Bonesaw- Cape Plague

“Riley,” I said.  “If I went and got another tinker, not necessarily a bio-tinker, do you think you could walk her through it?”

Chris scoffed, a hollow, eerie sound through a mouth that incorporated some beak.

“If she’s not a bio tinker, then no.   We could try, but… I wouldn’t get your hopes up.  Time’s short.”

“Could you do it?  We could work out a way of reaching you.”

“And manage distribution at the same time?” Riley asked.  “I don’t know.  I could.”

“Can you start?  And stay in touch?”

“On it.”
...

“There are two things that the Entities have always been bad at handling, when it comes to us.  Dreams… Rain’s thing drove that home, but capes like Miss Militia and Swansong, they had screwy retention and processing of data through their dreams.”

“Swansong remembering things that Damsel did after dreaming, and vice versa.  I don’t know about Miss Militia’s.”

“She remembered her trigger every night when she dreamed.  Doesn’t matter.  Dreams, and death.  We had enough come back from the dead.  Mix the two… the idea was we’d put down every cape we could.  Make the death slow, and riddled with heavy dreams.  Pollute the system, so they can’t use the data.  Let Fortuna get her end of the world… and find that there’s nothing to send out there.  Force her to abort.  Riley thought it would work.  So did Cryptid.”

“That’s a heavy decision to make on behalf of tens of thousands.”

“It’s a heavy decision to make on behalf of billions, maybe trillions, to make the decision to not do it,” I replied while gently leaning my head and shoulder into the wall, despite the pain it produced, “as Chris and the Simurgh just managed.”

- Ward, Last 20.8