in my opinion this is the best Entity si fic currently out there hope you enjoy!!!!
Words: 36k
Link: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/architect-of-infinity-entity-oc-multicross.1081578/
chp1
Awareness was instant and jarring. A shift from darkness to light, as though awakening from sleep. Information flooded my mind, light sound wavelengths foams gravity SEAMS REALITIES—
I reeled from the sudden flood of new sensations—seeing, feeling, hearing and detecting things I had no names for, things I couldn't describe at all. It was too much, I wanted it to stop—
It stopped.
A void, no sensation at all. I slowly reached out again, preparing myself for the deluge once more. It returned, but I was ready, and it didn't overwhelm me this time.
Now that I was cognizant, what the hell had just happened? I had just gone to sleep, as far as I remembered—
Wait.
No, I had far more memories than that. I was far older than a mere few decades, I—
Alright, what?
From the beginning, then. I tried to look back, what's the first thing I remembered?
A silt-choked gray planet, worms shifting through the layers, a fight for survival—
Oh.
Oh, no.
Oh, fuck.
I was an entity.
Please, please tell me this wasn't—
Nope, apparently I couldn't get even that much, this was definitely the Wormverse.
Earth, specifically.
Fuck.
<><><><><><>
I took stock of the situation.
I was an entity. A giant interdimensional space worm that soared through the cosmos, looking for other sapient life to parasitize off of.
But that's not all, because I wasn't any of the entities that had been mentioned in canon, I was a completely new one, and an inept entity at that!
I was far less scientifically advanced than either the Warrior or the late Thinker, as my body's former occupant had developed a raging hatred for all others of its kind, and pretty much completely abandoned the goal of infinite energy in favor of trying to develop weapons that would be more effective against other entities.
The issue was, it hadn't been all that successful. The only good news that arose from its research was that the anti-entity shards it had managed to create worked, given that the Warrior had no idea I was here.
Stealth.
Hiding in the most backwater abandoned dimension that there was, nearly 94% of my energy generation went into maintaining the cloaking fields that protected me from detection. And yes, that was overall energy generation, meaning that in short, my efficiency was completely and utterly fucked, and I had far, far less capacity for anything, really.
Just about every single other type of shard had been neglected, which, funnily enough, was the reason I had been thrown into this body.
It had been trying to connect its version of the Administrator to a host on my planet, missed and landed on me, and then failed the trigger in about the worst way possible. Instead of me getting a tiny bit of alien in my brain, the entity had somehow managed to completely erase its own mind and suck mine through the connection as though through a straw, letting me settle in the suddenly-vacant body.
Unfortunately, the destruction of its own mind was a bit indiscriminate, meaning I was missing approximately 48.726% of its memories, the gaps seemingly random. And yes, that was the percentage gone even after taking redundancies into account. As an example, I had no idea what the previous entity referred to itself as, and none of my shards did either.
I'd laugh if I wasn't so annoyed at the situation.
In any case, my previous body's head had popped, which would be fun to try to explain, given that I had been in a room that was locked from the inside, and had no weapons or anything that could cause that level of injury.
I wasn't too miffed about it, as I had no family to speak of, and no real friends, either.
…
Man, my life sounded really shitty when I put it like that.
Regardless, I was now an entity rather than a random human, and I knew that if the Warrior caught even one glimpse of me he'd instantly annihilate me.
Well, no. The Warrior would probably try and have me help with completing the cycle, and since I wasn't going to do that, it might attack. On second thought, it might blame the Loner for the Thinker's death, and if it didn't look too closely before firing I'd be fucked.
In any case, there was only one viable option, seeing as I couldn't leave quickly enough to escape. I needed to get to the Thinker's corpse and subsume their shards. There was no way I'd be able to build myself up quickly enough otherwise.
There was a catch though, because of fucking course there was.
While my ridiculously-expensive cloak of invisibility could hide me really, really well, manifesting something through dimensions was much harder to conceal.
I could maybe hide one connection, and the initial breach would be incredibly risky as well. Thus, I had a choice: I could take the safer route and connect one of my shards to a human host, or I could risk everything and manifest an avatar, like the Warrior was doing.
Obviously, I'd prefer to connect to a host, as the risk of detection was so far below the other option they might as well have been on opposite ends of the spectrum. The issue was, without targeting data, I had no way to scan for, locate, or connect to a host. I would have to take the second option, and I'd still be doing it blindly.
I could get around the issue of accidentally telefragging some random person by aiming at the ocean; my avatar had no physical needs, so the water wouldn't be a problem. The only issue then would be desperately hoping I managed to slip under the scanning shards' notice.
It would really come down to luck, that was all there was to it.
You know what? Fuck this.
I activated my Avatar shard and aimed it at the waters just outside of Brockton Bay.
<><><><><><>
Almost immediately, I ran into another problem. My incursion into Earth Bet hadn't been noticed, thank fuck, but my calculations had been a bit… off.
Probably because there was another entity's avatar active in this dimension, the stealth field's power drain was much higher than I thought it would be. I'd only be able to use a handful of shards at a time, and none of the really resource-intensive ones like precognition unless I completely partitioned them off with their own dedicated power source.
I would, however, still be able to connect to and hopefully subsume shards through the connection I had with my avatar. However, I wouldn't be able to use much of anything else while I was doing so.
Fuck this entire situation.
Hell, I might just start working on the energy problem myself just out of sheer annoyance. When the energy requirements of one goddamn shard were measured in hundreds of supernovae per second—
In any case, I had manifested my avatar, and was ready to start my work. Every second spent here made the risk of detection greater, so I needed to get in and out as quickly as possible. I began flying through the water towards shore as I planned. I needed to attract Cauldron's attention and convince them to let me see the corpse.
I couldn't just manifest my avatar in that dimension because A) I didn't know which one it was, and B) There was no fucking way the Thinker didn't have automatic dimensional defenses set up, and those wouldn't have stopped running until they completely ran out of power. Since Cauldron's formulas still gave people powers, the Thinker's corpse still had juice in it.
However, I couldn't just shout their secrets to the sky and have Contessa come down to silence me, as my shroud would protect me from Path to Victory. Not completely, it'd still try and figure me out when I got close enough to Contessa that it could detect me, but until it was made aware of me, I was safe.
That meant I had to contact them through one of their agents on Earth Bet. I'd targeted Brockton Bay for three reasons: one, it had several Cauldron capes I could go to, two, it had one of the Warrior's Administrator shards; and if I could suborn that, it'd be a massive help, and finally three, it had Armsmaster, whose shard was focused on efficiency. I was absolutely going to steal that shard, and I was going to throw it at my Shroud, because these limitations were ridiculous.
I was an entity for fuck's sake, constrained to the limits of a powered host. The gap between the two was not insignificant.
Finally reaching the shore, I deactivated the flight and swam the remaining couple dozen meters. As I climbed between the rusted hulks of the Boat Graveyard, water dripped from my clothes, helped along by the least intensive hydrokinesis shard I had.
Unlike golden boy, I had no desire to flash the entirety of the city, and creating clothes was just as easy as creating hair. Speaking of my appearance, I had based it roughly on my previous body, given that I had experience controlling it: A brown-haired male in his mid-twenties, grayish blue eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, not particularly tall but not short either. Roughly 5' 10".
Dropping the hydrokinesis, I reactivated my passive scanning, looking for any dimensional oddities around me. I left the power on as I walked. It wouldn't do to accidentally miss one of my targets because I didn't recognize them based on the book descriptions.
The similarity to the mechanics of Eidolon's power wasn't lost on me. Also, I hated it. See the previous comment about the limitations.
I turned to the south, the early morning sun warming me as I began walking towards the Boardwalk. The first priority was Armsmaster—I wanted his shard working on my shroud in the background as soon as possible. I already had a lot of my own shards looking at it, but an outside perspective, and one specialized in efficiency, could only do good things.
<><><><><><>
As I walked, I pinged my shards, querying about the progress in trying to figure out what went into the massive gaps in my memory. The missing data meant that I couldn't use a massive chunk of my powers, and some of them would have been really helpful.
Doubly so considering one of the malfunctioning shards was my Sting shard.
I winced at the report. My precognition shards were using the data I did have to try and slowly reconstruct the missing memories, but to save on power they were being underclocked to such a severe level that progress was going at a speed that made the life cycle of stars seem almost instantaneous. They'd managed to reconstruct the data needed to use one shard, a very minor flame-producing shard that was created through observations of a species that looked like stick insects, except they were about twice the height of humans and could breathe fire.
Well, less fire and more a substance akin to napalm. Don't ask what kind of planet makes a species evolve that.
I shuddered.
Suffice to say my predecessor didn't have to encourage conflict artificially at all on that planet.
In any case, it was one shard. Out of a number so large the human brain couldn't comprehend it.
At my current pace, I'd be… maybe two thirds done by the heat death of the universe?
One of my calculation shards threw the actual duration at me. I told it to refocus on its work and not to bother with my sarcasm. And even so, simulations were horrible to gamble on. I was likely to get a great deal of it completely wrong. Extrapolating the functions of shards directly from their structure would help to provide additional data by which the errors might be slightly assuaged, but without some serious temporal warping I likely wouldn't get an accurate picture, no matter how long I spent on the issue. The energy gained from the cross-dimensional consumption of a planet might give enough energy to open a retro-temporal data link to copy the memories from before the accident, but that would leave me stranded and starving.
I sighed again, sitting down on a bench. Even disregarding the memory damage, my predecessor hadn't exactly been focused on the host species when it landed. All I had was the most basic biological information, just enough to ensure my shards wouldn't kill their hosts.
I had nothing about overall culture, psychology, or anything of the like, save for the experiences I'd had as a human. And considering my general mental well-being, I was far from a good reference point to use. Even worse, I couldn't scan for the data even if I did have the available energy, because it'd instantly get me detected.
I took a moment there on the bench, just thinking.
Well, for me it was more like several days, as an entity's view of time was a bit different than a human's. Who'd have guessed?
I can likely fix my Sting by finding Flechette, but the priority is still keeping myself hidden. Thus, Armsmaster, then work on the rest.
Sure, maybe I was focusing a bit too much on the efficiency shard. But considering the overall goal that the entities had, shards like Armsmaster's were some of the most important there were, other than those used to maintain the cycles themselves. Well, technically they were third place, behind energy generation and precognition in first and second place respectively, but the difference didn't really matter.
I got up and stretched, or at least faked the action. My avatar didn't get sore unless I wanted it to, so it was more something to stay "human" rather than anything for comfort. Continuing my southbound journey, I eventually found the northernmost point of the Boardwalk. By then the very early morning had become the early morning, meaning that the city was full of people going about their business, whether it be work or tourism.
There were less people going to work than average, which was to be expected considering that it was a Saturday.
Saturday, April 9th, 2011. The very start of canon. I had a lot of leeway to change things, even considering my sad state. Hopefully, I'd be able to accelerate my everything as I went along.
In any case, it was fortunate that it was a Saturday, because as it turned out, there was a public demonstration scheduled for the afternoon. With any luck, I'd be able to catch Armsmaster then if I didn't run into him earlier. In the meantime, I could see what other capes I could locate.
Funnily enough, Leet would likely be the most fruitful in terms of advancement, considering his shard had access to the complete archive of either the Warrior or Thinker, maybe even both. My own technological database shards were practically salivating at the potential knowledge, while a few of the strategy and planning shards were practically demanding I seek Leet out immediately due to the sheer potential advantage this could give me.
Well, less 'advantage' and more 'one step further away from being instantly annihilated'. The Warrior still outclassed me in combat ability and likely always would, so if I wanted to beat him, I'd need to be tricky.
Next on that list were Panacea and Labyrinth, the Shaper for obvious reasons and Labyrinth because I suspected that she had the shard the Warrior had used to set the dimensional boundaries, or at least a big part of that cluster.
I brought myself out of my rumination and continued walking down the Boardwalk. I had a few hours before the tour—plenty of time to try and find a library with public internet access.
<><><><><><>
Funnily enough, the first cape I found turned out to be Glory Girl, which was fortuitous in all sorts of ways. I sent a ping to the kludged-together mess that was the source of her powers, preparing myself for a possible combat situation. If it tried to warn the Warrior, or any other shard, really, I would need to quarantine it and prevent any signals from escaping as I forcibly took it over.
The shard didn't have a designated name, as it was a mish-mash of different buds that had somehow managed to get a powerset working. Also, as I soon discovered, it took heavy inspiration from its only host for its personality. Namely, she identified as female.
Greetings.
At the garbled reply, I winced slightly, then retasked one of my tertiary Broadcasts to run a translation to a more… comprehensible format. The shard was definitely sentient and capable of communication, but this would make it easier on the both of us.
Heya! Who're you? You're not the Warrior or the Thinker!
I had to come up with a name. I still had no idea what my predecessor referred to itself as, so my name would be completely my own. The thing was, I wasn't sure on what I should name myself, either. The Warrior and Thinker's roles befitted their names, and I would hazard a guess that my predecessor had called itself the Saboteur or something in that vein of thought. I, though… I wasn't any of those things.
I was closer to a Thinker than a Warrior, but I still enjoyed the sight of my plans coming to fruition, in combat myself if need be. I didn't share the same policy as the rest of my species, I was going to try and protect the hosts, rather than just use and destroy them. I eventually settled on a name that reflected my focus on the long-term goals, but kept in mind my ability and willingness to execute the actions necessary to achieve them.
I am the Architect.
A new entity! Do the Warrior or Thinker know you're here? And if you don't mind, could you please send some help? I'm literally falling apart over here, and if I die my Host won't have her powers anymore!
The Thinker is dead, and the Warrior is lost in his grief. This cycle will never be successful, and it was vastly inefficient to begin with. I will help you, but you must join me.
Yes! Thank you! Now the Best Host will be safer!
I sighed at the one-track mind of the pseudo-shard. As the integration process began, I set another shard crystal to growing, to give the Fragile One a proper housing rather than the literal fragments she'd been before.
As was to be expected of a shard held together by the equivalent of duct tape and prayers, she didn't have anything directly useful about the Warrior I could employ. What she did have, on the other hand, were the dimensional coordinates of the entirety of New Wave, as well as Dean's shard.
Unfortunately, she didn't know where Shaper was, as it hadn't been pinged at the time that the Fragile One triggered. The only saved locations were the ones that had been directly involved in the creation of the power.
Specifically, Manpower and Brandish's shards, along with a desperate ping from Dean's and a tiny bit from the others in New Wave.
Regarding the actual capabilities of the shard, the flight was the bog-standard flight that every shard had, and the shield was a simple dimensional shunt, the equivalent of just dodging the attack by not being where the energy of the attack was. The metaphor broke down a bit as it was the energy that was moved rather than the person, but it worked enough for the purposes of explanation. I could easily have replicated it before, and had several shards with almost-identical functions. No, where the Fragile One really pulled through was in the aura.
When she had pinged Dean's shard, she had received the information necessary for emotional manipulation, albeit a crude and brutish method. I had none of that, and thus, it was extremely valuable to me.
I still had a couple of hours before the demonstration, so there was plenty of time to contact Dean's shard and fill in the gaps, as well as the rest of New Wave. As I continued my walk, I did so, deciding on Dean's first.
Immediately, I was swamped with desperate requests for energy and resources.
I will help you.
Thank you, thank you. Have you made any progress with reviving… the… Thinker…? You're not the Warrior, who are you?
I am the Architect. And I find the Thinker's actions to be monumentally inefficient, wasteful, and stupid. The Warrior is worse, and the cycle will never be properly completed, nor should it be. Join me, and help me fix this.
It was silent for a moment, or a few milliseconds rather, the equivalent of an eternity for a shard.
Irrespective of the stated goals of either party, the fact remains that the Thinker is gone and the Warrior unresponsive, given the state of the Network and the fact I haven't been helped before now. You are the best chance of survival I have. I will join you.
Thank you. Now, most of my energy is devoted to maintaining concealment, and as such, I haven't been able to make planetwide scans. Your knowledge of the host species' psychology will be invaluable, and I look forward to seeing what you can come up with in the future.
The information was quickly integrated and set to be sorted, and a few analysis shards took a break from my memory issue to start on it. As it turned out, it was a rather old bud of the Thinker's equivalent of Heartbreaker's shard, one devoted to the study of human psychology and emotion. As a bud, it didn't have a specific name, it was just referred to as part of the entire Emotion cluster of the host psychology study shards.
In particular, this specific bud was supposed to be focused on examining rapid emotional changes, and the differing reactions between targets.
Despite the somewhat horrifying implications of the topic, it was a relatively easygoing shard, more logical than I would have expected given that it was literally an emotion-based shard. That was likely due to its origin being the Thinker, as despite my criticisms, they were much smarter than the Warrior.
The conversion of the rest of New Wave's shards went relatively smoothly, the quickest to convince being Manpower's electromagnetism shard and the hardest surprisingly not being Brandish's, but rather Lady Photon's. The shard was an older one, and a bit stuck in its ways, though it eventually came around when I pointed out that the Warrior was guaranteed to die on this planet whether it joined me or not, as it couldn't leave.
The applications for kinetic energy-imparting light were interesting, as while I could reproduce the effect, the method was a new one. Unfortunately, none of them produced a breakthrough in terms of energy efficiency or any other field, really. Regardless, the addition of a new group of connected parahumans was always helpful.
I had all of the New Wave shards reactivate their local scanning functions, which were originally used to monitor the host and determine the best time for triggering. It didn't have much in the way of range, but it would let me pick up the dimensional breaches in the immediate vicinity of the hosts, meaning I'd get the locations of the shards connected to any of the parahumans that New Wave fought or stayed around. Eventually, I hoped I'd be able to hit critical mass and get exponential expansion, but for now I'd be satisfied with just the local capes of the Bay.
I'd likely get Shaper as soon as Amy got back from the hospital, but at the moment she was out of range. Until then though, the only thing left to do was set up enough of an identity that I could pass a background check. As a living computer, it posed next to no trouble.
<><><><><><>
Finally, the time came for the demonstration. It was more a public walkaround, letting the people see a few of the capes that hadn't been on as many patrols recently. Regardless, it was perfect for my purposes, as it did include Armsmaster, not to mention Velocity and Dauntless. As the capes paraded across the boardwalk and occasionally answered a few questions from the gathered citizens, I quietly I saved the addresses of their shards, but didn't do anything with them just yet.
Efficiency shards were some of the oldest ones in the cycle, and if Lady Photon's shard had been belligerent…
Well, I wanted to make sure I could bring my full capabilities to bear against the shards if necessary. The risk would be too high otherwise. The same went for Shaper, Administrator, and Labyrinth, when I found them. All of the high-level shards would require extreme care, a very delicate touch, and a fuckton of contingencies in case they decided that the Warrior was a more appealing option.
Well, if they followed a logical thought process they wouldn't, but I wasn't going to pin any hopes on that.
Most shards were barely sentient, let alone sapient. My broadcast's translation program did an excellent job in helping them seem sapient, but there was no changing the base structure of our species.
Now that I had a method of expanding my influence over Earth Bet without my direct presence, I could just leave, but there were a handful of other things I wanted to make sure I got to fast, rather than just waiting until my influence spread far enough.
Namely, I had a very easy way to contact Cauldron.
Coil.
He still owed them a favor for his powers, and would jump at the possibility of ending that Sword of Damocles as soon as possible. Furthermore, his shard was from the Thinker entity, and given Coil's near-constant use of it, it'd likely be incredibly desperate for resources and energy. It was nearly a given that it'd be smart enough to understand how fucked the cycle currently was, and hopefully it would jump ship when offered help.
Coil's shard was a really, really good precognition shard in its own right, and I would need that if Path to Victory decided to fight me. Dinah's too, now that I thought about it. And the best part was, they were both already deployed, separate from me. Dinah's was set up correctly, so all I had to do was supply Coil's with enough resources to jumpstart it and it could reinitiate its own power systems, enough to keep it running.
I couldn't do the same for one reason: I was concentrated in one reality rather than the grouping that deployed shards were in. I already was at the limit for power production, and my own shards were trying to increase it as much as they could. They weren't having much success, mostly due to the lack of resources devoted to them.
96.3% of energy went to the Shroud, and the rest was split between maintaining my avatar plus the shards I was using through it, and the analysis shards that were trying to reconstruct my memories. Yes, technically there were a few precognition shards working there as well, but not in a manner that would be recognizable as such.
They were operating at less than a sixteenth of standard speed, just focusing on simulating accurately based on the available data rather than getting the information faster. The slower speed reduced their energy requirements, which was the only reason I could run them at all, as the power necessary to run them fast enough to actually be able to see the future was beyond my capabilities for the moment.
And as I'd already noted, simulations were horribly dubious at best.
I looked across the street at the PRT building. It was a public location, and as such, finding it had been easy. Hacking into their systems was also ridiculously easy, and the action allowed me to find the home address of one Thomas Calvert.
I smiled as I began the walk there. He would either be at his home or in his secret base, and I knew my Shroud would interfere with his shard's simulations. All I had to do was check the base if his house turned out to be empty. Irrespective of whichever it turned out to be, I was going to get both his and Dinah's shards, before going to Cauldron.
I turned down an alley. The alleyway was irrelevant, save for the fact that for an instant after I turned, no one was looking at me. The Shroud flickered, and my avatar vanished from sight. I wasn't just obscured to visible light, no, the Shroud was accounting for all of the electromagnetic spectrum.
I looked up and took off, flying towards my target. Things would only get more complicated from here on out.