Better not linger in her starting place too much longer. Yellow's faster than her and may have already come home to a wreck. Thorn might have a habit of checking up on the place, even, just in case. She's invisible, inaudible, unsmellable - that won't help if he sends someone thorough. Or comes in person.
She sets out.
She's been flying for about thirty minutes after her shopping trip when she falls through a tear and squeaks inaudibly and lands in the middle of -
This is still going to take a couple of days. When she's done with the priority interviews and has a list of her vassals and their powers well underway, she puts her desk back into the wood of her tree for the night. She makes sure they all have places to sleep and access to the food. She puts up a few bulletin board type things - infrastructure projects for which she'd like volunteers (plumbing, internet, electricity that won't require periodically buying fuel), suggestion list for things she should attempt to import, any permissions/order amendments/conflict resolution someone would like to call her attention to. She lights it all up with fairylights against the growing dark and leaves pens around and goes into her tree for sleep.
By morning the infrastructure part is heavily annotated and the list of imports is extensive. She just gave every Tinker in the Birdcage free rein to do stuff, even if it is all basic things. A few projects, the ones that can be done in a cave with a box of scraps, even get completed. (There are three competing plumbing systems by morning, each creating water from thin air or possibly just creating it and each working in completely unrelated ways. Some of Teacher's students are expanding the most reliable of these.)
And how do they feel about being weaned off? (Are any of them absolutely irreplaceable, looking at the other Tinkers she has on hand?)
They do object. They have different reasons, some saying they like having powers more in demand than their own, some saying they've gotten used to their new senses and don't want to go blind, some saying they still need it, and some saying they're just happier now. But all of them say no for one reason or another.
She finishes her interviews.
Internet up yet, or does she have to go to Bet to email Dragon and see how crazed the netizens are about her escapade?
The answer is very. Very crazed. The Protectorate and the Guild either didn't try to cover it up or they failed, and the public now thinks Promise is the world's scariest villain. 096773 alone is big, on the same scale as 133468, and now Promise controls her plus six hundred others. Some opinions are along the lines of "I hope she killed all of them," often accompanied by lists of atrocities committed by particular inmates. Cooler heads are of the opinion that this could be much more humane but now the more dangerous villains have no option between ordinary prison and death.
Promise has almost no popular support on Earth Bet. People talk about how at least now there'll be a much stronger defense if there's another Endbringer attack, but this convinces very few people and is suspiciously conditional.
Promise posts a picture of one of the more photogenic unsuitable Earths she checked in the course of finding Hawthorn to her photo blog and then checks her email.
She's got emails from Quinn, most of which will stay safely irrelevant as long as she doesn't get caught. Some updates from her preexisting sets of vassals, none of whom need her continuous intervention except Noelle. And a polite notification that of course you realize this means war from the person who has since become the former Director of the Brockton Bay PRT.
She emails Noelle. She apologizes for the inconvenience. She is still happy to turn her into a sparrow and back but they may have to work out something cloak-and-dagger in case the PRT decides to ambush her. Or Noelle could come to Hawthorn if she doesn't mind having supervillains for neighbors.
Noelle herself agrees that she might be being tracked, it's what she'd do in the PRT's position. It was still recently that being near Noelle was sufficient reason to be killed by Bonesaw's teammates, so she doesn't have a lot of attachments on Bet. And she's also indestructible, so she's less worried about supervillains than she could be. Hawthorn sounds fine.
Promise emails the replacement director, apologizes for the inconvenience. Asks when and where she can pick up the time-stopping tinkertech she is owed for the most recent gate and if they will be so kind as to not attack her when she does, because bringing a large detachment of supervillain bodyguards sounds like a hassle to her.
It turns out they are kind enough not to attack her. This might only be because EMPing her harmonic flattener and covering her in foam would just end with her activating her self-destruct and getting away, with no results other than tipping her off. She gets her payment with no hostility at all.
Well, then, she can tell Noelle when and where that will be, and invite her to come back with her then.
Noelle, slightly surprised that she gets through that easily, gets through that easily. The Dallons, the other Dallons, and Canary are still on Bet, but everyone who needs ongoing supervision is safely on Hawthorn.
Promise emails Dragon about revising her orders. She has no quarrel with Dragon which is unrelated to the Birdcage and is willing to totally release her, although this does involve Dragon being in a position to hear enforced orders.
Dragon responds with a really interesting life story. Or, well, origin story. She is, she says, an artificial intelligence ("...yes, like a computer program but smarter") and was already operating under some heavy restrictions.
She'd been vetting Promise as a possible way around them all along. Which is kinda flattering. And is why Promise got such a detailed description of the Birdcage: information about what Promise does and does not consider appropriate to do to imprisoned persons was essential information. Dragon wasn't expecting her to do that with it, but the decision of whether to let Promise have her name is already moot.
And it turns out that some of the orders Promise delivered during the breakout were at cross purposes with Dragon's creator's intentions. Some actions Dragon habitually takes are compulsory whether she likes them or not.
And when told to stop taking them, she did.
That said, Dragon does not want to perform extensive experiments on Promise Versus Dragon's Author at this time. She will settle for a small rescindment for the time being while seeing how Promise's... thing... shakes out. She whips up something that will filter out the sound if Promise deviates from the accepted wording. They have a VOIP call. Promise removes the exception from Dragon's freedom to act as she wishes, enabling her to take actions which relate to Promise having broken into the Birdcage.
Promise's thing continues to shake out. Hawthorn is beginning to turn into an actual colony as well as an escape. Quite a few powers are useful for this, and some of the people who have them are willing to use them (probably in an attempt to look helpful-but-not-too-necessary for when Promise decides who to release, but still).
It's not about who's essential. Anyone whose powers may go off involuntarily or who seems to have an excessively twisty turn of mind or who does not seem to have an actual plan for how to use their freedom is held back, but she will give up anybody who seems like nobody will be worse off for their release.
When she finds herself with some downtime she looks in on the forum. Is anyone actually asking questions of her or are they just encouraging each other to speculate?
All of the above. (Mostly speculation, of course. This is still the Internet.) They want to know why she did it, whether she's officially A Villain now or if the Birdcage was a one-off thing, whether she gave specific inmates what they deserved (enough people ask this one that it adds up to half her list), and if she's still going to be healing people. And people still appreciate her photo blog, even now that she's a wanted archvillain.
I considered the Birdcage inhumane. The five hundred and ninety-nine inmates who preferred to volunteer to hand themselves over to a stranger's Master power rather than stay there, this when at the time I didn't even have running water available, would seem to reinforce the point.
I think I am probably legally categorized as a villain at this point but I do not think I am morally one. To the extent law and ethics match I will abide by both. Where they diverge, I have lost patience with the mortal legal system, much to the apparent dismay of my lawyer.
I have not satisfied your revenge fantasies, although some of the inmates were hoping for more outlets for their villainous inclinations than I offered and were disappointed, which will have to content you.
It may be logistically complicated for me to heal more people. I'm not opposed in principle, but the last time I did it the Slaughterhouse Nine showed up, killed and injured and frightened some people who were there for my help, and made my life very inconvenient before I killed and acquired the remaining members. Other villain groups, or Protectorate contingents who think I'd look good on their resume who happen to be feeling lucky, might try something similar; I managed one known-entry-point transit to Bet since the jailbreak but it was a rather tense affair. If anybody has an ambush-proof way for me to do healings, let me know; otherwise it will have to wait until I have a defensive excursion contingent put together which I expect to be able to decisively and with minimized casualties handle anyone who thinks they can take me.
The photo blog will continue to update for the foreseeable future. Let me know if there's anything in particular you want pictures of.
>Slaughterhouse Nine ... inconvenient before I killed and acquired the remaining members
It's not like the villains Promise is keeping aren't already the most powerful faction the public has information on (A forumite coins the term 'Kept' and it catches on until that's the unofficial name), but this little detail doesn't go unremarked. The Birdcaged villains have been out of the public consciousness for a while, but the Slaughterhouse Nine were very much current bogeymen. Everyone's curious about which ones are dead or captured; all the normal channels is saying is that the Nine are defeated. Speculation is that this is because the PRT didn't want to say some of the Nine were safely in the hands of another villain.
Suggestions for healing range from "message Promise a time and a long list of addresses, hope they aren't watching all of them" to "just be invincible and laugh."
And of course people have requests for more Fairyland pictures. (Alongside more doable requests, some of them include stars, eclipses, wildlife...not everyone has caught on to what Fairyland doesn't contain.)
The problem isn't that I can't be invincible; the problem is more that whoever I was healing could be taken hostage, which is what happened with the Slaughterhouse Nine. I worry that a motivated Thinker would be able to corner me at a chosen address and time; it would be a bit less of a concern if I were faster at healing than I am, but I am not.
I killed Jack Slash and Cherish, and still have the Siberian, Bonesaw, Shatterbird, and Mannequin. I never had contact with any others.
That count leaves [two numbers], who haven't been confirmed active since Leviathan and would both be really obvious if alive. Promise gets asked for the full story, since waltzing in and winning sounds like it's not that, but everyone understands that capes often keep details back. On more recent escapades, people want to know what made her attack the Birdcage now instead of earlier or later, whether it's now empty, and what she's doing with the rescuees.
The Siberian doesn't want people knowing she's literate, even if this is a weaker preference than avoiding them knowing she's not mute, so Promise doesn't explain the rest except to say that she had Mannequin's name from the PRT well in advance.
She attacked the Birdcage now instead of earlier or later because this was how long it took for a critical mass of damning facts about the place to accumulate and because founding even a bare-bones colony on an alternate Earth is not trivial. One person elected to remain in the Birdcage. The rescuees are doing what they like, within the constraints of Promise's definition of good behavior. She does not elaborate on whether they are all doing this in the same place.
No one wants to deny that this is more humane than the Birdcage, even with as little information as they have. Who stayed and what do they have against alternate Earths, is the obvious next question, followed by Alternate Earths? Can you open a gate to Aleph? I want to find out if their Star Wars prequels were any good.
Marquis stayed; he has nothing against alternate Earths as far as she knows, but something against handing Promise control of his life, and frankly Promise is surprised he didn't have lots of company. She can't think of any reason she wouldn't be able to gate to Aleph. She has been advised against it but not in particularly strong terms; someone might have to come up with more compelling reasons than Star Wars prequels to get her to do it though.