Lorica lands in sentinels!mutant world
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The two girls exchange looks. 

"Time to head east, I guess."

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"Cool. Do you ever run into other survivors or are they sparse enough that we're not likely to find them anytime soon?"

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"We run into other survivors now and then but they've all been non-mutants and they didn't want to take the risk of hanging around Sentinel bait."

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"Are they like, towns, or like individuals roaming around?"

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"Oh, small groups, Sentinels make quick work of towns."

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"Okay. Well. I'll build my own robot army and wreck this one's shit and then there can be towns."

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"Yeah. The way you escape Sentinels if you're not, like, us, is to be in a group bigger than your average group of Sentinels and scatter when they find you. Then the survivors regroup later."

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"That doesn't sound sustainable."

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Shrug. "Sentinels are bad."

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"I know, but that sounds like it shouldn't have been going on very long before it just didn't work any more. How long did you say it's been like this?"

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"The Sentinels have been around for eleven, twelve years, but they will in fact preferentially target mutants, and we're a lot harder to kill than baseline humans, even with the adaptability thing. I don't know how long it's been the case that they've mostly been left in peace to terrorize everyone else."

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"Mkay. Fuck. It's practically a United-States-sized Simurgh quarantine."

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"Simurgh quarantine?"

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"Uh, Earth Bet has three giant monsters that wipe a chunk of a major urban area off the face of the earth several times a year. There's the Simurgh, who's telekinetic and has a mind-affecting song and is also so insanely precognitive that you can't let a survivor who's been near her too long live because they'll turn out to be set up somehow to do something awful weeks or years later. If she hits a place you build a wall around whatever's left after the fight and leave everyone there inside. There's also Leviathan, he's a hydrokinetic speedster and there's no more Newfoundland or Kyushu now, and Behemoth, he's a dynakinetic - radioactive, super-hot, lightning, tunnels under the earth, highest cape death rate."

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"Yech."

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"I - uh, I triggered in a Simurgh area. I am under the maximum exposure limit - and not just because the song stopped affecting me when I got my power - but usual policy is actually just to straight up murder anyone who triggers that way, they threw every single mind-affecting power they could dredge up at me to see if they could justify letting me live and I think it still made a big difference that my dad's a longstanding hero and couldn't be kept in prison."

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"Do you want a hug?"

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"Not in my kit, but thanks."

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"Makes sense." Emily could probably render the kit malleable enough to hug through but that might fuck up the Tinker bullshit and also it would be weird so Edie doesn't even mention it. 

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"So anyway, there's still civilization in the United States in addition to other places - well, Africa's mostly warlords now and stuff like that - but everywhere's missing chunks, I don't want to give the impression I come from Paradise here."

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"If the Sentinels never lose their 'stay out of other countries' limit or other countries develop better weapons before they do we might just be better off, on the level of humanity if not us personally."

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"I expect to be able to solve the Sentinels problem with your bootstrapping assistance unless one gets in a lucky shot before I find enough salvage. I'm unusually well suited, but I'm not the only cape who could pull that off. Endbringers can be driven off by hundreds of capes teaming up to fight them but can't be killed."

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"Enough Sentinels tended to win in a fight against enough mutants, but that was mostly because they have specific anti-mutant advantages, maybe after we fix the Sentinel problem we can figure out some way back to your world and mutants will turn out to have some kind of weird advantage against Endbringers."

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"That would be keen."

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"Like, I dunno, maybe some power that isn't by itself combat-oriented turns out to synergize really well with one that does? Or...hmm...I assume they're immune to telepaths, one way or the other..."

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