go

I was back in the world with the vines.

Hopefully I was far enough from the building that had been on fire that the interconnected vines wouldn't immediately come after me.

Did the fact that the PRT building was here mean that this was an alternate version of Earth Bet?

I moved down the street, careful not to step on the vines. There was no grass in the street, a fact that I was grateful for. I'd do better against the things in the grass if I wasn't trying to keep people protected and could really fight back, but in the end it would be a losing proposition because there seemed to be an unlimited number of them and there was only one of me.

The front door wasn't locked, and I stepped inside.

The layout was mostly the same as the one in my world, but there weren't any containment foam sprayers, and some of the furniture was different.

It looked as though the PRT had repurposed an existing building; I would have personally built one from scratch myself. It was easier to reinforce walls and protect structures from Earthquakes if you weren't retrofitting things, but this structure was built pre-Endbringer, and they likely hadn't thought the expense was worth it.

I moved up the stairs, and found one of the meeting rooms.

The table here was different, but it was in roughly the same place and the same size.

I considered.

I wanted this to make an impression on the PRT. I could slip the body underneath the table, but we probably weren't going to be having that many meetings in the near future, and cleaning staff probably wasn't going to be going through their usual routines due to the electrical issues. We still had cameras, and that meant I couldn't just casually step out and drop the body on the table.

A moment's thought gave me the answer.

Portals were invisible from behind, and nobody ever said they had to be vertical.

I was afraid that the table wouldn't be able to hold the combined weight of me and the body, and it groaned as I slipped up on it and reached over to lift the body up. It didn't have to last a long time though.

Forming a portal horizontally was strange, but I did it easily enough. Then I lifted the body and carefully set it down into the other world, closing the gate the moment it was through.

It would look like the body just appeared, and that was going to raise all sorts of alarms.

It would give me a chance to tell the PRT some of the things I'd learned about the capabilities of the Fae, and it would give them a chance to develop countermeasures.

The bad part was that the PRT was likely to consider it an attack, and they were likely to go through a lot of effort trying to defend against me and the Fae. However, the efforts to protect headquarters were likely to pay off in the long run.

There was a crack, and the table collapsed underneath me.

I fell to the ground, and I felt something rip inside me. A moment later there were two of me.

The other me was now devolving into a gelatinous mass, and it was splitting into two other masses now that I wasn't forcing it to deny its instinct to reproduce.

They were already moving away, devouring some of the vines that filled the corner of the room.

Wincing, I began moving away. We were five stories up and so I couldn't just slip them through a portal, and I didn't have any control over them when I wasn't actually inhabiting them.

Moving quickly, I ran through the hallways and down the stairs. I was pretty sure that the response from the vines would be coming and I didn't want to be anywhere nearby, at least not until I was close enough to the ground to survive a fall.

I managed to reach the second floor before the response came, and then I leapt through a portal onto grass as I fell into the world Ruth used to go back and forth to school.

It damaged my body, and I jumped back into my own body a moment later.

Vicky was leaning me over.

"Taylor, wake up!" she was saying. "Amy, there's something wrong with Taylor!"

"You're just noticing that now?" Amy said.

They were both in their pajamas.

"What?" I said.

The last thing I needed was for Amy to notice just how far I'd modified my body.

"Can't you hear the alarms?" she demanded.

The alarms were blaring loudly enough to wake the dead, so Vicky was probably right to worry about me not waking up.

The PRT response time was faster than I'd thought. Who'd have thought that dropping a single body in the middle of the Director's conference room would get everybody as stirred up as an anthill?

"I'm a deep sleeper," I said, and I waved her off. "Let's get dressed and see what this is all about."

Dropping a body into a conference room was apparently the equivalent of kicking over an ant's nest. By the time I got there, there had been three teams including Armsmaster and Kid Win scanning the body for bombs and for biological and chemical weapons. From everyone's expressions, those tests had come up negative. I probably should have checked for weird diseases or parasites before I dropped the thing in the middle of the table. Even if it hadn't had them before, it could have picked some up in the other room.

"The message looks like it was written in acid," Lisa said, leaning over the body. "The writing is shaky; I doubt that it's the user's normal style of writing.

She glanced at me.

She knew it was me; of course she did, and a slight shift in her expression showed me that she knew that I knew.

"They claim that this is one of the Fae. How likely is that?" the Director asked.

"This one matches the size and general profile of the ones that I met, and the weight seems roughly the same," I said. "We had this place scanned for portals, and we know where they are. This isn't one of those places, which means that the portal that was made here was likely a temporary one."

"We're going to have to increase the sensitivity of the defenses," the Director said. She grimaced.

There were automatic sensors that would fill a room with containment foam in the event of a threat. The more sensitive they were, the faster they would react, but the more likely that there would be false positives. That led to personnel spending thirty minutes in containment foam because they'd leaned over a colleague a little too quickly.

It was a massive pain in the ass, and it led to decreased morale, which was why sensitivity tended to be set to low so that only a few actions set it off. Ideally, a lot of people would prefer for there to be human monitoring of the system, but a lot of people disliked the sense of Big Brother looking over their soldier, and humans weren't really all that good with guard duty. When things got boring, they tended to have slower reaction times, much like Dennis or even completely miss things they should have seen.

"We'll have to take a closer look," I said, glancing at Lisa, "But I think the message might be genuine."

"Who did this?" The Director demanded.

"Someone who has something to hide," I said. "Or maybe someone who's worried that the PRT might get a little trigger happy if they were to come up to the door with a giant bug on their shoulder."

"Maybe someone from another world?" Lisa said. "After all, our response to Earth Aleph was to almost go to war, and the attitude at the moment is to shoot to kill any alien critters."

"Even innocuous creatures can devastate an ecosystem," the Director said. "Ask Australia, or a lot of the island countries. When invasive species move in, the native species tend to suffer."

"And bringing in other alien species to deal with the first set hasn't proven to be that helpful either."

The Australians had problems with that; so had other places.

"Another faction of the same species?" Armsmaster asked.

He was gathering up his scanning equipment.

"Unlikely," Lisa said. "This handwriting is that of a female, likely someone human, although not necessarily from here."

My eye twitched, and her eyebrow rose.

If she didn't give them some information, then they'd start wondering why. The last thing either of us needed was for them to suspect that we were collaborating.

"Maybe that Fairy character," Vista said.

"Who?"

"I was talking to one of the kids when I was transporting people. She says that most of them were saved from the fire by a woman dressed like a Disney princess, beautiful and able to open portals to another world… one filled with vines and skeletons and things in the grass."

"You and Wayfarer reported a world with those characteristics," the Director said sharply.

"It might not be the same one," I said. "Just one similar in nature. I can see the benefit in using it though; it had alternate versions of buildings here. I'm not sure how far back the catastrophe happened. If we were to explore it we could probably use newspapers and the lack of some of the newest buildings to estimate when the disaster happened. Worlds like that are probably more likely to be used for infiltration; I'd imagine that it'd be difficult to orient yourself if you're wandering through a forest or grassland without a fixed portal for reference."

She nodded.

I suspected that she was considering an expedition to that world just to set explosives and detonate the PRT building.

"We don't know how many worlds like that there are or how many the enemy has access to."

"A live specimen would have been more useful."

"Have we gotten anything from the captive that we have?"

Lisa spoke.

"They believe that the Fae are the servants of the gods," she said. "They moved her ancestors to an empty world, and there is a Tithe once every ten years where ten percent of the population is taken by the Fae. No one knows what happens to them, but it's assumed they are either put in the military, or they are sacrificed to the gods."

I leaned forward, even though I already knew the details of Fae anatomy by heart.

"They're carnivores," I said. "It looks like they have very good night vision, and it's possible that they tend to be more nocturnal. It looks like they can turn their heads all the way around to look behind them, and the shell is thick enough to stop bullets."

"I'm more concerned about their stranger powers," she said. She grimaced. "And if there are any limitations to their abilities to pass through universes to sidestep all of our defenses."

"Well, I'm not sure they can become fully invisible," I said. "And I'm pretty sure that they can't actually change shape, otherwise they'd have no need to cover themselves with illusions. You might try using cameras able to detect infrared or ultraviolet rays; I'm doubtful that they could create an illusion in frequencies they couldn't sense themselves. From a mythological perspective, you might try using mirrors or shadows. Either they won't be able to spoof those, or they might not think to. It's probably better to make sure they don't notice you looking."

"I'll inform the troops," she said dryly. "Anything else?"

"I'd have to do an actual examination," I said.

"Any progress on your other work?"

"I've sent the information to Armsmaster, Dragon and your personal assistant. In brief, Dragon says Masamune can have a dozen sets of the scaled down equipment to the places they need to be in five days, including transport by Air Dragon. There might be some pushback from certain congressmen, but it's not likely to last long because they'd get mobbed if people learned they stood for leaving the power off."

People had a tendency not to care about things that only affected someone else. They were in favor of cutting those things that didn't seem to have a direct benefit to them, whether it was aid to the poor, foreign aid, trade deals or even roads for parts of the country they didn't like. But the more something seemed to affect them, the more passionate about it they became. Things like Medicare, taxes, things that would affect their local economies and the like had a lot of passion.

Keeping the lights on, the food coming and the water in the tap would be number one on almost anybody's agenda, and if they learned that people were trying to keep them in the dark, I wouldn't be surprised if some politicians got murdered.

The congressmen in question were part of the NEPEA crowd; they hated parahumans and they didn't want big business to have to compete with them. It was short sighted; in the long term, parahuman devices and abilities tended to be non-replicable and short lived and so they'd never match big business at all. Even someone like Panacea, who could credibly compete with some local doctors would be swamped and overwhelmed in short order, especially if she got famous.

The lure of money meant that she'd have likely ended up healing billionaires mostly and the poor would be back in the hospitals they'd been in before; the free market in action. She was never going to be more than a niche player simply because there was one of her and she couldn't be scaled up.

Now if someone was able to mass produce clones of Amy along with their powers, then concern might be a little more warranted, but even then a few hundred clones could hardly heal the country much less the entire world.

"How much of a difference will it make?"

"It should be enough to get the power distribution centers up and running more efficiency. The damage to the transmission lines are going to be more difficult, as will getting the entire system bootstrapped. We should be able to provide the initial power with a Tinkertech power source; there's a Tinker in California who has what we need. He's a villain, but mostly because he's unwilling to abide by rules on the things he creates," Armsmaster said as he finished packing up his equipment.

"The government frowns on unlicensed antimatter reactors in the middle of the city for some reason," Lisa said, smirking. "Hopefully they don't go the Ghostbusters route and insist on shutting the thing down without proper safety protocols."

"Considering that a pound of antimatter is about as powerful as nineteen megatons of TNT, we're lucky the entire West Coast didn't go up when the power went down," I said.

"I've spoken to him," Armsmaster said stiffly. "He's not sloppy or stupid enough to rely on grid power for containment."

"I'm sure somebody that decided to go by Doctor Terawatt is completely rational," Lisa said dryly.

"In any case, we've got multiple conflicting needs vying for our time. This just adds to the list," the Director said. She scowled. "The only good side seems to be that the damage was limited to the eastern half of the country. The damage to one of the key substations was less than they'd intended, and some systems were down for repair, which meant that the cascading effect was limited. California, Nevada and Texas still have power, and they're able to send electricians to help restore power here instead of being overwhelmed themselves."

That was good news.

The relatively empty states in the middle of the country would send people as well, but their populations weren't as high, and they'd have fewer people to send as a result. Most of the population of the country was huddled against the coasts. Worse, the East coast had been settled longer, which meant they had more people. The states with coasts bordering the Atlantic ocean had something like 117 million people. The states with coasts on the Pacific ocean including Hawaii and Alaska had something like 52 million people. That didn't include landlocked states that would be affected.

It was still a disaster, but at least it wasn't a total disaster.

Texas wouldn't be able to send power because they were disconnected from the national grid. They had a lot of electricians though, which would be helpful.

The Director said, "Let's keep alert. Just because a parahuman decided to be "helpful" doesn't mean they are a hero. Those of you who are out in the field need to keep an ear out for anything you hear about this Fairy character, and also about Grendel."

"Grendel?"

"There's been reports about a monster out attacking people," Lisa said, giving me a sideways glance.

She knew.

Of course she did.

"They say it killed a police officer, and attacked a half dozen people who were doing nothing wrong," the Director said. "Of course, at least one of those people has been accused of rape. Given the lack of power, we haven't been able to confirm any missing police officers, especially since a portion of the force seems to have defected in order to protect their families."

I nodded.

"Grendel, though?"

"Nine feet tall and ugly with scales," Lisa said. "And lots of teeth. People say it made them pee themselves."

She was enjoying this.

I glanced at her, and she flinched minutely.

"It's possible that both of them are from another universe instead of being some Tinker's creation; it seems likely even. What we need to hope is that there aren't more of them. Grendel is being listed as a Brute 3 until more information is gathered, and a hundred of him would be unpleasant to deal with him.

"Maybe it's a footsoldier," Battery said quietly.

The Director said, "A thought that had already occurred to me. I'm attempting to get heavier weaponry sent here, but transportation difficulties are making it difficult. Dragon would help, but her ships have been redirected for other tasks for the duration of the emergency, at least until Miss Hebert's project is finished."

"I'd suspect that the usual suspects in Congress will lobby to have unproven parahuman technology to be replaced as soon as possible," I said.

"We'll worry about that when it comes to pass. If we get the lights on, we'll have earned a great deal of political goodwill that can be used for all sorts of things."

She'd try to get me paid, she meant, because if she got paid, that meant that this branch did as well, and we were going to have a lot of expenses over the next few years.

"All right," she said. "Everybody get back to work, or to bed. We'll get a better idea of the damage to the city in the morning."

I nodded, and I headed back downstairs.

Lisa followed me.

"Lucky break," she said. "The body just showing up like that."

She didn't know how I did it then. That was probably for the best. I suspected she'd be freaked out by the fact that I had more than one body. In her mind it'd mean that I could come at from anywhere. While it might be good to keep her scared, I didn't need to give her any information to hand to the PRT if she finally cracked and turned against me.

"Yeah," I said, controlling my expression.

The elevator opened on the next floor, and Sophia was on the other side.

She stiffened when she saw Lisa.

"My two favorite bitches," she muttered.

"Well, I can agree with the last part of that statement," Lisa said. She smirked. "Although I'm not sure it's safe to be in an elevator with this much bitchiness."

"You saying I'd do something?" Sophia asked.

Lisa glanced at me, and I shrugged.

Sophia noticed, as I'd meant her to, and her expression hardened.

"I'm in as much control as you two," she said.

It looked like she'd gotten some of her resilience back. I'd been ignoring her for too long.

"Well, Scandal here clearly can't keep her mouth shut," I said, "And you can sometimes get a little punch happy. I fail to see how I'm a bitch at all. I'm a perfectly well balanced and pleasant teammate. Just ask anyone."

Lisa smirked at me, and I let my lip twitch.

"Yeah. You just like to fuck with people," she said. "Make them think that they're being mastered so that they run around and around in their head questioning everything that they think."

"I've told everybody I can't master anyone," I said mildly. "It's not my fault if nobody believes me."

"Is that what you told Stormtiger?"

"No. I told him that Purity was planning to kill Kaiser and take over."

"And was she?"

I shrugged.

"Hell if I know. Power's pretty tempting, and her ex had been threatening to take her kid, so it would be a pretty decent solution to two of her problems."

She stared at me.

"That's pretty fucked up."

"For me to tell him that knowing that he was ready to jump off a cliff, or for him to believe me?"

Sophia was silent for a long moment.

"You saying I'm ready to jump off a cliff?"

"Well, violence can be a little like a drug," I said. "A little is good, but holding back starts to be less… satisfying. There's always that temptation to do a little more, and once you do, you don't get the same thrill from doing the lame crap you were doing before. You've got to what… step up your game?"

Her flush wasn't easy to see, not with her skin tone, but it was obvious to me, and to Lisa too. She wisely stayed quiet.

"I could control it."

"Isn't that what junkies always say?"

"Fuck you, Hebert."

"Best way to manipulate somebody is to tell the truth. You were using your special stash. How long before something happened that you couldn't take back?"

She stared at me.

"You're an angry person," I said. "There's a lot of animals out in the streets tonight, and a lot of them aren't from other universes. You aren't one of them. Even animals can learn, but the dumb ones have to have it beaten into them over and over. The smart ones learn from seeing it once. Humans, sometimes, can learn from seeing someone else screw up and not doing the shit that screwed up the last son of a bitch's life. The problem is, that most people aren't that smart. They aren't that strong. They grow up in a bad neighborhood, they do the same stupid shit as everybody else in the neighborhood. They grow up in a bad family, it's even worse. The smart people, the strong ones… those are the people who climb out of the bucket of crab they're in and don't let the others pull them back in."

"So you're saying the way to be strong is to be weak?"

"No. An animal attacks because it's scared or hungry, or because somebody moves onto it's turf. People are like that too. The smart ones are the ones who can take their instincts and shove them aside to actually get things done. Being strong means you choose when to apply violence, and you apply it strategically."

I was never going to make her into Gandhi; it was too foreign to her nature.

"You saying that's you, Hebert?" she sneered, but she was actually listening to me.

"I'm not sure I have any instincts anymore," I said. "Being a Thinker screws with your head."

For some reason, Lisa flinched.

Lisa seemed to be under the mistaken impression that I had all sorts of instincts. Clearly her power was on the fritz. I'd never been clearer in my life; even when I let go of the focused state that let me do things without being overwhelmed by emotion, I wasn't overwhelmed by guilt or anything. There might have been a time where I'd have been squicked out by eating the alien equivalent of dogs and cats, but you could get used to almost anything, and it was a lot quicker and tastier than leaning over a body and picking through the brains, then leaving everything to rot.

The extra mass was handy too.

"Heard you gonna have this shit fixed in a week," Sophia said after a long moment of silence.

The elevators were moving slower as an energy conservation measure, and we actually felt the acceleration and deceleration because the inertial compensators were offline for the same reason.

The elevator came to a stop, and we stepped out into the Wards common area.

"Well, partway," I said. I shrugged. "Gonna be parts of the country without power for a long time."

"Poor parts, I bet."

"Yeah," I said. "They'll probably have New York up and running before any of us. I haven't heard what the damage to the transformers were, but it might be a couple of weeks before we get back up and running."

She grimaced.

"Not sure my kid sister's going to like being cooped up underground for two weeks."

"There's a lot of agents with kids," I said. "I'd imagine some of them would be more than happy to play with her, no matter who her sister is."

She glanced up at me and then she smirked.

"Where was all that wit in Winslow?"

"My power is talking smack," I said. "I could probably talk a villain into committing suicide if you gave me a little time with him."

"Why don't you?"

"Most of them will smash your head in before you get that chance," I said. "Also, I'm the least bitchy person in this elevator. I'd rather talk somebody over into the light."

"It's true," Lisa said. "She convinced me that the retirement plan is much better as a hero."

She smirked.

The fact that she had millions of dollars stashed away somewhere was something that the PRT probably knew but chose to turn a blind eye too. From what I understood, she'd already identified more than a dozen moles in the ranks of other PRT divisions, as well as two Simurgh bombs. She was proving her value to them in part because she knew that the more valuable she was, the more shit they'd put up with.

Sophia had likely only gotten away with her attitude and general unlikableness by her good arrest records. She was efficient in the field and so people put up with a certain degree of crap from her.

Somebody who was not effective would have been forced to comply a lot earlier. The PRT hadn't known about her bullying people at school, but she'd bullied the other Wards in mild ways at least, and that never would have been tolerated in someone who wasn't bringing in the arrests and helping the PRT look good.

In the end, it was all about how useful you were.

"She'll be fine," I continued. "At least compared to the poor bastards out in the rest of the city."

"Yeah," Sophia said. "I've seen some things that I never expected tonight."

She stared off into space, and I wondered whether it was the portal monsters or the behavior of people who were neighbors normally.

"I always thought most people were sheep," she said. "Maybe they are, but hell. I saw an old lady who goes to Mom's church knife somebody tonight. The wimpy guy down the street turned out to be a damn good shot when some rat things showed up. I also saw some guys I thought were bad asses turn tail and run."

Ah.

That was what really bothered her.

"There's a social contract," I said. "We've got police so that we don't have to go out and kill the people who fucked with us. In the old days, we would have, and then their family would have done the same to our family, back and forth, maybe forever. Hatfield and McCoy shit. So we let the police handle it, and in return we don't go out guns blazing."

"Police don't do shit," she said.

"They do if you're rich and white," I said. "Or if you're poor and white and they like you. It's a little better over in Earth Aleph, I hear, but it's still not perfect. The people that feel like they won't get justice are the ones who feel like they have to take things into their own hands. Then they join gangs for self protection."

"Like the Protectorate?"

"Exactly like the Protectorate. You think the cops aren't a gang, just kill a cop and see how fast you end up dead. You'll have an accident on the way to the courthouse, assuming that they bother to arrest you at all. It's just human nature… somebody kills you or yours you go after them, and people hardly ever convict cops, so…"

"What's that got to do with Miss Johnson stabbing a guy in the neck?"

"People who believe in the system stay quiet," I said. "They act meek. They do what's expected of them, whether it's by the cops, their church, or society at large. But when the system breaks down, those same people take the gloves off. You could think of them as wolves in sheep's clothing. The "bad asses" sometimes act tough to cover their own insecurity. They don't like to look weak because they think that deep down they really are."

"I'm not like that!"

"Some of them are wrong about being weak," I said. "There's good looking people who think they're ugly after all. But some of them, statistically are going to be right, and when the chips are down, they're gonna run."

She was quiet for a long time, then nodded.

"I've got an early morning tomorrow," she said, and she turned and headed off for her rooms.

As soon as she left, Lisa said, "The whole social contract and cop thing are more complicated than…"

"You tell people what they understand," I said. "You want me to explain it to you?"

She stared at me for a moment then shook her head.

"Uh, no. I think I'm going to head to bed."

I smirked after her.

My work for the evening was done; it was probably a good idea to get at least some sleep, despite my different brain chemistry. I couldn't get a good look at my own brain without opening my own skull and creating eyestalks, and that would probably raise some eyebrows even though there weren't supposed to be cameras in the Wards rooms.

There were, though. I'd already found them. Presumably they had the computer monitor them, and same gender agents looked over any suspicious footage. They'd probably be adding more cameras soon now that I'd proven that the enemy could infiltrate anywhere on the base with a little preparation.

They'd probably even add them in the bathroom, at least outside the toilet stalls and the showers. I could only imagine how trapped I'd feel if I didn't have my nighttime escape.

So I went to bed.

I stripped down and slid into bed. I had a vague sense that cameras seeing me nude would have bothered me at one time, but I'd been self conscious about my body ever since Emma and Sophia had been targeting my insecurities there. Now though, my body was what I wanted it to be, and it wasn't even necessarily my actual body anyway. I had bigger things to worry about than whether some female PRT agent would see me naked.

My sleep kept being interrupted by dreams of me sliding through the sewers, devouring tasty creatures that looked like nothing that had ever been seen on Earth and splitting over and over again.

It still seemed like only a few moments before my phone alerted me that it was time to get up.

I should have felt exhausted, since I'd had less than four hours of sleep, but I felt fine. If anything I felt better than ever, like I'd just had a wonderful meal and was full and satisfied.

After showering and getting dressed, I went up to the cafeteria for breakfast. The thing about my new body was that no matter how full I was, I could always eat.

I sat down with my overstuffed breakfast burrito; eggs, bacon, ham and sausage with a lot of cheese. I'd really been enjoying meat recently, and it seemed likely that refrigerated foods were going to get scarce before it got better, even for places like the PRT that had power and money. We had a lot of mouths to feed and only so much refrigerator space, and once the food was gone, getting it transported in was going to be trouble.

Of course, I could survive on almost anything.

"There were a lot of weird creatures out last night," Agent Ferris was telling Miss Militia. "But they really started to thin out over the last few hours. We stopped seeing many of them after five AM or so. If we're lucky, they all retreated back through their portals. If we aren't, it's because they're hiding because something bigger and badder has scared them ."

"Grendel?"

"No sightings after the thing with the cop. We still haven't found out who it was; all the mounted police are accounted for; there weren't that many to start with."

"I'll let Director Piggot know," Miss Militia said. She grimaced. "How bad is the damage?"

"A lot of stores were looted," Agent Ferris said. "People stealing televisions and a lot of stuff that might not be useful for a while. There was a lot of vandalism, but not much in the way of arson except for the one case."

I finished my meal and headed back down to console.

Clockblocker was sitting in front of the screens.

"It's all part of a conspiracy, folks. The government wouldn't have even told you about the attack if I hadn't been on the airwaves, and now they want to take me off? They'll take this microphone from my cold, dead hands. You can't trust the government for anything. They'd leave you sitting in the dark, both literally and figuratively. You've seen the lights from the government buildings and the hospitals. The fat cats still have power, and they don't give a damn about the rest of us."

"Who's this?" I asked Dennis.

He looked up.

"Mark Melvin," he said. "He's a crank, but he's one of the only radio channels still running, so everybody's listening to him."

"I've been talking about how filthy the Chinese are for years, but nobody has been listening. Now they've attacked the U.S. and what is the President doing? Nothing! This never would have happened back when we had the bomb. A country that tried something like this would have known that we'd light them up like the fourth of July and they wouldn't have time to kiss their own asses goodbye before we lit them up and left them with a nice radioactive glow. But the parahumans kneecapped the country, which is something that nobody wants to talk about. When that Golden Jackass took the bomb, he pretty much gave the entire world to the CUI. They outnumber us four to one and they're going to breed us into extinction, assuming the blacks or the Mexicans don't do it to us first."

He gets away with saying that kind of crap?

"He's got a pirate radio station," Dennis said. "He's gotta have some kind of Tinkertech to hide where he's broadcasting from, because the FCC has been looking for him for a couple of years. It's national, though, which means that he's got to be broadcasting from a lot of places. Maybe he's using the Internet? Some people think he's a parahuman himself, for all that he likes to claim he hates us."

"I'm the only man who's going to tell you the truth. The government wants you to stay in your apartments, huddled and hiding until the food and water runs out, and then it'll be too late. They'll have taken everything for themselves and left nothing for the good, honest Americans. The Republicans don't give a damn about the little guy, and the Liberals talk a good game, but they only care about you until election day. In the end, it's the taxpayer holding the bag."

"What are the plans to help people?"

"Fema's trying to release food aid, but coordination has been complicated by communication difficulties, and people who heard this jackasses broadcast all ran and filled their cars up, leaving gas stations empty and trucks stalled on the road."

"There've been runs on the stores, right?"

"In the wealthier places. In the poorer places people just broke in and stole everything."

"The parahumans caused this problem," he said. "America was great before they came. Since then, it's all gone to crap. Does anybody think the Endbringers aren't just the final form of parahumans? There's something a little… off about all of them, isn't there? Normal people don't go running around in costumes and start murdering their neighbors, right? Parahumans are mostly villains, if you'll notice, and the ones that go to the PRT are only heroes because they have chains. They're monsters on leashes, and they all need to be working for us instead of trying to destroy the world. We need to reinstate the draft, and put all of those bastards on the front lines. It's a win for humanity either way; either we beat the hell out of the CUI, or we lose these alien things that have been ruining the world for real humans like you and me."

"He's a parahuman," I said. It was there in his voice. "And he hates it. I'd imagine that he was a conspiracy theorist even before he triggered. He's probably a hyperspecialist; I doubt that he can do much more than build communications devices and he probably feels like he was betrayed by getting a useless power."

Powers fed on conflict; even something like Amy's powers could be used for attack. There were likely elements to his Tinkering that he'd never discovered because he was so disappointed in what he'd got.

"I wouldn't be surprised if they collaborated with the CUI on this," he continued. "After all, people are willing to give up all kinds of fundamental rights in times of emergency, and it's hard to get them back. The PRT already takes funding from our brave, underpaid human police officers, and they've got all sorts of rights that they shouldn't. It's bad enough when big government takes our rights, but at least you've got the illusion of being able to change things, even though the vast majority of people in big government aren't elected and are barely accountable to anybody. But the PRT works independently of the US government. They're funded by the government, but they don't take orders from them. Even the military has civilian oversite! What's wrong with this picture, folks?"

"He's paranoid," I said. "But not as paranoid as he's making himself out to be. He hates parahumans and he hates the PRT almost as much as he hates himself."

"If real people don't wake up soon, they'll find out that there was a revolution and they never even noticed. We'll all be licking the boots of our parahuman overseers. I have no doubt that certain elements in the government are going to make a power grab. They're going to declare martial law. They're going to claim that there are monsters in the street, and that we all need to stay in our homes and let them do whatever they want. Well, I say it's time for real humans to fight back. We need to get out in the streets and keep the enemy from stealing our government, stealing our rights, taking our freedom. If they tell you to stay at home, don't just say no, say hell no. If they ask you to do anything, no matter how inconsequential it seems push back. They've got Thinkers, and they've got plans behind plans. Just because you can't see why staying away from other people or staying home after dark is a big deal doesn't mean they won't be using it for some nefarious purpose."

"Shit," Dennis said. "That's going to make things harder. It's already bad enough, and there's a lot of people out there who are going to believe him."

"There's a lot of people who don't want to do anything that helps other people," I said. "Even if it's a minor thing as long as it's an inconvenience to them. Then they look for an excuse to justify what they're refusing to do. Sometimes that's true even if it's in their best interest, like not going outside when people tell you there's monsters outside."

"He's going to get a lot of people killed," Dennis said soberly.

"I think he already did," I said. "People wouldn't have known that this was anything more than a regular blackout if he hadn't been on the air; the government channels were keeping it all secret."

"Well, there's nothing we can do about it."

"Well, if I could just talk to him, we might be able to do something," I said. "Maybe get me on the radio."

Dennis glanced at me.

"There's no way in hell anybody is going to put you on the radio. You think they were so happy not to put you on a televised press conference while making your introduction just for your safety?"

"Well, it's not like I'd have tried to take the country over in a fifteen minute press conference," I said. I paused. "I probably could have gone viral on the Internet, though."

Hmm.

I could probably do a lot of good if I had a voice on the Internet. It'd be harder to manipulate groups than individuals, because I wouldn't have body language or tells, but I could probably start crafting messages that would resonate with a good portion of the population. If I chose different messages, I could hit different segments, and in the end I could likely start bringing maybe eighty percent of the country around, even if I had to make sure I wasn't saying mutually exclusive things.

"I don't suppose you know how to become an Influencer on the Internet, do you?"

Dennis was staring up at me wide eyed.

For some reason he flinched.

"Well, I guess I'd better get things up and running sooner than later then. I'm getting back to work."

The sounds of bottles shattering and angry voices was the first clue I had that things were going badly wrong.

I'd spent much of the day working on helping Armsmaster and Chris set up a small Tinkertech power source for the Water purification plant that fed the city. We still had a couple of days of fuel left for the pumps that pumped water into the water towers, but the water purification and the sewage plants were areas of high concern. We'd built two micro-fusion plants, and I already had ideas of how to make larger ones that would work without all the Tinkertech. However, there wasn't time to build anything like that, not without Tinker shortcuts.

Moving quickly, I turned around a corner, and I saw that a group of almost a hundred people had surrounded a PRT van, and there was a PRT agents standing on the roof of the van with a bullhorn.

"Return to your homes. The city is under mandatory curfew!"

"Who the fuck do you think you are, telling us where we can and can't go!" I heard a voice yell.

It looked like someone threw a beer bottle. It sailed over the van, missing the Agent and kitting somewhere on the other side. I heard a sound of pain.

It wasn't really the agents job to enforce curfew, but the growing crowds were stopping them from hunting down any extradiminsional creatures that might be in the area. They were looking for signs of incursions, especially now that our infrasound grid was down due to the power grid being out of commission. There were battery backups, but we'd been using the cell phone towers to transmit data, both as a cost cutting measure and to save time in construction.

Part of the reason I was coming out myself was to take a look at some of the portals that had already been mapped, take a look through them so that I could get more universes to be able to move through, and close the ones that were due to open soon. The PRT was doing the same thing.

"You guys plan to just hand us to the CUI! I bet you try to disarm us first. Well, you'll get my gun from my cold dead hands!" a heavyset man wearing a flak jacket and covered in all sorts of American flags shouted.

Everybody shouted in agreement, and I could feel an ugly kind of excitement running through the crowd.

There was an energy that went through crowds. People who would never break a window on their own would start doing it if they saw other people doing it. The more people who were doing it, the more the resistance of everyone else was worn down, until the whole crowd was committing atrocities that any given member would have never done. It was why there were crowds of people yelling for suicidal people on ledges to jump. No individual person felt any responsibility for what was happening, and they all got to enjoy the results.

There was an angry undertone in the crowd. People were angry and they were looking for someone to blame. There were a lot of people with guns. It surprised me; the gun laws here were stricter than they were in Earth Aleph, and yet maybe it meant that people had just hidden their weapons instead of not buying them. Or maybe the dissolution of the gangs had led some gang members to make a quick buck by selling off some of their old boss's arsenals.

Either way, there were more guns here than I would have expected, and some people had them in their hands.

It looked like things were about to get ugly.

I couldn't use my social skills here; people had to actually hear what you were saying, and my ability to magnify my voice was limited. It would be easy for this crowd to simply catcall me and out yell me before I could get my hooks into them.

I shifted.

Grendel would have been easy, but with that many people with guns he wouldn't have been considered that scary. I wasn't fully brute strong in that form, despite being bulletproof.

What was scary were giant bugs. I took the form of the bug that had tried to eat me on the shore, the one with the nasty venom. I changed my interior structure to be slime so that any bullets that actually got through the shell of the bug wouldn't bother me too much.

"There have been reports of Tinkertech monsters in the area!" the agent on top of the van said. He was young and new to his post, and the men in the van were even younger. This was their first posting, and they were out of their depth, even if Agents with years of experience hadn't seen anything like this either, they'd have had mor4e confidence in how to handle it.

They could hear his uncertainty, and it gave the crowd a sense of power.

"Fake news!" one of the men said. "That's just bull crap you're putting out so you can finish spraying mind control chemicals in the air!"

Well, the monster line was a perfect entrance, so I bellowed and charged the crowd. The people in the back were completely surprised, and they screamed as I slammed into them. I could feel bones snap under my feet, and I didn't feel a bit guilty. Screw these guys; we were trying to keep them alive and they were spitting on us. While it was possible that some of them were just scared people lashing out, I couldn't help but feel that a lot of them had probably been to Empire rallies.

The screaming continued, and some of the idiots started pointing guns and firing. I allowed tentacles to emerge from beneath me, and I used glamour to conceal them. In the confusion of the fight, it must have seemed like people were breaking their arms by falling against other people. The glamour would show up on camera, but I didn't see any mirrors and I was pretty sure that I had all the bases covered. The confusion of the fight would have kept people from paying close attention anyway.

I charged through the crowd and I felt bullets hit my shell.

Running through the crowd, I could hear people running away behind me.

The PRT agents were emerging from their vehicle and grabbing for containment foam sprayers, likely because they didn't think that their pistols would be able to penetrate my shell. I ran away from them even as I heard the van behind me rev its engines. They were leaving the people behind moaning on the ground in part because they were inexperienced and also because screw those guys.

The moment I turned a corner, I created a portal and I slipped through.

Fuck.

There had been other ways I could have dispersed the crowd, other than just charging in and breaking bones. I was pretty sure that at least some people had been shot by overeager idiots, and I'd enjoyed stepping on them. The bad thing was that I didn't think that it was the weird instincts that Lisa thought I was getting, and I hadn't been using enhanced intuition either. I'd been emotional, and I'd been angry.

It was the human Taylor Hebert who had enjoyed hurting those people, and that probably wasn't healthy. It was starting to get to me; I'd been listening to the asshole on the radio, and it was horrifying to realize that underneath the pleasant facade that most people not only weren't grateful toward everything we did for them, they actively feared and hated us. He'd as much as said that we should be put on the front line against the CUI and then "friendly fire" might take care of the problem for once and for all, but he'd also suggested that villains tended to be attracted to cities with heroes.

Heroes tended to stay in cities that had the highest populations, places that had the most things to steal, the most customers for drugs and sex and crime, places where you could fade into the background after doing whatever crime you wanted. A town of fifteen hundred where everybody had grown up together and nobody owned anything wasn't likely to be a target of anybody except the Slaughterhouse Nine.

This was the world where Ruth's dad had been lost. I'd seen the videos of the world, and I knew which portals they'd been through, but the whole search had been abandoned when the current conflict was done. I could tell that Ruth was worried about her Dad, and now for her mom, even though she was safe in the Endbringer shelter. I'd talked to Dad, and they had it pretty good there; electricity, water, board games and movie night. He was glad that I was stuck in the lab and made sure to reassure me that he was doing all right. I had an uncomfortable feeling that he'd met someone in the shelter; he sounded way too chipper to be hating where he was, and from what I'd heard there wasn't enough there to keep him that happy.

Despite the fact that our parents were doing better than the people in the rest of the city, Ruth was clearly deteriorating now that the PRT wasn't actively looking for her Dad, and now that she was separated from her mom. I'd wanted to help her, which was the whole reason I'd come out tonight.

Knowing where the hill had been, I approached from the other side.

I needed to avoid the giant crabs, even if the PRT had been forced to kill several of them before Swarm had taken control of them. The mother crab was the main concern. I doubted that I could take her no matter how many other mes I absorbed.

The thing was that all I needed to do was reach the other world and then I could move back and forth without stepping back into the world with the crabs. Seeing a picture wasn't enough; I had to be there in person, feel the hum that each universe had. It wasn't hard to remember that hum; if I could remember the place I could remember how to get there. The problem was going to be getting by the crabs.

The obvious solution was to simply start from the hill, then work my way down as a slime. Some crabs had fairly good vision, even though much of their prey was in murky waters. To compensate for that, they had a great sense of smell, and they could taste with receptors on their mouthparts, pincers and feet. I wouldn't have any trouble dealing with one of them, but best estimates were that the Mother still had twenty of them, and I didn't feel like being eaten today or ever.

I knew the landscape from the drone photos, and it wasn't all that hard finding it. Working my way up the sheer back of the hill was harder than I'd thought; at some point, the back of the hill had slid away leaving an almost vertical cliff. None of my forms were climbers, and I couldn't create tentacles long enough to pull myself up, so I was forced to go around and take the hill from the side.

There were more portals than I'd thought; almost sixty of them. The urge to stick my head through and starting to categorize portals and see if there was anything useful on the other side was almost overwhelming, but I had more important things to do. I'd managed to get a scent from some of Ruth's dad's stuff that she still kept with her; her smell had almost overwhelmed it, but by crosschecking multiple items, I had managed to get the scent in my head.

It was unlikely I'd be able to find anything by scent alone. Most dogs couldn't track a scent more than two weeks old, and while I wasn't sure how my abilities stacked up to those of a bloodhound, the number of particles in the air would vanish over time. Tracks would have been washed away by wind or rain, or by the movement of other animals.

Still, he'd left clues through six different universes, which meant that he might have left a trail even further along.

I suspected that he'd meant the trail to be for himself. After all, human memory was fallible, and it would be difficult to make a map to account for multiple universes. Maybe a book might do, with the portals marked so that they appeared on the next page with the map of the area drawn around that. Her father had seemed to be the kind of guy who liked to plan ahead. Did he have a book like that? Did he have mapmaking skills, and had he been allowed the time to make a good map, or had he been forced to flee from one threat or another and then lost track of just where he was?

I made my way down the hill.

It was dark, but I could see easily. The sands were still, although occasionally I could see a small ripple that indicated that something was down there, waiting to attack. Letting my mind go cold and logical, I looked for patterns in the movements, and I could only come up with one conclusion; they were aware of me. Approaching by stealth wasn't going to work; my best bet was to go in fast and hard. I'd seen the movements of the crabs on video multiple times, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on how fast they were.

They could likely outrun a man, but I was pretty quick myself. There was a span of distance between the sands and the bottom of the hill; they didn't seem to come after things on the hill, which was likely the only reason Ruth's father had managed to escape at all. It also meant that I needed to be calm until I was almost to the spot and then sprint into the portal while they were still making their way across the expanse. The problem was that it took a moment to open the portal, which made the timing a little more difficult.

I made my way carefully down the hill. It had been cleared of underbrush by the PRT for reasons of safety; nobody had wanted things to stop popping out of the underbrush to kill them. It had left the entire hill denuded and blackened, as though a forest fire had come through with a vengeance.

It also left the hill eerily quiet. Normally the wind would have caused the underbrush to move, but now there was only the sound of whistling across the empty surface and the smell of accelerant and ash. I could make out the distant scent of the crabs, and I could only wonder if they'd taste as good raw as they did with butter. With my new taste buds, it was entirely possible. I wasn't going to snack on one of them though, again because the others would have been snacking on me.

As I reached the bottom of the hill, I exploded into action, leaping to the ground and turning to head for the portal. It was harder to make the turn at my current weight, and I kept one eyestalk pointed to the sand. I could see at least twenty six foot crabs exploding out and heading for me.

Charging the portal, I reached out and opened it. I felt pain as a pincer snipped off an eyestalk, but I closed the portal behind me.

Passing through five of the worlds that we'd known about was easy. There had been challenges in each that would have made it difficult for him to circle back; a twenty foot drop to sand, a cave system filled with giant ticks, a forest with flying carnivorous bats the size of hawks and other things. Frankly, I'd been surprised that the PRT had been willing to continue for as long as they had. If they hadn't found clues along the way, I suspected that they would have given up long before.

Finally I reached the last of the worlds.

Stepping into it was like stepping into an oven; it had to be a hundred and forty degrees in the middle of the night. By day the temperatures would have risen to the point that survival would have been impossible for a normal person. I doubted that my slime form would be much better all things considered, at least over the course of an entire day.

Ruth's father had found himself in a desert world, or at least there was nothing but desert as far as the eye could see. If someone had landed in the Sahara on our world, they might have assumed it was a desert world. We'd only scanned a fifty mile radius, enough to know that the ocean was nowhere in sight and that there didn't seem to be any life here.

Running across the sands was easy enough; they were hard packed and there wasn't much in the way of wind. It was three miles before I reached the city, which looked to be made of massive stones. The sands had scoured away at the surface of the walls outside; drones had shown that the sun itself was red. The sun of our world wouldn't change from white to red for more than five billion years.

Life would have been gone for billions of years, though. The sun would be ten percent hotter in 1.1 billion years, which would turn Earth into something like Venus. In three billion years it would have gotten hot enough to boil the oceans and life would be impossible. Right now we should have been fifty percent farther from the sun than we had been, and even then, temperatures should have been hotter than they were. It should have been hotter than this, though, which confused the scientists.

Time ran faster here by a third; an hour passed here for every forty minutes back home, something that had intrigued the PRT; if the place had been even marginally more habitable they'd have liked to use it as a way to speed up things like research.

As it was, the heat of the day had destroyed the drones, but not before they'd sent the message that the impossible stone city had portals, and that some of them were open.

I needed to be fast; sunrise would be here much earlier than I'd like, and once daylight hit, I wouldn't be able to come back until the next night, which would be eight hours shorter than back home. The day and night cycle there and here only sort of matched up every three days or so.

The city should not have existed; no structure was going to last four billion years whether it was stone or not.

So I raced toward the impossible city, ignoring the heat as well as I could, hoping to reach the next world before dawn.

I had to finish this before it was time to wake up in the morning, but sunrise would happen here long before that. My best guess was that I had less than an hour and considering that the city was three miles away and that I'd likely need at least a little time to find the portal if it wasn't open, that meant that I didn't have time to dally. Finding Ruth's Dad was something that I'd been incapable of before, when I'd been limited to preexisting portals, but now that I could skip the line, it meant that my becoming trapped anywhere other than underground was very unlikely.

Even if I was trapped underground, I could just abandon the body if I had to. It felt like I was gaining more and more body mass all the time, so any particular part was becoming less and less important. It was requiring a bit of readjusting in my thinking; people weren't meant to think of their bodies as disposable, and I was afraid that it would make me a little restless.

The stress had to be getting to me; letting of of my focus had been what had led to the anger that had me breaking people's bones when I'd charged the crowd. Sure it had been satisfying to feel them snap like twigs, but it had been wrong of me. All I'd done, really was make things harder for the hospitals, where things were hard enough. I'd justified it in my head as saving the PRT agents, but really I'd just wanted to lash out.

After all, part of the reason that this had happened was that I'd failed to predict the attack. I was supposed to be this great Thinker, but I'd been blindsided by how quickly the attack had come. It had meant that Dad had to be stuck in hiding and I couldn't see him just as our relationship had finally begun to improve. I was trapped in a place with cameras everywhere; before I could have confided in Ruth maybe, or Amy or Vicky, or maybe even Lisa. But now that they were under the same roof, I couldn't talk about my frustrations; even with Lisa we were limited to short conversations lest we give enough information for another Thinker to figure out what we were saying.

Gabe was in the wind; I could have possibly talked to him, but I had no idea where he was, and he was a serial killer anyway. It was possible that some of the urges I'd felt would seem normal to him even though other people would have been horrified about them.

In the darkness before I went to sleep I sometimes wondered if I was even really me. After all, I had changed so much that I could barely even be called human anymore, and for all that I liked to pretend to myself that I was still the same, I could feel myself changing, and I wasn't sure how to keep myself from slipping away, especially when it felt so natural and pleasant at times.

The sky was beautiful in a strange way, even though it was different than any other sky I'd seen. The constellations weren't recognizable at all, and the colors that couldn't be seen by human eyes were strangely muted compared to what I'd seen in other skies. I suspected that it might be more due to dust in the air than to the skies themselves changing; the universe should still have a long time yet to continue to run down.

I could feel myself slowly overheating as I jogged across the sand. It was a little different than it would have been as a human, but then I suspected that eventually I'd have to slow down. Human beings were good at expelling heat compared to other animals, maybe as result of not having so much hair. Humans had been known to outlast most animals in endurance races, trained humans at least. I doubted that couch potatoes or good old boys with a belly hanging way over their belt would be able to outlast a turtle.

A lot of heavy people had been in the crowd attacking the PRT agents. If they'd had a path open, all they'd have had to have done was drive a hundred feet and all of their pursuers would have been winded… or maybe I was just exaggerating.

The city was close now, and I stared at it, trying to understand how it had avoided being buried by the sands of time, or melted when the outer edges of the sun had kissed the Earth as it had turned into a red giant. There shouldn't have been people here for billions of years. Maybe they'd come from another universe? But the place looked ancient, and conditions would have been even worse the farther back you went. How bad would the universe they'd come from have been to be forced to settle here?

I'd heard once that the granite on Mount Rushmore was eroding at a rate of an inch every ten thousand years. That meant that within less than two and a half million years the faces would be gone, assuming ice falls from glaciers didn't wipe them away first. At a similar rate, walls that were twenty feet thick of granite would have vanished completely in the same time period. Enhanced vision showed me erosion and pitting on the outside of the walls, but nothing like I would have expected. Either the city was less than a hundred thousand years old, or the material it was made of was a lot tougher than granite.

The walls of the city had to be at least a hundred feet high; there were huge gates that were slightly ajar, with enough room for an adult man to have slipped through.

Reaching the door, I slipped through and emerged into a wide avenue, two hundred feet wide. I hadn't really realized just how large the city was from the last portal; it was a lot bigger than I would have expected. I made my way through the avenue, moving quickly.

I'd run almost a mile when I heard it, beckoning.

In the distance there was a pyramid; it wasn't like the pyramids of the Egyptians; it was more like a Mayan pyramid, with stepped sides, and a set of steps down the middle. At the top of the pyramid, I could see a portal shining brightly.

Sprinting, I found myself gasping for air that I didn't really need. The heat was getting a lot worse, and the sky was changing colors slowly. How hot would it get during the middle of the day. Should I abort the mission?

Maybe I'd be doing more good out in the middle of Brockton Bay, even with my growing anger issues. I shouldn't take my anger out on people who were probably scared and expressing that as anger themselves.

At least that's what Yamada would have likely said. I hadn't seen her in two or three weeks; she'd had to miss our last session due to an Emergency in Fairbanks, and I wasn't likely to see her again until this whole electric grid thing was resolved.

As I moved through the main avenue, I realized that I could see movement along the walls. It took me a moment to realize that it was the walls themselves. It looked as though they were rippling, changing, becoming less worn.

Nanites.

I felt my flesh crawl as I realized that the city around me was most likely made of some form of nanite, and that with the right commands, the whole thing could probably dissolve into goo. The weathering that I was seeing might be because the devices were so old that they were slowly degrading, whether it was the programming or the building of replacement machines. The devices were finally starting to fail, even though the failure might have started ten thousand years or longer in the past.

After all, the walls were continuing to heal; they just weren't healing enough. Maybe there had once been a grand society here, with solar cells filling the deserts and providing virtually unlimited power through portals to other, greener places.

I could see the remains of statues on the street as I passed. The ones at the edge of town had looked positively evil, but the closer that I got to the center of town, the more affable and kind the statues seemed to be. Had this been a society that had slowly degraded, with the statues starting from the center and the later rulers becoming more and more jaded and corrupt as the city itself had expanded.

The sun was rising, and the city around me started to change color. The stone, or at least the material that had looked like stone had been white; as the sun washed over it, it was turning black, absorbing the energy of the sun. Why even bother to turn white at all? Black objects tended to absorb energy more easily, which meant that they had the energy to radiate at night. But turning white wouldn't keep the energy in; maybe it was a result of something to do with the nanites, or maybe it had an aesthetic component.

How hot would it get by day?

In our time, there could easily be a thirty degree difference between day and night in the desert, if not more. I was betting that it was going to be a lot worse than that. Would it hit two hundred during the day? Higher?

I didn't see any other portals other than the one at the top of the ziggurat, and I'd reached the base of it. I started climbing the stairs and I grimaced as I felt the first rays of the sun hit my back. I could hear myself start to sizzle, and I made my way up faster, extending tentacles and stretching myself as quickly as possible. Even the first rays of the sun were painful; it wasn't as bad as running through fire had been, but it hurt.

Moving faster, I could feel the air around me heating up unnaturally quickly. It was quickly becoming as hot as an oven. I had to wonder about the ozone layer. How much radiation was coming through, and could slimes even get cancer? What would it mean for Ruth's father?

As long as it wasn't brain cancer, Amy could heal it, and it was likely that she could heal it even then if she was convinced well enough.

The PRT would love to have Ruth's father on their side. Twice as many people able to close portals would make everything easier, and they were likely to be happier to work with an adult, rather than a teenager. Her father had skills too; experience with other worlds that was unparalleled except maybe for his own father, and it was possible that he might recognize some of the creatures running through Brockton Bay by night. There were likely worlds that he had explored that he'd thought were too dangerous for Ruth.

I was tempted to jump to another universe to cool off, but most of the universes I knew would have a much lower elevation. I was already at least two hundred feet up, and there was still a little ways to go. The last thing I needed was to fall three hundred feet and explode like a sack of pus on the hard earth.

As I reached the top of the ziggurat, I was surprised to see that the portal wasn't just open, but that someone had run black tubes from the other side to cover the entire flat top of the structure. The portal had to have been open for a while, because there were hundreds of feet of tubing spread out, and I could hear the sound of water rushing through the system.

I leaped through the portal, and there was an immediate shock to my system as I went from a place as hot as an oven to being cold inside what looked like a cobbled together shed. It had been constructed shoddily, but the tubes went straight through a concrete wall straight in front of me. There was a door which looked like it was made of metal.

The shed likely wasn't as cold as I had thought; the tubing was covered up with a fiberglass cover. Despite that, some heat was leaking through, enough to keep the room above freezing.

There was a doorway into the building, and none outside, although there were areas that had chinks in them that had been patched with mud.

Taking my Fairy form with glamour, I knocked on the door.

No one came, and so I tried it. It wasn't locked, although it looked like it could have been easily.

"Hello?" I called out.

The walls here were made of cinder block, although the paint was peeling. It was still chilly here, although it looked as though someone had run tubing all along the floors, and the heat was getting a warmer. The walls were radiating the chill, and I could see where someone had attached comforters using screws to provide insulation.

A little more exploration showed that this place looked like it had once been a post office, although that had to have been thirty years ago given the state of the place. I could smell the rank smell of sweat; whoever was here hadn't been bathing often, at least not recently. Given the fact that I could only smell one person, it had likely seemed like a waste of effort, especially if it was a person who had been here weeks or months.

It looked like they'd collected things from outside; there was a mattress from a twin bed laying on the floor on the far side of the room, along with what looked like drying racks that smelled faintly of elk. Were they using the other world as a place where they could dry meat into jerky?

It looked like there was an old refrigerator laying on it's back in another corner, and I could smell what smelled like meat and dried fruit inside.

It was dark in here, lit only by the light coming from beneath the front windows, which wasn't much considering that it was still night here. I had no trouble seeing in it, but it would have left a normal person blind.

The door opened.

A man stepped through, wearing what looked like six different layers of animal skins. He had an elk slung over his back, and a lantern that he picked up from the floor of the crudely constructed shed on the other side of the wall. Presumably he'd built it so that he wouldn't let the cold in.

He hadn't seen me yet; I stood in the darkness as he moved the lantern onto a hook by the door, and he stepped inside, closing the door carefully behind him. He'd set up what looked like a metal table next to the door and he dropped the elk onto it. It had rollers, so he'd presumably scavenged it from somewhere. He slipped the rifle from where it had been strapped to his shoulders and leaned it up against the wall. He knelt down and started unstrapping a pair of makeshift snowshoes that looked like they'd been repaired multiple times.

It took him a little bit to unstrap himself, and when he finally looked up, he froze as he finally noticed me in the dim light of the lantern. His first urge was to grab for the rifle on the wall behind him, but he was kneeling, and he suspected that I was a parahuman. My beauty was unnatural, and he knew that and wasn't fooled by it. He very carefully rose to his feet with his hands up.

"Uh… can you understand me?"

He sounded as though he hadn't spoken in months.

"Yes," I said, and smiled at him.

"You speak English. Good. Good," he said. "I'm going to set the lantern up on the table, if that's all right with you."

I nodded.

He was moving very slowly, making sure to telegraph his motions as he knelt down for the lantern, which he set on the table beside him next to the elk. There was a hook on the wall beside the gun, but it looked as though he didn't want me to get antsy about his going for the weapon.

Ruth hadn't said her father was cautious, but all the stories she'd told about him suggested it was true. It was likely that this was the reason he'd managed to survive on strange worlds without any power but the ability to get there in the first place. He was likely pretty good with the gun too.

"Mr. Walker?" I asked.

"You know who I am?" he asked. He stared at me. "Are you a parahuman?"

"I have power," I said. "And I'm from Brockton Bay. I think it's time to get you back to where you belong."

Looking around, I grimaced. It looked like he'd made the best with what he'd had. My bet was that there was a small town outside and that he'd looted what he had from the other houses. He'd made creative use of what he'd had, and it looked like he'd found a lot of undamaged hose, which surprised me in this kind of cold weather.

"How?" he asked. "There's no portals in a twenty mile radius; I checked. There's two feet of snow outside, and there aren't any portals in the hellhole I presume you came through except for the one leading to another death world."

I frowned.

Most of the worlds I had access to had a much lower elevation. Just slipping back to Brockton Bay wouldn't be enough, unless I could get my bearings and even then I doubted that there were any thirty story buildings in the whole city.

"We'll figure something out," I said.,