Chapter 31

Rebecca Costa-Brown, Chief Director of the PRT was sitting through yet another boring meeting.

Or so it appeared.

In fact, it was her double, Wanda Perkins, sitting there in Rebecca's Washington DC office, trying to pay attention to another briefing.

Wanda really liked the deal she had with Rebecca.

She had a hidden apartment behind a secret door in Rebecca's study, so she could come and go when she was needed, even at a moment's notice, which was often how it was.

Wanda was required to take Rebecca's place as often as needed, and with as little as 10 minutes' notice. But most of the time that worked out to once or twice a day. The pay was good, and in her free time she could do whatever she wanted - in one of her various 'Not-Rebecca' disguises - as long as she could be back in ten minutes.

In this city, there was a lot you could do within 10 minutes' jog of the PRT building.

There was also a lot she could do in her apartment. She mostly didn't use her unlimited Pay-Per-View, favoring instead her unlimited online courses at both a trade school and a regular college.

She'd started her schooling by getting a certificate as a Court Reporter, largely so she could take notes in shorthand in the meetings that Rebecca missed, so she could catch her up with summaries later.

Next she'd gotten a certificate in Cosmetology, with an emphasis in Movie Makeup, to improve her 'Not-Rebecca disguises'.

Those were both to improve her ability to be a good double and so extend the viability of the job. But still, she knew it couldn't last forever. So she was also taking a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in Accounting. That helped her understand more aspects of what Rebecca did as Chief Director, and also gave her a possible career later.

And she'd also quietly gotten a certificate as a Locksmith, both because she wasn't really sure what she wanted to do when she 'grew up' and also because she was curious about all the various locked drawers and cabinets in the Chief Director's office.

She was very very careful about hiding those explorations.

Wanda had learned that things usually followed patterns. And so the time when Wanda was least likely to be called up was right after a stint playing the part of Rebecca. That's when she took the risk of doing things that would take her more than 10 minutes away.

And there were certain times when Wanda had learned Rebecca was not just far away, but guaranteed to stay that way for a while.

She used those too.

But Wanda's cushy job seemed to be over, since Costa-Brown seemed to have disappeared.

Not that anyone was likely to tell Wanda to leave: only Rebecca Costa-Brown and the Triumvirate - the three most powerful Capes in the country, knew about Rebecca's deal with Wanda.

Everybody else thought Wanda was Rebecca. They looked the same, and Wanda had been playing the part of Rebecca, at need, for years now, so she was very convincing.

But, with Rebecca gone, Wanda was playing her part full-time now, so the job was no longer cushy in the least.

Worse yet, Wanda was starting to fear that things would remain like this, and she would be stuck playing the Chief Director.

In some ways that was exciting - she had not been allowed by Rebecca to make any decisions as Chief Director. So, when Wanda was playing her part, the Chief Director often asked for more information before making decisions, or said she would have to consider it and get back to them.

Now she was already starting, tentatively, to make decisions. She had to. Decisions needed to be made and the Chief Director could only delay so long.

That was what Wanda would say, in her defense, to Rebecca, when - or if - Rebecca came back.

But that was starting to look doubtful. Rebecca had been missing for five days and had never been gone that long before. Not without contacting Wanda in some way.

But it wasn't just Rebecca Costa-Brown that was missing: all three Triumvirate members - Legend, Eidolon, and Alexandria - were missing too.

That was significant.

Wanda pretended to be an airhead, when she was being Wanda. So people gradually relaxed and said things around her which they felt she would not pick up on.

But Wanda was actually pretty sharp, mentally, and a very good actress.

So she picked up quite a bit of information she wasn't meant to have.

And one of those things she'd picked up - the first, actually, since it was so obvious, given her perspective into it - was that the cape Alexandria was actually Chief Director Costa-Brown.

When Alexandria was out doing cape things, Wanda was always on-duty playing Costa-Brown. Always.

And there had been a few times when Costa-Brown had traveled to another city, but left Wanda behind, not expecting to need her. Sometimes that worked out fine. But other times Wanda had been needed unexpectedly, and a teleportation portal had been opened to take Wanda where she'd needed to be to play her part. Wanda had been strictly commanded by DoorMaker - the cape who made those teleportation portals - to keep it strictly secret.

Wanda had agreed and played her part well. Indeed, she hadn't told anyone.

Nor had she told anyone that, those times when DoorMaker had to send for her had all - every one of them - been times when Alexandria had unexpectedly been needed somewhere.

But the whole thing made it pretty easy to figure out how Costa-Brown, based in Washington DC, and Alexandria, based in Los Angeles, could be the same person: she just called DoorMaker and stepped through a portal.

Of course it was illegal for a cape to be a member of the PRT.

PRT stood for Para-human Response Team, and was supposed to be an organization of normal humans trained and equipped to stop the para-humans if they tried to take over.

For a cape to be a member of the PRT, fundamentally undermined its purpose, and so it was illegal. For a cape to be the leader of the PRT was so far offsides as to redefine the game entirely.

But that wasn't the only illegal thing Costa-Brown was doing. Not by a long shot.

Wanda had picked up bits here and there over the years and quietly pieced them together.

She knew, for instance, that the Triumvirate were secretly among the leadership of the secret organization Cauldron, which went about doing anything it pleased, without regard to what was legal or moral, including multiple assassinations, in efforts to further their secret agenda.

Once Wanda had learned that, she'd gotten a lot more careful not to reveal anything of what she knew. She didn't want to be assassinated too.

Wanda's sub-conscious picked up on certain cues she'd heard, and brought her attention back to the meeting she was in - it was about to get to the good part.

"OK," Willoughby the briefing officer was saying, "now that the important budget allocations have been reviewed, we have some time for a few miscellaneous situational reports that may merit your attention."

Wanda sat up.

"Item One," Willoughby said, "is an update on the Simurgh. Our analysts have gone over the information we have and come up with the following as the most likely scenario."

He clicked a remote and changed from the current slide showing a section of a spreadsheet, to a new one showing an irregularly-shaped dust cloud in orbit above the Earth.

"Everybody has been wondering why the dust," he began. "For a long time she just sat there, more or less inert, except for attacking a random city a little more often than once a year. Then suddenly there's dust right where she had been sitting. Why?"

His question was meant to be rhetorical, but Wanda wanted to see what he had to say in response to the rumors, so she repeated one, "Some are saying that the dust is what is left of her - that she died somehow and is decaying into dust."

"Harumph!," Willoughby snorted in disgust. "'Hope springs eternal' and the ignorant will always leap to hopeful, yet baseless, conclusions, as a sop to their weak minds. But we have science on our side. And this is what we've learned."

He clicked again and a portion of the dust cloud, looking a bit like a tail extending out into space away from the main cloud, was circled in red.

"It can be no accident," Willoughby said, "that this tail points exactly at the planet Saturn. We believe it is a wake, of sorts. We know the Simurgh can travel very fast - going from the Earth to the Moon in basically no time. This incident clearly shows that she can go a lot faster than we had any reason to suppose, before now."

"What?" Wanda asked.

Willoughby did an impressive balancing act between, on the one hand, sounding like he was insulting his superior officer, and, on the other hand, trying to sound superior himself. He managed to come across as only insulting the idea that he was either wrong or unclear.

"What it means is this," he said, only slightly condescendingly. "The Simurgh waited until cloud cover blocked our telescopes from directly observing her, then raced off to Saturn. There, she used her impressive level of telekinetic power to gather some rocks and small moonlets - it must have been those, since telescopes have been able to verify there is no change to the major moons or the ring system. These, she brought right back to where she had been, in Earth orbit, and crushed them to the size of sand particles. We can't test those particles directly to verify - all our orbital assets having long-since been destroyed by the Simurgh - but indirect tests have strongly suggested that these particles have recently been crushed from something larger, and are the same chemical makeup as moonlets around Saturn. Then, after putting the new dust cloud here, she raced back to Saturn from within her new dust cloud, generating this tail or wake in the cloud."

"Why?"

"It should be obvious. She is not from Earth. She has to be from somewhere. Interstellar travel is far more difficult than travel within the Solar system, so it's more likely she's from this Solar system. Now, with this hint, we've pieced more together, and know where."

Willoughby paused to emphasize the triumph of their logic, "She's from Saturn - the rings specifically. She went home and came back with material to make this place more like her home. Before, she was just 'camping' here, now she's moving in."

"And what reasons do you have to justify those conclusions?" Wanda asked.

Willoughby held up a finger, "Point one, The Simurgh spends most of her time in orbit. Nobody understood why that was until just recently, when she brought this material," he gestured to the slide showing the dust cloud, "which will eventually spread out and form a ring system around the Earth, a lot like Saturn's. So her preferred environment is clearly within a planetary ring system."

He paused to receive the praise he felt was deserved, then hearing none, held up a second finger and continued. "Point two she is inert most of the time. She wakes up and attacks about 4 times every three years, then goes inert or quiescent in orbit again. In other words, she hibernates. Various creatures on Earth hibernate when solar input is low and therefore energy is scarce. Solar input is always low at Saturn, so it makes total sense that life there would have a similar life cycle - long periods of hibernation, followed by brief periods of activity, to hunt."

Another brief pause was followed by a third finger being raised. "Point three, she resists damage very well. She does that because her molecular structure is very dense, just as it must be in order to survive the extreme environment she would experience in diving down into Saturn's atmosphere - with winds up to 1100 mph for one thing, which, by the way, would be a good reason for her to have 11 wings: to help her fly in an atmosphere like that - to hunt for food."

"Hunt for food?"

"Yes, she hunts. She's obviously attempting to do that here - every 9 months or so she wakes up and dives down to the surface of the planet below here, looking for food, just like she would do back home at Saturn. But she gets frustrated because we are the wrong type of food, and the right type keep not responding to her lure: that's her song, which would sound very different here than on Saturn. Eventually she has to go back to sleep still hungry. Nobody has seen her eat since she's been here - she must be starving. Though there are some life forms that can continue for quite a while on one good meal, like snakes. So we think she is like that."

"Are you suggesting she hunts for other Endbringers?"

"You get it!" Willoughby exclaimed excitedly. "Yes, exactly!. They have the same absurdly high density that she does, and showed up around the same time as her. We figure that, in simple terms, this is an interrupted picnic for her. By that we mean she had just hunted up a Leviathan and a Behemoth to eat, and was navigating back home with them - or possibly somewhere else to eat them in peace or with nice scenery or whatever - and her navigation system got interfered with and so she ended up here. In her confusion, her lunch got away."

"Lost?"

"We think her navigation system works something like a Moth's does - they use the moon as a reference point and navigate by it, but often mistake light bulbs for the moon, and end up circling those. All it'd take is one Tinker somewhere on Earth sending out the right kind of signal at the right time, and the Simurgh would navigate by that and get lost."

He held up a fourth finger, "this was going to be point 4 by the way - the other Endbringers. If she hunts them, then they are vulnerable to something she does. We think her song both impairs their cogitation - which we want to study more, by the way - and lures them to her. She obviously needs a lure, since she clearly sucks at hunting without it - there are two suitable prey for her on this planet and she's failed for years to find them. But more exciting is the thought that her main power is telekinesis, so that power must be able to defeat the other endbringers somehow. They must be vulnerable to it in some way. We want to study that."

"And how do you propose to do that, without any way to subject an Endbringer to tests?" Wanda asked.

"Well, first, We want to make a computer model, and study that."

Wanda had opinions about that, especially after hearing an analyst talking about it just last week.

She said "That's like painting a portrait of a frog and studying the portrait under a microscope to learn more about frogs. It has no information that you did not put there. So the best it can possibly do is help you notice patterns in the data that you'd missed before. But mostly it means you just double-down on any errors, since it tends to reinforce those.".

Willoughby, not having heard an explicit "no", continued on.

"Then there is also this. One Endbringer or another attacks every 3 months or so. That will be our chance to experiment. We want to round up people with telekinetic powers and force them to attend the next Endbringer fight. Not just attend, we want them at the front of the fight. Then we also bring various instruments to take readings, measure and record the results. After that fight we analyze them and hope to find the answer."

"What happened to this being a land of Liberty, where people can freely choose what they do or don't do?" Wanda asked.

Willoughby actually laughed, briefly, before realizing she was serious. Then he scrambled, "Well, uh, you see, that's a nice ideal, but with the precedents set by the NEPEA-5 law, and others like it, we ..."

"Nevermind. Request denied." Wanda stated flatly. "You don't get to enslave certain para-humans Next topic."

She wanted to laugh at the apparent absurdity of it all- Saturn indeed: to her, it all sounded like conjecture based on very few, equivocal, facts, which could be interpreted otherwise just as validly - but Costa-Brown treated all such things as if they were plausible until something showed otherwise, so she did too.

"Understood, but before we move on, we have a second proposal on this matter we'd like to explore." Willoughby asked.

Wanda nodded.

"Since the Simurgh will, when she returns, obviously be nesting in her dust cloud, we'd like to poison it in an attempt to weaken and kill her over time. We can do it by gathering radioactive waste from our nuclear reactors, grinding it to a similar-sized dust, with particles about the size of sand, then launching that into her cloud. We still have some rockets heavy enough to lift it to that orbit."

"But will that radioactive waste stay in that orbit?" Wanda asked. "That could devastate us if it fell down."

Willoughby hesitated, and that was answer enough.

"Get the idea studied by a panel of suitable scientists." Wanda demanded.

That was one of her 'go-to" delaying tactics for when a decision was required and Rebecca would certainly want to be the one to make it, which was most of the time.

She'd gone out on a limb deciding against enslaving telekinetics, but she'd been upset. Plus, she wasn't sure that Rebecca was ever coming back.

Willoughby made a note, "Will do. Now on to Item Two in our summaries."

Wanda nodded for him to continue, and he did.

"The Machine Army is up to something. We're not sure what, exactly, but there is a lot of activity there in Eagleton Tennessee. There was some burrowing, and we thought they were trying to find any electric lines or natural gas pipes that may still be live. There aren't any. And they know they can't escape the walled-off city. So it stopped - we figure they gave it up when they realized the futility. Secondly, and far more odd, is that, bit by bit, the city of Eagleton has been disappearing. We think they are burning it for fuel, somehow. Machines do need a constant fuel source and that was a big part of why we walled off the city - to prevent them from getting any more fuel and hopefully 'starve them out', so to speak."

Wanda wanted to speak, but would have to first carefully consider how exactly, since what she knew would get her killed if she was not careful.

She'd heard Rebecca Costa-Brown talking with other Triumvirate members, including sometimes when they were drunk, and they often, especially when drunk, let slip pieces of valuable information.

Wanda had put those pieces together, a bit here, a bit there over time and now had quite a good understanding of the situation with Machine Army.

Everybody knew that Machine Army were a bunch of intelligent machines which had the ability to self-replicate. They were first created by a Tinker in Eagleton Tennessee, who was was trying to make a friendly, powerful servant. He got instead an implacable pitiless competitor - one with its own motivations, goals and interests, and no interest at all in the Tinker's goals.

The AI quickly took down the Tinker and then had rapidly started taking over the town. The PRT had responded and fought back, ending in a stalemate. Then the PRT had walled off the city, to contain the Machine Army. They'd guarded the walls, shut off supplies to the city of electricity, natural gas and anything else that could be used as fuel, and then commenced to wait for the inevitable result: machines without fuel do not run.

It was not the only city they had walled off. Every city the Simurgh had attacked was also closed off like that, to prevent the inhabitants, all of whom had been driven insane by the Simurgh, from leaving. Nilbog, a BioTinker who could convert every living thing he touched into ferocious monsters under his control, had also been walled off in his city.

But Eagleton had been the city with the best chance of eventually being opened up again.

Everybody knew all of that.

What everybody did not know, but Wanda did, was that the Machine Army had a benefactor: Cauldron.

DoorMaker, from Cauldron, had opened a portal to Eagleton and dropped off two Tinkertech Fusion power plants, with a note. The note had been all about how supporters of AI wanted to help them and so on. It also mentioned that a Tinker would have to visit from time to time to maintain the reactors and keep them working.

The Machine Army AI had read all of the Eagleton Public Library's contents. So they had information about fraud, lying, duplicity etc. Consequently they checked out the fusion reactors very carefully, and tested them carefully, before using them.

The machines also had information in the library about activists selflessly working on the behalf of others'.

And they had no experience at all, to give them context and help them judge whether this was an instance of selfless help or fraud.

It is one thing to be able to decide for yourself, and another thing to be good at it.

Experience is mostly what refines our judgment and improves our decision-making.

You can read all the books in the world about swimming, and still have no idea what it is like to swim.

You can read all the books in the world about riding a bicycle, and still not be able to ride a bike at all.

The machines were a new creation and had no experience at all.

'Book learning' is a derisive cliche for exactly that condition - where knowledge gained from study has no experience to go with it. The phrase is derisive because, as has proven to be the case time after time in practice, such knowledge frequently leads to dramatic failures, since those who have 'book learning' believe they understand something better than they actually do.

Whereas, on the other hand, humans have a vast amount of experience at fooling each-other, in thousands of subtle variations.

We even make games of it. Children play hide-and-seek.

Some computer programmers participate in contests such as the "obfuscated C" contest, where the object is to write a program in the programming language known as C, which program is as hard to decipher as possible.

Computer hackers do a less formal, less legal, version of that, in writing virus code that morphs or obfuscates what it does in an attempt to evade antivirus programs.

And, of course, fooling each-other, whether just marketing, or outright fraud, is big business.

And, Cauldron were outright professionals at fooling people. Most people did not even know that Cauldron existed. And Cauldron's prime team of enforcers, the Triumvirate, were believed by most people to be 'good guys'.

So this contest between Cauldron and the Machine Army AI, to trick or not be tricked, was similar to a boxing match between a 300 pound heavyweight champion and an infant. It was completely one-sided.

The machines, having tried to be careful first, went ahead and used the fusion generators. Those generators worked perfectly, and had no tricks hidden in them at all.

The box of memory chips that Cauldron gave Machine Army next, also got scrutinized by them, then used. It also had no tricks in it at all.

There were no tricks in the first two gifts because Cauldron were sneaky enough to know that such an approach would fool even a cautious human, and get them to lower their guards.

The third gift had been where the tricks were.

Cauldron gave a box of CPU chips to Machine Army. These were fast and powerful CPU's and there were enough for all the existing machines twice over.

These had been specially-made by Cauldron, just for this purpose.

They also got checked by Machine Army. They read over every line of code within the chips, and followed every possible path through the transistors. Then they used them to upgrade themselves.

But the important parts of the code - from Cauldron's viewpoint - were not even connected to the rest of the CPU's. Not yet.

So they could not be found by careful searches such as Machine Army had done

Most people do not know it, but the process of etching silicon wafers to make silicon chips is imperfect. There are almost always areas of the wafers that do not 'burn' correctly, and do not function correctly, so they get excluded from the final chip.

This is a standard part of the process, and a certain portion of the wafer is expected to 'go bad' like this. That loss is planned for from the beginning, so there are mechanisms for 'locking out' the bad portions.

And Cauldron had simply had a Tinker 'lock out' very specific portions of these chips, with what amounted to a decaying lock. After a certain amount of time, these locks would degrade past a certain threshold, and suddenly no longer be locks.

Then the hidden code and logic in these CPU's would execute.

Contessa's Path to Victory had been used on this, and said to set the decaying locks to fully decay in 6 days, then give the Machine Army similarly compromised wireless networking chips.

That was done, 3 more days were waited, as Path to Victory had said, and then Cauldron had sent the activation signals.

All of Machine Army had been Cauldron's slaves since then.

Since that time, Wanda knew, Cauldron had been building up Machine Army even more, with occasional gifts of computer parts, partly as upgrades, and partly to further lock in their control, and frequent gifts of raw materials with which to build more Machine Army units.

Bit by bit, they'd given them the entire contents of more than one automobile junkyard.

Wanda also knew that Cauldron had emplaced one of their agents in the PRT group which had responsibility for guarding Machine Army and keeping them contained. In fact, that Cauldron agent was the second-in-command of that PRT group, and could control all of Machine Army on his own if he decided to.

As Wanda contemplated how to use what she knew to try to stop whatever bad stuff Cauldron, or their local Machine Army controller, was brewing up - hopefully without getting herself killed - the briefing officer Willoughby finished and prepared to move to the next item.

"So, that's why we think Machine Army's flurry of activity will come to nothing," Willoughby concluded.

Wanda thought, "I disagree, but still need to think up a safe way to act on that, so I'll let it drop for now."

"Now on to Item Three." he clicked for the next slide, which showed a middle-aged man in a suit. "This man, Alfredo Garcia, is a Venezuelan oil baron and mob boss. His daughter, Consuela," he advanced to the next slide, showing a beautiful girl in her 20's, "was on holiday, touring the Eastern United States when she got captured by a gang known as the ABB in a city known as Brockton Bay. They regularly kidnap girls of all ages and force them to work as prostitutes in their brothels."

Wanda shivered at the thought, and asked, "don't we have any effective Law Enforcement there?"

"In short, no," Willoughby answered. "That gang, like most gangs, has support from para-humans within it's own membership, which usually makes them tougher than the police can handle. That's where the PRT usually comes in, but Director Piggot, in charge of the East-NorthEast PRT, has not achieved any measurable progress at all versus the gangs in her jurisdiction - not in the entire span of her tenure as Director there. She comes up with various reasons why. Yet the fact remains the same, despite trying things like giving her more resources."

Wanda had met Director Piggot many times and knew she was one of the most bigoted people alive when it came to para-humans

In Wanda's opinion, prejudiced people such as that should not be in charge of anything.

She went out on a limb and made a decision - though a reasonably safe one, since it was just to study a possibility. She said "Start investigating the case to fire her. See what evidence for it there is, so we'll know if there's enough to proceed down that line."

On a whim, she added "Do the same for Director Tagg."

She knew Tagg was, if anything, worse than Piggot, as well as being a truly rotten human-being.

"Very well," Willoughby answered, making a note in his computer before resuming the briefing.

"Garcia was incensed at the situation, and immediately hired a team of capes to extract his daughter and bring her home."

He clicked for the next slide, this time showing a pair of performers on stage in Vegas, wearing sequin-covered jumpsuits, one in green and one in purple.

"These are Razzle, in green, and Dazzle, in purple. They had a successful stage magic show in Las Vegas before triggering and becoming capes. Now Razzle has strong telekinetic powers and Dazzle has strong illusion powers, and they hire out for various contract jobs, even though that's illegal for capes".

He cleared his throat.

"The jobs they do are never what they seem to be. Instead they depend heavily on Dazzle's illusions. And they make them seem more real by having Razzle use telekinesis to make it seem like the illusions are actually interacting with their surroundings."

"When Razzle and Dazzle went in to Brockton Bay to get Consuela Garcia out, they did it with a small group of heavily-armed mercenaries, and a lot of illusions such as these."

Willoughby's next slide showed a montage of tanks, combat planes, combat robots, a battleship, and a reptilian monster hundreds of feet high.

"Their mercenaries shot up the town really well. Locals shooting back hit mostly illusions - very realistic illusions backed by telekinesis, as is their standard. Also typical of the Razzle-Dazzle team is that, when they're done with a particular illusion, they just dismiss it. That happened in scores of cases in this attack, with tanks, planes, robots, people, and various vehicles all just disappearing and leaving no trace of themselves. They even made illusions of chocolate, spices, and fuel, supplemented by a little of the real thing, to use as bribes to get information."

"So the residents of Brockton Bay believe they were attacked by tanks, planes, a giant lizard and a battleship?" Wanda asked.

"Yes, but we know better than they do. We have more information available to us than just what is right before their all-too-easily-fooled eyes. And we have experts to put together the pieces of even very complex puzzles, rather than just assuming, like the ignorant masses do, that the obvious story we are handed is all there is to it." Willoughby noted smugly.

He continued, "Razzle and Dazzle are pretty good at leaving false evidence and making convincing illusions, although this time they were apparently hard-pressed, which is why some of their illusionary people looked exactly like each-other. But their hired mercenaries messed up and left some clues discordant with the story they are trying to sell. For instance, their mercenaries did actually bring a tank, but they brought it, and took it away again, by rail, on a flatcar. That's why the railroad between Brockton Bay and Texas shows signs of recent use, and even repair. That helped us put it all together."

"Interesting," Wanda allowed, sticking with a neutral response since she was unsure how much of this was groundless speculation. Willoughby did tend to focus on the facts that agreed with his conclusions and rationalize or outright ignore the facts that did not.

Willoughby took that as agreement, and cheerfully added, "yes, but even more interesting is this: Razzle and Dazzle were upset that every significant faction in town opposed them, so when they left, they tried to kill everybody in town."

"How?"

"From Bakuda - a bomb Tinker working for the ABB gang they were principally after - they'd captured half a dozen gas bombs. They assumed they were deadly, and as they left town - with an accompanying silly illusion of the battleship flying away - they set off all these bombs as airbursts around town. It had an illusion of missiles doing it, but we know it was telekinesis, since there was no debris such as always remains when missiles detonate."

"What happened?" asked Wanda.

Willoughby smiled, "The gas turned out to be just a mild euphoric with a weak knockout gas. Not everybody was knocked out, and even the ones who were, recovered in about a minute. The PRT, of course," he puffed out his chest in pride, "and the Protectorate, both followed NBC - Nuclear, Biological, Chemical - protocols immediately. They shut off all outside ventilation to the undamaged parts of their buildings and vehicles, and shifted entirely to stored air, or at least filtered air, for the duration. Those in damaged parts of the buildings used gas masks. None of the PRT or Protectorate were affected by the euphoric knockout gas. Some complained of feeling ill or tired, but we suspect that is due to using old gas mask filters."

"Did the gas have any other effect than the brief knockout and euphoria?"

"Only indirectly," Willoughby allowed. "The event caused someone to trigger as a new cape, with, as is often the case, powers that address, but do not really fix, the trauma or concerns that caused the trigger event. We're calling this new cape 'Sane Asylum', even though we have not yet encountered him or her. That's because, in response to the brief mass insanity caused by panic as folks everywhere just fell over as if dead, Sane Asylum triggered with the power to suppress insanity within a large area around himself. Apparently, that power does not affect himself, as is the case with many other capes, such as Panacea. And our analysts say that a person who would trigger this way with a power like that is probably a very fearful and neurotic person. So Sane Asylum probably lives in his mother's basement and rarely comes out. We may never see him, in fact. But his effect spreads over the whole city."

"What effect?" asked Wanda.

Willoughby smiled wryly and said, "one of our analysts described it as 'a dramatic change to being exactly the same...mostly'. That is, people are the same as they were in most respects, but more so, since any fears or hesitancy they previously had are suppressed. They become more bold. They don't hold back. It's as if they'd lost all the old mental baggage that gives you concerns that things will go wrong because they have done so before. This magnifies whatever they were - people inclined to be kind are less reticent to do so. People inclined to be gregarious are also less hesitant. But similarly, people inclined to steal, kill, or even just insult others also do that with no hesitation, as if all their fears are gone. Also," he added, "all forms of depression go away, as do nearly all neuroses. And there's a great divide with drugs and alcohol. If folks took them up as a coping mechanism, they no longer seem to need them. But if they took them up for other reasons, such as thinking that's what the popular people do, they still need them. It's odd."

"Hopefully," Wanda responded, "that means we'll be getting some troopers back onto the force, who were retired for substance-abuse issues."

"Unfortunately not," Willoughby responded. "people who work for the government - at least those who we have tested - are not affected by Sane Asylum's power. We believe it is due to Sane Asylum's own neuroses - he hates or at least distrusts the government, so excludes them, either consciously or subconsciously. But, it could instead be that the experimental mental conditioning training we've been giving our people - to help them resist Master powers they may come across in the future - is causing this exclusion effect. We'd like to study it."

"Do so." Wanda knew that Rebecca Costa-Brown would want that studied, if she ever came back.

"OK," Willoughby noted that in his notebook. "Now on to Item Four. Signals Intelligence has intercepted and copied a message, though the original still got though, to Kaiser, who runs the Empire gang in Brockton Bay. The message was from Gesellschaft - a European nationalistic neo-Nazi organization, who provided capes to the Empire. Some of our Thinkers decoded the message, which tells Kaiser that now is the time for him to make his move and seize control of all the territory here that he can."

"Do you mean expand his gang territory, or make a try to seize political power?" a concerned Wanda asked.

"The latter. The letter says they are sending help, and says more help will be forthcoming once Kaiser starts. It then degenerates into a ideological rant predicting that the masses will see the inevitability of his success and rise up and support him."

"Do we know what to expect, or what support they sent?" Wanda asked.

"They sent a cape named Krupp,with some equipment. Krupp is a Tinker with an unusual specialty. He doesn't make Tinker-tech products. Instead he makes Tinker-tech manufacturing apparatus that in turn creates normal non-Tinker-tech gear. As with most Tinker-tech, his manufacturing apparatus seems to defy the usual laws of physics in what it can do. So he is, in effect, a Tinker who specializes in making normal things, but doing so very quickly and efficiently."

"So," Wanda prompted, "They plan to build something to use in trying to take over our country."

"Yes, exactly," Willoughby responded. "Our analysts say that Kaiser has strong copy-cat and one-upmanship tendencies. So they are pretty sure they know what he is building."

"A battleship, or maybe some tanks?"

"No, not that," Willoughby laughed. "there are several reasons why not. While Kaiser could easily 'grow' that much metal out of nowhere and into the right shapes, his control of the precise shapes isn't up to it. He could make the ship, ladders, rooms, water-tight hatches, and even things like the ventilation ducting without difficulty. But things like engines require very tight tolerances that he isn't up to matching. And guns require even tighter tolerances. If Kaiser made an engine, it almost certainly would not run. And if it did run, it would soon beat itself to pieces."

"So have there been any recent purchases of engines suitable for such a ship?"Wanda inquired.

Willoughby looked smug. "We checked for that, and the closest match were seven engines for diesel locomotives rated for 18000 horsepower. That's way too little for a battleship, and way too much for a tank. To give you some context, a 1500 ton Balao class submarine - or an old-time steam powered locomotive like the 2-10-4 - would have an engine rated about 5500 horsepower, while a much faster 2000 ton Fletcher-class destroyer used a 60000 horsepower engine. So these engines are too weak for a ship, and too strong and big for tanks. They are designed for pulling trains, and they got shipped to Brockton Bay, where there just happens to be a new company, named CAPES, that is trying to go into business shipping things by railroad. So these are clearly not what we're looking for, as far as determining what Kaiser and Krupp have been building. We'll come back to that."

"How about guns?" she didn't let the subject go.

Willoughby suppressed a sigh, "we checked into that too, and no guns suitable for battleships have been bought, sold, stolen, or built. The closest match was a recent theft in Germany, from an old military warehouse - part of which doubled as a museum - storing spare parts for the WWII German Navy. It seems they had three complete replacement turrets for the Scharnhorst class battlecruisers. Those all went missing one night, which is amazing given how many tons each one weighs. But that very fact aided the investigation. There is a Swedish cape who calls himself Molnig - that's Swedish for Cloudy - who could have done it. His power can turn whatever he touches into thin wispy clouds, which move, though slowly, at his command. He is unaccounted-for the night of the theft. And there is a new construction site near Stockholm Sweden that could accept the turrets. And a European think tank recently published their prediction that Leviathan's next target will likely be Stockholm. So we believe this is an attempt to prepare to defend Stockholm from Leviathan. The guns may work for that - nobody has tried anything similar. But the guns are only 11 inchers - inadequate for a battleship or battlecruiser even in 1942, when Scharnhorst proved that by shooting the battleship HMS Duke of York twice with negligible effect. The Germans had plans to upgrade the Scharnhorst to 14 inch guns, to put them on a par with other battleships of the time, but they never got around to it."

"So you discount the chance that Kaiser would want them?" Wanda checked.

"Absolutely. They are too big for a tank by far, and too small for a battleship by far. Remember, he has a 'one-upmanship' aspect to his personality. He wants to make things more impressive than others, not less. That's why he wouldn't want the other museum-pieces stolen by Cloudy either. Before you ask, those were a bunch of 20mm and 40mm cannons, mostly. Those are too small for a tank, and battleships only use them for anti-aircraft work."

"So Kaiser could have used those small guns in making a battleship, if he could get big guns somewhere to complete it?" Wanda pressed.

"Director, I'm glad you are curious, but you're way off base and really should let this one go," Willoughby sighed. "He just can't do it. Even given guns and engines, nether of which he's got, The best he could do is make a big battleship-shaped, inert object. Sure he can grow that much metal, but there is so much more to it than a hull, decks, engines, and guns. Just like there is a lot more to your car than a frame, body and engine. The wiring alone would be completely beyond him, without a team of electricians spending many months at least, or a cape like BigRig from ToyBox who specializes in large building projects. And before you ask, yes, we checked that too. ToyBox says he is not available right now - he has already been contracted for a project that, while they won't give us details, definitely is not a battleship."

Wanda backed off, "so what is Kaiser building then?"

"Battlesuits!" Willoughby proclaimed. "In the fighting versus Razzle and Dazzle, another local gang called the Merchants brought out a 50 foot tall battlesuit which had some success, and of which Kaiser would have been aware. Kaiser likes to imitate, and to 'one-up', or improve upon, what he imitates. His known activities are completely consistent with making a number of battlesuits, possibly very big ones, bigger than 50 feet tall. But we've got him there! There are certain rare elements which are ideal for both the 'artificial muscles' and for the power systems of battlesuits, and we've got the sources of those under tight control. He won't be able to buy them, and when he tries we'll track him and pounce! We won't even need the old army tanks a regional PRT commander ordered taken out of mothballs just in case."

Wanda considered a moment, then asked, "You say Kaiser can 'grow' metals out of nowhere?"

"Yes."

"Any kind of metal?"

"Yes," Willoughby scratched his chin as if confused.

"Are these rare elements metals?"

Willoughby blanched white in fear, said "I'll have to check on that. That's all for today's briefing." and hurried out.

-0-0-0-

Author's Note

Yes, Willoughby, like Armsmaster a few chapters ago, has drawn several incorrect conclusions even though his data was generally sound.

People do that.

Especially the types of people who jump to conclusions, and then defend those conclusions as if defending themselves from mortal peril.

Some people do that.

Plus, as I mentioned, I'm really tired of stories where folks jump to correct conclusions based on almost no data, and do that over and over, with almost no mistakes.

In my experience in cases like this, mistakes are the default and successful guesses are quite rare.

Also:

In case it wasn't clear earlier.

Alexandria was in Cauldron's base when Agamemnon bombarded that. She probably survived, since she is very durable. Yet, without DoorMaker, she has no way back and is stranded on that Earth, which is in a different dimension than Earth-Bet is in.