[Plot] Like a Melody Stuck in My Head

[Cailleach]

"A lost little bird that roosts in our Spark. Who knows where she used to belong but now she's nothing but burning jealousy and madness. An outcast, an aberration, an unwanted thought."

[Will Stanton]

"And you can't evict this bird? For all your threats, you're just as incapable as the rest of us, aren't you?"

[Cailleach]

Cailleach deflates, spines falling flat against her as she lunges just enough to grab Will by the shoulder and pull him close enough to gnaw on his face. Which she briefly looks like she might.

"Careful with the prey in your net or you might lose an arm!" she hisses before shoving him backwards again. "You bumbling fools know so little. She does not live, so how could she die? Has her hand on the same knife as me so how can it cut her?"

[Will Stanton]

The computer started spitting up warnings and error messages left and right about malware deep inside the system's core. And as for Will, a brief moment of terror flashed across his face -- for as capable and trained as he was, this was still Cailleach at the end of things, and there was just a slight difference in power between them. And when he's pushed, he falls ass-over-teakettle behind himself.

"The Morrigan would find a way to wrench that knife free," he said, although some of the bravado doesn't quite hit with him on his butt.

[Cailleach]

"Think, you buffoon! It's the Morrigan's knife as well. I saw when the Li Ban tried to reach for the Phantom Queen's empty body and she could not claim it. We can harm each other plenty but the Deep Magic, the Spark Magic cannot be levied against itself. That is the second truth I will tell you in exchange for releasing me. The third and final truth you will hear from me is that I can see you're being pulled down many paths at once and that I can tell you why but not here, not while your electric lies ensnare me."

[Will Stanton]

"We're more than just our... 'Sparks'. Maybe you'll figure that out, one day," Will said, though his mind was already whirring.

"And your third truth is I have a lot of hobbies? You are desperate."

[Cailleach]

"Blind, blind, blind!" she cackles. "You think the Vampyr's meddling, elegant as it may be, was the first time you've been torn asunder. If you don't believe me, ask your little friend how many of 'You' there are. Not one like you, sharing a Spark like me and the Phantom Queen, but only you. And when you decide I was right then come find me in the North York Moors."

[Will Stanton]

"You stay away from my...'little friend'," Will said, in a way which was very much not a 'no'.

[Cailleach]

"T'would be too filling anyway." she huffs and slips out of the hole and back into the Abyss she crawled from.

[Will Stanton]

Will took a few shuddering breaths [cleared out some of the cache], and set about fixing the hole where the hag came in.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Somewhere, several layers up, in normal space, Ashlie has been frowning at the display pretty much from the beginning. Will simulating a space made some amount of sense to her, even if she figured it was full of his personal idiosyncrasies and assumptions. Upon interfacing with 'Spark Space' the data had gotten increasingly difficult to parse into sensible things, the view of the chessboard full of static and the diagnostic computer trying to parse the actual data logging a whole bunch of garbled non-sense. Then randomly a mostly readable trace route (though the contents were still kind of messy), some messy anti-virus data and then finally the view cleared up again a little.

Through the console Ashlie sends a message into the Will-puter.

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>> Everything going okay? The data became extremely hard to read there for a while.

[Will Stanton]

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>>No.

>>Scratch that.  I am fine.  I think.  Running diagnostics.  But things are definitely not going 'OK'.

[Ashlie Minamida]

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>> That's not particularly reassuring.
>> Do you need me to pull the plug on this fragment?

[Will Stanton]

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>>NO

No.  I have things under control now.  I'm going to come out as soon as I gather my wits here. We had an intruder from an alternate dimension, and I don't want to bring any of the stink up from the depths.

[Ashlie Minamida]

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>> That was what the anti-virus was about then, I assume.
>> Be thorough.

[Will Stanton]

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>>Believe me, I don't want to bring this stuff back up more than you do.  If you've got any next-level super-X-Men grade anti virus stuff, feel free to sick it on me; I don't know if a shareware copy of Norton's AntiVirus will do much against things from the deep.

[Ashlie Minamida]

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>> The Point systems have a proprietary security suit, courtesy of yours truly but it's difficult to gauge how they would fare against something so thoroughly unlike anything we've seen before.
>> Currently you're isolated to your own system and the diagnostics equipment, so there should be no threat to anything other than yourself.
>> Assuming the strange extra-dimensional virus is not made transmissible by air because it shares a name with an infectious biological particle.

Seems like Ashlie is beginning to catch up to how some of Will's nonsense works.

[Will Stanton]

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I'll do my best to avoid it.  Coming back up now.

And then the screen went blank, as Will twisted and shucked his way from boxy form to skinny body, sitting on the edge of the workbench and shaking his head to clear it from cobwebs.

The various cables and wires were still sticking out of his back, as was the Titan spike itself. It didn't seem to bother him at the moment as he regained his bearings.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie is well acquainted with the sight of cables sticking out of a humanoid form, so she doesn't bat an eye at the remaining cables. The diagnostics computer on the other hand is showing all kinds of garbled data as it tries to make sense of computer turning into person.

"Welcome back. No worse for wear, I hope?"

[Will Stanton]

"I...think I'm alright. That got very existential towards the end," he said, taking some deep (and unnecessary) breaths.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"There was a lot of data that did not exactly make a lot of sense. Maybe it will once I had a chance to look some of it over."

[Will Stanton]

"I...communicated? Kind of? With something.

Well, with a few somethings. One of them was the Cailleach, a counterpart to our own Samantha McManus. But the others were..." he trailed off, trying to put things into words. "They were more...

Well, they were more," he finished, lamely.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"They were... more." Ashlie echoes him. "More how? Other Titans?"

[Will Stanton]

"I suppose, yes. Or their origin? Or...well, it's all very doused in metaphor and unclear. But there was something that strongly resembled the source of that clockwork time manipulator, as well as some others.

I'm not entirely sure how much they understood. Or, frankly, how much I understood. But they were sent here. To look for something. For, uh..." Will said, squinting as he tried to remember. "The Quantum Child. Something -- someone -- is pushing them here from...wherever they're from. To look for this Diminutive One and bring it back.

The Cailleach claims that the thing sending the Titans to us is a threat, as opposed to the Titans themselves. Some kind of outcast, but from where, I have no idea.

She also said something about sparks not being able to harm sparks, and me having too many hobbies, but I tend to discount those as the ramblings of a crazy woman."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"The Diminutive one. Hold on..." she says and brings up the satellite view with the pathing of the second Titan.

"It was headed right for the University and stopped on Northey Island due to the cliffs barring it's immediate path. After that it changed trajectory towards the town. After we dispatched a team to stem the flood damages. A team Victor Freud was part of."

[Will Stanton]

"And Victor Freud was in Cerebra," Will said, catching on. "That's only two out of three, but still..."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Did the first one exhibit any urge to move a certain direction? It may have been an early attempt. It can't be easy targeting three-dimensional coordinates from an outside dimension."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, it was trying to get out from where the Wests had trapped it. I suppose Victor wasn't in the mine, but neither was pretty much every human being on the planet, not to mention several dozen extraterrestrial societies."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Still, it's not a contra-indicator at the very least. And understanding them, not to mention establishing a rudimentary way of communication, gives us an advantage in dealing with them, if more are coming. And more importantly, gives us an inroad to stopping the attacks altogether somehow. We can't play defensively against an opponent with possibly infinite resources."

[Will Stanton]

"And more will be coming, and shortly."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"That's what I was afraid of. Everyone has done more than should be expected to protect the school and the town but everyone has limits. And building weapons effective against something of the scale of these Titans would raise more than justified scrutiny from the government. At least so far it only appears like a one-off attack from the outside. More like Eil Mor and people will start asking questions. Which is still somehow the preferable alternative to more like the Chronos Titan because defending against oblique vectors of attack like that is nigh impossible."

[Will Stanton]

"Perhaps, then, it's time we went on the offensive."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Against what? And how? Open a portal to the space between dimensions? You saw what happened when Conduit did just that."

[Will Stanton]

"I'm really more of an 'ideas' guy."

Will paused, thinking about it.

"Conduit is a West. Brilliant ideas, terrible execution. There must be a way to do that, but safer..."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Well yes because they take an almost dismissive approach to it, brute-forcing one piece to leverage another and banging physics into compliance in unstable and unpredictable ways. Refining those methods is difficult. Not impossible though." she says with a glance at the pieces of the transportation arc she's working on. "Still, even then we have no idea if we can even send anything through, much less if it'll survive journey or destination."

[Will Stanton]

"We can send information through, at the very least. That's a start. And...and there might be..." he says, trailing off again in thought.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"You send information. Through an interface and antenna of sorts. That's like saying because you plugged in a toaster you should be able to step into an active fusion reactor. Hell that might actually be safer."

[Will Stanton]

"You don't have a very high opinion of my adaptability, do you, headmistress?" Will said, still lost in thought.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Oh I do. I also can't help but notice that an outgrowth of those fundamental forces turned you into inert clay." she says, gesturing at the small mountain of clay with an upturned palm. "Yet somehoe I doubt that is going to disparage you from whatever is going through your head right now."

[Will Stanton]

"Again, we don't really know what happened there, because we cut those experiments short," Will said. "And what's going through my head is still a hazy idea at the moment.

But someone took the first spacewalk. Someone was the first deep-sea diver. We can build some sort of protection, surely."