-trajectory. agreement.-

[from_scratch]

"Hasn't everyone heard of Kithabel? I live in Africa, not under a rock," Cam tells Tattletale. "You, on the other hand, are new to me."

Comments

[wormcan]

"The directly harmful side effects may not apply to you. But even if it can't burn your eyes out of their sockets like it did to him, it's more information than you can process. I wouldn't want to walk around seeing that much all the time."

[from_scratch]

"Fair enough. I could also try to give the Contessa power a really limited question, but I'd need to think of one that wouldn't make it reach too far afield for - anything."

[wormcan]

"And there aren't too many ways a black hole can go wrong. Go for it."

[from_scratch]

Cam touches the two six five.

[wormcan]

The world unfolds and gets bigger. He can see a full circle of everything around him, to a great enough distance that he can make out the curvature of the earth. Earths, rather; it's iterated across too many parallel worlds to count. It's not infinite. There are more worlds out there and more space in each world than he's looking at right now, but this is already several steps beyond a view ordinarily reserved for astronauts.

[from_scratch]

"Trippy," says Cam.

And he looks for entities.

[wormcan]

There are two. They look like gardens or forests growing human body parts instead of plants, one colored silver and the other gold. Each occupies a substantial fraction of the surface of its world. The worlds' histories diverged long enough ago that they aren't recognizable as earths, and they don't seem to have native life of any kind. Cam's four-dimensional vision can also see that each entity has a tiny protrusion, humanoid and barely larger than the human average, poking into Earth Bet from the planet dominated by the body of the entity itself and, in the gold one's case, rescuing a kitten from a tree.

[from_scratch]

Right.

Black holes.

He starts them at the centers of the Earths and grows them simultaneously and as fast as he can.

[wormcan]

Despite having gained more than enough mass to do the job, the planets steadfastly refuse to get collapsed.

And the entities' avatars take notice of the attempt. The silver and gold humanoids leave Earth Bet and head toward Cam. "Toward" involves flickering across dimensions; to an observer on Bet it would probably look like that they just vanished.

He can see the silver woman take a detour to her planet, while the golden man appears on an uninhabited world and fires a laser at a tiny winged figure.

[from_scratch]

And now Cam's singed and also not touching - or particularly near - the two six five anymore and the nifty omniscience is gone. "How the fuck did they no sell black holes," he says.

[whole_new_can]

"Fuck!" Tattletale agrees, as the silver avatar joins the gold one. "And if the bimetallism brigade can handle that, the backup plan isn't going to be any use either."

[from_scratch]

"Can you do anything useful from inside keratin bubbles or should you cut and run."

[whole_new_can]

"Bubbles wouldn't work. Physical barrier doesn't block everything they can do. And I've got teammates to warn." Faultline cuts and runs, Tattletale doesn't. "You kidding? This is the room where it happens. Besides, running isn't likely to work better. I'll take the bubble."

[from_scratch]

Cam bubbles her. Mobility is not his asset in this fight and having a cape attached to his foot isn't a big deal.

They've got to be at least as indestructible as Endbringers, even if they were getting Kithabel to deal with the black holes. He can't try any obvious tricks. "Suggestions?"

[whole_new_can]

"Powers are supposed to have an energy limit. A lot, but finite. Try to blanket some earths in capes without passengers, connected to the sources directly, and hope it bankrupts them?"

[from_scratch]

Cam makes another two six five, in his own keratin bubble, connected toe to toe. "Name me some capes with nice expensive passive powers -" He starts with Crawlers. Crawlers on the most hostile planet he can find.

[wormcan]

Tattletale starts shouting some names. Ash Beast, Gray Boy, preferably on a planet where every square inch is affected by an Ash Beast, jailbroken Sleeper. Even two six five is more power-intensive than he looks.



The entity is unconcerned. Even if that plan worked, it has plenty of fuel and a means of recharging. Possibly two, now. While the Warrior fires another blast that bounces harmlessly off the bubble of keratin, this entity applies the same mind-affecting abilities it used on the sorceress. Nothing works. This is good, in a sense; it confirms that the humanoid has abilities that beat anything shards can do.

The entity provides a portal and summons its sorceress. With the recent improvements in large-scale observation, thinking speed, and multitasking the sorceress is already vastly more powerful than she was yesterday. The entity plants the idea in her mind that she should try to break that bubble.

[ertia]

How dare that bubble try to be unbreakable. What's making it unbreakable? Her friend's helpful powers to cover sorcery's deficiencies fill her in: it's because it's "part of" that fellow there who attacked them with those black holes. Well. He doesn't usually have a bubble, does he? He must be thinking of it in some special way to make it count, mustn't he?

He can't keep that up every microsecond. And her friend has made her so gloriously fast and given her such exquisite timing.

The bubble evaporates.

[wormcan]

Excellent. So sorcery does beat the winged humanoid's defensive capabilities.

The Warrior wipes the host on the inside of the bubble from existence, but that's hardly important. The entity sets the sorceress to change her opponent's mind. Harmless and cooperative, that's the goal. The sorceress could be the answer to the cycle eventually, but this one could be today.

[from_scratch]

He's not budging. (He doesn't notice, either - he's hissing a sharp intake of breath when Tattletale dies, and, shit, now what, now what -)

(- he's still got the Clairvoyant attached he can see what they are -)

(- and how they're put together -)

(- basement dweller shards are mindless as any others he can attach them to himself four-dimensionally -)

Cam finds an empty Earth and he starts building plagiarized entity plugged directly into his brain, reminding himself like a mantra that he's adding this to himself, this is him this is him he's all of this. Clairvoyant's power first.

[wormcan]

Concern the entity sends to its partner. The message is a palimpsest, sending more information and undercurrents than the single word would include, even if it's a shadow compared to the number of layers it would normally be. If the humanoid can finish building a full-scale entity body—and predictions suggest he can—he'll dwarf these two entities and crush them easily.

The entity has the sorceress continue trying to overwhelm the mental invulnerability while also breaking off and destroying as many of the duplicate shards as she can as often as she can. It advises the Warrior to give up on direct destruction and distract the opponent with whatever amount of pain he can feel. This entity does something similar, with bright lights and noise and their equivalent in the new senses that the humanoid will be developing as he gains shard clusters.

[from_scratch]

Ow.

Nothing's going too deep, nothing's hitting too hard, it's not as viscerally terrifying as the evaporated keratin, but he still doesn't like it and nothing's come online from his new extremities yet to help with his attentional capacity. Fucking grow, grow -

[wormcan]

None of this is going to stop him. Only slow him down. But the entities have their own way to escalate.

Urgency. The entity broadcasts to its partner a memory of an earlier cycle, one that ended in a forced exit. The two of them begin collecting their own shards. Parahumans across the worlds die in droves as their passengers get excised from their brains and reabsorbed into the whole.

Once the whole is reassambled, the trillions upon trillions of shards worming their way through dimensions because they'd dwarf the planet in any one world...they still can't hurt the opponent any more than they're already doing. But that wasn't the plan. They leave.

They leech what energy they can, from this world and from the others. The energy is released, and the planet shatters. The shattering reverberates through every dimension the entities are capable of reaching, and all of those earths end up equally destroyed. The entities ride the wave outward, with their sorceress prize.

[from_scratch]

And Cam watches it happen - and feels it, from the one his humanoid body is standing on -

And there is no air left with which to say 'oh shit'.

...But Kithabel can do resurrections.

Bad move, entities.

Now Cam can't just let you go. Now he has to chase you.

He doesn't have to blow anything up to take off. He needs no input to run at a high capacity. He just has to wait until he's grown enough shards to duplicate their speed - and load up on enough defensive anti-everything that they don't think to make a pit stop at Mars to wipe out the last remaining human aside from Kithabel.

Cam gives chase.

Drop the sorceress and he might consider letting you run -

- not that he'll let you have enough information to guess that.

[wormcan]

There's no normal mode of entity combat because it doesn't happen. Not in a long time. But the end result here wouldn't be in doubt; the sorceress can only slow the opponent down and the real entities don't have literally endless energy supplies. This entity's simulation of the opponent's mind confirms that he does. Gambling on him being wrong would be a bad idea.

And the opponent is indestructible. And some of the older shards are weapons. This isn't the battle to choose.


The opponent believes his weakest point is a surviving human currently located on a nearby planet. One option would be to kill the human, but that guarantees a direct confrontation. Safer to flee. They have the sorceress; an escape today is still a win in the long term.

The entities start moving by their own methods, by insinuation more than by momentum. It's faster, and more importantly it's less predictable. Once they're out of range of the opponent's perceptive abilities, tracking them should be nearly impossible.

Normally, the entities leave a trail. Breadcrumbs, marking which worlds have already been consumed so others of their kind know not to follow them. The entity sends out a trail following the path the momentum from the planetary explosion would have taken. They themselves flee to somewhere more distant in three-dimensional space and in a few more senses beyond that.