5.1

5.1

Saturday, 2nd April

You woke up with eyes stuck together with sleep and the trademark sensation of dried drool across your cheek.

Since becoming a parahuman, the opportunities for long, uninterrupted sleep with no expectations for the following day had become increasingly more scarce, and after having dinner with Dad the previous night you had placed your helmet in the bottom of your cupboard and promptly gone unconscious with an unspoken promise to catapult anyone who woke you into the ocean.

The universe, it appeared, had listened and when you finally managed to work up the energy to roll over and check your phone, the sight of double digits in the hour brought a soft smile across your face.

Reality was that even before Friday you had vastly exceeded the required hours of your Wards' contract and as a result, you had no obligations to do anything until Monday at the earliest and you were fully planning to take advantage of it. That began with simply luxuriating in that plush warmth of a well slept in bed, but it was going to extend to skipping your morning jog for the first time in a while and refusing to put your costume on unless someone messaged you for an emergency.

A real emergency, too. If Lung was under twenty feet tall, you didn't want to hear it.

Snorting to yourself, you rolled out of bed and made your way to the bathroom so that you could go through your morning's ablutions, before grabbing your phone again and sending Vicky a good luck text. While she had been fairly sure that you weren't needed to help with the meeting with Amy – a fact for which you were extremely grateful – you still wanted her to know that she had your support. Amy being a healer meant that even if she had a freak-out, there probably wasn't much she could do to hurt anyone but it always helped to have someone on speed dial. That was the one exception to your do-nothing day: if Vicky needed you, you'd be on your way. The aforementioned ocean catapulting applied to medics too.

Switching your phone volume up, you slipped it into your pocket and made your way down to the kitchen for breakfast. Dad wasn't around, but you weren't surprised. While you were taking the day off, you weren't sure that anything could make him take a similar break; with the move to Atlanta looming, it appeared that he had been possessed by the spirit of the Dock itself to make sure that everything was in order before he left. You knew he had been in contact on and off with the PRT, as they were setting him up with employment before you left, but whether his increased level of activity had anything to do with that was a mystery to you.

As you warmed oatmeal on the stovetop, trying to decide on the vital choice between jam and chocolate – perhaps, even both? - you allowed your mind to wander.

Manic as it had been, the day before really could have gone worse. Aside from some material damage and some surface injuries, none of the heroes had taken any punishment, and while Kaiser being so wounded wasn't ideal, you weren't going to lie to yourself and pretend that it was some enormous tragedy either. You didn't view yourself as a ruthless person, but if there was anyone in Brockton Bay who deserved to lose a limb it was probably him.

Telling yourself that did nothing to remove the shudder that ran through you when the image of his broken body returned to your mind, but you shook it off as quickly as you could. Jam and chocolate, for sure.

What was more impressive, or at least more important in your own mind, was how little it had damaged you. While you weren't exactly an expert on the Empire, you knew enough to know that Night was considered a real danger while in her transformed state – Armsmaster's damage spoke to that too, and yet she'd been able to do nothing to you. In fact, Fog's toxic cloud had been the only thing since you had gained your brute power that had done anything to damage you at all. That and, you supposed, the pulled muscle in your back from elbowing Night; you weren't really sure how much the damage counted if you caused it yourself.

Still, it had been enough to notify you that you weren't untouchable. Resilient didn't mean impervious to reality, and the taste of your own blood had made that clear enough, even if it had been healed up quickly.

You could still be hurt.

It was a sobering thought, and your mind immediately raced with ways to avoid it but none seemed readily apparent. Powers like Fog's couldn't be defeated with a new fighting style or weapon; if it could, Armsmaster would have figured it out years ago, or Miss Militia would have summoned the projectile necessary.

Your costume had held up well enough, and you were more or less airtight when wearing it, but you still had to breathe and Rhizome's filtration system was top of the line. It simply didn't get any better – at least not in any way that you could imagine. Just muscling through a cape career would work much of the time, but not all of the time. Better to learn it now, in a situation where you had backup, than in a moment of vulnerability in the field somewhere.

It was hard to imagine being more cautious though. You were already taking care not to rush into things, as much as you had to fight your instincts to do so.

You pictured that moment at the Memorial Hall when you'd raised the idea of simply taking Kaiser out to the Protectorate capes, and shook your head at your own naivety; what might have happened if you had rushed in then and there, and been gassed more thoroughly?

'Nothing good,' you said to yourself, pouring the oats out into a bowl and sweeping some dark chocolate from the counter over the top. 'Nothing good at all.'

You were going to have to fight smarter in future, not necessarily harder – though, you thought to yourself, the time to fight harder was going to come too. However strong you were, nobody just muscled through the Endbringers.

A damper already put on your morning, you grabbed a jar of jam and scooped some out to swirl into the oatmeal before taking a seat at the table and going in for your first bite.

They'd stopped showing footage from Endbringer conflicts on television when you were a kid, but you still remembered the clips you had seen – grainy, taken from a distance – of a Behemoth sighting. Maybe you were six at the time, and you had seen it on the news after sneaking downstairs a little past your bed time. Mom and Dad had been watching it, talking in hushed tones, and you had seen just enough to give you nightmares for weeks.

It had been too far away for blood, too far away for gore. You didn't see anyone die, but you saw the flashes of electricity and the guttering, fading beams of light and you knew even at that age what it meant. There was something primal about it, something you understood in a way that didn't need language or concept; you feared it the same way that people feared the dark.

Even the Triumvirate never really did anything to stop them. No blaster had anything that truly damaged them, not that they couldn't recover. No tinker had yet come up with a trap or tool to stymie them; no shaker had been able to turn the tides against Leviathan, or to stop Behemoth in his tracks. The Triumvirate drove them off, sometimes; the news loved reporting whenever that happened. More often than not, even their combined might – all of Eidolon's magnificence, Legend's searing power, and the gargantuan strength of Alexandria – could do nothing to stop cities falling, people dying, and vast spans of land being rendered unfit for human habitation.

As you spooned some more oats into your mouth, you wondered what your first time fighting them might be like. You knew it had to happen at some point. There was no way you could just choose never to go, not while there was still breath in you. Shame still filled you from your choice not to go last time – you'd excused it as pure pragmatism, and it was. Nothing you had back then could have helped you against the Simurgh. Objectively speaking, as Vicky had told you, it would have been madness to go.

But that didn't stop it feeling like cowardice.

Some of your powers would be useless against them, you knew. You weren't even sure if they had senses to dull, not really, and if Legend couldn't stop them your blaster power would have nothing to offer. Perhaps only your Brute power was strong enough to make any sort of difference, and even then, Alexandria had proved that Brute power alone could always be matched.

But you were stronger than she was. You remembered asking yourself that, weeks ago when that power had first come up. Your thinker power had confirmed it.

Did you dare ask? Was it sheer arrogance to even attempt to know? You had to know.

Chances that my Brute power would be enough to beat an Endbringer?

0%

You'd thought as much. In a way, getting the confirmation took some of the pressure off. At least you knew not to expect too much from yourself whenever that first confrontation happened.

Beating them, though, was always considered out of the question. Nobody was even sure if they could be beaten, or killed; certainly not by you. Maybe Scion could do it, if he was so inclined, but he hadn't done it yet so either he couldn't or the attempt would be so chaotic that the fallout would be worse than just letting them attack again.

After what had happened in Moscow, the idea of worse make you feel uneasy in your seat.

More important was just driving them back. Stopping their progress enough to prevent their attacks from becoming total washes; to prevent Moscow, or Kyuushu. What about that?

Chances that my Brute power would be enough to drive them back?

33%

You blinked, and swallowed your mouthful without tasting it. That was more than you had expected.

It had the same problem you'd experienced with Coil – there were three of them, so was thirty three per cent a guarantee that you could drive back one of them, and not the other two, or was it an overall possibility for each of them, averaged out? You didn't know, and you didn't feel like burning through enough questions to put your in bed on a mere curiosity, but the fact that it wasn't totally off the table was enough to cheer you up and make you feel terrified at the same time. Because now you knew that, there really was no refusing; you had to be there the next time. Even one per cent chance was too much to pass up.

Contemplating that pledge while you finished up your bowl, you went over and placed it in the sink before heading up to your room. The decision to do nothing of import and avoid the PRT meant, at least for now, that you were on your own. Vicky was dealing with Amy and Rachel basically lived at the PRT building – you were more than happy to see her, but she didn't really have a phone herself, relying on the PRT's comms for any kind of communication and you got the feeling that she wasn't the kind of person to mind going a day without you.

That meant that you had a lot of time to yourself, and you slumped down at your desk and flicked your computer on.

The entire machine was outdated; it had belonged to your Mom before Dad had dragged it out of storage, and while you had bought a few bits and pieces with the settlement money from Winslow to fix it up a little, all that had done was bring it from the stone age to the bronze. Iron was a pipe-dream. Bulky case, slightly yellowed plastic towards the back, and a keyboard that had several uncooperative keys, it was far from a dream, but it worked and that was all that you were asking for.

As you sat there, the thoughts from the previous night arose unbidden in your mind. Your helmet and your phone; there had to be some kind of way to integrate the two things together. You'd never seen Armsmaster with a phone, other than the one on his desk, and you thought it was absurd to the extreme to imagine that he was the kind of person who would make himself incommunicable in the field. Even if he may have wanted to.

So incorporating it had to be possible, at least theoretically. It was just a matter of working out how to do it. Therein lay the problem; a high school level understanding of physics and some basic ideas about how circuits worked didn't make you the kind of person who was willing to crack open Rhizome's work and start jamming chips and wires into it. If nothing else, the idea of how expensive a replacement would be was frightening and you got the feeling that explaining to Rhizome how you broke it in the first place would be even more so.

Nevertheless, you had a few ideas – mainly process, rather than specifics. Maybe getting a phone apart, trying to identify the pieces that were responsible for the key functions; what was it that allowed them to communicate, or to encode messages in text and send them? You had no idea, but you scribbled down some notes and told yourself to set a reminder to look into it. If you came up with something that looked half workable, you could always ask Kid Win or Armsmaster to tell you if you were being completely stupid or not; they may not appreciate being used as human troubleshooters, but they should have thought about that before becoming tinkers.

Besides, your phone was cheap. You'd gotten Dad to buy it, but it had been before the settlement money came in so even if he had been enthusiastic about it, you hadn't really had the cash to spare for something fancier. Now, you did. So if it broke in the course of your investigations you would probably be able to just upgrade anyway.

Wasteful? Maybe, but you figured that it couldn't be too hard to find a way to make use of the pieces even if things went poorly.

Leaning back in your seat – it was nearly midday and you were still in pyjamas and stiff from stable sleep – you felt your spine stretch over the backrest and your obliques twinged with a sharp pain.

Cursing, you curled back in on yourself. Maybe saying you had been unharmed was an overstatement; it turned out that you were strong enough to hurt yourself, and that elbow that had crushed Night's exoskeleton had been both awkward and poorly executed. Brute force made up for it, and Night had been repelled, but the fact that it worked didn't mean your own body appreciated it, and apparently it wasn't the kind of ache that Othala's healing fixed up. Perhaps because it wasn't so much damage as it was just sensitivity? You didn't know.

Before you had trained with New Wave to get your Brute power under control, you had been on the lookout for some kind of way to fight unarmed without hurting yourself or anyone else by accident; maybe it was time to look into that again. You were pretty confident that you weren't going to pulp anyone by mistake, so at least getting a few motions in practice couldn't hurt anyone, right?

Or perhaps they could hurt some people, but only at the right time.

Still, it was difficult deciding how to go about things. Ultimately, you decided to follow the lazy ethos of the day; getting someone else to do the work.

It was a luxury you hadn't had before becoming a parahuman. With your friends deserting you and Dad in the depths of his depression, if you had wanted something done you had to do it yourself, even if your own lack of capability or information meant that you ruined or destroyed it in the attempt. Admirable, maybe, but not exactly conducive to success.

Now, though you wouldn't call them all friends, you had a network to fall back on. Personal or not, the Protectorate had invested in you and you weren't going to waste that resource.

Sending a text through to Aegis, the only other Brute who might know, you kept it simple.

Penumbra: Hey Aegis, I was just wondering if the PRT/Protectorate had any classes or anything on unarmed fighting. Hurt myself against the Empire yesterday and wanted to avoid it in the future, it would probably help if I knew what I was doing.Click to expand...

You looked at the message, wondering whether you should add anything friendly to it. Most of your presentation had been formal thus far, trying to keep things professional and give off an air of control – you supposed that had worked somewhat, but not entirely, and you'd had most of your success when working with people who were more inclined to be friendly.

Dropping your cold front entirely wasn't possible. You couldn't do that. The idea felt too personal – too vulnerable. These people didn't know Taylor, they knew Penumbra, and you weren't sure if that was ever going to change the way it had with Rachel, who you'd bled with, or Vicky who had guided you.

But maybe you didn't have to be a complete stiff about things. Even Armsmaster had been softening up a little, you thought. Though he might attempt to kill you if you told people about how he'd praised you after taking out Night.

Penumbra: Hope you're doing okay.

Aegis, you supposed, must have been already on his phone. Or, if not, he was the most conscientious alert-checker of all time, because his answer came back in seconds.

Aegis: Hi there, good to hear from you. I'm doing well. Miss Militia told me about what happened yesterday, everyone was shocked. I'm glad you made it out okay!

His next message followed through after a brief pause.

Aegis: The Protectorate does have combat training available, for everyone including Brutes – you're welcome to check it out. I can forward you the paperwork if you would like to enrol in a class, and there are some materials you can follow at home. It's kind of a few different martial arts stitched together with most of the ceremonial stuff removed for practical execution. Would that work?

Penumbra: That would work very well, thank you. And thank you for your concern; I think everyone made it out pretty safely, except Kaiser.

Aegis: What? What happened to Kaiser? I thought he was in custody.Click to shrink...

You winced. Perhaps you shouldn't have said so much, but then, nobody had told you that anything was classified; even Piggot's dismissal after your debrief the previous day had been curt but non-restrictive and it wasn't as if it was real concern.

Penumbra: Kaiser was caught in an attack from another Empire cape. Or former Empire cape, I suppose. He's alive and he'll probably be okay in the long run but it was a nasty injury.

Aegis: I see. I'm glad he's alive – at least that way he can face legitimate justice. Well done again for bringing him in, you should be proud. You might even get a commendation on your record.

Penumbra: And thank you for sending that information over. Hope you're doing well 

The smiley face was, perhaps, a little much but you considered it no less dignified than the thumbs up you had given in the past via your helmet. Trust Aegis to think of commendations on your record; you'd barely even realised that you had a record.

True to his word, however, you received a follow up text message containing no less than eleven different files each with titles that referred to schedules, rotas, plans, and a few terms of an origin which you knew to be Asian but couldn't identify with more specificity than that. You would look over them later and figure out how to actually sign up, but it was good to be going through with things and making some progress even if you were technically on your day off.

It wasn't really working just to text a co-worker, you justified.

Before you could put your phone down, it rang.

Fumbling to answer, almost dropping it, you held it up to your ear.

'Hello?'

'Hey Taylor,' Vicky's voice came; glancing at the clock on your bedside, you saw that it was early afternoon. Long enough for them to have spoken to Amy.

'How are things?'

Vicky's subsequent deep inhale and slow sigh sounded like someone for whom the weight of the world had been a long time burden, and who had just been told that a decision had been made to build reward their hard work with a promotion to carrying Jupiter instead.

'That bad?'

'Not bad, I guess. Not any worse than we had feared. She was okay at first. Nervous, you know, but she was listening,' you nodded, as though she could see you, but let her continue. 'Then as things went on, she got kinda twitchy, and when Gallant said something about like, a problem shared being a problem halved, she kinda flipped out.'

'Oh. Was anyone hurt?'

You could easily have imagined someone like Vicky hurting Amy purely by accident, if the situation was frantic enough, and flipping out certainly sounded like a situation with a fair degree of chaos involved.

'No, she just kinda yelled a lot and stormed out. Left the house, even, in her slippers. Gallant says we should just give her some time to cool down, so that's what we're doing. Called you instead, to let you know.'

That was something, at least. Gallant usually had a pretty good gauge on those kinds of things, for exceptionally obvious reasons, and you were more willing to trust his evaluation than your own admittedly shoddy social perception – especially when that perception was being applied over the phone rather than to a situation you had seen with your own eyes. If it had been left up to you, you wouldn't have trusted Amy to storm off unsupervised like that; she had a sort of nervous energy about her that you thought could snap pretty quickly.

'I guess it could be worse. Are you okay?'

'Yeah, just kinda shocked. Drained. I thought we were getting to her, you know?'

'Maybe you did, and it's just a sensitive subject. We have stuff we don't want to talk about.'

Vicky would know that herself too, once she calmed down a little. She was a people person, and every people person had the ability to read others and know when the line was being crossed. Going into a situation like she had where crossing the line was the entire point, just so that the existence of the line was acknowledged, was dangerous ground because it upset the entire dynamic of the conversation.

You could imagine Amy's freckled face flushing red before she stormed out, and you weren't sure whether it would have been scary or childish. Perhaps both. You always felt like both when you lost your temper, even if you were losing it against Tattletale or Cricket rather than a member of your own family.

'You're probably right. Gallant's probably right,' she took a deep breath again, and you could swear you heard a tremor in it, as though she was holding back a tear. 'Look, I'll call you back later okay? Gallant's kinda just sitting there listening to me on the phone, and you probably have other stuff to do. I'll keep you updated?'

'Please, but don't worry about bothering me. If you need something, let me know and I'll help. Whatever I can do, don't hesitate.'

It felt strange putting yourself out on a limb like that, but you'd do it for Vicky no matter the circumstances; you owed her a lot, and you intended to make sure she knew just how much you appreciated it, even if you couldn't do much for her in terms of the emotional side of things. If you'd have been there, you probably would have ended up with an explosion even worse than the one that had apparently happened.

'I won't. Thanks Taylor. We should hang out soon, it's been a while. Maybe a patrol next week?'

'Definitely. Let me know when you're free and I'll set something up with the Wards schedule so we're free at the same time.'

After a handful of repeated goodbyes, the phone went quiet and you were left to your own thoughts again.

It was strange to feel like you were taking some time to yourself to do nothing while your friends were wading into drama, but while you were eager to support Vicky through it you couldn't say you envied her presence. While your relationship with Amy had become decent enough, it had taken some work on your part and you had no desire to blast it to pieces while Gallant attempted to give her a hand out of whatever issues she had going on.

Hearing the door downstairs shook you out of your reverie and you decided to head straight down. Your butt was starting to go numb sat in your desk chair, and you needed something to distract you and what better way than to chat with someone who neither knew Amy nor, probably, cared about her personal dramas.

'Hey Dad,' you said, stepping off the bottom step.

'Hey, how was your morning?'

You ran through a brief summary, which was a spectacularly elaborate method of explaining that you had very purposefully done nothing at all and enjoyed every moment of it. Well, most of it. Parts, at least. Some.

'How were things down at the Dock?'

'Not too busy, there's only a few jobs on right now. Things are starting to pick up since you cleared the graveyard but shipping in general is down and it's going to take more than a few weeks for everything to get set back up. They're in good stead though. Lot better than they were last month, that's for sure.'

You were glad. There was a gleam in Dad's eye that told you he appreciated what you had done, even if it had been partly folded into your punishment for not communicating with him as clearly as you should have done.

Thankfully he couldn't pull any similar trick on you for the Empire collapse; you'd agreed to debrief him on whatever happened during the week on a Friday, and you'd told him straight after it happened on exactly that day.

Circumstances sometimes worked out like that.

'Got any plans for the week upcoming?' he said.

'Yeah, a few. Going to hang out with Vicky, maybe go on patrol. There's a first aid class on Friday that I want to go to, so there's that. Aegis passed me some information on learning how to punch without putting my back out.'

A sympathetic wince later and you got the feeling that Dad knew intimately what it felt like to put your back out. Curses of age, you supposed.

'You think you could free up an afternoon anywhere? Maybe next weekend?'

'Sure, what's happening?'

Dad sighed, and placed his palm down flat on the table. He did that a lot, you'd noticed, and it usually meant he had something important to say.

'I wanted us to go up and see your Mom, together. Before we leave. Just so she knows.'

The mood in the room dropped, and you felt your smile fade slightly.

After Mom had died, a lot had gone wrong. It was after that summer that Emma had turned on you, that Dad had fallen into his depressive spiral, and that had culminated in the moment traumatic enough to turn you into a parahuman. It was a compounding sort of tragedy, where the damage it had done to you had exposed wounds the bullies could pick at while simultaneously removing any support you could have had at home, and even the fact that you couldn't remember Mom for herself anymore without associating it with that entire sequence of events stung even worse.

But he was right. You couldn't leave without saying goodbye.

'Definitely. Maybe next weekend? We can take flowers.'

'Perfect. I'll make sure to take the morning off if you can do the same.'

'I can, don't worry about it.' You moved into the kitchen to start making a cup of tea, and as you did so you paused.

'Dad?'

'Yes?'

'Do you think that Mom would mind? Us leaving, I mean. That we're leaving her.'

A few small footsteps clicked across the kitchen flooring and you felt Dad's warm hand on your shoulder.

'You know, I don't. Your Mom didn't live in Brockton Bay her whole life, you know?'

'Yeah, I know. Boston, right?'

'Yeah, Boston. She left there too, for college, when she wasn't much older than you are now. I'm definitely glad she did – we met there, after all. You remember the story?'

'I remember. Better question is if she ever let you forget.'

Dad laughed, rubbing the back of his neck. 'No, she never did. Feels like the bruise never went away, sometimes.'

'The point is,' he continued, 'your Mom understood what it was like to need to go somewhere new, see new things, learn from new people. How could she ever judge someone for doing exactly what she did? If anything, she'd probably still be annoyed that I'm hanging around this place when it's all downhill traffic.'

You mirrored his earlier move, putting a hand on his shoulder and drawing him in for a hug much as you had the day before.

'I think she wouldn't mind. She knew what kind of person you were when she married you. Stubborn.'

You both smiled.

'Glad I never inherited any of it.'

You laughed as Dad scowled at you and you scampered back up the stairs to your room, glad to hear a chuckle following you up the stairs as his faux-outrage dropped away.

Collapsing back down in your desk chair – you needed a new one desperately – you looked back over the notes you had left from earlier. Very few of them made any sort of sense. There were some lines and some arrows and a few words that you weren't even sure you could read, but you remember writing it. Scribbling it down while thinking about your helmet and cell phone, maybe looking into it.

With enough hours left in the afternoon, you powered the computer on and decided that if you were going to pursue such a small project, you might as well try and figure out what you were doing first. The internet had a number of issues, but you were pretty sure you could find somewhere that would tell you which parts of the phone were actually important when it came to the features you wanted to integrate into the helmet; it couldn't be that complicated.

After all, your phone had been relatively cheap and weighed fairly little; it was rugged, but not heavy, and you were pretty sure that everything inside it combined couldn't have been more than a few hours worth of work to put together. Designing probably took longer than the manufacture.

So if you could find the outlines, just enough to isolate the key parts, you could take some notes and at least have something to show Kid Win to get his take on things; enough to prove you weren't just idly approaching him to do the work for you.

And so you waited for the computer to load up and hit the internet, notepad by your side to take notes.

Scrolling and thinking, scribbling down notes, ideas, phrases that stuck out to you as you were reading, you could feel yourself getting into something of a groove. Most of what you were reading washed off you like the tide against the shore, terminology more arcane than theology and perhaps equally as confounding, but you thought things were coming together, at least in some way. The core things to ask about, at the very least; maybe if you took a look inside the phone it would be easier to identify the parts you were reading about. If you successfully integrated it into the helmet, you wouldn't need it anymore anyway, so it wasn't like it would be a loss.

You'd lose the texting capacity though, which was important. Maybe there was a way around that though – Eidolon never used a phone and he had a mask like yours. Nobody had ever seen him crouched on a rooftop texting. Maybe there was something to the idea of showing it inside the mask, putting that technology in too? Maybe an inverted screen, like the LED panel that already showed on the outside. Something transparent but which would display at least basic text on the interior of the helmet, so people could still contact you with those means if necessary. You could respond using the same mental prompts that let you show imagery on the LEDs.

It made sense.

Time passed as you waded through what felt like an ocean's worth of pages, swathes of information and diagrams, your pen at work all the while, and when you finished you leaned back in your chair – and noticed the window.

Dark. Not pitch black, but dark enough to tell you it was late in the afternoon, perhaps early in the evening.

Glancing at the clock, you saw the time – nearly 6PM. Close to dinner time.

Turning back to the desk, you gasped audibly, a rare reaction; papers spilled either side of the desk, falling out on to the floor, escaping the confines of the narrow writing surface; the curled rings along the top of the notepad were bent slightly where a piece of torn away paper hadn't quite escaped without a snag, and you must have just pulled it through.

Diagrams, notes, columns, figures; like the ones you had seen all across your screen but that you hadn't remember copying out.

What on Earth was going on?