Fundamentals of being human.

"The only reason the Endbringers exist, Eidolon is because YOU NEEDED WORTHY OPPONENTS!" I said.

Eidolon looked up at me, eyes bloodshot with stress as the realisation set in.

His hands dropped to the sides and he scrunched up his eyes in pain and regret.

"I....I understand now.

I did this. You're right. I made the Endbringers. I should have known...but....." He shook his head, his voice hoarse and cracking.

"Wait... you're just going to admit to it? That easily? You're not going to put up a defence? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you should fight back a little?

I might have a way for you to prove your innocence~" I teased, laying a verbal trap.

"Prove my innocence?" Eidolon asked.

And the trap is sprung. This is too easy. I might just yawn.

Just then Alexandria caught Eidolon.

"No. You're just playing into his hand, Eidolon. It's a trap. He's trying to set up something else."

"What?" Eidolon asked.

"Cheh! Spoilsport! You must be fun at parties!" I spat, "And here I went through all that effort to bring enough evidence to bury the lot of you six feet under. And you're not even going to let me use it? Come on!"

"No. Just stop this, GameBreaker. Let's end this here. We admit it. We made the Case 53s. We kidnapped them from their worlds. We did all those things. Maybe Eidolon even made the Endbringers. But we did it for a good reason. Trust us on this."

"I think you're way past getting any trust on this!" Gully shouted, "GameBreaker, do it! Expose them!"

"Gully! You don't understand anything! We did what we had to. To save humanity!" Alexandria replied.

"Then why don't you explain it to them? Isn't it high time you came clear to the rest of the world?" I suggested, taking a sip of mega seed juice.

"You!" Alexandria fumed.

"Unless you know that whatever your reason, it would never excuse your actions!" I added.

"Why don't any of you understand-" Alexandria shouted, when suddenly a beam of light passed her, forming into the form of a man.

Legend! The last of the Triumvirate and the only one with any moral compass.

He was carrying a woman in his arms.

Fortuna!

The most powerful thinker in the world.

"Alexandria. It is time." The woman said.

"Contessa?" Alexandria furrowed her brows.

"The path showed me." Fortuna said, pointing at me, "He is the one we were waiting for. It is time to reveal the truth to the world."

"Hold on. I was the one you were waiting for? What is this, fucking Wheel Of Time? Am I the chosen one or something? Don't make up excuses just to save your skin. You're flayed already. There's no skin to save." I replied.

"No. That's....not what we meant." Fortuna replied, using her power to pick the right words.

Trying to manipulate me?

It won't work!

I have a plan and I will follow it to the T.

"Then how about you explain it to them?" I smiled, and took another sip from my flask.

"You know!" Fortuna gasped, "Then why?"

"Of course I know. But I want them to hear it from your mouths. I want you to tell them why you did this." I said.

"We will." Legend said, stepping forward.

"I know that a lot of you don't trust us right now. The things we have done, the crimes we have committed. I will not deny them. We did those things. And we did them to protect humanity."

"From what?! The Endbringers that you created? From the villains you let go?

The only people the world needs protection from is you!" A cape shouted from the crowd.

"Scion." Legend said, loudly, shutting them all up.

"Scion is not what he seems. He is not a hero. He is an alien entity. The golden man you see is a projection it uses to put you at ease. His real form is that of a multiple reality spanning worm. He came here from a distant world to find something. He is running an experiment on the planet, a cycle.

We don't know what this is for. But we do know this.

Whether he finds whatever he's looking for or not, in a few years, his experiment will end.

When that happens, he will destroy the earth, and move on to another world to continue this cycle. Just as he has done before to countless other worlds just like our own.

I know this isn't the first contact any of us wanted, but it is one we will have to deal with if we want to save the human race." Legend explained.

Everyone looked at me for confirmation, even Legend, and I sighed, shaking my head.

"20 percent truthful as usual. Yes, Scion is an alien space whale that's trying to kill us, but that's not the whole story. They're still hiding the majority of it from you.

But I'll give you the choice. You want the long version where I explain the whole thing with Scion in autistic detail or do you want the short sweet to the point explanation?"

"We don't have time for the whole explanation!" Fortuna cried.

"That's what you'd like wouldn't you?" I smiled.

"Yeah. We deserve to know." Weld shouted to murmured agreements.

"Scion will be here soon! We have kept him busy with natural disasters and african wars but he will hear of this discussion. And when he does...."

"Yes. I know. Alright. Middle of the road then." I said, turning to the camera.

"Scion is from a species of hyper advanced aliens that want to achieve eternal life by eliminating entropy from the universe.

But they have a fatal flaw. In their evolution, they evolved out of a feature we hold dear. Creativity. They became so powerful, their species didn't need much creativity anymore.

But that became a hinderance for them when they tried to innovate a way to stop entropy.

So they came up with another solution. They blew up their own planet and used the explosion to catapult themselves across the stars to other worlds with life.

There they infest these worlds and their natives with shards, machine organisms that attach to a host and harness the host species' creativity to gather data on how to evolve themselves further till one of them manages to figure out a way to reverse entropy.

The way they do this is by granting the hosts access to what you call superpowers.

These shards are parasites that latch onto your brain, and flood extradimensional energy into it to mutate it.

You call it the corona gemma and corona pollentia, new brain sections that develop in parahumans.

The effects vary depending on the shards inhabiting you. There are strong shards and weak shards. Better and worse.

But there is something else that all shards do. They subtly fuck with your head to push you to be more violent. It's called a conflict drive. That's why they usually attach to people in their most vulnerable moments. Trigger events. Because that's where you are easiest to manipulate. Of course, if you are the sort of person that is strong, if you have an iron will and don't break under trauma, then they don't attach to you, because they know you will be harder to manipulate.

That's why some poeple can go through hell and not trigger while others can trigger on a beautiful sunny day, after they spill their coffee.

It all depends on how easy the shard thinks you will be to manipulate into committing violence for them.

The more you fight, the more likely you are to find a CREATIVE use of your powers, giving them more data on their functions, bringing them closer to their next stage of evolution. To stopping entropy.

Of course, if they had found a way to do that they wouldn't have come here in the first place.

That's because they can only cause so much conflict before the planet becomes uninhabitable and stops providing them new data.

That's also why they don't let you use your powers after a certain distance from your planet. Because they don't want their guinea pigs to escape the experiment.

Now once the planet stops giving them new data, they destroy that planet and use the explosion to push themselves to another one.

That's what Scion would have done in a couple of years, after Eidolon's Endbringers destroyed civilization completely.

But there's something else they didn't tell you.

Scion didn't come here alone. He came here with his wife, Eden. But Eden made a mistake in her calculations and crash landed on a parallel Earth, dying in the process.

There, Cauldron was born. They found her corpse and took the best powers for themselves, before pawning off the rest to you people across this multiversal cluster for a price.

That's how Cauldron can give people powers, without going through the trauma of a trigger event. Without being driven to conflict by their shards.

A safe way to give people powers.

A method found they found out off the backs of you Case 53s."

"Now you see! We were trying to save the world. The more parahumans there were, the more people there would be to fight Scion off.

That's why we had to let the Slaughterhouse Nine go free. That's why we had let the villains do what they did.

To protect humanity!

We had to do it!" Alexandria exclaimed.

"No you did not! You did not have to do any of this!" I said, shaking my head.

"Don't you understand? The more people that trigger the more of a chance there is that someone strong enough to fight Scion will show up!" Alexandria argued.

"Hold on! So let me get this straight.

That's why you did this? That was your whole shtick?

Your grand plan was to inflict so much violence, hurt and misery upon the people of the world in the hopes that maybe, probably, someone, somewhere, someday could hypothetically trigger with a power strong enough to PUNCH an ALIEN GOD to death?!

Which genius came up with this horseshit?

Do you realize how stupid you sound?

Ooga booga, me hit bad guy with big stick!

That's what you sound like!

God forbid you use your brain to think about it for a minute!

Ask yourselves?

Is that how we created civilization?

Is that how our ancestors hunted the wooly mammoth?

Did they just run up to the giant murder beast empty handed and just fucking jam their fists right up it's urethra? Huh?

No! They used spears and bows and shot it from a distance! Like proper civilized people!

That's the whole reason we invented bows and spears!

That's how we got mobile phones and flushing toilets. We thought, we created, we fucking innovated.

We didn't just go up to our problems and punch them hoping that they'd get solved like idiots!

The fundamental human ability to solve problems remains the same on all levels!

And yet, your first thought when it came to killing an ALIEN GOD, wasn't to rub two fucking braincells together and make a tinkertech cannon to blow the fucker out of the sky.

No. Your first thought was, "Let's kidnap and torture people from other dimensions and commit genocide on our own people so that maybe someday we can punch Scion to death!"

Do you also burn down your house everytime you try to kill a spider?

Do you also chop off your whole arm everytime it itches?

You fucking dickwads!

You couldn't be fucked to think for once in your miserable, pathetic lives before you jumped headfirst into committing unspeakable atrocities?

If you're the protectors of this world, then humanity is doomed!

It took me less than a minute of thinking to find the glaring flaw in your plan AND create an alternative.

And you couldn't do that in how long...twenty? Thirty years?

And let's just say it worked. Let's assume for a moment that your nightmare fuelled delusion of a plan worked.

What then?

Do you remember what you guys did when you found Eden's corpse? You took the strongest powers for yourselves!

Do you think Scion didn't do that himself?

Do you really think Scion would EVER give out a shard that could potentially trigger with a power that could kill him?

Would you do it, of you were in his position?

No?

Then why do you assume he would ever do that? He isn't an idiot!

Not to mention, this plan of yours. I doubt it was made by someone thinking independently.

You probably used some sort of thinker power to get to it didn't you? Actually don't answer that. I already know you did.

You asked a shard that works for Scion how to kill it's master. Do you really think it would give you a viable answer?

It is Scion's and Eden's servant, not yours!

Any plan it gives you is one that will inevitably benefit it's master!

Did a barbarian come up with this plan of yours?" I asked.

Legend looked at Fortuna in shock, as she stood there with a horrified look on her face.

"She came up with this plan didn't she? Oh wait....

now that I look at her.

Those features..... Isn't Fortuna over there from a world that was stuck in the bronze age?

A literal barbarian. And you three modern humans just took her word for it?! You didn't give her plan a single thought?

What a joke.

'We had to do it' my ass. You didn't have to do shit! You had to think before you did all this is what you HAD to do!

All of your crimes, all the poeple who died to the Endbringers, those millions, billions if you count the harm you've likely done on other Earths. All of that blood is on your hands!

And for what?!

Nothing. That's what!

Absolutely nothing!"

"We didn't know! We were-"

"Of course you didn't know! Because you didn't bother to know! You used your powers like a crutch, so is it any wonder your legs atrophied?

You have had tinkertech for decades now.

And despite what you might think, tinkertech isn't bullshit. It doesn't 'just work'.

It is legitimate superscience. If you had bothered to explain the reality of the situation to the world and brought humanity together to work on and understand tinkertech, you could have dealt with Scion years ago, like this!" I snapped my fingers.

"You know how I know this?

Because I made all of this tech, my moon sized ship and a method to travel across dimensions, without tinker powers. Just plain old human ingenuity. Now sure, I'm an unprecedented genius. But that doesn't mean sufficiently smart people on your world couldn't have learned.

If you had just given cooperation a thought.

It is your power's job to help Scion complete his goal!

And it is your job to think, like a human, use logic and reason.

Decide for yourself if what you're doing is right.

But clearly, you're no human. The atrocities you have committed...

Monsters. That's what you are."