Once the workbench and surrounding areas were cleaned, Taylor went to work. She placed one of the first respirators on the bench and went to work. A part of her had always wanted to tinker and now she could. Knowledge smoothly flowed into her and she started to take the machine apart with clockwork-like precision and efficiency. The broken parts were removed, set aside, and replacements queued into the fabricators. Her hands flew expertly over her omni-tool to scan the electronic components for any kind of defects.
She fell into a state of flow. One of her forks kept an eye on her surroundings but the rest were absorbed by the tinkering. In a way, it was lucky that she could dip her toes in the pool with simple repairs. It gave her a new perspective on tinkers. She understood why people thought tinker-fugues were a thing. She knew, from her PRT training, that they were a myth perpetuated by bad Hollywood movies. Tinkering required a lot of focus and it was easy to slip into a flow state, like she had just done, where you were fully absorbed into a task. She had also done it as a way to relax back on Earth Bet while weaving silk undersuits.
After a few hours and three respirators repaired, the professor interrupted her.
"Time for meal," he said.
"Why did I pick a Quarian as my cover," Taylor stretched herself. "I could've tasted alien cuisine."
"Rations all equally tasteless," Mordin clarified.
"Small mercies," Taylor laughed.
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After a particularly tasteless Turian field ration, food was scarce in the quarantine zone after all, Taylor took a break from repairs. She shifted her specializations towards bio-tinkering and took a look at the data Mordin had collected on the virus.
"This definitely looks engineered," she said.
Her power filled in the gaps. The simple fact that it worked on different species was suspicious. Though she didn't have samples of DNA to confirm her hypothesis. Maybe the doctor could provide some? It was worth asking.
"It's a multi-stage payload which mutates in response to the host," she continued. "It infects like a conventional virus and uses a generalized RNA structure to produce another viral payload adapted to the target's species. It even manages to hide itself from the immune system during that phase. Then, it infects the pulmonary system or equivalent and from there, it produces two variants, one retroviral variant targeted at the host that will spread through the internal organs, and one with a copy of the original that will be secreted to spread to other hosts. I'm pretty sure there are some built-in immunities too, for Humans and at least one other species."
"Whoever made this is a bastard," It almost looked like something Bonesaw would create, "but they're about as creative as a rock. Not that it makes it easier to cure."
"Conclusions similar," Mordin nodded. "Virus engineer unknown at present. Suspect list small. Very few have required knowledge."
"Some kind of bio-weapon test?"
"Prime hypothesis. Accidental release, unlikely."
"Without access to genetic material to analyze, both healthy and contaminated, I can't help much. My power, for some reason, doesn't have the decoded sequencing for any of the local species."
Can't you scan it from where you are? She asked Asteria.
"Samples can be acquired," Mordin said.
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Omega never truly slept but certain parts of the station, like the habitation area she was currently in, had a scheduled cycle that mimicked days and nights. For the clinic, it meant a shift change and some rest for those who had worked during the day.
Mordin had converted a small office adjacent to his workshop into an improvised bedroom. Taylor had a feeling that the Salarian slept fewer hours than what he truly needed. From what she had garnered, he was a former member of the Salarian special forces, the Special Task Group. He probably had the training to eschew sleep for some time but she knew, from experience, that no matter what, everyone crashed at some point.
Taylor wasn't sure about herself. She had no proper brain after all, her entire body filled that role, but her mind was still human or at least close enough. Even if she didn't sleep the entire night, or at all, some rest would probably be good for her.
Her day had been very eventful after all.
She found a spare camping bed in the storage room and dragged it back to the workshop. Then, she moved some of the crates in the back of the room to build herself a small den. There wasn't much space but she managed to use one of the smaller containers with compartments, tilted on its side, to create a bedside table where she could store her drones inside.
One of them shut down the lights in the room from the control panel before returning to her side. She flopped onto the bed and relaxed. Her beetles would send an alert if anything happened. Taylor closed her eyes and spooled down her mental partitions.
Do Shards sleep? She asked Asteria.
Did you ever get to sleep?
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<[Asteria] slept while awaiting … rescue>
Taylor reflected on her situation. She was on a space station, a massive one, surrounded by aliens yet it also felt oddly familiar. The abridged history lesson Mordin had given her was telling. History doesn't repeat but it often rhymes. The galaxy seemed to face similar problems as her old home only on a much grander scale.
At least she didn't have some apocalypse hiding behind the horizon this time.
Hopefully.
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After a few hours of tossing and turning around in her bed, Taylor abandoned the idea of sleep for the time being. From the clock in her omni-tool, synchronized with the station's local time, she still had most of the night to kill.
It was the perfect time for some power exploration. After all, she had all those powers at her fingertips, it would be a shame not to take advantage of them. However, the cramped interior of a space station wasn't the best place to test things out. If anything went wrong ... Well, Taylor would probably survive, her plasmoid form could handle the vacuum of space without issues, but everyone else probably wouldn't.
Thankfully, her other minds had found the solution. The simulation engine provided by Athena was incredibly flexible and capable of reproducing all of her powers with perfect accuracy. It was as simple as closing her eyes and ...
Taylor stood on a circular stone platform atop a verdant hill in the middle of a valley. The sun hung high in the sky, surrounded by white fluffly clouds. Small corse of trees and rock formations were dotted around and decorated the rolling hills around her. Perched atop one of them was a small village with stone houses.
She had also traded her Quarian enviro-suit for something more appropriate for the current setting. A white cotton blouse with a long brown dress overtop and sturdy leather boots on her feet. If one ignored the nebula-patterned hair, she would be perfectly at home in the Shire or Rivendell.
"Ah," she stretched her arms. "The suit is comfortable but nothing beats feeling a warm breeze on your skin."
Asteria, can you give me the list of powers again? She sent.
She was interested by the possibilities offered by both Hierophant and Archmage. From the quick summary Asteria had given her earlier, they were both highly versatile powers. She had already used the latter during her fight with the Batarian thieves but it had been more instinct than anything else.
The idea that powers were magic … It had been considered a fringe theory.
Now that she knew what powers were, maybe the truth was somewhere in the middle.
Any sufficiently advanced technology can seem like magic. But the reverse was true as well. Any sufficiently understood magic becomes technology.
She raised her hand forward and called the same spell she had previously. This time, she went through each step slowly. The rings of light appeared a few inches from her palm and rotated slowly. Each was inscribed with hundreds of tiny dots and lines that, when put together, described what that particular spell did. It was closer to computer programming than mysticism. She pushed the required energy into the construct and fired the red beam of energy towards the horizon where it dissipated before hitting anything.
The basic theory behind several magic systems floated in her mind, likely implanted there by Asteria as part of the repair process. She also knew the power had a rather large library of both deeper knowledge and a wider array of systems to choose from. With all that knowledge, she knew she could build her own spells or even create her own magic systems if she wished. What she could do was only limited by her imagination.
And it was only a quarter of what Archmage could do. During the fight, she had also used another part, one that was modeled after psionic powers rather than magic. The force-field she had used was one of the most basic options, the easiest to deploy in a pinch, but she could already see much better ones. Ablative barriers composed of thousands of tiny scales, sharp-edged fields that could be used to protect and attack at the same time, and more.
A small swarm of coin-sized blue fields sprang into existence around her hand. She guided them to move in fluid patterns like a shoal of fish then, in an instant, they snapped into place to form a solid shell.
All of this from a single power … Taylor mused. How much easier would it have been? To defeat Scion with this? Or maybe he would have shut me down like he did with Eidolon. There was no sense in rehashing the past.
She spent some time playing with different variations on her force-field. It was relaxing to almost aimlessly tinker with it, she had no precise goal except from the desire to explore what she could do. Some of the scales grew in size and gained an orange glow, a shield against heat rather than force, another turned frosted pane, to dampen lasers, and so on.
She made several stone statues appear around the platform. One of them, she grabbed then lifted up with her shoal of miniature force-fields. It easily weighed several hundred pounds but she barely felt the strain on her mind or energy reserves. With a thrust of her hand, she launched the statue backwards off the platform. It tumbled through the air and shattered on the hillside down below. Another one was even less fortunate and was smashed to rubble by a giant fist made of force-fields. The last was sliced to pebbles by spinning serrated barriers.
Then, with a wave of her hand, the mess of force-fields and rubble before her disappeared.
Enough experimentation with that one for now. Let's see what Hierophant has to offer.
With an effort of will, she made several stone benches appear and sat down to think.
From what Asteria provided, there were five different parts to the power. The first two, Network and Manager, weren't all that useful to her at the moment since there were no other parahumans around. One allowed her to, as the name helpfully implied, network with other Shards and share the powers between all the members. Manager, on the other hand, allowed her to take or copy powers from parahumans, cycle through their expressions, and give them to others.
The other three were much more useful in her situation away from any other parahumans since they were all about power creation, each in different ways. The simplest was Combiner which gave her a very large collection of … hype-dimensional LEGO pieces she could assemble together into fully fledged powers. It was also the one with the least flexibility since she was limited by what was available in the catalog. Next in the order of complexity was Prototype, as long as she had the available slots and enough charges, she could create any power she wanted and tweak it to suit her desires. Finally was Designer which gave her near-complete freedom in what she could create by combining modules and cores but she needed to program and connect everything properly.
She spent the last few hours of the night exploring the possibilities of power creation. Flight was the first power she built with Combiner. Her first iteration was crude and sent her careening into the dirt several times from a lack of control but after several revisions she finally managed something stable.
She hovered several hundred feet above the simulated hills and let the wind flow through her hair as she took a deep breath. It felt incredibly freeing to be able to fly under her own power. She flew a few lazy circles in the air before she let herself fall towards the ground below. When the ground was dangerously close, Taylor put forth a burst of speed and entered a cavern sculpted into the hillside. She flew through the rocks tunnels at high speeds, her joyous laughter lost to the winds.