Amaranthine

The knock at the suite’s door came almost the same second that the first burst of warning from Cait reached Kennedy, and she felt the muscles in her back bunch like a riled cat. Beside her, Rose arched her back and hissed at the door, giving form to Kennedy’s emotions perfectly. Gwyn looked up from the table they were working at, and groaned when she saw Kennedy.

“So, that’s not room service then?” she asked, getting a curt shake of Kennedy’s head in return.

“Nope, the away team is in trouble, and I’d bet anything that knock is trouble finding us,” Kennedy said.

“Fuck, means they’re fucking with our comms then,” Gwyn replied. “That also probably means they don’t know we know that, you don’t count on visiting superteams having empathic links, and most people don’t know how your ability works. Could try playing along?”

Kennedy frowned at her, but could see the wisdom in her suggestion.

“Good point. I’ll answer, links still up with both my girls so I’m tough enough for this building to fall on me and walk away laughing.”

She approached the door, nerves going wild, more from the bursts of violence she kept getting from Cait than from fear of what was on the other side of the door. Kennedy peered through the peephole. Whatever she’d expected to see, it certainly wasn’t a confused DriveDiner waiting with a thermal bag. She almost opened the door to help the poor guy out of reflex, before the obvious thought occurred.

No fucking way they just let random delivery drivers into the diplomatic wing of the city’s command center.

Kennedy let a little more of Qi’s power bleed into her, feeling her skin tighten at her temples as horns sprouted from the scales that raced down to armor her. She threw open the door, and the guy barely had time to yelp before a sleek black talon yanked him inside. Kennedy pinned him to the floor, lethally sharp tip of her tail positioned right above his eye.

“Didn’t order room service,” she hissed. “Who sent you, and why didn’t they use a better disguise?”

“I don’t-, I don’t knoOOuUAhaghahhHHHHAHAHHHEEEEEE,” the poor guys desperate confusion turned into a shriek of horror and pain as silver blossomed out from his eyes, freezing his face in a screaming rictus. It didn’t freeze his body though, and a blow that would have gone straight through Kennedy without her girls’ support slammed into her flank.

She was, fortunately, linked to two of the toughest things on the planet, and it didn’t even move her. Still, the situation was complicated as her tail plinked off the man’s silvered iris.

“Fuck!” Kennedy cursed, wrenching the guy’s flailing arms behind him, and wrapping him up with her tail. She moved to breathe some of Qi’s fire into his lungs, but his screaming mouth slammed shut, slivered teeth forming a macabre barrier. “Guys! Got some bad fucking news here!”

Gwyn and Willow had obviously begun moving as soon as they heard the scuffle began, but it had happened fast enough that they were just now arriving at Kennedy’s side while she held the struggling Silver by claw and tail. Gwyn frowned, a tendril of ‘bots floating out of her pocket to prod at his silvered skin. The instant they made contact, they sparked and the whole tendril fell to ash.

“Just like the Ironhides,” she murmured, and tried again, this time with an offshoot tendril linking the main one to her tablet. This time, when it sparked, the burst of energy was translated to the device. Gwyn hissed in rage.

“Goddammit I fucking knew it!” she yelled, brain getting more out of the waveforms on her tablet than Kennedy’s was. “This is a nano-coating, made to react destructively with any foreign nano-tech, that’s why my shit kept freaking out when I tried to fight them!”

“Is that new?” Kennedy asked, eyeing Willow, who’s eyes had gone white and was chanting something over Kennedy’s prisoner. “I mean, did you ever fight the Ironhides before yesterday?”

“Nope,” Gwyn sighed, “so no idea. Could have always been that way, could be new. What’s concerning most is that it seems to have been done to counter me, specifically.”

Kennedy had to agree, she’d never seen anyone else use the same kind of tech Gwyn and their mystery bastard seemed to throw around so casually.

“Okay, so? Ring any bells? Piss anyone off at any nerd conventions?” she asked, growing increasingly concerned at Willow’s activities. Her eyes weren’t just white now, they were glowing, and her silver-white hair had begun to float in an invisible wind. Gwyn hadn’t even noticed, eyes still glued to her tablet.

“No,” Gwyn answered, “I don’t go to nerd conventions. Us Meta-Brains are pathologically protective of our inventions, myself included.”

She sighed, closing her eyes for a moment, her face taking on the grimace of regret.

“Kinda wonder if that’s the point,” she continued, opening her eyes, then squinting at Willow’s increasingly witchy behavior. “I was not well known before last month, but going public as NanoSmith, flaunting my tech? Whoever’s doing this, with tech so close to mine…. They probably got antsy. Kicked it into overdrive. Hey, what the fuck is Willow doing?”

“-f’TAN!” Willow finished, and Kennedy’s prisoner stopped struggling. A blue-white mist rose out of him, coalescing above them into a ghostly apparition of the DriveDiner. He looked at the witch, then his still, silvered body beneath Kennedy.

“Am I dead?” he asked, affect considerably flatter than one might expect, given his situation. Willow nodded gravely, but she wore a smile with so much warmth Kennedy thought she saw Dawn for a moment.

“I am sorry, friend, but yes,” she responded, voice carrying a whispering resonance right at the edge of Kennedy’s hearing. “your body was taken from you. Would you help us find out how, and why?”

The ghost nodded, the motion of someone who’d just had the listed price for a can of soda confirmed, not someone who’d just been informed they’d shuffled off the mortal coil.

“I think I would like that, yes,” he answered. The slightest bit of heat on ‘would’ told Kennedy death hadn’t stripped him of all emotion.

“Do you remember how you got here?” Willow asked, and the ghost nodded again.

“Got an order. Was surprised it was at The Column, but not the first time, just rare. Door just opened. No-one at reception to drop it off with. Tried the elevator and it worked. Came to the door, then the dragon lady grabbed me, and—” his voice began to choke off, face starting go twist in remembered pain before Willow made a sharp motion, and his flat affect returned. He continued. “Then a lot of pain, then I was here.”

“Thank you. Do you rememeber attacking Kennedy here?” Willow asked, gesturing to Kennddy’s onyx-scaled form, still uncomfortably pinning his body to the floor, just in case life wasn’t required for the tech to move it.

“Not at all,” he answered with a slight shake of his head. He regarded his body impassively, maybe the smallest bit of distaste coloring his features. “My vision went black and you were the next thing I saw.”

“Again, thank you,” Willow sighed, her smile was looking slightly more forced as it became apparent there were unlikely to be easy answers had here. Still, she remind kind and polite. “What is your name?”

“Kevin,” the man answered, somehow imparting the tacit implication that it didn’t matter. Kennedy hissed in a breath.

Good thing Cait’s not here, that’d get her keyed up.

“Kevin,” Willow continued, sparing Kennedy a confused glance at her reaction to the name. She gestured at the silver coating his body. “Does this look familiar to you at all? Anything that stands out as to how this happened to you?”

Kevin shook his head, not offering any further explanation.

“Not surprising,” Gwyn interjected. “If this guy isn’t practicing ethical nano-tech, you could do this any number of ways. Shit, you could infect someone by accident, which is exactly why—”

Kennedy knew a Horizon centric rant coming on when she heard one, and held up her hand to cut Gwyn off.

“We get it, Gwyn, Faro plague and all that, we’re very happy you are conscientious about potential apocalypses,” Kennedy said, to a huff from the cute nerd. “How can we make sure this doesn’t become one? This whole goddamn city could be sleeper cell Ironhides!”

Gwyn stopped looking put out long enough to look very scared, but only for a moment, before her eyes went hard and she shook her head.

“No, I don’t think we’re anywhere near that point yet,” she said, “if this guy really didn’t have control, or if these bots were fully self-replicating, we’d probably all already be grey-goo besides your girlfriend. I bet he’s got production issues, that’s why there were so few Ironhides for so long.”

“Well he’s pretty clearly figured that particular snag out,” Kennedy replied, gesturing to the silvered corpse, then more broadly out of the window to indicate the horde they’d fought on the way here. She glanced out as she did, and her eyes went wide as she saw the dark curls of smoke beginning to rise into the sky. “What the fuck!?”

She rushed to the window, quickly joined by Gwyn and Willow. The city below roiled with power and motion, Altered abilities zapping out from power lines to intercept monsters that rose from the streets or the very populace.

Kennedy’s first instinct was the rush down there, help the people on the street that weren’t turning into silvered monsters. But some of the tactical thinking her mother had drummed into her held her back. She grabbed the sleeve of Gwyn’s lab coat as the girl moved to do exactly what Kennedy was holding back from.

“Wait, Gwyn,” Kennedy said, eyes fogging a bit in thought. “We gotta think this out. This…. This shouldn’t be possible, based on what we understand of The Council’s control over the city, right? This definitely should count as hostile tech.”

Gwyn looked angry at having been stopped from rushing off to do hero work, although Kennedy suspected she’d once more forgotten she was basically just a cute nerd now, with none of her nano-weapons working. She listened though, and started putting that big brain to work.

“Right…. If my stuff is getting knocked out, no way this shit should be getting past Firewall,” she said, and Kennedy could see the gears in her head grinding towards the same conclusion she was reaching.

“So, that means someones fucking with the Powerlines, right?” Kennedy prompted, pretty sure she was correct.

Gwyn squinted, weighing the proposition.

“Maybe…. Or we’re dealing with some bad actors. Firewall could be doing a little creative targeting, or Splice could be screwing with his input,” she said, brainstorming on the fly.

“What about PlazLoad himself?” Kennedy asked.

“I don’t fuckin’ know Kennedy,” Gwyn groaned. “I don’t have any real idea how the Powerlines work. I know they’re based on PlazLoad and Splice’s abilities, but there’s a lot of Meta-tech riding along to make them actually function as intended. We need your girlfriend, the one that’s horny Google, not the tough one.”

Kennedy sighed.

“Yeah, Lira would make things easier, but even if we called, we couldn’t trust we were actually talking to her—”

Willow interrupted Kennedy, words somehow seeming to flow over hers without actually drowning them out.

“Call, yes, but I may be able to help with that, given a bit of time,” the witchy woman volunteered. She fixed Kennedy with that amused smile. “Your link to Lira might not be as unique as your link with Cait, but it is very strong. Through ritual, I may be able to extend it. We have no indication that the interference with our communications extends to your animantic abilities.”

Kennedy had been contemplating thinking less, and assaulting the Council chamber more, but having a bit more information before making a major diplomatic incident with the closest NAAC city seemed like a smart move. She nodded at Willow. “What do you need?”