The unknown prisoner - a woman - lay perfectly still on one of the beds within the safehouse. I had carefully cleaned her and changed her clothes, but she hadn't woken up. I noticed some oddness about her body, her legs… But that could wait. I connected her to some medical equipment, and couldn't do much else for now.Weaver and Julius waited in the other room, discussing possible plans of action. Julius had reacted poorly to working with a teenager, but soon accepted that he didn't have many other options.Closing the door behind me, I stepped into the living room."Her vitals are stable and the healing is progressing well, faster than in mundane humans. I've got her on saline and a nutritional drip to support the process.""Any ideas on who she is?" Weaver asked, looking at Julius."None. The Vatican shouldn't have a secret prison, and I'm no jailer." Julius sneered. "She's connected to the Master. There is no other explanation. Those prisons are something the Swiss Guard are taught about, but we were always told they had collapsed during Leviathan's attack.""Sure." Weaver answered in a monotone. "What about the water?"Julius looked confused:"What water?""The top of the room was connected to a hatch that went all the way to the surface. Weaver watched a soldier pour water down it, in the past," I clarified. "I think that when they poured water down, the Master created a hole in the metal. If she has a similar level of control to Malacoda, then they could easily do so.""[Jesus Christ…]" Julius muttered, "[It gets worse the more we talk about it.]""And we've yet to discover anything about the connection the Blasphemies have with the Master…" Weaver sighed, removing her mask and massaging the bridge of her nose.I had a hypothesis regarding that. One that maybe the 'prisoner' could confirm."The heroes are on high alert now, and they know that Julius is no longer on their side. Rest for today, I doubt we'd be able to get much more. Besides, I don't want to leave her alone until she wakes up.""Any chance the Master can trace her?" Weaver asked.I shook my head. "She had some of the black threads hidden in her clothing, but Julius turned them to bronze and I made sure there was no other tracker on her." A quick x-ray scan also confirmed that none of the black threads dwelled within her body."We need more help." Julius changed the topic, turning from bronze to flesh and sitting down on the couch. "This is beyond what three parahumans can manage.""I agree. We do not have many options, unfortunately. There are us, Crowley and Cariddi-" the mere mention of the living calamity caused Julius' eyebrow to twitch "- the Blackbranch and the parahuman woman in the other room. Every other parahuman in the city has gotten wind that something is about to go down and has fled as fast as they could. Both criminals and independent heroes.""Our fight with the Blasphemies in the Colosseum plus the deaths in Corviale made them scared shitless," I added."You fought with the Blasphemies too?" Julius asked, glancing at Weaver."Yes.""And she did most of the work," I said, "with Weaver here we can make up for our lack of numbers. Which means we can manage with only three people. It's not ideal, but we can work with just us.""The alternative is worse." Julius sighed and stood up to get something from the fridge. A soda. "Anything I could do to help in the meanwhile?""Help Weaver train while I continue my research."Weaver glanced towards me and nodded. Having an opponent to spar with would help. Besides, that way they would get the hang of each other's abilities, allowing better coordination."Right. I forget that you're a Tinker. [Virgin Mary], you're like a mini-Dragon. Except I'm pretty sure none of the Dragon suits can stand up to whatever you've done to your body.""I would need to go all out in a fight with her. I'd rather not." The nanothorns were a serious threat, and Dragon still held a plethora of Tinker schematics and prototypes. I wasn't confident I could win. "Take care training. See you later, or when she wakes up."
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My 'lab' was an empty dark room in the safehouse. As I closed the door behind me, I whispered 'door me', and the dimensional gate appeared. I walked through and reached my actual lab as the doorway shut behind me.Quickly interfacing with the security system, I made sure that nobody had messed with anything. Then I looked towards the terminal that was finishing up compiling the data I had gathered from the Thanatos vial.Rather obviously, it too was crystal. It seemed that anything that was connected to the Shards was made of crystals. Which lent credence to Tattletale's insistence that the Endbringers were not and had never been humans.Besides that, my scans returned another coordinate in the Shardspace. The third one I had managed to obtain. Shatterbird's own island was a mainstay in my arsenal, while Cherish's archipelago was still too dangerous for me. Though I had been making some progress on that front as well before I got involved with the mess in Rome.At the same time, I checked on the state of the Earth I was on. This one was a populated planet, with civilization in its infancy. They had no parahumans though, so Cauldron saw little value in it… At least that's what I used to believe. After my short skirmish with Alexandria, I decided to check on the human race on this planet more closely, finding an odd pattern in disappearances. Rather, corpse disappearances. Something that on Earth Bet could be attributed to parahumans.I sighed and closed that file. I couldn't afford to get angry at Cauldron again, not before I dealt with the Blasphemies and the next Endbringer attack. Making them my enemies would cost too many lives, and I could at least justify working with them as long as I was not aware of what exactly they were doing.That's how I lied to myself, at least.Safety protocols disengaged.Entering Deep-Exploration mode.I lay down on one of the many net-running chairs I had placed in the lab, connected the Thanatos vial to a small probe that went inside the liquid, and then closed my eyes. The world began to fall-
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Giving way to the Shardspace. With a thought, I reformed the avatar as I'd done many times before. Then glanced in the direction of the Thanatos coordinates.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.The travel was a long one, though time and space didn't hold their full weight in the crystalline dimension.What I happened upon was not a desolate island. Rather, it was a graveyard. Covered in tall, transparent pillars, each as wide as my avatar and much taller.These pillars looked out of place within the island, and they did not grow out of the island so much as they were embedded into the foundation. Like pins in a pin-cushion. I could only see a smudged reflection of my own avatar as I got closer.Touching the pillars led to nothing. There was no signal sent across the connection. I even tried to shape my avatar in a way that I could touch more than one pillar at the same time, even tried all of them at once. Still nothing.The Shard was completely inactive. Inert. Comatose, in the same way Shatterbird's parasite was, but further within the sleep. As I repeated the same approach I had done with Shatterbird's shard, there continued to be no reaction.What could I do with this? Why did this vial always result in deaths?Given its lack of reaction…I decided to take a risk.My avatar changed shape, becoming thinner. Losing the form of a sphere, and taking on the shape of a large spear.Then I jammed myself into the foundation of the island.A flood of information threatened to drown me.Most of it was garbage info. But one thing in particular attracted my attention.A memory.I saw two floating creatures of endless size moving through the empty space between the stars. They communicated, one seeming to defer to the other.I saw the world puppeted by these aliens. I saw people I recognized, and people I didn't. I saw Scion. I saw someone like Scion, but different.I saw a third creature, of the same species, though it had diverged generations before.I saw the third creature crashing into the first of the two.The vision ended.The Shard reached for my biological body. It managed to breach my defenses for less than an instant, and only because I was still reeling from the memory that had jammed itself within my mind. The Shard moved to try and gather data about me, starting with identifying the DNA of my host.I changed the shape of the avatar once again. First it turned back into a sphere, then thin lines began to appear over the surface, lines of red among the black.Then each of those lines opened up into a maw, as I began taking bites out of the Shard's tendril, until finally it gave up on its approach. Going back to being dormant… but not fully.I didn't want to risk it. I ordered the avatar to come back.
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I jumped up from the chair with sudden cold sweats, stumbling forward and almost losing my footing. I felt dazed, even as my implants returned nominal vital signs. I wasn't sweating, but it still felt like it. My hands were shaking ever so slightly.This was problematic. I refocused on my body and…There was a crack.Not on my body.Not on the chair.But in the air. Right where my skull had been, above the head-stand.A crack in the glass of reality, taking the shape of a spider-web that seemed to grow fainter every second that passed. It was disappearing.I activated my speedware even while feeling sick, rushing for my equipment and sensors. I assembled what I could, gathered all the data that could be gathered. The flooring of the lab creaked underneath my heavy steps. Glass screens began to groan under the sheer speed I was moving at.Within the minute, the crack in reality had disappeared, but I'd just managed to get some data from it. Enough to make it worth the sudden headache that began to pound at my skull. I had forced my human body beyond its limit. Or maybe?I walked up to one of the x-ray machines off to the side. I took a quick brain scan.Everything seemed normal at first. Until I looked closer. There, right in the center, near my crystallized frontal lobe, something had forced its way through the crystal. A biological lump. Brain tissue. It had been immediately squashed to liquid by the crystal, and now nothing but blood and fluid remained.I recognized it. It was a misshapen Corona Gemma.Had I triggered? Everything I knew about natural and induced triggers said no.In some ways this made the situation worse. I walked up to the Thanatos vial to disconnect it from the chair, and was relieved to see that the liquid was still fully there, and it still had its ominous colour.Whatever had just happened was not meant to happen.Before I could dwell too much on it, a doorway of light appeared to my side and one of Weaver's Wasps flew in. The moment the dimensional gate was established, our communicators connected."She's awake."It seemed that the mystery of the Shardspace would wait some more.
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The woman looked much healthier. It had been less than three hours since we got her out of the prison. In the meantime, her skin had gone back to its original healthy pink, her hair had regained its lustrous black, and already her muscles were reforming. She looked like she had just recovered from a fever, rather than being a prisoner for many years.She was sitting up in bed, glancing at the window overlooking the city. Tears fell from her black eyes, as she stared in wonder at the rising sun."[God? Is this heaven?]" she asked, looking towards Julius, who had once again turned fully bronze."[No. You're alive. You were in terrible conditions. Do you know how long you stayed there?]"She shook her head. "[I think… 2005? Leviathan had just attacked… And… Shit. No. It can't be.]" She placed a hand over her eyes and began to weep loudly.Weaver pointed at the side of her head. Her ears. I quickly began displaying a real-time translation of what the woman and Julius were saying.Julius turned back to flesh and knelt by the bed, placing his hand over hers."[Do you remember your name?]"It took a while for the woman to recompose herself and answer. Julius offered her a handkerchief, which she used to clean the snot from her nose and dry her tears.Speaking was strange for her, I could tell. She likely hadn't spoken to someone in a long time. A normal human would have long since gone mad, but it was possible that in some ways her power preserved her, or had changed in order to better preserve her mind.I glanced at Weaver. She was gritting her teeth behind her mask."[It's…]" She took a deep breath, realizing that she could, in fact, take deep breaths here now that there was space for her diaphragm to expand. "[My name is…]" A breath. "[Adriana.]"