"How are you even here?!" Alexandria roared, zooming back into the fight holding a piece of the black pyramid that had been blasted off before the structure as a whole was erased. She tried to smash the Queen with the huge chunk of stone, but the Queen's dress fired out a sword that cut the stone in half. "This universe's magic isn't strong enough for you to come here without being summoned! We checked!"
"Hmm? Oh, have you really not figured it out?"
Fate and Strange flew down from above, a cone of energy held in both of their hands. They tried to capture the Queen underneath it, and the cone did hold the exploding white power for a moment; but it ultimately couldn't withstand her attack and burst. The contained energy was sent into the sky, but once again just the shockwave of their spell bursting sent Fate and Strange tumbling.
"In Brother's world, I need a formal summons. But in a world like this one, or that friendly world from before, a simple invitation will do."
"Nobody invited you here!" Alexandria refuted, ducking and dodging as the Queen's dress expanded outwards into more and more god-killing weapons, throwing themselves lazily in her direction.
"Are you sure about that?" The Queen teased.
Fate and Strange split apart into a million copies of each other each, the swarm of magicians descending in a fury. Each one held a weapon that they'd somehow ripped free from the Queen's dress, the Sword of Unsullied Truth.
"I did warn you," the Queen continued talking, not even bothering to stop and look as she fired countless white beams upwards, annihilated the millions of magicians. Only the original Fate and Strange tried to defend themselves, spherical shields protecting themselves from the onslaught just long enough for the two to teleport away. "Next time you faced a threat like that impostor Behemoth, you should call on me, or you would die!"
"We defeated Tiamat without your help!" Alexandria screamed, risking a glance at the Dampener. Symbols were flashing across it's tiny LCD screen that she was certain had never been programmed into it.
"Yes," The Queen said, smugly "thus inviting me to kill you."
Alexandria gaped at the White Queen, momentarily forgetting herself. "What?! That's –"
"An exploitation of a loophole that doesn't even exist?" The Queen taunted. "That's right. It's the sort of absolute nonsense that only works if you've already subverted the rules to your whim."
Out of nowhere, Doctor Fate suddenly appeared in a mad charge, ahnks made of energy in each hand. With contemptuous ease, the White Queen grabbed him by the helmet and slammed him into the ground.
"You don't actually understand what the Unexplored Class is, do you?" The Queen mused. "That suggestion of the Titans reaching those heights is ridiculous. The Unexplored Class are not 'slightly' more powerful than the gods. We are are a force that they dare not oppose."
Suddenly, the Queen plunged her free hand into Doctor Fate's helmet, tearing a hole into it. But when she pulled her hand out again, somehow, she pulled someone out of it.
"Hello Nabu." The Queen address the figure writhing in her grasp. "A Lord of Order isn't quite strong enough to be an Unexplored Class, but I suppose our ranks can always expand downwards."
The Queen dropped the now-limp Doctor Fate, and with her newly-freed hand blasted Nabu with a white beam. After a moment, she stopped, satisfied with her work.
Whereas Nabu had been a bearded man wearing an Ancient Egyptian headdress and loincloth, the newly revealed figure was a slim girl with golden eyes, wearing nothing but scraps of golden cloth in a perversion of the mummification process.
"See?" The Queen asked rhetorically. "Now you're the Golden Girl who Likes Things Neat and Orderly."
She tossed the newest member of the Unexplored Class aside like a piece of trash, looming over Alexandria. "Do you understand now?" She said in a tone of voice that indicated she didn't particularly care if Alexandria did or not. "Destiny, Dreams, Evil – the Three Who Watch Over Mankind were among the first to oppose me, and the first to fall. The very rules that hold the gods bound can't stand in my way now that I've remade them in my image."
"Don't make the mistake of thinking that mankind is powerless on our own."
The White Queen blinked in a moment of honest surprise as Doctor Strange's fingers somehow emerged from around her like an Escher painting, the man himself appearing behind the Queen even as she disappeared in a confusing visual illusion (or was it?), vanishing into the creases in Strange's palm.
The Sorcerer Supreme clamped his hands together, looking like he was holding something shut.
"Hurry!" He gasped. "I've trapped her in an infinite series of nested pocket universes, but I don't expect it to hold her for –"
His face twisted in pain and effort, and a loud roar and bright white light began to escape from his clasped hands.
Alexandria gave a grateful nod to Strange as she turned, flying as fast as she could back to the Dampener. She glanced over the hijacked device, knowing she had seconds at best.
"Hurry!" Strange roared.
Gritting her teeth, Alexandria thrust her fist downwards, punching a hole through the centre of the Dampener. Huge sparks of energy erupted from ruptured tanks and broken wires, and Alexandria quickly drew her hand back, not trusting her invincibility against enough energy to halt a universe.
She was just in time, too, as immediately after that she heard Strange's cries abruptly cut out.
She turned around to find the White Queen dusting her hands off, no sign of the Sorcerer Supreme anywhere.
"Looks like it's just the two of us now." The Queen said, a smile equal parts eager and psychotic spreading across her face. "Such a shame. I'd never had to try to fight a human before, and I was quite enjoying the novelty."
Alexandria didn't consciously make the decision to try and flee – she just blanked out for an instant to find the White Queen's hand clamped tight around her throat. The two of them were suspended over the damaged Dampener, Alexandria held aloft by the Queen and the Queen by strands that had extended out from her dress.
"Now, what was it I promised you earlier? A thousand million painful deaths?" The Queen mused, as Alexandria gasped for breath. "I suppose I can spare you one or two of those, after you tried so hard to help me."
Alexandria didn't have the air to respond to that, but the Queen continued explaining anyway.
"I'm sure this will surprise you, but even the Strongest has limits to her strength. I crushed that friendly world as hard as I could, but Brother's world still wasn't going to move all the way to where I wanted it to." The Queen actually pouted. "I was fully planning to go on a rampage across creation, exploding worlds left right and centre until I had my way, so you adding a way for me to skip all that work was actually really helpful."
In less time than it took to blink, the Queen hurled Alexandria downwards. She only knew that was what had happened because of the second-long sensation of being forced through magma, then suddenly having to hold her breath against vacuum of space. She'd been thrown clear through Third Earth and out the other side.
The Queen gave a little titter. "Now don't go dying just yet." She said, even though Alexandria had no way of hearing her from so far away. "If you get off so easily this time, it'll just get your hopes up for no reason."
She looked down, and focused her full attention on the Dampener. "Brother's world has moved far enough now." She said, more white tendrils emerging from her dress and extending downwards into the Dampener. "It looks like that 'hero' tried to disable it while I was busy." She observed critically. "But like everything else she does, she failed. The tanks and wires I can patch up with my Sword."
Putting actions to words, the threads from the Queen's dress quickly wove itself into replacement parts for the damaged Dampener, slamming themselves into place.
"Now that Brother's world is in the ideal spot for me, it's time to slam on the breaks." The Queen covered her mouth with the back of her hand, letting out an 'Oh ho ho' laugh. "I wonder if I should make Brother clean out my bellybutton with his tongue first? No, I should definitely save that until after I've hunted down every other girl he's ever smiled at, just to be sure!"
A couple strands of the Queen's hair wriggled and writhed into the control circuits of the Dampener, setting the power to maximum.
"Those so-called heroes were going to gentle about this, but I've already made sure Brother's world will be safe. I can't wait a moment longer, so I don't really care if one or two unrelated worlds go pop."
With one final push, the Eye of Thundera was forced once again into serving the Queen, providing power into her hijacked Dampener, flooding the space around this universe with unimaginable quantities of Speed Force.
The White Queen's laughter stopped only when she felt this universe speed up.
Alexandria had just managed to bleed off her backwards momentum with her flight ability, struggling to get back to a breathable atmosphere. If she accelerated as fast as she could, she might just slam into the planet before her Shard decided that she had suffocated.
Her efforts were rendered moot when the planet was slammed into her.
She had just enough time to gulp down one precious lungful of air over the unholy roar as the planet clipped its moon and began to break down under the strain of its sudden movement. Then the White Queen burst out of the crumbling earth before her.
Despite having taken a shortcut through the core of the planet, the Queen showed no signs of effort or even of being dirty, even as droplets of molten iron dripped out of her hair. The tangible fury she gave off was causing the grass around her to instantaneously turn to ash and crumble away, the soil underneath it boiling away.
"WWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAATTTTTT DDDDDDIIIIIIIIDDDD YYYYOOOOOUUUUU DDDDDDOOOOOOO?!" The Queen roared, her voice loud enough to send shockwaves through the ground and hasten the planet shaking itself to pieces.
Alexandria was considered the greatest of the Flight/Invulnerability/Strength/Speed (or FISS, as one world would call it) parahumans on Earth Bet. She had encouraged that opinion in every PR stunt she had ever performed – not because it was wrong, necessarily, but because it helped people forget what she considered the greater half of her powers.
Perfect memory. Enhanced processing and learning ability. Impunity to mind-reading and mind-control. Alexandria was just as much a Thinker as she was a Brute, and it was those powers that she'd used to turn the PRT from an idea to the group holding Bet's United States together.
She had gone into that meeting with the Justice League having never heard the term "Speed Force" before. She had left after having seen a blackboard full of maths equations and several glances at Dampeners in various stages of assembly burned into her mind.
"Speed Force, when no other factors apply, naturally tries to increase the velocity of an object." Alexandria said, slowly orienting herself upright respective to the crumbling planet. "However, if you 'congeal' it, it acts as a dimensional barrier, and can be used to slow down a universe. Each Dampener had one internal circuit board that handled that congealing."
She opened her right hand, the one she had kept closed ever since plunging her hands into the Dampener, and the crumpled remains of something metallic dropped down. "Specifically, this one."
The Queen was more than smart enough to repair any damaged parts, but she couldn't replace a part that she didn't know about and that was missing altogether.
"YYYYYYOOOOOUUUUUUUU…!"
"You need Earth Bet in one specific place, a place where magic is strengthened to the point where you can enter uninvited. But if you move it just a little bit further than that, and suddenly magic doesn't work at all – and you can't enter, even with a formal summoning."
"YYYYYYOOOOOUUUUUUUU…!"
"You've probably already destroyed the Dampener here, but it's too late. With the extra boost, and the fact that you didn't get the breaking you were counting on, Earth Bet will slide well out of the blue zone and into the red."
"YYYYYYOOOOOUUUUUUUU…!"
"I couldn't think of any plan that relied on you loosing, so I made one that relied on you winning instead. What do you think, you so-called Queen? Was this worthy of your time?"
For the second monster in a row, Alexandria fully accepted her death, seeing no way at all to survive this.
So she was understandably shocked to see a Door open up behind the Queen, and for Contessa to walk out with something large carried in both hands.
The Queen, somehow sensing the danger even through her blind rage, turned and fired an axe from her dress towards whatever it was that Contessa was carrying. (Contessajust so happenedto have positioned herself perfectly so that the axe would miss her).
It was only as the bisected halves flew apart, revealing a point that light seemed to curve towards, that Alexandria recognised it as the Donation Box's gravitational singularity generator.
As a being that could destroy universes, a black hole naturally wouldn't be much trouble for the Queen, but this one seemed to have caught her off guard, sucking in the axe she made and trying to draw the rest of her in as well. Even now, she was trying to pull herself free, but the field of slow time that the singularity was generating had ensnared her.
The Queen was tough enough to avoid spaghettification, as was Alexandria, while Contessa seemed to be somehow shielding herself with a piece of the wrecked generator.
Just like the first time she had met the Queen, Alexandria felt the field of slow time like molasses – something she could, with effort, force her way through. Possibly, she speculated, because my power is already able to move my body when it's time-stopped.
She glanced – if that word was even applicable when just moving her eyes required more effort than lifting a dump truck normally did – over at Contessa.
She was making her "hurry up, I have things to do today" face.
Mentally gritting her teeth (because physically gritting them would have required even more effort), Alexandria forced herself forwards, through the thickest of the temporal distortion, towards Contessa and the still-open Door behind her.
"YYYYYYOOOOOUUUUUUUU…!"
With a start, Alexandria realised that the Queen was moving as well – even more slowly than she was, but with increasing speed as she pulled herself free of the distortion.
She reached Contessa, grabbing her around the waist and shoving her backwards, towards the Door.
"WWWWWOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNN'TTTTTTTT…!"
As her torso passed behind the shielding device that Contessa had grabbed from the generator's wreckage, the weight pressing down on her from all sides seemed to halve, allowing her to put on another burst of speed. Six feet left until she reached the Door…
"GGGGGGGEEEEEEETTTTTT…!"
Five feet…
"AAAAAAWWWWWWAAAAAYYYYY…!"
Four feet…
Alexandria heard the rustling of cloth behind her, and knew that the Queen was about to fire another weapon from her dress.
Three feet…
She wasn't going to make it…!
"B-brother?!"
The Queen's sudden squeak, nothing like her screams of rage, made Alexandria look up – and found Kyousuke Shiroyama, the one the Queen called 'brother', standing on the other side of the Door, hand outstretched. If the Queen fired a weapon at Alexandria from where she was, she would hit him as well.
Two feet… And from here, Alexandria could see that it wasn't Shiroyama at all, but a photo-realistic painting of him on the wall immediately behind the Door.
A wordless scream of rage told her that the Queen had just realised the same thing.
One foot… and the tips of Alexandria's fingers crossed through the Door. Unexpectedly, as soon as she did so, the feeling of viscosity vanished, and she and Contessa shot across the threshold. Alexandria just so happened to tumble and take the force of slamming into the wall, cushioning Contessa so much that she could stand up and dust herself off, completely unhurt.
Alexandria turned and looked back through the Door, catching one final look at the Queen before she exploded in a burst of white light. Alexandria tensed, but when the light reached the Door it simply disappeared, the light erasing the Door before it could cross it. Only some light scorch marks and the painting on the opposite wall showed where the Door had been at all.
Alexandria wondered if she had just watched the death of another universe.
The two of them stood in a dark alleyway. Unlike the one Alexandria had ended up in with Celestia, this one was cold and wet, with mould being the only thing trying to cover up the graffiti.
"Right," Contessa said, adjusting the fedora on her head "now that that's dealt with –"
Crunch
"– step 763 is to let you get it out of your system." She finished, not reacting at all to the fist Alexandria had embedded into the brick wall in front of her.
Alexandria was no stranger to risking her life. She was no stranger to thinking she was going to die, either, despite her 'invincibility'. She knew how to take the whirlpool of worry and elation, panic and relief, and stash it away in the corner of her mind to deal with later. Or never.
But what she wasn't going to wait to deal with was sabotage.
"Why," Alexandria growled "are the Doors working all of a sudden?"
"They never stopped." Contessa tilted her head. "Did you honestly think that a human who gained his powers by accident would be better at crossing dimensions than lifeforms that have being doing so since they were single-cell organisms?"
"It was you." Alexandria scowled. "You told Doormaker not to pick me up."
Contessa shrugged. "If it makes you feel better, he was quite busy." She said, knowing full well it wouldn't. "I had a lot of villains I needed to move into place to slow the others down, otherwise you would have finished too fast."
The worlds had needed to drift just that little bit more for the lockdown trick to work – which Alexandria wouldn't have tried at all if she'd been able to retreat back to Earth Bet.
Alexandria knew it was possible to predict the White Queen's actions – after all, she had anticipated the Queen coming after her. Though she had assumed (not entirely incorrectly) that it would be out of pettiness, not because the Queen was cheating her way into the world through her vendetta with Alexandria. That was why she had requested Strange and Fate on her team – to give her enough time to pull off the plan she had come up with on her own and told nobody about.
(Though it was likely Batman had at least deduced part of it, given that he had agreed with her team suggestions).
Path To Victory could approximate where it couldn't model perfectly, and "arbitrarily powerful yandere" went a long way to mapping out the Queen's actions, but there was one main reason Alexandria couldn't believe what Contessa had done.
"What Path was it this time?"
"Path to getting you here undistracted."
…Contessa couldn't remember the White Queen.
Despite having just used up one of Cauldron's most powerful assets (that wasn't a person) and having mobilised the forces of evil across several universes, Contessa didn't know, or even particularly care why. Even without the Queen's Stranger effect, it was possible Contessa would have forgotten all about the Queen the moment she stopped being relevant to her various Paths.
That was why Alexandria found Contessa creepy. She would single-handedly bring down an empire if her Shard told that it would improve their chances against Scion 1%.
"Step 764 is telling you to avoid worlds with magic for the foreseeable future." And with Path to Victory, 'for the foreseeable future' might as well mean 'forever'. "The White Queen – whoever that is – will obliterate you or anyone you speak to if they take a single step into her area of influence."
Which meant she couldn't ask the Avengers or the Justice League for help unless they came to her on their own. And that was if they were willing to give her the time of day, with how badly things had gone. She wasn't dead, but that was just about the only bit of good news she was getting today, apparently.
…wait.
"Where exactly are we?" Alexandria asked, pulling her fist out of the brickwork. "And what disaster was so bad you needed to set a Path to come get me?"
"We're in Brockton Bay, Earth Bet."
Alexandria blinked. "Where we were going to try the Parahuman Feudalism experiment?"
"Yes, but that's not why you're needed here. Door, Cauldron."
Alexandria crossed her arms. "Not even going to finish explaining before you leave?"
Contessa pointed to the open end of the alleyway even as she stepped through the Door. "Step 765."
Watching the Door close behind Contessa, Alexandria braced herself, and was unsurprised when there was a loud crash echoing from somewhere in the distance.
"Had enough yet, Albert?! You have to know you have no way of beating my beautiful Eggbringer Leviathan!"
"I'd be more impressed if you could control that monstrosity, Ivo! Now, my Slaughterhouse Masters, on the other hand…"
…yes, Alexandria conceded, lifting off the ground and smashing a fist into her palm, I can see why I'd be needed for this.
A despairing wail shook the other world to it's foundations.
The world of gods and monsters, of fairy tales and ghost stories, had a vague hierarchy at the best of times; one that changed every time a new story was told. However, some things remained the same.
A mere 'monster' was no match for a god.
The gods were bound by 'rules'.
But all of these things could be overturned by Power.
Or, as some humans had taken to calling her, the White Queen.
"Wwwwwhhhhhyyyyy?!" The Queen sobbed, her arms flailing around in aimless rage, reducing everything within arm's reach to dust. "Why why why why?! Brother and I are meant to be, he can't just… can't just…!"
Alexandria and the others had wondered before how the Queen had been able to know so much about what was going on in the physical universes without being there. The answer was rather simple: Power had a sister, Wisdom.
(Before you ask, no, they did not have a third sister named 'Courage'. Wisdom wasn't her real name either, but her real name continued on in a non-looping pattern forever, so here it's been abbreviated down to her nickname.)
"Wisdom!" The Queen screeched, grabbing her look-alike in all but outfit, her eyes bloodshot. "Tell me he's upset! Show me that he's despairing! He can't live without me, right?! RIGGGHHHHTTT?!"
Wisdom considered herself the protective older sister, keeping the White Queen safe from the world… or far more often, the world safe from her sister. The White Queen did not share this view, thinking of Wisdom as more of a convenient way to find things out, like a human search engine.
Hearing her sister's request, Wisdom read the words that gravitated towards her like a magnet, and told the unvarnished truth. "_ _ _, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _."Each of her syllables were so tightly packed together that to a human ear it would have sounded like a single tone.
For a moment, the White Queen stood completely still, her eyes as wide as dinner plates, tears obscuring their bottoms. Then she screamed, throwing her sister away, and fired a white beam off into the distance that casually annihilated a pantheon that had the misfortune to be in its path.
Wisdom did not know what the future held, but she did know everything that was happening in the present. That was why she had been kicking herself for the past several years for letting the Queen answer that stupid summons from the humans – after seeing the human world first-hand, without Wisdom's careful filtering, the Queen had grown excited, and had eagerly looked forward to going back there. Wisdom's careful lullabies hadn't been able to coax the Queen back into inactivity as she grew more and more obsessed with one human boy in particular, chasing after the one goal she couldn't achieve with an instant's worth of effort.
The Queen huffed and puffed, tired out from emotional turmoil rather than physical exertion. "How… do I… fix… this…?!" She panted, her eyes aflame.
"_ _ _ _ _ _ _." Wisdom lied.
The Queen shut her eyes and screamed, the Sword of Unsullied Truth rippling and undulating, ready to attack but having no clear target.
Wisdom was not worried about the Queen killing her. They were equals and opposites, the two of them defining each other. As long as one of them existed, they both would.
"Brother…" The Queen moaned in longing. "No… this can't… be how it ends…!"
Honestly, Wisdom greatly preferred that particular world locked off from this one. It's wasn't quite perfect – if she'd had her way, she would have exterminated the human race everywhere and everywhen to fully kill the possibility of anyone getting her beloved little sister so exited.
Wisdom placed a comforting arm on the Queen, whose sobbing had descended to the point of being wordless. She wrapped her sister up in a fearless embrace, and began to hum her favourite lullaby.
But this would do for now. With the Queen sealed off from her obsession, Wisdom would be able to sing to her, wrap her in a protective cocoon of half-truths, and coax her back to sleep.
"Brother…" The Queen murmured, her eyes started to close. "…I'm sorry…"
Besides, Wisdom mused, thinking of the forces posed to strike at humanity, it wasn't like they were going to be around much longer anyway.