Elaine usually didn't overstate her abilities in front of other people; it was never really a great idea. Bragging tended to bring heat down on you... or made people expect more from you than you could really give. In war, making too great of a claim would just inspire people to hunt you down and kill you. In fact, Elaine had very quietly understated her powers in front of her peers for more than a century.

If people knew she was a level 6, they would not have let her go quietly. Fortunately, the Blackhats made this a very quiet thing; there were no marks, no telltale energy signatures. You simply had more abilities, and if you chose not to use them, and appeared to be at the same level as you were twenty years ago, well, maybe you were just a coward, someone who ran away all the time.

That said, Elaine's suggestion that she could just roll up and find the remains of an old friend of hers some two hundred miles away was basically a complete fabrication. It wasn't possible, and it didn't need to be.

Elaine dematerialized the copy she left at Teddy's compound once it was alone. She just wasn't good with goodbyes, and she had no idea how long she'd be gone. The idea of tearing into some meaty targets using Teddy's ability was a nice one, but the targets she really wanted were not local, and would probably be harder to find. Starting, of course, with Bohrs.

Scott Bohrs was probably the longest living King aside from the Maniac... but unlike Thomas Madd, Bohrs actually made it to the end, albeit in retirement. Madd and Bohrs, "The Maniac" and "Metal Monster" to their enemies, were among the greatest elite fighters on the planet, for one specific reason: they were greenlisted. They had unique powers that the Blackhats normally restricted, but those abilities only came out "on stage", when they embraced a mental and spiritual narrative that resonated with the situation.

It was... complicated. The Blackhats did that so that heroes would win more often, but there were some Stage-fighting baddies who did just as well. And... in war, things were often too complicated to set down in black and white. Either way, the Stage system boosted people who genuinely believed in what they were doing... or could fake it really, really well.

With Madd gone, some people claimed that Bohrs had inherited his flamboyant red cape, a piece of equipment said to be part of Madd's strange connection to the stage system. She had never seen it, but there was no question that Scott retired immediately after the Maniac died. His location was secret enough, but somehow the right people were always able to find him.

Not that that would work now. Ciddia said the Stage System was long gone, a part of the City that they had never bothered to replace. Even if the cape could have led her to Scott, there was no longer a system to pass those things on to her. But still... there was one place she could check, a place she had met the Metal Monster years ago. A safehouse he only reluctantly shared... and only with pretty women.

Elaine grinned as she broke through the sound barrier flying south towards the Gulf of Mexico and, soon enough, across South America to the mountains of Chile. Archons tended to enjoy places no mortal could reach; it kept random passers-by to a minimum, of course, and it deterred armies, but it was also an ego thing. They were special, and sometimes it felt good to live that life.

And so, more than a day later, Elaine hovered next to what was, by all appearances, a nearly vertical mountain surface. It was difficult to figure out exactly which mountain she remembered, and which section of stone was the right one, and then she had to spend a great many more hours looking for the right few square feet that contained a hidden door.

But eventually, she did. A latch there was supposed to respond to a key, but Elaine could remember the geometry of the hallway inside well enough to pop a copy of her inside without opening the door, and then shifted over to it as her main.

It was... exactly what you would expect for an abandoned hidey-hole in the side of a mountain. Dusty, cold. This section was unlit, but she could see a glimmer from down the hall. She floated down it without touching the sides, except once to pull a lever she had been told disarmed a certain trap. It broke off in her hand, and she shifted her main back outside, but the copy set off no traps all the way to the end of the hall.

Out of sheer habit, Elaine knocked on the door before she opened it, and had quite a start when she found a naked woman curled up comfortably on a couch, by all appearances alive and asleep. But... instants turned into moments, into seconds, into minutes, and there were no signs of life.

Finally, she managed to wet her incredibly dry mouth and speak out, as loudly as she could. "Nobody's alive in here, right?" Minutes went by, and no answer.

She examined the woman's skin closely, but her stigma was concealed; there was no telling her Archon caste without them, and only she could turn them on. She found a blanket and tossed it over the poor woman, realizing uncomfortably that Teddy had been dealing with this madness for years. Every moment, she expected the woman on the couch to stand up and accuse her of breaking and entering, to draw a blade of darkness or fire out of nowhere and stab her in the back. It was enough that she had to split and keep one eye on the woman constantly, just to assure herself that the woman was, exactly as she had been told, braindead.

"Son of a bitch, Teddy, how did you do this," said Elaine, quietly. "I would go mad. I will go mad if this keeps up." But she searched the rest of the hideaway, finally locating a secret hatch in the floor that led to a secret-within-a-secret room.

And there he was, passed out sitting up with his head propped on his hand. Scott looked older, somehow, in a way Archons rarely chose to do. He was gray, and he had a gauntness to him, like he really was an old man. And he was old, for an Archon; he had been there from the start of the Pan-Terranic Wars, which consumed Earth before it ever linked up with Draco. He had been an on-again, off-again King Archon, responsible for making choices about the maintenance and power set of his Archon caste. And he had been a constant thorn in the side of pretty much everyone he ran into.

And here he sat, covered with dust, asleep since who knows when.

"Just to be sure," Elaine forced herself to say, again, out loud, "you're not just asleep, you're braindead like everyone else, right? Because I'm going to take your stuff and I don't want you to be mad at me."

Seconds became minutes, one heartbeat at a time, and Elaine sat on the edge of the desk and looked at Scott's face. It wasn't just that he looked alive; he was. His heart beat, his lungs heaved, and moment by moment, the illusion grew stronger and stronger, as though she could shake him to wake him up.

"I hope this works... or I hope it doesn't," she muttered, hopped off the desk, grabbed a standing lamp, and with a twirl, smashed Scott in the face with it.

Each second brought a new fear. She expected him to snap out of it from the moment she did made her first sudden movements, then again when she grabbed a weapon, then again when her intent was clear. It wasn't paranoia; she had seen people intuit her actions before she was certain of them herself. She had watched Archons think so fast and so far ahead that they could parry bullets and deflect laser beams, then fade straight through a hail of attacks and cut one of her bodies in half. She gave him plenty of warning, so that if he were merely asleep, he could have a knife to her throat in moments.

Or a chainsaw, or some kind of laser poleaxe, or all kinds of other options. Mecha archons like Scott had some neat kits to play with. They weren't quite as random as Titans, but she honestly couldn't predict what he might pull out at a moment's notice.

But the lamp base smashed Scott right in his sleeping face, and he flew backwards five feet and skidded to a stop. He lay there, as though in shock, and she expected him to backflip, or front flip, or hover, or put a hand to his head and stand up. She expected him to shake his head, cough, spit blood... anything. But he lay there.

And Elaine, finally giving in to the urge, curled up in a ball on the floor and cried.

She'd tried to be strong. She had been told. She knew. But this was insane. He was alive. He was right there. That was his face, those were his hands. The dead were supposed to be gone. This wasn't right.

Elaine cried until she couldn't cry any more. Time had passed, she wasn't sure how much, and she still couldn't process everything that she felt. She vanished this body and with the other, crawled into the corridor leading outside. She appeared a sleeping bag from her inventory, and a portable cookstove and a can of beans. She hardly thought about the traps, but miraculously, none of them went off. And there she sat, not able to confront what was inside the door, not even able to make use of the supplies... or even the electricity inside.

It felt like screwing with the dead. She had killed, had stolen, had done lots of things. But this felt like undeath. She felt like she was a demon, walking in frozen time. Messing with those bodies, with the living, felt like she was tampering with their souls. They were supposed to have free will. They were still "alive".

The beans and the mild chill of her sleeping bag reminded her of war, of fighting, of killing and death. They helped, just a little bit. She might have to do violence to the "living", but it wasn't something supernatural. It was just... death. She could put aside the thought that they were living. She could "kill". All she had to do was set aside the feeling of ancientness, the feeling of rightness, that they were exactly how they should be. They were dead, and she would kill them.

Elaine shivered in the sleeping bag and watched her beans cook, putting off confronting that awful truth just a little longer.

In the end, she stayed in the hall until her internal clock said a good day had passed. As the next dawn approached, she split a copy off to sit on top of the mountain and watch it crest over the the mountains. With her body split, she sensed... something, in the area, probably some of those static monsters, but it wasn't close, and she was able to enjoy the vivid hues of the sunrise, quietly. But that moment refused to stand still, and she felt the creepy sense getting ever closer, so she split one sentry into two, both armed with the Administrator's weapons, and went back inside.

Her indoors copy split into three, one keeping an eye on each of the braindead Archons, and one searching the house for anything worth taking along. Archons usually didn't keep a lot of physical things around... not that most had the inventory system that Elaine did. She kept real tangible items--not copies that she could duplicate--as equipment for each of her clones, and pulling things into and out of storage was originally a cheat; she would instantly replace herself with a "different version" that had the item equipped. When she got higher level, it simply became a feature, one she appreciated greatly.

As high level as Bohrs was, he probably also had gained some kind of inventory, whether that was summoning pieces of a Mecha kit individually, or a more generic system that was given as a level-up bonus. Each Archon level was technically a "wish"; the same Pandora tokens that had turned mortal humans into Archons were necessary to level up, but with the additional restriction that you had to show mastery over your current abilities. That wasn't automatic in any sense; you could kill, use your skills, meditate, do whatever you wanted, but if you never mastered your abilities, you couldn't go up in level.

If he did have an inventory, whatever he had would be inside, along with some number of those Mecha server racks. If she just had access to one of them, Elaine was sure she could begin to modify it. They, unlike the systems to support a real Archon body, were just advanced holo-equipment. No biology, no advanced chemistry, just virtual structures whose engine was hidden from the world. When broken, they didn't even leave debris, they simply vanished into thread.

Whether he did or not, though, he did keep a few things in the house. Elaine was surprised to find a fully automated farm in a back room, although it had run out of topsoil and a couple bearings had won out, so the process had broken down. An overhead truss rolled back and forth watering things and using holotools to weed, trim, and harvest, while the goods went into a large refrigerator... which was periodically emptied into a composting device. In theory, it should have remained a closed system even over centuries... but no, the composter had broken.

It was still a fantastic design, and Elaine made a mental note to come back, disassemble it, and haul it back, but not on this trip. She suspected that somewhere, people on this world had an equivalent tech, if not the same thing, but from what she'd seen, they were hurting for the parts and the ingenuity to make use of them.

Aside from the rotting vegetables and the damaged system that was supposed to grow more, Elaine also found a library. Not... too surprising for a Mecha Archon, Elaine found, the library was packed with "reference materials"--comics, books, movies, posters, and data storage that she would need to plug into a computer in order to read. She scanned over the titles, thinking she would leave most of them behind... until she realized that she might need some of these books in order to understand the Mecha that she was hoping to rewrite.

"Ugh." Elaine looked at the many shelves. It wasn't so much that she didn't have the room, but there was a mental weight that came with having a full inventory. The weight she had just dropped off with the Administrators was, comparatively, very familiar; she knew one gun from another by its feel, smell, weight, and shape. Trying to keep track of hundreds of books, comics, and DVDs would mean running through a whole catalog of identical objects and judging them based entirely on their looks alone. Even just storing that many felt like a burden.

But she started by grabbing a plastic box and filling it with every data card, chip, dongle, disk, cube, and matrix she could lay her hands on, and stored that all as a single entity. That done, she looked around. In theory, she could store an entire bookcase as a single object, with all of its books, but she had tried similar things before and had loose pieces fall off in her storage and disappear... which, now that she thought about it, was something Teddy could, in theory, help her remedy. If they had just come loose, they were probably kicking around her internal space, somewhere... in theory. She had no idea what her insides actually looked like.

In the end, she picked up some video disks that looked well-worn or familiar to her. She also picked up a stack of video games, and the copy of her standing watch over the woman on the couch noted a rack full of two centuries worth of game consoles around the TV. Most of the space was taken up with originals, but there were also a few obvious third-party many-in-one consoles designed to handle a bunch of different discs, cartridges, memory cards, and matrixes at once.

In a way, Elaine found it a little exciting, although gaming wasn't her thing and hadn't been since she was mortal. But she couldn't shake the sense that this historical treasure trove was years--decades--worth of time she could spend adventuring. A few things there would be familiar, others she might recognize vaguely, but they would probably all be new to the locals. And... some of them would be informative, for her study of Borhs' supplies.

She grinned and shook her head, able finally to shake off some of the funk of this tomb-like place, and went back to looting.