Ember

A/N: I'm probably going to end this soon, once I find a decent stopping point, probably after the Simurgh Fight. I've accidentally written myself into a corner since I made James too powerful, especially starting in a couple of chapters. I've come back to it a few times, but the build up demands payoff and I'm not happy with how this goes and my muse has me in the process of starting a new story all over again. So, my apologies, but this is probably not going to last too much longer.

We touched down on the rig, even as I calmed mom down with a promise of teleporting back to Brockton Bay at the slightest sign of the Simurgh's scream.

The other members of the PRT were waiting for us at the helicopter pad as we waited for our ride. I was busy fiddling with a small prop that I was putting together for Amy and myself - ostensibly a teleportation device that would let me evacuate, not that I would be stating as much to the PRT, or to Amy, just fitting myself with the devices.

The travellers, weren't coming, and to be fair, the only reason I was coming, was that Amy had guaranteed that we would be far away from the actual fighting.

I idly hacked the PRT networks as I sat in the waiting area, tracking the movements of the various capes. We would be waiting for one of Dragon's hypersonic transports to bring us to Los Angeles to meet with a bunch of other american capes, while we waiting for several teams of movers to teleport us to Brisbane, which was as close of a location as anyone had managed to figure out.

Amy and I would probably end up waiting there at the staging location until the Simurgh left or was driven off. That was, unless I specifically volunteered for the fight. That said, I wasn't in a hurry to strap a bomb to myself in an attempt to rive off the Simurgh, I just wanted to have an opportunity to scan the largest group of capes I could ever get my hands on.

And thankfully, I had my opportunity. Several members of the Brockton Protectorate that I had already tagged with Targets were heading into the battle.

So, as we loaded onto the transport, I cuddled close to Amy and settled in to wait.

It was only a few moments into the flight when I got to work, memories of the future pouring into my head as my mind began to accelerate in order to manage the influx of information.

Dozens of powers meticulously scanned as I pinged every power I could detect. Each mapped in moments as an accelerated mind searched over segments in parallel futures, spending untold hours in worlds that would never exist, feeding its ill gotten gains into my tinker repository and power catalogue.

I even managed to tag Dragon Somehow. Apparently, her suits linked up to her power somehow, though I didn't quite understand how. Still, it was enough for me to figure out her power.

It straddled the line between a Thinker power and a Tinker, and in a way, was very similar to the one I already had, but with a few improvements. It wouldn't take me too much effort to improve my power to match, though the required additional power was just barely more than a first level charge, so I would probably wait to fill it in with a large array of thinker powers to fill out the fill cost.

But even without that, her repository and the technological databases flowing in from the dozens of Tinkers waiting to be taken to Australia were filling gaps in my knowledge almost faster than I realised they existed. Instruments and technology that allowed me to better understand the psionic energy fields that I could easily connect with more and more thinker powers.

It wasn't universal. Some Thinker powers had other means of collecting data, but those that directly scanned their surroundings rather than relying on the senses of the parahuman they belonged to used it.

Even my own powers used it. This field apparently being the basis for how Sensors worked. Though mine was apparently better tuned, capable of detecting finer detail. But even as I learned about it, I could see improvements. Or at least, I think I could. Other sensors, using other fields and I could expand the level of detail I could detect.

Vista's power, for example, was better optimised to detect and manipulate space-time in ways I couldn't really touch right now.

But it was Alexandia's power that really opened my eyes.

Not only did the similarity between her power and Clockblocker's mean that I was finally starting to understand the true mechanics between their 'temporal locking' but her thinker power was really starting to let me piece together where I went wrong with my Lanes.

Her power operated her mind outside her brain, just like my Lanes did, but I could see how it interacted with the carefully assimilated scan of her brain to extrapolate behaviours beyond the machine-state of the mind, properly extending the process to integrate various physiological processes. Her's didn't take into account ageing, but I had already copied the tools I needed to complete that part of the equation for Amy.

I had everything I needed to adjust the effective age of my lanes with respect to their hormones, but there were better ways to spend those charges.

Hundreds of powers simulated in untold futures a list of different interactions flowed back in time. Different degrees of investment as I optimised the skill, focusing on different conditions, each time better understanding power creation, refining my approach with tens of thousands of unmade decisions as a flood of information poured in from a future yet to be.

It seemed like weeks had passed, but I wasn't done.

As I sat there next to Amy, the deluge of information just continued to grow as My arrival to Brisbane was finally less than ten minutes away.

A deep sense of satisfaction filled me as hundreds of powers fell within my sight.

Timeline after timeline filled my mind as I gathered every last iota of information in those fractions of a moment that I had access to. More Tinker tech, more Thinker powers breakers, brutes, blasters, movers.

I noted with a little amusement that our ride to Austrailia, a cape named Strider, had a power surprisingly similar to my own implementation of teleportation. Momentary recall into an extradimensional space, but dropping them off through another targeting mechanism, one that I would probably be stealing before long.

But there were others. Shrodinger, for example, was a cape that made 'probability clones' which was impressive enough before you realised what they were doing. They could stabilise multiple personal timelines, dropping those that they didn't like as they wished.

Fathom's power was actually interdimensional, transporting people to another 'earth' that was largely composed of water.

Gunnery Anne's powers gave me even more information on communication between powers, hinting more and more at a comprehensive list of commands that powers could send to each other.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Legend's lasers were about as much of a lie as everyone believed, but Luminary's laser lances were actually made of light, and her effectors were definitely much better than mine at manipulating electromagnetic energy.

Not to mention Narwhal, whose forcefields outclassed anything that I had managed to study thus far.

But it wasn't just powers.

In some timelines, I practise with my sensory powers, allowing me sensory capabilities approaching some of the better tinkertech I could make, allowing me to piece together more pieces of the puzzle of how powers worked.

By the time I saw Strider in person for the first time, there was nothing more that I could learn from his power. Even a mere ten minutes into the future, months of research has been put into the powers before me, giving me greater and greater insight into how powers worked.

Results of repeated experimentation flowed back through time into me as I followed Amy towards another transport, these ones heading south as the incoming Simurgh attack was projected to be moving towards Canberra.

The staging area was far enough north that it would be possible to evacuate if the Endbringer started to move towards us.

As we moved towards the shuttle, one of the people that would be joining us there caught my attention. Scapegoat, another dimensional manipulator, it turned out.

His powers helped me fill in more gaps in what I was calling inter-dimensional quantum mechanics. I'm sure people would argue that a bunch of gut feelings and guesses I put together after staring at shiny lights for a good couple of hours didn't count as a proper field of science, but most of my guesses worked out, and while the results of my experience would have been a little unpredictable, I was starting to see results.

They still exploded more than half the time, but it was starting to get there.

Through my Target on Armsmaster and Ms Militia, I started scanning the capes as they evacuated Canberra.

More and more information came pouring in. A surprising amount of people would just kind of ignore me as I set up ominous black metal pillars everywhere to study their powers and it just meant that I was able to send back even more information on all these capes.

Various Thinkers showed me how to optimise my post-cognition, driving the cost down quickly. Improved implementations of my dimensional transfer technologies that meant that I could create a better version of my Hidey Hole, though I might not even need it.

I absently tried to pre-cog a timeline where I created my intended post-cog power, only to grab my head as the powers clashed with each other leaving me with a splitting headache.

Absently trying to make other powers, I find that I cannot spend changes in a timeline that I intend to drop.

Still, the pain abates quickly, and with my mental acceleration, it goes unnoticed by the others in the transport.

Eventually, though, even if I can't remember most of the research, it becomes boring. Since landing at the Brockton Bay PRT, it has been roughly half an hour, and even if I wasn't using the full extent of my mental acceleration, almost a day had passed for me at this point.

Even if my lanes didn't experience emotion in the same way as my organic mind did, I still got bored.

Still, I kept learning. Even as my mind returned to a more normal speed and I continued over to the tents set up along the highway, I was still receiving more and more information from aborted timelines.

At this point, I didn't really have to conserve charges. I was building this stockpile for a situation like this in the first place. The endbringer was still more than ten minutes out, so I could freely scan amongst the collection of capes.

Changes, in particular, were quite interesting, some of them having biology that I didn't have records of, giving me even more options when it came to what I could do to myself and my creations. Some of the exotic biology in particular, that incorporated materials nor normally found in nature.

But it was the Strangers that really helped move things along, especially in terms of my planned anti-master power. Strangers and Masters had a skillset that overlapped quite a bit, and masters were a lot less likely to show up to a fight against the Simurgh.

Still, it was confirming my suspicions on what I needed to do to protect myself from masters.

There was only one test left for me.

It was a risk, a gamble, but everything I was able to find on the Simurgh suggested that, as long as I was far enough away, it wouldn't be able to touch me. I just needed to be careful.

Looking through my Targets on the Brocton Bay Protectorate, I scanned the sky, watching for the signs of the monster as it slowly descended. My tap into the networks fed me the latest telemetry as the abomination careened down from orbit.

Before long, it would be within range of my precognition, and with that, I could finally pull the trigger and spend the charges I had stockpiled.

Eventually we spotted it in the distance, a speck of pale light against the clear blue sky.

My Eye grew, the Projector adjusting the shape and size to let me more clearly track the creature as it descended. In futures not-to-be sensor arrays sprouted from the ground, scanning different energies even as my Sensor dissected the area around them.

My heart stilled as I finally made out the creature. Even with ten minutes of precognition between us, I shuddered as the mockery of a human form slipped towards us.

As it got closer, I began to detect the surges of psionic energy washing over the gathered capes, and even just from that, I could tell that the sensors this creature wielded were far beyond what I used.

Or at least different.

As it finally fell within my range, I set to work, studying and analysing my powers, not just through my power sense, but using my Sensors to detect what it was doing to the world around it.

And I was immediately shaken by what I saw.

The Simurgh wasn't a cape, or really anything that I had ever seen before. The thing was an extension of the powers themselves, an antenna peeking into this world from another dimension entirely, radiating strange energies as it scanned the world around it in order to process and predict the future.

Because that's what it did.It predicted the future. Complex equations and estimates worked to establish the most probable outcomes, it analysed not just earth Bet but complex interaction between worlds to predict the future in ways that drastically reduced the possibilities it needed to consider.

It wasn't perfect, I could already tell as much, but it could still see things. The general course of events that would arise from the changes it made. Within minutes it was as effective as my own precognition, but it didn't cut off like mine did, it just got progressively less clear.

It was still enough for the thing to detect large events in the far future. Even decades out, sufficiently wide-ranging events could be picked up. Not in any great detail, but enough for it to know how to weigh things in favour of the results it wants.

And with how active it was, I could easily tell that despite not having a host, this power had an agenda. I couldn't see everything, my powers weren't geared towards that form of information extraction, but I could still see a pattern on the futures it chose.

I couldn't make out too much, but I could make out certain disasters being prefered over others, a complex network of misfortune working towards some strange, unknown end.

But that wasn't all, as I studied its power, I could tell that it was communicating, signalling the powers around it gaining information. Some of it refined it's models of the future, additional information that let it more quickly predict what it needed to do in order to achieve it's goals.

But it also tapped information in a way that was very familiar to me. It sent requests that caused Tinkers around it to start searching through their repositories, sending back information that matched what the creature was looking for.

There were advantages, I supposed, to the way that the Simurgh did it, but I think I would stick with my approach. Between my mental acceleration and precognition, I had already scanned every tinker here, and I wouldn't loose access to the repositories once they left my range.

I took a moment to consider my plan.

Even now, my mind blurred analysing what I knew. The time had come.

Through my power, I stared at the simurgh in the distance, and grit my teeth.

Was I really going to do this?

I looked at Amy and ther other healers, their faces grim as they awaited the first wave of patients.

The Simurgh screamed, and I finally saw, in the present the tendrils of telekinetic power reaching into the brains of the capes around her.

My choice was made.