'Is she gonna make it?'

The Shaper's avatar turned its head so the young aberrant - unusually intelligent for by the standards of those thanathropes humans called zombies - could look it into the eye. The Shaper's position had no relation to its perception: it could see and hear, among many other things, through nearly every creation of the Collective; a range that spanned the entire macrocosm.

As such, the movement was entirely for the zombie's benefit. The Shaper almost scoffed at the absurdity of wanting to interact with something you knew to be just a projection - in this case, a metainformational entity carved from the metadata clump Mocker half-jokingly called "Science". It was the idea of a hologram, rather than a construct of light. Just another fruit of their labour in the bowels of the macrocosm -, but it then chastised itself.

Sometimes, sometimes, irrationality, sentimentalism, was not detrimental. Besides, as much as the Shaper found unreason to be exasperating...its people had once been worse than mankind and its offshots. Much worse, arguably.

'She will live,' the thing that resembled a small Zhayvin with green scales answered, looking at the bedridden thanatophiliac aetherkine. The necromancer's breathing was stabilising, her chest settling into a steady rate. The antimagic shards had been broken down by yoctomachines, and their properties stored into the Collcetive's memory banks, for later use.

The young aberrant had no need to know that. Being told that what had almost killed one's employer (and owner...lover?) had been studied in preparation for replication would've been unsettling. No need to make him think the reptilians were going to come after him or his witch.

The zombie scoffed, rubbing his nose with a dark green anorak sleeve. 'Dude, I don't care if she comes back like me, o-or if you make her move with one of your gadgets. Just...'

'She will make it, then,' the Shaper promised, solidifying one of the avatar's paws so it could pat his forearm. 'And...' It tried to smile as reassuringly as possible without showing its fangs, which would've just pushed the expression into intimidating territory. Frankly, for people so particular about expressions, humans certainly had an easy time making them. No teeth to scare each other with...most of the time. 'Without any of that, I assure you.' It chuckled. 'I won't be necessary.'

The zombie nodded gratefully, with such force and speed his neck broke at the same time as the speed barrier. He facepalmed in the millisecond it took to heal, milky, cataracted eyes widening slightly. 'Ah, crap-! You'll, um, probably want our names, I guess? For the record?'

'You guess correctly,' the Shaper confirmed gently. 'And you can stop fidgeting. You are not going to get in trouble with the authorities for calling upon our help. The Collective is an ally of Earth, not a rogue state.'

An ally, but not a member. For some reason, the reptilians had never really felt like they belonged on Terra, even before its current inhabitants arrived or evolved. More like...squatters, even if they'd always done their part in defending it from otherworldly assault and invasion.

The zombie chuckled. 'Fair 'nuff, I guess. Name's Robert, by the way, but my mates call me Rob.' Rob Zombie? Really. 'Sasha is - '

'Full names would be more helpful, actually,' the Shaper remarked. Rob adjusted his clothes.

'Right. Robert and Sasha Keyes. And before you ask, no, we're not siblings.' He scuffed the floor of the makeshift clinic with a white sneaker. 'I've just...taken her name. Y'know, as a show of trust.'

'Why would we care if you were siblings?' People scared of being spied upon by the Collective were usually also scared of being kidnapped by them and placed into anatomically-unlikely scenarios. It swore, the humans had far more imagination when it came to probes than it was healthy.

'Well, if she needs a blood donation or something, if I were her brother, there'd be a better chance of me having the right type, correct?' He shrugged. 'There's a chance her magic would react well to dead blood and supercharge her healing, but I'd rather not risk it. You never know, with these things, and I don't want that stuff rotting in her veins.'

'Quite,' the Shaper agreed, curious about the mechanics of that effect. The possibility of the macrocosm or its creator having a set of principles was as heartening as it was dangerous. Subjectivity, like many things, only got worse with enough power backing it up. 'But do not worry. If your...' Hmm. 'Acquaintance needed blood, we would have simply scanned and replicated hers.'

Rob leaned against the off-white wall, grinning wistfully. 'You guys can really do anything, huh?' His posture became stiffer as his expression turned uncomfortable, despite the metamaterial changing to fit his body. 'So...would you mind if I asked something?' He ran a hand through his mess of dark hair as he spoke, before scratching the back of his head. 'I...know it's not really my business, and you don't have to answer, especially after saving our bacon. I'm grateful, by the way, honest.'

The Shaper was quietly pleased. Recently, it had issued a request to the Global Gathering, describing how the Collective would like to become more proactive in terms of helping out where Terran agencies could not, if possible. Since it had doubtlessly sounded like a blatant power grab to the more cynical of its recipients, the Shaper (or, rather, the linear subroutines of its mind) had not expected much.

Instead, it had received responses that the GG was not opposed to such help, in the spirit of fostering cooperation. Honestly, just them looking the other way would've been enough. If it came down to helping the needy or undermining the image of legitimate authorities, the Shaper would rather choose a third option.

Rob had spoken to it during the treatment. He and the mage were returning home after the first noteworthy ritual she'd performed following her obtaining her magical licence. Rob had wanted to remain with her, for as long as possible, but he'd got tired of slowing her down with his human weaknesses, and hadn't wanted to be turned by a were or vamp.

Thinking zombies were a relatively unpopular choice when it came to becoming superhuman. Less because people were uncomfortable with being separated from their souls, and more with how the necromancer who raised a zombie could override their will. Of course, the would-be zombie knew and had to agree to that, prior their death, but how many were willing to?

The knife Rob had used to kill himself had made a potent focus for his resurrection, but, on their way back to Leeds, the weapon's mana had triggered an old bomb, filled with antimagical shrapnel and buried deep beneath the road. Rob's wounds had healed immediately, the shards being ejected at supersonic speeds: zombies would recover from anything as long as their mage survived. Sasha, however, had been less lucky.

Even as Rob had started running the many kilometres to civilisation at Mach 4, his ragged calls for help had filled the aether, drawing the attention of the Collective. A yoctomachine had shaped a portion of road into a shelter, before creating the appropriate tools.

'You are welcome to ask anything.' Within reasonable bounds, of course. 'And we expect no payment.' What the reptilians accepted in exchange for their services was either of sentimental value, or things so tacky they deserved to be studied, so Terran psychology could be understood better.

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'Thanks. And, at the risk of sounding like a whiner...um. You guys can do anything, or at least so much there's no real difference. So, why haven't you...?'

'Done more?'

Rob snorted. 'Yeah, sounds really bitter when you put it like that, don't it? I mean, you've helped so often, in exchange for nothing, so this must come across as pretty pushy, huh?'

'It is a reasonable question.' The Shaper folded its hands. 'Why don't we share everything we have with the rest of the world? Why did we remain hidden until the nineteen forties, despite not being subject to the anthropocentric quantum separation effect?'

'Wait, that's what the AQSE stands for?' Rob rubbed his chin. 'It's just, I saw this guy on the conspiracy theories subreddit dropping this acronym, but I couldn't tell how whatever the AQSE was had to do with pre-Shattering metaphysics, cuz he never gave deets. I thought it was some kinda pun, you know, supernaturals getting the AQSE when they tried bursting into the limelight.'

'Please do not call it the AQSE,' the Shaper said flatly, already knowing it was too late. It had caught on. 'Anyway...many wonder why we didn't uplift your ancestors as soon as they appeared, if we could. That's what's eating at you too, isn't it?'

'I mean...' Rob shuffled his feet. 'You said you wouldn't mind...'

'We are not offended,' the Shaper waved him off. 'Arguing whether to stand by or not when less-advanced beings struggle tends to lead into discussions about exploitation, and whether pragmatism trumps morality. Now, we could say that the pantheons would've intervened if we'd tried influencing possible worshippers, or that Atlantis or one of the other ancient civilisations would've opposed us, leading to a devastating war that might've wiped out humanity in the crossfire...but those are only parts of the reason at best, and excuses at worst.'

The Shaper allowed itself a smile as protoplasm was pumped into the mage's body, quickly changing to replace the shredded tissue and shattered bones. Without its help, the young woman would've likely died, or become a lich, at best. 'The truth, the entire truth, is that our simulations,' and paranoia. 'Showed extremely high chances of humans falling upon each other, or other, more dangerous opponents, following the sharing of technology. And besides...' The projection crossed its eyes. 'We did not want to unduly influence mankind. Awe and terror are sadly common reaction to powerful, unknowable beings, and they were as unappealing to us as the reverence and worship that often accompany them.'

There were fringe cults that worshipped the reptilians even in this modern world, full of powerful but known beings. The Shaper kept dismantling them and sternly discouraging the practitioners, but they were stubborn, if harmless.

A more power-hungry being might have argued that the holy power that could be gained from worship was too potentially useful to be discarded for the sake of principle. But, even if the Collective had been unable to quantum entangle with the macrocosm and its contents (and not just things within the bounds of traditional spacetime, but everything that could be quantified. Human scientists cried foul, claiming the reptilians were either lying or did not know what they were talking about. Wrong terminology was claimed in both cases), they would've rather allied themselves with the pantheons' more reasonable members than turned into them.

'But...the Shattering?'

Ah. 'A stressful period, to be certain.' The Shaper began pacing. 'And perhaps the reveal of our existence added to the panic, but our presence, and assistance, were necessary. We could not afford to worry about public perception. And...you had grown wiser, by then.'

At Rob's dumbfounded look, it chuckled. 'The appearance of so many aberrants hardened your psyches. You became able to look in our eye, rather than up at us, as your ancestors might have. Able to oppose us, if necessary.'

There was a pause after that. When Rob spoke again, he was looking at Sasha's sleeping form, grey skin resembling slate in the blue lighting. 'We must be a pain in your arses, aren't we? Sometimes, I wonder why you stay on Earth.'

Pain in... 'Please do not mistake our terminology for bigoted slang.' The Shaper held up a clawed hand. 'We call you aberrant because you deviate from baseline reality, not out of hatred. We do not hate you because you deviate from physics. As for the second part...while our arrival on Earth was entirely coincidental,' well, the wormhole generators had been too damaged for anything precise, but nowadays, the Shaper suspected hidden hands at work. The First Principle's, maybe. 'We decided to stay, not just because of growing attachment, but to atone. Set our sights on a single world, and protect it, because we were strong. Because it was the right thing to do.'

Things hadn't been as simple as that, sadly. The Zhayvin had been predators before they had been sapient, and the Shaper's core personality had united their scattered tribes under a philosophy not unlike that of the Vyzhaldi Breaker School. As long as one could do something, and wanted to, that was that. Protests were useless without strength to back them up - ideals granted no power.

So, instincts that had been honed in awful deserts and noisome swamps over eons of evolution, for the sake of survival, had become a way of life.The warlord had been able to unite her species because she had been strong. The weak and disorganised had fallen, to their knees or into the dust. They had taken their world, and countless others, because they had been strong enough.

Anything that did not have to do with the pursuit of power was removed, or never taken up. Art had never taken root among Zhayvin, not when they were pushed to breed, work and fight as long and as often as possible. Same-sex couplings had been outlawed as distracting wastes of resources, and breeding pairs made to donate genetic material as often as possible, so the best Zhayvin could be made.

The weak, the diseased, the crippled, had been purged or banned from reproducing. No need to pollute the gene-pool with their deficiecies.

And, in the end, all the preparation, all the conquest and warmongering, had brought no joy. Not just because of how many cultures they had ground underfoot before meeting their match, but because, when losses had become unsustainable, the Shaper had realised she felt no pride in her people's prowess, no desire to make a last stand.

When they had retreated, the other, few remaining Zhayvin had asked her to find a way to turn their lives around.

And so, they had jumped into a wormhole, after dozens of failure, only to find themselves on a strange world, with stranger people, few of them its own, at the time.

Even as she begun shaping herself and her people into what they were now, the Shaper had realised how much Earth would need and benefit from their help.

And...it still did.

'We love them,' it thought to itself, and thus to the Collective. 'We loved watching them grown and blossom. Witnessing their achievements. We love their exuberance, their passion...even the aberrants, with their nonsense.'

The realisation, it decided, was not unwelcome.