Katherine "Nekomata" Legato

Katherine spent the entire night practicing her anima cultivation. She knew she was closing in on Tier 2, and it would only take a few more incursions—or one big enough one—for her to reach the point where the only thing between her and the next Tier was her own readiness.

The scary part was that unlike a typical Guardian, there was little to nothing she would need to do in order to trigger a successful tier increase. Once her core reached its own threshold, she would begin ascending to the next tier no matter how prepared—or unprepared—she was.

Just like Alex and Luna. For a true Star Guardian like herself, the process was similar to what Anathema went through to evolve to the next tier. After all, her core itself was a special kind of Anathema seed, if the other Star Guardians with whom she regularly met were to be believed.

Katherine saw no reason not to. Everything they claimed fit perfectly with the observations she made using her own power.

Because she had been quietly focusing for hours, diving deep into the nuances of her core and her power, she was completely unsurprised to find Daniel, the Tier 8 Star Guardian Eigenmacht, sitting in the penthouse common area, reading some kind of printout.

Her aunt, meanwhile, was still sleeping. Finally, David, Alex's adoptive father and now seemingly her own aunt's unofficial partner, was up doing his usual morning exercise routine. The only one missing was Luna, which wasn't unusual.

The other victim of esoteric human experimentation had taken to living with them as well, despite her own adoptive parents being perfectly well and alive. She never really talked about them, and Katherine didn't push for information.

That being said, much like Daniel—the Star Guardian, Katherine often got his actual name confused with the other main new man in her life, David—well anyway, much like Daniel was supposedly Alex's genetic dad, Luna's biological father was also a high tier true Star Guardian, but Bloodbath, as he was rather widely known, made for an even poorer parental figure than Eigenmacht.

That was already a pitiably low bar, given what they'd done to their own children. Katherine was still very angry with them, but that rage was useless against the man currently reading in one of the armchairs.

It wasn't merely a matter of power. Yes, there was nothing Katherine could do against someone like him, but that alone wasn't everything. Just open any news feed and you could witness immensely powerful, even untouchable people becoming hilariously tilted at the tiniest little things that comparably insignificant people said or did to antagonize them.

Yet Daniel Onslow wouldn't, and would likely never, care. Katherine could scream and rage, call him names, or even spread lies about him, and it would all fail to stir his own emotions. At worst, it would make him mildly annoyed or disappointed, but he wouldn't even yell back.

Even if she went too far, spreading certain things that she knew would incite him to violence, it would never be passionate. He could outright murder her and then only shake his head, cool down by a single degree, and lament that it had to come to this.

Expending anger on a person like that was like punching a rock.

"What are you reading?" She asked as she entered the attached kitchen and began preparing a capuchino. David's kitchen came with many interesting and sometimes useful appliances, such as a real espresso machine, much to Katherine's delight.

"Yet another deep learning preprint," he replied immediately. "This one makes an interesting information theoretical argument about parallel versus serial compute. They argue that serial architectures, or parallel architectures with serial inference, are essential to developing generalized capability at solving the likely inherently serial problems that deep learning is now attempting to surmount."

"Right," Katherine said over the buzzing of the bean grinder, "and that means?"

"Well first of all, it would seem to violate the universal approximation theorem," he replied, "but that's not the case, because the claim is about efficient scaling. Universal approximation holds for unbounded width, and the argument here is that when you scale inherently serial problems, you would then need to scale parallel compute exponentially for problems that can be solved with linear or polynomial serial compute scaling."

"Ah," Katherine said, shutting off the grinder and pressing down the grinds. "Which is important, because…"

"Because it implies that a transformer using simple autoregression is theoretically more capable of solving challenging problems than, say, a diffusion model. If you told me just ten years ago that raw sequence continuation with a fully feedforward network could eventually write correct and highly nontrivial math proofs, I would have called you a fool."

Katherine decided to give it up at that point. Alongside his other personal characteristics, Mr. Onslow was the type of person who considered niche technical papers to be enjoyable light reading. That was more than just intelligence—it was a great deal of a specific kind of intelligence along with something else.

He also tended not to automatically understand what was and wasn't obvious, or what was common knowledge among educated people. Ask him for help explaining a concept and he would happily and 'helpfully' provide a highly detailed explanation that would explain nothing to someone who needed an explanation in the first place.

The most striking thing was that he treated small children and highly educated adults identically. Katherine observed this firsthand just a couple days ago. It was equal parts uncanny and enlightening.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Usually, when an adult man treated people like children, it was a highly insulting form of behavior. But in this case, it was closer to the other way around. There was no smug superiority behind it. From his own perspective—which was deeply alien as much as it was merely intelligent—there was little difference. Children were just small people who hadn't been alive for very long.

After finishing making her morning capuchino, Katherine asked her senior Star Guardian to accompany her up to the roof.

There was realistically little to be gained from moving a sensitive discussion there, practically speaking. If they needed true privacy that badly, the man would have portalled them both far away. It was more symbolic, just like many daily interactions were.

Shortly after stepping out onto the gravel—Katherine kind of wondered why there was gravel on the roof—she detected a familiar presence stealthily scaling up the sight. It was Luna, arriving back at her new home in the early morning as per her new habit.

When Katherine asked about it once, the answer she got was that Anathema didn't need to sleep, so neither did Luna or Alex—the latter often still slept, but according to her alleged 'real' father, that was just 'because she's still lazy.'

Luna herself claimed to 'be nocturnal if anything.' So it made sense, but Katherine privately wondered what she actually did each night after vanishing.

Wordlessly, both Star Guardians tracked the girl as she seemingly slipped over the edge of the roof and prowled her way to the main stairwell—Katherine with the basic use of her power and Daniel with his highly developed, Tier 8 aura senses.

It seemed like Luna was deliberately avoiding the chance of running into anyone—something that was confirmed when she dropped down right in front of the pair and let out a high pitched, startled yelp.

Katherine narrowed her eyes. The other girl looked dirty and disheveled, but what caught the eye most was the mostly dead racoon. Judging by the way it was being carried with a convenient, unnaturally black and smooth 'rope' coiled around its neck, Katherine would guess it had been strangled.

It wasn't one hundred percent dead, though. Just mostly dead.

Thinking quickly, Katherine placed herself between Luna and the stairs, shutting the door and pressing her back to it. She'd also relied a bit on reading the other girl's immediate intention—not thoughts, just basic, momentary will—which instantly caused a flood of guilt and shame to rise up and threaten to choke her breath.

She steeled herself. I need to be firm. I need to be firm. "Luna." Caught between her new friend and a Tier 8 Star Guardian, the Luna in question looked like she was as ashamed as Katherine felt, if for different reasons—so Katherine tried to soften up a bit. "Were you out hunting? Is that what you've been doing at night?"

Shifting like she was trying to put the strangled racoon out of sight—a doomed attempt from the start—Luna's immensely pale complexion flushed a darker, slightly purplish color. "...Sometimes."

Yeah, right. Katherine wanted to rush in and hug Luna but she didn't know if the girl would take it well. Sometimes? The poor thing was too embarrassed and was doing everything she could to keep downplaying it.

Temporarily relenting, Katherine eased away from the door and opened it to let her friend through. Luna took her chance and darted through the door, scurrying into the darker stairwell so fast that Katherine barely saw it.

Closing the door, she waited a few seconds to make sure they were alone again. Then she exploded on Eigenmacht. "Have you not been fucking feeding them?!"

"We—"

"Is that what happened to Alex?" Katherine demanded. "She couldn't keep up with the constant hunger and lost control? Killed people? Ran away to those criminals for help?"

"Basically, yes," he acknowledged, appearing unmoved by her sudden outburst. "From what we can tell, she rushed to Vegas entirely on her own. I don't know why, or what she was thinking. What seems likely, however, is that she had entered a manic state of some kind."

"Fortunately, she only killed one person as her control slipped, and that seems to have been satiating enough for the shock to disrupt her mindset away from reverting to an unthinking feral state again."

Katherine felt a chill. "What do you mean again?"

Mr. Onslow blinked. "Oh, right, you wouldn't have known."

Katherine narrowed her eyes. "Tell me what you mean by again."

The other Star Guardian considered it—really considered it. Then he nodded to himself, as if agreeing with an imaginary attorney that had persuaded him to humor her. "The night of the previous incursion on your campus before the one today. She had only just awakened to her full nature, and that night was the first time she truly lost control, at least after the initial awakening. She didn't cause the incursion, but her presence unambiguously contributed to it."

Katherine remembered that night. How could I forget it? It was the night when she first went home with Alex, after their first day of the new trimester—the night when Alex was 'kidnapped' for a second time.

She wasn't kidnapped, Katheirne realized. She just jumped out of the window and then lied about it. Katherine wanted to cry. Poor Alex. She struggled to imagine what the other girl might be going through at this very moment. It's not over, I promise. I'm still coming for you.

After taking a few moments to absorb the information, Katherine turned a dark, withering gaze back onto Daniel Onslow. "But why? Why don't you just—why not take care of them? She's your daughter. Even if you see her as just another test subject, then she's—she's your creation."

It was hard for Katherine to force out that last word, but she did. "You have a secret base on fucking Mars, for Christ's sake. What's stopping you from just fucking caring for them?"

"Oh." The Tier 8 Star Guardian scratched the side of his head. "Well of course we could do that. We do those basic things, such as providing them with adequate consumption material, for the majority of test cases. But, we're also interested in testing a range of different conditions and factors, and Alexis and Luna both happen to be in what we call the 'foraging,' or 'self-sufficient' group."

Katherine stared. The man showed no hint of amusement, irony, guilt, or even cruelty. He just stared back at her, waiting for her inevitable response.

"Holy shit," was all she said, and then she turned around to descend the stairwell, shutting the rooftop door behind her.

Originally she had intended to ask some very different questions—for instance, she still needed to know what was going on with that girl Veronica's masked spirit. She wasn't going to ask now, though. She and Luna could do whatever investigating they needed to do on their own.

Never trust authority.

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