35

Chapter Text

Coil was gone.

Not just gone, he completely fucking vanished.

He did not use the secret exit, he did not even open it. He took nothing, and from Taylor's words, she could easily deduce the fact that he was somehow kidnapped in the middle of their base without much to show for it.

So she had to ditch their new, cautionary additions and go personally investigate, because her power was made for this kind of stuff.

She'd combed over the entire room, and only caught a single thing out of place.

An almost imperceptible, naked footprint.

She could extrapolate something from that, which was that someone, likely a female from how small the foot was, walked in here, grabbed Coil, and probably teleported out.

So an invisibility power, and teleportation.

Some janky teleportation, probably, because if they could teleport someone out of here by just thinking of doing so, they would have likely done so without even sending someone down here.

It didn't take too much to extrapolate that Cauldron heard of what Coil had told them, and had come to collect their blood debt for the betrayal.

Either that, or the power was blocked by Taylor's Eidolon-tier bullshit… somehow, so whoever this woman was had to get close.

Or.

Or they only sent someone here to send a message, of sorts. If Cauldron was as all-knowing and all-powerful as Coil said, they probably knew about her power, right?

So what, was this an intrusion that couldn't possibly be interpreted or uncovered by anyone else except her, and they just sent the woman in here to notify her that they were responsible, knew who they were, and could infiltrate them at any moment without even using teleportation?

Discarding most of the paranoid-sounding, somewhat convoluted plots, she only had two things to work on.

One, someone invisible walked in and took Coil away.

Two, the bitch probably worked for Cauldron and came to collect the price of betrayal for her masters. There weren't many, if any, other things she could chalk this up to.

Now, if only Taylor would crawl out of whatever hellish hole she'd crawled into and get a signal so Lisa could tell her any of this…

Usually, when someone wakes up, they get to feel their consciousness slowly come to awareness.

All she felt was pain, and the almost incoherent sludge of thoughts in her mind pulse in time with her heart as she began to cast Heal on herself again, knowing it would do nothing but offer a moment of relief but still craving that singular second.

Compared to when she passed out- because what she did could NOT be called 'falling asleep'-, however, this headache was… manageable.

She could at least walk without feeling like someone was squeezing her brain with live wire.

With how fast things were moving though, she knew better than to assume there was something that didn't require her attention, so grudgingly, over the course of a couple hours of miserable writhing, she straightened, took a deep breath, and Teleported into Coil's office.

She flinched away from the bright light, raising a hand to block it, and turned to observe the empty room.

She had many things to do. Dinah Alcott was still in the base, likely about to wake up, then she had to deal with Shadow Stalker, then hopefully finally start to cripple Lung's human trafficking empire because it fucking sickened her.

It was especially viable now that the Empire likely lost a few capes, as it meant that her fucking with Lung's business wouldn't end up with the nazis owning the entire Bay because of her. 

She had to get a sitrep first though.

As if to remind her it exists, her phone started buzzing.

And buzzing.

It just didn't stop.

With a slight sigh, she moved up to the door, locking the massive mechanism, then leaned back against Lisa's desk, perusing through her messages, using her free hand to massage her temples.

The usual spam from Bakuda, which loosely explained that she went to the fight in person to prove herself and how she could work without killing people but ended up flunking the whole thing and how much she's sorry.

That part made her feel more than a little bad about her minion, so she sighed, and sent a simple ' I'm just glad you're okay Mia' message back, not paying too much attention to the hyperactive spam surrounding the important bits.

She'd have to clear an hour or so for Mia eventually. The woman missed her a lot, which... she wasn't sure how to feel about.

She went to Coil's contact, which, oddly enough, hadn't sent her a single thing. She checked Lisa's.

By the time she was done reading, the back of her eyes felt like they were getting stabbed with needles, so she closed them, and began to breathe in and out, slowly.

Coil got kidnapped. In the middle of their base. In the most secure room.

Time to move, she supposed.

Another task to the endless list.

She switched to the Rune of Domination, then focused on the Ultimate Hunter effect.

Coil was… alive, but clearly in another world.

The effect couldn't open portals. The best information she got was that he was most definitely not in this one world, and by extension, not on Earth Aleph either. He was somewhere, but it didn't know where because direction between dimensions didn't exist.

So Cauldron had a cross-world teleporter of sorts. She already knew that, but she wasn't exactly happy about being vindicated on their existence.

She wasn't sure what to do with this information.

She switched to the Rune of Sorcery for the Absolute Focus effect, pursing her lips.

Some part of her was furious that someone messed with her people, because Coil might be a despicable sociopath with an ego the size of a skyscraper, but he was her despicable sociopath. She controlled him.

A more practical part of her knew when to cut her losses and move on.

She knew how to find Coil regardless. She had a Legend in her arsenal who could teleport to him with a thought and a mental image, through worlds and realms if need be.

But she was too diminished to jump into a fight into what she assumed was the center of hostile territory in another world. She couldn't risk something like that for someone like Coil.

Lisa's speculation sounded about right. The chance of Cauldron giving them Coil back after he betrayed them was practically nil. He was likely to be tortured and killed in retribution. Maybe used as an example or a fear tactic against them.

It stung, but there wasn't much she could do about it at the moment.

She also had to assume he'd spilled everything about them. She had no testing with Master powers, but if Cauldron was as scary as Coil claimed, she would assume the worst.

Lisa had already implemented a three man squad protocol for everyone on base, and had used some of Coil's capital to get a couple tinkertech sensors, and for a moment, Taylor was so infinitely glad she had Lisa on her side, doing so much work while she was a vegetable in her bunker.

She checked through more reports on her phone, working her jaw.

Maria said that the Wards were all on thin ice and under watch, and reported that her increased work ethic was getting good results.

She briefly reminded the woman to keep having a social life for self-fulfillment, thanked her for the office gossip, and moved on.

Oni Lee reported that Lung was surprisingly beat up, and was practically crippled so far. He'd ramped up an incredible amount, but he ramped back down so quickly that his regeneration faded before it could deal with the overwhelming damage.

A day or two and he'd be fine for fighting again. A small window.

She briefly considered going after him to Master him now that he was weak, but discarded it.

Too much to deal with. Way too much. Her usage time was improving extremely fast, but not enough to deal with the overwhelming chaos.

With a deep breath, she kept scrolling.

Spitfire and Imp seemed to be on board, on the basis that they got paid well and could leave when they felt like.

Imp especially was invaluable, if she was alright with killing people. To have someone in her team that could just walk up to someone and slit their throat without them even noticing she existed was… incredibly, incredibly powerful. It was the kind of power that made the hairs on the back of Taylor's neck rise with caution and alarm.

Even as just a spy, she'd be amazing. 

Spitfire, she wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her. Her power was mediocre at best, but as long as she could keep the girl away from her enemies and relatively safe, she was fine with paying for a cape she had not that many uses for.

Rune had asked to join the Travellers, but seemed to be under the impression that they were going to be leaving the Bay soon-ish. That seemed to be one of her main motivations. 

Rune was another thing she hadn't expected to just tumble into her net.

But the synergy she could have with Taylor's magic cards, or Bakuda's bombs…

She felt her spine stiffen in response to the mental image, a strange glee that felt out of place within her mind.

The glee of a child cackling at destruction…

Ah. Jinx.

She was too tired to reel it in and examine the maddening glee, much less stomp it down. Simply suppress it.

She skimmed through the next message, not really reading it, her mind stuck on the actual child she had on base.

Dinah Alcott.

Her finger tapped on the phone meaninglessly.

Taylor had committed untold atrocities in another world. Whether she was wearing the skin of a demon, a rotting demigod sealed into his own sword, a soldier or commander, a general who had to give the order to bombard thousands into paste for the wider campaign... short of the most degenerate acts known to man, she'd done every evil she could think of.

But she'd also done many good things. Saved many lives as healers, wanderers, philanthropists or sacrificial figures. Even beasts.

She didn't want to be defined by what she did in another world, wearing other people's skin and feeling their emotions and going through their thoughts in parallel tracks like they were one and the same.

She wanted to do good, in this world, even if she kept slipping and slipping in different directions from moment to moment.

As her finger tapped the side of the phone, her previous idea, to gently let the girl know what had happened to her family, and then give her a choice, felt like the idea of another person now.

The power dynamic was off, the girl was scared, and she was a child. She shouldn't be given such monumental choices. Taylor wouldn't ever feel alright about having a child working for her. Dinah should be in school.

She quickly sent a message to Mr Pit, the odd, creepy caretaker, to cut the dosage and prepare the girl for transport.

She couldn't do much in this state, but she could sort her business real quick before starting the liquidation protocol Coil had prepared and scattering her assets.

She unlocked the door, and marched to Shadow Stalker's cell while Dinah slowly stirred awake.

Sophia looked quite pitiful like this.

She couldn't say she took any pleasure in it, honestly.

The ankle devices that Sophia wore were still in place, scratched a little bit from her manic attempts to break or file them off, her jumpsuit was lightly scorched and torn, and her hair was almost an afro at this point, not the least helped by the electrical shocks she no doubt got every time she tried to break the ankle restraints or use her powers.

The cell was basically just a dead end hallway with bars and a metal door slapped in front to contain someone. The only thing even mildly advanced about it was the electrical lock.

She patted the shoulder of one of the agents to her side and jerked her chin to the end of the hall.

He nodded and walked off, the second guard following him.

Sophia, likely hearing the light clatter of their weapons and equipment moving, lifted her head, a glare on her face.

One that faded into befuddled shock.

They held eye contact for a moment, before Sophia, surprisingly, ducked her eyes down, a face of terrified and furious realization slowly forming on her face.

"Fuck. Fuck. This is what this is about, isn't it? I made you fucking Trigger so you join a supervillain for revenge or some shit?" Sophia hissed, gaze still never reaching higher than Taylor's knees, her body tensing.

Evelynn's senses tasted fear. 

Odd, odd behavior.

She swapped runes, Cosmic Insight flickering to life.

Views the world as predator versus prey. Does not believe the weak should be protected. Believes they should be dragged to their feet to defend themselves, or left to die. Views it as the natural order. Despises the idea of reliance. Despises those who choose weakness. Not as naturally aggressive as she is at the present time, outside influence. Hates feeling trapped.

The short snippet was followed by a bizarre, headache-inducing mess of ideas that seemed to explain that her power seemed to be alive and making her constantly overaggressive.

She didn't know if that was just faulty wires crossing and her rune couldn't make sense of how powers worked, or if powers were actually alive, but the strange collection of ideas stuck with her. 

Wouldn't be the most bizarre explanation, truth be told, but it was still a bit out there.

She focused back on the short snippet, something about it bugging her, until it clicked.

Her eyes widened, shivers erupting up and down her arms.

For a moment, she felt like she was hit by a truck full of memories.

"What do you Noxians believe in? How do you keep this… mess, even vaguely coherent? There has to be a unifying factor." Luxanna mumbled, gesturing at the Noxian section of the camp, lightly shivering from the Freljordian weather beating down on both Demacian and Noxian with equal, foreign hostility.

Flecks of white clung to her blonde hair like moths to a flame, and she once again slapped at it in vain, sighing as she worked to shove more of her hair under the fluffy hat.

The camp's color palette clashed between brown wood, white fabrics and snow, blue ice and the warm orange of flames, and it was much too soothing after being so used to seeing nothing but dizzying hues of pink and magenta and purple for days.

Draven glanced aside to their side of the camp, his brother's pauldron resting heavy on his shoulder, above the stump of his arm, massive in comparison to his slimmer frame. 

A mess of different races shifted around their tents, countless tribes with countless customs and looks, a riot of color and organised chaos of both living people and chained, necromantic abominations, the only unifying factor being the clothes given to them by Queen Ashe's supply delegation.

A pitiful, cautious gift that felt more like a temporary appeasement to the sudden massive army yelling at her messengers that beyond her frozen mountains, the continent was melting pink and bleeding purple while she tried to confirm for herself.

She liked the Freljordians, she really did, but their distrust and isolative nature made them a nightmare to deal with.

And she wasn't even the one doing most of the diplomatic work.

Draven sighed, a tired, heavy thing, slowly turning his head to stare ahead at the horizon, that thin line of barely-visible pink that seemed to brush over the plains of their broken kingdoms like an unerring brush below.

"Strength." He simply said, low and rumbling. "The unifying factor, is strength. Noxus believes in no god, reveres no science nor harmony. Only strength. To quote the old crow." He huffed, jerking his thumb somewhere behind him.

Presumably at the late night light emanating out of General Swain's tent.

She frowned.

"How does that work though? I don't get it." She grumbled.

How did 'strength' unite anything? 

Draven shifted, a slow, stiff thing, his scarred hand brushing down the flat of his bizarre, spinning… throwing axe thingie at his thigh.

"The basic idea is that strength is the ultimate goal, the most revered aspect of a uh… eh, a person, I guess. Don't have the energy to give a fuckin' speech." He grunted, working his tongue at his teeth before shifting again, his charred, odd moustache swaying with the motion.

"I remember what Darius told me when we were kids. It's okay to be weak. Everyone is, at some point. It's encouraged, for the strong to push the weak forward, so all of us can be strong, for one man to help another be better. But there is nothing more disgusting and pitiful than someone who chooses to remain weak. So long as someone is fighting for strength, they live life right. If they're complacent, if they're content with being protected by walls and their betters, they should be crushed like a worm. And we're not talking just physical strength either, even if that's the most pure and respected kind. You think that old white bastard got to where he is by armwrestling?" He scoffed, once again likely referring to General Swain.

She took a deep breath, considering it.

It made some kind of twisted sense.

And it was a lot less barbaric than what she thought Noxians believed in, being a warmongering Empire and all that.

To think that less than five years ago, they were still at war.

Now look at them. A mixed group of refugees who hate each other, one half trying for diplomacy and the other half saying they should just barge into the Avarosan capital and take over, bickering for hours on end while the Void kept crawling forward.

"Your brother wasn't that bad, for a Noxian…" She started, and Draven grunted, his brows lowering a little bit. "Should have grabbed his axe though, I have no idea how you use that thing on your leg." She mumbled.

Draven burst into roaring laughter, something more like his usual self, loud and brash and almost mocking, throwing his head back and using his remaining arm to hold his stomach.

She couldn't get that memory out of her head now.

She couldn't get the dozens of memories out of her head, of being a Noxian and having that same concept explained to her a dozen different ways.

Sophia was just half an inch away from being the closest thing to a Noxian she'd ever find in this world, even if her worldview was stupid and crazy in this more modern age.

"The fuck happened to you, Hebert? How many people've you killed?" Sophia growled, and Taylor blinked, returning to the real world.

It took her a moment to realize what Sophia meant.

The unnervingly intense stare thing.

People she interacted with often sort of got used to it, so she'd forgotten about it.

She could guess that Sophia interpreted that as the gaze of a killer. She wasn't technically wrong.

She didn't speak, thinking.

"Well?" Sophia raised her voice, still not looking up at her, acting like a chihuahua, unsure if she should bow down to something more dangerous than her or keep barking at it just in case she fooled it into thinking she could back the commotion up with a bite.

"Sh. Thinking." She mumbled, squinting down at her.

Sophia scoffed.

She'd planned to just Master Sophia, throw her into Noelle for a test run, then execute her and make more clones from the clone she'd gain, but now she hesitated.

When she took over this city, she planned to model the culture of her organisation from Noxus and Demacia, but mostly Noxus.

And she couldn't help but think that it would be so nice to have someone by her side who would get it instantly when she explained what she believed in, or at least, some parts of it. Who believed in it enough to have internalised it already.

Alongside that, she just… couldn't really feel any of the hatred she thought she'd feel.

Sophia was just a stupid kid. An evil, psychotic stupid kid, but still just a stupid kid. One that had in some ways ruined her life beyond repair, and in others, might have indirectly saved every life that Taylor would.

The locker also just… didn't feel like it was even in the top hundred worst things that had happened to her.

But she also could never trust Sophia. Not like this.

"I'll make this simple, Sophia. Come closer for a sec." She said, squatting down to be equal height with her.

Sophia finally raised her head to meet her gaze with a glare.

"Fuck you, don't tell me-" Sophia started.

She flicked her fingers through a dozen patterns, lowering her eyelids in a lazy, challenging look, and finally, just to draw her attention, snapped her fingers in the blur of motion before opening her palm.

"-what to-"

A steady flame burst to life on her palm, one of the spells she trained for her personal mana pool, roaring up high to lick at her chin.

Sophia stopped talking, staring at the fire.

"Do as I say before I cook you alive in your little box. You can't phase an inch." She said, calmly, and Sophia briefly glanced up, meeting her eyes. She lowered her eyes, hissed out a cuss, and got up to walk closer, dropping to her knees once she was at the bar, at the same height as Taylor.

"Look at me."

Sophia instantly replied with a furious, constipated glare, likely stuck between her ideology and her pride.

Taylor's eyes flashed gold, pushing a numb haze into her captive's mind. 

This time, she'd worked with exceeding delicacy and caution.

Evelynn used to be a rather all-or-nothing type. She would either use none of her mind-bending ability, or crush someone with it just to get it over with.

So despite her absurd lifespan, Taylor didn't have extensive experience with slight tweaks, and she had very little juice in the tank at the moment. 

If she wished to be able to still function after Sophia, she had to go for exactly that though. Slight tweaks.

For that reason, she spent a lot of time in there, just thinking.

What few small changes she could make to have the biggest and most trustworthy impact.

It was three-fold. Loyalty, acceptance, and trust.

She didn't brute-force it, slowly inflaming them and eyeing them with a careful consideration for both her reserves and her 'relationship' with Sophia.

When she exited, she only took a sudden deep breath, blinking rapidly as she stumbled back to fall on her ass.

A moment passed as Sophia did the same, blinking rapidly.

Then she squinted at her.

"Did you just fucking hypnotise me or something?" Sophia gruffed, suspicion written all over her face.

She slowly got up, and cracked her neck, stretching her stomach to check how winded she felt.

It was manageable. Little exertion.

"Sort of. Wanted to test something." She replied, feeling mildly nervous, on top of the slowly worsening headache.

It could probably qualify as a migraine at this pace.

Thankfully, Sophia's suspicious look faded, switching to a vaguely confused one.

"I feel weird. The fuck did you do?" Sophia half-mumbled, staring at her with an intense focus, like she was trying to dissect her with her eyes.

Moment of truth. Acceptance would either hold up, or Sophia's indignation would push higher and she'd get angry at her.

"Mastered your behaviour so that you're less of a snarly mess towards me." She simply said, dusting off her butt, even if she didn't really need to.

Sophia's expression slowly blanked as she stiffened, averting her gaze.

"Oh."

A moment of silence.

"I'm going to assume this is going to stick?" Sophia asked, expression shifting once more to a confused, almost constipated look.

"It should. How do you feel about that?"

"I dunno. Don't really feel anything. It is what it is." Sophia shrugged, face smoothing over to her usual, bored RBF.

That was a lot better than some of her other tests, where people would be angry at the fact they weren't angry at her. More stable.

Or Sophia was a good actor, getting ready to stab her in the back.

"Good. Now, let's have a chat about the ideology of my little organisation, how you fit into it, and what I want from you."

Sophia blinked at her, wide eyed. "Wait, this shit's yours?" She asked, incredulous, gesturing with her hand and eyes around and above them before returning to her. Then she paused, her brows furrowing. "No, wait, what the fuck. Why do you want me to work for you? I made you trigger."

She shrugged, trying to speak in a way that Sophia could resonate with.

"Wasn't the worst thing that's happened to me. Besides, you're useful, and I think you and I will see eye to eye quite a bit. Well, in some ways." She conceded with a tilt of her head. "I'm going to ask you a broad question."

She bent down again to be on eye level with Sophia, resting on the floor with her legs to the side as she flickered back to her real self, hoping to give her brain a slight rest as she set the foundations of her working relationship with the girl.

"What do you think strength is?"

Sophia scowled.

"The fuck kinda question is that?"

She tilted her head, staring off into the wall as she switched Runes and envisioned what she wanted for her organisation, for the Bay.

"Strength. What is strength? Most people would say it's physical or mental fortitude, but it's something more than that in my opinion. Strength can manifest in many ways. It can manifest in a predator who's physically weak but terrifically fast, in a general with a mind as sharp as a razor, a man who can read others like open books, or traditional strength, like someone turning over a car with their bare hands."

Sophia gave her a weird, skeptical look.

"Okaaaayy…?"

She was going to lose her on the idea at this pace.

"I think strength is something to be sought and fought for. Whether it takes the form of physical power or mental fortitude, an aptitude with numbers, et cetera. That strength should be used for the good of the organisation or nation the people are a part of. Most people will deny this, but the desire to be part of something greater is an intrinsic part of human nature. To build something great, you need great people. Of course, to achieve that without cruelty, the weak should be uplifted by the strong to be strong themselves, and if they refuse to improve, left behind in the dust. Does that make sense to you?"

Sophia only thought of it for a moment with a tilted head, before nodding.

"Yeah. I guess. Seems a bit like cultish mumbo jumbo bullshit, but it makes sense. Don't agree with the entire thing, but It makes sense."

"Does it resonate with you?" She asked.

Sophia frowned, working her jaw and glancing to the side.

"Besides the whole 'help the weak be strong' shit, yeah. If they won't fight for something first, the strong shouldn't bother helping them."

She bobbed her head.

"Alright. I want that to be part of our culture in this organisation, or gang, or whatever name we give it in the future. I want someone who believes in it to spread it, someone who gets it. Do you think you can be that person? You seem to believe in most of the idea already."

Sophia considered it for a moment, biting her cheek.

Then she glanced up at her.

"I'm not going to be your motivational speaker or some shit. But if you want something like a uh… drill instructor who believes in the same thing, I could probably ride that. Tell me more first. Explain it."

She nodded, and gathered her thoughts.

She'd spent enough time chatting with Sophia and explaining what was going on in her organisation for Dinah to reportedly wake up in full, understandably scared but compliant in one of the base's rooms.

As she walked to her destination, face mask in place, Sophia walked beside her, scratching her neck and gazing around with shrewd eyes.

"Hey, hold it for a sec."

She paused, turning a little to look at her new acquisition.

"I know this is kind of a sudden request, and that you legit just explained stuff to me, but I want to go see my mother. Can I do that?" Sophia asked, voice surprisingly… not soft, just tired.

For a moment, Taylor's own eyes softened in sympathy.

It had been entirely too easy to forget that before Sophia decided to ruin both their lives for her stupid, sadistic amusement, they both had families. Painfully easy.

At least her own dad was better off now, far from her and hopefully building something new. He might have some cognitive dissonance and mental disturbance from knowing his daughter was dead yet somehow walking around, but he shouldn't be thinking about that too much.

Sophia on the other hand likely hadn't seen her family in something like five or six months.

"Yeah. Go for it. But do try to keep a certain level of distance and stealth. You're a very wanted fugitive now."

Sophia scoffed, frustration in her eyes.

"Blaming me for your made up murder likely didn't help."

"Accurate in an ironic way though." She mused.

Sophia didn't reply, just giving her a confused look.

She shook her head at the inside joke.

"Whatever. Feel free to visit your family whenever you're not on the job, just be aware of the risks to everyone involved."

"I'm not retarded, He-"

She whirled, flickering to Evelynn in an instant, her hand snapping shut around Sophia's throat, holding her just high enough for the balls of her feet to brush the floor as she choked and grabbed her wrist, wide eyed and barely resisting the urge to kick her in the stomach, judging by the spasms in her legs.

"Did I not say to refer to me as Sam or nothing in public?" She slowly whispered, eyes slowly gleaming gold as she dragged Sophia to her height and closer. 

Sophia tried to nod, a vibration travelling through the throat inside her palm, a word she couldn't get out.

She let up, not letting go but lowering her and allowing her to cough and gasp in a breath.

"Ye-" cough "-Yeah. My bhgh- bad." Sophia forced out after what sounded like a heave.

She knew she should have ramped up the idea of secrecy connected to her. 

Fucking Sophia.

Some other time.

She let go, and Sophia backed up a step, grimacing and massaging her bruised throat.

"Do not ever slip up with sensitive information, Shadow Stalker . I may have given you another chance to do some good in your unique, violent way, but I will turn you into a drooling puppet if you compromise me even once." She calmly said, quietly, trying to not turn this into a commotion in the same hall as Dinah's room.

Sophia made a face, but nodded.

"Good. Now, head to the guard at the end of the hall, tell him Sam cleared you. He'll give you a nondescript suit and your old belongings. Do your business and keep your phone on. Things move fast in the Bay. We're going to move out before the day is even over. Good luck with your personal business." She dipped her head in a dismissal and acknowledgement both, and Sophia just continued clearing her throat while massaging it, walking past her.

A paranoid dreg inside her hissed that Sophia was bound to betray her, Mastering be damned, but she tamped down on it.

Sophia knew pretty much nothing but this location, and they were leaving it within the day. She could enforce better mastering later.

She flickered back to herself, and took a deep breath as she began walking, ducking into a small, brightly lit hallway leading to a single white metal door.

The singular guard jerked a thumb to the door behind him with a questioning tilt of his head, and she nodded.

He tapped his knuckles to the door, then opened it a smidge, facing away from it.

"Incoming visitor, little miss." He said, muffled through his facemask, and she thanked him as she stepped past him and into the room.

It was like someone took a jail cell and tried to make it cozy. Sure, it somewhat worked, but something was still off and restrictive about it.

Her gaze turned to the side where Dinah was, giving her a squinting look from where she was sitting at a little table, writing something down.

There was far too much weight behind those eyes for a girl that age.

There was nothing to talk about. She was just planning to let the girl know what had happened, that she was safe, and that she was going to be delivered to a police station soon.

Until she swapped to the Rune of Inspiration and a deluge of useless information framed a single batch of information that stopped her cold like a statue as Cosmic Insight did its thing.

The little girl staring at her knew who was going to set in motion the end of the world. Or at least, used to know.

Whether that meant the identity of the person changed, her knowledge vanished, or the end was prevented, she didn't know.

What she knew was that the mere idea of a single person being able to bring about the end of the world horrified her.

She stepped forward, a tad too quickly, and the girl tensed.

She stopped, shifted her stance to something more open and friendly, and took a deep breath, silently.

She'd take the face mask off, but she couldn't afford to show her face nor use a Legend too much today.

"Hello, Dinah. My name is Sam." She began, and the girl glanced up at her eyes, gaze still heavy.

"What did you do to my power?" The girl replied.

She moved to the girl's bed, and sat down, rubbing at her neck, aiming for a more casual air.

"One of us unfortunately scrambles precognition powers everywhere they go and have been and will be. Can't fix your power if I wanted to."

She turned to look at the girl, who seemed to grow increasingly frustrated and scared, looking down at the paper.

"So I'm useless now. Am I going to get killed too?" Dinah asked, voice surprisingly steady for how obviously scared the girl was.

And for how it seemed the girl already knew her parents were dead.

She slowly closed her eyes.

Fuck you, Coil. Should have helped Lisa beat you halfway to death when I had the chance.

"No. Dinah, the person who wanted to kidnap you was Coil." She began, and the girl looked up at her. "A supervillain, as you can guess, and he wanted your power, as you deducted. He's out of the picture now. He'll never harm you or even be involved in anything to do with you ever again. We've… taken over his gang. Stole it, in a sense. He's powerless and likely going to die sometime soon from some enemies he made." She said, then glanced aside, feeling guilt churn in her gut from what she was about to do.

She just couldn't let the girl leave before she knew exactly who the hell had the ability to end the world. She had to get that information first. Then the girl could go do as she wished.

She still felt bad about asking for a condition to free her.

"We're going to let you go. I-"

"Are you heroes?" The girl asked, cutting her off, and she paused.

She didn't want to lie, but she was unfathomably good at it.

She chose not to, this time.

"No. I wouldn't say we're villains either, but we're not heroes. We do bad things, but we mostly do it to bad people. We're going to help people, but we have to make sure we're secure first. Our goal is good and noble, but the process so far has been a little ethically questionable."

Dinah was silent.

"I appreciate you not talking like I'm mentally disabled just because I'm twelve." Dinah mumbled, staring at the piece of paper. "You said you do bad things to bad people, right?"

She nodded.

"Yes. That's one of our main goals. To kill those who should be killed but for whatever reason aren't. "

Dinah pressed her hands into her eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath.

"Do you know what my power did? Before your guy broke it?"

"Likelihood based precognition?"

Dinah nodded.

"I- think that's what my power is. Just with numbers. Absurdly specific numbers. I ask a question, I get a number possibility of it happening. The- the numbers told me something."

Her body fought to react, but she kept herself outwardly calm. Was Dinah about to…?

"Something that someone horrible is going to do, and soon. I couldn't go to the PRT because then this Coil man would be there, and with me knowing that Coil was hunting me, I haven't really been able to tell anyone, but. Before my power got messed with by your guy, I knew that Jack Slash would come to Brockton Bay within the next year. That was a couple months ago."

One of her fingers twitched minutely, but other than that, she remained silent.

"I asked a lot of stuff to my power at the first days I got it. And it told me that somehow, some way, Jack Slash is going to end the world if he leaves Brockton Bay alive. As in, he's going to start some kind of event or domino effect that will result in the death of the entire world. "

She still said nothing, watching Dinah's breathing get deeper and more erratic.

"And it's- it's stupid, isn't it? I know that no matter who I tell this to, I'll just get laughed at. I could have gone to a hero and they might play along as I tell them what my power does, but the moment I tell them a serial killer with a knife power will end the world, I'd get laughed out of the building. I'm not lying- "

"I know." She said, simply. "Don't worry. I believe you. I'll kill the bastard. Keep an eye on the news." She said, then after a moment of digesting this insane information and whether she truly believed it, she glanced at the door.

"I believe it's best you left for now. Sorry for your power. If you tell the PRT, they'll likely do their best to place you somewhere our precog blocker won't be involved in. And I'd really appreciate it if you didn't tell them anything about us. Just claim you woke up in the car we're going to drive you to the police station in."

Dinah nodded.

"Alright. Before we go, how long have I been out?"

She looked up to the ceiling, struggling to parse the days.

So much shit happened so fast she felt like a month had passed, but counting the sunsets and mornings…

She only had Coil on her side for three or four days, right?

Wow.

It was insane to think it had only been a little less than two weeks since she came back here.

"Less than a week, I think."

Dinah nodded, averting her eyes.

"How long are people dead for before funerals happen?" Dinah asked, her voice wavering a little, and Taylor sighed, getting up and digging into her pocket for the blindfold.

"They usually wait for a week. They did so for my parents. You should be able to catch your parent's funeral." She softly said, and laid a gentle hand on the girl's shoulder as her breaths deepened even more.

To her credit, she did not sob nor cry.

"I'm sorry. Let's go, Dinah. Things are happening around here. Best we get you to your uncle as soon as possible."

Dinah nodded jerkily, crumpling the paper and throwing it in the little trashcan in the corner, then turning to her and getting up from the chair.

Taylor stepped back and let go, giving the girl room.

She presented the blindfold in an open palm, and Dinah took it, wordlessly putting it over her eyes.

"Will you take me there yourself, Sam?" Dinah asked as Taylor put a light hand on her shoulder and began to guide her, her other hand fishing for her phone.

"No. I'll put one of our workers to drop you off near a police station. From there, just go inside, and try to explain that you were kidnapped by bad men before waking up in a car and being told to go outside and talk to the cops. It wouldn't really harm us if you mentioned us, but I'd really rather you didn't." She mumbled, pushing the door open then flicking her phone on as she walked the girl to one of the vehicle depots.

She'd miss this base. It was so fucking good.

Fucking Cauldron bastards.

"I'll try not to. T-thanks." Dinah mumbled, and Taylor's eyes tightened in pain.

She hated seeing children hurting, but there was nothing she could really do here.

The next five minutes of walking were done in silence, until they reached one of the car garages attached to one of the entrances.

The driver wordlessly helped Dinah into a nondescript car, and they drove off.

It was oddly anticlimactic considering the new information she'd gained.

She could feel stress like a physical sensation, digging into her shoulders and pulling relentlessly, trying to drag her under.

After a short few minutes spent in the dark in utter silence, relishing the quiet darkness as her headache momentarily cooled, she turned, and walked back to the door she walked in from.

Just for her peace of mind, she switched to the Rune of Domination, directing her attention to Ultimate Hunter.

She stopped cold, hand on the door's handle turning white from her vice-like grip.

Lisa was gone. Alive, but not in this world.

She turned to her father.

Gone as well.

Her hand spasmed in rage, her mind whirling with both pain and fury.

She dug into her pocket, grabbing her phone, then picked Evelynn, flickering back to her real appearance, leaving her face a blank slate of skin.

As gently as she could manage without crushing the phone, she sent three simple codewords to the base's operating system, and a simple timer.

The alarms blared instantly, every number and comms device in the network buzzing with a mechanical voice, repeating the codewords into agent's ears, buzzing on their handhelds. 

Within two hours, the base would be empty.

Within two and a half, it would be rubble.

She could deal with making a new one after she was done dealing with Cauldron in one way or another.

She swung the door open and walked through, forming eyes.

The moment her shoulders crossed the door, she paused, going very, very still, eyes scanning the endless plain of sun-lit grass stretching out under her in all its morning glory, a golden sun peeking over the distant mountains like a goblet holding a flame.

Grass tickled the fake sneakers she'd formed at her feet.

A single soul stood behind her, at rest.

The door suddenly went slack in her grip, and she held it in place with her hand, teeth grinding as her face remained blank.

With a casual flick, she tossed it away to crash into the far grasses, invisible feelers vibrating in the air with the urge to rend and tear.

Her chest burned.

Her facial features returned, the same as ever, forming rapidly on her face.

"And here I was, coming to meet you. " She said, voice playful and downright pleasant as she turned around, a slight, condescending smile on her face.

Self-control was fraying, but she held herself in place as her eyes met a black reflective mask like glass atop a black and white suit, sitting calmly in a chair, a wooden round table in front of them, a single chair tilted to the side on Taylor's end, a tea set steaming in the cool morning air.

Something horribly out of a place in a valley that looked like it had never been touched by a single mortal hand.

The woman in the chair nodded slowly, gracefully, her brown, curly hair bobbing with the motion.

"I'm glad we got to be the hosts of this meeting then, before some rash action was taken. We do apologise for all the inconveniences and the scares we've given you. I believe Coil told you about us. Would you please take a seat, Taylor? We wish to negotiate." The woman asked.

Her mind raced.

Coil didn't know everything. He barely knew anything beyond the surface details. He didn't know of her plan with Noelle, he didn't know what the deal with her power was.

But he still knew a lot more than she was comfortable with an enemy knowing.

Had she already fucked this up? How should she act? What misdirections? Or maybe she went for brutal honesty?

Acting got very tiring, and she was in far too much pain and stress to take to the task with vigor.

She switched to the Rune of Inspiration, Cosmic Insight activating as she slowly walked to the chair.

Human puppet under molecular stasis. Loved by millions. A woman who wishes to save the world, has the intelligence to, yet is too inhuman and prideful to see the most likely solution. Part of the upper echelon of a secret organisation that heavily influences the majority of the western world of Earth Bet, and many smaller portions of multiple other planets in other worlds. The world will never see the real her.

Her steps didn't stutter, switching rapidly back to the Rune of Sorcery for Perfect Focus, ignoring the pain in her temples to think fast and hard, each step a frantic swirl of thoughts.

Loved by millions?

Who the fuck was this person?

Old celebrity? A hero? A politician maybe…? African warlord? 

Something about this woman was tickling the back of her mind, but she couldn't figure it out. It wasn't like she'd ever heard that faint accent before, and the voice was too deep to be forgotten so easily. Maybe she was changing it on purpose?

After returning from Runeterra, she was quite used to sudden, overwhelming deja Vu, but this wasn't quite the same. 

It was bothering her.

The entire batch of information she got on top of that, raised so many questions she wasn't even sure if the answers she got were worth it.

She turned the chair, and sat down, pushing aside the teacup on her side to lounge back, hands resting on the table as they regarded each other. 

The woman had no emotions, yet she could still taste them, or something like an aftertaste. It was like holding a scentless flower, yet being able to taste the rose and morning dew in the air.

It was bizarre.

She'd never seen molecular stasis like this. Her inner magic nerd wanted to take the woman apart and see if she could recreate it.

A bigger part of her wanted to crush the woman to pulp just to make her thoughts on this situation abundantly clear.

She slowly blinked at the black slate across from her, unamused, unafraid, and barely keeping herself from being even the tiniest bit aggressive.

"Is kidnapping some of our most useful assets and my father a part of your regular negotiation tactics?" She asked coldly, and the woman fingered the teacup's rim, tilting her head.

She really did move like a puppet. Or a statue.

"How did you know that?" The woman slowly asked.

She tilted her own head, eyes lowering in a bored look, pondering how best she could kill this… woman? Creature?

Molecular stasis was tricky.

But it all depended on what kind of energy was keeping the cells in that kind of state.

Whatever that energy was, she doubted it was magical.

And magic always broke physics.

The question was whether she had enough power to force through whatever physics-twisting bullshit was keeping this thing together.

So she could kill this woman. It would have a steep price, but she could.

If physical destruction didn't work, she had other ways. 

"Why would I ever answer that?" She scoffed with derision. "Let me guess. Your strategy was to play nice, and if I denied you, you'd use your captives as leverage to force us to agree." She calmly accused, ignoring the woman's question.

The woman nodded.

"I'm afraid that's the kind of measures we're forced to take, considering our goals."

She resisted the urge to quirk a brow.

The woman wasn't lying, at least from what little aftertaste of emotion she could feel in the air. She really did believe they had to do this.

"Rest assured, they are all unharmed. We had to use a Master power on Coil, but whatever you used on him seemed to take back control very quickly. The other two are untouched, mentally and physically."

She tilted her head back, drooping her eyelids.

"Am I supposed to be grateful? You said you're here to negotiate. That's not happening until you bring our assets back and leave my father to go live his boring normal life. A negotiation is a discussion between two equal parties on equal ground. What you're attempting is a juvenile, childish and frankly embarrassing blackmail tactic while trying to dress it up nicely. I'm young, not stupid."

The woman made a pensive hum.

"I'm afraid we cannot do that. Too much is at stake to entertain an equal ground. This is not blackmail yet, we simply arrived prepared and you did not, because we set the pace. But, this conversation is quickly moving to a hostile tone, which we do not want. Would you allow me to explain some things to you? Who we are, what we do, our goals, and why we need your cooperation?"

She hadn't expected that much. She expected demands.

She nodded.

The woman nodded, and very carefully took a sip of her tea, pushing the glass mask with the rim of her cup.

Taylor did the same.

For some reason, she doubted either of them tasted it.

"We are Cauldron. Our organisation was formed with a simple goal in mind. To save the world."

She would have scoffed, was her goal not the exact same thing.

"You're doing a very, very bad job of it." She mused, and the woman made a short hum of acknowledgment, not deflecting or commenting, continuing.

"To explain further, and for anything to make sense, I have to share some information first. The kind of information that must never, ever, get released to the public, or even mentioned in passing. The kind of thing you treat with superstitious caution."

She watched on, silent and blank-faced as the woman's mask.

"The origin of powers. What brought them into our life. For what purpose. And what will happen inevitably, if we do not stop it. To rip off the band-aid, so to speak, powers come from alien entities we simply refer to as Entities with a capital E. They're bizarre, foreign lifeforms, and we have spent the entirety of our existence researching them with the strongest and most versatile powers in the multiverse to understand them, their motives, their way of operation, everything down to their very names, if our primitive language could vaguely mimic theirs."

All of a sudden, she felt like she was taken here for a very, very, very different reason than she expected.

She leaned forward, allowing her face to show interest and scepticism in equal measures.

It sounded insane.

That's exactly why it sounded true.

"These entities are some kind of alien lifeform, to put it bluntly. They seem to travel in pairs. Their life cycle consists of them arriving at a planet, or a cluster of the multiverse, locking it in place, then descending down on it to spread parts of themselves down to its inhabitants. The general population calls these 'powers'. We call them 'Agents', and that is because these powers are not inert packages of interdimensional and physics-shattering impossibilities, but actively learning alien consciousnesses that seem to operate like a gestalt consciousness of some kind with the main two controllers."

Her anger was not forgotten, but she was never ready to just… hear all of this out of the blue, with complete and utter conviction. She could only listen with a bizarre sense of disbelieving dread, knowing that this woman really believed what she was talking about.

And that this was too detailed to be some hare-brained theory. It made too much sense.

"These entities seem infinitely more advanced than us in every way but one. Creativity. The power of imagination. They have none of it, it seems, so they rely on the most creative species of all to do the work for them. Tinkering away new combinations and technologies, coming up with new uses for their powers, mixing and combining them in interesting ways the entities would never be able to, for one reason or another. They give us powers so that we do their homework for them. Once that ends, and they have harvested sufficient data and we've run out of creative ways to use what they gave us, they're done with the cluster of the multiverse they've locked away."

The woman took a sugar cube off one of the little plates, and held it up, her gloves not crumbling the tightly packed grains.

"Then, they detonate it."

Her fingers crushed the cube, and flicked the sugar over the side of the table, scattering to the grass.

"They combine their powers to detonate the sun, or just outright detonate the planet's core, then they use the resulting explosion to propel themselves to another cluster of the multiverse without using any of their own energy. In a way, ingenious."

Her throat felt tight as the magnitude of this began to bear down on her.

Anything, anything that could detonate a fucking sun or a planet, was effectively unbeatable. No parahuman could stand against such a thing. The Void couldn't possibly stand against such a thing. The scale of power was too ridiculous.

"Why do they do all this?"

The woman shifted, steepling her hands over her stomach as she leaned back.

"Frankly, we do not know. Our best guess is that this is simply their life cycle. Like a parasitic alien pair of a world-ending scale. Another less credible theory we've formed is that they are seeking immortality. These things probably live for endless billions of years. We're less than the blink of an eye for these Entities. The heat death of the universe, the march of time, whatever you might call it. The truth is that nothing truly lasts forever because entropy will always crawl forward, and for us, that is so distant a concern we don't even register it as a problem. For them, it could be a terrifying thing that looms over them. The fact that energy is not endless. Aside from those two hypotheses, we have no clue what they're after."

She paused.

An errant thought wormed its way into her mind, and she paused, unable to help the widening of her eyes, the sharp little inhale of shock.

The whole 'entropy' thing was just a theory, from what the woman was saying, but...

The phantom sensation of a heartbeat tugged at her chest, where the answer to entropy now lied, and she suddenly felt dizzy at the realization.

The runes were endless energy. Something that fundamentally broke this world's rules. Mana could be an endless array of energies, and inexhaustible. The World Runes had no limit, even as mangled and cobbled together as they were into the strange ball of crystal in her chest.

If they could just figure out what the damn alien wanted... she could give it to them. Then let it shoo off into the deep reaches of space.

Maybe she could even find a way to live through doing such a thing. Probably not, but just maybe.

She felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in her throat, and she tensed to suppress it.

As if there wasn't enough weight on her shoulders.

Now she just realized that if this woman was right… she could save the entire multiverse by simply sacrificing herself and the last remnant of Runeterra that would ever exist. Billions, trillions of lives, universes and planets.

All on her.

It wasn't a small weight to bear, no matter how uncertain it was that entropy was the problem, rather than something even simpler, like this being their life cycle.

But even if she sacrificed herself, what good would it do? Earth Bet and countless other worlds would no doubt slowly crumble under the endless assault of Endbringers and powers and gods knew whatever other sadistic bullshit some coked up alien made up to harvest creativity, a death by a thousand cuts.

Additionally, there was no guarantee she could ever properly communicate with a completely alien lifeform that resided in fuck knows where, much less ensure it wouldn't detonate planets anyways just to clean up its tracks before it floated off into the ends of space to enjoy its new toy and figure out how it worked, that little answer to entropy.

In fact, how would it learn any of the runes required to utilize that energy? How would it even sense mana, and what would it do with that endless energy? Would it enslave her to teach it for centuries before it killed her?

Would her teaching it magic just make it descend into another cluster of worlds and gift it magic to watch them figure things out for it over the course of a couple thousand years because it got bored of immortality or something?

Would sacrificing herself even fucking do anything in the short term, much less the long term?

And that was all working on the assumption and possibility that they might be running from entropy. They might not be, this might just be how they fed, or something so incomprehensible human minds could never get it. Maybe they just used the connections to the 'Agents' to feel alive and experience real imagination, like some kind of mental drug or an addiction.

"Based on the information I've given you, you would be led to believe that this is impossible to confirm, and if it were true, we'd stand no chance. Fair enough. But, we disagree. Something went wrong when the Entities descended. One of them crashed into another Earth, and was killed." Someone spoke, and it took her a moment to remember there was a Cauldron agent right fucking across from her.

She forcibly focused, pushing that aside to agonise over later.

One of the aliens dropped dead…

Could she kill the one that was left?

Something clicked.

"Your vials." She said, and the woman paused, the first genuine sign of a hiccup in her motions so far. "That's how you make them. That's how you give people powers. You're using the alien somehow…" She trailed off, intrigued.

"Surprisingly intelligent." The woman remarked. "Let's not get off topic, however. The second Entity died. That leaves another one, waiting to torch the human species. That's what we are preparing for. A final confrontation of world-ending proportions. That is why we try to create Parahumans. Soldiers for a war they don't even know will happen. That is where your precog blocker comes in, as a massive, massive problem… or a potential asset that could turn the tides of all this, assuming their power might work on even a tiny fraction of this Entity's own powers. Normally, powers like that of whoever is emitting this effect are programmed and restricted by the Entities to not be used against them, but the death of the first entity has allowed a tiny, almost impossible margin of error chance that it might. So, we need you to give this person to us. We're ready to reimburse you with whatever is within our means."

She tilted her head, then frowned.

She could surmise from that simple request that their organization likely relied a great amount on precog work…

"What would you do with them?" She asked, inwardly trying to puzzle out where they were going with this and how she wanted to play this without outright admitting anything until she'd made up her mind.

"Ideally? Nothing. We'd put them in a secluded corner world where they have absolutely no chance of affecting or reaching anything until the final fight began, then we'd try to see if we could utilise them against the Entity. Simply having them out of the way would be more than enough for us. Our organization is heavily dependent on the work of our precogs. Their mere existence is threatening the entire human species, even if it doesn't seem that way to you and even if that seems like an exaggeration. Cauldron cannot afford mistakes. They tend to snowball quickly."

She frowned, feeling cautiously open to being convinced if only because of the sheer devastation at play.

She was also fully aware that she could be getting duped, however. Or lied to.

"What's your timeframe?"

"Five years at the absolute max. Anything beyond that rapidly reduces our chances of winning. Societies and cape numbers decline too much, too fast, and as powerful as we are, not even we can do anything about the Endbringers."

She ducked her head, frowning in both thought and pain.

Five years. A shorter timeframe than she'd ever be comfortable with at the pace she liked to move, but she'd just have to speed up further wouldn't she?

If the only option was to step on the gas, she'd floor it.

"What can this thing do?"

"It has access to every power it gives out. Unrestricted, untethered versions."

That…

That was not a fight that could ever be won. Even if it was just one, that was impossible.

That sounded like something the Void would get crushed by. They had no fucking chance of overpowering that thing.

And what if it could control the Endbringers too? It was obviously what made the fucking bastards. How could they possibly win against all three Endbringers and the thing that made them?

"What is your plan for dealing with this entity? Because for an organization that's supposedly trying to save the world, I honestly don't see you guys achieving even the bare minimum, much less defeating this alien simply because you throw our precog blocker onto a random planet. I'm dubious at best of this proposal." She said, allowing some of her fury to bleed into her tone.

She sounded mildly annoyed at most, still.

The woman seemed to fractionally relax, glancing aside at the softly swaying grass.

"We have many plans. But as for a specific battle plan, it's deceivingly simple. The main plan, is to produce unique power interactions that multiplicatively add to each other. With proper cooperation and the right combination, you can achieve more with ten powers than a thousand. The secondary plan is to mass produce as many capes as possible with our vials and hope to stumble upon a strong enough formula to make an ace-in-the hole like a second Ash Beast or Siberian or something of the like. That aside, more Parahumans cannot possibly hurt our chances. But if we were to somehow stumble onto something even vaguely comparable to The Triumvirate, it might be enough. The rest of the parahumans will simply be nothing but cannon fodder, but even if they were to distract the entity for a mere fraction of a second, their deaths would be worth it. "

She waited.

An awkward moment passed, the woman turning back to her.

"...And then…?" She prompted, rolling her wrist, starting to feel incredulous.

The woman tilted her head.

"Then nothing. That's it. That's the only thing we can do and hope for. To make a strong enough power combination to have a chance, or alternatively, make enough powerful capes to hopefully put a decent resistance to the Entity, or outright defeat it."

She felt that anger return with a vengeance.

That was it? That was it? No mention of how the hell they'd group and organise into an army, any tactics, a battleplan, cross-power experimentation, purposeful experiments to create things like Noelle as absolute final solutions, no attempts to break through whatever block this alien had on their dimension and flee, no convoluted plot to try and communicate with the fucking thing or try to emotionally manipulate it or reason with it or- or using someone like Shatterbird to see if they could just make the fucker explode into a pile of crystal dust, no discussions of how the hell they would manage morale and dissent in a scenario of high stress like a world-ending fucking battlefield, nothing at all except the most... simple plan?

She couldn't call it much else. For all this plotting and intrigue, the base plan was insultingly simple. It was... ridiculous. They couldn't possibly defeat this thing, even with a hundred Eidolons. Could a hundred Eidolons detonate the damn planet? No!

She wasn't sure if she was offended at the sheer simplicity of it all or furious at herself for taking this cadre of fucking clowns seriously.

"You-" She sputtered for a moment, then ground her teeth with an audible scraping sound, glaring at the woman as she slowly rose from her seat. "You are supposedly facing some kind of alien lifeform that has the power to destroy our fucking species across every iteration of Earth in this cluster of the multiverse…" She began, her voice a barely restrained hiss, hands clenching into fists.

"And your grand plan of winning such a confrontation is to fucking fistfight it with whatever fucking dregs you can cobble together by gambling on a one in a million chance you can make another inferior version of the Triumvirate or the Siberian, and sheer, brainless numbers? What's your battle plan, how will you handle morale, what other things have you tried? Have you tried to talk to the damn thing?" She demanded, feeling her chest quiver in indignation and stress and frustration and barely withheld violence.

"Morale will hardly be an issue, I believe, when the world is facing total annihilation." The woman started, her tone starting to get vaguely condescending.

She resisted the urge to burst out into bitter, roaring laughter.

That's what Demacia thought as well when they released their captive mages from the dungeons in a desperate bid to hold back The Void.

The world is ending, how could they do anything but fight with us?

Once the mages realized they would die regardless, only placed on the frontline with the soldiers to buy time for the helpless folk of Demacia to pack up and run, they turned on the people that had persecuted and imprisoned them, and ensured that Demacia would die with them, a final act of spite.

Jarvan's stupid naivete had buried the capital in ash, and she was seeing the same here again, except instead of naivete, it was just a puppet's inability to think about how human beings thought.

Even if she were to strip away the context of wrongful imprisonment from this comparison, not much would change. She'd seen this song and dance before. People would not fight to the death just because the world was ending.

They would not throw themselves into a meatgrinder just to buy a single second against an unstoppable force. They'd scatter in a million directions, some seeking to run from terror, others wishing to die without regrets and enjoy something one last time, others would just sit on a log and watch the end approach until it lopped their head off.

Without hope, humans and the cohesion between them broke like a dry twig.

These Cauldron people couldn't be trusted with Earth Bet alone, nevermind the multiverse, if she could even consider the woman's story to be true.

"Secondly, any attempts to communicate with the Entity so far have proven from anywhere between ineffective to genuinely detrimental to our plans. Thirdly, with the numbers involved, communication barriers, and the general chaos that will ensue, drafting any kind of battle plan is bound to fail."

She'd personally led an army of over eleven million civillians, warriors, monks, mercenaries, mages and savages with nothing but fucking crow formations in the sky and a magical voice amplifier, in a battlefield ravaged by a dozen different magics and creatures and scattered regiments.

She'd personally led the most chaotic yet effective army in the world, comprised of Noxians and Ionians and Demacians and Shurimans and jungle beasts and Yordles and spirits while staring down the maw of entropy itself. 

Numbers and uniqueness and language barriers as thin and frail as they were in this reality were excuses for a fucking simpleton who couldn't be arsed to commit basic effort to what they claimed to be the end of the fucking world. All one needed was authority, a vision, and the old adage of not putting one's eggs in the same basket.

"You're delusional. Absolute clowns." She grit out. "All this meeting has done is show me that whatever is coming, placing you at its helm would ensure that we will all die scattered and panicked. Return our assets and my father, and we'll pretend I never heard anything and let you do as you usually do, nice and far from us."

The woman took another sip.

"I'm afraid we cannot do that until we know for certain who is emitting this anti-precog effect."

She was fucking stuck.

She could just fight this woman, probably manage to kill her, and be done with it, but that would leave the simple problem of the two most important people in her life being in the hands of immoral mad scientists who were also incompetent beyond measure.

She also just didn't have enough juice in the tank to fight the entirety of Cauldron. She didn't know enough about their capabilities. The best she could hope for was a hostile, temporary ceasefire until she could destroy them.

Possibilities ran through her ravaged mind, the pulses of her headache turning into the insistent scrape of a migraine.

She had a way of getting to her dad, Lisa, and Coil, but her only way of taking them back with her was likely to kill her in this state, and she couldn't afford that. It just wasn't worth it, cold as it sounded.

She needed them to voluntarily give back her people, without showing herself to be weak.

If she gave an inch, they'd look for a mile.

The question became an unfortunate gamble…

How much did they value this messenger they sent?

"That would be me." She coldly said.

The woman's emotions had the faintest taste of puzzlement, even as she waited for a moment before nodding.

It just occurred to her that there was no way this wasn't being watched in one manner or another by someone else. She had a platform, small as it was, right here.

"Just over this tiny hill we're on, is a bunker full of supplies that should more than last you a decade. Enjoy your life as this planet's sole human. Your assets and family will be safely delivered back home, with a touch of memory erasure to forget we ever took them."

She didn't react, Perfect Focus straining to keep up with her rapidfire thoughts.

Getting what she wanted without capitulating any further…

If she just said nothing, she'd get her people back. Then she could just Teleport back home and scatter like a rat. They obviously hadn't even considered the chance her Teleport could work across dimensions, because they still thought she had conventional powers like their own.

Where would that leave her, however? They would obviously work to kill her from the shadows, and that was the one thing she absolutely did not need to have as a problem while fighting a hundred other enemies in the open.

And she doubted they'd ever collaborate with her to fix their crap. They wouldn't take her seriously enough.

The only option left was violence to establish some measure of equal ground.

A gamble that might cost her her only loved ones' lives, in exchange for dodging the possibility of a potentially omnipresent, half-omniscient foe finding her at her weakest and killing her.

As much as it might hurt, she was always prepared to sacrifice whatever it took for this noble, naive goal she'd set for herself. And with the stakes having grown so unfathomably, knowing that if she died, the world would be stuck with these monkeys as their only form of leadership or protection?

What choice was there, really?

"What makes you think I can't get back home, exactly?" She calmly asked, anger still boiling and roiling in her chest like a blast furnace.

She knew the outcome of that simple question.

She switched to the Rune of Sorcery, locking in the Arcane Comet main effect.

Much as she hated to show this much of what she could do, she had to make a show of strength here, or Cauldron would never hold back from taking every chance they could to interfere and kill her.

With what was at stake, they couldn't afford not to.

The pale indigo glow of the little rock drew the woman's gaze as it seemingly formed from nothing and began to slowly orbit Taylor's waist.

"I see you've made up your mind on the matter of cooperating with us." The woman said, rising from her chair for the first time, working on her cufflinks.

They sized each other up for a moment.

"You're important, aren't you? You're not just some lackey agent." She surmised. Cosmic Insight had told her as much.

Loved by millions. A public figure of some kind. In the upper echelons of Cauldron.

The woman put her arms behind her back, standing tall and still.

"I suppose you could say that."

She nodded.

"How about a trade then. Cauldron gives me my people back and doesn't involve themselves in our business. And In exchange, I'll give you back to them, and I'll pay the same courtesy back."

"You won't have to do anything to involve yourself in our business. That's a rather bad deal isn't it?"

She conceded with a dip of her head.

"It's the only deal incompetents like you are going to get. I need nothing from you that you can offer. And I won't back down just so you can mess everything up when it's most important. Last chance. Give me my people, and steer clear."

The woman said nothing.

Her mind reached for the highest damaging thing she had in her arsenal that wouldn't strain her, the sole Summoner spell she could never use in an urban area without drawing every eye for miles.

'Smite' tingled at her fingertips as she held it in place, the clear sky above them suddenly muddying with golden fabric-like clouds swirling in a tunneling vortex to the unseen stars, lined by silent golden lightning.

In an instant, from zero to a thousand, the woman charged through the table, practically detonating it as she bullrushed her faster than Taylor thought possible.

She only had enough time to twitch before a fist buried itself into her gut, Evelynn's toughness the only thing preventing her from splitting in half from the sheer force as she flew back in a straight, spinning line.

Notes:

i have no idea what im doing

but i also know EXACTLY where im fucking going

yes im confused but im not

its very strange

Edit: For people wondering how she didn't recognize Alexandria, Alex does a lot of things to place distance between identities. For starters, as Alex, she's always flying at least a little bit with a long cape which makes her look a lot taller than she really is. She also changes her voice, and makes her body language more rigid. Combined with the mask, all Taylor had to work with was that this person was some kind of public figure and had the same haircut as Alexandria, which is a haircut that's so generic I'm not sure it can be called one.

If someone is wondering how she didn't recognize her as Rebecca Costa Brown, that's because all the documentation of the main director is of the body double, to prevent any Thinkers from figuring out something they're not supposed to, and Taylor hasn't exactly looked into the main director, as she has no goons anywhere close to the woman to bother looking into.

That's what I was thinking of in my head as to why she doesn't recognize Alexandria. It made sense, but some people seem to think it's a bit unrealistic or dumb. Honestly, I don't see it, but sorry if you think of it that way, I wasn't expecting people to focus on that so much. xd

hope you enjoyed