10.5

After Faultline carried out the census among the captive Case-53s, the number of my Miko Dolls rose drastically. I couldn't afford to dally, leaving literal thousands of Cauldron's immediate victims to suffer, after all.

So, I sent one of my remaining Miko Dolls to harvest pieces of Yggdrasil's body, and then to make an Endbringer Crystal Miko Doll - or Miko Doll 2 - out of the material. The main difference between the two versions were that Miko Doll 2 was highly conductive to Karmic Energy, meaning improved crafting efficiency, the ability for its entire body to act as a continuation of its Orb - and since it used a Mini Orb instead of a Camera Orb as the 'eye', its entire body could ALSO act as a conductor of powerful Karmic Expulsions. I also presumed it was slightly more difficult to damage if someone got the drop on it before it activated a 4D Barrier.

Basically, it was an overpriced, ~10-20% better, premium version to my Miko Dolls that I wouldn't have had even considered in the first place, if I didn't have literal hundreds of thousands of metric tons of Endbringer body available to make it.

And then, these two dolls crafted two more. Then, those four made four more. Then there were sixteen, thirty-two and finally sixty-four. Well, 63 - one of them was the initial old wooden model.

I would've considered doubling their amount again, but I ran out of spider web cord - Brightbug's troops could only produce so much of the stuff for my needs.

Still, I had created literal dozens of spare hands capable of engraving Karmic circuitry - all in a matter of a single evening - and so, they were knocking the most repetitive parts out of the park.

Watches that made the wearer look more baseline human (like the one I made for Gregor) and sometimes required some minor adjustments, like dimensionally shunting extra parts, or creating a wavelength holographic projection over what was (or wasn't) there. Watches that connected to a bio prosthetic, dimensionally shunted or otherwise (like the ones we'd made for Weld and Dragon) - Amelia was still working through the backlog for the PROSTHETIC part of the equation, though she looked like she was having fun making those for some reason. Watches that resized the wearer, or made them less of a threat to themselves or to others - like those I created for Newter and Gentle Giant.

In the span of a few days, my Miko Dolls 2 made nearly a thousand and a half tinkertech aids - and now the only ones left were the things I had to actively look for a solution for.

Which was kind of an issue, considering the addition of Cauldron's stupid bullshit on top of the pile of things I already had to do.

I… sorta had to find a way to delegate shit that specifically required my powers in one way or another. Which meant, there were no two ways about it - at this point, I HAD to work on the Endbringer Cores.

Why?

Because the Endbringers were the closest thing to artificial intelligence I had at hand that was even remotely related to my powers. They were essentially alien robots, programmed to do specific things - and while the things they were PROGRAMMED to do amounted to mindless destruction, if I managed to adjust them for my purposes? To make not semi-living weapons, not tools - but actual artificial people - ones just like Dragon?

They could be a game changer, on a much larger scale than anything I had ever created.

Which was why, I was going to ask Dragon for help when the time came to 'program' them proper. Today? Today I was studying the two Cores, to try and learn HOW to create a Karmic Circuitry AI. The sooner this was done with, the sooner I could assign one of these AIs to manage Cauldron's ex-prisoners and whatnot, and proceed further down the list of things I had to do before confronting Scion.

I was currently in that separate dimension where I stored Leviathan's Core, me and my Doll in front of two of the three workbenches, simultaneously operating on the bodies of two Endbringers.

There were a lot of similarities between the two - which was EXACTLY why I was working on them both at the same time. Sorta like overlaying two pictures in a 'find 5 differences' puzzle, to solve them quicker.

And yeah, they clearly followed a similar blueprint.

Both were grown organically, veins and pools substituting for the lines and dots of my circuitry. One had liquid control, another - control over light and heat. Both had 'regeneration' - or rather, they were both offshoots of power-granting eldritch abominations, stored most of their mass off the conventional planes, and just pulled it in to replenish any mass they missed. Leviathan had a puppetry movement mode, while Yggdrasil could only move along the W axis. Both seemed to have brains that were engineered specifically for direct conflict with very little in the way of existing outside the battlefield.

The Endbringers were essentially bioweapons by design.

From what I saw in these two Cores, it was a pipe dream to rehabilitate any of them. But then again - last time I checked, the Simurgh was knitting a kaiju-sized backless sweater as she stayed in the stratosphere. Was her current behaviour a ruse? Was the Simurgh somehow an exception to the rule? Or was there something else at play?

The human race was not a monolith. We all had different values, different morals, different goals. No matter how essential to the human existence you thought any single thing to be, there was gonna be at least one weirdo who hated it with all of their heart. Like, there were people who refused to drink water. Or hated very normal pizza toppings, like pineapple and pickles. Or thought that Pepsi was better than Coke.

Were these aliens a monolith? Supposedly, all these eldritch abominations came from two specific entities that worked in tandem. Could these shards of a greater omnicidal whole have their own wants and needs, independent of their data-collecting mission? I wanted to say 'yes'. I really did - refusing one's personhood just because of the circumstances of their origin never sat well with me.

I was, however, intending to approach this cautiously. Just because an eldritch being from beyond the stars COULD be what we, the humans, quantified as a person, didn't mean anthropomorphising them by default was a good idea. If I assumed our understanding of Good and Evil applied to them, and they worked on the Blorp and Fweeb axis instead? That could end badly for everyone involved.

Hm… I was pretty sure I now understood how to make a simple Karmic Circuitry Robot.

One of my Dolls brought in a chunk of Yggdrasil's flesh, and put it on the third workbench. I took my enchanted carving knife - and began processing the thing, cutting it into puzzle-like pieces, and carving all the necessary circuitry into them with the Dragon Nail.

By this point, I could probably do this kind of work in my sleep.

Soon, I had a small crystal orb on my hands. A simple Camera Orb with an audio projection and holographic wavelength shunt. Plus, a very baseline program.

I threw the Orb up, and flicked the mental switch to activate it.

It immediately stopped right where it was in the air, and began playing a very familiar jaunty tune, 'hopping' in place in time to the music of the first verse. Then, came the chorus.

"IT'S FUN TO STAY AT THE-" and then just like the program told it, the Orb projected holographic letters at the same time as the singer spelled them out. "-Y.M.C.A.!"

"All the power in the world, and you use it to make a funny jukebox~"

I looked to the side, where Lisa stood. After so many months of tinkering around other people, it barely fazed me when someone suddenly appeared in my vicinity while I was busy building things. Though…

"Did you ask Doormaker to send you here just so you could bother me?" I looked at her plainly.

"Nope~" she smirked. "Actually, I think this is one of few worlds Clairvoyant isn't able to see somehow. I wonder why~"

"Huh, weird," I noted, deactivating the music-playing Camera Orb. It dropped into my extended hand with all the grace of a paperweight.

Now that I had the proof of concept at hand, I could ask for Dragon's input on-

Wait.

What?

"Wait, Cauldron can't reach here? Then how-" I turned to my friend, who was still smiling at me. "-how did you get here…?"

"I guess, the question isn't so much 'how', as it is 'why'," she kept smiling. "I… guess I have something to tell you…"

Hers was a fragile kind of smile. A sad one.

I felt my blood run cold.

"You… You drank one of their vials?" Without even telling me? What if something went wrong?! Why- just to maybe raise our chances against Scion?! What kind of stupid-

"No. No, I didn't," she halted my train of panicked thought, sounding almost empty. She opened her mouth to say something else, but then seemingly changed her mind before planting her rear on the ground and covering her face with her hands. "Ghaaah, this is harrrrd…"

I sat next to her.

"Look, I don't know what this is, but take your time. And if you absolutely have to say this now… maybe start from the beginning?"

"I… Yeah I guess," she nodded, finally detaching her palms from her face.

The look in her amber eyes was uncharacteristically distant.

"Okay, so… these entities are 3.5-dimensional beings, yeah?"

"They are." This was seemingly a non sequitur, but as long as it helped Lisa gather her thoughts.

"What does that mean, exactly?"

"In their case, it means that they are technically 3-dimensional, but shunt parts of their bodies along the W axis, which both acts as a defence mechanism and gives them higher durability compared to regular 3-dimensional beings. And, I guess, some of their pieces cross the threshold into four dimensions - like the Siberian did. Those probably act as either swords or shields against other 3.5-dimensional beings."

"And… could there be a true 4-dimensional being?"

"I mean, why not? They'd probably be unable to properly interact with our 3-dimensional world though, so it's unlikely we'd ever encounter them."

She nodded.

"Then what about 2-dimensional beings?"

I blinked.

Hm… Technically, it COULD be possible, even if I couldn't imagine that sort of life existing. And just like it would be difficult for 4D beings to interact with us, it would be just as difficult for us to interact with 2D ones.

My mind went back to my very first Barriers - from before I learned to Array them. Just touching them was enough to shatter the things without even feeling a speck of resistance.

Lisa glanced to me, and then nodded.

"Well, 2D beings do exist. Not on Earth Bet - at least, not for long - but on parallel Earths. And remember how your 2D Barriers disappeared really quickly? Yeah, it would happen to a 2D being too - unless they either found a place they could exist safely, or they had some special condition to make them slightly more durable. Think of it as a special diet - just like humans have to get water, carbs, fats, proteins and vitamins, these 2D beings have to get SOMETHING."

She… spoke of this like it was not a hypothetical. I looked at her seriously, as she continued.

"One of these SOMETHINGS is stuff like human belief in and fear of the supernatural. There's very little of it on Earth Bet - but there are worlds where it still hasn't waned, at least not fully yet. Over many centuries, people came up with stories about weird stuff. The fair folk, the changelings, the elves, all the monsters hiding just out of your sight. And if enough people believe in it enough? This belief still has the power of creation. Not a strong one - but enough to sustain or even create these 2D beings, form them into something close to those beliefs. I guess you could call them spirits, because of their diet? These spirits, of course, do everything they can to prolong their existence - you know, a monster popping in front of someone in the dark, scaring the socks off them, and disappearing without a trace? That sort of thing. Still, with the faith ever waning over the Earths, many of these creatures teeter on the brink of starvation, or just dwindle in numbers until nobody is left."

I did not dare to interrupt her, even as it was dawning on me what she was explaining.

"And it's a really nasty feedback loop, when things become that way. Less faith and fear to go around, and these spirits grow weaker, faring against the world becomes more difficult for them, they appear less frequently in front of humans, and humans think even less about them. It… can get pretty bad. 'Eating each other to survive' kind of bad." There was a tiny, barely perceptible shudder in her voice - so small I nearly wondered if I imagined it. "So, imagine one of these spirits, being left all alone, already too weak to reach the nearest human village. Still, it goes out, in hopes of maybe chancing upon someone, anyone to prolong its life, even for a bit. And just as it leaves its home one last time, something happens indeed. A huge alien thing crashes from the sky nearby."

As she explained, Lisa's eyes slowly grew colder, and more distant, her tone more neutral.

It was at this moment that I realised that my hand was around her shoulder, supporting her as she continued.

"And something probably came loose in that crash landing, because a small part of that huge thing? Crossed dimensions straight into being 2D. And that starving spirit tried to nibble on it. And, well - let's just say that it's not just humans who can get powers from eating alien bits and pieces - imagine going from the brink of death, to suddenly getting power beyond your wildest imagination. That being? First used it to keep eating as it ran out of 2D parts. It kept eating, and eating, until it felt full for the first time in its life, even as it devoured bits of knowledge, along with the alien meat. Turned out, that thing she ate? Gave her the power to define, change and switch boundaries as one saw fit. Technically, these entities used it as a master tool to modify and restrict functions of their pieces - their shards." She chuckled mirthlessly. "And among that knowledge, was also the knowledge of their cycles. Which had really put a damper on the entire 'surviving through the day' thing - because it turns out, there was another alien thing out there who was probably still gonna go ahead and destroy everything…"

Welp. Now I understood things, and… huh, we were back to that 'counting as people despite origins' thing?

"So… you're a 2D being, a spirit, that gained the power to change your dimensionality by eating one of Eden's shards," I concluded.

"Yup!" she smiled widely. It was a very, very fragile smile.

"I see," I nodded. "And… is there a reason you're… here, I guess? Not in this dimension, I mean, but-"

"Yeah, I get it. Once I learned about the cycle, I couldn't just do nothing. They were gonna destroy every Earth, and I kinda JUST survived nearly starving to death, so I was a bit too invested to let that happen. But I had no experience even being three dimensional, let alone fighting something on the scale of these aliens, and only had one power of many, even if it was a strong one. Which was why I thought - hey, why don't I find someone with a similar power, and learn from them?"

"Which is how you stumbled upon me."

"Actually, no. I searched for years, but NEVER found a power with a similar functionality. Scion probably kept his, or maybe only Eden had it. Which was why, I decided that if I couldn't find one, I could just make one," she explained as if it was the easiest thing in the world. "See, every shard has its own functionality in the entity ecosystem. Like, Legend's and Vista's powers are probably used for long-distance travel, and Thinker powers give those aliens enough of a brain to even function on their scale, that sort of thing. And there are two shards I know of that are supposed to help entities operate so many different powers at once. One of them was already tied to Eidolon, and the other one? Was primed to go either to you or Danny."

"And you chose to go with Dad and I."

"I mean, between a good kid who needed a friend and her grieving father, or a guy who's simultaneously suffering through a midlife crisis, inferiority complex, superiority complex and a martyr complex, who would you choose?" She shrugged. "So, I hung around, intercepted your shard the moment it tried to establish a connection, and politely, non-violently and definitely without ever threatening to eat it suggested modifying your power a bit."

"Modifying it how?" I looked at her seriously.

"Well, it was just gonna give you tinkertech drones, probably more traditional electronic ones, maybe made of some exotic tinkertech metal. But I brought it a bunch of shards from the dead alien that, if combined together, could form a Tinker approximation of my own powers, and in return, the shard just had to avoid pushing you around. So you got a stronger power, the shard got more data, and I got a fantastic example of what could be done with these powers-" she looked away from me, "-and a friend, I guess…"

I thought about it.

Good and Evil, or Blorp and Fweeb? Well, she'd lived in my house for a year and a half by now, and I was pretty sure that even with her secret past as a literally starving and maybe-cannibalistic fairy tale 2D being, she was definitely a person. Also, definitely my friend; my best friend, in fact - one who had looked after my physical and mental wellbeing way beyond what was necessary if just seeing me do Tinker stuff was her goal. Hell, she got me a therapist!

Sure, us meeting was pure chance based on the powers lottery - but the same applied to many first meetings. Not the 'power lottery' thing, the 'pure chance' thing.

Although...

"You didn't cause me to Trigger, did you?"

"Of course not! If anything, I tried to postpone it!" she sounded part horrified part indignant at the suggestion. "Pretty sure your shard saw a possibility for a Trump or a Tinker Trigger, and kept pinging others to come cause trouble. Maybe that's how Contessa got that Coffeebara idea."

"I still can't believe Cauldron had a hand in my first part time job," I muttered, before getting back on track. "So, to summarise… You are an extradimensional being used to feeding on fear and belief, who modified my power to resemble yours for the reference on how it could be used against entities, and you kept it all a secret for all this time because… you thought I was gonna treat you differently?"

"Partially," she said. "Also, if you learned about Scion too early? You would've worked yourself into an early grave trying to get to the point where you could deal with him. Unless he suddenly became an issue, I was gonna let you progress at your own pace."

Yup. Definitely my friend.

"I see," I nodded. A phrase uttered by someone else came to mind that pretty much described my feelings on the matter, as I placed a hand on her shoulder. "I'm mad at you for hiding this from me for so long, but I understand why you did it, Lisa. Just… No more secrets, please?"

"No more secrets," she nodded, her smile finally becoming genuine, a single tear in her eye.

I hugged her.

She was warm.

Hm…

"But wait, I don't get one thing. If you ate a piece of Eden before even finding me - how did you avoid appearing on Karmic Sonar?"

"Ah, that. I just shunted most of my body into being 2D again. Usually inside my 3D body."

"Ah, because you can theoretically fit an infinite amount of 2D matter into a single 3D object of any size," I nodded, before blinking. "Is that why Amelia was weirded out when she checked you over?"

"Ah, partially?" she said awkwardly. "I might have been, uh… threatening some people here and there to keep things quiet…? Including her…?"

My hand found its way to my face.

"I see. Is it part of your feeding process?"

"Ah, no. Eating Eden kind of… supercharged me, I guess? I'm still full-ish? At least, on fear and faith, I mean."

Bloody hell, this was a mess.

I had to do something nice for Amelia. Maybe a personal Floating Engine? Those were nice.

"Speaking of, is this still gonna be a secret?"

"I… would honestly prefer things that way. At least for now, considering the whole Cauldron thing."

"Yeah, makes sense," I sighed. "You aren't taking extra work now that I know this, are you?"

"Nope! I'd like to shadow you for a bit though, get some extra experience and all. Also, I WILL pick up the slack if something goes wrong - so don't get any ideas about dying while facing the alien guy!"

"Same goes for you too."

So, two of my friends turned out to secretly be not human, and… Yeah, I guess this was my life at this point.

At least Tana and Madison were humans, right?

Right?

March 8th, 2011

I think I knew what was wrong with Thinkers as a power category.

Remember my theory about Tinker fugues being the state when an eldritch abomination behind a Tinker's power takes the wheel to apply their particular brand of physics-breaking bullshit that effectively blackboxes tinkertech? Yeah, who said that Tinkers were the only power category that could have direct feedback from the eldritch power provider?

Thinkers were known to be able to procure knowledge or instructions or skills straight out of their asses, oftentimes with NO information gathering or effort involved. I also had plenty of empirical evidence of them being, among parahumans, probably the least creative and most prone to overly relying on their powers and making stupid decisions. Initially, I thought it was simply laziness at work - if at school, you were used to always relying on cheat sheets and getting straight As across the board, chances were you weren't gonna question things if one day, your cheat sheets began showing you nonsensical answers. And even if you did - since you'd foregone proper studying for so long, you probably didn't know HOW to study as well as other students.

However, now that I knew that there was an eldritch intelligence behind powers - and a literally alien one at that…

Yeah, suddenly things began making much more sense.

These powers evolved over a horrifying number of civilization-killing cycles, training their logic on literal alien worlds that certainly had different sensibilities from us humans. And given that unlike Tinkers who temporarily lost control of their body to make a piece of technology (usually, with no morality or logic involved in the process), Thinkers had a shard of an omnicidal eldritch being whispering wisdom taken from literal alien worlds into their ear - was it ANY kind of surprise that Thinkers generally were prone to the dumbest decisions imaginable?!

All that to say - now that I thought about it, it suddenly made sense why Cauldron pivoted so hard into STUPID EVIL territory from the get-go. After all, it was all built on step-by-step instructions fed to them by Contessa - THE Thinker in the worst ways imaginable, one that had been overly relying on her powers since she was a little girl to build a shadowy cabal under the guidance of her BLORP-FWEEB-aligned alien counselor and the lacklustre tutelage of Doctor Mother.

Then, they had Alexandria - oh, make no mistake, she was a flying brick of such magnitude the popular culture called ALL flying bricks 'Alexandria Packages' - but she was also a Thinker due to her eidetic memory. Which was why her cape name referenced the Library of Alexandria - she could perfectly recall literal libraries of information, and learned to use it to 'cold read' people, which… Yeah, it was something Lisa once attempted to teach me, because it WAS a useful skill. Except, in Alexandria's case, her Thinker rating and the ability to be a flying encyclopaedia had led to her thinking she was completely infallible - and, of course, to her not consulting ANYONE for so many important decisions she had to make daily. Which, of course, resulted in her going along with Cauldron's stupid, stupid program.

And then, there was the Number Man… who I actually didn't have THAT much of an issue with. I mean sure, he used to run with the Slaughterhouse Nine once, as a teenaged cape named Harbinger, one of the founding members - but then, he quit, joined Cauldron, and opened up worldwide cape banking. Good on him for quitting the roving band of mass murderers, too bad he joined a STUPID shadowy conspiracy - maybe his exposure to Jack's bullshit had left him desensitised to STUPID and EVIL. I mean, his cape banking provided anonymity to even the worst scum on Earth (which was EVIL, but not STUPID)... Ah, and also that same system was depending on him as the sole service provider, with no other people to pick up the slack. Was it STUPID, or was it an attempt at preventing Cauldron from 'tying some loose ends'?

Whatever it was, it at least didn't give me as much of a headache as the rest of their bullshit.

But yeah, back to the 'eldritch abomination at the wheel' matter. I had a few other data points to the theory.

One of them was Mimi - previously Burnscar. In her file, it was stated by the Parahuman Asylum staff that after Triggering, she 'became afflicted with a power-induced dissociative identity disorder' - being exposed to open flames made 'another personality' surface, one violent enough to be outright Slaughterhouse Nine material. What made it particularly strange, was that the moment she was depowered? That 'second personality' vanished entirely, even when she was near an open fire - in fact, Mimi was carrying a lighter nowadays, flicking it on for comfort, as if to remind herself that she was in control.

This? This was downright damning. What the experts had diagnosed as DID, seemed to actually be the eldritch abomination taking control of its host's body in a Tinker fugue-like state, against Mimi's wishes and will, ghostly possession style - just to cause whatever destruction it could for the sake of data.

Which was yet more proof that these things were alien at best, and outright hostile at worst - a point towards proving Cauldron's claims about entities. And who knew how many more parahumans were damned in the same way, except even more insidiously and more difficult to detect?! To say nothing about the fact that humanity had less than a century of proper psychological research, and these alien shards were mucking things up with THEIR brand of bullshit, resulting in false positives that made things more difficult for EVERYONE in the field of psychology!

Ugh...

And another datapoint…

Well, I was about to meet her.

My Doll landed in front of the facility. It was located offworld, practically on its own Earth. A reinforced building in the centre of a military compound, filled with non-parahuman personnel - PRT troopers, scientists and service staff. According to the documents, there were three hundred people over here in the middle of nowhere, all present because of a single parahuman hidden within the deepest part of this facility.

Studied like a lab rat because of how their situation changed. Hidden because of the danger they MIGHT pose if they were allowed back on Bet.

I did not know what Cauldron HOPED to achieve here, to be honest. Or maybe I knew, but THAT idea was so bloody distasteful I didn't want to even consider it.

"Miko of Paradise, welcome." One of the scientists approached me, followed by a pair of troopers. "We were told to expect you. I'm Dr. Oatt, head of this facility."

"Were you told WHY I'm here?" I looked questioningly at the man whose dry voice kinda matched his name.

"Yes, we were told that you are capable of neutralising the threat entirely, rendering the containment procedures obsolete and allowing us to re-allocate our resources elsewhere," he nodded.

"Golly gee, listen to the guy talk about someone like they're a rabid animal to be put down," came in the voice of Lisa in my Doll's ear. Because that was literally where she was currently located - riding along with my Miko Doll as this sorta intern, as well as possible backup, hidden entirely in a small metallic container inserted into where Doll's ear was supposed to be. Yeah, it was kind of bullshit what a being capable of freely shifting her dimensionality could do.

"Then let's not waste time, Doctor," I said plainly.

We were led through the compound, into its main facility - a bunker that was heavily fortified against incursions from outside, and REALLY heavily fortified against anything escaping - we were talking literal dozens of heavy turrets, each hooked up to shoot containment foam, electricity or some sort of tinkertech ordinance. Nothing outright lethal - but likely only because of the nature of the sole prisoner of this facility.

The corridor leading into the heart of the prison was long and winding, not allowing for more than twenty or thirty feet of unobstructed view, with every square inch being in the view of at least five automated turrets. It also had these heavy, seemingly tinkertech shutter doors that could isolate specific sections of the corridors, as well as what I assumed to be gas sprayers. Plus, a few tinkertech doors with biometric access, and a heavy elevator that seemed to be capable of cutting off the two levels of the facility from each other in case of a breach, just to be on the particularly paranoid side.

"They're really afraid of her, huh," Lisa noted. I just hummed noncommittally.

Finally, after about twenty minutes of walking through the overengineered nonlethal labyrinth that kept the prisoner from escaping into the wilds of an otherwise uninhabited Earth, we arrived to our destination.

It was an observation room with a few chairs, a table, a lamp, a fridge - and a one-way mirror that looked into… frankly, a pretty normal-looking pair of rooms. One had a bed, a TV with a DVD player and an entire rack of things to watch, some art supplies, a few posters on the wall of something called One Direction - I assumed it was some kind of an Aleph boy band, because the posters were full of pretty boys. The room had this lived-in look of a place where the inhabitant didn't get a lot of things to choose from.

And the second room had a small library, a couch and a clearly reinforced armchair - where the sole permanent inhabitant of this place currently sat heavily restrained. And I did mean HEAVILY restrained - huge, Brute-rated manacles on the hands, heavy chains tying their legs in place and to the floor, a reinforced metal mask that kept the eyes covered - with all of this, I was pretty sure the wearer couldn't even scratch their nose if needed.

"Why the hell is she wearing those?" I said levelly.

"Ah, well, it's protocol. Whenever a parahuman visits, she has to wear those - you know, just in case," Dr. Oatt noted in turn.

Just in case… …she decided to 'switch bodies'? Did they seriously treat her in a way that this became a possibility?

"You can wait outside," I sighed.

"Uh, the protocol-"

"Is likely about to become irrelevant anyway. Leave, all of you."

Luckily, they only hesitated for a couple of seconds before finally deciding to leave.

With that, I stepped through the glass and into the room.

"Hello, Juggernaut," I said neutrally. She jerked in place - but the restrains prevented her from doing anything.

"Wai- who's here?" She became very still. "Are you my new therapist?"

Huh, so they did get her a therapist. At least THAT was nice to know. Although…

"Do they make you wear all of this just to see your therapist?"

"Ah, no. But I'm told, new people are kind of jumpy around me… …You're not a therapist, are you?"

"No, I'm not. Do you mind if I get your headgear? It would probably make this talk easier."

"I mean, I guess - but aren't you scared I'm gonna teleport and go full Butcher on your ass?"

"Not really," I said plainly, before approaching her - and tearing the headgear apart, allowing her to finally see me.

"Y-you!" she balked, recognition clear in her eyes. The fact that I just tore apart her metallic headgear didn't seem to even register to her.

It'd been a while since I saw Juggernaut. Last time, she kind of tried to kill me, but I couldn't find it in me to blame her for it, considering her circumstances.

"Yeah. Sorry, we weren't introduced before," I smiled, sitting on the couch across from her, "I'm Miko of Paradise."

"Yeah, I- I think I heard of you… You bagged Lung, right? And then me." I nodded. "They say that it was your tinkertech thingie that cleared my head from all the shouting, so I guess I have to thank you for finally being able to get some peace and quiet. Even if it's in a place like this," she chuckled mirthlessly.

"Were they treating you here well?"

"I mean, I guess? I get to watch all the shitty pre-approved movies they keep bringing here. Listen to shitty pre-approved music, read shitty pre-approved books, do finger painting. The meals are big enough, though the amount of spice the cooks use would only satisfy a sickly Victorian child. Got therapist visits twice a week, even if they keep rotating guys for some reason. Barely get any visitors though. I thought spending so much time alone would drive me nuts, but I think I'm not there yet," she shrugged.

"I see," I nodded.

"What have YOU been up to though? They don't let me anywhere near the news, fear all the Butchers might resurface if I get too excited. Which is probably bullshit."

"It probably is," I agreed. "Well, let's see… I opened a Shinto shrine in Brockton Bay, stopped Squealer from bombing the city with a giant-ass flying fortress, killed Leviathan…" I decided to skip Ellisburg because the PRT was still dragging its feet about going public with its destruction. "Then wiped out Slaughterhouse Nine and killed another Endbringer - Yggdrasil, a new one. Also, stayed in school and ate my veggies. Ah, and found a way to depower people along the way."

I could almost hear the popping sound Juggernaut's eyes were about to make, so close were they to leaving her eye sockets.

"You're shitting me- no, you're SERIOUS?! TWO Endbringers and Slaughterhouse forking Nine?! Girl, you what, decided to just end all S-class threats in the world or something?!" Then she blinked, "Wait… What was that about depowering?"

"Yeah, long story short, I can take powers away from people. Forever. Meaning, if you wanted, I could take away yours. The process if fairly painful, and I can't guarantee that I'll be able to detach just the Butcher tag-along, instead of depowering you entirely-"

"-but it would mean, I could actually leave this place without worrying about ending up in some other asshole's head," she muttered, before jerking towards me, forgetting for a moment that she was restrained, "Do it! I don't care if I'll lose the powers, I just want to get out of here!"

"Okay. Hold on for a bit," I nodded, before replacing my Doll's body with another Doll - and sending this one off on the W axis.

"She seems to be a nice enough gal. How did she even become the Butcher?" Lisa asked, appearing next to me as we flew along the eldritch tendril.

"The previous one got blown to smithereens by a tinkertech grenade thrown by some unpowered Tooth, she was the closest parahuman available."

"Yikes, that's just rough," she winced. "You gonna offer her a job?"

"Of course," I nodded. "She's a college dropout, was caping to pay her bills, so there's not much she can do outside of fighting, but I've been thinking - don't we need our own Arena team?"

"I mean, we already have one?" Lisa gestured to herself.

"No. You, Swordsman and Brightbug have your own duties outside of that. I meant a professional team whose job is solely to participate in the Arenas, and make it more difficult to challenge me. Something we could offer to parahumans who don't know much except how to fight, you know?"

"So… a stipend just to dick around in the Arenas and challenge other teams?"

"More or less," I nodded. "We already have another potential candidate. Coil 2 picked up this homeless girl with fire breath who didn't care for joining a criminal enterprise. Maybe being on a professional sports team is more up her alley?"

"Maybe," Lisa agreed.

Then, we had finally arrived.

Juggernaut's eldritch being looked… different from Rinke's. First, it was somewhat smaller - I was not sure how THAT correlated to things, as I had too few data points to compare, so I just catalogued it, and moved on. Second - it had two OTHER tendrils stuck into it, the same way tendrils usually attached themselves to people's heads.

Upon further inspection - it turned out that one of the 'neighbouring' shards had multiple tendrils leading into OTHER shards, that were all daisy-chained together and fed into Juggernaut's. Guess this was how the Butcher's eldritch being operated - it stuck to its previous victims like a parasite, slowly but surely amassing more and more shards in this sort of an inefficient, bastardised network that ALSO drove its current host mad by projecting psychic impressions of previous hosts into their head, intensifying conflict even further.

"Okay, so… I think the best way to go about it is to get rid of the Butcher's shard entirely just so it doesn't find a new host, and to fully detach it from the others," I noted. "Although… maybe we should ALSO detach the daisy-chained shards from Juggernaut's, since there'll be nothing left to hold them together, and we don't want to learn what would happen?"

"Yeah, might be a good idea," Lisa nodded.

"Okay. Testing the 3D-2D Conversion Array," the name, just like the array itself, was still workshopped.

I slapped the Talisman onto Butcher shard, activated it - and it slightly visually shifted?

"DId it work?" I looked to Lisa.

"No, it just casts a modified 2D shadow now."

Ugh, this was a whole another set of issues compared to ADDING dimensionality.

"Back to the drawing board then."

"Yup," my friend nodded, before her face brightened up. "Oooh, can I try your Sun Array idea?"

"I guess," I sighed.

With a wave of her hand, she opened a jagged gash in the space beneath the Butcher shard, even as the entire thing was surrounded by the shimmering haze of what I recognised as a planar shift. Then, a painfully bright sun tendril arose through the portal, and licked at the eldritch being, causing it to visibly shudder in agony. The heat intensified, the brightness only rose - until a point where the portal just collapsed onto itself, and…

The shard looked crispy, but it was still there, alive and in immense pain. Huh. 3.5 dimensionality went a long way for durability, huh?

"Ah. I'm guessing, using it on the golden oaf is a no-go then," Lisa noted with clear disappointment.

"I'm not sure we have time to test what works, Juggernaut is NOT enjoying the procedure," I stated, before throwing a Lethal Persuasion Needle at the thing. It went THROUGH the eldritch being - but did not kill it yet.

Did I miss its vitals?

I threw a few more Needles - and the shard FINALLY perished at the fourteenth one, leaving us with a mostly-intact massive corpse.

Yeah, this was NOT efficient, even against a stationary target. It ALSO left a lot of cleanup. I maybe had an idea on how to erase shards relatively quickly, but in the meantime...

"Can you… eat this thing, or something?" I looked at Lisa. "I don't want to risk just leaving their corpses around."

"I don't feel hungry, but… I guess…?" she shrugged, flying towards the medium rare eldritch being.

I did not need to see what was gonna happen next, so I went to detach the unnecessary tendrils from Juggernaut's shard.

Also, since even small (relatively speaking) chunks of entities could survive solar cremation, I had to eventually come up with a way to deal with Scion that did not include 'throwing the Sun at him'.

Part of me was even thankful for it.

March 11th, 2011

There were a few things I did not want to go the way of the dodo the moment something happened to me.

Not Karmic Circuitry - now that I knew that my power was essentially an Entity Development Kit, I was perfectly fine with Lisa being the only one capable of doing anything similar to me. Not my Floating Engines and Karmic Weaponry - it would be better for humanity to science its way into something similar, rather than depending on my essentially blackboxed inventions they couldn't replicate or fix. DEFINITELY not my dimensional tech - that stuff would be a nightmare and a half in the wrong hands.

However, there were at least two of my creations I wanted to persist for a long time.

The first one was the extradimensional depowering method. Without the aid of powers, humankind currently lacked the ability to peer into the fourth dimension, let alone to affect it. And the mere existence of parahumans necessitated the ability to take powers away from them, be it to help those whose psyches or bodies were affected by their powers, or to render the worst of the worst powerless to act on their abhorrent tendencies. And sure, technically Lisa could depower people in my stead - but knowing her? She didn't want any extra responsibility or work. Which I could respect, even if I had a hard time understanding it - great power did not necessitate great responsibility, only great care not to harm others.

The second one was the Arenas. The first season was still ongoing, but Land of Fantasy Ltd had already received half a dozen offers to expand the program into other cities, including Chicago and Las Vegas - likely looking to decrease violent crime rates and build industry around spectacle fights the same way Brockton currently did. And of course, I wanted Arenas to stay operational even without my direct input - something that, once again, Lisa could technically do, but was unlikely to (without ABSOLUTELY having to).

Look, she was my best friend. And my best friend was a lazy-ass bum who, if allowed to, woke up around dinner, and then spent the rest of her day wrapped in a blanket like a burrito, eating junk food and watching cat videos on the internet. And if something ever happened to me, I definitely wasn't gonna be there to wake her up at proper hours and force her into being a productive member of society.

Which meant, I needed a plan A, B and probably C, with Lisa being plan D in my most optimistic estimation.

So, I was creating a Karmic Circuitry AI.

Not just Karmic Machines. Machines were tools, they could fall into the wrong hands and be exploited, used not for the betterment of humanity, but for power, for control, for evil. I could easily imagine a modified, mobile Arena Array used to fortify a formation of police officers, or SWAT teams or soldiers on the field with 4D barriers, allowing them to destroy the opposition, be it an enemy army or regular protesters, with contemptuous ease. Or the way a ruthless dictator or a parahuman warlord could use the depowering to run the country into the ground unopposed.

But an Artificial Intelligence? A fully fledged, long lived person who knew right from wrong, and could disobey orders if they went against common decency? Someone like Dragon - now that she was not shackled by Richter's paranoia?

It was the best way forward I could think of. Yes, people were fallible, but I trusted them far more than mere tools, for tools knew no loyalty.

"So, did I miss anything this time?" I looked to Dragon, who was peering over the diagrams I drew so she could better understand.

After all, she could not read Karmic Circuitry the very same way I couldn't comprehend common tinkertech. So I drew what was essentially a map of the KC AI Core, indicating what each segment was responsible for. This bridged the gap so she could apply her knowledge of robotics to a piece of technology that was entirely foreign to her. It was a bit strange to have our roles reversed - usually it was her translating things for my benefit.

"I think everything is in place," she nodded. "I don't know how much space the 'decision making centre', 'temporary memory storage' and 'permanent memory storage' actually have though. They MIGHT be enough, or it might call for a size increase."

"Yeah, until we have practical knowledge, there's no point in increasing their size. That's why the first one is a prototype, with no access to really important functions." With a shrug, I began working on the pre-harvested Endbringer Crystal through dozens of Miko Dolls 2. Whereas it would've taken me several days of crafting the Core around the clock with my own two hands even at my current level of mastery, the Dolls could be done with it in a hour tops.

You know what they say - in every girl's life, there comes a time when every second is worth its weight in gold.

Now, if only I could calculate the weight of a second…

"It's still amazing to me that air acts as its energy supply," Dragon muttered, studying the schematics.

"Not air. There's a source of Karmic Energy that basically emanates it like the Sun does heat and light - but it's weirdly shifted off the axes."

"Weirdly how?"

"Well, it's not on the common planes, nor on the fourth axis. Theoretically, there should be more than four, but experimenting with them was never my priority."

"Because four is more than enough to kill an Endbringer, I suppose," she smiled.

"Yeah. Though, considering some other targets…" I did not continue. We were in that one dimension where I dissected the Endbringer Cores - one Lisa claimed to be out of reach for Cauldron - but it paid not to be careless.

"It might be a good idea to experiment with even higher dimensionality - that is, if it's even possible for your power," she nodded. "Though I do wonder. Is the dimensional shift of the Karmic Source a spatial one?"

Uh…

"I mean, what else could it be?" After all, my dimensional tech only affected spatial dimensions… Wait, did it…?

"Well, apart from the spatial dimensions, some theories suggest that time is its own dimension," Dragon stated plainly. "One we usually only interact with in a linear fashion - although there have been some exceptions. For example, one of Indian Thanda villains, Phir Se, can create portals that travel a few minutes back in time-"

"Wait, wait, hold on. There's a cape who has TIME TRAVEL?" I blinked. "What time travel rules does he even use?"

"From what I know, he can alter the past as he sees fit, with the time limit to his travel being the main restriction. Althoooough, I suppose that if we take into consideration the existence of alternate Earths, sometimes with only minute differences based on a single point of divergence, it's possible that he simply travels between them."

"Hm…" I was a bit sceptical about it. After all, if Eden had the power to rewind time, it wouldn't have been killed by Cauldron in the first place. "Or it might be possible that his power is actually a Thinker prediction engine. As in, his shard knows when Phir Se will kick off his power, runs a simulation of the events that lead up to it, and keeps replaying the simulation up until the guy decides that he's happy with the results. And the power either knows when to stop, or there's some fugue-like state were it masters Phir Se into repeating his last time loop for real."

"You don't think the powers have actual time manipulation?

"They barely figured 4D out by stumbling blindly through their omnicidal evolutionary arms race. It's easier to believe they found a way to emulate time travel through other means. Especially if their goal is not to interact with the time plane, but to ensure that they always achieve a desirable outcome - which seems to be the main point of Phir Se's power."

"I mean, his portals do have properties that also allow them to act as regular transportation, but I suppose it could just be a Mover/Precognitive classification instead…"

Well, up until we found a way to detect and quantify temporal distortions, it was just one theory, even if it made the perfect amount of sense.

Although, all this talk about time made me wonder about something else.

My Floating Engines sorta interacted with the fabric of time, didn't they? At least, as long as I traveled in 3D, while my Engine was traversing a 4D plane - the countless folds and creases in the fabric of the Universe, the ones we as 3D beings had no way to detect as we were always perfectly aligned with it - caused a time dilation effect as I moved, slowing the world around me - or to an outside observer, making me faster, and capable of moving in a non-Euclidean fashion.

If we treated the Time Plane theory as true - did that mean that said plane was closely tied to the three spatial dimensions we were familiar with? Or was time sort of a 'shadow' of the spatial planes instead?

There were multiple known powers that were treated as time manipulation. For example, Gray Boy's bubbles and Clockblocker's freezing touch. The way I saw it, neither were truly examples of time manipulation; they were stasis techniques, meant to preserve matter over periods of time, including through danger - whenever an Entity's prediction, shields and regeneration failed. Gray Boy's bubbles were basically a 'leaky stasis' effect, where the stasis repeatedly failed to take hold, and brought all the matter within the bubble back to the moment it was first created in an attempt to re-establish it - only to fail again.

This was sorta why I had trouble breaking Gray Boy's victims out of those damned bubbles. Common sense would suggest that you simply had to break the stasis effect to release the frozen subject out of its hold - and poking anything frozen by Clockblocker's power with a 4D effect always ended it instantly. But how could you break an ALREADY broken stasis that repeatedly tried to re-establish itself whenever it was broken - which happened every few seconds without fail?!

After thinking things over, I came up with two methods.

The first one was finding the eldritch abomination responsible for Gray Boy's bubbles, and then forcing it to shut the bubbles down - or destroying it if necessary. The issue with this method was that there was no 'trail' to follow from these Bubbles - the shard responsible for them had long since moved on.

The second one was forcing the stasis to take hold fully, and THEN breaking it - which was kinda difficult to achieve, because even if I found a way to put something into stasis, it would be a DIFFERENT method. Although… I supposed it would be a good idea to research a way to put things into stasis in general - say, if I had an injured and bleeding out civilian on my hands, Panacea was currently indisposed and my potions were a bad idea (like during Shatterbird's attack in Chicago, where civilians had glass shards still embedded in their bodies), I would've preferred to have a way to put said civilian into stasis until they could be attended to by her, or any other healer. Or a surgeon with a potion.

Hm…

Hold on.

"Wasn't Gray Boy killed by Glaistig Uaine?" I blinked.

"Hm? Ah, yeah. Not long before she turned herself in, and was sent to the Baumann Parahuman Containment Centre."

"Huh. Which means, it's a safe bet that she harvested his power," I concluded. "I was planning on visiting the Containment Centre anyway, guess that's another thing on my list."

"Oh?" Dragon looked at me with clear interest.

"There's a number of people that shouldn't be there. Falsely accused, or brought in on trumped-up charges, nearly all per Cauldron's plans. I was planning on having the PRT's Chief Director officially ask me to pull them out, maybe make a PR event for the 'heroes' out of it to show that they cared," I explained. "I also planned to offer depowering to a number of inmates who were sent there not because of what they did, but because of the danger they presented - I suspect, some of them could be transferred to regular prisons, or even outright released if they went along with it."

"Oh!" She beamed at my words. "I've got a list of people who I think should be released, or could be with those stipulations. I'll send them to you, so we can compare notes."

"Yeah, do that," I nodded, before turning most of my attention to the KC AI Core. "Okay, I'm done with the production stage."

A pair of Miko Dolls transported the thing to where we were - it was currently inert, and roughly the size of a human head. A near-perfect orb of crystalline matter - even when I specifically looked for them, it was difficult to notice the seams between the pieces that made it up. Unlike my Yin-Yang Orbs that initially came to me in a fugue, the KC AI Core was a result of months of experimentation, practice and research, including reverse-engineering the functions of Endbringer Cores, and attempting to translate them into a less uselessly destructive expression.

I coursed the Karmic Energy through the Core, activating it.

Immediately, I saw and heard through it in perfect clarity - the wavelength research once again proving its worth. Then, I flexed the Matter Generation, causing the Orb to sprout a puppet body around itself - functionality taken from Leviathan's Core. Then, with a slight redirection of Karmic Energy, it moved its arm, its fingers, then another arm, then both legs. The controls seemed to be fairly intuitive - and so was the activation of the Floating Engine functionality. Then, I checked on the Prosthetics that imitated the sense of touch - and yeah, those worked fine as well.

"It works…?" Dragon looked at me for confirmation.

I shook my head.

The Core was perfectly functional.

As a tool.

I collapsed the body, and rendered the Core inert again. For all that it was a marvel of Karmic technology, it required one final step before I could call it a success - the Spark of Life.

"It was just me in control, like with a Miko Doll. I hoped that just coursing Karmic Energy through it would be enough to jumpstart it, but it clearly lacks something essential."

"So, it basically has no Operating System, just the hardware," Dragon said thoughtfully. "Do you have an idea of how to do the 'programming'?"

"Hm…"

I thought about it carefully. So far, my attempts at automation had been simple affairs - like that Y.M.C.A. Orb. They followed the general principles of Karmic Circuitry, albeit with the twist that once the energy entered the system, it was used to follow a set routine - it was a fairly straightforward solution, like setting up dominos.

But this? This called for something else entirely.

Looking at both humans and Dragon, it was fairly easy to realise, that the way to creating a true Artificial Intelligence lay in creating a rudimentary intelligence capable of learning, and giving it time and space to grow into its complex hardware.

The issue was that CREATING that rudimentary learning intelligence was something I had no previously established way of doing - and it certainly was not fugueing its way into my brain at the moment. Meaning, I had to find a solution the hard way, of course.

The question was then - if I was a regular Tinker, how would my power have approached bringing the Spark of Life into the KC AI Core? Hm… I suppose, it would've attempted to create a dimensionally-shifted, Karmic Circuitry-based, self-learning quantum computer - and then would've placed the thing dab in the middle of the Core, allowing it to 'grow' into its new habitat…? Sorta like a quantum computing pilot for a spherical crystal mecha.

…

Hooooold on.

I was fairly certain I knew of a way to make that work. It probably couldn't be called an actual AI in that case, but…

"I think I have an idea, but I'll need some time to think about it," I finally said.

I had to talk to Lisa before she went on that 'field trip' of hers tomorrow.

There was yet another thing to consider about THAT project now.