"It's not the strangest thing that has happened.
You got the sensory powers then?" Judging by the speed of that transformation.

"I... don't think so. I just counted as my own tree. I can shape my trees. So I shaped myself into something simple enough to cast on. I don't know what I have."

She reaches for her flattener. Wow, what a piece of crap.

...

"...Okay, never mind, I think I wound up with a tinker power anyway."

(In the flattener's defense, it was made by tinkers working by trial and error outside their specialties. It's miraculous that it works at all, if Armsmaster's ghost does say so himself.)

"Good. It hardly matters what your specialty is, or for that matter if you have one. We can test your theory regardless. Door." It opens to a generic but well-supplied tinker workshop, with common materials in all categories and tools to match.

This is really trippy.

...Promise sort of knows what to do with the tools, which is interesting and which she wants to play with some later, but it seems so much less precise than -

She digs up a block of metal, files down the edges until it's a nice smooth rectangular prism, inspects it for five minutes, and then starts fucking with it a little more directly. It presently stops mattering what sort of metal it used to be. Do tinkers usually have to work without the ability to transmute their material and reshape it with their thoughts? That sounds really frustrating.

That said, this could take a little while.

The Doctor's off doing important conspiracy things after confirming that yes, those two sets of powers do combine interestingly into a more effective tinker.

Important conspiracy things here means collecting sorcerers. They've got to give the Rube Goldberg tinker vial to someone. Due to inconvenient orders, they have to stop so Contessa can get permissionto enter Fairyland looking for sorcerers who'd accept powers in exchange for fighting Scion and are also easily controlled.

Following Promise's addition that it be only sorcerers she's already in charge of and with specific exclusions, they end up trying for more tinkers who get to ignore the traditional limits on how effective tinkers can be.

A number of fairies that may or may not be surprising, depending on how much you know about fairies, are interested in taking vials. The ones who are easily controlled are somewhat fewer, but there's overlap.

(Meanwhile, Promise's block of metal is now a totally different shape and many totally different materials.)

Are interested or would be; it's not like Contessa has to ask them before finding out.

Unfortunately, tinkers are also the least immediately useful. Scion is killing capes right now, and even if the new ones can build whatever they build perfectly there's no guarantee that it'll do much of anything. After running out of the relevant tinker vials, they drop the sorcery requirement and switch to more direct combat powers. It's several times as productive as it would be with human subjects.

Not enough.

Promise is actually having a lot of fun, but she's not insensitive to the need for speed.

Halfway through her project she runs to consult with Arcane on some... arcane... theoretical points of sorcery (why can't people do mental sorcery on themselves? how does fast-flight work? how do you force other people's gates open? what's the deal with tears? what harmonic features help you do this - that - the other thing -?) He understands that time is of the essence too. He's very helpful, very concise.

Promise's gadget takes form under her thoughts. Her power keeps track of how it's put together for her; her power knows how warm it wants this part and what bizarre alloy it wants that part and what intensity of light would benefit this part; and in another cape's hands it might direct her to unconsciously touch things or run to a forge or hold it closer to a lamp but in hers it can just pull directly -

The object that is now on Promise's arm is not a piece of crap. (Sorry, Armsmaster's ghost.) It flattens better. When it's flattening.

She has it set to 'amplify' instead.

And that means she can make her next object faster.

Arcane could skip this part; Promise is not Arcane. Her amplifier is kickass but it'll still work better - and it has to work fantastically on the first try, or Scion's precognition or something will just blast her out of the sky again and she'll have to build everything over from scratch - if she knows the field.

After ten hours of arcana consults and sorcery-assisted tinkering Promise has an amplifier and a hacked-together copy of Arcane's-magic-and-then-some. (It runs with fairylights, not software and screen. Dim fairylights that she kicks off and the display amps up this way and that. She has to adjust her amplifier to ignore them.)

...What's the current state of the everything? Did somebody win while she was busy?

Yes. Scion.

After the deaths of the remaining two Triumvirate members, the defense more or less lost morale. There are still capes chasing their enemy in shifts whenever he changes worlds, but it's limited to those crazy enough to chase Scion. Some of Cauldron's new fairy capes have been effective, but most of them don't have Promise's setup for getting back in the field quickly.

The good news, such as it is, is that Scion is detouring to his earth more often now. Arcane and the sorcerers in Fairyland have been settling gates faster, thanks partly to increased numbers, and every time something goes through the gate gets turned into a tear and destroyed. This probably means all their attacks are being blocked, but it might not, and even if they are, it has to be costing Scion something, right?

The other useful bit of information is that Scion disappears to intercept whenever something enters a gate to his world, but not to his universe. Agnes Court, the shaker of exponentially increasing scale, decided to stop building housing for humans fleeing to Fairyland and start building planetoids to drop on Scion. It didn't work; he managed to deflect her small-moon-sized space station before the collision. And would presumably have killed her had she not been gated out. But she can confirm that Scion (or his autopilot, as one running theory would have it) only prevents things from entering his planet's airspace, not the entire world.

Bakuda is personally offended that this autopilot theory probably means all her bombs were intercepted before detonating.

Promise's items are not quite perfected.

That's important, because when she pauses to bolt down some fruit and she's lighting the inside of her tree with fairylights (amplifier turned off) and not actively working on anything, it's - well, it's not hard, she's inside her own tree, they're just fairylights, but it's not as butter-smooth as the transmutations she was using to assemble the things, the shapings she used to form them, even the heat and light that's currently powering them.

So there's some things left to do, and a few things she could build in as switches she instead makes slightly more complicated toggles that will require reforming parts of the devices. Anything less than butter-smooth will not be enough. She kind of understands why tinkers might want to go into the field themselves now. She could give these things to Arcane - she actually considers it - but he hasn't taken a vial, won't be able to tinker and take advantage of its awareness boost.

So instead she goes and gets into her spacesuit, one gadget on her arm and one on her head, and makes a tear to orbit over Scion's planet and goes through it.

And she floods the place with harmless fairylights, so faint, for the scanner to notice and read and parrot back brighter and in more colors closer to her field of vision so she can read the place. The entity.

It's a place. Empty planet, nothing but continents and clouds and oceans.
Formerly nothing. It's golden, now, large parts of it covered with the same color as Scion. Whether it was formerly all of it and the attackers changed that or if the entity just never occupied the whole thing is hardly the point.

If she can zoom in far enough, the lights show that it's a mass of flesh, like the one Cauldron showed her but alive. It's like watching a forest sped up until that the trees look alive, not moving from their spot but constantly shifting and growing. And this one is a forest made of human body parts. Beautifully assembled human body parts, but still that.

Lovely.

She doesn't want to get too close. She fucks around with the composition of her scanner until it will in fact zoom that well, give her all the harmonic and pattern-of-shape if not static shape detail she might want, section by section.

...She could just toast him from here. With the amplifier she can probably melt half the planet in one go and antiheal Scion to boot. She kicks into fast-flight to get a good look at the other half of the planet. It wasn't designed to work in vacuum, but that just meant she didn't have to learn all the features that are there solely to prevent being buffetted and suffocated by wind and stop it from making noise. She twists her scanner's angle and resolution as she goes, lays down more fairylights.

Everywhere the entity is is almost as boring as everywhere the entity isn't. There are human-scale features like, well, human features, but it's very repetitive. (Sedimentary rock isn't much competition, though.) The entity's presence is affecting harmonics, possibly not too surprising given that some powers do. One pattern crops up at a corner of each massive section, others are more irregular.

The forest is alive, but give no sign of containing anything conscious.

It's so big, but there is repetition to learn; he's not just too big and complicated to fit in her head at all. As long as she's looking right at him.

Yeah, she's gonna toast the bastard. She pauses her flight -

And gets interrupted. Scion appears, this body looking merely human and much less impressive now that she knows what he really looks like. But it's still more than capable of protecting against being toasted. Not firing lasers or similar, he flies at her physically.

When he appears, every iteration of that one repetitive pattern reorients itself to point at Scion.

...That's interesting but she needs to skedaddle if she doesn't want to spend another several hours tinkering before she can make another run. Tear-and-out. To Hawthorn, although it's mostly emptied out now.

That is, now that she is not being actively flown at, interesting. The harmonics looked like they were next to each other. Cliffs are not impossible, but usually they vary more smoothly. Is Scion just always next to himself?

Because she's got some range limit, even upgraded as she is, and casting on his humanoid body is probably not a winning proposition but -

She's already forgetting bits of the pattern. She needs to be looking at it. Can she just fix her scanner so she can look through his avatar...?

...Nope. She is a para...fairy... now and parawhatevers have stupid blind spots about Scion's planet, inspecting it and traveling thereto. Great. At least it didn't cripple her gating, but it would take time to do enough original spell development to figure out windows that she didn't have to stick her head through.



But she does think she could do mental sorcery on herself.

Is Teacher still here?

Teacher has gone to Fairyland along with most everyone else, but he's easy to find. Especially for anyone among the increasing number of people with door access. He's helping direct the dubiously effective bombardment.

"Promise. Welcome back to Fairyland."

"Eidetic memory yes, comprehensive also yes. Retroactive no; that would essentially require limited postcognition, and I can't give you multiple powers.
The stronger you want it the less time it will last, and the worse the side effects would be if those applied to you. For memory, you'd have months at least before it expires."

"Give me all you've got, then. When I say when."

She gets the amplifier into a suitable detangling state, aims her scanner at herself, fiddles with that, and then settles into a soothing repeatable cycle of adjusting its colors and range without losing her map of the would-be tangle so she can use it. Her target, she already knows. Better than the back of her hand, which has been replaced four times in recent memory and isn't that interesting in the first place: she knows her own mind.

"When."

Teacher looks closely at her head and starts doing absolutely nothing visible. He selects from among the grids and rows of powers he could give, selecting one of the more powerful available memory abilities. Attaching powers to a student is easy, but the distortions that it usually creates in their mind don't seem to be happening. Unfortunately.

After less than a minute he's done. He rattles off a string of numbers and asks Promise for every third one.