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Two Sorts of Destiny
Ellie in Worm
Permalink Mark Unread

The first rays of the sun are just threatening to peek over the horizon as Ellie pulls into the parking lot. The sign at the gate says "Open dawn to dusk" so she's a little early, but no one stops her. Not that they could, if they tried. She turns the engine off and grabs the backpack from the passenger seat before getting out of the car.

It contains some travel essentials: change of clothes, meal bars, water bottle and purification tabs, first aid kit. Jeanne always did emphasize preparedness, she's had a similar bag sitting next to the door of every house they lived in for as long as she can remember. The battered copies of the Iliad and Odyssey are not part of the standard. A last-minute concession to sentiment. Ellie liked those stories, of gods and heroes and monsters. It provided a relief from the present world, where the monsters far outnumber the heroes, and the gods are indifferent and uncaring. But she's one of them now. No more escaping it.

She sets off into the woods of the national park. Her destination is on the far side, a town called Eagleton, nestled up in the Appalachians. A long hike, but doable. And she shouldn't come across any patrols from this side.

It's a long day of walking before she gets close.

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The defenses are thick, but they aren't mostly meant to keep anything out. She'll see a wide area just empty, no cover with no real way to know whether any particular stretch is being watched. In the center is a skyscraper-tall wall of flat stone. Parahuman-made, probably. Inside, who knows.

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She's here to test, isn't she. Only one thing for it.

Still behind the treeline, she summons up one of her images. Or ghosts. Still not quite sure what exactly to call them. But they obey her, that's enough for now. A hulkingly indistinct figure leads her as she crosses the open space at a run. When it reaches the wall it slams both fists into it, and a gaping black door way appears.

Ellie enters without hesitation, it's not the first time she's used a tunnel like this. It is the first time it's been created at her command. She emerges on the other side of the wall.

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If she didn't know better it wouldn't be obvious that this place used to be Eagleton, Tennessee. There's another broad swath of a few football fields' worth of nothing; no patrols in sight at the moment but no guarantee it'd stay that way. Beyond that there's a town, but most structures anywhere near the perimeter are collapsed. Inhabitants—not for a long time, she knew that much coming in.

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Part of what makes this a good testing ground. As crosses, she summons her other- shade might be a good word for them. The one that used to be Jeanne. The stylized lightning motif she favored as highlights on her costume has become part of her skin in death, the jagged bolts forming raised ridges across her body.

Ellie heads for the closest intact structure, to get her bearings while she looks for signs of the mechanical denizens.

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The first sign is a glint of light reflecting through a window from across the street. It's not attached to a machine soldier, but it means she's been spotted.

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She makes her way to a higher floor. At a thought, her shade raises its hand to point at the glinting window. With a crack and a crash, the glass is shattered by an electrical impact. The shade continues pointing, and bolts of lightning continue to crack through the air, getting louder and more violent.

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It's no longer an issue of "spotted."

The camera's gone, but it's done its job. The expected robots start to swarm, or more like march, toward her position. They're coming from every direction (except outward, naturally). They move perfectly in step: the left leg of the bipedal machine to her left hits the ground at exactly the same time as legs one, three, and five of the insectoid ones in front of her, and an enormous wheel farther off rolls toward her with one revolution in an amount of time exactly divisible by that length...

The former site of a window only gives so much of a view. But there's plenty of hardware in every direction she can see.

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Many targets, easily predictable. Just the sort of thing she wanted. She has her lightning shade fire with both hands into the ranks of approaching machines. She had never seen Jeanne sustain a barrage longer than ten or fifteen seconds at a time. She complained of tiredness afterwards, but there was not much left of the vault door. Fatigue should no longer be an issue.

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Extremely predictable. They go down, but only when hit. Not all targets are equally visible, and there are plenty to fill the gaps in the ranks. They keep advancing mechanically.

The fallen robots get removed for either repairs or spare parts or just to get them out of the way.

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She continues the assault. The lightning bolts are now so fast as to be almost continuous, their thunder an endless drumroll across the sky. Some of those buildings are blocking the view, one of the shade's arms shifts to demolish them while the other continues sweeping methodically across the robotic ranks.

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They're an army, not a horde. Heavy losses can convince them to slow.

...or maybe they aren't thinning out their numbers at all and this was just a question of creating enough of a distraction. The floor rocks with explosions, and the building she's in starts trembling.

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The tunneler reappears, creates an opening on the wall next to her. She darts through, hits the ground in a roll, and keeps moving to cover, not presenting a stationary target. Just like she was trained.

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Well, moving toward cover leaves a brief window where there's a clear shot. 

There are a few types of weapons coming at her. Electricity not entirely unlike her shade's blasts, explosives, bullets. She could probably match the appearance of different types of robots to their weaponry, if she weren't busy not dying.

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Yes, that does tend to occupy one's full attention. She pulls her lightning shade down to provide some covering fire. Which she should have done earlier than now. She doesn't personally direct it, just forms the vague intention of what she wants it to do, while she concentrates on moving.

Well. She's not dead yet. But goddamn does that hurt.

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Thanks in part to the covering fire, she can outrun the slowly advancing lines. The hard part is running to somewhere they aren't already occupying. This is very much enemy territory.

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She can at least go directly through walls and buildings rather than going around or finding a door. Or if there's a long wall with a cross-section wider than she is, she can order a tunnel down its length and skip that distance.

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The first bit doesn't throw them off. They predict her position flawlessly. The second does; any time she doesn't happen to come out in view of a camera she gains a wall-length on where they think she is. It only lasts until she's spotted again, but she can reliably earn a brief moment out of the spotlight.

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She needs a way to disable the cameras, or to predict where they are. It's no good blasting them after she's been spotted.

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Now that she's well past the perimeter, sentry cameras are fairly rare. When she gets observed it's more often by a mobile drone. Even harder to predict in advance.

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All right. New strategy. Her shade is strongest when it's allowed to stand still and focus fire, but staying still is going to get her killed, there's just too many of them. She needs to pick her fights, find places that limit possible approaches and allow quick getaways and do as much damage as possible before she gets in danger of being overrun, and keep moving in other cases.

She moves slightly wrong and grits her teeth at the pain. She'll have to see about finding a moment to wrap that up as best she can, too.

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Those criteria tend toward leading her inward. Quick getaways and few approaches mean more intact walls, especially thick ones, and the closer to the center she gets the less damage there is from skirmishes with the Protectorate.

The downside is that, while she was already surrounded, now she's more surrounded. The army of robots is pursuing from behind, but mostly it's converging toward her from every direction. The fact that they go around walls that she could go through only means that the ones approaching the front line get zapped from the side early, not that the other side of walls are safely clear.

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Why's there have to be so many of the damn things? Where are they coming from?

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Everywhere except up. From most sources the numbers actually do thin out, though; it's only holding steady from one direction. Those ones are coming from near but not at the center of the former town.

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Well. Let's see if she can't do something about that. Cut them off at the source. She starts moving in that direction.

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It's against resistance, of course. But they're predictable; if she times it right and resists the temptation to just blast everything she can avoid letting the machines get off a shot.

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Plenty of time to blast them all later. After they won't be immediately replaced.

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Means she's back to being more surrounded, for what that's worth. But after making some progress, she can see where they're coming from. It's definitely not a converted preexisting building; this one is all metal and heavily fortified. Robot armies march out of the open gates, but there's no easy way to tell if they're leaving a garrison or are actually being built in real time.

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Metal walls don't present any more of an obstacle than other sorts. She'll go in on the far side of the building from the gates.

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The gates on this side are closed. And subsequently irrelevant once she's inside.

It's more of the same. Mostly bipedal, some variants, and the same types of weapons. There are in fact robots being repaired, but it's slower than the rate she's been destroying them and the repair drones aren't building more from scratch. She's been making progress after all.

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Aha. Good. Then she can get to work on destroying these repair bots.

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They go down easily. It's a sensible priority, but it eases up the pressure on the ones currently trying to kill her. A hail of what looks like lightning arcs toward her from most directions.

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Not good. She retreats back through the still-open tunnel.

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As long as there's a tunnel it also contains bullets and the a few grenades. Apparently the robots weren't going to use those indoors. When the tunnel disappears, the blasts from both both sides of the wall and inside it leave a more permanent hole.

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Very very not good. Lightning is preferable to grenades. Back to the enclosed space. Not the same room that just got a hole blown in it.

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As soon as she's inside the explosives and bullets stop. Missed lightning shots hit the thoroughly grounded wall, regardless of whether they're hers or theirs.

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Time to keep moving again. Maybe she can find some sort of command center in the building.

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On the way, she'll thin out their numbers a bit more. (The robots aren't terrible shots, probably, but they're very predictable. A split second to register her location, another to aim, and if she keeps moving she can usually be gone by the time she needs to be.)

A few tunnels later one of the rooms is entirely empty for no obvious reason. A voice comes from a hidden speaker. "You've really put a dent in my army, you know that?"

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She starts, looks around for the source of the voice.

"Your army?"

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"Robot armies don't just happen, you know. Congratulations, you got farther than any other heroes. Though to be fair I don't think either side is seriously trying usually."

The ceiling retracts, and a human descends. He's flanked by a squad of robots similar to the ones she's been evading, and wearing a matching suit of fairly basic power armor. He gestures, and the machines open fire.

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Ellie dodges to the side while he lightning shade returns fire.

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These are much less mechanistic about it than the earlier ones. They move like extensions of the tinker's suit more than as autonomous drones. He leads them out of the direct line from wherever she puts her shade, but doesn't seem to be doing anything analogous to help them shoot at her yet.

Then several of the machines blast straight down and plant long metal poles through the floor, angling them toward her. Lightning grounds harmlessly through the rods, and they take aim with ordinary bullets.

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The lightning shade repositions so that the rods aren't directly between it and the tinker, while Ellie ducks through the wall again, closing the tunnel immediately after herself.

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And the other side of the wall contains ranks upon ranks of robots, already set up with lightning rods and already firing.

 

They aren't terrible shots. And there are a lot of them.

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Too many, too many-

Keep moving-

If she can get closer to the tinker she can at least kill him before she dies-

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She can run back through the wall and that doesn't exactly help...

 

 Everything is bathed in a golden light. The machines don't stop, but they get silenced and shut down with a beam from the newcomer's hand. Ellie can hear others still active but none in the immediate area. Her opponent is more confused than anything else; what is Scion doing here, doesn't he have kittens to rescue or something?

The golden man swings an arm, not bothering to make a fist, and the tinker slides across toward Ellie. His suit sparks and hisses and is obviously at least partly nonfunctional.

 

Scion looks around, barely acknowledging Ellie, and then flies off to explode a few more helpless machines.

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What.

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And then she recovers herself enough to lunge down and grab the tinker, reach out for his power and rip it away.

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He's not totally out of fight yet, and a partly-functional set of power armor is great for grappling—

but he's really not expecting an instant death touch.

 

There's a brief flash of something enormous floating through space, and then—
His power is exactly as impressive as it probably looked to the heroes. Not a lot of variety in what it can make but perfectly capable of machines building machines. Easily overwhelming with a little buildup time; presumably that's what happened here.

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Oh, oh this is nice. She is going to have some fun with this.

...Though she should check if Scion is still in the area first.

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He's out of sight. Notoriously hard to track, but at least she can't see him at the moment.

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Good.

She shouldn't stick around either, come to think of it. Someone's probably noticed all the commotion and might come to investigate. Better to make something outside of the Endbringer-grade containment, anyway. Back to the wall.

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She doesn't quite have to fight her way out. Scion did enough damage that keeping her way clear is almost trivial, especially with the new shade whispering about what patterns the robots are repeating.

 

On the way back she does run into a Protectorate patrol. They all take an aggressive stance, but ready to fire at the drop of a hat doesn't mean they already let fly.

"You're not Scion," one of them says unnecessarily.

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"Well spotted. Get out of my way."

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"Mind if I ask what you're here for first?

I'm Lightscour, by the way." He's surrounded by shadows, or wearing them depending on point of view, and dismisses the ones pointed at her.

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She still has all three of her shades up.

"Sightseeing."

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"In Eagleton.

There is exactly one sight to see here. I'd ask what you had to do with the Machine Army except that no one ever has anything to do with it."

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"I wanted to see what it looked like."

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"It's quarantined for a reason. The fact that it took Scion to bail you out should be a dead giveaway.

Look, I don't especially want to arrest you. Lot of bother for not much reason. But we've got to have something to tell our superiors. Why'd you really break in?"

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"I already told you. I wanted to see it."

She starts stepping sideways around, edging closer to the wall.

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The three of them spread out, staying between her and it. "All right. Why did you want to see Eagleton instead of some other, less robot-infested place."

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"I thought people would mind less if I broke things here."

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"Heh. You're not wrong. Stupidly high stakes for testing a power, but that's your risk to take. Kind of. Still restricted access here.

Anyway, that mean you aren't going to break things anywhere important?"

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"Yes."

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Shrug. "All right by me. What do you do, anyway?" He eyes the shades. They're recognizably human, in about the same sense that a caricature is recognizably a portrait, but at least the new one isn't obviously the source of the Machine Army.

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"Walk through walls," she says, starting to move towards the big one again.

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They let her approach, but walk with her. "Explains some. But you could test that anywhere. What was the power that breaks things?"

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"Sometimes the walls don't survive the experience."

She alters her path slightly, so her trajectory converges with the talker's.

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He thickens the shadows on that side of himself, but manages not to do anything remotely aggressive.

"Okay, but expendable walls are easy to come by. Eagleton's where you end up to shoot robots instead of hurting someone. If you don't want to explain your power, you can just say so."

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"I didn't want to seem overly hostile."

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Shrug. "You're seeming pretty darn evasive, but that's not a crime. Breaking in here probably is but it's not like you were breaking anything out." If he has a reason other than gullibility for knowing that, he doesn't volunteer it. "You got a cape name yet?"

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"No."

She evaluates the distance between them. She just needs a touch, but the shadows will probably do something inconvenient. A distraction would be good. She dismisses two of her shades, leaving only the tunneler.

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"That one of the things you don't want to explain?"

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"Hm?"

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"The– ghosts, or whatever they are."

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"They follow me. Sometimes they go away. I don't know why."

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"That's a yes, then. Okay, fine.

 

Huh, I'm probably supposed to pitch the Protectorate. Job sucks but worst-case you end up here blasting robots and bored, they'll take you if you want. There, done."

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They're close enough to the wall now that she can make a break for it if this doesn't go well. The lightning shade comes back, placed on the other side of the talker from her, immediately raising both hands and firing at the talker and the nearest other person. The tinker appears in the face of the third patroller. Ellie lunges for Lightscour.

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They go down, one with a shout of surprise and the other not even that. The nearest opponent solidifies the shadows and knocks her back, but in the split second it takes him to form it into a weapon she's already on him again. And that's all it takes.

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The power is hers, now. This one, and the others that are on the verge of floating free.

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There's the same glimpse of vast formless things with each collection. And then new powers. Shadow generation and manipulation, with slightly increased physical abilities. A thinker power detecting nearby threats, fairly vague but her own power can help understand how to phrase queries about what does and doesn't count. A generic blaster power, shooting bullets that explode into hot air and smoke. Not exactly the cream of the crop as powers go, but they're hers.

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She shakes her head to clear it of the visions.

None of these feel as big as the tinker did. But they are useful, in their own ways. The thinker, especially. No more running blindly through walls and stumbling over enemies.

...But it seems she can only have three shades out at once. Mildly inconvenient. She keeps the tunneler, the thinker, and the lightning shade. Any dangers outside the wall?

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Yes.

(It doesn't say any more than yes, but she does get an automatic description of what that is and isn't answering. What it considers to be the relevant range for "outside the wall," what level of risk is worth warning her about, no details on what the danger might be coming from.)

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Can she get it more specific about location than that? Anything within a hundred-foot radius of her exit?

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That switches it to "no."

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Within a thousand feet?

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Yes.

(Each specification comes at a cost to precision in other possible variables, her own power informs her, as well as a higher risk of being outright wrong, but she's barely exerting it so far. Plenty of room to just keep asking before the thinker headaches set in.)

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Is it more or less dangerous than the blaster she just collected?

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More.

(That might have fooled the original thinker once, but Ellie knows this power. The danger sense can't usefully make comparisons outside the present tense— it doesn't think she's in any danger at all from the blaster she just collected.)

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Not exactly user-friendly. Fine. She's still feeling confident. Through the wall and see what awaits for herself.

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It's just more Protectorate heroes. Could probably have gotten that from common sense instead of superpowers, but either way.

 

They noticed teammates going silent. Then they spot Ellie and charge toward her.

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She swaps tunneler for the shadow-maker and starts gathering darkness around herself as armor. She'll take the thinker's advice on which one is the most dangerous for lightning's targeting.

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Most dangerous does not necessarily mean most resistant to lightning. First target goes down—not fatally or she'd have noticed—and the next most dangerous manages to evade the bolts. He's moving faster than a non-cape could, and charges at the lightning-throwing shade. Manages to get close without being zapped, only to find that a physical strike moves right through it.

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If she switches out the thinker for her other blaster, does that one have more success at hitting the speedster?

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Not really, but a near miss can mess with visibility and slow him down. He can't evade forever now.

The next problem is that the other capes are getting into their effective ranges, and Ellie is still only three capes.

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Bullets can keep focusing on the runner, lightning can attack the rest of the group.

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After a few shots the smoke from the bullets obscures enough that no two people can see each other. Her lightning is easily the best blaster power on the field; she can take an undirected hit every now and again but the same isn't true of her opponents. The best response would be area-effect powers, and the closest the heroes have is a localized earthquake that seems to follow her around.

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She's probably gotten as much benefit from the bullets as she's going to get. She brings back the thinker to help with targeting. How fast and strong is the earthquake?

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Strong enough to throw off her aim, weak enough that she can keep her feet while trying to aim.

It'd take a lot of asking to get the danger sense to output a location precise enough to shoot at. While she's narrowing down the probable location of the earthquake person, a large cape flies out of the smoke and tackles her. Bad idea.

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He's dead before she hits the ground.

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—impossibly huge beings, dwarfing planets, alive

The new power gives strength, toughness, and a complete lack of endurance even compared to normal humans. The cape probably got as far as she did by walking up and shrugging off the hits whenever the lightning got a lucky shot. The body is not quite human; for instance there are metallic ridges running down the spine that could almost pass for part of the costume. The shade has the same deviations but exaggerated, most notably representing the ridges as more like a carapace.

 

Thanks to the smoke, the other Protectorate capes still don't know that hand to hand combat is hopeless.

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Gah, that is distracting. What is with those... things?

She wriggles out from underneath the body and moves away from it before returning her focus to tracking down the earth quaker. Wouldn't do to have other capes stumble across him before they get close to her.

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Cape fights are a lot more one-sided than usual when one team doesn't know that touching the opponent means death. She gets the earthquake generator and another blaster before that detail gets out. When the speedster is the last one standing he turns and runs.

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Can she slow him down with the earthquake and then tag him with one of the blasters?

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If she wants to kill a fleeing hero, then yes, she'll land a shot before he gets out of range.

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No witnesses. No survivors.

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There's no way of knowing what if anything they communicated to the PRT. But the no witnesses part she can do. Plus, free mover power.

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Good enough. That'll help with getting back to the car.

She'll have to think about where to go next. This expedition proved... unexpectedly fruitful. She wants more powers. And she needs a place to work with the tinker for a while.

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Those goals are at least partly opposed. The main constraint on working with the tinker power is going to be the Protectorate, or maybe even unusually observant villains. Going somewhere smaller with less parahuman activity can buy time easily enough but also means fewer powers to steal.

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She has, let's see... ten shades now. That's probably enough to be going on with for the moment. Once the machines get set up, they can be sort of self-sustaining, so it'd be a good idea to get that rolling first. Somewhere smaller it is.

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Geography's up to her too— anywhere close and the PRT is that much more likely to recognize the robots as the Eagleton machines.

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She's always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. She'll head westward, and see if she comes across any good prospects.

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Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas... there's any number of prospects across the country. Serious cape towns are few and far between, but plenty of places have two or three locals and a tiny PRT office. Aiming for closer to the second category, it could mean almost anywhere in the lower population density states. If she does research in advance she could basically pick a number for how many targets she wants.

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She gets back to her car. It's dark again. No sign of any rangers, so she takes a quick nap, then sets out, gets on the interstate.

When she stops for gas the next day, she also pays a visit to the town's library. Not big, but it has a few computers with Internet. She skims the Parahumans Wiki, looking for capes that are based in the Kansas-Oklahoma-Colorado-New Mexico area. Anyone really interesting is probably going to be at a big city, but she might find something anyway.

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There's uninteresting and then there's uninteresting. A lot of parahumans are limited less by what their powers can do than by their personalities or their neuroses or their circumstances—problems their shades wouldn't have. Reading between the lines, a small-time villain on the Kansas-Oklahoma border is probably in that category. Extremely destructive short-range blasts of chaos, the unofficial wiki describes it, losing control if she gets stressed. Which happens easily. Has a habit of monologuing about her own greatness even though her villainous career usually just involves stealing necessities. She fails miserably whenever she tries to make it in the serious cape scene, but not because of a weak power.

The town of twenty thousand includes a handful of other capes. Two part-time heroes whose (non-emergency) hero work consists of working with nearby police departments on ordinary crimes and foiling the local villain occasionally. One has a very short term master power, the other selectively penetrable three-dimensional force fields. The last is a rogue who uses the sensory component of her shaker power to detect gas or oil. A nobody by the standards of the more combative cape scene.

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Looks promising. She'll start there. She clears the browser history and logs off the computer.

She can get a room for the night when she gets to the town, and look for an abandoned warehouse space or similar to set up in the next day.

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The town is actually doing pretty well economically. There are probably some empty buildings to be found with effort but they're not on every corner or anything.

If she wants to take over one of the Endbringer shelters, that'd be...aggressive, but a hard target to dislodge her from.

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Well. It's not as though they are in active use at the moment, is it?

One would suit her purposes. Already hardened, limited approaches, out of the public eye. Is there anything set up to stop her from taking it?

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Directly, no. It'd be too much to hope for that no one would notice her at all, but she doesn't even need it unlocked.

Unlike some coastal cities that would be likely targets for Leviathan, or large cities that would be slow to evacuate, they aren't expecting to have to hide the entire population. But there are a few giant bunkers; places engaged in energy production are at slightly elevated risk of Behemoth.

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Big enough to set up in. This works. Any insights from her tinker about security/surveillance systems?

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Outside the shade's purview, mostly. It can tell her that if there are, nothing looks like it works on the same principles as its machine soldiers. But looking with regular eyes or cameras turns up no security other than lots of really thick walls.

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Then she will start production here, and deal with problems as they arise.

First she needs eyes on the town. Cameras. Drones to deliver them. A monitoring station.

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The tinker shade doesn't tell her how to build those things; it tells her how to build things that will. It fills her head with plans that are hard or impossible to execute, and suggests shortcuts and substitutions to make it manageable. She'll need resources. And the power wants her operating at an industrial scale, but the Eagleton tinker got started somehow. That's probably not mandatory.

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She's not able to operate industrially right now, nor does she want to. Provoking another quarantine would be less than optimal. Overwhelm, not annihilate.

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There are fewer options for small scales and quantities. The shade remembers making autonomous helper drones to inspect the assembly lines? There were never very many of those, and they could be modified for spying probably...

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Seems like roughly analogous skillsets. She'll try to put some of them together.

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Needs fewer resources and nothing that can't be cannibalized from consumer electronics. Very little robbery required.

The end result is an ugly kludge compared to the design in her head, but serviceable. She can plant cameras anywhere that isn't secure enough to notice a drone dropping things off, and the cameras will stay hidden. Probably.

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Serviceable will do. Anything immediately interesting?

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Depends where she puts them. There's technically a PRT office, which is definitely relevant. It's a one-room affair that probably has like one staff member and one part-time employee. Not much threat there. The police are more likely to notice a camera flying in but are probably where the response would come from if she wants to risk it.

Permalink Mark Unread

She can have cameras watching the outside of station. Does it get quieter at night?

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Quieter, yes. Never empty.

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...She'll not risk it yet.

If there's no indication of undue activity, then it should be safe to start work on some other projects. The beginnings of an army.

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She gets into the start of the larger-scale production before the PRT notices she's not just squatting. Ellie's device can let her pick up on the PRT calling the regular law enforcement and sending in both Edict and Licit. They're not there yet, but will be soon.

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It's not like this was unexpected. How much equipment are they bringing?

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The camera isn't going to tell her that until they're on the way; she can't see them preparing.

Turns out it's regular police equipment. They're well armed with guns and less-lethal weapons, but none of the fancy containment foam sprays. And they've got both parahumans with them. They think it's probably overkill.

Permalink Mark Unread

Her army isn't ready yet. A couple units have weapons online, but they're not mobile. She repositions them to cover the entrance.

Lights off, two blasters and the danger sensor at the ready.

Permalink Mark Unread

They do not come in guns blazing. Or in large numbers, for that matter. They don't know she knows who they brought.

"This is the police," one of them calls out after opening the door. One visible silhouette. "I'd like to talk to you, if you're willing?"

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"You're already talking. Feel free to continue."

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"Um, you know this is a restricted area right?" The figure starts approaching and fumbling for a light switch. "Whatever you're building, doing it officially can get you resources and backing instead of having to trespass. What is it, by the way?"

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"Stop. Either all of you come in, or none."

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"Okay."

The door is wide enough that an additional nine people entering still leave it looking empty. Two of them are in costume, visible once the light goes on, and Ellie can see the ghostly forms representing their powers hovering around them.

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Danger priority?

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None are imminently about to be a threat. The most dangerous is the cape whose shadow has a bobblehead shape, with the exaggeratedly large face. Probably the master power.

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He can be first then. When the shooting starts.

"Better."

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They're mostly looking at her, but not exclusively. And the robots aren't exactly hidden, or the reason they've been moved.

"Why the weapons?" one of them asks as soon as no one is in the immediate line of fire. "Self-defense is a common tinker problem, we might be able to help."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Help how?"

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"Depends why you needed the guns. The most common threat is someone forcing people in your position to work for them, or trying to, but sometimes there's someone more specific involved. In which case we can usually just arrest them."

In the interests of politeness, they continue assuming this is definitely what the guns were for.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's more of a sort of insurance against that sort of thing."

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"Just in case, huh? Kind of a lot of hardware for that."

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Shrug. "Seemed like a good idea at the time."

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"Does it still seem like one? I can't help but notice you're still going. There aren't that many threats you'd need an army for."

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"True. Unless I intend to become such a threat."

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Well, that response made everyone in the room more likely to be a threat. Not knowing about the danger sense, they try not to show it.

"I wasn't going to say it. Do you?"

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"Not to you. Leave your capes here and go wait outside."

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"...so that you can fight them? If that's what you meant, no. Definitely no."

"We can take her," one of the capes interjects. "She's outnumbered—"

"On a field she chose, and surrounded by her machines."

 

And then another officer recognizes the robots as the Machine Army, and Ellie is extremely under arrest.

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"I'd like it to be noted that I did offer you the chance to walk away."

And then her two blasters open fire on the master while she uses the speedster to get to cover. She sends the activation command to the units she has by the door, which can at the very least hinder the retreat.

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They don't retreat.

The master starts shouting "Stop!" repeatedly halfway through Ellie's sentence. The police exchange fire with the robots. They don't shoot at Ellie, likely because they know the second cape is creating three-foot force field pillars in front of her. They block the smoke blaster power fairly effectively, but each goes down after the first lightning bolt. A new field appears about once every two seconds—too slow to actually cancel out her blasters, but the translucent fields do help obscure her vision.

 

Ellie isn't forced to stop. But after the first time she ignores the command, she sees a rodent of unusual size leaping straight at her from stage left. The second time she disobeys her left leg goes limp, and the third time her aim worsens beyond what she'd already expect from being unbalanced.

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And that's supposed to be enough to stop her? He'll have to be much more persuasive.

Smoke is useless, go away. She summons the earthquake cape, starts that beneath her enemies. Mover has done its job, replace with shadow-molder, begin gathering darkness. The rate of fire on the lightning continues to increase.

Permalink Mark Unread

If she keeps not stopping, a shallow wound opens up on one of her arms. Nothing she can't ignore. Then she starts involuntarily flinching every few seconds, then it's a case of hiccups, and then the cape must have guessed that the effects got negligible because she runs for cover. Or staggers for cover, what with the earthquake and all.

Between the smoke, the shadow, the earthquake, and the remaining force fields, everyone's accuracy is pretty terrible. Ellie is earthquake-free but has the additional difficulties from some of Edict's effects so it's roughly even.

Most of the robots are down, but some of the police have been zorched and the people still standing are having a hard time with the remaining ones. The earthquake's fault.

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Who needs accuracy when you can fire three bolts of lightning a second? She keeps up the pressure on the forcefields, and begins dragging herself in her best guess to where the master is hiding.

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At the rate she's going the force fields can only block one shot in six. The cape makes sure to drop the occasional block in her way; slowing her down is worth an extra lightning bolt. He's less affected by the earthquake because all the force fields are at least a foot wide anyway; he doesn't need to be as precise.

His partner shouts again, giving a clue to her position. This command doesn't have any obvious penalty any more than the last one did. But Ellie's robots are definitely about to turn on her right now.

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Her hand twitches towards the self-destruct. But- even if they were, they're still on the other side of the fight from her. And it's not like they can move.

She pauses to rescan the field.

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The robots she deployed are, but what if the half-completed ones behind her finished building themselves weapons, she should at least consult the tinker power for whether they could have—

 

There's one robot still shooting, and three officers. Ellie's power doesn't tell her if the downed non-capes are dead, but the danger sense confirms that they're not threats. With a few more questions it can narrow down the master's location, which it turns out is just on the opposite side of the half-open fortified door. There are force fields providing enough cover for her to duck in and back out, and the shaker is keeping his distance at a wide enough angle to avoid the earthquake. While she pauses a sharp pyramidal force field appears in front of her with the point directly toward her good leg.

Permalink Mark Unread

...the hell with it. She'll just start over. She swaps shadow for that brute to use its resilience, replaces the earthquake on the shaker, and hits the destruct button for the robots, who all go off like hand grenades.

Permalink Mark Unread

Most of the robots were behind her, but she's fine. Some of the neutralized robots had intact self-destructs, so the police are not fine. The master sticks her head in the Endbringer shelter and shouts again, and when Ellie ignores this one she's blinded. Her power sight and danger sense are unaffected, so the opposing capes might not even know what happened.

Permalink Mark Unread

The lightning shade continues to pound at the shaker. They won't be able to hide forever. Ellie resumes her course to the master.

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The shaker doesn't have cover and can only layer so many force fields. Ellie's aim is still terrible but the sheer number of bolts overwhelms him. He cries out after getting zapped.

Ellie's course, meanwhile, leads her straight into the pyramidal spike. The brute power means it glances off without doing more than scratch her, but it gives away the fact that she's bad at avoiding those. Licit could probably make use of that if he weren't a little busy right now. Edict doesn't want to reuse her power so soon but fires her taser at the lightning shade and drops it. Half the bolts from the next volley get diverted through the path of least resistance.

Permalink Mark Unread

If Licit was hit, it's a good time to step up the attack. Danger sense isn't as useful, she can tell where the capes are well enough herself. Switch for another blaster, continue firing.

Permalink Mark Unread

The second blaster still isn't very effective against the force fields. But since there usually aren't force fields—

Licit is desperate now. Sharp fields appear pointed at her face, in hopes that making Ellie stop shooting will be more effective than trying to block. But it's still only scratches. Edict shouts continuously again. Paralyzed arm, fall to the ground, trip again, inability to talk, no effect. She tries a handgun but can't get a clear shot through the smoke from the new blaster. Ellie manages to inch closer to Licit while he's pinned down by lightning.

Permalink Mark Unread

She is going to reach this cape and rip the life from his beating breast, and he can't stop her, and neither can anyone else.

Step. Step. Step.

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He yelps again after another lucky shot zaps him. Edict risks getting closer for a direct line to Ellie, fumbling through the smoke.

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Bullets switches targets, shooting at the approaching cape. Step. Step. And then she's on top of him and grasping-

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The bullets miss, of course. But they don't need to hit to billow out more smoke and protect Ellie from bullets. Shields appear in front of her, separating her from her target. But they're never very big; she reaches around and—

destination–

—the power is exactly what it looked like. Force fields, simple three-dimensional geometric shapes, three cubic feet maximum and selectively intangible. Can only take so much punishment; the bullets and smoke power could batter it down eventually. It's hers now.

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She drops bullets again and uses her new forcefields to pin down Edict, throwing some lightning her way too.

Permalink Mark Unread

Now that the force fields have switched sides, it's much quicker.

 

After claiming the master power, she gets a sense for duration. She's not permanently blinded or paralyzed or cetera, but it may take a while to wear off. Half the effects will disappear after an hour, half of the remainder after a day, and from there it slows down to a half-life of a week. No control over what disappears when, which is inconvenient because she probably needs to move.

Permalink Mark Unread

With luck the big things will be gone first.

Any danger approaching?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nothing in that power's range.

The PRT has to know where she is (and, worse, that she's not just a tinker), but that was all two of the local Protectorate affiliates. There shouldn't be much left they can throw at her.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well. Not much to do but wait and hope the blindness goes first. She checks for danger periodically.

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Blindness goes, revealing that one of the ones with no apparent effect was color blindness. Which stays. The paralyzed leg reactivates and the paralyzed arm doesn't. The rest are comparatively minor, or at least not incapacitating.

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Good enough. Are any of the fallen not yet dead? And she can check for intact comms at the same time.

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They all look pretty dead. Licit's comm is still in one piece; he got killed by a touch instead of lightning or explosion.

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She takes it. Anyone still talking?

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No. If there was, they stopped when the line went dead while Ellie was waiting out the hour.

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"Is anyone still monitoring this frequency?"

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Pause. Pause. "Yes. Who is this?"

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"We are the Keres." She speaks with all the voices at her disposal, lending an ethereal echo to her speech. "Harvesters of the slain. This is our warning. You are of little interest to us. So long as you do not come between us and the god-touched, you will be ignored. Interfere, and your lives are forfeit."

Permalink Mark Unread

"God-touched?" The lone PRT person knows exactly how far out of her depth she is, but can at least try to get more information. "Who are the god-touched, and what do you want with them?"

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"Those you term 'parahuman'. They are ours."

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"Who's we? Edict and Licit were parahumans, killed by one person."

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She tosses the comm on the ground, and fires a bolt of lightning at it.

Two down, two to go. She consults her tinker: is anything left after the blasts salvageable?

Permalink Mark Unread

The local PRT office has some calls to make.

 

The pieces of robot that hadn't yet been assembled into anything much are fine, but for all the best progress, the self-destructs were too effective.

Permalink Mark Unread

Alas.

Not a whole lot of point in staying around. Doubtful that she'll get the time to ramp up to production again, if she was the PRT, she'd be screaming for reinforcements. Take what else she can from here, and move on.

She exits through the back of the bunker. With the shadowmaker to shroud her, the sensor to scout, and the forcefield maker as a first measure against any she encounters, she sets off looking for the other local capes.

Permalink Mark Unread

She gets interrupted. A tall and very thin figure dressed all in black runs toward her faster than anyone in a gown should be able to. She rockets forward and occasionally upward with dark blasts of something or other going behind her. Overall it's pretty erratic, but fast.

"Are you Keres?" she shouts. "Prepare to meet your match, in Damsel of Distress!" She continues monologuing as she gets within her range of Ellie. "You killed my nemeses! MY nemeses! The white hats said you'd be coming for me next, but Damsel of Distress doesn't run!"

Her aim gets progressively worse as her number of exclamation points increases.

Permalink Mark Unread

How convenient. Ellie drops a couple forcefields in her way.

"Do you always talk so loudly?" Sensor gets dropped in favor of lightning, who begins shooting.

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Her next backward blast launches her straight into one of the force fields. It winks out, implying a lower bound on how hard she hit it. Then she get zapped by the lightning bolts and stops moving.

It technically answers the question, depending on how you look at it.

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It's not like she really wanted an answer. She targets the unmoving Damsel with a few more bolts.

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That doesn't make her move any less.

 

The now-familiar flash of a vision shows the enormous life forms watching parahumans fight, and as soon as it's over she has yet another blaster power.

Permalink Mark Unread

...Perhaps her 'god-touched' phrasing was not entirely inapt. She had chosen it on a whim, but.


She has one more to collect from this town. Who was it? A rogue, something to do with oil dowsing?

Permalink Mark Unread

There was one, but without Damsel of Distress' specific motivation the shaker probably did flee. She could try tracing through some employers if she wants to; that's not the most available information ever but it's not secret either.

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Not worth her time to pursue when there are still other, more accessible targets.

This town is exhausted, then. Onwards.

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There are several cities with a small handful of capes. But she's very kindly informed the PRT of what she's doing, so they warn the capes ahead of time. Not all of them heed the warning, or run fast enough, so the trail of murders does point out a direction.

 

A few towns later, she runs into a man in a green cloak waiting for her. She might recognize him from the fact that he's Eidolon. Someone's taking her seriously. He isn't speaking loudly, but his voice carries clearly.

"Keres." He leaves off the definite article. "Two things. One, what you've been doing is a very good way to get a kill order quickly. One of the best ways, even. If you continue your killing spree, there won't be a warning next time unless you count the warrant from the judge. And two, there won't be a next time. You're under arrest."

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She stands her ground, hooded in a black robe and not at all afraid.

"We will not be caged. Not by you, or anyone."

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"I don't suppose that means you'll swear off the murdering? If you don't commit any crimes, maybe we can talk about not jailing you for the earlier ones."

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"Were it anyone else, Shepherd," she laughs, "we might have to take offense. But for you, we could content ourselves with merely scavenging the battlefield and ceasing to contribute to the carnage."

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He levitates in place for a moment. "You meant that. But what happens once you think you could challenge me? If it's only for me that you stopped, there'd be nothing stopping you from starting again."

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"What oath would you have us give that you trust more than your own strength? For those such as we and you, what higher power can there be?"

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"Contessa," he doesn't say. "Scion," he doesn't say. "Derek Parfit," he doesn't say.


"So that's a yes, you'd go back to killing capes as soon as you thought you could get away with it? I'm taking you in after all, then."

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"Are you so eager to see a death today? Our question was genuine, Shepherd. What assurance do you seek?"

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"If you could have honestly said that you wouldn't, and that you were not expecting that to change, I would have believed you." Not necessarily true anymore; the truth-detection power is being swapped out for something he hopes turns out to negate hostile powers. "But if it's a question of strength, we both know you'll eventually get to where you think you can challenge me. I'm not going to loose that on everyone else if I can capture you now."

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"If you can."

Two of her shades are blasters, and start shooting. She and the third blink away with a briefly blindingly bright flash of light, appearing on a rooftop behind Eidolon's position.

Permalink Mark Unread

He doesn't bother turning around, but casts an arm behind him and throws a beam of dull light toward her new position. It moves past her, and during the period where it intersects she can feel part of herself moving slowly. Then it's past and she's back to normal.

Eidolon shrugs off the shots from one of the blasters but takes the time to neutralize the ones from the other.

Permalink Mark Unread

That... did not feel pleasant.

She blinks again, back to the ground, and replaces the ineffective blaster with the shade of Edict. "Don't do that again," she orders.

Permalink Mark Unread

That power only does one-word commands, but in context "don't" is perfectly clear. Eidolon knows Edict's power too—he stares Ellie down for the requisite three seconds and then deploys the same thing from both hands directly at her.

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She knows the timing as well as he.

"Stop."

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The beam washes over her with the same bizarre feeling as before, but he doesn't replenish it. After pausing for what feels like maybe one second he does it again, not showing any effect from the order.

Rather than actively block the ranged attack, he experimentally lets one hit him and decides against shrugging off the rest. He drops out of the sky, it looks faster than free-fall, then catches himself.

Permalink Mark Unread

She swaps Edict for a brute, who charges. She blinks away again.

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He avoids the charge. No surviving witnesses ever did find out if the shadows can do the instant death thing, so he's not about to take the chance.

The blinking is ineffective because he's fast, and more importantly because he still knows where she disappeared to right away. His own blaster power catches her again, and this time the world speeds up by even more than before for a shorter subjective time. It hadn't reached full strength before. There's no way to tell if it has yet.

Permalink Mark Unread

Can she block it with forcefields?

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If she drops one of the current powers.

It acts like a variety of light. The translucent force fields make it less effective but not ineffective. On the bright side, each fields lasts a relatively long time against this beam compared to other ranged attacks.

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She keeps the blaster and the teleporter, uses the fields to set up a barrier around herself and two other points, then rotates them between them. She drops the forcefield maker while doing that to experiment with other offensive capes she has, to see if she can find another one that is as effective as the blaster.

Permalink Mark Unread

He's keeping his distance enough that it has to be ranged, and the lightning bolts are still the best blaster power she has.

Eidolon seems perfectly content to let her shuttle around and slow her down. How much it interferes with her is mostly determined by how many fields are in the way at the moment, but the general trend is toward the world speeding up more and the force fields giving less protection.

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It was probably to much to hope for. Time is not on her side here. She'll have to get close.

Blink.

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He stays at range, and high enough to be out of reach. It costs him accuracy but he's mostly still playing for time.

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Note to self: find a shade that counters flyers.

She tries blinking up to where he is and grabbing him.

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He's moving quickly and not especially predictably. If she gets close he'll start to worry. 

And then there's a sound effect like a rush of air and he flits outside her field of vision to where there aren't any force fields blocking his way, and suddenly everything is a gray blur.

The blur disappears after a few seconds. When the world is visible again she's restrained, in what is either a very small room or a very large box, and with an uncomfortable series of irregular plates jutting out from every side instead of any flat surfaces.

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Killing him is going to be personal now.

Plates block her tunneler, no spaces big enough for her to fit through.

She summons a selection of shades, arrayed around her. The projecting metal presents no obstacle to them. First, dangers in and around the box?

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Nothing that's about to harm her. Not to be confused with nothing that could.


(Trying not to be obvious about it, cameras keep track of which shades she calls up first when trying to escape.)

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Not discreetly enough.

Cameras get zapped by lightning, the shadowmaker starts darkening the room.

Does this change the outlook?

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No. The potential danger on the outside doesn't change position, so either doesn't know or isn't surprised. But now her observers can't see anything, so there's not too much point in waiting. A voice comes from one of the walls.

"Keres? My name is Dragon.

The speaker's to your left if you want to zap that too, but keep in mind you are still in a small space filled with metal."

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"The Keres. It is our title, our role, not our name."

She doesn't zap the speaker. Instead, she summons a shade that can cut her restraints, and one with resilience so that her extremities remain intact.

Permalink Mark Unread

The restraints are very cutting-resistant, certainly more so than any available brute power. Probably some kind of a titanium-technobabble alloy.

 

"My apologies. If you'd prefer a name to the title, let me know.

I had a few things I wanted to say. You might be sent to the Birdcage, even on a first conviction, simply because no other prison could hold you. If that happens, you'll be surrounded by parahumans, many quite powerful, with nearly no one who can stop you from killing them. Don't. It would be useless as a prison if it became a death sentence, and that would mean no new inmates.

And second, you might not be sent there. Then this would be the only time you're in my custody, so I'll say it now: you don't want a kill order. If you get put in a prison that can't hold you, keep in mind a powerful parahuman motivated by murder is likely to be overwhelmed by heroes and villains. And Eidolon might not be holding back."

Permalink Mark Unread

Any better luck with energy-based shades?

"All are victims of their nature. We are for the harvest. Killing is not our true purpose, it is simply expedient."

Permalink Mark Unread

She hasn't got a great selection. There's Damsel of Distress' former power, but that would be extremely obvious and not a good one to use around any limbs she wants to keep.

"Regardless of why you want it, keep in mind that the rest of us don't. Make a pattern of killing people and you could get sentenced in absentia, and the more you escalate the more the Protectorate will."

Permalink Mark Unread

How many does it take to make a pattern for these people? Not that she's going to say anything like that to them.

She doesn't have any good options right now, and it sounds like the Birdcage is not imminent. If she waits, perhaps something will present itself. She dismisses all her shades.

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After she doesn't do anything for a while, an engine starts. The room shudders and starts moving and drives off.

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Is the danger she sensed following?

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No.

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She waits an hour and checks again.

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Still no.

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She summons up Damsel's shade and blasts through a wall of the box, in the direction of the front of the vehicle.

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The blast is a cone-shaped maelstrom. It applies chaos to space, gravity, physical force, temperature, and the wall. Basically any single blaster power is probably included in there. The wall didn't stand a chance.

Through the new hole in the cell, she can see that there was no driver. Through the new hole in the front of the van, she can see it turn on its hazard lights and turn signal and pull over to the side of the road.

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She lets it do so.

"We told the Shepherd we would not be caged. If you want to keep us, you will have to kill us."

Then she sends another blast at the likely location of the engine block, and blows out the other walls. She calls her teleporter and blinks away.

Permalink Mark Unread

Kill her, or transport her in a really big vehicle so Damsel's power can't reach anything. Either way.

 

One of the walls had her attached to it. That one takes more effort with such an inexact power, but doesn't stop her from teleporting. The handcuffs stay on.

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She can deal with them later. After she gains some distance. She heads north and west, using a combination of her speedster and teleporter.

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They don't have eyes on her, as far as she can tell. She's kind of in the middle of nowhere but it's better than the previous problem.

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Yes.

She keeps going.

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Most powers have usage limits. If she's following roads she'll easily be able to get somewhere that's less nowhere before that starts to matter, but will also be easier to find.

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She's not exactly inconspicuous with her present accoutrements. The longer it is before she's spotted by anyone, the wider their search radius will have to be. She stays away from roads, and finds a thicket to hole up in when her shades are exhausted.

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Then she can stay unspotted longer. The other limiting factor would be that she still needs to eat and sleep, but that's less pressing.

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Yes, those can be put off until she comes across a lonely farmhouse or similar.

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Or a cape who doesn't need to eat and sleep. But here she is in the middle of nowhere, so farmhouse it is.

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She doesn't worry too much about finding one the first day. The next, she will be looking harder.

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Even with having to rotate the shades, she's making good time. It'll be less than a day before she runs into somewhere robbable.

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Excellent. Hello people, she is here to take some food from you, do not make this get messy.

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She is more than scary enough to get away with that demand.

They're very likely to call the PRT after she leaves, though.

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She's going to blast the landline, and they're going to hand over any cell phones they have. And if she runs into any units responding to a tip from them, she's going to come back and burn their house to the ground.

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Yeah, they're not that civic-minded.

It's entirely possible that the PRT would pay for the arson, but they're too recently-threatened-by-a-supervillain to be tempted and don't mention it.

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Good.

She moves on.

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She could keep doing this indefinitely. Or at least until she gets tired. If she's stolen a map, she could even have an actual destination.

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After a few days, she stops to find a highway and check where she is.

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She's on US route 400, middle of Kansas. North of where she came from and a bit east.

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It's probably safe enough to emerge, if she keeps a low profile.

She shadows the highway west, until the next town.

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The signs welcome her to Dodge City (Yes That One). Population twenty-five or thirty thousand; there are probably parahumans here.

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Maybe one of them will have something to get these handcuffs off. Kind of hard to walk around in daylight with them. Is there somewhere she can claim that won't attract attention?

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If it's just space that she needs, she could break into an empty hotel room or something without anyone looking at her hands. Her shades can't be inconspicuous, but she can go temporarily powerless if there's a good reason. Probably can't not be seen at all, though; being here in daylight risks finding out the hard way whether the PRT has been disseminating her picture.

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Well. If that happens, she'll deal with it. For now- she wants these cuffs off. That means something powerful enough to break them but precise enough not to hurt her, or some kind of changer, or a regenerator so she can use a powerful but imprecise ability. She also wants to sit down with her tinker and ask about designs for smaller, less obvious bots. If she'd had more available to distract Eidolon in that fight, it might have gone differently. But for that she needs space and time, and a city with parahumans is not really the ideal setting.

She finds an empty room to stay in until dark. Then she goes to break into a library to use a computer again.

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Dodge City's public library is equipped with the latest in anti-parahuman defensive technology— yeah, no. It works. Priorities on information to look for?

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Capes local to Dodge City, powersets, affiliations, favored haunts.

Capes in other areas that might suit her requirements.

Any news about herself.

Abandoned warehouse space.

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None of the local capes have a get out of super-handcuffs free card. Other ones that might... if distance were no object it'd be easy. There's a tinker in North Carolina who can make healing potions. A traveling mercenary whose power is to straight-up pick her own body, and another whose is exactly "cut inanimate objects." A hero in New York who can cut things just as well. Two in Brockton Bay who heal themselves, one in Las Vegas who probably can. A kid who expands and contracts space.  Boston has a shape-changer hero and a villain who can vanish small or medium-sized objects with a touch. One with concentrated energy in Texas. The right tinker could dismantle it if she had any way of knowing who the right tinker is. There are brutes who could just break pretty much anything, but they'd be high-profile and potentially difficult targets. Plenty of possibilities in the Birdcage. Sleeper.

 

The fact that someone killed all the parahumans in several towns has hit the news. It's the biggest news locally, and a big deal nationwide for cape geeks. The news doesn't say who or how, or mention that she was captured and escaped. It's known that Eidolon was somewhere nearby, and some people speculated that that was related. Current speculation is that he killed her, possibly by accident, and that nobody told the media.


There are five warehouses for sale, and some of them have been unused for a while. None that are conveniently labeled "abandoned" because for some reason people want to keep the rights to their property.

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Texas is out. Too close to Eidolon. New York is where Legend is based, less daunting but still unwise. Mercenaries might be a good idea, if she had any way of tracking them down. She doesn't especially want to go chasing a 'probably' in Vegas. Boston is promising. Brockton Bay... has a lot of activity. Easier to hide maybe, but also easier to trip over something else. North Carolina is the closest reasonable target.

It seems as if they might be waiting to see if she pokes her head up again? Low profile it is. If she doesn't need a specific cape, attacks of opportunity only, and no getting caught up in large-scale fights.

She notes warehouse locations, and goes to assess them in person.

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They range from a few thousand square feet to nearly a hundred thousand. None have any manufacturing equipment she might want to use, and of course the ones closest to places to steal from are also in higher-trafficked areas and more likely to get her spotted. Not that seizing a building is exactly low-profile at best.

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So the question is, can her tinker make anything that would be worth the risk? She doesn't need something as big and obvious as an army, she needs something more along the lines of a flock of stealth drones.

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It'll do small if it gets to do numerous, to anthropomorphize a bit. Stealth per se is outside its fairly narrow range of designs, but it can manage inconspicuous.

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She can work with that. What is the warehouse that's been empty longest look like?

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It's in an industrial area, two twelve-foot drive-in doors, boasts of being hooked up for electricity and ready to go which could be convenient if true except that actually using it would be a bit of a giveaway. It's plenty big enough; since she's not actually building an army space isn't likely to be a constraint. The current owner is an out-of-state realtor who bought it when the prior owner went out of business and hasn't managed to make any use of it.

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Out-of-state owner is good. Hopefully the neighbors won't be too nosy. She will set up here.

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She'll have to steal equipment like before. Probably better equipment, both for producing larger numbers and because getting the end result closer to her power's mental image will be more important when stealth is a goal.

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This is an industrial district. There must be usable things around, free for the taking by the enterprising parahuman who can walk through walls.

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She doesn't have forever before the night ends and people might see her. For everything not stopped by time constraints, she can find anything she needs aside from the really exotic.

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Then she can begin work as dawn breaks.

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She'll pretty frequently think "if only I had a whatever," but that's more just because tinker powers aren't very understanding about circumstances than because she prioritized badly.

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The important thing is that she is making progress.

It's relaxing to be able to tangibly achieve something, after spending those days on the run.

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Extremely tangible. It'll take more trips, and so more days, before she can get a fleet of really good drones, but she can do it.

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And once she does have them, she has no further reason to stay. She spends the day dismantling the workshop.

When night comes, she's ready to leave. But she's short on cash, and since she's leaving the city anyway, she might as well rob a bank on the way out.

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Spur-of-the-moment bank robbery. Sure why not; it's important to be spontaneous.

The nearest bank is nicely placed on her way east.

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She sends a pair of drones in via the roof to scout the layout. She wants the shortest path from an outside wall to the vault.

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It's coming in from the back. The vault is itself up against an exterior wall.

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...Well then. Nothing fancy, just in and out. She's not expecting trouble, but spreads her drones out in a screen just in case.

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It's a very thick wall; multiple layers of very tough material. Still just a wall.

As soon as she sets foot on the inside several different alarms go off. Presumably. They don't come with sirens on the inside.

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She has a bag, a drone to carry it, and another to help fill it. This shouldn't take long.

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She doesn't have long. But response time isn't literally zero; she can slip out before they get the place surrounded.

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It is for the best if she leaves without a fight. Yes. This is true. She exits out the back again.

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They'll know she was here; there have to have been cameras in the vault. But they'll also know she passed up a fight she could easily have won, so maybe it's worth it. Besides, "under threat of law enforcement" is the traditional way to get out of Dodge.

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Which she proceeds to do.

She only keeps a few drones with her as she travels, the rest are spread out, keeping pace. She decides to try for the Carolina tinker first. She'll never get there if she travels on foot, driving a car would invite awkward questions if anyone looked in and saw her hands. She could take a bus, if she can get a ticket. A few towns over, there's a station. Anyone around who wants to make a hundred dollars for five minutes work and not ask questions about it?

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That raises curiosity, but curiosity doesn't beat literally being paid to not ask questions.

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A drone offers a stack of bills. She wants a ticket to North Carolina, keep the change.

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Then she's on her way. It's a long slow trip but a much faster increase in the Protectorate's search radius.

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She keeps her hands hidden, and doesn't interact with other passengers.

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No one bothers her or needs any terrifying.

Eventually: Raleigh. It has a medium-sized Protectorate department, and the tinker she's after is part-time and strictly noncombat. Finding him might be tricky.

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He must visit the Protectorate at some point. She can have her drones keep watch for that and then trail him back to wherever he lives.

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Cask is pretty identifiable. Between his size and the barrel-shaped costume, not to mention the large bottles he's always carrying, the fact that there's someone called "Cask" would be enough information by itself. The drones can spot him without having to go inside the secure building. When he's on his way out, he's usually either going to the North Carolina State campus or to...yep, wherever he lives. Perfect.

(He's much less identifiable without his costume. Not that it matters; his power looks exactly the same.)

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Does he have any security arrangements at home?

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Not that she can see without sending the drones in to check, which of course hypothetical security arrangements might notice. But he does leave at exactly the same time every day.

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If he has a consistent schedule, she can catch him while he sleeps.

Is his bedroom visible from outside?

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Yep. Not from an easy angle from the street, but the drones can identify it easily.

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Then once he's safely tucked in, she can infiltrate.

Tunneler, danger sensor, and the resilience brute to mitigate the effects of any poisons.

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As soon as she's in something awakens him and he sits straight up. But he's still half asleep, and she's charging straight at him with three superpowers and an instant death touch, so he really doesn't have a chance.

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No, he really doesn't.

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–two monstrosities spinning through space, shedding pieces of themselves and watching the fragments fall to the planet below–

 

 

There are several of the large bottles nearby. Unlabeled. Her new tinker power might be able to tell what's in them later, but there's no time.

 

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She has what she came for. Time to get out of the house, and then the city.

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This whole strategy of bursting through walls and killing people is so effective there should be a rule. Some kind of unwritten rule, that capes follow out of enlightened self-interest because they don't want other people going after their own secret identity next. No, that'd never catch on.

 

Anyway, she gets away clean and is halfway out of the city before the sirens go off.

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If she had a secret identity she cared about, a rule of that sort might matter more to her.

Next step is find a trashy motel room a town or two over with a proprietor who cares more about the money she hands over for its use than any trendy jewelry she may be wearing on said hands.

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The proprietor starts warning her about what records he's required to turn over to the police on request, then sees how much money she's handing over and doesn't bother finishing.

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It is pleasant to deal with a reasonable person.

Now, what sorts of things can her new tinker do?

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Makes elixirs that give better-than-human abilities. Strength and endurance are ones this shade knows well; same with healing. It's not outright regeneration, but if there is a hand left after getting out of the cuffs this can restore it to perfect condition. Cask also used it for reflexes and even mental speed. It's possible that with a well-stocked lab and time to tinker she could come up with more and better options.

Multiple potions work fine together. The catch is just that she has to physically drink about a liter and a half per dose.

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That's less than ideal. No wonder he called himself Cask. She doesn't have a well-stocked lab and isn't likely to acquire one. Is it going to be possible to make a potion that will fix a hand she breaks badly enough to slip it out of the cuffs?

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As usual, it depends on the quantity of robbery. She can do it easily if she has a decent supply of cookware and the entire contents of a drugstore.

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Stealing an entire drugstore so soon after Cask's unexplained death is going to get her noticed and found by a person with the right cast of suspicious mind. She'll have to do multiple smaller thefts, spread out in space and time. Still noticeable, but hopefully harder to track. Randomize where she hits across the state, and travel off the grid as much as possible. She can lay out more cash for an extended reservation on this room.

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A series of connected robberies definitely alerts the PRT that something is up, but that by itself doesn't help them narrow down where. A few crimes later she's got her alchemy.

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Can she also do an anesthetic?

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If she sits down and invents for a few days, probably. It's not something the shade knows off the top of its head.

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If she doesn't have to deal with the pain, she'd prefer not to. She will take the time to come up with something.

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The end result is a neurologically dubious effect that should turn off all feeling while still allowing her to move. Would probably be really dangerous if not combined with the healing draught.

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Good thing she is combining them, then.

Right. First the anesthetic draught. Losing feeling but not control is quite odd. She follows that up with the healing potion, it works slowly and it would be hard to lift the bottle with broken hands. Then- it's time to break some bones. She summons a brute, and crushes her hands until she can shake the cuffs off. From the way they flop around, this would be excruciatingly painful to experience.

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They slip out, or maybe more like ooze out; they're not in great condition.

Watching her hands re-settle is differently weird. The disconnected joints get realigned, and the tissue she tore grows back. The healing is sped up but not immediate. The anesthetic wears off first, but by then she's healed enough that it's less an unendurable agony than a bizarre feeling like her hands are expanding.

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So much for being comfortably numb. But she can move her hands and arms freely now, and is no longer the target of immediate suspicion on that basis. Whether she will be on others is something she needs to check on. Library time again.

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News has already broken that Cask died. No one has made any serious accusations, probably because all the local villains were a lot of escalation away from home invasion and murder. If the PRT suspects it was her, they didn't publicize that.

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Still safe to walk around, then. She should still move on, away from here. Maybe head north. Any interesting powers in that neck of the woods?

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Selection's limited if she's still avoiding the biggest cape cities. There's a shaker 12 who can reportedly more or less create her own environment, and a highly rated changer who can morph into impossible monsters. Each is with a traveling team, so could maybe be coaxed away from wherever they are right now. If she wanted to go to Toronto there's a cape who is almost Legend lite, toggling between the speed and invulnerability or the firepower. A hero who doesn't need to eat or sleep, which would have come in handy lately, but she's not likely to get him out of Boston.

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Toronto sounds good to her. Far enough away that she probably won't be expected there either.

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It's definitely that. She's kind of establishing a pattern if they do know this was her, but at least it's not a pattern that lets anyone predict her very well.

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That's the idea.

Now that her hands are free, she can get another car and use that instead of taking the bus.

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Cars are traceable. At least if anyone does track it down, it'd be the stolen-car police not the extremely-superpowered-serial-killer police.

Luckily for them, no one tries to get in her way for far enough that they probably aren't following her.

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Good. It's going to be a long enough trip without that kind of distraction.

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The Protectorate building is nice and obvious. Toronto's cape scene is on roughly the same scale as Raleigh's; it has a fully-staffed PRT department and hero team but isn't one of the big-name cities. A couple gangs mostly engaged in petty crime and only notable for the fact that they have parahumans attached, and an independent hero team who would probably be more accurately labeled rogues.

The target is also fairly conspicuous. Grumman doesn't really have a secret identity; it's a side effect of how he's either completely immobile or an extremely maneuverable bullet. It'd come out the first time he tried to have a conversation while walking. So finding out where he lives is easier than the last time around. Of course, identities are normally secret for a reason. Even if no one expects villains to attack someone at home, they have to be aware of the possibility.

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Reconnaissance is part of what the drones are for. She sends them to scope out the target.

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The drones spot what are probably alarm systems. Getting very close would be a risk. But they can tell there doesn't seem to be anyone living there except for the target and his mother.

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Surprise is going to be crucial. If he runs, she won't be able to catch him. Probably neither of her tinkers know anything about alarm systems?

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The new one definitely doesn't; the other would have to see the house's defenses up close.

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How heavily trafficked is the neighborhood?

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Not very. If she strolls by looking at the house, chances are no one outside it would see. It still wouldn't be that much better a view of the home defense systems than the drones could get, but it's something.

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Risk is low enough. She'll take a walk. Casual-like.

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No one questions her. A woman who is presumably Mrs. Stodt is visible inside the house but doesn't do more than glance at her.

Some of the alarms look like motion sensors, presumably turned off since it's the middle of the day. Cameras view the entrances from the outside but have fairly wide fields of vision. There's no stretch of wall that's obviously unwatched. Including the roof, though the drones could say that one already. (The devices look sufficiently different from what the Machine Army tinker could do that that power is no help here. Which is interesting; it's suggestive that there might be tinker tech involved.)

The house probably isn't impenetrable. But if there are vulnerabilities, walking past isn't going to reveal them.

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It's more penetrable than the Protectorate headquarters, and catching him in transit is intractable. If she knew when and where he was going to be patrolling, she could try to arrange something that would require intervention.

Tinkertech home security is.. atypical. Does Toronto have any local capes who might provide such a service to teammates?

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They don't publicize exactly what the specialties are except in the obvious cases, but there is a tinker on the team. She does have a tendency to make sets of interconnected small items; that could apply here whether it's for power reasons or not.

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Hmm. So it's not completely unreasonable that this be here. Doesn't really help with circumventing it.

Does a few days more of observation turn anything useful up?

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Nothing out of the ordinary. She can guess in advance when he'll be at work, but not whether he'll be actively out patrolling. He's probably never going to be completely vulnerable; she might have to pick a least bad option.

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Which is probably going to be the house while he sleeps, again. She waits for his return and plans her route.

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It's a bit of an awkward angle of approach. His room is on the ground floor and not on the side facing the street. But: teleportation.

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The flash of light associated therewith can be kind of a giveaway. But perhaps no one will be watching.

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They aren't.

Until she's approaching the wall and right up next to it, and by the time she tunnels through the wall he's half-awake and blinking. Once she's inside, wow those alarms are loud. And bright. And arranged directly around the person who needed to be woken up at a moment's notice; nice and considerate.

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She blinks again, next to him, reaching out-

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–and he crashes away at eighty kilometers an hour. Straight through the wall behind him, without even leaving an oddly precise human-shaped hole. Or a wall.

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Dammit! That's exactly why she wanted him.

With her target gone, she will make her own exit.

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(A few seconds after the crash there's a less dramatic sound of a door opening and then silence.)

 

And a voice blares through the same speakers as the heavy-duty alarm clock. "Surrender! You're surrounded!"

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Drone report?

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She's not even a little bit surrounded.

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In that case, she's not sticking around.

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They are on their way, though. First to arrive is a suit of power armor with limbs tapering down to points and a bewildering array of weaponry. "Hello again," says Dragon's voice.

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...There's no one in that suit. No reason to stick around and try to peel them out, then. She pulls out the chaos blaster to distract/disable the bewildering array of weaponry while she continues fleeing.

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The suit flits out of the way of the conical blast and activates some sequence of random bright flashes. The light isn't a threat, but it does mean there's no line of sight to teleport with.

"Grumman was a fairly obvious choice of victim once we knew you were coming here. Incidentally, my guess is that assassinating specific people for their powers would still get you a kill order but in most places would not mean every parahuman in the city bands together against you. In case you were wondering." Dragon is still talking for some reason.

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"We were not. We were wondering why you care enough to provide us this information, but not enough to visit us in person."

She can still run. And call in drones to attack the suit.

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"You're hard to find. And if someone does go to the courts, I'd rather you know better than to conclude you might as well go back to killing every parahuman you can." The drones are primarily built for stealth not combat. Dragon doesn't know that, so they provide an effective distraction.

Some ghostly forms, like hers but less caricatured, start shambling toward her from the direction of the street.

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Any clear paths out of the area?

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Bursting through hedges into a neighbor's yard? Or it's possible she could fight her way through the ghosts; research before arriving showed they're dangerous to touch but not all that tough and there are rarely more than four at a time. Whatever she tries, she doesn't have long before Dragon's drone finishes with the distraction.

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She'll go through the ghosts. Even with one shade tying up Dragon, she's still got the firepower. And maybe she'll run into the cape responsible for them.

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He's got to be around somewhere; nothing mentioned him having an amazing range. She could probably track him down by which direction the replacement ghosts are coming from if she wants to take the time.

The first cape she sees isn't him. It's a tall woman whose shade has a mark on its forehead. She's wielding a metal rod, which she plants into the ground angled toward Ellie. Then she starts unloading a containment foam sprayer even though she's outside the effective range.
(The Protectorate might not know whether she's grossly underinformed. Having done her research, Ellie knows any blow she lands would affect both of them.)

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Another ones for the drones to distract. Ellie opts to continue tracing the ghosts' path.

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Dragon can run through a carload of spy drones pretty quickly, and having to dodge an extremely destructive cone whenever the Keres can spare the attention doesn't slow her down all that much. She flies forward. When she's directly above Ellie she starts raining down red energy bolts that take a mover power to dodge.

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Good thing she has a mover power at her disposal. And if Dragon's closing in, then she can start having to dodge two blasters.

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She rises another fifteen feet, staying well outside the range of the maelstroms. One blaster is easier to dodge. Aside from the harm to Dragon's accuracy, the increased distance does mean there's the occasional gap in the dazzling lights strategy for blocking teleportation—

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She finds a hole, blinks out-

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She's past the hero with the containment foam, and the three current ghosts reverse course to come back at her. Then they vanish and four replacements start coming from the other direction. Makes sense, since they're slower than she is. Dragon repositions herself near-instantly to prevent the same thing happening again, decreasing her safety margin and firing more energy weapons. A glancing hit makes Ellie's left hand go numb.

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Tsk. Her own fault for pausing. She keeps going towards the ghosts, and their creator.

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They don't put up strong resistance so much as they have a decent chance at landing a touch while she's distracted. She still has to mostly focus on Dragon, with the occasional warning shot at the tall woman, but can zap ghosts as necessary. The time it takes for replacements to arrive gradually decreases until she steps around a corner and sees where they're coming from. Two capes, not one.

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She can spare one shot of chaos at this pair.

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The one generating ghosts has been scrambling backwards since she came into view and gets away. The other screams as her arm gets disintegrated, but manages to slam a button with her other hand.

Small lights start glowing from every direction and elevation, then in a split second thin blue lines connect the perimeter and pull toward each other. The glowing constellation snaps shut, leaving her bound and immobile. The ghost cape rushes forward to pull his teammate out of vaporization range while Ellie is distracted as well as stuck.

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She pulls out a brute and tries to struggle free, but that doesn't stop her from shooting again.

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This power isn't the most accurate one even when the user is in more of a position to aim. But then, they're not in the best position to dodge either. The tinker stops yelling, and the master starts. He still has the presence of mind to move out of range.

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She grabs the tinker's power before it floats free, and queries it for ways to escape this trap.

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No single point is necessary; the ones around it would just link to each other to close the gap. Getting out while tied up would take forever. Easier to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow on the remote, which is right over... she blasted it.

Dragon flies over, too late, for what she cares about, and starts firing stun bolts again.

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She can't dodge anymore, but she can still shoot back.

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And Dragon can dodge. Everything goes numb, then black.

 

 

When she's conscious again, she can hear Dragon saying to a newly arrived PRT team that she'll be out for a few minutes yet. Probably a bad idea to open her eyes.

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Can she tell where Dragon is based on sound without opening them?

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Pretty close, at least. Probably not close enough she can confidently shoot at her or anything.

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...She cracks her eyes open very slightly, not moving anything else.

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Dragon is there, standing close in case there needs to be emergency re-stunning. She left the dazzling lights on, but now it's pointed more precisely. PRT agents there (and, by the voices, there and there and...). Other heroes are present, mostly in the direction where Ellie vaporized their teammate.

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Now that she knows where the suit is, how does it handle an unexpected short-range chaos blast?

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Not very well at all. Most of the suit is a hole now. The PRT people are trained professionals and start spraying containment foam as soon as they see what happened. The capes are marginally less trained mostly-professionals and start reaching for their powers. Some of them are screaming Dragon's name in exactly the same way the ghost cape did the last time she vaporized someone.

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Do they not know the suit was remotely controlled? Well. They'll figure it out.

In the meantime, she has not-here places to be. Blink.

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It's kind of a silly sight. She's tied up and moving only by the teleportation power and the recoil from Damsel's, and is still outrunning the pursuers. At least until those shades get tired.

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As long as she is outrunning them, that's the important thing for now.

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Very important, but unlikely to last forever. They have advantages like numbers, and vehicles, and not being tied up.

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She can change at least one of those things if she gets some time to do it. Just need to break line of sight and duck into a house.

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Neither of those is very hard. They will know which house, though.

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Are the people inside she can hold hostage?

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Probably. They're asleep; she's covered enough ground by now that the cape fight didn't wake the neighbors this far out.

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Up and at 'em, everyone, you get to be the things standing between her and the Protectorate while she gets out of this netting. Feel free to call for help and let them know you're here, but if they come in or you kick up too much of a fuss, she's going to kill you.

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No one likes the idea of doing what the villain wants them to do, but under the circumstances it's better than not doing it. People start dialing.

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She keeps an eye on them while asking the tinker shade the best way to go about removing the net, given the tools she has at hand.

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Get as much electricity as she possibly can and apply it to that node right there. Unless she wants to do it without frying herself, in which case the easiest way is probably to make an extra node, and attach it to the network without telling the adjacent ones to pull it tight, and then just step through the gap.

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She'll work on the second option.

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She'll want to cannibalize the microwave, dismantle the television, and probably raid the fridge.

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Her hosts have no objection, she trusts?

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Nothing worth arguing about when they're being held hostage.

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Good. To work.

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The opposition is all around the house and has evacuated the nearby ones by the time she's done. Surprising that the tinkering went that fast; probably because it's just a slight modification to something recent.

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She adds the node and extricates herself from the net. Much better.

Now. What she wants to do next is leave the city. The heroes are blocking her from doing that, so she needs to create a hole. There are too many to fight efficiently, so she needs distractions. She has hostages, a few drones, and a variety of powers. So what she'll do is send drones to attack on one side, blow open a second with her shades, and go out the front door, with the hostages. Hopefully that will confuse them long enough for her to blink away and gain some distance.

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From the heroes' point of view, there are more people than they expected, then a flash and it's the correct number. They don't have any way of cheating at finding out where she reappeared, but if it's close they might spot her the normal way.

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She's on top of a roof at the other end of the block, and moving fast.

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Then without Dragon, they'll have a much harder time tracing her.

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Good. She needs to leave the city and lay low for a while, rebuild her drones, see if the new tinker has any useful concepts, figure out how Dragon traced her.

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The hardest part was getting far enough away that she could be anywhere in the city. That done, actually being anywhere in (or out) of it is relatively easier. Any destination in particular?

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Not really. Somewhere quiet, out of the way. No resident parahumans.

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There are quiet out of the way places. After heading east and skipping some she'll end up pulling over at some place called Jacob's Bell.

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And now she needs needs a place to sit and think, and optionally work.

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It's early morning by now; coffee shops are open. Or she could break into a hotel room like before if she's worried about being recognized.

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...Some coffee actually would be a good idea. It's been a long day.

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Coffee, then. They haven't plastered her face across every television screen, so there aren't any surprise interruptions.

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She wonders briefly if they ever will do such a thing. Convenient for as long as they don't though.

First question. Dragon. How did they find her, and can she do anything to stop it from being done again?

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Most relevant face-plastering is the tinker's picture. The PRT is spinning it as "there was a hostage situation, no victims harmed, one hero tragically deceased" and letting people draw the obvious (false) conclusion. Then they talk a lot about the person now revealed to be Diana Thompson, partly because it plays well to the viewers and partly so the PRT can focus no more than necessary on the fact that the villain escaped.

 

There's really no way to find out how Dragon did it. Tracked the car she stole in North Carolina? Left a tracker under her skin in Kansas? Chicken entrails? It'd look the same from Ellie's side.

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If Dragon would have just actually been in that suit she blew up, this would be a solved problem. The heroes weren't expecting it either, judging by their reaction. It seems like she ought to be able to exploit that somehow, but nothing immediately springs to mind. She might just have to wait and see if Dragon turns up again and if any new clues reveal themselves.

Other tinker things. She has a new one now, with a new specialty. What information did she get about what it can do?

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It's less about specific devices than connections between them. It's not going to build anything complex or powerful but might get some complex piles of coordinated stuff. The last person with the power used it mostly to affect wide areas, like the security system or the net trap.

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That could be interesting in combination with the Machine Army. She needs a workspace. Is this the sort of town to have one?

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Not really. Not on the Machine Army scale, for certain.

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Hmm... Actually, she has an idea for a project that wouldn't need much space. A room's worth. It'd only be person-sized at the end.

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Rooms are way easier to steal. Equipment and materials are about the same difficulty as in the other places.

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Then she finishes the last of her coffee, and goes to look for a room.

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Finding room-sized places is easy. Now that she has money, she could probably get it fairly. Or not; whichever's easier.

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It's important to try new things. She'll pay money for it.


Once she has a bit of privacy, she gets out her two tinkers to go over the idea, and the danger sensor, just to check.

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The two relevant tinkers say maybe and yes, respectively, and the danger sensor is mostly just flashing neon signs about how now is a good time to panic.

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How far?

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There's a knock on the door. That.

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Shades out, brute-blaster-mover.

 

She opens the door.

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It's a Johnny Depp lookalike smiling and extending his hand to shake. He's pretty recognizable.

"Hello! You must be the Keres."

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She regards the outstretched hand.


She takes it. "Jack Slash."

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"Correct.

You know, you've made a much bigger splash among the white hats than they've been showing."

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"What makes you say that?"

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"You fought Eidolon, and got Dragon's attention. Twice. Better, even: they sent Eidolon early. That means they're afraid of what you might become."

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"Are you?"

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"Afraid? I'm well aware you could become more powerful than me, but you did that long ago. Unlike the heroes, I don't always have to be the strongest one around."

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"Hardly surprising, given the company you tend to keep."

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"Very true. 

And if I'm not mistaken, I can offer you what you're after on that score."

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"Is that so."

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"Extremely. If you'd confirm a guess of mine, either Eidolon or Dragon got you to scale down and cross the country between assassinations instead of just taking the powers you want?"

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"Something like that."

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"I can offer you a way to stop holding back."

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"Is this a recruitment pitch?"

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"Got it in one."

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"We understand your organization has a fairly high rate of turnover."

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"It's a very dangerous lifestyle; not everyone can hack it. If only there were people who actively wanted fights to the death against as many other parahumans as possible, them I'd expect to do just fine."

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"The fights are incidental. We only care about the deaths."

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"They usually go together. Sneaking around can get you some, sometimes you even get to pick. Not sneaking around can let you collect an entire hero team while using the powers of the last one. Or villains; we're not picky."

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"What if we do not wish to join you?"

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"I think you will. If not, the other members rush you through the interview process anyway. It's not unheard-of for people who don't want to join to survive."

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"What is the interview process?"

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"It's very...rigorous. Each member sets a test. Can be hard or very hard, depending on their opinions. If the candidate fails, they exact a forfeit. Always major, sometimes fatal, occasionally worse. But since you're my nominee, I have no compunction about telling you that it's perfectly acceptable to decline to participate in a test and simply fight anyone who presses the issue.

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"We accept your offer."

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This would look like an evil grin even if it were on a face not belonging to Jack Slash. "I thought you might. Anything you want to take care of before meeting the rest of the team?"

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"We were about to begin creating a replacement for the drones we lost at Toronto before you knocked."

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"I'll take that as a no, then. Much better than interrupting you once you've started. Besides, they're here." An elevator dings, audible through the open door.

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She opens the door fully, and stands aside to let Jack and the rest enter.

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Some of them are recognizable, others less so. It varies by infamy. Crawler's unmistakeable. He's also outside the window. There aren't many elevators that work for him. Then there's the Siberian, and the other end varies all the way down to a completely unfamiliar friendly-looking girl with a red streak in her dark hair.

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The Slaughterhouse Nine. Right here in front of her. Not how she was expecting this day to go.

"We would extend our hospitality, but we have only just arrived here ourselves."

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"No problem at all. Introductions!

This is the Siberian, and Bonesaw, Mannequin, Shatterbird, Crawler, Burnscar, and our newest recruit, Cherish. Me you've met. Everyone, this is the Keres. They're up for Hatchet Face's spot, depending on how all this goes."

The black-and-white striped woman has no visible shade at all. Even though the Siberian definitely has powers. The absence is a bit distracting.

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It's like Dragon's suit, except for the part where it doesn't seem plausible. Some sort of projection? You'd think that sort of thing would have been noticed.

"A pleasure to meet you all, we're sure."

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Bonesaw is the first to pipe up. "Jack says you collect powers! Do you have any good ones for art, yet?" Bonesaw's idea of art is pretty widely known to tend toward the biological.

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"That is not a criterion by which I have been filtering. The tinker called Cask, perhaps." She brings forth the relevant shade.

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She peers at it. There's not a whole lot of information to be gleaned that way; the ghost is at most a vague metaphorical depiction of the powers and even less clear to people who aren't Ellie.

"Well that's something. I'm sure you'll get more."

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"Perhaps you would like to suggest some possibilities?"

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"There's– oh, but I wouldn't want you to have to kill her. Maybe the tinker in Boston, even though he makes his own canvases. Oh! Or Nilbog!"


Jack laughs. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. There'll be plenty of time to plan collaborations after she's joined."

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Ellie smiles at Bonesaw.

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Bonesaw smiles back.

One of the others looks up from where she's staring at a flame encircling her hand. Burnscar. She intones in a flat voice "Seems OK. So when do we start the testing."

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"Whenever you're ready."

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"I'm not," says the same flat voice. "Don't know what you're afraid of yet."

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"Nothing you'd be capable of doing."

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"You'd be surprised how many people say that. It's part of why we have the tests in the first place.

Anyone else?"

Cherish looks about to speak up. An unknown quantity.

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"What about... her?" she asks, looking at the Siberian.

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"She wants to start at the top, we can play along."

To Ellie, "She doesn't talk, of course, but her test is always the same. It's..well, if you don't know I suspect you'll find out."

The danger sense goes apocalyptic shortly before the striped woman rushes her, snarling.

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Teleporter out, blink out the window, blink again. Again.

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The Siberian is fast. She can of course run absurdly fast, but when looking backward Ellie can also occasionally see her jump into the air and kick off a falling leaf. She doesn't quite move at the speed of being at her destination as soon as she can see it, but it's close.

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That's not fair. It really isn't. She's not even in that body, so Ellie can't do anything about it.

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And Ellie knows how much teleporting this shade can do and how fast, but she doesn't know what the Siberian's limits are. If any. The extremely unfair person runs circles around her, occasionally even literally curving to come from a different direction, and is really hard to stay away from.

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The Siberian is immune to everything. Ellie tries a chaos blast, just in case 'everything at once' turns out to be an exception to everything.

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It doesn't, and letting the Siberian get close enough to test that may be a bad idea. The range is only six or fifteen feet, and either participant in the chase can cover that in a blink.

Suddenly there's a cold, colorless hand over her eyes and an inexorable force moving one of her arms Siberianward.

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"I know you're not here. Come out and show me what you really look like."

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The Siberian spreads Ellie's fingers and bites down on one above the second knuckle. Then she lets go, takes the hand away from her quarry's face, and stands a step back. There's blood sliding down her chin.

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Gah. That hurts. She grits her teeth, but refuses to scream. She grabs the stump in her other hand and applies pressure. Deep breath.

Blink away. If it is a projection, maybe there's a range limit. This is Canada, there's lots of wilderness. She travels as deep as she can, avoiding roads and towns.

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That... works. The Siberian's movements and reactions slow, then she eventually stops reappearing. 

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So there is a range. Good. The projector can reposition, but hopefully whatever mobility solution they have been using will be less effective in this terrain.

She should move from this position, then find somewhere hidden to rest a while. With the danger sensor up.

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The Siberian is outside the danger sensor's range. Until she abruptly isn't. And she covers the distance from the edge of the range quickly, sometimes charging straight through obstacles. There's a cartoonish Siberian-shaped hole in one tree; another just falls.

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She goes, again trying to outrange it.

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She (it?) is faster than Ellie with the wilderness blocking line of sight. She's taken to running in the low branches of trees; it barely slows her down and it means Ellie can't keep an eye on her if she wants to look where she's going. She closes in.

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She blasts a hole in the canopy and blinks straight up then over, catching herself on a treetop before blinking again.

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She can't fly, and the Siberian might as well be able to. But she can change direction midair a lot more easily– it's hard to tell whether she's actually getting anywhere. But she's not currently having any more fingers bitten off, so that's good.

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She's going to run it out of range eventually.

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The trick is to teleport whenever the Siberian starts to move in a direction, regardless of how much safety margin it looks like she has. Once she gets that down, she's as safe as one can be when pursued by a that thing. There are a couple close calls, but no more injuries.

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"How long are you going to keep chasing us?" she calls. "What happens when we decide to go back to Jack and tell him you're not what he thinks you are while you're distracted moving your real body?"

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Charging: still happening. Telling Jack isn't a sufficient threat, apparently.

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"What happens when we tell him that's the reason you failed?"

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No response. Unless continuing rage monsterness is a response, of course. The Siberian leaps at Ellie twice more in two seconds.

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She blinks for range again.

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It works, eventually. She's covered a lot of ground by now (again) and the projection stops pursuing.

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This time, she backtracks, looking for the projector.

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Without knowing the radius or even the direction, that's a tall order. The first promising-looking car parked by the edge of a road turns out to be just a breakdown. She'll spot the projection raising its face to the air and sniffing before finding the master.

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"There you are. Are we playing again?"

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Standing. Staring. Not charging.

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"And here we came all this way to find you."

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She tilts her head to one side.

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"Vocalizations not in your repertoire? Then here is our offer: We return together and you tell them I passed your test, or you return alone and tell them you couldn't keep up with us because you are a projection."

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The Siberian stands stock-still for indecisively long. Then she nods.

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"Let us be off, then."

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It takes a bit longer than the way out, since it's not a life and death hunt, but it's not a hard trip. The projection leads the way to where the others have moved to and they can walk in side by side with the Keres conspicuously not dead.

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"We return." She looks around the room.

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"And ended it early! That's a novel result."

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"For how long does it usually last?"

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"Until she decides she's had enough."

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"Who is next?"

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"There's a good standby for capes like you," says Shatterbird, "I decided to try putting you in solitary confinement for a while. You, singular." A floating ball of glass pushes her through a door. She barely feels, let alone sees, the prick of something sharper.

Her new surroundings are a bare room, not remarkably small but mostly taken up by a large roughly cubical glass. Very roughly; there are shards jutting out at irregular intervals. It appears almost designed to look threatening, as much as an inanimate object can.

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All the more so, given the nature of the person who pushed her in.

Not that she need stay. She summons her tunneler.

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No she doesn't.

A moment after she tries, the object expands.

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what


she thought hatchet face was dead

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No. Stop. That is not a helpful response. She's been here before, and lived through it.


The glass expanded. Not all powers in the area are blocked. It's not Hatchet Face. That slight sting- an injection? A drug by Bonesaw?

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It seemed like it moved in response to her attempt at summoning a shade. Well enough, she will simply not call on any.

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For a moment, nothing happens. Just a ticking clock. After a moment, nothing continues to happen.

It's a full five minutes before the unusually scary pile of glass reassembles itself into a form that takes up more space. Again.

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Okay so maybe it's time-based.

She tries for a brute this time.

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Nope.

And it moves again. There's enough space for now that she can still walk around it normally, but why would she do that when she can hug the wall.

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yes that seems like a good idea

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No, it actually isn't. That would be an admission of fear, of weakness. She can't afford that.

She will not hug the wall. She will stand normally.

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At a certain point fear is really just accuracy.

Especially since ignoring it means standing closer the next time it expands like that– no, it didn't really move yet. Did it?

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...She shouldn't be this scared, nothing has actually happened.

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Yes it has; it's right there. All lurking and stuff.

It does get a lot less scary on reflection.

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That was significantly more fear than it warranted. Someone was messing with her.

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...maybe it made sense while she was scared, but now she's thinking about that theory and it's almost embarrassing.

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Right, best to drop it and never bring it up again-

 

No, someone is messing with her. Likely the new one, Cherish.

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Well, being more specifically suspicious doesn't prompt any change. Still vaguely embarrassing.

 

Five minutes after its last shift, the glass expands again. Now she actually is too cramped to walk normally, and can't not stare at that thing

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Okay, she's done with it now.

She tears strips off her shirt to wrap up her hands.

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It exists at her threateningly.

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She aims a blow at one of the less spiky areas.

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It breaks about as well as glass should. Then the pieces return to where they used to be, now spikier.

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She's not going to stand here and wait to be crushed against the wall. If she can't get out, Shatterbird is at least going to need to keep picking up the pieces she makes.

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After breaking it and watching pieces reattach, she'll eventually run out of nearby smooth parts. Which means that when it expands again and she has to stand exceptionally straight, there's nothing on that side to brace against...

(Which is fine; the thought of touching that is almost the worst part of picturing being lacerated to death against the wall–)

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"Get out of my head," she hisses, raising her arms to bring them down in one final blow, heedless of damage.

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Then damage happens. Partly to it, more to her arms. The first category repairs itself.

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Again. She is not going to sit and wait.

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This is an extremely questionable idea. Eventually she's going to run low on blood if the pain doesn't convince her to stop first.

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If Jack still wants her, he'll have Bonesaw do something afterwards. But she's not going to stop for petty concerns like pain or death.

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Eventually she'll stop for similarly petty concerns like blood loss. The no-longer-a-cube expands again, pressing her against the wall in case she's still conscious.

 

Bonesaw does in fact do something afterwards.

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...If she wakes up with her mind intact, there's a limit to how bad it could be.

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It's not even close to the limit. Her arms are definitely human ones, if not precisely hers she still wouldn't even stand out on the street. Perfectly functional too.


"Jack said to do as little as possible since you might end up joining or failing. So I didn't do any upgrades or anything just for fun."

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"There will be time enough for that later."

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"Yep!" Either way, really.

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And now to return to the others?

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Shatterbird gives her a nod. If any of the others were relevant they're not showing it.

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She fixes a look on Cherish. That is a person she is going to kill, regardless of anything she may feel now or in the future.

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That kind of professional rivalry isn't uncommon.
Everyone especially Cherish notices the look but no one seems to consider it urgent. Possibly because Ellie's power is still out of commission.

"Congratulations on that result, I think I can say. A very spirited response."

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"De-spirited, we would call it."

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Jack laughs more than the pun strictly deserved. "That too.

Mannequin's test is always a variation on the same theme, if you haven't been following us closely you might not have heard. You're going to change yourself, something that costs you."

He tosses her a piece of paper. It says, in neat handwriting, that since she's barely more attached to her physical form than Mannequin himself is, and making her cripple her power would be counterproductive, she is to interrupt the nearest news broadcast and introduce herself as Keres. A parahuman like any other and not any kind of mystical plural entity. 

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"Will we be allowed to use our shades to accomplish this?"

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Jack looks to Mannequin, who shrugs. Bonesaw tosses her a pill. "Antidote. Well, antibiotic, technically; it's a parasite not a poison. But this fixes it."

"Yes," Jack agrees, "showing off will make for a much better image. Might want to confess or commit some juicy crimes for the same reason, pretend to be doing this for the notoriety, but he left the details up to you."

The paper does include locations. None of them are likely to have capes defending, because why would they.

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She takes the pill.

"We think we can provide a suitable spectacle. We will return when this is accomplished."

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"Have fun."

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So she leaves. She'll go to the nearest station, minimum of messing around. Is it as undefended as it ought to be?

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Pretty much. As far as she's concerned it might as well be made entirely of unlocked doors.

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Is it an hour when there is a broadcast to be interrupted?

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Judging by the "do not enter" and "on air" signs, probably.

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Excellent.

She enters from the back, accompanied by three shades, darkness swirling ominously around her. A blast of chaos obliterates the anchor's desk.

"Do not cut," she instructs.

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If there's one thing that obedience is symptomatic of, it's weaponry. People talk themselves into thinking this is newsworthy even without the implied threat.

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"Most of you do not know who I am, your Protectorate has not seen fit to inform you. I consider this an unforgivable oversight. I am the Keres." The shades are not echoing her voice. "I have killed many of your heroes: Edict, Lightscour, Cask," she lists off the shades she has. "I have fought Eidolon and Dragon, and yet walk free. I am not magic, only myself, a parahuman. If you are another such and think yourself capable of stopping me, come and find me. I will add you to my collection."

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When she gets to the tinker from Toronto the cameras zoom in on the shade's face. Regardless of whether it was because the PRT wanted to affect the focus, that was big news very recently.

Anyway, singular personal pronouns, giving up the deal with the role, ought to satisfy Mannequin.

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She sneers into the camera, then turns and departs the way she came.

Back to the Nine.

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Mannequin signals his acceptance by extending a hand. It looks more like a length of chain being levitated than an arm.

After they shake, Crawler interjects, "My turn. I want to see if you can hurt me."

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"That's it?"

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"It's why I joined. Most can't. If you can't, you fail."

The armor plates where his foremost pair of legs meets his body shift around, a motion that was probably a shrug when he was humanoid. His motivation is pretty obvious; Crawler is famously immune to whatever once managed to hurt him.

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"Very well." She reaches out a hand, touches, grabs-

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There's the creature from her visions again. A short flash of all its discarded cells combating each other—

Crawler's shade doesn't even recognize that there was an attack. Certainly it doesn't regenerate the lack of physical damage; it's hers now. Not his. The ground shudders when Crawler's body hits.

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"Does that count?" she asks with a half-smile.

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Crawler doesn't object.

"You killed him! Now you've got to help me bring him back."

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"Oh? And how will we be doing that?"

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"I don't know yet. It mostly worked with Hatchet Face, but Crawler is a little bit different. We can figure it out, it'll be fun!"

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"Is this another test?"

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"Those aren't supposed to be fun. I guess, if that's what it takes."

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"Let us be on with it, then."

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"If you need more tinkers just say. I'm sure no one would mind a detour, and I can put Crawler on ice." She looks at the body, roughly the size of a small car. "Lots of ice."

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"Outside of you, the only one with an applicable talent I am aware of is the one in Boston."

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"Not the barrel one? Oh well, we were probably going to hit a big city next anyway since we were about to have all Nine; it might as well be Boston. Right?"

She looks to Jack, who says "be patient just a little longer; she hasn't finished joining yet."

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"Could I not say I decline any further tests, and fight anyone who wishes to press the issue?"

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"If you wanted to risk it," Burnscar threatens.

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"Do you know what your test would be yet?"

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The fire around Burnscar's hand has been gradually growing since Ellie mentioned fighting her. "You know what, never mind," she says flatly. "Let's just do it this way." A pool of fire spreads out around her feet, and she disappears into it.

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So that's a no, then. If Crawler is not already immune to fire, Ellie will be very much surprised. This ought to be easy.

She leaves to look for the fire Burnscar emerged from, summoning Crawler's shade. The nature of this power means that it does not follow behind as a distinct entity. Rather, it wraps around and through her, a ghostly image of the horror she killed.

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Crawler had adapted to fire, but not just fire. She feels herself mutating, the extra mass coming out of nowhere, until she's exactly the size of the Crawler body on the ground.

There's a trail of small fires. Burnscar decided on a whim, so no setup ahead of time. The problem is that she doesn't have to be going linearly: she's appearing and disappearing between fires to lob small fireballs and expand her list of places she might be at any given time.

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Ellie does have to travel linearly, her teleport is limited by line of sight. She stomps out fires where she can, and tries to catch up with Burnscar. She only needs to get one hit in.

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Yeah, but she's enormous. Crawler may have been deceptively fast, and all that experience transferrable to her, but that doesn't mean hard to avoid.

Burnscar's easily avoiding her but hasn't tried anything offensive yet.

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Then she will continue to cut off lines of retreat as she finds them.

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Her opponent has plenty of time to wait for an opening. The first time Ellie is standing over a big enough flame while prioritizing the fires next to her, she erupts from underneath. She's directing concussive blasts upward—how does that even work, it's massless—and jolts her vertically. Then does it again, and again.

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"Stop," she says, an Edict-enforced command.

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After using her power enough to knock Crawler around, Burnscar is in no condition to just stop. Whatever the penalty was isn't slowing her down.

Ellie lands with a crash, completely unharmed. Bonesaw's voice shouts "Not here!" but Burnscar's not listening. Ellie's Crawler-sized bulk suddenly vanishes, along with all her shades.

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What the hell- Bonesaw said something about resurrecting Hatchet Face. Must be it.

She can't get shot by a fireball in here, but Burnscar can still ring the place in fire. She needs to get out now. She runs through, pulling at Crawler's shade all the time, wanting it up as soon as she's able to.

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Burnscar is launching obstacles at her the same way she moved her when she was Crawler-sized. A piece of a tree trunk here, a rock there. Much to Bonsaw's dismay. None are very accurate as weapons, but it's more than enough to make her think twice about running straight through.

And then a knife appears in Ellie's leg. "Our dear Burnscar wasn't the only one who hasn't had a go yet, remember."

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Ow.

"Oh, but Jack. I thought you liked me."

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"Oh, what's a little stabbing between friends?" He's lazily tossing more knives, none of which do more than scratch her. That and give Burnscar some time.

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"Maybe treat me to dinner, first."

She takes a winding path through, trying for cover from both knives and fire-propelled projectiles.

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Hatchet Face's range was never very wide.

Apparently what Burnscar came up with was an enormous fiery pulse. Her control over it fizzles out, highlighting the boundary neatly, but the blast of superheated air continues.

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...Hatchet Face will be at the center of the circle. She grabs the knife out of her leg. She'll just do another resurrection with Bonesaw if she complains.

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From the outside, this probably looks like she's fleeing the heat. But the circle is small enough that seeing the curvature could point her toward the center. When she finds Hatchet Face, he's standing inactive. No current orders.

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She cuts his throat.

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He does move to defend himself—more than zero instincts, apparently—but not quickly. And his brute powers do not render him immune to knives.

After he falls, her attempts to reach for Crawler's shade go through. She can walk through the fire and probably shrug off most of whatever Burnscar is throwing.

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Good. She heads in the direction of the most recent missile.

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Jack is enormously pleased when the power nullification goes down and the Crawler shape goes up. He seems to be trying to talk Burnscar into conceding. She's not very receptive.

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"You should just let me kill her."

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"Why? Admittedly she's not always the most interesting member of our little family, but that's hardly a capital offense.

And I don't think you'd want her power anyway. What with the enforced recklessness and inability to think clearly."

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"I do get some insulation from those effects. And it would solve the problem of the moment."

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"But long-term solutions to short-term problems are so boring. Much more exciting when everything is balanced on, well, a knife's edge.

Besides, you'll probably outlast her. Until then, the more dangerous we collectively are the more capes we end up killing. After, of course there's no reason not to."

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"Fine."

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He doesn't talk Burnscar into conceding, but he talks her into a ceasefire for a bit and then into calling the fight over.

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Ellie will accept that.

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Then the only one remaining is Bonesaw, who is not about to object.

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So she is one of the Slaughterhouse Nine now?

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Yup. Welcome to the most-feared group of...humans. Endbringers don't count.

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Where are they going first?

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"Bonesaw suggested Boston. The problem with that is, Boston is in perfectly fine condition right now. They'll be able to concentrate forces on us. In a straight-up war...we could probably win. We are the Slaughterhouse Nine, after all. It goes much better if we pick somewhere already on its back foot. A question of priorities, and risk management."

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"Sensible enough."

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"In which case... Cherish, how would you like to set Boston at war with itself for the occasion?"

 

She smiles, looking a lot more cheerful than Jack's near-permanently evil grin. "Absolutely."

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If no opportunities present themselves, create one. This should be interesting.

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It should indeed.

 

Boston is close, at least on a relative scale. They migrate eastward, committing the occasional theft but no atrocities that would get serious attention. Being hard to pin down is important. When they're in the vicinity, Jack deploys Cherish to track down important capes and determine who can be set against whom. Bonesaw takes advantage of the delay to offer the Keres the same upgrades the rest of them have.

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Which are?

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A mental switch to toggle pain on and off. Implanted armor around each major blood vessel. Backups in case of organ failure. Reinforced skeleton. Any extra limbs? Extra limbs are fun.

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She has all the limbs she requires at present, thank you. The other upgrades sound appealing.

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By the end of it, she'll be not literally immune to weapons but certainly able to temporarily ignore details like a bullet to the chest. Depending on the bullet.

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Excellent, thank you Bonesaw.


Does she still have time to make her drones before the show starts?

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The show starts when Shatterbird says it starts. Right now it's still Cherish they're waiting on; Bonesaw can do an everything surgery in minutes or hours but Cherish has to track capes through a normal-person schedule.

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Then she'll start work and hopefully won't get interrupted.

Tinkers, she has need of you. She wants a suit of armor made of individual drone-like components she can send off piecemeal to fight or reconnoiter or perform other such tasks.

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The tinkers are happy to collaborate. The result will need regular maintenance, but being with the Nine so far has involved more downtime than it might have sounded like.

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Then she will be as ready as she ever will be.

Still waiting on Cherish?

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She comes back shortly after the suit is done, with a summary of who's how easy to subvert. There's a Protectorate division, obviously. PRT Director Armstrong is annoyingly fair-minded when confronted with someone who may have been less than legal in the past, so absent interference he'd probably work to ally with the local villains.

Accord, a mostly non-combat Thinker. To Cherish, he just screams being overwhelmingly frustrated at anything even the tiniest bit out of place. This also makes him absolutely awful to be around even when he can't order your death. Definitely capable of putting aside a grudge to deal with an unexpected Slaughterhouse Nine, but it's anyone's guess whether he could hold to that when an ally insists on speaking informally or tilting their head too far left. His Ambassadors are all loyal to him personally. While Cherish can isolate that faction easily and probably arrange enmity with others, she can't splinter it without being far too obvious.

The Teeth, led by Butcher. That's most of what there is to know about the Teeth, actually. The Butcher has her own powers, plus watered-down ones from the previous Butcher, whom she killed. She is number fourteen. It comes with thirteen other minds, so Butchers don't usually stay sane very long. The Teeth follow whoever is the current Butcher, because they're differently insane. Most of what they do is ordinary violent crime and drug selling. If someone arranges an unplanned assault by a Teeth cape on a PRT team or cape, that could spiral out and escalate.

Blasto, a plant tinker who is holding East Allston by himself. Frequent opponent of Accord, who is disgusted by him slightly more than by everyone else. Has similar rivalries with one of the Teeth and some unimportant independent villain.

The Travelers are in town. Probably not for long, what with all the traveling, so if the Nine hold off for a bit there'll be that many fewer capes in play. They don't necessarily like each other much but are very tight-knit. More interesting is that they have a hidden teammate who they keep voluntarily locked up. She has some powerful but dangerous ability, which she hates, probably because of unwanted physical changes. Cherish can recognize that feeling. The hidden girl is not always in control of herself, and on her bad days her friends—former friends, most of them—are afraid of her.

 

 

From the Keres' point of view, of course, it's all about the powers. None of the heroes seem uniquely interesting, with the possible exception of a Ward made of metal. No need to eat or sleep...and immune to Cherish. Butcher would be a fantastic prize, but killing her would be a gamble. Might risk becoming number fifteen. The Teeth have some promising-sounding powers among their lesser members: one changer can also temporarily cancel powers, one creates clones that quickly fade from "dull" to "brain-dead" but would be absolutely terrifying if combined with Crawler's bulk, and one potentially useful force field power. Accord's people tend to have strong powers in addition to being extremely competent. Notably, their field leader has an area-effect trump power that can strengthen or weaken parahuman effects with only slightly more difficulty than mundane physics. Blasto she already wants to target. One of the Travelers is publicly a Changer who can pick her own form with few or no limits, but Cherish says that's a lie. The fantastic beasts that get addressed as "Genesis" are projections; the girl herself is wheelchair-bound and unhappy with it. The real question is whether their other teammate should be targeted.

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She wants them all, of course. But if pressed to prioritize: Blasto, Accord's trump, the Teeth capes other than Butcher, the metal Ward.

She wants to know more about the hidden Traveler. These hints are... tantalizing. Call that priority zero.

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The rest are interested too. If they could find out what the power is, if it has enough collateral damage when she loses control, that could be more than enough chaos right there. Or it could just drive everyone to unite; that wouldn't.

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So where is she hiding?

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The basement of the building the Travelers are using for a hideout. It's tough but not fortified vault tough. Not that that would matter.

If they just show up, though, it'll let people know they're here. And Cherish hasn't started a war yet. How much surprise do they want?

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That probably depends on whether the unknown cape losing control is something they can use. If it turns out it's not, they can always just kill the Travelers.

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Ellie is in favor of plans that involve potentially killing several capes. They should go and see whether she will be useful, and then either start the show with her, or kill the Travelers and then start the show without them.

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And even if the locals aren't at each others' throats going in, there'll inevitably be some kind of inter-faction war council. They can all hate each other then.

Cherish leads the way to the Travelers' current base.

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Anyone home?

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Three people. One is the hidden girl, another a friend of the Travelers or something. He's often around. Genesis' real body is here, which means the others are probably out in their cape identities.

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Ellie is inclined to kill the spare and not disturb the Genesis body while they investigate the hidden girl.

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If they don't end up killing the Travelers, the spare might be useful as leverage.

Turns out it's a moot point: there are no spares. As soon as they force their way in, with Cherish bearing down hard enough that the third can't muster the will to wake Genesis, Ellie will recognize that he's a parahuman.

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Not an argument in favor of letting him live as far as she's concerned, but Jack would probably be interested to know.

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"Well, we may as well interrogate him. Cherish, would you let him up?"  When she does,

"Hello. We are very scary. You're going to answer some questions for us."

 

Some enhanced interrogation later: his name is Oliver, the girl in the basement is Noelle; he got a useless power and she got something worse because they split a vial of superpowers in a can; there is such a thing as superpowers in a can; Noelle is herself from the waist up but is sitting on a monster that has to be fed a lot of meat every day; starving it makes it harder for her to keep control; if anyone touches her the monster spits out misshapen duplicates of that person; duplicates try to destroy everything the original cares about; duplicates of capes have variants on the powers tending toward slightly stronger; the Travelers are from Earth Aleph courtesy of the Simurgh. The Nine can be very good at enhancing interrogation.

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That's in keeping with their reputation.

That power sounds very chaos-inducing. And also very much like something she wants.

Canned superpowers she might look into later, privately, as a side project.

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Oliver can't tell them who made the cans. The Travelers found a set apparently abandoned in Madison.

 

Jack is incredibly happy with that description of the power. So much more potential than just setting off an uncontrolled rampage. "New plan! We kidnap at least one representative of each faction, and we do the obvious."

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"How are we securing access to the girl?"

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"Staying here, I assume. We'll have to fight the Travelers for it, but they won't know who's here."

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"Can we kill them?"

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"I don't see why not. Any surviving members would be able to spread the warning about what we're doing. We get them, no one can. Kind of them to keep it a secret."

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"Good."

What does Oliver have to say about his other friends' powers?

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Except for Genesis, all of them are as publicly portrayed. Sundancer creates and controls a sphere that can melt asphalt, and is herself immune to heat, Ballistic can launch any object he’s touching at a speed toward the low range of “bullet,” and Trickster is a teleporter in the sense that he swaps objects of roughly the same size and weight. Perdition is– dead, probably. Accord took him.

Jack senses a story there, and asks some more questions. It's not the most relevant.

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Those all sound fairly impressive. And dangerous, for people who aren't the Nine.

If Ellie kills Genesis now, that will probably bring the others back to see what happened.

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It will, but waking her up would do the same. Her power might not be much use to Ellie, since it might be either she or the shade that would have to go unconscious to use it.

(Besides, they don't know yet whether capes the Keres kills can keep their powers when resurrected. Best not mention that to Bonesaw until they've tried it for Crawler.)

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Tsk. Fine. They can wake Genesis up instead of killing her to call the others back.

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Bonesaw happily ensures that Genesis isn't going back into any comas. If Ellie calls up Cask's shade she might even be able to follow along; most of it is just some clever stimulants.

After that's taken care of, they may as well go see Noelle while they wait.

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Yes, what's monster girl like?

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Physically normal from the waist up. Of course, "the waist up" means near the ceiling. The monster part is mostly raw, angry red flesh, with some parts smooth or differently colored. It has multiple giant animal heads, some complete with necks and one only half jutting out from her side. Several sets of limbs, of which the most unsettling is the one that looks like a human child's arm. A couple of tentacles.

 

Noelle hears the door open and says "please, don't look at me—" before she recognizes who the visitors are.

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"That is impressive."

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That's one of the worse things to hear. Noelle seems to shrink back, and her reaction does nothing at all to most of her mass.

"So how does it work? Just touching you? What determines the clones' mutations or changes in their powers?"

Noelle doesn't answer.

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"She doesn't seem in the mood to answer questions. We may have to wait for experimental results."

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"I'll tell you if you– if it means you do it less." Jack agrees. This one's going to be easy.

The answer is that it's mostly untested, and testing might not be very informative, but as far as she knows it's how long she stayed in contact with the other victim. The longer the clone spends being created before being vomited up the closer the copy, and the benefit only accrues if she's touching the template. They do have to be alive; otherwise they'd probably just increase the size of the mound the way meat does. Power variations are random as far as she knows.

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Can she do clones of clones?

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She hasn't tried, because she's never used her power on purpose and what kind of crazy people would even want there to be more clo— never mind. She doesn't have any reason to think she can't.

 

While they're talking, Cherish warns them that the other three Travelers are arriving. They're ready for an emergency but are far too confident to know what emergency.

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Best to get them inside before attacking, and then preventing retreat, yes?

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Sounds like a plan.

...this is going to be completely trivial, of course. Outnumbering them three to one when all the heaviest hitters are on their side. But that's no reason not to do it right.

Burnscar sets up a wall of flame behind the Travelers, not to be impenetrable but to block Trickster's line of sight. Shatterbird launches a wave of glass shards. None of the Nine even need to be seen.

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And as they die, one two three, Ellie grabs their powers.

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May as well get Oliver's too, since they don't need him for anything and she doesn't seem to have a storage limit.

She gets the normal fragments of visions. Ginormous Incomprehensible Monstrosities altering the cells they drop so they don't outright kill the hosts—

And the powers are as described. Trickster's comes with an interesting new sense, like a pressure between any two objects, and if they're similar enough the pressure is the same from both directions and she can push them to switch. It makes sense how it would fit with teleportation.

When Noelle finds out what happens, she breaks down even more.

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Not to worry, one of her friends is still alive. And Ellie wants to see what sorts of power variations will pop out of that interaction.

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That's barely better!

Noelle manages to make Jack an offer. She'll cooperate, not that he really needs her to, if he'll have his Nine kill her after. It's not like she hasn't tried, and that was before today. Or at least kill her if he wants Bonesaw to keep the not-her body around for its power. He agrees, for whatever that's worth.

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Ellie can work with that.

Now, about creating those clones. Are they going to start with Genesis or go gather representatives from the various factions first?

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Genesis clones probably wouldn't feature in that plan; they're more just for overkill amounts of firepower and potential interestingness. The group they'd target is already gone.

Ellie is free to start with Genesis if she doesn't mind having her attention split during the planning for the kidnappings.

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They're still in the 'subtle' phase, right? Which means no killing extraneous capes during the kidnappings, which means Ellie isn't all that interested in helping plan them. Just let her know what you want her to do when you've got it worked out.

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Noelle is extremely unhappy about creating clones of her friend. Creating clones at all, for that matter. But she can't feasibly resist very successfully, and definitely not without losing control.

Genesis' hand sticks to Noelle's bulk and sinks part way in. She's nearly as horrified as Noelle is.

The Genesis clones get vomited out one by one, naked and misshapen. The later ones are closer, in the vein of a bulbous head instead of a stretched-out skeleton, but none would pass for Genesis herself. They aren't paraplegic, for one reason or another. When they start going into their comas most create forms that could pass for Genesis', with most making different tradeoffs of duration versus size versus biological plausibility. Some stay at least halfway conscious. They're not all strictly stronger than the original, but there's a wide variance. Most are undetectable differences from the outside. Ellie can get some mileage out of comparing their shades. 

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Very interesting.

Test the first: Can she collect their shades normally?

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Yes. After collecting the second she can compare the differences in full detail.

Unfortunately, after collecting the first she goes from a mostly-neutral enemy who shares some goals to a direct threat. Genesises three through five attack her. (Geneses? Leviticus through Deuteronomy? Whatever.) She has a pretty good sense of what kinds of creatures they could make, by comparison to the clones she did kill. But her knowledge of what these creatures can do is limited to "that one can fly and that one spits acid; what tradeoffs would my shades have had to make for those." The clones do manage to hide the projectors behind Noelle but they don't like their odds.

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It's not as though they can meaningfully hurt her through the Crawler shade. She removes the original Genesis from the fleshy mass and has her other two shades mop up the detritus.

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Maybe they could eventually come up with something Crawler had never been exposed to. But it's not as if they had time to experiment.

Noelle looks sick, not without reason, but she kept her head throughout and can confirm that some of those were clones of clones. So that's that question answered, she adds.

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Yes.

Does she have any degree of control over the clones?

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Not directly. None have ever tried to hurt her and she thinks they'd try to protect her, but she can't puppet them or enforce orders. Clones of Genesis would probably respect her tactical judgment because Genesis does.

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If she makes a new clone now, will it also attack her?

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Probably. Now that the original knows she'd just kill the clone, so will any subsequent clones.

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Kind of puts a damper on experimentation. Well, she can still go slowly and see if any interesting powers crop up. After all, she doesn't care about physical appearances.

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Noelle suggests using a clone as the source in place of the original. It might mean more variation, in addition to letting Genesis not have her wrist stuck sinking into monster.

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Worth testing. As long as the clone will remain docile for the duration.

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She won't, but can't actually do much about it with all four appendages stuck.

 

Eventually Burnscar drops in, having gotten bored with the planning since it basically amounts to who's going where, and volunteers to be cloned because why not.

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Sure, could be interesting. Let her just clear away this clone first.

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Burnscar clones all have different varieties of the power. Hotter and a different color flame. Faster acting mental changes. Finer control with less firepower. Water instead of fire. That one has a shade that looks like something to do with the mover power part, but it's hard to tell for sure because she vanishes right away.

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...That was maybe a predictable variation. They should go inform Jack of this new complication.

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"Well. That's not good. Cherish, do you think you can correct your colleagues' mistake?"

"I wasn't watching there, wouldn't recognize the clone's mind unless it stands out in a crowd..."

"If the emotions looks like Burnscar's when she's been using her power?"

"Then definitely not; there's hardly any emotion there."

 

"Then we have a problem. We can devise a punishment for you two later, for now we need to move before Burnscar's evil twin sets anything in motion. Burnscar, you're with Shatterbird and Mannequin going after the Teeth. Get a cape other than Butcher, it doesn't really matter which one. If you can do it without being recognized so much the better. The Keres is with Cherish, getting whatever heroes are on patrol at the moment—I want them alive, no disintegrations—while the Siberian and I handle the Ambassadors. Bonesaw will take Blasto easily, I expect."

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She nods acknowledgement.

Presumably Cherish handles tracking down the heroes?

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That and making sure they don't radio base until it's too late. The fact that these are the non-recognizable members of the Nine makes that easier.

Or it should.

"Scared and urgent. They're running back to HQ. The emergency is probably us, maybe Accord saw Jack and called them."

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"Or the clone was spotted. We need to cut them off, prevent them from getting back."

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"I could make them stop running, I don't think I could do that and stop them from saying something weird over comms. Think you can fake being the Travelers? A false trail can't hurt."

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"As long as they don't see me or the shades. Drop a sun in their path, jerk them around."

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"I'll distract them. And keep them down once they think they know what's going on. Can you get me near them like Trickster would do it?"

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"Yes." She calls up the relevant shades. "Are you ready?"

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"Ready."

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She waits a moment until the heroes pass an appropriate trash can, then swaps it for Cherish, and conjures a burning orb in front of them.

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One of the heroes suddenly thinks she's extremely distracting, and the other doesn't literally mistake her for his younger sister but reacts as if he had. No time to come up with something more original. Both rush to pull her away from Sundancer's sun. She lets them.

 

They start looking around for the Travelers, confusedly so after the first time Keres swaps them. Probably means they've called it in. So some complete hopelessness and despondency, always a good standby when you want someone to go inactive. Bit of an effort to maintain, though.

"They're down. Do you have anything to get their comms disabled?"

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Does her systems tinker have any insight?

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Yes, they can be silenced by taking the microphones and stepping on them.

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She had already thought of that herself, she was wondering if there was a less obvious approach. But whatever, the direct route works.

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Now for the bit where they have to move two prisoners, one of them heavily armored. "The plan was to get a ride from Shatterbird, but if they already know we're here you could just go all Crawler again. Probably."

She checks that they do actually know that. Interrogation is so much simpler when you can skip straight to the "gibbering wreck" stage and they can't think of lying. It's less know than suspect, but that's probably close enough.

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Crawler form it is. She's more than strong enough this way to move everyone.

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The heroes aren't physically restrained, but for some reason they don't feel like doing anything other than holding on for dear life.

 

Cherish suggests using Trickster's power for the last bit, in case anyone was following the highly visible Crawler.

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She de-shifts from Crawler before doing that. Things of that size are easier to notice being displaced.

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There are mostly human-mass sandbags lying around with an open line of sight. Presumably for Trickster's use. Swapping the heavily armored hero is harder and less accurate, but the counterweights get as big as some of Genesis' forms. It'll do.

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Is anyone else back yet?

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Jack and the Siberian are. They've brought in a cape in a black and white mask. He's badly injured and Jack occasionally cuts him again. (He promises there's a reason but it's not  obvious what.) The group that went after the Teeth managed to get the force field generator by the simple expedient of blasting glass around until it broke all the force fields. They did get recognized and killed people on the way out, but none of them was Butcher. Bonesaw arrives shortly after Ellie and Cherish, with Blasto being carried unconscious by one of his own creations.

Their own prizes are apparently Adamant, a short-range metallokinetic who uses it to essentially give himself power armor, and Hunch, a precog of some kind. The name might be an admission that he's unreliable or just a self-deprecating reference to his humpbacked appearance.

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They'll be able to find out soon enough.

Best get to cloning if they want passable doubles.

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No double will fool Accord. The heroes probably have ways to detect impersonation; the first pair of clones will be able to say whether they could pass with Bonesaw's help. Fooling the Teeth could work, if it weren't completely implausible that Vex would escape from the Nine. Blasto they can straightforwardly replace. 

But they don't actually need to sabotage from the inside. A supremely powerful psychological weapon can do a lot even without impersonating anyone. To cloning!

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And hopefully they're not immediately hostile?

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Jack had to make it clear they don't plan to kill any of the clones. Their other goals are to defend Noelle and wreak some targeted havoc, and as far as they know Noelle is an ally of the Nine.

(Doesn't mean they can't kill clones, but not until they don't need any further cooperation. On the way out at the latest.)

 

The Adamant and Hunch clones do think they can pass for the originals if Bonesaw corrects the deformities. They'd need a plausible way to have gotten less captured... (Cherish suggests saying the Nine have a master with them who can hijack people's bodies, and that Hunch guessed at how to block it with an appropriate metal hat.) The heroes' source is probably evil Burnscar, evil Hunch thinks, but a good enough impersonation should work even if the heroes know what to look for.

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So they could send the hero clones off to do some inside sabotage. Does Bonesaw need any potion-based help with the surgeries?

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Not really, but she's happy to have it. Too bad they still need the original Blasto for making clones of.

The end results look indistinguishable as far as any of the Nine can tell. At Hunch's suggestion, they make another who won't go in. They could use the extra precog cover.

And when they're on their way with suggestions about priority targets, Jack gives Shatterbird the signal. No glass anywhere here? Good.

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Her drones are hardened against that. It seemed a natural precaution.

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It's a high note, rising continually higher and louder than Shatterbird herself could sing. Seen from above, it looks like a cloud of broken glass billowing out from below her. There aren't very many capes who are on par with a natural disaster in their own right, and Shatterbird takes pride in being one of them.

It doesn't last very long. Each window pane or television screen can only transmit the sound for so long before it explodes. The cloud turns into a ring, and continues expanding until nearly everything glass in the city is shattered.

And the Nine have officially arrived.

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Yes, very impressive and certainly demoralizing for the enemy. (But she's here because Jack promised parahumans to kill. Spreading terror and fear is more of an incidental thing.)

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The easiest and most anticlimactic way of doing that would be to accept an invitation to the inevitable truce meeting and just kill every non-clone at the table. Has she checked whether she can use her death touch through a Genesis projection? If not they could disguise her as Sundancer for a little while. The Othello clone is spying on the Ambassadors and can tell them when and where...

If they go that route they'll have to create some spectacle later to make up for it.

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She can't deathtouch through her shades. Genesis's power doesn't obviously seem like it would create an exception.

Every power she collects only makes her more capable of spectacle.

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The Keres doesn't look anything like Sundancer, of course. Bonesaw could give her cosmetic surgeries until she fits perfectly into a spare costume, which is an extreme step to take but technically an option. (Someone like Accord would probably see through it in short order anyway, but not instantly. And the Othello says he wouldn't come in person.)

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But Sundancer wouldn't go alone. And if she has a shade out to fill a spot, it'll be obvious that she's an imposter.

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Jack can be Trickster. He's got no serious objection to being shorter and worse looking for a good cause. (Not that they know what Trickster looked like under the mask, he jokes, but they don't need to.) If the Keres can't use a shade, that just means they can't have her be Genesis as well as Sundancer. Fortunately, they have infinite Geneses.

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Most of whom would rather kill Ellie than work with her. But Jack has shown himself to be a skilled negotiator.

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This one's harder than most clones because everyone she especially wants dead is already dead. But she doesn't begrudge Ellie wanting to kill her; she wants to kill everyone. Most everyone, at least. And this is a good way to strike against every faction especially Accord. She walks out the door with some of Genesis' civilian clothes and is perfectly willing to work remotely.

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Then all they need is a bit of surgery and confirmation on the time and place.

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A lot of surgery, but that's trivial.

The scheduling doesn't take long. It's an emergency.

Accord doesn't come. He's sending Citrine instead, his top Ambassador and also the trump Ellie wanted. He of course has a plan for dealing with the Nine, but Othello doesn't know what's in it. It probably requires a lot of cooperation, so Cherish loiters within range making sure everyone dislikes each other more than usual.

Even to a truce like this, sending a single representative is an expression of confidence. The Teeth don't do that. Butcher is there, flanked by Spree and Animos, the self-duplicator and the changer with the power-nullifying scream. The obvious two for backup in case the meeting goes wrong.

Blasto has his own seat at the table. The person in it, with some of his half-tree-half-bear creations standing in the background, isn't the original Blasto. 

The heroes don't have much of a presence in Boston because of low crime. (Accord always takes credit for this.) Praetor, the leader of the local team, has hard-light powers that come with too much of a delay to be really high-level. Dynamo would be more useful to Ellie; she stores up kinetic energy whenever she's moving. Next to them is a masked figure in a Protectorate temporary costume. No one recognizes her except Ellie, who can cheat. Her shade is the same as the escaped Burnscar clone.

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Citrine and Animos are likely to be the biggest problems, she should prioritize them. Then Spree, Dynamo, and Praetor. Butcher... She doesn't want to try killing Butcher. Not without significant precog support for the idea.

If they have the Burnscar, the Protectorate knows that the real Travellers are dead. As long as they haven't told the other factions, they'll have to explain themselves before attacking. Might be possible to try to spin that so it looks like the Protectorate is just grabbing an excuse to eliminate a gang.

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It might!

As soon as the Travelers arrive, Praetor shouts. "EVERYONE, YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE! Impostors—" he points them out. Fortunately it would be in character for Trickster to object, so Jack does, and suddenly there's shouting and even powers pointed at both factions. Animos is transformed but vacillating between targets; Citrine looks unreservedly certain that Praetor is telling the truth.

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Maybe this fear and chaos thing is a little fun after all.

The Genesis is big enough that she can manifest a shade behind it and not have that be instantly noticed, at least. Get Trickster's, swap Jack for Citrine, kill her. If they're going to start something. She looks to Jack for a cue.

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He's mostly just enjoying the fear and chaos thing. While being certain not to give any cues that Trickster is enjoying the fear and chaos thing.

He surreptitiously slices a piece off the end of Trickster's inexplicable suit coat and whispers swap her mask.

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Whose, Citrine's? That'd be almost pointl- ah. The Burnscar's. That is a good idea.

Shade out, scrap cloth for mask, shade away. Hardly a flicker.

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Flop.

The non-mask falls down, and now the undecideds are menacing the Protectorate. That's the Teeth and enough of an excuse for Blasto. The heroes try to explain, but if there's a way of producing evil twins the Burnscar is probably evil, and if it's in the hands of the Nine why would they make one who's against them... Introducing her as "Phoenix" does little to defuse the situation.

No one has started shooting yet but that's kind of a low bar for an alliance.

 

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Heh.

But a simple not-alliance isn't the only goal here, she also wants to kill some people...

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Everything goes silent. Citrine's voice rings out, "The Travelers have a sixth member. Clones she makes want their originals dead, followed by their friends and family and then as much destruction as they can manage. Phoenix probably didn't tell the Protectorate the last part." 

 

Blasto plays his part well. "I seem to recall something about a rule. Using powers violates the truce, anyone else remember that?" "So we kick her out," Jack says, "and then get on with this."

"Of course he wants me gone." Citrine. "He's a clone of the real Trickster."

"I assure you I'm not a clone. And, a secret teammate with an incredibly convenient power? Really?"

"He's not," the Burnscar clone says. "Trickster's dead and Noelle's power only works on live people."

 

Jack is having far too much fun to stop, but there's at least one person at the table that Ellie could frame for shooting first.

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She considers her options for a brief moment.

Then appears one of her own copies of Burnscar in the same hidden spot and causes a wreath of flame to spring up around Phoenix, which spits out a fireball aimed at "Trickster". She quickly steps between and absorbs the blast with her body, harmlessly.

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Things're already tense. That sparks it. The Teeth fire on the Protectorate delegation while Blasto shouts to his creations. Citrine does...something...and looks surprised when Jack starts bleeding from suddenly appearing cuts instead of teleporting uncontrollably. Once Spree uses his power it's instant chaos; that power is good for precisely one tactic, which is rushing the enemy.

Jack hasn't bothered to attack yet, but Genesis is using wide-angle breath attacks that can just happen to hit Citrine as well as the heroes.

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Ellie brings out Trickster's shade and swaps people so that Citrine is being more definitively hit by the breath, and adds Sundancer's fire orb to the midst of those happenings.

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That's three new shades, one of them a trump. The Burnscar clone was immune to heat, of course, and teleporting out while the getting was good.

The Teeth try to object that lethal force was a bit extreme, but by now the Teeth are outnumbered.

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And the only trick is going to be getting Animos and Spree without tagging Butcher. Most of her powers are a little too unfocused.

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Butcher is also tougher; if she wanted to go for it they'd probably die in the right order, but that's a bit of a risk. The main advantage is they aren't expecting another attack. Jack is saying something or other in character as Trickster. They aren't believing him at face value but it means she has time to strategize.

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What's the range of capability on her new trump?

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It targets an area and alters some characteristic. Friction, gravity, even time. The trump aspect is because if she finds the right wavelength, so to speak, she can make a specific power stronger or weaker, or even uncontrolled.

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Are the Teeth stacked tightly enough that she can get them all at once?

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If there's something she has in mind that she wants to do to all of them. It's a pretty wide area. Won't get all of Spree's clones, but they're not much of a threat without him anyway.

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She wants to slow time way down for all of them, then use the dead bodies as counterweights to switch out Animos and Spree and deathtouch them. Any obvious reasons for this plan to fail?

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Citrine's power thinks she can do it. It'll take some extra fine-tuning to make sure Trickster's power works across the boundary, but she's got time. Butcher is busy arguing with Jack and Blasto about why the Protectorate was in league with Accord and whether that was the real Burnscar.

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Then she'll take the time, and set it up properly. Nice and neat, and the opportunity for a clean getaway from Butcher.

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As soon as she does it Jack takes off Trickster's mask. "Told you it'd be easy. I do want to see what Bonesaw can come up with for this one. If you could shut down her teleportation?"

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"If you like." She brings out Animos, and aims it at Butcher, dismissing Citrine's field.

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She's probably going to have to keep reapplying that until they get back to Hatchet Face, but it's functional. Blasto leaves in a different direction, telling Jack he's going to spread the word that the Teeth started it by opening fire on Citrine.

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It's the best solution she has. She keeps the effect active on the way back.

"That was enjoyable."

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"Extremely.

Plus we've beheaded most of the opposition. A predictable success all around, really."

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"Will they bring in reinforcements?"

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"The Protectorate definitely will. Legend, probably. We do rate Triumvirate interference and he's closest. Accord might bring backup too; he does have allies outside the city."

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"Good."

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"Legend is fairly hard to kill."

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"One never knows until one tries."

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"That's the spirit! Of course, he hasn't managed to beat us either."

When they get back, Bonesaw starts gleefully investigating the inside of Butcher's head. And now they don't need the original Blasto anymore, so the Keres can join in! (It's not actually that much help. Blasto's plant-animal hybrids may be mechanically interesting, but plants don't have much neurology. Not that this is what Bonesaw would want to hear.)

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Alas. Still, it is important to face reality as it is. Bonesaw will have to come to terms with remaining a uniquely gifted generalist in this field. Ellie will still offer what knowledge she can share, limited as it may be.

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It's still just a matter of time. Maybe they can hit the Toybox later for that one brain tinker.

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She is not averse to the idea.

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Bonesaw thinks she could arrange for someone to kill the Butcher safely. Safely-ish. It'd be by constructing them a bunch of redundant neural pathways, and deactivating them as soon as the Butcher powers jump. They other fourteen personalities would still be there, just locked out of actually affecting anything or talking to the holder.

But safely killing the Butcher isn't interesting enough. She'll come up with something.

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If the person who 'safely' killed the Butcher in that way was themself killed by someone else, would that person then get the full fifteen personalities with no barrier?

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Oh yeah definitely. Unless someone did the same for them.

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It could be quite interesting to arrange for one of the heroes to unexpectedly inherit the mantle of Butcher.

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Bonesaw grins. That sounds like a plan. Not the hero part; that happened before and didn't do much, but the unexpectedness. If she keeps the Butcher unconscious but stably alive and hanging by a thread, they just have to arrange for the heroes to have some collateral damage...

And for that they need to know where the heroes are going to be. Well, Jack did want a spectacle.

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Has he had any ideas for what the particular nature of that might be?

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He's thinking the Protectorate base. They're down a couple members and this wasn't their most heavily garrisoned city in the first place; capturing it should be pretty doable. If they declare victory while sitting in there, preferably nice and dramatically, it'd have to carry some extra weight. Liberal application of fire and glass at scale, and they can be sure of getting attention.

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Sounds like fun. And they have a pair of moles inside already.

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And as much extra firepower as they need.

They could walk in right now and the non-mole Boston Protectorate couldn't do much about it. None of them had really fantastic powers and numbers won't save them. The only question is whether Legend came in person ahead of the reinforcements from New York or Brockton Bay.

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Is that a question their precog has an answer to?

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Hunch's guess is more of the form "I have a good feeling about this," so probably no Legend yet.

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Then it sounds like they're good to go.

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Unless they resurrect Crawler first!

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...Yes, or they could do that.

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Getting the body to restart is harder than usual, since Crawler has a completely bizarre physiology. And very heavily armored; she has to ask the Siberian to act as a scalpel a couple times. (Jack asks if she's sure he won't come back immune to Siberianing; she's pretty sure he won't.) Eventually Bonesaw and Ellie manage to get his hearts going, but he's not moving or thinking, or even regenerating.

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So when she strips someone of their power, she's taking more than just that. Interesting. He feels... empty inside, somehow. Like a bag waiting to be filled.

She brings forth Crawler's shade, willing it to attach itself not to her body, but the one in front of her.

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The shade flows through until it overlaps with the body. Bonesaw is poking around in one of Crawler's brains and can't see the shade but looks surprised at exactly the moment when Ellie feels the shade accept the host.

Crawler starts regenerating and opens his eyes.

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"I suppose I ought to ask if killing you outright counts as passing your test, or if you want me to take a do-over."

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Blink. "Why, do you have something that would hurt me?"

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"I'll take that as a no."

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"Also, where are we?"

"Boston. We've taken every local faction down a couple of pegs and are planning to go after the Protectorate directly before their reinforcements get here."

"Huh. Okay."

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She's sort of going to missing having that power at her disposal.

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Jack doesn't suggest cloning Crawler and having her kill the clone. Wouldn't want her getting too powerful too fast; this is good. When she suggests it the stated reason is that they did turn a bunch of clones loose to cause havoc. If the Nine start killing clones, that turns into a bunch of factions united against them. Annoying.

So at this point they actually aren't waiting on anything much. Prisoners secure, thanks mostly to Bonesaw, and isn't that an ugly sight. With the exception of Butcher, who they're bringing with them. She's not an ugly sight yet. Onward!

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Onwards. At some point during the transit while there are no clones nearby, Ellie approaches Jack.

"If they decide they can protect Noelle better by trying to get rid of us than by helping us, we will be in an equal amount of trouble."

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"We'll always have the option of just leaving; only one of them has a grudge against us in particular. But you're right. Of course, the other factor to consider is Noelle herself. She wouldn't want to be rescued by them and forced into producing an army; she'd rather be dead."

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"She doesn't have any direct control over them."

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"No, but can you imagine them trying to rescue her by force? That would be hilarious."

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"And likely to end with us being simply smothered by the sheer mass of clones produced."

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"Oh, I'm sure we'd win. We have Siberian. Crawler. You. Besides, their goal in this scenario isn't to kill us in particular unless we're fighting to exterminate; they just want to capture their leader."

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"Fair enough."

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"Not that we'd have to stand by and let them, of course. When we take the Protectorate headquarters we'll be declaring a game of king of the hill, and Noelle is an excellent card to keep up our sleeve."

(Jack may be used to rule sets best described as "Calvinball.")

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Ellie has no direct playground experience with which to contradict his interpretation of the rules.

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Neither does he, but the point is this is going to be fun.

When they arrive, they walk up to the visitors' entrance and knock. They haven't been hiding at all, just having Cherish suppress the frequent bursts of panic whenever they get recognized, so they might as well be polite about it.

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Appearances are important. She has a cloak on, mostly covering the matte black multi-segmented drone armor she created. Three of her shades shadow her every step.

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For some reason they don't open the door for the visitors. How rude.

This building doesn't have a force field around it like some places, but it does have some automated tinker defenses. Mannequin climbs, almost slithers up into the ceiling rafters the first time containment foam opens fire.

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She puts up forcefields in front of the nozzles that have revealed themselves.

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That doesn't hurt.

The building is impressively empty, considering how little time they had to evacuate. Cherish identifies some people on a higher floor, probably heroes planning a last stand. The duplicate capes are being detained downstairs, thoroughly locked up but guarded only by non-capes. Going up is the higher priority, but it's not like it's very time-sensitive.

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If the capes are up, Ellie is in favor of going up.

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Predictable, but it's probably also the tactically better choice, so.

When they arrive, they can pretty much see immediately that the heroes know they're doomed. Doesn't mean they won't fight. All the moisture gets sucked out of the air around the Nine. It has no effect on the Siberian, who's in front, but the cape in white is widening the area. The metal Ward rushes forward, his hands forming long blades, and chops at the squishier-looking members of the Nine. One of the Wards, a girl of fifteen or so, is already unconscious. A tinker with...a  bow, really? is launching arrows at the same targets. No one wastes energy on the completely invulnerable people.

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She has her lightning shade target the metal one, and swaps the bow tinker for one of the ones he's chopping at.

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He stops, whether because of good reflexes or maybe that's just what happens when he gets electrified. Either way, he doesn't hit his teammate. (Burnscar does, though. One down.) The swap also leaves Shatterbird next to a Ward with a lightning bolt costume, who frantically grapples at her. Once he's touching her with both hands there's a loud zap and she goes down. But so does he, a glass spike in his back, and he stays down. Two. An armored figure descends on her, but whatever. Shatterbird can take care of herself.

 

The unconscious girl's eyes snap open. She looks every bit as scared as she ought to, but she keeps her gaze steady while she looks over the Nine. "You have no idea what you're dealing with, do you."

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"Are you going to enlighten us?"

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"The way things are going it's probably better than not doing that, yes." 

One of the other capes takes advantage of the break in festivities. He cries out, and what looks like an entire wall rushes toward the Nine. It clips Ellie, Burnscar, and Shatterbird, whose opponent ducked out of the way. They get knocked painfully back until the wall hits Siberian and stops. Nothing Bonesaw can't fix later.

The girl glares at him. "Not now, Railgun, I'm monologuing."

She continues, "anyway, I don't know how much research you did coming in, but I'm Roulette. See the future. Kinda. Let's see, you could get away," she looks at Burnscar, "most of the rest of you wouldn't, and huh. There's even a chance the Siberian doesn't. I thought it was nothing you hadn't faced before except more so; maybe that means I was wrong."

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Swap Burnscar for this Roulette, reach out and grab her, interrogate the shade for the nature of the power.

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Roulette is already dodging, in the direction that gets her away from Ellie starting from Burnscar's position. The metallic cape grabs Burnscar's head in a very literally viselike grip. "I suggest you listen. I kind of want to hear what she's got to say, and I can't imagine you want that less." (Burnscar teleports out to one of the nearby small fires. She has already spent any time at all in this room.)

Jack is paying attention, and the other Nine look more like they're selecting targets.

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Very rude of the metal one. He maybe needs more lightning, for a value of maybe that means definitely.

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He grits his teeth and sparks. It's not obvious whether or not lightning even can do serious damage.

Roulette looks back at him for a few seconds, and then keeps talking while backing away from the Nine. "Armies of capes. Two armies of capes, like if everyone at an Endbringer fight went up against everyone at a different Endbringer fight instead of the Endbringer. Your team wasn't part of either side, more just caught in between. Both wanted you dead, but I think they prioritized it differently.

 

(The Burnscar clone appears out of mostly nowhere and lets loose a concentrated blast at Shatterbird. Jack pulls her out of the way just in time and the clone vanishes.)

 

"Her too? Wow, no one wants to let me talk.

I know some of you might like the sound of a battle like that, but most of you shouldn't. You're not infinitely better than other capes."

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Ellie is one of the ones who likes the sound of that.

It's probably to do with Noelle. Clones against people trying to contain them, maybe. Easy enough to avert, Ellie can just claim the power before they make additional clones.

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"For the...seven?...of you who want to avoid that, you should probably know that it matters what you do right now. Today. I'm super not thrilled about agreeing with you guys on anything, but I don't want a massive battle to happen either, so." Deep breath. "I guess I'm giving suggestions to the Slaughterhouse Nine."

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She gets Ballistic's shade out, and sends a piece of debris flying at Roulette.

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It's Jack who blocks it. A swipe of his knife rings off the projectile just enough to throw off her aim. "Hey now, let the rest of us make an informed decision. Crawler, that goes for you too. Though, to be fair we have been leaving her entirely in too much control of the situation." A few slashes and Roulette is on the ground with a scream and a lot of blood. "You aren't bluffing, I hope?"

"What kind of moron tries to bluff the Slaughterhouse Nine?"

"The kind who mistakenly thinks they have nothing left to lose. Carry on."

She takes a minute to collect herself. "It's...by fighting us, you..."

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A figure in a blue and white lightning costume bursts through where a wall-sized window used to be. Pre-Shatterbird.

Legend beams out enough rays that they can't easily be counted. All have the same effect in different ways. The ones directed at Slaughterhouse Nine members push them backward, the ones at surviving heroes curl around and shove them out the window where he came from. It probably hurts, but they're in a hurry.

 

Roulette's voice mutters "oh thank God, I thought I was going to have to make something up."

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"Should have let me kill her, I could have told you if she was bluffing."

Smoke blaster up to cut Legend's visibility.

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Legend has notoriously good vision. But he's mostly not shooting at them; he's concentrating on rescuing the people who can still be rescued. He essentially drags them all to the window in the time it takes for the Siberian to leap at him, and then he gets distracted dodging. Briefly.

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Take the opportunity to switch the closest ally for the closest hero she can see, then hit the spot with a chaos blast.

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That's Roulette. Most of the others were in a position to go along with what Legend is trying.The others jump or are pushed out the window, trusting Legend to catch them. They don't notice the switch until after it's too late.

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Not a total loss, at least. Is Legend coming back?

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Signs point to no.

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Then she can see what new powers she's turned up. Touchy-zappy, the archer, and Roulette.

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Roulette's power is nowhere near as useful as she was portraying it. When used, it shows several possible futures. Number and length depend on a lot of things: time since last used, how well rested she is, how close this is to a combat situation. It could plausibly have shown a future where Noelle's clones started a war, but the picture wouldn't have gone into things like who wanted whom dead how urgently. And she would have been out for a long time if she went for a long-term prediction like that. Unless the potential fight is imminent? Mostly Roulette used her power to experience several futures in the same amount of time and get more practice with firearms or trigonometry.

The archer is a tinker. Not the most inspired but few strict limits, so long as the product is for a bow or an arrow. Tinker arrows might freeze the target, zap them, or explode after someone dramatically catches it.

The electric cape isn't strictly touch range; the zap just more powerful that way. He stored up charge by rubbing his hands together, and is strictly less powerful than her existing lightning cape.

 

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"She was lying, if you were still wondering."

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"About which part?"

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"The armies, unless that situation is going to crop up within the next hour or so. More likely she saw Legend's arrival, and was playing for time."

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"And they did know about Noelle, from the Burnscar copy, so it wasn't too outlandish a guess.

We could always resurrect her like Crawler to retaliate."

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"I've already killed her once."

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"And you're only at what, three thinker powers? Probably don't want to spare this one."

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"Not especially."

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"Fair enough.

Let's see, Bonesaw, how's your project coming along?" He checks, and can't tell by looking but Bonesaw describes it as working well. "Shatterbird and Burnscar are raising the flag, so to speak. You've got some copies of Burnscar's power, could join in. Or bring Noelle here."

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"How much longer are you going to leave her alive?"

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"Until we leave, most likely."

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She leaves to go fetch Noelle.

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When she gets there, Noelle's gone. So are the other prisoners.

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Well. That's unfortunate. Any sign of where they went or how they got away?

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They didn't exactly leave a note. It's not even entirely obvious which group they is. They did leave the bodies of unpowered members of the Teeth.

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They'd be a place to start, at least.

She should go back and tell Jack.

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When she gets back, Siberian has leveled most of the nearby buildings and Shatterbird has set up an architecturally questionable numeral "9" above the Protectorate base. It's lit from the inside with fire, to add to the effect. She can't see where Butcher fits into all this, but that's not supposed to be visible from the outside anyway.

Jack is not entirely surprised; they did talk about this on the way over. Has to have been a kidnapping by clones, but which and where. Involving the original Teeth is interesting, even if it was just as cannon fodder.

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It makes a certain amount of sense. Until they could get to Noelle, the clones had limited numbers, and the Teeth are probably the only faction crazy enough to help. They should also check up on the Blasto.

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It's not a question of crazy; it's motivation. There must have been some carrot. Unless it was just sticks of course, in which case the craziness isn't relevant.

Jack deploys Cherish, along with Ellie in case there's an ambush. They get to Blasto's lair and Cherish confirms it empty. The largest Teeth hideout, though, is packed. Large groups of very similar people, mostly driven by fear, anger, hate, and all that. They do also have Noelle. No one spots them, but if they go kill some clones the only drawback is letting the rest know the Nine know where they are...

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If they can't cut off the source, any thinning of the herd they do will be meaningless. Better to return in strength.

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It's tempting to capture one for interrogation, but they can do that any time. Back to Jack it is then.

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And he's probably going to want to leave them be to increase the chaos level?

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Well, maybe. That chaos might not be credited to them. They could try just saying "look what we put there" but the clones and Noelle herself are perfectly capable of denying it. It'd be a completely separate disaster, barely better than an earthquake. The other option would be sending Siberian to pick up Noelle and move her. Every last clone would try to stop her, but, well, Siberian.

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(And Siberian wouldn't get cloned because it's not a person.)

That sounds like a better plan. And then they really will need to kill all the clones.

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The Siberian won't get cloned because she is immune to powers. "Not a person" is complete nonsense.

While she's gone, Ellie and Cherish can see the final result with Butcher. She's very disconnected. There's still what Bonesaw and Mannequin say is a perfectly functioning system equivalent to a human body, but its different nodes are in separate cases all around the building.  Nobody even knows what would happen if she tried teleporting, since her body is covering more area than her usual range, so she's mercifully unconscious.

 

Siberian reappears early and without Noelle. She doesn't talk, of course, but points to herself and holds up two fingers.

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Two Siberians?

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"Two Siberians. She didn't clone you, did she? You?"

The Siberian shakes her head. "But she had another Siberian anyway?" Nod.

"Well. This just got more interesting."

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Signficantly so. Where'd it come from? Could one of the Geneses have thrown a Siberian-like? Both projectors, there were enough clones that they'd cover a fairly significant range of variations.

"Now what?"

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"We could tell Legend. Having the heroes clear up our messes is something of a tradition.

Or we could ignore it; now that the clones have a the Siberian there's no way anyone misses the link to us."

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"Might be amusing to see their reaction."

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"Indeed.

I suppose it's technically an option to handle it all ourselves, but that's a lot of work to put everyone else in exactly the same position as if this hadn't started."

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"We'd regain control of clone production." And she'd get a lot of extra shades, and maybe even a Siberian.

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"Oh, we can take Noelle back from the heroes easily. They won't have a Siberian. If they lose it'll be harder since the clone army will have more captives, but that would also mean more powers for you."

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"So tell them and let them try first, then pick up the pieces from whoever's left?"

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"And make it look like that was the plan all along."

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"Easy to remember."

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They wait until everything's ready here, first. The clones have had time to consolidate and who knows how the heroes are doing, so they don't want to fall behind.

And they go out in force. Jack, Siberian, Burnscar, and the Keres ought to be enough to safely deliver the message without surrendering their base.

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Yes, they don't want to be less than intimidating, but allowing someone to skip their checker to the top of the hill and crown themself would also be bad.

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And there's still some hope of Cherish not being recognizable, so best not waste that. Even if it does mean an extra trip for her to find the location and then give them directions.

 

On the approach, Jack waves a white towel on a stick for truce. Not that anyone would trust a truce, but it at least gets the message across. Legend does come out, keeping a safe distance and a hair trigger. It helps that none of the Nine here can fly.

 

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Yet. Growth mindset.

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"What do you want?"

"We're delivering a message. Have you talked to, I think she's calling herself Phoenix?"

"I know the name."

 

"The sixth Traveler, the one who makes clones. She's not happy about it, but has been handed over to her own creations and they're using her to build an army. At the Teeth's old hideout. They killed most of the Teeth; you'll want to remember that later. Depending on who they're clones of, the only difference is in what order they want to kill everyone."

"We're not allying with you, if that's what you're asking."

"No, of course not. We're going to stand out of your way and watch. Have fun!"

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"And give my regards to Eidolon, next time you see him."

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"One more thing. They have a Siberian."

 

"Are you done?"

"Yes, I think we're done."

"Good." Legend fires on them. Not the beams that moved people around at the window but deadly weapons, scoring the ground deeply where they land. Burnscar vanishes into a recently conjured puff of flame, and Jack takes one of the Siberian's hands. The other is offered to Ellie if she wants it.

And then Legend streaks off toward where they came from.

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Ellie uses the Siberian's hand.

"I do hope he doesn't do anything terribly rash at the headquarters before we can get back."

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"Rushing to wherever the Siberian isn't, I assume. We'll see how that turns out for him."

He leads the way back toward the former Protectorate, not especially hurrying.

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If he does kill the Butcher, maybe she'll be able to spot the difference.

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He's not careless enough to kill the Butcher. Certainly not crazy enough.

But there's a lot of collateral damage. Most of it is from the Siberian running around flattening buildings until there's nothing that would suffer from further flattening. Legend doesn't waste a laser targeting the giant flashing "9" over the building; he's got priorities. Tackiness is not the worst of the Nine's crimes. But Shatterbird dodges a shot while it's behind her and part of the the barely-standing glass structure crashes.

"That's probably it, then," Jack says. "See anything?"

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Promising. She looks.

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While she's watching, a shade flits upward and gets absorbed by Legend's.

It's not immediate, but it doesn't take very long for someone to die of having a couple of presumably important organs smashed. And Legend couldn't miss any more than Butcher could dodge.

Butcher Fifteen teleports to the ground with an explosion and blasts at Burnscar. She disappears into flame and reappears somewhere with a better view.

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"And... there it is. He's gone."

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"Perfect. The old 'if you strike me down you shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine' victory by giving your opponents superpowers. Now, to see about getting him off our backs."

He starts waving to Legend. Keeping hold of the Siberian's hand was probably a good idea; a blindingly bright beam splashes harmlessly off him.

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Point him at the remains of the Teeth? Two problems at once, if that works. He's got enough ranged power to take out Noelle without getting close. She'll have to follow to ensure she doesn't miss out on the harvest if that's the case.

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Jack may have guessed what she's thinking. He whispers, "don't worry. They've got a Siberian and a top priority of protecting Noelle. The only side here who can touch her is us."

Then he starts shouting. "Hey you! You plural! Don't break the guy's mind like Three and Seven just yet! The clone army still has your Teeth prisoner, every Tooth they clone wants you dead as maybe the thing they want second-most in the world, and you can still save the originals! Plus this guy probably won't even resist; he wants that threat ended himself you know."

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Well. She supposes that's true.

It'd be nice to pick up some of the variants, but that's not as high a priority.

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Legend looks very internally conflicted. He probably is. But he eventually flies away toward the clones. The three make their way back to the rest.

 

"Well done Mannequin and Bonesaw, whatever happens next the heroes have already lost.

Now, we could interfere with that fight or we could attack the Protectorate reinforcements. But we might want someplace less pinned down first now that this base served its purpose."

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Capes are more interesting than bases, but it is probably a good idea to have somewhere to fall back to if necessary.

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Most of the group's longevity does come from being hard to locate rather than impossible to beat in a straight fight. Mannequin's a step ahead and already has a candidate site pre-trapped, but wants to make sure that there's an actual reason behind any danger they undertake.

Jack answers that the heroes might not know about Butcher XV, or might not have realized the implications. Got to let them know exactly how doomed they all are. "So we aren't mostly fighting to exterminate," he adds to Ellie, "or even to win the battle. Do make sure some get away."

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She nods her acceptance. Most of the rest of the locals aren't terribly interesting, anyway.

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It's not just the locals; there's backup from Legend's team. Ellie might be interested in Prism, a self-duplicator who can consolidate into any of her bodies in exchange for temporary brute powers, or Cache, who stores things in a pocket dimension and is presumably here because someone thinks he can affect the Siberian. Probably not Astrologer or Ursa Aurora; Ellie already has ranged attacks and slightly less bear-shaped force fields. Dovetail can fly; that's something. Clay is yet another force field cape, spraying them out in liquid form and probably here as a counter to Crawler.

When they arrive, Jack asks the blasters with the broadest attacks to announce their presence. Then he calls into the chaos "We're not mostly here to kill you! Got a message to deliver!"

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Ellie can contribute to the announcement. As for the capes, well. As long as at least one survives, Jack will be satisfied, right?

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He's not too worried there; killing every last cape would take effort.

When the dust clears there's one clearly least damaged part of the building. Must be where the capes are. And they start coming out of it, ready for a fight. Led by two Prisms and three bears, though one of the Prisms disappears before even being fired on.

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Then she'll just have to put extra fire on the remaining Prism to make up for it. And some lightning, for good measure.

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Prism is hard to hit immediately after consolidating. But not impossible. She goes down. Her shade doesn't do anything, though; it just goes back toward the building.

Jack slices upward, and Dovetail drops her passenger. She barely manages to fly down in time to break his fall. Other heroes spill out from nowhere when Cache hits the ground. Burnscar lights the area on fire, which Clay extinguishes. The side effect is that they're temporarily fairly trapped. Mannequin and the Siberian engage them.

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They'll probably be able to handle it. Prism must have another body inside. Keeping a metaphorical eye out for any dying capes in the area, she blinks over to the building and shakes off a pair of drones from her arms to watch her back while she investigates.

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One Prism inside. She's already spawning more and all three exiting. Seeing the Keres, she knows better than to get too close. She consolidates and breaks through what's left of a wall, then splits again. Two charge her.

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Only normal strength when split. She blasts one and tries to grapple the other.

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The blasted one goes down but doesn't completely stop moving. Prism isn't going to risk consolidating before physically attacking the Keres, but grappling suits her just fine. Until Ellie grabs her shade and pulls, and all three die. The one that grabbed her in a death grip, the one on the ground, and the one outside fleeing.

(The vision of the vast formless thing comes with a flash of sadness and loss this time. What for, who knows.)

There's more to this power than was obvious from the outside. A finite store that she draws upon whenever she splits, only partly restored when consolidating. She could leave behind particular objects, with concentration and at extra cost, but adding them is harder. An object of any real size would mean it costs more to stay split than usual.

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Experimentally, she calls up the shade and splits. She regards her double for a moment, at the same time watching herself through its eyes. Or, well, her own eyes, there's not really a difference between the two. The second Ellie has shades flanking her as well, same as the original's. Any changes to the shades she makes is mirrored as well. Most useful. Prism will necessarily always be taking up a slot, but still.

She recalls the double, and rejoins the fight outside.

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The heroes are mostly just trying to buy time for the civilians to escape. They're succeeding at that but not much else. Dovetail and Cache are dead—inconsiderate of her teammates, that—as are most of the formerly remaining local capes. The metal boy isn't dead, but Mannequin hits him with the nearest large metal object whenever he manages to get unstuck from the last one and then goes back to wasting as little attention as possible.

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Pity about Dovetail. Perhaps she will ask Bonesaw to resurrect her briefly.

The metal one is the last remaining of significant interest. She splits into three bodies, with the teleporter and lightning, and has two distract him while the third sneaks up from behind.

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It barely matters that he's distracted; he's a melee fighter and stuck.

(A glimpse of the two whatevers, one of them crashing to Earth—)

The other Nine are mostly toying with the survivors at this point. They managed to get to the cover of a less ruined building somehow but now that one's in the same state. There are injuries on the Nine's side but nothing that still counts as serious in light of the fact that they have Bonesaw.

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Not much left for her to do then, as long as they're still leaving survivors. She collapses back to a single body, and offers fire support where relevant.

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Eventually they're down to a single visible survivor. Clay continues spraying her weapon at anyone who gets too close and looks like they could suffocate, even after Jack tells his side to stop. It continues not helping.

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Their point is probably sufficiently clear that they could just leave, at this point.

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And they will. Just as soon as they reemphasize that the heroes got annihilated by what might plausibly be the third scariest game in town. Pity they don't have any cameras to announce it into.

Next up is seeing what's going on with Noelle, since they'll all still be in fighting shape once Bonesaw has checked up on everyone. Unless anyone's given pause by the fact that all the Butchers especially Legend himself want them dead; there's only one Siberian on their side.

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Ellie is certainly not.

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She's not, neither is Crawler, Siberian's safe, Cherish thinks Legend just got a lot more interesting. The rest don't really see the point, but only Mannequin is very set against it and he doesn't talk.

 

Almost all the clones in view are dead. Their Siberian is lying stretched out with one hand gripping Noelle's massive bulk. Noelle's monster is bigger than before, and the protruding face is now a fully formed head. Most of the combatants are the Genesis projections, which re-form at various different speeds after being blasted. By now Legend might have figured out they're projections. Or maybe he still thinks they're just really hard to permanently kill. Every so often Noelle's monster vomits up some clones, who scramble for the Siberian. Usually they get lasered first. Most of the ones currently protected are hard to recognize without their costumes, but their shades look familiar. A Vex, an Othello, a Spree, and two Hunches. They make a point of moving to the side away from the mouth, so new arrivals have a better chance. The Othello vanishes.

None of the captives are visible, especially not touching Noelle. This doesn't seem to stop her from creating another set of Othellos plus a Hunch.

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Wonder where they're hiding.

But this looks to be mostly a stalemate so long as Other Siberian is in play. They could tip the balance pretty quickly if they found where the Genesis bodies are.

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They could if they had a way to look. The control radius probably isn't bigger than Cherish's detection radius, but there are a lot of people. Hard to identify what emotions someone should be feeling in a high-stakes life-or-death battle that doesn't threaten them personally. She can look of course. When she's less distracted by the Butcher.

They could just tell Legend about Genesis. If the other Butchers really want their Teeth back while Legend, Three, and Seven are feeling apathetic...it could be just as effective as killing the projectors. Assuming they want that to happen.

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It'd give them an opportunity to figure out where the originals are and remove them.

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That, Cherish can answer now. Noelle ate them. They're alive in there, and absolutely horrified out of their minds even more than Noelle is, but it's how she's keeping contact with them.

Yeah, in retrospect it makes sense that not everyone would have seen that already.

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That makes it a little harder. Other Siberian is going to have to go first.

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And the other Siberian is exactly as hard to get rid of as the Siberian. If they successfully distract Legend they could make that the world's fairest fight, and get them then? Again assuming they want to.

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Well, what even is their objective at this point?

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Mostly? Fun. That and not dying. Reputation, but on that front the gain would be "Slaughterhouse Nine created three or four separate disasters" regardless of how much effort it does or doesn't take the heroes to correct this one.

"Siberian? You're probably better at Siberianing than the copy, think you can kill her for good while Legend goes after the Genesis projectors?" She hesitates, but then nods. "Keres, kill Noelle if you can but if not go for the originals. Crawler, if she had anything that could hurt you she'd probably have tried it against Butcher."

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Finally. Lethality authorization. She nods.

Who to pick? Fire and chaos seems a good mix, duplicated twice more once Legend and Other Siberian are neutralized.

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Jack asks if Cherish has started yet, then shouts. "Genesis isn't a changer! Kill the projector and the monsters get out of your way!" The Butcher looks much less internally conflicted than the last time around, but he starts blasting.

The nearest building implodes. Then the next nearest. Then the next, and the next, until there's a growing radius of debris. Most everything nearby has been cleared because of the ongoing cape fight. But they didn't evacuate everything. Legend has extremely good vision. He keeps mechanistically targeting one building after the next, while Cherish and Jack look on.

The Siberian charges her equivalent and both vanish, only to reappear soon after and repeat.

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That's her opening. She splits off two copies, and spreads out to encircle Noelle before opening fire. And chaos.

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Noelle screams. Both Noelle and the monster she's attached to. Burnscar's blasts burn away some of the spare flesh, but it regenerates when she lurches away. Damsel's has more luck; whatever it hits simply isn't there any more. The downside is it doesn't operate from what might be called a safe distance so it doesn't penetrate far enough.

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If she keeps the fire big and distracting, it ought to be safe enough to approach a little closer. With one body still at a safe distance, to recall into.

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Noelle is bigly distracted. She recoils in pain, but Ellie is on both sides of her. Doesn't do much.

The cones of destruction creep closer together and do progressively more damage.

...then there's a shove from behind. One of her stumbles into a tentacle, which rams her into the side of the monster. Both her other bodies spontaneously die. Mostly spontaneously. Three Othellos vanish again.

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No no no no no-

Out, she need to get out, not be touched- Shade, burn it, blast it, kill it-

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Taking the shade doesn't work. It's not obvious why, it's right there and she's touching it, but her power doesn't seem to recognize that it's available to seize. Burning is a very questionable choice, but blasting cuts deep. Whole cones vanish from in front of her, but she needs every last bit separated– And then the Siberian is back, and her next blast does nothing. Noelle visibly regenerates from the inside out.

And after that, Noelle vomits again. A copy of her, with three Sprees as a distraction.

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Nearly perfectly formed, too. Were she not lacking the original's drone armor, it'd be hard to tell them apart.

Her task is obvious. Stop the Nine from further threatening Noelle. Either by killing them, or driving them off. Start with killing, see how far that goes. She splits into three copies, with the teleporter. One to get Crawler, one to get Bonesaw, and one for Jack. Blink. Blink. Blink.

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Jack somehow manages to get off a knife beam at each of them. More aiming for speed than fatality, but it gives the others time to respond. In Crawler's case that means creating acid that burns everything around him except himself, making him a much less appealing target for touch-based anything. Bonesaw instead pulls out two vials and shouts that you don't want to find out what this does if she breaks it.

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She sacrifices her offensive slot for the metal shade, and goes after her targets again.

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The acid still burns, but at least there's no pain. But it's very acidic and with a few globs of it that body loses the ability to move before she gets to Crawler. Bonesaw apparently doesn't trust whatever's in her vial against the metal power, but Burnscar bails her out. Every metal has a melting point. (Jack, meanwhile, is casually dodging and occasionally landing a knife flat against a joint. It's really not great for mobility.)

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She reconsolidates, and blinks out of melee.

Bonesaw is still vulnerable if she keeps the metal up, but she needs the others distracted. Fortunately, she has allies.

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She'll find the knives came with her. It'll take a minute to absorb the blades into her body enough to be flexible, and Jack presumably has a limitless supply of them.

Most of her allies have already been dismantled by Mannequin and Shatterbird. The Othellos are the main exception; neither villain can get a good shot until after there's been at least one chance to try to stab them in the back. The other exception is the Siberian, who is of course busy canceling out the other Siberian.

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Hm. She splits again, this time with Citrine. Three wide fields, one that will cancel out Shatterbird's power, one that will limit Jack's knives, and one that will suppress movement generally for everyone but the Othellos.

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It's going to take time for each body to tune the field to a power. Minutes, probably. Longer since she's being watched and targeted.

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More clones would be a helpful distraction. Meantime, she will concentrate as best she can.

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Not only is everything on fire, but it's also on acid and glass. Glass can't affect her. The others can. Her bodies start to melt, though more slowly than when they were being specifically targeted.

The Siberians annihilate each other again, and both come back only to vanish again. Very insistent about their indestructibility, them. The Butcher's ring of destruction is still expanding. Arc, really; back when this was a Teeth base it was relatively close to the harbor. But he hasn't found the Genesoids yet.

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And next time there's a Siberian-less window, a very angry metallic Keres bursts forth from within the beast.

She whirls around and starts blasting the body with chaos, bringing forth a burning sun and sending it into the cavity she just vacated.

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Oh, this will never do. She abandons the Citrine project and gets her own offensive shades and blinks down.

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The ensuing firestorm makes it quite difficult to tell just what happens next.

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There's an enormous flash. It'd look more like a large hole standing vertically than anything else, if anyone was watching, which they're not. And at the end of the explosion there's one badly melted Keres. No one else is left but the Siberians, not even Noelle. Well, and Mannequin. And probably some Othellos. And the Genesoi are reappearing. It was still a really big explosion, okay.

Jack starts clapping, while the other Nine look on. (Except Cherish. She's still busy.)

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...ow.

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Switching to metal makes it bearable, but only just. She's not quite up to moving, yet.

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"I can help, probably! If you can be less metal while I fix whatever's wrong."

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"Just toss me some metal, I'll do it myself."

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"Okay, if that works." Metal.

And it better work, because Cherish announces that the Butcher's back. Still hasn't reached the projectors, since the monsters are still re-forming, but she lost control somewhere around the point where none of the Butchers had the slightest reason to keep exploding places that were probably inhabited.

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She pulls it into herself, and her body fills back out.

She blinks up to the others. "So. Run or fight?"

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"Run, I think. We certainly don't want to kill him, and he's much more visible if not disabled."

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Suits her.

She's able to stand and walk now, so that helps.

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Running is hard. Not in a can barely walk sense; more in a world's fastest speedster wants them dead sense. Cherish can overwhelm that easily, but doing it for thirteen or fifteen people at once less so.

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She can at least provide some additional distraction. Primary shades: Prism, a Spree, the other her. That one lets her get out three more shades: metal for durability, and two offensive blasters. Split into three with Prism, two copies break off, reduplicate with Spree and engage.

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The Butcher has multiple different kinds of durability, and one of them is Legend's. And Ellie's most powerful blaster is also the one with the shortest range. He shrugs off the lightning bolts and returns fire.

He gets frustrated at not hitting anything that matters. Teleports to the ground and back up with two explosions, now with a handful of debris the size of gravel. Reshapes them until the fronts are arrowheads, Butcher Eight's power. Imbues them with Fourteen's. One rockets downward with a laser behind it, pushing. Burnscar vanishes to some other flame, as she always does, and the laser slams into the ground. The arrowhead doesn't. It turns a near ninety-degree angle toward Burnscar's new location and drills through her head.

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She collects the shade.

And now it's definitely time to leave. If she had time, she could set up a trap with Citrine, but it doesn't seem like she's going to get it.

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Nope. Most of the Butchers and certainly Legend are still capable of prioritizing; she's his next target. He rarely wastes a shot on a Spree-style Ellie duplicate but still takes valuable seconds trying to get all three of the Prism-style ones.

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She consolidates and splits frequently, varying which body she saves, and tries to use the Sprees as cover as much as she can.

"Get him down where I can hit him effectively."

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"I can do that."

It's mostly a matter of emphasis. You know these people you really want dead, here, have some overpowering anger and look how down here they all are. The Butcher speeds toward them, no longer prioritizing but still hitting mostly Ellie duplicates just because of numbers. He is a very fast-moving target. Smashes straight through all Shatterbird's barriers and several of Ellie before he stops cold and bounces off a sheet of glass. The Siberian lets go of it.

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Blast of chaos at the knees while he's still, hopefully knock him down without killing him.

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He's not in pain, courtesy of Twelve. But he's crumpled at odd angles even before the blast removes one of his legs at the knee and damages the other. There's actually a lot of blood; it might be bad if he dies.

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Nothing a bit of cauterization can't fix.

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It actually is; Burnscar's fires aren't enough energy to break through, which means he just absorbs them. But some of that energy automatically goes to repairing his body, so it kind of works.

"We could hold him indefinitely now that he's down. Bonesaw, were you planning to use Hatchet Face for anything? I'm thinking we could hide them both, with a countdown so Butcher breaks free once we're long gone..."

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"That sounds like the optimally chaotic way to deal with him."

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While everyone else is going about arranging that, or just happens to be facing the other way, someone taps Ellie's shoulder from behind.

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She whirls around, shades at the ready.

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He talks in a hushed voice, apparently having complete faith that that's enough to keep him from being overheard. By the Slaughterhouse Nine. Who are right there. "Hi. I'm Christof. I'm taking him, but figured you wouldn't mind missing out on the chaos." He starts picking up Legend. It's a bit of an effort, possibly because of his complete lack of superpowers.

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"...Not especially. Where did you come from, and where are you taking him?"

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Christof shrugs. "He's Legend. Weird things just kind of happen around him. Um, we don't have long before Cherish notices me, so while I'm here–" he gives her a name, a place, and a time. "And leave this for her teammates if any survive." It's a slip of paper, with a letter C on it. Or possibly U. Or omega. Depends on point of view.

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"That's not an answer to my question."

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"No, it isn't. I'm from– oh, here they come." He points behind her to where Jack and Cherish are rounding a corner toward them.

And of course he's gone by the time she turns back around. Pretty obvious in retrospect.

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That's what she gets for not shooting first. She palms the note away for later inspection.

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"...huh. What happened to our legendary Butcher?"

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"...He was right there. I only turned around for a moment."

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"You didn't decide to claim his power and vaporize the body and fool Cherish into thinking there was someone else here? You're sure?"

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"Do I look like that much of an idiot, Jack?"

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"No, but the other question is who managed to sneak up on us and this seemed like the right order to ask them in."

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"One of the Othellos. A teleporter of some type. An Eidolon."

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"Could be, but none of those really fit very well. I heard you get startled then stop, and someone else seeming oddly calm."

"Plus you didn't kill them," Jack adds. "Not that you need another Othello after that explosion, but it seems out of character for you."

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"He didn't have any powers. I was fairly sure I would be able to catch whoever dropped him off when he left again, but the second of distraction your arrival provided proved sufficient for the escape."

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"Interesting. A teleporter somewhere else, then, maybe with a restriction about being seen? A sufficiently different Othello variant that can send passengers? That's far too speculative, of course."

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"The Othello is unlikely. Seemed as though he was working for an outside party."

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"That strongly suggests we need to get out of here. What about him implied that?"

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"Call it a gut feeling."

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"I've learned the value of those over the years. So, an unpowered agent of an organization that is not the heroes pops in and leaves with a member of the Triumvirate as soon as we get him disabled.

Shockingly well informed, and we need to be somewhere else. Anyone disagree?"

(Mannequin doesn't; he's been thinking the same since the stunt with the Protectorate base.)

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This city has just about exhausted its charms.

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It'd be nice to find out what's going on, but self-preservation comes first. They vanish to the middle of nowhere, usually a good response when there's radar to get under.

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And when she has a moment to herself, she takes another look at the note.

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The note is just that one letter. Not even any way of telling which way is up, so which letter is indeterminate. Presumably it'd mean something to the teammates of the cape she got directions to.

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Very suspicious. But simple enough to leave it behind, if the cape proves worthwhile.

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Yeah, this isn't really what one does if trying to avoid being suspicious.

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In any case. First she needs a new set of drone armor. The last was utterly obliterated.

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Giving the tinkers downtime is kind of boring for the others but it's something they're used to.

Ellie may be able to get her tinker powers cooperating. If the archer one throws a technology at her but doesn't cooperate with building it because her drone armor isn't an arrowhead at all, maybe one of the other tinkers can come up with a different approximation of the same design. It takes some luck since the others have their own limits, but it happens more often than never.

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Then this set will be that much better than the previous iteration.

It's kind of silly how arbitrary the tinkers get, and it's interesting to see the way they can patch each other's problems when used in concert.

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They aren't more arbitrary than other powers. Licit can make force fields in pyramids or cubes but not triangular prisms. But yes. Kind of silly.

 

The official story on Boston is that they have no hope of covering up the leader of the Protectorate very visibly blowing up a bunch of buildings. They've blamed the Butchery on the Nine, and since Legend hasn't been seen since they're assuming he's dead. So the Siberian or the Keres is now probably also the Butcher.

The clones didn't spread far enough or do enough damage to get much play in the main narrative, but the information is there for people following it closely.

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Heh. Maybe that will make people more reluctant to engage her with lethal force.

She doesn't much care that the clones are not a bigger story. Notoriety is not a motivating factor for her. Jack may be slightly put out, but that's not really her problem.

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Jack's pretty happy about the Nine getting credit for killing Legend. That's as big as news gets, and it's mostly not wrong. They totally could have killed him. The trip's a success even if not as much of one as they deserved.

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So, next target?

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Probably going to lie low for a bit longer. They'll get a massive response if they do anything on the scale of Boston any time soon. More likely somewhere without a lot of capes, and they can just vanish after leaving the victims very entertainingly positioned.

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(She has some time yet before the deadline.)

That's fine. She's heard of a potentially interesting cape off in this direction. Perhaps they can wend that way?

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That happens to be the same city as a noncombat cape who could pretty easily find them. If any given object might have been observed by someone who can see things' future, they'd be treading on eggshells the whole time. Maybe in a few weeks when they aren't the talk of the country.

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She'll take that chance, even if Jack doesn't want to. She'll go by herself, then.

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"Are you coming back?"

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"I'm beginning to think that I shouldn't bother."

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"Really. Why not?" A rhetorical question, of course.

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"You are less interested in entirely exterminating the opposition than you lead me to believe. And you have exhibited the preference that I not collect very powerful capes."

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"If you mean Legend that was more a case of prioritizing the Butcher trick than an actual preference against it."

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"Regardless."

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And the bit where he killed capes rather than let her do it. And the bit with letting someone stall for time to rescue her allies. But it'd be so boring if she were too powerful.

"Understandable. Of course it occurs to me that if you wanted to leave the Nine, I know where there are some powerful capes you might want to collect."

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"As do I."

Prism split, two copies blink out of that fight, remaining body splits with Spree and attacks with Sundancer, keeping a non-metal brute for resistance to getting knifed.

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She doesn't have anyone completely knife proof, but she doesn't need completely.

Jack avoids the sun while it's forming, and ignores the Spree clones entirely. He just keeps scratching her as best he can.

"She decided she wants our powers," he explains to the other Nine. "Already." No one's exactly surprised.

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Drop Spree for Burnscar, light as much of the area on fire as possible. Use that for mobility, drop the teleporter for Damsel. Send a body in close enough for that to be effective, also opens up deathtouch possibilities. Keep one body safe at all times, consolidate and re-split as necessary.

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Shatterbird blankets the area in extremely thin glass. Since the Siberian's standing there the thickness doesn't matter, and now there's no fuel on top of it. Crawler jumps in front of a chaos blast, and laughs as it tears into him. (Then he spits a gob of acid, because of course he does.) Mannequin extends an arm...and keeps extending...and then cracks one of Bonesaw's vials in front of one of her bodies. Jack and Cherish, meanwhile, are unerringly pointing out her least targetable body. It accumulates scratches from Jack's knife.

This team works really well together; the fight feels kind of hopeless.

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...That's almost certainly Cherish. Still. Not everything is immediately winnable. She can always come back for them. She consolidates and prepares to run.

Then splits in three, one body immediately leaving, the other two returning, laser-focused on getting at Cherish by any means.

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This fight seems extremely hopeless. Also impossible to get away from. Cherish can drive someone to kill themself in seconds.

 

One body rams into one of Mannequin's weapons. A can of maces or something. She's brute enough to keep going. The fleeing body gets a bit of a burn from Jack slicing a glob of Crawler's acid while it's in the air to redirect it into the path of her dodge. At this point he's probably just showing off. More importantly, she can notice something about his shade. Subtle, but it's there. It has ghostly tendrils connecting it to each other shard, becoming marginally more salient when he interacts with others that way.

Cherish, of course, is now touching the Siberian's hand. That'd be the problem with prioritizing so obviously.

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Her emotions are untrustworthy, therefore she will not trust them. She has her goal and doesn't need further input on it.

One thing that's not been tried is deathtouch against Siberian protection. It might plausibly route around it, like it did for Crawler.

Jack, she can worry about later.

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She can see Cherish's shade, but can't get a metaphorical grip on it. Feels different from Noelle's where she could grab it but not pull.

Even if she's forcing herself through the emotions, it takes valuable attention and is extremely unpleasant. Is she sure she doesn't want to just spend a power slot on making herself immune?

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Would also help her get away. She swaps brutes for the metal one.

Gives up on Cherish, consolidates those two, tries for Crawler with a blink.

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There's really no defense against the teleportation than to already be touching the Siberian. Or, apparently, to be ridiculously fast at dodging. Jack's shade strengthens its link to hers shortly before the jump, and he calls out in time for Crawler to jolt backward and leave her a face full of acid.

(Knife flat across an elbow. Arm straight at the time, now it's staying that way for a bit.)

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Oh, Jack is cheating. How lovely.

She consolidates everything into the fleeing body, and concentrates on getting away.

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Knives sticking to her legs mean she's stuck relying on mover powers, but she already knows those are fast enough to evade the Siberian. She will, eventually, get away.

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And hopefully, they won't come after her.

To the rendezvous.

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It's more just a suggestion for an ambush. Labyrinth is there, as are some of her teammates. Out of costume, not that that matters to Ellie.

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Rendezvous, ambush. Really, the only difference is whether both parties are expecting the meeting. She does enjoy having the element of surprise. Split with Prism, swap a central group member for herself with Trickster, deathtouch the swapee and two others in range.

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That nets her the target shaker power and two monstrous-looking capes.

The remainder aren't very much competition either.

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She lets the paper flutter to the ground next to the bodies.

And now to get out of sight.

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Is there anyone left to find it, who knows; it's not like she kept count. It's also not like anyone's following her, so there's very little sight to worry about getting out of.

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Makes things easy.

What new powers has she picked up?

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Most are pretty minor. Cut inanimate objects at touch range. A flame generator that would be fairly powerful if she didn't already have multiple Burnscars. Two counts of changing form into a mutant with combat-applicable bodily fluids, one a hallucinogen and one more miscellaneous. A small-scale telekinesis that comes out looking like luck. The only really important one is the shaker power.

It looks like simultaneously exploring and creating new worlds, with the capacity to temporarily bring surroundings and objects into the real one and the speed depending on Labyrinth's mental state. Existing places are more based on what kind of day Labyrinth was having when she dreamed up the contents than on what would be most useful, but she can also leave people selectively unaffected.

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That is extraordinary. Is she able to route around the speed limit imposed by the previous user's brain peculiarities?

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It's more as if Labyrinth is by deep within her power by default now. Being a shade doesn't require much engagement with the outside world anyway, what with Ellie calling the shots. She doesn't have any special advantage in creating the settings, but using them should be toward the easy end of the spectrum.

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Good. This power will be very useful for defining the field on her terms, always an advantage.

While she's here, might as well pick up anyone else useful. Like that precog Jack was unwilling to risk.

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There's not a lot of public information about Pinpoint. Probably because he's strictly noncombat. But there is an easily locatable Protectorate headquarters, if she wants to risk being seen so soon after Boston.

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She doesn't have to be. She's got all these drones. Observation is well within their remit.

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It's pretty clear who she's looking for. Gray and black costume, very muted, with a large visor and multiple optical scopes. It practically screams "vision-based thinker power" as well as "not in a public-facing role." Her drones can't check for shades, but she can have a pretty good guess.

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Yeah, that's probably the one she wants.

Killing a precog might be a challenge. Assaulting a Protectorate headquarters on her own may yet be slightly beyond her, as well as unnecessarily attention-getting. Perhaps an ambush while he is in transit.

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If she spends a bit tracking, it's pretty easy to plot out his route. He rarely goes anywhere completely alone, mostly because he's blind, but surrounded by mere humans is basically the same as alone.

When she ambushes him, he's right where she predicts him to be.

So is a man in armor wielding an implausibly huge sword. "No," he says, and points it at her.

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"Can't I go anywhere without one of you showing up?"

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"Quit trying to murder people and maybe."

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"I think I definitively have more successes than attempts, at this point."

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"True. That's not a point in your favor.

Speaking of successful people everyone wants stopped, where are your teammates?" (His own are coming in from every direction, often in civilian clothes. They never did find out she can identify capes on sight.)

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"Former teammates. I am no longer a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, due to... philosophical differences."

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"Congratulations on surviving the exit interview. From your presence here, I assume it'd be too much to hope you decided to give up murder?"

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"If I say yes, are you more or less likely to call your team off?"

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"More, if you sounded believable. It's a long shot."

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"It's their funeral." An observant hero might note that she has six shades at her back now, compared to her capability of three last reported. One of them looks remarkably like her.

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Guesses range from 'oddly simple second trigger' up through 'was holding back all along.' Also the true one. An observant villain might notice that there are surprisingly few civilians around.

"You know, I'm not actually sure what happens when someone quits the Nine. Not that it's relevant here, but you should talk to a—"

He pulls the trigger on his sword and fires a cannonball at her, just in case she's still susceptible to surprise.

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That body is. Fortunately, she has a spare.

She blinks back in next to her original target. An overgrown hedgemaze appears in place of the city street.

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Her vision seems to split. She's seeing both the hedge maze and the city street superimposed, with either being tangible by her preference. But for everyone else it's just the maze.

They recognize this power as soon as the hedges start materializing. Either because Labyrinth used this maze against some of them or because there aren't a lot of other candidates. Hedges are fairly easy to destroy at the cost of some distraction.

The armored cape guesses who she's going for and plants his sword between the two of them. It helps that the blade grows to let him do it sooner. "I said no.

Do you know Pinpoint's power? He's a precog. Ask yourself whether we'd be here if we couldn't live with the outcome."

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She lights the maze on fire.

And calls up a Hunch. How likely is it that they will be happy with what happens here?

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For most of the capes the response to fire is to flee. Anyone close-range is at least kind of useless. One is a pyrokinetic—can't compete with Burnscar, but makes sure there's always some flame near Ellie so she has to spend one shade on fire resistance.

 

The armored cape is probably not bluffing, Hunch says. And is probably going to have to successfully back that up. He doesn't seem to mind the fire, but it doesn't take superpowers to notice that.

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The nice thing about Burnscar is that she gets pyrokinesis and mobility in the same package. Another Ellie blazes out of the fire near the pyrokinetic and grabs.

"Far be it from me to fight what is fated, king of knights. If you wish to protect his life, so be it."

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There isn't any fire immediately near the pyrokinetic—she's a pyrokinetic—which means enough warning to avoid contact.

"Protect, and—" he swings the blade, chopping down one-handed. It doesn't look more intimidating than a sword normally would.

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Still close enough to blast with chaos.

With the benefit of a metal body, she catches the sword.

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Keres #2 has her aim thrown off by the remains of the hedge maze, which are alternating between striking her and assembling into a crude cage. Neither is very effective against her new metal body.

The metal body doesn't help against the knight-themed cape. The apparently metal sword was ceramic in retrospect, so it doesn't stick to her while it shears straight through from shoulder to waist. This doesn't kill her, or even hurt, but is somewhat disorienting.

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"Cheater," she accuses before withdrawing that body.

This hedge maze is her creation, and if it is not helping her, then she will withdraw it. And replace it with a field of waist-high grass waving gently in a pleasant breeze that she promptly sets on fire.

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Chevalier takes the opportunity to inhale while there's slightly less smoke. Then he goes back to trying to look indomitable.

He pulls a large cardboard sign out of his back pocket. It says Labyrinth. Hedges. Grass. Do you really think you can kill any of us. She'll only have a moment to see it before— never mind, not burning.

And then it's more swording while the support capes stay out of her way.

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It was worth trying.

She withdraws both of the bodies she has on the field, and dumps a river through to snuff the fires. The body nearest Chevalier leaves behind a drone which colors itself white and drops inert to the ground. She effects a getaway.

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They kill two bodies simultaneously, and don't see the third escape. Not that they're counting on her staying dead.

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So. Postmortem analysis. That didn't exactly work out terribly well for her. Not a disaster, but not a success, either. If she can expect a similar level of opposition to future attacks, that does not bode well. She's at a level where she can hold her own against such resistance, but she can't crush it as easily as she would like. Clearly, the answer here is to accumulate more power, but in such a way as to not give a chance for the heroes to interfere. Sometime when there are lots of capes gathered, and a large distraction.

Like an Endbringer fight. It's about time for another one, yes?

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About time. They're in the window, which means it could be any point in the next couple weeks.

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Any hunches on where or when?

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Endbringer prediction mostly just means people with brightly colored web sites talking about the prophecies of Edward Kelley and how the last three attacks spell out a word in ancient Enochian and the next one is unavoidably going to be the speaker's home town. Maybe someone somewhere has some real ones, but definitely not that they publicize.

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Hmm. Her own precogs are useless here.

Maybe just keep a watch on the Protectorate and try to follow them when they leave.

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It'll involve hanging out here, or at least some city with a serious team, for possibly weeks. But now that she can hide easily and doesn't need to eat or even sleep, it's entirely a question of boredom.

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She can kill some time thinking of inventive ways to murder Jack.

And trying to put together a coherent narrative about those entities she keeps seeing when she collects a power.

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It's not obvious if there is a coherent narrative. Probably.

 

Eventually she sees heroes start rushing to the Protectorate base. More than zero villains, too. It's probably that.

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Time to go.

One of the Burnscar variants had an interesting twist: to travel to the vicinity of fire, instead of appearing within it. Assuming the transport runs on some sort of combustion engine, she ought be able to use that to follow.

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She'll still need to disappear from fire, but she has more capes who can create it than she can use. If she tries to appear inside the transport, she'd get noticed right away. The other option would be appearing near it and repeatedly falling, with the drawback that she doesn't know the destination.

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Probably easier to follow. Hopefully it's not farther than she can manage.

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Miami. Leviathan, from the weather. The capes disembark and head to the official rendezvous.

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She splits, and sends a body to follow. Her shades are defensively oriented, insofar as others can recognize them.

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A cape in a dark costume with a literal cape stares at her through a visor. Alexandria.

"You. Leviathan is due any minute. We do not have time for this. Stay back and collect only the dead, and we'll let you leave afterward."

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"We were going to offer our help, but as you like."

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She goes back to briefing the capes while there's still time. Front-line capes, blasters, support and rescue, et assorted ceteras. Most people have some idea where they're supposed to be. The general theme is holding Leviathan back and doing damage while waiting for Scion to arrive; they're prepared but they're also on top of a giant aquifer. Leviathan has the high ground. Metaphorically.

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Should be interesting.

She goes to find a relatively central vantage.

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Everyone avoids her. No one shoots. The foreign capes are less in shock, but take the Protectorate's word for it that the truce does not extend this far. (The reasons spread by osmosis.)

 

Waves start coming faster and larger, and then with almost no warning Leviathan himself. Thirty feet tall with a tail longer than that, four eyes on a lopsided face, and a top-heavy shape. Then he starts moving, too quickly to get a very good view. He charges straight into the front line.

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Possibly she could put her Shaker 12 to use in mitigating the effects of his high ground, but she was asked to stay back. Maybe if he breaks for a shelter she'll attempt to divert him. For now: observation and collection.

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Labyrinth probably couldn't do much about an aquifer beneath four counties anyway.

 

The first shades to collect are the ones from the front line. Capes who thought they could take a hit from Leviathan and were wrong, or who got hit harder than expected or just got unlucky. They are at least collectively slowing him down and letting the blasters get out some good shots.

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Their ill fortune is her good luck. Fear not brave warriors, for in death you will find such purpose as you never knew in life etc, etc.

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The first time Leviathan really breaks through, the shades come in faster than a trickle.

—two creatures leaving a planet, dense with information—
—sending its cells one by one to recipients of an unrecognizable alien race—
—crashing near the western coast of Africa—
—flying distances that would be mind-boggling if their minds weren't harder to boggle—
—watching the recipients of the cells, taking notes—

It's all out of order, and a lot of it repeats. Most flashes only involve one, but never more than two and she's had a fair number of visions by now.

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There is a story here. One she can almost see-

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The capes drive the monster back, and the deaths stop. It's probably very heroic from their point of view but really who cares.

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She can use the break to ensure her own position is relatively secure. Not in danger of waves or similar.

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It's not the most defended; that's being used as the battlefield hospital, but it's out of the way and relatively safe.

Most of the deaths at any given time are coming from injured capes that no one rescued in time. So they're getting less correlated with where the action is and trickling in one at a time. (Most of the action is people like Alexandria trading blows with the Endbringer. Irrelevant for her purposes.)

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As long as he's continuing to engage the heroes, that's the important thing.

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He does. The trickle keeps coming.

—scattering cells across worlds and time—
—two beings spiraling together through space—
—drawing energy from all parallel worlds when leaving—
Destination.—
building an avatar in the same shape as the inhabitants—

Each shade still comes with a power, but that seems hardly as interesting at the moment.

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Indeed.

This is fascinating.

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The search and rescue people managed some kind of improvement or whatever. That trickle slows down and fewer people die.

 

It's an Endbringer fight; that can't last for long.
—spiraling through space again, planning the next cycle—
—the crashed body being killed by a human with a knife—
—the shattered remains of every version of the world they just left—
—more spiraling—

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This has happened before, elsewhere. But the cycle is broken this time. Interference, cosmic, then human.

Avatars of the entities, in local form... Scion?

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She doesn't get any flashes that convenient, but that excerpt from a previous cycle does involve the impression of picking a form associated with local objects of worship. (It's a very high-bandwidth flash.) Flying golden Jesus would fit.

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Heh. That's kind of amusing. The savior is the one who would burn the world.

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It's taking longer and longer between fragments that aren't just redundant. It gradually comes out that the beings are dreading the end of the multiverse and are using the cycle as a way to evolve abilities that might get them around entropy somehow, hence all the note-taking on what hosts do with it. They make sure powers are incapable of reaching the worlds that contain the remainder of their own massive bulk, as well as the ones where they stash the cells that protrude into Earth Bet's three dimensions. The humans who killed the second one are now harvesting its body to distribute powers. Nothing says whether or not they know what they're messing with.

 

There's probably more information to be had, but judging by the repetitiveness she knows most of it.

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Answers the question of powers-in-a-can.

What an incredible amount of power these entities control. With her collection ability, she could perhaps simulate it, eventually. Or even replace the dead one. She'll need powers, lots of powers, preferentially those harvested from that entity.

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Nearly all the shades of physically mutated capes give flashbacks involving the dead one. The converse isn't true.

The fight, if she cares about that, seems to involve the defenders gradually losing ground. They drive Leviathan back and then he slides right through, and then they repeat. Spatial distortions and force fields occasionally prevent a charge before it gets going. Leviathan doesn't seem to be being very strategic, and then a geyser bursts from underneath the heroes' command center.

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That'd be the aquifer. This fight is probably just about over, then.

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The next few shades are more noncombat and thinker types than the last ones. Alexandria and the other front-line capes try to drive Leviathan back. While he tries to drown her, a blindingly bright light breaks through the clouds and bores into him.

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And now the fight really is over. Time to go. She's not ready to meet Scion again just yet.

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Wrong color. It's a white light, not golden. Not that she's the only one making that mistake.

Legend and Alexandria have fought Leviathan together before, and slip right back to fighting how they always do. Everyone else is just really confused.

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...Ellie is also confused. She hadn't been under the impression any of the Butchers were that altruistic.

Can she make out his shade?

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It looks the same as it did before. Butchers still attached. Most of them aren't actively doing anything at all, but there could be any number of reasons for that.

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Curiouser and curiouser. Just who was Cristof working for?

Change of plans, she's staying to watch the rest of this.

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So is everyone else, until some blue-armored cape with an axe reminds them that they're not just here to watch. Anyone who can join does; Legend is almost as much of a morale boost as a combatant.

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That admonishment presumably continues not to apply to her.

If they want her help, they can ask for it.

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No one does. One of the major reasons may no longer apply, but they still don't trust her.

Legend isn't enough to turn the tide by himself. Before Leviathan's next charge the blue-armored tinker duels him one-on-one, presumably coordinating with some communication device they didn't offer Ellie, and doesn't die. Alexandria does have to bail him out after he takes a hit, but giving the heroes a chance to regroup is worth a lot. They start driving the Endbringer back to the shore.

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Over after all, maybe. Unless he turns out to have something cute up his metaphorical sleeve before he leaves.

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More numerous and more dramatic waves, but Eidolon's off canceling those as best he can.

And some of the Triumvirate's international equivalents are here too, to compensate for Legend's loss, so the defenders are pretty well positioned to force him off.

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Wonder if they'll be calling this one a win.

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Definitely. There was a Leviathan attacking, then there wasn't.

After he's gone and after more urgent tasks, Alexandria stops by the Keres. "I hope I don't have to explain how much of a colossal bad idea it would be if you try to harvest any living capes here."

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"We think we can guess. You need not trouble yourself, Rule. The reappearance of the Beacon has given us much to ponder."

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"If you ever are tempted, remember that the truce is the only reason there are so many people battling Endbringers in the first place."

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"We understand this. Are you going to repeat yourself a third time, or will that be all?"

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"Just wanted to ensure it was explicit."

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"You have achieved that objective."

She turns away from Alexandria, studying the city below.

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Alexandria lets her go, and goes back to handling whatever was next on her list.

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So. A secret organization dragged off Legend's unconscious body in Boston. Weeks later, he appears in Miami, behaving much as he normally does. And there is also a secret organization with control of an entity's derelict husk. For two secrets of that scale, it's implausible that they are not somehow connected. In support of that hypothesis, the man in Boston pointed her to a group that contained more mutations than typical. Is this exploitable? Maybe, maybe not. She's likely going to need access to the corpse at some point. They might contact her to remove another cape somewhere. Possibly she'll be able to divine more information then.

Second point: powers come from the entities. Therefore, it is likely some of them have uses other than that to which they are currently being put. Such as Jack's. With the connections his shade has, it may have stood as some sort of communicative/coordinative aspect. As demonstrated by the case of Crawler, the shades are close to being the whole of a person. If Jack knows what you do as or before you yourself do, small wonder he has been so successful at evading death. That also helps explain how he has maintained control of the Nine for so long. He knows just what buttons to press to keep each of his followers in check.

So if she wants to kill him, it can't be by her own hands. Less satisfying that way, but ultimately, the fact of his demise is more important than the specific method. Easiest for her would be to construct an army with her tinkers, and sic that on him. But that requires time to set up, and knowledge of where he will be. Any of her thinkers have insight on where the Nine's travels might lead?

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They can make guesses. Most need some kind of information to go off, and she doesn't have very much of that. But they do think they'll be able to track them down eventually.

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She'll have to see about getting some information. She's spent time with the group, has an idea of their decision patterns. Could look for past instances, see where and when they've struck in the past.

Could ask the heroes for help. 'Hello Eidolon, I would like to kill the Slaughterhouse Nine, would you care to supply me with the information I need to do that?' Probably wouldn't go over well.

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Yeah, if Eidolon thought that would turn out well he could have assembled whatever thinkers he needed and tried it himself. And they're a bit too alive for that to have happened very often.

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He, presumably, never tried an attack which his shade could not telegraph. Still, likely better not to inform the heroes of that vulnerability. She doesn't want them to move without her.

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Once she leaves everyone is relieved at the lack of incident.

It's not until the next day that there's a voice from behind her. "Me again. With more time to answer questions; are we safe enough here?"

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She turns.

"So far as I know. Though perhaps I should be asking that question of you; your organization seems well-informed."

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"Extremely. In particular, I imagine you're probably planning to go after the Nine?"

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"I am."

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"We could find them. But we did mean to include some of them in one of our plans later."

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"Oh?"

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"We're trying to arrange for humanity to survive the end of the world. We suspect Shatterbird and the Siberian might be useful in that fight, and would rather they stay alive. Same goes for you, incidentally."

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"The fight after Scion inevitably tires of whatever inscrutable game he is currently engaged in, you mean?"

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"That one. Right now, Eidolon is the best card we have on the table. We could do with another ace."

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"I'd prefer to survive that too. It's not pressingly necessary that I kill those two."

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"Thank you.

Jack was taking them to New York to take advantage of Legend's absence, but they'll leave before getting there as soon as they hear he's back. They'll be lying low in Fishkill for a bit, pretty easy to find once you know they're there."

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"I'd best be moving soon, then." Headtilt. "Are you the same group that distributes powers in cans?"

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Well, she does already know about Scion's partner, or he wouldn't be here.

"Yes. My employers call themselves Cauldron. Selling powers is one of the most direct ways of arranging for there to be more capes to fight him with."

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"Why send me after Labyrinth?"

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"Had to rescue Legend without it being a total loss for you; you could have just said no. Why Labyrinth in particular instead of some other parahuman about equally powerful...her team was on its way to exposing us. This way it's multiple birds per stone."

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"What did you do to him?"

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"Officially nothing at all. A classic case of Heroic Willpower.

Unofficially, we threatened Heartbreaker. Now all the Butchers are fanatically loyal to Legend; he'd probably end up in control for a few iterations even if someone killed him."

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"Clever. Is Legend one of your creations?"

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"He'd be valuable enough to save even if he weren't, but yes. Having him meant we were in on the ground floor since the beginning of the Protectorate, and we could nudge the status quo so there'd be as many capes as possible alive when we need them."

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"You've been around so long?"

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"Since the beginning."

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"How much longer do you think we have?"

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"Anywhere from two years to twenty. Not even the best precogs can touch Scion directly."

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"I'll not make any long-term investments, then. I think that was everything."

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"Good luck with the Nine."

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"I don't need luck. Just time. Do you prefer I turn around so you can make your exit?"

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"No, that's fine, I'll use the door."

He unlocks it and walks through.

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Can't blame her for trying.

Time to get build an army in Fishkill.

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Her thinkers can narrow down the location of the Nine easily enough. In retrospect of course they'd be right there along highway 9. Probably a good idea to stay outside Cherish's range from their position.

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Yes. At least until she's ready to bait them in.

She makes sure her army is versatile and flexible, and not necessarily predictable by her, utilizing the full breadth of her tinkers. She makes robots that build traps independently, with only the constraint that she doesn't trigger them. The battlefield is prepared by her, but Jack won't be able to anticipate any of it, because she can't anticipate any of it.

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There is always the risk that Jack or Cherish will happen to come too close and find out. If that happens, they don't inform her of the fact.

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As long as they're still in town by the time she's done.

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Her thinkers can give some pretty good estimates; she effectively has advance warning.

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Then when she's ready, she'll go make an appearance in Cherish's range.

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She passes it on to Jack, not that there's any sign of that from this distance.

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She splits, spreads out, and starts walking towards them.

Her army is approaching from multiple directions. There's nowhere to run.

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Her army is also completely undetectable. She rolls her eyes when Jack starts acting like they're under attack, what with there being no one there, but crowds around the Siberian along with the other squishy people.

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She sends several suns into the building the Nine are in, not bothering to route around obstacles such as walls.

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Most of her opponents are invulnerable enough to ignore it. Crawler is briefly excited then disappointed, and Shatterbird is unaccounted for.

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They're going to have to emerge eventually, though. And one of her army's secondary objectives is sweeping for possible projectors.

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There are about two thousand people in range, assuming the Siberian didn't quit chasing her early to disguise it. Drones will have a hard time narrowing it down and will definitely attract attention.

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She can do some Thinkering on the problem while waiting for Jack and company to come out and play.

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The Genesis link suggests the cape doesn't necessarily look like the projection, she probably wasn't faking about the distance, and here come the Nine.

The more thinker capes she has out the less prepared she can be for knife beams etc., though most of the cetera are distracted by the swarm of robots.

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That is their purpose. She's got enough of variety to be able to stay alive long enough to shift to a more offensive configuration.

"Nice to see you again too, Jack. How was New York?"

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"Same as always, unfortunately.

The drones are a nice touch, but you have to realize you're outmatched." A glass spike as big as she is crashes against her back. Still no visible sign of Shatterbird.

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"Of course I am. Do you really think that's the sort of concern that would stop me? I'm not here to kill your henchmen, Jack. Just you."

She focuses on wide-area attacks, trying for as much collateral damage as possible. She probably should have come up with a way to stop the Siberian Siberianing before now, it's not like Jack is going to let go.

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It's going to take a lot of collateral damage to kill the two thousand nearest people. If she's just trying to flush out Shatterbird, her drone collective can get to it first. The shards of glass are under more fine control when higher up, and any drones that get too high get crushed or at least knocked downward. They can pick out a general direction, which is mostly up.

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She flies one of her bodies to go look.

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Shatterbird pelts her and flees. It's just physical projectiles, nothing she can't shrug off.

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She pursues, close enough to talk, not close enough to touch.

"Are you interested in fighting Scion at the end of the world?"

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Shatterbird is fast. Ellie is also fast. 

"You're trying to end the world? That's new."

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"Not me. Him. He's not human, not even parahuman. He's an alien, and somewhere between two to thirty years from now, he's going to get tired of rescuing kittens from trees, and it will be us against him."

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"Congratulations, you now sound marginally less crazy."

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"I talked with a group who thinks you might be useful in that. They asked me not to kill you. If you go now and leave Jack to me, I won't come after you, now or later. If you find the Siberian's real body and take that with you too, we'll call that me owing you a favor."

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"If I were scared enough for inventive threats to work, I'd run. Thanks for the tip about the Siberian being fake; Jack will be pleased to find out I know and didn't try to kill her at all."

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"Seems to me running is exactly what you've been doing."

She closes the gap.

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"Seems that way, doesn't it. It wasn't."

Tiny particles of glass flow around Ellie's face, sliding their way into her nose and forcing her mouth open. They're rounded, or something; they really should be hurting despite the brute powers otherwise. As soon as they've wormed their way some distance down her throat they merge into a solid object, and now running is what Shatterbird is doing.

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Bodies merge, then split, leaving the glass behind.

A forcefield appears in Shatterbird's path that will bounce her off, sapping kinetic energy. And then another shade will increase her inertia considerably as Ellie catches up.

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Stuck at short range, she tries the glass powder trick again. Nose, mouth, even eyes. This time she didn't round the edges first.

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She switches to a metal body, and grapples.

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Shatterbird's eyes go wide. Then she stops.

"Okay. You got contact and I'm still alive. You've made your point."

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"My previous offer stands. Are you going to avail yourself of it?"

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She stops and thinks, and looks downward.

"All right. I'll come back when the others have finished with you."

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"Don't hold your breath."

She releases Shatterbird and returns to the main fight, switching out of the metal body. More of a hinderance than a help, against Jack.

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The others saw when this body disappeared, and noticed when she turned metal. When she turns back, Cherish is going full force. Knowing that the hopeless dread and urge to kill herself are being induced by an enemy doesn't actually make it easier to disregard.

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Oh right. That's why she uses it anyway.

It's a good thing she didn't say anything about leaving Cherish alive.

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When she gets down, the drones are mostly keeping their distance. They're firing on the Nine occasionally, but Crawler can take it. He's rampaging and cutting in to her supply. Jack, Cherish, and Bonesaw are facing different directions and each reaching backward toward the Siberian's outstretched arm. Jack is occasionally helping Crawler out, not that he needs it. The Siberian's other arm is holding a monstrously long glass rod that really should break under its own weight. Once in a while it slices an arc through any drones that happen to get too close.

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Mannequin's probably up to no good somewhere out of sight. Crawler's a more immediate threat.

She's got more tools to close with him now.

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While he's all in favor of her using them, he doesn't want her to actually kill him. The Siberian jumps, and the other three don't seem to weigh her down. When she lands on his back Bonesaw drops something that sticks her foot down without it having to dig into his carapace. They look pretty ridiculous.

 

"Congratulations on driving Shatterbird off," Jack calls. "I'll have to tell her I was disappointed, afterward."

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She'll go clear the the area while they're having group hug time.

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It's pretty extremely clear. A side effect of giving the Siberian a weapon with reach. They're perfectly fine with waiting for her to get back, though.

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Any signs of Mannequin activity?

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No, but if she focuses for a minute she can track him by the suspicious lack of signs.

Mannequin isn't doing much damage to her robotic horde. He's mostly staying unseen, but every so often there's an unaccounted-for vanishing of a drone. The majority of those are in the same direction and getting closer.

 

And then there's an impact from behind her, the minority direction.
Mannequin looks up at his rocket-propelled fist, tingling with about fifty-seven varieties of exotic energy, then reels it back in. He looks about as disappointed as a faceless bogeyman can.

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Rude.

He's not touching the Siberian, though. All she has to do is crack open one of his pods. They're probably hardened against just about everything. Coincidentally, that's approximately what she has in her arsenal. Time to make some experiments.

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He's missing an arm, possibly from battles with her army. And also his shade, probably not from that.

Mannequin floats up on either subverted or cannibalized drones; it's not immediately obvious which. Then he tries again.

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More likely he purposefully detached the arm after moving some critical functions to it and hid it somewhere. She's getting tired of people who don't bring their whole selves to the fight. At least it's possible she can kill what he sent.

She blocks his attack with a field, and launches a barrage of her own.

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He dodges whatever he can, of course, and where he can't he prioritizes. Slithers out of the way of Damsel of Distress' power, moves from the path of some beam he hasn't seen before into the path of a lightning bolt, and hits back. Apparently at least one of whatever he's got lets him batter through force fields.

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She narrows down to a couple powers he doesn't seem to like, and fills other slots with containment to hold him still.

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He stays slippery, but eventually she manages to land a hit. Nothing happens. Aside from picking which to dodge, he gets to pick which to telegraph dodging.

And her metal body gets unexpectedly bisected. Crawler and his passengers land, the Siberian flourishing her lance.

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Okay, really time to do something about that. Regroup, reform. What's she got for options? Not much, especially with Jack right there.

Her comm flashes. The drones have found something, possible projector. She brings out Labyrinth and instantiates part one of the more malicious world-sections here. Might be a brief distraction while she investigates.

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The drones have been doing terrifying quantities of surveillance, and managed to keep track of who zones out while the Siberian is being particularly active. They've got a short list of candidates, headed by an unkempt and unhealthy-looking man. When she approaches, the Siberian vanishes from the others and reappears near him. Got the right guy, apparently.

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"I'm not actually here for you. Just Jack. Are you willing to listen or are we doing this the hard way?"

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"I'll talk." His voice comes out as barely a step above a rasp, but he's recognizably aware that he's very dangerous.

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"The people who told me where to find you asked that I leave you and Shatterbird alive, as insurance against the end of the world. Leave Jack and the others to me, and I won't come after you, now or later."

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"Cauldron. Got to you, did they.

Leave Bonesaw alive and you can have Jack and Alan."

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"Fair enough. You might want to see about spiriting her away yourself, I don't actually have any direct control over my army's targeting algorithms."

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"Deal."

The projection disappears, and the man's eyes go half vacant.

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Back to the others with her as well.

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Mannequin, Crawler, and Jack are cutting through her army. But not trivially. Cherish is already down; apparently the others couldn't manage to protect her.

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Good.

Shame about the waste, but nothing to be done for it now. She has a distraction to make of herself, and a Crawler to kill.

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They're mostly just fleeing. Jack's shade is still sending tendrils back and forth to the others, and Crawler barrels through her force fields with little difficulty.

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Jack at least she's not going to let get away. One body to try to chase down Crawler, the others to focus on impeding progress.

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She can make Jack spend arbitrary amounts of energy dodging things. Eventually he'll take a hit from one of the remaining robots.

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An incapacitating one?

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Not the first time, or the second, but it adds up.

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Can't rely on that to kill him, Bonesaw's enhancements. But once he can't move, she can pay him a personal visit.

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He's alive, but too incapacitated to do much of anything. Comes of having one's muscles and joints shot at. He stares at her with unadulterated loathing.

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She smiles as she bends down and plucks the power and life from his body.

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Without him, teleporting to Crawler is trivial. Mannequin seems to have gone to ground; she could probably track him down if she puts in the effort.

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No sense in leaving any loose ends behind that she doesn't have to. Come out from where you are hiding, little tinker, she hungers for your soul.

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Finding most of him is easy. Finding the relevant part is harder, but she has enough tinkers to trace the signals he's using to communicate with himself, and triangulate where he's controlling it from.

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And presumably he's laid some traps to protect himself?

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Probably. "Himself" is, in this context, one limb containing his brain, so he has to have defended it somehow.

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Probably not well enough to protect it from someone with endurance like Crawler and a plenitude of other sorts of destructive power simply walking up and smashing it, though.

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Nope. He doesn't have much luck fleeing either, under the circumstances.

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That's that wrapped up. Satisfying.

Possibly she should do something about the army, now that it's served its purpose. Or she could wait and see who comes to clean it up if she allows it to continue to maraud.

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If she sets it to "maraud," then heroes will show up eventually. Right now what it's doing is highlighting the next-most likely person to be the Siberian; she might want to give her flock some kind of updated instructions.

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She's had enough of chasing down targets for a while; let the targets come to her.

Go forth, minions, and rain down unwarranted destruction upon the peoples of Fishkill and environs.

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She's more than capable of being scary, even by proxy.

The nearest heroes are from New York City, and of course they send their fastest.

"Seriously?" Legend sends off one shot per minion. None miss. "What exactly was the win you were going for here?"

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"There wasn't really one. Here, let me help you with that." Self-destruct, go.

"What's it like, having fourteen people in your head?"

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"Incredibly creepy, even when we agree on what to do. And when we don't I'm vetoing them by force, while they keep objecting. I wouldn't recommend it."

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"I'll take that under advisement. Jack, Crawler, Mannequin, and Cherish are dead. Shatterbird and the Siberian survived, as your friends requested. Bonesaw left with the Siberian."

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"They requested what."

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"Cristof said something about valuable powers and the end of the world. I thought for sure you would be aware of something like that; perhaps I wasn't supposed to mention it."

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"It makes sense that they would, but Shatterbird. She's killed more people than anyone with a very short list of exceptions.

I think I need to go ask some questions."

He vanishes in a column of light.

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Hopefully he gets some answers. Definitely worth blowing up the army for, even if she can't go watch.

What to do now? Medium- to long-term, she wants a look at that entity Cauldron has. Still no good leads on getting there herself. Short-term: more shades. Not New York. Maybe Philadelphia, go for round two with Chevalier. Or Brockton Bay is reasonably close, with plenty of targets.

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Either of those works, if she's decided to go for singlehandedly upending Cauldron's equilibrium.

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They've proven clairvoyant enough. If they want to steer her off, they'll let her know. And she can ask to see the entity.

To Brockton Bay.

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It's some distance away. She's fast.

Conveniently, the Protectorate headquarters is extremely easy to find with its glowing force field and its complete lack of adjacent buildings in the middle of the bay. If she wants to start with heroes instead of villains, it's the obvious.

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Anyone home?

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She can't see shades from outside, but there are vehicles using the bridge. So at least it's not empty.

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Does she have enough power to overload the forcefield?

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She has enough variety to overload the force field. It's pretty generically tough, they had Leviathan in mind, but it's not built to handle assaults more exotic than lots of physical force.

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Knock knock. Come out where she can see you, heroes.

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They don't.

Instead, a woman disembarks from a car near the Protectorate side of the bridge. "If you're the Keres, you're in the wrong place."

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"Where, then, is the right place?"

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"Can't tell you that. I don't doubt you could force me to cooperate, so I don't know."

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"Who sent you?"

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"I did. Emily Piggot, PRT Director."

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She sets the car on fire.

"I assume you've instructed your underlings that you are of no value as a hostage. You should leave, Emily Piggot, PRT Director, before I decide to kill you anyway."

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She glares at the Keres for a moment rather than look at the explosion.

"Welcome to Brockton Bay." She turns and walks back to the apparently capeless Protectorate base.

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Well then. Looks like she'll have to draw them out of hiding.

If she were a local hero, villain, or other superpowered individual, what areas of the city would she be invested in protecting?

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Depends how much effort she wants to spend on research, really.

The best candidates are colloquially called the Trainyard and the the Docks, both left over from when the city had a thriving import industry. Now it still does, but the imports are of a slightly different character. Second-best alternative is the Boardwalk, filled with tourists and ludicrously expensive shops.

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Boardwalk's likely to get a heroic response. Might be time to change it up a little. She'll start destructing the Docks.

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Mostly what happens is people running.

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She splits up to better herd them towards the water. And takes a couple potshots into the crowd. Just for fun.

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Now it's almost more of a melee than a race. Amazing what a little fun can cause.

The heroes haven't had much time to arrive yet, of course. If they're even going to.

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They may not, true. Someone probably will. She can occupy herself for a while.

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The crowd is, on balance, mostly getting away. Unfortunately, it takes a fair amount of presence of mind to notice they're being chased toward the bay and will then be stuck. Some manage it, others don't.

She loses track of what's going on for a moment. When she regains it, a boy in the crowd has started pouring out white smoke from his nose and mouth, and basketball-sized flashes of energy appear sporadically around him. Definitely a parahuman, but no costume.

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Hm? Where'd he come from?

Collection time. From range, no reason to play with his energy flashes if she doesn't have to.

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The crowd is noticeably thinner than it was before. People got away somehow, probably.

 

And at last, cape interference. Insects and darkness, apparently.

Permalink Mark Unread

Metal doesn't care about bugs.

Where are the capes, shade of Jack, and what's their plan?

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It doesn't operate anywhere near that abstractly. But it would probably be a good idea to dodge, left, right now.

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Left it is.

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There's no sound, no rush of air, no feedback at all. It probably didn't lead her astray.

Also, it says to dodge right.

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Let's see if she can't get feedback.

Prism split. One body stays, the other goes right.

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The one that stays gets rammed from the front and knocked backward. It would be bone-breaking force if she had bones at the moment.

It does move her out of the cloud of darkness, so she can see what it was. Or see it, at least. It's some kind of cross between a wolf and a dragon. On balance it looks like nothing so much as the creature that some of Noelle's monster's mutated heads should have belonged to.

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Well, isn't that something. How does it react to having its face burned off?

And she can walk her other body out of the darkness,now she knows how finite it is.

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It yells. So does a voice from behind her. Cape.

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Third body out, looking back.

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Yup, there's a cape. No costume except a dog mask, and they're shouting instructions to the monstrosity.

Charge, but then reverse back into the cloud, her instinct says.

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No reason to mistrust it. Fake charge into a retreat.

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When she starts charging, a red-costumed cape appears near the one with the dog mask, and rushes both of them off. Then one of the energy spheres goes off right in front of her.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ah, so that's why the retreat. Smoked out another cape, too. Some kind of mover.

Is that wolf-dragon still alive?

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Body number two can see. Face unburned, so either it heals fast or there are two of it.

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This time she can try with one of the miniature suns.

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It rolls over and doesn't get burned straight through, but that's a huge gash down its side. Cauterized as it went, not that it matters. It's out and almost definitely dead. If Ellie weren't metal right now there'd probably be an awful lot of smell.

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Any dangers imminent? Cape-based or otherwise.

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Yeah, they've got lots of capes waiting in the wings or on their way. Right now the biggest danger is a cape across the darkness cloud from her.

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Can she affect the darkness cloud with the Labyrinth power?

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She can affect the area under the darkness cloud with the Labyrinth power. The darkness stays there in both versions of the space, and expands every once in a while.

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That's slightly annoying. She consolidates, and extends the Labyrinth through the cloud so her path across is free of obstacles.

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Empty field of grass is easy. Labyrinth had one of those for a long time. (Well, mostly empty. But she can make sure the fence is running parallel to where she wants to go and it'll count.)

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Then she crosses the darkness, towards that cape.

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That feels like a very questionable idea, actually.

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Not through, then. Over and around?

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Over and around.

This opens her up to a line of fire—a bullet here, an arrow there, a crackling bolt of whatever, but no one's aim is quite good enough. She's not going to be able to get to the target cape, though; a wall made entirely of axes bars her path.

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Are there gaps she can see through?

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No...there. A section bends under its own weight, leaving a temporary gap.

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Blink.

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The cape she's after is nowhere to be seen. Instead, there's a girl with a purple costume and a domino mask along with a completely unjustified grin.

"Hey you! I think I've got something you want; you up for a chat?"

(Jack's shade thinks this is a fantastic idea. Of course, he always did like to talk.)

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She approaches slowly, menacingly.

"Speak quickly."

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She talks fast, but doesn't aim for saving words.

"You're here for the powers, right? Of course you are. Way I see it, you could fight it out. Maybe you kill most of us, or maybe we manage to get you. It's amazing how many people will work together when all they have in common is that someone stupidly overpowered is coming to kill them in particular. I'm offering you a bit of information, something you can do but don't know you can do, and in exchange I want you to call this whole thing off."

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"A bold request. This information would have to be valuable indeed."

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"Do I look like I'm gambling here?" (Yes.) "It's valuable."

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"If we like what we hear, we will consider your request. You and we both know your coin is as yet untested. You will receive no guarantee on that basis alone."

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"I can tell you how to move sideways. Here to Earth Aleph and back, plus however many others there are. It does seem like a pretty decent way of getting you to not be here."

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"Explain."

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"Does that mean you'll leave if it works? I can only tell you once."

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"If it works, you will have earned our favor. We will leave this city."

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She nods. "Grue, the darkness?" The black cloud clears away. Instead of the empty field Ellie put there, there's an even emptier void. It has defined edges, but the interior is as white as its surroundings were black.

Permalink Mark Unread

What's this?

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"A portal to probably nowhere. And I suspect you can control it if you—"

That's probably the kind of thing some capes might want to shove her into, isn't it. Might be a good idea to dodge back to the other side real quick.

Permalink Mark Unread

Blink.

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It takes a couple blinks since she can't see directly across, but the first one is the one that matters. Mostly blaster powers but also a suddenly appearing wall of weapons (and one enterprising melee cape) all try and fail to force her in.

Her interlocutor shouts "Guys, that's not going to work! She doesn't think she's threatened by what we've got, and if she did she could summon an extra power instead of showing off that she killed Jack Slash. It's your skins I'm saving too.

Can you still hear me over there?" It echoes around and is audible, if not clear.

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"Your window of opportunity is closing. Say your piece, before we lose patience with the rabble."

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"I'll take that as a yes. Use Labyrinth's power to direct the portal."

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She attempts to affect the white area. Somewhere cold.

"What's the other half?"

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Looking at it with Labyrinth's power makes it look deep. Everyone knows humans are clinging to a thin film of atmosphere around the Earth's sphere—it's as if she suddenly saw what that difference in scale means. Except bigger; if it bottoms out at all it's not obvious. More worlds than she can count, worlds Labyrinth and doesn't remember and didn't create. There's no immediate way to search by temperature, but half the earths are colder than Bet and Labyrinth can look at them at the speed of thought.

"If this works, I just told you how to move between dimensions. Probably can't close it behind you, but you can leave it inside a mountain or something if you want. And I believe we had a deal?"

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"A portal with only one end under our control is only half useful. Perhaps we will only kill half of you."

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She pauses. Conferring with the heroes, probably. "Fine. The other half is you make more of them by using any power that relies heavily on interdimensional shenanigans, I'm sure you've got plenty. I have no idea if you can move this end, but you can jump around until it's impossible to follow you if that's what you want."

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"You have earned your companions' survival. But if any follow me, I will kill them." She selects a random world, and steps through.

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There's no mechanism for actual random, but reaching for an arbitrary distance should have the same effect. The image shifts to the grassy hills. Empty. When she steps through, the window shows Earth Bet behind her. The girl in purple is turning to face the other factions, but no one looks like they're moving to cross through. After some discussion—hard to say what; air is flowing through but sound gets somewhat distorted—a wall of steel starts springing up to seal the portal off.

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She leaves it open until it's completely cut off, just on the off-chance someone is foolish enough to follow anyway.

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Nope.

Well, can't rule out strangers. But probably nope.

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If there are any, they're about to be trapped, because she's switching the portal away from Earth Bet.

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It doesn't go. She can see the worlds that she or Labyrinth has already explored/created, but not the ocean of earths from before.

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She'll have to lay a trail, then.

Who's she got with exploitable interdimensionality?

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A couple candidates, but the wizard-themed cape with a handful of pocket dimensions is the obvious bet.

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She'll get him out and set up some portals, then.

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There are lots of worlds. Many don't have people. A rare few don't even have Earth. Probably a bad idea to leave a portal open to those ones. Two of them are closer to the metaphorical surface, taking less reach before she can find them. One is Bet, one is Aleph, one isn't.

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Are the portals geographically constrained? If she opens a new portal to Bet from here, will it still be in Brockton Bay?

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Yes. She's moving sideways along an axis English doesn't usually bother with a word for, but it is purely sideways.

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Then she won't make a portal home yet. Instead, a selection of three, to random destinations. At each of those, another three.

And then she goes back to the second branch, third option, and starts travelling west. So now she has a way to move between worlds. It's likely Cauldron has one as well. She wants to see the entity they have. She'll need to find where in the world they're hiding, and on which.

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The obvious guess for which is the unidentified third world. Even if true that doesn't help with where.

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Perhaps if she visits she'll find some clues. Portal.

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Its Brockton Bay equivalent is inhabited, but not densely. Grassy hills and short, wide buildings. She can see the beach from here. Nothing screams "secret Cauldron base this way."

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Does being here give her Thinkers more to work with?

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In theory yes, but none of them have globe-spanning range. There's no obvious path to finding the shadiest people on a given planet.

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Maybe she can just fly around until she finds one.

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There are people. She draws a crowd whenever she lets herself be seen flying around, but there's no shared language. So there's no way to tell if anyone is saying "let me take you to the nearest secret society." They probably aren't.

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No, that would be too convenient, wouldn't it.

She keeps looking. A longer-range teleporter would be nice, but she'll make do.

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Before she finds any clues, someone finds her. She's not wearing a costume, just an ordinary suit and a fedora, but the threat detector is off the charts.

"Hello. I assume you're looking for Cauldron?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Jack's out, with other defensive shades.

"You assume correctly. You people often do, it seems."

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Still reading as scary, but Jack's shade doesn't think she's about to attack.

"I'm Contessa. I'm here because you'd probably find us eventually, so this way I can just ask. What would you do with the resource you're looking for if you had it?"

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"That depends on what exactly it's capable of, doesn't it? At this point, it is mostly curiosity which motivates me."

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"You likely would not be able to collect powers direct from the source. I do have an alternative proposal to pass on."

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"And that is?"

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"Among our other plans, we are building an army of the physically mutated variety of parahumans. Some mutations are extreme enough that they simply die. If you would care to collect their powers, I believe it would be more parahumans and a greater variety of powers than you could collect by sequentially assaulting cities."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That may be amusing." For a time.

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Contessa notices the "for a time" part, of course.

"We don't have such subjects ready to hand, but I can bring you to our facility when we do. Say the day after tomorrow?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a date. I assume you'd prefer I not cause trouble between now and then?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd prefer you don't kill capes, yes. Other kinds of trouble are not really our purview."

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"And you'll know where to find me, I'm sure."

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"It won't be a problem."

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"I look forward to it, then."

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"Door to Cauldron." An opening appears in the middle of nowhere, a rectangular hole showing a dull white corridor. Contessa steps through, and it disappears behind her.

Permalink Mark Unread

Neat trick, that.

Back to Bet with her. Portal.

Permalink Mark Unread

Contessa, meanwhile, is talking with her boss.

"She's honest about helping, at least temporarily."

"Good. We can go back to higher-variance experimentation for a while now that the waste is less wasted. A bit late, but this changes the calculus."

"But when she leaves— you were right about what she wants."

"Can she do it?"

"You know I can't see that. But she's a natural trigger, and if she could her power would never have existed."

"Then you just have to ensure she leaves peacefully."

Which is an easy task, of course.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Two days later, Ellie is in the midst of tinkering with her drones.

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Contessa reappears. She never did specify a time, but happens to arrive while Ellie is at a convenient stopping point. "We have the subjects. Is there anything you want to bring with you?"

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She taps a button, and the completed drones flit back into place.

"Just what I have on me."

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She nods, and leads the way back through the gap in space she came from. "Ordinarily you wouldn't be cleared for this, but since you already know more than you should there's comparatively little harm."

They're someplace with the look of a temporary hospital, or emergency accommodations or something along those lines. It's crowded, mostly with people who look injured but stabilized. In a few cases they are instead sick. Sometimes nothing is visibly wrong, but no one looks happy. Or threatened. They're very diverse, in every way from skin color to accent, and the background noise is in several unfamiliar languages.

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"Where did you find them?"

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"Very far afield." She glances around the room. "War zone, hurricane, earthquake, fire. They all volunteered, at least in the sense that they would have died otherwise and correctly guessed that this gave them better odds."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Your concern for experimental ethics in the face of apocalypse is heartening."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Availability of subjects has so far never been our bottleneck."

Speaking of bottles, a supply of vials gets carted in from the next room over. Contessa starts speaking in tongues while white-coated Cauldron employees distribute them.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ah, this must be what she's here for.

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"It will be disorienting to be around. It also may be dangerous; I would recommend using some defensive powers."

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"I am aware."

She fills out her array of five with more defenders, including a barrier generator.

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Contessa leaves. The unpowered people in white coats stay to observe, but through some thick glass. At very close to the same time, the rescuees and test subjects drink their concoctions. It takes some time before any take effect.

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She erects her forcefields.

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One of the victims cries out, and then—

she finds herself on the ground in her ring of force fields. There are lights and crashes around the outside, and the occasional scream, and then just when she's almost collected herself she loses track again.

Eventually she's alert again. Few of the test subjects are still recognizably human. One person looks like more tree than man. He reaches into the foliage where his rib cage used to be and some organ or other is visibly bird-shaped. He gasps for breath, but, no lungs. Probably not long for the world. Another has been flipped around several axes simultaneously. Right and left arms switched places, head on backwards, and also her entire body is inside out. Even deader, and that one didn't even have a separate power. A third has her legs replaced with a tail, like a dolphin's but covered in small barbs, and her face permanently locked into a snarl of rage. Or maybe she's just angry for some reason. Other people are already dead; if they had usable powers at all Ellie missed them while she was down.

Someone expires, and this time she's able to catch it.

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Most of these are probably going to be extremely unusable. But she's expending very little effort to obtain them and the potential variance is high. She catches the ones that die.

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The most common result is to transform her into various kinds of mess that would be quickly fatal and probably painful if she ever tried doing it while not metal. Sometimes there are usable active powers. The tree man gained strength and endurance and so on based on how scared of him people were. Maybe he could have survived if surrounded by people who weren't busy being scared of other current events.

The most useful is probably this one. A short-range attack splitting people or objects into two incomplete duplicates, with her getting the choice of which half gets what attributes. The original holder never did get control of it, but did some property damage where the wall doesn't have both its structural integrity and its breadth and a few duplicates with partial power sets. Probably split up personality traits too, though they're a bit too dead to notice. And eventually that power's unlucky wielder got caught in their own crossfire.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's creative. The Nine probably would have enjoyed it.

Has anyone survived their dose for this long?

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The woman with the fish tail is stable. In the sense that she's not actively dying, not that she can stand upright. Not many others look like they're going to survive. One man even stayed human, if you look past the bit where he's glowing.

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She'll walk over and collect those two.

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The observers come back in, wary of the remaining mutants. "We're using the surviving ones."

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"So am I," she says, not stopping.

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"Would you rather take these two or be invited back for another round?"

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"How sure are you that I'll need an invitation, now that I've been here?" This is surely going to attract attention if it hasn't already. She swaps in Jack.

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"If you want us lining up parahumans for you as fast as we can develop the samples? Fairly sure."

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"I'm not convinced this is going to continue to be worthwhile use of my time. Not for these dregs."

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"Next time we ask you if you want additional parahumans with no opposition you can feel free to say no."

Permalink Mark Unread

She'll just go ahead and take the mermaid and the glowing man, then.

Permalink Mark Unread

They're about to try to run—effectively, in the second case—but there's also a potential threat soon to materialize in front of her.

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She should probably move, then. Blink to the glower, two birds with one stone.

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A door appears and Contessa steps through. After Ellie collects her target. (It's a mover power, twisting space to bring any two points together. Relatively short range but very high usage limits. Not the most useful given that she already has teleportation several times over.)

"Just those two it is, then. I won't say we're opposed to having you as a backstop, but apparently that's not the way to strengthen the army." She is still about to take the other parahuman with her when she leaves.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Apparently not."

Portal to Bet from here?

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She'd have to use Labyrinth's power and then batter down the door with Myrddin's before she can rearrange it. Cauldron might disapprove of that.

Contessa crosses the room toward her rescuee, and two portals appear. "The second one is for you if you want it. It's back to where I met you today."

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"I'm not quite done here, yet."

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"I believe dregs was the word you used? She's more valuable to us than to you."

There's no visible sign of a change of plans, unless "suspiciousness not otherwise specified" counts, but Contessa's about to leave in self-defense.

Permalink Mark Unread

She doesn't want Contessa as much as she wants the entity, and causing Contessa to leave will make looking for it easier. So she's going to swap herself for the mermaid and grab Contessa in five seconds. One. Two-

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The room explodes. From every direction at once: the walls, floor, and even ceiling.

She's using Jack's and Trickster's shade and isn't currently standing in a barrier, but that still leaves two defensive powers she hasn't swapped out. A little self-destruct isn't likely to kill her very fatally.

The mermaid's shade floats toward her. Contessa's doesn't.

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Unexpected. Snag the shade. But her goal is served. She pushes the debris out of the way, and evaluates the remnants of the situation.

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There is very little remaining situation. Contessa is gone and everyone else dead, and now that everything is demolished she can see she was in a temporary mockup of a Cauldron facility rather than their real base. If the explosives didn't already give it away.

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That's a pity. Probably no detectable residue of the gate Contessa used, hints as to where the real thing is?

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Not after it's closed. She can at least find out whether it's on the same earth by making a portal and checking whether all the familiar earths are accounted for, but there's no hint of Contessa's door.

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Are there any familiar Earths unaccounted?

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Doesn't look like it. Earth Bet is the easiest to reach from here, which means this is either Cauldron's earth or Aleph, and Aleph is relatively recognizable. So she's probably on the right planet.

Permalink Mark Unread

An entire Earth is still a lot of room to hide. Not likely to be near the sacrificial decoy base, though. Time to go flying.

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This world is sparsely populated. Her best flyers can get her high enough to see that there are a few agrarian villages dotted around the countryside, but nothing that looks like a Cauldron.

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Any Thinker-ish cues?

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She has a lot of Hunch duplicates. Eventually she can start narrowing the location down without an intolerably high number of false trails. Turns out it's near Africa's western coast. Hard to say which country since this Earth doesn't come with color-coded national borders.

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Bet doesn't color-code either. But she can get to Africa and take a look.

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Africa in Bet doesn't have many surviving nations anyway. This world has a low enough population that they might have just never bothered with the concept. For her purposes, of course, all that matters is Cauldron or Not Cauldron.

There's a very modern-looking building right where her thinkers told her it should be. It's enormous.

Permalink Mark Unread

Looks like Cauldron to her. And big enough to be hiding something. Probably doesn't have any doors, given their gateway ability. But then, she doesn't strictly need doors either.

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There are doors. Not that they see a lot of use, but they exist.

Her guesses have proven accurate so far. Now they're saying that she needs to go down.

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Down it is.

This is fairly thoroughly hostile territory. She should be prepared for attack. That means Crawler, and she doesn't care if interior walls don't survive her passage.

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Or floors, apparently.

Eventually she'll find her way to a long narrow shaft. Probably there are elevators or something, but for her purposes all that matters is that it's a way down. 

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She squeezes in and drops.

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There's no sign of, as it happens, anyone. They must have guessed her path and cleared it.

Following the obvious route once she's down, it's pretty unmistakeable that she's here. It's a vast cavern; presumably there are at least three sides but she can only see the one. All of it is filled with body parts. Limbs, faces, miscellaneous flesh. All of it could be human if not for the dull silver color. By all rights it ought to look disturbing, but there's a sort of unearthly beauty to it. It's not obvious how deep the roots of this garden go, except that it's deep enough for Cauldron to construct walkways over and across instead of clearing a way through.

Her vision has more dimensions than most people's. She can see shades, sort of. Ghostly figures superimposed on the gray flesh, playing multidimensional charades. Trying to collect one fails just as trying to collect Noelle's power did.

Permalink Mark Unread

Incredible. What it must be, to have such power at your beck and call. To subsume entire timelines and bend them to your will.

This. This is what she wants to be when she grows up. And fortunately for her, there's a job opening.

Permalink Mark Unread

It's too dead to offer to hire her.

A voice pipes out of an apparently-existent speaker. "We both know it's useless to you. The best you can do is let us exploit it and avoid killing enough parahumans that we write you off as a loss."

Permalink Mark Unread

This one is dead. Scion is not.

"I just wanted to see it. Now I have."

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"We'll refrain from the death threats, then." One of their portals opens in front of her, leading back to Bet.

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No reason not to take it. Easier than getting up to ground level on her own.

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And this way they don't have a hole through their dimension. It's a win-win.

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So now that she's back, she needs to find Scion. Easier said than done, it's not as though he keeps a schedule.

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And he's famously hard to track. She could get kittens stuck in trees until he saves the day?

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That's probably the least troublesome approach to implement. She can go imitate a natural disaster somewhere outside of Protectorate jurisdiction. Where did Cauldron drop her?

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Roughly the analogous position to where she came from.

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To South America, then.

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No one stops her, or tries to.

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And once there she can proceed to inflict upon the local citizenry at least a moderate amount of woe and misery. Forest fires, mudslides, floods.

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Scion doesn't show up very quickly. There is still only one of him.

The local capes are mostly helping evacuate, since Ellie isn't making it obvious there's a cape behind this. Just your ordinary everyday apocalypse. So no one tries to kill her, unfortunately.

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A shame, but she has a larger goal. And that's a complication that will not necessarily serve it.

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It's not as if she gets tired.

Eventually Scion does arrive, raising his hand and stilling a flood to a soundtrack of very loud cheers.

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She has Jack's shade out in case anyone tries to make trouble.

She flies over to the golden man. "There you are. I've been waiting."

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He turns and looks at her. He looks sad, just like normal, with no change based on what's happening around him. She has his attention but he doesn't break his decades-long silence.

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"I know what you are. I know your partner died and your plan for this world was derailed. And I think I know how I can help you fix it."

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He still doesn't say anything. But his eyes go almost imperceptibly wider.

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"I've seen the body. It still exists. I can collect the pieces that have been stolen, and then with your help, I can assume control of the rest of it. I can take its place."

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Scion continues staring. Thinking.

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"You need my help. You've been trapped in a rut for thirty years, stopping floods, saving kittens, driving off Endbringers. That's not your purpose. You and I together, we could be so much more than that."

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The cycle is doomed. He already knew that, and flying around helping people has done nothing at all to stave off the fact that he knew that. If he's not getting his partner back—

He reaches out a hand and removes a limit. The host probably didn't feel any different.

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"Did you do something?"

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Scion nods.

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"Does that mean you assent to the plan?"

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He nods sadly again.

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"Good. Will you help me find the pieces?"

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His expression changes, finally. Disgust.

But he starts flying northward.

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Whatever.

She flies after him.

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He flies fast. So does she, of course. In almost no time they're up to the U.S. border, and shortly after that—

Scion stops in front of Eidolon. Eidolon manages to look confused through the green hood. And then Scion blasts him.

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Heh. Overwhelming power is a nice thing to have on one's side. She scoops up the shade.

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There are very few specific essential shards. After a single-digit number of extremely powerful capes—maybe he remembers them from those events with all the strongest heroes in one place?—he opens a hole in space to Cauldron's lair. He makes his way across the field, to where there's a partially-constructed silver avatar that matches his gold one. He cups its cheek in his hand.

The disgust is gone from his face, but now he's visibly grieving. Grieving and angry. Considering how human he isn't, it's almost an accomplishment.

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Apparently even aliens form attachments. Potentially exploitable.

She follows across the field of bodies, stopping short of where he stands next to his former counterpart. "You miss her."

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He doesn't dignify that with a response.

Or maybe he just doesn't respond. Some variety of that.

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So she has the shades and is back at the body. Is her next step obvious?

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Well, now that she's looking closely the shades hovering around the masses of flesh look a lot more tangible than they did last time she was here.

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Claimable?

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Yup.

And this place is huge.

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Best she get to work, then.

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The shades she's collecting aren't powers, in the sense she's used to. Each one is more like an entire class of powers sharing a common theme. If it could allow a parahuman to control glass or control sand or who knows what else, she can do both and knows what else. And then there are more as fast as she can pick them up.

When she does, they don't float free and come under her control like she's used to. Not that they're out of her control, but they stay in place. The associated body parts come under her awareness just like any other body part she's not paying attention to. It's awfully disorienting until the first time she runs across a shard designed to help manage it.

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She's not going to be human by the end of this. But that is sort of the point of the exercise.

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The bigger she gets, the more she can reach and the faster it goes. Eventually she fills the cavern. The half-complete silver body is easily comprehensible; she can tell exactly which shards her predecessor was using when interrupted and how it was meant to work. Though it's a laughably small puppet and might not even be worth dramatically opening its eyes.

Her perception is much wider than before, too—she can see in all four dimensions even when not spending energy on precognition. Scion has an equally huge body, attached to his flying golden Jesus construct by tendrils reaching from dimensions no human or parahuman could see.

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She crafts an avatar of her own, raising it next to Scion. The same silver color as the other, but in the image of her human form.

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He speaks, or something like it. Each "word" has more information than humans could have thought possible, but she's got the corresponding equipment to hear and talk back.

 

He talks about the cycle, how he were his counterpart got interrupted while seeding the world before they could watch it descend into conflict and collect the information on how the hosts use their abilities. Mostly he's asking how do they resume it—his counterpart was always the planner.

Plenty of background information comes through, of course. How they want to discover a way to live past the currently scheduled end of the universe, without the last of their descendants cannibalizing each other when all the stars have run down. Or, worse, when they've multiplied enough to fill all accessible worlds and end the universe that way. He doesn't really know how to avoid that kind of result, but he's very sure that observing hosts and collecting data on what their shards can do is the way to find out. It's what they do.

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A long view of problems. But it's good to start on this one while there is still time. Apply as many perspectives as possible.

If they want to save this iteration, the first step is to destroy or coopt Cauldron. They are the planners of what resistance to the cycle there is. The main organization is secretive, not even all their members knew all the things they were involved in or even agreed with it. It should be straightforward to decapitate the leadership and turn people against the upstarts that remain.

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That's more like it. This entity thinks of itself as a warrior, and this task is much closer to warrioring. Not that the hosts will put up much of a fight, of course.

 

This is not back to normal and happily ever after. The counterpart is still dead. But at least there is a purpose again. The entity does as suggested, then destroys Cauldron's armies for good measure. The malformed, broken shards always were disgusting.

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And judicious dissemination of records should do well for sowing chaos. A shadowy cabal that unleashed several of the most feared members of the Slaughterhouse Nine and was also behind the formation of the Protectorate. And yet more of their creations still walk free.

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The revelation about the Slaughterhouse Nine is actually less of a bombshell than the fact that the same cabal was behind mutating and memory-wiping the case fifty-threes. Oh, and the leadership of the Protectorate and PRT were both in on and are also secretly the same person. Fun.

And Eidolon's dead, and the Endbringers are still out there, and basically this is a really bad day for the Protectorate.

The Protectorate still exists, but its legitimacy doesn't. It's holding together mostly by force and threat of force. Now that the center cannot hold, things fall apart. Which is just fine, for conflict-causing purposes.

 

The original plan was for both entities to be seen as earth's last hope, but the Keres can't credibly claim to be heroic. The world becomes more and more dependent on Scion.

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There is a push and there is a pull. When an area is in danger of collapsing too quickly, Scion can shore it up. When a place or a group becomes too successful, she can pay a visit and destabilize things. There is some use to this planet yet.

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It lasts decades. With the collapse of the major groups, most notably the Protectorate, there's a wave of prejudice against parahumans. The strongest capes dominate small areas by force, and ordinary governments fracture. The northeast of the Untied States is mostly stable, under the protection of Armsmaster and his enslaved artificial intelligence with its own shard, but she can direct a disaster that way. Most places are struggling just from the fact that nobody can count on importation anymore because of banditry.

Eventually civilization is undeniably sunk. Endbringer attacks get reinterpreted to mean writing off the city, no matter how much Ellie directs them to hold back. Her predecessor's plan was to increase the number of shards distributed until most humans are hosts, then let it descend into a war of all against all and move on to the next earth. No reason to change what works.

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Sounds good to her.

Cry havoc, and let slip the shards of war.

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And death and famine, but comparatively little pestilence.

The shards come back loaded with data. How was this power used, how did it interact with that other one, what technology do the hosts have that's worth copying.

The next earth reacts just like Bet did when Scion first appeared. They can go through several iterations before running low on power reserves and needing to leave.

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More smoothly these times, without unfortunate outside interference.

She won't exactly be sorry to be moving on from these lonely blue marbles.

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It takes about three hundred years before they expend the amount of energy budgeted for this planet. And then they'll have to refill somehow. Fortunately, they don't need the marbles for anything now and they can be safely lost.

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Rendering them down for the energy stored within is... satisfying.

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And then they leave. Propelled by the force of the explosion, with the shockwaves reaching and destroying more versions of the planet than they ever looked at. 

When they collect all their shards in the process, it's Ellie's first time at her full size. They dwarf the planet, even when spread across several realities. Duplicate entities created from promising combinations of information collected from previous cycles fly out in all directions. These two fly on, leaving this empty orbit and its star behind.

Cycle, the Warrior says. Success.

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Agreement. She casts a thin net into the currents of spacetime, finds a new planet, a new civilization. Destination?

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Agreement.

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Focus. Plot paths, histories, initial shard distributions.

Trajectory.

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Agreement.