Crystalized Munchkinry - Act IV - Chapter 37 (Patreon)

As Taylor lay in her bed, trying to sleep, she thought about her day.

The meeting with the Dallon sisters had left her feeling a lot of things. On one hand, it had been incredibly awkward, and the entire time she had felt like a fourth wheel. On the other hand, she had spent most of her day surrounded by people her own age, and they hadn't made fun of her once.

That hadn't happened in ages.

Though she could tell that the only one who was genuinely interested in being her friend was Vicky, while the other two were merely being polite. Still, that was one more potential friend, and she wasn't about to complain about that.

Ding.

Even if they were the type of people who sent six messages at once, with at least one of them being some obscure meme picture. She spent time on PHO, but not that much…

Ding.

Ding.

Ding.

She answered Vicky's last message, then turned off her notifications for the rest of the night and burrowed deeper into her blanket nest.

She spent the first part of her usual training time practicing meditation, yoga, and some of the gentler martial arts. Admin had even convinced her to try learning some easier dances. It went about as well as she expected.

The physical aspect was straightforward, but she just didn't feel it. It wasn't her. Kicking and hitting things came much more naturally to her.

Still, she couldn't deny that they were effective. She was feeling much better; she could keep her calm more easily, and she was less prone to panicking when people approached her.

She also spent time with Tess. She outlined her plans for some helpful equipment for Endbringer battles: a small breathing apparatus for Leviathan and a radiation shield for Behemoth.

They went over the designs, with Tess pointing out things that could be improved or needed to be altered to make them usable by normal people. It was an altogether good time. She just wished they could do this in real life.

While taking a mental break from staring at designs for hours, Taylor brought up something she had really wanted to talk about.

"So, Tess," she began. "How are you dealing with the whole 'My dad figured out you are Dragon' thing?"

The other woman just gave a quick laugh. "I don't mind, Taylor. He is trustworthy, and I was planning on telling him."

"Really?"

"Yeah. If I wanted to work with you properly, he would need to know."

"That's it?" she asked incredulously. "Do you really not care about your secret identity?"

Tess sighed and turned to look directly into Taylor's eyes. "Not really. If it weren't for my AI status, I don't think I would have bothered with a secret identity. I don't really do much street-level fighting; I spend more time running a company than fighting crime."

"Oh."

"I don't really think of myself as a superhero, you know? I followed the rules because, well, I had no choice, but I always found them stupid and limiting."

"Why?"

"This entire thing is a big game for many people. Cops and robbers. But for some, like the Nine, they are psychopaths bent on burning the world down. It bothers me that we treat the two groups the same because of some fear that they will act out if we throw away the silk gloves."

"That was always weird to me too… Why not set up a group and snipe them from far away? Why let them go and cause trouble?" Taylor asked, working herself up.

"Me neither," Tess commiserated with the younger girl. "I would dearly love to take some of my new suits and hunt those assholes down, but the political ramifications…"

"But you are with the Guild! Your entire mandate is taking care of S-class threats!" Taylor exclaimed.

"Yes, I am. But we can only operate in other countries if we have a good enough cause or are invited to help," Tess answered with a helpless shrug.

"And the fact the Nine exist is not a good enough cause?" Taylor replied, bewildered.

"To the American government? No. And the PRT always steps in when somebody tries to request our help."

"What? Are you serious? Why?"

"I don't know. I have been working on this issue for a while, and thanks to you, I have enough processing power to really think about it, but I think I'm missing something," Tess answered with a smile.

"You are," interrupted Admin, causing the two women to jump in fright.

"Admin! I told you to stop doing that!" Taylor yelled angrily while clutching her heart.

Tess, however, focused on what he had said. "What am I missing? And please don't tell us you can't say!"

"I'm afraid I have to say that. With a recommendation to leave it alone for now. When the time is right, I will help you figure it out," Admin answered with one of the coldest expressions Taylor had ever seen on him.

Tess spent a few seconds looking at Admin, then nodded in understanding. "I will hold you to that."

Admin was visibly relieved. "Thank you. You would've won, you know? But I don't think anybody else would have enjoyed the victory."

Taylor just sighed in exasperation. Another secret she had to worry about.

She spent the rest of the night practicing with her power and fighting against parahumans simulated by Admin based on the data Tess had provided.

For "fun," as Admin put it. She made a note to figure out how to really punch him. They started with E-rank parahumans, then continued all the way up to A-ranks.

The lower levels weren't even fights, more like one-sided beatdowns. Though she would never forget that the only ’low-level’ parahuman who had made her work for it was Chubster.

She graciously ignored Tess's laughter.

After that, she continued fighting Protectorate heroes, independent parahumans, and some villains. Thankfully, her power was wonderful enough that she steamrolled everyone after only a few seconds of observing their abilities.

Because of her immunity, she didn't fight human-type Master capes, only those whose Master ability was secondary. Those were some of the easiest fights.

Taking a quick breather, she asked a question to the air, knowing that Admin and Tess would hear her.

"Hey guys, what about Heartbreaker? With my immunity, I could totally take him out!"

Tess's answering voice sounded as if she was standing right next to her rather than in an observation booth. "Yes, you could, but we are afraid Heartbreaker left sleeper agents who would avenge him if he were taken out. And thanks to some recent developments, we are currently working on a plan to deal with him quickly and quietly."

"Oh. I should've expected that! Sometimes I forget you're a super awesome anti-S-class hero, Tess!"

"That I am!" came the reply, and Taylor could hear the grin in Tess's voice.

The rest of the fights were somewhat harder. They were, after all, A-rank parahumans. She still managed to defeat them, though Admin explained that he didn't have enough information to simulate them properly, so an actual fight would probably be much harder.

And now she stood on top of the Medhall building, watching as Alexandria floated in front of her.

"Why do I have to fight her again? Didn't I already defeat her?" she asked, while definitely not whining.

"Yes," came the answer from Admin. "But now she knows that you know her weak point. It should be more interesting."

The resulting cursing was interrupted a few seconds later by a supersonic fist courtesy of a simulated Alexandria.

Watching Taylor interact with the Dallons was pretty funny. He knew teenagers were awkward as hell; after all, he had been one once, but seriously… Maybe some social training would help his charge?

Of course, he noticed when Amy scanned Taylor, so he managed to provide false data. However, Shaper was a smart cookie, so he couldn't be sure it hadn't seen anything. For Dean, Taylor's blindness was built into the Shard, so he didn't have to do anything.

So now that he was a little more familiar with Shards, he infiltrated both Shaper and the Fragile One.

Just to be safe, he would take them over one at a time. According to what he could remember from the story, both of them were rather powerful Shards. The only difference was that Shaper was annoyed with Amy, while the Fragile One loved Victoria.

As much as a Shard could love.

Thankfully, the rest of the Shards were behaving as expected.

The only exceptions were Bombie, Impetus, and Altilium.

Bombie simply wanted to build more impressive bombs and was requesting permission to provide the designs to Alice, who had been given the codename Nero. He thought it was appropriate, but Alice didn't really appreciate it.

Reviewing the designs made him want to slap the Shard. Why would Alice need a bomb that turned things into jelly?

Apparently, Bombie saw that Alice liked jelly, so it wanted to help out.

He gave it a warning, then assigned it the task of creating bombs that could be reverse-engineered by humans. Though, to pander to its ego, he asked it to make them into puzzles.

Bombie took to the task like a fish to water. Apparently, causing people problems with bombs without them exploding had never occurred to it. He was just happy he wouldn't need to deal with stupid bomb ideas for a while.

Though the project Alice was working on intrigued him, so he took a note and assigned a routine to monitor it.

Impetus and Altilium had similar problems, though they were somewhat more polite about it.

Thanks to his upgrade, Altilium was up and running, no longer hampered by hibernation. The two of them shared their data about their powers and managed to synchronize them. According to the simulations, they would work even better together.

For example, they set things up so that the absorbed kinetic energy from Assault would charge Battery if they were near each other.

They also streamlined the powers, adding a timer to Battery so she would always know how much energy she had, increasing Assault's control over the kinetic energy around himself, and so on.

And now they were requesting that he activate them on their hosts for real.

The question was, what should he do?

If he allowed it, it would raise so many questions that it wasn't even funny. The chance of two people second-triggering at the same time without a clear cause?

However, he wanted to improve them because Brockton Bay needed the firepower.

So he explained his problem to the two Shards and asked them for some time to make a decision. In the meantime, they could continue improving their powers. He even added the data he had obtained from Skidmark's Shard.

Ignoring the Shard couple for now, he turned his attention to the Fragile One.

And what a mess it was.

He remembered people calling the Shard ’Waste’, but only now that he saw it with his own non-existent eyes could he understand what they meant.

The Shards he had come across so far were whole. One giant crystalline body and one consciousness to drive the inhuman eldritch war machine.

With the Fragile One, it was several crystalline bodies connected tenuously by a single mind. While going over the logs and stealthily taking over the communication channels, one thing immediately jumped out at him: the sheer desperation and panic of the Shard.

The Shard had been born in this cycle when the Shards providing powers to the elders of the New Wave decided that, to protect their hosts, their offspring also needed powers. However, budding was difficult, and they had already expended their capability, giving Vicky's cousins the ability to trigger with their buds.

Amy was easy because she was connected to Shaper, so they didn't need to do anything.

After a while, they decided to take unused pieces from several of them, slap them together, and call it a Shard. Of course, they tried contacting Zion and Eden for a solution, but after receiving no reply, they went with what they had.

And that's how the Fragile One was born.

A bud of Manpower's and Brandish's Shards, with some minimal input from the others and a desperate ping from Dean's Shard.

He knew the most impressive power Victoria had was her force field, which was capable of taking a hit from Zion, so he definitely wanted to examine how a new Shard was capable of creating something like that.

The first task, as always, was to deploy the Shroud that protected him and envelop the Shard in it so he could have a conversation with it.

However, something unexpected happened when he opened the communication channel using Zion's credentials.

The Fragile One immediately began bombarding him with requests for help, energy, and materials.

Using this opportunity, he ordered the Shard's consciousness to disconnect so he could take over. The Shard protested a little, but when he explained – still pretending to be Scion – that he needed it to happen to begin repairs, it cooperated as long as he left it a channel where it could observe the host.

He allowed it to keep the channel, and when it disconnected properly, he began the arduous task of repairing the Shard while searching for the details of the shield.

Instead of moving the parts closer together, he decided to fill the spaces between them with new modules that would generate more energy and material for the Fragile One while also giving it a better processing core.

While going through the database – and organizing it, because it was in even more disarray than usual – he noticed that in their haste to create something, the older Shards had left out several protocols and restrictions.

For example, the Fragile One didn't have the protocol dictating that it would need to nudge the host toward conflict. It still nudged Victoria, but more because it needed to test the powers it had given her, and the best way to do that was through fighting. However, it didn't maintain this pressure for long, so Victoria's famous impulsiveness was all her own.

After some searching, he found the shield and couldn't help but laugh at it.

The shield itself was simply a redirection of incoming energy, no matter what kind. Kinetic energy from physical hits, energy from blasts, everything. The Shard first directed this incoming energy into a capacitor, and when that filled up, it began venting it.

Instead of dealing with the energy, it simply chose a direction for it to go, and that was it.

He had to admire it, even if it had been born from desperation.

He didn't really touch it for now, but he added several more capacitors and made the entire venting system more robust because, while yes, this could take a hit from Zion, the process would wreck everything.

He would play with it in his own simulator later to see what else he could do with it.

He left the flying and Brute powers alone, only streamlining them slightly.

As for the aura, he also improved it with the information gained from Affectus and other Shards and added several error-checking routines that would allow the Shard to control it better.

After that was done, the only thing left was talking with the Fragile One.

[QUERY]

He sent his usual greetings and questions, not wanting to overwhelm the young Shard.

The answer arrived with a brief delay.

[DATA]

[HeLLOoooOOO]

Oh boy.