Amelia, Ch 277- Ruth
"Calling the first meeting of super social thinker committee to order," Minerva announced. She's nervous, and hiding it with flippancy. She knows her information is important, using it to tease others, much like she did with the 'Emissary' title she selected for her status as an Avalon 'royal'.
Around our table was an admittedly heady group of minds. Alexandria, Dragon, and myself were to be expected. Dinah Alcott was something of a surprise. Attempting to be seen as adult, views being a child as a weakness, trauma brought on by abuse. No signs of physical or sexual abuse markers. Signs of behavior learned by addicts.
I of course knew a bit about her history, having been rescued and placed under full protection by Pantheon. She was the most powerful known precog on the planet, now that the Simurgh was destroyed, so everyone considered it their business to know her story. Now I knew how she was controlled.
I spared glances at the others. Dragon was, again, using her robot body. There was a reason she was known as the world's best Tinker, and she'd never once let me see her real body, or even directly operated a puppet in front of me. Always it was through an AI filter. At first I had come to the conclusion that she didn't trust me, a fact I didn't blame her for in the slightest, given the things I'd done.
But I was sure she trusted trusted me now, she wouldn't have had me work with Heartbreaker's children otherwise. Nor would she and Avalon allow me into the sensitive operations that they did, like this one. Both kept some secrets from me, but that wasn't a surprise. No, now I was certain she used a proxy because she had to. A severe disability, perhaps like cerebral palsy or ALS. Why she didn't have Pantheon repair the problem, I was unsure. Perhaps they couldn't? If the disease was caused by her power, they would have to remove her powers to heal her. That seemed the most likely answer.
All of that mental analysis happened in a heartbeat or two. Minerva started speaking again, her smile saying that she knew all of us used that time to have a short mental conversation with ourselves. "As I'm sure is no surprise, we're here to talk about the Endmakers." She was right, it none of us were surprised. "Well, I think we've been doing this all wrong. Here's a thought, and right now it's just a thought, but what are the odds that the Endmakers are actually trying to help us in their own twisted way?"
I almost made the mistake of exclaiming a negation of the idea. So, I noted, did Dinah. Dragon, or her AI controlled puppet, didn't show a notable reaction. Alexandria's reaction was a sort of patient curiosity. She was surprised, but interested. I got the impression she'd be far less receptive of the idea if it were someone other than Minerva presenting it.
Minerva herself was clearly disappointed no one fell for her trap, and absorbing information from our less obvious personality tells. Her power is an order of magnitude greater than it was when I first met her so many months ago.
"I thought about it, after Atropos made a comment at the end of the Wendigo battle," she informed us.
"Yes, the one about killing an Endbringer making someone a hero once, while merely beating them made you a hero once a year," Alexandria supplied. She is saying it for Dinah and I, who hadn't heard that conversation. She's humoring Minerva's showmanship. Minerva's aware of this. It's... part of the way their friendship works.
"Right," Minerva responded. The interplay between the two women was more intimate than I'd have expected. They regularly have thinker conversations with one another. I felt a mild pang of jealousy that I didn't have someone I could be like that with. But, then, I was a Tinker and had that kind of fulfillment instead. "That made me think about how the Endbringers have influenced, well, everything. I think I speak for all of us here when I say, as uncomfortable as it is, all of us have directly or indirectly benefited by their presence."
The mood at the gathering went a bit on the dark side. A combination of 'explain yourself' and 'I don't want to be the one person here that can't figure out the answer if she happens to be right'.
"Take the birth of Pantheon," she went on. "We were Class S threats pretty much right out of the gate. What would have happened without the pressures created by the Endbringers? If the heroes weren't nursing their wounds from Leviathan and dealing with all the local threats instead of being able to mobilize more quickly. More than that, if we'd built like we were building, without making very public declarations of using our weapons on the Endbringers?"
"I would have killed you," Alexandria responded. The undertones were complex. Regret, in some ways. Sadness at the idea of losing Minerva? They know something they're not telling. Dragon does, too. A major secret. Alexandria took some action that kept Pantheon from being destroyed early on. What, I couldn't discern with the limited information I had. "As the member of the Triumvirate that was immune to Gaea and Khepri's power sets, the command would have fallen to me to do the job."
"Precisely," Minerva responded. "And that story can be told time and time again. The Protectorate itself was founded, at least in part, to respond to threats like the Endbringers, too powerful for any parahuman, or any team of parahumans, to believably fight."
"This is starting to make a sick sort of sense," Dragon agreed. "The Baumann Parahuman Containment Center shares a similar story. A nonlethal deterrent, for fear that the use of the death penalty in cases that are obviously deserving of it might provoke parahuman retaliation. Threaten the loose sort of peace that exists solely so both heroes and villains can work together against the Endbringers."
"Exactly," Minerva replied. "Dinah, don't worry I'm footing the bill for this, but if the Endbringers just mysteriously vanished from the planet tomorrow for no discernible reason, how long would it take before World War Three began?"
"Ninety four point three seven percent chance that a war involving more than fifty percent of Bet's population, including colony worlds, would occur within six years," she answered.
"And as destructive as the Endbringers are, I doubt they're as deadly as a war fought with nuclear bombs and tinker weaponry," Lisa concluded. "We know the death of India was caused by a parahuman, not the Simurgh. If there are even three or four people on the planet who have and use a power of that magnitude, then there wouldn't be a Bet left to fight over."
"You're saying this as if it would be better for us to allow them to live," I pointed out.
"No," Minerva responded. "That's what happens if they vanish mysteriously. Now what happens if the Endbringers are actually slain to the last?"
"I... my power isn't good at working with this many hypotheticals," Dinah informed us. "But the numbers are... I think it takes longer to occur, long enough that Scion happens first. That's too much a constant for me to see around."
"Of course, Scion," Minerva added. "Which really is the crux of the problem. The Endbringers are tough as hell, but they're nothing compared to the Entities that made them. If we can't beat them, then there's no way we can beat him."
Alexandria frowned, and the rest of us slipped into our thoughts as well. She was the one who spoke first, however. "So that's what this has to come down to, then? A weapons test. If we can't destroy the remaining Endbringers, then there's nothing we can do to fight the Entity."
"It's disturbing," Dragon agreed. "I take it that bringing this up to us, and only us, serves a purpose?"
"Of course," Minerva offered that foxlike grin. "I still intend to find the Endmakers and 'thank' them properly." Her vocal inflection was anything but grateful sounding. "But if we're going to find them, we need to be looking in the right places, and that means we have to cut the assumption that we're hunting for obvious enemies, and start looking at people who are possibly our allies."
"So, adding people who might want to help us, but are pretty certain we would reject that help if they just outright offered it to us?" I suggested. "I can create software that will look in that general direction."
Alexandria's reaction surprised me a little. She wasn't part of an Endmaker conspiracy, but she was definitely part of some kind of conspiracy. That's information that I might have felt safer not knowing about. Minerva already knows. Fuck. Dragon already knows, double fuck. Dinah's oblivious to the implications, she doesn't know.
"Try not to kick over any hornets' nests, any of you," Minerva responded, though the social cues led me to the obvious conclusion that she was only speaking to me. "Right now, there are a lot of people involved in trying to hold things together the world over. If we upset an ally like the Thanda accidentally, we might lose their help in future Endbringer battles. We'll cross reference our information with each other, if we come across any. No one acts without all of us comparing notes."
"That is reasonable," Dragon agreed. She didn't seem particularly happy with the conspiracy angle of this. She's an ally, not a friend, when it comes to Alexandria. While Minerva was at least friendly with both.
Wheels within wheels.
"Of course," I agreed. "The Endbringers and Scion are the top priorities. Everything else can wait until after that." For the time being, I made sure I believed that. Hopefully none of them were sharp enough to catch the fact that I knew I'd change my mind later.
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A/N- I've missed having Rapture in the story. So here she is! Yay!
