Legend continues blinking spots out of his eyes. "Give us a moment. I think that was a laser, which it didn't demonstrate at all in Brockton Bay. Do you think it has a Trump effect?"

Eidolon grimaces. "That would explain why it keeps demonstrating new abilities. In that case you should probably take point, since it already has lasers."

He grants Legend and Flechette the battle precognition, and lets his other two powers cycle out. He gets back aquakinesis and some kind of animal taming power.

"I can clear the water away so you have a better shot."

Flechette checks the density scanner and readies her crossbow again. The device is still dodging, but she can tell which way it's about to dodge before it does. Her crossbow jerks in the air as she tries to keep it on target.

"I'm ready when you are, sirs."

Legend floats into the air for a better angle. "Do it."

Eidolon parts the water, revealing the muddy rocks of the bay.

Three things happen at the same time. Legend fires a blast designed to soften the ground up for a follow up attack, Flechette releases another charged projectile, and Weeping Cherry notices the sudden lack of water.

She had been hovering near the hole in the ceiling, preparing to try and blast herself up it. When the water stops, she jams herself into the crevasse and lets the hydrogen and oxygen she'd been keeping separate mix.

She blasts through the stone. Forb crystal is tough, and she didn't expect to be particularly hurt by scraping past the rock, not when the fissure had already been widened by her previous explosion, but it's weirdly soft compared to the rock she's been digging through.

She goes sailing through the air where Legend was a moment ago, arcing over the water.

She gets a good view of the bridge as she sails over it. It's been mostly emptied of traffic, the last stragglers making it to one shore or another.

Weeping Cherry is in a bad spot. They can find her even when she's invisible, they have weapons that go right through her, and neither water nor rock is a meaningful shield.

As she falls, she plans. Given all the capabilities they've displayed, she thinks her best bet might just be to run along the surface and try to tank the lasers. When she hits the water, she splits her energy between accelerating southeast again and synthesizing some tungsten rounds. Once she's past the bridge again, she begins firing high-velocity tungsten slugs back towards her pursuers.

They dodge, but the point isn't to hit them, the point is to make flying after her in a straight line a hassle.

Legend takes off after her again, the battle precognition letting him dodge even as he accelerates.

Eidolon tries to grab her with the aquakinesis, but it's not designed for delicate uses, and she's going too fast to grab.

He shoves the aquakinesis and the animal taming away, and gets a durability/superspeed package and six prehensile energy tendrils.

He waits impatiently for the superspeed to come in enough that he'll be able to run on water, watching Legend disappear into the distance.

Weeping Cherry's top speed when she has convenient reaction mass to push on is basically limited by how quickly she can shove air out of the way. As she accelerates, she needs to dedicate more energy to clearing air out of her path, and therefore less to pushing on the water. If her forb were fully repaired, her theoretical in-air speed would top out at about 30 km/s, about 100 times the speed of sound.

As it is, with the damage she's sustained, the occasional need to plow through a wave or dodge an island or a boat, half her energy spent on manufacturing tungsten from seawater, and needing to keep some water suspended between her and speedy laser man as a partial shield, she's barely hitting four times the speed of sound.

She can tank the lasers for a while, but not indefinitely. And his aim seems to have improved.

Thirty seconds of this sees her out into the open ocean, though. The larger waves slow her down even more, but at least she's away from one hit kill crossbow lady.

And then Legend leaves Eidolon's range, and immediately takes a bullet to the knee. He's going fast enough that this isn't so much a problem as an annoyance, though. He glows as his knee is replaced momentarily by light.

Cherry idly notes that she finally hit him, and sets her forb to increase the mass of the tungsten rounds until he looses the use of a limb, which should hopefully make him back off.

Dodging is also working slightly better now (read: at all), so she sheds a little more speed in order to randomize her path more. Now that she's out of the bay, her goal is just make it out to deep enough water to see if 1 kilometer of water will do what 20 meters of water and 100 of stone couldn't. And if it doesn't, she's just going to head for the continental shelf and try burying herself in a volcano.

A major problem with her speed is that it effectively prevents the use of sonar -- she effectively outruns any sonic return from the ocean floor -- so she just has to guess when the ocean is effectively deep enough.

90 seconds and 100 kilometers out from shore, she takes a chance and throws herself into the ocean. The water around her is vaporized by the force she exerts on it stopping, and then she is below the waves once again, pulling herself down to the ocean floor.

Eidolon jumps off of the bridge as soon as he's sure the water will hold him, and then runs after Legend's bright star. The ocean is like glass around him as he accelerates, the waves disturbed by Weeping Cherry's passage frozen in swirling disarray.

Even at his speed, Legend is still visibly getting further away. Eidolon puts on an extra burst of speed, his new tentacles grabbing the frozen crests of waves and dragging him onwards.

He plows into a field of mist and vapor just in time to see Weeping Cherry vanish under the waves. He scrabbles at the water with his tentacles, but the fluid separating them is just as resilient as the rest of the vitreous ocean.

He paces in a circle to keep up his superspeed while he waits for the tentacles to swap out for another power. He's hoping for a blaster power, but he settles for gravity-based flight. He rises from the surface of the ocean and lets the superspeed go, watching the waves crashing closed where he had just stood.

Legend slows to a stop and circles back to join him. "I think we might have lost it," he says, gesturing to the featureless ocean returning to its usual inscrutable appearance.

"I'll get a thinker power, figure out where it's headed next," he replies. "See if we can cut it off. Let's get back to New York and regroup."

"Door to Pittsburgh," she says, stepping through and dropping a letter she wrote this morning into the mail. She turns the corner and tips her hat to the woman stepping out of a laundromat. "Plan Gamma, please, Ma'am" she says, idly poking her power to figure out who this woman is.

The woman pales and fumbles her laundry, silently shaking her head and bundling herself into a red minivan.

She turns another corner and takes the lid from a trashcan. "Door to Caracas, Earth Shin," she says, already ducking. A bullet deflects off her stolen trashcan lid, and she throws it like a discus, knocking the gunman to the ground.

Every day is like this. An unceasing whirl of nudges. She gives the gunman a precise kick to the temple and moves on to the next step.

Weeping Cherry hits the seafloor, raising a cloud of silt around her. She makes sure her optical camouflage is still on (it is), turns on the sonar camouflage, and sets her forb to prioritize minimizing the sound of her passage over achieving the best possible speed.

Stealth precautions set up, she sets her forb to do a biased random walk that will take her off the continental shelf and down to the abyssal plane.

And then she flops back onto a simulated couch and stares blankly out into the darkness of the ocean.

It's some time before she stirs. She flips through her forb's diagnostic reports and tries to generate some hypotheses about what those lasers or that bolt were, but she can't concentrate and she ends up trying to read four different books, but none of them grab her.

She reconfigures her simulated space into a blanket nook, and curls her hands around a cup of tea, and just lets the ocean pass around her until she is ready to sleep.

When she wakes, she feels a bit better. She has come to rest somewhere in the northern Atlantic, hovering a few inches above the drifts of marine snow.

She eats a simulated breakfast and considers where she could go next. She briefly thinks about going to China, but she can, actually, learn from experience and she's clearly missing something about what's going on in this world.

She pulls up her forb's projected repair timeline, and then zooms out to look at the projected time to get a fixity field over the whole planet. She makes a few different estimates at the chances that another risk like those crossbow bolts will come up, and derives a budget for information gathering.

She pauses her forb's repair for two hours to construct a fleck of crystal the only purpose of which is to generate power and convert between radio and tight-beam neutrino bursts. Around it, she constructs a small, durable robotic body out of carbon fiber and synthetic ceramics. It looks a bit like a cross between a fish and a quadcopter, with a retractable whip antenna.

She releases it and pilots it for the Florida coast, because she's already cracked US cellphone encryption, so getting on the internet again will hopefully attract less notice. Once it's on its way, she sets her forb to take a slow, meandering course down to the coast of Africa.

It's going to take a while to get anywhere, so she spends the time picking through the recordings of her two fights, marking where she made mistakes, updating her forb's default reactions to various contingencies, and trying to improvise a theory of physics that explains the various exotic phenomena she's encountered.

Her analysis is made easier by the fact that forbs are quite excellent scientific tools for experimental particle physics, and made harder by the fact that apparently the physics of her new world are insane.

She wishes she had thought to hold on to part of the lasers she saw, because there are particles in them which don't match the mass and charge of anything else she can figure out how to synthesize. She does manage to identify a trick to increase her inertial mass based on what was going on in that crossbow bolt, although she can't get all the way to full physics-defying unstoppable-force levels. She spends two hours integrating it into her forb's navigation primitives before realizing that it also lets her produce a slightly more energy-efficient fold crystal and switching the forb's blueprint over to that.

By the time she finishes that, her remote reconnaissance unit is barely a tenth of the way to its destination. She starts some more tests and settles in for a long wait.

"Thank you, everyone, for making time for this joint P.R.T.-Protectorate emergency response planning meeting," she says, straightening her notes. "Since everyone has read the briefing on our newest S-Class problem, I'd like to start by asking Dragon to talk about what she needs to support detection and tracking efforts, and then about the preliminary recommended response procedures that the P.R.T. has assembled. Dragon, if you would?"

Sometimes her life feels like it's entirely meetings. Meetings with senior P.R.T. staff, meetings with her co-conspirators, meeting with Protectorate heroes. It's the part that people watching her swoop above the streets of Los Angeles don't think about, and why would they?

"Thank you, Dragon. Are there questions about the priority for sensor placement?"

The point is, she's gotten good at meetings, at reading people's reactions and biasing discussion to lead where she wants it to. So she conducts the meeting like a dance, making everyone feel included even when their positions aren't going to be reflected anywhere other than the minutes."Dr. Matthews, what can you tell us about prospects for effective weaponry?"

The real decisions happened four hours ago, in a brightly-lit white conference room on another Earth. Really, it was made before that. It was made the moment that Contessa learned what Weeping Cherry could do.

"Thank you, everyone. We're done a little early, so I'll let you have 5 minutes back."

And now she's just got to make sure it happens.

Weeping Cherry spends a comparatively relaxing few days at various undisclosed locations throughout the Atlantic ocean doing experimental physics. Eventually, her remote reconnaissance platform pulls up off of the coast of Florida.

She starts by watching the other cellphones in the area, cracking the encryption on their communications with the cell towers to work out what a normal access pattern looks like. Then she waits for the signal from a phone to suddenly disappear, as though it had been turned off, instead of gradually fading away as though it was simply moving out of range.

When that happens, she starts spoofing that phone specifically, sending four narrow radio bursts at the local towers carefully time-shifted so that triangulation will make it appear as though the phone is in the same location.

Then, she spends a few minutes pretending to be a phone. Sending pings to various social media app backend servers, checking email, etc. After a few minutes, she starts using the phone's identity to make web requests.

She starts off by looking at porn, the world's least-suspicious internet traffic. She idly browses until she gets an add for a VPN company, and then clicks it. She signs up for a free trial with a VPN in Europe, and starts sending traffic down it. The traffic is dummy traffic -- pings with low TTL values and DNS requests for nonexistent domains that will be discarded on the other side, hopefully without being logged.

She continues pretending to be a phone in the background and sending dummy traffic through the VPN for 27 minutes before she sends any real traffic through the VPN. Hopefully this should help throw off anyone looking for correlations between when the VPN traffic started on this side and when it started on that side.

Once she has a VPN, she starts researching ways to earn money with computing power.

Bitcoin isn't a thing here. The paper laying out the idea was never published.

Also, VPNs don't have a great record against thinkers or tinkers, not that this is published in the VPN's promotional materials.

Well, the forb's object-recognition routines are much better than anything currently available. She'll earn some seed money on this world's mechanical turk equivalent solving captchas and doing image recognition.

That's not going to get her much. Tinkers have done weird things to the captcha system.