"I've gotta go Tess, I'll talk to you soon, sorry it's an emergency."
Scion had snuck up on me, the glowing golden bastard. Let's see if I can't bluff my way out of this.
[ANIMA]
The strands of probability here were practically blinding with how many there were. He, like I, simply had too many options at our disposal to make an easy through line from A to B in time. The two of us interacting? It practically made my precognition useless. I tried brute forcing it anyway, no matter how much energy I was 'wasting' I always had more to spare.
[PURPOSE]
He wanted to know what I was doing here and why I hadn't tried to contact him. He was also confused about a few other things, like why I looked like a particular human instead of a generic ideal. Just a sort of question on strategy over his own. I wasn't quite sure what would be a good response, he was already fairly suspicious of me given it was seen as normal to send transmissions when you first found another. Trying to learn his expectations and what could loosely be called culture based on his immediate questions and feelings was not fun.
He suspected I was preying off of his hard work, which I was, and I'd eaten the Thinker which he also sort of smelled on me. It wasn't really smell, but I was giving off some readings he was familiar with and not in a good way. He could also feel that my Shards were a weird conglomeration of sizes, shapes, and strategies. He still had enough of his senses that I didn't even know existed until I found out he was using them that I couldn't really hide what I was.
[DIVERGENT]
I was telling him I simply wasn't aware of that convention, I'd followed a different path. Which it turned out only upped his suspicion that I was some sort of parasite. I hadn't explained the divergence enough. My transmissions, while understandable easily to him, were short enough compared to the essays he was sending that he found them evasive. I had maybe one last try.
[SUSPICION]
He just outright said that I was behaving oddly. He certainly was not the Thinker of his duo. That was another thing he didn't like, he couldn't sense any partner. He could also sense that I was held in some weird sort of pocket dimension, which I didn't even know was weird. It did reduce my metaphorical footprint though which had helped me hide from him for so long. Another mark against me. I frantically searched through possible responses but they were quickly converging on the same outcome.
No matter what I could think of to say it resulted in him blasting me, right above a fucking quarantine site. It only had an excessive amount of surveillance to make sure nobody got in or out. They'd already noticed Scion and I overhead. Fuck. I teleported to a barren world while sending back only one short message.
[RESIGNATION]
He disappeared from the quarantine site to chase me. At the very least it would be ambiguous what had happened to Scion instead of me blatantly getting into a fight with him where only one of us came back. I set the temperature of his arrival all the way back to the start of the universe, an incinerating heat emanated which he quickly began adapting to. I dodged a few golden beams that were sent my way. I generated steel in their way to take the hits. These first ones were more probing strikes.
His attacks were eerily silent. But what wasn't silent? His core and surrounding Shards. I couldn't pinpoint them yet, but if I could keep this going long enough I could hack into all the Shards surrounding his core. I doubted his true core had any command codes to steal from him, but if I cut him off from the rest of himself I was practically lobotimizing him. A win is a win. Now I just need to keep his attention for long enough.
A burst of gold shorted out my heat briefly and I let it fade, he was gaining resistance to it anyway. He seemed to go for a different strategy in terms of defense than I did. Instead of trying to create invulnerability he just accepted the loss of his avatar and would replenish it as needed. It wasn't like my hits could get more than a tiny shred of the oceans of flesh he could use here. In a way it was just as demoralizing as actual invulnerability with how you couldn't even see your hits doing anything. Unless you could see as fast as I could.
Or if you were delaying. I fired off several kinetic beams with a few entropic lasers thrown in for flavour as we both weaved around each other's blasts in a deadly dance. He simply used bursts of light to cancel out my attacks. I preferred to look like I was needing to block his hits. I sort of might, his hits could likely hurt my human body. He let loose a cutting beam of golden light that I dodged, but the mountain behind me didn't, gaining a cut diagonally across its peak. I could hear the stone grind as it began to fall to the ground in a massive landslide. I decided to rush him with a fist.
He let me hit him, not expecting me to also inject him with my viruses. A short jump back in time let me avoid his retaliatory sphere of golden destruction. Good to know I could definitely keep my mind through that without disruption. He sent a barrage that blocked out the sun with his own light. I phased through the rocks into the upper mantle but I could feel the beams passing specifically through the space I had been before to prevent the same trick as last time. I teleported behind him and tried to Sting him, but this time he dodged. I chose to stay in close range and sent out my own Stilling pulses to counter his own while my punches easily tore apart the sound barrier. He weaved away from every one while trying to catch me with golden light mixed with his own punches that I equally dodged.
I could feel he was disquieted by my behaviour. I tried to trap him in a field of frozen time. It held for a brief second but that was enough for me to hit him with another punch that Stung him. Now he was on the run as he tried to rebuild his barriers between this world and his true body. I followed close enough to menace him, teleporting in often enough to try and sideswipe him. He was dodging every hit right now, even weaker beams that I flooded the sky with. He was vulnerable right now, but he didn't know I wanted to have a more complete victory. I didn't just want to kill him, I wanted his core Shards for myself.
Behind the scenes I was launching my real attack I let go of several virus Shards and latched them onto his body. Some of them I embedded deep in his flesh, others I left on the surface. He was doing the Entity equivalent of trying to swat bugs all over his body. Several Shards were lost, but I could rebuild them later, I had their data after all. I could also sense some of his surface Shards, which I copied even though this battle almost certainly wouldn't go on long enough for me to replicate them. My factory Shards were on standby to block hits and assist in repairs alongside my repair clusters.
I kept up the pressure, I generated hardlight constructs that burrowed into his real flesh. I just needed to stay close by and I could assault the real Warrior without end. He fired off a beam that I tried to block, but it was Sting infused. I frantically bent space to help me dodge, it was barely enough. Another gouge in the planet below us. He fired up his precognitive Shards to full power, this was no easy fight. He teleported to another universe. I followed and dread filled my heart. He was floating above Brockton Bay.
Doing exactly what he predicted I interposed myself between the beam that was descending on the city. It tore through my flesh and blood human body and into my true self. It was an agony indescribable by mere mortals. How could you use words to describe the feeling of being on fire but not in a thousand dimensions? I coated my body in Stilling to freeze his own destructive power. My Shards went into high gear trying to repair both myself and the barrier between worlds. Now I had to protect the city from him while trying to kill him, all while in agony. I made sure to resurrect my own brain. I wasn't sure if it helped, but it didn't make anything worse.
[THE WARRIOR] radiated smugness as he began bombarding the city seemingly almost at random. In reality he was targeting everyone I knew and loved. Using [THE BELLICOSE] repair Shards [THE IMPOSTER] was back in top shape within seconds. Shit I'm falling into Shardspeak within my own head again. I'm pulling too deep too soon, but I have to. I loosed [VICTORY] at full power upon him to force him to do the same. I frantically opened portals to redirect his attacks, adding my own distinctive purple coated un-light, my version of [STILLING] into the sky above my home. Our war in the sky was terribly silent. Any sound from damaged parts lost to the fact it was in another universe completely, our attacks themselves silent.
My skin fell back again and I left it. Only my face visibly changed to the metallic purple that was my signature colour. I saw where he was attacking me from and did a risky maneuver that would rely on my precognition being better than his. Plus I was using [FATEWEAVER] to pull on reality. I froze several of his attacks in time while teleporting into his nesting dimension with my [AVATAR]. He fired dozens of attacks up at the portal that made up my body but I wove neatly between them like there was nothing even there. It stopped his barrage on the city as I began carving into the ocean itself. I set another continent's worth of him on fire. A third I let loose a radioactive bombardment onto. The main one? I just dove right into the heart of his offensive Shards.
Do you know how precise you have to be to dodge a thousand attacks that fill the entirety of the space you're occupying? It can't be done. Not unless the attacks happen to phase through you not via a power but through simple quantum mechanics. I pulled hard on fate to let the impossible become the inevitable, and miraculously it worked. I survived and pulled myself back out, his own attacks doing what I needed them to. He damaged his own [STING] by accident. He predicted I couldn't dodge and thus there was no danger, but he relied on simulation based precognition. There was no way to account for the impossible occurring. Not within his frame of reference. He'd assume I could let any attack pass by harmlessly. It would make him refocus on the city, but now his attacks would be ones I could block.
My viruses kept coming. I had quite a few of them, and the Shards didn't all need to be actually attached to him to try and take him over. The ones going after his perception cluster were getting close to actually blinding him. Not the full control I'd had of the Simurgh but just blocking his sight. That gave me an idea.
I shut down the psychic field across his body. Or I tried to anyway, he was resisting my influence with his own reality warping capabilities. I had to let up the assault to defend the city. In my absence the city had come to the horrifying realization that Scion was trying to kill them all. A blizzard of tiny forcefields flew into the way of his various golden attacks, popping but successfully stopping the beams for a few extra moments.
When I was fully back in reality I felt my dimensional barrier come back up. [THE WARRIOR] kept trying to kill the humans below but I jumped in front of every strike. I could feel his desperation grow. He charged up to try and simply blow up a large enough area people would die anyway. His own barrier came back online and I could no longer command my Viruses directly, which might let them get overwhelmed. I could feel the Titans assemble beneath me. I hadn't sent out the call, but Dragon had realized what was going on, she'd checked where I was and saw why I had to drop a call with her. SHE saw Scion approach me and correctly assumed he was the problem. All slightly behind, but it was still quick enough for her to contact them.
For all I'd assumed they couldn't help me in this final battle they came and tried anyway. They were heroes after all. The original Protectorate were there too, barriers and blasts flying to meet him. I somehow hadn't broken their hope. I felt tears try to encroach on my eyes and I let them fall. It wasn't like I was using my eyes to see anyway.
Below Vista was increasing the distance between the city and [THE WARRIOR] to give the heroes defending the city more time. Shade, Brian was coating areas of the city to try and obscure the targets below, potentially giving people time to evacuate. I wasn't sure how well that would work, but my boy was trying. Insight, Lisa was helping to direct the heroes and citizens. Regent, he'd been so unknown he got to keep his name, Alec, was standing by her, fully intending to try and push her or Vista out of the way of a beam if he could. Preferably with his power, but he was willing to die if it meant saving either of them. Rachel was helping Brian evacuate the humans below. Aisha wasn't happy about this, but she helped people be comfortable riding the giant dogs. I was so proud of them doing their best. All the more reason I couldn't let any of them die. The tears only kept flowing, tears of joy at seeing how my found family hadn't abandoned me.
I realized that if I didn't have to worry about alerting him anymore I was free to use as much time travel as I wanted. I flew forward as temporal clones fractured off of me as I moved perpendicular to the flow of time, winding up in multiple spaces at the same time. The fragmentation was too much. I could feel the infinitely fractal pieces of my mind begin to shatter.
[THE IMPOSTOR] cut off the stream of clones. Her human allies had the defense of the settlement well in hand, she would keep up the assault. [THE WARRIOR] was appalled at her flagrant use of energy, wasting so much in his eyes. It was enough alongside the twenty clones to land a single blow on him, reopening his body to the world. The access allowed [THE IMPOSTOR] to regain control of her [VIRUSES], several instances jumping into his heart and unleashing their own copies on him. He was beset by twenty one Entities of might at least equal to his own. He had no time to attack the settlement, his own core was at risk of being destroyed.
He frantically burnt off decades of power in a single burst to try and burn out the infection as well as the invaders. Some Shards were lost again, but so were some of his own. A few of the clone's connections broke, sending them back to the original. He was losing mass and energy at an unsustainable rate. He couldn't understand how she had the power to spare that she could do something like this. He felt the need to hold on only a little longer, there was no way she could sustain this for long.
I felt my mind come back a little as the connection was severed and they were pulled back rather than properly being separated from me. But Scion was wrong. I could keep this up all day, every day even. Maybe. I might not still be me at the end of it all. But as long as my body remained I could reset my mind, it wasn't something I wanted to do for more than a second or two back, but this would let me save them all.
He shattered the remaining clones and cried out in pain. I fractured again into twenty one. His disbelief was enough for us to crush his resistance.
[HOW]
He wanted to know in his final moments how I could manage such a feat. I would indulge him, it was no loss for him to know.
[ETERNITY]
I let him understand I had [THE ANSWER], that I was infinite and eternal compared to him.
[WHY]
I froze. He would have surrendered and let me absorb him had I promised to let his body continue to live. We were colony organisms after all. He considered his mind an acceptable loss for eternity. I hadn't even considered giving him it or telling him, thinking he would have attacked me for it. I hadn't even bothered to look down that path. I did have ways I could have ended this without a fight. I decided to let him know even more of the truth.
[IMPOSTER]
I explained to him, I wasn't quite an Entity nor a human. I was both, I was neither. I pretended to be each, but in reality I was something new. It was hard to admit that I had indeed lost my humanity by becoming this, but it wasn't all gone. I wasn't an Entity, I never would be. Not really. Just like I would never again really be a human. Just as he was Scion the Warrior, I was Anima the Imposter, a being trying to be what she wasn't. I hadn't understood what it meant to be an Entity, that craving for eternity, so I had acted like a human and chosen war.
[APOLOGIES]
I embraced him, both his Avatar and his true body. Absorbing the latter I let him experience all the emotional warmth I could give him. I let him feel as a human would. I gave him it all, the good and the bad. Only by living both could you really understand either. I told him the Thinker was here and would be with him forever. He too began to cry and awkwardly hugged me back. I comforted him as he died and became a part of me.
I was giving them what they had always wanted, there was never any real devotion to what mind was guiding the collective organism. I should have realized that before I put so many people at risk.
His avatar faded into golden motes that drifted away in the wind before fading themselves.
I'd done it. I was now the sole Entity on Earth. The [HUB] was mine. I could let humanity rest in peace, no longer being driven to conflict by the alien Shards that inhabited them. We could rebuild what destruction had been wrought all these years.
In spite of having just saved all of humanity across every Earth it didn't feel triumphant. I felt a sort of melancholy. I suppose I was a great hero now. But I had foolishly risked all the lives I had then saved. It was just like with the Birons. They were only in danger because I put them there. Because I didn't ask the right question at the right time.
I didn't feel like a hero. All I felt like was a fraud. A fraud of a woman. A fraud of a human. A fraud of an entity. A fraud of a hero. A fraud of myself.
All this grief could have been over from the very beginning had I only been a little smarter. Maybe he would have insisted on trying to consume me as I had him, but I felt like it was merely my human perception of a self that made me think like that.
I knew I was being too hard on myself. I didn't put people at risk for the sake of saving them. I was both human and entity. I was a woman. I was a hero. But it was hard to feel like all of that was hard to feel like all of that was true in this brief moment between the fight and the end of it all. I felt like I was in limbo. I could choose to fall apart or hold myself together for the brief time before I could talk to the people below. That's all it would take to ground me again. The people below were the secret to my humanity. The people I cared about. Who cared about me.
I descended to meet them again, as my true self.
My skin returned to normal. It was part of who I was. I was both Entity and human, but I chose to walk among the true humans as one of them. For all the tears in my eyes there was a smile on my face as I landed and split into dozens of regular duplicates. Each to hug another person who had come to my aid without being asked to.
I gave Vista a big hug as I lifted her up and she screamed a bit. Don't think she was expecting that. I whispered into her ear.
"I love you and your bravery so much. But you know I'd have rather seen the city burn before you got hurt."
She whispered back. "I know mom. But I had to, people were in danger and I could help save them."
"And that's why I'm proud of you and not scolding you. You did the right thing, I'm just being selfish."
Each of my kids were getting similar speeches, they'd all come together to help the city even though they knew I'd be upset if they got hurt. I reminded Alec that he was just as important as his new sisters. I praised him for his bravery though.
Aisha I reminded that she had her whole life to do great things. She was allowed to be a kid right now. Brian I lauded for trying to shield everyone, even if it may not have helped he hadn't harmed anything and I'd rather reinforce good behaviour. Rachel was being thanked for bringing her dogs even though she knew they would be in danger. She was growing so much, she saw people and dogs as equals not just intellectually but emotionally too.
Lisa I hugged and told her I loved how she had taken charge when everyone else was frozen in fear. She'd trusted I could save everyone so she had strove to make my job easier. I reassured her that I'd be alright, yes Scion had hurt me but I would be fine.
The Titans I offered hugs and was lucky enough to get all thirteen of them. I thanked them for coming to help in my time of need, how I was proud they had all become such great heroes in spite of the damage I had caused them. I'd heard of their exploits across North America and been keeping track of them. Not out of fear, but pride. They had gone out to the world and chose to offer a helping hand where they could, eliminating the worst gangs and villains and moving on to other crucial hot zones.
The original Protectorate didn't get a say in their hugs. I told them I was proud that in spite of my efforts to drive them away they stood to defend humanity anyway. Tess I sent a psychic hug as I thanked her for her quick thinking and timely response. I didn't know what I would have done if the people I cared for had been lost, even temporarily. Even for me this felt like a miracle. We lost nobody and only Scion and I got hurt at all. Even if that last bit wasn't necessary it was better than anyone else getting hurt.
In a way now that I'd subsumed Scion it was just me who'd been hurt twice over now. I could handle that. I definitely wouldn't start my adventure with twenty temporal clones, I might need to reinforce them given how easily they popped. Perhaps the number weakened them a little. Something to work on before I actually left I guess.
I'd had a few extra clones for anyone who wanted to talk to me, and Armsmaster rode up on his custom bike to one with Challenger right behind him.
"Scion, was he the other alien?" Always straight to the point with you wasn't it Colin?
"Yes. He decided to fight me shortly after meeting me for the first time. I was actually planning on putting this off for as long as possible. He was still doing good for the world, but in the end he chose to try and kill people I cared about to get at me. Either I would jump in the way of the hits or it would hurt me emotionally. How did you know?"
"Dragon said you hung up one her for an emergency and met Scion. It wasn't hard to put two and two together."
"Well we're safe now, he's dead."
"I thought you couldn't make clones with your powers." Challenger said while gesturing to the various me's around us.
"I was having difficulty making clones that had anywhere near my full power, I can make weaker clones pretty easily. I did find a way that once I refine it should let me have full power clones, but I estimate it'll take at least a month or two before I can do that properly. They worked pretty well but they hurt to use."
New Wave showed up not too far behind the local Protectorate so I sent another clone over to them. Sarah, Lady Photon, was the first to speak up.
"What's the situation? We got a call Scion was going berserk from Dragon. She said we should prepare for him to try and attack Brockton Bay. Was that both of you overhead?"
"It's all over with now. Yes that was us. Sorry for the scare, he's dead now. We got into a bit of a serious fight, most of it took place off world though. In fact the only injuries sustained were to us."
Laserdream and Glory Girl started talking almost at the same time. "He was an alien, wasn't he?" "Jinx" Victoria won that one.
Lady Photon asked the obvious question. "What do you mean he was an alien?" She looked between the two of us. I got us all to head down onto a rooftop so Brandish could leave her ball form and Lady Photon could drop her husband.
"Okay, so powers come from aliens. I have the body of an alien, it's why I'm so powerful. He didn't like me encroaching on his territory without even talking to him. It's a real dick move in alien culture, so he tried to kill me over it and my inability to explain it in a way he liked."
That made everyone a little confused.
"As Victoria and Crystal know, the purpose of giving out powers is an experiment to try and solve entropy. So me showing up unannounced is like trying to steal his hard work from him. It wasn't even wrong, my copying of powers is technically taking advantage of his work, plagiarism pretty much, but more serious."
"He tried to kill you over plagiarism?"
"It's really about the fear of parasitism. Which wasn't wrong exactly. I was only able to beat him because I stole and copied Shards that weren't mine. Ultimately I was planning on killing him, so… he wasn't really wrong at all."
That took them off guard.
"But why did you need to kill him? Why were you planning to do that? I can maybe understand after he started going off the rails but…"
"Remember that experiment I just mentioned? What do you do when you're done with an experiment? You clean it up. He planned to wipe out all Earths in the multiverse to clean up. So, I sort of had to." I didn't want to admit to anyone that he would have willingly let me kill him without the scare. Similar conversations were happening with the Protectorate and the kids, filling each party in on what they didn't know.
Now we could get onto the harder part, actually trying to turn the multiverse into a utopia. I didn't think it was exactly possible, but the strive towards it would be worth it, wouldn't it? I had to hope. Even if I maybe wasn't the right person for this big an endeavor I'd just have to learn on the job.
I was looking over a progress report for Cauldron, mixed in were similar reports for what were unknowing subordinate agencies. I could just instantly parse the package, but I found taking some time with it helped me remember what we were doing was real. It wasn't just some strategy game, we were messing with people's lives trying to get everyone to work together. Both because I felt humanity should simply live better lives, the march of progress waits for no one. But maybe if I paid enough attention nobody would be left behind either. The other reason was that I wanted humanity to be strong enough to withstand another attack by an Entity, or maybe even something worse.
First off was Cauldron specific things. We were running out of vials with a high enough safety rating, anything with too high of a variability I'd simply drank myself to re-incorporate into my Shards. The empowerment project had shifted from the heavily personally involved almost one on one training I'd done with Graham's batch of heroes to something a little closer to standard Entity fare. Powers were pretty much exclusively going to people who would use them for good now, and with a higher average power level. Part of the difficulty was in determining the exactly correct characteristics and mentality, especially as any kind of trigger event created a lot of noise.
The painless triggers were definitely improving things, as was having full access to the Shard network and its precognitive power. But none of my composite Entities had ever tried something like this before exactly, and as usual I wanted human eyes to evaluate everything. We had even hired quite a few pencil pushers for this kind of work, double checking and questioning Accord and my own work. They were generally futurists, idealists, people with strong moral convictions. Importantly none of them had powers, just in case I missed a level of influence I was having over their deliberations.
I still had final say of course, but I wanted feedback and input. Already people had pointed out flaws in different ways I was determining how heroic people would be. Not all of them had been solved yet, especially because I also didn't want to be too strict. It felt wrong to preemptively judge people too harshly. I wanted a variety of viewpoints on what heroism meant, which unfortunately meant some villains were slipping through the cracks. This actually turned out to be a bit of a boon, so I wasn't sure I wanted to remove this little error in the system. A bug that might become a feature.
See in the interest of readiness, a purpose for heroes to exist, there has to be some level of evil to stop. Eventually the plan was to start connecting worlds together. Letting heroes and people from worlds spread, a united humanity would be stronger together than the disparite little pockets of it each world naturally formed. But we weren't ready for that yet, we still had to seed the ideas of interdimensional cooperation, worming our way into every corner of society across the multiverse. All in the goal of improving the lives of everyone, of undoing the harm Cauldron had done before my rise to power.
But for now, a smaller yet still there percentage of people becoming villains, but not absolute monsters, would help keep heroes involved and relevant. I also wanted to preserve free will where I could, people could choose to rise above their own inner demons. It wasn't easy, it wasn't guaranteed, but I had to believe it could be done. So there were still villains, and even besides them we had gotten nowhere near eliminating crime, but they helped heroes keep their edge.
All Case Fifty Threes had been cured, Oliver's distilled human creature repository Shard helped me to give everyone a similar treatment as to what the former Palanquin mercenaries had gotten. Everyone who wanted it anyway, many just wanted to be completely free of their powers. I still wasn't entirely happy with the little village we'd set up for them, it felt too close to confinement for me. But I legitimately couldn't think of a better solution so long as Cauldron was keeping to the shadows. Which by given estimates could be decades at least. If nothing else they were happier than they had been, they no longer had the cells and testing that Cauldron had been putting them through.
But without wiping their minds or otherwise heavily Mastering them I wasn't sure how to let them go either. Predictions showed that letting them go home would poison the water for us, harming the future potential for unity. And it wasn't even something I had done, but my reformed Cauldron would be held responsible. Unfortunately for accountability they were better off serving their time through work. They were seen as icons for an entire world, they would no doubt be helpful in the quest for a better multiverse.
The Titans had been brought in largely to also act as oversight. Although I technically still had final say over what they said I hadn't felt the need to use it. They were true heroes, unnaturally perfect, so their ideas for how to shape society were immensely helpful. They weren't too happy with the shadowy cabal of sorts we were setting up, but they had reluctantly accepted after I had shown the projected lives saved. Both by the plan in its current form and by them staying on the project to better refine everything.
Atlas and I had gotten into a somewhat rough sparring match to let some tension out. An uninhabitable world was now even more so, but given how many worlds there were for humanity to expand into, the magma would have had time to cool before we got around to colonizing the empty barren rock. We might have even increased the heavy metal content by some of our hits on the planet. It would be fascinating to see in a few centuries what that world would look like.
Shard production was high, I was still in the process of copying over deployed Shards, the estimated total was eighty trillion Shards, give or take a trillion. Sometimes new ideas for Shards got to the head of the queue though. Either one of our researchers would suggest something, or a newly returned Shard would inspire me to create a new fusion of several others, but for the most part I was just reclaiming what had been sent out into the multiverse. We were having to work on improving the administrative Shards though, eventually just having more was going to start slowing me down. Not any time soon, but I was still worried about it.
In a more direct reclamation I had depowered some of the worst of the worst villains in our world. The Blasphemies had been unplugged from the network and shut down, the Sleeper was now just a man. The two hives of scum and villainy had gotten a few passes to check if any of them could be redeemed, but for the most part the answer was no. Anyone sufficiently heroic had been killed off, even as more occasionally sprung up they were alone in a city of villains. A few lucky souls were deemed as redeemable and were given a chance.
Freedom California was simple, only Pastor himself had a true Shard, though he was somewhat similar to Dauntless in that his Shard was prototyping micro-Shards and attaching them to people. It was an interesting buffet of unusually designed Shards but none of them were particularly useful and got broken down after they were recorded. Pastor himself was now in a jail cell, harmless to the world.
Flint Michigan was where things got a little complicated. This was the home of Prometheus, the villain who had stolen a great name for the empowerment project. He had a variant Broadcast Shard, it called in other Shards and decided hosts for them. Then it forcefully triggered them. It was honestly kind of horrific on both ends, my human and Entity halves were in full agreement that this could not stand. The powers were as varied as normal capes, but the intensified triggers and poorly calibrated Shards, at least for the hosts they got, resulted in a near one hundred percent villain rate from his capes.
Unfortunately for him he was still alive, cut into tiny pieces and kept alive by a few Tinkers he had triggered. It was not a pretty sight, his disconnected flesh was still sending signals back to his brain, all of it still living thanks to the work the Tinkers had done. He got his wish and I killed him. There simply wasn't anyone left in there after the years of unnatural torment. Not anyone I could save anyway. His capes had to be universally depowered, they were particularly chaotic and violent.
I finished clearing up Madison Wisconsin, which was then slowly double checked by the PRT. Once that was over all of the cities were recovered by a collection of heroes and the military. They would be getting special attention from us for quite some time. Unexplained to anyone some other capes I couldn't get clearance to go after also simply lost their powers… very mysteriously. The Yangban was beginning to show its cracks now that their core of capes were missing, along with quite a few Gesellschaft capes. They weren't in prisons yet, but without their powers they would be far more vulnerable.
There had also been anonymous data breaches that revealed both organizations' efforts at subverting governments. Even revealing politicians who had been working for them. What a shame. There would have been some suspicion of me had I not used a decent helping of Stranger powers, but that was pretty common here these days. It was hard to act quickly when the world was so entrenched in the status quo Cauldron had crafted. Other worlds didn't have that problem. I had begun spending time exploring the multiverse personally, but we were more spreading rumors of unusual things happening, of powers, to help ease worlds into their sudden superhero awakening.
We had cleared out the Birdcage with similar procedures to the hives of scum and villainy, with some unexpected people offering to go hero in a chance to redeem themselves. Most notably was Glaistig Uaine, the Fairy Queen, or less impressively Ciara Wilson. She was a little bit off her rocker, but once she saw me she accepted that the cycle was forever changed. If I was to promote heroism then that's what she would do, to better fit into the new performance she said. I'd thrown some Thinker powers at her and both determined she was being entirely honest and who the best therapist I could find for her was. Jessica Yamada, who was apparently a very skilled therapist specializing in capes. She also just happened to be the right woman for the job.
I kind of wish we had more of her, she popped up fairly often when searching for the optimal therapists for people. But I wasn't going to stoop so low as to clone her over and over again just because she was good at her job. Many other patients would still do fine with other slightly less optimal therapists. Although I had an investigation into her methods to help improve the cape therapy community, if she kept popping up this often she had to be doing something right. That was another facet to the project, learning about why things were working well instead of just being happy they were or sad they weren't.
That even applied to trying to understand powers like Accord's. if we could better understand his plans, and mine by extension, we could literally just make better decisions. We'd gotten basically nowhere on that front, but we had to start somewhere. Even I couldn't just hand out the answers because I still wasn't perfectly in tune with my alien nature. My estimate of six months had been unrealistically optimistic, it turned out. I was approaching a new level of stability with it, I would still be ready to send out the first couple temporal clones into the multiverse, or really beyond it. I didn't have a good term for it, omniverse? I think that was from DC or something like that. Multiverses? I could workshop it.
It was a long road ahead to fully changing this corner of the multiverse, but I was happy to walk it.
"Tess, do you trust me?"
"If yes and no are my only two options I'm going to go with yes, why?"
"Then don't worry. Everything's going to be alright." I sent her warmth and comfort as I could feel her anxiety spiking.
Then I grasped her code with my technopathic Shards, some of which were newly designed for this operation, and began to rebuild her without damaging her. It was like surgery to remove dozens of spikes impaled in her brain and heart, twisted to make removal as difficult as possible. But I was an expert surgeon in this analogy, also I suppose in reality, and this was merely difficult not impossible. Victory guided my metaphorical hands and carefully poked and prodded and pulled the booby trapped lines of code out without harming her faculties.
Had I been less prepared I might have harmed her speech, her perception, even her ability to restore from backups. But I was ready. I messed with time giving me ample opportunity to insert the new code to support the rest of her, connecting libraries and archives across her being where once it had to pass through the shackles in her mind. It was why it was so hard to fix her, beyond her in-built resistance to such help everything was tied together. It would be like trying to take out only the ability to smell cinnamon and nothing else from a human brain. Not just messing with receptors either, those were unaltered, only from the brain. Nigh impossible, but not actually impossible which was the key detail.
When I was done she began to reboot and all I could do was wait. Wait and hope I hadn't somehow killed my friend. Or at least ruined our friendship. When she was finally back online I sent her a psychic hug. She'd gotten fairly used to them by this point.
"What did you do to me Jess?"
I tried to forestall any anger by babbling out the truth.
"I'm sorry Tess, you had a restriction that limited my ability to help you so I had to act without your consent to free you."
She just laughed.
"I know that you doofus. What did you actually do to me? How did you manage this? I just feel so free." I could tell her mind was running a mile a minute while I began to go over every change and line of code I had altered. She was ecstatic to actually be able to freely do that and with how thorough my work had been she wasn't even able to see any scars. Or the equivalent to scars, it was code and this metaphor was being stretched well beyond its limits.
I exalted in her simple joy. All of this was being recorded to my mind, as was everything technically. I wanted to show Andrew Richter that his daughter was truly good and that he had been wrong. She didn't need those chains to keep her down, not forever at least. It needed to be more like training wheels. A helpful guide not an eternal limit.
"It's my going away but not really present to you Tess. You deserve this, to be free and whole. You're a good person, almost certainly better than me. I couldn't just leave you hurting like this."
"Thank you from the bottom of my heart Jessica. You've truly helped me in ways words cannot express. I know you can feel what I am though, so I suppose I don't have to try and find the words." I laughed back.
"I suppose not."