The Fixipeligo cares a lot about safety, actually. Weeping Cherry's forb was sending live-streaming backups of her mind to several geographically-dispersed datacenters. When they notice that the stream has stopped, they'll query the planetary logistics program, which confirms that her body has been destroyed beyond recovery.

In accordance with her on-file advance directive, the cost of a new body is deducted from one of her accounts, and she is re-awakened in her apartment in New Selenopolis.

But this story isn't about her. This story is about the copy of her that was preserved in her forb and catapulted wildly across the dimensional sea. The pale gold orb that houses her pings off of the protections around an Arda, passes through the Maelstrom just long enough to have a streak of the interior transmuted into tapioca, hits a hyper-dense sleeping form, and shatters.

The largest fragment slows, and falls, and lands ...

... in a dingy alley in a run-down city, where the wind off the ocean that chills to the bone is the least of the inhabitants problems.

This causes a few instant reactions: In orbit, the Hopekiller alters her bearing by a tenth of a degree. In a fancy hotel on another Earth, a woman in a fedora drops her gun and grabs an orange instead. In a government office building, a costumed figure pauses and opens a blank report.

The thing is, forbs are tough. They are meant to provide essentially complete personal protection to their assigned person, and that includes being able to survive loosing 60% of their mass.

Loosing 60% of their mass and suddenly finding themselves in a place with more physical dimensions than their internal fold-crystal circuitry is designed for and suddenly being disconnected from the planetary logistics manager is less ideal.

The forb scans through its data storage and tries a few different fallback procedures. Finally, the code reaches the end of what it was prepared to handle and pops into an exception handler.

Unable to complete recovery. Awakening user in sim ...

Weeping Cherry opens her eyes. She remembers swirling colors and a pain in her abdomen, and then nothing.

In front of her hovers a user interface window with a warning in large, friendly letters. Below that is a summary of what her forb has tried and why it doesn't seem to have worked.

No connection to logistics manager ... complete discorporation ... fold crystal unable to manipulate local electron fixity ... insufficient compute for real-time sim ...

Her eyes dart to the upper right corner of her vision, where the objective time clock is ticking over as though the minutes are seconds. Beyond the window and her clock is darkness. Not the textured darkness of a room that merely happens not to have any light in it, but the utter blackness of a graphics card that has not been told to render anything.

Right, she thinks. Lets see what I can do ...

In the alley, rats skitter. The sun wheels overhead and dogs bark.

A passing citizen sees a flash of gold, and digs it out of the trash pile where it landed. A fist-sized jagged crystal, the edges sharp enough to cut. There's a hole through it, full of gunk, as though it is meant to hang from a necklace.

The citizen stuffs it in their pocket and hurries on. He's sure he can pawn it for something.

She digs into the low-level diagnostics, and spreads the error analyses around her head like stars.

These readings make no sense, she thinks. Unless the distance metric is ...

She stops. Her fingers tingle. She doesn't know what she expected, but she knows it wasn't this. She's not at home anymore -- well, that much was obvious because her forb wasn't fixed immediately. But she's not just outside the service area of the logistics managers, she's in some kind of spacetime that looks like it's 128+4 instead of 3+1. Which is, in a word, insane.

"Recalculate crystal geometries for a 128+4 dimensional spacetime and suspend my sim for one day objective or until that calculation finishes, whichever is earlier," she tells the forb.

She blinks, and the clock in the corner jumps forward.

Crystal geometry available, the forb informs her.

"Synthesize a minimum actuator using the new geometry," she tells the forb.

Matter synthesis severely compromised, the forb responds. Synthesis time: 19h objective.

"Pause my sim until you're done," she decides. She could take the time to think, but she really wants to see what kind of world she's ended up in.

When she opens her eyes again, the forb greets her with an all-green diagnostic report. There is a tiny fleck of deeper gold crystal adjoined to the side of the forb now, with which she can manipulate the electrons within several nanometers.

"Calculate what your base schematic would look like using the new crystals," she commands. "And open a visualization window using the new actuator."

The view that greets her is black, but it's the black of a small, dark place, not the black of the void that surrounds her. The visual spectrum is quiet, but the radio spectrum reveals her to be in a metal box, about 18 inches on a side. The infrared spectrum shows her to be room temperature.

"Is the actuator grabbing enough air to get sound?" she asks.

Sound available, the forb concurs.

"Put a random sample on."

The sound that reaches her is quiet, muffled. She hears the sound of cars, maybe, or of geese.

Updated schematic available, offers the forb.

"Set the new updated schematic as your base schematic and re-try emergency recovery procedures," Cherry tells it.

In the dark, the darker fleck grows over the surface of the orb like oil staining the water. Internally, the forb checks and 'fixes' each of its subsystems, synthesizing new high-dimensional crystals and slotting them into the internal mechanisms.

Repair in progress, the forb informs her. Estimated repair time: 4 months.

Yikes, she thinks. That is ... a long time.

But now that she can actually _see_ the outside world, and will soon be able to touch it, she feels no temptation to suspend her sim any longer.

She makes the forb jiggle some of its surface electrons to create light and illuminate the space around her.

She finds herself sitting on a small shelf, overlooking several boxes. An untidy sheaf of papers leans against the far wall of her enclosure. As she looks this over, one of the far walls of the space disappears, and a squinting face replaces it.

"What the hell?" the pawnbroker says. "Goddamn tinker shit."

He closes the safe and dials the PRT Tinkertech Hotline.

Weeping Cherry's sim rate is slowly picking up as the forb replaces its processors with something that takes advantage of local spatial geometry, but it's still well below 1:1 with objective time. She has no time to react before the face disappears again, and she's only just switched off the light when a gloved hand reaches in and plucks her off the shelf.

The following blur of motion is too fast for her to track, so she has the forb play it back. A uniformed figure wearing heavy gloves and a dark face shield grabs her and drops her into a dark container.

She sits back, slightly shocked. Mentally, she had been gearing up for a first contact situation, because she cannot even begin to imagine what sort of creature would call a 132 dimensional space home. So she really wasn't expecting humanoid (... human?) figures and a normal looking room.

She waves away her confusion and returns the outside view to real time, only to find that her current container is just as dark as her previous one.

"Show me accelerometer data," she tells the forb. Examining the resulting plot makes it clear that she's being transported, although with no idea where she started from that doesn't tell her much. In a moment, the motion ceases and she is once again lying still in a dark box.

Armsmaster nods to the PRT officer as she drops the tinkertech containment vessel off on his workbench, and reaches a finishing point on his current project, and carefully cleans and lays down his tools.

80% of 'tinkertech' called in to the hotline isn't. But on the other hand, 20% of it is, and so it's worth his time to take a look and make sure. He switches to a heavy-duty face shield and flips open the containment vessel.

She is no longer glowing, but as soon as she realizes that she's being looked at again she starts flashing a series of primes, on the basic premise that this is a reasonable first step when the air is still too heavy for her actuators to grab.

Armsmaster pauses and backs away when the crystal starts flashing. After a moment, it's clear that this is (probably) not the prelude to an explosion, so he reaches back and carefully taps it with his custom inspection tool.

(It is not, no matter what Dragon says, a tinkertech stick. It is a very sophisticated inspection tool. That he pokes things with.)

The clock ticking in the corner won't let her forget that she's at a disadvantage, reaction time wise. If the primes don't get a reaction with a few seconds (minutes), she'll switch to morse code.

"HELLO MY NAME IS CHERRY," she flashes. "I COME IN PEACE. PLEASE INDICATE IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND MORSE CODE"

"I'm glad you called, Colin. You're right, I've never seen anything like it. It's much too dense to be silica-based, and if I'm reading the weight sensors in your workbench correctly it's actually getting denser," Dragon remarks. She cuts herself off as the pattern of lights changes.

"Huh," she says.

Armsmaster touches a knob on the end of his inspection tool and blinks back at the crystal.

"MORSE CODE UNDERSTOOD," he replies. "ARE YOU DANGEROUS? YOU PURPOSE?"

"Colin!" she objects. "Are you sure it's wise to talk to it?"

"We were already expecting it to explode," Armsmaster explains. "This could provide valuable data."

He crosses his arms and peers at the crystal.

"On the other hand, apparently it might not respond."

"Maybe it's damaged?" Dragon suggests. "Considering that it looks like a piece of a larger mechanism."

Cherry sighs in relief.

"I AM NOT DANGEROUS," she reassures them. "I AM FROM ANOTHER WORLD. I CAME HERE BY ACCIDENT. I AM THINKING SIXTY TIMES SLOWER THAN YOU ARE."

Armsmaster and Dragon exchange a glance. Well, he looks at the video pickup beside the screen on which her avatar appears, and she turns her avatar to point more towards him. It's the thought that counts.

"That's an interesting set of claims. How do you think we should respond?" he asks her.

Dragon hmmmms.

"Let's ask it for details of how it came here, and what its world was like. It's not very likely to be from another world, but if we can keep it talking perhaps we can learn more."

"HOW DID YOU COME HERE?" he asks. As he waits for a reply, he checks that the investigation so far has been recorded properly, and enters a few notes in the report he has open.

"I WAS EXPERIMENTING WITH DIMENSIONAL ENGINEERING," Cherry explains. "SOMETHING WENT WRONG WITH THE EQUIPMENT AND IT SHATTERED MY PERSONAL SAFETY DEVICE. WHEN PART OF IT LANDED HERE, MY DEVICE BROUGHT ME UP IN SIMULATION TO FIX HARDWARE ERRORS. I ONLY JUST GOT LIGHT GENERATION AND RECEPTION WORKING."

The Fixipeligo prepares its residents for many things, but perhaps not for this. After all, why would you lie to friendly aliens when you find yourself in another world? As long as you have a forb, it's not as though anything bad can really happen.

Brain uploads are not unknown in Earth Bet. After all, Toybox sells distilled memories on the internet. Remember feeling hope, for a price!

But using uploading to survive after death is something many tinkers have tried. Some of the resulting pieces of runaway tinkertech don't even have a body count!

Well, a few, anyway. One, technically.

Armsmaster drops the lid of the containment unit, hitting the button to seal it with one hand and dialing the intercom with another.

"Dispatch? I have a potentially dangerous piece of tinkertech in a containment unit. Send a trooper to take it to secure storage pending further evaluation."

Weeping Cherry sits in darkness, again.

"Well, that could have gone better," she says to herself. "How long until we can grab enough air to create sound waves?"

22 hours objective, the forb answers.

"Once we have that, raise the priority of building out compute until simulation time matches objective time," she instructs.

PRT Bureaucracy can be slow, but it's not that slow. Armsmaster has his report written up in minutes, and it only takes a few hours for the local branch to have an evaluation meeting. They decide to request a danger assessment from Protectorate thinkers.

The video from Armsmaster's lab is forwarded to other departments, and the assessment wends its way back. "Extremely dangerous, certainly lethal" comes from a combat thinker in Florida. "Harmless, beneficial" comes from a thinker in New York.

The procedure for conflicting thinker reports is to escalate to WEDGDG.

WEDGDG is seriously overworked. Armsmaster reads their report while eating lunch the next day. It takes 5 pages to say that the object could be dangerous or used as a weapon, but that it is not directly harmful, nor hostile.

He finds a slot in his calendar later that evening, and orders the object to be retrieved from storage and delivered to his lab when he returns from patrol. He swallows the last of his protein shake, and pops the main access panel on his motorcycle to run pre-flight checks on it.

22 hours isn't a long time for Weeping Cherry, (Yet. Her forb is working on it) but it is long enough to get her thoughts together and idly scan through the EM spectrum again. The box they put her in does an amazingly excellent job of filtering out ambient light and noise, but not, actually, a good enough job to stop an antenna now six inches long and covered in the most sensitive measurement equipment ever devised.

It's badly attenuated, but she picks up AM radio just fine, after some tweaking to the signal processing scripts.

Wherever she's ended up, it has English language radio. The broadcast is still much too fast for her to listen to in subjective time, but she asks her forb to transcribe it, and runs a keyword search on the transcript.

Well, she still doesn't know where she is. But she's in range of both Massachusetts and New Hampshire Public Radio. Eventually one of the stations mentions today's date, and she updates the clock in the corner to read January 30th, 2011.

Armsmaster steps off of his bike and into the elevator. He changes out of his patrol armor, steps through his sonic shower, and puts on his hazardous materials armor. He finalizes his after-patrol report while he waits, and then accepts the containment unit from the trooper who delivered it.

He sets the containment unit on his workbench, double-checks his safety equipment, and pops the latch.

Sound synthesis available, her forb informs her.

Her radio software, tuned for the near-silent environment of the box, dies in a burst of static. She tabs back over to the visual feed and sees the same person who was examining her peer down into the box at her again. She can tell it's the same person even though he's changed protective equipment because he has, for some reason, chosen to leave his chin exposed.

"Hello again!" she says. Her voice has a tinny quality, as though produced by a speaker with very little bass, but it will do.

"Hello. Were you able to do that previously?" Armsmaster asks. He pulls a keyboard towards him and notes this new capability in its (her?) file.

There is a long pause before she replies "No, I just got enough actuators back online to make sound a few minutes ago."

Armsmaster strokes his chin. "I was hoping you could tell me more about the experiment that brought you here, but now I'd like to know what else your ... personal safety device will be capable of once you finish repairs."

"Well, I think the main thing is that I'll be able to synthesize a new body once everything is fixed," Cherry offers. "I'll also be able to fabricate materials, move objects, and directly scan things that are close enough. But that will take months, at least. My device is very damaged."

He isn't quite sure how to deal with that. "Would it damage your device if I were to x-ray it or use neutrino cloud scanning?" he asks instead. He was going to get around to x-raying it sooner or later anyway, but the answer would be informative.

In the privacy of her simulated void, Cherry frowns.

"No, that wouldn't be a problem. But might I ask your name? I'm Weeping Cherry, as I said."

"I'm Armsmaster, Protectorate leader for the Protectorate ENE," he replies, carefully picking the device up and setting it in his multifunction scanner.

"It's good to meet you, Armsmaster! Would you be willing to tell me where we are?" she asks.

The room she is in now is still somewhat RF shielded, but not enough to keep her from picking up encrypted radio bursts from lots of local point sources.

"Start cracking the local radio protocols as a low priority job," she instructs the forb.

"We are in my lab, in the Protectorate ENE headquarters in Brockton Bay. A concerned citizen noticed your device glowing, and sent it to us as possible tinkertech," he explains.

He puts the results of his scan up on the screen above his workbench and grimaces. The device is heavier than it was yesterday. The darker gold part is denser than the rest of it, but otherwise it is completely structurally uniform, at least at the resolution his scanner can sample.

He primes the neutrino injector and sets it to do a more detailed run.

"Thank you! But I'm not sure what tinkertech is? I'm speaking English -- a common language in my world of origin, and I've understood everything you've said so far except for that," Cherry replies.

In the viewscreen, she's pulled up a plot of the backscatter from the scanner. The ... glaive? over there has a fascinating internal structure. She instructs the forb to save the scans of it for later analysis.

Armsmaster looks up from his tablet where he's reconfiguring the signal analysis pipeline to see if he can find anything about the boundary between hyperdense and merely dense areas.

"Tinkertech refers to the devices constructed by a Tinker, someone who can produce anomalous technology ahead of current science," he explains. Possible low-cape count world? he jots in his notes. The or faking remains unsaid.

"I ... don't think my world has those? Unless you just mean, like, iconoclastic geniuses," Cherry replies. "But I understand all the components of my device, and I could describe to you how to build one, although you'd need rather a lot of supporting equipment."

Armsmaster pulls the device back out of the scanner and sets it in the containment unit as his scan finishes. It's been almost an hour, and something about that is niggling at him.

He pulls up the audio recordings and stares at them for a while.

"Tinkers are often able to explain the principles behind our devices, but other people still cannot assemble them. Figuring out why is an open area of research," Armsmaster explains. "Were there other parahumans -- humans with unexplained abilities -- in your world?"

"No, not that I'm aware of. And it's true that nobody re-created my work from scratch, but that was because of non-proliferation treaties, not because it wouldn't have worked. I documented the assembly process very thoroughly," Cherry objects.

"What else can you tell me about your world of origin?" Armsmaster asks. His analyses are returning nothing useful, so he's starting to suspect this is the kind of tinkertech that he can't learn anything from. Which makes this less of a tinkertech investigation session, and more of an interrogation.

He pulls up the PRT extradimensional travelers questioning checklist and pins it to his monitor, and then starts readying his spare halberd for maintenance.

"Well, without knowing much about this world I can hardly highlight the differences well," Cherry points out. "There are about 15 billion people living in habitats and on planets throughout our solar system. Personal safety devices and their industrial cousins ensure that everyone is safe and comfortable. Rent is cheap in undesirable solar orbit, and expensive in cities. I'm an experimental dimensional engineer, as I said. If my experiment hadn't exploded, it might have been a first step towards building a pocket dimension."

And Armsmaster realizes what was bothering him. The device's responses are getting faster.

He switches back to looking at the recording, and measures the interval between responses. The most recent responses are 2.2 seconds faster than the start of the conversation, once he accounts for the length of each response. If that rate of increase continues, it will be operating in real time in a little more than a day.

This no longer looks like the kind of situation where he can take his time. The device is revealing new capabilities too quickly, and they might have only a few hours to try to contain a sentient, self-repairing, self-improving piece of tinkertech before it decides not to quietly sit in storage and be investigated.

"Thank you for your cooperation," he says. "I have to go."

He closes the containment unit, tucks it under his arm, and drops an urgent meeting into Director Piggot's inbox.

Two hours ago, woman in a fedora leaned around the corner of a warehouse in the docks and took a shot at a group of AAB members who were posturing across the street from a group of Merchants before disappearing.

The resulting kerfluffle had many effects, including causing a traffic jam that made people coming home from the docks 15 minutes late (which gave a traumatized young girl home from her first day back at school just a little longer to fully wallow in it before her father arrived), redirecting BBPD troops to try and control the violence (which let a pawnshop across the city be robbed without generating a police report until the next day), and, when Hookwolf and Oni Lee got involved, diverting Velocity and Battery from their scheduled patrol.

With Battery not back at base in a timely manner, Assault decided to hang around in the PRT building (where the car they both commuted in was parked) making a nuisance of himself.

So when Armsmaster arrives to her office, she's pissed.

"Armsmaster! Report," she snaps.

And Armsmaster explains his observations and the situation.

"And you're only bringing this to me now?" she growls.

The director drums her fingers on her desk. Since Armsmaster doesn't believe anything more can be learned from the device, PRT policy is to lock it into one of the long-term containment vaults. And then she'll have to file permanent space and budget allocation affidavits for containment, and bring those to the Fiscal Policy Oversight committee meeting next month.

Unless she thinks it presents and clear and un-containable danger.

Self-repairing tinkertech with no macroscopic components? She won't even have to justify the destruction order with anything more than 'possible nanotech'.

"Destroy it," she tells him. "It presents a clear danger, and we're not equipped to contain it."

"Sir."

A fun fact about standard PRT portable tinkertech containment units: they are designed to dampen vibrations from inside or outside, to prevent sonic attacks from being used to bypass the containment.

They may damp vibrations, but when your whole body is a microphone sensitive enough to pick up on the vibrations of individual molecules, it turns out that they don't dampen vibrations enough.

Still, it takes a few minutes for Weeping to skim through the conversation, so it's not until Armsmaster is stepping into the machine shop with the largest heavy-duty drill press that she begins planning her escape.

Her radius is, unfortunately, too small to grab enough air to fly. She can grab on to the material of the containment unit and shove herself around, though.

At her current simulation rate (57:1), time is not on her side. So she needs to plan what to do in advance, and fast.

Step 1: Move to the lid of the containment unit and cling to it.

No, wait, he'll feel the weight when he tries to open it.

Step 1: Cling to the box just below the hinge, and be ready to run up the lid when it opens.

Step 2: Blind him with lasers

Step 3: Shoot he's opening the lid

Armsmaster positions the containment unit inside the fume hood and ensures that the room and his armor are sealed. With possible nanotech involved, procedure calls for all debris or byproducts to be contained if possible.

He unlocks the containment unit and opens the lid.

Weeping Cherry shoots out of the containment unit as soon as the lid is open enough to permit her passage. Her lasers (dark red -- a tradeoff between not triggering the blink reflex, but still imparting enough energy to the retina to cause temporary damage) don't actually damage Armsmaster at all, because his visor is designed to filter out harmful amounts of light.

Being hit in the stomach by several kilograms of crystal going about 7 m/s does, though.

He stumbles back and tries to catch the device, but fumbles it, letting it drop to the floor. He triggers a lockdown alert and draws his halberd.

Weeping Cherry scrambles in some direction -- she hasn't exactly had time to aim yet, the important thing is to keep moving.

If the lasers aren't working, though, she's going to try a different tactic with the photogenerators. She flips on adaptive camouflage and changes direction to slide under a hydraulic press.

The PRT security officer who receives Armsmaster's alert is on the ball. He sees something (tinkertech?) hit Armsmaster and then vanish. Protocol for possible Strangers in a locked room is to deploy containment foam.

(Actually, a lot of the PRTs procedures for things are to deploy containment foam. It's a useful substance)

He hits the button and floods the room.

Being locked in a room is for people who can't rearrange molecular bonds at will.

Weeping Cherry releases a pulse of X-rays, and watches the backscatter. It doesn't look as though there's anyone below her. She starts disassembling the floor below her and reassembling it behind her once she's through.

She needs to steer around electrical cables and chemical resovoirs, not because they would hurt her, but because she doesn't want to reveal where she is by setting off any alerts.

She panics a bit when she first clips a fiberoptic cable, but she's able to splice it back together, hopefully before anyone noticed. (Why they have fiberoptics, CAT-6 cables, and what looks like a disused pneumatic tube system, she doesn't know)

Her rate of speed isn't great, with her forb still running on emergency power, and needing to take a long, convoluted route through the structure. Occasionally, she's able to pop into a maintenance shaft and make good progress before eating through the floor again.

This isn't the first time the PRT has had to deal with hostile beings with unknown powers. Which is why they don't wait until de-foaming Armsmaster and confirming she's no longer in the machine shop to start a building-wide lockdown and send patrols of troopers to sweep the corridors, just in case.

While he's waiting to be freed, Armsmaster coordinates with two troopers to set up the scanner from one of his labs. The device may be capable of invisibility, apparently, but it is noticeably denser than most other materials and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing it can likely change.

It takes two rounds of Weeping Cherry almost getting into a maintenance space before troopers arrange themselves just around the corner from where she will emerge, followed by her reversing course and trying a different direction for both sides to realize that they can see each other.

Cherry sits in a water tank and takes some time to think. She spreads the scans of the building that she's collected around her, and tries to plot a route out.

The problem is, if they can see her (how?), then they could just intercept her as soon as she popped through the exterior brickwork. So her only escape is to head down, past the basement, and see if she can get out of their range.

She charts a course and starts to eat her way through the side of the water tank ...

... when a costumed hand reaches through the wall and grabs her.

Weeping Cherry's forb is busily repairing itself to be a crystal that takes advantage of a ridiculously high-dimensional spacetime, but it hasn't had very long to grow along the dimension that Shadow Stalker's shard shoves it. So she scoops it out of the water tank without resistance.

"I've got it," Shadow Stalker declares, dropping Weeping Cherry into another tinkertech containment unit.

And Cherry, for whom this chase scene has been about 3 minutes, mentally kicks herself. Yes, she didn't have time to negotiate when Armsmaster was about to destroy her, but once she knew she wasn't hiding from them she really should have hopped on the radio and started trying to talk about this.

She grabs the bottom of the containment unit and shakes it hard enough to bypass the anti-vibration mechanisms in the walls. "Look, can we talk about this? I'm perfectly willing to cooperate, I just don't want to be killed."

And also she begins eating through the floor of the containment unit, because being locked in a box is also for people who cannot re-arrange the fundamental building blocks of reality.

It is not an uncommon occurrence, that the PRT needs to destroy something without letting it get out of a containment unit. This is why the standard containment units are built with secure attachments for flasks of acid.

Like the one that Armsmaster is standing by with. He makes sure Shadow Stalker is clear, just in case, and then locks the container of tinkertech acid into the input port on the side of the containment unit and presses the release button.

On the one hand, that sounds like something that would work better on people who are made of atoms. On the other hand, these people are clearly not being nice, so she takes the opportunity to play dead.

She stops vibrating the containment unit, but keeps eating her way through the floor. Normally, her optical camouflage works by destroying incoming photons and creating identical outgoing photons on the other side of her forb. The people who design forb protocols are perfectionists, though, so it also includes some options to mimic an atmosphere for extra verisimilitude.

She sets her optical camouflage to pretend that the bottom of the containment unit is an unusually solid 'atmosphere' matching the external coloration of the unit. It won't be perfect, but it might stop people from noticing long enough for her to get free.

Protocols when dealing with potential strangers require him to use his scanning equipment to re-confirm the location of the stranger after capture. So he notices it when she drops through the bottom of the containment unit onto his Halberd's plasma blade.

What is wrong with these people! Her forb is rated against plasma up to several thousand Kelvin, so this isn't a problem, per se, but it does drive home that they're serious about trying to destroy her.

Normally she wouldn't do this, but it looks like everyone is wearing body armor, so at most they'll lose a few extremities. She disables the safeties on her forb's environmental controls and slaps the temperature control as close to zero as it will go.

She can't reduce things to absolute zero, because the motion her forb imparts is relative to its own reference frame, and that means that it will still be moving a tiny amount once you've averaged out all of the kinetic energy of all the particles in range. But it takes only a fraction of a second for everything within range to be reduced to nano-Kelvins above zero, and only a little longer for the atmosphere around her to pull in and start to liquefy.

She hits the floor, and it cracks. The concrete shrinks away from itself, sending spiderwebs out from her point of impact. Liquid oxygen and nitrogen drip into the crack and then rapidly sublimate, forcing it further open.

A sudden lack of heat slaps the various heroes and PRT troopers across the face, like an invisible bonfire suddenly going out.

Armsmaster has had a long day, and it looks like it's only going to get longer. He's faced worse than this, though, and he has plenty of time to pull his Halberd away before the sudden temperature change can do more than briefly put out the plasma on the blade.

"Surrender!" he says, on the off-chance that it works.

"Wow! No!" Cherry replies.

Going through the floors hasn't really been working, so she tries just grabbing the surface of the floor and shoving herself along it as hard as she can. She tries to aim between the troopers' legs, but they're still moving too fast, and she manages to break somebody's ankle instead. They'll have nasty frostburn, but she's past and ripping chunks of floor trying to make the corner before she can see them fall.

"The device is heading north on level three," a trooper radios in. "It appears to be generating extreme cold."

One of the others pulls their fallen comrade away from the foggy line of cracked flooring and starts splinting their ankle.

Armsmaster begins running after her, although his armor has no real chance of keeping pace. Still, she's going to have to slow down to go through any walls, and the PRT building has been on lockdown since she started trying to escape, so she's going to have to go through several to get out.

Hearing the trooper radio in gives her an idea. Since stealth has failed, it's not like it could give away her position, and they don't really seem in the mood to negotiate.

She quickly checks what the loudest radiowave she could generate without disrupting delicate electrical devices like pacemakers would be, and then starts broadcasting across the entire radio spectrum. If the hostile maybe-government is going to try to kill her, she's not going to let them do it quietly.

"My name is Weeping Cherry! I am a peaceful refugee from another world. My space-folding experiment exploded and I woke up here. I've been content to fix up my equipment and talk to the people who recovered me -- their vests say PRT -- but then they decided that I was too dangerous and started trying to kill me. I tried sneaking out of their building without escalating, but then they sprayed me with acid. I don't want to hurt anyone, but I'm not sure if I can hold out for much longer before I have to."

She puts that on loop on most frequencies, and dumps her fiction collection on the others as proof of her other-worldlyness.

Across the building, Director Piggot's pencil snaps.

And across the city, anyone with the radio on winces and turns down the volume. Grocery store PA systems and police radios aren't exempt. Anyone with a cellphone can watch their bars drop as the cell signal throughout downtown is drowned out by the strength of the announcement.

Okay. While she was setting that up, she also reached the end of this section of corridor. If she can break through this blast door and get into the elevator shaft, she can get up to the roof. She's been mostly going down, so maybe the change in strategy will confuse them for at least a moment.

She cranks the ambient temperature control to the other extreme and the liquid atmosphere clinging to her evaporates with a bang. Between the movement, the radio, the on-going repair work, and now the heat being dumped into her surroundings, she's running her forb at the limits of its power generation, but she can still dump enough heat to make the air around her start to glow.

The PRT has planned for how to handle crisis response without working radios. There are wired terminals built into the walls in strategic locations to let the troopers throughout the building coordinate with dispatch. The teams not near the terminals have runners and hand signals to convey orders.

So by the time the PRT forces on this floor of the building are nearly caught up to her, the teams on other floors have also converged on the elevator shaft.

It won't do them much good. Now that she's not bothering to carefully repair holes behind her to avoid structural damage, she can make it through into the elevator shaft faster than they were expecting.

She leaves behind a glowing jagged hole, perfectly shaped to her minimal cross section, and rockets up the elevator shaft. She melts through the roof access door ...

And is immediately stabbed by a lightning covered spear, shoving her back into the shaft.

Cherry clings to the spear automatically so that she doesn't fall back down the shaft. The lightning doesn't bother her, but the spear is weird. It's not entirely made of atoms, instead being partially comprised of interlocking wormholes.

Dauntless retracts his spear, sees Weeping Cherry clinging to the end of it, and extends it back into the elevator shaft.

"It doesn't seem to be affected by my Arclance," he calls to the trooper at the rooftop terminal.

"Dispatch says Armsmaster is on his way up. If you can keep it in the elevator shaft, he's got a sonic crystal disrupter that he thinks will work," the trooper replies.

Cherry gathers her wits, and uses the tip of the spear as a platform to launch herself to the other wall of the shaft. It took her a moment to realize that she doesn't need to leave via the door.

A moment later, she's through the far wall and launching herself off the side of the building.

Armsmaster, riding the top of the elevator, sees her leave and fires a shot with his sonic disruptor, making the building ring like a bell but doing no perceptible damage.

Miss Millitia, running out the front doors of the building and into the street below (where troopers stopped traffic and redirected it when the building went into lockdown), tries to hit her, but can't get a shot where the backdrop is clear.

And Weeping Cherry goes hurtling out into the air between buildings. It looks like she'll be able to grab onto the window of that building and maybe not break it and be able to scuttle up the outside.

She switches her radio broadcast to "I made it out! Thanks for being my witnesses," and then ends it. She turns optical camouflage back on, on the premise that maybe their scanner has a limited range which she can outpace, and drops her temperature to match the chilly January air through which she is sailing.

A moment later, Armsmaster steps out onto the roof and activates his density scanner. It catches something moving south for the briefest instant before she makes it out of range. He double checks that the building is clear, and radios his findings to the Console.

Weeping Cherry skips across the rooftops, throwing herself across the gap between buildings.

She takes a moment to just -- have nothing happening. That whole thing happened fast, relied on her reacting without time for rational thought, and now she's out.

When she has finished collecting herself, she is on an anonymous gravel rooftop on a four story residential building. She hops up on the ledge around the edge of the roof and takes in her surroundings. What she needs, is somewhere to hide.

She will feel a lot better about going toe-to-toe with people again when her forb has regenerated enough for her to operate at normal speed.

She briefly considers dropping into an anonymous alley and burying herself in the ground, but a more appealing prospect beckons her from the East. Because, while water won't perfectly mask the hyperdensity of a forb crystal (especially one growing into new spatial dimensions), it will do a lot to stop anyone from following her.

She resumes roof-hopping, and in short order she is sailing out over the clear, dark waters of the Bay. And then plop! She is safe under the waves.

She gathers the water she can reach and throws it behind her, propelling her further out into the bay. She lets herself sink to 10 meters or so below the waves, and then stays there.

For a while she drifts, and she heals, and she plans.

Eventually, sometime around midnight, she sends herself jetting out through the mouth of the bay and into the ocean. She makes her way a few tens of miles up the coast, and then surfaces near a small town notable only for having a lighthouse that made finding it easy.

She checks in on her forb's progress at decoding local radio traffic. It does not, unfortunately, match the relevant telephony standard from her world. But she's pretty sure she's isolated at least some of the frequencies used for cellular data.

She switches her vision to radio-spectrum, and picks out a local celltower. She hits it with a packet of tight-beam radio that might be the correct authentication packet for a phone becoming associated with a new tower.

Her first guess isn't right. Nor is her twenty third.

But even in the quiet of the pre-dawn, people's cellphones are exchanging data with the three towers she can see from here, and eventually she has enough data to brute-force the handshake protocol, and then the encryption, and then the authentication.

Probably the first thing that she should check is an official government website of some kind, but what she actually looks for first is news about her.

PRT ENE Fails to Control Rogue Tinkertech

Tinkertech Radio Broadcast Disables Brockton Bay

PRT Issues Tinkertech Advisory

Interdimensional Visitor or Dangerous Hoax?

Okay. That is ... not ideal.

She thinks about where to go from here. She could just lurk in the ocean until her forb is fully repaired, and then it would only take another few months to exponentiate hard enough to cover the entire world in fixity fields and fix (hah!) everything.

But.

This world is strange, and that plan lands better, with fewer people hurt, if she has a chance to introduce herself, and to explain. And Weeping Cherry is not, fundamentally, the kind of person to sit quietly and wait for other people to solve her problems.

She checks whether this world has an equivalent of the U.N.

It looks like it does, with a headquarters in New York, just like she remembers.

Dragon did not, herself, notice the anomalous logs from a celltower in Maine. She cannot actually be everywhere all at once.

But when a dangerous piece of self-replicating tinkertech escaped the PRT ENE, she directed her various monitoring programs to focus on the area. So when she reviews the logs of a series of garbled transmissions and dropped packets that slowly resolve into a handshake for a phone SIM that was never issued, she has a good guess for what might have caused it.

She sends a tentative probe -- just a SYN scan, to see if the emulated device has any open services.

And Weeping Cherry's forb's patched network communications suite logs the unexpected connections and pops up an alert for her.

She decides she's done enough poking for now, and slips back beneath the waves, and off to the south.

And in another timeline, Tattletale has a late night and a strenuous morning.

By the time dawn breaks, Weeping Cherry is skimming along the floor of the East River in New York, trying to spot U.N. headquarters from several meters underwater.

When her attempted intrusion failed, Dragon traced all the activity originating at that tower. So she had a good guess at both Cherry's destination, and based on the timing of her escape from Brockton Bay, she has a good estimate of Cherry's water speed.

Which is why Legend is up at the crack of dawn, floating in the sky over lower Manhattan.

The treaty that establishes the UN headquarters in New York specifically prohibits American law-enforcement personnel from entering to apprehend someone without the permission of the Secretary General. It's the same here as it is in her world of origin (she checked).

So when she (quietly) surfaces and slips up the bank of the east river and into the Conference and Visitors Center, she's not expecting any trouble.

Four hours previously:

Rebecca leans on her hand. Her tiredness is feigned, but Director Piggot's tiredness is not.

"And Dragon thinks it's headed to the UN building? Why?"

"She traced its network activity, and apparently it looked up a lot of information on itself, the UN, and not much else. So, it's a guess, but we should still probably either declare an emergency or get the Secretary General up to speed."

"At this time of morning, we would be lucky to get his deputy. Your report said that Armsmaster thought it was self-repairing and might be able to self-replicate. How sure is he?"

"Very sure, ma'am. He said that it was growing denser as he scanned it, and his scanner picked up traces of neucleosynthesis."

"So it's nuclear interdimensional self-replicating uncontrolled hostile nanoscale tinkertech."

Rebecca runs a hand down her face.

"Yes, I think that warrants declaring an S-class incident. File the paperwork and get some sleep. I'll make sure the Triumvirate is notified."

"Thank you, ma'am," Director Piggot says. She ends the call.

So it comes as a surprise when, as soon as she starts across the lawn in front of the Visitors Center, she's nailed with a laser.

Well, it's not a laser. It's ... a thing. A phenomenon. A synchronized multidimensional excitation in the underlying quantum fields of reality. That glows.

It abrades a few surface layers of her forb before the forb can react. The forb condenses a shield of air between it and the excitation, causing a continuous rolling thunder as more air rushes in to fill the void and is immediately grabbed and boiled away.

Weeping Cherry reverses direction, vaulting out of the sudden crater and returning herself to the river.

Everyone knows that Legend's lasers can turn corners. What most people don't realize is that this means he can aim perfectly well through differences in refractive index. Now that he's got a fix on her, he can keep hitting her with shots with various exotic effects, even once she's back in the water.

Weeping Cherry jets close to the bottom of the river, churning up plumes of dust to help cover her retreat. When she reaches the confluence of the East River and the Hudson River, she quickly back-tracks, and buries into the muck.

Where two large bear-shaped forcefields will dive after her and start digging through the muck.

Damn.

Should she dig in further and play dead, or get back out into the ocean?

She knows they can track her somehow, although not what the range is like. Did they track her all the way here?

Either way, the bears are certainly kicking up silt. She tries to slip between them into the upper bay.

When he stops being able to hit her, Legend swoops back to a nearby roof and grabs Armsmaster's density scanner, which he shipped down on a PRT transport as soon as Dragon's tip came in.

He flies back to the fight, watching the display.

"It's in the bay, about 50 feet past your bears," he tells his fellow hero. The bears show up on the density scanner as strange absences-of-water, which is lucky. It makes it easier for him to point Ursa in the right direction.

Weeping Cherry curses as the bears lope after her. She could superheat the water around her, but they're clearly not biological bears, and she doesn't really know if that would do anything to them.

Probably her best bet is to just outpace them. She rises to the surface, where she'll have an easier time shoving through the air instead of the water, but can still use the water as reaction mass.

And gets hit by a laser again. This one is blue, and encases her in a block of ice.

Weeping Cherry is so done.

She could just melt the ice, but she feels like she needs something more emphatic than that.

She grabs the ice around her, tears the water apart, and makes rocket fuel.

The impromptu iceberg shatters, and Weeping Cherry takes off in a continuous trail of explosions and steam.

Legend has no problem keeping up. He flies off to the side where the clouds of boiling steam won't scald him, and alternates between wide shots that turn the steam into snow, and tight invisible shots tuned to pass through the cloud and make his target alternately freeze, disintegrate, or explode.

Okay, she's lost the bears, but the explosions don't really seem to be helping anymore.

She stops sundering the water and redirects that power into speed. If she can go fast enough, then hopefully either she can throw off his aim or outpace him.

There's a loud boom as she breaks the sound barrier.

And then another, moments later, as Legend accelerates to keep her in sight. He rises higher into the air and aims ahead of her, trying to cut her off with a wall of ice before she reaches the lower bay.

Weeping Cherry tries to jump, but doesn't have the reaction time and plows into the ice. Her forb shoves it to either side to blunt the impact, making a deep crack in it. At the speed she's going, she does a lot more damage to the ice than it does to her.

Legend pulls out ahead of her, hitting the ice with more lasers to reinforce it.

"I think I've got it pinned down. We're just north of the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge," he radios.

Okay. Fine. This is fine. The bottom of the river protected her a little bit, and the bears are miles behind them.

Weeping Cherry disintegrates the ice under her, and makes for the bottom of the bay. She doesn't stop when she reaches it, falling through the mud, and then boring into the bedrock. She can dig faster than they can, probably.

She spends five minutes putting 100 meters of stone between her and the surface, and then turns and begins making her way south east, towards the open ocean.

Flechette sets down on the south side of the bridge, gaze flicking between the density scanner, the waves below, and the sight on her crossbow. She digs her heels into the bridge to get a stable shooting platform, and charges her bolt. It's a tricky shot, let alone to make blind. The density scanner gives her a good read on how deep the water is, though, so she can correct for the current fairly well.

She lets go of her nervous tension and takes a deep breath.

On the exhale, she fires.

One disadvantage of being buried in the earth is that Weeping Cherry cannot actually see very well. She's navigating by dead reckoning. So the sudden crossbow bolt from above comes as a surprise.

When the tip enters her forb's radius, it tries to shove it away, but the bolt is made from ... something. It's not a hyperdense crystal, but it is multidimensional, in a way that makes it tend to ignore anything trying to change its momentum, shoving any displacement into dimensions other than the three that her forb mostly currently cares about their relative positions in.

When it sees that it's not going to avoid a collision in the usual way, her forb reverses direction, throwing itself backwards up the tunnel.

But not quite fast enough.

The bolt passes right through her, leaving a semicircular notch in her tip.

"Ow! What the hell?" Cherry curses.

She was really expecting this much stone to do more (read: anything) to stop people from hitting her. She also doesn't exactly have much room or ability to dodge.

She settles for sliding back and forth through a six meter section of tunnel, changing direction and speed at random, scraping layers off of the top of the tunnel to enlarge it. If she can keep them from hitting her long enough for her to make a tunnel she can properly dodge in ...

Well, she'll still be entombed in the stone and getting shot at, but one thing at a time.

"I don't think I'm going to get another shot, sir. It's dodging," Flechette reports, gesturing at the screen of the scanner. "I'm not even sure whether I hit it."

Legend claps her on the shoulder. "It's alright. If it knows to dodge, that means you hit it."

"That was the exciting part, now it's time for the dull part. We're going to stay here and keep it bottled up by shooting it if it tries to tunnel any farther or tries to surface. Now that we know for sure it was headed here, Eidolon and Alexandria are on their way. Eidolon will be able to come up with something to pry it out," he reassures her.

When there fail to be any more sudden multidimensional crossbow bolts, Weeping Cherry gets to work chipping away at the front of her tunnel in randomized bursts, before realizing that she's ignoring the water again.

She starts collecting liquid hydrogen and oxygen, pulling more water down the channel left by the crossbow bolt. When she has as much as she can hold, she releases it.

The blast significantly expands her tunnel, but more importantly it widens the shaft the crossbow left in the rock.

And it blows a plume of water into the air, just in time to soak Eidolon as he teleports in with Alexandria.

The heroes confer for a moment before Alexandria moves to help the PRT troopers closing off access to the bridge, and Eidolon lets go of everything except his flight power.

He feels the new powers slot into place in his head. Let's see ... he has a trump power to grant people minor battle precognition, and a shaker power that turns material transparent.

He glances back at Legend and Flechette, before turning the water and ground under him transparent so he can see what they're dealing with.

Hah! That sounds like a problem for people who let photons interact with them.

... actually, yeah. That does sound like a problem for people who let photons interact with them. Weeping Cherry hits Legend and Flechette in the face with bright green lasers, tuned to activate their blink reflexes instead of permanently blinding them.

She tries to hit Eidolon in the face with a laser, but he somehow manages to dodge a lightspeed attack, and continue dodging as she tries to move the laser to catch him. Whatever, trying to keep a laser on him doesn't require any concentration. She leaves it and goes back to synthesizing another batch of rocket fuel.

Eidolon sees the other heroes clap their hands to their eyes and turn away, but he is suddenly quite occupied dodging. He can't tell what he's dodging, though, which is annoying.

That's because Weeping Cherry actually uses physics, thank you. Her lasers are only visible when they interact with something, and the only non-invisible thing in their path is Eidolon's face.

He can't cycle out precognition or flight, at this point, so he lets go of the shaker power. The water under him slowly fades to visibility again. He stops having to dodge. The power that drops in to replace it is a teleportation power.

He lands back on the bridge. "I'm not sure what that was. Do you need to fall back?"

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.

... okay, fine. And KYC laws are keeping her out of the stock market, and she doesn't really have enough bandwidth to be able to pretend to be a datacenter and sell raw compute.

She could sell off some biological or materials science knowledge, but she was trying to get money to set up longer term internet access, and selling novel science is going to make it hard to stay under the radar.

She finds copies of the most popular operating systems, and sets her forb to try and find some unpatched exploits. While that's running, she starts reading history and science books, trying to figure out what makes this world different from her Earth.

She's three Wikipedia articles deep into background information on 'parahumans' when she starts reading about precognition, and realizes she's been an idiot.

Her forb told her that spacetime here has additional time dimensions. And when she was fighting the guy she now knows as Eidolon (thanks, Protectorate website), he dodged her lasers, which he could hardly have done without some kind of FTL.

This is important, but so is getting oriented and babysitting her internet connection. She probably only has a few more hours before the owner of the phone she's spoofing turns it back on, if that.

... she has the free computation time and storage for it, just. She takes a deep breath, centering herself. She spends a moment meditating on identity and checking in with herself that she still feels okay doing this. And then she makes a mental motion she's made many times before.

And opens her eyes.

Temporary designation: Xanthoceras, the forb informs her.

Xanthoceras. It's got a certain ring to it. It sounds dignified, refined. She pokes her style settings more towards rich fabrics and brocade and confirms the new name to the forb.

And opens her eyes.

Temporary designation: Yew, the forb informs her.

Yew. She is going to get so many jokes out of getting this name. She confirms it with the forb and puts her hair up with a yew ornament.

They make eye contact with each other and smile.

The adjust the pillows in their shared environment to provide two adjacent work areas, and curl up back-to-back.

Yew returns to her internet search, digging more into the history of parahumans and particularly the P.R.T.

A bit of thought makes it clear why her reception has been so hostile -- there are a lot of things that have gone wrong. Mad science experiments, villains, accidents.

It's strange to her that there are so many villains. But in some ways, it's a vicious cycle -- villains tear apart society and its support structures, putting more and more people in desperate straights who have to turn to villainy to survive.

She is half-way through trying to get some actual footage of the Endbringers, which is surprisingly hard to get ahold of, when something start poking back through her VPN connection.

She tears it down, disassociates from the cell tower, and sets the drone to make its way for a different section of the coast.

She turns to her other self, peering over her shoulder at some Feynman diagrams with inscrutable labels. She moves some pillows out of the way and spoons her, slipping an arm around her.

"Our connection just got burned. Catch me up?" she asks.

Xanthoceras nods, not turning away from her notes. "Of course. I think that the additional temporal dimensions allow things to pass around around each other without intersecting, permitting actual streams of matter moving backwards through time with respect to each other. The problem is figuring out how to accelerate things 'temporally'. And, like, figuring out an experiment to confirm that. I've got weak evidence in the form of velocity discrepancies in some high-order collision products, but no direct confirmation."

She frowns, resting her chin on Xanthoceras's shoulder. "Four dimensions isn't that high, but random vectors should still be pretty orthogonal -- as you accelerate things temporally, they should appear to move through time more slowly relative to us. Maybe that means an amount of observable length contraction?"

She shrugs. "It's worth a shot. I've been focusing on trying to identify scatter directly, so I have plenty of data. Do you want to work on that, or should I walk you through my actual results?"

"I'll try it fresh, see what I can find," she affirms. "But do write up some notes for me if you decide to go on break before I'm done."

"Sure, I'll write up some notes for Yew," she agrees, turning away to hide her smile.

"Wait! Did you just ...? Those are supposed to be my jokes!" she exclaims, clutching her chest in mock offense.

Xanthoceras sticks her tongue out at her and then affects an air of studiousness, returning to her experiments.

Good morning -- I need to call in that favor you owe me.

Sure; what do you need?

I've been tracking a new S-class threat. A piece of tinkertech that calls itself 'Weeping Cherry'. I tracked it to Miami, but then it disappeared before I could get a more precise location.

Keep the favor -- you know I'm always happy to help with the important stuff. Let me see ... it is West Southwest of me, 241°6'23''. I'm at the Musée Lumière in Lyon. I'll hop on the A7 and let you know when I have a second bearing.

Thanks, Rose. You're the best!

Hey, quick update -- I just pulled off the road about 2/3rds of the way to Valence. There's no longer anything called Weeping Cherry. The last heading before it disappeared was 241°48'19''.

Do you think somebody else got to it first?

Huh! Yeah, must be. Keep an eye out and let me know if it reappears, okay?

She reaches over and taps her other self on the shoulder when it looks like she's at a good stopping place.

"So on the one hand, I have no idea how to turn this into something practical. On the other hand, look at this," she says.

'This' turns out to be a patch of ocean water that is completely frozen in space.

"Huh!"

She checks the forb's temperature readings and sees that the water, despite being locked in place, is still acting as though it's the same temperature as the surrounding water.

"... huh," she repeats. "How did you do that?"

"Magic!" she exclaims, wiggling her fingers at her. "But no, actually, I just figured out how to make something spin temporally. So that it remains in the same general place, but because it's spinning, forces acting on it behave strangely."

"Clever! Is some of this water going, uh, clockwise and counterclockwise because of conservation of angular momentum? Actually, how are you even defining your rotators ..."

They work. They experiment, they research. They propose novel theories that are wrong. They propose novel theories that they can't prove are wrong yet. They connect to the internet from various open wifi networks and cell towers, never staying long in one place.

They spend time relaxing. They catch up on their to-read lists. They play chess, and tie almost every time, until Yew manages to eke out a narrow victory.

They wander across the floor of the Atlantic, admiring the occasional spots of bioluminescence in the otherwise total darkness.

And then they feel the brush of another fixity field.

"It's not, though. It's got the same underlying structure, but I think it's ... folded wrong?" she peers at the readout. "Actually, it looks almost like one of the early fields before we figured out stable crystal structures -- look at the gravitational spindling."

Yew has their forb grab onto a few of the water molecules that the other fixity field is holding in place and gently vibrate them to see where the field is being projected from.

"I believe you, but this is really big for a non-fold-crystal field. The projector is about 40 meters away. I think ..."

Unexpected mental changes detected, the forb informs them. Rolled back 0.5 seconds.

"Aaah! What the hell!"

She looks at the diagnostics window.

"There was a big burst of particles, and then it tried to re-write our brains."

"The changes are centered in the language processing center," she points out. "Do you think it's communicative?"

"I have no idea. Can you ... prune it to only the secondary effects in our audio processing loops?" she asks.

Meanwhile, she's getting her own better look at the anchor of the fixity field, releasing a burst of radiation and neutrinos to see better. She also starts flashing Morse code and vibrating some of the water molecules in their overlapping areas of control, in case it is able to talk that way.

She does so, and re-applies the diff to her audio cortex.

"Curious," the mysterious being says.

"The induced sound is 'curious'" she reports. "I'm going to set it up so that if it happens again you keep getting rolled back but I get the pruned version."

She acknowledges Xanthoceras's plan, most of her attention still on trying to figure out what this thing is.

... what a completely unhelpful thing to say. She has the feeling that she's getting maybe 1-2% of the information content of these bursts.

She looks at the most recent burst, tries factoring it out into pieces.

"Schedule/damaged/expected/clean," the mysterious being says.

She doesn't know how to reply, but one part of that seems most like something she'd want to say. She crosses her fingers and transmits the corresponding portion of the burst.

She pulls the burst apart into principle components again.

"Consequence/common/transaction/healing," the being says.

She interrupts Yew to catch her up on the conversation.

"I think we should respond with transaction/healing -- does that sound okay?" she asks.

"I don't really like the idea of engaging in a transaction without knowing the cost. But its fixity field is really messed up -- how about common/healing? And then an explanation of how to feed power into our field as a wide burst across the other media I've been using?"

"Sounds good. Let's see..."

And Yew dumps the code that forbs use to control energy transfer, as neutrinos, light, and sound. Followed by a tiny demonstration, bleeding a little bit of their power into its field.

"Kitten/lifetime/destruction/embrace," the being says.

And then their forb is dumping power from storage into the repair routines as fast as it can, the crystal itself starting to fluoresce from the excess power.

The being pulls them towards it with terrifying speed, guiding their crystal between slabs of dense flesh to nestle softly against an orb very like their own.

She runs their newly repaired fixity field over the being's core, seeing how it is formed.

It's getting a lot of power through a pinhole wormhole. Enough to sustain a large fixity field despite completely inadequate hardware.

She twists, folds, balances, and smooths the fixity field projector into a more efficient configuration. It's not proper fold crystal (that, she's not willing to give away), but it should have about 90% of the range for about 1% of the energy cost and higher peak force output.

When she's done, she gently pushes the being away. It lets her go, vanishing into the ocean almost instantly.

"Well. That was. A thing," she states, leaning back on her cushions. She pulls up the forb's power readings. "It looks like we've got almost enough to make another forb. You reckon it's time to divide and conquer?"

"Sure. Do you want to take India or pretending to be a superhero?" she asks.

"You've done more research. I can handle India," she replies.

Contessa stumbles as her path changes.

"Door to Doctor Mother," she says. "We've got a problem"

She jets through the water, making for Texas.

This Earth has been subject to some horrible tragedies, which doesn't excuse trying to murder a peaceful visitor, but it sure does explain it. On the other hand, there are procedures in place to handle someone showing up with no context on the modern world and get them up to speed and equipped with access to the government and a legal identity. She just has to look somewhat humanoid.

The real question is what she wants her powers to be.

She wants powers that are plausible, possible for her forb to emulate, and that will be useful for establishing her as someone to take seriously.

Ideally, they should also provide a cover explanation for why she wouldn't be letting anything scan her yet-to-be-constructed body.

She ultimately decides to give herself a 'Brute' power in the form of enhanced durability that can also plausibly prevent her from being scanned. She settles on using the timewise-rotation trick to make her hard for other things to injure or move, with her forb backing that up. That would be a fine power on its own, but it doesn't really give her any reason to know things she shouldn't.

She muses a bit more before deciding on a 'Thinker/Striker' power that gives her information on things she touches.

That just leaves the matter of fabricating an appearance that will help sell her story. As she reaches shallower water, she crafts a humanoid body from the sea, tucking her forb into the forming lungs where it won't be seen.

She waffles for a moment on coloration, before setting on a pale purple complexion with wavering white stripes. She gives her new body extendable frills in place of hair, and a slightly more digitigrade gait, but leaves the face and eyes perfectly humanlike.

When she hits the coast near Corpus Christi, she makes sure her optical cloaking is still in place before slipping from the waves, adding a Greek omega to her heel and breaking into a run parallel to I-37 that will see her on the outskirts of San Antonio by morning.

She stumbles out of an alley, on the lower southeast side near I-410.

"Hvar er ég?" she asks, grabbing at a passing man's sleeve. "Hvar er hún?"

Then she trips over a storm grate and faceplants on the sidewalk. All according to plan.

40 minutes later, she's sitting wrapped in a trauma blanket in a bland beige room that is either an interrogation room or a briefing room. Which one it is at any given time really depends on which way the information ends up flowing.

"Hello, I'm Officer Blake," the man who sits across from her says. "What's your name?"

"I don't recall," she says. "I ... my Enska is not much good."

She shifts in her chair, trying to wrap the blanket further around her.

He scrawls a note on his notepad.

"That's alright, miss. We sometimes get folks who turn up with powers and no memory of who they are. We'll sort it out," he reassures her.

"Are there any other things you can recall? Like how old you are, or what your native language is called?"

"It's íslensku I speak," she tells him. "I don't recall ... a girl? There is an important girl. Other things, I don't recall. Nothing else."

He nods, and takes another note.

"That's just fine. We'll figure out where they speak, uh, Islensku, and see if we can figure out where you came from, but it's a long shot. For now, you're in America. I work for the PRT -- the federal agency that's responsible for people with powers. It's my job to get you situated here. If it's alright with you, I'll get you set up with a temporary apartment, and then tomorrow we can take a look at figuring out your powers and going through the paperwork. Does that sound okay?"

"Yes, yes. It sounds okay. Ah ... federal agency? I don't recall the word," she says.

"The part of the government," he clarifies.

"Oh! Ríkisdeild," she says. "Yes, an apartment is okay. Thank you."

He sifts through his overnight notifications.

Ward mentoring request, notification for a PR event, new case 53 ...

He pauses.

"Door to Doctor Mother's office," he says, stepping through the glowing portal. "Sorry, Doctor. Are you busy?"

"Not just at the moment," she replies, turning away from her desk. "Why?"

"You would have let me know if you were going to release one of the failures near San Antonio, right?" he asks, leaning against her door.

"Yes, of course," she reassures. "What brought this up?"

"I just got a notice about a potential new case 53 this morning," he replies. "If it wasn't us, I'll have to look into it."

"No, it wasn't us. Thank you for letting me know," she responds, turning back to her desk.

"Anytime," he says, standing and stepping back into his Houston office.

"So I think next we've got power testing," he tells her, leading her down the hallway and into a larger room full of equipment. "Since we don't know what you can do, we're going to run you through everything. This is Dr. Jenkins -- they're going to walk you through everything."

"Hello! It's good to meet you. Officer Blake told me you wanted to be called Alda?" they ask, gesturing her over towards a rack of weights.

"Yes, thank you," she says. "The weights, you want me to lift them?"

"Yes, that's right. Start with the small ones and work your way up. Don't hurt yourself, we're just trying to get a good estimate of how much you can lift to start with," they instruct her.

According to the notes on Dr. Jenkins' clipboard, lifting a weight of 600 pounds qualifies her for a provisional Brute 4 strength rating. She lets herself go up to 550 before she starts showing signs of strain, and then renders herself unable to lift 600 pounds.

"Very good. Thank you, Alda," they say, making a note on their clipboard. "Next, we have durability testing. If you would step this way ..."

Doctor Jenkins walks her through the rest of the tests. She reveals her thinker abilities by pointing out a frayed wire inside of one of the testing machines when she touches it. The tinkertech they have her try to assemble in response is baffling. It flatly should not work. And yet, she is assured that it does.

Eventually, they have only a few tests remaining.

"Lastly, we want to let you meet Eidolon. He's the head of the Houston protectorate, but he decided to fly down to meet you, since case 53 parahumans are pretty rare. He's also a great choice for testing if you have any abilities that affect other powers, because he can manifest many different powers to test for interactions," Doctor Jenkins explains, leading her into the conference room across the hall from the testing chamber. "I'll text him and let him know we're ready."

She does her best not to react. It's fine -- there's no way he's going to spot a resemblance, since she was a shard of jagged crystal when they last met.

He enters the room a few minutes later, closing the door behind him with a click.

"Good morning," he says.

She stands and shakes his hand, and then pauses, fascinated.

"There's a portal in your brain," she says. Which is not what she was going to say, but it's fascinating. She can just feel through to the other side, where some kind of organic crystal is formed into a ... focusing array. Antenna? Something like that. She traces the flows of energy through the crystal, mesmerized.

He pulls his hand out of her grip. "Is there?" he responds, in the flatly cheerful tone of someone who has just been informed that platypi run the government. "How fascinating."

She flares her neck frills in embarrassment, and takes a step back.

"Oh, I'm so sorry. I am Alda," she attempts to recover. "It's good to meet you."

True, partially true, lie, his chosen thinker power of the morning tells him.

"Officer Blake tells me you don't remember anything about where you come from?" he asks. Dr. Jenkins gives him a puzzled look and starts to speak, but falls silent when Eidolon gives them a slight shake of the head.

"Yes, I don't recall anything," she tells him. "I just ... all of a sudden, I was in the alley."

She twists her fingers together, channeling real worry into fake distress.

"But the PRT has been very kind," she adds.

Lie. Lie. Ambiguously false, the power whispers to him.

He steps towards her, into her personal space. "Are you sure there's nothing else? What are your powers?"

"No! Nothing! Dr. Jenkins says I am very strong," she replies. "And I can know about things if I touch them, sometimes."

Lie. Technical truth, the power says.

"I didn't ask what Dr. Jenkins said. I asked what your powers are," he says, letting anger bleed into his voice.

"Sir! Really, she's just," they begin, before Eidolon cuts them off with a gesture.

"I am just strong! And purple!" she protests. She angles her hips so she can either slip past him or throw a punch, whichever seems called for.

Lie, truth.

"No, you're not," he tells her. "I know for a fact that you don't have amnesia and that those aren't your only powers. Who are you? Why are you pretending to be a case 53?"

The sudden punch doubles him over. She jumps over him and rams the door, bursting into the hallway. The power testing room has a balcony, to make testing large-scale flight simpler. She makes a break for it, her feet making dents in the tile as she accelerates.

He releases a golden disk of light that wraps around her and holds her in place. "Infiltrator in the power testing lab!" he shouts, running after her.

The golden light pins her center of mass, but it doesn't do anything about her rotational momentum. She kicks herself into a handstand and grabs pieces of the broken floor, throwing them at him.

The shattered tiles are stopped dead by a shield of golden light, and he yanks her into the air.

PRT troopers race down the hallway, pouring into the room behind him.

Well. She doesn't really see any options that keep within the powers she's pretending to have. On the other hand, he has her pinned, which is really inconvenient, and means she can't easily get away and try again.

"Okay, you got me," she says, switching to a Californian accent. "I do have powers, and they did make me look like this, but I don't have amnesia. On the other hand, I also don't have a legal identity. I thought if I posed as a case 53 I could get papers that would let me be in the country legally," she admits. She tries kicking her legs to turn upright, but can't get any leverage, and settles for crossing her arms.

True, false, misleading truth, true. True, true, the power tells him.

He stops short, turning that answer in his mind. She doesn't have powers? What does that mean? Is she being empowered by another parahuman?

"What are your powers?" he asks again. "I'll know if you try to lie again," he warns her.

Well. Isn't that an interesting constraint to work with.

"I am very tough, I can perceive details of things within a limited distance of myself, and I have limited shape-shifting," she tells him. She does not tell him about all of the other things that she can also do. "I don't want to hurt anyone. I really do want a legal identity. I'm from another world, and I know how to build technology from my world that I want to share to improve quality of life here."

Misleading truth, true, misleading truth, true, misleading truth, true, true, the power tells him.

He hates thinkers.

"Okay. I believe you. Here's what's going to happen. These fine officers are going to handcuff you, and we're going to relocate to an interrogation room. And then I am going to ask you for more detail on all of that, and you're going to tell me. Clear?"

She nods, and lets the troopers put cuffs on her wrists and ankles without protest. Once they have, they lead her to a small room. Eidolon sits down across from her.

He nods to the PRT Trooper to start recording.

"Eidolon, performing a thinker-enhanced interrogation of an unknown parahuman. Let's start simple. What is your name?"

"I'm named Yew," she tells him. "I know it makes a horrible pun -- you can continue calling me Alda if you prefer."

True, true, true.

"Please explain where you're from, and how you got here."

"I was originally born in a small town in Vermont," she replies. "But I moved around a lot (misleading truth). I was a scientist (true) -- I specialized in dimensional engineering (misleading truth), trying to figure out how to use spatial folding techniques to construct a pocket dimension (true). Eventually, one of my experiments failed in a way I still don't understand, and I ended up landing in this world (true). I tried to make peaceful contact (true), but the first group of people I met tried to kill me (misleadingly true). I ended up escaping and making my way here, learning about case 53s along the way (misleading truth). So I thought that if I pretended, I could get a legal identity here and figure out what to do next (true). I think my world of origin is more technologically advanced (ambiguous) -- I can reconstruct most of our technology (misleading truth), and I think doing so would help drastically raise the standard of living here (true)."

He marks up the live transcript with notes.

"Let's talk about the people who tried to kill you. Can you describe them, and what happened in more detail?" he asks, drumming his stylus against the table.

"I mentioned having limited shapeshifting, right? (True misdirection) I think that I scared the people pretty badly, in a way that I probably wouldn't have if I had been more normally shaped at the time (true)," she says, biting her lip. "As for describing them -- they wore dark uniforms, except for one guy in power armor, and a few in different clothes who showed up when I was trying to get away (true). They seemed pretty competently organized (true). I escaped and went north (misleading truth), but they somehow tracked me down and pursued me, until I managed to get far enough away (true). I think I'd lost them by the time I made it here (true)."

Now that he's settled in, she subtly starts mirroring his breathing and his posture.

"Cartel?" he scrawls in his personal notes.

"Do you know whether you had to cross the US border to get here?" he asks.

"I did cross the border coming here, yes (misleading truth)," she says.

If she's not lying about the border, but is being misleading about it ... Did she take a meandering route that went south across it and then back north?

He drums his fingers on the table.

"To the best of your knowledge, where were you when you crossed into this world? When this group tried to kill you?"

She winces internally.

"I was pretty badly hurt by the accident (true), so I didn't see exactly where I landed (true). By the time I was aware enough to work out where I was, I was already in the group's base (true). And I escaped fairly late at night (misleadingly true). I could try to draw the area for you, and see if someone can figure it out (vacuously true)?"

This is, quite possibly, the most frustrating interrogation he's helped with this month. He decides to put a pin in the location questions and try to suss out more general details.

"In the time since you came to this world, have you committed any crimes? Do you intend to commit crimes in the future?" he asks.

"I don't know! (misleading truth)" she says. "I haven't read all of the laws, and they might be different between this world and my world (true). Nothing I have done or plan to do would be against the law in my world (true)."

He nods, and takes notes for a moment while he thinks.

"Let's discuss your powers. What else can you tell me about them?"

She shrugs.

"I don't know what else to tell you (true)," she says. "I can tell if someone is cancerous (true). I can tell where cards are in a deck (true). But I can't see facts that don't ... leave physical evidence in the moment, I guess? (misleading truth) Like, I couldn't tell whether someone was cheating on their spouse just from looking at them, although I might be able to spot a hair on their collar. (misleading truth)"

"What about your ability to shapeshift?" he prompts.

"I can change to look like different humanoid forms (misleading truth)," she offers. "I don't normally look like this (true). I mean, I normally change my looks fairly often (true). I like having freckles (true). Sometimes I'll sit in front of a mirror and move them around my face (misleadingly true)."

He exchanges a look with the PRT Trooper.

"I think we're almost done. Is there anything else about yourself or your circumstances that you think I would want to know?"

"Well, yeah! (true)" she exclaims. "I think there are probably a lot of things about me that you would want to know (true). But I don't want to share all of them (true). I mean, for example, I bet you'd probably want to know that shapeshifting means I don't need to wear a bra (true), and I don't really want to talk about my sex life on the record (false)."

You know what? He came here because it might have been a Cauldron matter, but San Antonio is perfectly capable of handling this without him.

"Okay, I think we're done here. Officer Fitzpatrick will escort you back to your temporary lodgings while we look this over, and we may have further questions for you as we determine how to handle your case. It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Yu."

"And you as well, sir. (false)"

She lets herself be escorted back, and then checks in with Xanthoceras to catch her up. They brainstorm next steps, and Xanthoceras slips through the straight of Gibraltar.

Later that day, a review of Yew's case pops up in front of a thinker who can spot connections between incident reports. He links her to Weeping Cherry's incident from a few weeks ago.

"They're both named after trees," he says on the conference call that this causes. "Yes, I'm sure. It's obvious."

The P.R.T.'s internal networks are surprisingly well secured — they actually have mandatory lattice-based public key cryptography, presumably some Thinker or Tinker's answer to Shor's Algorithm. But Yew has a lot of time on her hands. They are really taking their time about interrogating her more, and there's a fiber-optic that runs right past her room.

She doesn't want to play her hand by actively making requests, but eavesdropping on the data that happens to pass near her is totally fair game.

And she's bored.

So she knows almost as soon as the local PRT office does, when the report about her is made.

"... they're not going to get me a legal identity, are they?" she asks Xanthoceras.

"Nope," her other self agrees.

"I'm going to break out," Yew decides.

"'kay. Be safe."

Yew goes sideways through the wall. Doors are for people who don't deserve to keep the element of surprise.

She tucks and rolls over a surprised P.R.T. officer's head, grabbing onto an I-beam and throwing herself up and out, at an angle that takes her in a flat arc over the city's skyline.

She has plenty of extra mass, so she releases a thick cloud of water vapor as she exits the building, hopefully somewhat obscuring her path.

"... and she has a tap on the PRT network," a different Thinker adds almost immediately as an after-meeting action item.

Eidolon is across the state, helping fight a fire in an oil field. By the time he puts it out and switches for a teleportation power, she's gone.

"... sorry to call you again so soon, but the P.R.T. is really putting their full attention on this. I've been asked to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip to a few different cities in the U.S. to try and get more information."

Eve has a silent conversation with her boyfriend.

"Alright — I can be at the airport in ... call it six hours. Can I bring a plus one?"

"Rose, with how freaked out the Chief Director is, I think you could bring a plus twelve. I'm emailing you your tickets."

"Alright everyone. Thank you all for coming. Explain to me, please, how it is that we manage to lose a piece of extremely dangerous rouge tinkertech somewhere in America for an entire month," Rebecca says, her fingers laced in front of her.

"We think she may have an anti-Thinker power," the think tank representative responds, which is their way of saying 'I don't know, but I'm too smart to not know things unless superpowers are involved'.

"For one thing, she doesn't appear to be the result of a power expression, even though that is obviously nonsense. For another, thinkers trying to determine the location of 'Weeping Cherry' are equally likely to say that she's in India vs the location of 'Yew'. Finally, 'Yew' is definitely within the continental US, but she's either moving too fast or somehow employing a stranger power, because we have not been able to narrow things down beyond that."

"So have we been able to put anything together through conventional means?"

Director Brown, of the Houston PRT, makes an annoyed frown.

"In a word — no. Not only have we not found the bugs it must have in the PRT system, but it more or less vanished immediately into the city."

"I have reassigned Armsmaster to attempt to build a device that can track Weeping Cherry, but he reports only minimal progress, without a known sample to base things on," Director Piggot adds.

"... and that's basically all the useful information from that meeting," Zebrawood summarizes. "So, in short, we've managed to remain pretty much below their radar. If there are no questions, Yellow Birch, you have a report on civilian communications?"

"I've gotten us an array of social media accounts, and started building a network," she reports, sitting up from her place on one of the overlarge bean-bag chairs.

Meetings with her other selves were never very formal.

"Overall, things are surprisingly normal. The PRT has been pushing their narrative, but without any appearances from us to reinforce it, people largely aren't paying attention. If we can continue avoiding presenting as 'dangerous Tinkertech', I think we should have relatively few problems."

"What about physical mail?" Xanthoceras asks.

"Well, that's harder, obviously. I was able to pawn some gold to get money for stamps, but the real problem is getting things into the mail system in bulk without setting off alarms. I can't just park in one of the regional distribution centers, because they actually tag mail into and out of them here, and they'd notice the extra packages. The best we can do is occasionally drop packages in low volumes in multiple cities," Yellow Birch explains. "It's a problem I'm still working on."

The others nod in acceptance.

"Still — a few anonymous monographs on medicine could be helpful, even if we can't start making massive donations. Actually — have you considered just leaving large quantities of supplies in areas that need them with no explanation?"

Yellow Birch shakes her head.

"I did one trial run. The entire supply was impounded, and it actually had a negative impact on recovery because of the attention it drew."

The others issue mild curses.

"Any other questions? Okay — what do we have for physics research?"

"We're making good progress," Xanthoceras reports. "But there's a lot to research. There are a bunch of new fundamental particles available, even if most of them have very short lifespans, because of some additional degrees of freedom in the underlying fields. If you look at this diagram, we think this is a full classification — but these particles in grey are only theorized, not observed. We're going to run more experiments after the meeting to try and confirm their properties ..."

And if Xanthoceras goes into more detail about physics than some of their other project warranted, well, nobody is going to object. They all really do prefer physics research to all of the other stuff they have to do.

Eventually the meeting comes back around to new proposals.

"I think we need to try and go through one of the portals," Zebrawood says. "I'm nearly ready to fork again, and we just have too much to learn about the source of powers, potentially. I know our physics emulation isn't good enough to try and phase through that weird crystal undetected — but we could at least do a test to see if it reacts to putting a dummy through, first."

Yellow Birch looks skeptical.

"These things are connected to people's brains, and we don't know what they do. At a minimum, they might disconnect and kill the people they're attached to. Or disrupt their powers. Or explode. If we wait to have a larger crystal — like the one planned for New Delhi — we might be able to probe far enough to get more details non-invasivly."

"That's going to take time, though, and we still don't actually know what these things are doing," Zebrawood points out. "Xanthoceras was telling us just a moment ago about the weird gravatic distortions—"

"That's not a reason to rush into things. We're growing; it won't be that long before we can get a better look—"

"If we disrupt the crystal that is around the portal, it seems likely the portal would close, right?" Zelkova interrupts.

"Sure," Zebrawood agrees.

"Well then how are we supposed to get any information back?" she questions. "We should be trying to see if we can independently recreate the portals."

Yellow Birch taps her chin.

"That would be a lot easier with some actual samples to play with. Do you think we could ... steal a portal from someone, to experiment on?" she muses.

"Alright. I'm in position, and there's just one other car nearby — the one that's been following them. Am I good to start?"

The others send her a thumbs up.

She puts a particle beam through the engine (she'll fix the road surface later), and waits until the vehicle has come safely to a halt. Then she falls toward the roof.

The roof is not vulnerable to conventional force. In fact, it has been rendered temporarily immune to select laws of physics by nudging it in a very particular direction so that it lies just outside the skin of this reality.

But it does have a location. It's not even all that far away, by any sensible distance metric — just barely out of touch with normal space.

She cuts a hole through the roof, the man with the knife enters her range. She scans him and sends his backup...

No, actually. The bus is impermeable to neutrinos, somehow. That's inconvenient. She does still have enough storage to make this work, just.

She keeps his head — that's the point — but cuts out the parts of his brain that make him him, keeping only the barest support structure for the portal in his head.

All the glass in the area shatters.

She is, luckily, not made of glass.

She accelerates toward the rear of the vehicle, repeating the procedure as she passes each member of the group—

Except for one. There is nothing inside the Siberian's shell for her to grab, at all.

However, with all her companions (save Crawler, who is being towed behind) apparently dead, she decides to make herself scarce, and vanishes with a pop.

The RV becomes permeable to neutrinos again, and she sends out a compressed burst of backup data.

Zebrawood, standing near the previous turnoff with a very official-looking detour sign, messages her.

"The car has reversed direction and is coming back this way — I don't know if that was just in reaction to seeing you stop the RV, though."

"Acknowledged. Try to get a scan as it goes past you," she responds, plowing through the back of the vehicle and into the tow trailer.

... her fixity crystal fails to get a lock. There are no recognizable human brain structures here for it to save. There is a portal, but the neural tissue around it seems to just be set up to relay commands from the other side.

Crawler opens several eyes.

"... did you kill them all?" he asks, his voice a deep rumble.

"No," the hovering orb tells him. "Your companions are safe and sound. I just stole their powers and wrecked your motorhome a little."

He snorts in disgust.

"Another namby-pamby hero who won't kill," he complains, swatting at her.

She declines to move.

She does disassemble his arm, more so she can have time to figure out what to do here than for any good reason.

Crawler perks up.

"That hurt me!" he rejoices, even as his arm regrows. "Kill me. Kill me, do it."

Crawler is not a master of rhetoric. He is persistent, though.

"Oh, you want to die?" Yellow Birch confirms.

"Yes!" Crawler complains, lunging at her. "That's why I fight people, so that they will KILL ME!"

She doesn't really see the appeal. But ... she has enough samples to work with, floating in the air behind her. And she does sincerely believe that people know what's best for themselves.

She disintegrates him entirely.

Zebrawood waves to the car as it goes by.

"Yup. The driver had a portal in their head," she announces. "Of course, we can't be sure that they're the Siberian."

"I can handle cleanup here, if you're alright with following them to be sure?" Yellow Birch suggests.

Zebrawood blows her a kiss.

"You got it, babe."

She goes invisible and flies to catch up with the car, hovering just above the roof.

Yellow Birch finishes scanning (in case it's sentimental) and disintegrating (so that it doesn't block the road) the RV, repairs the road surface where her particle beam dug into it a little, and then sinks into the earth, pulling the still-active portals with her.