Chunks of Worm

by VigoGrimborne

A collection of Worm-related one-shots. Some will be AUs, some will be alt-power AUs, some will be both, and some neither. All will have a self-contained story, and I'll be hitting all sorts of different genres and themes. T-rated, though individual chapters may have additional warnings on them, as necessary. This IS Worm, after all.

11. Exile

AU: Exile

0 days

Amy was blind, deaf, and numb. She fell a short distance, hit something hard and wet, and rolled, only her dizziness and the rotating pressure on different parts of her indicating that she was moving at all. She smelled air, dull and strange, and inhaled deeply while her vision cleared... then again because she still felt like she couldn't breathe properly.

The ground, she found as she panted, was rocky and covered in a thin plant life somewhat akin to but mostly unlike moss. Its biology was already outlined in her mind, instant and simple enough that she had barely noticed. It was a hardy thing, evolved to withstand low-oxygen environments with minimal stress.

Low oxygen… She was still panting. Hard. Her lungs burned.

Someone smacked her on the back, a flat palm against her sweater. "We're… suffocating." A pale, freckled face sporting a domino mask fell into her line of sight, the girl attached to it laying on her back next to her, chest heaving.

Tattletale. Telling her that they were suffocating. The idea took a few hard, inefficient heartbeats to process. Spots were forming at the corner of Amy's eyes, clouding her vision again. She didn't know where they were, or why the air was so worthless, or whether she would have any time to find answers before suffocating.

She clenched her hands in the moss and pressed her face against it for good measure, her power racing with all the efficiency and thoroughness she couldn't have managed with her own body, deft mental fingers working where her own were numb. One part of the moss was broken up by the rest, all of the oxygen within concentrated and released into her mouth, a burst of energy and panic to drive her for the next few seconds.

She didn't shape plants as a rule; healing was all her power was good for, and it was all she would use her power for. But now, on the verge of death, there was no room for hesitation. Not in the frantic seconds it took her to reshape the moss within reach into a biological pump that drew to her pure oxygen from the moss in a fifty-foot radius beyond them. There was so much of the moss, covering the rocks for thousands of feet in every direction, all a single connected organism.

She grew some of it up and over to Tattletale's mouth and nose, forcing it inside to give her air while she worked. The supply of already-gathered oxygen was sparse, but she had more than enough mass to shape some crude but efficient organisms to filter it from the air and pump it to them…

Frantic seconds turned to minutes, and those possibly to hours. Amy was too busy to keep track. She had never been forced to use her power so extensively, with so few resources, and she was fully engrossed in the task. Immediately, oxygen to keep them alive, scavenged and unsustainable. Very short term, a body-sized dome over them to create a pocket she could pump good air into, to keep that which she was putting out around long enough to be inhaled. At the same time she was busy designing, almost from scratch, plants to take the atmosphere in and redirect the mixture she was used to down biological pipes and into the dome, but the first generation of those plants wasn't self-sufficient and would break down without constant maintenance. So she had to develop second, third, and fourth generations, and she had to do it carefully because there was only so much biological material within her reach.

All she could feel was moss. More to the point, the carpet of moss was unbroken for as far as she could feel it, save by where it had not naturally grown. Shaped by her, in some places, but all still one organism, unbroken and unaffected by anything around it.

Some time later – she didn't know how long, only that she was exhausted – she fell backward in the cramped little dome she had grown, breathing easily. Tattletale was passed out next to her, but a quick check revealed that the villain would be fine so long as she stayed within the dome.

The dome. Amy poked at her creation with a shaking finger, finally able to actually look at and think about what she had done. It was cellulose and a bunch of other things, woven together into something airtight and strong enough to keep a shape without collapsing like a blanket over them. Green, rough like wood, but far less solid, like a thick leaf with an odd texture.

Cold, clean air hissed in through what looked like hollow tree roots dotted around the base of the dome. It was cleaner than the usual Brockton Bay air, that was for sure. She hadn't even needed to build filters for pollutants save for those removing excess elements generated by their breathing; the air's only innate problem was that it lacked oxygen, not that it carried other things.

All in all, what she had created was a pocket of breathable air so small she couldn't stand or stretch her legs out without kicking a supervillain or the dome itself. Only her desperate machinations were keeping them alive. Nobody had come to rescue her. For that matter, nobody had come for Tattletale either, though she doubted any of the villain's compatriots could follow them… wherever they had gone.

Unless this was their doing all along.

She reached over and put her fingers on the villain's cheek. Still healthy, just asleep. The latter changed with a tiny influx of adrenaline, but at the same time Amy paralyzed her from the neck down.

"Ugh," Tattletale groaned incoherently, her eyes flicking open. "I see we're not dead."

"It was close," Amy said coldly. "Where are we?"

"Fucked if I know," Tattletale said… truthfully. There was no spike in her heart rate, no irregular muscle tension, nothing. "I have no idea what happened."

That did not make Amy feel any better about her situation.

---

0.35 days

"Remember," Amy warned, "You have thirty seconds. You can try to breathe, it won't hurt anything, but it might be less disorienting to just hold your breath for that time. No matter what happens, I'm pulling you in at the thirty second mark." She held her new, slightly larger dome ready, and grew more of the airtight material up over Tattletale, encasing her in an opaque bubble.

That done, she peeled back part of the dome keeping the air in, like an airlock. Tattletale was outside, but Amy was not, without losing any more of their precious oxygen than absolutely necessary.

Amy counted the seconds in her head, fighting to keep her own breathing steady. She was at once envious and worried; Tattletale was getting a clear look at their predicament, one that was done with eyes and not the senses of plants. But in doing so, she was in more potential danger than either of them had been yet. There could be anything out there, waiting for one of them to poke their head out.

She hit thirty seconds and quickly undid her changes. Seal Tattletale in, remove the cellulose covering from her body – while not thinking about the curves and contours she had shaped it to mimic, she was not going to admire a villain's body even if her costume flaunted it – and break down the thin covering separating the two of them. She shifted the extraneous material back out to the dome itself, strengthening it.

Tattletale was frowning. "The plan worked just fine," she began, "I could see, I didn't suffocate, all of that. But there is nothing out there. Rocks, dirt, plenty of moss, some ice… Nothing else. No trees, no animals, no birds, no sign of anything more advanced than moss. The ocean is off to our left, a fair distance away, but my power is telling me that this place is almost entirely lifeless."

"This area?" Amy asked hopefully.

"This planet," Tattletale corrected with a worried scowl. "The atmosphere has maybe two percent oxygen. We're used to twenty percent on Earth. And this is real, we're not in some sort of bubble or anything. You don't fake an entire atmosphere, that thing really does cover the whole planet."

"How did we get here?" Amy asked. That was, in many ways, the most important question to get answered. Even with parahumans seemingly around every corner, Brockton Bay was not so chaotic that they could be transported to an alternate earth at random.

Tattletale grimaced, her face scrunching up her domino mask. "I didn't get any new hints from my power on the subject," she said, "but I think I can guess. Remember what was going on right before we ended up here?"

"You were robbing a bank, your creepy bug friend was holding a knife to my throat, my sister was about to pummel you into the ground," Amy recalled. She remembered that scene, moments after Vicky had broken into the bank. Nobody had said a word yet, it was a Mexican standoff with one too many people.

"Yes, yes," Tattletale agreed, "that. And outside…"

"The Wards were beating up the rest of your team," Amy recalled. She hadn't seen it, of course, being stuck in the bank, but she knew it was happening. Had happened.

"Right. Your side brought Kid Win." Tattletale shook her head. "We brought Chariot. He brought his own Tinkertech, and he wanted to steal Win's hoverboard, so it's almost certain they faced off. My best guess is that Tinker plus Tinker equals bad things for everyone within a hundred-foot radius."

"That makes no sense," Amy objected. "Your Tinker only had his stupid little boot-skate things, and Kid Win doesn't even know his specialty. How does any combination of a raygun, a hoverboard, and souped-up roller skates send us to another planet?"

"Or another dimension," Tattletale corrected, "I don't know yet whether this is another Earth or somewhere else in our own universe. There isn't much to go off of."

"Either one," Amy said tersely.

"Neither of them could do it on purpose, on their own," Tattletale conceded. "But Chariot's specialty was something about personal transportation, and from what I've heard Kid Win didn't know his. If he brought something new to the fight, if he and Chariot clashed, if something in one's tech messed with the other badly enough in specific ways… I could see it. My power isn't telling me yes, but it's not telling me no, either."

"Fuck you for recruiting a Tinker," Amy said viciously.

"Yes, fuck us," Tattletale said seriously. She glanced around the tiny cellulose bubble keeping them from suffocating. "Very much fuck us. I am entirely willing to blame the one who recruited Chariot. But we'd better hope those same Tinkers can make it happen again, in reverse, and soon. How are we looking for surviving the night?"

"I have enough false lungs gathering oxygen for the two of us, and then some, so there's a backup even if something goes wrong," Amy said, letting her perception expand to the furthest extensions of her plant creations. They were all technically the same organism, else she wouldn't be able to sense them all without touching each one individually. "And pulling out carbon dioxide too, before you ask."

"Heat?" Tattletale asked. "And is there anything stopping you from making our little safe haven bigger?"

"The two are… related." She frowned as she spent a little while delving into the problem that Tattletale had brought to her attention. There was a disconnect between making something that could function on its own, and making something that kept something else functioning… she had never done it before today. She could use her power-given understanding of biology, but she had to think about how to apply it to the given situation. "Body heat in an enclosed space is working for now. If I expand the dome, it won't be as effective. Heating the air is inefficient, and I'm not working with unlimited resources…"

"You're not?" Tattletale asked. "How come?"

"I started with a bunch of minimum-complexity moss," Amy said absently. "Raw mass, raw materials. I don't pull mass from nowhere. Plants turn sunlight into energy and there are ways to use that energy to pull more mass from the ground, but these aren't set up to do it the way I would want. Right now, I only have so much to use."

"And you haven't played with plants much before now," Tattletale guessed. "You don't know the tricks they use that well."

Amy said nothing.

"At all," Tattletale added after a moment, somehow intuiting from pure silence. "Wow. Really?"

"Yes, really," Amy huffed. "Healing is a better use of my time." That, and it was the only allowed use of her powers, in that Carol's head would explode if she did anything else. Making things was dangerous, making things that reproduced was even more dangerous. Only raw necessity had forced her to bend those rules… Just this once.

But she was bending her rules. It hadn't really sunk in until now, while she was mind-deep in a massive, hand-crafted abomination of a plant she had made. She had broken her rules. That… she wasn't supposed to do that.

"Hey, hey, don't freak out about it," she heard Tattletale saying, faintly, as if from a distance. "It's fine. You did the right thing. Don't do anything stupid like dissolving it all because you feel guilty."

"They're going to come for us," Amy said quietly, pulling herself back to the present with more than a little difficulty. Her hands were shaking… she pressed her palms into the ground. "I'll break it down then." They would be here soon. Everyone would be working on it, even if she and Tattletale really had been thrown across dimensions or to a different planet. What Tinkertech did once, it could do again. She would be fine.

"We just have to survive until then," Tattletale said soothingly. "Don't worry about it. Just relax."

Amy felt a hand on her shoulder, brushing against her neck. The villain's biology flashed into her mind alongside that of her plant… of the plant she had made.

"It'll be fine," Tattletale repeated.

---

4.6 days

"Want to do the science thing?" Tattletale asked.

"What science thing?" Amy replied, her voice dull. She was curled up in her half of the dome, within arm's reach but with her back to Tattletale. In front of her face, a translucent triple-reinforced biological mesh let her see out into the wasteland. She was watching the utter lack of movement. Her improvements were on the other side of the dome, and the natural environment was completely uninteresting…

It still had sunlight. And a view of her best estimate as to where they had originally appeared, right at the top of a small hill.

It was the best place to watch for rescue. Even if rescue had yet to arrive.

"The thing where you make things, and I test them, and we write down what we're doing, all rigorous and thorough," Tattletale explained. "It's something to do, and your nutrient-paste could do with some different flavor variations."

"It keeps us alive," Amy murmured.

"And so does the water, but you redesigned the system for that four times before you found the right processing sequences to not make it taste like shit," Tattletale retorted. "Come on, we've got to do something. I'm getting cabin fever in here, and it wouldn't even be livable if you weren't so damn good at keeping the air smelling fresh and clean." The exact specifics of how two people lived in a tiny bubble for several days without being able to leave it for longer than they could hold their breath went unmentioned; they both knew all too well how it worked by now.

Amy sighed. "Do we have to do the food?" she asked.

"We can do whatever you find most interesting," Tattletale promised.

"Anything?" Amy asked darkly, her thoughts going to bad places. She had broken a rule once, then a dozen times over to make sure they could keep going until help arrived… Her other rules were still intact, but for how much longer? She didn't have the willpower to hold to the easiest one when things got tough–

"Hey!" An open palm swatted her back. She barely felt it. "No falling into despair! We are going to do something you find fun, and we're going to do it right now, or so help me, I will… rub your face in my armpit."

Amy rolled over to look at Tattletale, incredulous despite her heavy ennui. "You'll what?" she demanded.

"You heard me," Tattletale retorted, her face going red behind the now fairly grubby domino mask. "You've got this whole place rigged so it smells nice, like pine needles, but you haven't made plant deodorant yet. I'll do it."

Amy stared at Tattletale. Tattletale stared defiantly back at her.

"I don't want to do food," Amy conceded, mostly to move past the awkwardness. "You said… you said the ocean was nearby?"

"We're still on the coast," Tattletale confirmed. "Want to go for a swim?"

"We'll need some help to even get there," Amy muttered. Ideas were coming to her, ideas she should have pushed away as not being necessary for survival…

But she didn't want to. Tattletale wouldn't let her. Whatever the excuse, she began to shape some of her reserve of plant life.

---

5.0 days

Amy held an oxygen-squid out to Tattletale.

Tattletale took it and cradled it in her arms like a baby. "How is it meant to work?" she asked.

"Your power doesn't tell you?" Amy retorted, secretly relieved. No comment about how it looked disgusting, no questions as to the extent of her power, no mention of how it looked nothing like a plant… Just asking how it worked.

"It gives me hints, but I'd rather have the tutorial," Tattletale said. "Now, I can guess that the… arms… are for wrapping around my head." She lifted one of the wet tentacles. "The rubbery bit where the beak would be on a real squid is for me to bite on, and the flap is to cover my nose to create a seal. Beyond that, my power is just telling me that you know how it works, or giving me nonsense about the very basics of your creations. Not how to use it."

"It goes on like you said," Amy explained. She had her own oxygen-squid, but one couldn't talk while wearing it, so she wasn't going to demonstrate putting it on until they were ready to go out. "It lasts indefinitely, so long as you don't break the tube."

"Landlines, not wireless," Tattletale said sagely. "We'll be on a leash."

"A three hundred foot leash for this walk," Amy confirmed. "I don't have the mass for anything more." Even this was severely pushing her limits, and she planned to collect the two separate colonies of moss she could see from her window to make up for it. Going out and harvesting more raw materials by hand was ridiculously inefficient, but inefficient growth was better than not growing at all. The same could be said of her efforts to harvest minerals from the dirt and stone, and energy from sunlight.

"Any weak points I need to know about?" Tattletale asked, prodding at the mouthpiece with a finger. Amy took care to force it to be still, lest Tattletale be disgusted by its primitive nerve system misfiring and wiggling at her. Both oxygen-squids were further extensions of her network; she had complete control over them. They would work on their own, without her intervention or oversight, but direct control was a comforting additional layer of protection she actually couldn't avoid having. One was going on her face, after all.

"Don't sneeze," Amy warned. "That might break the seal, and you wouldn't notice until you started getting dizzy since it will still be pushing oxygen out." The oxygen deprivation would be slower in that case, and thus less noticeable.

"I think I would, noticing things is part of my power," Tattletale said confidently. "Point taken, though. If I trip and fall on my face?"

"It might save you from a broken nose, but you'll need to hold it on and run back to the dome," Amy replied. "It should be fairly impact resistant, but that was a low priority." She should have built more robust protections into it, there was a small chance it would splatter like jello if it got hit hard enough–

"Hey, you did good," Tattletale interrupted. Amy was fairly certain her power was telling her when best to interrupt, but she couldn't really complain. "I like it. Remind me to show you this movie called 'Alien' when we get back to our Earth, though."

"You'll be a villain," Amy objected. Even if they were operating under an informal truce here… Once they got back, Tattletale belonged in a cell.

"You can come visit and we'll watch it in my jail cell," Tattletale said casually. "Or my hideout, whichever I end up in. No big deal. Now, time to take a walk." She held the oxygen-squid up to her face and pursed her lips over the nozzle. The tentacles wrapped around the back of her head, squirming under her hair, and twisted together at the base of her skull. She made a muffled noise of disgruntlement when the slimy bit flapped over her nose and knocked her mask askew…

Then she reached up and took her domino mask off, rubbing at her eyes.

Amy's eyes widened.

Tattletale shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't speak, but if she could, Amy was sure she'd come up with some quip about how the squid covered more of her face than the flimsy little domino mask ever could, anyway.

Amy broke the awkward silence by putting her own oxygen-squid on; it wasn't awkward if neither of them could speak. She then sealed the various vents in the base of the dome, set her plants to gather and store oxygen in bubbles all throughout their surfaces…

She pulled a hole in the dome, breaking their refuge. Sunlight poured in, unfiltered by her biological membrane substitute for glass. Cold wind rushed over her body.

She and Tattletale stepped out, standing upright in the harsh, mostly inhospitable world for the first time since landing there.

It was desolate, all the more so when seen without the slight blur of looking out an imperfect window. Wild, rocky, with dirt and moss and her unsettling lung-plants dotted around the dome. The ocean surged in the distance.

Amy wandered up to the top of the little hill, her tether trailing like an umbilical cord behind her. She blinked wind-swept tears out of her eyes when she reached the top and saw absolutely nothing on the other side.

No portal. No sign anything had ever happened there. No signs of life, vast empty space with hills in the distance, as lifeless as everything else. The only thing of interest she could see was some more moss, a third separate colony she would gather later to expand their refuge.

She looked back. Their dome seemed so small from where she stood now, so intolerably cramped. Tattletale was stretching right next to it. Jogging in place. Waving at her. Setting off in the direction of the ocean.

Amy stood on the hill and watched for a while, her breath coming easily through the oxygen-squid. The wind stung at the parts of her face left bare to the elements, and a few more tears were absorbed by the squid's spongy body. Whether they were solely from the wind or not, she couldn't have said.

They were alone. As far as she knew, they were the only humans on the planet. And help was taking a long time in coming.

Tattletale's tether reached its furthest extent and tugged taut. She had barely gone anywhere; three hundred feet looked a lot smaller from where she stood.

Amy could see, almost without thinking about it, what she was going to do next. First, she would gather more biomass. Then, she would extend the tethers and enlarge the dome. From there…

From there, She didn't know what she would do. Something useful. Something to take her mind off the wild loneliness stretching out in every direction around her.

Something.

---

18.3 days

Vines crept along the ground, undulating like snakes. They stretched further and further, out to the East, over rocks and through loose soil. Simple tactile sensors provided feedback Amy could monitor from the dome, so long as she kept in contact with anything she had made on this planet.

Tattletale – Lisa, she had offered after they ended their first walk, discarding her domino mask for good – was jogging in place in the center of their newly enlarged dome. Amy could feel that too, through the vibrations in the padded mat she had made their new floor.

Amy focused on her reaching tendrils. She was using all of the moss she had gathered in the last few days, and if this failed she would have to go out and get more. It had failed twice already; it was hard to convert eyeballed distances to an estimate of the mass needed to cover that distance, not while accounting for the terrain and her inability to know exactly where her vines were at any given time–

A sample of salt, water, and various little micro-organisms trickled into the hollow interior of her leftmost vine. The salt was separated and brought to her, but the microorganisms were taken and broken down further by the basic stomach-type acids she had produced… her plants were functioning more like creatures at this point, albeit at a very basic level. No mind, no prehensile limbs save for the vines, no permanent method of movement… but they had organs, stomachs, nerves.

She smiled broadly, shoving the vines further into the depths. The rudimentary feedback she was getting wasn't anything like actually putting her hands in the ocean, but she could imagine how it actually felt. "I made it," she announced.

"Are our biomass problems a thing of the past?" Tattletale – Lisa – asked. "Or is the ocean as barren as the land?"

"It has the same lack of oxygen," Amy said as she wound her vines down into the seafloor. "I'm not pulling any more than I can from the air, proportionally speaking." Further, gills were a biological construct she could make, but had no experience with. She healed people, people didn't have gills. They wouldn't be much use here, either, what with the water having the same deficiency as the air.

"Any chance we could get some fish?" LIsa requested. "Can fish even live in an ocean without much oxygen?"

"Probably not," Amy said absently. Her vines were anchoring to stones and digging into the silt now, securing themselves. She could build biological nets off of them, some to catch the particles floating in the water, some to do photosynthesis, and some to filter the water itself. If she did it right, they would spread on their own and constantly expand to bring back more and more biomass.

If she did it right, she could make something that lived in these lifeless waves. Or something that spread and fed off what little did exist, like a parasite, with her the queen bee waiting back in the hive of mixed metaphors and horror…

She broke contact with the dome, with her vines, and huddled in on herself. Making things that spread and reproduced on their own… She wasn't supposed to do that. She didn't have to. But it was the first thing that came to mind, the first choice and she had almost done it without even thinking about it.

"Intervention time," Lisa exclaimed, halting her in-place jog. "Amy, over here. Stop thinking about whatever has you freaking out."

"No," Amy said quietly, refusing to meet the villain's eyes. She stared down at her knees instead. "No. Don't distract me." She knew what Lisa was doing, this wasn't the first time… But not thinking about how she was breaking all the rules didn't make it any better, she had to think about it. Not thinking almost infested an entire ocean with self-replicating vines!

"Fine," Lisa conceded, crouching down in front of her. "Talk, then. You're keeping us alive, and it's my job to keep you sane."

"Since when?" Amy asked miserably.

"Since I'm fully dependent on your sanity to protect me from the entire planet," Lisa said seriously. "I can't do a thing about what's outside this dome. You can, but you can't if you're sinking into depression and self-loathing because of the very things keeping us alive."

"Sounds like you know it all already," Amy sniffled. She felt terrible and humiliated now. "And you can't fix anything."

"Sure, because there's no such thing as a profession based around helping people by talking with them," Lisa said sarcastically as she lowered herself to sit cross-legged in front of Amy. "I'm no therapist, my power is better for ripping your feelings apart than anything else, but I can try. Tell me what's wrong."

"Everything," Amy admitted. "I was working with the vines…" She shouldn't be saying anything, this was a villain she was talking to, but it was either talk or be miserable in silence, and Lisa wouldn't leave it alone. The reminder that she was all that was keeping either of them alive sat heavy on her shoulders, a reminder of a familiar burden she had been neglecting these last few weeks… The last few weeks they hadn't been rescued. Everything really was wrong.

"And?" Lisa prompted.

"I have… I'm not supposed to…" She couldn't think of a way to phrase it that would make sense, that would convey how important it was without just saying Carol had told her what not to do, way back in the beginning. "I heal people. I shouldn't be doing anything else. It's dangerous. I have rules."

"Rules… Lay them on me." Lisa held her hands out, as if waiting to accept something physical. "Engrave them on a tablet, maybe. Should we do this up on the hill?"

The hamfisted attempt at a reference wasn't enough to make Amy laugh, but she might have had to hide a smile. "It's not like that… but it is important. Plants are one of the things I can't do. Or animals. Or modifying people, not even plastic surgery but I wouldn't do that anyway, nothing that reproduces, and I can't do brains, and making things like this breaks almost every single one."

She cringed, finally regaining control of her traitorous mouth, and waited for the confusion. The disbelief, or dismissal, or any of the other reactions she could imagine for telling someone her rules like that. She had to seem so pathetic or dangerous or maybe even both.

"Being on another planet doesn't change any of them?" Lisa asked gently. Amy couldn't tell what she was thinking. "They're meant to protect people. To protect you, and everyone else."

"Yes…" Amy said slowly. That wasn't really it though, Carol had made it very clear that these weren't rules she should break because it was convenient… No virus that eradicates all variants of the common cold, for instance.

"Okay." Lisa shrugged her shoulders. "That's okay. For now, let's just go with that being totally fine and perfect back home."

"It is," Amy insisted.

"And I'm agreeing with you," Lisa said quickly. "I get it. Here, though… This isn't home. So your rules might need to be modified for while we're here."

"No." She didn't want to do that… That wasn't a thing she could do. If she let herself bend them, then when she went back she'd be used to bending them and something would go wrong.

"Hear me out," Lisa asked. "Just… listen. Plants. You're worried about making something that ruins the other plantlife? Not that you'll lose control and hurt yourself or something?"

"It's not about my safety," Amy said bitterly.

Lisa's eyes widened. "Wow, not going to open up that bundle of issues right now," she said bluntly. "But tell me this. Who are you protecting here?"

People… But none could survive here, so there weren't any. The natural order of plants and animals and life… but that was all but nonexistent here. New Wave, from the backlash of someone meddling with life like Nilbog, but there was nobody to complain here, save for Lisa, and no New Wave to complain about.

"You," Amy said after a moment's thought. "And me. And any animals or plants that might live somewhere else on the planet… we don't know that it's lifeless."

"We just strongly suspect because this place is hellish," Lisa said dryly. "Can you even make complex creatures that could function in this world as it is? Living off moss and breathing almost no oxygen?"

"Maybe," Amy said defensively, "but I won't."

"No, my point is that if they're hard for you, then they almost certainly don't exist naturally," Lisa argued. "I don't like thinking about it, but everything my power has ever given me on the subject says we are alone here. Completely alone. Anything complex enough to think is either dead of asphyxiation, technologically advanced enough to leave the planet and never look back, or never evolved in the first place."

"So?" Amy asked. She didn't disagree… but that didn't change anything, it just refreshed her awareness of the existential horror that was the entire world.

"So what ecosystem are you trying to protect?" Lisa asked. "What government are you reassuring? Even your accidents would be better for this place than what it has right now."

"I still shouldn't…" Amy said quietly.

Lisa leaned forward, her eyes intent, staring right through Amy with their all-knowing gaze. "Here are your new rules for this planet. Be safe, run your ideas by me just in case, but don't be afraid of ruining something that doesn't exist. You are allowed to work with plants. You are allowed to make new things. Until and unless we meet someone else on this wretched rock, the only people you need to ask permission from are me and yourself."

Amy stared, transfixed by the intensity of Lisa's gaze, her words.

"No brains," Lisa said after a moment of silence between them. "For now, don't make anything smarter than a fern. No predatory plants either. Nothing toxic to us. But other than that… Our planet, our rules. My rules, if it makes you feel better about changing how you work. You're not just throwing it all away, you're getting updated directions."

Amy didn't say yes. She didn't agree, she didn't throw out her own way of thinking.

But she didn't say no, either. Because Lisa's way of thinking made sense.

"We'll start small," Lisa suggested. "I'm not throwing you into the deep end. Can you just not feel guilty about what you've made so far?"

"I'm not guilty," Amy said sullenly.

"No, I didn't ask if you could say it," Lisa retorted, "I asked if you could feel it. I know the difference."

Amy looked down at the fibrous plant-mat beneath them. She had intended the movement to only be about avoiding Lisa's piercing gaze, but… she couldn't look away, not from what the other girl meant. Her work was literally all around them.

It was… Necessary. But wrong. But not really, because it wasn't hurting anyone. Even though that was the kind of thinking she could use to justify other things…

"Is there anything wrong with this besides it breaking your old rules?" Lisa asked. "Anything at all? Is it dangerous? Does it take away someone's livelihood? Will it do anything in its existence besides keeping our butts from bruising on bare stone?"

Amy reached out and touched the mat, focusing solely on it. The rest of her varied biological creation also sprung to mind, not just the mat, the dome and lungs and vines in the water and everything attached to them…

"It's scary, stepping outside your comfort zone," Lisa whispered. "I get that. Especially when there are real monsters out there, sometimes. But you did, and when you did, you made this. Is it good?"

"Yes," Amy whispered back. She even believed it.

---

38.5 days

The creation Amy was most fond of was not her ugly oxygen-collecting plants, or solar-energy-converting leaves, or even her pipe-vines filtering and sorting the basic components of seawater into useful things. Nor was it the dome she had expanded to cover the area of a small bedroom, or the larger dome she was constructing, day by day, planned to be the size of a small house when complete.

Those were all big things, necessities; she needed them but she did not like them. Closer to the top of her mental list was the self-heating floor she finally had the spare energy to maintain, wasteful and comfortable though it was. The chairs she had grown up with their basic shape and added-on flourishes of whimsical attempts at artistry were maybe number two.

"Check," Lisa said primly, placing a thumb-sized, leafy bishop right next to Amy's scaly lizard-esque knight.

"I need to make the bishop taller, I didn't see it there," Amy complained, picking up a lizard-pawn – It was just a hunk of salt with a thin scale-like ceramic coating on the outside, byproducts filtered from the sea, but it looked cool – and moving it to block Lisa's avenue of attack. Her leaf-based pieces were a bit too puffy and confusing, but they also looked cool, like a custom chess board one would buy for hundreds of dollars online.

The chess pieces were tied with the chess board itself for the top spot on her list of power-aided creations she liked. The board was a little piece of jungle no thicker than her fist, complete with tiny fake trees and vines and a running river that separated the two sides of the board. It was like looking down at a vast jungle from far above, and the entire board was living, even if the trees were not really trees and served no purpose except looking good.

She didn't even like chess that much, but making the board had been a nice distraction. It was fun to look at, and any sort of game to play to pass the time was a godsend.

"Check for a second time," Lisa retorted, hopping one of her own knights around to a frustrating spot that meant Amy was going to lose either her queen or the game in the next turn. "Checkmate in four, I think?"

"We'll play it out," Amy said stubbornly. This wouldn't be the first time Lisa had called a checkmate, and she wasn't always right.

"Really?" Lisa asked with a sly smile.

"You're not supposed to be using your power," Amy said stubbornly, hopping her king over a tiny river to sidle up diagonal to a Rook that was blocking his escape, promising a swift defeat unless he retreated. "So you might be wrong."

"I'm not using it for this, but honestly…" Lisa swapped a bishop for a pawn on the other side of the board. "Checkmate. This isn't all that hard."

Amy scowled at the offending bishop. "I feel like you cheated somewhere," she said petulantly, fully aware of just how sore a loser she was being. Given this was her tenth loss in a row, she had a right to feel cheated. Somehow.

"Want to go back to Checkers?" Lisa asked, plucking up her pieces and settling them back into their initial positions. "Or you could try and grow us a Chutes and Ladders board."

"Never played Chutes and Ladders," Amy admitted. "So I probably can't design a board for that. Cards?"

"Your cards are too slimy," Lisa complained.

"I can't get them any more dry without making them too brittle to shuffle," Amy objected, leaning over to pick up a few of the cards in question. Replicating laminated cardstock with purely biological manipulation was surprisingly difficult; paper and plastic weren't living things, and any approximation she could come up with was either living and unwieldy, or dead beyond the limits of her power and thus impossible to further shape.

"Probably not a good idea anyway," Lisa admitted, leaning back in her chair. "It's hard enough focusing my power on the chess board itself, not your moves. A game all about bluffing would never work."

"I thought you said you were turning it off for the game," Amy objected, tossing the cards at Lisa. "You were cheating!"

"Like you can turn off your ability to see biology at a touch?" Lisa shot back, flicking the cards away from herself and then wiping her fingers on the chess board. "My power comes in two flavors: on, or off because I'm unconscious or wish I was."

"Thinker headaches," Amy guessed. She didn't get those, she wasn't a Thinker per se, her power just let her see what she needed to see to use it.

"Yes, and they are hell," Lisa said vehemently. "I haven't gotten any since we came here, but only because there's not much to use my power on."

"Just me and chess games," Amy said, moving a pawn forward to start a new game.

"I don't think you're fully understanding my pain, here," Lisa complained, shifting one of her own pawns out in response. "Painkillers don't work on Thinker headaches. Nothing works. I would have paid good money for something that did."

"Then just don't push yourself so hard," Amy suggested. That was the obvious solution.

Lisa let out a bitter laugh as they both contemplated the board. "We're back to my power having no off switch. It doesn't turn off."

"Do power nullifiers work?" Amy asked as she hopped a knight out into the open board. A little sprig of tree was trampled underfoot as she set it down, crushed into the board. It would spring right back up when she moved the piece again; she had modeled her board's foliage after weeds when it came to resilience.

"Never met one," Lisa admitted. "I assume they would."

"Then it's something that can be done," Amy concluded, not really paying the conversation any attention anymore. Their game was beginning in earnest, now.

"I would be open to finding out whether you could give me an off-switch to my powers, you know," Lisa murmured, sliding her bishop out into the center of the board.

"To the pain?" Amy asked sharply, looking up.

"Whatever is safe and works," Lisa said with a small smile. She sounded so casual about it, like it was no big deal. "Someday, if you ever feel like dipping your toes in that sort of thing."

"I don't and never will," Amy said firmly.

"Then forget I said anything," Lisa conceded. "It was just a thought. You wouldn't believe how much time I've spent in the dark wishing I could stick my hand in my head and slap my brain around until it listened to me and stopped causing problems."

"Your move," Amy said bluntly, taking Lisa's bishop with her knight.

"I don't think I'm going to win this one," Lisa groused, scowling at her bishop as Amy removed it from the board. "How the hell did I miss that?"

Amy smirked at the other girl. Maybe this time she would end her losing streak.

---

58.7 days

Amy's power gave her many advantages in life, but perfect memory was not one of them. Her memory was decidedly average, and while that usually didn't cause any problems, it was making certain things much more difficult now.

"Shit!" she exclaimed, kicking what looked like a tree sapling. It snapped like a brittle twig despite its outwardly supple appearance. Mineral deficiencies, because the bark had started crystallizing and she corrected too far in the other direction. A problem that hadn't been apparent until now. Admittedly, she caught it years before it would have killed the plant, but that just meant she got to see her failure less than a week after designing it.

Put simply, Amy didn't know how to make a tree. She hadn't hugged enough trees since getting her powers. She could turn a plant into a facsimile of an organ, or process seawater, or do anything a human body could do and quite a few things it couldn't, but designing a plant that grows and looks like a tree without her constant intervention? No, that was hard, trial and error with far more errors than trials.

At least she didn't have to worry about wasting time or precious raw materials anymore. She picked up the failed sapling and tossed it into the disturbingly organic 'mouth' in the corner of her working space. The systems to efficiently break it down would work without her direct input.

She contemplated her working space for a few moments, hands on her hips. A bare plot of dirt ten paces by ten paces, surrounded by the tall, arching walls of one section of the dome, cordoned off. Sunlight filtered in through the partially translucent top of the dome, illuminating her growing area. Simplistic grass grew in some places, several different strains fighting for dominance in an extremely slow war of attrition and assimilation.

Grass, she had figured out. That included how it reproduced, though it couldn't spread outside her domain as it was now, needing nutritionally rich dirt and no moss to take root. She should have been bothered by that, but what would have been a potential disaster back home was nothing here. Almost nothing.

She contemplated making a new sapling without the mineral problems she had just spent what felt like half the day messing with, then promptly decided to put it off until tomorrow. There was no rush, and bioengineering while frustrated rarely paid off.

It wasn't like she needed a tree, either. Wood was the end goal, just normal wood, but there were other ways to get something similar enough to pass as it. She – and Lisa – wanted something more normal, that was all.

Amy pushed open the door to the other section of the dome, what Lisa insisted on calling 'the house', and stopped in the little passage that lay behind it, closing herself in and brushing her shirt vigorously. Even if there was nowhere to spread to outside of her working space, she didn't intend to get into bad habits. If Armsmaster opened a portal or something inside their dome, her makeshift quarantine routine might be the only thing that stopped her grass from spreading to a new planet.

Though at this point, she might have been willing to risk that if it meant leaving.

Her clothing suitably cleaned – a blend of imitation cotton and imitation silk she had made herself, because no set of clothing could last two months of constant use without wearing out – she entered the other section of the dome.

It was large, five times the size of her last safety dome. Walls grew up from the floor, sectioning it into one large living area and two smaller bedrooms, each with their own bathroom. Organic lights were woven into the walls, like Christmas lights or fireflies, bathing her in a pale orange glow that could be brought up to a brighter yellow if either she or Lisa wanted it. Various pieces of furniture dotted the area, and the floors were warm.

It wasn't home, it wasn't Brockton Bay, but she was pretty sure her latest dome was big and luxurious enough to impress anyone who saw it and understood where it had come from. When rescue came, they wouldn't be found barely clinging to life in a tiny enclosure made of desperation…

Amy stopped by the door, one hand on the living wall next to it. She could feel the mostly autonomous oxygen collection efforts, the seawater reclamation, the miniature sewage processing subsection… It was all so big and complicated, reminding her more of a computer than any organism she had ever seen with her powers. None of it was meant to reproduce, it all functioned independently of her, but it all still needed occasional intervention. It was sort of like a human body, a bunch of different systems supporting life, but on a much larger scale and with a mobile, all-powerful brain.

The door to Lisa's room swung open, and she emerged long enough to grab a handful of paper-substitute Amy had managed to cook up specifically for her, taking it from one of the tables. She looked up at Amy, frowning thoughtfully. There was a black stain on the neck of her tan-colored tunic, and another running down the leg of her darker sweatpants.

"How big can you make a plant in this atmosphere before it starts to suffer from transportation failure?" Lisa asked. "Circulation, oxygenation, that sort of thing."

"You mean, how big before it takes the oxygen and everything else too much energy to get where it needs to be?" Amy asked. "That's not a limitation. I just partition and make new systems before I get to that point." If the 'heart' needed to pump too much blood too far, then she just needed another heart. It was as simple as that. Simpler, actually; her plants didn't have blood.

"Do those count as their own organisms at that point?" Lisa asked. "If you cut them apart, do both pieces survive?"

"No, why?" She didn't like making any of her side projects too difficult to kill; there was guilt over her creations, which she didn't feel as much anymore, and then there was just simple caution. Ensuring her plants were capable of dying to a weed whacker was definitely the latter.

"I'm trying to brute-force some stupid math problems and my power isn't cooperating," Lisa admitted. "It's been a while since I did anything more complicated than taxes."

"These problems involve my plants?" Amy asked suspiciously.

"Your plants and differential equations," Lisa groaned. "I'm trying to figure out how to fix this planet's crappy atmosphere. I think it's possible to do some math so that you would only need to tell me how fast they grow, how much oxygen they produce, and I'd be able to get an answer as to how long it would take… But I got my GED and didn't bother with calculus." She pulled her chair out from the table and flopped down into it, the papers hanging limply from her hand. "I spent all morning using my power to figure out what kind of math I need."

Amy could have said seeing Lisa frustrated didn't make her feel any better about her own frustrations, but if she did she would have been lying through her teeth. "My reproducing plants don't make any oxygen right now," she said. "So wouldn't the answer be 'never'?"

"Trees make oxygen, you're making trees," Lisa said dismissively. "I really wish I had taken just one college course. I remember bits and pieces from skimming through textbooks to see if there were any big unsolved problems I could figure out and sell to some schmuck who wanted to be famous, but that's it."

"You'll get it sooner or later," Amy suggested. For once, she had no problem with Lisa assuming she would make something to fix the planet; the desolate, unlivable expanse visible out their window was all the reason she needed. It would be hard, it might be frightening – she had never made something meant to spread rapidly in the real world – but she definitely wanted to try. To go outside without one of her air-squids on her face. To sit under a tree in the open air.

"Goddamn it," she cursed, spinning around. "I'm making you, don't you dare throw mineral problems in my face." Screw procrastination, she was going to start the next sapling right now.

"You're cute when you're trying to imitate a one-eyed sailor," Tattletale said mockingly. "Where did you learn to curse, the maternity ward?"

"Yes, actually," Amy shot back, looking over her shoulder. "You should hear some of the things first-time mothers yell halfway through labor."

"You should hear some of the things I'll be yelling the next time my power tells me I miscarried a two ten pages ago," Lisa grumbled, reluctantly rising from her chair. "Onward and upward, I suppose. Toward a future where we can breathe easy, one way or another."

---

90.4 days

Amy eyed her creation the way a gazelle might eye a lounging lion.

Dense, optimally-shaped blades of grass. Black with hints of purple, the former to absorb light with the utmost efficiency, and the latter to make Amy feel better about it. Wind pollination, because the wind was one of the few things she could rely on out in the wider world. Inside, on a smaller scale, it sported a highly efficient system of chemical reactions that made a square foot of the plant as good as a small tree at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen… and with inbuilt limiters to switch over to not doing so once a certain atmospheric composition was reached. All of which was necessary for it to survive, of course.

Most importantly, it was highly invasive and optimally designed to supplant the moss that currently, for all she knew, covered the planet. It also had a life cycle of four days from germination to producing pollen.

It was the most dangerous thing she had ever created, and it even looked evil, black with purple highlights, oddly shaped blades of 'grass' sprouting from the hardy base, like a weed. Unlike the moss, it was its own singular organism; she wouldn't be able to change or sense any of the offshoots that were carried away on the wind.

"Chance of mutation?" Lisa asked, a fancy 'wooden' clipboard in one hand and a pained look on her face.

"None, not for the next hundred years at least," Amy answered, feeling the plant in her hands. "I made its DNA redundant ten times over." Not to mention she had reworked the reproduction process to check all ten strands and go with the version that was in the majority; that wasn't how DNA usually worked at all, but it would mean that random induced mutations would almost never be passed on.

"Environmental pressure?" Lisa asked, marking something on the clipboard. Her forehead was creased, and she grimaced every so often. Amy felt bad about that, but at the same time, this was worth a migraine. If they messed this up or didn't check every possible thing as thoroughly as they could… There was a reason Lisa hadn't complained once about using her power so much on this.

"Not a thing," Amy said firmly. "If the environment isn't good for it, it dies. Environmental pressure effects change through evolution, and it can't evolve." Not in such a hostile environment, not quickly enough to survive. If she hadn't made it right for the environment, then it was dead, plain and simple.

"Right, right." Lisa held up her pencil, then pointed it straight at Amy. "Chemical changes. Does it react with any common compounds? Things you could find on Earth?"

"I…" She closed her eyes and focused entirely on the mental image she was getting, imagining various chemicals coming into contact with it… Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen… It would burn–

"It burns," she exclaimed. "Wildfires." Not like on Earth, not with so little oxygen in the air, but it was supposed to fix that and when it did… Fires.

"I think we still get lightning," Lisa confirmed with a pained smile. "Can you fix it?"

"Easily, now that I'm thinking about it," she huffed. Convert the outside to fire-resistant substances, remove any open spaces on the inside so that it couldn't smolder internally, redistribute some of the water reservoirs to be more evenly spread… Changing the DNA took longer than actually changing the plant itself.

"It can still burn, but now you'd have more luck burning the moss," she declared after fixing it.

"Yeah, looks like it," Lisa agreed. "Okay, next thing. Is it nutritious? Could a cow live off of it?"

"Theoretically, yes," Amy confirmed. Not that they had any animals… but futureproofing made sense. It wouldn't exactly be easy to replace this grass with a better variant once it took hold. Doable, certainly, but a hassle. She was designing it to be hardy, and now it was flame-resistant to boot.

"Good, good," Lisa muttered. "Toxins?"

"None." She was certain of that. "Some things that are toxic in large quantities, but nothing more toxic than Earth grass would be."

"Acceptably minor, within limits of irrelevance," Lisa translated. Amy suspected that she was trying to sound more 'scientific' purely to entertain herself, but she wouldn't begrudge her friend that. "How big can it grow?"

"Half a meter tall at most." No head-high fields of corn-esque grass. That would just be stupid. She had to live on this planet, all of the greenery – purple-and-blackery? – would be proportional to her.

"Thought so, but it was worth checking." Lisa hummed thoughtfully, her pale lips pressing together in a mildly pained line. "Just to be sure, we could eat this? I know it's okay for herbivores, but would it sustain us?"

"Well… No?" Amy said sheepishly. "That's kind of hard. I didn't think we would need it to be that broadly nutritious. And it would mess with you if you somehow ate enough to fill your stomach, I said that already when you asked about toxins."

"I can't pretend to be a cow, duly noted," Lisa said dryly. "It's not a problem, I'm just fucking with you." She tossed the clipboard aside. "I think we're in more danger of giving ourselves strokes worrying about this than we are in danger from the actual plants. It's good to go."

Amy was still dealing with the mental images Lisa had just provoked, so her friend's final verdict took a few moments to really sink in. "What?"

"Got a handful of seeds to dramatically toss or something?" Lisa asked, smirking knowingly as Amy shook off her stupor. "Plans for a ceremony? It's ready, so now's the time to roll out the red carpet."

"I was just going to plant all the grass I've already grown in the dirt I've been spreading outside the house," Amy admitted. "Do you want to do something more dramatic?"

"Nah." Lisa rubbed her forehead, smiling wanly. "No, it's fine. Something short would probably be better."

---

92.1 days

The grass had been spread. Even now it was taking over, replacing the now obsolete moss around their house. It would spread exponentially, aided by the wind and its ridiculously fast growth cycle. It would still take years to cover the continent, and longer to successfully reach other continents – that was mostly based on lucky winds and currents, not something Amy could directly influence – but it was spreading.

More importantly, it didn't need to cover the entire planet to fix the atmosphere. The continent would do, with how frighteningly efficient she had made its conditional output of oxygen. If something went wrong with the shutoff conditions, if the grass didn't biologically 'notice' the atmosphere's changing condition in time, the atmosphere would go from having too little oxygen to having far too much.

Lisa wasn't around to pipe in with a witty quip that distracted her from her worrying. She was still in bed, recovering. Her migraines were crippling, and she had brought them on herself pushing to get all of the safety analysis done as quickly as possible.

It wasn't even necessary to go that fast. They had literally no deadline, nothing else to take up their free time. But she had done it anyway, giving her cheerful reasons and excuses, and then she had retreated to her room.

Amy had checked her, yesterday. The migraines came straight from the brain. She could make painkillers in the bloodstream, but Lisa reported no change and Amy's observations of her body said the same.

The brain was off-limits, so there was nothing else she could do. Nothing she would do.

She was used to guilt, especially guilt over not being able to fix brains. Never before had it moved her to break her rules. The risks were too great, and nobody who would ask her to do it anyway understood that. Not really. If she made any mistake at all…

She stood, stomped on a remaining cutting of her grass – it rebounded like the invasive weed it was – and went through the totally unnecessary decontamination procedure. Right now, her work was beginning to spread across a planet. Lisa was suffering the aftereffects of making it safe.

She didn't know what she was going to do – not messing with her friend's brain – but she was at least going to do something more than sitting around brooding. That never led to good things, and Lisa wasn't around to pull her out of her funk if she let herself fall into one.

The door to Lisa's room was heavy and nondescript, a simple panel of dense plant matter calcified to make a solid, unchanging object. Much the same could be said of the walls, floor and ceiling inside. The unconnected, dead boards stopped Amy from feeling her friend's every move inside her private space. A semblance of actual privacy, at least from parahuman interpretation. Lisa had said she would do the same if she could, but her power didn't come with such workarounds.

All the carefully-designed materials in the world didn't stop Amy from physically entering the room, though. The bioluminescent lights were down low, the natural sheets were tossed on the floor, and Lisa was sitting cross-legged on her bed, head in her hands.

"Still bad?" Amy asked.

"Getting better," Lisa said, not looking up. "Seriously, I've had worse. Just… Not in at least three months. Kind of forgot how bad they could get."

Amy sat down beside her. "Can I take another look?"

"Don't tell me what you're seeing if you do, I don't need to know anything right now." Lisa took one hand off her face to give to Amy.

Her mostly normal biology sprang into view in Amy's mind, complex but relatively small. Compared to the behemoth connected systems she dealt with on a daily basis, anyway.

Lisa was physically at the peak of health that only close contact with a biokinetic healer could grant someone. Her bones were perfectly dense, her heart worked just fine, her lungs were clear of even the smallest speck of contamination from imperfect air. She had curves in all the right places and not a speck of unhealthy excess fat, any and all suboptimal fat deposits long since burned away to fuel Amy's corrections over the last few months. She ate well, slept only slightly less than she should, and had the expected balance of hormones for a young adult suffering severe, chronic pain.

Amy's analysis was inevitably drawn to the brain, the only place such pain could be coming from in a body so normal and uninjured. Here, she would glance and see a complicated mess of natural synapses and brain fluid, and then she would look away, because there was nothing to be done.

That was what she had done last time, but she was done feeling useless. She would look and not touch, but she would at least look. She had done so before, back when she was new to her power. It didn't hurt anything, and maybe she could at least determine whether these power-induced migraines were doing any permanent damage.

She watched Lisa's brain, waiting for something to jump out at her. So much information ran through her on a subconscious level, synapses firing like an endless display of fireworks, and all of it was normal. All except for the pulses originating in the little tumor tucked away in a hard-to-reach spot near the back of her head.

Amy had seen many such tumors since she got her powers. They usually – but not always – came with parahuman powers, part and parcel of whatever allowed otherwise normal humans to see emotions or build ray guns without knowing anything about physics. There would be a single anomalous lump somewhere, varying in size depending on the parahuman, and a bunch of connections to all over the rest of the brain. Said connections carried information. They had to, for Lisa to suddenly know more than she should.

"Are you getting any insight from your power right now?" Amy asked softly.

"No… Ugh, don't talk," Lisa groaned. "Just did, for what it's worth."

Amy saw an elaborate set of flashes from the tumor to the brain, entirely incomprehensible to her. They didn't need to be comprehensible for her to recognize what they were for, though… And for her to rule out 'conveying insight' as the purpose of the steady background pulses she had been seeing this whole time.

Lisa's power was doing two things. Right now, it was sending a steady stream of input, and Lisa was suffering from a migraine. When she received insights, a single set of signals went out. The two were different. As brain functions went, it was relatively rudimentary. Near impossible to detect or affect with conventional medicine, but Amy could just block the connections, all of them. Or reroute them, send them firing into dummy synapses disconnected from the rest of the brain. The tumor wasn't receiving any feedback from the pain-giving signals, but if it was and she just didn't see it she could make the fake synapses resemble the ones the pain signals were supposed to go to.

That would block everything, though; the same channels used for pain were used for insight. The signals went to different places once they were in the brain proper, but they came through the same connection.

Lisa had said several times that she would like an off switch for her power. Not just the pain, all of it. Amy thought she could shut it off, but making something that allowed Lisa to turn it on and off at will?

It wouldn't work like a normal brain connection; Amy understood those, but she didn't feel safe designing a totally new one. She also wasn't going to alter any of Lisa's brain, not like that. That way led to horrible things not worth imagining. But the tumor wasn't Lisa's brain, not really…

She could make a crude little biological electrical switch. If a synapse fired into it, the tumor connection would be physically rerouted – she could make the physical mechanisms for that easily enough, the body below the neck had plenty of inspiration for her to work from – to a set of dummy synapses. Every connection would have that happen at once, seamlessly switching from stimulating Lisa's brain to stimulating 'Lisa's brain' but really just some responseless neurons. The tumor wouldn't know the difference, and Lisa wouldn't get anything until she consciously switched it back.

The only sticking point was 'training' Lisa's neurons that firing into this one new connection did that. A few dozen or maybe hundred repetitions, with some careful monitoring… They'd need to test it. Extensively. But it was a deceptively simple contraption and the brain was adaptable, so a new binary output should be well within the limits of what could be integrated. There was non-Tinker science doing the same thing for prosthetic limbs, or at least operating under the same principles and getting hung up on the difficulty of implementation.

Amy almost did it. She almost started with her alterations.

Lisa's hand, long forgotten in her grip, twisted out of her grasp.

Amy looked up and met Lisa's haggard, pained gaze. "Ask first," Lisa reminded her. "What is it?"

"I think I can give you that off switch you want," Amy admitted. With anyone else she might have tried to hide her discovery, but Lisa could drag it out of her at the cost of even more agony. Not in any way worth it. "It won't mess with your brain at all, just the connections the tumor made between it and you, and a few dummy lines for it to send input to…"

She explained her idea at length, walking Lisa through every detail she could articulate. Lisa's expression grew pained, but she made no effort to interrupt. When Amy was done…

"My power says it would work, and says my quality of life would improve, which I guess proves it's either not self-aware or has my best interests in mind," Lisa announced. "God, Amy, why do you have to spring spiraling lines of existential investigation on me in the middle of a migraine?"

"I–" Amy began, only to be silenced by a hand literally clapped over her mouth.

"Do it, make it good, and keep an eye on it while I sleep the sleep of the dead afterward," Lisa growled. "I consent a thousand times over, make it before you start second-guessing a perfectly reasonable compromise."

Amy nodded and set to work.

---

134.6 days

"Yeah, I'd say Vista is the most lethal Ward in Brockton Bay," Lisa concluded, leaning back in her wood-substitute chair. "And the ones in charge of her think the same. Ever wonder why they never gave her any sort of weapon? She would be insanely effective with a taser, for instance."

Amy snorted indelicately. "I know why they don't arm her, heard straight from the horse's mouth. The Protectorate wants to update her costume, and that theoretically includes the potential for nonlethal weapons, but the ones in charge of designing the updates to go with any changes are stuck on a 'princess' aesthetic and refusing to change it. She's vetoing all of their suggestions and everybody above them either doesn't care or likes her current one, meaning they're stuck at an impasse until somebody bends or she turns eighteen and gains the upper hand."

"But she could just… Ugh." Lisa stared up at the ceiling, a thoughtful frown crossing her face. "Yeah, nope, powers don't have anything to say about it. Back to the dungeon with you!" She mimed slamming a door shut, if said door was floating right above her head.

Amy smiled, the warm glow of a job well done far from fading, even weeks after confirming that her power-redirecting switch worked perfectly. She still got a little thrill every time Lisa went from a mildly pained squint to a relaxed smile without Amy needing to do a thing.

"That's just stupid," Lisa concluded. "Somebody needs to teach her negotiation. Don't they have hostage negotiation classes, at least? The hostage is her weaponry, and the PR department is holding it for ransom."

"Don't know," Amy replied. "When we get back…"

The silence that fell between them was heavy. When they got back… If they got back.

"Could be we don't get back in time for that advice to be useful," Lisa said slowly. Testing her, watching closely. Amy didn't even need to look at Lisa to know that. Of the two of them, Lisa was the one who always had to be on guard, keeping an eye out for mental landmines.

But this was a wound that had at some point in the last few months begun to close, and Amy was tired of being handled. "Could be we never get back," she said casually. "No way to know."

"None at all," Lisa agreed. "And… you're not freaking out about that."

"What good would it do?" Amy asked, leaning forward. She fixed her friend with a flat, serious stare. "Maybe we're rescued tomorrow. Maybe next month. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe never. I can't do a damn thing to affect the outcome." She did biology, and when she thought 'biology capable of creating targeted interdimensional portals' her power didn't even stir. It wasn't within her capabilities.

"Sure, that's fair," Lisa conceded. "Me, I don't really mind the wait. It's boring here sometimes, but we're fixing that. We've got the basic creature comforts, social media withdrawal was a bitch but I'm over it, and by my estimate we'll be able to go outside without the air-squids as early as next year. There are worse fates."

"My family is missing me, thousands of people are dying in hospitals, I missed the last Endbringer fight." Maybe Lisa didn't mind being here, missing out on her life, but Amy had responsibilities.

"You know what I didn't hear just now?" Lisa asked, her voice sharp and her words precise. "I didn't hear anything about you missing it. Home. Only about people back home missing you."

"I miss Vicky," Amy retorted. She missed Vicky in more ways than were decent or right. She might have been embarrassed about giving Lisa a cue to dig into that situation if there was any chance Lisa hadn't already been told by her power at some point in the preceding months. But as it stood…

"Yeah, sure, but you're not missing being around her." Lisa held both hands up. "There's missing someone," she said, lifting her left hand. "And then there's missing being around them." Her right joined the left. "Which is it?"

"Both." She scowled at the other girl.

"Didn't sound like it," Lisa shot back.

"Does it matter?" Amy demanded. "We're stuck here. When I wake up every day I can either start out hoping today is the day I get to go back to my life, or I can make my life worth living here. Only one of those involves me definitely getting to have a life, and both have me missing the few things and people I actually miss in the meantime."

"Yes, but…" Lisa frowned and shook her head, leaning back in her chair. "No buts, that's a healthy way to cope. Suspiciously healthy. Where is the bundle of jagged edges and problems I got dumped here with?"

"I guess distance was what I needed," Amy muttered. Distance from her life. From the pressure, from the responsibility, from the judgment, self-inflicted and not. Being forced to live by her powers alone, spending months making things instead of fixing the same problems over and over.

"To distance, then," Lisa proposed, miming holding out a drink. "And making this place awesome while we wait."

"To distance." Amy mimicked her friend's actions, and they knocked imaginary cups together. "And before you ask, I'm not making alcohol for us."

"If you turn twenty-one before we leave?" Lisa suggested.

"Sure." If that happened, maybe. But there were more interesting things to make in the meantime. She would make the most of however much time they had here. Lisa was right, there were definitely worse fates.

---

473.5 days

Amy pulled up her practical custom-fitted overalls, donned a totally unnecessary straw-imitation hat, and examined her reflection in the still pool gracing the center of her ridiculously luxurious master bedroom. The juxtaposition of a veritable palace bedroom and a rugged set of clothing meant for mucking about in the dirt amused her, as it always did.

Her daily self-satisfied smirk done with, she left her room, ventured down the spacious hallway, and continued through the vaulted open space that made up the courtyard. The ceiling of the dome above was completely transparent, but it was a cloudy day so the sun was still absent. The small gargoyles Lisa had crafted by hand from clay loomed impotently to either side of the archway leading to her wing of the building, each resting atop a wooden pedestal.

When one had a lot of free time, no lack of raw materials, and no alternatives, one naturally turned to artistic pursuits of all kinds to fill the days. For Lisa, that meant sculpting and woodworking, the latter surprisingly enhanced by the contributions of her power. As it turned out, knowing the location of every knot and imperfection in a given piece of wood was something of an advantage.

Amy's favored method of artistic expression was slightly more exotic. She made her way over to the 'outside' dome, walking down the joining passage of airtight cellulose reminiscent of her first domes, and out into the field.

Two four-legged creatures stumbled about, their long legs ungainly as they wobbled across the dark grass toward her. They were adults, though she had kept them to the size of large dogs, and she had hoped her latest attempt at instincts would have steadied out their gaits by now.

A much more well-proportioned creature followed after them on two steadier and shapely legs. "Hey, the master of life, death, and obesity is up!" Lisa yelled as she followed the mini-horses. "Timmy the third fell down the well."

"I specifically gave Timmy the third an aversion to holes in the ground after what happened to Timmy the second," Amy complained. "Did he really?" She had long since ceded naming rights to Lisa, under the reasoning that if she didn't Lisa would name them anyway.

"No, but I cling to making references as a way to remember the old world," Lisa deadpanned. "Where will we be when we forget the invaluable lessons taught by old television shows?"

"Lessons like 'make your completely unnecessary but thematically appropriate farm structures too small to fall into,'" Amy agreed. "Clearly we would be lost."

"Clearly." Lisa smirked as both mini-horses reached Amy and smacked into her legs. Amy reached down to pet both, immediately assessing their condition. They weren't as coordinated as she would like, and if they didn't get any better in the next few weeks she would have to tweak the next generation, but she still had good feelings about these two. Animals back on Earth Bet didn't spring out of the womb with perfect grace. Some learning time was to be expected.

Besides, she was still riding the high of being this far along in designing animals in less than a year of effort. She only had one template physically there to use as a reference, that of a human, but her horses looked mostly right! They weren't actually horses, she was definitely missing a lot of little details and their DNA was completely different, but aesthetically and behaviorally they were horses and that was what she was going for.

"It's amazing what you can do with enough time and boredom," Lisa remarked. "Did you check their aggression instincts?"

"They don't have any yet, and that hasn't changed." She scratched the left animal between the long ears. "I think these two might actually make the cut." Intelligent enough to function independently of her once they were old enough. It would be another first in the long line of firsts required to create a species from scratch.

"Not like this, surely," Lisa objected.

"They'll get more coordinated." She would have to make new versions, obviously. These didn't have reproductive organs or any of the necessary instincts to know to use them, for one thing. That was going to be… not difficult, but complicated.

She glanced up at Lisa. Her eyes went to places they really shouldn't, and she felt her face heating up.

"I'd be more flattered if I weren't literally the only human on the planet," Lisa deadpanned.

Amy flushed and looked away. "I was thinking about what to change next in these two," she denied. "I was thinking… Maybe the entire species can be hermaphrodites?" She struggled to force her mind away from her gaffe. Lisa was… Lisa, and Amy was not willing to fall into the same trap she had with Victoria. Not again. Not even if those overalls were just tight enough–

"Only one set of instincts with absolutely no gender variation to figure out," Lisa said, interrupting her very unproductive train of thought. She scratched the back of one of the proto-horses as she spoke, her fingernails dragging through keratin-based fur. "Albeit a more complicated single set of instincts. That could work, but isn't it a crutch? Unless you want every species you design to come equipped with both sets of parts."

"It might be a crutch, but I don't have to go for the most complicated possible setup with my first ever species," Amy replied, thankful they were onto safer topics. "They won't be real horses if I make them that way, but that's okay."

"Who said we want real horses as the final product?" Lisa asked. She held both hands over the proto-horse's head, let it snuffle her fingers for a moment, then put her hands on its shoulders. "I'm thinking wings, starting here and going," she moved her hands up to head height, "to here. Relatively speaking."

"I need to figure out birds first!" Amy objected.

"Yeah, but we're not going to stick with the boring stuff, are we?" Lisa pressed. "Come on. You're populating a world with whatever you can imagine. Unicorns, griffins, dragons, mermaids… We could go full fantasy with just a little extra work and then it wouldn't be fantasy anymore."

"Yeah." They hadn't discussed it prior to now, she hadn't thought about it, but she liked the idea. It would be harder than developing animals she knew could exist, but difficulty really only meant extra time, and she had all the time in the world.

"But not mermaids," she said after a moment's thought. "That would be weird. Too close to human." She couldn't make fish with human features without feeling like the most perverted–

"I see," Lisa drawled. "You want something further from human, then?" A teasing smile graced her face.

"What? No!" now she was definitely blushing, even though Lisa was totally wrong. She yanked her hands away from the proto-horses, their biology fading away from her perception, and did her best to look Lisa in the eye. "No. Because I'm not making anything sapient, not because of… that."

"Never?" Lisa asked.

"Not for now, and maybe not ever," she qualified. It wasn't a rule Carol had imposed – well, it was, but she had discarded those long ago – and she had good, logical reasons. "I don't want to be responsible for that. For them. Animals are simple, it's okay if I mess them up a dozen times over to get something decent on the thirteenth try. I'm not doing that to people." Her first legitimate attempt to make something sapient would either be a total success or make her a murderer or torturer, with absolutely no middle ground between the two. And then would come dealing with the thousands of problems… "No. Nothing that speaks, nothing smarter than an intelligent animal."

"People do tend to spoil nature," Lisa conceded with an easy smile. "Okay. No humanoids, nothing that can blame you for creating it."

"Thank you." Lisa had a habit of pushing when she felt the rules Amy was setting were unreasonable, and usually Amy let her push, but this was something she didn't want to compromise on. That Lisa wasn't pushing, wasn't inserting her opinion as the designated sanity-checker and occasional therapist, meant that she thought this was reasonable.

One of the proto-horses nuzzled at Amy's leg, a gesture of affection she had not directly designed it to know to do, and she laughed. Progress was definitely being made.

---

600.8 days

Amy jogged up a spiral staircase, working up a sweat. She could have walked or taken the biological elevators she and Lisa had spent a solid week designing, but she needed to work off some extra energy. They had spent the entire day relaxing in the pool, and…

She tried not to think about it, but it was hard and time wasn't making it any easier. If anything, time was making it worse. Nearly two years was a long time to spend away from everything and alone with one specific person.

She reached the top of the lookout tower, ascending the final set of steps and pacing out into the observatory. It was a half-sphere made of reinforced, biologically-produced glass, with a secondary layer of clear but strong collagen coating the inside in case something ever broke the glass.

The sun was setting to the West, a vivid blaze of orange and gold. She blinked, hard, and turned her back on the blinding light. Off to the East, dark grass cast nearly invisibly shadows on itself, a hilly expanse of purple-black waves going out to the horizon. There were a few trees in the distance, spreading slowly but surely.

Closer to home, as she looked down between her feet, the sprawling exterior of the complex she had built took up wide swathes of land. It was a multi-layered brown tumor of wood-like exterior, complete with odd patches of more delicate biological machinery sticking out in some places.

All of which was nice to see, but not nearly distracting enough. She was still flustered. Still dealing with feelings that had no place on this world.

Things were good here. Her work was interesting and in its own way more vital than healing individuals ever could be, with none of the attached stress or guilt. She missed her family… vaguely. Mostly Victoria. It was easier to miss them from afar than to contemplate actually seeing them again. Maybe they felt the same way, seeing as nobody had ever come.

She had left all of that stress behind… But nothing was ever good forever, and it was starting back up again here in one specific way.

Lisa wasn't her adopted sister, thankfully. But it was still so awkward and even more so because she knew Lisa knew and wasn't saying anything. She knew that if they had some sort of falling out it would be horrible, because they were stuck together. And she knew, from looking into Lisa's head among other things, that Lisa didn't – wouldn't – couldn't – feel the same way.

"Can't help but lust after the one girl you can't have," Amy bitterly chided herself. She sat down on the tacky surface of the translucent floor, sticking her legs out and leaning back on her hands. The biology of the entire complex burst into her mind, and she lost herself in it for a moment.

Or, she tried to. But for all that it was the largest composite organism she had ever seen, her attention was drawn to one place. Not the stables, not the indoor fields, not the false caves, none of the orchards or oxygen processors…

Lisa was lounging on the grassy bank by the pool. The fake grass that acted more as a variable sponge to soak up water and didn't actually grow, all connected to the larger structure of it all. Within Amy's senses. It was currently depressed in a way that implied Lisa was lying on her stomach, soaking up the sun-like lights built into the ceiling. She knew from spending the afternoon down there with Lisa that the other woman was wearing a simple one-piece bathing suit, unless she had taken it off now that she was alone.

She was beautiful, and she was out of reach. Her power was probably off – she kept it off most of the time now, only letting it out when she actively wanted to use it – so she wouldn't have any chance of knowing she was being spied on.

Amy liked to think she was a better person now than she had been years ago, but she still hesitated to 'look' away from the depression on the grass, the shape she could interpret if she tried.

This was the most she was likely to ever get. Watching from afar. Just with Victoria.

But it could be worse. It had been worse, with Victoria. She leaned forward, broke contact with the ground, and returned to just herself in the observatory.

At least she wasn't agonizing over doing something irreversible with a single touch. She was better than that, and thanks to all her work with various brains over the last two years she now knew it wasn't so simple. Nothing that could be done in a single moment or even a single session, not if she wanted to actually change something without leaving all sorts of other side-effects. And in that time Lisa would know, and Lisa would make her change it back. Her power, her foreknowledge of what Amy was capable of…

It was comforting to know that she probably couldn't do it and get away with it. It made her feel more like a normal person.

She sat there for a while, watching the sky darken as the sun set behind her. The sky was breathtaking on this Earth, lacking light pollution, and the stars came out amidst swirls of pale light, the Milky Way in all its glory.

The sight did nothing to calm her thoughts, but it was distracting in its own way.

Until lightly-clad feet made the stairs below creak, that was. "Hey," Lisa said softly. "Am I intruding?"

"No," Amy said, though the answer was probably yes if she was being truthful.

"Good." Lisa came up the rest of the way, and Amy noticed that she was wearing a simple white robe, one of the many things they had designed to fill their closets in the last few years. She hadn't seen Lisa wearing it in a long while.

Lisa sat down beside Amy, close enough to touch but not too close. Her blond hair looked silver in the moonlight.

"It kind of sucks that we're the only ones here to see this," Lisa remarked. "But it's also… special. To be the only ones to see it."

"It is." This world was theirs, and only theirs. In a few years the area around their compound would be teeming with life, and in time it would spread, but it would still be theirs. Unless rescue came, but Amy found it easier to just assume it was never coming.

"There's something I want to ask you to do," Lisa said softly. "I'd like you to hear me out before you answer."

"Go ahead," she said nervously.

"I know how you feel about me," Lisa said bluntly, though her voice was still soft. "I don't resent you for it, or anything like that. But it's getting awkward and that's bothering me because it's bothering you. I've given it some thought… and I'm not interested in you that way. Not physically. Not even with my power off, though I'll admit that it does a lot more to make things less gross than you'd think, even though I still know what it's told me in the past…" Lisa trailed off.

"Oh." Amy said, reacting to the most important thing Lisa had said. That she wasn't interested. She knew that already, of course, but to hear it said directly…

"That said," Lisa continued, still looking out at the stars, "we're going to be here indefinitely, and we are literally the only two humans on the planet that we know of. I'll probably get bored in a few decades."

Amy turned to stare at her. "What?"

"Sorry…" Lisa rubbed at her face with an open palm. "Sorry. That came out wrong. God, that really came out wrong. Forget I said anything about boredom, that was me being stupid. Now is not the time to start making dumb excuses because I don't want to talk about my feelings."

"Okay?" Amy said weakly. She didn't know where this was going. It almost sounded like Lisa was going to ask her to reconsider her decision not to make sapient beings, but… she wasn't going to change her mind on that. Not even if Lisa asked.

"You're pretty easy to get along with, now that most of your big issues are smoothed out," Lisa continued, regaining some of the blunt forwardness Amy knew and admired. "We get along. You're fun and snarky and bitch right back when I get out of hand, and we've argued way less than any two people have any right to over the course of several years stuck together. I know you like me, and I can totally imagine a me with different interests liking you right back. So, here's my request. I want another switch."

"What?" Amy asked.

"In my head," Lisa clarified. "Like for my power, though it will probably be more complicated than that and I don't know if you even can, but if you could…" She trailed off, and for once Amy got to see Lisa embarrassed over something, her cheeks flushing red as she looked away. She would have savored it more if she could think about anything other than what her friend had just requested.

"Is this to make me happier?" Amy asked, voicing one of her many fears. That Lisa was only doing this to keep her mentally stable and preserve the person literally keeping her alive. Maybe she saw it as inevitable that something would happen, and wanted to get ahead of it and make the change on her own terms instead of waiting until Amy cracked beyond self-control–

"What?" Lisa winced. "No, not that. Seriously, no. Look, it can wait until the atmosphere is fixed if you want, that way if everything really goes wrong you're not worried about holding life support for ransom. This power dynamic we've got right now is badly lopsided, way too much for any kind of healthy relationship, so… yeah, good point. It needs to wait at least until we can walk around outside without slowly suffocating."

"But… you still want to do it." She hadn't changed Victoria, and she wouldn't change Lisa. Not against her will. But Lisa was asking. "Not for me. For you. You know how you are now isn't bad, right?" Lisa was being very vague about it, but it seemed to Amy that she might just want another off-switch – or, in this case it would be an on-switch – and that didn't sit right with her.

"If I thought that I'd have been on you about this years ago, so no," Lisa retorted with a roll of her eyes. "It's not like with my power except that you're fiddling with my brain in both cases. I want control, not to be fixed. There's nothing to fix here, but there are options. You get it? I know you can do it and I know I like making my own choices. Why not take that as far as it can go and see what happens?"

"And if I couldn't do it?" Amy asked. She did understand, in a way, but she still had reservations.

"I would muddle through like everyone else does." Lisa shrugged. "Maybe I could do some experimenting anyway, though I'm really not sure how I would start given… you know." She gestured toward the endless plains stretching out to the horizon. "Still doable, though, with or without your powers smoothing the way. I don't need this, it's not necessary or essential in any way. But you can do it and I can't see a reason not to ask you to. I'm asking you to give me the keys to my own mind and I'll figure out what I like to like, if that makes sense. Maybe I'll end up preferring how I am now, maybe not. There's nothing wrong with you doing that for me, is there?"

Amy had to admit that Lisa had a point. She could do that. She wouldn't be enforcing her will, no more than when she made it possible for Lisa to shut off her power. Even less so here, since this wasn't something that needed fixing in the first place. So long as it wasn't her in control, the worst that could happen was a big blow-out that ruined their friendship. That wasn't out of the question if she did nothing, though, so it wasn't any more of a risk. Or maybe it was, and she just badly wanted a chance and was convincing herself otherwise.

"It's kind of risky, and you were totally right that it should wait until I'm not dependent on your active interference to continue living, but… think about it." Lisa leaned back, laying to look directly up at the sky. "I know I have been for months."

Amy would definitely think about it. She was going to have trouble thinking of anything else.

---

955.2 days

The day had finally come. Freedom.

Not the freedom to return to Earth Bet. Three years and counting and not so much as a spark on the hilltop they had first arrived on. Not the freedom of being rescued.

The freedom of knowing that there was finally nothing to be rescued from.

Amy stood in a basketball-court-sized dome. Behind her, playing in the grass, a dozen different species waited, oblivious to her intentions. Crimson-feathered falcons swooped through the air, chasing the puffs of airy nutrient-fluff created by helium-filled air jellyfish, her first air creatures and her first symbiotic species pairing. On the ground, majestic brown griffins grazed alongside winged horses, both species stepping lightly to avoid trodding on the numerous little creatures akin to guinea pigs and mice and voles.

In another dome nearby, she had carnivores, separate from the herbivores and peaceful omnivores for obvious reasons. They were all instinctively averse to attacking humans unless the human harmed them first, but they had no such aversions toward their intended prey. Lisa waited there, walking among the silver-furred lions and blue crocodiles and massive emerald-green eagle-snakes with no fear.

Elsewhere, in a higher dome on the other side of the entire compound, the apex predators waited patiently. The most intelligent creatures Amy had created, not sapient but more akin to crows than sparrows when it came to cunning, unlike the rest.

She would go up to them last. The panther-esque dragons she had designed were capable of flight, swimming, and running, and would never lack for prey among even the lesser predators. They had no fire – the necessary biology would require taking in far too many elements her plants and other animals didn't supply – but they had teeth and wicked claws and all the killer instinct of felines. Their wings were sharp and angular, and they were set low to the ground, capable of sneaking, sprinting, and mauling with angular heads and large multi-colored eyes.

They were also curious, cute, and entirely willing to carry humans around on their backs after a little scale-scratching. She might have gone overboard, but the dominant non-human species on the planet needed to be special.

And then there were the ocean creatures, but she hadn't put much effort into those yet. A few dozen species of basic fish to provide food, some plankton, and a few types of coral that wouldn't be nearly as fragile as the kind back on Earth Bet.

This wasn't the end of her efforts to fill out the world with new life, it was only the start. But it was a good start, and today was the day it began in earnest.

Today was the day she opened the dome and set the first two groups free. Set herself and Lisa free. The atmosphere was not quite up to the final intended level of oxygen yet, but it was close enough that it was survivable with little discomfort.

A hand on the wall, an exertion of will, and it was done. A crack grew in the dome, splitting it down the middle. The walls were drawn down under the ground, broken down as they went to be recycled into another part of the compound. The sun shone down on the animals, and soon all that remained of this particular dome was a pillar reaching up to Amy's hand to maintain the connection as the rest disappeared.

The animals she had created did not hesitate to spread out into the dark, grassy fields and beyond, flying and floating and running and jumping away in all directions. They were not wild, nothing on her planet was wild yet, but they had the drive to move, to explore, to spread out and then procreate. The first dozen generations of herbivores would have massively increased fertility to jump-start things.

She waited, the unfiltered, undimmed sun on her face. Her chest heaved as her lungs worked a bit harder to compensate for the thin air, but she continued to breathe as her animals disappeared into the tall grass.

The predators were next. They were all full and sluggish, and she had made them so that they wouldn't immediately cull the populations meant to grow to sustain them, so she wasn't worried about them immediately making this joyous day a slaughter. She saw the two sinuous green eagle-snakes fly out overhead, swooping and diving playfully around each other. In the distance, a lion roared.

Closer to home, Lisa approached from around the side of the compound, her tunic rippling in the wind. "Looks good!" she called out as she approached. "We kept a few of each as a backup, right?"

"They're still inside, yes." If any of the species she had released today for some reason died out, she could restart them. She could probably do it from memory if she had to, but keeping a few live subjects to copy was a lot easier. "You've still got those extra guinea pigs in case I want to feed the eagle-snakes later?"

"They're cute and they like my room," Lisa said defensively. "You'll take them over my dead body." She came up beside Amy, smiling widely. "This is it, huh?"

"This is the beginning." There were years of work ahead of them. Observation, travel, experimentation, refinement… She was looking forward to it all. Especially riding the panther-dragons around; there was a reason she had designed their backs to snugly fit a human rider without poking up in inconvenient places. They would be the primary mode of transportation on this planet.

"The beginning," Lisa agreed. "The world is open to us, now."

And it was finally a world worth exploring.

---

1024.9 days

It was amazing how fast Amy got used to flying as a passenger again after several years stuck on the ground. It was easier now; the ones carrying her were a lot larger and literally made for the task. She also wasn't physically attracted to her carrier this time around, which was a huge bonus when it came to trying to concentrate on literally anything else.

Two panther-dragons flew through the sky, just below the clouds, each carrying a human between their wings. Amy rode a blue-scaled beauty Lisa had insisted they name soon, while Lisa herself rode the gray-scaled male of the pair who seemed more interested in the little bits of food they could offer than in them.

They had been flying for days, stopping every night to rest on the endless purple grass that blanketed the world from horizon to horizon. Amy was already planning several different kinds of tree to make up for the visual sameness, if nothing else. They had outflown the spread of the land-bound animals, and then soon after the spread of the air-borne creatures, meaning the grass was completely untouched. It rose to knee height in some places, the ones that got the most water and sunlight, but was otherwise a uniform surface.

The most interesting thing around was Lisa. Amy tried not to be caught looking at her too often, but the more bored she became the harder it was to resist stealing glances. As of three weeks ago, there was a chance she would catch Lisa looking back at her speculatively.

They hadn't said anything about it, beyond Amy giving her the requested mental 'switch' and Lisa confirming that it worked. There was no discussion as to what would come next, and Amy didn't want to push.

They set down for the night when the panther-dragons decided it was time to rest, landing atop a small plateau that sported some bare rock in addition to patches of the purple grass. In a sea of uniform color, even something as simple as tan stone was an eye-catching landmark.

Amy dismounted, and both panther-dragons watched attentively as she set about converting a big patch of the grass into something they could eat. It was easier than it would have been back on Earth Bet; she had made this grass herself, and it was simply a matter of rearranging the contents. The panther-dragons could eat plants, it was just a matter of forming those plants into something they would want to eat when they could just turn around and fly back to where more flavorful prey lived.

Bribery and favors were how the panther-dragons operated, and for Amy that made for very light traveling. A single pack of nutrient-dense material to make into food for her and Lisa, and two sleeping bags, nothing more. Anyone else trying to travel the same way would be severely limited by how much meat they could bring along to pay their carriers.

Not that there would be anyone else traveling like this.

She and Lisa set out the sleeping bags in companionable silence, then separated to deal with the unpleasant aspect of roughing it out of sight of each other. The panther-dragons wandered off, chasing each other into the distance. They would be back for more easy food in the morning.

Amy returned to their sleeping bags, picked up a bit of nutrient block, and began fiddling with it. It was technically a living organism akin to moss, but much more densely packed and without any method of spreading or reproducing, a living container of raw materials. She couldn't make pizza or hamburgers or anything too complicated from its limited stores, but she could do a passable imitation of pasta, which was easy because it could be extruded. A bit messy to eat without utensils or plates, though. She settled on flatbread and something approximating beef, though the protein stores were running perilously low after that.

Lisa returned, and Amy pointed out the flatbread and meat after taking her hand to kill off any and all bacteria on it.

"Thanks," Lisa said, sitting cross-legged on her sleeping bag. "How are the supplies?"

"We're running low on usable proteins," Amy admitted. "We've got a few more days out here before we have to turn back, I think."

"No problem." Lisa picked up a piece of flatbread and folded it in half. "Seen one dark valley, seen them all. Planning on adding some spooky black trees to complete the look?"

"I was thinking of a couple of different kinds of trees that are all mutually exclusive," Amy said thoughtfully. "That way they'll naturally form big groups, forests of different colors."

"Seasonal or evergreen?" Lisa asked.

"Some of both," she said, waving her own flatbread for emphasis. "I think I can make the seasonal ones turn all sorts of colors with the right adjustments." She noticed that Lisa wasn't eating. Just holding her flatbread and staring. "What?"

"You're cute when you're playing god," Lisa said seriously. "God of planet decoration, anyway."

"Thank you?" Amy said carefully. She was sure she was blushing, but she wasn't going to–

"And I think I want to kiss you, right now," Lisa continued earnestly. "Up for it?"

Amy mustered the courage to lean forward. "Have been for years," she murmured. "But if this doesn't work out…"

"Can't know until we try?" Lisa suggested. "If I wasn't willing to try I wouldn't have asked you to help me make it possible." Her smile was knowing, but Amy thought she knew Lisa better than that by now. She didn't know any more than Amy did about how this would work. Her power was leashed and she wouldn't be using it now.

A distant, resonant roar had them both glancing up. The panther-dragons were high above them, play-fighting in the air.

Lisa opened her mouth to say something else, but Amy mustered up the courage to lean further forward, and Lisa copied her, and then they were awkwardly kissing. Lisa's biology came into view through the contact, but Amy ignored it, focusing just on the feeling. The wonderful, heart-pounding, awkward, anticipated, unexpected feeling.

Sitting there, on a formerly desolate planet rejuvenated by her work, kissing a girl who liked her back, bereft of responsibilities or stress beyond that which she truly wanted to take on, Amy was happy.

---

Author's Note: I wrote this because I thought about it and realized that I had never read any story that had a believable genesis to a Lisa/Amy pairing. For obvious reasons, but still, it's not impossible to set up believably. Just highly improbable (Amy's pre-set fixation on Victoria and other hangups, different sides of the hero-villain divide, Lisa being asexual, their first interaction in canon being Lisa doing her best to hold Amy's deepest secrets and fears ransom…). This was my attempt to put them in a position where it could work. Not sure how well I did (it's hard to keep to any semblance of a canon characterization when the characters are completely removed from their normal environment, who knows whether it actually works from the average reader's perspective, and romance is hard anyway) but I'm okay with how it turned out.

Moving on from the romance aspect, I was inspired as to the setting and initial plot device by a one-shot I remember from somewhere about Amy getting sent to a lifeless planet because something went wrong in the bank heist involving Tinkertech, which was a great setup but cut out right before the part I would have loved to read, her actually surviving there. 'Stranded in the wilderness' is an interesting prompt for certain Worm characters; I might do it again with a less extreme stranding and a less perfectly suited POV character.

And in case anyone was wondering… When I originally came up with this, I had plans for them to eventually be rescued. I had a technological-sounding excuse for why rescue was so long in coming, and how it would be time dilation so they were only gone for a month from Earth Bet's point of view… but as I wrote this, I realized that none of that was interesting. The very premise of them eventually coming back is so trite and cliche, in fanfiction specifically. It doesn't add anything to this story, which is about them and their new planet.

So, in the canon of this story, they are never rescued. Amy might outgrow her reluctance to create sapience (one way or another), so they might not spend their entire lives as the only two people in the world, but whatever freak of unlikely Tinkertech interaction sent them out, it proves to be non-replicable over on Earth Bet. No Faultline portals are made searching them out, and Cauldron either cannot reach them or has no desire to. If Gold Morning comes, it does not target them; what does Scion care about a world with no apparent population aside from two parahumans, when he has so many more population-dense areas to ruin first? Taylor may or may not make her way to Gold Morning with the right mindset, and if she does Bonesaw might be there to take Amy's place in creating Khepri… Who may or may not notice and grab both Panacea and Tattletale to help. From there? Whatever you would like to imagine. All of this is just conjecture.

Next up on Saturday: Something else entirely!

EDIT: updated the Lisa-Amy heart to heart scene to remove some of Lisa's obscuring flippancy, as it wasn't coming across properly, and to ensure no unintended parallels are drawn.