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Yesterday, this was an ordinary twenty-first century city. Today it's a war zone, tomorrow it'll be walled off and abandoned.
A few collapsed buildings, shattered streets, and assorted craters. The place is mostly empty, with scattered groups of mostly humanoid monsters roaming and trying to escape the guarded fence around the city. The most instantly noticeable change is an ongoing wordless singing in the back of the mind of anyone present. By itself it's just a sound. An unpleasant sound, and almost but not quite predictable as if someone were trying to attack the listener's sanity without saying anything, but possible to ignore. But along with it, any time a listener closes their eyes they get flashes of memories. Not their worst memories, but whatever negative ones can stick with them unforgettably. It builds up associations between the feelings in those images and almost anything else. Sometimes there's a recognizable common thread and other times there isn't.
An angel fights off teams of opponents. She's fifteen feet tall, extremely winged, with more wings than is strictly necessary for an angel. Even some of her wings have wings. All of them are asymmetric and varyingly sized. A spherical halo of weaponry surrounds her, firing at her more distant enemies from across the battlefield. Her opponents cycle in and out: a golden man, a man surrounded by a bubble, a woman in a dark costume, all flying. Others make certain to stay away after taking their turn, on rare occasions spending too long hearing the angel's music. Those ones voluntarily self-destruct.
A small group of ordinary humans takes refuge in a house as far from the battle as they can reach. The song is quieter here, and, they hope, less potent. Some of them run away from and back to the house, occasionally calling for help. They haven't found any.
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whole_new_can
wormcan
It's not entirely unfamiliar. They share some similarities to the monsters she's seen before. Madison, 2009.
Some of the newly restored point a finger and hiss "her" at the Doctor. Others try to charge her, and are thrown back into their cells as soon as they cross the white line by what feels like a rush of wind.
Some of the newly restored point a finger and hiss "her" at the Doctor. Others try to charge her, and are thrown back into their cells as soon as they cross the white line by what feels like a rush of wind.
ertia
Kithabel fixes them all. She has to do them in an irregular order because there are a lot of them but she fixes them all.
And when she has fixed them all, when they are all okay again:
she floats up to the Doctor.
"Do you have a story about how you didn't do that to them, they just think you did, too?"
And when she has fixed them all, when they are all okay again:
she floats up to the Doctor.
"Do you have a story about how you didn't do that to them, they just think you did, too?"
wormcan
"We did." Can't very well get away with "this must be someone else's hell dimension because ours has a different paint job."
"Not all the tests were successful. I hope the fact that I'm willing to go this far demonstrates how important the other side of the balance is."
"Not all the tests were successful. I hope the fact that I'm willing to go this far demonstrates how important the other side of the balance is."
ertia
"...No! It demonstrates that you are a terrible person!" exclaims Kithabel. "It demonstrates that while he's spent the last few decades making mistakes like 'wasted time on a kitten' you have been making mistakes like 'experimented on people and didn't even release them somewhere I'd find them once I came along or mercy kill them'! So that you can grind up his dead wife's corpse and give out powers! While simultaneously accusing him of the horrible crime of giving people powers! What a fucking hypocrite!"
wormcan
The Doctor does not say no. "I don't claim to be a good person. I claim to be a desperate one. I kept them like this because they might be useful when he turns destructive and we need to fight him."
But Scion is already teleporting himself and Kithabel back to his counterpart. The Doctor can stay here with her recently cured prisoners.
But Scion is already teleporting himself and Kithabel back to his counterpart. The Doctor can stay here with her recently cured prisoners.
ertia
"I've only ever resurrected humans before," Kithabel warns him, "this might be harder."
But she looks at the vast swath of silvery death -
- and wants it alive again.
But she looks at the vast swath of silvery death -
- and wants it alive again.
wormcan
Some of the parts of it where Cauldron's equipment has drilled into it start visibly knitting back together. The partly finished humanoid avatar grows into a complete form, silver to match Scion's gold.
(In the unimportant background, several of Earth's mightiest heroes try desperately to kill Kithabel before she succeeds. Scion fends them off easily. A woman in a fedora shouts something that would probably be very convincing if it were worth listening to.)
And then the second entity's eyes snap open.
(In the unimportant background, several of Earth's mightiest heroes try desperately to kill Kithabel before she succeeds. Scion fends them off easily. A woman in a fedora shouts something that would probably be very convincing if it were worth listening to.)
And then the second entity's eyes snap open.
wormcan
It looks around, looks around at how lucky it is to be alive right now.
This entity's second priority, and the Warrior's first, is achievable now. The cycle can continue.
The Warrior sends this entity a description of who and how, and it instantly grasps the implications. This creature in front of it can create energy from nothing. And has, or at least believes herself to have, no ultimate upper limit. If its kind could harness that power, survival past the endpoint would be a certainty.
Controlling her directly is impossible. The entity can see her mind and knows that she believes her sorcery would simply fail. Convincing her would be difficult, given the typical procedures.
Manipulation can work. Not unlike Maiden of the Blasphemies, changing context so things the target would never do can seem like obvious decisions. And add mind alteration, of course. It's normal procedure, in cycles where the entities masquerade as heroes and someone gets too suspicious. The sorceress need never have reason to think to do anything other than the obvious power use. Obvious, being whatever the entity suggests, could of course be anything from refilling the reserves of particular shards to creating an extra superweapon to, eventually, increasing the size of the universe and reversing entropy itself.
It hides the sorceress in the dimension where it intends to move the rest of its body. Blocked off from where any of the powers given by shards can reach, and never interacting with anything that the entity doesn't show her specifically for that purpose. Gaining momentum in safety. It selects and crafts a shard. The sorceress will be able to think faster, split her attention more, and everything else that will speed up her increase in power. As a failsafe, if the host should happen to die, the entity will at least have a recording of exactly how her sorcery worked. It may be imitable.
And then Kithabel can get back to work.
This entity joins the Warrior as a tireless hero. It was the role planned for this cycle before the failure. The world is different from what was planned, but it and the Warrior can fix that. Those who know too much, many of them conveniently assembled in this room, can forget everything they need to. Some of the powers, ones taken from shards this entity never meant to give out, lack restrictions. They might theoretically be able to harm the entities. It fixes that, the way it did for the host that now uses its future-sight shard. The decrease in their power will only make this planet's population more dependent on it and the Warrior for aid.
The entity will allow the hosts to assume she changed her color scheme to claim her place as a second Scion as she flies around acting as a hero non-stop. She answers to the name of Kithabel.
This entity's second priority, and the Warrior's first, is achievable now. The cycle can continue.
The Warrior sends this entity a description of who and how, and it instantly grasps the implications. This creature in front of it can create energy from nothing. And has, or at least believes herself to have, no ultimate upper limit. If its kind could harness that power, survival past the endpoint would be a certainty.
Controlling her directly is impossible. The entity can see her mind and knows that she believes her sorcery would simply fail. Convincing her would be difficult, given the typical procedures.
Manipulation can work. Not unlike Maiden of the Blasphemies, changing context so things the target would never do can seem like obvious decisions. And add mind alteration, of course. It's normal procedure, in cycles where the entities masquerade as heroes and someone gets too suspicious. The sorceress need never have reason to think to do anything other than the obvious power use. Obvious, being whatever the entity suggests, could of course be anything from refilling the reserves of particular shards to creating an extra superweapon to, eventually, increasing the size of the universe and reversing entropy itself.
It hides the sorceress in the dimension where it intends to move the rest of its body. Blocked off from where any of the powers given by shards can reach, and never interacting with anything that the entity doesn't show her specifically for that purpose. Gaining momentum in safety. It selects and crafts a shard. The sorceress will be able to think faster, split her attention more, and everything else that will speed up her increase in power. As a failsafe, if the host should happen to die, the entity will at least have a recording of exactly how her sorcery worked. It may be imitable.
And then Kithabel can get back to work.
This entity joins the Warrior as a tireless hero. It was the role planned for this cycle before the failure. The world is different from what was planned, but it and the Warrior can fix that. Those who know too much, many of them conveniently assembled in this room, can forget everything they need to. Some of the powers, ones taken from shards this entity never meant to give out, lack restrictions. They might theoretically be able to harm the entities. It fixes that, the way it did for the host that now uses its future-sight shard. The decrease in their power will only make this planet's population more dependent on it and the Warrior for aid.
The entity will allow the hosts to assume she changed her color scheme to claim her place as a second Scion as she flies around acting as a hero non-stop. She answers to the name of Kithabel.
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