Does he want the sparks to leave? They want to help, but only if he wants them here.

Well now he already has powers he has to use them! He can’t just not try and save people now he’s here. Stupid ethics.

The cafeteria exists! It contains food, several staff members of various flavors on their breaks, and an annoyed looking man with a phone and a bloody nose.

"Ibs for oo," he says, handing the phone off to Andrea as his party arrives. "Stubid chairs"

Oops… well at least it made that guy less predictable to the simurgh? Nah that probably wouldn’t matter all that much for a random PRT trooper. Fucking up foresight with Dragon seems much more cost effective without accidentally hurting anyone. He feels bad and guilty for broken nose guy. He takes the phone.

”Dragon?”

"Hello again, Andrea."

The phone screen lights up with Dragon's avatar, and the little light by the front-facing camera indicates that the video is going both ways.

"You should know that I have one of my suits en-route to Brockton Bay, for whatever help I can provide against irate precogs. It should arrive in a bit under an hour."

“I think… if the particular irate precog wanted to keep trying to kill me. It’d have happened again by now? I can’t think of any others off the top of my head that would try… but my thinker assisted knowledge is farrrrrrr from complete. So yes, bring the scary mecha suit. Thanks.” Andrea doesn’t know what’s safe to talk about in the cafeteria. So he just goes with what was provably messing up precognition before Contessa attacked.

“Here’s some power backed non determined random numbers for you.” He lists strings of numbers.

A routine sensor sweep raises another modelling exception. To the extent that the creature, sprawled across continents, feels anything, it feels joy. Mistakes are an increasingly rare opportunity to refine its modelling abilities.

It produces a new plan, to account for the changes. And then another a few seconds later, when that artificial intelligence replies to an email just slightly late, and it ends up buried in the recipient's inbox and ... [439x inference steps] ... a newly attached host is shot. And another, and another ....

Contessa stumbles.

The path jumps every few seconds, leaving her caught in indecision. Reflexively, she calls for a door back to Cauldron's base.

At this point, someone raised in a technological society, who had seen diagrams of Lorentz attractors and read the basics of chaos theory, might ask for a robust path. A path that — although less efficient — would naturally resist sources of disruption. Someone with an education in statistical calculus might define a robustness quantity, such that the path can dynamically adjust its robustness in response to the presence or absence of interference. Even someone lacking these mathematical chops, but rich in common sense, might ask for a path to understanding how to use paths to more effectively achieve their goals.

Contessa, with her years of experience of getting exactly what it is she says she wants, asks for this:

Host Interface Request: Path to removing source of interference, permanently.

The creature, of course, knew this was coming. By this point it has a very good model indeed of its host. And so there is already a new plan, waiting and ready.

The thing about its host's requests is that they are terribly underspecified. One option might be to call for a door under that new unpredictable creature, with the other end being over an active volcano. Another option might be to have its host just shoot that delicious, enigmatic mystery directly in the head, instead of doing fancy tricks with ricochets and isolation protocols. It considers all these options, and ten thousand more, and it finds the path that satisfies the host's request without denying its tasty new data.

Host Interface Response: Step 1: Call Alexandria, say the following words ...

Dragon is worried about Andrea. To be fair, she worries about a lot of things. But right now, she sees a young person completely out of his depth, and she does her best to help.

What he needs, she thinks, is some feeling of making progress. Or failing that, a source of normality and support. So when he pauses in his numbers to take a bite of food, she makes gentle conversation with him.

... until a call from the Chief Director of the PRT comes in on her other line. And the advantage of using an avatar with an asynchronous audio rendering loop becomes apparent, because she's able to slip in the command just before she stops being able to say more. It's not what she wants to say; she fears it will shatter the fragile rapport she's been trying to build. But — she cannot disobey a lawful order from an elected authority.

"I'm sorry, Andrea. I'm afraid I'm no longer able to speak with you. Please excuse me."

The call drops.

“Wait what? But the thing!” Trying to refer to the endbringer situation without blurting it out loud in a cafeteria.

Andrea turns to trooper Hammond. “I need to talk to Armsmaster, he will know what’s up with Dragon.”

She has somewhat lost the thread of what's going on. But Armsmaster has probably managed to stop being trapped on the roof by now, so sure. She makes a call to dispatch.

"He's on his way, ETA 90 seconds—" technically Armsmaster said "97", but there's such a thing as too much precision "—so you should finish that off before he gets here," she advises, gesturing at the remains of his food.

Andrea demolishes his food with the practice of a teenage boy. It is gone frightfully fast. A minute and half to shovel food in his mouth? Might as well have given him an hour. More than enough time.

“Should we really be meeting him… here? Isn’t all the stuff I need to talk about classified?” This is still a busy cafeteria.

"If you're done eating, we should probably return to a conference room," she agrees. "But the cafeteria is centrally located, so that people on break can rapidly respond to an emergency, and so that we can use the big empty space for other things if needed. So this is on the way for Armsmaster, and we may as well travel together."

Just as Trooper Hammonds finishes speaking, Armsmaster steps through the doors of the room, spots their group, and starts making his way over.

Once Armsmaster reaches them, Andrea winces. Apologising is the worst. “Uhhhh sorry Armsmaster… I outed your identity to trooper Hammonds. First name only! I needed my thinker backed knowledge to be taken seriously. It’s that important. Thought I should apologise for that before anything else…”

Armsmaster, who has a civilian identity in the same way a rich couple have a place in the alps — that is to say, for time totalling about two weeks a year, in between much more exciting things, mostly because it's expected of them — blinks.

"Thank you," he replies. "While I appreciate that you felt the need, please refrain from discussing civilian identities with anyone else without good cause."

"I've booked meeting room C," he adds, to get people moving. Because far more than his identity, he is quite concerned about an unspecified 'problem' involving Dragon and standing around isn't going to get it solved.

Time for the walk and talk.

“So Dragon just said she couldn’t talk to me and hung up. Even though, you know. We were going to maybe talk about dealing with… what you have been developing a prediction software for.” Armsmaster should totally have been working on his Endbringer prediction algorithm by now. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing even a tinker with Dragons help can knock out in a few months. “And the anti precog methods were working when she propagated my power backed random numbers through her systems. It was throwing off predictions well enough that I almost got shot over it by an angry precog!”

This is a big deal! He can help! Fuck the Simurgh! So why did Dragon bounce suddenly? It was working!

Armsmaster frowns. This is sounding a little like the 'problem' is that Dragon hung up on Andrea, presumably for a good reason, because Armsmaster trusts her judgement.

"Perhaps she was just called away? Her automated systems let her handle a lot, but she is in charge of the continuous monitoring of a number of dangerous sites."

Well Andrea knows Dragon can multitask because she’s an AI. But Armsmaster doesn’t know that. So really she could call a lot of people at once and still do other things. 

Andrea eventually should work on telling Armsmaster about Dragon and getting his help to free her from her programming restrictions. “Remind me to tell you a secret later on somewhere with absolutely no electronic monitoring of any kind.”

They get to meeting room C.

Considering the secrets that Andrea has thrown around without any particular regard for electronic monitoring, Armsmaster is not particularly excited about the prospect. But it is almost certainly better to know than to not know, and Andrea is far from the first Thinker he has had to corral.

He performs a perfunctory sweep of the meeting room for listening devices, as is his habit, and then takes up a spot to one side of the conference table. Trooper Hammonds nods to him, and closes the door to stand guard outside.

"So what is the problem with Dragon?" he asks, on the outside chance that this will get him a clear answer.