Heh. Overwhelming power is a nice thing to have on one's side. She scoops up the shade.

There are very few specific essential shards. After a single-digit number of extremely powerful capes—maybe he remembers them from those events with all the strongest heroes in one place?—he opens a hole in space to Cauldron's lair. He makes his way across the field, to where there's a partially-constructed silver avatar that matches his gold one. He cups its cheek in his hand.

The disgust is gone from his face, but now he's visibly grieving. Grieving and angry. Considering how human he isn't, it's almost an accomplishment.

Apparently even aliens form attachments. Potentially exploitable.

She follows across the field of bodies, stopping short of where he stands next to his former counterpart. "You miss her."

He doesn't dignify that with a response.

Or maybe he just doesn't respond. Some variety of that.

So she has the shades and is back at the body. Is her next step obvious?

Well, now that she's looking closely the shades hovering around the masses of flesh look a lot more tangible than they did last time she was here.

Claimable?

Yup.

And this place is huge.

Best she get to work, then.

The shades she's collecting aren't powers, in the sense she's used to. Each one is more like an entire class of powers sharing a common theme. If it could allow a parahuman to control glass or control sand or who knows what else, she can do both and knows what else. And then there are more as fast as she can pick them up.

When she does, they don't float free and come under her control like she's used to. Not that they're out of her control, but they stay in place. The associated body parts come under her awareness just like any other body part she's not paying attention to. It's awfully disorienting until the first time she runs across a shard designed to help manage it.

She's not going to be human by the end of this. But that is sort of the point of the exercise.

The bigger she gets, the more she can reach and the faster it goes. Eventually she fills the cavern. The half-complete silver body is easily comprehensible; she can tell exactly which shards her predecessor was using when interrupted and how it was meant to work. Though it's a laughably small puppet and might not even be worth dramatically opening its eyes.

Her perception is much wider than before, too—she can see in all four dimensions even when not spending energy on precognition. Scion has an equally huge body, attached to his flying golden Jesus construct by tendrils reaching from dimensions no human or parahuman could see.

She crafts an avatar of her own, raising it next to Scion. The same silver color as the other, but in the image of her human form.

He speaks, or something like it. Each "word" has more information than humans could have thought possible, but she's got the corresponding equipment to hear and talk back.

He talks about the cycle, how he were his counterpart got interrupted while seeding the world before they could watch it descend into conflict and collect the information on how the hosts use their abilities. Mostly he's asking how do they resume it—his counterpart was always the planner.

Plenty of background information comes through, of course. How they want to discover a way to live past the currently scheduled end of the universe, without the last of their descendants cannibalizing each other when all the stars have run down. Or, worse, when they've multiplied enough to fill all accessible worlds and end the universe that way. He doesn't really know how to avoid that kind of result, but he's very sure that observing hosts and collecting data on what their shards can do is the way to find out. It's what they do.

A long view of problems. But it's good to start on this one while there is still time. Apply as many perspectives as possible.

If they want to save this iteration, the first step is to destroy or coopt Cauldron. They are the planners of what resistance to the cycle there is. The main organization is secretive, not even all their members knew all the things they were involved in or even agreed with it. It should be straightforward to decapitate the leadership and turn people against the upstarts that remain.

That's more like it. This entity thinks of itself as a warrior, and this task is much closer to warrioring. Not that the hosts will put up much of a fight, of course.

This is not back to normal and happily ever after. The counterpart is still dead. But at least there is a purpose again. The entity does as suggested, then destroys Cauldron's armies for good measure. The malformed, broken shards always were disgusting.

And judicious dissemination of records should do well for sowing chaos. A shadowy cabal that unleashed several of the most feared members of the Slaughterhouse Nine and was also behind the formation of the Protectorate. And yet more of their creations still walk free.

The revelation about the Slaughterhouse Nine is actually less of a bombshell than the fact that the same cabal was behind mutating and memory-wiping the case fifty-threes. Oh, and the leadership of the Protectorate and PRT were both in on and are also secretly the same person. Fun.

And Eidolon's dead, and the Endbringers are still out there, and basically this is a really bad day for the Protectorate.

The Protectorate still exists, but its legitimacy doesn't. It's holding together mostly by force and threat of force. Now that the center cannot hold, things fall apart. Which is just fine, for conflict-causing purposes.

The original plan was for both entities to be seen as earth's last hope, but the Keres can't credibly claim to be heroic. The world becomes more and more dependent on Scion.

There is a push and there is a pull. When an area is in danger of collapsing too quickly, Scion can shore it up. When a place or a group becomes too successful, she can pay a visit and destabilize things. There is some use to this planet yet.

It lasts decades. With the collapse of the major groups, most notably the Protectorate, there's a wave of prejudice against parahumans. The strongest capes dominate small areas by force, and ordinary governments fracture. The northeast of the Untied States is mostly stable, under the protection of Armsmaster and his enslaved artificial intelligence with its own shard, but she can direct a disaster that way. Most places are struggling just from the fact that nobody can count on importation anymore because of banditry.

Eventually civilization is undeniably sunk. Endbringer attacks get reinterpreted to mean writing off the city, no matter how much Ellie directs them to hold back. Her predecessor's plan was to increase the number of shards distributed until most humans are hosts, then let it descend into a war of all against all and move on to the next earth. No reason to change what works.

Sounds good to her.

Cry havoc, and let slip the shards of war.

And death and famine, but comparatively little pestilence.

The shards come back loaded with data. How was this power used, how did it interact with that other one, what technology do the hosts have that's worth copying.

The next earth reacts just like Bet did when Scion first appeared. They can go through several iterations before running low on power reserves and needing to leave.

More smoothly these times, without unfortunate outside interference.

She won't exactly be sorry to be moving on from these lonely blue marbles.

It takes about three hundred years before they expend the amount of energy budgeted for this planet. And then they'll have to refill somehow. Fortunately, they don't need the marbles for anything now and they can be safely lost.

Rendering them down for the energy stored within is... satisfying.