They're...plants. Everything from grass up through small trees. Kudzu is fairly recognizable, and it's one of the more successful ones here. Unsurprisingly.

Cam wants altitude. He has wings; he gets altitude with them.

Yeah, no kidding. Are there, like, cities of any kind here?

Depends how far he wants to travel. It gets progressively less apocalyptic the farther north he looks; some real cities still exist and he won't even have to fly over any seas. It doesn't get any less primitive, though.

At least Cam speaks Japanese. Internet café? Please? It's just not Japan if they don't have the Internet.

This is going to make a few waves. If he builds the island slowly and in the right order he can make them less catastrophic and point them away from the only-mostly-uninhabited lower reaches of the rest of Japan. And then he's got a completely uninhabited restored Kyushu.

Right then. He conjures up the recent email correspondences of movers and shakers, obtains their private email addresses, and sends them all mail in politely formal Japanese taking credit for the restoration of Kyushu and asking if there is anything else they would like done, no strings attached, he realizes this sounds too good to be true but when you can make Kyushus from nothing you don't have a long list of demands?

It took longer than it ought to for anyone to confirm that they did get their island back. Once there's both confirmation that it happened and exactly one person claiming to have done it, everyone pays attention. Most relevant people would like to meet in person before Cam does anything big. Anything else big.

That's fine, where would they like him?

Transport isn't quite as trivial as it used to be. If Cam can come to Tokyo, as many as possible of the important people will be able to meet him.

Transportation is, like, really trivial for Cam! He is happy to appear in Tokyo. Where would they like him to land his shuttle?

"Pleased to meet you too. My name is Campbell Swan."

"No pseudonym? It might not be quite universal, but usually the powerful parahumans are even more concerned with their secrecy."

"I know, but I think I can establish as much secrecy as I need by simply not explaining my life story to everyone I meet."

Cam follows along. He has no tail and he must wag.

"Not really. I mean, information on what could use doing is good, but I have an excellent power and I'm pretty much set for things I need personally." He makes a sushi roll and eats it. When in Tokyo. "So I don't require payment or an exchange of any kind."

"I can make things! The things must, once made, obey the laws of physics. I can't do antimatter. Objects cannot begin in motion but may begin under tension, in midair, or on fire. It is neater but not strictly necessary for me to be looking at the place the things are going to go."

"Anything at all? Land masses to sushi?"

"Or outside the range, if you need, I don't know, bucky balls or an extra planet, although I'd have to do a lot of math before I'd make a planet in this solar system."

"Ooh - no. I mean, I can make bodies but I can't do minds. Kyushu has no vertebrates. My bugs and snails can struggle along okay but if I'd tried to do those adorable flying squirrels they would, let's say, not fly. Also making an entire duplicate Japan would probably present sea level issues."

"Sure. I can improve on what you had in some areas, power generation included, if you like. Subsidence will be easiest to fix if I have an extremely accurate map of where you want how much gravel or whatever added."

"And it would just appear? We have detailed maps of how much change there has been where, but there might be people or property in some of the same space."

"I probably should not try to fix subsidence that is currently under somebody, particularly if I don't know they're there and can't accordingly go slow."

"Replacements are easier. I could probably get somewhere with a crumbling building or a disintegrating power plant, but it would be by far easier to just make a new one."

"From scratch, then. Power and communications are easy; we already have more plans than we could possibly execute and could just relocate them so they don't overlap with anything. How detailed do you need them to be before you can copy them?"

"I can work from blueprints. That's if you don't want an upgrade. Just to make my life even more hilariously luxurious I also have tinker-like abilities. I'm not a tinker per se, most saliently in the respect that I can in fact explain what I'm making to non-parahuman professionals and let them take over from there."

"Is this likely to matter on the same scale as replacing islands? What kinds of devices does your power specialize in?"

"I'm not a real tinker and do not have a specialty in the way that real tinkers do. I can do computers and generators and spaceships and medicine - actually, that should be a priority, I would like to start mass-producing and mass-distributing assorted reproducible medical stuff as quickly as possible, vaccines and a few solid cancer treatments and the like, I'm willing to mostly focus on redeveloping Japan but the medical stuff needs to go all over the place. Skim some money off the top if you like as long as it gets where it's going."

"If you can make cancer treatments of the kind a tinker might produce, there's a lot of need for that. Here especially," says one of the Ministers. Health, probably. "How reproducible is it?"

"Entirely reproducible! Again: not a real tinker. It's faster for me to just make a warehouseful of any given thing, but I have lots to do, so, law of comparative advantage."

"We will have to convince people to use it. Saying it comes from a strange parahuman who is definitely extremely powerful and probably not lying about what it does might take some doing."

"Yeah, I understand. I mean, I can also explain how it works. I don't have to make any of the components at all if that helps. But I do not have to ship the cure for hepatitis to every continent literally tomorrow."

"I'm glad you agree. I imagine you suffered awful brain drain from the remaining population after the disaster; do you have or can you potentially import doctors and engineers and so on?"

"Under normal circumstances no. Very few. But if we're suddenly offering the best laboratories and the chance to produce tinker technology that actually makes sense, it becomes more doable. This does depend on you being correct about the difference between you and every other tinker."

"I'm afraid nothing novel to you that I can make is also simple enough to teach you to assemble here in this room unless you want to trust me on the parts being exactly what I say they are, so we're back to square one there, but I can get you started on offering attractive working conditions."

It goes on the list next to power generators and repaired (or replaced) roads. Lower on the list, since reversing brain drain is not the kind of thing anyone was expecting to get around to any time soon and the blueprints don't currently exist, but still.

Practicalities time? Practicalities time. Cam recommends tidecatchers. They are an island and nuclear plants would be a big target for more Endbringers; tidecatchers are pretty harmless and will serve. And what are their power needs and projected power needs...? All right, that will require so many catchers and the following equipment to get what they catch onto the grid. He can't offer very much internet upgrade and still have them connected to the outside world, but he can do some, and lay down infrastructure for 2157 quality network within Japan itself if they'll kindly tell him where to put the stations. Roads he can do but is possibly not very efficient at doing unless they want all their roads to hover; he'd have to overfly the areas to get everything flush with preexisting matter. He can tell them how to maintain a hovering road system but they might not want to rely on that what with Endbringers plus brain drain.

Cam can totally copy buildings! And if their budget is lacking he can also make stuff that other countries want for Japan to sell. Wealth generation: not the same thing as inflation.

As it happens, duplicating Japan entire is a really bad idea. What with the unusually deep oceanic trench right next to the existing Japan, putting islands there would do a lot worse to water levels than re-raising Kyushu did. But there's plenty of improvements to be done on the original. The infrastructure ministry will be able to keep Cam as busy as he wants to be, getting gradually more creative as they have more time to think of useful applications of conjuration.

Good! Cam likes being busy. And he will drink all the coffee he needs to to continue being so.

Assistants yes, human yes, trustworthy depends on what for (they're probably reporting to the prime minister unless Cam wants to take the trouble of hiring his own), and of course no one knows the importance of the chalk.

And the circle gets completed by Sousuke, certified human.

The city of Takamatsu, plus or minus a decade. Cam's summoner is about as far southwest as anyone still lives, or at least he was before Kyushu's grand reopening.

Cam sends himself an email recording this event, in case the extortionist was going to come by later and wonder where their pomegranates went. He puts a tracker on the bystander.

The bystander is very quickly confronted by people in uniforms. If Cam's surveillance is detailed enough to pick up sound, it's something about smuggling and suspiciously out-of-season fruit. Turns out "I just found it" isn't very convincing.

More after it escalates to them accusing him of colluding with the rebels. (Rebels: apparently a thing?) He denies it, he runs, they take aim,

, their guns stop working and Cam steps out. "He wasn't smuggling. The pomegranates were mine."

"I don't think I fall within your jurisdiction!" objects Cam. If he doesn't want to just fly away his options are basically "get shot" or "try to dodge, fall over, and also get shot", so he just kind of sits down on the street. "As you can see I am a white person and as you could know by not living under a rock I've been working for Japan! If there is somebody I should have told before paying China a visit or something I'd be happy to keep that in mind in the future!"

"If you want me to fall over and die I really can't help you but if you'd like to have a conversation I'm all for it!" says Cam encouragingly.

Well, that one's mildly inconvenient. Said ground is pushed out of the way by water. They don't wanna talk, Cam doesn't wanna knock them all out, now Cam has wings and is flying away.

Since the distraction is just about to end, a gunshot takes the opportunity to go off. Several gunshots, close together. Three of the identically masked capes fall and two of them get back up while slowly healing.

...Any chance it's obvious how that happened?

"I was there for unrelated reasons and they turned out to have strong opinions about fruit and attacked me. I didn't fight back and when they didn't seem to want to talk, I left."

"They're framing it as the Yangban driving off a foreign parahuman allied with a rebellion. Apparently the news that the opposition has parahumans acted as a catalyst, and the CUI has seen more open fighting than they want to admit. Where did the fruit come in?"

"Apparently pomegranates are out of season. I'm honestly very confused by the entire sequence of events. I was only there in the first place because someone was trying to extort me for fruit and I wanted to know who it was."

"Wasn't planning on it. They found about a dozen different ways to try to kill me and none of them tickled."

"And this might go without saying, but if you get another such demand tell us and don't do it."

"I will take that under advisement."

"One of the most stable world powers is trying not to go more than a decent fraction of the way toward the brink of a civil war. The next pomegranate might be aimed at us."

"The threat was extremely specific and crafted using such hopelessly obscure information that I think it might be really important to know who issued it, but I will consider 'not doing the thing and telling you about it' a strong default."

"What information? It might be possible to narrow their identity down."

"It is obscure for a reason, although I will consider telling you at some point. Can you get anywhere off the fact that it was delivered as an email from me to myself?"

"Probably not. It would be hard for anyone who isn't a parahuman, but we already knew that. If obscure means known only to you, no non-cape could have gotten that far in the first place, and that's ignoring the series of coincidences they apparently predicted from across the sea."

"I can send technicians for fingerprint analysis and DNA samples so on. The face alone might not be recognizable."

"Excuse me I need to go to Mars immediately back in a week if I'm lucky," Cam blurts into the phone. He drops it. He scrambles for his shuttle and homes in on his tracking device.

It is right where it was last left. Attached to a living person and everything.

"Hello the Simurgh wants you personally dead get in the spaceship we're going to Mars."

"Spaceship now explanations when we break orbit."

"I guess if you're lying you don't really need me to go along with whatever this is..." He gets in the spaceship.

The Simurgh is flying as usual, sixty-two miles above the earth's surface.

Cam will relax when she's still doing that and he's past the moon.

She doesn't chase them. She doesn't give any indication that anything happened at all.

"Start with why there's an Endbringer after me!"

"Because you yoinked me into the world, and if you die I yoink out of it again, and I'm just full to bursting with the kind of prosocial ambition known to keep the Simurgh up at night. I would absolutely relieve you of this feature if I could do it without being stuck at home, but I can't, because for some reason the process isn't replicating in the way I expect it to."

"No part of that made sense."

"Well, we have a long flight, I can give you the long version. I am from another world. I am a sort of magical creature, which can be pulled from my home to Earth. Normally it is not this Earth but a markedly less horrible one, but for some reason you managed to be the first person to get a magical creature of my variety here. I tried to have somebody summon an additional magical creature, but it didn't work. So that means I am the only one this Earth gets, and your particular summoning of me is the only chance this Earth gets to have me around, and it badly needs the help. Summonings end on the summoner's death. The Simurgh managed to get me to start a war in China with pomegranates by threatening your life, I don't want more of the same, I will make you a lovely arcology on Mars and you can have Internet access."

"I'm immortal. I actually find the fact that she had to extort me very encouraging, because it suggests that singing to me wouldn't have done the trick. I apologize for the solitary conditions. When I figure out a way to kill her I will happily bring you back, or just finish terraforming the place - I'd do it now but it'd take weeks - and bring some colonists. Hopefully the Internet connection will help; it'll lag but the bandwidth will be fine. I can take other requests for what would make you more comfortable too."

"I was planning to show up to Endbringer fights. If I'm not immune I will get in touch with you about that. There is a plausible but not overwhelmingly determined reason why I might be, though. And I'm not planning to colonize Mars while she is still around because I do know what happened to the moon guy and even if I'm immune I don't want to attract her to bystanders."

"For all I know Mars isn't far enough. Just how badly does she want you gone?"

"If her top priority was getting me gone you would already be dead."

"I replaced Kyushu including everything that was there pre-Leviathan minus the vertebrates and contents of refrigerators, you tell me, do I seem like I might interest the Simurgh?"

"...maybe, yeah."

"So you can see why I'm concerned. I am not in personal danger of death; but I'm here to do good and if anybody could get me doing more harm than good it's her; so if she's going to extort me I need to be non-extortable."

"And this works? She still could threaten to kill me, if anyone can reach this far it's her."

"I'm not going to make any more things on her say-so. Getting anywhere farther than Mars would take ages, and if she can and will chase you to Mars there's no reason to expect Titan to be out of reach. Would you like me to put you in an autopiloted spaceship on a trajectory of 'away' until and unless I or someone figures out how to kill her, instead?"

"You can have an entire Taj Mahal, no problem."

Exile to Mars: at least not a total loss.

He goes through his chemistry notes to see if anything would like to energetically dissolve this stuff.

No silver bullet reacts unusually with pieces of Endbringer. It's pretty inert. The stuff can be destroyed by anything that would usually be destructive, but it gets exponentially harder to damage closer to the cores.

Well, he's in interplanetary space. How does a bit of core react to a pinhole singularity, surrounded by enough magnets of the sort that handles his home garbage disposal to prevent it from running off and eating asteroids?

Nothing much happens. The bit of core falls inward, appears to stop just before reaching the event horizon as per normal, and doesn't even spaghettify.

It doesn't go, but that's no surprise. He can only provide so much force, and this material already shrugged off worse. Nothing has any perceptible effect on the pieces of Endbringer core. At least the tooth doesn't chip unless he wants it to. Two can play at the indestructibility game.

Where the cores are is one thing everyone's glad to know. Especially in the case of the Simurgh; apparently her humanoid body is nothing more than a decoy. The level of indestructibility they're up against, less so. Publicizing that might very well decrease defensive turnout. (No one tries to de-publicize it. Can't stop the signal.)

Cam makes sure there's an email address available for anyone who's thoroughly investigating the research to let people suggest things.

Not a lot of suggestions, but some people would like pieces of Endbringer for testing against promising powers. Quite a few groups would like that, in fact.

Cam can provide! He puts up an order form.

People who just want a piece can have it for obscene amounts of money! And, yes, Endbringer truce. The website is now emblazoned with this assertion.

Why, hello, Tinkers. If Cam likes your projects you get all the parts you want, doesn't that sound nice?

Well, if Cam really likes your project, he can be convinced to ship overseas.

On which subject, Cam receives an email from one of his government contacts. Some shipping company wants in on the distribution—well, a lot of them do, but this one seems unusually prosocial and good to contract with—and a representative would like to meet with Cam to streamline the sending things overseas as much as possible.

Well, wanting Cam's individual time is not a super good sign, but he can schedule them half an hour.

"Don't want to accidentally drop them on things or what have you, need to know where they're going."

"Those both sound easily solvable. Long-distance communication does exist, and is much easier than sending things across oceans."

"Yeah, but looking through a camera doesn't cut it."

"Exact distance measurements, then? If all ordinary information fails, OTP has been known to contract with parahumans. Speed is valuable, even more so when the things being sent include otherwise-unavailable hepatitis cures."

"Exact direction and distance would do, but that's going to vary with things like tidal forces pulling the continents around by enough that I might put something through a warehouse wall, or someone who was unwisely anywhere near the premises when I appeared the things."

"Last problem is easily solved with communication. The former could be handled, maybe with getting a margin of error by making objects appear afloat. I'm almost surprised no one has suggested this kind of thing yet."

"I suppose I could appear things with parachutes if I knew enough about the air traffic and bypass most intersection problems that way. It's just fiddly and most of my help is firmly Japan-based."

"Oh, jumping everybody's tech level until the only remarkable thing about me and it is that I can conjure it up at the drop of a hat, relieving all forms of material scarcity for the entire population of the world, I really want to terraform Mars but don't have the gap in my schedule yet, that sort of thing."

"Not things I'm much of in a position to speed up very much, then. Good luck, I suppose, for what that's worth."

"I would definitely appreciate sufficiently precise intel about where to drop the hepatitis vaccines and so on, though, that's definitely somewhere you can help. I don't even mind if you profit off of it as long as every vaccine finds a patient etcetera. You will want to be sure nobody outcompetes you on the profit margin - no exclusivity contracts."

"I can do variety. Having a thing to duplicate onsite doesn't help, but I can do a big care package of thirty different things off a list with only a little more trouble and time than lots of one thing."

"Good. I can coordinate what and where with the recipients."

"Have you been in touch with the Prime Minister's office about what sorts of things there are on offer or do you need a list?"

"I know what you've been making. If there are things you've been holding back for any reason, no idea about those."

"Well, it's a start, I probably haven't thought of everything I can make that would be a good idea yet simply because there are so many things. There isn't anything that I have thought of, have decided not to give the Japanese, and do wish to offer you."

"Endbringer core is in high demand at the moment. That's probably going to be short-lived; there are only so many who have something to try. Miraculous cures and other technology will be more typical. And you've been supplying tinkers with what they need, but have you tried copying their results?"

"Not yet. I'm not sure it'll work, because it seems like it maaaaay run on magic, and so far all the tinker tech I have met falls into at least one of the categories 'I don't know why I'd want even one of it', 'if something went wrong in the duplication the materials involved mean I would accidentally nuke Tokyo', or 'glaring intellectual property conflicts I don't want to touch'. Do you have candidates?"

"There are things I'd suggest, but not being a tinker myself I can't speak to the materials question. Maybe after getting in touch with some of the creators."

"I'd appreciate that! I would like to see whether or not it runs on magic."

"It sounds like you mean that literally. Do you expect your power to interact with it differently in either case?"

"I can make things that run on physics. I cannot make things with persistent non-physics-behaving properties of any kind. No fountain of youth, no philosopher's stone, no ring of Gyges, etcetera."

"Powers in general do seem to ignore physics, and tinker products are probably no exception. But if it works, it could be incredibly important. I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks!"

"Well, there is a lot in this for us as well as everyone else, to be honest." But it goes on the list of things to try.

"Oh, yes, I understand. I thank you anyway. Anything else to discuss?"

"I don't believe so. We'll be in touch when the receiving ends are set up."

"Great, I'll look forward to that." Shoo, person, Cam has shit to do.

As long as it has someplace appropriate to go and everything's in order, sure. Cargo of Endbringer bits.

Hooray.

Cam makes one.

And the list now includes quite a few suggestions from overseas. Large-scale force fields to help protect port cities in case of Leviathan feature prominently. How OTP got the rights to make copies of those, even in limited numbers, is anyone's guess, but every city wants one.

Cam is not going to be too fussed about patent rights here.

"That sounds like a good way to get tinkers to not show you their products in the first place," says Vega.

"They don't have to show them to me up close, they just have to use them in any way that makes them look appealing to anybody who is willing to tell me about them," Cam says. "If any Tinkers come to me after the money they were previously not making by selling these things either, I'll pay them, I have been known to produce things of interest to Tinkers. This plan is not flawless but it seems better than 'try to negotiate with a lot of parahumans who have every reason to waste my time jacking up their prices every time I want to make some tech'."

"And a lot of tinkers would take you up on that. Others are more possessive, and keep in mind that tinkers are uniquely well positioned to make things unusable by anyone but the creator. You'd get most of the tech you can shake a stick at, certainly, but also the fear of every tinker and the enmity of plenty."

"Do you have a better plan?"

"I suppose that will do medium term as long as I can pretend I got ahold of plans or examples or video footage or something of anything a dead tinker made."

Hooray! People have been tolerating the wings pretty well. Cam puts his tail back as well.

Cam is known as the guy who put a country back on the map in multiple senses. He can look like whatever he wants to. And it's not the weirdest fashion decision parahumans make anyway; overseas it's considered normal to wear spandex.

Cam declines to wear spandex. He is a jeans dude. A jeans, wings, and tail dude.

To Google to find out who has been brutalizing Latin!

It's time to play Information Will Be Forthcoming When Cam Damn Well Wants It To Be. Let's read Regis Rex's email!

He'll be spotted on his way down, but they don't send up a force field and evacuate or anything so drastic. Instead, they just open the door and a cape comes out. "You must be Cam. I assume you're here to talk to Uppercrust?"

"How right you are."

"It has come to my attention that in addition to providing me a useful service you are providing many people unuseful antiservices and I intend that you," he gestures vaguely, "stop."

"That being the general you, I assume? The group I control directly is strictly business. In any case, what did you have in mind and what are you offering? It's possible you might be able to convince me."

"The general you, yes, Elite in general. The service you have been providing has been useful and I don't have a replacement lined up and skimming off the top of that alone would make any reasonable people quite a comfortable income, to say nothing of your other aboveboard behavior. I invite you to continue that, but only that."

"A good deal for my group, and for Regis Rex and many of the others. Less so for Bastard Son. The Elite gets a lot from having a broad tent. If you're powerful and capable, you can succeed. Requiring that operations be entirely aboveboard would drive off quite a few, and what they'd be doing instead is hardly likely to be better."

"How sad for those people. I invite you to solve this problem."

"I confess I don't quite understand the mentality of people who wake up one day and decide to be supervillains. It seems like the sort of thing one might fall into - in which case it will behoove you to be very unslippery - or the kind of thing that might happen incidentally as a consequence of wanting some thing technically orthogonal to villainy per se, like money or attention, in which case it would behoove you to find ways to make them part of a non-villainous employee benefit package. Do you deal with a substantial number of people who just want to be supervillains, full stop, yet have interests small-time enough that you can meaningfully control them - that is, they aren't just really enthusiastic about anarchy in general or something?"

"How much of this problem can we solve by finding areas of illegality I can live with? Run a thriving ring of well-treated volunteer sex workers. Sell marijuana to informed adults. Smuggle hardworking Mexican immigrants over the border."

"Oh, it's a question of your morality? I thought you were insisting on following the law. This makes it easier, but you'll understand if I don't answer the question. Anything else you'd like to whitelist?"

"The law is a convenient shorthand but if it becomes inconvenient one can dispense with shorthand. Why exactly will I understand if you don't answer the question, pray tell? If the problem cannot be solved with a whitelist, then you see, I will have to think of something else."

"If I want to find out, I will, and if you won't tell me, it makes me think I want to find out."

"It's a you don't seem to want be particularly convenient for me. At some point something less conducive to your apparent interests will seem more convenient. Your incentive structure might work or it might not; but you were the one objecting to the possibility of would-be supervillains choosing to self-employ."

"I might want to see an org chart." Can he just dramatically call up an org chart of the entire Elite? Is there such a thing?

"What I want is an idea of the extent to which I should treat them as different organizations at all. But I imagine you're a biased source on that so maybe I'll just snoop some more."

"We'll have you spied on as well, then. In the meantime, now that we aren't trying to trick you into anything, we can probably speed up the transpacific production. Unless you'd rather wait until you've verified that we're acceptable?"

"Let's stick with things like cures for cancer for now. If you want Endbringer bits, try to be more socially acceptable."

"Lovely. Anything else to discuss?"

"No, I'll pass your message on to my subordinates."

"Wrong with me? I think I've been very reasonable about this."

"I mean medically."

"Well, there's cures I can bottle and cures I can't. I can fix an amputee but only in person. What's wrong with you?"

"Cancer. Not one of the ones where you have a cure we've been distributing. As you can see."

"If it's not in your brain I can operate on that on a principle similar to the amputee one," Cam remarks.

"If you're trying to bribe me, the likely result is that some of my subordinates think I'm compromised and try to replace me early. Not a bad deal for me, assuming you then go on to bribe me, but it might land you back here having the same conversation with someone else."

"I'm not trying to bribe you in advance," Cam says.

"I really can't do anything about brains, so I recommend being really squeaky clean by the time I am next in town lest metastasis obviate your options. And if I ever have the urge to operate on inoperable cancer in people who aren't productively steering large international organizations I know where to satisfy that impulse and it won't put me anywhere near you."

"Yes, yes, you've made your point."

"I like it when I make points. Anything else to cover before I fly away again?"

"Not at all. I look forward to working with you. Productively."

Leaving the Elite to presumably restructure their organization on short notice.

The fuck. Cam lets his shattered spaceship make an emergency landing and takes to the air on non-glass wings.

This is a bad city to not be invulnerable in. Cam may have been lucky enough to be away from anything that exploded, but a lot of more fragile people weren't. The dust is settling, and even after the explosion the place is still loud.

Does anyone seem to know what happened?

Yes. Almost everyone does, except Cam. If he lands and asks, the first response is going to be "Shatterbird."

Shatterbird being...?

"...she's a cape," says the bystander, grimacing as she improvises a bandage. "This means the Slaughterhouse Nine are here."

She probably is, somewhere, but she has a lot of range. No sign of her.

Cam overflies San Francisco. He can't do a whole lot about the damage on the scale it was dealt.

Thousands of people flood the streets, there are screams and alarm bells ringing, and a few flying capes. And yes, there, one of the capes has decorative stained glass wings.

The decorative stained glass cape is now unconscious.

Well, they can't hurt him but they could trap him. How the heck did she -? Cam tries various methods of neutralizing shards to see if any of them work. Encased in plastic? Supercooled? Melted?

Melted and plastic both work. There is a surplus of glass to replace anything he neutralizes, though. Pieces are moving fast and from every direction.

Melting's easy to do en masse. Melt, glass, melt. (He makes a chilly layer of air below him so anything that hits someone beneath will be room temperature.)

Does she stay there?

She's not moving.

Right then, time to hunt down all her friends.

This was Shatterbird's dramatic entrance; the rest of the Slaughterhouse aren't flying around with brightly colored wings pointing at them.

Most of them do wear clothes. But trying to just spot them from the sky is a long shot; they could just be inside anywhere.

Still. He flies. Maybe killing one will get their attention? He can hope.

If so, they don't approach him about it.

Any chance they keep written plans?

No luck there. The Slaughterhouse Nine aren't the type to keep diaries. Their tinkers have written some blueprints for projects, in the fashion of tinkers everywhere, and that's obviously potentially useful. But nothing points to location.

License plate? Scribbled address of a bolthole? What do supervillains eat, if he conjures up Jack Slash's last breakfast does it look like it came out of a Dennys'...? It hardly matters if he has to drop ash and slag with all the glass shards and glass dust everywhere.

He can't just find "their hideout"... scale model of last place they slept?

Wildly different results depending on which member, none of them nearby. It might be confounded by the fact that most of them don't sleep.

Ugh. Cam doesn't know if Jack Slash is theatrical enough to come have a look at his own corpse were one to appear, and he doesn't want to sow confusion... Maybe he should just actually call the authorities, claim Shatterbird, ask if they can find anyone else for him. He gets the local Protectorate number, calls them up.

The person on the other end starts out with no preamble, "Are you in immediate danger?"

"Transfer me to whoever's coordinating the capes."

"The Director is in the middle of trying to handle the emergency. Do you have information?"

"I just killed Shatterbird and I can't find the others."

"Cam. The Kyushu guy. I'm in town for unrelated reasons, just killed Shatterbird, can't find the rest."

"Neither can we. Shatterbird's the only one to have been seen; we know where the blast came from and what direction she was flying when she started, but that's all right now. We're trying to beat the odds on narrowing down their location before they attack again."

"Anything useful to do with me in the meanwhile? Key glass objects I can replace for you?"

"We could use our computers back, but you should try the hospitals. They've got a lot of patients and they lost a lot of equipment."

"Call me back when you find any S9?"

"Definitely. We've got reinforcements coming in, but we'll need all the help we can get."

Enormous quantities of human blood appearing ex nihilo is the best thing that has happened all day. (Today isn't a very good day.)

Cam can be pretty useful in a hospital but this isn't the best kind of hospital for his form of help, because it's not from 2157, has no angels, and can't summon demons on a routine basis; diminishing returns hit pretty quickly. He moves on to the next one, checking his phone every few moments for local news and Internet alerts indicating anything.

Information is coming in more slowly than usual, under the circumstances. He'll be able to find out what locations were hit hardest, but nobody is spotting the Nine and tweeting it.

The group includes Mannequin and Crawler; it's not always the faces that would be recognizable. But Jack Slash has been smiling for the cameras for years, there are pictures of Bonesaw available, Cam has pretty good odds.

All right. Go, swarm of drones, go. They will all self-destruct into harmless unTinkerable slag if anybody grabs one.

Acid, burns, cutting... What it comes down to is "everything." He's been actively trying to become immune to things, and he's been running around with the Slaughterhouse Nine. They're collectively interested in novel ways to hurt people.

Crawler is very intimidating, but he doesn't have any powers that look enough like magic to worry Cam. Still, being tackled would be unpleasant. Liquid nitrogen, warm air to rise out of jumping range on.

Jumping range is easy to underestimate, but Cam can always just fly higher. So Crawler does the obvious-to-a-Crawler thing. He roars, and starts rampaging. Indiscriminate property damage ahoy.

Christ. What if he's encased in shock-absorption gel and then concrete around that?

Then it takes a bit longer. That earns a moment to think while Crawler dissolves his way out.

Cam can just keep adding layers of gel and concrete. On top. If Crawler can burrow there is a problem.

It's not his strongest suit, but he will go down eventually. It'll take a while; first he has to realize that lateral progress isn't going to help anything and then he has to guess that downward might. The concrete gives little external sign of what direction Crawler is attempting.

Well, if the ground starts cracking that's a clue.

He breaks through the walls first, and after being re-sealed he tries down next. This is not his kind of fight.

Cam's not super thrilled either. He sticks a tracker in Crawler; it is not harmful and might survive the process.

Crawler doesn't even notice. He's going to continue charging away from Cam, though, scoring the sides of buildings as he goes and trampling anything that gets in his way.

Cam calls the Protectorate folks again.

"Found Crawler, cannot kill him and don't want to set off rockets under him to launch him into space here, did get a tracking device in him, where do you want a thing to watch his movements put?"

"You found Crawler and told us after? At least say you haven't attacked him yet."

"Sorry." Cam chases Crawler. "I've got facial recognition drones looking for the others, may find them at any time depending on how low they're lying, I can copy you that too."

"Do. Here would be best for the monitor, it's the building with the force field. What is Crawler doing now?"

"Running away from me. I'm hoping he leads me straight to the others. Can you just get someone nearish -" Cam names the nearest intersection. "- so I can give them the thing and not miss the family reunion or fail to get between him and bystanders? I can also drop it out of the sky onto your forcefield if you like but landing things inside buildings I'm not looking at is tricky."

"Crawler and probably the Siberian are special cases, I see no obvious reason I can't just kill all the others."

Follow follow. "They must be, if the guy whose power is having knives has lived this long, but I managed one and that just doesn't seem like a full day's work."

Crawler goes to ground. Literally, in fact; he's somewhere halfway between a cave and a hole. He's hiding, not lurking, but at least the annoying cape has no way of knowing where he is.

"Yup." Cam hands them a thing. "Face recognition drones and Crawler's trackers and more immediately relevant trackers I make will report to this, you want spares?"

"I can immobilize him for a few seconds at a time, but I'm not sure your shots will do any better than mine. Do you have a reasonable testing ground for me to make a mindless copy of him to shoot at?"