As I agreed to a conversation, Alexandria simply nodded before speeding up and angling slightly North. I followed after her, keeping up with her new speed for a few minutes, until we had cleared out of DC. After a few more minutes of flying, we landed by a large cluster of trees, far from prying eyes. I assumed she just wanted some privacy to talk, but instead, she turned to me.
"This talk includes a few associates," she revealed, before turning away from me. "Please do not be alarmed. Door to meeting room."
Before I could say anything, a small hole appeared in front of us, like a window being opened in a wall that didn't exist. After a moment, the wall expanded, growing and reshaping until it was as large as a doorway. On the other side, I could see a meeting room with several people inside, including Legend and Eidolon. The hole itself had a warbled, almost crumpled, frosted-glass effect around its edges, as if the fabric of reality had been pulled to one side, bunching up along the edges.
Without another word, Alexandria walked through the hole in reality, stepping into the meeting room, before stepping aside to make room for me to step through as well.
I approached the portal, stopping just before it to study the edges. With a subtle bit of magic, I used a spell from the thresholds branch to get a sense of the doorway's intensity, and nearly choked at the results. This hole in space was beyond anything I had ever seen before. It represented a shift between two places with such power that there was no doubt in my mind that the meeting room on the other side was not on Earth. Or our Earth at least.
"... I'm not sure agreeing to chat included traveling to alternate versions of Earth," I said, looking away from the doorway to Alexandria on the other side with a raised eyebrow. "That is the kind of thing you tell someone."
I then stepped through the doorway, the portal closing behind me. On the other side, the temperature was cool and had the scent of sterile cleaning filters. I could feel Alya spinning a slight breeze around me to remind me that she was there, before pulling back to explore the space.
I looked around the room again, the better angle now revealing the whole table. People were still sitting around it, though I could now also see a woman in a pinstripe suit and a fedora, an older black woman in a lab coat, and another man in a black suit and tie. Eidolon and Legend were still there, the former giving me a glare.
"It's impressive that you could tell that at a glance," Legend said, though his usual confident smile was missing, replaced by a solemn look that did not speak well of what this meeting was about. "Thank you for trusting us enough to step through anyway."
I shrugged as Alexandria walked around the table to sit beside the woman in the lab coat, while Legend gestured for me to sit beside him. I nodded and sat down quietly before looking around expectantly.
"Arcanum, I want to thank you for agreeing to this meeting, the older woman in a lab coat said, speaking like a leader, which caught me off guard. The fact that the Truimverate wasn't in charge was… interesting.
"I have a bit more time these days with the next Endbringer battle so far away," I explained. "And you are…?"
"Doctor Mother," she explained, before gesturing to the suited man, then the fedora-wearing woman. "This is Numberman and Contessa."
We shared subtle nods, simple greetings in a meeting that clearly held some weight. After the introductions were complete, Doctor Mother took control of the meeting once again.
"We invited you to this meeting to discuss a threat we have uncovered, and have been working against for quite some time," She explained, her voice serious as she focused in on me.
"The Endbringers?" I asked with a raised eyebrow.
"No," doctor Mother revealed. "The Endbringers are a threat, a serious one, but only to Earth-Bet. None of the other worlds in the multiverse we can reach have them."
That made me frown, my mind running over all of the possible reasons. It made sense that some of the realities in the local cluster, of which my home reality clearly wasn't part of, wouldn't have them, but Earth-Bet being the standout was strange. Aleph didn't have them, nor did they have many capes…
In all honesty, I hadn't spent much time worrying about the local cluster of realities, I was too concerned with cleaning up Brockton Bay as well as dealing with the Endbringers. I had guessed that the local cluster was considerably weaker-walled than most realities, which was why Bet and Aleph had made contact, but beyond that, I never had a reason to consider the strangeness.
Especially considering that Aleph was basically a healthy, normal world, so there wasn't much I could do, not without jumping through some serious hoops.
As I was considering that, the fact that the older woman had said this meeting wasn't about the Endbringers finally reached my brain, and my eyes went wide. If Endbringers weren't this terrible danger, then what was?
"There is something else?"
"Something considerably worse," Alexandria said, Doctor Mother nodding in agreement.
"The true nature of powers, is that they are alien in origin," Doctor Mother explained, revealing such a massive bit of information with very little preamble. "They are connected to beings we call Entities, two of which arrived here many years ago. They both landed on Earth's parallel to Earth Bet and proceeded to spread their agents across the multiverse. These agents are what power parahuman abilities. This marked the beginning of a cycle, one that would end with the complete and utter destruction of all connected Earths."
The silence that followed was heavy, my heart nearly shuddering to a stop.
"Aliens?" I asked. "All powers are connected to aliens, and they are going to destroy all Earths they are connected to? Why?"
"They destroy their host planets to fuel their next cycle," Doctor Mother explained. "Burning countless Earths, each with billions of lives, so that they can go on to find another planet, setting another cycle in motion. Each one would be destroyed with a wave of their hands."
The level of death she was describing was... too much for a mind to comprehend, not completely. Not just millions, or billions. Trillions of people, quadrillions... Depending on how large the local cluster was, the number could be endless.
"The Entities are near eldritch monstrosities the size of continents, and they are horrifically powerful, dwarfing Endbringers in every way imaginable," the woman continued, while I struggled to follow. "Their abilities are like ours, but completely unrestricted. Where normal parahumans follow rules and limits, the entities have none. They herald in parahumans, and when the cycle is over, they will destroy everything."
I didn't say anything for a full thirty seconds, trying to wrap my brain around the new status quo. It took months of preparation to kill an Endbringer, and we almost failed. Instinctively, I tried to deny that such a threat was possible.
"How?" I asked weakly. "How could you know this?"
"Various Thinkers have confirmed that, at some point in the future, everything goes blank," Doctor Mother explained. "Very few parahumans have the ability to see this event, but those that do agree. The time shifts and changes, sometimes pushing further into the future as the present changes."
"Okay, that's terrifying, but what about these entities?" I asked. "How do you know they exist?"
"We know because we already killed one," Contessa revealed, the first time she had said anything. "When the pair first arrived, one of them crashed into their selected Earth. By chance, I gained a power from them, Path to Victory, which allowed me to land the final death blow on the Entity."
"And the other?"
"It projects an Avatar on Earth Bet," Alexandria revealed. "Scion."
Learning that Scion was this supposed Entity was the final straw, and I shook my head. What they were telling me was too much, too much for me to believe, at least not without proof.
"This is… this is ridiculous, Scion? The floating idiot who is just as likely to pull a cat from a tree as to do anything actually useful?" I asked incredulously. "That's… If that's true, I need you to prove it."
"We don't-"
Eidolon started to speak, only for Doctor Mother to glare at him with a harsh look, like she expected better, and the man cut himself off. One of the most powerful capes in the world, silenced at a glance.
It made me wonder what the hell she could do.
"We can do that," she said with a nod. "But be prepared, it is not something people enjoy looking at. Door to high above the Thinker's corpse."
For a moment, I waited for something to happen, only to see nothing. Then, Alya got my attention with a tickle of wind on my back, and I turned. There, just a few feet behind me, was another doorway. The view on the other side of this one was skewed, as if the doorway were looking down while floating high in the air. Of course, I wasn't paying attention to that at all.
What I was locked on to, unable to look away from even as my eyes went wide with horror and my stomach churned in disgust, was an abomination unlike anything I had ever seen before. A pool of flesh, grotesquely mishappen, big enough that I would have struggled with the scale, was it not covered with malformed, mishappen, and seemingly malignant limbs, eyes, patches of hair, faces, all twisted and deformed. It was unlike any horror I had ever considered before, almost beyond what I could comprehend.
Even worse were the impossibilities that coiled around it. Twists in the fabric of reality, misshapen limbs and flesh pulling in and out, some in two places at once, others occupying the same place.
It was like gazing into the physical embodiment of "wrong," and reality itself was decaying around it.
"This is the Thinker, the partner of Scion," Doctor Mother explained. "It crashed into the planet and shattered its massive form, spraying its powers across it. They twisted and broke the inhabitants, but one of them was lucky."
"I gained the ability to path a course to victory," Contessa explained, and I finally managed to tear my eyes off the horror to look at her. "With it, I found the flesh garden. The Entity was attempting to form an avatar when it was stunned by the impact. My power allowed me to find exactly where I could hurt it to finally kill its brain. With a knife knapped from stone, I killed a god."
"...How long do we have?" I asked, looking between the group.
"The time varies, fluctuations from changes I make across the globe," She explained. "A day forward, two days back. It was under two years. Then you killed the Slaughterhouse Nine, and we gained more time than ever before, nearly a decade. Unless something I can't see sets him off, we have nearly ten years."
"You can't see exactly?"
"The last act of the Thinker was to blind me from several things," she explained, tugging at the sleeves of her suit. "Including some of her more powerful agents, Scion, the Endbringers, and several others. I cannot path them, but I can path around them, create a model that lets me predict some aspects of their existence. That is how we get the predictions at the end of the cycle."
"Then I assume this is a group dedicated to stopping that?" I asked, and several members of the group nodded in confirmation. "What have you been doing?"
"Stabilizing the world, helping heroes come forward," Contessa explained. "We keep the economies from collapsing, major countries from falling apart, and massive S-class outbreaks from happening."
"As you can imagine, it has been an uphill battle," Alexandria said, and I nodded in understanding.
My internal warning bells rang as Contessa explained what they were doing. With a clandestine group like this, able to build a base on another Earth, with the scope and level of power they were flashing, the idea of only stabilizing things was laughable, especially seeing just how… fucking insane what they were trying to face was.
If all they were doing was that, I would eat my costume.
"Have you made any progress figuring out how to beat him? It?" I asked, looking between everyone, even Numberman, who was barely paying attention and writing into a notebook.
"A lot of our work has been focused on damage control," Alexandria explained. "Contessa has a myriad of paths to overcoming Scion, however…"
"None of them are particularly achievable," Contessa revealed bluntly. "With enough time, in a perfect world, I could make them happen. But with my blindspots, the Endbringers, the chaos of the world…"
"We hope, we pray, that a silver bullet might appear," Legend added. "That someone, or a group of people, will trigger with the power, or combinations of powers, that might be able to help us."
"Have you had any luck?"
"We have some promising capes, beyond the Triumvirate," Contessa revealed. "One you're even familiar with. Now that we have more time, we are looking to further cultivate Dauntless, as his ability to invest energy into equipment will hopefully put him on par with the strongest capes available."
"We also have you," Doctor Mother pointed out. "Between your ability to mass-produce your creations, the lack of upkeep and repair work, and the wide breadth of what you can make, you have an unprecedented level of flexibility for a tinker."
"In just a few months, you produced an army of enhanced soldiers on par with B-class capes," Alexander continued. "With the rifles, they are A-class. That is why we decided to bring you in. You are preparing to fight as if the Endbringers are your only threat, but they are small fish in a very large ocean. We can provide you with whatever resources you need, but you need to build bigger."
"Resources aren't what I need," I said, as I leaned on the table, putting my head in my hands as I tried to fit my mind around the task they had just dropped into my lap, the scale of the threat still not quite sinking into my brain. "I need time."
"Why?" Alexandria asked, leaning forward, picking up that they had missed something. "Why time and not resources?"
"Because I'm not a tinker," I explained. "I'm a trump. I get stronger over time, unlocking new avenues of power and crafting. With enough time, there is nothing I can't do. I am your silver bullet. Or rather, I will be."