Allegedly a villain ( 1/2) - fics I read

Main Content

Archive of Our Own betaArchive of Our OwnLog In

FandomsBrowseSearchAboutWork Search

tip: "uchiha sasuke/uzumaki naruto" angst kudos>10

Actions

Entire Work ← Previous Chapter Next Chapter → Chapter Index Comments Share Download

Work Header

Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Category:

Gen

Fandoms:

Exalted (Roleplaying Game)Parahumans Series - WildbowWorld of Darkness (Games)Mage: The AscensionWerewolf: The ApocalypseVampire: The MasqueradeChangeling: the DreamingDemon: The Fallen

Characters:

Additional Tags:

FriendshipAlternate UniverseSlice of LifeCrossoverBody HorrorMartial ArtsMind ControlDemonsCanon-Typical ViolenceReverse Isekai and TransmigrationAlternate Universe - World of Darkness (Games) SettingPost-Time Skip

Language:

English

Stats:

Published:2025-08-22Updated:2025-09-01Words:101,443Chapters:12/?Comments:4Kudos:14Bookmarks:7Hits:1,573

Allegedly a Villain in Brockton Bay: a Tale From The Broken-Winged Crane

tyrant_raksha

Chapter 2: Green Sun Prince

Chapter Text

Before you now is a book unlike any other. Permanent and correct in every way. Each copy as unique as its reader. It is as much text on a screen as it is anything else. Some see it as a ponderous and bound tome with gilt edges. Some hear it as an off-key song from a music box. Some hear it recited in the words of other readers, lovingly recorded and curated for public audition. Others know it as a limp-winged bird upon a gentle pond. All are as correct and perfect as any other.

And now the tale begins with the death of a king—brave and true.

The Dictator of An-Teng stood alone, trapped within the burning archives at the heart of his nameless palace---what was once The Pinnacle of Mercy before he killed and ate the god who lived there; the lavish gold and jewels of his crown glowing with reflected flame.

He had accumulated many titles in his over 800 years of life, but he was announced at The Thing Infernal as Lintha Sennong Dictator Admiral-of-Admirals Grandfather Joyful Fluttering Locust Mariner, Green Sun Prince, Sherden Caste (Chosen of Kimbery), Favored by Metagaos and Cecelyne, Surgeon-General and Plaguemaster of the Reclamation, Grandmaster of the Green Sun Kingdom, Conqueror of An-Teng, He-Who-Waits Demiurgos of The Order of the Locust, and The Tide That Drowns Cities and Swallows Gods.

His 400 year reign had been peaceful, perhaps too much so. The Gold Faction Sidereals and their allies had led a bloody and sudden coup against him that evening. It seemed while he was personally outside of Fate, his countrymen were not.

At his feet laid a pile of bodies. Over the countless long hours, the mounds of dead had collapsed on themselves under their own weight. Some were obviously foreign soldiers of some ilk---Dragon Blooded by taste. Most were his own subjects, somehow freed from the deadly enslavement of the mind-warping infection that was his Self-Seed. He could barely spare them a thought, not when he looked upon the leaders of the coup: his own grandchildren and a handful of dead Sidereal Exalts.

While his children were barely identifiable beneath the acid and black lightning burns, he knew his blood all the same. Still though, it disgusted him to know their treachery would not be properly punished. Next to them, the Sidereals who had plagued him for long enough to exhaust even him. They no longer glowed with The Maidens' light in death, and nothing about their corpses would have stood out, save for the massive gaping holes that had been bitten through them by his own teeth, or the fact that most of their bodies had been reduced to a frothy red pulp floating upon a pool of iridescent green acid. Still, to have survived so long against his efforts, they had been tough bastards; undoubtedly still young, for their kind, but a full Circle.

As he had swallowed their flesh, he also tore chunks of their minds and souls into his gut for digestion. He savored that small meal, until he spat back up their recent memories to chew upon like a cow upon its cud. It took him a moment to realize their last mission had not been his assassination, but merely to bring sacred Prayer Scrolls into his palace. If he was not so exhausted, and if his demons had not been banished, he would have entertained searching for other circles.

The words began: "It is the Judgement of The Heavens that this Creature of Darkness is recognized as a Blasphemy, to be Contained, Quarantined, and Purged. Let The Loom cut this place from its weft; with the sacred radiance of The Heavens Judgement We find you Guilty on the charges of Theocide and Cannibalism of The Golden Lord of An-Teng, most beloved Lieutenant of The Unconquered Sun; The Pale Mistress, dutiful Goddess of Disease and Death; Fao Baaw, God of Broken Water; Goukaen, Lesser Elemental Dragon of Earth; …" and ended with "... and by Convocation of the Bureau of Destiny, may the Condemnation of The Heavens direct the Eye of Judgment of The Daystar upon this Blasphemy upon the dawn, to be scoured from all memory."

They had trapped him with the only thing that he was truly helpless against, the holy golden fires of heaven's judgement. He could not eat it, he couldn't outgrow it, he could not defile it with his mind-warping toxins, he couldn't choke it, and being so surrounded, it cut off his contact with the waters that he might call to drown it. Flexing his spiritual self, he felt that he had been trapped fully materialized here, with some elaborate warding against him teleporting away, nor trying to warp space.

He had called down a hundreds-of-miles-wide killing storm outside, channeling the caustic waters of the the Demon Aea into his own hate-filled blood; if the winds and lightning did not kill, then the fact that the storm was as much his own blood as it was the acid rain of Kimbery. Smaller Cecelynian sandstorms still filled many of the places the unwary had taken refuge from his rains, grinding them to bones and dust for rejecting his gifts.

He was the Plaguemaster of The Reclamation because his blood held every disease he had ever met, and an equal number he had made from scratch; it held the spiteful caustic waters of The Great Mother, and the very same mind-warping Self-Seed that he used to conquer the continent of An-Teng.

It was this same kind of storm he used 400 years ago to conquer and subjugate his land with his tainted corrosive hypertoxic mind-warping blood. In a fit of pique, he had called it down as soon as he had realized there was a coup; his land would suffer for his anger, and he could sense the madness and death cries of tens of thousands immediately outside his palace.

By the Yozi's own Oaths of Surrender, the golden fires were not only unextinguished, they were only fanned higher and brighter by his winds.

All that power, but it was nothing before The Daystar.

There was nothing he could do but wait for it to reach him. Even if he tried something desperate and escaped, what then? Could he, a Creature of Darkness, really outrun The Loom of Fate and The Daystar? Even in death, they had won.

He reflected on his poor decisions in his life that had led him to where he was. Ruling through violence and fear and mind-warping assimilation had kept the peace, but it hardly made for a healthy resistance against the coup. Easily accomplished via his heretical art of Verdant Desolation Understand caused the laws of Cecelyne to treat them as the least demons, to be ground beneath his will, and beneath his boot.

He had long ago claimed An-Teng as a new homeland for his long exiled people, The Lintha Family. For a time, it had been good and productive, uniting the Lintha as they had not been since they were driven from their sea-borne nation within the womb-embrace of The Great Mother, Kimbery. Without the desperate need to just survive holding their attention any longer, the Lintha largely moved on to other projects.

He had not. He had kept the peace through his mind-warping power and fear over the non-Lintha subjects, while he worked for the Reclamation, to restore the Yozi. Not merely to free them, but to make them whole, as well as their Neverborn kin. A great work. Too much for his unnaturally short lifetime. The only progress he had made was just understanding the true nature of a single oath of surrender and Primordial unmaking in the form of Mardukh Who Holds In Thrall. The learning had nearly killed him and revealed only deeper complexity beyond his full understanding.

What was ultimately worse, in his opinion, was that he found no true satisfaction in power. He had been happier when he was a merchant privateer with several happy wives and a litter of fine children. All of them were long dead. The only family he had now were sycophants and parasites of his office, without love or kinship. Indeed, he was fairly certain that their infighting was what catalyzed the coup.

If he had truly desired to hold the country, it would have been his to the bitter end. His Self-Seed Infestation infected the whole country, and all he needed to do to take them all down with him was to say the command phrase aloud. All would die, consumed from within like Cordyceps, and their rotting flesh would fertilize his fields. Spilled blood a sacrifice to expand his ever growing grey mangrove swamps. Afterwards his vegetation would force the flesh to rise again, as numberless grey walkers; durable but unthinking they were his even in death, as much an extension of himself and his swamps as an army.

But, he could not bring himself to care enough to use it. He still hated to lose any of his possessions, but An-Teng's flavor was dull and unpalatable to him now. He was done with it, and the scavengers could fight each other over the sloshing contents of his chamberpot. They would never even realize that the whole place had originally been rigged as a deathtrap.

Staring at the fire, he recalled sitting drunkenly in front of a hearth, lamenting that he had wanted to leave this damned backwater country, and go somewhere that nobody knew his name. Maybe he'd be a farmer this time? He could be an excellent fisherman. While he hadn't been expecting a coup, he had been aware of his looming mortality from another angle. Green Sun Princes all burned out.

The Ebon Dragon insisted that it was a flaw in the design for the Infernal Exaltation; humans were never meant to channel direct Primordial energies in the long term. No one at The Thing Infernal believed him. Popular opinion was that the Shadow of All Things betrayed their confidence even before they met him, by adding in an integral time-limit by 'accident' when the Reclamation first designed them.

Everyone in The Thing Infernal strove desperately for some way to bypass their drastically reduced lifespans. A base 150 years from exaltation to death, compared to 3000 for the Solars and 300 for the Dragon Blooded (not to mention the normal 250 year lifespan of his own kind, the Lintha). There were as many ways to fight back as there were Green Sun Princes.

He couldn't fathom the majority of them, and had failed to unlock the heretical Cry of the Devil-Tiger, like his peers had. They allegedly became immortal, but no one had been alive long enough to tell for sure. The only surety was that the more powerful you were, the longer death could be averted--but not forever.

Politics and The Reclamation had distracted him. All he had to show for his efforts was a glass vial he kept in his chest pocket. He was fairly certain that, if he killed himself in just the right way, then he'd slip sideways instead of down, and he could bypass death by piggybacking on his Exaltation finding its next host. If he was right, he could trick the universe into skipping the steps where his mind and souls were cleansed from the Exaltation by the River Lethe and Lytek, and trick the Exaltation itself into thinking that it immediately had to go find its host the hard way, with no demon to act as an intermediate host.

He had prepared the vial, knowing he would need it eventually, though he had been putting it off for too long. If he didn't want to burn out, he eventually had to kill himself with its exotic poison. It was obviously untested, he knew, but it was the only option he had besides waiting for death by holy fire; no more delays. The glass vial held only a clear liquid, too thick to be water, but when he lifted it up in front of his eyes, the golden fires of his death cast beautiful shimmering reflections that made it seem alive. He held it aloft with palsied hands, after knocking the stopper out, and toasted the fires. "If this works, no more conquering." he said to the neomah Coadjutor who shared his senses and soul, quaffing the bitter poison.

As the chosen, Sherden Caste of Kimbery, he should have been inured against poisons. After all, when your blood was a toxic amalgam of the killing waters of the Demon Sea, the hypervirulent lymph-sap of Metagaos, all lesser poisons (diseases, parasites, etc.) are nothing. This vial was different, he knew. A strange solution of Vitriol with his own distilled blood, and the Yozi Venom that were hidden in weeping pools within hell. This one coalesced from the frustration of great Oramus that he should be confined forever within his own shattered wings. It was a poison so hypertoxic that it not only killed him, it also killed the strands of Fate that dragged his Soul down to Lethe, as well as the Demon that would have borne the Exaltation to its new host.

And he felt every minute of the pain of killing himself, the Fate of his Exaltation, and slipping beyond the bounds of Creation and Malfeas. Naked and raw, he was exposed to the non-place that lurked between the layers of the Tellurian. The scholar in him might have gazed in curiosity at the Shinma that defined all possible realities, but the agony of soul poison precluded anything besides obsessive and constant focus on the symphony of anguish he caused himself. He knew it was necessary to break his Exaltation and soul, to convince the cycle of Reincarnation that he was dead, but to also make the Exaltation think it was still alive.

The Great Maker had never thought that an Exaltation could feel pain after death, and so the mechanisms of rebirth were forestalled. From the screaming of his neomah Coadjutor, Thief-of-Whiskers, it sounded as though she was broken as well. It barely registered to him when his own internal stomach universe was inverted and burned up in the process, spilling everything he had swallowed to store, as well as the countless souls he had devoured over the centuries.

It was impossible to know how long it lasted, but he nearly went mad with helpless terror, sure that he had fouled up his occult experimentation, and doomed himself to an eternity of madness and pain.

Blind and deaf, he used the absolute last of his strength in a desperate attempt to escape. Of the tricks he had learned from the other Yozi besides Kimbery and Metagaos, none seemed terribly relevant. There was the smallest hope in mimicking Metagaos' own self-consumption. His teeth could grind the material bones of mortals as easily as immaterial god-flesh. He could and did even eat holes in himself and the interstitial spaces of Malfeas overflowed with his probing, colonizing spillover of grey muck and roots.

If his intuition was right, he was too heavy, too real to continue his journey. He needed to be light enough that the subtle 'currents' that moved around him like the dark heart-waters of Kimbery would be able to wash him out of the non-place he was stuck in.

A gut instinct told him that the same way that Malfeas survived in the Deep Chaos of The Wyld and beyond, World-Mastering Authority must have reflexively activated to keep him intact. It did nothing against active effects, but was priceless when you really needed it.

He'd already killed himself once, but this would take everything that he had. It would be a great effort.

Great effort… the kind that he could ill afford to do twice.

Pouring every part of himself into the center of being, where his soul intermingled with the heart chakra, he felt his extremities go numb, perhaps having been claimed or finally torn free by the strange environment he was within.

Nothing happened…

He cannibalized his own semi-immaterial flesh, wringing it out like a damp cloth for spare motes. Each and every one of them dumped into his core. Some places just don't allow for dematerialization in the first place… maybe this was one? It was so strange.

He felt heavy...

And then, with the suddenness of birth, he awoke screaming. Blind and deaf to all but his own birth cries, he felt only that he was encased in violent compression, as though being crushed in a giant's grip. Unseeing, he felt around for his bearings.

He was wet, and he could not feel his limbs. Where he could feel, even a slight flexion drove daggers of stabbing pain into his torso.

His tongue was intact, he stuck it out to taste the truth of the substance in front of him. Metagaos blessed him with a sense of taste which transcended all others. There was a stone surface that he lapped at, blindly. It was hard, cold marble. No time to spare for analysis, he bit down, tore a chunk of marble free with teeth sharp enough to pierce any mortal substance.

Crunch.

He realized how hungry he was. His stomach was empty, truly empty in a way it had not been for centuries.

IT MUST BE FILLED.

All over his flesh, maws lined with jagged thorn teeth opened themselves where they had never been.

HUNGRY.

Wriggling in place with the force of dozens of mouths all blindly reaching and searching by touch and taste. The pain of his damaged torso ignored for the visceral joy of consumption.

Marble tasted blandly bitter, and contained barely any nutrients such that he'd need to eat more than ten times as much compared to even a brick of charcoal.

Eventually, he fell headfirst to another floor of marble.

FRESH GRAZING.

Then another hole, and another. A writhing bore-worm.

At some point, one of his searching tongues desperate for any novelty found his own flesh and burrowed deep to find the flavor of his own pain. Sure enough, masses of his own bones had seemingly fused with marble pieces. He ate them. His damaged flesh remained ragged around the holes left behind within him. He ate that too.

DELICIOUS MEAT.

Turning more mouths to bite and dig, he found the ruined remains of his eye sockets and upper skull, also fused with stone. He twisted to feast upon himself.

CONSUME WEAKNESS.

Flesh moved and shifted. Most of his body had been partially fused with marble. He had heard the theory behind failed teleportation or materialization, he didn't realize it precluded healing from the damage; while the blessings of Cecelyne made him naturally immaterial like spirits, it didn't mean that he had tried the charm anywhere risky. Fusion ruined limbs, but left them intact, if useless. He would eat them too, and grow fresh limbs from the bloody stumps.

Once his eyes grew back, he looked at his freshly regenerated body, whole, if naked. He looked around, and saw only strange architecture that consisted entirely of marble stairs upon marble stairs, with no true up or down.

He was hungry again. He stood up, and looked around. There was no one there but him. No food, no water, and no apparent light source, just a uniform diffuse glare that cast no shadows.

No food. No water. No direction.

EAT ROCKS.

---

Before a mixed crowd of a dozen PRT and Protectorate bigwigs, Armsmaster and Dragon stood rather theatrically next to a curtained off partition. The room was ringed with PRT security officers carrying fire-fighting gear and first-aid kits.

One of Dragon's smaller units, barely bulkier than Armsmaster's own power armor suit, stood to the left of the curtain. She addressed him in a semi-private whisper. "Colin, are you sure you don't want me to call in Vista?"

Armsmaster held a notepad in his gauntleted hand, going over a checklist with a pen. "No, Dragon. I double checked the gravimetric readings last time she was supervising, and there are no major safety concerns. We could do without the fire-extinguishers as well, but I feel like that's going to be some kind of union rules that I don't have time to butt heads with."

"Safety aside, it would be polite to include her, given how much help she was with the design."

Armsmaster waved his hand dismissively, and turned his pen back to the pad.

Dragon sighed through her speakers, just loud enough for Colin to hear. He either ignored it pointedly, or was too wrapped up to notice it. Ater a moment, he put the pen down and looked Dragon's suit in the camera-eyes with a nod.

The room's lights dimmed slightly, and Armsmaster and Dragon took opposite places on each side of the curtain.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you all for coming out today for our tech demo." announced Dragon in her vaguely Canadian accent. Having worked with Colin in the past, she knew that he had little patience with basic pleasantries, and she had to convince him earlier not to just pull off a tarp and yell 'behold' like a cliche.

Armsmaster took a step forward, waving a hand outward at the seated audience. "While Professor Haywire was best known for his work on the Earth Aleph portal, much of his semi-published research involved theoretical spatial manipulations. Nearly five years ago, I managed a proof of concept application of his basic theory to miniaturize circuitry in my halberd, shrinking it to beyond any current industrial fabrication process by a factor of eight. Now, in collaboration with Dragon's advanced fabrication techniques, we have managed to make real one of the Professor's unrealized Gedankenexperiments."

Dragon helped him pull away the curtain at the front of the partition. "The 'Cheaters Box'!" she announced, with a dramatic flair that Armsmaster was seemingly incapable of. "A rather simple idea: can you use spatial manipulation to make a box which is bigger on the inside than the outside? The answer to that is 'yes'! Without the benefit of modern technology, this device would have been patently impossible to realize even 20 years ago. But now it sits in front of you today."

Armsmaster pulled the folded halberd from his back, and held it up. "The physical dimensions of this spear are more than three times the widest edge of this box." He stuffed the haft into the box with a demonstrative clunk, leaving most of it clearly visible. After withdrawing it and stepping away. "Now, when Dragon turns the power on…" he trailed off, as Dragon threw a lever on the table behind the box.

There was a slight hum, like a speaker-bank being tuned to static.

"... Now, the interior should be increased to the exact length of my halberd." he said, moving closer, and turning to face his audience.

The white-noise hum from the box increased noticeably as he approached it. With a wave of his halberd near the box, the lights in the room flickered. As the shaft sunk into the box, the tip of the spear and the upper edge of the box began to visibly vibrate.

Dragon noticed first, and turned towards Armsmaster in alarm.

Too late, the spear was already passing through the interior perimeter of the box.

A flash of distinctive blue-white Cherenkov radiation left the box. There was not even a proper explosion, instead only a tearing sound that reminded Dragon of hearing a glacier calving.

Without even time for thought, both Heroes were bodily dragged within the impossibly small box, and the front section of space that they had occupied all slid in sync within the box's open top, while the audience could only recoil in shock and try to flee the strange traceries of radiation and bent angles that defined the margin between the normal space of the room, and the exotic space of the box's territory.

Armsmaster and Dragon found themselves momentarily reeling from what felt an awful lot like being stretched vertically on a rack. Dragon felt no pain, but Armsmaster's horrified unmanly shriek was telling. What Dragon did notice was that her onboard G-meter had glitched, and the suit's thrusters had been turned on automatically by the safety measures to prevent an imminent collision with the earth.

Dragon looked at Armsmaster's halberd, and saw that it had its top third missing, being less a spear at that point and more of a baton. His hand looked the worse for wear. She floated over and grabbed his damaged gauntlet. A detailed inspection showed that it was not so much melted as sublimated. Strange to see high-temperature resistant plastic-ceramics turning into vapor at room temperature. All she cared about was that he still hand a hand inside there.

"The hell are we?" he spat out a loogie of blood as he spoke.

"Colin, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore…"

Dragon's cameras recorded it all: a strange Escher-esque room of stairs and stairs and stairs. There was no up or down, just stairs. If it weren't for the off-center shaft that was the box they'd entered through, there would be no point of reference at all.

"The HELL are we?"

A sound came from 'above' them. Both turned, seeing a distant figure on the 'ceiling' of the room, perhaps 100m away. As both of them had a zoom function, they could clearly make out the figure to be a man wearing a fuzzy dense white tunic-like garment made of white wool that seemed to merge with the man's long beard and white hair. He seemed to be wearing a form-fitting green bodysuit underneath.

Joyful Fluttering Locust Mariner followed the novel taste on the air with his tongue, sampling the breeze like a serpent. In what he had dubbed The Endless Staircase, there was no novelty. No breeze, no scents that were not his own. The only flavor was stone, aside from the locusts he farmed–but even their flavor eventually dulls.

During his long imprisonment, he discovered the price he had paid for his time in the non-place beyond the world. A lifetime of memories had burned from his mind. True, they were his memories of flavors, but he did not think he could pay it again. He might as well drink directly from Lethe next time, and save himself the uncertainty and pain; though he was half certain that his soul had been irreparably damaged and may just dissolve in the attempt. He was stuck wherever here was, so any novel taste was to be savored, no matter how mundane.

He sprinted down trackless stairs and up them again. He leaned hard on his senses, the tongue of Metagaos, no flavor was too small for it to delight in. He would find them, it was just a matter of time. There was nowhere to dematerialize to here, so he was stuck permanently materialized here.

When he left the notch between two sets of stairs, he saw them. Two armored men next to a portal that admitted the most blessed salt of fresh air, not the weird stale stone-scented flavor that he had long ago gotten sick of.

He was hungry.

MUST ESCAPE.

Those people, he could tell, were not from anywhere he was familiar with. Their mismatched armor did not smell at all like they had the touch of a proper smith upon them. He shouted at them in Old Realm, trying to sound as pathetic as possible. He forced down his passive fear aura like clenching his fist--it wouldn't do to scare off his rescuers. As it was one of the aspects of Malfeas he had taken into himself, it wasn't something that could be turned off, only redirected--in this case, rather than the pressing weight of the majesty of Malfeas being felt by the humans, it was instead greatly magnified his lordship over animals, forcing them to kowtow out of instinctual submission the their creators. It was extremely conspicuous, either way, but without any animals here, it was less likely to be obviously alarming to the potential rescuers. To say nothing of the many laws of Cecelyne that he might invoke over mortals, he must avoid that at all costs.

The advanced mics on Dragon's camera picked up the hairy guy shouting at her. It was no tongue she'd heard of. It was unclear to her if he was shouting at them to keep out of his territory, or if he was trying to have a conversation.

She saw an almost desperate kind of look in his eyes. The man switched languages several times. Dragon had language codecs for dozens of tongues, but none of these were among their number.

Mariner began to panic… how, by Adorjan's windy teats was he supposed to talk to them if they didn't speak any proper languages.

If only he'd studied under Elloge when he'd had the chance, then he wouldn't be in this mess. Why should he need a Universal Translator when he could just eat someone who knew whatever tongue he needed fluency with. If he was in the sea, Kimbery's Ocean Washed Words could have temporarily helped, if he was next to the sea. There were simply too many ways for sorcerers and exalts to break such charms; it was a backup plan, not a primary tool.

He had a desperate idea, and activated Flowering The Fairer Face. Social camouflage that it was, it helped him blend in with social environments like a Ghillie suit might in a field.

Dragon could see that the man had given up on proper communication, and was just whistling and waving his arms. Emergency responder protocols in her head labeled it a maritime accident: a man adrift.

Armsmaster saw her suit lean forward, as though preparing to leap to the rescue. "Dragon, stop! We don't know what's going on here, and we're under no obligation to do anything but return to the portal."

"I don't think that's a threatening gesture, Colin." she turned to look at Armsmaster again.

"You could lose a suit!"

She turned around again, moving away from him. "I can make more." As usual, she was unsure if she genuinely wanted to help the stranger, or if her inbuilt protocols demanded her to be selfless. It didn't matter right then, so she pushed it out of mind.

Armsmaster watched her leap up on her thrusters to fly off. He grunted in frustration at being ignored by his colleague. He tried his radio in his helmet. Most of the sophisticated communications systems he had installed were offline, leaving him with something about as fancy as a walkie-talkie as his fallback.

"Armsmaster to ALCON. Armsmaster to ALCON. Can anyone hear me?"

FSHHSSH STA --CK "Roger Armsmaster, this is Brockton Bay Dispatch Desk."

"Radio Check Dispatch."

"Signal Weak Armsmaster. Are you in a tunnel or something?"

"Negative Dispatch Emergency in progress. Await further instructions."

"Wilco Armsmaster."

Dragon found herself fighting to cross the 100m gap between the floor and ceiling. While it certainly looked short, it clearly was taking longer (or farther) than it should. Her sensor suite was not calibrated for anything this exotic. Eyeballing it was here only choice, figuratively speaking, since she had no real eyeballs. She blasted upward, only to slow down as she approached the midway point.

"Jump guy!" she shouted in English.

Living within the Endless Staircase was not only an exercise in tedium, it was also so Essence-poor that he barely respired any motes each day (what was a day in this place with no sky?). Hoarding slowly, he had to ration and account for each mote. Now was the time to consume them all.

The space was strange. What looked like 100m was not. His occult senses were finely tuned, but this place was (to his knowledge) unique in the universe. Its rules were seemingly arbitrary. It stank of the Wyld.

He was so hungry. Just like Metagaos, he could never actually starve, nor die of thirst, but Hunger Without Satisfaction did not mean that it would be pleasant.

How dare something so trivial as a staircase deny him.

He did not know how long the portal would remain.

He did not know if this person would help him or not.

He had to take a chance.

But… his powers didn't really work unless he was able to channel it through his base urges like eating and fucking.

Hmm…

At least the Excellencies of Metagaos worked that way. Maybe that was the wrong way to go. Kimbery's Excellencies were equally inapplicable without someone or something to focus his love or hate on. Finally, Cecelyne's did not seem relevant unless he had a vehicle or ship or mount. None of which seemed apropos; this place was technically a place of desolation, but the physics here stunk of the Wyld so who knew if that would help. He had learned many of Mafleas's secrets. Most of them were about how to endure the tortures of life, or how to impress your will upon the world, but none seemed relevant. Here in what he was pretty sure was a calcified chunk of the Deep Chaos, there were no guarantees about time and space, let alone the laws of physics. Don't overthink things. Straight lines…

His stomach growled.

He couldn't take out his frustrations on the two strangers, though that would solve his short term problems. Don't try to eat potential rescuers.

He needed to focus. He smelled the tiniest waft of air from the hole. Fat and sugar. Wheat flour and whole milk. Butterfat and salt. Tart berries and citrus.

He was drooling.

MINE.

{{Activates Greed Without Restraint (Consume the origin of that smell!), and the 2nd Metagaos Excellency; Channels Conviction}}

Dragon was unprepared for this excursion to the realm of stairs. She had a suit that was designed for meetings and paperwork, not for field trials. The thrusters on the unit were intended only for short hops to reach her suit-delivery systems: planes, helicopters, and drones. She was absolutely pressing her luck attempting to transit the folding space of the staircase. At worst she would run out of energy and propellant midway, and fall.

Her mental estimate based on fuel consumption (with a lot of assumptions about local gravity and linear spatial distortion strength) brought the folding of space turning 100m into several kilometers. Even now, at the visual midpoint, she did not really know if she was actually halfway there, but her Point-of-No-Return indicator had turned on. If she went any closer, she would be of no help to anyone.

She waved at the man, slowing to a static hover that she hoped conserved fuel.

He seemed not to be paying attention, her video cameras caught him closing his eyes and sticking his tongue out. Strange.

Then, an unexpected roar. The kind of primal sound that belonged within the midnight savanna. Armsmaster, however, being a human of flesh and blood, understood it in the visceral flight-inducing sound that a base primate would recoil from, and he turned and stared frozen at the source.

The stranger's face contorted into that of a snarling predator, staring upward at the portal, like it owed him money. But, the snarl and roar did not abate, but seemed to only grow in size and volume, until it was deafening and his maw had not only widened impossibly far in order to accommodate the sound too big for any mortal body.

With a suddenness that sent Armsmaster to his ass, and Dragon's cameras would not have caught, if she weren't already looking directly at him, he leapt with sufficient energy to leave a crater behind.

He sailed up on a ballistic trajectory that told Dragon that he lacked the ability to fly, nor did she see any kind of obvious spatial distortions like Vista made. No, she was pretty sure that he jumped just using his muscles and a lot of yelling.

Jumped kilometers straight up to meet her outstretched arms with just muscles and yelling.

Dragon was a little impressed.

His parabolic arc seemed to slow, but she knew that the area was simply spatially denser than it should be. He seemed to notice this too, and after a moment of falling back down, she desperately maneuvered to avoid missing him.

With time and great apparent effort, he finally began his approach to her, his power seemingly exhausted. His carefully cultivated inertia kept him on a parabolic path towards her.

Then he sailed up past her, grabbing her by the hand as his ballistic arc swung another quarter of the way to the floor where Armsmaster was. If she hadn't been there to meet him part way, he would have failed to jump, and fallen several kilometers to the ceiling again. Dragon only had to turn her thrusters up to get them back the last 25% of the distance, which was fortunate, since the stranger clearly outweighed the safe load for her suit.

Up close, Dragon could clearly see that the man was possessed of an appearance that was more fitting a Case 53 than a normal human. His skin is bright emerald green, almost the same color and shimmer as an iridescent beetle shell; it was tattooed in an exotic pattern of intertwining roses while his face, ears and upper body were heavily decorated with gleaming silver piercings. His eyes were ruby red. His hair was beyond frost-white, passing into the realm of being almost opalescent.

Armsmaster was on his feet again when they returned. "Dragon, that was even more dangerous than either of us anticipated! Your telemetry showed several orders of magnitude of spatial distortions! Are you okay?"

She touched down, forcing her thrusters into cooldown to avoid wasting any more fuel. "Turned out okay so far. Thank god that guy can jump kilometers on his own, or I would have had to leave him behind."

Armsmaster turned to regard the stranger, who was staring up at the portal like he was about to attack it. Armsmaster reached reflexively for his spear, before realizing that it was just a metal baton until he repaired it. The stranger had not appeared aggressive before, but everything about his stance and motion spoke of a stalking beast.

"Yeah good thing." he leaned in to whisper to Dragon. "Did he attack you?"

"What? No!"

"Okay. Do you think he's safe to bring back?"

"Maybe. It's hard to get a read on this guy."

He sighed, and poked his radio. "Dispatch, this is Armsmaster. Three to retrieve. Dispatch Vista and someone with a lot of rope. Also please transfer me to PRT Dispatch."

"Dispatch here, will comply and standby. Turning you over to PRT Dispatch."

"Roger Dispatch."

"PRT Dispatch speaking."

"Armsmaster here, PRT. I need a hot bath at the demo labs."

"Armsmaster, hot bath for one?"

"Two, plus company, PRT."

"Request received Armsmaster. Three away."

Dragon knew that Armsmaster had ordered a Quarantine team. The details were a little hazy, since the updated codes were local changes, but the 'company' part seemed important. She looked over at the stranger.

Without warning, his arms seemed to untangle from their apparent disguise of human flesh. Unknotting to flex outward into tangles of countless coiling grey tendrils. They were not quite roots, and not quite tentacles.

Armsmaster gagged. Dragon lacked the capacity to sympathize.

Where the arms had been, the tendril-knots/limbs seemed to stretch easily up to the 'ceiling' (a different staircase from where the stranger had been trapped), and poked physically around the hole of the box. It was hard to make out, but the opening of the box seemed far too small to permit a full person to pass through it.

The stranger snarled again, before seemingly disappearing.

Dragon's cameras, intended for fine-detailed facial analysis during meetings barely caught the stranger exploding into a torrent of needle-fine tendrils and threading almost instantly through the too-small opening.

Vista just barely entered the lab she had been paged to. It was the first real Emergency call she'd gotten in a while, and it made her a little giddy to be taken seriously. She sprinted, nearly out of breath into the doorway, expecting someone to be attacking the lab, or someone attempting to teleport into the building.

What she found instead was a hairy bearded buck-naked man covered in coffee and jam, stuffing his face with seemingly every donut within reach on the catering table he was crouched on top of. The man seemed oblivious to the security staff and PRT officers all pointing guns and tasers at him.

Vista stood in the doorway, her jaw agape.

"Is this another prank? If so, it's in bad taste guys."

Director Piggot stood there, holding a gun at the stranger's back. "Vista, this is no prank. This unknown cape teleported in here. Armsmaster and Dragon are trapped in that box on the table."

"What? Really?" she turned and looked at the box, recognizing it from a week earlier. "Oh! I had no idea Armsmaster was demoing that today! Sorry, I should have been here!"

"Don't apologize to me, Vista. I'm not the one trapped in a box by weird science."

Vista looked at the stranger, who seemed to be closing his eyes and murmuring happily in a foreign language while he ate a danish. "Did I get called in to deal with this guy or the box?"

"I don't know, Armsmaster called in a Quarantine squad for three, but did not call out a hostile."

She noticed the arm opposite her was less of an arm, and more of an array of kind of disgustingly meaty vines that searched the floor adjacent the catering table for spilled morsels of food before stuffing them into the mouth of the naked man. He licked the sticky fingers of his other hand happily.

"Uhh… I'm just gonna radio Armsmaster to make sure." Eww! She touched her earpiece. "Armsmaster, this is Vista, are you there? Can you hear me in that box?"

"Armsmaster to Vista, I can hear you loud and clear. Very important, do not let anyone turn the power off to the box! We could get stranded here."

"Okay, I will make sure of that. Did you call me to extract you, or deal with this naked guy?"

"Naked guy? The stranger? Negative, Dragon says he is weird but probably not hostile. He was in here before with us, I don't know how he got out."

"I can ask him?"

Dragon chimed in over the radio "Dragon to Vista, stranger doesn't speak English. At least I don't think he does. He is probably a cape. Let the security staff know he's enough of a Brute to jump a few kilometers straight up, and he's a likely Changer. Didn't seem hostile when we were interacting. Is he in the room with you?"

Vista looked over at him, unsure of what to think. She conveyed the situation to Piggot, who briefly thanked her before calling in an anti-brute squad and ordering the assembled security officers to focus fire on center of mass, should the stranger prove hostile. "Yeah, the naked guy is eating… donuts I think."

Dragon's mic went live, and then toggled back off a couple times. "Say again?"

"The naked brute is eating donuts and danishes. He's on top of the food table covered in jam and coffee."

"That's what I thought I heard. Okay, let me know if that changes, alright?"

"Armsmaster here. Vista, priorities!"

"Oh.. yes sir."

"We need you to extract us. The interior space of this box has variable folding, per Dragon's observations up to three orders of magnitude."

She leaned over the edge of the box, using her own powers to keep herself stable. "I can see you, but you don't look like you're inside the box. Where are you?"

Dragon answered. "An Escher drawing of stairs."

"H-how?" sputtered Vista with obvious confusion.

Armsmaster continued, "Not important right now. I don't know how stable this place is, and I don't know how long the circuits will hold out before they burn themselves up from the load this is putting on them. Vista, priority is getting us out, or else we'll be stranded with no clear way of coming back."

Vista nodded and set her jaw. "Yes sir. Both of you stay put until I tell you to move. This is going to be tricky." While she wasn't directly able to view spatial distortions, her power gave her a kind of kinetic feedback when she started to apply her own powers. All she knew from trying to stabilize herself was that, like playing Operation, she needed to avoid touching the side-walls of the box. She wasn't sure exactly what would happen, but it was the same kind of feeling she had when standing next to a long drop.

To begin with, she needed to establish a shaft of x-axis and z-axis compression down to the trapped pair, so they could fit through the relatively narrow neck of the box. Then y-axis expansion beneath their feet, to make an elevator. Each individual step was something she knew how to do, but with the weird overloading of the box, there seemed to be some kind of oscillating compression and expansion of space near the walls of the box, even if she didn't touch them directly.

She had to be calm. This was all about control, not power.

Inhale.

Exhale.

"Director Piggot!" cried one of the security staff. "The brute is eating the tablecloth and the trash can! Should we stop him?"

Inhale.

The intercom sounded with an audible beeping. "Attention, Quarantine protocols are in effect for this area. Please do not leave the room without the authorization from a Cleaner."

Exhale.

The door slammed open. "Director Piggot, we have the anti-Brute specialists here, where's the target?"

Inhale.

One of the security officers behind her shouted. "Brute, you are destroying Protectorate property! Put down the table or you will be made to comply!"

Vista turned around with a glare, and everyone in the room was flattened against the far wall by resized furniture. "Everyone shut up! If you distract me, Armsmaster and Dragon could die!"

Everyone except the naked guy, whose limbs somehow seemed to fuse with the floor while he was physically eating the wooden table that the food had been on. The trash can and coffee carafe were missing.

Piggot shot her a look that promised unceasing bureaucratic retaliation. Vista's butt clenched at the realization of what she had done. "Just give me a minute! Then you can go back to whatever."

She turned back to the box, now that the room was silent.

Inhale.

Try to ignore the fact that she'd stuffed the crippled PRT Director into a wall.

Exhale.

Try not to think about the fact that her boss would literally die if she fucked up.

Inhale.

Try to ignore the wet snapping crunch of tearing wood behind her, where a naked Brute was eating a table while ignoring her powers.

Exhale.

At least she couldn't kill Dragon if she fucked up, since it was just a remote suit.

That was the one positive thing she could think of.

She looked back at that naked Brute. How had he safely exited the hole?

Maybe it wasn't that hard.

Maybe she should stop psyching herself out.

Vista began, starting her shaft through the middle third of the available space. Not so small that it became difficult to control, and not so large that she was brushing the oscillating interference from the walls. She could see the shaft descend, and then she tried to wriggle it, just enough to get a feel for the space inside.

There only issue she had was trying to time it all so that she would not touch the oscillating walls, nor Armsmaster's flesh. It felt like being inside a clothes dryer. One full of clothes that explode if you touch them. She had no time for a better analogy.

Slowly, oh so slowly, she extracted the floor that Armsmaster and Dragon had been on. By the time they stepped off the marble platform, Vista was covered with sweat and her hands visibly shaking from the adrenaline.

As she released everything with a pop, she fell to the ground and tried hard to catch her breath. Behind her, the majority of the room came away from the wall all at once, confused as to what to pay attention to first.

The door nearby slammed open, "Rope delivery!"

Dragon walked over to Vista, and hugged her. "Thank you so much for saving us!"

Armsmaster turned behind the strange area of the box's orifice, and attempted to poke the power-lever off with his spear-turned-baton.

Piggot scrambled to establish order. "All teams, on me! Isolate the Brute in Quarantine, and get the Cleaners in here as soon as the power gets shut off. Don't let anyone else in or out of the room without the Cleaners go-ahead. Someone with a working radio call legal. Tell them we have a new immigrant, and ask them for guidance. Also, someone call in a translator, we need to figure out how to talk to this idiot before he eats something valuable."

Her team busied themselves, and a sudden silence fell on the room; Armsmaster was successful.

She walked over to Vista. "Let me make this perfectly clear: when its life or death, you need to make judgement calls. Today you saved the head of the local Protectorate. Did you need to crush your unpowered allies in the PRT using your powers? Could you have simply shouted louder? If it's impossible for you to be that loud, could you prepare something mundane to make up for your weakness, like a megaphone? Think about your answers to these problems while you are reassigned to babysitting the naked Brute covered in jam that doesn't speak English. Hope you weren't itching for more patrols."

Vista paled. Piggot's punishment could have been much worse, considering that she was well within her rights to demand actual imprisonment. But… if the protocols were anything above 'not a threat' level, she'd be putting in long shifts staring at the naked guy just in case he tried something.

Dragon patted her on the back. "If it is any consolation, I might be able to put together a translator, if you can get enough reference points for me. Then maybe you can ask him to put on pants." Dragon snickered.

Vista pouted.

Director Piggot had Dragon, Armsmaster, a PRT lawyer, and a dozen armed PRT officers equipped with anti-Brute devices all in a reasonably large conference room. Across the table from them, stuck inside of a triple-sealed Hazmat Suit was the (less) naked Brute.

While the Director had been waiting for the lawyer to arrive via helicopter from the PRT offices on shore, she had been amusing herself with the Quarantine team. Each and every person in the demo lab had been scanned and scrubbed, if they'd been exposed to detectable levels of radiation, chemical contaminants, or pathogenic microbes.

A practical woman, the Director had been among the first in line for scanning. She was a busy woman, but also understood what happened when people didn't follow protocols. The device had put out negligible levels of radiation, save for being an apparent neutron source. Piggot didn't know enough physics to personally understand what that meant, but deferred to the safety consultants that the Quarantine team had on call.

She had been cleared after a few minutes. Armsmaster, Dragon, and Vista had not been so lucky. Evidently, Dragon's remotely piloted armor was radioactive now, and needed replacement. Armsmaster needed radiation treatment, but some truly paranoid hardening in his gear kept it from being in the same bag as Dragon. His hand was partially cooked on the inside, and would need a full treatment elsewhere.

Vista had been especially unlucky, hanging around in the spatial manifold. Her costume would be incinerated. Piggot had grinned while Vista was being shoved into the chemical showers. They were alternatingly entirely too hot and too cold, Piggot knew from personal experience, as well as being less water and more caustics and soap. Hopefully she wouldn't suffer any long term health effects, outside of being scrubbed raw. Piggot was spiteful, but knew not to waste her forces.

The Quarantine team saved the naked Brute for last. Scanning him turned up strange results. First, that he was massively radioactive, to the point that he should probably be dead. Second, they had scanned him for chemical contaminants, only to have the machine confirm that there were not any surface contaminants, but that all of his blood was flagged as a contaminant. Third, they'd checked him for pathogens, only to turn up an impossible slurry of (more or less) every pathogen they had a detector for, as well as a few that they'd never seen but which were flagged as probable pathogens. His weird caustic blood was home to the pathogens that couldn't logically live there, as well as seemingly containing some kind of toxic compounds.

They'd scrubbed and tried to clean him, but all they did was wash off the surface. He was internally as radioactive as he had been before, but his skin would contain it enough to get him in a hazmat suit. As a Brute, the suit would do little enough to stop him if he tore it off, but it was functional enough to keep the staff safe.

The biggest surprise to Piggot was Armsmaster coming up to her after he was cleared, and quietly demanding that the 'Dimensional Traveller' be kept at a Probationary member of the Protectorate under Brockton Bay. It was a mixed prerogative, where new capes were assigned. Both sides usually had to agree before any transfer was scheduled. He could be paraphrased: 'he broke my toy, so I have dibs on his alien secrets'.

Piggot was not going to waste the opportunity to have Armsmaster owe her a favor for doing more or less nothing. Demanding paperwork works much better with a little extra leverage. She agreed, provided that the lawyers and the Brute both cooperated. She would have no unaccountable Rogues in her house, if she could help it. It went without saying that a particularly unruly Protectorate member would be transferred somewhere safe, like Greenland. Now, Armsmaster would have to keep that Brute well behaved and a model member of the Protectorate, if he wanted his toy alien.

She agreed, making a few calls to prepare her staff for the special assignment paperwork.

All she needed to do was figure out how to get that idiot Brute to sign paperwork via pantomime.

Which was why they were assembled at the conference room.

Piggot turned to address her assembled agents: "Right now we stand so gathered to determine the legal standing of this man. He is apparently a parahuman of some kind, but does not speak any languages that we know. Dragon I believe you commented on that on your first meeting?"

"Correct Director, upon first contact, he cycled through several languages I did not recognize, nor did any of my linguistic corpora databases. So he either speaks exclusively in nearly universally obscure languages from uncontacted New Guinean tribes. Or, per Armsmaster's interpretation, he is not from this Earth, nor does he appear to be from Earth Aleph. I cannot rule it out, given the strange nature of the directionless void of staircases where we met him."

"So, we need to figure out what category that puts this guy in, without being able to talk to him."

The lawyer coughed. "Director, I don't believe that it's a good idea to have him sign paperwork that he cannot possibly read or have explained to him. It certainly would get thrown out by any competent judge."

The guy in question could only stare at them blankly, a look of frustration evident through the glass of the hazmat visor. The guy slapped a palm on the table top, with a resounding thud. Everyone looked back and forth at each other, aware that they had been talking about him as though he were not there.

The brute in the hazmat suit pointed at the assembled, and then at himself, and then mimed walking, before pointing in a rather precise downward angle.

Piggot stared at him, uncertain.

Dragon spoke up. "I rather like charades. I think he wants us to walk over … uh… " she pointed where he had. He nodded his head. "Over there." She pulled up her maps, and could not see anything particularly outstanding in that direction. All that was over there were support structures and docks.

"Is he trying to arrange an escape?" asked Piggot.

"I don't know." stated Armsmaster.

Dragon pantomimed a question, tilting her head like a curious dog.

The brute pointed to Piggot and Dragon, and mimed talking. He tapped himself and pointed at Piggot, and shook his head while again miming speech. Then he mimed walking and repeated the talking gesture between him and Piggot, but shook his head yes.

Armsmaster muttered. "This is a waste of time."

"He keeps trying to get us to leave…" Piggot supplied.

"Uh… I think I have an idea." Dragon said, uncertainly. "He can't talk to us now. We will walk with him over there. Then he will talk to us."

"That doesn't make any sense." said Armsmaster.

Dragon shrugged her suit.

"Does anyone think this is too dangerous to try?" Piggot inquired of the assembled heroes and anti-brute team.

The Quarantine team shrugged. The anti-Brute team shook their heads. Dragon shook her head no. Armsmaster stood impassively.

"We need to get at least two more hands on. Just in case. I'll call in the Wards who are on standby, and Vista, since the Director gave her punishment detail already. Remember, we can't trust the unknown."

A few minutes later, Vista walked down the hallway, red like an awful sunburn, and dressed in a spare uniform that was two sizes too small, and hung off her like capris. She ran into Dean and Vicky, half in their costumes.

"Afternoon, Missy!' said Dean, in a pleasant tone that soothed Vista's heart.

"You look like a boiled lobster!" said Vicky with a smirk that undid Dean's efforts.

"Oh ha ha, Vicky. It's been a long day."

"I can see that. Are you alright?" asked Dean, leaning closer to examine her. Vista was just glad she couldn't turn more red.

"I saved Armsmaster and Dragon from a lab accident. This was anti-radiation stuff from Quarantine."

"That does sound like a busy morning." Dean said, nodding.

"Would you happen to know what we're all being paged for at once? There isn't a claxon or anything, so I wasn't sure." Vicky asked, slightly more cordial now that she knew Missy wasn't red because of something stupid and teasable.

"God I hope not." Vista groaned.

"Huh?" Glory Girl grunted.

The three opened the door to the room they'd been summoned to.

"Oh dammit!" shouted Vista.

Glory Girl and Gallant just looked at her in confusion. They followed her gaze, seeing her cursing aimed at a stranger in a hazmat suit. Gallant stepped in front of her, protectively. Glory Girl just looked on in confusion.

Director Piggot sat across from the stranger, and Armsmaster looked at them expectantly, before ordering them, "You three are our backup eyes on this guy. Glory Girl, be prepared, he can apparently jump a couple kilometers straight up and shapeshift. You're on counter-Brute duty. Gallant, try to keep an eye on him, and let us know if you get anything from him that might be useful. We're trying to figure out how to get this guy to sign paperwork. He doesn't speak English. Vista, you're his escort for the time being, you know why."

Vista sighed. "At least you got him to wear pants."

Glory Girl just stared at Vista, and then back at the guy in the hazmat suit. She shook her head, no time for riling the girl up now.

Gallant stared at the guy in the hazmat suit. He held up his hand quickly. "I think he's hungry."

Piggot frowned. "Trust me he's eaten."

Playing charades seemed to be the only way to communicate headings while the group of 20 walked down the corridors that had been rather deliberately emptied of non-essential foot traffic. Half the paths were vetoed by the PRT staff, half the ones they wanted to use were met with a shake of the head from the brute.

Eventually they wound up at the docks that faced out into the open ocean. They were typically disused, given that most sea traffic came from landward.

The group walked to a landing that was just inches above the high-tide line. Glory Girl hovered just above their heads, while the rest of the armed personnel took up positions that gave them a clear shot. The entire trip was unhurried, and slow. By the time they had arrived there, it was nearly 16:00.

Armsmaster put his foot down. "No further!" He blocked the brute's path to the water.

The brute laughed.

Armsmaster engaged in a staring contest with the brute, though he was cheating using his opaque visor.

Gallant spoke up. "Armsmaster, I think you're annoying him. Also, I don't think Glory Girl's Aura is working on him."

The brute grinned, nodding and planting his feet. He pointed at Armsmaster as though brushing aside a fly. The brute spoke in a language that none of them had yet heard.

The choppy waters of Brockton Bay around the HQ calmed within 4 kilometers in all directions.

The wind stopped.

Tidal currents halted.

Throughout the unnaturally calmed sea, pulsing of yellow-green phosphorescent light some 10m wide slowly rose to the surface, like pustules on diseased skin. They churned, up-gassing opaque green vapors, and strobing in place like the opening of great staring eyes beneath the water's surface.

Enormous shadows of alien nightmares rose up to swim just beneath the surface, turning the calm waters into an ominous froth. Never cresting, the beasts could be seen only as silhouettes against the eldritch glow. Like some kind of manifestation of countless ancient horrors long since forgotten.

Soon deep, mournful lowing rose up from the depths, followed by countless glowing firefly motes that drifted up into the sky and could be seen for many kilometers.

Then the song began, emanating from the collective voice of all aquatic existence: the waves, the wind, the waters, and all living things within them. It was no recognizable language, but everyone understood the words as a matter of instinct: The Sea's greatness is unending, her power terrifying, her reach limitless, her love/hate (they are the same) boundless and inescapable.

Armsmaster was not a superstitious man, but he felt the kind of primitive fear that a child does when encountering the unfathomable deepness of the sea. Instinctive fear. He didn't ever realize that he had frozen up until Piggot started shouting at the brute to keep his hazmat suit on.

By the time he had turned around, the Brute was already naked, and slipping into the sea waters still churning with eldritch *things*. The man lazily dipped into the glowing waters, before cupping handfuls of it and ceremonially pouring it over his head.

Director Piggot's cell rang. "Yes, Dispatch, I know something is happening out in the bay. Tell Air Traffic control and the Harbormaster to divert traffic around the glowing area. I don't know any details, and I don't want to chance something dangerous coming out of it." Piggot grabbed at a firefly mote. Her hand passed right through it. "I think it's just a big illusion. I don't know."

The Quarantine team which had been trying to get the brute back into the hazmat suit waved at Piggot. "Director, he's not radioactive anymore. I don't know how, but the geiger counter doesn't even pick up background radiation on him."

The brute stood up naked from the water again. This time his unruly bushy beard and hair had seemingly been washed away with the seawater, leaving him looking neatly coiffed. The brute spoke in a tone of relief, and ran his hands through the long wet white locks pulling it behind his ears.

Glory Girl looked on. She could see an unnaturally tall and wiry man, possessed of a grace and poise that seems at odds with his appearance. His face was long, with a cleft chin barely hidden by his beard, with high cheekbones, and he has a variety of symmetric facial piercings of gleaming silver. His skin was bright emerald green, like some kind of bright coral-dwelling fish. The tattoo seemed to move and shift slowly, but she could not tell if it was just a trick of the light. His ruby red gaze possessed of a shrewd piercing quality. His hair was almost opalescent white, not at all like the worn dull color of the aged. His voice was neither too deep nor high, but had a melodic twang when he spoke ceremonially to the sea, like he was a step off of spitting verse.

It was hard to tell whether his face looked more like mediterranean, african, or polynesian, now that his hair and skin were clean. Whatever he was, his muscled physique glistened in the yellow-green light. A trail of glowing algae slowly slid down his body to trace his nude manhood. Where had the crazed homeless man gone? This was an attractive man. He was handsome, in a solid and angular kind of way that was almost universally exotic.

Those assembled were largely professional enough to ignore it. The Wards were not among them.

"What the fuck!?" shouted Glory Girl.

Vista felt conflicting feelings comparing the man who looked like he should be a marble statue, with the memory of the same guy covered in sticky jam and with an arm made of gross.

Impulsively (for him), Gallant walked up to the naked man and tried to hand him his jacket, trying to get the brute to cover himself, pointing at the flashed women.

Piggot walked right up to, and stared at him in the eyes. "We're here. Are you done wasting time?"

Dragon moved up to attempt miming the Director's question. The brute shook his head and sat down.

"Well?" asked Armsmaster.

Dragon shrugged. Some of the staff started to walk away.

The brute stood up and whistled at them, before motioning for them to return.

Piggot was growing impatient, but could not imagine a situation where a hostile brute would call over PRT officers that were leaving him alone out of boredom.

The guy pointed at the sun, and then at the horizon.

Dragon looked at her internal clock, and saw that it read 201104111630, she guessed: "I think he's waiting till sundown."

Actions

↑ Top ← Previous Chapter Next Chapter →

Kudos

FromCarcosaWithLove, NinjaOfOrthanc, Prysym, Igotamace, Strah, kellanved, InfiniteToast, and Thren_93 as well as 6 guests left kudos on this work!

Comments

Sorry, this work doesn't allow non-Archive users to comment. You can however still leave Kudos!

Footer

About the Archive

Site Map

Diversity Statement

Content Policy

DMCA Policy

Site Status

Policy Questions & Abuse Reports

Technical Support & Feedback

Development

otwarchive v0.9.458.3

Known Issues

GPL-2.0-or-later by the OTW

Chapter 785 - Allegedly a villain ( 1/2)