Chapter 49: 4-16 Ripples

Ripples 4.16

2000, September 15: Arlington, VA, USA

I stood in the corner of my room like a scared puppy as the Boogeyman of Earth-Bet sat on my bed like she owned it. It was my first time seeing the legendary thinker in the flesh and I was… disappointed?

Truth be told, I wasn't sure what I was expecting. She was beautiful, but not in the same way movie stars and K-pop idols were. She was the kind of pretty that could fade into the crowd, be one part of an appealing background.

I didn't doubt that it was an image she cultivated meticulously. Easy enough to overlook, but oh so dangerous once you knew what you were looking at.

Then, as if to challenge those very thoughts, she stretched like a cat and lounged back against my favorite pillow as if to say, "It's my pillow now and there's nothing you can do about it." It wasn't exactly a subtle power play, but she was clearly done being subtle.

I scowled at her, my irritation overriding my survival instincts for a moment. It gave me the presence of mind to at least stand up straight. If I was about to die, I may as well die staring her down.

"Oh, quit the melodramatics, Hyunmu," she drawled. "Or, do you prefer Andy? Yusung?"

"Yusung," I replied.

She nodded magnanimously, like a queen deigning to learn the name of a useful servant.

I took a deep breath. 'Focus,' I chided myself. 'Think. Why is she here? What does she want?'

She smiled at me, an almost playful smile, as if to tell me that I could take my time.

Just our brief interaction thus far told me much about her and my current predicament.

I was helpless. It was a sobering realization, but it was true. There was no way around it and deluding myself wouldn't help now. If she wanted me dead, I would be dead. If she wanted me chained to a lab in some undisclosed alternate earth, I would be.

'But you're not,' a voice inside whispered.

And that was the rub. She didn't want either of those things for me. If she did, she would have no reason to visit me like this. She could just as easily have taken me in my most vulnerable moment and that'd have been that. The fact that she was willing to have a conversation with me at all proved that she wanted something more.

Contessa nodded subtly, that same maddening smile dancing on her lips.

'She can read me like an open book. Is this because the Path is fully focused on me?'

No, the exact details didn't matter. Putting on airs would do me no good here. The time for false bravado and delusions of grandeur was long behind me. The fact that she was here and I was free implied she meant what she said: She wanted to talk.

And that… that meant something big had happened.

I knew since the lawsuit against Rubedo's healing potions that I was on Cauldron's radar. Me moving out here meant I'd be at the heart of their power. I'd made peace with that. I knew I was being used and seeing how we had the same ultimate goal, I went with the flow, using them in turn.

But now, she'd chosen to strip the curtains bare.

Something massive had changed, big enough that the Path no longer called for granting me the illusion of freedom. Big enough to warrant this conversation.

Realization struck me like a bolt from the blue. Perhaps, my situation wasn't as hopeless as I'd assumed… Perhaps, I wasn't completely helpless here…

"Hero," we spoke in the same breath.

She removed her fedora and twirled it on a finger in lazy arcs. "And now we are at the crux of the matter. Hero is alive, currently doing his best impression of the world's most awkward goldfish."

Despite my current predicament, hearing of his survival was a weight off my shoulders. "That's good."

"Indeed."

"You're welcome," I said as the details of our dynamic solidified in my mind. "He's really important, you know."

"I know. Although the question remains: How do you know?"

"Limited precognition. I had a vision of what might happen without my intervention."

"We'll have to talk about that."

"Vaguely depreciating value," I shrugged. "The dream was a one-time thing. Information about someone's powers is likely to be consistent, but events are already changing."

"You changed things by making sure Hero survives."

"You're welcome. Seriously, I don't think you understand how important he is."

"Enlighten me. Just how much do you know?"

"Rebecca. Keith. David. Kurt. Eva." I pointed at her. "Fortuna."

"You don't know Hero's name?"

"No. The vision was more like reading a book or watching a play. I know a lot, but not everything."

"Thank you. That clears up quite a bit."

I sighed. "Is this the part where you torture me for information?"

"That depends." She tossed her hat with a flick of her wrist. It flew in a perfect arc and alighted gently on my head. "That depends on you, Yusung. You know what Cauldron stands for."

"I do."

"You represent a tricky new player, an unforeseen variable. So, what do you stand for?"

I said the first thing that came to mind. "Inspiration." At her puzzled glance, one I wasn't sure was true, I continued. "I stand for Inspiration. It's the closest thing to a name you'll find regarding my power. I want to create, to better the world. And yes, to kill Scion. Or Zion. Or the Warrior. Whichever name you prefer."

"We have the same goal."

"We do."

We stared each other down, Contessa and I. It wasn't awkward; awkward wasn't the right word. Nor was the atmosphere quite as threatening as before.

In a way, this was my worst nightmare. There was a reason she was called the boogeyman and a visit from her usually meant you weren't waking up tomorrow. But, the worst had not happened. I wasn't a rabbit about to be devoured by a cobra. We weren't equals here, I had no delusions about that, but nor was our dynamic completely one-sided.

I had something more valuable than any singular nugget of information: I'd proven I could refine the Path, bypass restrictions imposed upon her by Eden. In my own limited way, saving Hero proved I could contest a god and that made me valuable. That made my agency valuable.

With that in mind, I spoke.

"You're short-sighted," I began cautiously. "It's not your fault, but you think killing Scion will save humanity. You think that if the Warrior vanishes, we can rebuild, no matter how bad the damage, no matter how many earths are lost. So long as some spark of humanity remains, we can rise anew."

"Oh?" it was a single syllable, but there was danger there, a warning. I'd effectively told her that her entire life was meaningless. Path or no, there was no way she wouldn't be offended.

"It's not your fault," I repeated, "you're working off incomplete information."

"Enlighten me."

"The Shards, the fragments of entities you call Agents, do you know what they want? What the purpose of the Cycle truly is? Why they visited and extinguished so many worlds, so many species?"

"No, only that the Cycle will culminate in the end of humanity," she admitted.

"Immortality. You can laugh, but that's what it boils down to in the end. It sounds like a bad fantasy novel, but at the end of the day, the entities are no different than some medieval alchemist who couldn't tell the ass end of a fish. They want immortality.

"Somewhere along the line, they discovered that the universe will end. Not this dimension, all dimensions as they know it. No transfer of energy is truly perfect, some will always be lost into the surroundings. And eventually, all energy in the universe will just… cool down… and the universe will end. Geeks like me call it the heat death. The entities seek to solve that, to exist forever.

"That's it. That's all they want, to exist. And in turn, to grow infinitely as they devour countless worlds and each other. Funny, isn't it?"

"And you think killing the Warrior will not end the Cycle." She reached the logical conclusion. "There is a third entity."

I shrugged. "Kind of? But not really the issue. The problem is that the Cycle is like a boulder rolling down the hill. You can kill the idiots who shoved it, but the boulder's still going to crash."

"How do we end the Cycle?"

"We kill the Warrior, then the Thinker's exigency condition. She'll emerge as an endbringer called the Simurgh, a naked woman with many wings. At the start, she'll just be another endbringer, though one with a focus on thinker, master, and tinker powers. If you kill Scion, you'll put her in charge of the Shard network. She'll then activate contingencies, trying to gather as much data via human suffering until another entity can arrive and end the Cycle, resulting in the destruction of humanity. More importantly, killing Scion will damage the network, enabling broken triggers."

"Broken triggers?"

"Yeah, they're… They're what happens when a Shard takes over the parahuman completely. They lack a Manton limit because they're no longer human. The Shard has no interest in keeping the parahuman alive or limiting its power. And, if a broken trigger happens to also be the second trigger, they become titans, pseudo-endbringers that stand as tall as skyscrapers.

"My point… My point is that the Path can only take you so far." I sighed. I really didn't want to be the one who told the strongest thinker in the world she wasn't smart enough, but… I was literally the only person who could, the only person who had a shot at averting the shitstorm that was Ward. "There are too many blindspots. Endbringers. Eidolon. Triggers. Metaphysics…"

"You."

That brought me up short. "Me?"

"Yes. And no. You exist on the Path. And yet, you act outside of it with knowledge that should be impossible. Every time I see you on the Path, you become more powerful. Your creations seem to have fewer limits. I can see you, but not the source of your power."

'She can't see the World Rune,' I realized. She could see me, but not Inspiration. It made sense in hindsight. If an infinite source of mana wasn't metaphysical nonsense, what was?

"Why tell me this?"

She shrugged. "Consider it my 'thank you' for saving Hero. I told you; I want to talk. Lay our cards on the table. What you've told me so far. It's only proven the Path right."

"And what's the Path you're running now?"

"Path to making Yusung trust and cooperate with me."

"That's… That's fucked." I let out a frustrated sigh.

The Path was, infuriatingly, correct. I'd trust her a lot less if she fed me some bullshit and it'd clearly decided that the easiest way to take advantage of my psychological profile was to speak truthfully. Reciprocity: Truth for truth. That she was running a Path just to soothe my insecurities annoyed me like nothing else, but that she was honest about her manipulations actually helped put my mind at ease.

I could second guess her motives. She could be lying. But… But that way laid madness. I'd get nothing for my paranoia except an ever-deepening spiral of fear and desperation.

Contessa, everything she did, from the way she dressed to the way she lounged on my favorite pillow, said and did just enough, just enough to allow me to slowly unclench my fist. It wasn't enough, not fully, but it was a start. Knowing I had nothing else, leaving me no choice but to accept her outstretched hand in friendship, I was made to let go of my paranoia.

In a single sentence, she'd thoroughly checkmated me.

"Fucking thinkers," I cursed.

"Oh? Are you any different, Mister 'I want to kill God?'" she asked with a teasing lilt.

"It's not as fun when it happens to me."

"I wouldn't know."

"Bitch."

"Brat."

We shared a moment of solidarity and no matter how manufactured, it gave me the chance to take a breath.

"So what now?"

"Now you tell me everything, starting with how we can kill Scion."

"We can't," I admitted freely, "not as we are."

"But you know how."

"I do. Scion is just a piñata. You pop the human-sized balloon and it'll create a portal to the Warrior's real body, a body the size of a planet. You need to blow that to kingdom come."

"And who can pop the piñata?"

I held out a hand and started to tick my fingers down. "Sting. Stilling. High Priest. Harvest assuming she has the right powers. Inspiration."

"They are?"

"Sting hasn't been distributed yet. It's a Shard that entities use in combat against one another. Stilling is what I call Hero's Shard. It was Eden's equivalent to Scion's golden beams. High Priest is Eidolon's Shard. Harvest is Glaistig Uaine. Inspiration… is me."

"So you've said. You can kill Scion?"

"No, not right now. Later, in the same way that Hero might one day have the potential to kill Scion."

"What do you need?"

"Not a clue. I'll let you know when I get there. You said Hero's alive, right?"

She nodded, going with the change in topic. "Yes. Alexandria lost an eye. Manton escaped by bisecting Hero. Was that supposed to happen?"

"Yeah. Hero was supposed to die without me, but yeah. What exactly happened to his daughter?"

"Abby. You don't have her name. She expired during the fighting."

"That's…" I wished I could say I cared, but… I didn't, not really. The Siberian was an avatar of his daughter. I knew that in my head but his daughter wasn't really a person to me as much as she was some nebulous plot point. Insignificant. Irrelevant.

"You don't care. And it bothers you that you don't care."

"Can you stop Pathing me? You won. I'm on your side," I scowled.

And, surprisingly, she did. Or, I thought she did.

She flopped back to the bed and placed her hands behind her head, the picture of relaxation. For once, she didn't seem to mind that her perfectly tailored suit was getting wrinkled. It was the first crease that seemed out of place on her otherwise immaculate outfit. It was a small thing, ultimately meaningless, but the impeccable poise and control I'd begun to associate with her was gone. She wasn't Contessa, but Fortuna.

Or she was once again Pathing the best way to put me at ease.

'No,' I told myself, 'no more senseless spirals.'

"Don't you have a million better things to do than relax on my bed?"

"They'll keep going without me for another two hours and thirteen minutes," she said with the kind of smug surety only found in thinkers. "It's nice, you know, to shut it off, to be Fortuna again, to talk without the Path guiding me."

"But it is guiding you."

"Perhaps. We're still in the car, but I've taken my hands off the steering wheel. It'll follow the road for now. That's as much as you're going to get from me I'm afraid."

Sighing, I acquiesced. "Fine. Whatever. Do you crash Eva's bed when you want to relax or am I just lucky?"

"I don't relax, especially not around her. I respect her about as much as I respect me, really. Which is to say, not at all. I know we're monsters, Yusung. Your paranoia wasn't misplaced. I know too much of what the doctor's done to respect her. Alexandria too."

"Not the rest?"

"Number Man needs no explanations. Eidolon is a single-minded hero, for good and for ill. Hero and Legend… They are Cauldron's moral conscience, our heart."

"Then why do you keep insisting on ignoring their misgivings? Why hide so much from them?"

"Why do you?" she scoffed, throwing the question back at me. "You know the answer to that. Sometimes, you have to put aside what the heart wants for the greater good. Keith and Eugene, they're not soft, the opposite, really. Too hard in some ways. Too principled."

I raised a single brow. "Eugene?"

"What did you think his name was?"

"If I had to guess? Arthur. Maybe Clark."

"Sorry to disappoint."

"Not important. That's hardly the only thing I didn't know. I feel like I know enough to know I don't know anything, you know?" I processed what I said and laughed. "Shit. Can barely talk."

"You think you're the only one who feels like a Dunning-Kruger stereotype? Join the club."

"Club Sisyphus?"

"That implies we did anything to deserve it."

"Fair."

We shared a quiet chuckle. I never thought I'd ever relate to Fortuna of all people, but the end of the world made for strange bedfellows. I spun my swivel chair around so the back faced her and sat, leaning forward against the backrest.

"Thank you," I said. I was surprised to find that I was sincere. The chance to lay everything bare was worth more than I thought I knew. "Thank you for arranging this."

"I needed this too. Not just because you can seemingly refine the Path. It's… good to be Fortuna again." She looked at me intently. "Will you help me?"

"Join Cauldron?"

"Yes. Tell me all you know so I can better refine the Path. In exchange, I will provide you with more opportunities to grow. You'll have a say in the running of this world."

It was tempting. More importantly, there was only ever one answer. "Yes. But-"

"I never placed your mother at risk, Yusung."

"Not the point."

"You know that she'll never stop worrying for you. I'm told that's what mothers do."

"You'll actively keep her away from threats and protect her to the best of your ability."

"She can't be my priority."

"That's not what I said."

"Very well. She will be a consideration on the Path. She will not be the only consideration, but I will endeavor to keep her safe."

"Then yes, I will join you. But your question, it was the wrong one."

"Oh?"

"You asked if I could kill Scion. That's far-reaching. Too far in fact."

"And what is the right question?"

"Your Path is muddled. That's why Hero died and you couldn't prevent it, right?"

She nodded. I saw her eyes widen. "You know where Leviathan will be."

"Tomorrow." I glanced at the clock and corrected myself. "Today. Leviathan hits Naples, Italy. I wasn't sure about the date, but I know it's the day after Hero's death."

"Can we kill it?" she asked, all business again. Contessa was back.

"No. And until we can, we shouldn't even try. Cornering an endbringer just makes it stop sandbagging. Focus on minimizing loss of life because all the damage you do to it is superficial. You can behead it and it won't matter."

"So what will?"

"The core. An endbringer is a puppet made of layered crystals that get denser towards the core. If you can breach the layers and hit the core, it will destabilize, turning into a bomb that can wipe out a mid-sized country. Until you can do that and take the collateral damage elsewhere, it's not worth even trying."

"Then we let this one go."

"It sucks, but yeah. The next big event I know about happens sometime in January next year. A man named Jamie Rinke will trigger, becoming the greatest biokinetic alive."

I proceeded to tell her about Ellisburg. I told her about how he enacted the plot of a horror movie over the course of a week before killing all three thousand people in a single day of hostile takeover. I told her about his creations to the best of my knowledge. Lastly, I told her how he would trigger after being fired from his job at a bank.

"Nilbog, that's his cape name, ultimately turns Ellisburg into his personal kingdom and the PRT quarantines the whole place, fences and everything. As long as he's left alone, he's pretty much happy to remain in his own fantasy world. You let him live in the hopes of having more cannon fodder for the final battle," I finished.

"And?"

"And what?"

"And was he useful in the final battle?"

I thought about it. Khepri had mastered trillions of people across countless worlds. Ellisburg had a population of three thousand, give or take a few hundred. "Not really. You're talking about little goblins with bone spears and acid against Scion. He was a distraction, but only in the sense that his army was a novelty, nothing more."

"So why are you telling me this? Do you want me to keep him from triggering?"

"If I said yes, would you? Like I said, the only reason he triggered was because he lacked the support structure after he got fired from his job. Keeping the bank solvent enough to not need to lay people off would probably take the Number Man what? Five minutes? If that? He could save three thousand lives with minimal effort."

"You're testing my willingness to offer you concessions."

"Partially. I also want to know how the Path changes if I offer you actionable intel like this. As much as I want to say you should save Ellisburg, I'm not crazy enough to think they outweigh all of Earth-Bet. In the end, I'm not going to ask you to devote the Path to Victory to getting Rinke some friends if there are better ways it can be used."

"If he was able to distract Scion, even for a millisecond, I'm not willing to prevent his trigger. You may have knowledge on how Scion can be killed, but I will not gamble everything on you."

I sighed. It was pointless to argue. Worse, she was right. Were I in her shoes, I doubt I'd think any differently. Was I already falling down Cauldron's slippery slope? Would I sacrifice three thousand people to buy a single second against Scion?

Yes. Yes, I would. It wasn't even a question. If it came down to it, three thousand was nothing. But the truth of my own callousness disquieted me further.

I looked around for anything to distract me and saw the clock again. We'd been talking for a while and it was now past midnight.

'I could use the snack.' I just wanted something to chew on while I mulled things over.

Shrugging, I popped a Total Biscuit of Everlasting Will into my hand. If it could provide me "everlasting will," would it give me the resolve needed to make terrible sacrifices?

No, I knew the answer to that. The biscuits were powerful creations of magic, but they didn't harden your resolve. They just gave you the daily sustenance needed to carry on. And tasted amazing. That was important too.

Then I saw Contessa move.

She withdrew two somethings from her suit pocket and tossed them with inhuman precision. One bounced against the wall, off the ceiling fan just so, and down the back of my shirt.

I realized then that she threw two rubber balls.

Startling a little, I fumbled for the ball in my shirt and accidentally tossed the biscuit into the air. The second ball, tossed with an impossibly precise spin and bounced off the desk and closet, knocked the biscuit by the edge and back towards her.

Dainty fingers caught the biscuit like a miniature Frisbee.

"Mmm, always wanted to try one of these. Pistachio and wildflower honey. Delicious," she said with that infuriatingly smug smirk. "More."

"I only have three per day."

"One for you, one for your mother, and one for me. Perfect."

"Oh, fuck off," I grumbled. Still, I made my second biscuit and shoved it into my mouth before the bitch could decide she wanted that one too.

"You'll have to tell me just what the limits of your power are one day."

"Not today."

"Not today," she agreed easily, dropping not a single crumb onto my sheets. And then, the moment of levity was gone. "Let's compromise, Yusung. You don't want to become a second Doctor Mother, and rightly so. There are plenty of people in Cauldron who have no trouble making hard decisions, who have cast their morality by the wayside. I'm one of them. So, don't. Don't become another me. You know much. How can you use what you know to save lives while improving our chances against Scion?"

I chewed my delicious treat for a long moment. 'Rinke could trigger, but he is one of the greatest biokinetics in the setting. Is using him as cannon fodder against Scion really the best we can do? No… That's not right. Rinke could make goblins in the shape of Eden just like Leet did. There's no reason why we can't play on Scion's neuroses and that wouldn't require Ellisburg being written off.'

And then I had it. Amy manipulated Taylor's Shard, "jailbroke" it until Queen Administrator took over. 'Could… Could Nilbog do something similar? If Nilbog could be made mentally stable, or at least controlled, could he be used to ameliorate the worst mutations of a Case-53?'

Maybe I was grasping at straws, I was desperate to find a way to make him useful without throwing away the entire town, but… why wouldn't it work? As far as I understood it, a Case-53's Shard enforced mutated shapes onto their hosts and that form would be their new standard for "healthy." My own healing potion wouldn't turn them back into humans, but Nilbog's Shard had to have dealt with other Shards before. He had to have dealt with other triggers in Ellisburg.

After all, his little horror movie rampage was a textbook scenario for new triggers. Yet, he'd assimilated them all without any struggle that I knew of, making them loyal to him and turning them into his goblins. He's never done it with a Case-53, but he had a better shot than most. And even if Nilbog couldn't reverse their mutations, he should be able to stabilize the worst cases.

If he could be kept loyal, we could leave him at the head of an organized force of parahumans instead of his ragtag horde of goblins. They would be made to love him, but that love would be returned. Nor would it be absolute control; Dot was able to develop into her own personhood from her interactions with Amy and if a Case-53 wouldn't have any memories anyway… Didn't they deserve good health, family, and love?

"This is so fucked up," I groaned.

"You have an idea."

"Can't you pluck it from my head?" I snarked.

"I could, but it's good for you to voice it."

"Fine. Any chance you'll stop making Case-53s?"

"No, for the same reason I won't prevent Nilbog's trigger. Any small chance is better than nothing. We also noticed early on that Scion does not like to look at Case-53s, perhaps because they are avatars of Eden's broken Shards."

"Right. You keep the majority of them in Cauldron bases to redirect his attention elsewhere. Almost forgot about that. Do Legend and Hero even know what kinds of monsters you are?"

"No. All they know is that some triggers result in wild mutations and destroy the host's memories. We made sure to not brand those we've released into the wild as it were. As far as the PRT is concerned, a Case-53 refers to amnesiac capes with gross mutations."

"You were going to use Manton as an excuse to release more, branding them with the Cauldron symbol."

She nodded. "I saw that if I let him take the vials, he would incite more triggers, though the immediate aftermath of his theft was hidden from me. By leaving our own brand, I wanted to promote the idea that Manton had gone insane and was responsible for inciting a large number of Case-53s, leaving clues about our identity in some twisted attempt to expose and destroy us."

"It helps that he's actually insane."

"Quite."

"This is so fucked up," I repeated.

"So make it less 'fucked.' Tell me, what is your plan?"

"Recruit Nilbog," I told her. "His name is Jamie Rinke. Knowing he works at a bank, it'll take Number Man moments to find him. He can keep tabs on Rinke until he's fired. You'll know when he triggers because Ellisburg will fall off the Path for a few days. Go there as soon as your Path clears. Offer him a place to call his own. Social-fu his psyche until he's loyal to you then take him to a Cauldron base."

"You want him to work with the Case-53s."

"I do. I want him to see if he can stabilize their worst mutations if not outright turn them back into humans. He loves them, his creations, and they'll love him in turn. Except this time, if he can truly fix some of them, they'll have a real reason for their loyalty besides Shard fuckery."

"And with him sane, we'll have a far better organized army." I nodded. "That is acceptable. Congratulations, Yusung, I will save Ellisburg."

"And all it cost me was the Case-53s."

"They were already made and lacked both memories and identities. You've orchestrated a Path that could give them both."

Strangely, hearing that did make me feel a little better. "Thanks."

Contessa rose and spoke. "I'll have Alexandria arrange matters in your favor. The Elixir of Life, Wayfinder, and Worldstone. You made them because you were terrified of Leviathan. You made them in the hopes of protecting the primary male role model in your life in response to the death of your father. Agreed?"

I sighed. "Agreed."

"Good. You'll be expected to attend the next Cauldron meeting following Naples. I'll start the evacuations to minimize the loss of life there."

"I want Doormaker access."

"Granted."

"And safety for my mom."

"Already Pathed." She made for the closet. "Door, Cauldron base."

"So that's it then. I'm a member of Cauldron now."

"Indeed. Oh, Andy?"

"What?"

She nodded at me with a mischievous smile before stepping through the Door. "Keep the hat. It looks good on you."