Panacea taps Promise's hand, and the feeling of having just reappeared in one's tree after being vaporized by an eldritch godling disappears. She gets less tired.

"Do you know what started it? I heard he was going to do this, but it seemed so unbelievable."

"Oh, it's not. I've been leaving people more fit than they started, maybe they can keep going longer, but that's hardly going to make a difference."

Scion has, apparently, started attacking elsewhere. A door opens for people on this world to assist. Panacea goes through and asks, "You coming?"

"Until I think of something better."

Promise accompanies her.

"You can't stop him like you did Bakuda and the rest?"

They arrive in a wide-open area that was recently a city. Fortunately, Scion is still mostly fighting capes rather than geography at the moment. He's flickering in and out, whenever a gate settles from Fairyland and something in need of destroying appears on his earth.

Here on Earth Whichever he's opposed by a large group of Yangban, who can't stand up against him very effectively but can apparently reset themselves whenever a row or column gets eradicated. The Triumvirate comes through a door at approximately the same time as Promise and Panacea. They're accompanied by Lung, winged and larger than anyone has seen him in years. He and Alexandria are missing pieces of themselves. Lung's regenerate, and neither seems to be slowed down very much.

Panacea starts healing the injured. She gives preference to capes, and probably won't have time to move down the list to civilians.

Promise heals Alexandria, since Panacea won't be able to. And Lung, after a moment to assess how oddly shaped he is.

Promise doesn't recognize any civilians, but she can get a handful of capes out of Panacea's queue before Panacea gets to them.

"Scion doesn't count as his name, and I doubt he'd just tell me. ...But I have no good excuse for not having tried asking. I'll need waking up again if this doesn't work, probably," she says, taking off.

"What's your name?" Promise asks him conversationally.

If this works she's going to feel so stupid.

He answers, despite the rudeness of causing Armageddon during a conversation.

Warrior and Counterpart are the most comprehensible pieces.

Scion takes a hit from the blade of an enormous sword, and stops. He grabs the blade, squeezes, and it falls apart. Eidolon and Legend aren't having much more luck than that either.

Role
Identity

Agreement.

Aaaand now Promise is in her tree again. She still feels kind of stupid but not as devastatingly stupid as she would have if something had gone click.

She puts in a new self-destruct - it's her last one - and stumbles back to Panacea and holds out her hand.

And Promise resumes healing capes.

And thinking.

Two is a stupid number. There must be more. They're landscapey enough to gate to. Could she just go get another one and ask it for help?

No. Scion, even trying to destroy everything, is not really on his game. He's not resorting to Master powers or any very exotic Thinker abilities or Trump tactics or Tinker equipment; he has not mind-controlled everyone into lining up for destruction - or committing suicide - the way a Canary combined with any sound- or power-amplifying power could. He's just sort of shooting things. It's unstoppable and awful and cutting an enormous swath of destruction, but Promise cannot assume that a non-depressed non-widowed entity she gates to out of nowhere will stick to blasting her to smithereens if it doesn't like her.

It could get much worse.

Even if she assumes fairy orders are inviolable -

(heal, heal, heal)

- against all possible powers and power conversations, that just means that she'd have to stay under the most constrained orders imaginable, in a sort of Simurgh quarantine, forever. She might not have to go personally - if it would work, a Simurgh quarantine's not more than she'd throw Thorn into to save the world. His favorite consort probably even knows him well enough to do mental sorcery to check, and powers don't necessarily account well for sorcery. But it's not unlikely that the other entity would just decide to wreck Earth itself. Promise doesn't have the impression that respect for mortal life is high on their priority list as a species. And keeping it out of Fairyland would be essential, not only to protect fairies but to allow the evacuees in the Steppes to live.

There should be some way to just - trade with it - but it's just too powerful and untrustworthy, and the fact that she might have things it wants ultimately makes that worse, not better.

Promise heals capes.

Of the capes that go back to fight, a lot die. The next time a smaller fraction will go back. Scion seems content to be uncreatively unstoppable.

He doesn't appear to be untouchable. Alexandria or Lung can sometimes strike straight through him, gold motes trailing behind the exit wound, and Legend can do it from a distance. But Scion heals faster than the eye can follow even if Eidolon manages to disintegrate most of his body. Half the time he ignores them.

A tinker's drones fly up, and the volume between them seems to distort. Scion launches an orb in his characteristic golden light, and they maneuver so that it flies between them, turns around, and flies back at him. After returning another shot and permitting a volley from those on the ground, the drones are the next target. Followed by the tinker.

A ray of deceptively solid light swats Legend out of the sky.

"No idea. You'd have to ask the tinker." Where the tinker used to be standing, there's a pair of boots from which smoke is rising cartoonishly.

Scion disappears again. After a brief pause, doors start opening up again. Panacea stays behind; there are plenty of injured here.

Or less scattered. Gavel, Lustrum, and Acidbath, all from the Kept, join the front line for as long as their various flavors of invulnerability last. Tougher capes that Scion has to hit multiple times seems to be the idea.

Nilbog's creatures are playing the same role, providing cover for humans wherever an attack looks blockable. Which isn't often. Bonesaw upgrades some of them until they look even more monstrous and dangerous, and once in a while one rams into Scion before being disintegrated.

She looks like she's having fun.

Think, think. Is there any way to just go get help from something in Scion's weight class? Gates are novel, gates alone would be a big deal to something that normally has to travel through space even if it can do it very fast, its very power and untrustworthiness are currently costing it gates, if it were smart it would have decided to never be the sort of thing that ought to scare useful people like Promise away - aaaand if it's not smart, if it just runs on Thinker powers or alien intellect or has never conceived of a useful person like Promise, it will squish her the moment she gets near. Dead idea.

She heals her Kept; she heals the Triumvirate. She barely looks over her shoulder to see where they are; she's got a flattener (she's running a little low on flatteners, although she still has probably enough as long as she doesn't have to go talk to and get creamed by Scion four more times).

No more of those drones are forthcoming. "Can't anybody copy the little swarm of drones?" Promise asks no one in particular.