I, Panacea Pt 30 (Patreon)

Part Thirty: The Beginning of the End

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Tattletale

Riley—Lisa was still having trouble dealing with the fact that a tweenage mass murderer (or all that was left of one) was sitting on their sofa—took a little while to get used to the controller. Faster than some, to be honest; despite her power's best efforts, Lisa had never been more than mediocre at the games Alec liked. But Riley stuck to it anyway, and only a few minutes in she got her first unassisted kill.

Well, technically unassisted. From Alec's sly sideways glance, Lisa figured he'd set it up to give her the chance. Not that he was being nice. That sort of thing wasn't even in his DNA. But he'd evidently decided (as had she) that not antagonising the girl who held the distinction of having been the youngest ever member of the Slaughterhouse Nine was probably his best possible life choice, right then.

As Riley dived back into the game, Lisa was struck by an epiphany. Not via her power; she had it turned down right then, so as to not overuse it. This was the ordinary type that ordinary people got, but she was still nearly blinded by the intensity. All of a sudden, everything she'd been vaguely wondering about made sense.

Stepping up beside Amy, she cleared her throat gently. "This is all part of the master plan, isn't it? For dealing with Scion."

Part of her still wanted to gibber madly about what she'd learned during the terrifying confrontation in Coil's bunker, just over two weeks previously. Panacea was possessed … partnered … whatever … with an eldritch being that knew far too much about things it had no business knowing, and went by the unlikely name of 'Michael Allen', or the equally unlikely one of 'Security'. Also, that Scion was another eldritch entity that needed to be killed in order to save the world.

Amy gave her a sideways glance. "Partly that, yeah. And partly because she needed to be saved."

Lisa let the 'needed to be saved' thing go by the wayside. If someone who'd never heard of Bonesaw or lived in a world with the Slaughterhouse Nine met Riley now, they'd think she was just a normal twelve-year-old. They could interact with her without flinching every time she made a move in their peripheral vision.

Intellectually, she knew, Panacea's work could be trusted.

Emotionally, however, was another kettle of fish altogether.

"So, what's the plan?" she urged. "I'm pretty sure it's more complicated than sneaking up behind him and smacking him over the head with Circus' mallet."

Amy grimaced. "Michael's still working on the exact plan. He's got options, he says, but none of them are great. Some of them involve me working on brains, but he's trying hard to avoid going there." Her eyes cut over to where Riley was concentrating on blasting her opponents on the screen, tongue sticking out one corner of her mouth.

"So, he's going to get Riley to do the brain work where you can't or won't do it?" Lisa guessed. Doing this sort of thing without using her power was actually difficult, but she didn't want the sort of Thinker headache that came from trying to unscrew the inscrutable enigma that was Michael Allen.

"If and when it's needed, yeah." Amy sighed. "I really hope it isn't, but if it comes to saving the world, we're just going to have to grit our teeth, get it done, then get therapy after the fact."

Lisa tilted her head, raising her eyebrows slightly. "Huh," she observed. "I'm impressed. Two weeks ago in the bank, there's no way you would've been able to face up to making a compromise like that. You were so black-and-white in your thinking, you would've made the Siberian jealous."

Amy snorted softly. "Two weeks ago, I hadn't had the facts of life explained to me in great fucking detail by Michael. Including stuff about the nature of reality that I'm still getting my head around." She shuddered theatrically. "It has not been the most fun time of my life."

"What?" Lisa frowned. "From what I can see, you're sitting pretty. You're literally getting the secrets of the universe handed to you on a silver platter. It's basically my dream. What's not to like?"

"What's not to like?" For a moment, it seemed Amy was going to raise her voice, but then she grabbed Lisa's elbow. "C'mon, we need to talk."

Together, they headed down the corridor to the kitchenette area. Amy pulled out a chair and spun it around, then straddled it and crossed her arms over the back. Lisa debated doing the same, but decided to sit in hers normally. "Okay, what's on your mind?"

"You asked me what's not to like." Amy drew a deep breath, then let it out through her nostrils. "At the point in my life when you hit the bank, if you'd asked me if I had my life together, I would've said yes. I thought I had all my problems under control, but I was lying to myself so hard my pants should've spontaneously combusted five minutes before I put them on."

Lisa nodded cautiously. She'd known of some of Amy's issues due to her delving at the bank. Now that she knew the healer somewhat better, she regretted pushing Amy's buttons quite so hard when she did, but at the time matters had been more than a little fraught. "Okay," she said in an encouraging tone. "So … I'm guessing Security changed things?"

"If you want to understate things massively." Amy rolled her eyes. "He pulled the damned Band-Aid off everything. Every little lie I was telling myself, every stressor I was pretending to ignore, he made me face it all."

"Wow." Lisa got up and set the jug to boil. This was a moment for tea, if there ever was one. "Sounds like every hardass drill sergeant ever."

"Yeah, kinda." Amy seemed to rethink her harsh attitude. "But then he helped me through the aftermath and let me lean on him while I figured out who I really was."

Lisa resumed her seat. "And in the meantime, you're pulling crap like setting up Coil and fixing Taylor's shithole of a life and saving Alexandria's life and stuff. And, you know, making sure nobody comes down on us like a ton of bricks."

"There is that, yes." Amy seemed pensive. "But there's more that he's told me about. A lot more. More than you know about. You probably haven't guessed how deep the rabbit-hole goes. I'm not sure if I even want to know what I know."

A shiver ran down Lisa's spine at the portent behind Amy's words; she did her best to ignore it. "So, what's the big plan?"

Amy seemed to still be pondering over her answer when the jug burbled to indicate that the water had boiled. To give her time, Lisa got up and poured cups of tea for both of them. She knew the way Amy liked it—no milk, half a teaspoon of sugar—but she refrained from making it that way. Instinctively, she knew that showing off with her powers was not a great thing to do right now.

With the half-teaspoon of sugar in the cup, Amy stirred her tea gently as the teabag hung inside. "Like I said, we're still working on that. We've got several options, some of which are more palatable than others, and some that he really doesn't want to go with."

"Why not?" Lisa felt the question had to be asked. "I mean, this is the end of the world, right? How bad does an option have to be, that we reject it outright?"

Amy raised her eyes until she met Lisa's gaze. "One option involves sitting back and waiting until Scion snaps, then taking him down the hard way."

"Whoa, wait." Lisa held up her hands. "Slow down a bit. How does he snap? Why does he snap?"

"Michael says he's not sure about the second time, but the first time it was because Jack Slash talked him into it. Apparently Jack's got—had—some weird bullshit trick for talking to Scion so he listened. Anyway, Jack's dead, so I guess we'd have to wait for another inciting incident."

"Great." Lisa ran her hands through her hair. "So, what happens then?"

Amy shrugged. "Scion starts blowing shit up. Everyone's got their own personal plan for fighting him, that they're sure will work. Spoilers: it doesn't. Lots of people die. Whole countries get cratered. He even starts attacking the alternate earths. People get scared and alliances fracture. Taylor talks me into jailbreaking her power as a Hail Mary pass. She takes control of basically every cape everywhere, and uses lessons her bullies taught her to fuck with Scion's mind and kill him. But, you know, the jailbreak also breaks Taylor's mind for good and she ends up taking two bullets to the head before she can become a danger to the rest of the human race."

Her tea forgotten, Lisa stared at Amy. "Jesus Christ," she whispered. "That sounds … fuck, that sounds way too specific. Is that a Dinah prediction?"

"No." Amy shook her head. "Michael. He said he's seen it happen. He's also seen an instance where he prepped everyone to fight Scion as thoroughly as he could, but shit went sideways anyway. We won with a lot less bloodshed, mainly because we had all our planners running strategy and tactics, but he had to pull a sacrifice play. Scion killed him, then Taylor and Dragon killed Scion."

"You're talking alternate timelines here." Lisa wanted to bring her power into play, but knew it wouldn't give any results worth a damn if Michael was involved. "How many versions of our world are there? I thought there was just Aleph."

"No, no." Amy shook her head. "I was confused too, but it's more like alternate multiverses. Entirely separate. You can't get there from here, unless someone like Michael intervenes."

The conclusion was inescapable. "But he can go wherever he likes."

Amy paused for just long enough that Lisa was convinced there was more to the situation than she'd already figured out, then nodded. "That's what he told me, yeah. For him, it's effortless. It's part of the whole 'older than our universe' thing."

"There's something you're not telling me." Lisa leaned in. "Something you're aware of, but you're not sure about."

"Yes. No." Amy hesitated again. "You're seriously not going to believe it. The only reason I believe it is because he's never lied to me, not once. Also, because it's the only thing that fits in with everything else he's told me. Everything. About how he knows stuff he shouldn't."

Lisa drank from her teacup. "Well, doesn't that fall under 'inscrutable eldritch entity from beyond time and space'?" Her question wasn't quite as rhetorical as she tried to make it sound. "They know shit because they know shit."

"I only wish that was the case. There is an actual reason." Amy shook her head morosely, then took a sip herself. "Michael dropped enough hints that when he finally confirmed it, it wasn't as big a shock as it could've been, but still …"

"Do you think I want to know?" Lisa challenged. She absolutely wanted to know, of course, but she also knew somehow that was her power talking. What she was actually asking was more nuanced: would it help for me to know?

"Not sure yet." Amy took another sip from her teacup. "What we're reasonably sure of is that right now we've got direct or indirect access to all the assets and resources we need to beat Scion. The trick is to assemble an action plan with as few moving parts as possible, but with the best possible chance of destroying him. Michael is talking about getting in contact with Accord."

"Oh, hell no." Lisa shook her head vehemently. "The last thing we want is that twitchy little asshole coming in on this. I bet he doesn't even know all there is to know about half the people you want to make use of. I do; or rather, my power can fill me in as needed."

"What if you worked together?" Amy's voice was reasonable. "You give him the specific details and he works out the broad strokes?"

"Accord rarely works well with anyone," Lisa declared. "And if anyone even looks like being a disruptive influence around him, his go-to is murder."

Amy raised an eyebrow. "Michael says that's not entirely true. In late July, Behemoth was due to attack New Delhi. You would've been there, working alongside Accord to coordinate planning for the defenses. He can control himself when it's urgent. Are you sure you aren't pushing back because when he's working on a big problem he's the smartest person in the room?"

Lisa gritted her teeth. "Accord's thing is, he takes all the facts and puts together a rock-solid plan of action that takes all the minor details into account, right?"

"Uh huh." Amy kept eye contact with Lisa while she finished off most of her tea. "That's more or less exactly what we want, right?"

"Wrong. That's not what you need." Amy still wasn't getting it, so Lisa tried again. "When Accord makes his plans, he only takes into account the facts he knows at the beginning. My power lets me intuit more options as we work on the plan. Anyway, I know you. I've seen what you can do. With Accord, you'd have to go through the whole process of gaining his trust—if you could ever really get it—and talking him around into believing you. Me, I'm already there."

"Hmm." Amy finished her tea and put the cup down. "I'm still not totally convinced that you're not just trying to prove you're smarter than Accord. This is not about bolstering your respective egos. The lives of everyone on Earth—on all the Earths—are at stake here. Pride has to take second place."

"So, try me." Lisa set her own cup down and spread her hands. "Give me all the deets. See what I can figure out." She paused, then when Amy went to open her mouth, cut in again. "But start with the basics. What is Scion, and why's he so hard to beat?"

Amy was silent for a moment, then nodded fractionally; Lisa figured she'd consulted with Michael and he'd given the go-ahead. "Okay, imagine a giant multidimensional space whale. That's almost totally wrong, but it's right enough for the current situation. Now, each one of these whales is composed of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of smaller bits and pieces that can detach—"

"Whoa, wait a second." Lisa held up her hands. "I need a sense of scale here. How big is 'giant'? How small are these smaller pieces?"

There was another brief pause, then Amy shrugged. "Michael says that data is inconclusive, but the whales are maybe the size of a small planet. The shards are like their cells, but they're semi-autonomous, and maybe the size of Manhattan. They're what contain and generate powers." She raised her eyebrows. "Any more questions?"

"Keep going. I'll think of more." Lisa gestured generously.

Amy gave her a dubious glance, but continued anyway. "When the whales get to a life-bearing planet like Earth, they dump a bunch of shards into its local dimensional space. These are set up so they can link up with whatever is the most intelligent species on the planet. After going nuts with their powers for a few centuries, shards would have picked up lots and lots of data on how to use the powers most effectively, so the whales reclaim the shards. Then they blow up everything and ride the shockwave on to their next target. Rinse and repeat."

"Jesus." Lisa became aware that her nails were digging into her palms. She'd known it was bad, but not this bad. "All this, just to get information on how to use their powers?"

"They're not overly creative, and they're kind of obsessed," Amy explained. "Some do it a bit differently, but Scion's part of a Warrior-Thinker pairing. They had plans for Earth that would've made it a lot harder to fight back, but due to a series of fuckups and fortunate events, we've only got Scion active. The Thinker is currently semi-dead; we are gonna have to make her all the way dead sooner rather than later, though."

Lisa wanted to ask why, but decided not to take on any extraneous information right at that moment. "Okay, so if Scion's the size of a small planet, that means he's got the powers of all the shards he kept, right?"

"Got it in one." Amy didn't look or sound thrilled at the explanation. "He handed out a lot to the population, but he kept enough back that he can take care of himself. His real body's parked in a dimensional pocket, and one of his powers allows him to project the Scion form as a three-dimensional plug over the entrance. Destroy the golden man, and we can get access to his real body. Of course, that's easier said than done."

"Thank you, Captain fucking Obvious." Lisa rolled her eyes, drawing some comfort from the snark. "What about the Endbringers? Where do they come into this?"

Amy drew a deep breath. "They need us to fight, to gather data, right? The original idea was to have a bunch of nations, their capes all engaged in low-level warfare with each other. Whenever peace threatened to break out, a superweapon would attack someplace, and kick the fighting over again."

"Superweapon." Lisa didn't like the sound of that in the slightest. "So, they're not independent. They're weapons. Tools. Projections." A thought worried her. "But if the same three kept attacking different nations, pretty soon they'd figure out that it's an outside force, right?"

"If there was only three, yeah." Amy looked unhappy as she spoke the words. "But there's twenty. And if we kill one, two or three pop up in its place."

Twenty? Twenty Endbringers? Fuuuuuuuuck. Lisa didn't like the way this was going, but she'd started asking questions and she hated to not know all the answers. "Okay, so why are they just attacking cities at random now? This definitely isn't pitting capes of one nation against another."

"That's a whole other rabbit-hole," Amy said, making a cut-off motion with her hand. "Let's just say that when shit went sideways, it didn't do things by halves. But on the upside, Michael says he may have possibly fixed the Endbringer problem. Back to Scion; what else do you want to know?"

"How we kill him." This was, after all, the point of the entire uncomfortable discussion. "Or rather, how Michael's seen him killed before."

"It's a two-stage thing," Amy explained. "First, you have to destroy the fake body while it's fighting back all the way. Second, you get to the main body in its pocket dimension and hit it with planetary-scale damage. But you can't brute-force your way in. He's called the Warrior for a reason. You've got to use his emotions against him."

Lisa blinked. "Emotions? Really?"

"Really." Amy nodded earnestly. "It's what Michael told me. The first time, they kept hitting him with the Thinker's face and reminding him of her death—remember, he's depressed as fuck right now because she's basically gone—until he stopped fighting and let them take his body out. The second time, Michael pissed him off badly, to the point that he didn't register danger until it was too late."

Lisa leaned forward intently. "Wait, wait, go back. 'Take his body out'?"

"It's a power effect the whales use for offense between themselves. It basically destroys anything it hits. Michael calls it Sting, and says Flechette can empower weapons with it."

"But he can dodge it?"

Amy nodded. "Yeah. Remember Contessa? He's got the same power as she does. Nearly everyone who goes up against him, he can anticipate their attacks."

Lisa remembered Contessa, alright. She also remembered how Contessa went down. "But Michael can ignore that, right? Scion can't anticipate him."

"Michael's pretty sure that's the case, but it raises a whole other set of problems." Amy gestured to herself. "I'm not a Brute. Sure, Michael can wrong-foot Scion by doing something he doesn't expect, but then he can hit me with a wide-area attack that I can't dodge or run away from."

"Good point, good point." Lisa got up and took the empty cups to the sink, dropping the used tea-bags in the trash along the way. "So, the trick will be to figure out how to leverage Michael's ability to bypass Scion's precog ability in such a way that we can one-shot him. Scion, not Michael."

"That's the problem, yeah." Amy leaned back in her chair and sighed. "Michael says that the last time he went through this, he got Leet to build a gun that emulated Flechette's ability. The idea was to get Dragon to reverse-engineer it and give everyone one, but Scion attacked before he'd made more than the prototype."

Lisa blinked. "Well, we could do that again, right? Just give you the gun. You front up to Scion and pop a cap in his golden ass. He won't be expecting that."

"And if he can analyse what sort of Tinkertech that's gone into a device, just by looking at it?" Amy shook her head. "I'd be a cloud of greasy smoke before I even aimed it at him."

"Right, right." Lisa sagged back into her chair, closing her eyes. This was starting to sound not as easy as she'd hoped it would be. "Uggh. Name the other resources we've got access to. I probably know them, but I need to hear them out loud."

When Amy spoke, her voice held a smirk. "Well, if we're going by alphabetical order, first up is Accord."

Lisa cracked one eyelid, just to give her a filthy look. "Thought I told you why he's a bad idea."

"No, you gave me excuses why you don't want him in on this. Michael, on the other hand, knows exactly how to secure his undivided attention and his absolute cooperation. That's a direct quote, by the way."

"Okay, fine. The man can make a plan that won't blow up in our faces. Granted. Next?"

"Coil." Amy spoke the word blithely.

"… is dead." Lisa closed her eye again. "I watched him die."

"Michael insisted his body be put on ice," Amy countered. "We have access to his genetic material."

"Let me guess," Lisa snarked. "Next you're going to say we can get Blasto to make a clone of him, with his powers?"

"Well, yes," Amy agreed. "That's something that can actually be done." She paused. "Michael says the last time something like this happened, it was the Slaughterhouse Nine. They kidnapped Blasto and raided Toybox for Cranial's stuff. Cloned themselves and had basic personalities implanted, so the clones would raise havoc, all for shits and giggles."

"Let's put a pin in that and move on." The last thing Lisa wanted to face was a clone of Coil. "So, when Leet made the Flechette gun, it actually worked?"

"Michael says it did, sure." Amy shrugged. "Will it work this time? No idea."

"Okay, so once you get access to the real body, how do you kill that? Size of a small planet and all, I mean."

"Well, that's the easy bit, or so I gather." Amy leaned back in her chair. "There's a lot of capes who can do a lot of damage in a short time. There's also a bunch of Tinkers who can also build really destructive stuff, like String Theory or Bakuda. Give them free rein once the way is clear, and he's toast."

"String Theory's in the Birdcage though, isn't she? And I thought Bakuda was heading there."

Amy grinned. "Well, she's not there yet. And she can make all kinds of nasty shit."

"Yeah, so I gathered." Lisa frowned. "Talking of nasty shit, how good is Blasto's tech anyway?"

"Give me a second here." Amy paused as though listening, then whistled softly. "Damn. Okay, he's good. At one point, he does a hybrid of Myrddin and the Simurgh, and damn near ends up with a viable cross."

"Nope, nope and hell nope." Lisa shook her head vehemently. "The man is fucking certifiable if he's going to pull that shit. Why hasn't he been kill-ordered yet, anyway?"

Amy gave her a tight grin. "There's an unsigned one just waiting to happen, if he ever creates something that can replicate itself. Nobody wants another Nilbog."

"Ah. Good point. Next on the resources list?"

"Doormaker." Amy said the name casually. "Portal cape. You might recall Michael asking for access to his ability. Well, we got it. If we need to be somewhere, we can be there." She snorted. "Remember how I said Jack Slash could talk to Scion? He could talk to other capes too, and make them listen. He gave himself access to Doormaker, and we had to chase him all over America."

"That must have been annoying … wait. Wait, wait, wait." Lisa sat bolt upright. "I just had an idea."

"What?" As Amy stared at her, Lisa dipped into her power.

What are the chances … pretty damn high. Huh.

Lisa raised a finger. "Tell you in a second. But I'm going to need you to make a phone call for me first. We need one thing to make this work."

Amy took her phone out. "Name it."

<><>

Grue

Brian hated to admit it, but Alec had been right about something after all. Specifically, watching Riley play first-person shooters was a good way to figure out her current state of mind. As unnerving as her current presence was (and why had Panacea and Lisa gone off to talk privately at the far end of the loft, anyway?), he was able to pick up a lot of tells from her as she concentrated on the screen.

She'd been tense when she first arrived, which wasn't totally surprising, given that she was literally walking unprotected into the middle of a bunch of teenage supervillains. Never mind that they'd been more scared of her than she of them (Brian was never going to let Alec forget how he'd actually jumped up on the sofa) and was under Panacea's protection; it would've been a nerve-wracking experience for anyone but a total sociopath.

… which was, he belatedly realised, a point in her favour.

However, she'd begun to relax, not even expressing more than mild irritation every time her on-screen avatar got shot, stabbed, blown up or run over by an APC. Alec was, of course, far and away her superior in the game, but even he wasn't being as much of a dick as he could've been. In fact, Brian caught him subtly assisting her from time to time, though he wasn't sure if she even realised it.

A shy smile was showing up on her face each time she overcame another obstacle. Alec's praise, rarely given as it was, made her smile widen, and she doubled down on her efforts to conquer the electronic battlefield.

Rachel had headed out, picking up the collars and leashes for her dogs but not bothering to attach them straight away. Brian hadn't been sure whether this was a reaction to the stranger in their midst—Rachel had seen enough of Panacea for her not to count as a stranger, he hoped—or just because she needed to go out. Either way, it was probably a good thing to remove a potential source of argument from the room.

Taylor appeared to be casually watching with a tolerant smile on her face—she had about as much use for computer games as Brian himself did—but Brian knew three things. First, Taylor never did anything casually. As a matter of course, she would be watching the surrounding few blocks with her bugs, checking and following every person who moved within that area. Second, he'd gathered that she knew a thing or two about spotting people with a hidden agenda, and she'd already spent some time in Riley's presence without sounding the alarm. Third, there would be a truly massive swarm gathering somewhere close by, getting larger by the second. If Riley were trying to pull a trick on them, about a million bugs would descend on her and strip the flesh from her bones at a rate that would cause the average piranha to back away carefully.

"Hah!" Lisa's voice echoed down the corridor, startling Brian and making Taylor turn her head. "I knew it!"

For some reason, the sheer level triumph in her voice gave Brian a deep sense of foreboding. "Is this something we should be worried about?" he asked Taylor in a low voice.

She shrugged. "I have no idea. I haven't been trying to listen in, and bug senses are crap anyway."

"Is Lisa being smug again?" asked Alec without taking his attention from the screen. "Can one of you responsible adults go and ask her to do it somewhere else? We're busy here."

"It should be okay." Taylor sounded like she was trying to convince herself of what she was saying. "Panacea's there, and she's got Michael to advise her against doing anything really stupid."

Brian grimaced. "Unfortunately, Lisa can be the stupidest smart person I know. And when she uses her power to get answers, those answers can be totally convincing and utterly wrong, all at the same time."

"Yeah," Alec threw in. "Remember the bank, and how she totally borked her prediction of the response level? Yeah, that's happened more than once."

"Do-do you think it's happening now?" ventured Riley.

"That bit, I'm not sure about," Brian said. "Like Taylor said, Panacea's there. Whether she's got enough of a level head to keep Lisa from going off the deep end—"

In the most egregious example of 'speak of the devil' Brian had ever encountered, he was interrupted by the girl herself making a grand entrance from the direction of the kitchen. "Ladies and gentlemen," she declared, throwing her arms wide. "I am a certifiable fucking genius!"

"Well, you're certifiable, that's for sure," snarked Alec. "As for the rest of it … meh, you do you."

"Shut up, Alec." Brian's sense of foreboding was ramping up quite dramatically. Seeing Panacea wearing an unhappy expression behind Lisa did nothing at all to dispel it. "Lisa, what've you done now?"

"Oh, nothing much." Lisa batted her eyelids in an apparent attempt at false modesty. "I've only figured out a plan for saving the entire fucking world from inevitable fiery apocalypse, that's all. Yeah, that's right. Me. The stupidest smart person you've ever met." The savage irony in her tone would've required an angle-grinder to cut through it. "The line to apologise for misjudging me forms on the left."

"Is that right, Amy?" Taylor looked at Panacea. "Have you two come up with an actual plan? Is that what you were doing back there?"

Panacea sighed. "Yes, there's a plan. It's … not a bad one, to be honest. Not where I would've gone, and I'm really not going to enjoy implementing it, but … Michael says it should work."

"Shit, it's that bad?" In the time Brian had known Panacea, he'd formed an impression of someone who it was hard to put on the back foot, but she didn't look at all thrilled. "Does someone have to die to make it work?"

"Hah, nope." Lisa was definitely riding the endorphin high. "That was the last one. This time around, there's gonna be exactly one casualty. The big golden doofus."

"What do you mean, last one?" Alec asked suspiciously. "We've never fought Scion before … right? Or did I sleep in one time and miss the whole thing?"

Panacea shook her head. "No, but Michael has. As far as he's concerned, the time and space constraints of our universe are merely polite suggestions. He's been through it a couple of times already."

Brian blinked. "He what?" Then he shook his head. "Okay, you know what? I'm not even going to ask."

"Okay, so what's this plan involve?" Alec put the game on pause and turned to give Lisa his full attention. "And how come you came up with this plan when Pan-Pan there's got the guy with all the knowledge in her head?"

"Because the plan she came up with isn't one I would come up with," Panacea answered with a touch of asperity. "Just because it'll probably succeed doesn't make it a good plan, just a successful one."

"Hey, any plan that doesn't involve Scion blowing up our everything is a good plan in my book." Alec spread his hands. "So elucidate us, o tattler of tales. Give us the straight dope. Spill the beans. Give with the sordid details. How are we gonna kill him?"

"You're a dope," muttered Lisa. "So, this plan is going to involve spending a stack of cash getting a few people to cooperate. Also, I'm going to have to ask the Chief Director of the PRT for a favour. But once that's done, the answer is … with panache and style."

<><>

PRT Department 22, Washington DC

Chief Director Costa-Brown

It was somewhat restful to be able to settle back into her office chair and pretend that her cape persona didn't exist for the time being. Events had been moving in unexpected directions since the Panacea situation had cropped up. Formerly very much a wallflower-type cape who would never have gotten Rebecca's attention had it not been for her healing ability, Panacea had in one night thrown all of Cauldron into turmoil.

It had been highly tempting to pigeonhole Panacea's enigmatic passenger as being the result of a Case 70-style second trigger, but she knew damn well that it just didn't fit the prerequisites. Case 70 capes involved two personalities and powersets sharing the same body, but the powers were invariably similar in nature. Panacea's powers revolved around manipulation of biology—Rebecca had known for years that the girl's 'inability' to affect brains was a self-imposed limitation, nothing more—whereas 'Michael Allen' had a whole different set of abilities.

As far as she could tell from observation—and from listening to Contessa's less than totally thrilled account of events—the man called 'Michael Allen' had no active powers of his own, but could hide Panacea from precognitive observation. He also had access to a terrifyingly broad array of information he had absolutely no business knowing, including things that Rebecca had trouble believing herself, such as Eidolon's purported connection to the Endbringers.

And of course, he knew about Scion. In fact, befitting his self-described status as an extra-dimensional being, he apparently knew more about Scion than the entirety of Cauldron had been able to divine in the last thirty years of operation. So much so, that he was confident of formulating a plan to kill the golden demigod with the resources at hand.

Which was more, Rebecca had to admit, than they'd managed to do in all this time.

Her desk phone rang. She frowned as she picked it up, noting that the caller ID showed up as the PRT ENE phone desk. "Chief Director Costa-Brown speaking."

"Sorry to bother you, Chief Director, but I have Panacea on the line. She says it's important."

Rebecca's eyes widened. "Put her through." If Panacea considered something important, then so did she.

There was a click, then the background noise changed. She could dimly hear the sounds of combat … no, that was a combat-style computer game. "Hello, Chief Director? This is Panacea."

She recognised the voice. "Panacea, good to hear from you. What do you have for me?"

"We're, uh, we're working on a plan to end a certain problem, and we need some information. Specifically, when you ended Jack Slash, did you keep the body?"

"No. It was destroyed. Why?"

A second voice, one her perfect memory marked as belonging to Tattletale, muttered "Shit," but Panacea bored on. "Genetic material. Did you keep any?"

There was only one use Rebecca could think of for DNA, and that was for cloning. Though as horrific—and resourceful—as the Slaughterhouse leader had been, she just couldn't see him facing off against Scion. Still, she'd been asked the question. "I took a sample, yes. To ensure it was indeed him and not a fake, and to test for bio-agents. The sample is still in storage. Why?"

She heard two separate sighs of relief, before Panacea replied. "Don't want to spill too much over an open line. Thanks; I'll get back to you." As the call cut off, she heard the beginnings of a triumphant whoop.

Putting the phone back down, she shook her head. If Panacea's plan involved cloning Jack Slash, the world was in more trouble than she'd thought. Still, the plan had to have Michael Allen's okay, which meant there were facts she had yet to learn about the situation.

She got back to work, dealing with necessary documentation that absolutely had to be sighted and signed by her personally. It would've been tempting to delegate such things to her subordinates, but she'd heard of many cases where this led to the decay of authority to the point that the boss had no idea what was actually going on in the organisation. As it was, she could speed-read and absorb the content of any document in seconds, and any hinky wording would leap out at her just as quickly.

Just as she was scribbling a request for clarification in the margin of a seventeen-page document—the wording felt just a little too vague to be accidental—a Doorway opened in her office, in front of her desk. Automatically, she pressed the button next to her knee that locked the office door and lit up the DO NOT DISTURB sign, but it wasn't Contessa who stepped through, or even any other member of Cauldron. Instead, it was Panacea, out of costume, followed by a girl with bottle-green eyes and blonde hair in a French braid.

Rebecca's agile mind processed the information even as she spoke. "Panacea, when we granted you Doorway access, I did not give you permission to invade my office, nor bring along those not authorised to be here, such as …" There was barely a pause before she matched body type, height, and hair and eye colour. "… Tattletale." She hadn't so much as raised her voice, let alone stood up, but Tattletale went pale.

"Sorry," Panacea said breezily, in a tone of voice that made it clear she wasn't sorry at all. "We had some more questions to ask you, and I didn't want to do it over the phone. Most important secret in the world, and all that. Also, Tattletale's the one who came up with the plan."

Now she stood up. "You actually have a plan to kill Scion? One that will work?"

The corner of Panacea's mouth quirked in a dry half-grin. "We both know that there's no guarantees in the cape business, but Michael thinks it's got a better chance than most. But we're going to need access to stuff, as well as certain capes. Not all of them are heroes. Also, how's Flechette's transfer going?"

"I've expedited it," Rebecca said firmly. "She's one of the capes you need access to?"

"Yup," confirmed Tattletale. "Also, what's the status of Bakuda?"

Rebecca queried the name in her own head, leading her to a report she'd viewed the previous night. "Alive, though in some residual pain. Currently awaiting trial for multiple crimes against innocent citizens. The chances are that she'll be Birdcaged. Why?"

Panacea placed both hands in her desk and leaned over it. "Would you be good with granting her a certain amount of leniency, if she can build something for us? A really big and dangerous bomb?"

Just for a few seconds, Rebecca looked Panacea over. Aside from holding herself differently—she was far different from the self-effacing girl Rebecca had seen in every New Wave publicity shot—the teen didn't seem disturbed or insane. Which just begged the question as to why.

"I have no doubt that she could construct an extremely dangerous device from the contents of the average garage," Rebecca posited. "However, I have to query your reasons for allowing her to do so. What do you need this for? Why not a more focused attack?"

Tattletale grinned. "Well, you see …"

<><>

Panacea

Amy and Lisa stepped back through the Doorway into the Undersiders' loft, Lisa leading the way with a jaunty step. "That went well, I thought."

"It did," Amy agreed. She was glad Lisa had kept her mouth more or less under control, as well as the fact that the Chief Director had seemed to be in a cooperative mood. She hadn't even queried the plan too deeply, merely raising an eyebrow at salient points. "That's the interview with Bakuda set up, and she'll release funds for dealing with Blasto and Toybox."

"What's this about Blasto and Toybox?" asked Brian, entering the kitchen. "And what did the Chief Director say about talking to Bakuda?"

Amy grinned. "She said yes. And as for your other question, we're going to be dealing with both Blasto and Toybox in the near future. It's part of the plan. How's Riley going?"

Brian shrugged. "Alec says he's satisfied that she's not a scheming mass murderer, which doesn't comfort me as much as it should. Rachel came back from the walk, and she's showing Riley how to brush her dogs down. When are we going to hear the rest of this plan?"

Lisa rolled her eyes. "When we're sure we aren't going to fall on our faces before we ever get it off the ground, duh. We've got to refine our technique and work on our lines."

Confused, Brian shook his head. "I thought we were going to be killing Scion, not auditioning for an acting job."

Amy smirked. "Who's to say we can't do both at the same time?"

Part 31