Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“It's raining…”

“Hm? Oh, yeah,” she said, sparing a glance towards the window. 

Heavy, fat water droplets were coming down, the sort that splatted themselves across the glass in a big, ugly spread. It was the sort of rain that goes from zero to a hundred in just a few seconds, all the kids outside were shrieking, some threw their hands over their heads and began running for the doors. 

She rather liked the sound of rain, it had a certain rhythmic quality, but when the wind caught it and cast it against the windows in those uneven bursts? 

There was something magical about that. 

It was nice to do her homework to the sound of it, one time she even had a candle beside her window, providing a nice light to work with… then her mother took it away, worried that the tiny flame might set the curtains on fire. 

The fact said curtains were half a metre either side didn't factor into the woman's thinking, and more notably, she had not been allowed a candle on her desk after that either. 

Her parents didn't trust her at all…

“It's really starting to come down, man, that's crazy…”

She glanced at the windows again, more focused on her rather pathetic little packed lunch than anything else. Kids that had gotten out of class earlier or just scarfed down their food early had been so keen to play outside despite the cold weather.

The rain was indeed heavy right now. 

Actually, she had seldomly seen it so strong, it was practically obscuring the other kids. 

Man, she wouldn't want to be out in that.

Kids were falling, tripping, crushed into the tarmac of the school yard by the sheer force of the water coming down on them. 

It wasn't rain any more, it was a solid wall of water that was smashing down by the second. 

She was on her feet as others took notice of the situation, 

Carlos ripped open the door with strength that, were it not for the situation, would likely call him out as a Cape. 

With the door open, the curtain of water that was coming down began to splash into the room, the overwhelming roar of sound, the ceaseless deluge filling the cantina with noise. For a moment, Carlos just stared out into the yard, the same question on his mind as hers. 

What the fuck?

She saw the moment he put his mind to it, to try to get some kids out. He was a Brute, no doubt he would be fine, right? Big, strong, dependable Carlos, if anybody could make a difference it was him… so why did her gut tell her to stop him? Why was her power screaming at her about just how bad an idea this was? It wasn't that the space beyond the door was warped, it was that it was almost a solid column of water coming down at near terminal velocity.

“Carlos!” she said, reaching out to grab his hand---

His fingers slipped through hers, and she watched as he pushed himself out into the rain, 

In just seconds he was a silhouette, fading away, disappearing into the curtain of water. 

It was lapping up to her ankles already, her socks were getting wet, the rain was smashing down, she could see the moment it was too much, the moment that he fell to the ground just like all the others, struggling with all his might, it was hopeless---

She woke in a cold sweat with a reflexive jolt. 

The sound of the blood rushing in her ears, so akin to that crashing deluge that just moments ago she had been watching. Her breathing was ragged in her chest even as she desperately tried to bring it under control, to stifle the urge to hyperventilate. 

Missy Biron lay in her bed, ears straining to catch any small sound or indication that the rain was there, that she was back in Arcadia High school on the third of January, the first day back after Winter break.

She pushed herself up, half-staggering, half-running for the tiny en-suite bathroom that was attached to her room. 

There was no need to bother with the main light; the glow of her charging toothbrush was enough to pick out the outline of the sink, to guide her hands to its steep edges even as her stomach tightened and she threw up.

Without grace she hovered there, waiting for the next spasm of her stomach muscles, despite the stabbing, aching pain of the last retch.

If she had been granted just a moment longer, she would have at least moved to the toilet, but the nightmares always had her throwing up quickly for whatever reason, perhaps she just had a weak constitution, as her father would have put it. 

Don't think about him, don't think about him. 

There was still a chance, however distant, that he was still---

“URGH---” a painful clench of her already screaming stomach muscles, the last few drops of her stomach contents splashed against the bare fingers still gripping the porcelain. “---rrrrkrk…”

Feeling quite miserable with herself, she remained hunched over for a few moments more. Her eyes, even if they were filled with tears of pain and discomfort, had adjusted further, making out the features of the bathroom better now, even if the light was weak. 

She'd made such a mess again… 

Three nights in a row. 

Somewhere in the walls, a pipe did that thing where it hisses as water flows through it and reflexively after a nightmare, she found herself hunching up, waiting. 

The first droplets, the water… the crashing crushing unceasing deluge---

Her hand found the faucet and turned it on, weak at first but then stronger, mechanically she moved her hands to begin pushing and moving the vomit towards the drain. She'd already made a mess, it was already all over her… what did it matter if she used her hands to clean it up? 

It wasn't like it mattered, nothing really mattered in the end.

She partially turned and flicked on the light, wincing at the harsh LED bulbs that had been hastily installed months ago, and which the PRT had seemingly no intention of replacing with something nicer, then turned back to the sink.

She caught her reflection in the sink and, partially numb, partially disgusted by the creature she was looking at. Green eyes, short, wavy dark-brown hair, a face that once upon a time plenty of people had called cute, or sweet, or any other combination of things that she had come to resent, to hate. 

The face of Missy Biron...

The name didn't matter, Missy Biron was just a name, two names that just so happened to be placed beside one another. 

She wished she had her helmet on. 

There were probably hundreds of Missy Birons across the country... But there was only one Vista.

Even if they was a trail of grossness dribbling from her lips, even if she was a mess who looked as if she had been skipping meals and sleep for weeks… there was only one Vista.

With the help of the light, she began to clean up more. 

No point leaving a mess; they'd get on her case again. All the useless bureaucrats wanted to get rid of her anyway, only the people who really knew what she could do argued her case properly… no point giving the former any ammunition.

“Hah…”

Well, she was awake now, might as well get dressed. 

One of her several outfits was waiting in her tiny wardrobe, and mechanically she changed into it. Once upon a time her outfit had been green and white, with a patterned skirt and a green visor… no more. Here in Quarantine Site-08 there were no expectations of cutesy outfits to appease some overly sensitive fuck's with college degrees in PR, there was just hard utilitarianism. 

Now her outfit was almost fully covering, armoured in ways perfectly calculated to maximise protection whilst allowing for a full range of flexibility. The helmet had communications built into a pair of ear-like spurs that rose from its side. The visor was the same, but now had various tinkertech additions, and her entire outfit was covered with small satchels and pockets for anything she might need. She took the pauldron from yesterday's outfit and placed it on today's, carefully tying it on.

It was a special part of her outfit, dearly precious... cut and gouged deep into the plastic were two symbols: #8

Gabriel, Janet, Killey, Johnny, Aputi, Asher, Owen---

Dressed, she got breakfast in the canteen, moving around the various troopers and military sorts on staff. Most gave her a wide berth, but a few wordlessly patted her on the shoulder as they went past. 

Members of Team One, rowdy and quick with a joke, but she'd seen them with their backs to the wall more than once and had her life saved by them once.

Jackson of Team Three, just off shift. He had a cute little girl back in Indianapolis who really liked the butter cookies Vista sent him back with on his last trip. 

The food in the cantina was not great, but not bad either. 

Quarantine Sites may be a PRT function, but a lot of the staff and facilities were more akin to those of the military than anything else, each of the chefs looked as if they could crush a man's head between their hands. After ten months in this place, it was like home... home away from home, because it wasn't like there was anywhere else in this world for her, now that Brockton Bay had been lost. 

The forward base of the Quarantine Site was geographically the closest that human civilisation reached to what had once been Brockton Bay, and ever since the cities fall ten months ago, she had lived here full-time.

She wasn't supposed to be, though, but she stubbornly fought to remain, no matter what people said---

There was somebody behind her. 

“Vista.”

She glanced to see who it was. 

“Ma'am.”

She could see the slightly pained way that Miss Militia responded to that, the faint tensing of her shoulders, the strain in her expression. 

Ever since she began spending time with the military and the professional Quarantine Site troopers, Vista had increasingly been picking up their lingo and way of doing things.

“Did you sleep okay?”

“Like usual.”

Other people walked past them, and none of them would have reason to pay heed to the comment. But the other woman knew exactly what she meant by that statement. 

Vista's new outfit covered most of her face, so the bags under her eyes and other signs of tiredness were hidden, but the woman was one of the few left from the Brockton Bay crew. Perhaps it was greater experience with Vista from the before times, before the rains came, but the woman had an infuriating habit of knowing what was going through her head. 

"Did you take your tablets?"

"No. I don't like them, they make me groggy even when I'm awake."

The woman was trying to restrain a frown, or some other expression of disapproval, she could tell. The other Cape leaned closer, to say quietly. 

"Missy---" under the table, Vista clenched her hand into a fist. "Johanna was convinced that they would help."

They did. 

They let her sleep like a baby. Perhaps if she was just a normal person then she would be able to live the rest of her life in some cushy, safe place whilst relying on those drugs for her rest. 

“I'm taking part in the expedition today. I can't do that if I'm addled with sleeping pills,” she replied.

“I know, but---”

“I need to. I can keep them safe.”

She didn't need the drugs, she was strong, she was capable!

Missy was… Vista was fine. 

A deep breath. 

“I know you can.”

A pause. 

Miss Militia wanted to say more, she could tell… 

Go on then, tell her again how she should move to a new, safer city to put her skills to use. Tell her again that what had occurred in Brockton Bay was a tragedy, that the deaths of her parents was an 'unavoidable tragedy,' tell her that there was no hope at all in finding the truth of what had occurred! 

Tell her that she should just be a normal orphan girl without family and friends in a strange new city, going on pointless, inane patrols that didn't save anyone!

Be one of dozens to tell her that it was wrong for her to be here, when she had more right than most of the people here to be taking part in this! 

Go on, then!

Call her unworthy of being a hero!

Do it, you fucking coward!

But the woman didn't.  

She said nothing whatsoever.

After a moment, Miss Militia reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder, probably giving it a comforting squeeze. Vista could not feel it through the pauldron of her armour. It was something that she liked about her new outfit, it wasn't just protection from the outside world, it was protection from the efforts of others, a professional suit that forced people to take her seriously. 

“Take care out there, Missy,” Miss Militia said softly.

On some level, Vista found herself feeling bitter that the other woman didn't say anything more beyond using that useless name, but she couldn't name the aching feeling in her chest as the woman said her goodbyes and walked away. 

She just… She wanted to say something, but she wasn't sure what that thing was. 

Still... it was time to get going. 

Hell awaited, and it was up to Vista to keep team four safe today inside it.

Chapter Text

Brockton Bay was an unrecognisable hell compared to the place she once knew

The city that she had grown up in had been transformed in the course of just a week into something else, something far grander but also utterly decayed. 

Reaching a ledge overlooking a precipitous drop, Vista paused to stare up at the grand, looming structures of metal and concrete that stood opposite, reaching high into the sky, far taller than anything normal to the Bay.

Some were corroded, others broken, and as many still standing but overgrown with strange plants and fungus that hadn't been native to earth beforehand. 

Each of those species now had neat little PRT fact-files all about them, explorations of their genetic structure, their abnormalities, their place within this strange ecosystem and more. 

It wasn't a case that Brockton Bay had been overwhelmed by what had happened all those months (almost a year) ago, as it was that the city with close to three-hundred thousand souls had been utterly overwritten. 

It had been replaced with something new, a great circular creation ringed in a several hundred-metre tall wall, within which was an urban plan that, perhaps, had once been a city of some variety. Just trying to map out and understand the place was difficult, what delineation had once existed between the districts of the strange city had been muddied by decay and overgrowth.

Complicating the situation, the entire of the Quarantine Site was one colossal Thinker blind spot, and flying through it was inordinately lethal. Even advanced satellites struggled to pierce the incredibly dense rain-clouds that hung over the fallen city. 

The information that they did have been collected at great risk and no small amount of loss, the majority of data and images were collected not by machine, but instead by boots on the ground. 

Missy had spent hours studying what maps, pictures (many with little attached labels speculating on function) that existed of the Quarantine Site and everything within it. 

The most notable features were the pair of superstructures, one collapsed into a vast lake, near the centre. The one still standing was a great cuboid whose top pierced the clouds, standing atop vast legs nearly a mile tall in themselves.

Exactly what the giant structures were, Vista had no idea. 

Nobody did. 

That's how Team Seven was lost, an attempt to land people via helicopter with climbing equipment. She still remembered the looks of grim determination on their faces the day they left, had listened in and followed their reports back with trepidation as they found a solitary way in…

She could see them now, feel Gabriel's hand on her shoulder, the promise to return.

Their communications did not last long, cut out by interference and broken up descriptions of the impossible. 

Vista reached up automatically, fingers tracing the '#8' gouged into her pauldron.

That was the real problem with Quarantine Site-08.

You could send as many drones as you wanted, could send in high-level Movers to explore the place, but ultimately, it was a vast and lethal killing machine. 

In ten months, the Site had chewed up and devoured almost two dozen Capes and as many PRT troopers who thought that they had what it took to be the one who discovered this place's secrets. The Parahumans put too much faith in their powers, and everyone had hoped they might be the one who could reveal the secrets.

Turns out, in a confusing labyrinth like this, many powers were more of a hindrance than a help most of the time.

Vista turned her gaze to the sky. 

The clouds were still white, not so dense and dark as to occlude the sun. 

The rains were not coming… yet. 

There was only so much time in a given day to take advantage of, you had to be disciplined and rigorous whilst exploring this place. 

Every second counted because eventually time would run out and the rain's would come… and nothing could survive the rain. Even Alexandria, the most fearsome Brute in the world had almost died here, her body had endured, and she had just about been dragged out before she could drown, her prodigious strength unable to push back against thousands of tonnes of water crashing down upon her.

Vista's ears filled with the sound of roaring, her breathing grew shallower---

She shook her head. 

Focus. ​

Don't think about the rain.

On today's expedition, she was with team 4, all former military who had become Quarantine Site troopers. Most people didn't think about the sort of men and women who volunteered for this sort of work, they just expected that the PRT would keep Capes full-time to monitor these places, but in truth the majority of the work was done by the rank and file.

Tragically, most Quarantine Site troopers came from the very places that had been lost to whatever led to the walls being thrown up.

To this day, much of Ellisburg was staffed by former police and veterans who had lost their home, and now stood vigil over it, unable to move on.

Haha…

By all rights, she should not be here, taking part in this lethal operation. It went against both ethics and standard operating procedures to have a Ward on staff (even if on a seemingly very long temporary contract), but then again… who really cared? 

When it was a matter of public safety, most arguments fell by the wayside. 

Plus… she had almost seventy expeditions under her belt. 

If she wasn't in the top five contenders for highest time recorded in Quarantine Site-08, then it would only be because of people like Dragon who could cheat with technology. 

In terms of people who had walked, flesh and blood, into this hell, there were few who could match her. 

“Are we getting a sample of the blue?” asked a member of the team, Henry, pointing a flashlight at a cluster of hanging blue 'fruit', which stood on long, narrow black stalks from the ceiling of the tunnel that had led to the ledge the team was no standing on. 

The 'blue fruit' were not actually fruit, instead they were the eggs of some manner of insect, but everyone referred to them as such. 

About the size of a clenched fist, the grub that hatched from them was a harmless scavenger that ate moss, dirt and pretty much any other form of organic detritus it could find, hence their ubiquitous nature.

“Leave them. We're looking for Batnip.”

The potential sample was left behind; the insect eggs were common enough that plenty of specimens had been collected anyway. 

Around the team, strange plants sat and glistened, green mosses climbed and grew over ancient graffiti in languages that she (and nobody else for that matter) could neither read nor understand. Distinct buzzing sounds from various insects could be heard, there were all manner of strange things in this place. 

Like right now, the team was being investigated by a trio of creatures. 

“Call in, Vista,” spoke a voice in her ear, announced only by a solitary 'ding' sound. 

Vista did not recognise the voice on the other side, but there were enough people around that it was no real surprise that she didn't. Operators of the console were a dime a dozen. 

She reached up and pressed a button on the side of her helmet. Communications were hard here; part of the reason why drones were so unreliable, but occasionally they could get signal and share information with the base.

“Vista here. Nothing much so far, still looking for the Batnip plant. Got three Noodles; one adult and two babies,” she said, watching the trio of organisms fly and flutter nearby.

The long, thin winged creature regarded them all with beady eyes, its body a rich-pink, whilst the pair of juveniles hovering around it were a much paler shade. 

Noodleflies. Inquisitive creatures that moved with the grace of dragonflies despite being close to five-foot long… but when angered the adults put their incredible speed and mobility to use, protruding a wickedly sharp proboscis that could easily pierce cloth, the heart and then stab out the other side. 

“Copy that. Remember, no aggressive actions, they'll get bored with you and move on.”

“I'm perfectly aware,” she wanted to say.

Instead, she held her tongue, and focused on watching the trio of strange creatures.

Her helmet had a camera in, and whilst the signal was a desperately patchy and erratic thing within the Quarantine Site, in moments when it was good or upon returning to base, it would be all sent back. From there, it would be picked and parsed over by highly paid men and women in Watchdog would parse through it all.

Vista regarded the Noodleflies with a jaded eye, watching the delicate looking babies flutter this way and that, darting closer before being corralled back by their parent. 

Something about watching these creatures frolic always made her feel something unpleasant, a hollowness.

After a few seconds to make sure her helmet had caught some good footage, she turned her attention back to the team. 

With her handling comms, it fell to the others to keep watch, weapons ever at the ready. There were no foam launchers here; it was firearms with a calibre of bullet that was probably breaking several conventions to use against a human being. 

Good thing they were the only ones here, then. 

The Noodleflies grew bored swiftly enough and moved on. 

The team leader, William, had taken out a small telescope and was eying some distant location intensely. 

“What are you thinking, sir?” Kaliel asked. 

“Ledge over there has a sample, looks healthy, good number of Batflies,” the man replied, and then glanced at her. “Can you get us over there, Vista?” 

“Yes, sir.”

It was quite a distance, but she was already adjusting, her power's extent spreading, and just a minute later she was taking care of it, transforming a hundred-foot leap into a single step. 

The ledge was decently sized, but with six of them crowding on there, it was rather cramped indeed.

Their prize was, frankly, a rather innocuous little red plant that superficially resembled a fern. Despite its seemingly insignificant appearance, it was incredibly enticing to one of the most ubiquitous creatures found in the Quarantine Site, Batflies, a small insect a couple of inches long, with large wings that let them flutter and fly with a strange, bouncing matter. 

The fluffy little insects were a major component of the ecosystem here, and even as they stood there, a small cloud of them was flying nearby, waiting for them to leave.

Those on the outside of the ledge kept their eyes on the skies and surroundings as one of their number, equipped with a small trowel and plastic cylinder, took the sample. 

Carefully, Kaliel dug it up, roots, soil and all, and placed the plant carefully, sealing it with a lid pierced with a number of holes for air.

Exactly why Watchdog or their superiors wanted a live sample of the plant wasn't something that she needed to know, only that it was allowing her to contribute in some way. 

They had their objective, now they needed to get back. 

It had taken them a good half day to get in this deep, entering the Site within half an hour of the last set of rain's stopping and barely pausing once in that time. 

Even then, these outer regions of the Site were better explored, it was in the inner portions where things really got dangerous, but even then, overconfidence and a lack of attention were the biggest killers in this place--- 

Something splashed against her helmet---

A water droplet. 

Rain.

All Vista could focus on was running for her life. 

Her ears were filled with the sound of her racing heart, and the distant rumbles and sound of the ever-escalating rain. 

On some level, they were lucky that the rain had only just started on the edge of the cloud; that meant that they had additional time to clear the Site before it reached the stage when it was lethal. Already the water was coming down hard, it would be disorientating and painful to be caught out in it, but it would not crush somebody against the floor. 

Yet. 

But give it and it would begin to pour down the pipes and into the structures that currently that shielded them, the tunnels would all soon be flooded, closing off escape routes---

Terror was mounting in her, even as she fought to push it back. 

“Left tunnel!” she shouted, her visor had a map of their route token today, and whilst the entire site was a labyrinth of passages and chimneys, the place did not change so much that they couldn't trust it!

The men ahead of her took her word for it, breaking for the left and clambering over increasingly slippery plants and surfaces. 

Up ahead was a gap, some ten metres wide by three deep, enough to normally take ages to get around, but she was here! 

Her power was playing up, there was something alive in that space, but she could work around it, the god-damn Manton limit wouldn't hold her back from getting the team out!

She was panicking, she could see the faces of others that had been lost in the rain. 

Perhaps that was why she was rushing her power. 

“It's good to jump!” she shouted, putting her power to good use. Thus far it had been used for jumps and crossings, there were only so many long, straight corridors in this labyrinth, but she could make those easier to get across as well.

But still, she was Vista, she was the person who could get any team to safety! 

Henry took the running jump---

---And was grabbed. 

What had looked like a perfectly straight, if corroded, metal pole in the ground positioned just to the left of him moved.

A Poleplant, long predatory beings somewhere between animal and vegetable, which imitated the various metal upright metal bars that were essential climbing tools for many organisms in the ecosystem. 

She had thought that the living thing messing with her power might be a stray Batfly or errant squidcada that she couldn't see. 

But no… just a moment's investigation would have revealed the differences, had she not been rushing, had she not---

With a scream, the man was dragged down.

“HENRY!”

A gun was raised, aim was taken, but it was too late, half the man's body was already being dragged into whatever subterranean hole the being had made its home. Firing a bullet had equal chances of hitting their captured comrade as it did killing his aggressor. 

Perhaps it would be a mercy…

Vista had only a moment to see the man's head sink below the ground, wrapped around by the strong, cord like body of the creature as it was pulled down, down into the ground. A solitary hand was reaching up into the air as if to try to grab onto something, anything that would avert his fate. 

“Move, there's nothing we can do for him!”

It was an order, something to get them moving, and they plunged on, with little heed for anything but getting the hell out of here. 

She put all thoughts of Henry, the friendly man who once brought in an entire bowl of his wives delicious homemade baklava just to make Vista smile on her birthday, to one side. 

Push them aside and away, have her break down later once she was safe in her room.

Now that people were panicking, they were getting sloppy. 

Most people died either in the rain, or during accidents made whilst rushing to safety when it began. 

Aka, in the situation they were currently in. 

But even with Henry lost, they were making progress, they were getting closer and closer to the entrance to the base, with all its reinforced passages and pump systems to prevent flooding. Just two hundred or so metres, even if they were coming from an odd angle. 

One of the makeshift bridges used to cross a gap had broken, unsurprising really, and Vista made it possible for the others to cross, focusing with all her might to bring the two ledges close. Even with all the rain in the way, she managed it, even if she could feel herself straining now. The more water there was, the harder it was to focus and see exactly where it was she needed to connect, her intuitive ability to feel and 'map' the surroundings only worked so well in this place and under these conditions. 

She couldn't afford to rush, that's how they lost Henry, she focused with all her frantic might as the others went ahead, even if their death was growing closer and closer by the second---

GGGGRRRR-UNK!!!

She tried to jump, even as the rusted metal under her buckled and broke. She tried her best, she did everything right that had worked before, and yet this time, her luck had run out.

Falling, falling---

It felt as if she fell forever, when it was just a few seconds. 

She missed the ledge that had the rest of the team on, missed the arms of William who had been trying to catch her, and fell into the void below. 

Her helmet smashed against the wall, her shoulder collided with something but her armoured suit took the brunt of the blow. Her visor cracked and glitched, it was a mercy that it didn't shatter and pierce her eyes. 

All the information on it flickered and then disappeared, or was so confused as to be useless.

The voices in her ear providing guidance were gone, but the boys should know the route back from here… right?

Perhaps it was instinctive use of her power that let her survive, reducing the effective distance she fell. 

She landed in water, that was all she knew, a current pulling at her, dragging her along on its course. Her head surfaced, she gasped for air and then she was forced back under as her helmet impacted a wall again. It felt like she was dragged endlessly, but it was likelty just for half a minute or so, before her scrabbling hand gripped a metal pole and clung on. 

With a ragged, pained gasp she pulled herself from the water onto a ledge, forcing herself up. 

It was dark and shaded, in just a short while she had been utterly isolated and dragged away from the others, and now she had no idea where she was. The rain was coming down harder and harder. Even if she were to make it backto where she fell, she would still be fighting against the torrent. 

It was then that the realisation struck her. 

'You're trapped here now.'

'Trapped in the rain'

'You'll finally die like the rest of us.'

She couldn't think straight, the jolt, the knock of the fall and her panic was making her breath so quickly. 

Stop, think... remember what the therapist said; deep, slow breaths through the nose. 

There had to be a tunnel further in, something she could climb to get to where the others were, they had not been far away from safety now… they had to be near to the gate.

She pushed herself forward; this close to the full arrival of the rain, almost everything had found whatever shelter or den it would be using to escape the deluge.

In just a minute, the water roared around her so loudly even her hammering heart was inaudible, the water was gathering, rising. 

She found another overhang, and watched with a dull, aching despair as the solid sheet before her. It was amazing to imagine that the sky could contain so much water that it could ever fall like this, but then again… this entire place was one big, wretched ecosystem, wasn't it?

Soon the water would be crashing down with such intensity that that would either drown or a jet would catch her. 

No matter where she hid, soon she would be drowning, or crushed…

Off to the side, a little white shape darted.

Her eyes snapped to it.  

It was a creature, like a cat, with brilliant white fur and big, soulful black eyes. Its tail was thicker than normal, and with some of its acrobatic jumps it easily cleared the space, clambering and climbing rapidly over the uneven terrain. It had to be two-foot or so tall, and in its hand it was holding what looked like a piece of rebar, sharpened and made into a spear. 

Vista could only watch as it made its way, then paused when it noticed her. She saw the way it hunched, the way it gripped its little spear. 

The creature stared at her for just a moment. 

She'd never seen a creature like this before, and evidently, it was in the same boat as her; keen to get out of the rain. Well, it was smaller, it could probably hide somewhere to weather the storm.

A shame. 

It was quite different from the other intelligent species in this place that they had discovered. 

If they ever found her helmet and the data within, perhaps they would attribute this major discovery to her?

The pale feline looked at the rain beyond their little overhang… and gestured for her to follow.

… She wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  

Half-running, half-stumbling she gave chase, followed along the overhang and then into a tunnel little wider than her suit would allow, and on her hands and elbows she crawled as quickly as she could. 

She wouldn't get stuck, so long as she didn't panic---

Her vision was darkening around the edges as the sound of the rain dominated her hearing, as there was nothing else in the world that occupied her mind beyond following the strange white creature and getting out of the rain before it was too late---

Emerging into a cramped space. 

It was not larger than five feet in each dimension and dark bar for several blinking lights. There were objects in here, with the low light it was hard to know exactly what, but some of them felt a little squishy?

Yes, blue fruit and dead Batflies… was this some sort of larder? 

A den for the strange creature that had guided her here, a place to weather out the rain?

The sound of mechanisms.

GRRRrrrrrrrrnnnn---SLAM!

Mechanical doors closed behind them, banging shut, plunging them both into darkness with only the blinking lights on the walls for company. 

She was trapped in here with the creature. 

🡇

Chapter Text

It was still raining.

Unceasing, unrelenting rain that crushed caught within it. 

She had been unable to do anything for Aegis… he had been smashed and shattered against the hard ground. If she had tried to warp it, would it bring all that water into the school? 

She had tried, only to be soaked by the deluge that was rapidly covering the floor, rapidly flowing in. 

Beyond the doorway, the bodies of the students caught outside were being jostled around by the rain, but were unmoving. 

“Missy!” a hand found her elbow. 

Dean.

“We need to get somewhere up!”

Did he know that Carlos body was just a few feet away, could he even do anything about it? The desperation in his eyes said no, that there was nothing that could be done. 

“But---”

She glanced back, just once, before the choice was removed from her hands as Dean pulled her arm, dragging him behind her. 

The shape of Carlos, a blob of colour amidst the rain, was the last impression she would ever have of him.

As she was pulled towards the stairs to Arcadia's second floor, metres above the ground and away from the rain, all she could hear was screaming and shouting from panicking students and teachers. Everything was confused, a daze, she was in some sort of nightmare, what was going on? 

This wasn't normal, there weren't any capes in Brockton Bay who could do this, so what… what…

The lights were flickering, was the rain so intense that power lines were being brought down? Without the lights, the hallways of the school were plunged into gloom and darkness, the floor was slippery, plants… plants were growing everywhere, the air was all humid and strange things were fluttering through the surrounding air--- 

What was this? 

A Shaker effect of some sort?

Space wasn't warping, she would have been able to feel it, no, this was something else, like the world was being rewritten around them. 

It was as if every norm and convention of the world was changing. 

In the gloom, occasionally lit by the failing lights, she saw movement to their side. 

A lizard-like creature, large and decorated with large, cyan rings on its body, emerged from the darkness. With the lights flickering, it moved with unnerving speed, clambering over the walls, in one flicker one place, in another, somewhere else… and then, it jumped.   

Missy had tried to increase the distance in that snap second, but it was already too close. 

“Dea---!”

The blonde Ward turned just in time for the creature's jaws to come crashing down, snapping shut with a force like a hydraulic press, bone splintering and blood splattering. She could feel the warm droplets on her face, heard the sound of his body hitting the ground.

Desperately, she tried to pull at his arms---

But the creature was stronger, it was dragging Deans body away, there was nothing she could do, nothing she could do at all---

The creature won out, her hand slipped from where it was gripping Dean's ankle as he was dragged into a gap in the wall, bones breaking as his body was pulled and forced into that small space.

And she was left, with her friend's blood all over her body, in a hallway with the screams of the terrified and the dying as the rain only continued to fall heavier and heavier by the moment. 

Four days. 

🡇

Chapter Text

Six days of rain…

The deluge that crushed people had continued, unceasing, beyond the walls of Arcadia. The roof was slowly degrading, in weaker sections of the building it had even come down, and the lower floor was literally underwater. 

And with the flood, all the food in the kitchens was lost. 

With the rain hitting at lunchtime, plenty of them had been crushed by the rain, and everyone else had gotten upstairs. In the dark recesses, creatures lurked, many of them asleep for the moment, and most of the survivors had holed themselves up in classrooms in the science and computer labs.

“Any luck, Chris?” Dennis asked his fellow Ward. 

“No.”

Missy watched, languid with hunger, from her seat beside the window.

She hadn't eaten in a day, and the lack of energy that such a situation created was getting to her. 

She was hardly alone in this position; between all the kids and several teachers, they had perhaps a few packed lunched between them, which had been rapidly rationed out and eaten.

“Got something earlier, I swear…”

The lines between Ward and student had faltered; most of the remaining school population knew who they were now, and it didn't really matter whether she was a Ward or not. 

As the only Tinker in the group, so much hope had fallen onto Kid Win to be able to do something to help their situation… exactly what that something was, was another matter. 

The adults among them, the teachers, had not exactly been forthcoming, and Chris could not just create some manner of food generating machine. 

Between four cannibalized PCs and a radio, he had managed to just about tune in to various frequencies, desperate to get a message out about their situation. His fingers were covered in little nicks and cuts; he didn't have his workshop or tools right now, and he had barely slept in the last few days as he desperately worked away. 

“What's the point in letting him try?” one girl ventured, tired and looking irritated by the constant noises of Chris breaking things apart for parts. 

“You get a better idea, Annie!?” 

It was an answer tinged with anger and frustration on the Tinker's part. 

With everyone counting on him, he really must be under a lot of pressure. 

“Hey, hey, no need for that guys,” it was Glory Girl, aka Victoria Dallon, who was trying to calm things down. The girl's mascara had been smeared and marked for days, after the death of Amy Dallon, she had thrown herself into trying to keep everyone's spirits up.

Missy blocked out the ensuing conversation; the teachers were there to try to calm things further, but she could feel the building irritation and short nerves. 

The rain was pounding above them.

Distant rumbling… another part of the school had succumbed to the downpour. 

A few kids rushed to get a good look, with her seat beside the window, Missy looked out onto the flooded streets. The water was brown and black with debris and broken tarmac, the water levels had risen to the point that soon enough it might begin to pour into the second floor itself, and then they would really be fucked. 

She didn't want to succumb to despair, there was still a lot of hope that things would get better. 

Maybe the Triumvirate would come and sort out whatever the root cause of all this was? 

...

...

...

People can go mad after just a few days without food. 

She was so hungry, her stomach hurt… she hoped her parents were okay. Her mum would be, right? Back at home, she probably had plenty of stuff to eat…

Exactly how things fell apart, she didn't really know. 

Only that it did.

She had been so hungry and weak at the time that she hadn't really been able to follow everything, she just knew that there had been an explosion of violence all at once. 

“I've had it!”

“We need food, not fucking radios!”

“I'm close to something! Something is creating distortion and trying to stop us, I just need time---”

“You said that yesterday!”

“Tinkertech doesn't just magically appear and work, dipshit---”

“Jackson has candy!”

That broke people's focus away from the argument over the merits of Kid Wins work. One of the kids was shouting at the top of her lungs, holding something high in the air. A long, thick looking candy bar, a little crumpled from being in a backpack all this time, but that didn't matter. 

The girl who found it looked so smug, so triumphant. 

Whether it was the triumph of finding food, or the vindication that somebody was 'holding back' was another matter, but with it.

The kid it had been taken from, Jackson, was short and plump, or had been before all this. He had a bit of a stutter, and all at once all eyes and attention was on him.

“Split it up!”

“Fucking porkin's over there was keeping it for himself!”

“What else he got in there!?”

Over shouted protests, the kid's backpack was ripped apart with all the vicious energy of a troupe of chimps ripping apart a smaller monkey for food.

The narrow line between civilisation and barbarism broke down utterly in the course of just seconds. 

Missy didn't see exactly who threw the first punch or grabbed a sharp piece of metal, but it was pandemonium as kids suddenly turned on one another. Narrow lines and factionalism fostered over days of the worsening situation exploded, everything was a blur of motion. 

Somewhere in the chaos, Chris was knocked to the floor unmoving, bleeding from his head, and somebody was frozen in place by Clockblocker.

And then came the retaliation.

Superpowers were great… until they marked you out as the 'other' in a group. 

A scapegoat. 

What was going on had to be a Parahuman effect, so of course, in the end, they got blamed. Who would win, a hundred starved, desperate and infuriated teenagers or Clockblocker, Vicky Dallon and a couple of teachers? She would perhaps have given it to Glory Girl were it not for the fact people were throwing things and there was only so much space to move.

Under a barrage of projectiles, her forcefield broke, and was set upon by half a dozen frenzied kids.

And Missy---

She ran.

Out of everything she could have done, she ran.

Her power allowed her to slip through the spaces between people, out into the corridor beyond the classroom.

She found herself a nice little cubby-hole to hide in and tried not to break down from it all. All she could do was listen to the sound of her heart racing in her ears, the other kids further falling to infighting and a few of them forming search parties to try and find her. 

Any pretence of social order had broken down, how long would it be before somebody suggested cannibalism out of sheer desperation?

The rain broke just hours later. 

Had everyone just waited a bit longer, then they would have been able to get out.

It had all been pointless… that Lord of the Flies-like burst of primal, bestial aggression had done nothing but create bodies and break apart the fragile spirit that had held them all together.

With the end of the rain, the various creatures woke up hungry.

Amidst screams, Missy once more ran for her life, putting the surviving students behind her. 

Leaping across rooftops amidst the strange, changed city that she found herself in, she abandoned the people she had grown up and studied alongside, leaving them to be hunted down by the creatures in the school. 

So much for being a hero...

There was nothing she could do, nothing to be done. 

They had killed the others, just like that, they deserved it… so she told herself.

The water drained quickly, even as she continued on her journey along the various roofs. Soon enough, the streets were filled with sodden debris and people who emerged, blinking, into the sunlight. 

And then the great, winged bird-like things with masks on their faces swooped from the sky, hungry for the feast of the weakened and stumbling survivors. And other things, different coloured lizard-like things and more, all hungry for food.

It was, perhaps, a miracle that she ever managed to get out at all.

She had landed beyond the vast, vast walls of the city and found herself staring, numb, at the world beyond. It was entirely the same as she had left it, and yet she was unable to see it the same.

Vista Missy sat in the shelter, staring listlessly into the darkness. 

Every time she went to bed, it was with the knowledge that she would probably have nightmares, randomised from the selection of things she had experienced

Even though she could feel the six walls surrounding her, the food pile and the sleeping Slugcat, her eyes were wide open, to see any small detail or threat coming her way. 

Beyond those walls, the rain slammed down. 

It had been awhile since she had that particular nightmare.

All the others died in Arcadia; the Wards and Vicky Dallon, they all tried their best to keep things calm and under control, and she was the one who had broken first and ran away when it all became too much. 

Out of everyone… she was the sole survivor of Arcadia, and one of just a few thousand who escaped the city of Brockton Bay. 

Her name wasn't on the grim memorial that had been erected outside the city, five walls making a great semicircle, adorned with metal plates on which the names of the dead were engraved. She had been there when it was set up, but had never been able to force herself to visit it since, couldn't bring herself to look at all those names. 

Rather than the immortality of being a tragic victim of catastrophe, she got to try to piece her life back together in the aftermath of the disaster. 

In her darkest moments, she wished that her name was on there.  

But no. 

Missy Biron Vista, the last Brockton Bay Ward, had survived. 

The PRT had been swift to expedite her paperwork and provide her with a place to stay.

All because she could not let go. 

“You owe it to them to live and hold their memory.”

“You need to move on, Missy… this place isn't good for you, you need to be somewhere else.”

“The anniversary of the site appearing is coming up, they want you to come to the ceremony.”

Jamming her eyes shut, Vista forced away all the dark thoughts that came to her. Why couldn't they just let her keep going, surely with time she would find her end in the Quarantine Site, or find the reason behind it all.

Ah… but whenever the time came and Missy faced down her end, she always ran, ran to try to find safety.

It was Missy who had run away that day rather than perform her duty as a hero, who had hidden away in a janitors closet when all her fellow Wards were killed. It was Missy who had followed the Slugcat into that dark, miserable hole rather than being crushed by the rain, safe in the knowledge that she had saved her team and gotten them to safety.

Not Vista.

Vista was the last Ward, she had survived.

She closed her eyes. 

She was hungry, but she didn't want to eat right now.

With a slow hand, she reached out and put her hand atop the sleeping Slugcat and stroked it. 

It was a distraction from everything else. The fur was so soft and smooth, silky, the body was only lukewarm, but hibernating were colder than normal, right? To conserve energy, you needed to reduce your metabolism to make your fat reserves last as long as possible.

She was doing the same, on some level. 

Sleeping, not moving, eating carefully. 

In this second time, she had fallen asleep four times… but of course, she had no real concept of time in here. Trying to count seconds saw her reaching into the hundreds, even the thousands, but the rain remained the same beyond the walls.

It was a purgatory, a torture all of its own. 

It just went on.

And on.

And on…

GRRRrrrrrrrrnnnn---

Mechanisms releasing, the shelter opening. 

Vista had been asleep, her sixth sleep since they entered the shelter, and the rain had come to an end. Her eyes stung from the light, watered and ached, but her thoughts were on just one thing---

She still had some food left, and in moments Vista scarfed it down, filling her aching belly with wriggling larvae still in their eggs and the seeds of plants, any shame or compunction about holding back or decency lost. 

They only had so much time to gather more, but she was so hungry. 

She left just two eggs uneaten, and when the Slugcat opened its eyes, she offered them forwards. 

Perhaps it was something of a way to ingratiate herself with the creature, or perhaps it was just that instinct to share food, considering that Vista had eaten abundantly but the Slugcat hadn't.

This big dark eyes blinked back at her languidly, and then, in a gesture just a little like a snatch, the creature took the fruit and began to eat, putting food into its belly. 

Time to head out again, it would be good to feel the cool air on her face once more.

...

...

... 

🡇

Chapter Text

🡇

Chapter Text

Everyone was gone. 

Missy Biron stared at the opposite wall of the temporary structure that had been made up to shelter the survivors of the disaster. Ten thousand or so of them. 

One thirty-fifth of the total population of Brockton Bay had weathered the storm and managed to escape. 

Everybody looked like shit. 

There were sick, there were injured.

Children who had seen their parents die and been escorted out by what was left of their family, or by random strangers who could not stand to see somebody so young lost to the horror. 

Everybody had a story about seeing somebody die now. They had endured days of hunger, terror and suffering, only to make a break for it through the ruined streets, watching what was left be picked off one by one, all fleeing for the walls surrounding the city. 

Parahumans had swooped in, with the rains clearing fliers and people like the Triumvirate had appeared to guide and clear the way for their escape. 

They had been unable to make a difference during the rain. 

But still, because of them, they had been able to get out.

And now Missy was sitting in a temporary shelter and structures created by a Rogue called Agnes Court, trying to adjust to this new normal. A bowl of porridge sat, stone-cold, on the bed beside her, forgotten.

She didn't want to eat. 

When they first handed out food, she had been unable to help herself. 

After days with diminishing supplies, she had gorged herself, eaten it all down in the hopes of filling her empty stomach. But no matter how much she had eaten, even when she felt sick, she had still felt a strange, gnawing wrongness about it all. 

There she had been, eating so much when everyone else had starved, had ripped each other apart over a single candy bar. 

It was wrong for her to do so. 

So she hadn't eaten the next day. 

Or today, which was the third day after the escape. 

Beyond the thin door that had been hurriedly installed to the small room she had been graciously given, somebody had come to a stop. Her eyes took in the pair of shadows, a distant part of her wondered who it was, perhaps somebody come to check on her?

A gentle, yet consistent knock.

"Missy... Missy, it's me."

It took her a moment to put the voice to a face. 

Ah...

Miss Militia?

"C'min..."

Languidly, she lifted her chin, moving for the first time in an hour as the other Parahuman stepped in. 

The woman had removed her bandana, and looked for all intents and purposes like any other member of the personnel currently stationed as part of the disaster relief and containment procedures. Seeing the other woman's face was strange, but certainly nothing compared to anything else Missy had experienced in the last week or so.

"You're okay."

"Yes, just about's."

There was some hope, then. 

"Who else got through?" she found herself asking, and whilst some small part of her hoped for the best--- 

"Assault and Dauntless. We were hunkered down in the base," she explained. 

The Protectorate Base, the old oil rig, with its shield and other defences, of course it had survived this all. It made sense that it would weather the rainstorm, even if, clearly, those inside had been unable to do anything to stop what had happened. 

"Ah..."

Even making that sound of acknowledgement felt wrong.

She knew for sure, had suspected it all along that she would be the only one left, it was nice to know that she had been wrong about that. Even if it was just three people from her work, at least somebody in her life would still be around, right?

A long pause. 

Miss Militia was handling it all very well. 

That strange, detached thought came to her. 

Well... she had been a hero for a long time, and whilst Missy had no idea what her past, she did seem to have a lot of training and experience. Once, when she first joined the Wards, Missy had asked what her history was, back when she was still largely ignorant about plenty of things to do with the Cape world. 

Certainly, just how rough a lot of peoples lives had been. 

The woman had paused back then, a momentary and distant look in her eyes, before she made some excuse about needing to get to a meeting soon. She never did find the time... but even if she had, Missy was not sure that she would want to hear the story any more.

In that long, long pause, the two of them stared at one another. 

Armsmaster. Battery. Triumph. Velocity.

More people she had known added to the list. 

Evidently, Miss Militia read her expression, and she knelt down. 

Missy hadn't thought of standing once this entire time, too tired to consider it.

"Missy, what happened to the others?"

Ah...

"They killed them, they... the rain, the kids, they just killed them. Then the rain stopped, just afterwards..." she said, struggling to put the words together. Everything was moving so fast, so quickly. It was like her brain was a mush and the world around her was moving at three times the normal speed. 

A hand on her shoulder, Miss Militia was leaning down. 

Slowly, as if scared of frightening her off, the woman hugged her. The arms came around her shoulders and squeezed, and Missy supposed that there was some degree of comfort to it. 

As it was, she put her head on the other woman's shoulder and stared at the wall opposite. 

The previous rain cycle only lasted four days, unusually short. 

Missy still had some food left over from it, having stocked up abundantly, and upon waking she and the Slugcat had gorged themselves on what remained before they set out. 

It was short-sighted, perhaps, but there was no point starving herself in the now if it would compromise her in the future. 

At this point, Vista had fallen into a strange rhythm of things; upon waking they would throw themselves out into the wider world of Quarantine Site-08, gathering as much food as possible and making distance. 

They only had so long to move, to reach the next shelter, and once all was said and done, she could recover herself and soothe her aches. 

Upon emerging that day, it was to the sight of a beautiful rainbow and clear blue sky. 

It was jarring, to see such beauty in a place so horrible, the place that had taken everything from her.

As she had before, Vista looked for a distant helicopter or Dragon mech in the faint hopes of rescue, but saw nothing. 

As it was, their path was rather more clear today. The Slugcats new fashion accessory, the mask that had once adorned the face of the Vulture, was proving to be surprisingly useful. 

Carrying it somewhat restricted what the creature could easily hold, but the mask had the benefit of scaring away the vast majority of predators that could get in their way. 

Lizards of all sorts took one look at them and panicked, confusing the two-foot tall feline with a several hundred pound aerial predator and fleeing. 

High intellectual prowess was clearly not something that the creatures specialised in.

Still. 

From the vast, industrial complex or whatever the previous locations had been, the two of them continued their way up, into a vast canopy of chimneys and ruined structures that reached high into the sky. 

As far as going went, it was fucking rough. 

Her every muscle screamed, there was not a moment in which she was not using her powers. The Slugcat was small, and could fit through most of the narrow gaps and spaces with ease... Vista had to find her own ways around, and for the most part, it involved extensive cardio and pulling herself up rusted bars of metal and up along narrow ledges and inclines. 

When she looked down, to see the vast reaches of the Quarantine Site below, the industrial wastelands and the outskirts and more beyond that. 

The more she looked, the more she saw, only this time instead of a glimpse caught from the (relative) safety of a helicopter, she was on a narrow ledge overlooking a one or two mile fall straight to the ground. 

... She had gone mad. 

She was following a small creature through this post-industrial hell when she could be back at base, safe... warm... in clothes that hadn't been on her body continuously for a month or so now. Her gloves were utterly scuffed from gripping rusted, scarred metal, her armour was nicked in dozens of places, she probably smelled like an absolute garbage tip right now. 

The wind was striking her face, her fingers sought a grip on the corroded wall behind her. 

If she just took a single step, she would fall hundreds of metres---

She tore her eyes away from the fall, and continued upwards. 

Her greater concern up here was vultures. She could only imagine that the damnable creatures nested or lived up here.

Sporadically, she saw them in the distance, swooping and diving through the sky, travelling to other parts of the Quarantine Site. Even as she looked now, she could see, very distantly, the form of a helicopter moving over one of the external regions, far from here.

Up here, atop this vast collection of ancient chimneys, surely somebody would see her, right? 

If she was going to be noticed and evacuation organised, then it would be somewhere like this, right? 

It was only logical.

Upwards, ever upwards. 

They were past the chimneys. 

Now, it was vast, thin spears of metal that reached into the sky, perhaps the remnants of some ancient communication array? 

They were connected by wires and supported, but there were only so many ways to go up. The wind was howling in Vista's ears and by the second she found herself questioning, more and more, where exactly her guide was taking her. 

Was it trying to take her to the very top of the world itself! 

She glanced to the side. 

No...

No, they were nowhere near the top of this hell. 

The vast wall of the superstructure rose, hundreds of metres away, a great side of metal and concrete dotted with ledges and structures. It was impossible to describe just how big it was without seeing it, so vast that it's top pierced the clouds, safe from the risk of rain. There were so many mysteries about it all, the most important being exactly what it was, and secondly, the nature of the ancient city that stood atop it. 

For almost a year, people had been trying to decipher the various pieces of art and decorations found there, the purpose and nature of the civilisation that, by the looks of it, the city was intended for. 

Whatever ancient people had resided there... judging by their art, they had not been human, and were it not for the sheer difficulty and danger of exploring the place, they would have conducted far more thorough investigations. 

As it was, the sheer number of vultures and the aggressive tribal civilisation there had rather gotten in the way of such, and the majority of research there was conducted by drones rather than people. 

Everything about this godforsaken place got stranger the closer you grew to the centre.

With each step forward you took, the more questions you found yourself asking. 

Why did this place it appear?

What ancient civilisation did this all serve?

Why was this place so different from other examples of Parahuman powers?

Missy had no idea... but the drive to have answers to it all, to find out more about this place, and why so many had died for its sake was what drove her onwards. 

Or perhaps it would be better to say, in this case drove her upwards. 

The cloud layer was just above them, so close that Vista was pretty sure that she could just reach out and grab it. 

But...

The air was darkening by the moment. 

Not with rain, but with something else. 

They had reached the very top of this place. What was the purpose of all this, why had they wasted so much time that they could have been foraging or making progress forwards? 

There had to be a purpose, right?---

The air was distorting. 

She cast her gaze upwards at the strange being above her, around which the very air, the very world was being warped in place. 

Her power was struggling to understand it all. 

Within the centre of this space was some manner of blob-like, multi-limbed entity. Her immediate instinct was that it was some manner of vulture, but the longer she looked, the more she saw... and the more illogical it all was. It had long, frond like limbs that curled and curved over themselves, fringed with gold, and some manner of head (perhaps?) decorated with golden scales as well.

Its body was dark, or was it the warping of the world around it that had that effect?

Either way, after a moment... the air was filled with sound, words, strange and distorted in nature. Momentary fragments and scraps made their way to Vista's ears.

The only problem was that she couldn't understand it at all. 

Blinking, Missy glanced down at the Slugcat 

The creature was staring up at the strange being with a strange expression, eyes slightly narrowed, as if irritated with it. Or reproaching it? 

Either way, it made no sound whatsoever. 

The more that the thing vocalised at them both, the more Vista felt something was off about her. It was as if her thought processes were slowing down by the moment. 

It was hard to keep her eyes open, what was happening? The Slugcat seemed unaffected, but Vista felt... tired...

And then----

Gggggrrrrrrrrrrr--- UNK!

Vista woke up inside the shelter. 

... What... 

How?

Beside her, in an inversion of how this normally went, the Slugcat was stood and looking down at her. 

Groggily, she pushed herself up from the ground. It was as if time had gone backwards, or had it all been a dream? 

No, she had felt things, she had been sure that she was awake. 

"What happened?" she asked. 

The Slugcat tilted its head. 

Unhelpful.

Vista was sure that all of that had been real, there was no imagining all of that experience, as trippy as it was, could have just been a figment of her imagination.

Right?

"What was that thing? You saw it, right? Like, big, floating---"

A nod.

She had never heard of anything like that thing. 

Was it one of a kind, and people had just never come through the right place to encounter it? If so, then what did it mean?

It had spoken, it had communicated.

The Slugcat had looked up at it, ears tilting this way and that...

"Could you understand it?"

The Slugcat nodded.

"How?"

After a moment, the Slugcat gestured for her to follow, and Vista crawled out of the shelter behind it, emerging once more to see the same beautiful blue sky, complete with the exact same rainbow splitting it. 

The Slugcat pointed to something on the horizon. 

The superstructure at the centre of this place, the one that had proven to be the greatest mystery of Quarantine Site-08 this entire time.

"You can understand it because of that thing?"

A nod, the Slugcat made a gesture, this time moving its little paws as it was... going inside something? Or opening something up and then moving through. 

Inside that place? 

Inside the place that had only been entered once, and they lost an entire team to without so much as a communication? 

The Slugcat made another gesture, an indication for her to follow. 

That was their destination, and the key to understanding the secrets of this place, then... perhaps.

Vista looked behind them. 

The high walls surrounding the Quarantine Site stood in the distance. 

To press on, to approach that place where certain death had been the only results of the solitary attempt to investigate it.

 She had known them so well, Team Seven that was...

It was another potential answer, the question of their fates, and the key to understanding what that thing they had just met had been saying. 

All this time, she had been holding back from returning back to base, justifying it that she would find more answers if she remained here for longer, and now the Slugcat, who could help her find them, was suggesting their course forwards. 

She was already most of the way there, her helmet still had enough battery...

"Let's get going, then," she resolved, and took the first step.

🡇

Chapter Text

Vista was still a Ward, and Missy Biron was now a Ward of the state. 

She supposed, mathematically, that meant that she was now Ward squared.

She didn't so much as chuckle at her own internal joke. Instead, she focused on what she was doing; namely, looking over, with obsessive attention, at the grainy satellite images of Brockton Bay. 

Well, not Brockton Bay. 

Quarantine Site-08

The city was gone. 

In her time trapped there, it had been slowly transforming into something new, the buildings decaying and rebuilding into a new landscape. Now, a month after the fact, it was utterly unrecognisable from the place she had once known. New buildings, great structures that reached miles into the air...

Getting clear pictures had been hard, what with the amount of cloud cover that dominated the place and the interference that occurred.

But now they were available, research was taking place. 

Vista had been kept on, instead of being moved to some other city to join the Wards there. She had clung on by the skin of her teeth. 

Abundant conversations and discussions about her, but very rarely actually involving her. Adults, presuming to know the best for her without actually consulting Missy once.

'It is thoroughly inappropriate for a Ward to be living permanently as part of a Quarantine Site!'

'She's only twelve years old! She shouldn't be exposed to these things!'

'What about her education? What about her opportunities to socialise with people her own age!?'

Fucking idiots. 

Like she cared about all that!

What, did they all think that she could ever interact with other kids properly, having seen them descend into barbarism, brutally tearing one another apart? Did they think that she gave a solitary fuck about her education?

What did she think about it all?

She hated it. 

She hated, hated, HATED all the useless motherfuckers who thought they knew how her life should go! The useless, worthless bureaucrats of the Youth Guard who kept trying to move her along to some new city, thinking that she would perfectly fit in immediately, that she could 'heal' and 'recover' from the horrors that she had seen!

Why don't you see a man be bitten near in half and then dragged, bones breaking to fit, into a small gap in the wall to be eaten alive?

Why don't you wake up, covered in sweat any night in which there was a rainstorm, out of reflexive terror at the sound of the hammering droplets of water that could crush a person to death?

But most of all... she hated that nobody thought to ask her what she thought, and what she wanted.

Because she wanted answers to why, not solutions to the now.

She wanted to know. 

Perhaps... she just wanted to justify her own survival when so many others had not made it. Like, there had to be a reason why she had made it, right? Something she had to do for which she had been intended to live... the notion that it was all just random chance, that there hadn't been any particular reason was... 

Well.

She was more useful here than anywhere else; her power was too useful, right? If only people would trust her, if only they would give her a chance to accompany one of the teams into the Quarantine Site. 

Vista could keep them safe, could make it so much easier to travel around.

She had been reading every report available to her, consuming all the information that was accessible on the topic of how the place worked. She knew all the creatures that had been encountered before, she could make things so much better, could help in ways they could not imagine---

“Excuse me, Vista?”

She jumped a little, so engrossed had she been in looking over the images and reading over the little labels of landmarks and discoveries, that she had not noticed somebody walking up to her side. 

A man. One of the site's many troopers. 

He was just short of middle-age, and whilst she was steadily learning how to recognise peoples ranks by the various decorations on their uniforms, she was not so far advanced that she could look him over and tell for sure exactly who he was or how important he was. 

“I'm Gabriel, Sergeant of Team Seven. Here,” a candy bar was pushed into her hand, a KitKat, the sort that the vending machines gave out. It was just still cool to the touch, it must have just been purchased.

“Huh?”

“Eat it, you'll feel better.”

“I'm not a baby who needs candy,” she said, waspishly... and it earned a small smile. 

No chuckles or immediate efforts to refute, to declare that he didn't see her as a kid, or drawing attention to them.

“I can tell, you got that look in your eyes.”

Huh...

She took the KitKat, ripping it open without grace and throwing the wrapper on the table. She took a bite as the man went on.

“Listen, my team and I will be heading out to patrol the walls in a few hours, but the boys are going to have a go at the training course we're setting up.”

Ah, so he had been bribing her.

“What, hoping I'll run it and find it fun or something? I keep up enough with my exercises, you know---”

Perhaps she woke up on the wrong side of bed today, or alternatively, her poor choice of words was because of everyone treating her as if she were cast from glass recently, always underestimating her.

Either way, she was interrupted. 

“I don't want you to run it because I think you'll find it fun; I want your advice on making it realistic to what we'll face,” the man said, and this time, there was a hint of steel to his voice. 

He wanted her expertise. 

In retrospect, a long time later, she would come to recognise what this moment truly was. 

The beginning of something new. 

...

...

...

Her first trip into the Quarantine Site as a proper member of staff, and not just the Ward who lurked about the site whilst the rest of the world decided what to do with her, was with Team Seven.

It was a surprise thing. 

“Hey, Vista. Got an order from command that they need samples gotten and that you can come. If you want to join us in the site, then get suited and booted, young lady!”

No gentle 'if you really, really want to, we'll take you in a little way' as had been suggested before. 

The man came right out swinging, even as behind him the six troopers under his command stood waiting.

In the last week, she had been spending a lot of her time with them, bar for on Tuesday when they went in for a brief operation.

Whether it was running the obstacle course, doing through paperwork or watching presentations and reading through the latest reports about what folk had encountered into, and the analysis by Watchdog, she had been spending all her time with them. 

There was Janet, who had lost her daughter to the Site when it first emerged. 

Killey, the comms' guy who bought Vista a canned, chilled mocha every day, even when she told him not to, simply because she mentioned that she liked them. 

Johnny, who served three tours of service and had the scars to prove it. 

“Yeah! I mean, yes... I'll come.”

Even if she was stepping back into that hell, there was no hesitation in her voice. 

Finally, an opportunity to be useful, to do more than sit around and stew in her own thoughts. The recent days with Team Seven had been great, a distraction from it all, but she needed a purpose. 

She raced to grab her things, and when the members of the team fussed over her, making sure she had everything that she could possibly need.

They even pressed a knife into her hands to keep hold of. 

The Brockton Bay PRT Had never allowed her any real weapon despite the dangers she had faced, and here was Janet giving her a weapon with a blade over half a foot long. 

It all felt so... professional. 

Like they were taking Vista seriously, not just seeing her as useless, childish Missy.

At the gate into the site, they prepared to go in. 

In the distance, she could see Miss Militia and others watching... all of their expressions were so severe in nature. Did they disapprove of this, who was it who had sanctioned her to go with Team Seven? Plenty of people did not look happy about it, but she would show them! 

She would prove that she could handle it!

In truth, it had not been a difficult matter. 

They were in and out in two hours. 

Their task was to locate, secure and return with several eggs from a 'Noodlefly', three of them in total. 

The entire thing had been a blur of rapid movement, careful coordination and constant communication and most importantly, she had been able to contribute!

Be it shortening gaps, extending them or creating platforms from distant terrain, Vista had been able to drastically shorten and reduce the danger that the group faced as part of their mission to transverse the terrain. 

She had returned tired, weary... and so utterly satisfied with herself that she had approached Miss Militia to tell the woman all about it. 

And yet, all she had to say in response...

“That's wonderful, Missy.”

... Something about being called Missy rankled, but she had been unable to quite describe why. 

It hadn't been Missy who had helped the team, it had been Vista who had made a difference, and she would much rather have it be recognised that way. She almost found herself resenting the fact that Miss Militia insisted on using her civilian name all the time. 

In truth, she struggled to describe why, only that it was how she felt. 

Feelings weren't always logical, after all... and given her circumstances, it was amazing she had any logical thought at all.

...

...

...

“Oi, Vista!”

She was getting increasingly used to being approached and spoken to very casually. 

Before, none of the troopers had treated her like this, but ever since she began spending time with Team Seven, word had clearly spread that she was not just the big bad Shaker who lived on site, but somebody who could be trusted. 

A few from other groups had come to speak to her recently, getting to know her, saying hello... all the little things that helped make a person feel valued.

The speaker was Johnny, the big lug was striding towards her with a grin on his stubbly face,

“'Bout time I give you the full induction you know...” he said boisterously, as if he were simply joking around with one of the other troopers. She liked that about the man, Gabriel treated her as if she were older than she was, but Johnny could joke around with her, despite being former military. 

“What do you mean, full induction?” she asked, just a little confused. 

Was this one of those 'hazing ritual' things she had heard about in the past?

“Just a little team special, the boss would have me polishing all the boots if he knew I was gonna do it to a proper heroes outfit, but you're one of us, y'know. I'll let him know after the fact,” he gave her a grin, one that made the scar on his cheek distort and stretch just a little unpleasantly. 

She gave a small nod, just a little... surprised. 

Johnny was a little bit of a joker, but he would never be the sort to risk his superiors' ire, at least normally. A good military man, through and through, but---

“Got any spare outfits around?”

“Yeah, one or two...” 

“Do they all have those detachable pauldron things?” he asked, gesturing.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Go grab one then.”

And so she did, and Johnny led her somewhere quiet for the work to come. 

There, he took out a knife the moment they were alone, but it was only to begin carving a symbol onto her outfit.

The pauldron of her armour, beforehand blank and undecorated, had something new scored and cut into it. 

The work was a little rough, but it was clearly not Johnny's first rodeo, and soon enough, he was done. The two symbols that had been carved were made up of harsh lines, but she rather liked it. It was by no means perfect, but then again... everything in this place was rough around the edges, from the building to the people.

And what he carved...

#8

The team had seven members, now that she thought about it, everyone had a number on their outfits somewhere, either painted or gouged like this. She wasn't sure if it was standard... but it was a quirk of the group, a sign of really being part of it.

For the first time in a while, she smiled, and was unable to stop herself.

A mile or so up in the air, Vista and the Slugcat took a momentary break. 

The climbing had been almost constant, the great walls of the superstructure in the Quarantine Site's centre were by no means a flat expanse, they were dotted with ledges, machines and metal bars... not that the effort was by any means easy. On the plus side, they were not climbing all the way up the side, instead, they were approaching the vast structure from below.

The gloom here was omnipresent, with the sheer scale of the structure, the sun was utterly obscured.

Across tiny, dilapidated platforms precarious suspended over a thousand-foot drop, the two of them had been moving along this underhang. 

It was a grim place... 

Without her power, she would never be able to make it, if she had thought that the canopy of chimneys was bad, then this place was far worse. 

The Slugcat, on the other hand, had found a means to cheat. 

“It's unfair you can use that thing,” Vista griped as they took a brief rest in a safe spot.

The Slugcat glanced up from the strange blue creature it had found, and kept a good grip on. It was a cylindrical blue thing, some manner of clam that could release a long, sticky appendage, with which the Slugcat had been expertly grappling from location to location, swinging as happily as Tarzan through the jungle.

Still...

Her muscles were burning. 

She felt exhausted. 

If the previous day's efforts, ascending that canopy of chimneys, had been difficult, then today was an equal workout.

They had made it to the great wall of the megastructure via a strange gate at the edge of the chimneys, which had skipped out having to try and climb the vast legs of the place. 

Food was another matter, bug eggs and a strange, glowing yellow mold that the Slugcat promised was safe had been gathered in abundance. 

Plus, the Slugcat probably knew where there was a shelter, right? 

Vista scarfed down a batfly, her body craving nourishment so that its crunchy, gooey body was a strange nirvana all of its own on her taste buds.

The creature had gotten close enough for her to grab, and she was hungry, oh so hungry. 

She needed her strength. 

In this world, she was a survivor.

“What is this thing?” she wondered, knocking the ceiling with the back of her finger against the wall behind her. 

The Slugcat, of course, had no answer for her. 

Still, at least her musings would be caught by the helmet. 

By now, it was on less than a third of its battery, it would probably hold for another day or two, although she could always be more conservative with it from now on.

Still... 

They were so close now. 

Each step, each metre they traversed, was another closer to the truth. 

She hungered to know so much, she had to know the truth behind this all, the wretched reason for this place, for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives all for the sake of its existence...

'We'll be fine, Vista, quick in and out to get a good look around.'

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, and then, with a sigh, released the tension that had built up in her shoulders. 

Don't think about them all, not until all said and done, at least.

The five-minute break over, they continued onwards, even though her body screamed at her to stop. 

She had to push onwards.

Occasionally, the sounds and roars of lizards could just about be heard in the distance, although she had only seen one so far, with a bright orange head and tendrils. The imaginatively named yellow lizards, the only social species, usually hunting and working in pairs or even small packs of up to five... 

All yellows had a pair of tendrils extending from their heads, but the oldest, meanest among them, the leader's, had them almost as long as their body, and the creatures were an absolute menace. 

Other lizards would just run you down, or had other tricks, but yellows... yellows were smart. 

They coordinated, like hyenas or wild dogs, cutting off avenues of escape, cornering you until you had nowhere else to go.

In her time, Vista had never seen anybody killed by one. 

She'd heard that a woman on team three had lost a hand to the bite of one, though, when she and her team had to fight their way through an encirclement by a large pack. To this day, the woman nursed a grudge (and had named the offending creature 'Moby') against them. 

Vista couldn't exactly complain, she bore a grudge against the very existence of this place.

But fortunately, Vista and her companion had managed to thus far avoid the marauding packs of yellow lizards and continued on.

In the distance, the first indicators of rain, the sound of thunder. 

The rains were not far away now...

The Slugcat, who was on another platform some ten metres to the side, was pointing in a particular direction, it must know the way to the shelter, they had to be close---

A long, elasticated tongue snapped out of the darkness and struck her shoulder, pulling her. 

Vista lurched forward as whatever was on the other end tried to pull her in, she barely managed to grab hold of a pole before she could be pulled into the open air and off the ledge she was stood on. 

The source of the attack was a lizard, not a yellow but a white.

The damn things were excellent climbers, and worse, could turn near invisible when they sat still, changing colour to be near invisible in their environment. And worst of all, just like chameleons, they had a wickedly long tongue multiple times the length of their body with which to launch and attach to prey. 

Each second the creature was pulling, even though Vista's weight would be more than enough to drag it from its perch, sending them both tumbling to the wastes far below them---

There were chirps from the Slugcat as it used its strange grappling clam to move closer, but it would not be quick enough---

Vista reached for her knife, and with a desperate movement, slashed upwards, driving the sharp blade up in a slash. The tongue went limp, the sucker-like end and a foot or so of its flesh mass remained attached to her body. 

She stumbled, so close to the edge---

The tongue of the Slugcat's grappling clam gripped her shoulder and pulled her roughly back, the little creature collided with her even as she was pulled back and onto her ass, feet just inches away from the perilous drop. 

She scrambled back, swallowing thickly. 

In the distance, the agonised sounds of the de-tongued lizard filled the air, no doubt it would either bleed out or starve to death from such an injury.

The Slugcat clambered onto her shoulder, there was a chirping sound into her head before it bumped the side of its head against hers and peered at her with those big black eyes.

She could only presume it was making sure she was okay.

“Yeah, I... I just need a minute.”

A sound, perhaps concerned. 

The Slugcat pointed all the more fervently in a particular direction. 

The message was clear. 

'No time.'

They needed to get going, before it was too late.

She pushed herself to her feet, even as her heart thundered in her chest. 

Green electricity and sparks were increasingly suffusing the environment, the distant thunder was getting louder and more frequent, it may already be raining beyond the underhang, and now she and the Slugcat were racing along. 

They barely made it to the shelter before it all got too much. 

Vista slumped against the ground and its cool, dry mud. Just to have a moment of utter safety in the darkness was a blessed relief. 

With a trembling hand, she reached up to turn off her visor, ignoring how the power indicator was flashing to signify that it was in its last twenty percent. 

“Hah... that was... rough...” she said, and then she coughed, having inhaled some dust. 

A soft crooning sound in response.

As she caught her breath, in that cramped shelter, she rested her head against the back wall, as she had so many times before, and closed her eyes. 

So close now... one more rest, one last time in one of these shelters.

What would she even do if this all went nowhere? 

Rescue was not coming any time soon, it had been at least a month, right? Everyone back at base probably thought that she was dead... she supposed she could try to get nice and high up, or try surviving all the way long enough to get back to base, as she had originally intended...

That was all that mattered... 

All she needed was to understand, to know the reason for it all and get the information back.

The Slugcat would be falling asleep soon, right? In these quiet moments in which they could actually communicate, she really should make use of it, right?

“Y'know… I wonder if you could leave this place with me? Would you want that? To be safe from the rain? Plenty of food... I bet everyone would want to try and chat with you somehow, I bet you have so many stories and things you could tell us about this place,” she mused. 

No response.

Vista glanced to the side. 

The Slugcat was looking away, its eyes partially closed with tiredness, but there was a weariness to those eyes beyond the physical, there was something... deep there. 

It was as if the very idea brought up some manner of painful memory. 

Just a few minutes later, and without a word more between them, the Slugcat was asleep in her lap. 

Dutifully, she took out all the food she had gathered over the course of the day, a pile of blue bug eggs and the glowing orange slime mold, and settled down to sit, wait... and think. 

What nightmares would come to her this time?

Ah, she was close... so close to understanding more, she could feel it.

🡇

Chapter Text

Missy stood, watching the group as it completed the last of its preparations. 

In her time here, she had gotten used to being in this part of the base, the helicopter bay. The vehicles were the best way to get in and out of the Quarantine Site's deeper areas fast. 

She could still remember her first flight out with Team Seven, how Aputi had fussed over making sure she was safely buckled in, having once broken his collar bone from not being secured during a rough landing.

“Guys, are you sure? I don't mind coming along,” she said, for what felt like the third time in the last hour. 

Team Seven barely paused in their preparations.

“It's fine, lil' eight, we'll be just fine,” Asher said, cracking a grin at her even as he adjusted the pack on his back; the man always was insistent that correct weight distribution and the packing was one of its most important preparations someone could make, and could save one's life. She wasn't so sure about the latter, but then again, she wasn't former special forces, so what would she know on that matter? 

The members of Team Seven were all gearing up to go into the Quarantine Site...  Without her. 

It was the first time that she would not be joining them in the several months that she had known them. The seven professional troopers, the youngest of whom was twice her age, had become like a strange group of friends for her. 

They had gone on so many expeditions into the Site to collect resources, samples and clear out nests that they were... well, they were her team. The idea of not going in with them felt so completely and utterly wrong to just stay behind and sit around at base for them rather than be at their side. 

She was the one who got them out of the really tight spots, their good luck charm, for these expeditions. 

And today, they might need that luck. 

A small opening had been found on the Superstructure in the Quarantine Site's centre, a small gap that opened onto a narrow ledge. 

Given how all the water vapour creating the rain's came out of that place, how it was the source of the electronic interference and the general mysteries surrounding it... it was only natural that folks wanted it investigated. The electronic interference in the Quarantine Site was worst in the area surrounding it, so drones and other mechanical forms of exploration were not viable...

But did they have to send in Team Seven for this?

Hell, did they have to send in living people at all? 

Wasn't there some alternative option? Maybe some Parahuman with clones powers? But nobody would hear her out. 

“C'mon, got some homework for you whilst we're gone,” Gabriel said, giving her shoulder a nudge and leading her away from the others as they finished the last preparations, getting their packs onto the helicopter.

Homework? 

Probably some files or things to read, even though she obsessively kept up with just about every report produced by this place... so what did he mean by that, was he just trying to distract her?

“Listen, the higher ups don't want you to put in too much risk, it's such an unknown what's in there,” Gabriel said, voice lowering so that the others would not have to hear.

Vista glanced to the side. 

In the distance, she swore that she could see a number of the site's seemingly endless bureaucrats watching them from the windows. They were an army of mostly faceless drones who took everything the troopers could provide from the comfort of their nice, ventilated and warm office rooms, yet always managed to find fault. 

If nothing else, it was those faceless bureaucrats' signatures that allowed her to join the expeditions, and who waylaid Youth Guard and all the protests about how she should not be taking part in this all. 

At least for that, she was grateful.

And yet, it still felt wrong for her to be left behind.

“But---”

She was cut off, Gabriel's deep voice silencing her. 

Hell, by the looks of it, he had fully expected her to interject.

“No buts, Vista,” he said, and putting a hand on her shoulder. For somebody so tall, he didn't try to kneel to look her in the eyes or do anything so patronising. Instead, he met her eyes, face serious now that he was away from the others. “We don't know what we're running into, and I'm not going to put you at risk. We're going, and you are staying out, understand?”

She said nothing, she wanted to say so many things---

“Do you understand?” it was firm, uncompromising. 

This was all set in motion, there was nothing she could do to change it, and she had to respect that now. 

Perhaps it was just the rules that her time with Team Seven had installed in her, but---

“Yes, sir.”

She tried not to sound petulant, she really did. 

The sergeants hand gave her shoulder a squeeze. 

“Good, we'll be back in a jiffy, don't you worry, Vista,” he promised, stern face smiling just a little, before turning around to rejoin the others. 

There were waves and abundant promises, and Vista saw them off, feeling distinctly ill at ease.

She watched as the helicopter ascended, like a gigantic, loud balloon that rose ever so languidly, before turning and setting off towards the centre of the Quarantine Site.

Why did she feel a familiar sense of dread, of a lack of control over things? It was a sensation that, to some small degree, she had managed to forget, or simply hadn't felt in long enough that it hit her suddenly. 

It was the same sensation as in Winslow when Dean dragged her away from the door beyond which Aegis lay, or when the lizard attacked him, or when the other kids---

All she could do was wave them off.

They would be fine...

Hungry…

She was so, so hungry…

Missy did not move, her breaths were long and slow, the warmth of the shelter went some way to conserving her energy but also filled with a heavy, slow feeling. 

Four sleeps in, and there could be another few to go. 

Would it be a long rain cycle, or a short one? Humans could live for a month or two without food… She'd been here, in this Quarantine Site, for weeks now… how many? She had been eating in that time, so she would be able to survive longer than if she was truly starving, right? 

When she was thirsty, she could lick the moisture that trickled down the walls; it kept her alive, even if it never truly satisfied.

Time had no meaning any more.

Vista had long-lost track of things like days, and measuring things in how often she had slept was pointless as well. At this point, it felt as if her entire life was spent in gloom and darkness, with just periodic bursts of activity and exploration to punctuate it. 

She still had some food left, but she couldn't afford to eat it all now.

Vista was strong, she was a survivor where others were not. 

All that mattered was that she would have her answers soon, the meaning behind this all. The pain, the tragedy, the agony. 

Her life didn't matter so long as she could find out, right? If she could get the answer and have it recorded in her helmet, and that could get that back, then it would all be worth it even if she died.

Maybe then they'd all forgive her for surviving…

In her dark dreams and nightmares, she could see their faces. 

Pallid, pained faces. Some crushed, some ripped apart. All the faces of people she had seen die, or knew had perished, whilst she survived. Endless surviving where others didn't.

Hah…

There had to be a reason for it all, right?

Maybe it was like… fate or something? That would be a really nice idea, the notion that she, and she alone had been fated to do all this, to survive…

But then again, that would imply that all of this was pre-written, and she was not sure that she liked that notion. 

… That was the problem with all this. 

Vista couldn't stop thinking.

When she was busy, when she was out there surviving alongside the Slugcat, or back at base training and reading reports, she had a purpose. But now that she was in the shelter, in the dark, alone and without anything to do but wait, that was when memories came to her. 

The human brain was a nightmarish thing, just three pounds of flesh capable of creating unmitigated horrors and torture for itself. 

She closed her eyes, even though she knew that nightmares were to come, and tried to get some sleep. 

The sooner she got out of here, the sooner she would have her answers, the sooner her survival would have meaning.

...

...

...

Grrrrrrrrrrrr---

It was time to go.

The moment the mechanisms began to open up, Vista was looking at the Slugcat, silently wishing that it would wake up quicker. There was no food left, but they were close now, so close to an answer of some sort, right? 

---UNK!

She turned on her helmet, taking note of just how little battery it had left. 

The ominous flashing red, anywhere between one and twenty percent, probably closer to ten... But she could stretch it out, right?

The Slugcat woke, and they began on their way. 

It did not take long to reach the entrance to the Superstructure at all, indeed, Vista had to wonder whether they could have just about reached it the previous cycle. If so, then the last few days and nights sitting there, sleeping, waking and eating had all been to waste. 

Still.

They grabbed just a little food on the way in, Batflies and the glowing mould, something to fill their bellies, but Vista paid little heed to the needs of her body at this point. 

They entered, Missy widening the pipes to more easily climb her way in. 

Upwards, upwards---

Gravity ceased. 

The inside of the structure was bizarre. 

It was so utterly unnatural that the rest of the Quarantine Site was a perfectly maintained public park by comparison.

It was technology beyond anything she had seen before, not even in Armsmaster's workshop, the one time she had been allowed to see it, or when Chris tried to show her some of his creations. 

Blinking lights, strange lines and tubes. 

Moving around was tricky, without gravity, she and the Slugcat had to launch themselves from one wall to another, and this time… her power was only so much of a help getting around. 

It was not responding as it should, the entire of this place was messing with her. 

It was mechanical, yes. 

But also biological. 

The walls were metal, but there were swarms of small, glowing creatures that moved in vast swarms, and stranger structures and panels that her power registered as alive.

“It's alive…” she found herself muttering.

It was as much for the sake of her helmet, and its recording, than anything else. Keeping a record was significant because in the end, no matter what happened to her… others had to know. 

A few times, they found strange, dead things. 

She regarded the strange lifeform with some small amount of confusion. 

Its body was composed of several bulbous spheres gathered and merged, with large X's at the centre of each. Numerous long, sticky looking tendrils terminating with blue-ish nodules emerged from this core, yet hung limp and lifeless. It looked about the same colour as some of the surrounding flies and systems, but they were clearly dead, and had been for a long time indeed. 

If this was all one big biomechanical structure, then what purpose did this thing serve?

She didn't know. 

But she had to. 

The Slugcat waved her closer, having floated on ahead to a particular pipe, and now looking back at her, gesturing her impatiently.

She pushed off gently from the wall and floated through the air until she collided with the other wall, careful not to launch herself too hard. Not after the first time she crashed into solid metal and probably dented her helmet again. 

This place was a vast, convoluted maze. 

Without the Slugcat, she would probably have been lost forever. 

The Superstructure pierced the clouds, and sat on multiple legs that were individually wider than a city block. Hell, it had an entire metropolis built upon its top, a civilisation had seemingly flourished upon its back, even if it was long extinguished now.

Through multiple rooms they went, contending with the lack of gravity and the strange dimensions of this place, until, suddenly, they came to a room that was bare empty of the strange swarms of flies.

Instead, in this small room, there were numerous pieces of debris floating aimlessly. 

Her heart sank. 

She floated over, caught one of them, and then bumped against the opposite wall. 

A moment later, the Slugcat impacted on her back and gripped to anchor itself, looking over what she had found. 

It was a body. 

Dessicated and all dried up, empty eye sockets staring vacantly at her.

Her eyes slowly moved over to the tag on the front of the trooper's stained armour.

Sgt. Gabriel Nielson.

There were six others, all dead.

Slowly, she looked around her. There were numerous panels on the walls that looked as if they could open or close, any of which could have been the way in… and then been sealed up. 

Had this vast, seemingly alive structure led them into this place, and then trapped them inside, unable to escape without the benefit of her power to make pipes wider? 

All this time, she had been hoping…

What had she hoped?

To find them alive in here?

Happy, content, but unable to escape?

… There had only ever been one direction that this could have gone.

But to imagine them trapped in this room, slowly dying, starving, or perhaps thirst got them first? Some of them were missing large portions of their heads, had they taken their own lives rather than endure a slow, agonising death, or did one of them break, and kill their fellows out of mercy?

How long had it taken for Team Seven to die?

Days? 

A week?

Dully, Vista released the body of Gabriel, allowing it to return to floating through the chamber, and she watched it, 

The Slugcat on her back remained there, gripping onto her, even as they both stared at the seven floating bodies left suspended in zero gravity.

A faint, gentle squeak from it was the only sound in the world, as it looked too her with an unreadable expression. Did it understand what this meant, that they were dead? Could it empathise with her right now? 

After a moment, it scooted closer, coiling around her neck and, with a careful paw, wiped away at something on her cheek. Then, it bumped its head against that spot as a low, melancholic crooning sound filled the air as if nuzzled against her skin.

Oh...

Vista reached up under her visor to wipe at her eyes, casting the little beads of moisture into the room. 

How often had done this for them all in those long, long nights of wondering what had happened to them? 

And now that she had the truth... she almost felt a strange sort of horrible, sick, a guilty relief that now she knew, which was just so fucked up, right? Everyone would hate her if they knew she felt this way.

She had hoped against hope to find out the truth, but now that she had… 

She had to know the reason for all of this. 

It was all that mattered in the world. 

There had to be a reason for all this.

It was the only thing keeping her going.

Chapter Text

The vast room was silent despite containing over a hundred people. 

At a lectern, a short, skinny woman with a face heavy with the lines of somebody who spent most of their time frowning was speaking, addressing them all. 

"---At this point, we have to conclude that all members of Team Seven are unlikely to have survived. As a result, it is the decision of Site Director Reina that all proposed manned missions into the Superstructure are not to go ahead after this tragic loss. Our hopes and well wishes are with the families of the members of the team in this time, and we hope that all members of staff will join us in remembering all members who lost their lives---"

Murderers.

They sent them to die. 

All of them

Gabriel, Janet, Killey, Johnny, Aputi, Asher and Owen.

It was just her. 

Vista. 

#8

The last member of Team Seven. She had never been officialised on the paperwork of anything because of the potential blowback, but had Johnny engraved her pauldron, she was their good luck charm. 

She was the eighth member of the team. 

And she had been left behind.

They would have been fine if she had been there, right? It was because of her that they were all lost, it was Arcadia all over again. If only she had been beside them, then they would have been okay---

No. 

It was everyone else's fault. 

She shouldn't have listened, shouldn't have let them go! She should have done something, should have used her power to get on that damn helicopter, or found some way there. 

They had been so confident that they would be fine... or had they been lying? Trying to spare her from the grim thought that they would never return?

She had argued so hard to go, but she could have done more, so much more--- 

Vista had no idea quite when she left the big room in which the address was taking place, all she knew was that she was walking in a haze, each footstep echoing around her. Nobody was getting in her way, or trying to talk to her today, the halls were deserted.

She piloted her body forward's, observing as she went with an utterly detached point of view. 

It had been days since they left. 

Everyone had quietly known what had probably happened. 

But she had hoped, hoped with every fibre of her being that they were fine, that they had gotten lost or were just making their way through it. Communications would come back, they had enough rations to last a week or more in there, and if truly needed, a rescue could be staged, right?

No.

They weren't even going to try. 

Her hand found the key card to get into her room, and she stepped through into the small space beyond. It was dark, but it didn't need to be bright for her to see in here. She was so used to the space, her power told her it's exact dimensions and more. 

She set her helmet down, her body was all slow and languid as she mechanically set about removing her costume, piece by piece divesting herself of Vista. 

It was like losing an iron shell that protected her from the world beyond, each little piece of armour was a barrier that separated herself from the realities of it all, until she was left with just one piece. She unclasped the pauldron and held it, fingers tracing the harsh lines gouged into it by Johnny, which later Janet had sanded down to be more smooth.

She put it down on the bed, all very controlled... 

And then she lost her mind. 

The room contorted, stretched and warped as she let loose. At once, the small, confined darkness was an enormous void, it was the size of an aircraft hangar, the bed was as vast as a swimming pool, she smudged and stretched and just absolutely let loose her power. 

It did nothing.

It wasn't constructive or destructive, it was altering and warping her surroundings for no greater reason than because she could, because it was the one thing in her fucking life that she could control. 

Nobody could take it away!

Nobody could change the way that she had made her surroundings, only her! No stupid rain, no people trying to meddle and make her move to some stupid city or decide her life for her, nothing to further mire her in this stupid pointless hateful confusing world!

She grabbed things, she launched them through the air, hearing them clatter tens of metres away in this space that she controlled. 

A knock. 

Distant... or was it loud, and it was just what she had done to the room that made it sound quiet? What the fuck did it matter?

Somebody was there, interrupting her. 

Because even right now, there was just no peace, somebody had to meddle.

"Missy, it's me."

...

...

Miss Militia, it brought such an irrational surge of anger to her, to know that there was somebody there, rig ht now. The mere crime of existing during her period of despairing anger was enough, without regard for anything the woman had done. 

"Can I come in?"

"..." she couldn't trust her lips, she couldn't think properly, everything was so messy, there were things she wanted to say and do right now. 

Yet in the end, the room began to shrink, that sensation of control she had managed to get was gone now that the woman was here, now that she had to pretend to be reasonable again.  

She had to open the door to her superior. 

Miss Militia was there, it was just like when they first met again after the Quarantine Site first appeared. And a half dozen other times the woman had come to check up on her. 

"Missy, do you want to talk?"

She looked long and hard into the woman's face, the woman who had removed her bandana to look at her, person to person instead of Parahuman to Parahuman.

She thought of so many things, and yet it was the very ugliest and most traitorous thought that arose from that turbulent sea that somehow escaped her lips.

"This is all your fault..."

Silence.

"... Missy---"

"It's all your fucking fault!" she knew just how pathetic she sounded, screaming at a hero, at a member of the Protectorate. She was acting like a petulant child and a brat, she sounded like she was having a god-damn mental breakdown, but she just didn't care any more!

She just felt so angry, so filled with impotent rage at her inability to control all this, at the hideous circumstances that just kept piling up.

"You stopped me from going with them, I could have saved them, you bitch! You stopped it, don't try to tell me you weren't, you signed the paperwork, right? Made sure I wasn't on there? There has to be a reason why they didn't want me to go with them right, you talked them out of it, you and that bitch from Youth Guard are just trying to ruin my fucking life!"

Uncontrolled, unceasing words spilled from her lips, there was not so much as a moment's thought behind any of them, they were words compiled in a fraction of a moment for one purpose.

Destructive catharsis. 

They were words that any normal person would deeply regret later, the sort of outburst that ruined marriages or families as a person said things that they did not really mean.

They were intended to hurt the other person and little more for the sake of just getting them off her chest. 

It was all just so much all at the same time, the breaking apart and pulling of her world in separate directions, the fact it would never be the same again... 

Again...

She felt light-headed suddenly, like she was losing control or beginning to fall for just a moment---

Miss Militia grabbed her shoulders and, despite all the abuse she had hurled at the woman, Missy was pulled into a hug, crushed against her chest and swayed from side to side like some baby even as she uncontrollably just... broke down all over again. 

Her vision cleared, whatever moment of headiness had struck her faded away and all she could do was vent and scream mutely into the woman's shoulder for catharsis. 

What was the reason for all this... what was the point?

When they did finally reach their apparent destination, it was almost without fanfare. The Slugcat had excitedly pointed towards a particular pipe or tube, one of the many that they had made it through during their exploration here, and dutifully she had made their way through it---

And emerged into a cuboid chamber, in which gravity once more resumed. 

There was a sound, mechanical, high-pitched, as Vista and the Slugcat landed, and Vista realised that they were not alone.

A thing on a mechanical arm, connected by a dozen wires, to the wall around them.

It was humanoid in design, with a pink outer casing over which an orange piece of cloth similar to a shift or Buddhist monk's robe had been adorned, although it was visibly frayed with time, wear and tear. A pair of glowing eyes peered at Vista as the strange, puppet like thing was moved around the chamber. Either side of its 'head' were a pair of grey antennae that almost resembled long ears, a bit like those on her helmet.

She watched, guarded, but the Slugcat beside her seemed utterly unconcerned with the mechanical avatar, instead, it simply pointed imperiously towards Vista even as it maintained eye contact with the machine.

Sounds filled the air, a strange language she could not understand, one that sounded familiar from the strange, blob like thing the two of them had met atop those chimneys.

On the back wall behind it lights flashed, forming shapes and images, things she couldn't understand, symbols--- an outline of a human being? 

Yes, and then, highlighted in pink, an image of the brain, her brain. 

She was being floated off the ground, all at once her forehead was burning---

🡇

🡇

🡇

🡇

🡇

---And she was released as suddenly, she felt... felt...

Her vision was swimming, she staggered a little in place and her first instinct was to hurl something at the damnable machine that had just done… something, to her. 

“…is this reaching you? You, the one beside the little creature.”

The thing was talking… to her? It was the same strange communication as before. Her forehead felt warm still, under her helmet, as if something was being pressed there---

“I think I know what you are looking for. You're stuck in a cycle, a repeating pattern. You want a way out.”

… Huh?

She focused on the puppet as it went on.

“Know that this does not make you special, every living thing shares that same frustration. From the microbes in the processing strata to me, who am, if you excuse me, godlike in comparison,” it continued, slowly moving around the chamber to observe them both from all angles. 

Beside Vista, the Slugcat was sitting patiently, watching the machine.

Wait, machine was not the right word, was it? Just as a computer could have a digital avatar, this was the physical avatar of this entire, gigantic computer that was the superstructure surrounding them, right?

“The good news first. In a way, I am what you are searching for. Me and my kind have as our purpose to solve that very oscillating claustrophobia in the chests of you and countless others. A strange charity, you the unknowing recipient, I the reluctant gift. The noble benefactors? Gone. The bad news is that no definitive solution has been found.”

The puppet was utterly focused on her, a hand had been gestured to the side, as if indicating the magnitude of its words. 

Even as the flashing battery icon on her helmet indicated that it had reached its last ten percent, she made sure to catch every word the machine spoke.

“For you though, there is another way. The old path. Go to the west past the Farm Arrays, and then down into the earth where the land fissures, as deep as you can reach, where the ancients built their temples and danced their silly rituals. The mark I gave you will let you through. Not that it solves anyone's problem but yours.”

A momentary pause. 

“Best of luck to you, little creature. I must resume my work.”

It began to move upwards, turning its eyes away from her---

“Wait!” she interjected, taking a single step forward. “I have questions for you!”

“Oh?” a strange, mechanical hum, it looked back. “Well, this is interesting. The capacity for communication, beyond the blank eyed-staring of creatures like your companion beside you. I will wait a little longer, then, for your questions.”

“Who, what are you?”

“I am the Iterator of this structure. That is to say, a thinking biomechanical machine. I was tasked with the oversight and implementation of functionalities by the ancients, and the answering of the big problem. My name is Five Pebbles.”

“And... why are you here?”

“Why?” The puppet shifted a little, its head tilted to the side in a decidedly artificial expression. “We ask ourselves this question often. The cycle of birth and rebirth afflicts living creatures. Our creators sought the answer to implement a means for all being's to escape it in a manner that followed the rules of the triple affirmative. We iterators were left to discover it.”

“No… why are you here?” she clarified. “In this city?”

The puppet like thing paused.

It shifted a little in the air, a momentary spark of irritation?

“An ancient visitor came to our world. 'The Loner', for its species normally travels in pairs. They are a species captured within cycles dissimilar, yet similar enough, to our own. It sought the answer to a question, just as we do. We communicated. Their question is different than ours, but provided avenues of investigation.

What the fuck---

“Over the course of multiple cycle's we conversed and came to an agreement. The Loner needed energy. The Void Sea, deep below the surface, is filled with the fluid that powered our creator's civilisation. It dissolves material matter and releases such vast quantities of energy that a solitary cup may power a civilisation for an entire day.” 

Deep below the ground… but that was where the machine had told her to go---

“The Loner desired to explore this power source, we desired an answer to the problem. We reached an agreement. I would facilitate access to the Void Fluid. The Loner maintains a connection to our Facility Grounds and supplies us with additional processing power and repaired damage to my structure. As an additional benefit, I observe the other civilisations that the Loner encounters, and their own efforts to answer the same problem I face.”

Energy for information? 

But even then, didn't this all imply something far more drastic about the origin of Parahuman powers? 

Like, if this 'Five Pebbles' was here to observe other civilisations, was it some manner of alien being itself, or was it something from another dimension?

Each second, she had more questions than answers.

“But why... here?”

It was all she could focus on, the thing she needed to answer the most.

“The Loner granted remote access to part of its form to another of its kind to facilitate our agreement. When a member of this planet's intelligent species gained access to the creature's abilities, our Facility Grounds were superimposed over the original metropolis that was located here.”

“Wait, so it was just a trigger event!?” 

A pause.

Images on the background of the wall, a map of Brockton Bay, and then, zeroing in on a location, she recorded it all on her helmet, even if she could not recall exactly where that place had once been. 

A flash of a face, again one she did not recognise. A girl, dark haired and wearing glasses---

“If that is the name your kind has given the development of anomalous abilities associated with the greater being, then yes. It was incidental, in previous cycles, I would purely observe. The space-time distortion required to superimpose our Facility Grounds upon this world requires truly vast quantities of energy, and the entity the Loner communicated with is compromised. At the current rate of consumption, our Facility Grounds shall disappear within ten years."

Ten years!?

But it would go, for certain? 

This really was all just one bad trigger that had ended an entire city?

"Who was that?" she asked, and pointed to where the image of a person had been.

The one who had been behind this, the trigger event that created this city. 

"I do not know. They were merely the unwitting host of the processing Shard that facilitated the connection. Perhaps they perished and became part of the cycle, reborn in a new or similar form. Or perhaps they fell into the Void Fluid. It is of little consequence. Our appearance here was a misapplication of the entities abilities and should not have occurred. After this cycle, the Loner shall terminate the access to us that was granted. We have been disappointed with this attempt, but your species has various religions in which your understanding of the cycle contains its own enlightenment."

The puppet moved, drawing away. 

“Now then, little creature. Please leave, I must return to my duties.”

All of this was just born from some sort of esoteric agreement? 

Energy for information? 

Whatever was going on was so much bigger than she could have imagined. 

What was this about alien beings and other worlds? 

In a daze she was guided along, she had no doubt that there were boundless other questions that she could ask, that she would forever regret not taking the opportunity to pose this 'Iterator.' 

But at that moment, she just could not do it. 

It was like her mind had gone utterly blank, was struggling to process this all. 

As gravity once more disappeared, the Slugcat tugged at her hand, guiding and directing her upwards out of the chamber. 

In a blur of confused motion, she and the Slugcat emerged onto the surface of the vast Superstructure. 

In the distance the metropolis was visible, there were no clouds up here, just boundless sunshine, even as distant thunder sounded. It was raining over the Quarantine Site, and yet to Missy, all the sounds in the world would fail to drown out her racing thoughts. 

It was then that exhaustion overtook her. 

Finding a protrusion of metal or junk, Vista sat herself down, legs collapsing out under her, sitting atop the grimy surface of this vast, thinking structure. 

Her mind was racing, and yet, her thoughts felt so heavy and slow. 

Ah… she was in shock right now, right? 

All of it, all those revelations, were just too much. 

Idly, she noticed as the little Slugcat stared up at her, as it gently tugged on the sleeve of her outfit. 

Her hand reached out automatically, patting her companion. 

“It's okay, I'm okay…”

She wasn't. 

Not at all. 

All of this was the product of some esoteric agreement between something called 'The Loner' and the vast machine beneath her, which continued to sit and think away without regard for the hundreds of thousands of people who had been killed by its appearance here. 

The death of Brockton Bay was little more than a mistake, a trigger event. 

It could have happened anywhere in the world, to literally anybody. 

And it came and ruined her life. 

A cruel cosmic coincidence. 

It was all choices made by things far more powerful than her, without any ability to actually impact or control her fate whatsoever, pulling her in all directions without regard for her existence. Everything she knew, deconstructed, and despite every hope of understanding and putting it all back together, it could never happen, there was no way to fix all this. 

It was the divorce all over again but worse and worse and---

She didn't realise that she was blacking out until it happened. 

One moment she was falling, the next, she was staring across this vast, mechanical plain at the distant, empty metropolis in the distance. 

The air was filled with the Slugcat's frantic squeaking as it clambered over her, evidently shocked by her sudden collapse. 

Ah… this felt familiar. 

This was the worst day of her life, it was just like back then... 

Silently, she pushed herself back up.

Her mind was such a mess and so disconnected from everything, her power was different now, she could sense it. 

A second trigger... whatever, in the end it was just a testament to how messed up all of this was, how messed up she was.

She was not in the right headspace to put it to use, so instead…

She picked up the Slugcat and moved it to her lap. 

It stood there, staring up at her. 

Automatically, she reached up and ran her hand from the top of its head down its back. It was like petting a squishy cat, but she felt… next to nothing at all. 

“Thanks, lil' guy… guess I really know now…”

Her voice sounded croaky and small.

She did not know how long she sat there, just... absorbing this all. Or trying to, at least. It was hard to really take it all in, a few times she lifted her head and stared vacantly at the city in the distance, at the towering buildings, safe above the clouds.

In her lap, the Slugcat sat, making no sounds, doing little but just... existing with her.

They should get moving.

They should find food and shelter.

But now they were somewhere without rain, she felt no drive to move, to survive. 

She just wanted to...

To...

A distant shape, a dark spot against the sky, growing closer and closer. It was too level in its flight to be a Vulture, and as it grew closer, the louder it became. 

The low thrum of helicopter blades. 

It was heading towards the Metropolis, or intended for such, at least... 

Part way there, it suddenly banked around, and began heading towards them.

The Slugcat tensed up as it focused on the airborne vehicle. 

It looked at her.

“Ah, they're probably here for me,” she said, disconnected. “I don't want them to think you're gonna attack me… if you want, you can come back with me? I'll make sure you're okay, that they know you're smart… I bet you could help us a lot in explaining and exploring this place more. Not that it matters…” she said, voice soft. 

It was so tiring to talk. 

The Slugcat glanced at the helicopter, and then, suddenly, it shook its head. 

Ah…

“Okay.” She felt so empty. “You might wanna hide somewhere… thanks for all your help…”

Her hands moved to empty her pockets, taking out what little food she had left on her, and passed it over to the little creature. Might as well eat on her behalf, if she was going back to base. 

There was food there, and no battle for survival. 

She owed her travelling companion so much, these horrible revelations could never have occurred were it not for its efforts. She would be dead and rotting away, crushed by the rain she had spent so long scared of. 

The Slugcat stood there, staring back, it felt like so much was communicated between them. They couldn't even speak properly, but it understood her, and she understood its body language all the clearer after speaking with Five Pebbles. 

It couldn't come with her. 

... Perhaps it just could not survive beyond the Facility Grounds; perhaps it had some purpose here to attain, but it could not come with her. 

It took the food, rubbed its cheek against her hand one last time, and then it darted away. 

She felt so empty with it gone, her arms felt empty, and moved to wrap around her knees and she set her heavy head upon her interlaced forearms.

The helicopter stopped in the air a short-distance away, the wind created by its propellors buffeting her, but she didn't bother to move at all.  

She sat and stared, vacantly, staring but not really seeing, as it landed, as the doors on its side opened, and troopers rushed out towards her.

Chapter Text

Missy was alive. 

It had taken her a few seconds to compute it, for the frantic communication coming in from the helicopter that was returning to base early to sink in. 

Missy had been gone for over a month. 

All hope of her survival had long since faded, there had been a period of mourning, there had been tears and a memorial service commemorating her life. Even now, her name was on a plaque recording and honouring the names of all those who had died in the Quarantine Site. The members of Team Four were still wearing all black and had only recently come back to work after therapy from that expedition. 

All this was to say that her loss was a tragedy, and one with far-reaching consequences and impacts on everyone.

Hannah had mourned the loss of the last Brockton Bay Ward, had spent countless hours in seclusion thinking of all the things she should have said and done to save the girl, the child that, on some level, she had failed to take care of. 

It was... hard. 

To see that bright-eyed young girl that she had once known be broken down, be left as little but a hollow shell of a person after what she had experienced in the rain...

Hannah had hoped that slowly, she would be able to bring her around, that common sense would prevail. 

She should have pushed harder, should have taken the bull by the horns. 

The state had the right to move her, and yet, despite everything... somehow Vista had been prized over Missy Biron. 

Vista's power was so incredibly potent, yes, but it was only after her first venture into the Quarantine Site with Team Seven that suddenly opposition to her departing for a better, more stable life had become so stiff. 

That was when the site staff in charge realised how useful she was. 

Weeks of trying to help Missy, to return a smile to her face and ease her nightmares and suffering had been undone the moment the girl stepped back into that hell. She had developed the delusion that it was her duty to try and make sense of it all, to protect others. 

The girl was a victim of her own survivor's guilt, unable to exist in the future and languishing in the past. 

Hannah had set up therapy for her, had tried so hard to do all she could for Missy Biron. 

She had lied, had said that it was the PRT covering the costs when in fact, the expensive sessions and tablets the girl needed for a good night's sleep instead came out of her own pocket. 

She earned plenty of money, and if it would help Missy, then it would be worth it... after everything, after the loss of all the other Wards and so many colleagues, the idea of the girl's life being so snuffed out was just... intolerable. Death was a part of life, she had seen it abundantly in her relatively short time on this earth. 

But to see somebody who was alive yet dead inside, that was worse than anything. 

Missy had been in a barely functioning state when Hannah had first seen her after the first rain.

She had sat on her bed, a bowl of porridge left uneaten and cold at her side, and stared up at her with an expression of deadened shock. Even speaking had carried an air of exhaustion, as if the notion of trying to communicate took everything of the girls' mental energy, let alone physical.

"They killed them, they... the rain, the kids, they just killed them. Then the rain stopped, just afterwards..." 

And of all things to have returned some spark of life to the girl, it was not therapy or attempts to draw her out of her shell... it was willingly stepping back into the very place that had destroyed her in the first place. 

Was Missy dependent on the adrenaline and the risk to feel alive?

Was she just seeking answers that probably did not exist?

Or was it survivor's guilt, a certain drive towards self-destruction and the notion that she needed to join those who had not made it?

The site had allowed it, even encouraged it, because Vista was just so good at what she did. It could not be denied that she was such a fantastic asset for keeping boots on the ground safe and able to function properly, and no matter how many complaints Hannah had raised about the matter, nothing had been done, or it had always been waved off. 

"Vista is always surrounded by highly armed troopers, Miss Militia---"

"She only goes a safe distance in, there's no need to worry---"

"We have set out a comprehensive list of guidelines for all personnel when it comes to ensuring the best care is taken for Vista---"

Utter bullshit.

The number of times she had slammed her fist against a table in frustration once she left those damnable meetings, the complaints and her concerns... all brushed off, pushed aside. She should have tried so much harder, she should have forced the point!

But in the end, it was not Hannah who paid the price for the negligence and pig-headedness of the site directors, nor was it those responsible (well, not until the investigation took place after Vista's loss), but poor Missy herself. 

Missy, who threw herself into reading every document possible, who grew increasingly unhappy whenever her birth name was used, and who, every day, asked to go into a place that for most meant certain death. 

The news that Vista had been lost was a shock to everyone. 

The shockwaves it created had been monumental, the blow to the morale of the troopers incredible, because not only was she their good luck charm... she was one of them.

But for Hannah...

It represented utter failure. 

She hadn't even been able to do anything for the last Ward, the last of her charges, the person she had tried to be there for, yet in the end, failed to protect. 

So when somebody interrupted the meeting she was in to mention that Vista was alive, there was only one response she could give.

"Where is she."

"Miss---"

"Where the FUCK is she."

It wasn't a question. 

She wasn't a violent woman, not by nature. She'd always tried to be reasonable, but at that moment, she just could not help herself as she slammed her hand on the table, creating a sound like a gunshot.

"The 'copter taking Team eleven to the Metropolis, they saw her on the Superstructure and have picked her up, they're going to be landing at bay four---"

She had turned around before the woman was done speaking, wrenching open the door and ran, god-damn ran through the facility towards the location mentioned. She pushed aside people in her way, all to get to the place in record time, and from there, it was a minute or two of frantic waiting, of looking towards the sky. 

Others were joining her, news had clearly begun to spread. 

The helicopter came in with speed, slowing and then descending towards the ground. She searched it keenly, looking for a face in the windows, but there was nothing to be seen. 

It landed, the doors were flung open. 

A small shape, half-walking, half-staggering towards her, flanked by troopers forced to abort their original mission for something far more important. 

Missy looked so very thin.

Her costume was dirty, ripped, frayed and torn. There were small pieces of armour missing, snapped and chipped, the helmet on her head was visibly damaged, pitted and broken. It was no wonder that the signal had been lost, considering the state of the piece of technology, indeed, it was amazing that it was in one piece at all.

But those eyes...

Hannah had seen eyes like that before, but hoped never to do so again. They were the deadened, unseeing yet awake eyes of somebody who had seen so much... too much. 

And so, Hannah stepped forward. 

As noise filled the courtyard, she took the decision she should have ages ago. It was time to take Missy into her own hands and force the matter, she could not, she would not be staying in this accursed site anymore.

She stepped over, put one hand on the girl's back, the other behind the knees and picked her up with such a disturbing ease, sweeping her off her feet and holding her close. 

There was no resistance at all; the Missy who had left that fateful day would have protested, would have grown angry at her. But whatever fight would have occurred could not today, or perhaps there was just no energy left to do so? 

From there it was a rush to get her to the medical ward, the various troopers around Hannah helped to keep away the nosey bureaucrats and officials who might have tried to get in the way. 

The various men and women of the troopers formed up a wall of armoured bodies that served to shield and open the way forward for her. 

Soon Missy was on a bed in the medical bay. 

"Here," carefully, Hannah reached forward, gently lifting the helmet from Missy's head. The girl's hair fell, lank, in her face, she had clearly not washed in weeks, if not the entire time that she had been in the Quarantine Site. 

But there was something else, even as she set down the helmet in the girl's lap, she took notice of the mark, and carefully raised a finger to move aside the girl's hair. 

On Missy's forehead, sunk into the flesh in a manner that looked like a brand, was a symbol. 

An X inside a circle. 

It was only an inch or so across, but she had definitely not had that symbol before, and like hell would anybody allow the branding of a god-damn thirteen-year old! What the hell had happened to her in there, how had she survived? 

There were so many questions---

Evidently taking notice of her shock, although it took a few seconds, Missy raised her head to look up at her.

"Ah... hey..." 

"Missy?"

This time, there were no complaints or reaction to Hannah using her name, it was as if it washed over the girl like water from a duck's back. The blonde stared, a little vacant, for a moment, before, with a hand gesture, she indicated the helmet. 

"... Footage..."

And then, just like that, her eyes began closing, and she fell asleep, leaving Hannah sitting at her side as the first doctor arrived. 

The footage collected by Vista was incredible. 

Revolutionary.

Even if much of the time inside those claustrophobic, cramped shelters was cut, she had captured more valuable information and footage than the entire site's worth of troopers put together in months. 

The recordings had been disseminated and dissected, picked apart and stitched together to include the most important details and new findings. 

In the two and a half days that the girl had been in and out of consciousness, the entire base had been abuzz with information, with updates. There were conversations taking place in boardrooms, new documents, procedures and discussions. 

A first cut, as it were, had been supplied to troopers to make them aware of major findings, but unlike a lot of the top brass, there was one major undercurrent to the responses.

'Holy fuck, Vista survived all this.'

It was a testament to Missy's will to survive and the utility of her power... and a lot of luck, but the more one saw of her experiences, the more harrowing it got. 

Making friends with a previously unknown intelligent species, climbing miles into the sky on a rickety, and surviving for days at a time in those cramped, claustrophobic shelters with the food she had amassed over the course of just a few hours. She had even killed a vulture in hand-to-hand combat, and then there was whatever the fuck that experience inside the Superstructure was. 

If there had ever been doubt about the sheer alien wrongness about the entire place, the zero-gravity installation with its swarms of floating beings, and the humanoid puppet at the centre confirmed it. 

She had provided a veritable treasure trove of information. 

Hannah hated the conversations now taking place. 

"Do we have any records of these cat creatures? It's clearly intelligent, but it's not like those tribal scavenger creatures, so are we looking at another intelligent species? It helped her, so perhaps if we can find another or make contact---"

 "How did she black out on top of the that giant chimney, and then wake up in the shelter? And why have we never seen those things before? That white cat creature couldn't possibly of dragged her back down, teleportation? It's like the day started all over again, this is big, really big---"

"She acts as if she can understand the machine, and judging from the responses, they were clearly communicating in some way. When she is awake, we'll need her to provide translations---"

All of the people in charge of this place were talking about practically interrogating Missy the moment she woke up, seeking clarifications. 

They had forgotten that Hannah was here, so she spoke up, interrupting the conversation. 

"Vista is still recovering from her ordeal, and will not be available until she is back in shape," she snapped at the last speaker, a weedy woman who had been excitably reading over the reports. "Again, and I reiterate, she is a thirteen-year-old girl who has just survived an incredibly traumatic experience."

"Aha, of course... how is she doing?"

Only caring when reminded that a fucking teenager had made it back, near insensate, after surviving a month in a place where most people barely made it a few hours. 

She was half tempted to drag every singly pencil pusher and bureaucrat in this damnable base into Quarantine Site-08 to show them just what a terrifying, horrible place it was to survive. Seeing the footage didn't do it proper justice, they were all only seeing the interesting parts. 

The footage amounted to nearly four days or so in total... 

Missy had been gone for much, much longer than that. 

What else had she experienced in that time?

What had gone through that head of hers?

"I'm not a doctor, but she is still on fluids," Hannah said, bluntly. "She also may have undergone a second Trigger Event, given how she blacked out after her conversation with the machine at the centre of the superstructure, and if so, then there will be no interrogations until she sees a Parahuman psychologist."

Whatever had been discussed between Missy and that thing had clearly been the final straw, her tone, her movements and everything else had utterly changed the moment she left that room.

And after finding the deceased members of Team Seven as well...

They had all known that the seven of them were dead, of course, but for Missy to have actually chanced upon them like that was... well, the girl had only started opening up again after she met and interacted with them, and their loss had driven her further and further into her obsessions---

Judging by the expressions of a few people around the room, the notion of having to wait so long for Missy to both recover, and see a mental health professional was unpalatable. 

However, things were different now.

"Miss Militia is quite correct, and as one of the few people on this site who appears to have been looking out for Vista's well-being this whole time, Youth Guard will be advocating for the same," the woman to Hannah's side said, voice firm yet faintly silky in tone. 

One that promised all manner of bureaucratic horrors should the site not comply. 

When Vista was seemingly lost to the Quarantine Site, the full force of consequence came down on the former director and members of staff that had allowed this farce to go on for as long as it had. Of course, a few discreet messages and letters to Youth Guard had helped to force that particular issue... had Hannah overstepped the mark, even compromised her own relationship with the PRT on some level? 

Probably. 

But the entire situation had been intolerable, and her own anger at it all so great, that in the moment she had not given a solitary fuck about whether the consequences for her own failure to act would fall on her. 

Somehow though... she was still here, hell, they had lauded her actions, her attempts to help Missy. 

Heh, she had failed the worst of all...

Which was why she couldn't afford to budge an inch right now.

The old site directors and his staff had been replaced after the investigation, and now it was time to drive the point home, to remove her from this environment and somewhere that she could begin to heal from all of this. Somewhere safe where she could begin to rebuild her life. 

Even if she ended up hating her.

On the fourth day, Missy woke. 

Or that was to say, she was sensate enough for conversation. 

Two troopers who had taken watch over the medical bay door let Hannah through with a salute. 

It was an unofficial thing, hell, the people at the top disapproved of it, but a constant vigil had been held over the entrance to Missy's room. There were always troopers making sure that nobody could try any funny business or to interrogate the girl.

It would not be correct to say that it was open rebellion, but the staff who manned this place had quite enough of what had been going on.

Hannah opened the door and stepped through. 

In the green gown that she had been put into, Missy looked all the more like a sickly patient of some terrible wasting disease, even with consistent nourishment and fluids, she looked so desperately ill. The bed had been raised into a seated position, her hands were folded in her lap as she stared past the window at the world beyond the glass. 

It was raining, but despite the girl's phobia, when Hannah offered to close the blinds---

"Leave it... I'm used to it now."

 Of course she was, on some level. 

The girl stared beyond the window, sitting ever so still, the faint sound of air passing between her nostrils was a quiet whistle that interrupted the sound of the fat raindrops hitting the window. 

"Missy? What are you thinking?" she asked.

A momentary pause.  

"'The old path. Go to the west past the Farm Arrays, and then down into the earth where the land fissures, as deep as you can reach'..." she said, voice soft, distracted. "That's what the Iterator said... Five Pebbles, I think its name was..."

Oh, Missy... can't you think of anything beyond the Quarantine Site, even now? 

How she wished that she could rip the knowledge of that place from the girl's brain...

"Iterator?" she gently pressed.

"The machine, the one at the centre of the Superstructure. It's alive, it's... alive. Biomechanical? I think that's the word, right? My power didn't work in their properly. Ah... could you guys understand what it was saying? I think it did something to me to help me..." 

A hand reached up, tracing the mark burned or impressed into the flesh of her forehead, tracing the circle and X within it.

She didn't seem concerned by the fact she had been scarred, or perhaps she was beyond caring about it?

Hannah sighed. 

"We can't understand it, no, but everyone has been watching it and putting it all together, you did very well to get in and out of there Missy... but I'm just glad that you are back, we were so worried about you, everyone was."

"That's nice..."

Distracted, hearing but not really processing. 

There was a long pause. 

Hannah reached out, and placed a hand on Missy's. The girl didn't so much as flinch from her touch, there was no resistance at all. 

"Missy, do you want to talk?"

She was honestly trying her best.

The teenager glanced away from the window and the falling rain beyond to instead fix her gaze on Hannah. 

There was no hope at all that the girl could live a normal life now, at least, not without a lot of help. She could tell so just from the first second or two of their staring. 

Missy understood, and Hannah understood in return. 

There was no going back to a time before all this, only trying to work out a path ahead. 

"... It's all pointless, it's... it was just a trigger event, the entire site was created by a trigger. We talked about it, I demanded to know and Pebbles told me it all, it's all just a big agreement, and it doesn't care, it never cared about what happened. Everyone died for nothing. In ten years, the entire place will be gone, but what's gonna be left behind when it goes?"

... Goddammit, they really needed those translations, but the longer Hannah spoke with Missy, the more clear it became just how much the conversation had utterly shaken the girl to her core.

There was no going back to a time before all this, only trying to work out a path ahead. 

Missy said nothing. 

There was something going on in that head of hers, though. Thoughts that she was not sharing, reflections perhaps. But she looked tired out already, even as her mind was visibly racing. 

 "I see."

"Do you?"

"The people want me to provide translations, I guess?" the girl asked.

"There is no rush, Missy."

"It's okay, I'd rather do that then just lie around here, you're gonna keep me here awhile," it sounded just a little accusatory.

"Yes, you need to recover Missy."

This time, she did not couch it in 'maybes,' or 'you shoulds', it was an iron-clad statement that she made. As she had thought, several days ago, she needed to take the bull by the horns and force it. 

"Okay."

No fight, no great struggle. 

She simply agreed. 

There was only so much more to say, and when she left, Hannah released something of a sigh and rubbed at the corners of her eyes. It was going to be a long process---

"Excuse me, Miss Militia?"

She glanced to the side. 

A woman, pale-skinned and in a rather snappy suit, with long black hair put up in a ponytail. She had the badge of s civil servant, although with a cursory glance Hannah could not tell exactly which branch. The woman seemed rather unruffled or concerned by the presence of the nearby armed troopers.

Hannah prepared herself.

"Yes?"

"Amy Smith, Child Protective Services. Miss Hansome from Youth Guard contacted me, I wanted to speak with Vista to try and determine the next steps, and she mentioned that you were the best person see beforehand."

Hannah took a better look at the badge. 

Very official, and the woman had the paperwork to validate who she was. 

"I know that she is probably very tired, but may I speak with her for a few minutes? It's essential that I have a baseline to work with, and I need to ascertain the state of mind to support any requests going forward." 

Going forward...

This woman could be essential for getting Missy out of here.

"Okay, I'll wait across the room as you speak with her."

Hannah couldn't hear much of the ensuing conversation, but if nothing else, she could tell that the woman didn't press Missy for painful details. There were a few times when the girl glanced towards Hannah, and then back to Smith. 

There were notes quickly made, and a few times Missy nodded.

"I am sure that progress can be swiftly made," Smith said, with a somewhat grim smile once they left the room. "... I would like to push for her to move to another city, with lifetime pension for the catastrophic mistakes made. This all is such a perversion of the normal systems that I am amazed it lasted this long. I can't say much more right now, but she'll need a guardian and a fresh start," the woman gave her a significant look.

"I'll do it."

Missy deserved better than some foster home.

Even if the girl hated her, Hannah needed to make up for her failures and make sure she could live a proper life. 

It was no wonder that Missy was in such a mental headspace after meeting with the 'Iterator' at the centre of the Superstructure. 

Now that she had provided a translation and transcript for the conversation, what the two had discussed and explained was... well, let's just say that the site was enjoying a second great wave of appreciation for Missy's efforts. 

The Site was working around the clock to integrate its new understandings into various frameworks and directives.

... But Hannah couldn't help but notice that during some parts of the transcript, Five Pebbles said a lot more than Missy translated, or perhaps it was a case that the language used was quite voluminous, and she cut it down to the bare essentials?

Hannah knew the girl better, she had omitted certain parts of the conversation for some reason known only to her.

Most did not seem to have noticed, so caught up with the flood of new revelations, and perhaps that was a good thing because people were overexcited enough as it was;

"The Void Sea, deep below the surface, is filled with the fluid that powered our creator's civilisation. It dissolves material matter and releases such vast quantities of energy that a solitary cup may power a civilisation for an entire day.” 

"We've sent a report of this along, if we could tap into this then it could be huge. Imagine if we could use this stuff, and we only have a short while to do so as well, but if it's right and just a cup---"

"The energetic potential of this stuff would be well beyond anything we know of, although it's a shame that Vista could not get it to quantify what the Iterator considers to be a 'civilisation', does it only mean the city on its back and the structure itself? Or does it mean planetary---"

“---When a member of this planet's intelligent species gained access to the creature's abilities, our Facility Grounds were superimposed over the original metropolis that was located here.”

"We've done a quick run through people who were in the area at the time with that picture that the Iterator put up, we've got a few possible candidates but none of them managed to get out of the Quarantine Site---"

"So it really was just one bad trigger, well, Dr. Archer will be glad for a confirmation of his theory, even if it just brings up even more questions on how it could happen like this. They'll be studying this for years---"

"It's a shame that Vista didn't focus more on this topic, we could really have done with more information instead of her focusing on---"

"At the current rate of consumption, our Facility Grounds shall disappear within ten years."

"Assuming it's not incorrect, then that should be by twenty-twenty one, then? In that case, we have a timeline to work with---"

"We can relax the majority of procedures and downscale operations if we have a guarantee that it will disappear."

"That does rather depend on if we can trust this thing. As it is we still can't send drones in there, and Vista is the only person who could have ever gotten down those pipes---"

She really, really hated these people.

In her time with the PRT, she had seen a lot of scumbags who worked for the organisation, hell, she had worked with plenty of them... but this was really starting to grate on her. 

They were all so busy discussing the future, hell, they were lamenting that Vista had not been able to get clarifications and more information, even though it was clear the level of damage it had done to her! 

The Troopers at the doorway had been reinforced, now it was entire squads who held down the entranceway, after a few too many people determined to get further answers had tried to barge their way in. 

The tension in the air across the troopers was only getting worse and worse, if this situation persisted, then the top brass might find themselves with an open rebellion on its hands. They were too disconnected from the feelings behind it all, too caught up in the potential, in what could be, to see what was going on right under their noses.

She couldn't stand it much longer. 

"Missy, I want to take you out of here."

The girl looked at her. 

She was looking a bit better, certainly no longer like some victim of prolonged malnourishment and hunger, that was for sure, even if her weight was still far below where it should be. But the doctor was increasingly confident in her full recovery... especially now that the parasites in her gut from eating raw, living creatures had been cleared out.

"Boston maybe, I know it's not the same or anything like that, but please, let go of this place, you deserve a normal life."

"A normal life?" the question sounded dead on the girl's lips. 

They both knew that normality was an impossibility after all that they had been through, but---

She powered through.

"Yes, or as close to it as possible. Missy, this place isn't somewhere that you should be, you've done enough for it, you've given far, far too much for it and I know all the troopers recognise it... but it's time for you to be able to live your own life again, not all this," she had thought of a way to have this conversation, but in the end... it was an emotional appeal. 

She did her best to put how she was feeling into words, but she had no idea whether it truly reached the girl. 

So she took her hand, clutching it, holding its small, bony mass between her calloused palms. 

"Please, Missy, let me just... let me try to give you a fresh start, isn't this enough? Everyone know's you're incredible, you've found so many answers, you've done enough for this place, more than anyone... when I thought that I had lost you..."

She trailed off, not wanting to say what she wanted to. 

"... I can't lose you as well, not along with everyone else, I can't see you throw yourself away for all this."

Vista stared her in the eye for a few long moments, her lips parted for a moment. 

After all the shouting and screaming, after all the distance that had built up between them after the death of Team Seven, even with how broken the girl was... 

There was something there, a yearning, perhaps, for something that Hannah could only guess, even as she waited patiently for an answer. 

Chapter Text

"Please, Missy, let me just... let me try to give you a fresh start, isn't this enough? Everyone know's you're incredible, you've found so many answers, you've done enough for this place, more than anyone... when I thought that I had lost you... I can't lose you as well, not along with everyone else, I can't see you throw yourself away for all this."

The words washed over her. 

It was as if the entire world around her was a distant dream, or a place where things happened, but in which she was uniquely detached. She could see the way Miss Militia's mouth moved, could hear the words that were uttered, and yet despite that... there was a strange lag in time before she truly understood what had been said. 

Throw herself away?

Found answers?

She had, hadn't she, she'd discovered the ultimate purpose behind this all, and in doing so had lost whatever small little thread it was that connected her to everything, that kept her grounded on some level.

The old path... 

Even now, an answer eluded her, some grander truth, the explanation to whatever it was that Five Pebbles sought. Whatever it was that had motivated the Iterator was the thing truly behind all of this. Already some part of her was latching onto the notion...

But she couldn't find it in herself to care. 

A cosmic joke. 

A coincidence. 

"Missy? Can you talk to me, if you can?" the woman coaxed. Ah right, she was still here and expecting an answer, wasn't she? 

It took a great effort, but---

"... I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"... About anything, it's all so empty," she admitted, and to her ears her voice sounded small and deadened. "What do I do now?"

Miss Militia looked down for a moment. 

"What do you want to do, Missy?"

What did she want?

It was a strange question, after everything, to finally be asked. For the longest time, there had been so assumptions made for her by other people that actually hearing it felt odd. Hell, she had been among those who did so a great deal... but looking at her, it seemed that she was not the only one who had been through a lot recently. 

Now that Missy looked, the bags under the woman's eyes told a story all of their own. 

"... Home."

It was an impossible dream, perhaps. But---

"Will you let me try to give you it? I know it will never quite be the same, hell, I can't even guarantee that it will be anything close," the woman made a probably self-deprecating sound. "But after all this... I don't care whether it's me or someone else, I just don't want to see you do this again." 

Did she want such a thing? A pale approximation of a true home?

After everything, she still didn't feel as if she had redeemed herself in the eyes of all those that had died, but with a strange, detached clarity, she could perhaps see that such a thing could never happen. 

After a moment, she sighed, long and deep. 

There was no more fight left in her, no more desire to try to reach into whatever abyss Five Pebbles had mentioned. At that moment, she felt so utterly sick and tired of expecting to find some manner of answer within an impossible task and dream, she just wanted to exist.

"Okay," she said, with neither true conviction, nor hope for something truly better. 

But at that moment, she just wanted to not have to worry about anything.

Starting a new life was hard. 

Like, really hard... 

She hadn't really thought about what it would be like to live in a city again. A place where food was something made in your own kitchen, where you could go for a walk out in the streets around normal people. 

She had spent long enough in the Quarantine Site base that the lack of organisation to the world beyond it was difficult. In Boston, there was no set routine, not a schedule that everyone followed, at least not to the same degree that she had become so used to. 

It felt wrong. 

All of it. 

The first time she and Hannah went out shopping, and it began raining, she began hyperventilating so badly that it took fifteen minutes for her to get a hole of herself. The irony was that... well, after her second trigger, she never needed to feel the sensation of rain on her face again. 

But feelings didn't always make sense. 

Society didn't, certainly.

On a fundamental level.

It wasn't stratified or logical in the same way that life with the troopers had been. There was no easy command structure into which she slotted, and could easily recognise other people within; every new person she met could be anything, a mother, a businessman, a soldier... 

Occasionally, she found herself longing for the base and its rules and regulations and structure.

... To be honest, she had never really imagined rejoining this world, had never envisioned that it would be like. Perhaps she had assumed it would be easy, that it would just be like it once had been, or alternatively... she had fully expected to continue working at the Site until the day she died, until the rain eventually claimed her as it had almost everyone else. 

Telling the truth, the fact it hadn't still haunted her. 

Some days she wished she had found her end there. 

Amidst tortured half-dreams, at the boundary between sleeping and waking, she would imagine Carlos' hands wrapping around her neck and cutting off her air supply in revenge for never having made any effort to save him. Or Dean smashing her head repeatedly against a wall until there was no more Missy Biron, until the crime of her survival had been sentenced.

... Her therapist was damn well earning her money, dealing with somebody like her, eh?

And yet, even with the therapist... she just could not open up properly. 

She couldn't cry. She just... couldn't do it. Actually, it was hard to feel a lot of anything, it was like a heavy blanket was settled over her a great deal of the time, making movement and thought heavy. 

The topic of school had been raised recently, and she just couldn't do it. 

Not after Arcadia. 

No matter how much she tried to imagine it, tried to talk herself into thinking with a more positive mindset, the memories were still there. Carlos crushed, Dean's body being dragged and forced through a gap in the wall, the other kids all setting upon one another... no, she couldn't do it. 

"It's okay, Missy, you can be homeschooled, if you like?"

It was yet another indicator of the fact that she would never be able to be normal again, that she was a freak who could barely act like a normal person. 

And yet, she took lessons, she caught up on all the education that had fallen behind with her work in the Quarantine Site. 

With little else to do, she could read, she could study things she wanted on some level... it was very different from school, but it was still kind of nice to have that bit of structure in her day, for Miss Penny and Mr. Henderson to spend time with her, filling gaps, making up for all she had missed. 

In the time around her lessons, she read books, she watched movies and tried to live a normal life, and at the end of each day, Hannah would come back from being Miss Militia, and they would try to spend time together. 

It was nothing like having a parent, more like what Vista had always imagined having a big sister would be like.

Hannah was always so gentle, asking periodically or whenever she was down whether Missy would like to talk, like to discuss what she was feeling. The woman was not perfect, either in manner or approach, but she was trying oh so hard to be there for her. 

But it was all so difficult.

Whenever she walked down the street, there were always those memories of seeing a city swallowed up, of normal people being plucked off one at a time by all manner horrors. 

But everyone around her was all so ignorant, blamelessly so, of what sorts of horrors existed in this world... they could not imagine what it would be like to have their lives, both pleasant and difficult. They had no conception that their lives could be suddenly torn to shreds by a freak cosmic coincidence, of the wrong trigger at the wrong time.

At night, there would be times when the nightmares would be too much, and she would look out of their new home's window, out over the city... and half expect to see the Superstructure and its walls in the distance. 

There was no escaping the reminders of her life, let alone when she looked in the mirror. 

That symbol, forever etched into her skin... she had started having her hair cut so that bangs would fall over it, but that only went so far. 

It wasn't the fact the symbol was there; hell... hell it symbolised her efforts, it was proof that against all the odds she had won. She had got in and out, she had found the answers she had wanted and managed to live long enough to relay them back to the Site. The entire approach to the place had been altered to factor in the revolutionary information that she had brought to them.

The symbol on her forehead was a testament and stamp of her efforts, of the fact that in the end... she had broken free from it all. She had escaped from the site, from the memories, from the desperate, self-destructive drive to seek answers within it. 

Sometimes, when it was all too much, she would reach up and feel it, a finger tracing the circle, and then moving along the grooves of the cross within it. 

It brought a strange sort of serene comfort.

But at the same time, the mark represented a failure. 

It was a monument to the fact that she had fled before she discovered the secret to what Five Pebbles had been talking about. Whatever the 'old path' was, the ancient temple that it had described... it had mentioned an escape from things, there was some greater, grander secret hidden away deep below the Quarantine Site.

It was unknown to her, forever locked away within the darkest depths of Quarantine Site-08. 

She could not help but wonder just what it was. 

Sometimes at night, she imagined she was back in the Quarantine Site, with the Slugcat at her side, but it was as if it could not see or hear her at all.

She had never managed to lucid dream before, but suddenly, she could... and each time, it was following the Slugcat. 

On those days, she would wake up and feel the mark on her head

“I think I know what you are looking for. You're stuck in a cycle, a repeating pattern. You want a way out.”

Perhaps, in a strange way, she had found her own way out in the end, one without a need for Five Pebbles route deep into the earth? But yet... on some level, was she still trapped in a different cycle all of her own?

Waking. Eating. Walking. Sleeping. 

It was all the same, her existence was empty. 

Chapter Text

There was nothing left now. 

Vista sat in the medical ward, staring out of the window at the fat droplets of water sliding down the glass. Like slug's they slid, gaining momentum as they absorbed smaller droplets, until it was all too much, and they accelerated to the window pane below. 

Beyond, the dull grayness of the sky was an unceasing carpet. 

She used to be scared of the rain, even the weak stuff like this... it all felt so childish now. 

She was alone in here; Miss Militia had left after making her impassioned plea to begin a new life. But how was that possible when her life was empty? No family, no purpose, not even a home city... setting up a new life was inconceivable to her at this point because she hadn't truly had a life for the longest time. 

Her only purpose had been, in an idealistic, dream like way, to discover the truth behind the Quarantine Site. Now that she had, there was nothing truly left in her existence. 

She felt hollow. 

Or was this simply some bizarre state of acceptance, a Zen like observation of everything around her. She could watch the water droplets, hear the words of others and monitor the entire world around her, but she saw through it. It was all just the illusion of normality, caught up in the needs of a world in which everything fought for survival and purpose. 

And now that she had completed her purpose, there was nothing else in her life that justified her life or the struggle to maintain it.

No questions.

No answers.

No hopes.

No dreams.

Just existence.

“I think I know what you are looking for. You're stuck in a cycle, a repeating pattern. You want a way out.”

"Me and my kind have as our purpose to solve that very oscillating claustrophobia in the chests of you and countless others."

She felt it, now... that sensation Five Pebbles had described, the feeling of entrapment within a larger world in which she had no true control, and into which she had been cast adrift. 

Miss Militia wanted Vista to live out the perfectly empty, mundane life of a normal person, wanted her to give her a chance, the opportunity to try and make something out of this pointless life.

There was no future for her. 

What would such a new life look like? All that would matter was that she was the hero called Vista, she would probably have to dedicate her life to fighting crime and perhaps becoming a fully fledged member of the Protectorate someday. But it was impossible to care about such a thing when it could all be wiped away in a single moment by a casual, cruel coincidence, such as Brockton Bay had suffered.

She was a survivor of all this, and it was the most terrible curse in all the world to be the one left behind. Even though she had made it through, no matter how much she justified her continued existence, it was impossible to deny that she should have died alongside so many others. 

But it was a survivor's curse to have to step into a new future, no matter how empty and vapid such a thing was.

"For you though, there is another way. The old path. Go to the west past the Farm Arrays, and then down into the earth where the land fissures, as deep as you can reach, where the ancients built their temples and danced their silly rituals. The mark I gave you will let you through. Not that it solves anyone's problem but yours.”

She closed her eyes and rested her head against the window pane. 

The words of the Iterator resonated through her head, the mark on her forehead gently pulsed with a comforting, warm heat. 

... There was still one question left.

Well, there were many really... but only one that mattered; What was the way out that Five Pebbles had mentioned?

Even if the wretched computer had been the source of all this, had killed so many thousands, it also had provided some manner of way for her escape. It was not as if she understood everything that it had been saying. But so long as there was an escape from this pointless cycle, so long as there was some manner of final answer.

A day passed.

One day became two, became three. 

She regained her strength, and slept for much of it, waking for the most part only to eat and drink. People came to see her, mostly Miss Militia, the doctor, a Parahuman therapist and, once or twice, people from Site command. They had questions, always so many questions... none of which really mattered to her. 

To them, sure. 

But for all their excitement at the revelations of this all, for all of Miss Militia's concern for her health and emotional state... In the end, her fate didn't lay with the world beyond. Or even with this site, and the more she thought on it, the more she dwelt upon what her future would look like, the more she reached one inescapable conclusion.

She needed to go back in. 

The realisation brought her to a muted despair tinged with a wretched hope.

No matter what she did, her life was a mess. But she didn't care anymore. She ate the food as instructed, drank the drinks and did everything they wanted her to do because in the end, it did not matter. 

She was going back in, no matter what.

"You're getting so much better Missy, I'm glad, have you given any more thought to what I asked? It's okay if you want more time---"

"If you continue to recover like this, then you'll be right as rain in no time---" Go and die you quack doctor.

Vista had been exploring her second trigger altered power, and with that, she could do it.

There was no more holding back. 

When it was time to go, there was no hesitation and barely any thought to it. She could feel the tug on her chest, was suddenly aware that the time had come. 

She got up and out of the hospital bed, legs just a little unsteady. She probably looked a mess... but she didn't care. In a calm haze, she put on the clothes that she had asked for, she was sick of this hospital gown, after all, and moved for the door. 

Beyond were troopers, a pair, they greeted her even as they got concerned as to why she was walking.

She didn't bother lying to them, didn't try to promise something that was not the case. She just began to walk, it felt good to stretch her legs after so long, to be doing something, anything, but languishing in the bed. 

People tried to stop her, one of the troopers was encouraging her back to the med bay---

She used her power to keep them away. All at once, the world was filled with shouts that she tuned out. All that mattered in the end was getting back, returning to the Quarantine Site and seeking the old path.

There wasn't room in her existence for anything else any more. 

She loved the troopers, she had given such a great deal to keep them safe... but now Vista needed to be selfish, she had to know the final secret and the escape it promised from this hateful cycle that was her life.

She needed an escape. 

Alarms were blaring around her. 

Always with the alarms and people rushing about. 

Her power was an inviolable imposition upon the world that served to keep others away from her and move things as she desired. Whether it was troopers, containment foam or other means, they could not stop her. 

Vista reached the gate into the site proper, contained as it was in a large, hanger-like room that served as the staging point for so many expeditions, both successful and doomed. She stared up at the huge metal doors, currently closed to stop the rain. 

She stepped closer to them, the infinitesimally small gap between the two pieces of metal was forced wider and wider by her power, until it was effectively open. 

Beyond, all she could see was a solid sheet of water crashing down, spelling certain doom for any being that was foolish enough to step into it. 

Vista did so, even as alarms blared in the background, she stepped into what for anyone else would be oblivion. 

In those hours sitting in her bed, she had watched the rain, the perfectly gentle, harmless rain of Earth... and she had explored her power after her second trigger. She hadn't mentioned it to anybody, because it had just been idle poking around, and it was not like she needed to share that, right? It was her power, her trauma... heh, who was she kidding, had she given them time they would definitely have eventually come around to demanding to know what it could do, right?

Her power's range was so much smaller now, just twenty metres or so. Beforehand, her power had required time, as with many Shakers, before it could 'ramp up' as it were. Causing grand changes in the environment was not something she could do immediately, and whenever she moved that same radius had become more restricted.

Now, that was no longer a factor, she had complete, constant, unceasing command over her surroundings.

Trading range for control. 

And right now, that utter control was influencing the water. 

The crashing downpour of the Quarantine-Site moved, it bent and shifted as she willed, forming a large hemisphere around her. The surging torrent was harmless to her now, any place she set her foot was hers, a place where she and she alone was absolute. 

After so long being tugged around by the world around her, she finally had control. 

"Vista!"

She turned her head. 

Miss Militia was across the hanger-like room, dozens of people were running in, trying to respond to what was going on.

She supposed it must be an odd sight indeed, to see her up and about, willingly stepping into the rain, but she felt such a complete and utter serenity in her choice, in the safety that her power afforded...

It was impossible to fear it now.

It felt good, to not be afraid.

"I'm not done yet, I need to know what Pebbles meant," she said, her power warping the distance so that they could hear. "I need to know the answer, the other one. I'm sorry, but I can't go with you, Militia"

She took another step forward into the site.

"Vista, you don't need to, there's nothing more to find out!" the woman near shouted at her. 

"There is. I have to go."

Another, step, a second---

"MISSY!"

The cry escaped the woman's throat even as she surged forwards, as she fought against Vista's control of the surrounding terrain. The woman looked so desperate, her eyes were wide as she reached forward towards her, as if Missy were a lifeline---

Another few steps, the protective hemisphere of rain shifted, and a wall of water came down between herself and Miss Militia, cutting them off forever.

... She felt guilty, but she had to do this. 

She had to seek out the old path, no matter what.

Within hours, the rain ceased, and Vista was a good distance into the Quarantine Site. 

A beautiful rainbow, similar to that one she had seen weeks ago, hung in the sky, transitory, ephemeral but beautiful... but she barely paid it any heed as the world around her woke up. Batflies emerged from their nests, Squidcada and Noodleflies darted about as Vista marched onwards.

To where?

To the Farm Arrays... well, she suspected that was what they were. In her countless hours of studying maps and reports, certain structures of this place had become more and more apparent with time. 

The vast lake, the mysterious, vaguely cathedral-like structure put into perpetual shadow beneath the Superstructure, the antennae arrays. She had an inclination of what the Farm Arrays were, the large, open plains that were, as Pebbles had described, to the west of its structure. 

Now, no gap or tunnel held her back as she moved. 

She no longer needed additional time to focus and allow her power to expand before she made it through a tunnel or gap. The tightest opening was made as wide as a subway tunnel as she passed through it, an insurmountable wall was merely a series of brief alterations to make into a stairway for her feet.

There was no obstacle in the world, she moved as she desired, unobstructed. 

A pink lizard was left running on the spot, helpless, as Vista strode past it, serene in her omnipotence over the surrounding terrain. 

... When you didn't have to fear the rain, this place was... kind of beautiful, in a post-apocalyptic sort of way. 

A distant scrabbling sound, something moving within her radius. 

She glanced over her shoulder to see a Slugcat racing along the ruined terrain, jumping and sliding along its belly with the momentum generated, its eyes utterly focused on her. There could be no doubt that it was the same one as before, by some grand, cosmic coincidence they had met again, or---

The Slugcat launched itself through the air at her.

She caught it automatically as it crashed into her chest, she had to take a step back from the impact, hands gripping the squishy, silky creature.  

Despite herself, a chuckle escaped her lungs. 

"Were you waiting for me, lil guy?" she asked, just a little incredulous that they had reunited so swiftly.

"Cheee~~~" a chirping sound filled the air as the Slugcat climbed her chest and neck as easily as it would a pole and promptly rubbed its cheek against hers affectionately.

She returned it, she couldn't help it. 

"C'mon... let's see what Pebbles meant... do you know the way?"

A moment, and then it gave a sort of nod. 

As imperiously as a commander directing his troops, the Slugcat pointed in a direction for her to go, even as it perched on her shoulder and wrapped its chubby tail around the back of her neck for additional purchase. The motion made her laugh, it felt so good to giggle at the little things before whatever fate awaited her.

They continued onwards.

The Farm Arrays were, as previously mentioned, a mostly open expanse that, at first, almost looked inviting for research and exploration.

They had open lines of sight for the most part, affording a good awareness of one's surroundings... and easy viewing of the large, long-legged deer-like creatures that had been affectionately termed 'Rabbit-Deer' among the troopers. 

Harmless grazers... and also the only creatures that were truly safe in this place. 

It was deceptive. 

The long grass that thrived in the furrows and ruts of this place was not grass at all, but instead, tubular, worm-like creatures. Vast colonies of them existed in great mats, seizing and dragging unaware creatures to their doom, drowning them below the surface before slowly digesting them and distributing the nutrients. 

The Slugcat grabbed a plant from nearby, holding on to it as Vista bore them over the terrain, closer and closer to the sea of Worm Grass before them. Formerly, Vista would have created a tunnel through the air for them to jump through it... but with her limited range, there was only so much she could do right now.

"Welp... you know a way, lil' guy?" 

The Slugcat clambered up, perching atop of her head with its superb balance, and began waving about the plant it grabbed earlier. 

Automatically, Vista reached up and gripped its sides to make sure it didn't fall off, and watched as one of the Rabbit-Deer in the distance paused. The creature looked their way for a moment, and then began to make its steady way towards them. 

It grew closer and closer, until it was right in front of them... and the Slugcat clambered onto its head, before gesturing for her to follow. 

"... Okay then." 

The Rabbit-Deer shifted a little, a head came around to look at Vista as she clambered onto its back. Large, doleful eyes stared for a moment, and then the creature gave a shake of the head, turned, and began to languidly walk through the Worm Grass. 

Did it understand that this was a trade, food for safe crossing? Or had it simply accepted its two hitchhikers for the moment, seeing how they were doing it no harm?

Vista didn't need to know, and didn't really care either, focusing instead on keeping a good grip on the creature below them. 

They reached the other side of the patch of Worm Grass, the Slugcat hopped down and she joined it. The Rabbit-Deer continued on its way, ignorant or uncaring as to the fate of its passengers.

A few more Rabbit-Deer rides later, and Vista was starting to idly wonder what, exactly, these large, placid herbivores did to avoid the rain. The Vultures were too small to threaten them, and the lizards could not risk the Worm Grass, but what did they do when the rain came? Were there caves dotted about for them to avoid it? 

Ah, so many questions and so little time to consider it all.

With the Rabbit-Deer rides and their slow, irregular progress across this place, there was plenty of opportunity to reflect. 

Even now, she stood beside the Slugcat waiting for the next Rabbit-Deer to grow close, and found herself wondering whether the base had sent out teams to try and bring her back? 

How long would it be before a helicopter was sent out to drag her back in? A few times she had seen them in the distance, but surveying an entire city sized site like this wasn't exactly easy, especially without Thinker powers to help. 

High above them came the sound of heavy, flapping wings, a Vulture was high in the sky, swooping down---

Vista simply warped space so that instead of lunging for them, the damnable creature instead landed in the Worm Grass off to the side.

There was a moment as her companion watched the flailing predator desperately struggle to escape the sticky colony, dragged by increments underground until it was gone. And then the Slugcat looked up at her for a long moment with a reproachful, questioning look. 

"I couldn't do that before," she justified.

A dramatic waving of the arms. 

"I mean it! If I could, I would have just done it!"

The Slugcat seemed to accept it, as it began clambering back up her leg.

"You've gotten lazy, you know," she joked, shifting a little so that the creature could retake its perch on her shoulders. It was like having a heavy, heated scarf, and she reached up and patted its tail as she clambered onto the next Rabbit-Deer.

She wouldn't want anyone else as her companion right now. 

Onwards they went, the distant sky was growing darker and darker, the threat of rain increasingly omnipresent, no matter how they hurried. Often the Slugcat would look skywards with what she could only interpret as worry. Well, Vista supposed that any creature that had evolved in a place like this would be ever aware of the risk of rain, yes?

It was definitely a longer rain cycle today, and with a strange serenity, Vista swayed with the movements of the Rabbit-Deer below her as the long-legged creature bore them onwards. 

Just days ago, she would have been increasingly scared of the inevitable rain, but with this new aspect of her power... she felt nothing at all. What was the downpour, when she could be sheltered from it? Was this what it was to live without any sort of concern or fear at all? 

Afar, she could see yet another helicopter flying around, was it looking for her?

Did it matter?

She could only feel the discordant serenity of one doomed by this all, this journey was only leading in one direction. The last time she had been here, she had been so desperate to survive, struggling against desires like hunger, exhaustion and pain. Well, she still felt those things now, on some level, it was the nature of being mortal.

But they all felt so very far away.

"It's okay, lil guy, I'll keep us safe from the rain," she promised, voice interrupting the song of the crickets and the various creatures of this place, even the breathing of the beast below them. 

The Slugcat looked up at her, and then pointed at the clouds. 

"I know... I'll protect you."

A doubting expression; it had probably been in a shelter when she first came in, and had perhaps caught her scent trail afterwards... it did not know yet about her power. She would show it when the time came.

Eventually, the land fissured. 

She had seen images of this divide before, but never imagined that it was anything more than some geological creation, not that the wound in the earth could be the gateway to the final secret of this all. 

Down, down into the depths they went, a long, long drop into the earth itself. 

Natural light diminished, the rain was coming closer and closer by the moment... and somehow, of all things, Vista found herself in a subway tunnel. There were ancient, rusted and dilapidated train cars on ancient tracks, or at least, she supposed that the vehicles were analogous to trains. No doubt, in the language of Five Pebbles creators, they had some other name. 

She supposed that it proved several theories by Watchdog correct, to see such a thing... how tragic. After almost a year of expeditions and research, to the best of her knowledge, there had been next to no exploration of this underground layer. 

She may well be the first human being to lay eyes upon such a thing.

Just like everything about this damnable, accursed site, everything was broken down, ruined, dilapidated... what was that poem her mother quoted to her a few times? About a King of Kings, who raised great monuments, only for them to be buried under the sand?

The air in her nostrils was humid, the scent of water and iron pervasive.

Water dripped from the ceiling, the Slugcat tugged at her leg, indicating for the wall. 

There was a small space there, a shelter? 

But they had no need for a shelter, did they? So long as Vista was here, she would keep them both safe.

"... Just give me a minute, okay? I'll show you that I can keep you safe," she promised, kneeling down to look into her companion's big, black eyes. The Slugcat glanced towards the shelter, but after a moment, it stopped tugging, even though it was clear that it was tense. 

Well, it was only a short run to the shelter, and the rain never came down full force all at once, did it?

When the first droplets fell, Missy let them, but as the rain grew heavier she created a dome of space surrounding them, shielding them both. As the surrounding wildlife fled for whatever nook and cranny it could find to wait out and hibernate, Missy simply waited, an island within this storm. 

When the water began to lap around her ankles, she pushed it back, the Slugcat looked down, blinking in confusion and shuffled closer.

Water surrounded them, but was held at bay by her power. 

With a strange serenity, Vista walked, and ahead of her the water was pushed back, no matter its weight. It parted and moved as she wished, and the Slugcat scrambled to be at her side as she did so, it peered all around them with undisguised curiosity at this new display of her power. 

"Told you."

A chirping sound in response, confused, indignant, or thankful?

They moved on, ever onwards.

Through tunnels both artificial and those carved by the forces of nature, through vast machines and pieces of infrastructure that surrounded them on all sides. Any place that Vista set foot, the water was pushed back... imagine if she had this power when the site first emerged.

Maybe if she had second triggered all that time ago, she could have kept everyone safe. 

Another weight around her neck, another heavy thought. She was so used to them by now that all it represented was another tether pulling her downwards,  ever onwards into the depths. 

They had reached some strange place... a bizarre golden radiance passed over the wall, and then was gone, but for the life of her she had no idea exactly what the source of such a thing was. It was such a strange place that they were in, they strode forwards, the Slugcat once more on her shoulder, and chanced upon something. 

Until, suddenly, there was no more water to push back, as they entered into some manner of underground cavern sealed away from the water. And the first thing she noticed here were the statues. 

Figures sat in poses like those depictions of Buddha's, a few of the older looking pieces of art were missing their heads, or at least... she presumed that they were heads. 

So this was the form of the creators of this place, the ones who had made the Iterators and given them their question to pursue. 

In a way, it was this race of creatures who had doomed Brockton Bay... but perhaps that was not fair? How could they have known that long after their disappearance? 

Onwards, through halls filled with strange structures, stupa, and dedications to the dead? Past more statues of seated figures, carvings, and arts. The symbol of the X within a circle became increasingly omnipresent as they progressed onward's.

They paused a moment, upon encountering something truly strange in a room, a trio of floating... things. 

She had never seen them before, the Slugcat looked equally mystified. They were like long, golden slugs, or perhaps worms... but they floated, translucent, in the air for a few moments before they each uncoiled and began to swim, languidly, through the air towards the floor. 

To Vista's power, the beings held no weight at all, they were neither living creatures, nor inorganic matter that she could manipulate. But they were clearly there, unless her eyes deceived her? 

The Slugcat watched them as well, and the pair saw them disappear into the ground.

They continued on; in this place there were so many questions to be answered, aha... what would they say if she had brought a replacement helmet and recorded all of this for them? 

Would they even believe her at this point?

Did it matter?

Onwards, past a trio of tall beings that watched as they went, long tendrils extending from their bodies, silent watchers and guardians over this place? Perhaps they were the ones who kept the torches burning down here, providing small pools of warm light as they walked further and further onwards, all the way into the caves.

More of the ghostly floating beings were here, all moving in one direction. 

The further they went, the more... distorted the world became. 

Her vision was struggling to make sense of what she saw. The world around her was being devoured and eaten away, she could feel it, atom by atom, layer by layer. Her power was acting oddly in this place, she still had command over their surroundings, but in a strange way it felt... wrong, to try to change it. It was probably entirely within her own head, but beyond using her power as a map and a guide onwards, she let go of it. 

There was no risk of rain, each step brought them closer to their location. They were growing closer and closer to something.

The Slugcat had paused to look around them, to look at it all.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Vista mused aloud, and after a moment, her companion nodded. With how distorted the world was around them, her voice sounded strange to her ears, it echoed as if there were innumerable of her, each of them different in their own way, yet joined at this moment. 

Onwards, a final cavern, filled with great stone pillars, and then a drop, the world was entirely black and gold surrounding them now.

Until, finally, they reach a final cavern, and both stopped at its edge.

Just a few steps away was a beautiful golden lake or sea, a shimmering expanse that glowed with its own light. The entire world around them was molten, bubbling, sliding...even standing at the shore of this lake. She was acutely aware of just how unnatural this all felt, even as found herself marvelling with a strange serenity at this place that Five Pebbles had described. 

Was this the void sea that Five Pebbles been described?

It seemed very... golden, for something that held the title of 'void.'

"... Just give me a moment," she said softly, swaying suddenly. 

She felt... tired. 

So tired. 

She had been on her feet and wandering this place for almost a day solid now, the sensations of her body had not hit her until she was face to face with the end of this journey. This was it, this was... this was the place that had been described, the solution to the problem, to that strange existential claustrophobia within her chest. 

She had been the first human to do so many things... her mark had been left, in a strange, tortured way, upon history. 

And right now, none of that mattered.

The strange draw she had felt all this time, this was what had been pulling on her very being from across the site, and beyond. The constant tug, pulling her into this golden sea---

She took a step forward, her foot stepped into the sea of void fluid.

It came up to her skin, there was a comforting warmth to it. 

"... You ready to go?" she asked the Slugcat, glancing over her shoulder, and a moment later, she was joined, and they were swimming into the golden sea. The Slugcat was the first to dive downwards, and she joined it. 

Down.

Down...

She kept pushing onwards even when her lungs began growing tight. 

She was willingly drowning herself here, it was madness, it was insane, and yet she had to keep pushing onwards. Whatever logic she had once possessed had long ago been abandoned in this journey, she had willingly stepped back into this place, and there was nothing else even left for her in this world any more, so what was the point of caring? 

Her lungs screamed, second by second, trying to push her back to the surface.

She couldn't hold her breath anymore---

Her mouth opened, an involuntary gasp, the surrounding fluid filled her lungs. 

And yet, she was not drowning. 

She could breathe.

The void fluid was warm within her, it made her throat, mouth, and skin tingle the longer she was in it, not painful, not unpleasant... a gentle thing. Below her, the Slugcat had paused a moment to look back at her, and Vista surged onwards, trying to catch up. 

It felt like a final surrender to this all. 

Far below them, the gold was giving way to infinite darkness. 

Was the golden light created only where the fluid made contact with the matter that is dissolved? Was she dissolving? 

Yes, a faint golden sheen surrounded her as she swam onwards.

A titanic shape, utterly immense, moved past them. 

The Slugcat continued to swim, and so did Vista, even as her eyes searched the darkness for the source of movement. 

There! In the distance was a gigantic being, a creature swimming within the void fluid. It was a great worm with many frond-like limbs, it swam and coiled over itself, its head a bright, fuzzy light... and there were more of them, dozens, hundreds possibly. 

The more she looked, the more Vista saw.

They kept moving, past myriad vast forms, the creatures paid no attention to herself or the Slugcat even as their movements shifted them about, as sometimes they grew so close that Vista could feel the void fluid shift around them.

Until---

One of them took notice of the strange pair. All at once, a disproportionately tiny head with a pair of golden eyes was peering over them. By a thin neck it was connected to an immense body, little tendrils writhed and swayed this way and that as it regarded them.

Vista stared back even as the fluid surrounding them glowed with her dissolving body, each second was another in which she was disappearing, wreathed in gold. 

A long tendril grew close, a tiny hooked thread attached, and then they were being dragged down, downwards into the very depths of the void sea, and she and the Slugcat were helpless to stop it. 

But there was no need to resist either.

And then they were both released, the titanic worm swam back towards the surface, leaving the two of them trapped within an infinite, dark void. 

Far above them, the light from those colossal worm-like creatures was as distant, small and weak as the most distant of stars... and even those might just be her imagination now. 

There was nothing else here, bar the two of them... and for a long moment they were left, floating adrift within the void sea, their bodies faintly shimmering. It did not hurt at all, which was perhaps the strangest thing, and the kindest mercy... she felt no fear of what was happening, it all felt right.

But after that long pause, came something else. 

A distant dot of light... two of them, one behind the Slugcat, and another behind her.

One of them, the light that was directly behind her, that was her light. 

That other one was for the Slugcat, this was where they had to part, wasn't it?

She could tell by the Slugcat's face that it understood the same as she did, as those big, soulful black eyes stared at her. 

They swam towards one another, and for a moment, they embraced. 

She brought the Slugcat close, patted its head and found herself smiling, the two of them a gentle path of gold amidst the darkness.

She wished she could talk underwater... but she couldn't, so all she could do was cradle it close and try to communicate everything she felt. 

'... This is it, lil' guy… thanks so much, without you, I'd still be the person I used to be.'

Still weak, pathetic Missy, the person scared of rain who could never truly conquer either her past or her present. Her journey into this strange future had only been possible because of the little creature that had taken a chance on her. 

When the time came, they broke apart and went on their separate ways. 

It was as simple as that, without need for further words or communication, the entirety of everything she wanted to be communicated to the little creature could be delivered through a simple hug. 

And so, she swam towards her light. 

The closer she got, the more she noticed something superimposed against her destination. It was a shape, gaining distinction and definition as she swam, and it was joined by others.

Humans, people, all swimming in the darkness. 

The first she saw was Carlos. With long powerful strokes he swam against the void fluid, and yet, she was swimming faster than him. His face was set, determined, the same expression he wore that day when the rain arrived, he looked so confident, so strong. 

And yet, she could not call out to him.

Instead, her heart surged as she forced herself onwards, ever onwards. After so long, after all this time doubting herself...

The Wards. 

Her parents. 

Team Seven. 

Everybody that she had lost in the course of her short life was there, swimming onwards. She reached out for them, but no matter how close she swam, they were always a little distance away... but they all looked to be at peace. As she came alongside, they looked her way, with gentle smiles and unspoken encouragements. 

So she pushed on.

There was no longer conscious thought behind it all, all that mattered was getting to that light, the closer she got, the more it blinded her, but she had to continue onwards. 

Whatever was beyond, she hoped she could see them all again. 

After so long of being the one cursed to stay alive, the one who had been forced to endure the constant doubts and thoughts, she felt... happy. She plunged into the light, and when she could see what lay beyond it, she stopped swimming. 

There was no need any more.

Vista gazed upon what had been drawing her down here all this time. They were all here, they were all looking at her with smiles and hands extended to join them.

None of them were judging her for the crime of surviving all this time, each of them were beckoning her onwards, encouraging her to join them.

Vista took that final step. 

She felt... light...

So, so light...