"I am so sure that all of this is a trap," Taylor grimaced, pacing back and forth. "C'mon, it's an Endbringer, and the only one that's ever been known to use deception, red herrings, and long-term traps. Her entire reason for being is to kill as many of us as possible. Whatever she's going to ask you to do, it's going to involve somehow building a bomb or giving her even more power or something."

Theo Anders sat on the edge of the table, this time full-sized. He was no longer wearing Scavenger black, he had traded that uniform in for a suit of generic-looking power armor made from generic parts that were produced by Dragon's new production facility. His armor was grayish-tan, and bulky on his sturdily-built frame. In the past several weeks he'd been losing fat, keeping up the intensive workouts that his aunt had put him through before he triggered, but he was still big-boned with a barrel chest and a thick core. His helmet sat on the table beside him. "I thought your dad said they already checked for that sort of thing, talked to Dinah."

"Dinah is weirdly unreliable around Endbringers," Taylor volleyed back. "And even still, I'd rather trust that an Endbringer is sneaky and genocidal than trust that Dinah's powers are accurate. They're a known quantity, they've never shown anything but an urge to murder and terrify."

"And literally nobody has ever spoken to them," Oni Lee pointed out. He put his feet up on the table. "Lots of things can change when you start talking to people."

Taylor pulled a face. "Nevertheless, it's the only outcome that makes sense. You said yourself, she puts a higher value on destroying humans than she puts on saving her own life. She only has a self-preservation instinct or a Third Law of Robotics so that she can survive longer and have a higher long-term body count. If she knows that she is going to die soon, her only consideration is to kill as many of us as possible. If her choices are between surviving without killing, or killing without surviving, she'll try to kill us. That's how she's wired."

"She asked to be reprogrammed and to be released from her compulsion to kill," Theo said. "That's in really tricky ground, Three Laws-wise. The fact that she could even fathom that shows that she has a fair amount of creativity and a capacity to imagine more. She wants to be more than she is, she wants to expand and evolve."

"No, she wants you to think that, so she can kill us," Taylor retorted. She reached the end of the room and turned, striding the other direction. "Heck, I'm not even comfortable with what is going on with Pariah right now. This is really, really heavy, and she should not be doing this by herself, and this is only the smallest issue we've got in front of us right now."

"She's got Eidolon with her," Theo pointed out.

She threw her hands up. "I'm still not sure I should trust him! We know the Protectorate is going to turn on us, and soon. And I am not just slightly freaked out by that, either. The Protectorate has been building up its power for months, creating thousands of new suits of power armor, training its people up more intensively than ever before. Dragon has been creating more vehicles and transports, to load more Protectorate heroes into a location than ever before. I honestly wish we'd had this sort of layout when we were fighting Leviathan. Instead, this is the sort of force that turns a blind eye when we get hit with two Class S catastrophes at the same time. God, sometimes it seems like these so-called heroes only exist to make my life harder. Like they can't help doing everything wrong at every turn. And now they're armed up all to hell and back, and we're going to be wedged between those assholes and an Endbringer with a hydrogen bomb."

Oni Lee chuckled. "Paranoid much?"

"What part of it is wrong?" Taylor demanded, rounding on him.

"The part where Cauldron isn't in charge of the Protectorate or the PRT anymore," the man who was Butcher XV reminded her. "Look, every teenager thinks the world is out to get them. It's normal and it's natural. You're trapped in between the part of your life when you get no responsibilities and the part of your life when you get autonomy, and right now you're just hit with responsibilities and no authority. It sucks, but it passes. The first thing is just to recognize that this is not what the world really is, it's just what being a teenager is. Draw that distinction, understand that difference, and you'll find it a lot easier to hold a better outlook."

"That's pretty wordy for a fortune cookie," Theo said blandly.

"Racist," Oni Lee grinned at him.

"Seriously!" Taylor blurted.

"He knew I didn't mean it like that," Theo said.

"I did," Oni Lee acknowledged.

"Still!" Taylor said, still flustered.

"I think Uber and Leet and Salvage are bad influences on us," Oni Lee said. "It's a dryer humor, but it still works for us."

Oni Lee dropped a hand onto Taylor's shoulder. "What's going on with you? This isn't really you."

The girl sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "Sorry, I just get tense before big fights. Bigger fight, more tension. Normally it's easier because Dad's around. But this... this is like the biggest fight there could be. And whatever Dinah says, I'm not sure about the outcome here."

Danny walked in from the side office, running his hands over his short-cropped hair in an extremely similar gesture to his daughter's. "Well, I've got Citrine on board now. She's looking for work now that Accord's dead, and she's having a hard time making her way as a mercenary. Most people that would want to hire her, she doesn't want to work for. And the rest want to recruit her rather than hire her, and she hates that even more."

"And she actually agreed?" Taylor blurted. "Does she know that we're the ones that killed Accord?"

"Apparently she gave us a discount because of that," Danny chuckled. He walked to the whiteboard and crossed off Citrine's name. Flechette, Eidolon, Floret and Usher were already crossed off as well. "Okay, now just Epoch and Shamrock. She should be easy, she's hanging with Faultline's crew these days and they still owe me a favor. But Epoch is not just a villain who doesn't want to work with heroes, he's also a leader of a large organization so he's got a ton of pride and self-image to argue against. And he considers himself a chessmaster type, so he's likely to try to game us or make a move for himself right when it's least convenient."

"I'll sort him," Taylor said. "I just need to read him and find out when he's going to act up, and we can deal with him then." She seemed more confident already.

"I'd appreciate it," Danny said, smiling. "Now I just need to figure out how to make him say yes, when he would gladly say no just for the sake of spite."

"You've already figured it out," Taylor said as she flopped into a chair.

He quirked an eyebrow. "Did you finally decide to read my mind?"

"And see what you're imagining about Sophia Loren? No thanks. I just know your tells, dad. And, I've gotten better at reading people in general. When you know what thoughts go with what expression, you start figuring out the patterns. So, how are you going to get Epoch?"

"By appealing to his ego of course," Danny said. "C'mon, we're the team that tood down the Empire in a day, took out the Elite in a day, we bring down criminal empires just because we happened to be in the neighborhood, and take on Class-S threats two at a time, and we're coming to him for help. Not even his Adepts, either, but himself. He'll get such a swelled head that he'll never wear the same hat again."

"Sounds solid," Theo nodded.

Taylor was looking at the whiteboard again. "Y'know, I'm looking over this list. You've got two people that totally change physics, two more that only kinda change physics. A minor thinker, the most powerful parahuman in the world... but the one that concerns me the most is Usher. You've got someone whose only claim to fame is that he can give other people power immunity and invulnerability. What the hell does that really say? That she only really needs one of you guys alive at the end?"

"Usher's there to make sure that the Simurgh survives the reprogramming," Danny explained. "She was really not designed for aftermarket alterations, especially not deleting her primary objective and all its variations."

Taylor considered that. "If it's true, that makes me feel a lot better. So, I know that Sabah's off with Eidolon doing that Flechette thing that Theo insists isn't actually necromancy. And the rest of us are here. But where the hell is Morrigan?"

"I set her up in a cabin up on Captain's Peak about five miles from anyone at all," Danny said. "It was just best for everyone if she was away from people in general, and this team specifically. In particular, to be away from you, Taylor."

"I'll say," she muttered.

"She said that you really freak her out," Danny finished.

She looked up at him, then across at Oni Lee and Theo. "That's one of you guys' jokes, right? You're messing with me?"

Danny looked over at Oni Lee. "You guys've been telling jokes?"

"We're getting into it," Oni Lee said. "We're finding a chemistry to it."

"The chemistry is mostly dry and sardonic," Theo added.

"You're not kidding?" Taylor asked. "She was freaked out by me?"

"You're a human mind reader," Danny pointed out. "Everyone thought that was even more impossible than hybrid Endbringers."

"Unbelievable," she muttered. Danny got up to go call some contacts that would have a phone number for Epoch of the Adepts.

It was dark out by the time that Sabah came back through the doors into the wing of the factory set aside for Scavenger work. She was bleary-eyed with exhaustion, yawning continuously, but her step had a grace to it that had never been there before. Theo leaned his head out of his door, and blinked at her appearance. "Whoa, Sabah, are you okay?" he asked, sympathetic concern immediately flooding over his face. He was wearing flannel pajama bottoms but his usual modesty and self-consciousness was forgotten in a second as he stepped out to check on his teammate.

"Yeah, fine," the short fashion student said, leaning up against the wall. "It took Eidolon hours, literally hours, to find the right power to use, and I just sat by and waited for him to get it right. I really kinda wish that he could have done that stuff on his time, and just let me know whe it was ready so I could do something besides sit in the grass in a cemetery thinking about the sixteen-year-old girl I'd fallen in love with before I broke her heart and try not to feel stupid sitting around with Eidolon standing there talking to himself. He's kind of a tool sometimes, but he has these moments where he actually gets so awkward it's almost charming. I think they call that adorkable. He's almost that, but never quite gets there."

"And you feel fine? I mean, you're not..."

"Despondent? Depressed? Traumatized? Angsty?" she said. "I don't know, maybe a little. Some of her personality got merged with mine, so I have to figure out how to deal with that. She's a little more feisty than I am, so I need to watch myself that I don't start snapping at people. And I've got most of her memories, along with her power."

Danny leaned out of his room, then rushed out to see her. He was still in his Scavenger black garb, it was rumpled like he had fallen asleep in it. "Damn, I'm glad you're okay!" he exclaimed, stepping up to give the girl a hug. "If I'd known it would take Eidolon that long, I would have made sure had a packed lunch."

"There was a food cart, we were okay," Sabah said. Her accent was slightly changed now, bits of Flechette blended into Pariah. "Mostly it was boring. There was lots of waiting. Apparently we were trying to do something way too specific. Ask the guy for ways to turn stone to water and he's got a hundred answers, but necromancy is-"

"It's not necromancy," Theo said sternly.

"And why not?"

"Because we're heroes, and necromancy has been outlawed in this state since the early 1800s," Theo replied.

"Got it," Sabah said, nodding.

Salvage was wearing a t-shirt and boxers when he opened the door. "Ah, you're back. How'd it go?"

"Not bad," Pariah said, gesturing. Threads bearing needles snaked out of her sleeve, weaving in the air. "These needles can now penetrate any material at all. If I need to take down the Simurgh, I've got this under control all by myself. No Alexandria, Clockblocker, just me. So, that's a cool feeling."

The little man snorted. "Shit. I'll bet."

Taylor poked her head out the door. "Oh, you're back! Thank goodness, I thought we were just having impromptu team meetings in the hallway at midnight just for the hell of it."

Sabah laughed a little at that. "So, Taylor, just to soothe my worries, could you take a peek at me and make sure my brain's not broken?"

Taylor rolled her eyes and shut the door, then emerged a minute later with a bathrobe on over her nightshirt. "Okay, this'll only take a second... ah hah. Well, I can see why you'd be worried, this isn't how I would have merged two personalities, but the two of you seem to be melding peacefully, two confident young women who got along well, with nobody insecure enough to try to seize the whole identity. "

"Well, that's good at least," Theo said, grinning.

Oni Lee poked his head out the door and looked around. He spent a few seconds sizing up the situation. "It's late. Go to bed," he said, and closed the door.

There was a moment of silence, and then Theo cleared his throat. "Well, I guess simple probabilities would dictate that at least one of us sleeps naked, right? Good night, I need to wash my eyes and brain now."

"Good night," Danny said, turning back to his room.

"Didn't need that," Salvage grumbled.

"I'm underage," Taylor griped as she walked away. "Isn't that illegal?"

"So much a lesbian," Sabah muttered, opening her room. "Good night everyone."

Tattletale was out of costume but was still clearly recognizable when she pushed the door open and let herself into the break room. "Rat, have you seriously been telling people that you know how to kill Scion?" she demanded.

"If by 'people' we mean 'literally nobody except the leader of Cauldron', then yeah. But she was already planning on killing Scion, just she was going to do it the hard way."

"God!" the teenager burst out, throwing her arms up in the air. "I leave you alone for like, four months, and you just fall right the hell apart! What the hell, man, this is about as dumb a thing as you can do!"

Danny spun the bag of bread closed and cinched the twist-tie onto it. "If anyone's heard about this, at all, it's because Doctor Mother is launching a pre-emptive strike to discredit me before I have a chance to take her spotlight away from her. She's probably trying to convince the Protectorate to come after me all at once and kill me."

"I'm glad you figured that out without thinker powers!" Tattletale exclaimed. "Seriously, what were you doing?"

He shook his head as he put the jars back in the refrigerator. "Look, if she didn't have something like that on me, she would have made something up. This isn't about what I said, this is about how much the Doctor wants people to hate me."

"Well she's certainly starting in the right place! If you threaten Scion, you threaten the man that saved hundreds of millions of people from the Endbringers!" she dropped heavily into a chair and glared at him.

Danny chewed his sandwich for a minute before he spoke. "And it doesn't matter to people that he is going to destroy all human life, sooner or later?"

"They're more worried about the sooner or later, when you seem to be all about the sooner," she said. "Rumors shoot right through cape communities, we've got a rumor mill like you wouldn't believe. And right now literally everyone knows that you've been collaborating with the Simurgh and plotting to kill Scion. Mister Rat, you're gonna get killed, like today! If I were you I'd find a news camera with a live broadcast and surrender yourself immediately, tell them you've realized the error of your ways and you've given up your plan, you're ready to make amends, and maybe you'll get life in the Birdcage instead of a shallow grave in Potter's Field!"

"Hmm," he said, considering. "This really does sound pretty tough. Your powers are backing you on this?"

"My power is telling me that you are radioactive as hell!" she said, slapping the tabletop. "It's screaming at me to get away from you before I'm collateral damage! Mister Rat, there are forces mobilizing. Right now the worst dudes in the world are literally writing your name on their bullets!"

Danny looked over his sandwich. "I should do something about that," he said.

"Fuck! Yes! Save yourself!" Tattletale insisted, surging to her feet.

The man cleared his throat, and looked up into the middle distance. "Wharf Rat to Doctor Mother," he said.

The doorway opened immediately, and the woman stood in place with her arms crossed. "It should not have come to this," she said sternly. "You have no idea what measures I would take to save my operation and the world."

"Did you know that Taylor's a pretty decent artist?" Danny said. "Especially portraits, she got good at them after her mother passed. She sketched her mother over and over to make sure she would never forget her face. It's amazingly sweet. So when she read your mind last time, she got a good look at your memories, at the one face you were guaranteed to never forget. The thing you killed, Scion's counterpart, his wife-slash-sister-slash-daughter-slash-mother-slash-whatever. Long black hair, striking and strong features. You saw the thing's face that was going to be Scion's partner before you killed her, Doctor. So I wonder, Doctor, why it is that you never recognized that face when you saw it again?"

The scientist stared at him blankly. "Whatever are you talking about?"

"The human face of the female Scion-thing. The human face that was created by one of its power-shards. You looked at it for years and never connected them. But Taylor's a good artist, and we both saw the connection," he said, and gestured towards the refrigerator. Hung upon it with kitchen magnets was a piece of paper, a sketched portrait with bold colors, depicting a woman with long, straight black hair, wide eyes and a strong mouth. The woman in the portrait was looking up from a mass of flesh and membranes that depicted an utter horror of sickening proportions. It was the entity's wife, the female version of Scion, that had been killed in the Doctor's home dimension. And it had stared at her with Alexandria's face.

Doctor Mother stared at the drawing. "That... that should not be possible."

"And yet here we are," Danny said, taking another bite of his sandwich while the woman from Cauldron stared at the drawing and saw the resemblence. "So," he said when his mouth was clear, "you harvested powers from the dead alien on your homeworld. You started with the big ones, the important ones. You stole the shard that lets them travel at light speed and gave it to Legend, you took the shard that lets them activate different shards and gave it to Eidolon. You took the shard that makes sure they never make a mistake, and gave it to Contessa. The shard for infinite invulnerability, to the man who created the Siberian. And the shard that was going to create the entity's likeness for humanity, you gave to the girl who grew up to be Alexandria. Strength, invulnerability, flight, high-end conventional intelligence, even super senses and enhanced speed. It's a great powerset, and so easy to build on. A great default setting for anyone who can take any other powers they want at any other time. And doesn't it seem just a bit familiar?"

"You think that Scion's base powers are the same as Alexandria's," the scientist said.

"Oh, shit," Tattletale murmured. "Wait, I've been doing my own research. And I know that Scion was meant to be stronger than his counterpart. He's the brawn, she's the brains."

"True, but that's about matters of degree," Wharf Rat said. "Look, they activated a power that would create for them a compatible form to interact with our species and our planet, with powers to make them superior to us. The one that the Doctor killed was not done activating her powers to create the form. But Alexandria has finished, and so has Scion. So, while he has a ton of other powers to choose from, he's got a few favorites, and only one that's activated constantly by default. But more to the point-"

"Alexandria's weaknesses are Scion's weaknesses," Tattletale finished, her brain working quickly. "Okay, so any flaws in Alexandria's powers would be present in Scion's. But Alexandria has only been seriously in danger twice: once when she was fighting the Siberian-"

"-which does not count for reasons I'll explain in a minute," Danny interrupted.

"-and when she was nearly... drowned," Tattletale said, her voice winding down.

Danny nodded. "The shard that created the Scion form, the locus through which all of his other powers are channeled, was made to survive in our environment. Specific pressure, gravity, oxygen content. It's pretty durable, but when it chose this form it did not seem to realize how easily a human or parahuman can asphyxiate. Look at all of Scion's movements from his first appearance to present day, and you'll see him flying all about within a couple thousand feet of the surface. He does not dive, or bury himself, or fly too high. Not once in thirty years. He does literally everything else a parahuman could be expected to do. He moves mountains, slays monsters, walks through fire, shrugs off major explosions. But he does not go anywhere that there is not an oxygen-rich air environment. The three Endbringers hide in three places: the upper atmosphere, the deep ocean, and under the earth. Places that Scion can reach easily, but he never pursues them once they leave environments that humans can survive. Patterns like that are important."

"And he has been struck by the Siberian before, but it only injured him for a second before he recovered," Tattletale said. "Even if you hit him with something that can hurt Alexandria, he still regenerates it nearly instantly. But regeneration doesn't stop someone from drowning..."

Doctor Mother's jaw was half-hanging, staring from one to the other, occasionally looking back at the portrait drawn from her own memories. "You mean to tell me that you think that Scion, the most powerful hero in the world, the unstoppable juggernaut that is fated to destroy the world, the interdimensional monster hidden behind a human face.. can be drowned like a toddler in a wading pool?" Her voice started out awed but shifted to skeptical and then mocking. "Do you even hear yourselves?"

"Then tell me why I'm wrong," Danny said, staring at her with frankly contemptuous eyes. "And not just because you don't believe I'm right, but a reason."

"It can't be true, it's too..." she sputtered to a stop. "It strains all credulity, and there's no proof at all."

"Say, Doctor?" Danny said with disarming nonchalance. "When did you get your degree?"

"Pardon?" she was taken aback.

"I mean, you were pretty busy after you killed the wounded alien, harvesting powers and building your facility, and recruiting your private army and building your power base in our world and kidnapping people. I'm just wondering if you put all of that on hold so you could dummy up a fake identity, go through modern schooling as a citizen, then eight years of higher education, writing your thesis, submitting for peer review, and getting certified. Doctor." He held her gaze, unblinking. "I mean, your native world was stuck in the late Bronze Age, and you were an uneducated villager there. So, what is your degree in? Multidimensional mathematics? High-energy physics? Xenobiology? Genetic engineering? Medical practice? Liberal arts? Honorary degree? Or are you self-titled as a doctor without any specialized training, so that you could get the respect and the reverence of an accomplished expert, when everything you know about this comes from abducting people and running them through trial-and-error tests to see what happens? Your image is predicated on unquestionable credentials and nigh-superhuman intellect, but I think that you are actually wildly unqualified for your position, and you are in way over your head. So you discard any idea that wasn't your own, just so that you can rest secure in your perception as a peerless expert."

Her face was frozen and her voice was just as cold. "You have never shown me an ounce of respect, Mister Hebert. You have jabbed at me, insulted me, and antagonized me from the very beginning, taunting me to have you killed. And yet you offer endless patience and forgiveness to common street criminals. Thugs and brutal murderers, you take in as friends, coddled and swaddled. But for myself, a professional who has accomplished so much, you have such a bottomless well of disdain and contempt."

"Of course," Danny said, looking at her with something like disbelief that she was bothering to ask. "If someone does terrible things because of hardship, you offer them security and companionship to make them stop doing those things. If someone does terrible things because nobody has ever tried to stop them, you challenge them over and over until they stop doing those things. Circus and Trainwreck, Grue and Tattletale, they committed crimes because they felt they had no choice. I gave them a choice. You've always had a choice, but nobody ever bothered to tell you that you were wrong. So, now I am here to tell you that you are wrong."

"In your opinion," she snapped.

"In a dozen ways that I've already proven to you," he sighed, rolling his eyes. "Your methods. Your goals. The giant piles of dead bodies. The corruption. The tattoos. The way you manipulate people. The skinny-chef issue. The fact that you have been proven to be evil over and over again and you just literally ignore all the evidence. But now, I've shown you how to kill Scion. You need a half-decent hydrokinetic or telekinetic, and some way to baffle his precognition or keep him from realizing that he should activate it. And that's it. And right now, you've got an army of good men and women you have deceived into attacking me. They are arming up and gearing up and preparing themselves to bring the vengeance of a righteous god down on my head. They are doing this because of you. Your excuse for this underhanded insanity was that you thought I was bluffing about knowing how to kill Scion. Your excuse, was that I was dangerous because I was going after Scion without any way to contain the damage if something went wrong. And now you have no excuse. I have a Plan A through Plan F how to convince Scion to help humanity from now until the end of time. I have a Plan G through Plan M how to kill him if that fails. So, you have no excuse for rousing the Protectorate against me. No excuse, no rationalization. Now, if I can convince you to be a little less evil than absolutely necessary for just five fucking minutes would you please be so decent as to tell someone the truth for the first fucking time and get your corrupted heroes to stand down."

"There's still no proof that your plan will work, that he really has a weakness," Doctor Mother retorted, but she sounded bitter and resentful now.

"Lady, your best plan was to muster up a giant army of parahumans to attack him with lasers and explosions and fists," Danny pointed out. "You were going to try the only thing you know for sure wouldn't work, but your plan was to try it really hard. Do you understand that your Plan A under ideal conditions is less likely to succeed than any of my last-ditch backup plans? He is invulnerable to all conventional damage, he regenerates from attacks like the Siberian that have what amounts to infinite strength. But you think that if we just punch him enough, then suddenly we'll win? And you think that's a better plan than the only weakness we've ever found on him, by examining thirty years of his movements?" He shook his head. "Just stand down. You're going to get everyone killed."

The doorway disappeared, and Danny took a bite of his sandwich. Tattletale stared at him in awe, shaking her head. "Mister Rat, I used to think I was the reigning champion of talking mad shit to authority figures who can kill me, provoking them until they have no choice but to bury me or give me what I want. But that... I'm in awe. That was so stupid, that shouldn't have worked at all. You were out-and-out suicidal, cussing out one of the most powerful and ruthless people in our world, and yet she crawled away with her tail between her legs. What the hell man."

"Few months ago I developed a thinker talent that includes a knack for social dynamics," he said, shrugging. "Not long before the whole Leviathan thing. Besides, it's easier to win an argument when you can prove that you're right." He took another bite, and turned on the television that hung above the paper-towel dispenser. As break rooms went, it was pretty generic, not at all suited to a superhero headquarters.

"I knew it," she punched the air. "I called it back then, I said you had to have a thinker talent to handle those people the way you were!"

He flipped a few channels until he got to a live news broadcast. "-members of the Protectorate now turning around, returning to their own cities. No statement has been made and no explanation has been offered, but the recent history of Brockton Bay has certainly been contentious enough that a maneuver like this should not be entirely unezpected. We can only speculate as to what new developments are arising between the Protectorate and the Scavengers of Brockton Bay, but based on information that has come out before, nearly anything is possible. We go now live to-"

"One of these days it's going to be New Wave that gets in trouble, and nobody's going to be expecting it," Danny said, brushing the crumbs off his hands and reaching for the cleaning supplies.

"It's never going to be New Wave and you know it," Tattletale scoffed. "Now then, it looks like you've bought yourself some time, Mister Rat. Now then, let's get to the choppah."

"Why are you talking like that?"

"It's Schwarzenegger. 'Get to the choppah!' Right?"

"You sound ridiculous. Let's got catch a helicopter and move onto the next stage of our plan to save the world."

The skids touched down lightly, and the twin rotors started powering down. None of the passengers rushed out, nobody flung open the door to run out through the prop-wash, they just sat in place while they waited for the blades to idle down. It was a widely mixed assortment of individuals.

The Scavengers themselves were weirdly disparate looking. Two weeks ago they had been eerily uniform, with black uniforms and hoods, bulked out so that nobody could tell one of them from the others. Today, only Pariah wore that outfit, but hers was trimmed with glimmering silver in various places, from metallic thread wrapped around her wrists to small stiletto-like blades that fit into loops in her costume. Gulliver was wearing the same gray-beige power armor, generic parts in generic configuration, with a pair of nine-millimeter handguns in holsters on his hips with extra clips, a pair of stun-guns strapped to his back, and a heavy square shield that he was resting to one side, the back of it covered in containment-foam grenades that were clipped into place for quick removal. Benthic was also wearing her armor, deep blue, streamlined, with a half-reflective visor, and modular pods slotted into place on her hips, thighs, forearms, and shoulders. Oni Lee was wearing a pair of loose-fitting linen pants and a bandolier of knives and a face mask that showed a grinning Japanese demon's face. Wharf Rat was dressed in cargo pants and a trenchcoat, with combat boots and his brown mask with the built-out mouth and nose.

Citrine was no longer wearing the evening gown that Accord had always demanded, but had switched to a fashionably-fitted pantsuit that looked severe but enticing on her slender figure, and kept the elegant yellow jeweled mask that her former employer had made for her. Usher rated highly enough in the Protectorate that his new armor, produced by Dragon and Armsmaster and Kid Win and Masamune and Big Rig and a consortium of other tinkers, was customized to his costume. It was tall and broad-shouldered, in bold silver and gleaming crimson with a heavy neckguard like a yoke over his shoulders. The gauntlets were hevily built up with implanted weaponry and gadgetry, but the gloves themselves were thin enough that his power could work through them. Floret was out of costume entirely, wearing blue jeans and sandals and a cardigan over her bony shoulders. Her hair was dyed green and swept up into a bun on top of her head, secured with a few simple pins. Shamrock on the other hand was in full regalia, a kelly-green bodysuit and face mask that left her long red hair flowing free, with a pair of holstered handguns and a four-leaf clover emblem on her shoulders and knees. Epoch huddled in a thick black-and-purple cloak, conspicuously cultivating his mysterious silence.

Wharf Rat was the first one to stand up and open the sliding side doors, and led the way out onto the boat. It was a chartered yacht, because that was the easiest kind of boat to rent for a day with a helipad and some deck space and a minimal crew who could be evacuated before the action started. It was a tall three-decker for the luxury billionaire set, but unlike virtually every other boat of its type it was not gleaming white, but rather a soothing sea-foam green. The rental had been a surprisingly reasonable price, but the deposit had been very, very high when the owner found out it was being used for parahuman business. The other capes filed off the helicopter behind him, and Eidolon came walking over from the bow, having already teleported in ahead to clear the area of bystanders and onlookers. "I have so many bad feelings about this," Eidolon said to the Rat, as they came together for a handshake. "But I keep trying out different precognitive powers, and they all seem to indicate that this is going to go okay. So I guess the only real question is whether the Simurgh can baffle all of those different precognitive powers."

"I won't lie, it may be possible for her," Danny said, and both men felt the tension of the day. "But we try anyway, right?"

"I've had tons of trouble sleeping ever since you mentioned to me that it was even possible for Scion to turn against us and attack," Eidolon admitted. "Even I am just a gnat compared to him. I think the only reason I've been able to live a normal life is because I never stopped doubting that Scion was always going to be on our side. I can't imagine living even five more years like this, wondering if today was the day that he decided to try something new and just blow up the planet. And the idea that humanity would live like that for three centuries, always knowing what was going to happen... can you imagine if the people of the world had a deadline for the End, the Apocalypse? If they realized that nothing really mattered at all because Scion was someday going to stop playing games and kill us all..." Eidolon shook his head. "And it's a matter of time. Sooner or later. Because that was his purpose all along, his mission was to make us fight, make us suffer, and then kill us all. He's taking his time, that's all. This... this needs to get done. We can't live like this. Not for a century, a year, a week." Eidolon's voice was firm and certain, but backed with fear. It was the voice of a man speaking what had to be done, or else.

"Exactly what I was thinking," Danny said.

"Nice view from here," Gulliver said.

"It is," Benthic said.

"Something bothering you?"

She shook her head. "Nothing important. Not today."

"C'mon, if something's bothering you, maybe I can help."

"Not with this," she said, averting her eyes.

Gulliver paused, hesitated, and then nodded. "Okay. But if you ever need someone to-"

"I checked the Parahumans Online page," she blurted out. "To see what they were saying about me. There's a new theory going around the message board, that I'm actually a bunch of rats piloting a power armor, like another of the Druid's drones."

Gulliver stared at her.

"It's stupid, I know, but it really has been bugging me," Taylor said lamely.

"That's adorable," Gulliver said, his voice choked with mirth.

She sighed. "Fuck you," she muttered, but her heart wasn't in it. For his part, Gulliver just pictured hundreds of cute white mice operating the Benthic armor from the inside, like the cartoons where three kids would stack up on top of each other inside of a trenchcoat to look like an adult. He stifled a giggle and paced off a few steps away from her.

Epoch straightened, his hood rustling as he spoke. "She comes."

The heroes and rogues and mercenaries looked in all directions, checking the sky, and then something blipped on Usher's long-range radar. "That way!" he said, pointing. Danny shaded his eyes as he stared, and soon was able to pick out the alabaster-white figure of the Simurgh, flying down at a long slow angle. He wings were spread to look like she was using them to glide, but the angles were a little off, and she was not bobbing on air currents like gliders did, just moving steadily and smoothly like anyone else using telekinetic levitation.

"The scream is starting," Floret pointed out.

"Working on it," Citrine said, and the air began to haze with yellow, speading out from her. The area of effect was not a dome, but more of a thick disc. It spread out from her for twenty feet to every side, but only a couple feet up above their heads. The sound in their minds began to fade.

"You don't quite have it," Floret said. "It's close, but not quite there."

Shamrock nudged the yellow-clad woman. "C'mon, we'd all like to finish this job and not be crazy."

Citrine ignored her and tuned her power a little more, until Floret nodded her approval. The Simurgh approached, and for a minute it looked like her feet were going to touch down on the deck of the boat, but it was just a trick of the swell and ebb of the waves under the yacht. The pictures of her made her look like an angel, all brilliant-white with flawless features and a great wreath of feathers. But up close, she was horrifying in unexpected ways: without the wings, she would still stand fifteen feet tall. She loomed over them all effortlessly, and her head did not turn in their direction at all.

"Kind of miss having Morrigan around to translate Endbringer-to-English," Oni Lee stage-whispered to Wharf Rat.

"Too risky," Danny said. "But I really do know exactly what you mean."

The Simurgh stood on the air, hands flat and loose at her sides, toes pointed downwards, her chin slightly lifted. But her wings furled, rearranged themselves. The largest of those wings, the one that normally curled around her body, stretched out towards them, the feathers glittering like finely-serrated knives, the light breaking on the edges of them. The joint of the wing was built up with pinion feathers, thick and powerful looking, broader and thicker than the Simurgh's actual torso. "The deepest part of her body, the core," Pariah muttered. "Someone tell me where to cut."

Shamrock and Floret conferred for a second, then pointed at a specific area. Epoch turned to Eidolon. "Be ready to catch," the head of the Adept villain organization advised him.

Pariah unspooled what looked like Christmas tinsel off of her wrist, thin metallic ribbon that glimmered in the early-afternoon light. It was lightweight and malleable, easy for her telekinesis to control. But it was also a metallic composition that her Flechette powers could affect. And with the same physics-breaking power that had killed Leviathan charging the metal ribbon, Pariah swept it down and around in a tight loop, carving a section of the white wing loose from the rest. The section cut loose was about the size of a garbage can, a cylindrical section that showed all the layers of the Endbringer's anatomy. The sections inside, like tree rings, alternated roughly as white-black-silver-white as they approached the center of the core. The cylinder hung in the air as Pariah retracted the tinsel, but the rest of the Simurgh tipped over and started to drop before Eidolon caught it with his telekinesis.

"Shit," he said, looking at the massive inert facade of the Simurgh. "There is no place to set this down, is there?"

"Toss it overboard," Danny said. "She can grow another one."

Eidolon tried to look casual and nonchalant as he flicked the corpse of his third-greatest enemy over the railing and let it sink into the water, as if he wasn't daunted by the disrespectful gesture and the enormity of this moment. The cylinder was already regrowing at a fantastic rate, two feet wider in every direction, slowing as it floated down into Citrine's aura. The regeneration ground to a halt, and it hovered in the air.

"The enemy is helpless, offered to us of its own power," Usher said, his voice husky. "And now we do surgery to take out its programming so that we don't need to fight one another."

"Someone should be taking pictures," Oni Lee said.

"Usher, Eidolon and I all have cameras in our helmets," Taylor said. "We're recording all of this all the time. I think the other two are uploading to the Protectorate in real-time. I considered livestreaming this, too."

"All the hits," Gulliver muttered, shaking his head. "You could have had all the hits with a livestream of Endbringer surgery..."

Pariah had finished trimming away the excess until there was a strikingly plain gray orb hanging in the air. Without all the externalities and distractions, this thing was the Simurgh, the alien weapon of immense psychic power. It was about two feet around, and did not reflect any light. And now the other members of the assembled team were at work. Shamrock and Usher were holding printouts of detailed instructions, most of them diagrams drawn by Oni Lee or Wharf Rat himself. Usher had a hand on the Simurgh-orb, imparting his power to make it glow, and make sure it could survive what was about to happen. Epoch paced in a circle around them, jumping forward and backward seemingly at random, and periodically shouting instructions at the surgeons to correct them, every time he jumped back in time to warn them about a close brush with death. Shamrock just stood by, apparently uninvolved, but her power was working passively to assist them all while she read out instructions from the pages in her hands. Floret and Eidolon were working on something, emptying a huge compressed-gas tank covered with warning labels into what looked like a shiny Mylar balloon. Citrine held her field up, adjusting slightly this way or that when the instructions required a different form of physics.

"Looks complicated," Gulliver said.

"Did you read the instructions they've got?" Danny asked him.

"Nah. Not my department."

"Trust me, you can't see a quarter of what's actually going on there. The Simurgh gave us shorthand instructions, that were meant to only make sense during this procedure. They've already failed and killed us all a couple dozen times, but this is part of the process for getting all the components into the right order. They're going to force that hydrogen into a fusion reaction like a sun, then Pariah's going to turn the silver orb invulnerable to keep it contained. Shamrock, Floret and Eidolon are going to start it spinning and convectioning in a specific pattern, while Epoch forces it through time until it contracts into a teeny-tiny neutron star built exactly the way they want, and then they're gonig to phase it out of sync with our universe and slide it over the Simurgh's core with a perfect fit so that the new thing they made will be forced to replace the old bit exactly in the same place, at the same time as Floret and Pariah reconnect the interfaces so it does not lose connection before or after. They're going to break physics a dozen different ways, playing with fusion reactions and high-energy physics, relativity and the border of black holes, violating hell out of several fundamental physical laws like 'two objects cannot occupy the same space' and 'conservation of mass and energy', not to mention all the time jumping and the fact that a huge part of the plan is only labeled as 'luck'. But apparently, this is a simple tech support job for the sort of computer that the Simurgh happens to be."

"And that's if the Simurgh actually gave you correct instructions and isn't tricking you into blowing up the world," Gulliver pointed out.

Danny blew out a long breath. "Why do you have to think like that? Huh? That kind of negativity isn't good for any of us." He reached over and punched Gulliver lightly on the arm.

"He spends too much time around Taylor," Oni Lee chuckled.

"Besides, I checked in with Dinah before we left," Danny said. "Our odds of losing the world this week dropped to fifteen percent. We're on the right path. I don't take many chances, I just look like I'm taking a lot of chances."

"Would've been nice to have that Marchosias chick working with us on this one," Taylor said, propping an elbow on Oni Lee's shoulder and leaning on him. "Can you imagine? Dinah's predictions, Marchosias's ability to manipulate probability, Tattletale's information, and Shamrock's crazy luck power."

Danny nodded. "It would be amazing. Too bad she was completely bonkers. She would have killed us all if she had been here."

"Is Shamrock dancing?" Taylor asked, staring past the others.

Her father nodded. "Yeah. Apparently having her spend twelve seconds 'performing recreational movements in rhythm' sets off a chain of events that saves four pages worth of steps and explanations. This is... honestly just kind of weird at this point."

"Ya think?" his daughter grinned sardonically, shaking her head. "Dad, they're creating a fusion bomb to jump-start a borderline black hole because they're trusting an Endbringer, and this is the least dangerous thing that's going to happen for the next couple days. Yeah, it's weird at this point."

Gulliver shrugged. "Wonder how they're getting by back home."

"If any villains make a move, New Wave and the Auxilliary team will jump into action," Danny said. "If the heroes try to attack again, they've got orders to surrender peacefully and give name, rank and serial number."

"So, Dad?" Taylor asked. "Where the hell did you find a green yacht? Seriously?"

"Hang on, they're doing it now," Oni Lee said, twitching his shoulder to get her attention.

The Scavengers watched with bated breath while the metal orb was fitted over the Simurgh core. Epoch jumped around rapidly, each time touching one of the participants slightly or speaking a couple words to them. They stopped, they settled, Citrine dropped her amber-colored aura, and Pariah took her hand off the metal sphere, and it tore away in a second as white wings surged out in a coruscation of feathers and angles, growing continuously. The feminine body was the last part to form, sprouting from the center like a flower.

But this time, there was no scream. No amber field, no damping measures, and no siren's song of madness. The alabaster-white winged woman stood above the deck precisely as she had when she arrived. But this time she dipped her chin, and she seemed to look directly at all of them with her eyes, and nodded slightly. It was a small gesture, only visible because her head was the size of a beer keg, and wafted her floating hair around her face. Then Danny finally released the breath, and slumped against the boat rails.

"Okay," he said. "Thank you all for your help, you've done.. you've done amazing things here today, all of you. But this gets worse before it gets better, and we're already at 'close proximity to Endbringer' levels of bad. All of you should probably get on the helicopter and get out of here, the further you are from us the better."

"I think that goes for me too," Gulliver said. "I left my other self back on shore, I'll just be heading out. Sorry, at this point I'm moral support at best, and too likely to get in the way. And unless I slather myself in barbecue sauce and go streaking thorugh Ellisburg, this is already the most dangerous day I'm ever going to have in my life."

"You could try to saddle up the Ash Beast," Oni Lee suggested. The last of the surgeons got onto the helicopter, and the fans began spooling up.

"I could call the Sleeper a weenie to his face," Gulliver countered.

"You could crudely proposition the Three Blasphemies," Oni Lee shot back.

"I could try to break out of the Birdcage," Gulliver grinned back.

"You could call up the head of Cauldron and bitch her out to her face," Oni Lee suggested.

"I could march into Alexandria's office and threaten her," Gulliver tried. The chopper lifted off, heading back west towards shore.

"You could call Dauntless a coward in the middle of two Class-S events," Oni Lee laughed.

"Okay, you two, you're done," Danny said. "And technically Alexandria's office is in Lose Angeles, I was in the Chief Director's office. Now, we need to get this boat back to Brockton Bay, but you don't need to-"

Eidolon walked up from the side, putting his hands together to form a T for 'time out'. "Hang on, you're just gonna drive this thing back? That'll take hours."

"Yeah, we-"

"Boring," Eidolon said, and gestured with one hand. The yacht lifted up from the water, pivoted sixty degrees, and raced off. The Simurgh flew alongside it unhurriedly, but the wind whipping Danny's coat around told him they were going well over a hundred miles per hour.

"Screw this," Gulliver grunted. "I don't get seasick but this is just ridiculous. I'm out." And with that he vanished away.

Oni Lee shrugged. "I'm gonna go run ahead and get Morrigan ready, save us some time," he called out, pictching his voice above the wind. He leaped up, somersaulting over the railing, and exploded to nothing before he hit the water, teleporting far ahead.

Taylor clung to a railing with one hand. "Well, I guess we've got a little time until we get to shore," she said. Danny braced himself against a cabin close by. Eidolon had floated up out of earshot, flying above the ship while he towed it telekinetically.

Danny nodded, pulling off the mask. "We don't get enough you-and-me moments, I think."

"We don't get enough that aren't life-and-death situations," she corrected. "Still, once we deal with Scion, that should be the end of it for a while."

"Gambler was pretty clear about that," he said. "Our last fight, after that our work is done. I'll be glad to retire. This has been an exhausting year."

"It's only been about ten months," she pointed out.

He gave her a fake glare. "Don't nitpick me. This is The Year Of The Rat. And it has been exhausting. What are you going to do when I step down?"

"Probably keep going," she mused. "With however much of the team is going to stick around. I'll try to keep the mind-reading power under wraps, but I've considered that maybe the world could use a telepath. Maybe if people knew that someone can read minds, they'd rethink their decisions. Keep less secrets. Or I could contract out to some judges or police detectives. But that's idle thoughts, I'd rather be a hero with an edge that nobody knows about."

"It's a hard road, you already know that," he responded.

"Still, worth it," she conceded.

"Worth it. I don't have a lot of regrets, even if it's been a convoluted path. I wanted to get the ferry running, to help the people who lived in the Docks. I beat up Lung and the ABB and the Merchants so that I could make a big impression on the Protectorate and get them to get the ferry up and running. Man that was a long time ago. And then I had to protect the Docks so that nobody would start a gang war and kill dozens of civilians. Then Kaiser set me up to fight Crusader, and Coil set me up to fight everyone at the same time. I captured half the Empire, then went after Coil. I got him and drove the Travelers underground, and finally got to join the Protectorate. And then I found out how corrupt the PRT was, and had to do something about that because they wouldn't let me fix up the ferry. More villains, more crooks, Mouse Protector, Leviathan, Director Piggot... then the Druid, and Director Glenn. I took out the Undersiders, survived Butcher, chased out Faultline, and finally got the ferry working. I went after the enforcers, tracked the corruption in the PRT, then Slaughterhouse Nine and Lamia. Starting the Scavengers, cleaned out the city, built the factories, took out Accord, finished off the Empire Eighty-Eight, dismembered the Elite, fixed the city's economy and politics... Now here we are. The Fallen, Morrigan, Contessa, Doctor Mother, Simurgh, Scion. What the hell has this year been?"

"It's been better because you helped," Taylor smiled, holding a hand out for him. He took it and squeezed. "Now then," she said. "Let's talk less about you for a while. Talk to me about Mom."

The Class-S klaxons were already whooping when the boat came in. This time it looked like an orderly evacuation, there was no sign of the chaos that had marked the streets after Leviathan's entrance, or the arrival of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Either the city's residents were adapting better to these conditions, or the heroes he had left behind had taken steps to make sure it went smoothly. The boat splashed down into the water and the ropes moved themselves to tie it up in place, as Eidolon hung in the air, humming and gesturing to control the telekinesis. The Simurgh hovered above the harbor, only fifty feet away from Morrigan. The smaller winged woman stood on a thin rim of fog in the air, and seemed quite untroubled there. Danny was glad to see that his mice and rats had kept themselves in position to scout about, he could see their memories to observe the evacuation, and he felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. When the Endbringer alarms had sounded, the mice had lined up on the streets, using coordinated movements to guide people along. Hundreds of faces had relaxed and eased when they saw that the rodents were helping out. They knew they were taken care of. The rodents gestured them not to run, but to move safely and confidently to the shelters.

Danny had been miles from shore when that happened. This was not smart mice in Boston moving to connect their network with Brockton's. This wasn't mice signing police reports while he was asleep. This was his mice doing exactly what he would have done if he'd been around, using perfect coordination and teamwork like they did for him. It had to be impossible, he knew.

He shook himself out of it. No time. "Okay, Taylor, I'd like to tell you to get to a shelter, but I know you'd tell me off. So, get yourself to the factory. The walls are thick there, you should be well-protected. And, the Scavengers are right there as well, you guys can watch after each other. And... shit, Kurt and Lacey and there too, dammit they're supposed to be in shelters. Looks like a couple dozen dockworkers decided not to go to shelters. Okay, now I definitely need you to keep them safe," he said, shaking his head. "I'll be in the tunnels, I have a leftover console there I can use for communications and coordination. Just a couple miles away, I'll be in touch the whole time. All right?"

"Be safe, Dad," Taylor said, and hugged him. He hugged her back fiercely, then sent her running off. She was traveling as fast as a car on a freeway by the time she was out of sight, and he shook his head as he lifted a manhole cover and exposed the ladder beneath. Those upgrades that Panacea had worked on the girl were really something, and she was getting better all the time.

"Oni Lee, check in," he said.

"Oni Lee here, boss," the other man said. "I'm in contact with Morrigan, she's linked up with Simurgh. We're ready on your mark. But, wouldn't this be easier if you were talking to Morrigan directly?"

"Still don't entirely trust her," Danny said. "It doesn't hurt anything to be extra-safe. So we're routing the communication through at least one non-mental channel of verbal communication, just for safety."

"But not my safety," Oni Lee drawled. "Thanks boss."

"Oh, hush you. If it gets really bad, you can teleport and scrub out anything she does to you. It'll suck, and it'll take a few months for you to recover, but it's better than any of the rest of us," Danny said.

"Nah, I think Oni Lee is right," Salvage said. "That's kind of cold."

"It probably won't come to that," Pariah said. "Besides, too late now to change the plan."

"Thanks, Pariah," Danny said, squatting down to get past some pipes. His rodents were already ahead of him at the console, firing it up. "I'll be in place soon, but I'm ready to go now, Oni Lee. Tell them to call him."

"Got it, sending," Oni Lee said. And he relayed the instructions to Morrigan, who relayed them to the Simurgh, who released a telepathic call she had never used before: a wide-band call that would attract attention from anyone and anything that had enough power to sense it. She had never used it because the only entity that call might reach was her Enemy, the one that injured her and drove her off to lick her wounds for months or years. The Enemy that would do enough damage to activate her programming's self-defense protocols, then the self-preservation protocols, over and over. She had a built-in aversion to using those, a mechanism configured to make her a more effective combatant by creating an incentive to fight without taking structural damage. But it functioned rather like a sense of pain, and the Enemy had hurt her many, many times. Her aversion was run through pattern-recognition protocols, and she knew how to link the Enemy to the pain. And her self-defense protocols had a capacity to pre-empt danger, that served by prioritizing which targets needed to be destroyed in what order. By those standards, the Simurgh hated Scion more than she hated anything else in the world. And with her programming altered, she could make her own evolving decisions about what to do about that. Her natural incliniation was to fight the Enemy, to try to destroy Scion. Perhaps to manipulate the humans into destroying Scion for her. But those that communicated had made it clear that she would be killed before Scion. That would cause her to fail on all of her priority objectives. A partial success was preferable to total failure. Maybe a thousand years from now she would figure out how to kill Scion. She could wait.

And at a house fire in Estonia, Scion heard the call. He set down the child he was saving, well clear of the fire, and floated upwards, turning in place to face the proper heading. And then he leaned forward into the air, and flew off at high speeds. He eliminated the effects of friction and inertia in a small range around his body so that he would not cause any sonic booms or radiation effects that could damage or destroy any houses, vehicles, humans, or the plants and animals that the humans valued as property. The shock of his body moving through the air currents at those speeds could have knocked out aircraft for a mile if he did not dampen it. He did not reach a cruising speed, he accelerated as fast as he could until he was halfway there, then he decelerated as fast as he could. And he could produce a lot of thrust, it took very little time to travel across a planetary surface when he was motivated.

"Scion is present, repeat Scion is present," Gulliver called out before Oni Lee had a chance.

Scion looked at the Simurgh, and recognized one of the beings it was tasked with fighting. He raised an arm, and a golden glow suffused his fingers. He fired blast from that hand, and the Simurgh dodged like it always did. He began building up a larger charge that would be harder to dodge, while a mid-rise building leased to an engineering company toppled to the ground, sinking ino its own foundations as its substructure was destroyed. And then it paused, the charged blast still held in its hand. The Simurgh had sent a message towards it. Not an attack or a trick that Scion would deflect as a matter of course, but a simple stated series of thoughts that bore information.

"We would like to speak to you. A representative of humanity, speaking through an intermediary, is speaking to and through the Simurgh to the being known as Scion. Please confirm that you have received this message."

The golden man dissipated the charge, and lowered his arm.

"I confirm. State the purpose of this interaction."

"We have a question for you."

"Ask your question."

"Are you getting what you want, Scion?"

There was a very long pause before the reply. "No."

"See?" Danny said through the comm channels of his console, the mice pressing the buttons in the coded sequence to project his voice. "Some people just answer the question instead of giving me a hard time. Okay, Oni Lee, next part-"

"We would like to help you get what you want, Scion."

"How?"

"We have an idea for how you can distract yourself and interest yourself indefinitely."

"Why is that what I need?"

"Because you miss her."

"I do."

"You had a mission, and now you can't complete it. You had a plan for your life, you had objectives. You intended to create another generation to further your species. But you needed her for that, your partner. And now she is gone. Scion, I had a plan too. I had a mission, and my partner died," Danny sent his message through Oni Lee to Morrigan and the Simurgh. He hoped that the sentiment and earnestness translated through those contacts. "And for some time I was lost and aimless, trying to find something to do with myself now that my mission was over. But I found a new mission, Scion. One that would never end, one that drowned out all my suffering and all my confusion, and satisfied me even more than my original mission did."

"Tell me."

"I helped people, Scion. Not just saving lives, that is finite. It is limited and temporary, and ultimately futile. And unlike killing people or destroying, it is not boring. You can only kill people once, but you can help each of them a thousand times, and the more you help the more opportunities there are. It is a way to keep yourself from missing her, forever."

"You know my mission. You attempt to divert me from my misison for your own selfish reasons."

"Both my selfish reasons, and your selfish reasons," Danny replied. "If you succeed in your mission, you will have nothing. It will make you feel worse, not better. Without your partner, you cannot conclude yourself, you cannot build a new generation of your kind. All of your options are bad, except one. Help us."

"I promise nothing. Tell me your proposal."

"Build things. Solve problems. Make people's lives better. Show them better ways to do things. Protect them, nurture them. Find the people who are destructive, and find out why they are, and then remove that cause. It is difficult. It requires planning, consideration, foresight and forethought, as well as power. And it is far more rewarding than fighting or killing."

"In your experience. Your species is nothing like mine, your thoughts and emotions are not like mine. What is true of you is not true of me." Scion sent back, the words intense and resentful.

"You won't know until you try."

"And if not? Then I destroy your species and you?"

"You understand that our species is your only chance at recreating your partner. It may take eons for our shards to evolve to that point, but it is possible. A non-zero probability. And the more of us there are, and the more we have to lose, the greater your chances are."

Scion paused, and the silence stretched out, tense and heavy with possibilities. "I won't know until I try," Scion communicated through the Simurgh. And then he turned to the southeast and vanished in a flash that stretched out over the horizon.

All of the assembled individuals stared after that flash with wildly different reactions. The mice and rats seemed to carry Danny's tension and anticipation as they stared from a thousand nooks and crannies. Oni Lee stood on the shore, staring with his face slack in shock. Morrigan turned towards the city with a crafty look on her face, the Simurgh simply held position and waited, implacable.

The Class-S klaxons faded and stopped, and the shelter doors opened themselves. People stepped out into the afternoon, walked back home. Those near the waterfront gawped openly at the Endbringer that hovered harmlessly above the harbor. But stranger sights had been seen in the wake of Endbringer events in Brockton Bay. Benthic and Gulliver, Pariah and Oni Lee walked out of the massive roll-up doors of the factory's loading dock, and stared out and around.

Mice on the console pushed buttons and rang a phone call through to a familiar numbler.

"Alcott residence."

"Mrs. Alcott, this is the Wharf Rat. Could you put me through to your daughter?"

"She's right here, hang on a second."

"Hey, Mister Rat."

"Hello Dinah. I think we did it."

"You're not out of the woods yet. The one-week odds just dropped to ten percent, five years is down to five percent, three hundred years is down to five percent. Never is up to eighty percent. Rounded off, you're welcome," she said, a smile creeping into her voice. "So, it's looking really good, but don't let your guard down yet."

"Thanks, Dinah. I'm probably going to call to pester you a couple more times later."

"I'll be by the phone," she said.

Kurt and Lacie were whooping it up and hugging each other fiercely, while Barry was happily organizing a beer run. Oni Lee stared up and to the right, until his eyes fastened on Morrigan. The winged woman stared down at him, her expression a bit sad or even horrified. He staggered, fell to his right and caught himself on Taylor's shoulder, his hand coming down heavily on the armor plate. "Shit," he murmured. "Something got me. I thought I was okay but.." he shook his head. "While we were connected, I was getting something from the Simurgh, something filtered through. I can feel it..."

"Let me check," Taylor started to say, but he lunged back, shaking his head.

"No!" he cried. "No, I have to get rid of it." And then he dissolved into a burst of white chalky dust. And another Oni Lee stood on top of the roof, staring across the street. Briefly there were three of him, four, five, and then they puffed to dust, leaving one behind. The Asian man stood on the street, barefoot and swaying as if drunken. He reached up and pulled off his mask, his eyes gazing blankly at the ground.

"Shit," Danny whispered through the comms. "Oni Lee is compromised, repeat Oni Lee is compromised."

"I'm sorry," the hybrid Endbringer said through the comm systems. "I'm new to this, I didn't know. I tried to filter them out from each other, but the Simurgh's thoughts, they have a .. pressure... that is hard to resist."

Oni Lee shook his head, blinking rapidly. He vanished in a burst of chalk dust, retracing his steps.

"Keep trying to run, Oni Lee," Morrigan urged. "The contagion might be diminishing."

"Not now!" Danny groaned. "We just prevented the end of the world! This is our finest moment! We have beaten the threat that nobody thought we would ever beat! This is all supposed to be done!"

Oni Lee appeared in front of Taylor, his face etched with strain. And then he reached up, grasped her by the shoulders, gripped her tight, and activated his rage aura. Taylor gasped as she was swept in a tide of red-eyed madness, an anger so absolute that it took her mind away. Her sword was drawn in half a second, run through his throat in another. Oni Lee died, gagging on blood, sagging to the concrete in front of her. She gasped, stifled a scream as her anger vanished and she was confronted with what had happened. She dropped to her knees, and tears burst from her eyes. A quiet mind opened up inside of her own, blank and unmoving, with a twist of electricity lodged inside of it that gnawed at it, pulled at it.

"Benthic!" Pariah gasped, stooping over her. "Are you okay?" Gulliver hovered over her shoulder.

"Oni Lee is in my mind," Taylor panted. "And Morrigan's in his mind, too, or the Simurgh. Shit, it's... The Simurgh's song, we didn't stop it we just confined it, and Morrigan let it out, into herself, into Oni Lee, into... me..."

Pariah stood, staring up into the air where the winged woman stood, looking dispassionately interested. "Panacea, can you fix her?"

"I can't do brains or thoughts!" Panacea answered, her hands trembling. She knew that her answer really meant that she did not dare try, not that she could not succeed.

Panacea looked from Taylor, who was growing pale, trembling in her armor as the Simurgh's cry worked its way through her thoughts. Leet and Uber came running, but they both had the lost eyes of someone who wanted to help and had no idea how. Gulliver appeared at Taylor's side, helping Panacea hold her upright. Danny appeared as a hologram, his face etched with concern and worry and wretched, gut-crushing fear.

They all surrounded Taylor, holding her up, staring up towards Morrigan floating in the air. Behind her, the Simurgh pivoted in the air, facing her directly. The Endbringer did not make a move or shift a feather, but Morrigan's head spun more than a hundred and eighty degrees in a half-second, the snapping of her neck sounded like potato chips crushed underfoot. Then she dropped in place, thudding against the pavement with a singular lack of ceremony. And the Simurgh pivoted back around to watch the ocean. Its plans were closer to fruition, one less obstacle.

"It's gone," Taylor panted, sitting up straight. "Her song, it's gone now, there's nothing growing in my head now. Morrigan must have been the link. I'm fine, I'm fine," she repeated, pulling herself to her feet.

"Thank God," the Wharf Rat sighed into her ear. "I was really worried there. I have nearly lost you a couple times, I would hate for that to ever happen to you, even for a second."

Salvage was staring down at Oni Lee's corpse. "Oh shit," he breathed. "Butcher's dead. Long live the Butcher." His eyes tracked up to Taylor, growing wider.

Taylor stepped back several feet, clear of everyone else, and then vanished in a burst of flames and noise, reappearing thirty feet away in another explosion. She stared at her hands, feeling the growing strength and power that filled her up.

Tattletale swaggered out of the factory interior, grinning. "Looks like you're in trouble," she said. "Anyone that wants Butcher's powers is after you now. You're going to need a team around you."

Taylor shook her helmeted head. "I was supposed to give this up, get back to classes, spend some time training and-"

"Not gonna happen anymore," Tattletale said. "But don't sweat it, I'm watching out for you." She draped an arm over Benthic's shoulders. "Now then, where's the rat man? I wanna talk to him about this team he's built, now that like half the starting lineup is dead."

There was silence from the comms. "I, uh," Danny started, hesitated. "I can't seem to find myself."

"What?" Taylor blurted out a second before Tattletale. "What do you mean?"

The silence drew out a little longer. "Taylor, I... I don't think I made it."

Tattletale turned, staring at the fallen building that Scion had leveled with his first volley, sunk into its own foundations. She bit back a breath, and then said slowly, "Wharf Rat, were you in the storm drains or steam tunnels under Huguenot Street?"

"I... I think so," he said, his voice even smaller, sadder. "Damn."

Taylor's voice rose, nearing hysterics. "What are you talking about? What's going on?"

"Pariah?" the man's voice said. "Tell Kurt and Lacie to hug my daughter. I can't anymore."

Taylor's ears filled with static and she did not even feel herself drop to her knees. She only vaguely felt the two dockworkers wrap her up in their burly arms, holding her as they cried for their friend, her father. And a rush of rats and mice ran from the drainpipes, surrounding her with their furry bodies. They swarmed over her legs, embracing her with their mass as best they could, a pressure and warmth suffusing her as they tried to embrace her en masse.

The darkness of the factory produced several more people, auxiliary Scavengers coming out of shelter now that the klaxons were done. Mockshow stood and stared a minute, then walked away. Madcap bowed his head and murmured some words, then started stripping out of his villain's costume to his tanktop and bicycle shorts, then walked away, already feeling more like Assault than he had since his wife had died. Chariot paused, traded some words with Gulliver, and both of them walked away after Assault. Brian Laborn and his sister stood awkwardly by, shared a glance with Tattletale, then scooted closer to talk to her in low voices. Floret slipped away without a word to anyone, but Wallop and Wordsworth hung around. Wordsworth muttered something ugly and the word floated away to explode harmlessly away from everyone else. Wallop grew his hand to giant proportions and cuffed his partner casually, nearly knocking him to the ground.

"I'm going to need someone to explain how Wharf Rat's ghost is still talking," Pariah said eventually.

"I've got a communications console in the sewers," Danny said, switching to a closed channel to talk to her. "I've got mice running it. I started that before I died. I was concentrating so hard on everything else I didn't even notice my body was gone. God, what kind of... anyway, I've been noticing for a long time that my powers have been working without me. My ability to control rats, that is. That's how I do my infinite multitasking trick: I have been slowly delegating more and more of my power, and even my own mind, to the rats. I've spread who I am across the rats of the city. And when I died, when the real me died, the part of me that was with the rats and the mice took over. If the rodents are networked together, my consciousness has been uploaded into that network."

"For how long?" she asked, keeping her voice low.

"Brown rats that we have here live from two to three years," Danny said. "Most of these are pretty young, so I may have two or two and a half years to go. Though when they do start dying, I might start to ... I don't know, degrade. Right now the repeater rats are carrying my signal, bouncing it between them to keep the network going. And the smart rats are each holding some small part of my thoughts and mind. So my memories and personality are stored, and connected, so I can... act like I'm alive. For a while. Maybe long enough to see Taylor graduate high school. Definitely long enough to say goodbye."

Pariah stiffened up, tears running from her eyes, and Panacea caught the girl to hug her close, to cry with her. Danny disconnected that communications line. He couldn't stand to watch women cry, it hurt him someplace deep. Leet and Uber were leaning on each other. They were both dry-eyed, but their hurting was obvious just watching them. He couldn't turn away, but he could turn his thoughts to something else at least somewhat. On televisions around the city, people watched as Scion swept across the Sahara desert, leaving a trail of golden light that turned the packed sand and dust into soft loam and soil. A mass of clouds was following him, bringing rain to the world's largest desert. It was a good place to start, Danny had to admit. He watched Gambler crying at home, her parents holding her as she told them that the man who rescued her was dead. He watched as Assault, and Gulliver, and Chariot all walked into the PRT offices next to the ruins of the Protectorate Tower, and signed in at the receptionist. The Protectorate would do well with all three of them, he thought to himself. Assault had only left because he was bitter; Gulliver had a hero's heart and would be a credit to himself in their ranks; and Chariot was a tinker and that alone meant a lot to the Protectorate.

"Incoming," he murmured to Tattletale, and she looked around and spotted the figure that was approaching, fast over the rooftops. A half-dozen massive bulky quadrupeds, misshapen but powerfully built, were leaping from rooftop to rooftop, crossing city blocks in seconds. The lead one leaped down at the last second, skidding to a stop nearby as its mistress dismounted.

"I came when I heard," Bitch said, pausing to nod towards Grue and Imp, then Tattletale.

Brian Laborn, Grue, nodded back. "The PRT is going to hear pretty soon," he said. "We should be ready."

"We're going to need money and support," Tattletale mentioned. "Maybe we could talk to the highest-ranking member of the Elite that survived the attack?"

"Who do-" Imp started to say, then stopped, grinned. "Wait, no way! I thought he was dead or in the Birdcage!"

Bitch snorted through her nose. "Not everyone that the Wharf Rat hates gets sent to the Birdcage. Some of them get picked up first."

Tattletale grinned. "Getting the old team together!"

Aisha looked over at Pariah, who returned her nod. "We may be bringing new members in, too," she said.

Bitch looked over at Wallop and Wordsworth. "Even those two can be useful."

Brian looked at the crying, slumped figure of Benthic. "If we're lucky, she'l join us," he said. "She's got the kind of power we've always needed."

Danny chuckled in their earpieces, a sad and rueful sound. "You guys run your team, and run it well. It's time Panacea went back to New Wave, time that Gambler went back to a normal life. Leet and Uber have business to run, Gulliver's finally joined the Protectorate. There's not much of a team left, we never meant to stay together. Not like you guys, you can go the distance. I'd be honored if you'd take Pariah and my daughter, and Salvage, and even myself for as long as I last."

Tattletale grimaced. "Not as long as you think, Mister Rat, sorry."

Salvage shoved his hands into his pockets. "Actually, I was thinking I'd go independent. Maybe take some counseling courses, see if there's any villains out there I could reform and redeem."

Pariah looked up. "What do you mean, 'not as long as you think'?"

Tattletale slumped her shoulders. "The whole structure's unstable," Tattletale sighed, patting the smaller woman on the shoulder. "The source is dead, what's left is just... echoes. It held long enough to save the world, but without the connection between his power and this world, it can't last."

"Maybe we can get Panacea to make a whole bunch more repeater rats for him, so we can keep his network going?" Pariah said hopefully.

"Doesn't stop the signal degrading," Tattletale said, her mouth tight. She turned to Wallop and Wordsworth. "Hey, you two! You've been trained on Chariot's teleporter, right?"

"That's right, slattern," Wordsworth said, the insult sliding from his mouth in an oily cloud that detonated to punctuate his sentence.

"Cool. I've got some coordinates for you to punch in, we're recruiting the Elite into our team," Tattletale said, texting a string of numbers on her phone to his phone. "Now, go, get started."

"Why the hell are we doing that?" Grue asked.

Tattletale looked over at him. "Because Scion didn't make any promises. And right now, our old friend the leader of the Elite can muster up a hundred villains to help us out. Now then, I'm going to call the Protectorate and see how fast they can get here in full force."

The rats swarmed away from Taylor, and Kurt and Lacie held her up, holding her between them. She was vaguely aware that these were her new foster-parents; that's what god-parents were for, after all, and she was an orphan now. She had cried herself out, this new realization did not draw out another burst of tears, but just rang around in the hollowness she was feeling now. She lifted her visor and swiped her face clean, then lowered it again before she looked up at Kurt, then Lacie. "Thank you," she murmured. "Can I-...?"

They nodded and stepped back, letting her alone with her thoughts and her fathre's voice.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I guess this job did kill me. You were right. I should have stayed safe, I should have kept my distance."

She sobbed once, and caught the next one in time to stop it. "You saved billions of lives, Dad. I'm proud of you."

"And you have no idea what that means to me," he replied, his voice carrying a smile despite everything. "And I hope it means something when I tell you that I'm proud of you too, Taylor."

"More than you know," she said, sounding more tired now than distraught. "But at least you stuck around long enough to say goodbye. That's what always hurt the most with Mom, you know. She was just gone, with no time to say the words we need to say."

"You're going to have to wait a little bit," Danny said. "Scion's on his way back."

"Arm up!" Brian Laborn said, swathing himself in darkness as Grue. Bitch swung up onto her dog, and Tattletale dropped back as she produced a handgun. Pariah stitched together a half-dozen lean and quick-looking minions for herself, each one bearing spiked knuckles that gleamed with the influence of her physics-breaking power. A crowned figure in chainmail and silk stepped out of the factory with Wordsworth and Wallop flanking him, and a troop of soldiers at his back. Taylor drew her sword and stepped to the front, measuring her breaths. Flying figures appeared in the air, a fleet of metallic dragons loaded with dozens of armored heroes ready for the fight of their lives.

"You ready for what's about to happen, Benthic?" Grue asked her.

"I need a new name," she said, rolling her shoulders to get the kinks out.

Scion stopped in front of the Simurgh, hovering, glowing. Danny Hebert's daughter Taylor held her ground, waiting for Scion's answer.

The End.

Author's note: I hope you all enjoyed this alternate version of Wildbow's Worm story. I know there will be those who hate the ending, but it would have been hard for me to end it any differently than this. I'm not entirely done with edits, so if the readers find any factual errors or continuity flaws, let me know so I can fix them. Worm is a huge story, a huge setting, and it is hard to keep every detail accurate. I can overlook aspects of it by accident. Likewise, some changes were made deliberately, but I would hope that by now those are obvious in their context. Thanks to everyone that has supported this massive endeavor. This wordcount is equivalent to a full trilogy of novels, and was written in eight weeks, published in seven. And for any of you that really hate the ending, I invite you to write your own. Show me your entries, how you would change what I've changed. Fanfiction is organic and open-ended.

And if any of you want to pick it up from here for a sequel, feel free to adopt it.

This story was written because I read Worm and I had to do it. I read some reddit threads on the subject and hit an idea that gelled instantly in my head, a full story of Danny Hebert and how different everything could have been. And it was a big idea, a strong idea, that wouldn't take no for an answer. I tried to write other projects, but every time I sat down Danny was right there, new ideas spawning all the time like Druid and Taylor the telepath and Oni Lee erasing the Butcher personas and the parallels between the death of Anne Hebert and the death of Eden. Finally I had to open a file and start or it was just going to keep growing. I hope you all enjoyed this for what it is. I seriously considered not uploading it, just writing it for myself and being done with it.

For those that expressed interest in my original works, I've recently started self-publishing on Amazon under my own name. And for any writers who anticipate publishing their own works, I'll tell you that print-on-demand and electronic self-publishing is absolutely the future of literature; stay well clear of anything with a no-compete contract or restocking penalties.

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I've presently got a comedy superhero novella that is the first of a series in progress, a superhero-versus-zombies story that is a lot smarter than it sounds, and in the next few weeks I'll have a contemporary-fantasy young-adult novel added to that site. Now that I'm free to write on my own terms, any ideas I want, there'll be more entries added regularly and often.