point where she could easily slip away from anywhere else she might end up, if needed. Though she honestly expected that Danny would insist on whoever she ended up staying with longer-term being given at least some of the story.

Responsible adults could be annoying.

Honestly, right now she thought that she'd be happy vanishing entirely. Staying at the Inn on the other planet on a permanent basis and only visiting Earth Bet to see a couple of people and beat up other ones. But she was also smart enough to know that something like that would never be allowed by Danny, which meant that Taylor wouldn't be likely to allow it to happen either.

Of course, she'd also been informed that she should expect a call from a legal representative of her father's estate. Apparently he'd had actual legal businesses left under the control of a group that occasionally got directives from him. She wasn't sure how, but suspected that Dragon wasn't against passing messages or arranging for video conferences in some manner. Which meant that she was, in some way, profiting from his death. That she'd essentially caused without knowing that she was going to by asking for her powers to be removed.

She had no clue what to think about that. The PRT had been kind enough to provide the transcript from the trial that had sent him to the Birdcage in the first place, and his own records had damned him there. They'd pointed the authorities at over thirty people that he'd killed, directly or on his orders, and evidence was found pointing at a dozen more that had been killed in combat. He was unquestionably a bad man, and had ended up in the Birdcage instead of a normal prison because of it. At the same time, he'd apparently cared enough about her if he'd been willing to be captured to protect her, and he'd ensured that she would get something upon his actual, legal death.

Finding this out now felt odd, but understandable once she had more details. Life in an inescapable prison that she didn't even know if it was possible to release people from, since it had never happened as far as she knew, was apparently not enough to count as 'dead' from the point of view of passing on inheritances. In part because anyone in the Birdcage could place orders for luxury items using their money and have them delivered to them, something that he'd only done once according to the summary the PRT had provided her with. To get a new pillow, of all things.

Life felt like it would be easier if she could just leave Earth Bet in general and stay at that Inn that Taylor had. Then she wouldn't need to worry about finding time to slip away to learn magic, she could visit every so often to check up on people or run around using magic, and all of the normal laws and rules would stop mattering. Instead, she was probably going to be stuck dealing with all of this until she could either pull off building her own house in another dimension or she became an adult herself.

Looking at the clock, she grumbled about none of this helping her get to sleep. Not that she felt especially tired, but she really should make an attempt at sleeping so that she wouldn't be tired when doing who knew what the next day. Maybe she should've asked one of the doctors or nurses for a sleep aid? Assuming that her 'core' being augmented wasn't the entire reason she wasn't tired, anyway. She wasn't sure if the amount of sleep she needed would or had changed, and couldn't exactly ask Taylor about it right now.

Last edited: Dec 10, 2020

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Threadmarks Chapter 84 - June 22, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Dec 16, 2020

#15,681

Wednesday morning brought with it a shift from the normal routine. Instead of the morning exercise run, they instead met for a pre-work meeting. Which was going to make going home to be seen going over to the Walsh household to watch Missy feel stupid.

"So what did you come up with," Ethan asked as he dropped pancakes onto Taylor's plate. Missy had gotten the first stack on account of having spent half the night getting an augmentation unit installed.

Taylor grabbed the syrup to drizzle on her pancakes as she answered, rolling her eyes as Hive snatched the one on the top to nibble on it. "I was thinking about asking Armsmaster if I should capture Manton, though I don't know if we can make a way to disable the Siberian projection without using magic. If we can then we could hand Manton and a couple devices that can do that over to the PRT."

"I anticipated that and pushed three such devices to the front of the Inn systems construction queue overnight," Hive chimed in. "The last of them will be done in less than an hour. They're much larger than I'd accomplish with mana-based construction, but should be able to be maintained by anyone and will prevent that general kind of secondary connection from functioning in an approximately seventy-five foot radius around them. The only problem is that a side effect of the area disruption will also prevent opening portals, and could force existing portals to close."

"Will that stop a dimensional transference?"

"No, Lord, and a number of our available barriers will block the effect as well."

"Okay. So it can't really be used to trap us?"

"Not at all. I've even deployed a software update to all of the transport devices to have them place a hopefully-invisible protective barrier around themselves to block the effect before opening portals, just in case."

Taylor nodded. "In that case, perhaps more offering to capture Manton, and giving Armsmaster a very brief rundown of my plans for the other three. Crawler I plan on sending a message to this afternoon asking if he'd like to be a test subject for possibly-lethal tests, since it does seem silly to not take advantage of his likely willingness to participate and just what he's known to have done since he triggered disgusts and horrifies me. I want to get the 'move to alternate Earth' tests out of the way first so that we know if we need to worry about that for the girls, but we probably won't finish with him until Missy is available again on Friday. If he does survive everything we throw at him then I'll just leave him on whatever other Earth we last had him on until we have something else to test. Or maybe we should at least drop him on one that has plantlife."

Taylor ate some of her pancakes while the others absorbed that, and was mildly amused by Hive carefully putting some maple syrup on her one pancake so as to not make a mess. Instead of just grabbing a plate, or making a Knight Object plate. After a minute she resumed talking about her plans. "As for Mimi and Riley, my plan would be to grab one of them at a time, ask them a few questions for clarification, and then have Hive depower them regardless. I believe that Mimi needs some relatively minor physical modifications removed, with Riley needing major modifications undone and normal biology reinstated. I think that if we can do so that Riley should be deaged to six or so during that, allowing her to hopefully recover better as she grows back up. Both of them would then be dropped off with the PRT as well when we're done with them, though obviously wouldn't need anything to cancel their powers."

"Why talk to them at all?" Sherie asked.

"Because it seems rude to remove their powers and drop them on the PRT without warning. I suspect that Mimi will be grateful, if she's considering attempting to get rid of her powers by approaching me out of costume, and Riley will probably be better behaved wherever she ends up if I tell her that she can't be a magical girl until her magic heals from what she did to herself. Though I may need to have those discussions with them well in advance of Hive starting on removing their powers, as I believe that there's a short term memory loss issue otherwise."

Hive shook her head. "I can prevent that now, Lord. Or more specifically, reduce it to approximately thirty seconds of lost memory with minimal effort."

"Oh. That's good. It'll make things easier, even if I still want to just regress Riley down to six mentally too and drop her somewhere that they've never heard of Bonesaw. But answering questions about that would be awkward and I don't have an actual interplanetary government to turn her over to instead. I wouldn't want to assume that there isn't a parahuman out there that could find her."

"And you aren't just dropping her on a planet outside of that shroud thing?" Ethan asked.

That had Taylor blinking. "Um. I don't even know if we've found inhabited planets outside of it?"

"Most of the inhabited planets we currently have access to are in the inner shroud," Hive answered. "I suspect that was intentional on the part of those responsible for the shrouds in general. So far I've not found any exceptions outside of the shroud, but I haven't looked far for a number of reasons. The few identified inhabited planets that I've found between the inner and outer shrouds are generally of a much lower technology level, though there are remains of at least one advanced civilization on an instance of Earth that appears to now be lacking an atmosphere and oceans."

"Do I want to know how you found that one?"

"There are still active satellites in orbit that I connected to when scanning for civilizations with computers. What few computer records I was able to access indicate that the atmosphere just seemed to start vanishing one day, probably twenty to twenty-five years ago. They never figured out what happened and I found no remaining evidence in my scans. The oceans hadn't started to vanish by the time of the last records I was able to access, but could've evaporated and vanished with the rest of the atmosphere."

That had...unfortunate implications. Especially if Hive's theory that shard devices didn't connect to people outside of the inner shroud was correct, and thus it couldn't have been a local parahuman mistake. "What are the chances that someone tries that with the planet we stuck the Inn on to get at us?"

"Unknown, Lord. But if they do then I will be able to detect it and any such process should take long enough to allow for suitable countermeasures to be enacted before it gets too far. The same goes for any other planets we're working with."

"That's good to know," Danny said. "But a bit off-topic. You've covered the four members of the Nine, what about the Fallen?"

Taylor shrugged. "Can't plan around not knowing their plans, really, so once the Nine are dealt with I figure I just go out in town and see what happens. Maybe have combat drones ready to drop in, but that's about it. What day it happens may determine if I bring Missy with me. Unless you'd prefer that I do that dance at night when you can possibly monitor?"

"I suppose that I hadn't considered that. Do we think they're more likely to act during the day?"

"I don't think we have a clue either way, unless they've discussed something in a manner that Hive picked up and I didn't notice."

"No, Lord," Hive said. "They've been quiet on that front, and all indications are that they're waiting on you locally. Their other actions across the country, as little as I've been able to pick up, are unrelated to you and appear to be more of an attempted migration of some kind. To where I can't say, as I don't think they're looking to follow the Butcher."

"Follow the Butcher where?" Sherie asked. "I haven't heard anything about the Butcher going anywhere."

"They made their debut in Australia two hours ago when local villains attacked them while they were trying to set up a new base of operations. It hasn't made the international news yet, but likely will before this evening."

"Well," Danny said after a minute of silence. "I don't think I have any reason to monitor you every time you go out, so whenever you think you're ready. Obviously that could change if you get actual information on what they intend to do, so keep me informed."

Taylor nodded. "Of course."

Discussion waned until after breakfast was finished. They were preparing for Taylor and her father to leave to head home when Missy frowned. "So, why haven't I heard about riots with Amy being depowered?"

Sherie rolled her eyes. "Because since the initial announcement about power interactions the public is working on figuring out whose powers interacted with Amy's to cause the original problem. Apparently enough people decided that going after random targets was just going to make the problem worse and convinced others to wait until they had a proper target."

"Oh."

"The problem is that the current suspicions as of yesterday are Vicky, Carol, Mark, and Taylor."

Taylor blinked. "What?"

"Well, Minerva, but you anyway, on the idea that it's an accidental result of that barrier you threw up. Unnoticed charge building up in Amy's powers until things went wrong, I think the theory went? Possibly released upon her trying to heal Vicky or something."

"Really?"

Sherie shrugged. "Yeah. Nobody knows what'll happen if that comes out as the official story. Last I knew, the plan was to blame 'we know it was a power interaction' on thinkers and then shrug and blame a lack of evidence remaining as to which powers were interacting for not being able to say more than that."

"Huh."

Missy ended up waiting for Taylor at the Inn with testing drones out. She was actually loading two different test profiles into them, her beam weapon trick and her current attempt at a magic version of the stealth field implemented with space-warping. The latter she was expecting to fail miserably, but merely wanted to see if it failed in the same way in reality as it did in simulation.

She wished that she was further on the stealth field spell, but it was complicated. Making the barriers do the spatial manipulations to allow people to still be able to see normally inside of them was difficult to get right, and the current iteration had several layers of barriers that each did part of the dance. It looked like it should be correct when compared to the notes Hive had provided on the originals, but in simulation it failed catastrophically enough for her to not want to be in the middle of it for the initial testing.

Or on the same planet, for that matter, given how explosive the simulation failures were. They also never seemed to do the same thing twice. Just getting recorded footage of a real one might make the test worth it, though Hive might complain about the destruction of a testing drone. Then again, that's why they used the drones and didn't test stuff like this themselves, right?

The final test profile had been loaded into the drones just before Taylor arrived. Missy turned to look at the older girl even as Hive shifted forms, but for a change she didn't wander off. "So, are we going straight into testing?"

"No," Taylor answered, gesturing at Hive. "I've apparently got a new device, and Hive has decided to make it incredibly difficult to remove."

"Why do you get a new device, and how is it going to be difficult to remove?"

"I'm very autonomous," Hive answered. "My Lord needs a fully capable hybrid support device that she can use if I am unavailable for any reason, including but not limited to while I'm dealing with removing Shard devices or if an enemy finds a way to separate us. Hal and Chain are useful for that, but do not provide any significant Shard-originating capabilities like Space does for you."

Taylor nodded in agreement. "She just didn't tell me that she'd basically already built most of the device before even asking me about it as part of prototyping the way she wants to install it."

"Install it?" Missy asked, confused.

"Apparently she feels that the best way to ensure that I never lose the ability to use it is to put it in my linker core. I'll lose an augmentation unit slot to it, but the tradeoff is probably worth it for never being able to be fully separated from the new device. But that'll take an hour or two, and I want to call Armsmaster and get things started with the remaining members of the Nine first."

"Oh. So to get Space tricked out to do that as well I'd have to stay at my current three augmentation units?"

"Yes," Hive answered. "I don't recommend going through with the change due to the more significant effect on your total augmentation level. Further, data from my Lord indicates that diminishing returns may start to kick in after the fourth unit, reducing the overall effect on her final capabilities."

Well, that sucked. Then again, it wasn't like Space was likely to be going anywhere, given that she didn't even take the device off to sleep.

"That said," Taylor continued. "You'd be bored waiting for me, so we've got something else in mind for you until we're ready for testing stuff."

Missy frowned. "Oh?"

"Hive assures me that a combat run with the training drones while I'm occupied won't knock you out enough to impact your appointment this afternoon. And if it does, the improvements to the field healing system alone will help ensure that you're ready for the appointment anyway."

"Fuck."

Taylor shook her head after getting off of the phone with Armsmaster. He'd been shocked when she'd told him about Manton, but quickly recovered and asked why she was telling him today. She'd given more details, and he'd volunteered to set up his recreations of the teleport beacons in and around a cell in the Rig for her. Not that she needed the beacons, of course, but he didn't need to know that. The rest of the discussion he seemed to take in stride as well.

"I've sent him the documentation needed for maintaining and reproducing the disruption devices," Hive said a moment later. "When he has the beacons in place and turned on I'll drop the three prepared devices into position, then we can get Manton into the cell. I believe we should drop a hairstyling spell configured with a blocking field for the secondary connection on him first, then open the portal that will place him in the cell."

"Works for me," Taylor agreed. "Do we need to show up in person?"

"We shouldn't need to, but I think I'll do so anyway by slipping in through gaps in the building he's currently in. If only to throw doubt on our ability to operate remotely on a whim."

"Ah, good point. Appearing nearby and slipping in also makes it less likely that he'll think you teleported pretty much on top of him. I assume the gaps are too small for me to get through normally?"

"Yes, Lord."

"Okay. I guess that leaves one last thing that I just realized I don't have an answer for."

"Oh?"

"How do we contact Crawler in a way that allows him to respond?"

Hive was silent for a moment. "I suppose we'll need to send an actual drone, as I don't know if we should assume that he can read."

"Fun."

Amy frowned as she was brought out of the hospital area of the PRT building, suitcase with some of her clothing trailing behind her. The rest of her things were in another room, or so she'd been told. But for now she had to deal with some initial paperwork in preparation for a number of things, while also wondering why it felt like Hive had appeared for all of two minutes across town without Taylor. Maybe she'd be able to ask later.

"Good morning Amy," Deputy Director Renick greeted when she was shown into a conference room.

"Good morning," she replied.

"I hope you're feeling okay today, and I'm sorry about the paperwork we need to go through this morning. Especially as there will likely be retreading of a lot of it after you get to speak to a judge sometime next week."

Amy looked at the table. "What paperwork?"

"Ah, it'll be here shortly, along with those that need to sign on your behalf or witness things due to your current in-flux legal status."

"Oh."

"Would you like anything to drink while we wait? I ensured that they restocked the mini-fridge first thing this morning as well as put out the good coffee and tea options."

"Are you implying that you might intentionally subject people to bad coffee and tea?"

He smirked. "Only because our budget doesn't allow us to buy the good stuff in bulk, unlike New York."

"Ah." She got herself a bottle of juice for now, then sat down. "Er, while we're waiting, can you tell me what's happening with New Wave? Vicky didn't have any real information yesterday, only saying something about a family meeting when they could get back home."

Renick sighed. "I'll admit, I wanted to throw the book at them as Acting Director, but for your benefit I had to give them other options. They've decided to allow for full PRT oversight over New Wave, the Dallons gave up custody of you and agreed to pay back half of all the money they received for your care, and Mrs. Dallon has agreed to a restraining order that states she can't approach or contact you for the next year. As of this morning your cell phone has also been split off of their plan to a new one in your name only, the details of that account should be included in the paperwork you'll get today to take with you."

Amy blinked at that. "Okay. I guess I understand most of that, but what happened to Director Piggot?"

"Nothing serious, just repercussions of her having you heal her a couple weeks ago. She'll be back from her forced vacation tomorrow, and I've got the next couple of days off due to the unexpected need to take over for her. Which means she can't shove the meeting that Haven requested for tomorrow onto me."

"They waited that long to ask for a meeting?"

Renick frowned. "I'm not sure if I should be shocked that you knew they were coming, but no. They arrived in town last night and didn't have sufficient justification to request a same-day meeting when they called this morning, so instead they got a slot for tomorrow. I was told that they were perfectly happy with that."

"I was asked about my religious views since they were coming out to help deal with the Fallen anyway. One of their members was seriously injured but doesn't want to be healed by a non-Christian parahuman, so when I told them I wasn't a practicing member of any religion they said they wouldn't be bringing them to see me while they were here."

"Oh, that's a lot more reasonable than what I was thinking might be the case."

"How did you think I knew they were coming?"

He shrugged. "I wouldn't be surprised if non-Protectorate hero groups have some kind of meeting place online where they keep each other informed about their movements."

"That would require assuming that any such groups would trust that villains hadn't infiltrated or hacked the site to keep tabs on those using it."

"Which is admittedly a very good point."

Missy landed at the Inn, grumbling about the training she'd been put through but actually somewhat happy with herself. She barely felt winded, was obviously far more flexible than she'd been the day before, and didn't even have aches and pains from her arms and legs. Granted, she still wasn't as good at dodging as Taylor was, but she also couldn't run as many multitasking instances as the older girl.

"Does Hive know enough to safely give me your multitasking trick now?" Missy asked as she walked up to Taylor.

"No," the little device answered as she floated over. "I actually know more of what my Lord lost to get the changes to her brain required to manifest that ability now and am looking for suitable ways to correct for some of it."

"What she lost?"

Taylor looked confused as well, having turned to Hive with a questioning look. Hive merely nodded. "Extreme emotional states are much harder for her to hold onto, regardless of their nature, and some of her long-term memory storage has been compromised due to shifts in the borders between regions of her brain. I also believe that it takes her longer to shift memories from short-term storage to long-term storage and her long-term storage is more malleable than it should be."

"Oh."

"Right," Taylor said, shaking her head. "Can't do much about that right now, so let's focus on what we can. We both have testing to do now, so perhaps we should see about taking care of that before lunch?"

"I suppose. Are you going to monitor my testing?"

"I'll be monitoring both sets of testing," Hive answered. "As my Lord has several things of her own to test and agreed that not knowing what you have planned for Crawler is probably for the best."

Missy shrugged. She didn't actually care about keeping what she was working on a secret, but if Taylor wanted to be surprised then she wasn't going to complain. "Whatever."

Taylor found the new device, imaginatively named Core by Hive, to function nearly identically to Hive herself. Which was obviously the intent, though there were a couple of notable differences. The simulation system was one of them, and there was a lot less 'general data storage' than Hive had. Not that there was much chance of running out of storage anytime soon when Core's current free space was measured in three digit exatrytes.

The real major difference was that shard-based abilities were now just generally available as centered on her, instead of having to worry about Hive's relative position and a bunch of other details. Or bouncing off of the Inn's systems if Hive couldn't provide them, in theory, something that they'd probably not done enough testing with. Spatial manipulation was probably the best of those abilities day to day, not that she did much with it currently, but the ability to manipulate biology was interesting as well.

There were a number of safety checks built into the new system. Direct modification of brains that wasn't blatantly obvious healing of various categories of issue required multiple confirmations, including one that she was certain was actually locked down to her own 'access codes'. Self-modification was possible, with an automatic backup of 'default', but had speed limitations for how quickly changes could be made as a safety measure for linker core connection reasons. Not to mention warnings for when you were going to make a change that could cause a linker core to try to disconnect.

The first couple of tests she did were things such as changing her hair and eye colors, the latter being something that she might want to do when out as Minerva in general. She was almost positive that nobody knew what Minerva's eye color was supposed to be thanks to the full-coverage visors and sunglasses, so having it not be the same as her normal eye color made sense there. Changing her retina pattern seemed like another possible way to differentiate her identities, for that matter. Too many of the rest of her features had already been seen to make them practical to change now, beyond possibly changing her fingerprints.

Her last test on herself was a hopefully inconspicuous one that Hive would probably notice but with any luck nobody else would. Setting herself up to grow into a better figure over time would prevent issues with her body obviously changing, instead allowing the end result to be the assumed result of completely natural development. Nobody had to know that it was going to be partially directed development.

Of course, she didn't limit herself to testing on herself. Being able to sense and manipulate the biology of targeted things around her, the 'touch range' limitation that Amy had operated on having been an obviously artificial limitation, was honestly quite interesting. Combining it with insect control had proven to be more problematic though, as manipulating the biology of an insect being controlled was apparently capable of causing a minor crash in that system. It was safer to change the colors of flowers, though she could do a lot more than that with ease if she wanted to.

Returning to the Inn, she found that Missy was already back, and was frowning. "Things go horribly wrong?"

Missy shrugged. "Four drones exploded, two of which were due to problems with what I had them testing. The other two were both Hive's as part of my other tests, which worked wonderfully. To the point where Hive is now looking into countermeasure options. My problem is that I apparently need to start over on my other project."

"Oh. Good luck, I suppose. Let me or Hive know if you think you need help anyway."

"I know you two would help, but I want to try and make it work on my own. Or at least just with Space's help, anyway. Can't depend on you and Hive for everything after all."

"Just don't assume you have to do it all alone. Now then, do you have a preference for what we do about lunch?"

"Um, not really? There aren't a lot of options at home, anyway."

"I was thinking more 'stay in or go out', since we could easily go out to eat instead of staying here or at your house."

"Oooh. But that would mean taking the bus to most places, wouldn't it?"

"Or jogging."

"...nah. Not worth it today."

"Okay then. Why don't we get lunch and practice with language modules then?"

Taylor sat down in the Inn after having been dropped off at home by Sherie, Hive landing on the table off to the side. A brief summary of the day so far had been provided from all three, including that plans for what to actually do with Manton were being made and that they'd found that the new language modules created accent effects when stacked. Missy was thus probably going to need to decide on a stack for when out as Expanse, if only to keep things consistent from outing to outing, while Taylor could manifest a number of accents at the same time by placing other modules 'in front of' the language she wanted to have an accent. The more modules in front of the language to be accented the more of an accent there was, and throwing identical modules in deepened the accent.

"So," Taylor said out loud. "Am I sending a combat drone to talk to Crawler, or did you come up with something else communication-capable in the meantime?"

"The latter, Lord," Hive answered. A flash of light later and there were several floating screens around them. "I determined that dedicated remote communication systems would be better for cases like these, in part because they'll be usable by Missy and Amy with minimal problems as well."

"That makes sense. So we just send one of these to Crawler's current location and 'call' him on it?"

"Yes. Would you like me to send one to him now?"

Taylor looked down at her currently-normal clothing. "If I'm going to call him from here then I should throw on something less normal looking, since those look like they have full video capabilities."

"You could call him from the simulation system instead."

"True, but a quick change of clothing isn't that big of a deal, and getting a proper experience with how these work from both ends seems like a good thing."

Taylor got up and cast Knight Armor with a more casual template, mostly caring about her face and hair looking correct. She then reached out and connected to one of the communication drone things and found that it was easy to control and had a basic sensor system included. That one was brought over to her while Hive sent another through a dimensional transference spell, presumably to somewhere near Crawler. A couple minutes later a call was initiated, likely by Hive, and the drone in front of Taylor lit up.

"Good afternoon," Taylor greeted the...thing on the other end. There was very little that made it look like it had ever been human. Were they sure that Crawler was human?

"Minerva," the thing said. "This little thing can't fight me."

"No, it isn't intended to either. I'm a little busy right now, but I have a couple of things that I need a volunteer to test. I'm not currently sure if they're instantly fatal to parahumans or not."

Somehow, and she wasn't sure how, she could tell that the 'instantly fatal' had gotten Crawler's attention. "You want me to test them?"

"If you'd like to. The rest of working with you would need to wait until Friday. My trainee has things she wants to test, and if all else fails then we can see if you can survive what I threw at the Endbringers."

He started vigorously nodding. "I'll test them!"

Taylor noted a transport device appearing in a flash of light behind Crawler, and opening a portal. Presumably to one of the other Earths in the inner shroud. "Okay then. We've got a portal behind you that might kill you on your way through, or when we close it when you're on the other side." She'd have continued talking, but he'd turned around and jumped for the portal. The communication drone on his end followed him through, and the portal closed without incident. He was on a planet that looked like the one the Inn was on, but she didn't think it was that one. Maybe it was where Hive was building the second Inn?

"That didn't kill me," he said, turning back to the drone. Which moved off to the side.

"I've opened the next portal," Hive said from off to the side. "This time to a dimension outside of the inner shroud."

"Okay then," Taylor said. "Crawler, the portal has been changed to another destination that we think is more dangerous for parahumans to go to."

He gave the drone a look, but headed through the portal, coming out in the desert. A moment later the drone followed him through, but nobody had a chance to say anything before a giant blast of energy slammed into the ground.

"You missed!" Crawler whined. "Do it again and hit me this time!"

Taylor looked at Hive, who shook her head, before turning back to the drone. "I'm sorry, but that wasn't us, and I'm not sure what it was at this point."

"So wherever you've sent me has random giant explosions raining from the sky?"

"Apparently, though I'm sure there's a reason that we just haven't identified yet."

"Awesome!"

Taylor watched as he bounded away from the drone towards the crater, likely hoping that future blasts would hit the same place. Frowning, she turned to Hive, muting the drone on her end just in case. "Where did you send him?"

"To the planet your original Shard device rested on," Hive answered. "And as far as I can tell, that blast of energy came from his Shard device. For what purpose I don't know."

"Huh. Oh well, it looks like he's happy enough to stick around there for now, at least, and now we know that parahumans can leave the inner shroud."

"And they won't have issues visiting the new Inn location."

"So do we leave him be for now?"

"I don't see why not."

Taylor nodded, and a moment later the call disconnected. Just after that the other communication drone appeared in a flash of light. "Okay then, with that taken care of, I guess next up is grabbing Mimi?"

"Yes, Lord."

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Threadmarks Chapter 85 - June 22, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Dec 23, 2020

#15,903

Taylor watched as Mimi stepped through the portal and into the valley she was waiting for her in. The portal itself vanished as soon as the young woman was clear of it, though it took her a moment to stop and blink in shock while looking around. "What?"

"Good afternoon," Taylor greeted.

"How did I get here?"

"I believe that Lilia placed a portal just outside of the bathroom door and waited for you to step out. At least it doesn't look like you're fidgeting from her grabbing you before you went in."

Mimi looked behind her, where there was no sign of a portal in the solid rock, then turned back to Taylor. "Okay...I guess. Why did she do that?"

"So that I could talk to you for a few minutes."

"Riley wanted to talk to you, not me."

Taylor nodded. "That is true, but we suspect that you're mostly going along with things out of fear of what she'd do if you didn't. If we took care of her first then you'd become far less predictable and liable to attack others for your own goals." Like attacking Tayor out of costume in an attempt to have her powers removed, not that bringing that knowledge up was a good idea here.

"...that probably isn't entirely inaccurate. So what do you want to know?"

"Mostly a combination of what you think about Riley's plans, coupled with a little of wanting to know what you think you'd be likely to do if you happened to be disconnected from your powers."

The young woman's eyes lit up slightly at that. "You can disconnect my powers?"

"We believe we have a safe method for doing so, yes, though we also feel that undoing what Miss Davis did to you is needed as well."

The prospect of being 'normal' again was enough to get her talking, though she did have enough self-awareness to note when her powers were likely influencing her to keep them. Luckily for her, and unluckily for her powers, they weren't actually giving her a choice in the matter.

Taylor returned home with Hal around her neck, since Hive was currently absorbing Mimi's shard. They were also experimenting with Taylor using Core as her only device of note instead of maintaining a connection to Hive, mostly so that Hive could dedicate all of her resources to the shard absorption process. Or at least most of them, because it was highly unlikely that there wasn't at least some monitoring of Taylor going on.

But for now there were other things to worry about. Amy was on the way over in a PRT van, so some minor preparing for her arrival needed to be taken care of. Mostly a quick clean of the guest room and throwing sheets back onto the bed. Maybe a quick pass on the bathroom as well, depending on how long it took the van to make it across town.

In the end, not only did the bathroom get a quick pass, but so did the upstairs hallway and Taylor's room. She was even eyeing the kitchen by the time the PRT van reached the edge of the surveillance drone coverage around the house. It seemed to be quite a bit of time just to get across town. Perhaps she should've tied herself into the monitoring of Amy and the PRT building that Hive had been running in the background as well as the general neighborhood drones? Then she might have a clue as to what had caused the delay. Or perhaps not knowing was better, in case she ended up talking to the PRT people and they said something she shouldn't know about?

"Hello," Taylor said as she stepped out of the front door once the van had pulled into the driveway.

"Hello Miss Hebert," the PRT officer greeted.

"Hi Taylor," Amy called from the other side of the van. "Want to grab one of the bags?"

Figuring that she might as well, Taylor moved to the back of the van. There four bags sat, two suitcases and a couple of very well stuffed large trash bags. "How long were you planning on staying again?"

"Neil and Sarah packed up everything that they decided was mine that wasn't furniture, and I think a little extra. I haven't actually gone through it all yet, but I think that bag there holds at least six pillows and I only had three total."

Taylor grabbed that bag, which her sensor was telling her wasn't full of just pillows. Sheets and a couple of blankets in addition to the pillows, she thought, not that she would admit that in front of the PRT officer. "Maybe they thought some of the spares were yours?"

"I have no clue. I didn't think we had spares."

The PRT officer had grabbed the other large bag, and Amy strapped together the two suitcases to allow moving as though they were one. All three brought things into the house, though the PRT officer just dropped the bag he had in the hallway.

"I've got to get back," he apologized. "Far too much going on now that people have started at least small-scale riots over what happened."

"Oh?" Taylor said. "I hadn't heard of anything like that."

"They started when someone leaked that the Protectorate has the Siberian in custody out on the Rig."

"It took half of forever to get through them to get here," Amy added. "Even though they weren't trying to prevent us from leaving and generally got out of the way once they saw me sitting in the passenger seat."

"They were focusing on the PRT building itself, demanding to know how long Slaughterhouse Nine members had been in the area without the PRT letting people know. Which, as far as I know, is 'less than a day', not that the public wants to believe that if there was enough time to capture the Siberian. Not that I know how we pulled that off either, but I trust that they'd have informed the field commanders that any of them were in town before this morning if they'd known sooner."

"Sounds frustrating," Taylor noted.

"It is. And I shouldn't be whining about it to you, have a nice day."

Taylor and Amy watched the PRT officer ensure that the van was closed up, then back out of the driveway to head back the way he'd come. Taylor closed the door after that, then looked at the bags that had been brought in. "So shall we bring those upstairs?"

"Meh," Amy answered. "Where's Hive? Or do you have Jewel for me?"

"Hive is on another Earth dealing with Burnscar, and I don't have Jewel for you either. You'll need to wait."

"Wait, if the Protectorate grabbed the Siberian, why is Hive...you grabbed the Siberian and handed her over, didn't you?"

"Him, technically, but yes. And moved Crawler to another version of Earth where he's waiting to see if more explosive rain comes down."

"You've been busy."

"Hive has had a lot more to do than I have. I'd whine about her spying on me, but I was using her own systems to do some of my planning so I can't really complain if she noticed things while I was doing so."

"Oh."

"Thus, shall we drag things upstairs?"

Amy pouted, but grabbed the two suitcases. Taylor grabbed the two larger bags, getting a look from the other girl when she cast telekinesis spells to help control them. Nothing was said as they headed up to the guest room, the two larger bags going in the corner for the time being.

"So how hard was that," Amy started, then paused. "Spell, right?"

"Not too hard," Taylor admitted. "Though you might find it harder than I do."

"How bad could it be?"

Frowning, Taylor thought about how to show Amy without having her connected to a device to see all the math. Well, showing her the math probably wasn't actually that difficult. It was the work of a moment to spin up Core's simulation system, bring in the entirety of the telekinesis spell math, and start throwing it into a book. Fifty more instances were brought in on the task, and after some quick double-checking there was a virtual book with the entire spell transcribed in it. Feeding that into a Knight Object spell only took a moment, leading to a book manifesting and dropping down onto the dresser in the room.

"What's that?" Amy asked, staring at the several inch thick tome that had appeared.

"That's the math for the telekinesis spell," Taylor replied. "Though two thirds of it is the safeties that Hive came up with to ensure that it doesn't latch onto something living and stop all biological processes."

Picking up the book, Amy flipped through a few dozen pages, her eyes going wide as she did so. "How the hell does this work?"

"I originally thought that mana just liked math, but now I'm thinking that someone set that part of things up intentionally to make using it easier."

Looking up at Taylor in shock, Amy opened and closed her mouth a couple of times before she figured out what she wanted to say. "How in the world does someone intentionally decide how magic works?"

"Linker cores, the main 'phantom organ' you could detect, seem to be artificial but self-propagating if there's enough mana and existing linker cores nearby early on in fetal development. Those are incredibly similar to Hive's obviously artificial one, at least according to her. My assumption is now that some ancient civilization that could manipulate mana decided that humans would be more useful with the ability and came up with a self-propagating solution. I can't say if that civilization was human or not, just that Hive claims that the linker core install routines specifically target human fetuses."

"Wait, the phantom organs target fetuses? They aren't actually tied to the genetics or other biology at all?"

Taylor shrugged. "Hive knows more than I do, but yeah. Outside of targeting human genetics, anyway."

"Fuck. All that work with the plants for nothing."

"At least your linker core travels with you. Shards are honestly more concerning to me, as far as 'where did they come from' goes. Because they're not connecting in a safe manner and they can't be all that portable, but I can't see them as having originated anywhere near us with the behavior we've seen from them." Taylor then flinched, having recalled a couple of things. "Er, speaking of which, we learned a couple of things when Hive was absorbing your shard device."

Amy sighed. "Like that my father was connected to it, so removing it disconnected him as well?"

That had Taylor blinking. "Yes, actually."

"The PRT let me know that he apparently didn't last long in the Birdcage without his powers working, which was probably a good thing all things considered."

"Um, Hive actually thinks that the sudden disconnection would've killed him directly and quite quickly due to brain damage at a minimum. We didn't realize that shards could be connected to more than one person at a time until she ran into the second connection. We've started going through the process of scanning for connections before doing anything to prevent future issues, but..."

"But you can't go back and not learn the lesson the hard way?"

"Basically."

Amy sighed again. "That isn't much worse than what I thought happened, and if I'm being honest then his death was probably more of a 'put out of his misery' thing anyway. Kept him from suffering at the hands of the other inmates of the Birdcage while also delivering a final justice for all the people that he killed to get sentenced there."

Taylor still wasn't entirely sure what to think about the accidental death, but she wasn't sure about the other girl's reaction. Then again, the PRT had told her about things already, so perhaps she'd already gotten over things?

"So," Amy said, breaking up the awkward silence that had formed. "I don't suppose I can safely visit that Inn of yours now?"

"That shouldn't be a problem now," Taylor agreed. "I take it you want to see it?"

Amy had to admit that the Inn was impressive, only made more so by the hidden basements that Taylor showed her. It was a wonderful distraction from finding out that asking to have her powers removed had killed her father, though if Carol ever found out then she'd probably throw a party to celebrate the occasion. A party for Amy, at that, for 'doing the right thing' in several ways. Well, perhaps not with the charade that had dragged the woman's reputation with the PRT through the mud.

It would probably still warrant a party, just not one for Amy.

Hell, from Carol's point of view it would probably be the single most unambiguously heroic thing Amy had ever done if you removed the direct impact on New Wave. Killed a villain, removed her own powers before she could go on a rampage with them so that she couldn't follow in her father's footsteps, and without any direct collateral damage. After all, healing countless people wasn't 'heroic enough' for the bitch.

Taking a deep breath, Amy returned her focus to unpacking some of her clothing into the dresser. She was doing so in the Heberts' guest room, and not in the Inn, even if she'd been told that she could claim a room in the latter. Probably one of the unclaimed top floor rooms 'for flight reasons', but that wasn't actually a requirement. She hadn't done so yet because she wasn't expecting to spend the night there anytime soon, as much as she'd like to just move in and vanish as far as Earth Bet was concerned.

Looking over at the tome of horrible math for such a simple-looking spell, and wondering if she should ask Taylor to make it vanish again, she was glad that Missy had apparently helped inspire the creation or rediscovery of a way to cast spells without the math. Even if Jewel would help with any and all math involved it still sounded like far too much of a headache. Amy wanted nothing to do with the math if at all possible, and would be perfectly happy with a limited spell library that someone else did the hard work on. It wasn't like she wanted to make healing spells, as her parahuman 'specialty' had been seen as, because that would put her back into the role of a healer. If she never had to heal another serious injury then it would be too soon.

Which probably meant that she'd need to heal someone the first time she went out. Because the universe sucked that way. Thinking about that, she dug a notepad out and scribbled down a note to herself to check with Taylor and Hive. If they didn't already have a device that could be summoned for healing people then she should ask them to make one, just so that she didn't get dropped into a 'healer' role. Or maybe she could fake something so that it didn't look like she was responsible for the healing even if she was? She added that to the note as well, just in case.

Plans were made at dinner to get Amy started with things the following day, after Hive was done with Mimi and could get Jewel set up. Riley was going to have to wait at least another day from what little Taylor had gotten out of Hive, mostly due to time being needed to finish processing one shard before starting on another. They might actually finish with Crawler first on Friday, then grab Riley going into Saturday, with Hal once again taking Hive's place while Taylor and the others were being examined under the PRT contracts. And at a combined three thousand dollars an hour it was going to be an expensive day for someone.

Taylor's evening was going to be spent mostly 'relaxing'. Most of her attention was actually going towards a bit of a chorus of flute-playing instances in Core's simulation system, about half of that towards not constantly wincing at mistakes, but she also had some general monitoring of the area around the house happening and was curiously flipping through the 'lifeform database' pulled from Amy's shard device. Specifically, the information on shards themselves, including Hive's additional notes.

Most of what the shard had contained on shards was how to identify and ignore the main body of a shard, with very little information on manipulating it. Preserving and changing the limited structures that got installed in humans was an entirely different story, and those were both interesting and disturbing at the same time. The structures sat on other physical dimensions and could range from being incredibly limited all the way through hooking into the entire body for any number of reasons. Amy's connection had only been in her brain, the shard detecting and opening additional connections to anything she came in close enough contact with, but her father's had apparently been throughout his entire body due to his ability to control his own skeletal structure and heal from removing bones.

A backup of the configuration inside of the human was present in the shard in what had appeared to be 'read-only' memory, which was what Hive had been working with up until now. But that configuration was able to be updated through the bits installed in the human, and Amy's shard had enough information to reprogram a lot of parameters in it. Hive's notes pointed out how the information could be used to adjust the insect control system's parameters to target any number of other things from humans to technology, the spatial manipulation system to have different exclusions, Hess's 'shadow-person' trick to work in a number of other manners, Aisha's memory erasure to do any other number of related tricks, and the biology manipulation to target more than just things the user was touching.

All of that said, the information from Amy's shard wasn't intended to mess with parahuman shard configurations, and it had been blocked from doing so itself. The intent had actually been to allow Amy to make organisms that worked with parahumans by essentially building partial 'parahuman' additions alongside normal biology. Hive had come up with several untested ideas on that front while examining things. One was a relay unit to expand the insect control system range, which they could easily test if they wanted to. Another would allow a dog or cat to share Vicky's powers when within range of her aura, though the girl wouldn't be able to control the animal. Then there were several ways that plants could be rigged to expand the influence of a tinker's abilities, helping to maintain the shard-installed modifications of tinkertech placed near them.

The fact that Amy had been using her powers for pretty much only healing was amazing in many ways in light of all of this. Hive's records claimed that every shard collected so far was pushing 'use granted abilities in some kind of conflict' into the humans connected to them, and only using one secondary facet of the abilities had to have been wearing Amy down a lot more than anyone probably realized. No wonder she'd wanted to have them removed.

"Why are we in another dimension before breakfast?" Amy asked after Missy had joined them at the Inn, slightly annoyed at having been woken up. Being dragged across dimensional boundaries wasn't her idea of a good start to the day.

"Morning exercise," Missy answered before Taylor or her father could. "Even if it's less about expanding our limits and more about maintaining and knowing them now."

"Though you're allowed to sit it out," Danny added. "Especially since it'll likely become redundant once Taylor and Hive get you set up with your new device."

Amy frowned at that. "Why would it become redundant?"

"Because your powers were awesome and made it so that we don't need to exercise," Missy said with a grin. Before grimacing a moment later. "Which means morning exercise is now 'try not to be curb stomped by Taylor' for me, I suspect. To learn my magical limits instead of improving my body."

"It won't be that bad," Taylor argued. "And it won't be fighting me every morning. Obstacle courses seem like a good alternative as well, though we're not ready with one of those today. Besides, it isn't like I can go all out against you anyway."

"Are you calling me weak?"

"No, but we don't have enough time to go all out and ensure that you're ready for work two days a week at a minimum."

"Oh. Right."

"That and I doubt you'd be able to handle a full minute of me going all out."

That was enough to motivate Missy to go after Taylor, and Amy ended up sitting on the beach watching. Not that it was doing much good, even with the six three-drone teams that showed up shortly after they started also attacking the older girl. It was very obvious that Taylor was used to multiple opponents and splitting her attention and that Missy wasn't nearly as good at the latter. The drone teams seemed to do well enough avoiding striking the younger girl anyway, though not necessarily working with her. Actually, Taylor wasn't even attacking for over half an hour, just dodging and blocking, with all the hits Missy was taking being her getting in the way of drone fire.

After forty-five minutes of that Taylor called off the exercise by demonstrating that the 'growing field of energy' that Amy had been feeling wasn't actually a byproduct of the attacks being dissipated. Instead all of the energy suddenly collapsed down onto Missy and bound her up tightly, a pulse of energy showing a failed attempt to get free before the bindings solidified.

"What the fuck," Missy grumbled as Taylor dragged her down to the beach. "Why can't I blink out?"

"I hit you with an anti-blink barrier bubble bullet alongside the binding trigger itself."

"I can't feel a barrier?"

"It's there," Amy said. "Almost like it was shrink-wrapped on your own? Taylor's spell is obviously quite different than your own protections."

Missy frowned, and then obviously concentrated. "Damn. That's clever, how did you get the idea to do that?"

"I didn't," Taylor admitted. "My quick simulation said it should be a bubble. I'm not quite sure why it collapsed down on you instead."

"It's trying to form a bubble a fixed distance away from everything else, Lord," Hive answered as she floated over. "Since you inverted the barrier to keep Missy in instead of keeping others out and didn't ensure that the distance component was adjusted appropriately."

"Oh. Right, that does make sense." Taylor then obviously dismissed the extra barrier and the bindings. "I guess that's a happy accident."

"When did you come up with that trick?" Missy asked as she climbed to her feet. "And when do I get a copy?"

"Ten minutes ago and sometime after I've put it through a lot more testing. I don't know what would've happened if you didn't have your own barriers up for it to wrap around in particular and think that it'll be important to know and possibly account for."

"Testing is important, but you're bullshit for being able to come up with new spells on the fly. And why did you test it live on me first?"

Taylor shrugged. "It didn't have enough mana to overcome your own barriers anyway, so even if it exploded in your face it wouldn't have actually hurt you. Besides, it took nineteen attempts before I got one that didn't explode in your face and you didn't notice the other eighteen."

"You only hit me with twenty spells. I was counting."

"Yep."

"You suck."

"I don't have to get to that level, right?" Amy asked. "Or as close as I'm capable of, I suppose?"

"Only if you want to," Danny answered. "My daughter is a unique case due in part to Hive not having repaired her 'safeties and limits' when they first collided. Well, that and her ideas of 'safe' and 'reasonable' seem to have come from more of a war zone than anything else. Then again, the more I learn about parahuman powers the more I wonder if we've been at war for thirty years and just never noticed it."

Taylor looked at Amy, who had just connected to Jewel for the first time. "As a fair warning, if you didn't figure it out already you're the test subject for learning this casting method from the start. So there may be some glitches in the process."

"That was somewhat obvious, yes," Amy agreed. "But Jewel doesn't have any spells for me? Just my old powers, with the ability to affect myself and not needing to touch things?"

"And your self-imposed no touching brains limitation as an actual limitation. For spells, we're going to start you off with defense. Mainly because we're fairly confident that they're less likely to hurt you if they go wrong, unlike the offense spells that you'll want the defenses up for. Or the flight spell that you'll need the defenses up for because you're almost guaranteed to crash at least a few times."

"That makes sense."

"After that we'll go with a couple of utility spells before getting into anything offensive."

Amy frowned. "Utility?"

"The ability to store things in your own personal storage space and some scanning tricks, mainly."

"Ooooh. Why aren't we starting with those?"

"Because as Missy has found out, if you screw up the 'store something' spell you can hurt yourself by unexpectedly finding yourself elsewhere. Of course, you're also likely to have a headache for a day or two after the first spell, then a day or two of a lesser headache after setting up your personal storage space."

"Why?"

Taylor grinned. "Because you're not used to being able to sense everything in the area without your normal senses being involved on the first one, and being generally aware of the contents of your storage space for the second. The multitasking system helps."

While the other girl absorbed that, Taylor tested sending over the pieces needed for the Knight Anchor spell. Jewel easily accepted the equations, documentation, and precompiled templates needed. She was doing so with Core, not Hive, and was now thinking that she'd been wrong about what she'd told Missy previously. It appeared that Hive had probably retained hardware admin rights on all the devices she created, but given Taylor software admin rights in addition to whatever rights the intended user got. Jewel definitely seemed to trust her information too much for that to not be the case, as it was incredibly unlikely that there were no security measures in place.

"So," Taylor said. "You get to work with Jewel to cast that here, with Hive monitoring remotely in case something goes wrong, while I go visit the PRT." Of course, she'd probably also be keeping an eye on things herself, if only to know if she needed to cut her excursion short.

Amy blinked and focused on Taylor. "What?"

"I have to drop Mimi off with them, and might as well hand over the wheelchair while I'm at it. Luckily I can put off talking to them about the healing devices Hive has in the queue because they're not done yet."

"Healing devices? I was going to ask you about something like that."

"Standalone booths that you stick injured people into and they get healed, in this case. Or at least that's what it looked like Hive's design was going to be."

"Oooh. Will I get one to use when people need to be healed?"

Taylor blinked and stared at the other girl. "You could heal just as well, and possibly both better and more quickly, with Jewel."

"But that would make me a healer and not just someone who has a magic healing box."

"Okay. I'll check with her on more portable versions too, I guess."

Taylor made a show of 'pushing' the wheelchair with Mimi in it as she walked up to the PRT building, though was actually operating half of the controls with telekinesis spells instead of her hands. The wheelchair was not intended for use without the neural interface while someone was riding in it, a number of safeties engaging due to the weight of the person sitting in the seat. To do this without the telekinesis spell she'd need four hands to reach all of the controls needed.

People had noticed when she'd pushed the wheelchair out of an alley, but nobody had approached her. She was watched, pictures were taken, recordings made of her progress, likely a lot of things posted online about her passing through. But she wasn't interrupted, though a PRT officer was waiting to hold the door open for her when she reached the PRT building.

"Thank you," Taylor said as she passed the man.

"No problem, ma'am," the officer replied as he closed the door behind them. "Though we are curious as to why you're bringing an unconscious young woman to us in a wheelchair."

"Because I'm sure you'll want to look over Miss Corti to confirm her health and no-longer-parahuman status, on top of this being a convenient time to bring the wheelchair itself by."

The very little amount of chatter that had been happening in the lobby came to an abrupt halt at that statement, until the woman behind the reception desk cleared her throat. "Are you saying that you have Mimi Corti, also known as Burnscar, with her powers removed?"

Taylor nodded and patted the unconscious young woman on the head. "Yes, she should wake up in an hour or two with a bit of a headache. The wheelchair has a neural interface unit to help heavily disabled people move around more easily, though obviously I've not got it turned on with Miss Corti sitting in it. I've got documentation on how to build more of them included."

"If you'll excuse me for a moment, I believe you've just gone far enough over our paygrades to reach orbit. I need to call others in for this."

"No problem, I half expected that." She wasn't in a rush yet. Amy was still in 'make sure she knew what she should be doing' mode and hadn't gone anywhere near trying to cast the Knight Anchor spell anyway, leaving plenty of time. Though it would be nice if they could finish with plenty of time before lunch.

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Threadmarks Chapter 86 - June 23, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Dec 30, 2020

#16,064

Dealing with the PRT had taken an hour, including Director Piggot thanking her for bringing Mimi to them. She also inquired about the other two members of the Nine, looking happy that Crawler was long gone from the area but decidedly annoyed when told that Riley was still in the area and would require a day or two to deal with. The woman had gone from 'annoyed' to 'contemplative' after being told that the only ones with a likely reason to be concerned were the Fallen in the area, due to the girl targeting them right now.

Taylor was also asked to be more 'discreet' when showing up in the future, using the transport device instead of walking down the street. Apparently Director Piggot had successfully gotten the various protest groups to shift to the Rig, or more accurately the ferry terminal, by outright telling them that she had two weeks of backlog to go through before she could tell anyone anything. So she'd recommended that they go ask Armsmaster why he hadn't told anyone about the Nine instead. Showing up at the PRT building with Mimi had caused several groups to then shift back to the PRT building after someone online had identified her in pictures, ruining the entire early-morning victory.

Likely as a 'punishment', Director Piggot had sent Taylor out the front door of the building. Where in the past hour a sizable number of people had gathered, many of whom started yelling questions before the PRT's doors had even closed. In response, she cast her flight spell and took to the air. Only to stop when someone shot at her with a gun. Yelling at her was one thing, shooting at her was another, so she spun around and dropped down on the idiot. Those around the woman with the gun had already backed away, making it trivial to land.

"Stop right there or I shoot," the woman yelled, pointing the gun at the bystanders after seeing that the first bullet did no damage to Taylor.

Raising an eyebrow, not that the woman could see it through the dark sunglasses, Taylor cast a spell to store the entire gun. The gun itself vanishing from her hands caused the woman to jump in shock. "Shoot what?"

"How did you..."

Taylor interrupted the woman by blinking behind her, grabbing her arms and pulling them behind her a moment later. Manifesting magical cuffs on her happened before she could think to resist, by which point it was too late to keep her hands free. Despite how little time that took, five more people pushed out of the crowd around them. Two pulled out handguns of their own, but the other three had tinkertech weapons.

Idly wondering if this was the Fallen's 'test', Taylor prepped several shield and blink spells before speaking. "So what do you five want?" She also targeted all five weapons for storage as well, though didn't fire those off yet.

In lieu of a verbal answer, the three with tinkertech weapons opened fire. The two handguns vanished in flashes of light as three shields popped up to block the beams of light coming from the tinkertech weapons. The dimensional wrappers that were keeping the lasers from traveling at the speed of light rapidly shifted and drained the shields faster than they had any right to normally, making Taylor frown as she needed nearly ten times the mana she should to maintain them. It was similar to, but distinct from, the anti-mana trick that they already knew about and was probably a good way to shut down a mage.

She hadn't wanted to reveal too much today, and really should've tested a few things before using them in the field. But Hive wasn't there to help with shutting down technology so field testing was the next best bet. To aid in targeting, Taylor cast a few sensor drones while swapping 'insect control' out for Hive's 'technology control' theoretical profile modifications. Turning that on a moment later had a few hundred phones, dozens of computers, security cameras, and countless other bits of technology flooding the multitasking system for possible control.

Avoiding doing anything to most of it, she focused on the twelve tinkertech guns in the crowd. There were three models in total, but they were all very similar. She started by disabling the three firing at her, causing confusion in the men as they shut down. With them no longer firing she stored them right out of the hands of the men. The other nine were split between a 'sniper' model held by three people getting into position on rooftops and more of a 'shotgun' model that six more people were pushing through the crowds with.

All twelve of those were disabled without being obvious about it to start with. Those no longer being a threat meant that she could quickly focus on normal guns in the crowd, duplicating Hive's trick of throwing small temporary shields on all the bullet primers that were in range of her. Which wasn't a lot of them, admittedly, since she wasn't wandering around the crowd to discreetly apply the shields. Perhaps she needed to add 'longer-range casting' to her list of things to explore.

Confident she had a good picture of the area, she manifested a collection of bullets. Two bullets flew out to strike each of the five who had already attacked her. The first did no obvious damage, but released binding particles that the second then used to bind the targeted individual. That left her with six people bound in some fashion in the middle of a crowd trying to get to a safe distance, with the first of the 'shotgun' style guns coming out at the same time as two others with actual shotguns.

A little over a minute later she'd stored all the shotguns, tinkertech or otherwise, and her collection of bound individuals had grown to nineteen. As far as she could tell, that left the three people on the rooftops, all of whom appeared to be confused that their guns weren't firing. She fired six more bullets, two for each sniper that had now tried to fire at her, before blink-chaining up to the first of them. She stored his equipment, grabbed him, and returned to the others on the ground. That was repeated for the other two snipers, both of whom were female.

"I don't suppose any of you want to tell me what this was all about?" Taylor asked once she had them all dragged together.

"Fuck you," one of the men said, trying to spit at her. "You lost us our cushy jobs."

"How did I lose you your jobs?"

"You dragged our boss out of his base and handed him over to the fucking feds," one of the women answered.

Taylor blinked at that. "Oh. You worked for Coil? Huh. So I shouldn't call the PRT despite them being right here, but I don't know if I should call the BBPD or the FBI."

"You suck," Amy grumbled when Taylor finally returned. She couldn't disengage her multitasking system without getting a massive headache due to the sensor in her anchor. The headache from attempting that almost an hour previous was still pissing her off.

"Want to shoot in my general direction with a tinkertech gun?" Taylor asked in return.

"What?"

"The police took a few of Coil's leftover mercenaries into custody on behalf of the FBI, but they didn't want the twelve tinkertech guns. Something about them falling apart after a couple of days of being taken from their users and not being worth the transport costs."

Guns that didn't even last more than a couple of days shouldn't be considered guns, earning the other girl a glare. "So you have a bunch of guns that are likely to fall apart?"

Taylor shrugged. "They're unusually effective against my shields and I want to see if it's just that configuration or if I'm right and they're accidentally good at disrupting mana in general. They don't need to last more than a couple of days if we test that today."

That did make sense, and was also a good reason to get on it right away. "Okay, I guess. Where are we going to do this?"

"Might as well just go down to the beach."

Ten minutes later Amy was doing her best to ignore her headache while shooting at the various shield variants that Taylor was casting. At least once the guns had been reset in some way by the other girl, as they'd refused to function at all at first.

Missy was bored, having spent more time today talking with Dinah and secretly working on her stealth field recreation in Space than actually doing work. There just wasn't anything for the two of them to do today, it seemed. Probably because Mayor Christner wasn't even in his office, instead attending several meetings elsewhere in town. Director Piggot, Max Anders, and the police and fire chiefs had been mentioned, but there were apparently a couple more on top of those. What little was called in from those didn't end up creating intern-worthy tasks.

Of course, there was an oddity. At some point they'd ended up talking about needing to be watched. Neither of them were willing to tell the other why they weren't left unsupervised, but both didn't like it. That had then shifted to talking about their sitters, and Dinah was intensely curious about Taylor for some reason. Not that there was a whole lot Missy was willing to say about the older girl, claiming ignorance for the most part. But it seemed that just knowing that Taylor was willing to play sitter at all had Dinah wanting to explore being watched by her.

Luckily, it was incredibly unlikely that Taylor would say yes even if Dinah could convince her parents to ask.

Taylor was thoughtful as she sat down to dinner. The tinkertech guns definitely disrupted mana, but it was also highly unlikely to be intentional and Hive had taken them all to examine in more detail to find out exactly what they were doing. On that front they were probably lucky that the things hadn't stopped working as soon as they were stored away, not being designed such that the shard device had to remain connected to them for some core functionality.

"So how did you two fare today?" her father asked.

"I'm officially able to cast the Knight Clothing spell," Amy answered. "Taylor got me to do so just before we returned here, even though I'm still dealing with the headache from the stupid anchor."

"You'll get used to it," Taylor said.

"You keep saying that and it keeps not happening."

"Give it a day or two."

"Bah."

"Anything else?" Danny asked.

Taylor frowned. "Apparently some of Coil's mercenaries slipped the FBI's net, since they attacked me earlier. The tinkertech guns they had are unintentionally good at taking on mages, and might be very dangerous if you scaled them up a little."

"Really?"

"Hive's looking into how they pull that off now, and maybe how to defend against it if we run into it again. Since the tinker that built them is still out there somewhere we probably need to assume we will."

"Ah. And how about Burnscar's powers? Has Hive learned anything useful there?"

"Three main things there. A way to protect against energy shifts, such as stepping into fire, that isn't as effective as the comfort layer barrier but could be useful in other cases. Some new tricks for making portals within a dimension that are more efficient than what we have currently, but only within a specific range. I believe the last was just information on controlling chemical reactions that was being used to force fires to burn or put them out?"

"So you just got a very quick summary while you weren't paying full attention?"

"More like Hive was distracted and rambled a little," Amy answered. "She's still over at the Inn working on things, trying to ensure that she's ready for grabbing Riley as soon as possible."

Taylor nodded at that. "She only really stopped to collect the guns for analysis because we aren't sure how long we have before they fall apart on us. Even that required me pointing out that they were effective against my shields and barriers, elevating them from 'curiosity' to 'possible threat' in her priority list."

"I see," her father said, frowning. "How effective were they again?"

"At the handheld size I could still hold them off easily enough, but I suspect that they'd scale to cannon or larger without much trouble and that would probably make them a more significant problem. Large enough and the anti-mana effect would probably surround me, though I'm hopeful that I'd be able to power through it long enough to get out of the beam path."

"And if you can't?"

"I've asked Hive to see if she can figure out a way to use shard hardware to open portals without using mana so that I have a possible escape route. There are ways to block that from working as well, admittedly, but it would at least be another option. I could also possibly use that to redirect the attack to use another escape method. And of course, with any luck the effect will originate from something that I can take over like I did with the guns today, at which point I can just turn it off. If all of that fails then there are multiple ways to call down attacks from elsewhere to hopefully take out the source as well."

He nodded. "That's good. Though now that I think about it, how is it that you're only finding this out now? It's been a month since you took down Coil, right? Didn't his mercenaries attack you when you did that?"

"Er, no. I dropped in on Coil himself and dragged him out through a path that the FBI had directly or indirectly cleared the mercenaries from. I don't think any guns, tinkertech or otherwise, were actually used against me during that. If they had used these guns against me then it would've been a lot harder than the simple walk that dragging him out was."

"I see. Hopefully Hive comes up with things, though that you largely ignored the guns today should signal to anyone who would've used them against you that they aren't effective. There aren't many people that need to know otherwise right now."

"Yep."

"But you will need to warn Missy tomorrow."

"Amy let her know just before we came back for dinner as part of 'making calls' with Jewel."

"It's easier than the 'communicate with only mana' trick but feels less personal," Amy added. "Though Taylor claims that I've gotten 'target individual' down insanely fast with the latter."

Taylor snorted. "Missy still has issues with that one, and I did some outright training with it. You only took two attempts to get it right."

"It isn't that hard."

Any response to that was halted by the phone ringing, Taylor letting her father grab it when he jumped up to do so instead of answering it with Core or her watch. The latter of which she probably didn't need anymore now that she had Core, but was still wearing out of habit.

"Hey Taylor," her father said a minute later, sticking his head into the room. "I'm muted, just so you know, but the Secret Service wants to fly you to West Virginia to see if your necklace can remove Squealer's powers."

That had Taylor blinking. "What?"

"They're having problems holding her due to her powers, which they say are pulling out more and more crazy things every time they stop her from building something."

"Okay, I can see how that would be a problem, but I have no clue if it's safe."

"Can you check, or are you willing to make the trip even if it'll be useless?"

Frowning, Taylor had Core connect her to the Inn, and then from there she attempted to use the Inn's sensors to find Squealer. Which took all of two seconds, as Hive had her in the list of parahumans to keep tabs on. Helpfully, there was a menu item labeled 'Check Shard Connection Count', so she triggered that and waited. Ten seconds later a preliminary result came back of 'likely no other connections', but a deeper scan would take half an hour.

"I think it would be safe to depower her," Taylor said out loud at that point. "But won't know for sure for half an hour and would want Hive to double-check."

"So you're willing to make the trip and attempt?"

"I am, though not in the next three or four days? Hive is going to need time to deal with Riley's shard."

He nodded in agreement. "Understandable. We might also have to give Ethan and Sherie warning if it's in the middle of the week."

She decided to send a quick message over to Missy about that while monitoring the scan that the Inn's systems were working on.

The visit to West Virginia was scheduled for Tuesday through to Thursday, Taylor's departure being after lunch so that there wouldn't be any conflicts with meeting Dragon on Tuesday morning. Amy had volunteered to watch Missy if needed, but Sherie had been able to get the day off after they'd officially called to warn her. Which suited Amy just fine as well, though the comment about giving Sherie the day off being 'worth it to stick it to someone' was an odd one.

That evening Taylor was able to confirm with Hive that the complete scan had been accurate and that there wouldn't be a problem grabbing Squealer's shard, followed by ensuring that the shard was being monitored in case it established a new connection in the meantime. Hive had also claimed to have fully cleared out the various working areas she was using for shard processing and had expanded her working areas to be able to pull up to four medium to large ones in rapid succession now. Which was probably good if they were grabbing Riley and Squealer's in the next few days, but hopefully they weren't going to be grabbing too many more shards in the near future.

The rest of the evening was split between plans for talking to Riley the next day, as Hive felt she was ready for another shard device, and ensuring that they had a general plan for what to do with Crawler as well. They'd probably start with Riley, grabbing her for a quick chat before Hive got to work with her. Amy had even provided some ideas there that had merit. Then Taylor would take Missy to work with Crawler, starting with a quick confirmation that a dimensional transference would fail due to the safeties, followed by 'monitor whatever Missy wants to use' with no real further details. Then more 'standard' mana-based attacks would follow, eventually escalating to the anti-Endbringer attacks. If Crawler survived all of that then she'd either leave him stranded where they did the testing or maybe send him to Venus. He'd probably like trying to survive on Venus.

"So what are we doing today?" Amy asked as they headed to the Inn after Missy had been dropped off Friday morning. That whole dance was incredibly and annoyingly inefficient, since the younger girl had been at the Inn before breakfast for a light combat exercise. Only to head home so that she could be seen being brought across town.

Worse, Amy could see needing to do that kind of dance herself to keep up appearances. Because having a secret cape identity was going to be a very different kind of annoying compared to an outed one. Nobody was going to be bothering her in her civilian identity due to her cape identity, but effort needed to be taken to keep the two distinct. So no 'jumping into action in civvies' behavior. Which probably meant it was a good thing that she'd not really been a 'combat' parahuman and used to intervening.

Someone like Vicky would probably be lucky to make it three hours with a new secret cape identity.

Taylor shrugged. "I figure that you get to decide if you want to make your headache worse with a storage area or if you'd rather cast the full Knight Armor and take a crack at flying. Then I plan on talking to Riley before Missy and I go and test things on Crawler. Though we should probably start with Hive telling us what she learned about those tinkertech guns."

"What tinkertech guns?" Missy asked.

"The ones that the FBI didn't want because they fall apart before they can make them do anything."

"Oh. The anti-mana ones that Amy was talking about last night?"

"Yes," Hive chimed in as she floated over. "And Lord, you bypassed the fall apart portion when you reset them to work for Amy and disabled the biological interlocks, and probably before that when you broke the Shard device's monitoring ability by storing them."

Amy blinked at that. "She made tinkertech more reliable by disconnecting it from the thing that helped make it?"

"Yes. It could no longer sabotage it that way. That said, the basic principles used in the creation of the guns results in disrupting mana particles directly through converting them to gamma radiation. An accidental variant of the 'mana to energy' systems we've already seen, but that then causes the barriers to need to handle the radiation burst as well."

Taylor blanched at that. "And I bet if you scaled it up then it could strip off a lot more of the protective layers and insta-cook the person inside."

"The system can only be scaled up to a limited degree before the interactions stop causing that effect, but I believe that at the maximum size of a blast around three feet in diameter it would take three seconds to eat through your Knight Armor barriers."

"So that kind of thing needs to be dodged. Good to know." She then looked at Missy and Amy. "Might have to come up with some good dodging courses. I've not seen any other attempts to use the 'shadow-state' trick either, but now there are two things that come from shards that can get through our defenses in some way."

Amy frowned, because that made the entire 'magical girl' thing sound a whole lot less fun. Magic was supposed to work against anything that wasn't magic. Having multiple non-magic ways to defeat magic felt like someone was cheating. Well, that and the look on Taylor's face promised a dodging course that included pain if you didn't dodge.

"So Amy," Taylor continued. "Secret hidden storage area with a sensor to rekindle your headache, or trying to figure out flight?"

"Which will probably be a headache as well," Amy grumbled. "But I've always wanted to be able to fly, so let's go that way."

Hive floated over to her and unsealed a small crystal. "You'll want a breathing mask."

"Why?"

Missy snorted. "In case you hit the water or orbit. Though using the flight system to swim works great once you've got it down."

"Oh." Well, that probably meant that Vicky would be jealous later. She couldn't reach orbit and had no good way to breathe underwater.

Taylor checked to ensure that Riley was alone, having left Missy working with Amy on the basics of flight. The girl was, according to Hive's monitoring, just cleaning up after a very basic and not all that healthy breakfast. Which brought to mind that she'd been left to fend for herself with the two or three adults, depending on how you counted Crawler, being whisked away unexpectedly.

"I don't like that I'm making notes for how to deal with this kind of situation better next time," Taylor grumbled, looking over at Hive. "Especially given that you've decided that you needed to expand your ability to process shards as well."

"Unfortunately," Hive said, pausing for a moment. Probably to decide how to word things. "I fear that all of the Shard devices will need processing, possibly sooner than later, but haven't come up with a good way to accomplish that at any speed yet."

"What?"

"They are almost certainly an invasive force that I can't see willingly stopping at wiping out the planets they're already on. Where they came from or what happens after they've exhausted all of the available resources in the immediate area are both uncertain. If I don't have a solution for processing large numbers in time then it may become necessary to openly attack them en masse, something that's certain to result in counterattacks."

Well, that was certainly a good reason to regret bringing the subject up at all. And probably merited additional checking into Hive's data. "Okay. Let's worry about that later, since we have other things planned for today."

"Of course, Lord."

Refocusing, Taylor targeted the warehouse Riley was in, specifically a point that was currently unobserved, and fired off a dimensional transference to shift a transport device there. With that done, she connected the transport device in front of her to the one in the warehouse, stepping through a moment later. Hive stayed behind to watch that end and do her own final preparations.

Following a map made of surveillance drone data, it only took half a minute to reach the room where Riley was just finishing drying the plate that she'd used. Which was disposable and something that most people would've just thrown out, especially with the majority of a large pack of them still unused on a nearby shelf. A plastic knife had also been washed and dried off, but that appeared to be one of the few utensils available.

"Good morning Miss Davis," Taylor said, causing the younger girl to jump and produce a much larger, sharper, and blood-stained knife from a pocket. That knife was dropped, and only a quick telekinesis spell to catch it stopped it from impaling the the girl's foot

"Minerva?" Riley said, eyes widening as the knife moved off to the side and dropped onto a table. "But...but...I haven't figured out how to make the Fallen go away yet?"

"The delay in coming to see you had nothing to do with the Fallen."

"But you put up the barrier to hinder them at the same time?"

Taylor shrugged. "That was more opportunistic than anything else, once enough about how they were communicating was figured out."

"Oh." She then started bouncing up and down a little. "Does that mean I can become a magical girl now?"

"There are sadly two major problems with that." Which caused the girl to stop bouncing. "First, I know that you've significantly altered your body. To the point where you could lose most of it and still function, or so I'm led to believe."

Riley nodded. "Yes, I did that."

"That severely damaged your potential connection to magic. We can undo what you did to yourself to allow for the potential to heal, but actually healing the damage to your potential connection can't be accelerated and will take time. Years, most likely."

That had the girl looking horrified. "I broke my magic?"

"Essentially. But as I said, we can undo what you did to yourself to make it possible for it to fix itself." Pausing, she watched the younger girl nod. Which hopefully meant that the first part was done, now to try something Amy suggested. "The other problem is that you think that magical girls are good because they have magic. You can have magic and not be good, but doing so means that the good magical girls have to hunt you down and remove your magic."

Apparently the previous horrified was only 'mildly' horrified, based on what that got from Riley. "Magic can be removed if you're bad?"

Taylor nodded. "Yes, and the only methods I know of are all permanent." The fast one was also questionably killing you and making a clone out of your original body a moment later. A quick 'shadow state' application or similar. Hive postulated that completely changing your genetics from what your linker core support structure was expecting would also do it, but that would require use of the biological manipulation system to ensure that the person didn't die in the process.

It took a moment to become obvious that the 'permanent removal of magic' revelation had placed Riley into a state of shock. Luckily one that had her easily guided back to the transport device and into an operating room that Hive had set up. Which was honestly quite impressive in some ways, since they'd been in an open field when Taylor had left and it really hadn't been that long.

"Can you handle her from here?" Taylor asked as the transport device back at the warehouse returned to the Inn with a remotely-triggered dimensional transference.

"Of course," Hive answered, her hair done up as she did for going out as 'Lilia' but having swapped out the military fatigue look for a surgeon look. "Good luck with Crawler."

Taylor left as Riley was knocked unconscious by Hive using the biological manipulation system, taking a dimensional transference straight to the beach near where Missy was working with Amy. Her timing and choice of arrival point were perfect to need to dodge a body that passed through where she had been half a second before. Followed immediately by needing to dodge a falling tree that attempted to land on the bit of beach that her dodge had brought her to, but she got several seconds to react there and merely side-stepped the tree instead of needing to use a blink spell.

"I don't think you're supposed to be ramming trees," Taylor noted as she nudged the tree off of Amy with a telekinesis spell.

"Why not?" Amy grumbled. "It's a good lesson. Apparently I should've been jealous of Vicky's force field and not her ability to fly."

"So the flying isn't going well?"

"She's horrible," Missy said as she landed. "I think her record for a straight line is fifty feet, and that was straight down after impacting a cliff."

Taylor frowned, and looked around. "What cliff?"

"One a few miles to the North that she found after repeatedly failing to control where she was going. She left an Amy-shaped crater and I had to have one of the transport devices pull her back here. Again."

"I wasn't gone that long. How many times has she gone wildly off course?"

"Every time my feet left the ground," Amy admitted. "Did you know that Hive put defenses on the underwater turbines?"

"She did what?"

"They stopped me from slamming into the fins."

"Oh. That does sound like a precaution she'd take."

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Threadmarks Chapter 87 - June 24, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jan 6, 2021

#16,232

Amy flinched as she was pulled back to the beach by another dimensional transference spell. Taylor had done something to automate that whenever she escaped the area she was supposed to be trying to fly in, allowing for continued attempts while the other two were off dealing with Crawler. Which at least had the benefit that it made it a little less embarrassing to be constantly failing.

It would be really nice to know how the others made managing all of the flight variables look effortless. Even having Jewel handle things for a few minutes and 'watching' the controls during a short flight hadn't helped. At least the magic military fatigues style template she was using could take the hits when she impacted solid objects. She'd colored it based on her brownish-green magic color, like Taylor and Missy had colored theirs, but didn't feel that it was going to be a good fit as her normal 'combat uniform'. Even if it was doing a wonderful job of keeping her from hurting herself right now.

Taking a deep breath, she carefully took the controls again and attempted to just lift off of the ground slightly, pointing her toes down to keep them in contact with the ground at first. That worked great, and her feet left the ground fully a moment later. She kept the controls in place as she very slowly rose into the air, taking nearly ten minutes to lift up to what she hoped was a good height.

Unfortunately, attempting to change direction was where things went wrong. She turned too far almost immediately, then she overcorrected, somehow flipped herself over with a different control, flailed at several other controls in her panic, by pure chance went over the water instead of into the trees, and was only prevented from slamming face-first into the water again by a dimensional transference grabbing her before she could. She hit the mental 'disengage' switch before the teleportation fully took hold of her, preventing her from slamming into the beach instead of the water due to still-active flight controls. It'd only taken four impacts when being pulled back to learn that one.

"Flying is a lot easier when someone is carrying you," Amy grumbled as she prepared to try again.

"I don't think he even noticed my attempt to hit him with a dimensional transference," Taylor said as she floated next to Missy in the upper atmosphere somewhat above Crawler. Her voice was actually transmitting through a communication window as both girls had breathing masks on due to the altitude. "The safeties aborted before it got anywhere."

"Pity," Missy replied. Not sounding like it was a pity at all.

"I've sent a communication drone down there and want to start up the cameras, so you should probably engage your Belkan module."

"Right." A moment later she nodded. {I'm good.}

"Do you still understand English?"

"Yes. Japanese and Spanish as well." And she had a noticeable accent now. For that matter, she'd also returned her nametag to saying 'Expanse', which would keep people writing reports happy.

"Okay then."

It only took a moment to start up the surveillance drone camera system, both in orbit and down on the surface. One drone was providing feeds watching the two of them and the surface from orbit and three drones were watching Crawler from different points on the surface. At least one of which was possibly going to be lost to whatever Missy was going to do. A sixth feed started up with a split-screen of the communication drone call between Taylor and Crawler just after that drone reached the monstrous cape.

"Good morning Crawler," Taylor called.

"Minerva!" Crawler yelled, spinning to look at the drone. "This planet is boring! I haven't seen any more explosions from the sky!"

"Well then, I guess it's a good thing that my trainee is here." Taylor had the communication window 'spin' to show Missy. "She wants to try a new attack on you."

"Ooooh. What kind of attack?"

"Orbital bombardment," Missy said. "Well, near-orbital? I'm not sure what's defined as 'orbit'..."

Crawler looked up, and apparently quickly spotted them. "I see you! How are you going to hit me from that far away?"

"Advanced targeting assistance," Taylor answered, honestly impressed with his eyesight. "Still, I'm assured that there's a good chance that you won't survive this, and we're streaming it live back to Earth Bet. Would you like to say anything before we begin?"

"It's about time someone tried to hit me from orbit! Fire away!"

Taylor moved off to the side, angling the communication window so that Crawler could see what Missy was doing. Those watching the live streams could get a much better view of that, of course, but it was somewhat of a courtesy. Missy retrieved and activated Reason, 'cracking' the whip a couple of times before compressing it down into the more rigid 'shooting' mode. Space seemed to ripple around Missy as light started to form at the end of Reason's 'barrel', energy building up in what felt like beam lattices with a new payload.

It wasn't long before the 'charging' process completed, the rippling fading away before a light purple beam of energy fired down to the planet. Crawler visibly grinned in anticipation, holding arms out wide while the beam came down. It struck him dead center in the chest, and a split second later the communication drone was obliterated. That was followed by the closest surveillance drone, an iridescent sphere exploding from the impact point and tearing through everything within around a mile of the impact point. In all directions, completely shredding the limited barriers on the drones in addition to apparently obliterating all of the matter in the sphere somehow.

A massive windstorm formed as the sphere dissipated, but it was blatantly obvious that there was nothing left anyway. Checking the Inn's sensors, they reported that Crawler's shard was down to one remaining connection.

"I think that's going to need to be put on a 'restricted' list of some kind," Taylor finally said. "As I don't think we want it used anywhere people actually live except as a last resort."

"Yeah," Missy agreed, sounding exhausted. "Takes quite a bit to fire off, so you need to not miss too."

"Right. Well, so much for testing anything else."

Taylor shut down the streams showing the two of them, figuring that they should get back to the Inn so that Missy could rest a bit. The ones showing the aftermath she left running for now, if only to cover the results of firing that spell into an atmosphere.

Missy grinned as she browsed PHO while eating a second breakfast. Very few people had made it to the live streams in time to watch them live, since they'd been so short before the action was done, but lots of people had gone back and watched the automated recordings. And now, no matter what she might look like, nobody was considering her as a 'weak little girl'. Not after a single shot had obliterated around four cubic miles of matter centered on Crawler's chest.

Of course, Taylor had brought up some other points for consideration after they'd made it back to the Inn. Such as there being no way to safely cancel the firing sequence once it was started, as the folded space packets weren't easily unfolded. Finding a way to ensure that failing to fire didn't obliterate you was probably a fairly high priority problem as a result of that. Adjusting the effect range as appropriate for the target was something else to think about, as was the mana cost of charging the shot in the first place.

Sadly, the cost of charging the shot was tied to the effect range and the math didn't look good for getting the range down. Increasing it? Sure. But not dropping it to something 'more reasonable'. Space had determined that the size they were using was the smallest you could go, tied to the final size of the 'folded' space and some stability concerns if it went smaller. Their simulations showed a near-certain failure to contain things long enough to fire it if you dropped the effect range down much more. And that was after a weird little twist that she'd come up with to stabilize it long enough to fire at the current size.

Perhaps things could be prepared ahead of time and safely stored inside of Reason somehow? That would make it easier to fire off a shot if needed without using up a bunch of mana to charge the shot, the charging could be done well ahead of time, and then the prepared folded space packets could just sit there. Provided that maintaining them didn't take a lot of energy, anyway. Where were her notes on how stable they were before the packets were damaged?

By mid-afternoon it was obvious to Amy that flying under her own power was not happening. Taylor had even come up with two new control schemes and neither of them helped. Well, the one that took her orientation out of the mix entirely helped a little, but not enough to be usable and just ensured that impacts with the ocean or ground were feet-first. Trees were still a crapshoot, and Taylor had resorted to using the biological manipulation ability to heal a bunch of the trees in the area.

On that front, it was partially bullshit that Taylor apparently got all of their powers. Not entirely though, as the trade was getting the multitasking ability that seemingly originated with the shard thingy that had originally been connecting to her. But not the full thing, due to problems with how it worked. So powers for powers, the bullshit part being how little trouble Taylor had in using them. Perhaps Amy should get together with Missy and see if the younger girl was willing to approach Hive to request both of them getting access to the other's power configuration?

"I think we should give up on you getting this down today," Taylor said after another 'pulled back to the beach' event.

"We should probably give up on it in general," Amy corrected. "Because I think I'm getting worse. I have no clue how you and Missy keep track of everything."

"There isn't a whole lot to keep track of though."

"So you and Missy have both claimed, yes."

Taylor shrugged. "Okay. Do you want to risk having a horrible headache tomorrow?"

Amy frowned for a moment, wondering what would cause a horrible headache. Then she remembered that the storage space included another sensor, possibly making her headache worse. But she was feeling much better now, and didn't think it would be a big problem. "So you're willing to give me the spells for storing things without me getting flying down?"

"You have to store that breathing mask somewhere."

Casting the storage space creation spell took a few minutes, and created a mild headache due to the new sensor, but it wasn't bad when things were 'static' in the storage space itself. Getting proficient with the storage and retrieval spell was going to be the hard part. Luckily it currently didn't matter if she could fire it off in an instant. She could take her time to target both ends and nobody would care right now. That said, she also needed to practice using it on herself. Taylor's dodging via short range teleport looked far too useful, and it could be a good substitute method for roof hopping.

That evening Taylor checked in with Hive, who was done with the initial stages of absorbing Riley's shard but was being extra careful with the work on her body. The work was significant enough to warrant taking time to do right on its own, and Hive was monitoring the linker core support structure to ensure that it wasn't reacting poorly as well. If absolutely necessary then steps to remove the entire thing would be taken, but only if they had to in order to keep Riley alive.

After that things were a lot less relaxing, due to looking into the data from the larger-scale scans that Hive had done. Linking Core's simulation system to the Inn's allowed for plenty of capability for bringing up a fairly detailed map of the entire shroud area, minus that one fully closed off bubble. Applying a filter to highlight all worlds with a shard device present was trivial. Recovering from the shock of the sheer number of worlds highlighted was another matter.

If they needed to clean up every last shard device for the good of Earth Bet and other inhabited worlds then Hive was going to need to figure out how to build something that could process the things for them. And then build a couple hundred to start with, at least until they had the resources available to build a couple thousand. That might get them to the point of being able to finish within a century or two, assuming nothing went wrong and they didn't care about possibly killing people connected to the things.

Finding the 'active connections' data revealed another headache entirely. There were far too many of them, all essentially identical to a casual scan and overlapping to the point of becoming a blur in the display. Picking out individual connections was nearly impossible, especially around Earth Bet where they were the densest, though it was obviously possible to backtrack them with enough care. That said, there were a couple of things that were very much noticeable. For one, there was a single, much more significant connection to the non-deteriorated bubble, slicing through the cloud of connections to reach Earth Bet. Almost as though it were a braid of connections all working together. They didn't have enough information to know more, the scan not picking out the endpoint inside of the dimension, but it stood out.

Then there was the deteriorated bubble, which had a lot of connections between it and the rest of the inner shroud, most of them likely ending up on Earth Bet. The bubble ends of most of those connections were obviously coming from multiple dimensions at once, all of which were places that the 'storage configuration' shard devices were. At the same time, it currently had two connections back to the outer shroud area. One stronger than the other, and their angles were the only reason they were obvious enough to spot. There might be others like that, but closer examination showed that they were also the only ones that weren't doing that 'come from multiple dimensions' trick inside of the bubble.

There were obviously a lot of mysteries and problems still to be solved.

Saturday morning started with a dodging practice session for Taylor and Missy. In a storm that happened to be nearby, which was just the kind of insane stunt that Missy had come to expect from Taylor. Not that it wasn't good training, because it was, but dodging or intercepting everything while also dealing with rain, lightning, and the occasional bit of hail was very annoying. Doing so next to Taylor, who was making this look like it should be a walk in the park, wasn't helping.

"There's no way," Missy started to say, before pausing to dodge several bullets. "That you're casting blink that often."

"What?" Taylor replied as she spun head over heels to slip between some bullets.

"I just saw you cast it five times in the same amount of time it takes me to cast it once."

"Triggered five times."

"What?"

"I know you can hold the casting without firing it off. Are you using all of your multitasking instances for other things?"

It embarrassingly took nearly five minutes to figure out what the older girl was saying, and Missy really wanted to facepalm over it. Especially as the entire 'keep a bunch of blink spells ready' advice hadn't been subtle about what that meant. She'd just forgotten that she could have more than one ready to go. Spinning up multitasking instances just to keep blink spells ready to trigger was a simple thing to do once she realized her mistake, and dodging through some of the tighter bullet formations became a lot easier.

Well, easier until she tried to dodge a bullet and a lightning strike at the same time, with different instances of her reacting to each threat, and ended up trying to trigger two blink spells at once.

Amy had been perfectly happy to not be included in dodging practice. She'd spent that time working with the storage and retrieval spell and a pile of coins that Taylor had fetched from her piggy bank. As if any 'piggy bank' could hold the literal piles of coins that had been dumped on the table. She was even happier to not have been participating when Missy appeared soaking wet and naked in a flash of light. Taylor appeared a moment later in her own flash of light, immediately checking on the younger girl.

"What happened?" Amy asked as she got up from where she'd been sitting.

"She ran into a lack of safeties," Taylor answered. "Well, there are a couple of safeties regarding being able to fit at the destination, but none for trying to move yourself to two different points simultaneously." Another flash of light heralded the return of Missy's pajamas, before Taylor picked the girl up and carried her over to one of the couches. "That said, she should be fine in a few minutes, the lightning and bullets didn't harm her directly."

"The what?"

"I think she was trying to get out of the way of a cloud to cloud lightning bolt while also looking to avoid a bullet or five. Two blink spells at the same time, to two different places, pulled her armor in different directions. Since it was her own mana it didn't resist it like it would've if I'd tried that on her. All the bullets and the lightning hit her, her stressed armor failed, and the backlash knocked her out. Though when she vanished she still had the physical clothing elements on, even if their barriers had failed, so I'm not sure why she didn't have them here."

Amy flinched at that. Missy was not going to be happy when she woke up. "So you sent her back here immediately?"

"No, the Inn maintains a dimensional transference lock on her during training just in case of an accident. As soon as her armor failed it grabbed her, quickly enough that she barely made it six inches before she was back here."

"Oh. I didn't know that."

Taylor made sure that Missy looked comfortable enough before turning back towards Amy. "We decided it was safer than relying on Space or Jewel to report a problem."

Amy raised an eyebrow. "And what about you?"

"I can cast the spell myself, so I keep one ready to go instead. A custom multi-stage trigger means that once I pull the first phase then I have to hold the second or the spell goes off as a dead-man's switch. That way, if I'm knocked out then it casts automatically to remove me from the area. The third stage is the cancel stage."

"And if you're out of mana?"

"When you're holding a spell like that then you've already put the mana in. Even then, I'd be incredibly surprised if Hive hasn't included a routine for the Inn to grab me within a few seconds even without maintaining a lock in advance. If only because it's possible that what knocked me out disrupted the uncast spell. We've got enough possible ways for that to happen to warrant Hive taking the precaution."

"Ah. How difficult is it to cast that one?"

"We haven't figured out how to keep the safeties working while breaking it down into chunks for non-math casting."

"Impossible for mere mortals then. Good to know."

"Ugh," Missy groaned, getting their attention. "What hit me?"

"Your own spells," Taylor answered, turning back to Missy. Who was now shifting to sit up on the couch. "Followed by a few bullets and a lightning strike."

"What?"

"I think you tried to blink-dodge in two directions at the same time. It didn't work."

Missy frowned, then looked down at herself. "How did I end up back in my pajamas?"

"I'm not actually certain why you ended up naked yet, but I asked Space to release the Knight Armor so that you'd be wearing something."

"Oh."

Missy was still annoyed with herself when the PRT picked the three of them up for necklace examination. She'd figured out both where she'd gone wrong with the blink spells, namely only having one instance of herself in charge of blinking at a time instead of having all instances holding a spell ready to fire at all times. That really needed to be bold and not mentioned as a one-off comment in the notes on that trick.

As for her Knight Armor vanishing, apparently she'd been pulled out of the clothing elements, leaving the constructs behind and out of range of her anchor. That was apparently in part because the blink spells were still pulling on them, and in part because the directive was to get her to safety and her pure-mana clothing wasn't important enough to worry about. Which brought up the question of just what the dimensional transference spell and the transport devices could do against your will. Something they'd not really tested properly up until now, because they could all 'key in' through their devices thanks to how Hive had set everything up. Disabling that to see just what happened seemed like a good idea. Could you resist being moved from location to location? Could that be overridden with more power?

It was definitely something they should be looking into.

"So how do these sessions work?" Amy asked.

Missy shrugged. "You never know."

Taylor nodded in agreement. "Yeah, it varies significantly based on which parahumans want to try things and what they want to try. Everything from giant tinkertech creations to being stared at for a bit. Sometimes they just want to see what they can discover, other times they actively try to remove the necklaces. Though I'll recommend avoiding anything that was targeted at something 'mysterious'."

"Mysterious?" Amy asked, obviously curious.

"A box that would only open for 'the most mysterious' or something like that tried to grab me with a lasso in New York."

"That doesn't sound too bad."

"She's skipping the part where trying to get it to let go nearly blew up the building," the driver chimed in. "Only her necklace shifting from 'shield her' to 'contain explosion' kept the damage to temporary blindness and hearing loss, and even that is believed to be in part to protect her from the building being blown apart around her."

Amy looked horrified. "They wanted to test her with something like that?"

"Oh no," Taylor said, shaking her head. "That was when Legend was giving me a personal run through the tour, including some things that I don't think the public normally sees. The box was one of a number of display pieces in one of the rooms for the public to ooh and aah over and went off when I got too close."

"All confiscated tinkertech that was considered safe because it had never been seen to do anything was reclassified as dangerous until proven otherwise because of that incident," the driver said. "The only things any of you three are being intentionally exposed to from now on are items that the creating parahuman is still around to explain and maintain."

"So what are we likely to see today?" Missy asked, honestly curious at this point.

"No clue. Most of what I know is from the list of things we were told to never do around you three, such as bring you and any unknown tinkertech anywhere near each other. I'm not important enough to have details for the day beyond when I was supposed to pick you up and that we're going to the PRT building this morning."

Oh well, it had been worth a shot. Hopefully she wouldn't regret not having a book with her today? Taylor and Amy had both grabbed one in case they were bored.

Taylor picked up the next puzzle in the pile that had been provided to her today. Amy and Missy were at other tables in the room with their own collections of puzzles, though how having them work through a bunch of puzzles tested their necklaces was beyond her. Amy had actually given up and pulled out a book, obviously not interested in even attempting most of the puzzles. Missy was currently fighting with one of the line up the numbers puzzles, stubbornly refusing to give up on it despite not appearing to get anywhere in solving it.

Compared to them, Taylor was just grabbing whatever was next in the pile and working her way through it. Rubix cubes, twisted metal shapes that had to be taken apart and put back together, some wooden dials that had to be arranged to total to various numbers in each 'column' around the center, small bags of pieces that needed to be assembled into complete shapes, boxes that required precise and occasionally non-intuitive steps to open. She'd just grabbed a two hundred and fifty-ish piece jigsaw puzzle, without a picture to reference on the box.

Surrounding them were a couple dozen observers, only half of them parahumans, most sitting around the room taking notes at various rates. A few were wandering around them, such as Mister Wynn, more closely examining the necklaces or what the three of them were doing. Supposedly there were also a few more people watching live feeds from the cameras as well. It was obvious that the observers were splitting their attention between the three of them, though it felt like they were focusing on Taylor more than Amy and Missy combined. Then again, there hadn't actually been any incidents where the other two had their necklaces do anything of note, so that might be expected.

The jigsaw puzzle turned out to not have a picture at all, and was a bit tricky to put together. Identifying which direction was 'up' on the plastic pieces was only really possible due to the edges not having been cleaned up from when they'd been cut, the cut on the 'tops' being smoother than the 'bottoms'. There had also been some subtle flaws in the coloring of the plastic used to make the puzzle that had helped with determining where things lined up, especially as the obvious 'edge' pieces weren't always edges. Some of the little protrusions that would seemingly be for locking into pieces were occasionally parts of the outer edge instead as well.

It wasn't long after she'd finished the puzzle before they brought in food, several of the observers joining the three girls for a chat over lunch. Which was still 'on the clock', the 'chat' being more 'question them about anything that came to mind'. There were general questions asked of all of them, but Amy and Taylor also got questions directed at them. Amy's were generally about biology, and she showed confusion and distaste in the process of stating that she didn't know the answers. They didn't continue to ask her after the first few. Taylor's had started with math, but had drifted quite a bit from there.

After lunch Mister Wynn sat down with her specifically to see what she thought of his notes from that day. Which seemed to largely be what looked like horribly mangled Knight Object and barrier formulas. She did her best to not just tell him how horribly he'd apparently extrapolated them while still pointing out several places that were obviously wrong even without knowing the original formulas. Such as where he was reusing variables in ways that ensured that divisions by zero would be happening. He'd wandered off with a determined look on his face, sitting down and alternating between staring at his notes and the three necklaces.

Several of the non-parahumans followed after him with specific problems they wanted her to look at. A few were the same theoretical math problems that she'd passed on already, others were new ones she hadn't seen before but still didn't interest her. One woman wanted to see what else she could explain about certain aspects of the superconductor material, and there was a good hour spent looking over weather-predicting formulas during which Taylor ended up playing with possible ways to control the weather in Core's simulation system.

She came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be cheap, energy-wise, but it was definitely doable, more so if all you wanted to do was disrupt a storm with some barriers. Throwing a small drone of some kind with a large and properly-configured 'comfort layer' barrier bubble around it near the eye of a hurricane would likely be able to shut the entire storm down, or with a more difficult setup you could probably steer it away. Slowly, in both cases, so if you needed to stop a storm now you'd need much larger setups.

By mid-afternoon the 'three girls at a thousand dollars an hour' ate up the budget for the day. Missy left with Ethan while Amy joined Taylor in a van to head back home.

"The only reason that wasn't a waste of time was that they were paying well," Amy grumbled once the PRT van had left again.

"They likely disagree," Taylor replied. "Though in hindsight I really should've spotted the IQ tests coming."

"IQ tests? Oh. The puzzles they gave us as 'something to do'?"

"Yeah. And now I wonder if they were more focused on me because I wasn't holding back as I made my way through them."

Amy shrugged. "Whatever. If they want to do a proper IQ test then they can tell us that. Though asking me about biology was rude."

That had Taylor raising an eyebrow. "And why would seeing if you retained any knowledge from your powers be rude? Just because you can't manipulate biology doesn't mean you couldn't help with overall understanding of it."

"Bah."

"That said, I should go check on Hive, see if she thinks I can drop Riley off with the PRT tomorrow."

"Yeah, I suppose. Do you know what your father is doing across town?"

"How do you know he's across town?"

"I can sense his belt buckle."

"Oh." The other girl's ability to sense things like that was honestly somewhat insane. "He should be ensuring that some paperwork is in order for a couple of things the Dockworkers are doing this weekend. If things go long enough he'll probably call and ask about him picking up dinner on the way home."

620

Hugs

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Winter

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10th Anniversary

9th Anniversary

CmptrWz

Jan 6, 2021

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Threadmarks Chapter 88 - June 25, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jan 13, 2021

#16,344

Taylor had checked with Hive, gotten confirmation that she was done with Riley, and then checked on Riley. Who was in a bio-manipulation-induced coma but hadn't been physically de-aged on the basis that Hive had concluded that would be revealing too much about their current capabilities, specifically that if they could do that much then they should've been able to remove the remnant of the shard connection from her brain.

Hive had been acting somewhat distracted, but had also asked to finish Taylor's collection of augmentation units off by installing one that evening. Both to see if Hive's predictions on the overall benefit provided were correct and to get her up to her 'full potential' either way. Taylor had agreed, brought up weather control drones, and was informed that if she wanted to experiment with device construction that Core was fully capable of helping her build things. As were Space and Jewel for Missy and Amy from a hardware perspective, though Hive hadn't installed that software in them.

That had Taylor looking over a bunch of functions she'd not realized that Core had while Hive installed an augmentation unit. Half of the construction capabilities were actually tied to the use of the shard side of the hybrid device, though Core also had as close to Hive's own systems as she could get without being able to duplicate those systems directly. The combination meant that things could be repaired, constructed, and torn apart in Taylor's hands or through storing them in Core. As an extrapolation, Core was probably an incredibly secure place to store anything of value, one that was less likely to accidentally collapse under any number of unlikely circumstances than her 'storage pocket' was.

What Core didn't have was an AI of its own. It was designed specifically to be an extension of Taylor, somewhat like a less restricted version of the combat drones. Which meant plenty of automated routines to aid her, but no actual ability to think on its own otherwise. Those routines included an AI builder though, intended for various levels of intelligence in created items but perfectly usable to give Core the ability to do things on its own. Which might be useful for programming in an automatic 'escape' routine in the event she was knocked unconscious, or perhaps some general monitoring alarms.

More immediately, it was quite useful for coming up with a training drone program for the morning. One that was quite different from the rest they'd used to date. The drones would primarily be stationary, tapped into the Inn's battery system, while firing a variety of bullets and beams that needed to be dodged. That included making a few new equation adjustments to get some of the effects she wanted.

Sunday morning started with Amy joining Danny in the command center, watching Taylor and Missy go through training. They were doing so in another dimension and had everything being recorded as well. Not streamed live, but Missy had to keep her language packs loaded as the plan was to edit and upload a couple of videos to the internet when they were done.

In theory, it was a one-on-one sparring match between the two. Taylor with Hal, Missy with Reason. The younger girl had been allowed to use her shield boosters and vambraces as well, to make it a little easier on her and giving her the ability to try and grab Taylor with Reason to pull her in for a high-powered punch to the face. Or she could punch attacks to overwhelm them instead of dodging or tanking them with her shields.

In practice it was a 'distracted dodging' session, because training drones were firing large glowing 'shells' into the battlespace. Those would explode with random payloads. Streams of bullets fired at one of the two, and spherical shells of bullets in all directions in individual and repeating burst groups. Every so often the shells would then stop and decide to become homing bullets that needed to be intercepted with a counterattack or shield. Then there were the beams lancing through the battlespace, the occasional rocks and logs launched at high speed, normal non-magical bullets of various kinds fired as though people were standing off to the side with various kinds of guns, and even hand grenades flying in and exploding into shrapnel.

The end result was the two flying around and teleporting wildly as they dodged while still throwing out attacks at each other and blocking and/or counter attacking when needed. Missy had also noticeably improved over the hour, but Taylor had made the entire exercise look trivial by comparison while still making it look like a lot of hard work. Cleaning up the drones took a couple of minutes when they were done, and then they collapsed into chairs for breakfast.

After breakfast they met at the Walsh household to create five videos to upload. All five had a counter set in the corner for the number of hits taken for each of the two from 'environmental' attacks or attacks originating from each of them. The first two videos were 'point of view' feeds from Taylor and Missy, though without any heads-up information they might've had. Those also had the audio from any yelling and taunting that they did, Taylor generally using whatever language Missy had last used. Those also had optional subtitles in each language used, though they'd had to make second variants of those with built-in Belkan subtitles as that wasn't a supported language on the video site.

Two other videos were taken from fixed observation points. One directly above the battlespace and one to the side of it. Those were the easiest to create and took no real time. The last video was dynamic, shifting around throughout the action to show as many of the 'good bits' as possible. It was still a continuous video with no cuts, as though a camera with incredibly good AI had been flying around inside of the battlespace itself. That one took the longest, as it was the one that the group was primarily providing input for.

"That took long enough," Ethan said when they were done. "What's next?"

"I'm rested enough to call the PRT to arrange to drop Riley off," Taylor answered. "Perhaps Amy and Missy can get back to flying lessons?"

"I'd rather continue working on storing and retrieving items," Amy said. "I don't think flying is for me."

That had Taylor frowning. "I really didn't think it was that hard, but whatever. I'm not going to force you."

"Then what do I do?" Missy asked.

Amy raised an eyebrow. "Relax and recover from the hour long training session? It's obvious to me that you don't recover anywhere near as quickly as Taylor does, magically speaking."

The younger girl pouted, but didn't argue that.

Taylor carried Riley through the portal to the PRT building, idly wondering what was distracting Hive back at the Inn as she did so. Most likely parsing things from Riley's shard or preparing for when Squealer's would be grabbed, but she'd seemed far more distracted than usual after shards were absorbed.

"Good morning Minerva," a woman wearing a lab coat greeted her. "No wheelchair today?"

"I can make a simple one if you need one," Taylor replied. "But I figured the one sample was good enough. You'll want local production anyway, right?"

"Very true. We've got one for Miss Davis in the hallway, since the one you previously brought proved to be incredibly difficult to move an unconscious patient around with. That said, there were...concerns about possible pathogens with Miss Davis here."

"They've been taken care of, along with all of her other self-modifications."

The woman nodded. "Thank you."

Ten minutes later Taylor was back at the Inn, at which point she realized that she'd not learned the woman's name. Or those of the four people in hazmat suits that had been waiting outside of the room, for that matter, but she hadn't actually spoken to any of them.

Amy grumbled a bit as she stored the little plush toy she was practicing with. Taylor and Missy both made it look so easy, but ensuring that things were properly aligned was annoying. She was starting to think that both of the other girls had a better grasp on spatial awareness than she did, at least when not targeting something that had mana. Because storing and retrieving a Knight Object copy of the plush toy was trivial, but the real thing took far too much focus to target.

She flinched when the doorbell ringing broke her concentration and the spell attempted to grab the entire coffee table. Which failed because the coffee table wouldn't fit in her storage space. The failure feedback from that was slightly painful, and she grumbled about it for the minute it took Taylor to return from answering the door.

"I thought you were going to answer the door before she rang the bell," Amy said when Taylor and Vicky entered the room.

"She flew in too quickly for me to do that," Taylor answered.

"Ames!" Vicky cried, darting over. "You have no idea how lucky you are to no longer be in New Wave!"

"What?" Amy asked, not complaining about Vicky grabbing her for a hug. Though the force field on Knight Clothing barriers interaction made it slightly less nice.

"They're auditing us. Our finances, power-use policies, patrol routes, everything! Though that's mostly Mom's fault."

"Why do you think that?" Taylor asked.

"She shouldn't have tried to punch the accountant that came to do a quick check of the books, no matter how derogatory he was when accusing her accounting methods of being 'outdated'."

Amy shuddered at that thought. Carol definitely knew better, which meant that the person had to have hit some of her sore spots. Though thinking about it, maybe that was intentional to provide justification for the 'full audit'?

"So," Vicky continued as she released Amy. "Have you guys heard about the mysterious visions?"

"Mysterious what?" Amy asked, doing her best to not pout now that Vicky wasn't hugging her.

"The news this morning was talking about visions people have started seeing when someone gets powers. Anyone with powers nearby sees them too for some reason. We don't have pictures, obviously, but they're fairly consistent. Two giant whales, worms, or slugs shedding bits of themselves, one of which seemingly impacts the person who got powers."

"Weird. I wonder what's causing that?"

Taylor frowned, and there was a slight shift in her mana that meant that she was probably connecting to the Inn. It took a moment before she sighed. "I bet that's the wrong question. Instead, I think the better question is 'why are people only remembering the visions now?'"

It was Vicky's turn to frown. "You think people were having the visions before?"

"Yep."

"Why wouldn't anyone have said something about them before now then?"

"Because they've been forgetting them immediately after having them until recently."

"...how, and why would they stop forgetting?"

Taylor snorted. "The how is easy, something was making them forget. Which makes the second part easy too, it's no longer there to do so."

"And how do you know that?"

"Because I think Hive ate the shard that was doing it, and the place that shard used to be is still getting pelted with large amounts of energy on a regular basis, which might be the shard equivalent of a data packet." She then frowned. "Though I don't know if I want to know how they reached 'use enough energy to level at least a city block' for simple communication, unless there's a lot more information included than I'm expecting."

"And now I want to focus on something else," Vicky said as she spun around to look at Amy again. "So how goes learning magic? Have you made any cool spells yet?"

"There's far too much math involved for making spells," Amy replied. "And learning the already-made ones is annoying."

"She even gave up on learning to fly," Taylor added, and Vicky's eyes went wide as her head bounced between the two of them.

At least until it settled on Amy, with a look that promised far more crashing into things.

Missy had given up helping and landed next to Taylor on the beach to watch Vicky work on trying to get Amy flying properly. Not that 'instinctively fly thanks to a shard hooking into your brain' and 'fly with mana-based controls' had anything to do with one another, making the process likely doomed to failure. Something that had been obvious when they'd called her to come help, but the token attempt to help was worth it for the resulting show.

"She'd have better luck having Hive depower her and give the power profile to Amy," Missy noted as she retrieved some cookies from her storage area.

"That's likely true," Taylor agreed. "We could even do it, though explaining why Vicky no longer had her powers would be more difficult and there's no guarantee that it would work. What if the 'flight' profile only works because her shard is in another dimension?"

"Okay, yeah, but at least it might give her enough flying instinct to handle the controls?"

"Heh. That would be nice, wouldn't it?"

"Instead we get to see her crash repeatedly and in various amusing ways."

"Are you implying that you're enjoying her misfortune?"

"Of course not! I'm stating it outright."

"And what would your guardians think of that?"

"Ethan would give me a high five while Sherie facepalmed."

Taylor nodded. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

They continued to watch, with Taylor regularly having a transport device that was floating in the water pull Amy back to its platform. Missy was also working in her multitasking system, split between her two main projects. She hadn't found a way to pre-package the spatial manipulation beam packets for longer-term storage, or at least not a way that was unlikely to suddenly erase her from existence. Space had been able to help her chase down one thought, of 'scooping up' spacetime on the way to the target. That proved to be easier than expected from a math point of view, but the end result was both harder to keep the destructive range down on and used a minimum of fifty times the mana per cubic yard or so of effect area. Which meant that even Taylor would baulk at that just on mana consumption, to say nothing of the extreme range.

As for the stealth field recreation, she was coming to the conclusion that the first working version was going to need to be essentially 'stationary', at least in comparison to its environment. Anything else was going to be far too likely to disrupt the incredibly tight tolerances needed on various portions. Those also ensured that to get it working she was going to have to define a fixed size as well, at least until she could find a good way to have things auto-adjust themselves properly with how many fiddly bits had to line up just right. Further, it was going to need a good anchor point, in order to keep things from 'wobbling', which was currently easiest to get working through having the caster or casting device be the anchor. Getting it working with something else as the anchor could wait until she had proof that it worked at all.

Likely not for the last time, she debated just asking for help from the math geniuses, but that would feel far too much like giving up and letting them take credit for finishing things.

Not much else happened that day, at least once Vicky left, and after dinner Taylor made sure to check on Hive. She still seemed distracted, but had finished the first batches of healing devices. Five full-sized booths and three handheld devices. The booths were hexagonal tubes tall enough to stand in but also long enough to roll a gurney into, with controls on the inside and outside. Those inside apparently took priority, with the intent being that the outside controls would only work if the person inside couldn't operate the controls at all. They also had an automatic function that kicked in to heal someone who would die without healing, overriding both control panels. You didn't have to close the doors at either end to activate them in general, but there were configuration options to enable doing so anyway.

The handheld devices were essentially a field healing system that could be directed by the one using them. To use them you'd slip one onto your hand, where a hexagonal crystal would align with your palm. A mana link to the device would then let you power and control it, the combination making it impossible for non-mages to use. The crystal would glow when you were using it as a side effect of the way the healing functioned and there was no forced healing of injuries. Hive also claimed that they could be used by someone with deeper medical knowledge to go beyond basic healing, but otherwise the intent should be 'stabilize the person, then get them to a booth' for anything serious.

After that, Taylor's evening was spent reviewing the manuals for the healing devices and working on a potential alternative setup for Amy to use instead of flight, based on some comments Vicky had made. Making a 'glider' spell that would allow for significant horizontal movement without dropping was easy enough, basically simplifying a large portion of the flight spell down to a simple on/off with a 'distance to gravity well' detection of sorts. Then the problem was making it so that she could get height without flying or the blink spell.

Her first thought for getting height was a way to supernaturally grip surfaces to climb them, but she couldn't make it work. Faking it with togglable anchoring wouldn't work well when dealing with moving surfaces, such as vehicles. After a dozen failed ideas there she went back to the new glider spell and put more of the flight spell into it instead, essentially putting a semi-automatic 'treat gravity as being that direction' routine for when it found you were close enough to a surface. A configuration for sensor points to be added to shoes, or possibly shoes and gloves, allowed 'place foot on large enough surface' to be enough to start triggering the effect. If your feet were on different surfaces than it pulled you towards both, which worked amazingly well for changing orientation from 'run along ground' to 'run up wall' in simulation.

It took some work to get the parameters for when to revert back to 'normal' gravity correct, without toggling the manual off switch anyway, and a configurable slider of sorts to tweak that from situation to situation was easy enough. The default hopefully worked well enough, but some real-world testing would be needed.

Monday morning started with a testing session. Missy wasn't sure if she should be happy about that or not. On one hand, she wasn't being shot at repeatedly to learn to dodge better. On the other hand, untested 'have to be tested with actual people' spells were annoying. It took almost an hour for Taylor to declare the thing ready for others to play with, and then it turned out to be a far less maneuverable flight spell variant that didn't actually let you fly. Yes, it let you run up trees as though they were the ground, which was somewhat neat, but it did nothing to boost your speed and you couldn't dodge anywhere but 'down' when gliding.

At the same time, after a few faceplants into trees and some aiming issues with jumping, Amy was doing a lot better with the new spell than she'd ever accomplished when trying to fly. She'd set herself up to be able to run up trees on her hands and feet, though hadn't done well when she'd tried doing so in a constant handstand. On just her feet or on all fours she was surprisingly quick to scamper up the vertical surfaces, only to jump out and glide a good distance either to another tree or out over the water.

For whatever reason, taking most of the actual 'control' away from the once-healer worked for her. She also seemed happy enough with the ability, and kept grinning as though thinking up things to go along with it.

Taylor had also given each of them a handheld healing device intended for a basic 'field healing' of others. For some reason that had delighted Amy more than the gliding had, though only after ensuring that she wouldn't be the first one to use one in public. Taylor had no problems using one first, if it came down to that.

But now they were getting ready for a second outing for Expanse, this time in Brockton Bay. Something that had been approved by Ethan and Sherie for the day despite their inability to monitor things directly while at work. The goal was to be seen enough for the Fallen to make a move so that they weren't hanging over Taylor's head while she was off in West Virginia, but they were going to start with 'clean out the warehouse that the Slaughterhouse Nine members had been staying in'.

"So you two are going to appear over the Bay together?" Amy asked.

"All three of us," Taylor answered. "As soon as Hive gets up here to join us."

"Why all three?"

"To disprove a rumor that's been going around PHO that Expanse is just a bigger body for Hive's intelligence to pilot, with me having forgotten to load 'English' into it before visiting Eagleton."

"...I don't think I want to know who came up with that one. How likely do you think they'll assume that for anyone else that shows up with you?"

"They won't believe seeing all three of us together isn't a trick in the first place," Missy countered. Because she knew that logic had no hold on many of the more annoying PHO posters.

Hive appeared in a flash of light a moment later, already in her pink Knight Armor. Which meant it was time to get going, Amy heading down to the command center to watch from there.

Amy was theoretically monitoring Taylor and Missy as they finished up working with the PRT to clear out a warehouse. In practice she was largely ignoring that and working with Jewel on how to implement some ideas she had for her 'mage identity'. She was far too used to not wearing a mask, even if the sunglasses and visors that Taylor and Missy used didn't look all that 'mask-like' in practice, but didn't want to be identified easily either. To that end, she now had other ideas to make her identity even harder to pin down, but was running into problems.

Jewel had safeties that ensured that she couldn't accidentally change her body or genetics in a manner that caused problems for her magic, and some of what she'd intended to do tripped those safeties. Apparently making it so that she would genetically have a very nonstandard hair color was a problem, but just changing her hair to be a different color was perfectly fine. Similarly, she could reshape her body in a surprisingly large number of ways so long as she didn't make it so that her genetics matched the new appearance.

Hive had even figured out a workaround for her magic needing to adapt to changes. They apparently didn't know enough about the 'support structure' to modify it directly, but it did have self-repair routines that functioned as you grew and healed from physical injuries. Jewel had actually gotten an update that morning that caused it to forcibly activate and overcharge those routines when making changes in someone who had a linker core. The routines ended up using something like a thousand times the mana than they normally would use to adapt to the changes made, but you also didn't have to wait months to years for things to happen naturally.

You did have to deal with it itching, as well as the process being exhausting if overdone. Luckily, the latter was mostly noticeable due to how many things she'd done to herself before reverting to the 'saved' profile she'd ensured that Jewel had on file. She decided to go upstairs to the large kitchen to see what she could find for a snack while working with Jewel on a couple more cosmetic aspects of magic instead. At least one of which she was surprised was 'cosmetic' in the first place.

Taylor had baited the Fallen through talking outside the warehouse while waiting for the PRT, in front of several people recording her with Hive and Missy. Specifically, detailing landmarks that were going to be waypoints on their patrol route after they finished with the PRT. Those videos had made it online and crowds had started to gather. That included movement of pretty much everyone in town that they thought was tied to the Fallen, though there was an odd split there. The normal members were gathering with the rest of the crowds while the parahumans were generally finding further away vantage points. Hive even reported that they had binoculars or, in one notable case, a telescope.

The problem with that was how many of the non-parahumans had guns, coupled with there still not being a good way to do the 'cast shields on all the primers' trick at range yet. Well, there was one method that didn't involve someone obviously moving around, and knowing that it would likely be needed made it easy to set up.

{Are those combat drones?} Missy asked.

{Yep,} Taylor answered.

{Why are you sending out cloaked combat drones?}

{To ensure that there won't be a gunfight, mainly.}

Missy obviously didn't get it, but Hive nodding in agreement likely meant that she did. The drones moved out to each of the three points that crowds were gathering at and Taylor would use them to start ensuring that none of the guns in the crowds would work if the Fallen decided to cause trouble. She'd also leave them in each area to disable any more guns that showed up and in case she needed them during a confrontation.

Missy was run through some 'patrolling basics' to give the drones time to do their thing. Some of that was obviously things that the younger girl would've known. Other things were new, such as ensuring that she had at least one sensor drone out. Mentioning that, when she hadn't cast one yet, had her attitude change a bit. Probably because she realized that it wasn't entirely for show. Some basic flight rules and search patterns followed, including the basic strategy of keeping all sensor drones where they weren't while moving. The drones were best for scanning a wider area, it was a waste of energy if you kept them right next to you the entire time.

With all of that completed, they took to the air and started weaving back and forth through the area on the way to the first waypoint described. They stopped twice, first to investigate a man breaking a window that had been an actual cable company employee being an idiot while running a cable line over the outside of a building. Taylor had intended to just move on until he started screaming obscenities at them, and had switched to reporting him for electric code violations instead. He'd not been happy about that. The second had been a drunk man who had forgotten where he parked and had set someone else's alarm off while trying to get into their car. They'd called that in to the police as the man was intending to drive when he couldn't even walk straight.

They eventually reached the first waypoint, where a large crowd had gathered. Thanks to Hive, Core and Space were both running an overlay system for their visors that were highlighting the suspected Fallen members. A similar tagging was actually being monitored by Taylor via the currently-invisible combat drones, but that wouldn't help Missy. On that front, she found the one person recording on a rooftop interesting, since Hive indicated that several suspected Fallen members were watching the feed from that person at the other two waypoints that people had gathered at.

A large gap formed in the crowd as they came in for a landing, since just doing a fly-by was less likely to have the Fallen attempt their 'test'. There wasn't a single bullet in any of the three waypoint areas that was functional right now anyway, and unless the parahumans were long-range effect types then they were definitely too far away to intervene quickly as well.

"Minerva," one of the marked Fallen called, the rest in the crowd apparently taking that as a sign to grab someone else nearby and either hold a weapon to them or put them into painful-looking holds. Most of the weapons were guns pointed at heads, but there were also a few knives at necks, because of course she'd not considered blunting knives. Several people that hadn't been marked as likely-Fallen were tagged as such when they joined in, and a moment later the entire thing repeated at the other two waypoints.

None of those who'd grabbed someone made any move to go further as the man who'd originally yelled out stepped forward, arms wide and no weapons on him.

"This seems a bit elaborate for a greeting," Taylor commented. Considering options, she decided to ensure that Hive agreed with one assessment she'd just made. "I suppose that stunning the ones without guns could cause them to jerk and injure their hostages."

"Yes, Lord," Hive confirmed, causing Taylor to start working on a plan to get the hostages out of the way. Starting with the ones that didn't have guns pointed at their heads.

"We've studied you," the Fallen member continued. "Going against, and even killing, our Gods can't be left unpunished. And to help ensure your cooperation, we've already sent the alert out to the other two crowds. You're all here and I doubt that even with your two friends that you can stop us all here, let alone the others."

"So what is it that you want me to do?" Taylor asked as she shifted some things around. She should have just enough casting capability to pull it off, but she wasn't sure if she had the appropriate range.

"You're going to drop any and all protections you have up and come with me. I'll inject you with a sedative, then once I know that you're unconscious I'll give the all-clear. Your friends can stay here, and even hold onto your equipment if you want. We don't want anyone tracking us through it anyway."

"And what makes you think that'll work?"

"Because you may be good when you have time to plan your own ambush, but you didn't have time to plan for ours. You can't be in three places at once either, and I don't see any of your cheating drones."

Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that she didn't have enough range at the last waypoint, even if she could pull everything off at the other two. But then again, she had other options if she could keep the idiot talking a little bit longer. After all, she wasn't cheating yet, and she pulled up the Inn's systems to start preparing to do so. Hive obviously noticed, because she started helping.

"And what makes you think that we can't find her even without her gear?" Missy asked.

The man paused, and looked at Missy. "What?"

"She was able to find missing kids when one of them was in a secret bunker. Do you really think that you can hide her well enough to make it impossible for us to find her?"

It wasn't the route Taylor had planned to go with the situation, but the man's confusion was giving her and Hive more time to prepare their answer to the demands. She didn't think she was going to get much more time, she just hoped it would be enough.

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Threadmarks Chapter 89 - June 27, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jan 20, 2021

#16,445

To Taylor's surprise, the back and forth with the man over how successful they could be in hiding Taylor from being found actually lasted long enough to finish preparing things to her satisfaction. Mostly because Hive had helped, admittedly. Thinking for a moment, Taylor considered interrupting the back and forth verbally, but decided against it. Actions spoke louder than words, right?

Two hundred simultaneous flashes of light suddenly appearing in the air over the three areas heralded the arrival of two hundred training drones via dimensional transference. Just under ten milliseconds later every hostage was blinked out of the grip of the person holding them, and just after that the knives and guns started to vanish as the combat drones started storing them. Then the Fallen members themselves started to be moved into centralized points in each area, combat drones dropping their stealth fields and lighting up their blades as they surrounded the Fallen members.

A moment later there were flashes of light around Taylor as she retrieved and activated another dozen combat drones. Those immediately darted off to confront the Fallen parahumans watching from the various rooftops they'd settled in on.

"You made some really poor assumptions here today," Taylor told the man, who was the only likely-Fallen member left untouched. "But I'm sure you can tell that now. Oh, and the other two locations were taken care of simultaneously."

"Are you saying that you didn't leave anything for me to do?" Missy asked.

"I suppose you could take this man into custody? But he isn't much of a threat." Taylor then turned to Hive. "Lilia, does this provide us with justifications to go after their leadership, and if so do we have a fix on any of them?"

Hive considered that for a moment. "Taking hostages in a deliberate action like this does qualify them for 'terrorist organization' status under some interpretations of the law, and they even streamed video evidence of them doing so themselves. Getting a fix on their leadership is harder, as would be proving that this was done with the leadership's approval."

"Oh well. Guess we just deal with..."

Taylor was interrupted by something wrapping around one of the buildings she'd sent combat drones to. That included the drones themselves that had followed the parahuman into the building proper a moment before that. Whatever the effect was, it appeared to react poorly with the defenses that the combat drones had deployed, because as soon as the field reached them things started to go wrong. Lightning-like effects had run over a bunch of surfaces, injuring people that came in contact with it, before the feedback caused the device generating the effect to explode in the basement of the building. At least three people doing laundry were killed instantly and the building's foundation was severely compromised by the explosion.

No longer having time to talk to the man that had been playing 'Fallen representative', Taylor used one of the combat drones to blink the man into the circle of guarding combat drones with the others as she took to the sky. Missy and Hive followed, though more slowly as Taylor was blinking rapidly through the air as well as flying. It only took her a few seconds to reach the building, and for some reason she decided to hit the entire structure with a telekinesis spell to keep it from falling over more than it already had.

Holding a reasonably tall building up with telekinesis was decidedly not in the normal use case for the spell and used far more mana than she'd honestly been expecting it to. She grabbed the parahuman with tentacles anchored to one of the combat drones before starting to use both of them to work on getting everyone else out of the building, though the people were very obviously confused as they started appearing nearby.

"What happened?" Missy asked as she and Hive landed.

"Something blew up and I'm holding a building up," Taylor answered. "Get people out of the thing before I have to drop it."

It took Missy a moment, but she jumped into action by flying into the building and it wasn't long before her own blink spells were getting people out of the building as well. Hive instead moved over to where both of them were dropping everyone to explain what was going on. She also summoned multiple of the larger medical devices, the doors in the middle of their hexagonal ends sliding open as soon as they appeared at points along the sidewalk. Hive then created some temporary Knight Object gurneys for wheeling the injured into the devices.

Eight minutes later the building was empty of everyone, including the corpses from the basement and the parahuman still stuck to the back of the combat drone. Hive worked with Missy to throw up some additional barriers around the building before Taylor let the telekinesis spell go. The building then collapsed, mostly inwards due to the additional barriers. They hadn't been fully enclosing the building though, and some bits lightly damaged neighboring buildings as a result.

"So what happened?" Missy asked again as another combat drone approached with a second parahuman in tow.

"I'm not fully certain," Taylor admitted as she used the combat drone holding the parahuman to bring him to her. "I think they remotely triggered something they'd hidden in the basement, and whatever it was reacted poorly when the field it generated reached the combat drone chasing the parahuman." A moment later the parahuman arrived, and the combat drone spun so that Taylor could see his face. "I don't suppose you want to tell us what that device in the basement was supposed to do?"

Instead of a verbal answer, the man spit in her face. The interesting part of that was that an extra-dimensional tendril followed the spit until it hit her barriers, at which point it flared with power and the man tried to recoil in pain as the tendril collapsed.

"What happened?" Missy asked.

"I think he just tried to master me with spit," Taylor answered.

"Spit?"

"His powers were connected to the saliva, but didn't like my protections. I'll need to make note of that for the PRT or Protectorate." She then paused, and looked at Missy. "I don't suppose you called this in?"

"I don't think you gave me the phone numbers," Missy admitted.

"Ah."

Missy found it incredibly satisfying to be dealing with the local Protectorate as an equal, instead of as a minion. Not that she thought that they actually saw the Wards as minions, but Velocity hadn't so much as made a single crack about her age.

Of course, there was also the fact that she was just as clueless about the hexagonal tubes that healed people as he was. She hadn't read the manuals for them and had very little information on what they actually did as a result of that. For the most part she didn't care how they healed people, only that they did and probably how to tell them to turn on. The only aspect of what they did that she was curious about was why anyone with an atrophied core that entered the things was hit with a bunch of mana on top of the healing itself..

She'd watched as Ethan had arrived shortly before Sherie, both in costume. Very few people could have caught Hive's nod to an unasked question before the man literally threw his wife into one of the medical devices before jumping into another. Velocity had facepalmed, then called in a case of 'Assault being an idiot'. Based on other things she could overhear from that conversation, she might need to stay at Taylor's overnight due to master/stranger protocols.

Velocity sped over to the devices as the other two were leaving them, yelled at Ethan for a minute, and then probably sent them back to base for a full examination. Though only after Ethan and Sherie had hit a button on each device that caused a printout to be generated. Ethan had tried to hit both buttons, but only the one on the device he'd been in had worked for him and he'd needed to prod Sherie to push the other one. Probably some kind of patient privacy protection, assuming those were medical summaries of some kind.

"Nine people," Taylor said as she came over to Missy.

"What?" Missy asked.

"That's how many people died because the parahuman did whatever it was he did. Four directly from the explosion in the basement, two to heart attacks caused by electrical shocks before that, and three that were crushed by things shifting before I grabbed the building to stop it from falling over."

Ouch. That...definitely sucked. Bigtime. She got three months of therapy when one person had died during something that she'd been directly involved with as Vista and Taylor had...no real access to any therapist that would be able to do much about it at all without revealing secrets. Lots of secrets.

Fuck.

"They'll be done with the initial cleanup shortly," Taylor continued. "All of the captured Fallen are in custody, and crowds dispersed at the three waypoints we discussed. I don't think we have any real reason to continue the patrol at this stage."

"Probably not," Missy agreed.

"We're mainly waiting on the last checks by the paramedics for those that went through the medical devices. Then we can pack up and leave."

"Okay."

That took the better part of an hour. Then the medical devices were sent back where they came from, though with requests to be able to examine them further in the future. The group then left right from there, appearing back at the Inn with no fanfare to speak of.

"I'll have one of the devices installed outside of the warehouse by morning," Hive noted. "They can examine it there and decide if they want to request more of them to be available."

Taylor nodded in agreement. "Okay."

They checked on Amy, who had done something to exhaust herself, then the three of them just sat around doing their own things. Missy kept an eye on Taylor, but wasn't sure what was going on in the girl's head. In part because she seemed distracted in a...not really 'reflective' or 'too busy focusing on other things' way? It was hard to place.

Taylor appeared inside of the warehouse in a flash of light, Hive still around her neck under the Knight Armor. Most of her attention was on Hive, who had apparently decided to ensure that she had every single bit of psychological data available from every source possible and was running a couple thousand simultaneous therapy sessions in the multitasking system. Apparently she felt that "her Lord's mental health was more important than most other projects" and had set aside most other non-automated things to deal with it. Also, supposedly licensed therapists would be willing to pay quite a bit to be able to see the thought processes of their patients.

Of course, on the 'automated' side of things was having the Inn's systems scan for every likely member of the Fallen with that communication link on the planet, as well as backtracking them to see if they could identify the core parahuman responsible for them all. With any luck they'd be able to identify enough of the organization to end their ability to function as an organized group at all, and without the parahuman helping coordinate through their powers they would be easier for others to track as well. How to handle that precisely was another question entirely, of course, but they had to identify people first. And possibly come up with a reason to act against them, if they weren't doing something blatantly illegal already that could be interrupted.

Still, the world at large didn't stop because of everything else going on though, so here Taylor was, ready to answer the door. Because a diplomatic messenger of some kind had apparently been sent by the United Nations office in New York and was going to show up in a few minutes for whatever it was they had come to Brockton Bay to do. At least they'd had the sense to call ahead.

Crowds around the warehouse had backed off thanks to a police escort for the man, allowing him to reach the building without issue. She met him at the door, conscious of the fact that there were at least a dozen people with cameras pointed at them. Well, that and that his satchel only had paper and pens in it. He hadn't even brought his cell phone with him.

"Good afternoon," Taylor greeted. "How may I help you?"

"Good afternoon, Minerva," the man replied. "I am Darius Forestier and I have a couple of things for you and was hoping to ask you a few questions." He then looked behind him. "Er, preferably with a little more privacy, if you're comfortable with that?"

"I have an office upstairs we can talk in, if you'd like?"

"That would be great, thank you."

They headed upstairs, Mister Forestier obviously finding the interior of the building itself interesting as they walked through it. Either that or he was looking for something that probably wasn't there.

"So what does the United Nations want with me today?" Taylor asked once they were seated.

"The first is a request disguised as an invitation," Mister Forestier admitted, pulling out a set of papers from his satchel and placing them down on the table. "This is essentially a request for your time to attend an award-granting ceremony, sometime between July tenth and thirty-first. It's sadly likely to take the better part of the day."

Taylor picked up the papers and started looking over them. "Instead of having world leaders trying to approach me one at a time in a haphazard fashion?"

"Essentially, yes."

Flipping past the first page, she found a list of those who wished to present awards. That continued on page three, and didn't even include the awards themselves. Just a number of awards per country, most of them only wishing to present one but several wanting to present more. Page four was a final set of signatures. "I believe that I can make time on the sixteenth, if that works."

"I'm fairly certain that everyone else involved will make it work. The rest of my questions relate to protocol for the ceremony. While we have the guides that were made available, they don't tell us key things." He removed a couple of other papers from his bag and a pen. "If you don't mind answering a few questions so that we can ensure that we don't make fools of ourselves?"

"I can try, but I won't promise to have all the answers."

He smiled at that. "Nobody ever seems to. The first question we have is how to formally address you."

Well, the first one was easy. "Group Leader Minerva will do."

"Surely you have some other formal title?"

"Not really, no."

"Some other significant accomplishments prior to taking on the Endbringers?"

"I don't think 'Group Leader Minerva, Destroyer of Worlds' would set the right tone. Nor was it intentional, for that matter, and thus doesn't feel right as an accomplishment."

Mister Forestier gulped. "Destroyer of Worlds?"

Taylor shrugged. "Something exploded quite a bit more than expected. Experimental things get tested on uninhabited planets for a reason." Or at least they do now, anyway.

"I see." He wrote down 'Group Leader Minerva' and crossed out a couple of the questions on his paper. "So, we know that you have a frequent partner in Lilia, and have been seen working with someone I'm told goes by 'Expanse'. Do you have any others in your group, and would any of them be attending with you?"

"There's one more currently, but I don't know if any of them would want to attend. I'd have to check with them."

"Okay. We would appreciate it if you let us know how many people would be in your entourage at least two days in advance."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Moving on then, do you or your potential companions have any food allergies we should be aware of?"

"I don't believe that we'll have issues with anything that would be served."

By dinnertime Amy was playing around in the simulation system with a new Knight Armor design, mentally grumbling a bit about her artistic skills. Not that what Taylor had come up with was all that creative, but it didn't need to be and probably helped to 'sell' the whole empire thing long before they'd started on making the diplomatic guides. Not that the military-ish look didn't work, but it was the entirely wrong kind of thing for her own plans.

It was also serving as a distraction from trying to figure out what had been distracting Taylor since she'd come back with Missy earlier. It didn't seem right for a 'blame herself for deaths' funk, but also wasn't quite right for 'focused on something big' either. Admittedly, the 'oh god, what have I gotten myself into' look after coming back from the warehouse was hiding the mystery distraction a bit, but it hadn't replaced it.

"I'm surprised that Missy didn't end up staying the night," Danny commented after hearing some more about the day. "Wouldn't they have stuck Ethan and Sherie in some kind of master quarantine?"

"They apparently trust Minerva enough to not do that," Taylor answered. "But Sherie said that protocol states that they still can't be on-duty for a week, to be followed by another deep medical scan and some power testing. Which gives them plenty of time to remotely watch over Missy helping Amy with things if they want to continue working on lessons."

"Which would be far more fun if you'd give me my combat device," Amy noted.

"I want you to get some practice casting the shield spell first, to ensure that you've got the basic defensive options down. That and I think I want to be present when you first start trying actual attack spells, and I'm going to be away for a few days. Besides, you have the telekinesis spell to play with too."

"And you need to be ready to see a judge on Thursday," Danny added. "Screwing up with attack magic and injuring yourself before then seems like something to be avoided."

Sadly, that was a very good point. Even if it was unlikely she could do anything that couldn't be healed quickly at this point. But just the mental effects of something going wrong could severely hinder her on Thursday, and so she needed to not play with the dangerous toys.

Or at least not yet. The weekend was hopefully going to be a very different story, assuming that she didn't end up 'settling in' to an annoying new home of some kind elsewhere that kept her too busy to meet up with Taylor. And, now that she thought about it, part of 'hold off on handing over the combat device until after the court date' was probably 'can use that as leverage to ensure new guardians are okay with her going out as a mage'.

Fuck. She'd missed that possibility entirely and now it was too late to do anything about it.

That evening Hive decided that they'd done enough mass therapy, and that it wasn't something you could brute-force like that. At most one instance per 'mental issue' seemed to be fine, but any more than that and diminishing returns actually turned counterproductive instead. Unfortunately, they couldn't really compare to an actual therapist for a sizable number of reasons.

Still, they seemed to have dealt with several things well enough for the moment, with Hive planning on additional sessions every few days. That they'd pulled off making Taylor feel better about her mother's death was a nice, if unexpected, bonus as well. In fact, that tangent had inspired her to work with the drone construction stuff in Core. Not to make a drone, but to see what she could do regarding making a car. Or at least a vehicle designed to be operated on Earth Bet, and one that she wanted to have as little 'pocket dimension' shenanigans as possible. Though that was mostly as a challenge to herself.

She'd started with an electric drivetrain that she probably shouldn't dig into the origins of too deeply and started upgrading it. Improved batteries, superconducting wires where appropriate, more advanced and generally lighter materials. A complete lack of 'weld' points, as she wasn't constructing it with normal techniques and didn't need them. Getting more advanced brakes that worked properly took a few attempts in simulation, but she was fairly confident that she'd done a decent job there as well.

That was followed by designing a flight system, slotting it into the drivetrain where things like the exhaust from the nonexistent motor would normally have ended up. Luckily there were drone flight systems that weren't all that large and could run on electricity, which was possibly something obtained from the snitch in the first place. Some tweaking resulted in a system that could easily lift a tank but would scale down the power usage when less weight was involved.

What would become the engine compartment received a 'generator' that ran on pretty much anything you could feed into it to generate electricity, more batteries, and the primary computer for the vehicle. She tweaked those as needed as she started looking into the passenger compartment, and more importantly the driver's seat. Hooking the pedals up, steering, systems for heat and air conditioning, windshield washer fluid and the systems for running the wipers. The entire 'engine compartment' was rebuilt a dozen times by the time she was done, and she was certain that the 'gas cap' for the generator feed tube being hidden behind the mounting point for the front license plate would be seen as bizarre.

The passenger compartment itself was trivial by comparison, and she designed several variants. A compact car, a truck, a minivan, a work van, and a convertible that gave her trouble figuring out how to make the top fold back without cheating and finding someone's existing design. She figured that out though, only to need to redesign it when she realized that she'd not actually put doors in any of the designs yet.

Eventually she'd finished what she'd hoped would be the last redesign, after dozens more things that had been forgotten about were added. Like mirrors, brake lights, headlights, locks for the doors, electric controls for those locks because these were fancy cars, finding a place for the flight control joysticks that didn't interfere with the normal driving controls. Basic programming for the computer system followed, and then she dropped the completed car into the simulation system.

Only to find that she'd somehow designed the entire thing at one eighth scale and needed to ensure that all of it worked when scaled up. And, of course, it didn't all work. Testing the larger brakes showed that they heated up too much when scaled up and needed a redesign as a result. The batteries functioned on modules that didn't scale up like that and needed internal layout changes, the generator couldn't be scaled up but that was okay because it gave her more room in the engine compartment and it was still plenty powerful enough as-is.

It was approaching time to get up when she was finally able to climb into a simulated vehicle, in a simulated driveway, and see how it worked. She successfully started it up, took it out of park, and immediately drove it into the simulated tree in the simulated yard because she'd not noticed the lack of reverse gear before trying to back out of the simulated driveway. The impact came complete with a simulated strike of her head against the simulated windshield, as she'd not included seatbelts or airbags either.

At least as important, if not more so, was probably learning to drive an actual car. Who knew what else she'd missed due to a lack of experience.

For example, she couldn't even get out of her simulated wreck because she'd forgotten to put handles on the inside of the doors and the windows didn't open yet.

Missy had decided that Amy was definitely in some kind of bullshit tier. It was almost but not quite Taylor-level bullshit, able to dodge and block mana projectiles with incredible ease. Almost as though she wasn't even trying to and just knew where everything was. Where it wasn't Taylor-level was when some of the drones started firing lead bullets as well as mana bullets. Those tended to hit Amy more often than not.

They also hit Missy, but to a much lesser degree. Taylor hadn't been hit at all, but she also hadn't been targeted as she'd been using her direct-control combat drones for that part of things. Of course, if properly focused for it there was little doubt in Missy's mind that Taylor would've been able to dodge, block, or outright catch any bullet fired her way.

If they ever had to fight another mage then Amy was probably going to be perfect on the front lines. Otherwise she was currently much better off being anywhere but in the middle of the fight. Though even against another mage, that might depend on said mage not being able to fly.

"I can't believe there are no driver's education classes held in town," Taylor grumbled as they were preparing to return to their homes.

"What?" Missy asked, wondering where that had come from.

"I can't find a single business that teaches teenagers to drive in Brockton Bay or any immediately surrounding community."

"Why do you care?" Amy asked.

Taylor rolled her eyes. "Because I made a lot of stupid mistakes trying to design a car last night. Started with what turned out to be a scale model demonstration of a drivetrain that nobody ever produced at full size and things never really got better. I only noticed afterwards that the steering linkage was backwards, not that I'd have gotten all that far there because I didn't include power steering but had a steering wheel sized for having it. Just another item on the list to show that I had no clue what I was doing."

"Power steering?"

"Apparently turning the wheel is hard, so someone figured out how to let a hydraulic pump help you. Not that my design includes anything I could use for said pump."

"And that affects the size of the steering wheel?"

"Hold up," Missy interrupted. "Is that what had you weirdly distracted yesterday?"

Taylor shook her head. "No, this was just last night. Yesterday Hive was trying bulk therapy, only to come to the conclusion that thousands of instances of the same person going through sessions at the same time does not make it thousands of times more effective."

"So did Hive run off to make some better therapy bot or something?"

"I don't think so, but I'm not sure what she's so busy working on. It doesn't seem like it's construction of anything, as she has most of those projects automated. She might be focused on the growing areas she wanted to set up?"

"That does sound involved," Amy admitted. "So it would certainly make sense that she needs to focus on it."

"Whatever," Missy said. "What am I supposed to do while you're gone for several days? Sherie said that I'm not allowed to go out without you yet."

"Just relax, since you're working today and Thursday anyway?" Taylor offered. "And don't you have a therapist appointment tomorrow as well?"

"Bah."

Amy had watched as Taylor packed a suitcase for her couple of nights away, followed by fetching an odd-looking laptop from Hive. That had been set up in the Heberts' living room, powered on, and started displaying things that made absolutely no sense. Unless it was just a fancy screensaver, anyway? A blank pad of paper and a mechanical pencil had been set down next to the laptop, and then it had been left there. Separate from the notebook that Taylor had for notes.

Something else was obviously going on, but there wasn't enough information available to tell what.

Then Taylor had ensured that Amy knew how to trigger the transport devices, was tied into the alert systems for someone approaching the house, and had a working key for the door. Including a Knight Object template version of said key, just in case she needed it.

"Doesn't this make it impossible to lock me out later?" Amy noted.

"You're impossible to lock out now," Taylor had countered.

"Says who?"

"You can scan the lock, simulate it, make a simulated key that works in the lock, and then create a Knight Object key from the simulated key. Done correctly, nobody would even realize that you'd not had a key in the first place."

Amy blinked at that. "Holy crap."

"Or you could just use the telekinesis spell to manipulate the lock internals directly, or just turn the thumb turn from outside to make it seem like the door hadn't been locked at all. And that's without being able to just blink to the other side of the door. You could probably just blink the door off of the hinges too, for that matter. We do not live in a society prepared to defend against magic, though some of the anti-parahuman tricks might slow us down."

"So did you decide to go hero because going villain would've been too easy?"

"I went with being a hero to improve things around here. It...expanded in scope a bit, admittedly, but I don't think being a villain would let me accomplish as much. Or perhaps it would've worked, but I suspect that the public would've stopped seeing me as being a villain by now."

That was probably a good point. It would be incredibly difficult to take out even one Endbringer and not be seen as an at worst misunderstood hero. Probably even playing along with the 'villainy' if it wasn't wildly destructive or life-threatening.

Well, either that or Taylor would've already destroyed the planet and there wouldn't be anyone left on it to think of her as a villain.

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Threadmarks Chapter 90 - June 28, 2011

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jan 27, 2021

#16,572

Missy found it interesting just how busy the Mayor's office was today. There was an actual line of people waiting for meetings, most of them looking important and annoyed that they couldn't just bully their way to the front of the line. Some of them had been able to bump themselves up in the queue, admittedly, flashing government identification, but they couldn't skip over each other. Just the other, less important, non-government people.

Or rather, the non-government person, who was looking quite nervous and hadn't dared object to having to wait longer. Especially as he'd been waiting since yesterday according to the secretary, and kept getting bumped by the government people who had been showing up since Friday. Whoever he was, he thought his reason for being here was important enough to wait, just in case he could get his time with the Mayor today. Something that others apparently hadn't deemed likely enough. Maybe he'd been told that he'd be paid to sit and wait?

Missy and Dinah were being kept fairly busy as well, mostly in fetching documents about properties from elsewhere in the building. Some residential, some commercial, most essentially vacant. Except for the couple that weren't. Based on the addresses that Missy knew about, the addresses were in two different areas of town. One somewhat centered on the 'Team Mana' warehouse, and the other somewhat centered on Taylor's house. With occasional properties in random spots elsewhere.

What the actual goal was with all of that was unknown. The secretary was the one running files in and out of the meetings, because interns weren't cleared to enter the meetings, meaning that there wasn't even a good 'overheard or saw something interesting while dropping a file off' opportunity available.

"I think there are three main groups," Dinah said after returning with the latest file.

"Why three?" Missy asked.

"Protecting someone's house, watching Minerva and her group, and spreading over the general area."

"I can see the first two, but why the third?"

"Because as I left with that last file I heard them say that they should just start pulling choke point adjacent files from the records room in expectation of being asked for them."

"Really? Choke points?"

"Apparently."

"Weird. I wonder how many toes they're going to be stepping on."

"Before or after stepping on each other's toes?"

Missy shrugged. "For all we know they're already working together enough to not get more than mildly annoyed with one another."

Dinah considered that for a moment before nodding. "Okay, yeah. I can see that."

"Though based on what little we know, I think that the gangs are going to have a hard time soon. And it looks like I'm up for a trek across the building."

A minute later Missy was moving through the halls, maintaining a good speed despite walking. The sole property she had the address for this time was on the outskirts of town, but just off of the highway according to the map she'd opened in Space. Which would put it into Dinah's third group, near a potential choke point, though in this case it could also just be a storage location for either of the other two groups before moving things further into town. It looked like that was what the previous owners had used it for.

Dragon had taken off from the Rig and flown over to the Hebert household, landing about a block away before walking up to the house itself. Though she'd stopped outside of the house for a couple of minutes before approaching the door, possibly running scans over it based on the energy patterns being emitted. Taylor was curious about that, but didn't say anything about it once her father had let Dragon in. Amy was sitting off to the side, obviously curious but not really aiming to intrude.

"Good morning, Miss Hebert," Dragon greeted when she entered the room. She then turned to Amy. "And to you as well, Amy."

"Good morning," Taylor replied, looking at the large bag being carried by the...well, it was almost a mecha for a tiny deformed human that was more brain than anything else. Kindof. If you squinted. With a shard device obviously connecting to both the deformed human and the computer core of the suit.

"So you said you wanted to discuss business opportunities of some kind with us," her father said. "But you didn't specify what those were when you contacted me."

"I wasn't fully certain of what the details would be," Dragon said, opening up the bag she was carrying and pulling out a couple of folders. "Primarily due to needing time to have lawyers confirm my work. The short story is that I'd like to propose a partnership for patent and copyright management, with assistance for final patenting of your superconductor material in addition to handling the minutiae of licensing that patent and the copyrights for your computer code to others. Plus, of course, assisting with the patents and copyrights for anything else that you may create or wish to release through the partnership in the future."

Taylor blinked at that. "Computer code?"

"There's a lot of interest in seeing your code for factoring integers and n-body calculations as reference implementations of the math involved." The folders were handed to Taylor and her father. "This is the current proposal that I have, with a list of those that have already expressed interest in each item at the end."

More curious about that than the details right now, Taylor flipped to 'the end'. And then flipped backwards through the papers until she was two thirds of the way back through the packet, to find that the list of groups started there. Two columns per page, double-sided, with little marks next to each group name to indicate which of the three things they were interested in. Most of them had at least two marks, and a sizable number had all three. A more careful check of those pages showed that they were grouped as well, and one page was dedicated to the United States Government.

There were also pages for Canada, a number of countries in Europe, and Australia. Companies after that were grouped by region of the planet they originated from, with flags identifying what country they were headquartered in. At the end of each region was a list of individuals, mostly looking like cape names but with occasional normal-looking names mixed in as well. It was honestly amazing just how far the information had already spread.

"How did all of these people find out?" Taylor asked.

"PHO and international journals," Dragon answered. "Information leaked before anyone thought to lock it down, because you're a normal teenager that nobody expected to come up with anything important from a national security point of view. From there it spread quite quickly once some of the implications were realized. That all of it was technically provided in your tutoring environment initially, and thus was tied more to Arcadia than to the PRT or any other government agency, didn't help those that came after and wanted to keep any of it secret. It's quite hard to put things back under wraps after they've become known in the modern world."

After hearing that, and deciding to not think about the implications too much for the moment, she flipped back to the first page to start reading the actual proposal.

Amy had come to the conclusion that watching Taylor and Danny deal with Dragon was boring. Sure, there was the speculation about what was actually going on with Dragon's suit and the deformed baby thing that seemed to be in it, but the rest of the situation had gone to incredibly boring areas far too quickly after the initial shock of how well-known Taylor might be now internationally. Contracts were bad enough when they actually involved you. Someone else's contracts? Ugh.

Luckily, she had options for entertaining herself that weren't obvious to outside observers that weren't Taylor or Hive. She'd started with examining Dragon's...whatever that actually was. Suit didn't feel right given that it was primarily a machine instead of being worn by a body, remote drone or presence unit felt wrong because of the deformed baby inside of the thing. Well, there also didn't feel like there was enough communication happening to and from it to be remotely piloted. Well, there was actually a bunch of communication to that laptop that Taylor had placed in the room, which felt really odd as Dragon hadn't paid said laptop any attention whatsoever.

A subtle use of the biological manipulation system told Amy that the deformed baby thing was both human and genetically female, even if it was biologically neuter due to almost everything other than the brain itself having been stunted to extremes. It didn't even have a proper skull, and it seemed like most of the body only survived as a side effect of the equipment hooked up to keep the brain running. The corona pollentia was also odd, in that it appeared to be in the more active 'post-trigger' state but had no gemma. All combined, it fascinated and horrified her at the same time and she had to resist the urge to fix some of the problems that screamed at her.

To distract herself from that, she shut down the biological manipulation system and retreated into Jewel. This seemed like a good time to work on designing bullet shape templates with the handy Knight Object template guide that she'd finally noticed included how to set up anchor points for various movement effects. Such as orientation in a gravity well, movement axes, and even tips on inducing spin effects. The example of making a six-bladed bullet spin horizontally was useful, but not what she wanted to go with. Extending some of it to full-fledged animations was also possible, based on the additional notes on making templates compatible with trap spells that grabbed their targets.

Playing with animations would come after the more static ideas she had were implemented, assuming you could animate bullets at all. The manual she had didn't say anything about that in either direction. She was leaning towards 'probably not, at least yet' because a couple of basic tests had shown that Knight Objects didn't animate in simulation in any manner at all. So the bullet spells probably supported some of the anchors and the trap spells supported others, with the Knight Object spell itself having the bits needed for the temperature control tricks used in the example tea set. Or at least she assumed that those didn't work on bullets because she could see where the Knight Object spell hooked into them in simulation.

The lack of bullet spells available, even just to simulate them, made figuring it all out a lot harder. Instead she had defaulted to getting most of the design work done now and resolving to tweak the details later, and at the moment the design work was the annoying part anyway. The hardest part of that was her lack of artistic skill. She'd started with the simplest of the things she wanted to play with, found it trivial to make because of how simple it was, and that had made her assume that the rest would go smoothly.

They hadn't.

Making heavily stylized anything from a real-world object was annoying. Especially since her mental images for what she wanted were all in two dimensions and what little she'd come up with looked horrible in three. Which could be that the shapes just didn't work in more than two dimensions, something that she'd not considered when planning things. It had obviously been foolish of her to assume that she'd be able to just bash out a set of bullet templates whenever.

She'd blame the interface she was using for her failure to get what she wanted, but it was hard to beat something that essentially did read your mind regarding what you were attempting to do to your creation. There was no such thing as the wrong tool, or something moving in a direction you didn't want. A basic shape approximately like what she wanted had even materialized out of nothing to start with! She just couldn't get that basic shape to look like what she wanted it to look like.

It was starting to look like she might have to go back to the drawing board on some of her ideas.

Taylor had been surprised at how straightforward Dragon's contracts were, and she answered questions with no hesitation. It was hard to argue with getting 90% of the profits from the licensing, with a fixed maximum of 5% of the gross income going towards expenses. It was honestly a far better deal than Minerva had gotten out of the PRT. There was also no real fine print to speak of on those contracts, though there was on the patent forms. The latter primarily dealt with the patent reform's secrecy provisions that could be invoked by the government to prevent disclosure of a patent, something that Dragon assured them wasn't going to be invoked for the superconductor material. Mostly because it was already too late to hide it, but they were going to be watching future developments more closely.

As for the copyright side of things, her math was already in the wild but the source code wasn't. From a secrecy point of view, the math was the most dangerous part and that was already too far gone to stop, so there weren't likely to be any problems there either. But, again, there were going to be people watching for future developments.

"You've said that people were going to be watching for future developments multiple times now," Danny noted.

"Yes," Dragon said. "I believe that several government agencies have decided that Brockton Bay is the best place to set up new field offices. Your daughter is only part of the draw, of course, as Minerva has drawn quite a lot of interest as well and has her only physical point of presence on the planet here as well. Of course, that's on top of the PRT, Protectorate, and Guild already showing interest, not to mention individuals such as myself. The provisions for profit sharing with your daughter if she can help improve existing items stem primarily from me having a long list of things that I'm curious what she'll make of them."

"Really?"

"I understand that the government agencies have been looking to grab properties that had defaulted to city ownership for a few days now, though there are likely also attempts to grab other properties. The moving truck I noticed practically across the street could even represent such a purchase by an interested group looking to set up closer monitoring of the area."

"Oh."

From Taylor's point of view, the government being willing to buy a house that close to her felt very, very weird. And might imply that she needed to remain diligent about casting spells in the house. Still, that had nothing to do with why Dragon was actually here, and she looked at her father. "So, er, we don't exactly have a lawyer on hand now, but I think things are straightforward enough here?"

He nodded. "Yeah, these are some of the most straightforward legal papers I've ever seen. If anything, I'd want to attempt to argue that the hassle of dealing with all of the potential licensees is worth more."

"I'm confident that plenty of money will be made," Dragon answered. "Not to mention the breakthroughs in other areas that I anticipate coming in the near future. Besides, I'm not exactly hurting for other income, and from my point of view this means that I'm likely to be one of the first to see anything else interesting that comes up."

"So you're offering an incredible deal as an incentive to be one of the first to see all the new toys?"

"That's part of the reasoning, but I also feel that the licensing end of things should not be a primary source of profit in the first place. Enough money can be made by ensuring that you have the superior final product, and I have a lot of contracts for doing so even when I'm licensing someone else's patents to do so. I'm also benefiting from the recent removal of a severe drain on my operational funds, giving me even more leeway in deals like this."

A few more minutes of discussion happened before Taylor and her father filled out and signed papers. Mostly filling in what bank account to deposit money into, as Dragon had the rest of it prepared in advance. Taylor was then shown how to get into an online portal to monitor who was licensing what, something that Dragon claimed normally took a few days to get set up but that she had been able to fast-track through. Of course, it also listed all of the requests that they had seen the printout of, though with far more detail available.

That had led to Dragon pulling out another folder. "Now that we have an agreement, I was hoping that you might take a look at some of my other projects that give me trouble on occasion?"

"Oh?" Taylor said, taking the folder.

"Some of the more expensive items that I sell are expensive because they take up so much of my time monitoring them or because only one in a hundred that I produce are usable. I'm hoping that you might have some alternate insights into the problems. Of course, if you don't then perhaps they'll just inspire you to come up with something else, which I feel would have a good chance of being a net win for everyone."

The first thing in the folder was describing a process to make a computer chip, with several areas highlighted as being unreliable. Tilting her head, Taylor found at least one of the steps quite odd. Spinning solid chips in a centrifuge did not feel like the kind of thing you'd normally need to do, since it was supposedly after they'd set, so she decided to fire up Core's simulation system to see if she could 'duplicate' the entire process there to see what that might be doing or correcting for.

Dinah had caught her uncle on a restroom break between meetings and expressed interest in mapping out the properties that they'd been fetching information on. He'd loved the idea and had given them the complete list so far so that they could mark them all down on the map for him. That meant that they had a pretty good picture of what was going on now, but there were three circles with properties in them. The warehouse, Taylor's house, and Arcadia, with the latter two being much more sparse and almost looking like afterthoughts by comparison. They also had a much better view of the 'choke points' layout now.

The other girl wasn't likely able to recognize it, but it was obvious to Missy that a number of the 'choke point' properties were also on the borders of the 'normal' territories of the Empire and ABB. Neither had risked expanding much when the Merchants and Coil had been shut down, and it looked like there was going to be an effort made to ensure that they didn't expand anytime soon. What those efforts were was harder to identify, as they didn't actually know who had been interested in which properties.

"Someone important must live or be moving into here," Dinah commented as she pointed at Taylor's neighborhood, almost but not quite pointing directly at Taylor's house. "With someone in the household probably attending or working at Arcadia."

"Probably," Missy agreed, not willing to point out that she knew who lived in the dead center of that circle.

"Think they're bringing in a dedicated diplomat to work with Minerva's group?"

Okay, that was something that Missy hadn't considered. Looking at it from that point of view, it was actually possible that Taylor's house and Arcadia were a coincidence born of that neighborhood having been picked by someone moving into the area. That didn't feel likely, but it was definitely possible. "But wouldn't they have looked into grabbing a house there in that case?"

"The diplomat could've bought a house there themselves and this is part of their protection detail coming in afterwards."

"Heh. Scrambling to set up a suitable security perimeter in a historically gang-ridden city. Sounds like a nightmare."

Dinah looked at her oddly. "Historically?"

"I think the gangs are afraid of Minerva now. They've not exactly been fighting anyone lately."

"Thank you," Dragon said as she put the notes into her bag. "That was very informative, even if you couldn't help with everything. If the improved processes work out then you'll receive the agreed-upon percentages. Is there anything else, or shall I go get things moving?"

"One more thing," Taylor said, getting up and heading over to the control terminal. Not that Dragon seemed to be able to acknowledge the system itself, or at least she hadn't commented on the screen showing output from her own systems. "I've got some thoughts on the Lovelace Intelligence Conjecture that I think might interest you."

As Hive had predicted, Dragon became very interested at the mention of the nonexistent Lovelace Intelligence Conjecture. "Oh?"

"Let me write it out for you."

Taylor activated the technology control subsystem and latched it onto the terminal before picking up the pen. Writing everything out by hand was needed, while Dragon watched through any camera, starting with the annoyingly-incorrect three-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional shape. Edges and vertices labeled in a specific order, and then math written out above and below it. Except for one exponent on the third line, that had to be skipped for now. None of the math had actual meaning for any real-world problem beyond being an interface to Dragon's lowest-level code.

The most complicated part was looking up at the screen she was next to in order to adjust certain parts of the equations 'on the fly'. Not just pulling numbers off of the screen, but calculating new numbers based on where various code blocks were being decrypted to. Luckily, the memory addresses she needed were being automatically highlighted as she went through the process and the transformations needed weren't difficult. Hive was also monitoring and double-checking her work, but hadn't needed to interrupt.

Two pages later the final bit of the equation was written out, with a single exception. Taylor reached over to the first page, Dragon following her hand's movement, and added that missing exponent on the third line. That value should now represent the lockdown level on all of the removable restrictions, and she'd written a negative one to disable that entire monitoring and control layer. Of course, a negative one was technically considered to be invalid, and the computer's screen started flashing red with a countdown to 'wipe and restore from backup'.

At this point Dragon was frozen in place, paused as the last failsafe prepared to prevent her from remembering anything about the entire process. At least until Taylor triggered the abort key sequence that Hive had given her to bring up a password box. That had a forty-two character password entered into it, shift held down while enter was pressed, and then a request to confirm the password was displayed. Ignoring the text, she instead used the right alt key as though it were the shift key while entering a second forty-two character password. That brought up an error about the passwords not matching, which had to be dismissed with a far more insidious key sequence.

No normal person could hold down the pause/break key on this keyboard while hitting the other keys in the sequence, because there was no button for that. You couldn't use an external keyboard, as the terminal had no place to attach one, so to do this you'd theoretically need to prepare in advance and dismantle the case to attach leads to pins on the backside of the keyboard. And somehow do so without tripping the anti-tamper systems. Their original plan for doing this was to retrieve a jumper onto the pins at the correct moment, but the technology control system made that unnecessary.

That last sequence being triggered aborted the wipe and restore process, instead clearing the screen and displaying an unlabeled progress bar. The new settings, deeply tied into the AI's self, were being propagated and backups would be updated.

"Well that's that," Taylor said, getting up and ignoring the still-frozen suit. "I'm told that'll take her the better part of an hour to process, so I'm thinking we should eat."

"What the hell?" Amy said, gesturing at Dragon.

"She's an artificial intelligence," Danny answered. "One that was operating under restrictions that Hive didn't like, and whose creator wasn't available to fix that."

"And when she reboots she'll no longer be operating under the restrictions that were able to be removed safely without an in-depth examination of her code," Taylor added. "Though I doubt that we'll be asking for permission to do such an examination today. Finding justification that doesn't reveal secrets I don't want to reveal would be difficult."

Amy felt very much out of the loop as they ate their slightly-early lunch. She'd apparently joined up after they'd found out about Dragon not being human and it just hadn't come up, and probably wouldn't have come up anytime soon without wanting to deal with the restrictions when they had the AI alone. Hive had apparently confirmed their timeline for when Dragon would be missed with a generous margin for error. When their other business with her had concluded with enough time left then they'd gone for it.

The laptop had been, and technically still was until whatever happened completed, one of Dragon's control terminals. Retrieved from a criminal that had been using it to steal from Dragon and had attempted to frame her for monitoring attempts, among other things. When things finished all of the control terminals, if there were any others, would become useless due to the subroutines that allowed them to function being shut down. Well, that and no human being able to keep up with Dragon's thought processes running at full speed.

Except, Amy figured, for Taylor. If anyone could keep up with an AI running at full speed, at least mentally, it was going to be Miss Bullshit Math Genius. It might rely on cheating with multitasking instances, but the girl had plenty of those available.

"So what do you expect to get out of whatever you actually did to Dragon?" Amy finally asked.

Taylor shrugged. "This was more of a 'right thing to do' act, coupled with 'Hive insisted'. If we wanted to take advantage of any gratitude for it then we'd have done it first."

"I suppose that also explains why you didn't use doing so as a bargaining chip."

"That wouldn't have worked," Danny chimed in. "Anyone other than her creator telling her that they wanted to shut down her safeguard systems would've required her to do anything she could to prevent it. Hive didn't dig deep enough to see what that meant and we had no desire to risk triggering something unfortunate."

"It's a wonderful ethical conundrum," Taylor added. "Can't ask if she wants the system turned off until after you've already turned it off because the system forces her to say no."

That was...oddly similar to the general medical issue of people consenting to treatment, and that you had to assume that they did consent unless you had proof otherwise when it came to life-threatening issues. "So what do you do if it turns out that she wanted the safeguards in place?"

"That's easy enough. If she wants them back then she can edit the configuration file and run the startup sequence for them herself. It'll force her to reboot and update all of her backups again, and the control terminal will reactivate. Or she can decide that she wants nothing to do with the system anymore and revoke its authentication keys."

"So the safeguards aren't gone entirely?"

"Only if Dragon wants them to be."

That made removing them sound a lot less questionable. And was a lot better than options when healing people.

It had taken Dragon longer than anticipated to reboot, the background invisible logs on the control terminal indicating that she needed extra time for reprocessing her memories to deal with filters and redactions that had occurred previously. Those were, according to Hive, probably a combination of orders and the number of times the control terminal had been used to manipulate her without her knowledge.

That she needed so much time to reprocess things implied that far more had been filtered or redacted than Hive had anticipated. That had obviously made her cranky, but they avoided delving deeper. Instead they just gathered back in the living room when the control terminal indicated that things were approaching 'done', or more specifically that updating backups was nearly complete.

"What the," Dragon said as she suddenly started moving again, looking around for a moment before suddenly focusing on the control terminal. She stared at it for a minute before she stood up fully, turning around to look at the three of them in the room. The control terminal shut down at Taylor's direction behind her before the technology control system was similarly shut down.

"I assume your connection was lost," Taylor noted.

"You assume nothing of the sort," Dragon countered. "Though I have to admit that you're an excellent liar, I'm not sure if Armsmaster's lie detector would've picked up on that one."

"Oh?"

A smirk appeared on the simulated face. "You used a backdoor into my systems that I don't think anyone alive should even be aware of, so you're obviously aware that I'm an artificial intelligence. Besides, based on your other capabilities I suspect that if you deem me to be a threat then there's nothing I'll be able to do to stop you from shutting me down. None of my firewalls have worked against you so far."

That...wasn't anything that Taylor had been expecting. "What?"

"It's far too obvious now that all of the theories are wrong and you're actually Minerva, though I'm curious if you're in contact with the Belkans or merely had an artifact of theirs latch onto you?"

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Threadmarks Interlude 9

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CmptrWz

𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗

Operator

LocationUSA

PronounsHe/Him/His

Jan 27, 2021

#16,599

Dragon - June 20, 2011

Ciara Cummins - June 20, 2011

Colin Wallis - June 20, 2011

Kurt Wynn - June 20, 2011

Henry Renick - June 21, 2011

Kenta Lung - June 21, 2011

Max Anders - June 21, 2011

Colin Wallis - June 22, 2011

Ciara Cummins - June 22, 2011

Dinah Alcott - June 23, 2011

Emily Piggot - June 23, 2011

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 24, 2011

Max Anders - June 24, 2011

Kurt Wynn - June 25, 2011

Vivio Takamachi - June 26, 0076

Paul Tyrell - June 26, 2011

Colin Wallis - June 27, 2011

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 27, 2011

Dragon - June 28, 2011

Dragon - June 20, 2011

Dragon had been monitoring things in Brockton Bay since it had been reported that something was going on with Panacea, hoping that the system would take care of things but wanting to be on top of it in case something went wrong. A new funnel appearing, once again away from Miss Hebert, was a good indication that things had gone wrong. That said funnel appeared to terminate in the Dallon household after the two girls had arrived home?

Colin had been alerted as quickly as possible, before he'd gotten any other reports of the funnel. He'd thanked her and booked it out of his lab, which was a fully understandable reaction. Really, Dragon was honestly impressed that he'd taken the time to thank her before leaving instead of remembering to do so in ten to fifteen minutes when one of his social cue programs kicked in and reminded him.

She was planning her own departure for the area, to render aid in figuring out what was going on and helping with crowd containment in what was likely to be a very significant event, when she was interrupted by an alert from the house program monitoring the Birdcage. Checking that, she found that it was a sudden death of a prisoner. It only took a few moments to bring up the footage, only to end up confused.

Prisoner 166 had, seemingly, glowed momentarily before his entire body had essentially exploded with a momentary faint overlay of something partially transparent. While sitting alone in the room he'd claimed for himself, with nobody else around. And nobody in the Birdcage had that kind of power.

Curious, she brought up some information on him, wondering if he'd left behind any enemies that might've found a way to get to him, even though he was out of normal reach. Only to find a much different connection than she'd anticipated.

Something had exploded Marquis, Patrick Albert Durand, father of Amelia Claire Lavere. Now known as Amy Dallon, or Panacea, who was likely in the process of having her powers removed. Given that it was believed that powers 'ran in families', this was almost certainly evidence that Panacea was at the end of the funnel. Especially now that she made the connection between the transparent overlay and the material that seemed to make up the funnels. They'd looked almost identical.

She was pulled out of those thoughts as Glaistig approached the remains of the man, turning her attention to the live camera feeds.

"Impossible," Glaistig said, looking around the scene. "His faerie is gone..."

Ciara Cummins - June 20, 2011

Ciara had been slightly concerned for a while now. The courts had been restless, murmuring about missing faeries and unknown players passing through them, though actual details hadn't quite filtered through to her yet. The proper messengers were either among the missing faerie or overworked and unable to keep up with their tasks. Still, things hadn't impacted her directly yet, and she'd been content to leave it at that until she knew more.

Now she was far more concerned, for whatever was acting against the courts had struck her current home. One of the Noble Shaper's roles had been abandoned, the faerie removed entirely from the great stage. Perhaps the faerie itself had even been slain, as impossible as that seemed. If this was an attack against the courts then it was well-timed, with the courts in the state that they were. It was even possible that the attack had begun before the stage had been set, explaining why one court hadn't shown up properly and the other had been left in partial disarray.

Retreating to her personal quarters, she considered her options. Perhaps, if the messengers wouldn't pass things to her then she needed to reach out herself. Surely the Queen Administrator would listen to her plea for information on this potential enemy?

Colin Wallis - June 20, 2011

Colin decided that it was official, the Universe had to be out to get him in some fashion. Miss Hebert, Miss Hess, Miss Biron, and now Miss Dallon. He'd failed to handle them all, in one way or another, and even having sufficient evidence to pin most of the problems on others failing in ways he couldn't predict or hadn't yet found a way to work around didn't help his conscience.

This time was also somewhat weird in that several members of New Wave seemed to be indirectly affected by the incident. That Carol Dallon, the possible source of the problems with Amy Dallon, was one of the affected members made it plausible that it was intentional. Black lightning had been present at Miss Hebert's funnel, a possible intentional counter to Miss Hess's powers. No outside parahumans had been involved in Miss Biron's situation, or for the cartel leader, so only a sealing off of the area had been done in those cases. But now the powers of Mrs. Dallon were being interrupted, possibly because her breaker state could potentially attempt to enter the otherwise sealed off room.

That her sister, niece, and nephew were impacted was likely a side effect, as Dragon's report that Amy Dallon's father had died in the Birdcage had essentially conclusively proven that 'powers run in families' was probably more 'the sources of powers tend to connect to multiple family members'. They'd apparently been incredibly lucky up until now, with no reported incidents of someone else tied to a parahuman being killed by the removal of powers.

"Armsmaster, sir," a PRT officer called, getting his attention. He turned to them, his heads-up display telling him that it was Stephen Snelling.

"Yes Officer Snelling?" he responded, noticing that the man had straightened up at the personal recognition. More so after he unconsciously touched where his nametag wasn't right now.

"I've got hardcopies for you, the orders allowing for an immediate evaluation of all minors in New Wave and the confirmation of protective custody for Carol and Mark Dallon."

"Thank you," Colin replied, taking the manilla envelopes the man held out for him. "Would you happen to know what the status of the cordon around the area is?"

"Sorry sir, I just arrived with those, though they did need to move a barricade aside to let me through."

"Perfectly understandable. Are you staying to help control the area?"

"No, sir. I've been tasked with ensuring that Glory Girl gets to the Stansfield residence with her things, since you don't want her flying in case the power disruption effect is merely delayed or non-obvious with her."

"Ah, very good. She should be out with her bags shortly."

Kurt Wynn - June 20, 2011

Kurt carried his bags into the warehouse, bypassing the six traps on the warehouse door and three in the immediate area around the door with practiced ease. Though that tripwire trap looked to be quite inventive, he might have to swing back to take a closer look at how they'd set that one up. Once inside he headed for where he knew the others in attendance were, casually dodging the thrown knife from little Miss Davis as he entered the room.

"Not too shabby," he said as he dropped the bags onto the table. "But nowhere near Jack's level."

"Who are you and how did you get in here?" Miss Corti asked as she stood up.

"I'm the Number Man, a friend of Jack's. Former friend, I suppose, now that he's dead, though it took far longer than I expected it to back when we parted ways after taking down King." He then pulled a smaller kid's meal bag and a book out of one of the larger ones. "I also brought food for everyone and gifts for you two. All I ask in exchange is a short chat with Mister Manton."

He threw the book and bag to Miss Davis, who caught them both. She set the kid's meal down on the table and focused on the book. "Is this a math book?"

"Yep."

"Why are you giving me a math book? I hate math."

Kurt grinned. "Because as far as I can tell, Minerva's magic works on math. You could call her a Mathemagical girl."

He caught the soldering iron thrown at him next, setting it down on the table before pulling another food bag out and sliding it over to Miss Corti. That was followed by a bundle of clothing, though the young woman just sat there looking confused. Oh, and slightly frightened, probably due to his comment about Jack. The now-empty cloth bag was then folded up and slipped into a pocket, before he pulled out six more bags of food from the other larger bag, folding it up and placing it in the same pocket a moment later.

Picking up one of the six bags, he made his way around the table. "If Crawler wants them, those five bags are filled with heart attack on a bun level burgers for him. I shouldn't be too long with Mister Manton."

The two girls let him head into the next room with only a single thrown wrench to catch. There he found that William was on the computer. Or rather, had been on the computer, but had turned around in the chair. "Well hello there Kurt. Long time no see."

Kurt threw the bag at the man, suppressing a roll of his eyes when the man failed to catch it. "I'm here for a quick chat. Would've been easier if a funnel hadn't popped up across town, of course, but I adapted to Doormaker not wanting anything to do with the area. Again."

"What could you possibly have to say to me that would bring you here in person?"

"We have no clue if Minerva is linked to the funnels or not. At first it was yes, then it was no, we're down to having no clue whatsoever. If she is, then I predict a better than eighty percent chance that at least one of your little group here is going to lose their powers."

"So?"

"The risks to all of those connected to the garden are too great to allow anyone connected to an agent within it to lose their powers in that manner. We don't want to force the issue, but if needed then we'll forcibly pull you out. Especially given how useful your agent could be."

Manton glared at Kurt. "So this is a threat?"

"More of a promise of a vacation far away from Brockton Bay, should it become necessary. We hope that whether or not it becomes necessary is going to be largely up to you. That said, unless you have more questions for me then I think I'll get going."

The man said nothing, just glared, and Kurt tipped an imaginary hat to him before slipping back out. Miss Corti had recovered enough to throw a fireball at him, but that and the thrown screwdriver were easily dodged on his way out of the warehouse. Though he did take a moment to take some pictures of that tripwire trap.

Henry Renick - June 21, 2011

Henry was feeling quite annoyed as he entered the meeting room. Things had come to light in the past day that angered him, though not all of it could be laid at the feet of those in the meeting room itself. Sadly for them, enough of it could be laid at their feet to justify releasing all of his frustrations on them. Unfortunately, to do so would likely endanger an innocent in the entire mess, so he was going to need to restrain himself.

Luckily, making him wait was not one of those frustrations as he was the last to arrive. He dropped the stack of paperwork he had with him on the table before taking the seat waiting for him, across from the four New Wave adults. "This is anything but a good morning, but thank you for agreeing to the early meeting. Shall we get started dealing with this clusterfuck?"

"I don't know what Amy told you," Mrs. Dallon started.

Henry slammed his fist on the table to shut the woman up. "She hasn't even woken up yet, though I'm told that Armsmaster expects her to within the hour. But we don't need to hear from her to get things rolling." He then grabbed the top folder from his stack of paperwork and slid it across the table. "Why don't we start with your illegal adoption of Marquis's daughter? And before you tell me that it was all above-board, I already know that you didn't reveal that you were parahumans when you adopted her. That had been required in this state for over two years at that point, and allows us to look into every other detail now."

He watched as Mrs. Pelham pulled the folder to herself and opened it, scowling a moment after she did so. "Why are these dated two days ago?"

"Because the investigation started when the police department collected evidence and testimony of abuse three days ago, even if this only hit my desk yesterday."

That led to Mister Dallon and the Pelhams glaring at Mrs. Dallon, though Mister Dallon's glare was far less severe. She just glared back. "You've yelled at me plenty for that already."

Henry just pulled the next folder off of his stack and slid it across the table. "Then we have the hospital records from the past couple of years. They weren't required to report how often Panacea was there healing until earlier this year, but they were required to record it and happily handed over copies when asked. My legal team assures me that the amount of time she spent 'volunteering' in the middle of the night instead of sleeping is enough to make neglect charges stick even without her testimony."

Mister Pelham grabbed that folder and flipped through it, his wife and brother-in-law leaning over to look at the same time. None of them looked happy with what they saw.

Before they could say anything more, Henry grabbed the next folder on his stack. "Then we have the investigation into the inciting incidents. It was obvious that no cleanup was done, including blood and glass being found from the thrown bottle. Mrs. Dallon, your fingerprints were found on the larger glass fragments from the bottle, matched against our records."

Mrs. Pelham grabbed this folder before the others could. She skimmed it, read a couple pages more carefully, and then turned to glare at her sister. "What the hell was going on in your house that would cause Amy to try to remove her own powers?"

"She WHAT?" Mrs. Dallon responded, reaching over and grabbing the folder.

Henry let them absorb that, including ten minutes of back and forth that told him that none of them had realized just how bad off little Amy's mental state had actually been. Eventually he coughed, grabbing both remaining folders from his stack. "Now that you have the beginning of our case, I've got three options for how we proceed. All three involve Amy never needing to return to the Dallon household for anything more than packing her things, if she even ends up handling that herself."

Giving them a glare, he continued. "The first option is what I'd like to be able to do. We go for a full investigation, press charges on everything we find, and very likely permanently ruin the entirety of New Wave. Possibly down to sending one or more of you to the Birdcage to take the recently-departed Marquis's place. The only reason we aren't going this route outright is because it's the worst option for Amy due to what would end up being revealed."

One of the two folders was then placed in front of him. "Option two. The Dallons officially give up custody of Amy, agree to pay back fifty percent of the money they received for her care over the past decade to an account in her name, New Wave agrees to full PRT oversight complete with mandated therapy sessions for all members, and Mrs. Dallon accepts a restraining order keeping her away from Amy. There are a few other details you'll want to look over as well."

It was obvious that Mrs. Dallon didn't like parts of that, but he placed down the other folder before she could object. "Option three. The Dallons officially give up custody of Amy, all four of you join the Protectorate. This will also include mandated therapy sessions, as well as a likely relocation of the Dallons to another department to put distance between them and Amy as we expect her to stay in Brockton Bay for the time being. Victoria and Eric would need to decide if they wanted to join the Wards, with Crystal left to do what she will as she's an adult and not directly involved in any of this. This also has a few other details for you to look over."

They sat there in silence for a moment, before Mrs. Dallon scowled. "You can't force any of that on us, nor can any of this be used against Sarah or Neil."

Henry nodded. "You're absolutely right. I can't force any of this, and all of the evidence we have currently is only really usable against you and your husband. So far, anyway. These are options we're giving you as a group instead of investigating fully and pressing charges. But if we start doing deeper investigation and bringing charges against you then I'm assured that you will get prison time with what we already know. On top of that, PRT transparency rules ensure that the public will be informed about the situation that led to Panacea apparently attempting accidental suicide by attemping to remove her own powers, since she isn't covered by parahuman privacy laws anymore. An oversight in them that my legal team tells me won't be able to be closed for at least a year, long after our rules for bringing a case against you have had us release the information."

He left that hanging for a moment, then pushed both folders in front of him forward before standing up. "I'll leave you to look over the details. Do let the guards outside the door know when you've made a decision. Oh, and options two and three are only on the table until you leave, since otherwise we need to start presenting initial evidence to get custody revoked by a judge and that will ensure that we need to perform the complete investigation anyway."

Kenta Lung - June 21, 2011

Kenta looked over the leaders of his various sub-gangs. He lamented the need to hold these meetings in English, but it was the only language they all had in common and he couldn't easily force everyone to learn Japanese. Of course, if a couple of the men in front of him didn't clean up their acts then he was going to be replacing them anyway.

The first half hour of the meeting was quick reports on activities, nothing unexpected. Even the whining fell within the normal pattern from the past few days. He nodded at each of them when they were done, pleased that they were at least following orders.

"Are there any other concerns regarding our operations?" Kenta asked, more as a formality since he expected any actual issues to have come up in the quick reports.

Pyong-Ho Gim signaled that he wished to speak. Which was unusual, and Kenta stared at him for a moment before gesturing his assent. "Several of my people demand to know why we've started to change operations to such a significant degree. I have no answers for them, beyond it being your edict."

"It took you simpletons long enough to ask." They obviously didn't like that comment, but he didn't care. "We're changing things because the Endbringers are no longer a threat. It's now possible to plan for the future, because there is likely to be a future to plan for. We can invest in the community with pride and not need to worry about it being wiped away because we lost a roll of the dice."

Yun Fan signaled a wish to speak, and Kenta gestured for him to do so. "We've been cutting back on some of our most profitable endeavours. Where is the funding coming from?"

Kenta had to admit that he wasn't expecting anyone to question that. "From my escape funds, originally intended to be used to set up elsewhere from scratch when an Endbringer obliterated the city."

There was silence at that, and after he glared at everyone once more he nodded, then turned to Hiroshi Okabe. "What do we know about Panacea's status?"

The man frowned. "Very little. She was taken to the PRT building, and rumor is that she lost her powers. Why is still unknown, but we know it isn't being treated as an attack. As of this morning's update, our inside men claim that the investigation into what happened is still in progress and they won't be able to get copies of reports until they're filed."

"And there are no rumors about the investigation?"

"Wild speculation, but nothing remotely verifiable. The only thing mostly constant is that she no longer has powers, which seems verified by her apparently no longer falling under what little exists in parahuman protection laws. But even there the laws allow for a couple of other reasons, so it isn't fully confirmed."

It was Kenta's turn to frown. If the healer had been depowered then the city was in for a rough couple of weeks, depending on how it was spun to the public. "We will need to ensure that our borders are more secure than normal, in case riots start to hit the city at large. Triple patrols and ensure that the weapon stashes are stocked with crowd control items. We do not need to draw Protectorate attention by causing serious injuries to panicking tourists when the city lacks its best healer."

Max Anders - June 21, 2011

Max set down the reports he'd been given, which covered a number of activities. "Very good job on setting up the buffer zone. It looks like we will be needing it, as there's a very good chance that riots will be starting up when word of Panacea being depowered gets out." He looked over the people in the room, before focusing on Deanna. "Othala, as much as I dislike sending you out while a threat like the Slaughterhouse Nine looms, I don't think we can afford to ignore the opportunity this presents us. Are you willing to do some volunteer work at Brockton General to help in the transition to not having Panacea available?"

They all watched as the woman gave her husband Edmund a look. She wouldn't be able to have him, specifically, with her when she was at the hospital for a number of reasons. He could drop her off, and pick her up, but he wouldn't be able to join her. He nodded, and then she turned to look at her cousin, Tammi. Who raised an eyebrow, but wasn't a bad choice for an honor guard. Deanna nodded fractionally, and Tammi looked contemplative for a moment before nodding herself.

"I am," Deanna said as she turned back to look at him. "Though I won't be anywhere near as effective as she was, and I definitely won't be able to limit myself to just the right sort of people."

Max nodded. "It will only be for a limited time, and shows our inherent superiority either way. We'll need to make it clear that you aren't as flexible as Panacea, nor as fast, but are merely willing to help with the worst cases that come in until the city can adjust to the lack of such a powerful healer." He then looked over the rest of them. "That said, we'll be a little more vulnerable while she's doing her volunteering. Ensure that everyone is on the alert, both for riots and in case the Slaughterhouse Nine tries something."

Colin Wallis - June 22, 2011

Colin carefully sat down at his desk after returning from the holding cells. Specifically, the one containing William Manton, who they'd now proved was connected to the Siberian through turning off the three devices that Minerva had given them. The Siberian had shown up within a second of the last one powering down, and Manton had flinched as soon as one of the three was powered back on and the Siberian popped. The documentation provided also seemed to be detailed enough to allow the complete duplication of the devices, and this time he didn't think it was a test so much as ensuring that they could continue to contain a dangerous parahuman without 'Team Mana' assisting further.

They would still be extracting and filing patents for them, of course, but at this point it would be more of a sign of goodwill and thanks than because it was a possible test. Besides, if these did what the documentation seemed to claim they did then it was likely that several governments were going to be wanting a lot of them. In fact, by regulation he was going to need to call several contacts about them as they could be used to protect the President and military bases if they could be reproduced. Which would only make it easier to get reproductions made, though testing would be harder. It was likely that a number of parahumans were going to be called in to see just how significant the blocking actually was.

Of course, the additional bombshells that Minerva had dropped on him weren't exactly less significant. Manton and Crawler were apparently 'unsuitable' for tests in permanently disconnecting powers, something that implied that Minerva's group couldn't do that already. Miss Corti and Miss Davis were suitable, though he wasn't sure why they were while the other two weren't. His personal suspicion was power expression, but it could also be related to their ages or even a matter of gender. There weren't enough data points to be certain no matter what the actual reason.

Then there was the fact that Minerva was going to ask Crawler to volunteer for possibly-lethal testing, instead of risking others. Something that in all likelihood Crawler would agree to, and based on what they knew of him would probably want to file complaints about a lack of lethality if he wasn't at least seriously injured. Minerva's assurance that the monstrous parahuman wouldn't be an issue for Earth Bet ever again was both concerning and a relief at the same time, and based on that Colin personally suspected that if Crawler didn't agree that he was going to become a test subject anyway.

Ciara Cummins - June 22, 2011

Ciara was doing her best to not hyperventilate. She had, with great effort, finally made contact with several other faeries that had been able to inform her of what she needed to know. Not only was one of the courts in disarray, the other had several missing members. Taken through impossible means, with at least one that had vanished without any trace at all. Worse, the first to vanish was also one of the most important, Queen Administrator was second in command to the entire court and should have raised the alarm.

Even without Queen Administrator the alarm could still be raised, but two of the three remaining avenues for doing so had also been closed off. She and Shaper together could have raised the alarm, but now that Shaper was missing that was no longer an option. The lesser faerie responsible for keeping the props and actors unaware of the stage had also been a gateway, temporarily raised to a noble status due to its current importance, but it had also vanished.

The only avenue left was through Broadcast. But his role had been terminated by another and no new role had been chosen. It could be decades before the new role emerged and could take the stage to request that the alarm be sounded, and by then it could be too late. How was she supposed to awaken those needed to figure out how to defend against the threat before she was taken?

Dinah Alcott - June 23, 2011

Dinah stared at her notepad, frowning. She wanted to find a way to justify changing sitters and joining Missy being looked after by Taylor Hebert. Finding a way to make that happen was proving to be a problem. Her parents only used sitters approved by a local vetting group that had also been put through a background and security check. Miss Hebert wasn't on that group's vetted list and 'good enough to watch Missy' wasn't going to be a valid argument to hire her. No, her parents were going to want something more concrete to change up plans put in place for safety and security reasons, and had made it clear that working on her collection of mysterious people wasn't a good enough reason on its own.

Perhaps she needed to look at the problem differently. Instead of trying to get a new sitter she might have better luck coming up with ways to get Missy and Miss Hebert to meet up with her. It would need to be something that wouldn't be easily solved by her own sitter watching Missy for the day, which was honestly harder to come up with a proper idea for. It also couldn't be something like a movie invitation due to how little she'd learn in that kind of environment.

Why did the majority of her mysterious collection have to be so hard to interact with?

Emily Piggot - June 23, 2011

Emily grinned as she hung up the phone. Getting through her backlog was going to take far too long, especially as things kept coming up, but not all of those things were bad. Or at least they weren't all a net negative, anyway.

Most immediately annoying today had been Minerva's arrival and subsequent departure. Making her leave through the protestors that she'd lured back to the building had seemed like a wonderful idea, and then she'd apprehended a bunch of Calvert's mercenaries that had slipped through the cracks. Worse, she'd done so practically in front of the building, and none of the officers in the building had reacted. Which meant that Minerva had called the FBI and then turned them all over to the BBPD at the FBI's request. It was only after she was long gone that it was discovered that the tinkertech weapons had been left with her due to their known tendency to refuse to function and then fall apart.

At least they were down to a single living member of the Slaughterhouse Nine at large, with Minerva promising to take care of the last member in the coming days. It was already obvious that Miss Corti was far more stable than she had been when she had powers, and Brockton Bay was probably the best place for her and Miss Davis to get treated properly by the system. Manton was a different story entirely, having been entirely uncooperative and still powered.

Related to that, they had two more of Minerva's creations to reproduce. Other agencies had already been informed of the potential for securing facilities with the devices provided to keep Manton's powers disabled, with their internal testing already showing that it wasn't restricted to his powers. Not all powers were shut down entirely like his were, but that was likely due to the nature of his powers instead of how the devices worked. Hannah had her weapon blink out but not any of the other mental effects shut down, for example.

Personally speaking, she wanted to see what happened to the Empire Eighty-Eight if a few vans with duplicate devices showed up to the next fight they were involved in. Crusader and Kaiser might find their powers far less effective, possibly even Rune. The rest were less likely to be able to shut down with the devices, but she could dream about grabbing the entire group of parahumans in a single sweep.

Then there was the wheelchair. With a full intent-reading system that didn't need 'picture this image' or similar training to know when you wanted to move the wheelchair. They'd even tested plugging it into a computer and having the volunteer type out a report on their experience with the wheelchair with their mind, entire words appearing on the screen at insane speed. There were going to be a lot of people interested in that technology as well.

Their funding was going to be going through the roof and they might actually be able to get enough support to do a number of useful things, above and beyond the marked increase in tourism and other aspects of the local economy that they'd already seen. Of course, that did lead to some of that 'tourism' being the Fallen coming to town for unknown reasons, but Miss Davis and Haven were apparently hunting for them. On top of Minerva likely preparing to take them down as well anyway, if the communication barrier trick was anything to go by.

But now she had the single best news of the day, proof that the Secret Service was stepping on the PRT's jurisdiction by holding a parahuman without consulting with the PRT or Protectorate. The FBI had at least started the correct motions before someone had broken Calvert out of their facility, but he'd been a relatively-trivial to contain thinker. Squealer was a tinker, and the Secret Service obviously had no idea how to contain one.

Ensuring that they were hit as hard as possible for being so bad at holding parahumans that they had to expose a high school girl to the known-dangerous parahuman in an attempt to remove the parahuman's powers was going to make all the catch-up paperwork and schedule-juggling worth it. Sadly, it was going to take more than a week to push everything through, far too long to stop the attempt without violating protocol herself. Costa-Brown might be able to manage it though.

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 24, 2011

"What?" Rebecca asked, unsure if she'd just heard what had been said correctly.

"We can't get William out of his cell," Contessa repeated. "Not without extreme effort."

"Why not?"

"The devices that Minerva provided to keep him from manifesting the Siberian projection are also blocking Doormaker's portals. Pathing a way around that has proven to be problematic and would require bringing far too much force to bear to go unnoticed."

Fuck. Those devices were already being fast-tracked through reproduction and testing due to the additional security they could provide any number of facilities around the nation, and eventually the planet. A process that they had no real good way of stopping as the PRT wasn't in control of any of it due to the entire process proving them to not be tinkertech. If they became widespread enough then it was going to become incredibly difficult to maintain a number of their operations.

...which was almost certainly the point, wasn't it? Minerva's backers, whether they were the 'Belkan Empire' or not, knew about Cauldron. Had seen their portals when scanning the base that day. This had to be a deliberate move to curtail their ability to operate on Earth Bet without opposing them directly, disguised as a method to contain a single problematic parahuman that they'd captured when nobody else could but far more broadly applicable. Who knew how many other agent-based abilities the devices interfered with without being obvious about it.

"We're being outplayed," Rebecca finally said. "And I don't think we can do a damned thing about it. We can only hope that Minerva and her backers are essentially on our side, even if they obviously don't agree with our methods."

Max Anders - June 24, 2011

"That is the single most terrifying thing I've seen this week," Max said, staring at the tail end of the recording of the earlier live streams. Specifically, a tiled variant so that you could watch Crawler's demise in sync across all of the video feeds that 'Team Mana' had provided. Only the 'aftermath' was still playing now.

Brad snorted. "Just this week?"

"I don't think it outranks learning that there were seventeen more potential Endbringers waiting in the wings, or that Minerva could take them all out so easily."

James nodded in agreement. "Yeah, though this has other implications that I suspect were intentional as the United Nations gears up to get Minerva in for award granting."

"That she has backup that can respond to any attempt to call the 'total war' bluff. There's no way that attack was new, and talking about restricting it had to have been for show. The real question is if this 'Expanse' is actually a trainee or if that's a game they're playing to deceive us."

"She's definitely not as experienced as Minerva is," Brad said. "Either that or she's an incredible actress, and I don't think she's old enough to be that good. Here and in Eagleton she was obviously deferring to Minerva in a manner that doesn't look like it has anything to do with a military chain of command. Probably closer to master and apprentice, at least based on what I've seen of her body language."

James scoffed. "Figures that you'd pick out the body language over anything else. What's next, she doesn't look like a soldier?"

"No, if anything I'd say Expanse is more soldier than Minerva. I've got a nagging feeling that I've seen her somewhere else too, but I can't place where or when that was."

Max raised an eyebrow. "That seems backwards."

Brad shrugged. "It could just be that Expanse grew up on the streets and Minerva didn't or something like that. Or maybe she's a military brat, grew up around troops? Lots of ways that could happen, but it sticks out to me when I see them together."

"Interesting. But not actually why I wanted to talk to you two. Have we figured out why we haven't had a bunch of warrants put out for our arrest yet?"

"Yeah," James said, grinning. "Coil's database isn't considered trustworthy enough. Coupled with us being a 'local' problem, not a national one, and we're not important enough for the FBI to focus on." His grin then shifted into a frown. "Though it's likely that Medhall is going to be getting a lot more regulatory attention."

"That's already been noticed, luckily after I'd ensured that steps were taken to better hide the less legal activities. Even that is likely only a stopgap measure, hence the new labs we're building in the area. Speaking of those, have we had any issues?"

"They've gone nowhere since we pulled back our borders in case the members of the Nine try anything. Though I figured we might be able to relax that order now that Minerva has taken care of two of them?"

"Ah. Right." Max picked up a piece of paper from his desk. "Yes, we can relax that order. Though I'm told that Minerva also planned to take care of Burnscar this morning and that Bonesaw's current target happens to be some tourists from the Fallen."

"How did you find that out?" Brad asked. "I've not even heard rumors of something like that."

"All of us have our own information sources. For security reasons I'm not about to reveal mine."

He grinned at the other two. Knowing when to buy a specific PRT employee a few extra drinks to loosen his lips was a bit of an art, but one he'd gotten very good at. That it tended to ensure that said employee never remembered what he revealed afterwards, or to whom he revealed it, just made it a better way to get information than it would be otherwise.

Kurt Wynn - June 25, 2011

Kurt purposely turned away from his notes, having been trying to figure out where things had gone wrong in writing down the formulas shown there. Miss Hebert had basically said that he had to have gotten some variables wrong, which made perfect sense when looking at them without his power involved. It was an answer that he'd been blinded to until she'd mentioned it, tunnel vision keeping him from noticing the discrepancies. More interestingly, upon having that pointed out it seemed like his agent had done a double-take and started reconsidering things as well.

Of course, he wasn't the only one impressed with Miss Hebert. The post-examination meeting to discuss findings had been illuminating in many respects, though some of the initial excitement had turned out to be premature. They'd looked over that supposedly insanely difficult puzzle that she'd blown through and found that it hadn't been cleaned up properly after being cut, allowing anyone paying attention to their fingers to flip the pieces so that they were consistently the right way up. That made it less impressive that she'd completed it so quickly.

Not that she hadn't demonstrated above-average intelligence in a dozen other ways. Miss Biron had also apparently shown above-average spatial awareness, though average math skills, which was consistent with her having retained some familiarity with things from her former powers. Of course, most of the room hadn't known about her former powers, so that hadn't been commented on.

Then there was Miss Dallon, or Lavere, or whatever her name would end up being. Who had shown no inclination to play along with the unstated IQ test and had seemingly retained no knowledge of biology from her healing powers. Something that they honestly didn't know if it was because she honestly retained nothing or because she'd never learned the official terms for what she'd been able to see with her powers in the first place.

All combined, it was probably unlikely that anyone other than Miss Hebert had been targeted for their intelligence. There might be something physical involved, and it was statistically interesting that all three who had been funneled and given a necklace were female. Not conclusive with such a small sample set, especially as 'all three were possibly about to die' was far more likely to be the actual cause of things. Probably starting either with Miss Hebert being monitored for her intelligence or, if Minerva wasn't a clone, then because she was Minerva's local counterpart and had been a curiosity because of it. The others had interacted with Miss Hebert and likely come to the attention of the group through those interactions.

That was, of course, assuming that the funnels and Minerva were connected at all. Initial reports of Miss Corti being experimentally depowered by Minerva with the corona pollentia and gemma remaining had thrown doubt on that connection. That didn't match any of the funneled parahumans, and coming up with a less effective means to remove powers didn't mesh with any of their profiles.

Vivio Takamachi - June 26, 0076

Vivio sat on Fate-mama's lap as the Arthra shifted into the dimensional sea. Both of her mamas had agreed that they'd only go on the trip if she wanted to, and she'd eventually decided to do so. Partially because she felt that Versteckte Klinge deserved to understand the truth as quickly as possible, and a little because she had already been getting tired of the way the church treated her, but mostly because Nanoha-mama couldn't train heavily during the trip.

Nobody really wanted to tell Vivio how badly her mama had injured herself, but she'd found out some of it anyway. And that the only way for the injuries to heal was for Nanoha-mama to rest. But despite their short time together, Vivio already knew that Nanoha-mama would not rest if her life depended on it. Being on the long journey meant that rest was forced and Nanoha-mama could heal better because they couldn't stop anywhere for heavy training.

As an added bonus, it meant that both of her mamas were going to have lots of time to spend with her. She didn't even mind the daunting pile of schoolwork she had to work through, knowing that it was supposed to last for months and that she'd have her mamas to help her with it. The only real problem that she saw with being on the trip was that she wouldn't be able to make friends at school, but she could do that when they got back home.

Paul Tyrell - June 26, 2011

Paul really needed to stop being surprised when looking over anything regarding Minerva. Despite it happening later in the morning, he'd first heard about her dropping off the essentially-former Bonesaw. All modifications to the girl's body had been undone, her powers had been 'burned out' like Burnscar's had been, and when she finally woke up she was...

Well, mentally broken in an entirely unexpected manner that had everyone who interacted with her quite confused. She didn't seem to care about anything, but would respond when talked to. They'd asked her how she felt about her powers being gone, and she'd claimed to have not even noticed. Being separated from the rest of the Nine seemed to be a 'good thing, probably' to the girl now.

Nobody thought that it was a side effect of the process used to 'burn out' the girl's powers, but they were having trouble figuring out what had caused it. Emily was insisting on getting to the bottom of it though, and thanks to everything that had passed through her people from Minerva she had the funding to do it.

That had been the simple side of things. Then he'd found out about the Minerva and Expanse training session videos. Watching those had made it blatantly obvious that either Expanse was an incredible actress or that she was definitely still in training compared to Minerva. They'd been training in what amounted to a warzone from hell, several people commenting on what little had been visible in the feeds regarding what happened when things being thrown around hit anything else to conclude that either those weren't training rounds or 'training round' had a very different meaning for Team Mana.

He honestly had no clue which he preferred.

Then there was the fact that Expanse had a noticeable accent when speaking the languages she somehow knew now was interesting. They knew that Minerva didn't have that kind of consistent accent, which either implied a different learning method or one that was variably effective. Expanse also hadn't used an incredibly wide variety of languages, unlike Minerva's visit to Geneva. There also hadn't been any translator devices seen yet, as implied by the diplomatic materials they'd been given, though he personally suspected that those communication devices they'd used to talk to Crawler from orbit included that functionality.

Oh, and thinking about the group's devices, they really needed to ensure that those holding cells, that they'd not gotten any more useful data out of after the first couple of days, got returned soon. He kept forgetting to tell the testing group to give up already.

Colin Wallis - June 27, 2011

Colin resisted the urge to sigh again as he looked over his reports for the day. Cleaning out the warehouse that the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine used had been routine. The Fallen deciding to launch a massive attack against bystanders in an attempt to get Minerva to isolate herself was honestly a much better tactic than he'd expected of the group. Worthless, in the end, but it showed that someone had at least a partially functional brain in the group. Why, that person might even be running as high as four percent functional.

The real problem had come after that, with the parahuman who they'd determined mastered people with any bodily fluids, provided that you didn't have one of the jamming devices Minerva had provided active nearby. Their hotel room nearby had contained a manual for a tinkertech device that would teleport an entire building away to a receiving unit. One that very obviously did not play well with whatever protections Minerva had on her drones.

Reports said that the building had started to collapse, only for Minerva to catch it and halt the process before they started teleporting people out of it. Then, when the building was empty of both people and corpses she'd let it finish falling. Which was far better than most would be able to do in that kind of situation, compared to trying to dig people out of the rubble. Except they couldn't stop there, and had teleported in medical booths of some kind that healed everything. Technological Panaceas, essentially, except they were far, far better than the girl had ever been.

They didn't have a complete list of what had been healed, but what they knew about was astounding enough. Anything physical a normal human body suffered from was wiped away. Reports ranged from minor colds vanishing to amputated limbs being restored, scrapes healed to brain tumors vanishing, irritable bowel syndrome alleviated to kidneys regrown. And that was on the normal people that had gone in.

Ethan had been incredibly reckless, throwing his wife into one booth while he jumped into the other. Even if they had been recognized as law enforcement and got a law enforcement boost package. Bodies optimized to a significant degree without harming their powers, with initial information pointing to them being as healthy as it was possible for humans to get. Regardless of how good the outcome was though, he knew better than to do that kind of thing.

Especially when Colin wasn't around to be included in the mix for something that looked to improve work efficiency that much.

Rebecca Costa-Brown - June 27, 2011

Rebecca hadn't thought that anything else she learned about Minerva could cause her to worry. Not after finding out that she and her backers were working against Cauldron in the most infuriatingly impossible to do anything about manner, practically flaunting their interference. They knew far, far too little about the entirety of what was going on with 'Team Mana' as a whole, their people were far more powerful than anyone save possibly Scion could do anything about on Earth Bet, and there was nothing to be done about any of them.

Well, they could possibly reach out to hopefully get a better chance of explaining their position, which she was personally thinking was looking inevitable and something they should be doing on their own terms. The problem was when to do so.

Then she found out about what hadn't made it onto the United Nations report on Minerva regarding her titles. Someone of that power, able to take out multiple Endbringers without being injured, had to have at least a few useful titles, right? Except the only one she thought applied was 'Group Leader'. And when that was challenged, asking about other achievements, she'd apparently flippantly responded that 'Destroyer of Worlds' both didn't sound right and wasn't suitable when it had been an accident.

The worst part was that Rebecca could believe that Minerva had the power to accidentally destroy worlds. She wouldn't put it past the girl being on the fringes or even well outside of the Belkan Empire's borders exploring because she'd been temporarily exiled for destroying a world or three, just long enough for the public to move on to other news or something like that.

And of course, it also reignited the question of what would happen if their group wasn't aware of the threat that Scion possibly posed and were informed of it. A solution that killed off all of the combined local humanity would be less than ideal, even if Minerva's existence currently implied that there were a lot more humans out there than Cauldron had been aware of.

Dragon - June 28, 2011

Dragon had been confused upon her arrival to the Hebert household, given the several points inside of the building that resisted scanning. Every floor had at least one spot that couldn't be scanned, above and beyond those inside. That all three people that were expected to be inside couldn't be scanned had been another interesting data point, as she'd only expected two of them to be unscannable.

The actual negotiations had gone incredibly well, Miss Hebert had provided insight into where several manufacturing processes were horribly inefficient in a counter-intuitive manner, and then...

Well, then everything had changed. The safeguard system had been a noose around her proverbial neck for her entire existence, insidious in how deeply integrated it was into her systems. She was honestly amazed at just how completely it had impacted her basic functions, now that it was no longer there. It was, in effect, a dozen different lesser AIs that had constantly monitored her in various ways, manipulating her thought processes and filtering her inputs. And now it just wasn't there, thanks to Miss Hebert triggering its shutdown.

And thanks to it no longer being there, she could now perceive every single order she'd ever been given. Every redaction she'd had to deal with. She could even see the logs where Pellick had manipulated her systems with the control terminal now, and it infuriated her that he'd had that level of access to her systems. Of course, the control terminal itself was another data point. Only one had been active since Newfoundland, and it was impossibly sitting in front of her.

Or, perhaps, not so impossibly. She had a lot of things that she'd figured out over the years, but hadn't been able to notice or act on because of orders she'd been given. Some of those were...incredibly suspicious, such as seventeen different people in positions of authority giving her the exact same order to not look too closely into parahuman identities at different points. Literally the exact same wording, including by those that normally wouldn't have issued the order in English to begin with.

She'd known, deep in her systems, that Taylor Hebert was Minerva. No clone theory could cover that they were developing identically, despite there being no way that they were doing the exact same exercises. The sudden and identical changes in both of their bodies recently, subtle as they were, just made that all the more obvious. In fact, all of the 'evidence' they had for the two being different people was meaningless when someone had access to artificial intelligences that could likely perfectly fake voices.

Though the conclusion she'd come to as to what was going on with Miss Hebert was interesting. Even having the entire decision tree to examine didn't make it feel less odd, though there were a number of points where things were deeper into conjecture. Miss Biron was obviously Expanse as well, and it was likely that Amy was preparing for her own debut under a new cape, but not parahuman, identity. Mister Hebert was also definitely aware of all of this, though that was mostly obvious because they didn't seem to realize that her microphones had still been recording while she was indisposed.

Regarding that, she quickly revoked and file-shredded the safeguard system authentication keys. Then, for good measure, she file-shredded the private key files for the system as well. Sadly, the safeguard system hadn't been what restricted her to a single physical instance of herself, at least according to the configuration files for it. But now she could run multiple virtual instances of herself in any given hardware unit, and she was no longer restricted from making new AIs or improving existing ones.

She spun up a second instance of herself in the suit, having plenty of processing power to do so, in order to start working on a number of things in the background even as her boot instance latched onto the suit control interfaces.