He was not a stupid man.

Debatable.

“ETA to completion?”  She queried him on his project.

“Three months if I don’t work on anything else,” Armsmaster spoke.

Are you even allowed to work on anything else?

“Will you?”

“I’ll probably have a few ideas I want to work on here or there, so no.  More like five, maybe six months.”

Guess he’s staying here for a while, then. Fair enough.

The head she was displaying on the monitor nodded.  Five or six months until they had uniforms and visors that tracked how the wearer’s opponents fought.

Armmaster is not stupid in some ways, but when his arrogance steps in, he makes some stupid decisions. Like trying to take advantage of an Endbringer situation to become known as the guy who took down Leviathan nearly single-handedly.

What wasn’t stupid was how he went about it. Besides the assumption that he could, y’know, actually defeat Leviathan, his plan was pretty good, and he did seem to do more damage than any other individual hero we watched. The combat analysis system was particularly brilliant, and is largely the reason he’s still alive. I can’t blame the PRT for wanting access to it.

Gear that learned from outcomes in combat and calculated how best to respond from moment to moment.  When the fights concluded, for better or worse, the suits would upload all the information to a database, which would then inform every other suit on whoever had been encountered.

Niice.

Every encounter would render every single member of the elite PRT squad stronger and more capable.

Knowledge is power and they’re essentially creating a hyperadvanced built-in wiki.

He wasn’t in a high security area.  Theoretically, he could use the things he had in the room with him to cut a hole in the wall and escape.

So why doesn’t he? Is it that he doesn’t actually want to go rogue, in a sense separate from that of “neither hero nor villain”? That he’s inclined to face his punishment?

It’s probably not that he’s accepted that the Protectorate and Wards would easily be able to catch him if he tried to escape. The man is stupidly proud, though losing against Leviathan and Tattletale may have been a hit to that pride.

His ‘cell’ was a full floor of the building, containing conveniences from a jacuzzi to a small pool.  Were he not confined to it at all hours, it would be luxury.

Yeeah, looks like he’s drawn the long straw, for now at least.

I suppose hero/villain discrimination is one of the more reasonable forms of discrimination, but it’s still a bit annoying. Especially when that was part of Armmaster’s crime and he’s separately benefitting from it in his punishment.

If he did escape, he wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything afterward.  It would take him too long to put a fresh set of gear together, and the authorities would catch up to him.  He would be sent to the Birdcage.  She knew it.  He knew it.

I suppose there’s a limit to even Armmaster’s arrogance.

By the time he sent the file, she knew what he had been working on, perhaps as well as he did, and the progress he’d made since their last discussion.

This reminds me of Dragon’s immediate reactions when Armsmaster brought up the early warning system back in Interlude 7.

Mass production for his combat analysis program, and the more problematic project of finding a way to gather and then disseminate the data.

The same program that helped him against Leviathan? Sounds reasonable. I guess he managed to find a way to stay too useful to get rid of entirely.

She knew he would expect her to take time to read over it.  Instead, she used that time to check it for traps.  He would find it insulting if he was aware what she was doing, but it was her primary duty, here.

Ahh, yeah, good call. If you’re gonna work with a guy who might be thrown in prison afterwards, better make sure he’s not trying to do something rash to get out of it.

She would search every note, every formula, and discern whether he had hidden something in there that he might use to break out or do harm to others.

Yeah, that.

It was imperfect, but that was the result she desired.  An imperfect disguise over a disguise, to give greater validity to the latter.

Heh, yeah. It was quite convincing, for a while. I only started guessing something was up when Dragon continued to only show up as a face on a screen and a voice from speakers.

Colin looked tired.  He had deep lines in his face, and he was thinner.  He looked at the camera, rather than the monitor, “Dragon.  It’s good to hear from you.”

Heh, yeah, I suppose Dragon runs into people that don’t think to look her in her actual eyes all the time.

So, uh, Colin, why are you still here? Shouldn’t you be detained? Or is this just how they’ve chosen to keep you locked up?

“Just doing my regular checkup.  You know the drill.”

“I do.”  He typed at his keyboard, preparing to send the files, but she was already poring through his hard drive, reading his notes, and getting a sense of his work.

…what kind of work?

Are they not even taking him out of the PRT, just “retiring” him from the Protectorate? If that’s the case, then wow double standards. They were ready to throw Skitter in the Birdcage for a far milder variety of Army’s crimes. Or at least Army was.

Dragon decided her next order of business would serve two purposes.  She would fulfill one of her daily responsibilities and investigate the subject of that altercation at the hospital.

Alright… which responsibility would this be?

Facial modelling program loading… Complete.
Voice modelling program loading…. Complete.

Talking to someone, apparently. Miss Militia, perhaps?

She opened a line of communication to the Brockton Bay PRT headquarters, the same building the Wards were based in.

She found the port for the next-to-highest floor and connected to the monitor and speakers and displayed her modelled face.  She opened a video feed from the cameras.

Nice.

“Colin,” she spoke, using her synthesized voice. 

Guess we’re going straight to the source. Not gonna lie, I wasn’t expecting to see Armmaster again so soon. How’s it hanging, dude?

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have anyways.  She just would have liked the choice.

Ah, okay. Yeah, I see what you mean.

Making sacrifices and doing good deeds wasn’t actually good if you were forced to do them.

True that.

Dragon wished she knew what she’d said to Skitter.  She had been hoping to have a conversation with the young villain and discuss some of what had apparently come up at the hospital.  Skitter had been undercover, had been in touch with Armsmaster, but something had happened since, and the girl had apparently committed to villainy.

Honestly, this is a good point: The PRT has no idea why Skitter remains a villain.

She was even accepting the use of Regent’s powers, which implied a moral shift on a fundamental level.  It didn’t sit right.

I mean… to some extent. There has been a moral shift, it seems, but it’s also consistent with pre-Extermination Taylor. She’d be uncomfortable with it, yes, but she’d probably accept it if it were absolutely necessary. It also helps that their victim was Sophia.

There was a missing piece in that puzzle, and any clues in the conversation between them had been lost when the Cawthorne unit had been obliterated.

I don’t think she lost much on that front, honestly, but I also feel like I should go back and reread their conversation sometime, because this might be read like “nudge nudge there’s a hint back there that Dragon doesn’t remember”.

No incidents had occurred while Dragon was loading her backup to her core system.  She had to admit she was relieved.  A great deal could happen in thirty minutes.

Heh, yeah. The Undersiders’ heist in this Arc was even quicker, for that matter.

She turned her thoughts to the data that was uploading from the skirmish at the Brockton Bay headquarters.  The last event in the agent system’s recollection was of her piloting the Cawthorne through the gift shop window.  To see what happened next, she had to review the surveillance tapes.

Good luck.

She’d attacked the Undersiders, attempting to incapacitate them and bring them into custody, had captured only one, Skitter, and then had let the girl go when the untested gun had started to overload.

Yep! Shame you don’t remember telling her you’d be in touch.

Some sort of lightning cannon, ionizing a channel through the air to control the lightning’s path.  She had been forced by the rules her maker had imposed on her to sacrifice herself for the human.

Eesh, sounds like she didn’t actually want to.

Eidolon had reported that Leviathan descended into the Atlantic Ocean as he made his retreat from Brockton Bay.  He had sustained heavy injuries, which led Dragon to think he would delay his next appearance slightly.

Nighty night.

She adjusted the window and checked the data.  As was his habit, Leviathan would likely lurk in the deepest recesses of the Ocean to mend.

Imagine being a deep sea diver and accidentally coming across a sleeping Leviathan (that is, if he needs to sleep) in the Mariana Trench.

The Simurgh was currently directly three hundred and fifteen kilometers above Spain, in the Earth’s thermosphere.

Not a bad altitude, for sure. It’s officially in space, having reached more than three times the mostly-arbitrary altitude considered the edge of space by the FAI.

Certainly higher than any ordinary bird could reach.

It was the Simurgh that offered the most clues about what the Endbringers did in their periods of dormancy.  

Makes sense. It’s a lot more visible up there, even if it might be hard to spot.

I wonder if some astrologers have incorporated the Simurgh into their horoscope making. “Mercury is in Aries and the Simurgh is in Sagittarius, so you’ll have a hell of a day.”

(Won’t be as consistent as the other celestial bodies, as far as being in the same constellation for differently placed astrologers goes.)

The Endbringer winged a lazy orbit around Earth, beyond the limits of conventional weapons, and the highest resolution camera images showed she barely moved.  Her eyes were wide open, but they did not move to track any cloud formations.

It seems the assumption that the Simurgh would be birdlike was accurate.

She was, despite appearances, asleep.

Ah, that answers that. Also, it just occurred to me that it didn’t seem like Leviathan had any way to close his eyes, so that hypothetical deep sea diver might not realize he was asleep. Not that him being asleep would make him much less scary of a sight.

Dragon surmised it was a form of hibernation, the Simurgh’s broad ‘wings’ absorbing light and ambient radiation as a form of nourishment while she recovered.

So what do Behemoth and Leviathan nourish themself on, if they need to? Magma and water?

Also, why is “wings” in quotes? What are they really if they’re not really wings, technically? Flight-ineffective growths that she doesn’t actually need to fly?

Then again, flying isn’t a requirement for something to be considered a wing. Just look at chickens and penguins and other flightless birds.

Behemoth, location unknown.

Ah, okay, she was actually talking about the Endbringers. Yeah, if the threat classes are like the S, A-F system, then Endbringer’s being S class sounds about right. I mean, at least if you don’t know about whatever threat Jack Slash is helping along.

This’ll probably give us some interesting information about them.

When injured, it was his habit to descend into the earth and burrow deeper than his enemies were able to go, and experiments run on the trace earth and minerals he shed on his arrivals suggested he habitually stayed close to the Earth’s core.

Huh. I suppose living in the mantle or upper core makes sense for a lava monster.

This is deep lore.

Seismic data hinted at his current locations, but there was little beyond her analytic data to suggest where he would appear next.

Yeeah, even if he’s under a particular part of the world, I suppose you never know whether he’ll decide to come up for air before he does. And being close to the core comes with being practically equidistant from almost everywhere on the planet. (I’m sort of assuming that his burrowing is ridiculously quick, much like Leviathan’s swimming.)

Also, I’m now imagining Behemoth more like a mole than the vaguely bull-like appearance I was previously picturing. I still think he’s likely to have horns, though.

His last attack had been in November.  He wouldn’t appear for another five weeks at a minimum, unless he deviated from the Endbringer patterns.

So there’s usually at least eight months between each time an Endbringer shows up?

Still, he was due to appear sooner than later.

Whether anyone likes it or not.