Ciddia was never the kind of person who was accused of going easy on people. Even if you went all the way back, before she met Domino Effect and became a Blackhat, she was a technical expert in a well-funded private Chinese company who rose to middle management on a very important project purely on her spunk and willingness to bust balls. Before that, her teachers had highly mixed reviews of her attitude, some praising her no-nonsense attitude and other insisting that women should not act like that.

Then that project came to the government's attention. A military unit took it over by force, and imprisoned anyone with technical knowledge. The discipline and oversight of that particular unit was... lacking. Bad things happened. Domino rescued her by force, gave her power and protection, and asked for nothing in return... and from that day to the day he died, she was a loyal follower. Even then, even with him, she would give him shit when he deserved it. Same for the rest of the Blackhats, even... well, no matter who they were.

For chewing out Archons, there was no one tougher. Domino loved them too much to be a hardass with them pretty much to the end; he saved his vitriol for normal humans, especially those in the government or military who he felt betrayed the human race. So Ciddia, who in her pantsuit was often mistaken for Domino by those who didn't know better, would frequently step in to discipline those who needed it. She made sure that Domino got an undeserved reputation for being hard on Archons, exactly because he wasn't.

And then there was the Fall, which Ciddia only barely survived, and only because of Timothy. It was in many ways a betrayal, but Timothy was usually right, and he was right about this. She still wished he was still around, but the future would not have accepted him and his optimism. They barely accepted her and her blunt realism, willingness to accept blame, and continued unwillingness to put up with other people's bullshit. Timothy was soft-hearted, even after centuries of war, and would have just sacrificed himself on the altar of public opinion--more literally than Ciddia, by either stepping down or letting himself be executed as a symbol of peace.

That would have been pointless. The future needed someone who remembered. It needed more than just her, but the way things were looking, Elaine DeWitt was probably not the reinforcements she had been waiting for.

None of the Administrators recognized the Archon signboard for what it was, and if they had, they might not have tied it to the attack of the nightmares. For Ciddia, the facts lined up as soon as she heard them. Only Archons could see Archon signboards; none were around, since Ciddia herself had gone around making sure they were shut down. They still showed up on the scanners as a low-powered beacon, but it wasn't enough to start a panic. In the time it took them to figure it out, the nightmares had organized an assault. It was decades since the last time the nightmares showed any sign of organization; if they didn't sense anything, they wouldn't gather. There hadn't been anything lately to draw their attention, but that wouldn't last.

So after dispatching a small team of Administrators to arm Elaine, Ciddia locked herself in her office in order to have privacy to do something very rare: she dropped back into the subspace node where all of her abilities as a Blackhat were hidden.

Subspace nodes like hers used to be one of the closest-held secrets of the Blackhat organization. It was Domino's theory that if anyone understood the planar structure of the universe, they would be able to reverse-engineer Archon technology, hack it, and destroy the world... or at least the world order that they had created. He was, regrettably, exactly correct, although it took a while, a lot longer than he had expected, almost long enough that he wasn't prepared. Regrettably, by that time, his was not the only magic on the Two Worlds, and he had no answer for what happened when the two combined.

So for a very long time, the Blackhats, the Archons, the City... it was all a mystery how it worked, sometimes even to the Blackhats themselves. In truth, it was just hidden in rooms that "didn't exist". Power generators, farms, huge racks of servers, materials storage, hidden weapons, and of course, the Archon engines themselves... all of them were actually just hanging around in extra-dimensional spaces. Usually, if you got a look at the truth of it, it was a lot less miraculous. Inside those rooms were industrial machines neatly organized, and nothing else of consequence.

Except for a few specific instances, like a Blackhat's avatar center.

Ciddia dropped into a room that she had customized herself--several times, the last a long time ago. The artificial gravity was a comfortable 90% earth normal, and a number of pieces of relaxation furniture formed a circle around a meditation bench--one she probably used twice in the centuries since she created it on a whim, but it reminded her of her own ideals, and that was enough.

She dropped onto her favorite couch for a long moment with a deep sigh. A number of user interface windows popped up in easy reach, and by reflex she toggled the time dilation up to 100x, then paused. Having extra time to think was always nice, but she had come to think of her Blackhat abilities as a cheat, a crutch. She hadn't used them in a long time, except as the job required. She could cheat. This of all things she could get away with, and nobody would know. But wasn't that the point of calling it a cheat?

In the end, she compromised, dropping the time dilation to 10x. Small enough that if she wasted time, she might miss something in the real world, but high enough that she didn't need to rush.

After a good five minutes of enjoying the comfortable feel and smell of her couch, Ciddia got up and crossed over to her workstations. Without the City's databases, she couldn't connect to just anyone anymore, but because of the "diagnostic tool" she gave Chun Liao, Ciddia already had a backdoor link to Elaine specifically, and that was enough that she could administer her system remotely.

At that exact moment, Elaine was making a hot approach to the compound. Ciddia pulled down the time dilation until she was watching in almost real-time--a measly 2:1. She cringed at Elaine's choice of weapons, but allowed the farce to continue. It simply wouldn't do to drive a wedge between her and Elaine--or anyone else--by revealing just how much control she still had. Again, using her abilities was "cheating".

Then again, it had always been that way. Domino had the same attitude. The human species had to evolve on its own; no mater how advanced the Blackhats were, they couldn't solve all the world's problems. So, even if they could fix a problem didn't mean they would. Too often she had just sat there watching. It always made her itch, and now was no exception. But, showing her hand now would only put her in a sticky situation.

So she deactivated the signboard and left Elaine a brief message telling her not to use them anymore, and to please follow the instructions of the Administrators. Just to be safe, she re-activated her own neural interface to the messaging system, in case Elaine chose to reply in kind. After all, for Elaine, the message system was as natural as breathing, even if only she and Ciddia could use it anymore.

Then, with a last longing look at her couch, Ciddia dropped back into her office. In all, less than five minutes had passed. Nobody was the wiser that she had disappeared, and nobody ever would be. She sat down in front of her mundane-technology terminal in her relatively-crappy office chair and sent notes to the Administrators on their sunglass-HUDs reminding them to confiscate any and every heavy weapon that Elaine had. She reviewed the satellite footage of the incident as it streamed in, slightly delayed, and adopted a look of supreme boredom.

The smell of that room lingered in her nostrils for a long time. It reminded her of decades of time she had spent there, cheating death with time dilation and superior computational ability. It reminded her of day after day of analyzing the state of the world and searching for any problem she could solve. It reminded her of watching a battle between high-powered Archons, or Archons and incredible native magic users, one unending second at a time, learning every last trick that people were using, adapting her own style, finding weaknesses... and exploiting them. Of battles that lasted hours for her, and moments for eveyone else.

Memories of cheating.

She missed it, but not for the reasons anyone else would think. Nobody thought of Ciddia the hardass as being nervous, but she was, and had always been. She had seen humankind on the verge of destroying itself time and time again--before Domino, during his debut, throughout the Pan-Terranic Wars, through the Terra-Draco wars, through the Reign of Fire... and now those that remained were too eager to die, to give up without trying hard anymore. Every time humanity was on the brink of dying, the Blackhats cheated.

She hoped she wouldn't need to do so again, but she wasn't counting on it.