Katrina briefly brought Rick up to speed on the Three Percenters, and what had happened to him. He fell into a daze for a while, considering the situation, then clarified, "So I spent six weeks in a coma receiving my blessing. How long did it take everyone that received theirs? And why did mine take so long?" He had just woken up and his brain was still a little fuzzy. To him, the time had passed in an instant and he just remembered a fierce, tearing pain in his head before he collapsed. But even that memory was fading, as all memories of physical pain do, a convenient defense mechanism that humanity had.
"Yes. Although you were among the first to receive your blessing, it took this long for you to wake up due to resources. The empire's blessed started coming to around the second week, while ours mostly started around day twenty. While we have access to the Biogen that the tyrant's company developed before the war, that's likely generations out of date now and the medical pods in the empire surely use more advanced nutrients to go with their more advanced delivery system," she explained.
One of her thugs came into the room carrying a thick stack of folders and stood by the door. Katrina gestured to him and he handed her the folders, which she glanced at and passed on to Rick. "Here's a detailed breakdown of everything we've managed to gather on the blessed, the blessing, and everything else that's happened over the past six weeks you were in a coma."
Rick got into a more comfortable position in the hospital bed and calmly began reading through the files contained in the folders. He was curious about his blessing, sure, but before he tried using them again he first wanted to understand them. The feedback he had suffered from his first attempt had taught him a harsh lesson on the usage of his power, and though the memory of the physical pain had faded, the lesson itself remained. Especially the loss of control; that was something he absolutely could not tolerate.
As he read, his shock grew greater and his eyebrows practically climbed all the way up to his hairline. The sheer amount of information alone was unbelievable and he was having a hard time imagining the lengths to which his people had gone to gather it under the circumstances they'd been in during his absence.
"We gathered all of this over the past six weeks?" he asked, raising his gaze from the documents for the first time since Katrina had handed them to him. "What's our confidence level in this?"
"The information is straight from the empire, and we're pretty sure they know a lot more than is easily available," she swiftly answered.
"Looks like having the entire world under your control really helps in data collection," Rick sneered, feeling a brief twinge of helplessness that he ruthlessly stamped out in his heart before it could manifest on his face. "So how'd you get this? The empire must be going to great lengths to not leak important information like this."
"From the public," she answered.
"The public? Just like that?" He blinked in surprise.
"Yes. This is what all of their blessed are taught the moment they wake up. It was also publicly available in their knowledgebase for anyone to view, an effective measure to prevent accidents. And from there, it was a simple task of just... asking. The Three Percenters aren't just imperialists, after all, so the information spread rapidly from there.
"Besides, the blessed are still just kids. Kids with awe-inspiring superpowers, sure, but kids nevertheless. And when have you ever met a kid that could keep a secret? There's a reason security clearances take age into account as a determining factor in how much information people are allowed to access. So the kids that woke up first scrambled to publicize the information, whether in interviews with reporters, posts on social media, or even just bragging to their non-imperialist 'friends' about the superhero academies the empire is going to build for them."
"Has it been verified?" he asked. Though he had set rules and guidelines to sieve the good information from the bad, he'd been in a coma for six weeks and a lot of things could go wrong in far less time than that.
"We've already cross-referenced it. Hundreds of millions of people received the blessing, and they all have friendships that travel across the wall, so to speak. As it turned out, they were all saying the same things, with the only difference being small changes based on their individual blessings," Katrina replied with confidence and pride on her face. She had gathered more than a thousand people to watch more than a million videos, relentlessly filtering the information in each and discarding anything that differed into separate confidence levels. Once that had been done, she'd gone even further and had her people go out in small groups to gossip and brag with the non-imperialists that'd received blessings, or even those who had friends who received them. As a former member of the FSB herself, the intelligence analysts she had trained were her pride and joy.
They were all she had left, after all.
Rick grunted, then continued reading the files in his hands, making sure everything he read was etched into his mind and unlikely to be forgotten. As he read, he slowly began developing an understanding of the blessings as a whole, including the division of their power, their source, and the mysterious particle in the atmosphere and how it related to the strength of their individual blessings. Something inside him felt... different, though, like he was destined for more, so the information he had on hand was leaving him somewhat unsatisfied.
However, the more he read, the more questions he had.
"Why didn't our people wake up with those so-called 'instincts'?" he asked. "The imperialists all said they 'just knew' how to use their blessings as soon as they woke up, and it only required a brief time for them to put that knowledge into practice... but nothing like that was reported by our blessed, or any of the non-imperialists for that matter...." That specific bit of information had been printed in a different color in the files in his hand. The analysts had erred on the side of caution and considered it unverified and unverifiable, but it was still a point they felt should be included in the record.
"And how'd the empire have so much information ready? No matter how you look at it, they had to have put in a lot of research time to get this much." He gestured at the thick stack of paper in his hand. "Did they know about the particles in the atmosphere before people started evolving?
"And if that's true, does it mean the tyrant already knew about and was prepared for it?"
The more questions arose, the wilder his speculation grew. And the wilder his speculation grew, the uglier his expression became. Because if his theories were true, he was up against a much bigger beast than he had originally thought.
