this is crazy

[from_scratch]

Cam is watching a new recording of Atriama, tail swishing in the gap in his couch, and doesn't stop to pause the show when he feels a summons go by.

Comments

[wormcan]

"You think you're immune to the Simurgh, because she told you that, and you're planning to colonize Mars, and you do know what happened to the moon guy, right? You should be the one running!

Uh, unless getting away involves killing me. You know what, you're probably immune."

[from_scratch]

"I was planning to show up to Endbringer fights. If I'm not immune I will get in touch with you about that. There is a plausible but not overwhelmingly determined reason why I might be, though. And I'm not planning to colonize Mars while she is still around because I do know what happened to the moon guy and even if I'm immune I don't want to attract her to bystanders."

[wormcan]

"For all I know Mars isn't far enough. Just how badly does she want you gone?"

[from_scratch]

"If her top priority was getting me gone you would already be dead."

[wormcan]

"Right, the world-destroying monster has other things to do aside from killing me.

I don't suppose this is just all delusions of importance on your part and she doesn't actually care about either of us?"

[from_scratch]

"I replaced Kyushu including everything that was there pre-Leviathan minus the vertebrates and contents of refrigerators, you tell me, do I seem like I might interest the Simurgh?"

[wormcan]

"...maybe, yeah."

[from_scratch]

"So you can see why I'm concerned. I am not in personal danger of death; but I'm here to do good and if anybody could get me doing more harm than good it's her; so if she's going to extort me I need to be non-extortable."

[wormcan]

"And this works? She still could threaten to kill me, if anyone can reach this far it's her."

[from_scratch]

"I'm not going to make any more things on her say-so. Getting anywhere farther than Mars would take ages, and if she can and will chase you to Mars there's no reason to expect Titan to be out of reach. Would you like me to put you in an autopiloted spaceship on a trajectory of 'away' until and unless I or someone figures out how to kill her, instead?"

[wormcan]

"That sounds like the kind of thing I'd never get back from even if you did pull off killing her. No return signal she can't fake, probably. And Mars is at least a planet.

There's really no way out of this, is there. As long as I'm being stuck out here, you better at least make me an entire Taj Mahal or something."

[from_scratch]

"You can have an entire Taj Mahal, no problem."

[wormcan]

Exile to Mars: at least not a total loss.

[from_scratch]

Cam spends the rest of the flight designing the summoner's arcology to spec and working out what sort of food supply he'd find most agreeable and so on. Cam lands. He makes the arcology, hands the summoner a copy of the blueprint he used for a map, and then says the internet connection will be online when Cam gets back to Earth to set up the far end.

Cam doesn't go straight back to Earth.

When he's about halfway there he pauses to make Endbringer bits in a sort of exploded diagram.

He wants to know what they're made of.

[whole_new_can]

Endbringers are, apparently, made of Endbringer. Every piece, whether it be the outer skin of the Simurgh or the thick non-blood of Leviathan, has a crystalline structure like sharp-edged snowflakes. No cells at all. (It has exactly the same structure regardless of how closely he looks, and Cam has very good microscopes.)

The monsters have no internal organs. What they do have is layers. The flesh gets progressively tougher from the skin down to a core, and even the outer layers are relatively indestructible compared to what they have any right to be. Between the lack of vital organs and the Endbringers' known regenerative abilities, the entire visible body is probably just some combination of armor and decoration.

[from_scratch]

He goes through his chemistry notes to see if anything would like to energetically dissolve this stuff.

[wormcan]

No silver bullet reacts unusually with pieces of Endbringer. It's pretty inert. The stuff can be destroyed by anything that would usually be destructive, but it gets exponentially harder to damage closer to the cores.

[from_scratch]

Well, he's in interplanetary space. How does a bit of core react to a pinhole singularity, surrounded by enough magnets of the sort that handles his home garbage disposal to prevent it from running off and eating asteroids?

[wormcan]

Nothing much happens. The bit of core falls inward, appears to stop just before reaching the event horizon as per normal, and doesn't even spaghettify.

[from_scratch]

What the hell is this stuff?

Cam tries more things - intense heat, more fun with chemistry. At one point he puts a bit of core in his mouth and bites it hard enough to chip a tooth if it won't go.

[wormcan]

It doesn't go, but that's no surprise. He can only provide so much force, and this material already shrugged off worse. Nothing has any perceptible effect on the pieces of Endbringer core. At least the tooth doesn't chip unless he wants it to. Two can play at the indestructibility game.

[from_scratch]

Great.

Cam flies back to Japan. He writes up all his findings on the way, notifies the Prime Minister that he thinks he's contained the problem, puts up his experimental results on the Internet, and gets back to what he was doing.

[wormcan]

Where the cores are is one thing everyone's glad to know. Especially in the case of the Simurgh; apparently her humanoid body is nothing more than a decoy. The level of indestructibility they're up against, less so. Publicizing that might very well decrease defensive turnout. (No one tries to de-publicize it. Can't stop the signal.)

[from_scratch]

Cam makes sure there's an email address available for anyone who's thoroughly investigating the research to let people suggest things.

[wormcan]

Not a lot of suggestions, but some people would like pieces of Endbringer for testing against promising powers. Quite a few groups would like that, in fact.