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.

Dragon turned her attention away from the audio and video streams.  She checked the records, and true enough, Marquis was on record as the killer of Iron Rain.  It was impossible to verify the rest of the story.

Oh, huh, I guess she doesn’t know. I guess she can’t be kept up to date on everything that happens everywhere in Canada and the U.S., especially when it doesn’t involve the Protectorate or the Guild all that heavily.

She composed a message with a general transcript of the conversation and sent it to Amy Dallon’s mother.  It was better that the girl was warned about any potential danger.

Ah, right, I guess she was talking primarily about the Allfather’s revenge portion.

She might have devoted more attention to the subject, but she was already falling behind.  She moved on to her other responsibilities.  The Class S threats.

Hm. I guess that means Endbringers are class A? Or does this operate off a game-like rating scale, with S at the top and A-F below? I doubt that – the Birdcage may be well-designed, but I doubt it contains anyone as dangerous as, or more dangerous than, an Endbringer.

That said, maybe these “other responsibilities” are one layer further out than I was just thinking? As in “other than checking on the Birdcage” rather than “other than checking on the newest inmates”.

With that said, let’s get back to this!

I received a whole bunch of asks last night, some of them about this Interlude, but due to the sheer amount I think I’ll hold off on answering those for now. I’ll finish the Interlude first and then do the asks tomorrow. (This post is pretty much just an acknowledgement that I’ve seen them.)