"Hmm…"

Taylor very carefully inspected the two Parahumans she had in storage beneath, comparing both of their linkages to their respective powers. Victor's conduit was clearly much stronger than Coil's now was, and in fact like Lisa's, was distinctly different from it in other ways. She was certain this indicated that the E88 cape's power stemmed from the same network as Lisa's did, the one the administrator came from. Coil's was the odd one out in several ways.

Which did make sense, of course, based on what they'd found out so far. His power was some sort of cobbled-together mess of broken parts, while the other two she'd so far examined were correctly functional. Now that she knew that for a fact and also knew what to look for it was quite obvious, although it was still a very subtle difference if you didn't have prior experience.

Delving steadily deeper, she pushed her special senses to the limit, ignoring the way Victor's entire being flowered into a near-infinite web of interactions between forces and subatomic particles for now in favor of concentrating on the link to the alien construct in his brain to the exclusion of everything else. Mentally squinting, she narrowed in on the fundamental connection of the conduit imprint, trying to extract every last iota of information about it. Coil's was so damaged that a lot of the really interesting stuff was either missing or, for want of a better term, 'corrupted', but this was a nice fresh conduit. One she had no compunction about destructively testing if it came to that, either.

An unrepentant murderous Nazi was not really someone she was feeling all that charitable towards, after all. Very few people outside the E88 would, certainly in this city. Far too many lives had been destroyed by this man and those like him for anyone to really care about his fate.

On the other hand, her own ethical sense made her reluctant to actually hurt the bastard even if he richly deserved pretty much anything done to him. She was certain that a lot of people wouldn't hesitate, but she couldn't quite bring herself to that point. After all he'd not actually been doing anything at the time they'd… acquired… him, even though he was clearly intending to do something, so it wasn't like she had the same excuse her dad did with Oni Lee. And frankly the man was no threat to them at all. As long as he was stored away, he was totally harmless, and while that could well change if she let him go, she wasn't planning on doing that without taking precautions.

Any interrogations of Victor would wait until she could be certain his power wasn't a threat.

Hence the deep dive into what made powers actually work. They had a lot of information already, but it was, while extremely interesting, not enough. There was much more to learn, and she was going to learn it. Regardless of what the top level node might have wanted…

Lying on her bed in the dark, she smiled a little grimly to herself, but kept working. And she could feel the ghostly presence of the administrator watching intently, giving a sensation of intrigued fascination and what was close to eagerness. Which was odd, yes, but she was becoming used to it. While getting a much better concept of what Lisa felt.

'OK,' she thought to herself, peering at something probably no one else had ever seen before. 'That's the final endpoint of this side of the conduit.' To her beneath-sense, the imprint of the probably dimensionally-transcendent linkage leading from Victor's brain to somewhere entirely elsewhere almost glowed in colors that didn't really exist in any normal manner. She'd managed to work out how to mentally highlight just that aspect of what she was looking at, in essence boosting the contrast of the phenomenon while allowing everything else to fade into the background. It had taken a while and a lot of experimentation with Coil's conduit, but apparently having managed the trick in that case, when presented with a fully working Parahuman power, the technique turned out to be a lot easier with much more dramatic results.

Like training yourself to hear the faintest of sounds then going into a noisy room, only completely different, she thought with an inward giggle.

Regardless, she could now easily see what she was looking for. The human-end of the conduit spread out into a mass of tiny fractal tendrils, as best she could describe it to herself, anchored in the Gemma and Pollentia like the roots of a plant on an infinitesimal scale. But it also spread almost imperceptible threads throughout the entire brain, apparently forming what looked almost like an entirely separate neural system overlaid onto the brain tissue. From reading up on how a brain worked, she got the impression that the end result was probably to allow the power-granting alien device to connect to the mind of the host human on a level that was likely essentially full-blown telepathy, despite current theories on how such a thing was technically impossible.

She wondered for a moment if the alien supercomputers were capable of actually copying an entire human consciousness and actually 'running' it like a program. After some consideration, Taylor breathed, "Oh my god. That's how the Butcher works!" under her breath. It was a stunning realization but it fitted what she was looking at and her own ideas and observations about Parahuman powers all too well. And explained a lot of things about that particular villain that she'd been wondering about since she started looking into this whole area of research.

The sensation of approval from the administrator made her momentarily smile. "I'm right. Great. And thank you for the confirmation." She was becoming rather fond of her invisible apparent-companion, in a very strange way. Making a mental note to document her conclusions later, she kept on studying the conduit with extreme care.

After some considerable time, not that she was really keeping track at the moment, she decided that she'd optimized her viewing ability to trace the conduit imprint beneath about as much as she was going to right now. She'd managed to make it very clearly visible and could see several potential places that might be amenable to modification, although she didn't know what that modification would actually do. Not yet. Which was after all the entire point of experimentation. 'Reaching out' with her Anton-skills she very carefully tried poking one little thread of the conduit, watching the result with interest. Even though it was frozen in no-time, she could… feel… a tiny change. 'Ah. Fascinating. I wonder if…' She tried prodding another in a slightly different way and got a slightly different change. 'Very interesting indeed… I think I'm right, and this would work. But I don't know what it would do to him. Well, we'll find out soon enough. All right, then, let's look the other way.'

Pulling back a little from her close examination of Victor's brain, she let the fine details mostly fade, leaving only the main imprint of the conduit leading off in a direction that was orthogonal to reality. In a way that she simply couldn't put into actual words the girl peered along that vector, letting her senses flow through beneath as if she was sliding under the carpet of normal life, along the smooth floor underlying everything that comprised four dimensional spacetime. Under that floor, so very thin and fragile when you actually found out how to look at it, lay possible infinity, deep and unknown, with strange things lurking just out of sight, in a manner reminiscent of the abyss of a dark alien ocean.

Taylor had read Lovecraft. She had an inkling that the man in his disturbed mental state may have noticed just a little more of the true nature of things than almost everyone else did…

Or perhaps he was just nuts.

Either way, it was an interesting coincidence, and she was mildly intrigued by the way she found the whole thing too fascinating to really be terrifying. She suspected that her mind might not work in quite the way most people would find normal…

A sense of amusement drifted past her, making her grin a little in the darkness.

Leaving such musings aside for now, she kept following the memory of a trail across the skin of reality, until she pushed through something that couldn't be described in human language, piercing a barrier that wasn't and finding herself looking at something entirely different to what she'd seen with Coil.

'Holy crap…' Taylor stared in amazement at what apparently lay at the far end of a Parahuman power conduit. It wasn't what she'd been expecting, but it was incredible even so.

'How big is that thing?' she wondered with incredulity. Apparently when a power was deployed it was rather larger than the undeployed state. And Anne had indeed been correct in her suggestion that afternoon. The power computers were dimensionally folded into something much much smaller than what she was looking at now.

To her beneath senses, it wasn't like looking at a physical object with her eyes. The alien creature/device/thing was a weirdly beautiful fractal crystalline construction that obviously wasn't strictly fixed in three dimensions. It was more like a vast misshapen tesseract-like creation, or possibly a klein bottle blown from some esoteric not quite real material by a drunken god. Overall, it was incredibly hard to describe even in her own mind, and she wondered if it looked as strange to normal vision as it did to what she was using at the moment…

Almost certainly, if not stranger, she thought, studying the phenomenon with fascination. Just looking at it was giving her all sorts of intriguing ideas which she was going to have to write down and think about later.

One thing she noticed immediately is that her initial impressions of the dead powers she'd discovered from studying Coil's conduit as being vaguely reminiscent of one of Papa's crystals, although considerably simpler, was reinforced by this thing. There was a distinct similarity in overall effect although the actual construction was quite different. She thought about it for a while and concluded somewhat tentatively that what she was looking at seemed more organic, and not as precise as a proper gnurr-resonator crystal, or the bigger ones she'd managed to produce after her initial run. Those were basically perfect, a multidimensional matrix far larger internally than they should have been, all the oddly vague atom-equivalents that went into their makeup arranged in a way that had no defects at all.

The ones that did have defects basically didn't actually form, as the process of starting the process winnowed out anything that didn't exactly match the desired growth pattern. So even if she ended up with something the wrong external shape, internally they were entirely correct.

This thing though… it wasn't nearly as perfect. Even at a casual glance close up she could see how parts of it were slightly askew from other parts, giving off an effect not unlike something like the scales of a fish in far too many dimensions. At a distance all the subunits, the crystals so to speak, were identical, but if you looked closely there were a myriad of differences. Some larger than others, but none were the same as any other. 'Organic growth pattern, I think,' she mused, examining one part of the thing as closely as she could manage. 'Following the same pattern but producing slightly different results each time, like… cell replication imperfections, maybe?' She thought back to her biology lessons and nodded slowly to herself. That wasn't a bad analogy even though it was in many other respects obviously completely wrong.

This construct wasn't made, it was grown. And not like her crystals; it was far closer to a living organism, although she was sure that for most purposes it wouldn't strictly count as such. On the other hand, what was life? No one really had a perfect definition of it even now, after all. So perhaps this did count as alive…

With an internal smile Taylor wondered what would happen if the gnurrs ran across the thing. Would they ignore it, or decide it was a nice snack?

She got a sense of uneasiness from somewhere, which made her smile grow for a moment. "Don't worry, I'm not going to feed you to the gnurrs," she muttered very quietly as she lay there, which provoked a combination of relief and amusement.

It was very clear that the the power computer was really enormous in this state. Vastly larger than she'd assumed it would be, although of course they didn't really have any reason to assume a size to begin with. Just how big was hard to tell, but after spending some time examining it, she came to the conclusion that it was something you'd measure on an atlas rather than with a ruler. Which was both incredible and horrifying.

One thing that stood out was that unlike with Coil's power, the 'interference' she'd noticed in that case wasn't present here. Possibly it was because as far as she could tell only one of the things was actually wherever it really was she was looking? In the previous case, the computers were not only basically inactive, but packed closely together, which suggested that there were a lot of the probably-quantum conduits in close proximity, this in turn likely being the source of the interference. She was having to finely filter out almost identical impressions to zero in on just the one of interest, while in this case there only was the single link to concentrate on. And it was completely intact, not damaged and warped like Coil's one was.

Not to mention she'd spent hours refining her technique for studying the conduit as well, which had resolved a lot of little problems she'd initially had. Which would probably make looking at dead power conduits much easier, something easy to test later.

Carefully probing the construct, she examined it from all sides, which was a concept that got a lot larger when what you were looking at wasn't in three dimensional space in the usual way. Luckily she was getting rather good at dealing with too many dimensions having spent so much time learning about beneath, which helped a lot. Even so she was sure it would take a long time to really understand what she was looking at.

But she didn't necessarily need to fully comprehend the totality of how it worked to do useful things with it… After all, the power-selling conspiracy appeared to quite possibly not even understand as much as she currently did if they went on what Lisa's power had divulged. Did they even know about the conduit, for example? Without being able to see beneath that would be a tricky thing to discover, and she was almost certain they didn't know anything about beneath. Mostly because if they did, neither Lisa's power or the administrator probably wouldn't have been so intrigued by her discoveries. From what the former had told them, it found the entire concept so out of left field it had basically crashed like a PC with faulty RAM while trying to understand it.

Which was hilarious, as well as strange.

Eventually she pulled her awareness back from the eldritch pathway to the alien power into her completely normal three dimensional bedroom, letting the infinite reaches of beneath slip back behind the walls of reality. Rolling over in the bed she turned on the table lamp next to her, then picked up her notebook and a pen. Sitting propped up against the pillows she wrote rapidly for half an hour, filling page after page with her observations on what lay behind Parahuman powers and their alien source.

Finally finishing, she glanced at the bedside clock, decided that twenty past three in the morning was certainly time to go to sleep. Putting the notebook and pen down, she turned the light out, rolled onto her side, and closed her eyes.

"Good night, Administrator," she murmured sleepily, smiling a little at the faint sensation of affection. Seconds later she was deeply asleep.

For some reasons she dreamed about lizards, onions, and crystals larger on the inside than the outside.

It was nice.