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Tree branch: check. Assorted lightweight seed-bearing fruits and nuts: check. Other seeds: check. Water bottle, for when she has to veer away from the river: check.
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 -
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imeanforever
imeanforever
"A geographical-style description of the place and a complete accounting of the evidence that he definitely is planning to destroy the world and you aren't just murdering a depressed widower who killed all three Endbringers."
wormcan
"He isn't planning to destroy the world. 'Depressed widower' is too anthropomorphic to be accurate, but isn't wrong.
We know that all the precogs we have access to predict a large fraction of the human race dying in the next few years to decades, and none of them can see the cause. With the Endbringers gone, that leaves very few other candidates. We know he's the source of powers, and that powers feed off conflict. He wanted Earth at war.
We know he was planning to destroy Earth, every Earth, as an ordinary part of his species' life. Contessa saw that before she and I killed his counterpart, interrupting their cycle.
And if this is all a case of mistaken identity, if Scion is somehow not the second entity, then the golden man in the sky will be untouched by all of this."
"Door to Hawthorn." The Doctor steps through.
We know that all the precogs we have access to predict a large fraction of the human race dying in the next few years to decades, and none of them can see the cause. With the Endbringers gone, that leaves very few other candidates. We know he's the source of powers, and that powers feed off conflict. He wanted Earth at war.
We know he was planning to destroy Earth, every Earth, as an ordinary part of his species' life. Contessa saw that before she and I killed his counterpart, interrupting their cycle.
And if this is all a case of mistaken identity, if Scion is somehow not the second entity, then the golden man in the sky will be untouched by all of this."
"Door to Hawthorn." The Doctor steps through.
imeanforever
"Are there strategic options that allow me to try to talk to him before attacking?" Promise asks.
wormcan
"The problem there is that we don't know how he would react. We don't know what might make him stop acting as a hero. In theory that only means that we need to be prepared to fight him quickly if he does snap, but no decrease in the chance of success would be worth it.
Before we try, there is something you need to see. Door to Cauldron." A rectangle appears in thin air, light streaming out from it. "It's in here."
Before we try, there is something you need to see. Door to Cauldron." A rectangle appears in thin air, light streaming out from it. "It's in here."
wormcan
"The body of Scion's counterpart. Body is perhaps the wrong term, as from a human perspective it's more like a place than a corpse, but it's also the best description I can give of what our destination looks like."
wormcan
The door disappears behind them. They're standing in a tapestry of meticulously designed human body parts, all colored a soft gray, every arm or face looking artistically designed and repeated in incomprehensible numbers of variations. The pieces are alien imitations of a human body, but they are all placed in ways that look gentle and elegant.
There are walls, artificial ones, but this place is vast. It extends for miles, with all of it filled by what might as well be beautiful marble statues of human body parts. Near where the door deposited them, enough pieces come together to form most of a humanoid shape. Long-haired, no discernible sex, the same gray as all their surroundings. It's held up by the unfinished parts of its body: two arms and a leg trail off into fractal patterns, the same is true of its back, and its head is hanging. The fractal pieces stretch out into space, covering more area and becoming thinner until they gradually disappear into thin air. Nothing else is holding up the humanoid figure.
"It was making this body when we killed it. As you can see, it's Scion, with a different color scheme and body design. All this, around us, is what his real body looks like. A forest where all the trees are made of the same material as humans. His will be alive, and gold instead of gray. And his won't have pieces disappearing into nowhere like this does. Those are vanishing into worlds beside this one, but I believe that when an entity lands safely it places itself on a single earth. Contessa spoke to Glaistig Uaine, who claimed—correctly—that no powers from either entity can reach the world where he keeps his garden. A world, singular.
Will you be able to gate to it?"
There are walls, artificial ones, but this place is vast. It extends for miles, with all of it filled by what might as well be beautiful marble statues of human body parts. Near where the door deposited them, enough pieces come together to form most of a humanoid shape. Long-haired, no discernible sex, the same gray as all their surroundings. It's held up by the unfinished parts of its body: two arms and a leg trail off into fractal patterns, the same is true of its back, and its head is hanging. The fractal pieces stretch out into space, covering more area and becoming thinner until they gradually disappear into thin air. Nothing else is holding up the humanoid figure.
"It was making this body when we killed it. As you can see, it's Scion, with a different color scheme and body design. All this, around us, is what his real body looks like. A forest where all the trees are made of the same material as humans. His will be alive, and gold instead of gray. And his won't have pieces disappearing into nowhere like this does. Those are vanishing into worlds beside this one, but I believe that when an entity lands safely it places itself on a single earth. Contessa spoke to Glaistig Uaine, who claimed—correctly—that no powers from either entity can reach the world where he keeps his garden. A world, singular.
Will you be able to gate to it?"
imeanforever
"...Probably. I can't normally gate to people as targets, and whether this is enough of a landscape feature to get around that requirement, I don't know."
wormcan
"The target will be larger, since Scion's garden with luck won't be spread across realities as we feared. That earth might even have no landscape at all other than this."
imeanforever
"Somebody who can operate without air would be useful to double-check it, then. All I did when I was finding Hawthorn on the 'does it have atmosphere' question was stick a finger through. I can manage it with Kept but for information security and my little preference for volunteers."
wormcan
"We can manage that part with technology. We can't manage getting there, or, as of very recently, convincing the world's most destructive Tinker to remove a planet."
wormcan
"She's not necessary, but would be a first choice. If not her, the Elite have a villain who could do it eventually, and Eidolon's power might or might not provide something."
imeanforever
"I mean, I can probably sell her on 'hey String Theory, want to wreck a planet', I was just checking."
wormcan
"I'm sure you can. Tell her whatever resources she needs will be provided, and you'll probably have other Tinkers begging to join."
wormcan
"Excellent. All that really matters is whether you can get there; every other ability is replaceable.
And I think you should open us a gate to Fairyland. Feel free not to tell us where it is, but if you die I don't want to lose the possibility of creating gates."
And I think you should open us a gate to Fairyland. Feel free not to tell us where it is, but if you die I don't want to lose the possibility of creating gates."
imeanforever
"...I can't die," Promise says. "I am immortal. If I am physically obliterated I will reappear a couple of minutes later, intact, in a different outfit, groggy, and pissed off. If I am less than physically obliterated you should be able to heal me on the spot if you have anyone handy who can heal."
wormcan
"You can't die by having your body destroyed. If you get trapped in a loop repeating the same six seconds over and over? Or have your ability to form conscious thoughts stripped away? There are ways to end up beyond our ability to help without also being destroyed."
imeanforever
"Then don't use the word 'die'. If I am irretrievably incapacitated what good will a hidden gate to Fairyland do you?"
wormcan
"Tell someone to pass on the information if you're ever effectively dead. We enslave a sorcerer—sending Contessa, not Eidolon—and not everything depends on your availability to gate to Scion. With any luck this will never come up, but contingency plans are often unpleasant ones."
imeanforever
"I'll borrow a gate-capable one of Peak's sorcerers and keep them in Hawthorn; will that do?"
wormcan
"It should. The advantage of Fairyland is that it seems to be strictly impossible for Scion or parahumans to get there on their own. Two points of failure is almost certainly enough, but it's still a risk, however small."
imeanforever
"If I leave a gate open it is not impossible for people to get there," Promise says. "Actually, if just a gate, any gate, will do, some powers can destroy gates; you could de-pair one of the pairs I sold the Protectorate. Do we have an approximate timeline? The gate destination won't be flat and may take a while to settle."