Earth Bet was an interesting place. The world progressed largely as normal until in the eighties a flying golden man showed up out of nowhere, and shortly after caught a falling plane.

Not long after one of the passengers developed a superpower of his own, put on a costume, and within a years time died from a baseball bat to the brain.

More followed.

Many, many more followed.

Superheros, supervillains and those who just fell between the cracks. The cape population grew with every day in spite, or possibly even because of the sharp attrition rate.

I explained it before. A cape or 'parahuman' by the defined term was someone linked up to an extra-dimensional artifact that gave them their powers, not to unlike my own situation.

But the devil was always in the details. Hiding, smirking, and waiting to stab you right when you finished thinking you've figured everything out.

There were a lot of names for these devices, 'Agents', 'Passengers', and the one I favored most, 'Shards'. I liked that name as it seemed the most descriptive.

After all, they were all 'shards' of a stellar scale entity who split them off as part of it's reproductive cycle.

The Entities themselves were idiots. Well no, that was simplifying it. They were brilliant, but brilliant like the primordial were brilliant. They saw so far beyond us it wasn't even funny, but also had blind spots miles wide. They knew it too, and made use of other species to fill the gaps. Hence Parahumans being a thing.

The cape game was their version of the bastard child of evolution, information consultation, and body conditioning. They sent their shards, limited in their use and function to interface with the locals symbiotically. The powers were limited intentionally, both to keep the host from accidentally killing themselves and to force them to get creative. To use their abilities in new and innovative ways. To gather data on their interaction with various phenomena including other shards, and to eventually bud off new shards modified off of this test data.

It was a cross between a breeding farm and a testing laboratory.

And like every lab, after you got all the samples and results you wanted... you sterilized it.

This was the Cycle of the Entities. They would find a world of sapient life, sow themselves into it, invoke violence, conflict. A forgotten thought here, repressed impulse there, inflamed aggression, general tension. Sow the seeds of discord and insure no one managed to work together on a level that actually mattered so they could reap the glorious data of their conflicts.

Then retake the gifts they had spread out and detonate the host planet alongside countless dimensional twins to propel themselves to the next.

But that is where things had delightfully gone so very wrong for them this time.

You see, two such Entities had landed on Earth, or rather scattered themselves across various parallel Earths, setting the conflict stage of the cycle on Earth Bet, Earth Aeph and an unknown number of others.

But only one Entity was still alive to oversee it.

The pair were specialized, one thinker, planner, the overall strategist and decision maker, the other a warrior, vanguard, and general 'muscle' of the pair. Ironically it had been the former who had slipped up, distracted by an information exchange with a third passing, distant entity when she should have been paying attention to her final decent.

The comparison had been made to being distracted by a text message while driving before being hit by oncoming traffic. The results were proportionally devastating.

It had lingered for a short time, lasted precious few moments.

Then a little girl had stabbed it right in that moment of vulnerability before it had any chance to recover, and thus Eden, the 'clever' Entity died. It's corpse becoming a source of powers sold at a price and forced onto humans by humans.

The Warrior had become distraught and confused. It still lingered on the world, imposed on it in the form of a golden man, so impossibly dangerous but so utterly crippled by his grief and inability to think beyond the immediate without his counterpart. At current he spent his time pulling cats out of trees, putting out fires, and fighting off monsters in an attempt to find some sort of purpose.

In the original timeline a Madman would eventually convince him to start butchering humanity by the score in another, unfortunately far more successful attempt.

He had to go.

But that was long term stuff.

Right now I was waiting at a corner for a teenaged supervillainess to show up, probably in costume with a trio of very big very angry bone spike covered-

"Oh there you are!" A voice called out.

I blinked and looked over and saw a freckle faced blond girl in a sweater and jeans, standing with a young black man with cornrows and an unhappy look on his face.

-monsters?

I blinked, huh, okay they went minimalist. Didn't expect that.

I exhaled, "Ah good. Sorry about that, I know it had to be pretty upsetting, but I don't have much of a window to work with. The longer I spent waiting the more likely this is to screw up."

Brian didn't look that impressed. Lisa on the other hand was all smiles, though not nice ones, "And just what is it you need to do?" she asked in a voice that was sweet like antifreeze.

I let out a half bark half laugh, "Just want me to come out and say it then? Fine... I need your help to go kill Coil."