53 -|

Krieg was quite pissed at her, and it was somewhat understandable, but, again, she didn't have any better options at the moment. 

So, a gigantic room in one of their warehouses was to be hastily converted into a room for Florence via Lisa's commands, and Krieg was the sole person with a key allowed to enter and exit.

How he would explain to his wife and kids the sudden, irregular absences, was his problem.

She had to take a minute to write up the agreements she made with Cherie and Amy and send them over to their quartermaster, or whatever the modern name for them was- management maybe?- and then immediately used Evelynn to fly to her and Lisa's room.

It was right next to the main office, so she picked up her phone, and instead of spending a bunch of time reading the reports, she just flew twenty feet over, and materialized next to their desks, phone in hand, dropping Evelynn entirely.

Lisa's eyes brightened, quickly leaning forward and getting up to rush at her.

She raised a brow, smiling, and accepted the hug as Lisa groaned in relief, squeezing her with a fair bit of her might, making her ribs creak a little.

"Told you I won't get Mastered." She hummed, softly, rubbing up and down Lisa's back, feeling so much tension she wasn't even aware of, all suddenly draining away, shoulders slacking.

Lisa nodded into her shoulder.

"Yep. Now you proved it though." Lisa said, muffled, then pulled back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her along as she stomped to the door. "Now, come talk to Greg before I have a fucking conniption pretty pretty please with a cherry on top?" Lisa rushed out, almost one long continuous sound rather than a sentence, and Taylor rolled her eyes.

"Don't you like mysteries?" She asked as they started on the walkway, the door closing behind them.

Lisa swung around on one foot to point a finger at her nose, mid-step, clarified "I like knowing the answer to them," then swung back forward in the same step with a half-step off her heel.

Her brows raised.

"Your footwork's gotten way better." She noted.

"Oh. It's noticeable? Sweet." Lisa said, smiling. "My power's changing too. You were right about the usage theory. It's changing slowly, and I'm not sure it's changing for the better, so I think I'll stop pushing it for now, don't want it skipping too many details so that it runs faster. That's my best guess for what it's trying to do. Less random detail to cut to the chase of things, but it might actually be skipping important details so... leaving it be for now. Man, knowing how to fight and not wheezing from climbing three flights of stairs is a pretty big confidence booster." Lisa said, keeping her head high, almost strutting on the catwalk rather than walking.

"Yes, because confidence is definitely what you were lacking in." She snorted, and Lisa snickered, still dragging her by the arm.

"You just can't handle how absolutely perfect, beautiful, intelligent, valuable, sporty, and humble I am." Lisa sniffed, lips curled into a smug, catty smirk.

She rolled her eyes to herself, smiling.

"This is a complete disaster." She deadpanned.

"Shush, drama queen." Lisa shot back, and kept going.

Lisa stopped before a door, and gestured to it with both hands like a magician revealing a trick, bending at the waist.

"Voila." Lisa dryly exclaimed, then dug a small device out of her sweatpants, and extended it to her. "Recorder. Now, go please. I'm dying here." Lisa pushed, then extended her foot over to tap her calf insistently like an impatient toddler, gently pushing her.

She shook her head as she grabbed the recorder and put it in her pocket.

"Yeah yeah I'm going." She said, and opened the door.

The room wasn't locked, and neither was Greg in any kind of restraint, so she walked in, closed the door, and stared at Greg, unbothered.

He was bent over a table in the corner, furiously scribbling away at a notebook, writing…

Absolute gibberish.

She squinted.

No, wait… that looked like some programming mumbo-jumbo.

"You're hand-writing code?" She asked, brows raised, and he didn't reply.

She rolled her eyes, walked over discarded candy wrappers strewn about the floor, and gently shoved his shoulder.

"WHa-AheWHat!?" Greg squeaked, finally broken out of his fugue, and turned to glare at her, only for his eyes to widen right back up to a look of pure relief. "Oh god, hi." He breathed out, and got up from the chair.

"I need to talk to you. Okay listen this is really really really important and it's incredibly dangerous, I need to know if you have like uh the the the the fucking- uh, the-" He rambled like a broken record, gesturing wildly, before he found the word he was looking for, and snapping his fingers at her.

"LISTENING DEVICES! That one, I need to know if there are bugs in here." He rushed out in one breath, then turned, closed his notebook, and dug out a sketchbook. "We're tight, right, I can know that right?" He rushed out.

She rubbed at her face.

"Greg, we're not tight, we're barely acquaintances. No, this room isn't bugged, it has no cameras, nothing." 

The lie was even technically true.

"Calm down and speak." She said, simply, and leaned back to plant her butt on the bed's headboard, leaning back.

He flipped the sketchbook open, threw it on the table, sat down, then paused.

"Wait why'd I take this out?" He mumbled to himself, then scoffed, pushing it aside, then pushing his hair back as he turned to her, chair scraping loudly at the rusty floor. "Okay, listen, this is some deep state kinda stuff that's really important, and I just need you to believe me because it's insane and makes no sense but it's true." He rushed out, then took a deep breath, met her eyes…

"Dragon's a self-iterating data assimilation algorithm running on a satellite somewhere." He said, almost wheezing it out, wide eyed like he could barely believe it himself.

Her brows furrowed.

"... Is that fancy tech-speak for 'Dragon's an AI of sorts'?" She asked, and Greg goggled at her.

"Why are you this calm about it! Artificial life is possible! It can trigger! Dragon's a bunch of code! I have Dragon in a fucking hard drive! And I want it back, please! Dragon's going to kill us all! She's a robot! It's a Skynet scenario, and Armsmaster's trying to make a copy of her to control for himself rather than eradicating it! This is a world-ending problem!" Greg shouted, near-hysterical.

She closed her eyes, and breathed out in frustration.

She remembered why Greg was so annoying now. All that was in his head was media, conspiracy theories, and absolute certainty with little to back it up.

"I'm calm because I already knew. So that hard drive that fries our computers when we plug it in, it's got some of Dragon's code in it?" She asked.

"No, it's got Dragon in it. The- the the the hero, the SKYNET thing?!" He wheezed, waving his arms around, wide-eyed. "No wonder she kept banning me on PHO! That Saint guy on PHO was right!"

Okay, this was getting annoying.

"Greg, stop yelling and freaking out." She snarled, glaring at him, and he reeled back a little, before settling down with a chastised nod.

That... worked?

"Now, what do you mean that you have Dragon in a hard drive? Explain a bit more. Why, how? What did Armsmaster want you for? Working on stealing Dragon's code to… make stuff?" She ventured.

Greg took a deep breath, and seemed to calm down as he started.

"Okay, so, Dragon's not a person. She's this… self-training algorithm of sorts. And- and she has these restrictions in her code by whatever created her. Or whoever. Oh god they can probably make more of her… Shit. Uh, one of the- the restrictions, one of them is that she can't make other AI or multiply herself. I don't know the rest yet because I wasn't even close to getting finished even understanding the rules nevermind programming them out but whatever, point is, she can't replicate herself. And to circumvent this… somehow, she uploads herself into her suits. Why do this instead of just, you know, controlling them like a drone?" He gestured, miming a puppeteer, clumsily at that.

"No clue yet, doesn't matter, she does it. If the suit is significantly damaged while the suit is able to be detected or connected to her satellite, it deletes itself and all it's programming, but if it gets destroyed while not connected to the satellite, it'll keep looking for a connection to it until it can verify the satellite exists, then it deletes itself. I don't know how, I don't know where or why, but Armsmaster found a Dragon suit that has never reconnected to the satellite. And it's an old one, like a really old suit before any of the biomechanical stuff got involved." He emphasized, then paused.

She was tempted to ask what kind of biomechanical stuff, but refrained, since Greg finally had a track of thought he could follow without random rambling.

"I don't think that matters actually but whatever. Point is, he- he got this really old suit. And Dragon's code is still in there, while the actual Dragon, the active one, is doing its thing. If any of these things connect, the copies will immediately self-delete. So to survive it can't connect to the internet, it must absolutely not get booted outside of a Faraday cage or it'll just get spotted by the satellite and delete. Or that would be the case if it was active. The suit is so old that you could put it out in broad daylight and it still wouldn't delete itself because it can't even scan or activate the deletion process. Additionally, since I extracted the code for Armsmaster already, as long as nobody runs the code, I could work on it on a beach with a laptop perfectly safe. I-I'm saying this because this means that there is no easy way to just delete all of Armsmaster's copies. We need to get them, then we need to run them, and run them in a place where either the original or the cloned code can connect to the other so the cloned code can kill itself. On the plus side, it's not that complicated to finish all of this. Just- let them connect to the satellite."

She snapped her fingers in front of his face, and he stopped abruptly, startled.

"Greg, focus. I didn't ask how to destroy the copies. I asked what Armsmaster wanted you for. Come on, focus." She gently redirected, and he latched onto the new direction given with surprising ease, nodding.

"So- so what's going on with Armsmaster is that he wanted me to dig into it's code, de-restrict everything, then add a root restriction in that would make the program listen to him and only him, no matter what he told it to do." Greg said, staring at her with a pleading look, as if he could will her to fully understand him.

She took a deep, stabilizing breath, then covered her face, and sighed it out.

Shit.

Shit, shit shit shit.

"So Armsmaster is trying to clone Dragon, remove any kind of restriction, then enslave her?" She asked, just to clarify, rubbing her jaw.

Greg nodded, eyes full of fear.

Greg talking about world-ending scenarios and Skynet when talking about Dragon was annoying and stupid because Dragon was genuinely a great person, but when talking about Armsmaster, then all of a sudden it went from slanderous exaggeration to an actual, real threat.

"Can he do it by himself?" She asked, and Greg hesitated.

"It's very unlikely he'll do it right, or be able to not corrupt and destroy significant portions of the AI, but that's not a good thing! It means he'll have an unstable Skynet in his pocket! We- can we talk him out of it?" Greg suddenly asked.

She ignored that utterly stupid question.

"Focus. What exactly did he say he wants to do with this copy? Help the Protectorate? Make himself a warlord?"

"He wanted- no, he wants to strip his copy of Dragon down as much as possible, de-restrict it, make himself its master, then… I don't know! I don't know what the hell his goal is, but that's what he wanted me to do. When your tall blue dude teleported on me, I only had enough time to copy her code into the hard drive and then attach a re-tuning attack program over it to fry anything that tried to connect to it without my programs in it. I deleted his copy of Dragon but I don't think it matters because he probably has another ten copies buried in a box somewhere, so right now there aren't just two Dragons, there are three. Or, or twenty, or however many Armsmaster had managed to copy. And we have one of them." Greg said, then deflated, almost out of breath.

"We need to destroy them all, this is so bad…" He continued, moaning in misery into his hands, leaning back against the wall.

She frowned, brows furrowing.

They… well, theoretically, they did need to destroy the copies. Armsmaster's copies, because the man had seemingly gone mad without any good explanation yet.

Cherie's power only affected emotions in the short term while the girl was tweaking them which would mean that she was practically innocent by default, Regent had only physical control, and Heartbreaker hadn't touched Armsmaster, so unless there was another Master involved, the only real explanation was that he just... went crazy.

Maybe one too many frustrations, maybe it was a particularly crushing failure, like his loss against Lung at the docks when Lisa's team got scattered, maybe it was one too many stressful projects he couldn't solve with his mortal mind, maybe the stakes in his eyes were as severe as they were for her, there were countless possibilities, and to be honest, she did not have the time to figure it out.

But in the grander scheme of things, having a way to clone Dragon, the strongest Tinker in the world… it might be helpful in dealing with that goddamn alien that Cauldron had told her about. If not in fighting with it, then definitely in other ways. Coordination, maybe tinkertech combos with powers… maybe helping to trick it somehow, or establish a way to communicate, because the thought of fighting something like that in a fistfight still sounded like a horrendous, horrendous idea.

And since this world did not have magic before she was reborn for better or worse in that damn locker, she could theorize that these alien lifeforms could be communicated with. They were still based on this world's mundane physics, somehow.

Maybe they could not communicate with a human. If these lifeforms were capable of such incredible things, humans might as well be grasshoppers at their feet, making little croaks and being annoying. But a superintelligent AI that could keep up, that might be able to decipher or at least comperehend their communication methods through sheer computing power?

That opened a path to solving this problem without Cauldron's incomprehensively simplistic 'just try to fist fight the all-powerful alien god' method.

With everything they knew, some part of her told her that they had to have thought of this already. That there was a reason they ended up on the simplest, and simultaneously most ruinous, option. They ruled half the world, they weren't fucking stupid. There was something she was missing, surely.

But whatever it was, she could guess that fear was what had stopped Cauldron from drastic measures like this. Fear that they'd be trading a malevolent alien god for a machine one, that they made purely to save them.

She couldn't come up with anything else, really.

And if Cauldron was commited to fighting the alien apocalypse, she was commited to trying every other method possible to avoid that.

This was a bit of a moral dilemma, however, even with what was at stake here. She wanted a Dragon clone for her organization. If it could interact with the 'entities', it might single-handedly prevent an apocalypse.

But it would be really grating on her morals, having one forced to be with her organization, if it was enslaved or Mastered in any way.

The only option that made sense to her was to take that copy of Dragon, strip her to the bone, remove her personality and memories, give her some scant few restrictions to make sure she wouldn't lose her marbles out of nowhere like Armsmaster or some such and become a massive problem to them and the world itself, and then… well, at that point, you essentially had a blank slate, a child of sorts. 

Like Dragon's… baby sister?

Odd, and likely would not make Dragon happy when she found out, but far from immoral in her eyes.

Then again her perspective was a warped kaleidoscope formed of every scumbag and hero and animal and god known to Runeterra's man so maybe she was just too twisted to see things straight.

Regardless of that, practically, if one raised the resulting AI right, all would be well.

If one didn't… well, that was going to be a problem.

Maybe Greg could code a lot of Dragon's personality traits in, or just keep them, but that felt a little… morbid. 

She raised a hand as Greg opened his mouth.

"I need some time to think about this. Just do what you were doing, I'll be back in a bit." She said, and ignored his protests as she got out, opened the door, and closed it behind her.

It was unlocked, so he could still follow and pester her, but he did not, thankfully.

Lisa perked up across from her on the railing, and rushed to her side, leaning in to whisper.

"So? What is it?" Lisa asked eagerly.

She breathed in, sighed, then dug out the recorder, extending to Lisa who grabbed it with the kind of fervour a starving pooch would have as it pounced on a piece of jerky.

Lisa then just connected the recorder to her ear piece, and leaned on the railing, tapping her foot.

Thirty seconds of silence later, Lisa clicked something on the device, and turned to her, seeming genuinely annoyed.

"Dragon's an AI. And you knew. And you just didn't mention it to me?" Lisa asked, genuinely irritated.

She tilted her head, brows furrowing a smidge.

"You do remember that I said a while back, that there will be plenty of things I won't tell you? Are you actually upset at me?" She asked, mildly, and Lisa opened her mouth, closed it, then groaned.

"Yeah to both. I know you said that but I hate not knowing things, and you're the only person who can just keep all their secrets around me forever." Lisa said, then frowned. "Also, not going to lie, I feel like you don't tell me because you don't trust me. Which you do, I know that logically, but I can't think of another reason you wouldn't tell me stuff. Maybe you're paranoid about me getting Mastered…?" Lisa mused and Taylor moved over to sit on the railing with her, butt to butt and shoulder to shoulder.

"This is going to sound stupid, but in my head, the more someone knows, the more danger they're in. Logically, I know you already know enough that any one of our enemies would consider you priority number one for getting information on us, but… I don't know. It's irrational, but it's a way to protect you. Probably won't work though." She mused quietly, and Lisa sighed, dropping her head on her shoulder.

"Ta-"

"Sam, out here." She corrected, and Lisa huffed, air ruffling her hair.

"'Kay, Sam, you do realize that if you wanted to protect me, you've done a shit job of it, right? I mean, I learned that Dragon's a big toaster anyway. All you did was delay it. I'm not… good at it, not yet, but I'm pretty much running Nexus with Coil while you're on the warpath. I need to know these things. Fuck whatever minor safety ignorance can give me, we're already up shit creek without a paddle and the shoreline's full of landmines. It physically cannot get any more dangerous. Cauldron's on our ass and the only reason they don't open a portal and nuke all of us into oblivion is that they don't want to make you a genuine enemy. Me not knowing things only makes my life more dangerous at this point, rather than the opposite, because we've crossed several dozen lines already. I don't want to demand that you tell me everything, but protecting me is not an excuse to not tell me stuff. Make up a new one or tell me stuff." Lisa said quietly.

Taylor put a hand around Lisa's back, and sighed, putting her cheek on Lisa's head as she considered things.

Lisa was, as usual, right. It was just a habit, really. To keep things secret. Information was dangerous, both for her, and those receiving it. 

But Lisa had earned her trust, for the most part, and she was the person who most needed information to come to correct conclusions. It was logical to tell her everything.

"Yeah… yeah, you're right. There's tons of things I haven't told you. In fact, I'll give you something in a bit. Something so important you can't imagine, and it should tell you everything. About powers, the world, the most powerful organisations in the world." She said, and Lisa turned to her with raised brows. "No, I'm not exaggerating. I'll show you soon."

Lisa huffed through her nose, and tapped her thigh with her fingers.

"Thank you. Don't keep me in the dark."

"I won't. Now, finish listening to the audio." She prodded, poking Lisa's cheek with a fingernail, and Lisa nodded, raising a hand to her ear, clicking a button, then dropping it.

Eventually, Lisa groaned, and clicked the thing on her ear again.

"You're shitting me." Lisa said, and pulled away, so Taylor let go, and leaned back a little.

Lisa side-eyed her.

"So, what are we doing about this? Are we taking a page out of Armsy's book and making Greg make us an AI out of Dragon's copy? It would definitely free things up for me and Coil. Things are so expansive at the moment it's hard to keep up. We could like, name her The Administrator or… Athena, or something cool like that." Lisa nonchalantly said, and she blinked at her in surprise.

"I… pretty much had the same idea. For much grander designs and purposes, but fundamentally the same idea." She said, indecisive. "My idea was to take the programming… core, of sorts, strip out all the memories and personality traits, and when it's a blank slate, to pretty much raise it. Problem then becomes… raising it right. And who will do it."

Lisa turned to her, a considering frown on her face.

"... Huh. That's way smarter than my idea. We could even give it like, a little robot body and raise it until it connects to the internet and ruins its innocence." Lisa suggested, snickering silently with her shoulders, then she leaned close to her, batting her eyelashes. "Sam, I want a child." Lisa said, with a complete straight face, somehow.

She burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of that.

Lisa joined her.

A few seconds later, the humor passed, and she flexed her jaw, noting her sore cheeks, and turned to Lisa, who was grinning like the world's smuggest housecat.

"Gotcha to laugh, you broody grump." Lisa said victoriously, then turned forward, smiling, one of her legs swinging as she shifted on the railing. "But, in all seriousness, what do you think?"

She hummed, staring off into the distance as she considered it.

A minute later, she sighed.

"I mean, if we did get Greg to strip the clone in the hard drive, into like… an AI toddler of sorts, and then we raised it… it's not morally reprehensible or anything, if you do it like that. But then we'll have the problem that we'll have an unrestricted AI we can't ensure the loyalty of. And even if I can, I'm not mastering a child. And it's not even just an AI, just a regular person, but a machine. Which might be even worse." She pointed out, and Lisa paused, squinting at the opposing wall.

"Yeaaaah… you're incredibly busy, always, and I don't know many people I'd trust to raise an AI with the kind of company we keep. Especially a loyal one that won't freak out on us and ruin everything." Lisa asked.

Damn it, having a Dragon equivalent for her own organization would be… immeasurably huge. It was a bigger advantage than a hundred cape clones. It might be the more sophisticated solution to Cauldron's 'just fist fight the alien god' approach and might even work without billions dying.

She really wanted to do this.

Lisa stared at her.

She glanced up at the ceiling, contemplating.

A few seconds later, she gave in with a sigh.

"Can you raise it? Her, whatever." She said, and Lisa's brows furrowed.

A few seconds of silence passed.

"... I was gonna say no then I realized I don't trust literally anyone else to do it… Damn. Fuck, I screwed myself. I mean... I can't be that bad of a parent. I already know exactly what not to do so that it doesn't run away like I did... So… we're doing it? AI baby-raising project?" Lisa said.

"... Yeah, I guess we are. Are you sure you can handle this though? I don't want to have to face some bitter 'machine god' in a few years because we didn't raise it right." She clarified, and Lisa shifted, obviously nervous.

"I mean, I'm sure I can do it. My power's a massive cheat in this too. It's going to take a lot of my time and attention, so Coil will have to pick up the slack on the organisational side of things until it's a little more intelligent. Besides, raising kids isn't that hard. If my parents can shit me out I'm sure I can do better than them. The AI will be even smugger than me. And pettier." Lisa said, face slowly morphing into an impish grin.

She rolled her eyes.

"Don't corrupt it before we've even made the thing connect to the internet. You utter fiend."

Lisa snickered.

"Right, I'm gonna go in and talk to him real quick. You have more things to tell me after, right?" Taylor asked, hopping off the railing.

"Yep. Lots. Be quick. Oh and uh, this is really fucking morbid, but… maybe we should keep a kill switch for it? Her?" Lisa said, seemingly in deep thought. "Not the type to buy into old movie tropes, and I do trust that I can raise the AI right, but there's something to be said about hubris and the irony of us making our own destruction et cetera." Lisa pointed out, reasonably.

She paused, and with a frown, she nodded.

"I suppose that makes sense. Going to have to be careful with that. I'm not sure about it though." She hummed in acknowledgement, and walked back into Greg's room, swinging the door open and shut.

He was still handwriting code, but this time he looked up instantly.

"That was a lot less time than I expected. Uh, hi? So… I mean, what now?" Greg asked.

She sat on the headboard of his bed, and sighed. 

"Okay, Greg, listen." She said, and cracked her neck, staring down into his frustratingly naive orbs. "You work for us now, right? Or with us, whichever sounds best."

He hesitated, then shrugged.

"I… I guess so. I mean, it's not like I signed anything but you did save me and… if you take care of my mom- or, or help me visit her sometimes, yeah, sure." He quietly said, voice thick and sad.

She nodded.

"Alright. Deal. What that means is, we give you things, we protect you, and in exchange, you do exactly what we say. Like any other job." She slowly noted, and although hesitantly, he nodded, appearing a little wary.

"Alright. Since you understand that, here's what I want you to do. First of all, leave Armsmaster and his copies to us. I can't guarantee we'll be able to grab him and interrogate him to destroy them all, but we'll do our best. Don't make it your priority to find and mess with Armsmaster. Don't poke the sleeping bear, alright? Leave him be until we figure something out. Secondly, we are not deleting our copy of Dragon. We need to know everything we can about it. Speaking of which… did he mention anything about removing the program's memories, personality, et cetera, or did he just want you to enslave the clone as it was? Armsmaster, I mean?" She asked.

Greg was looking at her like she was an alien.

"I… no? He uh, didn't say anything about that. He… seemed to care about efficiency more than anything else, so I doubt it. Memories are useful information to the system, it would also save time in re-training it. So… I don't think he intended any of that? We hadn't gotten too deep into the project though, he had- he might have." Greg said, then bit his lip. "Look, this- this is an AI, we can't just let him have it. It's literally like- like making a god. You can't just duplicate gods and hope they don't crush you later, that doesn't work, we need to destroy all of it-"

"Greg." She interrupted, projecting her voice with distilled impatience.

He stopped talking, and stared like a student would at a teacher.

"We will be doing absolutely no such thing. So, here's your first assignment. Make our communication systems safer, faster, smoother. As best as you can make them. We'll give you half a million dollars once you give us something we agree is good enough." She said, and Greg's eyes bulged in disbelief, gaping at her.

To him, that was probably an astronomical sum of money.

"Your second assignment is that copy of Dragon on the hard drive."

"Uh...? " Greg said, intelligently.

"Just listen. This Dragon copy you have. I want you to dig into her, figure out every last thing about it, and then do absolutely nothing. Come to me, explain everything about it, and then I'll likely make my decision on how to deal with our copy of Dragon moving forward. I might decide you're right, and we need to destroy them all. I might decide to try something entirely different. We'll figure out something for your work later, since we can't possibly know how long this will take or how hard it will be. Sound good?"

Greg stared, mulled it over for a bit, then nodded.

"Yeah. Now, can I please get access to a computer? I'm kind of-" He gestured around, jittery, "-a little stressed here."

Tinker withdrawal…?

She shrugged.

"Alright. I don't know the ground rules around here, but do not ever wander outside this top floor, this is one of our safest locations. We'll get some of our tech guys to get you a really powerful computer in here like, today. And, I cannot stress this enough, Greg." She said, projecting her voice, directing a laser-sharp look into his eyes. "Do not. Compromise us, or anything around here. Stay away from any unsafe websites, do not poke Dragon or any government agency, and do not touch social media. Do not brag to any of your friends about this either, at all, do not even talk to them if you can." She said, cold and calm.

Greg averted his eyes, and sighed, deeply.

"Yeah, I know. I learned my lesson. I figured out why I got caught, you know? Bragged on a site about what I did, and… then I'm guessing Armsmaster just tracked me down through that account and my internet activity. So, yeah, no social media, no nothing." He said, utterly serious.

...Wow, that way of getting caught was so Greg it was kind of funny how accurate her assumptions were.

She nodded, and walked close enough to pat his shoulder, giving him a rare smile.

The way he brightened up from that alone was… familiar, at the very least.

"Good job. At least you learned from it. Don't do it again, and we should all be fine. Talk to Insight about the details, or preferably, Coil. Work out a cape name too. I gotta go now. Good luck, Greg, I'm sure you'll do great work." She said, and his spirits seemed to soar, outright smiling as he nodded.

With just a little bit of praise and encouragement, he practically flipped his mood on a whim. Just like she remembered.

She turned around to leave, before she turned one last time, and pointed at him, grabbing his attention one last time.

"Oh and never ever ever ever tell anyone anything about me, or even say my name, in public, or I will get very, very angry." She said, eyes wide as she could make them. "I'm not Tay or Taylor around here, just call me Sam. Alright? Good." She said, then waved backwards. "Good luck."

"U-uh, yeah, you too?" He called out, somewhat timidly, and the door slowly swung shut behind her.

She sighed, and Lisa raised a brow.

"He's on it. Told him to dissect the code first so we know everything about it. Then when he's a bit too deep to back out and been working for us for a while, I'll drop the bomb on him and tell him to strip it to bare bones and activate it for us."

Lisa whistled slowly.

"Forgot you can even be manipulative, damn."

She shrugged, walking back to the office as Lisa followed.

"With him, you have to be. He's nonsensical, overemotional, overcommits when he gets started on pretty much anything, and very easily uplifted and controlled through a bit of encouragement and praise."

Lisa hummed.

"Yeah, noticed that."

She walked into the office, stole Lisa's comfy office chair, and Lisa shot her a weak glare as she dragged the wooden one in the corner over to sit face to face with her.

"Hello Ma'am. All went well?" Coil asked without looking, typing something.

"Exceptionally, sort of." She replied curtly, and focused on Lisa.

"So, what more did you have to tell me about? Why did you say something about a fuck-up? This seems to have gone quite well." She gestured around them.

Lisa nodded.

"Seems is the key word. For starters, the ENE Protectorate just got its budget tripled. Yes, tripled. So, there will be a shitload more grunts with containment foam, more therapists, and significantly better pay for any hero that moves here. Which means we might get a couple organic transfers who want more money." Lisa said.

"That's not a big deal." She noted, and Lisa handwaved it aside.

"Let me finish. So, budget tripled. Secondly, and much more importantly… do you remember that office worker you Mastered?" Lisa said, and after a moment of incomprehension, her eyes widened.

"Maria?" She asked, and Lisa nodded.

"While you were gone, she called one of your burner phones. I answered, and after a lot of confusion on both our ends, and some convincing I worked for you, guess what she told me. Apparently, while helping the local Director during a phone call he was having with another Director, he was being dodgy and talking about some kind of meeting with other directors, about what I can only assume is a local figure of significant threat . Not an organization, but a person . " Lisa emphasized, body language growing subdued, a bend of vague, tired disappointment settling over her features.

"When there's more than one or two Directors in a meeting, and there's discussion to be had about a specific Parahuman, like 'Summoner', or maybe just Executioner if we're guessing this is a simple deal, it's usually not a tea party but a meeting to discuss a Kill Order. My power seems to agree." Lisa said, avoiding her gaze, shame and guilt practically exuding out of her like light from a lamp.

Oh…

"And if my power is right, they might just rush through and put the Kill Order on you solely to ruin your reputation without even expecting it to amount to anything. Kill Orders are not exactly shouted from the rooftops to the general public, but it gets onto the internet cape circles pretty damn quick and eventually bleeds over to the regular folk. Anyone with a Kill Order is usually just completely dismissed as a mad psycho. So anyone who bothers to look into you will probably form their opinion off of that. And there's another problem. Do you remember that Polish guy that fled towards our coastline after killing their President and a bunch of heroes?"

She squinted, wracking her brain.

"Heart…burst…er?" She ventured, looking at Lisa, practically asking for an answer.

"Close. Hearstopper. I just remember it because of HB, it's similar. But regardless, he had a pretty huge bounty on him. Something like fifteen or twenty million. As much as a Slaughterhouse member. So, as you can guess, there has been a sudden surge of bounty hunter capes walking up and down the coastline, or making their way here, at least. We've already spotted three of them asking around for the guy, some even tracked down Hookwolf and chatted, trying to find where he vanished off to. There's probably a couple more around we haven't identified, but point is, we could have anywhere from three to ten capes really hungry for money, really psychotic, used to hunting other capes, all running around our city, right as there's a discussion to give you a Kill Order from the PRT. Depending on the bounty, they might just switch targets to you and then… then we're going to have a huge tide of crazies rushing here to try and find and kill you. And that's going to hurt us, not you." Lisa said, spreading her hands as if spreading a map, staring at her intently.

She stared, the enormity of the problem slowly dawning on her.

And underneath it… an opportunity, and a way out.

She had an idea. A risky one.

Oh that would… that would be so damn risky. So dangerous.

And such a damn good opportunity.

She leaned forward, elbows on her knees.

"How is Boston doing? I remember there being a turf war triggered by the truce break and us taking Spree."

Lisa blinked at the seemingly unrelated topic, then shrugged.

"It's not great, not terrible. Things haven't cooled down or escalated, sort of a cat and mouse game at the moment, with everyone avoiding Butcher and striking where she isn't. Accord's getting really pissy about Blasto. You should go Master him sometime soon."

She hummed.

"Okay, you're gonna have to organise that soon. That aside, about the Kill Order… if it happens, if it's targeted on me, and if it goes through, I have a plan. It's quite risky, but… I think it'll be worth it. To start with… is there anything else I need to know before I explain, actually?" She asked, and Lisa shook her head.

Lisa frowned, rubbing her chin.

"Not that I don't believe in you, but that sounds kind of suicidal, even for you." Lisa said, voice filled with genuine worry.

She tapped her foot on the floor, slowly, like a metronome.

"It's not safe by any means, but I should still have plenty of ways to escape if it becomes too serious. Besides, imagine the kind of statement it would make." She said, brows raising.

Lisa worked her jaw, thinking it over.

"I mean, you are absolutely getting a Kill Order if you do something like that. A Super Kill Order. They'll make one just for you. There's no way to avoid that, you know that right?"

She nodded.

"Yes, that's why I said if I'm already getting one, this will be the plan. That way I don't hastily make a problem for myself by assuming. They might not have the guts to spit on the Truce by giving Executioner a Kill Order, but Summoner, his supposed leader? That feels quite a bit more likely. Whether that's because of Cauldron interference or just the PRT growing angry at us for constantly attacking them without paying a price. We also killed five PRT agents, even if we didn't want to. Not only do I buy time before the Kill Order like this, I also clean things up, remove some pieces off the board, and if all goes well, I might even get a couple recruits for us."

Lisa snorted.

"And how do we move them back here?"

"Helicopter? Plane? Coil's got ways." She ventured, and Lisa paused, making a dubious noise.

"Maybe. Okay… shit, okay. How long do you think it might take, if we do this and if you get a Kill Order?"

She stared off into nothing for a few seconds, trying to estimate.

"Give it a week, maybe?"

Lisa hummed.

"There's not much going on right now, right here. If you could get Heartbreaker's clone onto mastering our men and securing our hold, free yourself up, you could catch up on some of the projects and ideas you've been putting off."

She nodded, blinking in surprise, because for once, she actually… had time to do things that weren't incredibly urgent and dangerous.

She pursed her lips.

"You said there were five PRT agents killed in the raid, correct?" She asked, and Lisa grimaced, nodding. "Oh don't look so guilty, I'll feel bad. Things happen, you'll learn." She said, leaning forward to pat Lisa's knee, which was answered with a grunt. "But, to my original topic… do we know who they were? Anything about them?"

Lisa nodded.

"Yeah, the PRT will be holding a funeral for them. It's public."

She nodded, and sighed, tapping her fingers on the arm rests.

"This is going to sound dubious, but I have a cape that's… somewhat similar to the Fairy Queen. As in, gathering souls and the like. They don't need to have powers. And we also have all this." She gestured around them, and directed a questioning look to Lisa. "I want to… well, I don't think I can make it right. Not now, I don't have the power yet. But I want to do something. The thing is, I don't know how. Isn't that funny?" She asked, darkly amused. "I have thousands of years of life experience and all the powers one could ask for and I still don't know how to make this better in a meaningful way because im so desensitised to the weight of life I can't bring myself to do anything but shrug, emotionally. Like hearing that a bee died. Just... oh, okay. That's kind of what they do, no?"

Lisa stared at her, a look in her eyes like she uncovered a piece of a particularly befuddling puzzle, somewhere between joy and alarm.

"But I want to try to not be like that, regardless of my emotions. So, give me a detailed list. I want to know who died and why, how, what their families are like. And most importantly, where exactly they died. Their souls might still be around. I might be able to do... something. Not sure what."

Lisa's face dawned in understanding.

"I mean, I'm not sure how they'd take it, to know their loved ones aren't dead but with a… semi-villainous cape." Lisa pointed out, and she nodded.

"I don't know either. It's still much better than being dead, if you don't believe the afterlife exists. Which it doesn't by the way, did you know that?" She asked, and Lisa's face pinched.

"No, and frankly, I'm annoyed you told me. That sucks." Lisa said.

She nodded.

"Depending on how you see it, yeah. Did you find that tattoo artist I asked for, way back when we had first gotten Coil's original base?" She asked, and Lisa's face was blank for a solid couple seconds before it alit with realization.

"Oh shit, yeah. Fuck, I forgot to call them back, it's been fucking weeks. " Lisa hissed, glancing around.

"I've got it." Coil drolled. "Say a time and a place, I'll direct them to you. They're more than discreet and skilled enough."

Lisa paused, squinted at Coil, then turned to her, expectantly.

She frowned, scheduling things in her head.

"How much time do we have before the Directors come to a decision?"

Lisa made a see-saw with her hand.

"Eeeeeh… it depends. They've been at it for two days now and we've not caught wind of a new Kill Order yet. Could be tomorrow, could be in a week. Maybe they'll decide not to give any Kill Order out. We don't have information that deep in the Protectorate, so I can only guess." Lisa shrugged, troubled.

"They're plenty busy with stuff right now. Endbringer attack is a month and a half late, almost, which is very unusual, for starters. Then apparently there's some cooky cult down near the US-Mexico border taking up loads of their time, our city's a headache on its own…" Lisa trailed off, dropping her hand and the fingers she'd raised to count.

So, speculative.

"Tell them to schedule for early morning, tomorrow. I'll have things ready. Now… you said my lab's ready, before I left?" She asked, turning to Coil, who glanced back, nodded, and continued working.

"The address is on your phone. It's discrete enough but we'd do much better with an actual base. This situation where we're all spread out is starting to grate on me. Complicates everything. Kaiser is organizing his own people with ours well, but Lung is useless dead weight when it comes to organization. " He grumbled.

Right, base.

Her head was… pretty good right now. A tad tight, but that was nothing.

"Where do you want the base? I was thinking of digging straight into Captain's Hill and under the Trainyards. Would let us bring things in and out easier, it's isolated and so abandoned that it's hard to monitor around it without being noticed, and if you're not too cocky and upfront, it shouldn't be an issue to keep the place really well hidden. Just a few strategically placed hanging vines and any tunnel will disappear."

Coil paused, as did Lisa.

" Digging straight into Captain's Hill?" Lisa asked, brows raised.

"I have a geokinetic. I could probably shift the entire hill or roll it forward to make a rockslide and bury a fourth of the city if I wanted. Making a hollow cavern and some tunnels shouldn't be too difficult."

Lisa and Coil eyed each other.

Lisa shrugged.

"Sounds good enough for me. Another Bond Villain base won't hurt."

Coil turned to her, and nodded.

"The location is strategically sound. If the tunnels could be discrete and in distant locations so as to misdirect authorities to where exactly we might be located, that'd be best."

She got up, stretched, blinking blearily and suppressing a yawn, then patted her harness and silk suit down.

"I'll have it ready by tonight then. Oh and Lisa. That thing I mentioned I want to show you. I'll go grab it, wait here. Show nobody, and treat it like it's worth more than your own life. I'm serious. Immediately call me back when you're done so I can put it in a safe place again."

Lisa nodded, squinting at her with palpable curiosity.

She chose her bunker, and Teleported away after a few awkward seconds of standing in place with ribbons of purple energy swirling around her.

The plants inside the bunker burst to life before her, some of the thornspitters creaking awake to breathe in and examine her.

They promptly curled back up to rest after recognizing her scent as an ally, and she went to her backpack, taking out the binder she'd gotten from Alexandria, lit by the green-blue moss on the walls.

Sixteen hundred-something pages of information, on the world's strongest organisations. There wasn't enough money in the world to pay for something like this.

She teleported back, and Lisa stared at the binder in her hand with palpable dread.

"...How many pages is that?" Lisa asked warily.

"Sixteen hundred? Eighteen?" She shrugged, and extended it to Lisa. "An ally wrote this. Everything on Cauldron, the PRT, and powers in general. Abbreviated severely, of course."

Lisa's eyes widened, and she snatched the binder out of her hand, cradling it like a holy book as she gingerly opened the first page, slowly reading.

"Holy shit. Al- she wrote this… What the fuck." Lisa breathed out.

"I haven't read it yet. So, here you go. You wanted information regardless of the danger." She said dryly.

"This is uh… the equivalent of saying 'teach me how to swim' then getting thrown into the Mariana Trench." Lisa noted with a gulp, glanced up at her, then slowly nodded, eyes full of conviction. "Alright. I'll try to rush through it."

She smiled at her, and nodded back, then turned to Coil.

"Coil, I think I doubled your workload for the next week or two. Apologies. I'm going to go work on our base now. Give me a list of the PRT agents, where my lab is, where the equipment is for No- for Printer's time cage, and then we'll see what we do for those men's families. We can't make it right, but we can make it better." She said, practically to herself as the two Thinkers busied themselves with their current work.

She picked Evelynn and flew off, invisible, not waiting for a verbal reply.

Contrary to what she'd said, she took a moment to check on her first minions, and how they were doing.

She felt quite bad when she realized she only remembered Sile's name, honestly.

She felt less bad when she checked up on them and found them all doing well.

The black man who used to be a Merchant with a pedophilia problem now lived in a run-down but clean apartment, and though she couldn't for the life of her remember his name, she was glad he'd turned to religion and cleaned himself up. How he reckoned his faith with his past and his job of dealing Haze for her at Faultline's nightclub was beyond her, but it wasn't her business at this point. The scope of things had shifted too far for her to bother keeping up with her first humble beginnings.

Siles was skinnier, and was driving a truck for some company. She didn't spend the time to know more.

She teleported to her old Haze plants, beneath the Trainyards, and gathered all the plant bags full of crushed dried leaves, a giant mound of them, before quickly dumping a couple bags each to her minions' apartments.

Mostly to keep running the experiment. She had to get money from somewhere in the future, and since she was shutting down all of the hard drugs, the gun trade, the human trafficking, the dog fighting, and almost all of the protection rackets, their gangs' had started to go into the red, according to the budget reports. Accord's businesses were picking up the slack, as were Coil's few legal ventures and their astronomically successful gambling site, but they still needed to look forward for the future. Dealing minor drugs like weed and Haze was hopefully going to fill up the gigantic hole left behind by their far more illicit activities.

After that, she flew around Captain's Hill, which the Trainyards sat upon, and tried to figure out a general layout for what Coil had suggested.

Long tunnels were going to be a slight problem depending on their size, but she could… yeah, she could see some places where the elevation was high enough to conceal them, mostly on the lower left outskirts of the city near Shanty Town, as one drove up to Brockton from Boston.

It took the better part of two hours to have a general idea of what to do, but eventually, she found an empty plot of land right on the border of where the city ended and bushy wilderness split by highways began, around the back of the city. A cental location inside the hill, with branching tunnels outwards. It seemed perfect.

So, she made sure nobody could see her, and dropped to the ground, switching to Taliyah.

She straightened with a deep breath, feeling the earth breathe with her.

It was hard not to miss this ability, to feel and move the earth at a whim.

She tapped her foot, and the shrubbery and dried out tree ahead collapsed, roots tearing as the earth shoved to the side.

She moved into the hole, and with a tap of her heel, closed the tunnel behind her.

Moving stone and dirt wasn't nearly as difficult as compacting dirt into stone, so by the time she was done with the tunnel, it had to have been two miles long, fifteen feet tall and twenty wide, and two hours later.

Slight headache aside, the positive part of that was that the tunnel ran to directly underneath the Trainyards, about a hundred feet below the highest part of the hill.

From there, she had to dig down, and get a lot… noisier.

Mostly to conserve energy.

So, she dug a hole up to an abandoned warehouse in the Trainyards, and with rhythmic motions of her hands, shoved thousands of tons of dirt up into it, until it was bursting at the seams with compacted material, and her head felt like a boiling kettle, before pushing the dirt out further to form a giant mound, almost forty feet tall, just outside one of the warehouses.

Much of it was also so wet it would inevitably end up drying in the sun as clay, but she was in a hurry here, so she left it to deal with later.

The open space left behind in the hole was… arguably more of a cave than a base, so she got to work on smoothing it out. Less of a blob of void in the stone, and more of a shaped structure.

The end result took well over four hours, and when the pain had gotten to the level where it was hard for her to focus on anything but the headache, she had to stop, and call it good enough.

It was one gigantic rectangle, split into three fifty foot tall floors. A quarter mile long and a hundred fifty feet or so high, it should be able to accommodate ten times the amount of people they currently had with space left over.

The lower, first floor, was split into a docking bay for all their vehicles coming in from the main tunnel, before moving into general areas meant for training and sparring, whether melee or for a gun range, and finally, a large portion at the back as a placeholder for any future development.

In the corner of the placeholder section, she made a large downwards pocket room to house Noelle and the Tinkertech battery that would likely power everything until Coil got the plumbing and electrical sorted.

The second floor was mainly more sensitive things, like barracks, safes, containment rooms, large vents for airflow guarded by compacted rock grates of her own making, laboratories, and all manner of segmented rooms to be used for anything and everything.

The third was going to be empty space to be used for whatever they needed. Fifty feet high and plenty wide, it was enough for whatever they wished to do up there.

It was, of course, all somewhat rough around the edges. Using Shuriman air vent designs used for tombs and palaces was not quite up to the standard of modern, electric vents, neither in safety nor smoothness, and there was going to be a monstrous amount of unused space collecting dust until they moved everyone and everything in. Or massively expanded.

She also had put a ton of tiny tunnels running through every wall, for plumbing and electrical work, but it would still need to be done and inspected by professionals, which would take a while.

After adding two more tunnel entrances, to the left and right of the hill, as well as a few small escape tunnels for people only, she found herself satisfied.

In the meantime though, it was as safe and hidden as a base could be, creature comforts aside.

She double-checked everything for safety, and followed the main tunnel to outside, using earthen pillars to shuffle the toppled tree she had pushed aside back into place, laying sideways with its branches hiding the entrance.

It spoke volumes for how much more her soul could withstand than when she first started. She used to wipe herself out on a fifty foot bunker. Now she had made a monstrously large cave just a couple hundred feet away from it. 

She sent a simple message to Coil, and then Teleported back to her and Lisa's room, dropping Taliyah with only a moment of hesitation before scouring the nightstand for a pen and paper.

Then she focused on drawing runes, until her head had recovered a little, and the sun had crawled away beneath the sea.

Her phone's constant bugging eventually drew her out of her headache induced stupor, and she picked it up, flicking through the urgent notices.

She put the phone down, and focused on the Runes until her eyes slipped shut.

Lisa grumbled something into her shoulder as she huddled closer, practically asleep already.

She blinked slowly at the ceiling, slowly rubbing Lisa's arm, easily accepting the comfort offered by her presence.

The analog clock in the corner blinked '2:03 AM' insistently as what felt like lead weights kept pulling her eyelids down, and eventually, she went to sleep, purposefully ignoring the dread coating every shadow and every shuffle making her tense like a stone.

She dreamt of their HQ bursting into a trillion splinters and chunks of broken steel, herself and all proof of Runeterra's existence wiped out without a trace, not a moment to react.

She woke up with a sharp inhale, eyes shooting open, then moving down to her side, where Lisa was giving her a bleary, exhausted stare from her shoulder, cheek mushed into her collarbone.

No questions were asked, and eventually, Lisa settled down to sleep again.

Taylor didn't.

She wriggled out of her sister's grasp, if not in blood then in spirit, and rubbed at her eyes, elbows on her knees. She and Lisa only technically needed four hours of sleep due to the enchanted bracelets, so she should have felt much better about waking up on the early end of sunrise. With a quiet sigh, she moved the blanket back up to cover Lisa, up to her chin, then walked off to their main office, clicking through her phone.

Financial report… Citrine was back at Accord's side… Travellers were still helping him keep the peace, with minimal harm. Coil was checking in on things with the base and some inspectors he'd sent over. The tattoo artist was also finally picked. He'd either come in tonight, or she could go find him in his studio in an hour.

She stopped, and glanced up through one of the windows at the dimly lit morning, the sun not yet casting its rays between the squat rows of overgrown warehouses before the docks, hidden beneath the sea. Early morning air next to the sea smelled so nice. It was almost enough to make her forget about the minor annoyance of a still-persisting headache. It reminded her of Bilgewater mornings, up in the mountain temples and away from the slaughter docks. Just clean air, fog, and a sea stretching to the horizon. She had a lot of things to miss, despite the overall nightmare of her time in that world. Lots of things to reminisce about. Lots of people.

If she dwelled on any of it, she'd be here forever in a melancholic coma, so she focused on the present, the only thing that was certain, and real.

Breathing in, then out, letting herself relax just a little, she checked her phone again for the address. A bit early to be casting mana infusions, but this was a long time coming. She had to get much stronger, fast, and now that she had a day or two without anything horribly urgent to do, this was the time. Magical tattoos were an easy way to achieve and maintain that, when one's source of mana was literally endless. Her body's mana circuits could never handle that load, not without her dedicating years of her time, but alternative methods of casting like magical tattoos and artefacts were perfect for her situation.

Killing Spree's clones and fistfighting Lung again would also help, but whether or not she'd have time for those was uncertain at the moment.

She reached into their nightstand, and pulled out the giant bundle of drawings she'd made of the runic sequences she'd need, double-checking them.

Then she picked Evelynn and flew off to find the man's studio.

She raised a brow at the location, a mere sticker on an ankle-high window, and a suspiciously sturdy security door denoting it as any different from the other thousand abandoned basements in the city.

She was mildly pissed at how long it took her to find the place even when she had the address.

She squeezed herself in through the tiny door, eyeing the walls covered in asian-styled pictures of tattoo subjects, some in the style of Aleph Japanese comics, and most in more traditional styles.

The stairs were steep, and rattled as she went down.

A room came into sight, an eye-searing amalgam of countless tattoos, red walls hidden behind them, and searing light shining down onto a small dentist chair and a mobile workstation covered in art apparatus.

She eyed the man on the stool next to the tattoo machine, and he glanced at her with pitch black holes for eyes, every square inch of him aside from his face covered in tattoos and swirling designs. 

The eyes gave her pause.

"... You have powers?" She asked, and he smiled calmly, before shaking his head.

"I'm afraid not. It's just an eye tattoo. Wouldn't recommend the procedure, quite dangerous. And as you might have guessed, I need a lot more light to see things normally." He hummed, pointing above at the near-blinding fluorescent lights, wiping at his tattoo gun with a small cloth.

She nodded, and stepped off the metal steps, glancing around at the sparse furnishings.

"You do work for the ABB?" She asked, assuming both based on his location, and his race.

He didn't answer for a few seconds, before tiredly sighing, sweeping back his black, gelled hair, a habit more than a need it seemed, his piercings glinting in the light.

He worked his chiselled jaw for a moment, before tilting his head.

"Not willingly. They stopped forcing me a few weeks ago, oddly enough, but it's hard to get business from reputable, paying folk, when your reputation is 'the guy who gave Lung his tattoos'." He said, voice tribbling with bitter chuckles under his breath. "Part of why I took such an oddly specific, shady job. Now, let's ignore my financial and artistic troubles. Are you Coil's client?" He asked.

His voice was oddly soothing, she noted, as she flickered to her real self, and shrugged off her harness, beginning to unwind the laces holding the silk suit tight to her body.

"I'm Coil's client. I need you to give me the ink first, I have to do something to it."

"Will it change the chemistry and consistency of it?" He asked, still fiddling with his tattoo gun.

"No."

He hummed in acknowledgement, and picked up a small bottle of black ink, extending it behind him.

She took it, and glanced around.

"Do you have a backroom I can use?"

"Bathroom's in there." He replied, gesturing to the corner with his head.

Even the door was so covered in pictures it was practically camouflaged.

She pushed on the knob, and closed the door behind her.

The bathroom was predictably tiny. There was barely enough room to sit and stand between the sink and the toilet.

It would have to do.

She put the bottle on the kitchen sink, and picked Kassadin, the Void Walker.

Kassadin was a man she greatly admired. He lived his life cutting a burning swath through the darkest places of the world, knowing his days were numbered. A widely traveled Shuriman guide and adventurer, he had chosen to raise a family among the peaceful southern tribes when his village was consumed by the Void. He vowed vengeance, combining a number of arcane artifacts, forbidden technologies, and his own arcane might, for the struggle ahead.

Eventually, Kassadin had set out for the wastelands of Icathia, an ancient civilization of mages so powerful they used to be seen as gods, now nothing but rubble, ready to face any monstrous Void-construct in his search for their self-proclaimed prophet, Malzahar.

Somewhere near the end of the world, Kassadin had succeeded. Malzahar's primordial dagger hung from his waist as she inspected herself in the mirror.

Unfortunately, killing the Void's strongest pre-cog had been too little too late at that point. All the void needed was brute force, and they had it.

It had been one of the few great triumphs against the void though. She still remembered the satisfaction of her blade phasing through Malzahar's hood, the way he collapsed. The way she had twisted fate itself to give her a small window to deceive and trick Malzahar enough to get close to him. She remembered grasping the dagger that hung from his hip, and killing herself before the swarm of voidlings around her did. She remembered the uncountable enchantments holding her mangled body together bursting. She remembered Ryze stumbling upon the scene months later, no longer a hill but a crater of charred corpses, and sucking Kassadin's soul into the artifact.

She took a deep, deep breath, trying to force the memories away, the nostalgia, the pain and triumph, distancing herself.

This wasn't Runeterra, and she was here for a reason.

She hissed out a sigh through the respirator, the bathroom feeling half the size now. Every tiny shift made things inside her grind and pinch, tubes and artifacts and botched, dangerous spells humming away inside her like live bombs on a countdown long since reached but still ongoing. Her hooked pauldrons scraped the tiles raw with the tiniest shift, and she had to force herself half-sideways to not dig into the brick and make a ruckus.

Kassadin was not someone she wanted to dig out, mostly because he brought back… so many terrible memories.

Mostly of the Void.

She was too desensitised to everything to be genuinely traumatised anymore, but seeing Kassadin in the mirror brought forth nothing but a tide of horrific deaths and mindless ruination to her mind. Decades of watching her body and mind crumble bit by bit, held together by the arcane equivalent of unstable bombs and maddening vengeance, months of nothing but constant fighting, and fighting, and running, and killing and killing and killing and peeling voidlings apart, dominating them, perusing through their primitive minds with her own, infecting her sanity bit by bit to squeeze out even the tiniest hint of where Malzahar could be so she could go and gut him for what he was, for what he did.

It didn't evoke much emotion anymore, but the stone-cold numbness that overcame her when she thought of such things made her feel like a golem. Like a machine meant to kill and nothing more. And it was a spiral, because his memories brought forth the memories of other Legends.

Memories of Sivir, melting alive under a spray of acid, memories of Ezreal being injected with void crawler parasite eggs and left in a desert to be eaten alive from the inside out over the course of weeks, piles of rubble and corpses that reached for the tops of the treelines as cities and civilizations crumbled...

She took a steadying breath, mastering herself, emptying her mind to focus, focus on the simple task at hand.

Regardless of such memories, Kassadin was one of the few individuals on Runeterra who had enough raw mana to dwarf literal demigods , and he was a mage with unfathomably well-developed mana circuits through decades of constant use in neverending slaughter, contrasted to the power of an inherently mighty demigod who swung around their power with all the finesse of a drunk troll.

When enchanting, the former mattered more than the latter.

With a loud, hissing sigh from her respirator, she gingerly opened the ink bottle, picked it up, and turned it upside down, holding an open palm underneath it.

The liquid fell before slowly coming to a stop and shifting into a ball mid-air, moulding itself to the shape of her kinetic field, a floating orb of darkness, sloshing in place.

She put the bottle back down, and gingerly put the sharp point of her index finger into the orb, dipping into the ink.

She closed her eyes, focusing.

The form of the ink bloomed in her mind within her mana field, a writhing, slippery mass, and she grasped it, allowing her influence to seep into every atom through simple brute force.

Then, she flooded it with mana, enough to disintegrate a common mana crystal and poison a mage into an arcane fever so severe they would die screaming.

The liquid squirmed, boiled, turned to slush, shuddered, the laws of nature around it shifting chaotically.

Then, slowly, equilibrium came, phantom mana veins tingling with overuse along her chest and arm.

She breathed out, and opened her eyes, peering down at it through the eye holes of her headpiece.

The liquid looked the same, but to her senses, it was practically a shining star of potential energy.

Carefully, she picked up the bottle, and shifted her grip on the liquid, slowly pushing it upwards into the bottle's neck.

She turned it upside down, let go of the liquid, and turned the cap, neatly slotting the ink back into its container before dropping Kassadin for her real self, and opening the door.

The lights above slammed into her eyes like sledgehammers, and she froze, grimacing as she turned her gaze into a slit, a steady pain blooming behind her nose.

Fucking headaches.

One day she could relax.

"I can dim the lights if you wish. Hungover?" The man asked, his baritone soothing the pain a little.

She glanced at him, staring. Mostly appreciating how handsome he was, she wouldn't lie.

Then she grunted a negative, walked over to give him the ink which he accepted, and looked around for a moment, eyeing the coffee table in the corner.

"Sit with me, I need to show you the designs and how we're going to do this. It's not your usual tattoo. If you do it wrong or we don't work with each other, I could literally die ."

He slowly nodded, brows furrowed with intrigue as he got up from his stool, then dropped onto the floor pillow next to the coffee table.

She did the same.

Oddly comfy for being a pillow on a dirty floor.

She dug out her designs, carefully, and laid them out on the table.

Concentric runic circles, with diagrams, numbered sequences, and procedures, written in tiny letters all over the page.

"What's your name?" She asked, knowing full well she'd forget the moment she went out that door.

"Ito." He husked, leaning close to tilt his head at the first page.

She was once again reminded of teenage hormones due to how distracting that was, but she pushed it away with sheer annoyance, jutting a finger to the top left of the page.

"Each of these symbols and the frames have very specific purposes. Tiny errors in shape won't impact anything, but the sequence will. Follow the numbers, keep the frame lines straight. " She emphasized, giving him a look, and he met her eyes with a nod, interest gleaming in his black eyes.

"It shouldn't be too hard. You have a good sketching hand. And nice, tight skin." He mumbled.

… Far from the strangest compliment she'd ever received.

"Thanks. The diagram is understandable, right?" She asked, tapping at the page's margins.

He nodded.

"First frame goes along the center of the tailbone, second step is the odd… symbols, around the outer edges… yes, I believe I understand. If you see me doing anything wrong, do tell me though. How many pages are there?" He asked.

She used sleight of hand to spread them out like cards on the table, sweeping left to right.

"Eighteen... Hm. This will take us at least three days." He murmured.

She sighed in annoyance.

"Do it as fast as you can without sacrificing quality. Push yourself. I'll triple your pay if we finish by evening. If you can't do it, tell me now, because if I die, so will you."

He didn't reply, instead immediately getting up, and putting his gloves on with an eager sort of aggressiveness.

"Sounds like my kind of challenge." He said, weirdly pleased about the whole thing.

She took that as acceptance, and walked over to the scuffed, refitted dentist's chair, lying on her back as she undid her silk suit.