22 -||

They were cautious: neither Shen nor Lei Ling new exactly how their healing powers worked or how they would interact with, for example, sutures or broken bones. They had let the medical people bind up the injuries in the usual fashion, except with the Azeroth bandages. Those alone had produced swift and miraculous results, but if they weren't enough then they administered the healing potions, followed by the healing and purifying auras (to draw out infection.) Within the first hour they had nearly everyone there either fully mended or on the mend.

Including the elderly aboriginal lady Lei Ling was tending now. Relieved from the pain of her burns, the woman regarded her with kind if tired eyes. "You seem bit edgy around me and mine," she noted knowingly.

Lei Ling didn't meet her eyes. She focused on sorting the empty potion vials and putting them back in her bottomless belt pouch. "I'm not used to being around, um, people from other ethnic groups," she mumbled.

"Darkies, you mean." The old woman laughed at Lei Ling's jump and twitch. "Go on, I ain't offended. Got better things to do then spend all my time being offended by silly people." She harrumphed. "Got a few grand-nephews always complaining about how the British killed us, shot us, the British did this, the British did that-- like they were there a hundred years ago and it happened to them." She sniffed. "I was THERE. I went through a lot of what they yammer about. But I ain't about to waste the rest of my life beating on old graves. Might as well poison yourself as spend time hating on people." She looked over at Lei Ling and sighed. "I suppose though everybody's got somebody they hate on, and a pile o' half-assed excuses for doing it."

"...Yeah. My 'Family' wasn't exactly too open minded, either," Lei Ling said.

"Eh, you'll grow out of it," the woman said. "And what you don't, you'll learn to live with."

Lei Ling gave her a hesitant smile. "...Thanks."

There was a rumble; Lei Ling felt the ground tremble under her feet. A great deal of shouting started up outside. "The heck was that?" she exclaimed. She stuffed the last of her vials in her bag and ran for the exit.

Outside, the workers had all retreated off the dig and were now were clustered on the edges. Lei Ling saw 'Mick' and ran up to him, Shen close behind. "What happened?"

"Everything shifted," he summarized. "We had to clear out to keep it from caving in further." And killing the people still trapped beneath, his grim expression said the last silently.

Lok'Tara was on the far side of the pit, her dogs clustered anxiously around her. Her attention was fixed on the crumbled ruins below. "Mick, where's Fennek?" Shen asked, his voice full of foreboding.

"'E said there's still people alive down there," Mick said. "Him and those two ferrets o' his took a line and dove down into it." Mick's accent got thicker with worry. "'E sent word up, 'e found 'em, but now we gotta figure out a way to get 'em all out without crushing 'em."

Lei Ling felt inspiration hit. No, more than inspiration; a feeling that made the fur on her arms and neck stand on end--the feeling that she was born for this moment. "No problem, I got it covered," she said.

Mick held up a hand. "Whoa now, we've all seen your big rocky friend, but 'e's a bit too heavy to be climbing down there shifting stuff around."

"That's not what I'm going to do," she said. She pulled out several vials-- stamina, mana, intellect-- and downed them, then slapped several scrolls on herself to boot. She held up her hands. "Shen, hit me with whatever buffs you have, and keep them coming." Mana flowed from her hands, down into the dig and into the broken piles of rubble.

Once upon a time, Mick and his family had gone to a stage performance. Some exotic Cirque du Soleil sort of thing, a gymnastic performance of sorts. The lights would come up on stage, revealing a stand of trees, or a giant lotus blossom, or a human skull. Then as the music started, the performers would start to move and the trees or the skull or the giant lotus blossom would unfold, revealing it was a group of these gymnasts all along, grouped up and balancing on top of one another.

That was the closest he could come to describing what he saw happen that moment. For a brief heart stopping moment the rubble shifted again-- then it began not to slide and shift but to move, arms and legs and torsos forming out of rock and brick and broken wood and glass, humanoid forms unfolding from one another, standing, stretching and walking, ever so carefully, up out of the pit…

The red panda girl stood there, hands outstretched, brow furrowed in concentration, tail twitching, arms trembling. The male black-and-white panda planted his hands on her shoulders and bubbles of jade-colored light began pouring from him into her.

The workers cleared back as the craggy titans climbed up out of the foundations of the collapsed shopping center. Some of them were carrying the tragic remains of the Simurgh's victims; these the golems set down tenderly with the others, before trudging patiently over to the excavation piles the back hoes and bulldozers had made and tidily crumbling back into the broken rubble from which they had come.

This eerie parade went on for five minutes, ten, a quarter hour… the strain was showing on the panda girl's face, her partner was leaning on her as much as holding her up… then finally, the last three of the concrete giants stood up and stepped back, revealing a man, a woman, a little boy, and a fox-man and his two ferrets, alive and well.

Lei Ling dropped her arms; the golems walked a few more steps back then slumped over. An almighty cheer went up from all those watching, worker and rescuee alike. Lei Ling sagged to the ground with a moan, Shen close behind her.

"Gonna have to remember that trick," Shen said. He was aching like the juice had been squeezed out of his tissues.

"Remember not to ever do it again," Lei Ling retorted. "I don't even know the words for the parts of me that hurt..."

Her tone might have been grumpy, but there was no wiping the smile of satisfaction off her face.

Greg barely made it to the garbage can. For that matter he barely got his helmet off in time. He bent double over the bin and retched and heaved noisily, his hasty breakfast and even less well thought out lunch coming up in a rush.

"Are you okay, Vindicator?" Panacea said behind him.

Greg looked up at her. "I… I've never had to do anything like that before," he said weakly.

"Not too many people have," Panacea said, handing him a bottle of water. "Duct-taping someone's severed leg in place while someone else glues it back together isn't exactly a common first aid method."

 They'd sent Greg to the field hospital. Things were still hectic, hours after the Simurgh's attack. PRT troopers came on the hop, got their information (such as it was) and-- after a bit of debate over commlinks with persons unseen-- sent them to the field hospital. It had been set up here at the airport in expectation of thousands of injured, cape and civilian alike. Even though the miraculous early defeat of the Simurgh had left the hospitals in Canberra standing, the field hospital was having to handle the spillover.... there were plenty enough injured civilians to be getting on with. Fortunately Panacea was still there; she led Greg around, walked him through procedures. There was only so much she could do to brace the former basement-dwelling nerd for the gruesome realities of a hospital, field or otherwise.

Greg took the water gratefully. He rinsed and spit, then gulped down the rest. "And you do this all the time..." he marveled.

"Hey, don't feel too bad," Panacea said. "You got through all those injuries, right up to the severed leg. You held it in till you got the leg in place with those magic bandages of yours, and I got everything spliced back together. You even held out long enough to hit it up with that golden heal-light of yours for good measure. THEN you ran for the chunder bucket." She grinned at him.

"So you did better YOUR first time?" he challenged, a little needled.

Her smile disappeared. "My first time was my Trigger event," she said. "I was holding Vicky's guts in place after she took a shotgun to the belly." She got VERY sober. "It's how we found out her invulnerability can be knocked out. Blam, no problem. Blam Blam, big problem."

Greg cringed. "Sorry."

"It's okay… do you need a mask?"

Greg laughed. "I'm nobody, Panacea. Who'd recognize me?" He donned his helmet again. His eyes glowed blue through the eyeslits.

Panacea looked upset at that for some reason. She started to say something when there was a whoosh and Glory Girl landed next to them. "Hey Ames, Vindy," she said.

"Please don't call me Vindy," Greg muttered in his helmet.

"Where've you been?" Amy said.

"Helping with cleanup-- clearing blocked streets, mostly," Vicky said. "Grubby work." One wouldn't know it to look at her pristine white uniform, though… one of the advantages of a personal force field, Greg supposed. "Hey, could you guys do me a favor?"

"Depends. What?" Amy said, hand on her hip.

"There's a little girl on the other side of the field hospital," she said. "Just a few chunks of gravel in her arm; the field meds already cleaned it up and bandaged it buuuuut..." she gave them an impish smile. "I sorta promised her she'd get to meet her favoritest new hero..."

"Me??" Amy said in surprise.

"Sorry, sis, not this time." Amy deflated a bit. Vicky spun about in mid air and booped Greg with a fingertip on his helmet right where his nose would be. "Yyyyyou."

Greg felt his jaw working. "Me?? But… I haven't… really done anything!"

Vicky rolled her eyes. "Says the guy that smacked Lung in the mush with a sledgehammer," she said. "She's apparently gaga over knights and dragons and wizards and stuff. She saw you clanking about when they brought her in and she's been busting at the seams to meet you." She cocked an eyebrow. "Well?"

Greg suddenly felt a twinge of self-consciousness. "If… Panacea, would you mind coming along? I--"

Amy gave him a wry smile. "Sure, all the heavy work's done here." The potions, scrolls and bandages the Warcrafted had contributed had lightened Panacea's burden considerably. "Wouldn't hurt my PR to finish up fixing her arm, anyway."

Greg sighed and shrugged. "Lead the way, I suppose..."

Those who had been patched up, but not yet seen Panacea or one of the other Cape healers, had been moved to a row of recovery tents. Vicky led them to the last one in the row and pulled the door flap aside. "May I introduce you to Miss Olivia Walker," she said with a little flair. "Olivia-- allow me to present my sister, Panacea, and her friend, Vindicator the Paladin."

Greg and Amy stepped inside. Inside was a little pigtailed, brown haired girl lying in a medical cot. A woman (Greg guessed it was her mother) was sitting in a folding chair next to her. The little girl had her left arm bandaged from fingertip to shoulder, and was wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon unicorn prancing across it. The moment she saw Greg's armored form step into the tent, her eyes went round as saucers. Greg started to stutter. He was definitely not used to having anyone look at him with such reverence, no matter what age.

Panacea spoke up. "Hello, Mrs. Walker I presume?" Amy was a lifesaver, Greg thought with relief... "We had a spare moment so I thought I'd step in and take a look at Olivia's arm?"

"O-of course, yes," the tired-looking woman said. "Thank you!"

"It's no problem." Panacea knelt down next to Olivia. "Olivia, I'm going to fix up your arm, okay? It may go all numb and tingly for a bit, but it won't hurt a bit, I promise." Olivia, still wide eyed and open mouthed and staring at Vindicator, merely nodded. Amy gently pulled the bandage aside and placed her fingertips against the skin underneath. Greg could see her slipping into the state of meditation that she used when she was using her power. He could see Olivia's arm relax, and her narrow shoulders un-tense-- she must have been in a bit of pain.

Greg knelt down on the other side of the cot. He thought back quickly to his roleplaying days and channeled one of his favorite 'Knight Errant' characters. Thank God he'd played so much Dungeons and Dragons... "Greetings, Olivia," he said. "I heard you wished to meet me?"

Olivia nodded so energetically the barettes in her pigtails rattled. "A real live knight, wow," she breathed. He saw her mother smother a smile behind her hand.

"Alas, though I am a Paladin, I am yet to be properly knighted," Greg said. "But I will serve as a Champion all the same if need be."

Olivia reached out her free hand to run it over Greg's gauntlet, fascinated by the gleaming metal. "Why are you in a hospital?" she said. "Shouldn't you be out battling monsters and stuff?"

"I can do other things, too," Greg said. "I can heal as well." He held out a cupped hand and filled it with Light. Olivia cooed appreciatively. "Though nowhere near as well as the fair Lady Panacea." Amy said nothing, but he saw a faint smile curl the corners of her mouth. "I heard there were people in need, and thought it worthy to come lend what little aid I could."

Olivia nodded again seriously. "That makes sense." She scrutinized his helmeted face. "Have you ever slain a dragon?"

"Slain a dragon?" Greg blinked at that one. Then he remembered and grinned. "Well, no, not yet. I did smack one in the face with my warhammer, though." He produced the hammer and let her look it over.

"Cooool." Olivia traced her finger over her reflection in the metal. "Didja knock his block off?"

Greg couldn't help chuckling. It echoed inside his helmet. "No. But my good friend Shar'Din the Wizard turned him into a sheep."

"Really?" Olivia giggled.

"Really. You should have seen him-- oh, he was the angriest little sheep in the world. BaaaaAAAaaah!" he imitated the rage-suffused Lung the Sheep, grimacing theatrically and pawing the air, his hands fisted to look like hooves. Olivia pealed with laughter. Even Amy and Olivia's mother giggled at that one.

"Well, that should take care of that," Panacea said. She pulled a pair of bandage scissors out of her belt and cut the wrapping off of Olivia's arm, revealing whole, unblemished skin beneath. She tossed the bandages and the severed stitches into the waste bin. "Good as new."

Olivia touched her arm, then flexed it. "Thank you," she said with a gap toothed smile.

"Yes, thank you so much. I know it was a trivial thing but--"

"The injuries were easy enough to fix," Amy said. "No sense in making Olivia go through weeks of discomfort when a moment would heal it up."

"Again, thank you." Olivia's mother took Amy's hand and patted it in gratitude. "Are you ready to go home, honey?"

"Uh huh." Olivia hopped off the cot and started to follow her mother out of the tent. She stopped, then turned back to Vindicator. Her smile was missing and she was biting her lip worriedly. "Mr. Vindicator?"

"Yes?" Greg said.

"If… if the Simurgh comes back..." She almost whispered it, her eyes liquid with fear. "Will you and your friends come back and beat her again?"

Greg thought his heart would wrench in half. He did the only thing he could think of. He took her hand in his own metal-clad one and looked her in the eyes through the slit in his helmet.

"I SWEAR it," he said fervently. For a brief moment, golden light shone through the seams of his armor.

"Sydney."

Flash.

"Hong Kong."

Flash.

"Mt. Fuji."

Flash.

"New Delhi."

Flash.

"Rome."

Flash.

"London."

Flash.

"Toronto..."

This, Strider decided, was BORING. About an hour ago they'd buttonholed him to take this new elf-looking Cape on a literal whirlwind tour of the major stops around the world, so he could "learn" them and be able to open portals to them. And it wasn't a lightning fast process either. At every stopoff, the kid would go a few steps, pull a chunk of quartz crystal or something out of his belt pouch (dang big belt pouch, considering all it seemed to hold) and do a little song and dance for a few minutes. Then he'd open a quick portal back to Canberra, look through, nod, say "Got it" and hop back next to Strider for the next leg of the trip.

He wouldn't have minded the delays… well, not as much… but the weird little ritual at each stopoff was setting off his freak-o-meter something fierce. The robes, the staff (which was kind of cool looking, he had to admit), the whole shtick just screamed of a Cape who thought his powers were 'magic.' He'd dealt with Myrddin, the self-proclaimed "wizard" of Boston, more than a few times and the whole superstitious claptrap drove him up a wall. Strider had spent a good bit of time in college earning a liberal arts degree, and he'd studied enough logic and rhetoric that he could make a hobby of listing off the fallacies some of the more egregious "mages" in the Cape community made to justify their thinking. Myrddin, for example, had turned Begging the Question into a veritable art form...

The fact that complex geometric patterns and formulas in some strange text appeared to hover around the elf-guy's hands as he worked only made him think the guy was REALLY reaching.

"Hey, Shar-whatever," he finally said on their stopover in a corner of Berlin. "So what are you doing here, exactly?"

Shar'Din didn't pause, he continued moving the glowing numbers and symbols around in the air. "Calculating," he said. "planetary signs, lunar cycle, dominant ley lines..."

"Ley Lines? Lunar cycle? I thought so. This is supposed to be MAGIC, right?" Okay, maybe he was being a bit of an ass, but "sorcerers" got his goat. He couldn't resist tweaking them.

The blonde 'elf' paused briefly at that. "Well, yeah, some people might call it that… but sufficiently advanced whatever, you know?" He turned back to his work.

"Astrology isn't science, sufficiently advanced or otherwise," Strider snorted.

"Who said anything about astrology?" Shar'Din said. "Dude, I'm ripping time and space a new one trying to open a stable portal halfway around the world on a MOVING PLANET. Don't you think knowing the rotational and orbital speed of the earth and the gravitational effect of the sun, moon, and local planets MIGHT be kind of important to the equation?"

Strider huffed. "I never had to muck around with all that," he said.

"Yeah, but your sh-- your power does it all for you," Shar'Din said. "Some of us don't get easy short cuts." He lowered his arms and the equations disappeared into the chunk of quartz at his feet. "I mean sure, over short hops I can fudge most of this, but once you start getting to planetary scale you gotta start dotting your i's and crossing your t's. Go from the North Pole to the Equator without making the right adjustments and you splat into a wall at literally a thousand miles an hour." He shrugged. "Or you get a thousand mile an hour wind blowing in your face out of your portal… and that's just the easy part of the math."

Strider was feeling properly chastened now. "So you don't really believe all this hocus pocus claptrap," he said, waving his hand and indicating Shar'Din's appearance, attire, et al. "You know you're not really a magical elf--"

"Uh, no. I'm an elf. A Sindorei, a blood elf. And no, not like a vampire. Long story. And yeah, magic."

"There's no such thing as magic," Strider sighed, longsuffering. "Or elves for that matter."

"You bet that hat on that?" Shar'Din said, grinning. He picked up the quartz-- actually levitated it off the ground-- and stuck it back in his belt pouch. "Fifty years ago there was no such thing as superheros and supervillains except in comic books, and the only giant kaiju running around were rubber suits on movie sets. There was no such thing as alternate worlds either, and now we've got trade agreements with another Earth. If there's another Earth, why not one more, one where there are elves?"

"That's pleading from ignorance," Strider pounced.

The blonde elf stopped and seemed to square up. "Okay, look dude, I haven't got a fancy education, so I don't even know what that means," he said. "Other than you know a lot of fancy terms and words and like to throw them around to show how smart you are.

"But that's what it all comes down to, isn't it? Terms and words and phrases. And they don't mean nothing. What do you mean by the word 'magic?' Do you know how many words in science are just fancy, smart sounding ways to say 'I don't know?'

"You ask them why if like charges repel one another, why all the protons in an atom don't fly apart. They say 'the Weak Force.' Which is just science geek shorthand for "Heck if we know." They say there's not enough matter in the universe, you ask them where it is, they say 'dark matter.' Which they can't see or detect or even find. What was that about invisible pink unicorns again? So, guess what, where's the rest of the universe? "Heck if we know." You ask 'what makes everything that goes up, come back down" and they say "gravity" and you ask them what gravity is and they say "the force that makes things fall down." "Gravity" is just another word for "Heck if we know." It's all, all circular reasoning posing as explanations, but because it uses sciencey words everyone thinks it explains everything.

"You have powers that can do crazy, impossible things whenever you want. Myrddin has powers that let him do crazy, impossible things whenever he wants. Neither of you has a clue how they work or what they are. Myrddin calls his 'magic,' you call yours-- well whatever you call yours-- and you might as well both be calling it phlebotinum, or oobleck, or bingo bango bongo boingo, for all the difference it would make. You're not smarter than him or anybody else for using different words to describe something neither of you really understand." He pulled his robes around him and stood in place next to Strider. "Next stop?"

"New York," Strider muttered. Toronto disappeared in a flash of light and was replaced by the New York skyline.

Strider's hobby of needling people didn't seem quite as much fun as before.

Hemlokk was feeling about as useful as the "G" in "Lasagna." She had expected Bayleaf to stay with her, to help with familiarizing the rescue crews with the Warcrafted equipment they had brought. But no, before she could even ask, Bayleaf had been buttonholed by Armsmaster and the local director to come up to the command center that had been set up (how apropos) in the airport traffic control tower. Tattletale, Grue, and Aisha aka "Mama Crow" had trundled off after them, their home-brewed commlink equipment in tow. Now Hemlokk was busy dealing with the crew leaders-- medical, search and rescue, repair and demolition, sanitation, fire and emergency-- explaining, in exhausting and overly picky detail, precisely how the potions, scrolls, stat buffing gems, tinkerbots, gnomish gadgets, azerite first aid bandages, and other gear they had brought along worked and was to be used.

She was also running up against an unexpected consequence of the unique… style of Azeroth science; arbitrary skepticism. She found herself hard pressed to convince people that yes, little flasks of ruby colored liquid could heal, or that a scroll of inked parchment could boost mental clarity. Even if she'd possessed the language to describe the process whereby the inscriptionist used higher formulae to quantum-entangle the parchment to an energy infused collapsed fractal tessaract, it would have been utter gibberish to the people she was addressing. None of that should have mattered, they'd been SHOWN it worked!

"I don't have time for all this crystal waving nonsense," the doctor she was speaking to was saying for the umpteenth time. " We're packed to capacity. And I can't have my staff walking around wearing ridiculous looking "bling" while doing their work!"

"Look, if it helps, it's just really exotic tinkertech--"

"New untested 'tinkertech.' My confidence soars."

Hemlokk finally snapped. "Doctor House, you are chief of staff at one of the biggest hospitals at Canberra. Your staff have been on your feet twenty-four hours, your superiors do NOT want you using stimulants to keep going, and since you refuse to get out of my way and sign off on these potions, scrolls and rings for your staff without PROOF, you're going to GET it right here and right now." She held up a ring with a rather large yellow stone in its setting. "Now put this ring on, or God so help me, I'll give you a Prince Albert and make you wear it THAT way!"

Dr. House's eyes went wide. He backed up a step. "Now wait a minute here--"

Hemlokk pulled out one of her daggers. The razor-sharp tip gleamed in the light. "Your choice, your finger or your dick!" she snarled.

He quickly took the ring and slid it on his middle finger. He did a double take. "Did it just resize-- HOO!" He blinked and staggered back, catching his balance. He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair.

"Doctor?" One of the nurses said.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," he said. He paused. "Actually, I'm better than fine. Sakes alive, that was like forty cups of coffee at once. Hoo!" he shook his head again. "Fine, fine. I'll run this crate to Calvary Bruce..."

He left without so much as a thank you.

Hemlokk sighed and leaned against the stack of crates, her head resting on the top lid. "Tough job?" the lady at the airport counter said.

"I am spending way too much time convincing people that this stuff actually works," Hemlokk said. "The doctors, the paramedics, the Capes, the PRT rank and file… every step of the way some bureaucrat nitpicker, skeptic or paranoid is getting in my way, keeping me from just handing this stuff out and getting done with it! We live in an age where teenage girls can levitate buildings with their fingertips and flying men shoot lasers out of their hands. Lasers that turn corners! This is beyond arbitrary skepticism, it's arbitrary stupidity!"

The lady at the reception counter came over and looked in the boxes. "Well, it's probably that it all looks so… video-gamey." Hemlokk raised her head and looked at her, puzzled. "You know," the woman went on. "Like something out of a roleplaying game. I mean," she picked out one of the potion bottles and held it up. "Healing potions? Scrolls? Magic rings and necklaces? The healing potions are even red and in little round flasks. Right out of Final Fantasy, that." She held the bottle up to the light and swirled it. "Why are healing potions always red?"

"Dunno, I never thought about it," Hemlokk confessed, looking into the excelsior-lined box. "The stronger ones use entirely different ingredients, I can tell you that much, so they should be a little different in color at least… hm."

Hemlokk's intercom suddenly buzzed. She tapped her earpiece. "What is it Mama Crow?" she said.

"Hemlokk, you better get to the air traffic tower ASAP," Aisha said, her voice low and urgent. "I'm calling in anyone else who can move. Things are about to get hairy."

"What is it?" Hemlokk said, her hackles prickling in alarm at Lisa's tone.

"Bayleaf's here with us in the Command Center. And-- take a look out the window and check out who just arrived." Hemlokk glanced up. Standing in the lobby, she had a clear view out the glass front of the building. Swooping in out of the sky was a very familiar figure.

"Alexandria," Taylor whispered. The leader, behind closed doors, of the Triumvirate and of the Protectorate and (illegally) of the PRT. One of the most powerful Capes on earth. A stone-cold killer, And one of the top guns of the secret organization Cauldron… who her boyfriend had all but declared war on by blowing the bejeezus out of their secret base.

Someone had arranged for Alexandria and Adrian to be in the same room together. Whatever was about to happen was NOT going to be good.

"I'm on my way." She shut off her commlink and disappeared from the lobby in a puff of indigo smoke, reappearing a few hundred feet away behind one of the rescue workers (scaring the pee out of the unlucky fellow) as she began teleporting behind one person after the next, hop-scotching her way to the aircraft control tower.

Bayleaf looked around the glassed-in room. It was packed full of Capes (well, one assumed from all the spandex) and PRT officers. Most were around computers or communication equipment of one sort or another. Wasn't that keeping air traffic snarled up? What particular logic led them to conclude taking over an airport's nerve center for this mission was a good tactical idea, he wondered?

The belief that the Simurgh would have destroyed Canberra by now and there would be NO air traffic. Right, Bayleaf corrected himself. Probably too late and too much of a logistical nightmare to move the post-op command center somewhere else... "So where's the rest of you?" he asked Armsmaster idly.

"The majority of the Brockton Bay Capes returned already," Armsmaster said. "Endbringer truce or no, it's inadvisable to leave the city without an organized hero presence."

"And the villains and rogues all returned to try and take advantage of your absence, got it," Bayleaf said dryly.

"Either that or sleep it off," Armsmaster said, with an almost-smile-like quirk to his lips. "The Simurgh's early withdrawal was a cause for a lot of local celebration, and the locals were rather liberal in sharing their alcohol with heroes and villains alike."

Bayleaf chuckled as he got the picture. Even in this world Australian beer had a reputation for kicking the arse of the unprepared, and after the wounded Simurgh fled anyone with a cape or mask who walked into an Aussie billabong probably got plied with enough beer to fill a bathtub. The mental image of Kaiser with a XXXX Gold hangover was an amusing one.

"I am here largely to coordinate the efforts to secure the various tinkertech the Simurgh left behind, particularly the… the techs are referring to it as a 'Star Gate'," Armsmaster explained. "As is Dragon. Though she is also lending a great number of her robotic construction vehicles to aid with the cleanup. Most of the Wards are back home as well, with the exception of Clockblocker and Vista. Their powers are already incredibly useful in disaster aftermath work, but those power-projecting ray guns you gave them have made them indispensable. They're working together in the Northeast quadrant, helping clear debris."

Lisa and Aisha in the meanwhile had commandeered a table and chairs for their own setup. Some of the older Thinker capes looked disgruntled at being crowded by a couple of teens (though none looked eager to make much noise, with Grue standing there behind them in his skull-helmeted glory, his thick arms crossed across his chest.) One of them managed to muster a little snark. "A little late to the party, ain't you kid?"

Aisha started to make a sarcastic crack but Lisa stopped her. "You're still here," she pointed out. "And you're a little quick to judge what we can contribute, aren't you?"

"We're unraveling the single biggest rout against an Endbringer ever," another cape said. "So what makes you think you have something to contribute here?"

Tattletale held up a thumb drive. The smirks she and Aisha were sporting weren't inhibited by their masks in the least. "Oh, the fact that we're on the team of the Tinker who created the Simurgh blockers?" she said. She waggled the thumb drive. "And we have all his notes and specs with us?"

"I have notes?" Bayleaf murmured in surprise.

"You scribble them down everywhere, on dang near anything and everything," Aisha muttered to him. "Lisa just collects 'em up. I had to spend an hour helping her computer-scan a stack of takeout napkins."

THAT certainly set the cat among the pigeons. "You know the guy who made those??"

Still smirking smugly, Aisha and Lisa stood on either side of Bayleaf and waved their hands toward him. "Ta freakin' Dah," Aisha said.

Things got very exciting for quite some time after that.

Bayleaf had expected to drop off the team Thinker and then slip away to see where he could help. Now he was being mobbed by people desperate to shake his hand, to show him the duplicated 'Simurgh Blocker' they had attached to their cowls, hoods, masks or helmets, that they wore next to their watches or inside their coats… Dragon-- or at least one of her smaller, remote suits was there. "We know we jumped the gun, producing these without your permission," she apologized.

"No, it's fine, needs be as the devil drives and all that--" Bayleaf stammered, a little dazed.

"That's gracious of you," Dragon said. "But I do want to sit down and hash out an agreement to produce these devices in bulk. I would like to see them in every major city--"

"How did you figure out how to block the Simurgh's broadcast?" Armsmaster said. "What was the clue, the data that--"

"I didn't!" Bayleaf blurted out. "I wasn't trying to make a Simurgh-blocker." The "Whaaaat?" in response was pretty much universal. "It was designed to help a friend of mine who was having trouble controlling her Stranger aura--"

"You mean Glory Girl?" Armsmaster pressed. Whups. Bayleaf's 'guilty puppy' face gave that one away completely.

"Wait," Dragon said. She did not seem surprised; more that she was giving him a chance to clarify. "Are you saying that these devices can block more than just the Simurgh… it can block other Stranger effects? maybe even all Stranger effects completely?"

"I don't know," Bayleaf confessed. "They haven't been tested. I didn't expect them to affect the Simurgh in the first place--" but Dragon's words had set off an uproar that drowned him out.

The next couple of hours was spent in a great deal of commotion as handshake agreements were worked out, testing schedules--- for the Simurgh blocker and any other interesting toys that Skinwalker and the other Warcrafted might have-- were tentatively agreed to; schematics and blueprints were passed back and forth, other Tinkers and Thinkers who hadn't made it to Canberra were contacted by internet…

It was in the midst of all this that Alexandria arrived. She strode into the room, the crowd parting before her, her black and gray costume and dark half-helmet recognizable to anyone. She ignored the salutations from every quarter, never taking her unsmiling gaze off of the wolf-man in the middle of the room.

Bayleaf saw her at the same moment she saw him. He went absolutely still, his hackles rising and his muscles swelling as his powers responded to the overwhelming sense of danger, trying to pump up his worgen form even more…. Fruitlessly, the thought crossed his mind. Forget the same league, he wasn't even in the same zip code as her power level. She was allegedly capable of lifting millions of tons. She could fly multiple times the speed of sound, from a standing start. Till she had been injured by the Siberian it had been believed she was utterly invulnerable. She was also one of Cauldron's most ruthless agents, and she was here in a closed-in room with him. And the expression on what he could see of her face would have chilled his blood, even if he'd seen it on the face of a mere mortal.

My enemy is Silver Age Superman, and she has PMS, Bayleaf thought. "Alexandria," he said, fiercely struggling to keep his voice pleasant and steady.

She stopped just out of arm's reach of him, hands on her hips. "Skinwalker," she said. "The man of the hour, it seems." Her voice was calm. Bayleaf wasn't fooled; he could literally smell the killing rage on her. She had clearly come here hoping to catch a dangerous enemy of Cauldron away from his base of power and deal with him. Perhaps with a skillfully arranged 'accident' in one of the Search and Rescue sites…

But it wasn't going to happen today. She was, along with all her other ridiculously unfair advantages, a hyper-cognitive Thinker; from the moment she'd walked in the room she'd sized up the lay of the land at the speed of thought, and realized the situation. She had the frustrated air of a cat who had realized the caged canary was truly, inviolably out of its reach.

"Indeed," Armsmaster said… though he didn't sound particularly happy about it. "Skinwalker is the Tinker responsible for inventing the Simurgh blocker."

"What's more, it seems the device may be effective against several forms of Master/Stranger effects… possibly even universally," Dragon practically gushed.

Either she feigned it well, or Alexandria was genuinely surprised. "A universal anti-Master/anti-Stranger filter?" she asked.

"We've arranged field tests at one of my laboratories," Dragon said. "I at the least am hopeful..." she muttered something about 'that bastard Heartbreaker right in my back yard' but it was drowned out by the clamor of voices.

"Mass production in the offing.."

"Every Protectorate and PRT base supplied..."

"… Hope to improve and perfect those giant field generators..." Armsmaster said.

Adrian could feel her eyes boring into his own from behind her helmet's visor. All right lady, your play. "Ladies and gentlemen," she said in a voice that demanded respect. "If I could, I'd like to speak to Skinwalker here for a moment? Privately? There are some sensitive issues..."

Director Bays nodded. "Certainly, of course-- there's a room in back--"

Good play. Bayleaf followed the superheroine into the back-- was it a storeroom of some sort? There were a few metal shelves, but it was empty-- and let the door click behind him. He hadn't missed Lisa and Aisha frantically fiddle-faddling with their "portable commnet" setup out of the corner of his eye.

The commlinks the Warcrafted used had more than just earbuds and throat mikes plugged into their 'cellphones;' they had audio microphones and discreet, pinhead-sized optical fiber camera lenses. As he turned about to close the door behind him, discreetly as he could he turned the pickup on the voice mike as high as it would go. Aisha and Lisa would hear (and hopefully record) every single word.

Alexandria turned to face him, hands on hips, standing akimbo. "Man of the hour," she said. "You must think you're completely untouchable right now, with everyone going nuts over that Simurgh-blocker you invented." Her voice was smooth and calm, and as full of menace as a viper's hiss.

"Actually I'm surprised," he said casually as he faced her. "You didn't have Doormaker open a portal under my feet the instant I stepped inside. Out of practice abducting people?"

Alexandria's lip curled sourly. "Doormaker refuses to open a portal anywhere within miles of you," she said. "Something about you, or your tech, scrambles Clairyvoyant's power, and Doormaker is quite protective of him. I have to go to incredible lengths with detours and workarounds anywhere in the Boston area thanks to you."

"Poor thing. Trampling the law underfoot is so demanding, isn't it Chief Director." Adrian was angry and he intended to stay angry. Keeping it on a slow simmer was the only way he was going to keep himself from letting his fear show.

"You're hardly going to provoke a reaction from me about breaking the law, Adrian," she said calmly. Adrian's hackles prickled; there it was, the casual name drop, just to let him know that they knew. "Not with you being as careless with the law yourself."

"Oh I hardly expected to strike a nerve with your law-breaking. That would require you believe in the law. It would require you believe in anything. And you haven't believed in anything since the day Doctor Mother found you in a children's hospital and had you trade your chemo in for a magic test-tube."

He could see the frisson of suppressed fear that ran through her when he let that little detail of her past slip. Can dish it out but can't take it, he thought. She doesn't LIKE being the one having HER secrets pried into. It was smothered out by the spark of anger that came with it. "Everything I have done has been for the good of humanity," she said, a trifle harshly.

"...she eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness," Bayleaf quoted, giving her a contemptuous smile. "You've been providing cover for murderers, rapists, serial killers… hell, you've been working alongside them in your super-secret Cauldron base... because Mommy Doctor thought they might be useful. Your hands are wet with all sorts of blood."

She seemed to swell up. "I want answers, Skinwalker," she said.

"It's nice to want things, isn't it?" he said.

"Don't even try to play with me, Skinwalker. How did you find out about Cauldron, Smith?" she said. "How did you track Contessa? How are you blocking our precogs and thinkers?" She glared at him, hands on her hips.

"Not telling, Didn't need to, and none of your business, in that order." He stood with his arms crossed, unsmiling.

She ground her teeth together hard enough to make diamonds. "You are meddling with things a smart man would leave well enough alone, Smith," she said, her voice low and dangerous. "You are already on our shit list. You are NOT untouchable. You would be SMART to tell me what I want to know or--"

"Or what?" he said. "You'll kill me? Maim me? Threaten my loved ones? Kill a few of them and show me the bodies to break me? Hey, you're already Cauldron's bitch, might as well go the full Monty, right?" His eyes narrowed. "You've killed, kidnapped people and experimented on them, thrown innocents in prison, given aid and comfort to murderers, rapists and molesters… Is there any principle or moral you didn't whore out on Mommy-Play-Doctor's orders?"

"You self-righteous prick!" she seethed. For a brief moment she lost control, her rage at being called out coming forth. "We're trying to save the world from total destruction. Everything we've done has been for that! Humanity has to survive!"

"Humanity has to be worthy of survival," Skinwalker shot back. "What kind of a world will be left, after you and your lord and masters remake it? After all the billions are dead and the only ones left are the ruthless and brutal and amoral-- like you? How long will that world last before the barbarian remainder falls on one another and humanity finally devours itself?

"Because that's just the world Doctor Mother is going to build. A brutish, barbaric world just like the one she lived in before a giant monster from space fell on it."

She stepped closer, trying to loom. He was more than a foot taller than her; it didn't quite work. "Where are you getting all your information?" she snarled. "Who's feeding you data on our operation?"

"From sources I'm not going to reveal," he said calmly. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you, and I couldn't care less if you do."

"You are threatening everything we've done with your childish games--"

"Note my tears of remorse."

"You think you're untouchable right now. You figure Cauldron can't do anything right now because you made it a little harder to track you; because you're currently useful for fighting the Endbringers. I'm not above taking care of you. I could snap your neck with my fingers in the time it takes you to blink, Adrian Smith," she said icily. "And I will take care of you…you, and those associated with you... permanently if need be, if you don't start getting a little more cooperative."

"You could but you're not about to," Bayleaf said.

"And you know that because?-- urk!" Alexandria's mouth fell open slackly.

He glanced down. "Because of the six or so inches of Ghost Iron sticking out just below your sternum," he said.

Wisps of indigo smoke drifted around her from behind. "Now, bitch," a husky female voice purred in Alexandria's ear. "Let me explain some things to you. I've already stabbed you through nerve points in your shoulders and hip joints. That's what that spreading burning and numbness is. Your arms are paralyzed for the next fifteen minutes or so, your legs locked. One of my blades is now stuck through your torso. I have the tip of another planted at the base of your skull. If you so much as twitch the wrong way, I will drive one into your cerebellum and slice the other up through your heart." A whiskered muzzle filled with teeth brushed against Alexandria's cheek. "Do NOT test me."

Alexandria rolled her eyes down to look at the blade sticking out of her. "H-how…?"

Bayleaf smiled humorlessly. "Like I said, Ghost Iron. Or, well, ghost steel azerite alloy, but that doesn't roll off the tongue as easily. Hello, beautiful. Spectacular timing."

"Glad I'm not fashionably late."

"Anyway, Ghost Iron has some interesting properties… as you can probably feel. My lovely Hemlokk's blades can slice through damn near anything-- including your nearly indestructible costume, obviously-- but they do not cut living flesh. Of course they have nasty side effects from passing through it… burning pain, followed by prolonged numbness and paralysis--- but you knew that." He smirked at Alexandria; it was all fangs. "So before you get clever and try anything, I want you to think what the effect will be of paralyzing someone's heart. Or driving a nerve signal disrupting blade into their brain. Which is what will happen if you try anything."

"Long version short: don't," Hemlokk growled.

"See, this is your Road to Damascus moment, Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown. The moment when you get the fear of Jesus put into you, and you go on your merry way with a whole new message. About exactly what it is I and my friends can do. I'm going to tell you why you and the rest of Cauldron should stay the hell out of our business, and pray to God we don't decide to get in yours.

He leaned in. "I know how to kill you."

"That's right," he said. He wasn't smiling, he wasn't even threatening. He was speaking as if he was saddened, as if he had a message to deliver and this was the only way to get it across. "I know how to kill you, Alexandria. I also know how to kill the Slaughterhouse Nine, all of them-- starting with the Siberian. I also know how to kill the Simurgh, and the Leviathan, and the Behemoth, and their seventeen brothers and sisters waiting in the wings. And I've got a pretty good lead in on how to kill Scion too.

"We are going to beat all your little monsters. We are going to root out all your corrupt little conspiracies. We are going to defeat Scion. We are going to save the world, and we're going to keep our souls while we do it. And we are NOT going to tolerate you and your band of stupid little idiots getting in our way."

 "Get in our way… try to bully, blackmail, intimidate or terrorize us or ours again… EVER… and we will find you and END YOU."

The Ghost blades were yanked out of her body. She staggered back and found herself leaning against the wall for support, her arms dangling limply and her legs locked in cramped spasms, half bent, beneath her. "I suggest you leave," Bayleaf told her. " Your arms and legs will work again in a few more minutes, but you should be able to fly without them... We'll make your apologies to everyone else, tell them there was an emergency that came up." He held the door open for her. Alexandria looked at him, then with a crack of displaced air she was gone.

Hemlokk wiped her spotless blades on her cloak and sheathed them, then shuddered all over, involuntarily. Bayleaf stepped forward and gave her an embrace. They held each other for a moment, then both silently turned to the door and headed out to face the people still crowding the command center.

Bayleaf stepped into the room, Hemlokk at his side. Every eye turned to them. Bayleaf caught Tattletales' eye and gave her the all-clear sign; he watched as she and Aisha sent out word to the rest of the Alliance that everything was okay. "Dragon?" Bayleaf said to the armored Cape. "Would you happen to have any facilities for a, well a large meeting of the minds that we could rent from you?"

"You mean for like a forum or a symposium?" Dragon asked.

"A symposium, yes," Bayleaf said.

"I have one or two auditoriums somewhere I think," she said, slightly amused. "I can set one up for you-- and don't worry about the cost, free of charge."

"Thank you," Bayleaf said with some relief. "There's nobody I would trust more to set it up."

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to take the opportunity to announce that, approximately one month from now, the Alliance will be holding a symposium-- with Dragon acting as gracious host--" Dragon waved a gauntlet. "We'd hold it sooner but my friends and I need time to compile all our notes..."

"Dig them out of the trash, you mean," Aisha snarked.

"And copy them off the food wrappers," Lisa threw in as an added dig. Everyone chuckled at that; many of the Tinkers rather ruefully. When a Tinker fugue set in, any flat surface was fair game to write on.

"I'm throwing the invitation open to any Tinkers, Thinkers, Precogs… even any baseline scientists and inventors. What we are going to need is ideas to sift through, the more, the better. Heroes, rogues, villains…. Hell, if I can get Uber and L33t to show up I'll send them an invite. We have data… now we need to put wheels under it and make it into a plan."

"What is the subject of the symposium?" Director Bays said.

Bayleaf took a deep breath. "A possible method to kill the Endbringers," he said. "ALL of them."

Morning came to Brockton Bay. In the Lost Workshop tinkerbots whirred and clicked and went about their chores, fabber machines cranked out gears, pistons, springs and other more arcane things, a golden eagle snoozed on its perch, sleeping off its breakfast (diced chicken, served by a carefully instructed tinkerbot), and a lonely dog the size of a horse lay with its nose an inch from the garage door.

Boss go through that door.

Boss come back soon.

Boss come back through that door.

Truck had repeated those thoughts over and over all last night, and all this morning. At long last patience was rewarded. There was a rumble of a motor from behind the door, and the smell of exhaust wafted through the cracks in the jamb. Moments later Boss' entire pack came staggering through the door, smelling dirty and sweaty and VERY tired. Brutus, Judas, and Delilah came tumbling in, wagging tails and doggy smells and barks hello and THERE WAS BOSS!

The enormous mastiff all but flung himself into Lok'Tara's arms. The orc girl was too tired to discipline him for jumping on people; she just laughed and grappled with him. "Hey, someone's happy to see us," Bayleaf said, chuckling, as he edged past.

"Yeah, hurray," Fennek said. He came dragging in, Fidget and Gidget asleep in a toy wagon he had found somewhere. "Augh, it's morning? What-- oh yeah. Man, jet lag SUCKS." He tottered off to his room, wagon squeaking along behind him. "Gonna sleep the whole day, then the whole night, then the next day after that."

"Man's a genius," Shen grunted. "Come on, Lei Ling, we're home--" he poked gently at the red panda girl leaning into his side. She grunted and grumbled a bit, but stayed glued to him, her head nestled into his shoulder. Shen sighed. "Which way is her room?" he said.

Greg pointed. "You gonna put her to bed?" he asked.

"I intend to push her through the door, close it behind her and run," Shen said drily. "If she faceplants in the carpet, that's on her."

"Not very chivalrous," Greg muttered.

"Back in the day, she had issues about boys," Shen countered. "She thought every guy was after her panties...she'd tear the head off any guy she even thought looked at her funny. She can tuck herself in; I'm not in the mood to deal with that."

Greg shrugged. "I guess." Shen stumbled off, the still-sleepwalking Lei Ling stumbling along with him. Greg yawned enormously. "I could sleep on my anvil, I'm so pooped..." He roamed off to find something softer.

Lok'Tara yawned hugely, giving everyone a look at her tusks. She tousled Truck's ears. "Gonna put these guys in the kennel run, then go to bed," she said to noone in particular. At the words 'Kennel Run' her mob of dogs almost swept her off her feet.

"Place your bets she just sleeps in the kennel run with the dogs again?" Aisha said as she stacked the computer gear on the Comm table.

"No bets," Lisa said.

Soon everyone had wandered their way off to bed (Shar'Din had to be towed to his room; he had fallen asleep on his flying carpet and left it floating in the middle of the Workshop.) Bayleaf sprawled on the sofa, groaning. Hemlokk sprawled next to him. They lounged there silently, too tired for words, as the minutes ticked by.

Hemlokk sat up. Slowly, without warning, she started to shake. Alarmed, Bayleaf sat up. "Taylor, what's wrong--"

She looked at him, tears in her eyes. "Adrian--" she sobbed, holding her arms out to him.